re-title.com Features

LE FLASH 2009: A Night of Public Art and Performance in Atlanta

 

 

LE FLASH Atlanta 2009

Friday, October 2

Dusk to Midnight

Castleberry Hill District

 

www.Leflash-atlanta.com

 

An Evening When Art Experiments with Light

 

 

Opening Event for Atlanta Celebrates Photography: ACP11

LE FLASH presents a burst of fantastical art and creative performance for one October night in the Castleberry Hill district at the edge of Downtown Atlanta. From dusk to midnight, Atlanta expects to be showered with the light and sound of installations, performance art, poetry readings, music, video projections, an iron pour and art happenings of all sorts.

 

gloATL and Dancemaker Lauri Stallings present Pour.
Two dozen diaphanous dancers flood the streets with liquid energy in a performance designed for LE FLASH 2009.

 

Using light as the theme, LE FLASH centers on interactive installations, projected imagery and illuminated performance. The five-hour event shares a transitory aesthetic with cities around the world that take a night out for art once a year. Paris and Toronto, Tokyo and Berlin are among cultural destinations that light up for Nuit Blanche, a magnetizing city-wide phenomenon that is echoed in LE FLASH.

 

Curators Cathy Byrd and Stuart Keeler, inventors of LE FLASH, have played on the spatial dynamic of Castleberry, making site-specific use of empty lots and dark streets in ways that capture Atlanta’s largely untapped potential for experimental cultural production.

 

Stefani Byrd + Wes Eastin: You Sound Funny When You Smile
An interactive storefront installation works with sound and video to reverse cultural stereotypes. Sponsored by Atlanta Celebrates Photography

 

Byrd and Keeler aim to initiate a yearly ephemeral arts celebration that will deepen the significance of contemporary art Atlanta, while linking the community to a broader cultural scene. Creating an exciting and expandable platform for new-genre public art, the curatorial team calls attention to the need for public and private investment in impermanent projects.

 

 

Danielle Roney: Mission | Guest curator: Rebecca Dimling Cochran
The temporality of place and people is at the heart of Mission, a Castleberry-centered video installation. A nearby Baptist Mission provides respite for the transient citizens whose likenesses appear in the utopian landscape projected onto the corner of a U-Haul building.

 

This inventive site-specific project joins 60 other performances and installations that create Le Flash 2009, a communal encounter with contemporary art. While creating a burst of light and art in public space for only one night, Le Flash has taken on a significant role in shaping the cultural future of the city. Atlanta is now poised to invite the event into other neighborhoods; Le Flash can grow to celebrate art across the entire city.

 

 

www.Leflash-atlanta.com

 

 

 Atlanta Celebrates Photography supports Atlanta’s emergence as an international center for photography. Through an annual October festival and year-round programs, ACP seeks to nurture and support photographers, educate and engage collectors, promote diverse photography venues, and enrich Atlanta’s cultural scene. Through these efforts, ACP facilitates Atlanta’s emergence as a world-class city. For more information, visit acpinfo.org

 

 

 

Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin

 

 

TIM RODA - make BELIEVE

September 18 - October 31, 2009
 

Tim Roda has something that many emerging artists don't - three boys under the age of 11 and a burgeoning marriage.  And, because he has made them the content of his theatrically staged photographs for more than half a decade, Roda's work is also something of an anomaly.  It deals with content we don't see much of in contemporary art - the familial.  Rejecting the banality popular in contemporary photography, Roda features his wife and young boys throughout his black-and-white prints so that the relationships between father and son, wife and husband, mother and child are central to each composition.

But the Pennsylvania native uses more than his immediate family for inspiration.  The reticently slanted domesticity we see in every one of the 35mm images combines make-believe memories from the artist's own childhood, as well as autobiographical moments from the present and shared histories from his extended family's past. The photographs are balancing acts between documentary and falsity; family portraits of multiple generations becoming complicit within Roda's own; documents of a family memorializing what was while also playing with what is. And, as such, Roda's art directly meddles in his life, while his life intervenes in his art.

A sense of yearning as paired with a dreamlike playfulness - evident in homemade costuming and exaggerated narratives - is consistent throughout Roda's oeuvre and makes each vignette a timeless, virtual reality that is part memory, part history, part real-time record of lives as they are unfolding.

No more is this better evidenced than in his latest body of work, which comes on the heels of a Fulbright Scholarship in Italy - and will debut this fall at Roda's galleries in New York City, Seattle and Berlin - where Roda investigated a foreign domesticity as well as his personal past. After some time in Rome, the family headed South to Pentidatillo, the village where Roda's grandfather grew up.  Eager to explore his ancestor's existence as faithfully as possible, Roda blurred the lines between his art and his life more so than in any other series. The five Rodas settled into a one-bedroom house that served as both their home and Roda's studio.  The resulting images look, therefore, like extracted splices of real-life moments because they were.  The boys would be doing their homework or eating breakfast and they'd stop to work on one of Roda's sets.. 

Since Plato confined art to his cave, art and, for that matter, artists have struggled with art being second best to the "real" thing.  Modernism achieved a self-referential autonomy where art could exist in an obscure, albeit ideal "Platonic" place, governed not by real life but by stylistic laws.  Painting and sculpture were separate from the materialistic, mundane affairs of ordinary people. This was art for art's sake, and the complete opposite of Roda's paused performative reenactments of a life gone by and developing documents of a life going on. While the photographs have roots in the tradition of the family snapshot, Roda's work transcends.  Though his works are an ever-evolving documentary of Roda's relationship to his past and his present they are most of all compelling investigations of both the passage of time and the dynamism of human relationships.

Carrie E. A. Scott

Tim Roda (*1977 in Lancaster PA, USA) lives and works in New York surrounded by his family that represents, at the same time, his main artistic "material" and source of inspiration. He graduated whith excellence from the University of Washington. He took part to different residencies all around the world and received several awards, such as the Fullbright Award in 2008. 

 

 

 

PETER ZIMMERMANN

 

September 19 - October 31, 2009

For his first solo exhibition in Berlin, Peter Zimmermann utilizes two rooms of the Michael Janssen Gallery. In the first room, visitors come across two of his new sculptures. The current exhibition shows this special body of work to a wider audience for the first time. Zimmermann has been using epoxy resin for his pictures for two decades already, but it is only in recent years that he has also used the material to create three-dimensional works. With their intense colors, they unmistakably set themselves apart from the grey floor and white walls. At the same time, they take on an organic form, resembling oversized drops of a fluid that has been spilled accidentally. Yet a closer look reveals the complex structure of the sculptures. Their shiny, running surfaces give the impression of soft, upholstered objects. Sometimes it's even difficult to resist the temptation to prod them with a foot or poke at them with a finger. This is due to the material that they are made of. In its unprocessed state, epoxy resin is colorless and liquid. Zimmermann blends the liquid with pigments, using it to form layers. When the resin dries, it creates hard, stable, heavy formations. A similar effect can be observed with the pictures in the second room.. The same method of production is used to create large format canvases. As his starting point, Zimmermann uses digitized motifs taken from sections of earlier works or found on the internet, television or other sources. He manipulates them using Photoshop, combining details from different motifs in order to make a one-to-one template, which allows him to transfer the contours of the various patterns onto the canvas. With the additional use of stencils, the colored epoxy resin is then poured onto the surface. This happens layer by layer, with lighter colors being applied first. One special characteristic of the material is that, despite the use of a clear template, the final results vary. There is always an inevitable element of fortuity contributing to the process. The various layers of epoxy interact with each other in order to create the nuances that are ultimately appreciated in the finished work. The resulting smooth and transparent surfaces take on a captivating luminescence, which magically attracts the beholder. On one hand, the pieces embody a lightness that suggests dried soap bubbles. On the other hand, the substance is applied across the entire surface of the painting, yet each layer of color contributes relief-like elevations, giving the pictures a sculptural presence and a spacial impact. It almost seems as if the color wants to venture beyond the borders of the canvas, as if it had been difficult to restrain. The gleaming, irregular surfaces reflect the surrounding area, distorting it. When standing in the exhibition room, with the walls almost seamlessly absorbing the large format works, the viewer is confronted with an opulence that is almost overwhelming. Peter Zimmermann's painting defies all attempts at categorization, although the influence of action painting and its main exponent Jackson Pollock is clearly apparent.

Peter Zimmermann (born 1956 in Freiburg) lives and works in Cologne. He studied at the Academy of Art and Design in Stuttgart. From 2002 to 2007, he was a professor at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. His solo exhibitions have featured at important European and American institutions: "Wheels" at the Nuremberg Kunsthalle in 2007, "Current: Peter Zimmermann" at the Museum of Art in Columbus OH in 2008, and recently, the significant retrospective "All You Need" at the Museum of Modern Art Kärtnen in Klagenfurt, for which an extensive catalogue has been published.

Images:

 

Tim Roda, The Centaur, 2009
Black and white photograph printed on fiber matt paper
37 x 53,5 cm 

Peter Zimmermann, Untitled, 2009
Epoxy resin on styrodur
650 x 360 x 35 cm

 

Courtesy of Galerie Michael Janssen Berlin

 

Galerie Michael Janssen
Rudi-Dutschke-Straße 26
( formerly Kochstrasse 60 )
D-10969 Berlin
+49 30 2592725-0

Galerie Michael Janssen

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KLEMM'S, Berlin

 

 

Ulrich Gebert
Life among Beasts

September 5th - October 10th 2009

"All aspects of the relationship between human mankind and nature solidify behind the bars of an animal cage: repulsion and fascination, the will for appropriation, control and knowledge, the gradual acknowledgement of the complexity and idiosyncrasy of different life forms and much more. The microcosm of the zoo herewith stands in close relation to the history of other modern phenomena such as colonization, ethnocentrism and the discovery of the Other, the civilization of men, the development of cultural and commemoration sites like museums, or the development of leisure time. The gaze at the animal cage hence allows us to comprehend an entire society."
E. Baratay und E. Hardouin-Fugier: Zoo - Von der Menagerie zum Tierpark, Wagenbach, Berlin 2000

(translated by KLEMM'S, 2009)

Ulrich Gebert (*1976) examines in his metaphoric image-cycles and series the relation of human beings to their environment, in particular to nature - whether civilized or untouched. However, he does not pursue the 'romantic' idea of a reunification between culture and nature but rather creates in form and content a background that critically questions our living conditions. The question is, "How does the individual or society inscribe into the habitat?" Order, hierarchy, power structures, categorization, functionalization and instrumentalization are the terms that play a vital role here. Ulrich Gebert finds images which provide this information and which convey something that is hard to be translated into language. He selects from the variety of photographic possibilities and chooses forms of depiction according to the context, be it documentary, scenic, still life or based on found material. His approach conflates an almost scientific inquisitiveness with subjective auxesis and a precise intensification of the respective subject. In regard to the viewer Gebert relies on the psychological power of his images and the aesthetics of their presentation.

His current work 'Life among Beasts' takes reference to former cycles such as 'Typus' (2005) or 'Soft Land' (2007). At first sight the viewer encounters an unusual composition of partial forms and abstract information that are arranged in loose tableaus. In trying to order it according to existing categories the visual familiarization process gradually reveals the formal and conceptual coherences. The result, however, is disturbing and hardly accords to what one has expected or maybe wished for. Impressions of drastic brutality alternate with awkward tenderness and absurd humor.

His installations consequently convey this atmosphere into the space. A variety of antiquarian animal cages are set in dialogue with the images on the wall. Gebert has built new spaces in these 'living spaces': they are fictitious, abstracted landscapes, being familiar to the collective memory from zoological gardens or museums of natural history. The idea of the model discloses in the abstraction of these 'architectural landscapes': it is about 'the world in a nutshell', understanding the wild, collecting and exhibiting, and at last it is about taking control.

Inherent to these 'microcosms' - and in the same manner in the tableaus on the wall - is a gesture of violent appropriation in the sense of cultivation and categorization. Yet, it is immediately presented as aesthetically intelligible by means of clear composition and an aesthetic open to meaning.

Image:
Ulrich Gebert, Life among Beasts, 2009,
exhibition view KLEMM'S, Berlin
Image courtesy KLEMM'S, Berlin and Ulrich Gebert

KLEMM'S
Brunnenstraße 7
10119 Berlin
Germany
+49 (0) 30 40 50 49 53

KLEMM'S

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Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

 

 

Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler
Grand Paris Texas

12 September to 24 October 2009

We are pleased to present the work "Grand Paris Texas" by the artist duo Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler in their forth solo exhibition at the gallery.

In their elaborately produced video works - both filmically and architecturally - Hubbard and Birchler bring into play the shifts between the conscious and the subconscious, presence and absence, inwardness and outwardness. They fathom conflicts involving desire and repression, gender positions, remembering and forgetting. The house, or the dwelling, as an unstable space between home and haunting, frequently comes to the fore in their work as well.

Through their open narratives, which interweave agency and its spaces in a complex manner, Hubbard and Birchler unhinge the spatiotemporal order. Involved scenes include both real locations and mise-en-scènes appropriated by the artists based on personal experiences, historical research, and literary or filmic sources.
The protagonist of "Grand Paris Texas" is "The Grand", a long-abandoned cinema in Paris, Texas - the same small town made famous by Wim Wenders through his 1984 film of the same name, without the actual town even having made an appearance. "Grand Paris Texas" interweaves various narratives and metanarratives: about an obsolete site of filmic illusions, about a small town and its entanglements with Wim Wenders's film as well as with the French capital, and about the techniques and production methods of filmmaking itself. In "Grand Paris Texas", Hubbard and Birchler for the first time take up formats of the documentary so as to equally approach both real and imaginary spaces and situations.
At the dilapidated cinema, cluttered with debris and dated technology, we observe a film team armed with dust masks and gloves, their activities reminiscent of those pursued by speleologists. At one point, Hubbard and Birchler are even caught in the picture.
In a series of interviews, local residents comment on the former cinema, on films in general, and on Wim Wenders's "Paris, Texas" in particular. A funeral home director, for one, compares his work with that of a film director.
In "Grand Paris Texas", narratives and metanarratives are intricately interwoven - for instance, in the involvement of a VHS tape of Wenders's film that was found by the artists in a video store in Paris, Texas. Years ago, another video renter had accidentally overwritten the last section of the film, making it impossible to discover how the story of Paris, Texas ends. This anecdote can indeed be interpreted as a reference to the open narrative techniques employed by Hubbard and Birchler.

Teresa Hubbard, born 1965 in Dublin, Ireland, and Alexander Birchler, born 1962 in Baden, Switzerland, have been working together since 1990. Their works have been shown in numerous biennials, including the Venice Biennale (1999), the Busan Biennale (2008), or the Liverpool Biennial (2008) and in exhibition venues like the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., the Museum of Contemporary Art at the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Hamburger Bahnhof-Museum for Contemporary Art in Berlin, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Whitney Museum in New York, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and the Reina Sofía in Madrid.
In 2008, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth dedicated a comprehensive solo exhibition to the artist duo with No Room to Answer. Now with No Room to Answer - Projections, the Württembergischer Kunstverein is focusing on a wide selection of video installations by the artists. A further variation on the exhibition will be offered this fall by the Aargauer Kunstmuseum in Aarau, Switzerland, at the same time as our show at the gallery.

Source: Württembergischer Kunstverein

Image © the artists, courtesy Galerie Barbara Thumm

 

Galerie Barbara Thumm
Markgrafenstrasse 68
D-10969 Berlin
Germany
+ 49/30/283 90 347

Galerie Barbara Thumm

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JOHNEN GALERIE, Berlin

 

 

Roman Ondák - Rear Room

25 September to 11 November 2009

Johnen Galerie is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Roman Ondák in conjunction with the unveiling their new gallery space in Mitte at Mariennstrasse. Roman Ondák is currently showing at the 2009 Venice Biennale (Slovakian Pavilion), MoMA in New York and the Hamburger Bahnhof exhibition, "Die Kunst ist super!"

The selection of early works from 1996-2001 all pertain to the idea of space and its perception. Shared Floor, 1996, Untitled (Wall), 1997, Freed Doorway, 1998 and Untitled, 1998 are each made from real found elements from different apartments and galleries. Each element refers directly to architectural structures of these former sites, although when originally in situ, they were in a certain sense invisible: the objects were such an inherent part of any room that the viewer did not pay any particular attention to them.

In Shared Floor, for example, the parquet flooring of a room was removed and then reassembled in the outline of its original shape on the gallery floor. The electric sockets from the same room were dismantled and affixed to metal rods, which were then attached to the parquet floor, thus simulating their original positions in the walls while retaining the same spatial relationship to the floor.

Freed Doorway shows a door that has been cropped: its edges have been cut and the door itself is now dysfunctional. It has been negated from its relation to the doorframe to which it belonged. The door now leans against the wall of a gallery.

Untitled occupies the whole room with only several tiny pieces, such as electric sockets and traces of water pipes. They are pushed out a few centimeters from the wall by metal rods, thereby implying the surface of a fictional wall, which could stand in front of the real gallery wall.
A panel from a gallery has been relocated to the exhibition in Untitled (Wall). The panel leans against the wall, as if it were a remnant from the construction of the exhibition. Upon closer inspection, however, one notices that the panel still has an electric socket completely intact, while its back casing remains hidden behind the panel in the gallery wall.

In addition, there are two works that directly link the gallery's interior with its exterior. The work Colour and Size, 1999 draws from the view of the trees in the gallery windows of the rear room. One window is left open and next to it, a white shoe box has been installed. With a circle cut out in the front and its top slightly sloping on the sides, the shoebox is reminiscent of a birdhouse. Below the hole is the shoebox's original sticker that reads, "Colour/Black; Size/36," which absurdly conflates the description of shoes with the taxonomy of birds: it seems to say that only those birds that are black and can fit in the 36mm hole are allowed to enter.

Untitled (Traffic), 2001 consists of a red emergency-exit hammer that has been removed from a bus and installed next to the window of the gallery. The windows of the gallery make a strange reference to a bus, especially when such a hammer is installed next to the windows: its very presence summons visions of undesirable but possible bus accidents. Moreover, in the gallery, it suggests that the viewer might yet find one more way to leave the exhibition other than the way he came in.

The new Gallery Building on Marienstrasse 10, formly the location of the architect O. M. Ungers' Berlin office, houses Johnen Galerie, Krobath, and ph-projects. It is a block away from the Boros Collection and minutes from the Hamburger Bahnhof. Johnen Galerie artist Robert Kusmirowski will transform the staircase into a large installation. He will have a solo exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery from September 30 - January 2010 and is also exhibiting at the current Hamburger Bahnhof exhibition "Die Kunst ist super". Johnen Galerie will participate in Art Forum Berlin in Hall 20 Booth 136 from September 24 - 27.

 

Image:

Roman Ondák

Rear Room

Courtesy of the artist and Johnen Galerie, Berlin

 

JOHNEN GALERIE BERLIN
Marienstrasse 10
10117 Berlin
+49 30 27 58 30 30

Johnen Galerie Berlin

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Luis Campaña, Berlin

 

 

Emil Michael Klein

26 September - 7 November

This is the first exhibition by Klein in Berlin and an encounter with unfamiliar works of art. Context is required (therefore this text) in order to establish relationships and to create meaning and content. In Emil Michael Klein's case, this context could be craft. His work displays a seductive virtuosity in the handling of materials. Craft is one of the issues of the month, it is praised by Richard Sennett in his book "The Craftsman", and it is essential to Berlin, a city which thrives on its ubiquitous and creative craftsmen. Another context is disclosed in the complex and dynamic relationship between artwork and furniture, autonomy and function, Bauhaus and Ikea, which, in the 1990s, underwent a formative fleshing out through artists such as Franz West, Heimo Zobernig, Jorge Pardo and Tobias Rehberger. Finally, there is the question of a certain against-the-grain elegance.

Emil Michael Klein's works have the appearance of words gathered from art's vocabulary, then misspelled from a conviction that their meaning is not fully exhausted. Say - to keep it on the metaphorical level - Klein takes the word "word". It would be one thing to write it in Arial, Helvetica, Georgia, Neutral or Courier font. Its basic meaning would not change in the process. But what Klein dares is not the testing out of the various character styles, but rather the altering of the word itself, so vvrod or woid. In this fashion he can seize on any object that is of interest to him. What is most striking about this process is that it seems to have no limits, in the same way as I am able to write any word that comes to mind. Yet this is different; in contrast to software, which processes data smoothly (although subject to standards), material is defiant. Matter, from which the world still is made, lies at the center of this work; but also the question of how easily it can be defined, how much you can play with it, and if, in the end, between the work of shaping, between seemingly absolute disposability and screwed-up material, new woids emerge - to produce phrases, which, through their formal accomplishment, lead us astray.

Daniel Baumann

Image:
Emil Michael Klein
Courtesy of Luis Campaña, Berlin

 

Campaña Berlin
Axel Springer Str. 43
10969 Berlin
Germany
+49 (0) 163 470 85 29

 

Gallery Luis Campaña

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Worlds End Contemporary presents Eisbergfreistadt by Kahn/Selesnick

 

Currency Balloon, 100x 720 cm, digital print, 2007

 

 

Eisbergfreistadt

Kahn/Selesnick

 

1st October – 14th November, 2009

 

Worlds End Contemporary is pleased to present Kahn/Selesnick’s European debut of their latest work and first solo exhibition at the gallery. For this occasion, the artist duo will present Eisbergfreistadt, a project inspired by an incident that took place in a Baltic port during the Weimar Republic.

 

Mixing facts and fiction, Eisbergfreistadt depicts the creation and decline of a short-lived utopian state, with the same name, in the port of Lübeck. In 1923, a colossal iceberg drifted into the Baltic Sea and ran aground off the German port. The people of Lübeck declared the iceberg a free trade state, with the hope that Eisbergfreistadt would become an offshore financial heaven.

 

Bear Parade (detail), 210.8 x 30.5cm, digital archival print, 2008
 

 

More than a financial success during the hyperinflation crisis of the Weimar Republic, Eisbergfreistadt attracted all sorts of curious, travelers, and artists. Eisbergfreistadt became an important source of inspiration for artists, including the utopian movement of the Chrystal Chain founded by artist and architect Bruno Taut and of which Walter Gropius and Wenzel Hablik were influential. The Chrystal Chain designed utopian cities, and issued manifestos on behalf of Eisbergfreistadt’s imaginary socialist government. Many of their drawings were used on the emergency money called Notgeld, which was issued in Germany to supplement the shortage of small currency during the economic crisis.

 

The Iceberg Free State came to an end when a large masked ball was held to celebrate the creation of the Eisbergfreistadt bank. During the celebration, the iceberg split under the weight with one of the parts drifting towards the arctic and the other melting.

 

 

Billion Mark Notgeld, 76.2 x 127 cm, flashe on paper, 2007

 

 

Kahn/Selesnick’s exhibition presents a series of panoramic photographs taken at the time of the Eisbergfreistadt, and a variety of objects and souvenirs created on the Iceberg, stacks of Eisberfreistadt’s Notgeld, and a painting. This documenting project explores the historic utopian state where the artists take us into an apocalyptic fantasy mirroring our own present reality of economic gloom and global warming.

 

Card Game, 210..8 x 30.5 cm, digital archive print, 2007

 

 

Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick have been collaborating together since 1988. They were both born in 1964, in New York City and London, respectively; and now live and work in New York. They have exhibited internationally, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, the Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo, the Smithsonian Institution, among others. Their work is included in many notable collections, such as The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC; and The Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as many private and corporate collections. They completed in 2007 a commissioned photographic project for NASA on the exploration of Mars. Their photographic projects City of Salt, Scotland Futurebog, and The Apollo Prophecies have been published by Aperture Press (New York).

 

King of Birds, 91.4 x 91.4 cm, digital archive print, 2008

 

 

Worlds End Contemporary is a new gallery representing international contemporary visual artists working with photography. We work with artists that challenge the boundaries of the photographic medium, reflecting the trends and visions of contemporary photography today.

 

The private view will be held on September 30th, 6:30 – 8:30pm at Worlds End Contemporary.

Works will be on view 1st October – 14th November, Tuesday – Saturday 10 am – 6 pm or by

appointment

 

 

Worlds End Contemporary

357 Kings Road

London SW3 5ES

T: +44 (0) 20 7352 9376

E: info @ wecontemporary.com

 

www.wecontemporary.com

 

 

For more information on the artists:

 

www.kahnselesnick.com

www.eisbergfreistadt.com

 

 

Galerie Christian Lethert presents DANIEL LERGON: METALL

Galerie Christian Lethert
Antwerpener Straße 4
D-50672 Cologne
Germany

 

+49 (0)221 35 60 590

www.christianlethert.com 

 

 

Galerie Christian Lethert presents DANIEL LERGON : METALL

 

4 September to 24 October 2009

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images:

Daniel Lergon : METALL

4 September to 24 October 2009

Installation views, Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne

Photography: Simon Vogel, Cologne

Courtesy of Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne

 

 

For more information, please contact Galerie Christian Lethert:

 

www.christianlethert.com

 

 

SCOPE Art Show presents The Arctic Circle

 

 

SCOPE Art Show presents The Arctic Circle
Art & Science Organization Set to Sail

 

 

 

New York, NY, Sept 09, 2009 — This October, The Arctic Circle will embark on its first expedition into the High Arctic, with a collective of eighteen juried professionals aboard an ice-class, scientific research sailing vessel. The traditionally rigged 150’ Schooner will host a crew comprising international artists, architects and scientists that will set sail, using techniques of early exploration, for three weeks while working on individual projects in a collaborative environment.

 

Forging an alliance between the arts and sciences is a growing area of interest and importance. The Arctic Circle founder Aaron O’Connor believes that the organization provides a new focus that will serve to broaden creative exploration and raise awareness about the importance of the role that the artist and scientist hold in society. “Artists and scientists are the hunters and interpreters of new, vital, and often challenging information,” says O’Connor. “As observers and question-askers, both disciplines play a critical role in fostering human understanding of the issues of our time.”

 

 

 

Contributing participants on board the expedition will include Australian born, New York-based multimedia and sculpture artist, Ian Burns, whose work focuses on the relationship between art-viewing and technology; Canadian artist and Grange Prize winner Sarah Anne Johnson, whose work intersects early expeditionary documentation with a contemporary interpretation, and Andrea Galvani, an internationally-renowned artist and professor of Photographic Language at the University of Fine Arts in Bergamo, Italy.

 

Also joining the crew will be Matt Holzman, award-winning radio producer at NPR (National Public Radio) and PRI (Public Radio International). Holzman takes on the task of documenting the process and experience of this unique program.

 

The three-week expedition will take place in the international territory of Svalbard, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean north of mainland Europe, midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. The expedition will be followed by an international exhibition schedule, traveling to major centers in North America, Europe, and Asia.

 

SCOPE is pleased to present The Arctic Circle, the first of several projects hand selected by SCOPE’s curatorial committee in association with the SCOPE Foundation.

 

For more information about The Arctic Circle program and a full list of its participants,

please visit The Arctic Circle website at www.thearcticcircle.org

 

 

 

 

For all press inquiries please contact:

Aaron O’Connor, founder
The Arctic Circle
646.577.7959 New York

[email protected]
www.thearcticcircle.org

 

 

 

Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, New York

 

 

STEPHEN j SHANABROOK
Liquid LUSHES and Late Night House of PILLS

September 17 - October 17, 2009
Reception Thursday September 17, 6-8pm

Looking at Stephen j Shanabrook's work is like watching the horse jumping over an obstacle and instead of landing on the other side it starts to float and you are lost. Like a man on a wire, Shanabrook restlessly walks the disturbing line between heaviness and zero gravity, between painful and sweet, death and beauty; melting them together - metaphorically and literally - into one frozen state, one fossil. In 'Hopping Hills, the Pharmaceutical Landscape', the artist melts plastic prescription pill bottles and presses them into the form of Easter bunnies. An installation of running and hopping rabbits made out of hundreds of empty pill vessels suggests that prescription drugs have become the new religion, with addiction to drugs the new American side effect - the result of lost hopes and multiplying disconnections between people and reality..

In Shanabrook's sculpture 'Island of the Lotus-Eaters' the viewer is seduced by the beauty of a huge flower, which upon closer examination becomes again, just a pile of melted drug bottles. On his long journey back home Odysseus visited the lethargic island of Lotus-Eaters. The lotus fruits and flowers, which were narcotic and addictive, were the primary food of the islanders. The Lotus-Eaters entertained Odysseus' men to the drug causing them to forget about their strong desire to go home, now they only wished to stay and eat more lotuses. The labyrinthine journey back home is the methaphor of our lives. While drug induced illusions have the tendency to bring us 'home', most of the time it's a wrong turn on a slippery road - and often a fatal one.

Shanabrook isn't a stranger to addiction, he went to hell and back on his own. Whith a mix of materials in non-stop experimental process, which for the addictive personality is never enough, in combination with themes of longing for home - strongly reminds us of another mover - Martin Kippenberger. With similar types of gestures, such as one where Kippenberger painted his Ford Capri in brown paint imbued with oatmeal, Shanabrook covers common plastic soldiers in delicious dark chocolate in his new installation 'Battle of Losers and Lovers'. The sweet, desirable chocolate dripping on the white surface of stacked office tables (an allegory of the everyday working process) becomes messy bloody evidence of fear and dissatisfaction with one's self.

In his rather horrifying statement 'The Chocolate Soldier or Heroism - The Lost Chord of Christianity' C.T. Studd (1860-1931) said "a soldier without heroism is a chocolate soldier! ...dissolving in water and melting at the smell of fire. Sweeties they are! Bonbons, lollipops! Living their lives in a glass dish or in a cardboard box, each clad in his soft clothing, a little frilled white paper to preserve his dear little delicate constitution." More than a hundred years later we understand that there should be place for all - chocolate soldiers, losers and lovers. While, and especially because, society puts so much pressure on people's lives, that every day feels like a battlefield. And in the end of the day we want a prize, we want chocolate, we want home. Shanabrook remembers reading an account of a field medic from the Vietnam War. "He was explaining what he carried with him in his medic satchel, these bare necessities as he called them included: gauze, morphine, tape, comic books and M&Ms. The candies were for the mortally wounded soldiers, the ones that would never make it to the field hospitals. For these soldiers the candy was a way to satisfy a simple desire to feel closer to home, before they slipped away into that unknown jungle."

(Veronika Georgieva, 2009)

Image:
Stephen j Shanabrook
Courtesy of Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, New York

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