Loop Barcelona
June 5-7, 2014
Enrique Granados 3
Barcelona
Spain
loop-barcelona.com

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Brice Dellsperger, Body Double 14 (After My Own Private Idaho),1999. Single channel video projection, sound, 4 min. 20 sec. Image courtesy of the artist. 

Brice Dellsperger
Body Double: Vous N’en Croirez Pas Vos Yeux
June 8th – August 1st 2014
83 Grand Street & 47 Wooster Street
New York City
teamgal.com

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The only other artist in my family was my great aunt. I never met her, but one of her paintings of a swan on a lake hung over her sister’s fireplace. It was magical to me as a child.

LO: What are the themes of your work and what inspires you?
KM: The major themes in my work have to do with temporal and spatial experiences of the body that cross over into a psychological engagement. I am interested in how we construct past experiences in the present and perceptions of dislocation and connection.

LO: Did you begin as a video artist? One sees painting, drawing, and photographic references when viewing your videos. Please tell us more.
KM: I make videos, but I also paint and draw. I work on the videos as if they were paintings and the paintings as if they were videos, or a part of a longer narrative over time. The ideas in my work are the same regardless of medium, so I can freely move back and forth.

LO: What is your working process? Each artist is so different in how they approach their work. How do you approach the creation of your work? Do you plan things out or play in the studio?
KM: When I begin a new phase of making work, I experiment in the studio until some theme begins to reveal itself. I then focus on this theme until its internal logic builds into a body of work. I feel it’s akin to asking a question and then letting the answer take its time to unfold. I make art because I enjoy this process.

LO: Why do you think art is important for the world and why is it important for you as an artist?
KM: I am an artist because making things is the way I process and understand the world around me. It’s like thinking with my hands.

Art is important because it performs the double task of reflecting culture while pointing beyond it. Art simultaneously embraces and critiques culture.

LO: What advice would you give other artists who are emerging?
KM: Do what you love. If you don’t love what you are doing, it’s not worth your time. And protect your solitude.

LO: Please talk about upcoming bodies of work, shows etc. that you have coming up.
KM: I just returned from a two and a half month research trip in Japan in preparation for a collaborative sound/video project with composer Akemi Naito. The project is based on Kobo Abe’s 1962 novel “The Woman in the Dunes”. The music is scored for percussion and the eighteen minute video is made up of stop-motion animation. Abe’s story is a post-war Sisyphean tale that I think still resonates today. The DVD is planned for release next year.

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Brazilian artist Duda Penteado is excited to announce the launch of his new book.

“Art can not be empty, because the history of humanity repeats itself and is frightening. It is up to the artist to manifest himself through his work, and bequeath an interpretation of his time, a message.”

Duda Penteado is a multimedia artist who has lived between the United States and Brazil for almost 20 years and works with performance, video, installations, murals, sculptures, paintings, and other visual practices. In recent years Duda has devoted much of his work on important issues of peace, globalization, diaspora, dual citizenship, and other geopolitical and social phenomena of the twenty-first century. This year, Duda returns to his hometown of São Paulo, for the launch of his new book on Wednesday, May 21 at 7p.m. at the Book Store Cultura.

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Image courtesy of Campagne Premiere

Featuring: Pep Agut, Eric Baudelaire, Matthew Buckingham, Marianna Christofides, Simon Fujiwara, Vittorio Santoro, Shira Wachsmann

Campagne Premiere
Archaeologies of the Future 2
November 16 2013 – January 4 2014
Campagne Première GmbH
Chausseestrasse 116
D-10115 Berlin Germany
campagne-premiere.com

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Stepping into Red Head Gallery we come face to face with a combination of nerve and wit, a painting of a large dark tunnel that seems ready to swallow us. Above it is a landscape with a bridge and greenery while in the top left corner the image of a bull breaks the peace. But we don’t spend too much time looking at nature as our gaze keeps returning to the tunnel. It is so dark and forbidding but somehow mesmerizing as well. A sculpture of a young hooded girl stands behind a rail and stares into the darkness, maybe trying to decide whether to enter or keep away. The exhibition poster shows a different version of this installation where a boy squats on his skateboard in a suspended moment of indecision. It’s not a question of seeing the “end of the tunnel” at this point as it’s so far away. The boy is all the way at this end and has to decide whether to move into it at all. It is a very scary depiction of starting your adult life and it’s understandable that the young person’s reaction seems rather passive.

The corner piece titled A Momentary Decision of Monumental Significance has two large red panels and a smaller, blue one, plus a sculpture, a projector and a video. In one panel we see a deer and behind it a bloody carcass that might be its future. In the opposite panel a man is posing as a bourgeois family patriot—someone important. The hunter and the hunted are looking at each other from one panel to the other. The sculpture of a young girl faces the man. Her head is covered by a hood and she’s holding some brochures—maybe handouts against animal cruelty. In her other hand is a large flag with a forest bridge projected on it.

Gillian Iles, A Momentary Decision of Monumental Significance, 2013. Triptych, oil, acrylic and pastel on canvas, 78 x 66, 72 x 16, 78 x 54 in, with video. Image courtesy of the artist.

Can the generation gap between these two figures—between past and future—be bridged, or it is just an illusion like the projected image? Maybe the bridge is there so the deer can avoid a grisly fate.

A pack of lions are fighting in the corner of a large painting titled A Combination of Cunning, Speed and Astonishing Grace. Their sudden movement is in strong contrast to the heavy stillness of the futuristic building towering over them. Most likely the land with its sandy colors originally belonged to the animals even if they seem to be alienated from it now. This composition includes two sculptures of youngsters, one with the face of a lion on the back of its head, and the other, a wolf. Iles mentioned that she often uses animals as metaphors to show the characteristics of a group or to signify what might become of those children as adults. Will these two become fighters for the environment or will they just tear each other apart in social conflicts?

Sculptures of fragile young figures fill the room and they are often the protagonists of Iles’ paintings as well. She is looking at the social disruption that teenagers face these days and their body language as a clue to figuring out their response. Many of the youngsters wear hoodies to protect their fragile identity. Some of them turn their back to us unready to face the challenges we represent. As Iles says in her artist statement,

“The world of youth on the cusp of adolescence is a closed and inaccessible environment of mysterious rituals, customs and codes of behaviour that are unintelligible to outsiders. Sculptural elements have been added which work in tandem with, and react to the paintings, creating a physical void between the subjects and the object of their desire and repulsion. The figures stand tentatively on the cusp of awareness of their potential and the abyss of the adult prerogative.”

This exhibition is not for the frail of heart. It is a brave show with a strong message about environmental issues as well as the challenges that every generation faces when replacing the previous one. They want to be better. Hopefully they still have a chance to save our environment and define a morality that supports and respects us all. It won’t be easy for them while adults are always saying, “That’s not how we do things here”—the title of Iles’ previous show.

By Emese Krunák-Hajagos

redheadgallery.org

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Image courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery

Yayoi Kusama
I Who Have Arrived In Heaven
David Zwirner Gallery
November 8, 2013 – December 21, 2013
Opening Reception: Friday, November 8, 6-8 pm
525 West 19th Street
New York, NY 10011
davidzwirner.com

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Shirazeh’s work for the 55^th Biennale di Venezia, Breath is a collateral event housed in La Torre di Porta Nuova. Built between 1809 and 1814 to enable the mechanical placement of masts onto ships, it is a building of almost ecclesiastically monumental proportions and presence. Breath is a four channel video and sound installation that features soft but captivating voices.

There is one chant for each of four major religious traditions: Buddhist, Christian, Jewish and Islamic. The work’s positioning couldn’t be more fortuitous. The two, looking out together over the water, enhance each other perfectly.

From the outside Breath announces itself as an immense fabric box. Made from black felt, its sides soar upwards as far as the archway it inhabits. Sunlight beams down from above onto its muted surface. At the front there is a shoulder width gap through which it is clear the viewer is invited to enter. Visibility is limited as one passes down a short, narrow passage. There is very little light either natural or artificial, only that which seeps in from outside

Inside is an intimate, square space. As my retinas adjust to near darkness, four small video screens slowly become apparent at eye level. The sound that welcomes me is an enticing, but unclear overlaying of four different incantations. As I approach each screen in turn, one of the four chants becomes more clear, but it is never possible to hear one without registering the other three. The sounds are fused together, inherently inseparable before they reach the ear. The source of the audio is lost somewhere in the darkened space. Do they originate from the ear, the brain, or in the space between the speakers and myself? Like the breath, these sounds are hardly tangible. No sooner are they perceived than they are gone, transformed into something else.

On the screens I see what appear to me as specks of light floating and pulsating in abstract, centrifugal formations. Their movement evokes something of the astronomical realm. It’s almost as though I’m outside the universe looking in, watching it in miniature, expanding and contracting. The spaces between the dashes of light grow larger and then smaller again.

Involuntarily I throw my head back and look up as one might beneath the dome of a cathedral. In the semi-darkness I can’t make out an ending to this temporary vaulted structure. The four black walls fly upwards into an apparent infinity. The space has no edges, as if there were no limit to its bounds.

What I find most compelling is that this work seems to point towards commonality and that energetic oneness that permeates every being, living and nonliving. It is something of a surprise that Shirazeh Houshiary’s Breath should find itself at la Biennale di Venezia—the home of competitive, jingoistic individuation.

So subtle is this work, and so persuasive, that I begin to question the wisdom of the Biennale’s artistic nationalism. At a time when borders are in a constant state of actual, philosophical, and metaphorical transgression, and the transfer of communication and knowledge take place almost exclusively via a rhizomatic hyper-network, the notion of a meaningful space existing for national pavilions begins to seem absurd.

By Beverly Knowles

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I was introduced to computer technology from an early age: my father was a programmer in the late ’60’s. He would bring me parts from giant computers to play with and gave me Radio Shack kits to build electronic gizmos. I also have a background in music and was introduced by composers I was studying under programming computers to control voltages going to analog synthesizers. Decades of electronic art, film, video, performance and music utilizing digital media followed, surfing the wave of emergent technologies as they came out. This led to a leadership position amongst peers in this particular genre and organizing exhibits and performances. I have been curating and showing in the art and technology scene since the 1980’s.
I had done so much organizing and exhibiting in the media art scene in commercial, non-profit, guerrilla and academic environments that it made sense to start my own gallery space to continue on that mission in a more focused and structured kind of way. We have had three locations and each time we have become much larger. 2014 will mark the ten-year anniversary for L.A. Center for Digital Art.

My focus in digital art, new media, or art and technology (as it is described variously) cuts a very wide swath in terms of the kinds of works that are out there. I try to represent the best of everything, be it academic or not, sellable or not. My interests are not that commercial, that part is an experiment in this genre at this point, really.  I do support community exhibits by non-professionals as well, this is an important aspect of what we do at LACDA. I try to stay open to many types of people making efforts they are very invested in and create opportunities to support their work. Some are very famous professionals, some are high level academics holding important university posts. Others are simply people who are driven to create and devote much of their lives to it.

The look and feel of L.A. often informs the work we show here; the wide open sky, the pop mid-century sensibility of the architecture, suburban banality, the movie industry and so on. You get images of gas stations, cars, hollywood stuff, big skies and vast panoramas. Lots of media art, too. There is a big video and new media scene here.

There is a “lowbrow” scene here that is enormous. This pop surreal art is where hot rod, surfer and latino low-rider sensibilities collided to form a genre that has matured over many decades into an extremely viable style. This popular “Juxtapose” scene is very L.A. and has been found to be very viable commercially.You can find a huge number of viable commercial galleries on the West Side of L.A., but that scene is completely dwarfed in comparison to New York.  Los Angeles is less expensive all around, so you find more DIY situations and non-profits often thrive here. There are almost 400,000 visual artists living here, and our art scene is very diverse and thriving. The artists here are not so on top of each other and don’t copy each other as much, I believe. New York generates more fads, and also more enormous dramatic installations, big flashy stuff. Speaking in the most general way, the work in L.A. is more individual and studio oriented.

The energy in Los Angeles is gargantuan. This is a project city and nothing else but that. If you find yourself doing something that people in the various creative communities like you get picked up in this incredibly dynamic energy that draws you upward with opportunity and collaborations. I have found this kind of support here in countless ways, my work here thrives and will continue to do so, of that I am certain.

The post On The Center of Digital Art by Rex Bruce appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Joining this work in the selectively installed exhibition is a long format video depicting the artist walking the length of Manhattan on Broadway while making a concerted effort never to place his foot on a line. This conceptually pregnant linear motif happens twice more in the exhibition.

The first example confronts the viewer immediately in the form of a floor to ceiling pillar constructed of an aluminum I-beam cut into equal sections and re-stacked in such a way as to lock together. The result creates an ordered but semi-precarious  alignment of elements conceivably once composing a single rigid architectural bone. The second linear element is on black enamel reverse-painted glass laid on the floor to create a threshold which must be crossed over in order to experience the rest of the work.

The show is economic in it’s expressive elements while employing largely communicable aesthetic themes of serious conceptual weight. Go see it.

inglettgallery.com

IMAGE:Syncopated Descent, 2013. Video, 4:36 hours. Edition of 3.

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