Artipedia - Arts News

Copyright Will Kwan, 2008

Exhibition dates: September 4 - 18, 2008
Opening reception: September 4, 2008, 7 PM

Posters by Luis Jacob & Paul De Guzman, Will Kwan & Kristina Lee Podesva, and Fedora Romita & Sara Mameni

Curated by Alissa Firth-Eagland & Johan Lundh

Between Us - A Toronto/Vancouver Exchange is an experimental, curated group project that invited six artists to participate as key contributors to, and creators of a national dialogue between the cities of Toronto and Vancouver, Canada. The project is comprised of three double-sided posters. In each instance, two artists collaboratively conceptualized and crafted one poster in a long distance dialogue.

Luis Jacob is a Toronto-based artist, curator, educator, writer, organizer and activist whose practice challenges categorization. Jacob shares an interest in social spaces like his Vancouver collaborator Paul De Guzman. De Guzman is a self-taught artist, and his practice draws from his training as an engineer. Both have incorporated the image of a tower in their poster works, but notably, not the high-rise architecture conventionally used to visually represent their respective cities.

Toronto artist Will Kwan uses a range of approaches such as installation, performance, photo, text, video and editions in his practice. Like his Vancouver collaborator Kristina Lee Podesva, he addresses the politics of space, geographies, identity and globalization. Podesva is the founder of Colourschool, a free school within a school, Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. The project is dedicated to the speculative study of five colours: white, black, red, yellow, and brown. Through their poster works, Kwan and Podesva have described the space that exists between the two of them and more broadly, the space between humans in a global context.

Toronto artist Fedora Romita’s versatile practice encompasses performance, video, and drawing. Romita’s process-based works are self-referential, as they both respond to and envelop their own methods of creation. Both Romita and her Vancouver collaborator Sara Mameni use text and transcribe information through painstaking labour. Sara Mameni’s practice of drawing, design and text deals with language and translation. These artists’ poster works are in direct conversation with one another, and act as a record of what communication took place between the artists up to the point of production. The posters describe the unpredictable dialogues and inevitable miscommunications that take place in any long distance relationship.

This conceptual framework provides space for artists of two cities to exchange ideas in the creation of new work, and engineers a distribution mechanism for art between organizational partners and cities. By choosing the form of three double-sided posters, we distribute six new works to two major cities in a format that is challenging to artists and affordable to all.

The opportunities presented by Between Us - A Toronto/Vancouver Exchange over the long term are what we find most exciting of all. We imagine this project to be a point of departure for an increasingly dynamic relationship between the two cities, one that could catalyze future exchanges between Toronto and Vancouver-based artists.

Western Front Media Arts acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $11.8 million in media arts throughout Canada.

Media contact:
Alissa Firth-Eagland
Director/Curator
Western Front Media Arts
303 East 8th Avenue
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada V5T 1S1
604-876-9343
media@front.bc.ca
www.front.bc.ca

Contemporary Art
Museum St. Louis

Lutz Bacher
JOKES: Jane Fonda, 1988, distressed photomural on aluminum, 30 ¾ inches x 37 ¾ inches.
Courtesy of the Artist and Taxter & Spengemann, New York.

LUTZ BACHER and AÏDA RUILOVA

and THE FRONT ROOM
September 12, 2008 - January 4, 2009

Contemporary Art
Museum St. Louis
3750 Washington Blvd.
St. Louis, MO 63108

http://www.contemporarystl.org

MAIN GALLERIES
Lutz Bacher: Spill
For her first major museum exhibition, Lutz Bacher takes over the Main Galleries of the Contemporary. Working since the 1970s in Berkeley, California, Bacher makes use of a broad range of media to search for the noises that disfigure contemporary culture, isolating the alien images that make up our shared visual landscape. Rooted in a tradition of appropriation, she sifts through anonymous books, illustrations, pulp fiction, advertisements, and abandoned photographs. Spill maps out the artist’s most current artistic territory and includes new site-specific installations, a rotating display of older works, and an artist-book.

and

Aïda Ruilova: The Singles 1999 – Now
New York-based artist Aïda Ruilova presents an installation of short videos that draw from horror films, music, and popular culture, combining interests in classic cinema with a frenetic and low-tech sensibility. Ruilova—a classically trained musician and member of the experimental music group Alva—is one of a young generation of artists who employ media with a do-it-yourself aesthetic, often drawing upon structures of cinema and music that exist outside the art world. Co-organized with the Aspen Art Museum, The Singles 1999 – Now presents a comprehensive survey of her single-channel video work since 1999 and is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue.

THE FRONT ROOM
Running alongside the Main Galleries, The Front Room operates at a different rhythm, with exhibitions lasting anywhere from one day to a few weeks. These reactive, nimble, provisional, and experimental exhibitions test the boundaries of conventional programming and echo the elasticity of contemporary culture.

The upcoming Front Room season features projects by:
Reena Spaulings; Wojciech Gilewicz; Chihcheng Peng; Claudia Wieser & Andrew Falkowski & Elad Lassry; Gregor Hildebrandt; Hany Armanious; Diego Perrone; Beatrice Gibson and Alex Waterman; Ian Burns; Roman Signer; Claire Fontaine; Meredith Malone (guest curator); and, Dexter Sinister (carte blanche).

For the exact Front Room schedule, please visit http://www.contemporarystl.org/frontroom.php

Support for Lutz Bacher: Spill is generously provided by The Nimoy Foundation. Support for the Aïda Ruilova: The Singles 1999 – Now catalog is generously provided by Toby Devan Lewis; Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin; and Salon 94, New York. General support for the Contemporary’s exhibitions program is generously provided by the Whitaker Foundation; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; William E. Weiss Foundation; Regional Arts Commission; Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; Arts and Education Council; Nancy Reynolds and Dwyer Brown; and members of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM ST. LOUIS
With an artist-centered exhibition program, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents the most relevant and experimental developments in contemporary art. The Main Galleries feature large-scale projects with two artists at a time, while The Front Room proposes short exhibitions by artists and others. The Contemporary makes the arts available to wide and diverse audiences throughout the St. Louis metropolitan area by developing successful community partnerships, education programs, and outreach initiatives. Founded as the Forum for Contemporary Art in 1980, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis re-opened with a new 25,000 square-foot building in 2003. For more information on the Contemporary, visit http://www.contemporarystl.org

DAN GAMBLE “Form” egg tempera on panel, 10″ x 10″, 2008 Courtesy Zg Gallery, Chicago

Exhibition Dates: September 5 – October 11, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, September 5th, 5:30-7:30pm

Zg Gallery
300 W. Superior St.
Chicago, IL 60610
T. 312.654.9900
Preview Paintings: www.ZgGallery.com/gamble.htm

Dan Gamble exhibits nine new paintings in his first solo show with Zg Gallery, Chicago. Gamble states, “I consider my work visual inventions. A synthesis of organic forms and geometric structures, each image presents numerous possibilities: armatures or architectural models, anatomical fragments, mechanical devices, botanical growths, diaphanous vapors. These hybrids either float in an atmospheric field or exist in an undetermined landscape. All appear to be in a state of growth or decay. This body of work attempts to balance opposing ideas: structure vs. disorder, impulse vs. deliberation, emotion vs. intellect, growth vs. decay. While attempting to reconcile these ideas within each painting, innumerable changes take place. A great deal of time is spent painting images that will ultimately be destroyed or submerged. This process is necessary; each piece is a puzzle that consists of many false starts and abandoned paths. Rather than setting a predetermined result, I choose!
an
approach that reflects uncertainty or unpredictability, one that allows the past to influence the present.”

Dan Gamble received his M.F.A. from The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and his B.F.A. from The University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

Kunsthaus Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum

Photo from the making of the film “Project for a revolution”, 2000 by Johanna Billing. Photo credits: Johanna Löwenhamn.

Surface of the World
Michelangelo Antonioni
Film Retrospective

featuring
Johanna Billing,
Project for a Revolution
Carlo di Carlo,
My long Journey with Antonioni
September 16th - September 26th, 2008

Kunsthaus Graz am
Landesmuseum Joanneum
info@kunsthausgraz.at
http://www.kunsthausgraz.at

Curator: Adam Budak
In collaboration with Nikos Grigoriadis, KIZ Cinema in the Augarten, Graz, Austria

“Words do not come easily to me, images do!” Michelangelo Antonioni used to confess. With Surface of the World, the Restrospective of the oeuvre of the Italian master of contemporary cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni, Kunsthaus Graz in collaboration with KIZ Augarten cinema Graz, aims to display the architecture of vision of the director who used to be known as „the Man of Images”. From early documentaries (Gente del Po, 1943-47) through groundbreaking feature pictures Blow-Up (1966), Zabriskie Point (1970) and Professione: Reporter (1974) to documentaries on Antonionis life and work, this retrospective analyses the condition of an image, the status of a colour, the treatment of a space and the intensity of an emotion - all necessary components of the fabrics of the Surface of the World.

This investigation’s second layer includes possible passages and intentional relations: Johanna Billing’s video Project for a Revolution (2000), on view in the Kunsthaus Graz (opening on September 16th, 7pm) constructs a bridge between formal grammars of cinema and visual arts. Billing masterfully restages the introductory scene from Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, featuring an intense meeting of student activists at the campus during 1968 revolutionary tensions. The artist concentrates on generating the ambiguity of students’ advanced state of expectation, between revolutionary alertness, passivity and boredom, thus commenting upon the possibilities of a real social engagement and rebellion in a present-day culture.

Surface of the World is complemented by My Long Journey with Antonioni, a lecture by Carlo di Carlo (Septmeber 23rd at 7pm in Kunsthaus Graz), Antonioni’s long-term collaborator and friend, film critic and author of essays and books, including Michelangelo Antonioni (1964), Il primo Antonioni (1973), Professione: Reporter (1996), Il Cinema di Antonioni (2002), Michelangelo Antonioni sul Cinema (2004), Antonioni (2004). He also worked on at least 30 short and mid-length films. The collaboration with Antonioni (and especially working on the Italian versions of films such as Blow-Up and Zabriskie Point) was of crucial importance for the development of his career. Di Carlo was curator of the Ente Autonomo Gestione Cinema, Cinecittà International and the Progetto Antonioni, which aimed at reissuing all Antonioni’s films and presenting them at 22 international events. He worked on the project for the future Antonioni Museum in Ferrara (1996) and was in charge of the first complete
solo show of all Antonioni’s works for the 59th Venice Film Festival (2002). He also collaborated on Antonioni’s “Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo”, a documentary about the restoration of Michelangelo Buonarrotis Moses (2004), who nowadays can be visited in San Pietro in Vincoli church in Rome.

Iaspis

Iaspis Open house august 2007.

Iaspis Open house, autumn 2008
29 - 30 August 2008

Friday 3-10 pm
Saturday 12-4 pm

Iaspis
The Swedish Arts Grants
Committee’s International
Programme for Visual Artists

Maria Skolgata 83
118 53 Stockholm
Sweden

http://www.iaspis.com

Participants: Malin Arnell, Antippa, Kader Attia, Victoria Brännström, Kerstin Ergenzinger, Athena Farrokhzad, Boris Groys, Róza El Hassan, Emma Hedditch, Anna Livion Ingvarsson, Hristina Ivanoska, Andreas Johansson, Gülsün Karamustafa, Eli Levén, Metahaven (Daniel van der Velden), Warren Neidich, Suela Qoshja, Laercio Redondo, Emily Roysdon, Pia Wergius and Ylva Westerlund.

Iaspis presents the Open house, autumn 2008. This is one of Stockholm’s recurring open meeting-places for artists and their audience. On 29 - 30 August 2008, we will open the doors for a presentation of a total of fourteen Iaspis grant recipients as well as several invited guests that will take part in a packed programme of lectures, film screenings, performances. In addition to showing their own works, the artists participating in this year’s Open house have been provided with the opportunity to connect with other persons, within or outside the artworld, which has led to several exciting new collaborations.

For the Open house weekend, among many things Emma Hedditch will create a site-specific, dialogic performance with Malin Arnell. Emily Roysdon has engaged Eli Levén and Athena Farrokhzad for a reading based on a recent performance in Stockholm. Kader Attia will give a lecture on his artistic process with themes such as exile, globalisation and identity as his starting-points. Three films by filmmaker and theoretician Boris Groys, will be screened, presented by Ylva Westerlund. And for this occasion only, the artist Victoria Brännström will revive the anarco-feminist café Antippa, through workshops and presence of the actual café. Warren Neidich will show several works based on theories of the neurobiopolitical and the public space. Gülsün Karamustafa will screen her video, Bosporus 1954, depicting the social effects of a peculiar natural phenomenon that occurred in Istanbul in 1954 when the Bosporus froze over and people could walk across the strait from one side of th
e city to the other.

As a part of Iaspis program within the field of applied arts we present a lecture with Daniel van der Velden, one of the members of Metahaven, a design research collective based in Amsterdam and Brussels. The lecture is part of the ongoing lecture series In Practice.

On Friday 29th August all visitors are kindly requested to bring a vegetable of their choice, which will be part of Hristina Ivanoska’s performance Stone Soup, in collaboration with Anna Livion Ingvarsson/Konsthall C, Hökarängen. The vegetables will form the content of a soup that will be prepared and served during the evening.

For further information about the program please visit http://www.iaspis.com

Iaspis is the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual Artists. Iaspis encompasses an international studio program in Sweden and abroad, a support structure for exhibitions and residencies abroad for Swedish based artists, as well as a program of seminars, exhibitions and publications.

The Swedish Arts Grants Committee is a government agency responsible for grants and remunerations to individual artists in the field of visual art, design, craft, architecture, music, theatre, dance and film. It also support international exchanges and keeps itself informed about artists’ financial and social situations.

Contact:

Robert Stasinski
Project Manager
Iaspis/The Swedish Arts Grants Committee
Tel +46 8-50 65 50 76
rs@iaspis.com

Gumtree Museum of Art

Roy LaGrone,
Beacon #4: Shelter from the Storm (Biloxi), Beta Projection series C-print 24 x 35 in., 2007.
Courtesy of the Artist and Gumtree Museum of Art.

Roy LaGrone: The Beauty of the Impossible
August 1 - September 20, 2008

Gumtree Museum of Art
211 W Main Street
Tupelo, MS 38804

http://www.gumtreemuseum.com

Gumtree Museum of Art organizes hometown debut of media artist
Roy LaGrone

The Gumtree Museum of Art is delighted to present “The Beauty of the Impossible,” a solo exhibition by video/ new media artist Roy LaGrone. LaGrone, a Tupelo native based in Italy - creates computer-generated artwork “centered on transforming discarded artifacts, places and entities into sacred projections.” This debut exhibition, which is LaGrone’s first ever in his hometown, presents eighteen works from his Beta Projection series, a suite of large-scale photomontage constructed from found objects, addressing issues of 21st century displacement and renewal. “At this moment in my life and career, where I live the farthest physical distance away from Tupelo, I’m pleased, honored and humbled to be sharing this current body of work in Mississippi… For it’s rare, indeed that one is blessed with the gracious opportunity (after twenty plus years away), to dialog with his/or her birth-home on this sacred level,” said LaGrone. Roy LaGrone: The Beauty of the Impossible is on view !
from
August 1 through September 20, 2008.

The Beta Projection series is an ongoing series of fortuitous experiments that LaGrone conducts in his immediate surroundings (currently in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of Italy). On daily walks, LaGrone collects objects (”remnants of trash”) of interest; and then morphs his artifacts into virtual images involving intricate illusions of three-dimensional space. These objects were already charged with their own respective histories,” says LaGrone. By “utilizing advances in digital imaging processes, I attempt to prescribe visual narratives for these now-discarded artifacts. Working together at the intersection of photography, sculpture and painting these large-scale, computer-generated transpositions are fetishes; which explore the idea of” healing and transforming the socially discarded, LaGrone wrote in his artist statement. “I am questioning whether today’s technology can be optimized in the production of holistic renewal.”

“In objects collected from the detritus of society Roy reveals a transcendental beauty and tells its story. Rooted in the manner in which commercial photography composes small objects such as a precious gem to reveal its inner fire, these experimental photographs are also digitally manipulated to reveal the enigma of our environment. Though this digital process may magnify the fact that you are no longer viewing a photograph, Roy LaGrone’s work is not about process and effects. LaGrone’s work is the composition of a poet. The microcosm encapsulated within a bit of trash is our story. We are pleased to offer our visitors the metaphysical images of Roy LaGrone.” said curator Robert Ring.

Born in 1966 in Tupelo, Mississippi, Roy LaGrone received a B.F.A. from the Atlanta College of Art and a M.F.A. in computer art from the Savannah College of Art and Design. He lives and works in Pordenone, Italy. LaGrone’s work has been shown at numerous venues including the Smithsonian Institution; SIGGRAPH; the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans; the Cultural Center Pablo of the Torriente Brau, Havana, Cuba; and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum, Austin.

Gumtree Museum of Art
211 W Main St., Tupelo, MS 38804
Mailing Address:
P.O. Box 786
Tupelo, MS 38802

General Information: (662) 844-2787
Web site: http://www.gumtreemuseum.com

Museum Hours: Tuesday-Friday: 10:00 a.m.-4:00 p.m.;
Saturday: 10:00 a.m.-2:00 p.m.

The Gumtree Museum of Art provides museum quality exhibitions, educational opportunities, and culturally diverse activities.

MuHKA

THE ORDER OF THINGS
11 September 2008 - 4 January 2009

MuHKA
Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp
Leuvenstraat 32 2000 Antwerp Belgium
T +32 [0]3 260 99 99
info@muhka.be

http://www.muhka.be

In the fall of 2008, the Antwerp museum of contemporary art MuHKA will host an exhibition on the uses of archival images, image archives and image banks (and various other manifestations of a classificatory, encyclopaedic impulse) in contemporary art.

The Order of Things takes as its point of departure a web-based project by Vancouver photo-artist Roy Arden titled The World as Will and Representation, an online image archive consisting of a staggering 30,000+ jpegs from which Arden, who helped to flesh out many of the germinal ideas for this exhibition, selects the visual motifs for his recent digital photo-collages.

In The Order of Things, this image archive’s use of a stringent classificatory logic – alphabetical and thus eminently logical, yet also often bizarre in its (inevitably arbitrary) ordering of one ‘class’ of images after another – operates as a curatorial trigger for a sustained reflection upon the various uses of archives, databases, encyclopaedias, typologies and other “ordering devices” (the title being an allusion to a well-known book by the historian of dis/order, Michel Foucault) as methods and strategies for confronting the delirious spectacle of the contemporary image world. This delirium is of course nowhere more palpably present than in the phenomenal proliferation of (photographic) imagery that is the worldwide: the conceptual horizon of the Internet figures as one of the exhibition’s defining parameters – hence the centrality accorded to Arden’s own The World as Will and Representation in the exhibition, hence also the inclusion of one of Thomas Ruff’s emble
matic “jpeg” photographs, or of Joachim Schmid’s exploration of the aesthetic of the ordered everyday in the depths of Flickr. In some sense, The Order of Things views the world as a universe entirely made up out of images/pictures (mainly of a vernacular photographic nature) and only made accessible to us through images/pictures; a world that may seem impossibly chaotic, and therefore invites all kinds of ordering interventions that seek to domesticate and contain the natural excesses of the image-world. This partly ironic, self-conscious Will to Order – a classificatory impulse that is supremely aware of its own futility, and of the fatal contingency of its classificatory criteria – is the precise juncture where the archival and/or encyclopaedic impulse in contemporary art enters into the picture: the “art of classification” that is implied in the archive, the atlas and the encyclopaedia (or its corollaries, the data-base and image-bank) is an integral self-reflexive part of what Martin Heidegger has called “the fundamental event of the modern age” – the “conquest of the world as picture.”

Visual abundance and the excessive aesthetics of plenty, as formal qualities of the world encountered in this chaotic, delirious avalanche of images, are at the heart of this exhibition. They are features of our contemporary digitized condition that inevitably invite critical scrutiny (much of which takes the shape of art – an art that seeks to impose order, or otherwise reveal the hidden order of things), yet at the same time also act as sources of authentic wonder to which art may respond by duplicating this spectacle of visual overload, by adding to it even. This deep, irresolvable ambiguity – a seamless reflection of the ambivalence of the image proper – is a defining characteristic of the exhibition, and of much of the work included in it, and of course serves to remind us of the ironies implied in all uses of the term ‘order’. It is an irony that is also present in the awareness that, no matter how sincere and profound contemporary art’s indignant criticism of the
society of spectacle may seem (and effectively be), art – and art’s desire to see everything and show everything – also irrefutably belongs to this very regime of spectacularization.

Two types of profusion, then, are at work in this exhibition. One pertains to the brute fact of the visual abundance characteristic of contemporary society proper – the realization of the world’s overwhelming visual riches, and the mirror effect it creates in any art that seeks to respond to this relative wealth by replicating it. Here we find the rationale for the exhibition’s own character of visual overload – the sheer quantity of work on display that consists, precisely, of picturing (or imaging/imagining) quantity. Secondly, there is also the fact of the fundamental heterogeneity of the visual abundance that characterizes the image-world – hence also the heterogeneity of artistic responses to this fact: not only is it an art of visual plenty, it is also one of irreducible differences and differentiations. To grasp the baffling variety of artistic attitudes, methods and practices that are at play in this labyrinthine exhibition – a reflection in itself of the laby
rinthine nature of the world as such, and one that must by its very definition remain incomplete – a number of organizational principles that symbolize or reflect these varying attitudes, methods and practices have been isolated, such as “appropriation”, “archives”, “collage & bricolage,” and “typology”.

As is clear from these enumerations and taxonomies, photography will be the dominant medium in the exhibition; it is the technical innovation of photography and of the ideally limitless reproducibility of its images, theorized to such epochal effect by Walter Benjamin, that has transformed our experience of the world into an overwhelmingly visual one. Furthermore, photography has also contributed decisively to the democracy of imagery that is implied in the exhibition’s conceptual make-up: as a project, The Order of Things would be entirely unthinkable without the democratization of image production that was ushered in by the popularization of photography, beginning with the introduction of cheap cameras and film at the beginning of the twentieth century, all the way up to the advent of digital photography and the Internet as everyman’s image bank.

Participating artists & artworks by: Roy Arden (CAN), Sarah Charlesworth (US), Marjolijn Dijkman (NL), Hans Eijkelboom (NL), Daniel Faust (US), Douglas Huebler (US), Sanja Ivekovic (CRO), Luis Jacob (CAN), Cameron Jamie (US), Arthur Lipsett (CAN), Tine Melzer (D), Marc Nagtzaam (NL), Cady Noland (US), Peter Piller (D), Sigmar Polke (D), Richard Prince (US), Robert Rauschenberg (US), ROMA Publications (Mark Manders & Roger Willems) (NL), Julian Rosefeldt (D), Thomas Ruff (D), Joachim Schmid (D), Steven Shearer (CAN), Nancy Spero (US), Batia Suter (CH), Els Vanden Meersch (B), Christopher Williams(US)

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete

Following the exhibition, Stoffel Debuysere and Maria Palacios Cruz conceived a film and video programme on September 12th, 19th and 26th.

For more information: http://www.muhka.be/film location: MuHKA_media