Monday 23 March 2009

Dryden Goodwin

These larger scale photographs are the first in an on-going series sharing the method of tracing the face and head with a compass with the smaller scale Capture (2001) series. The Cradle series presents these individuals in life-size proportions.
The scale of the photographs offers the viewer the opportunity to examine at close quarters the intricacies of the scratched line. In each of these works the figures are caught at a moment of seeming introspection and focused thought; the poignancy of these moments counterbalances the mundane nature of the urban context they are in. The gesture of mapping their faces with further lines could be construed as an act of violence yet has a paradoxical tenderness and intimacy as the web of lines forms a cradle to hold their particular features and expressions. These markings are an attempt to elevate the individuals above the street in which they have been spied.

Emily Richardson

Nocturne (2002) 16mm Film

Ori Gersht - Pomegranate

Thursday 19 March 2009

Lisa Oppenheim | Killed Negatives, After Walker Evans' (2007)

Killed Negatives: After Walker Evans (Cow and Bucket), 2007
Two Hand printed black and white, and color photographs
9 6/8 x 12 1/2 inches each


Lisa Oppenheim’s work constitutes an archaeology of visual culture. She brings the hidden, under-appreciated and repressed into view, and in the process reveals an ordering of things that goes beyond our commonplace responses. Her work ranges from damaged negatives from early 20th century news stories, personal photographs posted on ‘Flicker’ by soldiers serving in Iraq through to the constellation of the day and location of famous historical media stories.

Her show at STORE, titled ‘The Making of Americans’, nods towards Gertrude Stein’s novel of the same name. In the opening paragraph, Stein writes: ‘Sometime there will be an ordered history of everyone.’ This notion, although somewhat conspiracy laden, points towards Lisa’s interest in pulling apart and reconstructing visual languages to understand how aspects of visual cultures and histories are produced.

With this in mind, the exhibition is divided into three parts, each providing a visual representation of something distinctly American. In ‘Killed Negatives, After Walker Evans’ (2007), Oppenheim uses Walker Evans’ unpublished photographs from 1938 found in the National Library of Congress. Evans was commissioned by the Farm Security Administration to document depression era rural America. These negatives are ‘killed’ because they had holes punched through them to prevent publication. Oppenheim printed them and conceptualises the holes as a space of potential contemporary interpretation.

In a second series of works, ‘Multicultural Crayon Displacements’ (2007-8), Oppenheim visually deconstructs a set of colours produced by Crayola termed ‘Crayola Multicultural Crayons’. Crayola’s ‘Flesh’ colour was re-named ‘Peach’ in 1963 in response to the Civil Rights Movement, and similarly ‘Indian Red’ was changed to ‘Chestnut’ in 1999. This photographic series playfully underlines the way the notion of ‘colour’ is culturally constructed – both through the physical process of early colour photography and through the almost invisible social shifts that shape the consumer’s view of the world.

The final work is a 16mm film of what looks like the moon disintegrating into abstraction. Oppenheim repeatedly photocopied an image of the moon taken from the earth at the time of the first Apollo landing. With each photocopy the image becomes ever more degraded. She then filmed each image in series and we see the eventual dissolution of an image that always signifies both more and less than on first sight, a move that is essential to Oppenheim’s working strategy. As the artist herself notes. ‘My interests lie in the tell tale expressions of contemporary life which are often overlooked...not from the moment itself, but rather the gestures and remainders of the forgotten.’
Store Gallery Press Release

Sunday 15 March 2009

Thursday 12 March 2009

Christo & Jeanne-Claude - Revelation Through Concealment

Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Wrapped Trees, Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park,
Riehen, Switzerland 1997-98

Photo: Wolfgang Volz, ©Christo 1998


Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Wrapped Trees, Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park, Riehen, Switzerland 1997-98
Photo: Wolfgang Volz, ©Christo 1998


Statement:
The temporality of a work of art creates a feeling of fragility, vulnerability and an urgency to be seen, as well as a presence of the missing, because we know it will be gone tomorrow.

The quality of love and tenderness that human beings have towards what will not last - for instance the love and tenderness we have for childhood and our lives - is a quality we want to give to our work as an additional aesthetic quality.

Georges Rousse | Space & Time





In Georges Rousse, we see an actor in search for another mode of spatial experience, based on his critical analysis of space. A sensibility of deconstruction emerges in these settings, in the tension between inside and outside, between floors and ceilings, between direct and reflected sights, in this aesthetic of chaos, confusion and imbalance.
Isabelle Alzieu in "Georges Rousse : Plasticité des espaces déconstruits" in Espaces transfigurés - À partir de l'oeuvre de Georges Rousse, PUP 2007

Grey Area | Danny Treacy





2002, 150 x 200 cm, Archival Photograph. Edition of Five.

A Grey Area is not a restricted Area. It may be entered freely, the only condition being that one now is free to do so. There is of course a line which must be crossed, but one that is not thin, like a tape or ribbon. Its breadth, or distance is more an agreement, a complicity, more unspeakable than unspoken. It is not a physical line, one that may be walked across, or through, or stepped over. It is sensed rather than seen, primary sensation which evidences the line - and which keeps most out - being fear. At best it is climbed through or crawled under on all fours. It is often accompanied by a bad smell. It is a psychological line which has become a distance, but one that is still somehow flattened to a plane of sorts, a field (force field) which repels at a distance beyond the visible.
These are all sites of prior or potential brutality, real or imagined. Anything that can be imagined may quite likely have occurred and continue to occur as these spaces continue to exist. Treacy renders these spaces visible in two ways; he paints them grey and then he photographs them. The grey looks cool, intelligent, almost chic, but I would argue that this appearance is part of the subversive nature of the project. The opposite of clinical becomes critical in grey, as though become a politicised form of a medical condition, a fucking with forensics. Treacy is driven to these places by the urge for the project. (It is the experience of any photographer to increasingly find himself able to overcome all kinds of trepidation for the photograph). He reveals these sites by painting over them, leaving in his wake, in the world, a secretive, yet ultimately absurd (theatrically, philosophically), series of grey painted areas. If one were to draw back from the frame of the image, one imagines an edge which is as roughly painted as the edge of the image is tight. They are lost, unfit places, abandoned even by Treacy himself, having been sought out, served their purpose, once again discarded. One might seek out these actual locations but success would be unlikely for most who might read this text. You'll know it when you get there though: it smells bad and is painted a shade of milked grey, already peeling away at the edges.

Monday 9 March 2009

Alex Calder

Kiki de Montparnasse (II), 1930
Wire
12" x 10 7/16" x 13 9/16"
Untitled, 1938
Wood, wire, sheet metal, string, and paint
81" x 96"

Red Frame, 1932
Sheet metal, wood, wire, and paint
35" x 30 1/4" x 26 1/2"

Umbrella Light, 1928

The Art of Nothing at the Pompidou

Roman Ondak's 'installation' More Silent Than Ever is on show at the decidedly uncluttered Paris gallery this week

Peter Coffin at the Barbican



The latest installation in The Curve is by New York- based artist Peter Coffin. In this, the ninth new commission, Coffin explores various models of perspective and challenges the way in which we perceive space. In his sculptures, installations, photographs and videos, Peter Coffin examines our knowledge and interpretation of the world with curiosity and wit, borrowing from numerous disciplines, such as art history, science and New Age beliefs to test his ideas about the way things work and exist.

Friday 6 March 2009

Photodimensional at MOCA

Laurent Millet, Les Vacances, Dusseldorf, 2006, Courtesy of Robert Mann Gallery, New York

Florian Slotawa, Hotel Europa, Prag, Zimmer 402, Nacht zum 8. Juni 1998, Gelatin silver print, Courtesy Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf

Pello Irazu, La Fábrica (Belgrado) VI, 2007, Courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York


Work by: John Coplans,Katalin Deér,Leslie Hewitt, Bettina Hoffmann, Pello Irazu, David Ireland, Melinda McDaniel, Heather Mekkelson, Laurent Millet, Vik Muniz, Susana Reisman, Lorna Simpson, Florian Slotowa
The experience of sharing a space with an object (and being able to move around it), and the experience of seeing that object represented and embedded in another object—a flat photographic print—are very different. But do we always experience the photographic image as absolutely flat? Isn’t it the tension between the flatness and the illusion of space in photography—its fidelity to the real—the very thing that makes it compelling, possibly troubling? Photography clearly allows us to imagine space. So is there a strict distinction between phenomenological space and imagined space, and how unambiguous, or understandable for that matter, is the difference between the two experiences?

To Illustrate and Multiply: An Open Book | MOCA




To Illustrate and Multiply: An Open Book examines how sequencing, a characteristic of time-based media, manifests itself in various ways within artists' books.

To Illustrate and Multiply: An Open Book examines how sequencing manifests itself within artists’ books, highlighting a diverse range of conceptual strategies and formal processes. The exhibition constitutes the first large-scale museum survey of artists’ books in Los Angeles since 1978, presenting work by a range of artists, from emerging artists who have begun to experiment with this genre to established artists who view bookmaking as an integral part of their practice. Borrowing its title from a limited-edition ’zine by Raymond Pettibon, To Illustrate and Multiply: An Open Book presents many different book forms, some with corresponding wall-mounted works that suggest the relationship of books to other aspects of an artist’s practice.

The Space In Between : Making a Book

Laurent Millet

Les Zozios, Petits Rouges, 2004

Les Zozios, Bulle Dure, 2003

Les Zozios, Maman, 2004

Les Zozios, Rotheneuf, 2004

Les Zozios, Plo, 2004
20 x 24 inches / edition of 20
chromogenic dye coupler print

Les Zozios is a series of photographs of sculptures which Millet quickly assembles from objects found in his home. He approaches the work with spontaneity, taking no more than ten minutes to complete and photograph each piece. His delight in shape and color brings to mind the works of Joan Miró and Cy Twombly. Millet compares the lines of his sculptural creations to a skeleton, and suggests that the act of photographing grants it life.

The lightness of Les Zozios is a departure from Millet's earlier work, whereas Monolithe continues his exploration of complex sculptural installations built and photographed against an abstract shoreline. As the title indicates, the subjects are massive black structures which are at once impenetrably solid and yet oddly transparent, like doorways through which the viewer might step.

When Laurent Millet's first solo exhibition opened at Robert Mann Gallery in 1999, Margarett Loke of The New York Times praised his "unabashed, almost innocent delight in the low-tech, magical interactions between man and nature." Millet's work is included in public collections at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris. In 2002, he was among the artists profiled in Lyle Rexor's book Photography's Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave In Old Processes.

Wednesday 4 March 2009

Sarah McKenzie | Building Code

Interior 2, 2009, oil and acrylic

Interior 3, 2009, oil and acrylic

McKenzie paints buildings in various states of construction, playfully referencing geometric abstraction and twentieth century Modernism. She applies paint to the canvas in ways that often break the unity of the image. The effect is perplexing but informative; her process parallels construction and her surfaces encourage the viewer to compare the structure of the paintings with the frames of the buildings she is painting. The gallery's founder, Jen Bekman, first viewed McKenzie's work at the Walker Museum's opening reception for its traveling exhibition, World's Away: New Suburban Landscapes. About first seeing the work, Ms. Bekman noted:
At first glance it seemed photorealistic, in part because it reminds me of the ground well trod by many of my favorite fine art photographers. But look closely and it's clearly not quite real -there is a flatness in both her paint and perspective that has the primitive feeling of folk art. Take that flatness in and allow yourself to focus on the lines, angles and grids of her work; suddenly you're fully immersed in geometric abstraction, a la the twentieth century Modernists. The familiarity of the subject matter allows me to travel through these genres with ease.
Worlds Away, a traveling exhibition, will open at the Yale School of Architecture in March 2009. Her work has been exhibited at institutions throughout the country, including the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, the Bemis Center, the University of Akron, and the Katonah Museum of Art. McKenzie’s paintings have been featured in New York Times articles by Grace Glueck and Allison Arieff, as well as in Art in America, Dwell, The Miami Herald, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and The Denver Post.
 
Building Code is at Jen Bekman Gallery, 6 Spring Street, NY, New York

John Divola : the Abstract and the Specific

Zuma Series (folder one) / b Zuma F
John Divola
1977

Vandalism Portfolio / DSCN0550
John Divola
1974 / 93

Diptychs / Untitled, 83DPT01
John Divola
1983

Silhouttes / C
John Divola
1983-85

Five Prints Portfolio / B - House
John Divola
1987

John Divola works primarily with photography and digital imaging. While he has approached a broad range of subjects he is currently moving through the landscape looking for the oscillating edge between the abstract and the specific.