VB 64, Deitch Gallery, Long Island City, New York, 2009

Vanessa Beecroft‘s newest performance, VB64, took place at Deitch Projects on March 6th, the second day of the New York Armory Show. Once again, the controversial Beecroft and the equally, though differently, controversial Kanye West joined forces (the two staged a collaborative listening event for the debut of 808s & Heartbreak, at which West’s music plays and Beecroft’s models pose). Their previous collaborations have been highlighted in a fall issue of The Fader magazine. VB64 interwove live models and gesso sculptures, an amalgam of equally passive living and lifeless forms. The white body paint on the models matched the gesso on the cast sculptures, and both animate and inanimate bodies boasted the slim, fashioned figures for which Beecroft’s performers have become notorious.

Artforum’s investigative critic Rhonda Lieberman described the event in terms that are as eerie as they are clinical. “Effectively aestheticized, abstracted by the gessolike spackle, the women were literally ornamental figures,” she writes, “their breath unobtrusive, their movements very, very slow.” West, who is producing the film of VB64, reportedly flew in from Paris just to appear at the performance, his presence further clouding Beecroft’s weird half-mainstream, half-elusive mystique. Though the performance has ended, the sculptures (including wax and gesso figures not made for the performance) will be on view at Deitch through April 12th. A video of VB64 will also be projected in the gallery space throughout the exhibition.

Julie Henson creates drawings that explore the idea of religious extremism in the United States, with a focus in the Southeast. The Charleston, South Carolina native examines historically significant religious rituals and the ways in which the modern South maintains these practices. The drawings often depict subjects united in spiritual ecstasy, while undergoing the transcendent religious acts of holding snakes, placing one’s hands in fire, speaking in tongues and the laying of hands for miraculous healing. The artist captures her subjects and suspends their emotional state by rendering them on translucent mylar, many of which are exhibited as a light-box, emitting a glowing aura. As a Southerner, the artist tracks both religious and family traditions that merge to construct a long history which is full of dark secrets and strong bonds. While the source material and research for each work is varied, every drawing is based on a first-hand experience that the artist encountered sometime in her childhood. Henson has stated that this body of work “evaluates [her] personal relationship to Southern piety and family heritage, along with the utilization of religious rituals as a tool of personal devotion and social control.”

Henson is a graduate of the School of the Arts at the College of Charleston, and is currently a member of the Studio Program at Redux Contemporary Art Center. The artist has exhibited throughout the Southeast, and her most recent solo exhibition Alone was reviewed by the Charleston City Paper. In addition, she frequently contributes to DailyServing.com as both a copy editor and writer, and has collaborated on DailyServing’s recent catalog projects, The Sun Machine is Coming Down and Broken, Beaten and Buried.

This weekend marks the relaunch of Cerasoli Gallery in Culver City, California. The gallery will simultaneously present two new solo exhibitions, featuring the work of artists David O’Brien and Tofer Chin. Both exhibitions utilize a graphically formal language of abstraction, featuring bold colors and hard-edge shapes. Explosions in a Mental Sky features the expansive paintings of Los Angeles based artist and architect David O’Brien. The artist, who is a member of Frank Gehry Architects, creates large-scale works which embody the stark mathematical rational often associated with architecture, alongside a free-flowing explosion of color and shape. The result is an impressive vibrating field that subtly shifts form, referring to multiple sources of origin.

Tofer Chin’s exhibition Double Dip promises to take the viewer on a psychedelic Op art journey into “a world of electronic psycho sexual energy.” For this new body of work, the artist is exploring the psychological and spiritual implications of LSD. The result is three large-format paintings, which make use of a spectrum rainbow as well as a play on two and three dimensional pictorial illusion. In addition to the new paintings, Chin has also produced a limited edition print titled Cause and Effect, which is printed on perforated blotter paper.

The opening for both Explosions in a Mental Sky and Double Dip will take place this Saturday, March 14th from 6-9pm. These two shows will be on view through April 15th.

The art world is guilty of hierarchical thinking and elitism, and probably always will be. This, I think most of us would agree, is a shame. So it becomes that much sweeter when an institution renown in the contemporary art world unapologetically presents an exhibition of contemporary ceramicists–artists whose medium has historically lived in the gray area between “fine art” and “craft”, despite its having been the choice medium in the practice of several important artists across many movements. Although the postmodern era has proven to have quite significantly blurred that line between the “high and low” arts, it is a sad fact that it still considered “groundbreaking” to show ceramics. That said, the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (CAF) is currently showing An Expanded Field of Possibilities, an exhibit featuring the work of eleven mostly west coast avant-garde artists using ceramics, including several household names like Amy Bessone, whose work is pictured above, and Eduardo Sarabia, who blew minds with Babylon Bar at the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

An Expanded Field of Possibilities is on view at CAF through May 24, 2009. All eleven artists included in the exhibition are: Amy Bessone, Nicole Cherubini, Mari Eastman, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Klara Kristalova, Franco Mondini-Ruiz, Kristen Morgin (who is simultaneously showing at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts), William J. O’Brien, Eduardo Sarabia, Anna Sew Hoy and Stephanie Wagner.

Bas Louter recently concluded the exhibition, Dust at Kopeikin gallery in Los Angeles and is currently exhibiting Dust/Asphalt at Ambace and Rice in Seattle. A fitting title for Louter’s ethereally haunting visages–referencing perhaps the black soot of charcoal used to create his works, or the ashes and dust of human remains. Louters works uncannily examines the fleeting and transitory nature of existence, and humankind’s attempts to immortalize ourselves through representation and art. Louter notes, “What interested me most about these portraits was how elapsed eras can crop up in result, like time condensing in a flash of lighting. When this flash is over it seems all detail is lost, like the portrait is somehow haunted or hollow.” Time within these portraits is obfuscated– set within grainy washes of charcoal, in timeless voids devoid of setting or temporal indicators. Of this, Louter notes: “I am attracted to take things out of the past in the now, the actuality. In general I think time can be a non-chronological cycle, things from now can be old and things from the past can be contemporary. It’s my interest to question the way we look at these whole container of images.”

In a recent interview, Louter discusses the nature of his works, his creative process and sources of inspiration with DailyServing.com’s Sasha Lee.

DUST (ASPHALT), Ambach and Rice, Seattle

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Photo Credit: Nick DiFilippo

Your Donations Do Your Work is a collaborative installation by Los Angeles artists Suzanne Lacy and Andrea Bowers. On view at UCR Sweeny Art Gallery, the installation centers around its “Collection Point,” where visitors can discard clothing and small appliances. These discarded or donated items will then be rehabilitated, becoming part of a barter economy established by Lacy, Bowers and art students in the farm community of Laton, California. At the exhibition’s opening on Janurary 31st, the price of admission was one full bag of “stuff.”

Your Donations Do Your Work was organized by Tyler Stallings, Shane Shukis, Jennifer Frias, and Georg Burwick. It includes earlier work done by Lacy and Bowers, both of whom have explored social activism and community engagement throughout their careers. The earlier work–including handmade quilts and large format photographs by Lacy and banners and videos by Bowers–sets the productive, operational tone for the collaboration.

Lacy currently chairs the fine art department at Otis College of Art and Design. Bowers teaches at UCLA and was included in this year’s California Biennial.

This year, Honor Fraser Gallery from Los Angeles presented the work of Alexandra Grant in their booth at The Armory Show in New York. Grant has contributed to the Watts House Project, an artist run neighborhood revitalization program determined to ameliorate the lives of residents around the historic watts towers in South Central Los Angeles. The project, an effort to regenerate the cultural activity and status of the area, is directed by artist Edgar Arceneaux.

Grant’s participation involved the placement of a large outdoor text based sculpture atop the roof of a home in this somewhat troubled area. The scripted text reads ‘love’, and connotes feelings of permanence and domesticity. In an incredible expression of both personal investment and artistic devotion, Grant (never tattooed before), had the same script permanently inked on her arm.

The exhibition at The Armory Show includes a video of stills from the tattooing of the artist next to a cast of her arm. A photograph of the rooftop sculpture and a large scale drawing, the artist’s preferred medium, are also displayed. In an effort to raise money for the artist driven project, the ‘love’ sculpture has been made into a necklace and available through Honor Fraser’s website.