The master::::
Month: January 2010
Ian McKeever
Copenhagen Graffiti
Some new stuff from 2010:::::
Artist web::
Pascale Birchler, Saskia Edens & Simon Senn
I rather be a joke than a tragedy”
Sam Moyer: Shape Shifters
Rachel Uffner Gallery is pleased to present a show of new work by Sam Moyer. In the gallery, Moyer will exhibit sculptures that explore the meeting point between the elevated language of abstract form, and familiar, universally accessible materials and processes. Incorporating photography, drawing and painting into her sculptural practice, the artist creates objects that somehow seem both handmade and prefab.
In a series of wall-hung fabric sculptures, Moyer marries the world of mass-produced goods with the sphere of able, home improvement craftsmanship, approaching them both through a subtractive rather than additive art-making process. Purchasing cheap IKEA rag rugs and picking at each to unravel it into a new composition, Moyer then paints them with a black encaustic. This is a practice both organically homespun, paying tribute to handcrafts such as weaving and the “making do” employment of everyday artifacts, and oddly detached, resulting in an object that might initially seem an untouched relic from planet Minimalism. Taken together, these sculptures form a structural grammar – their similarities marking them as a unified language, their subtle differences defining each as its own iteration.
The interest in overlaying the familiar and quotidian over and against high abstract forms continues in Moyer’s floor-based triangular sculpture. The artist’s own black and white photographs are printed and appended to modular plywood constructions, transporting photography and sculpture from their originally savored objecthood into the more tactile, workaday realm of pattern and materiality. This context shifting is also observable in a series of book sculptures. Pocket books – those most personal of artifacts that, at the same time, speak to a much broader cultural framework – are alternately joined together, drawn and painted over, or assembled alongside other found objects. Here, Moyer engages with a sphere that, due to its limitedness, encourages a highly nuanced exploration of her sculptural interests.
Sam Moyer is currently exhibiting her work in “Between Spaces” at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens, through April 5, 2010. She has also exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn, and Max Hans Daniel, Berlin, among other venues. She received her BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, and her MFA from Yale. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
Copenhagen Graffiti: Jem – Skiny
Fresh from 2010::::: Happy New Year:::::::::::::
Conrad Ventur @ ROKEBY
Ventur is recognised for creating complex environments and installations that raise questions regarding time and space, whilst exploring the subject in relation to historical and contemporary technologies. In a recent work This is My Life (Shirley Bassey) Ventur downloads numerous pieces of footage from YouTube of Bassey singing “This Is My Life” throughout stages of her career. The films are concurrently filtered through slowly spinning crystal prisms suspended in front of the projectors to create an immersive environment of multiple moments, offering the viewer a conflated experience of past and present. Other performers that have been the scrutiny of Ventur include Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley; sometimes tragic characters whose subjectivity is fragmented through their fame. Captured on film these historical characters preserve a collective experience of sadness and loss, amalgamating the past with contemporary significance. For his exhibition at ROKEBY Ventur presents brand new work including a new installation using footage of Nina Simone performing “For A While”, a song about a past lover that the singer cannot forget. Commenting upon loss, tragedy, memory and love the work encapsulates the stars potential to make private moments, public, exposing the collective sadness implicit in the lyrics. The Internet from which Ventur selects his footage exists as a collective space that is in constant flux and which disrupts the perception of a continuous flow of time. It is no coincidence that the artist uses technology that offers multiple non-hierarchical temporalities in his installations; immersive environments, which present the viewer with an expanded cinematic narrative that questions our sense of reality, perception of history and the passage of time. In an on-going project, Ventur turns to the history of archival film footage and investigates film-based portraiture through revisiting Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests. Ventur films living Screen Test subjects in the same manner as the originals created some forty years ago. Not necessarily recognizable as the ‘star’s’ that they were in Warhol’s time, these characters point to Ventur’s own perception of fame, notability and contemporary art. Billy Name’s Screen Test will be seen at Rokeby alongside that of Bibbe Hansen. For Ventur the passage of time is magnified and past and present are united in a narrative that connects the two. Conrad Ventur (b. 1977, Seattle) currently lives and works in New York. He received his MFA from Goldsmiths College, London (2008) and has recently exhibited at Forever and Today Inc. New York (2009), The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2009); P.P.O.W, New York (2009); 1/9 Unosunove Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2009); Architecture Annual, Bucharest (2008); Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam (2008); Louis Blouin Institute, London (2008); Invisible-Exports, New York (2008); Ludlow 38, Kunstverein Munchen Goethe Institute, New York (2008); Somerset House, London (2008); and Stockholm Konsthall, Sweden (2008), among other international solo and group exhibitions. In 2004, Ventur launched the contemporary art magazine USELESS.
