Artipedia - Arts News

The Power Plant

Simon Starling, Proposal for Lake Ontario-Infestation Piece/Warrior with Shield vs. The Zebra Mussel, 2005-06, collage. Courtesy of the artist, the Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow.

SIMON STARLING Cuttings (Supplement)
SADIE BENNING Play Pause
1 March - 11 May 2008

The Power Plant
231 Queens Quay West
Toronto ON Canada M5J 2G8

http://www.thepowerplant.org

SIMON STARLING ‘Cuttings (Supplement)’
‘Cuttings (Supplement)’ is Simon Starling’s largest exhibition since winning the 2005 Turner Prize and his exhibition ‘Cuttings’ at Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel. ‘Cuttings (Supplement)’ features nine major works from 2002-07, including The Power Plant’s new Henry Moore-related commission Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore), that in different ways address the various ecologies that Starling’s works engage. Also included is Island for Weeds–Starling’s work from the Venice Biennale in 2003 when he represented Scotland–as well as Bird in Space 2004, By Night, Nachbau, Autoxylopyrocycloboros, 24 hr Tangenziale, Tabernas Desert Run, and Los Angeles, 3rd-5th March
1969 // To indefinite expansion.

An interest in systems lies at the heart of Starling’s practice. His work explores the contemporary interdependence of cultural, political, economic, and environmental conditions, and the ramifications of such interdependence for a critically effective sculptural practice.

Working almost like a novelist, Starling’s approach embodies active narration. This tendency emerges strongly in the new commission, Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore). Evoking the heated reception to Henry Moore’s work in 1960s Toronto, the sculpture also evokes the impact of the zebra mussel, native to the Black Sea, on the Great Lakes’ ecosystem. It also reflects upon the art object at its most elemental. As in this work, Starling often melds two or more stories. The exhibition’s title plays on both the botanical practice of grafting and the idea of recovering sections that have been omitted from a story. Throughout Starling’s practice, narratives multiply, inform and are grafted onto subsequent works. ‘Cuttings (Supplement)’ explores these overlapping concerns, taking Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore) as its starting point.

Born in 1967 in Epsom, England, Simon Starling graduated from the Glasgow School of Art. He won the Turner Prize in 2005 and was short-listed for the Hugo Boss Prize in 2004. He lives in Copenhagen and is Professor of Fine Arts at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt. Starling has exhibited widely including the Bienal de Sao Paulo and the Busan Biennale in 2004. Recently he has made exhibitions at Villa Arson, France, MACRO, Rome, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, and Museum of Contemporary Art
in Sydney.

The exhibition was curated by Director Gregory Burke with assistance from Pamela Meredith and Swapna Tamhane. The commission was initiated by Reid Shier, former curator at The Power Plant. The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication, Cuttings (Supplement), with essays by Gregory Burke, Mark Godfrey, Reid Shier, and Sarah Stanners.

‘Cuttings (Supplement)’ is proudly sponsored by Exclusive Presenting Sponsor BMO Financial Group; Lead Donors Jay Smith and Laura Rapp; and Support Donor Jeanne Parkin. The Power Plant gratefully acknowledges the support of the 2006 Founding Commissioners: Lonti Ebers and Bruce Flatt, Yvonne and David Fleck, The Latner Family, Phil Lind, Garnet and Evan Siddall.

SADIE BENNING ‘Play Pause’
At age fifteen, Sadie Benning sparked international attention with videos she had made with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision toy camera. Shot in her bedroom and featuring herself, these intimate, funny and revealing missives explored Benning’s emerging lesbian consciousness.

Play Pause (2006) differs in many ways from Benning’s early single-channel videos. A two-screen video installation made from hundreds of drawings and with a soundtrack culled from hours of ambient recordings, the work weaves in and out of public and private urban spaces. Play Pause also, however, relates in interesting ways to Benning’s teenage oeuvre. As it leaps between anonymous urban figures, its characters are not dissimilar to those in Benning’s earlier works–isolated, lonely and wandering through the world as they explore and come to terms with their sexual and cultural identities.

Play Pause was directed in collaboration with Solveig Nelson.

Sadie Benning was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1973, and started making films when she was fifteen. Her films appeared in the 2003 Whitney Biennial when she was aged twenty; she was included again in 2000. Benning received a Rockefeller grant when she was nineteen. She is also a former member/co-founder of the band Le Tigre. Recently she has expanded her practice to include drawing and painting. In 2007 the Wexner Center organized ‘Sadie Benning: Suspended Animation’, her first museum retrospective, which included the debut of Play Pause.

Play Pause is programmed by and presented in conjunction with the 21st Images Festival, 3-12 April, 2008, http://www.imagesfestival.com

Fruitmarket Gallery

Douglas Gordon
Five Year Drive-By (The Searchers), 1998
Video projection
Copyright: Douglas Gordon.
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery from The Searchers,
1956, dir. John Ford, Warner Bros. Studios
Copyright: Warner Home Video

Print the Legend
The Myth of the West
1 March - 4 May 2008

Curated by Patricia Bickers

Adam Chodzko, Peter Granser, Douglas Gordon, Isaac Julien, Mike Nelson, Cornelia Parker, Simon Patterson, Salla Tykkä and Gillian Wearing

http://www.fruitmarket.co.uk

The Fruitmarket Gallery’s major spring exhibition is a group show which presents a selection of northern European sculpture, photography, installation and film in the context of the western and its role in the creation of the myth of the American West.

Curated by art historian, lecturer, writer and the editor of Art Monthly Patricia Bickers, the exhibition has its origins in her long-standing fascination for westerns takes its title from the final scene of the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance:‘Sir, this is the West. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’. Arguing that the western is a key component in the construction of the myth of the American West, and that this myth is as politically and culturally relevant now as it has ever been, Bickers uses the western as a lens through which to look at work by Adam Chodzko, Peter Granser, Douglas Gordon, Isaac Julien, Mike Nelson, Cornelia Parker, Simon Patterson, Salla Tykkä and Gillian Wearing.

Print the Legend offers an opportunity to see some great works of art in a new context. Some, such as Adam Chodzko’s Better Scenery (two photographs of signs, one in London describing a site in Arizona and the other in Arizona describing a site in London), play on the idea of the American West as a semi-fictional construct. Others, such as Salla Tykkä’s film Lasso, emphasise the enthralling power of this construct – the central image of Tykkä’s film is that of a young man spinning a lasso inside his house in suburban Finland. Both Peter Granser and Gillian Wearing deal with the modern compulsion to dress up as cowboys, while Isaac Julien’s complex three-screen film installation The Road to Mazatlán looks at longing and desire and the homoerotic potential of the western.

Three ambitious installations in the exhibition directly reference particular westerns. A wall drawing by Simon Patterson takes its structure from the shootout in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Douglas Gordon’s Five Year Drive-By (The Searchers) is a projection of the film The Searchers, slowed down so that the running of the movie matches the five-year fictional duration of the action, the frame changing at a rate of approximately one every 23 minutes. Faithful to the spirit of the drive-in (or drive-by) movie, this work is projected in the site opposite the Gallery. It runs continuously throughout the exhibition, the image coming up as the sun goes down. The Fruitmarket Gallery are particularly pleased to have commissioned Mike Nelson to make a new work, inspired by the climax of Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter. Echoing the film, Nelson has painted a part of the Gallery not normally open to the public an unforgiving and hellish red. Thus enticing the audience in
to the unknown and completely immersing them in the artwork/fiction.

Print the Legend is part of an ongoing series of group exhibitions at The Fruitmarket Gallery, in which artists, academics, art historians and writers working outside the Gallery’s structure are invited to bring their expertise into the programme. Like all the exhibitions in this series (which includes David Hopkins’s popular Dada’s Boys of 2006), Print the Legend is unashamedly ideas-driven, and begins with Patricia Bickers’s position as a long-term western fan. Nonetheless, it ultimately cedes the floor to artists, providing a new context in which we can begin thinking about the work, but allowing the art itself, endlessly inventive, the final say.

The Fruitmarket Gallery
45 Market Street,
Edinburgh EH11DF, Scotland
+44 [0] 131 225 2383
+44 [0] 131 220 3130
info@fruitmarket.co.uk
http://www.fruitmarket.co.uk

Fondazione Sandretto
Re Rebaudengo

Cyprien Gaillard
Nouveau pittoresque/The New Picturesque, 2007
Acrylic paint and enamel on canvas
50 x 60 cm each
Courtesy of the artist and Cosmic Galerie, Paris

GREENWASHING
Environment: Perils, Promises
and Perplexities
29 February - 18 May 2008

Fondazione Sandretto
Re Rebaudengo
Turin, Italy
+39 011 3797600
info@fondsrr.org
http://www.fondsrr.org

Curators: Ilaria Bonacossa and Latitudes (Max Andrews & Mariana Cánepa Luna)

Artists: Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, Lara Almárcegui, Maria Thereza Alves, Ibon Aranberri, Amy Balkin, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Chu Yun, A Constructed World, Minerva Cuevas, Ettore Favini, Cyprien Gaillard, Tue Greenfort, Norma Jeane, Cornelia Parker, Jorge Peris, Wilfredo Prieto, RAF/Reduce Art Flights, Tomás Saraceno, Santiago Sierra, Simon Starling, Fiona Tan, Nikola Uzunovski, Sergio Vega, Wang Jianwei,
James Yamada.

“As rockets go to the moon the darkness around the Earth grows deeper and darker”
Robert Smithson

GREENWASHING presents the work of 25 international artists and artist-groups whose practice suggests that the literalism embedded in old-fashioned concepts such as ‘environmentalism’ and ‘nature’ is not equipped to comprehend the ecological territory of our time. Today we negotiate an evermore urgent and pervasive ecological (and thereby cultural, political, social and economic) arena that is darkly shadowed by potentially catastrophic ecosystemic collapse. Yet in the face of a constant bombardment of eco-economic guilt, corporate agendas and political point-scoring, what might emerge are genuine perplexities and false promises instead of the possibilities for unleashing creative change.

The terminology and agency around ‘the environment’ and sustainability has become increasingly asymmetric and immaterial. Emissions’ offsetting, food miles, environmental marketing, carbon debt, ecological footprints, and so on, are all recently-coined terms, tied to the anxious sense that the processes and practices of modernisation and globalisation, industrialisation and urbanisation have induced unprecedented deprivations and intrusions on the planet. Consequently there is the familiar refrain to limit growth, particularly in the developing world. Yet how do we reconcile this with the observation that ecological concerns are far greater in affluent societies where more basic needs have been met? And how can we more generally balance personal responsibility with collective consensus, local with global, or short-term remedies with visionary strategies? This exhibition sets out to pose
such questions.

The artists presented in GREENWASHING often adopt process-based and speculative approaches in order to articulate energy and material transformations—fundamental ecological processes. Likewise, several works in the exhibition consider repositories of energy—whether waste, water, or oil—in ways that reveal previously obscured patterns, while similarly ‘upcycling’ meaning.

The diverse practices represented in the exhibition share a strategy in that they do not just passively lament the degradation of our planet, or only provide sound technical solutions. Instead they actively articulate the contradictions and responsibilities that we encounter personally and as a society. Art here does not necessarily proclaim a ‘correct’ ethical or green choice, but allows the possibility for broadening and analysing our perceptions and actions. It sets a critical attitude into motion that intervenes and infiltrates, re-interprets and decodes humans’ relation to non-human life, as well as to each other.

A catalogue to the exhibition will be published by The Bookmakers, Ed.

GREENWASHING will run at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo centre for contemporary art in via Modane 16, Turin, Italy from 29 Feb. to 11 May 2008: Tue/Sun, midday-8pm, Thurs midday-11pm. Closed on Mondays.