FIGURES ON THE MOVE


FIGURES ON THE MOVE

They come from the imagination’s subconscious wonderland. They are laughing, jumping, dancing, jerking, twitching and moving around like hectic tap dancers. They are creatures of a kind, fetched from a cabinet of curiosities – and nonetheless they look sorely human, all too human. This is precisely why one feels a strange sense of familiarity when viewing the artist’s pictures. They are about you, me and our peculiar neighbor. And surely also about beings that you still can’t put a name to.

We speak about the figures in the painter Heidi P’s universe. And what we are speaking about is a universe that is entirely her own. She started – seriously – painting about three or four years ago, quickly making contact with an art gallery that sold her pictures in short order. Ever since that time, things have been moving fast­ – well-deserved. She has – presumably without consciously wanting to – become a part of the wave that is currently raging in the art world, a wave that has to do with the potential of art to communicate in a direct and unpretentious way, without too many filters and theoretical explanations.

But don’t make any mistake about it: Heidi P has a lot to offer – a fertile sense of fantasy, raving humor and a wryly capricious approach of the kind that can only emanate from a wholly uncontrolled poetic sensibility. Call it a seventh sense … or an eighth sense. In any event, it is quite certain that Heidi P possesses a delicate intuition about life’s tumults and more erratic aspects. Her talent is secure and it’s already clear to see that it will develop even further than what we’ve seen up until now.

Her sources of inspiration feed in from everywhere: from her subconscious mind, of course, but also from the figures that she suddenly fastens her eye on, on a billboard, on a street corner or on an old wall. No matter what, as long as it ignites her picture-creating capabilities.

And then there are the colors. To a great extent, Heidi P builds her pictures up in colors. Bright colors, which vividly and jovially resound in the paintings like some kind of music. And then again, she is most certainly not afraid of using the colors in an untraditional way.

In certain periods in her output, she has been “writing” on the paintings. Short sentences – a kind of poetry. But her pictures tell stories in themselves, a profusion of short stories. Or, more precisely, fragments. For it is up to us to guess further, fueled by our own curiosity. There is no answer key.

  • Heidip
  • Jimmy Baker


    Roberts & Tilton is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Jimmy Baker. Titled Rapture, the exhibition is a collection of fragmented narratives and artifacts that regard the present as if it were unearthed in a time capsule from our near future.

    Baker’s variety of working media presents the inevitable chaos of futuristic digital culture in form of highly refined aesthetics. Classical portraiture, iPods, photography, sculpture and hacked cell phones describe a variety of global concerns that accumulate into a grim dystopian future. The sum of this global turmoil is more the subject rather than its parts. While at once Baker’s future is looming and ominous, it also provides hope by voicing the conscientious and aware. Baker contemplates the structure of information, and how we perceive events in hopes that we will step outside our moment in history.

  • Robert & Sanstilton
  • OSCAR TUAZON


    OSCAR TUAZON / “I’D RATHER BE GONE” /

    STANDARD (OSLO) is proud to present its first exhibition of objects and photographic works by Paris-based artist Oscar Tuazon. “I’d Rather Be Gone” continues the artist’s yearlong examination on how personal liberty can be embodied in architecture. Drawing on the early building experiments of the hippy commune Drop City as well as current practices in ‘dwelling portably’, Tuazon’s work questions the conditions for sustainability and self-suffiency.

    “When I attended Deep Springs College in the mid-90s, the Greyhound would stop at an intersection in the middle of the desert, 50 miles from the college. You had to wait there until someone drove out to get you, which sometimes took a few hours. The only other thing at that intersection was a whorehouse in a doublewide. (In Nevada, prostitution is legal.) On hot days, the Madame of the house would sometimes invite us inside and offer us a cold drink. The only way in and out of the college is through the whorehouse.” Tuazon’s works and writings continuously return to the ideal of the bare minimum – put forward by the writer Henry David Thoreau in the novel “Walden” (1854) – and thus also return to the question of whether isolation from civil society may gain a more objective understanding of it.

    Since graduating from Whitney ISP Tuazon has produced a series of sculptures composed of urban debris: cardboard boxes, wooden pallets, printing plates, OSB boards from building sites, or melanin boards from defunct kitchens – materials gathered from the area of his Paris studio or near the various venues of his exhibitions. In an initial phase these sculptural works would take forms of geodesic domes and draw on such typologies as indigenous building techniques, DIY architecture, as well as a more determined dedication to structural clarity, advocated by the engineer R. Buckminster Fuller. More recently the works have taken on the character of full-scale building prototypes, such as the work “1:1” at the center of the show.

    This assemblage of melanin boards and wooden pallets is constructed to serve as a corner of the house Tuazon planning to erect near Portland, Oregon. Approaching the building project through a series of trial products rather than drawings, the exhibition context becomes a chance to test rather than portray this situation. At the same time Tuazon exposes the shortcomings of the works as prototypes, which continuously seem to be balancing between actual functionality and a possible transcendent materiality as sculptures. Tuazon draws attention to the disjuncture of forcing one space (the un-built house) onto another space (the gallery), and underscores the impossibility of really modelling something accurately in the context of an exhibition. Adding to these sculptures are four folded and framed photographs, rendering tableaux of temporary architecture from the woods of Portland. The photographs become a surface for exploring another kind of space, while being folded also modulating the distances within the image, between one space and another.

    Oscar Tuazon (b. 1976 in Seattle, Washington) received his education from Cooper Union and the Whitney ISP in New York. His works were earlier this year shown in solo exhibitions at Bodgers and Kludgers, Vancouver and at castillo/corrales, Paris. His recent group exhibitions include “Down By Law”, The Wrong Gallery for the Whitney Biennial, New York; “The Elementary Particles (Paperback Edition)”, STANDARD (OSLO); and “Minotaur Blood” at Jonathan Viner / Fortesque Avenue, London. “Metronome no. 10”, which Tuazon co-edited with Clementine Deliss, will also be included in the Documenta 12 Magazines project.

    Upcoming projects:
    Matias Faldbakken: “A Hideous Disease / Art Basel 38 / Statements / 11.06.-17.06.2007
    Gardar Eide Einarsson: “South of Heaven” / Frankfurter Kunstverein / 27.07.-16.09.2007

  • Standard Oslo
  • "I’VE BEEN SETTING FIRES ALL DAY"


    BRETT WILSON
    MICHELLE CORTEZ
    SUZANNAH SINCLAIR
    “I’VE BEEN SETTING FIRES ALL DAY”
    May 25 – July 8, 2007

    Opening Reception with the Artists Friday, May 25, 6-9 p.m.

    “I’ve Been Setting Fires All Day” shows the work of 3 artists with an intrinsic sensibility that is both vulnerable and sophisticated.

    Brett Wilson does what few others dare to do when he takes the craft of painting at face value, making naive oil paintings that use a sharp wit to convey meaning. In “Let’s Do Some Living After We Die” his deceased dog Gilligan is portrayed enjoying himself in the afterlife in a field of raw and beautifully rendered flowers. His self-portrait “Feelin’ Fine” is a depiction of a trip to the afterlife to visit “Gilly”, showing just the top of Wilson’s head peeking up in that same field of flowers. Since life is so fragile it should be taken with the best of humor, Wilson reminds us.

    Michelle Cortez’s watercolor and embroideries on thin white fabric resemble old bed sheets, fragile and strong. Domesticity comes to mind as it usually does with sewn works, but in this case she has taken it on the road. These works were all made before, during and after a 6 month bus trip through South America. In Cortez’s simultaneously meticulous and haphazard work you can feel the sweat of her labors and the issues she may have been struggling with along the way. There is a distinct sense that she was working something out by creating these highly personal works.

    Suzannah Sinclair paints seductive portraits of young females in different states of repose. Whether in bed, laying in the grass or in other intimate settings, her subjects are always stripped down to their bare elements. Often inspired by 1970’s era Playboy imagery, her muses are mischievous and knowing with a pure innocence and clarity which it seems Sinclair wishes to preserve in her paintings. Often referred to as sad and lonesome, her paintings also show a confident power in their solitude which is presented by Sinclair to us, the audience and voyeur. Created with thin layers of translucent watercolor on birch panel, Sinclair uses the natural wood grain as part of the composition which furthers the sensual quality of her work.

  • Galleri Loyal
  • Ben Nason/Pilaiporn Pethrith


    Ben Nason
    Spare
    24. maj – 30. juni 2007

    Ben Nason: Untitled 1 from the series “Spare”, 2006, archival ink jet print, 126 x 84 cm.


    Pilaiporn Pethrith
    SOS#4 (Series of Situations)
    24. maj – 30. juni 2007

    Pilaiporn Pethrith: Untitled, 2006, print på lærred, 120 x 80 cm.

  • MAP Projects