OSCAR TUAZON
OSCAR TUAZON / “I’D RATHER BE GONE” /
STANDARD (OSLO) is proud to present its first exhibition of objects and photographic works by Paris-based artist Oscar Tuazon. “I’d Rather Be Gone” continues the artist’s yearlong examination on how personal liberty can be embodied in architecture. Drawing on the early building experiments of the hippy commune Drop City as well as current practices in ‘dwelling portably’, Tuazon’s work questions the conditions for sustainability and self-suffiency.
“When I attended Deep Springs College in the mid-90s, the Greyhound would stop at an intersection in the middle of the desert, 50 miles from the college. You had to wait there until someone drove out to get you, which sometimes took a few hours. The only other thing at that intersection was a whorehouse in a doublewide. (In Nevada, prostitution is legal.) On hot days, the Madame of the house would sometimes invite us inside and offer us a cold drink. The only way in and out of the college is through the whorehouse.” Tuazon’s works and writings continuously return to the ideal of the bare minimum – put forward by the writer Henry David Thoreau in the novel “Walden” (1854) – and thus also return to the question of whether isolation from civil society may gain a more objective understanding of it.
Since graduating from Whitney ISP Tuazon has produced a series of sculptures composed of urban debris: cardboard boxes, wooden pallets, printing plates, OSB boards from building sites, or melanin boards from defunct kitchens – materials gathered from the area of his Paris studio or near the various venues of his exhibitions. In an initial phase these sculptural works would take forms of geodesic domes and draw on such typologies as indigenous building techniques, DIY architecture, as well as a more determined dedication to structural clarity, advocated by the engineer R. Buckminster Fuller. More recently the works have taken on the character of full-scale building prototypes, such as the work “1:1” at the center of the show.
This assemblage of melanin boards and wooden pallets is constructed to serve as a corner of the house Tuazon planning to erect near Portland, Oregon. Approaching the building project through a series of trial products rather than drawings, the exhibition context becomes a chance to test rather than portray this situation. At the same time Tuazon exposes the shortcomings of the works as prototypes, which continuously seem to be balancing between actual functionality and a possible transcendent materiality as sculptures. Tuazon draws attention to the disjuncture of forcing one space (the un-built house) onto another space (the gallery), and underscores the impossibility of really modelling something accurately in the context of an exhibition. Adding to these sculptures are four folded and framed photographs, rendering tableaux of temporary architecture from the woods of Portland. The photographs become a surface for exploring another kind of space, while being folded also modulating the distances within the image, between one space and another.
Oscar Tuazon (b. 1976 in Seattle, Washington) received his education from Cooper Union and the Whitney ISP in New York. His works were earlier this year shown in solo exhibitions at Bodgers and Kludgers, Vancouver and at castillo/corrales, Paris. His recent group exhibitions include “Down By Law”, The Wrong Gallery for the Whitney Biennial, New York; “The Elementary Particles (Paperback Edition)”, STANDARD (OSLO); and “Minotaur Blood” at Jonathan Viner / Fortesque Avenue, London. “Metronome no. 10”, which Tuazon co-edited with Clementine Deliss, will also be included in the Documenta 12 Magazines project.
Upcoming projects:
Matias Faldbakken: “A Hideous Disease / Art Basel 38 / Statements / 11.06.-17.06.2007
Gardar Eide Einarsson: “South of Heaven” / Frankfurter Kunstverein / 27.07.-16.09.2007
Benji Whalen
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I like a lot.
"I’VE BEEN SETTING FIRES ALL DAY"
BRETT WILSON
MICHELLE CORTEZ
SUZANNAH SINCLAIR
“I’VE BEEN SETTING FIRES ALL DAY”
May 25 – July 8, 2007
Opening Reception with the Artists Friday, May 25, 6-9 p.m.
“I’ve Been Setting Fires All Day” shows the work of 3 artists with an intrinsic sensibility that is both vulnerable and sophisticated.
Brett Wilson does what few others dare to do when he takes the craft of painting at face value, making naive oil paintings that use a sharp wit to convey meaning. In “Let’s Do Some Living After We Die” his deceased dog Gilligan is portrayed enjoying himself in the afterlife in a field of raw and beautifully rendered flowers. His self-portrait “Feelin’ Fine” is a depiction of a trip to the afterlife to visit “Gilly”, showing just the top of Wilson’s head peeking up in that same field of flowers. Since life is so fragile it should be taken with the best of humor, Wilson reminds us.
Michelle Cortez’s watercolor and embroideries on thin white fabric resemble old bed sheets, fragile and strong. Domesticity comes to mind as it usually does with sewn works, but in this case she has taken it on the road. These works were all made before, during and after a 6 month bus trip through South America. In Cortez’s simultaneously meticulous and haphazard work you can feel the sweat of her labors and the issues she may have been struggling with along the way. There is a distinct sense that she was working something out by creating these highly personal works.
Suzannah Sinclair paints seductive portraits of young females in different states of repose. Whether in bed, laying in the grass or in other intimate settings, her subjects are always stripped down to their bare elements. Often inspired by 1970’s era Playboy imagery, her muses are mischievous and knowing with a pure innocence and clarity which it seems Sinclair wishes to preserve in her paintings. Often referred to as sad and lonesome, her paintings also show a confident power in their solitude which is presented by Sinclair to us, the audience and voyeur. Created with thin layers of translucent watercolor on birch panel, Sinclair uses the natural wood grain as part of the composition which furthers the sensual quality of her work.
Skylar Haskard
Ben Nason/Pilaiporn Pethrith
Ben Nason
Spare
24. maj – 30. juni 2007
Ben Nason: Untitled 1 from the series “Spare”, 2006, archival ink jet print, 126 x 84 cm.
Pilaiporn Pethrith
SOS#4 (Series of Situations)
24. maj – 30. juni 2007
Pilaiporn Pethrith: Untitled, 2006, print på lærred, 120 x 80 cm.
Gert Robijns
Gert Robijns Olympics
In his works Gert Robijns focuses our attention on simple scientific principles, forms and places. Smallest details may inspire him to his philosophical and poetic contemplations. For example that a blink causes reality to shift to the left or to the right, that images take shape in our brain.
His exhibition Olympics emanates from a similar idea, it developed from reflections on the shape of a circle. Found material is sawed into smaller and larger elements generating positive and negative outlines of a circle. The modest composed cuttings evolve in space to images of a wide range of meanings.
The sculptural installation is completed with a sliding door, which opens and closes in irregular intervals. The structured framework is leaning casually against a wall, leaving only the space behind it open for view. Simultaneously to the rhythmic opening of the structure a bright light switches on in an adjacent part of the exhibition space.
Connotations to gateways, crowds of people, the flurry of camera flashes, and spotlights are in a striking contrast to the quite order of the rest of the installation. The critic Wim Peeters aptly characterizes Gert Robijns approach as being marked „by indication, rather than designation or interpretation.
Herzliche Grüße / best wishes Julia Sökeland, Nasim Weiler
www.artagents.de
Larry Clark at Preus Museum
G a l l e r i s . e
DUNK! / FORMEL 1
DUNK! / FORMEL 1
DUNK! is proud to present new paintings by the upcoming Danish painters Rasmus Lütken and Jakob Rød
Rasmus Lütken is a profound fabulous surrealistic formalistic humorist who keeps a perfect balance between colors and form in some marvelous far-out cartoon like paintings in which every-day-life walks dreamlike on the edge of the abyss.
Jakob Rød is a super conceptual painter who by simple moves creates some of the coolest and breathtaking beautiful paintings on the art scene right now in a style where
Pop is confronted with the purest form of zen.
Opening Reception:
Thursday, may 24, 2007 from 6:00 p.m. –10:00 p.m.
The exhibition is open from Friday, May 25, until Sunday, June 24, by appointment or
every Thursday from 10: a.m. – 3:00 p.m.
DUNK!
Værkstedsvej 6, 2. sal tv.
2500 Valby / København.
Zadok Ben David
Zadok Ben David
Black Field
Black Field, 2007, painted steel, size variable
Exhibition dates: 1st June – 7th July 2007
Hales Gallery is pleased to present Israeli sculptor Zadok Ben David’s first solo show at the gallery.
Ben David is best known for his work using slights of hand and eye, emerging from his obsession with magic tricks. In 1988 he represented Israel at the Venice Biennale, which was the culmination of this early period of single works.
Since this time, Ben David has enjoyed considerable success with his large scale installations; his major work, Evolution and Theory, 1998, has been exhibited at the Museum Beelden aan Zee, Scheveningen, in the Netherlands and the San Francisco Art Institute. This work initiated Ben David’s exploration into the paradoxical position of western scientific discovery which has continued to form a central theme within his practice.
This new work Black Field continues to investigate Ben David’s interest in visual trickery and illusion in relation to a fascination with science as a vehicle for progress. A major installation, it completely permeates the left hand side of the gallery allowing the spectator only one vantage point from which to view this spectacular work. Both witty and playful, the piece seduces its audience by creating a deception, easy to unravel but magnificent in its simplicity.
The installation consists of over 3000 acid etched stainless steel miniatures, cut to resemble illustrations from 18th and 19th century herbal and botanical manuals which Ben David has collected and chosen specifically for this project. Each flowering plant has been given a unified size, painted black and placed upright. Viewed individually, the pieces appear to be both a shadow, and a shadow of a shadow, superimposed against an immaculate white ground. Yet, seen as a whole, as the title indicates, the installation emerges as a ghostly horizon, metaphorically suggesting a burial field, ravaged by plague, pestilence or war.
Zadok Ben David moved to Britain in the 1970s and studied sculpture at St Martin’s School of Art under the tutorage of Anthony Caro, William Tucker and Phillip King. His work first came to prominence as part of the New British Sculpture movement in the early 1980s which reacted against much of the minimal and conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s.
Most recently, Ben David has produced a solo survey show at Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou, China and has completed a series of major outdoor sculptural works including those at the Yad Vashem, Israel and Goodwood Sculpture Park.