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Max Liboiron, Abundance, mixed media, 2008

The Klondike Institute of Art and Culture presents:

THE NATURAL & THE MANUFACTURED 2008
An ODDGallery and KIAC Artist in Residence Project

Max Liboiron: Abundance
and
Joan Scaglione: Earth Bed Tells

Thursday, August 14 to Friday, September 26, 2008
Artists’ Talks: Thursday, August 14, 7 pm
Opening Reception: 8:00 pm

Public lecture by John K. Grande
Friday August 15, 8 pm
Followed by a question and answer period with Grande, Liboiron and Scaglione

The Natural & The Manufactured 2008 is a three-part exhibition series that engages artists and audiences in a re-examination of the various cultural and economic values imposed on the environment. The project kicked off in July with HO, an exhibition by Toronto-based artist Toni Hafkenscheid, and now continues with projects by Liboiron and Scaglione, along with a contribution from theorist and writer John K. Grande.

During her six-week tenure at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture residency program , Liboiron produced Abundance, a gallery-specific installation made up entirely of Dawson City’s local and tourist garbage. The trash makes up a miniature natural history diorama of the town’s four historical garbage sites. Each part of the diorama is modular and gallery visitors are invited to take pieces of it away with them for free, enacting a landfill that erodes out of the landscape and into people’s homes. Based on the idea that what gets to count as natural and what types of land and objects are valued is culturally manufactured, the installation is built facilitate the re-valuation and uptake of previously worthless “garbage,” while encouraging gallery visitors to consider how they participate in Dawson City’s landfills and landscapes.

During her residency, Scaglione produced Earth Bed Tells, a site-specific outdoor installation on a path near the Moosehide Slide, Dawson’s most recognizable natural landmark. Scaglione’s project takes the form of numerous roughly crafted bed structures that are literally “embedded” into the landscape. With this startling juxtaposition, Scaglione invites the viewer to relinquish the hold that consciousness has on our psyches and enter the interior realms of the unconscious. While beds are typically seen as a place where we slip from wakefulness into the restorative time of sleep—a place of intimacy and dreams—in this installation the earth-beds become a site of transformation. Notions of old and new, the intellectual and intuitive, the natural and the constructed are conflated in Scaglione’s landscape.

John K. Grande has traveled from Montreal to present a lecture addressing recent histories and current trends of site-specific, land based, and environmental art practices. After his lecture, Grande will be composing a post-exhibition essay addressing and reflecting on the work of Liboiron and Scaglione.

MAX LIBOIRON grew up in rural northern Alberta, where her understanding of environmental relationships was formed. Max Liboiron holds an MFA and a certificate in cultural studies from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and BFA with Distinction from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada. She is currently pursuing a PhD at New York University in Visual Culture and environmentalism.

JOAN SCAGLIONE’s work addresses concepts and social constructions concerning the power of the earth to reflect and integrate human experience, culture, and spiritual vision. Currently, the Saskatchewan prairie is her home where she teaches and works as a practicing artist. Joan Scaglione recently received her MFA from the University of Regina.

JOHN K. GRANDE is an art critic, writer, lecturer and interviewer based in Montreal, Canada. His articles have been published internationally in many periodicals, including ArtForum, Sculpture, Art Papers and Espace. He is the author of numerous books including Balance: Art and Nature (2004), Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists (2004), and Dialogues in Diversity: Art from Marginal to Mainstream (2007). His latest book Art Allsorts was released in June, 2008.

KLONDIKE INSTITUTE OF ART AND CULTURE
Bag 8000, Dawson City, Yukon, Canada Y0B 1G0
http://www.kiac.org
Contact: Lance Blomgren, ODDGallery Director

Proa and MAM-SP

Marcel Duchamp: A work that is not a work “of art”

MAM – MUSEU DE ARTE MODERNA DE SÃO PAULO:
15 July - 21 September, 2008

FUNDACION PROA:
November 19, 2008 - February, 2009

Curator: Elena Filipovic

Organization: Fundación Proa
Coproduction: Fundación Proa and MAM-SP

http://www.proa.org
http://www.mam.org.br

Two years after an intensive investigation and production, Fundación Proa today shares with the MAM-SP the success obtained from the critics and public for the exhibition Marcel Duchamp: a work that is not a work “of art”, inaugurated in São Paulo last July 15, constituting the artist’s largest individual show in Latin America.

This is the first presentation of the exhibition, which will be shown in Buenos Aires starting November 22, when Proa inaugurates its new building. The last great retrospective of Duchamp was at the Tinguely Museum, Basel, in 2002, curated by Harald Szeemann; after this six year absence Fundación Proa undertakes the challenge of organizing a traveling exhibition, bringing the artist back to the international art scene.

The show at Proa is curated by Elena Filipovic and offers an extensive panorama of over 140 pieces that highlight Duchamp’s aspects as curator, designer, typographer, and promoter of culture, without excluding his revolutionary production. Through objects, works on paper, photographs, projections, and documentation, the exhibition underlines the production following the 1913 creation of the readymade – revolutionary step in the history of art that implied the rupture with the traditional concept of a work of art- until the last works by Duchamp, making its way through the most emblematic pieces of his production, among them La Mariée mise à nu par ses Célibataires, même, also known as The Large Glass and Boîte-en-valise, his miniature portable museum.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 360-page catalogue containing a careful and rigorous selection of images specially produced for each institution in its local language with the original version and English translation. It is composed of a selection of historic and foundational essays (Thierry de Duve, Octavio Paz, and Rosalind Krauss), which allow to see who Marcel Duchamp was and his importance in the context of art history, contributing to the debate new perspectives on different aspects of his production.

In parallel to the exhibition, Fundación Proa is organizing its first International Colloquium on Duchamp, coordinated by Paul B. Franklin, art critic and Editor in Chief of Étant donné Marcel Duchamp -magazine published annually by the Association pour l’Étude de Marcel Duchamp (Association for studies in Marcel Duchamp)-. For more information regarding the colloquium, please write: duchamp@proa.org

It will be a unique and unbeatable opportunity to interchange points of views and discuss in the Twenty-first century one of the great men that left their mark in the last century, with the presence of renown local and international researchers. The meeting will become a platform for debate and investigation on contemporary art and the influence of Duchamp’s work not only on the visual arts, but also on music, literature, cinema, theater, and other performatic arts.

D:Mes imagesimages pour ACCEA(2) brochure-vers.jpg

Arménian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art
08.08- 30.08.2008 “in vivo” Armén Rotch. /Curator: David Kareyan
adresse: 1/3 Pavstos Biuzand Blvd., Yerevan, Armenia
http://www.accea.info
http://armenrotch.blogspot.com/

Württembergischer
Kunstverein Stuttgart

Kevin Schmidt, Wild Signals, Video installation, 2007

Wild Signals
Artistic Positions between Symptom and Analysis
September 13 - November 9, 2008

Württembergischer
Kunstverein Stuttgart
Schlossplatz 2
D-70173 Stuttgart
info@wkv-stuttgart.de
http://www.wkv-stuttgart.de

Corinne May Botz
Sorel Cohen
Martin Dammann
Charles Gaines
Jana Gunstheimer
Susan Hiller
Joachim Koester
Joshua Mosley
Pablo Pijnappel
Tim Roda
Kevin Schmidt

From September 13 to November 9, 2008, the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart is presenting the exhibition “Wild Signals. Artistic Positions between Symptom and Analysis.” The exhibition comprises works by eleven international artists who have appropriated scientific methods in different ways. Historical documents are subjected to a shifted reading. The instruments and discourses of criminology, psychoanalysis, ethnology, natural and parasciences are borrowed as much as questioned. With an attitude that is as critical as it is ironical, the artists confront that production of truth that seeks to master the unknown and the incomprehensible and that rests on the denial of its own fallacies.

Speculation and staging, as techniques intrinsic to scientific thought, its experiments and reasonings, receive special attention – not least because this is the point at which aesthetic and scientific practices intersect. For example, stage, photography and film have long been described as instruments of knowledge, that serve not to prove but rather to actually produce and stage knowledge.

“Wild Signals” presents artistic mis-en-scènes of knowledge – and non-knowledge – in which the performative aspect is manifest. Here, knowledge appears in an open resonant space in which fact and possibility, what may be interpreted and what may not, are mutually conditional.

The exhibition’s title refers to Kevin Schmidt’s video installation of the same name.

Corinne May Botz (*1977, USA), The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, 2004
In her photographs, Corinne May Botz presents a collection of meticulously created crime scene models made by Frances Glessner Lee (USA) in the 1940s. Each of the doll’s house-like dioramas presents a composite of various unsolved criminal cases. They were designed on the basis of police reports, while the detailed furnishings of the various crime scenes were the product of Lee’s imagination.

Sorel Cohen (*1936, CND), Divans Dolorosa, 2008
Sorel Cohen’s series shows photographs that the artist took in the consultation rooms of fourteen different psychoanalysts from Quebec. The focus in each case is on the couch – the icon of Freud’s talking cure. Each deserted interior is assigned a concept from the field of psychoanalysis.

Martin Dammann (*1965, D), Soldier Studies, 2007
Martin Dammann’s works are based on an extensive collection of photographs from the two world wars. The “Soldier Studies” series focuses on German World War II soldiers involved in various “cross-dressing” scenarios.

Charles Gaines (*1944, USA), Night Crimes, 1997
Charles Gaines researched in the archives of the Los Angeles Times for crime scene
pictures and portraits of killers. In the four photomontages he assigns a criminal’s face to each scene of a crime, while in fact there is no connection between the two. The third
element he adds is a sky chart displaying the constellation at the exact time of the crime.

Jana Gunstheimer (*1974, D), Stammsitz, 2005
In her work – ensembles of black-and-white watercolors and objects – Jana Gunstheimer takes a critical, tongue-in-cheek look at the structures of scientific methods. Here, the construction and reconstruction of the research findings coincide. This also applies to the “Stammsitz” project, a work in progress that examines the Krupp dynasty and its domicile, the Villa Hügel in Essen.

Susan Hiller (*1942, UK), The Curiosities of Sigmund Freud, 2005
“The Curiosities of Sigmund Freud” is based on eight tiny microscope slides – micro-dots of collages of paintings and photographs –, possessed by the family of Sigmund Freud. Susan Hiller created magnified prints of them. The pictures are only shadowy and barely decipherable. A further find reveals a slip by the scientist.

Joachim Koester (*1962, USA), The Magic Mirror of John Dee, 2005
“The Magic Mirror of John Dee” is dedicated to one of the most important scientists of the seventeenth century and his occult practices. His attempts to communicate with the otherworld, in order to better understand the earthly, failed. The piece features one of the tools of his experiments: the surface of a black mirror.

Joshua Mosley (*1974, USA), dread, 2007
Inspired by Blaise Pascal’s “Pensées” and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Emile”, Joshua Mosley drafts a fictitious dialogue between the two philosophers. The subject is the relationship between man and nature, the question as to whether things are there by themselves or created by god and are therefore good.

Pablo Pijnappel (*1979, NL), Felicitas, 2005
In his works, Pablo Pijnappel re/constructs the unusual paths through life of various family members. Based on the family archive and other historical visual documents, his narratives oscillate between the credible and the incredible, the mundane and the grotesque. The three-part slide projection “Felicitas” revolves around the story of Felicitas Baer, a friend of Pijnappel’s mother.

Tim Roda (*1977, USA)
Tim Roda’s black-and-white photographs are based on elaborate stage-like installations in which he interacts with his family. The opulent sets are furnished with numerous obscure, fantastic props made from everyday materials and remnants, that the actors use for their performance.

Kevin Schmidt (*1972, CND), Wild Signals, 2007
The video installation “Wild Signals” presents a stage rig that is both spectacular and spectral in the midst of unspoilt nature: as if it were about invoking the sublime, the incomprehensible, that does not, however, appear. The installation features the five-note melody that served to communicate with extraterrestrials in Steven Spielberg’s film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.

Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart
Schlossplatz 2
D-70173 Stuttgart
Fon: +49 (0)711 - 22 33 70
Fax: +49 (0)711 - 29 36 17
info@wkv-stuttgart.de
http://www.wkv-stuttgart.de