1 February 2008

re-title.com newsletter - Painting & Mixed Media February 2008

Home About Contact us Artist Opportunities Thinking of Joining Advertise with re-title.com

the Agency London Roebling Hall New York Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers London Branch Gallery, Durham NC Vegas Gallery London Next Newsletters         sign up!

the Agency London CASEY&MCAREE Heavier than a Coffin on your Shoulder S.T.O.R.A.G.E Patrick Goddard We Regretfully Decline Your Invitation 19 Jan - 23 Feb 2008 The Agency is pleased to present a new collaborative installation and series of works by Irish artist duo Casey&McAree in the main space and new sculptural works by the English artist Patrick Goddard in S.T.O.R.A.G.E. Casey&McAree's work rises from post-punk inspirations such as Joy Division's sound as well as references to the Irish troubled historical and cultural legacy. The work is highly theatrical, the installation functions akin to a mise-en-scene both as a complete vision as well as paying credence to the making-of. For Mona Casey and Paul McAree the collaborative/ performative process of making work is as important as the final piece itself. Hence the exhibition begins with a video diptych documenting a performance, continues with a light- piece spelling Screaming Skulls Putrid Hatred and culminates in a large sculptural installation. The sculpture rises from a path of latex skulls and reveals an apocalyptic rider on a stag. Made from cardboard remnants the life-size stag is both regal and dilapidated. The faceless rider wears a dunce or Capirote, a conical hat, which during the Spanish Inquisition was given to heretics to wear in order to ridicule them but later took on another dark meaning with its association with the Ku Klux Klan. The Stag also has iconographic meanings, both within Celtic mythology and later as part of Christian iconography. St Eustace saw a stag with a cross appearing between his antlers. This inspired his conversion to Christianity and subsequent persecution and death. The artists play with poignant iconography, religious and historic connotations, albeit transposed into a diasporic world where materials are not precious, yet thoughts and cultural ciphers inherently remain powerful. Casey&McAree are evoking a world of dubious morals, danger and death in a gothic manner, which becomes a stage set for the world's malaise recounted with images. The dark iconographic connotations also echo more recent transgressions against humanity in Iraq. Casey & McAree's Irish sensibility translates this in a poignant manner of remembering continuous resistance to the eradication of indigenous cultural values. The work comments on global identities being forged through localized wars and rapid re-alignment of cultures through external influences and conflict. Playing on multiple meanings their works become universal. In parallel their sub- cultural references to graffiti and music as well as the poverty of materials used speak of the transformation of iconography into a contemporary unstable environment. Whilst both artists pursue their independent practice, Paul McAree as a painter and Mona Casey as a multimedia artist, they come together regularly to create a folk-like rendition of their common cultural references. Casey&McAree's common practice comes across like a powerful exorcism. Together they find the strength to dispel popular myths, disseminate inciting truths and find a new language of visual expression, which conveys these concerns with a rigorous and yet poetic conceptual language. Paul McAree and Mona Casey have made collaborative works since 2001. In 2005 they founded Colony, an artist run space in Birmingham, where they have shown alongside a host of invited artists. The Agency is pleased to present the young British sculptor Patrick Goddard (*1984) with a first solo show in S.T.O.R.A.G.E. He will exhibit a new sculptural piece as well as related works in a small installation. His figurative sculptures take their cue from a Kafkaesque world of waking nightmares and surreal scenarios, as well as modern writing such as Beckett and Pinter. Goddard cites the banal and translates it into parallel universe where emotions and a sense of unease take over. He is fascinated by the ordinary guy and creates a pathology of a man's inner life, where both tragic and comic extremes take over. We Regretfully Decline Your Invitation depicts a young man without trousers but still formally dressed in a pinstripe shirt hunched over the spikes of a garden fence. The piece is quite farcical, the title leaves things open for interpretation. Other works depict everyday objects such as the ceramic laptop, which looks like it has slightly melted. His sculptures play on dark narratives and yet they are imbued with spontaneous humour. Much like Erwin Wurm's works are derived from performance Goddard's works are inspired by theatre; seductive, funny and thought-provoking at the same time. Goddard has shown within the UK, participated in the group show Barely Human with Enrique Marty and Jemima Brown and will be included in EVERY BODY, in Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Norway in May 2008 image: Casey McAree Rider, 2007 distressed cardboard, wood 150 x 210 x 175 cm cables sound, latex skulls Courtesy of the Agency, London the Agency 15A Cremer Street London E2 8HD the Agency, London Read on... the Agency, London

Roebling Hall New York Ray Smith RAYS MITH Rebecca Horne The Corner of Your Eye 17 Jan - 23 Feb 2008 Roebling Hall in conjunction with Nicholas Robinson Gallery are pleased to present Ray Smith in RAYS MITH, his first New York solo exhibition in five years and the first exhibition following the publication of his monograph and recent Retrospective Exhibitions in Europe and Texas. For this occasion Smith has returned to the intimate realm of his naturalist Tex-Mex mythology; recounting personal mythologies which are arguably the pillars of his existence: women, family, desire, politics, the carnivalesque culture of rodeo, eroticism, mockery and the worship of nature's magic and mystery. These new paintings and drawings continue the path explored by his solo shows at Akira Ikeda Gallery (Berlin) and Joan Prats (Barcelona), in which an onerous aesthetic and the interplay of a decisive stroke signal the unreality of the tale. The landscape converses with what is private and attached to the subject's experience; where dream, nightmare, or the phantasmal realm of memory converse with reality. This is a body of work in which innumerable drawings take an enlivened look at amusement, coquetry and laughter while the inherent grandiloquence and majesty of the work comment on its internal splendor, the knowledge of its gesture, and its own pleasure, ultimately rendering Smith a master of his mark. In the Project Room Roebling Hall is pleased to present "The Corner of Your Eye", Rebecca Horne's first solo exhibition in New York City. At first glance, Rebecca Horne's pictures appear as elegant quotidian scenes or still-lifes of familiar objects. The viewer who too briskly takes in the scene, automatically completing the image in their mind or quickly categorizing it, is lulled into thinking they have fully perceived the image. Peering closer however, the viewer is often surprised to find the photographs reveal themselves to be less ordinary. Horne accomplishes these twists in the photos with a playful wit, slyly employing a mix of punctured routine expectations and improbable events. She devises ephemeral sculptures comprised of raw elements - such as salt, ice, water or ink that coax the unreliability of the photographic image to the fore. By freely mixing objects and their operations to confuse scale or perform little transubstantiations, Horne's photographs function as a record of these performative phenomena. Historically "Nature Morte" operates as a Memento Mori, piercing the illusion of a replete life with reminders of mortality. Horne peels back the alternate veil of illusion, the illusion that still-life is inanimate. Here we glimpse the liminal moment where the image comes to life, quietly slipping from the constraints of logic, revealing the simultaneity of things seen and those that go unseen. Image: Ray Smith Ballerina II 2007 240 x 112" / 609.6 x 284.5 cm Courtesy Roebling Hall and Nicholas Robinson Gallery Roebling Hall, New York 606 West 26th Street NewYork NY 10001 Roebling Hall, New York Read on... Roebling Hall, New York

Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers London Jenny Holzer DETAINED 1 Feb - 15 Mar 2008 Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers is pleased to present DETAINED, an installation by Jenny Holzer. Beginning with her 2004 exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, Holzer has made the study of declassified US government documents the content for her context-based practice. Incorporating memos, sworn statements, emails, directives, judgments, and other government materials regarding the situation in the Middle East into paintings, large scale light projections, and electronic signs, Holzer has harnessed a variety of approaches to make sensate the accounting of war and torture. From documentation to material and situational renderings of bureaucracy's operations, Holzer's presentations of, among others, Department of Defense, White House, CIA, and FBI documents commingle the need to "get the word out" with the urgency to translate those words to a physical register. By activating the senses of the viewer, Holzer recasts the anonymity and indirection of government and administrative language as affecting and wounding objects. Holzer makes material Hannah Arendt's claim that, "Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses." In DETAINED, Holzer exhibits new works including a series of paintings and a large LED configuration. Each oil on linen painting depicts a handprint of an American soldier accused of crimes in Iraq, including detainee abuse and assault. Culled from documents made public through the Freedom of Information Act, Holzer's paintings refuse to be read from the fixity of any one ideology. Hanging the hands of the charged next to those of the wrongly accused and those whose culpability has been lost, the artist represents the fog of war. In her LED artwork, Holzer stacks ten semi- circular signs to animate the front gallery wall. The piece, entitled Torso, displays in red, blue, white, and purple light the statements, investigation reports, and emails from the case files of the accused soldiers. Providing these voices, part damning, contradictory, sympathetic, banal, anecdotal, and evidentiary, Holzer layers accounts of abuse and blame. The installation lays bare that it is the individual who suffers and confronts the mechanics of politics and war. DETAINED makes substantial Wislawa Szymborska's lament and statement in her poem "Tortures" that "the body is and is and is and has nowhere to go." A gallery in the Italian Pavilion of the 2007 Venice Biennale was devoted to Holzer's continuing series of declassified document paintings. A large-scale traveling exhibition of the artist's work, focusing on her output from 1990 to the present, will first open at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in October 2008. Jenny Holzer has presented her ideas, arguments, and sorrows in public places and international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale, the Reichstag, London's City Hall, and the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, since the late seventies. Her medium, whether formulated as a T- shirt, as a plaque, or as an LED sign, is writing, and the public dimension is integral to the delivery of her work. Starting with the New York City posters, and up to her recent light projections and paintings based on declassified government documents, her practice has rivaled ignorance and violence with humor, kindness, and moral courage. Holzer received the Leone d'Oro at the Venice Biennale in 1990. She lives and works in New York. Image: DODDOACID 008769, 2007, oil on linen, 102.25 x 79 in. (259.7 x 200.7 cm.) © 2008 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ DACS, United Kingdom. Courtesy of Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers London 7A Grafton Street London W1S 4EJ Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers London Read on... Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers London

Branch Gallery, Durham NC G1: Calvin Burton - Canopy G2: Javier Pińón 18 Jan - 23 Feb 2008 Branch Gallery is pleased to present Canopy - Calvin Burton's first solo exhibition at the gallery. Burton's gestural, abstract paintings explore the ambivalent nature of the American imaginary. Born in Roanoke, Virginia and raised in Lake Tahoe, Burton's work reflects his interest in political philosophy, history, and the mythic American frontier. Often large in scale, they consider monumental architecture and landscape as allegories for the persistent optimism of the American Dream-drawn from such sources as Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, modernist deck homes, and contemporary skyscrapers, as well as the hills, valleys, and mountains of the perpetually shifting American wilderness. Burton employs abstraction, jarring color combinations, and impasto to confuse the boundaries between the lived and the dreamed, creating surreal landscapes that have an energetic entropy that is particular to abstract painting. As the artist states, "In the mind, personal memories are experienced alongside history, fiction, and film. Sometimes they get confused. As these elements are woven into a painting, like colors, they mingle, fuse, and overlap. This ambiguity is reflected in the flickering relationship between paint and image: each being a vessel for the other." At the same time, such ambiguity may give way to ambivalence-one cannot be sure if these works celebrate or are disillusioned with the Catholic consideration of utopia, inspired by the contemplation of such a grand landscape. Burton seems to wonder if perhaps, this very ambiguity helps to define the American experience. Burton received his mfa from Virginia Commonwealth University. He has participated in solo and group shows at venues including: Raw & Co., Cleveland, OH; ada Gallery, Richmond, VA; Galeria Ramon Alva de la Canal, Veracruz, Mexico; Appetite, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Denise Bibro Gallery, New York, NY; and the California Institute for the Arts, Los Angeles, CA. Branch Gallery is also pleased to present new work by New York based artist Javier Pińón. Though born in Miami, Pińón moved at an early age to Houston, Texas. It was there that he formed a fascination with the American West and its masculine archetype, the cowboy. In his carefully constructed collages, Pińón shows his hero being bucked and thrown from mountains of Chippendale chairs or riding on the backs of crystal chandeliers in a state of triumph. By injecting the violent activity of a rodeo bull into typically static objects, the artist is able to capture a unique sense of tension, drawing the viewer into his unlikely pairing of cultural trappings. Pińón received his mat from Rhode Island School of Design and in 2007 was awarded an artist fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (nyfa). He has participated in group and solo exhibitions at venues such as: El Museo del Barrio, New York; David Risley Gallery, London; Atelier Cardenas Bellanger, Paris, France; Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco; and ZieherSmith, New York, where he is a represented artist. Pińon's work will also be included in the 2008 Beijing Biennale. Image: Calvin Burton Split oil on canvas 70 x 52 2007 Courtesy of Branch Gallery, Durham NC Branch Gallery 401c Foster Street Durham North Carolina Branch Gallery, Durham NC Read on... Branch Gallery, Durham NC

Vegas Gallery London Loose Booty Alexandre Bianchini Jeff McMillan Sylvie Rodriguez Pascal Rousson Guy Sherwin Eileen Simpson & Ben White 24 Jan - 16 Feb 2008 Combining artists based in London and Geneva, Loose Booty presents a wide variety of works made mostly from material borrowed or simply taken in order to create the new. Set adjacent to Brick Lane, the exhibition uses the vernacular of the street market as a mode of presenting seven artists who source, then manipulate their material surroundings. Swiss artist Sylvie Rodriguez will use the streets of London as a source for a new installation. Her works combine makeshift construction with scavenged images and text to suggest a narrative based in both fact and fiction. She has recently participated in exhibitions at Galerie Mars, Moscow and L'Hermitage, St Petersburg. Fellow Geneva-based artist Alexandre Bianchini will exhibit an array of new drawings on transparencies for this occasion. Bianchini has recently held solo exhibitions at Ganga International Gallery, Bogota, Colombia and at Skopia Gallery, Geneva. Pascal Rousson presents new work including retouched paintings and ceramics found in flea markets along with new canvases based on 1960's DIY manuals in work that merges the handyman to modernism. Rousson graduated from the School of Visual Arts Geneva in1991 and now lives and works in London. He recently showed in Write Off at Corsica Arts Club, London. Loose Booty allows a rare gallery viewing of Guy Sherwin's silent black & white 16mm film 'Cycle'. His works concentrate on a single event so that vision is intensified through particular positioning of the camera. Sherwin was part of the influential London Filmmakers Co-op and his films have been widely screened in Europe and the US. Recent solo film programmes have been screened at Cinema de Balie, Amsterdam, Cinema La Clef, Paris, and Ocularis, New York. Jeff McMillan alters objects and second-hand artworks through a simple but decisive use of paint. His new work is a visual mashup of found paintings and studio offcuts with children's wooden puzzles. He has previously shown in Transformer, Woburn Square Research Centre, London and the John Moores 22, 23, 24, The Walker, Liverpool. Eileen Simpson & Ben White source out-of- copyright 78rpm recordings, digitize them, and distribute them via their Open Music Archive website (www.openmusicarchive.org). The pair has brought together several 'cover' versions of a song from the archive, Pinetop's Boogie Woogie, originally written by Clarence 'Pinetop' Smith of Chicago (d. 1929). These versions will be offered free on cd as a way of disseminating these materials back into the public domain. Simpson & White's recent projects include Free-To-Air, Cornerhouse, Manchester, Open Congress, Tate Britain, and Screen Tests, BALTIC, Newcastle. A publication with a text by Joel Vacheron will accompany the exhibition. Pro Helvetia and the Swiss Cultural Fund in Britain have provided support for this exhibition. Loose Booty will travel to Freestudios, Geneva, 13 - 24 March 2008. Image: PASCAL ROUSSON Installation at Vegas Gallery January 2008 Courtesy of Vegas Gallery, London Vegas Gallery 64-66 Redchurch Street London E2 7DP Vegas Gallery, London Read on... Vegas Gallery, London

Next Newsletters re-title.com - Independent directories of emerging & professional contemporary art re-title.com now lists more than 500 galleries and 1400 artists re-title.com is searched and researched by more than 250,000 art professionals & enthusiasts every month. re-title.com newsletters now reach out to over 25,000 recipients. The next re-title.com newsletters are scheduled for: Painting / Drawing - February 5-6 Photography / Film & Video - February 13-14 Sculpture / Installation - February 20-21 Painting / Drawing - February 27-28 Advance Spring 2008 schedule now available. Please contact us to discuss and schedule your requirements for January 2008 - July 2008 These newsletter features are an exclusive service for re-title.com members. Please contact us to arrange inclusion in these newsletters and to discuss your publicity requirements in more detail. More Information...Click here