GALLERY NEWS
Ann Veronica Janssens: Esther Schipper, Berlin
Ann Veronica Janssens, MuHKA, Antwerp, 1997, Artificial fog, natural light
Ann Veronica Janssens
Ich rede zu Dir wie Kinder reden in der Nacht
November 4 – December 16, 2017
Esther Schipper
Potsdamer Strasse 81E
D-10785 Berlin
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Jack Goldstein: Meliksetian | Briggs, Los Angeles
Jack Goldstein
Selectric Works
October 28 to December 16, 2017
Meliksetian | Briggs
313 North Fairfax Avenue
Los Angeles CA 90036 USA
A graduate assistant for John Baldessari's first class in his Post-Studio Artprogram at Cal Arts in the 1970s, Goldstein (1945-2003) became best known as a key figure of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists who came to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s, their practice characterized by the embrace of mass media imagery and what critic and curator Douglas Crimp called the "processes of quotation, excerptation, framing and staging."
The Selectric Works, made during a period between 1988 and 1990, are part of Goldstein' practice of writing and making text-based works, following the production of his one-line Aphorisms and the basis of his well-known typographic portfolio, Totems. The name Selectric given to these works refers to the '80s era IBM electric typewriter that Goldstein used to make them, a machine characterized by its rotating type mechanism, an interchangeable ball which gave one the ability to choose various font and type styles. These works centered on 17 x 11-inch sheets of paper introduced a graphic component into his textual work.
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Artlyst: Bloomberg Launches Art-worthy New European Headquarters - Pae White: “Pomona”
Pae White: "Pomona"
Bloomberg Launches Art-worthy New European Headquarters - Pae White: "Pomona
I have just returned from an outing to Bloomberg's new European headquarters in London and it certainly doesn't disappoint. The building designed by Sir Norman Foster is almost entirely sustainable, and filled with Contemporary art treasures commissioned by Michael Bloomberg himself along with two other curator/advisers.
Artists include Michael Craig-Martin, Olafur Eliasson, Arturo Herrera, Cristina Iglesias, David Tremlett and Pae White who have created site-specific works for Bloomberg's building. The works are complemented by an existing work by Ben Langlands & Nikki Bell and a new commission by Isabel Nolan for Bloomberg SPACE. The building, situated in the heart of the City of London. Space will now be a purpose-built gallery for new commissions and exhibitions.
Pae White's "Pomona" is located on the ground floor in the auditorium's pre-function space. The suite of three tapestries weaves together the artist's fascination with historic textiles and the natural world. They are inspired in part by traditional textile "samplers" that would have been stitched by hand. Each tapestry is approximately 10 feet high and spans a width of approximately 40 feet. Together, the three tapestries envelop visitors as they enter the space.
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Jorge Pardo: Petzel Gallery, New York
Jorge Pardo, Self Portraits, 2017
Jorge Pardo
Self Portraits
27 October 2017 - 6 January 2018
Petzel
456 W 18th Street
New York, New York 10011
Candid snapshots of Jorge Pardo in workaday situations—man-spreading in a chair, strolling down the street, posing in Brazilian swim trunks—taken by friends, family, studio assistants, as well as up-close-and-personal Selfies, are the foundation for these 15 new paintings. And then the metamorphosis begins, simultaneously upending what defines a painting and a self portrait. Amalgamating craftsmanship and computerized manipulation with a range of media, Pardo creates an intricate, hybridized fusion of painting and sculpture. The images are bastardized—blown-up, engraved, laser-cut, hand-painted and back-lit with LEDs, to produce, in some cases, vast ornamental objects. Tiers of milled, perforated wood and Plexiglas overlap and interact on a relief which dissipates and parodies both self and portrait. Transparency, light, and color add further layers of complexity to these works—when illuminated the shapes, patterns and subjects within the paintings alter. A larger transformation occurs when the works are hung from the ceiling; the paintings morph into seemingly weightless light-boxes.
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Philippe Parreno: Museo Jumex, Mexico City
Philippe Parreno
La levadura y el anfitrión (The Yeasts and The Host)
26 October 2017 - 11 February 2018
Museo Jumex
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 303
Colonia Granada
11520 Mexico City
Museo Jumex presents La levadura y el anfitrión (The Yeasts and The Host) the first exhibition in Mexico by French artist Philippe Parreno.
One of an influential generation of artists emerging in the 1990s, Parreno has pioneered new forms of art through collaboration, participation and choreographed encounters where "the exhibition is conceived as a scripted space, like an automaton producing different temporalities, a rhythm, a journey, a duration." His most ambitious installations have used systems to orchestrate the exhibition. These have included musical notations, weather patterns, and living organisms to trigger sound, video and lighting conditions within the gallery. For Museo Jumex, Parreno presents an expanded proposal over two floors. Combinations of new, existing and re-edited works are overlaid to produce different realities and experiences in an ever-changing composition.
At the centre of the exhibition, on the second floor of the museum, is the control centre. Here a bioreactor breeds yeast connected to a computer that remembers the program of a past exhibition (Anywhen, Parreno's Tate Modern Hyundai Commission 2016 in London). These living colonies are now exposed to a new context and are reacting to it. The dynamic systems trigger the order of appearances of events in the gallery space such as the projection of a film or the sound and light movements that reverberate throughout the building. By turning control of the show over to natural systems, Parreno's work explores the realm between the human mind (el anfitrión) - the host that choreographs the exhibition and other spectral forms of intelligent or emergent matter and activity.
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Fiona Banner & Kerry Tribe: Imperial War Museum, London, UK
Age of Terror: Art since 9/11
26 October 2017 - 28 May 2018
Imperial War Museum, London
Lambeth Road
London SE1 6HZ
See the UK's first major exhibition of artists' responses to war and conflict since the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Age of Terror: Art since 9/11 will feature more than 40 British and international artists.
The complex issues surrounding the global response to 9/11, the nature of modern warfare and the continuing state of emergency in which we find ourselves have become compelling subject matter for contemporary artists.
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Fiona Connor: Community Notice Board, High Desert Test Sites 2017, Joshua Tree
An Ephemeral History of High Desert Test Sites: 2002-2015
High Desert Test Sites 2017
21 & 22 October 2017
The exhibition will remain on view from 11am to 5pm on October 21, 22, 28, 29, November 4, 5, 11, 12.
Community Notice Board: Fiona Connor
COPPER MOUNTAIN MESA COMMUNITY CENTER
65336 Winters Rd
Joshua Tree, CA 92252
This year's iteration of High Desert Test Sites is built around An Ephemeral History of High Desert Test Sites: 2002-2015, a month-long exhibition focused on the project's history. In addition, a pseudo-symposium titled The Palm Talks compliments the exhibition with live music and presentations on the topic of non-communities.
An Ephemeral History of High Desert Test Sites presents an incomplete and partial look at the organization's fifteen-year history, based on the artifacts, ephemera, and facsimiles that have been recovered by High Desert Test Sites and past participating artists. It has prompted a desire to document the organization's history, to create a living archive of contributions that were otherwise ephemeral and temporary, and to observe the narrative of the gathered material in order to tell the story of the organization, the vast community of artists involved, and the landscape that has witnessed these activities.
High Desert Test Sites 2017 is complimented by new projects and contributions by Fiona Connor, Bob Dornberger and Sarah Witt, Neil Doshi, Edie Fake, Glenn-Murray & Co., Oliver Payne, Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs, and Ry Rocklen.
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Jack Goldstein & Philippe Parreno: Field Guide, Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Canada
Field Guide
21 October 2017 - 25 February 2018
Remai Modern
102 Spadina Crescent East
Saskatoon SK S7K 0L3
Canada
Remai Modern's inaugural exhibition animates the entire museum with a spirit of active engagement, curiosity and disruption. Presenting a series of singular positions and coherent groupings of works, Field Guide introduces the museum's program philosophy and direction. Works from the permanent collection are placed in dialogue with contemporary projects, commissioned pieces and immersive installations. Through an open framework, Field Guide invites consideration of a network of issues and questions impacting art and society today.
Featuring leading artists from Saskatchewan, Canada, and the world, Field Guide rethinks the idea of "modern" from multiple cultural, geographic, historic and contemporary perspectives. Legacies play an important role and act as a formative nucleus for the exhibition—both the legacy of modernism and that of our predecessor the Mendel Art Gallery, from which Remai Modern inherited a collection of nearly 8,000 works. Field Guide also signals the start of a new chapter, debuting many key acquisitions that speak to the aspirations and future growth of the collection.
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Ana Prvacki: Homeward Bound, Nicodim, Los Angeles
Ana Prvacki, "Music Stand," 2015, Wood, poured resin and mixed media on paper,
53 x 19 x 19 inches
Homeward Bound
21 October - 22 November 2017
Opening: 21 October 6-8pm
Nicodim Gallery
571 S Anderson St Ste 2
Los Angeles, CA 90033
Lisa Anne Auerbach • Elmer Batters • Razvan Boar • Melanie Bonajo • Monica Bonvicini • Polly Borland • Chris Burden • Michiel Ceulers • Karon Davis • Nancy Grossman • Namio Harukawa • Philipp Kremer • Lazaros • Kris Lemsalu • Atelier von Lieshout • Monica Majoli • Bjarne Melgaard • Daido Moriyama • Ciprian Muresan • Simphiwe Ndzube • Ana Prvacki • Gus Van Sant • Eric Stanton • Ruben Verdu • Robert Yarber • and more…
"The drabness of her daily life made her dream of luxury, her husband's conjugal affection drove her to adulterous desires. She wished he would beat her so that she could feel more justified in hating him and taking vengeance upon him. She was sometimes amazed by the horrible conjectures that came into her mind; and yet she had to go on smiling, hearing herself told over and over that she was lucky, pretending to be happy, letting everyone believe it!" —Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
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Kerry Tribe: OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria
Kerry Tribe, Here & Elsewhere, 2002, 2-channel DVD projection, 10:30 minutes loop,
Stills from video
Alice in Wonderland
Oct 21, 2017 - Apr 02, 2018
OÖ Kulturquartier
OK-Platz 1
4020 Linz, Austria
For more than 150 years the adventures of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland have moved not only the imagination of children, but are also inspiration for art, mathematics, physics and, of course films.
As if in a dream Alice falls from one queer scene into another, and despite of the confusion and the nonsense she tries not to loose the thread. The roles are exchanged: In the story, Alice suddenly finds herself in the position of the adult and the rational. She grows, shrinks and jumps from one level of meaning to another, she finds herself in a world where everything is possible. A proper portion of curiosity is her great driving force. But also thanks to her tremendous self-confidence, she does not stop in spite of occasional fear.
The exhibition area of the OÖ Kulturquartier with the OK in its great variety and complex architecture is an ideal backdrop for such a wonder world. Focusing on key elements of Lewis Carroll's classic, such as the dream, nonsense, the queer, time, order and chaos, but also play, the exhibition tells a wondrous narration with performative elements throughout the exhibition spaces.
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Jorge Mendez Blake: rac Franche-Comté, France
Jorge Méndez Blake, Pangram I, 2015 © Courtesy de l'artiste et Meessen De Clercq,
Brussels, photo : D.R.
Montag or the library-in-the-making
14 October 2017 - 14 January 2018
rac Franche-Comté
2, passage des arts, 2
5000 Besançon, France
Montag or the library-in-the-making explores the links between literature and the visual arts, reflecting artists' unflagging interest in the literary medium. It brings together some thirty works on the subject, either in the form of adaptations of famous texts via the visual arts (sculpture, videos, installation, design, etc.) in particular, or by directly reworking the textual matter, subjecting it to a host of transformations, new twists, recoups and other 'affronts'. A final section is devoted more specifically to libraries, as well as to books, which are regularly the targets of censorship in repressive political regimes; in view of such violations book production has become stronger than ever among artists for whom literature remains an unrivalled field of experimentation and who are highly instrumental in its revival.
Ignasi Aballí, Francesco Arena, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Dora Garcia, Mark Geffriaud, Rodney Graham, Camille Henrot, Claire Fontaine, Gary Hill, David Lamelas, Jorge Méndez Blake, Jean-Christophe Norman, Claudio Parmiggiani, Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza, Katie Paterson, Lili Reynaud Dewar, Özlem Sulak, The Book Lovers (David Maroto et Joanna Zielinska), Thu Van Tran, Oriol Vilanova
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Kerry Tribe: New Work, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Kerry Tribe, Standardized Patient, 2017 (detail, production still); commissioned by SFMOMA
New Work: Kerry Tribe
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
7 October 2017 - 25 February 2018
SFMOMA
151 Third Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
1301PE is pleased to announce the opening of Kerry Tribe's exhibition, New Work, at SFMOMA. The exhibition premieres an SFMOMA commission by the Los Angeles–based artist and filmmaker that offers insight into the work of Standardized Patients—professional actors who portray patients in a simulated clinical environment as part of medical students' training. The multi-channel video installation explores questions of empathy, communication, and performance, and was developed through Tribe's close collaboration with professional clinicians, communication experts, and Standardized Patients at Stanford University and the University of Southern California. In this, Tribe's first solo exhibition at a major U.S. museum, the artist builds upon her history of engaging individuals from the acting and medical communities and exploring the willing suspension of disbelief.
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SUPERFLEX: One Two Three Swing!, Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall Commission, London
Danish art collective Superflex, from left: Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne
Christiansen, on One Two Three Swing! at Turbine Hall in Tate Modern, London. Photograph: PA
SUPERFLEX: One Two Three Swing!
Hyundai Commission 2017
Turbine Hall, Tate Modern
3 October 2017 - 2 April 2018
Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
1301PE is pleased to announce the opening of SUPERFLEX's exhibition, One Two Three Swing!, for the Tate Modern's 2017 Hyundai Commission. Through an unprecedented partnership with the Tate Modern's community development program, One Two Three Swing! is the first Turbine Hall commission to move beyond the gallery walls. Conceived in states of apathy, production, and movement, the work extends as an orange, human-powered line from the Turbine Hall gallery, into the Tate Modern's south landscape, and around the world. SUPERFLEX engages the productive potential of the building itself, a former power station that once produced electricity for the City of London, through the strategy of 'extreme participation' introduced in 2012 through the urban park project Superkilen. Any visitor to the Turbine Hall is invited to suggest a connection for the orange line, One Two Three Swing! engages the public in experiencing the potential of collective movement by swinging together on the count of three – One Two Three Swing!
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The Guardian, In full swing: Tate's Turbine Hall turned into adult playground by Mark Brown
Evening Standard, Tate Modern's Turbine Hall transformed into giant playground full of swings by Robert Dex
Telegraph, A whimsical exercise of shallow metaphor: Superflex, Tate Modern by Mark Hudson
Artsy, SUPERFLEX’s Swinging Playground at the Tate Is More Than Just Entertainment by Coline Milliard
Ann Veronica Janssens: Inside the White Cube, Bermondsey, London, UK
Photo: White Cube (George Darrell)
Ann Veronica Janssens
Inside the White Cube, Bermondsey
27 September - 12 November 2017
White Cube Bermondsey
144 – 152 Bermondsey Street
London SE1 3TQ
This is the first extensive solo exhibition of Janssens's work in the UK and includes new and recent sculpture and installation.
Janssens explores spatio-temporal experience and the limits of perception through precise installation and minimal sculpture. 'I investigate the permeability of contexts' she has said, '[...] even as I propose a form of deconstruction that fragments our perception of these contexts.' Her first works, made during the 1980s, were constructions or spatial extensions of existing architecture such as Gallery inexistent, Antwerpen (1988), an installation created by stacking borrowed concrete blocks in a gallery space. Since then, however, she has often applied scientific knowledge to the use of non-material mediums such as light, mist or sound. Her works can act like triggers, encouraging heightened visual awareness by exposing or revealing the transitory conditions of particular situations and a slowing down of perception.
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LA Times: 'Make New History,' the second Chicago Architecture Biennial, brings the focus back to square one
A biennial performance at the Garfield Park Conservatory was a collaboration between
New York firm SO-IL and artist Ana Prvački, with music by the Los Angeles composer
Veronika Krausas. (Iwan Baan)
'Make New History,' the second Chicago Architecture Biennial, brings the focus back to square one by Christopher Hawthorne
Architecture has taken an extrospective turn in recent years, looking outside itself for new ideas and to measure its progress. Or maybe just to feel more useful in a world flooding, burning and generally coming apart at the seams. Among its most visible and lauded figures have been dedicated populists like Chile's Alejandro Aravena. It has made engagement — political, humanitarian and environmental — a key priority.
"Make New History," the second edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, shifts the focus back inward. This elegant and densely layered exhibition, organized by the Los Angeles architects Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, argues that architecture can (and should) find the motivation for new work within the discipline itself, within its own stores of self-knowledge and tradition.
As the title suggests, "Make New History" takes as its explicit theme the return to the past, to architectural precedent, that's increasingly a touchstone for younger architects. It's true that emerging and midcareer firms are these days producing work that's grounded in history — and even prehistory, with buildings that look less neoclassical than primitive or primordial — to a degree not seen since the 1970s and '80s.
In another echo of the 2015 show, this one makes a point of breaking out of the Cultural Center and positioning events around the city. During the opening weekend there were performance pieces at Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House in Plano, Ill. (where L.A.'s Gerard & Kelly sent dancers careening through the interior, down its travertine steps and across its lawn) and at Chicago's Garfield Park Conservatory (where a meditation on air, breathing and the environment from the New York firm SO-IL and artist Ana Prvacki, with music by the Los Angeles composer Veronika Krausas, hid four musicians inside thin, white prophylactic suits that suggested a charmingly low-tech combination of mascot outfits, air filters and the gear beekeepers wear).
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More articles:
ArchDaily
ArchDaily China
Dezeen
Designboom
Architectural Digest
Architects Newspaper
Floornature.com
Rirkrit Tiravanija: Gavin Brown, New York
Rirkrit Tiravanija
skip the bruising of the eskimos to the exquisite words
vs.
if I give you a penny you can give me a pair of scissors
24 September - 28 October 2017
Gavin Brown
439 W 127th Street, New York
291 Grand Street, New York
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Artsy: 10 Architects Designing the Future at the Chicago Architecture Biennial
Installation view of SO-IL and Ana Prvački, l'air pour l'air, 2017. Courtesy of Chicago
Architecture Biennial, Steve Hall © Hall Merrick Photographers.
10 Architects Designing the Future at the Chicago Architecture Biennial by Anna Kats
SO-IL and Ana Prvački
Prvački, a Los Angeles-based artist, and Florian Idenburg, an architect and co-founder of New York studio SO-IL, jointly conceived an interdisciplinary offsite project at the verdant Garfield Park Conservatory.
Dressed in mesh sculptural forms that obscure their faces and instruments, wind musicians and a vocalist from the Chicago Sinfonietta wander among the greenhouse's proliferation of plants; the encasings filter air as the wind instruments are played, creating a feedback mechanism whereby the music cleans the air that in turn produces the music.
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Diana Thater: Floating Worlds, 14th Biennale de Lyon, France
Diana Thater, White is the Color, 2002
14th Biennale de Lyon: Floating Worlds
20 September 2017 - 7 January 2018
Since its creation in 1991, Thierry Raspail, Artistic Director of the Biennale de Lyon, has asked each guest curator to think about a keyword, assigned for three editions. The 2017 Biennale de Lyon is the second volume of a trilogy around the word "modernity", and it was with this word that Thierry Raspail invited Emma Lavigne, director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, to imagine this 14th edition, at the Sucrière and macLYON from 20 September 2017 to 07 January 2018.
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Diana Thater: Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, Turkey
Diana Thater, A Runaway World (background), As Radical As Reality (foreground), 2017.
The installation view at The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, 2017. Photo by: Fredrik Nilsen.
Diana Thater
A Runaway World
September 16, 2017–February 18, 2018
Borusan Contemporary
Baltalimanı Hisar Cad.
Perili Köşk No:5 34470
Rumeli Hisarı/Sarıyer
Istanbul Turkey
Diana Thater: A Runaway World (September 16, 2017‒February 18, 2018) comprises five video-based installations: three newly commissioned and two earlier works to provide context for the artist's examination of environmental issues. As Radical As Reality(2017) and A Runaway World (2017) were commissioned by The Mistake Room for the spring 2017 exhibition, that was also titled A Runaway World. The new installations incorporate video of elephants hunted by poachers for ivory; the last male Northern white rhinoceros, a species hunted to extinction for its horns; and the landscapes they inhabit. Thater and her crew gained unprecedented access to the creatures living in enclosures protected by armed guards. The videos are projected onto specially made X-shaped screens designed by the artist to create an immersive and somewhat disorienting experience.
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Ann Veronica Janssens: Naissances Latentes, Le SHED, France
Naissances Latentes
16 September - 12 November 2017
Le SHED, centre d'art contemporain de Normandie
12 Rue de l'Abbaye
76960 Notre-Dame de Bondeville
France
Ann Veronica Janssens's work will be the object of a triple exhibition, Naissances Latentes, at Le SHED. Janssens's artistic practice could be defined as a study of the sensory experience of reality. Through various types of devices (installations, projections, immersive environments, sculptures), Janssens's works emphasize space through the diffusion of light, the radiance of color or reflective surfaces, revealing the instability of our perception of time and space.
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Ann Veronica Janssens, Philippe Parreno, and SUPERFLEX: Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland
Ann Veronica Janssens, MUHKA Anvers, 1997
Dizziness: Navigating the Unknown
15/09/17 - 07/01/2018
Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art
Jazdów 2, 00-467 Warsaw
This exhibition can get your head spinning. Artists leave the established to seek other states of consciousness. They lure the audience into a confrontation with their own convictions.
The group exhibition Dizziness. Navigating the Unknown is the result of the artistic-research project Dizziness – A Resource, which is being implemented since 2014 by Ruth Anderwald and Leonhard Grond at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, in collaboration with the Institute of Psychology at the University of Graz. In the project, the various states of instability become the starting point for exploring the frontiers of philosophy, cultural studies, medicine, research into creativity and innovation.
The exhibition will feature the works of thirty-three artists from around the world, created in the second half of the 20th century and in the 21st century. These works instill in the viewers the sensation of disarray mentioned in the title of the exhibition. The premeditated artistic strategies force the audience to confront their own convictions, directions of thought as well as intentions. Artists elicit questioning of the established rules or the ongoing changes in the world. They go beyond what has previously been established, beyond the generally accepted framework of thinking.
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designboom: SO-IL + ana prvački create air-filtering outfits for chicago architecture biennial performance
'flute'
SO-IL + ana prvački create air-filtering outfits for chicago architecture biennial performance by Philip Stevens
during the opening week of the 2017 chicago architecture biennial, architecture studio SO-IL and artist ana prvački are debuting a musical performance piece titled 'l'air pour l'air'. as part of the project, which aims to ensure the continued legacy of musicians as the world's cities grow more polluted, the collaborative design team has created an ensemble of mesh enclosures. each piece has been conceived as part mask, part shelter, and is designed to clean and filter the air through breathing.
presented as one of the chicago architecture biennial's special projects, the four SO-IL-designed enclosures — named 'flute' 'saxophone' 'voice' and 'trombone' — will be worn by the respective members of the chicago sinfonietta. through performing an original composition, created by veronika krausas, the musicians will 'clean the air that produces the music'. 'the installation and performance encourage its viewers to meditate upon the complex notions such as the relationship between purity and pollution, and the distinctions between self, body, objects, and nature,' explains the design team.
the main exhibition is free and open to the public from september 16, 2017 through january 7, 2018.
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The Guardian: ‘Underground city’ set to become Chicago’s next attraction
‘Underground city’ set to become Chicago’s next attraction by Ella Buchan
For this year’s Chicago Architecture Biennial (until January 2018), Los Angeles architect Erin Besler and artist Fiona Connor are creating installations inspired by the walkways’ textures, fixtures and fittings. Their work will highlight “a bit of functional infrastructure that gets far less attention than the more iconic structures it serves above ground”, said Biennial executive director Todd Palmer. These will be displayed in the Chicago Cultural Center, one on the ground floor and another where its basement joins the Pedway.
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Ana Prvački: Chicago Architecture Biennial, IL
Chicago Architecture Biennial
Ana Prvački and SO-IL
16 September 2017 - 7 January 2018
Performance of L'air pour l'air
Saturday, 16 September 3 - 5 pm
Garfield Park Conservatory
300 N. Central Park Ave
Chicago, IL 60624
Architects SO–IL and artist Ana Prvački have created a poetic collaboration for Garfield Park Conservatory called L'air pour l'air. Part installation and part musical performance, it features an ensemble of air-filtering mesh enclosures that touch on the continuities between people, objects, and nature through a medium as ubiquitous as air. The performance debuts a composition for three wind instruments and voice by the composer Veronika Krausas, performed by a quartet of musicians from Chicago Sinfonietta, an orchestra dedicated to diversity and inclusion in classical music. Drawing upon the Conservatory's abundant plant life as inspiration, the enclosures worn by the Sinfonietta collaborators have been designed to clean the air through breath. SO-IL and Prvački's installation ensures we will always have street music, even in our smog-filled cities of the future. The more music played, the cleaner the air.
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Fiona Connor: Chicago Architecture Biennial, IL
"The History of Pedestrian Ways in Downtown Chicago", 1979,
Courtesy of City of Chicago
Chicago Architecture Biennial
Fiona Connor and Erin Besler
16 September 2017 - 7 January 2018
Chicago Cultural Center
78 E. Washington Street
Chicago, IL 60602
Front Door, Part 1 & Part 2
Front Door takes its cue from the passageways and thresholds of two spaces: the Chicago Cultural Center and the Chicago Pedway.
This Beaux Arts building originally opened in 1897 to house the Chicago Public Library and the Grand Army of the Republic Memorial Hall; it was designed by the Boston-based firm Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, who were working concurrently on the Art Institute of Chicago (1893–1916). Since a renovation by Holabird & Root from 1974 to 1977, the building has been used as an arts and culture center; in 1991, it was officially established as the Chicago Cultural Center, as it remains today.
The Chicago Pedway began in 1951 with the construction of two block-long pedestrian tunnels between State Street and Dearborn Street at the Washington and Jackson CTA stops. Since then, the subterranean system has expanded through public and private development to connect more than 50 buildings with public transit stations underground in the downtown area, so far covering roughly five miles altogether (this includes a few street-level and overhead walkways that are part of the mostly underground network). The wide variety of designs and materials that appear in the Pedway demarcates changes in ownership and also functions as a historical index of shifting standards and tastes. This section of the Pedway, situated underneath the Chicago Cultural Center, opened in 1989.
The Chicago Cultural Center's main entrance on Randolph Street, contains a cross section of the different types of fluorescent lights that illuminate the underground chambers of the Pedway. The second site of the project can be found one floor below, upon exiting the Chicago Cultural Center and entering the Pedway.
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Jessica Stockholder: 360 Speaker Series, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX
Nasher Sculpture Center
360 Speaker Series: Jessica Stockholder
26 August 2017 2pm
Nasher Sculpture Center
2001 Flora Street
Dallas, Texas 75201
Jessica Stockholder's sprawling constructions have played a crucial role in expanding the dialogue between sculpture and painting and form and space. Within her work, the artist merges seemingly disparate, everyday objects to create holistic, colorful installations.
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Ana Prvacki: Stealing Shadows (Duchamp) at MOCA Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA
Ana Prvacki, Stealing Shadows, Duchamp, 2007, Medium variable, Dimensions variable
MOCA Grand Avenue
Laughing on the Outside: Selections from the Permanent Collection
16 August - 31 December 2017
MOCA Grand Avenue
250 South Grand Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Laughing on the Outside: Selections from the Permanent Collection presents artworks from MOCA's collection that register the ludicrous, the impossible, and the playful. On view are stairs that lead to nowhere, invitations to exhibitions that contain no objects, and boots that appear to walk by themselves. The centerpiece is Gabriel Orozco's interactive sculpture Ping Pond Table (Mesa de ping-pong con estanque) (1998). Museumgoers are invited to play with the paddles and balls provided, though it is likely they will need to invent new rules for a new game. While the artists belong to different periods and nations, they all orient art toward play, often via absurdity and ridiculousness, and in ways that deflate the grandiosity that sometimes accompanies the word "art."
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Kirsten Everberg: Garden Party Auctions, museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium
Kirsten Everberg, Studio, Gaeta (after Twombly), 2015, Oil and enamel on wood panel, 24 x 24 inches
museum Dhondt-Dhaenens
Saturday, September 2nd, 2017
Annual Garden Party
On Saturday, September 2nd, 2017 the museum Dhondt-Dhaenens organises the eleventh edition of its annual Garden Party. The successful Paddle8 auction and the Christie's live charity auction are assured to be the highlights of this happening yet again.
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SUPERFLEX: Flooded McDonald’s on view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA
SUPERFLEX, Still from Flooded McDonald's, 2009
Hammer Contemporary Collections
SUPERFLEX, Flooded McDonald's
19 August - 15 October 2017
Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90024
The film Flooded McDonald's poses questions about consumer culture and the fast food industry.
Flooded McDonald's is the second film by the artist collective SUPERFLEX. In the video, a life-size replica of the interior of a McDonald's restaurant slowly floods with water until it is completely submerged and destroyed. Based in Denmark, Sweden, and Brazil, the members of SUPERFLEX consider their works "tools" for investigating systems of power, globalization, and the role of the artist in contemporary society. Flooded McDonald's poses questions about consumer culture and the fast food industry while reveling in the pleasure of destroying a global capitalist icon.
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Glasstire: Diana Thater: ‘The Starry Messenger’ at the Moody Center
Diana Thater: 'The Starry Messenger' at the Moody Center by Betsy Huete
I was lying on the ground one night at an artist residency in rural Pennsylvania. There were no clouds, no smog —I've never seen so many stars receding into infinity. The sky was so clear and the night so crisp that it was easy to make out a clear outline of the Milky Way. It wasn't how we normally see it in science textbooks or NASA posters; I was looking at the Milky Way turned on its side. It looked like a dense, fat, pixelated line — like a tail that, in one whisk, could fling us out into deep space — a place capable of immense obliteration and violence, a place of silence and timelessness. It felt immersive and very far away. It was majestic.
Diana Thater's The Starry Messenger (2014), currently on view at the Moody Center at Rice University, is not that.
Nor does she want it to be. Thater is instead using the act of stargazing as a seduction technique, to entangle us in a piece that interrogates our human need to separate ourselves from a fetishized "nature," one that cultivates frustration and desire, and that challenges us to be bored. She does this by layering our experience of her piece: the meta-mediated experience of Thater's recording of a projection of the Milky Way inside a planetarium; the mediated experience of her filming the projector inside the planetarium, and the immediacy of us viewing it all through a nine-monitor grid.
On view at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston until February 3, 2018.
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Wallpaper: Philippe Parreno transforms the Rockbund Art Museum in a perpetual motion of events
Philippe Parreno turns exhibition spaces into the exhibition, at the Rockbund Art Museum
in Shanghai. Photography: © Andrea Rossetti 2017
Philippe Parreno transforms the Rockbund Art Museum in a perpetual motion of events by Charlotte Jansen
For the past two decades French-born artist Philippe Parreno has used museums as his material. Known best for his recent installations at Tate Modern, HangarBicocca and the Palais de Tokyo, he has turned exhibition spaces into the exhibition. Instead of installing art on the walls, Parreno begins with what already exists in the architecture of a building, choreographing light, sound, image and space in an ephemeral dance.
Parreno's first ever exhibition in China follows a similar strategy. 'Synchronicity', at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai until mid September, sees window blinds opening and closing over a window like a blinking eye, casting different shadows over a room. A heliostat shunts natural sunlight through the glass rooftop over the floor below. On the third storey, an illuminated marquee constructed in glass — referencing the skylight design of the museum's upper floors — plays music that can be heard throughout the space. The artist even nods to the design of the building, completed in 1933 and restored by David Chipperfield in 2010: his vertical plane slices through four of the building's six floors, referencing the central axis and the overall harmony of the space.
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1301PE participating in Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA
Jorge Méndez Blake at 1301PE
More than 65 art galleries in Los Angeles and throughout Southern California will participate in Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, the Getty-led exploration of Latin American and Latino art that launches on September 15, 2017, and runs through January 2018. Complementing PST: LA/LA's expansive roster of exhibitions, performances, and public programs at more than 70 museums and cultural institutions, participating galleries will present more than 90 group and solo exhibitions, artist-curated projects, and installations in Downtown Los Angeles, Culver City, Santa Monica, Hollywood, West Hollywood, and beyond. Throughout the four-month initiative, a vibrant cross-section of emerging and established galleries will join in celebrating Latin American and Latino artists, and will bring works to the region by both internationally-known artists who will be shown on the West Coast or in the United States for the first time and emerging talent from across Latin America and the U.S.
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LA Times
Rirkrit Tiravanija: Film premiers at the International Film Festival Marseille, France
Rirkrit Tiravanija, Karl's Perfect Day, 2017, s16mm/arri digital, color, sound 5.1, 1h33mins.
Rirkrit Tiravanija's film, Karl's Perfect Day (2017) will premier at the International Film Festival Marseille.
15 July – 3:45 pm
16 July – 5:30 pm
FID 28th International Film Festival Marseille
July 11-17
Karl perfect day is a portrait of artist and poet Karl Holmqvist thru the own idea of what a perfect day is to him. Is a journey from the time he wakes up to the time he returns to bed. The journey is constructed in Karl's mind, like his own work and artistic interests. Is a collage of peoples, places, sounds, images and texts. His idea of the perfect day is not one of extravagance but rather modest, layer with complexities and significance with moments of contentedness and small pleasures. Seemingly the film of Karl's perfect day perfectly looks like another day in a life of a person.
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Philippe Parreno: Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China
Philippe Parreno
Synchronicity
8 July - 17 September 2017
Rockbund Art Museum
20 Huqiu Road
Huangpu District, Shanghai
China
1301PE is pleased to announce the opening of Philippe Parreno's exhibition, Synchronicity, at the Rockbund Art Museum. It will be Parreno's first major solo exhibition in China. This exhibition is dedicated to the late Xavier Douroux whose influence on Parreno's career cannot be overstated.
Curated by the Director of the museum, Larys Frogier, Parreno's first exhibition in China will occupy four of the museum's six floors, also extending to its seventh floor glass rooftop.
Over the past twenty years, Parreno has radically redefined the exhibition going experience by exploring its possibilities as a medium in its own right. Realised in dialogue with the physicality and functionality of the museum's architecture, the exhibition will alter the building's current existence through an unexpected use of time, space, light, and sound to become a semi automated puppet, a perpetual motion of events in which Parreno subverts the conventions of the gallery space.
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Del Mar Times: Jorge Pardo leaves his mark at the Lux Art Institute
Jorge Pardo poses in front of a new art piece, which he invites children to add to, at the
Lux Art Institute in Encinitas.
Jorge Pardo leaves his mark at the Lux Art Institute by Brittany Woolsey
Lux Art Institute
4550 South El Camino Real
Encinitas, CA
On view through Aug. 5.
When Jorge Pardo was invited to spend time as an artist in residence at the Lux Art Institute in Encinitas, he had a set goal in mind: to create an original, new art piece in just five days.
The Mexico-based artist spent June 12 through June 17 staying at the Lux to work on the large canvas-based piece. Other artists have in the past chosen to spend up to a month there.
"I gave myself a week to make something that would be interesting, and that's really the only agenda here," he said in an interview on the day he he arrived at the studio. "The interesting thing is to use the space and to make something here. They're very flexible about how and what artists do. Residency can be a lot of things: it can be a retreat for people or it can be work."
During his time at Lux, he created a 5-foot-by-30-foot scroll work that is covered with silkscreen ink in bright colors such as pinks, purples and oranges. He had planned the work for months, with materials sent over ahead of time, to make the most out of his stay at the Lux, he said.
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Art Agenda: Kerry Tribe’s “the word the wall la palabra la pared”, Parque Galería, Mexico City
View of Kerry Tribe's "the word the wall la palabra la pared," Parque Galería, Mexico City, 2017.
Kerry Tribe's "the word the wall la palabra la pared" by Catalina Lozano
PARQUE GALERíA, Mexico City
May 6–July 1, 2017
For her first exhibition in Mexico City, LA-based artist Kerry Tribe removed the front wall of Parque Galería and transformed it into a makeshift screening room. The crumbling architecture, with its exposed dry walls and frayed edges, introduces an exhibition in which seemingly solid physical and psychical structures are undone.
Tribe's work addresses perception, memory, and language, as well as the technologies used to perceive, record, and describe experience. Combining video, sculpture, and photography, her latest exhibition considers how atypical circumstances—such as alterations in the mechanisms of reception and emission in the brain—create opportunities to analyze the norms by which fitness and unfitness are defined. By paying attention to the anomalous, Tribe tackles new, affective configurations of knowledge.
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Pae White: Artists on Art, LACMA video series
Pae White
LACMA's Artists on Art video series
For Artists on Art, Pae White speaks on Soup Tureen and Ladle by Christopher Dresser.
LACMA's Artists on Art videos offer insights into works in the museum's encyclopedic collection that have inspired and informed artists working today. Looking at art through their eyes, we hear directly from artists about works that intrigue them and have fed their own creativity.
Pae White's practice straddles the line between what is thought of as "high art" and "functional object." I; in fact, her creations often—and purposefully—are both, finding their place simultaneously in the worlds of art, craft, and design. Her work ranges from intimate installations incorporating Vera scarves to large-scale tapestries, based on photos of crumpled aluminum foil or plumes of smoke and made on computer-driven looms. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
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Kerry Tribe: Chalk Circles at REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA
Kerry Tribe, Rinse and Repeat, 2017. 10 minutes, single channel video with sound,
video (still), courtesy of the artist.
Kerry Tribe
Chalk Circles
Saturday, June 17, 2017 to Sunday, August 20, 2017
Opening Reception June 17, 4-9pm
REDCAT
631 West 2nd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012
The Gallery at REDCAT presents Chalk Circles, an exhibition and series of related performances and events that consider the ways in which performing and visual arts intersect. Curated by Ruth Estévez and José Luis Blondet, the exhibition Chalk Circles stages a number of ways in which artists think critically about live actions, theater and performance.
Artists in this exhibition document, reimagine, and rearticulate acting methodologies to investigate performance as a form of production, not just as an event-based form. Their projects center on mixed traditions of movement, acting and gesture, as well as pedagogic models. The role of the actor, the figure of the performer, and their different perspectives in the construction of a character inform several projects in the exhibition, while others focus on the frictions of a body in a fictive—theatralized—space.
Chalk Circles features works and commissions by local and international artists who engage in theatricality and performativity as a tool to feed the instability of such terms. Artists included in the exhibition: Carola Dertnig, Dora García and Peio Aguirre, Adrià Julià, Joachim Koester, David Levine, Emily Mast, Silke Otto-Knapp, Santiago Roldós and Pilar Aranda (Muégano Teatro), Catherine Sullivan and Kerry Tribe.
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Jorge Pardo: Lux Art Institute, Encinitas, CA
Jorge Pardo
On exhibit
June 12, 2017 through August 5, 2017
Lux Art Institute
1550 S. El Camino Real
Encinitas, CA 92024
Havana-born artist Jorge Pardo has been recognized as a MacArthur "genius" and featured in the collections of some of the world's top museums, and he once spent six years designing a utopian compound in the depths of the jungles of the Yucatán. This summer, San Diegans can witness him at work during a five-day residence at Lux Art Institute (June 12-17), followed by an exhibition of his vibrant, genre-defying artworks. June 12 to Aug. 5. Lux Art Institute, 1550 S. El Camino Real, Encinitas. $5; free for members. (760) 436-6611 or luxartinstitute.org
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LA Weekly: 5 Art Shows to See in L.A. This Week
Tacita Dean, The last beautiful pleasure., 2017. Installation view 1301PE.
5 Art Shows to See in L.A. This Week by Catherine Wagley
Smoking in the grass
Downstairs at 1301PE, actress Sylvia Kristel holds a cigarette in a 16mm film that's being projected on a wall. Smoke rises against the lush yard in which she's standing. Artist Manon de Boer filmed Kristel, who died in 2012, in the Hollywood Hills in the early 2000s. The footage is quiet and the actress stoic. Upstairs, another 16-millimeter film plays. This time, it's iconic painter David Hockney who holds a cigarette and quietly smokes in his studio. Sometimes he laughs. Tacita Dean filmed him just last year and, over the course of 16 minutes, we see him smoke five cigarettes. This show, called "The last beautiful pleasure," marks 1301PE's 25th anniversary and drips with nostalgia — for a time when too many of us still found chainsmoking romantic.
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Artnet news: Is Capitalism Doomed? A New Museum Imagines the Downfall of the Economic System
Superflex, Bankrupt Banks (2012).
Is Capitalism Doomed? A New Museum Imagines the Downfall of the Economic System by Brian Boucher
If capitalism is slowly on the outs, as some economists and theorists say it is, should there be a museum to preserve its artifacts? The Museum of Capitalism (MOC), an aspiring institution at the very earliest phase of development, opens its first exhibition this month in a disused warehouse in Oakland, California. Its ambitious goal is to educate future generations about the economic system's "ideology, history, and legacy," per its mission statement, in the vein of history museums and so-called museums of conscience.
Headed up by the artist duo FICTILIS (Andrea Steves and Timothy Furstnau) and supported by a $215,000 grant from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, its debut exhibition is to be housed in a temporary space in Oakland's post-industrial Jack London Square, an area with multiple vacant warehouses. The artist list, totaling a whopping 83, includes members from around the globe.
Museum of Capitalism
55 Harrison St, Suite 201
Oakland CA 94607
Opening Exhibition
17 June – 20 August 2017
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Fiona Banner: De Pont Museum documentary by Maarten de Kroon
Fiona Banner: Runway (AW 17)
De Pont Museum, Tilburg, Netherlands
Through 27 August 2017
Documentary by Maarten de Kroon
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e-flux: ARoS Triennial, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Nikolaus Hirsch, Michel Müller
Rirkrit Tiravanija, Nikolaus Hirsch, Michel Müller, DO WE DREAM UNDER THE SAME SKY, 2017.
Rirkrit Tiravanija, Nikolaus Hirsch, Michel Müller
DO WE DREAM UNDER THE SAME SKY
June 3–July 30, 2017
ARoS Triennial
Various locations
Aarhus, Denmark
DO WE DREAM UNDER THE SAME SKY is located at the beach near Mindepark, Aarhus
For The Garden, the first ARoS Triennial in Aarhus, artist Rirkrit Tiravanija and architects Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller have developed a new version of their ongoing project DO WE DREAM UNDER THE SAME SKY comprised of a pavilion and a dense program of films, talks and cooking.
In the logic of an exquisite corpse, the pavilion can be seen as a disembodied part of the future artist residency and workshop at The Land, a self-sustaining artistic community initiated by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert near Chiang Mai in Thailand that engages with the idea of an artistic utopia and presents both an ecological and sustainable model for future artistic practice. Reminiscent of a Surrealist "exquisite corpse"—beginning with a single contribution that continues to grow piecemeal—various architects, engineers, and artists will contribute different building components (such as structure, façade, etc.) to this unusual architectural assemblage as a collective work.
After its first manifestation at Art Basel in 2015, the pavilion in Aarhus presents the first version of the building in its future dimensions of 22x22 meters. The structure houses several kitchen and garden elements within which the various themes of the project will be played out. Investigating models and practices of sustainability, the geopolitics of food, and building technologies in the era of the anthropocene, Tiravanija, Hirsch and Müller have put together a public program that runs daily from June 3 to July 30.
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Artforum: Diana Thater at The Mistake Room
Diana Thater, As Radical as Reality, 2017, Plexiglas, steel, two-channel video projection
(color, silent, indefinite duration). Installation view. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.
Diana Thater at The Mistake Room by Alexander Keefe
"I'm always working with multiple, simultaneous perspectives," Los Angeles–based artist Diana Thater explained to Lynne Cooke in an interview published on the occasion of her 2015 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This statement makes sense, given the complexity of Thater's subject matter: the networked entanglements between human and other, species and habitat, viewer and viewing space, zebra and zeal (the last a term of venery for a group of zebras). "A Runaway World" adds to the artist's bestiary of transitory media architectures. The show presents two cruciform structures. Each is composed of four Plexiglas sheets arranged via metal scaffolding to form the prone Xs; their four sets of moving images alternately bleed into and jarringly abut each other, creating bifurcated viewing environments that choreograph the body into position, then divide and mend the gaze. Viewed from afar, the screens appear as moving images in the round; up close, these immersive viewing stations facilitate what Thater describes as an "in-between space and time that we (humans and animals) can occupy together, whose mode is instinct and whose affect is beyond simple emotion."
Thater has been working with architectural screening environments since 1995's six-channel video projection China, a Deleuzian body trip into the multiple subjectivity of the pack wolf that muses on what it might be like to feel like many instead of one. Travel and zoological research have formed key parts of her practice ever since; both works in the current exhibition emerged from trips to Kenya in 2016 and 2017. The piece that gives the exhibition its title draws from footage of a herd of African elephants that the artist filmed in the country's Chyulu Hills. Images of elephants dominate the screens, singly and in groups, viewed from up close and far away. These intersect with scenes of the threatened landscape that the magnificent creatures inhabit: rolling grasslands and distant mountains, gorgeous trees isolated in motion against azure skies. Thater has said of her work that it "must have a presence like a subject." An installation like this one conjures and sustains a particular interplay of subjectivities, here entangling viewer, elephant, and land in what feels like a daydream. But it's also something of a nightmare.
Few animals are as emblematic of species loss as the northern white rhinoceros named Sudan, the subject of the adjacent work As Radical as Reality, 2017, a moving meditation on extinction in the Anthropocene. Per the show's press release, the last surviving male of his species has shown little interest in mating with the last two remaining females that accompany him in the Kenyan conservancy that shelters them (an assertion that is challenged by the conservancy, which provides the sobering counter that Sudan's two female companions are themselves incapable of normal copulation). Soon his advancing age will preclude reproduction regardless. To make matters worse, poachers would love to have his horn. Species loss and individual death are inseparable in this pathetic story; so are human and rhinoceros. Thater's installation creates a space to encounter Sudan as he lives, a rhino in a post-rhino world, ringed by the armed guards who will accompany him everywhere until someday—too soon—security team becomes funeral escort. And we stand and mourn.
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Visual Art Source: Manon de Boer, Tacita Dean at 1301PE, Los Angeles
Tacita Dean, still from "Portraits," 2016, 16mm color film, optical sound, 16 min.
Manon de Boer, Tacita Dean at 1301PE, Los Angeles, by Jody Zellen
In "The Last Beautiful Pleasure" two films play in the darkened gallery space. Downstairs is a portrait of Sylvia Kristel by Manon de Boer; and upstairs, a portrait of David Hockney by Tacita Dean. What is striking in these filmed portraits is that both subjects are smoking and this activity — conscious and unconscious — is about so much more.
Their smoking functions as a metaphor for duration and pleasure. De Boer's short film "Sylvia, March 1 and March 2, 2001, Hollywood Hills" (2001-2005) portrays the French actress (best known for her role as Emmanuelle) outside, surrounded by nature yet tightly framed. As she gazes silently at the camera, smoke from her cigarette billows around her. Dean's "Portraits" (2016) depict David Hockney in his studio. He is shot both close up and from a distance as he inhales, exhales and casually flicks ashes onto to the floor without a care in the world. Although smoking is now looked down upon as a known health hazard, in film it is has long been accepted as a trope and an affect. In these films, Dean and de Boer investigate the visual power and pleasure of this activity.
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Newsweek: Superflex Uses Humor to Challenge Corporate Power
From left, Fenger, Christiansen and Nielsen of the Danish art collective Superflex.
Nikolaj Møller/Blink Production
Joke's on You: Superflex Uses Humor to Challenge Corporate Power by Francesca Gavin
Sitting around the white Ikea-like desk in their studio, on the ground floor of a low-key office building in the gentrified northern part of Copenhagen, the core members of the Danish art group Superflex seem far less confrontational than you might expect. From their bases in Copenhagen, Stockholm and London, Jakob Fenger, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen and Rasmus Nielsen have been working together for 25 years on politically charged projects that have taken them everywhere from Texas to Africa, via Bangkok, Japan and many of the world's most prestigious art galleries. This year sees their most high-profile commission to date, with the recent announcement that they are the latest artists invited to fill the vast Turbine Hall of London's Tate Modern. Yet, despite the glamorous-sounding projects and their globe-trotting lifestyle, the three men, all in their 40s, appear surprisingly grounded, dressed in casual clothes, with a beard here, some gray hair there and plenty of lines around the eyes.
Talking about their provocative work—which has included such pieces as an exact replica of the toilets used by the U.N. Security Council in New York, erected on a beach in the Netherlands in 2010, and a video installation, made in 2009, that attempted to hypnotize viewers so that they might perceive climate change from the perspective of a cockroach—they are serious, patient and have a clear sense of their approach. Intent on challenging globalization and power structures, they call their works "tools," suggesting a broader application beyond art.
Though their mission is pugnacious, playfulness is central to the Superflex worldview. "Humor is just one of the buttons you can press. It's very effective. It's also challenging. It's not just fun," says Nielsen. The collective's work questions economic systems and the commodification of art, but the artists also highlight the comedy innate in everyday life. They call 1970s Danish children's television a main source of inspiration, and their works are more likely to be experiences rather than objects. "We want to do things that have an impact," Christiansen says. "Understanding the systems and the game of the realities that we choose to participate in is crucial. Let's say it's important to smash things before you can move on."
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Independent Collectors: Interview with Clayton Press & Gregory Linn
Diana Thater, The Best Animals Are the Flat Animals, 1998
Clayton Press and Gregory Linn are well known as early identifiers of emerging talents, many of which have developed into artists who are well recognized in the contemporary canon – from Richard Prince to Diana Thater, from Jutta Koether to Borna Sammak.
Our approach is to develop portraits of artists' careers, collecting several works – 5, 10, 15 – over time. For us, we are most interested in making a commitment to artists who are doing something fresh and evolutionary. We own paintings, time-based media, photography, sculpture, installation, and even several URLs (domain name and web application). Here is an example by Damon Zucconi, www.dictionary.blue.. By supporting these artists longer term, we feel – rightly or not – that we are encouraging them to push forward and through.
We took this approach first with the Pictures Generation, and then we did this with artists like Angela Bulloch, Stan Douglas, Zoe Leonard, Jason Rhoades, Kay Rosen, Diana Thater, Franz West, TJ Wilcox, and Christopher Williams in the 1990s. Next came, Matthew Brannon, Wade Guyton, Jutta Koether, Seth Price, and Kelley Walker in the 2000s. Now we are making similar, deep commitments to artists like Adam Henry, Jacob Kassay, Win McCarthy (whose work we first saw at Art Cologne in 2014), Borna Sammak, Kyle Thurman, and Damon Zucconi.
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The Irish Times: Paul Winstanley, Minimalism in the Dutch Golden Age at the Kerlin
Paul Winstanley, Lost (After Saenredam), 2016, oil on gesso on panel, 72 x 66 cm / 28.3 x 26 in
Minimalism in the Dutch Golden Age at the Kerlin by Aidan Dunne
Paul Winstanley: Faith After Saenredam and Other Paintings
Kerlin Gallery, South Anne St, Dublin
The key work in his new show at the Kerlin is his recreation, or re-imagination, of a lost painting of Mariakerk by Saenredam. Winstanley set about approximating it by referring to a surviving, precise preparatory sketch. Then he moved on to make another painting of Mariakerk, but from a slightly altered viewpoint, so that we can see a window and a golden tapestry, both of which, he points out, were documented as being there. But in composing his painting, Saenredam made sure neither would be seen, though he did include comparable elements in other paintings. The bottom line is that Winstanley's re-imagination of the Saenredam is of course a Winstanley. And perhaps our version of anything is uniquely our own.
Other paintings include people looking at paintings in the National Gallery, London. A man and a woman stand before a Vermeer. A larger group moves around in front of a religious icon painting. The moving figures are blurred as though by a long photographic exposure. The figures are ephemeral, the artworks fixed and bathed in light. There's also a painting of a recurrent subject: a birch tree, which of course changes all the time even in its constancy. Seeing is believing, but the implication of these beautifully poised works is that our faith may be misplaced.
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Judy Ledgerwood: Chromatic Patterns, Bloomberg mural, New York
Judy Ledgerwood, Chromatic patterns, 2016-2017, site specific wall painting at Bloomberg
Judy Ledgerwood's Chromatic Patterns mural for Bloomberg is at the new 919 3rd Avenue building in New York. It's inspired by the idea of place-making, about making the work space "a personal space rather than a more generic public space," according to Ledgerwood.
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Contemporary Art Daily: Venice, Philippe Parreno at The Central Pavilion and The Arsenale
Venice: Philippe Parreno at The Central Pavilion and The Arsenale
Philippe Parreno: All the World's Futures
The Central Pavilion and The Arsenale at the Venice Biennale
May 9 – November 22, 2015
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Domus: Pae White, Qwalala
Pae White, Qwalala, installation view, Le Stanze del Vetro, Venice, 2017
Pae White: Qwalala
until 30 November 2018
Pae White, Qwalala
Le Stanze del Vetro
Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
Qwalala, a monumental new sculpture by American artist Pae White, opened to the public on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, coinciding with the 57. International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Qwalala consists of a curving wall made only of solid glass-bricks. 75 metres long and 2,4 metres high, the thousands of glass bricks for Qwalala were hand-cast by Poesia Glass Studio in the Veneto region. Each of these hand-cast bricks is unique, owing much to chance and variation inherent in the artisanal manufacturing process.
Approximately half of the bricks are made of clear glass. The other half span a palette of 26 colours, and are made using a technique where each brick contains a storm-like effect of swirling colour, while remaining transparent. For this project, the individual bricks present the idea of modules of contained chaos. The artist combines these bricks to form an abstract, painterly pattern when viewed from afar, which, upon closer inspection, reveals unexpected worlds of detail. The muted blues, greens, pinks, greys and browns of the palette are drawn from colours used in first century Roman glassmaking created by the presence of sulphur, copper, manganese, and other metals and minerals.
The title of the piece, Qwalala, is a Native American Pomo word meaning "coming down water place." It references the meandering flow of the Gualala river in Northern California, which the work echoes in both its structure and layout. The wall's ever-shifting play of light, recalls the way in which the colour and temperature of the river water changes minute to minute as it meets the Pacific Ocean. Additionally, the name "Qwalala" itself, rolling off the tongue, also mimics the visceral experience of the body as it journeys around and through the curves of the wall.
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Kerry Tribe: Recipient of the 2017 Herb Albert Award in the Arts
Kerry Tribe: Recipient of the 2017 Herb Albert Award in the Arts
The Herb Alpert Foundation announced the 2017 winners of its annual Award in the Arts, which are given out annually by the foundation and the California Institute of the Arts. Each award honors a mid-career artists and comes with an unrestricted $75,000 prize. This year's winners are: Luciana Achugar for dance, Kerry Tribe for film/video, Eve Beglarian for music, Daniel Fish for theatre, and Amy Franceschini for visual arts.
Kerry Tribe, for her fearlessness in rethinking and readdressing social issues, her ability to make surprising and moving connections, for her demanding, pleasurable, transformative, and accessible work. They value her empathetic, generous and rare ability to immerse her audiences in new ways of seeing the world.
Past winners have included Simone Leigh, Tania Bruguera, Emily Jacir, Roni Horn, and Kerry James Marshall.
"It's particularly meaningful at this divisive moment to honor and support this year's winners who are rigorous in their reach, alert to the world, and make community as much as they make art," Irene Borger, the director of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, said in a statement.
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ARTnews, Herb Alpert Awards Name 2017 Winners, by Robin Scher
Los Angeles Times, Why the current political moment makes the new Herb Alpert awards for experimental artists so relevant, by Carolina A. Miranda
Opening this week in Venice
LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA
13 May – 26 November 2017
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PHILIPPE PARRENO
VIVA ARTE VIVA
Central Pavilion
Giardini, Venice
JORGE PARDO
Applied Arts Pavilion
Arsenale, Venice
______________________________
Pae White, "Qwalala", work in progress
PAE WHITE
LE STANZE DEL VETRO
Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
12 May 2017 - 30 November 2019
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Qwalala, a monumental new sculpture by artist Pae White, will open to the public on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, coinciding with the 2017 Venice Art Biennale. Qwalala consists of a curving wall made only of solid glass bricks, which occupies the entire area opposite LE STANZE DEL VETRO. At 75 metres long and 2.4 metres high, the 3,000 glass bricks for Qwalala were hand-cast by Poesia Glass Studio in the Veneto region. Each of these hand-cast bricks is unique, owing much to the chance and variation inherent in the artisanal manufacturing process.
ANN VERONICA JANSSENS
Palazzo Fortuny
San Marco, Venice
13 May – 26 November 2017
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To coincide with the 2017 Venice Art Biennale, the Axel & May Vervoordt Foundation and the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia will present their sixth and final exhibition: Intuition. The exhibition will explore how different manifestations of intuition have shaped art across geographies, cultures and generations. It will bring together historic, modern and contemporary works related to the concepts of dreams, telepathy, paranormal fantasy, meditation, creative power, hypnosis and inspiration.
Pae White: "Demimondaine" at kaufmann repetto
Pae White: Demimondaine
kaufmann repetto, Milan, Italy
8 May - 9 September 2017
The exhibition title lends itself to the French "demi-monde" or "half-world", a popular phrase at the turn of the early twentieth century characterizing those living opulent, pleasure-driven lifestyles. The derivative "demimondaine" spoke of the women that lived on the fringe of respectable society, straddling the standards of the "real-world". Their way of life a challenge of the status quo but existing within the con nes of those very ideals - a controlled excess, a chaos within boundaries.
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Cultured Magazine: 1301PE Celebrates 25 Years
1301PE Celebrates 25 Years
On April 28, 1301PE celebrated its 25th anniversary with an intimate dinner and two exhibitions at their gallery. On view in the main gallery is "The last beautiful pleasure," with work by Tacita Dean and Manon de Boer, including works on view for the first time in L.A.: Sylvia, March 1 and March 2, 2001, Hollywood Hills and Dean's Portraits. In the new viewing room, the exhibition "Life of riot at 25" depicts 1301PE's storied history through posters and postcards produced at the gallery over the last quarter century.
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Cultured: Brian Bulter, 1301PE
An Open Book by Maxwell Williams
Brian Butler, the owner of 1301PE, holds back on nothing for our two-hour interview. He's held a prime vantage point for more than two decades and we touch on subjects like how in the past few years, big galleries have tried to control artists the same way Monsanto controls seeds (choosing monoculture over biodiversity); how our culture wants "the Harry Potter box set" of a particular artist's works (the finished story, instead of waiting to see how it develops) and how the gallery opened 25 years ago on the inauspicious day that the L.A. Riots began."We sat around for a couple of days with nobody coming to see the exhibition," Butler says, reminiscing back to the inaugural Ericson & Ziegler show in April, 1992.
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Kerry Tribe: Parque Galeria, Mexico City
Kerry Tribe: the word the wall la palabra la pared
Parque Galeria, Mexico City
May 6 - July 1, 2017
Tribe's new works in video, sculpture and photography playfully literalize ideas around linguistic communication, transnational relations and empathy. The exhibition continues Tribe's investigation of the "speaking subject" who narrates their experience for an audience. The show is organized around a video in English and Spanish called Afasia (2017) which features the artist's friend photographer Christopher Riley, who, at the age of 43, suffered a left hemisphere stroke that severely limited his ability to speak, write and understand language. Despite these challenges, he passionately communicates an appreciation of his life and the vast world around him. The video is projected in a make-shift screening room built from the remains of what had previously been the gallery's front wall.
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Fiona Banner: De Pont Museum, Tilburg, Netherlands
Fiona Banner: Runway (AW 17)
De Pont Museum, Tilburg, Netherlands
29 Apr - 27 Aug 2017
In the vast industrial space of De Pont's main gallery, Banner creates a theatrical mise-en-scène where towering helicopter rotor blades and re-purposed military plane parts become the unknowing cast. Her deft handling of these objects reveals their anthropomorphic potential: Gazelle helicopter rotor blades are reminiscent of totem poles; a pair of Harrier nose cones suggest breasts, and elsewhere faces emerge from the juxtaposition of Jaguar drop tanks with abstract graphite drawings of full stops in different typefaces. Banner has long been fascinated by military aircraft, finding them at once beautiful and horrifying; almost 'prehistoric, from a time before words'.
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Charline Von Heyl: Capitain Petzel, Berlin
"Boomerang (Aboriginal Sin)", 2017, Acrylic and oil on linen, 208.3 x 198 x 4 cm /
82 x 78 x 1.6 inches © the artist, courtesy Capitain Petzel, Berlin, photo: Jens Ziehe
Charline Von Heyl
Capitain Petzel, Berlin
April 28 – June 3, 2017
Charline von Heyl creates paintings that function as self-perpetuating visual events, enigmatic pre- sences silently seducing or disturbing the viewer. They are often funny, but not afraid of poetic depth and even pathos. The colors are active: they shift, empty out or recharge depending on the time of day and the position of the viewer. Interference colors made to engage paradoxically with light con- fuse the hierarchy of tonality. Copper, aluminum-flakes, dirty pastels, charcoal powder, fluorescents but also graphic black and white are laid down in unstable and abused layers to provoking different moods and feelings.
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Angela Bulloch: Esther Schipper, Berlin
Heavy Metal Tall Stack: Beige and Blues, 2017 (detail; foreground), Powder-coated steel, 400 x 70 x 50 cm, Photo © Andrea Rossetti
Angela Bulloch: Heavy Metal Body
Esther Schipper, Berlin
April 28 – June 17, 2017
Drawing on her previous experiments with geometrical distortion, these new works expand in form and size. If the stylized geometry of Heavy Metal Tall Stack: Beige and Blues, which stands at more than three meters tall, recalls the formal aesthetics of Constantin Brâncuși's sculptures, something about the appearance of Heavy Metal Stack: Fat Beige Three and Heavy Metal Stack of Four: Red Monster—three massive rhomboid elements for the former and a pyramid-like shape for the latter—associated with their title, invokes the idea of an anthropomorphic presence. By changing the appearance of each column in accordance to one's point of view, Bulloch plays with our perception of sculptures while orchestrating our experience as gallery visitors. To envision the work in its entirety the viewer must circulate around the sculpture, which at times seems graphic—almost abstract—shifting between two and three dimensions. Here, the artist transfers major themes of Minimalism into the present, and more specifically, the aesthetic exploration of objects' influence on spatial perception.
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Kirsten Everberg: Galerie Eric Hussenot, Paris
Market, 2017, Oil and enamel on canvas over wood panel, 183 x 228,5 cm
Kirsten Everberg
Galerie Eric Hussenot, Paris
22 April - 3 June 2017
Exploring the complex relationships between culture, history and place, Kirsten Everberg applies the framework of distinct ethnic neighborhoods in Los Angeles to create a new body of work, using the concept of Chinatown as a jumping off point.
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Ana Prvacki: Socle du Monde Biennale, Herning, Denmark
Ana Prvacki
Socle du Monde Biennale
22 April – 27 August 2017
The 2017 Socle Du Monde Biennial takes place at HEART – Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Herning Højskole, Carl-Henning Pedersen & Else Alfelt's Museum, The Geometric Gardens and HEART's Sculpture Park.
Socle du Monde 2017 presents a wide range of works. Paintings, installation art, sculptures and performances – from colourless paintings, shit in a can and live chickens to art exchanges and a dancing light robot.
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Kerry Tribe: Faena Art, Biennale of Moving Images, PAMM, Miami
Kerry Tribe, still from Exquisite Corpse, 2016.
Kerry Tribe: Exquisite Corpse
Pérez Art Museum Miami
Thursday, April 20th, 7 pm
PAMM will screen Exquisite Corpse, a 51-minute installation and single-channel film that follows the 51-mile Los Angeles River from its origins in the San Fernando Valley northeast of the city to its terminus at the Pacific Ocean. Using a detailed map as a script, Tribe's camera captures the river's varied landscapes, neighborhoods, inhabitants, and communities through a string of meditative encounters that collectively describe the site, and the city, at this juncture in its history. Tribe's film is shown as part of Faena Art's presentation of highlights from the Biennale of Moving Images, on view at Faena Art April 13-30, 2017.
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Jorge Méndez Blake: Meessen De Clercq, Brussels, Belgium
Detail of Calligrammes. Poèmes de la Paix et de la guerre (Guillaume Apollinaire), 2017,
Ink on paper, polyptich of 12 pieces. 27,5 x 37,5 cm (each). Edition of 3 + 1 AP
Jorge Méndez Blake
Apollinaire's Misspell and Other Calligrams
March 30, 2017 - May 13, 2017
It's raining women's voices as if they had died even in memory. This is the first sentence of the poem II pleut (It's Raining) by Apollinaire. One of the famous Calligrams which dynamited the form and typography of poetry at the beginning of the 20th century. This poem has always intrigued Jorge Méndez Blake, who explores the intimacy of world literature in his work. The Mexican artist questions both the language and the structure of a work, from its foundations to its rafters. The exhibition Apollinaire's Misspell and Other Calligrams pays tribute to the singularity of the poems written by Apollinaire right in the middle of the First World War.
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LA Weekly: 15 Female Artists Who’ve Shaped the L.A. Art Scene
Uta Barth, In the Light and Shadow of Morandi (17.01), 2017, face mounted, raised, shaped,
Archival Pigment print in artist frame, 48.75 x 52.75 x 1.75 inches (framed), edition of 6, 2 APs.
15 Female Artists Who've Shaped the L.A. Art Scene by Eva Recinos
Uta Barth
Known around the world for her unconventional style of photography, Uta Barth calls Los Angeles home and received her MFA at UCLA in 1985. Barth's compositions usually require that viewers allow their eyes to adjust a little; there seems to be nothing really there, but the faint shapes that come to the surface turn out to be haunting. Her work is a part of major museum collections including those at the Hammer Museum, LACMA and the Getty.
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LA Weekly: 5 Art Shows to See in L.A This Week
Uta Barth, Untitled (17.04), 2017, Archival Pigment print in artist frame (welded aluminum,
optium), 75.75 x 64.875 x 2.5 inches (framed), edition of 6, 2 APs. Installation view 1301PE.
Quietly serious - Uta Barth at 1301PE by Catherine Wagley
One six-foot-high image in longtime L.A. artist Uta Barth's current show at first looks like a painting when you see it hanging at 1301PE. In fact, it's an especially sharp photograph of the white-painted exterior wall of Barth's studio. The sunlight makes the subtle inconsistencies of the paint job apparent and, as with much of Barth's best work, the image's quietness has more intensity than serenity. It requires your attention and demands that you acknowledge all its mundane but idiosyncratic details.
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Diana Thater: ARoS Triennial (The Garden - The Past), Denmark
ARoS Triennia: The Garden - The Past
April 8–July 30, 2017
The first ARoS Triennial will feature major new commissions and large-scale installations across the city of Aarhus, Denmark. Focusing on depictions of nature throughout history, the Triennial will be split into three sections: The Past, The Present and The Future. The launch of the Triennial will coincide with Aarhus’ year as European Capital of Culture.
The Past, which opens April 8, will span 400 years and will illustrate man’s relationship with nature: from the powerful orchestration of the baroque garden, the mathematically constructed landscapes of neo-classicism, and the sensuous gardens of the rococo to the monumental use of nature in land art projects and modern man’s impact on nature portrayed in contemporary art. The Past will provide the historical context for the Triennial theme and will be spread across several levels of the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, comprising more than 100 works (paintings, installations, video art, and sculptures) by artists including Nicolas Poussin, Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch, Robert Smithson, and Meg Webster.
The Past will feature works by Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Antoine Watteau, Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael, John Constable, Caspar David Friedrich, Edvard Munch, Paul Gauguin, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Maurice de Vlaminck, Emil Nolde, Max Liebermann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Jean Arp, René Magritte, Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Smithson, Joan Jonas, Richard Long, Diana Thater, Meg Webster, Olafur Eliasson, Damián Ortega, Darren Almond, and Pamela Rosenkranz.
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Diana Thater: "A Runaway World " at The Mistake Room, Los Angeles
Image Credits: T. Kelly Mason.
Diana Thater: A Runaway World
April 1 - June 3, 2017
For her exhibition at The Mistake Room, Thater will present two works she produced in Kenya in 2016 and 2017. Conceived as both portraits and landscapes, the works will be staged within a unique architectural environment of free-standing screen structures that the artist designed. The works give us glimpses into the lives and worlds of two species on the verge of extinction—rhinos and elephants—and the illicit economies that threaten their survival.
The first work, As Radical as Reality, revolves around Sudan—the world's last surviving male white rhino. Protected from poachers by guards who accompany him at all times as he roams the grounds of the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Sudan represents the last hope of his species but he has shown no interest in mating with the two female rhinos who also live at the Conservancy. When he dies, at some point in the near future, so will the rest of his kind. Thater was given unprecedented access to film Sudan and his guards. Over the duration of a week, Thater filmed Sudan and his human companions in the wild during the day and at night—capturing their daily lives from a very intimate perspective. For Thater, a species is a world unto itself—a configuration of existence that is worthy of our contemplation. Thus, in this work, Thater attempts to metaphorically assemble a portrait not only of a species, but also of an entire world coming to an end.
The second work, A Runaway World, captures a herd of Elephants that Thater filmed in Kenya's Chyulu Hills earlier this year. The elephants meander through on one screen as images of the terrain in which they reside are projected onto an intersecting one; gesturing to the relationship between the natural environment and survival. This changing landscape, forged by shifting images of majestic beings and the land between Mount Kilimanjaro and the Chyulu Hills, comes into focus only momentarily—reminding us of the fragility of the world and our complicity with its longevity.
Presented together in the space, this portrait of beasts and this landscape inhabited by beasts ask us to confront urgencies that are going to shape the well being of a future all species will inhabit and to accept a reality that too many today are attempting to frame as fiction.
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Bloomberg: Philippe Parreno on "Brilliant Ideas"
Bloomberg's 'Brilliant Ideas' documentary
Each 'Brilliant Ideas' episode profiles an artist from around the world who specializes in a medium that could include sculpture, painting or performance art. The artists discuss their lives and careers, including how they got into the industry and what inspires their work.
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KCRW: Uta Barth at 1301PE
Uta Barth, 2017. Installation view 1301PE.
Uta Barth at 1301PE
Hunter Drohojowska-Philp praises the photographer's skill with light and shadow.
Uta Barth is best known for her photographs chronicling the effects of light in her studio, images that are minimal in both their appearance and sources. Her exhibition In the Light and Shadow of Morandi at 1301 PE is a more dramatic intervention. By placing colored glass vessels on a table in her studio, she photographed the effect of light passing through them to cast colored, rippling, fanciful shadows.
The show is an ode to the modern Italian artist Giorgio Morandi, who repeatedly painted still lifes of bottles, bowls and pitchers in a monochromatic and poetically simplified manner. Barth follows his method of returning repeatedly to similar compositions in order to concentrate on the relationships between the shapes of different vessels, the effects of light, whether radiant or cloudy, the range of possible colors.
Barth is not slavishly copying but borrowing from Morandi to analyze the differences between the individual perception of a painter and the camera's eye. Barth compensates for the parallax distortion of photography by combining different points of view in a single image. Objects appear both solid and translucent. Are we seeing the actual vessels or just their reflections and shadows? Heightening the effect, each photograph is presented on a matte that is cut to correspond to the black table bearing the vessels, which adds to the illusion of receding perspective. One edge of the matte is colored by Barth — yellow, blue — in a way that is scarcely noticeable but still adds a sense of containment. A shadow of the artist's hand in the arrangement is included in some pictures, as it has in some of her past work, as though the artist wants her intellectually and perceptually evolved art to retain a sense of self.
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Artillery: Uta Barth at 1301PE
Uta Barth, In the Light and Shadow of Morandi (17.01), 2017, face mounted, raised, shaped,
Archival Pigment print in artist frame, 48.75 x 52.75 x 1.75 inches (framed), edition of 6, 2 APs.
Uta Barth by Ezra Jean Black
Uta Barth's work has always dealt with the way images and perceptions are shaped through both the tools and conventions of image making. Much of that work has addressed more specifically divergences between those synthetically shaped and focused perceptions and expectations conditioned by convention. In the body of work currently on view at 1301PE, shape itself is made the 'foreground' threshold for what becomes a dazzling play on the essential materials of photography and image-making generally. The subject is nominally a bar or serving console with bottles, decanters, vases and other vessels arrayed across it – the kind of still life that was a favorite subject of Italian painter, Giorgio Morandi; and In the Light and Shadow of Morandi becomes clearly, not only an homage to Morandi, but itself a kind of painting with refracted light. The process is willful and deliberative in every respect, yet also admitting of mystery. 'Field' here is shaped subtly into simple polygons and floated within the framed squarish rectangle – echoing the severe rectilinear geometry of the bar. The bar is mostly blacked out; but even here, Barth subtly conflates and confuses its structure with its shaped polygonal support. The angle seems to shift, elongate, flatten. Slits or storage spaces (or apertures?) reveal openings or other vessels beneath the bar's surface. The focus and emphasis are on the silhouetted verticals of the vessels infused by the (mostly horizontal) refracting light and its luminescent color – dazzling and ethereal. The vessels are rendered as distinct worlds, alternately separated crisply by white space or clustered close; yet not bleeding so much as displacing each other, each preserving its specific transmuted atmospheres in a spectrum of glass-inflected colors: chartreuse veering into olive (or even 'bottle') green; azure and sapphire; amber, rust and ox-blood red; and a host of smoky grays. Occasionally a refracted wave makes a jagged trajectory across the field; zones of color are layered within a vessel; or a human arm (similarly transformed and luminescent) intrudes upon the tableau to grasp a glass or vessel, setting off its own disturbances – e.g., an inverted parabola of light. 'Ghost' lights linger here and there upon the opaque blacks of the bar. In another Untitled series (only one of which is on view here), Barth fixes her thoughtful gaze on an exterior wall – as powerfully and poetically as she does on the classic Morandi motif. This is work that stands in no one's shadow.
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Kerry Tribe: “Top Five Buddy Cop Films” at Steve Turner, Los Angeles
Top Five Buddy Cop Films, Installation view, Steve Turner, March 2017
Top Five Buddy Cop Films
Amanda Ross-Ho & Diedrick Brackens, Larry Johnson & Adam Stamp, Joel Kyack & Lisa Anne Auerbach, Kerry Tribe & Edgar Bryan, Lila de Magalhaes & Roni Shneior, curated by Santi Vernetti
March 23 – April 29, 2017
Top Five Buddy Cop Films is an exhibition of collaborations between five pairs of Los Angeles-based artists, curated by Santi Vernetti.
On paper, the practices of Kerry Tribe and Edgar Bryan couldn't be more dissimilar. Tribe works mostly in film, video, and installation, while Bryan works mostly in painting, book design, and clay. What they share is a collection of overlapping interests and approaches to making. Both explore the boundaries and possibilities of gesture and representation within their chosen mediums. They also share a rich history of collaboration with other artists, friends, and strangers.
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Ann Veronica Janssens: ”MARS” at the Institut d'art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes, France
© Ann Veronica Janssens. Photo : Isabelle Arthuis
Ann Veronica Janssens
MARS
Institut d'art contemporain - Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes
From 24 March to 7 May 2017
1301PE is pleased to announce MARS, a large-scale solo exhibition of Ann Veronica Janssens' work at the Institut d'art contemporain. The entire space will be dedicated to new pieces referring to existing works.
Ann Veronica Janssens bases her work on the act of perception, developing an experimental research through the prism of physical phenomena such as light, colour, sound, or mist. Using stripped-down gestures, the artist activates 'undefined zones' between blindness and revelation. These gestures seek to render manifest the indefinable and transitory nature of the very material of reality. Duration, space, and movement determine their primordial conditions.
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SUPERFLEX: Hyundai Commission for the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, Britain
SUPERFLEX
Turbine Hall, Tate Modern
3 October 2017 - 2 April 2018
1301PE is pleased to announce that Danish collective SUPERFLEX will undertake this year's Hyundai Commission for the Turbine Hall, opening on 3 October 2017. It will be the next in this major series of annual site-specific commissions by renowned international artists.
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The New York Times, Superflex Is Chosen for Tate Modern Turbine Hall
The Guardian, Danish artists Superflex next for Tate Modern Turbine Hall
Artforum: Blake Rayne, Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston
View of "Blake Rayne," 2016–17. Foreground: A Line, 2013. Background, from left: Untitled,
2010; Untitled, 2010. Photo: Peter Molick.
Blake Rayne
BLAFFER ART MUSEUM, UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON
—Paul Galvez
I have seen the work of Blake Rayne in bits and pieces over the years, and in each instance I have been puzzled by what I like to call the ugly ducklings nestled within his installations. By this I mean the one work out of a gaggle of beauties that seems to be deliberately, aggressively out of place. For example, the yogurt container–cum–projection screen perched on the windowsill of Campoli Presti's London gallery back in 2012 (Yogurt Cinema, 2014). In a mostly pristine exhibition, it stood out like a sore thumb.
Sometimes the clash makes sense. The decision to hang paintings next to their wooden transport crates worked marvelously in the 2008 exhibition "Dust of Suns" at Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York, reminding us, once again, that canvases are objects, too. I therefore waited with bated breath for Rayne's midcareer retrospective, curated by Javier Sánchez Martínez, in which the ugly ducklings, with the additional context that only such overviews can provide, would finally become glorious swans.
Or so I thought. Instead of finding peaceful resolution, Rayne's oeuvre seems at war with itself. Take, for example, the atrium-like entry gallery, the first of the show's two rooms, in which Rayne's well-regarded series of canvases that have been folded, sprayed, and sewn (in that order) are understandably highlighted. However, as if to slight their elegance, a gang of incompatible objects—a book of felt (A Line [Almanac], 2013), glasses on a wood table next to a plant in a cardboard box (Table of Contents, 2010), a plastic bottle (Untitled, 2016)—loiters at the center of the room. I suppose the two sets (paintings and things) share a readymade quality. But even so, their visual incongruity overshadows any sense of filiation.
The placement of works in the second room only accentuates the discord. A small squiggly red, white, and blue canvas, Untitled, 2012, neighbors five of Rayne's iconic wall works from the series "Cover Letter," 2010, featuring felt letter a's drooping off their canvases onto the floor. Since I don't think an homage to Brice Marden's "Cold Mountain" paintings or Robert Morris's antiforms is intended, I can only assume that the disjunction between pictorial and sculptural, smooth and textured, line and letter, is the goal here.
Everywhere you turn, unlike is pitted against unlike, most jarringly whenever one's gaze crosses a towering, eclectically composed mobile of T-shirts, 3-D letters, and a bicycle hanging in the middle of the room. One corner of the room does, however, approach legibility: A pair of Day-Glo, dye-sublimation-printed abstract canvases draped with equally garish vinyl garlands, both Untitled, 2010, are a canny criticism of the arbitrary, decorative impulse underlying so much of today's computer-generated painting. Bracketing these is a pile of the aforementioned felt a's, A Line, 2013, and an André Cadere–esque pole. Altogether, the trio surveys the multiple ways in which color can be used as a sign.
Coming from a lesser artist, such cacophony might indicate a confused mind. But works such as Untitled, 2011, a panel onto which a chart from Cynthia and Harrison White's art-historical text Canvases and Careers (1965) has been silk-screened, show that Rayne is no dummy. The graphic lists by year the number of paintings that each of the Impressionists made over the course of their careers, documenting in numeric form their respective moments of breakthrough. Rayne is all too aware of the complicity between the making and the marketing of art. And indeed, interpretations of his work have tended toward over-cerebralization, earnestly shrouding it in a cloud of semio-speak (abetted by Rayne himself, it must be said). While there is something admirable and even necessary about linking such an artistic practice to the digital and the socioeconomic, I fear that this body of work's most striking feature—namely, the violence of its juxtapositions—has been somewhat downplayed in the artist's critical reception.
It is exceedingly ironic that an oeuvre so hostile to any overarching narrative should so often be explained by one. For it is hard to find a practice with a comparable level of purposeful discontinuity and obfuscation. Rayne's work is neither pastiche nor bricolage, neither assemblage nor pure shock. It would seem that the artist seeks above all to preempt totalization of his practice by any interpretive system, going so far as to refuse to establish a system in the first place. The interpreter's frustration would be akin to sexual frustration, were it not for the fact that the work is so decidedly unerotic. Therefore, the closest thing I can come up with is that emblem of mechanized frustration, the bachelor machine, minus Duchamp's irony and duplicity.
LA Times: Petra Cortright's digital paintings, a tangled web of dots and swipes
Petra Cortright, "man_bulbGRDNopenz@CharlesSchwaabSto9ds," 2016
Petra Cortright's digital paintings, a tangled web of dots and swipes by Christopher Knight
Petra Cortright's paintings wedge themselves between the celebrated history of gestural art, mostly Expressionist and abstract, and the past generation's frantic upheaval of established visual norms generated by the emergence and now ubiquity of digital imagery.
Think of them as touch-screen paintings.
If you've ever done a drag-and-drop, you'll have a general idea of the five recent paintings in Cortright's inaugural solo exhibition at 1301PE. Digging around the Internet and using familiar computer software, she cobbles together pictures, palettes and markings into big, mostly dense and tangled compositions for printing on large sheets of rag paper and Belgian linen.
The squiggly marks on the surface recall the oily, swiped residue left behind by fingers on a smartphone or tablet. The big difference is that actual screen marks are tactile, while the smooth, inert surfaces of Cortright's digitally printed paintings are not. There's some tension between old and new conceptions of "the artist's touch," but as yet it's more cerebral than intuitive.
The intuition comes in the compositions. Cortright piles on loops, swoops, scribbles and slathers, invoking the ironic fusion of personal gesture and impersonal mass-production in Roy Lichtenstein's sleek brushstroke paintings from 1965-66. Where he made big gestures, however, which befit the crushing scale of the banality that had come to engulf Abstract Expressionist art, she taps into the sheer volume of today's roaring digital deluge.
Look closely, and an ancient Greco-Roman sculpture or a bunch of gaily colored pansies pokes through the enormous gestural mass. Nearby, in five flash-animation videos on small flat-screens, animals both real and imaginary — deer, fish, unicorn — likewise cavort through similarly gestural fields. These juxtapositions of digital culture with nature and material culture recall interests in video projections by Diana Thater and Jennifer Steinkamp. They're the work's most compelling feature.
In the relationship between these paintings and animations and the abandon of children's finger-paintings and the wackiness of SpongeBob SquarePants-style cartoons, there's also a hint of playfulness. Given the apparent inevitability of the printed work's inert surfaces, which operate like a visual mute button, Cortright would do well to ramp up that mischievousness.
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Hyperallergic: Proposing Painting as a Form of Refusal
'Blake Rayne: Cabin of the Accused,' exhibition view, Blaffer Art Museum at the University
of Houston
Proposing Painting as a Form of Refusal by Anthony Hawley
Blake Rayne's first midcareer survey is full of linguistic disruptions and quiet repetitions, bringing to mind Bartleby the scrivener's disarming resistance.
HOUSTON — As our 45th president's chief white house strategist tells the media to "keep their mouth shut," as the newly appointed press secretary chastises everyone for unfairly misrepresenting the 2017 inauguration crowds, and as Kellyanne Conway transmutes alternative facts into reality, one wonders what kind of refusal might counter refusal itself. Given a political machine working overtime to silence any competing versions of the truth, how does one counterattack a far right-extremism that touts falsehoods as "telling it like it is"? Like Tom Huhn, chair of Visual and Critical Studies at the School for Visual Arts in New York, put it in a recent piece in the New Yorker, "Part of what makes Trump attractive to many is that he practices a kind of great refusal himself, saying no to just about everything, and thereby appearing to be on the side of human beings liberating themselves from restrictions and hierarchies." As we enter a global political climate where the alt-right is on the rise and a large constituency is convinced that it's being "liberated" by a particular form of refusal, how does one form a refusal of another kind, one that resists and retrieves difference?
One avenue might be something akin to Herman Melville's infamous "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street." In it, a Wall Street lawyer hires a new clerk who, after an intense period of impressive work, simply refuses to make another copy or do any of the other office tasks expected of him. Whenever the lawyer asks Bartleby to do something, Bartleby quietly utters, "I would prefer not to." The phrase beguiles the lawyer: It's not exactly a bold-faced rebuttal, nor is it walk-out, a workers' strike on the streets. While the lawyer continues to press Bartleby to do various tasks, the scrivener instead does less and less. Bartleby eventually starts living in the office as he maintains his staunch and paralyzing "I would prefer not to."
I thought about Bartleby while viewing Blake Rayne: Cabin of the Accused at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston. Rayne's first midcareer survey is full of linguistic disruptions and quiet repetitions, bringing to mind the scrivener's disarming resistance. Wall Street doesn't know the act of "preferring not to" — the simple statement has so much power not just because it interrupts but because it also creates a lingering silence in its lack of alternatives. For me, Rayne's oeuvre and exhibition embody a similar act in the various refusals.
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T Magazine: Protest Art in the Era of Trump
"untitled (the tyranny of common sense has reached its final stage, new york times,
november 9, 2016)," 2016, acrylic and newspaper on linen, 89 1/4" x 73 1/4".
Protest Art in the Era of Trump by M.H. MILLER
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Some of the most famous works of the Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija eschew traditional art objects in favor of social interventions, including cooking large meals in galleries and at events like Frieze Art Fair. This painting, "untitled (the tyranny of common sense has reached its final stage, new york times, november 9, 2016)," was made directly following the election, and debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach last December.
"I've been using newspapers for a long time now, and I draw from long lists of quotes floating in my head. It is an ongoing project at this point. In newspapers, I see the contradictions of reality and fiction play out. 'The tyranny of common sense has reached its final stage' is a quote from Aldo van Eyck, perhaps taken out of context, but in the wake of the recent election, the quote resonates."
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The Art Newspaper: How an art work could literally save lives in Syria
SUPERFLEX, Hospital Equipment (2014) (Image: Anders Sune Berg, courtesy the artists)
How an art work could literally save lives in Syria by Jose Da Silva
Danish collective SUPERFLEX's hospital equipment installation will be shipped to war-torn country after exhibition
The Danish art collective SUPERFLEX will unveil today (17 February) a new installation called Hospital Equipment, which consists of functioning surgical equipment that will be shipped to a Syrian hospital once the exhibition is over. The collective describe the work as "a ready-made upside down, since we not only take a ready-made object into an art context, but we bring it back into the world again".
The surgeon's table, surgical tools and mobile lamp that form the work at the Von Bartha gallery in S-chanf, Switzerland, will be packed-up and transported to the Salamieh Hospital in Hawarti, a village in the southwestern Hama region, following the dismantling of the show on 18 March. All that will be left of the work will be three "slightly different and unique" photographs, a gallery spokeswoman says, while the rest of the piece carries out its practical functions in the hospital. But, "as much as it is an operation table in the gallery, it is an artwork inside the hospital," the artists say.
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Ana Prvacki: Shunga lecture-performance at the Boghossian Foundation, Brussels
Ana Prvački collection, estampe Shunga, 1920
Boghossian Foundation – Villa Empain, Brussels
Shunga, the Japanese Erotic Prints
Lecture-performance by Ana Prvački
1 February 2017, at 7 pm
In the framework of Embassy of Uncertain Shores, Ana Prvački will hold a lecture-performance on Shunga. The word Shunga means erotic art in Japanese and refers to graphic images of sexual activity. The intentions of Shunga are: stimulation, consolation, seduction, education, veneration and amusement. Their influence is profound and inspiring.
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Philippe Parreno: "A Time Coloured Space" at Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porugal
Philippe Parreno, Speech Bubbles (Gold), 2015 Photo: Andrea Rossetti
Philippe Parreno
A Time Coloured Space
Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal
3 February 2017 – 1 May 2017
The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art presents A Time Coloured Space, a major exhibition by French artist Philippe Parreno, his first in Portugal. Curated by the Director of the museum, Suzanne Cotter, the exhibition will span thirteen rooms, across two floors, occupying the museum's entire building.
The exhibition is structured on the mathematical model of the fugue, and conceived around the idea of the counterpoint, or ritournelle, a principle whereby a particular passage is repeated at regular interludes within a musical arrangement to create compositional meaning. Governed by a similar method, A Time Coloured Space is determined not by its 'objects', but by the regularity and rhythm of their appearance, featuring some of Parreno's most emblematic work dating back to the 1990s.
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1301PE at ALAC
Ana Prvacki: "Tent quintet, bows and elbows" at Art Catalogues at LACMA
Ana Prvacki's Tent, quintet, bows and elbows
Art Catalogues at LACMA
Sunday, 15 January 4 pm to 6 pm
The tent will activate at 4:15pm | performed by Lyris Quartet
Talk, reception and book signing to follow
Ana Prvacki: "Daily practice, tuning" performance at Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai
Daily practice, tuning, performance piece, Castello di Rivoli performance, 2009
Ana Prvacki, Daily practice, tuning performance
Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai
24 December 2016 - 12 February 2017
At McaM Ana Prvački will present her Wandering Band/Performing Daily Practice series. The work was performed at Castello di Rivoli (2009), Pompidou (2010), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (2010-2011) and Highline NYC (2010) and will be developed for the context of Shanghai. Prvački will invite local music makers of various and diverse training to the McaM and they will be given free reign to perform their daily practice of scales, tonal exercises, and trills while roaming through the galleries and exploring the visual and acoustic environment of the museum, transforming the museum into a lyrical set. This gesture challenges the way we as individuals (both performers and audiences) physically and aurally perceive space while demystifying the labor of practice.
Every day at the musicians will gather in an attempt to harmonize without a fixed given note. They will bring their traditional Chinese and Western classical training and intuitively work together to find their way into and out of sonic chaos while exploring the conventional time-space limitations of culture and geography, searching for a universal sound of humanity. The tuning will take place around a microphone and the 15 minute exercise will be broadcast through a speaker out onto the street.
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Jack Goldstein: "Art Center Talks" Book Launch at 365 Mission, Los Angeles
Art Center Talks: Graduate Seminar, The First Decade 1986-1995
Book launch & panel discussion on Sunday, December 11th at 365 Mission
3-5pm Panel Discussion / 5-6pm Public Reception
ArtCenter College of Design's Graduate Art MFA program announces the publication of the first of three volumes of ArtCenter Talks, a collection of transcripts of lectures given by artists, theorists and historians throughout the program's thirty-year history. For this inaugural volume, Stan Douglas, who joined the Graduate Art faculty in 2009, chose 13 lectures from among hundreds that he deemed best represented the scope and range of the first decade of the program and its guests.
To celebrate the book's publication, on December 11, Douglas will moderate a roundtable discussion at 356 Mission Rd. in Los Angeles that will include former faculty, alumni and visiting artists (Meg Cranston, Stephen Prina, Diana Thater, T.J. Wilcox) who participated in the "Graduate Seminar" during the decade covered by this first volume.
Contributions by: Beth B, Rosetta Brooks, Luis Castro Leiva, Meg Cranston, Charles Gaines, Jack Goldstein, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Susan Hiller, Roni Horn, Kellie Jones, Mike Kelley, Justen Ladda, Thomas Lawson, Sylvere Lotringer, John Miller, Constance Penley, Brian Routh, Mira Schor, Allan Sekula, Robert Storr, Lynne Tillman
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Fiona Connor: "Ma" at Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles
Ma
December 10 - January 14
Chateau Shatto
406 W Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90015
Ma is an exhibition curated by Fiona Connor at Château Shatto, sprung from the artist's encounters with the photographic archives of Frank J. Thomas.
For Ma, Connor has composed a group of works that she understands as being nourished by similar concerns that she first responded to in Frank J. Thomas' photographs, more specifically his documentation of the paintings of John McLaughlin. Ma includes works by Judy Fiskin, Sydney de Jong, John McLaughlin, Frank J. Thomas, Audrey Wollen, Bedros Yeretzian and Fiona Connor. The exhibition design has been undertaken by Sebastian Clough.
Ma is the culmination of a series of projects by Connor including a display case at the Auckland Art Gallery, a lecture at Elam School of Fine Arts at University of Auckland and an exhibition at Minerva in Sydney, Australia. This exhibition takes Connor's research back to Los Angeles, where it began.
Arteviste: An Interview with Internet Artist Petra Cortright in Los Angeles, California
Portrait courtesy of Petra Cortright's studio.
An Interview with Internet Artist Petra Cortright in Los Angeles, California by Flora Alexandra Ogilvy
FO:Was there a pivotal moment when you decided to be an artist?
PC: no its just always been an affliction that i've suffered from my whole life
FO: Can you tell us about the process of making your artwork?
PC: i troll the internet for scraps to use, and then i use some of those scraps, change some scraps around, break up some of the scraps, put some scraps back together, add my own scraps and scratches, do this all of this very quickly -- and then post it. sometimes i print it out later, sometimes i don't.
FO: What is your favourite art gallery in Los Angeles and why?
PC: and/or gallery just re-opened in pasadena after years of hiatus. originally it was in dallas, tx. i've always had a huge respect for paul slocum and the community of artists that he has supported, we have all been a tight knit group of nerds for years now. i am thrilled to be working with brian butler of 1301PE now, brian and the gallery are both so cool and for lack of a smarter word so chill and we just get on so well. 1301PE is also in an area that feels so 'LA art' to me and i just love the way that gallery is set up, i always love an upstairs/downstairs situation like that. also maybe because its by LACMA but i just have always deeply loved that area. it just seems so so so classic LA. palm tree emoji.
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Philippe Parreno: "Thenabouts" at ACMI, Australia
Philippe Parreno, The Crowd, 2015 (film still) © Philippe Parreno, Courtesy Pilar Corrias,
Barbara Gladstone, Esther Schipper
Philippe Parreno: Thenabouts
Australian Centre for the Moving Image
6 December 2016 - 13 March 2017
For his first solo exhibition in Australia, Philippe Parreno activates a singular retrospective of his filmic works as a cinematic ensemble in which the artist's films play with temporal and spatial boundaries, guiding the visitor through a complex journey of images, duration, memory, and the passage of time. Controlled live by a gallery technician, no one visit is ever the same.
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Artnet: In Miami, Artists Rirkrit Tiravanija and Tomas Vu Will Teach You How to Surf
Rirkrit Tiravanija and Tomas Vu Model for RT TV Boards at UNTITLED, Miami Beach
(2016). Courtesy of the artists and Nathalie Karg Gallery.
In Miami, Artists Rirkrit Tiravanija and Tomas Vu Will Teach You How to Surf by Brian Boucher
One of the keys to surviving Art Basel week in Miami Beach is taking advantage of the Atlantic Ocean, and artists Rirkrit Tiravanija and Tomas Vu found the perfect way to bring the experience of art and surf together this year in a joint work titled DO WE DREAM UNDER THE SAME SKY. Billed as a "surf inspired participatory installation," they're offering custom-designed surfboards for UNTITLED visitors to get out into the water.
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Ana Prvacki: "A Song for Rio" at Galeria Fortes Vilaça, Rio de Janeiro
Ana Prvacki, "Various keys," 2014, gel pen on gampi paper, 10.5 x 7.25 inches
Uma Canção para o Rio / A Song for Rio
Galeria Fortes Vilaça
Rio de Janeiro
PART I November 22, 2016 – January 19, 2017
PART II February 4 – March 18, 2017
What lives in the zone between the world of objects and the realm of music? A Song for Rio brings together a group of Brazilian and international artists who each in their own way attempt to answer this question by undertaking a poetic investigation of the intersection of art and music. A collaboration between Galeria Fortes Vilaça and Douglas Fogle & Hanneke Skerath.
Artists (part 1): Allora & Calzadilla, Ana Prvački, Anne Collier, Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Búrca, Bruce Conner, Cabelo, Cerith Wyn Evans, Chelpa Ferro, Christian Marclay, Dave Muller, Ernesto Neto, Jac Leirner, Kelley Walker, Los Carpinteros, Mark Leckey, Nuno Ramos, Paulo Garcez, Rivane Neuenschwander, Susan Philipsz, Vivian Caccuri
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Jorge Mendez Blake: "Nocturnos" at Travesia Cuatro, Madrid
Jorge Mendez Blake, Todos los nocturnos de Villaurrutia I (Nocturno, Nocturno miedo, Nocturno
grito, Nocturno de la estatua, Nocturno en que nada se oye, Nocturno sueño), 2016
Jorge Mendez Blake: Nocturnos
19 November 2016 - 10 February 2017
Travesia Cuatro
San Mateo 16
28004 Madrid
On this occasion, the artist has set his focus on the "nocturne", a musical genre cultivated primarily during Romanticism and Modernismo, the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Spanish-American literary movement led by poets and writers such as Rubén Darío, Leopoldo Lugones, Federico García Lorca and José Asunción Silva, among others. The Nocturne, was popularized in Mexico by the group Los Contemporáneos, whose members included Salvador Novo, Antonieta Rivas Mercado, José Gorostiza and Xavier Villaurrutia. Who used it as the backbone of his book Nostalgia de la muerte, that would become a benchmark in twentieth-century Mexican poetry.
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Fiona Banner: "Au Cœur des Ténèbres" at mfc-michele didier gallery, Paris
FIONA BANNER: Au Cœur des Ténèbres
November 18, 2016 - January 7, 2017
mfc-michèle didier
66rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth
F-75003 Paris
On this occasion, Fiona Banner - who continuously investigates the slippage between object, image and text through the prism of graphic and editorial works - has hinged the exhibition on her adaptation of Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness.
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SUPERFLEX: 11th Shanghai Biennale
SUPERFLEX presents Pigs, Time and Space for the 11th Shanghai Biennale 'Why Not Ask Again?'
11th Shanghai Biennale
11 November 2016 - 12 March 2017
Pigs, Time and Space is a new film installation that addresses the exchange of pigs between Denmark and China. With a pig as the main protagonist Pigs, Time and Space is set in a dream-like universe unfolding the highlights of a historical loop from I Ching, the ancient Book on Divination, to the Schjellerup crater on the moon.
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Fiona Connor: "Brick, Cane and Paint" at Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland, New Zealand
Fiona Connor, Brick, Cane and Paint, 2016, installation view: Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland
Fiona Connor
Brick, Cane and Paint
12 November - 22 December 2016
For Brick, Cane and Paint, Connor presents work from three new notice board projects (quoted from three sites: a brick plant and a cane factory in Los Angeles, and a weavers guild in Auckland) alongside a new series titled Insert (Chopping Board).
Where previously Connor's work has focused on bulletin boards from public spaces (such as city parks, libraries, community centres etc.), the sculptures in Brick, Cane and Paint represent activity at specific sites of production, with content generated by a fixed group of individuals. Notice Board (Pacific Clay), the set of six boards in the small and large galleries at Hopkinson Mossman, are quoted from Pacific Clay; a brick plant frequented by the artist. The Pacific Clay boards are punctuated by a single piece from the Handweavers and Spinners Guild in Mt Eden (a community organization close to the artist's childhood home), and the boards that hang in the gallery's office spaces are from Cane and Basket Supply, a workshop near the artist's Los Angeles studio.
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Artforum critics' picks: “Fiona Connor, Sydney de Jong, Audrey Wollen” at Minerva, Sydney
Fiona Connor, All the doors in the walls, 2016, installation view, Minerva
Fiona Connor, Sydney de Jong, Audrey Wollen at Minerva by Claudia Arozqueta
Minerva
4/111 Macleay Street, Potts Point
October 29–December 10
Three artists whose work seems both conceptually and materially dissimilar and five press releases with different interpretations can be found here, though the title of Fiona Connor's All the Doors in the Walls, 2016, is to be taken literally. Each door in the gallery was stripped of its function; they no longer serve as mediators or passages from one place to another but as static objects of art, disposed toward admiration for their simplicity.
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Artforum critics' picks: Petra Cortright at Carl Kostyal, London
Petra Cortright, royal-chat—dispatchesSCANFERLA{ROM-adventures4tattoo-gun}.resx,
2016, digital painting on Sunset Hot Press rag paper, 42 x 30".
Petra Cortright at Carl Kostyal, London by Valerie Mindlin
Carl Kostyal | London
12A Savile Row
October 5–November 19
To call Petra Cortright an internet or post-internet artist would be similar to calling Matisse and Monet paint artists. They were painters all right, but that's not really saying much, is it? There is, in Cortright's work, a mesmerizing core of formalism, a newly relevant medium specificity for the cognitive gluttonous distraction of the brazenly immaterial.
"ORANGE BLOSSOM PRINCESS FUCKING BUTTERCUP," Cortright's first solo exhibition at this gallery's London location, brings the manifold beguilements of her digital steamrolling into a tightly delightful showcase of canvases and flat-screen videos. And "flat-screen" is the operative word here. Cortright composes her pieces by layering their copious constituent files into final pancake of Photoshop "mother files." Such works flatten the layered and immersive aspects of the digital economy, simultaneously parading and exacerbating its manipulative properties. Cortright's mother files are built up from the endless iteration of what are profoundly private visual, temporal, and spatial entities. They are the wet-dream actors of adolescent sexual rehearsals, solipsistic webcam posturing, and distracted-browsing self-indulgence. Would you ever act out a real-life equivalent to an emoji in a conversation? Of course not. Cortright's works disrupt the comforting stability that would confine the digital to the servilely personal, and make a frantically gorgeous show of it.
Where Impressionism's heyday hypnotized us with its dynamic vibrancy in indulging the wondrous relish of the ordinary, Cortright's new digital formalism unmoors the cognitive comforts of the private in a seductive sumptuousness of pageantry and inexhaustible possibilities.
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ART 21 Magazine: The Variations of its Shadows - An Interview with Jorge Méndez Blake
Jorge Méndez Blake. The Art of Loving, 2009. 10 ladrillos, edición de The Art of Loving de
Erich Fromm / 10 bricks, edition of Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, 24 x 8 x 4 cm.
Courtesy of the artist.
The Variations of its Shadows: An Interview with Jorge Méndez Blake by Caroline Picard
Every book creates a world, a place that readers enter through language on the first page, and inhabit thereafter, as the text's unique character compounds in an individual's imagination. This happens with novels, with philosophy, mathematical treatises, and poems. How astonishing it is to consider the lush autonomous universe each spine on a bookshelf proposes. Each of those worlds has a logical structure that cajoles a reader into its unique proposition—a situation not so different, perhaps, from that of architecture. The Guadalajara-based multimedia artist, Jorge Méndez Blake, addresses this intersection directly by translating nuanced themes embedded in canonical books into art installations. In our interview, we discuss this process of translation, looking at how it differs from literary criticism, and drifting over the site of Emily Dickinson's desk.
Caroline Picard: Your installations interpret the work of different authors like Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, Shakespeare, and Jules Verne, by drawing out nuanced themes within a book (or poem) into a single place and time; it is almost like you draw a three-dimensional translation of the book in space. Do you see a connection between what you do and literary criticism?
Jorge Méndez Blake: My approach to books and language is more as a reader than as a critic. I like reading literary criticism, but I'm working from the side of art, and art should propose different ways of understanding literature, not the same ones as critics. Approaching a book through sculpture expands the possibilities of regular literary criticism. I believe some seminal texts of the history of literature have many possibilities of interpretation: there's nothing new under the sun, but the variations of its shadows are infinite.
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Kerry Tribe: Biennale of Moving Images, Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève
A still of the Los Angeles River from Kerry Tribe's "Exquisite Corpse" 2016.
Kerry Tribe: Exquisite Corpse
Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement
Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève
November 9, 2016–January 29, 2017
Opening week: November 9–13, with a program of performances, special screenings, conversations and round tables
Vernissage: November 9, 6–9pm
1301PE is pleased to announce Kerry Tribe's participation in the celebrated Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement (Biennale of Moving Images) at the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, Switzerland. Tribe's contribution, Exquisite Corpse, was commissioned for the 2016 CURRENT:LA Biennial and will be presented for the first time as a three-channel installation.
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FLAUNT: Colorvision - Artist Diana Thater’s Solo Exhibition at 1301PE
Diana Thater, "Colorvision," 2016. Installtion view, 1301PE. Image by Fredrik Nilsen.
Colorvision: Artist Diana Thater's Solo Exhibition at 1301PE by Sid Feddema
L.A.-based artist Diana Thater's mind-bending artwork is so effective in part because of an often overlooked aspect of her artistic process–installation. Thater deeply considers setting in her work, and utilizes space in a way that that emphasizes the architecture and the surfaces upon which she shows her pieces so that the room itself becomes a part of the art. Fortunate, then, that the 1301PE Gallery at 6150 Wilshire Blvd., within spitting distance of the LACMA (where Thater was recently honored with a comprehensive mid-career survey), offers beautiful territory for her explore in her ninth exhibition with the gallery, titled Colorvision, and currently on view until November 5th.
Thater's highly innovative work has been transformative in the world of projection art and video installation. Since the early '90s she has continued to expand the medium in which she works, incorporating a formal and technical element into her artmaking process. This embrace of technology may seem at first thematically incongruent with the subjects of her artwork, which often explore the conflicts between human culture and civilization and nature, but Thater insists that "visible technology, beauty and pleasure (which are one and the same) are not antithetical to one another but may exist simultaneously in the work of art and may produce the sublime."
As 1301PE Gallery describes the series, "Colorvision consists of 8 individual monitor pieces. Each vertically-hung monitor displays the name of a color along with a bouquet of flowers in a different, complimentary, color. The colors used are those of the video spectrum: red, green, blue (primaries); cyan, magenta, yellow (secondaries); purple and orange (tertiary). The word "RED", for example, appears with cyan flowers, while the word "CYAN" appears with red flowers. The series is based on a neurological test that is given to people to decipher the relationship between sensation and language." Thater is interested in this conflict in how we discern visual and textual information, and she suggests that it illuminates something fundamental in how we perceive art: "It's especially difficult for a viewer to think about color and language simultaneously and the dichotomy, when shown one color but asked to read the name of it's opposite, forces a rupture between the two. The question is: Does reason or sensation dominate our experience of art?"
It's been a busy year for Thater and there's no sign she's slowing down, with a solo show opening last week at the MCA in Chicago and more showings in the pipeline for this year. Catch Colorvision while you can though–it closes this week and it should not be missed.
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e-flux: On Snow Dancing, Phillipe Parreno
Phillipe Parreno, Snow Dancing, 1995. Installation detail.
On Snow Dancing by Ina Blom
Some twenty years ago, the effects of an expanding regime of design were starting to be felt in the field of contemporary art. Increasingly, designers seemed to use art contexts as platforms for non-pragmatic reflection and expression. Increasingly, design was also becoming a catalyst in so-called "social" art practices, artistic efforts to engineer or test drive new social and/or economic relations. In the work of collectives like Superflex or Atelier van Lieshout, for instance, design was an all-important feature of their manufacture of innovative objects or technical solutions, as well as the branding of the groups themselves. Concerned discussions about the aestheticization of anything and everything abounded: design should, apparently, know its place. But this new design ubiquity might have actually been grounded less in a political appeal to the senses over reason than on rapidly expanding processes of informatization and a growing preoccupation with their social and economic effects. A wider concept of design thus established itself: defined as "the conception and planning of the artificial," design reflected the fact that, with computation, it was no longer the final outcome of a process, but an interdisciplinary activity embedded in all aspects of production. This was "design thinking," a systematic approach to a plastic environment that more than ever seemed subject to human construction and control.
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Philippe Parreno & Rirkrit Tiravanija: Dreamlands at the Whitney
Whitney Museum of American Art
Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016
October 28, 2016 - February 5, 2017
Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016 focuses on the ways in which artists have dismantled and reassembled the conventions of cinema—screen, projection, darkness—to create new experiences of the moving image. The exhibition will fill the Museum's 18,000-square-foot fifth-floor galleries, and will include a film series in the third-floor theater.
Dreamlands spans more than a century of works by American artists and filmmakers, and also includes a small number of works of German cinema and art from the 1920s with a strong relationship to, and influence on, American art and film. Featured are works in installation, drawing, 3-D environments, sculpture, performance, painting, and online space, by Trisha Baga, Ivana Bašić, Frances Bodomo, Dora Budor, Ian Cheng, Bruce Conner, Ben Coonley, Joseph Cornell, Andrea Crespo, François Curlet, Alex Da Corte, Oskar Fischinger, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Alex Israel, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem and Pierre Joseph, Aidan Koch, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Anthony McCall, Josiah McElheny, Syd Mead, Lorna Mills, Jayson Musson, Melik Ohanian, Philippe Parreno, Jenny Perlin, Mathias Poledna, Edwin S. Porter, Oskar Schlemmer, Hito Steyerl, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Stan VanDerBeek, Artie Vierkant, and Jud Yalkut, among others.
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Diana Thater "The Sympathetic Imagination" at MCA Chicago
Diana Thater, Delphine, 1999. Installation view, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2015–16.
© Diana Thater Photo: © Fredrik Nilsen
Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
29 October 2016 - 8 January 2017
1301PE is pleased to announce the opening of Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The exhibition originated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Among the most important artists to emerge during the 1990s, Los Angeles–based Diana Thater creates groundbreaking and influential works of art in film, video, and installation that challenge the normative ways in which moving images are experienced. Her dynamic, immersive installations address key issues that span the realms of film, museum exhibitions, the natural sciences, and contemporary culture through the deployment of movement, scale, and architecture.
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The Guardian: Philippe Parreno's Turbine Hall review
A young visitor to Philippe Parreno's Turbine Hall installation. Photograph: Guy Bell/Rex/Shutterstock
Philippe Parrenos's Turbine Hall review- mesmerizing and unmissable by Adrian Searle
Hyundai Commission 2016: Philippe Parreno is at Tate Modern from 4 October 2016 to 2 April 2017
The length and height of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall is alive with ripples and rivers of pulsing light. High above, the box-like viewing balconies on the side walls throb and wink as light travels from one end of the building to the other, reflected and multiplying on glass walls and casting aberrant forms on the concrete. Here comes a plane, droning invisibly through the hall's indoor sky. And then it is gone.
Anywhen is astonishing, mesmerising, magnificent and unmissable. It is filled with constant surprise. But superlatives aren't sufficient. Over this weekend, I spent five or six hours here during technical rehearsals and run-throughs, and still can't say that I have seen and heard everything.
Anywhen is one of the very best Turbine Hall commissions, filling the space with sounds and furies, grand and small events, stillness and movement, noises and light and silence. Parreno likens it to a public park, where different events and a constantly changing tempo orchestrates the day. He also likens the commission to a kind of instrument that he is only now beginning to learn to play.
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Diana Thater: ART21 SHORT
SHORT: Diana Thater: "Delphine"
Artist Diana Thater discusses her interest in improving the lives of both humans and animals through art and activism. Speaking from the site of the former Los Angeles Zoo, Thater describes her activism as being focused on "anti-captivity." As an activist she has worked with Ric O'Barry and the Dolphin Project to bring attention to the sale and slaughter of dolphins in Japan's Taiji cove. Thater's multi-channel video installation "Delphine" (1999) is shown in the artist's solo exhibition, "The Sympathetic Imagination," at Los Angeles County Museum of Art last year. In the work "you can see a dolphin spinning underwater and you can almost feel it." Thater hopes "Delphine" generates a sympathetic response from the viewer and creates a new way to communicate between species. "My life as an artist is a different one," says Thater. "The politics are much more subtle."
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Uta Barth and Jorge Pardo: L.A. Exuberance: New Gifts by Artists at LACMA
Uta Barth, "…and to draw a bright white line with light (Untitled 11.5)," 2011.
L.A. Exuberance: New Gifts by Artists
LACMA
BCAM, Level 3
October 30, 2016 – April 2, 2017
Since LACMA's establishment, living artists have played an instrumental role in understanding the museum's encyclopedic collection through a contemporary lens. L.A. Exuberance: New Gifts by Artists features a selection of works given to the museum for its 50th anniversary, as part of an unprecedented campaign led by artist Catherine Opie. Featuring over sixty gifts, the exhibition includes additions to the collection by Edgar Arceneaux, John Baldessari, Uta Barth, Larry Bell, Tacita Dean, Sam Durant, Shannon Ebner, Charles Gaines, Ken Gonzales-Day, Glenn Kaino, Friedrich Kunath, Sterling Ruby, Analia Saban, James Welling, Mario Ybarra Jr., and Brenna Youngblood.
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The New York Times: The Mission to Save Vanishing Internet Art
An image from Petra Cortright’s video “VVEBCAM.” Credit Petra Cortright/Foxy Production
The Mission to Save Vanishing Internet Art by Frank Rose
In the early days of the web, art was frequently a cause and the internet was an alternate universe in which to pursue it. Two decades later, preserving this work has become a mission. As web browsers and computer operating systems stopped supporting the software tools they were built with, many works have fallen victim to digital obsolescence. Later ones have been victims of arbitrary decisions by proprietary internet platforms — as when YouTube deleted Petra Cortright's video "VVEBCAM" on the grounds that it violated the site's community guidelines. Even the drip paintings Jackson Pollock made with house paint have fared better than art made by manipulating electrons.
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Ann Veronica Janssens: video screening at Palais de la Découverte, Paris, France
Ann Veronica Janssens, Chasseurs d'éclipses en Mongolie, 2008. Collection IAC,
Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes
Les collections vidéos des FRAC - Projection spéciale FIAC
Organized by Institut d'art contemporain
From 19 to 22 October, 2016
Palais de la Découverte
Avenue Franklin Delano Roosevelt
75008 Paris, France
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Blake Rayne: Blaffer Art Museum
Blake Rayne, Untitled, 2013, acrylic & walnut shell on canvas, 24 x 18 inches
Blake Rayne: Cabin of the Accused
22 October 2016 - 18 March 2017
Blaffer Art Museum
4173 Elgin Street
Houston, TX 77004
1301PE is pleased to announce the opening of Blake Rayne: Cabin of the Accused, at Blaffer Art Museum, the first midcareer survey of the New-York-based artist. The exhibition features major works completed from 2003 to the present which showcase the breadth of his work in various media including in painting, sculpture, printmaking, and installation.
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Angela Bulloch & Rirkrit Tiravanija, Okayama Art Summit 2016, Japan
Rirkrit Tiravanija's 'Untitled 2016 (this is A, this is A, this is both A and not-A, this is neither
A nor not-A)' 2016. Japan Times, Cameron Allan McKean.
Okayama Art Summit 2016 - Development
Okayama, Japan
October 9 – November 27, 2016
Okayama Art Summit 2016 is the first edition of a new triennial contemporary art exhibition to be held in Okayama, Japan. Thirty-one artists from all over the world have been invited to participate, including Cameron Rowland, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Rachel Rose, Angela Bulloch, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Katja Novitskova, Trisha Baga, Joan Jonas, Pierre Huyghe, and Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Some of the venues designated for the summit are Okayama Castle, the Hayashibara Museum of Art, the former Fukuoka Soy Sauce Factory, the Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art, and the Korakukan Tenjin School.
"All the artists involved in the exhibition play with structures—ideological, formal and political. They do this in very specific ways. Each artist layers their work upon what they encounter. They offer various levels of distance to the given structure. And leave us with different strata for encounter, examination, and experience." - Liam Gillick, Artistic Director
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Angela Bulloch, Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong
Angela Bulloch, installation view, Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong
Angela Bulloch: One way conversation...
Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong
14 October - 19 November 2016
One way conversation… is a continuation of Bulloch's latest body of work presented last year in Considering Dynamics and The Forms of Chaos at the Sharjah Art Museum, UAE and L'ALMANACH 16 at the Le Consortium Dijon, France. Formed in steel and MDF, the stacked columns of polyhedra have a stylized geometry and manufactured surface sheen that alludes to minimalism and technology. Often apparent in Bulloch's installations where technology mediates interaction with the work, is her interest in cybernetics, fundamental themes of biological, social and technological systems, and the integration of the human subject with technology.
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SUPERFLEX receives the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for Superkilen
Superkilen park in Copenhagen
Together with co-creators BIG and Topotek1, SUPERFLEX is awarded the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture for the artistic contribution to the Copenhagen urban space Superkilen.
The Aga Khan Award for Architecture is given every three years to projects that set new standards of excellence in architecture, planning practices, historic preservation and landscape architecture. Aga Khan writes of Superkilen:
'Superkilen, a new urban park in one of Copenhagen's most diverse and socially challenged neighbourhoods, emphatically rejects this view with a powerful mixture of humour, history and hubris. (…) It fuses architecture, landscape and art in a truly inter-disciplinary manner, providing new opportunities for shared public engagement.'
Superkilen (2013) is an eight hundred metres long urban park project wedging through one of the most ethnically diverse and socially challenged neighborhoods in Denmark. It is imagined as a giant exhibition of urban best practice with furniture and everyday objects nominated from the future users. Ranging from exercise gear from Muscle Beach in LA, to a playground octopus from Japan and palm trees from China, Superkilen is a collection of global found objects that derive from 60 different nationalities representing the local inhabitants.
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Philippe Parreno: Tate Modern's Turbine Hall Commission
Philippe Parreno today unveiled his new installation, Anywhen, for the Tate Modern's annual
site-specific Turbine Hall commissions, sponsored by Hyundai. Courtesy of Tate Photography
Philippe Parreno: Anywhen
Hyundai Commission
Tate Modern, Turbine Hall
4 October 2016 - 2 April 2017
1301PE is pleased to announce the opening of Philipe Parreno's exhibition, Anywhen, at Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. Please visit the Tate Modern website here for more information.
LA Times: Wrapped in stretchy fabric, orchestral musicians become performance art at Green Umbrella festival
Venice artist Ana Prvacki uses fabric to translate musicians' movements into an unusual
visual soundtrack. (Christina House / For The Times)
Wrapped in stretchy fabric, orchestral musicians become performance art at Green Umbrella festival by Catherine Womack
This Saturday, five members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's double bass section will convene, bare-footed, inside a giant sack of stretchy, shimmering white fabric in Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Zipped inside the opaque pocket, the musicians will set up their instruments, transforming the amorphous fabric into a makeshift tent with the help of the basses' tall, pole-like necks. As they play, the tent will quiver and flex with each jab of a bow or poke of an arm.
Titled "Porcupine for tent, quintet, bows and elbows," the piece was conceived by artist Ana Prvacki and features new music by composer Veronika Krausas. Commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, "Porcupine," will be just one of many experimental pieces being performed throughout Walt Disney Concert Hall on Saturday at "Noon to Midnight," a one-day festival that launches the 2016-17 season of Green Umbrella, the orchestra's contemporary music series.
Blake Rayne: Campoli Presti, Paris
Blake Rayne, installation view, courtesy of Campoli Presti, Paris
Blake Rayne: Paris
22 September - 15 October 2016
Campoli Presti, Paris
Diana Thater: ART21
ART21 Art in the 21st Century Season 8
Los Angeles episode featuring Diana Thater
Friday, September 23, 9:00pm on PBS (check local listings)
ART21 produces features focusing exclusively on contemporary visual art and artists throughout the world. The Peabody Award-winning biennial series ART21 Art in the Twenty-First Century provides unparalleled access to the most innovative artists of our time, revealing how artists engage the culture around them and how art allows viewers to see the world in new ways.
Full episodes will be available to stream online on the days following each episode's national broadcast through ART21.org, PBS.org/art21, and PBS streaming apps.
1301PE at Paris Internationale 2016
PARIS INTERNATIONALE
19–23 October 2016
51, avenue d'Iéna, 75116 Paris
1301PE is pleased to participate in Paris Internationale. We are presenting works by Fiona Banner, Fionna Connor, Kirsten Everberg, Judy Ledgerwood, Jorge Méndez Blake, Ana Prvački, Blake Rayne, Diana Thater and Pae White.
Continuing the sentiment of its inaugural edition, Paris Internationale's 2016 edition will take place at 51 Avenue d'Iéna Paris, a hôtel particulier built in 1897, most notably known as the Parisian residence and salon of prominent art collector Calouste Gulbenkian. From October 18th to the 23rd, the four story mansion, which spans over 3,000 m2, will host 60 participants including 53 galleries and 7 project spaces hailing from 19 countries. Echoing the plural identities of the participants, the building will feature a mosaic of rooms with strikingly specific characteristics. Responding to the current climate of art fairs in regards to both its production and reception, Paris Internationale is a joint initiative from 5 emerging galleries; Crèvecoeur, High Art, Antoine Levi, Sultana and Gregor Staiger, as a collective attempt to develop an appropriate model for fostering new advanced initiatives in contemporary art.
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Fiona Banner: Buoys Boys at De La Warr Pavilion
De La Warr Pavilion
Gallery 1
Saturday, 24 Sep 2016 - Sunday, 8 Jan 2017
Leading British artist Fiona Banner presents an immersive installation exploring her ongoing interest in language and its limitations. The exhibition, which takes place both inside and outside of the gallery, is a play on digital vs. material experiences.
Banner continues her Full Stop sculptures – a sequence of full stops from typefaces blown up to human scale, previously produced in polystyrene and bronze – reformed here as large inflatables. They will be presented as a series of happenings around the Pavilion. Full stops also feature in a vast window installation spanning the full length of the gallery, making illusory sculptural interventions, or Buoys, on the seascape beyond.
As part of the Root 1066 International Festival
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Ana Prvacki: LA Phil - Noon to Midnight
Noon to Midnight
Walt Disney Concert Hall
Saturday, October 1, 2016
The LA Phil's 2016/17 Green Umbrella season begins Saturday, October 1, 2016 with Noon to Midnight, an opportunity for audiences to hear performances by a number of L.A.'s most exciting new music ensembles throughout the spaces of Walt Disney Concert Hall. You'll hear 12 world premieres commissioned by the LA Phil, plus new works by National Composers Intensive participants, in a festival-like atmosphere that includes food trucks and beer.
**1301PE is pleased to announce the world premier of Tent, quintet, bows and elbows by Ana Prvacki with the original score Porcupine by Veronika Krausas (commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel, Music and Artistic Director). The performance will take place at noon and 5:15pm at BP Hall.
Tickets for everything between noon and 8pm cost only $15
Buy tickets here
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Jorge Pardo: Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s 75th Anniversary Art Auction
Jorge Pardo, Verdical, 2015, silkscreen on paper
These stellar works of art have been assembled by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art curators for a special auction in conjunction with the Museum's 75th anniversary gala on September 18th. Auction proceeds will support a wide range of programming and ensure the success of the SBMA into the future.
The auction is live on Paddle8 through September 19, 2016.
View the auction here
New York Times: What to See in New York Art Galleries This Week
An installation view of Jessica Stockholder's show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.
Jessica Stockholder 'The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room' by KEN JOHNSON
Jessica Stockholder's colorful assemblages of diverse store-bought and found objects call to mind a term from neuroscience, "multisensory binding." The phrase refers to the fact that the outer world appears to us seamlessly coherent, despite the many sensory signals streaming in from diverse sources — eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin. Usually we don't notice how the mind binds together these different inputs. In Ms. Stockholder's engaging, if not wildly exciting, show of sculptures at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, your awareness of your attention's shifting between the disparate parts and the whole composition is essential.
View article here
Wallpaper: Box Fresh - Walker Art Center presents a series of artworks that think inside the box
A kit of camping essentials forms Without Title (Rucksack Installation), by Rirkrit Tiravanija, 1993
Box fresh: Walker Art Center presents a series of artworks that think inside the box by Alexandra Alexa
Everything important that I have done can be put into a little suitcase,' Marcel Duchamp declared in 1952. He was speaking of his Boîte en valise ('Box in a Valise'), a suitcase he had assembled and reproduced between 1935 and 1941 to house the body of work he had created up to that point; a mini retrospective exhibition that could be carried anywhere. This work, and that of four other artists, is currently on view at the Walker Arts Center as part of 'Unpacking the Box', an exhibition that explores the artistic potential of thinking inside the box.
Pieces include George Brecht's Valoche / A Flux Travel Aid, a box containing an assortment of quirky artisanal children's toys, including a jump rope, a chess piece and plastic eggs, and Rirkrit Tiravanija's Without Title (Rucksack Installation), a kit of camping essentials.
View article here
Wallpaper: Feeling gravity's pull - Jessica Stockholder's stacked works at Mitchell-Innes & Nash
The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room, installation view, 2016
Feeling gravity's pull: Jessica Stockholder's stacked works at Mitchell-Innes & Nash by Allison Young
Blurring the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture, Stockholder's current exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash emphasises process, form, and, above all, gravity. This is apparent in installations such as Sale A Way or Security Detail that feature slouched and hanging components.
However, the force is most integral to the artist's ongoing series of Assists – sculptures that cannot stand upright without the support of a given 'base'. Assist: Smoke and Mirrors, for instance – comprised of a web of copper wire, tarp and hardware parts – is buttressed by an upholstered chair; in a future iteration, it may instead come to lean on another sculpture or object. In the Assists, each component's mass, orientation and weight affect the stability of adjacent elements. Such works, perhaps, reflect the possibilities of both vulnerability and mutual dependence within our personal and civic lives.
View article here
Rirkrit Tiravanija: Sexy Beast, A Benefit for Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, Art Auction Now Live
Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled (freedom can not be simulated, new york times, june 28, 2016), 2016
Sexy Beast, A Benefit for Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, Art Auction Now Live
Sexy Beast co chairs Mieke Marple, Davida Nemeroff, and Eliah Perona are excited to announce the Sexy Beast art auction is now live on Paddle 8.
This September 10, Hollywood entertainment and the art world will come together again for the second edition of Sexy Beast, an evening of performance and art auction benefiting Planned Parenthood Los Angeles (PPLA) at The Theatre at Ace Hotel, Downtown Los Angeles. Tickets can be purchased here.
The evening will feature an art auction led by Viveca Paulin-Ferrell with paddles designed by Math Bass, performances by WIFE and Mutant Salon, music by DJ Rashida, and a floral installation by Maurice Harris of Bloom and Plume. The Sexy Beast 2016 Award is designed by Kathleen Ryan.
Participating artists include: Theodora Allen, Harold Ancart, Darren Bader, Alex Becerra, Larry Bell, Brian Belott, Jennifer Boysen, Katherine Bradford, Brian Calvin, Nina Chanel Abney, Alex Chaves, Mira Dancy, Marcel Dzama, Laeh Glenn, Jennifer Guidi, Camille Henrot, Whitney Hubbs, Xylor Jane, Jasper Johns, Dwyer Kilcollin, Josh Kline, Barbara Kruger, Sadie Laska, Eric Mack, Robert Mapplethorpe, Orion Martin, Eddie Martinez, Julie Mehretu, Paul McCarthy, Marilyn Minter, Sam Moyer, Margaux Ogden, Alex Olson, Neil Raitt, Sterling Ruby, Ed Ruscha, Matt Sheridan Smith, Lucie Stahl, Despina Stokou, Claire Tabouret, Samantha Thomas, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.
For more information, please visit www.sexybeastforplannedparenthood.com
Blouin Artinfo: Fiona Banner's 'Buoys Boys' at De La Warr Pavilion
Fiona Banner, Buoys Boys, (detail) 2016, Full Stop inflatables, From left to right: Bookman,
Courier, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, Courtesy: De La Warr Pavilion, U.K.
Fiona Banner's 'Buoys Boys' at De La Warr Pavilion
English artist Fiona Banner's "Buoys Boys" is scheduled to run at the De La Warr Pavilion, United Kingdom, from September 24 through January 8, 2017. The exhibition includes site-specific new work by the artist both inside and outside the gallery. The theme of the exhibition centers on the artist's interest in conflict and language and is a play on digital versus material experiences.
The exhibition features her "Full Stop" sculptures, a sequence of full stops from typefaces blown up in proportion, consisting of large helium-filled inflatables. They will also be installed and float from the roof of the pavilion representing floating buoys. The sculptures also manifest in "Ha-ha" and will be placed as a panoramic window installation spanning the length of the gallery. Banner will also present a series of films and posters related to her experimental publishing activity. Through her artwork, Banner has approached the idea of language and conflict and how historical events are fictionalized over time.
View article here
Blouin Artinfo: Everyday Abstraction - A Q&A with Jessica Stockholder
Installation view of Jessica Stockholder: The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room at
Mitchell-Innes & Nash (© Jessica Stockholder; Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes &
Nash, NY.)
Everyday Abstraction: A Q&A with Jessica Stockholder by Taylor Dafoe
Jessica Stockholder's work is difficult to talk about because it eschews so many of the typical classifications we use to discuss contemporary art: "installation," "site-specific," "ephemeral." Indeed, that's one of the most central elements of her practice: the dissolving of boundaries.
Look no further than her immersive new show at Mitchell Innes & Nash, "The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room." In it, multifaceted sculptures made from found items are installed sporadically throughout the space, calling into question what belongs with what. Discarded scallop shells rest atop blue ice cube trays. An old dance floor tile is mounted to the wall above sheets of industrial metal fencing. A sagging square of linoleum hangs from a rusty hinge. There are two new pieces from her "Assists" series — modular sculptures that can only stand upright when attached to something else: a car, a piano, or in this case, two threadbare lounge chairs the artist sourced from Craigslist. (Though, the furniture isn't technically a part of the sculpture: "If you buy an 'Assist' attached to a piano, you don't get the piano," Stockholder says.)
Finally the show's central work, the eponymous "The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room," features a large, winding, wooden stage connected to an elevated deck gallery-goers are encouraged to walk onto. Part sculpture, part viewing platform, part pedestal, it's easy to love, but hard to explain why.
While the installation was wrapping up in the gallery, Stockholder sat down with Artinfo to talk about the show and some of the larger themes that run throughout all her work.
View article here
Jorge Méndez Blake: Other Literature
1301PE is pleased to announce the arrival of Other Literature (English translation) by leading Mexican artist, Jorge Méndez Blake. Other Literature highlights the importance of libraries as structures of knowledge and as architectural entities. Exploring the theme in works by Méndez Blake, the volume includes essays by renowned art critics and architects, including Sarah Demeuse, Verónica Gerber, and Luis Felipe Fabre. Published by RM, hardcover, 6.5 x 9.5 inches, 408 pages.
Copies can be purchased for $38 by contacting the gallery at 323.938.5822 or info@1301pe.com.
Jessica Stockholder: Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
Jessica Stockholder: The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room
August 25 - October 1, 2016; Opening reception: Thursday, September 15, 6-8 pm
Mitchell-Innes & Nash: 534 W 26th Street, New York NY 10001
The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room will feature works from several facets of Stockholder's practice, including a large-scale site-responsive installation in addition to distinct bodies of studio works. This will be the gallery's third solo exhibition with the artist.
Diana Thater: Untitled (Butterfly Videowall #2) in Indestructible Wonder at the San Jose Museum of Art
Diana Thater, Untitled (Butterfly Videowall #2), 2008 (detail), Five flat screen LCD monitors,
Blu-ray player, Blu-ray disc, distribution amplifier, two fluorescent light fixtures, and Lee filters,
Dimensions variable
Indestructible Wonder
August 18, 2016 - January 29, 2017
On view for the first time in Indestructible Wonder is the important recent acquisition Untitled (Butterfly Videowall #2) (2008), a video installation by Diana Thater. Thater filmed monarch butterflies as they rested on the ground at El Rosario Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary in Michoacán, Mexico, where millions of monarchs hibernate after their long migration from Canada. Due, in part, to the lack of foliage in which the butterflies normally take refuge, their only option was to gather together on the forest floor—an extremely vulnerable position. By placing upturned monitors on the gallery floor, Thater created a meditative experience through which to consider the lives of other creatures who share this planet.
More information here
Contemporary Thai Cuisine by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Dalad Kambuh at Dóttir
Courtesy of Dottir
When Pop Becomes Attitude | Dóttir Berlin
July 26 - August 6 | Tuesday till Saturday, from 6pm
New York chef Dalad Kambhu and artist Rirkrit Tiravanija will take over Dóttir in Berlin and create their own version of contemporary Thai eatery. For two weeks, from the 26th July to the 6th August, the two friends and Berlin lovers will serve authentic yet contemporary Thai cuisine. Guests can expect fresh and summery ingredients and dishes, served family style as sharing dishes. They will focus on seasonal and regional products and incorporate them in traditional and newly interpreted Thai recipes. On the long list of ideas are fresh artichoke salad, green curry beef cheeks, roasted duck with Panang Curry, fish sauce ice cream and melting salmon on garden vegetables. The food will be accompanied by special wine recommendations of Dóttir's sommelier Patrick Wentzel and Thai flavored cocktails by Pauly Bar's mixologists Bobbi Kay and Justin Powell.
The New York Times, The Professional Pop-Up Artist
ArchDaily: Rirkrit Tiravanija's Water Pavilion
Photo by Panic Studio LA, courtesy of City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs
DCA). Image © [Rirkrit Tiravanija 2016]
wHY and artist Rirkrit Tiravanija Design "Waterfall Pavilion" for the LA Public Art Biennial by Patrick Lynch
Now on display as part of CURRENT: LA's Public Art Biennial is "The Waterfall Pavilion," designed by Los Angeles architects wHY's Objects Workshop division in coordination with contemporary artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. The temporary installation is located at the point where water from Lake Balboa flows via a waterfall into the Los Angeles River, and consists of an open pavilion and a water purification wagon, corresponding to this year's festival theme of 'Water.'
View article here
Artillery: Current:LA Brings Art to The Valley in the Form of Tea
Current:LA Brings Art to The Valley in the Form of Tea by Beverly Western
"On Sunday we spent the later part of our afternoon trekking to the deep valley for tea. No, not the pinkies-up, triangle-sandwiches-type of tea. Instead we attended Tea Ceremony, a performance organized for Current:LA Water Public Art Biennial by Lauren W. Deutsch and Pacific Rim Arts. Here we would join Nakada Sokei, sensei, and practitioners from Urasenke Tankokai Los Angeles as they performed chado ("the way of tea") using precious water from the LA River that has been filtered and purified. Yes, the idea of anyone drinking anything from the LA river, purified or not, made us cringe…until we did it ourselves."
View article here
Kerry Tribe: Introducing Ed Rusha's films at MOCA
Join us for a screening of the only two films ever created by iconic LA-based artist Ed Ruscha, Premium (1971, 16 mm, 24 mins.) andMiracle (1975, 16 mm, 28 mins.).
Premium, Ruscha's first film, starring artist Larry Bell and model Léon Bing, exemplifies the artist's deadpan aesthetic and his investigation of the codes of Hollywood storytelling. Miracle, a story about a curious day in the life of an auto mechanic, stars artist Jim Ganzer and actress Michelle Phillips. LA-based film, video, and installation artist Kerry Tribe introduces Ruscha's films; Tribe's work is included in LA's first public art biennial, CURRENT:LA Water, opening July 16, 2016. Felipe Lima will present Ed Ruscha: Buildings and Words, a new short-length documentary film about Ruscha's extraordinary body of work written and directed by Lima.
More information here
KCET: A Guide to Current:LA Water, the Biennial Bringing Art to 16 Locations Across the City
Kerry Tribe, "Exquisite Corpse." | Photo: Panic Studio LA.
A Guide to Current:LA Water, the Biennial Bringing Art to 16 Locations Across the City, by Carren Jao
"This summer, Los Angeles' riverbanks and water-related sites will blossom to life despite the drought... Across 16 locations (15 designated sites plus a "hub") from Bee Canyon Park in Granada Hills to Point Fermin Park in Long Beach, site-specific artwork and public programming by international and Los Angeles-artists will provoke visitors to ponder the tangled web of connections water weaves in our city's history."
View article here
The New York Times: Current: L.A. Brings New Art Projects to the City
'Current: L.A.' Brings New Art Projects to the City, by Jori Finkel
"Lacking an organization like New York's Creative Time or Public Art Fund, Los Angeles artists have long depended on local museums and scrappy nonprofit galleries to fund of-the-moment public art. Now the city's Department of Cultural Affairs has a new biennial to help fill the gap: "Current: L.A.," which runs for a month starting on Saturday.
This year's theme is water, inspired by the record-setting drought in California as well as city ambitions to transform the Los Angeles River, which for stretches resembles a concrete trench, into a more functional, accessible and even leafy refuge for city-dwellers."
View article here
Rirkrit Tiravanija: untitled 2016 (LA water, water pavilion) at CURRENT:LA Public Art Biennial
Rirkrit Tiravanija
CURRENT:LA Public Art Biennial
untitled 2016 (LA water, water pavilion)
16 July - 14 August, 2016
Lake Balboa, 6300 Lake Balboa Hiking Trail, Los Angeles, CA 91411
It is with great pleasure that 1301PE announces Rirkrit Tiravanija's contribution to the CURRENT:LA Public Art Biennial, 'untitled 2016 (LA water, water pavilion)', a temporary public artwork that consists of an open pavilion and a water purification wagon. The work was created in collaboration between the artist, Kulapat Yantrasast from wHY and the non-profit Water One World Solutions.
Located at the very site where reclaimed water from Lake Balboa flows via a gushing waterfall into the Los Angeles River, the work offers visitors a sphere of respite and recovery as well as prompts them to reconsider their relation to water. The water purification system allows for the river's non-potable water to be reclaimed, purified and consumed by the public; the water will also be used in different performances during the opening weekend. The work can be experienced every day during the biennial from 5:30 am to 10:30 pm.
LA Weekly: A New Project Lets Viewers Explore All 51 Miles of the L.A. River in 51 Minutes
A Still of the Los Angeles River from Kerry Tribe's 'Exquisite Corpse'
A New Project Lets Viewers Explore All 51 Miles of the L.A. River in 51 Minutes, by Catherine Womack
"Artist Kerry Tribe has a deeply ingrained sense of civic duty. When she noticed that the garden at her children's public elementary school was neglected, Tribe got her hands dirty and started planting. She tackled forestry issues in her Eagle Rock neighborhood by running for elected office. And when the city of Los Angeles approached her last summer to submit a project proposal for Current:LA Water, the city's first public art biennial, Tribe developed a large-scale piece that incorporates her passion for community and ecology."
View article here
Kerry Tribe: 'Exquisite Corpse' at CURRENT:LA Public Art Biennial
Kerry Tribe
CURRENT:LA Public Art Biennial
Nightly screenings of Tribe's 'Exquisite Corpse'
16 July - 14 August, 2016
1301PE is pleased to announce Kerry Tribe's participation in Los Angeles' first public art biennial, CURRENT:LA, which will take place between July 16 - August 14 exploring the theme of 'water'. Tribe's contribution, 'Exquisite Corpse', is an open-air nightly screening of a 51-minute film that traces the 51-mile Los Angeles River from its origins in the San Fernando Valley to its terminus at the Pacific Ocean.
Nightly screenings in Sunnynook River Park at 8:30 p.m. Pre-screening presentations by the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wildflowers and Native Plants every Friday at 7:00 p.m.
More information here
Ana Prvački: PLEASE HAVE ENOUGH ACID IN THE DISH! at M+B
Organized by Vinny Dotolo
July 7 - September 2, 2016
Participating artists include: Harold Ancart - Alex Becerra - Louise Bonnet - Derek Paul Boyle - Matthew Brandt - Greg Colson - Bjorn Copeland - Cameron Crone - Awol Erizku - Kim Fisher - Samara Golden - Rives Granade - Joel Kyack - Dwyer Kilcollin - Friedrich Kunath - Shio Kusaka - Candice Lin - Nevine Mahmoud - Josh Mannis - Calvin Marcus - Max Maslansky - Joshua Nathanson - Claire Nereim - Ariana Papademetropoulos - Ana Prvacki - Sean Raspet - Charles Ray - Fay Ray - Ed Ruscha - Adam Silverman - Marisa Takal - Kenneth Tam - Paul Pascal Theriault - Charlie White - Chase Wilson - Jonas Wood - Eric Yahnker
M+B, 612 North Almont Drive, Los Angeles, California 90069
Jorge Méndez Blake: LADERA OESTE Inaugural Exhibition
LADERA OESTEis a non-profit independent exhibition space, founded by curator Geovana Ibarra and artist Jorge Méndez Blake in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Artists: Vito Acconci, Santiago Borja, Pia Camil, Alejandro Cesarco, Edgar Cobián, Fiona Connor, Claire Fontaine, Karl Holmqvist, Runo Lagomarsino, Nicolás Lamas, Fernando Palomar, Allen Ruppersberg, Valeska Soares
Opening: Saturday, July 9, 12–15 h
More information here
New York Times: Judy Ledgerwood, Pussy Poppin' Power
Working with spontaneous panache, the Chicago artist Judy Ledgerwood paints expansive, boldly colorful grid-based abstractions. An infectious exuberance animates her new canvases in an exhilarating exhibition at Tracy Williams on the Lower East Side.
The paintings consist mainly of rows of diamond shapes that combine into optically percussive argyle patterns. Enhancing the rhythms, thick and thin dots of paint punctuate the lozenges. In "Mountain," the show's biggest piece at 7½ feet by 12 feet, three horizontal rows of spotted diamonds in many colors fill the viewer's visual field with a strobing fabric of syncopating voluptuousness.
A distinctive feature is how Ms. Ledgerwood shapes her compositions. She leaves white borders around the edges of the canvases, as if the overall designs were tapestries or quilts pinned by the upper corners to white walls. They seem to droop and bow outward, creating paradoxical fusions of actuality and virtuality. Drips of paint falling over the white, lower edges of the canvases further confound the dichotomy of the real and the illusory.
This may sound complicated in theory, but on canvas it's perfectly clear. Painting with the carefree abandon of an improvising jazz musician, Ms. Ledgerwood makes what's hard look easy. - Ken Johnson
Hyperallergic: Sexual Abstraction: Judy Ledgerwood’s Recent Paintings
Sexual Abstraction: Judy Ledgerwood’s Recent Paintings by John Yau
If, as Amy Sillman has said, "The elephant in the room is sex," Judy Ledgerwood's paintings ask the viewer: What exactly do you think you are looking at? The viewer sees a shaped rectangle painted onto an immaculate white ground. A catenary seems to have been used to determine the rectangle's top curved edge, while both sides bow in slightly, bringing to mind textiles hanging on a laundry line. A few rivulets of paint drip down from the rectangle's uneven bottom edge. Meanwhile, the thick stretcher bars turn the painting into an object protruding from the wall, rather than a flat thing hugging it.
In a public conversation I had with the artist the day after her show, "Judy Ledgerwood: Pussy Poppin' Power," opened at Tracy Williams (May 7 – June 16, 2016), it was evident how clearly she had thought about all the issues – including the relationship between painting and architecture – that I've just described. Her paintings are what David Reed would call "bedroom paintings." In her case, this means diamond-patterned grids in which emblems of sexual desire disrupt the comforting visual rhythms we associate with modular units and repetition.
View article here
Paul Winstanley in coonversation with Charlotte Mullins
Artist Paul Winstanley speaks to historian, writer and broadcaster Charlotte Mullins about his new body of paintings and prints that depict the interiors of British art schools in conjunction with the exhibition 'Paul Winstanley | Art School: New Prints and Panel Paintings at Alan Cristea Gallery, 17 March - 7 May 2016.
During the summer months of 2011 and 2012 Paul Winstanley traveled throughout England, Scotland and Wales photographing unpopulated art school studios, including the iconic Mackintosh Building, Glasgow School of Art, that was later severely damaged by fire in 2014. The imagery, selected from over 200 photographs, provided the source material for this new series of work.
View video of conversation here
SUPERFLEX participates at Emscher Kunst 2016
Photo: SUPERFLEX
4 June - 18 September 2016
SUPERFLEX presents the new work Waste Water Fountain at Emscher Kunst 2016, a 50km long Art Trail that stretches between the cities of Holzwickede, Dortmund, Castrop-Rauxel, Recklinghausen and Herne in Germany. With this work, SUPERFLEX erects a temporary memorial in form of a great fountain amidst the course of a river still carrying waste water on site, at the Stadthafen in Recklinghausen. The Emscher's industrial image, an open waste water canal, reminds the artists of open intestines, our vital organ. Superflex celebrates the waste water for 100 days of Emscherkunst before it soon vanishes underground completely due to the Emscher conversion.
The Emscherkunst accompanies the development of a natural riverscape in the heart of the Ruhr area as a triennial. In a generational project, the open waste water canal Emscher is being converted to a close-to-nature river since the 1990s.The river's's waste water is conducted with pumps through the more than 4m high sculpture. It rises over the water surface and ground level and vehemently enters the observer's view, equally showing uninhibited passion for breaking taboos and also delight for the absurd. The get-together of all our waste that used to be part of us, and the participation in a universal process of degradation shall also be celebrated, according to Superflex.
More information here.
Rirkrit Tiravanija: Tomorrow is the Question at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2012 (who if not we should at least try to imagine the future, again) (remember Julius Koller). 14 mirror polished stainless steel ping pong tables, Gavin Brown Enterprise, NY. Photo: Thomas Müller
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Tomorrow is the Question
A co-production of Holland Festival and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
June 4–26, 2016
Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija (1961) creates art that explores human social interaction. In Tomorrow is the Question, he will set up a series of stainless steel ping pong tables and invite the public to participate in his work. Tiravanija has staged exhibitions at venues throughout the world. Tomorrow is the Question (2015)—previously presented in Moscow, Arles, France, and elsewhere—marks the artist's debut in Amsterdam. Tiravanija is seen as one of the most influential multimedia artists of his generation.
With his installation on the Museumplein, Tiravanija blurs the line between art and life. The work playfully confronts traditional ways of viewing art in classic Tiravanija style, as well as the etiquette that goes with it. As an alternative, the artist offers a more theatrical and social—and more enjoyable—experience. Tiravanija sees art as something artist and viewer create together, a process where people can be social beings, preferably outside the rarified realm of the gallery space. "It is not what you see that is important, but what takes place between people," says Tiravanija.
The social interaction that Tiravanija pursues with this project has different historical references, from the ping pong matches organized at a gallery in Bratislava as a way of communicating by Slovakian artist Július Koller in the 1970s, to the Ping Pong Diplomacy of the United States during the Cold War period. In 1971, the US organized a ping pong tournament between American and Chinese players, under the motto "Friendship First, Competition Second."
The work is accessible to everyone and free of charge. Ping pong paddles and balls can be borrowed from a distribution point on Museumplein.
More information here
Fiona Connor: Newspaper Reading Club in Routine Pleasures, MAK Schindler House
Opening Reception: Wednesday, May 25, 2016, 7-9 PM
Wednesday, May 25 – Sunday, August 14, 2016
Schindler House
835 N Kings Road
West Hollywood, CA 90069
Routine Pleasures brings together artists working in a variety of media to explore "the termite tendency," a concept introduced by artist and film critic Manny Farber (1917–2008) in his 1962 essay "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art." Whereas the original essay applied these labels to the work of filmmakers, exhibition organizer Michael Ned Holte finds manifold parallels in contemporary art.
In today's overheated art world, it is easy to see a preponderance of "white elephant" art, defined by Farber as "yawning production of overripe technique shrieking with preciosity, fame, ambition." Routine Pleasures presents practitioners who embrace a quieter, more process-oriented approach. Like termites, these artists focus closely on what is before them, and follow the work wherever it may lead, often in diffuse directions. To locate and expand upon Farber's construct of the termite tendency, the exhibition features works by: James Benning; Jennifer Bornstein; Center for Land Use Interpretation; Harry Dodge; Manny Farber; Judy Fiskin; Magdalena Suarez Frimkess and Michael Frimkess; Galería Perdida; Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer; Simon Leung; Lucky Dragons; Roy McMakin; Carter Mull; Newspaper Reading Club; Pauline Oliveros; and Steve Roden.
More information here.
Jessica Stockholder: Colour Jam Houston
Color Jam Houston treats the intersection of Main and McKinney as a single public canvas. The stripes of color on the four corners seem to be woven together and present a kind of basket. The weaving of different stripes together into a single whole is resonant with the reality of different owners, jurisdictions and codes that govern this section of public space consisting of crosswalk, roadway, sidewalk, store fronts and Metro platform. The work also signifies the delicate social and political balance that exists between individual rights, freedoms, responsibilities and our collective well-being and coexistence.
More information here.
KCET: Current:LA, A New Public Art Biennial
A recent mayoral announcement officially launched the Department of Cultural Affairs’ new Current:LA initiative, an issues-driven public art biennial whose inaugural edition happens at non-traditional locations scattered across the city in July and August. The first edition, Current:LA Water, addresses the multivalent topic of water’s usage, history, and role in the city’s physical and social infrastructure. This includes the L.A. River, but as the organizers are quick to point out, it is about so much more than just the river. There's water infrastructure throughout the city from the Port of L.A. (San Pedro) to the L.A. wetlands of Ballona Creek, to Hansen Dam in the north), and of course, the coast.
The DCA’s Public Art Division is using $1 million received through a grant program of the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Public Art Challenge, plus matching funds from the city’s Arts Development Fee (ADF) program, more commonly known as the percent-for-art program that taps developers and other kinds of businesses for sustaining funds for what is usually permanent works of public art. But forget that abstract-sculpture-in-a-plaza model of public art; the Bloomberg grant specifically called for temporary public art projects and public programs at outdoor locations, and the DCA has embraced this paradigm shift with an enthusiast, open-minded can-do spirit taking full advantage of what DCA general manager Danielle Brazell calls “L.A.’s inspired moment.”
Besides reframing the conversation on what public art can be, Current:LA is also reconfiguring assumptions about what a biennial looks like.
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Current:LA Water with Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kerry Tribe
via the LA Times:
Mayor Eric Garcetti announces artists for L.A.'s first public art biennial to be held this summer
More than a dozen artists — including L.A.-based Kori Newkirk, Edgar Arceneaux, Gala Porras-Kim and Michael Parker — have been selected to participate in Los Angeles' first public art biennial, Mayor Eric Garcetti announced at a news conference early Tuesday afternoon.
The "Current:LA Water" exhibition will consist of temporary outdoor installations that will go up throughout the city this summer, all focused on the theme of water.
The project was initiated by the Public Art Division at the Department of Cultural Affairs and is supported by a $1-million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies, and other financial support.
Felicia Filer, the director of the Department of Cultural Affairs' public art division, said in a statement that the line-up is "an exciting group of internationally recognized and emerging talents that are as culturally diverse as the inhabitants of Los Angeles."
This includes video artist Kerry Tribe, conceptual artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, installation artist Teresa Margolles and social practice pioneer Mel Chin. Also on the list are the sound duo Lucky Dragons (Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara), sculptor Candice Lin, sound and performance artist Chris Kallmyer and two artist teams — Josh Callaghan and Daveed Kapoor, and Refik Anadol and Peggy Weil.
Biennial artists were selected by a curatorial committee that includes Ruth Estévez of REDCAT; Rita Gonzalez from LACMA; Karen Moss, an art historian and curator who also teaches at the Otis College of Art and Design; and Irene Tsatsos, the chief curator at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena.
"Current:LA Water" will be on view throughout Los Angeles in July and August.
More info here. LA Times article here.
Fiona Connor: Canyon School up for auction to benefit Canyon Charter School
Fiona Connor, Canyon School, 2016, ink on paper, 10 x 14 inches
Click here to bid on the work.
All benefits go to the Canyon Charter School in Santa Monica. The auction concludes on April 24th at the Canyon's Fiesta and Auction, 11am - 4pm.
More information here.
Artnet: Superflex's Readymade Medical Equipment is Now in Use in a Gaza Hospital
Superflex's 2014-15 exhibition "Hospital Equipment," at the Den Frie Center for Contemporary Art. Photo: Anders Sune Berg, courtesy Superflex.
Casualties of recent fighting in the Gaza Strip may well find themselves undergoing surgery atop an operating table that is also an artwork. In what the three-man Danish collective Superflex calls a "readymade upside-down," the artists organized for a museum exhibition of top-of-the-line medical equipment which then went to a setting defined less by well-heeled visitors than by life-threatening injuries.
As a result, Al-Shifa Hospital is the beneficiary of some $90,000 worth of goods, including the operating table and surgical lamps, with the financial support of Danish product design company Area9, which is one of three private collectors to acquire the piece. The table itself, the motorized, highly mobile Trumpf Medical MARS model, represented more than half the cost. The choice of equipment was guided by by PalMed, an organization of medical professionals who aim to provide improved care for Palestinians living in Gaza. Al-Shifa treated the largest number of victims of the most recent conflict in Gaza, says Dr. Mahmoud Ismail, head of PalMed's Danish office, in a press release.
Working together since 1993, the artists (Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, Jakob Fenger, and Rasmus Nielsen) have created socially-engaged projects in various mediums that examine the baleful effects of capitalism via financial and banking structures, the place of fossil fuel in the global economy, and systems of free trade, among other subjects.
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Huffington Post on Ana Prvacki: A Catalogue Of Wonderfully Useless Ideas Highlights The Power Of Imagination
Artist Ana Prvacki dares to imagine how our smallest, most absurd ideas can change the world.
A great gift -- one that's significant, thoughtful, filled with meaning, big -- can be, despite all good intentions, somewhat of a drag. The time, money, thought and resources that go into a diligently assembled gift can leave the recipient with a combination of appreciation and anxiety, grateful for the magnanimous offering but nervous for when, if, and how the service will be repaid.
That's why, for me, the most generous gifts are not the large ones that come elaborately wrapped up on holidays with a big bow on top. Instead, they're the ones that come unexpectedly and with joyful ease -- a note on your pillow, a candy on your desk -- gestures weightless and light as air.
Ana Prvacki's artworks are such gestures. While most art grapples with Big issues like Death, Sex, God, History, The Color Blue -- Prvacki's preferred concepts are simple and succinct. For example, how to properly alert your friend to the small leaf of spinach caught between her incisors.
- Priscilla Frank
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Artforum.com: Fiona Banner Critics' Pick
An unflattering view of a power suit’s trousers greets visitors to Fiona Banner’s exhibition: aqueous gray lines diverge down a big Day-Glo orange sheet to form Pinstripe Bum Face, 2015. If the intrepid financiers who steered the 2008 banking crisis sought unregulated waters, Banner finds premonitions of our recessional present in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). The novel opens on a dusky River Thames; Orson Welles set his unrealized screen adaptation on the Hudson—both waterways opened the world’s oceans to the West’s colonizing, commercial capitals. It is not lost on Banner that these waters now conceal the gangly fiber optics that keep both cities at the mouths of more ephemeral trade.
Upstairs is a salon hang of posters and prints incorporating Conrad quotes and ISBN numbers, as if posing the shadowy Company that sends Marlow after Kurtz as a venerable publisher of art books. Among them are a graphite rubbing of a brass placard that reads Power, 2016, and Thames and Hudson Nude, 2012, a silk screen of a woman’s silhouette beside a page of Welles’s script. On a nearby plinth sits a copy of Banner’s own Heart of Darkness, 2015, a September issue–size magazine lavishly illustrated with glossy shots of London’s financial district taken by Paolo Pellegrin, a conflict photographer. In the HD video Phantom, 2015, a drone tracks a copy of Banner’s book as strong winds push it across a parking lot. Its pages—flapping to shreds—flash a colonnade, a revolving door, and a spread of waves.
For Conrad, madness follows mere corruption. For Banner, this holds true. In Mistah Bag, 2015, the phrase “Mistah Kurtz he not dead”—the artist’s revision of Conrad’s famous line—appears in gold serif on a black plastic shopping bag. The body may be buried, but the spirit still sails.
— Travis Diehl
KCRW: Hunter Drohojowska-Philp on Fiona Banner's Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness, the 1899 novella by British author Joseph Conrad, is the story of the mysterious character Captain Kurtz as remembered by the captain of a steamer traveling up the Congo River. Loosely based on Conrad's own experience as a young seaman, it is written in a deeply descriptive and symbolically-charged manner that has attracted a number of reinterpretations including a film never realized by Orson Welles and, possibly the best known version, the 1979 film Apocalypse Now.
British artist Fiona Banner has been mining this fictional territory at least since her 1999 Nam, a "wordscape" describing the violence in that and various other films about the Vietnam War. In this show, she applies the book's metaphorical observations to business conducted in the City of London, a financial heart of darkness in this context, where the brokerages are centered. If morally abhorrent actions in the book are driven by greed, Banner's work suggests that parallels can be found in the capitalist motives of the City.
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The Wall Street Journal: ‘Ann Veronica Janssens’ Review: Lights, Color, Action
The most civilized spot in this city of sprawl, tall buildings, shopping malls and a spider's web of highways is one of Renzo Piano's great buildings, the Nasher Sculpture Center in the downtown arts district. Until several years ago, at the end of its stately garden filled with masterpieces by Rodin, Picasso, Calder, De Kooning, Moore, Di Suvero, George Segal and Richard Serra, there also stood one of James Turrell's "sky spaces," an enclosed room in which a visitor could look up at the changing heavens. As a consequence of a continuing dispute with a neighboring condominium tower whose height eradicated the room's sky view, the piece has been closed permanently.
Mr. Turrell is a master of light. Now, another master of light's uses and effects, Ann Veronica Janssens (British born; Belgian based), is having her first solo American show here. Outside, to the right of the Nasher's main entrance, "Green Aurora" is a small, projected light piece, barely noticeable. Indoors, placed diagonally on the floor, lies "IPE 700," a single 23-foot-long steel I-beam, its top side polished and reflective. In its solid materiality, this is the most conventional of Ms. Janssen's works here. As you look around you, materiality gives way to light and lightness. Four pieces she calls "Aquariums," variations on a theme, of identical size (21 5/8 inches cubed) and made of glass, distilled water, paraffin oil, and ink or silkscreen, stand atop identical wooden bases. They refract the light, and they also reflect Mr. Piano's signature grids for the Nasher roof above. Each is titled and colored differently: "Cocktail Sculpture" is pure glass; the others are called "Orange," "Margarita," and "Blue Wind" for their main shades. They will remind viewers of Donald Judd's 100 milled aluminum boxes in Marfa, Texas.
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art Magazin: Ana Prvački
Aktuell überschätzt: Das Original! In L. A. verkauft die Künstlerin Ana Prvački für viel Geld die Schattenwürfe berühmter Kunstwerke – thanks to Marcel Duchamp
Dass auf unserer Gegenwart der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit ruht, ist eine häufig bemühte Metapher, die man eigentlich nicht mehr hören mag. Nur in der Kunst, wo gern alte Ideen recycelt werden, lässt sich so eine abgegriffene Erkenntnis noch in Gold verwandeln. Ana Prvački jedenfalls hat das mit dem Schatten wörtlich genommen und stellt in der 1301pe-Galerie in Los Angeles die Schattenwürfe berühmter Skulpturen aus: Michelangelos David, den Schreitenden von Alberto Giacometti, Constantin Brâncusis Endlose Säule und natürlich auch Marcel Duchamps FahrradRad. Nicht die Skulpturen selbst, wohlgemerkt, sondern nur die Silhouetten, die sie auf dem Boden oder an der Wand hinterlassen. Die 1976 im ehemaligen Jugoslawien geborene Künstlerin nennt ihre neue Werkserie Stealing Shadows und bedient sich dabei natürlich ganz bewusst einem der größten Erfolgsmodelle der Moderne: dem Prinzip des Readymade (siehe auch Seite 34) und dessen Wiedergänger Appropriation Art. Größe und Material der Schattenwürfe sind variabel – auf Wunsch können sie auf den Boden aufgemalt oder als ausgeschnittener Filzbelag erworben werden. Der Preis der »gestohlenen Schatten« ist hingegen nicht verhandelbar. Er bemisst sich am Wert des Originalwerks und soll exakt ein Prozent des Preises sein, den die jeweilige Skulptur auf einer Auktion erzielt hat, so hat es die Künstlerin verfügt. Der Schatten von Louise Bourgeois’ Bronzespinne beispielsweise ist mit 281 650 USDollar ausgezeichnet, weil eben dieses Werk letztes Jahr bei christie’s für das Hundertfache versteigert wurde. Stolzer Preis für den Umriss eines Kunstwerks, den man mit Taschenlampe und Photoshop auch selber herstellen könnte. Aber wer so denkt, hat eben Marcel Duchamp nicht verstanden. Nicht das Werk zählt, sondern die Idee, lautet das Mantra der Moderne. So gesehen liegt Prvačkis konzeptuelle Schattenkunst ganz weit vorn. Denn wer will sich in unsicheren Zeiten noch mit zentnerschweren Skulpturen belasten? Oder wie die Künstlerin sagt: »Auch wenn es eine sehr einfache Idee ist, ist sie doch sehr wertvoll. Dünnere Dinge zu machen sollte sogar mehr Wert haben als große Dinge.«
- Ute Thon
New York Times: Ann Veronica Janssens Casts Strong Beams at Bortolami
The work of Ann Veronica Janssens, a British artist who lives in Brussels, precipitates the heightened optical and spatial awareness similar to that of Light and Space but without the often attendant fuss that seems antithetical to the movement’s less-is-more, dematerialized aesthetic. At least as seen here, in her first solo show in the United States, Ms. Janssens’s efforts avoid the more grandiose Light and Space hallmarks, including the immaculate built-out environments, computerized light shows and viewers removing their shoes. The results are less immersive, but more thought-provoking.
At Bortolami, Ms. Janssens, who has shown in Europe since the early 1980s, presents six eye-teasing works. The most immediately arresting is a thick layer of aqua-blue glitter, spread on the floor. About the size of a kiddie pool, it is lush and dazzling and flashes shades of green and yellow as you circumnavigate it, almost as if its surface were moving.
More understated are two modest sheets of corrugated aluminum that jut out from two walls, tilting upward, a little like awnings. They seem to levitate, delicately shaded on their undersides and glowing on top, as if harboring concealed lights. Actually, the aluminum is covered with platinum leaf, and each piece is fittingly titled “Moonlight,” which is, of course, all reflected. A narrow portion of vertical blinds, titled “California,” also seems lighted from within but is simply covered with gold leaf. The show culminates in a room where seven spotlights with pink gels form a circle on one wall while a haze machine lends heft to their crossing beams, which cast a lotuslike pattern on the opposite wall. These pieces might weaken if seen separately, but together their trick-free, low-tech magic is refreshing.
- Roberta Smith
Glasstire: Top Five: Ann Veronica Janssens
1. Ann Veronica Janssens
Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas)
January 23 – April 17
An exhibition of works by Brussels-based artist Ann Veronica Janssens. For this show, Janssens has created sculptures that play with the eye, in which viewers “encounter shifts in surface, depth, and color, challenging perception and destabilizing their sense of sight and space.”
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Star-Telegram: Artist Ann Veronica Janssens takes us inside the rainbow
Ask your children if they would like to take a walk in a rainbow. The answer should be a unanimous yes.
You can deliver on this enticement at the Nasher Sculpture Center in a new exhibit by Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens.
Janssens is an artist who manipulates light, and in her piece titled Blue, Red and Yellow, a rainbow of light is encased in a large rectangular box in the Nasher's garden. She fills the box with fog from a fog-producing machine, and as the sunlight streams into the box made of colored plastic panels, it transforms the fog into clouds of color.
Unexpectedly, though, the fog is so saturated that as soon as people enter the cube, they disappear. You can hear them; in fact, audio perception is heightened, but you cannot see them. All that can be seen are the billowing colors that change through the prismatic palette and the tiny optical floaters that are always there on your eyes but are rarely noticed.
It's beyond weird in a wonderful way.
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The Creatorsproject: Throwing Shade—Literally—At the World’s Greatest Art
In the increasingly stock market-esque culture that the art world and market have become, the work of a select few artists that entertain billionaire patrons cast shadows upon everyone else's creations. Serbian born, LA-based artist Ana Prvački has opted to explore this metaphor in a literal fashion in her most recent exhibition, Stealing Shadows.
Prvački's show, which opened at LA gallery 1301PE last weekend, consists of the silhouettes and shadows of incredibly familiar works of art. Through projection and in some cases a thin sculpting process, Prvački has created "shadow-artworks" of iconic and easily recognizable pieces, including Jeff Koons' Rabbit and Michelangelo's David.
"I was thinking a lot about the tendency for appropriation and a kind of cleverness towards art history in the contemporary art practice," tells Prvački. "I was intrigued at the possibility of a playful, humorous gesture of stealing shadows but at the same time with the question of value and a critique on pricing."
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Wallpaper: Shadow play: artist Ana Prvački satirises the art market with new works in LA
The artist Ana Prvački has imagined the shadows of some of the world’s most famous (and expensive) artworks. Staged at 1301PE, Los Angeles, 'Stealing Shadows' is both a comment on the position of physical production in contemporary art practice and its 'preoccupation with ephemera and mischievous urges', and a critique of the commercial engine of culture. 'Shadows are in the spirit of the moon, they change depending on time of day and the season – just like the art market,' Prvački notes.
Prvački – known for her performance work on consumer aesthetics, gestures and etiquette – has been mulling over the idea since 2007. It comes to fruition following a publication that the artist released last year with the ICA Singapore, a catalogue of her ‘uncomfortable imagination’. In order for the exhibit to work in reality, all of the pieces Prvački selected had to be inscribed on the collective cultural conscience – so that they could be recognised in flat format. This process of eking out iconic contemporary works is revealing in itself, but Prvački is also asking the viewer to contemplate very directly how value is attributed to art, pricing her stolen shadow works in relation to the original. 'Stealing shadows of famous masterpieces and selling them at one per cent of their auction price is both tactical and economical. I think it is a timely project and audiences are really ready to talk about the economy of the art market, the one per cent, the value of art and ideas.'
But can you get your hands on a stolen shadow? The artist explains that she can custom design them to fit any space, and in a variety of formats that range from digital projection, painting or graffiti, or as an animated shadow that moves through a space as an umbra, penumbra or antumbra. 'There is something very poetic and elegant about shadows – I think the subtle yet very graphic nature of shadows appeals to our psyche. There has been great dialogue with artists, collectors, dealers, and copyright lawyers at the exhibition!'
-Charlotte Jansen
Independent: Ana Prvacki: US artist pays homage to greats by creating shadows of their work
Ana Prvacki is living in the shade of other, more famous artists. But if the price of the works she is displaying in a Los Angeles gallery are any guide, there is good money to be made in the shadows.
The 39-year-old has taken homage to a new level by exhibiting works based on the shadows cast by a series of well-known sculptures. Visitors to the 1301PE gallery can play a game of "name that shadow" with Jeff Koons's Rabbit, Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel and Michelangelo's David creating some of the most familiar outlines.
Each of the new works costs only one per cent of the original sculpture's current market price, but it's a formula that makes for some eye-watering prices.
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Artforum: James Nisbet on Jack Goldstein
Jack Goldstein, Burning Window, 1977/2015, wood, Plexiglas, acrylic paint, lights, dimensions variable.
Exhibiting three of Jack Goldstein's lesser-known works—his Burning Window installation, 1977/2015, and two sets of text-based Aphorisms (both dated 1982) painted on the gallery wall—this show distilled a tension within Goldstein's practice between mundane observation and metaphysical introspection. Burning Window consists of a single window frame containing four panes of textured Plexiglas placed in the center of a gallery wall that has been painted bloodred. Behind this window, flickering red lights give the appearance of fire. But this faux flame produces no heat. Instead, Burning Window effects an unsettling experience with its uneasy marriage of implied trauma and camp. No spectator of this installation would reasonably assume that Burning Window was intended to simulate an actual fire. Its reality is far more ambiguous. Goldstein commented in the compilation Portfolio Performance, 2001, that "the window functions as a 'safe' but fragile barrier in front of which the spectator is witness to the world outside as a measureless inferno." Burning Window evokes film but is not quite "cinematic"; suggestive of a narrative, in actuality it more acutely dramatizes the staged quality of its moving images. Per Goldstein, the spectacle "calls into question the 'truth' of visual experience."
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LA Times: 'Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination' at LACMA stuns the senses
by Sharon Mizota
Walls dissolve in Diana Thater's beautiful, affecting retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. For 25 years, the L.A. artist has been creating immersive video installations that appear to breach the contours of the gallery, transporting viewers into other realities: swimming with dolphins, interacting with wolves or exploring the contaminated ruins of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
Throughout, Thater has exploited the technology and conventions of video to examine the nature of perception and to probe the fraught line between human and animal.
With just 22 works, "Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination" is tightly focused, somewhat austere but nevertheless stunning. Curators Lynne Cooke of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and Christine Y. Kim of LACMA have selected major pieces and given them ample space to play. They forgo wall labels, and some of the room-filling installations overlap a bit, suffusing the space in lovely fields of colored light. (An indispensable gallery guide includes maps, titles and a brief artist statement for each work.) The exhibition is split among three buildings on the LACMA campus, but even this potential disconnect provides welcome breathers from what might otherwise become retinal overload.
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KCRW: Edward Goldman on Kirsten Everberg
http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/art-talk/art-of-war-and-peace
"The exhibition of paintings of LA-based artist, Kirsten Everberg, at 1301 PE Gallery will slow you down and put you in a quiet, meditative mood. Everberg traveled to Sweden to the remote island of Faro, where famous film director, Ingmar Bergman, lived for most of his life. Inspired by the architecture and interior of his house, she created a series of oil and enamel paintings, abstract and representational at the same time. The pale light of Nordic White Nights fills the rooms. Everything looks realistic, but strangely mysterious. Stepping close to the paintings, one discovers the elaborate texture of individual brushstrokes, as if enamel and oil are still wet and continue to slowly drip down the canvas"
"One large painting offers a glimpse of Bergman's library, with hundreds of books cramming the shelves. Each book is created by a single brushstroke" at least that is the impression one gets. And this multitude of books and exquisite brushstrokes makes one dream about Bergman's Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Cries and Whispers, and Fanny and Alexander"
Ana Prvacki: Thirty Shades Of White at Praz Delavallade Paris
Thirty Shades Of White
28 November 2015 - 23 January 2016
Artists: Pierre Ardouvin, Robert Barry, Lisa Beck, Oliver Beer, Florian Bézu, Ulla von Brandenburg, Matthew Chambers, Martin Creed, Trisha Donnelly, Thomas Fougeirol, Fernanda Gomes, Julian Hoeber, Shila Khatami, Jiri Kovanda, Rodrigo Matheus, Fabien Mérelle, Julien Nédélec, Camila Oliveira Fairclough, Laurent Pernot, Ana Prvacki, Joe Reihsen, Ry Rocklen, Analia Saban, Yann Sérandour, Florian Schmidt, Sergio Verastegui, Marnie Weber, Lawrence Weiner, Zoe Williams, John Wood & Paul Harrison
PRAZ-DELAVALLADE
5, RUE DES HAUDRIETTES
F-75003 PARIS
More info here.
Rirkrit Tiravanija: A Restaurant Where Art is on the Menu in the New York Times
A Restaurant Where Art is on the Menu
By KAT HERRIMAN
In 1992, the art dealer Gavin Brown helped the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija transform 303 Gallery, then on Greene Street, into an operational kitchen for a part performance, part installation piece titled "Untitled (Free)." The seminal solo show, which found the artist serving up gratis curry and rice out of the converted gallery, represented a critical development in Tiravanija's practice. It also marked the beginning of his friendship with Brown, who at the time worked as an assistant at the gallery. Now in the collection of MoMA, "Untitled (Free)" — considered a masterwork of relational aesthetics — was the first of many interactive projects realized by the twosome. Their latest scheme: a gallery-meets-kitchen in Hancock, N.Y. Lovingly referred to as Unclebrother (the name is an inside joke), the hybrid restaurant revives the generous spirit of Tiravanija and Brown's inaugural partnership, but adds in a full-time, brick-and-mortar locale. "It's the first time he's had a commercial kitchen, so it's a departure in that sense," Brown says. "It's a natural progression, in a way. It's about entering into the same place but from a different direction."
Read more here.
Diana Thater in The Wall Street Journal
Film and Video Artist Diana Thater's First Retrospective at LACMA
Known for projects that explore nature and the cosmos, Diana Thater is the focus of Los Angeles County Museum of Art's largest exhibition focused on a female artist
By Carol Kino
IT'S A SMOGGY DAY in Los Angeles, and the artist Diana Thater is walking up the steep, winding path toward the Griffith Observatory, one of the city's most recognizable landmarks. Passing a gauntlet of tourists snapping photos with selfie sticks, Thater, 53, says she realizes the destination seems cliché. But as a self-avowed movie buff who creates film and video installations, Thater is also clearly reveling in the moment, pointing out the James Dean statue, the best place to get a shot of the Hollywood sign and the precise location on the observatory steps where Sal Mineo's character bit the dust in Rebel Without a Cause. "When I was a child I was obsessed with movies," says Thater. "I must have seen thousands." (Perhaps that's the inspiration for her severe bob, which is reminiscent of the hairstyle of silent film star Theda Bara.)
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Diana Thater: gorillagorillagorilla at Aspen Art Museum
Diana Thater
gorillagorillagorilla
Nov 6, 2015-Feb 21, 2016
Aspen Art Museum
637 East Hyman Avenue
Aspen, Colorado 81611
More information here.
Uta Barth and Ann Veronica Janssens: Another Minimalism at The Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh
Another Minimalism
Art After California Light and Space
Exhibition 14 November 2015 – 21 February 2016
Curated by Melissa E. Feldman
Uta Barth (Germany), Larry Bell (US), Carol Bove (Switzerland), Sarah Braman (US), Tacita Dean (UK), Olafur Eliasson (Denmark), Sam Falls (US), Jeppe Hein (Denmark), Robert Irwin (US), Ann Veronica Janssens (UK), Spencer Finch (US), James Welling (US)
Opening Events Friday 13 November:
Curator's Talk Melissa E. Feldman 5–6pm
Exhibition Preview 6–8pm
The Fruitmarket Gallery
45 Market Street
Edinburgh EH1 1DF
More information here.
Ann Veronica Janssens at S.M.A.K. in Gent
Pae White: Command-Shift-4 at Henry Art Gallery Seattle
Pae White
Command-Shift-4
24 October 2015 — 24 January 2016
Fall Open House:
Thursday 29 October 2015, 7.30 - 10 pm
Henry Art Gallery
University of Washington
15th Ave. NE & NE 41st St.
Seattle, WA 98105
https://henryart.org/exhibitions/pae-white
Philippe Parreno on the cover of ArtReview
Following his exhibition at the Armory in New York and in advance of a major show at Milan's Hangar Bicocca later this month, the French artist talks about the the process of exhibition-making. Interview by Tom Eccles
More information here.
Ann Veronica Janssens: States of Mind at Wellcome Collection
Ann Veronica Janssens
States of Mind
15 October 2015 - 3 January 2016
This new installation by Ann Veronica Janssens explores light and colour as she invades the gallery with coloured mist. Colour is caught in a state of suspension, obscuring any detail of surface or depth. Instead, attention is focussed on the process of perception itself. Janssens's work is both disorienting and uplifting as the daily wonder of conscious experience is given renewed emphasis.
Wellcome Collection
183 Euston Road
London NW1 2BE
UK
Blouin Artinfo: 25 Most Collectible Midcareer Artists: Diana Thater
An installation view of Diana Thater's "Science, Fiction" exhibit at David Zwirner, New York.
Since the 1990s, Thater, a pioneer of video art, has been producing video installations that focus on the mechanical aspects of media and the dynamics among humans, animals, and ecosystems across the globe.
"This is a very important moment to reevaluate her impact and her influence and importance in the history of video art and contemporary art in general. People are recognizing how influential she's been," says Justine Durrett, director of sales at David Zwirner in New York, the artist's New York representative since 1993.
The global subject matter of Thater's work resonates with an international collector base and "reaches an audience that goes beyond collectors who are purely interested in video art," says Durrett.
It's uncommon for Thater's work to reach the auction market; only three pieces have sold at auction since 2002. Nine Red Sun, 2000, sold at Lawson Menzies in Kensington, Australia, for $18,000 (est. $21–26,000) in 2002; Perpetual Motion Two, 2005, sold at Christie's South Kensington in September 2010 for an artist record of $77,000 (est. $31–45,000); and in March 2012, Composite Sun Video Wall, 2000, achieved $22,500 (est. $30–40,000) at Christie's New York. David Zwirner's most recent exhibition of the artist's work, "Diana Thater: Science, Fiction," which was on view from January 8 to February 21, 2015, offered works that ranged in price from $150,000 to $300,000. The artist's Starry Messenger, 2014, a nine-monitor video wall depicting the Milky Way, sold for $150,000.
The San Francisco native, who studied art history at New York University and received an mfa from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, is currently participating in the 56th Venice Biennale, where her "Vita Vitale" is part of a group show in the Azerbaijan Pavilion until November 22. "Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination," a retrospective, will be on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art November 22 through February 21, 2016.
- Liza Muhlfeld
Blouin Artinfo: Jessica Stockholder Takes Chicago
Jessica Stockholder apparently hasn't had a solo outing in Chicago in over two decades, but she's certainly making up for lost time. The artist — known for bright assemblages of consumer goods and other materials — is now a professor and chair of the visual arts department at the University of Chicago. She opened "Door Hinges," an exhibition at Kavi Gupta Gallery, two weeks ago, and she curated a companion show, "Assisted," in the same space; a large new piece dangles from the ceiling of upscale, art-crowd-friendly Chicago restaurant mk; a site-specific piece is also now on view at the Smart Museum of Art.
At Kavi Gupta, pictured above and below, the artist goes big, conscripting a freezer unit, an enormous and clunky desk, and a Smart car into her installations. Another piece sprawls through the entrance foyer, combining energetic wall-painting with driveway safety-mirrors and other found objects; it continues on the second floor of the gallery, as well as on the space's exterior. Stockholder's facility with throwaway plastic consumer detritus — generating a buzz through the artful repurposing of toys, furniture, junk, and raw color — make her a kindred spirit to someone like Iza Genzken.
— Scott Indrisek
Rirkrit Tiravanija: untitled 2015 (tomorrow is on our tongue, as today pass from our lips) at CCBB Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brasilia
Kreëmart + Rirkrit Tiravanija presents
untitled 2015 ( tomorrow is on our tongue, as today pass from our lips )
at
CCBB Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Brasilia
CRU 2015
Kreëmart and Rirkrit Tiravanija have a social understanding of this project. The glass structure, (the laboratory) within the glass house can be understood as a microcosm of itself, or better, of the city we will be using as our platform, Brasilia. The ceiling reiterates the ideas of containment.
Within the laboratory, we will be creating different interpretations (tastes) of a wafer that can be used in the same way as holy bread (Ostia). It would is important to use the same base for the wafer as so the only variable that changes is the taste.The tastes are based on the concepts: Everest, Pacific, Sahara, Antarctica, Amazon and Iguaçu Falls
The idea behind having the wafer is that it is a very genetic form. The association with the wafer is that of being bland, tasteless. Here, we will give the public a sensorial surprise, an explosion of flavor of different tastes given our separate wafer creations.
Within the lab, there is a table hosting the wafer structure. The laboratory workers will pull one by one out with a tweezer to give the wafer to the public through the glass hole.
We are staging a situation and the public will have a personal experience of it.
The person in the public will have no choice of the taste of their wafer, they will eat that of which is served to them. As to reiterate the idea of giving false autonomy to the public, the public will line up in four different divisions of the space with tubes that connect into the laboratory.
This ties back to a political and social context of having choice between candidates but not really having power or autonomy of ultimate choice. Here the political connotation also ties to the containment within the structure. The public may try to perceive and will have their own ideas of what is happening within the laboratory but this is something that will never be divulged. The glass house is a metaphor for the personas created by a political party, whatever that may be.
There can be a further investigation of concept of what happens within the laboratory. As there is a glass separation of the public and the laboratory, it may be understood as that unreachable, untouchable understanding of production and consumption.
Whether the reaction is pleasure, disgust, confusion – this will be provoked by taste and will arise curiosity. No two people will have the same experience of taste and that exploration and documentation is pertinent.
Fiona Connor: Newspaper Reading Club at The Physics Room
physicsroom.org.nz/exhibitions/christchurch-poster-project
Ana Prvacki at Contour 7
29.08–08.11.2015
MECHELEN
The Family Fig Tree (for the Utopians it's important to see their future spouse naked before marrying them)
video, sound, fig tree, 2′ 34″
Commissioned and produced by CONTOUR 7
Fig leaves have played a significant role in the history of art, covering male and female sexual organs to neutralise the erotic charge of images. Prvački's art explores ways of re-charging the erotic dimension in art, while addressing forms of social intercourse and protocol. In her piece for CONTOUR 7, she ironically plays with a social rule on the island of Utopia and subverts it, while paying respect to the artistic tradition of using fig leaves by placing a fig tree in front of her video. The work finds its point of synthesis in its audio component, which invites the listener into a subliminal trip back in time, covering one generation after another on a family tree and perhaps inviting us to contemplate a primordial scene in the Garden of Eden.
http://contour7.be/en/artists/ana-prvacki
Ana Prvacki at Istanbul Biennial
The 14th Istanbul Biennial
SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms
5 September - 1 November 2015
http://14b.iksv.org/participants.asp?id=35
Charline von Heyl at Galerie Gisela Capitain Cologne
Charline von Heyl
September 5 - October 24, 2015
Galerie Gisela Capitain
St. Apern Straße 26
D - 50667 Cologne
Fiona Banner: Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness
By Joseph Conrad
A work by Fiona Banner
Photographs by Paolo Pellegrin
Designer: John Morgan
Four Corners Familiars number 12
In 2012, Fiona Banner was invited to select an exhibition of works drawn from the Archive of Modern Conflict, a London-based collection of photographs and ephemera relating to war and conflict. After much time delving into the archive, Banner observed a lack of images relating to conflict in the here and now. In a reversal of roles, Banner commissioned Paolo Pellegrin, a conflict photographer who has worked extensively in the Congo, to observe the City of London – its streets and trading floors, its costume and strip-clubs – through Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The resulting photographs were first exhibited at Peer, London under the title Mistah Kurtz – He Not Dead.
A selection of these images now form part of the Archive, they can be found filed under 'Heart of Darkness, 2014'. They also form the illustrations for this new publication of Conrad's novella, which takes the form of a luxury magazine.
Heart of Darkness (first published in 1899) is a story of trade and corruption, and of our own conflicts and desires. From a boat moored on the banks of the Thames, Marlow narrates his story in which he travels to the heart of the Congo in search of renegade ivory trader Kurtz, who has mesmerised and enslaved his workers.
Like many artists of her generation Banner has lived just outside the boundaries of London's financial district since the early 90s observed the area's close proximity to the Square Mile and its apparent separation from it. This publication links with Banner's first artist book The Nam (1997) that references Apocalypse Now, a film that uses Conrad's text as its narrative template.
Jan Albers: hallOfzinOgen at Van Horn Duesseldorf
Jan Albers
hallOfzinOgen
5 September - 23 October 2015
Opening Friday 4 September, 6-10 pm
VAN HORN
DANIELA STEINFELD
ACKERSTR. 99
40233 DUESSELDORF
GERMANY
Jessica Stockholder: Rose's Inclination at Smart Museum of Art Chicago
Jessica Stockholder: Rose's Inclination
September 12, 2015 – July 2, 2017
In a site-specific Threshold series installation, Jessica Stockholder intersects the Smart’s lobby with a wave of color and texture that climbs to the clerestory, cuts across the floor, and travels outwards into the Museum’s sculpture garden and beyond. Rose’s Inclination makes use of ordinary materials—lamps, paint, Plexiglas, carpet, and garden mulch—to “reach up and out,” altering the physical experience of the Smart Museum’s modernist architecture and landscaped courtyard. The work also repurposes a small section of the previous Threshold commission, a wall painting by Judy Ledgerwood, by agreement of both artists.
Stockholder is Raymond W. and Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor and Chair of the Department of Visual Art, The University of Chicago. Art21 deemed her “a pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations that have become a prominent language in contemporary art.” Rose’s Inclination is her second public installation in Chicago since she arrived in 2011—the first being Color Jam (2012), which took over a busy intersection in the Loop and was one of the largest public art installations in the city’s history.
Smart Museum of Art
University of Chicago
5550 S. Greenwood Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
Jorge Mendez Blake: Nao de China
Nao de China
Jorge Méndez Blake
This book is a close collaboration between artist Jorge Méndez Blake (Guadalajara, 1974) and Rodrigo Ortiz Monasterio (Mexico City, 1985) in our mutual interest on unfinished novels, libraries and the connections that can be made between literature and architecture. Nao de China (China Boat) takes as a departure point Jose Juan Tablada’s (Mexico City, 1871-1945) writings, seeking the missing connections in order to produce a series of encounters and perspectives into Tablada’s literature. By unraveling Tablada’s oeuvre, imagining his lost or unfinished works, this book attempts to give contemporary interpretations of some of the seminar themes in his work: Orientalism, the relation between literature and visual arts, and the creation of national identity through art and architecture.
How to interpret Jose Juan Tablada’s work? Can we analyze Tablada’s work separately? Do we attempt to read through the scope of his multifaceted persona, via his poetry, drawings, incomplete novel(s), as a librarian, art-critic, and amateur biologist…? This publication focuses on Tablada’s two books of haikus; the destroyed manuscript of his novel Nao de China and his only published novel La resurreccion de los ídolos (1924).
http://guayabapress.com/upcoming-book/jorge-mendez-blake/
