The October Gallery in London is currently showing the work of Chinese artist Huang Xu. Huang Xu’s Fragment series features plastic shopping bags in a haunting, yet aesthetically pleasing way by pairing the bags against a contrasting black background. The aesthetic nature of the Fragment series is countered by the scientific precision of the image’s creation. The artist documents plastic bags with a 3-D scanner, a technique typically used by archaeologists. He then manipulates the resulting three-dimensional description of the plastic bag to achieve the image’s final result as photographic print.

The large scale of Huang Xu’s c-prints of discarded shopping bags physically confront the viewer with the reality of capitalist excess. The bags both literally and metaphorically represent the waste of our society. The transcendent quality of the Fragment series seem to evoke the inorganic nature of plastic, which lasts for hundreds of years in our land fills before beginning to decay. Huang Xu’s work is perhaps even more relevant to China, where a relatively recent shift toward capitalism and a huge population have made plastic waste a contentious environmental issue.

Huang Xu graduated from the Beijing Academy of Fine Arts in 1991. He currently lives and works in Beijing as a professional photographer. He most recently exhibited at the Arc One Gallery in Melbourne Australia in 2008 and founded the Big Basin Studio in 2003. Huang Xu’s London debut exhibition will be on view at October Gallery through 18 April 2009.

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s The Murder of Crows is currently at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum fur Gegenwart (Museum for Contemporary Art). This mixed media sound installation is set within the Museum’s historic hall, which was once part of a 19th century train station terminal. The gallery visitor enters this hall by passing through heavy red curtains to encounter a bold cacophony of sound. The impressive, yet stark setting underscores the intensely physical experience of listening to Cardiff and Miller’s 30 minute-long audial composition.

The Murder of Crows was inspired by Franciso de Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. This inspiration is manifest in the irrational and terrifying dreams Cardiff’s voice describes through a centrally-placed megaphone. The sound of birds flying and squawking, in addition to other soundscapes, help to further articulate the stories. The artist’s spoken voice is interpolated by both booming and soft musical compositions, often accompanied by singing. The almost mournful tone of the piece is inspired by the concept of the ‘crow funeral’, in which crows mourn the deaths of fellow crows by gathering and cawing around the deceased.

Listening replaces looking in what amounts to an incredibly visceral gallery experience.

The Canadian artist duo Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller currently live and work in both Grindrod, British Columbia, Canada and Berlin, Germany. Their work as been shown internationally since the 1990s. The Murder of Crows, currently the artists’ largest-ever sound installation, was first commissioned for the 2008 Biennale of Sydney by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. It was brought to Berlin as a part of the Musikwerke Bildender Kunstler (Works of Music by Visual Artists) series and is on at the Nationalgalerie at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin through 17 May 2009.

The opening of Wish You Were Here marked a milestone for young painter Julienne Hsu. The exhibition ran from March 9th through the 13th at CGU’s East Gallery. It was Hsu’s first solo exhibition sampling her work from the past few years. The exhibition featured a variety of subjects including dogs, humans, and machines. Her concern lies in the juxtaposition of nature and the imposition of man. Although Hsu deliberately limits the objects in her paintings, the viewer is still able to come to their own conclusion about the morality of the subject. Hsu has found a noteworthy balance – presenting subject matter and formal style – without allowing one to dominate the other. At first glance, the color appears bold and dark, but is often punctuated by a carefully decided upon bright hue. The formal qualities of paint application and color palette creates an interesting emotive relationship between the subject and the viewer. The resulting psychology helps to extend the potential for dialogue between the works.

Hsu was born in Taiwan and immigrated to the US at the age of fifteen. Since then, she has been living and working in Los Angeles. Hsu received a BFA from the Art Center College of Design and is currently an MFA candidate at Claremont Graduate University, graduating this year.

Time is an integral element of life. For me, it seems similar to the phenomenon of breathing, in that it is largely uninvestigated in any great depth by the general public, though it is collectively understood as essential to our existence. Time runs everything, and though most of us plan the entirety of our lives within its confines, we rarely experience the epiphanic moments where the concept of time suddenly hits us like a ton of bricks and for a brief moment we begin to question just how it all works and how extraordinary it is that we all follow it, with our clocks and our calendars, so faithfully.

To kick off the new exhibition series entitled Intervals at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Mexican artist Julieta Aranda will exhibit a multi-part installation that conceptually deals with the notion of time, and plays with the way it is observed as a natural progression. Aranda’s work first became engaged in a discussion about time in 2006 with her body of work You Had No 9th of May!, in which she responded to the idea of defiantly shifting the rule of time, when in 1995 the Republic of Kiribati (an island nation in the center of the Pacific Ocean) decided to reroute a section of the International Date Line that divided its islands between two different days, causing it to no longer be split. Aranda was struck by the way Kiribati challenged the zigzagging line that spans the globe, which we have historically adhered to, though it is not under any international law. Moreover, Aranda explored the idea that Kiribati had blatantly changed time to fit its own agenda, making it as subjective a concept as beauty or comedy. For Intervals Aranda has created new pieces that playfully challenge the concept of time as we know it, including an oversized clock in which the daily cycle is divided into ten elongated hours. According to the Guggenheim, “this system references ‘decimal time': a short-lived initiative introduced during the rationalizing fervor of the French Revolution that divided the day into 10 hours, each hour containing 100 minutes of 100 seconds each.” Another piece is an image of an hourglass, as seen through a peephole. “Seen through the refracting optical device of a camera obscura, the grains of sand appear to flow upward in a startling reversal of time’s passage.”

Intervals, initiated by Chief Curator Nancy Spector, was “conceived to take place in interstitial locations within the museum’s exhibition spaces or beyond the physical confines of the building.” Julieta Aranda’s work will open the exhibition on Friday, April 10th. The entire series runs through July 19, 2009.

Julieta Aranda was born in Mexico City. She earned her MFA at Columbia University and her BFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has exhibited internationally, including at Galerie Michael Janssen in Berlin, AR Contemporary Gallery in Milan and El Museo Del Barrio in New York.

PPOW Gallery in New York City opened a new exhibition this weekend titled Intuitive Visualization of the Unseen, featuring new works by artist Bill Smith. The sculptures presented explore natural systems of order and how they can be translated three dimensionally. The works are meticulously created out of various industrial materials. The artist has stated,” All terrestrial behavioral events and physical components, however bland, sweet or ghastly, conform to the same rules of mechanical beauty.” In this way, the works are constructed in accordance to the unbiased, mechanical rules of science rather than by formal aesthetics.

Smith is a graduate of the University of Illinois and has exhibited with several galleries and institutions including the Chicago Cultural Center and the Alfedena Gallery in Chicago, and White Flag Projects in St. Louis.

Artist Aaron Noble was recently profiled in an artist video produced by Osmosis TV and Beautiful/Decay Magazine. The artist creates a diverse range of works, all of which are centered on superhero comic imagery. His core practice involves large site-specific murals, some of which are several stories tall, however he also creates small works on paper and prints. The artist has created edition prints with Wingate Studio in New Hampshire. Noble is represented by Pavel Zoubok Gallery in New York City and is currently exhibiting in the Beautiful/Decay A to Z exhibition at the Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles.

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Saatchi Gallery in London is currently presenting the group show, Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East, which proudly showcases the recent work of 21 artists originally from the Middle East and currently living around the globe. Participating artists include Diana Al-Hadid (a Syrian-American artist also currently showing an outdoor sculpture at the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates), Halim Al-Karim, Kader Attia, Nadia Ayari, Khaled Hafez, Jeffar Khaldi, and Tala Madani, among several others, all displayed among three spacious floors.

Kader Attia’s Ghost, 2007, a large installation of several aluminum foil casts of faceless Muslim women in kneeling prayer positions is powerful in its fragility and aesthetic brilliance. Arranged in multiple rows that occupy an entire gallery, these vacant silver shells have a magnitude and materiality that suggest some divinity and presence, demanding extended contemplation.

Previous DailyServing featured artist Diana Al-Hadid‘s massive architectural sculptures of towers, such as The Tower of Infinite Problems, 2008, are made with materials such as plaster, wax, Styrofoam, and cardboard, and draw attention to the frailty of humanity and civilizations. Their toppled presentation and rustic appearance evoke the feeling surrounding the emergence of an exciting excavation find. Towers have long been symbolic sites of cultural conflict, both in legends such as the Tower of Babel, and in actuality such as the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the horrific attacks of September 11th, 2001.

The show will remain at Saatchi Gallery until May 9th, 2009.