Stephanie Syjuco. Empire/Other: Morphset E, 2013 (video still); 3D animated video. Courtesy of the Artist and FLACC Workplace for Visual Artists, Belgium.

Much of the history of museum collections is related to the concentration of wealth and power of empires, and more recently corporate monopolies. While museums take great care in contextualizing the aesthetic, cultural, and historical significance of their artworks, they often omit most of their objects’ acquisition histories. These backgrounds, extending from antiquity to present, would most likely include emperors and profiteers, along with their contemporary counterparts: the business tycoons that museums name as donors. In RAIDERS: International Booty, Bountiful Harvest (Selections from the Collection of the A____ A__ M_____) (2011) and Empire/Other (2013–ongoing), Stephanie Syjuco alludes to the questionable acquisition of museum artifacts. In these projects Syjuco harnesses technologies of distribution and reproduction—the web, photography, and 3D scanning and printing—to create objects that reveal the tangled history of colonization and cultural hybridization. Syjuco’s web-sourced imagery and 3D manipulations create imperfect objects that declare their simulation while entering into the same economic exchange system as the artifacts that they reference.

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Nina Katchadourian, "Lavatory Self-Portrait in the Flemish Style #18-19," 2011. C-print. Edition of 8. Diptych: 7.157 x 6 inches each.

The thing about traveling on an airplane is that we take for granted how phenomenally absurd it is. There we sit, unfazed, hurdling through space at 500 miles per hour, 30,000 feet above the ground in a metal tube, surrounded by complete strangers whom in all likelihood we will never see again. There is also the unspoken airplane etiquette that we all hope the stranger sitting next to us will follow: please don’t talk, don’t move, don’t get up…basically please do everything you can to appear as though you don’t exist. With these restrictions, an airplane in flight is a very difficult place to do anything more than sleep, read, stare out the window or watch movies with only the most watered-down content. Unless you are Nina Katchadourian.

For Seat Assignment, her fifth solo show at Catherine Clark Gallery, Katchadourian culled from a body of work made on more than seventy flights over the past two years. Now, artists reading this might be terrified by having their workspace confined to the miniscule square-footage of an airline seat and the plane’s lavatory. For Katchadourian, it is a pragmatic opportunity to bring her “studio” with her. Using only her camera phone and the materials at hand, she creates everything from improvised classical Flemish self-portraits to miniature composed landscapes and worlds.

Nina Katchadourian. Excerpt from the Extreme Sports series, 2010. From the Seat Assignment series.

As its title suggests, the series Lavatory Self-Portrait in the Flemish Style uses objects such as inflatable neck pillows, napkins, bits of plastic and whatever else Katchadourian has on hand to make self-portraits in the style of classical Flemish paintings. Window Seat Suprematism references the fundamental geometric forms of the early 20th-century Russian movement. The images in the series, taken of the planes’ wings through the window, create compelling minimalist, geometric compositions that even Malevich could approve of.

Nina Katchadourian, "Meteor," from the Disasters series, 2010. From the Seat Assignment series.

In-flight magazines supply some of the most fruitful material. One work from Landscapes uses black sweater lint to turn a snow-covered mountain into a smoldering volcano. In Disasters, pretzel crumbs become a devastating landslide off mountain road. Black lint makes another appearance, with the addition of other various detritus, in Birds of New Zealand, adorning the heads and bodies of exotic birds and giving them an even more elaborate flare. The strangest thing about these images is how believable the compositions are. While it may be obvious that the pretzels on the road are indeed pretzels and not rocks, or that a bird does not have a cashew shaped appendage on its head in real life, the objects give a genuine moment of pause, plus the feeling that while absurd, it could be real.

Nina Katchadourian, "Wigeon" from the Birds of New Zealand series, 2011. From the Seat Assignment series.

Katchadourian views a situation that most of us find claustrophobic, boring and tedious as a challenge to highlight both the fantastic and mundane aspects of air travel. The sense of humor and improvisational genius that make up Seat Assignment exemplify an artist setting certain parameters for herself and successfully working within them to create work that is both complex and light hearted.

Seat Assignment will be on view at Catherine Clark Gallery until May 26, 2012.

Image Courtesy of Catherine Clark Gallery

In this year’s February issue of Artforum, which features a lengthy section dedicated to the topic of collaboration, Tom Hollert writes, “Collectives and collaboratives are still assumed to be intrinsically liberating. Their emancipatory dimension is linked with the elevation of co-labor, of working in teams rather than lingering in the solitude of the studio.” This intrinsic liberation may be the reason for the continued practice of collaborators leonardogillesfleur, a husband and wife team comprising Leonardo Giacomuzzo and Gilles-fleur Boutry. Yet, they take this straightforward logic on a roundabout, even paradoxical, route toward emancipation in their exhibition SNOWBALL.

Staged front and center at the entrance of Catharine Clark Gallery is SNOWBALL’s headlining act, FITO (2006-2010). Like most self-aggrandizing, fashionably late performers, this showstopper initially refuses to play its part. Part three of an ongoing series titled Irreconcilable Differences, FITO comprises two lipstick-red 1976 Fiat 600s seamlessly fused into one double-headed, obstinately opposing entity. This “car” doesn’t appear to be escaping or liberating anyone or anything anytime soon.

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Anthony Discenza, Teaser #1 (2009)

Opening Thursday, May 13th and running through Saturday the 15th is a flash project at Catherine Clark Gallery‘s New York space, the 14th Street Studio. The show, entitled Everything Will Probably Work Out OK, will feature recent work by Oakland, CA-based Anthony Discenza. Discenza’s text-based work is both literary-minded and low-brow laugh-inducing, and references the artist’s interest in what he calls an “internal viewing experience,” which is born of the freedom offered when one steps back from the constant heckling of image-based culture. His aluminum “street signs” offer the sort of one-liners that the Age of Twitter has become known for, though their enigmatic sentiments require a deeper dive into the murky waters of the wasted adult imagination than most 140 character witticisms.

When I spoke recently with gallery Owner/Director, Catherine Clark, she responded to Discenza’s new work—his so-called “non-visual source material”—by noting that “the new body of text-based projects, while in some ways a media or stylistic departure from his videos, remains consistent with his interests in appropriation and re-contextualizing cultural information.”

Everything Will Probably Work Out OK is the second pop-up exhibition being held at the 14th Street Studio—which is not so much a gallery in the classic sense (there is no “Catherine Clark Gallery, New York”), as an experiment into the way collectors and the public commingle with work. The first show at the space opened in March of this year—during the swarming of Manhattan that is New York art fair week—inspired by the idea that this season the gallery would like to present work in a more personalized setting in lieu of doing a fair.

The Discenza exhibition is a similar, though slightly altered, East Coast incarnation of an eponymously titled show at the Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco in January/February 2010. According to Clark, while many of the pieces from the original exhibit will be re-presented in the new space, “there are some significant additions and changes,” including the addition of a large digital photo-based work featuring the Olsen Twins. Additionally, she notes that “some of the text-based signs and works on paper are either newer pieces or feel more appropriate in relationship to the space and the other works selected for the exhibition.” While Everything Will Probably Work Out OK is only on view for three days this weekend, including during several cocktail receptions, the body of work will be up through the beginning of September and can be arranged for viewing by appointment.

Anthony Discenza, ELECTIVE PROCEDURE (2009) and LOW-KEY BASICS (2009)

Anthony Discenza earned his BA from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT and his MFA in Film and Video from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA. His work has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Australian Center for the Moving Image, the Getty Center, the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive and at the 2000 Whitney Biennial at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Currently in its last week on view at Catherine Clark Gallery is a solo show of work by Montreal-based photographers and brothers Carlos and Jason Sanchez. The exhibition marks the brothers’ second at the San Francisco gallery, and displays a survey of their work over the past seven years, since their collaboration began. The twelve large-scale photographs on view depict scenes that have been exhaustively staged by the artists and are rich with Hollywood-rivaling sets, props and lighting. These moments on display are like fleeting beats of time caught as stills on a film reel, and at the same time appear openly contrived– unashamed that they have been so heavily orchestrated. The artificiality of these moments, in the darker themed photographs, evokes an eerie sensation that grips the viewer. The discomfort is that these scenes seem to be depicted as fantasies in some twisted mind. In Abduction (2004), a generic, mustached and pasty white man kneels ominously at a little girls bedside as she seemingly opens gifts from her suitor that are intended to lure her to his windowless van.

The star of the show is John Mark Karr (2007), a portrait caught in mirror’s reflection of the pedophile who made a false confession to the murder of child beauty pageant queen Jon Benet Ramsey. While in many of the photographs the models are members of the brothers’ social circle, only the real John Mark Karr could perform as authentically and disturbingly as the artists imagined for this shot.

There are quieter, more subtle moments in the show, such as Drifter (2007), wherein a stained denim-donning vagrant pauses for reflection at a spot in the urban wilderness where a train track meets a chain link fence.

Carlos and Jason Sanchez have exhibited their work internationally at Caren Golden Fine Art, New York; Torch Gallery, Amsterdam; and Parisian Laundry, Montreal, among many others. Their work is in several public and private collections, including Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and 21c Museum, Louisville, Kentucky. Both men studied at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, where Carlos earned his BFA.