Team is pleased to present a group exhibition organized by Miriam Katzeff. Forced Exposure will run from the 1st of July through the 30th of July 2010. The exhibition will include paintings, video and sculptures by Lutz Bacher, Tom Burr, Ross Knight, and Bjarne Melgaard. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor.
This exhibition focuses on works of art that position the viewer as an interloper in the gallery. As technology encourages people to expose themselves to unknown audiences online, the idea of privacy has relaxed to reflect these developments. The works on view test whether this lack of boundaries extends into the physical world. While the artists in the exhibition do not have a strictly confessional style, the works force an immediate and awkward intimacy onto the viewer.
For over a decade, Lutz Bacher has produced an ongoing body of work entitled Do You Love Me? Interviewing curators, friends, and dealers about her life and her work, Bacher asks the questions but never appears on film. Using whatever technology was available, the seemingly casual interviews reveal more about the person answering the questions than the evasive artist. It is easy to imagine how Bacher’s relationship with the subjects must change as a result of uncomfortable revelations.
Using minimal forms and personal dedications, Tom Burr’s sculptures recreate private architectures as public stages. Through his transformation of domestic objects, Burr produces a sense of access to interrupted encounters. Black Wall Skirt simultaneously alludes to conceptual, physical and psychological spaces. The forms are loaded with possibilities of the fulfillment and failures of concealed desires.
Ross Knight’s formalist sculptures combine utilitarian materials with corporeal references to suggest secret rituals that are deliberately unresolved. In Void Fill, a cardboard box that is the height and width of an average man is punctured by a plastic bag filled with air. While Knight operates on his works with a reductive precision, the sculptures aspire to a precarious quality as though they were hastily abandoned in the gallery.
In Bjarne Melgaard’s most recent paintings, old pornographic magazines are defaced with crudely executed figures and scrawled texts from a continuous novel that relies on the violent mythology surrounding the artist. Like the rest of Melgaard’s work, the fragmented and diaristic qualities of the text lures the viewer into the artist’s constructed personas and manipulates the relationship between fact and fiction.
Tag: New York
JEFFREY SAUGER // Where Furrows Run Deep
The existence of yet another population of our nation’s landscape has
begun to fade. Institutional racism, foreclosures, and bankruptcy have shattered
American black farmers’ rights to the land they have occupied for generations.
Today, African Americans own only roughly 1 percent of all farmland in the
United States and few have taken notice.
As recognition of this population continues to grow faint, the Jack Hanley
Gallery presents “Where Furrows Run Deep,” a photographic documentary by
Jeffrey Sauger. Sauger’s collection of images shot on black and white film over
several years bares witness to a disappearance. Neither overly sentimental nor
strictly practical, “Where Furrows Run Deep” speaks with an emotional utility.
The aesthetic achievement of Sauger’s compositions function to further the
testimony and visibility of the vanishing American black farmer; they are a call to action.
Jeffrey Sauger began the project as a graduate student in Ohio in 1999. He
continued the project through grants and sponsorship from Blue Earth Alliance.
Sauger received his master’s degree from Ohio University’s School of Visual
Communication, and is a professional photojournalist whose work has appeared
in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Time, The Detroit News, Detroit
Free Press and The Washington Post. In 2000, Sauger was named Michigan
photographer of the Year by Michigan Press Photographers Association.
Reflexive Self //
Michel Auder // Keeping Busy: An Inaccurate Survey
Jack Pierson
Bortolami is proud to present Go there now and take this with you, a show of Jack Pierson’s folded photographs.
While Pierson is best known for his wall sculptures, he has been working as a photographer since he was in art school in the 1980’s. He later expanded his practice to both sculpture and word pieces. The themes of his art are investigated through all mediums, but perhaps they are most directly addressed in his photography due to the concrete representation afforded by the imagery. Pierson’s choices of subject matter seem sprawling, but they are linked by beauty and a thread of passing drama, sexual tension, and ephemeral glamour.
Pierson has always struggled with the needs of photography as a medium. Framing, mounting and glass, separate the observer from the work itself, making the photograph a cumbersome object. The photos presented in this show challenge the need for protection and hang directly on the wall, exposed to the viewer much like the word pieces. Each work is printed on photo paper and folded suggesting that the works are portable. One can take the picture with them in an envelope, or send it to a friend, for hanging and re-hanging in new settings. The picture is intended to age and evolve rather than remain a static print behind glass and a frame.
Jack Pierson was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1960 and attended the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. He lives and works in New York and Southern California. Pierson has had solo exhibitions at El Centro de Arte Contemporaneo de Malaga, Spain; The Irish Museum of Art, Dublin, Ireland; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois.
Not Quite Open for Business
The Hole is pleased to present itself! We are a new art outfit launching in New York City run by Kathy Grayson and Meghan Coleman. Both former directors at the legendary and now-closed Deitch Projects, we have put together numerous art exhibitions both at Deitch and around the world while also making books, essays, art reviews, parties, fashion shows and shops. Former Executive Director at Deitch Projects Suzanne Geiss will be collaborating with us to program cutting edge art and exciting everything else for downtown. “Filling a hole in the down- town community” will be our goal.
Our current location is 104 Greene Street hosted by art enthusiast and renowned community developer Tony Goldman. Tony partnered with Deitch Projects in presenting the huge mural project Wynwood Walls in Miami last winter and the Bowery Mural wall on Bowery and Houston Street in New York City. In our new space, The Hole will present exhibitions and events by our team of artists, including many of the artists from Deitch Projects but also a new group of fresh faces. We will hang available works by everyone in our showroom connected to the back of the gallery and open to public view, which by the end of the summer will also feature a cool café situation.
The first exhibition is called Not Quite Open for Business, a conceptual group show of unfinished art, unfinished poems, and unfinished symphonies. The installation is designed by Taylor McKimens and the show includes over twenty artists from the community. What does a finished piece mean anyway? Come tell us no, no, no; we are doing it all wrong, it needs more yellow.
What else?? We will be presenting a special exhibition and chill zone by Cody Critcheloe and his band SSION for Fall Fashion Week including a pop-up shop by his collaborator, fashion designer Peggy Noland. Before 2011 we will also present both thematic group exhibitions, solo shows by new artists including cult hero Mat Brinkman, and a collaborative club installation by Dearraindrop and the inimitable Kenny Scharf.
Besides experimental exhibitions, The Hole will be organizing numerous events and community services that you will hear more about very soon! For now we can tell you that HOLEY BOOKS, a shop of art books, zines and products in the back room designed by our favourite Rafael de Cardenas will be open for business June 26th.
Group Show in NCMA’s Contemporary Gallery
Group Show in NCMA’s Contemporary Gallery
Currents, at NCMA’s Contemporary Gallery from June 5 to September 12, features the work of three artists: Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Benjamin Edwards and Tom Sanford. The exhibition is organized by Elaine Berger for the museum’s Contemporary Collectors Circle.
Jessica Jackson Hutchins is a sculptor whose work is included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. She has shown in many group and solo exhibitions in this country and the UK. Her work explores the relationships between people and objects and how they both form and inform each other (Artforum). Benjamin Edwards has been exhibited widely throughout the New York area and other US cities. Working in oils, acrylics and digital inkjet, his paintings and drawings hold a mirror to contemporary society, reflecting it back as hallucinatory and visionary landscapes. Tom Sanford paints vibrant representations of pop objects and celebrities. His work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Copenhagen.
Michael Bevilacqua
GERING & LóPEZ GALLERY is pleased to present Placebo Effect, an exhibition of new paintings on linen by New York based artist Michael Bevilacqua. This will be Bevilacqua’s second solo exhibit with the gallery. This exhibition, radically different from his last at the gallery, is much more minimal, starkly showcasing his technical and conceptual skill as a painter.
Contrary to popular trends in art and art theory, Bevilacqua is not afraid to admit that he is an autobiographical artist. Each painting is a series of diary entries, painted and repainted as he explores and reflects on the world around him. Each work starts with a song, the soundtrack of Bevilacqua’s life at that given moment of creative production. These works display clear references to the bands the Ramones, Gorillaz, and Placebo, through lyrical text often scrawled graffiti-style across the canvas or in cutout block lettering. The textual component interacts with abstracted cartoon characters and objects, forcing the viewer to oscillate between background and foreground. Through this visual language, Bevilacqua weaves his personal narratives, stories and emotions that under- and overlap each other in the layers of screenprinting, stencils, and free hand acrylic brushstrokes.
Bevilacqua further deviates from the contemporary status quo of a Neo-Modernist approach to the picture plane with his vibrant use of color, which simultaneously intertwines multiple painting techniques across the canvas, stretching our conventional notion of collage. He creates a myriad of surfaces all functioning within the confines of a single plane, similar to the way we open endless windows on our computer screens. These multiple layers of color, technique, and references provide the eye with many opportunities to wander, but there is no resolution.
The complexity and depth of this work relates directly to the artist as a person. He is exploring issues of self, family, art, and the co-existing roles he must play as well as the power the practice of painting has over these internal struggles. This leads to his enigmatic title, Placebo Effect. A clear reference to the music group, the title can have multiple secondary metaphorical interpretations. Bevilacqua could be feeding himself this sugar pill, pouring his life onto an inanimate piece of stretched linen as a form of therapeutic relief, or he could be serving it to the viewer, the voyeur. He has lived this, and your viewing experience is merely a “placebo effect” of Michael Bevilacqua’s life.
Michael Bevilacqua was born in Carmel, California in 1966. He attended Long Beach State University and Santa Barbara City College, later continuing his studies at the Cambridge College of Art and Technology in Great Britain. Bevilacqua has exhibited internationally including solo shows in Beijing, Copenhagen, Milan, Tokyo, Madrid, Barcelona, and New York. He has also exhibited in group shows at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Deste Foundation, Athens, Greece; The Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT. His work is in numerous public collections including The Mitsuni Collection, Tokyo, Japan; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Deste Foundation, Athens, Greece; Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, Norway; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and The Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX.
Pierre Bismuth
Molly Dilworth // art installation in Times Square
Molly Dilworth has just received a commission from Mayor Bloomberg’s office
to produce a massive art installation in Times Square as part of the
reNEWable Times Square project.
One of Molly’s previous installations can be seen on the rooftop of
Hendershot Gallery, located at 547 West 27th Street. The installation is
accessible and open to the public during normal gallery hours, Tuesday
through Saturday 11am-6pm.