Simone Leigh
Page 1 | 2 | 3 | Biography | Information & News
|
Art in Review ‘Else’ Published: September 24, 2010
8 East 76th Street
Manhattan
Through Oct. 23
Although this stimulatingly textured group show credits the dealer Jack Tilton and the artist Derrick Adams as curators, it was Mr. Adams who made 80 percent of the choices, and they’re good, with a bunch of newish artists and some familiar figures brought in for a further look.
Several pieces by Noel Anderson, recently graduated from Yale, apparently relate to his performance work, but do fine on their own, from an intensively erased and in other ways hand-altered Ebony magazine cover, to a machine-made tapestry portrait combining the features of John F. Kennedy, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and, possibly, the Rev. Al Sharpton.
Yashua Klos, remembered for an intriguing word-piece at Scaramouche on the Lower East Side last summer, makes a strong, different impression here with an unframed, mural-size collage, assembled from woodblock prints, of a man’s bearded face. David Antonio Cruz’s paintings of a nude exploding from clouds of color are on roughly the same scale, as are Diane Wah’s scroll-like photo pieces. With near life-size figures sleeping on nests of broken stones, they bring performance again to mind.
There’s also a helping of small-scale photographic work. Carlos Rigau has two outtakes from a longer photo-narrative, “7 Gables.” From Felandus Thames, last seen at Kravets Wehby in Chelsea, come two lips-only photomontages so visually overloaded they’re almost abstract. Jaret Vadera, also from Yale, mixes a photographic print, a light-box image and a small sculpture in a spare arrangement that hints, but only hints, at a story.
Adler Guerrier made a memorable contribution to the 2008 Whitney Biennial with an installation supposedly by a 1960s African-American collective, but really by Mr. Guerrier himself. At Tilton, he’s showing a couple of subtle, image-concealing transfer prints and two toy-size hutlike sculptures made from cut-up commercial signage. In his seemingly effortless melding of language and image, he’s a poet as much as an artist.
So is Simone Leigh in sculptures that seem to pose metaphors without narrowly defining them. In “Head Piece (Black),” an all but featureless gun-metal-gray bust blossoms into an Afro of white and black ceramic roses. “Brooch (Black),” bristling with ceramic bananas held in place by steel clamps, looks like a cross between a giant flower and a thresher.
And I’m glad to meet three artists new to me.
Langdon Graves, from Virginia, now in Brooklyn, has a pair of elegant, understated drawings here and a spooky, surrealist sculpture. Arjan Zazueta puts unusually low-tech craft mediums — thread and paper towels — to complicated uses in embroidered vignettes based on Western art history and Aztec myth.
That leaves only two last pieces to be accounted for, both fine-lined portraits in ink, acrylic and tea by the young Los Angeles artist Umar Rashid, who also uses the moniker Frohawk Two Feathers, and performs as Kent Cyclone. All I can say at first acquaintance is that the portraits, of fictional
| 30 Seconds off an Inch at The Studio Museum In Harlem
November 12, 2009–March 13, 2010
The Studio Museum in Harlem will open the fall/winter season with a major exhibition entitled 30 Seconds off an Inch. This survey will bring together contemporary artworks by a group of artists who, having absorbed the lessons of U.S.-based Conceptual art and identity politics, imbue their respective practices with a critical sense of play and irreverence adopted from Fluxus, Arte Povera, Gutai and Neoconcretism, among other international movements. 30 Seconds takes the singular practices and conceptual methods of black artists active on the West Coast in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a starting point—work that inspired a bodily engagement in conceptual practice.
Presenting approximately one hundred works by dozens of artists, the exhibition will provide an overview of a generation of artists who use a variety of media, including photography, video, large-scale sculpture, figurative painting and site-specific installations. 30 Seconds aims to show how this group of artists engages with the body and race in clever, subtle and astute ways.
30 Seconds off an Inch has been generously supported by a grant from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust and with additional support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
|
|
In Practice Summer 2009
MICHAEL ASHKIN, MICHAEL BLUM, DAVID DIXON, SIMONE LEIGH, CINDY LOEHR, VIRGINIA OVERTON
SculptureCenter is proud to present new works by Michael Ashkin, Michael Blum, David Dixon, Simone Leigh, Cindy Loehr, and Virginia Overton in the twelfth installment of In Practice. The exhibition will be on view May 10-August 3, 2009 with an opening reception on Sunday, May 10 from 5-7pm.
Michael Ashkin: Untitled (where each new sunrise promises only the continuation of yesterday), [an abridged title, the first of twenty-one lines], 2009
Michael Ashkin's project consists of a miniaturized model of a fictional urban agglomeration at a scale of 1:128. Built entirely of found cardboard, stretching the length of the central basement tunnel at SculptureCenter the piece emulates a stretch that would extend for two miles and can be only be observed from one point of view situated well beyond its area of maximum density. The model is based on an architectural/urban typology increasingly found on the outskirts of many cities as a result of rapid urbanization. Though it reflects no actual location, various specifics have been pulled from a wide selection of photographs and global satellite imagery.
Michael Blum: Psychics VIII : Debra Huelsebusch & Marion Hedger / The Sculpture Center, 44-19 Purves Street, LIC, NY 11101, 2009
Michael Blum's project invites two psychics to amble and react to the upper and lower level of SculptureCenter's gallery spaces. The two women communicate their experience and impression of the space as they freely walk through it in the presence of a camera. The unedited video is part of a series of psychic readings of spaces, first realized in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2007. The project was conceived as an attempt at connecting with the past of domestic or exhibition spaces outside the limitations of rational discourse.
David Dixon: The Ancient Art of Rock Stacking, 2006/2009
David Dixon's stack of Styrofoam rocks was used as a prop in two separate films, once as a miraculous occurrence, and in the other as an occurrence of bad sculpture. To the artist, "art requires the expression of difference, choice, or originality. Rock stacking does not try to do this, it only delimits natural forces: gravity, friction etc. There is the choice to stack one rock on top of another, but there is nothing original in this, [it has] been done before, for centuries. It could be argued that rock stacking is the original, and best, expression of the modernist notion of truth to materials, yet, here, in Styrofoam, deceit has been employed to go beyond the material." Dixon is also interested in how the stack can acquire different meanings within different contexts, undermining its existence as a stand-alone object.
Cindy Loehr: The Advisor, 2009
The Advisor says, "the revelation we're ready for is the revelation we'll get." The Advisor's ghost-like figure is inspired by a cut out pattern from an old paper project book. Though larger-than-life, it is unassuming in its construction: simple pattern pieces held together by nuts and bolts. Between decoy and protagonist, the humorous figure of the Advisor delivers philosophy and idiosyncratic ruminations, on life, death and hope. Combining prosaic descriptions of life in the city with aphoristic existential advice, small books of the speech are available for visitors to take home.
Simone Leigh: The Gods Must be Crazy, 2009
Simone Leigh's new video work departing from the opening sequence of the film The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980) presents conflicting narratives concerning authorship, labor, and recent artifacts. Leigh uses the anthropological term skeuomorph as a central concept to her exhibition, describing a derivative object that retains some sort of physical or metaphorical elements of the original, a substitute used to ease a sense of loss. Leigh's installation also includes a video portrait of Zira, the heroine of Planet of the Apes, a surrogate for a woman with an unclear racial identity. The objects and videos in Leigh's installation investigate the ethnographic object, the black body and feminisms.
Virginia Overton: Untitled, 2009
Virginia Overton's sculptures use material such as beams, pallets squished between walls with shims, and large sonotubes. Overton prefers to highlight what she calls "unskilled skills" - like driving a truck and stacking chairs or pallets. Often delicately levitating, the lightness of the works contrasts with the sturdy materials, rough edges, and spills involved in the process of making them.
|
|
|
