Mixing Art, Activism and Science. And Some Tropical Fish.

Superflex | New York Times | By Lisa Abend

COPENHAGEN — Somewhere in the desert outside Palm Springs, Calif. a new drive-in movie theater is opening. It’s a simple structure, not much more than a screen mounted on a few bubblegum-color pillars, with no concession stand and very limited programming. In fact, the cinema shows only one film, and that film is about fish.

Commissioned for the Desert X exhibition that opens Feb. 9 and runs through April 21 at various sites in the Coachella Valley, the theater — called “Dive In” — is an installation by the Danish artist collective Superflex and forms part of their larger project “Deep Sea Minding.”

“Dive In” responds to the prospect of rising sea levels by imagining a future in which coastal cities are submerged, and their inhabitants are fish. Blending art, science, and activism, it is a sly meditation on climate change, as well as an excellent primer on how Superflex, founded in 1993, has managed to remain relevant, even crucial, through 25 years.

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Philippe Parreno combines 20 years of footage to create ‘film of films, a seance of cinema’

Philippe Parreno | Wallpaper | By Tom Seymour

When Philippe Parreno was a teenager, he and his friends would sneak their way through the back door of an adult movie theatre in one of the seedier parts of Échirolles, a rough suburb of Grenoble, southern France. The backstreet XXX dive was called Cinema Permanente, because porn played all day, all night.

At a public talk at the 2019 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Parreno bashfully admits that watching the illicit movies acted as inspiration. In the dark, as the images writhed and morphed without sense of beginning, middle and end, so he formed his idea of what art should be. ‘We were always so alert, because we were scared of getting caught,’ he remembers. ‘But my sense of time became warped in the movie theatre. I started to think a permanent cinema is a beautiful idea.’

Parreno is here to present his new feature film, No More Reality Whatsoever, a combination of 20 years of disparate footage taken from dozens of art projects and edited together to create a ‘film of films, a seance of cinema’. The artist, who is 55, has the words ‘do so’ tattooed on his left wrist, a reference to the hypnotherapist Milton Erickson. He is soft-spoken, drinks tea over coffee, is dressed as if he might leave the cultured environs of the film festival for a quick hike along the canals of Rotterdam, and has a dry, self-deprecating sense of humour…

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Infinite Cinema: At The International Film Festival Rotterdam

Philippe Parreno | The Quietus | By Robert Barry

Nobody does 3D quite like Philippe Parreno. The French artist’s No More Reality Whereaboutsopens with the close-up face of Ann Lee, the anime character bought by Parreno and his compatriot Pierre Huyghe back in 1999. She self-referentially explains to us her own back-story (“I was bought for ¥46,000, paid to a design character company, K-Works…”), but, wearing 3D glasses, we see her face glitch and distort. Where a James Cameron or Joseph Kosinski might use the polarised glasses to more fully immerse their audience into their respective film worlds, to create a fuller, more lifelike cinematic experience; Parreno does exactly the reverse, using the stereoscope effect to jar and disturb, a high-tech verfremdungseffekt which feels like it is fucking directly with the cortical pathways between the eye and the brain.

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SUPERFLEX: We Are All In The Same Boat at the Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College

SUPERFLEX: We Are All In The Same Boat.

SUPERFLEX

We Are All In The Same Boat

The Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College

600 Biscayne Blvd, Miami, FL 33132

15 November, 2018 - 21 April, 2019

The first museum survey of the critically acclaimed Danish collective SUPERFLEX in the United States, this exhibition focuses on the group’s humorous and playfully subversive installations and films, which address the economy, financial crisis, corruption, migration, and the possible consequences of global warming. The exhibition’s title envisions passengers together in a ship at sea, and a set of shared risks that may put them in danger. Our own collective danger implies a collective responsibility and a need to collaborate so that our ship does not capsize.

Increasingly during the last two decades, global warming and climate change have been discussed and debated, and the consequences of human impact, interference, and possible triggering of the twenty-first century’s climate changes have recently echoed within the art world in a more activist way. Art has always responded to issues in the real world, and SUPERFLEX has been at the forefront of artists who grapple with many of these pressing subjects. SUPERFLEX was founded by Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, Jakob Fenger, and Rasmus Nielsen in 1993, and since then the three artists have gained international recognition for their DIY and activist approaches.

We Are All in the Same Boat includes a group of videos, sculptures, and installations selected for their relevance to the history, present, and future of the City of Miami. The works reflect upon the position of Miami from the perspectives of art, finance, climate, and a fictional, if plausible, future. The topics of water, migration, refugees, and the economy inevitably drive the conception of the exhibition. We Are All in the Same Boat includes the American debut of a number of the works in the show, several of which have been newly reimagined for our city.

SUPERFLEX is known for its interest in unifying urban spaces and commenting on society through art. The artists describe their practice as providing “tools” that affect or influence a social or economic situation. The group often roots its projects in their particular local contexts and outside of traditional art contexts, collaborating with designers, engineers, businesses, and marketers on projects that have the potential for social or economic change. The projects remain difficult to pigeonhole, yet innovative in their approaches to current issues.

The members of SUPERFLEX have used their position as artists to pose questions of political, economic, and environmental behavior and responsibility. In the words of the exhibition’s curator, SUPERFLEX’s “works are meant to create political awareness, generate discussions, and help us think and act.”

Organized by MOAD, SUPERFLEX: We Are All in the Same Boat is curated by Jacob Fabricius, Artistic Director of Kunsthal Aarhus. Support for SUPERFLEX: We Are All in the Same Boat is provided by the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, this.nordic, Funding Arts Network, the Danish Arts Foundation, and the Florida Department of State Division of Cultural Affairs.

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Charline von Heyl: Snake Eyes at Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.

Charline von Heyl, P., 2008. Acrylic and crayons on linen, 208.3 x 188 x 3.8 cm. © Charline von Heyl. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Gift, Adam and LeeLee Kimmel, 2016

Charline von Heyl

Snake Eyes

Hirshhorn Museum

Independence Ave SW &, 7th St SW, Washington, DC 20560

8 November - 27 January, 2018

The largest US museum survey of this pioneering artist to date, Charline von Heyl: Snake Eyes features more than thirty large-scale paintings that reveal the artist’s considerable influence in the field of contemporary art.

One of the most inventive artists working today, von Heyl has earned international acclaim for continually rethinking the possibilities of contemporary painting. Her cerebral yet deeply visceral artworks upend longstanding assumptions about composition, beauty, and narrative. Drawing inspiration from a vast and surprising array of sources—including literature, pop culture, metaphysics, and personal history—von Heyl creates paintings that are seemingly familiar yet impossible to classify, offering, in her words, “a new image that stands for itself as fact.”

In studios in New York and Marfa, Texas, von Heyl combines a rigorous, process-based practice that demands each painting develop through the act of painting, itself. The spellbinding results invite you to explore a unique visual language, exuberant and insistent.

Organized in collaboration with the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, this major multinational exhibition highlights the artist’s groundbreaking artistic output since 2005, including recent works that point to new developments in her constantly evolving practice. Together, Snake Eyes shines an international spotlight on one of today’s most dynamic painters and demonstrates the vitality and limitless possibilities of painting.

Curated by Hirshhorn Senior Curator Evelyn C. Hankins and Dr. Professor Dirk Luckow, general director at the Deichtorhallen, with curatorial assistance from Sandy Guttman.

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Ann Veronica Janssens: Ann Veronica Janssens at De Pont Museum, Tilburg

Picture by Andrea Rosetti, courtesy Esther Schipper, Berlin

Ann Veronica Janssens

Ann Veronica Janssens

De Pont Museum

Wilhelminapark 1, 5041 EA Tilburg, Netherlands

10 November - 31 March, 2018

Light, color and space are the fundamental materials used by Ann Veronica Janssens (Folkestone, 1956). With these intangible phenomena she creates 'sculptures' that make the invisible visible. Architecture is, by nature, static; whereas light and color remain changeable. That is what Janssens investigates while, throughout the process, she experiments and sets people and things in motion. Her work, based on sensory perception, demands the active involvement of the viewer.

With her interventions Ann Veronica Janssens turns the museum's 'white cube' into an indefinable space filled with colorful mist. Despite the presence of light, we need to grope to find our way. The disorientation makes us wonder: just how big is this place? And – am I alone? Gradually the limits of the space become discernible, and people begin to loom forth in it. The artist challenges us and puts our senses to the test. What are we actually seeing and experiencing here?

In an interview from 2016, Janssens tells about growing up in Kinshasa, spending her days there tinkering and observing a great deal. Her father was an architect, and her mother worked in an art gallery. In the local museum she became acquainted with African art. Architecture, art and the idea of experimenting and observing were part of her early surroundings. Simple discoveries, such as reflections of light that appear on a smoothly polished train rail or while mixing a vinaigrette, frequently prompt a new series of works. The initial attempts begin on a small scale, in her studio, but then she seeks the support of technical specialists in order to achieve the effect that she has in mind. But as Janssens emphasizes in her interview, chance also plays a role in the realization of her work.

We can, in any case, conclude that Ann Veronica Janssens evokes wonder with works that are unusual and ordinary. It’s a bit like the experience of an airplane traveler taking off on a dreary grey day and then passing through a dense layer of clouds. In the luminous white surroundings where patches of fog rush by, points of orientation such as above/below and far/close disappear. Once the plane has risen above the clouds, sunshine abounds. There the bright blue sky offers endless vistas, while an occasional cloud floats by. A Janssens exhibition feels like a rite of passage: ordinary phenomena suddenly assume magical power.

Watch a short video about her work in the Danish Louisiana Museum here.

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SUPERFLEX: Artist Talk for European Union Mayotte at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

SUPERFLEX: European Union Mayotte, installation view, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, September 7–December 30, 2018. Photo: Dusty Kessler.

SUPERFLEX

Artist Talk for European Union Mayotte

Thursday October 25, 2018 at 6:30pm

Exhibition On View Until December 30, 2018

Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

3750 Washington Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63108

Bjørnstjerne Christiansen—one of three members of the Danish art collective SUPERFLEX—discusses the group’s multidimensional practice and the video installation European Union Mayotte with CAM Chief Curator Wassan Al-Khudhairi.

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Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles Review: Fiona Connor at the MAK Center

Fiona Connor, Closed Down Clubs (2018) (installation view). Image courtesy of the artist and MAK Center. Photo: Esteban Schimpf.

Fiona Connor at the MAK Center

Beyond mere entry and exit, not much thought is given to the doors through which we pass every day. Closed Down Clubs, New Zealand-born, Los Angeles-based artist Fiona Connor’s latest exhibition, invited contemplation of the larger significations of such mundane portals. Housed at the MAK Center’s Mackey Garage Top (a sleek and airy space above a garage behind a Rudolf Schindler house), Connor’s exhibition was comprised of nine freestanding doors installed in a staggered, parallel formation, each emblazoned with printed or hand-written signs announcing the recent closure of the businesses to which they were once attached.

Like virtually all of Connor’s work, each of the sculptures included is a meticulous replication of an actual object. Having previously assumed such forms as bulletin boards, drinking fountains, and architectural infrastructure, her works are typically adorned with artist-drawn or screen-printed stickers, posters, or pamphlets to faithfully match the original reference as closely as possible. As relics of shared space, her works often bear traces of obsolescence or fatigue, expounded through the artist’s fastidious duplication of objects’ apparent wear or corrosion. Closed Down Clubs was no exception—one could sense the traffic that Connor’s chosen doors had experienced in their past lives, as seen in suspended animation (such as where sullied hands cumulatively left their mark in instances of worn-o paint or accumulated grime). With such minute attention to detail, Connor’s work offers a verisimilitude so precise that it could easily be mistaken for the real thing, which begs the question: why laboriously recreate an object that could simply be appropriated?

Unlike Danh Vo or Cameron Rowland, two artists whose use of the readymade foregrounds the compelling personal and political histories of their chosen objects, Connor’s work is a deft repetition of the real. Indeed, her readymade-once-removed production is a fiction residing in tandem with reality—meaning we are meant to understand that her work is a facsimile of lived experience at a particular place and time. With this, Connor mobilizes the deceptive surface of artifice not only to underscore the often-overlooked aesthetic qualities of quotidian objects, but also what they communicate about the societies in which they function.

By Thomas Duncan

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Jorge Pardo: Display for the Musée des Augustins

Jorge Pardo: Display for the Musée des Augustins

Jorge Pardo

Published by Hatje Cantz

Ed. Thierry Leviez, text(s) by Thierry Leviez, Rémi Papillault, Rémi Parcollet, Charlotte Riou, contributions by Stephen Prina, Jorge Pardo

Exhibition: Musée des Augustins, Toulouse, on permanent display

Hardcover, 160 pages, 171 ills.

ISBN 978-3-7757-4462-1

Extraordinary museum displays: Jorge Pardo’s “Gesamtkunstwerk” in Toulouse

At the invitation of the Toulouse art festival “Printemps de Septembre”, the Cuban-American artist Jorge Pardo (*1963) has developed a new display for the collection of Romanesque art at the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse. This collection—the world’s largest collection of Romanesque sculpture—is unique for its coherence with its well-preserved ensembles of capitals. Pardo produced a kind of “Gesamtkunstwerk” that has instantly become an iconic feature in the city and has now been adopted as the permanent display. This book includes an introduction to the collection of Romanesque sculptures at the museum, an illustrated history of its ever-changing presentation since 1830, an extensive survey of Jorge Pardo’s specific works for museums as well as a brief history of remarkable exhibition designs for museum collections throughout the 20th century.

With an interview between Stephen Prina and Jorge Pardo.

Jorge Pardo: Hotel L'Arlatan Opening 12 October 2018

From Antiquity to the present day, L’Arlatan has endured through many centuries. Its rebirth this autumn heralds yet another glorious new chapter in its history.

About L’Arlatan

As early as the Middle Ages L’Arlatan was recognised as being Arles’ most lavish hôtel particulier - a grand townhouse - and now, thanks to the exceptional vision of artist Jorge Pardo, it is making an outstanding début on the modern stage. A gigantic 6000 square metres of mosaic now adorns the hotel with an explosion of colour, light and contemporary design.

Hotel Website

how to spend it, Jorge Pardo: A long weekend in Arles and the Camargue with Maja Hoffmann

Maja Hoffmann at L’Arlatan hotel, which opens in October | Image: Tina Hillier

Arles’ old town is home to a world-class pâtisserie and a prominent bookshop

Culture is everywhere in Arles. I’ve almost always had something to do with Les Rencontres de la Photographie, the international photography festival that was founded there in 1970 and has been expanding greatly since it was revamped in 2002. What originally motivated me to renovate the former train depot at Parc des Ateliers – and build [experimental museum complex] Luma there – was partly a lack of quality spaces to show large-scale photography exhibitions or host creative events for Les Rencontres.

In the past few years I’ve really noticed some exciting energy in Arles. Creative people are coming to the city to settle down and make something special – like the owners of Le Collatéral, an incredible B&B in a former church that’s often used for artistic projects and events. Everywhere you look there is something curious, from digital art to a bespoke, snake-shaped table. It’s more of an experience than a hotel. Of course, L’Hôtel Particulier and Hôtel Jules César are very well known five-star properties in Arles. L’Hôtel Particulier was one of the first to add new life to the old city – they took over an 18th-century building and created a little oasis, with a swimming pool and beautiful garden – and the Jules is an institution that was redone beautifully a few years ago by Christian Lacroix. I myself never meant to be a hotelier, but ended up one due to the fact that I am occasionally asked to save old buildings. Ten years ago I opened Hôtel du Cloître, which I asked India Mahdavi to design and still today the interiors feel very modern. The most recent hotel project, L’Arlatan [which opens in October], is just as much of an artistic project as it is a hospitality one. Almost from the beginning, I knew I would ask Jorge Pardo to design the interiors; he did every surface and piece of furniture, and there are more than 30 different coloured and patterned tiles used for the floors and walls. It’s like a Gesamtkunstwerk.

By Gisela Williams

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Wallpaper*: Maja Hoffmann and Jorge Pardo on creating a remarkable Provençal retreat

In 1888, Vincent van Gogh, ravaged by heavy drinking and disillusioned with life in Paris, found refuge in Arles, intent on creating an artists’ commune. ‘L’Atelier du Sud’ would, he hoped, become a laboratory to experiment with colours and light, repositioning the Provençal city as a centre for artistic production. But the project ended abruptly the same year, after a series of violent quarrels with his friend Paul Gauguin – the only artist who had responded to the invitation – drove the Dutchman to a mental breakdown, during which he famously cut off part of his own ear.

Despite its failure, the ideals behind l’Atelier du Sud left an indelible mark on Arles which, some 130 years later, may get its artist colony after all. Designed by the Cuban-born American artist Jorge Pardo, l’Arlatan – a hotel and artist residence, housed in a 15th-century palace once belonging to the Counts of Arlatan de Beaumont – is set to become a hub for the international intelligentsia brought to the city by the newly established contemporary art centre, Luma Arles.

By BenoÎt Loiseau

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Artforum Review: Jack Goldstein "Under Water Sea Fantasy"

Jack Goldstein, Under Water Sea Fantasy, 1983–2003, 16 mm, color, sound, 6 minutes 30 seconds.

By Jan Tumlir

Online at Artforum

Glasstire, Jessica Stockholder at The Contemporary Austin: Props, Assists and Situations

Installation view: Jessica Stockholder at The Contemporary Austin at the Jones Center

Jessica Stockholder 

Relational Aesthetics

The Contemporary Austin

Jones Center

700 Congress Avenue, Austin, TX 78701

September 15, 2018 - January 13, 2019

Props, Assists and Situations: Jessica Stockholder at The Contemporary Austin

The promotional photographs for Relational Aesthetics, Jessica Stockholder’s show at The Contemporary Austin at the Jones Center, share some compelling features with the works themselves — they confuse the eye. It’s no accident. 

“I don’t think in volume,” Stockholder says, “I think graphically.” The sculptures themselves are described not as installations, but as three-dimensional paintings, or in some cases, “situations.” Stockholder’s propensity for working from a graphic, two-dimensional idea creates an interesting life cycle to the work, which transitions repeatedly from two-dimensional thought experiment to a three-dimensional model from which a full-scale work is rendered, and then to documentation photographs. In most instances this last phase might feel like convention, or bureaucratic necessity, but with these works, one wonders if the resulting images are actually nearer the artist’s original impulse than the structures themselves. Or perhaps it’s just another iteration of a persistent theme in Stockholder’s work — every element’s success is dependent on another element.

Stockholder routinely manipulates a viewer’s perception of space though materiality and composition, and refers to many of her works in Relational Aesthetics as “assists.” These forms range from bundles of sticks to unwieldy sheets of metal that appear to be waving in the wind, or heavy-gauge metal screens supporting miniature works of art by other artists. Each of these assists are in turn supported by a prop, which is strange reversal of expectation — or is it function, or is it semantics?

By Tatiana Ryckman

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Ann Veronica Janssens: "My main material is light" at Kiasma

Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Petri Virtanen

Ann Veronica Janssens

My main material is light

Kiasma Museum Of Contemporary Art

Mannerheiminaukio 2, 00100 Helsinki, Finland

12 October - 13 January, 2018

Light art by Belgium-based artist Ann Veronica Janssens fills the galleries on the two top floors of Kiasma in Janssens’ first solo show in Finland.

Janssens has been fascinated by light and associated phenomena ever since she was a child. Many of her works are based on light interacting with liquids, fog, reflecting surfaces and the surrounding space. Janssens seeks to heighten our awareness of these fleeting sensory phenomena.  

In her art, Janssens explores ordinary physical phenomena in highly visible ways. She often finds inspiration for her works in lucky coincidences.

Bicycling on the Fifth Floor

One of the highlights of the show is chromed bicycles that visitors can ride in the large gallery on the fifth floor of Kiasma. Janssens wants to offer the cyclists and other viewers a completely new experience of the space, drawing attention to the transparent materiality of the light and air around us.

Other works in the show includes Orange Sky Blue, a landscape of light that is visible outside the museum from Mannerheimintie, and Untitled (White Glitter), consisting of glitter strewn about the gallery floor at random.

Janssens likes to use surprising materials in her work, such as paraffin oil and reflective surfaces.

Minimal and Subtle

Janssens typically uses only a few materials in her works. For her, art consists not of an object but an experience evoked by light, colour, sound and movement.

The minimalist works invite visitors to move around them and examine them from different angles, to sharpen their senses and to be surprised. Not everything is what it seems at first.  

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Edge of Visibility (Group Exhibition): Fiona Banner and Philippe Parreno at IPCNY

Philippe Parreno, Vermillon Sands, 2004

Fiona Banner and Philippe Parreno

Edge of Visibility

IPCNY

508 W 26th St, New York, NY 10001

4 October - 19 December, 2018

1301PE is pleased to announce that Fiona Banner’s Top Gun (1966) and prints from Philippe Parreno’s 2005 book Fade to Black including A Penny for Your Thoughts, Website, 2006 (2013), A Wise Chinese Monk Shitting Light, Lamp Prototype For Alejandro Jodorowsky 2006 (2013), and Vermillon Sands, 2004 (2013), will be on view from October 4th to December 19th, 2018 as part of the exhibition Edge of Visibility at International Print Center New York.

Edge of Visibility, curated in conjunction with the September-October issue of the journal Art in Print by its editor-in-chief Susan Tallman, focuses on low-visibility strategies in printmaking. With over forty works spanning the 17th century to the present, the exhibition features laborious microengravings and subtle watermarks to evanescent images printed with UV-reactive inks.

“Viewing,” says guest curator Susan Tallman, “is at the heart of this exercise—what it means to see, physically, metaphysically, socially, and politically.” In Philippe Parreno’s Fade to Black (2005), visibility and its opposite take on intimations of mortality: in normal light, the prints appear to be solid rectangles of color; when the lights are switched off, however, phosphorescent images bloom, only to die off into darkness until they are recharged.

The often laborious, multi-step processes inherent to printmaking allow artists to maintain visual clarity before subverting this visibility in the final image. Examples include the highly-detailed, nearly imperceptible details of Chris Ofili’s multi-layered, opalescent Black Shunga (2008-15), or Walid Raad’s refined Views from Inner to Outer Compartments (2013).

The visual hurdle posed by low-visibility prints urges viewers to be more conscious of their sight upon entering the exhibition space. Rare historical works of virtuoustic micrography by Levi David van Gelder, Johann Michael Püchler, and William Pratt, use minuscule text to create images, escaping the conventional dichotomy of text and image. Matthew Kenyon’s Notepad (2007) and Fiona Banner’s Top Gun (1996) bring the tradition of micrography into the present.

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Diana Thater: True Life Adventures Launches Art on theMART

True Life Adventures at Art on theMART

Diana Thater

True Life Adventures

Opening Saturday September 29 at 6:30pm 

On View September 30 - December 30, 2018

Art on theMART

Upper Wacker Drive between N. Wells St.  and N. Franklin St.

& The Jetty and Confluence areas on The Chicago Riverwalk

between Wells and Lake St., Chicago, IL 60654

On Saturday, September 29, 2018, pioneering new media artist Diana Thater will present a site-specific program of digital artworks entitled True Life Adventures during the large-scale public unveiling event of Art on theMART. Spanning the river façade of Chicago's theMART, the public installation will be the world's largest permanent digital art projection.

The film explores the plight of animals living in imminent danger of poaching in Kenya. In scaling images of flora and fauna to the size of theMART’s façade, Thater explores the intersection between the time-based and spatial dimensions of the moving image. Thater manipulates video projections, light, color and architecture to transport viewers around the world.

“For the Art on theMART opening program I’ve made a short film titled True Life Adventures. It collages together live footage of wild animals living in the Chyulu Hills near Mount Kilimanjaro in Kenya. My work focuses on nature and the remaining last bits of wildlife that we’re lucky enough to still have. Perhaps we can inhabit a space where these fragile creatures and understanding is part of our world. I want to bring them to Chicago as a kind of big splash of the wild in the midst of a great city," says Thater.

“The work is not narrative and linear - it is simultaneous - with multiple images inhabiting the screen at once, all moving in different directions at the same time. The accompanying soundtrack was all recorded live in Kenya, to further the exotic but peaceful story of elephants, zebras and giraffe in their native habitat.”

Art on theMART will be a first-of-its-kind, curated digital art installation across 2.5 acres (two football fields) of theMART's river façade. The installation's first season will include four contemporary, digital artworks by artists Thater, Zheng Chongbin, Jason Salavon, and Jan Tichy, using 34 projectors to illuminate building's exterior. Art on theMART marks the first time a projection of its size and scope will be completely dedicated to digital art with no branding, sponsorship credits or messaging. The City of Chicago and theMART have partnered to manage and curate the projected artwork for the duration of a thirty-year agreement. The inaugural installation will be on view for two hours each evening beginning at dusk Wednesdays through Sundays, September 30 through December 30, 2018.

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KERRY TRIBE: "EXQUISITE CORPSE" SCREENING AT DESCANSO GARDENS FOR THE GROUP EXHIBITION "LA REINA DE LOS ÁNGELES"

Exquisite Corpse Trailer

Kerry Tribe

Exquisite Corpse Screening for La Reina de Los Angeles

Descanso Gardens

1418 Descanso Dr, La Cañada Flintridge, CA 91011

Thursday, October 4, 7pm

Without the Los Angeles River, there would quite simply be no Los Angeles. While the precise geography is unknown, historians have estimated it’s changed course at least nine times in the first half of the nineteenth century alone. La Reina de Los Ángeles will present a discussion of our current relationship with water, using the Los Angeles River as an entry point. Through contemporary art works, documentary films, historic materials and special programming, La Reina de Los Ángeles will explore the history, infrastructure and community around this critical resource.

Originally screened in 2016 at the CURRENT:LA Water Public Art Biennial, Exquisite Corpse is a 51-minute film that traces the 51-mile length of the LA River from its origin to its ocean terminus, capturing its varied landscapes, neighborhoods, creatures, and communities along the way. The film is presented as part of the La Reina de Los Ángeles exhibition curated by Debra Scacco at the Sturt Haaga Gallery.

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Blouin: Jorge Pardo's Creative Confusion

Jorge Pardo is the kind of artist whose practice is hard to neatly fold into a single sentence, unless it’s a run-on. He has reinvigorated, and fully furnished, a 19th-century hacienda in the northern Yucatan jungle, “Tecoh”; added Minimalist yet vivid decor into a liturgical parish in Leipzig; suffused undulating forms into the Latin American Galleries of LACMA; sprinkled bubblegum-bright tiles throughout the ground floor of New York’s Dia building; created towering public sculptures in Liverpool whose stalks were punctuated by illuminated Plexiglas spheres. His impactful early work was a single-story residential structure at 4166 Sea View Lane made for the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA, which he later moved into.

Born in Cuba and raised in the US, Pardo’s home base for the past 10 years has been Merida, Mexico. This locus has influenced Pardo precisely because “there’s not a lot of art here,” he said. The polychromatic work he produces can evolve without distractions in the immersive tropical context (barring his regular jaunts to New York City to see his daughter).

His relationship to pattern — the optics he fashions using a vibrant palette — is based on perpetual experimentation. Rearranging and rearranging paint chips in a way that imbues an inherent playfulness, “I’m always looking at color relationships,” he said.

On the phone from his studio, the affable Pardo refuses to intellectualize his work, recognizing instead the meandering curiosity that motivates his creativity. He studied at Art Center College of Design in California (Mike Kelley was one of his advisers) but, he countered, “I read so much theory when I was a kid, it was ridiculous,” adding: “we were forcefed.” Instead: “I tend to privilege what I was thinking, not necessarily what I was trying to achieve,” he said. “I don’t like the artist being an ‘authority.’” Although his aesthetics evoke something beautiful and whole, cohesion is not his priority. “I wanted to make an object that would resist a certain critical formalization,” he once told author Lane Relyea during an interview. “I wanted to make a work that would impose a lot of different critical modes.” He reiterated: “I’m not particularly interested in formal questions — I don’t know how to believe in that.” As an artist, “your only contract with the viewer is to literally just show them something,” he said.

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RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA: "THE DIVINE COMEDY" FOR PUBLIC DAY AT FONDATION BEYELER

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Public Day: The Divine Comedy

Fondation Beyeler

Baselstrasse 101, 4125 Basel, Switzerland

Sunday, September 16th, 2018, 12 - 6pm

Rirkrit Tiravanija invites to join a metaphorical journey through a participatory hell. Loosely and abstractly based on Dante's "Commedia".

Sunday, September 16, 12 – 6pm, included in the museum admission.

RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA

“I AM NOT INTERESTED IN LEAVING THINGS BEHIND, BUT IDEAS.”

Video: Bloomberg, “Brilliant Ideas”

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