Alyson Shotz. Invariant Interval, 2013. Courtesy of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC. Photo: Rick Rhodes.

Among the most dramatic works in the show is Shotz’s Invariant Interval (2013). Made of silver wire threaded with handmade glass beads, the work seems to float in midair. In fact, it appears to be breathing, gradually expanding and contracting in response to the passing of viewers and currents of air. This reaction to its own environment is perhaps its strongest quality. The tiny beads reflect light as the piece subtly shifts in space, resulting in a glimmering quality that is dependent on the interaction of light and glass.

Alyson Shotz. Force of Nature, 2015; installation view, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC. Courtesy of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. Photo: Rick Rhodes.

Installed in the same gallery, Frames per Second (2011) also interacts with viewers who pass by. Covering a wall approximately twenty feet long by seven feet high, the installation consists of tiny strips of mirrored acrylic that create a highly distorted reflection of the gallery. Ostensibly an homage to Eadweard Muybridge’s early documentations of movement, the work also has a contemporary resonance as it reflects our fractured state of being—one that is often broken up into frames, pixels, or bytes. Frames per Second functions similarly to Invariant Interval—it requires the interaction of viewers in order to succeed.

Alyson Shotz. Recumbent Folds, #25-28, 2013. Courtesy of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC. Photo: Rick Rhodes.

Other works in the show, while not as grandiose, exemplify Shotz’s process-based practice. Among these are Recumbent Folds #25–28 (2013), four post-minimalist ceramic vessels displayed on a reclaimed piece of wood. Shotz uses porcelain—a material known for its fragility—and shortly after forming each piece, she drops it on the floor. The resulting works show the compression from the impact, which enables her to combine the delicate nature of the material with the force of her process. In addition to exploring the particular qualities of any given medium she employs, Shotz also embraces the role of chance in her systems-oriented practice.

More works follow in this vein: Topographic Iteration (2013–2014) consists of a series of three-dimensional photographic prints. Shotz crumples up a large piece of white paper, photographs it, and then crumples the resulting print again, which is finally displayed. The resulting work’s subdued aesthetics are complemented by the knowledge of the artist’s process, as well as the fact that six iterations of this series are shown together. Likewise, the series Sequent (2011) consists of pieces of paper folded in various arrangements before being run through an aquatint press. The results are abstract forms produced in varying shades of color.

Alyson Shotz. Topographic Iteration, 2013-2014. Courtesy of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC. Photo: Rick Rhodes.

The sole video in the show exists somewhat incongruously to the rest of the work. The Bedroom, Time Lapse (2014) is a beautifully rendered video of a time-lapsed bedroom scene, which is essentially a CGI version of Vincent van Gogh’s The Bedroom (1889), an homage explained by the gallery text as well as Shotz’s own description of the work. Light from the window circulates around the room as the sun rises and sets; the room also floods with water at one point, apparently inspired by the artist’s own studio being flooded by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012. While the work is nonspecific in a way that allows viewers to project their own narrative, the video seems out of place amid a gallery of process-based works. Likewise, though the van Gogh reference is also certainly intriguing for the video work itself, it is hard to reconcile his name being broached within a gallery of such work.

Alyson Shotz. The Bedroom, Time Lapse, 2014 (animation still); digital animation; 27:49. Courtesy of the Artist and Derek Eller Gallery, New York.

Nevertheless, the exhibition thrives on its responsiveness and its ability to contextualize works that are process-oriented. Elucidating the aesthetic decisions that go into these works, the exhibition allows viewers to not only study the intricate forms Shotz has created, but to wonder how she produced them, and to imagine the degree of chance or nature in each. While some works are subdued aesthetically and others are fabricated with common materials, the exhibition succeeds in expanding their intrigue.

Alyson Shotz: Force of Nature is on view at Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art through July 11, 2015.

Walead Beshty. A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench; 2013-2014. The Curve Gallery, Barbican Centre, London, UK. Photo: Alexei Tylevich.

Made of over 12,000 cyanotype prints and photograms carefully placed and pinned to the undulating curve of the gallery wall, the work documents fourteen months in the material and relational life of Beshty’s Los Angeles studio.[1] Thus, every item used, broken, or exhausted in the process of the work’s creation found its way into the work, either as the material matter of the installation itself or as the object photographed. As a representation of an artist’s practice, the work finds a way to acknowledge and render visible the aesthetic compost that is often kept out of sight when objects are placed within the clean white walls of an exhibition space. For Beshty, it is this waste that signals the work of the “work of art”—the constellation of decisions, actions, labor, institutional interventions, and mistakes that inform how objects and projects manifest themselves in dialogue with the world around them.

Walead Beshty. A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench; 2013-2014; installation view of wall installation made of cyanotypes. Photo: Getty Images/Chris Jackson.

The discrete separateness of each object invites the viewer to meander between passive and active forms of engagement where classification and contemplation work together, one informing the other, turning the reading of the work into a game of seek and find. Traces of research and creation can be spotted in the photograms of studio equipment, industrial tools, newspapers, and art journals, while strains of Beshty’s personal life and management role can be seen in the empty food containers, employee contracts, exhibition invitations, thank-you notes, and cinema tickets that ripple across the surface of the wall. Adding to the admixture are the more mysterious objects obscured during the cyanotype process that resist the process of naming (and thus significance)—a reminder of art’s resistance to quantitative procedures of data collation and progressive outcomes. Careful to attend to the personal as well as banal aspects of accumulated trash, Beshty is able to pluck at the idiosyncrasies and curiosities exposed in the act of assemblage, where happy accidents and compelling choices are difficult to distinguish within the artist’s paper-blue ecology of purposeful waste.

Like much of Beshty’s work, the Barbican piece is deeply concerned with the dialectical nature of a work’s becoming—its groundedness within a particular historical context, and its openness to the contingencies of time and history—and the material and relational by-products produced within the duration of the creative process. By foregrounding the acts of gathering, assembling, and archiving within this work, Beshty is able to attend to problems of presenting the visible and invisible forces at play in the creation, distribution, and exhibition of his artworks: “I thought of the studio as one big machine…a machine for making a kind of picture…the sum total of all of this is one depiction, is one picture, and in that sense, it’s a transparent picture.”[2]

Walead Beshty. FedEx Large Box; 2008; installation view at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2008 Whitney Biennial: Signs of the Time (New York City, NY). Photo: Whitney Museum of American Art.

It is this desire to demystify process that provides a point of connection between Beshty’s practice and the recent demand for political, state, and corporate transparency. After making his mark in the 2008 Whitney Biennial with an assortment of shatterproof glass cubes made to the standards of FedEx shipping boxes—a gesture that pointed toward the illusion of autonomy in minimalist sculpture, and to the systems of corporate transport and capital that tend to cover over and regulate the processes that deliver objects to your doorstep—Beshty has continued to find ways to acknowledge and create representations of the repression of materiality in contemporary aesthetic production. Similar to the FedEx sculpture series that bears the accumulations of time and travel (marks, cracks, handprints) onto the surfaces of the work, A Partial Disassembling employs the indexical impression of the cyanotype process and the waste of the artist’s studio in order to acknowledge his work’s circulation and complicity within powerful networks of technological, institutional, and social relations.

[1] Only 7,000 of the 12,000 items made it to the Curve Gallery wall. Accompanying the exhibition is a 41-volume book archive that reproduces all 12,000 pieces of the work in its totality.

[2]See Beshty’s interview with the internet television art project VernissageTV on October 31, 2014. The interview can be found on the station’s YouTube channel in the segment, “Walead Beshty at The Curve, Barbican Center, London.” Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LO_o7os4Hs

On Kawara. Lat. 31º25’N, Long. 8º41’E, 1965; acrylic on canvas; 83.5 x 96.3 x 5.3 cm (32.9 x 37.9 x 2 in). Courtesy of Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Photo: Peter Cox.

On Kawara’s Lat. 31º25’N, Long. 8º41’E (1965), one of his rare coordinate works, tells of an exact location. Its addition serves to anchor the show’s general thread of location as a symbolic or constructed place. Without looking up the coordinates, it’s an idea of somewhere else, a projection left to the viewer. Having seen this work the day before the artist’s death, I notice new weight in the piece’s reference to place. Why would Kawara want to make a point of this location? One potential answer might be that it records the location where the work was made, but the coordinates point to the middle of the Grand Erg Oriental, an unlikely part of the Sahara Desert in which to engage in a bit of painting. This is not at all a desirable destination but a place to not be at. However, in 1965, the incredible isolation of Lat. 31º25’N, Long. 8º41’E may have appeared to be the only safe haven from postcolonial global turmoil. Perhaps it’s the only site on Earth that still cannot be imposed upon except conceptually, by coordinate.

Patricia Reed. Pan-National Flag, 2009; digital print on industrial-grade flag fabric; 250 x 150 cm (98.4 x 59.1 in). Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Adam Rompel.

One floor up, and directly above Lat. 31º25’N, Long. 8º41’E, hangs Patricia Reed’s Pan-National Flag (2009). Stripped of color and printed on industrial-grade flag fabric, it’s a composite of the outlines of every existing national flag superimposed on each other. Its presence as a stately symbol is heightened by being inset into the wall, and its visual weight comes from the point at which the thin black lines merge into a messy black knot in the center—a dark, global mass argument. Painful to look at, this flag proposes a state of existence that considers every national ideal simultaneously, and what results is a symbolic state of obliterated understanding.

Ahmet Ögüt and Cevdet Erek. Ahmet Cevdet Bey: “Jacket”, 2011; alerted woolen blazer, two chairs; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artists & Moiz Zilberman Collection. Photo: Adam Rompel.

When mergers are proposed, they have a way of offering idyllic optimism. They proffer the possibility that the union will result in the best of both worlds. When two artists take on this concept, it follows that the art might be about the failed attempts of two entities acting as one. Ahmet Cevdet Bey: “Jacket” (2011) is a remnant of Ahmet Ögüt and Cevdet Erek’s first (and to date, only) project together. It’s a physical manifestation of an attempt at compromise, and of failing to form into one person. Acting in unison as “Ahmet Cevdet Bey,” this specially constructed suit jacket manifests the possibility of symbiosis, of being joined side by side in the attempt to make art as one. The double-width jacket draped across the backs of two matching chairs makes the absence of the artists feel momentary, as if there were only a temporary break in activity. Yet, in this Waiting for Godot-like scenario, the anticipated arrival leaves the viewer to wonder exactly what the pair had gotten up to and when they will return to collect the jacket and resume their activities.

In Minja Gu’s work 42.195 (2006), the artist attempts to prolong the inevitable. She documents her participation in a marathon—and walks the entire distance. Completing the race long after everyone else has lost interest, Gu presents the quintessential artistic dilemma of accepting the idea of becoming; as it is with an art practice, usually that becomes moment is the one in which the work is recognized. She raises the question of how an artist might succeed and also still be true to herself. In 42.195 she attempts to do both, and her actions not only subvert the conventional points of fast movement, winning, and achievement, but also entirely dodge the act of becoming the marathon with all of its adrenaline, angst, and pain.

Pierre Bismuth. In Prevention of Technical Malfunction – Unplugged Bruce Nauman Video Work, 2003; two Sony Trinitrons, Bruce Nauman videos transferred to DVD, plinths; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artists & Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art. Photo: Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk.

Some works in the show negate the present as a means to embrace it. Pierre Bismuth offers the satisfying In Prevention of Technical Malfunction – Unplugged Bruce Nauman Video Work (2003). It’s exactly as you would expect from the title: Two side-by-side Sony Trinitron monitors, complete with standard metal frames, sit blankly on white plinths. As a video that is simultaneously ready to be played and never to be played, the efforts that protect it from “technical malfunction” keep it tethered to the present but also extend the work into the potential of a speculative future. Katarina Löfström’s Loop (The End) (2006) welcomes the inevitable by presenting a string of flashing red light bulbs draped from the ceiling that blink out the Morse code for “the end.” The work uses the present as a device to announce the imminent future that has yet to happen.

The Part in the Story Where a Part Becomes a Part of Something Else, 2014, installation view, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art. (front to back) Gabriel Lester. Chance Encounters, 2011. Ceal Floyer, No Positions Available, 2007. Courtesy of the Artists & Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art. Photo: Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk.

On the whole, Witte de With presents one of the most rewarding group shows that I’ve seen in a long time, and there are many more works that deserve mention. Curators Heman Chong and Samuel Saelemakers group the works within each room to draw out congruent threads without forcing new meanings. It’s a huge feat to curate a massive show that still makes sense, and the exhibition is a far cry from the recent trend of heavy-handed tactics by the curator-as-artist. Instead, the show flows effortlessly, as the works are given just enough room to be considered and then reconsidered in the larger context. And that moment of reconsidering is the transition to becoming.

The Part in the Story Where a Part Becomes a Part Of Something Else is part of Moderation(s), a two-year collaboration of events with Spring Workshop in Hong Kong. It is on view at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, through August 17, 2014.

Phyllida Barlow. Untitled, circa 1998; acrylic and pastel on colored paper; 59.4 x 84 cm. (23 3/8 x 33 1/8 in.). Courtesy of the Artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Alex Delfanne.

Barlow is known mainly as a sculptor, with work rooted in the anti-monument stance of modernist formalism. Her concern is for the consequences of the physical object in relation to the surrounding environment, and the resulting impact of that relationship on the viewer. Barlow’s acute understanding of the psychological effect of sculpture developed when she was a young artist, in opposition to the orderly and proper English art of the 1960s, when precedent dictated a “correct” way to make a piece of sculpture. Her focus was to reject the seriousness of pure or idealized form and its inherent misogyny by creating work that was the result of the experience of making. Using non-traditional art materials, her art is constructed to look quick, clunky, and precarious. Embracing absurdity, her pieces are physically menacing while simultaneously embodying a sense of lightness and humor. Constructed by layering materials such as cardboard, cement, fabric, plaster, polystyrene, tape, timber, and household paint, the work demonstrates the experience of intuitive making and asks the viewer to engage likewise.

Phyllida Barlow. Fifty Years of Drawing, 2014; installation view, Hauser & Wirth, London. Courtesy of the Artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Alex Delfanne.

Fifty Years of Drawing is a smartly hung show that avoids a chronological survey and instead offers groups of works to highlight common threads among drawings that are stylistically similar. The framed drawings are either stacked or hung side by side, and although there are many really strong individual pieces, to consider any one in isolation is to miss the point. They function as discrete components in service of a larger process that lays out Barlow’s history of development with all of the experiments, shifts, and styles. More than just sketches for larger projects, the drawings function similarly to the sculptural work: Though each piece is distinct, it builds off of previous work while simultaneously laying the foundation for the next piece.

(from left to right) Phyllida Barlow. 1 Chair Figure, circa 1970; colored pencil on paper; 76.5 x 55.6 cm. (30 1/8 x 21 7/8 in.). 7 Bathing Hut, circa 1970; colored pencil on paper; 56 x 76.4 cm. (22 x 30 1/8 in.). Both courtesy of the Artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Alex Delfanne.

What becomes evident throughout is Barlow’s urgency; her gestures are the most consistent part of the show and are characteristic of her art production. The early work encapsulates that time when a young artist is experimenting with a belief that the results are forever going to change the world of art. Pushing boundaries and searching for answers—along with looking terribly like everything else—is what makes these drawings powerful and honest. They reflect hunger, desire, ambition, and most importantly a search for meaning.

(from left to right) Phyllida Barlow. Untitled, circa 1975; compressed charcoal on paper; 57.2 x 77.4 cm. (22 1/2 x 30 1/2 in.). Untitled, circa 1975; compressed charcoal on paper; 56 x 76 cm. (22 x 29 7/8 in.). Both courtesy of the Artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Alex Delfanne.

The early influences are recognizable as what was fashionable at the time, digested through Barlow’s filter of understanding and gesture. The wildcards in the show are the works from the mid-to-late 1970s, which can only be called hard-edged. One set of four drawings—labeled untitled, circa 1975—utilizes compressed charcoal to depict abstracted interiors and exteriors of buildings in beautiful black lines. It’s as if Patrick Caulfield made a drawing while restricted to Frank Stella’s black stripes. Viewers can see Barlow sifting through all that modernity has to offer, trying to make sense of it. Only in the drawings from the 1990s can one see a more confident artist with a developed, cohesive style that becomes recognizably Barlow. With a nod to Philip Guston’s palette and gesture, the later works—heavy-handed, loose drawings of places, objects, and of her own installations—are more pictorially grounded. These are consistently solid works from an artist who has hit her stride.

Phyllida Barlow. Fifty Years of Drawing, 2014; installation view, Hauser & Wirth, London. Courtesy of the Artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Alex Delfanne.

This exhibition wouldn’t be nearly as successful if it was limited to work from a specific period. Witnessing Barlow’s lifelong investment in her practice and her process makes this show engaging. She is the type of artist who works from the gut. She captures moments of failure as a means to embrace the absurdity that is often the outcome of the process of discovery. Fifty Years of Drawing succeeds because it doesn’t try to hide the fact that Barlow, like most artists, had grappled with continuing to make something that is meaningful; by avoiding a clean, reverse-engineered view of Barlow’s oeuvre, it celebrates every artist’s attempt to make sense of the world.

Phyllida Barlow: Fifty Years of Drawing is on view at Hauser & Wirth, London, through July 26, 2014.

Something radical has been happening for a while in art that has been evading easy classification. The digital fold has facilitated a giant mash-up of layers upon layers of information composed from fragments of fragments. Sound bites, video clips, 140-character quips, and filtered snapshots are curated extracts, continuously looping in a recopied and redistributed cycle. Yet in an age of digital re-pointing, the language used to consider art is still rooted in a Modernist dialogue of movements and styles, and it’s inevitable that there would be a notional presupposition about much of the work made today. It would be easy to misclassify an artist’s use of digital-processing as part of a conceptual practice, but putting aside dated art-historical constructs, let’s incorporate the twenty-year-old foundation of Relational Aesthetics as a jumping-off point instead. Artists now process information rather than material or even constructed experiences; viewed through this theoretic lens, even if an artist paints color-field paintings in 2014, the resulting paint strokes are the consequence of reprocessed information. It’s a seemingly subtle shift, but one that accounts for process as the medium for our digital age. This is the access point for Michael Riedel’s current solo show at  David Zwirner’s London gallery. Riedel has been making art—collaboratively and individually­—for the last 14 years, and one won’t get a more succinct example of his mantra of “Record–Label–Playback” than in this exhibition.

Michael Riedel. Laws of Form, 2014; installation view, David Zwirner, London. Courtesy of the Artists and David Zwirner, New York/London.

On the ground floor, the installation Oskar-von-Miller Strasse 16 (2000–2011) offers ephemera and documentation of the collaborative activities of the Frankfurt art space that Riedel started with Dennis Loesch. The space is described as a “recording device that would merely replay the cultural offering it had recorded and then marvel at the pops, hisses, crackles, and skips that such playback caused.” Oskar-von-Miller Strasse 16 (OMS) opened its doors in 2000 by restaging a deinstalled Jim Isermann show taken from the garbage bins of a nearby museum. Other offerings included film nights that screened handycam-captured films from art theaters, reenactments of talks and readings of cultural importance, club nights that reconstituted other club nights by replacing the recorded sounds from those clubs, numerous copied publications and posters (often produced by printing over the source material), and on one occasion, hired actors to mime Gilbert and George at their own reception; all of which was obsessively documented. This continual outward critique would intermittently point back and copy itself by re-creating exhibitions from documentation of past shows. Each copy, with its flaws and interpretations, creates a new document. This strategy unfailingly extends to the Zwirner show where exhibition fragments, video documentation, and publication byproduct fill the space. One technique that OMS unwaveringly used was that the reproducible images were always done in black-and-white. This furthers the distortion, pushing the work away from its source and toward ambiguity. Framed and orderly, the ground floor has the tangential raw energy of a zine made gigantic, but the fun-spirited energy and prankster aura of the original space is still very much present in this re-presentation. Riedel offers another fold in the ground floor’s rear gallery by precisely re-creating the visual elements from Warhol Shooting (2001)—a reenactment of Cecil Beaton’s photo Andy Warhol and Members of the Factory—complete with a mirrored table, built-out corner with accompanying electrical wire, cheap wood-constructed window facsimile, stripy shirt, and tripod. To complete the install, stacks of the newly published Oskar (2014), the artist book that tallies up ten years of OMS activities, adorn the table as mass-produced props. A contained system of process in itself, the 490 pages of content are a reedited and expanded version of the earlier German version from 2003.

Michael Riedel. Warhol Shooting, 2001
; MDF and silver foil table, camera, tripod, sweater, cable, wood; 
dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and David Zwirner, New York/London.

If the activities at Oskar-von-Miller Strasse 16 were a continual transmission of processing copy after copy, then Riedel’s post-OMS work is the continual practice of copying process after process, and reveling in the resulting distorted byproduct. The gallery’s first floor feels much more grown-up and somber, with the polished PowerPoint Paintings series being the central axis of the show. This series is constructed from PowerPoint images that are interrupted at the moment of transition between one slide and the next; the content of those two separate images is fractured and merged to create a new aesthetic offering. This new image is captured and silkscreened onto a honeycomb panel and framed. The source material for these paintings is from Riedel’s previous projects, which themselves are the byproduct of a process that references older work.

(from left to right) Michael Riedel. Untitled (Circle), 2014; Untitled (Wheel 4 Spoke), 2014; Untitled (Dissolve), 2014; each work, silkscreen on honeycomb panel; 100 3/8 x 56 3/4 in. (255 x 144 cm). Courtesy of the Artist and David Zwirner, New York/London.

This system of production is tangible, made visible by the resulting composition of layered panels of reworked and combined fragments. Those individual fragments still reveal their origin but have been subsumed into the larger construct. Riedel has now come to a place in his practice where the source material’s original content is still traceable but is so distorted that it renders any original meaning purposeless. What is left is a chain of defused content that can be understood only visually. Adjacent to the paintings are windowed walls that have been papered with passages of repeated and scaled text. The content is taken from a snippet of HTML code on nature.com’s “Laws of Form Revisited” webpage. By displaying the raw metadata, content, and style, the site’s own system of formatting information is revealed. Riedel reorganizes the literal content as a repeated random pattern of perpendicular text segments and highlights the recurring phrase “Laws of Form” by more than quadrupling its size. This simple act of copy–pasting renders the code dysfunctional for its original purpose while leaving its reference points to generate an aesthetic experience.

Michael Riedel. Laws of Form, 2014; installation view, David Zwirner, London. Courtesy of the Artists and David Zwirner, New York/London.

Process as a system for art production utilizes ideas and material interchangeably. For Riedel, his concerns are aesthetic, hence the formal qualities of the output. The radical shift in art making is that for years, the conceptual strategy was to fancy-up ideas with tools from the aesthetic toolbox, but Riedel’s system takes tools from the conceptual toolbox as strategies to create an aesthetic body of work. Laws of Form is a treasure trove of byproduct that offers the proposition that it’s no longer the idea, but the process that becomes a machine that makes the art.

Michael Riedel: Laws of Form is on view at David Zwirner, London, through May 31, 2014.

[1] Adam Fisher, “The Copycat,” New York Times, accessed May 13, 2014, at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/t-magazine/michael-riedel-the-copycat.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&

Play With Your Own Marbles is the title of a new exhibition currently on view at San Francisco’s NOMA Gallery. The exhibition, which is curated by Betty Nguyen, Creative Director of First Person Magazine, brings together three Los Angeles-based artists in an examination of artistic process and its relation to utility, both in object and image. The exhibition highlights the objects and cyanotypes of Walead Beshty, the meticulously rendered photorealist drawings of Karl Haendel, and the formal concrete “paintings” of Patrick Hill.

Play With Your Own Marbles is not only linked through the evident formal and aesthetic concerns of each artist, as the show is remarkably connected through its homogenized temperament, graphically monochromatic palette, and overall deconstructionist sensibility, but each artist also plays with a strong sense of irony through material, form and method of display.

Patrick Hill

Patrick Hill has applied thick bands of concrete, absorbed and stained into a black velvety surface revealing small crevices of color, opening a dialogue between a strictly modernist approach to painting and the everyday utilitarian material of concrete.

Walead Beshty’s FedEx Kraft Box………… sculpture, which contains custom shatter proof glass cubes placed inside standard Fed-ex boxes, displays the evidence of wear as an object travels from one location to another. These ready made materials are further “improved” by the imposing alteration of travel. In addition to the sculpture, Beshty also presents several photographic images of isolated objects produced by placing the otherwise utilitarian forms on photosensitive paper, rendering them useless of their original function. Images of crumpled paper and eyedroppers begin to resemble abstracted paintings, drawings and monoprints further removing the viewer from the object’s original state and placing it more in the realm of the artifact.

Karl Haendel’s photorealist graphite drawings subvert functional objects by manipulating scale, content and source imagery. Haendel’s imagery and method of presentation is generous in it ability to be easily recognized though careful rendering and specific depiction of everyday materials such as paper, razor blades, nails and paper clips. However, the work subtly unfolds and challenges the viewer through its coded symbols and methods of display. Haendel presents a delicately drawn image of ripped paper on a plywood platform supported by stacks of art magazines, which plays with the viewer’s physical perspective to drawing and the repetition of material (paper) through multiple forms. This work is presented along side images of blades mounted to wood gently resting against a wall and large scrolls of paper containing references of would be titles for the exhibition, all of which playfully discuss the relationship between concept and material.

The collections of work in Play With Your Own Marbles are subtly seductive, engaging the viewer first through a whisper and later through a tug of the ear. Each work takes the utilitarian object and subverts it to reveal new potentials that have the ability to exist on a sliding scale of completion, remaining in a state of flux both formally and conceptually.

Play With Your Own Marbles will be on view in San Francisco through October 3rd.

Clayton Brothers, Rob and Christian, take root in the artists’ immediate environment, referencing local business, neighborhood characters, overheard conversations and local signs that exist outside of the artists’ California-based studio. Dense with information, these fractured narratives come to life through a unique collaborative process. The brothers rarely work on the same canvas at one time or even discuss the work while it’s being created; instead they work through improvisation, adding to, editing and reconstructing the work as it develops through their independent approaches. The artists’ co-creation is completed without ego and is thoroughly organic, allowing the final production to be ambiguous and developed directly from the employed process. Both brothers are graduates of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. The Clayton Brothers have exhibited in numerous national solo shows including “Wishy Washy” at the Bellwether Gallery in New York (2006) and “I Come From Here” at the Mackey Gallery in Houston, Texas (2004). The artists have also exhibited in several exhibitions with the La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles, such as “Six Foot Seven” (2003), “Candy Lackey” (2002) and “Lucky 13″ (1995).