Hello there DailyServing readers,

We recently teamed up with the website Society 6 to offer any visual artist the opportunity to have an interview published on the DailyServing website, reaching over 100,000 viewers each month. One winner will have their interview and 4 images of artwork published on the site, and then archived for indefinite public access. The winning artist will be selected by members of the DailyServing writing team.

To learn more about this opportunity visit:
DailyServing Grant Page (The grant application is very easy to complete, so don’t pass this one by!)

About Grants on Society6:

To fulfill their mission to Empower the World’s Artists, Society6 has created an open grants system where individuals and organizations can easily issue money or opportunity (free products and services) grants to creative people from around the world. Artists and other creative people apply to these grants. The community nominates applicants to create the list of finalists. The grant giver chooses one applicant from the finalist list to award the grant. Its that simple folks!

“In order to educate man to a new longing, everyday familiar objects must be shown to him with totally unexpected perspectives and in unexpected situations”. This quote by Russian Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko is especially fitting when describing the work of artist Mitzi Pederson. Mapping extremely formalized landscapes, Pederson’s sculptural forms are made up of found material (much resembling construction debris) and are intentionally placed and arranged throughout the gallery space. For her current show at Ratio 3 in San Francisco, Pederson has created an abstracted city that appears as if it could have arisen from the rough, wooden gallery floor. The show’s title, I’ll Start Again, perhaps refers to the rawness and nakedness of the object’s material make-up. The works themselves, very much akin to the work of the Russian Constructivists, are grounded in roots of formalism, balance, and material. Much like Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin’s Corner Relief (1914-15) – a relief sculpture made of iron, copper, wood, and rope meticulously poised between two walls – Pederson has created a number of balance-based wall works using small wooden boards, string, and nails. Her fascination with geometry, order, and space places her work in line with the architectural model and the modes of structural-spatial relations – shapes and voids created by manipulating the materials draw the viewer closer to inspect. The essential concept of Pederson’s work is a reconsideration of the formal qualities of everyday materials.

Pederson received a B.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from California College of the Arts. Besides Ratio 3, she has exhibited widely both internationally and nationally including Hammer Projects, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, White Columns in New York, and at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Pederson currently lives and works in Berlin.

The curatorial conceit of Blueprint, a group exhibition at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas, is that the work included somehow embodies a plan from which one could build something. None of these artists do this literally but in some sense the curator James Cope has included work that evokes generative possibilities is different ways.

Edward Setina has included a series of videos and sculpture that revolve around a figure in a white biker suit on all fours. The largest piece depicts this image projected onto a transparent plane. His anxious body twitches and retches, oscillating between fascination with and repulsion from the pool of his blood beneath him. In a clear ode to Narcissus and the struggle with one’s doppelganger reflection, this piece sees the self as the start of creation and ironically its demise. For once one looks at ones reflection, one is split between what once sees and what one knows.

Brian Fridge‘s video installation includes images that resemble cellular forms that float around and smash into one another splitting into multiple forms. Each revolving orb is similar but it is their juxtaposition and collision that provides endless loops of reproduction.

Also included in the show are three objects by Amy Revier leaning against the wall that resemble arctic sleds. They are crafted in a way that is at once regal and refined, with a reduced humility that suggests some kind of ritual for an idealistic explorer, trudging her way across the tundra.

Finally, Paul Slocum‘s work addresses both the histories of popular imagery and their dissemination as well as the way that they are made. Images of Heathcliff and the Skiing cat were created with a 3-D software called Blender. As Slocum explains,”a wire-frame model is formed in the computer, surfaces are defined, and then a final image is rendered by simulating the behavior of photons in reverse (tracing rays from the camera outward). These two cats were in a sense made based on a similar structure.”

Elliott Hundley‘s work mashes up the diligence of entomology displays with the audacity of pop-up books. He accumulates bits and pieces of lo-fi media like string, paper, and beading, and collages photographs – glues, pins and inlays for an atomistic, yet overall integrated scene. Color, texture and clipped images are made to beautifully butt heads in numerous intimate, epic conflicts. The effect is discursive, overlooking chronology and didacticism in favor of studying the nature of the conflict between the medias he pits against each other.

Hundley’s work is showing in a group exhibition, The World is Yours, ongoing until January 10 at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, just outside of Copenhagen, Denmark. The exhibition’s title promises the world, but also means to insinuate “the real world”: as diehard, breakneck times; as an empty/broken promise; and as a manque dream – usually could’a, should’a, would’a been, but isn’t.

Elliott Hundley received his BFA in printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design in 1997, and his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2005. His most recent solo show, Hekabe, occured this past spring at Regen Projects, Los Angeles, CA, and he will be in the forthcoming group exhibition, Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum Rotunda, at the Guggenheim in New York City this February 19 – May 16.

View Elliot Hundley’s previous feature on DailyServing.com

Tyson Skross was born in 1978 in Illinois, and spent his childhood in Texas and Geneva, Switzerland. In Geneva, the western European landscape and geography had a profound impact on him and led him to question notions of reality and place. Situated between Lake Geneva and the Swiss Alps, Skross witnessed many natural phenomena, which he refers to as “glitches.” These glitches alter the reality of the particular place and expose the fragility of perceived truths. The artist’s paintings often depict built structures within a landscape, sometimes real, sometimes remembered, and sometimes imagined. Skross is interested in the intangible aspects of a certain locale rather than its physical construction, insisting he paints places, not things.

The works, which are oil on canvas and mixed media such as silver and gold leaf on board, have titles referring to various plants and trees (among them Bulrush, Aleppo Pine, Horse Chestnut, and Redwood). Each plant has a certain characteristic or symbolic meaning and is chosen based on its relationship to the composition, which is not necessarily a geographical one. While the plants can sometimes be native to the place of the painting, they may reference a personal, historical, or literary event as well. Thus, the paintings are constructs of collective memories and the artist’s own personal experiences.

As the artist states, “This is a world made of memory. It is at the same time gathering and dispersing. It is a composition of heres and theres. Memories are formed on a sub-atomic level by a mixture of experience, imagination, and symbolism, the real and the unreal, of truth and deception.”

Skross graduated from L’Ecole Internationale de Geneve in 1997 and studied under the painter Janis Pozzi-Johnson from 1993-1997. He graduated from The Maryland Institute College of Art in 2001. Earlier this year, the artist had a solo show titled Spectral Rearrangements at Kunstraum Gruenerhund in Berlin.

Currently on view in the exhibition Contemporary Outlook: Seeing Songs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is the video installation, Queen (A Portrait of Madonna), by Berlin-based artist Candice Breitz. The piece assaults the museum-wanderer’s ears far before it is seen, a jumble of incomprehensible collective voices shouting through the MFA’s white walls. Only when one rounds the bend into the gallery where Queen is on display, does the inscrutable chanting of strangers become recognizable: it’s Madonna’s “Holiday,” and it’s being sung a cappella by thirty wild, Italian strangers.

Breitz’s 2005 video installation runs over 73 minutes in length, performing the entirety of Madonna’s “Immaculate Collection” album (a greatest hits of her songs from 1982-1990). To create the piece, Breitz solicited devoted Madonna fans in Italy by newspaper and online, to come to the Jungle Sound Studio in Milan to sing all 73 minutes of the album. Whether they spoke English or not, the thirty applicants that Breitz chose for the piece knew every lyric to every song and were willing to be filmed and recorded performing them.

The resultant Queen–which is part of a larger body of portraits of other pop icons, including different musicians such as Michael Jackson and Bob Marley, manifested through similar recordings–is a visual and audio symphony of the human experience. Though the different personalities express themselves uniquely in the video, and of course, the Madonna tracks are nostalgia-inducing for many of us, the music being sung and danced to becomes secondary to the overall, mesmerizing collection of momentary joy and rawness of character that we see and hear.

If you can’t make it to Boston for the show, which runs through February 21, 2010, to see this stunning video live, you can view part of it on the artist’s website, or see her piece Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon) at the SFMoMA beginning this week. There is also a survey of her work currently on view at The Power Plant in Toronto and she has an upcoming show at Yvon Lampert in New York in February.

Candice Breitz was born in Johannesburg, South Africa and lives and works in Berlin, Germany, where she is a Professor of Fine Art at the Braunschweig University of Art. She holds degrees in art and art history from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, the University of Chicago and Columbia University. Her work is included in several prominent public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; and The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA. Her work has been included in solo exhibitions internationally, including at White Cube in London, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

Mica-encrusted, ebony swirls weave through Camille Rose Garcia‘s most recent body of work, Hydra of Babylon, on display at Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles, CA through October 10th, 2009. In addition to her highly calligraphic black lines, Garcia layers translucent hues, silver leaf, and iridescent sheens to depict her usual suspects – winged creatures and desperate divas, all signaling disdain for the world around them. If oozing toxic drips, tear stained eyes, or nonchalant hand gestures don’t fully reveal the artist’s message, viewers can usually find a title written on an embedded coil of ribbon within the piece. Titles include names like Gloom and Doom, Destroying Angels, Poisons for Unthinkable Pains, and The Witch of Silent Spring, to name a few.

Garcia’s most persistent subjects are the illustrative animals that populate her melancholy scenes. In the 60″ x 84″ acrylic on panel painting, The Hydra of Babylon, a nine-headed serpent fatally injures an eagle, which weeps incessantly as it’s strangled with writhing tentacles. Most likely, Babylon is a geographical reference that, in conjunction with the dying eagle, is meant to summon ideas of annihilation, grief, and war in the Middle East.

Sickness and pain are also recurrent themes, seen in doe-eyed fawns that choke on malignancies that thoroughly permeate scenes like The Witch of Silent Spring. Ironically, there are tonics that promise solace and healing, but those solutions are the same deadly ones that infiltrate the animals’ surroundings, subsequently furthering their demise. In the midst of all the malaise are trumpet-like Easter Lilies, the quintessential symbol of virtue and hope. Those same lilies are present in Why Can’t You Just Be Happy, a painting of a quite corpulent vulture stewing in her woeful sorrow.

Occasional splashes of warm color and hopeful metaphors are planted sporadically throughout these psychedelic views, making them more accessible and alluring. Garcia creates a world of her own, yet one that is heavily influenced by the kaleidoscopic realities of Lewis Carroll‘s Alice In Wonderland, or, perhaps more pertinent to her Orange County upbringing, Tim Burton‘s Edward Scissorhands. It was no surprise to find out that Garcia is currently working on an illustrated Alice In Wonderland book that will be released from Harper/Collins in March of 2010. This will be the fourth published book featuring her work, the others being The Saddest Place on Earth, 2005, The Magic Bottle, 2006, and Tragic Kingdom, 2007.

Other publications that have showcased Garcia’s work are Flaunt Magazine, Nylon, Paper Magazine, Modern Painters, Art Prostitute, Juxtapoz, and Hi-Fructose.