Month: February 2009

Art Info

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Galleri Veggerby

Naoya Hatakeyama “Maquettes / Light”

Taka Ishii Gallery Kyoto is pleased to announce our fifth solo exhibition with Naoya Hatakeyama entitled “Maquettes/Light”. For this exhibition, the gallery will present 20 photographs from Hatakeyama’s “Maquettes/Light” body of work including previously unreleased images, bringing a conclusion to this series. The body of work, which has already been exhibited in abbreviated form at several museums including The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama, will next be on view at “Recontres d’Arles 2009”, France from July 7th in its entirety. Hatakeyama has for years been questioning the very nature of the modern world under the theme of “urbanity”. His varied photographic series, which received incomparable recognition upon their debut, bring interrogation of the credibility of reality to the fore by mirroring the urban city and even transforming it through photography. “Maquettes/Light” duplicates the emissions of urban city lights. The work transcends the limits of “image” and proposes a new aspect of the photograph as a medium by acting in place of depicted “reality”. The exhibited series of photographs explores a new frontier within photography, and strongly engages the conceptual aspect of an image. I photographed urban city lights. When I was watching the developed print, I felt something was missing. Then, I put the print on a light box. The entire print glimmered in grey. I thought “this is not it”. I printed the same image on a transparent film, and attached it on the back side of the print. Then only the images of light were illuminated. Of course, it stands to reason, but I had never seen this reason. It is merely a tautology of reality, in which characteristics of photography, conversion and metaphor are de-legitimized. I thought that I cannot title this anything but “Maquette”. Naoya

Taka Ishii Gallery

TAUBA AUERBACH / CAMILLA LØW / EMILY WARDILL
“ALMOST ALWAYS IS NEARLY ENOUGH”

STANDARD (OSLO) is proud to present the exhibition “Almost Always Is Nearly Enough”, including
works by Tauba Auerbach, Camilla Løw and Emily Wardill. Neither title nor any theme have been
employed to equip the exhibition with a categorizing framework. Rather the five works here on
display share an interest in a possible collapse of categories and cognition alike – inviting a
discussion of the animation of the artwork.

“Something that is taking shape in my mind and will sometime come to consciousness.”
– Robert Barry
“I can shoot pool, and I can play ping-pong. I’m pretty good at those games.”
– Thelonious Monk
The ability that jazz pianist Thelonious Monk claimed to have as a player of both pool and ping-pong is hardly surprising given his conviction that all musicians are in fact mathematicians. “Subconsciously”, he added, knowing that listening to his performances in order to pin down any attempt at translating the trigonometry of pool into music would be pointless. After all, eccentricity characterized his music as much as any loyalty to logic. Nevertheless, Monk would be right in claiming that the abilities to predict and project necessitate the possibility to play. Only then is there a chance to deviate and tweak standards with
dissonant harmonies, uneven bar structures, doubling of tempo mixed with abrupt, dramatic use of silence and hesitation. Wrong is made right, but only if you had it right in the first place.
Camilla Løw’s two sculptures in the exhibition equally seem to rely on rigid rules that are then subjected to hesitation. Suspended from the ceiling is the work “14 Days”, a trapeze made from oiled oak bars and nylon strings. The idiosyncratic form in combination with the title may suggest the collapse of a calendar, but less specifically the work seems concerned with the collapse of solid configuration. “14 Days” is a balancing act; its configuration an instable moment of movement and one that will inevitably alter with every new mounting of the work. This element of chance is also investigated in the adjacent work, “White Steel”, where Løw is applying force to merge the geometric and organic. A powder coated white sheet of
steel has been hammered haphazardly, leaving it at an in between stage of flatness and form. As sculptures they are both contradictions: being interested in how two-dimensional they can appear although inevitably being three-dimensional works.

Similarly concerned with matters of flatness and depths are the works from Tauba Auerbach’s recently developed series “Crease” / “Crumple”. The two paintings may be seen as continuing her research on ambiguity constructed from unambiguous parts. From focusing at the binary programming language of computers with her “50/50” series, Auerbach is this time looking at raster graphics (“halftone”) as a tool for translation of images. As indicated by the titles Auerbach takes an interest in the raster graphics ability to render a relief form on a flat surface. Entering the space and viewing the painting at the end wall of the gallery, one is capable of grasping the motif of a crumpled piece of paper. But when moving closer the
motif dissolves, the dots of the raster start pulsating and producing a sheer nauseating physical sensation of the work having an internal space. The paradox remains that when studying a fragment from up close one is able to recognize the transparency of form while also recognizing that information has been made opaque.

Emily Wardill’s contribution to the exhibition is the film Born Winged Animals and Honey Gatherers of the ,dating back to 2005. The mere 9 minutes long 16 mm film merges tableaux from the East End of London with the sound of the church bells of St. Anne in Limehouse, but its subject matter in prologue to Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality(1887). Here Nietzsche argues that humans have never been able
to find out who they really are and even in the attempt to do so they inevitably lose themselves:

“Rather, much as a divinely distracted, self-absorbed person into whose ear the bell has just boomed its twelve strokes of noon suddenly awakens and wonders, ‘what did it actually toll just now?’ so we rub our ears afterwards and ask, ‘what did we actually experience just now?’ still more: ‘who are we actually?’ and count up afterwards, as stated, all twelve quavering bell strokes of our life, of our being – alas! And miscount in the processes.”
Weaving together the staccato rhythm of the church bells and recorded snapshots of everyday life in this area of east London, the film revisits Nietzsche’s without literally referencing its source. However, as claimed by curator Katharine Stout, “Born Winged Animals and Honey Gatherers of the Soulharnesses the visceral impact of bells tolling, and juxtaposes this with evocative realist film footage to both suggest and dissolve Nietzsche’s symbolic description of an individual’s attempt to gain self-awareness”.

Tauba Auerbach (b. 1981) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include “Passengers” at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, “Yes and Not Yes” at Deitch Projects, New York, and “The Answer/Wasn’t Here”, Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco, in addition to group exhibitions such as “No Information Available” at Gladstone Gallery, Bruxelles; “Words Fail Me” at Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; “Beneath the Underdog” at Gagosian Gallery, New York, and “Panic Room” at the Deste Art Foundation, Athens. Throughout the duration of the exhibition Tauba Auerbach’s works can also be seen in the SECA Award Show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Camilla Løw (b. 1976) lives and works in Oslo. Recent solo exhibitions include “Straight Letters” at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee / Pier Arts Centre, Orkney; “Broken Windows” at Elastic, Malmö; and “Henriette Grahnert / Camilla Löw” at Sutton Lane Paris, in addition to group exhibitions such as “Language of Vision” at Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesborough; and “Standard Sizes”, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York. Throughout the duration of the exhibition her works can also be seen in a
solo exhibition at Gallery AHO, Oslo and group exhibitions “Constructivismes” at Galerie Almine Rech in Bruxelles and “The Thing” organized by MuHKA, Antwerp, in Mechelen, Belgium.
Emily Wardill (b. 1977) lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include NKV Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London and Jonathan Viner / Fortescue Avenue, London. Her works have also been included in group exhibitions such as “Lightbox” at Tate Britain, “Ballet Mecanique” at Timothy Taylor Gallery and “An Ambiguous Case”, MUMOK, Vienna. Wardill will this autumn have a solo exhibition with De Appel in Amsterdam and will also feature with a new film work in STANDARD (OSLO)’s two-person presentation (with Oscar Tuazon) at Art Basel this summer.

Standard Oslo

Pilaiporn Pethrith (TH) The Wall

Charlotte Fogh Contemporary is happy to present Pilaiporn Pethriths soloexhibition, ”The Wall”. The exhibition features new artworks of mixed media paintings and Persian carpets.

Pilaiporn Pethrith (1978) was born in Thailand and by the age of 17, she initiated the College of Fine Arts in Bangkok. In 2000 she moved to Denmark and graduated from the Royal Danish Academi of fine Arts in 2007. Since then she has marked herself by characteristic paintings reflecting both Western and Asian culture.

Pilaiporn Pethrith brings our attention to worldwide situations of complexity and disaster in her mixed media paintings. Pilaiporn combines dramatic news photographs, striking colours, and the ever-present persona of an elf like creation that she calls a ‘Goggle’; due to its fixed stare. The Goggle is an eerie and anonymous observer of events, a cartoon silhouette with elfin ears and a single eye. The mood of Pilaiporn’s paintings is up-tempo and ’Pop Art’ but also strangely unsettling. The images provoke many questions; does the Goggle represent us? Is it an impartial observer? A witness? A silent accuser? A practical joker?

Charlotte Fogh

FIFTEEN

Tom Skipp
Charo Oquet
David Buob
Jasper Sebastian Stürup
Yoshiaki Kaihatsu
Svea Duwe
Marlena Kudlicka
Joao Simoes
Marco Miersch
Grit Ruhland
Dirk Lange
Luis Bezeta
Luise Jonson
Leonardo Ramirez
Francisco Márquez
Curated by Berta Jayo

Edgezones
Jasper Sebastian Sturup

Old stuff, but very cool:::
Graffiti from 1991 on red trains

Scary works:::
Peter Beste
V1

Stage Fright, a collaboration between, and extension of Laura Buckley, David MacLean and Haroon Mirza’s practices takes the form of an orchestral piece of electronic music within a multiple video installation.

Using Buckley’s video as the starting point from which the audio is composed, the footage documents the deliberate and incidental nature of the everyday. From this footage, via a process of editing and assemblage, audio is created to construct and reconstruct a score. Multiple fragments of the video are projected throughout the gallery, reflected by sculptural forms which are framed by four independent channels of the song.

For the exhibition Doug Fishbone extends the viewing processes in his earlier work by focusing on the reaction of the viewer to a brand new video installation. Twelve protagonists watch the video in real-time, for the first time, in altered states of consciousness. All have been hypnotised. How natural are our responses? How predisposed are we to respond in certain ways? The work is no longer just its tangible limits but has extended to include the audience reaction and viewers personal and relational space. In this new work Fishbone creates a multi-perspectival environment, which uses video to create the space of an interlocutor between cause and effect; image and meaning.

The exhibition goes some way to explore how the viewer’s conscious experience is an exploration of phenomenology; as things that occur in time and of ourselves as temporal and spatial beings and the complexities that arise within multiple experiential existences.

Rokeby Gallery