LABORATORY

 

29 July - 30 August 2009

Opening Party Tuesday 28 July 6.30-8.30 & Closing Party Thursday 27 August 6.30 - 8.30 pm

Evening events Monday 10 & 17 August 6-8pm

A one month period of art production and experimentation on site at the Jerwood Space Gallery exploring the processes involved in making, curating and exhibiting art.

 

Curator Sarah Williams, writer Pryle Behrman and photographer Paul Winch-Furness will be on site throughout the exhibition documenting developments and uploading them to the Laboratory Blog.

 

Kathleen Soriano, Director of Exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts, will conduct conversations with the curator and artists during the exhibition.

 

Design team The Partners will use the blog to create a catalogue in real time in the gallery.

 

For the latest updates on developments please visit the Laboratory Blog

 

Jerwood Visual Arts was intrigued to know how the exhibition programme at Jerwood Space could be developed to help emerging artists in a relevant and exciting way at a crucial stage in their careers. We asked three emerging artists the question: if we were to hand over one of three of the galleries at Jerwood Space for one month, what would you do with it? The three selected artists, Steven Eastwood, Jock Mooney and Mia Taylor, each proposed to use the galleries as a site for experimentation. The resulting exhibition will attempt to explore the process and discourse surrounding art and exhibition production. The gallery will be a testing ground for new works and a chance to work on larger-scale pieces as the artists temporarily relocate their studios to the gallery space. Steven Eastwood will show some of his films whilst working on a new one, experimenting with formats for a planned feature length film/video intended for dual projection in the gallery. Jock Mooney will make a drawing installation and expand his series of hand-painted, glossy sculptures. Mia Taylor will open up her practice to the 'fabric' of the project, using the art, texts, and materials found in and around the site. She will respond to the interactions between the artists, contributors, visitors and other users of Jerwood Space, using a series of screens which will act as a mobile studio space. And, given that this is a Laboratory, all of the above may change...

Visitors to Jerwood Space will not only be able to see the artists at work, but also examine how the decisions of curation, design and promotion for 'Laboratory' were made - vital parts of the exhibition process that are normally hidden from view. At the opening party visitors can expect to see the gallery ready for artists to begin their month of working, and by the closing party a development of work charting the one month period. The exhibition catalogue will document the decision-making of curators, writers and designers in the lead-up to the exhibition and how the resulting decisions change in response to what the artists choose to create. Each day, text by Pryle Behrman will be added to the catalogue, while also documenting the development of a piece of critical writing for the exhibition catalogue. Like the artists' work in the 'Laboratory', this text will not only show the final work but also the false starts, dead ends and changes of mind which mark the creative process. The exhibition catalogue will be printed on site, with new pages added each day, and will also be viewable online. A limited edition of the catalogue will be available to purchase at the end of the exhibition.

 

Laboratory forms part of the Jerwood Visual Arts series. Launched by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation in 2006, Jerwood Visual Arts is a series of awards, prizes and exhibitions that celebrate a range of disciplines across the visual arts, including painting, drawing, sculpture, applied arts, photography and moving image. In addition to Jerwood Visual Arts, the Jerwood Charitable Foundation also works with artists and organisations across the performing arts, music, literature and film, with a focus on supporting emerging practitioners..

Jerwood Space
171 Union Street
London SE1 OLN
+ 44 (0) 20 7654 0171

 

 

 

 

 

 

10 July to 29 Aug 2009

Galerie Michael Janssen is pleased to announce the group show "Borderline Pleasure" curated by Lukas and Sebastian Baden.

We have chosen the title "Borderline Pleasure", which has as its central theme the limits of what pleases the gaze. On view will be works whose imagery either depict the naughty, cruel, disordered or dirty or stages these negative ends of the pleasure spectrum in a technical way.

Either way, the resulting works embrace an aesthetization that easily tends to cynism - sort of anticipating the hangover after the eye-candy-overdose. Borrowing from the connotations on both sides of the term, "Borderline Pleasure" diagnoses society as generally suffering from both social distortion and mental instability, but very masochistically taking pleasure in reflecting itself in that stage. In the Freudian explanation, the compulsion to repeat imagery that conjures up traumatic events or at least borders at the very unpleasant, is the signature of the death drive that goes beyond the pleasure principle. Howerer, this exhibition does not aim to illustrate trite academic iterations or dismiss society merely as a clinical case. The works on display rather raise the issue of aesthetic relief by putting the spectator in an undecided situation between self-enjoyment or agony of perception and comprehension.

The show will be devided in three chapters: Part one will be more on the playful, humorous side, with punch lines that might leave the viewer self-conscious of his own amusement. Part two will dig into the abyss of mental enjoyment and feature works that embrace the morbid, uncanny and blatantly violent, stopping short of graphic embarrassment through their expressive, blurry and ironic happily-colorful style. Part three will serve as sober intermezzo with luring optical effects and the ambiguous pleasure of presumably pure formalistic interventions. Chapter four will comprise two video installations that deal with the contradictory self-image of man, lyrically assuming the "borderline"-paradigm and turning it onto the pleasure of visual narrative.

The artists in the show have backgrounds as heterogeneous as the media that they work in. They are united though their message, attitude and style, which this exhibition aims to bring to the fore. Most of the participating artists have more or less fast ties to FGS gallery in Karlsruhe where their work was featured in solo or group exhibitions. A few artists have been invited to participate that have not yet shown in either gallery, FGS in Karlsruhe and Janssen in Berlin.

We hope that you can follow our borderline of pleasure. Please enjoy responsibly.

Lukas and Sebastian Baden

 

 

Galerie Michael Janssen Berlin
Rudi-Dutschke-Straße 26
( formerly Kochstrasse 60 )
D-10969 Berlin
+49 30 2592725-0

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3 July to 29 Aug 2009

With the exhibition "shiny dark clouds" the gallery presents the work of two young artists:

Christiane Feser (* 1977) and Barbara Hlali (* 1979).

Christiane Feser shows large, abstract and classic-looking black and white photographs whereas Barbara Hlali a wall installation with expressive and figurative drawings, coloured animated films and experimental videos. Despite the diversity of the works, associative connections between both of the artists can be seen, either in the choice of the motifs as well as in their technical approach.. These allow for an exciting interaction between the various pieces in the exhibition.

In the works of both artists the motif of the bird appears. While in Christiane Feser's images low perspectives of pigeons' swarms are captured into summarized abstract shapes, in Barbara Hlali's drawings these turn into flapping and falling birds. Both artists use symbolic motifs: the dove as a peace symbol or the embodiment of the Holy Spirit, birds as messengers between this life and the Hereafter, as a symbol of the human soul, or as an announcement of misfortune and death.

The associations of impermanence and death, this life and the Hereafter are evoked by the two artists in a couple of other ways.. Feser and Hlali deal with folding paper. Two thoughts come into the viewer's mind: on the one hand, from something very simple like a plain sheet of paper something of value is created, on the other hand through the crush of the paper an aspect of devaluation is achieved. Christiane Feser uses as the Folds as "prototype". They are the easiest way to produce a three-dimensional shape from any surface. Moreover, the folds of paper work with the basic conditions of photography: light, shadow and paper. The artist arranges its surreal look-like wrinkles in digital images from an archive with thousands of photographs.

In her video "Busayyah", Barbara Hlali deals with the finding of a Kurdish mass grave near the desert city Busayyah. On the TV screen, the simple action of folding the paper in combination with drawings turns into a silent picture of the cruel and incomprehensible, only to illustrate the idea of impermanence and death.

Finally, associative connections between the works of Feser and Hlali can also be found in the way they work, in a certain condensation of individual parts in order to create entire new structures. In Christiane Feser's pieces this takes place on an abstract level. She adds individual digital photographs to produce "all over" structures - as in the Fold images. The pigeon swarms are, on their turn, captured in a way that the individual animals merge into independent forms on their own. Hlali also investigates into this aspect but in a political context. In her video "Revolution Contra Revolution" a mass of people turns into a coloured print of a single figure on the wall. Here as in the series of small drawings, the blurring of individual opinions within large political movements and their reversal against the individual becomes the main issue.

Both artists have found a new use for the media they handle. Here, analog, haptic media are combined with digital media. Images are re-worked, real photographs deconstructed and reconnected in a way in which media questions reality and reality is the result of a reconstruction process.
In Hlali`s pieces this takes place by working directly with the classic materials of artistic brushstrokes and color on the screen. In this way the documentary media material is covered, however, certain aspects such as the effects of armed conflict are pointed out and critically made visible. For a long time, Feser has been dealing with the changes in the meaning of photography under the digital conditions. The works on display combine both sculptural, photographic and graphic ways of working.

 

 

 

Galerie Anita Beckers
Frankenallee 74
60327 Frankfurt
Germany
+49 69 739 009 - 67

 

 

 

 

 

July 1 - August 7, 2009

Originally this show was supposed to be about a moving truck going cross-country packed with art from Los Angeles. We'd invite a bunch of artists to contribute something and drive a truck around collecting pieces. When it was full, we'd drive eastward, show up in New York and put something together. This is basically what happened, minus the U-haul. "Tables and Chairs" brings together nine LA-based artists paired with selected works by Alice Hutchins. This show grew from associations in artworks that share an interest in abstraction, geometry, interaction, and dissolution.

Studios were visited and pieces were accumulated, withdrawn and incorporated back in again. Some works had been in our minds for a long time, a few offered from their resting places in studio corners. Perhaps this specific collection came about because of the camaraderie that is present when artists act as curators. As fellow artists, we enter into the studio with an understanding that it is also a place the artist lives. The works are (and are not) what they appear to be; straightforward yet slippery, a bit off kilter. Material directness and a sense of experimentation leads us paradoxically into interior spaces.. Each feels to be on the edge of falling apart, covering itself up, or disappearing altogether. These pieces are not quiet. They hide loudly and aggressively, like rainbow camouflage. "Tables and Chairs," the exhibition, feels awkward and private - a little too close to home.

In the front room is a selection of sculptures by Alice Hutchins. Spanning 40 years, Hutchins' magnetic works foster a certain intimacy and interaction. They can be rearranged into infinite variations and Hutchins, who lives among her works, is constantly shifting them. As written by Merrily Peebles, "An American based in Paris between 1950 and 1980, Hutchins began her artistic career as a painter at the age of 40. Critical to her artistic development was her inclusion in a group of avant-garde artists, musicians, and poets in Paris in the 1960s and her involvement in the Fluxus movement in New York City.. In 1967, Hutchins began experimenting with three-dimensional magnetic works and has since devoted her full attention to transformable, interactive work-a collaboration among the magnetic field, the art viewer and herself." (Magnetic Encounters, 2005)

-Jedediah Caesar and Shana Lutker

 

 

 

D'Amelio Terras
525 W. 22nd St.
New York, NY 10011
+1 (212) 352-9460

Read On... D'Amelio Terras 

 

 

 

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