"The show is photographic,” says New York-based artist Asher Penn, referring, improbably, to his current show of “Hebrew Paintings.” 100 small white canvases with fragments of black Herbaic text placed in the center, printed off a computer and fixed to the surface with brushstrokes of acrylic medium. The text originated as a poetic list of names, titles and phrases all of which have a strong cultural and personal meaning for Penn. He collected disparate, often absurd phrases such as, "I am a dog", "Arrested Development" and "Institutional Critique" into the Google Translate application to change them into Hebrew, a language he learned how to read phonetically in his youth but never learned to translate it himself even. “When I take photographs I tend to go through indexical subject matter,” says the artist explaining his tendency to photograph everyday objects and subject matter. “What I did with this body of work, is I established these phrases as objects, by forming them through an automatic process and then placing them on the canvas, instead of just writing down the words and letting all of the associations come through." “They are Epson Inkjet prints adhered to the canvas with matte medium, so they sit incorrectly on the canvas, which for me was a nice moment, each time I would make one it would be different and there was this possibility for variation, this was a way of making something that was both automatic and a painting, also the brush strokes, that is the painterly aspect to the show. ... With photography it feels like you’re working in the opposite direction to painting: the infinite variations are already out there: Your job is to frame them." This process becomes a simple experiment which gives Penn some aesthetic distance from the work and the ability to see what sort of cultural connotations are skewed through the translation process. Andrew Roth’s small gallery is also a bookstore and for Penn, who is a prolific book artist, adapting gallery work to the page is a natural process, the repetition of imagery and scale in the show functions the same in the small book that he self published for the show. To a viewer unfamiliar with Hebrew, the characters are entirely abstract, without any visual cues. Penn describes, "you are seeing something and not knowing what it is and there is something very peaceful about that. When I started working on these, I wanted them to be quiet objects." A small translation card available for perusal lists the words pictured in the exhibition space, but without a guide as to which painting is which word.
Year: 2010
Clients: Interview Magazine
Category: Writing