Artipedia - Arts News

DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art

Jean-Baptiste Mondino

DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art
presents the North American premiere of

SOPHIE CALLE
Prenez soin de vous

July 4 - October 19, 2008

http://www.dhc-art.org

DHC/ART is delighted to present Sophie Calle’s critically acclaimed exhibition Prenez soin de vous (Take care of yourself).

At the heart of this exhibition is a break-up e-mail that the artist received from a lover, which ends with the line “Take Care of Yourself”. Sophie Calle decided to do just that:

“I received an email telling me it was over. I didn’t know how to respond. It was almost as if it hadn’t been meant for me. It ended with the words “Take Care of yourself”. And so I did. I asked 107 women (including two made from wood and one with feathers), chosen for their profession or skills, to interpret this letter. To analyze it, comment on it, dance it, sing it. Dissect it. Exhaust it. Understand it for me. Answer for me. It was a way of taking the time to break up. A way of taking care of myself.”

In Prenez soin de vous ¬ - a massive installation comprising texts, photos, films and voices - the break-up letter is abstracted into digital code, Braille and shorthand, but mainly it is endlessly interpreted through the professional vocabulary of the many women. This poetic, humourous and touching project speaks to us all about our relation to the beloved and builds to a powerful meditation on loss.

France’s pre-eminent artist, Sophie Calle combines photography, text, video and performance in playfully conceptual and often autobiographical narratives concerned with absence, desire and loss. With a heady mix of humour, pathos, fetishism and voyeurism, her work repeatedly tests and redraws the boundaries of private and public, art and life. She often employs self-established guidelines, questions or rituals to transform her life into image and text-based works. She acts as the voyeur, The Sleepers (1979), The Hotel (1981) the pursuer Suite vénitienne (1983) or shares her love sorrows with others in Exquisite Pain (1984-2003), Double Blind (1992) and in her most recent exhibition, Take Care of Yourself (2007). Her experiments with different forms of photographic documentation: archival images, street photography, surveillance imagery and portraiture are combined with texts and stories and become compelling works that reside wistfully between fiction and reality.

Gallery Hours:

SUMMER HOURS
Wednesday to Friday from 12 PM to 9 PM
Saturday and Sunday from 11 AM to 9 PM
Free admission

Address:
451 and 468 St-Jean (corner Notre-Dame, in Old Montreal), Montreal, Quebec H2Y 2R5 Canada

For more information contact:
Cheryl Sim, Program Coordinator
Tel: (514) 866-6767 ext. 206
cheryl@dhc-art.org
http://www.dhc-art.org

Scottsdale Museum of
Contemporary Art [SMoCA]

Installation view, Pae White: “Lisa Bright & Dark”, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008. Ephemera objects in case listed below, all works collection of the artist, Los Angeles, CA unless otherwise noted. Copyright: Pae White

Pae White:
”Lisa, Bright & Dark”
17 May 2008 to 7 September 2008

Scottsdale Museum of
Contemporary Art [SMoCA]
7380 E. 2nd Street
Scottsdale, AZ 85251, U.S.A.
Phone: 480-874-4666

http://www.smoca.org

EXHIBITION:
Pae White: “Lisa, Bright & Dark”

Pae White seeks what she calls an “artfulness” in everything—books, advertisements, objects such as a shopping bag or perfume bottle, even exhibitions. She has a keen way of deconstructing or perhaps rethinking the assumed forms of things. This exhibition, an innovative approach to showcasing White’s broad output, marks the first full-scale American museum exhibition of her art.

White titled this exhibition after a novel by John Neufeld, Lisa, Bright and Dark, 1969, Copyright SG Phillips. The book was somewhat of a phenomenon and played an important role at the time of its release for many teenagers (White among them) seeking to understand the “craziness” of the world around them. In retrospect, for White now, the title represents a specific and elusive tone of that specific time and place. Rather than referencing the literal story of Lisa, Bright and Dark, she is interested in using the book title as a device that can reference notions of confusion and inconsistency. For her, it is about conjuring an essence more than telling a specific story.

The exhibition is literally and physically organized in two galleries, one “bright” and one “dark.” These two spaces create contrasting environments in which to experience the work psychologically. The “bright” gallery is like a jewel box. It is filled with White’s ephemera: books, catalogues, posters, stickers, announcement cards as well as various small objects including perfume bottles and delicate glass spheres that contain bath water, one of many un-collectable things, White has collected over the years. The sparkling realm of bright colors and dynamic shapes evokes a playful sense of wonder. By contrast, in the “dark” gallery, the richly hued objects made of heavier materials such as cast iron elicit a quiet, meditative quality and a more somber mood. Woven tapestries hang among dramatically lit paper mobiles and ethereal hanging sculptures. Central to the tone of this space is Reflective Tables, 2008, one of White’s “pools,” created for this exhibition out of layers of
mirrored and colored Plexiglas. The shimmering “pool” acts as an extended reflective pedestal that anchors various objects from White’s repertoire.

TOUR:
Pae White: “Lisa, Bright & Dark” will travel to the Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia where it will be on view from September 5 – November 2, 2009. The exhibition is available for travel from September 2008 – August 2009. To receive a full exhibition proposal packet please contact exhibition curator Cassandra Coblentz, 480-874-4637, or cassandrac@sccarts.org

PUBLICATION:
Pae White: “Lisa, Bright & Dark” Available now
The catalog accompanying this exhibition is the first major U.S. museum publication on Pae White’s art, which is widely shown abroad. Designed by Juliette Bellocq in close consultation with White, it includes an interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-director of exhibitions and programs and director of international projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London, and texts by Cassandra Coblentz, implementing curator, and Marilu Knode, originating curator and now assistant director, F.A.R. [Future Arts Projects], Arizona State University, Tempe.

For further information please visit our website http://www.smoca.org

Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art [SMoCA]
7380 E. 2nd Street
Scottsdale, AZ 85251
U.S.A.

Phone: 480-874-4666
Fax: 480-874-4655
e-mail: smoca@sccarts.org

Museum Summer Hours: Wed 12 noon – 5pm; Thurs 10am - 8pm; Fri + Sat: 10am - 5pm; Sun 12 noon- 5pm. Closed on Mondays & Tuesdays during the summer and major holidays.



Organized by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

Sponsored by the Peter Norton Family Foundation and the SMoCA Salon.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment of the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art.

Installation of objects in the case from image above include:
Bath Spheres, 2001, glass and bath water, each of nine; Blue Crush, 2007, porcelain perfume bottle and perfume stopper, edition of eight; Journal, 2003, mixed media artist’s book, courtesy of the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin; The Norton Family, n.d., Corian box and printed cards, Courtesy of The Norton Family Foundation.

San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art

Yves Netzhammer, Furniture of Proportions (preparatory sketch), 2008; Courtesy the artist and Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt, Germany; Copyright 2008 Yves Netzhammer

Room for Thought:
Alexander Hahn and
Yves Netzhammer
July 10 through October 5, 2008

San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
415.357.4000

http://www.sfmoma.org

Room for Thought pairs two computer-generated video installations by Swiss artists Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer that reveal a fascination with internal landscapes of the mind. Hahn’s single-channel, interactive video projection Luminous Point (2006) allows the viewer to take a self-guided tour of a virtual simulation of the artist’s Manhattan apartment, using a remote control to navigate a gamelike labyrinth of spaces derived from digital manipulations of photographic and filmic records. Where Hahn’s hybrid space incorporates images of the real world, Netzhammer presents a poetic world of pure invention. Premiering at SFMOMA, his new three-channel, site-specific installation Furniture of Proportions (2008) incorporates highly stylized wall drawings, animation, and sculptural objects to create an intricate spatial narrative.

Organized by Rudolf Frieling, SFMOMA’s curator of media arts, the exhibition occupies adjacent galleries and represents two generations of artists who have consciously worked with the computer as a formal artistic tool and means of expression. Both Hahn and Netzhammer combine a variety of traditional media with computer techniques in order to articulate a deep concern with the histories of philosophy and art. The artists also share an interest in human thought processes and the interplay between external images in the world and internal images in the mind. Undertaken as an open-ended investigation, their art is concerned with transience and states of change, and deals in surrealistic effects, associative thinking, and temporal multiplicity.

Alexander Hahn
Hahn (born 1954) is widely regarded as a pioneer of new media. His experiments with digitally reworked animations combine documentary film and video, photography, and computer-generated imagery, conflating reality and fantasy. Filled with associative, often cyclical image-streams, his work generally revolves around problems of representation—specifically rules governing individual and collective memory—and raises questions about what it means to perceive, store, and recollect visual knowledge in both time and space.

Yves Netzhammer
Zurich-based artist Netzhammer (born 1970) has become known for his graphically dynamic drawings, animations, and sculptural installations that explore the interconnectedness of things. Dealing in extremely reduced forms, his mainly figurative imagery intentionally blurs the hierarchy among humans, animals, plants, and iconic objects. This abstract pictorial lexicon—or, “thought-imagery” to use the artist’s term—functions more akin to a system of encoded signs that, uprooted from reason and familiar context, stand in opposition to the world of everyday images.

Room for Thought: Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Support for this exhibition is provided by Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council.

Public contact: 415.357.4000; http://www.sfmoma.org
Press only: Robyn Wise, 415.357.4172, rwise@sfmoma.org
SFMOMA Press Room: http://www.sfmoma.org/press/pressroom.asp?id=344&do=exhibitions