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Jeffrey Karl Reese Vallance:

Is a contemporary and conceptual artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California, he was also born there in 1955. His first formal training came from his maternal grandfather, Norwegian folk artist Karl Reese, from whom he is (middle-) named. He has also studied and taught at multiple universities in America.

Vallance is best known for projects that blur the lines between object-making, installation, performance, curation, writing and anthropological study. For over thirty years, Jeffrey Vallance has turned a critical and humorous eye which is disarming and charming, toward his own wide-ranging experiences.

The artist’s examination of these experiences combines a pseudo-anthropological approach with an art historically informed practice, and addresses themes of faith, myth, ritual and popular culture, along with the geopolitical landscapes of the past and present.

Young Vallance was also influenced by the morbid humor of The Addams Family and The Munsters television shows, and the feature films The Loved One, Harold and Maude and Mondo Cane (which he now describes as “a sick collection of imagery that warped my young mind”).

Vallance is the leading force in a distinct version of Intervention Art called Infiltration Art. He creates art by interacting with real-world institutions, communities, politicians, religions, museums and pop-culture figures, tampering within bureaucratic structures to create change without creating conflict. His first public infiltration took place in 1977, when, dressed as a janitor, he sneaked into the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and exchanged the gallery wall-socket plates with his own hand-painted versions.

Vallance is also known as a writer and curator for publications and journals such as Artforum, Art issues, L.A. Weekly, Juxtapoz and more.

In addition 9 books Blinky the Friendly Hen; The World of Jeffrey Vallance: Collected Writings 1978-1994; Christian Dinosaur; Art on the Rocks; Preserving America’s Cultural Heritage; Thomas Kinkade: Heaven on Earth; My Life with Dick; Relics and Reliquaries; and The Vallance Bible (2011).

Vallance’s work starts with the concept of a prank, then is transferred to reality. This weird combination is the origin of Vallance’s humourous conceptual art with applied hidden and found meanings. That is neither high art or low art.

Critics have described his work as an indefinable cross-pollination of many disciplines.

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Personal Statement:

A perpetual ritualistic process of making.

An experience of time.

Bits and pieces re-inscribing.

Remnants and revenants tune in stories that shift back and forth from one medium to another, mode to another and thing to another.

The Universal making of meaning.

Going back to a (non)origin.

The birth and death of meaning.

The materials raw and refined.

The body of work a manifestation of ritual.

A weave repetitive and binding.

A projection of documentation.

An installation of objects surrounds as hanging offerings.

A mixed media work of presence, power and remnants.

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Some Readings on Spirituality and Art: The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 (NY, London, Paris: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Abbeville Press, 1986). The catalog for an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, also shown at the Chicago Museum of Modern Art and the Haags Gemeentemuseum in the Hague during 1986 and 1987. The lavishly illustrated exhibition catalog is still in print; it includes seventeen extensive essays by various scholars which trace the spiritual interests and motivations of abstract painters during this period. A wonderfully rich source for this topic. Kandinsky, Wassily: Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912) Influential early essay by one of the founders of modern abstract art. Kandinsky sees human consciousness and spirituality as evolving, and the artist as the leading prophetic voice at the forfront of this development. The work includes a detailed explanation of the symbolic weight and significance of various colors and shapes. Lipsey, Roger: An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art (2nd edition) (Jan 1997, Shamballa Publications). A careful tracing of the history of twentieth century art from the perspective of its spiritual motivations.

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Is there a special relationship between art and spirituality? There are many reasons to think so; there seems to be a rich web of relationships between the two. The arts have always been integral to religion.

In the past art and religion were strongly connected because our society was ruled by religion: its rules, its ethics and values so that art was used as a visual representation of religion for the masses to understand, to revere and admire. These representations could be in the form of icons, paintings, lead lights, even books and architecture. In our current society, art and religion might seem to have lost their connection because religion is not as much of a predominant force in our society. This doesn’t mean that spirituality is not present in the art form. It has become more of an inspiration and guidance to the artist in their journey through their work.

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Current artists are more likely to explore different religions to create their own spirituality.

Artists began moving away from institutional religion in the modern and post modern, west pioneers of modern abstract art began to explore the idea of spirituality and the strong roots of it.

Kandinsky, Mondrian, Arp, Duchamps, Malevich, Newman, Pollack, Rothko and most of the other giants of early and mid-twentieth century painting shared common spiritual roots. For many of these men and women, art was primarily about spirituality, and was perhaps the most appropriate vehicle for expressing and developing the spirituality that the new century called for.

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Kandinsky expresses this conviction in his 1912 publication "Concerning the Spiritual in Art"; Mondrian mentions it in many of his writings.

 When religion, science and morality are shaken (the last by the strong hand of Nietzche) and when outer supports threaten to fall, man withdraws his gaze from externals and turns it inwards. Literature, music and art are the most sensitive spheres in which this spiritual revolution makes itself felt. They reflect the dark picture of the present time and show the importance of what was at first only a little point of light noticed by the few. Perhaps they even grow dark in their turn, but they turn away from the soulless life of the present toward those substances and ideas that give free scope to the non-material strivings of the soul. (Concerning the Spiritual in Art, p. 33)

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Whether artists saw their pursuit as primarily personal, or whether (like Kandinsky) they saw the artist as a kind of prophet of humankind's spiritual development, many of the great artists of the twentieth century saw their art in spiritual terms. For many of them also, the spirituality expressed in their work derives from eastern sources.

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Hindu and Buddhist ideas and practices had a strong influence on these artists, in some cases directly, in many others through the influence of Helena Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner, and the Theosophical Society. Mondrian was a member of this society, and Kandinsky writes approvingly of it.

 The goal of these and other artists was to develop an art, which expressed a reality beyond the material, a consciousness like that of a meditative state in which ordinary reality is transcended.

 Knowing this purpose casts a different light on the blank or monochrome canvases, the empty spaces, and the simple geometrical or biomorphic shapes of many abstract works. They might best be seen as meditative aids meant to reveal the transcendent or provoke a transcending consciousness. (In fact some of them strongly resemble Asian works produced for exactly that purpose.) The same is true for work like that of Jackson Pollack, strongly influenced by Native American spirituality, whose drip paintings are meditative healing exercises like those of Indian shamans and Navajo sand painters.

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Through the journey that I have undertaken in the process of my making. My roots and values have helped me structure my work while my spirituality has inspired me to question my work and to take it to a higher level of consciousness.

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Everyone has their own beliefs and values and that’s what every individual artist or not will use to represent their state of mind at the time. How do you think your spirituality has influenced the work?

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Instructions: From this point scroll to the bottom and up to this point again. Thoughts, quotes and questions provided, from and for myself and others about the Exhibition 'Tomorrow Is History' by Clive Barstow at Turner Galleries. JULY - 26 AUGUST 2017. 470 William St, Northbridge WA 6003. 28.

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CENTRAL THEMES OF TIME AND PLACE, AND CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION.

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operating beyond language but its operating also before, and that is beyond and through

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language to be mediated

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art can operate to produce responses in us that bypass our store of work