Thank You: New Works by Steven Harrington
and Justin Krietemeyer of National Forest
Art Prostitute
- Justin Quinn -
Thank You: New Works by Steven Harrington and Justin Krietemeyer of National Forest will go down in history as the second-to-last Denton Art Prostitute show. After a final blowout with Jay Ryan of the Bird Machine, the gallery will move to a much larger space in Dallas. In some respects, Thank You reflects the gallery's move: National Forest appears to be coming into its own as a refined duo just as Art Prostitute is about to shed its start-up gallery skin.
Steven Harrington, Mona Lisa, 2006
Hand-painted acrylic and silkscreen on record sleeve paper
25 1/2 x 33 inches
Thank You is a departure for Harrington and Krietemeyer as they break from a Pasadena Art Center heritage. Expecting paintings reminiscent of the Clayton Brothers or Jeff Soto, we are instead given small bodies of work in direct conversation with graphic media. This only seems natural as National Forest is also a dynamic design team. The honesty with which Harrington and Krietemeyer allow graphic language to spill into their art is refreshing.
This exhibition exists as a short chronology that starts as a mass array of related small works produced in what appears to be spastic, playful collaboration and continues as a refined set of medium-scale works. These reference individual responses to larger, collective ideas of childhood within an abstracted notion of late 1960s and early 1970s pop culture.
National Forest (Steven Harringtonand Justin Krietemery), 2006
Installation view, Art Prostitute, Denton
National Forest lays the foundation of Thank You through the production of open editionsdozens of 4-x-4 inch prints. By using Print Gocco, an economical and portable printing system, Harrington and Krietemeyer are able to present a variety of borrowed and invented icons. Childhood textbooks, stickers, comic-book advertisements and invented clay characters become modular game pieces in a grid-based picture puzzle. Colors are hipprocess colors replaced by faded blues, sun-bleached reds, mustards and brownscreating an aged, thrift-store aesthetic. The result is a quasi-hierarchical presentation of quotidian imagery.
The prints function like open-ended raw material, best understood through organizational interpretation. Like memories, the works gain importance through context, and because their palette and arrangement scream of the past, one is immediately familiar with even the most esoteric of images like a personal fictionalized childhood ripe for a generation obsessed with fiction.
A time-related narrative continues, largely by Harrington, in a more thorough and abstracted investigation of iconic imagery. Faces from 1960s rock bands, abstracted through tools of the psychedelic canon, are stretched across a halftone trompe l'œil armature to create fine edition children's kites. Colorful faces printed on thin, record-sleeve paper reveal wooden support bars under the image. The fragile transparency of each kite, combined with the armature reference on which they are built, reveals a keen understanding of a fallacy that rescues the works from being simple pastiche; the works are made with an awareness of vacancy. It is through the use of reminiscencethin, pop-culture skinsthat a denied physical structure and an implied narrative reveal their program, self-aware and proud of its semi-existence. Harrington attempts to abstract celebrity, revealing icons as we see them today: thin remnants of histories that are not reality but in fact borrowed sentimentality.
Justin Krietemeyer, Corporate Dance, 2006
Silkscreen on record sleeve paper
25 1/2 x 33 inches
The last section of Thank You shows a somewhat darker side of this abstracted history. Harrington and Krietemeyer still employ a printed armature and record-sleeve paper, but through the use of photomontage translated into a single black screen, they achieve a more sinister sensibility. Here, time and history are more evident in a choice of paper that is in the process of aging. Urban compilations equally reference 1930s Dada and Winston Smith's punk aesthetic of the 1970s, resulting in a tense urgency. Harrington and Krietemeyer's graphic photomontages speak again of constructed history and engage the viewer through a jarring and dislocated reality.
As the show progresses, the artists achieve a museumlike finish that foreshadows the upcoming upgrade of Art Prostitute. One can only hope National Forest and Art Prostitute can collaborate again, as each is clearly becoming more mature by the day.