Tag: US

Cody Critcheloe

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The Hole is pleased to present BOY, an exhibition by Cody Critcheloe and his band SSION. The exhibition includes video, painting, drawing, and installation and will fea- ture special guests Peggy Noland and Jaimie Warren. The sum of these parts could be called “Kansas City Gone Wild”: these artists are all part of an exciting new energy coming from this city and we want to show New Yorkers this big mess in the Midwest!

Cody Critcheloe is the mad mustachioed front man and creative ringleader of SSION: a band pro- nounced SHUN like the word PERCUSSION and FASHION and EXPLOSION. SSION is a collaborative confluence of creative kids in Kansas City. This queer punk performance art band just came out with BOY, a feature length movie documenting Cody’s life as a small town punk kid addicted to junk food dreaming of stardom who becomes a glamorous pop star with the help and hindrance of a gaggle of crazy dames. Archly witty and abounding and self-aware parody and pop-cultural collage, this film composites various music videos Cody made for SSION songs from 2007-2009 and links them together with mockumentary interviews, tour footage and cultural critique. Shitty green screen and hand- made painted cardboard props abound, as do hot fags, hot dance moves, and smoking hot costumes by Peggy Noland.

Peggy! She is a fashion designer on the verge. Her outrageous spandex concoctions put her on the map a few years ago outfitting bands CSS and Tilly and the Wall; she once sent me some apple print scratch and sniff leggings that really smelled. She has a shop in Kansas City that she does a com- pletely different crazy fashion/sculpture installation every few months and she will be building a pop up shop for the show.

I met Peggy a couple of years ago through Jaimie Warren, or “Madonna” in the SSION movie: she takes self-portraits looking and being weird that cut right to the heart of being young and bored and making your own fun in America. She co-runs a TV and community development show called Whoop Dee Doo that is another organizing element in the Kansas City creative community that includes Peggy and Cody and a whole lot more.

Cody will be installing his exhibition like a sweet hangout zone and video lounge. Peggy will have a fashion boutique in the front and Jaimie will have a photo installation in the showroom. SSION will do a one-night blowout performance in September and Peggy will present her new spring sportswear during Fashion Week. Stay tuned for details!


THE HOLE

Bernhard Fuchs // Autos

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“On bicycle tours I would come across cars just standing there in the countryside. I guess my first reaction was to look out for the owners. Most of the time, I would see no one and thus was left alone with the situation, developing a relationship to those vehicles that I hadn’t expected. From then on I started to regard these abandoned cars in the scenery as if they were actors on a stage and started to collect their wit and tragedy.”

The Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to present “Autos”, a solo exhibition of photographs by Bernhard Fuchs.  The series “Autos” is a collection of images of cars parked in parking lots and on roadsides.  Their stillness haunts, their solitude mystifies.  In the absence of human life, the cars in Fuchs’ series take on their own pulse, their function moves beyond expected utility.  Here, in a moment of the “happened upon,” travel freezes in contemplation.

Born in 1971 in Haslach an der Mühl in Upper Austria, Bernhard Fuchs studied with Bernd Becher at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and with Timm Rautert at Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig; he currently lives and works in Dusseldorf. Since 1991, his work has been exhibited in Germany and abroad: Museum Ludwig , Cologne Germany; Museum Folkwang, Essen Germany; Goethe Institute Washington D.C. and Paris. Several of his photographic series including “Autos” have been published internationally in monographs of his work.

Jack Hanley

Lezley Saar

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Merry Karnowsky Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of new work by
artist Lezley Saar entitled Autist’s Fables. The exhibition begins with a painting
titled “They’re Here, Get Used To It,” which sets the tone for a modern allegory
compromised of paintings, dioramas, photographs, and a short film. Saar uses
multiple mediums to create an imaginative and enigmatic environment
inspired by the sensibility, perception, and reality of her 17-year-old Autistic
daughter, Geneva.

Influenced by 19th century illustrations of animals and nature, the work
includes references to gothic literature, anatomy, biology, tattoos, cartoons,
and Art Nouveau. Saar expertly blends symbol and allegory with imagination and wit. The artist’s ethereal
work questions notions of normalcy, perceptions of reality, modes of communication, and the veracity of
emotions. The exhibition uses the body and soul approach of Aesop’s Fables where the body is the story,
and the soul is the moral.

In addition to paintings, Saar has created glass-encased dioramas resembling vintage dollhouses in which
scenes from Saar’s modern fables (based on things Geneva has said or done) unfold in miniature. With
found landscape paintings serving as the backdrops for tales unfolding within, titles like “Sorcerer’s Ritual”
and “Bad Seed Boy” describe the scenes and characters inhabiting Geneva’s imagination. In Saar’s
paintings, circular color photographs taken by the artist of vignettes within the dioramas are collaged into
the paintings, as hand painted animal creatures (Geneva’s numerous imaginary friends) are the ones
telling the tales of humans, or the Autist’s Fables.

Le Mystère de Geneviève, Saar’s short film, or court métrage, is a fairy tale which is symbolically
autobiographical as it relates to Geneva’s journey. In the words of Saar, “So much attention is focused on
the problems of autism; the tragedy of it all, how to ‘cure’ it, how to ramrod these children into being
‘normal.’ But, I find autistic people fascinating. With Autist’s Fables there’s the body; my work which tells this
story, and the soul; the moral which is that perhaps Autistic people should finally be accepted as they are.”

Saar’s work has been exhibited around the U.S. as well as in Germany, Cuba, Bermuda, and Australia. Solo
museum exhibits include The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, The ContemporaryArts Center, Cincinnati, OH, Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis, MO, Fresno Museum of Art, Pasadena
Museum of California Art, Palmer Art Museum, PA, and San Jose Museum of Art. Her works are included in  the collections of The Ackland Art Museum, MOCA, Kemper Museum of Art, California African American
Museum, and Smith College Museum of Art.  Saar has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, The New
York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Artnews, Time Out New York, and XXL. Originally from Los Angeles, Saar is
the daughter of assemblage artist Betye Saar, and the sister of sculptor Alison Saar. She currently lives and
works in Redondo Beach, California.

Merry Karnowsky Gallery

Michael Anderson @ Claire Oliver

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Nielsen Reports say that in the US, the average person is exposed to between 500 and 1,600 advertising messages per day. As we are only awake an average of 1000 minutes a day, this statistic underlines the import of mass media (and advertising as a subset) in our modern, work-a-day lives. It is with an eye to social commentary, at a time when mass media is present in almost every moment of our waking lives, that the art of Michael Anderson is most relevant.
Exclusively utilizing billboards and street posters, Anderson’s work is both confined and defined by a fixed scale, easily digestible messages and pop culture imagery. The artist strips the original advertisements of their power of persuasion and uses them for something much more complex and insightful. Seducing our undisciplined attention spans, Anderson adds emotional dimension and narrative to images that originally held none.

Abstraction and representation collide; repetition of specific fragments of imagery, some static and others swimming, mingle to hypnotize the viewer, luring him to decode the non-linear message hidden beneath the bright, enticing surface design. “I make art about the world we live in,” says Anderson.

Apparent in the artist’s work is a deep appreciation for graffiti art. In graffiti, letters often become so abstracted that they lose all legibility. Taking texts from advertisements, Anderson similarly renders the words almost undecipherable as he creates something unique and absorbing. He deconstructs, distorts, and then combines to generate a feeling of motion and energy in dazzling, mosaic-like images that fluctuate in optical pattern and cultural reference.

Also evident in Anderson’s work is the obsessive method behind the assemblage of each piece. As an ongoing process, the artist has meticulously hand-collected images from posters acquired in the dead of night on his travels to Germany, Mexico, and Italy as well as on the streets near his home in Spanish Harlem. A visual topography of these vibrant ethnic neighborhoods is layered deeply in each work, collectively driving its pulse and frenetic energy. ”When you see remnants of torn down posters, that’s my tag,” he says.

Like a sculptor, he layers and repeats shredded images into a visual staccato that he brings together, creating an elaborate and wonderful tapestry. Arranging new world orders, sacred battles and mythological manifestos in the pop-bright kaleidoscope of collage, his works resonate with cryptic possibilities; Anderson thus plays both critic and participant.

Michael Anderson’s work will be prominently featured in the upcoming exhibition Beyond Bling: Voices of Hip-Hop in Art at the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida opening May 2011. The Artist’s collages are included in the upcoming Scala Publication on hip hop influence in contemporary art. Anderson’s first solo exhibition with Claire Oliver Gallery opens November 18, 2010.  For further information please feel free to contact the gallery.

Claire Oliver

Michael Anderson

From the Street to the Cube

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Justin Giarla, White Walls, and The Shooting Gallery invite you to join us for the opening reception of From the Street to the Cube, a group show at 941GEARY.

941Geary is pleased to present From the Street to the Cube, a group exhibition featuring the work of many prominent artists of the Street Art genre. For its first two exhibitions in its nascent year, 941Geary has explored urban contemporary artists of note working in the styles of abstraction and realism. For this third exhibition, curator Justin Giarla has compiled a group of the world’s most influential artists whose artistic careers were birthed in the street and have transitioned to the more formal exhibition space of the white cube. From the Street to the Cube will bring together a collection of work in a variety of mediums for this cross-cultural survey of street art.

941 GEARY

Obey

Andreas Hofer

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Metro Pictures will open the Fall season with Andreas Hofer’s exhibition ON TIME by Andy Hope 1930 on Thursday, September 16th. The framing of spaces, images and time links the rooms of the new show to the fictional, time-traveling persona of Andy Hope, Hofer’s alter ego and signer of his paintings, in the critical year 1930. One gallery room extends Hofer’s 2008 Phantom Gallery in Los Angeles and Zürich. Both exhibitions were site-specific installations, empty but for the ghostly exposure of bright patches where once-framed pictures hung on walls that now appear discolored and grimy, and worn and dirty carpet with the original color exposed by the shapes of chairs and bureaus. The Phantom paintings, in tones of cream and beige and in discarded frames, bring value to the devalued or discarded decor of the Phantom rooms. In another room, adding further distance and remove, Hofer’s paintings are shades of gray that are representations of the black and white photographs of his Phantom paintings.

Andreas Hofer was born in Munich in 1963 and lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include the Charles Riva Collection, Brussels; The Freud Museum, London; and Sammlung Goetz, Munich. His work has recently been included in exhibitions at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie, Regensburg; Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany; and the ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe.

Metro Pictures Gallery