The Screaming Weathers, for Jennifer Lord's Dirty Abstraction at Union Hall,
demonstrates expressive potentials of weather through a set of three remediations originating from a decade-old folio of more than a hundred drawings. In various formats each piece comprises a background and three foreground drawings. Through collage figure and ground are - metaphorically applied to emphasize the dynamic interplay between various elements and conditions. (in both internal and external weathers)
    The Screaming Weathers is presented as a dynamic webpage, video loop, and print collages. The webpage generates randomized compositions, urging visitors to share their favorites via social media or directly to the artist. The video, continuing the background-foreground theme, presents an extended suite of shifting compositions. The trio of prints, produced with a creative-coding tool made by the artist, make the digital physical and give it form. These compositions highlight the unpredictability of both collage and weather.
    The emotive multiplicities of weather are engaged through a kind of Abstraction Expressionism, emphasizing the personal experience of weather, as physical forces, and as reflective amplification of our internal psychic-emotional states. The works challenge representational constraints, embracing the cacophony of elements in extreme weather crises, and referencing experimental cinema and horror lighting. In Screaming Weathers abstraction is critical, as the folio becomes a visual vocabulary, depicting the unseen forces shaping our environment, and the ineffable aspects of weather. The continuing remediations of Screaming Weathers are a contemplation of our relationship with weather and the power of abstraction to act beyond linguistic limitations emphasizing a more critical potential.

           
           


What does Abstract Art Represent comic - Ad Reinhardt cover
2024, photomechanical reproduction, 8.5x11in.

Special-edition signed & numbered print available at Dirty Abstraction opening, distributed personally by the artist for free

Dirty Abstraction curated by Jennifer Lord, and hosted by Union Hall Denver

original, Ad Reinhardt, 'How to Look at a Cubist Painting (detail)', 1946, printed newspaper tear sheet, 19 x 35 cm

This comic continues a longstanding practice of "covers" and unsolicited collaborations in dialogue with a diverse range go famous and lesser-known artworks and artists.

Before Reinhardt established himself as one of the most revered abstract painters in America, artist and writer he made a living by drawing cartoons. During the 1930s and ’40s, his humorous and frequently satirical drawings appeared regularly in print for a variety of clients ranging from the Brooklyn Dodgers to Glamour magazine. More often, they appeared in the pages of the communist-party affiliated newspaper New Masses, where they were mobilized in support of the American anti-war and labour movements.
In How to Look at a Cubist Painting (1946), for instance, a viewer’s incredulous query (‘What does this represent?’) is met with the anthropomorphized painting shouting back: ‘What do you represent?’
Often ironic and witty, when taken as a whole these works nonetheless registered deep tensions within Reinhardt’s visual practice, as well as his negotiation of concerns surrounding distribution, media and the integration of art and everyday life.