Month: July 2008

TONIGHT FORGET ABOUT YOUR HOUSES AND CARS


Tonight Forget About Your Houses and Cars deconstructs the allure of the apocalyptic. From bombs and explosions to cults and catastrophes, the exhibition explores the place of disaster in the collective imagination. Employing devices ranging from comic illustration to doomsday prophecy and postmodern meta-narrative, the artists in the exhibition consider both the historical and contemporary place of disaster, and the mysteries of its enduring appeal.

Matt O’Dell and Ahmed Alsoudani stage the visceral drama of disaster and destruction in works that reference acutely contemporary conflicts, ranging from the war in Iraq to the terrorist attacks of September 11th. Creating dramatic images and hermetically crafted aesthetics, these works viscerally present the apocalypse that daily takes place around us. Meanwhile, Christoph Draeger’s puzzle piece begins with a single image – a bomb explosion – and illustrates the manner in which this image is painstakingly reconstituted in our imagination.

Justin Lieberman, Doug Fishbone, Neil Hamon and Draeger / Reynolds explore the role of pop culture and news media in propagating ideas of the impending apocalypse. Employing barbed humor and a jarring sense of playfulness, these artists mine the territory of television and movies to create distinct and memorable narratives describing our contemporary social and political climate. Often inherently nostalgic, they reveal the way the idea of the apocalyptic is as much a hearkening back into the past as it is a projection forward.

That apparent temporal confusion is crucial to understanding the way in which the apocalyptic is fundamental not only to our ideas of culture and society, but also to our idea of utopia itself. In the apocalyptic, ideas of oblivion and disaster coincide. Tobias Collier’s floor work evokes the harmony of planetary systems in which destruction is inherent to order; Ivan Navarro’s light sculptures produce a sensation of menacing calm, at once rooted in the specifics of political turmoil and evoking an enduring erasure.

Similarly, Dan Colen’s paintings and Shinichi Hara’s marble sculpture articulate a vision in which peace gives way to horror. Colen’s birdshit paintings are at once entrancingly beautiful and deliberately repulsive. And Hara’s sculpture of the grotesque locates the point at which beauty and horror coincide, and dread and calm co-exist. In this way, Hara, like many of the artists in Tonight Forget About Your Houses and Cars, depicts a zone in which the apocalypse is no phantom from the future, but a catastrophe that has already taken place.

Artists exhibiting in Tonight Forget About Your Houses and Cars: Ahmed Alsoudani, Dan Colen, Tobias Collier, Christoph Draeger / Reynold Reynolds, Neil Hamon, Shinichi Hara, Justin Lieberman, Bernhard Martin, Ivan Navarro, Matt O’Dell, Christoph Schmidberger and Guy Richards Smit.

Union Gallery

Mark TITCHNER: Ivy Meet Mike (2007)


Mark TITCHNER: Ivy Meet Mike (2007)

Mark Titchner’s “Ivy Meet Mike” is a kaleidoscopic video animation of footage of the first hydrogen bomb experiment, code-named Ivy Mike. What sounds like a computer-generated voice repeats ‘yes’ in rapid succession, so that the one syllable become a rhythmic chant with no beginning or end. It suggests the robotic embrace of fission and an acquiescence to the strong will of a technology that, for a time, embodied the “free world’s” darkest visions of apocalypse and sublimated fantasies of omnipotence.

Oddly psychedelic, the work’s aesthetic recalls an arcane vision of the future: on the one hand, it is obsolete technophile aesthetics in motion; on the other, with its irregular pulsing it appears organic at the same time.

Mark TITCHNER, born 1973 in Luton, England, will open a solo show at Peres Projects Berlin November 1st, 2008.

Peres Projects

That’s Not How I Remember It


ANNA HELWING GALLERY
presents
That’s Not How I Remember It
July 12 – August 16, 2008
Reception: July 12, 6-8pm
Anna Helwing Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition
That’s Not How I Remember It, a group show featuring:
Matias Faldbakken
Diango Hernandez
Alastair MacKinven
David Maljkovic
Adam McEwen
Wilfredo Prieto
Armando Andrade Tudela

Adam McEwen, I’m So Tired, 2007
The opening reception will be held on Saturday, July 12, 2008 from 6 to 8pm.  The gallery is located on 2766 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90034.  Regular gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm.
With this group exhibition, Anna Helwing Gallery selects seven artists whose work hinges on the subtle, yet ever increasing “corporate-ization” or “Western-ization”, or eventually Americanization of culture abroad.  This cultural shift towards a social homogenization reflects a larger cultural and economical globalization of individual realities and aesthetics, and a resulting clash of ancestral and new values, beliefs, and moral systems visually and aesthetically manifested.
This group exhibition gathers the work of seven talented artists that employ this theme. Whether it’s in terms of investigating the potential of artistic intervention to disrupt the systems underlying this process; or whether it’s an interest in countercultural movements; or whether it’s in terms of exploring how political ideas are assimilated and activated aesthetically; or whether it’s a heightened interest in the dislocation of weary, dead modernist aesthetics and utopian ideology. It’s about the visualization of the difficulty of collective identity in times of cultural and economical globalization, its interpersonal conflicts, and the problematization of material and abstract ideals, all seen through the artist’s eyes.
Anna Helwing