Amanda Heng interacted with a group of over thirty participants on a performance walk titled, Let’s Walk Some More. Organised by The Substation, the performance traced and invoked Amanda’s personal memories of heritage sites in Singapore’s city area which have been demolished, re-used or left disused. Decked in yellow t-shirts, participants were led to share their reflections. Along the trail and at several sites, participants were prompted to spell out the words “Thank you for being part of our memories” from the printed letter on each t-shirt.

Amanda’s art practice began in the 1980s, and she was a founding member of the artist collectives, The Artists Village in 1988 and WITA (Women In the Arts) in 1999. She has exhibited internationally and her art practice concerning East-West and gender tensions in Singapore has extended towards recent explorations of memories and relationships in urban settings.

Photographed documentation of another performance piece by Amanda, Let’s Chat is currently on display at Curating Lab: 100 Objects (Remixed) presented by NUS Museum. Let’s Chat involves participants plucking the roots of bean sprouts to generate conversation, reminiscent of domestic communal practices in Southeast Asia. The exhibition will run till September 27th, and is part of Singapore Art Show 2009.

Amanda is currently working on the project, Singirl, investigating representations of gender and identity through the process of inviting women participants to join a community to form of contingent for Singapore’s National Day Parade in 2010.

Trevor Paglen

It is a common belief today that abstraction and politics don’t mix. We tend to think of formalism as either transcendent of problems like race and war, or on the other hand, beholden to its limitations as decoration, bought and sold in the marketplace. Reduced Visibility, curated by Core Program Critical Studies Resident Kurt Mueller at the Glassel School of Art in Houston, challenges these notions. Drawing on the rich history from the genesis of abstraction that engaged politics with movements such as the Russian Avant Garde, Mueller has assembled an array of artists that are deeply involved in both reduced form and sociological weight.

Rico Gatson

The exhibition of five artists includes Mark Lombardi‘s obsessively researched and painstakingly drawn constellations of financial and political scandals. Once we get past the beautiful formations of delicately drawn graphite lines, we can see small notes that reference oil companies, Swiss banks and politicians from the US, Middle East and Latin America that sit somewhere between conspiracy theories and nightmarish truths. Also included are Trevor Paglen‘s photographs of secret CIA and US military installations, shot with an astrophotography lens from up to 65 miles away. The resulting images look like a simple hazy horizon evocative of Mark Rothko’s late work.

Hellen Mirra

Lisa Oppenheim‘s Multicultural Crayon Displacements (2008) is a series of photographs based on Crayola’s Multicultural crayon Set. Oppenheim photographed each of the 14 colors included in this set with red, green and blue filters. She then projected the resulting colored shapes onto photosensitive paper, assembling geometrical compositions loaded with questions of race. Rico Gatson‘s video-sculpture History Lessons (2004) is a remix of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), clips of stereotypical depictions of African-Americans from 1930s and ’40s Hollywood films, and photographs from the 1965 Watts riots. Finally, Hellen Mirra uses sculpture and text to construct minimal forms which use pinecones and hand-sawn shipping pallets from Berlin’s Grunewald, referencing both minimalist sculpture and the fraught ecological history of industrialized Europe.

Rico Gatson (American, born 1966, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York), Helen Mirra (American, born 1970, lives and works in Cambridge, MA), Mark Lombardi (American, born 1951, died 2000), Lisa Oppenheim (American, born 1975, lives and works in New York, New York), and Trevor Paglen (American, born 1974, lives and works in Oakland, California).

Closing this week at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art is the first comprehensive survey in the United States of works by Olafur Eliasson entitled Take Your Time. Olafur Eliasson’s immersive environments, sculptures, and photographs elegantly recreate the extremes of landscape and atmosphere in his native Scandinavia.¬† Drawn from collections worldwide, the presentation spans over fifteen years of Eliasson’s career. His constructions, at once eccentric and highly geometric, use multicolored washes, focused projections of light, mirrors, and natural elements such as water, stone, and moss to shift the viewer’s perception of place and self, foregrounding the sensory experience of¬†each work. By transforming the gallery into a hybrid space of nature and culture, Eliasson prompts an intense engagement with the world and offers a fresh consideration of everyday life.

Olafur Eliasson’s creations evoke or incorporate atmospheric conditions and landscapes while foregrounding the viewer’s sensory experience of the works. Take your time: Olafur Eliasson was organized by the MCA’s Pritzker Director Madeleine Grynsztejn, when she was Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and is on view May 1 to September 13, 2009.

Take your time: Olafur Eliasson has been organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and an expanded version of the exhibition was previously on view in New York at MoMa and P.S.1.

Frencesca Gabbiani’s The Present, her new exhibition at Patrick Painter, opens on September 12. Gabbiani, known for richly detailed drawings that marry ornamentation with vacancy, has dedicated one of her new pieces to the Greek goddess Nyx, patron of the night. The exhibition’s venture into mythology will be accentuated by a series of decorated mirror pieces that pit surface and depth against each other. These issues – myth, decoration, shallowness – have been consistent motifs Gabbiani’s art and her new body of work promises to push them further.

Gabbiani, born in Montreal and raised in Switzerland, studied at Rijkskademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and Ecole Superieure des Beaux-art in Geneva before moving to Los Angeles. She graduated with an MFA from UCLA in 1997. Her work has appeared at the Armand Hammer Museum (she has also guest curated at the Hammer), Lora Reynolds Gallery, Marianne Boesky Gallery, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among other venues.

The Present will remain on view through October 24.

The Collective Gallery in Edinburgh is currently showing video works by Australian artist Susan Norrie as part of the Edinburgh International Festival Enlightenment Series, curated by Juliana Engberg. Norrie’s Enola (2004) along with a new commission, SHOT (2009), are highly relevant to our contemporary period. Each addresses the future of our planet in light of destruction caused by military and industrial actions.

Enola features a single channel video (in an 8.37 minute loop) on a demonstrably small scale complete with proportionately appropriate stools created by the artist. Through the use of created footage, the small scale transports the viewer into a frightening future of nuclear disaster imagined by the artist as mummified and still. The world’s well-known architectural structures are brought together as ‘It’s a small world after all’ plays.

SHOT, the exhibition’s new commission, is realized through a single channel video projection (in an 8 minute loop). This work further addresses the state of the earth as it is threatened by human actions. The Edinburgh International Festival asserts that in Norrie’s work “the empirical enlightenment ‘eye'” becomes “an astrologically positioned satellite capable of minute observation from afar.” In this way, SHOT visualizes environmental destruction through footage that seems real.

Susan Norrie lives and works in Sydney, Australia. Enola and SHOT are on view at the Collective Gallery through 27 September 2009.

Deitch Projects in New York City is currently showing Tauba Auerbach‘s Here and Now/And Nowhere, an exhibition which explores the collision of two conflicting states. The title (purposely composed as an anagram) reflects the artist’s fascination with the origins of language, both verbal language and the symbols used in written language. The multimedia show includes paintings, photographic works, sculpture, and a musical instrument, all investigating the space between order and randomness.

The exhibition showcases five bodies of work: Crumple Paintings, Static Photographs, Fold Paintings, a sculpture that is situated half inside and half outside of the gallery, and the central work of the show, the Auerglass. The Crumple Paintings require the viewer to stand far away from the work to perceive the illusion of crumples, created by large Ben Day dots. The Fold Paintings, painted on raw canvas with an industrial paint sprayer, are a series of incrementally sized fold paintings, which represent the conversion of a previous three-dimensional state to two-dimensionality.

The Auerglass, designed by the artist and her friend Cameron Mesirow of the band Glasser, is a two-person wooden pump organ. The instrument requires two people to play, as one must pump in order for the other to play and vice versa. The Auerglass was played at the opening on September 3rd, and will be played as a prelude to a Glasser performance at 8pm on September 11th. During the exhibition, it will be played daily at 5pm from Tuesday through Saturday.

Auerbach was born in San Francisco and received her B.A. in Visual Arts from Stanford University in 2003. She has had solo exhibitions at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco, and was included in the New Museum‘s Younger than Jesus this year in New York. She published Tauba Auerbach-How to Spell the Alphabet with Deitch Projects in 2006.

Here and Now/And Nowhere will remain at Deitch Projects at 18 Wooster Street until October 17th.

Eric Zimmerman uses drawing, sculpture and the archive to explore the legacies of utopian concepts of architecture and geography. His most recent graphite drawings included in Texas Draws I – a recent exhibition at the Southwest School of Art and Craft – are large indexes of visual information that include Thomas Jefferson, butterfly specimens, and an atomic bomb crater in the New Mexico desert. These exquisitely crafted images are combined with oblique abstract constructions and texts like, “REMEMBER THAT NOWHERE CAN BE HERE,” taken from a letter from Roberto Matta to Gordon Matta-Clark. The result is a collage of information that serves as an atlas for his interests, making reconfigured source material the work itself. Taking this idea further into the realm of archive as art, Zimmerman created The Historian and The Astronomer V, a book featuring re-photographed photos, texts, and documents combined with an audio program and video on an iPod.

Other recent projects by Zimmerman include Observatory/Projector (Metropolis), a mashup model of modernist architecture which projects a constellation of glowing abstract form on the ceiling and walls around it. This combination of hard edged geometries of form, evocative of the Crystal Palace and Tatlin’s Monument to The Third International (both frequent subjects of Zimmerman’s drawings) and soft focused celestial space, has been shown at Art Palace in Austin. Two other pieces in this series were shown at Centro De Cultura de Nuevo, Nuevo Laredo, Mexico and at the Austin Museum of Art.

Eric Zimmerman is an artist and writer who received his MFA from The University of Texas at Austin and a BFA from The Cleveland Institute of Art. His work was recently part of In Real Time, an ASDF Makes project, at Capricious Space in NYC and Golden Age in Chicago. In May of 2010 he will be in a two-person exhibition at Art Palace Gallery in Austin, TX with Los Angeles based artist Emilie Halpern.