Jonas Lund and Anika Schwarzlose

Work from Colourful Pieces of Sky.

“The work is a participatory exploration of the relation between objects, images and semantics on the internet. We created a small platform that serves as our set up model, an engine constantly browsing the image sharing platform flickr, extracting the latest photgraph that’s tagged with “sky” and displaying the result on the website colourfulpiecesofsky.com – the outcome is a piece that’s forever changing its visual appearance. Sometimes subtle, sometimes radical changes, which altogether reveal operational modes of communication, emerging semantics and image mediation strategies. Photographers all over the world are contributing content to create a shifting, and unpredictable, impermanent but ongoing visual experience. To participate visitors can take an image of the sky, upload it to their flickr account and then tag the image with “sky”. The webpage updates every 5 seconds and always displays the latest image added.” – Jonas Lund and Anika Schwarzlose

Jeff McLane

Work from his oeuvre.

“My current body of work is an on-going project focusing on image capture technology and photo abstraction. As my previous projects have focused on social landscape, my new project uses a more camera-controlled environment, producing a non-serial body of work – a first for myself. Utilizing image subjects such as: photographic equipment, graffiti-wore automobiles and abstracted nature scenes, these inanimate photographs display a shift of focus in the individual objects, creating a new function from their original intent. The linkage of these images stem from their reconstructed nature and represent the physical abstraction of photographic works containing power to repurpose its own content.” – Jeff McLane

Neil Clements

Work from Bad History.

“There are bubbling-under theatrics in this solo exhibition by Neil Clements. A recording of a grandiose synthetic organ refrain plays on a loop, aurally filling the warehouse gallery space as it circles the pitched ceiling, whistling into the decayed holes in the roof and reverberating in the invasive foliage growing through the gallery’s partially rotted walls. In the subtly disturbing context of the sound piece and venue, the Scottish artist’s installation feels akin to a dystopic cathedral of the future, in which three 1.5-metre-cubed steel sculptures, each raised on breezeblocks and with a spray-painted colour gradient applied to the surface’s utilitarian patterning, come across as venerated idols.

In many ways this reverence could be seen as a specifically masculine one suggested by the historical machismo of Minimalism and Clements’s specific use of building hardware: the sculptures are made from industrial treadboard sheets (commonly used in nonslip flooring) and paint applied via automobile body spray. Accompanying all this is a small framed photograph on the far wall, past a short step up to a permanent raised area in the depths of the building. This altarpiece depicts the space prior to the show’s installation, in which the since-removed words ‘bad history’ were painted (in the sort of typography that was used in mid-twentieth century science-fiction films to denote the future) on the same wall where the snap now hangs.

It is an evocative site-specific setup. One that moves the cube sculptures on from their formal lineage to 1960s ‘finish fetish’ and imbues them, beyond materiality, with a myriad of literary reference points. It’s a further use of a strategy employed previously by Clements in a series of electric guitar-shaped matt painted canvases, which similarly paired the stark essentialist quality of Minimalism with some kind of greater signifier. In that case the nihilism of metal music and here, in the context of Bad History, the cultism of religion and transcendence. The strange, alienating cubes are literally elevated, and the placement of the photographic work suggests that one should genuflect before it. The treadboard material has been usurped, stripped of its utility, dehumanised; this, combined with the derelict state of the gallery space (soon to be demolished, along with the adjoining Woodmill studios, to make way for a housing development), disquietingly imply human vulnerability in relation to the material object. Clements seems to be bringing the fetishisation of things to its logical conclusion, placing them as the subject of almost religious veneration, questioning what might happen when the balance of power between object and humanity is irretrievably destabilised. The soundwork, confidently blaring out one moment, abruptly stops before automatically replaying itself, suggesting that human, and specifically male, devolution of power to technology – allowing it to regulate modern existence, whether via computers, in the robotic production lines of car plants or in the prosaic protective qualities of the industrially produced treadboard – is misplaced at best, and dangerous at worst. ” – Oliver Basciano for Art Review.

Chris Basmajian

Work from I Need Some Space to Think (at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts through September 4th).

“Chris Basmajian is a new media artist who creates provocative interactive sculptural works that utilize custom computer software and proximity sensors to generate a dialogue about humanity’s elusive search for knowledge and truth. For his exhibition at the DCCA, the artist focuses on the subject of space as a site for a philosophical discussion of vision, systems of knowledge, and information. He specifically probes astrology, astronomy, and the media’s representation of information to literally and metaphorically depict hindsight, reality, superstition, and hubris through the medium of technology, mirrors, and distorted screens. Basmajian also exploits photography and video-projection as devices to re-frame our image of space, from the psychological to the intergalactic. Rather than accepting received wisdom—from zodiac readings to NASA’s space program—the artist draws upon electronic and imagebased media to query the personal and cultural motivation to interpret the stars or tame the “wild” universe. In a larger sense, Basmajian allows us to visualize human folly from the privileged perspective of the present, reminding us that truth is subjective and perpetually shifting in time.” – Maiza Hixson, Gretchen Hupfel Curator of Contemporary Art

Rémy Markowitsch

Work from Spirit.

“The sheer quantity of this extraordinarily extensive private collection gave Rémy Markowitsch a point of reference for his own work, in which he also addresses the theme of excess and the phenomenon of manic enthusiasm. With an explorer’s thirst for knowledge, Markowitsch has combed through, brought to light and reinterpreted many of the traces left in the Coninx Villa by those who once lived there and by the art they collected. One fundamental aspect of his approach lies in his handling of light. Rooms as bright as day alternate in a crescendo and diminuendo of light with dimly lit spaces and still others that are shrouded in darkness. This score of light and dark not only influences and interprets the effect of the works presented in these rooms, but also points up the architectural changes to the building. In 1997 the dark wood-panelled rooms were transformed into light, understated exhibition spaces.”

A Rod Stewart Little Richard Prince Charles Manson Family (collaboration with, Carson Fisk-Vittori, Derek Frech, Justin Kemp, Joe Lacina, Josh Pavlacky, and Daniel Wallace).

Work from their exhibition at LVL3.

Fruits of a connected and continuous collaborative consciousness, A rod stewart little richard prince charles manson family is the collaborative effort of six artists working in three different states, communicating ideas over the web through images and conversations. The culmination of this conversation is a physical diagramming of current events, physical incongruities, and a questioning of the present. Opportunities for thought, verbal pandemonium, favoring flavors, and competing hierarchies, are some, but not all, of the ingredients that have produced what has become the punctuation of a six-headed run-on sentence.

Krystina Naylor

Work from her oeuvre.

“I tend to work in sculpture as its initial function is to inhabit the third dimension, as do you, its viewer. Either the object its self or its situation should feel slightly odd.

A paradoxical & circular concept aims to contradict the original object’s purpose. The sculptures refer back to trompe l’oeil, aim for dimensional disruption and ask for particular viewpoints.

Ultimately, they attempt to dissolve space through surface but still anchor themselves within a conceptual language; which in some way or another connects them to their predecessors as well as their immediate environment.” – Krystina Naylor

via Today and Tomorrow.

Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhard)

Work from Inferno Observatory.

“Inferno Observatory is a multi-channel moving image work that explores our complex relationship with natural phenomena. During a fellowship at the Mineral Sciences Laboratory in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC, Semiconductor unearthed a 16mm volcano film archive shot by volcanologists in the field, it reveals spectacular occurrences and curious, obsessive and sometimes absurd processes of observing and studying volcanoes.

In the work, these films have been re-contextualised to emphasise and examine three distinct relationships; the erupting volcano as all-powerful and humbling the spectacle as people gather to watch in collective amazement, photograph and be photographed and the taming of the volcano through scientific probing, measurement and human endeavour.” – Semiconductor

via Rhizome

Felice Varini

Work from porta trapezi aperti.

“My field of action is architectural space and everything that constitutes such space. These spaces are and remain the original media for my painting. I work „on site“ each time in a different space and my work develops itself in relation to the spaces I encounter.

I generally roam through the space noting its architecture, materials, history and function. From these spatial data and in reference to the last piece I produce, I designate a specific vantage point for viewing from which my intervetion takes shape.

The vantage point is carefully chosen: it is generally situated at my eye level and located preferably along an inevitable route, for instance an aperture between one room and another, a landing… I do not, however, make a rule out of this, for all spaces do not systematcally possess an evident line.

It is often an arbitrary choice. The vantage point will function as a reading point, that is to say, as a potential starting point to approaching painting and space.

The painted form achieves its coherence when the viewer stands at the vantage point. When he moves out of it, the work meets space generating infinite vantage points on the form. It is not therefore through this original vantage point that I see the work achieved; it takes place in the set of vantage points the viewer can have on it.

If I establish a particular relation to architectural featers that influence the installation shape, my work still preserves its independence whatever architectural spaces I encounter. I start from an actual situation to construct my painting. Reality is never altered, erased or modified, it interests and seduces me in all its complexity. I work „here and now“.” – Felice Varini

via Today and Tomorrow.

Min Jeong Seo

Work from Summe im Augenblick.

“…There are different ways for the perception and understanding of time. Time is a construct but also a factor governing our social life. In physics time can only be now-time, it simply is present. In contrast subjective experience of time may be very different. For example the sense of time while waiting for something or how time perception differs for younger or older people. As we speak of the past, the present, the future the meaning of life becomes part of the question. Where do we come from? Where are we headed to? In that context Min Jeong Seo points out the buddhist notion to understand time as a sequence of moments. Each point in time holds a certain meaning and represents a fraction of the whole. According to this conception the explosion tears a hole in time. It is not the form that got lost but time itself.

The explosion itself cannot be seen but only its effects. The instant of the explosion constitutes an annihilated fraction of time as well as the disintegration of that space in its previous form. The frozen mass of ruins represents an image of the incident, it reflects the energy of the explosion. In that sense the ruin of the hall conveys the idea.” – Min Jeong Seo