Featured are 76 artists from Thailand and abroad. Amongst the Thai artists are Prasong Luemuang who explores the human body and emotions through his meditative practice and Sophirat Muangkum who draws inspiration from personal stories, nature and subcultures.

Art lovers can look forward to international works by artists like Louise Bourgeois, a French artist known for her large-scale sculptures and installations and George Bolster, an Irish artist recognised for his blend of art, science and philosophy.

In addition to appreciating works of art, the festival offers a variety of public programs such as artist talks, hands-on workshops and guided tours. A pre-event was held last week with a talk by world-renowned British sculptor Sir Tony Cragg, whose sculpture is on display at One Bangkok. Read full article here.

The 2024 Bangkok Art Biennale Transforms the City Into an Urban Artscape, by Bruce Scott at Prestige Magazine

“Anyway, what George has done is make a huge circular Jacquard loom immersive tapestry, which is slightly frayed in parts and worn down, so it’s drawing our attention beyond the myth, beyond how we think about these places and what’s actually happening there. It will be shown at the BACC and there’s an accompanying film based on an article from Newsweek about what Trump did to rollback protections on national parks in the USA. He’s considered to be one of the most anti-nature presidents ever.” - Brian Curtin

Read full article here.

Artforum, Critics’ Picks, Cork: George Bolster

Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre
Skibbereen
January 7–February 11, 2023

George Bolster’s exhibition “Communication: We Are Not the Only Ones Talking” immerses viewers in a mixture of fact and fiction, of documentary and mythology. (Read full article at Artforum here.)

Making Waves, Feature Article in the Winter Edition of Irish Arts Review, by Peter Murray

Imminent Archive: George Bolster & Dong Kyu Kim
May 29–July 25, 2021
Rule Gallery, Marfa

In Imminent Archive, George Bolster and Dong Kyu Kim exhibit exquisite textile works that examine time, displacement, and the human search for home.

Bolster’s The Epic Territories of the Now Unprotected Sublime Latterly Titled American is a jacquard tapestry that covers two gallery walls and depicts an image of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah. The piece is lush, gorgeous, and, yes, grand. The convoluted title of the piece hints at the complicated creation and ongoing political fight over this public land. Mounted on top of this piece are several smaller tapestries of the Allen Telescope Array—a field of large radio antennae in California built to scan the cosmos for extraterrestrial life. The combination of modern technology and ancient geology alludes to civilization’s unquenchable desire for claiming space. Earth isn’t enough; we must manifest our destiny beyond it.

Kim works with themes just as intrinsic to human experience but uses materials culled from his life that one might think banal—receipts, ticket stubs, wrappers. In Consuming Memories, he uses the jogakbo style—a traditional Korean quilting technique—to stitch together ephemera he collected from 2007 (the year he immigrated to America) to 2017. Kim is a fashion designer and the composition and color arrangement of these “scraps,” as they are called in the press release, are delicate and beautiful. What results in these framed pieces is an attempt to summarize a newly Americanized life by “following the money.” There is an uncomfortable humor to this work: recycling the physical detritus of everyday consumerism for the art market’s.

Besides the similarities in their techniques and their focus on time (Bolster: eons; Kim: a decade), it is a deeper resonance that stirred me. Both artists immigrated to the United States and without knowing the circumstances that brought them here, there is a feeling of physical and temporal displacement in their work—one that syncs to the experience of visiting remote Marfa. In bringing these artists together, guest curator Jane Burke, a curatorial assistant at the Denver Art Museum, pointedly asks us how we got here (Marfa, America, Earth) and, further, reminds us that we are the living ancestors of future beings.

Sommer Browning is a poet, writer, and librarian living in Denver. Her third book of poetry, GOOD ACTORS, will be out in the fall of 2021 with Birds, LLC. Her poetry and art writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, American Poetry Review, Bomb, Entropy, and elsewhere. In 2017, she founded GEORGIA, a DIY art space in her garage.

Read full article here.

Artist George Bolster’s Interstellar Yet Pastoral Paintings are Beyond Space and Time

By Brad Balfour

Q&A by Brad Balfour

George Bolster

November 14, 2020 – January 22, 2021

[also can be seen online]

Tearing at the Fabric of Your Reality

Ulterior Gallery
172 Attorney St.
New York, NY 10002

By appointment only.

www.ulteriorgallery.com

Irish-born and bred artist George Bolster does amazing work, imposing and impressive, intoxicating and hallucinogenic. Thanks to Ulterior Gallery, Bolster’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, opened Saturday, November 14, 2020.

After several years of research at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, this New York-based multimedia artist has developed a body of work that suggests a guide for the future evolution of human beings. Through his research into the possible existence of extraterrestrial life forms, Bolster envisions a future for art and culture beyond borders, perhaps beyond the earth itself. The main pieces in this exhibition are three large textiles in which Bolster merges the visible and invisible onto the same sphere, challenging us to imagine the first step in working toward a radically different future.

For five days during the exhibition, from December 1 through 5, the entire gallery installation changed to be Ulterior and Bolster’s NADA Miami 2020 physical presentation. This short-term presentation was carefully planned to nestle within Bolster’s larger exhibition. For the fair’s five days, Bolster presented a wall-scale panoramic tapestry of Grand Stairs Escalante in Utah — an at-risk National Monument during the Trump regime. Bolster manipulated the weave of the tapestry using a décortiquée technique, stripping away specific colors and then reusing the excised material to re-embroider celestial bodies. That revealed the invisible universe overlapping the visible landscape. This restructuring shifted the Grand Stairs Escalante into an imagined new reality.

A multidisciplinary artist, Bolster has exhibited at numerous museums and galleries internationally. His work addresses ideas and belief systems from multiple perspectives, using a combination of science, art history, and science fiction to examine pressing societal and species-wide challenges. Bolster is the recipient of many residencies, including: Centre Cultural Irlandais, Paris, France (2019); Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, NY (2017); SETI Institute, Mountain View, CA (2016-17); the Robert Rauschenberg Residency, Captiva, FL (2013); and the Firestation Residency, Dublin, Ireland (2012).

Q: What got you started painting, and has it been as fulfilling as you thought?

GB: I began painting as a teenager, and trained as a painter which began at Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork. I was hugely influenced by the landscape painting collection in the Crawford Gallery which really inspired my initial interest in painting growing up. Then I went on to London to do a degree and MA there at what is now known at the University of the Arts London. So, even though I make work in film, photography, tapestry and drawing, I always return to painting. Painting is really satisfying as you can cover the entire surface, continually change it and paint over it when necessary. It is a forgiving medium for those who are never satisfied, and continually push the piece forward. It is immensely satisfying.

Q: How does being Irish enhance or add to the work you do?

GB: I think of being Irish and having left there to try and find opportunities abroad before the Celtic Tiger happened. You have sympathy for people in similar predicaments who try to find lives outside of the countries they grew up in and loved. So, you have this legacy of migration which informs your life and how you view people humanely. I think that is the single greatest gift being Irish has bestowed on me, that and humility.

I think the landscape in Ireland is second to none, I feel homesick every time I see someone posting their walk there. There is an Irish sensibility I think you have instinctively, growing up surrounded by such grandeur.

I grew up in Cobh, and our view was over the bay, so being by the sea and having access to the breathtaking landscape throughout Ireland, was so important to my appreciation for nature and my use of landscape now in my work. When I go home now, it is to Glengarriff in West Cork, I spend as much time there as I possibly can. West Cork is one of the most beautiful places ever.

Q: How do you start a painting what is the process?

GB: It really depends on the project I am working on. For the pieces in Tearing at the Fabric of Your Reality, my solo show at Ulterior Gallery, I began with images from my residency at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, which also involved research from my time at NASA Ames. The actual images for the show were shot at the Allen Telescope Array in Hat Creek in California in 2016.

I take a long time to get from initial research to when I begin the final works. So, your question is very apt, because the images that look like paintings actually began as photographs, then I manipulated them massively to the point where they look exactly like paintings. This involves actually remaking them in tapestry and then further manipulating them by hand with hand applied thread, wool and paint.

Q: How do you decide the size of a painting what determines it?

GB: Usually, the size boils down to the initial image I either photograph or draw in situ. Once I begin working on it, I often change the scale several times, until it looks right to me. A lot of artists begin with the size, they stretch the canvas and that is the decision made, but I have never been able to follow that convention. Composition is so important to my work in painting, drawing and film, but film has preexisting constraints, so I like to experiment as much as possible on the physical objects. It is also the reason I have never made series, the three large works are the first I have made of exactly the same size, but that is purely by accident. Some pieces end up being the entire room as installations or in this case there are large and small pieces, each involving multiple techniques.

Q: You have a unique color palette how did you come up with it what makes it comfortable for you?

GB: The color palette for this exhibition was inspired by the discovery of the earth-like planet Kepler 16b, the planet is circumbinary, which means it orbits two suns. It was discovered by Laurence Doyle when he worked on the Kepler mission for NASA. He told me that because of the two suns, when it rains it causes two intersecting rainbows to occur. So, those rainbows and the discovery of over 4000 planets by this and subsequent missions became the palette for the entire exhibition. Our cultural reality of thinking we are alone is being challenged by constancy of new planets being made visible; there is an estimated 100-400 billion planets in the Milky Way alone. The colors also aim to reflect the fantastical quality of this extraordinary and hard to comprehend information.

The theme of the exhibition aims to highlight the plight of humanity, as one where we need to find ways to deal compassionately with each other and evolve to find a sustainable future together. If we are the only life, then shouldn’t we have more respect for human beings.

One of the most wonderful events that happened while I was at the residency at SETI, was a tour of the night sky with astronomer Jill Tarter who was played in the film Contact by Jodie Foster, and whose life the book of the same name by Carl Sagan was based on. As she said “We are made out of stardust. The iron in the hemoglobin molecules in the blood in your right hand came from a star that blew up eight billion years ago. The iron in your left hand came from another star. We are the laws of chemistry and physics as they have played out here on Earth and we are now learning that planets are as common as stars. Most stars, as it turns out now, will have planets.” And further to her words, there is a substantial possibility they will also harbor life.

Q: Is it hard to let go of your works when they get sold?

GB: Well, sometimes it is, but often when people buy them, they tend to invite me over to see them in situ in their homes or galleries, and it often develops into a friendship. I have very few collectors who only buy one piece, and it is great to have conversations with people as the work changes and evolves. So, there are actually very few of my works that are out of my life completely unless they are with international collectors who don’t travel, and art collectors do tend to travel a lot.

Read in full here.