Artipedia - Arts News

Karen Yasinsky, L’Atalante

Karen Yasinsky, L’Atalante, September 21 – November 17, 2007

Mireille Mosler, Ltd. is pleased to announce L’Atalante, Karen Yasinsky’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, presenting animations and drawings in which Yasinsky revives Jean Vigo’s 1934 cinematic masterpiece of the same title. With an interest in memory, the re-construction of narrative and re-creation of character, Yasinsky uses film stills from L’Atalante as starting points for the works. The stills serve as residual, emotional documents, stripped from the film.

In the stop-motion animation La Nuit (6 minutes), shown as a projected single-channel video installation, Yasinsky depicts the dark and strange evening of willful separation between the newlyweds Juliette and Jean. La Nuit cuts between the characters in their separate beds; the actors replaced by Yasinsky’s dolls, lacking any inherent emotion or history. Like a cartoon strip, a narrative is reconstituted from a succession of disconnected images and sounds.

In contrast to La Nuit, the exhibition will include the drawing animation Le Matin (2-1/2 minutes), shown on a television monitor. In this video, Yasinsky reiterates an opening sequence from the film where Jean and Juliette leave the church and walk to the barge. The animation reveals a childlike happiness in their movements and in the drawing style. The ending attempts to define the characters and their choices in the film, turning L’Atalante into a strange, super-abbreviated cartoon with one final fantastic scene.

Two other drawing animations, Jean and Juliette and Jules and Juliette, shown on flatscreen monitors, explore each one film still and are completely removed from the narrative. They grew from the process of redrawing every frame, 24 images per second, with which Yasinsky experimented in Le Matin. In Jules and Juliette (4 minutes 40 seconds loop), the tattooed upper-body of the boatsman leans over Juliette’s reclining figure. In redrawing a single, isolated frame, the image does not freeze but becomes animated. The nervous agitation of the drawn line emphasizes the subject matter of the chosen stills. Both threatening and sexually charged, the characters seem caught in the eternal loop of the animation. Small, slight movements are added and emphasize the passing of time in a long, unending shot.

The exhibition will also include thirty drawings and collages. Varied drawing styles and processes were lead by the artist’s interest in the individual still from which the drawing originated. Some frames of the animations are starting points for more detailed drawings, installed in chronological order with various digressions.

Yasinsky holds an MFA in painting from Yale University’s School of Art. Works related to L’Atalante were recently exhibited at The Baltimore Museum of Art, at The Sculpture Center in Long Island City and in a solo installation at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. In 2002, the UCLA Hammer Museum presented a solo exhibition of Yasinsky’s Still Life with Cows.

L’Atalante will be on view at Mireille Mosler Ltd., 35 East 67th Street, New York, NY. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm. For more information, please contact the gallery at (212) 249-4195 or info@mireillemoslerltd.com.

http://www.mireillemoslerltd.com

Galician Center for Contemporary Art

"Gender Battle. Lectures, theatre and debates about the rules of gender, sexuality and the impact of feminism in the art of the seventies"
25 to 27 September 2007

Galician Center for
Contemporary Art
Santiago de Compostela
Galicia (Spain)

http://www.cgac.org

The exhibition Gender Battle, curated by Juan Vicente Aliaga, will be opened in the Galician Center for Contemporary Art on September 13th and around it CGAC presents "Gender Battle. Lectures, theatre and debates about the rules of gender, sexuality and the impact of feminism in the art of the seventies". The goal of organising this cenference is to take on, as far as is possible, a whole spectrum of subjects and problems related to certain fields of feminist movements, the incorporation of the concept of gender as a category to be analysed and the social questioning that started to take force in the seventies related to the barriers between what is considered femenine or masculine. Three intensive days have therefore been organised with three lectures and three round table discussions in which artists, teachers, and activists with an interest in the subject will present to the public of Santiago their point of view about the complex questions of gender and how it m
aterialises in daily life and in art.

25 September, 17:00
In the first lecture, María Laura Rosa, a teacher from Buenos Aires, will take a look at the specifics of art and feminism in four countries in Latin America, namely Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Mexico. In some ways it will be a closer look at the valuable contributions of different practices in art and cinema (María Luisa Bemberg in particular) in relation to social proposals for equality in turbulent times and contexts for politics.

The round table involves Martha Rosler (United States), Sanja Ivekovic (Croatia) and Ulrike Rosenbach (Germany), and aims to share not only the four artists’ individual experiences that gave rise to works of great signficance in the seventies, but also to show the diversity of artistic options and different ways of approaching feminism.

26 September, 17:00
The talk by French essayist Elisabeth Lebovici will be focused on a highly symbolic year in France — 1975, when various different feminist groups came to light and both collective and individual artistic problems with different ideologies arose. The specifics of the Womens’ Liberation Movement will be analysed together with the rise of homosexual groups that criticised heterosexist orthodoxy.

Present at the round table will be Carmen Navarrete, Jesús Martínez Oliva, Chelo Matesanz and Assumpta Bassas. The goal is to carry out a critical analysis of the art linked to matters of gender that existed in Spain in the seventies, based on the professional and research experience of four Spanish University lecturers (from the Universities of Valencia, Murcia, Pontevedra and Barcelona).

27 September, 17:00
Amelia Jones’ talk is based on the relative surprise that the recent interest in feminism shown by the market and art galleries and centres has caused in this North American essayist, who is also a lecturer at the University of Manchester. This is in marked contrast to the usual disdain shown over the decades by institutions to art that is openly feminist.

Talking at the round table will be Beatriz Suárez Briones, Raquel Osborne and one of the main figures of the feminist movement in Spain, Empar Pineda. They will look back on the struggle for emancipation and equality of rights and the role that feminism played in Spain towards the end of the dictatorship under General Franco and in the transition to democracy.

If you want more information about exhibition and lectures, please contact:

Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea
Rúa Valle Inclán s/n
15704 Santiago de Compostela
Galicia -Spain
Tel: +34 981 546 619
cgac.prensa@xunta.es
http://www.cgac.org

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

LAXART

LAXART PRESENTS MICHAEL QUEENLAND’S THE MORL OR NYC-APARTMENT,
THE LOS ANGELES DEBUT OF NEW YORK BASED PAINTER FRANCESCA DIMATTIO,
AND A SCULPTURAL WINDOW INSTALLATION BY ALEXANDER MAY

LAXART
2640 SOUTH LA CIENEGA BOULEVARD
LOS ANGELES CALIFORNIA 90034
T.310.559.0166
F.310.559.0167
office@laxart.org
Tuesday through Saturday 11am - 6pm.

http://www.laxart.org

Michael Queenland: The MORL or NYC-Apartment

September 15 through October 27, 2007
Opening reception September 15, 7-9pm

LAXART is pleased to present the Los Angeles debut of Michael Queenland’s The MORL or NYC-Apartment. For this ambitious project, Queenland has restaged and examined the logic of museological display and the phenomena of kitsch by transforming the space of the gallery into that of a Wunderkammer. Resembling a wide-ranging accumulation of natural curiosities, cultural ephemera, and decorative sculpture, The MORL or NYC-Apartment functions as both a simulated domestic space and site of resonance and wonder, proposing a sustained interaction with both the refined and the banal. The staging of found and composed objects within this context furthers Queenland’s interrogations of sculptural fixity and the limitations of medium-specific modes of signification, while continuing to engage questions around the cyclical relationship between photography and sculpture.

The project references the Museum of Romantic Life, a mansion in Paris that, since 1987, has housed the personal effects of the French novelist George Sand. For The MORL or NYC-Apartment, the floor plan of Queenland’s New York railroad apartment has been installed and presented as a theatricalized set in which domestic, commercial, and cultural spaces reside in tandem. Conceived as a collection in itself, the domestic setting within The MORL or NYC-Apartment becomes a seamlessly integrated space of performance and theatre. By the conflation of this historical institution with the objects and layout that make up Queenland’s New York apartment, the artist’s deployment of a disparate array of cultural artifacts interrogates the relationship between modes of preservation and the symbolic nature of objects.

Michael Queenland received his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2002, and has since exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad in solo and group exhibitions. In 2005, the exhibition Michael Queenland: Photographs, Sculptures, and Shaker Classics traveled to both the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, and the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, Massachusetts. In 2006, he was named a United States Artists Fellow. From 2004 to 2005, he served as a resident artist at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Recent exhibitions include Happenstance at Harris Lieberman Gallery in New York, Civil Restitutions at Thomas Dane Gallery in London, Trace at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria in New York, and Frequency at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

LAXART GALLERY TWO

Francesca DiMattio: Unhinged
Curated by Jeffrey Uslip

September 15 through October 27, 2007

September 15, 6pm
CAMPARI and LAXART present Campari Talks: Francesca DiMattio and Art Critic Jori Finkel in Conversation
Please RSVP to 310.943.9236
Must be 21 and over to attend

For Francesca DiMattio’s solo Los Angeles debut, LAXART is pleased to present Unhinged, a large scale, eight-panel, site-specific painting installation based on Los Angeles’ distinctive modular architecture. Consisting of a 28-foot horizontally configured painting, as well as an additional 12-foot painting in the gallery’s adjacent corner, the monumental scale and dense layers that make up Unhinged move the work beyond the limits of painting to provide a stunning and resonate environment.

Paired with DiMattio’s renderings of a fragmented visual space, the modularity of the canvases that make up the installation heighten the artist’s investigation of surface tension and the anti-decorative. The paintings that make up Unhinged suture modernist architectural spaces with disparate cultural debris. DiMattio reconfigures her subject matter into webs of detritus; human limbs, dead birds, butterfly wings, urban scaffolding, American lace and quilt patterns, derelict architectural frameworks, public and private housing and domestic furniture dynamically collide to comprise her tightly woven compositions.

New York based painter Francesca DiMattio received her BFA from Cooper Union and MFA from Columbia University in 2005. Recent exhibitions include Salon 94 in New York (2006), November at Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York (2006), The Manhattan Project at Frederic Snitzer Gallery, Miami (2006), First Look at Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, New York (2005) and Paradise Lost at Marvelli Gallery, New York (2005).

LAXART WINDOW

Alexander May: Light Echo
Curated by Aram Moshayedi

LAXART’s ongoing series of window projects is pleased to present a sculptural installation entitled Light Echo by Los Angeles based artist Alexander May. Culling from interests in geological systems of representation, the occult, and topographic networks, May’s project centers upon a found stained glass window, recently discovered by the artist on the beaches north of Malibu. In the context of LAXART’s window project, the once decorative and ornamental object is here employed to treat an ominous light as a shifting object within the gallery’s office interior. The window-within-a-window aesthetic performed by this project highlights the function of light within architectural space, and enables the lustrous, discarded object to suggest a dynamic and material presence of natural phenomena.

Alexander May currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BFA in fiber and material studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006, and has exhibited throughout Chicago since 2004. Light Echo is the artist’s Los Angeles gallery debut.

LAXART OUTDOOR INSTALLATION BY MARA LONNER

Concurrently on view at LAXART is a site-specific installation in the gallery’s foyer by Los Angeles based artist Mara Lonner. Conceived as an extension of LAXART’s Public Art Initiatives, Lonner’s installation uses plaster and binding compound to build upon Mark Bradford’s original intervention entitled Volver that has occupied the gallery’s entranceway since November 2006. As part of an ongoing series, Lonner’s project was selected by Bradford as the first in many to take place within this highly visible and public site.

About LAXART

Responding to Los Angeles’ cultural climate, LAXART questions given contexts for the exhibition of contemporary art, architecture and design. With a renewed vision for the potential of independent art spaces, LAXART provides a center for interdisciplinary discussion and interaction and for the production and exhibition of new exploratory work. LAXART offers a space for provocation, dialogue and confrontation by practices on the ground in LA and abroad. LAXART is a hub for artists based on flexibility, transition, spontaneity and change. The space responds to an urgency and obligation to provide an accessible exhibition space for contemporary artists, architects and designers.

LAXART’s programs are made possible with the generous support of the The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Peter Norton Family Foundation, Campari, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Eileen Harris Norton, Nelson Buxton Collection, Harris Lieberman Gallery, Daniel Hug, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Dennis and Debra Scholl, Lisa Schiff, Karen Ma, Ben Spector, Donanne Kasicki and LAXART founding patrons and sponsors.

Upcoming: November 4, 2007: LAXART Live and Silent Auction and Party, sponsored by Hermès;

November 16, 2007 - January 5, 2008: Adrià Julià: A Means of Passing the Time and Michael Rashkow: Circle Pictures

CONTACT BETTINA KOREK 310.962.0399
LAXARTPRESS@LAXART.ORG

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

Kunstmuseum Bern

HORN PLEASE –
Narratives in Contemporary Indian Art

Exhibition at the Museum
of Fine Arts Berne, Switzerland
September 21, 2007 - January 6, 2008

Kunstmuseum Bern
Hodlerstrasse 8-12
CH-3000 Bern 7
Phone +41 31 328 09 44
press@kunstmuseumbern.ch

http://www.kunstmuseumbern.ch

Horn Please brings together different versions of the present in a narrative format by artists who have lived for the most part of their lives in India, and have responded to both the changing and apparently unchanging faces of the country. A country that has been transformed in the last few years by the economic and social implications of globalization, the rapid proliferation of new technology and its commercial aspirations to play a role on the global stage.

Perhaps the most important challenge that the artist in the 21st century faces is the question, is it possible to remain true to one’s art practice in an age of "money, adulation… creeping conservatism… and the apparent collapse of an alternative to capitalism?" But the works in this show also reflect on what it means to live in a place that has always been both vulnerable to and enriched by heterogeneity. And in response to the times, what it means to live in a time when we inhabit not one, but many intersecting, overlapping and disconnected maps, and the effects that might have on the personal, social, political and economic life of the country.

This exhibition begins by calling attention to collisions — 21st century tales of ecological disaster and national crises; collisions and collusions — the challenge of interpreting the theme of marriage in these considerably turbulent times; and ends with collusions – where times, places, people, characters from myth and folklore inhabit many intersecting, overlapping and disconnected maps of the world.

Horn Please spans three decades from the 1980s to the present and is loosely constructed around four sections — Narrating Collisions; Re-imagining ‘Place for People’ (this is a now mythic exhibition held in 1981, featuring Bhupen Khakhar, Nalini Malani, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Vivan Sundaram, Jogen Chowdhury, Sudhir Patwardhan and art critic Geeta Kapur); Re-telling Stories/Telling Metaphor; and Living in Alicetime. The stories weave back and forth across shifts in media and temporalities without tracing a history or lineage. The exhibition with its breaks in style, its digressions and diversions, its diversity in points of view and ‘narrators’, has a structure which allows the viewer to reconstruct a different story with each reading.

The project is curated by Bernhard Fibicher, curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts Bern and Suman Gopinath, independent curator and a partner at Colab Art & Architecture, Bangalore. A catalogue in German and English will be published by Hatje Cantz and distributed worldwide. A special programme with films and, in particular, literature, will accompany the exhibition: for details see http://www.kunstmuseumbern.ch

Participating artists:
Ayisha Abraham, Ravi Agarwal, Sarnath Banerjee, Jyothi Basu, Atul Dodiya, Anita Dube, Sunil Gupta, Sheela Gowda, Archana Hande, N S Harsha, Abhishek Hazra, Ranbir Kaleka, Jitish Kallat, Bhupen Khakhar, Sonia Khurana, Nalini Malani, Prabhavathi Meppayil, Surendran Nair, Sudhir Patwardhan, Justin Ponmany, Pushpamala N, Raqs Media Collective, K P Reji, Gigi Scaria, Mithu Sen, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Nilima Sheikh, Arpita Singh, Dayanita Singh, Vivan Sundaram, Surekha, Vasudha Thozhur.

Contact:
Ruth Gilgen Hamisultane, Press + Communication
Phone +41 31 328 09 19, ruth.gilgen@kunstmuseumbern.ch

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