|
|
New York Times
August 26, 2007
From Young Story Tellers, A Playful Tone
I have remarked before that a streak of craft is running through contemporary art these days, with many artists making objects by hand using techniques like model-making, knitting and ceramics. It is plainly apparent in this show. In addition to Natsu and Ms. Peppito, there is also Mike Womack, who has constructed a cinder block out of bright orange Cheetos. It is a tongue-in-cheek gesture, but the block is so perfectly made that you cant help but admire the artists oddball brilliance.
- Benjamin Genocchio
Art Papers
January/February 2007
Mike Womack
Hartford, CT
In his site specific installation Heat is Not Made of Tiny Hot Things, Georgia native Mike Womack offers an exploration of the disputed territory between painting and sculpture where modernism left off and postmodernism took over. Enlisting the dutiful reasoning of a revisionist art historian, he inserts a new chapter into an outdated survey text. Yet he does so interactively, in four dimensions rather than two.
Entering the space, I am confronted by a grid. Five thousand candy colored, tow-inch panels from a seemingly static, abstract image on the galleys far wall. The initial impact is phenomenal enough to disarm my critical faculties, that is , my natural tendency to search for a conceptual hook. As I proceed into the space, however the pictorial stability begins to falter. I soon realize that each panel is a mirror that, resting on a ball-and- socket, is calibrated to sample a sculptural object at that back of the gallery. The abstract color gradient thus shifts between various schemes as I change position, while the organization of the central grid remains intact.
At the rear of the gallery, several groups of geometric, monochrome sculptures reveal themselves as the source of the walls color: a wedge of sculpted yellow rope, a cluster of lime-green playground ball, several towers of regularly stacked red wood blocks, and so on. My process of recognition entails my cognitive transference of the sculptures local color to the universal color of the abstract image represented in the mirrors. This transformation underscores Womacks assumptions about the fugitive nature of form, shape, and color. His work is a tour of phenomenological relativity aimed at the orthodox rhetoric of minimalist sculpture, which he clearly references.
Not only does Womack allude to the detached, utopian Platonism of Robert Morris four-part canonical essay Notes on Sculpture published between 1966 and 1969, but he also offers a strong counterpoint to the minimalist pioneers stated intention to take relationships out of the work. If Morris exhibited an installation of four three-foot mirrored cubes at the Green Gallery in 1965, Womack takes things a couple steps further.
Not only are the colors contingently reflected in Womacks mirrors a function of the reflected light, but their chromatic significance is also completely subjective. As such, the red of any given panel is not just red, but a particular red or the red of an object, which can only be sustained from a single vantage point. Whereas Morris saw something autonomous and detached in his specific objects, Womack assert the unavoidable contingency of meaning that postmodernism has equipped us to detect in contemporary art.
The problem with describing interactive works such as Mike Womacks is that they ae essentially experiential. Description only squeezes and stretches language around what is essentially non-verbal. Interpreting the spatio-temporal effect of a work of this type is like trying to do neurosurgery with a wrecking ball. While Womack does an extraordinary job of articulating a coherent philosophical position as it relates to the historical past, it is important to note that the meaning of the work is generated by - and therefore confined to - experience itself.
Light-and-space grandfather James Turrell summed it up well when he said of hi sown work, a lot of spaces are interesting to me when they are generated not be the architecture of form but by the overlay of thought. Indeed, words can describe the architecture of form here as well as the art historical foundation of Womacks work, but how such a piece as Heat is Not Made of Tiny Hot Things is encountered and overlaid with individual thought is more significant than what is encountered.
- Shane McAdams
The New Yorker
January 15, 2007
Goings on About Town: Art
Mike Womack
From the front, Womacks ingenious construction looks like one panel of a fabulous disco pyramid, with hundreds of small mirrors glittering in a concentric square pattern. Walk around to the back of the open frame, though, and the real cleverness is revealed: all the little refracted scraps of color come from a goofy landscape made of vegetal piles of green garden hose, topiaries of orange Cheetos, clouds of blue rubber gloves, flower beds of red plastic stakes, and the like. The perceptual trick of turning Crayola-colored dross into Pop-art treasure, and the intricacy of the execution, is a delight.
The Village Voice
December 21, 2006
Best In Show
Buzz-Worthy
Mike Womack
From one side, this large, angled construction of thousands of laser positioned, credit-card-sized mirrors presents concentric squares of color that shift with the viewers movement. Only after peering behind the facade do you realize that the pixilated fireworks originate from an ersatz landscape: clouds made from hundreds of blue rubber gloves with plastic purple beads raining from them, a foothill of cardboard pierced with bright red spikes, cheese-doodle stalagmites, and garden hose bulrushes. Womack has extracted a chromatic diamond from workaday dross.
- R.C. Baker
Sculpture Magazine
November 2006
Hartford
Mike Womack
Real Art Ways by Jonathan Goodman
Mike Womacks spectacular interactive installation Heat Is Not Made of Tiny Hot Things (2006) centers on a wall of 4,750 small mirror-pixels, each and every one positioned by hand (a laser beam was used as a guide) to reflect a group of sculptures placed on the other side of the space. Womack, who studied painting for years before moving into sculptures, sees Heat primarily as an exercise in color. But at the same time, the sculptures are vividly interesting in their own right. They include a mass of yellow rope placed on the ground; a dark blue, plastic tarp bunched into many tight folds attached to the wall; a rather comical collection of mauve plastic watering cans surrounded by mauve artificial roses, also on the wall; a group of differently sized wall-mounted green plastic balls; a light blue cloth draped over poles; and a group of thin bright-red columns composed of cut blocks of two-by-fours (the last two sculptures rise up from the floor).
As viewers enter the space, their presence changes the quality and quantity of light reaching the mirrored wall, which duly reflects this new audience in its 11 x 20-foot grid. Drawing on advanced technology-Womack worked out the basic scheme on a computer-the wall of mirrors looks like nothing so much as a huge monitor, with each mirror perfectly poised to send back an image of a particular sculpture. Another association, perhaps technically more accurate, is that of a digital camera, the mirror-pixels picking up the available light and reflecting the captured imagery back to the viewer, who becomes a major figure in the schema of the environment itself. Womack has positioned the individual two-inch-square mirrors so that the viewers position, in regard to what he sees, is sent back to him by the reflective surface; a short step in any direction results in the appearance of a completely different image, one at a variance with the yellow grid that appears when the viewer stands in the exact middle of the room. The kaleidoscopic change of the colors corresponds to the most minimal of movements on the viewers part.
Although Heat exquisitely simulates the face of a monitor or the workings of a digital camera, the construction of the mirrored wall was achieved by what can only be described as a nuts-and-bolts approach. A magnet is attached to each acrylic mirror. A roofing nail cut to the length of half an inch is epoxied to a steel square; the nail is then inserted into and attached with glue to a wooden ball, which itself is placed into a piece of soft polyethylene tubing. The tubing, whose opening is slightly smaller than the ball, grips the ball but allows it to rotate, enabling Womack to angle the mirror (attached with the magnet). The tubing is then attached to a dowel of equal size, and the entire apparatus is finally mounted on a four-foot-square panel.
Heat is a brilliant composite not only of materials but also of process, and its meaning suggests both high-tech complexity and pain-staking craft. Visually sophisticated, it offers a crowd-pleasing, spectacularly changing view. Its artisanal quality ensures that the installation does not fail because of an obsessiveness with technical matters; in some ways, the work can seem very old-fashioned in its obsessive investigation of color. The result is a remarkably coherent presentation whose attraction results from its ability to change, moment to moment, letting the audience choreograph, to some extent, the terms of interactivity.
- Jonathan Goodman
Hartford Courant
May 22, 2006
Low Tech Art in High Tech Era
Mike Womacks Heat is Not Made of Tiny Hot Things truly lives up to its name. Womack created the original image, a modernist, abstract painting in Photoshop where he converted it into a digital matrix to plan out the color of every square. Using 4750 handmade mirror pixels, Womack steals color from painted assemblages in the periphery of the space, using a laser beam to reflect precise color to each carefully positioned mirror. The result is an 11-foot-tall 20-foot-wide luminescent grid resembling stained glass windows.
Precision is key in Womacks work. Variables such as shadows had to be controlled or the mirrors wouldnt reflect the intended colors. The viewing space also had to be limited because once the viewer enters the space the light varies, changing the color of the mirrors.
- Ruthie Ackerman
NY Arts Magazine
November/December 2005
Foundation at Gallery Boreas
The entry point of the exhibition is a conceptually economical sculpture by Brooklyn artist, Mike Womack. With a clarity and restraint that is rare in contemporary art, the piece addresses the range of post-Kantian oppositions that have preoccupied the art world for the past century: the noumenal vs. phenomenal, the virtual vs. actual, and the concrete vs. abstract. On the base of a simple office chair that looks to have been lifted from the IRS thirty years ago sits a Carl Andre-esque cube of standard bricks. A simple line painting of the removed back/top of the chair bends around the faces of the cube. From the galleries entrance one sees a perfectly proportioned chair that is half actual and half illusion, whose perspectival accuracy changes with the viewers vantage. While the piece is rigorous and cerebral, the mass of bricks that hulks oppressively on top of the spindly chair legs invests the piece with a blue collar poetry that trickles down from the head into the body.
- Shane McAdams
|
|
