Ryan Mandell

Work from Social Velocity @ Redux Contemporary.

“The psychological state of a society, its tendencies, hopes, and fears, are illuminated by the structures it chooses to create, and the ways in which those structures are used. Architecture is initially born from, and dictated by human need and desire. However, once a structure is complete and comes into use, it assumes a life of its own and begins to impress itself on the individuals that encounter it in unforeseen ways. My sculpture consists of scaled down and streamlined versions of existing architectural forms that are either re-contextualized or re-presented in such a way that architecture’s social influence (or potential for social influence) becomes more evident.

The study of contemporary architecture in developed or developing countries reveals universalities that exist throughout humanity (regardless of nationality, race, or geographical location). These repeated formal choices in architecture around the world betray a set of universal concerns and desires: modularity, order, efficiency, and convenience. The sculptural objects I create call into question the validity of adopting these characteristics as ideals. ” – Ryan Mandell

Doug Wheeler

Work from his oeuvre

“As a pioneer of the so-called “Light and Space” movement that flourished in Southern California in the 1960s and 1970s, Wheeler’s prolific and groundbreaking body of work encompasses drawing, painting, and installations that are characterized by a singular experimentation with the perception and experience of space, volume, and light. Raised in the high desert of Arizona, Wheeler began his career as a painter in the early 1960s while studying at the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts) in Los Angeles.” - David Zwirner

via The New York Times

Magdalena Jetelova

Work from her oeuvre

“Magdalena Jetelova used illuminated lines to expose communication structure of the landscape; Crossing King’s Cross – she uses lights to map out the future path of a train route as well as natural changes (in the Island Project / Islandský projekt – she enlists lasers to draw attention to the undersea intercontinental divide (mountainscape). In her geographical project, Songline 75° 36‘52‘‘ (1998) contemporary localization techniques are used to join two spots on the earth. This is possible thanks mainly to use of the imagination stemming from local traditions.” - Lenka Dolanová.

via Triangulation Blog

Andrew Lacon

work from A Magnitude in Albion

“Andrew Lacon’s work studies social class; that relentless – but of course not exclusively – English concern. Originally from Dudley and a working class family, the artist has found himself studying from within, whilst seemingly railing against, a series of now predominantly middle class art schools during the last six years. First at the University of Plymouth, then at the Royal College of Art, Lacon has received the ideal training in photography: being taught by such influential characters as Jem Southam and Olivier Richon. His practice draws from personal experiences, a kind of critical reflection on his own inquisitiveness and seeming discomfort with the education he has received, and the places it has led him to – South Kensington for example, where the RCA is, for now, situated. The result of Lacon’s important enquiry is a body of work that asks the question: How can I operate within a discourse that is fundamentally bourgeois (the majority of the art world, at least as it appears to us), whilst retaining my identity and working class upbringing? Or to put the question in another form: In precisely what way does what I now produce as an artist, communicate itself with where I am from; my sense of place; my heritage; my class – and as the exhibition’s title alludes to, my nationality?” -Daniel Campbell Blight

via OUTPOST

Andrea Galvani

Work from Higgs Ocean.

“The Higgs Ocean series documents a unique project staged off the coast of the Svalbard Islands in the Arctic Circle. It required the collaboration of a research institute, two scientists and a crew of 16 people, and was born out of four months of study and preparation with a group of New York-based Russian engineers. Over the course of the 2,800 km sail, the artist used two photovoltaic panels to collect and store the natural energy of the limited daily sunlight. He used the accumulated energy to power a flashlight capable of projecting a beam of light over 100,000 ANSI lumens strong. The beam cracked through the Arctic landscape like a bolt of lightning and pierced through the Earth’s atmosphere; within a few minutes, the luminescent memory of the artist’s journey had been returned to the universe. Each photograph in the series records a singular moment in this transfer of energy; they are only simulacra of a process that continues—segments of an infinite vector.” – Andrea Galvani

Cynthia Daignault

Work from her oeuvre.

“…Daignault’s paintings, or visual tautologies, are rendered in a not-quite photo-realistic manner – akin to that of, say, Vija Celmins or Luc Tuymans. They include depictions of analogue and digital projection equipment (e.g. slide projectors, overhead projectors, video projectors, etc.) that are paired with painted representations of their projected images. For example a painting of an overhead projector is paired with a painted image of a projected text taken from Beckett’s ‘Molloy’. These paired canvases, installed in direct formal relationship to one another, establish plausible but unstable illusions.

Daignault’s paintings amplify the sense of artifice inherent not only in the presentation of art but also with regard to painting’s own slippery relationship with reality itself. In other works, such as her painted takes on iconic modernist furniture – of the kind still to be found in certain gallery and museum settings – Daignault amplifies, and gently subverts the aesthetic codes and social hierarchies associated with these universal symbols of good taste.

Taking the potential of mimicry to its logical conclusion Daignault has painted, to scale, a version of White Columns’ ‘Bulletin Board’ project space. Daignault’s painted version has temporarily displaced the actual bulletin board that is usually to be found in the gallery’s lobby area, creating in turn a kind of aesthetic ‘double-take’ that plays on the visitor’s own relationship with White Columns’ history and its programs…” – White Columns Gallery

Markéta Othová

Work from her oeuvre.

“Marketa Othova’s large-scale black-and-white photographs are exhibited as suites of images that create a lyrical narrative of nomadism, charting her travels between her native Prague and cities beyond. They are captured moments of transit: a glance from the window of a car or a train or a moment caught while quickly moving through the open landscape or absentmindedly walking a city street. The surface of reality, captured and frozen in the photographic image, gives Othova a rich base upon which to create seemingly subconscious but highly evocative snapshot reminders of a past which seems only just beyond the reach of personal memory.” – Jiri Svestka Gallery

via VVORK.

Amalia Pica

Work from her oeuvre

“What, asks Pica, makes an image nostalgic? Is it a false memory of a time never even experienced or the patina of patchy historical accounts? Pica repeatedly wonders how we can ever retrieve or even accurately recount an occurrence. The tendency to abbreviate and reach for surrogates or approximations renders precise representation impossible, but the consequent displacement of detail, accuracy and subjectivity is not to be lamented, as it is a symptom of reaching out and sharing information.” – Frieze Magazine

Eric Fleischauer

Work from his oeuvre.

“Working mainly in video and sculpture with drawings, photographs, websites, artist books, and curated projects surfacing from the concepts that guide his work, Eric Fleischauer uses these various forms to investigate the position(s) and influence(s) that technology holds in society on both the individual and cultural level.

…

Fleischauer pushes the most basic of elements inherent to video media such as the single take or the rejection of post-production special effects to produce minimal videos that retain a “truth.” Folded into these pieces is a further layer of materiality, where certain objects are emphasized within the context of video, particularly other forms of technology like hand-held communication devices and televisions. Tapping into the formal language of video allows Fleiscahuer to remix and reorder the expansive lexicon included in the semiotics of television, film, and video to respond to its advancements, slippages, and history in order to question and challenge those changes.

Engaging the viewer in a close read, the work in POST-CURSOR invites the audience to connect to the work through the recognition of and access to the hand-held as it is melded or encoded with digital information. A hand-bound stashbook (in collaboration with Susannah Kim) hides hidden text, a video documents the deletion of coded personal information, and a series of slow, transforming images re-visualizes “truths.”” – via Three Walls

André Hemstedt & Tine Reimer

Work from Konstruktion von Bewegung (Construction of Movement)

“On the actions and perceptions of people in an equilibrium system

Denotes the equilibrium state, the balance in the forces acting on a system with each other. This state remains stable as long as he is not disturbed by external influences. The concept of balance can be applied to different systems – for example, physical, political, political, economic, social and environmental. Man can because of his understanding of system relationships in the direct- acting weight. Its scope is not unlimited: Has a system located in an unstable equilibrium state too far from its rest position, it is only possible with considerable effort to restore this state. Based on the present and anticipate, Piert climatic events, the work deals with the action and the perception of people in an unstable equilibrium system.” – André Hemstedt Tine & Reimer, Thesis (translated via Google)