Month: January 2010

‘Hope Springs Internal’

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We are happy to present ‘Hope Springs Internal’ – the first one person show at POVevolving Gallery by artist John Casey. The show will feature a collection of new pen and ink drawings and a large scale installation.

John Casey is obsessed with fictitious human morphology, which he explores in his ink drawings and small sculptures. At first glance, his works seem to portray a menagerie of deformed creatures. A collective analysis reveals this array of oddball creations to be a series of psychological studies — self-portraits of the artist’s inner psyche in all of its multifaceted incarnations. Some sad, some horrific, and some whimsical, these characters evoke responses from laughter and sympathy to disgust and discomfort. While one might call Casey’s work the exorcising of inner demons, his creations inspire more empathy than they do loathing. By depicting the grotesque as pitiable, John Casey illuminates the darkest corners of the mind, seeking redemption for all of us.

In the project room of the gallery, we are very happy to present ‘Odd Populi’ – A collection of works by a small group of artists carefully selected by John Casey to accompany him in his debut at POV. Artists include Martha Sue Harris, Bill Dunlap, Kerri Lee Johnson, Billy Sprague, and Mike Lay.

POVevolving Gallery

Lizabeth Eva Rossof @ Charlie James Gallery

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Charlie James Gallery is pleased to announce the gallery’s first solo show of Bay Area conceptualist Lizabeth Eva Rossof.  In “Hey, China!” Lizabeth will exhibit paintings and sculptures commissioned and fabricated by workers in the People’s Republic of China.  Uniting all of the paintings in the show is the politically sensitive subject matter depicted throughout.  There are images from the Tiananmen Square massacre (otherwise known in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the “June 4th Incident”)), images concerning Tibetan liberation, the Falun Gong spiritual movement, as well as images culled from pornographic websites blocked in the PRC.  In point of fact, every painting in the show is of content deemed illegal in the PRC, with the source images taken from websites currently blocked in the PRC, made by workers in the PRC.

Another thread in the show is American media’s global influence, and the PRC’s industry of counterfeiting the copyrighted properties held by American media.  Lizabeth playfully delivers these concerns through the presentation of a revised Terra Cotta Army consisting of 50 eighteen-inch soldiers on a riser in the center of the gallery space.  The soldiers are quite authentic in their composition and detail, and they take five discrete poses: Kneeling Warrior, Warrior Priest, and three Infantry poses.  Distinct from the warriors of the First Emperor of Qin, discovered in 1974 by farmers in Xi’an, China, the members of Lizabeth’s Army have had their heads replaced with those of notable figures from American popular culture.  A Warrior Priest may have the head of a Disney character or of a mascot from a fast food chain.  The heads of recognizable figures from television shows, comic books and films complete the ensemble.

The engagement of Chinese artisans in the creation of these paintings and sculptures adds a performative element to the show.  These “Master Painters” in China dutifully reproduced every image Lizabeth sent to them, despite very real legal risks, which prohibit the mention of the painting firm by name in this release.  Subsequent to the painting and sculptural fabrication, which Lizabeth supervised via Skype from her home in San Francisco, the paintings had to be effectively smuggled out of the country.  The unstretched canvases were carefully packaged amongst reproductions of famous paintings arranged carefully to be the first images seen if the package was opened in Chinese customs, which it was.

This extra-legal aspect serves as a conceptual flourish that unites all of the works in the show. The daring ruse that brought them into being expands their definition as art objects and elevates their commentary on the PRC.

Lizabeth Eva Rossof’s  (b 1973, USA) work examines the distribution of personal, political, economic, and sexual power and freedom in the digital age. Her artworks are experiments; they are projects and investigations. Lizabeth has been the recipient of many prestigious academic awards including the Thomas J. Watson Award and the Jacob K. Javits Award, as well as several artist honors including The San Francisco Art Commission’s Murphy Award, C5’s Gran Prix at ISEA 2006.  Lizabeth exhibited in Takashi Murakami’s GEISAI Miami.   She has completed residencies at Montalvo Center for the Arts and Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and has been awarded residencies at Cite International de Paris and CAMAC: Centre des Artes Marnay in France. Lizabeth’s artwork has been exhibited in Berlin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Miami, New York, Oaxaca, Osaka, Aspen, and at the National Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow.

Charlie James Gallery

Leopards in the Temple @ SculptureCenter

Leopards in the Temple

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Lothar Baumgarten, Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, Nina Canell, Latifa Echakhch, Aleana Egan, Patrick Hill, Nina Hoffmann, Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder (DAS INSTITUT), Lucas Knipscher, Kitty Kraus, João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, Lucy Skaer, Kathrin Sonntag. Curated by Fionn Meade
Leopards in the Temple is a parable by Franz Kafka that reads as follows:

“Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.”

The group exhibition of the same name focuses on moments of metamorphosis, paradox, and formal adjacency, borrowing from the parable an ability to promote multiple readings of succinct forms and extraordinary occurrences. Protean moments where materials elide, transform, and overlay take place in the work of Lothar Baumgarten, Nina Canell, Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, and Kitty Kraus, while the rules of image production are triangulated and problematized in the painting configurations of Patrick Hill, Lucas Knipscher, and Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder’s DAS INSTITUT. Kathrin Sonntag and Nina Hoffmann (working in collaboration) and the collaborative duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva present slide and film projections that explore the uncanny through acts of magnetism, doubling, and transference. And sculpture is framed and distributed as an effaced and often fictional artifact in the work of Latifa Echakhch, Aleana Egan, and Lucy Skaer. Gathering together an international group of artists, the works in this exhibition share an extra-linguistic interest in moments of translation and a resistance to fixed forms.

SculptureCenter

Stanley Whitney @ Team Gallery

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Team is pleased to present a show of new paintings by Stanley Whitney.
Like a correspondent in the standardized Western mode, Stanley Whitney approaches the blank page of the canvas and begins to write his sentences, word by word, from the top left corner, concluding at the bottom right. His words, blocks of vibrant color, are laid side by side – individual utterances, following one upon the other, creating full thoughts; saturated statements of luminosity. The artist’s process continues until the paintings are so loaded that they threaten to explode. In his view, the paintings succeed when, despite their scale, they become so crowded that it appears as though a single wall could not contain them.

These paintings are as much written as they are constructed, moving the viewer’s eye across the paintings – laterally first, vertically second – never allowing that eye to rest in one place for too long. In these paintings, colors are not only butted up against each other – at one moment seemingly contained by the horizontal bands, at other times careening off the edges of the canvas – colors also lurk behind colors, sometimes bleeding into each other.

Whitney’s work presents real, tangible, visible relationships – of the brush to the canvas, of the artist to his labor, of the artist to a world-view, and of the artist to the visual sign of his authorship; nothing is occluded, everything is out there. The paintings are what they are but their potent impact, their sensuousness, their attractiveness, remains nevertheless mysterious. It is possible that Whitney’s greatest accomplishment – and he pulls it off in every painting – is that these effortless paintings posses such severe conviction. In Whitney’s work, daily labor becomes something akin to spiritual practice.

The modules of painted color can be seen either as paintings within the paintings or as building blocks used in the construction of the picture’s façade. Once the idea of an architectonic reading is placed in the mind of the viewer, it seems impossible afterward to ignore it. Windows, piled on top of windows, create ramshackle tenements of light.

Whitney has been exhibiting his work since 1970. In those forty years he has never wavered from his intense commitment to a rigorous and reduced manifesto of abstraction with limitless possibilities. Both minimal and expressive, dryly conceptual and jazzed-up, Whitney’s pictures house equal parts intelligence, history, and reckless abandon.

Team Gallery

No Vacancy” @ The Butcher’s Daughter “No Vacancy”

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The Butcher’s Daughter is proud to present “No Vacancy” curated by Valaire Van Slyck. Opening January 9, 2010, this group exhibition features over twenty world-renown emergent and mid-career contemporary artists from around the country.

From the curatorial statement by Valaire Van Slyck,
“The exhibition “No Vacancy” explores the impulse that gives rise to art and artists’ attempts to reconcile their dissatisfaction with the world around them. The results of these efforts physically change the world, reordering it and creating points of dynamism in the environment. These points, infused with ideas and attitude, lead to a deeper consideration of thought and experience.

By bringing together many artists in a small gallery, we create a whole greater than the sum of its parts and establish a space of hyper-dynamism, a community with a multitude of perspectives. In turn, this show offers alternatives to the prevailing modes of relating to the world around us – a cacophony of possibility and hope. There is no vacancy in art.”

Featured artists include Michael Anderson, Sam Bassett, Michael Bevilacqua, Erik den Breejen, Brock Enright, Jack Featherly, Jonah Freeman, Kate Gilmore, Andrew Guenther, Kent Henricksen, Sissel Kardel, Nicola Kuperus, Justin Lowe, Shannon Lucy, Guy Overfelt, Tyson Reeder, Zak Smith, Michael St. John, Johannes Vanderbeek, Wendy White and Sherry Wong.

These artists are represented in museum collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, and Whitney Museum of American Art. International and national exhibitions include those at PS1/MOMA and The Sculpture Center as well as numerous independent galleries and project spaces worldwide. Other credits include editorial photography for magazines, international biennials and Time Square billboards for major multi-national corporations.
The goals of this exhibition as designed by The Butcher’s Daughter is to further expand the mission of the gallery and create an opportunity for participants to network with artists, collectors, and creative professionals. To help facilitate this an after party will follow the opening reception. Admittance is limited. Additional details will forthcoming or contact the gallery to reserve your place.

The Butcher’s Daughter is dedicated to creating innovative, cultural context for contemporary art through the representation of emerging and mid-career artists and the sale of their work.

The Butchers Daughter Gallery