Artipedia - Arts News

Sept 9 through Oct 14

Opening Reception:
Chelsea Gallery
Friday September 8, 6-8 PM

Internationally-renowned sculptor and installation artist Jessica Stockholder will exhibit several new sculptures in her first exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash Chelsea.

Stockholder’s work is an invitation to enjoy the multiplicity of meaning embedded in all kinds of objects. She engages an aesthetic vocabulary that is idiosyncratic and unmistakably her own, using materials including plastic buckets and baskets, skeins of brightly-colored yarn, swatches of fabric, lamps, and household furniture.

Stockholder has exhibited widely in museums and galleries throughout the world. She was recently the focus of the career survey exhibition “Jessica Stockholder, Kissing the Wall: Works, 1988-2003″ at the Blaffer Art Gallery, University of Houston, Texas and the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She has had solo shows at museums including the Dia Center for the Arts and P.S. 1 (New York), The Renaissance Society (Chicago), the Power Plant (Toronto), and Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik (Odense, Denmark). She is represented by Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

Press Information: Stacy Bolton Communications
T: (212) 721-5350, Email: Emily@StacyBolton.com

Mitchell-Innes & Nash (Chelsea)
534 West 26th Street
Hours: Tue - Sat, 10am - 6pm

Mitchell-Innes & Nash (Uptown)
1018 Madison Avenue
Hours: Mon - Fri, 10am - 5pm

www.miandn.com
press@miandn.com

Jaroslaw Kozakiewicz, “Transfer”, 2006, rendering.

JAROSLAW KOZAKIEWICZ
TRANSFER

POLISH PAVILION
LA FONDAZIONE BIENNALE DI VENEZIA

10TH INTERNATIONAL ARCHITECTURE EXHIBITION
GIARDINI DI CASTELLO
VENICE

pavilion commissioner Agnieszka Morawinska
exhibition curator Gabriela Switek
collaboration Ewa Wojciechowska

The exhibition was organized by Zacheta National Gallery of Art
Pl. Malachowskiego 3
00-916 Warsaw, Poland
http://www.zacheta.art.pl

exhibition opens Friday, 8th September 2006
exhibition open until 19th November 2006

Polish participation in the 10th International Architecture Exhibition is made possible through the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.

Transfer, the title of Jaroslaw Kozakiewicz’s conceptual-architectural project at the Polish Pavilion, denotes the act of transporting something or someone from one place to another, the transfer of people, information, money, technology, but also the conveyance of an image from one surface to another, such as by tracing. ‘Transfer function’ is a term known to sociologists (a statistical method) as well as to architects designing, for instance, airport terminals.

The lead theme of Kozakiewicz’s project - the author is a sculptor and author of architectural projects - is Warsaw as an example of the contemporary culture of congestion, a city on which the post-1989 political, economic, and social transformation has left a strong and unique imprint. Warsaw is a city that is constantly subjected to criticism, a city of great construction projects, but at the same time of architectural and planning failures.

Transfer is inspired by Warsaw’s historical and cultural spatial axes, its lost architectural values, such as the Saxon axis, the King Stanislaw August axis, or the Praga axis. Jaroslaw Kozakiewicz proposes a new organic transfer network for Warsaw, partly overlapping with existing thoroughfares, but at the same time creating new connections and bringing back from oblivion the historical axes. The transfer network consists of a system of overpasses and performs three main functions:

1. connects green areas (city parks, suburban wooded areas), facilitating alternative communication routes for pedestrians and cyclists without the need to use modern transit facilities such as cars, trams, or the metro. The system of overpasses makes it possible, for instance, to transfer from one park to another without the need to use a car;
2. connects places of particular interest, creating specific trails, e.g. of memory, art, education, entertainment, or leisure;
3. improves the transfer function of existing communication routes.

The planned overpass network overlaps symbolically with the city’s existing networks: with its transfer (bus, tram, train, metro), power, telephone, water, or gas networks. Short animated film presents fragments of the selected routes, e.g. a memory trail referring to the historical Saxon axis, leading towards the suburban Kampinoski Forest through historical sites, or a leisure trail connecting green areas.

The transfer network changes its form as it moves through the city, alternating, depending on local conditions, between open overpasses modelled upon park alleys; tube-like roofed overpasses, encouraging transfer in adverse weather conditions; and ground pedestrian trails, i.e. streets closed for vehicle traffic. The elevation of the overpasses varies depending on, for instance, the presence of tram cabling or the height of nearby buildings. Either open or roofed, from the bottom the overpasses reflect views of the city and ground traffic, making it possible to partly ‘dematerialise’ them.

As Michel de Certeau notices in his Practice of Everyday Life, in the contemporary Athens the mass transit facilities are called metaphorai. To get to work or return home, the city inhabitants use ‘metaphors’, or transfer means, such as the bus, car, or metro. Jaroslaw Kozakiewicz’s project offers criticism of the specific situation of a congested city, while retaining the ambiguity of a metaphor. The overpass network isn’t an immediately executable architectural project but rather a proposition suggesting that we change our ‘means of transport’, and thus also our viewing angles and the ways we experience the city, that we transfer not only from place to place but also in time.

Jaroslaw Kozakiewicz. Born 1961 in Bialystok. Lives and works in Warsaw. Sculptor, author of architectural projects, installations and set designs. Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1981-1985) and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York (1985-1988).

Websites:
http://www.labiennale.art.pl, http://www.kozakiewicz.art.pl

For further information please contact:
jarek.kozakiewicz@akademie-solitude.de, g.switek@zacheta.art.pl

Sunset from Wilson Creek, 2006, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches

David Burns is a Montreal-born painter whose beautiful work portrays the brooding colours of sky and water along British Columbia’s coastline and Gulf islands. Burns turned from painting abstractions to capturing the essence of landscape when he saw the breathtaking beauty of British Columbia - as once did the artists who have most influenced his style and theme, Takeo Tanabe, Don Jarvis and Toni Onley.

From Lions Bay is inspired by views from his current location north of Vancouver, BC on the coast. For the past year, he has been painting the ever-changing play of light on the clouds and sea near Bowen Island, Gambier and Anvil Islands, and up the Howe Sound.

The oil paintings have a dreamy, almost mystical quality that belies their simple strength. Burns’ approach was described by Paula Gustafson as “a willingness to encompass sea and sky with minimal intervention”.

Burns received formal training in the Fine Arts Program at Concordia University, Montreal before moving to BC’s Sunshine Coast. The Diane Farris Gallery has represented David Burns since 2000. His paintings are included in collections in London, Singapore, and across Canada and the United States. This is his third solo show with the Gallery.

Diane Farris Gallery, 1590 West 7th Avenue, Vancouver

Opening Thursday, September 7, 2006
On view through Saturday, October 14

We are pleased to announce Frank Magnotta’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, which will debut a new body of 13 portrait drawings.

Collectively these drawings form a “rogues gallery� of different social archetypes – doctors, bankers and priests – that embody institutions that consistently infiltrate, and in some cases define, contemporary life: The pharmaceutical/health care industry, the bank and the church.

Each portrait is composed entirely from actual logos and institutional symbols appropriated from these three fields; each work is a composite of public signs that have been anthropomorphized. For example, The Predator is reminiscent of an early 20th century portrait of a Rockefeller-style robber baron, in fur and pince-nez glasses. The entire drawing is in fact an amalgamation of multiple logos for existing banks constructed into an elaborate composition and rendered in virtuosic, seductive technique. The brilliance of each work is a careful balance between the legibility of each drawing’s representation of a subject, and proximity to historical precedents, while engaging a subtle, yet grotesque satire.

Magnotta’s drawings give human form to abstract corporate identities that define much of contemporary daily experience. As such, they question the degree to which control over our own bodies and destinies is an illusion constructed by corporate culture and institutionalized religion.

…I had been thinking how ID (in the corporate sense) which is a pure form, can also be read as id (in the Freudian sense), and how maybe ID’s are created to touch the id. I think these portraits slip between both.
(Frank Magnotta, August 2006)

Frank Magnotta’s first show at Cohan and Leslie (2004) consisted of large-scale drawings of fictional architecture and landscapes created from corporate logos. Most of these drawings are currently in public museum collections. Magnotta’s work was subsequently included in MoMA/PS1’s 2005 exhibition “Greater New York�, and published in Vitamin D (Phaidon Press, 2005).

This exhibition will remain on view through Saturday, October 14 at 138 Tenth Avenue (between 18th and 19th Streets), Tuesday through Saturday from 10am to 6pm. For more information or images please call212-206-8710 or log on to www.cohanandleslie.com.

Frank Magnotta would like to thank The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc. and the New York Foundation for the Arts for their generous support.

ALISON ELIZABETH TAYLOR, Swimming Pool, 2006. Wood inlay, shellac, 70 X 48 inches.

James Cohan Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition of new works by Alison Elizabeth Taylor, opening on Thursday, September 7 and running through September 30.

Emerging artist Alison Elizabeth Taylor is best known for her narrative paintings that are sharp social critiques. Taylor’s modern stories illuminate the estrangement from nature, sexual tensions and violence underlying contemporary American life. The people in her works live out their lives in the culturally barren subdivisions and suburban sprawl of the American west. Culture’s castaways, they indulge in modern life’s distractions: sex, video games, oversized cars, guns and drugs.

Taylor employs the craft of marquetry—wood veneer inlay, a technique popularized during the reign of Louis XIV and associated with luxury and privilege, to create a dichotomy between subject and surface. On one hand, the opulence of the medium highlights the banal and the abject in her dystopic vision of modern life. On the other hand, Taylor pays respect to the innate humanity of her characters through her choice of this extraordinarily demanding craft.

The current exhibition at James Cohan Gallery will consist of 7 new marquetry works. In Roadside, two men hunt from the comfort of their SUV on the outskirts of a subdivision, pointing their guns at two deer grazing in the foreground. The image suggests themes of thoughtlessness, invasion and occupation. Throughout all the works in the exhibition, including Redrock, Swimming Pool, and Morning After Pabco, one senses the dry wit and caustic eye that Taylor brings to the social commentaries she so carefully constructs.

This is the first exhibition at James Cohan Gallery of Alison Elizabeth Taylor, a recent graduate of Columbia University, School of the Arts.

For further information, please contact Jane Cohan at jane@jamescohan.com or Laurie Harrison at lharrison@jamescohan.com.

For more information please visit http://www.jamescohan.com/

BELLWETHER is proud to announce the opening of its newly built Project Room featuring:
Karen Dow ³8 Views² September 7-October 7, 2006 Opening Thursday September 7, 6-8 pm
Yield, 2006
This exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published with the generous support of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.
For more information please contact Bellwether at 212 929 5959

The autumn exhibition season commences at Catriona Jeffries’ East 1^st space with a solo exhibition of new work by Kevin Schmidt.

Kevin Schmidt’s photographs and projected-video installations frequently amplify the human experience of nature as an encounter imbued with cultural codes but, at times, expanding beyond our fluency. In his past time-based works such as Long Beach Led Zep (2002), Fog (2004) and Burning Bush (2005), Schmidt cues the viewer towards a particular trope of landscape while gradually casting the scene with an obviously fabricated approximation of the sublime. His works very often present an opportunity for individual feeling and meditation, and perhaps offer a means to explore the perceptual conditions at play when reality transforms into something beyond words.

For his first solo exhibition at Catriona Jeffries, the artist brings together three photographs and a projection installation. The first work in the show, Sad Wolf, consists of a large, do-it-yourself lcd projector that the artist built inside a wooden box which adjoins the darkened projection room. Inside the space, a looped, six-minute digital video portrays an omega wolf living on the periphery of a captive pack in the Metro Toronto Zoo. Interceded indistinctly by the wire grid of the enclosure, the footage follows the wolf’s movements and at the same time clearly discloses the shuffling, moving, breathing presence of his documentarian. In contrast to the romantic symbol of the lone wolf which commonly represents solitude and radical free-spiritedness, the condition of the omega wolf signifies the nadir of pack society: the underdog and scapegoat of the pack. While actively disclosing the mediation of the artist, Sad Wolf positions the viewer between a collectively designated victim and the larger structure of contemporary art.

To produce each of his three photographs, entitled Face Lake, Johnson Lake, and Little Blue Lake, Schmidt hiked into the forest on several occasions. For each work, he located a prospective view interposed by a lone tree, which then became marked as a remote lookout post on the landscape through its transformation into a trompe-l’Å“il pictorial prop. Akin to the technique of matte painting in photography and special-effects filmmaking, a plaster-like substance was applied to the bark of the tree to produce a smooth surface onto which was painted an image of the scene behind. This dual frame of representation both enacts and documents the distance between artist’s standpoint and the doubled view of the landscape that meets the viewer in the gallery.

Please note:  The opening of this exhibition will take place on the afternoon of Saturday, September 9, 2 – 5pm.

Forthcoming exhibitions at Catriona Jeffries:

October/November: Geoffrey Farmer, November/December: Isabelle Pauwels, December: Art Basel Miami Beach.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE JOÃO ONOFRE Dates: September 7 ­ October 14, 2006 Opening: Thursday, September 7, 6-8 pm For his second solo exhibition at I-20 and his first in New York since 2002, João Onofre will premiere Thomas Dekker an Interview, and a new photo series from 2006. This video consists of an interview with the actor Thomas Dekker. At the age of 6 Dekker starred in the 1995 John Carpenter horror movie ­ Village of the Damned ­ as an alien child. Since then he has continued his career as an actor, appearing in numerous TV series and some motion pictures. Onofre directs questions to him, always unseen but heard. In fact, Onofre framed the questions for the character the actor played in the movie - the alien child - but these questions are answered by Thomas Dekker as himself; he was not made aware of what the artist was doing. Having worked as an actor since a very young age, Thomas Dekker¹s life revolves entirely around acting and thus around fiction. This interview elicits a moment at which the actor, to a degree, is simultaneously immersed in the domain of fiction and playing himself.
In the horror film, a visit by an unknown life form leaves the women of an American village pregnant. While the town doctor (Christopher Reeve), the village minister (Mark Hamill), and a federal government epidemiologist (Kirstie Alley) investigate, the women give birth. With white hair and cobalt eyes, the children¹s unusual resemblance suggests that they are all siblings. They begin to display powers that are fatal to some townspeople and do not bode well for the human race. By somehow veering from the pack, the alien child played by Thomas Dekker is the only one that survives.
Onofre¹s video is accompanied by a documentary-style photo series: Every Gravedigger in Lisbon, 2006. Portrayed are men and women that work in this profession in Lisbon. Every model in these photographs wears identical sunglasses, thereby conferring a unifying look to diverse individuals and disrupting the gesture of the photo documentary genre. The show also includes Duration, Variable and Location Piece (Unnumbered Extended Version), 2006, a work that reinterprets Douglas Huebler’s most well known series of conceptual works of the same name. Onofre makes a cyclical hybrid, in part by using the summer solstice moment to photograph a young woman at two different seasons simultaneously and recasting a woman today who bears a striking resemblance to Huebler¹s model in 1974. João Onofre was born in Lisbon in 1976, where he lives and works. He was educated at the University of Fine Arts, Lisbon, and received his MFA from Goldsmiths College, London. Opening September 6, his work will be on view in neo-con: Contemporary returns to Conceptual Art, at apexart, New York. He has had solo exhibitions at Magazin 4, Bregenz (2004); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (2003); Vienna Kunsthalle Project Space (2003); and the Chiado National Museum of Contemporary Art, Lisbon, which traveled to Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela (2003). Group shows include Youth of Today, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2006); The New Media Collection of the Centre Pompidou at the La Caixa Foundation, Barcelona (2005); Animals, Haunch of Venison, London (2004); (Just Stand There!), MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston (2003); Art Unlimited, Art 34 Basel (2003); Strange Days, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2003); the 49th Venice Biennale (2001); and Performing Bodies, The Tate Modern (2000). For further information please contact Megan Duncan Smith at I-20 at 212-645-1100, duncansmith@i-20.com

For immediate release:
September 7 - October 7, 2006 NATALIE JEREMIJENKO OOZ, Inc. (Šfor the birds) Infrastructure and facilities for high-density bird cohabitation on the roof of Postmasters Gallery
with public housing projects by: Aranda/Lasch + TerraSwarm bonetti/kozerski Leeser Architects Materialab with Gensler+Gutierrez OpenSource Architecture SYSTEMarchitects llc theLiving
perch design: Phil Taylor water systems designed by Fountainhead landscape design consulting: Kate Bakewell urban system consulting: LOOK/Laura Kurgan
Opening reception: Thursday , September 7, 6-8 pm
OOZ is ZOO backwards. Expanding on her project at the 2006 Whitney Biennial Natalie Jeremijenko has created a unique garden on the roof of Postmasters Gallery - an environmental experiment in interaction with New York City bird population. The complex 1,000 square-foot garden includes architect-designed bird housing projects (multi-family dwellings), water systems, as well as other amenities to improve the quality of life for urban birds. The installation creates conditions to observe birds’ adaptation to human-engineered technologies, testing formal and ecological theorems for high-density lifestyles, sustainable resource sharing among urban organisms, and the play of public/private division in cross-species interaction.
The comings and goings on the roof will be transmitted live to the (human) gallery space downstairs. The birdhouses along with electronic bird perches, drawings and photographs will also be exhibited and available for sale. OOZ is ZOO backwards. OOZ, Inc. (Š for the birds) demonstrates an urban system that accommodates birds and recognizes the valuable services they provide for the Manhattan ecosystem. The roof of Postmasters is now greener, a model for urban development: it includes bird-scaled speculative and sustainable architecture designed by a selection of the boldest architects. Such private housing for birds welcomes them and invites them to urbanize. In addition, Jeremijenko provides public facilities for the birds, regular healthy food, water and bathing facilities, including a system to contain and recycle local waste, as well as other public *cultural* amenities for birds, such as a concert hall, shopping mall, preferred foliage, insects and other resources. She is in effect launching an experimental platform to see:
Will birds share? Will birds use a weapon against another? Will they use the concert hall to perform and amplify their lovely songs? What forms of leisure will they pursue, given their basic needs are taken care of? A ferris wheel ? Will they self-medicate when given the opportunity? How much ecological impact can one green roof have?
Manhattan, because of its high population density, provides the greenest lifestyle in the US but further environmental exploration, given the huge population involved and the primacy of the city in the culture economy, means that small improvements in the environmental performance are massively amplified (compared with equivalent changes in rural or suburban contexts).
New York (Neé, New Amsterdam) was settled in what was one of the highest density and greatest diversity bird population in North America, thanks to the resources and rich diversity of this estuary environment. The same conditions that favored the development of a megatropolis for humans–plentiful fresh water, harbor access and other estuary conditions-originally favored a megatropolis for birds. Today, despite the myriad of challenges the local and migrating birds face, New York, N.Y. is still the New York, N.Y. for birds.
Natalie Jeremijenko [http://xdesign.ucsd.edu] is an artist and engineer who for this project assumes a modest neo(Robert) Moses role re–imagining and rebuilding urban systems. Unlike Moses she is designing systems that promote and sustain diversity, remediate terrestial nutrient cycles and improve the air traffic and quality. She has been known to work with the Bureau of Inverse Technology, environmental scientists, and other activists. She is currently on faculty of the Visual Art Department at UCSD, and a Global Distinguished Professor at NYU. She was previously on the faculty of the engineering department at Yale. Her robotics work will be featured in the upcoming Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, and the TreeLogic installation at MASSMoCA was recently replanted. The OOZ project is generously supported with the Research and Experimentation Grant in Art+Science+Technology from the Daniel Langlois Foundation.
Special thanks to Audubon New York [ http://ny.audubon.org/ ]; The Friends of the High Line [http://www.thehighline.org/]; and Hudson River Park Trust http://www.hudsonriverpark.org/

LIMITED EDITION BIRD HOUSING PROJECTS DEVELOPED BY:
Aranda/Lasch + TerraSwarm, [www.terraswarm.com] are a young architectural firm who’s extensive research into social movement and urban flows includes equipping pigeons with a camera pack to collect video documentation from birds eye view; and issuing traffic guides. They have collaborated with Jeremijenko on the OneTree Map for bikes and Birds and recently won a competition to design a Park Ranger cabin to house people in the wilderness. This prepared them for housing birds in more human wilds.
bonetti/kozerski studio [http://www.bonettikozerski.com] are best known for their spacious designs of the DKNY superstores in New York, Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur, and sumptuous high-end apartments, including thoughtful interior strategies to maximize external views (in particular of Central Park). Their attention to material surface and clean simple forms invites birds to enjoy luxury that is familiar to us. Views are tremendously important to both human and birds, but do birds concur on our ideas of lifestyle?
Leeser Architecture [http://www.leeser.com] current redesign of the Museum of the Moving Image, integrates seamless skins, surfaces, and technologies, with wit and a strong formal vocabulary. Glass, the neighborhood bar in Chelsea, designed by Leeser, conflates inside and outside surfaces and challenges assumptions of privacy. Bathroom primping is displayed in the street through a two way glass.
Materialab, founded by Anna Dyson has explored solar system design and received major grants to investigate multiple scale design strategies to improve the environmental performance of buildings. Teamed with the material and image expertise of Gensler+Gutierrez [http://www.donaldgensler.com/], they are producing a state of the art housing system pushing passive energy strategies and the sophisticated use of material technology. [www.rpi.edu/research/magazine/ winter04/pdf/rrq_winter04.pdf]
OpenSource Architecture, based in Madrid have specialized in designing stealth housing, disguising residences inside mirrored surfaces. They provide a bird reinterpretation of OMAs (Rem Koolhaus’) Casa da Musica, a well known performance space housing diverse musical venues in a complex polyhedra volume. The birds, also musical performers, are invited to explore these performative spaces.
SYSTEMarchitects llc, [http://www.systemarchitects.net/] are known for their systems analysis and range of prefabricated housing. Not prefab as simple blocks, but complex beautiful enclosures rationalized for scaled production. Their design addresses the American Kestral, a popular bird of prey known to inhabit this area. One of the firm’s Burst series, built under stringent climate and budget, recently won accolades in Australia.
theLiving: [http: www.thelivingnewyork.com/] use active and adaptive systems, teach “The Living Architecture: Responsive Kinetic Systems Lab” at Columbia University, and explore the architecture of information.
Postmasters Gallery located at 459 west 19th street between 9 and 10 Avenues is open Tuesday through Saturday 11 - 6 pm Please contact Magdalena Sawon with questions and image requests
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Magdalena Sawon Postmasters Gallery 459 W 19 Street New York, NY 10011 phone 212 727 3323 http://www.postmastersart.com