Month: February 2010

Banks Violette

violette_248

Gladstone Gallery, in collaboration with Team Gallery, is pleased to announce a new installation by Banks Violette. Violette’s work ranges from haunting yet exquisitely rendered graphite drawings to sculptural installations composed of cast salt, light, and sound. Throughout his practice, he plumbs the simultaneous degradation and accretion of meaning through the process of mythology, often embodied in forms strongly associated with sub-cultural communities, personal memorials, or historical obscurities. The black and white spectacle of his stark compositions belies the uneasy and fraught allusions of appropriated images and forms reconstructed as vessels of oblivion.

For this new installation, Violette continues to mine a rich art historical terrain in which the materials and forms associated with Minimal and Conceptual Art become reactivated as theatrical platforms of performative decay. He pairs a large chandelier composed of multiple fluorescent tubes with a black wall that seems to buckle and melt against the reflection of the light. Both aspects of the installation recall the monochromatic tone and the use of replaceable industrial materials common to Minimalist and Conceptual sculptors such as Donald Judd and Dan Flavin; however, Violette’s works seem self-consciously constructed and theatrical. Wires fall in a cascade alongside the chandelier while the apparatus of steel tubes and sandbags supporting the wall remain in plain sight. By exposing these more banal technical necessities, Violette heightens the artificial spectacle of his installation, as if willing these two canonical art historical movements into an internecine danse macabre. He unmasks form and content as sites vulnerable to intellectual vandalism and moribund mythologizing.

Banks Violette was born in 1973 and lives and works in New York. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including those at Museum Dhont-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium; Kunsthalle Wein; the Modern of Art Museum of Forth Worth, Texas; Kunsthalle Bergen, Norway; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has also participated in group exhibitions at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Royal Academy, London; P.S. 1, New York; the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; among others.

Team Gallery

Gladstone Gallery

DAWN FRASCH

Dawn_Frasch_1

HAAS & FISCHER is pleased to present the international premier solo show of American artist Dawn
Frasch (*1978, lives and works New York).

With the 18 paintings that are displayed in Zurich, Frasch invites the beholder into her cabinet of
sexual horror. Her works reflect the excessive confrontation with sexuality in contemporary society
that has become inevitable due to its constant presence in the Internet and media. This is true to
such an extent, that is has become a part of the everyday routine just like the daily mouse click. It is
not just the cadence of images that we are exposed to, but also the form of representation in
pornography, which have moved towards detailed, exaggerated close-ups. In this iconography of
sexual horror the boundaries between sexuality and violence seem to be diminishing.

With the painterly qualities of her work, Frasch punctuates the clash of the visual media. Some parts
of her paintings are structured by generous brush strokes while with others its seems like the focus
has been sharpened, and out of the cloudy constructs emerge delicately worked scenes with actors
that belong to a child’s book rather than to a pornographic magazine. She lets Sesame Street meet
the multimillion porn Industry.

In the work Dog Eat Dog Frasch depicts a pack of dogs that attack each other. The wild dogs that
are associated with wolfs can be read as the epitome of vice and in that way once again fit the
theme of sexual horror. The frontier between violent appropriation and lust seems to have vanished.

Influenced by feminist video and performance artists like Joan Jonas or Vivienne Dick, the artist
herself is familiar with those media. Their procedures are mirrored in her paintings, where some of
them appear to be like film stills where densely filled clusters have to balance with vague and fuzzy
areas.

Haas &  Fischer

Dawn Frasch

Josh Azzarella

azzarella-86_1

DCKT Contemporary is pleased to present new photographs by JOSH AZZARELLA. AZZARELLA manipulates images from cinema, journalism and amateur photography. His photographs muddy the waters between the artificial beauty of a cinematic set and the inherent beauty of the natural landscape. Absent their most significant events, AZZARELLA’s images raise questions about how our society constructs a narrative of our collective history.

The emptying of the photographs presents each scene in its formal beauty but leaves a ghost of its narrative past. The viewer is tempted to draw relational lines between individual photographs and to decipher patterns and groupings, taking cues from color and film grain. Movie stills, homemade images and documentary footage mix together, as in our collective memory. How individual and collective memories form, the possibilities of confusing memories with realities or creating memories where none previously existed are all key to his oeuvre.

In one photograph vines drape across branches, hearkening documentary photographs of the Vietnam War although its true source is the B movie classic Creature from the Black Lagoon. Emptied seascapes recall the stillness of Hiroshi Sugimoto photographs. The backs of two men on an Elvis Presley film set evoke 1960s family photographs, perhaps of a picnic.

AZZARELLA lives and works in New York City. Solo and group exhibitions include Mark Moore Gallery (Santa Monica, CA); Vancouver Art Gallery (British Columbia); Kavi Gupta Gallery (Chicago); Akademie der Künste (Berlin). He was the recipient of the 2006 Emerging Artist Award and a solo exhibition from The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT). His work is included in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This is his third solo exhibition with DCKT Contemporary.

DCKT Contemporary

Bob and Roberta Smith

dig_demolish_destroy,_signwriters_paint_on_board,_78_x_70_cm

This is a British election year and London based artists Bob and Roberta Smith want to be involved and are keen to have their say!

Bob and Roberta Smith’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, provides them with the perfect platform to get YOU involved. During the course of the show Bob and Roberta Smith are inviting everyone to an event held each Saturday during March at Hales Gallery. They are offering the opportunity to be part of a mass letter writing to politicians on a wide range of subjects as diverse as:
Was it right for the Mayor’s office to cut funding for the anti-racism festival RISE
What is Hilary Benn doing to protect the environment post-Copenhagen?
And asking Ed Vaizey (the Conservative shadow Minister for Culture) why anyone involved in the arts would vote Conservative given their views over the funding of The Arts Council?

Where art movements like the Fluxus or art schools were once the bastions of left-wing thinking and direct political engagement, there now seems to be a mood of indifference. The Smiths are in part nostalgic for the past and on the other hand realistic about what an artist’s involvement with politics can achieve. They have created a show that delves into the current apathy surrounding politics of the ‘middle-ground’ and the elaborate channels that politicians have created to ‘try and get things done’. With their familiar language of signs and placards they attack scepticism in favour of a bright new world where campaigning can change the cultural, natural and creative landscape. With this exhibition, Bob and Roberta Smith are attempting to herald in a new era of political activity.

This is not the first time that the Smiths have used the democratic process and popular politics as subject matter, in fact the artists have returned to it many times. Pictured in their book Make Your Own Damn Art, is a small badge made by a youthful Bob Smith. The year was 1979 and Britain was on the brink of the Thatcher era. The text reads, Tories help the Rich, Labour helps the Rest. It was not meant as an artwork but reflected a common art school sentiment of the time. In an installation entitled The Government at Cell Projects, London (2003) Bob and Roberta Smith played with national disappointment as the first cracks in New Labour’s shiny exterior became visible with a selection of bluntly worded signs poking fun at the then Cabinet. In 2004, as part of a public art project, Bob Smith stood for Mayor of Folkestone, Kent, asking people to Vote Bob Smith for more Art. More recently during Altermodern (curated by Nicolas Bourriaud in 2009) at Tate Britain the Smiths presented a series of signs reflecting the optimism of the first black President of America alongside heaps of street debris.

What all of these projects share is a distrust of a fallible political process alongside a deep-seated belief that against all of the odds, things could get better…….(if only by accident!)

Bob and Roberta Smith live and work in London. Their work is currently being shown as part of Niet Normaal at the Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam and their solo show This Artist is Deeply Dangerous at Beaconsfield, London runs until 21st Feb 2010. Bob and Roberta Smith are also artists in residence at the New Art Gallery Walsall working with the Epstein archive resulting in a major exhibition The Life of the Mind at the museum in 2011. Bob Smith is currently a Trustee of the Tate. The show also includes three new sculptures that have been made in collaboration with Tim Fidall who recently worked with Bob and Roberta Smith on their 2008 Tate Christmas tree.

Hales Gallery

Annie Kevans

8b99ce1a

Perry Rubenstein Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Annie Kevans at 527 West 23rd Street. The exhibition will be comprised of some 30 new works, all painted within the past year.

The title of the exhibition is Manumission, a term with a complex history. Manumission refers specifically to a slave owner’s ability or discretion to free a slave. That power, in the hands of the men that wielded it, is the same power exercised by the philanderer in the choosing and the dismissal of his mistress.

The paintings in this exhibition are all portraits; most depict the illegitimate children of various Presidents of the United States, others their mistresses. Many of these figures, such as Sally Hemings and Grace Kelly, are well known. Others are considerably less so, and even less so are their children. Through this series of portraits, Kevans explores the representation of power, the lack thereof, and its manipulation in the hands of those who posses it. Having an affinity for the marginalized, Kevans paints figures overlooked, exploited, or objectified within the context of history or contemporary culture, imbuing her subjects with a tangible humanity and sensuality.

Kevans’ wide-eyed rendition of William Beverly Hemings conveys an innocence that arrests its viewer, yet exposes dark themes that belie its surface. William, the son of Sally Hemings, is believed to have been fathered by Thomas Jefferson. With William’s startled and seemingly innocuous gaze, Kevans alludes to the injustice and hypocrisy perpetrated by one of the most revered figures in American History.

Kevans looks to historical texts, illustrations, or photographs for source material, when possible. Yet as is often the case with figures that have been all but forgotten or perhaps deliberately omitted from history, she visualizes characters by borrowing features from life models. In effect, lending a face to the faceless and casting light on issues that are uncomfortable and thus ignored.

Implementing loose brushwork and layers of translucent oil paint, Kevans paints her subjects in a manner so elegant and subtle that she allows the character of both the medium and the subject to speak for themselves. Given their rich individual histories, the manifestations of these characters are as incredible as the feat of their rendering.

The exhibition of Annie Kevans’ paintings opens one day before the celebration of Presidents’ Day Weekend, February 11th, 2010.

British artist Annie Kevans was born in Cannes, France, and lives and works in London. Past solo exhibitions include Vamps and Innocents, Galleria Antonio Ferrara, Vienna (2007); Swans, 319 Portobello Road, London (2007); and Girls, Studio 1.1, London. Kevans’ work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, notably at the Galerie Karin Sachs, Munich (2008, 2007); Galleria Antonio Ferrara, Italy (2007, 2006); Contemporary Art Projects, London (2007) and will be included in the much-anticipated Power of Paper at Saatchi Gallery, London (Dates TBA). Kevans was a finalist for both the Jerwood Drawing Prize (2006) and Women Of The Future award (2007) in the United Kingdom.

Perry Rubenstein

William Leavitt

PLD cover sm

The Jancar Jones Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibit of the work of Los Angeles-based artist William Leavitt titled A Show of Cards.

The show will include over 300 ink drawings on index cards. These cards function, for Leavitt, as a bank from which individual images were selected at random to generate a narrative.  Subsequently they are incorporated into the text for Leavitt’s play “Pyramid Lens Delta”, thus titled by the first three sequential cards.  The script for the play will also be on view.

Leavitt has used similar chance processes to compose elements of the script for the theater piece “The Radio” (2002) and in his photo series “Random Selection” (1969), in which he photographed arrangements of arbitrarily selected objects together.  A collection of these photographs was included in the final issue of Landslide, a satirical art journal published by Leavitt and artist Bas Jan Ader in 1969/70.

William Leavitt received his MFA from Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, CA in 1967. He has been working and exhibiting in Los Angeles since the early 1970s. Recent exhibitions include Molecules and Buildings at the Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles.  An exhibit of three new prints opens at Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles on February 6, 2010.  In November 2010, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles will open Leavitt’s first solo museum exhibition and retrospective.

Jancar Jones