By admin on June 16, 2008
Starting June 19th, Daneyal Mahmood Gallery will exhibit Peter Belyi’s installation Pinocchio’s Library. Modellatura, which generally included an ideal vision of the future, was an extremely popular genre during the 1920s, an age of grand utopias. Not only did artists invest time and energy in creating models of future cities, but conceived their own artworks as indicators for potential technical projects. Peter Belyi’s "memorial modelling," however, casts its gaze into the past, to the 1960s and 1970s, a period that saw the existence of one of the last utopian expressions of our era. The artist’s intent is to use this "new" genre of representation to search for one of the paradigms of humanity: hope in the future produced by disillusionment with the past.
The wooden puppet Pinocchio is the project’s protagonist, incarnating the figure of an architect obsessed with grandiose projects through which he hopes to transform the world, as well as an indissoluble deposit of utopian ideology present in each and every one of us. Like its hero, Pinocchio’s Library is made of wood, and its books cannot be opened. They are solid marker stones of useless knowledge, inaccessible and impossible to consult ever again. That which was once a source of knowledge has been transformed into an indissoluble deposit of utopian knowledge, a memorial to utopia itself. And yet Pinocchio’s Library is rife with the hopes of each one of us and above all, with the fact that one day the wooden puppet will be transformed into a real child.
There will be an opening reception for the artist on Thursday, June 19 from 6-8pm.
Peter Belyi, Pinocchio’s Library
June 19 – July 31, 2008
Daneyal Mahmood Gallery
511 W 25 St, 3rd Fl
New York, NY 10001
(212) 675-2966
Posted in installation, new york, nyc, sculpture
By admin on June 3, 2008
PPOW will present and i would shine in answer/ being/ without becoming, its first solo exhibition of both oil paintings and intimate watercolors by Angela Fraleigh. Fraleigh’s work is unified by an inquiry into social constructs of gender, power, and identity as they simultaneously reflect on art history, literature, popular culture, and the myriad ways we construct individual and collective meaning.
Under slabs and curls of paint, figures are tangled with revulsion and desire, violence and lust. Fueled by tension, these usually stereotypical images of couples caught in embraces are obscured with ambiguous power structures. Distinguishing pleasure from struggle is complicated by the rich pours of undulating paint that grip the figures and often envelop the compositions. By disrupting the narrative, spaces and pockets are revealed in between the visible exchanges, they become openings to fill with significance.
Fraleigh is a painter who embraces her medium. She accentuates the characteristics and physicality of oil paints and creates illusions by contrasting realism and abstract tactility. The paint could be covering, hiding, devouring, being expelled, but it is a force that suggests the underlying and hidden causes of what is being produced within and around the female protagonist. The active complicity of the paint in Fraleigh’s images suggests there is something unseen and unnamed. Swathes of color emphatically state their presence, creating a paradox of revealing and hiding.
Depicting power struggles within intimate relationships, these specifics become universal hierarchies that affect and inform issues of politics, gender and notions of beauty. Playing with these stereotypes, Fraleigh confronts social expectations and challenges these constructs. The scale of the paintings, the immediacy of the figures’ closeness and the wetness of the paint induce a voyeurism that is doubly expressed by the seductive gesture and glisten of the paint. Once you look, you become a witness and participant engaged and part of the story.
Angela Fraleigh, and i would shine in answer/ being/ without becoming
June 5 – July 3, 2008
P·P·O·W Gallery
555 W 25th St (btwn 10th & 11th Ave)
New York, NY 10001
(212) 647-1044
Posted in new york, nyc, painting
By admin on June 2, 2008
Black & White Gallery Chelsea is proud to present To Know The Spiders by Julian Montague.
Investigations into overlooked realms of daily life, continues to be at the heart of Montague’s art practice. In his highly acclaimed The Stray Shopping Cart Identification System project exhibited in the fall of 2006 at Black & White Gallery, Montague’s method was to build a system of classification around a mundane object. In To Know the Spiders, Montague mounts a visual exploration of seemingly mundane animals – the spiders that occupy the peripheries of human architectural space. His process begins with the collection and killing of a spider. He then studies its face under a microscope and from the resulting drawings creates a portrait of the spider in the form of a fabric banner. The banner is then placed and photographed in the exact spot of collection. The banner illuminates the presence of a silent witness and sometime symbiotic partner while also serving as a memorial to the spider that had to die for that understanding to be gained.
Since his graduation from Hampshire College in 1996 with a BA in Media Studies, Julian Montague’s photographs and other works have been exhibited in solo and group shows at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY, Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT, Spaces Gallery in Cleveland, OH, Art in General in NYC, Light Factory in Charlotte, NC and at the Collectors Gallery at Albright – Knox in Buffalo, NY. In 2005 Montague’s work was included in the Albright – Knox Art Gallery Beyond/In Western New York biennial at the Castellani Art Museum in Niagara Falls, NY. In 2006 the book version of the Stray Shopping Cart Identification System project, The Stray Shopping Carts Of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification was published by Harry Abrams and is now widely available in bookstores and on most online book sellers. Julian Montague is the winner of the Diagram Prize for the Oddest Title of 2006. He lives and works in Buffalo, NY.
Julian Montague, To Know The Spiders
June 5 – July 12, 2008
Black & White Gallery
636 W 28th St
New York, NY 10001
(212) 244-3007
Posted in mixed media, new york, nyc, photography
By admin on May 30, 2008
Opening tomorrow, DNJ Gallery will be showing “Vanishing America,” Michael Eastman’s large-scale images recording the common, everyday places which once made up the greater American landscape. Eastman’s photographs do not depict humans, but nevertheless are about people. He captures the restaurants, movie theaters, bars, bowling alleys, city halls, hotels and the outskirts of the community – focusing on the public space. Eastman is firmly committed to portraying the legacy of small communities. He preserves the vanishing townscape.
One of Eastman’s major influences, Eugene Atget, a painter turned photographer, believed he was the author of his environment. He illustrated the late 19th century storefronts of Paris to record them for the future generations. Similarly, another one of his influences, Walker Evans, was known for concentrating on the ordinary. Evans noticed those common places that are not missed until they are no longer there. In this vein, “Vanishing America” celebrates the forgotten, preserving the rich visual relics still remaining, and holding evidence to our collective past. In 2003, Eastman began his three and a half-year project, traveling across the United States six times. Shooting with his 4×5 camera has made him a keen observer of the world, and given way to a developed poetic vision of what a more superficial observer would consider mundane architecture. Eastman’s images have a quiet painterly attention to light and space, which also translate beautifully to the colors of film. “Vanishing America” reveals the hidden jewels of the rural American buildings, recalling a history that in modern times has often been traded for corporate chains and mass uniformity. “The heart of our country is not along its highways, but in the small towns that dot the map along the way,” Eastman says about his work. There is a definite nostalgia for a part of our past slowly being demolished, but Eastman chooses to preserve what remains, taking subtle care as if he were an archeologist uncovering a long, lost civilization.
There will be an artist reception and book signing on opening night, Saturday, May 31, from 6pm to 8pm.
Michael Eastman, Vanishing America
May 31 – July 19, 2008
DNJ Gallery
154½ N. La Brea Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
(323) 931-1311
Posted in california, los angeles, photography
By admin on May 29, 2008
Martina Nehrling’s paintings are abstract compositions inspired by the simplicity of everyday life, translated through the complex filter of human thought and emotion. Martina states, “My recent work begins with observing the dappled sunlight of the Midwestern summer in a 21 foot panoramic painting titled, Through a Purple Patch, and develops into a study of the lulling experience of being present to the richly textured cacophony of daily life in a series of paintings titled, In Waves.”
“Grouped or tangled together, I use distinct brushstrokes for their directness, but rich color in order to engage and explore its imprecise language. I revel in color’s complexity, noticing how the eye tracks patterns of value and intensity and can be interrupted by particular relationships or a shift in scale. When I paint I am sounding out elements of my everyday life and I am captivated by the pulsation of disparate events, information, things… at once the beauty, the horror, the weight of it all. And so my work consists largely of compositions of accumulation. These seem to me one of the most legitimate kinds of pictures to make in our cultural landscape of abundant consumer goods, the privilege/burden of access to information, and the general order and disorder, calm and panic, chaos and hope.”
There will be an opening reception at the gallery, Friday, June 6th.
Martina Nerhling, Through a Purple Patch
June 6 – July 12
Zg Gallery
300 W. Superior St.
Chicago, IL 60610
(312) 654-9900
Posted in painting
By admin on May 21, 2008
Photographer Philippe Gronon’s first US show will open on Thursday, May 22 at Yossi Milo Gallery. This exhibition consists of Philippe Gronon’s gelatin silver prints of wall safes, library card catalogues and elevator doors. Through strict observation, Gronon captures meticulous details with a studio camera and enlarges each print to the exact scale of the object, presenting it unframed and devoid of context. A card catalogue from the Vatican Library, for example, is photographed in its original surroundings and then re-presented on a gallery wall, shifting perception of the object according to the setting.
While extremely detailed, the images are conceptual in their abstraction of commonplace and outmoded objects. Presenting his photographs in this dual manner, Gronon anchors each object in time by preserving visual traces of use, and yet strips them of their original functions so that a plurality of meanings may come to mind. Focusing on banal objects that are representative of a common past, Gronon’s work considers icons of a collective memory.
Philippe Gronon
May 22 – July 11, 2008
Yossi Milo Gallery
25 W 25th St
New York, NY 10001
(212) 414-0371
Posted in new york, nyc, photography
By admin on January 10, 2008
Theirry Goldberg Projects presents Recess, the first solo exhibition of Khalif Kelly.
With a fresh and vivid palette, Kelly’s paintings capture children at play in moments of sharing, solitude, and vying for power. The paintings often refer to Kelly’s own childhood experience and in turn, to the African-American experience at large.
Within these seemingly nostalgic paintings, the mechanisms of race, history, and theater compose the children in telling group dynamics. In picturing playtime, Kelly reveals the contrast between theater and voyeurism, which strikingly occur ever so naturally and innocently at an early age.
The figures he depicts are a mixture of personal archetypes and classic racial stereotypes. His aesthetic includes references to the figurative work of Jacob Lawrence and to the controversial stop motion animations of George Pal, especially ‘John Henry and the Inky-Poo’ and ‘the Jasper series’ from the 1940’s. Like George Pal, Kelly utilizes perception of race, not for entertainment, but as a narrative device, a role in the theater of personality. Here, race is a tool, something to work with and work against in the children’s subsequent formation of identity through play.
Kelly locates his paintings within the dichotomy of spectacle (that which presents) and voyeurism (that which discovers). He likens the spectacle to a moment that may create its own reality separate from the conventions actually governing it – suggesting the possibility of lifting the veil of history and race, however fleeting.
Khalif Kelly, Recess
Jan 11 – Feb 10, 2008
Thierry Goldberg Projects
5 Rivington St, Ground Flr
New York, NY 10002
(212) 967-2260
Posted in new york, nyc, painting
By admin on January 9, 2008
Yossi Milo Gallery will exhibit black and white photographs by Nicholas Nixon from the series “Patients”. The exhibition will open on Thursday, January 17 and close on February 16, with a reception for the artist on Thursday, January 17 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. This will be Nixon’s second exhibition at Yossi Milo Gallery.
The photographs that comprise the series “Patients” document people who are seriously or terminally ill. Taken while visiting four different hospitals in Boston over the past three years, the project is a continuation of the artist’s interest in portraiture and in phases of the life cycle rarely shared with others beyond family and close companions.
The exhibition will include 20 x 24-inch gelatin silver prints taken with an 8-by-10-inch large- format camera. Tightly cropped and extraordinarily detailed, the compositions underscore the intimate nature of subject matter that most prefer to look away from, as well as the intimacy of the patients’ relationships with their loved ones and of the artist’s collaboration with his subjects.
Also:
Nicholas Nixon, Patients
Jan 17 – Feb 16, 2008
Yossi Milo Gallery
25 W 25th St
New York, NY 10001
(212) 414-0371
Posted in new york, nyc, photography