 On May 10th, Cerasoli Gallery will open separate exhibitions by two artists working in different media: Andy J. Simmons' photography exhibition Visions of Europe and collage artist Joshua Krause's Convince Me I'm on Fire will be shown in two gallery spaces. In Gallery One will be the work of Andy J. Simmons. Born in South East London, Simmons grew up learning to take photographs and to skateboard. Both of these interests are reflected in his photographs as well as other subcultural rituals. He works with Polaroid film and plastic cameras to capture stills as equally simplistic as his machinery and presents the images in an honest and straight forward documentary style. Each photograph is uncluttered and exudes a clean sense of beauty. Simmons refers to Transworld Videos and Slap Magazine as his major influences. In Gallery Two is the collage work of Joshua Krause who works with acrylic, enamel, and resin on natural or painted wood. Krause relies on dreams and the unconscious to guide him through his artistic production. In his works, the foreground is an ornate organic pattern composed of white dots from which partial faces emerge in patches. Krause is primarily self-taught and currently lives and works in San Diego, California. His extensive client list includes the New York Times, Option Snowboards, Escapist Skateboarding, and Loud + Clear Records. Visions of Europe and Convince Me I'm on Fire will remain at Cerasoli Gallery in Los Angeles until June 7, 2008. | |||||
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 The photography, video and performance works of artist Kelly Nipper proclaim the material proof that is inherent to photography and lens-based media at a time when most artists are determined to prove the falsities of the medium. Nipper explores the human relation to time, space and dimension, usually carried out through the choreographed acts of her subjects. The artist often works against normal photographic expectations, leaving her viewers void of the satisfaction that comes from the release of a climax or the capturing of a spectacle. Instead, Nipper engages her viewers with quiet, unassuming, though philosophically rich, images that investigate the empirical nuances of life. Nipper lives and works in Los Angeles and is an M.F.A. graduate of the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, Calif. This year, the artist will present an exhibition with the Anna Helwing Gallery in Los Angeles. Previous exhibitions include "Bending Water into a Heart Shape" at the Galleria Francesca Kaufmann in Milan, Italy, and "shotgun and a figure 8" at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica, Calif., which was reviewed by Artforum (2001). The artist has performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in California, PERFORMA07, and she has received the Alberta Prize for Visual Art from the Alberta duPont Bonsal Foundation. | |||||
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 Tokion Magazine presents the Fifth Creativity Now Conference in New York City at Cooper Union's Great Hall on May 17th-18th. The doors will open at 11 am on both days with the conference beginning at noon and finishing at 6:30 pm. Tokion is an innovative New York-based magazine that covers artists, fashion designers, people from the film industry, photographers, graffiti artists, designers, musicians, and new media artists on a global scale. Founded over ten years ago, Tokion has become one of the most authoritative anthologies on alternative emerging art and artists as well as featuring more established artists such as Bjork and Jeff Koons. Previous print covers have featured diverse artists and thinkers such as Isabelle Huppert, Jena Malone, James Franco, Natasha Kahn, Jarvis Cocker, and most recently Nate Lowman, who will be presenting at this year's conference. Continue reading "Tokion Magazine's Fifth Creativity Now Conference- May 17-18, 2008 " » | |||||
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 Alex Lukas and Brian Willmont present new work in their two-person exhibition at Park Life in San Francisco opening on May 9th. Both artists are members of Philadelphia's Space 1026 artist collective. Alex Lukas paints contemporary landscapes depicting moments of disaster and destruction as seen from a distance. He collects his imagery from various sources, including the mainstream media and blockbuster films, which pump out threatening messages on a daily basis. All paintings include an element of unease and anxiety, familiar feelings in a post-9/11 atmosphere. He works with a variety of materials, combining watercolor, ink, spray paint, acrylic, and enamel on paper, creating a dynamic textural as well as emotional effect. In addition to painting, Lukas runs a small 'zine publishing company called Cantab Publishing. He began making 'zines in 5th grade when he created his first Xerox comic and continued throughout highschool and college. Lukas attended the Rhode Island School of Design and has previously exhibited at White Walls in San Francisco and Galleri Loyal in Sweden. Brian Willmont describes the new American folktale in his Technicolor paintings that are tarnished with traces of American History, Pre-Renaissance and Persian miniature painting, as well as dreamscapes and the fantastic. Willmont received his B.F.A. from the LaMontagne Gallery and the Mills Gallery. | |||||
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 Californian artist Mary Corse has been creating bold minimalist paintings since the '70s. In recent work, the artist has focused on light and its effects through large reductive painting; this is clearly illustrated in "Untitled (Inner White Band)" above. Corse uses a mostly monochromatic palette that contains deep blacks, pure whites and varied grays. In the past, the artist created a series of light boxes that investigated various illuminations more literally through wall-mounted structures. In the past five years, Corse has exhibited three times with the Ace Gallery in Los Angeles and was reviewed in Art in America for her 1996 exhibition with Ace. Previous exhibitions include works with the Peter Blake Gallery in Laguna and Chac-Mool Gallery in Beverly Hills, California. Corse has received awards from the Cartier Foundation (1993) and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1975). | |||||
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 The large-format chromogenic prints created by Robert Polidori depict a grand sense of destruction and desolation. The interrupted landscapes are hauntingly void of humans and offer only traces of previous human existence. Polidori has traveled internationally to find these forgotten cities where natural or man-made circumstances have caused everyone to flee. New Orleans, Havana, Versailles and Chernobyl are among the cities that the artist has photographed. Polidori is a staff photographer for The New Yorker and has exhibited with Marti-Gropius-Bau in Berlin and Lombard-Freid Fine Arts in New York City. Last fall, Polidori exhibited documentary photos of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans at The Met in New York City, and the exhibition was reviewed in The New York Times. In 2003, Art in America reviewed the artist's exhibition at Pace/MacGill in New York City. | |||||
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 A recent collection of works by Indian artistic duo Jitan Thukral and Sumir Tagra are currently on display at Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Waterloo. Known for their prolific use of color, their works often reference advertising and consumerism as a response to contemporary culture. Entitled Somnium Genero 02, their current exhibition is a combination of paintings and sculptural works, all of which include vibrant imagery and surrealist influence. Symbols of man-made technology including planes, television screens and radio transmitters are interwoven with images of flowers, evoking a sense of natural beauty. Such hybrid imagery is affixed to canvases and some circular sculptural works, causing them to appear almost as enlarged, ornate Christmas decorations. Thukral and Tagra were both born in New Delhi, where they still currently live and work. Both artists attended Delhi College of Art, while Thukral furthered his studies at Chandigarh College of Art, Tagra chose to do so at The National Institute of Design, Ahmadabad. They have collaboratively exhibited at institutions including Bose Pacia, United States, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai and Teatro Armani, Milan. In 2006 they were honored on the list of 101 Emerging designers of the world, as featured in Wallpaper Magazine. | |||||
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 Currently showing at Sarah Cottier Gallery, Paddington is a recent collection of paintings by Queensland based artist, Julie Fragar. Entitled Liar, Fragar's works include depictions of people in a multitude of scenarios. These include children at play, people appearing ambiguously alone and families enjoying each other's company. Often her paintings include an overlapping of imagery, with the inclusion of thin outlines of figures which appear in other works within the series. Judging by the title of the exhibition, one could assume that these depicted people's often contemplative expressions suggest that they are guilty of lying to themselves or those around them. Fragar studied at Sydney College of the Arts, before later earning her doctorate in visual arts at Queensland College of Art. She has received various awards for her art practice including the 2005 ABN Amro Emerging Artist Award, The 2001 Freedman Foundation Traveling Scholarship for Emerging Artists and the Griffith University Postgraduate Research Scholarship. She has exhibited widely on a national scale within various solo and group exhibitions. Galleries her work has been displayed within include Mori Gallery Sydney, Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney and Queensland Centre for Photography, Brisbane. Her work also belongs to permanent collections at Artbank, Gold Coast City Art Gallery and Ferrier Hodgson, Sydney. | |||||
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 Galerie Michael Janssen is currently showing a three person exhibition titled Heaven, Hollywood, and Hitchcock until June 14th. Tom Allen, Kristian Burford, and Christoph Steinmeyer are all interested in mixing motifs and media culled from the history of film and European painting traditions. Los Angeles-based artist Tom Allen references works from the German Romanticist and European Baroque traditions of painting and then transforms this imagery into fantastical worlds. He uses reproductions from the history of painting and obscures them into visual landscapes, maintaining some reference to the original imagery. Allen has previously exhibited at Richard Telles Fine Art in L.A. and Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York. Los Angeles-based artist Kristian Burford, whose installation Christopher is seen above, mixes hyper-real sculpture and filmic backdrops to create compelling installations. Christopher depicts a naked man (made of wax) lying on a disheveled bed with his hand dangling over the edge as his fingers graze a glass of water, referencing the popular tale that if you fall asleep with your hand in tepid water, you will wet the bed. Burford has shown her work at I-20 Gallery in New York and at The Happy Lion in L.A. Berlin-based artist Christoph Steinmeyer also combines motifs from European painting traditions with film qualities. After selecting his motifs, Steinmeyer uses a multiple transformation process to morph the image, thereby alienating the original motif. For example, Hitchcock's film The Paradine Case provided the the basis for his new large format painting Maddalena, which is included in this exhibition. He has previously shown at Galleri K in Oslo and Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York. | |||||
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Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC is opening a new exhibition today titled The Constructed Image. The show features five contemporary photographers whose work challenges the very nature of truth as documented by the photograph. Through a variety of techniques, including digital and traditional photographic manipulation, set constructions, temporary sculpture, models and intricate dioramas, the artists create a very calculated visual experience. The exhibition includes works by artists Luis Gispert, Lori Nix, Daniel Gordon, Chris Scarborough and Nathan Baker, and will be on view through June 7th. Please read below for details on the exhibition and the artists. | |||||
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 Currently on view at Bellwether in New York City is a self-titled solo exhibition by the photographer, Anne Hardy. The British born photographer constructs elaborate sets inside her London studio and shoots them in a medium-format camera with a wide-angle lens. Hardy's installation process can take months to execute. She begins with simple objects and ideas, instigating and encouraging her process to take over the project. The ambiguous rooms that she creates oftentimes suggest the presence of her own hand or that of an abandoned human space or situation. Her use of man-made objects comment on the western world of commerce and humanity's impact on environment. At Bellwether, Hardy exhibits five recent photographs which reveal a caliginous palette of derelict spaces and circumstances. Hardy attended the Royal College of Art where she received an MA in Photography and has since exhibited widely, both internationally and domestically, including the 2008 Armory Show and the Saatchi Gallery. Her photograph, Outpost, is on view at the Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art at the Barbican Gallery in London. | |||||
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 Cathy Akers' current show at Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles takes on a big issue: the history of the human race. Akers' dioramas depict Adam and Eve like figures in surroundings that resemble Eden. Yet the world depicted in Akers' exhibition, titled Hertopia: An Illustrated History of the New World, is more delinquent than it is idyllic. This is Akers first solo exhibition since graduating from the MFA program at California Institute of the Arts in 2006. Prior to now, she's exhibited in group shows, like (Tender) Assembly at the Show Cave and a Juried Exhibition at the Torrance Art Museum. Interested in the large-scale dilemmas of evolution and human nature, Akers wants to push the envelope where ideas of utopia and "natural" human interactions are concerned. In 2007, she made a sculptural cake called "Natural Selection." Gallery visitors ate away at the cake, naturally selecting parts of the edible world Akers had created. In Hertopia, Akers' utopias are childishly hellish. She at once captures the jubilance associated with lush, green terrain and uninhibited nakedness and the brutality of human beings. The lack of inhibition in her sculptures leads to a disconcerting world in which characters pursue their desires both to their own benefit and detriment. Hertopia will be on exhibit through May 17th. | |||||
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 Patrick Jackson's debut solo exhibition at Los Angeles' Chung King Projects will be a chorus of stuff. Found objects, construction, and ephemera all make up Jackson's work, creating an environment in which dirt and technology have equal footings. Recent MFA grad, Patrick Jackson has quickly made himself known in the LA art world. He initially studied at San Francisco Art Institute and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture before finishing up his graduate work in 2007 at the University of Southern California. He's a recipient of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, an enviable honor for a young artist, and he also participated in the annual LA Weekly Track 16 exhibition in 2006 and has participated in residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation in New York. | |||||
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Continue reading "Epistemology of Polka Dots: Evan Holloway responds to James Turrell" » | |||||
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 Jason Roskey's solo exhibit, Stay Or Pass On Through Or Whatever, at 33 Bond Gallery in Manhattan opens this week. The Texas-born Brooklyn transplant's works are composed of pencil, paint, ink, and collage on paper. His themes are derived from the New York City environment: urban life, architectural ruins, decay, identity, and the American Dream. Like many collage artists, his images are collected from recycled magazines and periodicals. In an interview with NY Arts, Roskey explains his image searching process, claiming to have a specific preconceived database of images that he wishes to utilize, which generally includes war-torn areas, political iconography, and images from fashion shoots. Stay Or... is a fresh body in comparison to his heavy handed paintings and drawings of his past life in Texas. The show demonstrates Roskey's conceptual maturing and (spatial) adjustments in his art making. Roskey has no formal training as an artist but attended Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. | |||||
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 Dirt Mansion, a Judith Supine solo show, is exhibiting in Brooklyn at Bushwick's English Kills Gallery until June. The graffiti artist's large-scale collages consist of magazine cut-outs and photographic images which he has digitally enlarged and painted. His palette is bright-hot pinks, neon yellows, greens, and blues that stand out on the urban canvas. Supine's figures are fantastic, distorted images of people, animals and situations mostly created from rubbish and found objects. In Dirt Mansion, he creates a gallery-wide installation of his contorted figures and imagery, set in a black box which adds to the eeriness of his convoluted sculptures. In addition to his dark side, Supine is playful with his environment, he once created a floating sculpture in the East River, a large-scale hanging banner which hung from the Manhattan Bridge, and he has pasted an anti-war collage onto the walls of Time Square's army recruitment station. In this, Supine inhibits the role of the street artist, remaining mysteriously under-the-radar. Although little is known about his background or his motives, Supine is considered a member an elite group of Brooklyn-based street artists, which include Bast and the duo Faile. In January, he exhibited with Bast in a show titled, Booby Trap, at the Leonard Street Gallery in London. | |||||
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 Currently at OKOK Gallery until May 4th is "While," a two person show with works by Mauro Altamura and Anna Von Mertens concerning the passage of time. Both artists examine political and historical occurrences from various perspectives. Altamura is exhibiting 144 (out of 1000) photographs from his series, "Anonymous," which he began during the presidential elections of 2000. Altamura collected images of anonymous people in the background of published pictures in the Friday New York Times. The artist then re-photographed and enlarged these faces, displaying them in a grid-like pattern, reminiscent of institutional methods of photographic indexing. Together they become a shrine of anonymity and obscurity, with the enlargement of the faces causing the original image to dissolve into a dot pattern. This partial portraiture creates a sense of loss and powerlessness, familiar feelings in our current political atmosphere. Von Mertens will be exhibiting three works from "As Stars Go By," a project that displays the star rotation patterns above violent and dramatic events in American history. The artist hand stitches the patterns into quilts, with each stitch becoming a marker of time and a silent reminder of past and future. Events depicted include the Civil War Battle of Antietam, Hiroshima, and the morning of September 11th. All took place during the daytime hours, thus concealing the star patterns above from those affected below. The stars serve as passive spectators and suggest nature's transcendence above human interactions and indiscretions. Altamura received an M.F.A. from the Visual Studies Workshop/SUNY Buffalo and a B.A. from Ramapo College of New Jersey. He has received several grants, including those from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Von Mertens received a B.A. from Brown University in 1995 and her M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts. She has displayed her work at Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco, the Berkeley Art Museum, and White Box in New York. | |||||
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