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10 Chancery Lane Gallery

The 2011 Hong Kong Art Fair in its 4th year, is the biggest fair to date, and has been extremely well received on many sides. Compared to the previous year, the 2011 fair has a tighter selection of galleries (I’ve been told the quality of art went up as well), better organization of events and a spacious layout of fair grounds, with superb marketing and service. On day one of the fair, while trying to tackle the jet lag many gallerists from New York seemed somewhat nervous, but by the final day many have completely mellowed out and happy with their results. Many say they look forward to returning next year, especially being speculative about the merge with Art Basel. The fair is separated by the main section of galleries, emerging galleries in Art Futures, and a focus on Asian artists in Asia One. Red art is speckled here and there, and so is the talk of Ai Weiwei. Organizers and galleries have been giving out “Where is Ai Weiwei” tees and buttons, although so far I haven’t seen anyone wear them in China.  Leaving the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong, and arriving in an artist village hideout in Shenzhen, China, I’m finally able to reflect a little on the events.  Enjoy the photos.

Liu Wei

Michael Lau (Hong Kong artist)

Ming Wong (Vitamin Creative Space)

The Horizon Placed at Home, Pak Sheung Chuen (seawater collected from Victoria Harbor)

Alex Katz

Yang Fu Dong

Selçuk Artut (CDA Projects)

Videotage

Leap Magazine editors

local media

Barnaby Furnas (Marianne Boesky)

Zhang Huan in conversation with Royal Academy of Arts

Elin Melburg

Standing inside Elin Melburg's "I Wish I Wish I Wish in Vain" installation

afterparty at The Pawn

(photos: HW)

E3-HS9, 2011

Tree Drawings, Nightwalks, Insect Flight Paths, Restorative Device, For the Baron, Postal Works, and his latest Recorded Delivery.  Those are the work titles of UK based artist Tim Knowles. You can pick up on the artist’s sensibility simply from those titles – simplified to bare bones – no more, no less. When I first experienced one of Knowles’ Nightwalks photographs at Bitforms Gallery, I was indeed speechless. One could easily muse at Knowles’ Nightwalks images and be inspired to write. Understanding the process behind this creation though, shows us a slightly different story. The artist uses all the natural elements as his materials, which forms a spontaneous and performative act. No, this has nothing to do with performance art, more like behavioral studies. Looking at Knowles’ body of work all together leaves me at this comfortable space that is somewhat ambiguous yet extremely familiar. Who would have the guts (or time) to wire-tap the inside of a package with audio/visual recording devices and send it off on a 902 mile journey?  I wouldn’t. It must’ve also required a period of trial-and-error before the package is ready to set off. The result, “an artwork which captures the topsy-turvy world of a parcel in the post.”  Recorded Delivery, created with permission from the Royal Mail, is currently on view at the Bitforms Gallery, NYC, until the 27th of May.

E3 3TT 18:21:41[E3-HS9

HW: I am fascinated by your Post Box project. It seems to be a progression from your previous Postal Works.  What is the inspiration that led to this entire series of work?

TK: I had been making drawings produced automatically by systems beyond my control, such as a series made by a pen suspended below a buoyant helium balloon which traced out the wind’s movements on paper. I was exploring different possibilities and began to think about ways in which the act out delivering an artwork might produce the work.  The postal drawing works and the vehicle drawings were conceived at the same time – the postal works particularly as a low cost and simple way of making a work for exhibitions further afield.  For my exhibition Music of Chance I drove down to Milan, Italy producing a drawing onto a roll of slowly moving paper in the back of the car. As I traveled the drawing recorded forces at work within the car as it drove along motorways, up and down mountain passes and around city streets.  Departing with a blank roll of paper a drawing is created over the duration of the journey, which maps the roads and traffic conditions with very distinct sections.

TK: Similarly, with the postal drawings, I seal a blank piece of paper into the parcel and neither myself nor the recipient (gallery / collector) knows how the piece will work out until it is opened when it arrives.  And with Post Box E3-HS9 when I downloaded the 20,000 images taken over its 902 mile journey there is a real sense of excitement to see what has been captured.I had been working with long exposure photography and experimenting with time lapse so Spy Box the first camera parcel was a logical progression.

HW: Do you plan to further develop it?

TK: Yes, and the crate work presented in the Bitforms 6th floor project space was a first step in that direction, but I don’t really want to give further developments away at this stage.

Recorded Delivery (Installation view), 2011

HW: A large part of your work seems to be based on the natural phenomenon of chance vs. control. Can you tell us a bit about working in this method?

TK: Akin to scientific experimentation, a situation is engineered and the work carried out – rules, limitations and boundaries may be set and to some extent affect the outcome of the work but with the exception of ending the experiment, I relinquish control. The work frequently utilizes tailor made mechanisms in its production, be they custom made parcels, weathervane helmets.

Roman Signer describes his practice as using actions (such as an explosion, a fall, etc.)  to sculpt  - cause and effect – he presents the results of actions. Similarly, my work presents the results of processes and experiments.  The situations I construct though carefully and genuinely adherent to the process are not scientifically rigourous and a multitude of external factors come into play.

My more recent works such as the Windwalks made in London are less predictable and allow for greater number of possibilities and outcomes, and a greater potential of the unknown for me the participant.  I set off guided solely by the wind venturing into unknown territory, the constantly changing wind is channelled, diverted and redirected or blocked and reversed by buildings, eddies shift, passing vehicles create air currents, etc.  The drawing produced as a part of the final work accurately maps my random meandering, which collides with the city’s structure and obstacles.

The Post Box work takes an image every 12 seconds. These images capture random moments, at times the parcel moves through the postal system, at others sitting still observing the system working around it. With works such as the tree drawings the outcomes are relatively predictable – clear connections, characteristics and patterns often existing between trees of the same species, though all the drawings differ.

Though notions around determinism, free will, chance, randomness and prediction are a significant aspect of the work, it is certainly not solely about these concepts.   The work does not assert a particular fixed position with regard to the concept of determinism,  certainly not a hard determinism incompatible with free will.  I’m currently developing works which explore the idea of the butterfly effect, and the way in which events are connected in an infinite global network of causes and effects, the world in constant flux.

Crate work #1, London - New York City, 2011

HW: Your Tree Drawings are delightful and hint at a playfulness that most of us as adults have forgotten. What influenced you to make this project?

TK: I think a sense of playfulness is very important and often goes hand in hand with a desire to explore, sadly can be looked down upon by some as connected to childishness. According to Stephen Nachmanovitch, play is the root and foundation of creativity in the arts and sciences also as in daily life. Improvisation, composition, writing, painting, theater, invention, all creative acts are forms of play, the starting place of creativity in the human growth cycle, and one of the great primal life functions. Play may also serve as a pretext, allowing people to explore reactions of others by engaging in playful interaction. Flirting is an example of such behavior.

Tree Drawing - Hawthorn on Easel #1, 2005

HW: What is your system of research, from concept to realizing an idea? Do you put aside project ideas and revisit them in the future?

TK: Ideas are refined and resolved over time until they are realised or not, as the case may be – in many cases there is a level of logistics, organisation, the production of mechanisms, before the project can be executed and/or realised. There are a number of different but connected strands running through my work be, it the mail art works, the Nightwalk photographs or the Windwalk series. There are connections between the strands – long exposure photography was used in my Insect flight paths, Full moon reflection photographs and in the night walks – which connects with the Windwalks and Restorative Device #1 and Suit which spills a trail of seeds as I walk through a barren landscape, creating a living trail. The notion of drawing a line, a pathway recorded is central to all of the work.

HW: What was the experience like producing the Nightwalk photographs?

TK: The Nightwalks are performed over a new moon so there is no moonlight. A large format camera is set up on a tripod looking out into the landscape, the shutter is opened and then I walk away from the camera into the dark night landscape carrying a number of very powerful flood light torches.  As I move through the darkness the lights illuminate the landscape revealing my path. Whilst one can see the ground within the bubble of light immediately around you – as I walk, my position in the landscape and orientation to the camera are steadily confused and I just try to follow the ridge I’m walking, a path or a compass bearing.

TK: For different works I have walked for between 45 minutes and an hour & a half, subject to the landscape and the camera’s view point.  When I reach the point that I want the walk to be finished or I’ve moved out of the camera’s view I turn off the lights and turn to the direction where I think the camera is, carefully retracing my steps in the dark until I can see a light signalling that the camera shutter has been closed by an assistant, I acknowledge with a signal back and then make my way back to the camera with a head torch. Each of the long exposure photographs takes 2 to 3 hours by the time I’ve returned to the camera and 2 or 3 walks are made each night.

Nightwalk - Valley of the Rocks #1

HW: Have you thought about other ways of capturing the light other than using photography, ie. shooting with video?

TK: I have looked at other ways of capturing light including video but photography also has the quality of being able to compress time into a single image often revealing things that weren’t apparent to the eye – the pattern of the full moon’s reflection on undulating water or an hours walk captured in one of the Nightwalk photographs.

HW: Your work addresses some environmental concerns (eg. the Seed Suit and Wind Walks), yet romanticized in its own right.  How do you feel about the environment that you’re living in now?

TK: Much of my work, particularly the Tree Drawings, Windwalks explore and investigate the natural world, drawing attention to it but without taking a political position. The new works made for the Horticultural Society introduce the notion of a restorative environmental gesture – I find the idea of restorative environmental design fascinating and something that will be required more and more if we are to preserve the world around us.

The world is changing fast, and in many ways that are deeply worrying – I feel that we need to pause, consider what kind of world we want to live in and change a lot of the values we currently hold.

HW: What are you reading these days?

TK: A little time back I read Our Ancestors – a collection of 3 great stories by Italo Calvino one being Baron in the trees from where the title for the Horticultural Society Exhibition originates.I’ve just started reading The Gift by Lewis Hyde.

HW: Any upcoming projects to share?

TK: I will be presenting a collaboration with Brazilian Artist Carlos Eduardo Costa (Cadu) at Galeria Vermelho, Sao Paulo in June – the project explores weather both on a local and global scale. There are others upcoming projects but they are staying under wraps at the moment!

(Images courtesy Bitforms Gallery)

(images courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art)

You probably already know about the relocation of the Whitney Museum to the Meatpacking in Chelsea. It’s a massive project that has been keeping the staff at the Whitney pretty busy for the past year. The new building is designed by the renowned Renzo Piano (the Centre Georges Pompidou is one of my favorite buildings).  Without doubt, the building will become an art piece in itself, situated at the foot of the Highline with Frank Gehry’s IAC building and The Standard Hotel looming above and behind. This new and very contemporary space will be an amazing backdrop to cutting-edge and dynamic works, that is able to use both indoor and outdoor mutli-layered spaces.  Although the new location officially opens in the Fall, this Saturday May 21st, the Whitney will be hosting a one-day fiesta to shake things up. Complete schedule of events below.

“The new building will include more than 50,000 square feet of indoor galleries and 13,000 square feet of rooftop exhibition space, providing long-awaited opportunities to show more of the Whitney’s unsurpassed collection of 20th- and 21st-century American art in tandem with cutting-edge temporary exhibitions.”

Brendan Fowler

Alex Prager

Eleanor Cayre
, Benjamin Godsill & 
Joel Mesler
Invite you to:
May 15th – June 10th
Wednesday – Saturday, 2PM – 6PM

Greater LA is the first ever survey to take place in New York of art being made in Los Angeles right now, and its massive – but sometimes under-acknowledged – impact on the global stage.  Filling a large industrial loft space in the heart of SoHo, Greater LA gathers the work of over 50 Los Angeles based artists who are setting the agenda for conversations about contemporary cultural production around the world.  Far from being a comprehensive view, Greater LA aims to be a selection of work as varied and idiosyncratic as the landscape from which it emerges.   Greater LA makes an argument for the vitality and urgency of art made in and influenced by the largest city on the Western coast of North America.

Organized by Eleanor Cayre, Benjamin Godsill, and Joel Mesler (a collector, a curator, and a gallerist respectively), Greater LA is the first large-scale exhibition highlighting art being made in Los Angeles right now as a subject worthy of examination.  While many of the artists included have exhibited in gallery and museum settings in New York, they’ve never been contextualized as a group that shares, however subtly, an identity based upon their geography.  Greater LA aims to be this contextualization, giving physical form to the oft-heard suggestion that the work made today in Los Angeles is some of the best in the World.  Works include sculpture, painting, photography, drawing, installation, video and performance; none seen previously and many newly conceived for this exhibition.

483 Broadway – 2nd Floor – NYC
www.greater-la.com

See the list of artists HERE

Judith Scott, Untitled, 2004. Courtesy of Creative Growth Art Center, Oakland

Create, an exhibition that highlights the extraordinary contributions of three of the leading centers for artists with disabilities in the United States: San Francisco’s Creativity Explored, Oakland’s Creative Growth Art Center, and Richmond’s National Institute of Art and Disabilities (NIAD Art Center). Curated by BAM/PFA Director Lawrence Rinder, with Matthew Higgs, director of White Columns, New York, the exhibition features over 135 works by twenty artists who have created artworks at these centers over the past twenty-five years. On view from May 11 through September 25, 2011, the exhibition features works by noted artists Judith Scott, William Scott, Willie Harris, James Miles, John Patrick McKenzie, Evelyn Reyes, Aurie Ramirez, and Dan Miller, among others.

“The artists featured in this exhibition—all of whom have some form of developmental disability—possess the talent, independence, and depth of feeling that makes the most powerful art possible,” says BAM/PFA Director Lawrence Rinder.

While the centers are independent of one another and have rarely collaborated, Creativity Explored, Creative Growth, and the NIAD Art Center have a shared history: all three were founded by two pioneers of the art and disabilities movement, Florence Ludins-Katz, an artist and educator, and Elias Katz, a psychiatrist. In the 1970s the Katzes developed an innovative new methodology for supporting artists with developmental disabilities. Their approach focused on a group studio environment, professionalism, and engagement with the broader art community. The San Francisco Bay Area, with its traditionally progressive attitudes towards the rights of disabled peoples, proved the perfect community for advancing these methods. Today artists at these three centers work daily alongside one another, create new works specifically for exhibition and sale, make frequent visits to local galleries and museums, and have regular access to artist mentors who assist them in developing new approaches and techniques.

There is no greater testimony to the success of the Katzes’ process than the extraordinary quality of art consistently being created at these centers. Clichés about how art by the disabled looks are quickly dispelled when confronted with the tremendous diversity of styles and approaches being deployed in Create. Willie Harris creates innovative abstract works in which thickly layered monochrome canvases are attached to one another to form a hybrid of painting and sculpture. Mary Belknap uses a variety of media—Sharpies, watercolors, pencils, and oils—combined with delicate repetition to create brightly colored patterns that seem to dance and move across, and beyond, the paper. Judith Scott created densely compacted sculptures from wool, rubber bands, and other media, evoking the shapes of rocks and chairs. In contrast, Carl Hendrickson’s large but spare wood constructions possess a fragile transparency while alluding to everyday objects such as tables, chairs, and flagpoles. Lance Rivers draws and paints from memory uncannily precise representations of Bay Area train stations, bridges, and other local landmarks. Meanwhile, William Scott’s ebullient portraits combine with inspirational text to evoke a brightly optimistic, utopian vision of San Francisco.

Complete details here.

The latest collaborative project by our previously featured artist Nico Muhly.

(courtesy La MaMa La Galleria)

Tracing the Unseen Border is an exhibition curated by Ian Cofre and Omar Lopez-Chahoud that takes a look at the dynamics surrounding the border between Mexico and the United States. Each of the participating artists critically engages questions about this imaginary line, some as a representation of the actual physical space that separates both countries, and yet is unseen by a large part of the nations’ populations. Others turn their focus to the social, political, and economic implications affecting those who are determined to cross it. Collectively, the artists begin to expose the broader context in which there has been a move to obscure the border. This tendency coincides with a political discourse and policies that have shifted to border security, immigration reform, and protectionism. The artists’ works will help reveal and unravel the interconnectedness of this contemporary landscape to those who may feel far removed.

Participating artists:

Alberto Borea, Monika Bravo, Tania Candiani, caraballo-farman, Sergio de la Torre, Blane De St. Croix, Ricardo Gonzalez, M & X, Teresa Margolles, Tom McGrath, Irvin Morazan, Richard Mosse, Alex Rivera, Javier Tellez, Patricia A. Valencia, Ishmael Randall Weeks, and Judi Werthein.

Curated by Ian Cofre and Omar Lopez-Chahoud

Tracing the Unseen Border

April 21 – May 22, 2011
La MaMa La Galleria
74A East 4th Street

Denver, Color Photograph, 2007

Artcards Review’s previously featured artist Xaviera Simmons has a show opening today at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery. “Wilderness” is on view through May 28, 2011.

(from the Press Release) Observations on natural and urban environments as they relate to social, political, personal and art histories set the stage for Simmons’ photographs. Alluding to traditions of American landscape painting and depictions of the human presence within it, carefully chosen scenery is employed as a hybrid, multivalent character harboring complex immigrant and migrant histories, an agent affecting and affected by the figures that inhabit it. Sages and nomads pose and roam through archetypal locales as conduits for the “nebulous” and “nonlinear” narratives embedded in the ground, allowing entrance into, in the artist’s terms, “other characters, narratives, and geographies.”

Hand-lettered, locally found wooden scraps affixed directly to the gallery wall comprise a sculptural installation of materials chosen for their ubiquitous use in vernacular signage worldwide. Simple painted signposts are re-imagined in a tangled matrix of fragmented, visually compelling text gleaned from notes, conversation, news articles, myth, folklore, poetry and literature, forming a disjointed tableau imbued with collective and personal memory. A lyrical, obscure landscape emerges from the cacophonous accrual of language, leaving accumulated association, conjured atmosphere and the uncanny to form meaning and perception.

Established or potential identities and histories are revealed to be as unstable as they are embedded, questioning notions of idealism and the fallibility of truth and falsehood. Reflecting on the ways photographers collect and own images, and how people define and are marked by their environs, Simmons offers a deluge of details in place of narrative to construct familiar landscapes from disparate parts.

Ben Frost, Daniel Bjarnason, Sinfonietta Cracovia with film manipulations by Brian Eno & Nick Robertson (Photos: Stephen Cardinale for Unsound Festival)

It has been a highly provocative and musically charged past week and a half. For those who have been following Artcards Review, I’ve been covering Unsound Festival 2011 here in NYC since its opening on April 1st.  And yesterday was the final wrap up of an entire week and a half of experimental music and sonic arts events. The shows were aesthetically diverse and seemed to have opened up new pathways for a lot of local sound art enthusiasts. Besides igniting interest through cross-cultural collaborations, audiences also got a chance to get a closer look at the artists’ practices through “conversations” during Unsound Labs. In retrospect, Unsound 2011 seemed to have a much less focus on electronic music per se, with a more diverse palette on genres ranging from Iceland’s Ben Frost and Sinfonietta Cracovia, to Lustmord and Deaf Center, both deep, dark, and ambient in its own ways, to the Bunker nights of techno music to the finale disco party by local hosts Kiss & Tell. Even though I wanted to attend it all (trust me, I penciled it all in my calendar), I would not have been able to write this recap if I did. But apparently Stephen Cardinale, Unsound’s official photographer shot through the entire week of events, and here it is below.

Ben Frost at Alice Tully Hall

Daniel Bjarnason and Ben Frost at Alice Tully Hall

Anna Zaradny at ISSUE PROJECT ROOM

HATI + Z'ev at ISSUE PROJECT ROOM

Deaf Center at Judson Church

Sinfonietta Cracovia at Judson Church

MERCE at ISSUE PROJECT ROOM

Morton Subotnick / Atom TM / Visuals: Lillevan at David Rubenstein Atrium, Lincoln Center

Morton Subotnick / Visuals: Lillevan at David Rubenstein Atrium, Lincoln Center

Robert Piotrowicz at Littlefield

Harald Grosskopf at Le Poisson Rouge

Lustmord at Abron Arts Center

http://www.unsound.pl/en

Unsound Festival New York is presented by Fundacja Tone, the Polish Cultural Institute in New York and the Goethe-Institut New York