James Cohan Gallery in New York is currently showing the recent work of Trenton Doyle Hancock in the exhibition Fear. The exhibition includes paintings, wall drawings, and a new portfolio of twenty mixed-media prints, entitled Fix, which the artist completed at the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions at Rutgers University.

Fear explores the battle between good and evil as it unfolds in the private symbolic universe of the Mounds and the Vegans. The Mounds live above ground in a color filled world and sustain themselves on Mound meat, a pink substance that allows one to experience the world of color upon consumption. The evil Vegans reside in a subterranean realm of black and white, where the two conflicting characters live, Vegan leader Betto Watchow and Vegan prophet St. Sesom. St. Sesom introduces the Vegans to color, thereby upsetting Watchow and facing his wrath. Watchow launches a full scale battle against St. Sesom, his followers, and the Mounds.

The centerpiece of the show is a grid-like arrangement of eight five foot square canvases installed on a wall painting depicting Hancock’s underworld battle. The paintings depict both Color babies and Darkness babies, some with dripping pink mound meat in the background, indicative of slaughtered Mounds. The layered works incorporate text, drawing, and collaged paper, plastic, felt, fur, and paint. The wall painting includes various sized black tear drops containing the letters F,E,A,R. Hancock’s symbolic system often reworks Biblical stories, exploring moral dilemmas through the saga of the Mounds. Each body of work furthers the narrative including scenes of birth, life, death, and even the afterlife of these mythical creatures.

Hancock received his B.F.A. from Texas A&M University and his M.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia. He was one of the youngest artists ever to be included in the Whitney Biennial, in both 2000 and 2002. He is also the 2007 Joyce Alexander Wein award winner from The Studio Museum in New York. Hancock currently lives and works in Houston.

Fear will remain at James Cohan’s New York space until January 10, 2009.

While in Miami earlier this month, DailyServing.com was fortunate enough to visit with artist TV Moore. Perhaps best known for his multi-media video installations, Moore was exhibiting APOCATOPIA (vol. 1) with Baer Ridgway Exhibitions at the Pulse Miami Art Fair. Moore splits his time between Sydney, Australia and Los Angeles, producing films, videos, and theatrical performances. Much of the artist’s work makes use of fragmented narratives, while blurring the line between constructed film and documentary footage. Moore received his MFA from CalArts in 2006, and since, he has exhibited in the Turin Triennale, the 16th Biennale of Sydney and the 2008 Busan Biennale in South Korea.

Guido van der Werve‘s current exhibition, Everything is Going to be Alright, is on view in the Hayward Project Space at the Southbank Centre in London. The exhibition includes ‘Nummer Acht’ (2007), a strikingly romantic video in which van der Werve walks ahead of an ice breaker ship, and ‘Nummer Zes’, another video with a memorable premise: a Steinway grand piano is lifted by crane through a second story window, a Chopin concerto is played, and the piano is removed.

Van der Werve, a Dutch artist, began exhibiting around 2003, after studying at a number of arts academies and institutions, among them the Rotterdam Conservatory and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Most recently, van der Werve has had solo shows at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Kunsthalle Basel, and Marc Foxx Gallery. In 2009, he will exhibit at the Hirschorn Museum. The Guardian recently featured van der Werve in the Artist of the Week column, which gives an insightful introduction to the artist’s work.

Everything is Going to be Alright continues through January 4, 2009.

Currently on view at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles is a solo exhibition of new work by LA artist Jason Houchen, entitled Fallen Trees Spread No Seeds. Houchen’s past life in Missouri solicits his Americana aesthetic, to which he adds a healthy dose of Los Angeles irony and tongue-in-cheek imagery. The painstakingly delicate woodburnings – manifested on either sculpted and carved moose or ram heads, lampshades with polished silver antler bases, belt buckles or flat wooden panels – depict a folksy batch of collective portraits and landscapes. But through Houchen’s witty presentation and thorough craft, one is sure to not confuse the work with folk art goods being sold roadside to tourists on the way to the Grand Canyon.

Read More »

Now on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver until January 18, 2009 is Adam Helms first solo museum installation. The installation consists of a large plywood construction that dominates the space of the Paper Works Gallery, and drawings/ sourced imagery that are hung on the surrounding walls.

With this installation Adam Helms draws attention to the continuum between past and present states of violence, occupation and injustice. Helms uses composite images sourced through the internet and unearthed in library archives to suggest a frontier that is both familiar and distant. His hand is revealed in the work through drawings, thus making personal the interior story of each image. The exhibition of new works on paper and a large- scale sculpture at MCA DENVER portrays radical political groups and extremist subcultures throughout history. Helms was born in the United States in 1974 and currently lives and works in New York, NY. Helms received an MFA from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. He has shown in group exhibitions at Ballroom Marfa, Texas; Kunsthalle und Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, Austria and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, NY among others. Helms was the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and was a recent artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

Brooklynite Gallery‘s current show presents the work of British collective Kuildoosh (pronounced coo-ill-doosh) which formed in 2003 as a reaction against low quality street art that was pervasive in the UK at the time. The group includes three members (Paris, Mudwig, and Eko) who create wall paintings, graphic art and wheat paste assemblages. They work on the streets of Bristol, around the UK, and in Berlin. They were recently in New York for Brooklynite’s opening on November 22nd.

DailyServing was able to ask the group a couple of questions via e-mail which were answered by Paris:

A lot of your outdoor painting takes place in the English countryside. How are your ideas of receivership different or similar to artists working in a more urban environment such as New York?

To paint in the middle of the English countryside is very relaxing for a start, often the only people we will see in a day are a few cyclists & people walking their dogs. Although when they do come across our paintings they are often baffled and amused, when we explain what we are trying to do they seem to get it and go away a little wiser. A lot of people in cities seem to be very conditioned to street art and often (in Bristol) have pre-conceived ideas of what you should be doing…We get a lot more freedom to create out in the countryside.

What artists are you interested in at the moment?

Personally, I think the work of David “Skwerm” Ellis is superb & the Barnstormers. Right now in the UK there doesn’t seem to be too much originality going on, people are playing it safe and copying a lot with played out ideas like monkeys in gas masks, etc. Other artists that are hot at the moment are Russel Maurice, Pinky, Will Barras, Mr Jago, EH-Questionmark, Honet…I would consider any of these artists the best of our generation.

Kuildoosh’s exhibition will remain at Brooklynite Gallery until December 20, 2008.

Over the past forty five days, Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, South Carolina has exhibited new paintings by Matt Phillips and Josef Kristofoletti, in a show titled the The Sun Machine Is Coming Down. The exhibition uses the language of geometric abstraction to discuss scientific processes, phenomenological experiences, and the nature of illusion.

The artists, who met in graduate school at Boston University, push the boundaries of pattern, color and space, synthesizing these elements into a formal system of painting which examines the basic building blocks of matter. In an attempt to better understand the world around us, Josef Kristofoletti focused his attention on the CERN particle accelerator, the world’s largest and most expensive laboratory for particle physics. While CERN was preparing for its first ever successful collision, Kristofoletti was creating The Angel of the Higgs Boson, a large-scale painting of a cross section of the CERN accelerator on the outside walls of Redux. The end result was a strikingly bright mural that furthered the dialogue about scale, the tradition of public mural painting and scientific theory. Kristofoletti is currently a part of the mobile living experiment Transit Antenna, offering him the opportunity to create murals across the U.S.

Inside Redux, are the encompassing paintings of Matt Phillips. Phillips paintings go far beyond the modernist ideals from which they are built. They attempt to simulate situations that speak about the phenomena of deep space, energy transfer and optical illusion. Some of the paintings in the gallery reach 16 ft. in length, and incorporate paint with collage, sewn surfaces and irregularly shaped canvases. Since completing his MFA at BU, Matt Phillips has completed an exhibition with Petra Projects hosted at Mehr Gallery in NYC as well participated in Gangbusters at Plane Space Gallery, also in NYC. The artist currently teaches painting at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.

The exhibition, which was curated by DailyServing.com Founder, Seth Curcio, is accompanied with a full color, 50 page catalog documenting the exhibition, including special articles and essays about the artists’ work. A limited edition catalog release event is scheduled for today at Redux and the book will be available for purchase on the DailyServing.com site by the end of next week.