In Apertura @ Vilmagold




Martin Soto Climent
Raphael Danke
Jennifer West

For the group show In Apertura, LA-based artist Jennifer West will present two films – examples from a series of cameraless films produced in 2005/6. Using a variety of techniques, West exposes, manipulates and transforms 16mm film stock to produce results reminiscent of 60s psychedelic visuals. West uses a range of everyday materials to marinade the film, from toothpaste to patchouli incense, Pepto-Bismol and guacamole, and exposes them with light sources such as fireworks; static electrical sparks and Xerox light. Other alchemic materials that transform the film include Jim Shaws urine and Comme des Gar篮s perfume, amongst Wests cocktail of corrosives.
In this exhibition we will present Wests Tar Smell Film (16mm film negative exposed with cigarette light, dragged along beach sand tar, rubbed with skin so soft lotion and dripped with manic panic hair dyes based on notes for Tar Scent by CdG) and Yeah Film (16mm film leader soaked in clover, belladonna and poppy tea, inscribed with the word yeah written in beet-juice and Pepto-bismol) which together, through their titled narrative and heady hallucinatory abstraction evoke a tale of the West Coast, of hanging out at the beach, smoking and drinking mind-altering teas.
In Raphael Dankes collages, the subject is removed from the page, leaving a void or aperture: an unidentifiable shape. The images assume the feeling of a missing person from the room. Remaining sections of furniture, hair, light and shadow point towards the one time presence of the figure, but the mood reflects the absence.The collages give the impression of an empty film set or stage, where the potential of the missing body is felt as a latent energy. Danke interweaves the substance of the fictive space with the physical and psychic energy of the absent human body.
Mexican artist Martin Soto Climent combines everyday objects to create simple sculptures that, through their seemingly effortless combination emphasise their loaded histories. Using often sexually charged objects such as pearls, shoes, hats and bicycle saddles, Climent creates relationships that examine masculine and feminine motifs and relationships between the urban and the body. Climents sculptures sometimes rest together harmoniously, sometimes focusing on their tenuous contact, and sometimes to create friction. Despite their apparent simplicity the sculptures are loaded with their own power and symbolic significance.

  • Vilmagold

    • Doug Fishbone @ Oeen Group


    Still from Ugly American

    Opening to day @ 16.00

    Until recently, my work involved itself mostly with impermanent materials and processes. My most ambitious project was an installation using enormous quantities of bananas – at times as many as 40,000 of them – which I pile up in public places and then give away free of charge. I have done this project, which deals with themes of globalization, violence and consumerism, on five separate occasions in the US (in New York), Ecuador, Costa Rica and Poland. In another much smaller work, I made a classical self-portrait out of gyro meat, rotating on a cooking machine in the middle of the gallery, which touched upon issues of death and decay, artistic vanity and notions of tradition and scandal in today’s gimmick-oriented art climate.
    20,000 Bananas, 2002

    And for a performance piece this past summer, I hired a young Arab American male actor to sit inexpressively in a cage during an opening in a museum, while the audience milled around drinking wine and enjoying themselves. These works were all created for particular exhibitions, and lasted only as long as they were shown, generally several hours. (The actual gyro meat head still exists, though, slumbering cryogenically in my mother’s freezer).

    slumbering cryogenically in my mother’s freezer).My recent work has focused on the creation of more lasting objects that mine similar terrain, and question the role and meaning of art in consumer capitalist society. These concerns have led me to develop my own logo, and to use it as a branding device – a cynical form of signature – for many of these artistic objects. In my most current work, the video piece entitled The Ugly American, I am investigating the language of the mass media to critique some of the more problematic aspects of our culture – greed, violence, pornography and indifference – by using its own delivery of imagery as the basis for the work. All of the images in the video, with the exception of only a handful, were downloaded straight off of the internet, and the video turns the vulgarity of our society’s freely available visual information back on itself. On a more formal note, I am interested in examining the use of still images in a video context, and in creating a hybrid form of narrative that rests, like some works by Chris Marker, in between the traditional territories of film and photography. This video work is my primary area of operation at the moment.
    Central to all of my work, and maybe its most important aspect, is a heavy reliance on humor. Whether co-opting the strategies of stand-up comedy, as I do in The Ugly American, making posters out of Yiddish proverbs, or constructing ridiculous corporate-style rubbish like logo watches, I invite the viewer to consider some of the more unseemly aspects of modern living in an amusing and disarming way.

  • Oeen Group