esrawe studio and SUPERFLEX unveil vibrant ARCA warehouse in miami →

SUPERFLEX | designboom | by Kat Barandy

Image: César Béjar

wrapped in a colorful facade by SUPERFLEX, stone manufacturer ARCA presents a design warehouse in wynwood, miami, with a gallery-like experience by esrawe studio. crossing through the vibrant exterior art piece, visitors enter a showroom collection of natural and technological materials and cultural activations. commissioned to imagine the arca’s new façade is danish artist group SUPERFLEX, three artists known for intersecting art, science, and activism. the facade, entitled ‘like a force of nature,’ is comprised of arca’s ceramic tiles designed by hector esrawe.

esrawe studio and SUPERFLEX work together to generate a facade installation that vibrantly expresses fibonacci sequence patterning along the ARCA miami warehouse. following a color palette inspired by the tones of banknotes, the work of art underlines the overwhelming experience of the world’s current economic systems as natural as volcanoes or tsunamis, almost like a force of nature. hector esrawe comments: ‘unlike its colorful façade, the interior is designed as a neutral space to shift the focus onto the material collections. ARCA wynwood is presented as a museum-grade experience where the materials are showcased as unique works of nature, creating an opportunity for visitors to have an interactive, sensory experience with ARCA’s products.’

ARCA’s miami warehouse is conceptually designed by esrawe studio and SUPERFLEX to shift away from traditional retail space. instead, the project promotes learning, stimulates dialogue and knowledge, and offers an understanding of why and how architecture, design, art, and culture are generated worldwide. this is accomplished with the dual-purpose design of showcasing the materials for experience and ease of purchase.

on the ground floor of ARCA’s miami showroom, visitors are presented with a visual experience. videos of the quarries arca sources for its stone, processes it maintains and other sources of inspiration or creation of materials is projected at reception. in the double-height stone gallery, a curated display of massive slabs of marble sourced from around the world are presented. each slab on display is available for purchase, where an indoor crane will reach down and help the customer select the exact piece. the second floor offers a journey through the evolution of materials, from natural wood to manufactured wood, ceramics, tile and porcelain, with a room dedicated to each.

Fiona Banner's 1.5 tonne sculpture protesting industrial fishing removed by UK government →

Fiona Banner | The Art Newspaper | by Louisa Buck

The government may be turning a blind eye to industrial fishing in the UK’s Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), but it is quick to respond when an unwanted sculpture is deposited outside one of its Department Offices. Within hours of Fiona Banner and Greenpeace dumping her 1.5tn granite sculpture Full Stop Klang (2020) on the doorstep of the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) to protest against the government’s failure to stop illegal fishing in protected waters, the police had mustered the forces of Westminster Council to remove the work. 

Ironically it was at almost exactly the same time as Banner’s other two Full Stop works were being craned onto the Greenpeace boat Esperanza over at Tower Bridge. There they began their journey to the North Sea to form part of a protective barrier at Dogger Bank. Klang, however, was hoisted rather less auspiciously onto a Council truck to be transported up the A12 to a facility in Dartford. Here it resides until its fate is decided.

“We hope to get the sculpture back” Banner tells The Art Newspaper, adding “perhaps your readers can suggest where it should go next?” 

Greenpeace drops 1.5 - ton rock outside Defra HQ in fishing protest →

Fiona Banner | The Guardian | by Mark Brown

Fiona Banner artwork is part of group’s direct action campaign against illegal North Sea fishing.

Security had been told to expect an artwork for the secretary of state at 9am. Perhaps they were not expecting it to be an enormous chunk of granite painted with squid ink and so heavy it will need a crane to remove.

The artist Fiona Banner and a team from Greenpeace deposited the 1.5-ton artwork outside the Westminster offices of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) on Monday.

Titled Klang, it supports Greenpeace’s direct action campaign against destructive and illegal fishing in the North Sea, which has involved dropping huge boulders in the Dogger Bank area to disrupt trawlers.

The artwork was sculpted from granite taken from the North Sea, which brought its own challenges. “I was astonished to be working with material which was just so dense and heavy,” she said.

The original intention was to carve something perfect but “once I started I realised it was completely resistant to human intervention. In the end that is nature telling us that it cannot, will not, continue to bend to our will.”

She made three sculptures using a powerful robot-controlled diamond cutter. Two of them, Peanuts and Orator, are heading by boat to the North Sea to be dropped by Greenpeace while Klang will remain outside Defra until authorities decide what to do with it.

Banner described the illegal bottom trawling of the North Sea as “like taking a bulldozer through an ancient forest”.

She sees the debate as not just about fishing in the North Sea. “It’s the future of humankind,” she said. “Here we are still in a pandemic, viscerally aware of our vulnerability and the vulnerability of nature. We know we all really need to act. Deploying the sculptures in this way is I guess a way of recognising we need to act beyond language.”

Greenpeace has said it will remove the boulders it is dropping in the sea – including the artworks – if the government takes credible action. What happens to the one in Westminster remains to be seen. “It will be quite hard to move. They will probably have to get a crane,” said Banner.

Banner, who once installed a Harrier jump jet in Tate Britain, has been sculpting full stops over two decades.

These works are materially different in that they have been painted with sustainably sourced squid ink. “We can’t put anything in the water that is toxic,” Banner said, “but they do smell a bit fishy. I was in the house the other day saying what’s that smell, what’s been going on and eventually it was traced back to me.”

A Defra spokesperson said: “We are putting sustainable fishing and protection of our seas at the heart of our future fishing strategy. We have already set up a ‘Blue Belt’ of protected waters nearly twice the size of England and the Fisheries Bill proposes new powers to better manage and control our Marine Protected Areas and English waters.

“The Common Fisheries Policy currently restricts our ability to implement tougher protections, but leaving the EU and taking back control of our waters as an independent coastal state means we can introduce stronger measures.”

San Jose Museum of Art Announces New Commission by Pae White →

Pae White | Artfix Daily

Pae White, Noisy Blushes, 2020. Image: Fredrik Nilsen

The San José Museum of Art (SJMA) announced a new commission by California artist Pae White. Commissioned to usher in the next 50 years of creative impact at SJMA, this new work will soar within the Museum’s thirty-foot high atrium and greet audiences. This site-specific work will be the artist’s second largest mobile completed to date and the most ambitious commission in SJMA’s history. Unveiled in September 2020, Noisy Blushes will be on view through the building’s glass façade until the Museum re-opens to the public. This will be White’s first public artwork at a cultural institution on the West Coast to be on long-term view.

In creating her colorful and dazzling mobiles, White looks to the natural world—flocks of birds, schools of fish, drifting clouds—to produce sculptures without volume, to find order within chaos, and to meditate on movement and time. With this commission, White celebrates the mundane, the overlooked, and the ephemeral with a glittering, shape-shifting orb that will deliver a sublime experience for visitors and transform the Museum’s entrance into a new place for art.

For SJMA, White has created a sphere composed of over 12,000 silkscreened, electroplated stainless-steel hexagonal disks and suspended from over 500 hundred cables that float behind a towering glass façade. Her mesmerizing mobile will scatter millions of reflections throughout the Museum’s spacious Harold Witkin Convocation Area and Frank L. and Edna E. Di Napoli Skybridge Gallery. The colors of the mobile—hot pink, coral, crimson, turquoise, fuchsia, sea green, periwinkle, and more—sweep through the sculpture through an effect White calls a “blush.” Hues of gold, silver, and rose dominate, acknowledging the entwined histories of quicksilver mining in the town of New Almaden in south San José and the California Gold Rush of the High Sierras.

“Pae White’s bold new commission mirrors SJMA’s commitment to experimentation and innovation and reminds us how great art transcends the immediate events of its time. We are thrilled that this will be the first thing visitors will see when SJMA can reopen,” said S. Sayre Batton, Oshman Executive Director, San José Museum of Art. “White has worked closely with SJMA curator, Rory Padeken, and Richard Karson, director of design and the exhibitions team, to realize this artwork. We are grateful to them for this collaboration as well as the 120 members of the Bay Area community who generously supported this project.”

SJMA presented a selection of new and recent artworks by Pae White as part of its exhibition series, Beta Space, from July 2019 to January 2020. Plans for the commission began in 2017 and developed concurrently with the exhibition, which included a smaller mobile as proof of concept for the larger sculpture in the atrium. The mobile is site-specific and created by White to work within a space that connects SJMA’s nineteenth-century historic wing with its modern addition and offers multiple points of view from below and from above. White also riffs on Conceptual art and Minimalist artist Sol LeWitt by incorporating a few miniaturized versions of his large-scale, geometric wall drawings with designs of her own making into the piece. “Over the years, White has increasingly relied on the use of custom software along with designers, fabricators, artisans, and craftspeople from around the world, maximizing their expertise to create her art.” said Rory Padeken, curator, San José Museum of Art. “This method of working is quite commonplace in Silicon Valley where innovation is driven by creativity as a shared value that transcends disciplines and industries. With this artwork, White elegantly merges sophisticated technologies with inventive processes and the effect is ravishing.”

Pae White shared, “Noisy Blushes embraces visual ambiguity. A site-specific artwork, it simultaneously reflects light and color, yet denies its material presence: although viewable from a multitude of angles, its essence remains fugitive, ever changing depending upon the viewer location, the time of day, even the time of year. I am interested in the play between massiveness and transience, the elusivity of form.”    

Ann Veronica Janssens: Jackson Pollock meets Disney princess party →

Ann Veronica Janssens | The Guardian | by Hettie Judah

Image: Ann Veronica Janssens/Andy Stagg

South London Gallery 
Vapour, shattered glass, glitter strewn across the floor – now feels like the right moment for the Belgian artist’s playful, shimmering work.

Buckets of glitter, coloured lights and a hall of mirrors. No, the carnival isn’t back in town. These are the raw ingredients for Ann Veronica Janssens’ sparkling takeover of South London Gallery (SLG). The glitter – iridescent blue with a hint of pink – has been strewn in armfuls across the wooden floor of SLG’s main Victorian gallery, like the offspring of Jackson Pollock’s studio floor and a Disney princess party. Walk past and it coruscates. Sneeze and it would shift. It’s so airy that it makes Katharina Grosse’s spray painting of the same space in 2017 look positively cumbersome. Midway through the show, the glitter will be swept up and thrown away, replaced with a set of highly polished bicycles that you are invited to ride, bouncing light around the room as you go.

Janssens works in the realm of floaty impermanence, playing with light, space, reflection and perception. Judged as simple sculptural forms, the Belgian artist’s work is restrained in the extreme: bicycles aside, this is largely a collection of cubes, sheets and rings. The objects’ liveliness emerges as they connect the person observing them with the surrounding space. Often they create the setting for a performance in which you star: perfect for our self-regarding era, though Janssens has been working this area for decades.

Leaning against the entrance wall, Magic Mirror (Blue) (2012) is a shimmering sandwich of shattered glass and coloured filters. Together the layers form a broken mirror, a symbolic object suggesting bad luck, madness, the folly of vanity or the illusion of truthful reflection. Janssens seems less interested in grappling burdensome art historical references and more in the spectacle of unstable reflection itself: your fragmented image appears to float in a mist of shifting colour inside the glass.

She is an artist of everyday magic, summoning phantasmagoria from phenomena such as vapour, polished surfaces and the separation of water and oil. While the glitter spill emphasises the empty grandeur of the old SLG building, works shown in the fire station opposite play on the intimacy of encounters in spaces of domestic scale.

Three Gaufrette (wafer) works are fine sheets of ribbed glass carrying PVC colour filters. Installed in a low-ceilinged room only just large enough to contain them, the mutating moiré colours that emerge as you walk to and fro have an otherworldly, ghostly presence that seems divorced from the solid works themselves.

Le Bain de Lumière (The Light Bath, 1995) is a glass vase formed of four stacked spheres filled with demineralised water. Placed on a window ledge, each ball acts as a lens, offering an inverted street view. The liquid-filled orbs work much as our eyes do, so in looking at them we unwittingly reproducing the trick a second time.

A cube-shaped vitrine filled with a combination of water and paraffin – Golden Dream (2011-16) – offers an expanding geometry of internal reflections and pops of metallic colour that shimmer in and out of sight.

While she shares her cool perfection with the light and space artists of postwar California, such as James Turrell or De Wain Valentine, Janssens also lets us see the working of her illusions. In a darkened space, two little spotlights blaze into a corner producing melding puddles of cyan, magenta and cobalt: the exhibition’s titular work Hot Pink Turquoise (2006). If you ill-advisedly stare into the lights you’ll discover the bulbs have been fitted with a dichroic filter. Each light is thus both potentially hot pink and turquoise simultaneously. This mundane detail is there for us to discover: the lights are simply standing on the floor, their wires on view.

Janssens has scattered treats around the gallery like Easter eggs, unannounced. A little liquid-filled cube with a suspended neon stripe sits outside an upper window. High up on one wall is a photograph of a figure pushing against an invisible surface.

The iridescence that Janssens favours recalls sequinned dance costumes, eye shadow and custom car bodywork. Pop, maybe a little vulgar. Someone dubbed her work “‘pornographic’ minimalism”. They invite unselfconscious pleasure.

Stacked informally on the floor is a pile of posters reading: “In the absence of light, it is possible to create the brightest images within oneself.” It’s a featherlight sentiment in a featherlight show – one that feels dedicated to playfulness and ephemerality. The maverick designer R Buckminster Fuller used to pose architects the question: “How much does your building weigh?” We might well ask the same question of sculptors. Sometimes a lack of substance can be a good thing. It feels the right moment for joy, light and air.

Ann Veronica Janssen: Hot Pink Turquoise is on view at the South London Gallery through 29 November.

"Noisy Blushes" by Pae White at San Jose Museum of Art →

Pae White | San Francisco Chronicle Datebook | by Tony Bravo

The San José Museum of Art is set to debut a new mobile installation by California artist Pae White in honor of its 50th anniversary.

This site-specific work, titled “Noisy Blushes,” was installed in the museum’s 30-foot atrium and can be seen through the building’s glass facade until SJMA reopens to the public.

The massive floating sphere is comprised of more than 12,000 silkscreened, electroplated stainless-steel hexagonal disks, all suspended from over 500 hundred cables. The mobile scatters millions of reflections throughout the space in shades of hot pink, coral, crimson, turquoise, fuchsia, sea green and periwinkle in what White calls a “blush” effect.

Hues of gold, silver, and rose dominate the piece as an acknowledgement of the entwined histories of quicksilver mining in the town of New Almaden in south San José, as well as the California Gold Rush of the High Sierras.  The piece is White’s second largest mobile to date.

Learning from Kippenberger?

Martin Kippenberger | Texte Zur Kunst | by Isabelle Graw

Martin Kippenberger’s work is invariably read in reference to his life, often described as “excessive.” Since his death in 1997, he has been regarded as the epitome of the rule-breaking male artist who takes 

every liberty in his social behavior and art – for better or for worse. And in keeping with this, the retrospective currently showing in Bonn praises Kippenberger’s work for its “everything is possible and permitted” attitude – one from which contemporary artists could supposedly also benefit. Things are a little more complex, though: Kippenberger’s social presentation and art are so closely interwoven that it is impossible to avoid the fact that some of his jokes are cracked at the expense of others. However, his art does not merge entirely into the personal, as the numerous self-portraits in the exhibition demonstrate. Ambivalences are also created with the help of titles that generate contradictions and ensure his pictures and objects remain relevant from today’s perspective. 

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Review: In this L.A. gallery, one artist put her 'Digital Thoughts' into orbit

Jessica Stockholder | Los Angeles Times | by David Pagel

Jessica Stockholder, Digital Thoughts, Installation View at 1301PE , 2020

Imagine an astronaut on the International Space Station. Then imagine her staying up late, making things with her hands and blocking the video transmissions that allow her colleagues on Earth to monitor her 24/7.

The freedom she feels is palpable as you wander through “Digital Thoughts,” Jessica Stockholder’s laser-sharp exhibition at 1301PE gallery in L.A. Each of Stockholder’s 11 inventive assemblages is out of this world — if not from another planet then at least from far out in space.

Some of Stockholder’s constellations of unrelated objects and materials are no bigger than notepads. Some are large, about the size of tents or picnic tables.

Four hang on the wall like paintings. One stands on the floor like an ad hoc end table. Most do both, forming painterly and sculptural hybrids that defy gravity and blur the boundaries between 2-D images and 3-D objects. Most make an intellectual mess of the idea that art is best when its various media are kept separate — and supposedly equal.

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Petra Cortright: borderline auroa boreals

Petra Cortright

borderline auroa boreals | Team Gallery

March 5th 2020 – April 11th 2020

Petra Cortright, Installation View at Team Gallery, 2020

For her first solo exhibition at team, Petra Cortright will use the gallery’s main room to realize an ambitious installation that expands the layers of a digital landscape painting into physical space. The painting’s hundreds of layers, individual and combined, are printed on industrial translucent substrates hung at intervals throughout the space, with pathways through and along the installation that introduce new and ever-expanding opportunities for composition to emerge. Cortright’s brand of landscape is chaotic, beautiful, and volatile, marked by abstraction and populated by jagged .jpg shards and swift blossoms of painterly brushwork; working with a pace and agility the digital methods at her disposal afford, the entanglement of mark-making, color, and texture can assume an almost synesthetic effect.

Cortright operates within the vernacular of landscape painting but outside of its classical means and materials, questioning how the haptic and lyrical might be laced within consumer technology, spam-text poetry, and files chosen not in defense of the poor image but in celebration of it. Her painting software of choice is, of course, Photoshop, and her works mine the expressive and unintended potential of its transformations, effects, and malleability. 

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Massive Digital Projections by Charles Atlas & Petra Cortright Illuminate Chicago

Petra Cortright | The Art on the Mart | by Jill Sieracki

Petra Cortright, Installation View Art on theMart, 2020

While most of the noteworthy artworks in Chicago this week are tucked inside Navy Pier for Expo Chicago, the city’s annual art fair, there is one exhibition that’s hard to miss. Projected nightly on the 2.5-acre exterior of Chicago’s iconic waterfront Merchandise Mart, Art on theMART is the world’s largest public digital display and it returns for its second edition on Saturday, September 21. This year features work by esteemed video artist and film director Charles Atlas and buzzworthy young talent Petra Cortright.

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Ann Veronica Janssens Interview: To Walk Into a Painting

Ann Veronica Janssens | Louisiana Museum of Art

Imagine walking into a painting, immersing yourself in one specific colour and almost feeling that colour inside you. This is the idea behind an installation by one of Belgium’s most prominent artists, Ann Veronica Janssens. She here shows Associate Professor in Physics, Troels Petersen, around in the work, which “opens to a kind of infinity.” 

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Review: Why the ‘Color Walks’ abstractions of Judy Ledgerwood captivate like few can

Judy Ledgerwood | Los Angeles Times | by Christopher Knight

Judy Ledgerwood, Crossing Over, 2012

Depending on what you think a painting is, the exceptional exhibition of mostly recent work by Chicago-based artist Judy Ledgerwood at 1301PE includes eight, 13 or 21 paintings.

A bunch of them are conventional canvases covered edge to edge with paint — oil or acrylic or both. Some do double duty by layering a picture of a painting on top of another painting. (Usually the picture is banner-like, its softly draped shape contrasted with the taut, stretched shape of its support.) Yet others do another kind of double duty as glazed and decorated ceramic vases.

All of them are sensual in the extreme, a condition amplified by luxurious, irrational color. Blue tends toward cobalt; red is crimson, and yellow and orange are sunny citrus. Pink is always hot.

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Pae White: Material History

Pae White | Sculpture Magazine | Kim Beil

Whistleblower (detail), 2019. Ink, cable, and electroplated steel, 3189 discs, 295 strands, 84.5 x 189 x 74 in.

She leads me to a series of freestanding cases, nearly 30 feet in length, which house AGAMEMNOMICS (2013). Hundreds of small, multicolored objects stand in regiments, organized in rows that repeat deep into the mirrored base of the vitrine. This is a selection of work made for White’s intervention at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna (MAK). She recalls, “I went down to the basement [at the MAK], and there were these insanely incredible pieces by Adolf Loos and Koloman Moser that I was supposed to consider doing an intervention with, but I kept looking at this box of toys in the darkness of a cabinet. Some were kind of broken. I realized they were never going to be seen because they didn’t have any attribution. I felt immediately protective and melancholic about the toys and so I took them as my subject.” As in the Velveteen Rabbit, White’s attention to these objects brings them new life.

Describing the project’s early stages, she explains: “I narrowed down the box of toys to an easy matrix, sort of a chess set, then assigned each object its role in the chess configuration. 

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An Augmented Reality Tour Guides Visitors to the Museum’s Margins

Ana Prvački | Art in America | By Sarah Hotchkiss

Ana Prvački, ‘Nourishing Facade,’ 2019.

The de Young Museum in San Francisco accurately describes Ana Prvački’s Detour, a new commission developed in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture, as an “alternative” tour. I’d add a few other adjectives: decentralized, wide-ranging, irreverent, semi-private, and technologically advanced. Available through September 29, Detour is a series of videos meant to be viewed on one’s smartphone at nine specific points in the museum, offering Prvački’s take on the museum’s architecture, gardens, and the views its tower affords. Her videos are activated by the magic of Google Lens, an app most commonly advertised as a way to identify species of flowers and dogs through a smartphone camera. Though Prvački’s tour, as an artwork, is a refreshing and adventurous addition to the museum’s contemporary exhibitions, the requirement to view it through one’s phone via an app often felt like rigmarole invented for the sake of collaborating with a major tech company rather than the future of expanded art viewing.

What is Google Lens? Imagine the promises of Google Glass—an overlay of contextualizing information between your eyeballs and the world—but reined in and applied through the far more fashionable accessory of your already handy personal device. To activate Detour, you need only point your phone’s camera at the symbols found at each stop on the tour, let a dusting of white dots flitter across the screen until they coalesce into a very tappable circle, then tap that circle. This process launches a page with an embedded video and some accompanying information, such as a map of nearby spiritual centers, or the definition of a less well-known word from Prvački’s script. Not every artist equips you with the know-how to use “prelapsarian” in future conversations.

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Google Lens, Augmented Reality, and the Future of Learning

Ana Prvački | Wired | By Lauren Good

The Fine Arts Museums invited artist Ana Prvački, known for her participatory projects that use humor as a means to disarm traditional museum activities and behaviors, to visit and imagine a project that uses the museum experientially, rather than as an exhibition venue. In the resulting project, "Detour", Prvački leads visitors around the museum to look anew at the building, grounds, and collections, and imagine different ways of viewing, connecting, and behaving. In collaboration with Google Arts & Culture.

Why take a boring selfie in front of the Mona Lisa when you can use AR to dive deep into it?

Did you know that the painter Rockwell Kent, whose splendorous Afternoon on the Sea, Monhegan hangs in San Francisco's de Young Museum, worked on murals and advertisements for General Electric and Rolls-Royce? I did not, until I visited Gallery 29 on a recent Tuesday afternoon, phone in hand.

Because the de Young's curators worked with Google to turn some of the informational placards that hang next to paintings into virtual launchpads, any placard that includes an icon for Google Lens—the name of the company's visual search software—is now a cue. Point the camera at the icon and a search result pops up, giving you more information about the work. (You can access Google Lens on the iPhone within the Google search app for iOS or within the native camera app on Android phones.)

The de Young's augmented-reality add-ons extend beyond the informational. Aim your camera at a dot drawing of a bee in the Osher Sculpture Garden and a quirky video created by artist Ana Prvacki plays—she attempts to pollinate flowers herself with a bizarrely decorated gardening glove.

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An early start to celebrating the US centennial of women’s suffrage: San Jose Museum of Art celebrates visionary female artists

Pae White | The Art Newspaper | By Jori Finkel

Pae White, Beta Space, Installation view at San Jose Museum of Art, 2019.

Women gained the right to vote through the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution in August 1920, and various cultural groups are getting ready to celebrate that centennial with themed events and exhibitions. But the San Jose Museum of Art got an early start, framing 2019 as the “year of visionary women artists.”

The institution kicked off the program in the spring with a pair of shows, one focusing on Jay DeFeo’s use of photography and another on the contemporary artist Catherine Wagner’s science-inspired imaging (think prints made from MRI machines). Currently on view at the museum, which marks its 50th anniversary this fall, is the first mid-career retrospective of the Calcutta-born, New York-based artist Rina Banerjee and new work by the Los Angeles artist Pae White.

“When you’re getting ready for an anniversary, you start mining your history to see what you want to celebrate, and for us it’s our visionary women founders and these women artists we wanted to show,” says the museum’s executive director, Susan Sayre Batton. She said the other impetus was the centennial of the votes in the US House and Senate for women’s suffrage in May and June of 1919. 

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As the crow flies: Kerry Tribe and Rirkrit Tiravanija Opening August 17th

As the crow flies
Kerry Tribe
Rirkrit Tiravanija

August 17, 2019 - September 30, 2019

Opening reception:
Thursday, July 25, 5–7 pm

“Mein Herr looked so thoroughly bewildered that I thought it best to change the subject. “What a useful thing a pocket-map is!” I remarked. “That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?” “About six inches to the mile.”

“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!” “Have you used it much?” I enquired. “It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well. Now let me ask you another question. What is the smallest world you would care to inhabit?”

Lewis Carrol, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded
Chapter 11: “The Man in the Moon” 1893 

Kerry Tribe has had solo exhibitions at the Anderson Collection, Stanford University, Palo Alto; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), San Francisco (SF MoMA); Parque Galeria, Mexico City' 356 Mission Rd., Los Angeles; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; Carpenter Center, Cambridge; and the Contemporary Art Center, Irvine.  She has staged performances at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco and the TATE Modern.  In 2017 she received an Herb Alpert Award in Film and Video, a California Community Foundation Fellowship in 2015, an Artadia Award in 2013, and both a USA Artist Fellowship and Creative Capital Grant in 2012.  In 2016 the City of Los Angeles awarded Tribe a public commission to produce Exquisite Corpse, a film about the Los Angeles River, which will screen nightly on the High Line in New York, Summer 2018.

Rirkrit Tiravanija was born in 1961 in Buenos Aires. For over twenty-five years, he has focused on the social ties connecting audience, artwork and artist, blurring the boundary between art and life. He is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts at Columbia University, and is a founding member of The Land Foundation, an educational-ecological project in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He is the winner of the 2010 Absolut Art Award and the 2004 Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Guggenheim Museum. Notable exhibitions include On Air at the Centre Pompidou (2012), Less Oil More Courage at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum (2009), and retrospectives at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2010), Serpentine Gallery (2005), and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (2004). He recently presented Soup / No Soup at La Triennale 2012 in Paris, for which he transformed the main nave of Grand Palais into a communal banquet featuring a meal of Tom Ka soup. do we dream under the same sky?, Chaos Omotesando, Tokyo, (2018); The NG Teng Fong Roof Garden Commision: Rirkrit Tiravanija, National Gallery Singapore, Singapore, (2018)

For further information please contact: Brian Butler or Susan Sherrick at (323) 938 5822.

A Review of WORD PLAY: Language As Medium at The Bonnier Gallery, Miami

Fiona Banner | Arteviste | By Robyn Tisman

Fiona Banner "Vs.," 2013, Double-sided lithograph

Words have meaning. They symbolize ideas, complex concepts. Otherwise, they are merely collections of accumulated letters. Language, or lack thereof, informs the ways in which we navigate life, respond to stimuli, and interact with each other. 

WORD PLAY: Language As Medium, is a tightly curated exhibition on view at The Bonnier Gallery in Miami, Florida through July 20, 2019.  It features works by artists Fiona Banner, Benjamin Bellas, Mel Bochner, David Moreno, Kay Rosen, and Damon Zucconi, and slyly explores the philosophical underpinnings of language. The exhibition's catalogue essay provides the viewer with an overview of the role of language as conceptual art within the context of Postwar Art. 

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Opening July 23rd: HERE TODAY: Posters from 1301PE, Los Angeles

Stanford Art Gallery

Stanford, CA

July 23, 2019 - August 30, 2019

Opening reception:
Thursday, July 25, 5–7 pm

The Department of Art and Art History presents Here Today: Posters from 1301PE, Los Angeles, curated by Jennie Waldow and Jon Davies, PhD candidates in art history, and initiated and facilitated by D. Vanessa Kam, Head of the Bowes Art & Architecture Library of the Stanford Libraries.

This exhibition showcases twenty-five years of exhibition posters from 1301PE, the celebrated contemporary art gallery that has enjoyed a prominent place in the thriving Los Angeles scene since its inception in 1992.

1301PE (PE referring to Projects + Editions), currently located on Wilshire Boulevard’s Miracle Mile, has historically featured the work of significant international artists, as well as Los Angeles-based artists who have gone on to be recognized internationally and to enjoy a substantial following among fellow artists, curators, critics, and scholars. Artists and artist groups who have shown at 1301PE over the years include Fiona Banner, Uta Barth, Fiona Connor, Kirsten Everberg, General Idea, Jorge Pardo, Jason Rhoades, Jessica Stockholder, SUPERFLEX, Diana Thater, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Kerry Tribe, and Pae White, among many others. While these artists’ practices are formally and conceptually diverse, themes that emerge include the intertwining of art, design, and pop culture, as well as leisure and lifestyle.

Since its first exhibition in 1992, the gallery has produced unique exhibition posters as part of its curatorial and promotional strategy under the creative leadership of Brian D. Butler, who is not only the gallery’s founder but also an enthusiastic proponent of artists’ editions and multiples. The posters on view were either designed solely by the artists or in collaboration with Butler. While these posters can be considered as important pieces of exhibition ephemera and as extensions of the artists’ varied practices, they are first and foremost visually engaging works of graphic art and visual communication. As a transitory medium, the poster format allows for a high degree of freedom for visual experimentation. Sometimes a poster will relate directly to the visual tropes of the exhibition at hand, while in other instances it acts as an autonomous work of art. Taken as a whole, the posters document the exhibition history of a groundbreaking Los Angeles gallery as well as the character and development of the city’s art scene at large.

More information here.

Fiona Connor: Closed for Installation, SculptureCenter, #4

SculptureCenter

New York

April 29 – July 29, 2019

Fiona Connor’s exhibition at SculptureCenter is composed of three pieces—two installed or taking place in the museum, and the other in the surrounding neighborhood, away from the spectator’s involvement. The first is a set of bronze-cast sculptures throughout the lower level galleries and courtyard; the second is the organization of an annual window cleaning in a nearby apartment, signaled to passersby by a modest plaque on the building; and lastly, collective workshops that Connor organized at the museum to produce an artist book. In thinking how such divergent objects or actions coalesce, it is helpful to consider how each piece analyzes distinct forms of value production within the exhibitionary art system: value produced via the tools of institutional spectatorship and accessibility, maintenance, and collective participation. That being said, a primary concern that emerges is how to reconcile different models of organizing work against forces that foreclose collective potentiality.

In the years since the “liberal counter-reformation”—as French philosopher Gilles Châtelet referred to the neoliberal, reactionary global politics that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan built atop the beaten corpse of May ’68—work has become increasingly invisible and devastatingly precarious. Given this historical context, attention to “labor” in art, as elsewhere, has become ubiquitous. Rarely, however, is this interest organized in a way that mobilizes across various axes of division; most often such attention speculates on other imaginaries—the troubled legacy of what was once referred to as “social practice” is perhaps the best example. When Connor and I discussed this concern over the phone, she remarked that many artistic projects around work as of late often fall for clichés (I think here of a common impulse to fetishize the working class or, worse yet, poverty), and that they often “reinforce categorizations or hierarchies.” On the latter point, consider the potential dangers in reifying the wage contract when agitating to recognize forms of typically invisibilized work. Connor’s exhibition proposes an elegant corrective (albeit mitigated by its institutional support): an analysis of the “latent heat of certain actions,” as she put it. I take this term to refer to the unrealized collective energy embedded in all our work, including attention, and the products or value that result from it. Connor’s move then, is to show this heat, in its sites of display, its geographic context, and its waste—three themes that can be used to analyze the varied acts of the exhibition.

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