I once read that when we travel to new or strange places that a very interesting phenomenon occurs. Since we are a bit lost and disoriented, our brains miscalculate the faces of strangers in the crowd in an attempt to find the familiar. As synapses fire, a person on the sidewalk may look like an old lover—or we swear we glanced a family friend across the restaurant. Akin to the feeling of déjà-vu, a second glance may not even clarify the mirage. We rationalize and analyze until the nose, eyes, and lips suddenly belong to a stranger. A surprising amount of our brain activity is dedicated to facial cognition—so recognizing a familiar face, or an unfamiliar one, is an unexpectedly convoluted task. I often find myself in a new place and momentarily conflicted and lost in the faces around me, grasping for the comfort of a returned stare.

Klara (Klara Liden), 10 October, 2009, Berlin, colored pencil on paper. Photo courtesy of the artist and Michael Werner Gallery.

Finding my way around New York in spring, in addition to faces in the crowd, I see familiar friends in paintings. In her intensity, Klara, the recurring subject of Elizabeth Peyton’s latest exhibition at Michael Werner Gallery, eerily gazes out of the walls in a confounding way. I have followed Peyton’s work for years, so I know I have seen the angles of Klara’s face before. As I walk along the walls of the small, traditional space, it seems that Peyton has encapsulated that same uneasy instant before a face is assigned as friend or foreigner. The tone is one of apprehensive intimacy, like being caught walking in on a person’s very private conversation. In a style that is reminiscent of David Hockney’s 1970s figure drawings, Klara’s face is often carefully, precisely drawn. Klara’s androgynous features, short hair, and simple garb compound the peculiarity of her smoldering stare, and, as with much of Peyton’s work, if we didn’t know the gender of the subject, it could bend either way; the beauty in the work lies in its compounded sexual ambiguity.

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Samson Young, "Biomechanics," 2013. Polypropylene paper, servo motor, 55 x 77 x 17 cm

This spring I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei to view The Innovationists, a show focused on new media art. The spectrum of technological works ranged from Ryota Kuwakubo‘s whimsical The Tenth Sentiment, which utilized a toy train’s LED headlight to project crisp then melting shadowscapes in a darkened room, and Samson Young‘s Dimension+, a floating spine-like structure of polypropylene paper, to Chris Honhim Cheung and the XEX GRP collective’s more dissonant and possibly migraine inducing Anadelta or Resonance Seed, an inverted triangle and hand wheel equipped with sensors that translated touch into flashes of light and sound.

Gregory Chatonsky, "Telefossiles I," sculpture and film installation, courtesy of Xpo Gallery and the artist

The museum’s second floor was dedicated to the works of Gregory Chatonsky, where his triptych, Telefossiles I, presented a post-apocalyptic earth after human extinction.

Chatonsky created the archaeological excavation on site to display eerie fossils from our time: laptop, gas tank, tub, fragments of machinery. Overhead, lamps illuminated sections of the gray, grainy blocks accompanied by footage of earth’s dead surface, ashen and cold, despairingly lunar. Telefossiles I relies on viewers to remember the present as past, and conjure a future where technological artifacts serve as the last testaments of life on earth.

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Seoul-based duo Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI)–Young-Hae Chang and Marc Voge–recently served as artists in residence at the Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco, and the resulting project is on view through May 12. The duo is presenting a project titled, Pacific Limn, which consists of a three-channel video that intertwines three narratives that focus on the United States, China, and Japan, respectively. The artists have used San Francisco as a hub for the fictional narrative, allowing the city to serve as a nexus for the conflicts or clichés residing in between the different geographic locations.

Each of the videos that comprise Pacific Limn combine an overlapping of text, jazz, and animations which incorporate slow-moving video or still image. The conflict between text, sound, and image in each video allows it to continually negate itself as the video plays. The resulting experience relies on one’s ability to interpret information through text and image simultaneously, placing the viewer in a position of uncertainty and mild mistrust as the images contradict or complicate the text on screen. This technique successfully targets the issues of cultural understanding and misinterpretation in the narratives of the the three videos, through an often-competing visual and written landscape.

The videos will be on view at Kadist through Sunday.

#Hashtags provides a platform for longer reconsiderations of artworks and art practices outside of the review format and in new contexts.

Georgia Sagri, "Diana Speaks with Animals Again," 2012, C-print. Courtesy of the artist, Central Fine, Miami and Melas Papadopoulos Gallery, Athens.

In the prelude to his book The Triumph of Anti-Art, Thomas McEvilley held up the Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, founder of the School of Cynics, as a prototypical conceptual and performance artist who strove to break down the barriers separating philosophy and life. Through numerous absurdist gestures and lifestyle choices, passed down to us as fragmentary anecdotes (such as the one that has him giving an entire public speech in the form of laughter), Diogenes performed his philosophy daily in an effort to “[reverse] all familiar values” and “[lay] bare a dimension of hidden possibilities which he thought might constitute personal freedom.” According to legend, Diogenes even lived inside of a large jar in the Athenian marketplace and ate onions and figs that he picked himself.

The Greek–born artist Georgia Sagri—an early participant in the Occupy Wall Street movement who was cited by Time magazine as playing an influential role in shaping its philosophy—often mentions Diogenes when discussing her own work. “He represented a rupture of the academy, of the official language of thought,” she reflected in a recent phone interview I conducted with her. “To him, there was no inside or outside—he simply lived everywhere. And the Cynics didn’t just talk, they activated their philosophy. This territory of thought was abandoned in favor of the dominant rational discourse of Plato and Aristotle, whose dialectic we still live with today.”

Georgia Sagri, "Working the no work/Travaillez je ne travaille pas/Δουλεύοντας τη μη δουλειά," Whitney Biennial 2012, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Melas Papadopoulos, Athens. Copyright Georgia Sagri. Photo: Paula Court

Sagri’s own feral practice—which encompasses performative events, video works, texts, and various forms of object-making—can be seen as a continuation of these ideas, albeit tuned to a much more complex world. The first time I encountered her work was at the 2012 Whitney Biennial, in which she was an exhibiting artist. Taking over a room on the fifth floor of the Whitney for the duration of the biennial, Sagri set about creating a living “book” centered around the theme of “working the no work” (Travailler Je ne travaille pas). The project, which took some inspiration from the May 1968 student protests in France, focused on the contemporary condition of labor in the capitalist marketplace and included a set/installation that Sagri had constructed along with various actions that took place in it. The book was never intended to be published, but rather consisted of everything that took place in the space.

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Today from the DS Archives, we’d like to help you start your week off with gusto by revisiting a piece written by Bean Gilsdorf from her weekly column “Help Desk.” For most of us, public speaking can be trying, stressful and intimidating. And when it comes to lecturing about your own work, it can be all the more overwhelming. In her entry “Rock the Lecture” Ms. Gilsdorf gives some sage advice on how to navigate and successfully deliver the almighty Lecture – but her tips can be utilized in many different contexts.

The following article was originally published on November 5, 2012 by Bean Gilsdorf:

Help Desk is an arts-advice column that demystifies practices for artists, writers, curators, collectors, patrons, and the general public. Submit your questions anonymously here. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. Help Desk is cosponsored by KQED.org.

“You’ve seen the pictures. You’ve read the tweets. New York City looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland along its waterfront. Among the many things New York City needs right now, clean up is one of them.” If you’re in the NYC area and able to help, Art Fag City has a list of places that need your assistance. Please check it out and lend a hand if you can!

An artist lecture certainly doesn’t have to be boring. The best ones leave the audience energized with a new appreciation of what it means to be an artist in a contemporary community. There are many ways to rock your presentation, and there really isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer, so what follows are some general suggestions that you can tailor to your style and comfort level.

Isa Genzken, “Ground Zero” installation view at Hauser & Wirth London, 2008.

This first tip is non-negotiable: above all other considerations, practice is the key to success. Whether you are a veteran at the microphone or terrified of an audience, practice will make your talk go smoothly, so once you have your PowerPoint slides in order, take the time to run through your images and talk out loud about the work—even to an empty room. Just hearing your own voice will alert you to any gaps or flaws and you can tighten up your lecture considerably by running through it a couple of times before the actual presentation. You can also use these opportunities to time your talk—no matter how good the work is, everyone’s butt starts to hurt at around the 50-minute mark, so don’t go over the time you’ve been allotted.

Another factor to consider is your audience: you’ll want to adjust your talk in keeping with who will be listening. In this case, your information should be mainly geared toward the students, so find out if they are undergrads or grads and speak accordingly. I’m not suggesting that you dumb down your presentation, but if you’re a theory geek and plan to talk about Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception, be prepared to introduce these complex ideas to an audience that may not already be familiar (which, by the way, will lengthen your talking time). No one gets excited about a presentation they don’t understand, so if you know in advance whom your audience is you can customize the information to meet their needs.

Isa Genzken, White Horses, 2008. MDF, mirror foil, tape, spray-paint, colour print on paper, 38 7/8 x 31 3/8 x 3/4 inches

Stage presence can definitely help a lecture along. To begin: stand up straight, smile, look around the room, and look the audience in the eyes. If you’re nervous, learn some breathing techniques that will keep you focused enough to get through the first few minutes—after that, the fight-or-flight mechanism will have died down and you’ll be in the zone. Also, avoid being a cadaver at the podium; during your rehearsals try to practice some natural gestures that you might make, such as holding your hands apart to indicate size or pointing to a particular area in an image. If you are comfortable on stage, you may want to get out from behind the podium a few times, because movement is dynamic and creates energy. Finally, humor is an excellent strategy for livening up a lecture. If there’s a funny point you could make, by all means we in the audience want to hear it.

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As a part of our ongoing partnership with the San Francisco-based arts publication Art Practical, today we bring you a review by Matt Stromberg of the exhibition Falling From Great Heights at Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles.

Heather Rasmussen. Untitled. (Containeryard, Liverpool, UK, January 13, 2004, flipped) 2012

Falling from Great Heights, the current exhibition at the Stephen Cohen Gallery, takes its title from a quotation by the astronomer Carl Sagan that addresses the sublime and ineffable nature of the universe: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the cosmos stir us—there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation of a distant memory, as if we were falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.”^I The three artists in the show, Siri Kaur, John Knuth, and Heather Rasmussen, each convey this sense of awe and wonder when confronted with the unknown and the unknowable. Interestingly, they all employ photography—a medium that is often considered to be objective—to create images that call into question the veracity of what they depict.

Siri Kaur’s selections from her series Half of the Whole (2010–13) align most literally with Sagan’s assertion. The first room of the gallery is hung salon-style with Kaur’s ethereal, abstract photographs that resemble various natural phenomena. Some of the images, which vary in size, contain patches of green, blue, and brown, suggesting views of the Earth from above, while others, in bright pink on white, recall microscopic views of the body’s interior.

Read full article here.

Since sitting down six minutes ago, my iPhone has buzzed no less than eight times. E-mail. E-mail. Text message. E-mail. Breaking news notification. Follow up text message. Reminder alarm. E-mail. Approve the attached contract to begin production. Bombing suspect hospitalized. What’s the address for tomorrow? Please send details for exhibition. Go to bank. John Doe wants to be your friend!

Installation View

Despite this electronic outburst, I am making every attempt to focus on the meditative installation in the back gallery of Ambach & Rice, and it hits a poignant nerve. The ability to concentrate on any singular thing has become an art form within itself. We are unremittingly multi-tasking, documenting, transmitting beings to which space – between thoughts or plans alike – is uncomfortable. Even in the face of social atrocities that beg for grave respite, we are cursory in our reflections because of a shared, trained inability to pause, to simply be present. Rocks & Clocks takes umbrage with this compulsion through a purposefully minimalist and elemental selection of works by Cameron Gainer, Mark Hagen, Emilie Halpern, and Mungo Thomson. On view through May 18^th, the group show confronts our collective anxieties about modern time and space in an elegant and quietly plaintive way.

Installation View

The aforementioned meditative installation – Sunrise/Sunset (2013) by Cameron Gainer – features a projected image through a sand-filled hand blown hourglass. What is initially a black wall gradually becomes a rich, citrusy sunset as the diminishing sand reveals the vista sliver by sliver. Within eighteen minutes, the last granule tumbles into the bottom half of the glass, and I am left with a stillness that is both comforting and unnerving. This artificial, static sunset has managed to seize more of my attention than the actual Los Angeles dusk does on a daily basis; not necessarily because it is more visually alluring, but because its manifestation of mortality is so precisely articulated.

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