Riki Kuropatwa‘s new body of work is currently on view in a solo exhibition at Vancouver’s Elissa Cristall Gallery. The show, entitled derby girlz, chronicles Kuropatwa’s reaction to the rampant oversexualization of women in advertisements. Offering up women in the context of the roller derby rather than the lingerie shoot, the oil stick on panel works depict the same sort of suggestive poses and provocative peaks at bare skin that we might see in Victoria’s Secret ads, but the “derbygirlz ” have traded in their stilettos for skates and tousled Giselle waves for helmet hair. Certainly the works are a comment on the absurdity of the way women are generally portrayed in the media, but if they’re still conveying the same sense of sex appeal–and thereby conjuring the same reaction–in this new context, is the message really clear? In the gallery’s press release, they offer the sentiment that “for every Kate Moss there is a Venus Williams.” Yet the work seems to be a bit more of a satirical look at the sexualized Kate Moss (one piece, Cheeks, is a cropped view of derby racers rounding a corner, though all the viewer sees are bare mid drifts and barely covered butts) rather than a straight-faced attempt at Girl Power a la Venus Williams. Kuropatwa seems to take a dynamic approach to the subject and render it with a soft, feminine-evoking palette and Degas-like interpretation of scenes and forms. derby girlz is on view through June 20, 2009.

Riki Kuropatwa earned an MFA from York University, Toronto, ON and a BFA from the University of Manitoba. She has had solo and group exhibitions across Canada; her work is collected in both Canada and the United States. Kuropatwa lives and works in Edmonton.

Steve McQueen, Girls, Tricky

Coinciding with the opening of the Art Institute new Modern Wing in Chicago is the newly created Donna and Howard Stone Film, Video, and New Media Gallery. The gallery is the first devoted “black box” installation space at the Art Institute. Steve McQueen’s Girls, Tricky has been selected to be the space’s first featured work and is currently on view until August 2. The installations in the Stone Gallery will rotate approximately every ten weeks.

Steve McQueen is a prominent artist and filmmaker whose reductive, often abstracted works pare down the projected image to its basic elements: light and dark, motion and stillness, silence and sound. The meanings in McQueen’s intensely concentrated, exquisitely choreographed films and projected-image installations are at once elusive, elliptical, and subtly transgressive. Although his body of work is willfully heterogeneous, much of his production uses the language of film to examine distilled but coded actions, gestures, and performative expressions.

Modern Wing, Art Institute of Chicago

In Girls, Tricky, McQueen portrays the famous London and New York-based “trip-hop” musician/producer Tricky (born Adrian Thaws) as he rehearses in his darkened recording studio. Tricky’s frenetic performance locks the camera’s gaze for a single uninterrupted 15-minute shot. The result is an exquisitely intimate and sensitive portrait. The singer’s frantic delivery of emotionally and politically charged lyrics, together with McQueen’s minimal camera work creates a counterpoint to the commercial music video aesthetic.

Other Steve McQueen projects include Queen and Country as the official war artist selected by the Imperial War Museum‘s Art Commissions Committee. McQueen will represent Britain in the 2009 Venice Biennale.

The artist/composer duo Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher create complex electro-mechanical sculptures that often incorporate video, robotics and motorized dioramas. Once the piece is activated by a viewer, elements come to life and begin to glow and pulsate, while images project on the screen and Fisher’s audio compositions begin to play. The sculptures reveal a sense of discovery as the viewer negotiates reality with the mysterious device.

Jeff Shore received a BFA in painting from the University of North Texas and his MFA from the University of Houston, while Jon Fisher completed a D.M. in Music Composition at Northwestern University in Chicago. They have both shown extensively, exhibiting with Angstrom Gallery in Dallas, Gallery UTA in Arlington, Arthouse in Austin, QED in Los Angeles and Clementine Gallery in New York City.

Currently on view at Freight and Volume in New York City is the exhibition Super! Natural!, new paintings by Toronto-based artist Kim Dorland. For this exhibition, which is his second with the gallery, the artist has continued exploring elements of suburbia in connection to the northern wilderness from which he lived. Many of the works contain odd juxtapositions such as abandon cars floating in a murky yet seemingly untouched landscape or the density of a forest, littered with graffiti on the trees. Other works depict the boredom of suburban youth, lounging on the curbs of extended lawns, creating a scene that is rather ubiquitous in much of the United States and Canada.

Formally, the artist renders these images with a hyper-colored palate, which helps to activate the rather mundane scenes. The artist applies paint with an exaggerated stroke, with volume often sitting well off of the canvas and very loosely rendered. In addition, much of the surface is also blurred through the mixed use of spray paint, oil and acrylics, creating a surface that is both luscious and seductive.

Dorland is a graduate of the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and the York University in Toronto. He recently completed exhibitions at Bonelli Arte Contemporanea in Montova, Italy and Los Angeles, Angell Gallery in Toronto and Skew Gallery in Calgary, Alberta.

DailyServing.com has added a new section to the website, DS Studio Visits. This will be an ongoing series where our writers visit private artist studios from around the world, discussing the artwork directly with the artist. The first artist of the series is painter Karen Ann Myers.

Karen Ann Myers recently invited DailyServing’s Celie Dailey into her one-bedroom apartment, which she is temporarily using as a painting studio. The artist studied graphic design, painting, and arts education for her BFA at Michigan State University and is a graduate of Boston University‘s MFA program in painting. She is motivated by a formal inquiry into uniting the patterned landscape of decorated space with the figure. Myers seeks to document her experiences in love and eroticism, her childhood memories, and herself as a 25-year old woman in a contemporary culture that places high value on glamor and sex appeal.

The artist enjoys furnishings with bold patterns and fine textures, but seeks organization and simplicity in her limited space, a quality which is also reflected in her paintings. As we talk, she pulls out books, showing me her favorite paintings, including David Hockney‘s Domestic Scene that she admired while making The Nose Picker.

Combining memories with models, The Nose Picker shows “just some random hot chick” from a magazine with a young version of Karen and her sister. She presents two worlds in contrast, unable to occupy the same space without tension. She also questions a woman’s ability to be taken seriously in a pose like this but also asks the viewer to seek a narrative and to see a relationship between the child’s gesture and the sexed-up lip tugging.

Karen considers her work rooted in the concept of the self-portrait, even when not painting herself, she is making an artifact of her world. She often paints friends and family, people she “knows well enough to feel comfortable assigning a pattern to them,” but recently she has been examining the glossy printed images of women from popular sources. She investigates the figure alongside the materials that are clues to their identity. She sees her textiles as a means of camouflage for her subjects and attaining beauty as a way of hiding fear and isolation.

A saturated, lively palette and playful assemblage of patterns produces an ironic, chaotic space to show her neglected subjects. She seeks to comprehend the poses that appear unnatural as they attempt to be pretty when subjected to someone’s gaze, whether a lover or photographer. Thinking of You investigates this idea, as it plays on the viewer as onlooker. She embraces the bird’s eye perspective and other methods of eliminating depth. Karen’s patterns are often well rendered while she experiments with how three-dimensional her figures should be. In Thinking of You, she points out that the body is fairly flat, while the breasts are more rendered.

She also enjoys the tedious, meditative quality of painting complex patterns. She often does many studies for larger works by painting with egg tempera, drawing, and making collages and prints. She uses Sharpie marker as a line-making tool in these works and large works too. Her printmaking method is collagraphy. Building layers on cardboard sealed with polycrylic, she collages with cutouts, fabric, and sometimes buttons, sequins or puff paint to create texture. An impressive print is Never is a Promise #5, showing faceless bodies and a contorted hand, reminiscent of genitalia, in a sex act.

In her early work, as she began to integrate the figure with decoration, she was looking at Gustav Klimt‘s collages. Her influences are abundant, including David Hockney and Alex Katz for their reductive linear style and simplified rendering of the figure. She has investigated the bodily distortion in the work of John Currin, seeking tightly-rendered realism, in Dana Schutz‘s narrative playfulness, and in the expressive styles of Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, and Cecily Brown. She admires Richard Diebenkorn for his interesting poses, Margherita Manzelli‘s figures in isolation, and Alice Neel‘s narrative, linear style. But her main inspiration these days, alongside her personal collection of photographs, is W Magazine and other fashion publications and stores like Anthropologie and Pottery Barn.

Her paintings and prints exist nationally in private collections and have most recently been exhibited at the Robert Steele Gallery in New York, the Commonwealth Gallery in Boston, and the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC. Karen Ann Myers is currently the executive director of Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC

Shinique Smith, Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York

Yvon Lambert in New York is currently showing recent work by American multimedia artist Shinique Smith alongside a show of Michael Brown’s melted record albums cast into common domestic objects, such as chairs, mops, and buckets. Smith’s exhibition, Ten Times Myself, includes painting, assemblage, and sculpture. Smith is interested in discarded objects and the complicated social and cultural contexts of what we keep, give away, and throw away. The artist’s anthropomorphic bundles of vibrantly hued textiles are on display as well as the more dynamic two-dimensional works.

Shinique Smith, Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York

Her two-dimensional collages fuse the bombastic energy of Abstract Expressionism with the more subtle scripts of Japanese calligraphy. And the World Don’t Stop, 2009, combines ink, acrylic, enamel, fabric, and cultural ephemera on canvas stretched over two wood panels. The work bursts with an energy that is tempered by the artist’s careful and controlled placement of text and imagery. These elements combine and produce a forceful but delicate movement across the composition.

Smith received her M.F.A. in 2003 from the Maryland Institute College of Art and has previously shown her work at The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, and at the New Museum and P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center in New York. This is her first solo show at Yvon Lambert New York.

Ten Times Myself and Michael Brown’s An Object is Just Material will remain at the gallery until July 31, 2009.

Luis Gispert recently debuted an exhibition at Otero Plassart gallery in Los Angeles. Gispert’s work is inspired by the idiosyncrasies of pop culture, urban life, cinematic technique, car culture, the uncanny and the poetics of transformation. In his latest show, Gispert explores these conceptual frameworks through the media of three large chromogenic prints and a a stunning, 26 minute short film entitled Smother.

The three large format photographs included in the show surrealistically examine panoramic landscape views and historic landmarks through the cockpits of Veteran-restored military bomber aircrafts and custom freight-liners. This mechanism — of framing and drawing parallels between seemingly disconnected visages through an unlikely, fabricated meta-frame of sorts — is an exploration that continues from Gispert’s last series of photographs. In his 2008 exhibition at Zach Feuer gallery, Gispert selected surreal Latin-American themed imagery and architectural tableaux, from a bizarrely Escalade populated suburban sleepy sprawl, to a processional litter in progress. When these vignettes are seen through the smooth lined, white leather pleated, faux-wood adorned aesthetics of wealth and luxury liners–the question of their relation to poverty, religion and oppression is raised.

In the newest series of works, Gispert instead examines sweeping views of perhaps one of the most amateur-photographed icons — nature at sunset. Gispert notes, “Sometimes I like to start with a problem and work my way out. Sunset landscape photography is one of the most cliched tropes in photography. So I decided to make landscape images that are interesting to me.” Interestingly though, by trying to unpack and revitalize an overexposed genre, Gispert notes that part of the inherent process has been chasing sunsets, trying to capture the sublime moment at a grand scale. In a move that is at once humorous and surreal, Gispert offsets Amsel Adams’ style purist/spiritualist “straight” photography that evokes the grandeur of the natural world with the implication of human presence. In this case, the masculine, psychologically-loaded customized spaces of souped up bombers, RVs and vans both mocks and renders foreign the romanticism of the sunset vistas.

The 26 minute short film, Smother, was a seductive semi-autobiographical narrative following a young boy’s “rite of passage through an Oedipal relationship with his mother.” The film was enchanting and violent, and revealed a penchant for the subliminal and horrific in the way that older, Brothers Grimm fairy tales encompass the nightmarish and fantastical. The film fluidly straddled the cinematic languages of science fiction and neo-noir to create a story that was at once powerful and unsettling.

Overarchingly, there is a certain dreaminess that pervades Gispert’s work: at once irrational, beautiful, slow and unexpected turns between the transcendent and the dark, with a languid sense of observing the in-congruencies in the images presented. “I tend to work slowly; several months usually elapse between idea and execution. When a new idea arrives I like to play with it in my head for a long time….I rarely make drawings, if something is too clearly illustrated on paper it’s finished for me, there’s no discovery left….I like to leave myself some room for improvising….I like the tension of not completely knowing what’s going to happen,” says Gispert. This modus operandi of holding, molding and shaping an image in his mind’s eye, rather than on the fatalistic and concrete media of paper, which locks in development seems to play a role in his works general aesthetic. “I don’t consider myself a ‘photographer’ as the camera is just another tool to illustrate an idea….I’ve always liked artists whose works resemble a group show….I don’t like when things are clearly defined or understood. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I jump around from medium to medium.” Perhaps it is this seemingly psychic induced conception process and fluid movement between genres & media that casts such a strangely hallucinatory light on his work- which unfold, as dreams do, nonsensically, but somehow with a divinely inspired sense of purpose.

Luis Gispert was born in 1972, in Jersey City, New Jersey. He has exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, South America and the Middle East including MOCA North Miami, FL; Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Studio Museum of Harlem, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK; His work has also been included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, New York, NY; Private collections include Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.