Landon Metz
Grand (IV), 2011
Enamel on canvas
16 x 20 inches
[video]
from Jeremy Liebman’s studio
(click to enlarge)
from Jeremy Liebman’s studio
(long-expired polaroids of details of abstract paintings)
(click to enlarge)
from Jeremy Liebman’s studio
(click to enlarge)
i had the pleasure of hanging out with Jeremy Liebman at his studio in bushwick the other day. jeremy’s been a favorite of mine for a while: from his righteously weird personal work to his beautiful editorial and commercial output (including the outstanding photo and video lookbooks that accompany each Hixsept campaign), he’s a consistent, exceptionally inventive photographer.
a look at jeremy’s latest work, however, finds him branching out into a variety of different (and, for him, previously unexplored) media: a series of highly gestural abstract paintings on canvas; digital prints of abstract (“accidental”) images taken with a medium format camera; a group of strange sculptures in which random objects - VHS covers, plastic crates, neon ice packs, cassettes, fireworks, etc - are balanced together in odd arrangements; foggy abstract polariods isolating details of his own achromatic paintings.
all of this work is still very much in-progress, so i won’t get into it too deeply. suffice it to say that in each of these projects, you can see jeremy working through some fairly complex ideas regarding representation, perception, visual referral, and layering (both physical and figurative). outwardly, it all seems quite different from the photography he’s known for. hearing him discuss the new work, though, you come to recognize it as a logical extension of ideas that have always driven his practice. (for a “missing link” between the older and newer stuff, one might look to the series of polaroids he contributed to JSBJ’s 2010 book Bruit de Fond).
jeremy’s coming at this new work from somewhere that’s at once highly instinctual and exceedingly thoughtful; i really can’t wait to see where he takes it.
i took some photos of the space - see them as separate posts below.
[video]
My portrait of the staggeringly brilliant (and friendly!) Mark Leyner for today’s NY Times Magazine. The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, his first novel in 15 years, will be released tomorrow. Read the article here.
TONIGHT in LA
Art show to benefit Akiko’s mom’s cancer fund.
I’ll have a piece in the show alongside Liars, Karen O, Christopher Murphy, and many others.