Currently showing at Sarah Cottier Gallery, Paddington is a recent collection of paintings by Queensland based artist, Julie Fragar. Entitled Liar, Fragar’s works include depictions of people in a multitude of scenarios. These include children at play, people appearing ambiguously alone and families enjoying each other’s company. Often her paintings include an overlapping of imagery, with the inclusion of thin outlines of figures which appear in other works within the series. Judging by the title of the exhibition, one could assume that these depicted people’s often contemplative expressions suggest that they are guilty of lying to themselves or those around them.

Fragar studied at Sydney College of the Arts, before later earning her doctorate in visual arts at Queensland College of Art. She has received various awards for her art practice including the 2005 ABN Amro Emerging Artist Award, The 2001 Freedman Foundation Traveling Scholarship for Emerging Artists and the Griffith University Postgraduate Research Scholarship. She has exhibited widely on a national scale within various solo and group exhibitions. Galleries her work has been displayed within include Mori Gallery Sydney, Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney and Queensland Centre for Photography, Brisbane. Her work also belongs to permanent collections at Artbank, Gold Coast City Art Gallery and Ferrier Hodgson, Sydney.

Galerie Michael Janssen is currently showing a three person exhibition titled Heaven, Hollywood, and Hitchcock until June 14th. Tom Allen, Kristian Burford, and Christoph Steinmeyer are all interested in mixing motifs and media culled from the history of film and European painting traditions.

Los Angeles-based artist Tom Allen references works from the German Romanticist and European Baroque traditions of painting and then transforms this imagery into fantastical worlds. He uses reproductions from the history of painting and obscures them into visual landscapes, maintaining some reference to the original imagery. Allen has previously exhibited at Richard Telles Fine Art in L.A. and Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York.

Los Angeles-based artist Kristian Burford, whose installation Christopher is seen above, mixes hyper-real sculpture and filmic backdrops to create compelling installations. Christopher depicts a naked man (made of wax) lying on a disheveled bed with his hand dangling over the edge as his fingers graze a glass of water, referencing the popular tale that if you fall asleep with your hand in tepid water, you will wet the bed. Burford has shown her work at I-20 Gallery in New York and at The Happy Lion in L.A.

Berlin-based artist Christoph Steinmeyer also combines motifs from European painting traditions with film qualities. After selecting his motifs, Steinmeyer uses a multiple transformation process to morph the image, thereby alienating the original motif. For example, Hitchcock’s film The Paradine Case provided the the basis for his new large format painting Maddalena, which is included in this exhibition. He has previously shown at Galleri K in Oslo and Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York.

Artist Luis Gispert: All images courtesy Redux Contemporary Art Center

Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC is opening a new exhibition today titled The Constructed Image, curated by DailyServing.com Founder and Editor, Seth Curcio. The show features five contemporary photographers whose work challenges the very nature of truth as documented by the photograph. Through a variety of techniques, including digital and traditional photographic manipulation, set constructions, temporary sculpture, models and intricate dioramas, the artists create a very calculated visual experience. The exhibition includes works by artists Luis Gispert, Lori Nix, Daniel Gordon, Chris Scarborough and Nathan Baker, and will be on view through June 7th. Please read below for details on the exhibition and the artists.

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Currently on view at Bellwether in New York City is a self-titled solo exhibition by the photographer, Anne Hardy. The British born photographer constructs elaborate sets inside her London studio and shoots them in a medium-format camera with a wide-angle lens. Hardy’s installation process can take months to execute. She begins with simple objects and ideas, instigating and encouraging her process to take over the project. The ambiguous rooms that she creates oftentimes suggest the presence of her own hand or that of an abandoned human space or situation. Her use of man-made objects comment on the western world of commerce and humanity’s impact on environment. At Bellwether, Hardy exhibits five recent photographs which reveal a caliginous palette of derelict spaces and circumstances. Hardy attended the Royal College of Art where she received an MA in Photography and has since exhibited widely, both internationally and domestically, including the 2008 Armory Show and the Saatchi Gallery. Her photograph, Outpost, is on view at the Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art at the Barbican Gallery in London.

Cathy Akers‘ current show at Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles takes on a big issue: the history of the human race. Akers’ dioramas depict Adam and Eve like figures in surroundings that resemble Eden. Yet the world depicted in Akers’ exhibition, titled Hertopia: An Illustrated History of the New World, is more delinquent than it is idyllic.

This is Akers first solo exhibition since graduating from the MFA program at California Institute of the Arts in 2006. Prior to now, she’s exhibited in group shows, like (Tender) Assembly at the Show Cave and a Juried Exhibition at the Torrance Art Museum. Interested in the large-scale dilemmas of evolution and human nature, Akers wants to push the envelope where ideas of utopia and “natural” human interactions are concerned. In 2007, she made a sculptural cake called “Natural Selection.” Gallery visitors ate away at the cake, naturally selecting parts of the edible world Akers had created. In Hertopia, Akers’ utopias are childishly hellish. She at once captures the jubilance associated with lush, green terrain and uninhibited nakedness and the brutality of human beings. The lack of inhibition in her sculptures leads to a disconcerting world in which characters pursue their desires both to their own benefit and detriment. Hertopia will be on exhibit through May 17th.

Patrick Jackson’s debut solo exhibition at Los Angeles’ Chung King Projects will be a chorus of stuff. Found objects, construction, and ephemera all make up Jackson’s work, creating an environment in which dirt and technology have equal footings.

Recent MFA grad, Patrick Jackson has quickly made himself known in the LA art world. He initially studied at San Francisco Art Institute and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture before finishing up his graduate work in 2007 at the University of Southern California. He’s a recipient of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, an enviable honor for a young artist, and he also participated in the annual LA Weekly Track 16 exhibition in 2006 and has participated in residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation in New York.

The exhibition at Chung King Projects, titled City Unborn, gestures toward a sort of cityscape that has no actual semblance to reality. Jackson uses fiberboard, glass, cement, and car paint to create his unborn city, emphasizing the materiality, not the referentiality, of his installation. City Unborn opened with a May 3rd a reception in LA’s Chinatown. It continues through June 7, 2008.

All images Evan Holloway Project Series 35, 2008, Photo credit: Robert Wedemeyer

Polka dots aren’t typically transcendental. They aren’t autonomous and they aren’t monumental. Yet in Evan Holloway‘s current exhibition, Project Series 35 at the Pomona College Museum of Art, polka dots take on some serious questions. Read below for the full article by Catherine Wagley.

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