VIEWLIST is MINUS SPACE’s new online project space where we invite artists and others to curate a visual essay of images. VIEWLIST exhibitions are experimental and usually thematic, and can include art works spanning various time periods, movements, and geographic locations. Exhibitions may also include ideas and images from disciplines outside of the visual arts. With VIEWLIST, we’ve created a venue that focuses exclusively on ideas, a kind of idealized curatorial space, where exhibition budgets, loans and acquisitions of art works, timelines, and all other logistics are set aside.

Our third viewlist exhibition is conceived by New York painter Karen Schifano.

Bulletin Board: Inspiration Information*
Thoughts on Inspiration
Conceived by Karen Schifano

The word “inspire” (originally meaning “to infuse with breath”) is a verb, but can also transform itself into a noun or adjective. It’s very active, and yet also implies being receptive, even demands openness, a readiness to receive, and a sharpening of perception and awareness. From one thing, there is a direct connection to another thing, a kind of touch that is nurturing, rich and full of promise. Potential becomes realization; we wake up rejuvenated, re-energized, and ready for action.

This group of inspirational flotsam and jetsam from our homes and studios is incredibly varied, running the gamut from a poetic quote to the restoration of a house, from the image of a computer desktop to strips of colored tape on a wall. In some instances, there’s a surprising leap from the image seen here to the finished work, in others there is a clear and recognizable relationship. I hope that as you are intrigued by an image, you will click on it to reveal the caption or thoughts of the artist, and then go to the individual websites linked to each name. Through a dialogue about how the mysterious process of getting from A to B or even Z unfolds for each of us, new avenues of search can open up, and we can be re-inspired by this “Inspiration Information”.

* by Shuggie Otis

Participating Artists (left to right, row by row):

Stephen Maine | Richard Bottwin | Paul Corio

Joanne Mattera | Kevin Finklea | Billy Gruner & Sarah Keighery

Linda Arts | Erik Saxon | Henry Brown

Rory MacArthur | Melanie Crader | Matthew Deleget

Daniel Argyle | Li-Trincere | Chris Ashley

Linda Francis | Sylan Lionni | Shinsuke Aso

Douglas Melini | Brent Hallard | Lynne Harlow

Guido Winkler | Michael Zahn | Karen Schifano

Lynne Eastaway | Daniel Göttin | Simon Ingram

Daniel Feingold

VIEWLIST is MINUS SPACE’s new online project space where we invite artists and others to curate a visual essay of images. VIEWLIST exhibitions are experimental and usually thematic, and can include art works spanning various time periods, movements, and geographic locations. Exhibitions may also include ideas and images from disciplines outside of the visual arts. With VIEWLIST, we’ve created a venue that focuses exclusively on ideas, a kind of idealized curatorial space, where exhibition budgets, loans and acquisitions of art works, timelines, and all other logistics are set aside.

Our second viewlist exhibition is conceived by Chicago-based artist Michelle Grabner. Michelle is a Professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1997, she co-founded, along with her artist and partner Brad Killam, The Suburban, an artist project space in Oak Park, Illinois. She is also a regular contributor to X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. Her work is represented by Rocket Gallery, London; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Green Gallery, Milwaukee; and Gallery 16, San Francisco.

There are many things in the air and all of them are for free
Conceived by Michelle Grabner

“So I think what comes next is a web with big holes blown in it. A spiderweb in a storm. The turtles get knocked out from under it, the platform sinks through the cloud. A lot of the inherent contradictions of the web get revealed, the contradictions in the oxymorons smash into each other.” — Bruce Sterling, February 2009

Fiscal exigencies have bestowed artists with promising new freedoms. No longer charged with the aim to develop tamped spoils for the voracious speculative collector, many artists are once again examining the formal dimensions of three-dimensional space.

In photography this can be seen in the renewed and enthusiastic interest in abstraction. The exploration of the darkroom’s technical limitations and its structural truths are once again concretizing photography.

The superabundance of ceramics and cast-metal objects weighing on gallery pedestals of the recent years has given way to boundlessness. Untying gravity and provoking physical space is being ushered back into the formalist’s syntax as traditional measures of object value have broken down.

Unlike the contemporary accretion work that engages in synthetic concepts of space, the works included here actively invent spatial relations, experiment with organizing structures and choreographing movement. Accumulation and collection practices — many of which were aptly featured in the New Museum’s “Unmonumental” exhibition — are acts of imitation, a superfluous and redundant practice mirroring web navigation and digital information gathering: web 2.0 assemblage.

“There are many things in the air and all of them are for free” is the title of a loopy wire sculpture by Diango Hernández that is currenty on display at the Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach. I have adapted this title for my purposes as it locates value while poetically summoning the progressive fact that three-dimensional space is new again.

Look up.

VIEWLIST is MINUS SPACE’s new online project space where we invite artists and others to curate a visual essay of images. VIEWLIST exhibitions are experimental and usually thematic, and can include art works spanning various time periods, movements, and geographic locations. Exhibitions may also include ideas and images from disciplines outside of the visual arts. With VIEWLIST, we’ve created a venue that focuses exclusively on ideas, a kind of idealized curatorial space, where exhibition budgets, loans and acquisitions of art works, timelines, and all other logistics are set aside.

Our first viewlist exhibition is conceived by Brooklyn-based painter Douglas Melini.

I Can Read in Red, I Can Read in Blue, I Can Read in Pickle Color Too
Conceived by Douglas Melini

Trying to make sense of color can be so difficult. I guess a big reason is that there has been very little written about it to help us out. I’m always grouping my experiences, and ideas about color together; making lists of my thoughts, categorizing them, hoping that somehow this process will help me achieve a better understanding of what color means to me.

Some of those meditations are about the relationship between color and humor, and that sense of playfulness that can happen with color, shape, and space. For a long time now, I’ve had this theory that the way we look and think about color has been influenced by the late Theodor Geisel, better known to the world as the beloved Dr. Seuss. For those of us born after the 1950s, Dr. Seuss books became one of our first formal encounters with color.

For me, it was the first time I began to assign meaning to color. The words, shapes, and feel of color in those books all seemed wrapped up together and functioned as a whole.  As a kid I would often open those books just to breeze through the images. That excitement is something I have never forgotten. Sometimes when I see certain works of art I feel like I am having that experience all over again.

For the last 12 years or so, I’ve made mental notations of artworks that fall into this space and this group of images is a collection of those thoughts, a representation of those experiences.