STUDIO VISIT: ETHAN GREENBAUM
there seems to be a shared interest among many young artists right now (particularly painters and sculptors) in referencing/appropriating everyday street materials in their work. it’s a familiar and long-standing impulse, for sure, but one which has picked up some steam again these past few years, resulting in a lot of really interesting work.
among those making strong efforts along these lines is brooklyn-based artist Ethan Greenbaum, who replicates industrial materials (cinder blocks, cement slabs) and urban surfaces (cracked sidewalks, tarred streets, chipped brick walls) as a means of highlighting the aesthetic potential of his surroundings.
his most recent work, consisting largely of low-relief photographs and double-sided plexiglass prints, is particularly interesting for its resistance to easy categorization: combining elements of photography, sculpture, painting, and digital manipulations, these pieces do a nice job of blurring the lines between abstract and figurative, 2D and 3D, etc.
having now seen these works up close, i will say that its pretty difficult to get a sense of what they’re about based solely on documentation shots. it might help to read up first on his working process:
“The works often begin as digital photographs taken by the artist in his travels throughout the city. This prosaic imagery is then transcribed through various abstracting filters including digital editing, flatbed printing and vacuum forming.
In his series of vacuum-formed photos of sidewalks, Greenbaum infiltrates the ubiquitous ground plane with unexpected strangeness and malleability. Actual size reproductions of sidewalk are printed on translucent plastic, which is then formed around broken ceiling tiles. The resulting low relief panels enact a series of inversions, where the outdoors is brought in, background becomes foreground and the horizontal plane becomes vertical.In the plexiglass works, Greenbaum again recasts the visual peripheries of the urban landscape. Derived from a composite photo of a rock wall outside the artist’s studio, the work is printed on a transparent acrylic panel. The mortar connecting the flagstones has been digitally deleted, and visible between the stones is a high-resolution scan of Formica patterning. This double-sided overlapping of textures paradoxically creates spatial illusions and depth between the layered flatness of the two surfaces.”
View more of his work HERE, be sure to visit his show Cultured Stone (now up at Thierry Goldberg, running through June 3), and also check out The Highlights, his online arts journal/projects archive.
scroll down for some shots i took during my visit. (right-click for enlarged views)
too good
![Invariance is the property of perception whereby simple geometrical objects are recognized independent of rotation, translation, and scale; as well as several other variations such as elastic deformations, different lighting, and different component features. For example, the objects in A in the figure are all immediately recognized as the same basic shape, which are immediately distinguishable from the forms in B. They are even recognized despite perspective and elastic deformations as in C, and when depicted using different graphic elements as in D. Computational theories of vision, such as those by David Marr, have had more success in explaining how objects are classified.
Emergence, reification, multistability, and invariance are not necessarily separable modules to be modeled individually, but they could be different aspects of a single unified dynamic mechanism.[citation needed]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4ex4m2nJQ1rp5cnco1_400.jpg)
Invariance is the property of perception whereby simple geometrical objects are recognized independent of rotation, translation, and scale; as well as several other variations such as elastic deformations, different lighting, and different component features. For example, the objects in A in the figure are all immediately recognized as the same basic shape, which are immediately distinguishable from the forms in B. They are even recognized despite perspective and elastic deformations as in C, and when depicted using different graphic elements as in D. Computational theories of vision, such as those by David Marr, have had more success in explaining how objects are classified.
Emergence, reification, multistability, and invariance are not necessarily separable modules to be modeled individually, but they could be different aspects of a single unified dynamic mechanism.[citation needed]
Gestalt psychology or gestaltism (German: Gestalt – “essence or shape of an entity’s complete form”) is a theory of mind and brain of the Berlin School; the operational principle of gestalt psychology is that the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies. The principle maintains that the human eye sees objects in their entirety before perceiving their individual parts. Gestalt psychologists stipulate that perception is the product of complex interactions among various stimuli. Contrary to the behaviouralist approach to understanding the elements of cognitive processes, gestalt psychologists sought to understand their organization (Carlson and Heth, 2010). Thegestalt effect is the form-generating capability of our senses, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and whole forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves. In psychology, gestaltism is often opposed to structuralism. The phrase “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts” is often used when explaining gestalt theory,[1] though this is a mistranslation of Kurt Koffka’s original phrase, “The whole is other than the sum of the parts”.[2] Gestalt theory allows for the breakup of elements from the whole situation into what it really is.[3]
