November 26 - December 23, 2008

The Apartment is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition of photographic work by Matt Lipps and Caroline May, the second in a series of ambitious projects in collaboration with OZON, Athens. Both artists explore issues of identity, sexuality and desire in relation to the photographic medium.

Matt Lipps takes inspiration from the iconography of pornography; he appropriates sexually explicit images from an archive of 70s gay porn, which he then manipulates by cutting them up and re-photographing them with a large -format camera, thereby enlarging the printed matter of the original source material and pointing out their magazine materiality. This representation of representation shifts the mood from a 70s post-Stonewall sexual liberation to the current post-AIDS fragmentation of desire. His large diptych, Untitled (black space) and Untitled (white space) is a comment on the positive/negative photographic space as well as an attempt to reclaim queer space.

Caroline May takes pictures of hustlers in parks. In her new series The Ramble, she follows a gay hustler in a cruising area of Central Park, NY. Not staged and to a large extent based on her relationship with her subject, May's photographs focus on the customary re-enactment of stereotypes of masculinity that are commonly embraced by both heterosexual and gay mainstream culture. The artist resolves to photography to question established modes of behavior as well as the language that validates them.

May is not a detached observer relying on the decisive moment for each picture, but actively creates 'situations' permeated by her post feminist gaze. The poser is asked to perform his social, sexual identity, thus relating photography with the death of self and the re-invention of a new identity on offer for consumption.

 

 

Matt Lipps (b.1975) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Recent museum exhibitions include Off Hours at the New Wight Gallery, UCLA, Photography Unbound at the Robert V. Fullerton Museum, San Bernardino; Rendering Gender at Truman State University Art Gallery, Missouri. His work was also included in the infamous Log Cabin exhibition organized by Jeffrey Uslip at Artists Space, New York, NY.

Caroline May (b.1975) currently lives and works in Athens, Greece. She had a solo exhibition with the gallery in 2006; recent museum exhibitions include Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2007), Heterotopias:The 1st Thessaloniki Biennale, Greece (2007), Crossing the Borders, Greek State Museum Thessaloniki, Greece (2006), Identities and their Topographies, Centre of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, Spain (2006).

Matt Lipps | Caroline May, organised by The Apartment and presented at OZON opens on Wednesday, November 26 and continues through December 23, 2008. The exhibition is part of the Athens Photo Festival 2008. It is open Thursday through Saturday from 12 to 6 pm or by appointment. OZON is located at 50-52 Valtetsiou Street in Exarhia, Athens.

 

The Apartment
21, Voulis St
GR - 105 63
Athens
Greece
T +30 210 3215469

OZON
50-52 Valtetsiou Street
Exarhia
Athens
T +30 210 3634 009

Read on...The Apartment

 

 

 

 

 

 

November 6 - December 11, 2008

Well, don't you see this was the way of it/ We bought the farm with what he inherited/And his brothers and sisters accused him of poisoning/His fathers mind against the rest of them/And we never had any peace with our treasure/The murrain took the cattle, and the crops failed/And lightning struck the granary/So we mortgaged the farm to keep going/And he grew silent and was worried all the time...Then the dreadfulest smells infested the rooms/So I set fire to the beds and the old witch-house/Went up in a roar of flame/As I danced in the yard with waving arms,/While he wept like a freezing steer.
- Edgar Lee Masters, Nancy Knapp, "Spoon River Anthology" (1915)

Sara Tecchia Roma New York is pleased to announce a solo-exhibition of new photographs by Christa Parravani. The body of work, Spoon River, is inspired by Edgar Lee Masters' "Spoon River Anthology," a collection of 244 poems told by the deceased residents of this fictional town describing the situations that led to their demise.

Parravani's work is heavily influenced by Diane Arbus, who sought to uplift an often downtrodden and socially outcast troupe of characters through photography. Parravani's work seeks a similar retribution as she is giving closure to each Spoon River denizen while investigating the psychology of death and trauma. Like Arbus, Parravani considers herself a straightforward pictorialist. She uses a 4x5 view camera and strongly avoids altering the works in any way. The photographs are taken near The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH. Founded in 1907, it is the oldest artist colony in America and the two years that Parravani spent there ingrained in her a sense of natural proportions. Each image has an uncomfortable and uncanny quality, the visual language of which suggests an event beyond the borders of the photograph.

Each scene is carefully planned but photographed en plein air with the spontaneity and the attention to landscape and portraiture attributed to symbolist painters such as Jules Bastien-Lepage. In fact, the identity of each figure is accentuated by the presence of nature, either grand sweeping backdrops or claustrophobic close-ups of a forest interior. The landscape, behind each character, plays as important a role in the development of the photograph as does the back-story associated with each poem. To Parravani, the individual is a product of his or her environment, and thereby belongs, embossed for eternity, within it.

Parravani's photographs were featured in the PBS documentary, "The Four Seasons of MacDowell" screened at both MoMA, NY and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. The work is in the permanent collections of the Woodstock Center for Photography and the Neiman Center for Print Studies, Bard College and has been showcased at Scope Miami, Scope New York, Photo New York, Photo San Francisco and Aqua Wynwood Miami.

 

 

Sara Tecchia Roma New York
529 West 20 Street 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10011
+1 212 741 2900

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

October 25 - January 17, 2009

 

In the second second solo exhibition of American artist Chris Larson at magnus müller, we show his latest video work "Deep North" as well as photographs created in this context. Moreover, drawings and a new huge wooden sculpture are seen in the exhibition.

During the opening, we presented  together with the noted European publisher Hatje Cantz Chris Larson's first monograph titled Failure, edited by Soenke Magnus Mueller. The book has been produced in conjunction with the Rochester Art Center, which is currently showing the exhbition Deep North.

Chris Larson engages his imagination in different artistic disciplines, including sculpture, photography, drawing, performance and filmmaking. He focuses on extravagant, large-scale wooden machine sculptures, which sometimes remind us of Leonardo da Vinci's machines and torture devices from the inquisition era. Resembling bizarre constructions "from another time," they take center stage in his videos, which - enriched by elements from mythology, magic, gospel music, farming and neurology - create a "dark romantic" stage setting with sexual allusions and references to art history (Bruegel, Fuessli, Piranesi, C. D. Friedrich, Barney), religion and literature (Kafka). There is often a main actor, acting as a "slave of technology." who operates the complex apparatus, while living through an indefinable state of joy and pain. It is left to the viewer's imagination to find out what the real function of the machinery might be and which consequences its operation may involve.

In his new 8 minutes film Deep North, Larson has expanded the number of actors in comparison with former works. Three young women produce and transport cylindrical ice blocks from one end of a frozen ice encased house to the other by working a huge wooden machine. It seems as if the house had been left in a hurry, after the colossal machine had crushed into it, thereby creating a new Ice Age. The severity and exertion of the women, dressed in grey felt suits, dominate the event. The machine's squeaking and creaking, the ice cylinders' tictac as well as the clattering of the wooden cogs form a rhythmical, spherical sound. Many elements of the film remain mysterious: How did the ice get into the house? What is the function of the circulary arranged ice blocks resembling an organ? What is the purpose of the women's work? It seems that the women's main ambition is to get over the cold and rigor with the help of movements which produce energy. As is so often the case with Chris Larson films, it is up to the viewers to conceive of or else to interpret the meaning of this surreal event.

Chris Larson was born in 1966 in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he still lives and works. Since 2008, his video County Line is part of the new location of the surrealistic collection Scharf-Gerstenberg/New National Gallery/National Museums of Berlin. Moreover, in 2008, his film Crush Collision, purchased by the New National Gallery Berlin, was shown in the Art Basel section Art Film as well as in the group show Screen Spirit_Continued #8 in the Staedtische Galerie im Buntentor in Bremen. In 2009, the Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin will be organizing a Chris Larson solo show.

For additional information please contact Sonke Magnus Muller or Constanze Korb at the gallery.

magnus müller
weydingerstr. 10/12
D - 10178 Berlin
+49-30-390320-40

 

 

 

 

 

21 Nov 2008 to 15 Mar 2009

"Raymond Depardon and I are both concerned by the same question: what is left of the world, of native lands, of the history of the only habitable lanet today?" Paul Virilio

While the world has reached a critical moment in its history, where the environment conditions what humans do and what they will become, the exhibition Native Land, Stop Eject proposes a reflection on the notions of being rooted and uprooted, as well as related questions of identity.
Whereas Raymond Depardon gives a voice to those who wish to live on their land but are threatened with exile, Paul Virilio examines and challenges the very idea of sedentariness in the face of the unprecedented migrations taking place in the contemporary world. The exhibition is, therefore, a confrontation. It is at once a contradictory and complementary dialogue between filmmaker and photographer, Raymond Depardon, and urbanist and philosopher, Paul Virilio.

Depardon's work has often explored native lands, and, particularly, the world of farmers, giving value to speaking and listening. His capacity to combine both the political and the poetic is clear to anyone familiar with his work. Through his writing, Paul Virilio has spent much of his time working on notions of speed, exodus, the disappearance of geographic space, and the pollution of distances.

Native Land
"Let us listen to these people, be they Chipaya, Yanomami, or Afar. Let us listen to these people and give them a chance to speak, so we can hear them express hemselves in their language, with their own way of speaking, their own facial expressions." Raymond Depardon

This notion of being rooted-the relationship that a population nurtures with its land, its language, and its history- finds its full expression in the monumental projection of a film by Raymond Depardon, made especially for this exhibition. Accompanied by sound engineer, Claudine Nougaret, Depardon travelled to Chile, Ethiopia, Bolivia, France, and Brazil to meet with nomads, farmers, islanders, and indigenous peoples, all of whom were either threatened with extinction or living on the periphery of globalization. They express themselves in their mother tongue languages, anchored in their native soil ("I was born in my language," says one woman), and voice their anger and pain in view of the numerous threats and fears that plague their lives.

"After travelling all over the world to 'give a voice' to [...] endangered minorities [...], I felt the need to confront my own world, one that is suffering from the 'disease of speed' denounced by Paul Virilio."
Raymond Depardon

Raymond Depardon thus goes on to share his first-hand experience of global-ization and the world's shrinking distances in the form of a silent filmed journal. After celebrating and "giving a voice" to those who wish to remain on their land, he travelled to cities around the world from East to West in 14 days- Washington, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Tokyo, Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore, Cape Town-accompanied solely by his camera.

Stop Eject
"I'm nostalgic for the world's magnitude, of its immensity." Paul Virilio

Depardon's travel journal-a long-distance imaginary dialogue with Paul Virilio-brings us to the second part of the exhibition Stop Eject, curated by Virilio, and designed by American artists and architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in collaboration with Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgan, and Ben Rubin.

"The nature of being sedentary and nomadic has changed. [...] Sedentary people are at home wherever they go. With their cell phones or laptops, [they are] as comfortable in an elevator or on a plane as in a high-speed train. This is the sedentary person. The nomad, on the other hand, is someone who is never at home, anywhere." Paul Virilio

Virilio questions one's capacity to settle somewhere and take root. The acceleration of movement or, using his terms, "the great migratory mobilization,"-it is estimated that roughly 200 million people will be forced to relocate by the year 2050-challenges the very notion of sedentariness. This exodus, unprecedented in human history, linked to globalization and to climate change, encounters the end of geographical space, or "the disappearance of the world's vastness," created by the current transportation and telecommunications revolution. The current urban exodus replacing the rural exodus of the past, the re-urbanization of the world, as Paul Virilio describes it, are factors that announce the emergence of the "ultracity," the city of urban exile, the city of departure, similar to the train or bus stations and airports of today, orthe spaceports of the future.

In this way, Paul Virilio questions the future of "native land" as a notion, reflected in the literal translation of the French exhibition title, Terre Natale, Ailleurs commence ici [Native Land, elsewhere starts here]. This elsewhere that begins here prefigures global mobilization, and is illustrated through a visual tornado of news clips that are literally choreographed on almost 50 screens. The exhibition's final room is entirely dedicated to cartography, proposing a dynamic visualization of global human migrations and their causes via a circular and immersive projection. The visitor is surrounded by a sphere that circles the room, leaving behind a new imprint of migratory data in the form of animated maps, texts and trajectories with each orbit.

This exhibition has benefited from the participation of François Gemenne, researcher and professor of migratory movement linked to climate change at Sciences Po (Centre d'études et de recherché internationales) and at the University of Liege (Centre d'études de l'ethnicité et des migrations). Chief curator: Hervé Chandès, General Director of the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain

Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain
261, Bld Raspail
75014 Paris
France
+33 1 42 18 56 50

 

 

 

 

 

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