leaves of glass

“Flock House” & Other Narratives

2011-07-26T13:33:00.005-05:00

[Above: From “The Investigation, Constitution, & Formation of Flock House”: An exhibition by Mary Mattingly. Middle Clockwise: Works by Patrick Mohundro, MTL (Made up of Amin Husain & Nitasha Dhilon), & Nina Horisaki-Christens. Bottom Clockwise: Works by David Colosi, Hector Canonge, Unkown, & Suzanne Kelser]

Formerly an army warehouse on Governors Island’s northern shore, Building 110 has been transformed by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council into a multipurpose facility for development and presentation of new work in the performing and visual arts. Housing 20 visual artist studios, two rehearsal studios, and an exhibition space, Building 110 is just minutes away from downtown Manhattan.

“The Investigation, Constitution, and Formation of Flock House”—an exhibition by Mary Mattingly that examines the urgency and cyclicality of urban development—is up at Building 110 through August 14, 2011. Mattingly often explores themes of travel, cartography, and human relationships of various kinds (with the environment, machines, corporate and political entities, and each other): She does this by creating futuristic landscapes and ecological installations, such as 2009’s “Waterpod.” In “Flock House,” Mattingly continues this on another trajectory—by proposing building for a time when migration and adaptable forms of habitation are a necessary and standard part of city life. It poses the question: What will our built environment look like when we live in a city where boundaries are flexible? This installation probes into a social sculpture—an autonomous “micronation” that traverses New York City on a choreographed journey. In constructing the “tools” to make requisite materials, Flock House is created from abandoned vehicles dredged up from New York waterways and recycled into construction materials. Through such constructions, Mattingly proposes experiments in compact, migratory living and interdependent, collaborative journeys. Mattingly’s work has been viewed internationally at a number of venues including: the International Center of Photography (New York), Robert Mann Gallery (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian (Paris), Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase), New York Public Library; and Galerie Adler (Frankfurt).

Experiencing retreat-style residencies, visual artists working at Building 110 work over the course of five months at Governors Island where they are afforded unparalleled access to this Island and its parkland, enveloping cityscapes, and sweeping views of New York Harbor. These artists-in-residence—who participated in the LMCC Arts Center Open Studio Weekend of July 15-17, 2011—have been working since early March in diverse media including photography, performance, installation, painting, and sound art.

Among artists under LMCC auspices and contributing to creative ferment on Governors Island are the following:

The work of Hector Canonge incorporates uses of various media, commercial technologies, physical environments, and cinematic and performance narratives. With a background in literature, film, and integrated media arts, he has been awarded an array of scholarships, fellowships, and residencies. “Insularis”—a new media project combining archival material, digital imaging, A/V technology, motion sensor devices, and installation—creates a fictitious island based on Canonge’s memories of growing up in South America. This interactive project explores physical and emotional isolation based upon his family’s trajectory of response to separation during military coups and immigration to the United States. Canonge’s work has been exhibited in such venues as the Queens Museum of Art, Jersey City Museum, Bronx Museum of Art, New York Studio Gallery, Exit Art, and Topaz Arts.

Louisa Armbrust depicts disasters of recess, anxieties of gym class, and the deadly seriousness with which grown men and women attack their weekend exercises. Using imagery of games and sports, she traces the paradoxical presence of play in everyday life, a practice that is informed by theorists and philosophers such as Johan Huizinga, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Paolo Virno. Colorful pictograms and diagrams illustrate disorder, nonsense, and useless actions in questioning ideologies of “work,” “learning,” and “leisure.” While in residence on Governors Island, Armbrust will focus on “Blue Swimmer,” a project that examines rules of competitive swimming to explore boundaries between abstraction and representation, and between still and moving images. Armbrust’s work has been viewed in such venues as the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art (Grand Rapids, Michigan), Hofstra Museum (Hempstead), Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver), and Eye Level Gallery (Halifax).

Interdisciplinary artist and writer David Colosi is focusing on two projects while working on the island. Demonstrating the island’s shift from a military base to an arts destination, Colosi is reanimating the island with the sound of practice, bugle calls, and improvisations by playing saxophone in the island throats. He will do this by back-blowing into the canons, PA systems, and drain pipes of the empty houses, and playing compositions based on sounds and positions of Canadian Geese inhabiting the island. Colosi is also making a video, photo, and performance project titled “The Life and Thoughts of a Retired Apostrophe” that will document the life of the apostrophe after it was no longer required in Governors Island. The work of this Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation recipient is represented by Cueto Project (New York) and Galerie Catherine Bastide (Brussels).

Operating within the spheres of visual, sound, and media arts, the work of Blake Carrington is informed by cultural geography, landscape, and architecture. Interstices between these formalized spatial practices and experiential qualities of sound and visual art are the focus of Carrington’s practice. While on Governors Island, recent NYSCA grant recipient Carrington will continue his work in fictional ornithological societies, visualization of field recordings, and developing a new project based on a glossary of geographic landform names.

Nina Horisaki-Christens’ Propositional Workshop #1 centers on investigations of abstractions of movement, while combining elements from performance traditions with ideas from systems and complexity theories. Classical Greek and Japanese Noh theater designs provide particular inspiration to its series of sculptural props and small stage set. (The set and props were used in a series of improvisational movement-based performances by Elaine Angelopoulos—and documented in video, sound, and photography.) The sculptures, installations, and performances of Nina Horisaki-Christens have been exhibited in such venues as: Hosfelt Gallery (New York), Socrates Sculpture Park (Long Island City), Incheon Women Artists' Biennial (Korea), Flux Factory (New York), and Fort Gondo (St. Louis). While serving as assistant curator at Art in General, Horisaki-Christens curated projects with artists including Shana Moulton, Julia Oldham, Rancourt/Yatsuk, Isola and Norzi, Guy Benfield, Dave Hardy, Łukasz Jastrubczak, Božena Končić Badurina, and Amy Yoes as well as managing that organization's Eastern European Residency Exchange Program. Her writings have appeared in publications produced by Art in General, Performa09, and Flux Factory.

Suzanne Kelser incorporates structures from the Internet into her drawings and invents images based on technology principles such as uniqueness, connectivity, capacity, and growth. She approaches such theoretical layers of technology as integral to our cultural vernacular. While in residence at Governors Island, Kelser intends to combine images, text, and numbers in drawings capturing technology in flux, specifically the additive process of technology growth. With drawings overlapping each other, the site-specific installation will be reminiscent of a computer network planning session. As an open reference room, the site will function as a legend for the unseen algorithms, systems, and methods used in the invisible technology that surrounds the island. Kelser’s work has exhibited her work at such venues as the Islip Art Museum, Bronx River Art Center, Kingsborough Community College Art Gallery, the Kentler International Drawing Space, and such New York galleries as A.I.R., 101 Wooster, and 55 Mercer.

MTL (made up of Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhilon) is a news-generator and participatory vehicle empowering individuals to reshape the news internationally and alter how it is viewed—one voice at a time. MTL allows Amin and Nitasha the opportunity to draw on the strengths of the other and explore issues they share in their art such as blurring lines between art and life and fact and fiction. Similarly, community participation aspects of this project will blur the “fourth wall” between artists and their subjects.

As a teacher and volunteer in Mozambique, Patrick Mohundro researched different dynamics, loci, and struggles of power among students, teachers, politicians, and other members of his community for over two years. Returning to the U.S., Mohundro has spent the past year creating drawings that represent his experience in Mozambique. Following the series “Mozambique,” Mohundro will research segments of the HIV-positive community in Brooklyn who struggle with substance abuse and mental illness (known as dual and triple diagnoses). On Governors Island, he will pursue 501(c)3 non-profit status and draft grants to fund Healthy, Hearty Bushwick to improve the quality of life those abovementioned HIV-positive Brooklyn residents through art and healthy lifestyle changes.

Using a wide variety of materials and methods, sculptor and installation artist Adam Parker Smith will participate in our human endeavor of understanding the universe—in his case through a confluence of experiential installations, emulations of the unknown, and interpretations of natural elements including sky, water, and wind. Drawing ideas from the setting and commute to and from the island, Smith plans on arriving at projects specific to that daily experience. Smith’s work has been viewed internationally in such venues as: Urbis (Manchester), Nordine Zidoun (Luxembourg), Priska Juschka (New York), The Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Berkshire Museum, The Soap Factory (Minneapolis), Painted Bride (Philadelphia), Parisian Laundry (Montreal), and the Maraya Art Centre (United Arab Emirates).

Aaron Fox's prime artistic motivation is to generate self-reflection while allowing viewers opportunities for introspective contemplation. His paintings lay bare their constructive process, thereby ensuring viewer accessibility. By highlighting methods and processes, Fox's paintings demonstrate various stages of their evolution and encourage an analytic-meditative state. While in residence on Governors Island, Fox’s project will start with digital smart phone photography that will ultimately develop into images through classical methods of oil paint on linen.

While working on Governors Island, Nicholas Fraser is creating a series of temporary on-site performances, installations, signs, posters, and printed hand-outs functioning in the guise of “enlightening” the hoi polloi about the amazing past and inspiring future of Governors Island. Taking Washington Irving's tongue-in-cheek 1809 history of New York, “Knickerbocker's History,” as an inspirational touchstone, the impetus of his project will be less to clarify the storied, though largely unknown, past (or elucidate a glorious future) than to take ample liberties with both in order to comment on the present. Fraser’s most recent installations were featured at Taller Boricua, the Flux Factory and in the exhibition “Escape from New York” in a former silk factory in Paterson, New Jersey.

Yaddo Fellow and NYSCA recipient Bari Pearlman is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work has been shown at major film festivals and museums around the world, as well as in theaters and on television. Examining the idea of the “intentional” community, Pearlman’s work includes “Mah-Jongg: The Tiles That Bind” (1998), “Daughters of Wisdom” (2007), “The Strangest Town in Alaska” (2009), and “Smile ‘Til It Hurts: The Up With People Story” (2009). During her Swing Space residency at Governors Island, Bari will turn her attention to a community much closer and more personal: her own family. She will develop and create a multi-format documentary “Looking for Lepke” about the notorious Murder Incorporated gangster who was her grandfather’s first cousin.

Working as an independent artist since 2001, the practices of Reeta Saeed involve traditional miniature painting from the subcontinent to the deconstruction of textile materials. Saeed has also combined both techniques with painting nudes in a miniature style and stitching them inside cotton fabrics. Saeed also creates pockets with thin symbolic flags in canvas, which are used to hide paintings in a way that some of its parts are revealed and others are hidden. While staying in London, Saeed created a series of large scale deconstructed British and English flags titled “Out of Curiosity,” which were later exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Arts (MOCCA) and at Harbourfront Centre for Arts along with Toronto’s South Asia Calling Festival. While at Governors Island, Saeed is interested in creating a new body of work in miniature painting that reflects the historical, beautiful, and peaceful environment of the island within an urban landscape.

Sculptor John Andrew primarily works with text and sound: His oeuvre is expressed in a number of media such as vinyl records, compact discs, three dimensional objects, works on paper, installation, and books. His pieces convey patterns of perception in relation to complications of living in a world saturated by objects, images, and information. Andrew’s Swing Space project on Governors Island will document the auditory experience of the island via field recordings. In the tradition of the mid-20th Century record companies devoted to such activities (Folkways, Droll Yankee, Smithsonian), these recordings will capture and preserve the mundane and extraordinary activities of a place and time. The recordings will then take form of a 10 CD box set encased in a handmade wooden box. This object will act as a physical interactive sculpture that can be utilized any place at any time, with eyes closed, and allow the listener to travel without the body to a landscape that may be recognized or at least familiar. Andrew has exhibited internationally in such venues as Audio Visual Arts (New York), Galerie Desaga (Cologne), Fold Gallery (London), and The Living Art Museum (Reykjavik).

Ilja Karilampi works across media such as video, sculpture, and installation. Bringing together different levels of narration, his work often references the utilized media as well as a series of elements that refer to contemporary pop culture. The latter include: likelihood of fiction, urban legends, music, and images from movies. Seductive forms and layers create personal meaning and order by fusing simple materials, ready-mades, and found imagery. In so doing, Karilampi weaves poetic symbolism with a conceptual impetus. Performance is an important dimension in his work: Its presence is always palpable. During his residency, Karilampi will work on a sculptural installation depicting a series of decorated spaces illuminating certain “hidden,” three-dimensional aspects of the city. His work has been viewed in such venues as Frankfurter Kunstverein, Royal Institute of Art (Stockholm) Kunstverein Medienturm (Graz), Studio Film Club (Trinidad), Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt), and Chisenhale Gallery (London).

Sweet Home is a collaboration of two artists, Yeimi Salazar from Colombia and Melvin Sanchez from Puerto Rico. Both came to New York separately, seeking an identity as immigrants and moreover as artists. To Sweet Home, relocating is like a rebirth: starting to walk again without staggering, learning to speak without stuttering, and continuing to dream. The artists met in the city walking and talking about art. Since then they have worked together for two years, exploring different techniques in their mutual projects. Sweet Home combines multiple media such as drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, design, and digital media to tell stories about life. Through puppetry, Sweet Home creates little characters that come to life, staged in homes built for these puppets. Both collaborators have been immersed in the great task of writing the ABCs: “My ABC” is written in English, which is not their native language. It is a personal exploration enabling both artists to connect to the emotions of others. During its residency, Sweet Home will develop its own ABCs: made up of letters that mark the beginning of words, words that make pictures, images that make up sentences, and phrases that tell stories.

Charles Koegel—who has had residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Fountainhead—will be creating a sculpture/installation and drawings, both inspired by architectural and geometrical forms. Koegel’s work—often addressing New York City’s urban environment—has been viewed in such venues as: Exit Art, Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn Art Alternative, The Painting Center, Slate Gallery, and Dimensions Variable (Miami).

As an artist, Lillian Gerson engages with information distribution and methods of display—especially as employed by museums, libraries, and other knowledge repositories. Gerson's work mixes a clinical language with information that may or may not be true and with data that is unbelievable or wholly invented. Her work results in reactions of curiosity and confusion and spawning a host of questions regarding content validity. Such questions eventually extend beyond the artwork and resurface in institutions whose display methods are mimicked. Rather than a quest for “truth,” Gerson's explorations straddle various uncertainties. During her residency on Governors Island, Gerson will transform her studio into a fictional museum dealing with the island’s history and present day uses. Her past projects include a temporary travel agency installed in an empty Italian ice shop in Williamsburg and a mock park ranger booth constructed at Socrates Sculpture Park.

During LMCC’s first season at Governors Island in 2010, they served more than 40 visual artists and 13 performing arts groups in-residence. LMCC sponsored events included three exhibitions, four major open studios, and 22 performances that welcomed over 10,000 visitors to Building 110: LMCC’s Arts Center. Again, LMCC has brought together an array of artistic energies that can draw audiences to New York City’s newest cultural destination.

The Investigation, Constitution, and Formation of Flock House

An exhibition by Mary Mattingly

Through August 14, 2011

@ Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Building 110

Governors Island, New York

(Open Friday-Sunday: 12-5 PM)

The Good, The B-a-a-a-d & The Ugly

2011-07-13T21:27:00.010-05:00

[“Wolf” (2011) by Scooter LaForge, oil on canvas. “San San International Archive #25” & “San San International Archive #26” (2010) by Jonah Freeman, four color screen print on persepex mirror. “Untitled (Armpit)” by Wolfgang Tillmans, C-print. “Deadly Friends (City of Angels)” (2010) by Patrick Lee, graphite on paper. “Sweet Crude” (2011) by John Ensor Parker & Johnny Moreno, video installation. “Untitled” (2010) by Lisa Kirk, makeup on linen. “American Hero Engine” (2003) by Wayne Cole, gouache on board. “Refills” (2010) by Tara Sinn, ink on paper. “Toilet” (2011) by Ryan Schneider, oil on canvas. “The Perfect Dumping Ground” (2011) by Jeffrey Shagwat, C-print.]

Curators Doug McClemont and Billy Miller have corralled a dizzying number of artists for this somewhat stimulating show at Anna Kustera Gallery, which is up through August 12, 2011. Viewer be warned: Nothing is sacred in the precincts of this show.

From his little studio on the Lower East Side, Scooter Laforge conjures his world of pop culture and cartoons. LaForge’s portraits, landscapes, and miscellaneous paintings—a veritable ménage à trois of Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism, and Dutch classicism—convey an in-your-face homoeroticism and meld 1950s story-book techniques, 1970s color pallets, fluffy animals, cartoon characters, and gay pornography into a soupy antithesis of apology. LaForge’s fresh and compelling oeuvre has been viewed in such New York venues as Exit Art, Wooster Projects, and White Columns.

Entered in the September 2010 DUMBO Arts Festival, “Sweet Crude” is a multichannel video installation that visually interprets the quantity of flow from British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill with light and movement. Originally accomplished by creating a volume with projection screens, viewers of B-A-A-A-D will come upon installation segment “Flow Rate”—footage of a projection of light that begins at the floor and moves upward filling the volume. The rate of which the volume fills is real time, calculated by the flow rate of the oil and capacity of the volume. Based on findings of the Flow Rate Technical Group—a group of scientists and engineers from the U.S. government, universities, and research institutions created May 19, 2010 to estimate of the flow of oil in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill—John Ensor Parker and New York filmmaker Johnny Moreno have focused on that body’s use of particle image velocimetry analysis to estimate fluid velocity and flow volume. Parker contacted members of the Flow Rate Technical Group requesting the high-resolution footage only to be denied. The scientists indicated they were not at liberty to release the footage in fear of retribution from BP. However, one member of the group made the decision to release the footage under terms that Parker maintains discretion in not disclosing the source. The whistle-blowing scientist felt it imperative to make the documentation public and bring awareness to the situation’s severity. [Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-MA), chair of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming directed BP to provide footage from the site to Congress, which would—in turn—make it public. However, corporately provided footage was a low quality Internet feed.] Highly influenced by the work of Abstract Expressionism’s strategist Robert Motherwell, Parker’s oeuvre is conscious, existential, energetic, fluid, and physical—if not downright archeological and mathematical. Parker’s work has been exhibited in such venues as Cheryl Hazan Gallery (New York), “The Endless Bridge Public Art Video Projection” (Brooklyn and Berlin), SEED Gallery (Brooklyn), Pluto Gallery (Brooklyn), City Arts Factory (Orlando), Gallery Twenty-Four (Berlin), LeMoyne Art Foundation (Tallahassee), and The Fat Gallery (Tallahassee).

Jonah Freeman's creates environments that tend toward the fictive and dystopian—their projected and alienated futures dripping with compelling narrative. Using materials ranging from video to soap bubbles and food coloring, Freeman’s work is improvisational and complex. At Art Basel Miami in 2008, Freeman—in collaboration with Justin Lowe—created “Hello Meth Lab With a View,” a looming and ramshackle installation of a drug lab. His work has been exhibited at Andrew Kreps Gallery (New York), Matthew Marks Gallery (New York), Deitch Projects (New York), Artists Space (New York), MoMA PS1, the Brooklyn Public Library, and Edward Mitterand (Geneva).

Deeply influenced by the work of Gerhard Richter, Adam Helms’ creative animus taps into profound explorations of renegade-tinged subcultures. As with many artists in this show, Helms’ work straddles different media—namely drawing, painting, and sculpture. Lawlessness, violence, banditry, patriotism, militias, oppression, zealotry, intolerance, and other manifestations of “acting badly” are represented by Helms in works that incorporate haunting landscapes, found items, totemic images, and various elements both abstract and figurative. Helm’s work has been exhibited in such venues as: MoMA PS1, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Aspen Art Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art (Tucson), Bertrand Delacroix Gallery (New York), Marianne Boesky Gallery (New York), Bellwether Gallery (New York), Center for Contemporary Art (New Haven), Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery (New York), Barbara Gladstone Gallery (New York), and Mary Boone Gallery (New York).

His figurative oil paintings noted for their engagement with the female form, recent works by Adam Axel largely consist of photographic imagery—depicting subject matter he believes the camera lens best addresses. Utilizing repetition of his chosen subject matter, works of Mattia Biagi are tactile in their expression. While deftly using form to reduce symbolism to its essence, Biagi hotly harnesses his media—allowing viewers access to every textured contour of his coyly reassembled components. Biagi’s work—as is the case in this show—can be trusted to collide with and be integrated into viewer psyches. The work of Lisa Kirk explores vagaries of consumerism and its anesthesia-like affects on those who should know better. Informed by the culture of “reality television,” Kirk’s projects are saturated with symbols implying that something “real” is happening: Her work deploys strategies designed to round up others than the “usual suspects” of the art world. In exploring various cultural “boundaries,” Kirk’s work has been exhibited in such venues as MoMA PS1, Invisible/Exports (New York), Participant (New York), and MOT International (London).

Provocatively, Paul McCarthy’s video-taped performances and multimedia installations take aim at such iconic American bastions—both cherished and hated—as Westerns, Walt Disney, Santa Claus, politicians, and Modern Art. Bombarding the viewer with cascading and fantastic scenarios, caricatures, erotic content, and elements of violence, frivolity, and charm, McCarthy’s work ridicules, lampoons, and provokes societal assumptions and beliefs—and is figurative to the core. High and low culture coalesce in his work, which has been viewed at such institutions as: Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (San Francisco), the Whitney Museum of American Art, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (Ghent), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), and Haus der Kunst (Munich).

In Jeffrey Shagawat's lush—and rather pastoral entry—viewers see the dumping ground of alleged “Craig’s List Killer” Philip Haynes Markoff (1986–2010). Known for using “vintage”/”analog” cameras, the artist processes his work non-traditionally—at the same time refusing to enhance it digitally. Shagawat has shown his work in such venues as Scott Eder Gallery (DUMBO), Melt Down (West Hollywood), Unitard (Los Angeles), Produce (Phoenix), Dream Space Gallery (London), and Caf & Diskaire (Lille). His work empathetic to human bedevilments, Wes Lang celebrates and incorporates several pioneering forebears—namely Cy Twombly, Martin Kippenberger, Basil Wolverton, and Philip Guston. Self-help manuals, rock music lyrics, canvases, and tattoos can be found unconsciously in Lang’s stew-like oeuvre. Lang’s work has been exhibited at such venues as: ZieherSmith (New York), Alexander and Bonin (New York) Andrea Rosen Gallery (New York), Dealim Museum (Seoul), Peres Projects (Berlin), and V1 Gallery (Copenhagen).

John Waters became notorious in the early 1970s for his output of “beyond edgy” cult films—and its iconic and compelling ensemble of actors Divine, Mink Stole, Edith Massey, and David Lochary. From “Desperate Living” in 1977, Waters began to cast convicted criminals and other infamous people such as Liz Renay, Patricia Hearst, and Traci Lords. From the original “Hairspray” in 1988 that introduced Ricki Lake, Waters' films began to feature familiar actors and celebrities such as Johnny Depp, Edward Furlong, Melanie Griffith, Chris Isaak, Johnny Knoxville, Martha Plimpton, Christina Ricci, Lili Taylor, Kathleen Turner, Sonny Bono, Pia Zadora, Debbie Harry, Cindy Sherman, Tracey Ullman, and Jerry Stiller.

Conveying a fascination with sculptural characteristics of food (and other everyday objects) Martha Friedman has created transformative works inspired by melons, eggs, pasta, sausage, waffles, and Chinese food. In this endeavor, Friedman uses a variety of constructions including foam, resin, molds, and metal. Her larger body of work—which has been shown in such venues as: Museum of Contemporary Art (Detroit), DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park (Massachusetts), Socrates Sculpture Park (Long Island City), Contemporary Art Center (Cincinnati), and Wallspace (New York)—references the everyday, banal routine. Approaching sculpture as an act of appropriation, Paul Gabrielli assimilates a number of media—photography, sculpture, video, assemblage, works on paper, etc.—into a comprehensive entity. While fusing his Minimalist and Conceptualist orientations, Gabrielli’s idealized and fabricated works exude an abortive eroticism at once lyrical and paradoxical. A Rema Hort Mann Foundation nominee, Gabrielli’s work has been exhibited at the Cartier Foundation (Paris), The Studio Gallery (New York), and 303 Gallery (New York).

While incorporating the strategy of the Minimalists with his large-scale works and their abstract and serially repeated units, Adam McEwen incorporates elements of such artists as Andy Warhol, Dan Flavin, and Walter de Maria. Simultaneously McEwen’s work is stark, triumphant, theatrical, and melancholy. In his works the viewer finds a useless credit card and other tantalizing manifestations of our “bait-and-switch” and “rob Peter to pay Paul” consumerism. McEwen’s work has been exhibited at such venues as the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, the Julia Stoschek Collection (Düsseldorf), and Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery (New York), Galerie Rodolphe Janssen (Brussels), Art:Concept (Paris), and Jack Hanley Gallery (San Francisco).

Dreamy, elusive, and revealing, the spontaneous work of Karine Laval has taken a cue from such masters as Cartier Bresson and William Eggleston in her expressive use of color. The simplicity and “naiveté” found in her work coalesce with unique perspectives of composition and place to produce powerful—if stark—narratives. Among the venues in which Laval’s work has been exhibited are: the French Cultural Center (Oslo), M+B Gallery (Los Angeles), Nattgalleriet (Norwary), Sorlandet Art Museum (Norway) Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Lodz Festiwal (Poland), Rhubarb-Rhubarb (Birmingham), Les Rencontres d'Arles (France), and L'Oeil en Seyne, (France). Laval’s work has also been shown in such media outlets as The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, New York, Newsweek, Le Monde 2, Le Figaro Magazine, Dazed & Confused, Next Level, and Eyemazing.

Writer and critic Luc Sante—a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books—wrote the brilliant and compelling “Low Life” in 1991 (a book suggested to me by a therapist several years ago). While casting his gaze at film, art, photography, and niche cultural phenomena, Sante—an instructor at Bard College—has received a Grammy, an Infinity Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writer’s Award, and a literature award from the American Academy of Arts.

Every subtle movement and physical shift seems to come forward in the layered drawings and paintings of John Monteith with their deft and palpable manipulations of opacity and figure. Monteith has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and Toronto Arts Council as well as a Dedalus Fellowship nomination. Monteith has exhibited his work in such venues as The Tate Modern (London), The Kitchen (New York), Elga Wimmer Gallery (New York), DUMBO Art Under the Bridge Festival (Brooklyn), Artlog Loft (Brooklyn), XEXE Gallery (Toronto), The Canadian Art Foundation (Toronto), Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto), Galerie Accidentelle (Montreal), and Galerie Stefan Ropke (Cologne).

Best known for his compelling graphite portraits of streetwise, masculine men, Patrick Lee entices the viewer with his oeuvre. Lee’s entry in this show—one of the “Deadly Friends” series—is a most arresting composition in which light and shadow contribute to a poignant “endgame.” In his deconstruction of such concepts as beauty and masculinity, Lee works sparingly, painstakingly, and with sublimated contradictions. Lee’s blue-collar background in Montana was formative in his approach. How do men relate? How do they communicate? How do they behave on an anthropological level? What threatens them or stokes their resentments? These are all questions that Lee finds fascinating—and ultimately find their way into his work.

Meanwhile, Wayne Coe’s work is profoundly inspired by the “commercialization of U.S. history” and consumption of “news” as entertainment and government propaganda. Coe goes to the jugular in taking exception to the larger society’s glorification of war and militarism. Having fond memories of model kits and using them as a jumping off point, some of Coe’s works have posed questions of priority and seemliness in our country that bans cigarette ads for children while emblazoning scenes of terror and war machines. In his “war horror works” Coe underlines how the imaginations of the very young in our society are polluted by the various obscenities of the military-industrial complex. He exposes the viewer to the dehumanizing, sexist, racist, sadistic, and “religious” texts that emblazon Humvee doors in our post-colonial “policing.” Coe’s work has been viewed in such venues as Bert Green Fine Art (Los Angeles), Dirt Gallery (Los Angeles), Gallery 825 (Los Angeles), Santa Monica Museum of Art, Art Murmur Gallery (Los Angeles), Riverside Art Museum, and Mendenhall Sobieski Gallery (Pasadena).

Like Coe, Borruso is intrigued by the heavy doses of violence being fed to the young in this country (much of it in the form of video games). Scavenging flea markets to collect books and myriad ephemera, Matt Borruso transforms these discarded and “lost” comic books, old magazines, advertisements, stills, slides, and medical books into detailed narratives that reveal tragedy and sadness as well as resilience. By recycling and repurposing these “shards,” Borruso gives them a new “life.” He deconstructs these elements and cobbles them together “like Frankenstein’s monster.” Borruso’s works have been exhibited in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Miami—and on the pages of the Ante Projects Journal, Fucked Up, and Photocopied: Instant Art of the Punk Rock Movement. Particularly influenced by the Color Theory of Josef Albers, Borruso takes many cues from corporate signage, graphic/interior design, and advertising. He is especially interested in how components of those phenomena play themselves out in use of color, psychology, and other factors to snare consumers. Working in oils, Charles Browning’s paintings reference art historical styles, puncture the mythology of Manifest Destiny, and comment on class, race, gender, and power in U.S. history. His work has been viewed in such venues as Nicholas Robinson Gallery (New York), Baer Ridgeway Gallery (San Francisco), Morgan Lehman Gallery (Connecticut), and Schroeder Romero & Shredder Gallery (New York). Notably, Browning teaches art to brain-injured clients at Success Rehabilitation in Quakertown, Pennsylvania.

One can view Elijah Burgher’s artwork on his irascible (yet engaging) blog “Ghost Vomit.” Drawing upon such influences as Austin Osman Spare, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, and Aleister Crowley. Burgher fuses these various muses into mutant and hybrid forms. Various phenomena pulsate in his work—whether doused with malevolence, desire, eroticism, rebellion, or any combination thereof. Burgher glimpses into ritual, the spaces in which it is practiced, and its varying viability. Constituent components of queer sex “magick” are broken down for the viewer in his work—whether in the banality of practice or in approaching its “limits.” Keith Boadwee, a professor at the California College of the Arts, achieved notoriety during the 1990s with such works as “anal targets” and “enema paintings.” Boadwee’s work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennial, New Museum, MoCA (Los Angeles), MoMA PS1, White Columns (New York), Rocksbox (Portland), and Good Children Gallery (New Orleans). A regular contributor to Beautiful/Decay magazine and The Brooklyn Rail, Colleen Asper is co-founder—along with Jennifer Dudley—of a roving series of panel discussions and lectures on a wide range of topics in the arts called Ad Hoc Vox. Asper’s work has been seen in such venues as Deitch Projects (New York), PPOW (New York), Steven Wolf Fine Arts (San Francisco), and on the pages of The New Yorker and TimeOut New York.

Perceptions of past, present, and future co-exist in uneasy stasis in the work of Luke Butler—an oeuvre that not only defies quantification, but also defies boundaries between abstract and figurative work. In his frozen moments, Butler releases contained images that burst forth vividly. This country’s wrenching “culture wars” preoccupy Glen Fogel and inform his work. In fact, tensions of politics, religion, and values are palpable in Fogel’s video footage—output he deftly manipulates with his editing, effects, and spectacle. Fogel’s work has been exhibited in such venues as Artists Space (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Toronto International Film Festival, MoMA, Lincoln Center, and Galeria Andre Viana (Portugal).

The pioneering Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger (1921-2006) has left a legacy that is included in many public and private collections internationally. Weinberger began doing homoerotic photographs for a gay underground club “Der Kreis,” which published a magazine by the same title—less than a decade after many European gay men ran afoul of Paragraph 175A and found themselves in Gestapo torture chambers. In 1958, he began a cycle of work in which he captured images of youth and their lifestyles, which spanned several generations. Many of his earlier photographs were done in Weinberger’s apartment and the larger Zurich area. While this “amateur” worked in a Siemens warehouse for over three decades, his output bespeaks broad cultural ferment. Another pioneer, American photographer and filmmaker Bob Mizer (1922-1992) often pushed societal boundaries. While his works first appeared in 1942, Mizer truly burst onto the scene in 1947 when he was convicted of unlawful distribution of “obscene material” through the U.S. mail. Indeed Mizer served a nine-month prison sentence for mailing a series of his black-and-white photographs of young bodybuilders wearing “posing straps” (precursors of G-strings). In the harsh societal reaction that occurred after WWII (that temporarily reversed short-lived, wartime advances in treatment accorded women, African-Americans, LGBT people, political progressives, labor unions, and others and attempted to quash “raised expectations” of those groups) the mere suggestion of male nudity was not only frowned upon but illegal. Despite that setback, this pioneer persevered and influenced such artists as Robert Mapplethorpe, David Hockney, and Gore Vidal.

With a dark whimsy and colorful animus, Ryan Schneider fuses bold palettes and quirky subjects in his intriguing works. Intimate and emotional, Schneider’s oil paintings conjure internal and external settings that pop. Whether exuding coziness, absence, or intrigue, his work allows room for existential exploration. While at times his oeuvre is unrefined or awkward, it is compelling at the same time—made all the more so with his reflective inclusion of text. Schneider engages viewers with the immediacy of his language set within currents of intimacy, nostalgia, ambiguity, and exuberance. He portrays moments resulting from his experiences and observations. His work has been exhibited in such venues as: Erika Deak Galeria (Budapest), Artcore (Toronto), V1 Gallery (Copenhagen), Galerie Mikael Andersen (Berlin), Galerie Baer (Dresden), Romo Gallery (Atlanta), Maddox Arts (London), Sweet Home Gallery (New York), and Priska C. Juschka Fine Art (Brooklyn).

The first non-English artist to be awarded the prestigious Turner prize, Wolfgang Tillmans has also been awarded the Kulturpreis der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Photographie (The Culture Prize of the German Society for Photography). Awarded first prize in the competition for the City of Munich’s AIDS Memorial (and subsequently built according to his designs), Tillmans has documented reconstruction efforts in Haiti responding to that country’s devastating earthquake. His work has been exhibited internationally and is part of many important private and institutional collections. Tillmans’ work has been an ongoing and comprehensive investigation of the photographic medium and its limits.

Eric Yahnker’s meticulous and painstaking body of work—including his graphite and colored pencil drawings and process pieces—examines pop culture and politics. Having drawn and directed “Seinimation”—a series of short animated bonus features on DVDs of Seinfeld’s last four seasons—Yahnker has exhibited his work in such venues as Ambach & Rice (Seattle), Kunsthalle Los Angeles, Galerie Jeanroch Dard (Paris), Kim Light Gallery (Los Angeles), Torrance Art Museum, Roberts & Tilton (Culver City), Other Gallery (Shanghai), Western Exhibitions (Chicago), Boxes Gallery (Denmark), Carmichael Gallery (Los Angeles), and Cinders Gallery (Brooklyn), False Front Gallery (Portland), Guerrero Gallery (San Francisco).

Awarded the Aperture Book Prize, Hank Thomas explores representation of the African American male body in visual culture. Thomas’ work has been exhibited in such venues as: MoMA PS1, Jack Shainman Gallery (New York), Galerie Anne De Villepoix (Paris), the Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg), the Studio Museum in Harlem; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), The Gantt Center (Charlotte), The Bronx Museum, Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, Artists Space, Leica Gallery (New York), Bronfman Center for Jewish Life at NYU, National Museum of American History (Washington, D.C.), National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.), High Museum (Atlanta), and Museum of Fine Arts (Houston). Thomas has also taught at a number of institutions, including Bard, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and the Maryland Institute College of Art. Tara Sinn’s work has been shown in such venues as: Lucky Gallery (Brooklyn), Spencer Brownstone Gallery (New York), Art Basel (Miami), Golden Age (Chicago), and MAGASIN Centre National d'art Contemporain (Grenoble)

Curator Doug McClemont is a writer and critic and the New York correspondent for Saatchi Online's magazine. He has contributed essays to several monographs on contemporary art, and his writing appears in publications from ARTNews to Publisher’s Weekly. As the former editor-in-chief of the infamous “leather” magazine HONCHO, he has been the subject of profiles in Time Out New York and Frieze. Meanwhile, the other curator of “B-A-A-A-D”—Billy Miller—is an artist, writer, and independent publisher. Miller’s work has been viewed in such venues as Deitch Projects (New York), MoMA PS 1, Kunstverein München, D’Amelia Terras (New York), and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He has curated shows and events at Exile (Berlin), The Jersey City Museum, and The Center for Book Arts while his writing has appeared in publications such as VICE, INDEX, K48, WON Magazine, and BUTT. Furthermore, Miller is the editor and publisher of a number of independent publications including When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again, No Milk Today, and Straight To Hell: The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts.

B-B-B-BAD: An Exhibition With Attitudes

Curated by Doug McClemont & Billy Miller

Through August 12, 2011

@ Anna Kustera Gallery

520 West 21st Street NYC 10011

A Multiplicity of Worlds

2011-07-05T02:31:00.007-05:00

[“My Frontier Is an Endless Wall of Points” (2007) by Joachim Koestler, 16mm black & white film. “The Diamond (Descartes’ Daughter)” (2008) by Emily Wardill, 16 mm color film with sound. “Associations” (1975) by John Smith, 16mm color film. “Some People Say They Think It Sounds Like Aluminum …” (2010) by Hannah Rickards, silkscreen on paper. “Fever 103” (2010) by Ulrike Müller, vitreous enamel on steel. “Chain of Triangles (from Rodez to Vernet)” (2011) by Leonor Antunes, copper.]

Taking its title from Bruno Latour’s 2005 book “Reassembling the Social,” this exhibition of works and performances by Leonor Atunes, Gregg Bordowitz, Joachim Koester, Ulrike Müller, Hannah Rickards, Sergei Tcherepnin, and Emily Wardill—up at Murray Guy through August 5, 2011—is conceived as a prompt for evaluating how artworks deploy and multiply uncertainties. Compelling viewers in their scrutinizing of collected forces, enacting of displacements, and drawing of associations, this exhibition is the first time Rickards, Antunes, and Wardill have been exhibited in New York.

Latour—an eminent French sociologist—sought in “Reassembling the Social” to pierce such concepts as “social” and “social relations.” Arguing that “the social” doesn’t exist—let alone explain or relate to human relations—Latour counters that it is a construct that must be constantly and provisionally assembled out of traces, translations, enrollments, and movements. In its negation of “the social,” Latour’s text asserts a series of significant uncertainties: “How are groups always in formation rather than formed?” “How is every action always overtaken by multiple agencies?” “How do objects have agency?” “What standards or formats circulate from site to site?” “What counts as an empirical fact?” Rather than settling or solving these essentially existential questions, Latour poses an alternative “sociology of associations” in which they are embraced. By actively deploying these questions, the many emanating connections drawn and redrawn around them can be collected and examined. This potential construct, a “sociology of associations,” is fluid—related as it is to experiential vagaries. While demanding a plurality of “identity currents” such as class, gender, imperialism, and racism, Latour’s nuanced metaphysics derides efforts by researchers to fit their subjects within specific structures or frameworks.

In their recognition of historical and anthropological contexts, the work of Leonor Antunes transforms spaces it occupies and is an especially apropos component in this show. Having shown her work in Berlin, Lisbon, London, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro, Artunes configures that space through a precision of staging. In her dialogue of renewal, the work of Artunes is dense and textured while exploring the disproportionate, miniature, and monumental. Variations of size, scale and proportion are key in her work.

While having a veneer of humor, John Smith’s films, videos, and installations convey a deeper—and many times darker—layer of meaning in which he narrates and composes discomforting visual narratives just beneath those jokes and puns. Unfettered by boundaries of “fact” and “fiction,” Smith’s work is rigorously conceptual while his “storytelling”—relying as it does on semiotics, digressions, montage, and linguistic explorations—reveals inherent social and political conflict. Viewers can experience the interplay between sound and image in John Smith’s works that have—since 1972—defied such film labels as avant-garde, documentary, and experimental. Obscuring as much as it reveals, Smith’s body of work betrays deeply conceptual analyses that run parallel to his craftily irreverent constructions. While teaching fine art film and video at the University of East London, Smith’s work has been viewed internationally in such institutions as: MoMA PS1, Tanya Leighton Gallery (Berlin), Tate Britain, Berlin Biennial, Venice Biennale, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Pallas Projects (Dublin), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Royal College of Art Galleries (London), Sala Diaz Gallery (Texas), Ikon Gallery (Birmingham), Kunstmuseum (Magdeburg), Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool), Pearl Gallery (London), and Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne). Additionally his works have won international acclaim in the form of major prizes at many film festivals.

Like those of John Smith, the works of Conceptual artist (and 2008 Hugo Boss Prize finalist) Joachim Koester bridge documentary and fiction. Working primarily in video and still photography, Koester draws upon an array of inspirations in his fresh—if forensic—works: occultist Aleister Crowley, philosopher Immanuel Kant, balloon explorer Salomon August Andrée, Jonathan Harker (of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”), theater enfant terrible Bertolt Brecht, film juggernaut Jean-Luc Godard, Belgian poet and painter Henri Michaux, and horror genre cult figure H.P. Lovecraft. Spanning internal and external worlds at once physical and psychological, Koester’s obsessive work conveys every shadow, blemish, and apprehension in its narrative.

Connected to the Dada-inspired Fluxus movement, British artist Emily Wardill has richly used language across the spectrum of her works to communicate ideas, reflections, and philosophical ponderings. Whether via performance pieces, installations, and 16mm films, one can experience Wardill’s imagery-laden scenarios. A senior lecturer at Central Saint Martins College of Art, Wardill—in her films—focuses on brief moments of clarity. As with John Smith and Joachim Koester, Wardill’s works blur constructs of truth and fiction—while struggling with such concepts as rationality vs. emotion and symbolism vs. reality. Noted for their rigorous intellectual and historic engagement, Wardill’s works have been viewed in such venues as the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), De Appel (Amsterdam), The Showroom (London), and Spacex (Exeter). Awarded the “Follow Fluxus After Fluxus” prize (instituted by Wiesbaden’s Nassauischer Kunstverein), Wardill’s work subtly deconstructs language and can be seen through the prism of “searching for self” within a vacuum of isolation.

Dealing with transformations between categories of perception and representation—such as between the visual and audible or between natural and artificial—the work of British artist Hannah Rickards utilizes a process of reduction recalling 1970s Conceptualism. Although Rickards' work shifts between different modes of perception and representation, sound and its “consequences” have a vaunted place in her work. In 2005’s “Thunder,” Rickards utilized a manufactured thunderclap while in 2002’s “Birdsong,” she used recordings of six different passages of birdsong (and lowered their pitch)—in both variably manipulating those sounds. Critic Melissa Gronlund has posed placement of Rickards between two very eminent poles in “rationale” for referential works—between Beethoven’s aim of imitation (in 1808’s “Symphony No. 6”) and John Cage’s of immediacy (in 1972’s “Bird Cage”). Meanwhile, in her diagrammatic installations, Rickards focuses on transformative processes. In the totality of her works, the viewer experiences the netherworld between perception and representation.

An extension of 1970s feminist ferment, the psychologically intense and sexually explicit work of Ulrike Müller utilizes text, narrative, language, and abstraction to break down traditional binary systems and create new options that address current feminist, gender, and queer concerns. With a body of work at once activist, feminist, and theoretical, Müller—in her use of language and body as vehicles of expression—confronts viewers to act critically. This she does in graphic works, videos, performances, and minimally colored drawings. A co-editor of the queer feminist journal “LTTR,” Müller has herself critically examined a number of relationships, including those between artist and viewer and speaker and listener. In fact, her book “Work the Room” was conceived around its own question: “What does it mean to act critically?” Müller's works have been performed or exhibited in such venues as: Broan Gallery (New York), Shared Women (Los Angeles), Diagonale Festival of Austrian Film (Graz), Mumok (Vienna), and PS 1 (New York).

Writer, AIDS activist, video-maker, and artist Gregg Bordowitz produced the autobiographical documentary “Fast Trip Long Drop” in 1993—a work that examined his experience in testing positive for HIV antibodies. A collection of his texts, “The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings: 1986-2003” was published by MIT Press. A professor of film, video, media, visual, and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Borodwitz’s essay, "Picture a Coalition," was published in the seminal "AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism" issue of "October" (#43, 1987). A work-in-progress of Bordowitz’s project “The History of Sexuality Volume One by Michel Foucault: An Opera” was shown at Tanzquartier Wien while his other works have been viewed at The Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago), New York Jewish Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Sundance Film Festival, and on PBS.

Containing their inner dialogue between improvisation’s theory and practice, the compositions and performances of Sergei Tcherepnin have been performed in such institutions and settings as Da Capo Chamber Players, St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble, the American Symphony Orchestra, the American Wind Symphony Orchestra, Merkin Concert Hall, Chelsea Art Museum, Dia Beacon, National Olympic Stadium (Tokyo), Look and Listen Festival (St. Petersburg), the Moscow Autumn Festival, and the Emerging String Quartet Festival (Deer Valley). Tcherepnin writes for the “Brooklyn Rail” and performs as part of the analog synthesizer collective “Analogos.”

The empirical works drawn together for this show—in various ways—attempt to shepherd contradictory elements and realities. Like Latour, some of these artists have been associated—if tangentially—with social constructionist approaches, and have since diverged from such approaches. On its face, this show may seem dryly intellectual: Yet these works that complement a relativist approach cast a light on possibilities of a “multiplicity of worlds” or “multiplicity of realities” in keeping with nuances of Latour’s worldview.

Events as part of this exhibition:

· Thursday, July 7, 2011 Performance/talk by Gregg Bordowitz: “Testing Some Beliefs”

· Thursday, July 21, 2011 Film screening by John Smith: “Slow Glass” & “Lost Sound”

· Friday, August 5, 2011 Performance/installation by Sergei Tcherepnin

A Form Is Simply Something Which Allows Something Else to Be Transported From One Site to Another: An Exhibition of Works & Performances by Leonor Atunes, Gregg Bordowitz, Joachim Koester, Ulrike Müller, Hannah Rickards, Sergei Tcherepnin, & Emily Wardill

Through August 5, 2011

@ Murray Guy

453 West 17th Street NYC 10011

Tyson Reeder: New Cycle

2011-06-23T18:53:00.004-05:00

[“Screen” (2011), mixed media on birch panel. “Untitled” (2011), mixed media on canvas. “Untitled” (2011), oil on canvas. “Untitled” (2011), mixed media on canvas. “Untitled” (2011), mixed media on canvas.]

Representing a breakthrough in his “fabulist” oeuvre, a new cycle of Tyson Reeder’s paintings are up at Daniel Reich Gallery through July 15, 2011. His first solo exhibition in New York since 2006, Reeder’s confident work is fresh while—at the same time—connecting with painting’s history and iconography. So unique that they call to mind folk and outsider art, his paintings reflect the brain’s hovering fluidity.

While painting this body of work, Reeder looked at paintings by Dada- and Surrealist-associated Francis Picabia (1879–1953) in which heads superimpose with figures in delimited psychological landscapes. Known for his “portraits mécaniques”—and associated with figures from Marcel Duchamp to Gertrude Stein—the provocative Picabia is credited with introducing Modern art to the United States. Also influential to Reeder—in obvious ways—are the paintings of Jean Fautrier (1898-1964), whose singular style distanced his work from Surrealism, late Cubism, and hard-edged Abstraction. Reeder’s mixed media on a birch panel recalls Fautrier’s post-war painted panels called “Otages” (or “Hostages”). Additionally of influence to Reeder are the predominately abstract, small-scale mixed media works done by Fautrier in late career.

Additionally, Reeder admires Paul Klee (1879–1940) for the musicality and childlike perspective of his work—manifested by a somewhat “cartoonish” imagery. Klee—associated with Wasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in “Der Blaue Reiter” (“The Blue Rider”) and with Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, and Alexei Jawlensky in “Die Blaue Vier” (“The Blue Four”)—was noted for his work’s Expressionism, transcendence, color vocabulary, and connection to metaphysical thought. Most admirably, 17 of Klee’s works were included in the notorious 1937 Nazi-organized exhibition of “Entartete Kunst” (“Degenerate Art“) and 102 of his works in public collections were removed by that regime.

At play in Reeder’s new cycle is an unleashed quality of the brush—seeming to free his brushstrokes from a precalculated banality. The resultant lively movement enumerates the artist’s fantastic—if contrived—world. Humor is palpable here, while one finds haunting beauty in Reeder’s choice of color and execution. One colorful portrait in this show contains a cartoon’s aura in a consciously sedate palette of aqua, yellow, pink, and white. Another of the included works—while pleasing—is obscured behind a mask and impulsive strokes of white paint. Its ocular impudence is rendered is such detail as to possess the gravity and Surrealism of one of the works of Marc Chagall (1887–1985). Reeder invokes an exotic precinct in which past and future coalesce.

Though embracing the hieroglyphic quality of Aztec and Egyptian works, Reeder’s canvases deftly borrow a muted and extremely individualized palette reminiscent of Brice Marden. In fact, the viewer may find Reeder’s cornucopia of references a bit dizzying. One may even discern a bit of the idiosyncratic, suggestive, and “Eastern influenced” canon of Henri Michaux (1899–1984) under the surface of a lone blue tree. In one work with a relic quality, musicians are illuminated by a golden sun. In another, light reflects meditatively on water. All burst with feelings and variations of mood.

Reeder’s work has shown in a number of venues such as: Jack Hanley Gallery (Los Angeles), Greener Pastures (Toronto), Black Dragon Society (Los Angeles), Angstrom Gallery (Los Angeles), Nicolai Wallner (Copenhagen), Hiromi Yoshi (Japan), Cheim and Read, the Swiss Institute, Shane Campbell Gallery, and Museum 52.

Tyson Reeder

Through July 15, 2011

@ Daniel Reich Gallery

537 West 23rd Street, NYC 10011

Donald Judd @ David Zwirner Gallery

2011-06-21T16:44:00.001-05:00

[Various untitled works (1989), anodized aluminum clear with Plexiglass.]

When Donald Judd died in 1994, there was a no more vigorous proponent of Minimalist art in the United States—though he just as vigorously eschewed the term. Beginning his artistic practice as a painter in the late 1940s, Judd’s first solo exhibition—of expressionist paintings—opened in 1957. As he explored the woodcut medium from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s, Judd moved increasingly from figurative to abstract imagery. Starting by carving organic round shapes and shallow reliefs, he evolved ever more toward painstakingly straight lines and angles. One of the most significant American artists of the post-war period, Judd’s unaffected and straightforward oeuvre demonstrated an instinctive energy toward color, form, material, and space. Going beyond the creation of work that assumed direct material and physical presence, Judd felt no obligation toward overriding philosophical “statements.” Furthermore, Judd avoided cliché representational sculptural ideas—instead creating a rigorous visual vocabulary and seeking clear and definite objects to articulate. Five decades ago, Judd commenced to create freestanding works using such “elemental” materials as plywood, steel, concrete, Plexiglass, and aluminum. Creating declaratively simple and fundamental sculptural forms, Judd would arrange his works—often in the shape of boxes or stacks—according to repeated or sequential progressions.

This show—up at David Zwirner Gallery through June 25, 2011—presents seminal works drawn from Judd’s 1989 exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle (Baden-Baden). Brought together for the first time since that event, these works have been drawn from private and public collections internationally. Spanning both of David Zwirner’s spaces at 525 and 533 West 19th Street, this exhibition reflects the clarity and rigor Judd intended in this installation. The galley’s inaugural exhibition of the artist’s work since obtaining exclusive representation of the Judd Foundation, the works included herein comprise one of Judd’s few explorations of color on a large scale using anodized aluminum. Indeed, the historic 1989 Kunsthalle exhibition of these 12 identically scaled anodized aluminum works was significant in that it marked the first time Judd used that colored material in such scale. Viewers are given a powerful vantage point from which to investigate these truly focused examples of Judd’s practice.

While Judd had previously examined the qualities of an open box form, works created for the groundbreaking 1989 exhibition display distinctive systematic approaches in determining each box’s interior space. In turn, Judd divided each box vertically into different spatial configurations—while sometimes introducing color through anodized elements or sheets of Plexiglass in blue, black, or amber. Resultant combinations of materials, dividers, and colors—varying from box to box—determine each work’s singular nature within a finite number of possibilities. Thus, each box is an individual work representing just one possibility amid various parameters.

Demonstrating Judd’s visionary approach in use of industrial material—coupled with his unique attitude toward proportion and installation—these works were designed in relation to each other and within the given framework of their design. As an ensemble they present a particularly cohesive perspective of composition and space. Placement of color and other composite elements was part of a larger context for Judd: In presenting these boxes as a group, we are allowed the breath of their intriguing spatial arrangements, colors, and dimensions: This is especially true vis-à-vis the surrounding architectural environment. This show at David Zwirner provides a special opportunity for viewers to experience such a large-scale presentation of a single body of work by Judd. Furthermore, this current installation has been accompanied by catalogue published in collaboration with Steidl (Göttingen)—including new scholarship on Judd by noted art historian Richard Shiff as well as archival material and reprinted interviews with the artist.

The highly articulated work of Donald Judd (1928-1994) has been exhibited internationally for over six decades—in a plethora of formats—at such institutions as Tate Modern (London), K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Düsseldorf), the Kunstmuseum (Basel), Kunsthalle Bielefeld, the Menil Collection (Houston), the Sprengel Museum (Hannover), Dia Art Foundation (Beacon), The Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Documenta (Kassel), the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), The Panoramas Gallery (New York), The Leo Castelli Gallery (New York), Paula Cooper Gallery (New York), PaceWildenstein (New York), and Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain (Nice).

Donald Judd

Through June 25, 2011

@ David Zwirner Gallery

525 West 19th Street, NYC 10011

Technology, Memory & Identity: A Convergence

2011-06-20T15:02:00.003-05:00

[“Anonymous #59, #60, #61, #62” (2011), computer punch tape & blue masking tape. “Anonymous #54” (2011), computer punch tape & blue masking tape. “Anonymous #53” (2011), computer punch tape & blue masking tape. “Anonymous #26” (2011), computer punch tape & blue masking tape. “Anonymous #27” (2010), computer punch tape & blue masking tape.]

Exploring relationships between technology, memory, and identity, Henry Chung continues his ongoing “Identity/Anonymity” series. These anonymous portraits—rendered in an obsolete technology no longer accessible—are forgotten faces culled from flea markets and antique stores. In looking at these “forgotten” individuals, one is compelled to ponder the lives they lived and their evaporated memories. Integral to how this “evaporation” occurs is its relation to relative levels of anonymity, familiarity, and fame of those individuals.

Cultural/historical memory in our transient and “throwaway” society-in-economic-upheaval is sketchy at best. With personal identity is more fluid than ever, Chung points out the importance of permanence and consistency. Perhaps the Chinese cultural heritage of honoring one's ancestors is the root of Chung's sadness at discovering the discarded evidence of lives experienced. However we come upon these individuals, Chung asks us to contemplate their lives.

Before the advent of disc drives, DVDs, Wi-Fi networks, and cellular technology, paper punch tape was used to store and transmit computer data. Rolls of 1" paper tape were punched by a machine attached to a computer that translated the binary information on the computer into a pattern of holes in the tape, a hole for the number one and the paper left uncut for a zero. This tape was then fed into a punch tape reader connected to other computer equipment and translated back into usable information.

Ingeniously, Chung wrote a computer program translating found images of the forgotten into such aforementioned 1” strips of data: These were then punched by a computer punch tape machine. Chung “recomposes” these images by aligning resultant strips of black paper punch tape. By “drawing” these images of unknown people in holes in paper, he emphasizes loss of memory and identity experienced when he found these vintage images. His work acts as a metaphor for loss, exposes the inherent sadness associated with it, and partially restores the spirit to wit. This body of work deftly and sensitively juxtaposes such losses in physical, metaphysical, and conceptual ways. These images “come to life” when Chung is cuts holes in the paper, creates loss in the paper, and uses an obsolete and unreadable technology to mimic his experience of finding photographs of unknowable people.

Chung’s technological competence and curiosity get vigorous pushes from his background in engineering at Columbia University. But these Conceptual works go far beyond technical fluency: In them one finds powerful currents of history, sociology, and transcendent soul.

Henry Chung

Through July 31, 2011

@ RHV Fine Art

683 6th Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11215

I Celebrate the Vision Elastic!

2011-06-18T22:51:00.006-05:00

[“Five Women, Freud’s Bookcase, London” (2011) by Joy Episalla. Pigment print mounted on plexiglass. “When I Put My Hands on Your Body” (1990) by David Wojnarowicz. Gelatin silver print & silkscreen text on museum board. “Untitled” (2011) by Katherine Hubbard. 24 black & white C-prints mounted on styrene. “Portrait” (1983) by Adrian Piper. Photo text collage.]

Curated by Moyra Davey and Zoe Leonard, “Vision Is Elastic. Thought Is Elastic,” explores intersections between photograph and writing. Up at Murray Guy Gallery through June 18, 2011, this exhibition was presented concurrently with the release of “Blind Spot Magazine,” issue number 43—jointly edited by the show’s two curators. Bringing together works by Josh Brand, Roy Colmer, Pradeep Dalal, Shannon Ebner, Joy Episalla, William Gedney, Roni Horn, Katherine Hubbard, Babette Mangolte, Mark Morrisroe, Adrian Piper, Claire Pentecost, James Welling, and David Wojnarowicz, the title “Vision Is Elastic. Thought Is Elastic” comes from the journals of David Wojnarowicz.

While examining a symbiosis between camera and notebook, this exhibition assembles works embodying the spectrum of relationships between such activities as reading, writing, and note-taking. This is in contrast to the iconoclastic milieu within conceptual art in which text is paired with photographs to fragment or unhinge those images. Thus, in these symbiotic relationships, dissimilar organisms coalesce into those mutually beneficial as opposed to one spotlighting insufficiency or artificiality of the other entities. Many of the works assembled in “Vision Is Elastic. Thought Is Elastic” propose interchangeability, flexibility, and fluency between images and text that not only anticipate (in the case of older works) or respond to (for those more recent) today’s proliferating digital interfaces—but rather acknowledge and withstand this reality. With images increasingly—if not ubiquitously—embedded within text (and texts inscribed within the spaces of an image) we can see a number of currents in this show.

Many of the artists represented in this exhibition write on the image or in their margins, making photographic surfaces virtual notepads. This includes the mighty elegy by the iconic David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992), the compelling frappé of Mark Morrisroe (1959-1989), and the annotated waterscapes of Roni Horn. Wojnarowicz—prominent in the New York City art world of the 1980s—integrated text into his work from the late 1970s, during the time he created his photographic series of Arthur Rimbaud and made Super-8 films such as “Heroin.” The work of David Wojnarowicz not only calls to mind frontline galleries in which his work was exhibited such as Civilian Warfare, Zero, Gracie Mansion, and Hal Bromm: His work is seen through the prism of his collaborators such as Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Luis Frangella, Kiki Smith, Richard Kern, John Fekner, Phil Zwickler, Ben Neil, and James Romberger. David lives on today in the work of countless artists such as Victoria Yee Howe, Matt Wolf, Emily Roysden, Henrick Olesen, Carrie Mae Weems, Mike Estabrook, and Zoe Leonard, a curator of this show. Morrisroe—unofficial “leader” of “The Boston School” (including Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Tabboo!, Gail Thacker, and Jack Pierson)—can be seen today through his oeuvre of “autobiographical photography.” Indeed, Morrisroe’s fresh and diaristic body of work will speak across the decades: This includes his technically imperfect Polaroids and photographs (highlighted with scrawled texts along the borders and other signature retouching). Roni Horn’s site-dependent works expand upon Minimalism’s creed of “site specificity.” Having had one-person exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Dia Center for the Arts, and Whitney Museum of American Art, Horn creates complex narratives between her work and the viewer. She does this by subverting notions of unique experiences.

Others in the show—such as James Welling (with his paired images of Connecticut) and Shannon Ebner (with her array of blank notebook pages)—photograph notebooks themselves across different states. The images of James Welling transcend categories of still life, landscape, architectural, abstract, color study, and photogram. At the same time, they are layered with irony, history, and paradox—drawing as he does from myriad subjects. Having produced more than 35 distinct series, post-conceptualist Welling pursues several at a time over periods of years. His work has appeared in such venues as Documenta IX (Kassel), Maureen Paley (London), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Sharon Ebner’s works often spotlight language’s discrepancies—and underline its undulating qualities. In this exploration of language, Ebner invokes those qualities that both imprison and liberate: The viewer is allowed a vantage point from which to examine its possibilities. Her aim at the “war on terror” was especially refreshing. Drawing upon a photographic tradition spanning from Jean Eugène Atget (1856-1927) to Edward Ruscha, Ebner embraces photography’s fundamental contradictions while—at the same time—unearthing its fictions.

The poignant and sensitive tableaux of William Gedney (1932-1989), the documentation and photography projects of Roy Colmer, and the sculptural and carnal constructions of Pradeep Dalal treat photographs as though they were entries in a journal or the means by which to keep a diary. Primarily documenting the environs of New York, rural Kentucky, and San Francisco in the U.S.—and Benares and Calcutta in India—Bill Gedney photographed from the 1950s until his death in 1989. With his particular forte nighttime photography, Gedney received several fellowships and grants during his lifetime—including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a New York State Creative Artists Public Service Program grant, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been exhibited in such venues as MoMA, George Eastman House, and Rochester Institute of Technology. Colmer began to experiment with closed-circuit TV in the early 1970s—sometimes incorporating video feedback. Ceasing his painting to work on documentation and photography projects in the mid-1970s, Colmer’s films and photographs have received critical attention—appearing in such venues as: Museum für Neue Kunst & Medienmuseum (Karlsruhe), the Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro), the Blanton Museum of Art (Austin), and the Mitchell Algus Galley (New York). Examining autobiographical and architectural sites in India, Dalal’s photomontage projects explore senses of legacy and geographical awe. Affected by the flow and rhythm of the works of Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, Colmer sought out and tested opposite values across a range of his projects. A native of Mumbai, Dalal appropriates a 19th century panorama from which he builds tattered yet robust collages challenging personal as well as larger assumptions. His work reigns in an array of moments, genres, time periods, and textures into a single montage: These disparate qualities represent his tangled—and sometimes contradictory—personal experiences. A recipient of a Tierney Fellowship, Dalal’s work has appeared at the New York Public Library, PS 122, TART (San Francisco), Vadhera Gallery (New Delhi), and Aljira Center for Contemporary Art (Newark).

A quick way into one’s psyche is to either investigate their book or music collections. Babette Mangolte and Joy Episalla have done the former—photographing bookshelves and giving external form to such internal activities as reading and writing (the former doing the library of Annette Michelson, the latter that of Sigmund Freud). An experimental filmmaker living in New York, Babette Mangolte has had complete retrospectives of her films and camerawork organized in Munich, Berlin, and New York. Exhibited in such venues as the Film Anthology Archives, Tate Britain (London), Tate Liverpool, and the Whitney Museum, Mangolte is noted also for her photography of dance, theater, and performance. Episalla’s work inhabits interstices between photography, sculpture, and video and focuses on the rich output of information produced by mundane objects and architecture. Art critic Bill Arning has described Joy Episalla’s viewpoint “so close to the subject” and her works’ effect as “especially pronounced.” Like a forensic examiner or palm reader, she combs an array of exposed fissures and entities—rendering and scrutinizing their secrets. A recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, Episalla’s work has been exhibited at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Carrie Secrist Gallery (Chicago), Debs & Co., Clifford Smith Gallery (Boston), the Contemporary Art Center (New Orleans), The Phoenix Art Museum, ARCO (Madrid), Aeroplastics Contemporary (Brussles), and Studio 1.1 (London).

Josh Brand uses the camera as though it were a writing instrument—evoking photography’s original sense of “writing with light.” He is but one of a number of “recent generation” artists as Liz Deschenes, Wolfgang Tillmans, Eileen Quinlan, and Markus Amm who have—in various ways—explored limitations of non-representational photographic images. Brand has shown his work in such venues as: CRG Gallery (New York), Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Elizabeth Dee Gallery (New York), QED (Los Angeles), Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery (New York), and White Columns (New York), and Shane Campbell Gallery (Chicago).

Engaged across collaboration, research, lecturing, teaching, fieldwork, writing, drawing, photography, and installation, the investigative work of Claire Pentecost defies those institutional structures. In fact, Pentecost’s website “The Public Amateur,” advocates for those whose work crosses and disturbs the disciplinary boundaries that traditionally cleave to the authorized specialist. Having addressed boundaries between “natural” and “artificial,” Pentecost has taken her work into arenas that include industrial agriculture and bioengineering. An associate professor in the photography department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pentecost’s work has been exhibited at the Drawing Center, Whitney Museum of Art, Kunstverein (Munich), Corcoran Museum (Washington, D.C.), Center for Creative Photography (Tucson), and American Fine Art Gallery (New York). In her beyond-thorough explorations of performance’s photographic documentation, Katherine Hubbard has examined and redefined equations and structures in that arena. Meanwhile, Hubbard’s sculptural, fiber, and costume-based works have been exhibited at the Rockland Center for the Arts, Higher Pictures (New York), and San Francisco’s SOMArts Gallery and California College of the Arts.

Without a doubt, much of the work by the other artists in this show rests upon the prescient “first-generation” conceptual artist Adrian Piper. Coming on the scene in 1967, her early work incorporated aspects of yoga and meditation (or what she calls the “indexical present.”) Not only did Piper’s work bridge passive contemplation of objects with more dynamic and self-conscious themes, she also introduced issues of xenophobia, race, and gender into the vocabulary of Conceptual art. Her 1987 retrospective at the Alternative Museum (New York) was a pivotal event and brought the media and strategies of first-generation Conceptual art to the larger art public. Over and over again in the following years, Piper has continued to challenge the complacency of art viewers with strategies that shock, outrage, and amuse. Combining photographs with silkscreen drawings and compressed political texts, Piper shines a bright light on reservoirs of political self-deception and disingenuousness. Piper withdrew her work from a 1995 museum survey of early Conceptual art to protest its funding by Philip Morris—replacing it with “Ashes to Ashes,” a photo-text work that narrated her parents’ smoking related deaths. Piper’s artwork of transcendence is in many august collections such as MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoCA, the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Generali Foundation (Vienna), and the Aomori Museum of Art (Japan).

Important are this show’s curators Zoe Leonard and Moyra Davey, who have taken this show on an über-intellectual trajectory. Both have previously used their own artistic practices to focus on physical representations of symbolic systems whose relationships of valuation are in major transition. With black-and-white photography as her principal artistic medium, Zoe Leonard’s prolific work includes sculpture, installation, and film. Reflecting experiences and observations in ways subtle and ambivalent, her work captures conflict and gray areas in gender relationships, nature, culture, and space and time. Leonard’s work—offering a language to the voiceless and bringing visibility to the invisible—has been viewed in such institutions as Documenta (Kassel), Whitney Biennial, Vienna Secession, Kunsthalle (Basel), Centre National de la Photographie (Paris), Fotomuseum Wintherthur (Switzerland), and Pinakothek der Modern (Munich). Editor of “Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood” (an anthology on maternal ambivalence and the intersection of motherhood and creative life) and author of “The Problem of Reading,” (a book of essays), Moyra Davey is an artist and a photographer whose work has been exhibited at the Kunsthalle (Basel), Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus), Fogg Art Museum (Harvard), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield), James Cohan Gallery(New York), and American Fine Arts Co. (New York). Thoughtfully, Leonard and Davey have included three artists ripped from us during the AIDS epidemic: Mark Morrisroe, William Gedney, and David Wojnarowicz. We can but guess as to where those visceral artists would have taken their work—“If only...”

Vision Is Elastic. Thought Is Elastic.

Group Show Including: Josh Brand, Roy Colmer, Pradeep Dalal, Shannon Ebner, Joy Episalla, William Gedney, Roni Horn, Katherine Hubbard, Babette Mangolte, Mark Morrisroe, Adrian Piper, Claire Pentecost, James Welling, & David Wojnarowicz. Curated by Moyra Davey & Zoe Leonard.

Through June 18, 2011

@ Murray Guy

453 West 17th Street, NYC 10011

Frank Brunner & Michaël de Kok: Psychic Landscapes

2011-06-15T13:30:00.007-05:00

[Frank Brunner: “Untitled” (2011), oil on canvas. “Broken Mirrors” (2011), oil on mylar. “Threshold” (2011), oil on canvas. Michaël de Kok: “Evening” (2011), oil on canvas. “Base” (2011), oil on canvas.]

In this two-person show at Bertrand Delacroix Gallery—up through July 9, 2011—one is overwhelmed by these psychic landscapes by Brunner and Michaël de Kok.

Using repetition and perspective to explore ideas in familiar iconography, Frank Brunner does so in a fog of reminiscence—whether “revisiting the woods from his childhood with the integrated image of suitcases” or “studying human form through reflected pools.” While Brunner’s creative results are unique, his approach is “art historical.” Thematic icons recur on canvas after canvas and manifest themselves within singular surfaces.

Originating from his fascination of greater forces that result from combined smaller efforts, Brunner’s conceptual framework emerges most strenuously. By recalling these memories across the breadth of his canvases, Brunner creates a world of “eternal return.” Brunner’s curiosity with light and form results in visual “poetry”—exposing the viewer to caches of psychic spaces and “rites of passage.” Fusing traditional painting technique with ideas emerging from contemporary life, his reflective work confronts artificial constructs of “nature” and image-making’s inherent complexities.

Windows and mirrors act as metaphors in Brunner’s work—allowing him to deconstruct these images in various ways. As with the work of Gerhard Richter, Brunner’s images are composed of progressively blurred objects: In Brunner’s work they convey melancholy and the fading of memories over time. Deriving from death, pain, and collective consciousness, Brunner’s images combine sculpture with the painted surface. Using a dripping device with his canvases horizontal on the ground, the surfaces of Brunner’s paintings have been worked over and over.

As with Brunner, images of the mental realm swirl within the painted landscapes of Michaël de Kok. While his landscapes are bleak, solitary, and vast, each de Kok canvas punctuates a moment’s impact. His paintings reduce scenes to basics of line, shape, form, and composition—regardless of whether his subject is a road, mountain, or building. Innately familiar, de Kok’s landscapes—with their vast horizons, skies, and spaces—blur these elements by altering such variables as light, palette, and dimension. Leveraged and shadowed degrees of visual, psychic, and emotional impacts then result.

Brunner has exhibited in such venues as Norway’s Drammen Museum, Haugar Kunstmuseum, Stenersen Museum, and Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, as well as Berlin’s Stiftung Stadtmuseum and New York’s Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts Gallery. Meanwhile, de Kok has exhibited throughout Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, and France in such venues as Museum de Wieger and Amsterdam’s lively Stedlijk Museum.

Frank Brunner / Michaël de Kok

Through July 9, 2011

@ Bertrand Delacroix Gallery

535 West 25th Street NYC 10001

Sign on the Dotted Line: Signature Paintings by Todd Kelly

2011-06-15T13:24:00.004-05:00

[“Signature Painting” (2011), oil & acrylic on canvas. “Untitled (Tree Painting)” (2011), oil, acrylic & collage on canvas. “Quilt Painting” (2011), oil on canvas.]

A number of elements converge and coalesce in the works of Todd Kelly: “Signature Paintings,” a show of his recent work is up at Asya Geisberg Gallery through June 18, 2011. In Kelly’s avalanche of experimentation, this Michigan native uses his name as a springboard in manipulating its letters as a compositional structure—whether as an exaggerated logo, a half-buried talisman, or entity altered beyond recognition. Imagination, momentary inspiration, present consciousness, and serendipity sustain his work—with Kelly firmly, if naively, believing that painting can make the world a better place.

In “Scrim Painting I”—with its finely nuanced gradients of pinks and zigzag of diagonal lines covering all but the top edge of the painting—the resultant pattern is a geometric extension of the veil. However, while the veil both covers and beckons with its seduction by suggestion, its lines also call to mind a hard-edged grated fence. Coursing underneath are lush jabs of paint, insouciant dots of spray paint, and washes of color. Buried deepest is the negative space of the artist’s initials – a whisper compared to the manic activity on top. Ultimately, the ego is meditatively erased as Kelly’s signature becomes a faint echo.

In “Untitled (Leaves),” actual leaves have been adhered to the canvas, as if to point out the old adage about “seeing the forest for the trees.” A splotchy pink layer rests on top of its precise fine lines—as if a drunken rock star had lost control in an elegant hotel room. “Untitled (Leaves)” are what one sees midway through a crash and burn: starched linens unfurling, sconces still intact, and ashtrays overflowing. Hours of detailed work are required to beget lines of equal length and distance, while quasi-scientific concern for color competes with a Dionysian expression of id. As the artist remarks, “the eye switches back and forth between illusions deciding which to land on.”

Inspired by nonhierarchical approaches to art history and diverse sources such as architecture, graffiti, and graphic design, Kelly takes viewers on an odyssey through modes of abstraction—engaging paintings’ physical and philosophical spaces. In this particular show (and in his paintings generally), Kelly provokes viewers in pondering creative mechanisms behind his work. Layers of brushwork, drips, spray paint, stencil, and collaged elements culminate with a surface of parallel dotted lines. Large areas of paint sometimes cover painstakingly applied marks as expressionistic flourishes vanquish control. Delicate uniform marks form a pattern within the Kelly’s “astral” plane and culminate in an overarching “signature.”

Kelly’s work has been exhibited in such venues as the National Portrait Gallery (London), Seven Seven Contemporary (London), “Artforum,” and the Jerwood Painters Exhibition.

Signature Paintings

Todd Kelly

Through June 18, 2011

@ Asya Geisberg Gallery

537B West 23rd Street, NYC 10011

Gillian Wearing: People

2011-06-13T15:27:00.004-05:00

Conceptual artist Gillian Wearing won Britian’s Turner Prize in 1997—among a “shortlist” of four artists, all female. Done to correct the all-male shortlist of 1996, this initially created a hoopla—a hoopla that largely dissipated when the work of the women was actually exhibited. A major solo exhibition of new work by Gillian Wearing—presenting an epic survey of accomplishment since her last major New York exhibition in 2003—is up at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery through June 24, 2011. Featuring new and recent video installations, photographic series, and sculptural work, the exhibition occupies both gallery floors and all four of its public spaces. Continuing her renowned and influential exploration of identity, performance, and storytelling, Wearing describes narratives that land on the edge of public and private, fiction and documentary, and raw improvisation and carefully staged. In projecting these issues through a lens of personal memory, cultural history, and media, a unique and compelling psychological resonance persists throughout.

In Tanya Bonakdar Gallery’s main gallery space on the ground floor, “Snapshot” is a monumental seven-channel video installation paying homage to the evolution of still photography through the implementation of moving images. While tracing still portraiture’s evolution throughout time, it presents an explicit “timeline.” Informed by old photographs—at the same time evoked through moving imagery—seven different women at various stages of life, are depicted on seven monitors corresponding to various eras in the 20th century. Ranging from youth to old age, an anonymous narrator describes the memories of these women, which are—at once—personal and universal. Evident in Snapshot is the influence of Michael Apted’s groundbreaking and poignant “Seven-Up” (Granada Television 1964) upon Wearing. Seven-Up is a longitudinal British documentary series charting progress by a group of children in seven-year increments.

In the second ground floor gallery, Wearing’s latest video work “Bully” counterbalances Snapshot’s exploration of feminine identity. Presented in a black box space, this large projection stems from Wearing’s acclaimed feature length film “Self Made” (2010). Confronting the viewer with an individual’s catharsis in a revelatory moment, one can follow a fiction’s construction while it transcends a character’s personal story to become a “reality” for all participants. Bully showcases Wearing’s efficacy in the role of director. At the same time, her compelling elevation of the mundane offers an angst-ridden view of reality.

Wearing presents another major video installation in this show: “Secrets and Lies.” Within the confines of a small chamber—not unlike a confessional box—the viewer is confronted by one masked figure after another recounting intimately kept personal secrets such as infidelity and murder. Gleaned from announcements placed online, participants answered a call to "Confess All on Video." The disguised features of these participants combine with brutally open honesty, challenging construction of “self” versus portraiture’s very raison d’etre. The mask protects the confessor’s identity while it empowers them to speak truthfully.

In the main upstairs gallery, Wearing exhibits three major photographic works, each a self-portrait of the artist posed as figures from recent art history: “Diane Arbus,” “Robert Mapplethorpe,” and “Andy Warhol.” Each of these mythologized artists' practices profoundly influenced Wearing's own. In each composition, the artist donned a costume and prosthetics to occupy the place of her subjects. In the same room, as if in reverence to these three iconic personas, one finds Gillian Wearing's most recent work “People” (2011). Inspired by Dutch still life paintings of the 17th century, it depicts an elegant and complex arrangement of silk flowers in a small vase. One can only imagine the explosion of color, otherwise more intense and unreal due to the artificial coloration of the faux flowers. These flowers will never wilt or die, and while the piece references the past, the artificiality of its construction is not disguised and cannot be ignored.

Finally, two small bronze figures, Gervais (2010) and Terri (2011), are the first of a new body of work Wearing refers to as "social sculpture." Depicting lifelike renderings of apparently everyday people, plaques below the sculptures describe the heroic role each has held within the broader context of their society. Of particular significance for this exhibition in New York, Wearing approached NYPD officer Terri Tobin, a hero of the 9/11 disaster, to model for the depiction of "Heroine." Ten years later, through the simple bronze figure, Wearing discreetly resounds the monumental in the everyday man and woman.

In her range of works such as “Dancing in Peckham” (1994), “One Sixty Minute Silence” (1996), “Drunk” (2000), “Broad Street” (2001), “Fuck Cilla Black” (2003), “Family History” (2006), and those in this current show, Wearing has pushed the limits of portraiture in photography and video and drawn out—in all their complexity—narratives on various relationships between people. Her works focused in Peckham and South London bring the magic of that milieu—known so well to Americans through the literary works of Hanif Kureishi (and their film adaptations)—to the arena of the plastic arts.

In addition to being a recipient of Britain's most prestigious Turner Prize, Gillian Wearing is internationally regarded as one of the most influential artists of her generation—with her work exhibited at such institutions and venues as PS1, the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Whitechapel Gallery (London), the Tate Gallery (London), City Racing (London), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), and K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Düsselfdorf).

People

Gillian Wearing

Through June 24, 2011

@ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

521 West 21st Street NYC 10011

Fernando Bryce: El Mundo en Llamas

2011-06-10T14:57:00.006-05:00

Alexander and Bonin Gallery is hosting the exhibition of two new works by Fernando Bryce—marking the first solo presentation of his work in the United States. Bryce’s drawings systematically re-examine how historical events are represented and reconstructed in real time through the media. Describing his work as “mimetic analysis,” Bryce culls archives for advertisements, newspaper articles, leaflets, comics, and other print materials focusing on specific political currents. He then reproduces these original documents in ink on standard paper formats. Representing Bryce in this show are his two respective—and most recent—works, “El Mundo en Llamas” and “Das Reich / Der Aufbau.” Up through June 18, 2011, both focus on representations of World War II in the popular press.

Panoptic in scope, Fernando Bryce’s painstaking work is the result of collecting historical documents, images from media, and illustrations, which are then combined and translated into large ink drawings. Poetically, he breathes life into these images by reimagining and reinterpreting them into various formative contexts.

Translated as “The World in Flames,” “El Mundo en Llamas” is an expansive set of 92 drawings in which headlines from major world newspapers are juxtaposed against advertisements for Hollywood film as they were rebranded at the time for a Peruvian audience. As with many of his installations, mainstream political coverage is weighed against the spectre of cultural imperialism: News of military maneuvers is followed by celluloid depictions of heroic pilots and femme fatales dubbed in Spanish. Spanning the period from 1939-1945, included are full-page spreads of “The New York Times,” Communist Party organ “L'Humanité” ("Humanity"), “Berliner Zeitung am Mittag,” “The Washington Post.” and the Peruvian “El Comercio.” Bryce’s juxtaposition of World War II news with events in Peru is ironic for one major reason: One of the only active roles played by that South American nation during that conflict was the rounding up of Peruvians of Japanese ancestry—with the connivance of the U.S. State Department—and the expropriation of property and other assets of these hapless people by Peru. [Only 79 Japanese-Peruvian citizens returned to Peru after the war, and 400 remained in the United States as "stateless" refugees.]

In “El Mundo,” as in his other works, Bryce has acted as a para-historian—revisiting and highlighting remnants of various historical perspectives. The artist opened a window through which historical events—anchored by significant military turning points of World War II—could be discerned and examined. Bryce searches newspaper archives on key dates—selecting and editing those pages whose graphic and ideological content he finds most compelling and emblematic. Bryce’s drawings embody unique views on history’s mediation.

Problematic examples of the period include the war reportage of the collaborationist Paris newspaper “Le Matin,” which emphasized anti-Soviet discourse. The days of “Le Matin” were numbered: Published from 1883, the once advanced periodical that had questioned the dubious charges against Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) had been reduced to anti-parliamentary vitriol and a pro-Nazi line before disappearing in August 1944 after the liberation of the City of Light. By comparison, “L'Humanité”—the daily linked to the French Communist Party and founded in 1904 by Jean Jaurès—continues to this day as the last French national newspaper of the left, despite the foundering of its parent party. In contrast to most French newspapers, the readership of “L'Humanité” has actually increased. Its pages heralded the Popular Front of Léon Blum in 1936: Despite its being banned during World War II, it published clandestinely until liberation of Paris from German occupation.

For “Das Reich / Der Aufbau,” Bryce has reproduced in full 14 covers of two periodicals—the German-language Jewish journal, Aufbau, then published then in New York, and Das Reich—spanning the months from July to October 1944. This period, after the liberation in July of the Majdanek concentration camp by the Soviet Army and the liberation of Paris in August by the forces of the “United Nation,” marks the beginning of the end of the war in Europe. By presenting the two publications together the viewer is able to compare the topics covered and how they might fit the ideology of the given publication. In hindsight Das Reich’s headlines (“The Utmost Effort,” “Full Display of Force,” etc.) read like fantasies of increasing power in the face of impending collapse. The differing style and formatting of these publications are also telling. Das Reich, for instance, sports a neo-classical, serifed masthead followed by one central headline. Aufbau’s masthead, by contrast, is modern, fat and angular and its multiple headlines are dispersed, and printed in different fonts. Design decisions such as these reiterate larger ideological constructs: Das Reich (and National Socialism) being Teutonic and monolithic whereas Aufbau (and the “United Nations” forces) modern and cosmopolitan.

Literally meaning “The [German] Empire,” “Das Reich” was a weekly newspaper founded by Nazi Germany’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in May 1940. Primarily the creation of Rudolf Sparing, Rolf Rienhardt, and Max Amann, Goebbels was not involved with “Das Reich,” other than having founded it and apart from contributing a weekly editorial. Except for Herr Goebbels very delusional editorials, “Das Reich”—with its foreign contributors, book reviews, essays, and news reports—did not share the tone of other evermore barbarous and strident Nazi publications such as “Der Angriff” ("The Attack"), the pornographic “Der Stürmer” ("The Attacker"), “Völkischer Beobachter” ("Völkisch Observer"), and “Das Schwarze Korps” (“ The Black Corps”). In the other part of the show, Bryce even included a 1942 issue of “BZ am Mittag”—by then a droning facsimile of the lively, urbane tabloid it had been when owned by the House of Ullstein prior to the Nazi takeover and the resultant “Aryanization” of that august publishing house. The latter was “put out of its misery” when it ceased publication in February 1943 in compliance with measures for the “Total War.”

“Aufbau”—including such names on its masthead as Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Hannah Arendt—was an important source of news about the war for those fortunate German-speaking Jewish émigrés who managed to avoid the Nazi dragnet. The very first newspaper to report on the murder of European Jewry in gas chambers, its reprinted deportation lists were used in evidence at the Nuremberg trials. From September 1, 1944 through September 27, 1946, it printed numerous lists of Jewish Holocaust survivors located in Europe, as well as a few lists of victims. Lists published in “Aufbau” were prepared by many different sources, such as Jewish relief organizations or officials in displaced persons’ camps. The vast majority of these lists are survivors. The only victims' lists give the names of persons who perished in the Shanghai ghetto. After the war, “Aufbau” helped those trying to relocate family and friends by running notices in its “searching for” and “saved” columns.

Other of Bryce’s series include: “Walter Benjamin’ (2002), “Trotsky” (2003), “Spanish War “(2003), and “Revolución” (2004). The first two are personal tributes to two intellectuals caught up in tragic maelstroms. In all of Bryce’s works, the past is ruthlessly un-romanticized as he addresses the tragic banality of historic sources.

Fernando Bryce was born in Lima in 1965 and now divides his time between Lima and Berlin, where he moved in the late 1980s. His work has been included in Manifesta in Frankfurt-am-Main (2002), the 8th International Istanbul Biennial (2003), the 26th Biennial of São Paulo (2004), and the 54th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (2006). This year, his work is the subject of a survey exhibition organized by the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI).

“El Mundo en Llamas”

Fernando Bryce

Through June 18, 2011

@ Alexander and Bonin

132 Tenth Avenue NYC 10011

Martin Kippenberger: I Had a Vision

2011-06-06T18:21:00.002-05:00

[“Ohne Titel (aus der Serie Heavy Burschi)” (1989-1990). Color photo graph. “Heavy Burschi” (1991). Chipboard container; silkscreen, metal, plexiglass, oil, cast resin on canvas. [“Ohne Titel (aus der Serie Heavy Burschi)” (1989-1990). Color photo graph. “Untitled” (1991). Wood, leather, metal, motor & seat, carousel & ejection seat. “Untitled (Wall paper)” (1991). Four-color offset print. “Cineastenabgang” (1990). Wood, felt, plexiglass, neon tube (set of 3).]

“I Had a Vision”—an exhibition of sculptural work by Martin Kippenberger (1953—1997) will be up at Luhring Augustine through June 18, 2011. Offering a partial reconstruction of two major shows from the summer and fall of 1991 that shared much of the same content, the included pieces evince a self-mocking disposition through transmogrification of domestic décor (lamps, mirrors, wallpaper). Those previous shows were “New Work (Put Your Eye in Your Mouth)” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and “Martin Kippenberger: Tiefes Kehlchen (Deep Throat).” The latter occupied an unused tunnel between two subway stations in Vienna and had been included in that city’s public art series “Topographie.” Considered Warhol's German heir, Kippenberger’s irreverence toward art world conventions comes through here: His taste for kitsch and an inclusion of electric vehicles denote this exhibition as a kind of “theme park.”

More than appropriate with relation to the works in this installation, the title “I Had a Vision” was also used for the San Francisco show’s catalogue. “Broken Kilometer” (1990), a series of boxes identical in length—but with ever shorter resin inserts—makes more concrete the optical perceptions of size and distance. The “Kippenblinky” lamp (1991) and “Cineastenabgang (Cineastes’ Egress)” (1990) supply foreground illumination: Their lighted steps function as a guide. “Mirror for Hang Over Bud” (1990) presents a mirror made out of aluminum foil rather than glass and eliminates viewer possibilities to see anything but hazy reflections. “Heavy Burschi (Heavy Lad)” (1990) comprises a dumpster full of paintings that Kippenberger asked an assistant to put together based thematically on other paintings of his, which were then destroyed by the artist. Exhibited alongside photographs of the paintings in their original state, it embodies paradoxes of presentation and representation—work that the artist shows to the public only through the process of its own demolition, abetted by the photographic likenesses of the pictures.

Known for his prolific output across myriad media (painting, drawing, records, books, posters, architecture, performance), Kippenberger also relocated frequently. He once referred to himself as “a traveling salesman” dealing in ideas: His itinerancy is felt in “Untitled (Carousel with ejection seat)” (1991). This looped train track was placed in the center of the San Francisco show and enabled visitors sitting in the motorized van seat to view the exhibition’s contents—arranged in a circle—in perpetual motion. This echoed Kippenberger’s own continual transit and encouraged viewers to synthesize works as a panoramic whole. In Vienna, an electromobile carried a resin-cast figure of Kippenberger wearing a suit jacket, white shirt, tie, dark shoes, and jeans, and traveling one-way down a track. This underlined Kippenberger’s conception of the show as an “art ghost train” with himself as the driver.

Kippenberger’s forerunner (and iconic) shows alluded to a correlation between the temporary nature of exhibitions and his transitory domiciles. Many of the objects had appeared in prior exhibitions and would reappear, recontextualized, in subsequent ones. It was almost as if he was moving house. It becomes clear that as with the rest of his oeuvre, Kippenberger’s personae and psyche permeated his ever-evolving sculptural work. His exhibitions were just as much an extension of himself as his living quarters.

Preoccupied with artistic currents of the 1980s, Kippenberger’s net output embodies creative sensibilities of that period. One who consistently appropriated, challenged, absorbed, transferred, and transformed what he saw around him, Kippenberger drew upon any number of “disciplines”—art, popular culture, architecture, music, history, politics, and the anecdotal into his ever-reinvented and rambunctious oeuvre—a veritable late-Modernist clearinghouse. Legend was the response when—to test his thesis that painting was an overrated, if useful, form—Kippenberger bought a small gray 1972 monochrome painting by Gerhard Richter, fitted it with metal legs, turned it into a coffee table, and transformed it into a “Kippenberger sculpture.” Nothing less than nucleus of a generation of German enfants terrible such as Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen, Werner Büttner, Georg Herold, Dieter Göls, and Günther Förg, Kippenberger collected and commissioned work by many of his peers. Some of his exhibition posters were designed by such art world figures as Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Rosemarie Trockel, and Mike Kelley.

The work of Kippenberger—who died in 1997 at the age of 44—has been the focus of major retrospectives at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), MoMA, the Tate Modern (London), K21 (Düsseldorf), and Museo Picasso Malaga.

Martin Kippenberger: "I Had A Vision"

Through Jun 18, 2011

@ Luhring Augustine

531 West 24th Street, NYC 10011

Ori Gersht: Falling Petals

2011-06-06T17:56:00.005-05:00

[“Will You Dance for Me” (2011). Dual channel HD video projection with sound (13 min. 45 sec.). “Hiroshima Sleepless Nights: Never Again” (2010). Archival pigment prints mounted on dibond (diptych). “Hiroshima Now: Motoyasugwa River to Cross” (2010). C-type mounted on dibond.]

Ori Gersht’s creative process—beset by and engaged with awareness of memory, experience, and embedded history—converges in “Falling Petals,” his recent series of images up at CRG Gallery through June 25, 2011. Comprised of images garnered from April to May 2010 during a trip to Japan, “Falling Petals” is culmination of his travels to cities affected by World War II (as well as ancient locations in the western part of that nation). In the latter locations, Gersht examined the evolving symbolism of the cherry blossom. Initially associated with Buddhist concepts of renewal, the celebration of life, and good fortune, the cherry blossom was reappropriated during Japan’s 19th century militarization and colonial expansion. Once celebrated as a healthy and abundant flower, the falling of the tree’s petals came to symbolize Kamikaze fighters. In contrasting cherry trees planted before the war in remote and relatively unaffected areas against those planted in Hiroshima’s post-nuclear soil, Gersht explores interplay between life and death.

In using digital cameras to allow for capture of images under extreme light conditions, Gersht questions photography’s very ability as a medium to convey a singular truth or story. His digital process—which presents documentation of assumed and exact locations—allows for questioning the veracity of light and color. By extension, viewers may interpret the “history” of such locations. Thus undermined are defined relationships engaged by photography. Such an understanding of film’s chemical and physical limitations, allows Gersht to more fully push the envelope in terms of the medium’s resonance. What results is Gersht’s highly dimensional vehicle portraying meaning through time, light, and other phenomena—and exposing human memory’s capacity and limitations.

Unlike previous series focusing on geographic journeys (Walter Benjamin’s following the Lister Route in Gersht’s “Evaders” of 2009 or “The Forest” of 2006, in which Gersht’s family found an unlikely refuge from annihilation during the Holocaust in the Ukraine), “Falling Petals” offers imagery conveying past and present without a specific and linear narrative. Gersht’s photographic process—in this case—implies passage of time without providing starting or end points in what he depicts. [In “The Forest,” the camera panned a lush, primeval forest. Shot deep in the Moskalova woods spanning Poland and the Ukraine, sound alternated with silence and suddenly a tree fell to the ground with a thunderous echo. Gersht’s departure point in doing that work came out of the adage: “If a tree falls in a forest, and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Yet a host of other existential questions emerged.]

Additionally, this show will debut Gersht’s new film “Will You Dance for Me” (2011). The film opens to a close-up of an old and fragile woman in a rocking chair moving backward and forward meditatively—drifting in and out of focus. Slowly this woman—Yehudit Arnon—fades completely out of the dark scene as snow falls from the sky. Eventually, the rhythmic falling of snow and the rocking chair give way to a virginal, white landscape.

Arnon—a native of Komarno (Slovakia) and veteran of Hashomer Hatzair—was an inmate in the hellish precincts of Auschwitz concentration camp. During her confinement there—at the age of 19—she was ordered to dance at the Christmas party of an SS officer. When Arnon refused, her punishment was to stand barefoot in the snow all night. At that point, Arnon resolved to dedicate herself to dance should she survive the ordeal. Upon her release, Arnon moved to Budapest and began study with Hungarian dancer Irena Dückstein (and disciple of noted German choreographer Kurt Jooss). In 1948, Arnon and her husband emigrated to Israel and settled at Kibbutz Ga’aton in the Western Galilee, where she still lives with her family. In 1962, Arnon created the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, which drew emerging talent from around Israel (such as Hedda Oren, Oshra Elkayam, Ya’acov Sharir, Flora Cushman, and the acclaimed Rami Be'er) and toured throughout Israel, the United States, Europe, and the Far East. In the following decades, she attained international recognition in the arts—culminating in 1997, when she received the “Distinguished Artist Award” of the International Society for the Performing Arts in recognition of her contributions to the dance world.

“Will You Dance for Me” springs from this specific, preexisting, and inspiring personal narrative. Within the cadence of Arnon’s rocking chair, Gersht’s construction encourages viewers to absorb the absence, presence, and persistence of her life of dance now in cessation.

In this show at CRG Gallery—including as it does, a series of large-scale photographs and an arresting video projection—Gersht’s work yet again encourages viewer reflection on the power of natural beauty affected by human intervention. Through such coinciding forces one finds powers of resilience.

Ori Gersht is represented by Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art (Tel Aviv), Mummery+Schnelle (London), Angles Gallery (Santa Monica), and Brand New Gallery (Milan). Born in Tel Aviv in 1967 (and now located in London), his work has been viewed in such venues as the Tate Modern (London), the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), the Hirschhorn Museum (Washington, D.C.), the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Centro Andaluz De La Fotografia (Almeria), and MARCO (Vigo). A signed edition of 100 C-prints entitled “Come and Go” (2011) by Gersht will be available to benefit the Japan Earthquake Relief Fund (via the Japan Society).

“Falling Petals”

Ori Gersht

Through June 25, 2011

@ CRG Gallery

548 West 22nd Street, NYC 10011

A Conversation with Ori Gersht

Seeing Red: New Works by Frank Badur

2011-05-26T18:22:00.003-05:00

[“#11-09” (2011), oil & alkyd on canvas. “#D08-23” (2008), pencil & gouache on Chinese paper. “11-10” (2011) oil & alkyd on canvas.]

“Mostly Red + works on paper,” an exhibition of new work by Berlin-based artist Frank Badur—known for his gracefully intuitive and minimalist compositions—will be up at Margaret Thatcher Projects through June 25, 2011. Drawing one into the subtlety of his work with an interplay of surface and color, his viewers experience delicate transition of shade, tone, and texture of each band in a newly heightened way, the veils of reds laying down bands of varying widths and opacity across the canvas. Far from clinical or mechanical in their sensibility, Badur’s paintings create a vibrant and almost tectonic sensation on their surfaces. Carrying this deep emotional weight, each level of surface reveals Badur’s hand.

Badur’s aesthetic language is clear: While tracing from Fauvism and Constructivism through the Color Field paintings of the Abstract Expressionist movement, his work relies on formal restraints combined with control of materials and intuition. Though aware of this evolution, it is also distinct—if not independent. While self-aware, his work—at the same time—seeks a pure and primeval meaning.

A selection of works on paper is also featured in this exhibition. Referred to by Badur as “scrolls,” these long vertical sheets—divided by subdued and delicate graphite and gouache lines, bands and grids—build a visual harmony achieved in his paintings. While of impact, these quieter works carry a gentle stillness. A minimalist who works through series of abstractions, Badur’s meditative paintings, drawings, and prints convey a uniqueness that subsumes any generic outcome. Lines in his drawings and prints are often lyrical and austere, while his paintings show a deployment of color both intense and unexpected. The latter sometimes suggests partial views of unspecific objects. This meditative minimalism—usually found installed in architectural settings—emphasizes an awareness of physical being and spatial experience.

Badur is acclaimed for a cycle of drawings called “Reflections on the Eisenman Grid.” Consisting of 24 small-scale drawings—presented in close proximity to each other on one wall, in four rows of six—they reference Peter Eisenman’s “Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe” (located close to Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate). Badur’s reaction to this emotionally fraught site is modest and personal—exhibiting no desire to exploit this charged subject. Injecting meaning into a work otherwise potentially neutral, Badur’s drawing in this instance serves as a mental note, topographic memory, and reflection. Over the years, Badur has influenced a number of younger artists including Tim Stapel, Rebecca Michaelis, and Katinka Pilscheur who have sustained an interest in abstraction.

Working in Finland and Berlin, Frank Badur is a professor for painting at the Universität der Künste (Berlin). His work has appeared in such venues as: Malmö Kunstmuseum (Sweden), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Mondriaanhuis (The Netherlands), Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin), the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Museé de Cambrai (France), MoMA, the Neuberger Museum (Purchase), and the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston).

Mostly Red + Works on Paper

Frank Badur

Through June 25, 2011

@ Margaret Thatcher Projects

539 West 23rd Street, NYC 10011

New Sculptures: Richard Dupont

2011-05-24T14:42:00.005-05:00

[“Consumptive Head” (2011), cast archival polyurethane resin with studio & personal detritus, found, salvaged, recycled objects & waste. “Pink Head” (2011), cast archival polyurethane resin with studio & personal detritus, found, salvaged, recycled objects & waste. “Convergent Head” (2011), cast archival polyurethane resin with studio & personal detritus, found, salvaged, recycled objects & waste.]

Departing from previous installations, Richard Dupont’s second solo exhibition at Carolina Nitsch Project Room presents a series of new sculptural works taking a more experimental approach to process and materials. With physiognomy giving way to the sculptural process in this show—up at Carolina Nitsch Project Room through June 25, 2011—Dupont has upended the historical motif of the self-portrait bust. Material content within each piece varies dramatically: Seen collectively the work represents a dense, contradictory, and paradoxical compression of time and meeting.

With the social landscape and Dupont’s own body as his works’ starting points—what results are sculptures, prints, installations, and public projects merging the individual and collective. Culminating from his previous deconstruction of the body vis-à-vis works derived from his politically notable 3-D laser scan at General Dynamics, Dupont’s new sculptures subsequently reconstruct body forms out of material residue. Art and non-art materials (including a 10-year accumulation of studio and personal detritus as well as daily waste), salvaged objects, and foodstuffs have provided fodder for his work—molded and bonded together permanently using an archival polyurethane resin.

In addition to the “busts,” this installation includes new sculptures based on casts of various bag shapes. Also cast out of archival resin, their clear, transparent surfaces mimic today’s ubiquitous garbage bag. Within these solid castings are the same accumulations of detritus on finds in the head sculptures. Permanently frozen in time, these objects portray the body/machine of late capitalist consumption—defined by the waste product of that consumption in all its internal contamination. Echoing the body both formally and conceptually, these vivid, gem-like works give permanence to everyday ephemera and waste and reveal a sculptural strategy of transformation, regeneration, and renewal.

Reviving aspects of figurative sculpture, Dupont has taken an anthropological approach emphasizing the interdependence of social and individual processes in a “co-construction” of meaning. To achieve this emphasis, Dupont immerses archaic and classical figurative forms in a “stew” of contemporary concern. In doing this he underlines the present influence of historic precedent. At the most benign, processing ever-increasing information in the digital age affects our view of the physical world. Conversely, this wealth of data—surveillance, tracking, statistical quantification, genetic testing results—have the potential for more ominous results. Dupont’s work in this show is informed by this reality.

Dupont’s work has been shown internationally and has been acquired by such institutions as MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library.

New Sculptures

Richard Dupont

Through June 25, 2011

@ Carolina Nitsch Project Room

534 West 22ndStreet NYC 10011

Out of the Boxes: Photos of Wolfgang Tillmans, Part 1 (Curated by Beatrix Ruf)

2011-05-24T14:33:00.003-05:00

Andrea Rosen Gallery has initiated a series of presentations in which they invite distinguished curators to select works out of the archival boxes of Wolfgang Tillmans’ small and medium c-prints kept in the gallery. This first presentation—curated by Beatrix Ruf, director of the Kunsthalle Zurich—is on view in their Gallery 3 through June 11, 2011. Spanning 1991 to 2010, these 60 small and medium c-prints have been carefully selected by Ruf.

Encompassing a wide array of genres, Tillmans’ photographic practice—portraits, still-life compositions, sky photographs, astrophotography, aerial shots, and landscapes—has been motivated by aesthetic and political interests, particularly in relation to homosexuality and gender identity. Tillmans’ comprehensive and diverse body of work is distinguished not only by an attentive and insightful observation of his surroundings but also by an on-going, systematic investigation of the photographic medium’s foundations. In his own view, Tillmans takes pictures, in order to see the world.

In the last decade, Wolfgang Tillmans has looked to the very chemical foundations of photographic material as well as its haptic and spatial possibilities. Created in the darkroom without the use of a camera and largely accidental such works present photography as a self-referential medium that could lead the way toward a new type of image structure. How different from the nearly documentary images created with a monochrome laser copier at his first exhibition in 1988! While both are compelling, Tillmans’ work shows ever more manipulation and play with materials and compositions—bringing his photos toward a sculptural sensibility.

Considered one of the most important of today’s contemporary artists, Tillmans was the first photographer and also the first non-English artist to be awarded the Turner Prize (2000). (His installation for the Turner prize show showed hundreds of photographs in a dizzying number of formats such as Polaroids, photocopies, inkjet prints, and cibachrome panoramas in saturated colors!) In 2001, he was awarded first prize in the competition for the design of the AIDS-Memorial for the City of Munich—eventually erected according to his “vision” at the Sendlinger Tor. Meanwhile, Tillmans was awarded the Kulturpreis der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Photographie (The Culture Prize of the German Society for Photography) in 2009. Viewing each exhibition as a site-specific installation, Tillmans often addresses the exhibition space as a larger composition. This year, he travelled to Haiti with the charity Christian Aid to document progress in reconstruction after that nation’s devastating earthquake.

Tillmans held his first exhibition at the Daniel Buchholz Gallery (Cologne). That was followed by large solo exhibitions at such institutions as Kunsthalle (Zürich), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2001), Castello di Rivoli (Italy), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), MoMA PS1 (New York), Armand Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, (Washington D.C.), and the Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin). Tate Britain’s 2003 retrospective of Tillmans’ work was the first time the museum had devoted an exhibition to the work of a single photographer. He was included in the 2005 and 2009 Venice Biennales.

Having organized exhibitions, written essays, and published catalogues on artists such as Jenny Holzer, Urs Fischer, Liam Gillick, Marina Abramovic, Peter Land, Emmanuelle Antille, Angela Bulloch, Ugo Rondinone, Richard Prince, Keith Tyson, Monica Bonvicini, Rodney Graham, Isa Genzken, Doug Aitken, Rebecca Warren, Carol Bove, Oliver Payne, Nick Relph, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Sean Landers, it is no wonder that this curator, Beatrix Ruf, is called “the anointer” and the curator commencing this series. Appointed director of the Kunsthalle (Zürich) in 2001, Ruf has served as judge for the Prix Lafayette, and the Enel Contemporanea and LUMA prizes.

To see Tillmans' work through the eyes of eminent curators is to understand his insight in terms of his journey through the photographic medium’s very foundations. Opening at the end of June, the next presentation will be curated by Stefan Kalmar, director of Artists Space.

Out of the Boxes: Photos of Wolfgang Tillmans, Part 1

(Curated by Beatrix Ruf)

Through June 11, 2011

@ Andrea Rosen Gallery

525 West 24th Street NYC 10011

Jasper Johns: New Sculpture and Works on Paper

2011-05-22T21:01:00.004-05:00

[“Numbers” (2007), aluminum. “Untitled” (2010), acrylic & collage on paper. “0-9”(2008), silver.]

Featuring nine sculptures completed over the past five years, “New Sculpture and Works on Paper,” up at the Matthew Marks Gallery on West 22nd Street through July 1, 2011, is Jasper Johns’ third one-person exhibition of recent work at the gallery since 2005. Included pieces represent the largest body of work Johns has completed in his career spanning more than five decades.

With one exception, the sculptures featured in this show are Johns’ classic grid of numerals 0 through 9. Making these sculptures in wax first, Johns works their surfaces in a complex pattern of textures. He then often adds collaged elements such as a key, newsprint impressions, a cast of Merce Cunningham’s foot, or a cast of his own hand. Casting them in bronze, aluminum, or silver, he then finally, applies a unique patina to each. The exception is a double-sided relief titled “Fragment of a Letter,” which incorporates part of a letter from Vincent van Gogh to his friend, the artist Émile Bernard. Using blocks of type, Johns pressed the letters of van Gogh’s words into the wax. On the other side he spelled out the letter in the American Sign Language alphabet with stamps he made himself. Finally, he signed his name in the wax with his hands in sign language.

This exhibition also features a room of 20 recent works on paper, including a series of drawings and prints based on three small works Johns made early last year on Shrinky Dinks, a plastic made for children to draw on that shrinks approximately 60 percent when heated. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated hardcover publication including a conversation with Jasper Johns and Terry Winters.

Johns has been a central figure in contemporary art since the early 1950s when he arrived in New York and became involved—over the years—with such cultural movers and shakers as Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Frank O’Hara, Robert Morris, Andy Warhol, Samuel Beckett, and Bruce Naumann His paintings—appropriating popular iconography such as the American flag, targets, numbers, and letters—quickly became icons themselves. MoMA purchased three pieces from Johns' first one-person exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958. As his career has developed Johns has added crosshatching, marks made by his body, and, more recently, the catenary curve to his collection of motifs. Such motifs constitute a very personal vernacular that Johns has introduced across his entire body of work—painting, sculpture, print, and hybrids combining elements of each. At every step of his career, Johns’ body of rich and complex work has evidenced a concern for process as well as rigorous attention to themes of popular imagery and abstraction and set the standards for American art.

Johns work has been exhibited throughout the world, at institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), and the Kunstmuseum (Basel). Having represented the United States at the 1988 Venice Biennale, where he was awarded the Grand Prize. Johns received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama.

New Sculpture & Works on Paper

Jasper Johns

Through July 1, 2011

@ Matthew Marks Gallery

522 West 22nd Street NYC 10011

PBS American Masters: Jasper Johns

MoMA Exhibition Interactives: Jasper Johns

Ali Smith: Exploring the Unknown

2011-05-22T20:56:00.004-05:00

[“Merge” (2011), oil on canvas. “Superstructure (2010), oil on canvas. “Civil War” (2011), oil on canvas. “Shard” (2011), oil on canvas. “Waves” (2011), oil on canvas. “Gut Glum” (2011), oil on canvas. “Shape Be Sweet” (2011), oil on canvas.]

Five centuries ago, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521) embarked on a three-year world voyage, crossing the Atlantic and continuing through to the Pacific—naming the latter in discovering previously uncharted territory. The world was Magellan’s blank canvas, absorbing his narrative as his ship cut its swath through history. Since then, our world has been mapped and charted in minute detail via today’s satellite, internet, and GPS technologies—leaving little to be pinpointed, described, and investigated. What remains is the terrain of imagination inhabited by artists, writers, dancers, musicians, actors, filmmakers, and scientists—many of whom continue to probe “uncharted waters.” While cynics attempt, on occasion, to declare painting’s demise, Smith uses her brilliant medium to explore the unknown.

In this show—her second at Freight + Volume (up through June 18, 2011)—Smith’s journey on canvas is a culmination of stray thoughts, fleeting moments, utter curiosity, and the tenuous line between fact and fiction. Her chosen medium girds her empty landscape and allows her resultant abstract terrains punctuating celebratory and Rococo-like excess and abundance.

Picking up where Arshile Gorky (1904-1948), Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), Philip Guston (1913-1980), and Roberto Matta (1911-2002) left off, Ali Smith delves into deep and near space on her canvases—each painting a window into an unseen world. Her thick and thin brushstrokes, dazzling color, and sculptural relief and flat background—contrasted with muted monochromes—create an unfolding and theatrical mis-a-scene tableau. Such painting titles as “Territory,” “Luxe Life,” “Into The Deep,” and “To Here Knows When” offer clues into the twists and turns of her journey. Smith’s recent paintings sort through daily life’s very complexity of daily life and relate this through a direct, raw language of abstraction at once lyrical and rough. Each painting is created in the moment, intuitively creating and laying bare the world Smith would like to visit or inhabit—while remembering their dimensions of complexity and contradiction.

Through these exuberant works, a viewer is offered a glimpse and gift of the quest in which Ali Smith has long been immersed. Her private and invented utopia is as much compelling as escapist. While the canvases in “Merge” have allowed Smith to make sense of conflict and cacophony, they offer solace and inspiration to those who absorb her works.

Living and working in Long Beach, California, Ali Smith has exhibited her work internationally in such venues as: Mark Moore Gallery (Santa Monica), Rhys Gallery (Boston), Pulse (Miami), DNA Galerie (Berlin), Smith’s work has been reviewed in such publications as Artus, the Los Angeles Times, NYArts, and Artweek.

Meanwhile, inter-disciplinary artist Suko Presseau exhibits her multi-screen installation “Love and Ceremony” in Freight + Volume’s video room. Concerned primarily with nature and ritual in her performance and video, Presseau utilizes eco-consciousness, kinesthetics, humor, and spiritual practice in her work. In “Love and Ceremony,” she has combined several vignettes such as “Vernal Fire Moon,” "Love and Ceremony,” and “Fish-Skin" to form a whole. Presseau explores agricultural, trade, and spiritual themes—taking cues from changing seasons, astronomical markers of time, and natural or man-made environments. She conflates memory and meaning, fact and fiction, and reality and fantasy in her suggested narratives to make sense of the individual within the world.

Merge

Ali Smith

Through June 18, 2011

@ Freight + Volume Gallery

530 West 24th Street NYC 10011

Jack Smith: Beyond the Demimonde

2011-05-14T18:35:00.008-05:00

[Miscellaneous untitled mixed media works on paper (1964-1985). Miscellaneous untitled black & white gelatin silver prints (1958-1962). “No President” (1967-1970), 16 mm transfer to DV. “Diva” (2011), Blue Ray disc by T.J. Wilcox.]

George Kuchar called Jack Smith (1932-1989) “the king of the underground." Laurie Anderson called him “the godfather of performance art." John Waters called Smith as the “only true underground filmmaker.” According to musician John Zorn, Smith was “the real Warhol.” The enigmatic Jack Smith—who inspired Charles Ludlam (1943-1987) of Ridiculous Theatrical Company fame and further inspired Hibiscus to found the Cockettes—was a multimedia artist before the term used formally. While creating films, sculptures, collages, and costumes—and shooting photographs—Smith was a major influence on Andy Warhol and included Federico Fellini among his fans. Following his arrival in New York in 1953, Smith became one of the most influential members of the American avant-garde and a central figure in the cultural history of the film, performance, and art of downtown New York.

Smith is probably best known for “Flaming Creatures” (1962)—a satire of Hollywood B movies and tribute to actress Maria Montez. Since some scenes were considered pornographic by the authorities, copies of the movie were confiscated at the premiere and it was subsequently banned. The movie provided traction for right-wing politicians during Congressional hearings. In 1998, PS1 mounted a retrospective of Jack Smith’s work that traveled to the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

While Gladstone Gallery has represented the Estate of Jack Smith since 2008, this is the gallery’s first exhibition of his works by Jack Smith. Curated by the eloquent and iconoclastic Neville Wakefield, “Thanks for Explaining Me” presents 12 recently restored films, as well as a selection of drawings, collages, black and white photographs, color photographs never previously exhibited, and two seminal slide shows. A writer and commentator on contemporary art, culture and photography, Wakefield is author of “Postmodernism: the Twilight of the Real,” published by Pluto Press in 1988. Contributing editor to Another Magazine, Elle Decoration and Open City, he regularly writes for Artforum, Art and Auction, Art in America, I-D, Interview, The New York Sunday Times, and British and Italian Vogue.

Seeing his curatorial endeavor as a tributary approach to Smith’s creative practice and panoptic production, Wakefield writes: "More than almost any artist of the last century Jack Smith understood that within the prevailing cultures of success, art’s greatest role may have been to provide provision for public failure. To this end his actors and accomplices, props and lighting, drugs and desires were invariably wrong: wrong before the performance had started – before even the lights had gone down. The marathon of tourettic revisions, false starts and delays signaled to the world the impossibility of creating anything of value in a rectilinear lagoon where even the dedicated and willing were dragged to the bottom-feeding level of landlords and lobsters. Yet out of these impossible conditions was born the stuff of exquisite beauty, radical politics, lurid, caustic, pornographic and often hilarious evocations of the sexual and social strata in which we find ourselves. Much of this endures even in conditions Smith would have most likely have loathed. But the fact that the same frictions that heated and formed his work continue to frustrate curators as well as inflame and inspire artists—including those who have agreed to continue the spirit and legacy with works created for this show—is, I hope, testament to the enduring power and influence of Jack Smith’s extraordinary art."

Three collaborative works will also be on view, in which artists Ryan McNamara, A.L. Steiner, and T.J. Wilcox appropriate heretofore unseen Jack Smith film material to create contemporary meditations on Smith’s legendary life and work. Using video and performance, Ryan McNamara’s work centers around the body and the role it plays in establishing identity. Simultaneously playful and contemplative, McNamara’s highly physical works are informed by comedic sensibility and driven by a highly thoughtful inquiry of the body’s limitations and vulnerabilities. His performances have been included in Performa at X Initiative (2009), MoMA’s PS1 (2010), and the Moscow Performance Biennial at the Garage (2010). His work is in the collection of MoMA. A.L. Steiner is a Brooklyn-based artist who uses constructions of photography, video, collage, installation, collaboration, performance, writing and curatorial work as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a cynical queer eco-feminist androgyne. A visiting faculty at UCLA and The School of Visual Arts, Steiner’s solo and collaborative work has been exhibited internationally. T.J. Wilcox has had solo shows at Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), and has had work shown at Museum Ludwig (Cologne), Tate Modern (London), and MoMA. In 2006, a monograph of his work was published in a multi-gallery collaboration.

A special film program will take place on Saturdays from 4-6 PM during the run of the exhibition, wherein newly restored Jack Smith prints will be screened on 16mm celluloid. The films will be introduced by film historians, scholars, friends and collaborators of Jack Smith. The Saturday series will present a rare opportunity to see these eleven film prints in the context of the artist’s larger body of work.

After Smith’s AIDS-related death in 1989, performance artist Penny Arcade and film historian J. Hoberman—along with others in the “downtown arts community”—bravely and tenaciously fended off attempts by Smith’s family to scuttle his artistic legacy. Thankfully, a horrendous decision on behalf of Smith’s estranged biological family by New York Surrogate Court Judge Eve Preminger–after a six-minute “trial”—was stymied by Gladstone Gallery’s purchase of his collection.

Smith, having been referenced by such artists such as Laurie Anderson, Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, David Lynch, Matthew Barney, Nan Goldin, John Zorn, Lou Reed, David Byrne, and Robert Wilson–across myriad disciplines–has had momentous, if unrecognizeded, impact on art internationally. Gladstone Gallery's show is a move toward rectifying this situation.

Jack Smith: “Thanks for Explaining Me”

Curated by Neville Wakefield

Through June 16, 2011

@ Gladstone Gallery

515 West 24th Street, NYC 10011

A Legacy Unfulfilled: Ted Stamm

2011-05-14T15:36:00.003-05:00

[“Untitled” (1974), graphite & ticket stub. “Untitled” (1974), graphite on ticket stub. Four untitled works (1974), graphite on paper. “Untitled” (1976), graphite on paper. “Untitled” (1974), graphite on paper.]

Ted Stamm unexpectedly died at the age of 39 in 1984. In the 12 years preceding his untimely death, Stamm created a mature body of work—at once responsive to the past, reflective of his time, and telling of the future. Despite this impulse, viewing Stamm’s work calls forth his very process and medium: Stamm’s life, passions, and preoccupations are revealed with each geometric form and mark. When viewing Stamm’s work, one is immediately tempted to focus solely on its surface minimalism. Marianne Boesky Gallery is presenting its first exhibition of Ted Stamm with a Project show of works on paper through June 11, 2011.

Drawing was basic to Stamm’s practice: The graphite lent itself both to tight precise lines and emotive scribbles. After 1972, black dominated his work—both as an artistic investigation and for its popular connotations of nonconformity and rebellion. At the same time, Stamm explored reductive elements of line and form abstraction while seeking his sought-after and “perfect” flat and non-reflective shade of black. In so doing, he nodded to artists whose process he admired, like Abstract painter Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967)—noted for his “black” or “ultimate” paintings—and Frank Stella, significant for his place in minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.

Stamm dubbed his earliest black works “cancel” paintings—createing them by covering the surfaces of his colorful poured abstractions with a grid of black paint. Such gestural forms eventually yielded to more pronounced lines and geometry reflecting shapes striking Stamm in his daily environment. These shapes were given specific names with specific rules. “Woosters” combined rectangular and triangular shapes derived from forms he had seen on Wooster Street. Semi-circular “Dodgers” culminated in tilted rectangles. Named for the Brooklyn Dodgers, they were possibly derived from baseball field perimeters. “Zephyrs” referenced high speed trains, with their sleek, elongated cross shape.

An early experimenter with graffiti, Stamm discreetly stenciled his “Dodger” form on buildings that were meaningful to him. On subsequent visits, he added to the work until—in a fourth stage—his final work was carefully documented. In his “Tag Pieces,” Stamm further enumerated his life and art. Found tags were glued to identical sketch pads, with guests to his studio asked to mark the page as they wished. Stamm responded with his own mark in the other sketchbook. The resultant work memorialized this implicit “collaboration.”

While remaining true to minimalism’s basic tenets with his concern for space and the object, Stamm injected his own interest in advancement and movement, which reflected his boyhood fascination with cars, trains, and planes. Perhaps describing his own work best, Stamm said “it represents no beginning and no ending. This is my life.”

Stamm’s work is included in the collections of Brooklyn Museum, Carnegie Museum, (Pittsburgh), MoCA (Los Angeles), Phoenix Art Museum, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, Conn.), MoMA, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Western Australia Art Gallery (Perth).

Ted Stamm: Works on Paper

@ Marianne Boesky Gallery

509 West 24th Street, NYC 10011

Through Jun 11, 2011

Full of Gumption: Vigorous Paintings & Works on Paper at ZieherSmith

2011-04-25T15:37:00.007-05:00

[“Don Juan & Don Quixote Riding My Horse” (1998), oil on signboard by Kirk Hayes. “Stairs (for Kelson” (2006), oil on panel (trompe-l’oeil) by Kirk Hayes. “You’re Late” (2007), mixed media on canvas by Trenton Doyle Hancock. “Panel Starers Triptych” (2010) oil on dyed fabric by Melissa Brown.]

ZieherSmith presents a group exhibition featuring vigorous paintings and works on paper by Melissa Brown, Tomoo Gokita, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Kirk Hayes, Keegan McHargue and Gary Panter through May 7, 2011.

Print maker Melissa Brown’s cuts across all disciplines: Among her recent projects are oversized woodcuts, stencil paintings, lecture performances, and collages made from discarded scratch-off tickets. Preoccupied with what is ubiquitous, Brown’s images put an array of vernacular styles and symbols into imaginary settings. Her work has enlarged the familiar while also accentuating an object’s embedded geometry. Meanwhile, Brown’s performances have ranged from the mystical to statistical. Brown studied at the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA) and Yale University (MFA). She has shown her work in such venues as Bellwether Gallery, Kenny Schachter/Rove Projects, Artist Space, and the Socrates Sculpture Park.

With Kirk Hayes’ work ones eye can play tricks on you. At once it appears to slap torn paper, tape, wood, and metal together. Yet Hayes skillfully applies oil paint to look like something it is not—assaulting your senses with bold, dark humor. Eschewing the mechanical, his present body of work offers the illusion of assemblage—suggesting torn cardboard, rusted metal, wood scraps, and masking tape as painted effects. Hayes’ fluency with trompe l’oeil makes us believe we are looking at tattered and discarded objects put together on gritty, torn surfaces, complete with coffee cup rings and doodles. Yet this is not the case. Beyond his finesse with paint is how he employs collage to defy convention while exploring chance and randomness. Hayes shares the mischievous intent of Dada artists in his faux-assemblages in oil and enamel on signboard. With this technique in hand, we are invited into the grotesque, sarcastic, and even cathartic precincts of his subjects. Hayes has shown at Horton Gallery (Berlin), as well as the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park), the Blanton Museum (Austin), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and Artspace (San Antonio).

Influenced by Abstract Expressionism as well as other forms, Trenton Doyle Hancock transforms traditionally formal decisions—such as the use of color, language, and pattern—into opportunities to create new characters and convey symbolic meaning. His prints, drawings, and collaged felt paintings work as an ensemble to tell the story of the Mounds—a group of mythical creatures reflecting the artist’s unfolding narrative. Each new work by Hancock contributes to the Mounds’ saga—portraying the birth, life, death, afterlife, and even dream states of these half-animal, half-plant creatures. Space offered within Hancock’s works allows for a psychological dimension that balancing moral dilemmas with wit, language, and color. Included in two Whitney Biennials, Trenton Doyle Hancock’s work has been exhibited in such venues as the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Cleveland), and James Cohan Gallery (New York).

Japanese artist Tomoo Gokita has shown at Bill Brady/ATM Gallery (New York), Taka Ishii Gallery (Tokyo), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Rome), and Deitch Projects (New York). Keegan McHargue’s work has shown at Jack Hanley Gallery (San Francisco), Hiromi Yoshii Gallery (Tokyo), Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin (Paris), and Metro Pictures (New York). Painter and graphic artist Gary Panter has exhibited at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the Phoenix Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Jewish Museum (New York).

“Gumption”: featuring Melissa Brown, Tomoo Gokita, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Kirk Hayes, Keegan McHargue & Gary Panter

Through May 7, 2011

ZieherSmith

516 West 20th Street NYC 100011

Jack Pierson & Elliott Puckett: To Cut & Construct

2011-04-23T12:35:00.004-05:00

[Seven untitled works by Jack Pierson (1998), photographic collages. Two untitled works by Elliott Puckett (2011), ink on paper.]

In association with Cheim & Read and Paul Kasmin galleries, Danziger Projects presents a two-person show of collages by Jack Pierson and Elliott Puckette. Synthesizing the artists' interest in the practice of collage as well as their longstanding friendship, this exhibition presents two quite different expressions of the medium. Pierson's collages are made from cut photographic c-prints while Puckette's are assembled works made on heavy handmade artist's papers. Linking these works are visceral qualities of the finished pieces and their execution’s very skill and originality.

Jack Pierson's work explores emotional undercurrents of everyday life—his photos and collages colorful quests bursting with tropical vegetation, cloud scattered skies, and blurry human figures. Cut and assembled into beguiling abstract shapes and compositions, his works explode with vibrant color. Like much of his work—including his well-known "word" pieces—Pierson's photo-collages harness narrative content and mine his visual archive’s form and color.

Elliott Puckette's work utilizes distinct use of line: What results are abstract paintings and works on paper that reference the body, calligraphic script, and musical scores. In Puckette's painted works, the line is carved out of colored grounds with a razor blade, while her works on paper reverse the process. Starting with a blank piece of handmade paper, Puckette begins with gesture. The resultant composition is developed carefully, painstakingly, and viscerally. Meticulously painted in ink, her lines wax and wane as they journey around the paper.

Puckette's collage works deconstruct the fluidity of her elegant compositions on paper. In her own words, collage becomes "a kind of recycling, of taking old drawings and ripping them up, and reconfiguring them to create a disjointed image." Yet, in doing so she mirrors her usual labor intensive process. Her torn drawings are held together with glue, which starts to pucker underneath the layers of paper. This is "the paper having its own life," she says. This is a reminder of loss of control, and a forcible letting go.

Jack Pierson and Elliott Puckette have each had solo exhibitions at Danziger Projects. This is their first joint show at the gallery. Both artists' work can be found in major museum collections throughout the world.

The exhibit of new paintings and drawings, at the Earl McGrath Gallery Los Angeles, is Elliott Puckette’s first solo show with the gallery. Puckette's paintings have shown in New York, London, Milan, and Los Angeles since 1993, including the Paul Kasmin Gallery, Matthew Marks Gallery, and The Armand Hammer Museum.

“Collage”: Jack Pierson & Elliott Puckette

Through April 30, 2011

@ Danziger Projects

534 West 24th Street NYC 10011

Multiverse: In the Plywood Forest of Matt Jones

2011-04-21T14:17:00.006-05:00

The question remains as to how and when an image emerges from its template to become emblematic of generations or movements. Further, how are archetypes constituted: particularly when visuals such as Campbell’s soup cans, bulls-eye targets, and André the Giant are recognizable across various strata of society. Matt Jones, in “Multiverse”—his lively solo show up at Freight+Volume through May 7th—raises these and other questions. The Black Flag logo—a simple affair of four vertical black bars rendered by Raymond Pettibon in the late 1970s—especially resonates with Jones. He sees this emblem as having to help spawn a punk and hard-core consciousness.

In Multiverse’s plywood cutouts and large-scale works, Jones incorporates images rendered with paint, photographs, photocopies, scans, laminates, and craft glue upon which further layers are introduced—secondarily drawn with markers. What results is a bold challenge to the viewer’s understanding of memory and recognition in a digital and internet-addled technology.

In utilizing techniques of image remove and repetition, Jones shares much with his peers Wade Guyton, Kelly Walker and Josh Smith. However, Jones goes a step further, his obsessive vision, Buddhist-inspired focus, and three-dimensional product construct resulting in an in-your-face dichotomy swimming between indelible and fleeting, loud and meditatively quiet, and invigorating and mind-numbing.

Beyond immediate visual impressions, Jones draws upon various technological and cross-cultural concepts in his work: Stephen Hawking’s exploration of space, time, parallel universes and the Big Bang Theory; comic book X-Men’s Wolverine; and Henry Rollins and the graphic expression of anarchy. Additionally he invokes a number of mass culture phenomena: The 1984 film Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Mischievous Spirits, Karma Chargers and Energy Reflectors. Strong elements of chance and randomness, magic, control, and organized chaos mix in this “soup.” According to the artist, energy resulted from the desire to get to paint’s possibilities without using it in the final object.

Certain inventions of this milieu have captured his imagination from an early age: “When I was a kid I was obsessed with Ghostbusters. I salute Bill Murray for providing a model of what a man can be. A lot of my spare time was spent making a number of ghost-busting devices, proton packs, PKE meters, and ghost traps. They of course didn’t actually catch ghosts, read paranormal energy, or fire energy from nuclear accelerators. You couldn’t tell me that, not really. I caught ghosts in the woods and cornfields behind my house for hours and hours. It only took my belief in the imaginary technology working for it to be true.”

Presently, Jones has achieved a vibrant realization of these childhood musings in this vibrant installation. Freight+Volume invites the viewer to experience Matt Jones’ “Multiverse” firsthand, meander through his free-standing plywood forest, bathe in the electric energy emanating from his optic stripes and karma chargers, and view his accompanying John Baldessari-inspired video “Every Expression Possible (Wolverine Black Flag).”

The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He’s participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions in New York and internationally. [In 2008 Jones formed The Atlantic Conference Press] to publish artist books and collaborations. He received a BFA in painting from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and has studied at the Yale/Norfolk Summer School of Painting.

Matt Jones: “Multiverse”

through May 7, 2011

@ Freight+Volume

530 West 24th Street NYC 10001

www.freightandvolume.com

Mourning Obsolescence: Morgan Fisher’s Film Boxes

2011-04-20T17:08:00.002-05:00

[“Kodak Verichrome 127 May 1952” (2011), archival pigment print. Below: 1950s film box archival pigment print series.]

Morgan Fisher’s new works in this show present boxes of still film from the 1950s. Doubly obsolete—once for being drastically past expiration, next for being a nearly discarded medium—these works represent the decade when Fisher became aware of photography and began to take photographs. Beside the oblique autobiographical focus of these works, there is one mournful as well. What is conveyed is the gradual evaporation of film’s use and its place in our consciousness. Obsolescence—as shown by the photographs—can be disturbing indeed. Relics of a market no longer existing, these boxes no longer fulfill their intended purpose: Instead, they are chance survivors of a system of production, distribution, promotion, and consumption. In these works is captured the pathos of unrealized intentions, expectations, and aspirations. While the boxes survive as made, they express waste in their disuse.

These works on archival paper are rubbings made from covers of “Photograms of the Year,” a British photography annual. Such annuals are the last gasp of photography’s salon tradition in which a photographer is represented by only one photograph. Photographs appearing in annuals are unoriginal and “pleasing pictures of pleasing subjects” taken with utmost “competence.” One finds such expected and nearly Kitschy images of moody Venetian scenes, yachts sailing, picturesque streets in poor villages, soulful children, wrinkled faces of the “mysterious” East, and nudes in embellished pose. Absent from the pages of these annuals are works of classical photographic modernism. One finds—instead—the last gasps of pictorialism. Reflected is an unhappy period when photography was unable to advance to and absorb the radical shift that consigned such photography to irrelevance vis-à-vis the gallery. A kind and touching medium expressing devotion, rubbings usually capture text and design found on gravestones.

Morgan Fisher lives and works in Santa Monica, California. A survey of his work—including film, paintings, installations, and works on paper—is currently on view in London’s Raven Row. He has had solo exhibitions at MoCA (Los Angeles), Tate Modern (London), Kunstverein (Hamburg), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York). Morgan has taught at Brown University, California Institute of the Arts, and the University of California Los Angeles.

Morgan Fisher

New Work: Photographs & Works on Paper

Bortolami (Gallery II)

Phone Gallery for End Date: 212.727.2050

520 West 20th Street, NYC 10011

http://www.bortolamigallery.com

Walt Cassidy: Tracing the Contours of Private Experience

2010-04-20T10:16:00.006-05:00

["The Realm of Chaos and Night" (2006)(from the series The Inferior Orbs), pigment print. "Through" (2010), ink on paper. "Attack on the Ascending" (2010), brass, wood, & fabric.]

With each piece of Walt Cassidy’s oeuvre charting private topographies of emotion, history, experience, and thought, his works—when seen in toto—capture a personal alphabet. A survey of Cassidy’s inner landscape, “The Protective Motif” is rendered in an intimate yet arcane visual language. Incorporating ink drawings, wall sculptures, and photographs, the work shown in “The Protective Motif”—up through May 9, 2010 at Invisible-Exports—testifies the turmoil and incendiary nature of private, affective experience. Furthermore, Cassidy’s work in this show—his very first solo exhibition—attempts to transform an inner chaos to a more palatable order.

Having previously exhibited at MASS MOCA, Paul Kasmin Gallery, and Deitch Projects, Cassidy’s works in “The Protective Motif” issue a narrative drawing upon his various chosen media—and incorporating gleanings from his industrial psychologist father. The brain’s fine workings—the very journey of energy and “information” through synapses to myriad destinations—come to the fore in his work. This show’s offerings trace contours of private experience, constructed on the basis of a therapeutic autobiographical agenda through the transformative ritual of re-experience. Cassidy’s constructions invoke—again and again—varied symbolisms of his “protective motifs.” These repeated ideas, patterns, images, and themes serve as the foundation upon which he extricates himself from personal experience.

In “The Inferior Orbs” (2006)—Cassidy’s introductory suite of photographs—the artist re-conceives John Milton’s map of the universe as a personal cosmography. Sketched by that 17th-Century English poet in Paradise Lost, Cassidy breathes visual life into lines of verse originally published in 1667. Cassidy’s photographic series of circles chart paths between heaven and hell and act as a template—formally and conceptually—for other works in “The Protective Motif.” “The shape of orbs that I use are rooted in alchemy," Cassidy told Interview Magazine in an explanation of his continual use of wheels and circular shapes. "And specifically Milton's construction of the cosmos in Paradise Lost [one finds] Lucifer is the rebel archetype in that story. I was thinking about that archetype and how the rebellious, dark, fallen outsider artist has overwhelmed art from the 1920s to the 1990s. I think we are past that state."

The artist’s most recent sculptural series is centered on “Nail Bomb” (2009), illustrating a field of fragments wired together in an ode to his personal emotional surrender and capturing momentous magnitude and velocity. One can discern this fluidity and motion in his work template, which—like a Nan Golden Cibachrome print—can be viewed as a disclosed private journal. Yet—as with Goldin—the depth and resonance of Cassidy’s works transcend any documentary aspects. Viewing the works in “The Protective Motif” is a meditative experience—on levels physical, psychological, spiritual, and cultural.

The Protective Motif
A Solo Exhibition by Walt Cassidy
Through May 9, 2010
@ Invisible-Exports
14a Orchard Street, New York City 10002

Movement Schmoovement: Between Movement & Stasis

2010-04-14T15:31:00.004-05:00

[Linda Matalon with “Untitled Diptych” (2009), wax & graphite on paper. Nancy Brooks Brody with “Glory Hole, black (vibgyor)” (2010), oil on Venetian plaster on wood panel. Zoe Leonard with “Nest #5,” (1994/98), “Nest #1,” (1994/97) & “Nest #10” (1994/98), gelatin silver prints.]

“Movement Schmoovement” brings together 12 artists and highlights the tension between movement and stasis—not to mention collective and individual actions—in creating change. With a nod to Jill Johnston’s 1971 essay of the same name, the exhibit includes those who have pursued artistic endeavors for decades. One of the first women to “come out” as a lesbian in the mass media in the heady post-Stonewall period, Johnston was a vibrant and controversial culture chronicler and Village Voice columnist who authored “Marmalade Me” (1971), “Lesbian Nation” (1973), “Gullibles Travels” (1974), “Motherbound” (1983), “Paper Daughter” (1985), and “Jasper Johns: Privileged Information” (1996).

In viewing “Movement Schmoovement,” I was reminded of an encounter with a surprised and amused Johnston in Spring 1986 at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 14th Street in which I thanked her for paving the way for queers of my generation (although queer was not the label in vogue at the time). As a junior high student in the early 1970s, I regularly read her column in the Village Voice—a periodical I picked up weekly at the local “head-shop.”

The artists in this show have lived and worked in New York City since at least the early 1980s—and collaborated in ACT UP, WAC (Women’s Action Coalition), WHAM (Women’s Health Action Mobilization), the lesbian collective Fierce Pussy, various alternative art projects, and an array of initiatives in the “peace and justice community.” As mid-career artists, they have maintained rigorous studio practices for two to three decades, through various economic upswings with resulting swells in art value not to mention the all too common recessions. Throughout, they have maintained artistic integrity and curiosity despite variability with respect to interest in their work. These decades have found them sought after, exhibited, collected, and written about alternating with the reverse situation.

Movement Schmoovement participants Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, and Carrie Yamaoka were core members of Fierce Pussy along with Pam Brandt, Alison Froling, and Suzanne Wright. This fluid and often-shifting cadre of dykes (active in New York City from 1991 to 1995) was adamantly low-tech, fast, and low-budget—relying upon modest resources such as old typewriters, found photographs, their own baby pictures, and whatever material they could scrounge. With much of their output produced using time and equipment at their day jobs (as was the case with those cultural initiatives emanating from ACT UP/New York and Queer Nation), Fierce Pussy emerged during a decade steeped in the AIDS crisis, activism, and queer identity politics. They brought lesbian identity to the streets in a manner demanded by the urgency of that period.

Importantly, the Women's Action Coalition (WAC) was formed in New York City on January 1992, in outrage over the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas after grueling and heated hearings. Like the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and the Women's Health Action Coalition (WHAM), they employed a direct action approach—demonstrations, sit-ins, civil disobedience, educational forums, and letter writing campaigns–to voice to their outrage.

Coming of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the second-generation Post-Minimalist sculptor Linda Matalon operates within an ever-expanding and -refining vocabulary noted for its individual, tactile, and luminous approach to materials and textures. Matalon’s work draws upon and pulsates with the collective legacies of Abstract Expressionist painter Agnes Martin (1912–2004), trained architect and abstract artist Gego (1912–1994), iconoclastic sculptor Eva Hesse (1936–1970), Color Field luminary Barnett Newman (1905–1970), abstract painter Blinky Palermo (1943-1977), and Cy Twombly who is so noted for large-scale, calligraphic-style graffiti paintings on solid fields of gray, tan, or off-white. One also finds strains of German avant-garde sculptor and performance artist Joseph Beuys (1921—1986). Having emerged in the early 1990s within post-Minimal examinations of feminism, the AIDS crisis, and identity politics, Matalon’s work references trajectories of context and metaphor from the human body to landscapes. She has exhibited in a range of venues such as the Wolfson Galleries (Miami), Herter Art Gallery (Amherst), the Drawing Center, the Aldrich Museum of Art (Ridgefield, Conn.), the University Art Museum (Berkeley), the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Americas Society, the Neuberger Museum (SUNY Purchase), Chrysler Museum of Art (Norfolk, Va.), the Harn Museum at the University of Florida (Gainesville), and the Weatherspoon Art Gallery (Greensborough, N.C.).

For a number of years, Nancy Brooks Brody’s work with movement-based ensemble LAVA has included photographs, videos, costumes, props, and set designs. Her drawings, paintings and sculptures have been shown across the United States and Europe, including Virgil de Voldere Gallery, White Columns, Exit Art, Andrea Rosen, Lehmann Maupin and Weatherspoon, the Musee de Beaux Arts (Rouen), Trafic Haute-Normandie, and the Musee de Beaux Arts (Bernay). In an Art in America review of her show at Virgil de Voldere, Sarah Valdez praised the Nancy Brooks Brody’s “sure-footedness, patience and intelligence.” In the New York Times, Holland Cotter described her work this way: “The effect is like having Agnes Martin’s bars and bands transmitted as sound waves, a soft, vibrant humming.”

With black-and-white photography as her principal artistic medium, Zoe Leonard’s prolific work includes sculpture, installation, and film. Reflecting experiences and observations in ways subtle and ambivalent, her work captures conflict and gray areas in gender relationships, nature, culture, and space and time. Leonard’s work—offering a language to the voiceless and bringing visibility to the invisible—has been viewed in such institutions as Documenta (Kassel), Whitney Biennial, Vienna Secession, Kunsthalle (Basel), Centre National de la Photographie (Paris), Fotomuseum Wintherthur (Switzerland), and Pinakothek der Modern (Munich).

His practice rooted in Minimalism, Tony Feher’s reworking of transient and “humdrum” materials such as bottles, jars, ropes, plastic bags, and soda crates elevate the mundane and throwaway—imbuing these items with emotion and beauty. In using these “common” materials, his works draw viewers’ attention with repetitive patterns in particular regard to an installation’s milieu and location. Exhibiting his work since 1984, Feher’s work has been shown in an array of institutions, including the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Chinati Foundation, Center for Curatorial Studies, MetroTech Commons, D'Amelio Terras Gallery, Marlborough Gallery, Aspen Art Museum, Serpentine Gallery (London), and Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago).

Liz Deschenes explores photographic processes in an investigation of photography itself, deconstructing the medium’s role and history in our culture. While circumventing the camera with counter-expectational works devoid of representational content, Deschenes produces reductive and reflective sheets by applying silver toner to black-and-white photographic paper. In doing so, she records any number of physical situations and conditions and parallels photography with method and procedure. Her compelling work has been viewed at MoMA, Tate (Liverpool), the Art Institute of Chicago,the Metropolitan Museum, the Corcoran Museum of Art (Washington, D.C.), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), and CCS Bard Hessel Museum (Annandale-on-Hudson).

Episalla’s work inhabits interstices between photography, sculpture, and video and focuses on the rich output of information produced by mundane objects and architecture. Art critic Bill Arning has described Joy Episalla’s viewpoint “so close to the subject” and her works’ effect as “especially pronounced.” Like a forensic examiner or palm reader, she combs an array of exposed fissures and entities—rendering and scrutinizing their secrets. A recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, Episalla’s work has been exhibited at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Carrie Secrist Gallery (Chicago), Debs & Co., Clifford Smith Gallery (Boston), the Contemporary Art Center (New Orleans), The Phoenix Art Museum, ARCO (Madrid), Aeroplastics Contemporary (Brussles), and Studio 1.1 (London).

Living and working in New York City, Carrie Yamaoka has been shown in such venues as Debs & Co., Aeroplastics Contemporary (Brussels), Artists Space, the Institute of Contemporary Art (San Jose), CCS Bard Hessel Museum, the Wexner Center (Columbus), Mass MOCA, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo). Yamaoka’s layered and mirrored surfaces are usually made of resin on wood and range from an almost mass-production quality to more random, if not haphazard, texture.

Movement Schmoovement also includes the work of Nicola Tyson, David Knudsvig, Siobhan Liddell, David Nelson, and Sarah Rapson.

While not unified by dogma, common techniques, media, or subject, these artists have lived and worked in proximity—balancing outward impulses to foster change with persistence in maintaining rigorous art practices. In the 39 years since Johnston wrote her essay, the specific political issues may have changed but the fundamental challenges of justice, equity, resource prioritization remain the same.

Movement Schmoovement
Through April 18, 2010
@ La Mama La Galleria
6 East 1st Street NYC 10003

Swept Behind the Curtain: Doug McClemont’s Magical Ensemble

2010-03-20T13:55:00.007-05:00

[“Institute for Turbulence Research (V2)” by Charles Atlas (2010). 3-channel video installation, video mirror unit, transparent screen, & 6 minute loop. “The Chipmunks Genuflect” by Nayland Blake (2010). Rope, fabric, artificial hair, & metal hook (foreground). “Ding Dong (Maggie’s Dead)” by Stuart Semple (2009). MDF, plastic, gloss paint, leather, & electronics on aluminum.]

Using the culturally and emotionally iconic 1939 film, “The Wizard of Oz,” as a jumping-off point, curator Doug McClemont offered the viewer a lode of goodies in “Nobody Gets to See the Wizard, No Nobody, Not Nohow,” which ran at Anna Kustera gallery through March 20, 2010. As Saatchi Online magazine's regular New York correspondent and the former editor-in-chief of HONCHO, Torso, Mandate, Inches, and Playguy , McClemont brought to bear a rich array of artists known for their impact. Charles Atlas, Nayland Blake, Sean Mellyn, Robert Gober, Stuart Semple, John Brattin, Kathe Burkhart, Scott Ewalt, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Deborah Kass, Dan Miller, Caroline Polachek, Susanne M. Winterling came forward with works drawing inspiration from the film adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s novel. McClemont appears regularly in such publications as Publishers' Weekly, Library Journal, and Screw. Having written introductory essays for several monographs on contemporary art, he is currently at work on a book of short stories entitled “Little Morticians.”

Importantly, Nayland Blake created a work especially for this show: In “The Chipmunks Genuflect” (2010), he paid plush tribute to lions and tigers and bears everywhere. This Brooklyn-based artist, writer, and educator is chair of the ICP/Bard Masters program in Advanced Photographic Studies at the International Center of Photography. Represented by such galleries as New York’s Matthew Marks and San Francisco’s Paule Anglim, Blake’s work is included in such collections of such institutions as MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the Studio Museum of Harlem, LA MoCa, the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the DeYoung Museum. His writing, meanwhile, has appeared in Interview, Artforum, Out, and OutLook. He is the author of numerous catalog essays. In 1994 he co-curated with Lawrence Rinder the exhibition “In a Different Light,” which was the first major museum exhibition to examine the impact of queer artists on contemporary art. In Blake’s contribution to this show, one is reminded of the role played by actor Bert Lahr in the film—in which “his” lion’s tail threatened not only to upstage himself, but the wizard as well.

Robert Gober’s meticulous sculptures—exploring nature, politics, religion, and sexuality—have appeared in five Whitney Biennials. With his work in many museum collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Menil Collection, Tate Modern (London), and Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Gober represented the United States at the 2001 Venice Biennale. He has also had several one-person museum exhibitions including those at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the Jeu de Paume (Paris), and New York’s Dia Art Foundation. In 2007 there was a retrospective exhibition of Gober’s work at the Schaulager (Basel)—accompanied by a comprehensive book of his sculptures entitled “Robert Gober: Sculptures and Installations 1979-2007.” The untitled red shoe sculpture (1990) in “Nobody Gets to See the Wizard, No Nobody, Not Nohow” can’t help but evoke the film’s iconic footwear. Made entirely of a red wax that suggests candy and blood in equal measure, the creation honors girlhood’s very fragility of girlhood.

Filmmaker and video artist Charles Atlas has created numerous works for stage, screen, museum, and television. His work has been shown in the august environs of the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, Musée National d’Art Moderne (Paris), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), and Amsterdam’s Stedelijk. A pioneer in the development of media-dance, a genre in which original performance work is created directly for the camera, Atlas was filmmaker-in-residence with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for 10 years. Atlas collaborated with noted choreographers, dancers, and performers such as John Kelly, Diamanda Galas, Yvonne Rainer, Michael Clark, Douglas Dunn, and Marina Abramovic. “Television Dance Atlas”—the artist’s critically acclaimed prime-time event on Dutch television—was a four-hour montage of original and found footage incorporating dance styles as varied as ballet, burlesque, and figure skating. In “Institute for Turbulence Research(V2)” (2010), the video installation for this show, Charles Atlas recalled the terror and excitement of seeking the safety from frequent tornado warnings in his St. Louis-area childhood basement. The chaotic environment created by his spinning objects, radio waves and mirrored projections is as disorienting as it is memorable.

Rhode Island native and Pratt Institute alumnus Sean Mellyn draws inspiration from Marcel Duchamp and Jasper Johns in his realistic paintings and drawings—usually of happy and wholesome children—in which there is an unmistaken eeriness and bizarre aura. With a surgeon’s precision, Mellyn interrupts the surfaces of his works in various ways. Ambiguity and indetermination often swirl together in his “interventions.” Mellyn contributed “Judas” (2007), an oil-on-canvas of a circumspect young man witnessing a shadowy figure in mid-flight. The subject’s 1970s mirrored sunglasses reflect the film’s nostalgic—if ominous—skywriting event. Appropriately, “Surrender Dorothy!” became the name of the infamous ACT UP/New York campaign to force the resignation or firing of New York City Health Commissioner Stephen Joseph in 1989.

Re-articulating Pop Culture elements into a personal universe of fear, isolation and nostalgia, the drawing, painting, and printmaking of Stuart Semple balance a fabricated, mechanized perfection. Semple has shown his work in London, Mexico, New York, Italy and Hong Kong—and participated in Biennials in Brazil, Mexico, and Britain. Having curated a number of group shows internationally, the surfaces of Semple’s works absorb emotion and collision. Stuart Semple took a literal approach to “The Wizard of Oz”—albeit with a British twist. For “Ding Dong, Maggie’s Dead” (2009) Semple’s heavy house landed on conservative enemy-of-the-arts and homohating purveyor of 1986’s Clause (later Section) 28, the former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. As black as a lump of coal, the piece can be seen as just miner’s revenge for Baroness Thatcher’s demise: harking back to the bruising United Kingdom miners’ strike of 1984-85 in which the former Prime Minister and ally of Ronald Reagan cut her razor-sharp teeth.

The show posits that the “wizard” (if there ever was a wizard), wants to remain invisible. While chromatic adventures in the Land of Oz fall dramatically short of its “rainbows and bluebirds” promise, artists can and do cast magic. The ensemble put together by McClemont shows the creating art is like The Land of Oz—promising unseen gifts behind the curtain. In “Nobody Gets to See the Wizard, No Nobody, Not Nohow,” viewers reap a cultural dividend of the heady ACT UP and Queer Nation period of the late 1980s and early 1990s in which McClemont himself participated (along with a number of the represented artists).

Nobody Gets to See the Wizard, No Nobody, Not Nohow
@ Anna Kustera
Through March 20, 2010
520 West 21st Street, NYC 10011

Robert Gober: Sculptures and Installations 1979-2007

Band of Brothers: A Salvaged Legacy

2010-03-19T04:10:00.006-05:00

[Third illustration: Unknown, Untitled, c.1972, found photograph]

Scott Zieher discovered a pile of photographs among discarded effects of a recently deceased tenant in the basement of a Manhattan apartment building. Exhibited for the first time in the show “Band of Bikers” at ZieherSmith (and presented in a new publication of the same name from PowerHouse Books), these photographs from circa 1972 offer an intimate and most poignant portrait of a group of gay bikers in both city and forest settings.

This touching sampling of a historical subculture at its carefree zenith brings into focus a brief, specific period of relative innocence, when middle-of-the-road Americans more often than not failed to perceive the homoerotic undertones of their most heterosexual of institutions. With conceptual light cast by issues ranging from anonymity in homosexuality and underground motorcycle chic to vernacular photography’s pop-culture ramifications, a warm and generous spirit of camaraderie pervades this subterranean survey. Like a real-world set for Kenneth Anger’s 1964 experimental film “Scorpio Rising” casually captured by an unpretentious extra, this found cache of old-school, leather party snapshots emanates archeological as well as emotional significance.

While the particular tenant’s cause of death is not known, these recovered artifacts bespeak the irreparable squander and loss of artistic, cultural, and literary legacy during the AIDS epidemic. During the late 1980s and early 1990s it was so outrageously commonplace to come upon trashed remnants of prematurely consumed lives. Isolated individuals (such as Zieher) managed to rescue minute portions of such treasures from oblivion. Happening upon such treasures on nights out with friends and comrades during that period, we would absorb the tragedy by looking through the books, records, and assorted ephemera of our lost brothers. Horrified, we would go through unidentified photos knowing that history and experience were being lost before a proper recording, reckoning, quantification, and qualification. At the same time we mourned for a brother unknown to us as well as the loss of his potential heritage. How we absolutely resented the cavalier decisions by survivors (whom we always assumed to be ultra-homophobic cretins from the "outer reaches") to trash such treasures on the curb!

The original individual photographs, as well as the book, will be available throughout the exhibition. The PowerHouse publication also includes an essay by Scott Zieher. Zieher , a poet, art dealer, and avid collector has scavenged and collected books, photographs, art, paper, archives, and ephemera since childhood. His recent poetry has appeared in Tin House, LAB MAG, The Sienese Shredder, and KNOCK. His first book, “Virga,” was the first of a projected 13 sequential, book-length poems. He is president and founding member of Emergency Press, and co-owner of ZieherSmith with his wife, Andrea Smith.

Amos Lassen has made the following observations about this documentation of three gay biker gatherings from the summer of 1972 (a high-water mark and season illuminated in the must-see documentary “One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern”): “The photos are old and faded but they still show the happiness of the time and the beauty of men. Leather and denim fill the photographs and the men who are in them smile gloriously. They are all happy to be with each other and exude a true sense of brotherhood. Some of the photos are playful and there is a certain sinuosity to others. However, what we see above all else are senses of pride and belonging. Here is a history of a time gone and what we see is the carefree abandon with which some of the gay community lived (and loved). It would be wonderful to know what was going through the minds of the men in the photos but we will have to wait until someone else can supply us with that. Meanwhile we have this wonderful album.” Well said, Mr. Lassen!

Band of Bikers
@ ZieherSmith
Through Saturday, March 20, 2010
516 West 20th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), NYC 10011

Band of Bikers 1962/1972 (Hardcover) by Scott Zieher

Susan Sharp’s Biomorphic Mastery

2010-01-31T22:32:00.006-05:00

[“Trilogy 1,2,3,” oil on three wood panels. “Rim,” oil on wood panels. “Borderlands,” oil on 15 wood panels.]

Intersections, polarities, continuum, and tension come to life in “Borderlands,” Susan Sharp’s new series of multi-panel paintings being shown at Heidi Cho Gallery through February 6, 2010. Sharp—drawn to paint in its liquid state in which its forms emerge—pours several layers of paint on smooth surfaces such as wood and masonite. In this process, Sharp evokes dense and translucent personal topographies of internal mindscapes.

Tension between organic and biomorphic forms struggling to connect—and the resultant interplay between attraction and repulsion—create a depth and resonance in Sharp’s work. Her seductive colors engage—via transparent veils—in a lyrical pas de deux. Such color-driven passages appear to be informed by meandering rivers and geological formations both real and figurative.

These multi-panel paintings explore infinite spaces of sky and depths of water in varying bands of color in which illusions of far and near arduously navigate borders delineating disparate worlds. As art critic Donald Kuspit has said: “Susan Sharp's abstract paintings are saturated with an indwelling luminosity on which intricately meandering lines spin themselves out, often composing themselves into free-form planes that seem to throb with a life of their own.” Her imagery and juxtapositions grasp patterns of psychology and intuition: The viewer is left to read and absorb an ambiguous back and forth that is as playful as it is impulsive.

With absolute impunity, Sharp manipulates forms, colors, and lines in an emotive—if fragile—entanglement. It functions effectively within these effusive parameters, so loaded with oblique references and metaphorical associations. The way lines convulse and explode in Sharp's work contribute to their meditative and mindful qualities. Their ethereal quality results from their reaction to painting surfaces as well.

Borderlands: Susan Sharp
Through February 6, 2010
@ Heidi Cho Gallery
522 West 23rd Street, NYC 10011

The Birthday Party: Scott Daniel Ellison

2010-01-31T13:02:00.010-05:00

[“Birch Trees” (2008), acrylic on canvas. “Haunted Houses” (2009), acrylic on canvas. “Mouth” (2009), acrylic on canvas.]

In his trademark faux-naïve style, Scott Daniel Ellison’s second solo show in New York City (and at ClampArt) expands upon his fascination with ragged animal life, horror film characters, and his own recurrent fears. On view at ClampArt through February 20, 2010, the small figurative works in “The Birthday Party” depict animals and people both as single and multiple figures.

Over the past two years, Ellison’s paintings generally have grown larger (up to 14 x 18 inches) and his macabre subject matter more entrenched. Inspired by Scandinavian folk art he admired while living in Sweden, along with obscure horror films, grisly tales, recurrent fears, and popular music (Ellison is also a recording artist), the darkly humorous works are sparse and enigmatic, suggesting but never completely offering extended narratives. Largely focused on animals Ellison has seen firsthand, his works offer a refuge to such quirky creatures as skunks, sloths, opossums, and ocelots. Yet, on occasion, one will find the stray vampire, werewolf, or hot young woman. His subjects’ diminutive nature give a sense of storybook illustrations on crack—that could have been taken from either “Friday the 13th” or the aftermath of a backyard raccoon raid.

Originally trained as a photographer at SUNY Purchase and the International Center for Photography, Ellison cites influential American photographers Diane Arbus (1923–1971) and Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925–1972) as other major influences. This is apparent in Ellison’s earlier deadpan compositions of animal portraits as well as the obvious mood of many of his newer pieces. In Ellison’s work, one can easily see disturbing elements so reveled in by Meatyard, not to mention the haunting intrusions of “inner space” so elemental in Meatyard’s work. Not conforming to either the east coast’s “street photography” or the west coast’s romantic camera realism, Meatyard was too far ahead of his time: His images were populated with dolls, masks, family, friends, and neighbors in such settings as abandoned buildings or suburban backyards. The “photo boom” in which Meatyard and such colleagues as Henry Holmes Smith (1909-1986) and Harry Callahan (1912-1999) found themselves roughly paralleled the ferment and general upheaval of the civil rights and antiwar movements—not to mention the sexual revolution and counterculture.

Based in Beacon, New York, the artist has also shown his work at Carl Berg Projects (Los Angeles).

The Birthday Party: Scott Daniel Ellison
Through February 20, 2010
@ ClampArt Gallery
521-531 West 20th Street, NYC 10001

Scott Daniel Ellison Music on iTunes

Hudson Guild: Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom!

2010-01-24T05:38:00.008-05:00

[“Winter Amaryllis,” Peter Harvey. “Birds, Butterflies & Flowers,” Alvaro Amejeiras. “Mexican Vase With Red Flowers,” Sally Friedman. “Bowl of Tulips,” Muriel Taub Glantzman.]

Last year, a request for submissions was sent out by the arts program at Hudson Guild for a show featuring unusual still-life works. The response was so overwhelming—and varied—that it was decided to separate the response into three different clusters of still-life exhibits. The show last spring was devoted to food and kitchen objects. Next year a show will focus exclusively on inorganic objects. The current show, curated by gallery director Jim Furlong, is focused on horticultural objects. Other exhibits have been devoted to watercolor, drawing, oil painting, landscapes, and portraits.

Since 1895, art programs at Hudson Guild have helped to strengthen the fabric of community in Chelsea by bringing together people from diverse backgrounds to explore their mutual interest in the arts. Hudson Guild’s two galleries—Hudson Guild Gallery (opened in 1948) and Guild Gallery II (opened in 2001)—offer a number of ways for participants of all ages to engage with the visual arts. Providing this opportunity for those who might not otherwise have access to the art world is a special mission of Hudson Guild. The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Milton and Sally Avery Foundation, Con Edison, Susan and Tony Gilroy, Emily Meschter, Jolie Stahl, and Friends of the Arts at Hudson Guild assist Arts at Hudson Guild in serving these underserved communities.

Just a glance at the four pictured works shows the remarkable variety of styles and media utilized in depicting elements from our everyday lives—and the enduring fascination of the still life in creative expression. For more than five decades, Hudson Guild’s various arts programs have presented more than 300 diverse shows and works by both professional and amateur artists. Traditional styles of painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography have been supplemented by works using emerging media and styles. Talks and tours led by Guild arts staff (and sometimes the artists) encourage a deeper exploration of the visual arts. Over 3,000 people participate in Hudson Guild's arts programming each year. Their various initiatives help foster development of self-discipline, self-esteem, and creativity.

In our new century, Hudson Guild continues the vital work of social reform. Begun by such visionaries as Felix Adler (1851-1933), Hull House founder Jane Addams (1860-1935), The Children’s Aid Society’s Charles Loring Brace (1826=1890), and Henry Street Settlement founder Lillian Wald (1867-1940), most settlement houses (of which Hudson Guild is one) were formed to empower the poor and working poor—especially those in America’s burgeoning immigrant population. These institutions are no less important to our neighborhoods today.

Botanical Pictures: Unusual Still Lifes of Plants & Flowers
Through January 26, 2010
@ Guild Gallery II
Hudson Guild Fulton Center
119 West 9th Avenue (between 17th & 18th Streets), NYC 10011

Matthew Cusick: Cease To Exist

2010-01-23T14:28:00.006-05:00

[“Charlie’s Angels” (2009). Maps, book pages, Folger’s Coffee, ink on wood panel. “Many Rivers” (2009). Inlaid maps & acrylic on wood panel. “The Colony” (2009). Inlaid maps & acrylic on wood panel.]

Apparitions lurk behind muscle cars, celebrity culture, ubiquitous freeway interchanges, and manicured golf courses in the new work of Matthew Cusick at Pavel Zoubok Gallery being shown through February 6, 2010. Incorporating maps and other printed materials into understatedly grim collage-based painting, his landscapes and studies convey Southern California’s more nihilistic corners. Recently featured in Katharine Harmon’s “The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography” (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), “Cease to Exist” marks Cusick’s solo debut at Pavel Zoubok.

“Charlie’s Angels”—depicting convicted Charles Manson “family” murderers Susan Atkins (1948–2009), one-time homecoming princess Leslie Van Houten, and former Catechism teacher Patricia Krenwinkel—is the centerpiece and sole figurative work of the show and indicative of the Southern California milieu at the onset of the 1970s so jarringly captured by Cusick. Embedded in their skin creases are map fragments showing geographic locations of their murder spree. Zombie-like and cloaked in textbook pages on the nature of the family from the Sociology of Child Psychology (1966), the three tread upon a carpet of Folger’s Coffee in a reference to their victim Abigail Folger (1943–1969)—an heiress to the Folger Coffee fortune. Stabbed 28 times in the rampage upon the Cielo Drive residence of Roman Polanski, Folger was a civil rights worker who had volunteered in the Los Angeles mayoral campaign of Tom Bradley and the seminal 1968 presidential campaign of Senator Robert F. Kennedy after having served as publicity director for the University of California Art Museum in Berkeley.

The exhibition title “Cease to Exist” refers to the song written by the monster Manson and recorded by the Beach Boys in 1968 under the title “Never Learn Not to Love” as the B-side of their “Birds Over the Mountain” single and included in their 1969 album “20/20.” Beach Boy Dennis Wilson—a former acquaintance of Manson—rewrote the melody and changed some of the lyrics. For instance, rather than opening with Manson’s original—and sinister—“cease to exist,” Wilson altered them to the sexual come-on “cease to resist.” The song was credited solely to Dennis Wilson. The connection between the Manson Family and the “squeaky clean” surfer image of the Beach Boys underscores the duality of innocence and malevolence in Cusick’s work in which desire co-exists with repulsion.

Hindsight is indeed 20/20 and to review these lyrics with knowledge of the brutal Manson rampage is chilling: “Pretty girl, pretty, pretty girl, cease to exist. Just come and say you love me. Give up your world. C'mon you can see I'm your kind, I'm your kind. You can see. Walk on, walk on. I love you pretty girl. My life is yours and you can have my world. Never had a lesson I ever learned. But I know we all get our turn. I love you. Submission is a gift. Go on, give it to your brother. Love and understanding is for one another. I'm your kind, I'm your kind. I'm your mind. I'm your brother. I never had a lesson I ever learned. But I know we all get our turn. And I love you. Never learned not to love you. I never learned.”

Loneliness, alienation, and isolation are downright visceral in this ensemble by Cusick, who has previously captured oblique aerial images of Texas highways traversing allegorical landscapes and depictions emerging from Hollywood films in respective shows at Lisa Dent Gallery (San Francisco) and Glenn Horowitz Bookseller (East Hampton). In dissecting books into fragments and combining them into inlaid and intricate works with unintended contexts, Cusick parallels human knowledge acquisition. Without being pedantic, Cusick offers the viewer a provocative yet playful exploration that is wonderfully cerebral.

Matthew Cusick: Cease To Exist
Through February 6, 2010
@ Pavel Zoubok Gallery
533 West 23rd Street, New York City 10011

Pierrot le fou is (not) Dead: Bernardí Roig

2010-01-22T02:27:00.005-05:00

[“Pierrot le fou,” mixed media installation. “Pierrot le fou is (not) Dead,” mixed media installation, aluminum, electricity. “Despondency Exercises (IV Movement),” mixed media sculpture. “Not Twin Heads,” mixed media sculpture, polyester resin.]

Classical myths and post-Modern philosophy culminate with the current body of works by Bernardí Roig at Claire Oliver Gallery. Showing through January 23, 2010, “Pierrot le fou is (not) Dead”—a powerful mélange of sculpture and installation by one of Spain’s most prominent contemporary artists—is Roig’s third solo exhibition with Claire Oliver Gallery. Media such as drawing, sculpture, and video come alive in Roig’s dynamic works in which the human figure is the conceptual center.

While flirting with traditional sculpture, these Minimalist and Conceptual works speak of society in which envelopes have been pushed to the bursting point. As cast in every tiny detail of “Pierrot le fou is (not) Dead,” the viewer can discern inherent chaos in our collective societies so pervaded by loss of historical memory and identity. In our respective societies—so saturated with the mass media—it has become a challenge to discern fact from fiction or important issues from those trivial. The figures in “Pierrot le fou is (not) Dead” Roig aptly capture this distance and lack of sensation.

Furthermore, Roig’s illuminative and metaphorical use of light is a vital element in conveying perspectives of time, space, wholeness, and schism. Sheathed by fluorescent tubes, Roig’s subjects are blinded in a cacophony of imagery and voyeurism. Simultaneously confined and sightless, Roig’s white sculptures (which are casts of real people) are an embarkation point in analyzing imprisoned memory and identity.

Inspired by classical myths and postmodern philosophy, the prose of Thomas Bernhard (1931– 1989) and art of Pierre Klossowski (1905—2001) also find their way into Roig’s work. One of the German language’s most important post-war authors, Bernhard’s existential works explored abandonment and death. Klossowski—who translated important works by Virgil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Holderlin, Franz Kafka, Nietzche, and Walter Benjamin into French—greatly influenced such seminal philosophers as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Indeed, Roig’s compelling work explores boundaries separating and connecting two essential paradigms: the pre-Modern (founded on the integrity of the spirit) and the post-Modern (which alters interpretation and presentation of images).

Communicating with the viewer through his solitary sculptures, Roig’s presentation of the human body and its symbols manage to balance a number of variables. These include death, immortality, desire, eroticism, intimacy, isolation, and fulfillment. This interior dialogue is accomplished in the separate narratives of his various works or by their absorption as an ensemble. The artist’s fluency in art history and philosophical discourse greatly empower his works.

The artist’s work has been viewed in a number of venues, including Atlantic Center of Modern Art (Spain), Foundation La Caixa (Barcelona), Foundation Ludwig (Havana), Museé d’Art Moderne (Oostende), the Kampa Museum (Prague), the Kunstmuseum (Bonn), the Domus Artium (Salamanca), and the Museo Carlo Bilotti of Villaborghese (Rome).

Pierrot le fou is (not) Dead: Bernardí Roig
Through January 23, 2010
@ Claire Oliver Gallery
513 West 26th Street, NYC 10001

Bernardí Roig Video

Building on a Cliff: Matt Connors, Arturo Herrera & Merlin James

2010-01-20T17:23:00.005-05:00

[“Tiergarten/Monuments” (2008), Arturo Herrera. Collage, mixed media on paper. “DBCWMCIII” (2009), Matt Connors. Oil on canvas. “To come” (2009), James Merlin. Acrylic on Plexiglas, wood, & metal.]

Creating bodies of work that are—at once—familiar and unsettling, Matt Connors, Arturo Herrera, and Merlin James move between painting, sculpture, and points between. On view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. through January 23, 2010, the three artists included in “Building on a Cliff” largely work in areas of drawing and painting, while additionally creating hybrid works blurring the definitions of specific art practices such as painting-sculpture, photography installation.

In Connors’ dialogue with post-war abstraction and Modernist painting styles, his palette, line quality, and paint application most clearly enunciate. His works transcend the self-referential, while attempting to incorporate film, music, and poetry. Irrationality, desire, and anecdotal experience fuse into Connors’ installations and extend the tenuous abstraction of his work into the architecture of the exhibition space. Indeed, abstraction and representation fluctuate radically in Connors’ work. This while Connors negotiates back and forth from embracing and rejecting Clement Greenberg’s tenet, which holds that painting is irreducible only to be obfuscated by pictorial representation. Installations by Matt Connors, despite disparate yet coexisting priorities of media, the artist’s work nonetheless lauds Modernism. While working in one medium, the artist’s final results evoke yet another.

Arturo Herrera creates steel sculptures based on delicate ink drawings, large wall works from small found photo images, and collage works that fluctuate between the recognizable and the abstract. Herrera’s fluency in a range of media allows him to evoke memory as he taps into the collective unconscious: This is true regardless of whether he works collage, work on paper, sculpture, relief, wall painting, or photography. In Herrera’s synthesis of characters, shapes, and obscured images memory and recollection are palpable. The artist’s techniques of fragmentation, splicing, and recontextualization—while compelling in their own right—culminate in a rather subversive quality. As with Connors’ work, viewers experience visceral ambivalence between the figurative and abstract as well as a seamlessness with regards to media. All this while the artist straddles various genres and styles! In Herrera’s hands, assemblage can come off as a primal expression of Abstract Expressionism. Provocative, the artist combs various niches of our cultural such as cartoons, coloring books, and fairy tales in his sometimes dark explorations.

New paintings by Merlin James often reveal their physical structure and may even include small sculptural details. For over two decades, the painting of Merlin James has evolved across myriad genres such as portraiture, seascapes, landscapes, still life, erotic works, and interior scenes. Meanwhile, his styles have managed to accommodate the range from smooth studies through impasto. Paint’s materiality, in fact, comes forward loudly in his explorations—in which any number of ingredients find their way into his cauldron. While sometimes embracing a certain cryptic quality, James’ work vacillates on degrees of representation as well as between tradition and innovation. As critic Roberta Smith has written about James: “His paintings blur abstract and representational; they hint at photographs, but also evoke Modernist masters. They revisit traditional subject matter like landscape and still life, but can also attend quite explicitly to sex. Always, they are hyperconscious of physical means.”

Matt Connors lives and works in Los Angeles; Arturo Herrera (while born in Caracas, Venezuela) lives and works in Berlin; and Merlin James lives and works in Glasgow. Connors’ work has appeared at CANADA (New York), The Breeder (Athens), and LutgenMiejar (Berlin). The recipient of such awards as a DAAD Fellowship, Herrera’s work has been exhibited in such venues as Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneva), Dia Center for the Arts, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art. Meanwhile, James’ work has been shown in such venues as Kerlin Gallery (Dublin), Vitamin Arte Contemporanea (Turin), the New York Studio School, Kunsthalle (Manheim), Andrew Mummery Gallery (London), and Galerie Les filles du Calvaire (Brussels).

Building on a Cliff: Matt Connors, Arturo Herrera & Merlin James
Through January 23, 2010
@ Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
530 West 22nd Street, NYC 10011

Bridge to the Possible: Helen Frankenthaler

2010-01-16T11:33:00.005-05:00

[“High Spirits” (1988), acrylic on canvas. “Groundswell” (1987), acrylic on canvas. “Untitled (February 24, 1984)” (1984), acrylic & crayon on paper.]

One of America’s most distinguished artists, Helen Frankenthaler has exhibited her work for six decades. Being a transitional figure between Abstract Expressionism’s first and second generations, Frankenthaler’s career took off in 1952 with her work “Mountains and Sea.” Viewers will have the wondrous opportunity to see an array of vital and continually evolving paintings and works on paper by this native and noted New Yorker at Ameringer McEnery Yohe through January 23, 2010.

While attending Dalton School, Frankenthaler studied under Rufino Tamayo (1899—1991). A Zapotecan Cubist painter who synthesized aspects of pre-Columbian culture into his work, Tamayo’s work was noteworthy for its tonal interplay and richness of geometry, metaphor, and explorative transfiguration. Upon returning to New York after completing her studies at Bennington College, Frankenthaler rapidly took her place as an important player among the ranks of its avant-garde art world and the New York School of painters such as Lee Krasner (1908—1984), Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), David Smith (1906–1965), Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989), Franz Kline (1910 –1962), Adolf Gottlieb (1903–1974), and Barnett Newman (1905–1970). She was married to Robert Motherwell (1915–1991), a fellow member of this “crowd,” from 1958 to 1971.

With these and other artists, Frankenthaler helped to wrest away the pole of artistic eminence from Paris—allowing New York to seize the spotlight of artistic innovation. Influential art critic Clement Greenberg—who actively promoted the Abstract Expressionist movement—helped “steer” Frankenthaler through the New York art scene in her career’s early years and introduced her to movement catalyst Hans Hofmann (1880—1966). Hans Hofmann reinforced Frankenthaler’s Cubist orientation—begun in high school with Rufino Tamayo—when she studied with the former in 1950.

Marked by its longevity, Frankenthaler’s career has spanned the entirety of post-war American painting—and several generations of abstract painters. First exposed to Jackson Pollock’s work at his Betty Parsons Gallery show in 1950, Frankenthaler was awed by its completeness. “It was all there. I wanted to ‘live’ in this ‘land.’ I had to live there and master the language.” The paintings so grabbing her attention? “Autumn Rhythm,” “Number One,” and “Lavender Mist.”

Abstract Expressionism itself resulted from an interest in Cubism and Surrealism among that generation of artists, combined with their antipathy toward social realism and geometric abstraction. As that movement morphed into Post-Painterly Abstraction in the late 1950s and early 1960s, two distinct trends could be discerned. The Hard Edged Painters—including Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella—explored relationships between shapes and edges. Color Field Painters—the other group—included Frankenthaler and Morris Louis (1912—1962) who stained unprimed canvases. The latter artists, inspired by European Modernism, explored various physical aspects of large fields of pure, brilliant, open color. At the same time, artists such as Kenneth Noland (1924—2010) straddled both trends in their work. In her moving of Modernist painting from the linearity of drips and spatters to the luminousness of Color Field works, Louis would call Frankenthaler “the bridge between Pollock and what was possible.”

Importantly, Frankenthaler joined Miriam Schapiro, June Wayne, and Lois Mailou Jones in speaking at the 1971 Conference of Woman in the Visual Arts, which protested exclusion of women from the Corcoran Gallery’s 1971 biennial show. While Frankenthaler once stated that “the question of sex will take care of itself,” MIT art historian Caroline Jones lauded the artist’s 1950s works that simultaneously conformed to the rules of abstraction while containing clear, sensual elements of rebellion against them. Though Frankenthaler’s painterly signs of protest lasted barely a decade in her many decades long career, Jones contends that their presence presaged feminist performance artists such as Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneemann who worked in the Sixties and Seventies.

In a 1995 interview with Rob Storr, Felix Gonzalez-Torres had this to say about Frankenthaler: “All art and all cultural production are political. I’ll just give you an example. When you raise the question of politics or art, people immediately jump and say, ‘Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero—Those are political artists.’ Then who are the nonpolitical artists, as if that was possible at this point in history? Let’s look at abstraction, and let’s consider the most successful of those political artists, Helen Frankenthaler. Why [is she] the most successful political artist, even more than Kosuth, much more than Hans Haacke, much more than Nancy and Leon or Barbara Kruger? Because [she doesn’t] look political!”

In her seminal work “Mountains and Sea,” Frankenthaler introduced the aforementioned technique of painting directly onto an unprimed canvas. By utilizing this technique of “soak stain” (in which the turpentine-diluted oil paint’s color soaks into the canvas), this Frankenthaler work had the effect of a watercolor. At times, the method would give a halo effect to her paintings. Yet, while this work is considered pivotal in art history, Frankenthaler avoided working in series and allowing her work to fall into a rut or formula—unlike some of her contemporaries. With her hand, the canvas moved from mere support in paintings to “playing” an “active” role. In Frankenthaler’s paintings from the 1980s exhibited at Ameringer McEnery Yohe, viewers will experience the continuing role of depth illusion in her ever spontaneous and varied work as well as its sculptural quality.

Helen Frankenthaler
@ Ameringer McEnery Yohe
through January 23, 2010
525 West 22nd Street, NYC 10011

Conjuring Passion: Chris Fennell

2010-01-07T00:17:00.007-05:00

[“Akupara” (2009). Acrylic, powdered pigment & paper collage on paper mounted on canvas. “Cataract” (2009). Acrylic, metallic glimmer & collage on paper mounted on canvas. “May You Live in Interesting Times” (2008). Acrylic, rice paper & paper collage on paper mounted on museum board. “Boom Times” (2009). Acrylic, glitter, & paper collage on paper mounted on museum board.]

Referencing nature, mathematics, architecture, and religious art, the organic and geometric patterns of Chris Fennell’s mixed media collages come alive in “In Little Place a Million”—Chris Fennell’s first solo exhibition at Newman Popiashvili Gallery. The title of the show—running through January 9, 2010—is a quote from the prologue of William Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” in which the chorus begs the indulgence of the audience that they might allow the small domain of the stage to stand metaphorically for larger ideas and events. Approximately written in 1599, “Henry V”—part of a tetralogy including Richard II, Henry IV (part 1), and Henry IV (part 2)—is based on the life of England’s King Henry V and focuses on events occurring immediately before and after the Battle of Agincourt during the Hundred Years’ War.

In Fennell’s work, abstraction’s revelatory and exploratory powers come together to conjure passion and the scope of such history implied by the show’s title. Accomplishing a synthesis of references, the abstraction of Fennell’s work goes beyond exploring those various entities and challenges the viewer as well. Fennell does this with his chosen medium of paper—cut in differently sized circles, lines, and rectangles that overlap in multiple layers. Created and meant to be viewed as an ensemble, Fennell conceives his works with a sense of how three or four or five layers will interact on the surface. Notwithstanding, the artist concedes inherent challenges in visualizing their entirety due to distortions created by intersecting layers.

With such processes set in motion, unforeseen things occur in creation of new works. Fennell welcomes this element of unpredictability: If he is not surprised at some point, something is probably wrong. Labor intensive, Fennell’s works take place both in space and over time. Unlike plane geometry, in which a dot represents a precise location in space, Fennell sees the repetitive dots in his works as capturing passing moments. Unlike mathematical points, Fennell’s dots elide and elude boundaries rather than defining precise places. He manages this in the plethora of his works’ visual effects. The spontaneity of Fennell’s works, coupled with the interplay—indeed dialogue—between textures and surfaces, result in tectonic movements between form and spirit allowing for larger existential questions.

Chris Fennell was recently featured in “Here and There,” a two-person exhibition at PS122. His work has also been shown at Carol Jazzar Contemporary Art (Miami) and Alpan Gallery (Huntington).

In Little Place a Million: Chris Fennell
@ Newman Popiashvili Gallery
Through January 9, 2010
504 West 22nd Street, NYC 10011

Beyond Narrative: Varujan Boghosian

2009-12-29T12:41:00.007-05:00

[“American Bouquet” (1997), mixed media construction. “Homage to Joseph Albers” (1995), paper collage. “Three Yellow Objects” (1998), mixed media construction.]

Various roles of selector, editor, builder, and juxtaposer characterize the working method of Varujan Boghosian. Cherishing the out-dated and the cast-off, Boghosian energizes them in a process imbuing them with new meaning, aesthetic value, and a contemporary sense. From Boghosian’s studio, old children’s toys, antiquated tools, and oddball objects are transformed into collages, relief constructions, boxes, and sculpture. One can get a sense of the working method of this lifelong collector at his solo show at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, which runs through January 9, 2010. Berta Walker, of the renowned Provincetown gallery bearing her name, has lauded the elegance, lyricism, and poetic nature of Boghosian’s work, calling it “Haiku in found objects.”

Constant trips to flea markets and antique stores have paid off handsomely for Boghosian, who has parlayed these scavenged parts and scraps onto a palette in which time is an essential element. Yet, this sense of time impacts on a number of levels, including Boghosian’s working process: Objects amass in his studio, perhaps waiting years for their new purpose to reveal itself. Even when recontextualized and reconfigured by the artist—however surprisingly and surrealistically—these objects and materials tend to manifest age and vulnerability despite their “rescue.” Boghosian’s very fluency in transcending previous contexts allows a conversation with the past without an ensuing nostalgia. Importantly, he does this without diminishing the integrity of his materials.

Boghosian has even recast history and legend in pursuit of his artistic endeavor. One source repeatedly mined by Boghosian has been the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Robert M. Doty, curator of Boghosian’s 1989 retrospective exhibition at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth, explained the artist’s ability to forge something ever larger out of component parts: “There is a mood about the work, a stirring of feelings about life and death, which is greater than the specific narrative and has universal meaning and appeal. Boghosian has revitalized the myth of Orpheus in his own terms, using physical means to create images which act as catalysts for transforming individual rapport into the most fundamental human experience.” Under Boghosian’s hand, Leonardo “goes native” in the Victorian Era before exploding like a psychedelic time-bomb into the 1960s. That, while the pitiful—yet hopeful—Orpheus is imprisoned in brick.

The G.I. Bill allowed WWII veteran Boghosian to attend the Yale School of Art and Architecture, where he studied under Josef Albers (1888–1976) whose name appears on a collage in this show. Albers’ students also include the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Susan Weil, Cy Twombly, and Ray Johnson. An eminent refugee from the Third Reich, Albers—whose work represents a transition from traditional art of the European academy to American modernism—is probably best known for his abstract paintings and his role in art theory. Bauhaus communicant Albers appropriated Color-Aid—originally developed in 1948 as a backdrop for photographers—and propelled it into a staple media for modernist color theory.

In addition to Lori Bookstein Fine Art, Boghosian’s work has been presented at—or is in the permanent collections of—such entities as Stable Gallery, Cordier & Ekstrom, Berta Walker Gallery, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Hood Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum. Twice artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome, Boghosian has taught at Pratt Institute, the Cooper Union, Yale, Brown, and Dartmouth.

According these weathered doors and windows, ornamental woodwork, toys, tools, and set after set of children’s building blocks with new identities through his faithful and masterful assemblage, Boghosian (the son of an Armenian cobbler) casts a light on roles played by dislocation and repositioning in identity’s construction. Indeed, upon such dislocation or “repositioning”—whether successful, tragic, or both—rests much of the history of the 20th century. Woefully, in light of identity’s seemingly intractable nature, this “exploration” remains unresolved.

Varujan Boghosian
Through January 9, 2010
@ Lori Bookstein Fine Art
138 Tenth Avenue, NYC 10011

Out of Order: Surfing on Confusion’s Clashing Waves

2009-12-28T15:56:00.008-05:00

[“Anatomy” by Scooter Laforge (2009), oil on canvas. “Levitation in Washington Allston’s Desert Landscape” by Larissa Bates (2008), acryla gouache & ink on canvas. “She Turned Up Her Toes” by Stephen Tashjian/Tabboo! (2009), acrylic on canvas with glitter.]

Scott Hug, the founder K48 magazine, has organized a diverse group of 33 contemporary artists into an exhibit at Andrew Edlin Gallery. Dealing with themes of disarrangement, mysticism, and internal logic, “Out of Order” runs through January 16, 2010 and asks: “If order comes out of chaos, what comes out of order?” K48 magazine—produced once a year and filled with works by emerging artists, photographers, fashionistas, and writers—gives Hug a natural vantage point in organizing this show. Like the artists represented in “Out of Order,” Hug has gone solely on gut instincts by picking up the pieces and carrying on in a world that seems to be falling apart. Hug’s own work has—at various times and in a number of media—interpreted and traversed the visual distance between boardroom and spiritual realms. As an artist, the curator’s work has been shown in such venues as D’Amelio Terras and The Kitchen.

In Scooter Laforge’s work—represented in “Out of Order” by two of his trademark neo-surrealist paintings “Anatomy” (2009) and “Bat” (2009)—whimsy can barely contain a larger volley of ambient danger, raw sexuality, and irony emanating from his East Village studio. Proceeding on a daring course, Laforge’s pungent storytelling fuses with a rich palette in a narrative on the heartaches of life in the Metropolis. Tenuous movements between desire and its fruition—and between fable and fantasy—reverberate upon Laforge’s tableau. His beguilingly deviant work has been shown in such venues as Exit Art, Wooster Projects, and White Columns.

Banality gets the shaft on the canvases of Stephen Tashjian (Tabboo!)—a seminal figure in the East Village’s 1980s underground scene. An artist not contained by any media—whether painting, sculpture, photography, puppetry, music, or theater design—Tashjian is revealed to viewers of “Out of Order” by three of his paintings: “She Turned Up Her Toes” (2009), “The Early Bird Catches the Worm” (2009), and “John Heys as Diana Vreeland” (1989). Tashjian attended the Massachusetts College of Art where he became friends with vanguard artists Mark Morrisroe, Nan Goldin, and Jack Pierson. Indeed, Goldin included photos of Tashjian in her book “The Other Side” (though in his drag persona Tabboo!). He performed in that persona at the noted East Village venue, The Pyramid Club, alongside other legends of that era such as the Lady Bunny, Rupaul, and Hapi Phace as well as at the annual Wigstock. Probably best known for his graphic design and iconic lettering on the cover of the successful Deee-Lite “World Clique” album, Tashjian’s work has been documented by the New Museum (New York) and Grey Art Gallery.

Greatly influenced by the French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) who worked in the classical style, Larissa Bates reflects a determined logic, clarity, order, and preference for line over color in her work, including those exhibited in this exhibition. Symbolism and imagination amid invented geometric spaces are offered in painstaking—though surreal—detail to the viewer. Bates work encapsulates a vigorous critique of gender roles, environmental swashbuckling, and political dynamics gone awry. The debilitating constraint of social pressures upon men to exude bravado and machismo is visceral in her paintings while she simultaneously provides an alternative construct for masculinity. In this new gender code, Bates frees men to possess sensitivity, vulnerability, and childbirth. Bates’ strange worlds and rich motifs—set within grandiose dramas—have been exhibited at Bendixen Contemporary Art (Denmark), the Mobile Museum of Art, the Ulrich Museum of Art (Kansas), and New York’s Monya Rowe Gallery.

In Andrew Guenther’s “Not a Doctor (Orange)” (2009) and “Green and Black on Chair” (2009), viewers catch a glimpse of his artistic practice in which sculptural elements are added to the canvas. Guenther’s paintings, silkscreens, and drawings accentuate and delineate viewer perspective and reaction—at the same time underlining our culture’s cumulative ambivalence. Paul Brainard has curated group shows as well. Having organized a group show called “True Faith” in the summer of 2007, Brainard’s figurative work runs to the edgy. “Fire in the Snow,” his piece in “Out of Order”—dense with collision of divergent human reaction—reflects Brainard’s penchant for the seductive and sexually charged.

At present, Keith Mayerson’s work is included in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Metaphor runs counterintuitively in his works, which draw from iconic images and popular culture—albeit with a mirroring twist that couples an unconscious world with one more concrete. The viewer will find a rich synchronicity of factors in Mayerson’s works—including those related to constructs of gay experience and identity, semiotic exploration, transcendence, and wells of cognition. Mayerson’s paintings are emotionally, socially, and spiritually replete. One is “catapulted” from them into an alternative dimension dependent upon the mood or figure captured in the particular painting.

As art critic Eric Gelber has pointed out most succinctly, “Justin Lieberman uses text in his art for comedic purposes and to recontextualize, subvert, critique, and perversely celebrate the mass media environment we are submerged in from birth to death.” Viewers of “Out of Order” are treated to a bit of Lieberman’s self-reference and bitingly twisted humor in his mixed-media work “Our Machine” (2006-2009). Despite our immersion in the overwhelming and overbearing mass media, Lieberman’s work poses an ultimate—if incomplete—transcendence of this situation by individuals who will find some way to express authenticity.

A number of David Benjamin Sherry’s works are represented in this show. Sherry hems and haws between psychedelia and surrealism, portraiture and landscape, reality and fantasy, and abstraction and photography in an eclectic creative tornado. A successful fashion photographer whose work has appeared on the pages of Dazed and Confused, Purple, i-D, V Man, and Japanese Vogue, Sherry’s first monograph “It’s Time” (ISBN 9788862080934) was recently issued by Damiani. Notably, Sherry worked with photographer David LaChapelle while a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. Tyson Reeder’s gouache works “Orange Lighting” (2009) and “Pink City” (2009)—as well as his oil painting “Jungle” (2009)—exude a certain primal velocity of color and line in elemental cosmologies broaching myriad landscapes. Reeder sometimes accomplishes this with Impressionist deftness, other times with a troubling impatience.

Upon walking into Andrew Edlin Gallery, one is confronted immediately by the looming untitled work of Louisiana ex-pat Lucky DeBellevue—constructed with chenille stems! Known for his sculptures made by pipe cleaners and other inexpensive store-bought materials, DeBellevue is represented by another piece in this show (also untitled and also made with chenille stems). Meanwhile, Michael Mahalchick’s mixed media works—produced with scraps of fabric, fur, and clothing—often result in nearly figurative and emotionally searing sculptures in which one encounters existential issues tinged with sexuality and loss. Mahalchick has exhibited his work at such venues as the Sculpture Center, PS1, and Andrew Kreps Gallery. Brian Belott mines thrift stores for discarded junk such children's books and found photos that are cut up and assembled into collages emanating beautiful, chaotic acts.

Others included in this show are Hackworth Ashley, Hrafnhildur Arnardottir, BOBO, Matt Bua, Jeff Davis, Jake Ewert, Ry Fyan, Amy Gartrell, Jonathan Hartshorn, Nancy de Holl, Shaun Kessler, Anne Koch, Ryan Lucero, Billy Miller, Annie Pearlman, Asher Penn, Jacob Robichaux, the Society for the Advancement of Inflammatory Consciousness, Ryan Trecartin, Jan Wandrag, and Amy Yao.

“Out of Order” offers the viewer a gleefully subversive odyssey, thankfully free of the pedantic and academic. Despite divergence in artistic fluency, this array of considered reactions and visions surprises at every corner while stretching the envelope to its farthest point and throwing in a bit of fun besides.

Out of Order
Through January 16, 2010
@ Andrew Edlin Gallery
134 Tenth Avenue, New York City 10011

Virtual Vistas: Nola Zirin

2009-12-22T23:04:00.007-05:00

[“Lost in Palermo” (2009), oil on canvas. “Saturnine Spirals” (2009), oil & enamel on canvas. “Black Holes” (2009), oil & enamel on canvas.]

From her studio in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood, Nola Zirin produces work tapping into the rich traditions of Abstract Expressionism—particularly the spatial, color, and pictorial relationships and equations enumerated by Hans Hofmann (1880–1966). Bursting forth in constant movement, Zirin’s vibrant visions point toward mythic objects and patterns. “Virtual Vistas,” an exhibition of her new paintings will be up at June Kelly Gallery through December 29th.

As described by writer Jill Conner, Zirin’s new work traverses boundaries between the banal and transcendent. “Pictorial depth renders a light, buoyant effect as each painting captures the dynamism of this world.” Zirin “clearly” captures an aura and ambiance in utilizing the landscape structure, according to Conner.

Superfluous elements fall by the wayside in Zirin’s work, allowing a glimpse into what is truly important. It is no wonder that Zirin studied painting with George Ortman and Milton Resnick (1917—2004) at New York University. In her geometric and symbolic vocabulary—conjugated in monochrome planes with flurries of “activity”—we see Ortman’s influence. In Zirin’s larger artistic animus, Resnick’s hand is seen in qualities and quantities of paint lodged across faces of her canvases and resolution of confluent forces in her compositions. With the specter of the September 11 tragedy extant in some of her works, one also can see a bit of the mystical qualities found in Resnick’s abstract paintings.

Color powers the velocity of the speeding, hovering, swaying, and other movement in Zirin’s work. This fluency of hues—coupled with a seemingly instinctive sense of space—allows the viewer to readily engage or commune with feelings and moods coming to life on her meditative canvases. Interchange between her painting movements drives Zirin’s representational spectrum. Whether fluid or coarse, her techniques culminate in communicatory depths not without their paradoxes.

Zirin’s work has been shown in such venues as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Heckscher Museum of Art (Huntington), the Islip Art Museum, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum (Rutgers University), and the National Museum of Taiwan.

Virtual Vistas: Nola Zirin
Through December 29, 2009
@ June Kelly Gallery
166 Mercer Street, NYC 10012

Without Saying a Word: Jiří Kolář’s Poetics of Silence

2009-11-22T00:43:00.006-05:00

[“Charles Baudelaire: Beauty” (1972), collage on board. “Charles Baudelaire: Hymn” (1972), collage on board. “Untitled (Movie Series” (1970s), collage. “Dialogue Between Mr. B & Mr. R in Heaven” (1973), collage. “Untitled (Madonna of the Rocks)” (1960s), collage.]

First introduced to American audiences through retrospectives at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery during the late 1970s, the work of Czech collagist and poet Jiří Kolář (1914-2002) will be presented in a solo exhibition by Pavel Zoubok Gallery through December 19, 2009. Kolář’s work—both as a poet and visual artist—emerged from the politically charged atmosphere of the Central European avant-garde during the 1950s and 1960s. Standing as a powerful symbol of resistance, Kolář’s work was forged through the ordeal of social and political repression.

Kolář railed against abuse and degradation of language by the nomenklatura of the former Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Defying the ruling elite of that “people’s democracy,” Kolář developed numerous collage techniques to establish a purely visual expression called “the poetry of silence.” Despite his auspicious beginnings as a young poet, translator, and designer, political circumstances were to intrude. By the late 1960s, Kolář became more widely known as a visual artist.

Jiří Kolář’s was profoundly influenced by the writings of Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert (1901-1986), the first and only Czech writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature; Futurist Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944); Irish novelist James Joyce (1882–1941); and the politically controversial Ezra Pound (1885–1972). Additionally, he participated in a number of edgy cultural circles in Prague. The best known of these was Group 42, which was enchanted by technology and influenced by Civilism, Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, and—to a lesser degree—Surrealism. Though Group 42 was established in 1942, its development began in the late 1930s and it had pretty much formed by 1940. It ceased to function upon the Communist assumption of power in 1948’s February coup, but its influence upon Czech culture was palpable for decades.

Kolář supported himself in a variety of jobs such as cabinetmaker and bartender until he became a full-time writer in 1943. Communist Party membership for him was a revolving door—in and out in 1945. Since “former Communists” drew the greatest ire of the nomenklatura, Kolář was forbidden to publish after their takeover. From the terror engulfing Czechoslovakia during the dark Stalinist years (especially in the wake of 1952’s bogus Slánský Trial) and then through the 1960s, Kolář moved progressively away from literary expression toward one more purely visual. He had great incentive to do this: When authorities uncovered a manuscript of his work “Prométheova játra,” he was arrested in 1953 and spent several months in prison.

As his homeland settled into a “milder” Stalinism, he led a group of poets including Václav Havel. The 1960s found him writing experimental poetry before visual art became his primary focus. When 1968’s Prague Spring and reforms for “socialism with a human face” initiated by Alexander Dubček (1921-1992) were brutally suppressed by the Soviet Union, Kolář found himself again afoul of the nomenklatura. Along with a cross-section of 1,200 citizens of the Czechoslovak “people’s democracy,” Kolář signed Charter 77—calling for respect for human and civil rights. That dictatorship’s authorities reacted swiftly and relentlessly: Supporters of the document faced harassment and arrest. Despite this, Charter 77 “monitoring groups” periodically issued reports on the Czechoslovak government's human rights violations. The efforts of Charter 77 were fueled by the Helsinki Accords—adopted in 1975—and aided by Human Rights Watch. Such events hastened Kolář’s emigration and exile.

Jiří Kolář gradually developed his unique and formal vocabulary (Crumplage, Rollage, Chiasmage, Ventilage, Razor Poems to name just a few of his techniques), which allowed him to combine various layers of meaning and order. These were first published in his “Dictionary of Methods” (1986). However, it must be remembered that Kolář exhibited visual art from 1937—and his collages could be found in those earliest exhibitions. After the success of 1989’s “Velvet Revolution,” Kolář spent increasing lengths of time in his homeland—eventually spending his last years in a Prague hospital.

Although Jiří Kolář’s presence on the American scene diminished following the “burst” of his New York retrospectives, his work has continued to be exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. “The Poetics of Silence” features over 40 key works from the 1960s-1980s and explores a broad range of themes (nature, art history, language, memory) that collectively articulate Jiří Kolář’s unique contribution to the theory and practice of collage.

Jiří Kolář: The Poetics of Silence

Through December 19, 2009

@ Pavel Zoubok Gallery

533 West 23rd Street, NYC 10011

To Cut Out: Daniel Buren's Situated Works (1969-2009)

2009-11-20T03:09:00.006-05:00

[Various situated works by Daniel Buren (2009), MDF, Alupanel, vinyl, & paint.]

Daniel Buren’s second exhibition at Bortolami Gallery—“To Cut Out: Situated Works 1969-2009”—will be up through December 22nd. This conceptual artist—most often classified as an Abstract Minimalist—has challenged the accepted canon and prescribed experience of art since the mid-1960s. To this end, he has coined a number of neologisms that have redefined art.

“Work in Situ” is work made for a particular site, for a particular time, and exhibited in this particular site—thereby not germane to another place. Buren has identified as an artist living and working in situ. From his perspective, this indicates a concept going far beyond painting, sculpture, and other media—emphasizing art as an experience, life, or weltanschauung.

“Situated Work” is that inspired by a particular location, but made with the intention that the very same elements of the original work can be reinstalled in different sites following a series of rules—evolving each time in response to the venue. Correspondingly, the venue is altered by the work. This includes Buren’s works from 1969 found in this show.

“Cabane Éclatée” or “exploded cabin” is a painting environment that has been “exploded” by turning a would-be two-dimensional work into a disparate three dimensional encounter. These evolved into the colored Plexi works that Buren has shown internationally in site-specific installations for two decades—and outside Bortolami in 2007. They have also snowballed into the “Zigzag” sculptures made of MDF to join Buren’s creative aggregate.

“Visual Tool” functions as a standard or measurement unit of formal properties in Buren’s work—an intended sign serving as a constant within wildly variable parameters and juxtapositions of any and all “in situ” and “situated work” accomplished by the artist since 1965.

When Buren created a sculpture in the great courtyard of Paris’ Palais Royal in 1986, he triggered an intense debate over the integration of contemporary art and historic buildings. But then Buren—like many in the French intelligentsia was highly affected by the outbreak of France’s May 1968 worker-student rebellion emerging out of the Sorbonne extension in Nanterre. Very little of cultural import was left static in its wake and nothing remained sacred. Buren himself was influenced by deconstructionist philosophies that gained ground in the aftermath. He began creating unsolicited public art works with striped awning canvas—inviting viewers to analyze traditional artistic boundaries and ideas. Hundreds of striped “panels” appeared around Paris, and later in more than 100 stations of the Métropolitain—forcing a public appraisal of artistic boundaries through this “extra-institutional art.” In another burst of “guerrilla installation,” Buren used stripes to block the entrance of the gallery conducting his first solo exhibition.

Amazingly—despite periodic controversy—Buren has deftly managed to balance his audacious interventions and philosophies concerning art with the milieu of the museum and gallery system. Indeed, there has been much demand by that system to show his art. Buren deserves his place with “Institutional Critique” colleagues Michael Asher, MacArthur recipient Fred Wilson, Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976) of the Groupe Surréaliste-revolutionnaire, performance artist Andrea Fraser, and installation artist Hans Haake—all of whom comprehensively critiqued the structure and very assumptions of institutions within the art arena.

Buren’s work has been exhibited in the following venues: Palazzo Grassi (Venice), Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena), Neues Museum (Nuremberg), Documenta (Kassel), Place de la Justice (Brussels), the Guggenheim, Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Venice Biennale, Lyon City Hall, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, ICA Nagoya, and Museum of Contemporary Art (Tokyo).

To Cut Out: Situated Works (1969-2009)

By Daniel Buren

Through December 22, 2009

@ Bortolami Gallery

510 West 25th Street, New York City 10001

Free Speech Movement at Berkeley: 45th Anniversary of the Sproul Hall Sit-In

2009-11-18T21:19:00.012-05:00

When asked by campus police for his identification on October 1, 1964, former UC Berkeley grad student Jack Weinberg refused. Tabling for the civil rights organization Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) on the “advocacy strip” at the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph just outside the main gate of campus—an area considered the jurisdiction of Berkeley rather than the University of California—Weinberg was arrested.

This incident occurred in the period immediately following Freedom Summer—launched in June of that year—when the highest possible registration of African-American voters in Mississippi was attempted. CORE was part of a coalition taking on Mississippi, a state that had—until then—nearly excluded black voters. That coalition, Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) also included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC, which came into national consciousness through their lunch counter sit-ins throughout the South in the early 1960s, was the lead group –with SNCC field secretary Robert Moses co-directing COFO and directing Freedom Summer.

Jack Weinberg wasn’t alone on this strip, which had come under the scrutiny of UC Berkeley Dean Katherine Towle who announced regulations prohibiting advocacy, recruitment, and fundraising for political causes and student organizations in that area. Empowered by the previous summer’s organizing in Mississippi, fundraising for groups like SNCC proceeded apace. It was also the middle of a Presidential campaign, and student organizations supporting Democratic incumbent Lyndon Baines Johnson and Republican challenger Barry Goldwater –in turn—sought support from students on this flagship campus. In this politically charged situation, students spontaneously surrounded the police car in which Weinberg was to be transported. That car did not move for 32 hours. Within the intervening hours, approximately 3,000 students surrounded the car, which was used as a speaker’s podium. Public discussion there ensued until charges against Weinberg were dropped.

This was just the opening salvo in the volatile political situation at Berkeley—one that would define the situation on U.S. campuses for another decade and not relent until the U.S. pullout from Vietnam and resignation of President Richard Nixon in the wake of Watergate in the early 1970s.

One of the people who climbed onto the car bearing Jack Weinberg to rouse the students blockading it was barefoot Queens, New York junior Mario Savio (1942-1996) who managed to talk the crowd down and get them to leave “with dignity” after reaching an “understanding” with UC President Clark Kerr. The previous summer Savio had participated in Freedom Summer in Mississippi–doing voter registration of African-American citizens and teaching at a “freedom school” for black children in McComb. In July 1964 he, another white civil rights worker, and a black acquaintance were attacked by two men in Jackson. [This took place during the frantic search period to find the bodies of the martyred James Chaney (1943-1964), Michael Schwerner (1939-1964), and Andrew Goodman (1943-1964)—whose deaths were presumed by federal authorities.] Savio returned to Berkeley that fall intending to raise money for SNCC organizing and was horrified to learn that UC Berkeley had banned all such activity.

By the first week in December 1964 the situation leading to the arrest of Jack Weinberg still had not been resolved: The university administration was adamant in pulling the plug on public political involvement and activism on campus. On December 3rd, nearly 2,000 students assembled at Sproul Hall to order school administrators to negotiate on these sensitive issues of campus restrictions on political speech. While those left and liberal on the political spectrum predominated, students from groups like Young Republicans and the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom also chafed under campus restrictions and demanded the right to organize and do outreach on campus.

A day earlier on December 2nd, Savio electrified the crowd at Sproul Hall with his important “Put Your Bodies Upon the Gears” speech: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it—to the people who own it—that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” For years after his involvement, Savio would be hounded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which continually violated his Constitutional rights.

Those students engulfing Sproul on December 3rd also protested disciplinary actions against four student leaders: brother and sister Art and Jackie Goldberg (both leaders of the student United Front), Mario Savio, and Brian Turner. (All had spoken from the car holding Weinberg.) With many of the students toting sleeping bags, the demonstration was orderly. During this famed sit-in students studied, others watched movies, and still others sang folk songs. Joan Baez led the singing and offered support. “Freedom classes” on a variety of issues were held by teaching assistants on one floor. Occurring as this action did during the Jewish festival of Chanukah, students observed the holiday by lighting a menorah.

Alameda County deputy district attorney—later Ronald Reagan henchman and censorious U.S. Attorney General—Ed Meese got the “OK” from Governor Pat Brown to remove the students from the Sproul Hall in a mass arrest. Cordoning off the building in the early hours of December 4, 1964, the police stormed the building and arrested nearly 800 students. (This was the largest mass arrest of students in U.S. history up to that time.) Most of those arrested were released on their own recognizance after a few hours at Santa Rita Prison. Gluttons for punishment, the UC administration proceeded to bring charges against the “almost 800”—which led to an even larger demonstration by students, which closed the university!

While outrageous disciplinary actions were continued against the involved students, UC officials finally started to back down. In early 1965, new regulations were promulgated by the Berkeley administration that permitted tabling and other forms of political activity subject time restrictions.

While there was a backlash following the Free Speech Movement that catapulted Ronald Reagan to the California governorship in 1966, the tradition of political organizing continued at Berkeley unabated. Reagan—who demanded that “the mess” in Berkeley be “cleaned up”—immediately directed the UC Board of Regents to fire President Clark Kerr who was considered by him to be “too soft” on the students. The fact is that Clark Kerr was irrelevant. Students who had confronted the horror of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the brutality of Mississippi racists, outrageous mandatory ROTC training, and backroom tactics of East Bay business interests (who loathed student support for a “fair housing ordinance” and the Woolworth/Kress boycott) were not going to be stopped by university administrators. The Free Speech Movement would be followed in 1965 by the instrumental Vietnam Day Committee, which helped to set the tone of the mass movement in opposition to U.S. policy in Vietnam.

An instrumental spokesperson for the Free Speech Movement was red diaper baby Bettina Aptheker, who cut her teeth on the “Old Left” politics of her family—notably the Marxist historian and Communist Party theoretician Herbert Aptheker. Having met luminaries such W.E.B. Dubois and Paul Robeson while growing up in Brooklyn, she was an important bridge between progressive political currents and tendencies. In the early 1970s she championed the release of political prisoner, childhood friend, and fellow UC professor Angela Davis. Aptheker has taught in the UC Santa Cruz Feminist Studies department since 1980. She has the great honor of having been included on the list of right-wing naysayer David Horowitz’s “101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” (2006). Brian Turner—a scion of a trade unionist family—went on after graduation to do important research on employment and union issues. Jackie Goldberg was the first openly LGBT elected member of the Los Angeles School Board and City Council. She later served in the California legislature until term limits kept her from running for reelection.

Mario Savio’s “Put Your Bodies Upon the Gears” speech

Berkeley Free Speech Movement Archives

Free Speech Movement Photographs

Free Speech Movement Digital Archives

The FSM: An Historical Narrative (by Bettina Aptheker)

In Memory of Mario Savio (by Bettina Aptheker)

The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (by Robert Cohen & Reginald E. Zelnik)

Essay by Jo Freeman (published in “Encyclopedia of American Social Movements”)

Narrative Summary by David Burner