Artipedia - Arts News

Lehman College Art Gallery

Sugar Buzz
February 6 – May 15, 2007

Lehman College Art Gallery
250 Bedford Park Boulevard West
Bronx, NY 10468
718-960-8731
http://www.lehman.edu/gallery

Sweets are the stuff of childhood memories and fantasies. They are also a locus of desire, pleasure, and guilt. Sugar Buzz features twenty-eight artists whose work deals with sweets — in its imagery or as its medium. In this exhibition the artists have used a variety of strategies — all with an element of humor, irony or whimsy. The exhibition, curated by Susan Hoeltzel with Nina Sundell, includes photography, video, painting, sculpture, and installations, completed since 2000.

The artists are: Becca Albee, Julie Allen, John Boone, Luisa Caldwell, Emily Eveleth, Lucy Fradkin, Pamela Hadfield, Maggy Rozycki Hiltner, Rebecca Holland,Yoshiko Kanai, Jenny Kanzler, Mary Magsamen & Stephan Hillerbrand, Mark McLeod, Amy W. Miller, Shelley Miller, Tracy Miller, Matthew Neff, Gina Occhiogrosso, Lynda Ray, Freddy Rodriguez, Milton Rosa-Ortiz, Jessica Edith Schwind, Karen Shaw, Dana K. Sherwood, Sara Sill, Vadis Turner, and Andy Yoder.

Using frosting, Canadian artist Shelley Miller applies intricately detailed architectural elements to building exteriors. Her monumental decorative embellishments, presented here as documentary photographs of installations in Canada and Brazil, wash away over time.

Becca Albee humorously alludes to the history of art in her homage to Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” made from fragrant cakes, as does Andy Yoder in his large-scale “Pipe” made of licorice that references René Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Its surface is richly textured with patterns made by long Twizzlers and shorter licorice stubs.

Twist ties, sponges, pantyhose, cotton balls, curlers – the stuff of daily life – are the materials used to produce a variety of tasty delights in Vadis Turner’s large-scale installation and vitrine filled with sweets. Eight thousand candy wrappers – those from candy consumed by the artist, her friends or found on the street — create a monumental cascade of color and light in Luisa Caldwell’s “Color Falls.” Twenty-one feet high, it’s excess is dazzling as the cellophane gently moves in drafts of air.

Maggy Rozycki Hilter offers a moral tale of overindulgence in her hand-stitched textile with cute children, animals, cakes, and candies. Her thirteen-foot embroidery includes ”found” textiles from old tablecloths and doilies as well as those stitched by the artist and her mother. It is a story told in multiple vignettes that suggest temptations and their consequences. Excess is also the theme of Milton Rosa-Ortiz’s “Gula” (gluttony). An allegorical reference to one of the Seven Deadly Sins, the sculpture hangs like a chimera. Its chalice-like form is created from hundreds of suspended sugar cubes and light.

Dana K. Sherwood’s book, “Confektion: The Sweet Allure of Entrapment,” is opened to a page with a compressed yellow cupcake surrounded by dead bees. On the opposite page the cupcake and bugs are described in a brief text and a whimsical drawing. Throughout the book, packaged confections from Twinkies to HoHos are paired with insects. They offer deadpan humor and musings on seduction and death.

Larger than life and suggesting the human form, Emily Eveleth’s sensuous jelly donuts depict one of America’s most ubiquitous morning foods. For over ten years Eveleth has made donuts her subject. In “Repose” the donuts are cropped and dramatically lighted against a dark ground. Their forms slouch against one another with jelly oozing.

The medium of Rebecca Holland’s site-specific installation “Crush” is sugar. Its minimalist form offers luminous, jewel-like color that appears to glow from within.

Mary Magsamen & Stephan Hillerbrand’s video “air-hunger” explores trust and boundaries as a couple blow and share bubble gum. Filmed in the lobby of the Woolworth Building in NYC, the majestic ceiling is almost cathedral-like. The title alludes to a medical condition associated with diabetic coma.

This exhibition is made possible with the support of JPMorgan Chase Foundation, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and New York State Council on the Arts.

For more information go to: http://www.lehman.edu/gallery

Burgundy FRAC

The Eventual

Artists: Francis Alÿs, Johanna Billing, Matthew McCaslin, Adrian Piper
Curator: Eva González-Sancho

Dates: March 17 to August 18, 2007
Opening Hours: Monday to Saturday from 2 pm to 6 pm (except April 28th and June 09th)
Guided Tour: Saturday 12th May, 2007 – 3 pm – free entry.

The group exhibition The Eventual is the brainchild of Eva González-Sancho, director of the Burgundy Regional Contemporary Art Collection [FRAC], and brings together four works by Francis Alÿs Untitled ( New York, September 2000), 2001, Johanna Billing (Where She Is At, 2001), Matthew McCaslin (The Walk Threw the Woods, 2002), and Adrian Piper (Bach Whistled, 1970). These works suggest differing landscapes in which an event or situation may occur at any time, greatly altering them. The works create a state of suspension, interruption, and deliberate unfinishedness, in which nothing seems to be happening, and nothing is explicitly said, either, but where, for precisely these reasons, everything becomes possible. These four works, recently acquired for the Burgundy FRAC, brought together incorporate video and sound in the exhibition area like so many ways of suggesting to visitors that they grasp a present state. By different devices, the works dilate the here-and-n
ow, and come up with its essence, honing both consciousness and experience.

The ephemeral, the fleeting, and the transitory are the pivotal principle of the work produced by Francis Alÿs (born in Antwerp in 1959). Untitled (New York, September 2000), produced in 2001, is a video installation showing a picture of Manhattan, a tight shot of tall buildings in which many vertical and horizontal grids are overlaid.

The video Where She Is At (2001) by Johanna Billing (born in 1973 in Jonkoping, Sweden) shows a young woman standing on a diving board in the grip of a lengthy shall-I or-shan’t-I. She captures a moment of uncertainty and anxiety, as caught in the rather ordinary act of diving. Involved here is a moment of doubt and questioning when faced with a free choice which a person must make on her own.

With A Walk Threw the Woods (2002), Matthew McCaslin creates an environment using the aluminium. Just as he reveals the presence of flows and wires behind the electrical equipment in his early works, here it is the structure of the walls, and their framework, which is uncovered. The walls are invisible, and it becomes possible to pass through them, and even live in them.

Bach Whistled, by Adrian Piper, is a real performance, no less. The piece lasts 45 minutes. And these minutes are taxing. It is not just sound and space that are presented here. Adrian Piper’s gradually exhausted and breathless body is just as present as Bach’s music.

These different densities of the present offered by the works in the show The Eventual are so many ways of asserting the work as a way of being in the world, through the different forms in which narrative and performance have been redeployed, after the radical breaks of the 1970s, less for their aesthetic dimension than for the way in which they address the spectator.

Text by Claire Legrand / Gwénola Regruto
Translated by Simon Pleasance

To see the whole text: http://www.frac-bourgogne.org/

Contact: Burgundy Regional Contemporary Art Collection (Burgundy FRAC) / 49 rue de Longvic / F-21000 Dijon / T : +33 (0)3 80 67 18 18 / F : +33 (0)3 80 66 33 29
infos@frac-bourgogne.org
http://www.frac-bourgogne.org

Supporting Bodies: The Minister of Culture (DRAC : Regional Direction of Cultural Affairs of Burgundy), the Regional Council of Burgundy and the General Council of the Côte d’Or.

For more information go to: http://www.frac-bourgogne.org/

Fotomuseum Winterthur

David Goldblatt
South African Photographs
1952-2006
3 March to 20 May 2007

Fotomuseum Winterthur
Grüzenstrasse 44+45
CH-8400 Winterthur (Zurich)
Switzerland
Phone: +41 52 234 10 60

http://www.fotomuseum.ch

David Goldblatt - South African Photographs 1952-2006

David Goldblatt’s photographic projects are all set in and deal with South Africa, and they are all occupied with the people, the work, the social constellations and the constructed and natural spaces of this country. They depict all this in a direct, tangible and concrete here and now, which is at the same time permeated by an awareness of the history, the structures and the balance of power from which the immediate present emerges in this country.

In the series about mines and miners (On the Mines, 1973), the closely-woven portrait of the Boers, also known as Afrikaners (Some Afrikaners Photographed, 1975), the portrait of a small town inhabited by middle class white people (In Boksburg, 1982), the vivid visualisation of the black people’s excessively long way to work (The Transported of KwaNdebele, 1989), the large-scale project on housing, shops and churches as "sculpted in stone" social structures (South Africa: The Structure of Things Then, 1998), right up to the series of close-ups, the cropped images of gestures and attitudes (Particulars, 2003), and on to the new South Africa, to the colour photographs of urban officials, new work forms, the streets of Johannesburg and the constellations in the country (combined for the first time in the book entitled Intersections, 2005): always and at all times, David Goldblatt’s interest was concentrated on South Africa. An exemplary documentary photographer, he has
explored the violent, conflict-torn history of his country, constantly focusing on the political and sociological development of South African society, the social disunity and the turbulent political events during apartheid.

In his own individual way, David Goldblatt, who was born in Randfontein in 1930, searches the surface appearances for "eloquent" indications that, as a visual collection of evidence, promote an understanding of the essence and structure of South African society. The mixture of concrete work on visual eloquence through direct, respectful encounters with the structural analysis of the society, and the interweaving of images and texts to form a complex visual anthropology revitalises documentary photography and lends David Goldblatt’s work an inimitable strength. His work is focused on South Africa, while giving us occasion to reflect on the balance of power all over the world.

With this large-scale retrospective, the Fotomuseum Winterthur pays tribute to the photographic work of David Goldblatt, winner of the "Hasselblad Award 2006", the most important international prize for photography. The exhibition was created in collaboration with the Rencontres internationales de la photographie in Arles. The curators are Martin Parr and Urs Stahel.

Supported by Stanley Thomas Johnson Stiftung

Publication on the exhibition: David Goldblatt, Südafrikanische Fotografien 1952-2006.
Edited by Fotomuseum Winterthur and Christoph Merian Verlag, Basel. With texts by Urs Stahel and Rory Bester, and a chronology by Alex Dodd. 256 pages, 128 Duplex- and 50 colour illustrations, format 29 x 26,7 cm, hardcover with dust jacket.

Till 14 October 2007:
Towards a New Ease - Set 4 from the Collection of the Fotomuseum Winterthur
http://www.fotomuseum.ch/TOWARDS_A_NEW_EASE.289.0.html?&L=1

For further information please visit our website http://www.fotomuseum.ch

Fotomuseum Winterthur
Grüzenstrasse 44+45
CH-8400 Winterthur (Zurich)
Switzerland

Phone: +41 52 234 10 60
Fax. +41 52 233 60 97
e-mail: fotomuseum@fotomuseum.ch
http://www.fotomuseum.ch

Opening hours: Tue – Sun 11am – 6pm, Wed 11am – 8pm, closed on Mondays

For more information go to: http://www.fotomuseum.ch