October 31, 2006

Photography November 2006

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Monika Sprueth Philomene Magers, Cologne Bucket Rider, Chicago Galerie Caprice Horn, Berlin Sara Tecchia Roma - New York Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York Paul Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles Espace Lacen, Paris Bellwether, New York Van Horn, Dusseldorf Cohen Amador Gallery, New York Next from re-title.com         sign up!

Monika Sprueth Philomene Magers, Cologne Richard Prince: Cowboys, Mountains and Sunsets The photographs from his Cowboys, Desert Islands, Gangs, and Upstate series along with the Tire planters sculptures represent important aspects of Prince’s artistic production since the early 1980s. Richard Prince’s work had a major impact on the concept of ‘appropriation art’. His artistic strategy of appropriating foreign pictorial worlds can be understood as the initial spark for a generation of artists that – in the early 1980s – made the artistic discourse regarding the questions of authorship and originality of the artwork the subject of their work. In the late 1970s, Richard Prince moved to New York where he first worked for Time-Life. His job was to look through magazines and pass on the articles to the respective writers. Once the articles had been clipped from the various magazines the advertisement – the authorless material of the print media – would remain. This oft-quoted anecdote from the artist’s life points towards the fundamental structures of the work of Richard Prince: The accumulation of commercial images represented to him a hyperreal high-gloss world of perfect looking, luxury-consuming people. Prince started appropriating these images of what he termed “social science fiction”. With the camera, the “electronic scissors” (Prince), he selected areas without text and brought these (re-)photographs into the context of art. This simple act had great implications: Were these images originals? Were they even more authentic than the original? Who and where was the author? Where is the artistic invention, where is the artistic genius? The boundaries between reality and fiction, between ‘high’ and ‘low art’, between the mass-marketable iconography of advertisement and the original work of art are becoming blurred. By appropriating these found worlds of images and presenting these photographs in series Prince exposes the myths of middle-class America while simultaneously showing the beholder how these myths are coded. Apart from images culled from the advertisement for luxury articles such as watches or cosmetics, Prince often employs the image of the cowboy from the Marlboro ads. With the works in this exhibition, Prince shows the vision of the ‘lonesome cowboy’ working hard in the big wide open and breath-taking landscapes of North America, taking in the raw beauty of nature – the dream of little boys and the yearning of men trapped in the drab routines of their everyday lives. The staged, gaudy pictures pretend to show the ‘real thing’, the real life, freed from the shackles of everyday life. The mass media generate reality. Read on...Monika Sprueth Philomene Magers, Cologne

Bucket Rider, Chicago Sarah Anne Johnson : In the Forest Sarah Anne Johnson’s work explores idealism, nature, and humanity’s ongoing struggles with the natural world. The main installation of In the Forest is a room of large lenticular panels of spruce trees photographed at night, making them appear to sway in the evening breeze This installation is accompanied by a new series of photographs which continue the work from her Tree Planting series in 2005. In this project, she combined traditional landscape photographs and the people involved in it with photographs of sculptural dioramas that recorded her memories of lived experience. The juxtaposition of the lived or instantiated and the remembered adds another dimension to the distance from the natural world that we draw out by our simple presence in it. Ms. Johnson was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1976. She completed her MFA at Yale in 2004, where she is currently teaching. Her thesis project, Tree Planting, was exhibited at Julie Saul Gallery in New York in 2005 where it garnered tremendous critical success. It subsequently traveled to Duke University and the Platform Gallery in Winnipeg. She also recently exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg and the Cartier Foundation in Paris. Her photographs are in the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery, Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, KS, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. This is her first solo exhibition with Bucket Rider Gallery. Read on...Bucket Rider, Chicago

Galerie Caprice Horn, Berlin Refraction: Margi Geerlinks, Erwin Olaf, Sveinn Fannar Johannsson, Maslen & Mehra, Tim White-Sobieski, Lukas Maximilian Hüller, Daniel & Geo Fuchs, Liza Nguyen, Denise Marika, JH Engström, and Michael Ackermann Galerie Caprice Horn Berlin are pleased to present the group exhibition Refraction within the frame of the EUROPEAN MONTH OF PHOTOGRAPHY which is taking place throughout November in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Bratislava, Luxembourg, Moscow and Rome. The photographic works of the exhibition are all concerned with the technical and emotional fracture occurring between the individual and his surroundings. Daniel & Geo Fuchs approach extreme personal situations, which others would prefer to avoid. Their series “Conserving” portrays life-in-death with objects from scientific collections. Lukas Maximilian Hüller, on the other hand, makes an appeal to human conscience and thematizes in an innovative manner the Seven Deadly Sins with reference to Hieronymus Bosch’s depiction of these transgressions in the form of a circular table. In the works of Maslen & Mehra, Californian and Australian landscapes are reflected in the human beings themselves. An effect created by placing mirror sculptures of people in different contexts and photographing them. The staging of living dream- sequences by Sveinn Fannar Johannsson makes the unusual behaviour of his figures seem almost familiar. In the works of the Dutchwoman Margi Geerlinks, the individual creates a personal and utterly new world. In the artistic perspective of Erwin Olaf, the search for identity by the naked astral body culminates in the purchase of designer articles intended to strengthen the ego. Liza Nguyen has created a quite personal portrait of her deceased father with the series “My father.” JH Engström continues the work of his teacher Anders Petersen and thematizes the deep desire for life, where as Michael Ackermann, with his black-and- white pictures of Poland, transcends the border between painting and photography. As the sole artist working from behind a video camera, Denise Marika depicts in her “Video Sculptures” the refraction of light upon moving nude figures. Read on... Galerie Caprice Horn, Berlin

Sara Tecchia Roma - New York Christina McPhee : La Conchita mon amour Sara Tecchia Roma New York is proud to premiere La Conchita mon amour, an exhibition featuring photography, HD video, digital print, and drawing by California-based artist Christina McPhee. With this new body of work, McPhee continues her exploration of the synchronicity between natural disaster and human trauma at the tiny coastal town of La Conchita, California. This community, just north of Los Angeles on Highway 1/101, is built on an ancient mudslide and has been subject to periodic massive debris flows. The most recent, in 2005, took ten lives and left a huge mass of fallen mountain on the town. Yet the inhabitants must continue to stay, despite the inevitable recurrence of this threat. La Conchita remaps the problematic of living with disaster in California in immediate, raw terms, since the trauma is always already here. Global warming appears to be accelerating the danger. Without resources for healing or leaving, La Conchita lives on in abandonment. The plight of residents at La Conchita is a microcosm of the conditions of bare life in post-911 material culture. For the past year at one month intervals, the artist has shot medium format and digital photographs of the disaster's vernacular shrines to the dead on the site of the mudslide chain link barriers a rubble of mud, destroyed house frames, roofs, retaining walls, play yards, swing sets and crushed cars. She has recorded video and audio in these site visits at quiet times of the day, developing a time based record of the cyclical power of the tides, the freeway sounds, and the voices of residents who would sometimes guide her into precarious parts of the ruin. Her working methods perform an intimate and subtle connection to the architectural conditions of the site, which also give rise to graphite and ink study drawings of the threat of debris flow. The drawings are repetitive and performative as if to retrace the edges of that which cannot be visualized. Given the impossibility of representing trauma, McPhee's images reach through obsessive layers of visual data towards an integration beyond the material facts of the site. The large scale images that result from this process are topologies of absence and recovery. Like the prayer flags they record, the images are performance gestures, signaling an attempt to remain in touch with hope and life in the face of indifference. Read on...Sara Tecchia Roma - New York

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York Hannah Starkey Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is very pleased to announce Hannah Starkey’s first exhibition with the gallery and the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York. Hannah Starkey constructs complex, yet seemingly fleeting images that primarily portray women's encounters with other women and their environment. Seeking to explore "everyday experiences and observations of inner city life from a female perspective". Her images often portray moments of quiet drama, touching upon areas of experience which are familiar but which remain unspoken or below the surface. Suggesting narratives based on chance experiences and personal impressions within the shifting structures of contemporary society Starkey captures her subjects in the private moments that often occur in the most public places, from lobbies and restaurants to libraries and hospitals. The images are the result of precisely chosen locations and staged rendezvous within our shared urban environment, and respond to everyday human experience. Importantly, Starkey uses not “actors”, but people she encounters at the locations she is exploring. Seeing this approach as inherent to the engagement with the environment, and further emphasising the mutual psychological shift between the subject and their surroundings. Also, predominant in this latest body of work (through 2005 – 2006) is the attention given to the relationship between physical and represented space. Aware of the psychological effects our surroundings can impose, Starkey further explores these notions to sometimes eerie effect. The absence of a horizon line or vanishing point, reflective surfaces and the presentation of a three dimensional space represented in two dimensions within the artists frame all serve to reinforce the abstract and psychological drama. Read on...Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Paul Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles David Maisel : Oblivion The Paul Kopeikin Gallery is proud to present “Oblivion”, an exhibition of recent aerial work of the city of Los Angeles by photographer David Maisel. Maisel calls his Oblivion chapter a coda to The Lake Project; the deliberate draining of the Owens Dry Lake to feed the once arid, but now well-watered L.A. Basin, which has enabled the megapolis of southern California to come into being. Aerial photography is expected to function as maps, to bear a one-to-one correspondence with reality, but the dissonance between our expectations and what we see presents us with a puzzle we are compelled to address in “Oblivion.” As we cast a critical eye upon the megalopolis of Los Angeles, it is necessary to remind ourselves that there is still a heart beating within it. Indeed, 10 million hearts, with all the souls and dreams of the bodies powered by those hearts: the city as living, breathing organism, constantly breaking down and constantly replicating. Read on...Paul Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles

Espace Lacen, Paris Maslen & Mehra EXPRMNTL galerie, LACEN, Bertrand Grimont with the cooperation of Galerie Caprice Horn Berlin present the first solo exhibition in Paris of London based artists MASLEN & MEHRA. The exhibition continues until the 30th of November. In an age of digital photography and Photoshop trickery, Maslen & Mehra have found themselves immersed in traditional, manual photographic techniques. Creating their photographic work is quite a layered process. They start by photographing the subject matter: for example, for the series in California/ Nevada, they photographed people in London and then fabricated mirrored sculptures based on these original photographs. The real people were photographed in busy urban areas such as Liverpool Street Station and Oxford Street, London. They captured the body language and movement of anonymous people in the throes of their busy working lives. The sculptures were then set up in various compositions in different contexts and then re- photographed with a medium format film camera. The resulting medium format transparencies are drum- scanned to the maximum size files in order to create high quality prints on aluminium or duratrans (transparency for light-box). The large-scale light- boxes are re-cycled and refurbished advertising displays from the London Underground. They have chosen to re-use existing boxes, shifting the context and meaning of a familiar urban object. The exhibition in Paris features work created this year in Australia and New Zealand and also work from a trip in 2005 to Death Valley and the Mojave Desert California/Nevada during the most exceptional wildflower season in 100 years. 'as is announced metaphorically by the mirrored images. Nature is much more vast and mighty. It marks the human beings living within its realm, and not the other way around.' quote from Mirrored - the photography of Maslen & Mehra by Eugen Blume the Chief Curator of the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum. Read on...Espace Lacen, Paris, London

Bellwether, New York Dice Thrown (Will Never Annul Chance) Curated by Joao Ribas and Becky Smith Walead Beshty, Peter Coffin, Elspeth Diederix, Marius Engh, Daniel Lefcourt, David Lieske, Lisa Oppenheim, Eileen Quinlan, Amanda Ross-Ho, Sara VanDerBeek, Melanie Willhide, Spencer Young Photography has undergone two major shifts in the past few decades: the loss of its objective relationship to reality, and the medium’s increasing distance from modernism through its use in conceptual art. Recent conceptual photography has amended these two directions with a break from the way conceptual artists relegated photography to architectonic and instrumental uses, often merely to illustrate, dematerialize or record. What results is a form of conceptual photography that approaches the medium as a poetic and expressive process. While digital technology has transformed the medium's pictorial potential, supposedly bringing it closer to the logic of painting, this new kind of photographic practice engages a conceptual space specific to the medium. “Dice Thrown (Will Never Annul Chance)” aims to contextualize a set of artists--many not yet associated with each other--that approach photography as an ideational, anti-mimetic, yet decidedly formal area of artistic practice. Whether by treating a photograph as an instantiation of an idea or an object--rather than its surrogate--or as a distinct image-making method, this kind of photography moves beyond the notion of a photograph as illustrative, as a 'picture' of the real, or as a mere supplement for ephemeral and time- based art. Replacing many of the traditional concerns of photographic practice, such work also confronts the reductive understanding of the medium’s role in the wake of conceptual art. With an active investment in the epistemological, socio-cultural, and material aspects of photography itself, and by intersecting it with a variety of disciplines, the artists included in “Dice Thrown (Will Never Annul Chance)” develop a diverse set of issues intrinsic to photography moving beyond the notion of a photograph as illustrative, or as a mere supplement for ephemeral and time-based art. Read on... Bellwether, New York

Van Horn, DUSSELDORF Jens Ullrich : Willkommende Gemeinschaft The piece “Welcoming Community” consists of many magazine-photos of political protests, on which Jens Ullrich exchanged the slogans on the placards with abstract, ornamental graphics made of Lettraset- collages. He still uses the typographic letter-system (Lettraset was used in the pre-computer time), but uses now the single letters as abstract forms, so from the new images one can’t read off concrete messages anymore.The photo-series, whose title refers to a book by Giorgio Agamben, shows protesters of various couleur, who do not carry a political placard, but rather demonstrate an artwork. Jens Ullrich *1968, lives and works in Dusseldorf. He studied at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf with Gerhard Merz and is teaching at UDK Berlin. In 2006 he has exhibitions at Museum Besiktas, Istanbul; Goethe- Institute, Paris and Tate Modern, London. Read on... Van Horn, Berlin

Cohen Amador Gallery, New York Olaf Otto Becker : Under the Nordic Light The Cohen Amador Gallery is pleased to present “Under the Nordic Light”, the first US exhibition of German photographer Olaf Otto Becker’s color landscape photography from Iceland. With a painter’s eye, and his large format camera, Becker covered over 11,000 miles of Icelandic terrain, taking perhaps 100 pictures. By photographing at night, with the flat, diffuse Nordic summer light diminishing shadows and elongating the intensity of his palate, Becker doesn’t photograph scenery, he builds compositions, using his eye - and his patience - to develop a work of melancholic beauty. Read on...Cohen Amador Gallery, New York

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