Anna Khachiyan's piece for
ARTWRIT,
The New Uncanny: Winston Chmielinski and the Unlikely Heirs of Freud really should not be missed, so please follow one of the links above. It is beautiful in content, style, and faith (especially in me :3 ). I have been contextualized, which is daring to say the least!
What proceeds is just an excerpt (and for the rest, again, there are links above):
If photorealism is a kind of sophistry—the exploitation of virtuosity in the absence of imagination—no one knows this better than Winston Chmielinski, a young Brooklyn artist whose oeuvre has mined the best of the genre. Like a good cover song, Chmielinski’s art is both an improvement upon and a spirited interpretation of the original medium. But if writing about dead artists is hard enough, writing about a living one is even harder. At the very least, there’s the issue of intentionality. Specifically, you run the risk of imposing an interpretive superstructure in retrospect or where none exists. At first glance, it’s easy to picture Chmielinski’s work as a kind of glorified dental office art—all broad strokes and bright swathes but very little substance—yet it’s just as quickly apparent that this isn’t the case.
...
was just read hypocritically, when youth-on-the-line spies a safety net of anonymity: he will bounce back. "I am an artist, so I have to leave," I said at some point last night.
Now I'm cleaning up this mess for a move at one o'clock. Clutter is a ghost that pokes, and it just wouldn't let me sleep; I'm dry-eyed, drained and averted-in-the-gut to things suggesting the same.
Sameness… though I’ve lived in six different neighborhoods throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan, it’s always been in cramped spaces, with roommates. In succession they've liked me increasingly, and I’ve feigned comfort accordingly. Humanely, I’ve long stopped leaving dishes in the sink. And I've never had guests: What you would see is not me. Early on, when I considered a floor a bed and a step-stool, shelving, I dreamt of sinking. “My roommate left the water on – again!” And those first months in Chelsea now clog my memory like hairs scumming a drain.
My point is far off but there’s no need to rope it in, because today is conclusive and the rest should stay free. There are moments… Usually while watching people perform on stage, when I become acutely aware of chronology: tonight, for instance, at the Metropolitan Opera’s performance of The Enchanted Island, I closed my eyes and committed the curtain-call to some other senses that were relating. I listened for two-step bows, felt Bravos.
Singers share in creating; I’ve always envied that. The social exchange of energy was my impossibility growing up. I compensated by rolling down hills and dancing in downpours. Alone I was touched, magnificently, and I shunned the external ‘amongness’ of people who seemed so regularly to unsteadily rise and fall. Mind you I’m from the East Coast, and I attribute the same rising and falling to our manic springs and autumns; and I would crash, colliding with cold damp dirt that seeped through skin to the bone… Did I actually embody hardness without turning into stone?
Things resilient shine and stay, and yet I swayed… Reasonably, “It’s just genetics,” but see there’s this home video of me postured like a natural-born yogi, spread-eagled and meditative at three. I guess my adapted crookedness (since adolescence then, in the context of historic tenseness), speaks to a dented self-sufficiency, or my never having trusted friends in that game of I-fall-back-and-you-catch. I fell a lot but I never made a noise so no one knew.
Well, at my new age (two Dragon years, today!) I get acupuncture for tension and rolfing for posture. Treatment of the symptom can subdue the cause. But I fear that it also anesthetizes sensitiveness.
I am leaving New York City.
Large
48" x 60" acrylic + oil on canvas
Matt Sims in the gallery space, me in The Cube with my Containers
opening 12 January 6-8 PM
envoy enterprises
131 Chrystie Street
New York, NY 10002
Runs through 26 February 2012
