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Jonathan Callan
 Colony

March 17 - April 23, 2016
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 17,  from 6 to 8pm

Josée Bienvenu is pleased to present Colony, Jonathan Callan’s second exhibition with the gallery. In this new body of work, the British artist continues to explore the relationship of disembodied knowledge to embodied experience and materiality.  Preoccupied with language and its limitations, Callan often works with text - books, maps or photographs - as a source material. No longer a secondhand carrier of information, text is turned into an object of first experience. His methodology consists of amplifying the physical aspects of the object by embedding or dissolving until the original form is barely identifiable. Through this sometimes violent, often obsessive process, Callan develops a system of inquiry, which both drives the work and generates meaning.

Colony was born from Callan’s interest in exploring organic motifs that played with the idea of nature feeding upon or possibly destroying knowledge.
 
“Some years ago outside an old studio I noticed that snails were eating some of the books and texts I had inadvertently left outside, I was reminded of it recently when experimenting with casting fabric in plaster. The unset textile bags were draped over and upon books, I became interested in the ambivalence of whether these animate shapes were embracing, suffocating or feeding upon the knowledge within. Whether they were benign, aggressive and or comic.” 
 
The larger floor piece ‘Colony’ was inspired partly by images and thoughts of pack animals, or creatures gathered at feeding sites, they could be microbes grown monstrously large or starfish made by an inept creator, or creatures from a B movie universe. The books and maps include Thomas More’s Utopia, a book on the development of early humans, a book on English sculpture wrapped over another book on special problems, a book on sequels, which is how the artist often thinks of his own work, and a wad of maps from the area he grew up in. The plaster forms connect the books as if they were nodes of communication in an external brain, where the intelligence of the hive or colony resides in socialized ‘thought’, messages that are transmitted via chemicals and pheromones.
 
The wall pieces are perhaps more comic and barbed, and the shapes hint at thrown paint or a gelatinous material recently frozen. The graphic form across 'Foreign influences in American life’ could be an explosive motif or the ganglion of some darkened neural pathway. Nature, though not unaffected by our conceits, ignorant and uncaring of our cherished bodies of knowledge, will regard the printed effluvia of our ideas with unconscious indifference and best treat it as a source  of chemical nutrition.
 
Born in Manchester, England in 1961, Jonathan Callan graduated from Goldsmiths College and lives and works in London. His works have been exhibited extensively in museums and galleries throughout Europe and the United States. Select institutional exhibitions include: Islip Art Museum, East Islip, NY (2014); Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT (2014); Boghossian Foundation, Villa Empain, Brussels (2014); Wesleyan University Museum, Boston, MA (2012); Teylers Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands (2012); John Michael Kohler Arts Center, WI (2010); Royal Society of British Sculpture, London, UK (2010). His work is included in major museum collections including: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The British Museum, London; The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, UK; Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, UK; The High Museum, Atlanta GA; The Leopold-Hoesch Museum, Duren, Germany; and Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ.
 
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On view in the Project Space:

Present 7: Berta Sichel presents "My Father Avoids the Sirens' Song"

March 3 - April 30, 2016

Josée Bienvenu is pleased to present the seventh installment of “Present” a series of guest curated exhibitions in the Project Space.­
 
The early mythological Sirens, those hybrid creatures that perched on rocky islands to seduce sailors with their honey-sweet songs, were the seed of the idea for this video program. Later, there were deformed and mumbling Sirens who “were neither dead nor alive”, living-dead creatures symbolizing the morbid embodiment of the end and inhabiting the level of purgatory – the location where Dante dreamed of Sirens. For Homer, too, Sirens and their song represent doom. Whoever listens to their voices must die. In Dante (19.58-60), the Sirens’ plight was purged “at the final three terraces.” It was Dante’s gaze that transformed this woman with her deformed body into an image of beauty with a harmonious voice.
 
The contemporary narrative and reinterpretations of these figures composes a very different melody – one that empowers, and that cannot be interrupted. Sirens today chant songs of survival and emancipation. In 1974, before postmodernism turned out to be the agent provocateur refuting long-established theoretical frameworks of philosophy and cultural analysis, Margaret Atwood wrote a free-verse poem called Siren Song. Not much noticed at the time, Siren Song is now reevaluated, a cherished mainstay of poetry club websites, literary associations, feminist writings, and educational institutions. The ongoing revisions of women’s subjectivity and their place and presence in society gave a shine to Atwood’s little-known poem. Today, Siren Song is an ode to female energy and determination. After all, they left the island challenging the male desire to control every situation.
 
My Father Avoids the Sirens’ Song includes 21 works by 12 artists from Europe and Latin America who are performing – though almost none of them see themselves as performance artists– the ballad of their laugh, the blues of their cry, the rhyme of their autonomy, the song of their jouissance. The performative acts by the artists selected for My Father Avoids the Sirens’ Song, whether inspired by established Body Art, by political and social activism, or conceived as delegate performance, manifest their artistic imagination, while the sound of their voices no longer destroys but calls for the transformation.
 
 -Berta Sichel
 
 
Berta Sichel is an international art curator, writer and lecturer expert in contemporary art with a special focus on media-based art. Born in Brazil, she’s currently based in Madrid, Spain. Cofounder of Bureau Phi Art Projects, Berta Sichel was the Artistic Director of the first International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia (2013-2014); Director and Chief Curator of Audiovisuales at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, (2000-2011). She has organized exhibitions for the Sao Paulo International Biennial, Venice Biennial, Newark Museum, Artpace (San Antonio, TX), CIFO (Miami), among others. Currently, she is working on the first European exhibition of the American artist Lorraine O´Grady, for the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporánea, Seville, Spain. 


Program 1 – March 3, 17, and 31.  April 14 and 28 (program cycle repeats)
Narcisa Hirsch (b. 1928, Germany.  Lives and works in Buenos Aires)
www.hugoares.com
Canciones Napolitanas, 1971
Colour, sound.  Duration: 10’21”
 
 
Program 2 – March 4 and 18.  April 1 and 15
Sofia Goscinski (b. 1979, Austria.  Lives and works in Vienna)
www.sofiagoscinkski.org
Without Head, 2013
Colour, sound.  Duration: 8’01”
 
María José Arjona (b. 1973.  Lives and works in Bogota/New York)
www.prometeogallery.com
Playing with the Spirit, 2015
Colour, sound.  Duration: 5’21”
 
 
Program 3 – March 5 and 19.  April 2 and 16.
Leonora de Barros/ Teresa Serrano
www.teresaserrano.com
E a voz tem sombra?, 2011
Colour, sound.  Duration: 5’26”
 
Teresa Serrano (b. 1936, in Mexico.  Lives and works in Mexico D.F./New York)
www.teresaserrano.com
Restraint, 2006
Colour, sound.  Duration: 3’06”
 
María José Arjona (b. 1973.  Lives and works in Bogota/New York)
www.prometeogallery.com
SV MUTED, 2012
DURATION 2;03”
 

Program 4 – March 8 and 22.  April 5 and 19
Elena del Rivero (b. 1949, Spain.  Lives and works in New York)
www.the-paraclete.com
Nu descendant un escalier, 2002-2013
Colour, sound.  Duration: 20’20”
 
 
Program 5 – March 9 and 23.  April 6 and 20
Maria Vassileva (b. 1964, Bulgaria.  Lives and works in Berlin)
www.dna-galerie.de
Traffic Police, 2008
Colour, sound.  Duration: 1’47”
Pedrito, 2010
Colour, sound.  Duration: 3’
 
Pilar Albarracín (b. 1968, Spain.  Lives and works in Seville/Madrid)
www.pilaralbarracin.com
Coreografías para la salvación I and II, 2011
Colour, sound.  Duration: 2’23”

Rosana Antolí (b. 1981, Spain.  Lives and works in London)
www.rosanaantoli.com
Walkative: From Mile End to the City.  Graham, 2015
Colour, sound.  Duration: 6’38”
 
 
Program 6 – March 10 and 24.  April 7 and 21
Teresa Serrano (b. 1936, in Mexico.  Lives and works in Mexico D.F./New York)
www.teresaserrano.com
Glass Ceiling, 2008
Video black & white, sound, 2’17’’
 
Pilar Albarracín (b. 1968, Spain.  Lives and works in Seville/Madrid)
www.pilaralbarracin.com
Lunares, 2004
Colour, sound.  Duration: 1’26”

Beth Moysés (b. 1960, Brazil.  Lives and works in São Paulo)
www.bethmoyeses.com.br
Performance: Despontando –Nós, 2003
Colour, sound.  Duration: 8’50”

 
Program 7 – March 11 and 25.  April 8 and 22
Irina Botea (b. 1970, Romania.  Lives and works in Chicago/Bucharest)
www.irinabotea.com
Auditions for a Revolution, 2006
Colour, sound.  Duration: 24’
 
 
Program 8 – March 12 and 26.  April 9 and 23
Narcisa Hirsch (b. 1928, Germany.  Lives and works in Buenos Aires)
www.hugoares.com
Retrato de una artista como ser humano, 1969
With M.L. Alemann and Walther Mejía, Colour, magnetic sound.  Duration: 15’51”
 
 
Program 9 – March 15 and 29.  April 12 and 26
Kirsten Heshusius (b. 1979, Netherlands.  Lives and works in Amsterdam)
http://kirstenheshusius.nl/
Bij Haar [Together]
A memorial for my grandmother, 2013
Performance during Twente Biennale Enschede NL.  Colour, sound. Duration: 10’
 
Beth Moysés (b. 1960, Brazil.  Lives and works in São Paulo)
www.bethmoyeses.com.br
Performance: Desatar tiempos, 2014
Performance during #1 Cartagena, Colombia.  First International Biennial.  Colour, sound.
Duration: 5’15”
 
Rosana Antolí (b. 1981, Spain.  Lives and works in London)
www.rosanaantoli.com
Agency without Intention, 2015
Herbert Read Gallery –UCA, Canterbury, UK.  Video black & white, sound.  Duration: 4’18”
 
 
Program 10 – March 16 and 30.  April 13 and 27
Beth Moysés (b. 1960, Brazil.  Lives and works in São Paulo)
www.bethmoyeses.com.br
Diluidas en agua, 2008
Zaragoza, Spain.  Color, sound. Duration: 5´36”
 
Narcisa Hirsch (b. 1928, Germany.  Lives and works in Buenos Aires)
www.hugoares.com
La Marabunta, 1967
Happening at the Teatro Coliseo, Buenos Aires, 1967.  Video black & white.  Duration: 12’40” 
 

josée bienvenu gallery
529 W 20th Street New York NY 10011
212.206.7990 joseebienvenugallery.com