Australian artist Sam Leach, who received his Bachelor of Economics from Adelaide University in 1993, is interested in how wealth is communicated through architectural spaces. There is often an ambiguous attitude towards the pursuit of wealth, and a sense of alienation in its presence. In contemporary culture, corporate spaces must balance a healthy display of success without being too overbearing or excessive in the eyes of the visitor. Several interior features have come to be seen as “corporate,” such as halogen lights, brushed steel elevator doors, and polished beech boardroom tables.

This same ambiguity towards wealth is seen in 17th-century Dutch still life painting, which is full of symbolic references to mortality, wealth, and corruption, including skulls and spoiling luxury foods. Sam Leach, who also received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from RMIT in 2003 and is in the process of completing his Master of Arts (Fine Arts) at RMIT, combines his economic and artistic interests in his exquisite still life paintings for the Sullivan + Strumpf Fine Art show titled Negentrophies. He chooses preserved game animals, insects, skulls, and other objects indicative of wealth as his subject matter.

The artist states he is “investigating how the aesthetics of corporate space convey attitudes towards wealth and power using the conventions and principles of Dutch painting as a frame of reference.” The artist paints darkly lacquered, fascinatingly detailed and hauntingly beautiful images of animals and relics. Meticulous attention is paid to each subject, echoing the fine calibration seen in nature. He encases each painting in a layer of glossy resin, recalling the glossy expanses of polished stone seen in corporate spaces. Through exquisite lighting and compositional simplicity, Leach evokes the transience of life and wealth. Leach was voted one of the ’50 Most Collectable Artists’ by Australian Art Collector magazine in 2007 and 2008. The exhibition Negentrophies will be showing at Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art in Sydney from March 18 – April 6, 2008.

Portland, Oregon-based photographer Mark Hooper is currently exhibiting ten large-scale color photographs for the exhibition Here:There at Quality Pictures in Portland. The artist was included in the 2006 Oregon Biennial, held at the Portland Art Museum, for his acclaimed series “Lewis and Clark, Quantifying Nature,” and has worked commercially for such advertising titans as Nike, Microsoft, and Miller Brewing. He has been published in several periodicals, including Esquire, Newsweek, and Vanity Fair.

The exhibition at Quality Pictures contains ten 48″ x 60″ photographs that comment on the ideas of change and it’s affect on man’s physicality, psychology, and spirituality. Hooper photographs abandoned architectural spaces, vacant parking lots, nature, and any site he feels evokes an awareness of entropy. He occasionally adds props, such as an upturned chair or a pile of rope ascending vertically out of the frame. Through expert lighting and careful staging, the artist creates meditative images that have a sense of desolation. The artist often includes a solitary figure, thus referencing the passage of time and mortality. Also at Quality Pictures is Interspace, a video installation by Laura Fritz. Both exhibitions will be on view until April 26th.

Italian-born artist Angela DeCristofaro opened a exhibition entitled Wake, featuring

a new series of paintings at Commissary Arts in Venice, California yesterday evening.

The exhibition is continuation of ideas and images explored in her

2006 exhibition titled Totality Shaped Out of Nothing which was exhibited at the Metro Gallery in Pasadena, California. Freely appropriating images and ideas from contemporary culture, the artist often layers wedding cakes, water towers and vintage clothing styles in her figurative compositions. DeCristofaro moved from Italy to Southern California in the 1970’s and returned to Italy to complete her BFA in painting and drawing at L’istituto D’arte e di Restauro in Florence. The artist has exhibited at Sonrisa Gallery in Los Angeles, Randon Gallery in Highland Park, California and the Italian Cultural Institute Gallery in San Francisco.

The San Francisco-based directing duo, Encyclopedia Pictura, has recently completed a nine month video and animations project that was shot at Deitch Studios on the bank of the East River in Long Island City. The members of Encyclopedia Pictura, Isaiah Saxon and Sean Hellfritsch, worked with musical artist Bjork to produce her latest video project, Wanderlust, created in 3D. The video, which contains large scale mechanical puppets, detailed costumes, original concept paintings and sculptures, corresponds to Bjork’s fourth single off her latest album Volta. The video will be presented this Thursday March 13th, at Deitch Studios, and will include a behind-the-scenes look at the video’s production. Encyclopedia Pictura has successfully completed several video and video-music projects through Ghost Robot, but this work with Deitch Projects marks their first gallery project.

Roni Horn is currently exhibiting her photographic series of taxidermied Icelandic wildfowl at Hauser and Wirth Colnaghi in London. The artist attended the Rhode Island School of Design and received her M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art in 1978. After completing graduate school, Horn journeyed to Iceland to explore the geological activity that takes place in a location virtually untouched by globalization forces. She has since made several Icelandic adventures, and continued to photograph the wildfowl for this long-running series. The artist has had several solo exhibitions, including those at Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and Kunstmuseum Winterthur in Winterthur, Switzerland. The manifestation of Horn’s work takes various forms, including works on paper, installations, books with her own images and text, and photographs. She has openly attributed her lack of media specificity to “growing up androgynous,” which prevented her from associating with any singular gender identity.

For the exhibition, Horn photographed the backs of wildfowl at close range against a monochromatic background, in the style of a conventional studio portrait. She presented these in doubles, a powerful conceptual and aesthetic tactic. The images of the bird’s melanistic markings are curious, much like the stuffed birds they represent, questioning the strange art of preparing and preserving the skins of dead animals. The accurate imaging of the bird’s fascinatingly mundane physiognomies points to our rather limited knowledge of life. The quizzical nature surrounding her work is an attempt to make the viewer responsible for their presence, and to create a more direct experience. As the artist herself states, “I want to make sensible experience more present.”

Photographer, video and installation artist Sue de Beer creates work that references experiences related to high school and adolescents. de Beer’s work centers on haunting narratives that resonate with the tragic emotional state of a post-Columbine youth, often focusing on the engagement of first time activities such as sexual experience and drug use. The artist is a graduate of both Parsons School of Design (1995), and Columbia University (1998). In January 2004, the artist appeared in a four page spread in Artfourm, and later that year she was featured in the Whitney Biennial. Recent solo exhibitions include Sandroni Rey Gallery, L.A. and Kunst Werke, Berlin. The artist’s video work has been selected for screenings with the MOMA Gramercy Theatre, NYC, and The American Academy in Berlin.

Currently showing through March 29th at Deitch Projects in New York City is Tim Noble and Sue Webster‘s collaborative exhibition titled Polymorphous Perverse. This is a recreation of an exhibition installed at the Freud Museum in London in the fall of 2006. The artists met while studying at Nottingham Trent University and have previously exhibited at PS1/MoMA, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and Centro de Arte Contemporaneo de Malaga.

The central piece of the show is a kinetic sculpture based on Freud’s assertion that children are “polymorphously perverse,” meaning that they display a tendency to achieve sexual gratification out of nearly anything. This nascent sexuality is suppressed by socialization within a culture that believes in the denial of genitality to the young, leaving dormant ideas of sexuality that persist into adulthood. Thus, the “mature” sexual adult is in a subconscious state of conflict between a desire to satisfy a wish and a fear of doing so.

The sculpture at Deitch Projects is constructed of a workbench, on which mechanized objects composed of childhood toys are placed and activated by viewer presence. When activated, the converted toys generate a series of sexual interactions our culture now regards as perverse. While a conventional response would perhaps be an initial squeamishness, a more open-minded view would allow for the existence of infantile gratification. Noble and Webster force the viewer to address his or her feelings about repressed sexuality by confronting sex-negative social structures and Freud’s concept that the libido is the primary motivational force in the self.