21 February 2008

re-title.com newsletter - Sculpture & Installation February 2008

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Priska C. Juschka New York MOT International London Postmasters Gallery New York Wyer Gallery London Daneyal Mahmood Gallery New York Galerie Martin Van Zomeren Amsterdam Next Newsletters         sign up!

Priska C. Juschka New York Jade Townsend YARDSALE 31 Jan - 8 Mar 2008 Priska C. Juschka Fine Art is pleased to present YARDSALE, Jade Townsend's second solo exhibition at the gallery. In his ambitious large-scale installation, Townsend confronts the gallery visitors with a meditation on the concept of the "American Dream" in our current consumerist culture. In the main exhibition space, Townsend has constructed a traditional house that has been ripped open and turned inside-out. Replete with appliances, furniture, plants, and leisure-time accessories that are painted entirely white, the inverted interior is on full display, while the outdoors - soil covered ground, picket fence, and dirtied flag - are now enclosed within four dark walls. Conceived by Townsend as a comic tragedy, the abundant yet stark house appears as an emblem of our culture's ironic perception of the traditional American Dream-a generic home filled with various goods that restrict rather than challenge us to seek out diverse experiences. While in the past, nature served as a source of infinite stimulation, nowadays it is entirely disregarded and replaced by formulaic objects-as exemplified in the futile outdoors of Townsend's house. In the wake of increasingly common violent natural disasters that can instantly obliterate all we have acquired in our lifetime-we are asked to reconsider our current vision of an 'ideal' and 'successful' life. This installation therefore prompts us to reflect on the absurdity of the alienating habitat we have sculpted in the course of our continuous quest for self- sustainable happiness. Townsend was born in Iowa and now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He holds a BFA from Iowa State University and an MFA from Hunter College, New York. His installations have appeared in numerous locations both locally and internationally. Most recently, he had a solo exhibition at Art of This gallery in Minneapolis, MN and completed a commissioned project at Scope Miami. image: Jade Townsend YARDSALE (Installation View) 2008 Mixed media Variable dimensions Courtesy of Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, New York Priska C. Juschka Fine Art 547 West 27th Street 2nd Floor New York, NY 10001 Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, New York Read on... Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, New York

MOT International London Ulrich Strothjohann 14 Feb -15 Mar 2008 Hidden in the sprawling mass of seating arrangements that make up the monumental installation, THE HAPPY END OF FRANZ KAFKA'S AMERIKA by Martin Kippenberger, is a makeshift wardrobe or cabinet containing a single chair with what looks to be a map cube. This strange piece is in fact a work by the Artist Ulrich Strothjohann that Kippenberger purchased for his own collection. That it ended up being used by Kippenberger within his own installation might be incredibly problematic for many artists, but for Strothjohann it was the perfect place for the object to find itself. For something to be lost gives it the ability to transform into something else and it is this philosophy of negation, or what appears to be missing that is important in understanding Stothjohann's work. He revels in the contradictions that such dilemmas produce and nowhere more has this been played out than in the blurring between his role as an artist and his role within the Atelier Kippenberger that has led him to be known as the "least well known artist." Looking at Kippenberger I found Strothjohann. For his first solo exhibition at MOTINTERNATIONAL, Strothjohann will be showing a new collection of aluminium made 'trolleys'. These sculptures will be presented, as they might be in a design museum, on a raised base in the form of a U around three sides of the exhibition walls. Such a presentation could throw the viewer into a state of confusion as they try to attribute the possible uses to these exhibited objects that all have a certain familiarity yet deny definition. Ulrich Strothjohann lives and works in Cologne and Berlin, Germany. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens (2007); Adamski Gallery, Aachen (2007); Neuer Aachener Kunstverein (2004), Aachen; M 29, Cologne (2003); kjubh Kunstverein, Cologne ( with Thomas Kalthoff, 2002) and Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne (1998). He has participated in numerous international group exhibitions including " The New Domestic Landscape", Kjubh, Cologne; Make Your Own Life, ICA, University of Philadelphia, USA and Not Quite 10 Years Without Martin Kippenberger, MOT, London ( all 2006); "Deep Action ", Kolbe Museum, Berlin (2005); "Gibt`s mich wirklich ", Museum K 21, Düsseldorf (2003); "Superman in bed ", Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund (2001) and "Deep-distance " , Kunsthalle Basel (2000). Image: Ulrich Strothjohann Courtesy of MOT International MOT International Unit 54 / 5th floor 8 Andrews Road London E8 4QN MOT International, London Read on... MOT International, London

Postmasters Gallery New York DIANA COOPER Overdrive 23 Feb - 29 Mar 2008 Postmasters Gallery is pleased to announce "Overdrive" - an exhibition of recent works by Diana Cooper opening on February 23 and remaining on view until March 29, 2008. This will be the artist's sixth solo show with the gallery. Defying easy categorization Diana Cooper is best known for expanding the idea of drawing into the third dimension to create dense, line-driven sculptural hybrids. Essentially abstract, yet projecting an inherent sense of systems, networks and circuitry, Cooper's works bridge the organic and technological realm. They transcend the childlike doodling of repetition, multiplication and absent-mindedness to create complex spatial units where spontaneity and control, chaos and order, joy and seriousness coexist. Cooper says: I am fascinated by maps, subway systems, color- coding, the relationships between macroscopic and microscopic imagery. But I always feel that I operate by osmosis. I really am influenced by the visual world. I want the work to have a sensuality and visual impact. And I think a lot of systems are visual. Systems are a way people try to make sense of things or create order. They also are all around us, in the natural world and in the man-made world, and I am intrigued by how they intersect, echo one another, or come into conflict. But I am less drawn to the specific content or narrative of a given system, which for me is just raw material. In fact, I am interested when something like a diagram or a graph disassociates itself from its origin and becomes something else entirely. A large survey show "Beyond the Line: the Art of Diana Cooper" curated by Margo Crutchfield was on view in the fall of 2007 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland. Spanning 10 years of work, this was Cooper's first one-person museum exhibition. "All Our Wanderings" (2007), a monumental freestanding sculpture originally commissioned by MOCA Cleveland is a centerpiece of the Postmasters' exhibition. A multi-sectioned, blood-red structure of interlocking wooden shells (Margo Crutchfield describes it in a catalogue as "a fallen ziggurat or a gargantuan armadillo made of hard edged angular segments,"), it incorporates Cooper's earlier drawings that are digitally printed and laminated onto the sculpture's hollow interior and are then further drawn upon. Discussing the piece in the current issue of Art Papers, Douglas Max Utter calls it an autobiographical time machine where " the infinity of former doodles becomes the ground for the artist to scrawl a fresh generation of hand drawn marks. The structural solidity of the wooden boxes and their febrile, reproducible interiors suggest that Cooper's prolific ephemera are beginning to build their own cultural reef." The second gallery of Postmasters will be transformed to create an enclosed chapel-like space for "Orange Alert UK" (2003-2008) - an ongoing room installation, that began during Cooper's residency at the Wimbledon School of Art in London and was originally inspired by the color coded terror alert system established by US Government post 9/11. Image: Diana Cooper All our Wanderings, 2007 wood, paper, vinyl, custom pigment print, ink, acrylic, colored pencil, ball point pen, foam rubber, felt, Sharpie, Velcro 76 x 80 143 inches from MOCA Cleveland exhibition photo by Diana Cooper Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York Postmasters Gallery 459 West 19th Street (at 10th Avenue) New York, NY 10011 Postmasters Gallery, New York Read on... Postmasters Gallery, New York

Wyer Gallery London Jennifer Taylor New Gallery Installation 14 Feb - 15 Mar 2008 Wyer Gallery is delighted to announce Jennifer Taylor's first solo show. Throughout January, the recent Royal College of Art graduate has been in residence at the gallery assembling her most ambitious installation to date. Wyer Gallery has been transformed into a chaotic labyrinth, crammed with a mass of intertwining pipes, mechanisms and domestic objects. Taylor creates elaborate interiors that at times exude a baroque sensuality and at others resemble Heath Robinson contraptions, out of control kitchens or 'mad professor' laboratories. Investigating the visual world around us, she uses an ever-expanding array of materials that it would be impossible to catalogue. She makes use of different viewing spaces and apertures to challenge her medium and plays with the language of sculpture by using familiar domestic objects, such as mincers, juicers, vacuum cleaner hoses or washing machine extractors. Within her installations, these objects transcend their original functions as they are transformed into absurd instruments with bizarre or dark tasks to perform and small interactions between objects become excessive and almost farcical. For her new project every item of her constructions is sprayed white and then coated in a layer of translucent microcrystalline wax, this sensual material softening objects, making them more visceral and inviting the viewer to relate to them in a different way. Drained of their real colour and distorted with the wax coating, ordinary logic becomes lost and the viewer is transported into the realm of fiction and dreams. Indeed, the visual intensity of Taylor's spaces, their impossible complexities resemble spaceship scenes from the film Alien, or bring to mind Stephen King's Maximum Overdrive, in which various murderous appliances include a hairdryer that strangles its owner with the power cord and an electric carving knife that spontaneously turns on its user's own arm. Taylor's work preys on a sense of anxiety that perhaps feeds off this kind of sub-genre of horror film as much as it does off a more rational fear of the mutation of cancer cells or the degeneration of the human mind. And, at their heart, her installations explore that energy which exists at the moment of breakdown or change. Jennifer Taylor graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2007. She has exhibited internationally in group shows including the prestigious Jen RÍve, at Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris and, more recently, in Says the Junk in the Yard at Flowers East, London. This will be her first solo show Image: Jennifer Taylor New Installation Wyer Gallery, 2008 Courtesy of Wyer Gallery, London Wyer Gallery 191 St. John's Hill London SW11 1TH Wyer Gallery, London Read on... Wyer Gallery, London

Daneyal Mahmood Gallery New York GUERRA DE LA PAZ Green Zone 14 Feb - 22 Mar 2008 The Green Zone - the International Zone in Iraq - is a heavily guarded diplomatic area of closed-off streets in central Baghdad where US personnel live and work. It is completely surrounded by high concrete blast walls and barbed wire. Access is only available through a handful of entry points, all of which are controlled by armed guards. It is the American military's heavily fortified and painstakingly Americanized home - The Green Zone residents eat standard American food, almost all of it brought in from abroad. They have an elaborate gym, satellite TV, computers, DVDs, and telephones with U.S. area codes, as well as a bar known as the "Country Club" - the place to go for Cuban cigars, fresh cuts of beef and a decent wine. The Green Zone is a little America in the middle of a war zone embedded in the heart of Baghdad. Contrary to popular belief, the Green Zone is lush and tropical - It's a perfect Middle Eastern paradise. It is a famous paradox that walls that protect you also hem you in. In the hands of the artist duo Guerra de la Paz, this absurd unreality serves as a catalyst for the discussion of the sociopolitical effects that such fictitious fortresses create in society. Through the use of the discarded abundance of the American lifestyle, these artists compose a grand fabric interpretation of an idealized landscape. The idyllic scenery is fashioned out of discarded garments, hand picked from mountainous piles of clothing designated to over flowing landfills created by our disposable culture. The artists' interest in the recycled object as an art medium examines the western concepts of cultural ownership and fictitious ideologies. Tree trunks made of tons of clothing weigh heavy on the ground, brown pants, sweaters, and jackets are industriously twisted into life like roots lolling around the gallery floor. Overhead a canopy forms where green garments hang gently down and sways in the breeze. No strangers to large provocative installations, Guerra de la Paz in these works as in others: Oasis (2006); Pieta (2005); Eden (2003) and Overflow (2002), pricks at America's cultural conflicts - seeking to define struggle, victory, and failure - while taking society's belongings and parading them about is as if to say, "No really, the emperor has no clothes." Though presented as a sheltered oasis of a sort, the forest beckons the viewers forward leading them towards a distant red light where the artists' presentation of the sculpture Martyr - a lone camouflage clad crucified figure hangs ominously on a pristine white wall. This sculpture stands as a personification of the ideals of universal sacrifice, which is freely sequestered from all its citizens lost to endless political plots for control and domination. A symbol of defiance and faith, whether a pawn of government or a true devote, here the artists are able to draw parallels between the two images that incarnate dialogue, questioning and defying authority. - Lynn del Sol Image: Guerra de La Paz Green Zone, 2008 (installation view) used clothing, mixed media Image courtesy of Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, New York Daneyal Mahmood Gallery 511 West 25th Street 3rd Floor New York, NY 10001 Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, New York Read on... Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, New York

Galerie Martin Van Zomeren Amsterdam Matt Calderwood : DAM 23 Feb - 29 Mar 2008 Galerie Martin van Zomeren is pleased to announce DAM, Matt Calderwood's first solo presentation in the Netherlands. Calderwood (1975, Northern Ireland)has become increasingly well known for his videos in recent years. His videos and sculptures deal with balance, instability, danger and risk, minimalism counterbalanced with a good sense of visual humor. For Galerie Martin van Zomeren Calderwood produced a group of six sculptures in which balance through geometrical forms is of primary concern. Standing Malevich-like minimalistic shapes (the typography of Pop Art also comes to mind) are about to collapse but are fortunately kept from falling over by a sack of sand. The works are made of plywood and covered with hooligan proof coating ( 'textured anti-fly poster coating') that is widely used in London's public space. Matt Calderwood works and lives in London. His upcoming exhibitions include Transformed, a group show at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, USA. Recent solo exhibitions include Projections at David Risley Gallery (2007), London and Hot Air at Taxter and Spengeman, New York (2007) Recent group shows include New Blood, Saatchi Gallery, London (2004) and Art Now, Lightbox, Tate Britain, London (2005) Image: Matt Calderwood Courtesy of Galerie Martin Van Zomeren, Amsterdam Galerie Martin Van Zomeren Prinsengracht 276 Amsterdam 1016 HJ Netherlands Galerie Martin Van Zomeren, Amsterdam Read on... Galerie Martin Van Zomeren, Amsterdam

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