Mirena Rhee, The Artist, with Winter and a “Blank” wearable photographed in the studio - 2011. Winter, a primed canvas wearable is painted with a frame from Winter Diagrams: December - Animated pen and ink drawings digital video, Edition of 12, dimensions variable, 2012. Music by marcus fischer / mapmap.ch
Winter Diagrams: December - Animated pen and ink drawings digital video, Edition of 12, dimensions variable, 2012. Music by marcus fischer / mapmap.ch
These series of animations are the digital equivalent of my Red diary. It is a non-linear diary - I sometimes write notes on past entries and cross-reference ideas. Usually written in both English and Bulgarian, sometimes a sentence starts in English and ends in Bulgarian, sometimes I write English words in Cyrillic; sometimes I write Bulgarian words using the English alphabet.
In these animations I use my latest drawings and paintings and they, instead of Bulgarian and English, become a new procedural language. I use a single drawing to create a visual Morse code and a procedural script to animate and draw each frame. The Brooklyn machine series carry the mood and the sense of place and space I currently occupy - Brooklyn, New York.
No digital manipulations for the drawings have been used - I scan them into the computer and procedurally animate them. The hands are pen and ink drawings on hot pressed board, a very smooth velvety surface produced by an American paper company. The red background is a Crimson Red Intaglio ink monotype on Fabriano papers
( an Italian paper praised since the Renaissance ).
For these compositions I was inspired by Marcus Fischer's amazing album mip~map/for friends this winter.. and my friends as well.
Painted and animated by Mirena Rhee. Music by marcus fischer / mapmap.ch
in 2011 I went to Zuccotti Park to photograph the Art of Occupy Wall Street. A man holds a sign which reads “The disease which afflicts the body politic is lack of love and absence of altruism.”
“If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?”
― Dogen
There's a snow storm here in New York City and it's a big one. Mainly wind really, and I think tons of snow. I wonder how did the first settlers manage these Winters man?
It is helpful to me though because I can find an excuse to read \ uninterrupted.
I was reading a saying by the Zen master Dogen.
I'm like let's see what his biography was like! And it turned out the man didn't find the truth where he was in Japan but he traveled to China and found it there, and went back to Japan to teach it.
The key lesson here is get your lessons from people that are already dead, that's one, and the second is always double check the context. Because essentially what he said didn't mean what we think he meant.
You have to travel far and wide to find the truth that's for sure.
Recently I have been going through some books I own and which I had decided to sell because they no longer move me, and their physical weight and space take space that I want to devote to what I truly believe in.
on the other hand there are many people who could genuinely benefit from these books, they will want them care for them and will be glad of the experience.
I see this as a win-win situation.
One of those books I own is Richard Avedon's fashion. When I first started out as an artist I was obsessed with photography and with Richard Avedon. I loved both fashion and beauty so his work was a natural fit to what my eyes craved.
One day I went to the San Francisco museum of modern Art to see an exhibition of large portraits by Avedon. Avedon's work was on the top floor. On the third floor there was another exhibition of photography by Robert Frank. Richard Avedon's portraits were enormous or at least they seemed to me so, larger than the height of a human being. Robert Frank's photographs on the other hand were tiny, or what it seemed to me the palm of a human hand. So what happened is that I descended from the top floor of the enormous portraits down to the tiny photographs of Robert Frank and I was profoundly moved by there genuinity. Where Richard Avedon's photographs were produced, Robert Frank's photographs were snapped casually and with keen eye on the streets, they were made with love and immediacy and they carried a personal truth.
I think what Robert Frank exemplified in his work was the profound sympathy for the human condition. While Avedon tried to cover it up, mask it and serve it on a plate.
“Ugly humans do not belong on the beautiful page, in fact most humans aren’t beautiful enough to grace here these pages so I come in to fix what’s wrong with the prowess of my photo improving skills, with the might of my lights and the fake filters on my lens” I could hear Avedon say.
I immediately fell out of love with Richard Avedon. See truth really matters in art, this is one of the reasons that Van Gogh is more prized than Bouguereau.
I have many painter friends who do not like Van Gogh and that is okay because he's not really painters painter, he's the truth of the human condition. His work speaks to everyone, just like his letters.
I frequently have arguments with people over values, and specifically the role of money in interactions. So I always tell this story.
Imagine a friend gives you a present, it is a beautiful present and you're so grateful to get it. You thank your friend profusely and you feel great. You turn around to stash your prize away but then your friends taps you in the shoulder and says, sorry it's going to be 200 bucks, how would you feel?
When art is produced this is exactly what it feels like. And this is the type of art that Richard Avedon makes and which turned me off to whatever he made. I could see the price tag of his work before I see the work, and the human being/s behind it.
Just like in the story with the gift and my friend, where within 5 minutes of interaction you decide whether this is a work from the heart or the work of a merchant, in art it really takes some time before you could decide whether to connect with the work or to put it in the merchandise box. It is fine to be bought and sold, bread is also bought and sold. But while bread has to be consumed fresh, art must live and outlive the human condition it was produced with, it must transcend the individual and its production value and speak to our higher brain, and not the consumer reptile brain. Art must speak truth.
I also wrote an essay titled “What is it to have?”
What is it to have? To hold? How is it that we are having it when we are not holding it? How do we have the things that we supposedly have like our limbs. We posses temporary control over a collection of molecules that responds to electrical stimuli? Is that the having? But we do own supposedly things that we neither hold nor electrically stimulate. How are we sure. It is a fascinating subject.
One of the best things that happened to me in the silicon valley is that I was able to make a lot of money and to learn how to dream and execute projects, and also I was able to grow as a person.
So while I was working in the valley I used my money to travel and see the most beautiful things in the world. And what I mean by that is I mean the greatest and best museums in the world that hold the most precious works of art.
Here is the essential list:
Louvre and Versailles , Musée d'Orsay in Paris
Prado, Reina Sofia and Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid
Rijksmuseum, and the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, Kunstmuseum in The Hague.
Vatican, Vatican Museums, Galleria Borghese, the city of Rome and its ruins
Florence and everything in it
Gaudi in Barcelona
MOMA in New York
Metropolitan museum of Art in New York
National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery and the British Museum in London, as well as the Tate
Later I visited the World of Salvador Dali and the beautiful countryside of Spain, especially the Costa Brava coast.
What I learned is that Boogie Woogie by Piet Mondrian is a terrible painting that has aged really badly, and that after visiting the Museum and Theater of Salvador Dali in Figueres I can no longer look at any gallery show with the same eyes - Dali surpasses them all by a mile. All art now to me looks ugly and badly made. Dali had the most superb taste among all modern artists and is of course only surpassed by Leonardo and Michelangelo.
https://youtu.be/3vDWWy4CMhE
A sketch, laying down the disegno and the space where these hands operate. Using blue acrylic paint that i have a lot of, to sketch, acrylic paint is terrible but excellent for sketching. It dries fast and doesn’t smell.
I have been interested in the surface of the hands but now I look inside and discover all kinds of things behind the skin.
It’s like the hands are being turned inside out - as if the hands - with the skin gone - become a door to unknown destination.
I feel like a detective, what is beyond the (skin of ) the hand?
Peeling hands, folded hands, hands landscape, hand tectonics. Peeling the hand is like peeling an orange towards unknown destination. It's going to be called the disintegration of the hands, the peeling of the hands.
The third dimension or the dimensions are spilling on the one side of the painting.
The Peeling of the Hands, discovery of the space of the hands, rejecting elements that don.t work. Beacuse this is not a flying hands painting.
Peeling of the Hands painting
January colors of Central Park - dry leaves, water and sky with clouds and blues
January colors of Central Park - wet rock and green moss
You know when you make plans and exactly the opposite happens? My plan was to make some quick money in the States and move to Spain, Costa Brava, the land of Salvador Dali.
After my journey on the Camino de Santiago in 2019, I went on the opposite side of Spain to see Salvador Dali, and fell in love with Cadaques on my trip to see Salvador Dali's museum and house.
Cadaques is in all of Salvador Dali's paintings.
So my plan was to just take care of some things in the States and move to Spain by the summer of 2020.
Instead I stayed in New York City and made art.
I made some pretty awesome art so I guess it wasn't just silver lining it was just a pot of gold as far as I'm concerned. Yeah I got Covid too and it was unpleasant, but I also got a City free of foot traffic..
As the title of my post says I'm planning on installations in honor and to celebrate my friends who answered my call for support in December.
A few days ago I went to Central Park and it was so incredibly beautiful during the magic hour which I photographed rocks and places with my crappy phone, but I'm planning to return to photograph with my regular camera.
I have this incredible fascination with Central Park, rocks and trees, that almost borders on infatuation.. and I am gonna act on it.
The colors are so fantastic and so different from the summer and fall, beautiful blues and Grays and earthen colors. I'm totally infatuated with Central Park at this point. And before that goes away I'm going to set up a series of installations which will celebrate the muted colors of the park in the bright colors of paint.
Remember Summer possible locations below and tiny Installation sketch.
I am not gonna pretend, I work in the tradition of Christo Javacheff but my work is quick, fast to deploy, without permission, cheaper to make and easy to handle by just one person. It lasts mostly a day and then its gone. That’s the spirit of the 21 century. The speed of light :)
Remember Summer tiny Installation sketch. I am planning a series of installations in Central Park in February, some may not be hands :)
Tree Cozies Installation Sketch for Trees in Central park
MOYERS: But aren't many visionaries and even leaders and heroes close
to the edge of neuroticism?
CAMPBELL: Yes, they are.
MOYERS: How do you explain that?
CAMPBELL: They've moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you've got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can't. You don't have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience that is the hero's deed.
exotic star, 3d drawing - pen and ink on hot press board - 11 x 8 in, 2021
Exotic Star, 3d pen and ink drawing, 2021, detail
My first completed work of the year, I am currently working on a really large painting and don't know what i am doing in a large format. This is an experiment I came up with on a whim, i generally don't like decorative stuff that are done without any meaning - but the 3rd dimension here has more than meaning - this is what all my work in any medium is about.
I just decided to see what i can just put together without too much "working it", it's basically two drawings, one wrapped around the other.
It could also be a lamp.
I was riding a subway car and in it a guy was trying to breakdance.
I was watching the Viennese New Year's concert, which is really great. But all the dudes in the orchestra looked almost identical. The BBC narrator mentioned that the number of women in the orchestra has gone down from 12 to 7 this year. This is however not this kind of essay..
As the BBC narrator explained Vienna is seeped in tradition, Brahms, etc, the Viennese get their entertainment in the concert hall, at the ballet and other stately and princely establishments.
In New York everyone performs everywhere, especially on the subway. They have the audience there captive at least between two stations.
The NYC Subway Car is one of the most entertaining platforms ever, of course not now but when the city is in full swing getting on the L is an experience.
They're all kinds of cultural styles arising from the street culture of New York City, but the subway culture is a thing of it's own.
Every train line is a subculture, and all New Yorkers know of the trains and their peculiarities, and the crowd that rides in them.
I created several video/performance/animation/installation works based on my experience and observations on the subway called Ingredients of a Subway Car. At one time I planned constructing a subway car and inviting people to paint graffiti on it. I am yet to act on that project.
As it happens I have moved so many times in New York - I have lived on almost all trains and all neighborhoods.
Giant Hands Installations Book here
or
https://www.mirenarhee.art/giant-hands-installations-book.pdf
A story of Many Hands and Many Places which came together over the last 2 years just like water seeps down the mountain - just obeying the laws of gravity.
One of the greatest experiences of a human being is the experience of human culture. I have always wondered what is it about New York City that is magical, magical and irreplicable anywhere else.
Because the entire United States is pretty diverse if you pick the right spots, California is diverse also and I think California is a great candidate to be a cradle of great culture just like Athens or Rome. The problem of California is the car culture and the fact that human beings do not get a variety of other human experiences, every person is confined to their car and their only experience of other humans would be typically at work. The California work culture is great - something that's really abysmal on the East coast.
However, having the experience of just going to Central Park and having on one bench person who probably works somewhere in a kitchen and then on the next bench over there someone who works in a boardroom and the fact that you could interact and have eye contact with each of these groups I think it's significant. I believe contact is significant to culture, the kind of people, the variety of people you may run into and interact with. California has a street culture, there's a lot of skating, there's Beach but this is not the kind of tumbling of rocks and pebbles that could be polishing these rocks into pebbles.
People in California ( or elsewhere ) are too confined to their cars and reflecting on my personal experience this was my major major gripe. I simply lacked the pressure of humanity around me which I really really appreciate in New York, and of course in many European cities. In New York people talk to strangers all the time I mean you can hardly get out on the street and somebody's going to say something to you. This is not my experience in Europe necessarily. Also, New York is incredibly diverse, you can be in a different country any couple of blocks. These two things work together to create a very thick human soup.
One of the problems with the media culture is the fact that they tell us that what is around us that the humans around us are not important and for some reason, we have to go online or whatever to look up some other human beings that we don't even know. I rather go on the subway and look at a car full of strangers and have first-person observations of their inner and outer lives rather than go online and look at some jerk do weird stuff that is just not truthful. Of course, weird stuff that's elaborate and well constructed like a hundred million dollar Hollywood movie works but that's an entirely different story and a totally different construct.
The human experience - as in experiencing other human beings is the greatest experience. And I'm reflecting on my own experiences in New York City and I believe that this is my greatest experience as an artist as well - experiencing other human beings, experiencing other human beings and their closeness not just as an artist but just as a human being, as a pedestrian in New York City, as , for example, a teacher or worker for the Census Bureau, and of course as a creator of installations. New York is really rich. Rich of The human experience.
I believe this is what infused the cultures of the Mediterranean like the culture of Athens, Florence Rome it was the culture of The human experience and the same thing with the culture in Amsterdam - it was the bouncing off of the mercantile culture of the people who went out on ships to explore the world and came back to the city.
In California, your human experience is stratified into work or shopping so it's fairly restricted to whatever you're doing. Leaving your house in New York City is like wondering into Narnia you never know who you going to run into. And they may change your life. I've had spontaneous conversations with people from all walks of life which is a specifically product of the way New York City operates. I've had conversations with Grandma's, I've had conversations with protesters, with spectators and participants in my art, with people who just run around Central Park, with people who just wander in New York City without a home I actually absolutely hate the word homeless, it somehow connotes human garbage when I think that all humans are gods but some of the gods may have fallen off to the wayside.
When I walk down the street and think of The human experience I think I experience the gods in people.
People paint on Memory Replacement Election Day 2020 - Installation and Performance by American Artist Mirena Rhee created on November 3rd on Union Square in New York City.
