Awkward x 2: a collaboration by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe and Rebecca Norton

for any information regarding Awkwardx2, please contact Rebecca Norton at beccnort81@gmail.com

Paintings

“The team’s technique is primarily focused on obliterating individuality; the result of the fusion is an energetic explosion of visual energy. Some are pink-hued and sensuous, others blazingly white; they are as interesting as the mouth of a lover you want badly to kiss.”

From Chelsea Gifford, Art: Deconstructing Light

Awkwardx2. Exit Velocity Faster than the Speed of Light. 2011. oil on linen. 63 3/4" x 63 3/4"

Awkwardx2. The Other Side of a Lie. 2011. Oil on Linen. 63 3/4" x 63 3/4"

Awkwardx2. Sparrow's Wingspan. 2012. Oil on Linen. 18 1/8" x 32 1/4"

Awkwardx2. Painting for New York. 2010. Oil on Canvas. 32 1/4"x 36 3/8"

Awkwardx2. The First One, 2010, Oil on Linen. 27 5/16” x 31 1/16”

Works on Paper

Awkwardx2. Wile E. in Roadrunner. 2010. Gouache on Mylar. 14"x11"

Awkwardx2. Summer/Fall. 2010. Gouache on Mylar. 11"x14"

Awkwardx2. Not Titled Yet. 2011. Gouache on Mylar. 14"x11"

Awkwardx2. Light Gouache. 2011. Gouache on Mylar. 14"x11"

Awkwardx2. So We Tried to Make a Red and Green Gouache that wasn't about Christmas but we Couldn't no.1 (for Julika). 2011. Gouache on Mylar. 14"x11"

Awkwardx2. So We Tried to Make a Red and Green Gouache that wasn't about Christmas but we Couldn't no.2 (for Seb). 2011. Gouache on Mylar. 14"x11"

Double Pendulum

A simulation of a double pendulum – one pendulum connected to another, pushing and pulling each other in unpredictable directions – created for Awkwardx2, a painting collaboration between Rebecca Norton and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. The double pendulum animation is a part of their essay for the Abstract Critical blog.

A simulation of a double pendulum – one pendulum connected to another, pushing and pulling each other in unpredictable directions – created for Awkwardx2, a painting collaboration between Rebecca Norton and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. The double pendulum animation is a part of their essay for the Abstract Critical blog. http://abstractcritical.com/article/chaos-complexity-and-double-vision/ http://awkwardx2.com/ The code for this animation is based on a Processing sketch by Martin Rykfors http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/57589

Stills

Chocolate Box

“Chocolates are our attempt to poke fun at the hundred year old fable about painting that dismisses the ‘retinal’ as mere eye candy. We think Marcel Duchamp’s idea is silly, that things are more complicated than that, and named our chocolates after Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s much better theory about the connection between involuntary sensations and the mind to drive our point home. When eating chocolate our senses distract our mind away from ideas by making us think only through pleasure, which certainly leaves us refreshed with a whole new approach to seriousness. Which we think quite close to what our paintings do, although they have to be looked at for much longer than it takes to eat a chocolate. So if the arguments that surround art, or even art itself, don’t interest you then we hope you may have been drawn to the chocolates by our box because if so you’ll have got the point even if you don’t care about it, which is itself something to think about perhaps…”

Awkward x 2 (Rebecca Norton and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe), 2011

“Terrific box...best chocolate I ever had.” - John Baldessari, artist and dark chocolate enthusiast

“That is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen!” - Matthew Collings, painter and critic

"Pleasure is affirmative although it does not preclude seriousness, the artists remind us (except perhaps here where the purely aesthetic is often considered too mandarin, suspect, rubbing against America’s self-proclaimed egalitarian, utilitarian grain.) Paint and chocolate: both are sensuous, seductive, to be savored and enjoyed as luxuries that are also (arguably) essential...Reader, I ate them. They were phenomenal!"

- Lilly Wei for The Brooklyn Rail, Wei is a New York-based art critic and independent curator. Read the article here.

For orders and inquiries, email Rebecca Norton at beccnort81@gmail.com

Exhibitions:

Into the Arcane of Animation: January 11 - February 9, 2014, Active Space Gallery, 566 Johnson Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11237

The Green Building Exhibition

May 2nd - July 27th, 2012, The Green Building Gallery: 732 East Market Street, Third Floor
Louisville, Kentucky 40202

Press Release:

We started to collaborate as Awkward x 2 in the summer of 2010. We decided to work together because our approaches to painting were quite similar, and we both wanted to see how far we could go in making works which, the product of two strong subjectivities, in its turn produces a third. The Awkward rule is that the painting isn’t finished until neither artist is sure who did what. We start the paintings by combining the two very different kinds of grid systems we each use, and proceed from that to generate an unpredictable and complex surface, which is also a space, made out of color and movement operating according to a logic which neither painter could have generated alone.

Awkward x 2 is also sensitive to science and technology in more than one way. For example, at least one of Awkward’s paintings has a title which refers to the unimaginable speed at which light particles leave a black hole. Likewise, from Awkward’s perspective at least, Awkward’s paintings reflect a concern that for Manet, the electric light was the brightest thing around, for Mondrian, the light of the movie projector was the brightest light he’d see, and for Awkward the light of the computer screen is the norm, much brighter than the light with which earlier technologies provoked painting to compete.

More than the cultural, art historical or the scientific, however, Awkward x 2 is about sensation, the immediate and the involuntary, in the interests of making paintings filled with movement at which one needs to look for a long time.

Awkward x 2 (Rebecca Norton and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe,) Echo Park, Los Angeles, 2012.

Sparrow's Wingspan. 2012. 18 1-8 x 32 1-4 in. Oil on Linen

Awkward x 2 at The Suburban

The Suburban, Oak Park, IL, Oct. 30, 2011 - Jan. 2012

website

MOCAtv Video: Published on Jan 18, 2013

Painters Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe and Rebecca Norton try to make work that they can't predict, superimposing grids in their collaborative paintings to create a third image whose existence hovers between each painter's marks. In this unconventional artist talk, Gilbert-Rolfe and Norton discuss the various facets of their work, from conception to execution.

Mapping irregular spaces onto the canvas is a way for the painters to generate an unfamiliar, yet controlled zones of movement animated by geometry. Colors are then added to the gridded spaces, releasing forces already present in the painting's structure. Referring to the weightless movement of the animated cartoon image, Gilbert-Rolfe and Norton's colorful collaborative paintings are full of physics: speed, mass, light, and math. Key to their process is the notion of going against expectations. As Rolfe-Norton explains,"Good art cuts across art history by not fulfilling its expectations, but instead doing something else."

Filmed by Stephen Pagano and Tom Salvaggio.

Edited by Tom Salvaggio.