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 Munich-based artist Tom Schmelzer describes himself as a concept artist who uses brilliant aesthetics in his illusionary sculptures and moving objects to "make a point" to the viewer. After being drawn in by the theatricality of the object presented, the viewer soon discovers a message. These messages concern social and cultural issues such as in Show Off, an enormous engagement ring followed by a woman. In this piece, composed of silicone, silicone paint, polyurethane, 925 silver, diamond, french nails, and metal, Schmelzer addresses the cultural expectations surrounding success and its manifestations. For example, men are expected to make more money than their fathers and to purchase engagement rings for their fiancees worth approximately three month's salary. In a 2006 installation, Schmelzer took on the expectations of the United Nations, who at a 2005 summit declared that individual states were responsible for protecting their people from crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and the like. If a state is unable to do so, the international community should step in. In Responsibility to Protect or To Whom It May Concern, Schmelzer asserts that collective action is only taken when whites are involved, when Christians are involved, when petroleum is involved, or when natural gas is involved. The installation consists of a white oil drum with Jesus figures encircling the rim of the drum, which contains petroleum and a pump to create gas bubbles. A literal but quite successful way to "make a point". Schmelzer's seductive sculptures immediately capture our attention, a task that is becoming increasingly difficult in the 21st century. He does this by moving past the aesthetic neutrality of previous conceptual art and reinforcing his appealing objects with sound conceptual statements. Jozsa Gallery in Brussels is currently featuring Schmelzer's work in their exhibition Let's Call it A Year until May 10th. The artist has previously shown at the Riviera Gallery in New York, White Trash Contemporary in Hamburg, and Galerie Jaspers in Munich. | |||||
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 Through in-depth self-examination artist Su-en Wong challenges issues of identity in relation to nationality, ethnicity, gender, adolescence and sexuality. Wong's self-portraits take place in a variety of coming-to-age environments, such as schoolyards, roller rinks and swimming pools. The artist casts her characters in these stereotypical scenes to reveal the close boundaries between adolescents and adulthood for a woman. Juxtaposing ideas of fantasy and reality with power and vulnerability, the artist's work speaks to the awkward stages of life where emotions and rationality run together. Wong was born in Singapore. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and is a M.F.A. graduate of the School of the Art Institute Chicago. She is a recipient of both an artist grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and from the New York Foundation of the Arts. Last year, the artist exhibited with Danese Gallery in New York and Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica. | |||||
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 Grant Barnhart, a previous DailyServing interviewee, is preparing for an upcoming exhibition entitled "Spread Eagle," on view from May 2nd - May 31st at Leslie's Art Gallery in Luxembourg. This will be the Seattle-based artist's first European exhibition. Barnhart investigates American archetypes of masculinity and heroism through wit and tounge-in-cheek humor. For his upcoming show, the artist will be using the images of cowboys and football players in absurdly vibrate color-field backgrounds. The newer metaphors of masculinity such as football players and cowboys are coupled with the artist's previous imagery such as urinating tanks. Together the images offer a glimpse into contemporary American culture and humorously sheds light on the current aggressive and confrontational nature of the U.S. Barnhart uses humor to disarm the viewer and allow for reflection on the American identity. Barnhart is a graduate of the Columbus College of Art & Design and is currently represented by OKOK Gallery in Seattle. The artist has a forth coming exhibitions with OKOK in 2008 and under their new gallery name Ambach & Rice in 2009. | |||||
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 Saul Becker is a contemporary landscape painter who incorporates fragments of different places and sources to create dream-like natural scenes that are both beautiful and foreboding. Titles like "Last Look", "Entropia", and "Ghostland" give urgency to his compositions, which lack any human presence. His drawings are particularly evocative, showing incredible detail in the natural landscape as seen above in Ghostlog. Becker chooses a muted palette except for the leaves and branches in the foreground, which appear to be seeping green, a metaphorical reference to our slowly fading ecosystem. The fallen log in front is pushed into the picture plane as a strong symbol of destruction and life past. Becker received his B.F.A from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax and his M.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. He has had solo exhibitions at King County Art Gallery in Seattle and at Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, and has two upcoming exhibitions. The first is Works on Paper at Sunday L.E.S. in New York from April 24-May 25 and Eden's on Fire! at the Platform Gallery in Seattle from May 8-June 14. | |||||
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Since 1996, Michael Salter has participated in developing the artist-run space, Lump Gallery in Raleigh, NC and has recently opened the new project space, LumpWest in Eugene, Oregon. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including his recent show, "Are you sure" at Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York City. Appropriately titled, this exhibition challenges our perceptions of everyday media, merging the vernacular of commercial design with a willful irrationality. While the commercial appeal of Salter's work attributes to it's accessibility, the way in which the imagery and surfaces are designated confuses our expectations of both advertising and commodity. Daily Serving recently spoke to Michael Salter about past projects and his most recent solo show in New York City.
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 Iraqi-born artist Ayad Alkadhi uses Arabic calligraphy in the form of calligrams, or figurative imagery composed of interwoven written words, to create narratives within his work concerning the themes of religion, politics, and culture. His recent paintings reflect the war in Iraq and its psychological, emotional, and social ramifications for the modern Iraqi population. Alkadhi works in series, his latest series being Al-Ghareeb (which translates as "stranger" or "the strange one") and Father of No One's Son. Al-Ghareeb explores the complex emotions of fear, loss of control, anger, and rebellion in a war-torn society. Most of the figures used in this series are based on photographs of the artist himself taken by photographer/video artist Scott Gerst, lending an intensely personal aspect to the works while simultaneously drawing attention to the position and problem of the artist surrounded by war. The faces of the figures are obscured by weaponry and masks illustrated using the elegant Arabic script, as seen above in If Words Could Kill II, thus elevating the emotional content of the work by referencing imprisonment and torture. Alkadhi received a Bachelor's Degree in Engineering Sciences from the University of Technology in Baghdad. He has exhibited at the Orfally Gallery in Baghdad, but left Iraq at 23 after the first Gulf War. He has had a solo show at the Aeotea Gallery in Auckland, New Zealand before moving to New York in 2000 where he earned a scholarship to the ITP/Tisch School of the Arts graduate program at New York University. Since then, he has shown at the Fire Island Pines Arts Project's 9th Biennial, The National Arts Club and Nader Gallery in New York, and Exposure Gallery in Palm Springs, California. | |||||
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 Landon Wiggs works with cultural paraphernalia, incorporating signs, text, and flashing lights into new contexts in the form of sculptures and collages. He plays with certain formal characteristics of his media like symmetry and repetition as well as with the semiotics and connotation of words. In each of his works, a sense of the familiar is perceived, but distorted to develop narratives based on each individul's own cultural associations and understandings. Landon's skills in manipulating and repurposing pre-existing everyday imagery can be seen in one of his past public projects. In 2006, he altered the text on an American Apparel bench advertisement (well known for their provocative nature) in front of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to read "ReAppear in lacmA." The project remained undisturbed for weeks as cleanup crews removed various stickers and graffiti tags around the bench. American Apparel later removed all bench advertisements in the area, thus ending the subversive public project. Earlier this year, Landon exhibited with Adrian Paules at Jail Gallery in the show Educated Dreamer. Both artists received their M.F.A.s from Yale University in 2003 and currently share a studio building in Los Angeles. Landon has also been featured online by Beautiful/Decay Magazine. | |||||
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 Appropriate, a recent collection of works by Sydney artist, Cash Brown is currently on display at Robin Gibson Gallery, Darlinghurst. The exhibition is comprised of various works on canvas which appropriate Gustave Courbet's infamous vaginal painting Origin of the World, 1866. While utilizing this image as a central source of inspiration, Brown has also incorporated influences from other western artists, painting Courbet's figure in the style of Tom Wesselmann's pop art nudes, integrating fish used in John Currin's The Moroccan and utilizing geometric Suprematist imagery ala Kazimir Malevich. Brown received her BFA from National Art School, Sydney and has had her work extensively exhibited on a national scale at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Greenhill Galleries, Adelaide and MOP Projects, Redfern. She is currently the coordinator of Off the Wall, a showcase of works by unrepresented Australian artists, taking place as part of The Weekend Australian Art Sydney, Art Melbourne and Art Brisbane. | |||||
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 Kate Schermerhorn was born in 1966 and raised in Malibu, California where she began taking photographs at age six. She studied with Joel Sternfeld at Sarah Lawrence College and graduated in 1989. She has traveled extensively, having lived and worked in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Florence, and London. However, her work displays distinct West-Coast elements. Schermerhorn incorporates imagery from the entertainment world and desert wildlife, all while playing with the boundaries between real and fantasy. In her photographs, a naturalistic rock is actually a stereo speaker, and an artificial cactus sits on the sand of a real desert. Her work is the result of critical observation of our contemporary American culture. Her first book, America's Idea of a Good Time, investigates through a camera lens why we play bingo, hit golf balls, stack Oreo cookies, bungee jump and the like. She is working on a second book that will examine the idiosyncrasies particular to Los Angeles. | |||||
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The Museum of Modern Art's current exhibition is a chromatic extravaganza. Color Chart includes an impressive span of artists, from ready-made deity Marcel Duchamp to young digital artist Cory Arcangel. Ann Temkin, who was appointed Department of Painting and Sculpture Curator at MoMA in 2003, is a curator with a penchant for early appropriation artists and seductive, culturally resonant mark-making. Temkin organized Color Chart, trying to capture the mass-produced, systematic, arbitrary and indulgent role color played in the latter half of the twentieth century. Duchamp and Warhol set the tone for the exhibition. Both artists took color out of the realm of spirituality and borrowed their hues from consumer culture and mass production. Ellsworth Kelly's straightforward color charts give the exhibition its name. Yet, while Color Chart certainly emphasizes the down-to-earth characteristics of color, it doesn't exclude natural, organic hues. Ed Ruscha's stains speak to the arbitrary nature of color - we don't necessarily have control over the shades of a thumb print or the way coffee yellows the table cloth. John Baldessari's Six Colorful Inside Jobs, on the other hand, has everything to do with the ways in which people control color. Carrie Mae Weems, on of the few women in the show, addresses color's relationship to race and adding a much needed consciousness to and exhibit that spans so many centuries.. The exhibition continues through May 12. | |||||
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 Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement is a breakthrough exhibition for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Despite the heavy Latino and Chicano population in Southern California, LACMA has never before featured the Chicano art movement. Organized by filmmaker and curator Rita Gonzales, LACMA's Contemporary art curator Howard Fox, and LACMA's adjunct curator of Latino and Chicano Art Chon Noriega, the show attempts to explore the experimental aspects of Chicano Art. Phantom Sightings includes around 125 works of art, all by contemporary artists. Christina Fernandez, whose photographs were recently displayed in the project space at Pomona College's Museum of Art, shot the promotional image for the show: a graffiti ridden laundry mat. Mario Ybarra Jr., an artist who likes his work to interact with its surroundings and its audience, recently participated in the Whitney Biennial. Nicola Lopez does free-spirited multi-media projects that probe urban landscapes. Juan Capistrani does it all--installation, sculpture, and drawing. As a whole, the LACMA show gives audiences a comprehensive idea of Chicano art as it stands today, emphasizing the social, environmental, and attitude related issues that young people face and showing how art can grapple with contemporary issues. The exhibition opened on April 8th and will run through September 2008. | |||||
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 An evocative collection of works by Dutch photo-journalist, Robert Knoth is currently on show at The Australian Centre for Photography, Paddington. Entitled Certificate no. 000358/ Nuclear Devastation in the Former Soviet Union, this display highlights the devastating consequences of radiation, by photographing the affected victims. Case studies include the Patuchenko sisters who both suffer from brain tumours, Vadim Kuleshov- an eight year old mentally retarded boy with bone disease and Nastya Eremenko a young girl who was diagnosed with cervical cancer at only three years old. Knoth has been photographing these subjects in black and white since the early nineties, continuing to make us aware of the repercussions experienced by such innocent victims. He names each photo after the people depicted, followed by where they are from. When noticing all the different countries included, we are able to see just how far spread the devastation really lies. Knoth studied at the Urecht School of Arts over the duration of a year before earning his way as a rock photographer in the early nineties. He has since documented various war torn destinations including Burkina Faso, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Sierra Leone. Certificate No.000358/ is a global traveling exhibition, which is estimated to have already been viewed by over 200,000 people. It is set to travel to Queensland and South Australia next. | |||||
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Coinciding with the politically fueled Beijing Olympics, Body Language: Contemporary Chinese Photography is currently on show at The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. A collaborative exhibition consisting of works by seven Chinese artists, Body Language focuses on the human form while fusing contemporary art forms with traditional iconography, representing China's changing society. Zhang Huan's Shanghai Family Tree series uses the body as a canvas for calligraphy; Huang Yan paints traditional mountainous scenery upon torsos while Liu Wei's Landscape photographs use black and white images of contorted figures to resemble hanging scrolls. Within Chi Peng's evocative Consubstantiality series, gender boundaries are blurred, while Wang Qingsong's triptych Preincarnation depicts figures dressed as ancient statues with missing limbs. Artist Sheng Qi is said to have cut off his own left pinky finger in 1989 after the Tiananmen Square massacre. He then buried it in a flowerpot, leaving it in China while he fled to Europe. His Memories series, which appears in Body Language, portrays his disfigured hand holding a photo of himself, his mother and Mao. Qi studied at The Central Academy of Art and Design, Beijing and Central Saint Martin's School of Art and Design, London. He has exhibited widely on an international scale at places including N.O. Gallery, Milan, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland and Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. | |||||
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SpY is an urban interventionist working in Madrid. His artistic practices range from interventions to objects, films, and urban furniture. His works include placing brown bags, black hats, and buckets over public statues across the city. SpY fabricates quizzical objects such as a lamp made out of an orange cone and a Rubik's cube with all white squares subtitled For the Lazy Person. Red Nose captures him placing a red nose on a billboard and a different clip, seen above, features him rolling thick black streaks of paint over another large street sign. Each takes place in midday and is accompanied by a jazzy upbeat background score, characteristic of the artist's playful and pleasing reappropriation of the city's fundamental iconography. SpY has been known to place urban furniture throughout Madrid such as his Yellow Fence. He has also positioned over-sized pencils along the M-30, a Madrid peripheral ring road, in Paint Your City. SpY replicates and alters this street imagery and installs his new creation, always in a non-invasive and amusing manner. SpY's first actions began appearing in the mid 1980s. He began as a graffiti artist and later experimented with other forms of artistic production in the street, creating large posters and modifying billboards. His pieces are based on years of urban observation and exist to break the mechanized motions of the modern urban dweller. The contexts for the works are always carefully chosen, and his works themselves always spontaneous and ironic, opening artistic communication in the street for anyone who wants to join. SpY has been reviewed by Serie B magazine and an interview with SpY by Subaquatica can be found online. | |||||
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 Peak Gallery in Toronto presents Susy Oliveira's first solo exhibition at the gallery, The Girl and The Bear. Oliveira graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2000 and holds a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Waterloo. She currently lives and works in Toronto. The Girl and the Bear includes three photographic sculptures, one collage series and one print. The girl and the bear, composed of C-prints on archival card and foamcore, is shown above, and comments on our reproduction of nature. The artist's intent is to form a simulated reality to remind us of our habit of replacing the natural world with our own fabricated versions. She mentions the garden in her artist statement, a domestic metaphor for things we create composed of organic elements, but for our own enjoyment. In Oliveira's three dimensional works, there exists a playful dynamic between the flat characteristics of photography and the round aspects inherent to sculpture. Their angular rendering recalls computer graphics from the 1980s or an over-sized origami project. Her collages depict outdoor scenes and are perforated with various sizes of cuts. In her photographic print, she placed holes in the sky, allowing real sunlight to shine through. Oliveira has exhibited at Niagara Gallery and A.W.O.L. Gallery in Toronto and has been reviewed by NOW Magazine and ECHO Weekly. The Girl and The Bear will remain at Peak Gallery until April 26, 2008. | |||||
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 There is a long history of art being presented along side fashion. These exhibitions have left one with the feeling that the art is being used to lend conceptual weight to the clothes. But the rigorous exhibitions mounted at Antwerp's Fashion Museum makes it clear that fashion designers can be as conceptually strong as visual artists. Their current exhibition is an overview of fashion designer Veronique Branquinho. She graduated from Flanders Fashion Institute in 1995. Since 1998, she has shown her collections on the world's fashion runways, but this is the first museum presentation of her creative output. | |||||
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 The group exhibition "The Ice Cream Show" at Loyal Gallery features artists Francine Spiegel, Katherine Bernhardt, Brian Belott, Brendan Cass, Jose Lerma, Bill Saylor, Mark Schubert, Cordy Ryman, and Guillermo Carrion, and emphasizes fluidity and the love of leaking and dripping. At some point, everyone has been fascinated by putting plastic in fire and watching it melt, cooking a s'more, or seeing ice cream liquefy under the sun. These sloppy gooey messes are portrayed by nine artists who capture the sprawling element inherent in these mutable conditions and poetically translate them into paint and other artist materials. The resulting works appear as if they are under the force of excessive gravity or as if they have just weathered a storm. Francine Spiegel works with photocollages, videos, mixed media assemblages, and freeform installations, as seen above. Her imagery is derived from feminine cyber subcultures and techno debris found on her studio floor. She combines this imagery with other found raw materials to present a massive eruption of color, paint, and texture. Spiegel graduated with a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 and has exhibited at the Silo Galelry and Deitch Projects in New York as well as Millicent Gallery in LA. "The Ice Cream Show" opening will be held on April 11th from 6-9 with special guest DJ Konichiwa Bitches and the show will remain at Loyal Gallery until May 25th. | |||||
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 Sullivan + Strumpf Fine Art presents Kate Shaw in "Redux", opening on April 15th in Sydney. Shaw paints landscapes that waver between pictorial illusion and complete abstraction and evoke images of the alpine wilderness and tropical jungles. The bottom half of her compositions is devoted to watery reflections, displaying a distinct Rorschach effect. She uses a cool pastel palette which varies between gentle washes of color and areas of dramatic saturation to create beautiful yet foreboding environments, inevitably awakening our own environmental consciouses and fears of global warming. Her landscapes are uninhabited, representing a time when nature has regained her control over mankind and lending a sense of apocalyptic immediacy. The artist describes her paintings as "disaster scenarios kind of...but only a disaster for humanity..". Shaw graduated from RMIT University in Melbourne with a Bachelor of Arts and then completed a Diploma of Museum Studies at Deakin University in 1997. She has exhibited in Australia and internationally, at Luxe Gallery in New York and at the Glendale College Art Gallery in Los Angeles. She had a solo exhibition at SSFA in 2007 and recently finished a studio residency in Brooklyn, New York. "Redux" will be at Sullivan + Strumpf Fine Art until May 4th. | |||||
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 Matt Mullican has been busy creating his own world in a multitude of different media since graduating from Cal Arts in 1974. His current exhibition at Galerie Micheline Szwajcer continues this constructive process. The front room is filled with banners and scale models done under hypnosis, that investigate the workings of the subconscious. The short lived Abstract Expressionist movement pursued a similar process, but, theirs was an unquestioned outpouring of the inner spirit. Mullican and his dreamscape contemporaries such as Johnathan Borofsky, Jim Shaw, and Mike Kelley reject this notion. Instead, they continually question, trying to come to an understanding of our motivation. In his black and white banners, Mullican tries to make metric conversions that just don't seem to make sense. But, at least he's trying. Being a concerned citizen, he outlines a path to follow should an emergency develop. This too sputters and spurts along with wry humor. And, in the end, suggests it's probably best to call 911 for help. Matt Mullican at Galerie Micheline Szwajcer through May 3, 2008 | |||||
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 The 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art opened on April 5th, launching 63 days and nights of art, revelry, and entertainment. Adam Szymczyk and Elena Filipovic curate bb5, which is divided into daytime and nighttime events and titled "When Things Cast No Shadow". It brings together artists of various generations and nationalities in the experimentation and promotion of new art. The day part consists of 50 artists exhibiting at three main venues: the KW Institute for Contemporary Art (the organizer), The Neue Nationalgalerie, and Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum. These were thoughtfully selected for their cultural and historical significance. KW Institute for Contemporary Art, a former margarine factory, is showing films by Babette Mangolte, Michel Auder, and Patricia Esquivias. Founded in 1991, it has become a popular venue for contemporary art in Berlin. The Neue Nationalgalerie is an icon of post-war modernist architecture in the capital. Mies van der Rohe's glass hall showcases a film installation by Susanne M. Winterling. Above is a still from her 2006 video, Piles of Shade. Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum is an outdoor exhibition site located in an area formerly occupied by the Berlin Wall, an urban void developed by artists who began to host diverse exhibitions and cultural activities. It hosts a community-based project by Katerina Seda and a screening of Lars Laumann's film about a woman who marries the Berlin Wall. The night portion, "My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days", sweeps the city's main venues and other locations in an eccentric array of lectures, performances, concerts, workshops, and other presentations. This curiosity-driven experiment draws artists and thinkers from various fields. Neuro-scientist Olaf Blanke demonstrates an out of body experience and this year's Nobel Peace Prize candidate, Augusto Boal, runs a workshop according to his context-sensitive teaching method. The Volksbuhne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz screens Cameron Jamie's recent film, JO, with a live score by Japanese noise artist Keiji Haino, and many many more events, night after night until June 15th! | |||||
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 Tony de las Reyes first re-imagined Herman Melville's Moby Dick in 2006, with an exhibition at Carl Berg that drew the attention of national critics. Ahab's America, the continuation of de las Reyes preoccupation with Melville's classic novel, is now on view at Carl Berg Gallery. De las Reyes uses red bister to make lush stains on paper. At first glance, these stains seem unassuming. But a closer examination reveals the intricate marine scenes that play out within the jurisdiction of the stains: rollicking waves or the confident mast of a ship. In Ahab's America, de las Reyes has also included a bronze sculpture of a skull, an elongated resin spout, and text paintings that quote passages from Moby Dick. The exhibition is a well-crafted, visually alluring exploration of American identity. De las Reyes received his BFA from California State University and his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He has had solo exhibitions at Bentley Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona, Howard House in Seattle, and Artplace in Los Angeles. His work has been featured in Art in America and Modern Painters. Ahab's America runs through April 12, 2008. | |||||
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 Anna Sew Hoy, a young artist who splits her time between Los Angeles and New York, makes work that sometimes seems therapeutically lyrical and sometimes seems tongue-in-cheek. Her current solo show Pow! once again straddles the line between lyricism and banter. At LAX Art in Los Angeles, Pow! includes two oversized casts, one for a giant ankle and another for an arm. Sew Hoy invites visitors to autograph the casts and the huge sculptures are already brimming with light-hearted consolations and one-liners. Sew Hoy participated in the Hammer Museum's 2007 exhibition Eden's Edge, a show that featured fifteen Los Angeles artists, including Ken Price, Lari Pittman, and Jason Rhoades. Her work for Eden's Edge had notable affinities with Ken Price's work; her ceramics took organic forms and she questioned art's decorative potential. In Pow!, Sew Hoy asks different questions. She explores medical practices and the social nature of the body by re-envisioning a casts on a massive scale. Sew Hoy received her BFA from the School of Visual Art in New York and she is currently completing her MFA in Bard College's low residency program. She has had solo exhibitions at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, Peres Projects, and Massimo Audiello Gallery. Pow! runs through April 26, 2008. | |||||
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 Curator's Office and Civilian Art Projects have collaborated on the exhibition craigslist at Civilian Art Projects in Washington, DC. On craigslist, users can search for essentially anything, from jobs and jewelry to casual encounters. Each month, the site receives more than 9 billion page views and more than 10 million new images are uploaded. Artists Joseph Dumbacher, John Dumbacher, Jason Horowitz, and Jason Zimmerman use the popular online community as a conceptual catalyst in their investigation of the identity phenomenon in the age of the Internet and how our online personalities generate a new type of portraiture. The Dumbacher artist team solicits models on the website to meet them and pose for photographic portraits by offering to purchase a movie ticket to a film of the model's choice. The Dumbachers meet them at the theater and photograph them in the low lighting, leaving their faces largely obscured. This allows the viewers to project their own identity onto the sitter. These haunting and shadowy portraits reflect the anonymity of the internet posting and our ability to manipulate our own images and personalities to the point of obscurity. Jason Horowitz solicits models on the site to come to his studio where they sign a social contract based on physical and emotional comfort levels. He then shoots extreme close-ups of the terrain of the body, creating his own type of anonymous portraiture. With the invasive zoom lens view, Horowitz awakens our own biases about beauty, race, sexuality, body image, and exhibitionism. Zimmerman uses images obtained from craigslist as his found raw material. He looks for images posted by people who are actively seeking sexual partners or indulging in blatant exposure and exhibitionism. He published an artist book, "The Willing", containing images of people who posted their rape fantasies on the Internet. An essay by Andrea Pollan, Director of Curator's Office, accompanies the exhibition that will remain at Civilian Art Projects until April 26th. | |||||
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 A collaborative team of Melbourne artists known as DAMP have created Scene 1, an interactive installation currently on show at the Kerry Gardner & Andrew Myer Project Gallery within the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Victoria. Consisting of three large painted wooden panels, the work depicts the artists posing in a conceptual freeze frame similar to the biblical nativity scene. Holes have been cut where their faces should be in order to allow for the audience to insert theirs instead. Photographs of spectators in this positioning can be taken and displayed on the gallery wall, allowing them to remain as part of the work. DAMP have been operational since 1995, and are frequently changing in members. Their projects are often performative in nature and rely on audience involvement, thus blurring the barriers between art, artist and audience. They have had various solo shows across Australia and have appeared internationally within group exhibitions at venues including Gallery Side 2, Tokyo, Basekamp Gallery, Philadelphia, Serpentine Gallery, London and UKS Gallery, Oslo. Members who took part in the creation of Scene 1 include Jonathan Bailey, Martin Burns, Olivia Dwyer, Sharon Goodwin, Ry Haskings, Spiro Kalantzis, James Lynch, Lisa Radford, Sean Samon, Dion Sanderson, Blair Trethowan, Masato Takasaka and Neil Wilson. | |||||
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 A series of works by late Indigenous artist Michael Riley are currently on show at Stills Gallery, Paddington. Entitled flyblown the photographic series portrays a range of imagery depicting the loss of Indigenous culture through forced assimilation. Christian iconography including wooden crosses and bibles reference the way Western religion was forced upon their civilization, while images of dead birds and heavenly skies refer to the death of their own identity. Riley grew up in regional New South Wales as his heritage lied with both the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi Indigenous communities. He later came to Sydney where he attended Koori photography classes at the Tin Sheds Gallery. His passion for new media art practices led him to become one of the founding members of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artist Co-operative, the only Aboriginal owned and operated contemporary art space in Sydney. His work has been displayed both locally and internationally within exhibitions and events including The 8th Festival of Pacific Arts, Noumea, The 2003 Istanbul Biennale and a solo retrospective held at the National Gallery of Australia. He was awarded grand prize at the 11th Asian Art Biennale, Bangladesh in 2004, while his legacy lives on by the creation of The Michael Riley Foundation. | |||||
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 Rotwand presents "Disguised," a group exhibition featuring Layla Ali, Melanie Bonajo, Kinga Kielczynska, Heidi Bucher, and Yael Davids. In today's world where everything is overexposed and overanalyzed, a countermovement to the dwindling distinction between public and private spheres is growing. Whether this is an effort to protect the past or to criticize contemporary culture is to be determined by the viewer. Ali's monochromatic prints in Indian ink portray cartoon-like characters in elaborate costumes and flamboyant headdresses. Her work provides some narrative with no specific references. Ali has had solo exhibitions at MoMA in New York and participated in the Venice Biennial in 2003. Bonajo and Kielczynska join to present "Modern Life of the Soul," a photographic documentation of a fictional cult at Poland's east border. The followers of this cult reject Darwin's theory of evolution in distaste for the success driven state of humanity today. They propose that humanity originates from plant life and they reside in a pristine and secluded forest. Bonajo has exhibited at Foam in Amsterdam. Kielczynska has made fashion videos for designer Bernhard Willhelm and Amsterdam Fashion Week. Bucher was a Swiss artist whose first fame came in the 70s when she dipped objects into latex, preserving and embalming them while playing with the transience and appearance of materials. She has been compared to Rachel Whiteread and Gordon Matta-Clark. In "Disguised", a pillow case, bed sheet, negligee, and ornamental cushion are displayed, transfixed and disguised in their latex casings. A retrospective monograph edited by Heike Munder was recently published. Davids isolates a specific part of the body and places it in a situation that inverts our expected relationships. Her video "Face" displays a model's head with a mechanical wig attached in continuous slow rotation, heightening our consciousness of the body. Davids has exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Galerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin, and Smart Project Space in Amsterdam. "Disguised" is at Rotwand until May 9, 2008. | |||||
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 For the first solo exhibition in a season-long multidisciplinary program called The Proper Animal at Black & White Gallery in New York, painter Asja Jung presents Mating Season, a series of humanoid apes set in highly ornate environments. The purpose and actions of the figures are ambiguous, but the intense gaze of the animal captures our attention. The subject stands alone in the elaborate surroundings, both confronting and confusing the viewer, causing us to ponder it's purpose. Jung's original iconography raises ethical questions surrounding the human-animal relationship. Several of her canvases are 96x40 inches, thus addressing us at our own human scale. Jung has previously exhibited at the Gedock Art Gallery in Hamburg, Gallery Reich in Cologne, and Monkdogz Urban Art Gallery in Chelsea. She has also done several independent painting projects in the streets of Cologne. Last year, she was a centerfold in the online art magazine Perfect 8. In Germany, Asja Jung completed a Study of Preparation of Cadavers for Scientific and Medical Studies at the University of Bochum and in pathologies, morgues, and museums in the area as well as in Munich and Berlin. She then began Art Studies at the Muthesius Hochschule in Kiel, Germany. She describes her subject matter as "in between the world of Bosch and Gruenewald creatures and science fiction movie aliens". | |||||
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 On display until November at the Rubell Family Collection (RFC) in Miami is a decade of Hernan Bas' works collected by the Rubell Family. The RFC is a museum-size collection of contemporary works dating back to 1960 housed in a converted 45,000-square-foot former Drug Enforcement Agency (D.E.A.) confiscated-goods warehouse. The Bas exhibit opened in early December 2007 to coincide with the movement of collectors and dealers flying south for Art Basel Miami. Hernan Bas is one of South Florida's most well received artists. Though only thirty years old, his work is included in the Museum of Modern Art and Saatchi Gallery permanent collections. He graduated in 1996 from the New World School of the Arts and lives and works in Miami. Bas' acrylic, watercolor, and gauche paintings take on the aesthetic of a blurry photograph, capturing intimate moments with a wide brush. His figurative subjects, if any, are always boys and men, and the viewer is invariably invited to peek into Bas' world as a gay man. Bas' vibrant pallet and the fairy tale and mythological scenes that he creates-often derived from history and high-art does not linger far from stereotypical utopian playgrounds. In the RCF exhibit, Bas features three multimedia works one of which is an underwater symposium, titled "Ocean's Symphony (Dirge for the Figi Mermaid)." The installation includes a phantasmagorical documentation of an underwater dance searching for the Figi Mermaid. In the gallery space adjacent lays an archive of ocean treasures carefully collected including a life-size replica of the mummified mermaid herself. | |||||
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Theresa Sapergia's show, A Thousand Natural Shocks, opened March 15th, 2008 at Cerasoli Gallery in Culver City, Los Angeles. Drawings, mostly large-scale and monochromatic, of various animals and one monumental depiction of the artist as both nymph and satyr hang in the front section of the gallery. The drawings have a tranquilized or sedated vibe to them, and yet there is also a drowsy yearning towards - for lack of a better word - nirvana. Theresa Sapergia received a B.F.A. from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, B.C. and an M.F.A. from Concordia University in Montreal. She has exhibited at AIR Gallery in New York City, and across Canada in Vancouver, Toronto & Montreal. She currently lives and works in Prince George, British Columbia. Please read below for a full interview with the artist by Darrin Little.
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