Team is pleased to present a group exhibition organized by Miriam Katzeff. Forced Exposure will run from the 1st of July through the 30th of July 2010. The exhibition will include paintings, video and sculptures by Lutz Bacher, Tom Burr, Ross Knight, and Bjarne Melgaard. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor.
This exhibition focuses on works of art that position the viewer as an interloper in the gallery. As technology encourages people to expose themselves to unknown audiences online, the idea of privacy has relaxed to reflect these developments. The works on view test whether this lack of boundaries extends into the physical world. While the artists in the exhibition do not have a strictly confessional style, the works force an immediate and awkward intimacy onto the viewer.
For over a decade, Lutz Bacher has produced an ongoing body of work entitled Do You Love Me? Interviewing curators, friends, and dealers about her life and her work, Bacher asks the questions but never appears on film. Using whatever technology was available, the seemingly casual interviews reveal more about the person answering the questions than the evasive artist. It is easy to imagine how Bacher’s relationship with the subjects must change as a result of uncomfortable revelations.
Using minimal forms and personal dedications, Tom Burr’s sculptures recreate private architectures as public stages. Through his transformation of domestic objects, Burr produces a sense of access to interrupted encounters. Black Wall Skirt simultaneously alludes to conceptual, physical and psychological spaces. The forms are loaded with possibilities of the fulfillment and failures of concealed desires.
Ross Knight’s formalist sculptures combine utilitarian materials with corporeal references to suggest secret rituals that are deliberately unresolved. In Void Fill, a cardboard box that is the height and width of an average man is punctured by a plastic bag filled with air. While Knight operates on his works with a reductive precision, the sculptures aspire to a precarious quality as though they were hastily abandoned in the gallery.
In Bjarne Melgaard’s most recent paintings, old pornographic magazines are defaced with crudely executed figures and scrawled texts from a continuous novel that relies on the violent mythology surrounding the artist. Like the rest of Melgaard’s work, the fragmented and diaristic qualities of the text lures the viewer into the artist’s constructed personas and manipulates the relationship between fact and fiction.
Month: June 2010
Brush Stokes //
Freeze //
Steve Roden
American artist Steve Roden presents his brand new work blinking lights at night made for the exhibition space Phonebox at the artist-run gallery IMO. Phonebox is located in a phone cabin, which now serves as an intimate exhibition space with room for only one person at a time. Here the public is invited to experience the sound work blinking lights at night June 26 – July 10.
Blinking lights at night by Steve Roden takes as its theme a view over Kobe, Japan, from a balcony which the artist has been visiting for almost 20 years. The rythm of blinking lights in the urban nightscape is transformed into a kind of visual and spatial score for a composition. The sound piece takes as its starting point small ‘beep’ sounds made by Roden while contemplating the «silent music» of the lights. The new work made especially for Phonebox is accompanied by a text written by the artist:
…because i have always experienced the view alone and in relative darkness, i began to think about how this outside visual experience at night might be able to converse with an inside audible experience in a small dark private space. Listening to my voice, i replicated each of the light rhythms on an old glockenspiel, and layered the recordings so that the relationship of the notes would resemble that of the field of blinking lights. I decided to present it as a 7” record because such an object needs to be activated by a visitor, as if one were opening a door to step inside, and closing it upon returning to the outside…
The work of Steve Roden, based in Los Angeles, spans various media. Roden’s work integrates various forms of specific notation (words, musical scores, maps, etc.) translated through invented systems into scores which in turn inspire the production of painting, drawing, sculpture, and sound composition. The scores are dictated by rigid parameters and rules though also full of cracks and holes that give way to intuitive decisions and left turns. The inspirational source material becomes a kind of formal skeleton that the abstract finished works are built upon.
Roden has among others exhibited at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and performed and played at Serpentine Gallery, London, SFMOMA, San Francisco and The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Steve Roden’s work is the eleventh in a series of 12 sound-based works presented in Phonebox at IMO in the first half of 2010. The series is titled Sounds Up Close #1-12 and is curated by Kristoffer Akselbo and Rune Søchting. It is the intention of the series to present a number of important artists who work with sound as medium. The series reflects a number of different approaches to sound. Over a period of six months a total of twelve pieces will be presented each for a fortnight. The final artists in Phonebox is the Japanese artist Miki Yui (JP).
Phonebox has earlier served as a phone cabin for the employees at Carlsberg. During the next six months the space, which is acoustically isolated, will function as a unique frame for display and reception of sound-based works. Moreover, the space itself will play an important role in the conceptions of many of the presented works.
Finasfrisen og andre arbejder //
JEFFREY SAUGER // Where Furrows Run Deep
The existence of yet another population of our nation’s landscape has
begun to fade. Institutional racism, foreclosures, and bankruptcy have shattered
American black farmers’ rights to the land they have occupied for generations.
Today, African Americans own only roughly 1 percent of all farmland in the
United States and few have taken notice.
As recognition of this population continues to grow faint, the Jack Hanley
Gallery presents “Where Furrows Run Deep,” a photographic documentary by
Jeffrey Sauger. Sauger’s collection of images shot on black and white film over
several years bares witness to a disappearance. Neither overly sentimental nor
strictly practical, “Where Furrows Run Deep” speaks with an emotional utility.
The aesthetic achievement of Sauger’s compositions function to further the
testimony and visibility of the vanishing American black farmer; they are a call to action.
Jeffrey Sauger began the project as a graduate student in Ohio in 1999. He
continued the project through grants and sponsorship from Blue Earth Alliance.
Sauger received his master’s degree from Ohio University’s School of Visual
Communication, and is a professional photojournalist whose work has appeared
in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Time, The Detroit News, Detroit
Free Press and The Washington Post. In 2000, Sauger was named Michigan
photographer of the Year by Michigan Press Photographers Association.
“Relationships”
Gallery Christoffer Egelund is proud to present this summer’s group exhibition “Relationships”, showing works by artists: Miss Van (FR), Victor Castillo (CL), Michael Swaney (CA) and Tim Biskup (US). The exhibition displays drawing, oil painting, collage, video, sculpture, and mixed media wall objects. The show is curated by Anthon Maxus Christophersen (DK) thanks to the kind collaboraton with Iguapop Gallery, Barcelona.
The curator of the exhibition, Anthon Maxus Christophersen (b. 1975), has for several years played an active part in Barcelona’s artistic underground environment. During the development of the documentary “Vaqueros De Barcelona”; an urban cowboy movie featuring Barcelona’s ‘outlaws’ – the independent street artists – Anthon came in contact with the artists Miss Van (b. 1973), Victor Castillo (b. 1973), Mike Swaney (b. 1978) and Tim Biskup (b. 1967). Common to them all is that they have left their roots, and found ‘home’ and kindred spirits in Barcelona’s creative underground milieu. The artists participating in the show, except from Mike Swaney, are exhibiting for the first time in Denmark. Common to the artists is that they have a personal relation to the untamed and wild characters and relationships depicted in their artworks. The four artists have, without losing their edge, gained international recognition and respect within the established a rt world testified by their representation in international art collections, galleries and museums around the world.
Miss Van is a legend in street art. She was 18 years old when she started painting trains with the big boys in Toulouse in the early 1990’es and she is known to be the first female street artist and the first to use brushes when painting in the streets. Her recognizable ‘Slutty Girls’ or dolls have since 1993 been a recurring motif in her art. Since her art has moved into the gallery space and she started exploring new media such as paper and cloth, the depiction of her girls have gradually become more refined and subtle, to which the new works in the exhibition is a good example. Miss Van has exhibited in Berlin, Paris, Stockholm, LA and New York.
In Victor Castillo’s oil paintings evil childhood games unfold in grotesque theatrical tableaus that seem oddly contemporary yet oldfashioned at the same time. The characters are bourgeois children from the 1800s in Sunday clothes and school uniforms performing malicious child’s play, wearing grinning grotesques masks with black hollow eyes and long red sausage noses. Castillo’s works draw reference to comic and satire, as well as to Goya and Velasquez. Victor Castillo has exhibited widely internationally, for instance in Santiago, Hamburg, Beijing and he will presents new works in this exhibition.
In Mike Swaney’s collages, childishly executed human figures are drawn, cut out, and pasted into surreal dollhouse setting, awkwardly performing everyday activities as if touched by black magic. In his sculptures are references to voodoo; here you will find large pins, dolls and strange hybrids of objects, animals and humans. The performative element stems from a childhood interest in having toys ‘come alive’, and it is a continuous part of Swaney’s body of work, that also includes performances. Mike Swaneys works have been exhibited widely internationally, including in Hamburg, New York and Tokyo. The exhibition displays new works.
Tim Biskup’s drawings and paintings depict erotically posing nude women caught in moments of ecstasy. The women’s euphoria is emphasized by the backgrounds, where time and space are dissolved in abstract graphic spaces. The backgrounds refer to various graphical eras such as Cubism and Art Deco. Biskup has long been recognized for his complex color and design theories and he has a background in illustration, animation and graphic design, which is reflected in his polished and graphic style that, however, always contains conceptual undertones. Tim Biskup is represented widely in galleries and museums and has exhibited in New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and Melbourne among other places.
Gallery Christoffer Egelund
“BOY” by SSION
Javier Peres is very pleased to present “BOY”, the first solo exhibition by Cody Critcheloe – SSION (B. Kentucky USA. Lives and work in Kansas City, MO) in Germany. “BOY” brings together nine separately shot but jointly conceived music videos for SSION’s 2007 record Fool’s Gold.
First things first! It’s SSION, pronounced “shun,” as in mission, fission, ambition-all apt words to describe the gesamtkunstwerk that is Cody Critcheloe and the queer punk/performance/art band he invented ten years back as a high school student in Lewisport, Kentucky. In the time since then, SSION has released 4 full-length records, toured extensively through the United States, and enjoyed cult status among fans and music writers who have lauded Critcheloe as everything from Out magazine’s Hottest Artist of the Year to “Prince’s love child” to the “one true master” of “high-concept sleaze pop.” Critcheloe’s songs are catchy, not abstract, and his visuals and live shows are crafted to appeal to more than an art-going crowd. SSION could easily cross over to become a pop phenomenon-a potentiality (or prophecy) which, in a stroke of self-reflexive genius, Critcheloe has already written into the narrative arc of his work to date. The story of SSION is a raucous, louched up, camp parody of Critcheloe’s own life, in which a small-town punk kid hooked on doughnuts and pizza follows his dreams with razor focus to emerge as a svelte, smoky-eyed pop star embraced by adoring crowds. And here, it seems, is the catch. While the annals of art and film give us plenty of examples to draw on for theorizing the artist’s alter ego, the image-obsessed dandy, the high-camp auteur, and the concept band, the discourse is less prescribed for an artist and musician who straddles all of these genres while aspiring to create work that actually is pop in the broadest and most populist sense of the word.
SSION’s first feature-length film, BOY, affords a fresh opportunity to consider the band’s work in the context of popular media and within the discourses of contemporary art. To situate the work this way is to necessarily highlight a degree of fluidity, criticality and complexity in the work that far exceeds the typical coming-of-age movie or arena concert experience.
Copenhagen Graffiti (Walls)
