SanArt

Until April 3, 2010, Mike Weiss Gallery in New York presents Remote Control, a multimedia installation including sculpture, photography and drawing by artist Sofi Zezmer. It’s the artist’s third solo exhibition at Mike Weiss Gallery. Work her work, she uses fragments of manmade, mostly synthetic materials.

Sofi Zezmer constructs her works by a gradual additive process dependent on intuitive responses to the materials and objects she uses forming color-saturated assemblages. Among the elements she incorporates are objects such as drinking straws, IV drip tubing, construction netting, film, foil, packing materials, bicycle helmets, cable ties and funnels. “In fusing the elements and breaking them down, Zezmer disrupts the common meaning assigned to the items and calls into question our own familiarity with them. Zezmer’s sculptures suggest irrational Duchampian hybrids of mechanical and biological systems. They are embodiments of the complexity of life in the modern age, ruminations on the omnipresence of mass-production, space travel and biotechnology.” (Excerpt from the press release).

Sofi Zezmer lives and works in Germany. Her work has been exhibited in numerous international gallery and museum exhibitions, such as her solo exhibitions at Museum Wiesbaden, at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan and her forty two foot long hanging sculpture, Es Darf Kein Mangel Herrschen, commissioned by the NASPA Bank, Wiesbaden, Germany.

Sofi Zezmer: Remote Control / Mike Weiss Gallery, New York. Opening reception, February 27, 2010.

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For the past couple decades ever more museums have invited artists into their store rooms to curate exhibitions: in an early example, the RISD Museum invited Andy Warhol; MoMA asked Chuck Close and Scott Burden; and Fred Wilson has made a career of the practice.  The results have almost always been interesting.  Artists, of course, have their own questions of and approaches to objects and collections and it’s always enlightening to see familiar things in unexpected ways.

The Penn Museum’s  recent  invitation to Pablo Helguera (as part of Philagrafika ) was well-rewarded.  Helguera spent time in the museum’s archives and discovered that museum director Froelich Rainey had made use of the quite new medium of television to bring the collections to public attention in the1950s. He hosted What in the World? in which a group of scholars and occasional celebrities were shown a museum object which they tried to identify; it was the first ever educational tv program.  Helguera’s response took three forms: a recreation of the tv show’s format for a live event on Feb. 28th (above), a small gallery installation on view through April 11, 2010 and a book of stories about objects in the collection and the people behind them.

The What in the World? re-creation on Feb.  28th was hosted by current director, Richard Hodges with Helguera, artist Mark Dion and PMA curator, Joe Rischel as contestants.  The objects they were given to identify were hardly from the museum’s best-known collections and a number of them were obscure indeed: Ainu prayer sticks, fetishes from Eastern Siberia, an apron from British Guiana.  The participants were good sports and Dion’s habit of talking through his examination process (this is heavy, which means the wood isn’t completely dry so it’s probably 20th century) was particularly edifying for the audience.

Mark Dion, Joe Rischel and Pablo Helguera attempt to identify a Siberian hat

The gallery and book reveal Helguera’s interest in the history of the museum’s artifacts in the course of excavation and once they left their originating culture (or burial site) and came to the museum; some of them passed through the market first.  While hardly a typical approach of archaeology and anthropology museums the Penn Museum looks at similar issues in its current exhibition about the excavations it sponsored at Ur (which I wrote about here).

The book, What in the World; A Museum’s Subjective Biography (which is available for purchase at the museum, ISBN -10:1-934978-28-0) is filled with stories about some of the obsessives, eccentrics and rogues responsible for five areas of the collection, and the gallery covers the same material with five objects on display, each with an associated video. The installation suffered somewhat from the fact that watching an 8-11 minute video projected on the wall above the objects case is awkward (all are available on Youtube, as are clips from the original television program ), but the videos themselves are great fun.  Helguera has faithfully re-created the style of the original What in the World? complete with dry ice mist and haunting background music; and he has unearthed wonderful stories that include deception, theft, fakes and madness, which make for entertaining viewing and reading. Richard Hodges said he checked with Penn’s lawyer before allowing Helguera to publish the material, and I’m not certain whether he was joking.

There’s been a proliferation of recent interest in the role of the curator, accompanied by criticism that Harald Szeemann set a harmful example in the late 1960s by using the curatorial function as an art form itself.  In that light it’s ironic that Helguera, working as an artist, took no more liberty with standard curatorial approaches than Fro Rainey had done sixty years earlier.

First Annual Print Invitational at Little Berlin

Stella Ebner, Car Lot on HWY 101, Screenprint

This first print invitational was organized by Tim Pannell, the only printmaker in the artists’ collective, Little Berlin,  and I had a chance to talk with him at the opening.  If many of the invited artists’ bios included R.I.S.D. it’s not a coincidence; that’s where Pannell studied. The twelve artists from across the country covered a broad range of what print-makers are doing these days from traditional uses of sreen printing and intaglio processes to mixed media and photographically-generated work.  Both the work and the event were somewhat more sedate than the always lively, sometimes noisy openings at the gallery.  I don’t mean anything negative by sedate; it’s just that most of the work was framed and sat quietly on the walls and none of it was edible.

I like prints, but I’m always asking why an artist did a work in multiples. Is the subject something that many people will want? Is there an audience that can’t afford the artist’s paintings (Durer sold engravings of commonly desirable subjects, such as madonnas, to finance his travels)?  Is the image an effect that can only be done in drypoint, silkscreen, or whatever; or is the subject somehow connected with the medium and/or the multiplicity (one might say that Warhol’s off-register silkscreen was integral both to the visual effect and the subject)?

Vicky Chen’s series on the Port of Oakland employed the unusual technique of silkscreen on translucent gampi paper glued to wood, so the underlying wood grain becomes part of the image. Ports these days are filled with standardized shipping containers, and printmaking seemed an apt way to depict their global uniformity. Chen’s means were not easy to understand at first glance, but the results are subtle and something about her delicacy of line and use of space reminds me of Ben Shahn’s work.

Stella Ebner filled an entire wall with a grid of screen prints of a car lot along a highway strip.  The only variation was the writing on the signage, an apt commentary on our culture of endless, interchangeable commercial appeals.  Amelia Hankin used woodcut to create multi-color prints (variations of grey) of extreme subtlety.  They gave the impression of landscapes, despite the fact that none of the forms was identifiable.  She studied in Japan, and the sensibility comes through.

Serena Perrone exhibited a large, two-sheet mixed-media work that contrasted the boldness of a woodcut ship at sea with the delicacy of gold ink she used to draw in two female figures. Pannell’s own work was an homage to nineteenth-century wood engraving (cut on the end-grain of very hard wood, which enabled very fine lines).  He gives historic tours of Philadelphia and, inspired by some of the mis-information he hears, produced the first in a planned series of fallacious histories: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln seated together, with the Statue of Liberty just visible through the window.

The print invitational, on view through March 27, also includes work by Kabuya P. Bowens, Kate Copeland, Juan Garcia, Morgan Hill, Fleming Jeffries, Alice Thompson and Tanya Ziniewic; it is also associated with Philagrafika.

Dead Flowers at Vox Populi

Work by Marti Domination

Dead Flowers, on view at Vox Populi through May 2 was curated by Lia Gangitano of PARTICIPANT INC, New York, where it will be exhibited May 9 – June 20, 2010.  Inspired by the work of actor/director Timothy Carey, Gangitano assembled a variety of work by contemporary artists and those of the 60s-70s to explore the idea of the artistic underground and the shifting boundaries between underground and mass culture.  The exhibition includes a recent documentary interview with Carey’s brother recounting how the actor made trouble for the nuns at grade school, among other stories.

Genesis Bryer P-Orridge ‘Red Chair Posed’ 2008 C-print

Gangitano’s underground is largely associated with the more flamboyant aspects of gay culture, so the exhibition is filled with false eye-lashes, heavy eye-liner and very high heels.  While all of this was certainly underground in the 60s, who could have anticipated a broadcast television program called Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, much less same-sex marriage?  Alvin Baltrop’s black and white Pier Photographs (1975-86) portray an insider’s view of  gay coupling conducted out-of-doors in a then unfrequented area of New York.  It’s hard to know what Baltrop’s intentions were, but the series records changing real estate as well as sexual values, as the far West Side has entirely succumbed to gentrification.

Charles Atlas, still from video

I’m not sure how Cynthia ‘Plaster Caster’s work fits in either with art or with the underground.  Word circulated in the late 60s that a couple of rock groupies managed to get into the (mainstream) stars’ dressing-rooms with the intent of making plaster casts of their erect penises (and providing the necessary stimulation).  The story was too outlandish to be made up, and now at Vox you can see the results yourself; although who but Cynthia can vouchsafe whether that is, indeed, a cast of Jimi Hendrix?  As I told Andrew Suggs at the opening, penises without men attached hold little interest for me, but chacun à son goût.  As to changing bounderies of the underground, not so long ago I saw photos of a middle-aged Cynthia in her kitchen (with casts) in the pages of some forgettable mainstream magazine.

Pat O’Neill at Screening

Pat O’Neill’s Horizontal Boundaries (2008, film transferred to video) is showing through May 2 at Screening, in Vox’s Space, and I found all 23 minutes mezmerizing.  His collaged images move in changing rhythms that at times resemble a heartbeat, at others a racing train, with elleptical snippets of dialog that echo Beckett. O’neill has worked with the most mainstream of Hollywood filmmakers, but this is rigorous, exciting experimental film by a seventy-year-old who can still out-run his juniors.

Joshua Liner Gallery
548 West 28th Street, 3rd Floor, 212-244-7415

Chelsea

March 18 – April 17, 2010
Opening: Thursday, March 18, 6 – 9 PM
Web Site

Joshua Liner Gallery is very pleased to present the New York/Tokyo-based collective the Barnstormers in their first group exhibition at the gallery. With thirty-five artists featured, this is the largest exhibition to date at Joshua Liner, which will double its gallery space temporarily to accommodate the special event. Expanding to host the collective’s full spectrum of art practices, the gallery will show individual works in painting, printmaking, photography, video, installation, and other mediums by the following Barnstormer artists:

Alex Lebedev, Alice Mazorra, Bluster One, Che Jen, Chris Mendoza, Chuck Webster, Cycle, Daikon, David Ellis, Dennis McNett, Doze Green, Ge-ology, Gion, Guillermo Carrion, Joey Garfield, JPL (UFO), Kami, Kenji Hirata, Kiku Yamaguchi, KR , Madsaki, Manny Pangilinan (Wello), Marlene Marino, Martin Mazorra, Maya Hayuk, Mikal Hameed, Mike Houston, Mike Ming, Miyuki (Pai) Hirai, Naomi Kazama, Pablo Power, Paul Coors, Pema Rinzin, Rostarr, Ryan McGinness, Sasu, Shie Moreno, Swoon, West One, Yuri Shibuya, and Yuri Shimojo.

Over the past decade, the Barnstormers have created large-scale collaborative paintings, films, and performances. The group formed in 1999 after a pilgrimage of twenty-five artists to the rural town of Cameron, North Carolina, where they painted barns, tractor-trailers, shacks, and farm equipment, and continue to return to paint new murals. The Barnstormers’ “motion paintings” best demonstrate the range and flexibility of their collaboration: each timelapse video depicts a mural in the making as members dart about, adding and effacing marks, evolving the image with each passing second. A 2005 project included the disassembly/relocation/reassembly of a barn captured on video in a time-lapse flurry of activity. Improvisation, in spirit and practice, is the Barnstormer ethos.

In this exhibition, the Barnstormers will present works by the group’s individual artists, all of whom have drawn acclaim in their own right and individual careers. As the unofficial founder of the Barnstormers (which rejects any form of organizational hierarchy), North Carolina native David Ellis is nonetheless the driving force who first drew this intrepid band of artists South. In his own practice, Ellis has received acclaim for freestylin’ installations inspired by popular music and DJ-ing, specifically the ways that image, sound, materials, and technology interconnect in
contemporary culture. His installations have been featured at the Huntington Museum of Art, WV; Rice University Gallery, Houston, TX; Tidal, Osaka, Japan; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA; and Deitch Projects, New York. Other Southeasterners in the collective include Virginian Dennis McNett, West Virginian Martin Mazorra, and North Carolinian Mike Houston, all master printers (in a cracked, R.Crumb vein) working with Cannonball Press.

Swoon is a Brooklyn-based street artist who gained immediate international attention in the mid-’00s for her woodcut-print-on-paper portraits—lovely, intricate, and life-size, these casual views of neighborhood denizens were wheatpasted by the artist on walls and other surfaces of the urban environment in close proximity to the lives depicted. More recently, Swoon has led teams of artists in the construction of “Swimming Cities,” handmade rafts of art navigated to various ports of call on the Mississippi River, Hudson River, and Adriatic Sea where the group has
performed songs and skits for local audiences.

Among the Barnstormers’ Eastern cohort are Hitotzuki, the collaborative duo of Kami and Sasu. The husband and wife team are Tokyo-based muralists who work in a distinctive style of wavy lines and geometric patterns. Born in Osaka, the artist Madsaki spent 25 years in the United States, three as a bicycle messenger in New York—now based in Tokyo, his art incorporates painting, contemporary graphic design, masks, heraldry insignia, and tag-style text, among other sources and media. Also originally from Tokyo, Yuri Shimojo brings a very different contribution
to the collective: supremely delicate works in watercolor on paper. Blending imagery from nature and eastern mythology, her practice also includes journaling, dance, and the traditional arts of the Samurai from whom she is descended.

The Nagasaki-born Kenji Hirata is inspired by billboards, Southeast Asian signage, and the pop-cultural legacies of Futurism and Superflat. His unique approach to hard-edged abstraction celebrates the dynamic interplay of color and form. The photographic arts are represented by the Okayama-born Gion, who has often served as documentary photographer for the Barnstormers’ international projects. Additionally, several of the collective’s artists hail from South Korea. The Seoul-born Che Jen works in sumi ink and acrylic on vellum and paper, building up gorgeous
abstractions from ornate filigree and calligraphy-style marks (she has also collaborated with Madsaki on installation works). And from Daegu, the artist known as Rostarr is the South Korean “Frank Stella,” creating dynamic abstract paintings and murals of banded colors, wavy lines, and camouflage-like patterns in acrylic and aerosol.

The Queens, NY-born graffiti writer KR became so successful that he now markets his own specially designed line of paint and markers called Krink—he built his fine art reputation in the active street/gallery crossover scene of San Francisco before coming back to New York. Doze Green, another New York-born graffiti artist in the collective, pioneered the use of ongoing-characters in street work, as well as participated in the burgeoning breakdancing and B-Boying dance styles with the Rock Steady Crew.

Maya Hayuk, who also got her footing in San Francisco, is now based in Brooklyn. She draws pure pleasure (or “bliss,” as several titles suggest) from the interplay of Day-Glo color and pure geometric forms, creating wall works of prismatic facets, spectral rays, and explosive starbursts. Similarly abstract and colorful but incorporating more organic, even vaguely representational forms, the New York-born Chuck Webster works both large and small in oil on panel. Rounding out the New York-based Barnstormers cohort is the Nicaraguan-born, Bronx-raised Chris Mendoza. His fantastical ink-on-paper drawings display a love of architectural draftsmanship and call to mind the abstract works of Miro, Kandinsky, and the Chilean modernist Matta.

To highlight the Barnstormers’ no-holds-barred sense of improvisation and internationalism, the exhibition will include Confessional Booth, a live, transatlantic project by Greater New York alum Ryan McGinness. While currently in Madrid executing his solo show Studio Franchise at La Casa Encendida, McGinness will host one-to-one conversations via Skype videoconferencing throughout the run of the Barnstormers show. Open to all visitors, the “confessionals” will be conducted during set hours from inside a draped cubicle, complementing the artist’s collaborative studio-cum-showroom project occurring simultaneously in the Spanish exhibition.

In their myriad combinations and collaborations, the Barnstormers have conducted public art projects and participated in exhibitions at venues worldwide, including Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; Museo del Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, HI; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC; Society for Arts and Technology, Montreal, Canada; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; and CWC Gallery, Tokyo, Japan.

PS122 Gallery
150 First Avenue, 212 288 4249

East Village / Lower East Side

March 20 – March 20, 2010
Opening: Saturday, March 20, 6 – 9 PM
Web Site

Using home movies, found footage and handmade film techniques, these four short films by filmmaker Sara Strahan explore the complex relationship between media, storytelling and the construction of memory. Sound by Melissa Grey.

About Sara Strahan:

A Chicago native who spent years in Japan, Sara Strahan is an artist, producer & video-maker now residing in the East Village. She is a graduate of the Masters in Media Studies program at the New School and a member of the Paper Tiger Television Collective. An avid supporter of community and youth media—an a 20 year veteran of the field—Sara is devoted to making critical, non-commercial media in fun, thoughtful way.

Project and screening made possible by a generous grant made by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Manhattan Community Arts Fund.

PS122 Gallery
150 First Avenue, 212 288 4249

East Village / Lower East Side

March 20 – March 20, 2010
Opening: Saturday, March 20, 6 – 9 PM
Web Site

Using home movies, found footage and handmade film techniques, these four short films by filmmaker Sara Strahan explore the complex relationship between media, storytelling and the construction of memory. Sound by Melissa Grey.

About Sara Strahan:

A Chicago native who spent years in Japan, Sara Strahan is an artist, producer & video-maker now residing in the East Village. She is a graduate of the Masters in Media Studies program at the New School and a member of the Paper Tiger Television Collective. An avid supporter of community and youth media—an a 20 year veteran of the field—Sara is devoted to making critical, non-commercial media in fun, thoughtful way.

Project and screening made possible by a generous grant made by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Manhattan Community Arts Fund.

the Distillery Gallery & Artspace
7 Hutton Street

Jersey City

March 20 – May 1, 2010
Opening: Saturday, March 20, 5 – 9 PM
Web Site

Splice, curated by Irene Borngraeber, features installation, sculpture, performance, and two- dimensional works by Leslie Alfin, Stephen Chopek, Hiroshi Kumagai, Pat Lay, and Deborah Pohl. Through the appropriation of classical and mythological iconography each artist melds, splices, and blends religion with technology—creating hybridized icons ranging from the uneasy to the exuberant.

For most people, technology is indispensible. We rely on it to plan our days, to communicate, to work and to relax—most of us would probably rather be physically incapacitated than face a normal day without it. When we wake up and reach first thing for a Blackberry or iPhone, when we run to check for new email or Facebook messages, we have merged our flesh lives with our digital ones. For some generations the “high-tech” has virtually become a holy grail, a source of inspiration, and a divine mystery. Splice examines how certain technologies have become far more than just tools that make our lives easier, but modern icons worshipped to the point of deification.

This is the first exhibition at the Distillery, a new contemporary gallery and community artspace dedicated to producing curated shows, arts programming, and innovative installations by artists of all stripes.

the Distillery Gallery & Artspace
7 Hutton Street

Jersey City

March 20 – May 1, 2010
Opening: Saturday, March 20, 5 – 9 PM
Web Site

Splice, curated by Irene Borngraeber, features installation, sculpture, performance, and two- dimensional works by Leslie Alfin, Stephen Chopek, Hiroshi Kumagai, Pat Lay, and Deborah Pohl. Through the appropriation of classical and mythological iconography each artist melds, splices, and blends religion with technology—creating hybridized icons ranging from the uneasy to the exuberant.

For most people, technology is indispensible. We rely on it to plan our days, to communicate, to work and to relax—most of us would probably rather be physically incapacitated than face a normal day without it. When we wake up and reach first thing for a Blackberry or iPhone, when we run to check for new email or Facebook messages, we have merged our flesh lives with our digital ones. For some generations the “high-tech” has virtually become a holy grail, a source of inspiration, and a divine mystery. Splice examines how certain technologies have become far more than just tools that make our lives easier, but modern icons worshipped to the point of deification.

This is the first exhibition at the Distillery, a new contemporary gallery and community artspace dedicated to producing curated shows, arts programming, and innovative installations by artists of all stripes.

Scaramouche
53 Stanton Street, 212-228-2229

East Village / Lower East Side

March 12 – May 2, 2010
Opening: Friday, March 12, 6 – 8 PM
Web Site

As the final exhibition at the former Fruit & Flower Deli space, Scaramouche is pleased to present an exhibition by Italian artist Cristiana Palandri. Beginning in May, the gallery will move to its new premises at 52 Orchard Street, NYC.

For her first solo-show in New York, Palandri presents a selection of recent drawings and sculptures, as well as an installation specifically conceived for the gallery space. Building on her previous investigation with organic materials, this new body of work continues to explore the sculptural possibilities of human hair, animal bones and bees wax, which simultaneously act as both fragile, ephemeral elements, as well as objects that transcend life.

As if it were a Wunderkammer, the gallery is taken over by Palandri’s personal microcosm of destabilized and reinvented structures, deformed pieces of furniture, and test tubes filled with exotic materials in dilution. Borrowing its title from her recent work “Noiseless”, the show articulates around the imperceptible processes of decomposition and transformation that the artist’s works undergo.

Cristiana Palandri (b. 1977, lives and works in Florence) is a graduate in Fine Arts from the University of Bologna. Her work has been exhibited in various public spaces and museums including BACC – Bangkok Art and Culture Centre; Quarter Centro d’Arte Contemporanea, Florence; MLAC, Rome and Galleria Civica di Monza, Milan. Recently she is the recipient of the 52nd Premio Termoli Award 2009, and the A.T. Kearney Prize Milan, 2008.

Emmanuel Fremin Gallery
546 Broadway, PH 5B, 646-245-3240

Soho

March 19 – March 31, 2010
Opening: Friday, March 19, 6 – 8 PM
Web Site

Emmanuel Fremin Gallery is pleased to announce our opening reception for Israeli born photographer, Drew Tal.

Drew Tal lives and works in New York City. His work combines photography with digital media to render highly stylized and realistic
symbolic imagery. Tal grew up in Israel where he was exposed to many different religions, struggles, ethnicities, and cultures. Tal often finds his inspiration through the experiences of his past. He focuses
on faces and dramatic close-up portraits. His work is powerful and often highlights the complexities of faith, spirituality and the dialectics between man and gods.

Sideshow Gallery
319 Bedford Avenue, 718-486-8180

Williamsburg / Greenpoint / Bushwick

March 6 – March 28, 2010
Opening: Saturday, March 6, 6 – 9 PM
Web Site

Sideshow Gallery presents a two-person exhibition titled Topos with work by Sara Klar and Noah Landfield.