New York-based Artist Adam Cvijanovic is currently exhibiting new work in Colossal Spectacle, his latest of four solo exhibitions with Bellwether Gallery in New York City. The exhibition contains several landscape paintings that are rendered with latex paint on Tyvek, as well as a massive painting installation which surrounds the viewer with a scene from Intolerance, a D.W. Griffith film from 1916. The epic film was a financial failure, due mostly to the elaborate sets used to depict the invasion of the babylonians by the Persians.

Adam Cvijanovic has exhibited internationally with recent solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. Cvijanovic is said to have a large installation in PROSPECT.1, the Dan Cameron curated, first-ever New Orleans Biennial, opening November 1st, 2008.

The art of Kelley Walker is rooted in the idea of social, physical and historical disaster and distress. The artist often appropriates iconic images from the media, including photos of ’60s race riots, plane and car wrecks and modern advertising and magazine covers. All of the images are disrupted by the artist’s use of violently splattered and abstracted patterns, usually scanned and printed from commercial items such as toothpaste and chocolate. These gestures, on top of such weighted images, offer a contrast that infuses adversity with pop culture and consumerism. Walker has had a brief, but significant, career that started in 2003 with his first solo exhibition with Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City. That continued to the exhibition “USA Today” in fall of 2006 that featured new American Art from The Saatchi Gallery and The Royal Academy of the Arts in London. In 2005, Walker exhibited “Crash/Cars” with the Museo de Arte Contemporanea (MARCO) in Vigo, Spain, and “Pictures Are the Problem” at Pelham Art Center in Pelham, New York. The artist has been featured in ArtForum (2004) and was reviewed by The New York Times.

Holly Andres is showing her second major body of work, Sparrow Lane, at Quality Pictures Contemporary Art in Portland until August 2, 2008. Her first series, Stories from a Short Street, was exhibited at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. as well as the Missoula Arts Museum. Her video work was included in the 2006 Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum.

Sparrow Lane illustrates adolescent girls on the cusp of acquiring some forbidden knowledge, a metaphor for the transition from girl to woman. The photographic series is playful and mischievous, as the artist incorporates familiar and suggestive elements for their iconographic value, such as scissors, chrome flashlights, bird cages, and open drawers, doors, and windows. Andres often includes identical twins, a compelling conceptual tool suggesting counterparts and accomplices on this mutual path to discovery. The air of suspicion caused by the incomplete narratives encourages the viewers to come to their own conclusions surrounding the event taking place.

The eleven photographs in the series were shot using an 8×10 large format camera, emphasizing the artist’s use of rich color, texture, pattern, and chiaroscuro-like lighting. Andres is influenced by the legendary work of Alfred Hitchcock, and his use of certain cinematic and thematic conventions, such as highly theatrical lighting and the employment of several female protagonists. The artist also revisited Nancy Drew book covers to look at the body language of the characters, in particular their hand gestures. Andres observed how the girls’ hands frame the scene, the delicate separation of their fingers, and how their silky hair frames their lovely, startled faces.

Michael T. Rea crafts large scale wooden sculptures of various objects used in space, war, under the water, or to make music. Constantly incorporating ideas from motion pictures, television, time travel, and music, Rea likes to add a sense of humor to his craft as well. The artist told fecalface.com in a recent interview that his current interests included MIA, Soft Pretzels, Lost, thongs, Folkert de Jong, and Fergie, among several others.

The items he chooses to represent, which include scuba tanks, space suits, fish tanks, guns, and tools, are often seen in other media such as glass or metal. Instead of the expected media, Rea uses the inexpensive materials of pine, mahogany-luan, rope, burlap, and pink foam to create his objects and characters. This paradoxical presence, as seen in the above instruments that will never be played, adds a puzzling yet intriguing quality to each sculpture. The artist states, “My work offers a sense of what could be and what could never be simultaneously.”

Bruce Nauman’s early career neon pieces have reared up again as the focus of a new traveling exhibition, currently installed at San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light includes some of Nauman’s first neon works from the ’70s and ’80s, as well recent figurative neon works. Nauman’s art has always been both lighthearted and confrontational, making him a strange bridge between the serious post-modern conceptualists and the spectacle seekers that populated the ’70s and ’80s art world. He has worked in almost every medium, performance, printmaking, and video included, but neon has been a recurring theme throughout his career. Elusive Signs is at once a history lesson and a sensory experience; Nauman’s neon spans a range of art world hot topics, broaching identity politics, consumerism, illusion, and exhibitionism.

Originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana, Nauman received an MFA from University of California Davis in 1966 and began his career in San Francisco, teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute. Nauman received an NEA grant in 1968 and a Skowhegan Award in 1986. He will represent the United States in the 2009 Venice Biennale.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s surreal photographs of people and places have been part of the art world’s vocabulary for over 20 years now. He’s used the photograph gaze to turn observable reality into stinging fictions and his current exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, A Thousand Polaroids, takes a look at some of his most influential series. The exhibition, curated by Charlotte Cotton, includes images from Hustlers, Streetwork, Heads, and Lucky 13 but it also features a staggering installation of 1,000 Polaroid photographs. DiCorcia has been accumulating these Polaroid images for two decades and, in this video, he discusses his decision to combine these images in a single project. He decided to “intentionally create chance,” letting the images relate to each other intuitively and illogically, creating an ebb and flow between ideas that emerged over the course of his career.

DiCorcia studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Art Boston before receiving an MFA from Yale University. His received his first solo show in 1985 and has since exhibited at MoMA, the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris, and Whitechapel Gallery in London. He also participated in the 1997 Whitney Biennial. A Thousand Polaroids will be on view through September 14th.

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What Do You See is an appropriately titled exhibition of photographs depicting the human body by Hong Kong born author, activist and artist Irene Kai. Now on view at Found Gallery in Los Angeles, the artist’s work explores multiple aspects of the human body, which challenge the viewer’s perception and ideas of sexuality. The artist achieves this through her series of ambiguous though sexually suggestive photographs. The series was originally created while the artist was a student, and was exhibited by the Royal College of Art in London in 1976. Princess Margaret was said to be shuffled past the exhibition as it was deemed too provocative at that time. The exhibition caused significant conflict within the institution and eventually lead to changes in the Royal College’s hiring policy.

Kai’s artistic practice is varied and includes photography, graphic design, authoring, and activism. The artist attended both the School of the Visual Arts in New York City and the Royal College of Art in London. Kai has also published a book of the exhibited images under the same titled of the show, and will have a book signing at Found Gallery two days before the exhibition closing on June 30th.