Painting by Proxy
Anoka Faruqee and David Driscoll, Ellen Hackl Fagan, Stephen Maine
Curated by Joan Grubin
September 13th – December 17th, 2021

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 23rd, 5:30 – 7:30pm

Project: ARTspace is proud to present Painting by Proxy, showcasing large work by Ellen Hackl Fagan, Stephen Maine, and the collaborative duo Anoka Faruqee and David Driscoll.

Painting by Proxy features artists who share elimination of the hand-made mark from the physical fabrication of their paintings, deploying instead an idiosyncratic, mechanical device, tool, or objects acting as proxy. Collaboration with chance allows their images to appear as if without author, exhaling some sense of a larger context beyond individual consciousness, and leaving behind a whiff of the sublime. Large-scale paintings are presented in the intimate space of the gallery, amplifying the sensory impact of their work, and engulfing the viewer in their optical sorcery.

The question Painting by Proxy raises is why harnessing some intermediary agent and invoking chance to make a painting can produce a sense of the ineffable. Does the focus of these four artists on mesmerizing color intensity, pattern, and repetition open a portal to a heightened state of awareness in which we suspend rational thought, and sense an intangible realm beyond our comprehension and control? By delegating the application of paint, favoring de-centralized composition, and reveling in hallucinatory color, something beyond the “self” creeps in. Painting by Proxy affords a glimpse of the sublime offered up with visceral materiality and potent visual pleasure.

— Joan Grubin, curator

Ellen Hackl Fagan makes her monumental paintings on paper by pouring paint around the forms of commonplace, mass-produced objects placed on large wet sheets of paper – little fruit cartons, fragments of floor tile, bubble wrap - and letting the paint perform autonomously as it reacts to the objects. Ghostly traces of forms and patterns floating in a universe of her signature mesmerizing color, a pure cobalt blue, give her work an elegiac air. Fagan says: “I call this ‘blind’ painting. For me, it's the ‘not knowing’ that moves me forward.”

Stephen Maine’s paintings are born of a makeshift printing process of his own invention: a jury-rigged contraption that conveys paint to canvas by means of textured surfaces that, functioning like printing plates, are pressed onto the painting's surface. Flaunting vibrant contrasting color, the resulting distribution of arbitrary splotches and blobs promotes a ravishing opticality in camouflage-like fields, while removing all signs of hands-on expressive mark-making. Through this dialogue between control and chance conjured through mechanical reproduction, the paintings embody qualities of “nature” that seem to come into being willy-nilly, without artifice or self-conscious striving.  

The paintings of Anoka Faruqee and David Driscoll leave one in a state of pleasurably disorienting bewilderment, wondering by what possible means such baffling perceptual phenomena could have arrived on the surface. Revealing the process does not diminish the sense of wonder: initially using a common hardware store tool, they now have a range of custom-made toothed rakes which they drag repeatedly through wet paint deploying a DIY rig to guide the rake. With each pass through an application of pigment, they shift the placement of the tool slightly, let the new layer of paint dry, then sand it down to fuse the accumulated layers into a single smooth surface. 

The resulting patterns unpredictably generated deliver an optical jolt before the mind and eye begin to sort out what’s going on. Referencing at once ancient low-tech traditions of weaving as well as digital computer technology, Faruqee and Driscoll produce paintings that summon a universe beyond human touch or comprehension, which are rescued from austere perfection by tell-tale oozings of pigment around the sides of the canvas, and disruptive slippages of registration left within the images. It is both this reaching beyond the human realm and falling back to earth, making magic and interrupting that magic that move us in these paintings.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Anoka Faruqee and David Driscoll are painters who began collaborating in 2012. Faruqee earned her Master of Fine Arts from the Tyler School of Art in 1997 and her Bachelor of Arts in Painting from Yale University in 1994. She is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program and residencies at the Skowhegan School of Art and the PS1 National Studio Program. Her grants include the Pollock Krasner Foundation and Artadia. Currently, Faruqee is Director of Graduate Studies in Painting/Printmaking at Yale. In 2016, she curated the major exhibition Search Versus Re-Search: Josef Albers, Artist and Educator, and directed a short film about Albers’ art and teaching for 32 Edgewood Gallery at the Yale School of Art. Faruqee’s work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad at venues including, Secession, Vienna, Austria; Hall Art Foundation, Reading, VT; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY; Schloss Derneburg Museum, Derneburg, Germany; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR; and Björkholmen Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden, among others. David Driscoll earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Ohio State University in 1987. The duo recently held a solo exhibition at The Suburban, Milwaukee, WI and had work on view in the DeCordova Sculpture Park Biennial 2019 in Lincoln, MA through September 15, 2019, and Koenig and Clinton Gallery, Brooklyn NY until October 19, 2019. They live and work in New Haven, CT. http://anokafaruqee.com

Throughout her career, Ellen Hackl Fagan has had over 30 solo exhibitions. She exhibits her artwork throughout the greater New York metropolitan area and Northeast, and has works included in permanent public and private collections throughout the United States and Europe. Currently her work has been the full color feature in print in Post Road Vol. #37 Winter issue 2021. She has been the subject of multiple interviews both on the air and online including WBYX’s radio program out of Yale University, and the New York Public Library’s Artist Interview series. Known widely for her generosity in offering artists opportunities, Fagan is also a fluent and experienced curator; as creator and director of ODETTA, she has curated and produced over 70 exhibitions showcasing more than 125 artists. Recently the pandemic inspired her to pivot to a new exhibition paradigm of online curatorial practices as founder of ODETTA Digital on the Shim Art Network, and ODETTA Petite, offering services enabling artists to better navigate social media tools and to develop their own curatorial voices and gallery spaces both virtually and IRL. Fagan maintains her studio and curatorial practice in New York City. http://ehfaganstudio.com

Stephen Maine is a New York painter and writer who lives in West Cornwall, CT. His approach to process-oriented, color-centric abstraction is molded by earlier decades spent living and working in New York City. Recently his work has been seen in NYC at Hionas Gallery, the National Arts Club, Silas von Morisse Gallery, Gallery Petite, and Odetta, and in northwestern CT at Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Five Points Gallery, Icehouse Project Space, and Furnace/Art on Paper Archive. Maine’s solo exhibitions have been reviewed in ARTnews, Artcritical.com, the Brooklyn Rail, Two Coats of Paint, and The New Criterion. He has received support from NYFA (2000) and Yaddo (2012) and is a longstanding member of American Abstract Artists and the International Association of Art Critics. Maine’s writing has appeared regularly in Art in America, ARTnews, Artnet magazine, the New York Sun, Art on Paper, and Artillery; currently he writes primarily for Hyperallergic.com. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts; Parsons, The New School; Hartford Art School, University of Hartford, and Purchase College, SUNY where he is chair of the Bachelor of Science in Visual Arts program. https://www.stephenmaine.com