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19 April 2007 | Installation and Mixed Media April 2007 |
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 John Connelly
Presents, New York assume vivid astro focus a very anxious feeling May 3rd - June 30th, 2007 John Connelly Presents (JCP) is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work by assume vivid astro focus (avaf). The exhibition will use the architecture of the gallery to create a dialogue between three distinct environments featuring an installation of 3-D wallpaper, a dark subterranean corridor of music and flashing neon sculptures, and a cordoned multi- disciplinary room that will feature an ongoing series of music-related performances. In the main gallery an installation of text-based wallpaper consisting of grids of four-letter words - BUSH, IRAQ, SPIT, HOMO, DYKE, ANAL, IRAN, AMEN, PRAY, EVIL, LOVE, EDEN, HOPE.. - alludes to the iconic design of Robert Indiana's LOVE emblem from the 60's and General Idea's AIDS insignia from the late 80's. "Four-letter words" tend to have a special status in the English language and in most cases reflect the more crude, sexual subset of the lexicon. The virus-like dispersion of these terms throughout the walls of the gallery and their political tenor suggest how the public policies and decisions made by our governments indiscriminately contaminate and shape our private lives and futures. By inviting the viewer to don a special mask with custom 3-D glasses to view the wallpaper, the artists also encourage the viewer's participation in activating the work from a two- dimensional static experience into a three- dimensional event that is both sculptural and temporal. The gallery's basement space, which is usually reserved for storage of artwork and tools, is transformed into a long dark corridor illuminated by a sequence of five animated abstract neon sculptures. The sculptures syncopate and flash along to a custom soundtrack featuring music by PolaroidHomoPhoto (an anonymous duo that looped a fragment of the song Zombi by French musician Sebastien Tellier). Furthering the multi-dimensional experience of the wallpaper installation upstairs, avaf's corridor of light and sound combines the aural and visual into a visceral occurrence meant to stimulate both the mind and the body. The space itself - marginal, dark and intimate- reflects upon avaf's interest in the multilayering of both structure and image and the generation of new platforms, vistas and vanishing points through architectural tools such as barricades and stairways. In the JCP project room avaf has transplanted an installation from their 2006 solo show, absorb viral attack fantasy at Hiromi Yoshii, Tokyo comprised of wallpaper, sculptures, video, neons, and balloons. Here, the group continues to explore the fertile confluence between art, architecture, performance and entertainment by presenting an ongoing series of performances and events including Barr, Tobias Bernstrup, Julie Atlas Muz, Loconuts, Ann Magnuson, Japanther, Good Good and Frankie Martin (full schedule to be announced). However, the entrance to the project room has been sealed shut and the only given access to both the performances and installation is peering through portholes fitted with sheaths and wigs. For the duration of the exhibition avaf has also invited UK artist Giles Round to take over the gallery's Tunnel Room (known for it's arched public display window that looks onto the former Tunnel nightclub). Round works in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, installation and video. He will present a new video installation addressing issues of public space, theatricality, reflection and formal/spatial orientation. Image: assume vivid astro focus Courtesy of John Connelly Presents, New York Gallery website Read on... John Connelly Presents, New York |
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 BLACK &
WHITE GALLERY, Chelsea, New York RANDY WRAY Chapter and Verse Black & White Gallery is pleased to announce a solo show of recent works by Randy Wray at the gallery's Chelsea space from April 27 to June 2. The sculptures, paintings, and drawings in Randy Wray's exhibition Chapter and Verse, take a variety of approaches to the subject of Faith. Diverse styles, materials, and perspectives converge to form a kind of psychic cubism. The resulting manifestations possess a formal intensity that transcends conventional notions of beauty. By skillfully joining ambiguous forms with images of webs, crosses, and the American flag, the artist achieves works rife with symbolic interpretations, often of a Southern Gothic flavor. With titles like Dark Matter, Faith Collider, Toward a Unified Theory, and Apparition, Wray evokes the language of both the laboratory and the pulpit drawing comparisons between science and religion. The distinctive works produced by his sophisticated sense of play are themselves affirmations of faith, even as they raise questions about spirituality, patriotism, and belief in things unseen. In a hanging sculpture entitled Higgs boson, Wray gives form to the hypothetical elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. He also references the ritual flower offerings made in sixth century Buddhist temples that later became known as ikebana. Dispensing with the plants, he composes shredded paper, quartz crystals, and electric lights in his offerings and calls them Ickybana. In a series of collages entitled Offal, Wray collects the debris generated as by-products during his sculpture making and painting practice and recycles it. These compositions of scrap paint and paper are mounted in his own frames fashioned from sticks, papier-mâché, and even small geodes, giving them an almost Victorian appeal. The artist's relatively restrained sculpture Sanctuary counterbalances the curvaceous and flamboyant Preacher's Daughter suggesting a penchant for the philosophizing of both the Dalai Lama and Dolly Parton. Wray's conglomerations of seemingly contradictory ideas and impulses appropriately echo the polarities inherent in discussions of faith. While it is interesting to consider the juxtapositions of synthetic and natural materials, or representational imagery and passages of pure material gesture, it is clear that polemic distinctions are beside the point. The energy that pulses throughout the works creates infinite invisible paths of connection while Wray's handiwork provides further evidence that God is in the details. Randy Wray was born in 1965 in North Carolina and lives in New York. His work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions during the last fifteen years, most recently at Kate MacGarry Gallery, London. In 2002 Wray received a Guggenheim fellowship and in 2003 had his first solo museum show at the Weatherspoon Art Museum. Image: Randy Wray Chapter and Verse, 2007 (detail) Papier-mâché, wood, sewn canvas, quartz crystals, wire, acrylic & oil paint, resin, mica 53" x 27" x 20" Image courtesy of Black & White Gallery Gallery website Read on...Black & White Gallery, Chelsea |
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 Galerie Emmanuel
Post, Leipzig Sebastian Gögel Welcome to the Sculpture Club Opening: April 26, 2007, 7 pm April 27 - June 09, 2007 Wed. through Sat., 2 to 6 pm and by appointment We are pleased to announce the third solo exhibition by the Leipzig artist Sebastian Gögel (b. 1978) Sebastian Gögel's kaleidoscopic approach reflects a universe of impulsive, to some extent aggressive, exploratory entanglements. While many of his works are pervaded by self-criticism, parody, and subtle, sometimes wreckless humor, a baroque abundance of forms contrasts with Gögel's rigourous precision. Eccentric drawings and playfully burlesque sculptures in plaster, wood or bronze address the social themes of order and conflicts. The grotesque, anthropomorphous hybrids in his paintings find themselves in new manifestations. Extremes meet in crude elegance, gigantic miniatures, and organic constructions. By questioning the limits of artistic feasibility, Gögel's work engages the observer in the dramatic tension between mystical transfiguration and the immediacy of his art. Perspectives, conventions, and meanings shake. Welcome to the Sculpture Club! Born in Sonneberg/Thuringia, Germany, 1978, Sebastian Gögel lives and works in Leipzig. He studied at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig (1997- 2005) and has collaborated in project-oriented works with Paule Hammer since 2005 (HAGEL). Solo Exhibitions include: 2006/07 Galerie Adler, New York, USA; 2006 HAGEL, Chung King Project, Los Angeles, USA; HAGEL, Galerie Wohnmaschine, Berlin; 2005 Galerie Adler, Frankfurt/Main; Galerie Emmanuel Post, Leipzig; 2004 Galerie Emmanuel Post, Leipzig. Group Exhibitions include: 2007 Städtische Galerie Sonneberg; 2006/07 Replacing Mashkov, Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag; 2006 clapham art gallery, London; Arario Gallery, Cheonan, Korea; HAGEL, Ritter/Zamet, London; HAGEL: Laden für Nichts, Leipzig. Collections: Arario Collection, Korea; Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag; Zabludowicz Art Trust. Sebastian Gögel's works will be included in an upcoming exhibition (DLD Collection) at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. Image: Sebastian Gögel Kopf 2006 plaster Courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Post, Leipzig Gallery website Read on...Galerie Emmanuel Post, Leipzig |
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 Standpoint
Gallery, London Dirty Nature John Holland and Fiona MacDonald 20 April - 19 May 2007 Private view - Thursday 19 April 2007 Holland and MacDonald create mutating or abused landscapes, echoing current fears concerning the environment, but with a twist of overactive, gothic imagination. They make alternate realities, scenarios or details, whether as backdrops for potential dramas to unfold, or to re-investigate the lived experience of being this human creature at once embedded in and alienated from the natural world. Picking their way through the philosophical and aesthetic fracture between nature and our cognitive experience of it, Holland and MacDonald seek some useful interpretive framework, but are repeatedly drawn back to worrying places where the writhing roots of feral leylandii enfold ancient, snail-eaten copies of Readers' Wives. They may not always be in control, but they know that the ethereal and sublime can only be approached through the physical - the moist, the lumpy, the cracked and the seething, the lovely and the embarrassingly unpleasant. The stuff of which the work is made is never allowed to sink behind the act of representation, but must surface. John Holland's installations portray a kind of nature that's at once intimate, romantic, and totally adulterated by man made tat. He uses a plethora of ordinary but out of context materials - sawn timber, plasticine, silicon rubber, gaffer tape, fibreglass, polystyrene, vaseline, house paint, fur, air freshener - making landscapes in which realistic birds and animals inhabit a space toxically laden with barely transformed matter. 'I assert the primacy of material specificity as a tool against the bad generalities of ideologies, strategies, metaphors and literary interpretations. The job is to avoid everything bar facts, sentiment, and the hope of a little bit of sympathetic magic.' John Holland was the last person to leave Maidstone Art College's Fine Art degree (he did turn out the lights). He has had solo shows in Brighton and France (Maybe nature gets bored too 2006, Lille, Culture 2004, Phoenix). Fiona MacDonald produces fictional worlds and details constructed from found objects, living organisms, natural and artificial materials. Her sculptures and paintings portray the desire for - and the necessary failure of - new spaces of the imagination. Unashamedly beautiful, but never without dark undercurrents, MacDonald's work evokes sensations of overabundance and stagnation. Alternately seduced and brought up against the kind of wrongness that only occasionally appears in nature (in such ways as the duck-billed platypus looks stuck together with glue), she positions us at the edge of illusion and materiality. Fiona MacDonald studied at Leeds Metropolitan and Chelsea College of Art. Solo shows include Habitat 2006, (Phoenix, Brighton) and upcoming at Long and Ryle, London, June 2007. She is a finalist in the Celeste Art Prize 2007. Also working in collaboration for the first time, the artists have produced for this show 'Nature versus Nurture', an epic fight to the death between the forces of Nature (small furry animals) and the forces of Capitalism (cheap plastic superheroes), constructed on a table football pitch. Image: Fiona MacDonald Jezebel's Island, 2007 Courtesy of the artist and Standpoint Gallery, London Gallery website Read on... Standpoint Gallery, London |
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 Mark Wolfe
Contemporary Art, San Francisco Ajna Lichau & Jessica Pezalla 5 Apr to 23 May 2007 Ajna Lichau uses video, photography, and mixed- media to create atmospheric installations that treat the body's relationship with its environment. Her most recent work, centered on the cameo, explore issues of physicality, sexuality, and sensuality. Jessica Pezalla employs simple materials (paper, felt, coated wire) to build sculptures and installations that function as waterless aquariums, "[connecting] the natural world to the domestic." Pezalla and Lichau have created site-specific installations for the current show. Though the artists have chosen to work independently, their works share formal and thematic concerns. Both artists play with temporality, change, and metamorphosis, engaging the physical body-as a surface, as an object of scrutiny or fascination-as a means to examine the problems of observation. Lichau's video works transform the cameo from a static (and passive) aesthetic object, into an unstable temporal experience. Pezalla's work asks viewers to confront our tendency to equate "truth" with "nature," by creating objects that are at once "naturalistic" in their organic beauty and "artificial" in their construction. Lichau and Pezalla first met in the MFA program at the San Francisco Arts Institute. This is their first two- person show together. Born in Montreal, Canada, Jessica Pezalla received her BA from Oberlin College, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Pezalla has held solo exhibitions in San Francisco and North Adams, Massachusetts. She has participated in group shows at the Lola Gallery, the Luggage Store Annex, and the Swell Gallery. Ajna Lichau received her BFA from the Parsons School of Design, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has held solo exhibitions at Spur Projects (Portola Valley, California), and participated in group exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art, the 9th Havana Biennial (Cuba), and the Art Point Black gallery in Florence, Italy. She participated in the 2005 GenArt: Emerge exhibition. Images : Ajna Lichau care taker cameo, (white yarn) (2007) Jessica Pezalla Relics (2007) Courtesy of Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art, San Francisco Gallery website Read on... Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art, San Francisco |
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 sister, Los
Angeles Kirsten Stoltmann : Worn Bush on the Horizon 7 Apr to 5 May 2007 The daughter of a high school guidance counselor and a public librarian, Kirsten Stoltmann was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Stoltmann attended the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she studied experimental filmmaking. It was there that she was introduced to George Kuchar and his video work. Stoltmann was greatly influenced by his use of awkwardness and humor and everyday situations to create his art. She moved to San Francisco to continue working in film, but found the world of experimental film to be too rigid, and moved back to Chicago, IL. Initially enrolling in the Film and Video Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she was encouraged to transfer to the Studio Arts program by the feminist video maker Julie Zando. Within this program Stoltmann began to work with artist Tony Tasset who encouraged the artist to embrace her Midwestern, self- deprecating aesthetic. Tasset called Stoltmann the Carol Burnett of the art world. Creating work in the Midwest carries with it a certain freedom and certain sadness. There is absolute freedom to make the work that an artist wants to make, and no one questions strange tangents or oddball pursuits in art. In fact, they are most often encouraged. But part of the journey of an artist is to be in dialogue with the work of the past and the present. And there comes a time when most artists, seeking something else, want to leave what can still be seen as a provincial and limiting midwestern environment. In June 2003, Kirsten Stoltmann married artist Sterling Ruby on a ferry that her grandfather had once captained, now permanently docked on Lake Michigan. Moving to Los Angeles from Chicago while Sterling was attending Art Center, Kirsten, like Georgia O'Keefe and many other Midwestern artists, found the land of the west to be a spiritual center and a source of inspiration. But it was also a hard move and it was during their first year in Los Angeles that Kirsten became pregnant and had a baby. It was also during this period that she returned to Chicago for a solo show at 1R Gallery. Overflowing messy collages created with melted crayons and cutout images of roses were juxtaposed with a serene video titled Renegade in which Stoltmann as shaman levitates between two rocks in the desert of the American west. Tumbleweeds adorned with turquoise beads, feathers and gold hot glue were strewn about the gallery and she presented a small modernist photograph of a crystal in her vagina. The show exhibited a persona pulled in two directions, the soul of a solitary shaman artist finding and losing itself within the messes and vicissitudes of motherhood. It is impossible to declare oneself an outlaw or outside of society without standing up against that society. But one reason that American contemporary women artists may not be willing to identify their practice as feminist is that it creates an immediate location for the art work as outside. This location would certainly be outside of the current market. But a positioning as completely outside would disallow for a cross contamination of artwork, or an invasion from within. Removed from her art world of Chicago it was necessary for Stoltmann to reestablish herself as the outlaw and the fool. It is in this context that the work Stoltmann presented at Wallspace Gallery in 2005 should be seen as an announcement and a provocation. The clue to the nature of this work was the title of the show; I know what I'm doing and a wine bottle spilled in the corner with you don't know me dribbled onto the gallery floor. This work was also a reaction against the faux naivety of the kind of artwork that Roberta Smith likes to champion. For Stoltmann, to be allowed to make something dumb it must be meaningful, heartfelt and ultimately vulnerable. The challenge and complexity of this work is that it seems so simple and so dumb. But the truth is that it is dumb and loaded. An unfolding of Stoltmann's work reveals the spillage of the manifest destiny of suburbia, a critique of the American family unit, a full frontal assault on the current art market, a call for everyone to stop taking themselves so goddamn seriously, an unmitigated vulnerability and pathos, a feminist revival, and an avant-garde manifesto. The work of Kirsten Stoltmann combines the vulnerability of Tracey Emin, the ballsiness of Sarah Lucas with the screwball antics of Laverne and Shirley. (In 2001 Donald Young Gallery placed an ad for Kirsten Stoltmann, which was a recreation of the Lynda Benglis art forum ad from 1974. For the ad for her show at Allston Skirt Gallery, the artist pulls down her pants, mimicking the collectable figurine of a young girl on a side table in her parents home. In these book-ended ads Kirsten reclaims the work of brazen and confrontational artist while the other reveals a more vulnerable and pathetic off-ness. Image: Kirsten Stoltmann All Dressed Up, 2007 gesso, paper, collage Courtesy of sister, Los Angeles Gallery website Read on...sister, Los Angeles |
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