Like many younger artists, Frank Magnotta treats television as a given–but unlike most, his approach is neither reverential nor cutely ironic. Instead his eight pencil drawings at Standard, his first one-person show, subject the pervasive power of the medium to imaginative scrutiny.
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Magnotta says he borrows aspects of his buildings from existing structures–in this case not only prisons but banks and schools–photographing some himself. Indeed, part of what’s so effective about the large drawings, which can take months to execute, is their strangely assertive obsessive detail, which creates an almost frightening presence.
Wednesday Afternoon Arena is a bit more benign than Monday Morning Complex. A sports arena with a convex roof, it has turnstiles at street level and the names of some TV sports shows on the side. But Magnotta’s view from above emphasizes the way the human-scale turnstiles are dwarfed by the building’s height and bulk. And like the structure in Monday Morning Complex, this one has a somewhat skewed perspective, growing wider at the rear; this combined with the buildings’ isolation underlines their fantasy nature–the fact that they’re mental constructs.
Born in 1955, Gary Gissler is almost a generation older than Magnotta, and some of his aims are different. But both use pencil, both are former Illinoisans, both now live in New York, and both mention as an important influence former Chicagoan Tom Friedman, whose famously obsessive sculptures and installations often use materials repetitively. (“I want to be him when I grow up,” Gissler says.) A Chicago native, Gissler moved back here in 1982–and left again after he lost all his things, and nearly his life, in a 1987 suspected arson fire.
When Gissler moved to New York in the late 80s, he became fascinated with hip-hop: “I liked the emphasis on language–we’ve got something to say and fuck you all if you don’t like it.” That’s when he started making text-based work. Applying the gesso background “probably takes as long as writing the text”–and the hours of writing can sometimes produce “an extraordinary catharsis, almost like chanting a mantra.”
