Ofer Wolberger's solo exhibition, (Life With) Maggie, is currently on view at Michael Hoppen Contemporary in London. The photographs on view depict Maggie--a fictional character with a a rosy-cheeked, stale-smiled, plastic-masked face and a wardrobe that would make any fan of vintage swoon--posing stiffly at various locations around the world. Like a retro poster child for the Independent Woman, Maggie is traipsing the globe in search of self-identity within a global context. Wolberger presents us with Maggie's journey in contrast to the web-based social networking that connects so many of us worldwide these days, though we generally do so without ever leaving our desk chair. The irony is that "Maggie" is portrayed by the artist's fiance, Billie Martineau--whom Wolberger met via an online social networking site before meeting in person.

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Currently in its last week on view at Catherine Clark Gallery is a solo show of work by Montreal-based photographers and brothers Carlos and Jason Sanchez. The exhibition marks the brothers' second at the San Francisco gallery, and displays a survey of their work over the past seven years, since their collaboration began. The twelve large-scale photographs on view depict scenes that have been exhaustively staged by the artists and are rich with Hollywood-rivaling sets, props and lighting. These moments on display are like fleeting beats of time caught as stills on a film reel, and at the same time appear openly contrived-- unashamed that they have been so heavily orchestrated. The artificiality of these moments, in the darker themed photographs, evokes an eerie sensation that grips the viewer. The discomfort is that these scenes seem to be depicted as fantasies in some twisted mind. In Abduction (2004), a generic, mustached and pasty white man kneels ominously at a little girls bedside as she seemingly opens gifts from her suitor that are intended to lure her to his windowless van.

The star of the show is John Mark Karr (2007), a portrait caught in mirror's reflection of the pedophile who made a false confession to the murder of child beauty pageant queen Jon Benet Ramsey. While in many of the photographs the models are members of the brothers' social circle, only the real John Mark Karr could perform as authentically and disturbingly as the artists imagined for this shot.

There are quieter, more subtle moments in the show, such as Drifter (2007), wherein a stained denim-donning vagrant pauses for reflection at a spot in the urban wilderness where a train track meets a chain link fence.

Carlos and Jason Sanchez have exhibited their work internationally at Caren Golden Fine Art, New York; Torch Gallery, Amsterdam; and Parisian Laundry, Montreal, among many others. Their work is in several public and private collections, including Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and 21c Museum, Louisville, Kentucky. Both men studied at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, where Carlos earned his BFA.

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Photographer, Lori Nix, is currently presenting new work from her ongoing series The City, in a three person exhibition at G. Gibson Gallery in Seattle. The exhibition, titled View Master, presents her work, along with Grace Weston and Jonah Samson. All of the artists in the exhibition make use of intricately fabricated, three dimensional sets to construct an entirely new reality. In the spare bedroom of her Brooklyn apartment, Nix builds these highly realistic dioramas, which explore urban environments devoid of human presence, often reclaimed by nature. For View Master, Nix will present three of her latest works, Church, Laundromat, and Botanical Garden. Each image continues to playfully blur the line between truth and illusion, calling into question the authenticity of the documented image in contemporary society.

Nix has exhibited her photographs nationally, including recent exhibitions with NAB Gallery in Chicago, Randall Scott Gallery in Washington D.C., Jenkins Johnson Gallery in New York City and Stephen Cohan Gallery in Los Angeles.

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Currently on view at Marvelli Gallery in New York City is the exhibition Palomar: Experimental Photography. The exhibition contains photographic works by 6 artists including, Phil Chang, Talia Chetrit, Nancy de Holl, Tamar Halpern, Mariah Robertson, and Asha Schechter. While the exhibition is incredibly diverse in the varying techniques, approaches, sizes and formats employed by each artist, the work is all united by a soft-spoken conceptualism that defies the often overly glossy, high production images that we are accustomed to viewing by both commercial and artistic sources. Many of the works in the show are created through an ink-jet or digital c-print process, while other works are created though the re-photographing of existing imagery or by darkroom manipulation processes, such as solarization, ambrotype, photograms, and multiple exposures. While the work is seemingly compelled by formal concerns, upon further inspection, one notices that it is a new type of conceptualism that is driving many of the artist's decisions, resulting in work that is as visually seductive as it is smart.

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The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh is currently showing, Buried, a solo exhibition featuring new and recent video and photographic work by artist Willie Doherty in conjunction with the release of a new publication by the same name. Doherty, who was born and raised in Derry, Northern Ireland, addresses his homeland's struggle to come to terms with its haunting past of violence and loss. His work has universal resonance in its focus upon a site of contested nationality, the human capacity for violence, and the collective memory of such legacies.

Continue reading "Willie Doherty" »

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Luis Gispert recently debuted an exhibition at Otero Plassart gallery in Los Angeles. Gispert's work is inspired by the idiosyncrasies of pop culture, urban life, cinematic technique, car culture, the uncanny and the poetics of transformation. In his latest show, Gispert explores these conceptual frameworks through the media of three large chromogenic prints and a a stunning, 26 minute short film entitled Smother.

The three large format photographs included in the show surrealistically examine panoramic landscape views and historic landmarks through the cockpits of Veteran-restored military bomber aircrafts and custom freight-liners. This mechanism -- of framing and drawing parallels between seemingly disconnected visages through an unlikely, fabricated meta-frame of sorts -- is an exploration that continues from Gispert's last series of photographs. In his 2008 exhibition at Zach Feuer gallery, Gispert selected surreal Latin-American themed imagery and architectural tableaux, from a bizarrely Escalade populated suburban sleepy sprawl, to a processional litter in progress. When these vignettes are seen through the smooth lined, white leather pleated, faux-wood adorned aesthetics of wealth and luxury liners--the question of their relation to poverty, religion and oppression is raised.

In the newest series of works, Gispert instead examines sweeping views of perhaps one of the most amateur-photographed icons -- nature at sunset. Gispert notes, "Sometimes I like to start with a problem and work my way out. Sunset landscape photography is one of the most cliched tropes in photography. So I decided to make landscape images that are interesting to me." Interestingly though, by trying to unpack and revitalize an overexposed genre, Gispert notes that part of the inherent process has been chasing sunsets, trying to capture the sublime moment at a grand scale. In a move that is at once humorous and surreal, Gispert offsets Amsel Adams' style purist/spiritualist "straight" photography that evokes the grandeur of the natural world with the implication of human presence. In this case, the masculine, psychologically-loaded customized spaces of souped up bombers, RVs and vans both mocks and renders foreign the romanticism of the sunset vistas.

The 26 minute short film, Smother, was a seductive semi-autobiographical narrative following a young boy's "rite of passage through an Oedipal relationship with his mother." The film was enchanting and violent, and revealed a penchant for the subliminal and horrific in the way that older, Brothers Grimm fairy tales encompass the nightmarish and fantastical. The film fluidly straddled the cinematic languages of science fiction and neo-noir to create a story that was at once powerful and unsettling.

Overarchingly, there is a certain dreaminess that pervades Gispert's work: at once irrational, beautiful, slow and unexpected turns between the transcendent and the dark, with a languid sense of observing the in-congruencies in the images presented. "I tend to work slowly; several months usually elapse between idea and execution. When a new idea arrives I like to play with it in my head for a long time....I rarely make drawings, if something is too clearly illustrated on paper it's finished for me, there's no discovery left....I like to leave myself some room for improvising....I like the tension of not completely knowing what's going to happen," says Gispert. This modus operandi of holding, molding and shaping an image in his mind's eye, rather than on the fatalistic and concrete media of paper, which locks in development seems to play a role in his works general aesthetic. "I don't consider myself a 'photographer' as the camera is just another tool to illustrate an idea....I've always liked artists whose works resemble a group show....I don't like when things are clearly defined or understood. Perhaps that's one of the reasons I jump around from medium to medium." Perhaps it is this seemingly psychic induced conception process and fluid movement between genres & media that casts such a strangely hallucinatory light on his work- which unfold, as dreams do, nonsensically, but somehow with a divinely inspired sense of purpose.

Luis Gispert was born in 1972, in Jersey City, New Jersey. He has exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, South America and the Middle East including MOCA North Miami, FL; Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Studio Museum of Harlem, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK; His work has also been included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, New York, NY; Private collections include Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

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The Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, recently held an exhibition showcasing photographs and sculpture by filmmaker John Waters. Entitled, Rear Projection, the name is derived from the term as used to describe a special film effect in which a background is projected onto a screen behind actors in the studio. This now dated method began in the 1930s, showing characters driving in cars and scenes when motion, without variability, was necessary. For this show, Waters photographed and edited scenes from existing films. He manipulates his photos in a way that exploits general perceptions of Hollywood. For example, Children Who Smoke, presents us with child stars, like Shirley Temple, with a cigarette in their mouths. The bizarre humor and satire we expect from Waters is present in the subject matter and perspective of these works.

John Waters was born, raised, and inspired by the city of Baltimore, where his films are still shot on location. He has become a cult figure in the film community. Waters has always insisted on addressing taboo subjects like sexuality, drugs, and religion, in what some may call a callous manner. His most popular films include Pink Flamingos (1972), Hairspray (1988), and more recently Pecker (1998).

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San Francisco-based artist, Christina Seely will present new works from her ongoing series photographic series Lux at the 1000 DAYS exhibition opening in LA this week at the Scion Installation Space.

Seely's interest in nature and the changing environment is reflected in her vivid photographs of night-lit cityscapes. For an artist with a strong mind and an innovative way of translating her message, her photographs are remarkably reserved and still. Seely's scenes are familiar, yet evoke the sensation of jamais vu --where the commonplace becomes eerily unrecognizable -- inviting the viewer into a place of investigation. Seely's images illustrate the world's reliance and connection to modern technology while creating a tension between the surface documentation of a photograph and the complex reality that lies beyond. Her works investigate how inherent beauty often has the power to both reflect and obscure a darker and more complicated truth.

This year, Seely will exhibit works from her ongoing landscape project, Lux, at Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle, The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and the Country Club Gallery in Cincinnati. The artist is also a principal member of Civil Twilight, a design collective that is pioneering Lunar Resonant Streetlights, which dim and brighten in correlation with the brightness of the moon.

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On view at Salon 94 Freemans until June 13 is Marilyn Minter's exhibition entitled, Green Pink Caviar. Minter is known for her interest in exploring the boundaries between high and low art. Not only does the work itself express this dichotomy, so does her method of exhibition, choosing to display her photographs on billboards and commercials, as well as in the gallery. Evident through her extensive use of erogenous zones as subject matter, Minter considers the body to be steeped in yearning and desire. Green Pink Caviar is a collection of photorealistic paintings and graphic photographs. Salon 94 describes the process, in which "[Minter] directed her models to lick brightly colored candy on a sheet of glass and then photographed them from the other side."The glass sheet can be compared to a canvas, the candy as paint, and the body as brush.

Minter was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. She received her BFA from University of Florida and MFA from Syracuse University. Recently, her work has been exhibited at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She has upcoming shows at the Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, Regen Projects, Santa Monica, and La Conservera, Spain.

Posted by Sidney Weinstein at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Discussion (0) | E-mail This

Currently on view at Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle is a solo exhibition of new and past work by Victoria Haven, entitled HIGHER... HIGHER. For Haven's first solo show at the renown Seattle space, the artist expanded her practice of creating works on paper and sculptural pieces to explore additional media, including photography and wall painting. This exhibition incorporates works in all of these disparate mediums, but with a cohesive aesthetic of geometric shape, delicate lines and text. With this work, it's as much about what the artist created as it is about what she didn't touch. The negative space that lingers inside the pointed angles of Haven's paintings and amid the matrix of shapes illustrated in works of ink on fragile varieties of paper, consorts with the work to create a full, yet ethereal image of her investigation of shape and space. Shadows on the wall below the lifted steel sculptures become as important to the pieces as their polished nickel or powder coated finishes. HIGHER... HIGHER is on view through May 16th.

Victoria Haven lives and works in Seattle. She received her BFA from the University of Washington and her MFA from Goldsmiths College/University of London. She was the 2004 recipient of 'The Stranger' Genius Award as well as the Betty Bowen Award from the Seattle Art Museum. She also received a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship in 1996 and in 2000. Her work has been exhibited at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; PDX Contemporary Art, Portland; the Austin Museum of Art, Texas; the Drawing Center, New York; and RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, Australia, among many others.

Posted by Allison Gibson at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Discussion (0) | E-mail This

Amongst the labyrinth of booths at this year's Art Chicago is Partisan, a special exhibition of works that explore social and political ideas. Selected from Art Chicago and NEXT galleries by guest curator Mary Jane Jacob, independent curator and director of exhibitions at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Partisan works represent a multitude of political ideas and positions from around the world.

According to Jacob, "It is no wonder in this day and age that artists are reengaging one of the most critical subjects in art: the political and social climate, war and survival. Such human dramas that shape destiny have always existed in the history of art, but they are not usually found, no less highlighted, in the environment of an art fair. So this year's "Partisan" show is evidence of inescapable concerns on everyone's minds and which have a place in every sector of the art world."

While Partisan offers global insights, the exhibition is anchored by the inclusion of politically-oriented works by American artists such Philip Evergood, who is known for practicing a brand of Social Realism in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as prolific artists Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, of whom works will be on view from the 1970s and 1980s.

Much of Partisan's energy, however, comes from newer generations of artists whose project-oriented works not only demonstrate critique and resistance, but they also imagine new possibilities.

Highlights include the video installation, The Penal Colony, by Vietnamese artist Dinh Q Le, which depicts the inside of the walls of a Vietnam prison historically known for abuse of activists and was inspired by the inhumane treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba; There are things we know ...a large scale installation by New York-based artist John Delk features 26 security surveillance globes. Finally, Maximo Gonzalez imagines new uses for obsolete vehicles in large drawings from the series Project for reutilization of vehicles obsolete after the extinction of petrol, whereby abandoned motorcycles become gardens and cars are oversized planters.

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British artist Matthew Stone's current solo exhibition, Interconnected Echoes, is the inaugural show in Galerie Paul Freches' series on the British art scene. Stone, a graduate of Camberwell College of the Arts, has become known for his involvement in the !WOWOW! collective, a group of young British creatives who have been staging events and parties in unoccupied South London buildings.

Stone's own work is perhaps simultaneously a re-phrasal of art historical tropes and an exploration of myspace-style youth cultural. He installs his photographs sculpturally, a move that echoes the interactive nature of his many of his projects, and he often uses friends as his models.

Stone regularly updates his blog, Optimism as Cultural Rebellion, and has recently been interviewed by a number of arts and culture publications, including Vice Magazine and Flasher. Interconnected Echoes will be on view at Galerie Paul Freches through May 30th.

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Christina Seely's interest in nature and the changing environment is seen through her vivid photographs. For an artist with a strong mind and an innovative way of translating her message, her photographs are remarkably reserved and still. Seely's nighttime cityscapes are familiar and at the same time, evoke the sensation of jamais vu--where the commonplace becomes eerily unrecognizable--inviting the viewer into place of investigation. This year she will exhibit works from her ongoing landscape project, Lux, at Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle and at The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. DailyServing's Arden Sherman had a chance to sit down with the San Francisco-based photographer and discuss her series Lux, her thoughts on the expansion of eco-awareness in today's world, and the potential of potential.

Continue reading "Christina Seely " »

Posted by Arden Sherman at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Discussion (0) | E-mail This

Recently opening at BELLWETHER in New York is an exhibition by Abbey Williams titled (STILL). In this body of work, Williams creates video portraits where she superimposes herself over a still image. In addition to these videos, she presents several multiple channel videos which Williams uses her figure to try to match the figure in the image, dissolving herself into art historical and pop culture imagery.

Wiliams' work has referenced the work of feminist artists such as Cindy Sherman and Sophie Calle by using compiled images to address the representation of women in art. (STILL) focuses on female sexuality and vulnerability, directly responding to her personal experience of losing her child in labor.

Williams has had several solo shows, including projects with galleries such as Foxy Production in New York. Her work has been shown at Tate Britain in London, PS1 in New York and the Hammer Museum in LA. In 2004, she attended Skowhegan Residency Program after receiving her MFA from Bard College.

Posted by Julie Henson at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Discussion (0) | E-mail This

Currently on view at Dallas' PanAmerican ArtProjects, with one week remaining, is Aperture - A Photographic Opening. This group exhibition samples the work of six photographers including Andrea Cote, Gory, Daniel Joglar, Jane Martin, Pablo Soria, and Laura Wilson. Each artist employs a different photographic technique, ranging from Wilson's more traditional landscapes to Cotes' unconventional self-portraits.

Andrea Cote's black and white digital self-portraits are indicative of her desire to engage multimedia. She works in photography, painting, video, and installation. Her time as an artist's model influenced her view of the artist and subject. She explores the concerns of this relationship with sensitivity to pressures associated with the image of the body.

The color-toned photographs of Cuban born artist Gory focuses on process rather than product, suggesting we question the nature of reality.

PanAmerican's mission is "to build a bridge between North and South American cultures by presenting and exhibiting artists from both regions concurrently" and the show does just this. It not only includes two Latin American artists and three Americans but both male and female, there is a wide range of representation. PA opened their doors in 1990 as Galerie Malraux in LA. In 1994, they moved to Dallas and have since established themselves in Miami as well.

Posted by Sidney Weinstein at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Discussion (1) | E-mail This

On view at Rhona Hoffman Gallery is Light, Time, Chemistry, an exhibition of work by Spencer Finch. In this exhibition, Finch references both phenomenology and the psychology of perception, capturing and re-contextualizing fleeting and ephemeral elements from our surroundings. Among the many works exhibited is Periscope, a photographic device composed of mirrors and ventilation ducts that extends from inside the gallery to the outside and allows visitors to view the changing sky. The periscope was used to expose a cyanotype directly on the wall of the gallery, creating a hazy blue image from a two-day exposure of the Chicago sky.

Also on display is Finch's installation Shadow, Sculpture of Centaur, Tuileries (after Atget), a component of a larger body of work entitled Shadows (After Atget). In this work, Finch captures the ephemeral phenomenon of shadows, focusing specifically on re-creating light from locations of Eugene Atget's photographs of Paris. Employing a fluorescent tube lamp covered with colored filters of Isaac Newton's spectrum, the light functions as a reverse prism, emitting the very polychrome grey light of the Parisian shadows photographed by Atget almost one hundred years ago.

Spencer Finch was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He studied at Rhode Island School of Design, Hamilton College in New York and Doshisha University in Kyoto. Finch had a major solo exhibition What Time Is It On The Sun? at MASS MoCA, Massachusetts in 2007, which was accompanied by a monograph with essays by Susan Cross and Daniel Birnbaum. The artist will be a participant in the upcoming 53rd Venice Biennale this June.

Posted by Benjamin Bellas at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Discussion (1) | E-mail This

The October Gallery in London is currently showing the work of Chinese artist Huang Xu. Huang Xu's Fragment series features plastic shopping bags in a haunting, yet aesthetically pleasing way by pairing the bags against a contrasting black background. The aesthetic nature of the Fragment series is countered by the scientific precision of the image's creation. The artist documents plastic bags with a 3-D scanner, a technique typically used by archaeologists. He then manipulates the resulting three-dimensional description of the plastic bag to achieve the image's final result as photographic print.

The large scale of Huang Xu's c-prints of discarded shopping bags physically confront the viewer with the reality of capitalist excess. The bags both literally and metaphorically represent the waste of our society. The transcendent quality of the Fragment series seem to evoke the inorganic nature of plastic, which lasts for hundreds of years in our land fills before beginning to decay. Huang Xu's work is perhaps even more relevant to China, where a relatively recent shift toward capitalism and a huge population have made plastic waste a contentious environmental issue.

Huang Xu graduated from the Beijing Academy of Fine Arts in 1991. He currently lives and works in Beijing as a professional photographer. He most recently exhibited at the Arc One Gallery in Melbourne Australia in 2008 and founded the Big Basin Studio in 2003. Huang Xu's London debut exhibition will be on view at October Gallery through 18 April 2009.

Posted by Kelly Nosari at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Discussion (1) | E-mail This

Artist, Daniel Gordon, creates amazingly innovative, albeit low-tech photographs. His photos begin as cheaply printed internet-based images constructed into temporary sculptures which are re-photographed for their final presentation. The process resembles something from Frankenstein's studio, as the artist assembles body parts and objects to reconfigure them in an endless cycle of creation. During a much anticipated visit, DailyServing.com had the pleasure to meet the artist in his Brooklyn-based studio to catch a rare glimpse of his unique process.

Daniel Gordon graduated from Yale University School of Art in 2005 and has since exhibited with Zach Feuer Gallery in New York and Groeflin Maag in Basel and Zurich, Switzerland. The artist is currently presenting new work in the exhibition Portrait Studio with Groeflin Maag in Zurich, on view through April 10th. This year, Gordon was selected for the annual New Photography exhibition, opening this fall, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition will highlight a selection of only six young artists who each address the concept of image collection, assembly, and manipulation beginning in the studio or darkroom. For more information, check out Daniel's previous feature on DailyServing.

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Lalla Essaydi's mesmerizing calligraphic portrait series, Les Femmes du Maroc, explores and empowers Arab female identity by cleverly employing the sacred Islamic art form reserved for men. A product of cultural fusion, Essaydi was born in Morocco and lived in Saudi Arabia for several years before moving to Boston to receive her B.F.A. from Tufts University in 1999. She then received her M.F.A. in Painting and Photography from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University.

The written text is partly autobiographical, referencing personal experiences and thoughts from the artist's past and present. The inscriptions are applied with henna ink which is used for daily and ceremonial purposes and typically associated with women, underscoring the subversive nature of the series. In a society where women are defined by the presence of men, Essaydi literally breaks the silence with her intricate and labyrinthine language.

The work seen above, Les Femmes du Maroc #27, can be viewed at Art Dubai in the Agial Art Gallery booth. Several other works from the series are displayed in the Edwynn Houk Gallery booth, a gallery representing the artist in New York.

Posted by Rebekah Drysdale at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Discussion (0) | E-mail This

This year, Honor Fraser Gallery from Los Angeles presented the work of Alexandra Grant in their booth at The Armory Show in New York. Grant has contributed to the Watts House Project, an artist run neighborhood revitalization program determined to ameliorate the lives of residents around the historic watts towers in South Central Los Angeles. The project, an effort to regenerate the cultural activity and status of the area, is directed by artist Edgar Arceneaux.

Grant's participation involved the placement of a large outdoor text based sculpture atop the roof of a home in this somewhat troubled area. The scripted text reads 'love', and connotes feelings of permanence and domesticity. In an incredible expression of both personal investment and artistic devotion, Grant (never tattooed before), had the same script permanently inked on her arm.

The exhibition at The Armory Show includes a video of stills from the tattooing of the artist next to a cast of her arm. A photograph of the rooftop sculpture and a large scale drawing, the artist's preferred medium, are also displayed. In an effort to raise money for the artist driven project, the 'love' sculpture has been made into a necklace and available through Honor Fraser's website.

Posted by Rebekah Drysdale at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Discussion (3) | E-mail This

Milan's Carla Sozzani hip gallery at 10 Corso Como is currently celebrating Guy Bourdin's provocative, masterful photography. The exhibition includes the section A Message for You, which presents a series of photographs dating back mainly to the 1970's, and Unseen, showing works from the artist's own archive. Seductive, glossy, sometimes disturbing and doubtlessly radical, Bourdin's works are a perverse and superb aesthetization of recurrent themes such as death, desire, and sex. Suicide, murder, pleasure and pain, but also decadence, glamor and a quest for perfection, are the components that define most of the images. Inspired by Surrealism and its fascination for transgression, the irrational and the uncanny, Bourdin envisions fantastic plots that make his fashion photography look delightfully attractive and impenetrable. He definitely succeeds in combining ground-breaking commercial campaigns and fashion advertising with his dark, gloomy, and even perverse modality of vision. He also seems to be well aware of the fact that it's not the fashion item per se but the image to attract us as viewers, and this probably explains why we cannot help but be intrigued, if not utterly captured, by the beauty of his greatly charged images. What is apparent is that each one of his photographs is not a simple medium subjected to presenting a product but becomes a place where Bourdin the artist asserts his idea of photography as art.

Posted by Alice Savorelli at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Discussion (0) | E-mail This

Dutch artist Ruud Van Empel is currently presenting Souvenir, Dawn, Moon, World, his third exhibition with the Chelsea-based Stux Gallery. Within this new series, the artist further pushes his unique photographic aesthetic. The photographs feature the artist's iconic childlike characters depicted in an erie light. The show also introduces new bronze-cast sculptures, bringing the same characters to life in a new form. The artist continuously challenges the notion of truth and possibility with photography through the use of subtle digital manipulation, destroying the fine line between the real and the impossible.

Van Empel has internationally and has 4 additional solo exhibitions scheduled this year. The artist will exhibit DAWN at Gallery Terra Tokyo in Japan and Flatlands in Paris, SOUVENIR at TZR Gallery in Dusseldorf, Germany and RUUD VAN EMPEL PHOTOWORKS at Leica Galerie in Prague, Chech Republic.

Posted by Seth Curcio at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Discussion (0) | E-mail This

Christopher Sims: Absolute No Return, 2008, Light-jet prink

Hank Willis Thomas is selling something. This is clearly evidenced in the works included in Pitch Blackness, his second solo exhibition currently on view at Jack Shainman Gallery in Chelsea. Thomas, who is well versed in undermining the loaded visual language of the advertising media--think Air Jordan meets the Hottentot Venus--relies here once again on visual trickery and deftly executed slight of hand in distilling key iconic media imagery.

Thomas is at his strongest in rendering works that not only conflate, but also leave room for interpretation. Absolut No Return, (2008) a digital photographic manipulation, skillfully invokes the iconic Vodka ad campaign by marrying the all-too-familiar spirits bottle silhouette with a photograph that invokes, perhaps, the solemn first-person view of an African American slave peering out of the window of a crumbling "port factory" - a way station for slaves before their forced exodus on the Middle Passage to the New World. At the same time, the seascape pictured offers an ironic riff on the all too familiar "Come to Jamaica and Feel All Right!" suite of ads.

Christopher Sims: I Am A Man, 2008, Liquitex on canvas

I Am A Man, (2008), a seductive suite of twenty works on canvas, pays homage to Ernest C. Withers' photograph of the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A strong case for the power of reductive minimalism, scaling back the psychological distance between the minority consumer and luxury products, the work ingeniously expands the scope of the "I AM A MAN" placards carried by the strikers by reordering the text to read, "I AM THE MAN", "AM I A MAN" and ultimately "I AM HUMAN".

As is the case with most sophisticated forms of media outreach, I prefer to feel as if I am somehow involved in the process (that I'm in on the secret). It is only when Thomas leaves room for the viewer to enter the work that he succeeds in hitting his target demographic.

Hank Willis Thomas has exhibited his work nationally at venues such as the Smithsonian Institution, the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. He was included in the recent exhibition, "After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy", at the High Museum, Atlanta, GA; in Frequency at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 2005; and in the 2006 California Biennial at The Orange County Museum of Art. His work is featured in several public collections including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the International Center of Photography in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.

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The landscape photographs of Michael Light and Christian Houge are simultaneously austere, reflective, and, as described by the Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco where they are currently exhibiting, bleak. The interesting combination of two distinct photographers creates a specialized viewing experience within the large warehouse-like galleries at Hosfelt. Michael Light lives and works in San Francisco and focuses his practice primarily on the American West. Christian Houge is a Norwegian artist grounded in the documentation of his Arctic homeland. Carefully shot from a self-piloted airplane or hired helicopter, Light's images of the Sierra Nevada region, Southeast California and Phoenix, Arizona present a still life of manufactured landscapes set in the sage-brush fields of the American West. At the opposite side of the gallery, Houge's work displays slow exposed panoramas of snowy white fields lightly dotted with man-made scientific instruments. Together, their work engages the viewer in a conversation that speaks to the vastness of the earth's surface, humanity's deep impact on it, and the overall balance of the natural world with that of the constructed.

Michael Light and Christian Houge will be in view until March 21, 2009.

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Currently on view at DRKRM Gallery in Los Angeles is a solo show of work by prolific New York documentary photographer Joseph Rodriguez. The exhibition, entitled Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico City, features photos from Rodriguez's eponymous book, marking first time the photographs have been exhibited in Los Angeles. Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico City chronicles the lives of sex workers of every gender and sexual affiliation, through a striking series of 25 black and white photographs, and confronts the contradictions of the world's oldest profession in a country where extramarital sex is both wily rampant and considered a mortal sin; where desires of the flesh and religious dogma are equally revered.

Joseph Rodriguez is a documentary photographer of over 20 years, with degrees from the International Center of Photography, New York; New York City Technical College; and School of Visual Arts, New York. He is represented by Bill Charles, New York. Rodriguez's work has been exhibited internationally, including the African American Museum, Philadelphia; NYU Tisch School of the Arts, New York; Galleri Kontrast, Stockholm, Sweden; and Fototeca, Havana, Cuba.

Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico City is on view from February 14 - March 15, 2009.

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Justin Cooper is predominantly known for his off-the-wall performances that psychologically challenge both the players' and viewers' endurance, as in his first solo show at Monique Meloche gallery in 2006 or more recently during Art Basel Miami in-and-around the pool at the National Hotel in South Beach. However, a long-standing interest in sculpture and drawing has pervaded Cooper's performances often resulting in dimensional objects that balance between the natural and the manmade. For his 2008 solo show THREAD in Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois Chicago, Cooper used 1 mile of garden hose to create a site-specific installation that functioned as both a drawing in space as well as a set for opening and closing performances. In Paranormaldise, now on view at Monique Meloche gallery in Chicago, Cooper presents a series of sculptures manipulating mostly ready-made materials from familiar places like Home Depot or the Party Store. As the artist states, his new sculptures spring Athena-esque from a cubicle-constructed notion that investigates the delicate line between vacation and hallucination.

Also on view in the project space is Cooper's 2007 video Studio Visit, about the difficulties sometimes involved with art-making, accompanied by a suite of related drawings.

Justin Cooper graduated in 2005 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an MFA in sculpture, performance, and video. He received his BFA from the University of Colorado in 2003 and studied at the Sorbonne, Paris in 2002. Cooper has performed and exhibited in cities worldwide including Hong Kong, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, London, Los Angeles, Mexico and Sweden. His work was recently reviewed by Susan Snodgrass in the September 2008 issue of Art in America. He had a summer residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine 2007 and this summer he will be a Resident Artist at the Djerassi Program in Woodside, CA. Cooper currently teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Photographs from Christopher Sims and Stacy Pearsall turn the War on Terror: Inside/Out, as if showing us its seams. Sims documents American-made Iraqi and Afghan villages, used to train soldiers in North Carolina and Louisiana, in his series Home Fronts: The Pretend Villages of Talatha and Braggistan. Pearsall, a military combat photographer since age 17, presents the facts of her experience, daily life that is dark, but captured with elegance and expression, and deeply humanistic. We are allowed an extended gaze into these otherwise restricted worlds. Curator Mark Sloan at College of Charleston's Halsey Institute has met his goal "to plumb the ironies and contrasts for all I could get."

Christopher Sims: Jihad Lamp

Continue reading "War on Terror: Inside/Out" »

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Zoe Leonard first exhibited her photographs in 1979 and her work has since been included in Documenta IX (1992) and Documenta XII (2007), as well as the 1993 and 1997 Whitney Biennials. The artist and longtime resident of the Lower East Side began taking photographs of her neighborhood in 1998 to record the gradual decline of the city's identity due to the influx of large chain stores. These photographs became Analogue, a complete project which consists of hundreds of photographs, each measuring an intimate 9" x 9". Included in Analogue is Bundle, 2003, photographs capturing the forces of globalization through the rag trade by showing bundles of New York's cast-off clothing routed to Africa, thereby upsetting the local textile production and becoming unhelpful in a certain way.

Approximately 400 photographs from Analogue are currently on view at Dia at the Hispanic Society of America in New York in a two part exhibition, Derrotero. The second part of the exhibition is Leonard's selection of navigational charts and cartographic maps pulled from the Hispanic Society's remarkable historical collection. Leonard contextualizes her work with this cartographic material, drawing further attention to where we are in the world, how we are connected to other people and places, and how many ways we can potentially track these relationships.

The exhibition will remain at the Hispanic Society until April 12th.

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Michael Kohn Gallery recently opened a duo-artist exhibition SHE: Images of Women by Wallace Berman & Richard Prince on January 15th. The exhibition is situated within a loose conceptual framework that foregrounds both Wallace Berman and Richard Prince's representations of women within their oeuvre. The exhibit was curated by critic and journalist, Kristine McKenna. McKenna seemed particularly apt to curate the show, as in 2007 she co-wrote a monograph with Lorraine Wild that focused on Berman, entitled Wallace Berman Photographs. The book itself was selected as one of the 50 best art books of the year by the A.I.G.A.

Continue reading "Wallace Berman & Richard Prince" »

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Rottenberg's video installations explore the relationship between the body and production, such as in
Mary's Cherries, 2003. In this work, subjects collaborate in the process of transforming red fingernails into maraschino cherries. Rottenberg was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and has upcoming solo exhibitions at La Maison Rouge in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and will be included in a group show at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 2009.

The series of performance stills will remain at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery until February 28th. The exhibition is accompanied by the release of a smaller format print portfolio.

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Herve Graumann constructs dizzying, modern day vanitas still lives from kitsch, throwaway souvenirs of our plastic culture. The works both valorize and disdain the role of the object in modern day culture. Like schools of fish joining together to create the impression of a much larger- and more powerful- entity, the multiplicity of Graumann's constructions aggrandize and impress. They are at once thrones to commodity culture and disdainful commentary on the never ending supply of useless consumer goods.

Graumann notes, "think my 'inspiration' started when I took the 'computer' as a model. It was in the 80's, and it was quite a new subject to observe and to think about at that time: the nature of it, of what was on or under the screen and how to manage it. The act of 'saving' an image, to be able to modify or duplicate datas... The size of images mentioned in 'weight' and not only in the traditional dimensions, the color depth of an image, the compression, the format... Inspiration is linked to the environment, in dialectic with the world you live in, and this world started to change radically with the use of computers. Our everyday life has been modified since and we can clearly see today how it changed our reality and the way we deal with. It was the revolution we had in front of our eyes."

Wholly relevant in today's seeming rising tensions between the analog and digital, Graumann's works reference and flit between technological language's from binary patterns and information systems, reinserting a kind of aesthetic beauty and harmony within these seemingly anti-humanistic vessels.

Herve Graumann is currently represented by Galerie Guy Bartschi in Geneva and Nettie Horn Gallery in London.

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Massimo Audiello Gallery in New York is currently presenting Alison Brady's second solo show, An Uncertain Nature, until February 28th. Brady received an M.F.A. in Photography, Video, and Related Media from The School of the Visual Arts in New York City. She works in series of color photographs that investigate subconscious desires and trigger emotional and sexual responses.

Brady creates compelling scenarios in domestic interiors by inserting some mysterious or troubling elements. Her subjects, both strangers and friends, often have their identities obscured by bizarre set pieces, creating images that are at once alluring and repellant. The artist states that she attempts "to create dichotomies between the sensual and the horrific, the beautiful and the destructive." She has previously been featured on DailyServing for her exhibition at the Foundation Center of Photography in Poland last summer.

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Levi van Veluw is a young multidisciplinary artist living and working in the Netherlands. He has won a number of accolades and been featured in a slew of magazines within the last two years for his ostentatious refashionings of his face, entitled Landscapes. In each of his series, he painstakingly obscures his likeness, in increasingly elaborate disguises. Earlier works include ridiculous wiring closed of ears and popsicle sticks applied to now Quasimodo like eyes to simply and humorously change the face.

Upon first viewing Levi van Veluw's works, I couldn't help but compare his disguised self-portraiture to the resurgence in the interest in the mask and film-inspired disguise in contemporary photography, ranging from Gillian Wearing's diaristic and macabre facial effigies of sorts, to Hanna Liden's gothic black metal inclinations, or even Cindy Sherman's self-portraiture. Van Veluw's works seem to function within this conversation; his experiments in obscuring and fundamentally altering his own visage seem like the logical, humorous, conclusion to prior explorations within examining, and shifting, self-image.

In a recent conversation with the artist, surprisingly, van Veluw dismisses the heavy conceptual framework of the mask, citing it as merely functioning for "religious" purposes or as "decoration/tradition." In a way, his refusal to acknowledge his relationship to other similar artists is interesting; they become instead private, more ego-driven explorations of himself, like a young child painting his face for the first time and marveling at his own transformation. His works become comedic, self-absorbed endeavors, with the endless presenting and representing of his own face becoming the sole focus of his practice. In this sense, van Veluw's practice is an apt metaphor for the creative process itself; laying bare an artist's inherent vain and narcissistic impulses to both recreate and abstract their own identities.

Perhaps this is fundamentally what introduces humor into the works - we voyeuristically watch van Veluw make a fool of his face in new and surprising ways, time and time again.

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P.P.O.W. Gallery will be showing New Works by Dutch artist Teun Hocks from January 8th-February 7th. Hocks is known for his use of constructed imagery and has exhibited worldwide for over twenty years. New Works includes photographs, drawings, and videos which often feature the artist as subject trapped in peculiar situations. Hocks explores human nature and communicates feelings of entrapment, perplexity, and wonder through his surreal settings.

Hocks' process begins in the studio where he constructs scenes and takes a black and white photograph. He then hand colors the photographs with translucent oil paint, composing scenes portraying man's alienation and frustration. His delicate use of props creates endless possibilities of narrative for viewers captivated by the curious nature of these works.

There are several publications of Hocks' work, including the Teun Hocks monograph with an essay by Janet Koplos, published in 2006. Several museums and private collectors have acquired his work, and this will be his eighth solo exhibition with P.P.O.W. Gallery.

**Due to a fire on the floor above P.P.O.W Gallery, the exhibition now has a temporary home at 511 West 25th Street, Rm 301 New York, NY 10001**

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Currently on view at the Budapest Mucsarnok Kunsthalle is a retrospective for the German photographer, Thomas Ruff. The artist uses a wide range of imagery to explore several major developments in the art of photography, including digital image making and manipulation. Each photo is presented in a large scale format and slightly out of focus. Ruff was educated in Dusseldorf in the early 80's , along side Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, and was a member of the first generation of artists who learned about photography in an academic art setting. While the artist gained initial recognition for his portraiture, he soon made major advancements in several areas of photography. The work on view at Mucsarnok spans the artist's career, focusing on both the endless series of dissolved JPEG images as well as his portraits and other works.

Ruff was appointed by Bernd Becher to be a professor of art at the Dusseldorf Academy in 2000 and remained in the position until 2006. In 1995, the artist represented Germany at the Venice Biennale and has exhibited his work worldwide over the past 20 years.

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Guido van der Werve's current exhibition, Everything is Going to be Alright, is on view in the Hayward Project Space at the Southbank Centre in London. The exhibition includes 'Nummer Acht' (2007), a strikingly romantic video in which van der Werve walks ahead of an ice breaker ship, and 'Nummer Zes', another video with a memorable premise: a Steinway grand piano is lifted by crane through a second story window, a Chopin concerto is played, and the piano is removed.

Van der Werve, a Dutch artist, began exhibiting around 2003, after studying at a number of arts academies and institutions, among them the Rotterdam Conservatory and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Most recently, van der Werve has had solo shows at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Kunsthalle Basel, and Marc Foxx Gallery. In 2009, he will exhibit at the Hirschorn Museum. The Guardian recently featured van der Werve in the Artist of the Week column, which gives an insightful introduction to the artist's work.

Everything is Going to be Alright continues through January 4, 2009.

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Another highlight from the Scope Art Fair in Miami this year came from the Hous Projects Gallery. This New York based gallery brought work from several interesting artists, but the clear stand out was the photographer Marian Drew. Drew uses masterfully lit scenes of bounty to slowly awaken the viewer to the horrors of human destruction. Her photographs reference Renaissance still life, with beautiful fruit and fauna paired with small cadavers of wombats, possums and marsupials found by the roadside. Her painterly photographs allow the viewer to be drawn in by the beauty of her image to be confronted by the lives of these tiny creatures, which have died at the hand of the human race.

Drew graduated from the Canberra School of Art in Australia, with a post-graduate study from the Kassel University in Germany. Since, she has worked with several prestigious galleries in Australia and the US, including the Fremantle Arts Center in Washington, the Robin Gibson Gallery in Sydney, Australia and the Dianne Tanzer Gallery in Melbourne, Australia.

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The photographs of Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky lead the viewer through the extremities of commercialism from a behind the scenes point of view. Desolate oil sites, packed and impersonal factories in China, abandoned boat sites, and mines and quarries are just a few scenes that the artist has captured in countries across the world. Burtynsky's photos depict the product of extreme industrialized development and its affect on nature and humankind. In 1985, the artist founded the Toronto Image Works, a darkroom, custom image lab and new media training center. Recent shows include the touring exhibition titled "The China Series" which was on view at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art and the Presentation House in Vancouver amongst others. This year, the artist had a major survey of 65-70 works at the Gemeente Museum Helmond in the Netherlands. Some of Burtynsky's awards include the Officer of the Order of Canada (2006) and the Flying Elephants Foundation Fellowship (2004).

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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. The artist's newest body of work continues 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. This year, the artist presented Empty Pockets at the Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York City , an exhibition that debuted in Johannesburg in March and at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing in April.

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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Can an exhibition generate a motion picture in the minds of its viewers? This question was asked to visitors of the exhibition, As Above So Below currently exhibiting at San Francisco's Photo Epicenter gallery. A cacophony of stimulation, the exhibition features work by over twenty international and domestic artists working in various mediums. The assorted ideas found in As Above So Below are drawn from the epic eruption of the Chaiten volcano in Chile during a lightning storm in May 2008. Nature, electricity, enigmatic messages, and alchemic theories are seen through sculptures (most notably, a large smoking paper mache volcano), reconfigured photographs, left handed paintings, digital lightning graphs, various texts, and a family play which was acted out and recorded by artists and gallery-goers during opening night. Curator Chris Fitzpatrick creates an electric atmosphere, a playful display of objects, an interactive project, and most certainly a film (of sorts) with all conventions left at the door.

As Above So Below is on display until December 12th when the exhibition will close with as much force as it opened, featuring two simultaneous performances of Van Halen's "Eruption" on the electric guitar, surprise appearances and disappearances of artworks, and the release of a catalogue.

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On view now at Howard House in Seattle is the photographic series Animal Logic by artist Richard Barnes. The ongoing series documents the strange world of the natural history museum, depicting crates of stuffed animals, large environmental sets and scenes of objects mysteriously wrapped in clear plastic. The artist's investigation of the museum calls into question the ideas of collection, preservation and display, as well as viewer relation and understanding of the natural world. Physically, the photos are large-scale and as full of wonder as the actual exhibitions that they document. The images carefully convey the mystery and fragility of these now man-made structures and translates the inherent beauty of both the objects and the display.

Barnes regularly contributes to magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times, and works as a nationally celebrated architectural and archeological photographer. In 2005, the artist was the recipient of the Rome Prize, and has now exhibited works at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others.

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Opening this weekend at David Salow Gallery in Los Angeles will be the recent photographs of Greg Miller, in an exhibition titled Nashville. As a native to the city, Nashville recalls a sense of truth that is all to real. The artist presents everyday people in everyday scenes, however there is always an emotional element that is a askew and disrupts the narrative of the image. Technically. Miller uses a large format 8 x 10 wooden camera with a lens plane that moves independently of the film stock, resulting an a hyper crisp image.

Greg Miller is the 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, and exhibited in the show Three Generations of Nashville Photographers at The Arts Company in Nashville, TN. He received his BFA from the School of the Visual Arts in New York City and has exhibited with PowerHouse Arena in Brooklyn, NY and Yossi Milo Gallery in Manhattan.

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For many folks, a family get-together is more of a responsibility than a choice activity of leisure. While people so often take their own family's traditions and history for granted, artist Anthony Goicolea chooses to dig extensively into his for inspiration in his exhibition series, Related. A recent trip to Cuba connected the Atlanta-born, Pratt Institute-educated, first generation American to his cultural and familial past, the result of which drew feelings of both dislocation and nostalgia. Culver City's Sandroni Rey Gallery showcases the third installment of the New York-based artist's ongoing series, a collection of manipulated photography, painting, and installation conveying his subsequent associations to his Cuban roots.

Most of Related III uses found family portraits (mostly of individuals) as a basis for Goicolea to create hypothetical and fantastical moments which become manifestations of his own version of truth gleaned from the Cuba visit. The particularly outstanding diptych Supper (2008) features a fictional dinner where idealized versions of family members from all different generations are represented. Goicolea does this by painting over photographs printed on canvas (in both negative and positive) in a strict gray-scale palette that makes his subjects stark and haunting. He uses this method again in Family Geometry (2008), a family tree in negative in which the family members seem emanate with light.

Prior to this collection, Goicolea was known for his manipulated photographs, which often featured multiple versions the artist himself in the guise of a rowdy schoolboy to speak about child sexuality and gender identity. In 2007, he exhibited Almost Safe with Postmasters in NYC and The Septemberists at Sandroni Rey, illustrating his series of dense environmental self portraits. While much of the sexuality is removed in the new series, Goicolea does revert to his photographic manipulation roots, re-imagining landscapes and architectural elements from photographs he took during the trip. The prolific and inspired artist draws these works into cohesion with the aforementioned ones by keeping his stark palette and adding touches of handiwork (painting, writing). The overall sensibility is split between the warmth of family association and icy cultural isolation.

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With Buenos Aires Photo, the international photography fair born of Arte al Dia Internacional, having just wrapped up on November 2nd, the photo world will amass once again in France next week for the opening of Paris Photo, arguably the most important photo fair of the year.

This year Paris Photo, which runs November 13th through 16th at the Carrousel Du Louvre, will fix its sights on the photography of Japan, having invited the entire Far East nation as its "guest of honor", which frankly seems a bit lofty. The fair is exhibiting work by more than 130 Japanese photographers, an apparent record for any European venue thus far. Among the contemporary Japanese artists being spotlighted is Hiroshi Sugimoto, an impressive and prolific photographer, but hardly an unknown in the West. He is also opening a solo exhibition this week at Gagosian Gallery, New York. FOIL Gallery of Tokyo will be presenting work by Rinko Kawauchi, another internationally recognized Japanese photographer, whose haunting renderings of fleeting insignificances have even inspired Paris Photo to use an image from her UTATANE series as part of their marketing campaign.

This year, aside from their celebrated interest in the East, Paris Photo will be including a record number of first-time exhibitors, the majority of which are from outside of France. With all major art fairs becoming more and more international in their programs, exhibitor lists, and even press materials, it is a welcome gesture from a leader in the photography world such as Paris Photo to be now on trend.

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Currently exhibiting at la BANK in Paris is a solo exhibition, entitled NO CASH/CASH, featuring two series of work by Juliana Beasley. Beasley, a former assistant of Annie Leibovitz, has become a notable photographer in her own right. The two series being shown at la BANK, Rockaway Park and Lapdancer, are seemingly polarities in terms of subject matter, but both cut to the heartbeat of what it is to be human and struggle, regardless of how that struggle manifests itself.

In Rockaway Park, the Jersey City photographer documents the faces of that fringe of the Queens population in a Leibovitz-esque style of portraiture, although capturing far less glamorous faces than those of the Hollywood stars shot by Leibovitz. These faces are not those gracing the covers of US Weekly, but those marginalized by a class seen above their own in both economic stature as well as broader social terms--predominantly found on the other end of the A train. One striking image, Last Stop Diner, seems to be made up of one part joy to two parts sorrow. The ubiquitous site of that scarf-covered white hair and red lipstick, maybe a little on the teeth, lives in the subconscious of others in the neighborhood, or in the bittersweet nostalgia of those who have since left the various Rockaway Parks of the world.

Lapdancer is taken from the 2003 book of the eponymous name. The series graphically captures the seediness of an establishment that lives within a time capsule of the late night hours, no matter how light it is outside. It documents the experience of the dancers and the anxious clientele in the coarsest and most honest of terms, omitting most traces of pleasure and leaving one grimacing at the sight of these scenes. NO CASH/CASH is on display until November 8th.

Juliana Beasley lives and works in Jersey City. A 1990 graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, her work is represented by Contact Press Images. Beasley is the recipient of numerous industry nominations and awards.

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Currently on view at Black & White Gallery in Chelsea, NYC is a new series of constructed photographs titled Shanghai At Last, by the artist Isidro Blasco. The exhibition is conceptually built around the physical space and architecture of Shanghai and and is presented in impressive sculpture / relief-like constructions where the collaged photographs sit directly on top of a wood armature. About the exhibition, the artist has stated, "Every city has a different impact on my work. I try to respond to the way the city is affecting me through the way I respond to the space that I inhabit. By doing so, I connect my experience as an outsider who walks the streets and interacts with the city with my more intimate feelings about closed and private spaces".

Isidro Blasco was born in 1962 and currently lives and works in New York City. The artist recently exhibited The Truth at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, in Sheboygan, WI, La Construccion del Paisaje Contemporaneo at the Centro de Arte y Naturaleza in Huesca, Spain, and Substance and Light: Ten Sculptors Use Cameras at the Museum of Art, Munson-Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, NY.

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I don't usually get hung up on press releases, but there's one phrase from the release for Daniel DeSure's current exhibition that I can't forget: "things we use to soften the blow." DeSure's work is described as an understated, non-reactionary response to the fact that blows are a given. Things inevitably go wrong; technologies malfunction, people disagree, cars crash, natural disasters strike. But what if we stop worrying about the inevitable blows, asks DeSure? What if we accept malfunction and disaster and focus on living instead of preventing? He's not the first to ask questions like these, but there's something surprisingly relevant about the way in which he asks.

Continue reading "Softening the Blow: Daniel DeSure" »

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On exhibition until November at San Francisco's Mission District-based gallery, Triple Base, are Jay Nelson's latest works. Titled Temporary Autonomous Zone, Nelson captures his journey for "self" through an array of paintings, drawings, and sculptural devices. Working mostly with landscapes, Nelson's body of work is comprised of gauche, watercolor, graphite, and oil on paper or canvas. In addition to his delicate two-dimensional practices, Nelson has applied his creative energies into ambitious and conceptually driven sculptural models. In Temporary Autonomous Zone, the gallery space functions as a nest for his dichotomous endeavors. Displayed is Nelson's deluxe-edition motor scooter, fully equipped for a solitary coastal tour. Skillfully fashioned wooden editions (roofs, drawers, and encasings) are added to the scooter and additionally, to a Honda hatchback car--which one can find in the Mission neighborhood streets surrounding the gallery-- thus transforming these everyday transportation modes into energy-efficient and fully autonomous vehicles. The sculptural structures placed alongside Nelson's soft, ambiguous paintings and drawings at Triple Base successfully articulates his search for an independent self.

Born in Los Angeles, Nelson currently lives and works in San Francisco- a notable detail since his work conveys a notion of the American West and the investigation of oneself. He graduated in 2008 with an MFA from Bard College and holds a BFA from California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA.

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Among the works featured in the exhibition are Noelle Mason's window installation of Mag-lites spelling the word SILENCE in Braille, and an illuminated stained glass that projects a surveillance image of 9/11/2001 hijackers passing through security at the Portland airport. Another work by Mason consists of 10 stitcheries that depict x-rays and infrared images of undocumented immigrants crossing the US/Mexico border illegally. Mason collected the images from the US Border Patrol and Minutemen websites, and then sent the images to Brazil where they we embroidered by Bilu Alcantara in exchange for the amount it would cost her to illegally immigrate to the United States. John Delk contributes a candy-coated American flag, and a drain installed in the gallery floor spewing George Bush's past five State of the Union speeches, which he has edited to consist solely of fear-inducing buzzwords and phrases. For his part, Conor McGrady offers up four new vignettes that are de-contextualized portraits depicting roles played by those at various levels within the political power machine.

John Delk is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work has been exhibited nationally in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington. He received an MFA in 2001 from the School of the Art Institute.

Noelle Mason graduated the School of the Art Institute's MFA program in 2005. Her work has been exhibited internationally and she is a member of the faculty in the University of Houston's sculpture department.

Conor McGrady has recently exhibited his work in the one-person exhibitions, New Arcadia at M.Y. Art Prospects, New York and Green and Pleasant Land, Saltworks Gallery, Atlanta. In 2002 he was selected to participate in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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Opening this weekend at Sprovieri Progetti in London will be Drive thru #1, new work by Brazilian artist Matheus Rocha Pitta. The exhibition, which is the artist's first UK show, will feature sculpture, video and photographs that investigate the concept of the word 'apprehend' as it relates to the Brazilian police. Often, the term apprehend is used to describe seized goods (mostly drugs). Once these items are confiscated, the police will create a display of the goods and call the press to have the items photographed and circulated through the media, boasting the crack-down. Pitta is interested in the meaning of this term and how it relates to global issues of possession, displacement and territory.

The exhibition was recently awarded the first Illy Sustainart and ARCO prize in Spain. Matheus Rocha Pitta was born in Minas Gerais, Brazil in 1980, and studied history at the Universidade Federal Fluminense and philosophy at the Universidade Estadual of
Rio do Janeiro.

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Exhibiting at Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco is German photographer, Matthias Hoch. Using architecture as his focus, Hoch creates a blurred division between the natural and the man-made. His large-scale, vibrantly colored photographs reveal contemporary city elements and cutting-edge architectural structures. Through learned manipulation, Hoch has created an organic atmosphere among these structures. The artist's choice in photographing public space questions the architectural notion of public arena - what are city planners, architects and urban designers creating for contemporary outdoor spaces?

Hoch has exhibited widely throughout Europe. He currently lives and works in Leipzig, Germany. Born in post war Germany, Hoch has been invited to show in the upcoming traveling exhibition, Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures, which commences at Los Angeles' Broad Contemporary Art Museum and will continue to tour throughout Germany in 2009.

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Catherine Opie lives and works in Los Angeles, where she is also a professor of fine art at UCLA. Opie's work has been featured in acclaimed exhibitions in the United States and Europe. She has had solo exhibitions at, and which traveled to, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Orange County Museum of Art in California, The Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, The Saint Louis Art Museum, the Photographers' Gallery in London, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, as well as at Regan Projects in Los Angeles and Gladstone Gallery in New York.

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On September 13th, Julia Fullerton-Batten opened her first American solo show titled In Between at the Randall Scott Gallery in Washington, D.C. This London based photographer has been gaining recognition over the past two years for her photographic series, which depict the struggle of adolescence. Julia Fullerton-Batten uses intense set design and photographs girls who are not professional models to enhance the uncomfortable and awkward teenage experience. In her previous body of work, Teenage Stories, the artist focuses on images of young girls in a miniature world. Her work addresses the emotional transition of young girls, focusing on the duality of childhood fantasy and the responsibility of adult life. Fullerton-Batten creates intense images representative of the emotional physical changes of teenage girls, portraying loneliness and awkwardness combined with playfulness and whimsy.

Fullerton-Batten was born in Germany, graduated from the Berkshire College of Art and Design and currently lives and works in London. She has recently shown with the Shanghi Museum of Contemporary Art, the Gallery Caprice Horn in Berlin, the Marlborough Gallery in New York, the National Portrait Gallery in London. See more of her work in recent issues of Juxtapoz Magazine.

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An exhibition by Taryn Simon titled An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar opened recently at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles. This body of work spans four years of photographs addressing public access to American private and restricted locations. The images include many current cultural references including governmental and religious spaces, depicting the supposedly open yet concealed duality of American culture. Simon's photos incorporate informative text that explains the subject and context to the viewer.

Her photos consistently depict the parts of American culture that remain out of view. Her previous body of work, the Innocents, documents the many cases of wrong conviction in the United States. These elaborately lit and staged portraits are filled with blank looks. In some cases, the former prisoners were shown with the people they were accused of victimizing. In interviews that accompanied the exhibition, the prisoners often questioned notions of justice and freedom. These photographs were shown internationally at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, the Haus Der Kunst in Munich and the Kunst-Werke Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin. Taryn Simon graduated from Brown University and is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship. Her recent shows have included exhibitions with the Whitney Museum and the Museum fur Modern Kunst, Frankfurt in 2007. Simon was also selected for the 7th Gwangju Biennale in 2007 for this recent body of work.

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Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection opened last week at the Berkeley Art Museum in Berkeley, California. The exhibition includes 141 works by ninety-six different artists owned Mr. Uli Sigg, a Swiss businessman and art enthusiast, who holds one of the largest collections of contemporary Chinese artwork in the world. Mahjong demonstrates a span of Chinese history through the varied artworks (ranging in medium, subject matter, and aesthetic). The museum becomes a vessel for thematically separating ideas among the works, with six individual galleries, each dedicated to a different theme and subject. The exhibition is distinctive from other contemporary Chinese art exhibitions in that while includes works from the most popular Chinese artists of today, it also follows a history of artwork dating back to the 1970s (when China was in the midst of the Maoist Cultural Revolution).

The exhibition also includes film screenings of Chinese filmmakers (and artists), Ning Ying and Jia Zhangke. Mahjong will be on display at UC Berkeley's museum until January.

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Apocrypha is the title of a new exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Sean Higgins. The exhibition, which opened Saturday evening at OKOK Gallery in Seattle, features fourteen new digitally manipulated prints, all of which have been appropriated from the NASA image archives. Higgins continues the ambiguity found in his previous series of work, but now hones in on the inherent mystery of certain NASA images, further pushing the nature of perceived truth as he meticulously manipulates images of vast clouds, shuttle launches, and space equipment. The result is an entirely new fiction, one that contains infinite narrative possibilities for the viewer.

Sean Higgins received his MFA from The University of Pennsylvania and since the late nineties has exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions including shows with Sixspace and Rogue Wave '05 at the LA Louver Gallery, both in Los Angeles, California.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

SunTek now resides in Richmond, VA, where he obtained his BFA in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University. He went on to study at Yale University for his MFA and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been featured on the cover of Beautiful/Decay, displayed in a solo show at P.S. 1 in New York, and exhibited across the U.S. and internationally.

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A new collection of works by Imants Tillers is currently on display at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Paddington. Entitled The Tears of Things, the exhibition is the artist's first Sydney-based solo show in three years. The tiled paintings are a collection of landscapes built in the Tiller's signature style. Many are monolithic portraits of Australian panorama, some even extending to almost 10m in length. Images of the outback, desert motifs and drought stricken land are overlaid with poetic text and names of regional Australian suburbs.

Tillers lives and works in Cooma, Australia, a regional town located near the Snowy Mountains. With a respected career spanning over thirty years, his work has been widely displayed on an international scale at institutions including Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Galerie Susan Wyss, Zurich and Bess Cutler Gallery, New York. He has received various awards for his art practice including Grand Prize at the 1993 Osaka Painting Triennial, First Prize at the 1999 Visy Board Art Prize, South Australia and a Prize for Excellence at the 2003 Beijing International Art Biennial. In 2005 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of New South Wales for his long and distinguished contribution to the field of arts.

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Jonathan Bouknight is captivated by the duality of one's psychological and physical presence and how this duality defines one's personal reality. His evocative photographs, drawings, and sculptures depict this aspect of the human condition. Referencing mythology, history, pop culture, and science, Bouknight explores his own sexuality and attempts to understand how the corporeal and cerebral influence one another, and how these entities are shaped by the presence of others.

In his compositions, Bouknight photographs barriers or membranes which neither completely conceal nor reveal the subjects within. He labels his series "Integuments" and "Encasements", thereby defining the unseen psychological division between the self and others. The above photograph, entitled Nipple, conceals this bodily part below a sea of diaphanous fabric whose frayed ends are stitched together with a thin black thread. The fabric clings to flesh in some areas, creating a visual tease for the spectator.

Bouknight studied at the Lamar Dodd School of Art in Cortona, Italy in 2000 with the University of Georgia and received his B.A. in Studio Art from Furman University in 2002. He has previously exhibited at Whitespace and Eyedrum in Atlanta, where he currently lives and works.

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In the second of a round of four exhibitions featuring eight artists, Randall Scott Gallery in Washington D.C. presents new works by Peter Van Agtmael and Jessica Dimmock. Both artists explore elements of photojournalism in a unique way as their subject matter documents scenes of military and social conflict.

Peter Van Agtmael enters international war zones to document truth as rarely seen. The photographer seeks to capture images of humanity and offer them to the greater public in an attempt to provoke awareness and change. Van Agtmeal is a member of the prestigious Magnum photojournalist association and has recent received acclaim for his work from Critical Mass.

Jessica Dimmock is a photojournalist working within social documentary, capturing scenes of the human condition as experienced by a drug addict. Her series Ninth Floor takes place in an upscale Manhattan neighborhood and provides a honest look a the frailty of the human mind and body. Dimmock is an associate member of the photo-journalistic agency, VII.

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A new collection of works by Sydney photojournalist James Brickwood opens this week at the Australian Centre for Photography, Paddington. The exhibition is a documentation of the annual Schoolies week, an end of year vacation for year 12 high school graduates. Brickwood documents drunken pashes, messy hotel rooms and the sunny beachfronts of Queensland's Gold Coast, which predominantly hosts the graduation festival.

Brickwood is a freelance photographer who has completed numerous projects for leading Australian publications including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sun Herald. While best known for documenting Australian youth culture, as witnessed within series such as Schoolies and Sydney Jungle (an exploration of Sydney's underground drum and bass music scene), he has also photographed various poignant subjects including the aftermath of the 2004 boxing day tsunami devastation in Sri Lanka and the funeral of late actor, Heath Ledger. He has recently been appointed a member of Oculi, a group of Australian award winning photo journalists. He has received various awards for his art practice including a highly commended within the sports category at the 2007 Nikon-Walkley Photographic Awards as well as becoming short listed for the 2007 Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize.

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Holly Andres is showing her second major body of work, Sparrow Lane, at Quality Pictures Contemporary Art in Portland until August 2, 2008. Her first series, Stories from a Short Street, was exhibited at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. as well as the Missoula Arts Museum. Her video work was included in the 2006 Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum.

Sparrow Lane illustrates adolescent girls on the cusp of acquiring some forbidden knowledge, a metaphor for the transition from girl to woman. The photographic series is playful and mischievous, as the artist incorporates familiar and suggestive elements for their iconographic value, such as scissors, chrome flashlights, bird cages, and open drawers, doors, and windows. Andres often includes identical twins, a compelling conceptual tool suggesting counterparts and accomplices on this mutual path to discovery. The air of suspicion caused by the incomplete narratives encourages the viewers to come to their own conclusions surrounding the event taking place.

The eleven photographs in the series were shot using an 8x10 large format camera, emphasizing the artist's use of rich color, texture, pattern, and chiaroscuro-like lighting. Andres is influenced by the legendary work of Alfred Hitchcock, and his use of certain cinematic and thematic conventions, such as highly theatrical lighting and the employment of several female protagonists. The artist also revisited Nancy Drew book covers to look at the body language of the characters, in particular their hand gestures. Andres observed how the girls' hands frame the scene, the delicate separation of their fingers, and how their silky hair frames their lovely, startled faces.

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Philip-Lorca diCorcia's surreal photographs of people and places have been part of the art world's vocabulary for over 20 years now. He's used the photograph gaze to turn observable reality into stinging fictions and his current exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, A Thousand Polaroids, takes a look at some of his most influential series. The exhibition, curated by Charlotte Cotton, includes images from Hustlers, Streetwork, Heads, and Lucky 13 but it also features a staggering installation of 1,000 Polaroid photographs. DiCorcia has been accumulating these Polaroid images for two decades and, in this video, he discusses his decision to combine these images in a single project. He decided to "intentionally create chance," letting the images relate to each other intuitively and illogically, creating an ebb and flow between ideas that emerged over the course of his career.

DiCorcia studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Art Boston before receiving an MFA from Yale University. His received his first solo show in 1985 and has since exhibited at MoMA, the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris, and Whitechapel Gallery in London. He also participated in the 1997 Whitney Biennial. A Thousand Polaroids will be on view through September 14th.

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What Do You See is an appropriately titled exhibition of photographs depicting the human body by Hong Kong born author, activist and artist Irene Kai. Now on view at Found Gallery in Los Angeles, the artist's work explores multiple aspects of the human body, which challenge the viewer's perception and ideas of sexuality. The artist achieves this through her series of ambiguous though sexually suggestive photographs. The series was originally created while the artist was a student, and was exhibited by the Royal College of Art in London in 1976. Princess Margaret was said to be shuffled past the exhibition as it was deemed too provocative at that time. The exhibition caused significant conflict within the institution and eventually lead to changes in the Royal College's hiring policy.

Kai's artistic practice is varied and includes photography, graphic design, authoring, and activism. The artist attended both the School of the Visual Arts in New York City and the Royal College of Art in London. Kai has also published a book of the exhibited images under the same titled of the show, and will have a book signing at Found Gallery two days before the exhibition closing on June 30th.

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Randall Scott Gallery in Washington, D.C. is currently showing new photographs by one of PDN Magazine's "30 Under 30 To Watch" (2007), Sarah Wilmer. Influenced by 16th and 17th century Dutch painting as well as the more modern medium of film, Wilmer's photographs evoke a sense of mystery and other worldliness. Her settings provide a vague framework for the imaginary story which she is documenting.

Wilmer begins with a general sense of imagery, subject, and cast of characters, but responds to her photographic surroundings upon arriving to each shoot. She uses props to create loose narratives of enchanted settings and transcendent realms. After processing the film, she employs saturation of color and printing techniques to create emotional presence and a sense of heightened reality. Her technical skills are crisply apparent, producing a presentational polish in each still.

Wilmer currently lives and works in Brooklyn and her work has been featured in various publications including V Magazine, Nomenus Quarterly, and Surface. Her work will remain at Randall Scott Gallery until July 5, 2008.

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Craig Norton began his career in art by selling decorated flowerpots in front of nightclubs while working as a bouncer. This self taught artist now utilizes drawing, photography, and collage in his exploration of controversial issues in history, politics, and religion. Lacking any formal artistic training, Norton's work has a sincerity that shuns conceptuality in favor of a more honest and direct approach.

Norton's exhibition, Bitter Crop, investigates social injustices that took place throughout the American Civil Rights Movement and is now on display at OKOK Gallery in Seattle. This mixed media installation confronts historical acts of inhumanity such as lynchings, segregationist rallies, and Ku Klux Klan activities. The main wall of the gallery is covered with a collage of over fifty individuals in the midst of protest, complete with familiar scenes of police brutality and civil unrest. The artist draws the faces of the figures, often in the midst of screams, with a cheap Bic pen. He then attaches these photorealistic portraits to bodies composed of wallpaper samples. The unconventional mix of materials creates a palpable tension that mimics our emotional guilt and unease surrounding those circumstances, which is now intensified given the advantage of our historical perspective.

Norton cites the text Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America as one of his main research sources. His previous work includes a large series based on the genocide in Rwanda and the Holocaust. Norton has exhibited at outsider art fairs in New York and Chicago. Portions of this body of work were first exhibited at White Flag Projects, a non-profit art space in St. Louis, Missouri where the artist currently lives and works.

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Black & White Gallery in Chelsea is currently showing one of Julian Montague's recent art projects, To Know The Spiders, until July 12, 2008. Montague is intrigued by the often neglected common presences and occurrences of everyday life. The book version of a previous project, The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification, was published in 2006 by Harry Abrams. The book details his highly methodical research and classification project of the stray shopping cart phenomenon, which took place over the course of six years. The book met wide acclaim and received the Diagram Prize for the Oddest Title of 2006.

For To Know the Spiders, the artist has conducted a visual exploration and analysis of a seemingly mundane creature- the household spider. The exhibition includes photographic evidence of the artist's somewhat scientific process. First, this overlooked occupant of our shared interiors is put to rest at the exact location it was found. The artist then collects the specimen and studies the face of the spider below a microscope, creating several drawings during this stage. From these drawings, a fabric banner is assembled with a stark black and white portrait of the little victim. This banner is then placed and photographed in the exact location of collection, thereby recognizing the presence of this innocuous invertebrate and serving as a fibrous farewell to the spider who had to die for this understanding to be gained.

This exhibition concludes Black & White Gallery's three-part season long multi-disciplinary program entitled The Proper Animal. All artists included in the program
utilized highly original animal iconography, inevitably bringing ethical questions into play. Montague received his B.A in Media Studies from Hampshire College in 1996 and has exhibited widely in the US, including shows at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut, Art in General in New York City, and Light Factory in Charlotte.

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The Whitney Museum's current exhibition offers a telling glimpse into photographer Robert Mapplethorpe's artistic development. Mapplethorpe, who became controversial because of his S&M inspired photographs in the 80s, helped bring beauty back into the art dialogue. Influenced by Andy Warhol's cultural connoisseurship and classical perceptions of beauty, his sleekly formal images were at once traditional and culturally relevant.

When his lover, collector and curator Sam Wagstaff, gave him a Polaroid camera in 1975, Mapplethorpe's photographic eye began to flourish. The polaroids that Mapplethorpe took in the later 1970s have the haunting, composed quality that came to characterize his work. But they are also clearly experimental. The nearly 100 photographs in the Whitney exhibition represent an array of technical and compositional explorations. Mapplethorpe's romanticized images of Patti Smith differ from his portraits of celebrities with whom he had a more distant relationship and his own self-portraits experiment with riskier subject-camera relationships.

Mapplethorpe received a BFA from Pratt Institute in the early 1970s and spent most of his career in New York City. In 1987, he established the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to help fund photographers and fight aids. He died in 1989, from complications related to AIDS. Mapplethorpe: Polaroids at the Whitney Museum continues through September 7, 2008.

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Currently showing at Blender Gallery, Paddington is a recent collection of works by acclaimed photographer, Toby Burrows. Entitled Footprint, the exhibition documents the artist's journey to Broken Hill, a regional mining suburb located in the far west of outback New South Wales. Images of picturesque scenery and vast landscapes present the beauty within the isolated town, and are cleverly juxtaposed with close ups of bird droppings smeared on windscreens and bugs splattered on the front of cars.

Burrows studied at Sydney College of the Arts, Rozelle before later moving to London. There he became the manager of Holborn Studios, Europe's largest photographic studio complex. Since his return to Sydney, Burrows has created advertising imagery for international corporations including Virgin mobile, Slazenger, Guinness and Epsom. He was commissioned by National Geographic to photograph deserted areas and remote communities within Australia, including Wilcannia, an outback region with a large indigenous population. Burrows has won several awards for his art practice including gold at the New York Festival, numerous finalist positions at the Cannes Film Festival and a World Press award.

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Over the last fortnight Sydney's Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery was scheduled to host an exhibition showcasing the work of acclaimed Australian photographer, Bill Henson. However, just hours prior to its programmed debut, the gallery was stormed by police confiscating 12 works on display and another 20 from the storeroom, while the gallery website was also forced to remove the offending imagery from its server. Such censorship was in play due to the depiction of naked adolescents within many of Henson's prints.

This story has dominated Australian tabloids and news broadcasts since its occurrence, with sensationalist headlines such as "Gallery raided as Bill Henson child porn art removed" appearing in leading newspapers, while news bulletins slander Henson a pedophile. The artist and gallery owners are now facing possible child pornography charges, causing debate to erupt over the distinction between art and pornography.

With Australia's own prime minister, Kevin Rudd declaring the images as "absolutely revolting," it's no wonder so many people have such an ignorant and philistine view on the topic. Boorish online groups entitled "Bill Henson is disgusting, perverted and a creator of child pornography," are being created while gallery owners Roslyn and Tony Oxley have even received anonymous phone messages from people threatening to burn down the gallery.

Yet much vocal support is also being shown in favour of the artist, aided with the defense of former child models who appear in Henson's earlier works, declaring they never felt violated when posing for the artist. Numerous high profile people have also voiced their support for Henson, including fellow artist Callum Morton, playwright Michael Gow and acclaimed actress Cate Blanchett.

Part of the current mass hysteria can be attributed to the way these images are being shown cropped, censored or out of context within the media. Close ups of adolescent girls' breasts or figures with blurred genitalia certainly demean the artist's broader body of work and have absolutely nothing to do with the way these images were intended to appear within a gallery environment.

One of the most shocking elements regarding the incident is Henson's global reputation as a respected artist. His work has been displayed within many major institutions around the world including the Guggenheim, New York, the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London- all without vilification. Within Australia his photographs are even studied as part of high school visual arts curriculum.

The current controversy in accordance with the Australian police force has required several other galleries, who have been displaying Henson's prints for years to also remove his photographs from their walls. In 2005 the Art Gallery of New South Wales (a somewhat "conservative" art institution), hosted a large scale retrospective of Henson's photography, which received no public objection whatsoever. Images within the exhibition contained the same form of adolescent nudity as present within the artworks at Roslyn Oxley9. The retrospective contained hundreds, possibly close to a thousand of Henson's prints and nobody seemed to say a word. So why now?

As a fellow Sydney-sider and art lover, my deepest condolences are with Henson and those affiliated with Roslyn Oxley9. These are certainly very dark days for the Australian art world.

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South African photographer Pieter Hugo was named the Standard Bank Artist for Visual Art in 2007. Hugo has long challenged the issues that face Africa and other developing nations, photographing the harshness of the land and occupants. The artist confronts his subjects directly, offering a raw sensibility and humanism that forces the viewer to question preconceived notions and prejudices. The Standard Bank exhibition opened in June in Grahamstown, South Africa and will tour throughout the nation. His work has been included in the 27th Sao Paulo Biennial (2006), and in publications such as Adbusters and Colors Magazine. More can be read about the artist at artsmart.com.

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Fairytales, imagination and surrealism present themselves within Phantasia, a group exhibition currently showing at The Australian Centre for Photography, Paddington. While using photography as a preferred means of expression the artists are subverting the medium's usual association with capturing the real. A range of interpretations relating to fantasy are presented, as Andrew Mamo draws inspiration from Nineteenth century science fiction, while Magdalena Bors incorporates mythical imagery into everyday scenarios. Simon Strong's sleek photography puts a modern spin on ancient fables, Alexia Sinclair presents the wonders of digital manipulation by reinterpreting medieval history and Mark Kimber reflects on childhood memories to create hybrid photos that appear almost as painted canvases.

Andrew Mamo's original interest lied in film studies, which he practiced at Sydney University over twenty years ago. It is only in the last six years that his digital photography has been exhibited and received awards including the Maywa Denki Award at the 2003 Toray Digital Creation Awards, Japan and the 2002 Kala Art Institute Fellowship Award from Kala Art Institute, Berkeley. Magdalena Bors recently completed a bachelor of arts majoring in photography from RMIT University, Melbourne in 2006. She has participated in various group exhibitions on a national scale and was the 2007 winner of the Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize.

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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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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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Her work is the result of critical observation of our contemporary American culture. Her first book, America's Idea of a Good Time, investigates through a camera lens why we play bingo, hit golf balls, stack Oreo cookies, bungee jump and the like. She is working on a second book that will examine the idiosyncrasies particular to Los Angeles.

Fifty One Fine Art Photography includes Schermerhorn's work in their current exhibition USA squared, along with the work of Peter Granser. The exhibition captures the stereotypes and absurdities that characterize American life and popular culture. There remains a subtle sense of humor throughout the exhibition, which will be at Fifty One until May 3rd.

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An evocative collection of works by Dutch photo-journalist, Robert Knoth is currently on show at The Australian Centre for Photography, Paddington. Entitled Certificate no. 000358/ Nuclear Devastation in the Former Soviet Union, this display highlights the devastating consequences of radiation, by photographing the affected victims. Case studies include the Patuchenko sisters who both suffer from brain tumours, Vadim Kuleshov- an eight year old mentally retarded boy with bone disease and Nastya Eremenko a young girl who was diagnosed with cervical cancer at only three years old.

Knoth has been photographing these subjects in black and white since the early nineties, continuing to make us aware of the repercussions experienced by such innocent victims. He names each photo after the people depicted, followed by where they are from. When noticing all the different countries included, we are able to see just how far spread the devastation really lies.

Knoth studied at the Urecht School of Arts over the duration of a year before earning his way as a rock photographer in the early nineties. He has since documented various war torn destinations including Burkina Faso, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Sierra Leone.

Certificate No.000358/ is a global traveling exhibition, which is estimated to have already been viewed by over 200,000 people. It is set to travel to Queensland and South Australia next.

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In Oliveira's three dimensional works, there exists a playful dynamic between the flat characteristics of photography and the round aspects inherent to sculpture. Their angular rendering recalls computer graphics from the 1980s or an over-sized origami project. Her collages depict outdoor scenes and are perforated with various sizes of cuts. In her photographic print, she placed holes in the sky, allowing real sunlight to shine through.

Oliveira has exhibited at Niagara Gallery and A.W.O.L. Gallery in Toronto and has been reviewed by NOW Magazine and ECHO Weekly. The Girl and The Bear will remain at Peak Gallery until April 26, 2008.

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Mullican and his dreamscape contemporaries such as Johnathan Borofsky, Jim Shaw, and Mike Kelley reject this notion. Instead, they continually question, trying to come to an understanding of our motivation. In his black and white banners, Mullican tries to make metric conversions that just don't seem to make sense. But, at least he's trying. Being a concerned citizen, he outlines a path to follow should an emergency develop. This too sputters and spurts along with wry humor. And, in the end, suggests it's probably best to call 911 for help.

In the second room of the gallery, Mullican ventures into the new territory of the digitally altered light box. Deeply mysterious in their abstracted form, it's hard to phantom their position in his new world order. Two pieces come close to making suggestions. Photos of trees have been altered so that the leaves resemble guitar picks, fingernails, or the plastic "feathers" on darts. These have then been treated to a camouflage coloration to help them blend into their green surroundings. Most telling, however, is the shadow they cast. Reminding us that no matter how much we try to fit in, we still cast a shadow on the world. And, it's this shadow that we must remain mindful of.

Matt Mullican at Galerie Micheline Szwajcer through May 3, 2008

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The exhibition at Quality Pictures contains ten 48" x 60" photographs that comment on the ideas of change and it's affect on man's physicality, psychology, and spirituality. Hooper photographs abandoned architectural spaces, vacant parking lots, nature, and any site he feels evokes an awareness of entropy. He occasionally adds props, such as an upturned chair or a pile of rope ascending vertically out of the frame. Through expert lighting and careful staging, the artist creates meditative images that have a sense of desolation. The artist often includes a solitary figure, thus referencing the passage of time and mortality. Also at Quality Pictures is Interspace, a video installation by Laura Fritz. Both exhibitions will be on view until April 26th.

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Pakistani artist Bani Abidi will be exhibiting a collection of video and photographic works with Green Cardamon for her first UK solo exhibition. Standing Still Standing Still Standing... will feature the artist's documentary style short films and photographs that examine the collective political culture held in Pakistan, but only to serve as a universal metaphor for oppression and political dominance. For the exhibition, two new works Reserved, a video produced for the 2006 Singapore Biennial, and The Address, a series of prints and video stills will be shown. Both works will be linked by a new series of digital drawings.

Abidi received her BFA from the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan in 1994 and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999. In 2000, Abidi attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Last year, the artist exhibited in Art Miami with Gallery Haines, Simulasian: Refiguring "Asia" for the Twenty First Century at the Asian Contemporary Art Fair in NY.

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James Casebere

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Rocky Schenck, courtesy of M+B

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In her tender novella Tumble Home, Amy Hempel wonders what drives us to preserve parts of our lives. She recounts a disturbing yet endearing news clip, a clip that has an uncanny resemblance to the exhibitions currently hanging in Gagosian's Beverly Hills Gallery: "A woman in West Virginia carried her unborn baby for more than forty years. It calcified outside the uterine wall. When questioned by reporters, the woman said, 'As long as the child is inside of me I haven't lost it.'" While Hempel isn't referring to the work of Y.Z. Kami and Sally Mann, she certainly could be. Her narrative describes what the two artists are doing: preserving and remembering in a way that taps into the mysterious nature of physiology, the sort of mysterious nature that allows an unborn baby to become a meaningful keepsake. Continue reading for DailyServing's review of the show.

Review by Catherine Wagley for DailyServing

Continue reading "Physical Keepsakes: Y.Z. Kami and Sally Mann at Gagosian " »

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"The Searchers" is a series of photography conducted by the collaborative duo Sasha Bezzubov and Jessica Sucher which investigates Western spiritual tourism in India. The project, which is currently on view at the Noorderlicht Photofestival 2007 in The Netherlands, developed from a year-long trip that the artists took throughout ashrams, retreat centers and pilgrimage destinations of India. What was discovered through that religious landscape was varied and was stated by the artists as "a more nuanced relationship than we expected between India and the Westerners." Other related projects for Bezzubov include "Things Fall Apart," a photographic series that illustrates the aftermath of natural disasters in India, California, the Midwest, Florida, and Indonesia and Thailand, and "The Gringo Project," which is a series of portraits of Western travelers in third world countries. "Things Fall Apart" has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, and has been exhibited in the Front Room Gallery in Williamsburg, NYC, and with Taylor De Cordoba in Los Angeles.

Bezzubov received her MFA from the Yale University School of Art and her undergraduate degree from the State University of New York, Purchase. The artist has received two Fulbright Scholarship Awards, one from travel to Cambodia (2000-01) and one for travel to India (2005-06).

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Ideas of asexual reproduction, sexual identity and youth are pervasive in the digital photographs of artist Margi Geerlinks. Humanity is examined in her work through the themes of birth and time. While all of her images are digitally manipulated, Geerlinks' photos remain mostly unaltered, confronting the viewer with the realistically absurd. The Dutch artist lives and works in Rotterdam, Netherlands. She is a graduate of the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam (1997) and attended the Art Academy Constantyn Huygens, Kampen (1995). In recent years, Geerlinks has exhibited with the Stux Gallery in NYC, Aeriplastics Gallery in Brussells and Richard Goodall Gallery in Manchester, England. In addition, the artist is represented by TORCH Gallery in Amsterdam, and, in 2001, TORCH Books released "Crafting Humanity," a book featuring the artist's works.

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Photographer Chris Scarborough creates hyper-real portraits of his family and friends. The artist alters the digital photos, leaving the subject exaggerated and the viewer asking whether the image is even real. Each subject is modeled from the principle of ideal beauty found in Manga and other Japanese animation. Scarborough alters each piece pixel by pixel, fabricating a reality that exists in between fact and fiction. The Nashville-based artist will be exhibiting in 2007 at both Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn., and Artspace in Raleigh, N.C. Scarborough graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design (2000) and since has exhibited with Gescheidle in Chicago and Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta. Both Art Papers (2005) and New American Painting