With the exhibition DAISY DIAMOND, Anna Sørensen once again fills the walls of Gallery Tom Christoffersen. In her new paintings, the artist continues her wrestle with the abstract colouristic mode which has resulted in a series of dynamic, intense and inviting paintings.

Colours and forms again play the leading roles on the big canvases, while there is an increased concentration in the still more complex compositions. The paintings are constructed in a democratic order with encounter as the central focus – the meeting between lines, forms and colours. Space is suspended and everything is drawn forward in balanced, lyrical compositions, where you seem to find yourself in either an aerial view or with the detail close up in a sort of mechanical structure. The striking colour range in the paintings creates an enchanting harmony, in which dark and heavy 70s’ tones are safely mixed with fluorescent 80s’ neon.

Anna Sørensen’s paintings are like frozen moments, where a controlled chaos of organic and geometric forms are held together by the square shape of the canvas. If you were to shake them, one could imagine the painting’s elements being pushed around between one another in order to melt into a new whole and fall into a new shape. Anna Sørensen keeps her art in play and creates paintings in a serial process – every new painting is created by the pillars of a visual vocabulary that seems to come from a kaleidoscope run wild.

Anna Sørensen (born 1968) graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1996 and has been at Gallery Tom Christensen since 2002. DAISY DIAMOND is her fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. Anna Sørensen has participated in several group exhibitions and last year also had the solo exhibition COLOUR GROOVE at Holstebro Kunstmuseum. She lives and works in Copenhagen.

Tom Christoffersen

New shitt from one of the boys:::
John Copeland

From XL to xs

There’s no spectacular movie scenery in Marc Räder’s colour landscape photographs of California. The Berlin-based photographer has chosen views which range from the natural (a lush forest) to the man-made (a metal bridge), from the urban (a parking lot) to the suburban (a sprawling housing development). Yet whatever the view, each one is marked by tunnel vision. Far from manipulating the images, Räder uses a large-scale architectural camera, which creates a zone in each photograph where the objects and the subjects remain in focus, regardless of their actual position in the landscape. Räder’s photographs are both sharp and blurry, like the popular studio portraits where the face is encircled by a hazy halo. But instead of being transported to a nostalgic familiar past, the viewer becomes a kind of Gulliver, peering through a keyhole at the land of Lilliput. Each California landscape, although resolutely real, looks like an architectural model, if not a child’s toy.

Most landscape photography offers a view from afar, which positions the viewer without giving him a sense of the size of his own body. Yet Räder’s landscape photographs – in and out of focus – play more explicitly with notions of human scale in a way that recalls the effects of sculpture and installation on the viewer’s perceptions of size and self. We measure ourselves against Räder’s views of California and end up experiencing them as miniature, and ourselves as gigantic. Is that little car real? Are those tree-tops bits of sponge? Are those toy people? The closer we come to look – the more intensely we examine each photograph – the more real the scenes become. Indeed, the car, the trees and the people turn out to be as real as our gazing selves. Nothing has been manipulated. In that moment of close inspection, the figures frozen in the photograph briefly, magically come to life as the inhabitants of Lilliput, living somewhere in California.

That moment – when the gaze alone can animate the inanimate – recalls the uncanny experience of the automaton. Think of the film Blade Runner (1982), when Deckard inspects the replicant Pris dressed up as a life-size doll, only to have her suddenly spring into action. While Räder’s figurines never quite come to life – and never attack – their diminuitive size transforms every viewer into a giant who could never inhabit their world without causing mass destruction. Gulliver’s feet are large enough to crush Lilliput with but one step. While anthropocentric, Räder’s landscapes offer a sense of containment and exclusion. The outside comes to look like a mini-interior; even the beach has the feel of a dollhouse which might be packed up and carried to a new location. While we might fit these landscapes into our hands, we could never inhabit them, except with our gaze.

Of course, that’s the goal of all photography: to transform life into endless images which can be experienced only by the gaze. Räder’s colour landscape photographs confront us with the legacy of the medium: We look at the world as giants who can never quite fit into the picture.

Galerie MøllerWitt

New Stuff from Sydhavn & Vesterport:::

This is the first video installment from rapper and graphic artist Bisc1’s multimedia album The Strange Love Project. Bisc, a native of Massachusetts by way of Connecticut, moved to NYC 10 years ago and quickly made a name for himself in music and graffiti circles. For The Strange Love Project, Bisc joined forces with twenty visual artists and ten producers to reinterpret his 2008 album When Electric Night Falls. The video was shot, directed, and produced by Carl Weston, who you may be familiar with. Weston has been a producer of graffiti videos for over two decades and is the co-founder of Video Graf Productions. In this video, Weston follows Bisc, equipped with an arsenal of supplies, as he leaves lasting impressions on the dark abandoned streets and alleyways of lower Manhattan.

Carl Weston Video

Shepard Fairey x Glen E Friedman x Bad Brains

Bad Brains are one of my favorite punk/hardcore groups of all time. If you don’t have their self titled debut, “Rock For Light”, “I Agaist I”, or “Quickness”, they are all essential. I first heard Bad Brains at the beginning of 1984 when my friend lent me the brilliantly curated and titled Alternative Tentacles compilation “Let Then Eat Jellybeans”(A Reagan dessert favorite update to the Marie Antoinette slogan “Let them eat cake”). The Bad Brains song “Pay to Cum” from their first album was on the comp along with songs by Black Flag, The Dead Kennedys, The Circle Jerks, Flipper, etc.. I then went out to find full length records by all those bands. I soon discovered Minor Threat as well, and learned that Bad Brains had influenced their vocalist Ian MacKaye and Black flag vocalist Henry Rollins who were from Washington DC where Bad Brains had started as well. The Bad Brains were also a huge influence for the Beastie Boys. This collaboration ties into almost all of the bands I mentioned because they were almost all iconically shot at various times by photographer Glen E. Friedman. Glen shot a lot of great photos of Bad Brains and a few different shots were spliced together as the reference for this poster illustration. If you don’t know Glen’s work, and you should… go to burningflags.com. This poster is signed by Glen, me, and all the original members of Bad Brains. Keep that PMA.
-Shepard

Bad Brains Collaboration Print
Shepard Fairey x Glen E Friedman x Bad Brains
24 x 18, 3 Color Screen Print
Edition of 425
Signed by Shepard, Glen E Friedman, and all the original members of Bad Brains
$120

ON SALE 3/26/09

Obey

Clare Rojas:
San Francisco painter, singer, and filmmaker Clare E.Rojas is not a folk artist. In Clare Rojas’ works, women, men, nature and animals are strong and weak caring and connected to one another in their struggle to find harmony and balance. She celebrates women for their traditional and most basic differences and strengths. While the characters are often imbued with feelings of loss and nostalgia, one gets the sense that they will not back down. They will ultimately beat their predators at their own game.

Rojas’s appropriation of folk imagery addresses contemporary female social concerns “The feeling of loss in my work, is my feeling of loss of hope. The struggle to find the good and the beautiful and represent it is my challenge. Understanding the ugliness that finds its way into our culture is crucial.” Rojas’s beautiful uses of allegory and of an imagined cultural landscape in her paintings act to subvert our current accepted perceptions of women. It allows the spectator an engagement with an alternate evocative world that is both funny and sad and that points to the complexities of being a resilient female in the twenty-first century. Rojas often depicts women alone, standing amid a flattened forest landscape, but this is not to suggest that they are lonely. No, Rojas’s women exist in their own reality, feeling peaceful, protected, and quiet.

Selected exhibitions include a group exhibition with the Luggage Store, San Francisco in 2003 for which she won a Louis Comfort Tiffany award. In 2004 Rojas had a solo show at the San Francisco Art Institute and at the Belkin Satellite Gallery in Vancouver. Her work was included in the travelling exhibition, Beautiful Losers. She has exhibited at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and was most recently a featured artist at the Prospect.1 New Orleans Biennial.

*Partial Text Credit to : Dietch Projects, and Katie Geha Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Andrew Jeffrey Wright:
Andrew Jeffrey Wright is a current and founding member of Philadelphia’s Space 1026 art commune. He has a BFA in Animation. The collaborative animation “the manipulators”, which he made with Clare E. Rojas, has won the top prize for animation at the New York Underground Film Festival and the New York Comedy Film Festival. Wright’s highly limited edition handmade books have gained an international following. His works include painting, animation, drawing, collage, photography, sculpture, video, installation, screen printing and performance. He has shown at Lizabeth Oliveria(LA), New Image Art(LA), Spector(Philadelphia), The Luggage Store(San Francisco), Lump(Raliegh), The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts(Philadelphia), ICA(Philadelphia), Giant Robot NY(NYC) The Corcoran(DC) and Foundation Cartier(Paris). He has shown with Barry McGee, Paper Rad, Leif Goldberg, Clare E. Rojas, Marcel Dzama and Michael Dumontier.

New Image Art Gallery

New book, 25 years later…

Graffiti Galleriet

Fuse Gallery NYC

“Wart Exhibit,” a solo exhibition by Houston-based artist Mark Flood, will include mixed media drawings, paintings, sculpture and installation.

Flood has been making and showing artwork for 30 years and has worn many different hats along the way: punk rocker, corporate lackey, author, identity illusionist. His work introduces the idea of a defeatist hermeticism: total, and yet not reassuring. A search-and-deface tactic serves the artist’s needs; collected Hurricane Ike debris, glossy celebrity posters, road signs and bolts of chintzy lace are transformed to cut a swath through the usual. This would seem to be the point of artwork at large.

But, in Mark’s case, the swath is not born from the withdrawn nobility of stereotypical studio practice. Instead the self-described “multi cellular invertebrate recently discovered under the slimy rock of obscurity” exists squat in the mix, if only to adjust it. Even beauty is re-mapped to become, as Flood says, “the sort that bypasses art bureaucrats, would-be authoritarians and the gut-shielding, gate-keeping functions of the human mind.” The surface of a text panel or lace painting still holds all the irregularities and shiny moments prone to seduction: if one is seduced by important words misspelled, does it still count? In the artist’s words, “Using the finest retail display technology, Wart Exhibit assembles a sampling of these problematic exercises into a walk-thru experience for casual viewing.” This is the first solo exhibition by Mark Flood in Berlin.

“Like A Turkey Thru Corn” is Bradley’s third solo exhibition at Peres Projects and his first at the new Culver City gallery location in Los Angeles.

Until recently Bradley has been known primarily for his minimal, rectilinear “figures” composed of monochrome panels. The paintings presented here, however, continue the artist’s beloved and maligned new Schmagoo series, first presented in New York last fall. A somewhat ridiculous word, “Schmagoo” originates from the Beat-era street slang for heroin. It is this wry semiotic pairing that compels the artist to take a primitive approach:

“The word stuck with me, and I began to think of “Schmagoo” as short hand for some sort of Cosmic Substance… Primordial Muck. The stuff that gave birth to everything∑I have been thinking of Painting as a metaphor for the original creative act.” (JB, 2008)

Bradley drafts many versions of each gesture before hitting the finished note on raw canvas, as if to imply that automatic writing can be made repetitive (picture a grade school notebook cover) and, as such, eventually reveals potent mutations: slang for heroine (Super Schmagoo), a faceless mouth, the Jesus fish who swims downstream. Perhaps as Jungian children, we’ve been inbred by appropriation and pop overexposure. Bradley titles the show after late Houston blues legend Lightnin’ Hopkins’ 1959 tune of a similar name. Hopkins sings about fleeing through the corn fields like a turkey in pajamas: “Just had to get away from there!” Bradley’s work shares this kind of endearing resolution of a fix.

Peres Projects