San Francisco Chronicle: Philippe Parreno - Deftly Curated Images from singular RFK Funeral Train at SFMoMA

Deftly Curated Images from singular RFK Funeral Train at SFMoMA by Charles Desmarais

“The Train” launches from a noted series of documentary photographs made by Paul Fusco from the funeral train of Robert Kennedy, 50 years ago this June, as it passed along the corridor from New York to Washington, D.C. That keystone sub-exhibition is flanked by alternative interpretations of the same event.

In one direction in the galleries, a small but touching exhibition of amateur snapshots, collected by Dutch artist Rein Jelle Terpstra, presents the unvarnished reactions of bystanders. In the other, a sumptuous film by French contemporary artist Philippe Parreno re-creates the day as the kind of fiction that extends and enlivens fact.

Though none of the sub-exhibitions would be as good on their own as they are in tandem, Parreno’s film “June 8, 1968” (2009) is the strongest of the three legs. The artist rented a train and hired a troupe of actors to achieve it.

Beautifully recorded at high resolution (70mm), it is a precise re-enactment of the funeral train’s now-famous journey. Long shots of the various characters recall the Fusco originals, yet the rocking of the train, the wind in the figures’ hair or in the grasses around them, place them — situate us — somewhere different on the continuum between past and present, life and image.

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DAMN #67: Diana Thater & Brian Butler speak about LA as an Artist's City

It may happily wear the mantles of city of dreams and city of angels, but Los Angeles' reputation as a city of art has been a more difficult journey.  The hurrahs of Hollywood have sometimes played a leading or supporting role, but it's not the only show in town, and over the last fifty years or so it has embraced pop and conceptual art, and is a beacon for figurative painting.  So what do the city's artistic protagonists make of recent developments and how does Trump-time feel?

" Los Angeles has the best art schools in the country. I found myself in a small new MFA program at the Art Centre in Pasadena, and my teachers were brilliant and all actively involved in the community.  They were my introduction to LA and, because of them, I never left and I have taught for the last 25 years at the Art Centre.  Frankly, I would have thought that LA was much more of an art city when it had a closer-knit community of artists who had zero interest in becoming celebrities.  Now we have this huge influx of artists from everywhere, and they come here knowing nothing about the city or the history of its small, dedicated art community." 

- Diana Thater

"Artists based in Los Angeles have for more than half a century been changing the conversation of the canon.  Historically, Los Angeles artists had to show inEurope to gain a reputation, as New York (the gatekeeper) was not interested in art from the West Coast.  In recent years you see a shift in the arts across the board from creative to financial. The market (meaning the one reported and celebrated in the media) is now global in its aesthetics.  So how does that affect Los Angeles and its evolution"? 

- Brian Butler

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Fiona Connor Lecture, Los Angeles Public Library

Fiona Connor: Photographer's Eye: Placeholder for a Grand Central Market Archive

Los Angeles Public Library, Central Library, meeting room A

630 W. 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071

Wednesday, April 18, 2018 at 12:15 p.m.

Fiona Connor set up a large format Toyo View camera in the middle of Grand Central Market, a bustling culinary bazaar in downtown Los Angeles whose rapid makeover in recent years has been the source of cheerleading as well as anger over the changing nature of the city’s urban core. Opened in the late 1800s, Grand Central was long seen as a celebration of the city’s melting-pot character. Immigrants from Michoacan served up carnitas near stands that hawked cheap bowls of Hong Kong-style wonton soup. It was a place for everybody, and anybody, or so goes the narrative of those opposed to its recent evolution. 

As city leaders have pushed for a downtown L.A. “renaissance,” with historic buildings transformed into stylish lofts and skid row’s homeless population pushed farther and farther to the margins, Grand Central has transformed, too. In just a few years, dozens of food stalls were pushed out as new ones serving up oysters and craft beer to the neighborhood’s growing class of young professionals moved in. 

Over the course of 12 months, Connor documented this change in a work titled "Placeholder for a Grand Central Market Archive." Once a month, she returned to the exact same spot at lunchtime and took a single photograph. The result is an edition of 12 sets of 8x10 prints that are a telling record of the market’s evolution. From one photo to the next, paint-cracked pillars change suddenly from black to white. A construction wall goes up. When it comes down, a brand new stall has been erected, an upscale bar opened by a pair of Hollywood restauranteurs that offers a collection of upscale wines as well as chicharones, fried pork rinds are a nod to the market’s not-so-distant past. 

Connor's prints will become part of the photo collection at the Los Angeles Public Library, joining other historical images of Grand Central Market for the public to use. The edition is designed so it can be seamlessly added to the collection, which is housed at Central Library downtown.

For her talk she will discuss this project and other examples where she has worked with existing archives.

Fiona Connor is a New Zealander born in 1981, currently living and practicing her art in Los Angeles. She received a degree in Fine Arts and History from the University of Auckland, and she earned her Masters in Fine Arts at California Institute of the Arts. Connor’s work uses strategies of repetition to produce objects that interrogate their own form by engaging different histories embedded within our built environment. For her, fabrication is a form of research. Her work was recognized in New Zealand when she was shortlisted in 2010 as one of four finalists for the bi-annual Walter's Prize for contemporary art. Her installations are held by the Auckland City Art Gallery, The Dowse Gallery, the Te Papa in Wellington, the Christchurch Art Gallery, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. During the past eight years  since being resident in Los Angeles Connor has devoted her energies both locally and  across a global spread with exhibitions in New York, Barcelona, Basel, Istanbul, Sydney and Auckland. Connor's artistic career has displayed a consistent attraction to working in a collaborative way and fluidly between curating, facilitating and object making. An example being the Newspaper Reading Club founded in 2011, and the conversion of her own Los Angeles apartment over 12 months into a gallery titled Laurel Doody in 2016.

Sponsored by Photo Friends. Presented by the Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection.

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Jan Albers: Fox/Jensen, Sydney, Australia

Jan Albers

Fox/Jensen 

CNR Hampden Street & Cecil Lane
23 A Roylston Street

Paddington
NSW 2021
Australia

Opens Thursday, 5 April, 6 PM

Jan Albers studied painting at the famous Kunstakademie Dusseldorf. Early on he sensed that working within the established protocols of paint and canvas felt too restraining.  He has gone on to produce a major body of work that shuns the flatness of the picture plane replacing it with a divergent mix of high and low art materials that are bolshy and strident, elegant and considered, yet seldom demure.

As much as Albers wished as a student to eschew convention, his work touches lightly on various 20th century moments. One feels echoes of Judd and Chamberlain in their robust materiality and determined “object” status - the visceral impact of Fontana’s puncturing of the picture plane, in his “chain-saw” lacerations. But there are also reverberations in form and composition that recall his namesake Anni Albers’ refined geometries, or Frank Stella’s shaped canvases.

As cognizant as he clearly is of history, Albers feels determined to extend his own artistic vocabulary so that it embraces a range of connections to architecture, even the environment, complete with its blend of allure and toxicity.

As Stephen Berg has described…“the entire picture is actually a permanent construction site alternating between destruction and repair.” This altercation between making and unmaking, harmony and disharmony runs through all of Albers work. One gets the sense that he views most material as potentially “uncooperative” and unruly – something to be tamed or at the very least bridled.

In all of his works you are compelled to look into them rather than at them from a respectful distance – the enticement and persuasion of the poisonous perhaps. Their complex topography, their nooks and crannies, their structural depth and intricacy suggest an entirely different reading of space that isn’t pictorial nor is it truly sculptural. Whatever the case, Albers is certainly up-dating the bas-relief and its traditional viewpoint.

The gallery is thrilled to present a range of major works by Jan Albers, including the large and magnificent bronze, mightyhighOnlight and stunning new ceramic works alongside further examples of his diverse and innovative practice.
It is also particularly pleasing, that during this years Art Basel Hong Kong, four large scale works were placed in major collections in Taipei and in a private museum collection in Shanghai. The response to his work at Art Basel Hong Kong has been overwhelming. We are delighted to say that Jan will also be present for the opening in Sydney.

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The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Invites You to Celebrate Jessica Stockholder

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

258 Main Street

Ridgefield, CT 06877

Honoring Jessica Stockholder

Saturday, April 21, 2018

Jessica Stockholder’s career in the visual arts now spans more than thirty years, including over seventy solo exhibitions worldwide and representation in numerous major public and private collections. Her work, which has had a significant impact on contemporary sculptural practice, is categorized by a deep love of color and a focused engagement with the intersection of pictorial space and the physicality of the material world. Stockholder first exhibited at The Aldrich in 1993, and in 2011 she presented Hollow Places Court in Ash-Tree Wood, a major solo exhibition based on the wood from a 130-year-old ash tree that had been removed from the Museum’s Sculpture Garden. Stockholder is also known for her writing on art and her commitment to teaching, which includes her appointment in 2012 as Chair of the Department of Visual Art at the University of Chicago.

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Paul Winstanley Book Release

Paul Winstanley: 59 Paintings

In which the Artist Considers the Process of Thinking about and Making Work

British artist Paul Winstanley (born 1954) has established an international reputation for his atmospheric photorealistic paintings of nondescript places and anonymous figures. Here he takes 59 of his own works as a starting point to discuss what it means to make paintings.

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Kerry Tribe: The Un-Private Collection: Lynne Tillman & Kerry Tribe on Joseph Beuys

The Un-Private Collection

Thursday, May 17, 2018 | 7:30 p.m.

Oculus Hall at The Broad

221 S. Grand Ave

Los Angeles, CA 90012

Organized by The Broad and X-TRA, this special three-part iteration of The Un-Private Collection addresses the legacy of German Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys in relation to contemporary art practice. Each program highlights a theme central to Beuys and invites contemporary artists to discuss their work and ideas through that lens.

New York writer Lynne Tillman and Los Angeles visual artist Kerry Tribe will speak on lies and myth. Joseph Beuys is a controversial figure in art history, in large part because of his constructed biography: Beuys often recanted his dramatic origin story, a swirl of truth and lies, contributing to his mythic stature. In their work, Tillman and Tribe both investigate the construction of narrative and knowledge. This conversation will explore the ways that Beuys, Tillman and Tribe each raise questions about how identity shapes public reception and perception. Moderated by Shana Lutker, a Los Angeles artist and co-organizer of this series for X-TRA.

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Paul Winstanley: Print Project Space, Alan Cristea Gallery, UK

Print Project Space: Paul Winstanley

23 Mar 2018 - 5 Apr 2018

Alan Cristea Gallery

43 Pall Mall,

London SW1Y 5JG

Paintings by British artist Paul Winstanley, never before exhibited in the UK, will be shown (together with prints by the artist) in an exhibition at the Alan Cristea Gallery, London, to coincide with the launch of the artist’s new monograph, 59 Paintings.

59 Paintings, written by Winstanley, presents an artist’s personal view of how paintings are conceived, made and interpreted. He is known for his detailed, realistic paintings of often overlooked, vacant, but familiar landscapes and interiors, which are rendered in a muted palette. The exhibition will include several paintings from the monograph that come directly from the artist’s personal collection. Winstanley, who trained at the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1970s, and now lives and works in London, depicts scenes that include a woman peering out of a veiled window in Fitzrovia, a commuter asleep on the London underground’s Circle Line, a narrow ribbon of park between office blocks in Canary Wharf, and the interior of a decommissioned government building. These works are based on the artist’s own photographs.

The exhibition also includes several print series’. Veil 1-8, 2008, a set of etchings which takes as its subject the motif of the veil, presents views a of net curtain hanging in front of a window, partially revealing a wooded landscape behind. Art School I-VIII, 2016, made from a combination of wood block and photogravure, depict the interiors of British art schools. The imagery used was selected from over 200 photographs taken by Winstanley when he travelled throughout England, Scotland and Wales photo-graphing unpopulated art school studios, including the Slade School of Fine Art and Goldsmiths, London, during their summer closures.

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Petra Cortright: Bank, Shanghai

Petra Cortright & Marc Horowitz

22 March - May 20, 2018

Bank

Basement Building 2

Lane 298 Anfu Road

Xuhui District, Shanghai

BANK is proud to present Petra Cortright and Marc Horowitz, marking the first time these married, LA-based artists are exhibiting their diverse but congruent creations together, and in Shanghai. 

Cortright is the poster-girl for ‘post-internet’ art, having come to fame with her lo-fi, webcam videos that, anticipated the rise of the selfie by exploring the perception of women online through her own eccentric ‘performances’. Cortright’s practice also includes intricate “touch-screen paintings” that are the ironic fusion of personal gesture and mass-production. Using digital software, she combines appropriated and self-generated elements in fantastical, all-over compositions that are printed on aluminum or fabrics. Cortright has exhibited at the New Museum, NY; Rhizome; Venice Biennale, Whitechapel Gallery, London; as well as at UCCA and MWoods Museum, Beijing. 

Horowitz’s social interventions helped garner him big media and artistic fame in the US by poking fun at the immediate present. Surprisingly Horowitz’s recent paintings seem preoccupied with making sense of the past. His “pile paintings” layer studio visitors’ footprints with citations of Italian Master paintings, which are then obliterated by cartoon-like color explosions. The resulting works reconcile disparate forces and embody the idea that “Each painting contains the memory of painting”. Horowitz’s satirical sculptural and video works question artifact and creativity in our non-linear, nomadic times. His work has been showcased in presentations at The Hayward Gallery, London; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; The Depart Foundation, LA and online with Creative Time, NY, etc.

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Judy Ledgerwood: Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY

Judy Ledgerwood: : Surface/Depth: The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro

Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY

22 March - September 9, 2018

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) presents Surface/Depth: The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro, an exhibition that showcases twenty-nine collage paintings by the pioneering feminist artist Miriam Schapiro in conversation with twenty-eight works by nine contemporary artists: Sanford Biggers, Josh Blackwell, Edie Fake, Jeffrey Gibson, Judy Ledgerwood, Jodie Mack, Sara Rahbar, Ruth Root, and Jasmin Sian. Bringing into focus the key, but unheralded, role Schapiro played in the reframing of craft and decoration in the American art world, this juxtaposition of historic and contemporary work highlights ways in which the decorative continues to be utilized as a critical tool in art today.

A site-specific tempera mural by Judy Ledgerwood, Chromatic Patterns for the Museum of Arts and Design is inspired by the history of abstract painting as well as a range of domestic textiles. Reveling in the promiscuity of pattern and the association of the decorative with the female body, sensuality, and immersive experience, Ledgerwood offsets the gallery’s architecture and the logic of her underlying gridded composition with an animated floral motif and a seductively intense color palette.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija: Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany

Rirkrit Tira­vanija: Power to the People. Political Art Now

Schirn Kunsthalle 

Römerberg
60311 Frank­furt

March 21 - May 27, 2018

Democ­racy appears to be in crisis; the post-demo­c­ratic era has already dawned. The symp­toms are mani­fold: populist leaders, fake news, auto­cratic back­lash, total­i­tarian propa­ganda, neolib­er­alism. However, tenden­cies toward a repoliti­cized society have been palpable for some time now. Artists too are increas­ingly raising objec­tions. They create works that they see as instru­ments of crit­i­cism and which expressly pursue polit­ical inten­tions. In a major exhi­bi­tion, the SCHIRN brings together artistic posi­tions which can be read as seis­mo­graphs of contem­po­rary polit­ical activity. It focuses on funda­mental issues and the exam­i­na­tion of the phenomena and possi­bil­i­ties of polit­ical partic­i­pa­tion. The works call polit­ical posi­tions into ques­tion, illus­trate forms of protest, and set their sights on artistic involve­ment. Instal­la­tions, photographs, videos, paint­ings and sculp­tures by Phyl­lida Barlow, Andrea Bowers, Julius von Bismarck, Sam Durant, Omer Fast, Adelita Husni-Bey, Hiwa K, Ahmet Öğüt, Rirkrit Tira­vanija and Forensic Archi­tec­ture docu­ment the erosion of demo­c­ratic achieve­ments and the active pres­sure of the new mass move­ments. They analyze discourses on domi­nance and noncon­formist inter­jec­tions, develop strate­gies of oppo­si­tion, and reflect the imag­i­na­tive ways of the new protest culture.

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ARTNEWS: Charline von Heyl Painting Survey to Travel from Germany to Washington, D.C.

Charline von Heyl Painting Survey to Travel from Germany to Washington, D.C. by Andy Battaglia

A survey of paintings by Charline von Heyl will be mounted in Germany in June at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg and then, for what is being billed as the largest American museum survey yet of the German-born, U.S.-based artist, will travel in the fall to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

After the German incarnation of the show—to run June 22 through September 24—approximately half of the works will head Stateside while the others will go on to show at the Dhondt-Dhaenens museum in Ghent, Belgium. The Hirshhorn exhibition, to open November 1 and continue into February 2019, will focus on the U.S.-based loans from the German exhibition, including some 30 paintings made since 2005.

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Fiona Connor: Hopkinson Mossman, Wellington

Fiona Connor: Closed Down Clubs & Monochromes

9 March - 14 April, 2018

Hopkinson Mossman, Wellington, New Zealand

Contemplating the different times suspended in the object opens up a connection between the sculpture, a thing in the world, and an awareness of myself as a thing in the world, something that’s been used and worn, something that holds many different stories. Time may be the deep link that connects us to the things of our world, and reading and re-reading the material signs of time passing allows these fictions and histories to resonate and echo within them.*

Hopkinson Mossman is pleased to present Closed Down Clubs & Monochromes, a solo exhibition of new work by Fiona Connor, and the inaugural exhibition in the Wellington gallery program.

Fiona Connor uses strategies of repetition to produce objects that interrogate their own form and the contexts in which they are encountered. Reconstructing a public drinking fountain, a kitchen wall, a notice board from the local café or brick production plant, her work engages different vernacular architectural histories embedded within our built environment. Closed Down Clubs & Monochromes comprises two distinct bodies of work that, while materially divergent, both interrogate the material and temporal course of an object’s ontological existence.

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Rhizome: Petra Cortright: The Ephemera Mine

The Ephemera Mine by Bruce Sterling

This article accompanies the inclusion of Petra Cortright’s VVEBCAM in the online exhibition Net Art Anthology. The vintage punctuation of “net.art” here reflects the preferences of the author. For more about spelling and punctuation, see Rhizome’s style guide. – Ed.

How did one know that Petra Cortright was a “net.artist”? It was because YouTube was expelling her.

This particular Cortright video, VVEBCAM, looks inoffensive on the face of it. The face is Petra Cortright’s, and she’s examining the screen with much the same bemused expression as the online viewer.

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Ana Prvacki: In Residence, de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA

March 1, 2018 – August 26, 2018

The Fine Arts Museums are rethinking how we engage contemporary artists across both museums, experimenting with ways that their contributions can resonate even more strongly among museum audiences, in more immediate dialogue with the architecture, operations, and collections. Rather than presenting traditional exhibitions of artworks, we are inviting some artists to think about the museums more experientially, beginning with artist Ana Prvački, who has been visiting the de Young since summer 2017 to research all areas of its activities and imagine new ways of seeing and experiencing the museum. Still in development, Prvacki’s project will result in multiple components in the spring and summer of 2018, including performance, an alternative tour of the facilities, and interventions into the building and collections.

Prvački is a cross-disciplinary artist whose works take the form of diverse projects that draw on performance, daily practices, consumer aesthetics, and popular concerns. Most often her projects are participatory, using humor as a means for disarming traditional museum activities and behaviors, and ephemeral elements as a nod to an environmentally conscious artistic practice. She has realized solo exhibitions and projects at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; and the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin. Her work has also been included in many international exhibitions, including the 14th Istanbul Biennial and dOCUMENTA 13. Her performances have been commissioned by the LA Philharmonic and the Chicago Architecture Biennial, among others.

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Petra Cortright: CAM WORLS, UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA

FEBRUARY 24 - APRIL 7, 2018

UTA Artist Space is pleased to present CAM WORLS, the first large-scale survey of Petra Cortright’s video work. Fifty of the artist’s videos, made between 2007 and 2017, will be on display, including eighteen never-before-exhibited artworks. The gallery will celebrate with an opening reception on Saturday, February 24, 2018, from 5-7PM.

Cortright’s computer-based practice pioneered a new kind of internet art. The videos in the show will trace the gradual evolution of her online presence, and a practice of perpetual modulation of over ten year of internet ephemera that mines decorative motifs from flowers to the female body. The archival impulse behind her work stresses the visual catchiness and mutability of the digital image, as well as the delicate and self-conscious act of putting oneself “online.” As an artist who “grew up on the internet,” Cortright carefully erects and investigates online trends of personhood as they appear in the culture, from the front-facing camera antics of solipsistic young girls on social media to virtual strippers.

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KQED: Video Installation of Medical Training Breaks Down Art and Science Divide

Among its many characters, Los Angeles-based artist Kerry Tribe’s sharp and riveting video at SFMOMA, Standardized Patient, features a woman in a doctor’s office who isn’t quite sure why she’s there.

Standardized Patient tracks doctors-in-training interacting with “standardized patients”: actors portraying characters with specific motivations, family backgrounds, personalities, and sets of symptoms. The camera follows the doctors as they discern the actor-patients’ ailments and communicate a treatment plan.

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Jorge Mendez Blake: All Eyes Are Suddenly on Guadalajara's Thriving Art Scene

All Eyes Are Suddenly on Guadalajara's Thriving Art Scene by Michael Slenske

Here's our guide to Mexico's newest creative hotbed and a look at its ever-more-popular PreMaco festivities

Nowadays, whenever you travel to a destination with an emerging art scene, you are almost always told that the city is the Los Angeles of whichever nation you are visiting. It’s a phenomenon you might call Second City Syndrome, which suggests the locale is on an upward cultural trajectory. Such was the spirit this past weekend in Guadalajara, Mexico, during the fourth edition of the city’s PreMaco festivities—filled with openings, studio visits, and parties that offered a precursor to this week’s blockbuster Zona Maco fair in Mexico City, now in its 15th year. As I discovered, this second city’s charms were best expressed by its distinctions from, not mimicry of, the CDMX scene.

That such a scene exists at all is a tribute to the reach of Dávila and his lifelong pals Gonzalo Lebrija and Jorge Méndez Blake. By establishing such formidable studio practices in Guadalajara they have become the real drivers behind PreMaco. All three artists show locally at Travesia Cuatro, the Madrid/Guadalajara gallery which sits next to Demetria in Casa Franco, a 1929 Luis Barragán home. Prior to joining the gallery, the trio ran its own exhibition space, Oficina para Proyectos de Arte (OPA), which gave early shows to international stars like Friedrich Kunath, Anri Sala, Liz Craft, and Pipilotti Rist. Another international star, Martin Creed, touched down in GDL to install one of his balloon installations at the top of Vía Libertad tower, a mixed-use complex redesigned by GDL firm SPRB that draws a hip crowd to its Mercado Mexico (filled with boutiques and cafés) in the plaza at its base. Also of note was an elegant archival show of multimedia works related to The Aesthetic Machine, a libidinous 1975 sculpture by Mexican abstract icon Manuel Felguérez at Páramo Galeria, which just opened a secondary space on the Upper East Side (and a Mexico City residence). Páramo also showed a suite of paintings and performance works by rising GDL talent Emanuel Tovar, who unveiled a transcendent new performance, Ritos estructurales, on the island of Mezcala on Sunday.

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