Originally published on: December 20, 2008

Loren Schwerd‘s Mourning Portraits provide humanized descriptions of the blight that persists in the years after Hurricane Katrina. Working from her photographs taken in efforts to digest these remnants of life, she rebuilds crumbling artifacts as scrupulous and loving memorials to her community. Out of human hair extensions, discarded near St. Claude Beauty Supply in New Orleans, she depicts her encounter with absent victims. Inspired by the tradition of 18th and 19th century memento mori hair jewelry, she participates in a sentimental activity to honor the deceased. These expressive and elegant constructions allow the viewer an extended gaze into this dark topic, beyond its sheer mass that obscures individual identities.

With found hair extensions, she addresses modern hair braiding in the African-American community, which has important functions beyond beauty and social status. It is a common activity, but requires skilled and quick handiwork learned through tradition. Often taking place within the family or between members of the same sex, it provides an opportunity for strengthening social ties and instilling values. By using hair of many colors, including deep reds, blacks, grays, and bleached-browns, she brings an array of persons into dialogue.

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This past Sunday, December 13th, distinguished California based photographer Larry Sultan died of cancer.  He was born in New York in 1946, but moved to the San Fernando Valley in 1949. He received a BA from University of California Santa Barbara in 1968 and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 1973.

It was at SFAI that he met the artist Mike Mandel, with whom he produced his first major body of work, “Evidence.”  This book of appropriated photographs and catalogued images collected from a large body of government agency archives, corporations, and research institutions looks at the then contemporary American life. The body of work evolved into an exhibit hosted by SFMOMA in 1977.

In 1988, Larry Sultan began working as a professor of photography at California College of the Arts, where he grew to be an integral part of both the Graduate Fine Arts, and Undergraduate Photography programs.  He was an influential mentor, teacher and colleague and received a great amount of joy from sharing his experience with his students.

Sultan produced what grew to be arguably his most recognized body of work entitled “Pictures from Home” in 1992.  The project began when his father was forced into early retirement, and became the culmination of a decade of photographs of his parents and their lives, as well as an inclusion of source text, home movie stills, and family artifacts.  This project ultimately led to his next body of work, “The Valley,” a look at the use of suburban houses for pornographic film sets.

Sultan has been internationally recognized and exhibited throughout his career.  His work has been collected by numerous established organizations including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The New York Times obituary for Larry Sultan recounts some of his greatest achievements.

On view through December 23, 2009 at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City is the new photographic series, The Fall, by Irish artist Richard Mosse. For the exhibition, Mosse has created a series of epic landscape-based documentary photographs that survey a variety of wreckage in remote locations such as the Patagonian Andes and the Yukon Territories. Images of downed planes, exploded cars, and dirt filled swimming pools become monolithic monuments of destruction, partially reclaimed by nature and left to slowly decompose. The artist embarked on this photographic journey as an embed with the US military. In a sense, the series is a rescue mission aimed at recovering, at least in image form, lost relics of globalization and archeology of our time.

The Fall marks the completion of the first year of a two-year Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Performing and Visual Arts. Mosse completed a postgraduate Degree in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths University in London in 2005, and an MFA in photography from Yale School of Art in 2008. The artist’s work will be included in the upcoming Fotofest 2010 Biennial of Contemporary U.S. Photography, March 12 – April 25, 2010, Houston, TX.

On view through the end of next week at Hauser and Wirth on 69th St. in New York City is White Snow, a new exhibition of drawings by Paul McCarthy. This exhibition features select pieces from a new body of work that makes reference to the popular German folk tale Snow White and the 1937 Disney classic, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. For White Snow, the artist is exhibiting two unique bodies of drawings. Among the works included, are subtle drawings that references classic old master works with confidently gestured mark making that compose classic McCarthy figures adorned with large noises and embedded with metaphors and sexual references. The other body of work features more than a dozen large and boldly rendered drawings that range from seven to ten feet in dimension. These highly gestural works overlap McCarthy’s characters with manic mark making in color oil bar, overlaid with appropriated images which are collaged directly onto the surface. These works appear to be enlarged drawings from a sketch book, both personal and immediate.

These works provide a unique insight into the artist’s initial process for creating many of the works for which we have become familiar. While the drawings continue the artist’s exploration of American notions of purity and Hollywood generated fantasies, they also allow a glimpse into the artist’s own psyche and working practice.

Paul McCarthy is a internationally reconized artist that lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute (1969) and the University of Southern California (1973). This year, the artist has exhibited with De Uithof, City of Utrecht, Netherlands, Salt Lake Art Center, Salt Lake City and Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland.

Jeff Ladouceur, Untitled, 2009

Currently on view at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica is a solo show of work by New York-based artist, Jeff Ladouceur. In the exhibition, entitled Barefoot in the Head, Ladouceur’s works of ink and graphite on paper present the viewer with motley scenes of tragicomedy, rendered with exquisite craft. The absurd moments of both humor and pain stretch neatly around the gallery walls like a comic strip. In one piece, a lanky girl in worn clothes folds her body over itself; miniature white elephants fall to the floor as she scrapes a comb to the scraggly tips of her long hair. In another, a starburst-headed man trudges fantastical, smashed-face terrain, his torso displaying a series of intertwining intestines like a glass-cased museum diorama. One of his hands grasps a triplet of distressed looking men wearing matching ensembles, the other hand twists into itself, fingers knotting into one another like the series of guts on display in his stomach.

Jeff Ladouceur was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including recently at Zieher Smith in New York, NY; Vancouver Art Gallery in Vancouver, BC and Taché-Lévy Gallery in Brussels, Belgium. His work has been discussed in PAPER Magazine, Artweek, Frieze Magazine and Modern Painters, among other publications and newspapers.

Installation view of ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993. Photo: Katya Kallsen © President and Fellows of Harvard College

When I was an undergraduate painting major, my drawing instructor, a cool-headed minimalist who approached teaching with as much restraint as he did art-making, warned me not to preach to the choir. I had made a series of over-stimulating, muddy drawings in which decadent magazine imagery swam in bleeding pools of ink. The drawings criticized consumer culture (loudly), but they didn’t do much else. “Everyone who sees these will already agree with you,” my instructor said. If I was going to make art that would hang on walls and be viewed by largely liberal audiences, what would I gain by reiterating progressive ideas? A pat on the back?

Over the past year, I’ve seen a spattering of activist art that made me bristle—all-but-haloed images of our new president, liberated grocery carts that have been turned into mobile compost bins, or wall texts that proclaim vague imperatives like “Now” or “Act.” Seeing work like this in a gallery feels like encountering a self-contained anti-war protest in the quad of a left-leaning campus. It makes you wonder, for a moment, if you do live in a vacuum.

Art and politics belong together, but not in the way the way global warming belongs to Al Gore, or the FDA belongs to Phillip Morris—there shouldn’t be any self-congratulation, lobbying, or under-the-table favors. When I think of the potential of political art, I often think of David Wojnarowicz’s videos from the early ‘90s—portraits of disintegration, they attacked Aids-era government with a vengeance so guttural and naked that they turned politics into gut-spilling and made viewers who voted red squirm just as badly as viewers who voted blue.

Art + Positive, AIDS Is Killing Artists, Now Homophobia Is Killing Art, 1990. Sticker, 4 x 6 in. Courtesy of Avram Finkelstein. Photo: Jessica Ficken.

Act Up New York: Activism, Art, and the Aids Crisis, 1987-1993, currently on view at Harvard’s Carpenter Art Center, may not rival the intensity of Wojnarowicz’s ITSOFOMO or Fire in My Belly. But it takes on the relation between art and activism in a way that is gripping, urgent and also pragmatic. Curated by Helen Molesworth, Harvard’s Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art, and Claire Grace, curatorial intern and doctoral candidate, the exhibition chronicles six peak years of The Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (Act UP), a group that took to the streets to advocate for gay rights and health care in the late 1980s, as the Aids death toll rose steeply. The work archived Act Up doesn’t pose as art, per se. It does, however, seem at home in an art space.

On the first floor of the Carpenter Center, video monitors play interviews from The Act UP Oral History Project, an effort, spearheaded by Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard, to record the stories of living Act Up alumni (Schulman knew she had to begin the project after she heard a commentator on the radio say “At first, America had trouble with people with AIDS, but then they came around”—“I could not continue my life without making sure that no one would ever say something like that again,” Schulman told the National Institute of Health). There are more than enough monitors to overwhelm; no one can possibly watch the hours of footage that loop through that room. Yet the talking faces on each screen compel attention, many of them speak carefully, considering their history with the hesitation of people old enough to feel the weight of time but young enough to see their personal futures as more promising than their pasts. Says on interviewee, “Becoming an Aids activist was like a religious conversion, in many ways, in terms of the passion and self-discovery and creating a new identity.”

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Closing this week is a new exhibition of 40 watercolors and collages on paper by painter Tomory Dodge at CRG Gallery in New York. While the artist’s large and dynamic paintings have become very well known, it is much more rare to find an exhibition of his watercolors and collages. Many of the same themes run through these new works as are found in the artists larger paintings, such as the catastrophic and uncanny in relation to the landscape. Chaotic storms spread fragments of paper wildly across the pictorial space in Lost in the Woods, large strips of color fall from the an abstracted sky in Tweedle Dum, and in garbage floats placidly on top of a large body of water in Sea of Objects.  Each piece is carefully balanced between formal abstraction and representation, a signature element of the artist’s other work. The immediacy of these works on paper offers the viewer a welcome break from the more calculated larger paintings found the in artist’s oeuvres. These new collages and watercolors embody a more playful and carefree mode of creation, allowing for a less self conscious product to form.

Dodge’s Works on Paper were exhibited at ACME in Los Angeles from October 17 – November 14, 2009 and will be on view at CRG Gallery in New York through December 19th, 2009. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, California.