Artipedia - Arts News

Circa Art Magazine

Circa Issue 120, Summer 2007

Circa Art Magazine
43 / 44 Temple Bar
Dublin 2
Ireland
Phone: +353 1 67 97 388
editor@recirca.com
http://www.recirca.com

subscriptions / purchase / PDFs:
http://www.recirca.com/subscribe

The summer issue of Ireland’s leading magazine for contemporary visual art is now on sale. The 112 full-colour pages include news, feature articles, reviews, projects, a host of images, and advertising from Ireland’s main art spaces.

Feature articles

Gobal enterprise: Gerard Byrne and Willie Doherty at the 2007 Venice Biennale Gavin Murphy looks at the Venice phenomenon, and the two ‘pavilions’ from Ireland | New-media art: An Irish context Paul O’Brien looks at some key players in the field of new-media art in Ireland | The gender gap revisited Cristina Martín de Vidales and Sophie Nellis examine Circa’s performance in relation to gender bias in coverage | What exactly is your reader profile anyway? Peter FitzGerald gives the results of a recent Circa reader survey | Well, speak of the devil! Art-world spectacle from Dubai to Dublin Joan Fowler tackles spectacle and chicness in contemporary art | Letter from Vancouver Jason McCaffrey gives a tour d’horizon from Canada’s west coast |

Reviews

Belfast Joanna Karolini The Bath is hot Slavka Sverakova | Julie Westerman Thinly veiled and barely | ev+a 2007 Fergal Gaynor | London Brian Hand A Decision to love Isobel Harbison | New York Armory Gemma Tipton | Paris Samuel Beckett Judith Wilkinson | Portadown Rita Duffy and Paul Muldoon Cuchulain comforted and Cloth - two visual and verbal collaborations David Hughes | Tasmania An other place Maria Kunda |

Project

Gareth Kennedy and Sarah Browne: Episode 306: Dallas, Belfast

Also available for online purchase: Space: Architecture for Art, a Circa book on the theory and practice of art spaces; it includes a comprehensive directory to visual-arts spaces throughout the island of Ireland. More information at http://www.recirca.com/space

Buy or subscribe to Circa Art Magazine at http://www.recirca.com/subscribe (you can also buy gift subscriptions and PDFs here).

Scans of the pages of the first 110 issues of Circa are now accessible online at http://www.recirca.com/scans

For more information go to: http://www.recirca.com

Kunstmuseum Stuttgart

JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER
July 14 to October 28, 2007
Curator: Dr. Simone Schimpf

KUNSTMUSEUM STUTTGART
Kleiner Schlossplatz 1
70173 Stuttgart
Tel.: +49 (0) 711 - 216 21 88
Fax: +49 (0) 711 - 216 78 20
Tue to Sun 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Wed and Fri 10 a.m. - 9 p.m.
Mon closed
info@kunstmuseum-stuttgart.de

http://www.kunstmuseum-stuttgart.de

The Kunstmuseum Stuttgart is honored to present the first extensive mid-career survey of Josephine Meckseper’s multimedia work. The exhibition will span four floors of the museum. It will be accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue, published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, featuring essays by Okwui Enwezor and Christian Höller.

Josephine Meckseper was born in Germany and received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1992. Meckseper is an internationally recognized artist, participating in such recent exhibitions as Resistance Is at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Media Burn at Tate Modern, the Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville, USA Today at the Royal Academy, traveling to the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, and the Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night. She lives and works in New York.

"… Josephine Meckseper’s artistic projects have stringently focused on addressing the politics of power and violence that undergird the current global imperium. Using a wide array of methodologies: film, video, photography, painting, graphic and product design, installation, and architectural fragments, Meckseper has invented an amalgam of display surfaces - in reference to both Warhol’s pop ironies and to the rhetoric of negation at the heart of the work of artists as disparate as John Heartfield, Raymond Hains, Asger Jorn, David Hammons, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer - as critical armatures for the interrogation of global geopolitics, protest, contestation, and empowerment. In her sculptures, paintings, films, photographs, collages, and posters, she draws a direct correlation to the way consumer culture defines and circumvents subjectivity, and as such sublimates the key instruments of individual political agency as part of the world of the commodity." Okwui Enwezo
r, 2007

PRESS CONTACT
Kunstmuseum Stuttgart
Dr. Eva Klingenstein
Kleiner Schlossplatz 1
70173 Stuttgart
Tel.: +49 (0) 711 - 216 19 32
Fax: +49 (0) 711 - 216 78 20
eva.klingenstein@kunstmuseum-stuttgart.de
www.kunstmuseum-stuttgart.de/presse

For more information go to: http://www.kunstmuseum-stuttgart.de

Savannah College of Art and Design

Afterglow
6 July - 28 August 2007

Savannah College of Art and Design
Lacoste
Rue du Four
84480 Lacoste, France
Monday-Sunday,10a.m.-5p.m.
exhibitions@scad.edu

http://www.scadexhibitions.com

The Savannah College of Art and Design-Lacoste presents "Afterglow," an exploration of light as an aesthetic, material, conceptual and poetic phenomenon by artists Ghada Amer, Patrick Blanc, Maja Godlewska, Hervé Half, Alfredo Jaar, Ju-Yeon Kim and Bill Viola July 6-August 28. The exhibition seeks to provide an atmospheric experience with installations throughout SCAD-Lacoste, including in the main gallery, Galerie Pfriem, located at Rue du Four. All exhibition spaces are free and open to the public Monday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

"Afterglow" pays homage to a history of art that has responded to the sun-drenched, panoramic vistas of the Provençal landscape. It reveals the manifold and nuanced ways that artists sense, articulate and experience light.

Ghada Amer’s "Love Park" (1997) is installed throughout numerous terraces and gardens in Lacoste, inviting lovers to sit and bathe in sunlight. Yet Amer’s ‘park for lovers’ is full of irony as the potential for intimacy is thwarted by her construction of ‘anti-love’ seats: seats that are conjoined but face opposite directions.

Patrick Blanc, the internationally renowned French botanist known for his ‘vertical gardens,’ has been commissioned by SCAD to produce his first permanent, site-specific sculpture. Blanc’s grand yet delicate spiral sculpture is covered in perennial plants that are biologically diverse and require minimal water. For the "Green Vortex," the hot, Provençal sunlight is the source of its existence.

Maja Godlewska’s work uses light to explore ephemeral vision and tension between formlessness and form. Her "Templates of Clouds" series, consisting of 20 painted polyester mesh banners installed on the Park Terrace, simulates the contradiction between the illusion of the physical and the reality of weightlessness in cumulonimbus clouds.

Hervé Half’s densely layered and light-infused paintings are products of an aggressive technique. Beginning with a representational composition, often of landscapes, in paint and varnish, he obscures the image by burning it with a welding torch, then seeks to retrieve the original form by stripping, rubbing or blasting with a water-jet.

Critically acclaimed Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar frequently uses light as a means to query the human ability to be moved by images. In his own words, he makes light for "communities that lack images," seeking to bring to mind reflection and contemplation upon universal themes of social injustice. In "Epilogue" (1998), a projected video installation, a brilliant light slowly reveals a portrait of an elderly Rwandan refugee, whose image subsequently withdraws and returns to luminescence.

Ju-Yeon Kim, an artist-in-residence at SCAD, is concerned with how Eastern and Western philosophies function side by side. Kim is interested in the contradictory perception of white in different cultural contexts: In her native Korea, white can symbolize fragility and death, but paradoxically, in the Western context, it evokes purity and simplicity.

Internationally recognized for his work in video and sound installation, Bill Viola describes video as treating "light like water." Inspired by Buddhist notions of "pure seeing," Viola uses light as a means of concentrating vision to stimulate a shift in consciousness. "Old Oak (Study)" (2005) is from a video series originally made for a production of Wagner’s "Tristan and Isolde," directed by Peter Sellers, which premiered in April 2005 at the Paris Opera. Viola translates the story of two doomed lovers into a universal evocation of love and loss.

"Old Oak (Study)" is a time-lapse video of a California oak tree on a hillside. As in many of Viola’s pieces, light becomes the source of a meditative experience through which the viewer considers the divine and the universal paradox of endless cycles of life.

Through a series of site-specific and gallery installations by invited artists, SCAD’s summer show in Lacoste considers the ambient and emotive qualities of light. The show features commissioned and selected existing pieces, and addresses the village holistically by engaging with its intricate spaces. The exposure to multiple light sources creates a warm "Afterglow," or enduring impression, that lingers with viewers long after the creations experience.

For more information go to: http://www.scadexhibitions.com