Month: December 2008

The Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco, is pleased to present Sound From a Rock, a solo exhibition of the work of San Francisco-based artist Shaun O’Dell. Shaun’s observations loosely compose inquiries about human engagement with nature and how this relationship has interacted historically with symbolic cultural production to support the construction and manifestation of power. The tombs and artifacts of history’s denials and creativities are the living source for the images produced.

Inspired by physicist David Bohm’s writings on creativity and the implicate order in nature, O’Dell uses sculpture and sound as well as more abstracted and intuitively derived drawings in this recent body of work to explore new formal and conceptual directions. The enfolded, expansive and unresolved nature of the conceptual content is matched formally in the looser, more expressive handling of materials and broadened variety of media.

In Sound From A Rock, O’Dell examines geological, cultural and ideological artifacts from the spillage of encrusted narratives that describe the creative force of high civilization as solely a construct of the West in opposition to a dark and barbaric East. Following knotted pathways, a traditional American quilt pattern called the “Star of Bethlehem” is traced back through Europe and Islam to the origin of civilization at the base of the Ziggurat at Ur. Here, the astrological matrix within the story of Matthew’s Magi, formally abstracts the planets Jupiter and Saturn and gestures to Zoroastrianism’s impact on the Persian empire and its subsequent influence on Greece, Judaism, Christianity and the historical construction of the Western mind. In a photograph from the archives of the Truman Library the hand of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh caresses the crack in the Liberty Bell during a visit to America one year before his CIA backed overthrow. A similar patina to that on the Liberty Bell is seen on the 2500-year-old limestone surface of a griffin sculpture in Lucien Herve’s photograph taken at Persepolis during a French Institute of Archeology expedition in 1962. The image appears again collaged with over-painting in the drawing Dawn Blood Of Gold, Of Yesterdays’ Dawn Gold. Two 3’ x 3’ cubes of red earth with conical shaped extrusions, physically refer to the surface, weight and density of the copper bell and limestone griffin, and the removal of the cone from the platonic cube becomes an act of reanimating its static nature.

During the opening O’Dell’s band Sword and Sandals will perform harmonic explorations based on the dualistic principles of Zoroaster.

Shaun O’Dell was born in 1968 in Beeville, TX.  His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, with a recent solo exhibit at Susan Inglett Gallery in New York, NY. O’Dell is the recipient of the 2005 SECA Award and Fleishhacker Award. In 2007, his work was exhibited at James Harris Gallery, Seattle, WA and Pierogi in Leipzig.

Jack Hanley

SACK OF BONES
Curated by Blair Taylor and Ellen Langan

Javier Peres is pleased to present SACK OF BONES, a group exhibition featuring: Jack Goldstein, Dan Colen, Tara Delong, Dash Snow, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Neil Jenney, Mark Flood, Bill Hayden, George Herms, H.C. Westermann, Bruce LaBruce, Daniel McDonald, Andrew Rogers, Arsen Roje, Agathe Snow, William C. Taylor, Donald Urquhart, Oscar Tuazon, Eli Hansen, Kaari Upson, Sebastian Mlynarski and Banks Violette.

Toted around, thrown in the corner, recovered as relic or disposed of as useless, a sack of bones is unavoidably deformed. It is an apparently dead object subject to the intentions of its creator, or its purveyor, or its consumer, or maybe just its times.

The group exhibition “Sack of Bones” comes from a viewing of Paul Rachman’s 2006 film, American Hardcore, in which Mark Flood appears as an interviewee on the topic of 1980’s punk rock. The tone of the film is reverent, to be sure, but more than an ode, the voices in the film present conflicting parts pride, humor, fraternity, anger, bitterness, nostalgia, and what are often doleful mechanisms for dealing with the here-and-now. That Flood was both part of Hardcore as it existed musically (in 1980 his band, Culturcide, put out their first 7-inch: “Another Miracle/Consider Museums as Concentration Camps”) and has been practicing visual art for over 30 years poses an interesting question: how, if at all, can art be hardcore? By embodying adolescent punk obsession? By miraculous use of irony? By a simple withdrawal from popular territory?

Consider, for example, the tangled ‘attitude problem’ precipitated by Reagan-era punk; there is the myth of a pure strain of FUCK YOU, there is the myth of the majority’s snide perception of its counter-movements, and then, somewhere in the overlap, there is the problematic dilution of any rebellion’s once-potent beginnings (causing cycles of backlash and resurgence pretty much ever after). In the art world this tangle is further convoluted by the relishing of trade and an inherent affluence, elitism and circuitous pandering that can compromise anyone’s well-intentioned we/they stirrings.

The exhibition as a whole may appear deadpan, satirical or pathetic ˆ in any case each of the constituent works turns its back on complacency, and, in doing so, becomes material evidence of resistance (kicking from within the sack). In other words, with all that is stacked against the mutinous artist and the mutinous viewer, hope could lie in objecthood itself.

Peres Projects

X-MAS 08 The big group show:
Anders Brinch, Heiko Müller (DE), Melou Vanggaard, René Holm,
Morten Steen Hebsgaard, Anders W.Ø.Larsen, Christian Finne,
Crystel Ceresa (CH), David Delleagi, Odey Curbelo Urquijo (CU),
Rasmus Rosengaard, Kerstin Wagener (DE), Christina Hamre,
Patricio Gil Flood (AR), Mikkel S. Andersen, Jes Wind Andersen,
Jon Stahn, Maria Torp, Thierry Feuz (AU)

Galleri Christoffer Egelund

Henningsen Contemporary

Exhibitions just now:

-Small solo show at Wok Store in Milan, Italy. Opening December 11th.

-“Wood pushers” Group show at Hecklewood Gallery, Portland OR. USA. Opening December 4th

-“News of the day” Group show at Galleri Slugen, Esbjerg, Denmark. November 21th – December 19th

Hecklewood
Wok Store
Husk Mit Navn
V1

THE KABOOM! PROCESS – a performance project between Soren Dahlgaard & Meir Tati kicks off at Nikolaj Contemporary art Center, Copenhagen this Thursday.



RENZO MARTENS EPISODE III

Episode III – ‘Enjoy Poverty’ is the second in a series of three films by Martens in which he raises issues regarding contemporary image production. The films prompt the viewer to think about the construction of a documentary and the role of the maker in it, and the responsibility of the viewers themselves. Martens filmed the
first part of the series in Chechnya, where he looks for diversion from the disappointments of romance among the ruins and victims of the war.

For Episode III Martens traveled for two years with his video camera in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an area marked by humanitarian disaster. Martens shows how development aid and Western photographers delineate an image of this situation. His film confronts the public with the fact that the Africans themselves do not
profit from the images that foreign photographers take of them. Quite on the contrary: like gold and luxury foods, the images of poverty, their most lucrative export product, are also out of their reach; they are exclusively exploited
by the Western ‘poverty industry’. As an answer to this injustice, Martens starts an emancipation project for Congolese photographers – a project that is doomed to failure.

Among the sources of inspiration for Martens’s film is the short novel by Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness from 1902, which also was the basis for Francis Ford Coppola’s film epic Apocalypse Now. Conrad’s book not only describes the colonial exploitation of former Belgian Congo, but above all it is a literary interpretation of the chaos and madness in a land where the natural resources are almost inexhaustible and the inhabitants almost without rights. The connecting thread in Episode III is Martens’s journey through the interior of the Congo. From the central Congo, where plantation workers live in wretched conditions and child mortality is high, the artist travels together with his crew of bearers to the east of the country, where guerrillas are engaged in a war with Western corporations that are extracting the local raw materials – corporations supported by UN forces, with Doctors Without Borders in their wake.

What solutions can Martens suggest for the problems of this land? It becomes increasingly clear that the egocentric artist, who feels himself akin to romantic spirits such as Yves Klein and Neil Young, can only make a purely symbolic contribution. In doing so, he holds a mirror up before Western development aid, and thereby also the Western viewer, in which the moral dilemmas are outlined mercilessly. Before doing that, he is equally implacable in first sketching the systemic humanitarian crisis in the Congo in excruciating detail.

The hour-and-a-half long film by Martens is a documentary in which the maker himself is constantly present as a performance artist. He not only conceived the concept, but is also the cameraman himself, and a reporter and political activist at the same time. With this personal presence, Episode III provides an alternative for the ostensible objectivity in documentary work by both visual artists and filmmakers.

Renzo Martens (Sluiskil, b. 1973) studied at the Catholic University at Nijmegen and the Vrije Universiteit, Brussels. In addition he attended the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent, and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. A fragment of Episode III was already to be seen this last spring in De Appel, Amsterdam, and at Manifesta 7, in Rovereto, Italy.

Wilkonson Gallery

HIGHLIGHTS 2008
Our annual Christmasshow featuring highlights of 2008 and small artworks by:
HuskMitNavn, Julie Nord, Zven Balslev, Christina Malbek, Søren Behncke aka Papfar, Birgitte Storm, Anne Torpe, Hesselholdt & Mejlvang, Jan Danebod, Louise Sparre and a lot more…

Charlotte Fogh
Husk Mit Navn

Camilla Thorup and Fritz Bornstück, Two Holes in the Bottom of the Sea, 5 December – 10 January

Galerie Mikael Andersen offers the possibility of getting acquainted with two painters, who finished their education at their respective art academies this year – Thorup in Copenhagen and Bornstück in Berlin.

The anatomy of the double exhibition should be taken seriously and should not be seen as a curated whole. Both artists paint, but that is as far as comparisons go – more or less anyway.

Camilla Thorup paints people. Human beings interacting with each other: they fight, ride on the back, balance, they are close to one another. But the closeness is very much only a physical closeness, whether it is in a fight or someone riding someone else’s back. Because the characters seem rather mechanical and stiff – almost alienated – towards the situation they are in and the people they are with; absent in their presence. Thorup’s works are characterized by a played down and controlled simplicity in their expression that waves back and forth between the sad and the humoristic.

Fritz Bornstück paints everything, and he does it with a wildness and volume. The paintings are loud, they call on the viewer through their expressivity, energy and humour. “Come here you cowardly sculpture,” says a fish with boxing gloves on. Apparently it is ready to pick a fight with a media it regards as competing and maybe also with the passing viewer, who does not dare to make sense of the painting.

Galleri Mikael Andersen