ArtSeen
Gayleen Aiken
Our Yard in the Future: The Art of Gayleen Aiken Sunday January 11–February 4, 2007

I had already been to a series of openings in Chelsea by the time I arrived at Sunday on the Lower East Side to see the late Vermont artist Gayleen Aiken’s work. At first glance, and from a comfortable distance, I thought it looked a lot like what I had just seen across town on West 25th Street: Densely arranged groupings of naïve-looking genre scenes in high-key color and low-key materials, presumably adding up to some internal narrative that, if not completely ascertainable, would be explained in the press release. It wasn’t long before it was clear I had misinterpreted what I was looking at.
There are scores of pieces in the exhibition curated by Peter Gallo, entitled Our Yard in the Future: The Art of Gayleen Aiken. Most are small and accompanied by handwritten text. Generally, though, they escape consistent visual classification. Rather, the work is best defined by its inimitable inconsistencies; the aberrant details that set Aiken’s exhibition apart from its crosstown counterparts. She worked, for the most part, on improvised or makeshift surfaces: notebook sheets, torn sections of craft or construction paper, canvas board, cloth, and an occasional piece of canvas. Her drawings vacillate between outwardly focused storytelling and inwardly directed diaristic nostalgia, revealing a fondness for nickelodeons, comics, farming, camping, her relatives, and “happy memories” in general. These sentimental treasures are well documented in her personal lettering style and often identified with her own ‘made by’ insignia conspicuously emblazoned directly on the face of the image.
Yellow, disintegrating tabs of tape bite the corners of most of the work. “Player Piano #3” (ND) bears the brutal scarring of a life far less pampered than most flat file quality work, its paper turning a deep goldenrod as acids eat it away. The skies above the many historic Vermont buildings are often covered so densely with cheap, waxy Cray-Pas and colored pencils that pressure tears are visible in the paper. The same is true for the backgrounds of her interiors, as in “I Entertained Crippled Shut Ins,” (ND) in which the intense red of the wall seems as if, in the absence of a high-quality oil stick, she tried to intensify the color by grinding it into the paper through sheer will power.
These erasures, misspellings, and personal reveries are clearly not the product of someone who’s trying to reverse-engineer the concept of the naive. Aiken is the original that so many artists have been trying to deconstruct and replicate on their Arches drawing paper. Her work is built on visual non-sequiturs that—though often attempted—can’t be manufactured synthetically in an MFA program or a TriBeCa studio. Aiken’s are the unedited interests of someone who happened to use paper and crayons the way some of us use conversation partners or bartenders. And whatever anyone says, this is impossible to duplicate.
I voiced these sentiments to the group I was with at Aiken’s opening. A long debate ensued about the nature of authenticity and whether such a thing exists anymore. I deduced from our conversation that there are three kinds of art viewers in the world: the cynical, the relativists, and those of us who believe that there might be people around who have managed to make it through life without regarding their own creativity in the mirror. This has little to do with the commercial art world complex—because the self-reflexive genie is already out of her bottle—but a lot to do with art as a personal practice. In light of this, it is all the more important to preserve an original so that its derivatives don’t become pure simulations. This is Gayleen Aiken’s contribution to art.
It’s been 40 years since Roland Barthes pronounced the author dead. And unfortunately, this has resulted in an era in which creativity has been relativized to the point that we’ve stopped discerning the synthetic from the really, really synthetic. The idea that meaning is fugitive is only true from a macro-perspective and shouldn’t be used to negate the contribution of genuine visual storytellers like Aiken any more than General Relativity should be used in traffic court to contest a speeding ticket. On earth, rate times time equals distance, and, from where I stand in one month in 2007, Gayleen Aiken’s work looks far more inventive, and tells a more compelling story, than anything I’ve seen at an open studio in New York City.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Out of (This) Time — Brief Notes from “Astrodoubt and the Quarantine Chronicles”
By Luca BuvoliSEPT 2021 | Critics Page
I had just returned to New York from a month traveling in India, where I had enjoyed rediscovering, among other things, the power of narration in visual arts (in the carvings in Hindu temples, in miniature paintings, etc.) and of a mythology and conception of time outside the Newtonian one. This was a couple of weeks before Covid-19 arrived in the US and I was working on one of the 180 ideas/projects that comprise Space Doubt, a work conceived as a ten-year expedition started thanks to a collaboration that I developed with NASA scientists and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C., exploring an idea enabling me to find the courage to use some dark humor about my aggressive and advanced cancer of a few years agoluckily and hopefully curedand cancer in general.
Glitching Time and Time-Based Media
By Charlotte KentOCT 2022 | Art and Technology
Time is a socio-technological system with profound organizing qualities that feels, these days, exceedingly oppressive. Theres never enough time! For anything. Calendars are the earliest containing device with the purpose of determining a social order; the history of the Roman calendar reveals the role of international and national politics that play out across each new temporal infrastructure. Our temporal orders have been designed through the global proclamation of Greenwich Mean Time in 1884 by colonial empires, the apocalyptic anxiety provocations of the doomsday clock established in 1947, the insistent instant-ness of digital time since the 1970s exacerbated by strings of video chat meetings of the last couple years, and the frenetic branding of our social/professional lives demanded by transnational corporate technologys mediation of everyone and everything, all the time. Its a mess.
Robert C. Morgan: The Loggia Paintings: Early and Recent Work
By Jonathan GoodmanNOV 2022 | ArtSeen
Intellectual, critic, and art historian Robert C. Morgan also makes paintings, and has been doing so for most of his long career. The current show, on view in the large, high-ceilinged main space of the Scully Tomasko Foundation, consists of a series of drawings called Living Smoke and Clear Water: small, mostly black-and-white works, of both an abstract expressionist and calligraphic nature (early on in life, Morgan studied with a Japanese calligrapher).
Spencer Longo’s TIME
By Josh SchneidermanSEPT 2022 | Art Books
The book uses unstapled pages from Time magazine as the bases of its collages. It shows what it feels like to live in a crumbling empire, in an era widely regarded as the end of history.