re-title.com Features

On Stellar Rays, New York

 

CLIFFORD OWENS

November 2 - December 14, 2008
Opening reception: Sunday, November 2, 3 - 6 pm

On November 2, On Stellar Rays will open an exhibition of photo-based work by Clifford Owens, marking the first solo exhibition for both the gallery and the artist.

Owens is well known for his Studio Visit series, in which he engages visiting artists or arts professionals in one-on-one acts relating to the visitor's work.  Studio Visits originated during a Skowhegan residency in Maine, where William Pope.L was one of the artists to visit Owens' studio. Owens commonly uses the body as a conduit for conversation, exposing the underlying dynamics between two individuals through prescribed physical interactions. The studio visit with Pope.L began with Owens' empty, white studio, buckets of mud, and pails of water.  Owens and Pope.L proceeded to cover the walls with mud, each mud-slinging and smearing in turn. The performance was documented on a roll of black and white film, from which all 36 photographs will be on view, unedited and in sequence.  As with all of Owens' work, the installation goes beyond documentation and takes on a strong formal component.  The first image captures the white studio, and as more mud covers the walls, and sequentially gradates to darker shades.

Owens plays with the history of conceptual text-based work in Text Piece, which presents a grid of 47 photographs of white text against black.  Though the stark formalism might initially suggest more distanced work (Owens often-present body is conspicuously absent), closer inspection reveals 47 intimate and personal phrases.  The viewer is confronted with "She likes to finger my feelings," "Mother Baltimore," and "I thought you were gay."  Here, the conversation is more literal, though it is unclear whether the words are directed at us, the artist, or whether the conversation is happening within the piece.

In Owens' most recent body of color photographs, the artist explores the uniquely African-Ecuadorian community of the Esmeralda Province, Ecuador.  There continues to be a thoughtful exploration of self in the work (Owens' young son is half Ecuadorian).  This is visible though the eyes of the young men Owens encountered in the Esmeraldas, who are looking intensely at Owens in each work.  Prelingual, an intimate family portrait taken before his son's birth, will also be on view.
 
Owens is perhaps best known for his provocative performances, in which the audience is frequently required to engage with Owens, and shifts of power and perspective are at play.  Owens will offer two performances in conjunction with this exhibition.  On November 2, there will be a performance in the downstairs gallery of On Stellar Rays. In addition, Owens is offering a custom-designed performance for an individual or institution.  Owens will visit the commissioner in advance, script and produce a unique performance for the commissioner and guests, to be performed in his or her private space. The work will be documented and made available to the commissioner in a video and photographs. This work pushes Owens' exploration of the interaction between artist and audience, and the positions of control and perspective in any engagement with art. Please contact the gallery for more information.
 

Clifford Owens art has appeared in numerous group exhibitions including Performa05, New York, NY; Freestyle and Quid Pro Quo at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Greater New York 2005 P.S.1, Queens, New York; Influence, Anxiety, Gratitude, List Visual Art Center, Cambridge, MA. Owens studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Mason Gross School of Visual Art Rutgers University, and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He was an artist in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 2005-06 and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2004. Grants and fellowships include Art Matters, Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Lambent Foundation, and the Rutgers University Ralph Bunche Graduate Fellowship. He was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1971, and he lives and works in Queens, New York.

 

Image:
Clifford Owens

Prelingual

C-print, 2008

Courtesy of On Stellar Rays, New York

 

On Stellar Rays
Candice Madey

133 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002
+1 212 598 3012

On Stellar Rays

 

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Curator's Office, Washington DC

 

Vanitas
Nicholas & Sheila Pye

November 8 - December 20, 2008
Opening Reception:  Saturday, November 8    6 - 8 pm
 
These actions are both heavily incestuous, and not at all: a delicate balance struck by the couple who claim that they are as much like brother and sister as they are lovers. This, perhaps, is the most common and dangerous trapdoor for married life, which, for the Pyes, is a dark series of dangerous games worth looking into.

Laura McLean-Ferris, Artreview Magazine

 
Curator's Office is pleased to announce Vanitas, a new exhibition of cinematic and photographic works by celebrated Canadian husband-wife collaborative team Nicholas & Sheila Pye. This will be the second exhibition of the Pyes' work at Curator's Office. Vanitas includes a film entitled Loudly, Death Unties, which is the final part of a trilogy of films, and five large-scale photographs.  The Paper Wall and A Life of Errors, exhibited at Curator's Office in 2006, were the first two films from this provocative trilogy.

A full color hard-cover catalog (52 pages) is available with texts by Andrea Pollan, Director of Curator's Office, and Anna Sansom, writer for Eyemazing Magazine. The Sansom text is an extract from an interview for Eyemazing Magazine, Summer Issue 2007, Picture Booklets Publishers.

In Vanitas, the Pyes play with themes present in the art historical genre of still life painting to examine their own relationship. Carefully staged and precisely crafted, one photograph features the symbolic fodder found in the vanitas painting genre: skulls, ivy, rotting fruit, and books. Four portraits delve into issues of mortality, narcissism, and the complex issues of youthful existence, the nature of being, and death. The artists take their married relationship and allude to the impermanence and illusion of togetherness. It is as though they are faking their deaths to consider their mortality and to repent to one another.

The Pyes relentlessly blur the borders between their lives and their art as they tackle the highly charged yet poetic issues that arise from their own relationship. But theirs is not a self-absorbed biographical fascination. Rather, the relationship depicted in their bodies of work becomes emblematic of all things that can go wrong in a mutually dependent and suffocating relationship. The Pyes' artistic output spans photography, film, performance, video, and installation while acknowledging the profound influences of surrealism in film, narrative conventions in painting, 19th and early 20th century portraiture, and conceptual approaches to subject matter. Given this well-versed theoretical blend, they avoid prosaic performance art documentation preferring to transform their photographs and films into works that cleverly reconfigure art historic antecedents. Additionally the finished works acknowledge their intrinsic aesthetic status as art objects.
 
The Pyes have exhibited their work at museums such as The Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, France; Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Canada; The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada; The Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Canada; and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Their work has been screened in numerous international film festivals such as the Toronto International Film Festival, Canada; the Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland; and Les Rencontres Internationales in Paris, Berlin, and Madrid. Their work has also been exhibited internationally at numerous galleries including Curator's Office, Washington, DC; Artcore / Fabrice Marcolini, Toronto; Alexia Goethe Gallery, London;  Begoña Malone Gallery, Madrid; and Caprice Horn Gallery, Berlin among others.

 

Image:
Nicholas & Sheila Pye, Vanitas, 2008, digital C-print,
60" x 44", 152.5 x 112 cm, edition of 5 + 2 APs
Courtesy of Curator's Office

 

Curator's Office
1515 14th Street NW, Suite 201
Washington, DC 20005
+1 202 387 1008

Curator's Office

 

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Ada Street Gallery, London

 

'jumpgallery' presents the photographic exhibition '7' at Ada Street Gallery

 

11 November - 16 November 2008

Private View Thursday 13th November 6-9pm

'7' is a print edition aimed at making high quality photographic art more readily accessible to the masses.

7 artists
Paul Calver, Victoria Ling, Oliver Martin, Spencer Murphy, Kate Peters, Linda Rompalla and Cat Vinton

7 images
Each of the seven artists has released an exclusive image, available in three limited editions.
Prints will be available throughout the exhibition and online in the '7' shop at jumpgallery.com

7 editions
The 3 editions


About Jump Gallery
Jumpgallery is an artist run, online photographic print sales gallery. Jump is about community, about people getting together and discussing ideas. We set up the print sales gallery to support this. We have links from our individual artist's websites to Jump and vice versa, creating a network of artists.
As a commission free gallery we aim to make prints affordable for all and allow buyers to deal directly with the relevant artist. We came up with the concept of the print sales event '7' to make photographic art even more affordable.

Paul Calver was born is Suffolk in 1980. He studied photography at the Kent institute of art and design and after finishing his degree moved to London.

Victoria Ling was born in Suffolk in 1979. She studied Fine Art at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and whilst studying became fascinated by photography. Her final exhibition consisted of photographic installations, or 'living images', challenging the way the viewer saw the gallery space. After graduating she assisted still life photographer Richard Foster for 2 years before becoming freelance. She now lives and works in London, working on her own projects and commissions.

Oliver Martin was born in England in 1975. He studied photography at Harrogate College of Art and then
further at the University of Brighton. After University he worked as an assistant to still life photographer Richard Foster and then with Landscape and Advertising photographer Stuart Hall where he worked on major advertising campaigns through out Europe and the US. In 2003 he travelled to Cambodia working on his first major project where he photographed children aged from 4 - 14 who worked at Damnakthom village, a refuse site located on the outskirts of the capital Phnom Pehn. He now lives in London working on commissions whilst continuing with his own projects.

Spencer Murphy was born in 1978 in Kent, England.After studying Photography at Falmouth College of Arts in Cornwall Spencer Moved to London. His work has since been exhibited and published all over the world. He now balances his time between producing his own artwork, taking on commissions and lecturing at University College Falmouth.

Kate Peters was born in Coventry, England in 1980. She studied Photography at Falmouth College of Arts, Cornwall and after completing her degree moved to London. She assisted photographer Nadav Kander for four years and now undertakes her own personal projects and commissions. She won the Metro Imaging Bursary for her work Home in 2002 and the Creative Futures Award in 2005. Her work has been included in group shows in galleries across the UK.

Linda Romppala was born in Sweden (1979) where she has studied photography and arts. Moved to England 5 years ago to study Photography and Media Arts at UCCA in Maidstone. Graduated 2006 and are now working as an assistant and photographer in London.

Cat Vinton was born in Northamptonshire, in 1974. After successfully graduating from Camberwell School of Art and Design in July '97, Cat left the UK to work in the People's Democratic Republic of Lao. Since then she has lived and worked as a photographer, both in London and Los Angeles. Based in London, she shoots and exhibits all over the world. Cat has recently been awarded the accolade of International Travel Photographer of the Year. Her prize will take her to the Tibetan settlement, Dharamsala in northern India, to spend time with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. Cat is in search of the worlds remaining nomadic souls.

 

Image:
Kate Peters

Courtesy of the artist

 

Ada Street Gallery
2a Ada Street
London, E8 4QU
Jump Gallery
+44 07909 515481

Jump Gallery

Kate Peters

 

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Raandesk Gallery of Art, New York

 

MISREAD: NEW WORKS BY MARIANNE FOURIE

October 24 - November 15, 2008

Raandesk Gallery is pleased to present the New York City gallery debut of photographer Marianne Fourie with her first solo exhibition, misread, a collection of large-scale photomontages, opening in October 2008.

Originally pursuing painting early in her career, Fourie was steered in a new artistic direction during a trip to Japan through photography. Positioning herself at the front of a subway train, she would shoot images as she rode through the darkened tunnels. She captured highly vivid, dynamic and beautiful arrays that she then digitally manipulated to explore and expand the plethora of forms she saw. Since that first experience, she has taken photos on subterranean trains in Paris, France, London, England, and Boston, New York and New Jersey.

"The strange forms created when taking photos of light sources in motion are 'misreadings'. I use this digital noise - the camera's attempts to capture data - to depict memories, thoughts and emotions," describes the artist. "The transient and intangible made into photo form become the material for mental responses that are themselves transient and intangible."

The photographs included in the exhibition are mounted and laminated archival digital C-prints, and the smallest of the collection is 29" x 30", with most images presented in a vertical orientation, some 80" high. The glowing surfaces illuminate the images that explore the relationship between photographic representation and painterly abstraction and the technical elements in tension with the speed and fluidity of the setting in which they were captured.

Marianne Fourie is an international artist Raised in South Africa and England, and educated in South Africa and France, she is now producing her artwork from her studio in Hoboken, NJ. She has participated in a number of exhibitions in France and the NY region, and most recently in 'ILLUMINATORS', an international juried exhibition mounted in the new international terminal at Koltsovo airport in Yekaterinburg, Russia. Marianne was recently awarded an Honorable Mention in the 28th Annual Spring Photography Contest held by Photographer's Forum magazine.

 

Exhibition is located at Raandesk's partner location:
VinoVino at 211 W. Broadway, New York, NY.
 

Image:
Marianne Fourie

Pleasure I, 2007
Mounted and laminated archival digital C-print
39.4" x 26.3"
100cm x 67cm
Edition, 1 of 3

 

 

Raandesk Gallery of Art
16 W. 23rd Street
4th Floor
New York, NY 10010
+1 212.696.7432

Raandesk Gallery of Art

 

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Exile, Berlin

 

Exile, a new project and residency space in Berlin-Kreuzberg, is very proud to open its doors on October 18th with two fantastic exhibitions featuring two unsung heroes of New York's creative underground:

Al Baltrop - Pier Photographs 1975-1986

Oct 18th - Feb 01st 2009

Al Baltrop was born in the Bronx in 1948 and passed away in 2004. From 1975 to 1986 he photographed the crumbling piers and their inhabitants on the west side of Manhattan. He photographed obsessively and created an incredible archive of thousands of photographs that show a captivating mélange of intimacy, decay, violence, creativity and anarchy. Without ever being nostalgic Baltrop's photographs portray the end of a legendary era; the architectural destruction of the piers and, even more, the emotional and physical destruction brought by the impact of the AIDS crisis. However, his photographs are so much more than historical documents. His passion and personality are visible in the prints. Each of his photographs offers a well-constructed, intimate, and moving glimpse into this fascinating time and place. During his lifetime, there was little artistic appreciation of his photography and only in recent years has his work slowly emerged to greater awareness. In February 2008 Artforum Magazine devoted its cover and a comprehensive visual essay to his work accompanied by a text by respected artcritic Douglas Crimp.

Exile is extremely honored to present the very first Solo-show of Al Baltrop's work in Europe. Al Baltrop - Pier Photographs 1975-1986 will present a monthly changing display of rare vintage and modern prints. Modern editions of each photograph, printed by the Alvin Baltrop Trust, are available for sale. Excerpts from an upcoming documentary produced by Baltrop's friend and former assistant Randal Wilcox will be screened as part of the exhibition.

 

 

 

Straight to Hell - In Cock We Trust (Resident: Billy Miller, New York)

 

Oct 18th - Nov 16th 2008

Straight to Hell (a/k/a The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts) is a living legend. Conceived and founded by cult writer Boyd McDonald in the early 1970s, it quickly gained a large following and underground notoriety due to a combination of graphic sexual content, radical politics and stinging wit. The unique concept of Straight to Hell remains unchanged: via a New York City P.O. box, readers are invited to send their accounts of true sexual experiences to the editor. Over the decades Straight to Hell has become an infamously comprehensive and uncensored library of homosexual practice and identity. The resulting series is a uniquely democratic and powerful collection of bizarre, funny, scary, and raunchy stories documenting the real and often embarrassing sex lives of a wide range of men - detailing a continuous chronology spanning nearly a century.

Exile is honored to inaugurate its residency space with an exhibition curated by current editor Billy Miller. Straight to Hell - In Cock We Trust presents an eclectic, and in some cases never before seen, selection of vintage and contemporary materials from the archives of Straight to Hell and the personal collection of Billy Miller. This particular exhibit is specifically not intended to be a historical overview over the complete story of the series, but rather a sample of the range of material featured in the pages of the magazine. Along with an exhibit of photography from Straight to Hell contributors, the show includes rare editions and ephemera - plus samples from edited anthologies, which will be made available for research during opening hours. Exile will also present a very special limited-edition artwork in honor of the occasion.

Participating Artists: Adam Kozik, Al Baltrop, Bob Mizer (A.M.G.), Brian Brennan (Latino Fan Club), Bruce La Bruce, Dan Acton, Darren Ankenbauer (Handbook Magazine), David Hurles (Old Reliable), Gary Indiana, Jan Wandrag, Janine Gordon, Joe Ovelman, Michael Alago, Michael Economy, Nico Urquiza, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Rick Castro (Antebellum), Scott Hug, Slava Mogutin, Stash Buttinski, Steve LaFreniere, Walt Cessna, Will Munro, Xavier Stentz and others

 

Images:

Al Baltrop, Pier Photographs 1975-1986

Straight to Hell, Installation view

 

Exile
Alexandrinenstr 4, HH
D-10969 Berlin
+49 176 83097626

Exile

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Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, New York

 

Meat After Meat Joy
curated by Heide Hatry

Sheffy Bleier, Lauren Bockow, Adam Brandejs, Tania Bruguera, Nezaket Ekici, Anthony Fisher, Betty Hirst, Zhang Huan, Tamara Kostianovsky, Simone Racheli, David Raymond, Dieter Roth, Carolee Schneemann, Stephen j Shanabrook, Jana Sterbak, Jenny Walton, and Pinar Yolacan 

16 October - 15 November

If the flesh disturbs you, then the reality behind the issue would disturb you far more if we opened our eyes long enough to see it. We live in a culture disconnected from what it is doing to itself and others, we choose to ignore rather than deal with the reality we have created for ourselves.
- Adam Brandejs

Meat After Meat Joy brings together the work of contemporary artists who use meat in their work (raw meat, the concept of meat, its symbolism and viscera) in order to investigate the paradoxical relationship meat has to the body. Meat combines flesh, skin, muscle, organs, blood - each with its own relationship to the body, yet meat's only reference to the body is as a once-upon-a-time living biological thing. By putting these artists together, the exhibition seeks to investigate the uncanny effect meat as a medium is for artist and viewer. This is not a show about meat as spectacle but about meat as signification, precisely because meat does not signify (a body) but its very annihilation.

Skin is the body's largest organ and greatest protection. It is the body's most public point of vulnerability and private realm of pleasure. Flesh is associated with the body often the body of Christ. It can't be separated from the body except when it is torn, crucified, burned, flayed. Muscle and fat are anatomy, as well as the fit body, the football body, the anorectic body, the fat body. Meat is the body without skin. It has no identity. Meat cannot have a mood, cannot feel, nor have an intention.

And yet, an exhibition on meat seems like an obvious continuation of discussions of contemporary art and the body. Certainly in relation to feminism, meat has been an erotic and eschatological component of a libratory, transgressive discourse of female sexuality and the body beginning with Carolee Schneemann's path-breaking 1964 Meat Joy. After Meat Joy, the female body was no longer the 'poulet" or chick but an erotic and political force of the laugh of the Medusa (Helene Cixous)-the writhing ecstatic female body freed from the constraints of patriarchal definition (meat is the indefinable flesh) that expresses an epistemology (Interior Scroll 1975) into ontology (the feminist movement). In Meat Joy, although controversial, raw meat -animal human-and the human body are at their most uncontested and merged, for meat is not the absence or the other the body but an act of reclamation and affirmation of all that patriarchy had previously "disemboweled" from the female body.

But forty years later, in Meat After Meat Joy, meat, as metaphor or synecdoche of the body, is different because we recognize more clearly that meat is precisely what the animal or human body is when it is not. In other words, meat has no body, can't be a body, may have been a body but is only called meat because it is no body. Meat here is neither flesh nor skin, but the notion of the human or animal at its most base, absolute zero point of being, "being" as completely without "Being".
- Heide Hatry

 

Image:
Betty Hirst, Dried Baby
Courtesy of Daneyal Mahmood Gallery

 

Daneyal Mahmood Gallery
511 West 25th Street 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001
+1 212 675 2966

Daneyal Mahmood Gallery

 

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Galeria Fortes Vilaça, Sao Paulo

 

Aranhas
Paulo Nenflidio

9 October to 13 December 2008 

Fortes Vilaça is pleased to present Aranhas [Spiders], Paulo Nenflídio's second solo show in São Paulo. In this exhibition, consisting of an installation entitled Teia [Web] in the form of a spider's web along with three spider-shaped sculptures, the artist presents kinetic works, for the first time, exploring visual effects based on physical movements.

Hanging from the walls at a height of 1.7 m, Teia is a large, open and irregular structure that seems to hover in the air. Composed of stretched and overlain electrical wires and nylon line, this artwork also looks like veins or neural connections. In this work Nenflídio has maintained his characteristic use of sound: he has equipped the web with a device able to sense the viewer's proximity, activating the emission of different kinds of harmonic and high-pitched sounds, at the threshold of audibility. This results in a jumble of sounds resembling the noise of a fax machine or Internet dial-up connection.

The Aranhas are right nearby. These sculptures are intended to avoid any static condition, remaining in constant movement. They are open artworks that are reinvented at each moment, like the works by Dutch artist Theo Jansen, a key reference for Nenflídio.

The sculptures are low-tech, made of fiberboard, electrical components, conduit or PVC pipes, motors, power sources, sensors and black electrical tape. They are able to walk about or climb the wall for up to thirty seconds in a predefined space. Sensors situated in their "eyes" detect the presence of the spectator and set the spiders' legs into movement. Wires that connect the spiders to small power sources act as ramifications of the Teia, interconnecting the various pieces of the set.

For Nenflídio, "the artworks are related more with cybernetics than with kinetics, as they are automatons that create automatic music, as all the pieces together form a sonorous composition." The set effectively realizes a central aim of this artist: the interaction/participation of the public with the work of art.
In 2007, Paulo Nenflídio participated in the show Panorama, no MAM - Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo; in 2006 he took part in the exhibition Geração da Virada [The Turning-Point Generation] at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake. He received an award from the fifth edition of the Sérgio Motta Prize in Art and Technology, in 2005, and was conferred the Pampulha Grant in 2004.

 

 

Also showing:

 

Quase Cheio, Quase Vazio
Sara Ramo

Galeria Fortes Vilaça is pleased to present Quase Cheio, Quase Vazio [Nearly Full, Nearly Empty] by Sara Ramo. In her second solo show at the gallery, the artist presents artworks made using various supports including collage, video and slide projection, installation and photography.

Pet Cemetery
Erika Verzutti
 
Fortes Vilaça is pleased to present the exhibition Pet Cemetery by Erika Verzutti. The show transforms the exhibition space into a graveless cemetery, in which twenty-two new animal-shaped sculptures are set atop pedestals or arranged on the floor. For Verzutti, the "cemetery" is a "pretext to exercise different styles, reflect on cultural representation and on the use of bronze, common to the arts and to gravestones."

 

Image:

Paulo Nenflidio

Aranhas

Installation view Galeria Fortes Vilaça 

 

Galeria Fortes Vilaça
Rua Fradique Coutinho 1500
05416-001
Sao Paulo
Brazil
+ 55 11 3032 7066

Galeria Fortes Vilaça

 

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Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm

 

MARILYN MINTER
The Pam Show

October 23 - November 16, 2008

The Pam Show. Andréhn-Schiptjenko is pleased to present its third solo-exhibition by Marilyn Minter, one of USA´s most distinguished artists. The exhibition opens Thursday October 23, at 5-8 pm, in presence of the artist.

Ever since photographing her mother in her home in Ft.Lauderdale in the 1960's, creating what has become a seminal work, Coral Ridge Towers, soiled glamour has preoccupied Minter for almost four decades. Her extreme, large-scale close-ups of body parts, covered in sweat, dirt, makeup, pearls or soap bubbles show details that at times push the image past the point of abstraction. Minter´s paintings may seem hyper-real at distance but the surface dissolves at close range. The image used to create a painting is never a straight photo, Minter's references are produced by scanning multiple negatives and combining them in Photoshop to make an entirely new image, then used to make a new painting. By working both with painting and photography she examines the relationship between them and exhibits them together.

 

- Speaking of the relationship between the two Minter says:

".. I am not really a photorealist. My paintings are never reiterations of the photographs. The photos are like drawings to me.. those photos that shouldn't be painted (because they are "perfect photos") remain as photos and are shown as photography."

All the works in The Pam Show, originate from a photo session last year with actress and pin-up Pamela Anderson. In addition to these photos, Minter will present one new painting, entitled Barbed Wire.
In Minter's images of her, Anderson is almost unrecognisable as the icon she has become through media. Pamela Anderson, as image and media figure, embodies issues that Marilyn Minter has been examining for many years - how media influence our understanding of gender, sexuality and desire. These photos also call into question the distinction between artistic and popular media, high and low culture.

Marilyn Minter's work has recently been seen in the Whitney Biennial 2006, San Francisco Museum for Contemporary Art (solo) and is currently on view at Fotomuseum Winthertur (CH) in the show Darkside. Upcoming shows include Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Salon 94, New York; Site Sante Fe and Pretty is as Pretty Does; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH.

 

Image © the artist. Courtesy Andréhn-Schiptjenko

 

Andréhn-Schiptjenko
Hudiksvallsgatan 8
Stockholm
Sweden
+46 (0) 8 612 00 75

Andréhn-Schiptjenko

 

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Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin

 

JOHAN THURFJELL
DEAD CALM

OCTOBER 18 - NOVEMBER 14, 2008

Galerie Nordenhake is pleased to present a solo show with new works by Swedish artist Johan Thurfjell. The exhibition's title, "Dead Calm" comes from a shipping term describing a weather condition indicating a storm pulling up ahead and suggests a foreboding and an unknown yet imminent threat.

Thurfjell's works are often characterised by an interaction between visual form and subtextual narrative. Thurfjell uses his own personal experiences as an aesthetic tool in many of his works, which are often constructed as exquisitely crafted sculptural models.

The work "Goodnight Mom, Goodnight Dad" consists of four apparently identical wooden models of his parent's summerhouse. A closer inspection reveals that the houses are gradually shaded darker, indicating a chronology. Instead of using external lights to depict the transition of a sunny, late afternoon, through dawn and on to midnight, shadows and tone are painted onto the models. The oncoming evening indicated by the shadows also suggests a greater passing of time - a generational twilight. The viewer is invited to investigate a psychological landscape through which he bridges the gap between the personal and the universal.

"Dead Calm" is also the title of a series of 21 watercolours depicting cargo- and cruise ships from the 1940's to the present time. These various ships of different type and origin have in common that they eventually foundered in fires, storms and groundings. Using the original marketing photographs as a reference point Thurfjell counterpoints the heroic and idealised depictions of these ship's maiden voyages with the viewer's knowledge of their fates.
In the second room of the gallery, secluded from the other works, the viewer encounters "Bright Eyes", a sculpture of a life-size hare that is starring into a glaring spotlight. Despite it's calm and alert stance it gives the impression of being completely paralyzed by what it sees. Like the rabbit with prophetic abilities in Richard Adams novel "Watership Down" it has its eyes open to all inevitabilities to come.

Johan Thurfjell was born in 1970 in Solna. He lives and works in Stockholm. He has had solo exhibitions in Magasin 3 Stockholm konsthall (2007), Färgfabriken in Stockholm (2004) and Index in Stockholm (2001). His group exhibitions include the Lewis Glucksman Gallery in Cork (2007), Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm (2007), 21c Museum in Louisville (2006), Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2006), Signal Malmö (2005), the Nordic Festival of Contemporary Art Momentum in Moss, Norway (2004), Norrköpings Konstmuseum (2003) and Dunkers Kulturhaus in Helsingborg. In June 2008 he won an award from the Marianne and Sigvard Bernadottes artist fund.

 

 

Image:

Johann Thurfjell

Goodnight Mom, Goodnight Dad, 2008

MDF, wood, acrylic paint

Installation view

Courtesy of Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin

Galerie Nordenhake
Lindenstrasse 34
10969 Berlin
+49 30 206 1483

Galerie Nordenhake

 

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Vegas Gallery, London

 

Fake I.D.
Curated by Ken Pratt

16 October/9 November 2008

Jemima Brown, Morten Viskum, Michelle Deignan, Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven, Risk Hazekamp, Simon Willems, Angie Reed, Deborah Schamoni, Caron Geary

The actualization of an authenticity is an idea that remains bound up in popular notions of the aims of artistic practice. Perpetuated by the osmosis of art historical ideas into the popular consciousness, mass understandings of art often embrace the idea that the artist seeks to present an authentic experience. This is particularly notable in popular notions about figurative and representational art: the artist strives to offer the viewer an authentic insight into the full identity of a portrait sitter or to render a building or vista in a way that offers a true sense of the experience, one that cuts to its essence. If anything, this notion of the artist as someone who can offer us the 'real' experience of something in all its beauty or power may even have been heightened in the evolutionary developments to overcome reactionary expectations of representation or realism in the period after photography and movements such as Modernism. Perhaps nothing highlights this preoccupation with the relationship between artistic practices and 'the authentic' more than the developments of discourses such as Bourriaud's notions of Relational Aesthetics in the late 1990's. Within them there is an intrinsic assumption that artistic practices that seek to engage 'authentically' with social contexts constitute a valid and, perhaps, more desirable position for contemporary artists. In many instances, these notions of art that has an authentic engagement with the social context has shied away from artistic practices that results in objects; steer clear of things looking anything like the traditional idea of the painting or sculpture. And yet, both currently, and contemporaneous to the developments of the kinds of practices offered up in a Relational Aesthetics and its adjunct and subsequent developments, there are numerous contemporary artists who, through very different means and to very different ends, intrinsically build in evident artifice and 'inauthenticity' to their work. Identifiable fakeness, artifice or even blatant lies appear as content, concept or working methodologies. Sometimes as counterpoint in which questions about the formal orthodoxies of art are challenged, sometimes as juxtaposition playing a game of double-bluff with popular notions of art as a purveyor of an 'authentic' human experience, diverse artists adopt strategies in which visual elements of the discernibly false and inauthentic feed discussions about everything from the nature of personal identity and cultural trends to media constructs of the documentary. Fake I.D. is a group show that traces some of these devices and strategies through the work of a handful of international artists producing work today.

 

 

Image:

Morten Viskum

© the artist, courtesy of Vegas Gallery, London


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