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EFA Gallery

Meme: Romanticism
Organized by Michele Thursz

Artists: Tobias Bernstrup, Jeremy Blake, Claudia Hart,
Michelle Handelman, Reynold Reynolds and Partick Jolley,
and Carlo Zanni

February 16, 2007- March 31, 2007

Opening Reception, February 16, 6:00-8:00 pm

DAILY SCREENINGS Wednesday through Saturday:
Winchester Trilogy: 12PM, 2PM
Mantis City: 1PM, 3PM
This Delicate Monster: 1:30PM, 3:30
Folly & Error: 1:40PM: 3:40
The Possible Ties Between Illness and Success: 1:50, 3:45PM
Sugar: 4-6PM

The Swing and the prints are in the main gallery.

For video synopsis: http://meme-romanticism.blogspot.com/

“I want to compete with the movies”

Meme: Romanticism examines five artists’ cinematic productions that utilize technological aesthetics, cultural symbolism, historic compositions, and narratives to expose the conceptual underpinning of Romanticism. The exhibition will be set up like a theater, with viewing times allocated by length of the video. The room will have a sound system and projection with seating for the viewer’s comfort, so they may enjoy the works. The waiting area will be set up as a traditional gallery space with prints derived or inspired by the films, but still functioning as unique objects.

The exhibition includes the artist collaborative feature film Sugar and prints by Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley; Mantis City, a video and print by Tobias Bernstrup; Winchester Trilogy, videos and print by Jeremy Blake; The Possible Ties Between Illness and Success, an interactive video and prints Carlo Zanni; This Delicate Monster, video and prints by Michelle Handelman; and The Swing, 3-D animation and prints by Claudia Hart.

Romanticism as a movement emerged in the late 1700s. Artists took a stance against formal aesthetics to define art as a place for sentiment, nature, and the play of the imagination. This was an idea of art in which individuals shared their subjective realities with the public. Since that time, technologies of representation have advanced from still to moving images, from early cinema to Hollywood films to personal computers and the Internet. A social medium of representation unfolded with the capability to archive and to edit histories, identities, and geographies. These capabilities allow the public to participate in fantastic situations. Movies became popular because they reflect the dreams, fears, or fantasies of a mass public. The impact of Hollywood film and mass media is intriguing sociologically: How does consumer culture affect the personal? How does it effect the way people define their own identities?

Artists of the 50s and 60s started using the machinery of commercial culture to create and engage a broad public. This tendency was later identified as “Pop”. Today’s contemporary artist raises the ante of the Pop aesthetic by creating works that reflect our communal experiences. Communality is the key to the success of the movies and mass media; both use the tactic of bringing together a general consensus and the popular. The market and the media are based on the human need to share—empathy, opinion, and history—making the media generative by the public and the media reflecting back and forth on each other.

In the contemporary art context these cinematic or communal works become the romantic concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art. The exhibited works are cinematic and poetic by the nature of their production and their narratives. They reference historic compositions to create an emotional outlook on nature. These works are also a good index of the values and needs of our society because they are invested in our cultural life. In them the hierarchies and histories of art making is deconstructed and reapplied to these artists’ craft and aesthetics, aligning theirs artistic intention with the ideas of romanticism.

Meme: Romanticism suggests that Romanticism was more than a formal movement of the past but successful in changing and adapting with the times and the exigencies of history—and with the needs contemporary art making.

—Michele Thursz, 2006

Michele Thursz is an independent curator. Recently she has been appointed as the director of NY Projects, an international art advisory and production company. Her previous projects include Post Media Network; Post Media is a term and action demonstrating the continuous evolution of uses of media and its effect on artists practice, and culture-at-large. Thursz’ recent curatorial projects include Thread, Wood Street Gallery, Pattern: Modernism as Mediator, Borusan Gallery, Istanbul, Cine-O-matic, The New Museum, public.exe: Public Execution, Exit Art, NYC, and Democracy is Fun, White Box, NYC.
Contact: michele.thursz@gmail.com

This exhibition is presented by the EFA Gallery, a program of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. With additional support from The Helen Keeler Burke Charitable Foundation, Peter C. Gould, Materials for the Arts, and Carnegie Corporation Inc. and many generous individuals.

The EFA Gallery is a curatorial project space. Through the gallery, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts supports the creative work of independent curators. Curators build the framework in which we understand artists and the art they make. At their best, they redefine how we look at culture. The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts believes in the essential importance of art in a civil society. The value of the artist’s creative spirit is not limited by age, race, nationality or acceptance by others.

EFA Gallery
EFA Studio Center
323 West 39th Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10018
between 8th and 9th Avenues

Gallery Hours: Wed. through Sat., 12-6 PM

For further information:
Elaine Tin Nyo, Director
T. 212-563-5855 x203, F. 212-563-1875
elaine@efa1.org

For more information go to: http://meme-romanticism.blogspot.com/

la criée center for contemporary art

Curatorial symposium
Exhibition Practices : Stakes & Perspectives

8 March 2007
22 March 2007

la criée center for contemporary art
place Honoré Commeurec, halles centrales
35000 Rennes, France
tel.: (+33) (0)2 23 62 25 10
fax (+33) (0)2 23 62 25 19
la-criee@ville-rennes.fr
http://www.criee.org

Symposium at the Museum of Fine Arts (Auditorium)
20 quai Emile Zola
35000 Rennes, France

With (subject to modifications) :

Thursday 8 March 2007
Chus Martinez, Director of Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany.
Joanna Mytkowska, curator at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.
Raphaële Jeune, Artistic director of the first contemporary art biennial in Rennes, France.
Alexandre Perigot, Artist.

Thursday 22 March 2007
John Welchman, Professor of Art History in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, USA.
Hou Hanru, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs and Chair of the Exhibition and Museum Studies program at the San Francisco Art Institute, USA.
Manuel Olveira Paz, Artist and Director of Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Spain.

In 2007, la criée center for contemporary art will initiate a series of symposia on exhibition practices in contemporary art. It is our hope that this first edition will be the beginning of a series rich in the exchange of experiences and curatorial perspectives.

The series of symposia on exhibition practices has emerged from la criée’s project for residencies and exhibitions initiated in 2005 in the European cities of the Atlantic Arc. This European project has provided opportunities for productive encounters and collaborations between visiting artists, curators, directors, international art critics and artistic directors.

The discovery of very different ways of working from one context to another, exchanges around production and exhibition projects, encounters, often unexpected, with art theoreticians and practitioners all contributed to our desire to prolong and deepen this reflection, to make these exchanges public and maintain the connections established.

Each symposium will bring together international professionals; these artists, curators, art historians and theoreticians will be invited because they analyze and renew exhibition practices in the field of contemporary art.

The complementary nature of artistic creation, curatorial practice, historical research, critical thought and theorization will enrich the debate and enable the exchange of experiences and the sharing of projects, thereby contributing to the quality of scholarship and prospective thought.

The goal of the 2007 symposium is to share different experiences and perspectives on the way artists and curators work with the history and current status of the exhibition, and how they take charge of, circumscribe or undermine existing exhibition formats.

How do they propose new ways of working with the artist, giving priority to directions within the work or to production rather than to the exhibition or, on the contrary, extending the exhibition model according to specific conditions of exchange, work and visibility?

How can we “produce”, “control”, or “free ourselves from” images in exhibitions in the age of globalization?

Further information (participants, program, etc.) : http://www.criee.org/pdf/curatorialsymposium2007.pdf

Joining the symposium : email at la-criee@ville-rennes.fr

The symposium 2007 has received exceptional support from CULTURESFRANCE within the framework of an agreement with the City of Rennes.

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

AFA

Lorna Simpson
Organized by the American Federation of Arts (AFA)
Opening March 1, 2007, at the Whitney Museum of American Art

“Lorna Simpson has spent her career as a photographer and videographer objectifying forces latent in the culture, questioning the semiotics of looking, exploring the construction of difference, asserting the interconnectedness of human beings and using art as a powerful means to heighten consciousness.” —Art in America, December 2006

Lorna Simpson, a comprehensive survey of the multi-faceted work of one of the leading artists working in the United States today, will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from March 1, 2007 through May 6, 2007. The exhibition is organized by the American Federation of Arts (AFA). It is curated by AFA Adjunct Curator Helaine Posner.

The exhibition includes approximately eighteen of the artist’s acclaimed image and text pieces (1985–93) and seven major photographs on felt (1994–2005). Also on view are six film installations dating from 1997 to 2004, including Call Waiting; Easy to Remember; Interior/Exterior; Full/Empty, a seven-part projection and related series of photographs; and Corridor (2003), a work that juxtaposes the domestic meanderings of two women—one set in the seventeenth-century Coffin House and the other in the 1938 house built by Bauhaus architect/designer Walter Gropius for his family in Lincoln, Massachusetts. The exhibition concludes with Simpson’s recent photographs, which consist of ghostly, silhouetted profiles of black women and men accompanied by the titles of paintings, songs, and films that date from the 1790s to the 1970s.

Lorna Simpson first became well known in the mid-1980s for her large-scale photograph and text works that confront and challenge conventional views of gender, identity, culture, history, and memory. In the mid-1990s, she began creating large multi-panel photographs printed on felt that depict the sites of public—yet unseen—sexual encounters. More recently, she has turned to moving images. In film and video works such as Call Waiting, Simpson presents individuals engaged in intimate and enigmatic yet elliptical conversations that elude easy interpretation but seem to address the mysteries of both identity and desire.

About the Artist
Lorna Simpson was born in 1960 in Brooklyn, New York, and received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1990), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1992), the Miami Art Museum (1997), the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1999), and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2003). She has participated in such important international exhibitions as the Hugo Boss Prize (1998) at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Documenta XI (2002) in Kassel, Germany. Simpson has been the subject of numerous articles, catalogue essays, and a monograph published by Phaidon Press.

Tour
Lorna Simpson debuted in April 2006 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and then traveled to the Miami Art Museum. After the presentation at the Whitney, the exhibition will travel to the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, Michigan (May 25–August 19, 2007) and the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina (September 7–December 2, 2007).

Catalogue
A fully illustrated catalogue published by Abrams, New York, in association with the American Federation of Arts accompanies the exhibition. The book includes a curatorial foreword by Helaine Posner; a dialogue including Lorna Simpson, artist Isaac Julien, and Studio Museum in Harlem Director Thelma Golden, with a preface by Shamim M. Momin, Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art; an overview of Simpson’s work, from the earlier image and text work to the recent films, by Okwui Enwezor, Dean of Academic Affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute; and an essay exploring the relationship of Simpson’s work to cinema by cultural critic and New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als.

The exhibition is organized by the American Federation of Arts and made possible, in part, by grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Peter Norton Family Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Inc., the Martin Bucksbaum Family Foundation, Emily Fisher Landau, and The Barbara Lee Family Foundation Fund at the Boston Foundation.

The AFA is a nonprofit institution that organizes art exhibitions for presentation in museums around the world, publishes exhibition catalogues, and develops education programs. For more information on the AFA, please visit http://www.afaweb.org

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