Month: November 2007

Faris McReynolds


Goff + Rosenthal Berlin is pleased to present Plastic Palace, a series of new paintings by Los
Angeles-based artist Faris McReynolds.
Painting from film stills extracted from sources of popular culture, McReynolds explores how an
image can be broken down through multiple layers of appropriation, from film to video to digital
media to paint. Depicting group activities such as party scenes, sun bathing and show-boat
performances, McReynolds magnifies the contrast between the immediacy of spectacle and the
slow reveal of an event’s details. His imagery lingers in the in-between depicting moments in
transition. Relishing this space between cause and effect, McReynolds bestows the mundane
activities of a self-congratulating American culture with a sense of seduction, violence, intrigue
and suspense.
Ranging from an expressionist palette-knife impasto to delicate watercolor to bold illustration,
McReynolds’ brushwork reflects a historically diverse range of influences including Warhol,
Bacon, the Impressionists and the 1980’s work of Richard Prince. Using a loose narrative style
and a seamless melding of assorted techniques, McReynolds immortalizes the minute and
fleeting in high saturation and bold contrast of color.
McReynolds states that his work, “comes from the desire to find a balance between something
that is staged and intuitive, original and reproduced, familiar and unexpected, digital and analog,
comic and tragic…the work explores the grey area between a document and the imagination of
a time and place. I’m drawn to moments that exist between genesis and resolve. Something so
fleeting and anonymous it’s impossible to see without the aid of technology”.
Faris McReynolds received his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Pasadena, California,
in 2000. He has exhibited world-wide including a solo exhibition this year at Tim van Laere
Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium. In 2006, McReynolds had solo exhibitions at Roberts & Tilton in
Los Angeles, Gallery Min Min in Tokyo and Perugi Arte Contemporea in Padua, Italy.
Additionally, McReynolds’ work has been featured in Details, Art Papers, Flash Art Magazine,
Tema Celeste and Art Week. McReynolds will have a solo exhibition at Goff + Rosenthal, New
York in March of 2008.
Goff and Rosenthal

Trevor Appleson


Hales Gallery is pleased to present Los Loss, a solo show of Mexican still-life photographs by the South African artist Trevor Appleson.
 
Appleson’s formal photographs are created outside; a large black screen is mounted on legs with a metal frame to become the backdrop for the work. Taken at either dawn or dusk when the light is at its best, the screen is used to reduce the amount of extraneous visual information, presenting the viewer with a stark point of focus.
 
Appleson’s past projects have centred on a wide range of subjects and venues. His Cape Town beach community series made between 2000-2004 featured the forgotten and lawless; Tel Aviv works of 2005-2006 presented contrasting venues of a Kibbutz and the Israeli army. Last year (2006) Appleson began to break away from the portrait format and produced a series of still lifes in Rome, continuing this approach in Mexico City and its surrounding villages this year (2007).
 
Los Loss features staged and co-incidental compositions, involving the locals of Mexico in the creation of the works. The bright colours and exotic people on the tourist trail left their mark on Appleson but he challenges the obvious and digs beneath the surface of Mexico City and its surroundings. Mexican Wrestlers destroy traditional candy filled Piñatas, resulting in broken and burned cartoon-ish forms; a group of young boxers with their clumsy gloved hands attempt to break eggs into a bowl – egg mixture on the dusty desert – this is the focus and subject matter for his work.
 
Pictures that at first sight seem to be representations of the rural idle, on closer inspection reveal graves and brutish industrial farming. An image of a pig, its leg tethered to a post initially seems to be in a tranquil repose until it becomes clear on closer inspection the pig has been slaughtered and left in the dust.
 
What ties all of these apparently classical still lifes together is Appleson’s ability to avoid the obvious and his enthusiasm for developing a whole new way of involving the locals in the creation of the works.

Hales Gallery

ANE GRAFF: "FALL INTO MATTER"


ANE GRAFF: “FALL INTO MATTER”
15.11.-14.12.2007 / PREVIEW: 15.11.2007 / 19.00-21.00 /
 
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STANDARD (OSLO) is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Ane Graff. “Fall Into Matter” sees Graff widening her range of medias, adding both sculptures and photographic works to her signature-styled pencil drawings. Despite their formal differences these works share a clear interest in the still life as a genre and the scientific principle of verification.
 
“The world is everything that is the case.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)
 
At the heart of “Fall Into Matter” is the poetics of scientific research. Having previously taken an interest in the 17th century ‘Wunderkammer’ – investigating the space between the factual and the fictional ­– Graff’s new drawings and photographic works portray the prosaic procedures of scientific research. Entirely derived from existent media – mainly gathered from university web sites – her three meticulously executed drawings present us with basic acts of measuring, dissecting and documenting. Nowhere can the scientists or students involved be seen. Rather, Graff’s drawings concentrate on the instruments applied and the traces of the various procedures. These are the matters of fact. However, these documentary photographs – now turned drawings – appear as more than mere rational conclusions. Present is also a triumphant belief in observational evidence, and a commitment to a positivism doubtlessly stating that the world and its phenomenons can be understood through collection, observation and verification.
 
“One by one objects are defined—It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf”. The description of transformation by the American writer William Carlos Williams, in the poem “Spring And All” (1923), also serves a description of coming into knowing. The belief in an essence – as with Wittgenstein’s belief in observational verification and that all knowledge should be codifiable in a single standard language of science – is in the case of William Carlos Williams merged with a constant stripping-down of language. In Graff’s photographic series Western Kingbird Juvenal Wing 1-6 an equal essence and economy of language is trusted. Appropriated from an American laboratory of ornithology these six photographs show hands carefully folding out the various feathers of the wings of a Western Kingbird. As with the poem of Carlos Williams this simple statement of what nature is, the result is equally rational and poetic.
 
Located in the opposite corner of the exhibition space is a group of sculptures. Mounted on the wall are two wooden shelves where Graff has arranged formations of slate. Partly freestanding, partly leaning up against the wall these formations – of this fine-grained and layered rock – appear as models of a mountain landscape. Again and again the artist has configured similar constructions in her studio, applying them as models for her drawings. With this exhibition they take place among the other works, while still appearing uncertain of themselves as models, as stage props, or as autonomous sculptural works.
 
This is Ane Graff’s second solo exhibition at STANDARD (OSLO). Since graduating from The National Academy of Fine Arts in Bergen in 2004 her works have been included in such exhibitions as “The White Works”, Bergen Kunsthall; “New Realism”, Oslo Fine Art’s Society; and “The Elementary Particles (Paperback Edition)”, STANDARD (OSLO). Ane Graff lives and works in Oslo.

Standard Oslo