Ross Moreno

In its last week at Boots Contemporary Arts Space in St.Louis is the exhibition The 7th Annual Midwestern Assorted Produce Snuff Shorts Film Triennial. The group show consists of video and performance works by the artists Benjamin Bellas, Clinton King, Noelle Mason, Magdalen Wong, Justin Cooper and Ross Moreno, whom often collaborate under the curatorial moniker “i.e.”

The videos on display range from Noelle Mason’s large projection Bob and Weave, that features the artist slap-boxing a much larger male opponent that leaves her bloodied by bouts end, to Magdalen Wong’s and they lived well but we live better which documents the artist entering the translated phrase into the keypad of an ATM during a transaction in Greece.

At the opening there were two performances by artists Justin Cooper and Ross Moreno.  Moreno started the evening off with a bang; dressed in a rainbow clown wig, suspenders and a Speedo, he attempted to break the Guinness World Record for the “Most Balloon Animals Twisted in One Hour.” It became clear during the performance that Moreno was not prepared to accomplish his goal. He struggled to twist balloons into dogs, flowers and other unrecognizable forms. Balloons exploded and deflated flying across the gallery as a timer counted down the hour. At one point he gave up and stormed out, only to be coaxed back by a supportive audience. The tension and frustration built till finally Moreno completely defeated and extremely agitated unleashed his anger toward the spectators. “I twist for tips”, he yelled which made some members of the audience question whether they were supposed to actually tip him money for the performance.

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Bari Ziperstein assembles all manner of figurines, furniture and various other found objects to create elegant yet convoluted documentations of time and place. Setting up antique store-like vignettes, her site specific installations of ceramic and mixed-media sculpture pieces seem at once all too common (owing to the banality of the original parts they are made up of) and wildly whimsical. Recently, Ziperstein’s work was on view in a solo exhibition, entitled Perk, at See Line Gallery‘s new location at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. As part of the Los Angeles-based artist’s ongoing exploration of peoples’ relationships to architectural spaces and the idea of place, the show–curated by Janet Levy–featured a site specific installation in which Ziperstein transformed a design showroom into what the gallery called “an uncanny quintessential model domestic space.”

Bari Ziperstein lives and works in Los Angeles. She holds an MFA from CalArts, a WS (Women’s Studies Certificate) from Ohio University and a BFA in painting from Ohio University. Her work has been exhibited widely around Los Angeles and internationally, recently in the group show, Bitch is the New Black, curated by Emma Gray, at Honor Fraser Gallery in Culver City; Drama of the Gifted Child: The Five Year Plan, curated by David Burns, at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena; and Edge of Light, curated by Emily Newman, at C.A.G. Gallery in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Courtesy of the Artist and The Third Line

The Third Line in Dubai is currently presenting What Happened to My Dreams?, Fouad Elkoury‘s latest photographic series. The artist, who lives between Paris and Beirut, earned a degree in architecture in 1979, but later turned to photography. He covered the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982 and has since been photographing war torn areas and landscapes in the Middle East. What Happened to My Dreams? consists of several black and white and color photographs mounted on aluminum, often with an overlay of written text. The title of the exhibition references the work of cultural theorist Paul Virilio (b. 1932), whose writings include Speed and Politics (1977), Pure War (1988), and The Information Bomb (2005). The author and filmmaker explores the complex relationships between technology, war, information, and society, asking the question “ce qui arrive” (what happened?).

Courtesy of the Artist and The Third Line

Elkoury’s Smile, 2008, depicts three armed soldiers standing over an empty swimming pool, photographed with their backs to the camera. The young men look across signs of demolition and vacancy, with the ocean in the distance. The poignant text “what I miss most is your incredible smile” is handwritten across the bottom of the image in an elegant white script. The picture captures and stimulates a moment of personal reflection amidst an otherwise fragmented and militaristic world, evoking broader histories of both national and individual conflict.

Elkoury, born in Paris in 1952, took part in a collective series in 1991 capturing the aftermath of the war in downtown Beirut.  The series was later published in the album Beirut City Centre and presented in an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Following the war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, he created the photographic diary On War and Love, which was exhibited at Galerie Tanit in Munich and at the 2007 Venice Biennale. In 1997, he co-created the Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation, which seeks to archive and preserve photography from the region and increase the accessibility of the medium.

What Happened to My Dreams? will remain on view at The Third Line in Dubai until December 17, 2009.

Images of interiors from 20th century Amsterdam architecture, references to Art Nouveau, and potential sites of phantasmagoria are all found in a new series of paintings on paper by Dutch-based artist Delphine Courtillot, titled Raptures of the Deep. Courtillot’s new exhibition, which is on view at Roberts and Tilton in Los Angeles through December 19th, continues the artist’s use of subdued and atmospheric palette, which leads viewers into a dark and mysterious interior space. Some of the interior references that the artist depicts include the Tuschinski movie palace, the Tiffany Lamp Studio, and the Dijsselhof room in the Central Museum in The Hague; all places that embody a certain bourgeois spirit.  The paintings gain significance not through the particular imagery presented or historical place that is represented, but through the psychology and potential narrative that her imagery merely suggests.

Raptures of the Deep marks the second solo exhibition for the artist at Roberts and Tilton. The artist has also exhibited with Annet Gelink Gallery in Amsterdam and ASPN in Leipzig, Germany. The artist attended both Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada and Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France.

Jeff Koons, Couple (Dots) Landscape, 2009, Oil on canvas. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Jeff Koons, November 14-January 9th, Gagosian Gallery

“To live outside the law you must be honest,” sang Bob Dylan in 1966, in his brash classic Absolutely Sweet Marie. It’s a line Dylan presumably appropriated from Don Siegel’s dark 1958 noir, The Lineup, a fact Jonathan Lethem insightfully pointed out in his 2007 essay ‘The Ecstasy of Influence.‘  Siegel’s film used the more unwieldy “When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” No matter which way it’s said, the sentiment rings true. It’s honesty that distinguishes the unlovable, often spineless villain from the law-breaker who nihilistically disregards conventional morality and candidly embraces his renegade status.

For two decades, Jeff Koons’ has been a lovable villain precisely because of his lawless honesty—a certain purity of motive has run through his otherwise amoral oeuvre. His art ads, made in the 1980s—in one, a bathrobe clad Koons surrounded himself with nearly nude models whose perfect skin compliments the brightly colored foliage—were insouciantly crass, so self-contained as to be unaware of the institution they were teasing. Later, the bust of his porn-star/diplomat wife and himself also seemed completely sincere as a floozy: as sultry as a romance novel and as pristine as any classical Greek statuette might have been in its hey-day. Then there were those oversized stainless steel keepsakes, like the Hanging Heart valued at $20 million, and the overstimulating collage-like paintings with surfaces as slick as Vogue’s ad-space.

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I Like Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving Likes Me: SuttonBeresCuller, Lawrimore Project

I Like Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving Likes Me is the title of a photograph produced by the Seattle-based artist group SuttonBeresCuller. Created in 2001, the photo playfully riffs on Joseph Beuys‘ famous performance from 1974 titled, I Like America and America Likes me. SuttonBeresCuller also has a new exhibition on view at Lawrimore Project in Seattle through December 19th.

Happy Thanksgiving from DailyServing!

Currently on view in the project space at Thinkspace Gallery in Los Angeles is a solo presentation of work by Montreal-based French artist, Turf One, entitled Shining Darkness. Often perversely proportioned, Turf One’s curious depictions of bowler hat and imperial mustache-donning men read like the lineup of a Coney Island sideshow act. His mixed media constructions of the seemingly dark side of kitsch reflect this aesthetic as well, with vintage-inspired depictions of a fortune telling monkey or a palmistry booth being presented inside the dark dimensions of ornate wooden frames. In possible homage to Francis Bacon, the grim-faced man in the piece entitled Meat holds a sow’s head out in front of his shirtless body, the folds of his stomach and tufts of his dark chest hair peeking out from behind it. Shining Darkness is the first offering of Turf One’s new work on the West Coast, and it brings a fresh approach to the canon of work being produced or shown in in Los Angeles by artists with roots in–and inspiration from–comics and street art.

Born Jean Labourdette, Turf One has had his work exhibited internationally, including this summer in the group show, Beach Blanket Bingo, at Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York, and in the two-person exhibition, Life Size, at Yves Laroche Galerie d’Art in Montreal. He is currently putting the finishing touches on a film project he’s been working on for the past three years with his partner Lela.