Woody De Othello exhibits a new large-scale, patinated bronze at Frieze Sculpture in London, co-presented by Jessica Silverman, Karma and Stephen Friedman Gallery. Curated by Fatoş Üstek and on view through October 27, 2024, in The Regent’s Park, London, this is Othello’s first large-scale public artwork presented in Europe.
Woody De Othello exhibits a new large-scale, patinated bronze at Frieze Sculpture in London, co-presented by Jessica Silverman, Karma and Stephen Friedman Gallery. Curated by Fatoş Üstek and on view through October 27, 2024, in The Regent’s Park, London, this is Othello’s first large-scale public artwork presented in Europe.
Sir Isaac Julien Elected as a Fellow of the British Academy
Julien joins an august group consisting of over 1,700 leading minds in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Only a small number of scholars are elected to the British Academy as Fellows. The academy is also a funder of national and international research, as well as a forum for debate and public engagement.
Listen to Dashiell Manley in conversation with Mika Yoshitake to discuss the thinking, process, and personal significance behind “Tule Lake,” his most recent solo show with Jessica Silverman.
“Conceptually, I wanted it to speak to memory, history and story. The way those things are manipulated or changed over time and the way memory gets scratchy, foggy, obscured.“ — Dashiell Manley
Manley was joined in conversation with LA-based independent curator Mika Yoshitake at the opening reception of his most recent solo show with Jessica Silverman, “Tule Lake.”
The conversation ranged from Manley’s interest in memory and film to time and iconography. Using imagery sourced from the National Archives’ repository of photographs, Manley reflects upon the site of Tule Lake, an internment camp on the California-Oregon border where members of his family were held.
Jessica Silverman congratulates Rupy C. Tut on being awarded a 2024 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship.
The Joan Mitchell Fellowship annually recognizes and supports 15 US-based artists working in the evolving fields of painting and sculpture. Encompassing long-term financial support, skills development, and community building, the multi-year Fellowship structure provides critical resources that artists need to sustain their practices.
“For me, stepping into the studio is driven by love—a deeply personal and nonnegotiable force. I’m honored to be selected for the 2024 Joan Mitchell Foundation fellowship, where I can now be nurtured by its opportunities and community.” – Rupy C. Tut
Join Chelsea Ryoko Wong for a walkthrough of “Nostalgia for the Present Tense,” her second solo show at Jessica Silverman. Listen to the artist speak about the inspiration behind the exhibition, the importance of living in the moment, and the joy of being with community.
On Monday 18 March 2024, Whitechapel Gallery will host its annual Art Icon Gala in honour of Isaac Julien.
Isaac Julien Receives Prestigious Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon Award
On Monday 18 March 2024, Whitechapel Gallery will host its annual Art Icon Gala in honour of Isaac Julien.
Of the announcement, Gilane Tawadros (Whitechapel Gallery Director) said:
“It’s an honour to announce Isaac Julien as our 2024 Art Icon. His ground-breaking, visually compelling film and video works, alongside his elaborate multi-screen installations, have defined new and important territories for artists and filmmakers, and changed the way that audiences view and experience moving image work – both within and outside art spaces.
His work offers a uniquely seductive yet critical lens to explore and interrogate historical and contemporary experiences and he is rightfully acknowledged to be one of the most influential artists of his generation. I couldn’t be more delighted to be presenting him with this year’s award on behalf of Whitechapel Gallery and the 2024 Art Icon committee.”
‘Working with ceramics is something near and dear to my heart. It feeds my soul… it gives me purpose and it gives me space to express myself.’
Woody De Othello is a ceramicist and painter who lives and works in San Francisco. His work has exhibited at the San Jose Museum of Art and the 2022 Whitney Biennial, and can be found in the collections of museums including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
De Othello is one of 23 international artists whose works feature in the Hayward Gallery exhibition, Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art.
In this video interview the artist covers a number of topics including the appeal of ceramics, both as an artistic medium and also in terms of what it offers him as an artist; the breadth of influences in his work, which are increasingly diasporic and ancestral, taking him to explore the notion of Black life in Africa and what that looks like; and the metaphorical quantities of everyday object
Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art
October 26, 2022 – January 8, 2023
Featuring 23 international artists working across recent decades, the exhibition examines the plasticity and the possibilities of ceramics.The artworks on show encompass fantastical creatures and uncanny representations of the everyday, as well as ranging from small abstract works to large-scale installations that take the medium beyond the kiln. Strange Clay explores the possibilities of thinking through making. The artworks vary in scale, finish and technique, and address topics that range from architecture, to social justice, the body, the domestic and the organic. While contributing to the broadening dialogue between art and craft, this exhibition provides a closer look at this tactile medium.
The exhibition features works by Aaron Angell, Salvatore Arancio, Leilah Babirye, Jonathan Baldock, Lubna Chowdhary, Edmund de Waal, Emma Hart, Liu Jianhua, Rachel Kneebone, Serena Korda, Klara Kristalova, Beate Kuhn, Takuro Kuwata, Lindsey Mendick, Ron Nagle, Magdalene Odundo, Woody De Othello, Grayson Perry, Shahpour Pouyan, Ken Price, Brie Ruais, Betty Woodman and David Zink Yi.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, co-published by Hayward Publishing and Hatje Cantz.
The Met is Showing Incredible Ceramics by the Often Unnamed Enslaved Potters Who Worked in the American South
By Vittoria Benzine
September 26, 2022 PDF
For Legacies, Simpson’s signature themes and approaches to working with clay are brought together in a focused open floor plan presentation of her ceramic sculptures, including individual figures, pairs, and groupings, and new works made for the exhibition.
Sculpture in the City is an annual sculpture park that uses the urban realm as a rotating gallery space. Explore the 20 artworks in the 11th Edition, on display in the City of London’s financial district from 22 June 2022 until spring 2023.
Included in the 11th Edition, Wieser’s site specific wallwork for The Leadenhall Building weaves various narratives—fictive, biographical, historical—into a backdrop that functions like a stage, encouraging the viewer to consider his or her place in time at the center of a great human drama that unfolds recurrently and relentlessly.
Situated in the City of London, whose history goes back to the Roman Empire, the arc is spanned from the ancient past to the present day.
Collaged together from her vast archive, the combination of textures, architecture elements, representatives of the past and the present, the layer of real people passing by automatically becomes part of the image cycle.
June 18 – November 30, 2022
The Guest House at Field Farm
544 Sloan Road
Williamstown, MA 01267
Counterculture open this June at Field Farm in Williamstown.
The exhibition will be installed along the horizon line of a Field Farm meadows that is visible from Sloan Road. The sculptural artwork consists of twelve cast-concrete figures supported by steel-gauge wireframes that stand approximately nine feet tall. The figures are covered with a dry concrete spray, adorned with ceramic and found objects, and include steel-posts rooted into the ground with cement.
Simpson’s most ambitious work to date, Counterculture honors generations of marginalized people and cultures whose voices have been too often silenced by colonization. The figures look West across a post-apocalyptic vista, the vast homelands from which native peoples were forcibly removed. The artist imagines the figures as watchful presences, reminders that history and the natural world perpetually observe humanity. With hollow eyes that catch the morning sunlight, the feminine-bodied forms also suggest that Mother Earth shows us the way—that respect for the land and its original inhabitants are the honorable way forward.
Commissioned by the Public Art Fund, Claudia Wieser’s constellation of five large-scale geometric sculptures creates an immersive environment for exploration. Each form differs in size, shape, and pattern, and combines painted, photographic, and mirrored details to create vibrant compositions that highlight the dynamism of the city and its people.
Clustered at the iconic vista where the Manhattan Bridge frames the Empire State Building, Wieser’s Rehearsal may be seen as both a meeting place and a theatrical set that hearkens back to ancient Roman forums—public spaces for assembly, interaction, and the exchange of ideas
Desert X announced today the participating artists, including Judy Chicago, in its third edition of the site-specific, international art exhibition opening March 12–May 16, 2021 at sites across the Coachella Valley
In "Countdown," a major commission of new works by Rose B. Simpson at SCAD Museum of Art, the artist surpasses the signature human scale typical of her figurative sculptures, bringing bodily forms to an unprecedented totemic stature. This exhibition is curated by Ariella Wolens, assistant curator.
Jessica Silverman is delighted to announce representation of Catherine Wagner, an award-winning artist, whose ambitious photographic practice spans four decades
Jessica Silverman is delighted to announce representation of Sadie Barnette, an artist whose work reveals quintessential American truths through exploration of her own family history. Working in photography, drawing, sculpture and installation, Barnette’s work makes a unique contribution to California social history and global discourses about race, sex and love.
Jessica Silverman is delighted to announce representation of Clare Rojas, the California artist best known for her magic realist and otherworldly abstract paintings. Scheduled for December, a solo exhibition of recent work by Rojas will inaugurate Jessica Silverman’s new gallery space on Grant Avenue in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Matthew Angelo Harrison has been awarded LACMA's Art + Technology Lab grant, a $45,000 award for an art project that engages with emerging technologies. One of four artists chosen from 600 submissions, Harrison will collaborate with scientists on creating a material that can be used for 3D printing of structural environments relevant to his ongoing exploration of “Abstract Ancestry.” Harrison's project is titled “The Consequence of Platforms.”
Jessica Silverman Gallery is pleased to announce the acquisition of Judy Chicago’s extensive earthwork archive, titled “Dry Ice, Smoke, and Fireworks,” to the Nevada Museum of Art, a non-profit founded in 1931.
The Ohio-born, LA-based artist combines meticulous observation of the social world with a nuanced understanding of materials. Researching her work like an archivist and ethnographer, Bowers embeds herself in activist communities in order to understand their motives and missions in depth. As such, her work bears witness. Never rigid or doctrinaire, it seduces viewers into pondering difficult questions through exacting draftsmanship, engaging texture, vibrant color and/or choreographed light. “My politics shift and mutate. I’m always looking to push my education about power, justice, liberty and privilege,” says Bowers.
With a nod to Modernist geometric constructions inspired by the Bauhaus and influenced by spirituality within an artistic practice like artists Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee before her, Generations will encompass Wieser’s distinctive, multi-faceted practice
The John Michael Kohler Arts Center has announced the selection of 13 artists to participate in its prestigious Arts/Industry residency program during 2020.
Artists-in-residence for 2020 include Daniel G. Baird, Elizabeth Corkery, Chotsani Elaine Dean, Rosemarie Fiore, Mimi Jung, Kate Klingbeil, Alex Lukas, Harold Mendez, Martha Poggioli, Ryan Scails, and collaborative team Rebecca Belmore, Osvaldo Yero and Woody De Othello.
BALTIC presents the first major UK survey of pioneering feminist artist, author and educator Judy Chicago.
The exhibition spans Chicago’s fifty-year career, from her early actions in the desert in the 1970s, to her most recent series, The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction (2013–16), which has not been previously shown outside of the US.
Judy Chicago explores the artist’s work from the perspective of the human condition, connecting birth and death with the emotional journeys experienced by the artist whilst highlighting Chicago’s ongoing concern with the devastating effects of climate change on the natural world.
The Birth Project (1980–85) is presented in dialogue with The End, linking the two extremes of being – birth and death. Alongside this, the detailed series of drawings and watercolours constituting Autobiography of a Year (1993–94) and My Accident (1986) offer a glimpse into the emotions the artist experienced over the course of one year and the impact of an accident in her life.
The exhibition also includes a selection of photographs from Chicago’s iconic Atmosphere series (1967–2017), which proposes a feminist approach to Land Art. A triptych of photographs from A Purple Poem for Miami (2019) will be seen for the first time in a commission for BALTIC’s entrance area lightbox.
The exhibition runs from November 16, 2019 – April 19, 2020.
“Matthew Angelo Harrison on Dark Povera, Minimalism and prototyping”
Feminist artist Judy Chicago, along with director Jordan Peele, will be this year’s honorees at the Hammer Museum Gala. The annual fundraiser is scheduled for Oct. 12.
Lessons of the Hour is a meditation on the life, words, and actions of Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), the visionary African American abolitionist and freed slave, and on the issues of social justice that shaped his life’s work. More poem than story, ten video projections provide visitors with a special opportunity to be immersed in the spirit of this monumental historical figure.
Shown at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester
Isaac Julien’s groundbreaking 2007 video installation The Leopard (Western Union: Small Boats) presents a lyrical and visceral meditation on histories of African migration. Combining exquisite cinematography with elements of documentary, dance and musical performance, The Leopard juxtaposes all-too-familiar images of Mediterranean passage–Black bodies crowded in rafts, laid out in reflective blankets on Italian shores, drowning in tempestuous waters–with the tranquil spaces of European tourism and luxury. Presented in conjunction with the Block’s Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time exhibit, The Leopard (Western Union: Small Boats) challenges viewers to contemplate the inequities of globalization and the cycles of displacement and violence that have bound Europe and Africa for centuries.
ICA Miami presents a new site-specific performance by Judy Chicago in the Miami Design District Jungle Plaza. Entitled A Purple Poem for Miami, Chicago’s new smoke performance is presented as part of ICA Performs, the museum’s signature platform for the development of new and recent works from leading performance artists.
Sat, Feb 23, 2019
Doors open 5:30pm, performance at sunset (6:15pm)
LOCATION
Jungle Plaza at ICA Miami
For more details and to purchase tickets, visit here.
Luke Butler will be participating in the Mills College Art Lecture Series. Organized each year in conjunction with the Studio Art MFA program and the Department of Art and Visual Culture, the series allows students and faculty to invite contemporary artists and scholars to campus in order to gain greater perspective on current ideas and practices in the contemporary art world.
Bulter’s work is a continuing investigation into the peculiar reality of popular culture. Inherently disposable, it is all but inseparable from our lives, and is a genuine point of connection with other people. Butler’s work borrows its universal language and bends it toward subjectivity- to anxiety, masculinity, mortality, and a lifelong fascination with the figures that tell the stories.
Luke Butler was born in San Francisco and grew up in New York City. He attended the Cooper Union School of Art and the California College of the Arts. He has had solo exhibitions at 2nd Floor Projects and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including “State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now” at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, “Approximately Infinite Universe” at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, “Now What?” at the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach, the 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, and “The Times” at the Flag Foundation in New York City. Luke Butler is represented by Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.
All lectures are free and open to the public.
Wednesday, February 13, at 7pm
EVENT LOCATION:
Danforth Lecture Hall
Mills College
5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland CA 94611
Congratulations to Davina Semo, who was named one of the 2019 SECA Art Award finalists! The awards are the Bay Area region’s most prestigious recognition for emerging artists. Click here to read more.
Congratulations to Matthew Angelo Harrison who was selected as a 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 in the category of Art & Style! Check him out through the link.
Isaac Julien Studio is proud to announce the UK premiere of the ten-screen installation of Stones Against Diamonds which was first shown in 2015 at the Venice Biennale, Art Basel and Miami Basel as part of Rolls Royce Art Program.
Isaac Julien’s three-screen installation of Playtime (2014) will be on show as part of Catastrophe and the Power of Art at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo this Autumn.
In conjunction with I Too Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100, this exhibition presents Isaac Julien’s landmark 1989 film Looking for Langston alongside a selection of related photographic works.
Curated by Simon Denny in dialogue with Distributed Gallery, Harm van den Dorpel, Sarah Hamerman and Sam Hart, Kei Kreutler, Aude Launay and Anna-Lisa Scherfose
The only survey exhibition of its kind in Northern California, the Yerba Buena Center for the Art’s signature triennial BAY AREA NOW returns in its eighth manifestation as a key component of YBCA’s 25th anniversary season.
Field Station is an annual cycle of projects that features work by artists at different moments in their careers. With a particular focus on new terrain, the series emphasizes the importance of research by offering a space for artists to develop ideas that may be in the early stages of conception or articulation
We are thrilled to announce that we are one of the newest members of the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA). The gallery is celebrating its 10th anniversary this summer, so the timing of this recognition by the ADAA is perfect. We are delighted to be a member of group of dealers who believe in the importance of ethics and aspire to museum quality art.
I Was Raised on the Internet documents a specific moment in time, beginning with 1998 and extending to the present, and focuses on the shifts that have occurred since the millennium. The nearly 100 works in the exhibition span photography, painting, sculpture, film, and video, as well as emerging technologies and interactive elements, which include interactive computer works and virtual reality. Among these are new adaptations of major bodies of work, as well as new commissions from some of the most significant artists working with these ideas today.
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami presents “Judy Chicago: A Reckoning”, a major survey of works by the pioneering feminist artist. This exhibition highlights Chicago’s iconographic transition from abstraction to figuration, and explores the ways in which the artist’s strong feminist voice transforms our understanding of modernism and its traditions.
Congratulations to Judy Chicago, who is one of the 2018 #TIME100. Says Jill Soloway: “Her moment is finally here again, and everyone can see she is our legacy.” Read the rest of Soloway’s words about the artist here.
Judy Chicago is an artist, author, feminist, educator, and intellectual whose career now spans five decades. Her influence both within and beyond the art community is attested to by her inclusion in hundreds of publications throughout the world. Her art has been frequently exhibited in the United States as well as in Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. In addition, a number of the books she has authored have been published in foreign editions, bringing her art and philosophy to readers worldwide. She is represented in the Bay Area by Jessica Silverman Gallery.
The McMurtry Lecture is presented this year in partnership with Stanford Live.
No tickets are required and seating is first come first served.
The nine-screen installation of Ten Thousand Waves continues its world tour and opens on Saturday March 3rd as part of the exhibition “Rebellion of Moving Image” at MOCA Taipei in Taiwan, curated by Huang Hsiang-Ning.
Special event: artist talk with Isaac Julien on Saturday 3rd March, 10:30am-midday at MOCA Taipei.
“Roots of the ‘Dinner Party’: History in the Making”
February 2018 PDF
Congratulations to Isaac Julien who was made a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) on Thursday February 1, 2018 by the Prince of Wales during an investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace! Back in SF, Julien’s exhibition “Playtime” is up at Fort Mason through February 11.
If Not Apollo, the Breeze
October 11–December 16, 2017
If Not Apollo, the Breeze takes the ancient literary history of the oracle at Delphi as its starting point to explore the irrational, ambiguous, infallible, portentous, performative, hallucinatory, and predictive. Like the oracle itself, the exhibition presents a series of coded messages that address a future that is both hard to discern and right under our feet, like a road. Nine artists and one underground newspaper are included.
Etel Adnan, Larry Bell, Mary Helena Clark, Trisha Donnelly, Terry Fox, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Tony Labat, Pope.L, Sturtevant, San Francisco Oracle (Allen Cohen, ed.)
Isaac Julien, CBE, is an award winning filmmaker and installation artist. He rose to prominence with the 1989 film Looking for Langston, a poetic documentary and homage to Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. His work has since explored a variety of issues including black identity, diaspora, migration and capital. Julien was born in 1960 in London, where he currently lives and works. In this film we visit the artist in his studio to explore three key works across his career: Looking for Langston (1969) is a lyrical exploration, and recreation, of the private world of poet, novelist and playwright, Langston Hughes (1902-1967) and his fellow black artists from the Harlem Renaissance. Playtime (2014) follows six characters: the Artist, the Hedge Fund Manager, the Auctioneer, the House Worker, the Art Dealer, and the Reporter, exploring how each is affected by capital and the global financial crisis. The work also exists as a seven-screen installation. Ten Thousand Waves (2010) poetically explores the movement of people across countries and continents and meditates on unfinished journeys, and also exists as a nine-screen installation.
Isaac Julien’s 1989 film Looking for Langston will be screened at the Museum of Modern Art New York on Saturday, October 7, at 4:00pm and again on Sunday, October 15, at 2:30pm.
ArtCrush is Aspen’s premier summer event benefiting the Aspen Art Museum. This year’s event features the 2017 Aspen Award for Art presentation to renowned contemporary artist Lawrence Weiner, a remarkable wine tasting, seated dinner, and both a Live and Silent Auction of major works of contemporary art. This year works by Judy Chicago and Hayal Pozanti will be included in the auction.
Aspen Art Crush bidding ends Thursday, August 3, 10pm ET
For the last event on the occasion of our summer exhibition “Marching to the Beat,” please join us for a performance by Detroit-based artist Maya Stovall titled Liquor and Other Things with the Artist.
“Coming Out: Sexuality, Gender and Identity” will display works from a diverse range of artists who have used art to explore sexuality and gender identity since 1967.
The soundtrack to “Looking for Langston” is now available on vinyl! Produced by The Vinyl Factory, this limited edition was created with a unique “Isaac Julien Blue” PVC.
Congratulations to Matthew Angelo Harrison on being one of nine Kresge Artist Fellows. Each fellowship comes with an unrestricted $25,000 prize.
Read more about Matthew Angelo Harrison and the Kresge Award here.
Since the 1970s, Judy Chicago has been a pioneer in the development of feminism as an artist movement and an education project that endeavors to restore women’s place in history. Her most influential and widely known work, The Dinner Party (1974–79) will be the subject of a major exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum from October 20, 2017 – March 4, 2018. The sweeping installation celebrates women’s achievements in Western culture in the form of a meticulously executed banquet table set for 39 mythical and historical women and honoring 999 others.
The Queen’s Birthday Honors List has just been announced! Huge congratulations to Isaac Julien on being awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire!
Isaac Julien is the winner of this year’s Charles Wollaston Award. The artist won the £25k prize – awarded for the “most distinguished work” in the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition – for his five-screen film “WESTERN UNION: Small Boats.”
More information about the exhibition can be found here.
2 June 2017 8:30-11 am, 22 Belgrave Square, London
“Home is not a Place” will display contemporary Art from Berlin and London includes works by Cornelia Baltes, Julius von Bismarck, Simon Fujiwara, Oliver Osborne, Florian Roithmayr, Random International, Daniel Sinsel, Wolfgang Tillmans and Nicole Wermers. It looks at a contemporary notion of home and identity and highlights the inherent power of art to transcend geographical or political boundaries.
Congratulations to Hayal Pozanti, whose painting, 18 (Possible variations of a human smile), 2015, was recently acquired by the San Jose Museum of Art.
Luke Butler and Dashiell Manley are featured in a group exhibition titled “The Times” at Flag Art Foundation, in New York, NY. The exhibition uses The New York Times as its point of departure and features over 80 artists, artist duos, and collectives who use the “paper of record” to address and reframe issues that impact our everyday lives. This show will be open June 1 – August 11, 2017. Opening Reception: Thursday, June 1, 6-8pm.
Margo Wolowiec is featured in a group exhibition titled “Tie Up, Draw Down” at The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design, in Asheville, NC. Tie Up, Draw Down explores weaving as a source for experimentation across media, genres, concept and scale. This show will be open Friday, June 2, 2017 – Saturday, September 2, 2017.
The o.t.v. (f.b.) print is based off of a series of the artist’s drawings and paintings that reference images from Japanese prints. For example, the handwritten text on the print says “decending bird” (misspelling as it appears on the Japanese print). The title of the work stands for “one thousand views (falling bird)”, also in reference to the Japanese print.
A celebration in Liverpool will take place in May and June for the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ 1967 album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Judy Chicago will create a giant mural on the theme of “Fixing a Hole” to celebrate the album that set a radical new direction for popular music. Congratulations to Judy Chicago and The Beatles.
On April 26, 2017, as part of SFMOMA’s San Francisco, CA celebration of the one-year anniversary of their new building, pioneering feminist artist Judy Chicago will create Be No More, an immersive dry ice environment in the Howard Street Corridor that will be illuminated at dusk by dozens of road flares, creating a visual metaphor for a new reality. Chicago’s history with SFMOMA is a long one, dating back to the 1979 premiere of The Dinner Party, her iconic work now permanently housed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.
We need Event Assistants to help build this exciting installation!
On April 25, a mandatory training and orientation session with Judy Chicago will take place from 10am to 2pm at Jessica Silverman Gallery (488 Ellis at Leavenworth, San Francisco).
On April 26 from 8am to 5pm five teams of event assistants will use forty tons of dry ice to build five unique structures. Flare lighting will take place at 5:45pm and again at 8:45pm.
Deadline for application is April 19, 2017. Preference will be given to early responders.
Hayal Pozanti’s new animation titled “RELENTLESS TENDERNESS” is now on view on 19 digital screens at the Westfield World Trade Center in New York. The project is part of Public Art Fund’s 40th Anniversary Season.
Jessica admits that from an early age she enjoyed pushing the envelope to get a reaction out of people. Perhaps this is the secret to her success as an art curator for Jessica Silverman Gallery, her namesake gallery in the Tenderloin and Fused, a gallery hosted by industrial designer Yves Behar.
“The Violet Revs”
Outdoor Swimming Pool,
Palace Gstaad, Palacestrasse 28, Gstaad
February 3 – March 19, 2017
Daily 12h-19h
Situated in the deserted pavilion by the Palace Hotel pool a group of white plastic stackable chairs carrying vintage black leather jackets, adorned with studs, patches and other details, suggest the presence of a female biker gang operating under the moniker ‘Violet Revs.’
Legendary feminist artist, Judy Chicago will appear at a special presentation on her artwork by Chad Alligood, curator of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. All available seats are reserved for this free event, but you can stream the event on Facebook Live, broadcast at 5:00 pm MST.
Friday, February 10, 2017, 5:00 pm MST
435 S Guadalupe St.
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505.982.8111
Artist Isaac Julien discusses the inspiration behind Isaac Julien: Other Destinies and more recent developments in his work. Lecture followed by a conversation with critic Michael Prokopow.
Tuesday, January 24, 2017, 7:00 – 8:00 pm, Reception to follow lecture.
Royal Ontario Museum
Signy and Cléophée Eaton Theatre
Level 1B
Nicole Wermers will participate in a seminar titled “Water, Fountain, Sculpture” at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, UK. The seminar is a half day event exploring how water and fountains have been used by artists and sculptors for a variety of purposes. Wermers will look at the use of water as a sculptural material and focus specifically on her 2011 series ‘Wasserregal’ (‘Watershelves’).
Saturday, January 28, 2017 from 2-5:30pm in the Institute’s seminar room. Event is free and open to the public.
The Royal Ontario Museum of Art (Toronto) will exhibit two of Isaac Julien’s film installations: Western Union: Small Boats (2007) and True North (2004).
Saturday January 21 – Sunday Apr 23, 2017
Royal Ontario Museum
100 Queen’s Park, Toronto,
ON M5S 2C6
From January 3-7, 2017, three of Isaac Julien’s films from the early 1980s will be screened at the Hammer Museum as part of “The Workshop Years: Black British Film and Video after 1981.”
Out of Focus is an art commissioning project. Each installment of OoF includes a new art work by a lead artist, and two contextualizing contributions: one by an art professional, the other by someone from a different profession. Nicole Wermers contributes with “Croissants and Architecture”.
“The Sun Placed in the Abyss”
Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH
October 7, 2016 – January 8, 2017
The Sun Placed in the Abyss brings together the work of more than 50 contemporary artists who, since 1970, have explored the essential relationship between photography and the sun. Delving into the historical, social, and technological conditions of photography, this dynamic exhibition highlights our enduring interest in our closest star.
Jessica Silverman Gallery is pleased to support the annual TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art auction, taking place on Saturday, October 22 in Dallas. This year gallery artists Julian Hoeber, Suzanne Blank Redstone and Nicole Wermers have each donated a work. All proceeds benefit amfAR and the Dallas Museum of Art.
Presented by Central Saint Martins in collaboration with the Stuart Hall Foundation, ‘Playtime’ by the critically-acclaimed artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien explores the dramatic impact of late capitalism through a number of individual stories in different parts of the globe.
This special event brings together artists, curators, writers and academics to discuss the intersection between art, money and globalisation and its impact on all our lives. It consists of two screenings, panel discussion and a book launch.
October 4, 2016 from 4:15 – 7:30pm at Platform Theatre, Central Saint Martins, London.
Los Angeles-based artist Julian Hoeber will discuss his work which includes multi-media representations of thought structures that examine vectors, rotation, cores, shells, knots, wounds, caves, and concepts of nowhere.
The talk will be on Tuesday, October 11, 6pm at Level 3, CRC/bookshop (Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University).
Judy Chicago and Crystal Bridges Museum Curator Chad Alligood in conversation at the Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, AK, on September 16, 2016.
Artnet names Jessica Silverman Gallery as one of the Top 10 Booth at EXPO Chicago 2016.
Highlights included works by feminist artist Judy Chicago, Tammy Rae Carland’s Lesbian Beds photo series, Nicole Wermer’s Untitled (Bench) (2016) which featured colored rocks in a plexiglass container, and two of Margo Wolowiec’s woven works.
The Beverly Center in Los Angeles, currently undergoing an extensive $500 million renovation, is now covered in several large-scale artworks from well-known local artists including Catherine Opie and Geoff McFetridge. The installations are part of an art program that launched in July, organized by curator Jenelle Porter in association with the Hammer Museum.
Julian Hoeber’s Artists and Models will be unveiled in September 2016. The work is a kind of seating pavilion composed of a curved billboard with an image of a woman’s face pressed against the glass. The facade wall is interrupted by a doorway that allows visitors to metaphorically enter the face, behind which is a sculptural bench and intricate floor that forms a relaxation space.
Matthew Angelo Harrison’s first museum solo exhibition “Detroit City/Detroit Affinities” is currently on view at MOCA Detroit, until January 1, 2017. The show is curated by MOCAD’s Susanne Feld Hilberry Senior Curator at Large Jens Hoffmann
Harrison will participate in an artist talk on Saturday, October 22, 1pm at MOCA Detroit.
TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art 2016 is an annual contemporary art auction held in the Richard Meier-designed Rachofsky House in Dallas, benefiting two organizations—the Dallas Museum of Art and amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research. This year works by Julian Hoeber, Suzanne Blank Redstone and Nicole Wermers will included in the auction.
TWO x TWO auction bidding begins on Monday, October 17, 2016, at 12 noon CST.
During AFI 2016, Arturo Bandini hosts two shows-within-the-show in the Ballroom Marfa courtyard, Sim City and Grey Goo Gardens. These micro-exhibitions will include work from sixteen artists, who will play with and off of the exhibition’s technological themes. Sim City (September 23 – December 4, 2016) features Edgar Bryan, Jason Roberts Dobrin, Michael Dopp, Liz Glynn, Kate Hall, Julian Hoeber, Nevine Mahmoud, and Mungo Thomson.
LGBT Studies at Yale University has awarded Isaac Julien the 2016-17 James Brudner Memorial Prize in LGBT Studies.
Julien will be in conversation with Prof. Kobena Mercer at Yale Center for British Art Auditorium, New Haven, CT on Wednesday, September 28, 2016 at 5PM.
Judy Chicago’s Birth Project: Born Again
Museum of Fine Arts, Florida State University
September 23 – November 13, 2016
Reception: October 14, 2016, 6-8pm
Judy Chicago’s Birth Project was completed between 1980 and 1985 and this current exhibition gathers a number of exceptional Birth Project works.
The Birth Project was stitched by 150 women needleworkers who joined artist Judy Chicago over the five year period of its production to complete approximately 85 textiles for a series of “exhibition units.” Chicago worked with needleworkers, providing underpaintings, cartoons, drawings, mock-ups, color specifications, and written directions for the transformation of her images and every needleworker received public credit for her work. Dr. Thompson Wylder summarizes Chicago’s Birth Project, now “born again” in this exhibition, as “a continuing force for cultural change and aesthetic transformation.”
Please join us for a candid and intimate conversation between film scholar B. Ruby Rich and Isaac Julien on the occasion of his solo exhibition “Vintage.” No strangers to discussions of “Queer Cinema” (a term coined by Rich), these longtime friends will explore the three series featured in this photographic exhibition – Looking for Langston (1989), Trussed (1996) and The Long Road to Mazatlan (1999-2000).
B. Ruby Rich is a Professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. She is also Editor of Film Quarterly (UC Press), the oldest film journal in the U.S. She is the author of New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut (2013) and Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (1998). With a long history in film festivals, she continues to participate in panels and juries at major film festivals including Sundance, Toronto, and Provincetown. She continues to write widely in both the scholarly and academic press, contribute to international conferences, and provide film commentary for public radio, television, and online.
Tammy Rae Carland will participate in the VOID Salon, a free panel discussion about zines, the 70s and 80s, and more. The panel also includes Allan deSouza, Matt Wobensmith, and Fiamma Montezemolo.
Friday, April 1, 6:00–8:00 pm
360 Kansas Street,Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (between 16th & 17th Streets)
Free and open to the public
Art historian Gloria Sutton engages LA-based artist Julian Hoeber in a conversation that focuses on how the artist’s work critically transposes architecture and visual art by translating spatial paradigms of the body and the built environment (e.g. exploring notions of interiority, rumination and the liminal). The discussion examines how positivist assumptions about artistic productivity are intentionally frustrated in this new body of work currently on show as “The Inward Turn” at Jessica Silverman Gallery. Referring to pedagogical models of Buckminster Fuller and Black Mountain College, the talk considers the various ways that “failure” can produce meaning for the viewer.
Julian Hoeber (b. 1974, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) has a BA in Art History from Tufts University, a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), MOCA Los Angeles, Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Rosenblum Collection (Paris), Tang Museum (Saratoga Springs New York), Western Bridge Museum (Seattle), Rubell Family Collection (Miami) and Deste Foundation Centre for Contemporary Art (Athens). Hoeber lives and works in Los Angeles.
Gloria Sutton is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History at Northeastern University and is a research affiliate in the Art Culture Technology Program at MIT. Her scholarship is invested in the ways that durational media have altered the reception of visual art in the post 1968 period. Her book The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome and Expanded Cinema was published by MIT Press in 2015. Gloria received her doctorate from UCLA and has been a fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the Getty Research Institute. She is the inaugural web editor for Art Journal.
“A Scholar’s Airport as the Body’s Proxy: Julian Hoeber’s ‘The Inward Turn’”
“There’s a cool new thing tech billionaires are spending millions on instead of Ferraris and private islands” Business Insider Written by Madeline Stone June 9, 2015 PDF
“On the Radar” California Home + Design Written by Lindsey Shook Summer 2015 PDF
“Open Source: Art at the Eclipse of Capitalism” Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin: Bleibtreu Straße 45 , D-10623 Berlin-Charlottenburg March 12 – April 18, 2015 More information
“Artists for Ikon” Ikon Gallery 1 Oozells Street, Birmingham, West Midlands B1 2HS, United Kingdom April 24 – May 4, 2015 More information
“Time seems sometimes to stop” Art Practical February 24, 2015 Written by Danica Willard Sachs PDF
In July 1978, New York’s Museum of Modern Art presented Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960. Curated by John Szarkowski, the visionary head of MoMA’s department of photography, the exhibition postulated that a photograph is either a mirror, “a romantic expression of the photographer’s sensibility as it projects itself on the things and sights of this world,” or a window “through which the exterior world is explored in all its presence and reality.”1 Szarkowski’s somewhat tidy dichotomy was specific to photography, but it is nonetheless relevant to Dashiell Manley’s paintings and sculptures in Time seems sometimes to stop, which oscillate between the two metaphors. Using the idea and form of the newspaper, the artist examines how information culture can be both a window to, and a reflection of, the larger world…[DDET read more]
Manley employs a labor-intensive process to make the large, enveloping New York Times–based paintings that constitute the bulk of the exhibition. For each, he transcribed in watercolor pencil the entire front page of a week-old New York Times onto canvas, covering the surface with pastel words that read both horizontally and vertically. Individual words and phrases are mostly illegible—the result of layering and the physical smearing that occurs as the artist’s hand traverses the canvas. The paintings are finished with a silver-tinted wash, adding a subtle reflective luster that further obscures the text. Ten of these paintings are installed just a few inches apart in the front room, effectively wallpapering the gallery with old news. As viewers, our eyes roam each canvas, seeking words or phrases that would locate them in time and geography, but the artist’s formal choices prevent a resolution.
The small sculptural objects that fill the center of the gallery likewise echo newspaper formatting, but these are less successful. They are perched on nine white pedestals with mirrored sides. They vary in size, each box made from glass, zinc, and silver. Some of their faces are either glazed, so that viewers struggle to see inside, or mirrored, so that we only see ourselves. The top of each pedestal is sized to match the broadsheet format of the Times—a key detail that is not immediately apparent—and the sculptures on top are intended to echo the placement of the photographs on the front page. The tension between mirror and window that makes the paintings so engrossing is lost in these confusing objects.
The exhibition resonates with photographic practices on another level as well, taking its title from an essay by the filmmaker and art critic Hollis Frampton on the serial photography of Eadweard Muybridge.2 In the essay, Frampton asserts that Muybridge sought to make photographs that were more than just frozen moments in time. Manley’s paintings likewise remove newspapers from the mere dichotomy of past and present, news old and new.[/DDET]
“Unfixed: New Paintings” ASU Art Museum 51 E. 10th St.Tempe, AZ Through June 6, 2015 More information
Featuring the work of Katherine Bernhardt, Hugh Scott Douglas, Jeff Elrod, Daniel Lefcourt, Eddie Peake, Avery Singer, Josh Smith and Brad Troemel. The artists in the exhibition unfix historic notions of what a painting should be. Their works are hybrids of old and new, familiar and surprising media and processes. Through this mix the artists find new ways to make, think about and view painting. The results range from abstractions derived from street and popular culture to computer-generated algorithms printed on canvas. Somehow, they are paintings while also beyond painting.
“Painting, Daydreaming and Dancing with Hayal Pozanti” WOVO January 14, 2015 Written by Beata Wilczek PDF
Hayal Pozanti was born in 1983 in Istanbul and currently is based in New York. She has studiedBA Visual Arts andCommunication Design at Sabanci UniversityandMFA Painting/Printmaking at Yale University.Pozanti is known for her acrylic paintings and animated GIFs – both of which depict anthropomorphic forms that evoke linguistic characters and fluctuate between imaginary machines, graphic symbols and figuration. She approaches data, and the storage and dissemination of data in an animistic way, creating hybrid forms; her hand-made digital figures seem to be in the dormant phase before receiving or expelling action. In various ways, the artist creates forms that begin to personify digital tools, a process that introduces a sense of existential physicality to seemingly immaterial networks and processes. With the increasing ephemerality and insecurity of the information age Pozanti’s practice proposes an interface with digital tools that denies the inherent transience of networked data and proposes an Internet reality that is not dislocated from human history…[DDET read more]
WOVO: When we met I couldn’t tell where you’re from and I thought your name sounded like a flower in Latin. Can you tell me more about where you’re from; what do you do and also what does your name mean?
HAYAL POZANTI: Thank you, that sounds beautiful. I was born and raised in Istanbul, with an overlay in Houston for elementary school. I am an artist and have been splitting my time between New York, Los Angeles and Berlin for the past two years. My parents fell in love during a hitchhiking trip in the 70’s, and on a later trip met a fisherman who had a daughter named Hayal. It means daydream in Turkish. They thought it was perfect for a girl.
WOVO: You have created your own alphabet – have you always been into typography and language?
HP: Yes. In a way, I had to be. From an early age, language has presented itself as an obstacle to overcome.As an only child, I was tasked with finding playmates for myself on our summer beach holidays. At four years old, I was surrounded by European children and had to improvise gestures to communicate. We played for hours in the sand with not a common word between us. Later on, when I turned 8, as our impending move to the United States approached, I asked my father “Will they let me stay even if I don’t speak their language?” My fears were unfounded and I became completely fluent in English within 3 months of our move. These experiences fundamentally changed my understanding of the world. Barriers of language seemed frivolous and obsolete. Presently, my work is an attempt to keep this idealism alive by creating a visual language that transcends the limits of speech.
WOVO: When I look at your work and read about it I can’t escape some references to new materialism and semiotics. Are there any books that have transformed your way of making art?
HP: Yes. Too many to count. I’m far from my library at the moment but I’ll attempt to make a list. Not in any particular order. Jean Baudrillard – Passwords, Boris Groys – Art Power, Hal Foster – Design and Crime, Peter Sloterdijk – Spheres, Paul Virilio – The Information Bomb, Jonathan Crary – Suspensions of Perception, Sherry Turkle – The Second Self, Life on the Screen: Identity in the age of the Internet, and Simulation and It’s Discontents, Robert Motherwell -The Writings of Robert Motherwell, Jan Verwoert – The Beauty and Politics of Latency: On the Work of Tomma Abts, Wouter Davidts and Kim Paice – The Fall of The Studio: Artists at Work, All Tiqqun, Hito Steyerel – Wretched of the Screen, Paul Graham – Hackers and Painters, Carolyn L. Kane – Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetic after Code.
WOVO: Artist Dafna Maimon once told me that she wants to speak 7 languages and that art is also one of them. Do you think that art is a language?
HP: No. I think all artists strive to communicate through art, but I wouldn’t combine their efforts under a universal definition. I like to think that all artist speak their private language. There may be overlaps and families with similar roots, but the beauty is in their uniqueness.
WOVO: Once when I was working on a site specific projection I ended up with having 3x3m screen, a massive square. In person it was great and overwhelming but online every still looked like an image cropped to fit the Instagram realm. A friend told me then: ‘Instagram killed the square’. But you use the square dimension in this particular reference in you work. Do the social media platforms and technology provide you with a symbolic framework?
HP: Yes, they have been. I studied Visual Communication in university, so my initial impulse is to analyze the world through this perspective. As my practice evolved to include painting, I simultaneously started to think of the work’s representation within the digital world. Our eyes are confined to the dimensions of both the screen and the predetermined media dimensions within screens. It seemed logical to mimic these proportions both in terms of understanding their relationship to my body and also to ensure that the work could exist in both the digital and the physical realms. My paintings have so far been in the exact proportions of iPhones blown up to human size or have mimicked the square of twitter avatars, instagram feeds and Facebook photos.
WOVO: Do you feel that as an artist you have to deliver a concept manifest in the visual form which will be noticeable, liked and acknowledged by a certain group of people?
HP: This is a great question that I think about frequently. Certain aesthetic tropes have overtaken visual production merely because they look better on screens. Instant online sharing enforces us to dream collectively. How can one maintain uniqueness without unplugging? I’ve tried to find a solution to this conundrum by inventing my personal shape system. A unique visual language that does not appropriate but seeks to invent new forms. I would of course like to be acknowledged by my peers whose work I respect, but I would not go out of my way to make my work look like what I believe they would like to see. I feel that all good art finds its audience eventually and the most important thing is to stick to your guns and make what you believe in.
WOVO: I know that you make digital sketches first and paint later. Why do you stick to traditional and tangible methods? Why do you need to paint a painting?
HP: I’ve come to paint in a roundabout way. I guess I used to be what you would call a net artist. In time, sitting for hours in front of a screen generated an undefined anxiety. It felt as if there were hundreds of voices screaming at me simultaneously for attention. I just felt a need to be alone with my thoughts. Or to rediscover what they might have been. I was also frustrated by printing. Printing things never looked as good as they did on a screen and I felt a there was always a failure in translation. In short, painting for me is about making a statement by reclaiming my physicality. By painting, I am stepping away from the computer screen and the immobility it confines my body to. By painting, I am freeing myself of the imposed aesthetic sensibility of computer programs. I am embracing imperfection. Through painting, I can enjoy the physicality of my body without a gym membership. I can think about how colors exist in real life as I mix them. I can meditate on complex thoughts as I fill in large areas of color. I can dance while I work. I continue to make digital work and also program, but it feels great to have both realms coexist in my life. I feel grateful to be part of the lucky few who gets to step away from their computers for extended hours daily.
WOVO: Would you ever consider working with a fashion label? How would you feel as a new Caravaggio on Givenchy sweatshirt?
HP: I worked in fashion for 5 years after I graduated from university. I was designing and producing shop windows for the Turkish equivalent of Barney’s; Beymen. Within the same company, I started designing clothes, t-shirts and fabric patterns (basically whole collections) for its sister street-wear label, t-box. I have also designed a best selling Istanbul t-shirt for Mavi. So it would not be a new experience for me, that’s for sure :)
WOVO: You are based in New York, could you recommend WOVO some exciting places?
HP: Hmm I’m not sure about exciting lol but I like to walk by the river. It’s super close to my house in Chinatown and perfect for morning exercise. I like the Parish Art Museumthat’s upstate. Beautiful building and drive upstate. My friends have recently opened a project space at PS1 calledALLGOLD, they’ve been hosting great sound projects.[/DDET]
“As San Francisco Booms, So Does its Gallery Scene” The New York Times Written by Joseph Akel January 8, 2015 PDF
San Francisco, as has been welldocumented, is undergoing seismic cultural shifts. The second technology boom has brought an influx of wealth, investors and start-up prospectors to the city, drawing parallels with the gold rush of 1849. Now, as members of the newly well-heeled tech elite look to invest their money, the city’s small but thriving gallery scene is finding itself the recipient of their attention…[DDET read more]
“San Francisco feels like the center of the world,” says Sabrina Buell, formerly the director of New York’s Matthew Marks Gallery, who is now a partner in the art advisory firmZlot Buell + Associates. Buell, a Stanford graduate, helps successful start-up founders – many of them her former college classmates – begin collecting. “The tech community is in many ways defining culture,” she says.
On any given opening night atJessica Silverman ‘s namesake space in the city’s gritty Tenderloin neighborhood (488 Ellis St.), the crowd is likely to include luminaries of the industry such as the Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger or the Jawbone creator Yves Béhar (Buell’s partner), with whom Silverman collaborated on a curatorial project, “Fused Space,” at his Potrero Hill design studio. “The tech community includes a lot of philanthropic intellectuals that are open to visual experimentation,” Silverman says.
Et Al. (620 Kearney St.), run by Facundo Arganaraz, Jackie Im and Aaron Harbour, is housed in the basement of a dry cleaner’s, exhibiting a well-curated selection of mostly young up-and-coming artists. Meanwhile, housed in 49 Geary Street — a multiuse building that was once the heart of the San Francisco art circuit but now houses mostly tech startups — Claudia Altman-Siegel ‘s eponymous gallery continues to promote a roster of artists that draws critical acclaim and the attention of its neighbors.
To the southeast, Chris Perez’sRatio 3(2831A Mission St.), with a line up of art-world darlings including Ryan McGinley and Takeshi Murata, was one of the first galleries to eschew the city center, opening instead in the traditionally Latino, rapidly gentrifying Mission District in 2004. Now that the neighborhood is home to numerous start-ups and nightlife options, other galleries have followed suit.Kiria Koula (3148 22nd St.), founded this past October by Rodrigo Peñafiel and Leticia Vilalta and directed by Juana Berrío, has already made a name for itself; one of its artists, Jose Leon Cerrillo, will be included in this year’s New Museum Triennial.
For gallerists like Silverman and Altman-Siegel, who both have shows opening this week – the 2014 Whitney Biennial participantDashiell Manley andMatt Keegan, respectively – the interest in their work goes both ways. On one hand, tech collectors are becoming increasingly discerning with regard to contemporary art, pushing gallery owners to exhibit artists with higher profiles. “People in the tech industry,” Ratio 3’s director Theo Elliott says, “are broadly very curious about art.” And though gentrification has caused some artists to leave the city, for others whose work addresses issues of the digital age San Francisco is an increasingly compelling place to live. As Buell observes, “artists want to be where the ideas are.” Local galleries, in turn, are raising their international profiles: Silverman, Ratio 3 and Altman-Siegel will all be showing at the Frieze Art Fair in New York later this year.
The Bay Area tech scene’s invigorated interest in contemporary art extends beyond gallery walls. Illuminating the western span of the city’s Bay Bridge, Leo Villareal’s $8 million computer-programmed light sculpture installation, “Bay Lights,” was made possible in part by donations from Marissa Mayer and the tech-world power couple Mark and Ali Pincus of Zynga and One Kings Lane. And with a massive expansion project underway by the Oslo-based architecture firm Snøhetta, theSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art has since 2010 brought on 12 new board members, at least half of whom come from the tech sector. And last September, at the opening night gala for Ai Weiwei’s Alcatraz-based installation “@Large,” many of the tech world’s heavy hitters — the Goodreads co-founder Elizabeth Chandler, Pincus and Béhar among them — mingled with art world movers and shakers. Throughout the night, attendees could be overheard discussing apps and and art exhibitions with equal enthusiasm. Entrepreneurs, as Buell says, “find points of deep resonance with the artistic community.”[/DDET]
“In __ We Trust: Art and Money”
Columbus Museum of Art
480 E Broad St, Columbus, OH 43215
Member opening: Thursday, October 2, 5:30PM
October 3, 2014 – March 1, 2015 View invitation here
Money. It is a simple fact of everyday life, as well as, a fundamental principal of our social, political, and economic order. It is a medium of exchange, an index and store of value, and a universal equivalent into which most anything can dissolve. It connects, defines, and divides nations. It is pocket change and dead presidents. It is the key to happiness and the root of all evil. It has no intrinsic value apart from what we’ve given it. Money is an idea, a social contract, and one that depends on frequently-tested collective emotional states like trust, faith, and confidence…[DDET read more]
With work by more than 20 artists and collectives from diverse international backgrounds, the exhibition In __ We Trust addresses this complex nature of money, as well as, its relationship to art. Works in the exhibition take currency as a material or subject, involve transactions, precious materials, and alternative forms of exchange. Anchored by select pieces from previous decades, the exhibition focuses on work made since the 2008 financial crisis.
Artists include JSG Boggs, Sarah Cain, Susan Collis, Moyra Davey, e-flux Time/Bank, Claire Fontaine, Tom Friedman, Meschac Gaba, Ryan Gander, Roger Hiorns, William E. Jones, Komar & Melamid, Gabriel Kuri, Shane Mecklenburger, Cildo Meireles, Ester Partegas, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Hugh Scott-Douglas, Superflex, Mark Wagner, Nari Ward, Andy Warhol and Robert Wechsler. Together, they explore issues of representation, value and exchange that have both personal and global impact.[/DDET]
Hayal Pozanti was born in Istanbul, Turkey. Since receiving her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University in 2011, Pozanti has had solo exhibitions at Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; Duve, Berlin, Germany; Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy; and The Armory Show in New York. Her work has been featured in an impressive list of articles in Artsy, New American Paintings, The Huffington Post, Modern Painters, the Los Angels Times, and the Paris Review.
Pozanti, who is primarily a painter and sculptor, was invited to Tamarind in February to make her first lithographs. In an interview published in New American Paintings (February 2014), Pozanti tells Curator Claude Smith about her experience working at Tamarind:
To my surprise and delight, [creating a lithograph] turned out to be a process that felt much more similar to painting or drawing than printing in the way we understand as digital natives. In lithography, one creates as one is printing and also manipulating the outcome through the process of printing. This is incomparable to pressing a button and waiting for the result to come out of a printer.
Regarding her work, Pozanti had this to share with the Paris Review (June, 2014):
As a Turkish immigrant who has moved from place to place, who speaks several languages, I’m intrigued by the possibility of creating a universal language to unite my cross-cultural experiences. When I think back to my childhood in Istanbul-even during my time as a young professional there-I was always concerned with the question of acceptance and with the idea of unifying people.
“Company & Conversations”
Redling Fine Art
6757 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90038
Opening reception: Saturday, September 6, 6PM
“Promises to Pay in Solid Substance”
Solo exhibition with Hugh Scott-Douglas
Jessica Silverman Gallery
September 5 – November 1, 2014
Opening reception: September 5, 6-8PM
More information to come
“2:44 – 3:08pm”
Hugh Scott-Douglas panel discussion with Scott Lyall and Ben Schumacher, moderated by A.E. Benenson
Swiss Institute / Contemporary Art
18 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10013
Tuesday, August 12, 2014, 7PM PDF press release here
“2:45pm on May 6th, 2010 marks the time and date of the Flash Crash. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged nearly 1000 points (accounting for roughly 9% of the total market) before recovering the entirety of those losses by 3:07pm. The crash accounted for the second largest point swing and the largest one-day point decline in the history of the Dow Jones. By most accounts, the thrashing was set off when one hedge fund’s algorithm clashed with thousands of other autonomous high-frequency trading algorithms operating beyond the threshold for human intervention, let alone comprehension. In 1945 US stock was held for an average of four years; this dropped to eight months in 2000, again to two months in 2008 and 22 seconds in 2011. It is estimated that high-frequency trading accounts for between 50 and 74% of the volume of trades taking place on the US market today…[DDET read more]
If something of contemporary art’s role is to give expression to the paradigmatic forms of its age, the Flash Crash demands our aesthetic attention. Within it we find the typical, if paradoxical, terms of contemporary culture: massive complexity on a minuscule scale, elasticity and compression, the black-boxes of autonomous digital systems precariously stacked upon each other in the name of all kinds of speculation–financial, political, interpersonal. To simply say that we live under the increasing influence of “algorithms” today means nothing – what matters is the ways in which specific algorithms are put into practice, not just their final outcomes (here, a zero-sum) but the strange paths they cut through our prevailing notions of time, autonomy, production, etc. Technological determinism gives way to a poetics of use.
With this in mind, the participants in this talk were chosen for their committed exploration into algorithmic processes and their networks; though their practices span a range of mediums and registers, they are united in a certain formal approach that adapts the processes and effects of algorithms to produce a new aesthetic vocabulary capable of describing the world in which we now live.”
Hugh Scott Douglas and A.E Benenson
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Scott Lyall lives and works in Toronto and New York. Recent solo exhibitions include οἴνοπα πόντον [Winedark Sea] at Campoli Presti, London, 2014 and Indiscretion at Miguel Abreu Gallery, 2013. His long time collaboration with choreographer and dancer Maria Hassabi includes stage design and dramaturgy for Premiere at the Kitchen, 2013, SOLO/Soloshow at Performa, 2009 and Gloria at the Ballroom Marfa, and PS 122, New York, 2007. In 2012, he participated in Anti-Establishment at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum. Lyall earned his MFA from the California Institute of the Art in 1993.
Ben Schumacher was born in 1985 in Kitchener, Canada. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France; Small Wing Buzz, Bed-Stuy Love Affair, Brooklyn; Mr. Vector, Croy Nielsen, Berlin; and DS+R and the bar at the Orangerie, Bortolami Gallery, New York, NY. This past spring he organized the exhibition BLOOMINGTON: MALL OF AMERICA, NORTH SIDE OF FOOD COURT, ACROSS FROM BURGER KING & THE BANK OF PAYPHONES THAT DON’T TAKE INCOMING CALLS featuring works by several of his peers. Schumacher received a Bachelor of Architecture from Waterloo University and a Masters of Fine Art from New York University.
Hugh Scott-Douglas holds a BFA in sculpture from Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD). His most recent solo exhibitions include eyes without a face at Croy Nielsen in Berlin and A Broken Mule at Kaikai Kiki Gallery in Tokyo. His work has also been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, London, Toronto, Paris and Basel, Switzerland and is a part of museum collections such as Dallas Museum of Art and Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, Michigan. Scott-Douglas is currently working towards an upcoming solo exhibition at Jessica Silverman Gallery titled Promises to Pay in Solid Substance opening in September 2014, as well as a group exhibition at Columbus Museum of Art. He lives and works in New York.
A.E. Benenson is a writer and curator based in New York City. His work abstracts the technical principles of contemporary technology and their systems into forms that can be applied to art, history, and politics. He is currently a curatorial researcher at the Artist’s Institute, New York, curator in residence at 221a, Vancouver, and the head curator of the Impakt 2014 Festival in Utrecht.
“Suds, Scents, and Soup in San Francisco’s Tenderloin”
The New York Times
Written by Christopher Hall
August 5, 2014 View PDF here
The Tenderloin art scene took a huge step forward with the November relocation of this respected gallery from lower Nob Hill. Flooded with natural light, the 2,800-square-foot space on the street level of the stately Arlington, a low-income residential hotel, showcases the work of emerging and midcareer artists worldwide.
“Chalk Blush”
July 3 – August 2, 2014
Kinman Gallery
81 Curtain Road
London
EC2A 3AG
Opening reception: July 3, 6-9PM
With works also by: Victoria Adam, Ryan Conrad Sawyer, Bradley Grievson, Ben Sansbury, Maximilian Schubert View invitation here
“Frieze Focus: Up and Coming Galleries Showing Previously Unseen Artworks” Artsy Editorial piece May 2014 Full article here
As the ferries dock at Randall’s Island for Frieze New York, fairgoers will cross the lawns to the fair’s iconic big-top tent. Those seeking fresh content from new galleries should beeline to the FOCUS section, where up-and-coming galleries (less than ten years old) will exhibit works previously unseen at an art fair…[DDET read more]
Although Jerusalem-born, London-based conceptual artist Amikam Toren has exhibited extensively throughout Europe, a mini retrospective at Jessica Silverman Gallery’s booth marks the artist’s first solo show in New York City in his 35-year career. The booth will include works from six series from the ’70s to present, including “Of the Times,” Toren’s large-scale paintings that depict letters made from the pulp of ground-up editions of newspapers, and “Pidgin Paintings,” which are made by cutting pieces of fabric from a stretched canvas, pulverizing the material, and reapplying it to the canvas, as if it were paint. Also on view are works from “Simple Fractions,” “Replacing,” “Hybrids,” and “Stack” sculptures, giving a comprehensive look at the artist’s oeuvre, filled with hints of Arte Povera, Minimalism, Gutai, and Pop Art.[/DDET]
“The Mechanics of Money: In Conversation with Hugh Scott-Douglas” Sleek Magazine Written by Josie Thaddeus-Johns May 5, 2014 Full article here
At the American artist’s first ever show at Gallery Weekend Berlin, Sleek caught up with Hugh Scott-Douglas at Croy Nielsen to talk about the value of the image and interacting markets in his most recent work, based on banknotes and the “chopmarks” found on them…[DDET read more]
“This is a newer series of work for me that I started showing in Switzerland. So far, it’s untitled but is referred to as “chopped bills”, which is the direct name of the phenomenon that’s occurring visually on one level.
My first interest in these “chopmarks” is the anti-counterfeiting. A company called Digimarc, founded by an American astrophysicist, who developed this technological platform of stenographical imaging – invisible digital watermarking. Originally, he did it to stop people pirating some photos he had taken of Jupiter – he didn’t want to jeopardise the artistic integrity of the images by imposing a direct watermark on them, so he created this invisible way of anti-counterfeiting. The practical application of that now is that it prevents the counterfeiting of money. It presents itself in a number of different ways – the most visually obvious one is a specific set of dots – called the EURrion constellation. If you try to scan a bill and put it into an editing program, it will shut itself down, as a way to prevent counterfeiting.
That’s the mechanics of the bill, it’s not an image that allows itself to be appropriated. If we think of Photoshop and the scanner as contemporary tools of the photographer, with Richard Prince, for example, as a precedent, those images are protected on an intellectual level from copyright: their ability to be appropriated is epistemologically black and white. My interest in working with currency in this way is because there’s something physical that prevents its appropriation, that is directly interfering with the tools of the artist.
The second area of interest comes from the marks: the firecracker, the toxic logo, this star shape. For this show I’ve focused more specifically on graffiti-oriented ones, but there are others that are more clerical in their form. My interest in those marks isn’t what their purpose is, but in the fact that their purpose is so oblique. They’re put there by an unknown assailant – banks, casinos, drug dealers, graffiti – it could be any number of things. For me, the real point of interest is more from our lack of ability to understand what they are. They’re a purely speculative moment.
Interestingly enough, this completely random act of mark-making, when combined with this structured image, creates a breakdown in the structure of the bills. Both visually because they have this organic quality, but also because in adding this foreign element to the bill, it stops the bill being recognised as currency. The project of the artist becomes one of formatting and framing the graphic content so that the mark occupies enough of the visual space that scanners no longer recognise it as a bill. The images are authored by their contingency.
Paper currency represents something so abstract, so broken from any material foundation: all economy is abstract. In my previous work with cyanotypes, I liked creating a container of value that was also hollow, in the sense that I was making blueprints that were finished works and then disseminated as such. This work, by contrast, isn’t so dependent on its material, it’s more about the image as material, and that would be the image of currency.
These paper sculptures are being shown for the first time here. If the other works are authored by contingency, these are authored by debt. These are made of newsprint posters, with 48 unique images, all taken from this website, Delcampe.net, a website that is like Ebay for old paper. These are the first 48 images for a specific search term.I have old transport tickets, which are actually really beautiful, and the others are old invoices and commercial documents. Each represents this specific moment in time, the particular things that are for sale, but I’m also really interested in how it’s a resource that’s continually in flux. It’s in flux because of the markets of availabilty and demand. To take it and make it into a static image makes it possible to redistribute it again, so you have one market which is the digital online economy of ecommerce and then there’s another in the gallery.
These papers are available to be taken for the duration of the exhibition, but at the end of the exhibition it becomes frozen – acknowledging the debt that it’s incurred by sitting here. I see this like the time of exposure: the image-object develops through its exposure to the acquisitive hand. All the paper artefacts we work with are all expended containers of value in some way or another, like a stamp or a transportation ticket. There’s something interesting to me in reinstating value to something that claimed a particular value at one time or another. The economy of collectibles in general really reflects market demand – for example people who sell a specific issue of 5 euro notes for 8 euros apiece. It’s inflated and then deflated and then reinflated as a collectible and then reinflated in the gallery to a degree that’s even further from its original value!”[/DDET]
Croy Nielsen Weydingerstraße 10 D-10178 Berlin Opening reception: May 2, 2014
“Tenderloin Investment Bounces Back” Beyond Chron Written by Randy Shaw April 22, 2014 Full article here
Despite dot-com booms, housing bubbles, and the post 2011 tech-driven economy, new investment avoided the Tenderloin. But in 2014, confidence in the neighborhood’s future has finally returned. In 1994, Tenderloin stakeholders identified disinvestment as the neighborhood’s top economic problem. This is still the case. This lack of non-housing investment in the Tenderloin has caused a lack of neighborhood serving businesses, unsafe streets, and the outflow of Tenderloin residents’ dollars to other neighborhoods. But the Tenderloin’s fifty year economic drought may finally be over… [DDET read more]
New Tenderloin Investments
In the last month, two long vacant properties on a single block of Eddy Street between Hyde and Leavenworth have changed hands. One has been used as a parking garage, the other for car repair.
The new owner of the parking garage will keep the historic façade and built housing behind and above the structure. Considering that the garage long served as valet parking for non-Tenderloin businesses, the new housing is a clear positive for the community.
The other site will be transformed into a “holistic spa” and bathhouse. I don’t exactly know what they have in mind, but like the other garage project, the spa will bring positive evening foot traffic to an area that desperately needs it.
A block from the two garages is a long neglected corner restaurant at Eddy and Leavenworth that will be transformed into a place people actually come to eat. The future home of the Tenderloin Museum will be on the other corner (see accompanying story by Karin Drucker). A block up at Ellis and Leavenworth is the Jessica Silverman Gallery, recently profiled in the New York Times.
The Piano Fight theater/bar/restaurant destination on Taylor between Eddy and Turk opens this summer, as does the nearby Bulldog Baths at 130 Turk. The art school under the renovated tourist hotel at 116 Turk has already activated a long dormant retail space.
At Taylor and Turk, Neveo Mosser will soon begin a multimillion-dollar renovation project at the Grand Apartments, 57 Taylor. Expect a great new restaurant along Turk (Mosser just attracted two quality restaurants for a building he recently purchased at 1008 Larkin), and as much as can be done to restore the building’s historic luster (57 Taylor, like TNDC’s headquarters at 217 Eddy, was a once beautiful building whose exterior was wrecked by ill-advised “modernization.”)
Mosser will also soon paint the building. 57 Taylor has long been one of the ugliest painted buildings in the neighborhood, and its high visibility has made it look even worse. Mosser can turn a longtime liability into a major asset.
But for years 57 Taylor was not the Tenderloin’s worst painted building—that honor went to the building at Golden Gate and Leavenworth across from the Kelly Cullen Community building. This huge eyesore has also been painted, getting one of the most positive makeovers in the Tenderloin’s recent history.
And commercial tenants are lining up for the space, which would eliminate the drug dealer fueling station also known as Boy’s Market.
Geary Street Progress
Media bias against the Tenderloin results in countless features on problems on Golden Gate and Turk while progress on Geary—just as much a part of the historic Tenderloin as the other two streets, and arguably more reflective of the neighborhood than Golden Gate—is overlooked. But two destination restaurants and a wine bar are seeking to relocate to the area, which currently is best known for its many bars (Rye, Swig, Ambassador, Trocadero to name four).
The vastly improved 800 block of Geary reflects the ideal Tenderloin future. It has the expanded White Walls Gallery, cafes, pizza, restaurants, ice cream, and an SRO housing formerly homeless people. The corner of Larkin and Geary has the Hartland Hotel, also part of the city’s master lease program, two bars and a vinyl record store.
Once people get used to coming to Geary, its only a matter of time before they venture deeper into the Tenderloin.
The Chairman is Coming
Here’s my prediction for 2014: the opening of the Chairman on Larkin between Eddy and Ellis will bring more new foot traffic to Little Saigon than any new restaurant in years. This is the type of restaurant that will get Twitter employees riding their bikes up Larkin when they get off work, because The Chairman offers a product unmatched elsewhere (its reputation comes from its food truck, Chairman Bao)
Larkin Street’s upside has not been tapped, and The Chairman will bring new people to try other restaurants. There is no reason Little Saigon should not be hopping until 10pm, rather than being busy at lunch and then slow at night.
A survey of Larkin Street business owners earlier this year saw widespread concern about sidewalk cleanliness. But under DPW Director Nuru and Superintendent Kayhan, Larkin Street is cleaner than ever. And the Phoenix Hotel is doing a great job keeping the long stretch of Larkin that serves as the entry point to Little Saigon clean as well.
There remains much work to be done. Far too many businesses remain that make little to no effort to attract customers (earning their revenue from carefully hidden slot machines and other under the table activities). Some business owners feel trapped in their leases, and lack the capital to attract new customers.
But the progress in 2014 is indisputable. Like adjacent Mid-Market, after fifty years of decline the once thriving Tenderloin neighborhood is slowly but surely coming back. [/DDET]
“Bloomington: Mall of America, North side food court, Across from Burger KIng and the bank of payphones that don’t take incoming calls” Bortolami Gallery 520 W 20th Street New York, New York 10011 May 2 – May 17, 2014 With works also by: Elaine Cameron-Weir, Lena Henke, Jason Matthew Lee, Jared Madere, Marlie Mul, Carlos Reyes, Ben Schumacher, and Dena Yago
“Of The Times” Review Modern Painters Written by Joseph Akel March 2014 Full review here
For his first U.S. solo show, London-based artist Amikam Toren continues a practice of appropriating daily detritus and transmuting his finds in a mordant inversion on the parley between consumption and refuse. With the several large paintings and stack-cardboard-box sculptures on view, Toren looks to find in the quotidian ample evidence of the supramundane…[DDET read more]
The eight paintings selected from his decade-spanning series “Of the Times,’ 1983-93, evince the artist’s interest in the physicality of print media. Beginning with an edition of The London Times, Toren pulverizes the paper to a pulp—often using a coffee grinder—and applies the resulting textured, pigmented mash as unidentifiable letterlike forms upon unprimed canvas. Next to the painting, the excised masthead of the macerated issue offers a chronological marker cleaved from its editorial context. Toren’s regurgitative process and the ensuing typographical enlargement deny any access to the textural information contained, instead foregrounding the very material substrates of their conveyance. Quite literally, the medium is the message.
Meanwhile, a trio of sculptural installations from his “Stack” series, 1984-95, further highlights an interest in the transcendence from the everyday to the monumental. As with his “Of the Times” paintings, Toren employs a process whereby found objects become endogenous sites of their reiteration. Cutting off one side of a cardboard box and pulping it, the artist then uses the pomance to paint shipping symbols on canvas before finally attaching the canvas to the absent end of the box. In Stacks (Five Only), 1992-95, the sides of five boxes depict segments of an arrow pointing upward, while in 3 Only (Fragile), 1989, the universal symbol for “fragile’—a large glass with a crack—looms large. The haphazard quality of the leaning structures, tenuously held together by brown packing tape, belies the deliberateness of their production. If Vladimir Tatlin’s Tower, 1919-20, was an ode to modernity’s streamlined promise, Toren would seem to be its eulogy.[/DDET]
“Live From Somewhere” Review SFAQ Written by Sarah Thibault March 2014 Full review here
“Live From Somewhere,” a video piece by Tammy Rae Carland for her new show by the same name at Jessica Silverman Gallery is inspired by the opening scene of “Gilda Live” where a spotlight trying to find an absent performer comes to personify the performer’s stage fright. Carland isolates this sight gag and mines the darker side of performance anxiety. In her video, the spotlight nervously paces back and forth across the stage, lowering itself intermittently to rest on the bottom of the curtain, sagging as if tired by its own weight. While a performer can theoretically evade the spotlight, a spotlight can’t escape itself. And while the pressure of the spotlight might be a heavy one, the alternative is the shadowy business of being unknown, invisible – an entertainer’s worst fear…[DDET read more]
“Live From Somewhere”, is inspired, in part, by Gilda Radner’s filmed one-woman show “Gilda Live”. The title of the exhibition plays on the name of Radner’s original Broadway show, “Live from New York”. The ambiguity of Carland’s title situates the viewer in her headspace – one of an artist who seems determined to examine the moment she’s in, even if she’s not sure what it means.
After seeing the show, the first thing I did was look up YouTube videos of “Gilda Live”. I realized I had seen Radner’s work so many times when I was younger, on loop on Comedy Central, that I had internalized it and forgotten I had seen most of it at all. How could I have forgotten Roseanne Roseannadanna with her story about chair-farting in Walter Cronkite’s office? The torch of Radner’s genius has been carried on by generations of new comediennes: Tina Fey, Kristen Wiig and notably Molly Shannon whose “Saturday Night Live” character Mary Catherine Gallagher and movie “Superstar” seem directly inspired by many scenes in “Gilda Live” – especially Radner’s “Audition” skit. “Audition” is enacted as a flashback to her ‘first audition,’ which is a parody of the classic “Chorus Line” song and dance routine. As Radner tap dances (buffalo-ball-change) her way across the stage, she is both a parody of the nervous, aspiring actress with amateurish choreography, and a seasoned pro working her ass off to get a laugh. This tension between self-deprecation and bravado is a key element of Radner’s humor.
Carland captures this tenuous position with “Balancing Act,” a photograph of a stage with gold curtains that open on a pillar of stacked chairs. The chairs are stacked high, symbolic of the audience’s expectations; their vulnerability as a structure reflects the precariousness of the relationship between the audience and the performer and the many negotiations that must be made to keep the expectations aloft.
“Live From Somewhere,” a video piece installed with a row of theater seating, is inspired by the opening scene of “Gilda Live” where a spotlight trying to find an absent performer comes to personify the performer’s stage fright. Carland isolates this sight gag and mines the darker side of performance anxiety. In her video, the spotlight nervously paces back and forth across the stage, lowering itself intermittently to rest on the bottom of the curtain, sagging as if tired by its own weight. While a performer can theoretically evade the spotlight, a spotlight can’t escape itself. The pressure of the spotlight might be a heavy one, but the alternative is the shadowy business of being unknown, invisible – an entertainer’s worst fear.
In the photograph “Ghostlight,” a mop is spot lit and propped upright, animated, as the title suggests, by supernatural energies- ghosts of female performers past. The mop was a trademark of another iconic comedian, Carol Burnett. It is a prop from her melancholy “Sign off song” and her cartoon avatar at the end credits of her show. The household tool embodies the mundane realities of housework in contrast to the glamour of the stage or for Carland, the dramatic ups and downs of the artist’s studio.
Carland’s series of sculptures for the show function as props. The “Mime” pieces, painted megaphones, embody the latent desire to be heard. The ladders, titled “Pratfall Effect” after a term that refers to a performer’s gain or loss in attractiveness after a mistake, are symbols for the fragile ego of performers who are ever at the mercy of their audience.
“Smoke Screen,” presents an image of an empty stage as a back-lit fog creeps out between a small opening in the curtains. The screen of smoke and curtains conceal the machinery that goes into producing the fantasy that the viewer sees. The smoke’s tantalizing plumes suggest the mystery of the anticipated performer, but as there is none it becomes the subject of the photo.
The exhibition statement points to the absence of the performer as a manifestation of performance anxiety, but it also got me thinking about the interchangeability of a performer. By isolating all these theatrical tropes on an empty stage, Carland invites the viewer to identify with them and to think about the way they contribute to the performer’s onstage persona. In pop culture in particular, performers and artists are churned out following prescriptive formulas: boy bands, blonde ingénue, and charismatic male singer. Does it matter who is in the spotlight as long as there is someone there to fit a given role? Once you’ve ‘made it’ the fear of struggling in obscurity forever gives way to the second greatest fear of all creatives: the fear that you are not unique, that you are replaceable.
In the closed off display window of the gallery on the not-yet-gentrified Ellis Street, a dozen or so metallic balloons shaped in the letters H and A are unceremoniously mashed against one another in the cramped space. Their letters spell out a chorus of laughter; the canned ha-ha’s of a laugh track, set aside until they are needed for a punch line. This is one of my favorite pieces in the new show by Tammy Rae Carland at the Jessica Silverman Gallery, “Live From Somewhere”. I asked the gallery what the name of the piece was. They said it was part of the installation of the show and not a piece in itself. I thought that was funny.[/DDET]
“The Armory Show is Here to Stay” The Huffington Post Written by Lori Zimmer March 5, 2014 Full excerpt here
The art world focuses once again on New York as the Armory Show and its satellite fairs open this week. This year, the fair has undergone improvements, new features and a new design to up its ante in its rivalry with May’s Frieze Week. The return of high powered blue chip galleries are joined by Armory Presents, emerging galleries 10 years old or less, Focus: China curated by Philip Tinari of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, panel discussions, larger booths and a redesign by Bade Stageberg Cox. Coinciding with the last Whitney Biennial at the iconic Breuer Building, this year’s fair is shaping up to an exciting week for art lovers in New York…[DDET read more]
The Armory Show has been trimming the fat since Frieze’s appearance in New York three years ago, cutting back on exhibitors in order to give galleries more space, in addition to tighter control on their curatorial choices. This year’s fair presents 203 exhibitors, 12 less than in 2012 and 71 less than in 2011. Well known blue chippers including David Zwirner, Marianne Boesky, Michael Kohn and Lisson Gallery have continued their support of Armory Week with their reappearance, joined by other big names like Lehmann Maupin, James Cohan, October Gallery and Honor Fraser. The emerging gallery section in Pier 94, now called Armory Presents, features 17 young galleries, each exhibiting one or two person shows in larger booths – about 30 square feet bigger than last year’s. Highlights include INVISIBLE-EXPORTS’ presentation of Scott Treleaven, Galerie Max Mayer’s Klaus Merkel and Nicolás Guagnini and Hayal Pozanti presented by Jessica Silverman Gallery. [/DDET]
“The Young Guns: 8 Whitney Biennial Artists Born After 1980” Artspace Written by Eric Bryant March 6, 2014 Full excerpt here
Manley’s presentation includes large clear panels that have been painted on or have had colored lighting gels attached, as well as video monitors showing looped footage that seems to incorporate these semi-transparent abstractions with both old films and more recent footage, perhaps from TV advertisements. The wall label tells us that the paintings and videos were derived from the 1903 filmThe Great Train Robbery, and it would be easy to assume these are homages or second-level appropriations…[DDET read more]
But as one considers the relative strength of the various pieces, it becomes increasingly hard to tell what was the input and what was the output of Manley’s creative process. One might guess that the panels are byproducts of a cumbersome process of colorizing the film. Or maybe they are Minimalist reductions of the film, movement transposed into color and shape. After further consideration, the whole ensemble becomes a comment on the overlap between the concepts of inspiration and creative expression and the circularity of the artistic process.[/DDET]
“Tammy Rae Carland at Jessica Silverman Gallery” Temporary Art Written by Genevieve Quick March 7, 2014 Full review here
In Tammy Rae Carland’s 2010 show at Jessica Silverman Gallery,Funny Face I Love You, she explored comedians’ (and by proxy artists’) masochistic desire for an audience, while also suffering from stage freight or fear of rejection, especially in the self deprecating humor of legendary female comedians, like Phyllis Diller. In her most recent exhibition, Carland’s single channel video and the exhibition title, both Live from Somewhere, pays tribute to Gilda Radner. In this new work Carland expands her repertoire to include broader ideas of theater, representation, illusion, and photography. The show’s press release nicely frames her work (specifically regarding the video included in the exhibition) as playing on the tension between “stood up” and “stand up.” I would also add “stand in” to her rhetoric play, as Carland positions various levels of representation against each other as stand ins for the elusive referent… [DDET read more].
Carland’s video Live from Somewhere presents several possible scenarios that explore “stood up,” as a group or individual who fail to show up. Based on the opening scene from Radner’s 1979 one woman show, Carland’s video features a spotlight panning across a velvet draped stage with a row of vintage theater seats. While spotlights typically focus on the star of the show or its emcee, Carland’s spotlight, like a nervous searching eye, never finds its resting point. Moreover, Carland toys with the viewer’s expectation by never opening up the curtain to reveal the star of the show, who might be a “no show” or too shy to reveal their presence. When the gallery is empty, the uninhabited row of theatre seats compliments this sense of the absence, but this time the viewers’. Anxiously,Live from Somewhere positions the presence of the performer against the viewers in a series of scenarios, where one or both have been “stood up.”
Additionally Carland explores “stood up” and “stand up” through objects that test the limits of verticality in a series of seductive photographs staged in grand theaters. Balancing Act (2013) takes “stood up” to its absurdist end with a dizzying number of precarious stacked chairs while Ghost Light(2013) depicts a vertical mop that appears to be mopping the stage, but without a mopper. In Tipping Point (2013) a jumble of entangled ladders suggest metaphorically the potential folly or failure as one might strive for height when climbing a ladder. Without depicting an active agent (like a person), the mop, stack of chairs, and jumble of ladders have a strange mysteriousness. Either the vertically oriented objects were “stood up” by stagehands as props or absurd maintenance, or the objects have magical become animate, and possibly “stood up” themselves.
Like René Magritte’s iconic The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) (La Trahison des images [Ceci n’est pas use pipe]) (1929), which uses text and image to acknowledge the painted image as representation, Carland’s This is Not a Brick (2013) creates a system of cascading representations that “stand in” for the original. In Carland’s image, black curtains are tied back to theatrically frame a concrete and brick wall. Faux brick paneling leans against the image’s brick wall to reinforce the artifice within the picture plane. In addition, Carland pits the object’s shape and form against its surface and pattern, as a faux brick clad a megaphone and a silhouette of a woman’s leg are not exclusively brick, megaphone, or woman’s leg, but multi-layered representations. Carland has created a photograph, itself a reproduction, with objects that exist on multiple levels of representation, or stand ins.
Carland’s work is filled with visual puns and subtle word play that plays on viewers expectations and the illusion of theater and photography. By smartly withholding bits of information, like the context and narrative, Carland creates ambiguous scenarios that probe levels of anxiety and humor. [/DDET]
“Whitney 2014 Biennial: Five Hot Artists to Watch” The Hollywood Reporter Written by John DeFore March 7, 2014 Full article here
Los Angeles-based Dashiell Manley, one of the youngest artists there, got his MFA a mere three years ago from UCLA. His ambitious The Great Train Robbery, expected to take ten years or so to finish, will be a scene-by-scene remake of Edwin S. Porter’s landmark silent film, albeit not your ordinary remake: Each scene is shot against an abstract backdrop covered with shorthand-like descriptions of the film’s action, sequences that may obliquely refer to the original. The installation at the Whitney, a recreation of the film’s third scene, was previously exhibited in a LA storage unit…[DDET read more]
Why focus on this film, one wonders? “I had been wanting to remake a film for a while,” Manley says, “and there were two specific criteria that I was looking for: I wanted the film to be a first in as many ways as possible: first action film, first jump cut, etc. Second, I wanted the film to have been remade already.” Michael Chrichton’s 1978 version starred Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland. “More than the idea of simply remaking a film,” he continues, “I am interested in telling the same story over and over again and the core reasons why we do this.” Other scenes in the project will be produced in different styles; the one he’s making now will be “traditional hand drawn animation, no physical sets or props,” he says.[/DDET]
“10 Artworks to Visit While People Watching at The Armory Show” Town & Country Written by Kevin Conley March 6, 2014 Full excerpt here
Hayal Pozanti, a native of Istanbul and a recent graduate of the Yale MFA program, creates amazingly cheery work. The paintings—almost comically old school abstractions filtered through a cartoon sensibility—feel like something Leger or Arp would paint if the two found themselves reincarnated insideAdventure Time. The acrylics on the walls, like this one, all have implied pedestals as if they were actually paintings of abstract sculptures. The Jessica Silverman gallery is also showing Pozanti’s animations, GIF files displayed inside black metal lecterns, that turn these same abstractions into brightly blinking iPad versions of a Vegas marquee.
“Hayal Ponzati’s Painting, The Key Word: Handmade” Lancia Trendvisions March 5, 2014 Full article here
Artist Hayal Pozanti (born in 1983) speaks a language all of her own. Instead of letters or simple brushstrokes, she created a visual vocabulary composed of about twenty abstract and colorful characters that she paints on panels that have the proportions of an iPhone 5 screen.What do these technological devices have to do with it? Ever since she was little, the artist – who is the daughter of a hospital director and an engineer – had access to large medical machinery, servers, software and laser machines. A world that influenced the first part of her career, with illustration, collages and digital animation for fashion and music…[DDET read more] Having reached saturation with virtual and digital art, after graduating from Yale in 2011, Hayal changed direction towards a more physical form of art, towards working by hand and unique pieces, and thus with a language she invented from scratch, without citation, pastiches or appropriation.Like in series “Passwords”, presented at the Duve in Berlin, where Pozanti explores the world of passwords as a linguistic system. Each painting represents a single password, a juxtaposition of characters, a personal universe made of deformed phrases or words alternated with numbers and symbols that condense her personal imagery.[/DDET]
“My Armory Show Top 10” Art Market Monitor Written by Elena Soboleva February 28, 2014 Full excerpt here
The booth is part of the inaugural edition of Armory Presents, a curatorially tight section of the fair dedicated to newly-established dealers and younger artists. The San Francisco gallery, and preeminent outpost of emerging talent on the West Coast, will present Hayal Pozanti’s new series of paintings. With names like Technocream and Archival Alchemy, the irresistible canvases depict rounded geometric forms derived from subconscious doodles, GIFs and digital rendering which reconcile the digital world with canons of modern art.
“40 Galleries You Should Know If You Love Paint” Huffington Post Written by Steven Zevita February 27, 2014 Full excerpt here
Jessica Silverman has, in a very short time, become one of the most talked-about young dealers in the world. She opened her gallery in 2008 after finishing an M.F.A. in Curatorial Studies at the California College of the Arts and quickly made a name for herself. Within a year of opening, she was already participating in significant art fairs such as NADA Miami and FIAC. Silverman has a knack for identifying new talent, including Hugh Scott-Douglas, who was recently taken on by LA powerhouse Blum & Poe, and Dashiell Manley, who will appear in the upcoming 2014 Whitney Biennial. She is also interested in overlooked mature artists such as Barbara Kasten, whose work is just starting to be recognized as seminal to a younger generation of photographers.
“Hayal Pozanti at the Tamarind Institute” New American Paintings Written by Claude Smith February 2014 Full article here
Fresh off a couple of high-profile exhibitions at Susan Vielmetter in Los Angeles and DUVE Berlin, New York-based painter Hayal Pozanti made a brief stop in Albuquerque in late-January for a week-long printmaking residency at the Tamarind Institute. Her efforts resulted in several monotypes and two lithographs that will be editioned later this spring. During her visit, we had the opportunity to talk about her experience at Tamarind as her first foray into lithography…[DDET read more]
Fresh off a couple of high-profile exhibitions at Susan Vielmetter in Los Angeles and DUVE Berlin, New York-based painter Hayal Pozanti made a brief stop in Albuquerque in late-January for a week-long printmaking residency at the Tamarind Institute. Her efforts resulted in several monotypes and two lithographs that will be editioned later this spring. During her visit, we had the opportunity to talk about her experience at Tamarind as her first foray into lithography. Claude Smith: How did you get connected with the Tamarind Institute? Had you heard of Tamarind prior to your residency?
Hayal Pozanti: I received an e-mail from Marjorie Lynn Devon asking me if I would like to make prints at Tamarind. This was the first time I’d heard of Tamarind, unfortunately.
CS: Was this your first experience with printmaking? As an artist that works fairly exclusively as a painter, had you ever envisioned yourself making lithographs?
HP: I’ve always been interested and invested in printmaking because my practice involves using computers. In fact, before painting became a central component of my practice, I was avidly experimenting with digital printing as a means of bringing the screen to life. Among analog printing techniques, I’d only had experience with silkscreen printing. Tamarind was my introduction to monotypes and lithographs. To be honest, I hadn’t given much thought to analog printing until I came to Tamarind and had my first hands on experience. To my surprise and delight, analog printing turned out to be a process that felt much more similar to painting or drawing than printing in the way we understand as digital natives. In lithography, one creates as one is printing and also manipulating the outcome through the process of printing. This is incomparable to pressing a button and waiting for the result to come out of a printer.
CS: What sorts of challenges did this residency present you with?
HP: I am used to working and reworking paint in order to generate the final composition. My paintings are usually heavily laden with layers of paint so that I can find that perfect color and shape combination. In printing, there isn’t the possibility of reworking. You have to plan meticulously, both in terms of color and line quality. Once the print is printed, reworking is redundant. This was the one challenge that took some time to fully grasp and work around.
CS: Did you have the opportunity to browse some of Tamarind’s collection? Any favorite pieces from the archives? Was there anything that you were surprised to find out about its history? HP: Yes, I did and there are real gems to be found! My favorites works were by Ken Price.
CS: You made some monotypes and a couple of editions of lithographs. Did you have a preference of the two processes?
HP: I enjoyed collaborating with master printers for the lithographs. I am used to working alone most of the time, so it was a refreshing experience to interact, exchange ideas and get feedback from other people who were helping me in realizing my ideas. CS: In terms of experimentation, do you think the overall experience was generative with respect to giving you new ideas or approaches to further contemplate in your studio practice?
HP: Absolutely! I would like to find ways of bringing the techniques into my paintings. Hopefully my next visit to Tamarind will be focused on making this possibility a reality.
CS: You mentioned in a past interview with Hunter Braithwaite that regarding your painting practice you were interested in “the idea of slowness.” Being that lithography is a very process-oriented practice, were you forced to work at a different pace and consider your approach more so than you would have to if you were painting?
HP: I would say the same amount of concentrated effort and time has to be put into both. At least in terms of my practice. I usually plan out my paintings with sketches much like the way planning has to be made for a print. It is just a matter of difference in technique and practice. While painting is simply done with brushes and paint, lithography requires the use of heavy machinery and rolling inks.
CS: In Passwords, your most recent exhibition at DUVE in Berlin, you showed work that was comprised entirely of your own invented language–glyphs, abstracted shapes and characters–all quite painterly and formal. Would you say that the work at Tamarind builds on those concepts or offers a departure?
HP: It is very much a continuation of the same concepts. Within the same framework of ideas, my work has been progressing to a more three dimensional and perspectival compositional understanding, so the work at Tamarind reflects that.
CS: Talk a little about the collaborative process between yourself and Tamarind Master Printer, Bill Lagattuta. Aside from the actual printing, what kind of role did he play in influencing your approach?
HP: Prior to printing, we sat down to discuss the process itself, including various possibilities in terms of papers and tools and most importantly printing suggestions that had crossed his mind after studying my paintings. His expertise in printing and years of experience with artists of varying interests brought possibilities to the table that would not have crossed my mind otherwise. He was also a delight to work with as a person and my experience at Tamarind would not have been the same without him.
CS: When can we expect your prints to be released?
HP: I believe in six months latest.
CS: Any plans to come back?
HP: I would love to come back! We have been talking about possibilities.
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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.
Claude Smith is an arts administrator and educator living and working in Albuquerque, NM. [/DDET]
“In the Studio with Hayal Pozanti” Artsy February 18, 2014 Full article here
The paintings of Hayal Pozanti, an Istanbul native and Yale grad, have been called “the impossible offspring of doodles and diagrammatic drawings of machine parts.” On a snowy January morning, we met Turkish-born Yale MFA grad Hayal Pozanti at her Queens studio for a tour of the space, and a first look at the paintings her gallerist Jessica Silverman will debut at The Armory Show in March. On the heels of two solo exhibitions in November—at DUVE Berlin and Susanne Vielmetter in Los Angeles—Pozanti was in the middle of this new work, which, at the time of our visit, existed solely as blank wooden panels. It was the perfect occasion for a start-to-finish rundown of her process and an explanation of the bold, interlocking abstract compositions that have recently caught the discerning eye of the art world.
“Critic’s Pick” Artforum Written by Joseph Akel February 9, 2014 Full review here
There’s a moment in Stage Fright (1950), Alfred Hitchcock’s theater-inspired murder mystery, when the investigating detective played by Michael Wilding remarks, “I once had a cousin who had an ulcer and an extremely funny face, both at the same time.” Entertainment, it would seem, entails a necessary degree of anxiety. With her latest exhibition, artistTammy Rae Carland returns to the subject of theatrical performance, once again evincing the heady charge of expectation and uncertainty that fuels the dramaturgical experience…[DDET read more]
While her last show, “Funny Face I Love You” (2010), elicited spectator angst through the obfuscation of her models’ faces, Carland now elides the body of the actor altogether in favor of precariously staged mise-en-scenés that evoke a frisson of internalized disquietude. In the large color photograph Tipping Point (all works 2013), several interlocking ladders, some inverted, stand precariously balanced atop rolls of gaffer’s tape, while in Balancing Act, a stack of nineteen golden chairs, framed by a heavily draped proscenium, threatens to topple. The overriding sense is that of catastrophe waiting in the wings. Meanwhile, in the looped single-channel video installation Live from Somewhere, a pair of spotlights frenetically paces against a background of drawn red curtains. A row of theater chairs opposite the monitor invites viewers to sit in anticipation of a show that does not begin, echoing the futility of Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon.
Elsewhere, leaning against a wall, two polished acrylic ladders that make up the installation Pratfall Effect 1 & 2 appropriate their title from the psychological phenomenon in which perceptions of others’ attractiveness change based on mistakes they make. If several of Carland’s other works evoke the anxiety of suspended immanence, here there is a nod to thwarted beginnings. Indeed, “Ambition,” Oscar Wilde quipped, “is the last refuge of failure.”[/DDET]
“Live From Somewhere” Excerpt Modern Painters January 2014 Full excerpt here
For her third show at Jessica Silverman Gallery, “Live From Somewhere,” Tammy Rae Carland presents photographs made from the light reflected off of disco balls, as well as a video in which a lone spotlight searches for an actor to illuminate. The work, on view January 24 through March 1, questions the meaning and nature of performance and its attendant anxiety, purity, and ephemeral beauty.
“Tammy Rae Carland Turns Up The Pressure To Always Be On” San Francisco Chronicle Written by Kenneth Baker January 31, 2014 Full review here
Tammy Rae Carland takes seriously the pressure that Americans today feel always to be “on.” In the national surveillance state, all serve as unpaid extras, but emergence as a star may spell doom.
Although the phantom empire of digital and social media up the pressure to perform rather than live our lives, the work in Carland’s “Live From Somewhere” at Silverman evokes an earlier era of aspirations to stage or television celebrity…[DDET read more]
Her show samples several bodies of work: handsome, seemingly abstract, black and white photograms made from reflections off disco ball mirrors, color photographs of staged anticlimaxes with props as performers, and simple sculptures with odd social implications.
Several sculptures take the form of single or paired megaphones with handles of the sort once used – in Hollywood myth, if not in fact – by early movie directors. Here they symbolize the desperation to be heard endemic to a mass society continually taunted by images of celebrity and attainment.
Cast acrylic ladders leaning on nearby walls, nearly invisible at a glance, express a common social intuition of vanishing upward mobility. They find a vaudevillian echo in the photograph “Tipping Point” (2013), in which stepladders, having taken the stage, get in a tangle suggesting how easily ambition can lose all sense of direction.
The paired megaphones hint at a more intimate meaning as figures for partners’ difficulties communicating. Many of Carland’s pieces contain coded sexual slapstick. (Look again at those scissoring ladders.)
The sole video, “Live From Somewhere” (2013), reprises shtick from a stand-up routine by the late Gilda Radner. A hand-guided spotlight scans red stage curtains over and over in search of an act that never appears. Eventually the spotlight turns into the actor, becoming a moon hammily disporting its phases, buying time for a delinquent performer.
As the viewer imagines cycling through excuses for a failure to show, the thought of untimely death as the ultimate exemption arises.
Beginning as an exercise in frustrated expectation, “Live From Somewhere” gradually shifts emotional focus to the fear, secretly shared by all denizens of “spectacular” society, that when our moment comes, we will not be ready.
Tammy Rae Carland: Live From Somewhere: Sculpture, photographs and video. Through March 1. Jessica Silverman Gallery, 488 Ellis St., S.F. (415) 255-9508.www.jessicasilvermangallery.com.[/DDET]
“Hayal Pozanti at Duve Berlin” Modern Painters February, 2014 Full article here
Fed up with the impermanence and glut of new media, the recent Yale grad has shifted her practice to painting, employing a self-invented alphabet of around 20 forms on panels that replicate the aspect ratio of an iPhone 5 screen. In “Passwords” she presents seven of these abstract, colorful works, with playful titles like Rubber Sun Grenade and Analog Assassin. Three works have accompanying GIFs presenting on iPads, putting the canvases’ digital origins front and center.
“Critic’s Pick: Alien She” Artforum Written by Chelsea Haines January 2014 Full article here
“Because we must take over the means of production in order to create our own meanings,” wrote Kathleen Hanna in a 1991 manifesto published in the second issue of the Bikini Kill zine. Her words are posted in the front gallery of “Alien She,” the first exhibition to explore the legacy of the Riot Grrrl punk feminist movement. Organized by Astria Suparak and Ceci Moss, two Riot Grrrls turned curators, the exhibition dynamically aggregates art and craft, video documentary, print ephemera, and music, concentrating on Riot Grrrl’s sphere of influence in North America from the early 1990s to the present.
“Of the Times and Other Historic Work” SF Arts Monthly January 2014 Curated by Christian L. Frock
London-based conceptual artist Amikam Toren enjoys a debut of sorts with his first American solo exhibition at Jessica Silverman Gallery’s new location. Dependent on the destruction of ready-made materials, Toren’s work offers new ways of thinking about everyday objects.
“In Transit: Between Image and Object” MASS MoCA 87 Marshall Street North Adams, MA 01247 January 25, 2014 – January 4, 2015 Full excerpt here
Artists Dike Blair, Hugh Scott-Douglas, and collaborative duo Guyton\Walker paint, print, and project abstract images and patterns onto the surface of shipping crates. Incorporating storage and transportation containers into vivid multimedia installations, these artists explore parallels between the physical movement of artworks and the seemingly limitless circulation of visual information across media and networks in the digital age…[DDET read more]
This exhibition is made possible by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in support of MASS MoCA and the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art. Special thanks to the artists; Greene Naftali Gallery, New York; and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.[/DDET]
“Diff’rent Strokes”
August 2- 23, 2013
Louis B. James, New York
“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.
“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.”
