NOVEL at Sculpture Centre, New York

Time Again
Featuring work by: Richard Aldrich, Troy Brauntuch, Manon de Boer, Matthew Buckingham, Moyra Davey, Thea Djordjadze, Aurélien Froment, Rachel Harrison, Charline von Heyl, Ull Hohn, William E. Jones, Elad Lassry, Rosalind Nashashibi, Blinky Palermo, Laure Prouvost, Steve Roden, Emily Roysdon, and Rosemarie Trockel

Novel with: Ed Atkins, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Steven Claydon, Sergej Jensen, Sam Lewitt, R.H. Quaytman, Josef Strau, and Paul Thek

New York – SculptureCenter is pleased to present Time Again, an exhibition that explores the language of repetition, bringing together works that destabilize conventional ways of seeing and considering what is past and what is present. Engaging gesture, image sequence, material affect, and displaced narrative, the works on view create disjunctions with the way the time of the present is experienced, challenging our understanding of what it means to be contemporaries. Curated by Fionn Meade, Time Again will be on view May 9 – July 25, 2011. An opening reception will take place Sunday, May 8th, 5-7pm and is open to the public.

Within the exhibition, archival and historical settings are re-animated only to be undone, including William E. Jones’s video Berlin Flash Frames, 2010, which parcels out footage from an unedited film produced by the U.S. Information Agency found in the National Archives of the United States labeled with the provisional title “Berlin, 1961″. Jones’s re-edit features distanced shots of the Berlin Wall under construction alongside propagandistic scenarios featuring actors on stage sets. Similarly, Emily Roysdon’s Untitled (David Wojnarowicz Project), 2001-2007, responds to and redirects Wojnarowicz’s earlier work Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978-79, while an excerpt from Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s Shoe Waste?, 1971-2005, returns to documentation of a clandestine action performed above and beneath the River Thames in London.

Additional works to be exhibited include a new sculpture by Rachel Harrison, Avatar, 2010; Ull Hohn’s series of plaster relief paintings, Untitled, 1988; Thea Djordjadze’s Deaf and dumb universe (Gerüst), 2008; and Troy Brauntuch’s Stamps, 1975-2007, which gathers together the artist’s collection of figurative rubber stamps that have been used in his collages over the past thirty years. Also on view will be sculpture, collage, and video works from Rosemarie Trockel, including Goodbye Mrs. Mönipaer, 2003, a cinematic pantomime that explores the psychologically fraught role-playing that can emerge between artists and gallerists, studio and market concerns, and private and public selves.

The performing body and political subject present themselves throughout the exhibition via acts of estrangement, reversal, ritualized behavior, and fragmentation. Manon de Boer’s film Attica, 2008, for example, captures a refracted consideration of the 1971 prison uprising in the form of a musical performance, while Rosalind Nashashibi’s This Quality, 2010, offers an indirect view of Cairo through tightly framed observations of likeness and variation. Matthew Buckingham’s Image of Absalon to be Projected Until It Vanishes, 2001, addresses a public that may no longer exist in a fragmented portrait of the Danish warrior-bishop and quasi-mythic founder of the city of Copenhagen. Similarly, the place of abstraction reasserts a longstanding dialog with the place of iconography through modes of projection, superimposition, doubling, and associative image sequences in works by Richard Aldrich, Moyra Davey, Charline von Heyl, Elad Lassry, and Blinky Palermo.

Also included within Time Again is a presentation of works organized in collaboration with Novel, a project founded by London-based editors and curators Matt Williams and Alun Rowlands. A publication project that takes up experimental writing as a parallel practice to visual art making, Novel draws on politics, poetry, theory, and storytelling to promote explorations of language and the possibility of a new critical fiction.

Extending across artistic mediums into sculpture, film and video, photography and painting, Time Again provokes a consideration of how ‘the now?’ of our time is perceived.

A series of talks and performances will take place at SculptureCenter, and a related screening series will be presented in collaboration with Anthology Film Archives in July (Dates TBA). The exhibition catalog will feature texts by contributing artists—including Ed Atkins, Josef Strau, and Richard Aldrich—and essays by Fionn Meade, Jacob King, and Isla Leaver-Yap.

About SculptureCenter
Founded by artists in 1928, SculptureCenter is a not-for-profit arts institution in Long Island City, NY dedicated to experimental and innovative developments in contemporary sculpture. SculptureCenter commissions new works and presents exhibitions by emerging and established, national and international artists. Our programs identify new talent, explore the conceptual, aesthetic and material concerns of contemporary sculpture, and encourage independent vision.

Hannah Sawtell at Vilma Gold

THE GREAT WHITE WAY GOES BLACK
17 APRIL – 29 MAY 2011
OPENING SATURDAY 16 APRIL 6.30 – 8.30pm
PERFORMANCE BY TRISHA BAGA 7:30pm

Trisha Baga, Ann Craven, Michaela Eichwald, Helena Huneke,
Hannah Sawtell, Katharina Sieverding and Julia Wachtel

Vilma Gold are delighted to present an exhibition of work of seven artists, many of whom – Trisha Baga, Helena Huneke, Julia Wachtel and Katharina Sieverding – are shown in London for the first time. The artists can loosely be linked by an awareness of their subjectivity; rather than work back from an existing or even vetted larger order, they look to themselves, their own system of being, as an individual in society, to build outwards in multiple directions and speak as they go.

Czech-born, German artist Katharina Sieverding’s (b.1944; Prague, Czechoslovakia) highly influential practice spans nearly four decades and includes photography, film, and installation. Employing the close-up to challenge conceptions of the relationship between photography and cinema, Sieverding explores areas where these interdependent forms of media coincide and diverge. This exhibition focuses on her large-scale self-portraits, which often appropriate the scale of movie screens and billboards and compose a significant portion of her oeuvre. For this exhibition, Sieverding presents her seminal work IX (1977), a monumental four-part photograph, taken on a New York City rooftop during the notorious blackout in the summer night of 1977; this work also lends the exhibition its title.

Julia Wachtel (b.1956; New York, USA) is fascinated with the visual language of mass culture. Her paintings enter into a visual language game wherein the appropriated vernacular of mass culture is illustrated, simulated, relicated, altered and parodied. The logic of this language is disturbed just enough to provoke a meditation upon the conditions of meaning intrinsic to that vernacular. In her paintings, Watchel inserts grotesque, irritating cartoon characters – popular with the middle class in the 1960s and 1970s when they were seen on greeting cards, bar supplies and T-shirts – into the “readymade” lexicon of mainstream magazine and newspaper photographic images which document the contemporary socio-political landscape of the time. For this exhibition, Wachtel presents her multi-panel work Procession, from 1989.

Trisha Baga (b.1985; Venice, Florida, USA) is a New York based performance and video artist. Of her practice, Baga writes of an idea of ‘present-ness’: she sees her process, and self, as like a dot on a line. Unable to impose an end point from the outside, the only thing to do is to look to what can be done now, to what can be said, with the materials and the self to hand and embark upon a trail. For this exhibition, the artist will present her performance video work Madonna y El Nino (2010), a non-fiction Filipino folk tale, made primarily from media produced by Madonna the pop star, using the El Nino weather phenomenon as a metaphor for changes in the pop landscape brought about by digitization and the internet.

Ann Craven (b. 1967; Boston, USA) uses subject matter such as flowers, moons, birds and dewy-eyed fawns in her multiple wet on wet paintings. She neutralizes her storybook content through continual variations and repetitions, thus removing any sense of preciousness in the work whilst shifting the conversation about her work into a theoretical frame that considers the body as a whole, rather than its individual parts. By reworking, re-presenting and returning to the same stock subject matter, Craven engages questions of consumption, collection, authenticity, value and skill. She examines the durability of a painted icon in a world that consumes mass imagery at record speeds.

Michaela Eichwald (b.1967; Cologne, Germany) makes neo-bohemian bricolaged sculptures and paintings, which suggest life beyond their simple means. In the past, Eichwald’s layered paintings have included such collaged elements as books steeped in thick spills of enamel or texts by other authors and artists. Details of objects are glimpsed through their surface suspension (in resin or varnish) but nothing is ever explained or clearly shown. As finished product, Eichwald’s paintings allow the viewer
to feel included in the process of handling material. It has been said that her works function like an index for the connectivity between sensual and intellectual activity in general, and that in this way it advocates subjective practice. For this exhibition Eichwald presents two new large-scale multi media paintings.

Helena Huneke (b.1967; Luebeck, Germany) is a German artist who lives and works in Hamburg. Her paintings and collages often incorporate sections of found fabrics such as bedsheets and tablecloths, which are painted, folded and overlapped. Sometimes positioned on the floor, sometimes draped and hung in varied configurations, a certain vulnerability permeates the work, a unique vulnerability that is fearlessly exposed. Huneke has talked of faces appearing in the work through the action of folding and unfolding. For this exhibition she presents Der Plan (2011), a painting/collage work composed of abstract colour fields painted onto a folded linen sheet and incorporating the silhouettes of two figures cut from newspapers.

Hannah Sawtell’s (b. 1971; London, UK) multi-disciplinary practice scrutinises the excess of production, through objects, image, text, video and sound. Her ongoing actions utilize a system of collation and manipulation of surfaces retrieved from the digital realm, collonized spaces and simulated matter; she manufactures works that navigate utility, connecting praxis and spectacle. This exhibition shows a recent work from her ‘Optic’ series. Structures that vascilate between window, shelf and screen are industrially manufactured; hand pasted with images that she creates by using current computer programs. All image capture, manipulation or slicing is made by the machine. A floor work from her ‘Mole’/ ‘Egressor’ series will also be shown.

A Dying Artist

Szuper Gallery at McKenzie Art Gallery, Canada

Ballet by Szuper Gallery
April 29 – August 28, 2011 at the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Exhibition Opening: Friday, April 29, 2011 at 7:30pm
Performance: Friday, May 6 at 8:00pm and Saturday, May 7 at 2:00pm

Curtain Razors 2011 is pleased to present it’s newest international creation -
BALLET by Szuper Gallery and Curtain Razors in collaboration with the Mackenzie Art Gallery.

Regina, SK – Szuper Gallery (Susanne Clausen and Pavlo Kerestey) are back in Regina with a follow-up to their highly successful project The Extras (2008). Ballet brings into focus current anxieties around food production and crisis through an exhibition, a spectacular video installation, and performance that was originally inspired by Cold War instructional films for farmers. Through a blended choreography of farm labour and movement actions, the London-based duo dissolves the neat separation of rural and urban – the “ballet” on which the world food system depends. Originally developed for the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading, England with the participation of artistic director Michele Sereda of Curtain Razors, the MacKenzie Art Gallery exhibition will mark the Canadian premiere of this unconventional response to agricultural realities.

On May 6 and 7, 2011 a newly commissioned performance of Ballet will take place at the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Ballet is a rock opera performance that flirts with a posthuman conception of action, focusing on the border between human bodies and their outside. Set in a world askew with attempts and remnants of civilization it questions how the world of vibrant, edible matter might affect the way we live. The setting: a mystical landscape, a crash site, in the wild or in the rush of a blackout. Pulling apart the “ballet” of the food system in musical scenes and absurd stories a hysterical cabaret unfolds.

Imagine a three-piece band and an international performance art ensemble on an apocalyptic desert island, where a series of tableaus unfolds. The Ballet performance features Morgan Garneau, Jason Cawood, Blair Fornwald, John Hampton, Susanne Clausen, Pavlo Kerestey, Billy Hughes, Trent Mailander, Otis Young and Michele Sereda.

Tickets are $20 each or $15 for MacKenzie Art Gallery members. Student and group rates are available. Tickets are available at the Mackenzie Art Galley Gift shop. Reservations can be made by calling 306.584.4273 <tel:306.584.4273> . Seating is limited.

Media Contact
Carey Shaw, Curtain Razors Communications
306.584.4273 <tel:306.584.4273>
curtainrazors@gmail.com | http://www.curtainrazors.com <http://www.curtainrazors.com/>

The MacKenzie Art Gallery
3475 Albert Street
Regina
SK S4S 6X6
Canada
http://www.mackenzieartgallery.ca/exhibitions/upcoming_exhibitions/287/

Ballet is produced by Szuper Gallery/Curtain Razors and presented by the MacKenzie Art Gallery and Curtain Razors. Curtain Razors gratefully acknowledges the support of Saskatchewan Arts Board, Regina Arts Commission, Szuper Gallery, MacKenzie Art Gallery, New Dance Horizons, University of Reading and the British Council.

On May 6, 2011 an exciting performance of Ballet with Michele Sereda of Curtain Razors and Susanne Clausen and Pavlo Keresty of Szuper Gallery will take place at the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Imagine a three-piece band and a group of performers on a cinematic apocalyptic fairytale set who pull apart the “ballet” of the food system in the tradition of a cabaret. Tickets, $20 each, will be available at the Gallery Shop.

Produced by Szuper Gallery & Curtain Razors, presented by the MacKenzie Art Gallery with support of the British Council and University of Reading 

April 30 to August 28, 2011

Exhibition Opening: Friday, April 29, 7:30 pm, Free
Performances of Ballet: Friday, May 6 at 8 pm and Saturday, May 7 at 2 pm

Future of things past

Future of things past, a set on Flickr.

Exhibition Images from student exhibition in partnership between Department of Art and Museum of English Rural Life are now posted on the Art Reading flickr site.

Orbitecture II: Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent

‘Orbitecture II: Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent’
18 April to 11 June 2011

Gerd Arntz, Ray Brassier, Pim Conradi, johnny de philo, Romain Gavras, The Gut Club, Head Gallery, Eileen Joy, Dean Kenning, Rachel Kushner, Patricia MacCormack, Alastair MacKinven, Man Like Me, Nicola Masciandaro, Robin MacKay, China Miéville, Stephen Molyneux, Reza Negarestani, Benjamin Noys, Laura Oldfield Ford, David Osbaldeston, PLANNINGTOROCK, Nina Power, Hillary Raphael, Francis Thorburn, and Evan Calder Williams.

Francis Thorburn will perform in the gallery at 2.00pm
The Gut Club will serve food at 3.00pm
Following the exhibition opening, a live event will take place at The Sunrooms, 20-21 Market Place, Southend-on-Sea, Essex SS1 1DA between 4.00pm and 7.00pm
Man Like Me will perform at 5.00pm

Focal Point Gallery
Southend Central Library
Victoria Avenue
Southend-on-Sea
Essex SS2 6EX, UK
http://www.focalpoint.org.uk/