Month: October 2008

Bo Bjerggaard

GERARD BYRNE
‘FORMS OF ABSTRACTION’

Galerie Nordenhake presents ‘Forms of Abstraction’, Gerard Byrne’s first solo exhibition in Sweden. Gerard Byrne’s art practice utilizes video and photography to question the ways in which images are constructed, transmitted and mediated. His work examines the modes and conventions of image making and analyzes the mechanics of representation itself. Influenced by literature and theatre, Byrne’s work consistently references a range of sources, from popular magazines of the recent past to iconic modernist playwrights like Brecht, Beckett, and Sartre.

The works presented at Galerie Nordenhake all in some way stage the act of representation, contrasting the information presented in the image with supplemental textual information. Forms of Abstraction is a reference to the legibility or illegibility of lens-based images. Each work suggests a play with the discrepancies, fragmentation and incompleteness of each representation. By doing so Byrne proposes the idea that all representations are abstract.

‘*ZAN -T185 r.1: (Interview) v.1, no. 4 – v.2, no. 6, 19 (1969 -Feb. 1972); (Andy
Warhol’s (Interview) v.2, no. 21 – v.3, no. 9′ 2007 is a video installation presenting a series of reconstructed interviews which were made with aspiring New York based actors at the New York Theater Workshop in May 2007. Neither documentary nor fiction, ‘*ZAN -T185…’ was shot by cult cinematographer Chris Doyle. The interviews Byrne reconstructs with these actors derive from microfilm records held in the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and document interviews with peripheral ‘celebrities’ from early issues of Andy Warhol’s ‘Interview’ magazine from c.1974.

The exhibition includes a range of diverse photographic works of disparate and seemingly unrelated subject matter, all linked through a chain of captions that weave narrative connections across the works, mirroring the way newspapers use language to anchor photographic images. Byrne’s photographs are both unequivocally clear and strangely enigmatic at the same time. The related larger photographic work ‘One year four weeks and four days ago’ is a unique photographic document of a specific moment in the ever-changing display of a typical magazine newsstand. Referencing Walker Evan’s famous series of photographs of newsstands, the work counters the throwaway flux of photographic imagery with a unique photographic print, whose exact age is chronicled in an ever-changing title.

Also in the exhibition is Byrne’s newest work ‘1968/ Mica and Glass (temporally removed) or A counter-enthropic exercise in Epic Theatre’, demonstrated by workers from Statens Museum for Kunst. Presented here for the first time in its completed form on 16 mm color film, it is a motion-activated installation addressing the relationship between film, object and space – an attempt to reconfigure the spatial dynamics of Minimalism and Robert Smithson’s sculpture ‘Untitled (Mica and Glass)’ from 1968.

Gerard Byrne (b.1969) is a visual artist working with photographic, video, and live art. In 2007 he represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale. His work has been shown at international biennials including the Sydney Biennial (2008), the Lyon Biennale (2007), the 3rd Tate Triennial (2006), and the 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003) as well as in major museums in Europe and the US. Solo exhibitions of his work include the Dusseldorf Kunstverein (2007), the Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver (2007), Frankfurter Kunstverein (2003), the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2002). In 2006 he was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn award. He lives and works in Dublin.

Nordenhake

Works from Raddum show @ Brandstrup::::
Brandstrup

SUZANNAH SINCLAIR
SOLO EXHIBITION: EYES FOR NO ONE

LOYAL is proud to present EYES FOR NO ONE, a new group of paintings by New York based artist SUZANNAH SINCLAIR.

There is a captivating emotion in these elegant watercolor on birch-panel paintings of female figures. The portraits reveal much more than the physical in a look or a gaze. Personal yet with an untouchable mystique, the figures are always alone and in intimate poses. Sad, proud, hopeful, exasperated, a range of human sentiment is transfered. The matter-of-fact nakedness of the subjects tends toward confrontational and examines whether we are more comfortable with the sexual than with the emotional. The consistency of Sinclair’s style of portraiture brings to mind the haunting and alluring portrait photography of Horst P. Horst, who said about his photograph “Odalisque”, New York 1943, “I don’t know how I did it. I couldn’t repeat it. It was created by emotion.”

Born in 1979 in Frankfurt, Germany, Suzannah Sinclair is based in New York. Sinclair completed two solo exhibitions this spring at Voges + Partner Galerie, Frankfurt and at Samson Projects, VOLTA NY. Previous solo shows include Samson Projects, Boston and New Image Art Gallery, Los Angeles. Sinclair was part of the 3 person show “I’ve Been Setting Fires All Day” at LOYAL in Spring 2007. This is her first solo show at LOYAL.

Galleri Loyal



Schroeder Romero is pleased to announce Future Darwinist a collaborative installation mimicking a Victorian salon by Andy Diaz Hope and Laurel Roth.

Future Darwinist is a multimedia installation dedicated to humanity’s desire to break free from the tethers of Darwin’s Laws. Modeled on a scholar’s salon from a past age that has been projected into the near future, Future Darwinist synthesizes the potential of modern science with the aesthetics and enthusiasm of the Age of Discovery. The nineteenth century was an era when the wealthy elite went on voyages of discovery without sacrificing the luxury of their plush, red velvet surroundings. It was also a time of unbridled enthusiasm for scientific thought and folly, when discovery and theory progressed by leaps and bounds as overeager collectors wiped out entire species in order to fill their collecting cabinets. This exuberance can still be found in today’s research climate, but the aesthetics of the Victorian era conjure a profound sense of adventure into the unknown that is more difficult to grasp with images of modern science.

No longer satisfied to work within the bounds of natural selection, the Future Darwinist strives to overcome the rigid restrictions of evolution. His collection cabinets display the best of his work. His walls are lined with the skulls of companion animals whose physiologies have been altered to please his aesthetic demands. He is surrounded by examples of his own interventions into natural selection, whether through examination of animals bred for food or with small suits designed for pigeons to disguise them as extinct birds, visually returning biodiversity lost through his own folly.

In his library, illuminated portraits of pharmacists and medical marijuana purveyors preside over landscapes of the post-Darwinian mental terrain, where one’s mental state is determined by psychopharmaceutical regimen instead of natural stimulus and genetics. In the living area, a colorful kinetic mobile of the Ritalin molecule soothes the Future Darwinist’s child. The room is decorated with a tribute to man’s cont rol over the reproductive cycle and fertility in the form of a crocheted quilt of embroidered panty-liners. Illuminating the room is a chandelier sparkling with syringes and garlands of crystal and pills, illustrating the danger and allure of this newfound ability of the Future Darwinist to effect and control ever-expanding areas of body and mind.

A centerpiece of the Future Darwinist study is a 6.5’ x 8.5’ woven Jacquard tapestry dedicated to the turning point of evolutionary forces from Darwinian Natural Selection to human centric evolution. The tapestry, titled “Allegory of the Monoceros,” is inspired by the 15th century Unicorn Tapestries and weaves a tale of medicine, discovery and evolution through the ages beginning with early medicinal botanicals and ending in the gene age. Utilizing tra ditional textile design and botanical illustration and woven on a computer controlled jacquard loom in Belgium, the technology used to create the tapestry spans the age of computers from 19th century punch card to current CNC machinery. In the tapestry, a Cerberus made up of the first cloned dog fused with his genetic and birth parents sits guard at the base of an apple tree whose branch structure is based on Darwin’s first sketch of his theory of Natural Selection titled “Tree of Life”. The tapestry is a tribute to the new forms of life being created and the species that lose their place in the new order.

Our research in pharmacology led to a greater interest in science and society as a whole, in particular an aesthetic and thematic fascination with natural history exploration. Rather than merely romanticize cabinets of curiosity and collections of natural history, we consider this fascination a lens through which to explore our contemporary age. From the Age of Reason through the Age of Discovery to Darwin’s pivotal book On the Origin of Species, natural philosophers and citizen scientists created the framework on which our modern society operates. Early development of the scientific method, taxonomy, biology, chemistry, and genetics led to the Industrial Revolution, the downfall of monarchies, and the birth of modern society. Three centuries of exploring, cataloguing and experimenting have led to a wealth of knowledge and immense power over the fundamental processes of life on Earth, from gene-modification to controlling the reproductive cycle to cloning. We have moved from a world of natural selection to one of man-directed selection, from On the Origin of Species to On the Creation of Species. The modern era, sometimes called the Gene Age or the Third Industrial Revolution, has fields of study and exploration that open before us much like the new world and natural philosophy did for Victorian scientists, with a new awareness of man’s own hand in the creation and alteration of our current and future world. Evolution did not end with Darwin’s popularizing of his theory; the impact of man on his environment is now more than ever pervasive and all encompassing. Never before has man had greater power and responsibility over life on earth.

Schroeder Romero

Group show:::

Avanthay Contemporary

Hales gallery is pleased to present The Freedom Centre, a group show that is bound to change your life!
 
The ideas for this show were developed from conversations between Paul Hedge, the gallery director and the great libertarian artist/s Bob and Roberta Smith, centring around a text based work that the artist/s had made in 2007 entitled The Apathy Workshop, 2003.
 
The mock diary page featured in the work describes how the artist/s set up an apathy workshop as a response to the hopelessness they felt when participating in government art programmes set up to do good in areas of mental health and prison inmate reform. The premise arrived at from these exchanges was that art is paradoxically a powerful tool in the fight for freedom because at its heart it is useless.
 
Discussions followed, with all sorts of artists, many of whom are the artists now participating in this show and it seemed that this sense of hopelessness was widespread, yet the response from the artists was to stoically continue to make art in the face of powerlessness.
 
‘Freedom’, has been used as a by line by many different and competing organisations. It has been used by political organisations, from both the Right and the Left of the spectrum. It has been taken up by both religious and secular groups, and by the psychedelic and the peculiar. The show attempts to create an environment where Freedom is promoted in all of its contradictory forms. The Freedom Centre celebrates the empty rhetoric and unrealistic nature of its aims.
 
Artists included in the show:
Trevor Appleson, Adam Dant, Ian Davis, Katy Dove, Peter Joslyn, Richard Klein, Hew Locke, Laura Oldfield Ford, Tom Price, Ross Sinclair, Bob and Roberta Smith, Tomoko Takahashi, Jim Torok, Julie Verhoeven, Jane Wilbraham, Martin Wilner.

Hales Gallery

Peter Taylor(can) Nathaniel Russell(us) Carol Es(us) Other(can) Doodles(us) Randy Laybourne(us) Justin B.Williams(us) Owen Plummer(can) Zane Kozak(us) Nic Burrows(uk) Joanna Price(us) Bang(ita)
Ben Jacques(can) Ty Danylchuk(can) Howie Tsui(can) Marco Zamora(us) Tracy Maurice(can) Kinoko(us) Andy Rementer(us) Alex Chiu(us) Billy Mavreas(can) Peter Thompson(can) Michael DeForge(can) Mark Price(us) Useless Idea(ita) Mike Perry(us) Daniel Gonzalez(can) A J Purdy(us) Scott Barry(us) Dean Sullivan(us) Timothy Karpinski(us) Zeesy Powers(can) Errol Richardson(can) Ben Marcus(us) C C Walton(can) Maxwell Paternoster(uk) Stephen Tompkins(us) Jonathan Boam(uk)   Matt Moroz(can) Michael Rytz(dk) Matteo Gualandris(ita) Jonathan Ryan Storm(us) Emanuel Kabu(ita) Andrew Neyer(us)& Luke Ramsey(can)

Mohs

Stephen Vitiello Four Color Sound

The Project, New York is pleased to present Stephen Vitiello’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, Four Color Sound (2008), an immersive environment divided into four sections: Blue, Red, Yellow, and Green. It was originally commissioned by DiverseWorks, a non-profit exhibition space in Houston, and features lighting design by Jeremy Choate.

The 28-minute audio cycle is accompanied by choreographed lighting effects that charge the foggy room with four consecutive color segments. Each audio section combines sounds produced using electronic synthesizers with excerpts from Vitiello’s documentary field and instrumental recordings. For example, in the Blue section one hears birds and insects recorded in the Brazilian Amazon. The Yellow section consists of instrumental sounds from the group Beta Collide, including the trumpet, flute and percussion. There are frogs recorded in Virginia in the Green section and, finally, thunder in the Red section. Although each section is a study in monochromatic color and sound texture, the cross fades are sublime moments of transition.

Stephen Vitiello is an electronic musician and sound artist. Recent solo exhibitions include Duets, MC, Los Angeles (2008), DiverseWorks, Houston (2008), and Slow Planes, Fast Trees, Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, Virginia Beach (2007). Vitiello’s work is currently part of Perspectives 163: Every Sound You Can Imagine at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. Recent group exhibitions include dis(concert), Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles (2008) and Organizing Chaos, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2007).

Vitiello also participated in the 2006 Biennale of Sydney, the 2002 Whitney Biennial and Greater New York at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center presented in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art. He was also a short-listed nominee for the Nam June Paik Award in 2006. Since 1988, Vitiello has collaborated with artists, musicians and choreographers, including Dara Birnbaum, Jem Cohen, Andrew Deutsch, John Jasperse/ White Oak Dance Project, Joan Jonas, Julie Mehretu, Pauline Oliveros, Tony Oursler, Nam June Paik, Eder Santos, Scanner and Yasunao Tone. Upcoming projects include a performance at The Marfa Sessions on September 26th with Steve Roden and an installation for MASS MoCA.

El Proyecto