Paul Campbell and Dominic Paul Moore are currently showing recent work at the Moreau Art Galleries at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana in an exhibition entitled Profile Me. Both artists use popular virtual community sites to examine contemporary portraiture and personality.

Campbell creates oil on canvas figurative portraits based on Facebook users’ self-appointed profile pictures. His energetic canvases cause the viewer to evaluate an individual’s desire to portray a personality through a single image. The artist states, “they’re essentially self-portraits that I project, and the projection itself distorts them, but it turns them into this painted object that makes them different from the quick image one might view online.”

Moore’s work has a rather morbid premise. The artist utilizes the site MyDeathSpace.com, an archival site of obituaries of MySpace members with links to their profiles. His gouache and graphite photo-realistic drawings mirror the virtual profiles that continue to exist after the life of the user has passed, creating a slightly haunting posthumous profile. The above image, Mandii, provides an artistic memento mori while bringing the viewer face to face with Mandii’s mortality and the immortality of the Internet. MySpace has previously been included in both Time Magazine and PC World’s rankings of the worst web sites to visit, a conceptual catapult for this particular body of work.

Profile Me will remain at the Hammes Gallery at the Moreau Art Galleries until September 26, 2008.

Opening next week at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art will be works by artist David Shrigley in his latest self titled exhibition. Shrigley is best known for his dead pan humor and intuitive drawings that illustrate simple yet absurd situations. The exhibition will also feature the artists object-based sculpture, which often plays with scale and have included items such as stuffed animals, doors, ladders, tents and sleeping bags. The artists has exhibited internationally and gained much popularity through a series of weekly illustrative contributions to The Guardian, since 2005. Shrigley has exhibitions this year with BQ in Cologne, Anton Kern Gallery in NYC and CASM in Barcelona, and a forthcoming exhibition at Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris next year.

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Paddington is currently hosting new installation works by Indigenous-Australian artist Jonathan Jones. Untitled (The Tyranny of Distance), 2008 is positioned within the main exhibition space and is composed of a series of six blue tarpaulin covered walls, each extending to over eight meters in length. Each of them radiate with light from fluorescent tubes positioned to make arrow like chevron patterns. The audience is not allowed access between the walls, and are instead allowed only to move around the perimeter of the installation. This makes reference to the Australian government’s 2006 intervention of the Northern Territory’s Aboriginal community, raising issues of land ownership and civil rights. Positioned outside the gallery space is Jones’ installation Genesis, 2008. Comprising of a series of stacked emu eggs illuminated by florescent light, this work also makes reference to indigenous issues as a symbol of traditional art and new life.

Jones is of the Kamilaroi/Wiradjuri people of South Eastern Australia. He has worked as a curator for Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative; the only Aboriginal owned and operated contemporary art space in Sydney. He has received numerous awards for his art practice including the 2002 New South Wales Indigenous Artists Fellowship and the 2006 Xstrata Emerging Indigenous Art Award. He currently lives and works in Sydney, while acting as a museum educator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

A new collection of works by Sydney artist Noel McKenna are currently on display at Darren Knight Gallery, Waterloo. Entitled The Weekly Bus-Rail Ticket: The Return Journey, the series depicts scenes of Sydney life, some as momentous as Anthony Mundine claiming the Middleweight Championship of the World, while others such as Kambala School Girl portray the more seemingly mundane aspects of city life. Depictions of cityscapes, oversized vehicles on suburban roads, children dressed in designer fashion and grand residencies of Sydney businessmen also make an appearance within the show. While most take form as works on canvas, Sydney Chair of Influence, embroidered with the names of prominent community figures, acts as a sculptural inclusion to the exhibition.

McKenna lives and works in Sydney. He has studied at various Australian institutions including The University of Queensland, Brisbane College of Art and Alexander Mackie College. His work has been exhibited on an international scale within galleries including John Batten Gallery, Hong Kong, Bowen Galleries, New Zealand and Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea. He has won numerous awards for his art practice including the 2006 Fleurieu Peninsula Vistas Prize, the 2003 Mosman Art Prize and the Wynne Prize for Watercolour in 2001, 2002 and 2005.

Opening last night at Mitterrand + Sanz Contemporary Art in Zurich, is new work by photographer Time Davis in the exhibition titled, Tim Davis: Kings of Cyan. The title is taken from the natural occurrence of fading that takes place when full color CMYK posters are placed on the street and battered by wind, rain and sun. Cyan is the last color that generally remains during this process, causing a ghostly image of the photographic subject. Davis has turned his eye to political posters of the past, observing these historical icons and the effects of their meaning once abused by time and weather.

Tim Davis originally studied photography at Bard College in the earlier nineties, and afterward developed a career as a poet and editor in New York. The artist attended Yale University School of Art for his MFA in 2001 and since has had several international exhibitions including works at Whitecube in London, the Guggenheim and MOMA in NYC and High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Davis now teaches photography at Bard College.

Opening this next Friday at the Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York City will be new work by Oakland-based artist Chris Duncan for his second solo exhibition with the gallery titled, The Faith Void Split. The show’s title is taken from the album The Faith/Void Split from 1982, by Washington D.C. hardcore groups Faith and Void. The artist will have a collection of two and three dimensional works featured in the exhibition, including a “string burst” sculpture that will cover one of the gallery walls which will be painted black. Duncan has completed several solo exhibitions with the Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco as well as with Nakaochiai Gallery in Tokyo, Motel Gallery in Portland, Oregon, and Lump Gallery in Raleigh, North Carolina. The artist is the co-creator of the zine project HOT AND COLD and was the 2006 recipient of the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s Goldie Award in Visual Art.

Photographer and animator Cassandra C. Jones employs great technical precession with works such as her kaleidoscope-patterned collages. The series “Good Cheer” depicts appropriated images of cheerleaders meticulously reconstructed and digitally printed into ornate patterns. The artist has used the imagery to develop complex wallpapers that dissolve into marginally recognizable anthropomorphic forms when the viewer gains distance from the pattern.

Previously, Jones created short-looped animations that often consist of more than 1,250 images, collectively portraying simple and personal events along with other sporting activities. “Track and Field” is a series that the artist produced that investigated ideas of the athletic arena while producing stunningly ambiguous images by overlapping multiple photos. Jones attended the California College of Arts in Oakland, Calif., and received her MFA in photography and glass from the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Penn. The artist has exhibited “Rara Avis” at the Queens Annex in San Francisco, and participated in the Pulse Art Fair in New York with the Nathan Larramendy Gallery. In 2004, Jones received the Vira I. Heinz Endowment Fellowship awarded by the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.