|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
Packer Schopf Gallery,
Chicago |
|
Michael Dinges
Dead
Reckoning
5 Sept 2008 to 11 Oct 2008
Michael Dinges recreates and reuses
defunct tools as surfaces for elaborate engravings of natural
forms, scientific models, and apocalyptic quotations. As tools
of contemplation, Dinges' sextants, saws, and laptops provoke
us to consider our relationship to, and impact on, the
world-to ask how and why we seek to attain control over our
surroundings, to recognize the destruction that may accompany
such pursuits, and, in so doing, to make ourselves
accountable.
Estimating a ship's location by tracking direction
and distance traveled from a previously determined position
using charts and instruments, rather than by direct
observation of the stars and sky, is called "dead reckoning."
This term suggests that mediating experience and knowledge
with various calculations and instruments removes man from the
"live" world. If we compare Dinges' facsimile of a
seventeenth-century backstaff to his appropriated laptops, we
see that the evolution of navigational technology produces
experiences that are increasingly "dead," or removed from
reality. A backstaff required man to use his full body to
gather information about his surroundings and to possess a
command of physics to interpret that information. A computer
hides its internal functions from the user, who passively
absorbs the information displayed on its screen.
The computer is not only relatively self-sufficient,
but the information it yields is so vast that it is difficult
for any individual to fully navigate. We gain control and lose
control at the same time, which is one way to interpret the
recurring phrase inscribed upon Dinges' instruments, "Every
process creates disorder." This maxim is derived from the
second law of thermodynamics, which identifies entropy as a
measure of disorder that is ever-increasing in any isolated
system. If each technological innovation expands our knowledge
base, it exponentially increases the number of problems to be
solved.
Dinges' engravings are meant to evoke the lost
practices of scrimshaw and trench art-the carved expressions
of whalers on bone and soldiers on artillery shell casings.
Both scrimshaw and trench art represent attempts to inject
personal history onto the byproducts of larger economic and
political processes. And in both cases, these byproducts are
symbols of the maker's enslavement or potential demise.
Similarly, Dinges' laptop series represents an attempt to
personalize what is global, standardized, and dehumanizing.
Dinges' hand-lettered pronouncements and organic imagery
destroy the sleek and modern, but perhaps vacant and
inanimate, aesthetic that Apple promotes. Physicists also
define entropy as that energy in a system that cannot be used
for external work, i.e. "leftover" or "useless" energy. An art
practice based on byproducts-discarded whale bone, artillery
shells left behind, dead laptops-is an attempt to harness the
scraps that represent the demise of a system into total
entropy, a state when the potential to do work is
eradicated.
Dinges' tools anticipate this conclusion, as they are
not able to do actual work. They are "dead" not only because
they represent a removal from the "live" world, as implied in
the concept of "dead reckoning," but they are literally dead,
broken, and non-functional. Both sets of tools are also dead
on a third level: the sextant and the backstaff are obsolete
and the Mac laptop will surely meet this same fate. With their
use value gone, they become symbols of tools and navigation in
general. Tools, which could be seen to form both the subject
matter and the medium of Dinges' works, are humanity's way of
creating order and understanding. On his backstaff, Dinges
inscribes the words "determination" and "orientation,"
alluding to this impulse. We need tools, literally and
figuratively, to navigate and make sense of our surroundings.
Dinges' tools transcend the information about our world that
they were originally used to obtain, for they provoke us to
question that very need for information and
control.
Excerpted from the catalog essay Dead
Reckoning by Antonia Pocock, 2008
Image:
Michael Dinges, Untitled, Dead Laptop Series,
2007
Engraved Plastic, Acrylic Paint
9.25 x 11.25 x 9.75
in
Courtesy of Packer Schopf Gallery,
Chicago
|
|
Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, New
York |
|
Jodie Carey
4 September - 11
October 2008
Daneyal Mahmood
Gallery is please to present Jodie
Carey's first solo exhibition in NY premiering her
most recent work. This exhibition explores the frequent
disparity between private and public grief and the acts we
undertake in the rituals of mourning. It continues the themes
of ceremony artifice and mortality that thread consistently
throughout Carey's practice.
Reproduction furniture such as dining room tables, TV
cabinets and the very English cake stand are heavily adorned
with feathers and flowers made of blood soaked news and wax
papers dripping with candle wax to create still-lives with
strong ritualistic and ecclesial overtones. The out-of-fashion
furniture speaks of a past generation, of Sunday best and
"keeping up appearances". It speaks both of domestic routine
and the rituals of hospitality. The carefully crafted abundant
funereal blooms present a magnificent facade, their own
fragility and elegance evoking a desolate transitory beauty
that is quietly sinister. The silence of the soft feathers
adorning both the walls and the furniture appear luxurious at
first glance, but on closer inspection still bear the stains
of the slaughtered birds.
Both sculptures and wall hangings represent the
commemorations of death through the traditions we uphold and
the public gestures we make. In a sense, Carey's works are
private monuments, unusually filled with sincere reverence and
emotion that can often be lacking in the public monuments set
in stone. They are filled with the piercing dramas of everyday
life, of everyday death, of everyday "Englishness" and stand
as still lives from past lives tainted by the inevitability of
tragedy, time and decay.
Jodie Carey lives and works in
London, UK. She holds a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmith College
and an MFA in sculpture from the Royal College of Art. Her
work has appeared in numerous European solo and group
exhibitions including Towner Art Gallery, Alexia Goethe
Gallery, Galerie Gabriel Rolt and Hauser and Wirth. Carey's
work has been internationally collected, among others, by
Charles Saatchi, David Roberts, Kay Saatchi and Hauser &
Wirth.
Image:
Jodie Carey, Untitled (Wall Hanging)
bone,
feathers, calico
108 x 74in, 2008
Courtesy of Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, New
York
Daneyal Mahmood Gallery
511 West
25th Street 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001
+1 212 675
2966
|
|
WESTERN EXHIBITIONS, Chicago |
|
Stan Shellabarger
Walking
Books
5 Sept 2008 to 11 Oct 2008
For his second solo show at Western
Exhibitions, Shellabarger will show several new
Walking Books, works that marry his performance and
book-making impulses. To make the Walking Books, the artist
paces on long sheets of rag paper with graphite-soled shoes.
His footsteps create a luminous graphite/gray drawing that
betrays the pattern of the surface trod upon. The verso side
of the drawing simultaneously becomes a beautiful blind
embossment of this same surface. He folds the paper accordion
style and affixes the ends to waxed MDF panels that function
as the covers of the book. Shellabarger started this series of
books this summer and made 5 of them at the Volta art fair in
Basel in June. The books in this show capture several
different surfaces form multiple locations, including a
particle-board platform in Basel, Switzerland, a parking lot
in Portland, Maine, the floor of Western Exhibitions old
location and several others. Shellabarger will make a new book
on each Saturday during the run of the show, either in the
gallery proper, or somewhere in the surrounding West Loop
neighborhood.
Stan Shellabarger's
performance and book work addresses issues relating to the
body. The artist often takes mundane, everyday activities like
breathing, walking and writing to extreme measures in
endurance-based performance work: walking from sunrise to
sunset on solstices and equinoxes, counting every breath he
takes in an 8 hour time span, filling notebook after notebook
with his signature. Shellabarger's work amplifies the traces
humans leave on the earth, as in his walking performances, or
on objects, as in his Lightswitch and Mousepad books.
This will be Stan
Shellabarger's second proper solo show with Western
Exhibitions. His last show was reviewed in Art in America,
artforum.com and ArtUS. Shellabarger has been invited to do
performances at the VOLTA show in Basel, Switzerland, the
Time-Based Art Festival in Portland, Oregon; the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Chicago; Illinois State University in
Bloomington, Illinois; The Suburban in Oak Park; and the
Center of Contemporary Art in St. Louis and has had a 12 x 12
New Work/New Artists solo exhibition at Chicago's Museum of
Contemporary Art in December 2005. He also makes work
collaboratively with his husband Dutes Miller. Together they
won a Tiffany Foundation Award in 2007 and their show at
Western Exhibitions in 2007 was reviewed in Time Out Chicago,
New City and the Chicago Sun-Times. Their performance work at
the 2008 Volta fair was covered in Artnet and at the NEXT fair
was covered in Art & Antiques.
Image:
Stan Shellabarger
Performance view of
"Untitled (Walking Book 9, Pier, Portland, Maine)", 2008
graphite on BFK rives with waxed MDF covers 19" x 19"
closed, 19" x 360" open
Courtesy of Western Exhibitions,
Chicago
WESTERN EXHIBITIONS
119 N Peoria,
Suite 2A
Chicago, IL 60607
+1 312.480.8390
|
|
The Proposition, New
York |
The Needle, The Paintbrush and The
Knife
Anna Torma, Istvan Zsako, Balint
Zsako
September 13 - October 18,
2008 The Proposition Gallery is
pleased to present The Needle, The Paintbrush and The
Knife, a group show opening on Saturday, September
13th featuring textile works by Anna Torma,
paintings by Istvan Zsako and collages by
Balint Zsako. Mother, father and son,
respectively, they are a family of artists creating works that
explore complex narratives and tales of archetypal experience,
subconsciously similar in themes like sex, mythology, society
and bodily functions, albeit with each member utilizing a
separate selection of materials.
Anna Torma's works are wonderfully
complicated silk and fabric collages assembled from a
patchwork of old textile fragments, found fabrics, and
clothing, which she combines with her collection of personal
writings, texts from close acquaintances/familial sources, and
visual fragments of well-remembered early experiences from her
Hungarian upbringing. She translates the contemporary content
of her hangings through traditional hand embroidery and
finishes her works in the style of a traditional kantha quilt
(a rural Indian embroidered hanging). Anna has exhibited her
work throughout Canada, England, Hungary, France, the
Netherlands and United States and her work is represented in
numerous public collections.
Istvan Zsako is a sculptor and
painter. For a long time he has made bronze sculptures of
warriors, birds and goddesses, but recently his attention has
shifted to exploring the medium of painting. Originally from
Hungary, he lived in Italy and Germany before eventually
immigrating to North America in 1989. Learning English has
been a long and often comical process for him and with his new
paintings he tries to sort out the relationships between image
and word and all of the alchemical absurdist logic one finds
in dissecting a new language. Istvan's work has been exhibited
throughout Hungary, Canada, Germany, France, Italy and
Slovakia and his work is included in the public collection of
multiple Hungarian museums, as well as the Hungarian Ministry
of Culture.
Balint Zsako works in many media
including drawing, photography and sculpture but for this
exhibition he is showing his series of collages constructed
from intricately cut reproductions of old master paintings.
With these pieces he is attempting to create compositions that
look like they could have been painted hundreds of years ago,
but which at the same time are undeniably contemporary due to
their narrative mix-ups and juxtapositions. His
re-contextualizing of the source material immediately injects
a contrast and humor not inherent to the traditional imagery.
Previously, The Proposition has shown Balint's watercolor and
ink drawings; during Love Stories, his solo exhibition in
March/April of 2007, as well as the summer group exhibition,
Five Years, also in 2007.
This exhibition is scheduled to travel to the Rebecca
Hossack Gallery in London from November 28, 2008 through
January 13, 2009 and subsequently to the Wilde Gallery in
Berlin in 2009.
Image:
Balint Zsako
Untitled, 2008
Collage, 16 x 12in
(framed)
Courtesy of The Proposition, New York
THE
PROPOSITION
559 West 22nd Street New York, NY
10011 +1 212 242-0035
|
|
Haunch of Venison,
London |
|
Anthony Goicolea
Related
5 September - 4 October
2008 Haunch of Venison London is
delighted to announce the first London solo exhibition by
Cuban-American artist, Anthony Goicolea.
"Related" is the latest in an ongoing series in which Goicolea
uses drawing, photography, sculpture and installation to
explore his family history and identity as well as larger
themes of ritual, assimilation and alienation. Like
many first generation immigrants, Goicolea experiences a sense
of cultural dislocation and is aware of the disjunction
between a supposed mythical homeland and his estrangement from
it. Confronting this is a series of portraits based on old
photographs of family - known and unknown - while they were
living in Cuba. By drawing and painting these portraits,
Goicolea creates a reinterpreted, second-generation
reproduction of their likenesses. Drawing his portraits as
negative images or daguerreotypes onto layered Mylar and
glass, he then inverts the images to create a positive
photographic mirror of the drawings. Goicolea then mounts them
in rural areas of the South where he was raised and in New
York where he now lives. Pasted on trees, telephone poles, and
the sides of buildings like missing persons ads or 'Wanted'
posters, the drawings are photographed again in a third
generation reproduction, referencing and memorializing past
relatives. Goicolea confesses to feeling "a strange
sense of nostalgia for something I have never been a part of
or experienced directly." In May 2008 he made his first
pilgrimage to Cuba and visited the homes, schools and churches
of his parents and grandparents. The resulting photographs are
devoid of people. Digitally cobbled together from locations
throughout Havana, Goicolea further manipulates these images
by painting over small voids of space or drawing on top of the
doctored images, thus re-imagining and reimaging the remains
from another time. The show also debuts three
sculptural pieces. Two glass display cases house drawings of
the artist's grandmother's skeleton, arranged and framed in
fragments so as to mimic religious reliquaries or
anthropological remains. A third sculpture bisects the gallery
as a three-metre long, low-lying wall made from translucent
glass cast in the shape of concrete masonry blocks. On top of
the wall, which references the sea wall running the length of
Havana harbour, family portraits drawn on Mylar are obscured
and sea led inside a collection of clear, hand-blown glass
bottles. Anthony Goicolea (b. 1971)
lives and works in Brooklyn, USA and has for many years been
known internationally for his powerful and sinister staged
photographic and video works. Depicting groups of
pre-pubescent boys, the images are often complex self-portrait
montages of the artist himself, enacting situations which call
social norms and traditions into question. Goicolea's work is
held in public collections such as the Whitney Museum of
American Art, the Guggenheim Museum of Art and The Museum of
Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York. He has
exhibited widely in Europe and Asia, notably at the Groninger
Museum in the Netherlands and the Museo Nacional Centro de
Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain.
Image:
Anthony Goicolea, Mother I Diptych, 2008
Negative
is graphite and acrylic on mylar fronted with etched perspex.
Positive is c-print.
59.69 x 33.02 cm, 23.5 x 13
inches
© Anthony Goicolea 2008, Courtesy Haunch of
Venison
Haunch of Venison
6 Haunch of Venison Yard
Nearest Tube:
Bond Street
London, W1K 5ES
+44 (0) 20 7495 5050
|
|
|
|
re-title.com - Independent directories of
emerging & professional contemporary art
Coming Next
September 10-11 - Photography / Film & Video
September 17-18 - Sculpture / Installation
September 24-25 - Painting & Drawing
October 1-2 - Photography / Film &
Video
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
| |
|
|
| |
