Artist and filmmaker Michel Gondry will open a new exhibition this week at

Deitch Projects in NYC to correspond with his new film; both titled “Be Kind Rewind.” After one of the characters in the film accidentally gets his brain magnetized by a local power plant, he visits the video store of his friend and unknowingly erases all of the videotapes in the store’s inventory. The characters then decide to make their own homemade versions of popular films in a junkyard behind the store. For the exhibition, Gondry will recreate the video store in the gallery, complete with a variety of movie sets for viewers to participate with and actually recreate the films themselves. Each video is recorded and screened in the gallery. This exhibition is the artist’s second with Deitch and precedes the exhibition “Science of Sleep” which premiered with his film of the same title.

Gondry began to gain attention as a student of graphics in France while creating short videos for his band. In 1993, the artist directed the singer/songwriter Bjork‘s music video “Human Behavior,” which won him countless music video awards. Since, Gondry has directed videos for artists including The White Stripes, Beck and Daft Punk and has directed three major motion pictures including, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Science of Sleep.”

Italian artist Blu has developed an international reputation for his signature public wall paintings. His work stems from a strong interest in drawing, which has been influenced by graffiti and street art. Recently, Blu has created a series of wall drawing/animations through stop motion photography that allow his characters to come to life and interact with themselves. Just a few months ago the artist traveled to Bethlehem with fellow artists including Banksy, Sam3, and Paul Insect to work on an the exhibition titled “Santa’s Ghetto.” For the show, the artists rented an old fast-food restaurant and presented and sold a mix of western and Palestinian artist’s works to raise more than a million dollars for local charities. Blu has painted walls in almost every continent in the world and is currently represented by the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in the U.S. and Lazarides Gallery in London. Swindle Magazine featured the artist in their final issue of 2007.

Abstraction and it’s placement in the contemporary situation is clearly addressed in the current installation at Galerie Michelen Szwajcer, exhibiting the Austrian artist Heimo Zobernig. Here he confronts these issues head on, in his first solo exhibition in Belgium. The first room of the exhibition presents a tame presentation of an abstracted domestic setting. It’s a radial remuneration, you can see beds, heads, chairs, and stairs, but clearly no one lives here, this allows us the space necessary to ponder arts placement in the home.

Proceeding to the back room one is confronted with the mind numbing wow of geometric abstraction. While stunning, they question the placement of art objects in a tranquil environment, while radically altering the sense of ease.

Using tape as an art material, they reference the work of artists such as John Franklin, (time clock and type writer ribbon), or Chris Wilder, (duct tape on canvas), in their use of an easily available substance for the construction of new meaning. What at first seems to be geometric abstraction is really process painting. Sometimes it’s tape, sometimes just paint, either way these objects suck you in, inviting the viewer to revel in their constructed beauty. In flipping the canvas to a diamond form, these jewel like objects are fractured, polished and refined to perfection. Having no subject allows us to luxuriate in their beauty.

Zobernig has previously exhibited at Galerie Anslem Dreher, Berlin and Galeria Juana De Aizpuru, Madrid.

James Casebere

Restricting oneself to the exploration of “Interiors” could seem a bit stifling. But the current exhibition at gallery “Fifty One” demonstrates how much room one can force into a confined idea. It can certainly help when you bring together a group of internationally acclaimed artists.

The limitless expansiveness of Interiors is clearly addressed in the work of Claudia Hoffer, Andreas Gursky, and Karl Hugo Schmolz. Interiors can be cleaned up, sterilized and sanitized as evidenced in the work of Kate Schermerhorn, or you can use the interior to reflect what’s outside, witnessed by the inverted camera obscura of Abelardo Morell.

But things get most interesting when we focus on the inner light, as in the work of Matthew Pillsbury. While the world outside is bright and light, it’s the inner glow that focuses our attention. It’s that same inner warmth that James Casebere focuses on, having pioneered the field of the constructed photograph. Casebere who graduated from California Institute of the Arts in 1979, here presents us with a zen like prison. Clearly illustrating that before we can venture out we must build an inner peace, only then are we able to explore the potential that lies before us.

“Interiors” 24 January – March 8

No Wonderland in Winter at A.M. Richard Fine Art is a multi-media group exhibition with work by Joel Adas, Vanina Feldsztein, Andrew Garn, Jillian Mcdonald, Sacha Mallon, Stephen Mallon, Michelle Sholtis and Jessica Weiss. The theme of the exhibition, landscape and snow, was conceived on the conviction that winter is a time of desolation, decay, isolation. The eight artists presented all work in distinct mediums – be it paint, computer animation, line drawing, and photography.

Small and intimate, Joel Adas’ paintings offer glimpses of a hinted larger expanse of scenery, while Vanina Feldsztein eerily captures man-made, artificial winterscape sets and maquettes in her photographs. “Night Snow Flake and Tree,” Andrew Garn’s quasi scientific slide view of magnified snowflakes, morphs the familiar into an otherworldly abstract rendering, and conceptual situations in an artic landscape are communicated through the inter-active electronic language of Jillian Mcdonald’s “Snow Stories.” The artist uses appropriated and original film clips, images, animation, and sound to translate the viewer’s written story into a visual narrative.

No Wonderland in Winter is on display at A.M.Richard Fine Art until February 17th.

Josh Tonsfeldt

The works in “Nina in Position”, the current group exhibition at Artists Space in SoHo, employ Walter Benjamin’s contention that “To live is to leave traces,” as a platform from which to examine the body and its environs. Curated by Jeffrey Uslip, the exhibition is made up of work that takes into consideration the ways in which artistic rituals, histories, and narratives are re-signified within contemporary visual culture. Artists in the exhibition include: Kelly Barrie, Justin Beal, Huma Bhabha, Anya Gallaccio, Wade Guyton, Barkley Hendricks, Roni Horn, Igloolik Isuma Productions, Mary Kelly, Charles Long, Michelle Lopez, Andrew Lord, Robert Mapplethorpe, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Jack Pierson, Michael Queenland, Marco Rios, Amanda Ross- Ho, Julia Scher, Haim Steinbach, Lisa Tan, Josh Tonsfeldt.

Although striving to challenge the parameters of genre, most of the work can be described as sculptural, or a hybrid of artistic disciplines that creates a “sculptural gesture.” Many of the artists like Michelle Lopez and Huma Bhabha have been recognized as “sculptors” in the past, and the artworks illustrate sculpture’s mercurial qualities by examining materiality, trantransience, and the process of making. Intergenerational and interracial, Nina in Position curatorial matrix places artworks in dialogue in order to identify how social, cultural, and geopolitical change occurs on a local level, as well as to articulate how methodologies, practices, and tolerance shape-shift over decades.

Rooted in stenciling and street art, Christofer (Tofer) Chin‘s paintings depict abstracted landscapes and fantasy environments. Blurring the line between nature and architecture, Chin’s rendering of the landscape is represented by geometric abstraction that references architectural elements. These reductive paintings make use of unnatural vibrant colors and geometrical devices which cause a psychedelic dream-like quality where abstract shapes become mountains, roller coast tracks, or large zig-zag lines.

Christofer Chin received his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles in 2002 and was included in Otis’ 2006 exhibition Otis LA: Nine Decades of Los Angeles Art at the LA Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Park. Chin has exhibited his work internationally, and a book of his photography, Finger Bang!, was released in 2006 with book signings at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and POP in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Chin is featured on the cover in the November issue of Flaunt Magazine.