Artipedia - Arts News

BECA gallery

New Orleans, LA – A new programme for emerging contemporary art has planted itself among the arts and cultural renewal of New Orleans, LA, a city which has historically been one of the most international of US cities. In the midst of the post-Katrina landscape BECA gallery is surfacing as a bridge by which emerging contemporary art flows between New Orleans and the larger contemporary art community abroad. The gallery is an 1100 square foot renovated warehouse space situated in the heart of the New Orleans arts district. It is located directly across the street from the Contemporary Arts Center and within close walking distance to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. BECA gallery will host 12 exhibits each year. Six exhibits feature local emerging contemporary art and 6 exhibits feature international emerging contemporary art.

The gallery was founded by co-directors Melissa Roberts and Kurt Schlough as a place for both innovative local and international emerging contemporary art to grow and flourish in an environment that is accommodating to both artists and collectors. A unique component of the gallery program focuses on the introduction of innovative international contemporary art to the city of New Orleans and its surrounding region via physical exhibits as well as future virtual exhibits and exchange partnerships with other galleries and projects. The latter will serve both future local artist members as well as those artists exhibiting from abroad.

The theme of the gallery’s first international exhibition, opening February 9, 2008, is ‘Connection’ curated by Caroline Worthington, Curator of Art, York Museums Trust, York Art Gallery. She looks forward to her pioneering position and writes, “As BECA gallery’s first international curator, it seems to me that the theme of connections is an obvious choice to reflect the aspirations for their programme. Working from the UK, I’ll be weaving together those invisible threads that spin outwards from each of us, connecting you with each other as well as to BECA and me.”

A Global Call to Artists has been posted at http://becagallery.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/11/beca-gallery–1.html

Bielefelder Kunstverein

Brandon Lattu, Banqueting House, 2007
Copyright: the artist
Photo: Genevieve Hanson
Courtesy Leo Koenig Inc., New York, and the artist

BRANDON LATTU
Jenseits des Physisch Möglichen
Curated by Dr. Stefanie Heraeus
October 26, - December 23, 2007
Opening: Friday, October 26th at 7pm
Bielefelder Kunstverein
Museum Waldhof · Welle 61
33602 Bielefeld

http://www.bielefelder-kunstverein.de

The Bielefelder Kunstverein is pleased to hold the first survey of works by artist Brandon Lattu held in a European institution. Working in his adopted home of Los Angeles, Lattu has developed a broad body of work that contributes to the understanding of the state of representation today. Citing Fox-Talbot and Duchamp as primary influences he has developed a growing body of work that sits squarely between the characteristics of both photography and the readymade. Looking back to the gestures of direct selection and the provincial grounding of late nineteenth and early twentieth century art, the works in this exhibition utilize photography, sculpture, and video to explore issues of empiricism without generalizing the subject but by carefully specifying individual sites and by presenting multiple vantage points of each subject for the viewer.

A case in point is Banqueting House (2007), a sculpture made from photographing the complete interior of the famous Neo-Palladian building by Inigo Jones in London. Using these photographs, Lattu has digitally produced a form that is a hybrid between the double cube of the buildings’ great hall and the sphere of the cameras’ recording. This form was then wrapped with an image of the interior of the great hall, making the interior of the building the exterior of the sculpture, as well as presenting a model of Vitruvian architecture re-formed by the model of perspective of a camera.

The works Selected Products (2001) and Rejected Products (2002) display boxes of consumer goods presented as hollow, transparent carriers of commercial information, showing the gorgeous, overwhelming, and seductive mixture of branding and decoration used to differentiate the product inside from other competing versions. In these works, Lattu finds a means to counter quantitative stylistic evaluation through objectification of issues of taste.

Resisting the conformity of a serial practice, Lattu approaches each subject with a process suggested by its implicit characteristics. For example, Sand, Pt. Dume, Malibu, California, (2001) is a monochrome painting as well as a sort of photograph of an evocative location. Produced by spreading the sand evenly across a scanner and resulting in an image of twenty by twenty-four inches, the subject is presented in a reproduction of sand with the verisimilitude of pigment through the contemporary digital technology of scanning.

This exhibition is accompanied by the publication of Office Gray Case, an artist’s book showing the deconstruction of a work by the same title in the exhibition. This book is published by Leo Koenig Inc., New York and is distributed by Verlag Walther Koenig in Europe and D.A.P. throughout the rest of
the world.

BIOGRAPHY
Brandon Lattu was born in Athens, Georgia in 1970. He graduated with an MFA from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1998 and teaches art, photography, and digital imaging at the University of California at Riverside. Brandon Lattu is represented by Leo Koenig Inc., New York, Vacío 9, Madrid, and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver. His work is in numerous museum and private collections.

In 2006 the Bielefelder Kunstverein showed photographic artists who experimented with different methods of image manipulation in analog photography in order to reveal the structure of a photographic image. Brandon Lattu - Jenseits des Physisch Möglichen continues our goal of exploring this developing medium in depth.

For more information contact: Claudia Turtenwald at kontakt@bielefelder-kunstverein.de

EFA Gallery

Are We There Yet?
Curated by Marco Antonini

November 30, 2007 through
February 2, 2008
Opening reception Friday,
November 30, 6-8 PM

Gallery is closed December 22 through January 2.

http://www.efa1.org

Stephane Couturier
Bill Dolson
Marco Evaristti
Cyprien Gallard
John Gerrard
Kazuhiko Kobayashi

EFA Gallery is pleased announce Are We There Yet? curated by Marco Antonini. The exhibition will be on view from November 30, 2007 through February 2, 2008. The gallery will be closed for winter holiday from December 22 through January 2.

Are We There Yet? focuses on works of art that reshape the notion of the natural landscape in an active way, somehow corrupting the integrity of our own idealizations of it. Redefined by direct actions upon its elements, envisioned through the use of technology, or used as a point of departure for daring conceptualizations, the natural landscape is followed and scrutinized in its continuous evolution of form and meaning.

“Are We There Yet?” the child’s obnoxious road-trip refrain, is a question/statement that implies a mix of excitement and inherent dissatisfaction with whatever place the parents might be driving to. Kids (…and artists?) are constantly expanding their knowledge of the natural world and raising the bar for future experiences. In short, they are perennially one step away from their own personal “frontier,” a place of learning as well as a physical threshold.

Are we all in need of a new frontier? All signs point to yes. We seem to be in constant need of expanding our boundaries, extending and streamlining the form and function of the natural landscape and adapting it to the speed, depth and quality of our daily life.

The outrageous, unsettling interventions of Bill Dolson, Marco Evaristti and Cyprien Gallard pave the way to an ephemeral, anti-monumental approach to Land-Art. Their unmediated approach flirts with vandalism to create statements: works of art that are concerned with the power, agency and the increasing responsibility of humankind for the environment. Our (now more than ever) radical ability and willingness to re-shape the sensible world as well as to “enhance” nature’s work is considered as a way to create new experiences, expectations and desires. Sharing a similar sensibility, the works of Stephane Couturier, John Gerrard, and Kazuhiko Kobayashi shift the focus from the landscape itself to our own personal perception and definition of it through the use of new forms of visualization and the definition of conceptually charged, unexpected point of views.

A special postcard suite will be published for this exhibition. Contact gallery@efa1.org for more information.

Marco Antonini was born in Pescara, Italy. He earned his MA in Art Administration from the University of Bologna. He moved to New York in 2003 and started to nurture a career in writing and curating on the side of several different day jobs. His project NACRE was the recipient of the Project for Emerging Curators (PEC) award of the ISE Foundation in New York. He is the curator of “The Shape of Things to Come”, one of four shows selected to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Artist Residency program, and the producer of “More than Nature”, a screening dedicated to Japanese video and animation trends commissioned by Japan Society, New York.

He works as Gallery Educator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and at PS1. A recipient of the Connors Fellowship at the City College of New York/ CUNY, he is currently studying to get an MA in Art History and Museum Studies. His articles, essays and interviews appear regularly on the pages of Contemporary and BMM. In the recent past, he has contributed to many international publications, including Flash Art, Arte & Critica, AroundPhotography, D and NYArts.

This show would have not be possible without the help and support of all the involved artists, the assistance of Cosmic Galerie (Paris), Ernst Hilger Gallery (Wien) and Laurence Miller Gallery
(New York).

This exhibition is presented by EFA Gallery, a program of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. EFA Gallery is supported in part by public funds from the New York Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts. Private funding for the Gallery has been received from The Carnegie Corporation Inc., The Foundation for Contemporary Art, The Helen Keeler Burke Charitable Foundation, Peter C. Gould, Materials for the Arts, and many other generous individuals.

EFA Gallery is a multi-arts 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, and that the value of the artist’s creative spirit is not limited by age, race, nationality or acceptance by others. http://www.efa1.org

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

REDCAT

Choi Jeong Hwa, Believe It or Not, 2006. Installation view, Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, courtesy the artist

TRUTH: CHOI JEONG-HWA
December 8, 2007 - February 3, 2008
Opening reception: Friday, December 7, 7 - 10pm
REDCAT
631 West 2nd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012 USA

http://www.redcat.org

As a visual artist and founder of Gaseum studio, Choi Jeong Hwa blurs the boundaries between art, graphic design, industrial design, and architecture. A contemporary of artists such as Bahc Yiso, Beom Kim and Lee Bul, Choi was part of a generation whose unique and varied practices gave rise to Seoul’s bourgeoning art scene in the 1990s. Trained in Korea during a period of rapid modernization and economic growth, the artist’s work acknowledges and internalizes the processes of consumption and the distribution of goods.

Choi Jeong Hwa’s residency at REDCAT will culminate in his first solo exhibition in the U.S. in which Choi will invite artists and craftspeople to install works alongside his own–challenging concepts of individual authorship and originality in art. Inspired by the chaotic vibe of local outdoor markets, his practice playfully interrogates the preciousness of art works in a rapidly-changing, consumer-frenzied culture. For a recent exhibition at the Ilmin Museum in Seoul, the artist stacked brightly-colored plastic baskets in an interlocking, brick-like fashion to form a floor to ceiling, undulating wall that ran the gallery’s perimeter. This monumental display of cheap plastic goods not only calls attention to the beauty of mechanical processes but also the absurd excess that reconsiders art’s privileged relationship to everyday objects and experience.

Choi’s ambitious and often boisterous installations are inspired by the informal economies of exchange. For REDCAT, Choi will radically transform the gallery space and the lounge/bar of REDCAT in order to collapse the rarefied space of art and the public space of everyday life. Part of the exhibition will function as a marketplace where goods are available for sale.

Born 1961 in Seoul, Korea, Choi received a BFA at the Hong Ik University in Seoul. He has been included in the 51st Venice Biennale, 2004 Liverpool Biennial, 2002 and 2006 Gwangju Biennales, 1998 São Paulo Bienal, as well as exhibitions at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Ilmin Museum, Seoul. Choi lives and works in Seoul.

Truth: Choi Jeong Hwa is made possible in part by the Nimoy Foundation.

Gallery hours: noon to 6pm or curtain, closed Mondays
Admission to the gallery is always free
Visit http://www.redcat.org or call +1.213.237.2800 for more information