OVERVIEW | CV | PRESS | GALLERY EXHIBITIONS
Halsey Mckay Gallery is thrilled to present Ann Pibal’s Surf Type drawings in the online viewing room from July 10 – August 15, 2021. Begun in 2010 Pibal uses pages of The Surf Journal Magazine as luminous inspiration for her own paintings and to burn off the macho dogma dominant in the canon of American abstract painting. First exhibited in Pibal’s solo exhibitions Surf Type, and LUXTC at team gallery and team (bungalow), the 10 works presented here are available for the first time. The presentation features texts by Nico Dregni and an interview with Cody Delistraty.
This Viewing room is now closed. For currently available works please contact info@halseymckay.com.
Under the collective title Surf Type Pibal’s drawings are made with pages culled from issues of The Surfer’s Journal, which serve as a cipher for the way in which the experiential and abstract intersect, switch, and decode one another. Crisp patterns are cut into the idyllic fiction of the images, distributing the graphic across the pictorial; as the figure-ground relationship between them shifts. Each drawing corresponds to a distinctive quality of light, with the bleached heat of high noon daylight contrasted by saturated color backings, and lineups of hearts, stars, and a palimpsest of “save the whales” appeals corrode into pattern. The lustrous silver drawings are criss-crossed with x’s that form a barrier to the tantalizing fictional space of the images, and in the hazy warmth of the golden hour drawings abstracted characters and symbols diffuse foreground and background.
Ann Pibal
Surf Type MC10, 2018
Lasercut magazine page with collage
11 x 9 inches
This luminosity emphasizes the optical and physical experience of the work, with a taut scaffolding of color and structure activating directionality and movement in the picture plane. Pibal’s sleight of hand is evident in the deft calibration of size and scale, with each piece generating its own internal logic and unique specificity of the relationship between line, form, shape, figure, and ground. Divisions of the picture plane serve as foundational axes around which elements or motifs are perfectly or imperfectly repeated, mirrored, or reflected, creating pairings that indicate temporal and kinetic relationships. This organic asymmetry locates either side as a rendition of the other, a site of convergence and divergence that tests the potentials and limits of representation and perception.
Ann Pibal
Surf Type MC19, 2018
Lasercut magazine page with collage
11 x 9 inches
SOME NOTES ON ANN PIBAL’S SURF TYPE DRAWINGS by NICO DREGNI
Surfing is something like 90% not–surfing. Ann Pibal’s drawings balance moments of acrobatic grace with the surrounding time traveling, waiting, watching, being watched, and wiping out. The saying goes that the best part of surfing is talking about it afterwards; the clearest manifestation of that adage is The Surfer’s Journal, a publication that prints page after glossy page of backlit waves and sapphire swells dotted with colorful boards and delightfully athletic bodies. Dismantling a trove of vintage issues found in Todos Santos, Mexico, as well as relatively recent issues from her own allowed-to-lapse subscription.
Ann Pibal
Surf Type SLVR16, 2018
Lasercut magazine page with collage
11 x 9 inches
The tantalizing and idyllic images selected by Pibal are emblematic of The Surfer’s Journal, which could masquerade as a tome of centerfolds for oceanographers, but are equally emblematic of the social and cultural dynamics of surfing. For all the waxing poetic on the power and beauty of the ocean, there is an equal amount of ink spilled chronicling a distinctly patriarchal history, steaming with unchecked colonial conceit; the jet-set protagonists foregrounded on these pages are almost exclusively a cast of white-guys-being-dudes. Throughout its almost 28-year existence, only two issues of The Surfer’s Journal have featured a woman on the cover, and the sole female presence in the Surf Type photos is a Russian model hired to ride an elephant through a Polynesian jungle for the film Strange Rumblings in Shangri-La. Pibal’s drawings poke holes in the fantasy of the images, slicing through the scenes of manufactured escapist fiction.
Ann Pibal
Surf Type MC13, 2018
Lasercut magazine page with collage
11 x 9 inches
Present in several of the drawings is surfing’s golden boy, Laird Hamilton, whose origin story–the chosen son, progenitor of tow-in surfing, conqueror of big waves–positions him as an archetypal figure, both of surfing and masculinity. One can all too easily imagine the biopic titled Vir Heroicus Sublimis, with “chiseled” and “force of nature” as leading adjectives throughout the opening montage. This brand of rugged male bravado is surf marketing orthodoxy, its heroes presented unironically as interlocutors with sublime forces. Pibal’s selections shift our focus to allow room for speculation about the durability of the conditions supporting these cultural icons.
Ann Pibal
Surf Type MC18, 2018
Lasercut magazine page with collage
11 x 9 inches
Ultimately, Pibal employs the Journal as a device to address modernism’s exclusive-by-definition orthodoxy, and the patriarchal inheritance offered by 20th and 21st century American painting. Using this material as the physical substrate for her drawings, Pibal subsumes and transforms the shared context and gendered history of both painting and surfing to examine persistent aesthetic and social legacies.
INTERVIEW WITH CODY DELISTRATY
Since 2010 Ann Pibal has chosen surfing — particularly mid-century depictions of male, American surfers in print magazines — as the lens through which to view not only new modes of artistic abstraction but also the gender and power politics therein. “Surfing is a ready metaphor in my mind for painting, especially abstract painting and all of its trappings.” Both surfing and abstract painting have tended to be “emblems of primarily white, male, American individualism, prowess, [and] exceptionalism,” while also both being legitimate ways of finding “transformative personal experiences.” How, indeed, might one square the circle of abstract painting being at once a mode of gendered and racial power as well as a place of legitimate, near-spiritual experience? Her “Surf Type”works on paper pose this question and continues her signature style of doing away with artistic hierarchies, exploring a work’s medium and physicality, and finding new meaning in classic archetypes.
Ann Pibal
Surf Type MC14, 2018
Lasercut magazine page with collage
11 x 9 inches
CODY DELISTRATY: What was behind your decision to use surfer magazines?
ANN PIBAL: The works use pages torn from The Surfer’s Journal as a substrate for drawing with laser-cut shapes. Stars, stripes, hearts, X’s and O’s. Surfing is a ready metaphor in my mind for painting, especially abstract painting and all of its trappings — everything from the way surfing and abstract painting have both functioned since the mid 20th century as emblems of primarily white, male, American individualism, prowess, exceptionalism, to the real ways both activities allow for legitimately transformative personal experiences embedded in a kind of quasi-spiritual language and an often-romanticized relationship to natural forces.
Ann Pibal
Surf Type MC15, 2018
Lasercut magazine page with collage
11 x 9 inches
CD: From the standpoint of the medium and its physicality, how do you see a page of a glossy magazine in dialogue with an abstract painting?
AP: The main thing about these magazines is that I am completely captivated by the highly produced water and landscape imagery. I like the athletes too. From the beginning, when I started working with this type of ephemera in 2010, I saw the photography in The Surfer’s Journal had much of what I aim for while painting with regard to space and light. For a long time, I’ve been engaged through my painting with a kind of transitional light — the luminous stuff of morning and evening. It is that kind of color — color with glowing, reflective parts — that allows me to engage most directly with an idea of time passing or of shifting realities. These magazines are packed full of photography that takes advantage of this kind of light — morning sets and evening sets. This, along with the heavy post- production this imagery goes through, makes for an unreasonably luminous color extravaganza.
Recently, I’ve been using a lot of reflective paint — silver, gold, also some iridescent colors. This has been partly to evoke the idea of a painted image as icon, and also to engage literally with the phenomenon of reflection. Water provides a reflective surface and simultaneously a translucent depth. Something I aspire to with my surfaces: that they be not solely flat, reflective, or pictorial.
Ann Pibal
Surf Type GH9, 2018
Lasercut magazine page with collage
11 x 9 inches
CD: You’re from Minneapolis and live and work on the East Coast; what does the “West” — and its archetypes, like California surfers — represent to you and your artistic practice?
AP: I probably only saw the ocean three or four times as a child. Because my experiences at the “edge” were few and far between, it was always a transformative space for me and held power beyond any other experience for my young self. I realize, of course, that this is not uncommon to allow the experience of the ocean to contain one’s spiritual life. At this point, I go to the water to replenish myself, to do my grieving and to send my respect into the universe. The desert works for me too, but it doesn’t provide anything close to the same kind of redemption. Somehow, the Atlantic doesn’t have the same resonance for me as the Pacific, and I find time in New England generally to be non-satisfying with regard to moving through and inhabiting the landscape. My partner, Colin Brant, is from California, although we met in Iowa City, and over the 25 years we have been together, he and I have regularly spent significant amounts of time out there and also in Baja, Mexico. Something in my connection to him is also sealed into a connection with the Pacific in particular. He isn’t a surfer, but he is an athlete, so I think I have an empathetic connection to the men in the magazine tear sheets, even as, at the same time, I take great and delicious joy in making some humor and criticism out of the images of them.
Ann Pibal
Surf Type GH7, 2018
Lasercut magazine page with collage
11 x 9 inches
CD: The phrase “without privileging one source over another” is often applied to your work. What does this mean, exactly, to you and how you create?
AP: I’ve been interested in disregarding hierarchies between design and painting — the “decorative” and the “serious,” the “grand” and the “personal” from the beginning. The decorative or effusive aspects of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism are paramount and are rejected based only on Modernism’s inherent cultural biases. I’m invested in the generosity of pattern and color in painting, in architecture, and also in industrial and domestic design, especially textiles. When I started working with hard edges, I discovered that the use of the hard edge makes easy work of connecting the history of Western painting to older, more venerable histories. The reach of abstraction obviously goes beyond the short story of European and American Modernism. And finally, aiming as I do, to create mutable surfaces and dynamic engagements with light and space the evocation of landscape and the pictorial has never been off limits for me.
Ann Pibal
Surf Type GH8, 2018
Lasercut magazine page with collage
11 x 9 inches
