Marianne Mueller‘s first US solo exhibition opens on January 24th at Kim Light Gallery. The London-based Swiss artist works primarily in photography and her show at Kim Light will consist of intentional clusters of images. These images–of bodies, objects, or structure–interact with each other in a multitude of ways, nomadically equalizing a diverse array of suggested places and experiences.

Called Dream-US-09, this exhibition overlaps with the LA Art Show, at which Mueller will be represented by Brussels’ Galerie Catherine Bastide, and with a projection of Mueller’s video The Flock at Maison Martin Margiela. Composed over the time Mueller spent with WWII veteran and bird breeder John Mandato, The Flock, like much of Mueller’s work, explores the duration, span, and worth of observation.

Mueller has shown extensively in Europe, repeatedly exhibiting with Galerie Susanna Kulli in Zurich. She teaches at Zurich University of the Arts.

Dream-US-09 continues through March 7th, 2009.

“…Personality as something with fixed attributes is an illusion – but a necessary illusion if we are to love!” -from Balthazar, by Lawrence Durrell.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya‘s ALEXANDRIA, a photographic installation currently on view at The Envoy Gallery on the Lower East Side, references the literature of expatriate British novelist, poet and dramatist Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990). Specifically, the installation is titled after the Alexandria Quartet (1957 – 1961), a work of literature set in pre-WWII Alexandria, Egypt, which tells the tale of Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea, and their romantic relationships with Durrell’s tragic artist, Darley. Each book in the Quartet presents one of four takes on a single love story, essentially the same tale told from different relativistic perspectives.

On view at Envoy, interspersed among crisply enlarged photographs of pages from the 1961 Penguin Edition of Durrell’s Quartet, are abstracted photographs collectively titled Portrait that refused to be taken (2007), an intimate grouping which hints at the transient nature of the photographic portrait. The predominantly white photographs reveal furtive glimpses of limbs and faces, blurred streaks across the surface of the photos that are reminiscent of Serrano’s spectral Ejaculate in Trajectory series (1989). In referencing such an esoteric piece of literature by Durrell, whose own discontent with the inherent narrative function of the novel is paramount, Sepuya’s artistic admixture is certainly fitting.

While in the past, Sepuya has been cast as an “uber-contemporary” seeker of love, lost within the cold confines of various internet hook-up sites (think manhunt.net) and a bare and white-walled urban apartment, here he makes a broad and informed leap toward a point of poetic equilibrium; an understanding of the subject-object synergy, partnered with the mature realization that certain universal truths are never to be revealed. In so doing, he reminds us that our own personal narratives, as well as our own continual search for love, are never as they seem and can never truly be known.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He studied photography and imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Sepuya has participated in group exhibitions at Envoy Gallery, Daniel Reich Gallery, Daniel Cooney Fine Art, STUX Gallery, Artists Space and the Powerhouse Arena in New York City; the Australian Center of Photography, Sydney, Australia, and Art Metropole, Toronto. His first solo exhibition, Beloved Object and Amorous Subject, was presented at Envoy Gallery in the Spring of 2007. Features of Sepuya’s work can be found in BUTT, EYEMAZING, TSHDT?, Capricious, and I.D., and The New York Times. He is the publisher of the well-known zine project, SHOOT.

SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine is currently presenting a group show curated by Gideon Bok, Sound and Vision: Circuit, Tube, and Prism. The exhibition includes two sounds artists, Galen Richmond and Kevin McMahon, and three painters, Bryson Brodie, Matt Phillips, and Stephanie Pierce. These artists explore and manipulate the effects of refraction in the media of sound, electricity, and light.

Sound artist Galen Richmond combines music, art, and performance by altering the circuitry of found vintage keyboards in a practice known as ‘circuit bending.’ He recently performed at New York City’s The Bent Music Festival, winning critical acclaim from the Village Voice. Kevin McMahon is a recording engineer and musician who repairs and manipulates sound equipment while searching for and developing new talent. He has been involved in the engineering and production of several records and has worked with The Secret Machines, Ray Davies, Blonde Redhead, Sonic Youth, and The Flaming Lips, among several others.

Painter and previous DailyServing interviewee Matt Phillips references op-art, textiles, mosaics, and pattern painting, treating his work as both object and illusion. His paintings maintain delicacy and rhythm in their abstraction while drawing from several visual sources. Stephanie Pierce’s paintings recall the atmosphere of Philip Guston’s work from the 1950s. She often uses her bed as subject matter, taking the phenomenon of light, space, and form as personal metaphors. Bryson Brodie is a New York-based abstract painter whose work often has a surprising narrative concealed within.

Painter, farmer, and curator Gideon Bok received his B.A. from Hampshire College and his M.F.A. from Yale University and is now represented by Plane Space in New York and Alpha Gallery in Boston.

Sound and Vision: Circuit, Tube, and Prism will remain at SPACE Gallery until February 21, 2009.

The ethos of the American landscape has been and continues to be a subject of great fascination among thinkers in any field or interest. The country’s flora and fauna intrigue even the most oblivious due to their extreme diversity and limitlessness. It is of little surprise then that an artist, in this case, painter Jake Longstreth, has chosen the American landscape as the launching-off point for his artistic practice, presenting a subtle uniqueness in his approach to the subject matter. Currently exhibiting at Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco is Longstreth’s latest series of paintings titled, All It Is: New Paintings. All it is, really, is a series of nine paintings, mostly of manufactured landscapes that makeup American suburbia. But it’s what it is not which Longstreth captures in his apolitical, flat acrylic paintings.

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Stephanie Brooks‘ new solo exhibition Tough and Sweet, is now on view at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago. With this work, Brooks examines mythologies of love, loss, and mental illness; signs of affection; and the poetics of sentimentality and materiality.

The formal aesthetics of poetry and how figurative language describes affection and emotion is an ongoing investigation for Brooks, whose practice includes an archive and classification of metaphors. For the lightbox sculpture Metaphors for Love, Brooks painstakingly combed through her extensive collection of poetry anthologies extracting metaphors for love from canonical love poems. These fragmented metaphors are combined with a universal symbol of affection: the valentine box of chocolates. Affect and affection are further explored with a pink neon sign Triple X, XO. Here, Brooks conflates two sign systems: the rated XXX symbols plastered outside strip clubs and emblazoned on pornography with the sweeter, yet all too banal XO (“hugs and kisses”), aligning the slight variation of these graphic symbols and their wildly disparate meanings.

Also included in this exhibition are Plath/Woolf and Star Scape for Sylvia, two works which were inspired by Brooks’ reading of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Deeply affected by Plath’s experimental writing, Brooks conducted research at the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, Northampton, MA which holds the majority of Sylvia Plath’s original documents including personal letters and journals.

Stephanie Brooks currently lives and works in Chicago, IL. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago and currently teaches sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions include Distance Intimacy at the Illinois State University Art Museum, Normal, IL, and I’m sentimental, Gahlberg Gallery, College of Dupage, Glen Ellyn, IL. Selected group exhibitions include City of Chicago, Department of Cultural Affairs public commission in Grant Park, Public Address curated by Ellen Rothenberg, Phaize, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, Schalter, Berlin, Germany, and Whitewalls, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago. Brooks’ work is included in collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the MacArthur Foundation, Chicago, and the Microsoft Corporation in Seattle.

Space 1026 Gallery in Philadelphia is currently showing the work of AJ Fosik and Andrew Schoultz in New Ancient Structures. Both artists use intriguing imagery and explosive color in this collaborative multimedia installation.

Fosik is a Philadelphia-based sculptor who began with street art and signage and now creates animal abstractions, or what he calls “existential fetishes.” In his sculptures, Fosik incorporates symbols from varied sources, both past and present, often including tigers and bears. He has recently exhibited at the L.J. Beaubourg in Paris and White Walls in San Francisco.

Schoultz creates murals, paintings, installations, and drawings in his artistic exploration of current political and social conditions, in particular the effects of globalism and capitalism. Schoultz also paints large-scale murals in public places and has upcoming gallery shows at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen and Roberts and Tilton in Los Angeles.

A group exhibition entitled Lucid Dreaming opened Saturday, January 17th at Curator’s Office. The exhibition includes works from the Estate of critically acclaimed abstract symbolist painter Simon Gouverneur, who pursued a lifelong investigation into the structures of language and meaning. His work invokes a wide range of ideas–from the principles of structural anthropology espoused by Claude Levi-Strauss to the teachings of Jewish mysticism, Buddhist texts and linguistic theories.

Also in the show are works from brilliant architect Paul Laffoley, who is reputed to have created over 800 works, mixing precise technical work with philosophical ideologies from ancient times to the present. Laffoley has described his work as blending the purely rational, Apollonian impulse with a more emotional, Dionysian stances.

Jason Hughes, who is directly influenced by both Laffoley and Gouverneur, will also be exhibiting his works. His iconic works appear like objects designed to inspire higher consciousness or serve as the focus of meditation.

The exhibition interestingly situates the artist’s conceptual framework around lucid dreaming, a dream stage in which the person is fully aware they are dreaming while the dream is in progress, without waking up. In this stage, the dreamer can act and create as they would in reality, though with limitless capability and imagination, a sort of moving painting. To reflect the continuing visionary tradition in modern and contemporary art, each of these artists attempts to harness this realm of a waking dream-state as part of their practice.

Through obtuse, and irrational visual logic, each artist creates a kind of mesmerizing mandalic emblem. These symbolic structures and tandototems attempt to organize and stratify consciousness itself.

Artists from top to bottom: Simon Gouverneur, Paul Laffoley, Jason Hughes