May 12th, 2020 • 10 minute read
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The Weekly Curation: Pre-Social Distancing Nostalgia
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Nostalgia is a hell of a thing. It makes us watch bad old movies, pour over childhood recipes, and long for ice cream cakes served at a birthday party at the bowling alley. It gives the past a special glow, an attachment to small things that should be forgotten. But maybe desserts really were sweeter when we were children, maybe those movies weren’t so bad.
Right now, nostalgia extends past childhood, into our everyday adult lives. We reminisce about the pre-COVID, pre-quarantine, pre-WFH life. We think about after work drinks at a rooftop bar, surrounded by people and loud music, with a rosy glow. Unlike childhood, we understand we will someday return to these activities, to those same coworkers, but we still long for them. We’re ready to live our lives again.
But, of course, not too soon. We all need to be safe, thoughtful, and patient.
And on our dark days, when we’ve finished all our work, watched all the TV we can handle, we wonder will it truly go back to how things were? Do we want that? Have we learned and changed and grown in isolation? Do we appreciate different pleasures? Will food ever taste just as good as that long coveted delicious take out meal left on the front step by a masked delivery driver? It’s ok if things change, that’s why we aren’t children anymore. It’s ok if life is never fully the same –– if we don’t move on from the comfort of nostalgia, the past, what we know. But, for a moment, let’s look forward to those things we’ve missed and will embrace again when it’s safe for all of us.
This week artist and curator Mel Reese has brought together a collection of Art in Res pieces to help us appreciate our nostalgia. Give your tired eyes a break from the screens and give your brain the mental vacation that it deserves. Indulge in the spring time routines we feel we’re missing and reminisce with us on those pre-COVID salad days.
Since we are always home, it’s a good time to spruce up our environment. Envision a new piece of art in your little universe, a new daily escape. New pieces are a welcome distraction to the same old rooms, same old walls, of your house right now. Scroll through the post to see Mel’s placement of each piece, as well as how the selected works come together in a thoughtful, coalescent collection. Make sure to also catch Mel’s tips on curating your own collection now!
Now, tie up those imaginary shoe laces and let’s travel down memory lane –– happy browsing!
Going Out to Eat
Remember eating at a restaurant? Remember tortilla chips brought to your table? Wine purchased by the glass? We crave the loud music, the crowd of strangers, the hustle and bustle of eating outside our homes. It seems luxurious and deliciously forbidden. The thrill of having just one more drink before walking home on a clear night.
These simple acts are things we took for granted. Now we long for them. Us city-dwellers can’t fathom when we will next be at a bar, an old haunt, or a fancy new restaurant. Restaurant tables seem so close together now. Would we have to wear our masks while eating?
We each reminisce on the last time we went to a restaurant, not knowing that would be the one memory to feed us for months. We think (and hope) of a future where life is filled with such simple pleasures - sugary sodas, greasy yet undeniably delicious burritos, salty potato chips. The neon signs of a corner pizza place burn bright above us, a loud and colorful environment, brought to life in Madeline’s bright and cheerful painting. For now, this is as close as we can get to bringing that feeling home again.
Madeline Rupard says about her practice, “Having moved very frequently throughout my life, my paintings investigate memory and the American landscape. Using rich colors and loose painterly brushstrokes, I explore the sensory quality of spaces I move through in my daily life: their colors, textures, floors, ceilings, and skies. These subjects range from the mundane to the miraculous, the grocery store to the gothic cathedral.”
Having People Over
Oh the joys of having friends over –– slumber parties, birthday parties, holiday get-togethers. We remember drinking liters of soda with our best friends in middle school, drunk on sugar and good gossip. We long for that closeness –– sleeping bags pulled together, telling ghost stories, trying to stay awake all night. In adulthood, we have friends over for wine and board games, New Years Eve parties, holiday dinners under mistletoe. We miss the company of our friends and we miss pouring them cocktails, getting them snacks, falling asleep tired and happy.
In Nikki’s piece, we see a gathering of girls (no boys allowed - as the painting’s title says). It’s intimate, casual and special at the same time, clearly a group of close friends or family. And we know this beats any Zoom hangout, internet always cutting out mid sentence. With this, we embrace our longing to hang out with anyone and everyone –– another person besides ourselves or our cats or our plants or our significant others.
Born in Brooklyn, Nikki was a musician most of his life. In 2014 he decided to teach himself painting by diving in headfirst with the approach of learning by doing. Embracing the unknown and trusting his intuition, he has been producing many works both haunting and decorative.
International Travel… or Travel in General
The term “vacation” has an ancient sort of ring to it now. It’s something we’ve lost this year –– dreaming of beach chairs and long car rides. W-ingFH everyday melds the working hours with non-working time, until the delineation is lost. We wake up at work and start to resent our makeshift kitchen table desk. And those of us who are parents are working triple time –– Paid Time Off has morphed into Parenting Time Only and it lasts forever.
We aren’t ungrateful, but what we wouldn’t give for a weekend in the mountains. A quiet beach and a long book to read in the sun. Cocktails served to us by someone who isn’t in our immediate family. The thrill of getting a sunburn. In Viktoriya’s dreamlike painting we feel the sunshine, warm weather leaking into our homes. It’s the dream of a Mediterranean-esque escape, the fantasy we all long for these days.
Viktoriya Basina received a master degree in painting from the Moscow State Art Surikov Institute. Over the years she worked on numerous commercial and non-profit mosaic and mural projects and exhibited her work locally and internationally. In 2017 Viktoriya moved from Russia to Brooklyn where she set up her studio. Most recently she was an invited artist at the Art and Design festival in Guri, South Korea and an artist-in-residence/grant recipient at the Valparaiso foundation in Spain. Since her move to Brooklyn she participated in numerous group shows and had solo shows at the Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia, in Greenpoint Gallery and Caelum Gallery in NYC. Apart from making fine art Viktoriya creates mural and mosaic public art projects and works in the theater and film industry.
Being Rowdy
Remember being WILD? Remember being loud in the middle of a NYC street at 2AM on a weeknight, just because you could? Remember the days of being 22 and going out, just to see where the night takes you. We miss real parties –– dancing, drinking, getting rowdy. We long to be loud outside our homes, sloppy with strangers, meeting nice drunk girls in the women’s bathroom. The silly little things that make being young fun.
Interacting with strangers now feels terrifying, but we long for the discovery of new people. The ease of lowered inhibitions, whispering hilarious secrets to a new person at the bar. Giggling with girls you just met. Steve’s piece is similar, yet different, from Nikki’s painting. In this we reminisce on parties, but this time with strangers! The thrill of someone new.
Steve Moors says about his work, “The motivation for my work is essentially driven by my fascination with the incongruities and conflicting self-deceptions created by the struggle between our primal and present modern selves. It is an attempt to present this phenomena in a visual language that is focused enough to address the issue at hand with as much clarity and transparency as I’m able, yet broad enough to transfer these coherent concepts without being colloquially or culturally exclusive. I see each piece as a collection of expanding contemporary visual sutras, to be pondered, absorbed, and considered.”
Public Spaces
Ah the public park. From the sprawl of Central Park to the bustle of Union Square, New Yorkers are craving our public parks. They are our favorite locations, where we can find solace in nature and pretend we’re leaving the big city behind. As the days get warmer, sunset coming later every day, the act of feeling sun on our faces, taking a nap in the park, a breeze on our shoulders, grass tickling our feet, feels like a risk. But, boy, do we miss it.
Ernesto’s monumental work is so clearly in direct conversation with the iconic Georges Seurat’s famous pointillism painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, not only in its subject matter and composition, but it’s large scale as well. Its human-sized scale engulfs us as viewers, the feel of sunshine emanating from the piece. It allows us to directly enjoy the vision of the work and gives our memories time to roam freely through our favorite outdoor spaces.
Ernesto Renda makes paintings and pastel works on canvas made primarily with rubbings of low-relief drawings. The lines of the relief drawing are how one sees the other layer of image. Renda attended the Brown-RISD Dual-Degree program and graduated with a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (‘18) and a BA in Modern Culture and Media Studies from Brown University (‘18). His work is included in an upcoming two-person exhibition with Janie Korn curated by Matt Nasser at The Empty Circle Space in Brooklyn, NY. In 2018, he was the inaugural recipient of the Brown Arts Initiative Post-Baccalaureate Fellowship at the Performa Biennial in New York. He grew up in Somerset, NJ and currently lives and works in New York.
The Commute
Do I dare say we might miss our daily commute or is that going too far? Perhaps we miss the routine, the daily consistency of the commute. Having a moment before the day really starts to listen to music, still sleepy from the night before.
The thought of pushing yourself into a crowded train car now feels like a horror movie. So many people, so close.
But Charis’ painting is a glimpse into things gone by. A quiet subway station, feeling like a dream or a distant memory. It evokes the freedom that we miss –– the ability to travel so quickly throughout our giant city. It reminds us of the places we used to spend so much of our time –– the in-between spots. Not work, not home –– now absent from our lives. We’ve made our piece with the rats and we know the proper dance moves to side step a busy platform, avoiding the mysteriously, yet consistently dripping ceilings. It wasn’t great––in fact, it was awful––but it was ours.
Charis Ammon has been curious for as long as she can remember. She received a BFA in Painting at Texas State University in San Marcos in 2015 and an MFA in Painting at the University of Houston in 2018. Ammon is now represented at Inman Gallery in Houston as of September 2019. She is now living, working, and painting in Queens.
Bringing it Together
On curating the collection:
Here I go again! I want to walk you through what I’ve considered when bringing this collection together. Whether you’re an experienced collector or totally new to the art world, it’s always fun to thoughtfully discuss what makes a great collection.
This week, from nostalgia to melancholy, we’ve focused on our life pre-COVID, all the little things we miss. I’ve brought together a group of paintings that depict these scenes, moments suspended in amber, environments, spaces that exist in our memories. But, of course, there are always more subtle notes connecting the pieces as well. I’m excited to share this week’s perspective and let you in on my process!
Color:
Many of the pieces within this group have dominant cooler tones in the composition. For me, the coolness of blue evokes the sense of memories, of times once experienced and now gone. But there’s also a brightness to each one: a third rail of bright red, electric yellow, and vibrant blue reminding us that the good times still wait for us, as bright as ever, when we are ready.
Composition:
The viewpoint of the viewer is important to each of these compositions and, ultimately, to the narratives each work tells. In Madeline’s warm painting, we are positioned as the eater of the burrito, placed directly in the scene (if only we had that burrito in real life as well…). In Steve’s we are watching the shenanigans at play directly before us. We are voyeurs, considering if we want to join their antics. In contrast, in Ernesto’s piece, we are both invited in as enjoyers of the park, due to its immense scale, as well as observing others' enjoyment –– much like the reality of public parks.
Size and scale:
Once again, we explore a range of sizes from small to very large. Are you sensing a pattern in my curation? As we discussed in Ernesto’s section, the large scale of this work engulfs us, inviting us physically into the scene. On the other hand, the small intimacy of Madeline’s work brings us closer to her vision, creating a proximity in the viewer –– a closeness that feels so foreign and scary to us now!
Subject matter:
Each of these pieces is a narrative –– they tell a story through images. What is the story exactly? That’s up to us as the viewer. The image is here to lead us wherever we may go. From composition, size, color, and more, we are guided through each storyline, each narrative, each artist’s imagination. But, we, the viewer, and our storyline are ultimately the subject of each work.
With these new viewing tools in hand, happy collecting!
Curated by Mel ReeseZhuzh by Emily Berge
Virtual installations courtesy of ArtPlacer