|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
Judi Rotenberg Gallery,
Boston |
|
May 3- June 1, 2008
Embracing the contradictions in our contemporary
celebration of Graffiti and Street Art, PIXNIT works
synergistically as a street artist who illegally stencils work
in public places, and as a gallery artist who exhibits
commissioned work in commercial and institutional spaces. The
name PIXNIT is derived from the Latin word pinxit, often
included in the signature of paintings from the 1800's,
meaning she/he painted this work. For this artist, the
identity PIXNIT functions as both a veil of anonymity as well
as a means to name a finite body of work.
In her new exhibition titled, "Hello my name is PIXNIT,"
the artist presents a pictorial space where architecture is
flattened and painting becomes three-dimensional. PIXNIT
integrates her signature stenciled wall paintings with mixed
media sculpture and dimensional painting, creating an
opportunity for interaction, as well as invitation to
physically navigate around the various sites in the show.
Overall, the exhibition is an installation that negotiates
space and plays with the expectations of the viewer.
Borrowing and re-contextualizing elements from historical
sources, PIXNIT presents a panoply of imagery throughout the
gallery. She engages the decorative arts with references to
architectural and interior ornament, combining imagery of
chandeliers, gates, urns, and birdcages. The entire exhibition
is a decadent theater of reflection and artifice--encouraging
us to reconfigure our notions of beauty and excess.
"Hello my name is PIXNIT" highlights the pervasive
malaise of the modern era, while engulfing us in the
indulgences of the Western world. It is a conversation with
history, universality, excess, cheapness, middle-class
banality, objectivity, romanticism, and sappiness. Whether one
eventually experiences her work as a pointed critique or
aesthetic event, pleasure and humor will serve the
experience.
Image:
PIXNIT
Installation at Judi Rotenberg Gallery, May
2008
Courtesy of the artist and Judi
Rotenberg Gallery, Boston MA
Judi Rotenberg Gallery
130 Newbury
Street
Boston, MA 02116
|
|
Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, New
York |
Justine Cooper
Terminal
8 May - 14 June 2008
Daneyal Mahmood Gallery presents TERMINAL a two-part
installation by Justine Cooper. Included is RAPT I and II,
marking the 10 year anniversary of these seminal works.
Cooper's work expresses multiple ideas of desire, drawing
from the fields of medicine and science, which outwardly may
seem far from desire. Yet there is a desire by natural science
to rationalize our sublime world, to understand where we came
from, and perhaps where we are heading. There is a desire by
medicine to push the physical and chemical boundaries of our
bodies into places that may make us healthier or happier.
Through her art, Cooper manifests her curiosity as to how
these areas intersect with us as a society and as
individuals.
The title of the current show refers to her new series of
large format photographs depicting medical robots and
mannequins. These sophisticated manikins, typically connected
up to computers, simulate living situations from crisis to
childbirth. At once alien and familiar, they represent the
feats of modern medical technology. Far from the public
dissections of the 17th century, these private theaters play
out imagined traumas for the benefit of doctors and surgeons
honing their skills. In this landscape, the abject body of the
patient is dispensed with and supplanted by creations that are
neither virtual, nor real. At a time when medical intervention
can be so de-humanizing, when technology is criticized for
removing us from reality, these images create a perverse
inversion. The artist found that the personnel charged with
the care of the mannequins had humanized these objects into
subjects by naming them, dressing them in holiday attire and
constructing a narrative through their care. These million
dollar manikins embody memories of daily life, offering up
their injuries and procedures as rather austere visual diaries
in the era of Second Life and the blogosphere.
RAPT (1998) has been celebrated internationally as a work
of great complexity and beauty. RAPT I is a computer animation
created from hundreds of images produced when Cooper
voluntarily underwent six hours of MRI (Magnetic Resonance
Imaging) scanning. RAPT II is an installation comprised of 76
of the MRI axial scans, printed on architectural film,
suspended and aligned to create a 24 foot long floating body.
Rapt is what the artist calls a universal Self Portrait,
originally posing the question of if and how new technologies
shift the way we can conceive of space, by presenting us with
an alternate, elastic interpretation of the body.. "Just as
the body is re-codified through medical technology, so its
internal spaces and brute physicality are remapped and made
accessible in these works. Living flesh is translated into
malleable data".
Bringing the two bodies of work together, made 10 years
apart, highlights Cooper's continued and inventive use of the
body. Whether factual in the case of RAPT, or fictional in the
Terminal portraits, her work forges relationships between
identity and medicine in a technologically advanced
society.
Born in Sydney, Australia and currently residing in New
York, interdisciplinary artist, Justine Cooper's artwork
investigates the intersections between culture, science and
medicine. She moves between many forms of media - photography,
animation, video, installation, as well as medical imaging
technologies such as MRI, DNA sequencing, Ultrasound and SEM
(scanning electron microscopy). Her work has been
internationally recognized and exhibited and screened at
venues including The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York;
Ars Electronica, Linz, The NTT InterCommunication Center,
Tokyo; The Singapore Museum of Art; The Netherlands Institute
for Media Art, The George Pompidou Centre, Paris; Kwang Ju
Biennale, Korea, and the International Center of Photography,
New York. Cooper's artwork is held in public and private
collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The
Powerhouse Museum (Sydney), The Queensland Art Gallery and the
Australian Center for the Moving Image.
Image:
Justine Cooper
RAPT II -
Installation View, 1998
MRI scans on architectural film, 3
x 3 x 25 ft
Courtesy of the artist and Daneyal Mahmood
Gallery, New York
Daneyal Mahmood Gallery
511 West 25th
Street 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001
|
|
NETTIE HORN, London |
|
Petradora
Annie Attridge
25 April - 24 May 2008
NETTIE HORN is pleased to present
Petradora, a solo exhibition by British artist
Annie Attridge; featuring a new series of
sculptural porcelain works, drawings and etchings.
Working mainly with porcelain, Attridge produces small
scale, delicately crafted figurative scenes and objects that
are expressionistic and often overtly sexual. The sculptures
recall abstract figures and forms set in a mythological
landscape, frozen in this seductive and lustrous material. The
scenes depicted are classical in theme and recall 17th century
crafted miniatures and notions of the ready-made.
Since graduating from the Royal Academy Schools in 2002,
Attridge's practice has focused on exploring female sexuality
through the use of different materials such as household
materials, jesmonite and more recently porcelain. Abstracting
the female form, Attridge explores ideas of seduction,
sensuality and beauty, mixing contemporary context and
traditional materials with an air of mischievous
fruitiness.
Attridge's objects of desire are intimate yet playful,
and are displayed as islands of "curiosities" - each taking on
a diaristic approach. The ornamental and seductive qualities
of porcelain and its intrinsic potential to be modelled,
stretched, shaped, carved and decorated with coloured glazes
lend the sculptures a pictorial quality. Using an amalgamation
of references and symbols, female figures seep and morph into
each other, entangled in commitment and struggling for
freedom; dripping breast desserts, dying flowers and hearts
sweep across alien landscapes; legs emerge from oozing
puddles, and trees loom over billowing mounds of curves.
Attridge's drawings are sculptural in their process,
using charcoal directly onto high-grade cartridge paper, the
rough spontaneous marks and sweeping movements evoke a
vitality which becomes more gestural and flowing. The black
and white excess of the drawings and their monumental quality
explore a world full of joie de vivre and their juxtaposition
with the sculptures result in an ambivalent environment where
both mediums become fluid and existent subjects and
consequently continue to seduce us and draw our
attention.
Annie Attridge was born in 1975 and
graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2002. Past
exhibitions include Art Futures at the Bloomberg Space;
Baroqueism at the Royal Academy Schools gallery; Splash &
Spectacle at the Economist Plaza and Baroque My World at
Transition gallery.
Image:
Annie Attridge
Installation at Nettie
Horn
May 2008
Courtesy of Nettie Horn, London
NETTIE HORN
25b Vyner St
London, E2 9DG
|
|
Caren Golden Fine Art, New
York |
|
8 May - 21 June 2008
Caren Golden Fine Art is pleased to
present Slump, Tom Burckhardt's fifth solo
exhibition with the gallery. Burckhardt resumes his ongoing
appraisal of his own practice and the sources of the creative
impulse in his FULL STOP exhibition of 2005. Burckhardt, who
has mounted numerous painting exhibitions, now asks the viewer
to question whether his new works are paintings or sculptures;
abstract or representational. The slumping "canvases" and
artifacts from the studio are made of wood, cardboard and
Variform (a synthetic modeling film) and painted with enamel.
Each has a funky, hand-built approach, which simultaneously
subverts a trompe l'oeil reading of the object and undercuts
the air of self-importance associated with hermetic
abstraction. While most painters tend to gravitate to one end
of the spectrum or the other, Burckhardt chooses to conflate
the two approaches, feeding off the charged relationship and
reevaluating its boundaries. Is the paint bucket rendered as a
representation and the canvas as an abstraction, or vice
versa? In a sense this show is a restaging of the moment in
art history when Pop Art challenged New York School
abstraction for pictorial dominance. Here, however, rather
than historicizing the issue, Burckhardt treats it as a
personal drama, with humor and affection leading to
reconciliation. The conflicting moods of sad sack pessimism
and improbable optimism conspire to imply a state of
exhaustion, revisiting the doubt displayed in FULL STOP. In
Slump Burckhardt collapses the distance between the place of
his paintings' creation and the place of their exhibition -
with sagging canvases propped on paint cans, crates and
ladders. By doing so, Burckhardt rejuvenates these weary
objects and invests them with optimism.
Burckhardt states: "Painting is not dead, but it can seem
a bit beleaguered. As a young artist, my energy and idealism
was unbounded. At this point, in middle age, I need to
reignite my love of the act of painting. I want to have it
all, and this form of artmaking is my way of having objective
and abstract paintings co-exist in a unique way. Many people
still come to a painting on the wall of a gallery and assume
it has already achieved a certain level of authority. As an
artist, I don't always trust this relationship; if we beat
down these preconceptions, perhaps a genuine optimistic space
will be opened. By lowering the floor, you raise the
ceiling."
In 2005/2006, Tom Burckhardt's FULL STOP was exhibited at
Caren Golden Fine Art, NYC, DiverseWorks in Houston, TX and
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT.
Burckhardt's work has been praised in The New York Times, Art
in America, ArtForum, ArtNews, Art & Antiques, Harper's
and The New Yorker, among others. He is a two-time recipient
of the Pollack-Krasner grant.
Image:
Tom Burckhardt
Studio Shot
Courtesy of the artist and Caren Golden Fine Art, New
York
Caren Golden Fine Art
539 West 23rd
Street
Ground Floor
New York, NY 10011
|
|
BANK, Los Angeles |
|
 Main Gallery:
JOSHUA CALLAGHAN
Very Concerned, Somewhat
Concerned, Not at all Concerned
May 10 - June 14, 2008
Joshua Callaghan's interdisciplinary work is often a mix
of wit, dark humor and critique of American material culture.
For his debut at Bank, Callaghan culls together found material
to create abstract sculptures of graphs and charts mapping a
variety of data. These linear geometric forms can easily
be dismissed as homage to minimalist object making until the
titles reveal their true identity. The sculptures are
pictorial devices measuring human behavior, cultural garbage,
political strife and so on. This exhibition is as much a
collection of ideas about how our culture defines itself
through statistics as a collection of formal propositions.
The impulse behind this body of work can be clearly
traced to the context from which it emerged; looming
pessimism, economic insecurity, and a sense of helplessness in
the face of the inertia of a civilization moving toward
certain collapse. In compensation comes the absurd and
arrogant feeling of privilege of being a witness to that
collapse, an impulse that must be common to many individuals
throughout cultures and history who sense they are living in
the downward slope of a statistical arc.
Joshua Callaghan has exhibited internationally at venues
including the UC Riverside Sweeney Gallery, The Guggenheim
Gallery of Chapman University, and LA Louver in Los Angeles.
His videos have been shown at museums and film festivals
around the world and he has completed a series of public
projects in Southern California. Callaghan is the
recipient of a Fulbright Grant, holds a BA in Cultural
Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at
Asheville and a MFA in New Genres from UCLA. He is based in
Los Angeles.
Project Room:
PAUL BUTLER
Everybody
Paul Butler's collage work centers around idealized
images depicted in typical glossy magazine spreads. Using the
language of subtraction or effacement, Butler masks out text
or figures using layers of tape and torn paper to create a
hybrid between abstraction, portraiture and editorial
design. For "Everybody," Butler introduces a new series
of text-based works that focus on the isolation of single
words found in books and magazines pages. Floating on sheets
of negative space, these solitary words create a quiet
disjointed narrative, perhaps the artists attempt at
meditation.
Paul Butler is a Winnipeg based artist known for his
traveling 'Collage Party!' exhibitions. The Museum of
Contemporary Canadian Art and Illingworth Kerr Gallery has
recently published a catalog archiving these exhibitions.
Butler has also exhibited at White Columns in NY, Zieher Smith
NY, MOCA Geffen LA in association with Outpost for
Contemporary Art as well as MOCA Grand Ave. and the Power
Plant, Toronto. Butler is also the director of Winnipeg's
Other Gallery, which represents the work of a newly emerging
generation of Canadian artists; guest curator of Plug IN ICA's
Overlooked Space; and the founder of theUpperTradingPost.com,
a non-profit, invitational forum for artists'
trading.
Images:
Joshua Callaghan, "Very Concerned,
Somewhat Concerned, Not at all Concerned," 2008
wood, enamel, 39x12x4"
Paul Butler, Untitled 2007
collage 8.5 x 11"
Courtesy of BANK, Los Angeles
BANK
125 W. 4th St. Ste
103
Los Angeles, CA 90039
|
|
|
|
re-title.com - Independent directories of
emerging & professional contemporary art
Coming Next
May 14-15 Painting & Drawing
May 21-22
Photography, Film & Video
May 28-29 Sculpture &
Installation
June 4-5 Painting & Drawing
These newsletter features are an exclusive service for
re-title.com members.
Please contact us for membership information
and to discuss your publicity requirements in more
detail
| |
|
|
| |
