September 17 - October 31, 2009

CRG begins its season with Ori Gersht; presenting his new film Evaders as well as related photographic works.

Evaders portrays the journey of a singular persona traversing the legendary "Lister Route", a passage through the Pyrenees mountains across the French / Spanish border. The passage is surrounded by some of the most exquisitely beautiful and severe vistas accentuated with equally severe elemental conditions. The locals in the region refer to the relentless gusting winds as "Transmontana" and claim that it has the power to make travelers go mad.

The making of this film, as with much of Gersht's work, was engaged as a kind of expeditionary journey, with unanticipated environmental phenomena influencing the medium and process. Gersht and his small crew retraced the path taken by the German-Jewish writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin during his escape from Nazi occupied France in 1940. The same route was also used by the Emergency Rescue Committee established by American journalist Varian Fry to rescue many intellectuals, artists and political dissidents that were fleeing the Nazis as well. Both in its harsh conditions and its tragic history, the route through the Pyrenees has come to symbolize a border between life and death itself, though with the creation of the European Union and its unified European market the idea of what a border is and the Lister Route has changed significantly; the once guarded checkpoints all but abandoned now.

Despite the many references to the final journey taken by Walter Benjamin, the film does not attempt to re-enact his journey or portray Benjamin in a strictly historical or literal sense, but is an open exploration of a primal struggle between a solitary individual and the elements. Thus the film is set in a nonspecific time, which could be thought of as no time or anytime.

Gersht states that the film is visually inspired by Paul Klee's painting, 'Angelus Novus', that was referenced by Walter Benjamin in his final essay 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'.

...."an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while piles of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

 

- Walter Benjamin, Illuminations,'Theses on the Philosophy of History', chapter IX, p-249

This tragic image of an angel battling the elements, attempting to cross a border or, as suggested by Benjamin, to return to the past in a helpless desire to resurrect what has been smashed, is the core premise of the film.

The clear visual references to German Romanticism, particularly the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, are suggestive of a fatal attachment to German culture that prevented Benjamin, like many others, from seeing all the way into the terrible truth of the Nazi project until it was too late to escape its consequences. In the film the traveler is hopelessly moving through the romantic landscape attempting to free himself from the physical and cultural burdens that are imbedded in this sublime environment; preventing him from reaching a new horizon.

The film is a dual channel work projected as two frames side by side. The two frames establish a dialogue defined by contrasting depictions of the traveler and his surroundings. The still photographic works in the exhibition are images taken by Gersht during his journey and document both elements seen within the film as well as some outside it. Many of these images are composited panoramas that Gersht created by combining multiple images together.

CRG Gallery
535 W 22 ST
New York, NY 10011
+1 212 229 2766

 

 

 

 

 

Atlas with Dove Allouche, Antti Laitinen & Oliver Pietsch

9 October to 15 November 2009

In the texts united under the title of "Atlas" , Jorge Luis Borges immerses the reader into tales of his travels around the world - relating stories of the sites he visited during his travels through his own personalized geographies. Real travel diary, this anthology of texts and photographs sets the writer's eye on the overlooked details of these places - even bi-passing esthetic concerns as Borges is more interested in «the raison d'être» of these entities and places.

Refered to for centuries as an allegorical and strictly iconographical association with movement, the question of mobility is nowadays expressed in contemporary art through practices integrating notions of travel and motion as a significant process. Evoking a poetry of fate and paradoxes, the concept of mobility - between wandering and progression - marks a deceleration of time revealing the existence of abstract geographies.

Each of Dove Allouche's works originates from a travel leading the artist to the source of his subject. If photography is often the first step which refers to the idea of the ephemeral or of what has been, other modes of representation in Allouche's practice such as drawing or engraving come to reactivate a time lost, a slowness specific to the artist's gesture. The project entitled "Mélanophila I" (2003-08) is a photographic series created during the fires which devastated the south of Portugal in 2003. Presenting transient images of a charred eucalyptus forest, this series is the result of a creative process which went on for several years and during which the artist introduced several techniques and approaches to this project. In the initial step, Allouche swiftly photographed the forest and then reproduced the resulting images as lead drawings - meticulously focusing on the elements which characterized these images as being furtive. These drawings, having already shifted from one state to another, came full circle by being photographed and printed onto charcoal paper, characterized by a texture suggestive of the original matter of the charred trees.

"Le Temps scellé" (2006) is a photographic project composed of a series of coloured cibachromes taken in Estonia on the location of the film "Stalker" by Andrei Tarkovsky. Thirty years after the production of the film, Allouche travelled to Estonia in order to reproduce as accurately as possible the views described by the abstract geography called "the zone" in Tarkovsky's fiction. This process, described by the artist as a "ritual of verification", also sustains the mysticism created over the years surrounding this area and where the rules linked to the fiction of the place seem to have taken over reality. Indeed, Tarkovsky had to re-shoot the entire film a few years later due to the disappearance of the original film.

Antti Laitinen's work stems from performances which are documented through photographs, videos or objects taken from his performances. Joining a search for identity and a poetry of the absurd, the artist pushes his physical limits in a quest for the discovery of the wild Nordic landscape. Led by an undeniable humor and irony, Laitinen's work immerses us into a world in which heroism meets simplicity through captivating images recalling the relationship between man and nature. In a dialogue omnipresent with the artist's origins - and as it is a dominating natural element in Finland - wood naturally intervenes in the artist's creative process. Laitinen therefore offers us this reconstituted forest, made from barks carefully collected and re-organised to create a personal living memory linked to the artist's childhood and roots.

Closing "The Island Trilogy" which started in 2007, "Growler" is a video issued from a recent performance. The first chapter entitled "It's My Island" depicts the artist building his own island in the Baltic Sea; Laitinen then went on to imagine an island which would enable him to travel and thus resulting in the second performance "Voyage". The trilogy was completed in spring 2009 with "Growler". Having preserved a natural ice block since the winter, Laitinen resurrected this iceberg onto the water on the occasion of the third performance devoted to the trilogy. Whereas in previous performances the idea was to inhabit his new island, this time, Laitinen went on a slow journey during which the small iceberg progressively disappeared.

Developed through filmic montage, Oliver Pietsch's videos are marked by a solid archival testimony to cinematic and audiovisual culture. From old films to more recent ones, from documentary to independent cinema through Hollywood block-busters, the artist plays around with fictional re-interpretations by a themed selection of chosen images. These images are accompanied by a remixed or alternative soundtrack, linked or not to the original fiction. This filmic "reshaping" immerses the spectator in a narrative of accumulated visuals, whose incomplete nature leaves the door open to personal identification and to emotions linked to the recognition and familiarity of the images.

The video "Because" presents a succession of views and aerial scenes taken from various documents - from « Triumph des Willens », « Superman Returns », « Badlands » and « Flying » to « The Aviator », « Sound Barrier », « Dark Blue World » and « The Right Stuff ». Lasting for three minutes, the film presents sequences of filmed skies - from clouds to sun-sets. Soothed by rhythm and hypnotic images, the spectator is embarked by the Beatles song of the same title remixed by George Martin.

NETTIE HORN
25b Vyner St
London E2 9DG
+44 (0)208 980 1568

 

 

 

October 10 - November 7, 2009

Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo are pleased to announce the forthcoming, fifth solo exhibition with Yuki Kimura, her first with the gallery in three years.

Yuki Kimura, born in 1971 and based in Kyoto, expanded her international presence with installations using photographs, moving images and sculptures, taking part in the "Sixth International Istanbul Biennial" (1999), the "International Triennale of Contemporary Art Yokohama 2005", "mellow fever", la galerie des galeries (Paris, 2008), "Yoshihide Otomo ENSEMBLES", Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (Yamaguchi, 2008) and "Incidental Affairs: Contemporary Art of Transient States", Suntory Museum (Osaka 2009). Recent works of Yuki Kimura from 2005-2009 and latest installations were shown in a large scale solo exhibition at the Daiwa Press Viewing Room in Hiroshima.

(Minoru Shimizu, "DAIWA PRESS VIEWING ROOM vol.09" (Daiwa Press, 2009))

The present exhibition is comprised of 10 photographs/sculptural works. The title of the show "Year 1940 was a leap year starting on Monday" is a quotation from the first sentence of Wikipedia when searching for the year 1940. The composition of this exhibition starts with a photograph that was taken for a Christmas card in Germany in 1940. Images deriving from this one photograph are combined with others images, vectors like Monday and leap year are added and an open ended narrative is created. Yuki Kimura applies dark blue and green colored Plexiglas to these photographs, creating images hidden, literally, in the shadow. The viewer is invited to use their own imagination freely.

 

Taka Ishii Gallery
1-3-2 5F Kiyosumi, Koto-ku
#135 0024
Tokyo
+81 (0) 3 5646 6050

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 October to 7 Bovember, 2007

 

Galerie Paul Frèches is pleased to present the first solo show of Benoît Vollmer in France,

The exhibition will be occurring in two sets:
From October 1st to November 7th the little photographs from the "Liminaire" (2007- ) series will be exhibited. The set, made of heterogeneous pictures, is strikingly united and poetic.
And from November to December, A new film will be shown, conceived in situ, it will take into account the light of the season within its device (the project being currently worked out).

The subtle images of the « Liminaire » series, open to interpretation, do not impose anything to the viewer and certainly not their - heterogeneous - subjects; Benoît Vollmer sees them as deconstructions that play with the photographic medium (with its genre, with the notion of editions, etc.). Recently, Benoît Vollmer has been exploring the possibilities given by the moving image, and has decided to direct a film (16 mm): a slow crepuscular walk for this aesthete of fragility and fineness, who was looking for a "plain landscape", in transition...

" Liminaire presents a set of unique prints that question the notion of aura in photography. A sheet of ilfochrome paper is directly inserted into a large format camera and exposed to light, without the prior use of film. Shooting is at once slow and tricky (...) It seems that the events recounted here are meant to live on outside their own frames, in some other time and place. There could be many shots made before and after each one of these. They would be nothing like stills but fragments of duration or slow snapshots."

 

(Magali Langlade - translation Céline Leroy)

 

Benoît Vollmer was born in 1983. In 2008, he was awarded with a "Mention spéciale du jury" for the "Prix Photographique Ville de Levallois - Epson". He currently lives and works in Paris.

 

Galerie Paul Frèches
12, rue André Barsacq
75018 Paris
France
+33 (0) 1 53 09 21 12

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10 October - 14 November 2009
preview Friday 9 October 7 -9 pm

Cassi stared intently at the mirror she liked the way she looked. She likes the way she feels, she likes the state she's in. Pammy said she likes the attention, but Pammy is a 2bit slut, least that's what the kids called her. Even Nichole had clapped (had clap) so hard that the nails had serrated the palm flesh, oozing red in the bright lights of the camera flash. Cassi had never noticed before now, how old Nichol's hands looked, even when garnished with raw fish and diamonds, but they all said how beautiful she was. Pammy was just jealous, how dare she ruin such a perfect life, letting it all hang out for the whole world to see, toppling around to the Cha Cha Cha on nine inch spikes. She sighed and picked up a copy of Hello. Turning the pages, her face flushed. Oh my god! That evil little bitch Clunie had scrawled all over it. Just you wait.

MOT International is delighted to welcome back Clunie Reid for her second solo exhibition at the gallery. Reid will be showing a new series of individual wall based works that push the medium and scale of her previous small photo-collages and focus the mass information of her wall based installations while retaining their raw guttural and immediate appropriation of media images. These new works successfully enlarge and focus our gaze on the reversed spectacle of contemporary society, slipping it to us in the bite-sized snippets for our mediaholic minds to devour. Pages from hello, loaded, adverts from TV, images from the internet are re-photographed and printed on reflective surfaces. Broken cameras, disruptive flash glare and printing slippage are all appropriated to enhance the work. Reid's venomous wit is hand written over these seductive surfaces, turning the language of spectacle in on itself, negating the stupidity, transforming the dumb into great profundity. Her materials mirror her subjects, the gloss and seductive surfaces combined with the trashy use of tape, stickers and marker pen, perfectly complement the celebrities, sneaker ads and out of focus environments. Clunie Reid tells it how it is, her work cuts through a global language and it is only a matter of time before she is recognised as one of the great new chroniclers of the 21st century.

Clunie Reid (born in 1971, Pembury, Kent) lives and works in London, UK and is represented by MOT International. She was selected for East International (2007) and received the John Jones Art on Paper Award 2008 for her work at Zoo Art Fair. She has recently participated in Nought to Sixty at the ICA and had solo exhibitions at MOT International, Focal Point Gallery in Southend and Galerie Reinhard Hauff in Stuttgart. Her work has been included in a number of international exhibitions including We came here to get laid not critique dutch culture at Wilfried Lentz Gallery in Rotterdam, Aspen 11 at Neue Alte Brucke in Frankfurt, Local Operations at Serpentine Gallery in London, falkeandcharlotte project space/ Dolores at Ellen de Bruijne Gallery in Amsterdam, and This show is ribbed for her pleasure, Cynthia Broan Gallery, New York.

Upcoming exhibitions include her John Jones Prize Winner's solo exhibition at Zoo 2009 opening 15 October, KARAOKE LIKE at Fotomuseum, Winterthur (24 October 2009 - 7 February 2010) and Newspeak: British Art Now at the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (27 October - 17 January 2010). For further press information and availability of works please contact the gallery.

 

MOT INTERNATIONAL
Unit 54 / 5th floor, Regents Studios
8 Andrews Road
London E8 4QN
+44 (0)207 923 9561

 

 

 

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