In 2007 young artist Zhang Rui, then newly graduated from the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, was one of 1001 Chinese citizens selected by Ai Weiwei through his blog to participate in his project Fairytale for Documenta 12. The experience proved to be a transformative one.

Zhang Rui. Two Birds, 2013; oil on canvas; 45 x 45 cm; Courtesy of the artist

Her body of work One Year is showing at Sydney’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Small works, painted with a somewhat muddy palette, initially resist interpretation. At first they appear charming, slightly awkward or naive. When you discover that her images have been largely sourced from the internet, from photographs uploaded to Instagram, Weibo, Facebook, and Twitter, their apparent lack of coherence—and weirdly disconcerting lack of affect—begins to make sense. Paradoxically painted in oil on canvas with a muted, almost monochrome palette rather than the lush hypercolor of a backlit screen, they are intended to reflect the constant stream of disparate, random, and mostly unconnected images that form the social media landscape: a never-ending “feed” of ideas and opinions. Even their various sizes and shapes echo the way we see images today: on a cellphone, a tablet, a laptop screen.

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Visceral, bracing, potent, Kathryn Parker Almanas’s Pre-Existing Condition, currently on view at Yellow Peril Gallery, is a collision of sensory extremes and formal nuances. In large-scale color photographs and small-scale collage works, the artist pictures and probes the physical body, both its corporeal effusions and existential implications. The result is an intensely vital, deeply disorienting study of being, sensation, and the intersection of inner and outer experience.

Kathryn Parker Almanas. Vestige, 2010, from the series Pre-Existing Condition; archival pigment print; 40 x 50 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Yellow Peril Gallery, Providence, RI

Entering the first of Yellow Peril’s two rooms, the viewer encounters Bloatation (2009), one of several evocatively titled photographs displayed around the room. Though impossible to identify, the swollen, globular form—framed, still-life fashion, against a richly hued backdrop—immediately suggests some kind of gaseous, grossly distended organ. On an adjacent wall, Vestige (2010) and Sever (2009) exude an immediate, paradoxical charge. Like the other photographs on view, they register as exquisitely rendered visions of the indecipherably grotesque—repellent yet entrancing, gory yet beautiful. Vestige is redolent of carnage and bodily remains: a white, gruesomely stained drape foregrounds a motley assemblage of shredded, torn detritus. Fur? Fabric? This image, apparently so explicit, is suddenly ambiguous; its disconcerting contents seem to refract some inner morass of subliminal association and shape-shifting horror. Read More »

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.

Pavel Büchler, Studio Schwitters, 2010. Sound installation, loudspeakers, table and computer. Courtesy the artist and Max Wigram Gallery, London. Installation view courtesy of the Power Plant. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid

Falling under the subtext of translation, Pavel Büchler’s Studio Schwitters (2010) is one of the raucous audio elements first encountered in the exhibition: a captivating visual and auditory anchor spanning one of the gallery’s main walls. A response to dadaist Kurt Schwitters’s nonsensical sound poem, The Ursonate (1922–32), a “sonata” predicated on the absence of language, Büchler’s sound installation uses a single laptop and seventy-five horn speakers to distort Schwitters’s poem. Using German text-to-speech software, the poem is translated from text to soundscape. The effect creates further distortion as the sounds are continually fed through the series of speakers; the resultant cacophony emulates a muddy symphony removed from a humanist dialogue through the insertion of the machine, yet it remains oddly warm and melodic.

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Like many in the scientific community, Eric William Carroll is searching for an ultimate theory of everything, but he’s doing so in a slightly different way. For G.U.T. Feeling, the current exhibition at Highlight Gallery, Carroll utilized aspects of the scientific method in combination with personal associations to create a series of collages, photographs, and sculptures that expose the unexpected, overlooked, and sometimes comically dubious connections in the universe. Initiated at a studio visit in February, this interview continues a conversation Carroll and I began then about his works in progress and any other revelations originating in his intestinal tract.

G.U.T. Feeling, installation view, Highlight Gallery. Courtesy of Highlight Gallery

Amelia Sechman: The collages in your most recent series, G.U.T. (Grand Unification Theory) Feeling, seem like an intuitive visual cataloging system. Where do the connections come from?

Eric William Carroll: A combination of theory and experience. Since the project is attempting to communicate something purely via photographs, I rely on visual similarities to make connections. But beneath the surface I’m trying to establish deeper connections.

AS: Were there any particularly extraordinary moments when you realized the connections between two things that previously seemed unrelated?

EWC: It wasn’t really a “moment,” but I had the gradual realization that everything is connected and that it’s only a matter of degree or perspective that separates something from everything else.

AS: What is it about these visual echoes and rhythms that compels you to bring them together?

EWC: Part of it is wanting to understand the world on a basic scientific level. The other part is that, image-wise, we’re seeing a huge variety of photographs appear together in the same container for the first time—by that I mean Google’s image search, Tumblr, Flickr, etc. Bringing seemingly random images together on the screen creates new connections. New photographic synapses are being formed. And also, I have a firm belief that everything is related and some things are more closely bound together than others (see fig. 3.4 and 4.2).

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#visibility #labor #institutions #class #race #access

Photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier makes her New York solo debut with A Haunted Capital, a tightly crafted, personal-is-political installation at the Brooklyn Museum. The artist’s hometown of Braddock, a forgotten steel mill town in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, is marked by a geography of postindustrial degradation. An outsider might take a social documentary approach to Braddock’s history and current woes. As an insider, Frazier documents that history’s tangible impact on her own and her family’s lives―an impact characterized by environmental illness, institutionalized racism, and disparity in access to health care―and her community’s pride and tenacity.  Documentary-style photographs of the demolition of Braddock Hospital, the only hospital in the area, are juxtaposed with intimate portraits of Frazier’s mother and grandmother, both of whom learned they had cancer in 2008. (A link is implied between Braddock’s environment and these illnesses, as well as Frazier’s lupus.) Framed gelatin silver prints of Frazier, her mother, grandmother, grandfather, and family friends, taken in Braddock at various points between 2002 and 2011, line the two white walls of the installation space along with carefully selected cityscapes. The end walls are wallpapered with dozens of images, a visual archive Frazier has gathered of Braddock’s history, one that is inclusive of African Americans. This was done in response to her realization that African Americans were excluded from a 2008 history of the town, Braddock, Allegheny County. “In the face of this and other exclusions, I have a strong sense of duty to visually write my family and community into the history of Braddock,” she says. [1]

LaToya Ruby Frazier. Momme Portrait Series (Shadow), 2008. Gelatin silver photograph, 15 1/2 x 19 1/2 in. Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund; © LaToya Ruby Frazier

Frazier’s portraits hover between staged and intimate. In Shadow (2008), the artist’s profile overlaps with her mother’s body; together they cast an ominous shadow that acts as a third persona that, the artist reveals, “foreshadows the loss of Grandma Ruby.” Grandma Ruby, Mom, and Me (2009) was taken at Frazier’s grandmother’s open casket. Frazier’s photographs, including some that are part of this show, are arrayed around the casket, while the artist looks out at the camera with a mixture of loss, self-assurance, and defiance. The snapshot Mr. Jim Kidd (2011), which shows a man protesting the hospital’s destruction, is overshadowed by the finality of a photograph of the destroyed hospital and its empty parking lot dusted with snow. The man’s handwritten sign reads: “UPMC is race-based, class-based health care.”

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Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses (250–400 words) to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Eva Morgenstein considers the artwork of New Orleans–based Dr. Bob.

Dr. Bob. Be Nice or Leave, n.d.; mixed media.

Tucked away in the Bywater district of New Orleans, Dr. Bob’s Folk Art condenses the city’s attitude into colorful phrases and sculptures. His gallery (which also functions as a studio) occupies a small warehouse and the yard adjacent to it. Through a gate adorned with dolls’ heads and spinning wheels, the yard contains a trailer and multiple other oddities, like lined-up glass bottles and twenty identical pieces of  wood.

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