Awesome new work from Peter, opening friday.
Month: March 2007
PERPS, USERS AND UTOPIA
PERPS, USERS AND UTOPIA
Peggy Diggs
Laurel Roth & Andy Diaz Hope
Heidi Schlatter
March 30 – May 5, 2007
Opening Reception: Friday, March 30, 6-8pm
Schroeder Romero is pleased to present the group exhibition, Perps, Users and Utopia, featuring work by Peggy Diggs, Laurel Roth & Andy Diaz Hope, and Heidi Schlatter. The works in the exhibition transform ideas of social design.
Peggy Diggs’ project, WorkOut, was inspired by society’s future need for living in constricted living conditions due to global warming over the next 20 years. More people will be living in emergency shelters due to natural disasters or will downsize their homes due to rising costs of fuel. Diggs chose to collaborate with a community that had experience in confined living habitats and, with a Creative Capital grant, she worked with 15 incarcerated men (over 90% of them incarcerated for life) at the State Correctional Institution at Graterford, outside Philadelphia, for 18 months in 2005-2006. After design workshops and spatial problem-solving exercises, they produced cardboard models of their ideas. All materials to construct the objects had to be in compliance with the prison’s strict rules. One prototype was chosen by the prisoners for full-scale production – a partially collapsible desk/storage unit to be made out of sturdy cardboard. The units were hand-made and painted by the inmates in their aesthetic influences: tattoos, grafitti art, labyrinths, tribal art, and the backs of playing cards. The prison forbade the selling of the units, so the prisoners decided to donate 20 desks to residents at Riverview Home, a Philadelphia city-run care facility for ailing and elderly homeless individuals. On view in the exhibition will be examples of the desks as well as documentation of the project.
Laurel Roth and Andy Diaz Hope have collaborated on a custom chandelier titled Blood, Money and Tears. The artists chose several chandeliers which were then dissassembled, chromed at a Harley shop, and reassembled with certain key elements upside down to create a mirroring effect. Dripping with hundreds of syringes and garlanded with strings of multicored pills forming a mandala pattern, and Swarovski crystal, the chandelier becomes a vehicle for the viewer to meditate on society’s use of drugs and pharmaceutical, whether recreational or prescribed, to modify behavior, emotion and perception.
Laurel Roth will also explore the man-controlled extremism of designer pets by showing pet skulls made of resin. The chihuahua, the persian cat, the pit bull and the english bulldog represent animals that we have modified for our own purposes and pleasure to such extremes that we have created difficulties for both the animals and ourselves.
Heidi Schlatter’s project, The Globex Corporation, focuses on the New Urbanist community of Celebration, a town created in Florida by the Disney Corporation. Celebration’s mission was to promote a return to the small-town American scale and values of an earlier era in America – a nostalgia for a period in American history which may never have truly existed. Schlatter’s work looks at the myth of small town America, and how it is repackaged and sold as a solid real estate investment and as a premise for continued sprawl. It examines architecture as an instrument of social control with the gloss of utopian vision as its veneer. Her “look-alike” photographs present images of houses from Celebration next to examples of historic small town homes from the Northeastern U.S., in an attempt to find the original iconic architectural styles that the Disney home designs were based on. The photographs resemble real estate ads, while referencing documentary photography of banal, similar structures. The lightbox montage image presents a photographic sampler – a generalized vision of the Celebration experience.
RASMUS BJØRN
Matt Leines Interview
Drawing influence from Hermetic Sciences to Hulk Hogan and Harald Hardrada to He-Man, Matt Leines draws pictures that depict the culture and conflicts of a fantasy world inhabited by mustached men, wild beasts, and living architecture. Leines presents himself as an insider in an outsider’s world, where he serves as both creator and narrator. The emphatically meticulous lines speak to a primitive, yet undeniably modern aesthetic. Image: Untitled (Lion), 2006, ink and watercolor on paper, 11 x 8.5 in (27.9 x 21.6 cm).
Artslant met up with Matt Leines to talk about his drawings, what influences him and how he makes his work.
AS: The subject matter in your work references a blend of folkloric imagery with a contemporary graphic play, can you tell me more about the imagery in your work?
ML: I always have problems just saying things about my work. My imagery is an amalgam of things that have floated through my head and adapted from basically everything I’ve seen until it’s been filtered enough to exist in the same world. Yes, I’m interested in folklore and through my drawings I’ve learned more about folk traditions I wasn’t aware of, and as i learn things I’m sure those things turn in the drawings.
To read the full interview
Claus Spanner Elmholt new works
Mie Mørkeberg
Desire in Switzerland
New works from Funch
Amy Adler “Player’s History”
Amy Adler
“Player’s History”
April 16 – May 12, 2007
“Adler is literally pushing against her materials, asking canvas and pastel to function in a way contrary to their design. But, this is exactly her intention ? a subversion of the essential nature of her media.”
– (Rachel Teagle, curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2007 )
Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to announce Player’s History, Los Angeles
based artist Amy Adler’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Adler’
s work has most recently been featured in solo museum exhibitions at the
Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado and the Museum of Contemporary Art,
San Diego (2006-7). Past exhibitions include the Hammer Museum, Los
Angeles (2002), The Photographers Gallery, London (2001), and the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998).
Player’s History is comprised of eight framed pastel drawings on canvas.
The present exhibition marks the second occasion at the gallery on which
Adler will exhibit work on canvas – this following two prior exhibitions
featuring work in the artist’s then signature media of unique color
photographic print. As in earlier works, Adler’s source material is
photographic ? in this case, found photographs of young, famous
international and unknown amateur chess players subsequently rendered,
sans opponent, in light tones of gray pastel on canvas. Depicted
characters serve as double-stand-ins; at once representations of the
tenuous yet persisting and, for Adler, foundational concepts of
“photograph” and “drawing” and at the same serving as self portraits,
depictions of the artist and her negotiation with and through the
mediated image.
Where Adler’s past photographic works had an air of permanence –
drawing distanced, encased within the cibachrome panel, the present
works benefit from a tension inherent in the fragile; pastel dust on
canvas, the drawings function, in part, as a trace of the more ephemeral
aspects of photographic production.
