Opening last night at Mitterrand + Sanz Contemporary Art in Zurich, is new work by photographer Time Davis in the exhibition titled, Tim Davis: Kings of Cyan. The title is taken from the natural occurrence of fading that takes place when full color CMYK posters are placed on the street and battered by wind, rain and sun. Cyan is the last color that generally remains during this process, causing a ghostly image of the photographic subject. Davis has turned his eye to political posters of the past, observing these historical icons and the effects of their meaning once abused by time and weather.
Tim Davis originally studied photography at Bard College in the earlier nineties, and afterward developed a career as a poet and editor in New York. The artist attended Yale University School of Art for his MFA in 2001 and since has had several international exhibitions including works at Whitecube in London, the Guggenheim and MOMA in NYC and High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Davis now teaches photography at Bard College.
Opening this next Friday at the Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York City will be new work by Oakland-based artist Chris Duncan for his second solo exhibition with the gallery titled, The Faith Void Split. The show's title is taken from the album The Faith/Void Split from 1982, by Washington D.C. hardcore groups Faith and Void. The artist will have a collection of two and three dimensional works featured in the exhibition, including a "string burst" sculpture that will cover one of the gallery walls which will be painted black. Duncan has completed several solo exhibitions with the Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco as well as with Nakaochiai Gallery in Tokyo, Motel Gallery in Portland, Oregon, and Lump Gallery in Raleigh, North Carolina. The artist is the co-creator of the zine project HOT AND COLD and was the 2006 recipient of the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Goldie Award in Visual Art.
Photographer and animator Cassandra C. Jones employs great technical precession with works such as her kaleidoscope-patterned collages. The series "Good Cheer" depicts appropriated images of cheerleaders meticulously reconstructed and digitally printed into ornate patterns. The artist has used the imagery to develop complex wallpapers that dissolve into marginally recognizable anthropomorphic forms when the viewer gains distance from the pattern.
Previously, Jones created short-looped animations that often consist of more than 1,250 images, collectively portraying simple and personal events along with other sporting activities. "Track and Field" is a series that the artist produced that investigated ideas of the athletic arena while producing stunningly ambiguous images by overlapping multiple photos. Jones attended the California College of Arts in Oakland, Calif., and received her MFA in photography and glass from the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Penn. The artist has exhibited "Rara Avis" at the Queens Annex in San Francisco, and participated in the Pulse Art Fair in New York with the Nathan Larramendy Gallery. In 2004, Jones received the Vira I. Heinz Endowment Fellowship awarded by the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.
Andy Warhol ate a hamburger for Jorgen Leth's 1981 documentary, 66 Scenes from America. He sat alone in a gray-blue room, wearing a suit coat and a tie that matched the ketchup bottle. He chewed slowly, fidgeted, stared off into space, removed the top of his bun, rolled his burger up like a taco, then fidgeted some more. He looked at the camera only once, giving it an uncomfortable, searching glance, as if asking how much longer he had to maintain the charade. At the end of the scene, he tensely announced, "My name is Andy Warhol and I just finished eating a hamburger."
The Vincent Award is a biennial art prize, meant to promote peaceful communication in Europe. The Award, established in 2000, is always accompanied by an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and past winners include Pawel Althamer and Neo Rauch. The 2008 shortlist includes Francis Alys, Liam Gillick, Deimantas Narkevicius, and Rebecca Warren. Work by the four artists can currently be seen at the Stedelijk. Peter Friedl, initially shortlisted, withdrew from the competition in June and was not replaced. According to the jurors, all of these artists are making work "highly relevant" to the art of today. The winner will be announced on September 12th.
The above video soundlessly walks you through The Vincent Award exhibition, capturing the haunting calm of Narkevicius' video work, the esoteric militantism of Francis Alys' multi-medium installation, and globular classicism of Rebecca Warren's sculpture, and the aloof sleekness of Liam Gillick's video Everything Good Goes. Warren is the only artist not working in video this year, and all of art of the multi-media work in the installation, even Warren's sculptures, seems to favor narrative over object hood. The exhibition continues through September 30th.
Painter and recent Rhode Island School of Design MFA graduate Ricky Allman, creates post apocalyptic landscapes that simultaneously reference dynamic mountains with architectural structures such as skyscrapers. The artist utilizes geometric abstraction along with organic forms to stimulate the image and allow for the multiple layers to tell a narrative about the possibilities of earth's future.
Allman has a forthcoming solo exhibition next year with Byron Cohen Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri, which comes after Your smallest sins are my greatest accomplishments: Recent work by Ricky Allman at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. Allman was featured in Beautiful / Decay Magazine Issue P in 2006 and was featured in Wallpaper Magazine 2008: 110 Art and Design Graduates to Watch.
Jaguar Shoes will present Tonight I am an Owl, new work and the first solo exhibition by Hannah Waldron, one of London's hottest emerging artists and illustrators. The exhibition, which will be located at The Old Shoreditch Station, will focus on the artist's imaginative drawings which feature an abstract vocabulary built from the artist's own world. The works will include glow in the dark screen prints, fantastical landscapes and images of the animal kingdom.
The work often exists as a hybrid of art and design and includes animation and film. Waldron grew up in Lewisham in South East London, close to where the artist continues to live and work. She attended the Chelsea College of Art and Brighton University, where she began her career as an illustrator. Since her graduation, the artist has completed several major projects including the design of a new magazine Counterpart, a music video for Good Shoes and various book covers.
For the first show of their fall season, the James Harris Gallery in Seattle, Washington will present new works by artist Richard Rezac, for his third exhibition with the gallery. Rezac's work is rooted in geometric abstraction that serves to reduce the formal elements of shape and color. While the work is presented as a two dimensional object on the wall, the viewer can't deny its sculptural form as a relief. Some of the pieces are supplemented with preparatory drawings, allowing the viewer to gain insight on the creative process.
Rezac has exhibited internationally with a 2006 survey of his work at the Portland Museum of Art. In addition, the artist has shown with the Yale University Art Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago and the Artgarden in Amsterdam. Rezac currently lives and works in Chicago.
Emerging Australian artist Erin Smith is currently showing work at Diaz Castillo Gallery in Melbourne. Smith's compositions are constructed of individual letters that mingle together to create large symbolic images. As a child, Smith kept a diary where words were written over and over, deconstructing language into its simplest structural components. By denying her letters any verbal meaning, Smith gives these familiar structures new visual potency. The density and dispersion of the letters lends an elegant chaos to the typographic assemblage.
Smith has previously exhibited at Metro Arts Gallery in Brisbane and the Mori Gallery in Sydney. Her work is displayed alongside that of Jason Wing in Diaz Castillo Gallery's current exhibition, appropriately entitled Before You Are Famous. The exhibition will continue until August 30, 2008.
Quiet Politics, currently on view at Zwirner & Wirth in New York, lives up to its name. It's understated, discreet and somewhat guarded. In the wake of recent political intensity, David Zwirner has invited a different approach to politicized art, an approach that emphasizes thoughtfulness over reaction.
The show is a multimedia experience, including work from a surprising collection of later and early career artists. Robert Gober's reworked newspaper pages have a characteristically heavy wit while Felix Gonzalez-Torres' Untitled (Fear) is as contextual and inclusive as ever. Lisa Oppenheim, whose work is pictured above, makes geometric abstractions out of Crayola's "multicultural crayons," a strange commentary on the role race plays in contemporary visual culture. The other artists in the exhibition are equally unobtrusive, making political observations, but not really taking political stands. Christopher Williams, Rosmarie Trokel, Roni Horn, Walid Raad, David Hammons, Michael Brown, Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, and Adel Abdessemed make up the rest of Quiet Politics' line-up. Ideally, the show endeavors to widen the range of politics in art, making the dialogue more inclusive. If nothing else, it will offer a relieving glimpse into an aesthetic politics that is more judicious then heated.
Oakland-based artist Deth P. Sun will be presenting new paintings for an exhibition titled I See it All, opening this weekend at Giant Robot's GRNY Gallery on East 9th St in New York City. The new works will feature the artists epic landscapes and characters which reference both cosmic and very personal worlds. The narrative works attempt to create "a place where cold mountains loom under the stars, cloaked figures arrive with the night, and lone dreamers struggle." The show is inspired by the films of Terry Gilliam and the work of David Attenborough.
Washington DC's Hirshhorn Museum has embraced the history and technology of cinema, launching a large scale video exhibition that explores the perpetually shady filmic relationship between fiction and reality. Called The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image, the exhibition is divided into two parts. The first, Dreams, ran through May 11th and focused on the imaginative capabilities of film. The second part, Realisms, is on view now. Realisms itself is divided into to sections, one of which emphasizes fictive realism - including pop culture references and Hollywood-inspired ventures - while the other emphasizes documentary-style film work.
Curated by Anne Ellegood and Kristen Hileman, Realism includes work by nineteen diverse artists: Candice Breitz, Matthew Buckingham, Paul Chan, Ian Charlesworth, Phil Collins, Jeremy Deller, Kota Ezawa, Omer Fast, Pierre Huyghe, Runa Islam, Christian Jankowski, Isaac Julien, Michele Magema, Julian Rosefeldt, Corinna Schnitt, Mungo Thomson, Kerry Tribe, Francesco Vezzoli and Artur Zmijewski.
As the above video discusses, Realism highlights the cultural, historical savvy of today's most innovative film artists, while also probing the unique technological capacity film has to question what's "real." The exhibition continues through September.
A new collection of works by Hong Kong born artist Kate Beynon are currently on show at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Demonstrating influences from a range of art forms including calligraphy, graffiti and textiles, the series reflects a variety of multicultural stimuli in order to create the artist's interpretation of today's global citizen. Oriental inspired imagery is a prominent feature of the artist's work, while the merging of Western attributes reflects the artists own dual heritage of being born to a Chinese mother and Welsh father. Her work is bold and ornate, often consisting of both acrylic paint and aerosol enamel, on either canvas or linen, adorned with clusters of Swarovski crystals.
Beynon immigrated to Australia as a child where she later studied at various universities including The University of Melbourne, Prahran College and The Victorian College of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited on both a local and international scale at institutions including The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Bendigo Art Gallery, Netherlands Media Art Institute and Stills Gallery, Edinburgh. She has received various awards and grants for her art practice including The 1995 George Award at Melbourne Fringe Festival, the 1999 Arts Victoria Women's Artist Award and a 2004 Professional Development Grant from the Visual Arts/Craft Board of the Australian Council for residency in Harlem, New York.
A new collection of paintings, collage works and drawings by Sydney based artist Ben Quilty are currently on display at Grantpirrie, Redfern. Entitled Smashed, the exhibition contains numerous works which are influenced by Rorschach inkblot tests, as the canvases have been folded in half with paint to create a symmetrical print. Skulls are a common motif within the series, as some eerily appear as black and white Chinese ink works, while others as school boy doodles in blue biro. Quilty's oil paintings are vibrant and textured, often appearing quite momentous as some extend to almost three metres in length.
Matthew Ronay's sculptures are centered on the several social and political issues including everything from funk music to possibility or implausibility of future revolution in America, yet his sculptures may not easily reflect this. The artist has stated, "my sculpture may not look like it is socially or politically
loaded. It only functions when it enters the mind of the spectator. That is, when it becomes an act of direct communication."
These narrative metaphors are intended to act as a visual puzzle and are often quite indiscernible as a result. The artists uses the familiar aesthetic of cartoons in his work and transforms them into sculpture, alluring the viewer in and offering several layers of meaning as you begin to engage the work.
The artist was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and is an MFA graduate from the Yale University School of Art. Last year, Ronay exhibited "Oh My God What Are We Gonna Do" with Vacio 9 in Madrid, Spain, and "Going Down, Down, Down" at Parasol Unit in London. The artist is currently represented with the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York City and has been involved in several notable group exhibitions, including "Make It Now: New Sculpture in New York" at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City and "Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium" at the Astrup Fearnly Museum of Modern Art in Oslo, Norway.
Opening next Tuesday at Zach Feuer Gallery in Chelsea is Tickle the Shitstem, the third solo exhibition of Phoebe Washburn with the gallery. Washburn's work explores absurd systems of production and the by product of waste. Tickle the Shitstem is a developed system in and of itself where the production and the waste are of equal importance. Some of the products produced in the exhibition include beverages, pencils, colored urchins and t-shirts. The installation will remain in production for the duration of the exhibition.
Born in 1980 on Williams Air Force Base in Arizona, Whitney Lynn received her M.F.A. in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute in California, where she currently lives. Having recently described herself as a "bit of a political blog junkie," Lynn pays attention to how visual elements shape our cultural perceptions of objects by examining military culture and its interventions in our civilian landscape.
In order to do this, Lynn selects something familiar or neutral, such as a pillow fort, and exploits its hidden conceptuality by artistically investigating it. This naturally leads her to work in a variety of different media. Children often play military games, whether chasing each other around the neighborhood (or Air Force Base), playing with water guns, or building forts in living rooms, and this concept is of interest to Lynn. By using pillows, mattresses, and sheets to create a sculptural installation of a fort, the similarities between civilian and military culture become less distinct. In another project, the artist took the familiar story of an army general walking up to the opposing side's fort with a butterfly net and paper. Claiming to be sketching butterflies, the general really writes down the floor plan of the fort. For the exhibition Decoy at LoBot Gallery in Oakland earlier this year, Lynn presented large paper butterflies with secret floor plans laser cut into their centers, an artwork with penetrating precision, both in concept and aesthetic. Whether she is using pillows or paper, Lynn imparts her accuracy and sensitivity in perception to the viewer. Lynn has previously exhibited at Swell Gallery in San Francisco and Spur Projects in Portola Valley.
Currently on view at artandphotographs in London is Testimony: Joakim Eneroth An exhibition of Photographs of instruments of torture is an exhibition featuring several photographs that bluntly, and as the title suggests, displays instruments of torture. In 2005, Swedish photographer Joakim Eneroth traveled to Dharasala, India to meet with a Paiden Gyatso, a recently released prisoner of China that had spent over 33 years in captivity. Once released, Gyatso, from fear of being recaptured, traveled over the Himalayas out of China and into India. Gyatso carried with him a bag of these instruments, which he hoped to reveal to the world and expose the torture practiced by Chinese prison officials. Together Gyatso and Eneroth accomplished this goal of which the result in part is this exhibition.
Joakim Eneroth is a graduate of Nordens Fotoskola in Biskops-Arno in 1999. Since, he has been honored with the Swedish Picture of the Year and won first prize in the Prix Voies Off in Arles, France. The artist's project Seeing Reality Behind My Projections was exhibited at the Guangdong Museum of Modern Art in China and his book Swedish Red is scheduled to be released this month.
On view through the month at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, CA is the work of artist Roni Horn. In the artist's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in nearly ten years, Horn ha presented a varied body of work which includes sculpture, photography and text-base works. The artist continues her investigation of form, material, time, presence and place with subtle intent. Horn has taken much inspiration from the inherent qualities of the Icelandic landscape, which provides the artist with many opportunities for references on nature and identity. Her photographic series includes images of Isabelle Huppert which capture the actress's many different expressions and moods.
Photographer Rhona Bitner has spent the past 15 years of her career observing and capturing the performer and the performance space. Though the artist documents the space, the photos are far from documentary. In her new body of work titled "STAGE," Bitner captures the silent moments just before and directly after someone appears on the stage. The space becomes filled with anticipation, expectation or the memory of the performed act. The dialogue between the viewer and the act is further challenged as it is being seen through still photography, complicating the relationship between the viewer and the physical space within each image. Bitner lives and works in New York and Paris. She exhibits work in the U.S. with the CRG Gallery in New York and the Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston. From March 8 to May 18, the artist is exhibiting with Galerie Xippas in Athens, Greece, and last year she exhibited works with Blondeau Fine Art (BFAS) in Geneva, Switzerland. Bitner received a fellowship from the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming twice (1993, 2002) and has been reviewed by ARTnews (March 2006) and appeared in an article with the Boston Globe (Dec. 8, 2005).
Nashville-based photographer, painter and draftsman Chris Scarborough creates diverse works that references the archetypes of Japanese cartooning similar to Manga. The cultural concepts of cuteness and beauty mixed with the playful violence of Japanese cartoons all inform Scarborough's imagery and process. While working in graphite, painting or the computer, the artist painstakingly renders his subjects with absolute precision. The artist's drawings were recently featured in the Southern Edition of New American Paintings, and he has been featured this year in The Constructed Image at Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC. The artist has ongoing gallery representation with the Curator's Office in Washington D.C., Foley Gallery in New York City, Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, and TAG in Nashville. Scarborough is a graduate from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) and has been included in several publications such as ArtPapers and The Red Clay Survey.
Opening later this month at Hosfelt Gallery in New York City will be two separate solo exhibitions featuring works by painters Chris Ballantyne and Naomie Kremer. Ballantyne's exhibition Everything Means Something and Nothing is What it Seems to Be continues the artists hard-edged painting approach which conceptually investigates suburban spaces that are fenced in or out of other parts of nature. The graphic images often feature buildings, pools, parking lots, and fences is absurd, yet familiar positions. Ballantyne received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and resides in Brooklyn.
Force Fields is the title of California and Paris-based artist Naomie Kremer. The artist's abstract paintings offer immense amounts of movement as the overall mark making is gesturally placed without any preconceived notion of what the painting will be. The physicality of the painting is reminiscent of certain abstract expressionist painters, as the artist leaves the content of the painting up to the viewers interpretation. Kremer is an MFA graduate of the California College of Art.
The artists in Environments are living in the here and now, responding to Global Warming, going green, and pollution with down-to-earth sincerity. Curated by Al Nodal, currently president of the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commissions, the exhibition emphasizes the role artists play as citizens and is part of the 18th Street Art Center's Future of Nations Series.
Environments is ultimately about engagement: How can citizens actively and effectively engage environmental problems? The artists involved represent a confluence of international, socially active aesthetes. The multi-disciplinary team Los Animistas, 18th Street's current artists-in-residence, explore the cultural relationship between humans and nature; Ala Plastica is an Argentina based organization that collaborates with scientists and environmentalists; Lauren Bon is best know for her Not a Cornfield project, in which she turned inner city brownfield into a fertile community cornfield; Natalie Jeremijenko runs a research lab out the art department at UC San Diego, studying landfills, pollutants and other environmentally pertinent phenomena. Each artist or collective in Environments is taking a different, aware approach to citizenship and the exhibition as a whole is a hopeful glimpse into what might happen if the boundaries between art and life continue to break down.
The exhibition opened on July 12th and continues through September 13th.
When Sol Lewitt died in 2007, he was working on a series of process oriented scribble drawings. Lewitt, who drew out the plans for his drawings and then let his apprentices and trainees execute them, never had a chance to see some of these drawings come to life. Now, Mass Moca is hosting an in-progress Sol Lewitt wall drawing retrospective, an exhibition that will include never-before-realized, premeditated scribbling. While the exhibition doesn't technically open until November 16th, the pre-exhibition process is well under way and patrons are able to follow its progress on the museum website and on its youtube page.
"We're scribbling very, very consciously," says Sol Lewitt professional Michael Benjamin Vedder, an artist who has made a career out of executing drawings like those he's working on for the retrospective. The drawing process has the collaborative feeling of mural painting and graffiti art - the apprentices, interns and professionals work at a low-key, but disciplined pace and the walls around change from blank spaces to geometric and tonal seas of mark making.
According to another Lewitt professional, Takeshi Arita, the art world's focus on Lewitt's late career drawings is misleading: "We're working for the scribble drawings, but I don't know if it's necessary to emphasize it's the last piece. My understanding is that he was still working on progress." According to Arita, Lewitt would finish one drawing and then his interest would move to the next project. Fortunately, that's the way this retrospective works: one drawing moves into another and then into another.
Transit Antenna is a diverse group of creators, bound in space and time to each other and a 40 foot metro bus named Walter. Traveling across North America, the mobile living experiment, which consists of seven people, featuring writers, filmmakers, painters, chefs, musicians and a dog, are all living on the road for a two year journey. Now six months into their travels, Transit Antenna, launching from Charleston, SC, are currently in Portland, Oregon. You can track them at anytime via their wikimap.
The nomadic group may seem like a throw back to the sixties with their free spirits, overgrown beards and desire to just be on the road, but there is much more than meets the eye. The group is capturing their experience through writing, painting, filmmaking, photography and most of all through a loose network of social collaborators that spread across the US, sharing what they know and can do with whomever they come in contact.
When asked, why are they doing this project the group has replied, "for the challenge of living on the road, of living frugally, and of finding ways to support ourselves. For the excitement of seeing the country, of meeting engaging people, of exploring the periphery of America where culture doesn't get handed down from cultural imperialists-it grows dynamically from the people up. We're doing this for the possibility of creating community on the road, of developing collaborations that will fuel our creative practices..."
Visit DailyServing.com and TransitAntenna.com often to find the location of the crew and to catch up on all of their recent projects and videos.
There's a SunTek that makes window films for impact resistance and solar protection, tubular polycarbonate skylights, computer cases and power supplies, auto-marine upholstery, pools and spas, valves for petroleum piping, and innovative beauty products. And then there's SunTek Chung who makes images of identity forged from concepts about culture and technology.
Like all of his photographs, SunTek makes a real space for us to examine. He challenges the integrity and meaning of artifacts that are marginalized by their own popularity. In his image The South The South, a drunken motorcyclist minds his business on the stoop of his marsh shack facade, drinking tall boys out of his well-traveled cooler. He's surrounded by pine bark mulch, the remnants of the oldpine forest. Set in the door of his shack is a strange southern flag. The yin and Yankee colored Saint Andrew's Cross holds the symbols of heaven, earth, fire, and water, made white like the stars. The background of the Korean flag, the color of cleanliness and light, has been changed to red, the yang spilled all over the flag.
The purity of the cause is questioned and the white flag as a symbol of truce or peace has been subverted. There's a skewed parallel between South Korea and the Confederacy that the drunk is not required to explain. But, there's a spirit of rebellion and autonomy in freedom from both government control and communism. The stereotype of the Asian imitation of American things is subverted. The Korean and American products are interchangeable and impure.
Displaying the Confederate flag is an inflammatory issue, especially in the South, where it remains common. Because it represents both oppression and rebellion, it's rightly capable of offense. Remaking that flag gives us a fresh vision of a cultural artifact, challenging information extrapolated from stereotypes and simplistic understandings. Ignorance and biases become apparent and silly, but remain a real part of identity.
OKOK Gallery's current exhibition, TEXT/URAL, presents the work of seven national and international artists whose text-based works illustrate the expressive potential of language. The infinite mutability of letters, words, and their meanings allow these artists to explore, both formally and conceptually, the role of language in art. The exhibition features works by Michael Waugh, Kay Rosen, Kim Rugg, Will Yackulic, Ewoud Van Rijn, Annie Bradley, and Grant Barnhart.
Michael Waugh's labor intensive drawings are executed in ink lines of tiny handwritten script. Waugh selects his text from dozens of Presidential inaugural addresses, commission reports, and speeches to Congress. Thousands of words are written out by the artist, and the text becomes large images, as seen above in one of two works on display in TEXT/URAL. The images created from the sprawling text are often loaded with religious and political allegory.
Kay Rosen has been working with language since 1969. Her wall painting, HALFULL, will be on display at OKOK Gallery. She articulates the meaning of this work in her essay, The Center is A Concept, where she states "referencing the proverbial glass, HALFULL offers a verbal shortcut for viewing the world in two ways, positively or negatively, through a simple linguistic choice involving the letter F". Rosen uses the predictable palette of 1 Shot brand of sign-painters lettering enamel, an arbitrary system with an infinite combination, similar to the alphabet.
Kim Rugg renders our print and media culture unintelligible by meticulously dissecting pages of newspaper with an X-ACTO knife. She cuts out every letter and alphabetizes them on the page, all while preserving the dignity in presentation and formality of the newspaper format. She cuts the pictures into small equal sized pieces,and arranges them by color into what resembles television static. Three works will be included in this exhibition utilizing the front pages of the New York, Seattle, and L.A. Times. Rugg was recently reviewed by the L.A. Times and described as "a vandal of the highest order, a tamperer, an interventionist."
Will Yackulic's works on paper combine text with obsessively rendered micro-landscapes that recall rudimentary digital imagery. His work was featured in 2007 on DailyServing. Ewoud van Rijn's epic drawing, Reality, will be included in the show as well. The image, whose gushing lettering suggests both water and sperm, contains a bold statement "reality has no mistress it has a master me." New Zealand-based artist Annie Bradley is presenting her audio video animation, Sodding G. Monolith, in the project room. This work is inspired by the names spammers use to circumvent e-mail filters and comments on the incessant flow of information. Grant Barnhart, another previous DS feature (and was interviewed by DS in 2007), is presenting work that combines text with adolescent ephemera, such as Playboys adorned with forged Babe Ruth signatures. He is also displaying the sleeping bag in which he received his first kiss, creating an awkward homage to innocence lost.
TEXT/URAL will be on display at OKOK Gallery in Seattle until September 7, 2008.
Samuel Roy-Bois constructs architectural spaces using industrial and domestic materials such as wood, plexiglass, paint, electrical lighting, objects, and furniture. His built environments often engage the viewer physically, such as in Ghetto from 2006 (seen above). This installation, from the artist's first solo show in Montreal, is a simple room with four walls of sheet rock and exposed framework which houses a mattress complete with pillows and a light fixture above. The large entrance on one facade allows the viewer to step in. The artist uses the term "uninhabit" when discussing his work, which describes "the fact of feeling outside a world that is nonetheless familiar to us."
Our awareness of material reality heightens as we address this public bedroom. The objects and interiors of Roy-Bois engage viewers in a spatial discourse that punctuates our presence in space. Roy-Bois received his B.F.A. in Quebec from the Universite Laval where he has also taught. He later received his M.F.A. in Montreal from Concordia University. He has exhibited in Canada and abroad (Paris, Lausanne, Mexico City), and had his first solo museum show, Improbable and Ridiculous, at the Musee D'Art Comtemporain de Montreal in 2006.
One Breath below Consciousness, is a new, corporeal exhibition by Spanish born artist Dani Marti. Currently showing at Breenspace, Waterloo, the display consists of both video works and textile weaving. These interlaced canvases are often a mix of both simple, structural materials such as nylon braiding, leather, polyester and knitting yarn, as well as more brilliant substances including Swarovski glass, beaded necklaces and Spanish rosary beads. Last year Marti took this fixation with weaving and applied it to more unconventional forms. . His installation work Off my Noodle, consisting of a giant tangled ball of pink, polyethylene foam pool noodles was displayed at both The University of Technology, Sydney and Newcastle Regional Art Gallery.
Although born in Barcelona, Marti currently spends his time living and working between Sydney and Glasgow. He has studied at various institutions around the world including Esade, Barcelona, Julian Ashton Art School, Sydney and Glasgow School of Art. His work has appeared in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including Dark Bones at Citric Gallery, Italy, Missing Spain at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Sydney and the 2007 Cornice Art Fair, Venice. In 2007 he was awarded the Newcastle Regional Gallery Residency as well as a New Work Grant from the Scottish Arts Council.