Artipedia - Arts News

D.A.P. Inc./ CAVS at MIT/ Regency Arts Press Ltd.

Drawings: Simple, Obscure and Obtuse and Portal Excursion from Michael Smith

What: Book signing and screening
When: February 18, 2007
3:00 - 5:00 pm
Where: Artbook @ P.S.1 &
LeRosier Cafe
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, NY 11101
http://www.ps1.org
Who: D.A.P. Inc./ CAVS at MIT/ Regency Arts Press Ltd.

Performance, video, and installation artist Michael Smith presents Drawings: Simple, Obscure and Obtuse, his first artist’s book focused on works on paper, now available from Regency Arts Press, Ltd. ; and Portal Excursion, 2006, his latest short video, produced with the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT.

Drawings: Simple, Obscure and Obtuse chronicles a lifetime of drawings by Smith and gives a keyhole view into his production and process. It is a project overflowing with manic energy and stream-of-consciousness connections including sketches, notations, diagrams, storyboards, and even childhood drawings. Most of the material has been culled from private notebooks and other sources that have never before been exhibited or published.

Portal Excursion, 2006, 8 min, is Smith’s latest video to star the hapless “Mike,” his alter ego, whose high hopes and dubious achievements have complicated the story of the white American male since the late 1970s. In Portal, "Mike’s" lonely lifelong project of knowledge acquisition is renewed when, at middle age, he discovers OpenCourseWare, MIT’s “free and open educational resource for self-learners around the world.” The soundtrack was composed by Red Krayola co-founder Mayo Thompson.

Michael Smith has shown his work extensively around the US, Canada and Europe at a variety of venues including museums, galleries, universities, festivals, night clubs, on television and in the streets. He is currently working on the exhibition Mike’s World: Michael Smith & Joshua White (and other collaborators), which will open at the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas, Austin in August 2007, and travel domestically.

*****

Regency Arts Press Ltd. is dedicated to publishing artists’ books and book-based curatorial projects with American contemporary artists and curators. A primary goal of Regency is to foster experimentation and innovation outside of the concerns and constraints of the contemporary art marketplace.
http://regencyartspress.org/index.html

The Center for Advanced Visual Studies is a fellowship program that commissions and produces new artworks and art-based projects in the context of MIT. The Center facilitates exchange between contemporary artists and MIT’s faculty, students, and staff through public programs, support for long-term art projects, and student residencies.
http://cavs.mit.edu/

artbook @ P.S.1 is the most vibrant source for cutting-edge contemporary art books on the East Coast. Re-fitted as of November 2006, the store now offers an even greater selection of contemporary art titles, including P.S.1 exhibition-related publications (and other P.S.1 products), books relating to current New York shows, a large stock of monographs, theory, photography, multimedia titles, limited editions, journals, and many out-of-print titles. New publications arrive every week, reflecting current trends in the international art world. artbook @ P.S.1 presents book signings and readings by artists, curators, and critics. artbook@ps1.org.

For more information go to: http://www.ps1.org

SPELPLAN LANDSKRONA KONSTHALL

Marked, unmarked
Video, sound and exercise

Elisabet Apelmo and Marit Lindberg
3/2-18/3 2007
Landskrona Kunsthalle
Slottsgatan
SE-261 31 LANDSKRONA
SWEDEN

Elisabet Apelmo and Marit Lindberg
Elisabet Apelmo uses photography, video, sound and drawing in her works to explore power, identity, the body and sexuality. Apelmo also holds a master’s degree in sociology. Marit Lindberg’s works in video are based on stories, collective memories and language gaps. The point of intersection in the two artists’ work is the absorption with narrative and the shift between the documentary and the fictional. They also share an interest in women’s soccer, Apelmo from a sociological perspective and Lindberg as the parent of a girl who is a serious player of the game.

Marked, unmarked
Landskrona Konsthall was designed in 1963 by architects Sten Samuelsson and Fritz Jaenecke. The austere architecture in concrete and glass is considered one of the best examples of Swedish modernism. The park is present everywhere in the museum: around the building, inside in the atrium and in between, captured in the reflections in the glass. The park is part of the public urban space, but for whom is it public and at what hours of the day? The resonant base of the work is men’s violence against women, in both private and public settings. Cultural geographer Birgitta Andersson describes the violence as a continuum from verbal insult to rape, where the less serious offenses serve to remind the woman of the threat of rape. In response to the threat of victimization, women calculate their risks to avoid violence, which in turn leads to spatial limitations. The risk assessment is often such an obvious part of womanhood that it is not verbalized. But the artists are not intereste
d in reproducing the stereotypical picture of the frightened and defenseless woman. Where power is exercised, there is always potential for resistance and the focus of the exhibition is this power/counter power.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu believes that the female existence is constituted through male superordination as a perceived object, an object for others to look at. The negative collective expectations of women’s physical ability tends to become part of the body, expressed as permanent states of affairs. Bourdieu discusses sports as a means of changing these states. Intensive practice of sports “leads to a profound transformation of the subjective and objective experience of the body. […] It [the body] is no longer merely a thing that is made to be looked at or which one has to look at in order to prepare it to be looked at. Instead of being a body for others it becomes a body for oneself; the passive body becomes an active and acting body” writes Bourdieu. Through the practice of sports, the passive and objectified woman becomes an active, and de facto stronger, subject. Sports may also function as one form of resistance against traditional femininity, wherein the risk of be
ing the victim of male violence seems to be an accepted ingredient.

Karate is a concrete form of resistance, a martial art of self-defense. Can soccer be used as a more complex picture of resistance? Even though it is the most popular sport among women in Sweden, women soccer players are paradoxically enough considered unfeminine, mannish, or lesbian. The strength, speed, fearlessness and aggression it takes to be a good soccer player do not coincide with either traditional femininity or the image of woman as victim.

A group of women karateka, two women’s soccer teams, a male choir and two young musicians from Landskrona are involved in the exhibition. Shadow pictures of the women athletes in training are projected on the museum’s glass façade. The singers in the male choir are dressed in sports jerseys. They represent the male coaches, fathers, or boyfriends standing alongside the field.

Spelplan Landskrona Konsthall
Marked, unmarked is the first of three exhibitions in Spelplan Landskrona Konsthall, a joint project of Kultur Skåne and the municipality of Landskrona. A catalogue documenting the working processes surrounding the exhibition will be published in September 2007.

Hours
Tuesday – Sunday 13-18, closed Mondays

Information
http://www.skane.se/kultur/english
Jaana Järretorp, Kultur Skåne, +46 418 35 07 24
Birthe Wibrand, Landskrona konsthall, +46 418 47 05 69

For more information go to: http://www.skane.se/kultur/english

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

EMERGENCY ROOM
Thierry Geoffroy/Colonel
February 8, 2007 through March 19, 2007
Opening Celebration: February 11, noon-6:00 p.m.

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Avenue
Long Island City, NY 11101
Phone: 718-784-2084
http://www.ps1.org
http://www.ps1.org/emergencyroom
http://www.emergencyrooms.org

P.S.1 proudly presents Emergency Room, a constantly evolving collaborative exhibition conceived and led by artist Thierry Geoffroy, a.k.a. Colonel. To realize this project, Geoffroy has invited over thirty local and international artists to create and install new works in a range of media, all generated daily in response to current events. Emergency Room is on view in the third floor Archive Galleries from February 8 through March 19, 2007.

Emergency Room is motivated by a desire to learn what other artists think about current affairs from varied international perspectives under strict time constraints. By providing a physical space in which artists can display works made in reaction to current events, Emergency Room takes the pulse of the artistic community today. On each day of the exhibition, artists will install new work in response to the events of the last 24 hours, an arrangement that recalls daily news cycles. The artworks stay on view until the next morning when some are moved to an adjacent archive space and replaced by new work.

Emergency Room seeks to foster a sense of community among the participating artists and an atmosphere in which the gallery serves as a laboratory both for personal expression and formal experimentation. Artists will come with very different methodologies, from the politically charged to the personally intimate, to interact with a specific space and develop an on-going project together.

French-born Thierry Geoffroy (b. 1961) has presented his art internationally since 1995. Recently he has had solo exhibitions at Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark; IKM Museum, Oslo, Norway; Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, Netherlands; Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany; and Devron Arts, Huntly, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. In 2006, Geoffroy presented Emergency Room at Galerie Olaf Stüber, Berlin; and Kunsthallen Nikolaj, Copenhagen. He received the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from France in 2003. Geoffroy will present a project at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Emergency Room is organized by P.S.1 Director Alanna Heiss.

Major support for Emergency Room at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center is provided by The Danish Arts Agency. Exhibitions at P.S.1 are made possible by the Annual Exhibition Fund.

Press Contact: Sarah McLemore, Press Associate, sarah@ps1.org or 718.784.4729

For more information go to: http://www.ps1.org/emergencyroom