 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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 The exhibition "Feral" which opened this weekend at the Luggage Store in San Francisco is a collaborative show created by artists Monica Canilao and Swoon. Through the construction of immersible environments, the artists create a domain "populated by wicked women and feral girls." They use wood, paint, paper, and found materials in the fabrication of their mystical and spontaneous world. Canilao is interested in the passage of time and the exploration of space, home, community, and life. She uses expendable materials, such as paper and fabric, in the composition of her stitched and interwoven collages and sculptures, finding life and energy in items made by hand. Canilao received her B.F.A. in Illustration from California College of Arts and has exhibited in San Francisco at the Onsix Gallery and 111 Minna Gallery. Brooklyn-based artist Swoon blends photography, traditional printmaking techniques, portraiture, and figurative drawings in the creation of her worlds, often populated by street people and characters based on her friends and family. Her subjects are realistically rendered and engage in typical pedestrian and urban activity. The inhabitants of this imaginary universe move through a cityscape of bridges, water towers, and fire escapes. Swoon's brilliant use of positive and negative space gives life to her cut out creatures. Swoon has exhibited at Deitch Projects and MoMA's P.S.1 in New York, but is best known for integrating her imagery into the city landscape. Inspired by traditional graffiti, she uses the city as her canvas, as well as engaging in street parties, poster campaigns, and billboard alterations. In New York City she has recently placed several hidden peepholes throughout the metropolis where, once stumbled upon, viewers are able to catch a glimpse of a secret and dream-like place. The installation "Feral" will remain at The Luggage Store until April 26, 2008. | |||
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 Currently showing through March 29th at Deitch Projects in New York City is Tim Noble and Sue Webster's collaborative exhibition titled Polymorphous Perverse. This is a recreation of an exhibition installed at the Freud Museum in London in the fall of 2006. The artists met while studying at Nottingham Trent University and have previously exhibited at PS1/MoMA, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and Centro de Arte Contemporaneo de Malaga. The central piece of the show is a kinetic sculpture based on Freud's assertion that children are "polymorphously perverse," meaning that they display a tendency to achieve sexual gratification out of nearly anything. This nascent sexuality is suppressed by socialization within a culture that believes in the denial of genitality to the young, leaving dormant ideas of sexuality that persist into adulthood. Thus, the "mature" sexual adult is in a subconscious state of conflict between a desire to satisfy a wish and a fear of doing so. The sculpture at Deitch Projects is constructed of a workbench, on which mechanized objects composed of childhood toys are placed and activated by viewer presence. When activated, the converted toys generate a series of sexual interactions our culture now regards as perverse. While a conventional response would perhaps be an initial squeamishness, a more open-minded view would allow for the existence of infantile gratification. Noble and Webster force the viewer to address his or her feelings about repressed sexuality by confronting sex-negative social structures and Freud's concept that the libido is the primary motivational force in the self. | |||
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 Greatly inspired by Germaine Greer's infamous publication The Female Eunuch, Melbourne artist Emily Floyd has created a 100 piece sculptural installation devoted to the book. Now showing at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, the wooden fragments include pieces which have been shaped to resemble the female form, referencing not only the book's feminist contents but its notorious cover image designed by surrealist painter, John Holmes. Entitled The Temple of the Female Eunuch,the exhibition includes carvings containing text exerts from the book, often in vibrant, psychedelic colors,reflecting the period in which the book was written. Emily Floyd earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts, majoring in sculpture from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She has been granted several awards and artist residencies, including the 2000 Cinemedia Digital Arts Fund and The University of Melbourne Asia link Residency, which sent her to work in New Delhi.She has had various solo exhibitions within Australia at institutions including The John Curtain Gallery, Perth, The Institute of Modern Art,Brisbane and Studio 12 at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne. | |||
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 "Supernova" is the latest exhibition by husband and wife collaborative duo Eleanor and James Avery. Currently showing at Grantpirrie, Redfern, the display showcases a selection of large scale sculptural works created by the pair. Appearing almost like over sized Christmas decorations, the angular structures are an exploration of contemporary culture and the interplay between reality and fiction. Both artists were born and educated in England, with James earning a Masters of Art and Design Education from the University of Warwick, Coventry and Eleanor completing a Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Central England, Birmingham. They were recently commissioned by the Queensland Government to create a series of sculptural works for Brisbane Cycle Centre. Both artists also have fruitful solo careers, with Eleanor set to participate in a group show at Gitte Weise Gallery, Berlin later this year while James has had his work displayed at various institutions including Leicester City Gallery, UK, West Space, Melbourne and Gold Coast City Art Gallery, Queensland. | |||
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 The Whitney Museum of American Art has recently announced artists for the 2008 Whitney Biennial, taking place March 6-June 1. Of the 81 participants, installation artist Carol Bove has been selected in addition to Rita Ackerman, Oliver Mosset, and Spike Lee. Bove has gained attention for what she calls "forced collaborations" with other artists. In a recent solo exhibition at Maccarone Gallery in New York, collectors lent Bove a 1963 eight-inch sphere by sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro, which she placed on a platform surrounded by concrete blocks, bronze cages, driftwood and steel. In the same exhibition, she covered part of the gallery's ceiling with rigid metal mesh and then suspended thin copper rods from it. Each rod corresponded to the exact location of a star in the night sky above the gallery on October 21, 2007. She did this same installation with bronze rods on March 2, 2006 in Berlin. The immediacy of this work demonstrates that Bove's work is "not nostalgic" as admirer (and co-curator of the 2008 Whitney Biennial), Shamin M. Momin states. Bove earned her degree in studio art from New York University and has been reviewed by the New York Times and W Magazine. She began her career with installations of bookshelves containing cultural paraphernalia from the 1960s, such as the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and framed drawings of Mia Farrow. The books and various objects chosen referenced revolution, LSD, suicide, and radical politics, among other things. Alluding to a time when creative freedom was seemingly unrestrained, Bove transcends simple nostalgia by taking a conceptual approach to the cultural ideals of the 1960s. Uniting her early works and her new installations is the allusion to the ephemeral quality of life, both in the cultural "moment" of the 60s and the temporal "moment" of the alignment of the stars. | |||
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 British installation artist Simon Starling has an upcoming exhibition at Toronto's Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery opening March 1, 2008. The Power Plant commissioned the 2005 Turner Prize winner for a site-specific piece based on Henry Moore's 1954 bronze, Warrior with Shield. Moore had a close but controversial relationship with the city of Toronto, having several sculptures placed throughout the city. Canadians became resistant to this public support of a foreign artist. For the commissioned piece, Starling submerged a replica of Moore's sculpture in Lake Ontario in 2006, providing a host for the invasive Zebra mussels native to the Black Sea. This species was accidentally introduced to the Great Lakes in 1988 by boat, the same way Moore's sculpture arrived in Canada. They have since proliferated, stimulating the ecosystem by flushing out pollutants and diminishing the population of the native species, thus becoming controversial themselves. The replica will be extracted and the shells of the mussels will remain, resulting in the central piece of the show, Infestation Piece (Musseled Moore). Starling uses the metaphoric mollusk to point to the tension between regionalism and globalism, both environmentally and artistically. The parallel between Moore's artistic "invasion" of the city and the mussels' biological invasion of the Great Lakes has both international significance and local relevance. Nine other works by the artist, all created in the past five years will accompany Infestation Piece. Starling attended the Glasgow School of Art and had his first solo exhibition in 1995 at The Showroom in London. He has also shown at London's Camden Art Centre. Starling's interest in how human history affects the natural world pervades his work. By taking an existing artwork and altering it, the artist makes the audience aware of the greater social and historical contexts of a particular piece. The elegance and simplicity of his message, despite the complexities of its execution, allow the viewer to perceive the interconnectedness of nature, geography, society, and art. | |||
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 For his first major solo museum exhibition in the U.S., artist Tom Sachs presented "Logjam," a series of objects and installations that reflect the mechanics of their own production and emphasize the process of their creation. The show was curated by Jeff Fleming, the Director of The Des Moines Art Center and was presented at Brandeis University's Rose Art Museum last fall. The exhibition consisted of a series of work stations that allow the artist to create, while being works of art in their own way. The many mixed media works in the show are composed from previously used tools and other used mechanical components. The name "Logjam" is actually a reference to a box the artist keeps in his studio that contains screws and nails which have broken during the creation of a work. The exhibition was reviewed in the recent Issue U of Beautiful Decay Magazine and also appeared in an article with the Boston Globe. Sachs has exhibited internationally and recently showed the exhibition "Space Program" at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles. | |||
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 Paul McCarthy has used Belgium to stage the largest presentation of his work to date, with over lapping exhibitions, first at Middelheim Sculpture Park, in Antwerp, and now currently showing at S.M.A.K. (Stedelijk Museum Actuele Kunst) in Gent. This seminal Los Angeles artist, after having toiled away in virtual obscurity for more than 30 years, first began showing at LA's Rosemund Felsen Gallery, then burst on the international scene in the early 90's, when his influence on generations of artists was finally acknowledged. In filling the museum to the brim, McCarthy utilizes practically all medias available to an artist today. Drawing, Sculpture, Installation, Photography, Video, etc.... are all crammed together. He also touches on most art movements from the past 40 years, blending Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Neo Expressionism, Neo Realism, Deconstruction, Performance, and everything in between. This exhibition also reveals McCarthy's interest in referencing the art of his contemporaries. In works such as, "Dreaming" (Duane Hanson), "Mechanical Pig" (Wim Delvoye), "Destroyed Walls" (Gordon Matta Clark), "MJBH" (Jeff Koons), among many others, the playful McCarthy seeks to do his colleagues one better. A dangerous game, but all his gestures maintain that distinct McCarthy touch. This jammed packed installation leaves no room for rest, for the eye or the mind. "AIR BORN/AIR BORNE/AIR PRESSURE" at Middelheim museum Antwep, Belgium. May 27, - Oct. 26, 2007 "Head Shop/Shop Head (works 1966 - 2006)", S.M.A.K. October 13, - February 17, 2008. Paul McCarthy is represented by Hauser & Wirth, Zurich / London | |||
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 Currently showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney is Julie Rrap's retrospective "Body Double". Spanning the last 25 years of the artist's career, this exhibition is an evocative exploration of the human body. With particular emphasis on the female form, Rrap's photographic, sculptural, video and installation pieces explore issues of feminism and identity. Rrap uses herself as a key figure in many of the works, creating casts of her own body, photographing herself and even utilizing her own hair and bodily fluids. Appropriation is a tool widely used by Rrap as her early works include a photomontage of herself as Christ, while others include her own naked body fused with artworks created by the 'great masters,' such as Rembrandt and Munch. Rrap currently lives and works in Sydney. Her work has been displayed on a global scale, appearing within solo exhibitions at the Galerie Eric Franck, Switzerland and Ecole des Beaux Arts, France. | |||
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 Lauren Bon has turned Ace Gallery's large Wilshire space into an intensely sensorial experience, filling it with raw honey, earth, carcasses, bees, corn, cotton and wood. Bon conceived of the exhibition, "Bees and Meat," as a sculptural symphony that joins decay and growth. In one small gallery, a lamb carcass hangs on the pole of a fountain that regurgitates slow streams of honey. In another gallery, the walls are covered with stacks of bent wood, twine and cotton. A third gallery has been transformed into a majestic, knee-deep sea of corn kernels. Because of its scale, the exhibition took longer than expected to install. Initially scheduled to open on October 20th, it opened on October 27th and will run through January 20th. Lauren Bon, who lives and works in Los Angeles, has been making land-focused work since the early 1990s and she became known as the "Not a Cornfield" artist after she transformed 32 acres of Los Angeles' industrial Brownfield into a cornfield in 2005. Bon graduated from Princeton in 1984 and received her Masters in Architecture from MIT in 1989. She has shown at the Freud Museum in London, the Santa Monica Museum in West Los Angeles, and Boston's Miller Block Gallery. | |||
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 Tracey Emin's first Los Angeles solo show, "You Left Me Breathing", opened at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills on November 2nd. Emin, who was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999, is one of the hyped Young British Artists whose work gained notoriety in the mid 1990s. She recently represented Britain at the 2007 Venice Biennale, installing large-scale neon signs and drawings on the walls of the British Pavilion. Emin openly uses her life as her subject matter and her work vacillates between virtuosity and one-liner candor. Paintings, like "Reincarnation III" (2005), explicitly play on the expressive style of Edvard Munch while neon works, like "Very Happy Girl" (1999), are gaudy and blunt. Emin's expansive oeuvre includes sculpture, drawing, video, photography, and needlework and "You Left Me Breathing" emphasizes her ambiguous, controversial breadth. At Gagosian, Emin's confessional drawings, including "Family Suite II" (1994), hang alongside her crude, tongue-in-cheek textile assemblages and her flashy neon signs contrast her large, expressionistic paintings. The Gagosian show also features a recent series of delicate jesmonite sculptures that incorporate bronze, bundled wood, cement, and glass. | |||
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 Lawrence Weiner is mounting a new body of work, "As Far As The Eye Can See", at the Whitney Museum from November 2007 through February 2008. The artist uses words to serve as the raw material for his art. Words are spoken, sung, painted, printed, stamped on coins and manhole covers, put to film, just about anywhere. The text is intended to help people understand their relationship to the objects in their world. Weiner is one of the key figures associated with the emergence and foundations of Conceptual Art and has defined art as "the relationship of human beings to objects and objects to objects in relation to human beings". Recent solo exhibitions of Weiner's work have been exhibited at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Weiner has produced various films and videos, including "Beached, Do You Believe in Water?", and "Plowman's Lunch". Weiner lives in New York and Amsterdam. | |||
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 On view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Feb 2008, artist Kara Walker will be showing "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love". The artist explores racism in the American psyche through large-scale silhouettes that tell a story as they spread from one end of a room to the other. Walker has created a repertoire of narratives in which she conflates fact and fiction to uncover the roots of racial and gender bias. Her imagery is haunted by sexuality, violence, and subjugation while depicting historical narratives of injury caused by the legacy of slavery. She's been featured in Art21 and was in Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World, Artists and Entertainers in 2007. Walker received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She now lives in New York and is on the faculty of the MFA program at Columbia University. | |||
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Acclaimed British sculptor, installation artist and musician Richard Wilson was born in 1953 and currently lives and works in London. The artist is one of England's best-known sculptors and has gained much notoriety for his ambitious architectural interventions and reconstructions which are often noted as architectural magic. In the video shown above, Wilson literally cut into the building, connecting the piece to a track allowing it to rotate in place. The artist often explores the relations of space to architecture and related structures, giving new form through reconfiguration and assembly thus changing the viewer's perception of the form. Wilson is scheduled to present a new exhibition in Galleria Fumagalli in Italy opening this Saturday, October 13 at 6pm. The artist studied at the London College of Printing, Hornsey College of Art and received his MFA from the Reading University in Berkshire, UK. Wilson has been nominated for the Tuner Prize twice and most notably completed the DAAD residency in Berlin in 1992. He has completed signature works for the Saatchi Gallery and the Matt's Gallery early in his career and has since been collected by museums worldwide such as Weltkunst Collection at IMMA, Dublin and the Centre of Contemporary Art, Warsaw among many others.
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 In a new body of work titled A Castle Dark (For Cathy), artist Hilary Wilder tells the story of Cathy Smith, a former groupie to The Band also known for her troubled relationship with singer Gordon Lightfoot and her implication in the drug-related death of John Belushi. The series of paintings are constructed from the visual details of her life while paying homage to Canadian landscape painter, Tom Thomson. Wilder received a B.A. in Studio Art from Bates College and an M.F.A. in painting at the University of Wisconsin. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Visual Arts. Wilder is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University. The artist is also taking part in a group show titled "The Sirens' Song" opening October 11 at Rubin Center in El Paso. | |||
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 Hauser & Wirth Colnaghi in London is opening a new exhibition today for the acclaimed artist Louise Bourgeois. Bourgeois, who is currently 95 years old, is highly regarded as one of the most important artists working today. For the exhibition "LOUISE BOURGEOIS: New Work", the artist will feature a major new body of cast sculptures, gouaches and two complete portfolios of hand-colored prints. The exhibition coincides with a major retrospective of the artist's work at Tate Modern also opening this month. Bourgeois draws much of her inspiration from her childhood and from a deep examination of feminine sexuality, stating "My work is not an illustration of anything, but rather it expresses an emotional state, good or bad." The artist is known for the diverse materials that make up her work, often using multiple forms and materials to express reoccurring symbolism and themes in her work. Bourgeois was born in France; she studied art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and has worked in the US since 1938. Her current exhibition at the Tate will travel from 2008 and 2009 to Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, LAMoCA, Los Angeles and the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. | |||
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 Cuban-Dominican artist Quisqueya Henriquez opened his first major museum survey exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts yesterday evening. "The World Outside: A Survey Exhibition 1991-2007," showcases the artist's sculptures, installations, drawings, photographs, videos and light/sound works created over the past two decades. In addition to the exhibition, Henriquez was featured in this month's ARTnews magazine. The artist's work investigates social environments through cultural cliches, invoking sensory experiences of urban life through his multi-disciplinary works. The artist, who is currently represented by David Castillo in New York City, studied at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana, Cuba and the Universidad Autonoma De Santo Domingo (USAD) in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Henriquez has exhibited in the Centro de Fotografia de la Isla de Tenerife in the Islas Canarias, Spain and Proyecto de Arte Contemporaneo, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico, among countless others. The artist is now in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), North Miami, the Henry Buhl Foundation and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
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 Opening today in Beverley Hills is the first exhibition by artist Tom Sachs presented by the Gagosian Gallery. Sachs, a previous DailyServing feature, has gained international acclaim for his technically meticulous sculptures of manufactured objects and structures. The artist crafts his sculptures with very basic materials often associated with model making such as foam core, chip-board and hot-glue. Over the last decade, Sachs has been engaged with the technical wonder and romance associated with the American Apollo space program. Through experimenting with individual models of various sizes, the artist has begun to develop his own fully operating conceptual space program. By working with high-style and production clothing companies such as Nike and Prada to develop items such as lab coats and space boots, Sachs has expanded his artistic vocabulary and inventory immensely. Sachs originally studied at the Architectural Association in London (1987), and later received a B.A. from Bennington College in Vermont (1989). Since the artist has exhibited globally and has work in the collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Centre Georges Pomidou. | |||
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Opening this Thursday at the RHYS Gallery in Boston will be an exhibition of several new works by Los Angeles-based artist Amir H. Fallah. On view in the gallery will be one of Fallah's signature fort/terrarium installations which will contain live cacti and music by Minor Threat. Fallah, who is also the founder and creative director of Beautiful/Decay Magazine, has exhibited internationally with the Third Line Gallery in Dubai and participated in the recent Rogue Wave exhibition at the L.A. Louver Gallery. DailyServing recently spoke with Fallah about his upcoming exhibition, new directions in his work and his pick of L.A. artists, read the full interview below. 
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 The material and process-based sculptures of Foon Sham have spanned the past 20 years. The artist's recent work relies on the principles of design, and some works have shifted from the previously abstract into newly recognizable forms, such as the house. During a residency in the mid-90s, Sham created "Houses at Night," a work that formed as an intuitive response to the surrounding landscape. The piece marked a breakthrough for the artist, as he is now working more freely with familiar forms and integrating light and architecture within the work. Sham was born in Macao, China, in 1953 and moved to the United States in 1975. The artist completed his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond, Va., and his BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCA) in Oakland, Calif. Sham has continued to participate in countless exhibitions and residencies, including recent shows with Heineman Myers Gallery in Bethesda, Md., Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong and Dianne Tanzer Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. Artist residencies include Kulturhuset USF in Bergen, Norway, and the Pyramid Atlantic Arts Center in Riverdale, Md. | |||
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 On Sept. 1, the Victoria Miro Gallery in London will present an exhibition of new works by New York-based artist Sarah Sze. As a continuation of the artist's sculptural aesthetic, Sze has created several new ephemeral installations that use throw-away materials such as water bottles, office lights, thread and scrap wood. The artist's sculptures are integrated into the gallery walls, floors and ceiling and are organized to represent a microcosm that is able to exist and function as part of a larger system. Sze is a graduate of Yale University and the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She has exhibited internationally with shows at Malmo Konsthall in Sweden, the Fondation Cartier in Paris and the Whitney Museum in NYC, and she was also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003. | |||
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 The dynamic site-specific installations of German artist Felix Schramm deconstruct pre-existing architectural elements while bringing outside structural fragments into the gallery. Schramm creates illusion and physical tension within the space, conjuring ideas of disaster and destruction by using structural fragments that are almost indiscernible. The artist will often cut into the gallery, twisting and breaking the walls, ceilings and floors, referencing artist Gordon Matta-Clark. Currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) are new works by Schramm, including "Misfit," which features the intersection of multiple rooms within a building, completely removed and placed in the gallery. The artist was born in Hamburg and received his MFA from the Kunstakademier in Dusseldorf, Germany, where he currently lives and works. In 2003, Schramm received a Northrhein-Westfalia's art and culture prize and, in 2000, a DAAD fellowship for study in Tokyo, Japan. | |||
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 Lithuania-born artist Zilvinas Kempinas creates site-specific installations that re-contextualize materials such as video tape to transform physical space into utter illusion. The physical and optical impact on the viewer is caused by precise geometry of structure and light. Illusions of speed and vibration are echoed through the space to accentuate the architecture and provide a new way of experiencing a usually familiar and non-descript space. The artist has been living and working in New York since the completion of his MFA at Hunter College (2002). Kempinas has experienced rapid growth since his entire 2006 exhibition at the Spencer Brownstone Gallery was purchased for the Margulies Collection in Miami. After several successful international exhibitions, the artist has been offered two upcoming major museum exhibitions with the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius, Lithuania, in June and Kunsthalle in Vienna in 2008. The artist will also participate in the Atelier Calder in Sache, France, from January to June 2008. | |||
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 In an exhibition ending just last week with the Peres Projects in Los Angeles, artist Chris Ballantyne presented "Existing Outside of Another." Ballantyne, who was born in Mobile, Ala., focuses much of his works on mundane architectural structures such as parking lots, old swimming pools and billboards. A dominate characteristic found in his recent work is a strong and eerie glowing natural light that seems to reference the glow of urban artificial lighting. Ballantyne, a previous DailyServing feature, moved around the country in his youth and has since remained influenced by suburban developments, interstate highways and the ideas of ownership and trespassing. Ballantyne's paintings, drawings and sculptural installations have been exhibited in "Out of Place" with the Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Forum in California and "Body of Water" at Cheekwood Museum's Temporary Contemporary gallery in Nashville, Tenn. The artist received his MFA in painting and drawing from the San Francisco Art Institute (2002) and has since been featured in Art Forum and Artweek magazines. | |||
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 Artist Susan Giles' work takes root in the eye of the tourist. The artist has presented hours of video documentation taken by vacationers and amateur videographers around the world. In 2005, Giles participated in the exhibition "Universal Experience: Art, Life and the Tourist's Eye," curated by Francesco Bonami at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago. Unassuming establishing shots of local scenery are spliced with scenes of street performers and the insides of airports, among countless other nondescript locations. In a recent exhibition with the Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago, the artist recreated a portion of the Eiffel Tower made completely of constructed foamcore in a work titled "Pilier Sud." Both bodies of work, while formally different, present very similar conceptual concerns dealing with ideas related to tourism, place and photographic documentation. The artist is a recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and a Fulbright Full Grant to Indonisia sponsored by the Museum Nasional in Jakarta and Sekolah Tinggi Seni in Indonesia. Giles has exhibited with numerous national spaces such as Spencer Brownstone Gallery in New York and Deluxe Projects in Chicago. | |||
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On March 22, artist Josiah McElheny presented a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City called "Artists and Models" to discuss his investigation of models and how they operate in relation to sculptural thought rather than direct function or information. McElheny is interested in the idea of a model as an "aesthetical utopia that could never be built." In a 1929 conversation between sculptor Isamu Noguchi and architect Buckminster Fuller, the idea of an experimental environment containing no shadows was determined feasible if a totally reflective form was constructed in a completely reflective space. While never completely realized by Fuller or Noguchi, McElheny, who is known for working with glass, used this reflective principle to create a series of sculptural models, both large and small, called "Extended Landscape Model for Total Reflective Abstraction," which contained a mirrored glass table with hand-blown mirrored glass objects placed directly onto the table. These works were eventually, over a period of about four years, extended into other works that illustrated the same principle through other environments and models. Many of these examples can be viewed currently at the Donald Young Gallery in Chicago in "Josiah McElheny: Cosmology, Design, and Landscape Part Two," while other projects and ideas are discussed in season three of the ART:21 series. | |||
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 The recent works of Los Angeles-based artist Vincent Johnson expound upon his research of the American Cold War Civil Air Defense Program. Johnson focuses on forms related to the mechanics of this period. For example, the artist has a new site-specific sculptural installation currently on view at LAXART in Los Angeles called "Civil Air Defense Project #1." For this installation, Johnson took the form of a Cold War Chrysler Air Raid Siren that was used in the '50s to warn the public about upcoming air raids and used the device for formal experimentation and as a deceptive tool to comment on current social, political and military relations. Johnson's photographic work has been exhibited in museums and art spaces internationally, such as at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York City and the Adamski Gallery of Contemporary Art in Aachen, Germany. The artist received his M.F.A. from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (1997) and participated in a collaborative project at the Studio Museum in Harlem. | |||
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 The OKOK Gallery in Seattle is currently presenting "I Have Been Remembering: Half-Lives & Half-Truths," new works that include a site-specific installation by Minneapolis-based artist Gregory Euclide. The exhibition is a continuation of the artist's interest in the implicit psychological layers of landscape and included a live sound performance and composition by Kamran Sadeghi on opening night. The exhibit also contains hundreds of one-inch drawings made from memory during the artist's trip from Minneapolis to Seattle. The circular drawings are each installed behind a single piece of bubble wrap and then displayed across the gallery walls, eventually breaking down and spreading across the floors. Additional pieces of bubble wrap are injected with water from Euclide's paintings and various other outside sources. Next year, the artist will receive his M.F.A. from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Recently, Euclide was featured in New American Paintings' Midwest Competition, which was curated by Elizabeth Dunbar, the curator of Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. OKOK Gallery conducted an interview with the artist that discusses the ideas and processes of his new work. | |||
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 In a current exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, world-renowned conceptual artist Chris Burden is presenting the new show "Yin Yang," which explores ideas inherent in the complementary principles of duality. The artist, who has a longstanding obsession with machines, motor vehicles and ready-mades, has chosen a 1973 Lotus Europa sports car and an International T6 crawler Bulldozer from his private collection to illustrate his ideas. The Lotus represents the perfect race machine -- light weight, fast, but completely impractical -- while the Bulldozer is a solid, heavy and otherwise unstoppable machine of duty. Burden will exhibit a series of photographs documenting the vehicles along with the machines themselves. The artist received his B.F.A. from the Pomona College at Claremont, Calif., and is a M.F.A. graduate of the University of California at Irvine. Burden first received international attention for his controversial performance in 1971 titled "Shoot," in which the artist instructed a friend to shoot him in the arm in a gallery full of people. The artist has since created numerous performances and conceptual projects exhibited internationally in venues such as South London Gallery and the Tate Gallery in London, as well as Magasin 3 in Stockholm, Sweden. Burden began teaching at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1978 and remained a faculty member until his resignation in 2005. | |||
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 Pakistani-born artist Asma Ahmed Shikoh grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, in a society constrained by tradition that was later subjected to rapid changes because of the impact of globalization. The artist uses mixed media to combine popular icons, cityscapes and social issues. When American fast food had just arrived in Pakistan, McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken became icons in the imagery of her artwork, taxing the otherwise helpless ideals of nationalism in Pakistan. She now lives in New York City where her work includes Arabic metro maps, iPods, Dora the Explorer characters and yellow police tape. To highlight the role of individual practices in the shaping of a unique national identity, her solo show "Liberated" at Ceres Gallery in Chelsea included personal contributions of more than 100 Muslim women across America who contributed by mailing one of their hijabs (the head scarf adorned by Muslim women). Shikoh attended Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi and has shown at Queens Museum of Art in Queens and Exit Art in New York City. | |||
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On view now at the Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, S.C., is "Tentacle House," new works by Korean artist Si Jae Byun. Byun was the 2007 artist in residence with Redux, completing the program only five days ago. The work of Byun often revolves around the artist's childhood experiences, focusing on inner conflict from social experiences, which are communicated to the viewer through the interactivity of her pieces. Using characterized images of human organs and videos that incorporate the artist's own body, Byun creates vibrant youthful works using multiple materials to achieve her diverse ideas. Byun currently lives and works in New York City. She received a BFA and MFA from the Kookmin University in Seoul, Korea, and has just completed her second MFA from the School of the Visual Arts in New York City. The artist has exhibited internationally, including "Da-Da-Da-Da-Da" with the Shin Art Museum and installations with the Seoul Art Center and the Seoul Museum of Art in Korea. Additional group exhibitions include "kinaesthetics" at Visual Arts Gallery in New York City and "Dual Scenery" at Artcom Center in New Jersey. To read an interview with the artist, please click below.  | |||
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 Artists Jan Braumer and Philipp Moll are presenting new works in "Noetik," an exhibition at the Galerie Emmanuel Post in Leipzig, Germany. The exhibition, which is on view through August, features painting and installation from the artists. The paintings of Braumer depict interiors that are rendered from fragmented memories that incorporate a false use of lighting and place an emphasis on artificiality and the absence of humans. The installations of Moll are constructed out of simple materials that are formed into hut-like shapes and a variety of other forms that express their reluctance to be discarded. Moll's work also calls into question ideas of imperfection, cliche and falsification. Both artists were born in 1970 in Nuremberg, Germany, and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg. Braumer received a scholarship from the Cite des Arts in Paris (2003) and has exhibited four times in LICHTFELD in Basel, Switzerland. Moll co-founded the Kulturvereins Winterstein e.V., and received a scholarship from the Bavarian Ministry of State for Science, Research and the Arts in 2005. | |||
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New York City-based artist SWOON creates fantastical cityscapes that are delicately rendered through cut paper and often posted publicly on the streets of New York. In the above video, the artist presents her work as part of this year's "Conversations with Contemporary Artists" series at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. SWOON introduced herself to New York by covering the city's streets with her signature public works, including cut-outs, billboard alterations, poster campaigns and street parties. The artist creates life-sized installations, indoors and outdoors, that depict friends and families engaging in a variety of everyday activities that take place within the city. SWOON gained much notoriety from her outdoor works, especially her street peepholes that, once discovered, allow viewers a glimpse into a secret world. The artist has been traveling for several years, exhibiting works across the United States and Europe. SWOON has collaborated with such groups as the Barnstormers, Glowlab and Change Agent. She has exhibited in the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center's "Greater New York" show in 2005 and has exhibited a massive walk-through installation with the Deitch Projects in New York City. | |||
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 Since the mid-90s, artist Jeff Carter has traveled extensively throughout India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and China. These travels have caused the artist to focus much of his attention on the idea of tourism and the implications of meaning that time and distance have on objects of travel, such as souvenirs and snapshots. Often, the artist will work directly from memory, recreating objects to investigate how experience is determined by the memory of the act. Carter's work negotiates space as a first-time viewer and as an intimately connected local. A sense of nostalgia and longing from the absence of a particular place is found in the artist's work, underscoring the physical and emotional effects of traveling. Carter received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1998) and his BFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder. The artist has received many awards, including a fellowship award for visual arts from the Illinois Arts Council in Chicago and an ArtCouncil Grant in San Francisco. Recent exhibitions include "The Surface" at Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago and a self-titled exhibition at the Spencer Brownstone Gallery in New York. | |||
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 German-born artist Sabine Hornig re-contextualizes architectural structures by rebuilding and abstracting her materials. The artist's work has no boundaries between public and private space, as she often covers her entire piece with stucco to remove any reference from the original function and placement. In addition to large sculptures, the artist creates large-format photographs of architectural elements that are usually overlooked because of their intrinsic blandness, though they also act as a visual vocabulary for place and bring attention to the trivial. The artist studied fine arts at the UdK Berlin with David Evison and Isa Genzken and will be exhibiting this month with Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art in Lisboa, Portugal. Other recent exhibitions include "Geblide" at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York City and "Raum mit grobem Fenster" with Berlinische Galerie in Berlin. In 1999, Hornig received a PS1 grant and has appeared in numerous international publications, including an article and review in Artforum. | |||
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 Brooklyn-based artist David Ellis creates work that is influenced by hip-hop culture and traditional elements of graffiti. The artist moved to New York to work in the music video business. However, he soon ended that career and began to develop Barnstormers, a group of some of the most prominent and well-respected graffiti, street and mural artists working in the U.S. today. Ellis has gained much notoriety for his live motion paintings that are often filmed and created to music. Music is pivotal to the artist's creative process and influences his imagery, sculptures and production. Many of the artist's works are painted directly on the gallery walls or onto buses, vans and cars. Many of his mechanical works are driven by small computers and beat-making devices that are controlled by impressions written onto vinyl records. The computers cause mallets to bang on a variety of items such as oil cans, cymbals and drums. The artist has exhibited throughout the country, including recent shows at the Red Gallery in Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia, and at the Jessica Murray Projects in New York City. The artist recently appeared with a full interview in the art and contemporary culture magazine Juxtapoz. | |||
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 During the next two months, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac will present a comprehensive solo exhibition by internationally renowned artist Wolfgang Laib. Titled "Where are you going," Laib's new exhibition continues much of the artist's exploration into the materials of pollen, milk, rice, wax and marble within the forms of cones, rectangles and stairs. Laib is less concerned with innovation and new discoveries within his practice and more interested in the continuation of his methodology. It was in the late '70s that the artist first began to use these materials, because Laib has approached his work with a consistent contemplative and ephemeral aesthetic, carefully balancing the work between many dualities. Laib was born in Germany and initially studied medicine at the University of Tubingen. After becoming a doctor in 1975, Laib decided to leave medicine and work exclusively as an artist. During his time studying medicine, the artist also studied art history, philosophy, psychology and Oriental philology, learning Sanskrit, Hindi and Tamil. The artist has exhibited globally, including recent exhibitions "Still Points of the Turning World" at the SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico and "Le Mouvement des Images" in the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Among many publications, Laib was featured on ARTINFO for an exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand. | |||
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 The massive, low-tech sculptures of New York-based artist Phoebe Washburn are composed of thousands of individual recycled units that are constructed together to create a unified, room-sized structure. The artist draws inspirations from signs of progress often found in construction sites, such as stacks of bricks and bags of concrete or sand. Of particular interest to Washburn are found elements of improvised architecture on construction sites such as a make-shift ramp or rigged-up workbench. However ambitious the attempt at construction is for the artist, the viewer is always left with clues as to how the structure is engineered. Many of the site specific works such as "True, False, and Slightly Better" weigh more than 7,000 pounds and are held together by more than 70,000 screws, supported by a mix of miscellaneous materials like two-by-fours and other scrap wood. In 2005 and 2006, Washburn filled the lobby of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles with thousands of pieces of constructed cardboard and plywood in a piece titled "It Has No Secret Surprise." The artist received her degree from Tulane University in New Orleans and her MFA from the School of the Visual Arts in New York City. Washburn exhibited at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and Zach Feuer (LFL) in New York and has been featured in an article in Art in America and in a recent article titled "Burgeoning Geometries" in The New York Times. | |||
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 The work of artist Rachel Owens acts as a metaphor to examine contemporary societal and governmental issues within the United States and its activities abroad. Last year, for an exhibition with ZieherSmith in New York City, the artist recreated a mythical fox-hunt in sculpture, complete with dogs, a rider, trophy heads and drawings made directly on The New York Times' articles. The fox-hunt is a metaphor for current situations in the U.S., the dogs being the soldiers or victims of the "fight against terrorism." Other works include a giant squirrel crafted out of cardboard, characterized by biologists as a "scatter-hoarder," that the artist created as a metaphor for U.S. aggression and the "resilience and potential for the advancements of human conditions." Owens was born in Atlanta and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. The artist is an MFA graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received her degree from the University of Kansas after attending the Tyler School of Art program in Rome, Italy. This year, the artist will present "Ground Swell," a fellowship project with the Socrates Sculpture Park, in Long Island City, New York. Other recent exhibitions included "Empathetic," curated by Elizabeth Thomas at the Temple Gallery in Philadelphia, and "Ionesco's Friends," curated by Irina Zucca, at Francosoffiantino Artecontemporanea in Turin, Italy. | |||
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 With a recent investigation into the dark side of life, contemporary art and culture magazine Beautiful/Decay has appropriately chosen artist Banks Violette for an article in its current issue. Violette uses such dark material as death metal, ritual murder and teenage suicide as points of departure for his slick and ghostly sculptures and installations. His aesthetics probe into American culture and are used as a commentary on the anxiety of youth. Violette blurs the boundaries between reality and pure fiction as he recreates the landscape of the teenage mind. The artist has selected contemporary music lyrics that have instigated violence and destruction amongst youth and attributed these lyrics to sculptures and installations that visually incite a similar or opposite emotive response. The artist has used salt to cast the music equipment from rock band Sunn O and has used disassembled forms such as a coffin as a relic of past performances and as an icon of aggressive subcultures. Violette received his BFA from the School of the Visual Arts (SVA) in New York (1998) and is an MFA graduate from Columbia University (2000), also in New York. The artist has exhibited extensively in New York City, including shows with Team Gallery and Whitney Museum of American Art. European exhibitions for the artist include works with the Galerie Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels and LISTE in Basel, Switzerland. | |||
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 South African-born artist Robin Rhode works in a variety of media, including performance, photography, sculpture and video that centers on his personal experiences as a young man growing up in Johannesburg suburbs. The artist uses and alters everyday objects that reference South African products or that embodies a personal or social connection to the artist. Rhode is currently exhibiting new work in all three of the Perry Rubenstein Gallery's exhibition spaces. The artist has continued his interest in exploring narratives where he uses only the most basic of materials to complete his ideas. Recently, the artist has expanded to 16mm film and sculpture and has created a collaborative performance in Rheims, France, with professional dancer Jean-Baptiste Andre and violinist and cellist Didier Pertit. Rhode lives and works in Berlin and in September will have his first major museum exhibition in Europe at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Rhode has exhibited internationally, including notable shows with Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. | |||
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 Artist Chris Johanson's brightly colored, socially saturated works offer a humorous light to current cultural and societal feelings. With the background of the artist rooted in contemporary culture rather than formal art training, Johanson is able to rely solely on his personal experiences and the collective experience of all Americans to explore absurdity and humor in contemporary life. The artist is a prolific creator and clearly prefers a steady stream of ideas to be completed over tedious long-term works. Johanson is a Bay Area artist who is often included in the "Mission School," a group of suburban-influenced creators, including Barry Mcgee and Margaret Kilgallen. Johanson was launched into art stardom after receiving the SECA Art Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and being included in 2002 Whitney Biennial. The following year, the artist completed an exhibition with the Deitch Projects in New York City titled "Now is Now" and was included in an exhibition at SITE Santa Fe. This year, the artist will exhibit "Apex: Chris Johanson" at the Portland Art Museum, and, in 2008, Johanson will exhibit again with the Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco. | |||
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 A new multi-media extravaganza exhibition titled "a very anxious feeling" by assume vivid astro focus (avaf) is on view with John Connelly Presents in New York City. The exhibition contains three environments within the gallery and includes 3-D wallpaper, a corridor of music, flashing neon sculptures, video and a room with a series of music-related performances. A featured installation titled "Four-letter words" is comprised of wrapped objects and text-based wallpaper with provocative words such as BUSH, HOMO, PRAY, ANAL and HOPE. The gallery also converted the store-room basement into an extension of the show that features five abstract neon sculptures. In addition, the exhibition contains a re-installed series of work from a previous exhibition titled "absorb viral attack fantasy" with Hiromi Yoshii in Tokyo. assume vivid astro focus is led by artist Eli Sudbrack and is said to contain many members who are all born anytime between the 20th and 21st centuries in various parts of the world. This year, (avaf) will exhibit assume vivid astro focus XVIII with Deitch Projects as a follow up to the widely popular exhibit in 2003. (avaf) will also be featured this year in "Destroy Athens" at Athens Biennial and "Space for The Future" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. | |||