Interior | Group Show
Hales Gallery is delighted to present Interior, a group show by six female artists. The exhibition focuses on the use of the enclosed, decorated space as a metaphor for a deeper probing of the thought process or an exploration of materiality.
Each artist has approached this in a unique and personal way through a range of media; stop motion animation, painting, diagrammatic drawing and sculpture.
Beth Campbell was born in Illinois and now lives and works in New York. Following Room, a recently completed site-specific installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art, consists of a series of multiples of a reading room in a grid of mirrored pairs. For this exhibition, Campbell shows several flow diagram drawings entitled My potential future based on present circumstances and a large related mobile piece It’s largely unresolved. Each work explores Campbell’s internalised thought processes and anxieties as a mental interior with the drawings acting rather like the mycelin of a fungus which occasionally throw up fruiting bodies in the form of sculptural manifestations.
Canadian born Laura Letinsky is well known in her adopted home city of Chicago for her seemingly accidental ‘table top’ photographs of the remains of meals and domestic activity. Letinsky’s elegant use of light and colour is reminiscent of the Golden Age Dutch and Flemish still life painting. The subject matter is contemporary and the metaphorical content is enigmatic.
Laura Oldfield Ford lives and works in London. Her work consists of regularly published ‘Zines’ under the title of Savage Messiah which are formed from her drawings and texts. Also part of Oldfield-Ford’s oeuvre are large-scale paintings in which she is the protagonist in a developing narrative based around her experiences of London’s East End subcultures. Oldfield-Ford presents a painting which explores the dereliction of the soon to be transformed site for the 2012 Olympic Games. The area, with signs of recently abandoned domesticity such as sofas and TVs acts as a commentary on past interior spaces.
Courtney Smith began making a variety of sculpture with defunct wooden furniture whilst living in Brazil. Now residing in Williamsburg, New York, she continues to reconfigure existing furniture and reinvent practical objects with paradoxical purposes. On this occasion she shows a screen made with wooden bricks, which in turn have been made by Smith from an elaborate and highly decorative piece of lacquered oriental furniture.
Jessica Stockholder is known for her assemblages of everyday objects. Born in Seattle and now living and working in New Haven, Connecticut, her work references cubist interior paintings from the early 20th century. Stockholder uses familiar household items in her pieces in ways that disorientate the viewer’s ordinary relationship with them. Untitled 1998 is made up of metallic flooring and mosaic tiles commonly found in washrooms, a light and other plastic household items.
Amy Yoes who was born in Chicago and now lives and works in New York, uses animated film to create odd roomscapes that metamorphose in to strange spaces that are reminiscent of the amazing
Chantal Joffe
Brian Griffiths
Vilma Gold is pleased to present a new exhibition of work by Brian Griffiths.
Brian Griffiths views art as a means of escape, a repeated and heroic attempt to leave the here and now and be transported to other places, other times and by extension, other psychological states. Through past works we have been asked to journey into space (via cardboard super computers), to travel to mysterious lands (via a galleon made from wooden furniture) and promised all kinds of imaginary excesses with his varied material transitions.
In a new series of sculptures ‘Another End’ presents a drama where a resigned ‘lostness’ and ‘used up-ness’ is rampant. It infers a kind of relentlessness, a laughable existential angst butted against the optimism of a new improved conclusion. The sculptures appear as distinctive players: A bear head with its roughly patched concrete surface and painterly graphic face has an air of an old school entertainer, a wooden box with its numerous openings and gleaming tan brogue shoes is enigmatically quiet, an over-plated concertinaed metal car lump is a somewhat comical showy beast. They all desperately want to be more, to be back performing in another place – instead they sit, wait and put on a brave face. The over zealous lick of brightly coloured paint on the banger car, the daft smile of the bear, the over polished wooden surface is a bravado that is disturbingly fragile.
In Griffiths’ work traditional genres of sculpture are reworked and rethought predominately through the assisted readymade or the fabricated found object. The stone monument, the wooden carving and metal sculpture are all revisited with disarming directness and ingenuity. For Griffiths, conceptual rigor is bound up with processes of making, so everyday materials and objects are selected for their potential to transform and to create rich, evocative experiences. In part Griffiths uses sculpture to inquire into ideas of the flawed and the failed. Employing complex sculptural languages and diverse references Griffiths skillfully confuses categories of the found and the made, the everyday and the fantastical, the humorous and the melancholic. The deliberate bluntness of the work propels the viewer immediately into a landscape where the supposedly familiar is scrutinised. Griffiths transforms everyday objects and base materials into remarkable encounters that question our experience of the contemporary world. Aspirational, and yet tragically flawed, Griffiths’ works are charged with humour, discontent and sadness.
Brian Griffiths was born in Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1968, and lives and works in London. Last year Griffiths produced a major installation for The Furnace Commission at A Foundation, Liverpool. He has exhibited widely including important solo exhibitions at Arnolfini, Bristol (2007), Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paolo (2005), Camden Arts Centre, London (2004) and The Breeder, Athens (2004). Later this year Griffiths is exhibiting at Lustwarande 08 – Wanderland at the Fundament Foundation, Tilburg and is also taking part in a series of commissions at the Royal Academy.
A Kassen & Fleron
A Kassen & Fleron
It is a pleasure to invite you to the opening of two solo shows in the gallery on Friday June 13th from 6-9 pm. The artist group A Kassen exhibits in the main space and Thomas Fleron’s show ”Det fede Læskur” is in the project space. Exhibition period is June 14th – July 19th.
A Kassen work with performativ installation and sculpture. Actions, discretely part of the exhibition space, are characteristc of A Kassen’s works. The actions may even be so discrete, they don’t get noticed. But if they do get noticed, they contain strong elements of humor and surprise. Once in a while, A Kassen perform the actions themselves, but mostly they are performed by supernumeraries or even by monstrous machines, constructed by A Kassen.
A Kassen’s works refer to the objectless, conceptual art of the 60s, to performances and pop art. They examine and experiment with the borders between art and non-art, as well as self invented systems that change the functions of things within a given space. The works are absurd, subtle and often very elegant due to their seamless adaption to their context. In this sense, they form a critique of the institution and draw attention to how we act and navigate in a certain context.
The exhibition consists of a large interventive and performative work, which shall not be revealed here. A Kassen also present their new artist book, ”Damaged by Water, Financed by Insurance”.
A Kassen are Christian Bretton-Meyer (b. 1976), Morten Steen Hebsgaard (b. 1977), Søren Petersen (b. 1977) and Tommy Petersen (b. 1975). They graduated last year from the Royal Danish Art Academy and have earlier studied at Städelschule, Frankfurt. A Kassen have been selected for LISTE 08’s official performance program and have recently exhibited at Vega Basement (Copenhagen), at Brøndsalen (Frederiksberg) and Gammelgaard (Herlev, DK). They will exhibit at Overgaden (Copenhagen) in August, be part of the ”U-Turn Quadrennial” and Grafikernes Hus (both Copenhagen) in September, Kunsthallen Brandts (Odense) in October and will show solo at Brænderigården (Viborg) in the beginning of 2009.
The exhibition is supported by The Danish Art Council.
Thomas Flerion’s show ”Det fede Læskur” presents objects, drawings and a cross stitched curtain with the text ”player 8000c”. His elegant and tactile objects are reminiscences of ritual symbols from tribal ceremonies, e.g. the barked cherry tree stick with inlaid sealskin which hangs on the wall from a thread. The works are both hermetically closed and interreferential, and yet they question historical and political issues such as why a language is forgotten, a population becomes extinct, a ritual is dropped. These questions are incorporated in a mixture of acquired knowledge and personal experience.
A modern penis case, constructed as a sheath of leather with one meter long fringes and an aluminum warship on top, is hanging on the wall. Poetic inscriptions on the ship function as a contrast to the humorous sheath and the references to boys’ toys, masculine trial of strength, and war feverish display of power. The works’ decadent look and choice of material comment on cultural and historical power relations.
Thomas Fleron (b. 1972) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Art in 2000.
Torben Eskerod
"TELL TCHAIKOVSKY THE NEWS" / CURATED BY TORBJØRN RØDLAND
“TELL TCHAIKOVSKY THE NEWS”
OLAF BREUNING, ROE ETHRIDGE, UWE HENNEKEN, MONICA MAJOLI, LUCY MCKENZIE & RICKY SWALLOW / CURATED BY TORBJØRN RØDLAND
Here is a question for Chuck Berry: Why tell Tchaikovsky the news? If you’re a black American in the 1950s and your revolution is vulgarity, why bother with Beethoven; why even address Tchaikovsky?
”Leopards break into the temple,” Kafka wrote, ”and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance and it becomes a part of the ceremony.”
Since Kafka wrote this parable, contemporary art has been both criticized and celebrated for having the characteristics of a leopard show. The celebration is an integrated part of our Romantic heritage. After Romanticism, who cares for the endless repetition of ceremonies? Bring on the events; the wildcat-burglary! Rock cemented the romantic revolution for all social classes. Testifying to the scope of his ambitions, Chuck Berry needed to tell the world that he was kicking Tchaikovsky’s pitcher.
Some artists who grew up with rock as a dominating cultural force, now see history as a mysterious hall of knocked-over pitchers or half-forgotten truths. “Tell Tchaikovsky the News” is relating everyday affective life to themes or artistic techniques from the past, while searching for a more nuanced and correct understanding of its post-rock borrowings and primitivisms.
– In sculpture, installation, video and photography, Olaf Breuning [b. 1970 in Schaffhausen, lives in New York] subverts the idea of true progress from archaic to contemporary culture.
– Roe Ethridge [b. 1969 in Miami, lives in New York] reconsiders archetypes of 20th century American photography. But motifs like The Moon are as old as the human imagination.
– The kooky figures of Uwe Henneken [b. 1974 in Paderborn, lives in Berlin] are 19th century dreamers, reanimated by a rock mentality. If they in fact represent the “Vanguards Of The Elite [V.O.T.E.]”, you might want to ask where we’re heading.
– In the watercolours of Monica Majoli [b. 1963 in Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles], sadomasochistic hardness and gouache softness balance each other out beautifully.
– Majoli’s work is installed over a hand-painted wall-piece by Lucy McKenzie [b. 1977 in Glasgow, lives in Brussels], who looks to trompe l’oeil wood paneling and Art Nouveau for a New Art. An unsuspected love for the ex-mainstream is a sign of true individuality.
– Ricky Swallow [b. 1974 in Melbourne, lives in Los Angeles] has crafted a paradoxical bronze couple: Donatello’s undernourished Mary Magdalene side by side with California’s unrestrained ’wolfking’ John Phillips – the former leader of The Mamas & The Papas.
-Torbjørn Rødland
