Greatly inspired by Germaine Greer‘s infamous publication The Female Eunuch, Melbourne artist Emily Floyd has created a 100 piece sculptural installation devoted to the book. Now showing at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, the wooden fragments include pieces which have been shaped to resemble the female form, referencing not only the book’s feminist contents but its notorious cover image designed by surrealist painter, John Holmes. Entitled The Temple of the Female Eunuch,the exhibition includes carvings containing text exerts from the book, often in vibrant, psychedelic colors,reflecting the period in which the book was written.

Emily Floyd earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts, majoring in sculpture from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She has been granted several awards and artist residencies, including the 2000 Cinemedia Digital Arts Fund and The University of Melbourne Asia link Residency, which sent her to work in New Delhi.She has had various solo exhibitions within Australia at institutions including The John Curtain Gallery, Perth, The Institute of Modern Art,Brisbane and Studio 12 at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne.

Currently exhibiting at Mary Boone Gallery in New York until March 1st is German artist Kati Heck. Heck earned her Masters in Painting from the Akademie voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp and has recently exhibited at Annie Gentils Gallery in Antwerp and Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Los Angeles. The artist has previously been featured on DailyServing.

Heck creates colossal paintings that link cultural imagery to give the allusion of collage. Formally reminiscent of Rita Ackerman and often somewhat disturbing, Heck’s visual language includes references to art history, pornography, cartoon, and film. Each painting presents a new narrative, such as in “No Time for Masterpieces: Ascension Commando,” which uses the gazes and gestures of the characters to direct the viewer across the canvas. This seemingly nonsensical, but incredibly theatrical, composition takes place over an image of the German flag, executed in huge painterly gestures. The anatomical anomalies and burlesque quality of these characters is initially confusing, but Heck’s compositional tour de force is helpfully arranged according to our natural left-to-right scanpath. The masterful execution in the artist’s chosen traditional medium of oil adds technical sophistication, and references to Magritte enhance the integrity of the work. By juxtaposing the formality of academic painting with inchoate imagery, Heck engages the viewer in an intellectual striptease. We want to know more.

Pakistani artist Bani Abidi will be exhibiting a collection of video and photographic works with Green Cardamon for her first UK solo exhibition. Standing Still Standing Still Standing… will feature the artist’s documentary style short films and photographs that examine the collective political culture held in Pakistan, but only to serve as a universal metaphor for oppression and political dominance. For the exhibition, two new works Reserved, a video produced for the 2006 Singapore Biennial, and The Address, a series of prints and video stills will be shown. Both works will be linked by a new series of digital drawings.

Abidi received her BFA from the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan in 1994 and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999. In 2000, Abidi attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Last year, the artist exhibited in Art Miami with Gallery Haines, Simulasian: Refiguring “Asia” for the Twenty First Century at the Asian Contemporary Art Fair in NY.

Opening this weekend at Freight and Volume in New York City will be “I and Thou,” new paintings by Israeli-born artist Ophrah Shemesh. This will be the artist’s debut exhibition with the gallery, and her third in NYC. Her work confronts and explores the psychology of the gaze, objectifying women by placing them in vulnerable and seductive situations. Shemesh is aware that she is working in a long art historic line of artists whose work functions through the gaze, and she addresses the notions of objectification with a quite empowerment embodied by her subjects. Her current body of paintings is based on the ’70s art house film “Night Porter,” a tragic love story of a woman and her Nazi captor.

Shemesh received her BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, and continued her studies at the New York School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture (NYSS). She has completed solo exhibitions at Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco, Baumgartner Gallery, New York and Mario Diacono Gallery, Boston, and her work has be featured in Art in America and Bomb Magazine as well as several other publications.

Monika Behrens

Now showing at Horus and Deloris Contemporary Art Space, Pyrmont is the latest exhibition by Sydney artist, Monika Behrens. Entitled “Cool the Globe: Glam Barbie,” the vibrant paintings are a tongue-in-cheek reflection of the media‚Äôs depiction of global warming. Polar bears can be seen stuffed inside martini glasses, while elongated structures at a windfarm are juxtaposed against the superfluous height of Barbie’s legs.

Behrens recently completed a Masters of Fine Art at the College of Fine Arts, Paddington. “Cool the Globe” is only her second solo exhibition, yet she has appeared in various group exhibitions both locally and internationally. The prominent inclusion of Barbie dolls within the series tie in with Behrens’ previous solo show “Silent BANG,” which depicts other children’s toys such as plastic soldiers, babushka dolls and train sets in quirky scenarios. In 2005 she was awarded the Viktoria Marinov Scholarship in Art, and has appeared in several publications including Australian Art Collector, The Sydney Morning Herald (http://www.smh.com.au/) and Art and Australia. All works on display are able to be purchased.

Ramak Fazel was born in Iran in 1965, but moved to Indiana when he was 2 months old. He graduated from Purdue University and later moved to New York to study graphic design and photography, assisting with notable photographers such as Mark Seliger and Bruce Davidson.

In the summer of 2006, Fazel embarked on a 17,345-mile odyssey to every United States capitol. His mission was to photograph each state capitol and to construct a 10″x14″ postcard in each city using stamps from his childhood collection. He mailed these cards to himself at his next destination, the postage providing his medium as well as payment. The postcard from New York to Pennsylvania had 11-cent stamps arranged in the shape of twin towers, one toppling over as a commercial aviation stamp pierced the other.

Fazel faced obstacles along the way, being mirandized and detained at one point. He believes he was placed on a “list” after telling an airline passenger about his artistic endeavor. Recalling he had a beard at the time, Fazel believes the passenger photographed him asleep and gave his image to TSA. After being questioned by a member of Maryland Joint Terrorism Task Force with the F.B.I., Fazel consulted his lawyer before moving on. Facing increased security at each capitol entrance, Fazel included this element of post-9/11 anxiety in his photographs, showing yellow caution lines and police security.

“49 State Capitols” is currently showing at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in SoHo until March 8th. (Entirely self-funded, Fazel ran out of money before Alaska). The exhibition includes the postcards, photographs, and ephemera from his 78- day trip. Having only wanted to “see up close the country you call home,” Fazel’s patriotic road trip recalls the interstate culture of post-Eisenhower America, but his journey unfolded in a way that could only have taken place in the contemporary atmosphere of “Homeland Security”.

The Stenersen Museum in Oslo, Norway is currently exhibiting Jan Christensen‘s “All Those Moments Will Be Lost” until March 9th. Christensen has explored different aspects of contemporary art and its markets in his previous works. His 2007 piece, Relative Value, which consisted of 100,000 krone (roughly $16,000) affixed to a 4 x 2 meter canvas, was stolen from it’s exhibition, generating international media attention for Christensen. Christensen’s aggressive attitude in his art comes from his background in graffiti, and can be seen in large-scale works such as his series, Painting Myself into a Corner, in which the artist uses thick painterly gestures to saturate a corner of the gallery in solid color. Christensen is restlessly creative, not content to be confined to a single medium. He segues between two and three-dimensional works, incorporating abstract images, video stills, text, and graffiti-based works. Christensen has previously exhibited across Europe and in the United States, both at the Galleri MGM in Oslo and at the Buia Gallery in New York.

For the Stenersen exhibition, Christensen ventures into the realm of light and sound, orchestrating an eclectic experience for the viewer by incorporating designs of the past and music of today. He has displayed over 80 lamps, dating from the Bauhaus period to the present, which he collected around Germany, where he currently lives and works. The artist has appropriated these “established design classics” and accompanied them with a contemporary soundtrack composed and produced by Rolf-Yngve Uggen and Johnny Skalleberg. The installation consists of the colorful lamps hung at various heights from 15 platforms suspended below the ceiling. The emanative qualities of the music and the luminosity of the lamps envelop the viewer and take the sensory experience a step beyond his previous, more visually exciting works.