Month: May 2008

V1 Gallery proudly presents

At Most Sphere

A solo Exhibition by Troels Carlsen

Exhibition opens Friday 23.05.08 From 17.00 – 22.00
Attached is invitation and information about the exhibition.

V1 Gallery



Helene Nyborg

Very nice…..
Kurimanzutto

MC is pleased to present My Best Effort, the first US solo exhibition of Japanese artist living in Spain, Kaoru Katayama.  A live performance will be scheduled during the opening reception. In her video work, sculpture and performances, Katayama mines the field of cultural identity, exploring the contrasts between Japanese and Spanish cultural patterns. In My Best Effort, three video installations play on explicit cultural and temporal difference, and convey painstaking in the communication process. As a series of choreographed contradictions, they reflect the artist’s experience and observations though consistently quotidian realities.

Technocharro (2004) for example explores the cultural interchange between new technology and folklore. In this video projection, a score of dancers, clad in their charro folkloric garb, attempt to syncopate their traditional Jota dance steps to the techno beats played by a DJ behind them. The result is a surreal experience, warped and anything but effortless, even if at times it comes together in its own idiosyncratic rhythm. Hard Labour (2005), another video projection, offers a forceful shift in the Japanese and Spanish everyday: five Spanish construction workers mimic traditional Japanese calisthenics, an almost ritualistic exercise in Japanese culture involving daily gymnastic performances and traditionally meant to enhance the worker’s health and citizen’s patriotism. The video reveals Katayama’s predilection for performance: it urges the audience to mimic and interact, creating an alternate real-time choreography.  In her effort to decontextualize, her work opens new venues for localisms, a reflection on fusion and the charged nature of harmony.

“Sobremesa,” a term which literally means “after table”, alludes to the lazy though potentially agitated period of time following a meal – where the diners take the opportunity to wind up, wind down, or simply to chat and perhaps even doze off. In her video, Sobremesa (2007), Katayama introduces yet another Spanish cultural element: the culturally subversive gypsy couple, in a conservative setting, subtly pounding a rhythm on the cracked plywood of an ordinary table. The minimal score created by the couple’s knocking on the table is subtly interlaced into a fusion of dialogues characteristic of Katayama’s strategies.

Kaoru Katayama was born in 1966 in Himeji, Japan. She has been living and working in Spain for over fifteen years. Past solo exhibitions include So Far, So Close, Galería Casa Triângulo, São Paulo, Brasil; Galería T20, Murcia, Spain; Kaoru Katayama, Dentro del proyecto El puente de la vision, Museo de Bellas Artes de Santander, Santander, Spain. Past Group exhibitions include Alter-arte ’07, Festival de Arte Emergente, Murcia, Spain, Heterotopias, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden, Dresden, Alemania, ARCO ’07, Madrid, Spain, Manhattan, The Project, New York. Kaoru Katayama lives and works in Valencia, Spain.

MC Kunst

PL Pallery

“Copeland’s visual and musical collages are unavoidable analogues; both deploy, then disrupt, structural patterns with psychotropic precision.”–Michael Ned Holte, ARTFORUM

The Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Björn Copeland, entitled The Soft Serve, including collage, drawing and sculpture. 

Co-founder of the experimental rock band Black Dice, Björn Copeland creates a visual universe that resonates of his abstract musical compositions. His hypnotic collages of kaleidoscopic patterns, influenced by psychedelia and Pop art, comment on the malleability of perception. Using everyday consumer culture imagery as starting point, Copeland perverts brand-making semiotics to morph them into conceptual works that underscore the uncanny.

Soft Serve—the name given to the method of doubling the amount of air in ice cream—references the commercial snack in jest, while illustrating a serious artistic process, both metaphorically and literally. Fluorescent liquid plastic fills the gaps in the grid of a department store shopping cart in one of his most recent sculptures; another features retail products emptied out and reworked into blurry abstract shapes. Copeland recasts objects in order to alienate them from their commercial purpose.

Björn Copeland graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998. His work has been shown in exhibitions around the world, including at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, D’Amelio Terras and the Gagosian Gallery in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Galerie Frank Elbaz in Paris, France, Flaca in London, England, among other places. Solo shows of his work have been held at the Daniel Reich Gallery in New York, and China Art Object Galleries in Los Angeles.

He and his band Black Dice have toured extensively since they started playing together in the late nineteen-nineties. They have performed internationally in several notable cultural institutions such as the Fine Arts Museum in Boston, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Cartier Foundation in Paris, France and the Taki Ishii Gallery in Tokyo, Japan.

Jack Hanley

Schroeder Romero is pleased to present Remembering to Forget: Strategies of Propaganda and Mythology by Charles Browning in the main gallery and Uncultivated by Lynn Cazabon in the project gallery.

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic
in its existence. – George Santayana

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. – William Faulkner

The paintings of Charles Browning offer a complex interplay of Art and History, humor and brutality, sincerity and irony, narrative and allegory. They present us with a “new” history painting, one that lays claim to a position of authority among the images of the past. Browning’s sincerely flat-footed love of an anachronistic form of painting adroitly skewers the propaganda of frontier mythology. Using the associative potential of historical imagery and narrative, the scope of Browning’s work expands to implicate us all in the goings on within.

What’s your strategy? Blow on west, shooting and drinking, and before you know it, you’ve conquered a continent. Use it or lose it! “We The People” shall decide who shall be included in “The People.” All others will serve or be destroyed, absorbed, or forgotten. We move closer to the self-evident truths and inalienable rights laid out at the founding of the nation by eliminating inconvenient claimants. And they will keep popping up!

What’s wrong with this picture? We live in funny times. We live in unfunny times. A confluence of Nationalism and Romanticism in 19th century American painting forms an image of the nation, a cultural foundation for the idea of Manifest Destiny, for Paul Bunyan, Kit Carson, Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. Distract the people from real dangers with shadow play. Shoot where there are easy targets. Sound familiar? Tell us another story of our great success, a story to explain away the cruel clowns and buffoonish brutes from then till now.

This is Browning’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Recent group shows include Promised Land at Morgan Lehman Gallery, curated by Elizabeth M. Grady and Keeping it Real at Richmond Center for Visual Arts, Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, curated by Jerry Kearns.

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For a great many species today, “fitness” means the ability to get along in a
world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force.
-Michael Pollan, Botany of Desire

Lynn Cazabon’s Uncultivated is a series of photographs documenting spontaneously growing plant life in urban environments. These images were taken in Baltimore, Maryland and Detroit, Michigan (where Cazabon currently lives and where she was born respectively), two cities rife with economic problems and as a result populated with abandoned buildings and large patches of open space. These urban wastelands over time become perfect environments for certain persistent and invasive species of plants commonly referred to as weeds, a word which designates any plant as ‘unwanted’. As the climate continues to shift due to human impact, invasive plant species like these will thrive while others will perish.

Recent solo exhibitions include Diluvian at Montpelier Arts Center in Laurel, MD; Marseille/Baltimore at Creative Alliance in Baltimore and Discard at the Courthouse Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, New York.

Schroeder Romero

Wilkinson Gallery