From our partners at Art Practical, today we bring you Rob Marks‘ review of Erased Loop Random Walk, a solo exhibition of works by Terry Berlier now on view at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. As Marks sees it, “Any despair over impending catastrophic environmental change evoked by [the work]…is balanced by a full-out sense of wonder and possibility.” This article was originally published on January 14, 2014.

Terry Berlier. Core Sampling (Tick Tock), 2009 (detail); FGR-95, dyes, steel, motors, MAKE Controller, computer, sensor, microscope camera, PVC, aluminum, pocket watch, and MAX. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: David Pace.

Half of the works in Terry Berlier’s Erased Loop Random Walk at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art hum with a mixture of ingenuity, obsolescence, and camp that would be at home in Los Angeles’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, David Wilson’s Borgesian paean to the 17th century cabinets of wonder.  The other half transport the visitor to what might seem to be a satellite installation of San Francisco’s Exploratorium, combining high technology with a do-it-yourself aesthetic to explore and reconfigure the world.

Berlier frames her show in terms of the passage of time. Some artworks mark the ticking seconds via the back-and-forth motion of a rocking chair, the subject of both I Would Not Change It and I’m Dying; This is a New Experience (both 2013). They also mark the length of a visit to the show, via the repetitions of the Beatles’s Here Comes the Sun emanating from When Comes the Sun (2012), a machine powered by a solar panel mounted on the museum’s roof. Several pieces reference the longer intervals encoded in tree rings and even the unfolding geological eras in the nine six-foot long ersatz “core samples” that compose Core Sampling (Tick Tock) (2009).

Read the full article here.

Love is a kind of obsession, and obsession is a kind of love. It is this sentiment, not one of sensationalism or romanticism, that permeates the works in the two-gallery group exhibition, Stay in Love, curated by Chris Sharp at Lisa Cooley and Laurel Gitlen. Alternating between meditative, neurotic, and celebratory, the featured artists investigate the subjects of their fascination with the thoroughness that exists only in a state of devotion.

Stay in Love, 2014; installation view. Courtesy of the Artists, Lisa Cooley, and Laurel Gitlen, New York. Photo: Cary Whittier.

Featuring the works of both well-established and up-and-coming artists, from local and international spheres, and connecting the east and west sides of Norfolk Street in Manhattan, the exhibition bridges both space and time. The individual installations, however, do not feel particularly integrated with each other. Lisa Cooley’s almost entirely monochromatic installation creates a necessary visual coherence that fuses the broad gaps in the enigmatic pieces. Laurel Gitlen uses a similar method, but with predominantly bright, colorful, playful works. With no text beyond the press release to connect the twenty-three artists and pieces that span almost fifty years, the works fluctuate in and out of recognizability, aided by a variety of contextualizing tactics.

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At Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis, dueling 35mm slide projectors whir and click in a darkened back room. Perched on top of two of the room’s many bookcases (this backroom also houses Midway’s impressive library), these projectors cast their images onto a shared center screen. Each slide contains a simple form on a white background: a single geological mass anchored by a heavy shadow. Overlapped and interposed via the semitransparent screen, the individual rock-shadow compositions create a central dense image that reveals a topographical form, like the portions of crossover in a Venn diagram. Richly textured with jagged edges, these fleeting shapes evoke maps—outlines and terrains of unknown, imaginary nations.

Julia Rometti & Victor Costales. The Savagery of the Inconstant Stones, 2013; double slide projection; 162 slides. Courtesy of Midway Contemporary Art. Photo: Caylon Hackwith.

In addition to this captivating projection-based work, the exhibition features several other bodies of work, all by the artist duo Julia Rometti & Victor Costales. The exhibition at Midway, titled Savage Palms, Worn Stones, Moonshine Vision, represents a collection of five groups of work that reflect a driving obsession of the duo’s ten-year collaboration. While most of the works speak, in various ways, to botany, geology, and geography, the collection also make gestures toward political ideologies and histories, though this content might remain a bit buried to an uninitiated audience.

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To say that Yael Bartana’s latest film, Inferno, opens in epic fashion would be a bit of an understatement. Accompanied by a dramatic score, the initial shot begins with a flyover of an expansive forest, which suddenly opens up to the colossal cityscape of São Paulo. Dominating the frame, the city appears as a vast empire, an allusion that sets up the rest of the film. The aerial shots continue, focusing on overcrowded and sometimes deteriorating residential areas as well as modern skyscrapers, both emblematic of the South American metropolis. This series concludes with a shot flying directly over the monumental Altino Arantes building, a midcentury skyscraper that evokes the Empire State Building both in style and cultural significance.

Yael Bartana. Inferno, 2013 (video still); HD video with sound; 18 minutes. Courtesy of the Artist; Petzel, New York; Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; and Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv.

This film by the Israeli-born artist was commissioned by the 19th Biennale of Sydney and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, where it is currently on view in the Project Gallery. Bartana was among several artists invited to participate in a residency in São Paulo by curators Eyal Danon and Benjamin Seroussi to explore the influx of religious movements in Brazil and their connections to Israel. In this context, Bartana’s work relates to the meteoric rise of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), a neo-Pentecostal church movement that started in the 1970s. This extremely profitable church is currently building an oversized replica of the Temple of Solomon, built in Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE and destroyed by the Babylonians some four centuries later, according to the Hebrew Bible. A second temple was subsequently built and later destroyed, making the UCKG’s Templo de Salomão the third—and most ostentatious—iteration of this religious site.

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John Sparagana fatigues images by manipulating them. First he scans pictures and runs off inkjet prints, then he crumples the pictures in his pocket and kneads the glossy paper for days or weeks until the sheet’s fibrous structure is loosened. The result is a soft fabric more than double in size, with its original image lightened and diminished on the new surface, appearing like a ghost. After wearing down multiple copies of the same image, the artist then carefully slices these images to tiny squares, recompiling them to form even larger pictures. Sparagana composes within this structure by selectively weakening his collages, introducing different colors or materials to stress or obliterate sections, and returning to images with different treatments, revealing in their differences the complexity of his approach. It is an overall physical process; five years ago, I visited Sparagana’s studio and was most surprised by the literal weight of his collages, especially given the pulpy, fragile surface of the artist’s papers.

John Sparagana. Crowds & Powder: The Revolutionaries, 2013; archival inkjet prints with oil stick, sliced and mixed, on paper; 58 x 92 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago. Photo: Tom Van Eynde.

The resulting works are firmly in the genre of collage, yet they operate in two directions: With their reliance on grids and fascination with images, Sparagana’s collages have much in common with the optical intensity of digital distortion or algorithmic abstraction, yet the artist adapts his images with the kind of diagrammatic storytelling more fundamental to collage. They are artworks that take their start from mass-market media, but they are also responses to those original images, as much interpretations as adaptions.

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Help Desk is where I answer your queries about making, exhibiting, finding, marketing, buying, selling–or any other activity related to contemporary art. Submit your questions anonymously here: http://bit.ly/132VchD. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. Help Desk is co-sponsored by KQED Arts.

I spent last year applying to residency programs in the U.S. and finally got one. How do I maximize my time there? Obviously I’ll be working hard, but is there anything else I should know or do before I go?

Congratulations! A residency can be a great place to get a lot of work done, experiment in a new setting, meet like-minded people, or even have a creative breakthrough. However, it’s not easy to take time off work and travel to a place where everything is new (and sometimes overwhelming) and still get a lot of artwork made. To answer your question, I turned to artist Christine Wong Yap, who has worked in residence at Montalvo Arts Center and the Tides Institute and Museum of Art, among others. Here’s what she had to say:

Anne Neukamp. Curl, 2013; oil, tempera, and acrylic on canvas; 240 x 190 cm.

“Be prepared. I’m a planner. I like to find out as much as I can in advance about the residency before I go. I like to know what kinds of tools and equipment they have, and what I’ll need to ship. If the residency is in a remote area, or your residency is only a short duration, ship your tools and materials in advance (if the staff don’t mind receiving your packages for you). This can be expensive and stressful, so having particular projects in mind before arriving helps. Remember, the more remote the residency, the longer it’ll take to receive your packages. You might also consider non-art creature comforts. For example, for me, physical activity makes me less grouchy and more energetic, so a yoga mat and sneakers are must-haves.”

“Be flexible. Residencies are great for experimentation. Explore. Recharge. Be open. Anticipate that other residents may have different agendas, working hours, habits, etc. You will probably be pushed out of your comfort zone, for better and for worse. Contribute positively to the residency community with a good attitude, gratitude, and forbearance. Remember that lots of other applicants wish they had the opportunity you do.”

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Today we bring you an article from our archives, a review of Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art. Author Caitlin Sutherland notes that the show “addresses the intersection of conceptual art and writing from a unique perspective. The use of the term after in the title does not necessarily reference a chronological narrative in which conceptual writing emerged from post-conceptual art. Instead, it may signify the relationship between the two practices as responses to modernist ideologies and, from a contemporary standpoint, the need to remain relevant while still pushing boundaries in the interest of creating new and exciting work.” There’s a conceptually related show, CON/TEXT, now on view at Lynch Tham in New York. With an all-star lineup of works from Barbara Kruger, Joe Amrhein, Mona Hatoum, Sherin Neshat, William Pope. L, and Robert Ryman, CON/TEXT is worth checking out.

Installation view of Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art. Courtesy The Power Plant. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid

Upon entering Toronto’s Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery to see Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, the viewer is immediately confronted by a raucous wash of sonorous elements. Over fifty artists and conceptual writers occupy the gallery space; canonical works from Andy Warhol, Sol LeWitt, Marcel Broodthaers, Carl Andre, and Dan Graham are nestled among pieces by contemporary practitioners, contributing to the sense of saturation. Originally curated by Nora Burnett Abrams and Andrea Andersson for the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the exhibition is divided into five sections—appropriation, transcription, translation, redaction, and constraint—modestly readapted to suit the gallery’s layout.

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