Amikam Toren | Review: “Of the Times and Other Historic Works” | San Francisco Chronicle

“Amikam Toren Finally Able to Live By His Art”
San Francisco Chronicle
Written by Kenneth Baker
December 11, 2013
Full review here

Sitting in his small, bleak, unheated studio in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets, Amikam Toren explained the personal background to his paintings and cardboard box constructions in ” ‘Of the Times’ and Other Historic Works” – his first show in America – which opened recently at the Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco….

Having made a modest name for himself in stage design before his move to London from his native Israel in 1968, Toren received a grant to study stage design with John Barry of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

“He took me around his empire,” Toren said, “and I realized you have a department of buttons and a department of shoelaces, and it seemed to me ridiculous and sort of soulless and academic. I decided to take my chances as an artist, which is what I wanted to do anyway.”

In his early London years, “I was doing my best to become a conceptual artist,” Toren said, “but in my nature, I’m a very sensuous person. Conceptual art was fascinating to me, but I had to incorporate it into something I could touch.”

Only in the past three years has Toren, 68, been able to live by his art. Remarkably, considering Toren’s lack of exhibition history in our hemisphere, Silverman quickly sold several large paintings from Toren’s series from the 1980s and ’90s, “Of the Times.”

Fragment fascination

Each unprimed canvas holds the magnified abstraction of a letter of the alphabet, painted in a grayish medium made by mixing clear acrylic with a single day’s pulped issue of theLondon Times.
Adjacent to each work on the wall, where a label might customarily appear, hangs a cutting from the pulped newspaper, displaying the banner and date and perhaps a tantalizing fragment of headline, irrelevant, Toren says to his choice of a letter to paint.

The Silverman show also includes a “Pidgin” painting – a stretched canvas with corners cut away and pulped to serve as material with which the remaining surface is painted.
And exactly how does one pulp canvas?

“The coffee grinder is a powerful instrument,” Toren said. He has used one to make a hash of materials ranging from newspaper to glove leather.

Of supporting himself during his many years in London, Toren said: “Sales would come occasionally, fellowships would come occasionally, but I taught at the University of Reading in the fine arts department, which was again a kind of gradual thing. I did it for about 15 years or so.

“The way I got into teaching was through exhibitions. They were seen by a lot of students who sort of demanded my presence for tutorials and such, then part time here and part time there.”
In the early 1970s, “I became fascinated by fragments,” Toren said, an interest “that continues and constitutes the bedrock of my work from then on.”

Paradoxes of Imagery 

In 1979, he made a key work (not in the Silverman show) that he titled “Neither a Teapot Nor a Painting,” with a deliberate echo of René Magritte’s famous play on the paradoxes of imagery, “This Is Not a Pipe” (1929).

Toren took an ordinary teapot, smashed it and ground some of the fragments to make pigment that he then used to make a small painting of it on canvas. He displays the painting on a small shelf, alongside the unused teapot fragment, stuffed into the sort of jar he would use to hold conventional raw pigment.

“The drive,” Toren said, “was simply to reverse the notion that in representation, the subject is excluded from its representation.”

Regarding his education in art, Toren said: “The most important thing is that I don’t have any art college background at all. I did a couple of years as an assistant to an artist in Tel Aviv. We became very good friends – lifelong, as it turned out. His name was Peter Hesse. He died about five years ago in Paris.

“That, in effect, was my art education, other than what I picked up among colleagues, and by traveling around and looking at things.”

Not an Entertainer

Hesse, who made abstract paintings in a European vein, “had strong reservations about the art market and would never exhibit unless his wife put her foot down,” Toren said.
“He was against the commercial aspect of art, trading in art, all of that was an abomination to him, and I guess some of that sort of stuck with me.”
Toren does not deny the humor that people understandably see in his art. “I don’t seek it, because I don’t want to be a kind of entertainer,” he said. “But it matters to me to the extent it would have mattered to somebody like Chekhov, who wasn’t a comedian, but there is a lot of humor in his plays because they deal with the human condition.”

“Of the Times” and Other Historic Works by Amikam Toren: Paintings and cardboard box constructions. Through Jan. 19. Jessica Silverman Gallery, 488 Ellis St., S.F. (415) 255-9508, www.jessicasilvermangallery.com.

Kenneth Baker is The San Francisco Chronicle’s art critic. E-mail:kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kennethbakersf


Jessica Silverman Gallery | Why Jessica Silverman’s Booth Was the Talk of NADA | Artsy Editorial

“Why Jessica Silverman’s Booth Was the Talk of NADA”
Artsy
Featured by NADA Miami Beach
December 8, 2013
Full excerpt here

Transcending the curse of overhype, Jessica Silverman’s much-talked-about booth at NADA Miami proves there’s a reason her own white cube became a hotspot of the Deauville Beach Resort. Among a selection of work that deals with the practice of image making—looking closely at color, pattern, texture, and materials—photographer Matt Lipps combines personal history with the history of photography in his collaged “Library of Photography” series; Sean Raspet fuses the optical with the tactile in wall-mounted lenticular lenses; and cyanotypes by Barbara Kasten, produced in 1974, offer some of the contemporary photographer’s earliest works.

Jessica Silverman | The Most Interesting Gallerist in Town | San Francisco Magazine

“The Looker – The Most Interesting Gallerist in Town”
San Francisco Magazine
Written by Lauren Murrow
December 2013
Full excerpt here

Jessica Silverman has a knack for spinning obscurity into greatness. Over the past five years, the 30-year-old Detroit native has made a name for her eponymous gallery on the international art scene by unearthing underappreciated talent and developing a collector base from the ground up. “I like being there first,” she says. “We’re bringing in artists who have no link to San Francisco and don’t already have a support system built for them.” Thhough her gallery’s 15 artists are commonly described as emerging, she’s vocally anti-ageist. Her youngest artist is 25-year-old Brooklynite Hugh Scott-Douglas, whose work Silverman showed at Art Basel last June; the oldest is septuagenarian Barbara Kasten, a photographer who will have a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia next year….

This month, Silverman’s unorthodox approach is again apparent with the next phase of the Jessica Silverman GAllery. While a handful of her fellow gallerists jumped east this fall, from downtown to the Potrero Hill strip newly christened Potrero Flats, she has relocated to a 2,800-square-foot corner space – formerly the Arlington Hotel – in the Tenderoin, quadrupiling her gallery’s footprint (488 Ellis St., at Leavenworth). Chalk it up to youthful enterprise or creative foresight, but her success belies convention.

Silverman launched her original Dogpatch gallery five years ago while simultaneously earning her master’s in the curatorial program at California College of the Arts. “I was totally nuts,” she admits, “but I’ve always been a risk taker. That’s why I work with unknown artists.” Her eye for overlooked talent has earned her a reputation as one to watch at international art shows – a rarity for a Bay Area-based dealer. (Bob Wilms, development director of Mission design showroom the Nwblk, calls her “by and large, the most interesting gallerist in town.”) The new space’s opening exhibition features a series of 7 1/2-by-7-foot paintings made from London Times newsprint pulp by the Israel-born, London-based artist Amikam Toren – his first U.S. show.

Jessica Silverman | Art+Auction | Power 100

“Power 100 List – 2013”
Blouin Art+Auction
December 2013
Full excerpt here

Although San Francisco isn’t exactly a market hub, dealer Silverman has built a reputation for her midcareer artists over the past six years by making herself a fixture at fairs. In 2013 she reported solid sales at NADA Miami, Art Basel Statements, Expo Chicago, the Armory Show and the Dallas Art Fair, all of which allowed a move to a bigger, ground-floor space in the city’s rapidly gentrifying Tenderloin district. Silverman now has four times her former square footage to show diverse works by Christopher Badger, Shannon Finley, and Israeli artist Amikam Toren, who made his U.S. debut there last month.

Jessica Silverman Gallery | SFGate

“Jessica Silverman launches gallery in Tenderloin”
SF Gate/San Francisco Chronicle
Written by Catherine Bigelow, November 29, 2013
Full article here

Inside the glass-walled corner of Jessica Silverman Gallery, located on the ground floor of a Mercy Housing SRO in the lively yet louche Tenderloin, visitors will never spot a red dot next to a sold artwork.

That’s because Silverman, 30, a burgeoning art-world eminence and S.F. arts commissioner who founded her first gallery in 2003 as a student at Otis College of Art & Design in Los Angeles, believes those little dots distract from larger conversations about art itself.

Last weekend, when she christened her new gallery ( www.jessicasilvermangallery.com) with the inaugural U.S. exhibition “Of the Times and Other Historic Works” by London artist Amikam Toren, none were the wiser that half of his 14 artworks sold within 48 hours…

Silverman’s artists range in age and experience from emerging to midcareer. She’s constantly on the go, to global art fairs and studio visits, on the hunt for artists and collectors.

“I love the education aspect of art,” says Silverman. “I’m also in the business of building careers. So I’m very keen for the collector to understand the breadth of an artist’s practice. So if I sell a Toren piece, I want to make sure the buyer continues to support Toren when another piece becomes available.”

Most of the buyers for Toren’s work at the opening were a new, younger clientele. Which delighted Silverman, who, in June, participated with art consultant Sabrina Buell and gallerist John Berggruen on a Christie’s “Collecting 101” panel for tech titans.

“Of course, Silicon Valley types sit in front of computers all day – they don’t go to shows – and buy Warhol prints online,” she says. “The computer is also changing how art is created. But when you’re buying contemporary art, you need to experience the piece in person.”

Sans, of course, those dreaded dots.

“My grandfather once visited me at an art fair and assumed I hadn’t sold anything,” she recalls, with a laugh. “He asked, ‘Well, where are the red dots?’ So he went across the street to Walgreens to buy red stickers. I was mortified! But I had to leave them up until he left my booth.”

A native of Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Silverman’s been immersed in art her entire life because of her dot-loving grandfather, Gilbert Silverman. His success in commercial development allowed him, and his wife, Lila, to amass one of the world’s largest, most important collections of Fluxus art which, in 2009, they donated to the Museum of Modern Art.

“I’m fascinated with the notion of collecting, that feeling of ‘can’t live without,’ ” Silverman says. “Most kids collect stamps or shells. I sought autographed things from people I admired – this is embarrassing now – like Drew Barrymore and Aerosmith T-shirts.”

At 18, she was creating her own art, which she traded for her first “must-have” piece – an edition box puzzle of the sky by Yoko Ono that Silverman still treasures.

Most artists never dream of becoming dealers or gallerists. But while studying painting in college, Silverman realized her aesthetic was on track for beauty but lacked concept.

“I couldn’t embed the critical, theoretical concerns and questions I had into the object I was creating,” she said. “And all I felt was a really big disconnect.”

Following graduation, she stepped through the looking glass to enroll at California College of the Arts, where she received her master’s degree in curatorial practice.

Once again, she couldn’t wait to experience the art world in real time. She opened her second gallery in Dogpatch while writing her thesis on collecting.

With the ink on her diploma barely dry, she opened her third, and most official, gallery on Sutter Street in 2007. But as her reputation among artists and collectors grew, that 700-square-foot space metaphorically shrank.

Silverman has spent the past 15 months scouring the city for a new space. But before landing just down the hill on Ellis Street in her light-filled 2,800-square-foot atelier, reimagined by designer Charles de Lisle, another opportunity arrived via renowned industrial designer Yves Béhar.

Béhar anchors the art world over in Portrero Hill, where his Fuseproject lab, in a graffiti-clad warehouse, is akin to the fanciful, but top-secret, factory of Willy Wonka.

However, this connector of culture realized the lobby of his lab was the perfect locale for the public to experience an intersection of design and art.

Choosing Silverman as his opening curator, the two launched Fused Space in June with “Formal Alchemy,” an exhibition of works by N. Dash, Nicole Wermers and Toren.

“In just a few hundred square feet, and with the correct curation, any space becomes a cultural space. I always remind my team that we’re not designers of things but designers of ideas,” enthused Béhar on their opening night. “And Jessica’s aesthetic here is inspiring for my team, myself and the community. It’s a true gift.”

Hayal Pozanti | Review: Solo Exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects | Los Angeles Times

“Review: Hayal Pozanti’s paintings will leave you wanting more”
Los Angeles Times
Written by David Pagel, November 27, 2013
Full article here

Hayal Pozanti’s five new paintings at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects resemble the impossible offspring of doodles and diagrammatic drawings of machine parts.

The combination is felicitous. It links the no-nonsense functionalism of precisely designed prototypes to the whimsy of what people used to do with ballpoint pens and scraps of paper when we had time to kill. Art, Pozanti’s mid-size acrylics on panel suggest, satisfies desires we didn’t know we had until they are revealed to us by the works themselves…

There’s a meat-and-potatoes pragmatism to Pozanti’s paintings, a hearty solidity to the flat expanses of their industrial colors and the rudimentary illusionism of their hand-drawn forms. Some parts lock together loosely, like pieces from mixed-up jigsaw puzzles. Others abut snugly, like smoothly machined pistons or meticulously engineered circuitry.

A love of geeky details is also evident in Pozanti’s compositions. It comes through in the gooey thickness of her brushstrokes, in the spunky roughness of their contours and, most emphatically, in the skinny slices of bright colors that peek out from behind some shapes.

As a painter, Pozanti handles imperfection with the best of them. Knowing when enough is enough, and when it’s too much, the Istanbul-born, Yale-educated, New York-based artist leaves you wanting more of just what she’s up to.

Jessica Silverman Gallery | SFAQ

“SFAQ Pick: ‘Of the Times and Other Historic Works’ survey exhibition of works by Amikam Toren at Jessica Silverman Gallery’s NEW San Francisco location. Opening tonight, November 22nd”
San Francisco Arts Quarterly (SFAQ)
Full article here

Jessica Silverman Gallery | SFGate

“Amikam Toren’s ‘Times’ @ Jessica Silverman Gallery”
SF Gate/San Francisco Chronicle
Written by Catherine Bigelow, November 22, 2013
Full article here

The first-ever U.S. exhibition by Israel-born, London-based artist Amikam Toren opens to the public Sat., Nov. 23, and inaugurates the exciting new Tenderloin atelier of galleristJessica Silverman.

Titled, “Of The Times and Other Historic Works,” the show feature objects and letters of the alphabet crafted from pulped editions of The (London) Times newspapers. Which some digital wags might describe as the best possible use of print. But we digress.

The letters are actually large-scale, abstract paintings (created between 1983-1993) created from pigment derived from print remnants and are identified by labels crafted from The Times’ masthead with snippets of the day’s headlines. Which invite viewers to contemplate concepts of time and timelessness captured by hundreds of column inches distilled into a single vowel or consonant.

Silverman’s new space is huge (compared to her previous, eponomously-named gallery on Sutter Street) and snazzy (located on a ground-floor, window-paneled corner within the bustling world of this lively and louche neighborhood). The Toren exhibition is on display through Jan. 19, 2014.

Matt Lipps | Review: Library at Marc Selwyn Fine Art | Los Angeles Times

“Review: Matt Lipps’ ‘Library’ of photographic images”
Los Angeles Times
Written by Leah Ollman, November 19, 2013
Full article here

A critical mass of artists emerging in the ’70s whose work responded to image saturation in the media and everyday life — among them Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince — came to be known as the Pictures Generation…

It could be argued that, thanks to the kudzu-like claims of the World Wide Web, every generation of artists since then, by default if not by conscious embrace, has been a pictures generation.

The designation is a natural fit for Matt Lipps, whose show, “Library,” at Marc Selwyn, addresses head-on the centrality of photographic imagery to our collective history and memory.

For this series the L.A. and San Francisco-based artist has culled images — instructional to iconic — from a multi-volume Time-Life series on photography published in 1970-72. He created black-and-white, paper-doll-like cutouts from the pictures and assembled them on glass shelves, like books in a library but even more like a collection of mementos or bibelots in a china cabinet. A single color photograph by Lipps provides the backdrop to each multi-shelf tableau.

Lipps turns the subject of each given photograph into a literal object, staging a kind of paper theater with loose coherence along the themes of exploration, reportage, nature and photography itself.

Scale is skewed and time is flattened. A reflexive game of who’s who recognition (There’s an August Sander! And there’s a Harold Edgerton!) offers some pleasure. As does the evolving awareness that this may be an exercise in taxonomy and archive-building, but it is also, and most engagingly, an idiosyncratic, fractured form of storytelling.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 6222 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 933-9911, through Dec. 22. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.marcselwynfineart.com

Desirée Holman | 7×7 | November 2013

“Ouroboros”
Introduction by Sura Wood
commentary by Katherine Krause
7×7, November 2013
View excerpt here

Combining large-format photography, sculpture, video, and works on paper, Desirée Holman navigates complex ideology with relative ease by inserting the unexpected into a conventional framework. Much of her work addresses myths of identity, involving faces obscured by masks. In her 2009 project Reborn, Holman captured women cradling fake babies in images that forced viewers to question their perceptions of reality. For this show, we selected one of her more recent color-saturated paintings of auras – a popular spiritual symbol, evocative of halos, suggesting the fields of energy that encircles us. A similar image from Holman’s Aura series is pictured here.

Jessica Silverman, Fused Space | 7×7 | November 2013

“360 News – The latest shops, goods, and happenings in the Bay Area and beyond”
By Cheryl Locke
7×7, November 2013
Full excerpt here

Potrero Hill – Art takes the spotlight in an unexpected neighborhood

Potrero Hill is bustling anew with artsy activity. Making headlines is Yves Béhar’s Fused Space, the art and design exhibition gallery that opened next to his design studio, FuseProject, in June 2013. Cool-girl-about-town Jessica Silverman (whose own gallery is expanding to a larger location in the Tenderloin) curates the rotating shows of contemporary work (fusedspace.com). Fused has a prime location near California College of the Arts and the Wattis Institute. And with some of the biggest names in the biz packing up their tony downtown galleries and heading to art’s newest ‘hood, Silverman is in good company.

Hayal Pozanti | Paint On, Paint Off | Halsey Mckay Gallery

“Paint On, Paint Off”
Halsey Mckay Gallery
79 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY
November 16 – December 8, 2013

Participating artists include: Elise Adibi, Trudy Benson, Louisa Chase, Steven Cox, Mark DeLong, Keltie Ferris, Alison Fox, Mary Heilmann, Chris Martin, Eddie Martinez, Scott Olson, Joey Piziali, Hayal Pozanti, Zak Prekop, Nathlie Provosty, Tyson Reeder, Chuck Webster

For more information, please click here.

Review: “Architecture Undigested” at Fused Space | SFAQ

“Architecture Undigested”
Fused Space, curated by Jessica Silverman
Written by: Sarah Thibault
November 2013
San Francisco Arts Quarterly (SFAQ)
Read full review here

If you’re like me, flipping through the pages of “Architectural Digest,” a magazine devoted to contemporary home design, is bound to cause a full range of feelings: desire (I want to go to there.), resentment (They’re not better than me.), inspiration (My home would also look great with turquoise walls!) and discomfort (Where do they put all their stuff?).  Interiors featured in this glossy rag are often presented like miniature museums of taste where the distinctions between art and décor are confounded, made secondary to the overall design scheme. The artists in “Architecture Undigested,” Jessica Silverman’s most recent curatorial project for Fused Space, use elements of interior design as a starting point for their work, taking chunks of larger architectural spaces and makes them bite-sized, palatable as painterly sculptures, sculptural paintings or dadaist reconfigurations…

The exhibition title, a riff on the home design magazine, implies that in contrast to the glossy pages of “Architectural Digest,” the work has not been tidied up into a neat domestic package.  Instead the work seems detached, lacking specificity or a sense of place.

A few themes emerge, the most notable is a repurposing of industrial tools and materials.  Removed of their original context, the materials lend the works a surrealist tone.  Marte Eknæs’ “Better furnished, more fortunate III,” an industrial-grade door sweep installed on a gallery wall six inches off the floor, drew me in with its subtle humor.  This Duchampian gesture reminded me of Robert Gober’s piece, “Untitled (leg),” a life-like replica of the artist’s leg coming out of the gallery wall.  Both works depict parts displaced from their whole, giving them a quality of uselessness and vulnerability. The door sweep’s plastic bristles point outward towards the room, asking us to engage, to give it a new purpose.

Eknæs’ second piece, “Anti-slip,” consists of three neon orange pieces of slip guard outside the gallery doors.  You aren’t immediately aware that you are looking at an artistic intervention until you notice the odd placement and unusually bright color of the material. In fact, the pieces were so covert that I missed them completely during my first visit to the gallery.  You might consider that a success, or not, depending on your artistic leanings.

Another theme in the show is that of painterly abstraction as depicted through pseudo-sculptural means.  Stephen Prina paints brushy color fields on floor-to-ceiling window blinds for his piece “Blind No. 16, Fifteen-foot ceiling or lower, (Cadmium Red Medium Hue/Anthraquinone Blue/Primary Yellow/Hansa Yellow Light).”  Brian O’Connell and Mitzi Pederson engage the spatial constraints of painting, in both material and depth of field, using cement and concrete.  Brian O’Connell’s pieces “Untitled #14” and “Untitled #20” are geometric abstractions made of rapid set cement and wood, scaled like a portrait painting and hung on the wall.  Cement has been scraped across the wood frame in a horizontal motion creating a pattern of stripes divided by ridges of excess cement. The cement oozes out in satisfying globs, like icing on a cake. The wood has buckled under the weight of the cement causing the surface to bow out towards the viewer at different angles.  In parts, the wood has forced its way through the cement to reveal a soft, organic underbelly. The stylish combination of cement and abstraction mimics the industrial-chic architecture found in liberal havens like the Berkeley Art Museum or converted loft spaces in Williamsburg.  This association further conflates the work’s relationship to decoration and interior design.

Pederson’s “Untitled,” is an arrangement of concrete shards laid on the ground in a rectangular formation – reference to the restrictions of the canvas.  The broken edges of each piece of concrete reveal a sparkly core of black glitter.  The gray and black shapes create various compositions that shift as the viewer moves around the piece like a three-dimensional cubist painting.

Remarkably, in a city obsessed with naturalism, hand-blown glass and reclaimed wood, the artists in the exhibition have completely rejected the natural world, favoring the man-made above all else.  The overall tone isn’t anti-nature, but rather a reflection of the geometries and materials of urban dwelling.  Petros Moris’ three panels “Commons 2, 3 and 4” seem to be the remains of ancient mosaics or are perhaps all part of one large mosaic mural.  The viewer is left to decipher clues of the original pictures: a bird’s talons, arcs of a wing or a wave.  But ultimately the imagery is less important than the overall sense of strangeness and decay they convey, like props in a dystopian sci-fi movie like “The Man Who Fell to Earth” or “12 Monkeys.”

The show’s only other natural motif appears in Ruairiadh O’Connell’s screen prints of a Las Vegas hotel carpets.  “Bellagio” depicts the floral motif printed over a garish, burnt orange wax.  The other two wax panels “New York, New York” and “Paris” depict carpet patterns from their respective hotels on the Vegas strip.  O’Connell’s works highlight the ways each hotel defines its identity and relationship to its namesake city through its carpet pattern. “Paris” displays an orderly black and white, art nouveau motif with palm fronds and fleur de lys.  Meanwhile “New York, New York”’s carpet is a jazzy mish mash of art deco iconography like the Chrysler Building and gratuitous floating shapes. 

One of the exhibition’s strengths is the way that it mimics the cold materials and muted-palette of the upper class apartments found in magazines like Architectural Digest.  While there are bright pops of color here and there, they appear like spots of color in a late Mondrian painting: self-contained and isolated amongst the hard-edge geometry. The materials in the show- cement, marble, stainless steel floor guards and window blinds- are all familiar, yet lacking the warmth one expects from their home decor connotations.  Perhaps this speaks to the coldness of contemporary architecture or to the state of contemporary art. 

“Architecture Undigested” is on view through January 15th, 2013.

For more information about the show visit Fused Space, San Francisco.

Jessica Silverman | C Magazine | November 2013

“Go-Go Gallerist”
C Magazine, November 2013
Full excerpt here

Jessica Silverman knew what she wanted to do practically in utero. The S.F. artist has been selling works since her schoolgirl days at Otis College of Art and Design when she converted her studio at Otis into a makeshift gallery. Now, Silverman balances dual acts, running the new Fused Space, a focus center within industrial designer Yves Béhar’s Fuse Project, and her eponymous gallery, which relocates to the Tenderloin this month. The 2,800-square-foot space opens with Amikam Toren’s first ever U.S. show. The Israeli-born artist extracts pigment from unusual sources, like pulverized issues of the London Times. “They speak to language in an interesting way. I think they are going to blow people out of the water.” Opening Nov.22; 488 Ellis St., S.F.,: silvermangallery.com

Hayal Pozanti | Solo Exhibition | Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

Hayal Pozanti – Solo Exhibition
Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
6006 Washington Blvd., Culver City
November 9 – December 21, 2013
Opening reception: Saturday, November 9, 6-8PM

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is excited to present new paintings by Hayal Pozanti opening on November 9, 2013 in the Project Space….

Pozanti’s abstract paintings are composed of opaque and suggestive forms; their scale inspired by the formats in which we receive digital images: the 4:3 ratio of iPhone screens and the 612 pixel square Instagram image. Before she turned to painting full time, Pozanti was making digital collages that directly referenced the visual culture of the Internet. The compositions in her current paintings continue to reference the layering and puzzling together of shapes that defined her collage practice, adding a new attention to materiality. 

Hayal Pozanti is a native of Istanbul who received her MFA from Yale University in 2011. Her practice encompasses painting, sculpture, collage as well as digital animation. Through these varied platforms, she explores questions of technology and language systems, as well as the possibilities of space mapped out by the body and screen. Hayal Pozanti has exhibited at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco, Duve, Berlin and at Brand New Gallery in Milan, Italy. She currently lives and works in New York, New York.

For more information, please click here.

Hayal Pozanti | Passwords | DUVE Berlin

“Passwords” – solo exhibition by Hayal Pozanti
DUVE Berlin
Gitschiner Strasse 94/94a
10969 Berlin
November 8 – December 20, 2013

For more information, please click here.

Christopher Badger | LIFE: On The Moon | Various Small Fires

“LIFE: On The Moon”
Various Small Fires
1212 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Los Angeles
November 2 – December 7, 2013
Opening reception: Saturday, November 2nd, 3-6PM

Exhibiting artists: Christopher Badger, Trevor Paglen, Katie Paterson, Robert Smithson, Tavares Strachan, Michelle Stuart

The surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles. — Neil Armstrong, 1969

I described the moon shot once as a very expensive non-site… there was a strange demoralization that set in that they didn’t discover little green men, or something. — Robert Smithson, 1972

Various Small Fires presents LIFE: On The Moon, a group exhibition tracing the immediate influence and lasting significance of the epochal July 20, 1969 moon landing on the early development of Land Art, represented by Robert Smithson and Michelle Stuart, in dialogue with recent works by Christopher Badger, Trevor Paglen, Katie Paterson, and Tavares Strachan…

In August 1969, LIFE Magazine published dozens of full-page stills from films of the moon’s surface shot by Neil Armstrong in an issue titled “LIFE: On The Moon.” The colonization and documentation of the moon’s previously mysterious lunar landscape revealed it to be a desolate “non-site”, while also forever shifting perception of fundamental landscape concepts such as scale, distance, accessibility, and jurisdiction.

Concurrently with the military-industrial “space race” leading up to the moon landing, American artists began to experiment outside of traditional studio practice, intervening at a terrestrial scale to initiate the Land Art movement. Michelle Stuart, an early member of this movement, produced a series of haunting mixed media meditations on paper in 1969 including Magnetic Forces, exhibited here for the first time, that subtly critique the techno-scientific mandate to strip the moon of its mystery. Fellow Land Art progenitor Robert Smithson’s rarely noted lunar influence is illustrated by his 1972 Lake Edge Crescent proposal to transform a depleted Midwestern strip mine “non-site” into a crescent-marked earthwork resembling the moon’s barren surface. 

A selection of recent works further engage the moon’s paradoxical post-landing status as a familiar yet inaccessible site/non-site. Christopher Badger’s Lunar Mirrors are polished reliefs of high-resolution NASA lunar topographical data rendered as glamorous abstractions. Badger also presents a towering 30-foot model of a lunar spire, which were commonly hypothesized to populate the moon’s surface by 19th century European astronomers misled by crater shadows. Katie Paterson’s Second Moon playfully addresses the moon’s out-of-reach familiarity by sending an actual crated moon rock into “orbit” around the Earth via UPS, which will make occasional stops during the exhibition to an otherwise empty pedestal at Various Small Fires, tracked otherwise via a networked touchscreen console.

Trevor Paglen uses espionage techniques to portray the military-surveillance complex’s landscape and skyscape interventions hidden in plain site, as in Dead Military Navigation Satellite (Cosmos 985) Near the Disk of the Moon, in which a defunct top secret satellite floats for eternity as an artificial second moon. In Standing Alone, which debuted at his 2013 Venice Biennale Bahamas Pavilion, Tavares Strachan plants the flag of his native Bahamas on the North Pole in proxy of a lunar landing, as a poignant post-colonial gesture.


For more information, please click here.

Hugh Scott-Douglas | Phantom Sun | Bugada & Cargnel

“Phantom Sun”
Bugada & Cargnel
7-9 Rue de l’Équerre, Paris
October 19 – December 21, 2013
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 19, 7-9PM

Exhibiting artists: Ryan Foerster, Sam Moyer, Charles Ross, Hugh Scott-Douglas

A phantom sun, or sundog, is an atmospheric phenomenon that creates bright spots of light on either side of the sun, often on a luminous ring in the sky. The sun light, passing trough diamond dust drifting in the air, creates a powerful image of two ‘mock suns’ appearing in the sky.

This exhibition intends to bring together the works of artists integrating the sun and natural elements into their work. Working across various mediums with raw materials and exposure to nature, each artist engages an experimental process of creation finding a balance of control and release. The resulting compositions are dual manifestations of the artists’ will and nature’s whim. In their own practice, each artist allows natural elements to dictate tone. Time and climate become their tools and geography a platform.

For more information, please click here.

Jessica Silverman Gallery | Gallerist | October 2013

“San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman Gallery Will Inaugurate New Space in November”
By Andrew Russeth
October 11, 2013
Full article here

Jessica Silverman Gallery, which works with artists like Hugh Scott-Douglas, Luke Butler, Susanne M. Winterling and Matt Lipps, announced today that it was nearing completion on a new space in the city’s Tenderloin district. Set in a 1907 building, it sports 2,800 square feet of space and 16-foot-tall ceilings.

“The new gallery space is appropriate to our increasingly ambitious, international program of exhibitions,” Ms. Silverman said in a statement released to press. “The artists that we represent are already inspired by the space’s beauty, distinctiveness and versatility.”

The first show in the new space will be a solo of work from the 1980s and ’90s by London-based artist Amikam Toren, which is scheduled to open Nov. 22.

Desirée Holman | Sophont | Philip J. Steele Gallery at RMCAD

“Sophont” – solo exhibition by Desirée Holman
Philip J. Steele Gallery at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design
1600 Pierce Street
Lakewood, CO 80214
October 17 – November 23, 2013
Opening reception: Thursday, October 17, 6-9PM

Sophont explores the iconography and aesthetics associated with spiritual pseudo-sciences through multiple mediums, including installation, video, and gouache on paper. Holman’s new body of work investigates the relationship between metaphysical ideologies and supernatural investigations. The works in this series move swiftly and easily between figure and abstraction, terrestrial and extraterrestrial, new and old ages, and speak largely to our culturally developed conceptions of “otherness.”…

About the artist: Desiree Holman is an artist based in Oakland, California. Her multi-sensory work positions theatrical tools, like costumes or props, in settings that illuminate ideas of identity, knowledge, and the complexities of the human psyche. Holman utilizes references to popular culture, as well as subcultures, in order to explore concepts around personal life experiences and how we interpret visual culture. In this space, the artist’s work reveals a complex dialogue about truth and the experience of the ‘real’ world.

Holman holds a Master’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley. Earning critical acclaim for her work, Holman was awarded a San Francisco Modern Museum of Art SECA award in 2008 and in 2007, the Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue award. Solo exhibitions of her work include the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Berkeley Art Museum’s MATRIX program. International exhibitions of Holman’s work have taken place at the Sao Paulo Museum of Modern Art, Hessel Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Milan’s BnD, and Toronto’s YYZ. Reviews of Holman’s work have appeared in numerous publications, including Artforum, The Los Angeles Times, NY Arts, Artillery, San Francisco Chronicle and Artweek. She is represented by Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco, CA.

For more information, please click here

Jessica Silverman Gallery | Modern Painters | October 2013

Modern Painters
October 2013
Excerpt here

Founded in 2007, Jessica Silverman Gallery long maintained a space on Sutter Street in San Francisco. Silverman’s move to a nearby ground-floor location this fall saw the gallery’s square footage quadruple. Thea Ballard caught up with Silverman to discuss plans for the spacious new site and being part of an evolving neighborhood.

Sean Raspet | Time Machine | M-Arco

“Time Machine”
M-ARCO Foundation
The Box, Marseille, France
Opening Reception: October 12, 7-9PM
October 12 – December 14, 2013

Curated by Corentin Hamel

Exhibiting artists: Lucas Blalock, Simon Denny, DIS, Lizzie Fitch with Ryan Trecartin, Parker Ito, Daniel Keller, Olivier Laric, Aude Pariset, Sean Raspet, Dan Rees, Ben Schumacher, Timur Si-Qin, Brad Troemel, Artie Vierkant

For more information, visit www.m-arco.org.

Amikam Toren | Reproductions | Anthony Reynolds Gallery

“Reproductions”
November 1 – December 7, 2013
Anthony Reynolds Gallery
60 Great Marlborough Street, London

For more information, click here.

Desirée Holman | Ouroboros | Root Division

“Ouroboros”
Curated by Katherine Krause and Jenny Salomon
November 6 –  23, 2013
Opening: November 9, 6-9PM
Root Division, San Francisco, CA
Website here

The ancient symbol of Ouroboros, the snake eating its tail, appears in many cultures, religions, and belief systems from Ancient Egypt to Jungian philosophy to alchemy to androgyny to mythology and to modern science.  It has referenced rebirth, creation out of destruction, self-discovery, the eternal, life out of death, the joining of opposites, devouring oneself, the shadow self, immortality, and infinity. The purpose of the exhibition will be to excavate the understanding of Ouroboros from its historical references and to explore its meaning today by observing the contemporary world through the Ouroboros lens.  In order to interpret the meaning of the Ouroborus image, each of us must decide how we see the symbol. 

Featuring works by Kim Anno, Joyce Burstein, Evan Holm, Desiree Holman, Matt Keegan, Sandy Kim, Bessma Khalaf, Ali Naschke-Messing, Jesse Schlesinger, Nicolas Torres and Andy Vogt

Barbara Kasten | Mary Mary at Laura Bartlett Gallery

“Sara Barker and Barbara Kasten”
October 11 – November 23, 2013
Preview: October 10, 6-8:30PM
Mary Mary, Glasgow at Laura Bartlett Gallery
10 Northington Street, London

For more information, click here.

Jessica Silverman Gallery | Strong Sophomore Outing for Expo Chicago | Art in America

“Strong Sophomore Outing for Expo Chicago”
Art in America
Written by Brian Boucher, September 23, 2013
Full article here

[. . .] Some of the more stylish galleries were in the Exposures section, devoted to about 20 younger dealers. San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman was showing bright geometric abstract paintings by Berlin-based artist Shannon Finley for $5,500 for small works and $24,000 for large ones. They were mostly sold on opening night, gallery manager Rina Kim told A.i.A. New York’s Blackston gallery showed large acrylic abstractions by New York-based Amy Feldman, who won the fair’s Andree Stone prize for emerging artists. L.A.’s Charlie James Gallery was showing works in various mediums by New York-based William Powhida that satirize art fairs. Snark aside, the works were going for $6,500 to $18,000 to buyers from not only Chicago but as far afield as Mexico City, James said.

Jessica Silverman Gallery | 9 Highlights from EXPO Chicago | Artspace

9 Highlights from EXPO Chicago
By Andrew Goldsten, September 20, 2013
Full article here

The San Francisco dealer Jessica Silverman has a knack for putting together memorable booths at art fairs, and her selection of paintings by the Canadian-born, Berlin-based artist Shannon Finley was a knockout, presenting a suite of abstractions that the artist created by using a palette knife to apply acrylic that he mixed with gels for a satiny, opalescent effect. Referencing a wide swath of visual culture, from Futurism and the work of artists like Gerhard Richter to early video game design, the work is only the gallery’s second presentation of the 30-something artist, who was recently featured in a rare paintings show at Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art and is getting a tremendous amount of interest from curators and collectors.

Lucas Michael | “Susan Derges and Lucas Michaels Open New Photography Shows at Danziger Gallery” | Architectural Digest

“Susan Derges and Lucas Michaels Open New Photography Shows at Danziger Gallery”
Architectural Digest
September 11, 2013
By Brienne Walsh
Website here

In an age when anyone can take a decent image using their smartphone and an Instagram filter, many fine art photographers set their work apart using analog processes not accessible to most amateurs. In the main gallery at Danziger Gallery in New York, British artist Susan Derges, best known for her photograms—camera-less images she makes by manipulating light sensitive paper with sound waves, water, ambient light, and plants she plucks from the fields around her home—presents new works that employ the symbolism of gates and bridges to suggest portals into other worlds. Less photographs than they are paintings using photographic materials (paper and light), the images resemble beautiful fairy-scapes, or reflections on still water.

In the project room at the same gallery, Argentinian photographer Lucas Michaels resuscitates Andy Warhol in “Polaroids,” a series of photographs taken with the Polaroid Bigshot Camera, the same device Warhol used to take commissioned portraits in his Factory. The exhibition is a combination of three bodies of work: “Golden Globes” (2013), which features portraits of celebrities such as Lena Dunham, Megan Fox, and Ben Affleck taken backstage at the awards ceremony for a New York magazine assignment; “Ladies and Gentlemen” (2005–13), in which contemporary female artists re-enact poses made by transvestites in Warhol’s eponymously named body of work; and “Six Appearing Acts” (2004), a video that captures the emergence of six Polaroid photographs. Imitating Warhol is something that many artists have done before, but still, Michaels photographs are tiny blips of joy.

Hugh Scott-Douglas | The Meteoric Rise of Blue | Flaunt Magazine

“The Meteoric Rise of Blue”
Arts Column
By Dr. James Fox
September 6, 2013
View full article here

We like to think that color is a matter of personal taste, but one of them is worshipped above all others. Blue is the world’s best-loved hue by a stretch, and it’s been top of the pile for quite some time. A survey recently found that 40 percent of people call blue their favorite color. And it’s ranked number one in every country on the planet.

But blue isn’t just popular. It exerts a strange hold over us too. Scientists have proven that it can increase creativity. Psychologists have found that we’re more likely to trust companies with blue logos. And market researchers say Google’s links are blue because that color makes it hard for us to resist clicking them.

With all this evidence it’s difficult to deny that blue has conquered our world. But it wasn’t always that way…

Remarkably, blue was the last major color to get a name. Languages around the world did not think of a word for blue things for a surprisingly long time. The ancient Greeks are perhaps the most noticeable. You can, for instance, read every line of Homer and never come across ‘blue.’ Despite all that wonderful Greek weather, he thought the sea was ‘wine dark’ and the sky was ‘bronze.’

It may be because blue is uniquely enigmatic. It’s all around us, but it feels forever out of reach. Because you can’t touch the blueness of the sky; you can’t bottle the blueness of the sea; and no matter how far you travel, you can never reach the blue horizon. And if something’s forever unattainable, you don’t really need a word for it.

But if blue was unattainable, how can it now be everywhere? When did it first enter our lives? And where did our love affair with it first begin?

The answer is in northern Afghanistan. There, beneath the mountains, is one of the oldest mines in the world. For millennia it has produced a mysterious blue stone called lapis lazuli. With a lot of strength, skill and patience, lapis lazuli was converted into a legendary blue pigment. The pigment was called ‘ultramarine,’ which means ‘across the seas’—because that’s where the lapis lazuli originated.

Ultramarine soon became a Medieval sensation. Artists, craftsmen and tailors were desperate to get hold of it. The demand was so intense that it became more expensive than gold. In fact, it was deemed to be so extravagant that governments across Europe prohibited citizens from wearing clothes in the color.

By 1500 only one person was special enough to wear ultramarine: the Virgin Mary. If you’ve gone to any major museum, or bought lots of Christmas cards, you’ll probably have noticed that the Madonna is nearly always swathed in beautiful blue robes. It was a remarkable transformation: from almost nowhere, blue had become Europe’s most sacred color. Maybe that’s why Hercule Poirot always said ‘sacre bleu.’

But that was only the first step in blue’s journey into the center of our lives. The second moment came a few hundred years later, in 1800. And believe it or not, it was all because one young boy couldn’t get to sleep. The boy was Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and he was the eponymous hero of a novel by the German writer Novalis.

Heinrich couldn’t sleep because he was obsessed with a mysterious blue flower. So he embarked on a quest to find it. With that quest, blue lodged itself in the Romantic imagination, and it profoundly transformed the meaning of the color. Because from that point on, blue became the color of our deepest desires and most unsettling feelings.

For those of you who’ve had the blues, listened to the blues, or ever felt a bit blue, and thus connected that color to a dark emotional state, you’re probably indebted, in part, to Heinrich’s little flower. But no one plumbed the emotional depths of the color quite like Pablo Picasso.

Picasso’s famed blue period began in 1901 when his best friend shot himself after an argument with his girlfriend. The suicide shook the young Picasso to his core, and before long blue crept into his paintings. We all know them. And with them Picasso did more than anyone to cement blue’s status as the color of fear, loneliness, and despair.

But it wasn’t all depressing. There was one more stage in blue’s meteoric rise. It was December 1968 and the crew of Apollo 8 became the first humans to leave the Earth’s orbit. They’d gone to see the moon but they made their most extraordinary discovery when they looked back. Because they saw, to their amazement, that they were looking at a blue planet—the color of our beautiful but fragile home.

This article originally appeared in Flaunt 129 – The Dye Issue.

Amikam Toren | Four Corners of the World | Hite Foundation

“Four Corners of the World”
September 3 – December 14, 2013
Opening reception: September 3, 2013 – 6PM
Hite Foundation, Seoul, Korea

Participating artists: Hurvin Anderson, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Marcel Dzama, Chang Enli, Bernard Frize, Tim Johnson, Amikam Toren

Curated by: Jonathan Watkins, Director, Ikon Gallery

For more information, click here.

Lucas Michael | Polaroids | Danziger Gallery

“Polaroids”
September 12 – October 26, 2013
Danziger Gallery, NY

Lucas Michael lives and works in New York. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina he is a performer, painter, sculptor, and photographer. His work has shown at the Getty Center and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Bahia Blanca. This fall Danziger Gallery is pleased present Lucas Michael: Polaroids…

Long intrigued with the work of Andy Warhol, Lucas Michael began to shoot with the Polaroid Bigshot Camera in 2005, the same camera used by Warhol for the photographs he took in preparation for his commissioned portraits and other paintings.  Michael reassigns the technique, equipment, and style, to the twenty-first century capturing today’s Hollywood icons and re-conceptualizing selected Warhol works in video as well as Polaroid.

For his first exhibition at Danziger Gallery, Michael combines three different bodies of work.  The first, “Golden Globes” (2013), features modern muses from Daniel Day Lewis to Jennifer Lawrence all shot for New York Magazine against a white background backstage at the famous awards ceremony.  These miniature portraits eerily capture Warhol’s star worshiping and re-animate and resuscitate the Warholian obsession with fame and glamour.

The second body of work  “Ladies and Gentlemen” (2005 – 2013),  is Michael’s appropriation of Warhol’s seminal body of work of the same name. Following the layout of Warhol’s book, Michael recreates the images shot by shot and page by page but with a cast of mostly female contemporary artists standing in for Warhol’s transvestites.  In this way with women playing men playing women, Michael creates a new dialog about image and identity that is both playful and thought provoking.

Lastly, “Six Appearing Acts” (2004), a twelve and a half minute video,  explores the symbolic power of the Polaroid  and photography’s relationship to voyeurism.  In this work – six Polaroid images are placed before the viewer as they develop.  Each ”act” is an attempt to repeat the previous but the impossibility of the task and the emergence of the figurative through the abstract create their own anti-narrative.

For more information, click here.

Luke Butler, Conrad Ruiz | Sea Stories Between the Tides | Highlight Gallery

“Sea Stories Between the Tides”
September 5 – October 3, 2013
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 5, 2013, 6-8PM
Highlight Gallery
San Francisco, CA

“What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature. It is that they are conscious of it…There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that…is always but a vain and fleeting appearance.” – Joseph Conrad (1897).

Highlight Gallery is pleased to present “Sea Stories Between The Tides”, a group exhibition that draws together the works of thirteen American artists. This exhibition will open on September 5th and continue through October 5th.

“Sea Stories Between The Tides” was inspired by Joseph Conrad’s theory that the mysteries and wonders of the ocean serve as the spiritual inspiration that is usually provided by the enigma of the supernatural. The works presented in the exhibition are the incarnation of this theory. The elements of the sea inspired the artists and each work captures the vision that followed.

For more information, click here.

Jessica Silverman Gallery | The Art Newspaper

“San Francisco dealers move away from downtown”
Written by: Julia Halperin, August 27, 2013
The Art Newspaper
Full article here

Rising rents around Union Square and the temporary closure of nearby SFMOMA has led some galleries to open new spaces in Potrero Hill…

A new gallery district is springing up in San Francisco. On 7 September, four dealers—Jack Fischer, Brian Gross, Catharine Clark and George Lawson—are scheduled to open new spaces in Lower Potrero Hill, located 20 minutes from the city’s downtown area. Rising rents and the temporary loss of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) as an anchor have contributed to the migration, dealers say.

Although San Francisco’s galleries have congregated downtown in Union Square for more than 50 years, dealers are increasingly being priced out by technology firms. Meanwhile, SFMoMA’s home nearby is closed until 2016 as it undergoes an expansion and the collection is travelling with exhibitions scheduled throughout the Bay Area. 

In the galleries’ new neighbourhood Potrero Hill, rent is around 10% cheaper than in Union Square, where landlords charge as much as $45 per sq. ft for a gallery on an upper floor, according to the San Francisco-based real estate agent Hans Hansson. Downtown rents have risen by nearly $20 per sq. ft in recent years because of competition from technology firms. “Art galleries want unconventional spaces with high ceilings—that’s exactly what the tech guys want,” says Hansson. Potrero Hill’s warehouses, however, are zoned for industrial use, which enables galleries to move in, but not technology firms. 

“Lower rent is definitely one of the driving forces” behind his decision to move, says Jack Fischer, who spent the past nine years at 49 Geary Street, a popular gallery hub. But the relocation is also motivated by “what I take to be a certain staleness in the downtown scene”, he says. 

Art institutions began gathering in Potrero Hill around five years ago, and the neighbourhood is now home to the artist-run non-profit Southern Exposure, the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, the Museum of Craft and Design, as well as the commercial space Hosfelt Gallery. “Gallery neighbourhoods in other cities like New York and Los Angeles are much more fluid, but the San Francisco gallery scene has, until now, always been so fixed,” says Brian Gross, whose new ground-floor gallery—a converted door factory—is twice the size of his former space. 

But some galleries are choosing to remain downtown. In November, Jessica Silverman Gallery will open a new, 2,800 sq. ft space in the Tenderloin, a slightly grittier area that is home to other emerging galleries including Shooting Gallery, Ever Gold, and Luggage Store.

Luke Butler | Artists & Editions | The Library Council of MoMA

ARTISTS & EDITIONS, 2013
The Library Council of The Museum of Modern Art

“Artists & Editions” is a tribute to Steven Leiber (1957-2012), co-founder of RITE EDITIONS. All proceeds from the sale of the edition will benefit the Steven Leiber Scholarship Fund at California College of the Arts in Oakland and San Francisco.

Featured artists include:

Tauba Auerbach, Elisheva Biernoff, Luke Butler, Claude Closky, Dina Danish, Sam Durant, Liam Everett, Ben Kinmont, Colter Jacobsen, Ruth Laskey, Adam McEwen, Dave Muller, Bruce Nauman, Franz Erhard Walther

For more information, please click here.

Review: “Digital Infinity” | San Francisco Chronicle

“Summer art splendor – Ganter’s riff on Botticelli”
Written by: Kenneth Baker
Friday, July 26, 2013
San Francisco Chronicle
Read unabridged review here

We expect low artistic wattage from galleries’ summer group shows, so exceptions, such as those at Ridgway and Silverman, come as especially pleasant surprises…

[…]

‘Digital Infinity’ at Silverman: The best reason to follow contemporary art: Willy-nilly it brings amazing surprises before your eyes.

Yugoslavian-born Aleksandra Domanovic, who now lives in Berlin, contributes a stunning piece – maybe call it graphic sculpture – to Silverman’s group show “Digital Infinity.”

Her “Untitled (Marina-Lucica)” (2012) consists of three stacks, towers really, of unfastened sheets of A4 white paper. Images appear inkjet-printed on the sides of each column. They show glimpses from different eras of a seaside resort the artist visited with her family before the outbreak of the 1990s Croatian War of Independence.

How do you print images on the side of a paper stack? Edge by edge, one sheet at a time. As if rematerializing a digital scan, the images gain definition as the pages stack up.

This might look like a feat of mindless labor, did not the fragility of the piled-up paper make itself felt as a nerve-twinging evocation of the frailty of civilized life and the memories on which it depends.

Looking at the precarious stacks – a gust through the nearby door threatens them – I thought of Ben Kafka’s recent book “The Demon of Writing,” in which he argues that paperwork, irrespective of what it communicated, founded the modern state.

Domanovic has made tangible that thought, or something like it, with an ironic backward glance to stacking as a strategy of late 20th century sculpture.

Other artists in the show impress by very different means.

Southern Californian Sean Raspet presents an ensemble of objects and raw material jumbled and suspended in blocks of polymer gel whose transparency belies the works’ legibility.

Londoner Hannah Sawtell’s “Terminal Vendor (Offshore Mix)” (2013) combines found materials in a manner that seems baffling in terms so up to the minute that we lack words for them as yet.

Digital Infinity: Works in mixed media by five contemporary artists. Through Aug. 3.Jessica Silverman Gallery, 804 Sutter St., S.F. (415) 255-9508.www.jessicasilvermangallery.com.

Kenneth Baker is The San Francisco Chronicle’s art critic. E-mail:kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com

Shannon Finley | In the Studio | Kunsthalle Athena

“In the Studio”
September 8-30, 2013
Part of ReMap 4
Kunsthalle Athena, Athens, Greece
Website here

The exhibition In the Studio is the outcome of Daily Lazy Projects’s online documentation showcasing images from artists’s ateliers along with descriptions of their studio practices and workplace environments (see “In the Studio”: http://daily-lazy.blogspot.de/search/label/In%20The%20Studio). The project was launched in December 2011 and is still in progress; currently the list includes contemporary artists based in Athens, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam, Istanbul, Zürich, Basel, Frankfurt, Florence, Valletta, Cluj-Napoca, Johannesburg, Kuala Lumpur, New York, Rome, Washington, North Carolina, Stockholm, Bratislava, Rotterdam, Tampere, Dusseldorf, San Francisco, and more…

In the Studio will display the work of selected artists, concentrating on the presentation of in-progress and unfinished artworks, sketches, maquettes, and models, and other objects taken from the artists’s studios. The exhibition will attempt to expose the process of artistic practice, to portray art as a procedure and an activity, and to document the private milieu of the artist studio.  

Daily Lazy Projects was founded in 2011, in Athens, Greece. The current DLP team comprises artists Dionisis Christofilogiannis, Stelios Karamanolis, Tula Plumi, Yorgos Stamkopoulos. Its goal is to present projects touching on contemporary art issues through collaborations with artists, curators, organisations, and other practitioners involved in the arts. The scope of activities includes three residences: in Athens, Cluj-Napoca, and Berlin, and will involve other cities in an endeavour to negotiate the notions of “art scene” and “art centre”.

The exhibition is organised and curated by Daily Lazy Projects with the support of Kunsthalle Athena. DLP collaborated with Lydia Pribisova for the selection and support of the Slovak artists.

Participating artists: Loukia Alavanou (GR), Athanasios Argianas (GR), Erik Binder (SK), Clara Broermann (DE), Stephane Calais (FR), Lizzie Calligas (GR),Thomas Chapman (US), Dionisis Christofilogiannis (GR), Michael De Kok (NL), Christina Dimitriadis (GR), Oana Farcas (RO), Petra Feriancova (SK),  Shannon Finley (CA), Dimitris Foutris (GR), Torben Giehler (DE), Helidon Gjergji (AL), Stelios Karamanolis (GR), Vassilis P. Karouk (GR), Michalis Katzourakis (GR), Jan Kiefer (SH), John Kleckner (US), Caroline Kryzecki (DE), Marek Kvetan (SK), Daniel Lergon (DE), Sifis Lykakis (GR), Mathieu Mercier (FR), Svätopluk Mikyta (SK), Ilona Nemeth (SK), Yudi Noor (ID), Ilias Papailiakis (GR), Angelo Plessas (GR), Tula Plumi (GR), Vassilis Salpistis (GR), Georgia Sagri (GR), Frank Selby (US), Yorgos Stamkopoulos (GR), Daniel Steegmann (SP/BR), Henning Strassburger (DE), Julia Strauss (RU/DE), Morgane Tschiember(FR), Brent Wadden (CA)

http://dlprojects.tumblr.com/  &  http://daily-lazy.blogspot.gr

More info: http://remapkm.com/4/ 

Hayal Pozanti | Diff’rent Strokes: Small Paintings and Intimate Performances | Louis B. James

“Diff’rent Strokes”
August 2- 23, 2013
Louis B. James, New York
Website here

“Less is a bore.” – Robert Venturi

Louis B. James is pleased to announce the opening of Diff’rent Strokes: Small Paintings and Intimate Performances featuring the work of more than 25 artists.

New York in August is hot and messy. So is this show. Comprised of various small(ish) works – mostly paintings, some wall sculpture, works on paper, videos, film and performance – Diff’rent Strokes – like a great department store – has something for everyone…

Featuring works by Michael Assiff, Ricky Bonzai, Canyon Castator, Leidy Churchman, Jeremy Couillard, Elizabeth Glaessner, Nora Griffin, Nikki Katsikas, Matthew Kirk, Doron Langberg, Michael Mahalchick, Nikki Maloof, David Mramor, Brad Phillips, Hayal Pozanti, Ryan Schneider, Bret Slater, Brendan Smith, Devin Troy Strother and Faren Ziello.

With performances by, Stiven Luka, Michael Mahalchick, Marissa Mickleberg, David Mramor and Geo Wyeth.
Videos curated by Brooke Tomiello and featuring Katie Armstrong, Max Basch, Trevor Clifford, Nazli Dinçel, Montgomery Knott, Rishi Linley, Alexander Neel, Kathy Rose, Daniella Sansotta, Brooke Tomiello and Nina Yuen.

The Pinch and the Ouch film and performance screening organized by Marianna Ellenberg.

For a full event list please visit www.louisbjames.com

Hayal Pozanti | Gattaca | Michael Jon Gallery

“Gattaca – Ethan Greenbaum, Hayal Pozanti, Will Rockel, Cole Sayer”
Curated by Hunter Braithwaite
June 27 – July 31, 2013
Michael Jon Gallery
Website here

Michael Jon Gallery is proud to present Gattaca, the first exhibition at the new location in downtown Miami / Miami World Center…

In Gattaca (1997), Ethan Hawke is a squatter in the genetic kingdom, trapped in a constant battle with his leakage. He vacuums his dead skin out of the cracks of his keyboard to remove his traces. The plastic and aluminum shell of the computer is the surface of today. Our fingers slide over it like people once touched statuary for salvation. But whereas the continual hand marks on marble or bronze left a certain luster, the computer attracts silt–an ever-growing delta of sweat and dust here on the banks of the information super-river. We shed bits of dead skin like the light from distant stars. Reload our bodies in the eyes of others.

The work in this exhibition deals with the trace, be it biological, semiotic, industrial, or a product of a seeping history. The trace indicates what is not explicitly present at the moment, and as such exists out of time. It isn’t hidden by technology, it just changes forms. It is the emailed joke that has lost its meaning. It is sexual frustration mediated by image quality. We know now that the simple interchange of two complete and sealed bodies, the human and the digital, doesn’t provide enough critical leverage. How does secondary information–typos, screengrabs, dead pixels–alter our subjecthood? In Gattaca, Ethan Hawke’s traces are antagonistic, incriminating. Now, over fifteen years later, they offer a fresh start.

Susanne M. Winterling | artSOUTH: Collaborations | Hampshire County Council

Artist / project: Susanne M. Winterling / The Lighthouse
Collaborator(s): Magnus Ström, architect
Location(s): Keyhaven Nature Reserve, New Forest
Lead partner: Hampshire County Council

Susanne M. Winterling is a German artist who has exhibited internationally including Oslo, Berlin, New York, Moscow and Tokyo.

Winterling is working in collaboration with Lymington-based architect Magnus Ström and Pete Durnell of Hampshire County Council Countryside Service, to create an architectural sculpture on the seawall.

Blending into the surrounding landscape, the sculpture will take the form of a wave-like shelter, it will provide a place to stop, rest and contemplate, whilst on a journey around the Keyhaven Nature Reserve. People will be able to reflect on the beauty of their surroundings, taking in the views of the Isle of Wight and the coastline, and the relationship the sculpture has with the environment.

The sculpture will also incorporate the material ‘aerogel’, which will give it a luminous quality both during the day and at night. The artist has selected this material, originally developed by Nasa, which has multiple qualities and industrial uses, to reflect the history of the site and its important role in the story of the salt industry.

For more information, click here.

Susanne M. Winterling | Girls Can Tell | GAK, Bremen

“Girls Can Tell”
September 28, 2013 – February 2, 2014
Opening: Friday, September 27
Gesellschaft Für Aktuelle Kunst Bremen

Dirk Bell, Juliette Blightman, Shannon Bool, Kajsa Dahlberg, Nina Hoffmann, Verena Issel, Maria Loboda, Anna Ostoya, Marlo Pascual, Seb Patane, Jeremy Shaw, Dirk Stewen, Susanne M. Winterling…

Nobody would seriously maintain that feminism’s urgent issues have been solved through lived social equality. It could, however, be the case that the focal points of feminism have shifted. What the Feminist Movement in the 1970’s and later the Punks in the 1980’s fought for has at least in part become a social reality, and that has lead to other issues taking centre stage. Accordingly, contact and interaction with early feminists and their doctrines has shifted significantly––for the generations born after 1970, the necessity of constantly standing up for feminist viewpoints has given way to a natural consciousness and to an omnipresent “live with it” feeling. The art theorist Monika Szewczyk speaks of a “profound absorption of those lessons of feminism that allows us to proceed without naming what we do––a pause in the forging of weapons in order to use them.”

That in no way means that the social need for a feministic attitude no longer exists today. However, it can be stated that the tone of its expressions has changed. That they have perhaps–should one dare to say– become lighter, without having lost precision. That a tone has been established that is sufficiently sovereign to allow for occasional doubts in feminist doctrines without immediately smelling the scent of treason against its fundamental idea. Moreover we have reached a point where emancipation is no longer an issue for women alone; men are increasingly engaging with issues relating to it.

The group exhibition Girls Can Tell displays works by a generation of artists born after 1970 that exemplify the shifted interaction with feminist issues in contemporary art. There are often feminist undertones, and at time feminist issues are expressed subliminally through the use of materials and techniques and employ a certain elegance of form and light aesthetic in order “to use these weapons.”

Girls Can Tell is the third part of an exhibition trilogy that deals with different feminist issues in contemporary art in various manners. The Bonner Kunstverein focuses on the reality of female participation in exhibitions in its presentation Their Stories (since May 2013), and the Kunstverein München criticises institutions using strategies from Gender Politics and Feminism in Door: Between Either and Or (since July 2013).

The exhibitions are accompanied by a three-step workshop in Bonn, Munich, and Bremen that deals with the main topics and that is being developed in collaboration with the art historian Kerstin Stakemeier and the students in the seminar Separatism and Autonomy at the Academy of Art in Munich. The workshop in Bremen will take place on  October 31st / November 1st and will involve the artist Michaela Melian (Hamburg and Munich) and the art theorist Hanne Lorek (University of Fine Arts, Hamburg).

For more information, click here.

Tammy Rae Carland | Alien She | Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University

“Alien She”
Curated by Astria Suparak and Ceci Moss
September 21, 2013 – February 16, 2014
Opening Reception: September 20, 6-8PM
Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, PA

“Alien She” will be the first exhibition to critically examine Riot Grrrl’s history and relevance today…

Artists: Ginger Brooks Takahashi (North Braddock), Tammy Rae Carland (San Francisco), Miranda July (Los Angeles), Faythe Levine (Milwaukee), Allyson Mitchell(Toronto), L.J. Roberts (Brooklyn), Stephanie Syjuco (San Francisco).

Archival materials from: EMP Museum, Seattle, Interference Archive, Jabberjaw, the Riot Grrrl Collection at the Fales Library & Special Collections, NYU, and many personal collections

Regional music playlist curators: Tammy Rae Carland of Mr. Lady Records and I (heart) Amy Carter zine (The South); Pete Dale of Slampt Records (North East England); Donna Dresch of Chainsaw Records and Team Dresch (Pacific Northwest); Lynne T + Bernie Bankrupt of Lesbians on Ecstasy (Canada); Allison Wolfe of Bratmobile, Girl Germs zine, Ladyfest (Olympia); Elisa Gargiulo of Dominatrix (Brazil); Ceci Moss + Astria Suparak (California). 

For more information, click here.

Shannon Finley | Painting Forever! | KW Institute for Contemporary Art

“Painting Forever!”
Keilrahmen
KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin
September 18 – November 10, 2013

Opening on September 17, 2013 during the Berlin Art Week

“Painting Forever!” is a collaboration between Berlinische Galerie, Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle, KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen ze Berlin. For the launch of this collaboration, initiated by the Berlin Senate, the four institutions involved have chosen painting as the focal point for the first year of this collaboration, which is to be continued in the future…

KW’s contribution to the cooperation, KEILRAHMEN (“stretchers”), is a collection of more than 70 pieces by contemporary painters who work or have worked in Berlin. The exhibition, curated by Ellen Blumenstein, offers insights into questions and topics being addressed in painting today and examines the meaning and significance of the medium of painting for contemporary art along with the potential it harbors. 

The exhibition includes contributions from both established and emerging artists, some of whom are exhibiting for the first time in an institution. The works address topics that are genuinely specific to painting, such as light and composition, but also investigate the materiality of painting and explore the possibilities panel painting offers. Diverse interpretations of painting are represented and brought into conversation with one another.

For more information, click here.

Tammy Rae Carland | Twisted Sisters: Reimagining Urban Portraiture | Museum Bärengasse

“Twisted Sisters: Reimagining Urban Portraiture”
Zürich, Museum Bärengasse
Exhibition + 80 Downtown kiosk posters 
2013 Sister City Exchange: San Francisco – Zürich
July 4 – September 7, 2013

The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery has teamed up with the City of Zürich to present a dynamic, multifaceted, travelling exhibition project celebrating the 10th anniversary of our Sister City relationship. SFAC Galleries piloted the biennial Sister City Exchange in 2011 with Sydney, AU, and has greatly expanded the scope of this important cultural exchange project with the Zürich collaboration. In addition to a central exhibition featuring artwork by emerging and mid-career photographers from SF and Zürich, there will be downtown kiosk posters, educational programs and public events that accompany the exhibition in each city…

TWISTED SISTERS is co-curated by SFAC Galleries Director, Meg Shiffler and Zürich-based independent curator Alexandra Blättler. They asked conceptual photographers from each city to create new and unexpected urban portraits. The resulting 80+ images challenge and occasionally subvert stereotypes associated with these two great metropolises through narratives and landscapes that strip away, twist, or dig under the picture-perfect postcard and expose the nasty histories, private lives, hidden views and constructed alter-realities.

Featured Artists:

San Francisco
Tammy Rae Carland, Pablo Guadiola, John Chiara, Sanaz Mazinani, Lindsey White

Zurich
Bianca Brunner, Cat Tuong Nguyen, Georg Gatsas, Dominic Hodel, Marianne Müller

For more information, click here.

Hugh Scott-Douglas | The Travel Almanac | Spring/Summer 2013

“A Moment with Hugh Scott-Douglas”
Interviewed by John Roberts
The Travel Almanac, Issue 5, Spring/Summer 2013, pg.60-62

Read the full interview here

Kori Newkirk | Art Ltd. | July-August 2013

“Kori Newkirk”
With a style once labeled “ghetto-fabulous conceptualism,” the LA-based artist examines issues of identity and material allegory
By DeWitt Cheng
July/August 2013 issue – pg. 56-59

Read the full feature here

Common and Not | “Formal Alchemy” at Fused | The New York Times

“Common and Not”
Arena – Highlights from T Magazine.com
By Brooke Hodge
View the full article here

Fused, a new exhibition space devoted to exploring the increasingly frequent intersection of art and design, opened last week in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. The gallery is a collaboration between Jessica Silverman (of the namesake gallery in that city) and the designer Yves Béhar. The inaugural exhibition, “Formal Alchemy” (below), Ms. Silverman said, “brings together a cross-generational group of three artists who are all creating elevated objects from common ingredients through conceptually interesting processes.” In Nicole Wermers’s “Water Shelf” pieces she transforms tubular-steel shelving into shallow, wall-mounted water troughs. Amikam Toren’s “Stacks” sculptures pair cardboard boxes and painted canvases. N. Dash explores the sculptural potential of the two-dimensional medium by combining adobe with the classic ingredients of painting. The exhibition is on view until October at Fused, 1401 16th Street, San Francisco.

Tammy Rae Carland | We Had Nothing To Do And We Did It | Adobe Books Backroom Gallery

“We Had Nothing To Do And We Did It”
Curated by Calcagno Cullen
Adobe Books Backroom Gallery
July 1 – August 23, 2013
Opening reception: Saturday, July 13th, 7-11PM

Benjamin Perkins Burke, Tammy Rae Carland, Christian Davies, Erin Colleen Johnson, Susan O’Malley, Erik Otto

Adobe Books Backroom Gallery: 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA 94110

For more information, visit adobebooksbackroomgallery.blogspot.com or contact adobebooksbackroom@gmail.com.

By Design: A Place Where Art and Design Collide | “Formal Alchemy” | T Magazine

“By Design | A Place Where Art and Design Collide”
By Brooke Hodge
June 24, 2013
T Magazine article here

Fused, a new exhibition space devoted to exploring the increasingly frequent intersections between art and design, opens this week in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood. The gallery is a collaboration between Jessica Silverman (of the namesake San Francisco gallery) and the designer Yves Behar. As Behar was building a new office space for fuseproject, his multidisciplinary design studio, he decided to include a gallery space as well. “Traditionally, design agencies have an exhibition space to show their own work,” Behar said. “I found that to be a little static and boring. There are a lot of creative businesses in Potrero Hill and I wanted to provide a space where a conversation between designers and the art world could happen.” Silverman will curate a program of exhibitions for Fused’s first year, while continuing to run her own gallery…

The inaugural exhibition, “Formal Alchemy,” Silverman explained, “brings together a cross-generational group of three artists who are all creating elevated objects from common ingredients through conceptually interesting processes.” Nicole Wermers uses the forms and vocabulary of design objects — industrial shelving units and acrylic boxes — but subverts them in ways that alter one’s sense of the everyday. In her “Water Shelf” pieces, she transforms tubular steel shelving into shallow, wall-mounted water troughs. Amikam Toren’s “Stacks” sculptures pair cardboard boxes and painted canvases, creating a hybrid between painting and sculpture. N. Dash explores the sculptural potential of a two-dimensional medium by combining adobe with the classic ingredients of painting. All three artists transform utilitarian materials into something more elevated.

While Behar hopes that Fused’s exhibitions will engage the wider creative community, he also believes his own studio staff will be inspired by the lively dialogue between art and design taking place — literally — next door.

Fused, 1401 16th Street, San Francisco. “Formal Alchemy” opens June 25 and is on view until October.

“Formal Alchemy” | fuseproject | Curated by Jessica Silverman

“Formal Alchemy”: N. Dash, Amikam Toren, and Nicole Wermers
Curated by Jessica Silverman
FUSED: 1401 16th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
June 25 – October 2013
Opening Reception: June 25 from 6-8PM

“Alchemy” is the power or process of transforming something common into something special. All three of the artists in “Formal Alchemy” have the ability to create elegant objects out of common ingredients through conceptually interesting processes. In a variety of twists on the tradition of being “true” to materials, Toren, Wermers and Dash exploit physical properties beyond their typical uses. The exhibition bears witness to a conversation about transformation, utility and the authority of pure form…

Amikam Toren (b. 1945) is represented in the exhibition by his Stacks sculptures from the 1980’s. Toren’s totemic Stacks involve removing and puling one side of a cardboard box, adding pigment to the pulp, then applying the mixture to canvas in a way that cpatures some aspect of the box (e.g. “This way up” or “Fragile”), then stretching the painted canvas over the opening of the original box. The artist then stacks the paintings, both reasserting their identity as cardboard boxes and proclaiming their status as sculpture.

Nicole Wermers (b. 1971) starts with diverse natural and man-made objects, subverting them in formally intriguing ways that alter our senses of the everyday. With Water Shelf #1 and Water Shelf #2 (both from 2012), Wermers turns industrial shelving units upside down and transforms them into shallow troughs for holding water. Untitled (bench), 2010, is transparent acrylics box in a branch-like form that contains three rocks that were handpicked by the artist. One can perch on the work but the plastic may scratch, so the viewer must wrestle with their desire for function. Many of Wermers’s works have a purpose beyond their art objecthood, but it is invariably an impractical one.

N. Dash (b. 1980) combines adobe, a material that is rarely used in painting, with the classic ingredients of art – stretchers, linen and paint. By these means, she probes and enlivens conventional approaches to painting. In Night Light 1 and Night Light 2, Dash creates a dynamic interplay between weight and sensuality of the linen and the careful application of hand painting, thus exploring the sculptural potential of the two-dimensional medium.

About FUSED: 

FUSED is an exhibition space where the art and design worlds can come together. Adjacent to the world-renowned design studio, fuseproject in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill, FUSED is hosted by its founder Yves Behar and curated in its inaugural year by gallerist Jessica Silverman. Behar and Silverman will work together to foster a provocative dialogue between art and design through several exhibitions a year. The space will be open to the public on weekdays from 10AM to 6PM.

“Art is a growing passion of mine,” says Behar. “Establishing FUSED is a way to engage with and support the art community directly. Sharing this inspiration with the broader art and design worlds, the fuseproject team, and the neighborhood where it lives, is a contribution we look forward to making.”

“In its first year,” says Silverman, “I will curate a series of shows featuring artists who explore the explicit tropes and subtle nuances of design in their artworks. I have always been obsessed with aesthetic minutiae and am keen to curate exhibitions that draw attention to formal details that sometimes go unnoticed.”

Barbara Kasten | Scenes | Kadel Willborn Gallery

“Scenes”
Kadel Willborn Gallery
Düsseldorf, Germany
May 24 – July 6, 2013
Opening: May 24, 2013
Website here

The second solo exhibit with Kadel Willborn Gallery is at the new location in Dusseldorf.

It includes a site specific video sculptural installation, SCENES which addresses the spatial quality and atmosphere of a theatrical set-up.   In addition each photograph is a mise-en-scéne for an act that is presented by the sculptural forms depicted.  Shadows and reflections fill the stage conjuring up a unique mysterious relationship between the elements for the viewer to ponder.

Dashiell Manley | Artforum | Critic’s Pick

Redling Fine Art/LAXART
May 7 – June 29
Full article here

Upon entering Dashiell Manley’s installation, The Great Train Robbery (Scene 3 version B), 2013, the viewer is immediately confronted with a large steel wall frame and, leaning against it, a glossy Plexiglas surface. Beneath the acrylic plane is a pastiche of ink spatters, pencil-drawn notes and storyboards, and brightly colored lighting gels. This flat surface’s opposing side, of gouache on linen, showcases painted geometric forms (checkers, arcs, rectangles) overlaid by dripping turn of the century shorthand symbols. Five iterations of these two-part structures are dispersed throughout the gallery…

Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 film The Great Train Robbery, known for its innovative use of camera angles, transitions, and composite editing to convey climactic narrative, inspired Manley’s eponymous series. The artist initially constructed the panels and frames to serve as a reconfigurable set for a film of the same name, currently on view at LAXART, Los Angeles. The two-channel video work is a stop-motion sequence of JPEG files that show the artist performing a series of actions (dictated by the leaning panels’ shorthand inscriptions) through and around the vertical structures.

Following filmmaking’s extensive production process, Manley produced three different versions of these five structures for his scene takes: A (also on view at LAXART), B, and C. (The latter configuration is mounted in an offsite storage unit, accessible with the gallery’s assistance.) This stored third set of structures is more tightly arranged than those found within the gallery, as their steel frames intersect with the wooden frames of the rented space and match the building’s foot-long distance between studs. The accord in proportions may be due to both coincidence and artistic intent. Regardless of their fate on or off the market, these works, like most art, will live in storage. Here, situated three blocks from Redling’s gallery walls, one can wonder—Is this still Manley’s film set or is it art’s cutting-room floor?

Hugh Scott-Douglas | Canadian Art

“Canadians Ship Out To Art Basel”
By Leah Sandals
Published: June 13, 2013
Full article here

Works by several Canadian artists, including Hugh Scott-Douglas, Rebecca Brewer, Liz Magor, Gareth Moore and Ian Wallace, are being featured at Art Basel in Switzerland this week. The fair opens to the public today.

OCAD-trained, New York–based artist Hugh Scott-Douglas is being featured in a solo presentation at the booth of San Francisco dealer Jessica Silverman, which is located in Art Basel’s Statements section.

Asked why Scott-Douglas, born in 1988, is the right artist for a solo project at this time, Silverman expressed confidence in his practice.

“Hugh Scott-Douglas is part of a younger generation of artists, who are making paintings and sculptures with unexpected combinations of analog and digital media,” Silverman said via email. “His work is creative, intelligent and ambitious. I was confident that he would make a new body of work that held its own on the international platform afforded by Art Basel’s Statements.”…

Scott-Douglas’s installation in Basel presents three new bodies of work displayed on and in road cases.

The “Chopped Bills” series results from high-res scans of small ink stamps found on American $100 bills. These scans are then used for dye-sublimation works on linen.

Scott-Douglas’s “Torn Cheque” works consist of abstract laser cuts on white gessoed canvas, with the cuts based on images of the artist’s earlier works as re-ordered by a digital algorithm.

The last series, “Bit Rot,” consists of four works derived from disassembled lighting-gel catalogs. Framed by slide mounts and run in an analog slide projector, the colored gels are transformed into projections.

Elsewhere in Art Basel, Vancouver’s Catriona Jeffries and Montreal’s Landau Fine Art have booths.

Jeffries has brought a variety of works by rising and established Vancouver-based artists. These include recent oil-on-panel paintings by Rebecca Brewer and objects from Liz Magor‘s Being This series.

In a review of Magor’s Being This series debut for Canadian Art, Lisa Marshall observed that each item from this series consists of a gift box that “presents its own unique arrangement: a neatly folded shirt, blouse or jacket embellished with fabrics, sequins, price tags, garment labels, slogans and other found objects.”

Sobey Award finalist for 2012 Gareth Moore is represented at Jeffries’s booth with electrical poles from his Place By the Buried Canal performance/installation, where he established a living space in a public park in Germany as part of Documenta 13.

Black and white works by influential photoconceptualist Ian Wallace are also being featured by Jeffries. These include the photo assemblages Poverty, The Decalogue and An Attack on Art and Literature I & II.

Landau Fine Art, a perennial exhibitor at large international art fairs, specializes in modern works by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Karel Appel, and Le Corbusier. It is expected to continue this tradition in Basel.

As usual, Canadian talent is also being brought to the fair by a range of international galleries.

For instance, work by Calgary-born, Montreal-based artist Hajra Waheed is being exhibited at the booth of Kolkata, India, gallery Experimenter, located in Art Basel’s Feature section.

Waheed, whose work has been collected by MoMA and the British Museum, is showing a new set of her Expansion Charts, which catalogue the destruction of historic buildings around Masjid Al-Nabawwi in Medina and Masjid Al-Haram in Mecca, two of the most important houses of worship for the Muslim world.

In January, Experimenter opened Waheed’s first solo exhibition in India, featuring work based on her experience of growing up in the Saudi Aramco compound in Saudi Arabia. Waheed’s first public-gallery solo show in Canada recently closed at the Art Gallery of Windsor.

Other Canadian works at the fair include sculptures by David Altmejd at the booth of New York dealer Andrea Rosen. A recent Rodney Graham lightbox titled Drywaller’s Boombox is advertised by New York’s 303 Gallery in the fair showguide, while Berlin’s Johnen Galerie is touting another recent Graham lightbox, Sunday Sun. Two new prints by Janice Kerbel—Love! Lust! Deceit! Revenge! Death! and The Pickpocket—are also noted in the show inventory of Reykjavik’s i8 Gallery.

Art Basel, founded in 1970, features more than 300 galleries focused on modern and contemporary art. It continues to June 16.

Tammy Rae Carland | The Riot Grrrl Collection | Feminist Press

The Riot Grrrl Collection
Edited by Lisa Darms
Available here

For the past two decades, young women (and men) have found their way to feminism through Riot Grrrl. Against the backdrop of the culture wars and before the rise of the Internet or desktop publishing, the zine and music culture of the Riot Grrrl movement empowered young women across the country to speak out against sexism and oppression, creating a powerful new force of liberation and unity within and outside of the women’s movement. While feminist bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile fought for their place in a male-dominated punk scene, their members and fans developed an extensive DIY network of activism and support. The Riot Grrrl Collection reproduces a sampling of the original zines, posters, and printed matter for the first time since their initial distribution in the 1980s and ’90s, and includes an original essay by Johanna Fateman and an introduction by Lisa Darms…

Lisa Darms is a senior archivist at the Fales Library & Special collections at New York University, where she has created the Fales Riot Grrrl Collection.

Johanna Fateman is a writer, musician, record producer, and member of the post-punk band Le Tigre. She, along with Kathleen Hanna and several other key Riot Grrrls, recently donated her zines and early writings to the Fales.

Tammy Rae Carland | Art and Queer Culture | Phaidon

Art and Queer Culture
Edited by Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer
Comprehensive survey covering 125 years of art that has constructed, contested or otherwise responded to alternative forms of sexuality
Available here

About the book: Spanning 125 years, Art and Queer Culture is the first major historical survey to consider the ways in which the codes and cultures of homosexuality have provided a creative resource for visual artists. Attempts to trouble the conventions of gender and sexuality, to highlight the performative aspects of identity and to oppose the tyranny of the normal are all woven into the historical fabric of homosexuality and its representation. From Oscar Wilde to Ryan Trecartin, from the molly houses of eighteenth-century London to the Harlem drag balls of the 1920s, the flamboyant refusal of social and sexual norms has fuelled the creation of queer art and life throughout the modern period…

Although the book proceeds in a chronological fashion, it does not propose a progressive narrative in which homosexuals become increasingly adept at negotiating the circumstances of censorship and overcoming the terms of stigma and invisibility. The dialogue between art and queer culture does not move towards ever more affirmative images of equality and dignity. Rather than countering homophobia with ‘positive’ images of assimilation, many of the artists and photographers featured in this book draw upon, and even draw out, the deviant force of homosexuality. 

Art and Queer Culture includes not only pictures made and displayed under the rubric of fine art but also those intended for private, underground or otherwise restricted audiences. Scrapbooks, amateur artworks, cartoons, bar murals, anonymous photographs, activist posters – all appear in its pages, as do paintings, sculptures, art photographs and video installations. Writing queer culture into the history of art means redrawing the boundaries of what counts as art as well as what counts as history. It means searching for cracks in the partition that separates ‘high’ art from ‘low’ culture and in the divide between public achievement and private life.

The inclusion of the word ‘queer’ in the title is a considered choice. No single word can accommodate the sheer expanse of cultural practices that oppose normative heterosexuality. In its shifting connotation from everyday parlance to phobic epithet to defiant self-identification, ‘queer’ offers more generous rewards than any simple inventory of sexual practices or erotic object choices. 

The editors of Art and Queer Culture, Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer, have assembled a complete overview of the subject in three sections. Their definitive Survey essay recounts in detail the ways in which art has constructed, contested or otherwise responded to alternative forms of sexuality, from the emergence of homosexuality as an identity in the late nineteenth century to the pioneering ‘genderqueers’ of the early twenty-first. The Works section presents large full-colour images of over 250 key artworks, each accompanied by an informative caption. And the Documents section provides a generous archive of primary and secondary texts, including artist’s statements, exhibition reviews, personal manifestos, sociological essays and critical writings. The extensive back matter includes biographies of all the artists and authors plus a full bibliography.

Desirée Holman | The Indigo and The Ecstatic: A Motion To The Future | SFMOMA

Farewell Processional: The Indigo and The Ecstatic: A Motion To The Future
San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts (SFMOMA)
Sunday, June 2, 2013 – 5:30PM
Begins on the rooftop, then moves museumwide

As SFMOMA exits its current building to make way for the upcoming expansion, artist Desirée Holman conducts a series of movements that bridge our present potential to our future tense. Drawing on eccentric histories of time and space, from New Age culture and extraterrestrial encounter to paranormal powers, Holman mobilizes extraordinary characters, costumes, and objects that can make the museum’s and our own futures happen now. Help us bid adieu to our building by joining the processional as it winds its way from the museum’s rooftop down to the atrium and into the world outside…

Four columns of agents will conduct our journey. The Indigo Children, a living and evolving humanity whose emotional and intellectual intelligence outstrips our own, lead us through sound from our current place. Ecstatic Dancers demonstrate how our focused present can always lead us to a visionary space. Time Travel Captains sport empowering sculptural helmets, built by Holman, that open portals to where we want go. Our visitors are invited to join us in a final column populated by your visions of time travel, goddess worship, spaceships, aliens, druids, additional dimensions, and alternative worlds. We all have a key to future in each of our traditions and fantasies.

Holman’s The Indigo and the Ecstatic: A Motion to the Future is commissioned by the Live Art program at SFMOMA. We are happy to invite back many of the performers from our 24-hour live art variety show, Future Countdown Live, for this important finale.

Co-presented by Boing Boing

For more information, click here.

Barbara Kasten | Prague Biennale 6 | Czech Republic

Prague Biennale 6
Freight Railway Station, Prague, Czech Republic
June 6 – September 15, 2013
Website here

The inauguration of the 6th Prague Biennale is scheduled for Thursday, June 6, 2013, just after the opening week of the Venice Biennale. This year it is based at the functionalist railway station from 1936, designed by Karel Caivas and Vladimir Weiss, in the vibrant district of Zizkov the only freight railway station in the Czech Republic, which was recently pronounced as a national monument in March 2013…

The crucial point of Prague Biennale 6 is the section Expanded Painting, curated by Helena Kontova, Giancarlo Politi and Nicola Trezzi, which presents, as always, a spectacular international selection of contemporary painting. Participating artists include some major names on the international art scene including Ali Banisadr (US/IR), Lee Seung-Taek (KR), Bruno Munari (IT), Entang Wiharso (ID) and John Henderson (US).

This year, the former section of Prague Biennale dedicated to Czech contemporary art expands to an international context. The curators of the section titled Flow, Zuzana BlochovA and Patricia Talacko, do not define generational or local connections nor the current direction of contemporary art. Rather than being similar in content and form, what the artists have in common is their ability to let oneself be carried away and to suppress the intellectual, logical and speculative part of thinking which in turn gives a unique integrity to the works. Among the participants are Quirin Baumler (DE), Dirk Bell (DE), Milan Grygar (CZ), Cestmi­r Kafka (CZ), Esther Klas (DE/US), Barbara Kasten (US), Viktorie Valocka (CZ), Lenka Vi­tkova (CZ), Dominic Wood (AU/DE), B.Wurtz (US).

The Slovak section Beyond the Art, curated by Mira Sikorova-Putisova, will present work by a selection of renowned Slovak artists who predominantly live abroad. Their interactive and relational work is centred on social issues. Participating artists include Anton Cierny (SK), Katarina Hladekova (SK/CZ), Jana Kapelova (SK/CZ), Michal Murin (SK), Lucia Nimcova (SK / NL / BE).

Barbara Kasten | The 5th Dimension | Ricou Gallery

“The 5th Dimension” – Group Exhibition
Ricou Gallery, Brussels, Belgium
May 18 – July 6, 2013
Opening: May 18, 2-8PM
Website here

Exhibition curated by Benoît Lamy de La Chapelle // Bruno Botella, Barbara Kasten, Ajay Kurian, Anton Lieberman, Sara Ludy, Bevis Martin & Charlie Youle and Philip Newcombe.

What is the 5th Dimension? A telepathic space? A new notion for Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere”? The place for a new scientific understanding of cosmos? A brand new theosophy? From astrophysical research to esoteric speculations on internet, including Maya’s calendar – pointing out that 2012 was the time for ultimate telluric transformation described as “the ascension to the 5th Dimension” – theories aiming at legitimizing the existence of another Dimension remain uncountable. While astrophysicists still don’t define it, this scientific void arouses a frenzy of mental constructions and desiring-productions as prolific as mind knows no limit. This represents a free and still empty space, detached from material contingencies maintained by an occidental rationalist system, known for restraining creative power of the mind. And yet, it just happened that recent times are enabling such mental constructions, to such a point that it would be premature and presumptuous to judge them whimsical…

Far from considering those conceptions of a 5th Dimension as an art in itself, they nevertheless remain prodigiously creative and above all, foster imagination to eventually give rise to a genuine aesthetic: those of esoteric book covers, those that one can find on Google-images after entering “5th Dimension”, combining symbols of ancient civilizations, Indian mandalas, supernovas and aurora borealis’ types of pictures… It is exactly here that a connection can be made between this aesthetic of aggregates, with no specific origin, and hardly classifiable artworks which, at the very moment of the aesthetic experience, can barely be related to well known historical categories, those normally influencing our comprehension of artworks.

Such a state of mind may as well correspond to this 5th Dimension, that empty space giving free reign to the often vain attempt to connect our perception to a fleeting memory, a repressed feeling, an unfounded assemblage, floating deep in our soul. Something exceeding our comprehension.

Sean Raspet Interviewed by Jessica Silverman | SFAQ | Issue 13

San Francisco Arts Quarterly (SFAQ)
Issue 13: May – July 2013
Full interview here

Jessica Silverman: The images that you use often have digital origins, whether combined and assembled into a single image, transformed through layering materials or edited digitally. What is the importance of using digital images? From where are your images culled? Would you explain your systems?

Sean Raspet: The majority of images we encounter have been translated into a digital version. There is no discernable difference between many “digital” and “non-digital” images. But, I do think that the digitally based platforms of image production and consumption have accelerated certain tendencies already inherent in photography and image culture…

One aspect of digital image circulation that interests me is stock photography and online image banks. These image banks also existed in various pre-internet forms, but to my mind they have come to reflect the nature of images in the present paradigm: encapsulation within expansive archives, accelerated circulation, increased interconnection and flexibility, and the fragmentation of images into their searchable keyword content. I’m especially interested in the uncanny qualities of stock photographs––how they seem to congeal into semi-autonomous image archetypes or genres. To me they seem to be moving towards an increasingly interconnected and codified system with its own self-referential logic––a kind of strange parallel universe.

After working directly with stock photography for many years, I started on a different project where I began to treat my own photographs as a kind of reusable image bank. I started from an arbitrary group of analog photographs that I had taken in a Burger King restaurant in San Francisco. I then began a process of fragmenting and recombining the digitized negatives. At a certain stage, I would have the resulting image arrangements printed––usually on printable office-type coffee mugs. The resulting mugs would then be arranged and documented as an artwork/installation. This photo-documentation would then be added back into the system of folders of images to be further fragmented and recombined with the other images, which would then be printed on other coffee mugs, etc.

I envisioned the overall process (which is ongoing) as a kind of feedback loop. As the process continued, the image fragments that had resulted from several generations of cropping and recombining became easier to fit into new arrangements with minimal editing. They reached a kind of stasis and lost a certain friction. They also seemed more “aesthetic” and pleasant.

JS: How would you describe your relationship to abstraction?

SR: There are a lot of different ways to think about the term abstraction. I’m particularly interested in it as an economic or informational sense––abstraction through financial derivatives or data-mining for example.

But as images become increasingly codified through keyword systems and search algorithms, and as they become increasingly self-referential, they have more to do with informational abstraction. Instead, they move towards a condition where they are primarily referring to other images (which in turn are also referring to other images) in a kind of recursive chain of association.

So, in this sense, one could say that the most clearly recognizable images––the ones that most effectively reference a particular image-concept or genre––are in fact the most abstract. I’m very interested in these processes, and as a side note, I think it’s interesting how, along with the term “abstraction,” the term “autonomy” also gets redeployed within this new context in a way that is almost a complete reversal from, yet possibly somehow still parallels the way these terms were used to refer to early 20th century developments in art.

JS: You mentioned your interest in legal language. What about it intrigues you and how do you see it being an important influence on your work?

SR: This relates to abstraction in a different sense. Legal language often represents a desire to completely define and anticipate all potential variables of a subject or situation. To leave nothing unstated, or where there is ambiguity, to use it as a precise tool. In a sense, that is, to fully
reconstitute a subject within the language of the law––and thus to abstract it into this frame. But the resulting abstraction has a materiality and friction that arises from the medium of language and legal language specifically. And this materiality is another kind of entity with its
own effects.

I often compare it to programming code, which is another interest of mine. They are both operational languages in that they accomplish something by stating that it is so. Their statements and definitions are self-enacting. In my own work, I’ve been working with the idea of writing “programs” that exist on paper without any sort of hardware basis, which the reader executes in the process of reading. It is a blurring of the line between legal language and programming code.

JS: Who are your key artistic influences?

SR: I always find this question difficult. I feel like I’m influenced by an overall climate, and I find it hard to trace that to particular artists. There would be too many to list. But a few artists/groups that I often revisit are Mondrian and Art & Language.

I think both of these artists/groups deal with the problem of overproduction and pointlessness in art, which maybe becomes a metaphor for the economy at large. The “endgame” of art can’t be to endlessly produce something new, or even to produce at all. For Mondrian it requires boiling down the medium into its minimum necessary components, which can then be reshuffled ad infinitum.

Art & Language do something similar in their shift of emphasis towards the discursive and administrative. I think it’s telling that they resisted the term “dematerialization” in art, since everything that exists has to have some sort of material basis, even if it is fleeting and hard
to fathom.

Jessica Silverman | Whitewall Magazine | April 29, 2013

“Jessica Silverman on Being An Art Dealer in San Francisco”
By Tess Thackara
Full interview here

In six short years, the dealer, curator, director, and writer, Jessica Silverman, has acquired a reputation for discovering emerging artists via her San Francisco space, the Jessica Silverman Gallery, which is nestled between the city’s run-down Tenderloin district and the well-heeled Nob Hill

Before meeting her for this interview, we knew her mainly for the excellent roster of artists she represents—which run the gamut in practices, from Luke Butler’s send-ups of male pop-culture figures, and Desiree Holman’s videos of fantastical avatar battles and dance-offs, to Christopher Badger’s abstract charcoal wall works, sculpture, and explorations of measurement systems. We spoke to her about her program and the San Francisco art scene.

WHITEWALL: You’re known as one of the bigger risk-takers in the San Francisco gallery scene. What are the challenges in dealing with artists who are conceptual?
JESSICA SILVERMAN: I trust what I like and appreciate challenging work. I am also interested in aesthetics and beauty, so I have worked to develop a program that embodies both conceptual rigor and visual interest. We focus on solo exhibitions with artists who have never shown in San Francisco, or even in America. I guess it is risky, but we’ve built a program and a business model that people trust and respect.

WW: Desiree Holman’s videos are fantastic, but I imagine they’re hard to sell. Is that the case? 
JS: Desiree’s videos are predominantly three-channel, which means we have most success with institutions and foundations. Desiree also makes beautiful works on paper and we just had a very successful booth with her at The Armory Show in New York. I also represent the LA-based artistDashiell Manley, who makes videos that blend thousands of still photographs taken during the production of his double-sided paintings. Collectors are so interested in his work that we have a waiting list.

WW: How do you see San Francisco as a distinct community and market from other art communities in the country? Do you ever think about moving the gallery to New York or LA, for instance?
JS: I like that I have been able to grow my program without being under a microscope and have the opportunity to present new artists to California and San Francisco. The gallery is committed to San Francisco, but we also show at art fairs, including Art BaselFIACFriezeEXPO Chicago, andDallas Art Fair. LA is enticing because I represent a few LA-based artists and we could potentially reach a broader audience there, but I’m not sure that’s the case—just today I had three different collectors from LA in the gallery.

WW: Recently, there was a piece in the Wall Street Journal that claimed that the second wave tech boom is creating a new collector base in the Bay Area. Have you seen evidence of that?
JS: Moving away from the computer screen and into an art gallery is exciting and we enjoy being a part of the education process for new collectors. However, when people are new to collecting, they tend to start by buying from mainstream dealers like Gagosian rather than galleries that represent emerging artists. This summer we’re going to present a group show “Infinite Inclusion” that will explore the everyday surrealism of our 21st century media environment. The exhibition will include sculpture, painting, photography and installation by Aleksandra DomanovićCarter MullSean Raspet, and Hannah Sawtell, and I think it will interest the tech community.

WW: Do you see the role of a dealer as an educator?
JS: Yes, this business is educational, but never didactic. That might be the biggest part of the job, especially because I am the primary dealer for most of the artists in my roster and work diligently to promote their work to curators, collectors, and dealers elsewhere.

WW: Are you selective about who you sell to? What does the ideal collector look like?
JS: The ideal collector is committed to keeping the work, displaying it well, and loaning it to museums when necessary. I prefer to sell to collectors who I have met in person, and who support the gallery’s program as a whole, rather than ones who only want to buy our trendy artists. I’m in the field of building careers and, although sales and the commercial side is a huge aspect of what we do, I’m equally interested in a collector’s ability to support an artist over time.

Susanne M. Winterling | Group Exhibition | Lübeck, Germany

Vielleicht sehe ich auch zu tief in die Dinge hinein (Maybe I look too deep into things)
Overbeck-Gesellschaft Kunstverein Lübeck Galerie
Lübeck, Germany
May 5 – June 23, 2013

For more information, click here.

Susanne M. Winterling | Prints Available

Susanne M. Winterling
Maske und Material, 2013
Dye Transfer Print
Image: 55 x 25 centimeters; 21.7 x 9.8 inches
Print: 60 x 50 centimeters; 23.6 x 19.7 inches
Edition 30 + 3AP

Available here.

Luke Butler, Desirée Holman | Approximately Infinite Universe | Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

Group Exhibition
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), La Jolla
June 8 – September 1, 2013

Approximately Infinite Universe 
is an exhibition loosely inspired by science fiction, with its exploration of other possible worlds, its dislocation of spatial and temporal trajectories, and its challenges to distinctions between self and other, human and alien. The artists in the exhibition understand art as a vehicle for time travel, employing an array of mediums as means to move backward and forward through time. Such work revisions fraught histories and envisions utopian futures, with the effect of gaining insight into our complicated present…

Recently, allusions to space travel and depictions of the cosmos have appeared with increasing frequency in contemporary art and in the broader culture. One way to understand this phenomenon might be to see it as part of a larger escapist impulse in the twenty-first century zeitgeist: consider the recent development of commercial spacecraft and privatized space exploration, or last year’s proposal by presidential primary candidate Newt Gingrich for a colony on the moon.

Rather than simply referencing the motifs and rhetoric of space travel, the artists in Approximately Infinite Universeemploy ideas and metaphors associated with experimental science fiction (such as that of writers Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia E. Bulter, and Samuel R. Delany) to rethink cultural categories, imagine new and different sets of social and sexual relations, and to create alternative realities in which historical and fictional figures interact.

Approximately Infinite Universe is an exhibition featuring contemporary artistic thought experiments, exploring ideas surrounding aliens and others, bodily mutations, disorientation and weightlessness, reproductive technologies, utopia and dystopia, cities of the future, Afro-futurism, and meta-histories, among others. Artists in the exhibition include Edgar Arceneaux, Andrea Bowers, Matthew Buckingham, Luke Butler, Victoria Fu, Chitra Ganesh, Desirée Holman, Emre Hüner, Ann Lislegaard, Simone Leigh, Yoko Ono, the Otolith Group, Jacolby Satterwhite, Amie Siegel, Cauleen Smith, Kara Tanaka, and Saya Woolfalk.

Approximately Infinite Universe is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and is made possible by a generous gift from the Cochrane Exhibition Fund. Institutional support for MCASD is provided, in part, by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture.

For more information, click here.

Christopher Badger, “Lunar Mirror” | Visual Art Source

Written by DeWitt Cheng
Visual Art Source
Full review here

The battle between reason and emotion has deep historical roots in art. In the early 19th century there was Neoclassism versus Romanticism; then there was the utopian and dystopian wings of modernism in the twentieth. In current discourse, that conflict between human Lapiths and bestial Centaurs takes shape as a clash between culture and nature, one that favored the former a generation ago, but only for a time. In recent years we have come to see culture in more traditional, modest terms — as a subset of nature…

Christopher Badger’s “Lunar Mirrors” focus on the mathematics of astronomy — the rigorous simplification required to construct analytical models — and the elusive realities of the material world—in this case, the moon, that mutable satellite that affects both the tides and, if you believe in astrology, the affairs of men. A previous sculpture by this Los Angeles-based conceptual artist and musician, “Monument To Secrets Lost In The Night Of Time,” took the form of a large irregular seven-sided polygon (or heptagon) fabricated from door-frame components. The meta-object contained smaller concentric heptagons, like nesting Russian dolls, framing a central aperture.

With this new work Badger divides his interests in mathematics and randomness or irregularity, previously combined, into 2D and 3D works, respectively. Square-format drawings or paintings in chalk and oil paint on black gessoed panels suggest blackboards as well as astronomical charts. “Lunar Mirrors” are silvery cast-aluminum moonscapes, replete with mountains, craters and fissures. Some of them are wall-mounted, while others are floor-mounted, atop short-legged tables. They invoke the moon’s historical identity as earth’s withdrawn, ghostly partner or, in mythic terms, the female yang to the sun’s complementary yin.

The elegant minimalism of Badger’s astronomical charts or diagrams emphasizes the antique rationality of Newtonian physics, with perfect spheres, variously illuminated, pictured in their various aspects and phases, or illustrating, in the polygon pieces, with their circular orbits and trajectories, that planetary bodies obey physical laws. This is a readily comprehensible, navigable Renaissance space, even if it’s airless. The seven-foot-square “Shadow Phase” presents a circle of sixteen circular moons, at various degrees of illumination, with a full moon at noon and a new moon a six o’clock. Slightly larger circles are inscribed in white lines both inside and outside the circular cycle, tangent to the shaded moons. It’s all steeped in orderly progression, closer to the aesthetically appealing but mathematically and astronomically impossible crystal sphere’s of the Ptolemaic system, the Divine Clockwork universe long since shattered by modern scientific knowledge. 

“The Construction 3-15” series, comprised of four-foot-square works, uses polygons of various types, centered in the black image field, to generate various circular projections, which are tinted in various gray shades, suggesting lens flare, gravitational fields, ionization zones, etc. The geometric solids of trigon, tetragon, pentagon, hexagon, octagon decagon, dodecagon, and pentadecagon, with their three to fifteen sides, thus take on cosmic, symbolic and even, if you are a peruser of alchemical, theosophical, or religious publications, mystical implications.

The more random, contingent nature of reality is reflected, literally, in the shiny but optically distorted surfaces of Badger’s “Lunar Mirrors,” which are derived from 1974 Apollo 15 photographs. Necho, Proclus Crater, Rima Dawes, Rima Hadley and King Central Peaks may be accurate models of real places, but they’re imperfect objects of contemplation and poor vehicles for self-scrutiny; to this Pacific Coaster, the nacreous surfaces suggest abalone shells, or perhaps the liquid-mercury rivers entombed, along with his clay armies, with the First Chinese Emperor.

Dashiell Manley | The Great Train Robbery (Scene 3 version A) | LAXART

Solo Exhibition
LA><ART, Los Angeles
May 4 – June 22, 2013

For more information, click here.

Christopher Badger, “Lunar Mirror” | San Francisco Arts Quarterly

Written by Leora Lutz
San Francisco Arts Quarterly (SFAQ)
Full review here

“Lunar Mirror” is a simple, yet detailed and aesthetically pleasing exhibition of aluminum sculpture and chalk/oil drawings on black grounds by Christopher Badger. Derived from an interest in studying the geography and cycles of the moon, the works nestle between earthworks and topography, abstraction and cosmology. The process holds my attention just as strongly as the works themselves, which are remarking on the potential for something more than they appear…

The series entitled “Lunar Mirrors” are cast aluminum relief sculptures generated through 3D mapping of photographs taken by the Apollo 15 spacecraft circa 1974. Knowing this, the pieces seem to allude to the human curiosity of planetary exploration while at the same time are solidified objects of potential. Like bronze baby shoes, they are cherished relics that bring a distant planet directly into our close gaze so that we may ponder our relationship to it – literally; each piece is polished so that the viewer can see their strangely distorted reflection in the ripples, small crevices, rolling planes and larger moon craters on the surfaces. This reflective relationship with the work is more difficult to experience in the pieces that are displayed on stout tables, but rather these allow the viewer to kneel down and study the terrain at an expected angle.

Although the tables are intriguing, the vertical pieces are more compelling and strongly support Badger’s scientific and conceptual interests. Consistent with all of the work is a clear cartographic dedication. While the “Lunar Mirrors” are definitive topographical studies, the piece “Shadow Phase” is a remarkable work of sixteen pristine, circles in varying shades of white to grey on a matte, black gesso panel. Each circle represents a phase of the moon – the full moon at clock’s midnight – the new moon at 6 p.m. The varying stages of waxing and waning complete the circular arrangement and are accented by concentric delicate, blue rings. Decidedly mathematical, this piece also alludes to the potential of celestial phenomenology while leveraging itself with Minimalism, or perhaps a nod to the mystically practical architecture of Buckminster Fuller. Within Badger’s studies of the moon’s texture and cyclical patterns, we are able to glimpse futuristic untouchable realms grounded in abstraction – which is equally elusive and nonetheless engaging.

Susanne M. Winterling | WINTER | Central Asian Pavilion

Central Asian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
June 1 – November 24, 2013
Preview: May 29 – 31, 2013

Curators: Tiago Bom and Ayatgali Tuleubek 
Artistic advisor: Susanne M. Winterling

Artists: 
Vyacheslav Akhunov (b. 1948) from Uzbekistan
Saodat Ismailova (b. 1981) from Uzbekistan 
Kamilla Kurmanbekova (b. 1986) & Erlan Tuyakov (b. 1985) from Kazakhstan
Ikuru Kuwajima (b. 1984) from Kazakhstan
Anton Rodin (b. 1988) & Sergey Chutkov (b. 1984) from Tajikistan
Aza Shade (b. 1988) from Kyrgyzstan…

Commissioner: HIVOS (Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation) 
Deputy Commissioner/Implementing Institution: The Academy of Fine Art/Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Dean Vanessa Ohlraun

The Central Asian Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia will present the exhibition WINTER, at the Palazzo Malipiero, featuring artists from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Selected through an open call directed at poets, writers, activists and other cultural practitioners, the artistic positions and discursive statements staged in the Pavilion will address questions relevant to Central Asian realities and beyond.

The title and underlying concept of WINTER comes from a poem by 19th-century Kazakh poet and thinker Abay Qunanbayuli, whose reflections on social justice endowed the region with a profound intellectual legacy. In re-contextualizing his poem, the Pavilion’s curators invoke poetic interpretations of reality. Through nuance and metaphor, Qunanbayuli’s poem reveals potential concepts for broader debate, raising questions rather than proposing firm statements.

The states of Central Asia are culturally similar, sharing a common past in their Soviet history. Now, after two decades of independence in the region, there have been substantial changes in social, political and cultural life. WINTER critiques the stagnation of these contexts, characterised by the absence of local spaces for analysis and artistic diversity. Yet, similar states of intellectual inertia can be identified around the world, inviting the universal question: “How can artists, cultural producers and activists react and respond?”

Parallel programme
Launched this February and continuing throughout spring in Oslo, the peripatetic parallel programme will continue throughout Central Asia, in collaboration with local institutions in Almaty, Bishkek and Dushanbe, from film screenings in spring, to seminars in autumn 2013. Through a diverse schedule of discussions, seminars and screenings, the programme sets out to find ways of establishing alternative models to foster the development of critical thinking and self-reflection within artistic contexts in Central Asia and across Europe. With the active participation of Central Asian and non-Central Asian contributors, these platforms will stress different aspects of the artistic production characteristic to the region, relevant to local and international audiences.

Breakfast Forum: “Perspectives Beyond Stagnation,” 30 May
During the preview of the 55th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia, the Central Asian Pavilion in Venice will host an opening breakfast and discussion on Thursday, 30 May 9–11am titled “Perspectives beyond Stagnation” organised in collaboration with the curators of LIAF 2013 (Lofoten International Art Festival www.liaf.no), Anne Szefer Karlsen, Bassam El Baroni and Eva González-Sancho. Speakers include historian of social and political thought Gopal Balakrishnan (History of Consciousness Department, UCSC) with a talk on “Further Convolutions of Capitalism” and philosopher and writer Aaron Schuster, who will address issues of transgression and constraint. This will be followed by an open discussion and tour of the exhibition with the curators and represented artists ofWINTER, Kamilla Kurmanbekova & Erlan Tuyakov, Anton Rodin & Sergey Chutkov, Aza Shadeand Saodat Ismailova.

The Central Asian Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia is commissioned by HIVOS (Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation) which has appointed the Oslo-based artists Tiago Bom (Portugal) and Ayatgali Tuleubek (Kazakhstan) as successful candidates of an International open call to curate this year’s pavilion. The artist Susanne M. Winterling is artistic advisor and The Academy of Fine Art/Oslo National Academy of the Arts (www.khio.no) was invited as the implementing institution, with Dean Vanessa Ohlraun as Deputy Commissioner. The project coordinator of the parallel programme in Central Asia is Almaty-based Yekaterina Serebryanaya, and the Venice coordinator is Andris Brinkmanis.

For more information, click here.

Tammy Rae Carland, Desirée Holman | Limited at The Lab

The Lab, San Francisco
Saturday, June 1, 2013
6:30 – 10:00PM; live auction starts promptly at 8:00PM

Join The Lab at a special event to support its experimental programming. Featuring a portfolio of very limited edition prints, an auction with a few surprises, and some exclusive but affordable pieces, don’t miss this unique opportunity to own work by Bay Area artists who have redefined the international art scene.

D-L Alvarez, Tammy Rae Carland, Ajit Chauhan, Seth Coen, Randy Colosky, Amanda Curreri, Anthony Discenza, Doron Fishman, Maggie Haas, Desiree Holman, Chris Johanson, Mary Anne Kluth, Alicia McCarthy, Barry McGee, Rubi Neri, Trevor Paglen, Clare Rojas, Zachary Royer Scholz, Michael Ryan, Clare Szydlowski, and more.

Your generous support of The Lab will fund innovative projects and future programming.

Contact auction@thelab.org for further information or click here.

Susanne M. Winterling | pocketpark | Lüttgenmeijer

Lüttgenmeijer, Berlin
April 26 – June 7, 2013
Opening reception: Sunday, April 28, 2013, 12:00-4:00PM

For more information, click here.

Christopher Badger, “Lunar Mirror” | Art Practical

Written by Mary Anne Kluth
Art Practical
Full review here

For his current solo exhibition at Jessica Silverman Gallery, Christopher Badger has created a suite of paintings and sculptures that draw on the aesthetics of Minimalism while incorporating pedagogical and informational forms of display. The pieces in Lunar Mirror explore territory well beyond their primary subject matter—the moon—and illustrate related phenomena, such as the physics of astronomical orbits and a variety of mathematical concepts, with the elegance and economy of a physics equation…

Cast in shiny, unadorned aluminum, the sculptural works, such as the wall-mounted Necho (all pieces are from 2013), and Rima Hadley, displayed on short table legs in the middle of the gallery’s floor, call to mind the minimalist tradition, particularly the work of Larry Bell. Like Bell’s sculptures, these pieces refract the gallery’s ambient lighting and pick up the color of any surrounding light or material. Unlike Bell’s works, their intricately modeled surfaces offer no clear reflection of viewers’ bodies circulating the space but instead resemble topographical maps of the moon’s surface. Rather than serve as accurate replicas, these works are in fact the product of a series of translations. First, Badger created digital files from aerial photographs of the moon from the 1970s, a process requiring speculative interpretation to generate topographical information such as relative altitudes and slopes. Working from these flattened images based on his calculations, Badger then created three-dimensional models of the terrain depicted. This allowance for interpretation opens up each sculpture’s final form: what are actually peaks could feasibly become valleys in the piece. 

For example, the contours of Necho’s central depression, which appears to recreate the piece’s titular meteor impact site, compose an elaborate guess as to the actual dimensions of the famous crater. Although Badger based the piece on an old photo, Necho’s finely detailed topographical form gives the appearance, and implicit authority, of a scientific or educational model. Badger’s decision to work from archival 

images, especially when the specific measurements of the objects in question are instantaneously available, is a move that privileges past scientific representations rather than currently verifiable information.

Similarly, the paintings—done in oil and chalk on black-gesso panels—reference in their scale, arrangement, and overall appearance the sort of blackboard diagrams frequently used to illustrate academic science lectures. Decagon Constructionhangs directly above Pentadecagon Construction, recalling both the blackboards hung in a similar manner in classic ’60s or ’70s photographs of the physicist Richard Feynman’s lectures and the minimalist display practices of the same era by artists such as Daniel Buren, Robert Ryman, and Donald Judd. Each of these paintings bears a number of concentric rings and intersecting lines, usually including a polygon; each illustrates a variety of mathematical relationships that are presented cleanly and precisely but are not explicitly labeled except perhaps by the piece’s title. The geometric information is being presented but not illuminated. Many sections are handcolored with Badger’s uneven but consistent marks, which create pleasing gradients and emphasize each composition’s flat abstraction. Shadow Phase (2013), the largest painting, and the only one not explicitly titled in relationship to its central geometry, portrays the familiar phases of the moon, with additional lines indicating epicyclical orbits or astronomical transits. Alternately, the piece can be read more abstractly as a map of flat, tangential relationships or symbolically, bringing to mind both the historical astronomers Tycho Brahe’s and Johannes Kepler’s diagrams, which attempted to prove Copernican astronomy, and Nancy Holt’s Dark Star Park (1984), an earth work that simultaneously illuminates and mystifies the human relationship to celestial bodies.

Badger seems to share Holt’s interest in both science and mysticism. Two paintings, Hexagon Construction andPentadecagon Construction feature the Flower of Life, anancient symbol of sacred geometry, a thought system that conflates mathematical purity, perfection, truth, and patterns in nature. Badger, however, depicts the Flower of Life as the product of mathematic relationships that don’t seem, on the surface, to support the same transcendent claims to the motif’s significance that New Age writers have more recently ascribed to it. Viewed together, this collection of work points both inward and outward simultaneously, not only ostensibly examining cold and remote celestial bodies in space but also contemplating the history of astronomy, physics, and mystical representations of those same bodies. The work holds such seemingly paradoxical modes of thought as mysticism and mathematics, intuition and empiricism, and aesthetics and scientific representation in careful balance.

Barbara Kasten | Vision Magazine, China | April 2013

Vision Magazine, April 2013 Issue
“Barbara Kasten: Geometric Abstraction on Photography”

View the excerpt here

Jessica Silverman Gallery | Whitewall Magazine | April 18, 2013

“Is the Dallas Art Fair Being Culturally Gentrified?”
Written by Amani Olu
Full article here

On April 11, artgoers gathered at the Fashion Industry Gallery in Dallas’ downtown Arts District for the fifth edition of the Dallas Art Fair. Founded by two longtime transplants, Chris Byrne and John Sughrue, the fair featured over 80 national and international dealers displaying painting, sculpture, works on paper, photography, video, and installation by modern and contemporary artists. Since 2009, the event has attracted over 30,000 guests, including a who’s who in Dallas and, increasingly, social royalty from cities like New York…

Browsing the fair during the preview gala, which benefited Nasher Sculpture CenterDallas Contemporary, and Dallas Museum of Art, our suspicions were confirmed – the fair, in terms of quality, made a quantum leap since the last edition, with galleries from New York, London, Chicago, San Francisco, Paris, Seoul, and Milan participating. Its manageable size, tight curation, and overall environment of smiling faces, made for an enjoyable art viewing experience, one that bests some of the more established fairs.

In its fifth year the fair graduated from featuring top galleries in Dallas and the surrounding region to working with dealers who may have mistakenly (and perhaps arrogantly) dismissed the city as a place of Philistines, even though some of the country’s most distinguished collectors (Marguerite Hoffman, Howard and Cindy Rachofsky, Catherine Rose, etc.) live there.

Today, things have changed, and if the mood of dealers on opening night was any indication of their current feelings about Dallas as a solid art market, then this is the city to be in the first week of April.

Jessica Silverman, who owns a gallery of the same name in San Francisco, said she was incredibly impressed with the fair this year. “It’s our second year. We came back because it worked out really well for us, and so far people seem to be selling, so that’s a good sign.”

The secret is finally out: There is gold in Dallas, or as New York dealer Franklin Parrasch put it, “There’s platinum.”

Back in 2009 when the fair started, 16 New York galleries were present, including Andrew EdlinNancy Hoffman, and Carrie Secrist. Two years later, influential galleries like D’Amelio TerrasZach Feuer, and CANADA exhibited at the fair, a move that likely influenced young, contemporary dealers to join the fray because this year it seemed as if “everyone” was in Dallas.

Young, cool-kid outfits – normally associated with NADA Art Fair, Frieze, Liste, and Independent – included The Journal GalleryVarious Small FiresJames FuentesNichelle BeaucheneNew GalerieMartosJohannes Vogt, and Marlborough Cheslea, each looking to forge long-term Dallas relationships.

The fair is clearly making strides at showing a broader, international range of contemporary exhibitors, but does it do so at the sake of alienating local and regional galleries, a form of (dare we say it) gentrification?

“No, that’s a crazy question,” said Lisa Cooley, owner of a New York gallery of the same name. “It’s just growing and changing to reflect the interest of the collectors here.”

Byrne, agreed, “The fair is an extension of what’s happening in the community with the collectors and institutions.”

Most people see the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas Contemporary, and Nasher Sculpture Center as important in bringing vigorous contemporary perspectives to Dallas, with the fair as ground zero for market activity.

Silverman, who participates in fairs around the globe, said it is about balance. “The fair has to balance a broad range of contemporary, local and international galleries if it wants to be on the map as a forward-thinking, contemporary fair.”

With the fair helping to put Dallas on the map, local galleries must contend with global competition, butNancy Whitenack, owner and director of Conduit Gallery, is up for the challenge. “It’s always kind of scary that all these great galleries will come in and poach our collectors, but the other part is the caliber of galleries coming in for the fair. It raises the level of expectations, so now I get to put my art against everyone else in the world, and I am very comfortable with that because [my program] stacks up.”

“There is something shaking in Dallas,” continued Whiteneck. People want to be part of it, like Hannah Bronfman and Jason Schwartzman who attended the fair preview gala (and after party) and the Dallas Museum Art Ball, respectively.

That’s not to say the fair’s forgotten its roots. “Dallas is always going to be known for the big hair and glam, and I don’t think we should do anything to dissuade that,” said Cris Worley, Dallas it-girl and gallery owner of the same name. “That’s part of our identity. And how we follow on in terms of cultural interest is yet to be determined, but there are a lot of people here interested in seeing our city grow culturally.”

Dashiell Manley | W Magazine | April 2013

W Magazine – April 2013 Issue
“The New Guard: The Next Generation of Talented Go-getters”

Just 29, the Los Angeles-based artist was featured in the Hammer Museum’s 2012 “Made in L.A.” exhibition and was one of the standouts at the New Art Dealers Alliance fair during Art Basel Miami Beach in December. Manley, who works in painting, sculpture, performance, and video, concocts dense landscapes of obscured letters, words, and images. His stop-motion videos are composed of thousands of photographs he shoots in the studio and act as a kind of frame for viewing his paintings — which (like the one above) are really two-sided: one side canvas, the other glass.

View the excerpt here.

Christopher Badger, “Lunar Mirror” | SF Art Enthusiast | Review

SF Art Enthusiast
Full review here

In a unique blend of artistic practice and scientific inquiry, Christopher Badger’s “Lunar Mirror,” at Jessica Silverman Gallery debuts the artist’s new series of polished cast aluminum sculptures, ”Lunar Mirrors,” and a 7×7 foot chalk-and-oil masterwork, “Shadow Phase.” Inspired by such artists like Robert Smithson, Sol LeWitt and Heinz Mack, as well as his interests in ancient Greek geometry and astrophotography, Christopher Badger continues his exploration into the relationship between abstraction and earthworks…

Badger’s previous solo exhibition at Jessica Silverman Gallery in 2010 explored a similar fascination of the natural landscape’s dramatic modulations. Works on view resulted from a trip to the peak of mount Whitney, the highest point in the continental U.S., and the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere, the Badwater Basin. Badger’s touchstone for this exhibition is the moon, where the artist advances his interest in the process of map-making, investigating subjective associations within this supposed objective process. Badger traces topographical lines of aerial photographs of the moon produced by the Apollo 15 crew in 1974, makes a vector map and uses a 3-D modeling program to create digital files, from which the works are cast. The resulting aluminum sculptures, polished to a mirror finish, reflect the viewer’s rippled and scrambled visage on its surface. Audiences are incapable of examining the surface without likewise examining themselves. The breakdown and distortment of one’s relfection is an eloquent metaphor and opens a provoking dialogue to the perhaps at times tenuous relationship in aerial cartography and photography between the categorization of the surfaces of objects and its true properties.

Also on view, Badger’s precise chalk drawings explore different permutations of basic geometric shapes, replacing systematic composition with perhaps more of an artistic, intuitive process. The Construction series’ elegant chalk abstracts on black gesso ground recall classical Greek mathematical equations while concurrently reveal the artist’s interest in the aesthetic ideals of 1960s and 70s Minimalism. The creation of geometric objects is by vicarious, not primary markings: the circles’ overlapping areas are what actually create the intended shape. In this way, Badger insightfully layers upon LeWitt’s formatting of space with cuboid frames that developed the void into an essential building block of structure, defining what its audiences see as shapes, the perimeters of space.

Hugh Scott-Douglas | Modern Painters April 2013

Modern Painters
April 2013
“Hugh Scott-Douglas: Blum & Poe, January 12 – February 16”
Written by Emily Ellis Fox

“It was a single still from the German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari that caught Scott-Douglas’s eye: The image uses the unnerving visual technique of mise en abyme, whereby two mirrors face each other, reflecting the same image back and forth infinitely in ever decreasing sizes. The effect distorts perspective and disrupts preconceived notions of space.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is known for its highly stylized, two-dimensional stage sets that reflect the delusional psychology and dream-within-a-dream narrative of its characters, including Dr. Caligari and the murderous sleepwalker he attempts to control. In homage, Scott-Douglas borrows the film’s title, turning the gallery into his own soundstage with installations created specifically for the space. The work manipulates the venue’s layout, mapping out an untraditional, visually disorienting experience…”

For the rest of the review, click here.

Barbara Kasten | The Polaroid Years: Instant Photography and Experimentation

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY
April 12 – June 30, 2013
Catalog available April 25, 2013

This survey exhibition brings together ground breaking Polaroid pictures by forty artists spanning the period from the initial release of the SX-70 camera in 1972 until the present. The exhibition centers on experimentation and examines how the invention of instant photography—in particular Polaroid, a brand known for its innovation and responsiveness to artistic endeavors—has influenced and inspired amateurs and professionals for nearly forty years. By juxtaposing early experimental work with more recent forays into the possibilities of the medium, the exhibition tells a more complete story of instant photography than has yet been chronicled. The photographs included represent a wide range of approaches and sensibilities and upend established parameters of photography in various ways. Artists represented include such pioneers of instant photography as Ansel Adams, Ellen Carey, Chuck Close, Walker Evans, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, Joyce Neimanas, Andy Warhol, and William Wegman as well as a new generation of artists including Anne Collier, Bryan Graf, Catherine Opie, Lisa Oppenheim, Dash Snow, Mungo Thomson, and Grant Worth.

For more information, click here.

Desirée Holman | Super 8 | Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro

Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro
April 6 – June 2, 2013

Super 8 
is an artist-curated video art exhibition organized by the Los Angeles-based Christopher Grimes Gallery. The exhibition first opened at the gallery in July 2011, then traveled to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (January – June 2012) and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (in two parts, March and August 2012). The Museum of Modern Art, Rio marks the final institution for this exhibition…

Eight artists from eight different cities across the globe were invited to present their own videos and, in addition, invite four other artists from their respective cities to present works as well. A total of 40 artists from Berlin, Dublin, Lisbon, London, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, and Tokyo are represented in the project.  

A unique feature of Super 8 is that this collection of diverse work in one-, two- and three-channel formats, selected through a peer-to-peer curatorial process, accumulates into a serial format exhibition with a global scope. The diverse selection of videos include Brazilian artist Thiago Rocha Pitta’s “Homage to JMW Turner,” a performative video honoring British Romantic painter Joseph Mallord William Turner; Los Angeles-based artist Euan Macdonald’s “The Healer,” which questions the illusion of the recorded image; and Dublin-based artist Jaki Irvine’s “The Actress,” which addresses issues of the human condition. The artists/curators are Marco Brambilla, Takehito Koganezawa, Reynold Reynolds, Julião Sarmento, Tunga, Richard T. Walker, Walker and Walker, and Wood & Harrison. Additional invited artists include John Baldessari, Nate Boyce, Yuki Okamura, and João Onofre.

Week 1: April 6 – 14
Lisbon, curated by Julião Sarmento

Week 2: April 16 – 21
San Francisco, curated by Richard T. Walker

Week 3: April 23 – 28
Tokyo, curated by Takehito Koganezawa

Week 4: April 30 – May 5
Rio de Janeiro, curated by Tunga

Week 5: May 8 – 12
London, curated by Wood & Harrison

Week 6: May 14 – 19
Los Angeles, curated by Marco Brambilla

Week 7: May 21 – 26
Berlin, curated by Reynold Reynolds

Week 8: May 28 – June 2
Dublin, curated by Walker & Walker

For more information, please click here.

Barbara Kasten | Frieze Magazine April 2013

Frieze Magazine
April 2013 Issue No. 154
“Barbara Kasten: Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco”
Written by Joseph Akel

In a passage from his 1658 treatise ‘The Garden of Cyrus,’ Sir Thomas Browne wrote of a room wherein ‘pictures from objects’, projected upon the walls of a dim enclosure, were ‘answerable to paper.’ Browne, a hermetically inclined English polymath, was describing a camera obscura. A mechanism involving the channeling and transposition of light in the creation of a reflected image, a camera obscura operates much in the same way as a human eye does – a fact not lost upon Browne. Reading his treatise, one could be forgiven in thinking the detailing of ‘pyramidal rays,’ tenebrific rooms and the mirrored transposition of light upon entities of ‘crystalline humour’ was a description of Barbara Kasten’s recent show at Jessica Silverman Gallery, ‘Behind the Curtain’.

Read the rest of the review here.

Hayal Pozanti | Young and Powerful | Elle Turkey

Elle Magazine – Turkey
April 2013

Hayal Pozanti is chosen as one of the fifty most powerful young talents in Turkey and around the world.

View the magazine article here.

Barbara Kasten | Color Rush: 75 Years of Color Photography in America | Milwaukee Art Museum

Milwaukee Art Museum
February 22 – May 19, 2013

Today color photography is so pervasive that it is hard to believe there was a time when this was not the case. This exhibition and catalogue explore the historical developments that led to color photography becoming the norm in popular culture and fine art.

This project charts—from magazine pages to gallery walls, from advertisements to photojournalism—the interconnected history of color photography in the United States from 1907 to 1981. Respectively, these years mark the introduction of the first commercially available color photographic process and the published survey that signified the widespread acceptance of contemporary art photography in color. In the intervening years, color photography captured the popular imagination through its visibility in magazines such as Life and Vogue, as well as through its accessibility on the marketplace thanks to companies such as Kodak.

With framed photographs, as well as publications, slide shows, and film clips, Color Rush: 75 Years of Color Photography in America promises to be a multi-faceted and engaging experience for general audiences and photography specialists alike.

For more information, visit Milwaukee Art Museum’s website.

Barbara Kasten | Black Rabbit, White Hole | Samuel Freeman

Curated by Amy Thoner
Samuel Freeman
Los Angeles, CA
March 2 – April 6, 2013

“Black Rabbit, White Hole” is a group exhibition featuring artists based in and outside of Los Angeles.  Spanning photographic, painting, sculptural, and mixed media works, the exhibition takes on—and reverses—the common literary tropes of the black hole and the white rabbit…

Much has been said about black holes.  As a conundrum of space-time and literary metaphor, it is well accepted that a black hole pulls light and matter into eternal oblivion.   Far more perplexing than the black hole’s endless void, however—and almost never referenced—the theoretical ‘white hole’ is its perfect inverse, with matter and luminescence endlessly escaping, but no point of entry or starting point for that light, whatsoever.  In a similar fashion, within the realm of magic, folklore and symbology, the rarely mentioned black rabbit gets overlooked in favor of its docile, omnipresent white counterpart, yet is undoubtedly a more intriguing foil.  Fast, elusive, sometimes ominous, and easily camouflaged into darkness, the black rabbit is slippery.

Attempting to tonally capture this intuitive mid-moment between inversion of logic and poetic switch, the exhibition “Black Rabbit, White Hole” combines works that embrace, transpose or subvert metaphorical, logical, or material understandings of lightness, darkness, reflection and disappearance.  Equally represented is work that is bound to binaries, inverse relationships, or bipolarities.   The exhibition’s numerous photographic works  probe relevant zones of abstraction and experimentation, both specific to the medium and in their relationship to sculpture and painting; large photographic pairs from John Divola’s Dark Star series and Barbara Kasten’s Studio Constructs preside as key touchstones for a younger generation’s rampant exploration of the photographic.   Mono- and bichromatic paintings crystallize current tensions between the allure of photomechanical/digital processes and the painterly gesture; and sculptural works of primitive geometries and humble or natural materials set up a dialogue between the roughly handmade/idiosyncratic and the highly polished or reductive.  Placed together, these works elicit moments that are at once shadowy, luminous, and intuitively complex.

For more information, visit Samuel Freeman’s website.

Matt Lipps | Aperture Magazine | Spring 2013

Aperture Magazine
Spring 2013 Issue
“Nine Years, A Million Conceptual Miles” by Charlotte Cotton

Contemporary art photographers are opening up new ways of thinking about the medium. Are institutions ready for this wave of photographic innovation?

Read the rest of the excerpt here.

Barbara Kasten, Lucas Michael in Network | Decenter Armory

Digital Exhibition

In the 1913 Armory Show, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors endeavored to showcase the “New Spirit” of modern art. On its 100th anniversary, we will celebrate the Cubist paintings and sculptures in its galleries with an exhibition curated by Andrianna Campbell and Daniel S. Palmer featuring 27 contemporary artists at Henry Street Settlement’s Abrons Arts Center (466 Grand St, NYC). Their artworks explore changes in perception precipitated by our digital age, and closely parallel the cubist vernacular of fragmentation, non-linearity, simultaneity, and decenteredness. Our exhibition poses the question: What is the legacy of Cubism in the hundred years since the Armory Show’s radical display of modern European and American art, and especially, how has this become relevant again in our digital age? The show will exhibit a group of artworks in the gallery, and also feature a corresponding internet component of digital works in an online gallery, which have been organized based on a system of artists inviting other artists whose work they admire (shown in black boxes, linked to the artists who have invited them). This digital portion of the exhibition will grow in a process that highlights the diversity and expansiveness of the 1913 show’s legacy as it relates to our world today.

Visit http://decenterarmory.com/network for the full digital exhibition.

Lucas Michael | I Killed My Father, I Ate Human Flesh, I Quiver With Joy: An Obsession with Pier Paolo Pasolini | INVISIBLE-EXPORTS

Curated by INVISIBLE-EXPORTS
Allegra LaViola Gallery, NY
Opening Reception: Friday, February 22, 6-8PM
February 22 – March 23, 2013

Participating Artists: Michael Bilsborough, Lizzi Bougatsos, BREYER P-ORRIDGE, Asger Carlsen, Troels Carlsen, Walt Cassidy, Andy Coolquitt, Vaginal Davis, Carlton DeWoody, Joey Frank, Paul Gabrielli, Ludovica Gioscia, Luis Gispert, Terence Hannum, Karen Heagle, Timothy Hull, Doug Ischar, Brian Kenny, Jeremy Kost, Aaron Krach, Yeni Mao, Leigha Mason, Mark McCoy, Robert Melee, Lucas Michael, Jennifer Needleman, Brent Owens, Paul P., Paolo Di Paolo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franklin Preston, John Russell, Xaviera Simmons, Duston Spear, Scott Treleaven, Ramon Vega, Jordan Wolfson, Dustin Yellin…

INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is pleased to present I Killed My Father, I Ate Human Flesh, I Quiver With Joy: An Obsession with Pier Paolo Pasolini at Allegra LaViola Gallery, New York. 

Pier Paolo Pasolini – the filmmaker, poet, sentimental leftist, and transgressive legend – lived a life marked by curious contradiction and unimpeachable integrity. Sculpted by a nomadic Italian childhood filled with religion, war, Socialism, Facism, and run-ins with the law, Pasolini reconceived, in a prodigious obsessive body of remarkably diverse work, the entire patrimony of post-WWII-Italy as a personal mythology refracted by the urgent demands of modern continental life and contemporary politics in an age of extremes. 

Beginning with his first film, Accatone (1961) on through to the game-changing Sálo (1975), Pasolini worked in an era in which avant-garde artistic gestures felt still truly dangerous, in which artists retained the power to shock, and in which the imposition of a personal artistic vision felt still like a radical, rather than narcissistic, act. Pasolini made the most of that power, and has become in the decades since an object of personal obsession for thousands of contemporary artists, many of whom offer up here, in a showcase that is as much open tribute as it is narrow appreciation, their own idiosyncratic homage to a person who has had an outsized influence on a whole generation enamored of radical gestures in a skeptical, ironic age. 

Pasolini is a mercurial, even arcane influence on the 38 artists whose work is assembled here—sculptors, photographers, video and multimedia artists, romantics and transgressives, advocacy artists and ironists. The tributes are in some cases straightforward — painted portraits of Pasolini subjects, collage and video sourced from his own work — and in others cases more oblique — sculptures addressing the subject of restraint, watery sketches in which figures dissolve into gothic ethereality. Some are hardly tributes at all—idiosyncratic arguments instead with particular corners of Pasolini’s practice, often revealing far more about the work and obsessions of the contemporary artist than the too-divergent-to-be-uncontradictorially-contained miscellaneous Italian master. The result is a social-networking-style and purposefully-loosely curated exhibition that points in 38 directions at once—possibly more.

For more information, please click here.

Tammy Rae Carland | Artadia Awards San Francisco 2013 Finalist

The exceptional range of artists living and working in San Francisco was evident as three prominent panelists selected the 10 finalists for the Artadia Awards 2013 San Francisco. Panelists Holly Block, Director, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Apsara DiQuinzio, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Phyllis C. Wattis MATRIX Curator, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; and Paul Pfeiffer, Artist, New York; determined the list of finalists after reviewing 430 applications received for the eighth cycle of Artadia Awards in San Francisco. 

The 10 Finalists for the Artadia Awards 2013 San Francisco are: Zarouhie Abdalian, D-L Alvarez, Tammy Rae Carland, Paul Clipson and Jefre Cantu- Ledesma (collaborative team), Liam Everett, Suzanne Husky, Tony Labat, Monica Martinez, Alicia McCarthy, and Lucy Raven.

Steven Wirtz Gallery (49 Geary Street, 3rd Floor, San Francisco, CA) is hosting the exhibition of the 10 finalists from the current round of the Artadia Award on Tuesday, February 12th from 6-8PM.

Matt Lipps | Reality Check | 44AD artspace

Reality Check
February 1 – 17, 2013
High House Gallery / 44AD artspace
7B Lower Bourough Walls, BA1 1QR, UK

This exhibition brings together a selection of exciting and award winning artists who distort the world on the other side of the lens within a wide variety of artistic strategies.

A photograph was once considered as a factual document – the camera being the window to the world, reproducing only what was present in front of the lens. The photographic images documented this truth, acted as purveyors of memory and were used as symbols of culture. The truth was, and is, far more complicated of course and in the post-modern world artists often use the camera not to show the truth but rather as one of the weapons in their armory to convey their preferred message…

The formerly inviolable images are now distorted and manipulated – perhaps altered, cut, layered, collaged, appropriated, painted or stitched over; the scene portrayed may be enhanced, added to or entirely faked; the images may be part of a more extensive conceptual whole, alluding to other meanings, questioning accepted ideas or referring to social, cultural or internal worlds.

Jonny Briggs’ intensely personal work uses props and constructed sets to photograph his disguised self and family members. He questions the boundaries between us, between adult and child, love and resentment, expressed and reserved, real and fake in attempt to revive the unconditioned, uninhibited self.

Polish artist Aneta Grzeszykowska creates photo portraits of imaginary people – all physiognomies having been created by the artist in Photoshop. The works depict people, whose nonexistence is difficult to acknowledge, our own preconceptions and ideas quickly superimposed on their blank histories.

Minhong Pyo examines the interface between the real and imaginary both by constructing his own worlds or by taking enigmatic photographs of the real world. All images are then manipulated to further blur the boundaries of reality.

For more information, click here.

Jessica Silverman Gallery | The Big Picture | Patron Magazine, Spring 2013

The Patron Magazine
Spring 2013 Issue
Written by Patricia Mora
For the full magazine feature, click here.

The Big Picture: With a wealth of talent, from established artists to future stars, look no further than the Dallas Art Fair for inspiration and high-stakes art.

Dallas and Fort Worth are broadly envied for their unfettered economic optimism. After turning the era into an impressive hub of commerce with the completion of a sprawling airport in 1973, an already thriving economy became impervious to the torque of economic downturns. Upscale neighborhoods have never seen a shortage of luxury cars or haute couture—and, apparently, the city-as-cash-cow-motif holds true for a booming art market. If you’re looking for optimism in challenging times, you need only speak with Dallas Art FAir Co-Founders John Sughrue and Chris Byrne…

A well-spoken and elegant frontman for the fair, Byrne occupies an office behind Stephan Pyles’s eponymous restaurant on Ross Avenue. He states that the Dallas ARt Fair—still rapidly growing a mere five years after its inception—has steadily gained traction. Not only are there stellar galleries from all over the U.S. participating in the 2013 iteration of the fair, but there is also a special emphasis on both emerging artists and a burgeoning international scope. Says Byrne, “We’re bringing in four galleries from the U.K., two from Paris, two from Italy, one from Japan and one from South Korea. They’re coming here for a reason. Everyone keeps their eye on Dallas because it’s a vibrant center with important collectors and collections.” Apparently the city’s sky-high stacks of cash and serious buyers make good on the promise of an outstanding market for both art dealers and collectors. In Texas vernacular, the city has both “hat and cattle.” It delivers on the notion that Dallas offers a robust venue for high-stakes art being shown and sold in an increasingly skyrocketing art market. Any naysayers (they are few and far between) should take heed and get on the lucrative bandwagon. The 2013 fair is making it easier to determine what artists are hot and what works are likely to morph into blue-chip items in prospering art portfolios.

Here’s your chance to get the inside scoop from nationally recognized experts in diverse locations. While all the collectors offer impressive work, Byrne selected some experts on what’s happening in the field of emerging artists. In other words, this is as close as you’ll come to a crystal ball. Here are a few gallerists offering insight that is likely to be especially prescient:

Jessica Silverman Gallery
San Francisco

The West Coast city known for morning fog that burns off in the afternoon shines more brightly thanks to Jessica Silverman’s gallery on Sutter Street. Moreover, Silverman lights up enthusiastically when talking about both the Dallas Art Fair and the city hosting it. She notes, “Dallas is certainly on the radar of curators, collectors, and dealers. It’s a community that likes to learn and stay informed. In 2013 we plan to exhibit three or four artists, including Dashiell Manley and Christopher Badger. I think collectors in Dallas will be excited to learn about both of these new artists. Also, here’s  roster of names I think Texas collectors – both novices and experts – should watch: Barbara Kasten, Alice Channer, Florian Schmidt, Ben Schumacher, Talia Chetrit, and Hayal Pozanti.”

Silverman is known for representing up-and-coming and mid-career artists and comes from a background in fine art. In fact, her initial gallery was launched from her own working studio and subsequently grew into an influential powerhouse on loca, national, and international levels. Her entrepreneurial spirit makes her a perfect candidate for becoming a new and welcome addition to Texas’s art world cognoscenti.

This is a condensed version of the article. For the full feature, please click here.

Christopher Badger | When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes | Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit

When Attitudes Become Form Become Attitues
Opens February 1, 2013, 7-9PM
Admission: Free
February 1 – March 31, 2013
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD)

When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes is a sequel to, and a reevaluation of, the legendary 1969 exhibitionLive In Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (Works – Concepts – Processes – Situations – Information), which was curated by Harald Szeemann at Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland. It showcases over 80 international contemporary artists who follow, in various ways, the legacy of Szeemann’s iconic exhibition…

The 1969 show brought together new tendencies in the art known today as Postminimalism, Arte Povera, Land art and Conceptual art, from Western Europe and the United States. It contributed a great deal to our historical understanding of the art of that time, how exhibitions themselves can influence artists and their works, and also how exhibitions can define art history. It was influential in promoting a wider understanding and acceptance of Conceptual art, as it included many non-material and process-based works.

Mostly known by its short title, When Attitudes Become Form has been discussed, researched and examined in a wide range of essays, books and conferences; When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes is the first major exhibition it has inspired. Curated by Jens Hoffmann and organized by the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, the new show presents existing pieces by artists working in relation to the history of Conceptual art as well as newly commissioned works by artists such as Zarouhie Abdalian, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Annika Eriksson, Simon Fujiwara, Jeppe Hein, Jonathan Monk, Nicolás Paris and Hank Willis Thomas, who respond directly to the history of the 1969 show. With the contemporary artworks installed alongside archival materials, floor plans and installation images from the 1969 show, this new exhibition does not make a distinction between what is past and what is present, but rather considers When Attitudes Become Form as a living past.

For more information, please visit MOCAD’s website.

Hugh Scott-Douglas in Pattern: Follow the Rules | Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum

Pattern: Follow the Rules
Opens March 21, 2013
Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, MI

Pattern: Follow the Rules
 looks at new definitions of the well-worn art historical terms Pattern and Decoration, presenting an international group of artists who contend with the different roles these elements have played across a range of cultural contexts in history. Today, new technologies, including digitization and computer programming drive artists’ abilities to innovate form and materials and there is a marked movement afoot in artists’ use of science, math, and technology to generate forms. Here, the definition of pattern is more akin to a mathematical pattern than a decorative one, though often the result veers into the language of rhythmic decoration. Importantly, these artists abandon (at least in part) traditional modes of using the hand and the mind in making aesthetic judgments, instead setting up a system of rules or a mechanical system to generate final form—a new way of conceiving of the relationship between form and content…

In a parallel vein, Zaha Hadid’s new Broad Art Museum at MSU is consistently described as a feat of digital engineering in architecture. Following her singular approach to making buildings that play with perspective, fluidity and optical illusions by manipulating traditional and innovative building materials, the building is extensively patterned on its façade and perspectivally varied in its interior. Art making has now moved well beyond the wall and the pedestal and into the architectural realm. The works in this exhibition will all be in dialogue with the building in which they are installed, picking up the tactics of Hadid’s design and exploring the potentially symbiotic relationship of art  installation and museum architecture that has moved beyond the “white cube”. Like the museum building, art that take up these new definitions of pattern alter our interaction with the space around us and challenge our perception of what we see.

Artists in the exhibition include: Walead Beshty (b. UK); Teresita Fernandez (b. USA); Mark Grotjahn (b. USA); Wade Guyton (b. USA); Shirazeh Houshiary (b. Iran); Mai-Thu Perret (b. Switzerland); Ara Peterson (b. USA); Hugh Scott-Douglas (b. UK); Alyson Shotz (b. USA); Rudolf Stingel (b. Italy); Tam Van Tran (b. Vietnam); Pae White (b. USA); Christopher Wool (b. USA). 

For more information, please click here.

Hugh Scott-Douglas On Toronto, Los Angeles & What’s Next | Canadian Art

Canadian Art
Interview with Leah Sandals
January 18, 2013

Hugh Scott-Douglas is looking forward to a pretty big 2013. The 24-year-old artist, who was raised in Edmonton and Ottawa and graduated from OCAD University in 2010, opened a solo show at Los Angeles’s Blum & Poe last week. He’s also included in “Pattern: Follow the Rules” at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in Michigan, which opens in March. And in June, through San Francisco dealer Jessica Silverman, he’ll be featured in Art Basel’s Art Statements. Mixed in along the way is a move to New York with his wife, fashion designer Lara Vincent. Recently,Canadian Art caught up with Scott-Douglas by phone to discuss Toronto influences, decayed denim and his signature series of cyanotypes…

Leah Sandals: Currently on display at your Blum & Poe exhibition “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” is one of your cyanotype-on-cloth projects. You’ve also done a book of cyanotypes with Mousse. What drew you do this somewhat unusual medium?

Hugh Scott-Douglas: In school, I studied sculpture and became fascinated with the idea of negotiating the tactility of an object or an idea. That fascination is tied into another big narrative for me—the idea of negotiating the value or currency of an image. I’m interested in how images can have both inflated and deflated values, and in how we might negotiate them.

A lot of different works have come out of these themes. The cyanotypes in particular came out of trying to investigate the idea of the architect’s blueprint—the image before an image.

They became a way to investigate other areas of interest too, because blueprints are sort of graphic and they are a method of mechanical reproduction, but the process is also unstable and analog, which gives it this tactility I was referring to. It’s a very hands-on approach to the production of an image. 

LS: A lot of the PR texts on your work emphasize its links to painting, cinema and theory. But when I saw your work at Jessica Silverman’s booth at NADA Miami 2011, I noticed many people were drawn to it in a visceral sense. How do you parse tactile or visceral appeal versus theoretical readings?

HSD: I think that’s sort of the project of the artist. We can speak about managing all of these very conceptual and theoretical positions, but ultimately we are dealing with a kind of affect-based—or we can call it commodity-based—object. We do call these the fine arts, so for me, at least, the conceptual exercise does need to bridge the gap into an object discussion.

There could be other ways of making a blueprint, for instance. But they might not be as beautiful as what I think I am doing—not to say that I think what I’m doing is most beautiful, but I am pleased with them as objects. When I first started working on the cyanotypes, I realized that this could be part of their potential.

LS: Your cyanotypes sometimes have a stained or aged quality. They seem to fit into a decayed aesthetic popular among artists of your age—or at least popular at that NADA fair, which had more than one decayed-mirror sculpture! I wonder how much this aesthetic might be related to growing up with a very digitally rendered, clean-looking visual culture. What are your thoughts?

HSD: I’m trying to think about what the root of my interest in that aesthetic would be born from. I don’t know if I ever considered it as a reaction to something digital.

I mean, some of this is just fashion as well—anyone who denies that is not being truthful, because these are trends that emerge on a broad level. Whether it’s by going through blogs on the Internet or by going to exhibitions of artists they admire, people begin to consume a certain aesthetic. Then it will shift as people begin to work in their studios.

I think that if you look back to artists like Martin Kippenberger or Sigmar Polke, this aesthetic may not be as fresh to our generation as it was to theirs. And even they’re borrowing from something else before that. It’s very much like a zipper—every part before it has a part to interlock to create this long strand that is history.

What I’m trying to highlight by noting connections like that to other artists and art movements is that there is something like a covalent bond or a locus that draws an aesthetic sensibility together over time; the factors that influence it are hard to pinpoint. I agree with you that this kind of aesthetic is absolutely present, but I’m not sure if its growth is as simple as a relationship to the digital.

I mean, I think back to the jeans that people my age wanted to wear when we were in high school, which were the caricature of what a distressed jean would have been—shredded and bleached ad infinitum. That was a very present aesthetic, and it was kind of born out of an Abercrombie and Fitch look, this tattered beach-bum kind of thing. It’s possible you could stretch those jeans and they’d be a hit at NADA now.

LS: Over the past few years in Toronto, you were involved in curatorial endeavours like the group show “Chopped & Screwed” at MKG127 and the operation of Tomorrow Gallery with Tara Downs and Aleksander Hardashnakov. What plans, if any, do you have to continue work of the curatorial kind?

HSD: I find it really fascinating to work in that capacity.

The MKG project was almost an extension of my own practice, and it explored a number of things I was extremely interested in at the time. I mean, I write a lot, I research a lot, I spend a lot of time looking at art. Projects like that one are an extension of working in the studio. Through curating those kinds of projects, you learn a lot not only about other kinds of art, but also about your own art.

Tomorrow was a totally different kind of endeavour. That came out of travelling a lot—my family was living in Europe while I was in university, so I was spending 26 weeks of the year at OCAD and the rest of my time travelling between Paris and Berlin and London. I saw so much art in that period of time.

Going and seeing all that art and then coming back to the classroom at OCAD or to the galleries on Tecumseth or Queen became a very frustrating experience, because there was so evidently a fracture between what was happening in the rest of the world and what was happening in Toronto. This fracture was also confusing because Toronto is a major metropolitan centre; there’s lots of money, and lots of cultured, interested people, but there’s not much support from the market. And the market is generally what brings new art to places quickly these days—at least, more quickly than institutions can.

So Tomorrow became a way for us to bring some of the art that we thought wasn’t getting seen to Toronto.

LS: OCAD peers like Downs and Hardashnakov have been a big influence on you. Who in terms of OCAD teachers was an influence?

HSD: Ian Carr-Harris is such an amazing teacher, and he really supported a lot of my projects. So did George Boileau and Ginette Legaré. Those are basically the thesis advisors I had.

I never enjoyed being in the classroom that much, and often I would take the assignments and do sort of what I liked with them, which was not always well received by the college. But those guys [Carr-Harris, Boileau and Legaré] pretty much always accommodated my projects as I presented them, which was fantastic.

I did have other professors who basically just told me to stop and give up what I was doing, because it wasn’t going anywhere. It’s really detrimental for a young student to hear that from somebody that they think is in a position of power.

But those three really stood behind me. And it gave me the confidence to do what I’m doing now. 

LS: It’s been a big few years. What are you hoping will happen next?

HSD: I’m really just, at this moment, looking forward to some time in the studio. Lately, I’ve been really focused on film, both 35mm and video, and I would like to keep working and see what comes from that.

LS: As you move forward, what artworks continue to serve as touchstones or inspirations?

HSD: Growing up, I was really struck by Abstract Expressionism. Richard Diebenkorn and Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman were my favourites when I was 14 or 15. And I still love it—the Rothko room at the Tate remains totally magical. I don’t know if I’m as engaged with it now as I was then, but it still resonates.

For the full interview, click here.

Barbara Kasten, Behind The Curtain | On Seeing and Nothingness | DailyServing

On Seeing and Nothingness
DailyServing
By Amelia Sechman

A few years ago, I found myself wondering: what is the essence of existence? After some thinking, I came to the conclusion that the simplest evidence of existence is interaction. Even at an infinitesimal level, if something doesn’t interact with something else, there is no way to prove it exists. That being said, there are different ways to measure interactions, both direct and indirect. For more than 30 years,Barbara Kasten has used light, planes, and dimensional layering and flattening to make the invisible visible…

In her current exhibition at Jessica Silverman Gallery, Kasten manipulates the interplay of light and surface, both transparent and opaque, to create abstract tableaus. While the work has a strong connection to the Constructivist aesthetic, the photographs relinquish much of the practicality sought after by artists in the 1920s and reintroduce aspects of the autonomous, nonfunctional art object. This isn’t to say that the work has come full circle; instead Kasten utilizes both historical and contemporary methodologies.

The works exhibited range from Polaroids made in the 1980s, to pigment prints made in the last five years. The installation is beautifully lit, with only three florescent tubes in one bay window of the gallery, and a light projection in the other. The low lighting, supported by heavy curtains on the windows, completely separates the gallery from the outside world. The projection reflects off a mirror and onto the wall on which the contemporary images hang, transforming the formerly three-dimensional tableaus, now turned into two-dimensional photographs, into a four-dimensional interface between the photographic object and projected film.

In addition to the multi-dimensional leap-frogging, the photographs and installation are very much about control. Kasten meticulously arranges the objects in her photographs to achieve the angles, shadows and reflections in her compositions, and then “paints” them with light. The combination of elements reveals that which would not be visible otherwise, and plays a trick on our eyes. Flat planes suddenly have depth, lines seem to create impossible shapes, and sharp points and dramatic colors draw an aura of mystery and violence.

Kasten works as the master of her spaces, whether they are within the camera frame or the confines of an installation. Viewers and experiencers of the exhibition become a part of the works, as light bounces off the bodies in the room and figures reflect in glass. The viewers’ organic movements through the space combine with the calculated dynamism of the video projection to produce the final layer of the installation. The next challenge and proverbial cherry on top would be to somehow gain access to an even higher-dimensional view of the gallery space and photograph it and install that image with the others. Talk about meta.

Click here to view the full article.

Desirée Holman in Thinking Like The Universe | K. Imperial Fine Art/Hatch Gallery

January 10 – February 2, 2013 – K. Imperial Fine Art, San Francisco
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 10, 2013 | 5:00 – 7:30PM

January 18 – February 23, 2013 – Hatch Gallery, Oakland
Opening Reception: Friday, January 18, 2013 | 7:00 – 9:30PM

Featuring Miguel Arzabe, Gina Borg, Fritz Chesnut,  Claire Colette,  Desirée Holman, Adam Sorensen,  Andy Vogt and Lena Wolff…

Considering David Bohm’s writing on the Implicate Order and the macro and micro perspectives of landscape, the exhibit Thinking Like the Universe is an investigation into psychedelic landscapes and geometric cosmic patterns. 

The theory of the Implicate Order contains an ultraholistic cosmic view; it connects everything with everything else. In principle, any individual element could reveal “detailed information about every other element in the universe.” The central underlying theme of Bohm’s theory is based on the “unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders.”  It is this unbroken wholeness and the inter-relation of all things that is the impetus for this exhibit. Bohm demonstrates this inter-connectedness, explaining that even two subatomic particles that have once interacted can instantaneously respond to each other’s motions thousands of years later and light-years apart. With this exhibition we examine our desire to make order from, or understand the interconnectedness of the universe, from subatomic particles up through the species. Whether observing expressions of landscape– abstracted, bastardized or imbued with mysticism or zooming in to see the patterns that exist at the particle level, we intuit the moving force that connects. 

Thinking Like The Universe brings two galleries and two cities into conversation: K. Imperial Fine Art in San Francisco and Hatch Gallery in Oakland. Exhibiting artists at K. Imperial include: Miguel Arzabe, Gina Borg, Fritz Chesnut, Claire Colette, Desiree Holman, Adam Sorensen, Andy Vogt and Lena Wolff.  Exhibiting artists at Hatch Gallery include: Randy Colosky, Bryan de Roo, Lauren Douglas, Alan Firestone, Llewelyn Fletcher, Treasure Frey, Sarah Jane Lapp and Jesse Schlesinger. Thinking Like The Universe  is curated by Aimee Friberg.

Thinking Like The Universe runs at K. Imperial Fine Art from January 10th through February 2nd, 2013. The opening reception will be Thursday, January 10th from 5 – 7:30 pm. The exhibit runs at Hatch Gallery from January 18th through February 23rd, with an opening reception on Friday, January 18th from 7-9pm. K Imperial Fine Art is located at 49 Geary Street in San Francisco on the 4th floor. Hatch Gallery is located 492 23rd Street in Oakland.

Discovery: Hugh Scott-Douglas | Interview Magazine

Discovery: Hugh Scott-Douglas
Interview Magazine
By Maxwell Williams

The characters in the 1920 silent thriller The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in which the title character keeps a somnambulist captive in a cabinet to carry out murder in his sleep, spin hypnotically around a soundstage filled with painted set pieces. They walk up stairs and hallways and rooms as if the goal wasn’t simply seeking out a mysterious killer, but in the journey itself. Brooklyn-based artist Hugh Scott-Douglas has named his first solo show at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, for the movie, as a tribute to the circuitous nature of this odyssey [opens Jan. 12]…

In his work in cyanotypes, laser-cut canvases and slide shows, Scott-Douglas begins with a patterned motif, which he threads through each of his different series. He begins with the cyanotype, an outmoded photographic printing process that relies on sunlight to create blue-toned images, to develop these patterns on a canvas. The original pattern is then scanned from the cyanotype, and laser-cut into another canvas. The laser-cut canvas is then housed in an upright, custom-built road case (the kind you might see holding a musician’s gear at a rock concert), which serves as a mobile frame on wheels. The cyanotypes are also the basis for a slideshow, where the blues are transferred into photographic gels that are cut into slides to play in a slide reel.

The remnants of this process—the cyanotypes in the road cases, the laser-cut canvases, the slideshows—are all gathered and displayed, creating a sort of real-time signature on the gallery, whereupon Scott-Douglas can gauge the work; because even then, the gallery is all a part of the continuous process.

AGE: 24

HOMETOWN: Cambridge, England

CURRENT CITY: Brooklyn

SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE: If there is a grand thesis to my practice, it draws from trying to negotiate the currency of image. It’s interesting to look at images that are both hyper-inflated and images that are deflated. I acknowledge cinema as the most inflated form of spectacle, and often draw from filmic examples, not so much for pictorial content of a film, but for the mechanics of the picture.

FRAMING THE FRAME: Mise en abyme is a simple phenomenon: things reflect in on themselves, or framing the frame. I was looking haphazardly on the Internet for examples from cinema that employ mise en abyme, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari comes up often in this regard. Its sets were all paintings on flat surfaces, so to create perspective everything was using a fictive pictorial space as the thrust. For the press release I’ve included a pictures of a door from the set, which carries on ad infinitum, black frame after black frame.

But also, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is hailed as the first film to use mise en abyme narrative, or a dream sequence. My interest in the film developed before I had ever even seen it. This body of work is not really about that film; it’s about the mechanics of that image—what gives that picture value.

RECYCLE, REUSE, RINSE, REPEAT: In the film, we have this sleepwalker, activated upon the opening of the cabinet. There’s something interesting about that relationship to narrative structure. In this show, the laser-cuts function the same way. They’re derived from files based on previously made cyanotypes that I’ve archived the image from. I see them as kind of “activating the sleepwalker” in the same way. There’s this dormant file, and then you open it up and put it in this case as a way of displaying it, and it comes alive again, which is a nice way of giving a second meaning to the laser-cut works. It’s reinvesting value.

DURATIONAL AESTHETICS: The road cases are about exhibition design, treated as a structure that temporarily accommodates the display of a work. They’re part wall, and they’re also part frame. It’s an accommodating structure. There’s something that makes them about their contexts. They have a life span in the same way that the cyanotypes do.

METHOD ACTORS: I would say if there’s any sort of covalent bond that brings me and who I would establish as a peer group together, it would be methodology. The methodology is part an understanding of a material process, part research, part independent interest, or independent lexicon. [Brooklyn-based artist] Ben Schumacher, who I have collaborated with—he’s an extremely close friend—he has a degree in architecture; that’s where he’s coming from, whereas I would say I’m much more interested in the mechanics of cinema. But he’s establishing a very similar studio methodology.

CHROMA CHAMELEON: A facet of my work is chromatic. The cyanotype plate sits in the parking lot in front of my studio for 15 minutes. There are environmental factors that change ad infinitum as time passes—UV shifts, cloud cover increases or decreases, the position of the sun in the sky is moving—so the chroma of each cyanotype is slightly different, or sometimes vastly different, than the last based on that process. I’m using a computer-driven approach to amalgamating the chromatic value of each cyanotype, by reducing it to its most generalized blue. I do that just as simply as using the color picker tool in Photoshop.

From that, you have this very unique color, because the RGB value is just a number, it’s infinitely varied. It’s unique. However, as a way of quantifying that value, I transfer the chroma to a cinematic lighting gel of which there are not as many blues as there are blue tones generated by the cyanotypes.

They’re never perfect. There’s always a difference. The way it’s quantifying or validating chromatic value became to develop a relationship to a readymade or a marketable product that is a lighting gel. I cut the gels up into 80 slides, and then give each one a time unit in the carousel of 11 and a quarter seconds, which culminates in a total time of 15 minutes. So it returns to the same amount of time that went into developing the color in the first place.

Scott-Douglas’s work will also be featured in the group show “Pattern: Follow the Rules” at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State, opening March 21, 2013.

Click here to view the full interview.

Hayal Pozanti in Beyond the Object | Brand New Gallery

Brand New Gallery
Milan, Italy
January 15 – March 09, 2013
Opening Reception: January 15, 2012 |  7PM – 9PM

With Aaron Aujla, Gabriele Beveridge, Andy Boot, Sophie Bueno-Boutellier, Sarah Crowner, Robert Davis, Michael DeLucia, Tomas Downes, Ed Fornieles, Raphael Hefti, Julian Hoeber, Parker Ito, Sachin Kaeley, Barbara Kasten, Sean Kennedy, Jason Kraus, James Krone, Daniel Lefcourt, Tony Lewis, Lloyd Corporation, Andrea Longacre-White, Marie Lund, Dave McDermott, Matthew Metzger, Carter Mull, David Ostrowski, Virginia Overton, Michael Part, Hayal Pozanti, Noam Rappaport, Davina Semo, Lucien Smith, Chris Succo, Mika Tajima, Oscar Tuazon, Artie Vierkant, and Emily Wardill….

Indeterminacy of arrangement of parts is a literal aspect of the physical existence of the thing.

-Robert Morris, Notes on Sculpture 4Beyond Objects, Artforum, 1968 

The term Anti Form, formulated by Robert Morris at the end of the ‘60’s marks the abandonment of the traditional concept of artistic production: a radical challenge that has catalyzed the attention towards new aesthetic models. Materials become the prominent elements of the artwork’s compositional process, prevailing on the necessity, essential in Minimalism, to plan and arrange beforehand.

The progressive ideas divulged through the Anti Form Manifesto, once considered subversive, are translated, today, in the theories that identify an increasingly globalized art structure. 

Brand New Gallery departs from these assumptions to present Beyond the Object, a group show appositely conceived to combine works by artists with disparate backgrounds and from different generations, inevitably forced to confront themselves with production, exploring the interaction between composition and form which radically becomes an archetype endowed with its own language.

The artists employ a post-minimalist lexicon, occasionally pictorial, at times closer to installation and assemblage of daily materials, to underline the experiential role of art as a tool to generate new perceptive possibilities in the disoriented spectator. The act of creation coincides with the process of production. The relationship between the real space into which the spectator moves and the physical presence of the piece gains more and more importance for these artists who invite the public to interact with their works in a physical dialogue which allows an empirical recognition of the object.

For more information, click here.

Between This, That and the Other Thing “With Liz Glynn, Jason Kraus, Dashiell Manley and Stephen Prina” | Harris Lieberman

January 17 – February 17, 2013
Harris Lieberman
New York, NY 10001

For more information, click here.

Hugh Scott-Douglas | The Cabinet of Dr. Callgari | Blum & Poe

The Cabinet of Dr. Callgari
January 12 – February 16, 2013
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 12, 6-8PM
Los Angeles, CA

Blum & Poe is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by the Canadian artist Hugh Scott-Douglas. This marks Scott-Douglas’ first exhibition with Blum & Poe and his first solo-presentation in Los Angeles…

For this exhibition, Scott-Douglas draws inspiration from the 1920 German Expressionist silent film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Directed by Robert Wiene, the film has long been regarded for its use of highly stylized two-dimensional stage sets and the employment of mise-en-abyme, or dream-within-a-dream narrative, to tell the story of Francis, its protagonist, through flashbacks — one of the earliest films to utilize this technique. As the plot unfolds, a physical and psychological mirroring takes place, one in which time, space, and perspective are called into question. The deceptively elaborate (although in reality quite simple) stage sets used to create such visual trickery are paramount to the film’s success and have inspired the installation and architectural choices in Scott-Douglas’ current presentation. Much like how Wiene’s stage sets dictate the mood of his film, Scott-Douglas, through careful study of Blum & Poe’s architectural footprint, has authored an ambitious installation comprised of ongoing bodies of work: cyanotypes, laser cuts, road cases, and slide projections.

The cyanotype (or blueprint), created in the 1840s and used largely by architects (and later artists), is one of the earliest non-camera photographic processes, developing images with the aid of the sun rather than artificial light. The process allowed architects to make inexpensive copies of their drawings prior to the age of photocopy machines. In Scott-Douglas’ hands, the cyanotype is used to produce works imbued with motifs designed through computer-generated algorithms. The patterns are output onto transparent film, and then exposed on canvas. The resulting chromatic variation from one canvas to the next is a bi-product of the contingent environment — the intensity of the sun passing over the canvas at its time of development. In this exhibition, Scott-Douglas uses a grid of eighteen cyanotype pictures measuring 18.5 feet high by 37.5 feet wide as the initial focal point for his installation, towering over four imposing road cases. Using the full surface area of the gallery’s largest wall, Scott-Douglas builds a lattice of blue patterning, alternating and subtly shifting in tonality. The artist endeavors to create an “architectural kiss,” a term coined by the architectural scholar Sylvia Lavin, whereby the cyanotypes gently embrace the existing architecture, and each piece of the remainder of the installation falls in line.

Just as Scott-Douglas’ cyanotype pictures require ultraviolet light to develop, his laser cuts rely on infrared light to generate their motifs. Infrared, on the opposite end of the light spectrum from ultraviolet, has the ability to burn away the surface of a canvas in a highly controlled manner, unlike sunlight. Scott Douglas’ laser cuts are “built” from the pictorial information found in his cyanotypes. After photographing a completed cyanotype, the artist will scan and decode the resulting image and export its content to a laser-cut machine. The laser cutter will then produce a “negative” of the blue picture, in essence creating a canvas devoid of all the cyan information found in the original source material. It is through this subtractive process that a relationship between these bodies of work takes shape. The life of the blue picture and the laser cut extends into a different potential space, all the while carrying the DNA of one and the other wherever it may travel.

This notion of transience is one that Scott-Douglas aims to address with his road cases. Conventionally used as a means of transporting equipment from one site to another, the road case here functions practically as a piece of “temporary architecture” and symbolically as the means to contain an inherently transient object. Constructed on a one-to-two descending scale from 14 x 28 feet at its largest to 2 x 4 feet at its smallest, the four road cases in the exhibition each contain an embedded laser cut filled within the metal frame of the case, which function equally as frames, walls, and cases. The laser cut exists only temporarily in its current incarnation as part of the gallery’s architectural plan – like a fake wall. Upon the end of the exhibition, the transient object becomes victim to any number of environments it might travel to, eventually finding a resting place, only later to be moved again. Scott-Douglas retrains our eye to the power of the set or stage to distort our understanding of space and time.

Alone in the smallest of the three main galleries, Scott-Douglas will present a new slide project. Loaded with eighty slides, each of the five rotary slide carousels will throw a square of blue light on the opposing wall at unsynchronized intervals, creating a cacophony of mechanized shuttering. Similar to how the production of his laser cuts depend on the existence of their corresponding cyanotypes, the artist has matched the chromatic value of each slide to an existing blue found in a cyanotype picture. Beyond their formal relationship, the duration of each slide projector is timed exactly to fifteen minutes, the amount of time required for the sun to fully expose a canvas outdoors, after which time, no further cyan can be drawn from the chemistry. It is through these relationships of form, content, time and space in which Scott-Douglas’ practice takes shape and one is left to negotiate within the hall of mirrors he has built.

Hugh Scott-Douglas (b. 1988, Cambridge, England) holds a BFA in sculpture from the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD). His work will be featured in the forthcoming exhibition Pattern: Follow the Rules at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State Museum in March 2013.

Two Weeks/Two Works: Conrad Ruiz | Fourteen 30 Contemporary

January 11 – 20, 2013
Fourteen 30 Contemporary
Portland, Oregon

For more information, click here.

Hugh Scott-Douglas | Walk The Line | Simon Lee Gallery

“Walk The Line”
Simon Lee Gallery – Hong Kong
304, 3F The Pedder Building
12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong
January 13 – March 7, 2014
Opening Reception: January 11, 2014, 6:30PM – 8:30PM

Participating artists: Jeff Elrod, Matias Faldbakken, Bernard Frize, David Ostrowski, Hugh Scott-Douglas, Christopher Wool, Toby Ziegler, Heimo Zobernig

For press release and additional information, click here.