From our friends at Artillery magazine, today we bring you a review of Newsha Tavakolian‘s work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Author Ellie Shoja notes: “…Tavakolian’s women seem to use their societal limitations to trigger an internal process of private empowerment…” This article was originally published on November 20, 2013.

Newsha Tavakolian. Untitled, 2011; inkjet print on Hahnemuhle paper.

Since she began her career as a photojournalist at the age of 16, Newsha Tavakolian has been capturing the essence of the modern-day Iranian experience through poignant photographs that challenge Western perceptions of the women of the Islamic Republic, while alluding to the intricate weavings of dialogue that shroud this forward-thinking and over-educated population. Her photographs capture the weight of the internal and external veils that, at first glance, seem to tether their subjects. Yet there is empowerment present in the faces of Tavakolian’s women, alongside determination, and a fiery tenacity that speaks of internal strength and defies subjugation.

Four of Tavakolian’s photographs are on display at LACMA through December 15, 2013. The fourth-floor elevator doors of the Ahmanson Building pull apart to reveal these somber-faced female protagonists who have been plucked from two different series: “The Day I Became a Woman” (2009) and “Listen” (2011).

Read the full article here.

It’s hard not to get lost in the rich colors, abstract tensile lines, and intense shades of gray in Liliana Farber’s photographs and prints—and for that matter, in the endless rabbit hole of mouse clicks one of her web-based works elicits. Farber works in a series of potentially unrelated mediums, and in some cases, structures: video, ink on paper, photography, a website, and image manipulation software.

However varied in form, her works all provoke an almost illicit sense of surreptitiousness, as though the figures and forms in her images and prints are both just around the next bend and are something one isn’t supposed to see, let alone look at without feeling slightly ill at ease. Furthermore, she is almost exclusively focused on working with “the image” as subject matter.

Liliana Farber. Commonplaces: Exhibition View, # 1, 2013; archival ink print; 104 x 72 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.

One approach Farber takes is working with software that alters and reconfigures a series of images she culls from the Internet, which once altered create entirely new and remarkably restrained abstract and textile-like compositions. In her series Commonplaces: Exhibition View (2013) and Mediocre (2013)—both printed in archival ink on paper—Farber has used software that she and her partner, Roy Klein, designed and programmed to manipulate images gathered from the Internet. For the Commonplaces: Exhibition View series, Farber gathered images documenting art exhibitions with the title “exhibition view.” Her software then took a different pixel from each of the images and placed them into a new composition, generating a kind of pixelated puzzle that fittingly resembles an out-of-focus gallery space, reminiscent of looking through a kaleidoscope or a slightly opaque filter.

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The story of Los Angeles is the story of water. Since the creation of the Los Angeles Aqueduct by William Mulholland 100 years ago this month (fictionalized in Roman Polanski’s film Chinatown), water has been intimately tied to power, status, and politics in Southern California. Here, more than in any other major U.S. city, water is an essential part of the urban landscape. Who has access to it and what they do with it are questions that define public and private space, shaping and dividing communities.

Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation. Different Kinds of Water Pouring Into a Swimming Pool, 2013. Courtesy of REDCAT. Photo: Scott Groller.

Architect Andrés Jaque and his Madrid-based Office for Political Innovation addresses this phenomenon in his current exhibition at REDCAT, Different Kinds of Water Pouring Into a Swimming Pool. The title references a work by David Hockney—another European artist who was similarly fascinated with Angelenos’ relationship with water upon moving to LA in the mid-1960s. Jaque has created four installations that address the various ways our domestic lifestyles are structured around pools, lawns, gardens, and Jacuzzis. These are not precise architectural models, but rather playful constructions that evoke different ways in which individuals and communities interact with water.

Jaque builds these works from household and backyard objects, and simple plumbing elements, to craft DIY fountains and gardens. In one piece, clear plastic bins stacked and filled with soil and rocks recall a terraced garden sprouting chilies, rosemary, and other herbs and vegetables. I imagine this is what Robert Smithson’s home garden would have looked like. In another, water cascades down primary-colored towers of bins, funnels, scoops, pails, bowls, tubes, and tubs. It resembles champagne fountains for a child’s birthday party. Elsewhere there are kiddie pools, toy planes, ferns, white laundry bins stacked like improvised, endless columns, water pouring from showerheads, live fish, and live birds. These are makeshift tableaux assembled from home-and-garden store ready-mades.

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At 6 a.m. on December 13, 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski appeared on Polish television to declare martial law in effect throughout the country. Following his edict, for the next two and a half years citizens were stripped of their civil liberties: All borders and airports were closed, public gatherings were banned, independent organizations were declared illegal, and travel between cities required permission.[1] Curfew was imposed, and postal mail was subject to scrutiny and censorship. In one ABC news broadcast from that day, Peter Jennings quoted Jaruzelski’s televised speech, saying, “Poland has come to the end of its psychological endurance,” but in fact a terrible period of psychological endurance had only just begun.

Installation view of Psychopaper at Piktogram Gallery, Warsaw, 2013.

Psychopaper at Piktogram in Warsaw presents an answer to the question of what must it have been like to live and make art during this period. Scattered over the walls of the gallery space are more than fifty works on paper (and one video) produced by Polish artists during and immediately after the years of martial law. Most of the works have never been exhibited before, and although they share a basic materiality, there is little in the way of unifying style or subject matter. The drawings stand, according to the gallery materials, “as a document to the mental state engendered by an overdose of reality, which was in a chronic state of crisis.”

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Elijah Burgher delves into the symbolic and uncanny in his one-man show Friendship as a Way of Life b/w I’m Seeking the Minotaur at Western Exhibitions. Large, painted drop cloths act as psychic doorways into an ancient universe of strange magic. On the other side, a confident series of colored pencil drawings feature unknown icons, nude men, or both.

Elijah Burgher. Excremental Philosophy Illustrated, Vol. 1, 2013; colored pencil on paper; 19 in. x 24 in. Courtesy of Western Exhibitions.

Excremental Philosophy Illustrated, Vol. 1 (2013) is a lexicon of invented symbols arranged over fields of vibrant color. A row of simple forms in the upper portion of the image begins with a circle, a square, and a triangle, then progresses into more varied combinations of geometry, arrows, and wheels. The rest of the composition is broken up into columns of varying width that contain increasingly complex groupings of coded signs. Some look slightly familiar, like stylized eyes, beach balls, or an Apple computer’s “spinning wheel of death,” maybe even a doorway or window. Those associations are mostly subjective, as Burgher’s imagery betrays no obvious referent.

These ambiguous symbols feel old and new at the same time. Originally, I associated them with Roman and medieval banners, alchemy, the Buddha’s Wheel of the Law, and the occult symbols from Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album (you know, the one with “Stairway”). In the show’s press release, Burgher’s symbols are described as “sigils,” which are signs associated with different forms of magic dating back to the Renaissance, and maybe earlier—there’s really no hard limit to the historical record when it comes to magical thinking. There is also no standard catalog of sigils; they are custom-designed for the personal wish fulfillment of whoever made them, though formally, modern sigils are often derived from mixing diverse iconographic sources like family crests, the Kabbalah, Eastern philosophies, and the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. Excremental Philosophy Illustrated, Vol. 1’s symbol combinations and saturated colors exist somewhere between a new illuminated manuscript, a map of spells, and a child’s board game with no clear instructions.

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#access #gentrification #street art #painting #historicity

A panel at the San Francisco Art Institute on October 20 in conjunction with the Walter and McBean Galleries exhibition Energy That is All Around – Mission School: Chris Johanson, Margaret Kilgallen, Alicia McCarthy, Barry McGee, Ruby Neri, posed the question: “Mission School: Yes or No?” The general consensus, both on the panel and in the wider Bay Area arts community, was a qualified “Yes.” On the panel, Natasha Boas, who curated the SFAI show, described the intense resistance with which her question—”Was there ever really a Mission School?”—was met when she began her research on an essay of the same title that was included in the Berkeley Art Museum‘s catalog for its 2012 solo exhibition by Barry McGee. Artists refused to address the concept, objected to the label, and were otherwise evasive, even when (perhaps especially when) they had personally benefited from association with the group.

Alicia McCarthy. Untitled, 1996. Oil and latex on panel; 84 x 84 in. Collection of Jeff Morris, Oakland. Photo: Johnna Arnold/SFAI.

In parallel discussions within the community and on Facebook, a common response to the question was, “Yes, but who cares?” Most people agree that the critical mass of artistic activity in San Francisco’s Mission District in the 1990s met the social and formal criteria for a “school” of artists: shared influences and connections that congealed into apparent stylistic and material affinities, and that informed later generations. Why, then, does the mention of this widely recognized and influential movement in recent art history provoke a polarized response from both the artists customarily included in the group and those who are not? Understanding the hostility to the Mission School label requires an appreciation of the many ways in which this Bay Area movement prefigured controversial developments in American contemporary art and urban space over the last 20 years.

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Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. This week, we have two Shotgun Reviews for our readers! In the first, Bansie Vasvani reviews Tracey Moffatt’s Spirit Landscapes at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in New York City. In the second, Felicia Hayes considers the Spectrum Queer Media programming of the New Parkway Theater in Oakland.

Tracey Moffatt. As I Lay Back on My Ancestral Land No. 2, 2013; digital print; 49 x 72 in.; edition of 8.

Perhaps the most striking part of Tracey Moffatt‘s Spirit Landscapes at Tyler Rollins Fine Art was meeting Moffatt in person. Forthright and guileless, she spoke of her Australian Aboriginal ties and her return to her country to document nature after being away for more than a decade. Stirring in her commitment to her heritage and nation, her photographs tackle issues of identity and belonging in a forceful yet subtle manner.

In the series titled As I Lay Back on My Ancestral Land, a slew of surreal images are presented through different colored filters that alter a viewer’s perception and reception of the work. Photographed while lying on the ground, a reclining naked female body’s contours are interwoven with shots of the trees and the sky that suggest her strong association with the land. Yet the spectrum of bright tinted filters create an affective distance from a more heavy-handed treatment of traumatic Aboriginal history. Not only does this feature set a playful tone and help release past anxiety, it also has the opposite effect of drawing the viewer in and making the image resonate and linger in one’s mind.

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