Ori Gersht: Falling Petals

[“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

[“#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

[“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)

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

[“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

[“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

[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

[“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

[“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

[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

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

[“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

["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

[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

[“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

[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