Category Archives: Sights

Sights

See: Light and Landscape and Tom Sachs

These look like they’ll be great show, well worth the hike upstate and uptown.

May 12–November 11, 2012
Light and Landscape
Storm King Art Center
Old Pleasant Hill Road‬, Mountainville, NY 12553‬

Storm king presents contemporary art that explores creative and conceptual possibilities of natural light.

Storm King Art Center presents a special exhibition devoted to contemporary art in which natural light is both a primary medium and a conceptual focus. Light and Landscape, organized by Associate Curator Nora Lawrence, encompasses 25 works by 14 artists who use a variety of strategies to engage with light as a central component of their art. Encompassing sculpture, installation, works on paper, and video, the works encourage viewers to contemplate not only their natural surroundings and the effects of sunlight, but also the vast impact of light on our daily lives and ecosystem.

Artists represented in the exhibition are Matthew Buckingham, Peter Coffin, Olafur Eliasson, Spencer Finch, Katie Holten, Roni Horn, Donald Judd, Anish Kapoor, William Lamson, Anthony McCall, Katie Paterson, Tobias Putrih, Alyson Shotz, and Diana Thater. Their work will be installed across Storm King’s 500 acres of hills, fields, and woodlands—interspersed with the Art Center’s permanent collection—and in the Museum Building.

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May 16–June 17, 2012
Tom Sachs: SPACE PROGRAM: MARS
Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue, between 66th and 67th Streets, New York, NY 10065

From May 16 through June 17, Park Avenue Armory and Creative Time join forces with artist Tom Sachs to launch SPACE PROGRAM: MARS, a four-week mission to the Red Planet that explores the universe as a path to discovering ourselves. This interactive installation recasts Park Avenue Armory’s 55,000-square-foot drill hall as an immersive space odyssey featuring dynamic and meticulously crafted sculptures, including elaborate spacecraft, Mission Control, a launch platform, a Mars landscape, and much more. SPACE PROGRAM: MARS will be manned by Sachs and his studio team of thirteen, who will perform the myriad procedures, rituals, and tasks of their mission at the Armory.

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Citizenship, Community, Sights

get excited: open studios, mfa shows, more

Besides Frieze, NADA, and Pulse art fairs in NYC this week, there’s a slew of auxilliary events, open studios, and MFA shows to check out. In support of friends and community, here’s my list:

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Go Stephanie!

May 4–6
Stephanie Syjuco: RAIDERS (Redux)
Catharine Clark Gallery’s New York Pop-Up Gallery
313 W 14th Street, 2F, NYC

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May 4–6
LMCC’s Open Studio Weekend
125 Maiden Lane, 14th Floor, NYC

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Go Michael!

Saturday, May 12
IN/VISION
2012 MFA Interaction Design Festival at the School of Visual Arts
Thesis Presentations: 11am – 4pm @ SVA Theatre
Thesis Exhibition: 5–7pm @ SVA Interaction Design Department
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Go Nyeema!
May 12–13
NARS Foundation Open Studios
88 35th Street, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn
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May 18–19
Kambui Olujimi: A Life in Pictures
Apex Art, 291 Church Street, NYC
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Saturday, May 19
Question Bridge: Black Males Blueprint Roundtable
Brooklyn Museum 
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Finally, if that’s not enough, learn about Emergency USA‘s amazing projects building medical infrastructure in areas of conflict:
Thursday, May 3, 7pm, E-USA office @ 21 Exchange Place. Presentation. RSVP to nyc@emergencyusa.org.
Sunday, May 6, 5–8pm, Randolph Beer, Nolita. 15% benefit happy hour.
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Sights

get excited: Josephine Meckseper, Josiah McElheny, Rob Carter

This week I’m looking forward to:

Josephine Meckseper The Complete History of Postcontemporary Art, 2005. Courtesy the Artist, New York, and VG Bild-Kunst.

Josephine Meckseper The Complete History of Postcontemporary Art, 2005. Courtesy the Artist, New York, and VG Bild-Kunst. Source: Sculpture-Center.org.

Monday, April 9, 7PM
Subjective Histories of Sculpture: Josephine Meckseper
SculptureCenter
44-19 Purves St, Long Island City, Queens

Citing specific works, bodies of work, texts, or even personal anecdotes taken from inside and outside cultural production, and inside and outside art, these subjective, incomplete, partial, or otherwise eclectic histories question assumptions and propose alternative methods for understanding sculpture’s evolving strategies.

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Josiah McElheny, Island Universe (installation view), 2009. Courtesy the artist, Donald Young Gallery, Chicago, and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. Photo: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid © Josiah McElheny. Source: publicartfund.org.

Josiah McElheny, Island Universe (installation view), 2009. Courtesy the artist, Donald Young Gallery, Chicago, and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. Photo: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid © Josiah McElheny. Source: publicartfund.org.

Wednesday, April 11, 6:30pm
Public Art Fund Talks at The New School: Josiah McElheny
The New School, John Tishman Auditorium
66 West 12th Street, between 5th & 6th Avenues, NYC

McElheny is whip-smart and I expect nothing less than to be blown away.

Public Art Fund is pleased to present a talk by Josiah McElheny, an American artist whose multifaceted artistic practice has incorporated decorative and functional traditions of glass, as well as research, writing, and curating to explore materiality and its relationship to the ways in which we see and experience objects. Often using narratives inspired by the histories of art, design, and glass as points of departure, McElheny has created massive sculptures of shining chrome and transparent glass that layer myriad references as diverse as twentieth-century fashion, modernist design, sixteenth-century Italian painting, and even the Big Bang theory.

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Rob Carter. Faith in a Seed, 2012. Image courtesy the artist. Source: ArtinGeneral.org.

Rob Carter. Faith in a Seed, 2012. Image courtesy the artist. Source: ArtinGeneral.org.

Opening: Friday, April 13, 6-8pm
Exhibition: April 13–June 23, 2012
Rob Carter: Faith in a Seed
Art in General
79 Walker Street (just off Canal and Broadway), NYC

I helped to build out this show, and I’m very excited to see how the installation and videos have come, quite literally, to life.

Faith in A Seed intertwines the languages of science and history into a living sculptural form. Rob Carter’s installation centers on the houses and gardens of three men of the 19th century. Miniature replicas of Charles Darwin’s Down House, Henry David Thoreau’s cabin at Walden, and Sir John Bennet Lawes’ Rothamsted Manor are the centerpieces of a large-scale triangular garden.

Viewers are invited to witness Carter’s controlled but fragile ecosystem in three distinct ways: time-based video projections, peepholes cut into the sides of the garden, as well as from an elevated viewing platform.

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Community, Sights

See: Bessma Khalaf @ Steven Wolf Fine Arts

This looks like it’s going to be an amazing show. Go Bessma & Steven!

April 20 – May 19, 2012
Bessma Khalaf: Re-Enchanter
Opening Reception: Friday, April 20, 6-8pm
Steven Wolf Fine Arts
2747 19th Street, A, San Francisco, CA 94110
Gallery Hours: Wed–Fri 10:30-5:30, Saturday 11-5

In Re-enchanter, Bessma Khalaf’s new exhibition at Steven Wolf Fine Arts, the Iraqi born artist draws upon the Chaldean tradition of witchcraft, sorcery and truth telling to play the role of artist as re-enchanter of a dead, modernist world. Chaldeans are a small Christian sect of Iraqis. Historically, they were perceived by neighboring empires as experts in sorcery, astrology and the magical arts, and were consulted to deal with the unknown. But with the rise of religious fundamentalism they are now hunted like witches in their region.

With little more than an oversized hoodie and some everyday objects, Khalaf uses vaudevillian magic to transform herself from Gandalf the wizard, to a lady in a burka, to a Jedi Knight, and then back to an Oakland home girl. Her broomstick is a Segway and her backdrop is night, and the promise land of California. While this new body of work is visually darker than Khalaf’s previous films and photographs, it continues to rely on humor and ironic juxtapositions to illuminate the dark, tragic geography that divides the old world and the new.

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Sights

This Saturday in San Francisco

Positive Signs, 2011, glitter pen, fluorescent pen, foil print, gridded vellum, 8.5 × 11 in / 21.5 × 28 cm.

Positive Signs, 2011, glitter pen, fluorescent pen, foil print, gridded vellum, 8.5 × 11 in / 21.5 × 28 cm.

Artists’ Talk
In Other Words
Sat, March 24, 2pm
Intersection for the Arts
925 Mission Street (at Fifth), San Francisco CA 94103
Exhibition extended through 3/31
Gallery hours: Tue–Sat, 12–6pm

In Other Words is a group exhibition that looks at language and its capacity to clarify and confuse, convene and separate, inspire and discourage. By exploring a range of areas concering the influence and evolution of language in our lives—the impact of technology, the obscurity of industry-specific terminology, the psychological internalization of language, and the recontextualization of language—the artists in this exhibition demonstrate through a diversity of media the many ways in which we strive to communicate to each other.

Katie Gilmartin, Julia Goodman, Emanuela Harris-Sintamarian, Susan O’Malley, Meryl Pataky, Alex Potts, Cassie Thorton, Annie Vought, Christine Wong Yap

Read reviews on SFGate, Zero1 blog, and the East Bay Monthly.
View opening photos on ArtBusiness.com.

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hope for good, allow for even better, 2012, ribbon, thread, pins, 51.5 × 47 in / 1.3 × 1.2 m

hope for good, allow for even better, 2012, ribbon, thread, pins, 51.5 × 47 in / 1.3 × 1.2 m

 

Opening reception: Sat, March 24, 3–5
Winter Art Walk 2012: Sat, March 24, 12–5
Voices of Home
Jenkins Johnson Gallery
464 Sutter Street (between Powell & Stockton), San Francisco, CA
Gallery hours: Tue–Fri 10–6; Sat 10–5
Exhibition: March 24–April 28, 2012

Each of these artists visually articulates works inspired by their diverse and rich cultural and ethnic backgrounds.

Artists: Noel Anderson, Kajahl Benes, Elaine Bradford, Elizabeth Colomba, Jamal Cyrus, Nathaniel Donnett, Zak Ové, Leslie Smith III, Devin Troy Strother, Felandus Thames, and Christine Wong Yap.

 

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Sights

see: Cindy Sherman @ MoMA

If you’re in New York this weekend, you’re probably going to the fairs (Armory, Scope, Volta, Independent, etc), but if you can, do yourself a favor and get to the MoMA for the Cindy Sherman retrospective.

Cindy Sherman. Untitled #466. 2008. Chromogenic color print, 8' 1 1/8 x 63 15/16" (246.7 x 162.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Robert B. Menschel in honor of Jerry I. Speyer. © 2011 Cindy Sherman. Source:MoMA.org.

Cindy Sherman. Untitled #466. 2008. Chromogenic color print, 8' 1 1/8 x 63 15/16" (246.7 x 162.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Robert B. Menschel in honor of Jerry I. Speyer. © 2011 Cindy Sherman. Source:MoMA.org.

I liked Sherman’s work before, though I always thought of her in the context of the Pictures Generation. Now, after seeing this world-class exhibition of her work, I’m convinced about her unique position in 21st-century contemporary art. There are many bodies of works in the exhibition, and a few—Untitled Film Stills, the history paintings, and the more recent grand dames—alone would make fantastic accomplishments for one artist’s lifetime. Some little-seen works really add to the visit, too. Sherman is an incredible photographer and artist, and I left feeling very inspired to be prolific, think big, and take risks.

(For example, I’ve been daydreaming about a forthcoming series of large collage/posters, envisioning a series of 10. Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills knocked my socks off—all 69 of them. Time to up the scale of my ambition, and do work!)

(Also, female self-portraitists, cliché of art schools: Bring it or quit it! Sherman’s A-game comes at risk to her, and the viewers benefit with immense rewards. Making vulnerable self-portraits in a very general way about “the gaze” can be like working on your punching form by hitting the air. It’s how you start, but sooner or later, you either step into the ring, or move on to Zumba.)

Cindy Sherman is on view at the MoMA through June 26. If you can’t make it, there’s a nicely organized exhibition website, though it’s just a sampling of the pictures and details you’d see in the exhibition. (Typography nerds will appreciate the fluctuating typefaces for this identity-upending show.)

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Sights

See: Chris Engman’s mirror/tint/landscape photos

Filter + filter + mirror + mirror = blue-r skies, cooler landscape. Ingenious!

Chris Engman, Permeation, 2012, archival inkjet print, 38 x 48 in, edition of 6, Courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. Source: re-title.com.

Chris Engman, Permeation, 2012, archival inkjet print, 38 x 48 in, edition of 6, Courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. Source: re-title.com.

March 3 – April 7, 2012
Dualities, Omissions, Loops, and Ruptures: Chris Engman, Cody Trepte, Samantha Roth, and John Houck
LUIS DE JESUS Los Angeles
2685 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90034
Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-6pm
Artists’ Reception: Saturday, March 3rd, 6-9 PM

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