Paul Thek: Ponza and Roma @ Alexander and Bonin

Paul Thek: Ponza and Roma is the first exhibition to examine the paintings and drawings Thek made in Italy during the 1970s. Following three sensational exhibitions of his wax meat pieces and the lost legendary installation The Tomb at New York's Stable and Pace Galleries in the 1960s, Thek spent a significant part of the 1970s in Europe. While there he created a series of large-scale collaborative installations constructed from transitory materials such as sand, newspaper and trees. These installations were exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Moderna Museet (Stockholm), “Documenta V” (Kassel), the Kunstmuseum (Lucerne), and Wilhelm-Lehmbruck-Museum der Stadt (Duisburg). Concurrently, Thek worked on the Mediterranean island of Ponza and in a flat in Trastevere, having first visited Ponza in 1968.

On Ponza, Thek captured the dramatic landscape of the island in traditional media of pencil, watercolor and oil paint. In Rome, he executed numerous paintings on spreads of the International Herald Tribune. A large number of these newspaper paintings were shown at Iolas Gallery in Paris in 1975. These works include images of Ponza, the sea, an eggplant, and a grape trellis as well as enigmatic personae such as a hot potato with arms and legs, and figures with globes or a valentine shaped heart for a head. Many of these images, and the Ponza motifs, are noted or sketched in Thek's notebooks, a selection of which is included in Paul Thek: Ponza and Roma. Ponza was a special place for Thek, a creative and spiritual haven. In his notebooks, he writes of the perfection of the work he made on Ponza and, referring to himself in the third person, “he couldn’t live without the special sweetness and purity of Ponza.” Three Roman notebooks in which Thek transcribed The Confessions of St. Augustine, punctuated by black and white Polaroids of clouds, are included in the exhibition as are selected correspondence and archival materials from the time. During this period in Italy, Thek created many works in conjunction with friend and photographer Peter Hujar.

Paul Thek was born in Brooklyn in 1933. He studied at the Art Students League and Pratt Institute in the early 1950s. In the mid-1960s, he produced a well-known body of work, The Technological Reliquaries: wax sculptures which looked like raw meat or human limbs encased in Plexiglas vitrines. Large-scale, full-body casts followed, sometimes set into specific environments. Thek’s work is included in numerous American and European museum collections with particularly strong representation of his drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2010-2011, “Diver,” a retrospective of his work curated by Elisabeth Sussman and Lynn Zelevansky was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Beginning February 6, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam will have a presentation of the works and letters of Paul Thek which came into their collection in 1994 through the bequest of Franz Deckwitz, a longtime friend and collaborator.

Although Thek began as a painter, he became known later in life for his sculptures and installations. Notable works include Technological Reliquaries (1964-67), a series of wax sculptures of human body parts, and The Tomb, a bright pink pyramid installation or "environment," which was badly damaged in 1981 but is documented in Edwin Klein's black and white photographs. Today his work may be seen in numerous collections, including that of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Thek died of AIDS related illness in New York City in 1988, aged 54.

Waves of nostalgia came over me as I absorbed this exhibition of Thek’s work: This was the first time for me seeing a collection of his work in one place since going to his posthumous show at the Clocktower Gallery in 1989 (that I reviewed for OutWeek Magazine in a December 1989 article called “Life Work”). While this work is very different from what appeared in that show, it is most compelling and hits at the heart of Thek’s processual methodology.

Through February 21, 2015

@ Alexander and Bonin

132 10th Avenue (between 18th & 19th Streets/Chelsea) NYC 10011

László Moholy-Nagy Production/Reproduction @ Andrea Rosen Gallery 2

"Man as a construct is the synthesis of all his functional apparatuses, i.e. man will be most perfect in his own time if the functional apparatuses of which he is composed – his cells as well as the most sophisticated organs – are conscious and trained to the limit of their capacity."

– László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), Produktion-Reproduktion, 1922

Curated by New York-based artist Erik Wysocan—recipient of Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artists and Hellen Gelman Fellowships—this exhibition takes its title from László Moholy-Nagy’s 1922 essay “Produktion-Reproduktion” in the Dutch journal De Stijl. That essay identified a turning point at which photography and film transcended conventional functions of reproduction and documentation to “produce new, as yet unfamiliar relationships.”

This installation at Andrea Rosen Gallery 2 revisits Moholy-Nagy’s engagement with the Berlin avant-garde and the circle of émigrés who left Hungary following the collapse of the socialist revolution. During that period, Moholy-Nagy formulated a politicized theory of aesthetics invested with materialism. His goal? To incorporate capacities of the body by posing a model of a wholly receptive biology in which collected cells and organs are sensitized to and shaped by aesthetics.

In this capacity, Moholy-Nagy expressed deep concerns for the sensory habituation technologies and their possible impact within the body itself. In Produktion-Reproduktion, Moholy-Nagy framed his lifelong project to parse innate qualities of emergent technologies and leverage positive capacities for “productive creation.” This was in opposition to stultifying effects of market-driven reproduction. In a 1932 essay he stated: “This phase is best expressed by capitalism’s anti-biological use of technology”—causing irreparable damage, with generations becoming enfeebled in their biological functions.

Already in the 1922 essay, Fame Bauhaus pedagogue and Modernist torchbearer Moholy-Nagy sought to deploy the logic of productive creation within the still-young field of photographic imaging to receive and record various light phenomena (or parts of light displays) to produce non-figurative images through direct manipulation of light. His thinking on the subject arose from experience with that period’s emergent photographic technology. In Moholy-Nagy’s case, that meant the Leica I—the camera that first made photography accessible to non-professionals and shared a political history that paralleled Moholy-Nagy’s.

After 1937 Moholy-Nagy worked primarily with the Leica series of cameras and, as with his own biography, the history of the camera’s development cannot be untangled from that political history and its resultant upheavals. The Leica I was released in the 1920s followed by the Leica II in 1932. During this same period the Soviet Union – unable to trade with Europe – began reproducing foreign technologies within the commune factories. In this way the Leica came into existence with a double life: the German original and a Soviet reproduction known as the FED. German forces destroyed the FED commune near the end of the war and manufacturing ceased until the fall of the Nazi regime when German technologies were expropriated back to the Soviet Union to rebuild production lines (in one notable instance, relocating an entire Zeiss factory). In the postwar years Leica copies continued to develop, some embellished with Leica logos and exaggerated connotations of wealth such as snakeskin leather and gold accents. Early models were intended for the Soviet audience, but following the collapse of the USSR, FED-made Leica copies found their way into western markets. With growing awareness of the Soviet provenance amongst collectors, a final revision came to light: re-inscribed with Nazi insignias intended to indicate German authenticity – a replica of a reproduction of a copy with no referent. For Production / Reproduction an original Leica II as well as three successive FED reproductions are presented. 

Over his lifetime Moholy-Nagy made strides with black and white photographic abstraction using the photogram technique, however, his longstanding ambition to do the same with color images was never realized. Made impossible by the state of photographic printing technology of the day, the project exited the darkroom to investigate the possibility of in-camera manipulation. The five abstract images in this exhibition made between 1937 and 1946, exemplify his work to directly manipulate light and color in photosensitive mediums. Moholy-Nagy died in 1946 making this late series the last of his investigation on the subject and perhaps his closing remarks with regard to Produktion-Reproduktion. The images were both prescribed and limited by the state of technology at the time they were made: the Kodachrome film employed for much of his color work was limited to producing slide transparencies. Despite significant research with color printing techniques, he was never able to achieve the color fidelity he desired in reproducing the images in print format–a project that would only be completed over half a century later by master-printer Liz Deschenes.  Thus the particular technical history in this work manifests Moholy-Nagy’s nuanced understanding of technological progress.

This exhibition addresses the lineage of direct technological manipulation in Moholy-Nagy’s work and pivots on a selection of his in-camera “light painting” investigations as expressed in a series of abstract color photographs. It also presents a selection of biographical photos in their original slide format–the intimacy of the works in their inceptive medium underscores the biological imperative and the agency of desire within Moholy-Nagy’s aesthetic framework. Moholy-Nagy was driven by a Modernist ideal of human progress that he strove to achieve within his own life through self-embodiment and reproductive teleology. 

Moholy-Nagy understood by the early 1920s that the reproducibility of technically based media such as photography and film, the easy production of facsimiles of artworks, the proliferation of image, sound and information through mass media, and an increasingly urbanized world have placed us into a fundamentally new situation. The Futurists wrote of simultaneity, the parallel stimulation of our senses from multiple sources. Moholy-Nagy felt that people needed guidance to cope with this simultaneous environment.

Through February 28, 2015

@ Andrea Rosen Gallery 2

525 W 24th Street, New York City 10011

Josh Smith @ Luhring Augustine

Luhring Augustine is exhibiting the new paintings and ceramics of Josh Smith. His fourth exhibition with the gallery, the show will be presented with two presentations, one on view at the gallery’s Chelsea location and the other on view at their Bushwick location.

The work of Josh Smith is distinguished by his mastery of multiple mediums (including painting, collage, sculpture, book and printmaking, and ceramics), his tireless production, and his tendency to acknowledge trends in painting and sculpture by expressly upending them. His most iconic works are paintings that boldly feature his name as their subject; in recent years, the name has given way to motifs such as leaves, fish, skeletons, insects, ghosts, and sunsets. In selecting these rather arbitrary subjects and rendering them in a manner that is by turns aggressive, playful, repetitive, and oblique, Smith compels us to move beyond aesthetics towards a focus on process and looking.

Not only is Josh Smith’s practice central to his generation's discourse on painting: His practice is also guided by certain parameters such as the persistent evidence of his hand, the regular sizing and serial nature of his work, and the use of diverse techniques, many of which are borne out of his training in printmaking. Spurred by that training in printmaking, he challenges the romantic mythology of the artist by creating mixed-media compositions that combine the handmade with manufactured and found objects to examine the value of originality versus facsimile. "Painting is like talking for me," Smith says. "It is how I communicate."The element of chance is also important, and Smith welcomes mistakes in his art of both the digital and analog variety. He strives to experiment constantly, but also to refine existing ideas, hence his prolific output is fundamental to his process. It not only reflects his inclination to think through his art, but also to challenge traditional notions of originality and authenticity. One of the most groundbreaking artists working today, Smith continues to test the rules of artistic convention and expand the language of contemporary art.

Furthermore, his paintings often communicate immediacy, speaking directly to the viewer and forcing interaction while forgoing formal representation and traditional technique in order to explore abstraction and composition. Though he has built a "bad boy" reputation among indie film and fashion types with his seemingly messy looking paintings, collages, book projects, and sculpture, his work is also seen as intensely emotional and sophisticated in the art world and has attracted important collectors and museums. Ultimately, many of Smith’s chosen motifs eschew formal representation toward an exploration of abstraction. Other works, such as his palette paintings, are purely abstract and explore notions of composition created by chance. In his mixed media collages on plywood, subway maps, take-out menus, newspapers and street posters are combined with reproductions of Smith’s existing works as well as silk-screened text and original painting. Following in the tradition of the “Combines” of Robert Rauschenberg (1925 – 2008) and the “Multiples” and “96 Picadillies” of Dieter Roth (1930 – 1998), Smith intersperses the manufactured with the handmade and elevates found materials by virtue of inclusion. He makes art so he can look at it.

Josh Smith (b. 1976) is from Knoxville, Tennessee and lives and works between Pennsylvania and New York. He has had several solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad, most notably The American Dream at The Brant Foundation in Greenwich, CT in 2011, Josh Smith at the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève in 2009, Who Am I at De Hallen Haarlem in 2009, and Hidden Darts at MUMOK in Vienna in 2008. He has also participated in important group exhibitions such as The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Le Printemps de Septembre in Toulouse, ILLUMInations in the 2011 Venice Biennale, and The Generational: Younger Than Jesus at the New Museum in New York. His works are in numerous public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, MUMOK, Vienna, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Through October 19, 2013, Chelsea (October 26, 2013, Bushwick)

@ Luhring Augustine & Luhring Augustine Bushwick

531 West 24th Street, NYC 10011

25 Knickerbocker Ave, Brooklyn 11237

Michael Raedecker @ Andrea Rosen

Andrea Rosen Gallery treats the viewer to yet another Michael Raedecker exhibition—his fifth—at the gallery. Highlighting substantial new developments in the Raedecker’s practice, this show anticipates an important traveling mid-career survey show opening at the Wilhelm-Hack Museum at the end of this year.

In a recent shift, Raedecker began cutting his painted canvases apart and stitching the fragments back together to form new compositions. The cut is disruptive and perverse: the rip becomes a repair and the fragmented scene becomes newly reanimated. In his newest body of work, Raedecker uses the intentional precision of this technique to interrogate our sentimental attachment to highly recognizable yet generic symbols of the good life: the suburban model home, the palm tree, the chandelier. These anonymous objects, repeated and set adrift in gestural monochromatic fields of paint, are placeholders for the whole history of the world, appearing and disappearing on the surface of the paintings.

The initial familiarity of these scenes allows for our personal investment in them, but the literal trace of the object, created by the puncture of the needle and gauge of the thread, continues to pull us back to the surface and to the painting itself as the object of extraordinary investment and inquiry. For Raedecker the decorative façade of a house is analogous to a painting – its flatness resists vision, reflecting instead the viewer’s own desires and fears. The painting, like the façade or the almost abstract filigree of a chandelier picked out in thread, is always a fragile surface, its loose narratives caving in on themselves, turning upside down and failing to resolve into known pictorial categories. This uncanny loop of recognition and estrangement is intensified by the newest sutures, which disrupt the integrity of the picture and memorialize the essential violence of representation.

The title of the exhibition invokes the tour as a journey undertaken for pleasure or inspection—a contemplative invitation to the viewer with various way stations for connection, exchange and new perspectives.  Raedecker’s enmeshed patterns spring from myriad sources: film, the American landscape, spaghetti westerns, old cowboy flicks, craft tradition, and nature’s various wonders—not to mention such human themes as solitude, tranquility and emotional isolation. This, while the monochromatic stillness of his compositions break down to the barest color-field essentials.

Michael Raedecker was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1963 and currently lives and works in London. He studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (1993 – 1994), and at Goldsmiths College, London (1996 – 1997). In 2000, Raedecker was shortlisted for the prestigious Turner Prize. Recent solo exhibitions include volume at Hauser & Wirth, London (2012); Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2010); and Line-Up which opened at Camden Arts Centre, London, England (2009) and traveled to Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands (2009) and Carré d’Art – Musée d'Art Contemporain de Nîmes (2010).

Through October 5, 2013

@ Andrea Rosen Gallery

525 West 24th Street, NYC 10011

Herb Jackson: Veronica's Veils @ Claire Oliver

Herb Jackson began his series Veronica's Veils in 1980 as a way to create a new space in which he could explore the enigmatical nature of the moment when a painting attains a life of its own. Thirty-three years and 223 paintings later, the exhibition Veils: new paintings from the artists ongoing exploration, continues the Artist's quest to create his own language of space. Jackson's paintings are pigment mixed with pumice, built up thin layer upon thin layer which he scrapes off and smoothes as the medium is being applied. Shapes, marks and topography come and go as the Artist engages the paint; gouging, scraping and excavating each consecutive stratum with whatever tool is dictated be it knife, fingernail or even dental tool. For Jackson, the work is a process not dissimilar to experiencing a long life, slowly evolving and revealing itself, much in the same way that our environment changes over time.

Noted art historian, critic and writer—the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art History at the University of Texas-Austin and author of Doubt (Routledge, 2008)—Richard Schiff says of the Artist's work: "Look for a parallel in nature and you will think not only of sky, air and water but also of ice and even crystalline rock. Jackson's brilliant hues tend to pull the space of his veils in and out, as if the entire painting were pulsing or breathing." While Jackson's work references the beauty found in nature, there is no sentimentality; a nod to myth and mystery is balanced with a very physical presence, creating contemplative work with the undying rumble of the tectonic plates.

"To require that an image be a bearer of content, (that) it must be recognizable is to suggest that there is no form to the unknowable,” Jackson says. “My personal journey (through art) confirms that it is not necessary to rob life of its mystery in order to understand it.” To understand the psychological dynamic of Herb Jackson's obsession with paint, we need look no further than the canvases in his current body of work. Says the artist of these paintings, "the canvas (begins) to exert more influence over the direction I must take, and at that point, it is often unclear where I stop and the painting begins". Yet Jackson’s works engage and excite; there is a dynamic force to his compositions and a haunting musicality to his themes that rewards repeated viewings; the work is not static.

In their constant theme and format, Veronica's Veils series can be compared to Robert Motherwell's Elegies to the Spanish Republic (over 100 paintings, completed between 1948 and 1967 as a "lamentation or funeral song" after the Spanish Civil War). One may recall the gestural, calligraphic nature of work by abstract expressionist Franz Klein (1910 – 1962) and the meditative emptiness and materiality of the surfaces created by Catalan painter, sculptor, and art theorist Antoni Tàpies (1923 – 2012), yet the experience of viewing a work by Herb Jackson is singular. The frequently jagged forms and broken surfaces somehow juxtapose quiet shape and flow to speak of relationship rather than destruction or death.

Herb Jackson has had over 150 one-person exhibitions, among them the first exhibition of Modern Art in the former Soviet Union. His work is in the permanent collections of over 125 museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the British Museum, London and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC.

Through October 19, 2013

@ Claire Oliver

513 West 26th Street, Ground Floor, NYC 10001

Spectator on the Stands of History @ (Art) Amalgamated

Running through Saturday, September 21, the group exhibition “A Spectator on the Stands of History,” brings together a diverse and accomplished group of artists, with the resulting dialog reflecting hope, fear, movement, homage to the past and a glimpse of the future.   Its venue, (Art) Amalgamated, is a project space founded by Gary Krimershmoys in January 2012, which exhibits an international, multidisciplinary group of artists that are on the forefront of the contemporary art discourse.  Experimentation with mediums, methods, conceptual quandaries, and sociopolitical engagement are encouraged and fostered.

Included in “A Spectator ...” is this ensemble of artists across different media, disciplines, experiences, various kinds and levels of engagement, and other confluences of creative geographies:

Rob Voerman is a Dutch artist who creates futuristic communities that construct simultaneous visions of utopia, destruction, and beauty that reflect on a rapidly changing society. He has exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Cobra Museum, Amstelveen; Bregenzer Kunstverein, Bregenzer (Austria); and the UCLA Hammer Museum, and many group exhibitions at venues such as University Art Museum, Santa Barbara; Generali Foundation, Vienna; Museum voor Moderne Junst, Arnem, NL; and the Museum of Modern Art. Architecture, instability, and deconstruction are central themes in the two-dimensional work and sculptures of Rob Voerman. His works are defined by a dialogue between the forms of old archaic appearances of the farmer’s-life and the modern technically developed society. The improvised constructions of his works reminds one of the anonymous architecture of sheds as can be seen on small farms and in gardens. Modern architecture was partially transformed and integrated by this archaic way of building. In his own words, Voerman tries “to create the architecture of fictive communities living in remote areas or occupying existing citylandscapes. The communities will consist of a mixture of utopia , destruction and beauty.” Voerman’s three-dimensional works are made of many different materials such as cardboard, glass, plexiglass, and wood. The sculptures recall the memory of a primitive hut but—at the same time—the technological achievements of the machine age. In Voerman’s sculptures, different typologies of architecture, furniture, and machines blend together. An example is Moonshine (2006), which is a table but at the same time a maquette of a ruined flatbuilding. The work also functions as a bar and a smoking area. A bar full of alcoholic drinks is built into the table and there is an ashtray mounted in it too.

Peter Beard, an artist based in New York and Kenya, has been widely known for photographs of Africa, African animals, celebrities. He has documented the history of his relationships with Africa, Karen Blixen, the New York art scene, the fashion world, Hollywood, and the Kennedy administration. In addition to creating original artwork, Beard has befriended and collaborated on projects with many artists including Andy Warhol, Andrew Wyeth, Richard Lindner, Terry Southern, Truman Capote, and Francis Bacon. In 1996, (shortly after he was trampled by an elephant), his first major retrospective opened at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris, followed by other exhibits in Berlin, London, Toronto, Madrid, Milan, Tokyo and Vienna.  When Beard first went to Kenya in August 1955, the country’s population was roughly five million, with about 100 tribes scattered throughout the endless "wild—deer—ness" - it was authentic, unspoiled, teeming with big game—so enormous it appeared inexhaustible. Everyone agreed it was too big to be destroyed. Now Kenya's population of over 30 million drains the country's limited and diminishing resources at an amazing rate: surrounding, isolating, and relentlessly pressuring the last pockets of wildlife in denatured Africa. The beautiful play period has come to an end. Millions of years of evolutionary processes have been destroyed in the blink of an eye. The Pleistocene is paved over, cannibalism is swallowed up by commercialism, arrows become AK- 47s, colonialism is replaced by the power, the prestige and the corruption of the international aid industry. This is The End Of The Game over and over. What could possibly be next? Density and stress—aid and AIDS, deep blue computers and Nintendo robots, heart disease and cancer, liposuction and rhinoplasty, digital pets and Tamaguchi toys deliver us into the brave new world.”

David Birkin, a British artist who currently lives in New York, explores the language of loss in both the private and political domains and deals with limitations of visibility, combining original and appropriated imagery with a conceptual approach. Having written and photographed editorial commissions on subjects ranging from the deforestation of orangutan habitat in Borneo to the Afghan Film Institute in Kabul,  Birkin has been the recipient of the Sovereign Art Prize (Barbican, London), Celeste Art Prize (Museo Centrale Montemartini, Rome) and a National Media Museum bursary, and has exhibited at the Courtauld Institute, London; The Photographers’ Gallery; and Saatchi New Sensations. His work was recently shown at the MoMA PS1 Rockaway Dome as part of Expo 1: New York. He will begin the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in September 2013. Lucy Davies managed to put his work in a nutshell when she wrote in the Telegraph: “David Birkin works with photography and performance to recount the ephemeral. His interest lies in the overlap between the two, where the life of the artwork exists in two places at once –first via the original event, and second within the visual echo or trace it leaves behind on a single two-dimensional image. Often these events are constructed by Birkin, but he is equally adept when drawing from history, plumping his concept until it positively glows with allusions. The result is a body of work that teases our struggle and fascination with limits – of perception, existence, knowledge and death.”

Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid are Russian born, New York based conceptual artists who collaborated to produce artworks from 1973 to 2003. They are perhaps best known as the founders of SotsArt (СоцАрт), a form of Soviet Nonconformist Art that combined elements of Socialist Realism and Western Pop Art in a conceptual framework that also references Dadaism. Komar and Melamid also collaborated with other artists, for example, Douglas Davis, Fluxus member Charlotte Moorman, Andy Warhol, among others. Their first international exhibition was took places in New York, in 1976. Since then, they have had numerous public commissions and exhibitions throughout the world. Their works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Komar has said he isn't so concerned that people actually enjoy the work, so long as it provokes thoughts of free will versus predetermination. To tie that concept into their earlier work, Komar said, "In our early work, we arrived at [the] definition of freedom that entailed being free from individual cliches, being free to change intonations and styles. Individuality lost its stability and its uniqueness. Now we are searching for a new freedom. We have been traveling to different countries, engaging in dull negotiations with representatives of polling companies, raising money for further polls, receiving more of less [the] same results, and painting more or less [the] same blue landscapes. Looking for freedom, we found slavery."

Meredith Monk is an American composer, singer, director/choreographer and creator of new opera, music-theater works, films and installations. A pioneer in what is now called “extended vocal technique” and “interdisciplinary performance,” Monk creates works that thrive at the intersection of music and movement, image and object, light and sound in an effort to discover and weave together new modes of perception. Over the last five decades, she has been hailed as “a magician of the voice” and “one of America’s coolest composers.” Celebrated internationally, Monk’s work—which has always defied categorization—has been presented by BAM, Lincoln Center Festival, Houston Grand Opera, London’s Barbican Centre, and at major venues in countries from Brazil to Syria.

Peter Rostovsky, a Russian born, New York-based artist, whose work represents the artist’s attempt to reconcile a deep interest in history with a keen interest in recording the immediate world around him. He was selected for the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and has exhibited widely both in the United States and abroad including such venues as the Walker Art Center, MoMA PS1, the ICA in Philadelphia, SMAK Museum in Ghent and Rauma Biennale Balticum in Finland. He currently teaches painting at NYU. Rostovsky’s work attempts to reconcile a deep interest in history with a keen interest in recording the immediate world around him. Each project begins with a simple question for him: “How is the past inherited by the present?” For instance, how does one currently experience the sublime? Or, what constitutes our contemporary experience of transcendence, ritual, and solidarity? What results are surprising updates and pictures of the present revealed as at once cliched, yet rich with repressed cultural meaning and transgressive possibility. Drawing on art history, film, photography, and the internet, Rostovsky’s paintings scavenge today’s omnivorous visual culture where paintings by Caspar David Friedrich rub up against sci-fi illustration and where the project of  Modernist abstraction can be read within the grids of local athletic fields. It is this overlap that compels him—that moment when one sees the contours of the past reflected through banal conventions of the present and the image of the outdated, the exhausted, and the reified glimmering again with new life.

Monika Weiss, a Polish-American artist based in New York, creates durational, performative and site-specific public projects, as well as films, drawings, photographs and sculptures, suggesting alternative forms of knowledge and perception. Originally educated as a classical musician, Weiss is renowned for the use of her own body as a vehicle of artistic expression. In 2005 Lehman College Art Gallery (City University of New York) organized a survey exhibition of the artist’s work to date. Solo exhibitions include Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos (Santiago), Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle (Warsaw), and Chelsea Art Museum (New York). Weiss’ work has been also featured at Kunsthaus Dresden, El Museo del Barrio, The Drawing Center, Montanelli Muzeum, and North Dakota Museum of Art, and is included in collections of CIFO Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (Miami), Albertina Museum (Vienna), and Frauen Museum (Bonn). Weiss’ transdisciplinary work examines relationships between body and history, and evokes ancient rituals of lamentation as traditionally performed in response to war. Her current work considers aspects of public memory and amnesia as reflected within the physical and political space of a city.

As English author, journalist and television personality Will Self has said: “Life, it is true, can be grasped in all its confused futility merely by opening one's eyes and sitting passively, a spectator on the stands of history–but to understand the social processes and conflicts, the interplay between individual and group, even the physicality of human experience, we have need of small-scale models.” This show encompasses and conveys—in an abbreviated way—such physicality, experimentation, and various kinds of sociopolitical engagement and discourse.

Through September 21, 2013

@ (Art) Amalgamated

317 10th Avenue, Ground Floor, NYC 10011

“Flock House” & Other Narratives

[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

[“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