Issue 21’s Earth By was contributed by MIKE PERRY, a multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. A true creative dynamo, Mike makes books, magazines, newspapers, clothing, drawings, paintings, illustrations, and teaches whenever possible. His first book, titled Hand Job, which explores and celebrates hand-drawn type, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2006. His second book, Over & Over, hits shelves this fall, and he is currently working on two new books. In 2007 he started a magazine called Untitled that explores his current interests. The second issue is out now. He has worked with clients from The New York Times Magazine, Dwell, and Microsoft Zune, to name a few. Doodling away night and day, Perry creates new typefaces and sundry graphics that inevitably evolve into his new work, exercising the great belief that generating piles is the sincerest form of creative process. His work has been seen around the world including a recent solo show in London titled The Place between Time and Space.

With Flowers and Open Wings III, 2007

Over the ages, people have looked to visual art to do many things. Whether the images they made, studied, and revered represented their cosmological beliefs, recorded the ins and outs of their survival systems, delivered them from banality to a place of fantasy, or simply sniffed out hidden beauty in the world around them, these classic aspirations have preceded and outlived the trappings of so-called postmodern art, and have more recently infused it with new tenor. Ernesto Caivano’s work reaches each of these art historical golden rings.
     In the summer of 2001, after a long trip to Europe, the artist began After the Woods, a series of drawings made with ink gouache, watercolor, and graphite on paper that can only be described as epic. At the time the contemporary art world was busy decrying the end of irony (an ironically befuddling death sentence) and dismissing classically beautiful work as “low brow”. Caivano had the fortitude to work against the grain and the foresight to launch a series that still keeps him engaged so many years later. Nonetheless, it’s a surprisingly complex project to define. “I’ve been trying to come up with a one-liner for eight years now,” says the artist. His work revolves around a master narrative he wrote at the beginning of the project.

Photography by Stephen White

If Mother Nature is the master designer, then Tara Donovan must be her direct descendant. Allowing her materials to lead the way, Donovan stacks, piles, heaps, and mounds as they see fit, letting the natural laws of chance and gravity rule her process. Each material’s own limitations and natural abilities rule the outcome of her sculptures — works composed of synthetic, man-made materials that resemble nature at its most ethereal.
     For instance, in Haze, she stacks millions of clear drinking straws against the full length of a gallery wall in what resembles a hazy blur or rolling fog bank. Nebulous, a twenty-foot installation formed from thousands of looped rounds of Scotch tape, appears like a soft mist emerging from the museum floor. Transplanted, composed of ripped and stacked tar paper, evokes the smooth, arid landscapes of the American Southwest.
     The simple repetition of her work makes sense the way nature makes sense. In fact Donovan, a 2008 MacArthur Fellow, is continually amazed by the places tar paper, buttons, plastic cups, and Scotch tape have taken her. “I’m completely relying on the physical properties of the material before me going where it naturally, inherently wants me to go,” she explains in an interview with Lawrence Wechsler in the volume Tara Donovan, “so things always wind up mimicking nature in a way.”

Photography Courtesy of Galerie Kudlek van der Grinten, Cologn

In our electronic age, the book doesn’t have it easy. It’s up against so many gadgets designed for instant gratification, it’s no wonder reading is on the decline. But the book will persevere; it’s been through much worse — burnings and bannings, for instance. With this kind of history, it makes sense that a visual artist would choose an object so fraught with meaning to drill holes in, bolt down in layers, and inject with silicone rubber.
Jonathan Callan, who burst onto the London art scene during the Young British Artists sensation of the early 1990s, has been creating sculptures from old, discarded books since 2003. One of his intentions in these sculptures is to explore language’s fundamental shortcomings, so he puts his tomes to the test. Callan’s books nestle, cluster, and cling to each other; their vibrant pages bend and swerve, coming together like a meeting of the minds. His larger pieces resemble the cross section of a huge tree while some of his smaller sculptures conjure up Hanta’s book bundles in Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude, a 1976 Czech novel celebrating the power and indestructibility of the
written word.

The collaborative drawing project by JANE FINE and JAMES ESBER, J. Fiber, reconciles the struggle of the creative process with the duality of the self and the decisions that must follow. Featured in Issue 20, J. Fiber is risky reality, a dripping world undulating with booted appendages thwarting attempts to distinguish human orifices from artillery openings. Fine’s work has been presented in solo shows at the Bernard Toale Gallery in Boston and AR/Contemporary in Milan, and she has held a residency at Paris’ Yaddo. Esber received the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in 2002 and 2008, and recently had solo exhibitions at Pierogi in Booklyn, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC, and the PPOW in NY.

Photography by Thomas Beale

A Child overlooking the Hudson River at the right time and place during the late summer of 2008, may catch a sight that to most eyes will appear, at least for an instant, as either enigma or hallucination. Seven boats, crafted from scrap wood, metal, foam, barrels, bottlecaps, fabric, and a host of attendant detritus are due to leave port from Troy, New York in mid-August and arrive in New York City during the fi rst week of September. Titled Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, the craft resemble less boats or cities than fantastical hybridizations of tree houses and shantytowns, playgrounds mixed with refugee rafts — Miyazaki-like contraptions woven together from bits and pieces of a known world, though seeming to arrive from some imagined past and headed fully prepared toward an uncertain future. Swimming Cities is the vision of Swoon, a 30-year-old artist who first came to attention nearly four years ago for her ambitious, expertly skilled prints and cut-paper portraits that she was pasting on derelict walls and construction sites around New York City. The simultaneous beauty and ephemerality of her work — the focus apparent not only in her attention to detail in the portraits themselves, but also in their contextual placement — brought her wide acclaim and quickly set her apart in the genre of “street art”. In 2005, Swoon made her New York gallery debut with an installation at the infl uential downtown gallery Deitch Projects.

Photography by Derek Peck

Coke. Semen. Viscera. Shit. These are the greatest hits of subject matter (and materials) among New York’s so-called “downtown” scene of artists. Like a diamond-dusted bauble, Terence Koh has floated to the top of this sea of curious creatures. The artist has literally sold gold-plated nuggets of his own poop for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And this was in the early days of his young career, with collectors at Art Basel fighting like agro moms over
     Cabbage Patch Dolls, circa 1984, to wrap their fingers around his scat. Now they’ll pay upwards of half a million for anything the artist has dipped in chocolate.
     Among the downtown kids, the radius of Koh’s circle is a bit wider than most. It includes child stars, art stars, their financiers, and those who write about them, and on given occasions in this milieu, the whole machine turns into a giant ferris wheel, where everyone’s on top eventually and there’s no more slowing down than there is speeding up, just a state of being akin to floating, a vantage best characterized as “high”.