Allegra Ravizza

Saskia Leek
Thick Air Method
May 10-31, 2008

The Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco is pleased to present a solo exhibition by New Zealand-based painter Saskia Leek.
Saskia Leek began exhibiting her paintings in the early 1990s, her subject matter being drawn from real and imagined memories of growing up in Christchurch. Her naïve, almost childlike style established her reputation as an artist who was willing to question accepted principles of ‘good painting’. Initially the works appear crude and amateurish; her naïve style is often absent of scale and perspective. Leek’s choice of media, acrylic on board, as well as the flatness with which she depicts her subject matter evokes a second-hand quality.
This exhibition introduces Leek’s most recent work. While the paintings abandon specific references to time and place, they convey an autobiographical dimension and suggest things from Leek’s past, both real and imaginary – drifting sailboats, perched cats, and crystallized landscapes; things left behind but not forgotten. Her bleached palette even recalls the faded colors of memory – pastel yellows, faint blues, washed out greens and hazy pinks.

Saskia Leek was born in 1970 in Christchurch, New Zealand. From 1988-1991 she studied at The Canterbury School of Fine Arts, Christchurch, where she obtained a BFA. Leek has shown widely throughout New Zealand and recently had a solo exhibition at Darren Knight Gallery in Sydney, Australia. She currently lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand.

Jack Hanley

Tim Roda / Living Large
We are pleased to present our second solo show with photographs by Tim Roda.

Tim Rodas black and white family portraits are filled with reverberations of his own childhood memories and family traditions as a site for individual and communal mythmaking. Incorporating his son and wife into his photographs while enacting familial scenes, Roda collapses the past and present as well as private and public. He positions his family in elaborately staged arrangements, which he builds out of rough and simple materials like wood, clay, paper and everyday items. His latest work explores themes of transition, whishes and dreams as well as the isolation of immigrants. Like memories the images are fragmented narratives, in which familiarity and strangeness blur. His technical process seems appropriately unfinished. He roughly cuts the borders of his photographs so that they look vulnerable and he allows or even creates chemical splashes and other technical flaws. This treatment of the pictures adds to the atmosphere of hand crafted, not at all valuable and is in contrast to usual clean-cut photography. The invalidation corresponds with the content. Rodas work is beautiful and alarming.

Tim Roda was born 1977 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, USA.

Please see “Introducing Tim Roda”, by Dan Torop in Modern Painter Issue 56, May 2008

Art Agents

Andersen S

Hales Gallery is pleased to announce Michael Smith’s second solo show at the Gallery.
Since 1979 Smith has concentrated on his prescient, tragicomic persona, the clueless and ever hopeful everyman, Mike. Mike, a.k.a. Blandman, has developed into an ongoing character in a series of comedic performances, videos and installations, and has become Smith’s primary vehicle for commenting on discrepancies in the social and cultural landscape. One is constantly reminded of recognizable models and formats, such as sitcoms, commercials, game shows and the Internet banners; however familiar, Smith’s work persists to be destabilizing, as it focuses on Mike’s plodding and inadvertent reflection on themes of failure and loneliness in our technologically sophisticated world.
School Work brings together two pieces of work most recently shown in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. 
 
Portal Excursion (2005-07) is a 10-minute video piece about Mike’s quest for knowledge and learning after his introduction to MIT’s OpenCourseWare, “a free and open educational resource for self-learners around the world”.  Mike is attempting to combine a long time interest in mnemonics with his newly found passion for on-line studies. Although his method for learning appears to be highly specious, it is clear he has figured out a way to cope with his mid-life struggle, keeping himself busy and fully immersed in the ever-expanding field of distance learning.
Over the past thirty years both Smith and his persona, Mike, have been ageing in real time. Smith’s ongoing series Sears Class Portraits (1999-2008) highlights this process more succinctly than in any other work to date. These photographs taken with his various classes at Sears Portrait Studios are both mementos and records of his teaching and ageing process. Each year his students seem to stay the same age whilst Mike shows sign of wear. This glimpse into the artist’s personal life through the ironic visual language of tacky studio photography subtly fuses Smith’s identity with that of Mike’s.
 
Michael Smith has an extensive performance and exhibition history that began in the mid 70’s. He has shown in venues as varied as The New Museum, MoMa, Carolines Comedy Club (New York City), Dance Threatre Workshop, Cinemax, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Pompidou Centre. Smith has collaborated with  numerous artists including William Wegman, Seth Price, Mayo Thompson and Mike Kelley, and for the past ten years has broken new ground in immersive installation art working in collaboration with Joshua White.
Smith has produced several artists’ books and an impressive collection of drawings and sketches that detail his creative process; many of which were published recently in MICHAEL SMITH Drawings: Simple, Obscure and Obtuse (NY: Regency Arts Press).

Hales Gallery

Victoria Miro

Emineo Fine Art

Terence KOH THE WHOLE FAMILY
Hello deer this is terence koh my first show was with this gallery almost 5 years ago WOW may 10, 2008 that’s gonna bee five years of love between javier peres and me i remember coming to chung king road for the first time and seeing the little street with red lanterns i remember falling in love with the street immediately i remember walking into the gallery and thinking it was perfect and magical i remember sleeping on the couch of the gallery on the second floor while installing because javier couldn’t really afford to pay for my motel (yep motel, not hotel) i remember eating the mostest yummy steamed shrimp with my boyfriend garrick and javier at the restaurant across the street i remember driving with javier for the first time in his huge silver jeep on the highways of la way pass midnight at about 180 miles per hour and he was swigging whiskey from a silver flask and i was screaming at him that we were both completely going to die that night i remember walking around with javier in the seedy pet district of downtown los angeles trying to find two perfect white budgeries for my show and finding them and then going to eat vietnamese desserts right after to congratulate ourselves i rememeber realizing after spending 8 days in la that waking up every day felt like the most strange deja vu because it was always sunny every day every day i remember javier contacting me via email for the first time saying immediately he wanted to do a show with me in his new gallery in la and i was very confused because i didn’t have a single clue what being an artist was i remember my first studio visit with javier in my tiny tiny apartment in chinatown in new york and it was night and we sat on my big white table which took up the whole room and i showed him a little white jewerly case with a gold capital M letter stuck on the top and when you opened it there was the thinnest sliver of glass (the kind you use for looking at specimens under microscopes) and it had a gold capital E stuck on it, my ME box and javier said he would buy it for 20 buck and that was the first thing he bought from me i remember the very first time i met javier was in new york where he standing next to a bed in this little tiny hotel room for the scope art fair and i was there with garrick and i immediately thought javier was someone i could trust and love forever and was going to be a friend for life, and i never felt that way before i remember every single shopping trip i made with javier buying clothes together, one of our many naughty vices i remember waiting for javier in the prada shop in london for more than an hour after the store was closed and the whole staff waiting around in the store and looking at me and i was feeling terribly uncomfortable and hating javier every single second because i was waiting for javier to come use his credit card to buy me a mink jacket cause my credit card could not take the 13,500 pounds the jacket cost and then forgiving him afterwards cause it was the most expensive thing i bought to date and it felt great wearing it even though i am vegetarian for ethical reasons i remember every single morning with javier as the sun came up because we were up all night and hating the sunlight and wished i had sunglasses and borrowing his sunglasses twice i remember in mykonos, greece baptising javier for his birthday in the dark night of the greek sea, while i was wearing a custom coat made out of about 200 chinese hairs and he was completely naked and i thought that he was my baby son i remember the absolutely terrifying sound of of 21 shots from a gun that javier fired in the basement space of his gallery for the main piece of our first show, which was 21 identical prints of a lovely young boy on purple paper i remember very well cycling on my bike round and round at the same spot for about an hour under the yellow glow of street lights near my apartment on henry street and talking to javier on my cell phone when we found out i was in the whitney biennial 3 months after my first show with him i remember too the 3 months after the opening of our first show when we only sold 2 sculptures and javier and i felt completely miserable cause we thought we would strike it big with money i rememeber telling javier he was crazy when he said that my sculptures for the whole family show should sell at 1000 dollars a piece and i told him to get a grip and that he should really sell them for 300 dollars or something like that i remember how excited we were when phil and shelley aarons (they are forever my other daddy and mommy) bought the first thing from the show, which was the owl shelf with the big fake diamonds for eyes i remember being cramped in many many many small bathrooms with javier all around the world and especially the time javier, dash and me made out at passerby in the bathroom the night of my whitney biennial i remember a few times when i was drunk horny and high and i wanted javier to fuck me doggy style even though we have never had sex but we like to say we doo i remember or know that javier has always had a crush on my boyfriend i remember that javier had a good sense of style when i first met him with his cheap t-shirts and american apparel jeans but that after 5 years of shopping with him i have given him an acquired taste for the very best and now his sense of style is absolutely low key while being strikingly fabulous i remember driving in a cab in london with javier my DADDY (one of my nicknames for him) a few years ago when we were doing the frieze art fair and telling him that we would know we would have made it when we finally could afford to stay at claridges and now that is our favorite hotel in the world i remember the time when i caught chicken pox for the first time at the age of 27! and i was crushing in his la apartment and he brought me honey to make a drawing cause i was going mental being stuck in his apartment 24/7 i remember the time when javier stole a blond haired boy from me at around 8am in the morning when i was totally crazy for him and they both secretly went off to have sex with each other instead and i don’t think i will ever forgive him for that i remember javier helping me to glue and paint the sculptures for our first show together in the basement of the gallery at night every night till opening night i remember 5 years ago when garrick and i were so broke that a good day for us was when we could afford to buy an egg to eat with our pack of 50cent rice which was flavored with free soy sauce packets i remember that night when javier was having sex with a fucking hot stud in the basement of the la gallery and i came down and i asked if i could join in and the guy wasn’t really into it, but javier said please let terence blow your cock and i blew the stud muffin’s cock i remember emailing javier to never forget that my art will always have the the power to give him more passion for life than sex and coke and he immediately replied back NEVER WILL! i remember shopping for poppers in berlin with javier ass i was too shy to get them myself and when we finally found this sex store in schoenberg we went crazy cause it had 1000s of dvd porn and javier and i dropped about 3000 euro in ten minutes buying the greatest porn ever and i still jerk off to them whenever i think i am running out of art ideas i rememeber always being really jealous when javier would find a new boyfriend because i knew that meant that for a few weeks he wouldn’t pay attention to me as much and i also remember feeling completely evil and selfish when he would break up with a boyfriend and i would feel extremely subconsiously happy cause he would pay all his attention to me again i remember almost all the countless times i told javier i was going to be the artist that would make the next evolutionary jump in not just art history but history for our millenium and then feeling about half an hour later that i really should work on my modesty skills i remember the time in leon, spain when we were having our usual late all night discussions and we were talking about what would go on my epitaph on my tombstone and then going to take a piss and it suddenly came to me when the yellow stream was coming out of my dick what it was going to be, and running to javier and telling him it would say LOVE FOR ETERNITY i will forever and forever and forever remember the magic javier and me created for our first show in that tiny mighty gallery on chung king road in chinatown, los angeles almost five years ago hugs love hugs terence koh new york city, march 13, 2008 sometime after midnight Javier Peres is pleased to announce Terence KOH’s third solo exhibition in Los Angeles, “The Whole Family.” Terence Koh (b. 1980, China. Lives in NY, Beijing and Berlin) will be present for the opening.

Peres Projects

TAUBA AUERBACH: “THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE”

08.05.-08.06.2008 / PREVIEW: THURSDAY 08.05.2008 / 19.00-21.00

STANDARD (OSLO) is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition with the American artist Tauba Auerbach. “The Uncertainty Principle” sees the artist extend her investigation of language and mathematics to a discussion of probabilities and polarities. At the centre of her analysis is the question: how are determinism and probability different?

In Tauba Auerbach’s works there is a recurring interest in the space between the sensical and non-sensical – in how meaning is translated through the help of fragile and frequently failing systems of signs and symbols. Language and logic both appear as porous (and potentially playful) in her works on paper, which have investigated such various elements of communication as semaphore, Morse, and binary programming language. In “The Uncertainty Principle”, Auerbach combines a double channel video projection with seven new drawings and five new photographs to address the constant diminishing presence of randomness – as a result of technology’s reductions and / or simulations of ‘the random’.

Among these works are three drawings belonging to Auerbach’s “50/50” series. Taking their starting point from binary programming language they confront the problem of digital definition: the impossibility of true ambiguity when only possibly represented through unambiguous parts. The artist has transformed the binary programming language of 1’s and 0’s into a system of modularized black and white halves. Employing this scheme, the works take a curiously complicated path to the most average, ambiguous grey. The result is anything but the colour, but thus also – by remaining loyal to its digital definition of 50% white and 50% black – offers a comment on how technology shapes our logical systems

Adding to Auerbach’s works on paper is a series of photographs: “Static 1-5”. Concentrating on a soon extinct phenomenon – TV static – these large-scale framed photographic presents tableaux where information is potentially present but interfered. The result is a ‘white noise’ where a random dot pattern is superimposed on the picture. Employing this formal principle a point of departure, Auerbach has produced a suite of airbrush drawings entitled “CMY 1-4”. The three primary colours of printing have been employed to produce non-compositions willingly aiming at randomness. They, nevertheless, seem to arrange themselves in accordance to rhythms and patterns. Evoking the flat power spectral density of the TV static they present a situation of symmetric possibilities: of information unfolding itself or folding in.

Tauba Auerbach (b. 1981) lives and works in San Francisco and New York. She graduated from Stanford University, California, and has since had numerous solo exhibitions including “Yes and Not Yes” at Deitch Projects, New York, and “The Answer/Wasn’t Here”, Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco. Her works have also been included in group exhibitions such as “Words Fail Me” at Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, “Beneath the Underdog” at Gagosian Gallery, New York, and “Panic Room” at the Deste Art Foundation, Athens. She is currently showing in “Passengers” at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, where she will also have a solo exhibition in September.

Standard Oslo