Month: January 2008

Mark Flores


Mark Flores

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present the second solo exhibition of new works by Mark Flores. The opening reception will be held on Friday, February 8th from 6 to 9pm, and the exhibition will be on view through March 8th. Flores’ poetic application of history draws together seemingly disparate motifs in a unique interrogation of beauty and visual pleasure.

At the conceptual core of this exhibition are Flores’ representations of Antinous, the Roman Emperor Hadrian’s adolescent lover who was deified by the emperor upon his premature death. Hadrian commissioned statues of the boy in myriad fantastical incarnations, effectively spawning a cult of the ideal male form. Flores’ Antinous Ubiquitous constitutes a meditation on desire, and speaks to a two-fold model of art appreciation that subsumes academic study and prurient interest.

This body of work alludes to strategies of the early homosexual emancipation movement, which invoked the ancients’ regard for love between men to legitimize homoerotic imagery. Flores’ portraits of actors who played the part of “Cowboy” in Mart Crowley’s Boys in the Band parallel the Antinous series. They are drawn from images in After Dark, an entertainment magazine known for its – ostensibly incidental – homoerotic content. Like Antinous, the character of “Cowboy” is a “beautiful blank” open to the viewer’s designs.

Flores traces a reverence for light from its appearance in ancient faiths to 20th century cinema and modernist color theory. The spirit of Bauhaus painter Johannes Itten inhabits this new work and serves as a link between ideas on tonal brilliance, intuition, and the subjectivity of the viewer. Flores expands Itten’s color grid into a large-scale painting that unites a wider conceptual scheme. Comparative Brilliance / After Itten complements Flores’ drawings of discarded frames from Judy Garland’s Easter Parade. Colored circles, which are by-products of Technicolor color separation, impinge upon her image, imparting a kind of chromatic pathos to the portraits.

Themes associated with gay identity form a vital link in Flores’ critical matrix, but he pushes beyond them to larger issues of visual pleasure. This spirit of investigation is embodied by Narkissos / After Jess, drawn from a photograph of the bulletin board used by the collage artist Jess. His visual index of the male form and canny “paste up” method mirror Flores’ imaginative archive of aesthetic appreciation.

In transferring subjects from one medium to another, Flores not only germinates dialogues between media, but composes a record of his own process of looking. Flores’ exploration of how we receive beauty avoids resolution, accepting it concurrently as an “irrational” phenomenon as well as a thing that can be studied, theorized upon, carved into stone.

Mark Flores has had a solo exhibition at Alison Jacques Gallery, London, England (2006). He was most recently included in Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967, curated by Dominic Molon for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL. He lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
David Kordansky Gallery

Cindy Loehr


Cindy Loehr Twilight Knowledge

For her second solo show at moniquemeloche, Cindy Loehr found inspiration in the theological poetry of Peter O’Leary and titled her exhibition Twilight Knowledge. The exhibition features Loehr’s Fuel for Constant Light – a multi-media installation consisting of six towering aluminum wings, representing the six-winged Seraphim, complete with audio accompaniment.

Spirituality has always been a concern of Loehr’s, whose meticulously hand-crafted works reference “…the benign communal vocabularies of organized religion and public display.” Lisa Kurzner ArtPapers Loehr’s interest in Angels stems from their role as intercessors between the ineffable abstraction of heaven and the concrete reality of earth. The six-winged Seraphim are the highest order of angels. Described as emanations of pure light, they are the most philosophical of the angels. Their only job is to fly around and sing, but they sing in direct communication with god. In the song for Fuel for Constant Light, human desire is sung as an earthly aspiration towards the divine. This is a subversion of traditional Christian doctrine, which sees desire as the root of all sin. Also on view is Inward Generator – a quilt sewn with photographs taken by Loehr in New York City, from dusk through night, combined with pictures by Randy Russell of his own personal shrine. The quilt is assembled to create an iconic pattern; a ritualized reordering of passing impressions. Inward Generator is inspired both by the cosmological mapping of the mandala and the dark luminance of church stained glass. Like the mandala, Inward Generator is created as a tool for focusing inward.

Fuel For Constant Light was first exhibited at the Hiromi Yoshii Gallery in Tokyo in 2006, and in the group show “Place of the Transcommon” curated by Nicholas Frank at INOVA/VOGEL, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee in 2007. The title is taken from Peter O’Leary’s poem “With More Passionate Flying,” which says: “Words of angels are fuel for constant light.” Lyrics are by Loehr in collaboration with Chuck Stebelton, with Carlos Lama (vocals), Ray Chi (cello), and Jesse Peterson (background vocals). The artist would like to thank Brad & Leslie Bucher and Nancy & Gene Hooff for their production support for Fuel for Constant Light and Michael Crocker & Stephen Tan for assistance with Inward Generator.

Cindy Loehr’s work is currently included in “The Puppet Show” curated by Ingrid Schaffner and Carin Kuoni at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), University of Pennsylvania. This traveling exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue and the venues are: Santa Monica Museum of Art, The Contemporary Museum Honolulu, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Frye Art Museum Seattle. Selected artist include Nayland Blake, Louise Bourgeois, Maurizio Cattelan, Anne Chu, Dan Graham, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Jankowski, Mike Kelley, William Kentridge, Annette Messager, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, and Charlie White. Loehr has exhibited widely, including the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She was awarded an artist residency with the Core Program of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (2003-05) and earned her MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago (2001). Loehr was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1971 and lives in New York.

Monique Meloche

Papfar!


Very funny and good work by Papfar!
V1

DUNK! / NIGHTCLUB NOTES


DUNK! / NIGHTCLUB NOTES

An exhibition by Peter Rune Christiansen, Johanna Domke,
Mikkel Olaf Eskildsen, Daniel Svarre og Bettina Camilla Vestergaard.

DUNK! is now ready for a fantastic new year in the world of art.
DUNK! is going abroad in 2008 with exhibitions in Stockholm and Glasgow.
DUNK! is also ready with a new and exiting season in the exhibition room in Valby / Copenhagen.
DUNK! has invited Danish visual artist Mikkel Olaf Eskildsen as curator on the first show of the year. DUNK! proudly presents NIGHTCLUB NOTES:
NIGHTCLUB NOTES are five viewpoints taken from the nightlife of contemporary urban culture. NIGHTCLUB NOTES are visual narratives inspired by the seductive darkness of the nightclub scene.
NIGHTCLUB NOTES are fantastic, dreaming, subversive and seductive works of art.
NIGHTCLUB NOTES are drawings, paintings, objects, concept and photography.
NIGHTCLUB NOTES are pieces by:

PETER RUNE CHRISTIANSEN who creates spontaneous and breathtaking abstract landscape paintings which sings the body electric in a world of visualized sound.

JOHANNA DOMKE who captures situations of standstill and stagnation in everyday life and transform these into photos and videos portraying people trapped within the ideals of modern society.

MIKKEL OLAF ESKILDSEN who unfolds a unique form of psychedelic realism that takes the viewer out on a mindblowing trip of visual excellence.

DANIEL SVARRE who in the form of sublime sculptural objects explores sociality in the twilight zone between intimacy, closeness and togetherness and the fear of loosing the exact same qualities.

BETTINA CAMILLA VESTERGAARD who in the form photo and text develops super conceptual narrative investigations into the relation between the subject, space and language.

Dunk

TAYLOR MCKIMENS


TAYLOR MCKIMENS
SOLO EXHIBITION: “SWEET DREAMS OF PHOENIX”

LOYAL is pleased to present the exhibition “Sweet Dreams of Phoenix”, a new group of paintings by American artist Taylor McKimens.

The figures in Taylor McKimens’ paintings could be described as grotesque. These bloated creatures with hairy, sweaty flesh, bulbous noses and lumpy butts are humanity in all its vulnerable glory, full of everything we try to hide and suppress. In this crumbling world of rot and decay, piles of trash ooze slime and engine oil drips onto a landscape.

Through his careful renderings it becomes clear that McKimens finds this all quite beautiful. Whether it be a spat out gob of chewing gum or a squirt of ketchup on a greasy burger, McKimens drafts an effective graphic device out of this modern deterioration. Painted in a paradoxically cheery palette of sun-bleached and vibrant pastel colors, McKimens shows us his compassion.

Within one painting McKimens moves from his signature graphic form to a great painterly expression. McKimens’ visual background was formed by the mass media imagery of comic books, MAD Magazine and Garbage Pail Kids. From this tradition, along with his formal art training, McKimens further breaks down of the barriers between comic art and fine art. Think R. Crumb’s candid humor and surreal storytelling with Ivan Albright’s superreal detail and portraits of decay.

Taylor McKimens was born in 1976 and raised in the small desert town of Winterhaven, Arizona near the Mexican border. After graduating from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, McKimens first exhibited his work in the Rich Jacobs curated MOVE shows at New Image Art Gallery in Los Angeles where he had his first solo show in 2001. Since then he has completed two solo exhibitions at Clementine Gallery, and has exhibited at Deitch Projects-NY, Annet Gelink-Amsterdam, Perugi Arte Contemporeana-Padova, Italy, among others.

Galleri Loyal