Month: April 2009
Waiting For Ararat
White Walls Gallery presents “Waiting For Ararat,” a joint show featuring Caleb Neelon and Mike Shine. An opening reception will be held Saturday, April 11th, 2009 from 7pm to 11pm at 835 Larkin Street, SF. Check out Caleb and Mike’s unrivaled abilities in transforming space with their interactive nautical landscapes in a show that should not be missed. Both artists will be in attendance, and you might even snag an autograph for the inside cover of Caleb’s “Book of Awesome.”
Caleb Neelon was born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he works as an artist, educator and writer. When he isn’t busy with solo and group exhibitions throughout the US, Caleb gets out of the gallery and out of the States. International venues for his murals include Brazil, Nepal, Honduras, India, Iceland and Europe. It was a childhood visit to the Berlin Wall that introduced Caleb to the dexterity of murals, a passion that he has since broadcasted onto city walls and translated into gallery spaces. Being a writer as well as an artist, Caleb has a handful of published books under his belt. His “Book of Awesome,” published by Gingko Press, catalogs his works abroad and on the home front. This little treasure highlights Caleb’s nautical large-scale wall pieces, street sign art, indoor installations, and just how awesome he really is.
Mike Shine spends his days surfing, creating, and spending quality time with family and friends at his notorious “art shack” in Bolinas, California. His mystifying artwork pays homage to his wife and Nordic mythology, all dipped in a thick coating of pop culture. Driftwood has become central to Mike’s conceptual basis, inspired by a storm worn amusement park that has literally washed up on his frequented beaches. Shine’s work takes the carnival theme to a whole new level, infusing nostalgic half-recollections with sinister mythological characters. Infusing the scary and fun sides of amusement parks (clowns are creepy), Shine has successfully created his own nautical interpretation of the age-old American classic. Take one look at his infamous shack and you’ll want to know what makes this artist tick. Shine’s alternate life is spent as the executive creative director of advertising agency, BSSP, which makes us wonder: where does this guy find time to have so much fun?
Andrew Sendor
Caren Golden Fine Art is pleased to present “Based on a True Story,” Andrew Sendor’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Through a series of bizarre hypothetical scenarios Sendor embarks on a self-referential investigation of the recent history of art. Each canvas features an interior exhibition space where videos, paintings, photographs and, absurdly, human-beings-as-art, reside. “Based on A True Story” speculates why, when no medium or subject is too outrageous, the site of a museum remains sacred. What would happen if taxidermied humans were put on display as art? Would this represent a vanguard act of appropriation, or an unspeakable taboo? And if it is indeed one of the last in art, then what does a painted representation of the taboo convey?
Sendor considers the historical function of the act of painting as a mimetic device, a means of expression, and an agent of desire. While his recent work is born of difficult questions and complex ideas, Sendor’s provocative imagery evokes a more visceral reaction from the viewer. Exquisitely rendered and improbably seductive, these disquieting compositions thrive on the same attraction-versus-repulsion dynamic that activated the work of such painters as Goya, Courbet and Bacon. Sendor extends these socio-psychological dialogues and continues to test the experiential limits of representational painting.
Supplementing the paintings, and adding to the philosphical discussion, is a new series of drawings. Executed on antique paper with such visible signs of age as oxidation, water stains and in some instances mildew, Sendor disrupts any clear determination of authorship, authenticity or chronology. Thus, the ethical discussion about humans-as-art comes full circle, back to the paintings, as Sendor encourages viewers to question the nature of his images, as signifiers of either an innocuous fictional event, or a separate, and possibly disturbing, reality.
Andrew Sendor’s work has been featured in museum exhibitions including “Phantasmania” at the Kemper Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO, “MAD LOVE” at the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, Denmark, and “XS-Size Matters” at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, NY, which traveled to the Knoxville Museum of Art in Knoxville, TN. In addition to a solo show at Mogadishni Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark in the Fall of 2007¬, his work has been presented in “Salon Nouveau” at the Engholm Engelhorn Galerie in Vienna, Austria and most recently the “All Too Human: Young American Painters” at Schuebbe Projects in Dusseldorf, Germany. Sendor has been featured in numerous publications including Art in America, New American Painters, M Magazine, Wonderland Magazine and Art Premium, which featured his work in a 10 page article and on the magazine’s cover.
pierre bismuth
John Waters Rear Projection
Dan Graham @ Lisson Gallery
Bombs Away @ Strychnin Gallery
JOHN KØRNER "Jacob, Sebastian, Benjamin, Jacob and Dan"
William Powhida
“When the individual thinks he is casting an objective eye upon himself, he is, in the final analysis , contemplating nothing other than the result of perpetual transactions with the subjectivity of others.”
-Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics
Oh, for fuck’s sake, he’s back and up to his crazy shit again. William Powhida has once again put us in a totally awkward position as his dealers. He is asking us to show a body of work that he claims was produced by William Powhida sometime in late 2009. We realize it is only April. What the fuck? Right? We aren’t even really sure we understand him, but William claims to have William’s reflections from his time locked in Thai jail for solicitation and drug charges while abroad on an NEA funded travel grant. Apparently (this is so weird) William underwent a difficult detoxification and documented it on paper. We are not shitting you. William even produced a NY Post cover and article verifying the events that haven’t even happened yet, which is just plainly ridiculous.
William has really gone bat shit crazy, making some sort of paranoid representation of the art world William produced after being freed from jail, and has expanded it into an installation of over 3,000 art world portraits. We tried to explain to him that it’s just not possible to show art from the future, but our special ‘little art star’ just stared at us. Are we missing something??? No, he’s obviously experiencing some kind of meltdown brought on by the economic collapse. We think he’s certain he might have had something to do with it and we tried to explain it wasn’t all his fault. Market Crash was just a drawing.
Unfortunately, we are, um, committed to the show based on what he told us he was going to do. He said something about a memoir and was vague about the details. UH, NO. We promise this is the LAST time we trust him. We are so embarrassed to have to do this, but we have to announce that we are pleased to present ‘The Writing Is on the Wall’ opening April 10, 2010 from 6–8pm opening this April 10, 2009 from 6–8pm. This is just absurd, but that is when he says the opening takes place and you know how ‘geniuses’ operate, totally weird, probably insane.
To make matters worse, William also collaborated on a project with Jennifer Dalton. They swear they received a fax time-stamped April 2012 from SchroRoWinkleFeuerBooneWildenRosenGosian Gallery regarding the opening of the last gallery in New York featuring unlimited editions of their work (and every artist still in New York). It’s really…we are at a loss for words. We are so mad at ourselves and Ed Winkleman for even suggesting they collaborate. The artists have provided us with the SRWFBWRG press release. It is a mortifying vision of our future. Please don’t be mad at us, we will show really serious art again soon. If only all of our artists were as thoughtful as Michael Waugh and Eric Heist we wouldn’t be in this position. So, for our sake, please come out and support us during this difficult time and just entertain Powhida, he is really fragile right now and we are just trying to be good art dealers.
