Month: June 2008

The Modern Institute



Boys of Summer June 20 – August 2, 2008
A group show featuring work by:
Nick Cave, James Gobel,
Zane Lewis, Ebony Patterson + more!

From Jamaican gangstas to a hopeful United States presidential candidate, the group exhibition Boys of Summer considers the representation of the male in contemporary art. The work, done in a variety of media by a diverse range of artists, depicts a multitude of men, some identifiable, others stereotypical or purely imagined. Issues of sexuality and power are present, but these contemporary representations go beyond to also investigate questions of race and class. Whether these artists portray men as objects of desire, symbols of hope, or signs of otherness, their loaded work underscores the power of representational images and our society’s cultural consumption of them.

Nick Cave (American, born 1959) is a Chicago-based multimedia and performance artist and fashion designer. His large color photographs feature the African American artist dawning ambiguous masks. Immediately questioning the viewer’s race assumptions, the masks look at once like a robber’s ski mask and an ethnographic object. Cave earned his MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art and is currently a tenured instructor at the School of the Art Institute. Recent solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, FL 2007, the Chicago Cultural Center 2006, and Jack Shainman Gallery NY 2006 among others. His work has been in important group exhibitions including Black Alphabet: Contexts of Contemporary African-American Art at The Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland 2006 and Frequency curated by Thelma Golden and Christine Kim at the Studio Museum in Harlem 2005. In 2006 he was a recipient of the coveted Joyce Foundation Joyce Award. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Portland Art Museum, OR, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, and the Seattle Art Museum, WA.

James Gobel’s (American, born 1972) vibrantly elaborate paintings of “bears,” or heavyset gay men, balance a gentle humor with sensuality and a loving sensitivity. Adorned with felt, yarn and fabric, the delicately pieced together paintings recall traditionally feminine crafts like quilting, yet their imagery is typically masculine. Gobel begins his creative process with photographs of people, but his final images are hybrids, portraying types rather than specific individuals. Gobel earned his MFA at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Gobel has mounted solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Hayworth Gallery, Los Angeles, Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco, and Kravets/Wehby Gallery, NY. Gobel’s work has been reviewed and featured in Art in America, ARTnews, Artforum, Flash Art, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Metro.Pop, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian, SF Weekly, Beautiful Decay, Flaunt, Zink, and The Believer, among many other publications.

Zane Lewis (American, born 1981) creates large scale images of pop culture icons, ranging from the Pope to Brangelina, begging questions of modern day worship. For Obama, 2007, he carefully spilt, pooled and mixed paint before fashioning the politician’s head with a knife. Baraka Obama, Charles Manson and Kim Jong II are three of Lewis’s portraits in his newest series Apostles. Lewis received his BFA from the Atlanta College of Art. He has mounted solo exhibitions at galleries such as Mixed Greens, NY; Romo, Atlanta; Finesilver, San Antonio; and Saltworks, Atlanta. His work has been included in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and Museum of Contemporary Art, GA.

In her Gangstas for Life series, Ebony Patterson (Jamaican, born 1981) depicts well-known Jamaican criminals. In doing so, she explores contemporary notions of male beauty within a Jamaican context. Specifically, the series highlights that fashionable practice of skin bleaching within the culture of the dancehall, a place of major cultural significance among young working class Jamaicans. Patterson earned her MFA in 2006 from the Sam Fox College of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Since 2005 she has had solo exhibitions at See Line Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Mutual Gallery, Jamaica; and the UC Gallery, University of Montana. In 2007 her work was featured in the group exhibition Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean curated by Tumelo Mosaka at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and in 2006 she was included in the Jamaica Biennial at the National Gallery of Jamaica. She is currently in residency at the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT.

The exhibition continues into mmg’s project space with works by Carlos Aires (Spanish, born 1974), Oscar Cueto (Mexican, born 1976), Russell Nachman (American, born), and more!

Moniquemeloche

Steinle Contemporary

TROJAN HORSE INTERNATIONAL INVITES YOU AND COMPANY TO ATTEND TRUTH OR
DARE.
A LIVE PERFORMANCE SHOWDOWN IN 3 LOCATIONS. EUROPE MEETS AMERICA.
ACCESS IS LIMITED, SO PLEASE WRITE NOW TO: truth-dare@live.com TO
RESERVE YOUR FREE TICKETS.

FRIDAY THE 13TH OF JUNE
7PM – 11PM
THE ROOFTOP
85 SOUTH 6TH STREET
BROOKLYN

SATURDAY THE 14TH OF JUNE
HIGH NOON – 4PM
THE BELVEDERE CASTLE
CENTRAL PARK
79TH STREET MID-PARK

SUNDAY THE 15TH OF JUNE
7PM – 11PM
THE SKY ROOM
NEW MUSEUM
235 BOWERY

PLEASE WRITE TO: truth-dare@live.com to reserve free tickets for any
one, or more of these events! Include your name, contact number, date
you would like to attend, and the names of your party. Hope to see
you there!

Sincerely,
Trojan Horse International

PERFORMANCE DIRECTOR: TED PIERCE
CURATOR: JESPER ELG – V1GALLERY.COM
CO-CREATORS: JEFF SUGG AND JIM FINDLAY

PLAYERS:
STEVE CUIFFO (USA)
MAGGIE HOFFMAN (USA)
JOEN HØJERSLEV (DENMARK)
ÖZLEM SAGLANMAK (DENMARK)
IDA WALLFELT (SWEDEN)
AND MORE!

TRUTH OR DARE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE GENEROSITY OF THE DANISH ART
COUNCIL- DaNY ARTS
WWW.TROJANPROJECTS.COM

TRUTH OR DARE is part of a series of events to be produced in New York
City by the art collective, TROJAN HORSE INTERNATIONAL (Copenhagen/New
York), that explore the political and ethical relationship between
Europe and the United States.
Truth: What is the capital of Finland?
Dare: Sing your national anthem as loud as possible.
Truth: Do you see your own opinion as more important than the majority?
Dare: Do a strip number.
Truth: Do you believe in angels?
Dare: Pray out loud for someone in the audience.
Truth: What do you wish to be done with your body when you die?
Dare: Perform your death scene.

TRUTH OR DARE is a durational performance work based on 1000 questions
and dares composed by the group Trojan Horse International, and boils
the situation of performer and spectator down to its essence. The
piece lasts four hours, and the audience is free to come and go
throughout the duration of the show.
Played by two teams representing Europe and the United States, TRUTH
OR DARE uses the universal teenage game to challenge stereotypical
views on culture, and question the spectator’s own relationship to a
cultural identity. There are limitless narratives that arise out of
the juxtaposition of various truths and dares, and through the act of
attempting to answer or perform, the limits of human knowledge and
physical existence begin to unravel.
As new questions and dares unfold, the mood of the room can change
from intellectual theorizing about sex, politics, and religion – to
embarrassingly comic interludes – to harsh interrogation and
humiliation. This is the stuff that nations are made of.



Faurschou

Milk Contemporary

Mohs

Hales Gallery is delighted to present Interior, a group show by six female artists. The exhibition focuses on the use of the enclosed, decorated space as a metaphor for a deeper probing of the thought process or an exploration of materiality.
Each artist has approached this in a unique and personal way through a range of media; stop motion animation, painting, diagrammatic drawing and sculpture.
Beth Campbell was born in Illinois and now lives and works in New York.  Following Room, a recently completed site-specific installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art, consists of a series of multiples of a reading room in a grid of mirrored pairs. For this exhibition, Campbell shows several flow diagram drawings entitled My potential future based on present circumstances and a large related mobile piece It’s largely unresolved. Each work explores Campbell’s internalised thought processes and anxieties as a mental interior with the drawings acting rather like the mycelin of a fungus which occasionally throw up fruiting bodies in the form of  sculptural manifestations.
Canadian born Laura Letinsky is well known in her adopted home city of Chicago for her seemingly accidental ‘table top’ photographs of the remains of meals and domestic activity. Letinsky’s elegant use of light and colour is reminiscent of the Golden Age Dutch and Flemish still life painting.  The subject matter is contemporary and the metaphorical content is enigmatic.
Laura Oldfield Ford lives and works in London. Her work consists of regularly published ‘Zines’ under the title of Savage Messiah which are formed from her drawings and texts. Also part of Oldfield-Ford’s oeuvre are large-scale paintings in which she is the protagonist in a developing narrative based around her experiences of London’s East End subcultures. Oldfield-Ford presents a painting which explores the dereliction of the soon to be transformed site for the 2012 Olympic Games. The area, with signs of recently abandoned domesticity such as sofas and TVs acts as a commentary on past interior spaces.
Courtney Smith began making a variety of sculpture with defunct wooden furniture whilst living in Brazil. Now residing in Williamsburg, New York, she continues to reconfigure existing furniture and reinvent practical objects with paradoxical purposes. On this occasion she shows a screen made with wooden bricks, which in turn have been made by Smith from an elaborate and highly decorative piece of lacquered oriental furniture.
Jessica Stockholder is known for her assemblages of everyday objects. Born in Seattle and now living and working in New Haven, Connecticut, her work references cubist interior paintings from the early 20th century. Stockholder uses familiar household items in her pieces in ways that disorientate the viewer’s ordinary relationship with them. Untitled 1998 is made up of metallic flooring and mosaic tiles commonly found in washrooms, a light and other plastic household items.
Amy Yoes who was born in Chicago and now lives and works in New York, uses animated film to create odd roomscapes that metamorphose in to strange spaces that are reminiscent of the amazing

Hales Gallery

Victoria Miro

Vilma Gold is pleased to present a new exhibition of work by Brian Griffiths.
 
Brian Griffiths views art as a means of escape, a repeated and heroic attempt to leave the here and now and be transported to other places, other times and by extension, other psychological states. Through past works we have been asked to journey into space (via cardboard super computers), to travel to mysterious lands (via a galleon made from wooden furniture) and promised all kinds of imaginary excesses with his varied material transitions.
 
In a new series of sculptures ‘Another End’ presents a drama where a resigned ‘lostness’ and ‘used up-ness’ is rampant. It infers a kind of relentlessness, a laughable existential angst butted against the optimism of a new improved conclusion. The sculptures appear as distinctive players: A bear head with its roughly patched concrete surface and painterly graphic face has an air of an old school entertainer, a wooden box with its numerous openings and gleaming tan brogue shoes is enigmatically quiet, an over-plated concertinaed metal car lump is a somewhat comical showy beast. They all desperately want to be more, to be back performing in another place – instead they sit, wait and put on a brave face. The over zealous lick of brightly coloured paint on the banger car, the daft smile of the bear, the over polished wooden surface is a bravado that is disturbingly fragile.
 
In Griffiths’ work traditional genres of sculpture are reworked and rethought predominately through the assisted readymade or the fabricated found object. The stone monument, the wooden carving and metal sculpture are all revisited with disarming directness and ingenuity. For Griffiths, conceptual rigor is bound up with processes of making, so everyday materials and objects are selected for their potential to transform and to create rich, evocative experiences. In part Griffiths uses sculpture to inquire into ideas of the flawed and the failed. Employing complex sculptural languages and diverse references Griffiths skillfully confuses categories of the found and the made, the everyday and the fantastical, the humorous and the melancholic. The deliberate bluntness of the work propels the viewer immediately into a landscape where the supposedly familiar is scrutinised. Griffiths transforms everyday objects and base materials into remarkable encounters that question our experience of the contemporary world. Aspirational, and yet tragically flawed, Griffiths’ works are charged with humour, discontent and sadness.
 
Brian Griffiths was born in Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1968, and lives and works in London. Last year Griffiths produced a major installation for The Furnace Commission at A Foundation, Liverpool. He has exhibited widely including important solo exhibitions at Arnolfini, Bristol (2007), Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paolo (2005), Camden Arts Centre, London (2004) and The Breeder, Athens (2004). Later this year Griffiths is exhibiting at Lustwarande 08 – Wanderland at the Fundament Foundation, Tilburg and is also taking part in a series of commissions at the Royal Academy.

Vilma Gold