Cheyney Thompson

One of the first book-length publications on contemporary artist Cheyney Thompson, whose work is known for its radically forward-looking intellectualism and formal rigor. Cheyney Thompson’s (b. 1975) work responds to a long history of debates about how art depicts the world, and about how we come to know the world visually. In these meditations on the artist’s work, Christian Schaernack shows that for Thompson, reality is something that we can know only in terms of probabilities, not absolutes. Thompson often produces work that explores contingency at the formal level, sometimes in his artistic process itself (as Jackson Pollock once did), and sometimes through the use of external constraints such as computer algorithms, which he subverts as often as he follows. The meaning of observation has changed time and time again in the history of art, just as it has in the history of science. Delving into art history, intellectual history, and contemporary continental philosophy, Schaernack offers a multifaceted study of an artist who challenges our assumptions about how the world is ordered. From Thompson’s early “black paintings” to his Chronochromes to the Stochastic Process Paintings, which engage with the algorithms that govern our digital lives, Schaernack presents a contemporary artist whose work embraces chance and responds to the shifting conditions of the present. This is art that reimagines artwork itself.

Published on the occasion of an exhibition celebrating the Wagners' promised gift of more than 850 works of art to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Musaee national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, November 20, 2015-March 6, 2016, and at the Centre Pompidou, June 16, 2016-January 2017.

-Culled from Dia Art Foundation's -Readings in Contemporary Poetry- series, this anthology includes ninety-four poets who have participated in the reading series from 2010 to 2016. Edited by poet and author Vincent Katz, the book stresses the experimental aspects of contemporary poetic practice, highlighting commonalities among poets and placing their diverse voices in conversation with one another---

Lynn Valley # 6 is a collaborative bookwork by New York artists Roe Ethridge and Cheyney Thompson. Ethridge is a photographer known for his clear depictive style and eclectic subject matter, while Thompson's most recent works are abstract and semi-representational paintings on canvas. Together, they have created a book that combines two highly diverse practices into a unique dialogue. Published in conjunction with a two-person exhibition at Art Basel Miami in 2009, this book includes selected documentary details of Thompson's paintings and outtakes from Ethridge's commercial magazine work. Their juxtapositions, which at first appear haphazard, coalesce into an increasingly complex rumination on the creative process. Along with glimpses of both artists' studios, the book also includes notebook sketches, collages, fabric samples and colour charts.