Negative Space Portraits

Curatorial Statement from Ted Riederer "A picture that comprises figure and ground requires an enclosed field. Without an enclosure, the space around its figure(s) will not necessarily read as part of the picture; enclosure is, therefore, the "originary" act that gives rise to the picture but also limits it. Nothing says this enclosure needs to take the shape of a rectangle, but the history of Western art, at least, makes the rectangle look like a virtually inescapable anatomical limit." — Amy Knight Powell, "Rectangle after Rectangle: How the picture frame was shaped." Before cinema cemented the unadorned rectangle as the standard landscape picture window, and before television further imprinted the 4:3 aspect ratio into our visual vocabulary, paintings were framed in often ornate and imaginative ways. Take Taddeo di Bartolo's "Assumption of the Virgin" from 1401. Three gilded panels mimic miniature cathedrals with Renaissance architectural flourishes. They are ecclesiastical architecture as much as two-dimensional paintings. The frames that surround Ethan Minsker's "Negative Space" portraits are as ornate as a Renaissance painting, yet even more three dimensional. Emanating from the subject at the center and fueled by Minsker's imagination, these sculptural frames are frozen in a state of transformation. They evoke a freeze-frame of the creature from John Carpenter's 1982 masterpiece The Thing. The rectangle becomes as plastic as the television from David Cronenberg's Videodrome. Like crystalline growth, buildings arise from the borders of the portraits. Cinematic references are apropos when you consider that for three decades Minsker has worked primarily as a filmmaker. For the past decade his films have featured wild animations layered over photographic imagery. The frames from his "Negative Space" portraits series are sculptural animations. Contemporary artists have broken free from the rectangle by making all manner of shaped canvases, from Elizabeth Murray to Lee Bontecou to Richard Smith, but no one is doing it quite like Ethan Minsker. He treats his portraits like billboards, constructing entire cityscapes and buildings to display them. The work develops beyond the billboard trope in the piece entitled "Russian Warship go Fuck Yourself!" The frame transforms into a surrealist landscape like a shapeshifting thought bubble.