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.
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.
Canyon School, 2016, ink on paper, 10 x 14 inches
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.
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Superflex's 2014-15 exhibition "Hospital Equipment," at the Den Frie Center for Contemporary Art. Photo: Anders Sune Berg, courtesy Superflex.
Artnet: Superflex's Readymade Medical Equipment is Now in Use in a Gaza Hospital
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
Click here for full text and images.
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Installation view, 2016.
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
Fiona Banner, "Mistah Kurtz - He Not Dead," 2015
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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Ann Veronica Janssens’s ‘Blue, Red and Yellow’ (2001). PHOTO: KEVIN TODORA/NASHER SCULPTURE CENTER
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.
Read Moreart Magazin: Ana Prvacki
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
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.”
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
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.
Read MoreIndependent: 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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Pictured: an interpretation of Louise Bourgeois' Maman
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 recognized 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
Stealing Shadows, Duchamp. Courtesy of the Ana Prvacki and 1301PE
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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Jack Goldstein, Burning Window, 1977/2015, wood, Plexiglas, acrylic paint, lights, dimensions variable.
Artforum: James Nisbet on Jack Goldstein
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"
http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/art-talk/art-of-war-and-peace
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.
http://www.praz-delavallade.com/exhibitions/upcoming/192/pressrelease/1.html
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."
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