Lili Reynaud-Dewar

Work from “Live Through That ! ?” at Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna.

“Lili Reynaud-Dewar’s first solo show at Galerie Emanuel Layr, “Live Through That ? !” is the first of a series of shows similarly titled. All the works in the show, ranging from sculptures, videos, sound pieces and performance documentation are also named Live Through That ? ! no matter their differences (and similarities). Indeed this is Reynaud-Dewar’s habit to name different works and shows with the exact same sentence for a certain period of time.

In 2013, she titled all her exhibitions and works “I Am Intact and I Don’t Care”, after a verse by Arthur Rimbaud in the poem Bad Blood. In 2014 it is “Live Through That ? !” after a text by american poet Eileen Myles which describes the activity of flossing as a kind of survival technique that allows the writer to think about life, death and the politics of the body.

A video opens the exhibition. It shows a black suited man carrying a mirror and walking through the snow-covered woods, his hands covered with black make-up. At times he stops to floss his teeth. Accentuated by progressive Techno music, the video increases its intensity by way of repetitive elements, both in the music and in the flossing scenes. Here we are facing some form of repetition of a daily mundane activity, but somehow at odds with normality.

In the second room, is a series of male suits pressed between glass, brutally fixed with duct tape and onto which are fixed photographs of dental anatomy. The sculptures show the inner and outer from human bodies. Without being able to characterize the person behind the glass, the suits function as stylized bureaucratic men without any personal character. Their slapstick and ridiculous poses seem to awkwardly mimic – or at least respond to – the agility of the artist’s dance performance, shown on a hanging screen in the middle of the room where these glass sculptures lean. In this video, Reynaud-Dewar naked, her body painted grey, and her hair dyed grey, impersonates the figure of Josephine Baker. She repeats the iconic’s dancer’s choreographies in the Logan Centre of Chicago, an art space where she just participated to a group show this winter. This video is part of a longer series, initiated in 2011, which serves both as documenting the artist’s circulation and life, as some sort of video journal, (she dances in most of the institutions where she gets to work or do an exhibition) but also the various exhibitions and typologies of art spaces she encounters (as well as -once again- their similarities) The artist once called this a form of “fidgeting and intimate institutional critique”…

In the final room, the “garage” named after its monumental metal door and functional beams, are five new sound-sculptures in the shape of miniature beds. Every single sculpture consists of a little bedframe, mattress and sheets, in which a speaker is incorporated. Again, this is a form of repetition (and degradation, the artist insists) since the miniature beds are reminiscent of Reynaud-Dewar’s previous sculptures of ink fountain beds, which she dedicated “to writers to make use of their own life in their work”. The sound consist of french writers Guillaume Dustan and Marguerite Duras devising mundane things such as their personal shopping lists and their maintenance of their homes. Here again, the mundane is at stake, but not necessarily meaning the normal. The music, composed by Nicolas Murer A.K.A Macon (just as in the first video on view), a collaborator of the artist, reinforces the feeling of repetition and exhaustion. Each speaker can be perceived on its own as much as the spectator gets closer to each little bed, but the work is also meant to be perceived as a whole, with voices, music and silences contradicting and covering each other. Which is somehow how one could perceive Reynaud-Dewar’s work in general : an assemblage of repetitions, stutters and contradictions.” – Galerie Emanuel Layr

Geoffrey Farmer

Work from “Let’s Make The Water Turn Black” at Kunstverein in Hamburg.

“Bettina Steinbrügge, the new director of the Kunstverein in Hamburg, is delighted to present the first solo exhibition in Germany by the Canadian artist Geoffrey Farmer.

The unique artistic practice of Geoffrey Farmer (*1967) has its roots in Dada, Happenings, performance and process-based works. It presents the possibility of alternate temporalities, reconfigures the opposition of the material and the conceptual, and embarks on the odyssey of performative meaning-making. After extensive research, the artist builds encyclopedias that unify aspects of visual art, literature, music, politics, history, and sociology.

The mechanical play Let’s Make The Water Turn Black, which is inspired by Farmer’s interest in Kabuki theatre, is populated with sculptures, some of which are kinetic, that perform the various acts in an ever-shifting, computer-generated score of lights and sound that play out over the course of the day. Using the life of Frank Zappa as a structuring device, the work progresses chronologically from 1940 to 1993, and employs various methodologies that have influenced Farmer: William Burroughs’ use of the “cut-up”, Kathy Acker’s employment of pastiche and Zappa’s own editing technique, Xenochrony, or strange time. The effect of this is kaleidoscopic, and allows the work to touch on disparate subjects, from Edgard Varèse to the L.A. Riots; from Pachuco music to nose picking. Algorithms and the ability for the score to improvise, makes experiencing the piece unique and unpredictable on each day.

Farmer’s work explores ideas and representations of power, freedom, and identity. It is rooted in the collaborative protest movements of the late 1960s. The way of being through music is actualized, re-presenting an anti-authoritarian perspective. The artist adjusts cultural history by breaking open temporality and chronology while mixing cultural forms. The liminal space between the outside world and the realm of art marks a point of transition for the visitor forming new pathways through music.” – Kunstverein Hamburg

Emanuel Röhss

Work from Knut Ljungfelt at Project Native Informant.

“A mellow lit high end Swedish restaurant interior, February, lunchtime.

Where the fuck is Beatrice?, Knut thought, starring at his Bovet Fleurier 46 watch through half closed eyes as he uncomfortably sat waiting at a corner table in restaurant KB downing a vodka tonic.

Waiter, another, he called out to no one in particular.

Beatrice walked in. White blouse underneath this season’s black denim Balmain jacket and tight ivory leather skirt. Her hair was extremely blonde, her eyes bright blue, framed by heavy dark eyeliner, she gave an aura of undeniable sensual confidence.

She was amused when she glanced at her waiting cavalier with his intensely arduous face.

You where supposed to be here 10 minutes ago!

My aerobics class with Daniel at the F&F went a little over. I always finish.

You’re never ever at the gym, if you went there it was to fuck your personal trainer

Don’t be jealous.

A bald waiter in all black appeared next to the table

Today’s lunch specials are a wild goose salad with caramelised cranberries, lemongrass and bourbon reduction, a Norwegian wild salmon steamed on a bed of seaweed with a gold extract and chili salt, a reindeer fillet with virgin asparagus and honey powder, or a….

Give us whatever is already on the plates over there I don’t care, and a Dom Perignon 1996 – in half a shake!

Someone could use some tranquilisers to bring down his coke hangover from last night…

Shut up! I need to be at Riddarhuset in 45 minutes, then I have an appointment with John from AFGX, and a conference call with LA and Hong Kong at the office, your unpunctuality doesn’t make things easier. And by the way why are you dressed like that?

Like what?

Slutty

I dressed as if I was going for lunch with you.

He blinked like a notorious epileptic as he was looking from the stucco ornaments in the ceiling to his beeping iPhone 5SX and typing something cryptic, then back at his Bovet Fleurier 46 and breathed heavily. In one motion, as the waiter came up from behind, he grabbed the Dom Perignon out of the shiny ice bucket and poured it’s content to the brim of their red wine glasses at a 90 degree angle making the liquid flow out over the edges to create a Jacuzzi of French sparkles on the white tablecloth. The bald waiter came in, this time carrying something looking like electrified chicken legs in pink dressing – the wild goose salad sir.

For a moment they silently starred at the fluorescent cadaver, then, obviously in an attempt to address Knut with something important Beatrice took on a face like the secretary opening a meeting at the chamber of commerce.

Your family expects us to announce our engagement before long.

No no no no he let out to the whole restaurant, not managing to meet her look as all his bodily capacity was consumed by trying to control a spasmodic reaction. Two seconds later a black Volvo limousine V90S appeared outside the window, he grabbed his iPhone 5SX and stood up

I cannot discuss this right now – I’ve got business to pursue! My team is operating like marines! We sail and we hunt. We can take anything.

Knut threw six 500 kronor bills into the Champagne Jacuzzi, gave out a loud unrecognisable muttering sound towards Beatrice, already in full motion he forgot his Samsoe and Samsoe coat on the hanger and just as the bald waiter started to open the entrance door, he ran through it and jumped into the car.” – via DUST Magazine

Katharina Fengler

Work from her oeuvre.

“…We probably could have a long conversation now about the terms “pure” and “authentic”. But I have to laugh a bit… did he mean by “vacuum” that he perceives a lot of contemporary art as empty and shallow? I think I understand to some extent what he means. And I can also relate to what you say about your work, but I find it difficult to try to describe this phenomena of collag- ing or sampling and these questions of pureness and authenticity through generalizing. To think of something as “pure” or “authentic” is also just a concept or an idea which means that in the end it is just a belief. One can believe a lot of things. If someone thinks pureness comes from knowing how to apply oil on a canvas, that is fine, if it serves some purpose. To me authenticity has more to do with trying to be true to oneself and knowing oneself (as good as one can), like the Temple of Apollo at Delphi suggests. But this is also just what I believe. In general I find it more important to become aware of one’s beliefs and not mistake them for the one and only truth. I also see that you and I already belong to a generation that is very much influenced by this overflow of information and malinformation through the internet. It seems that for our generation (and perhaps even more for the younger ones) it is just not very likely to stick to one medium and do the same thing over and over again, hoping to become a master in that field. There is just so much out there that is in- fluencing and interesting. It has also become a newer form of expression to touch all these interests on the surface without getting too deep into them. At the same time I am just thinking that this kind of practice isn’t at all that new, when I think of Paul Thek, for example. To me he actually stands for both – the romantic artist figure as well as someone who referenced a lot of different genres. I only see that some artists today are taking this wild mixture of references and materials to another extreme. Then again, I can appreciate the paintings that Jonathan Lasker makes, who has been doing the same kind of work for decades – but I would never be able to only work in such a way. I guess I am drawn to both, the “authentic-romantic-living-on-an-island-dwelling-on-escapism” kind of
artist figure and the shaken up A.D.D. kind of artist – the one who uses so many cultural references that everything starts to seem kind of random, and decoding becomes very difficult…” – Katharina Fengler excerpted from an interview with Vanessa Safavi.

 
Sarah Charlesworth

Work from her oeuvre.

“Ms. Charlesworth was part of a wave of talented artists, many of them women, who rephotographed existing photographs or dissected the medium’s conventions with staged tableaus. This work was an important step between the cerebral rigors of 1970s Conceptual Art and the more permissive image-play of 1980s Pictures Art.

Her Pictures Generation contemporaries included Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, Laurie Simmons and Ellen Brooks, as well as Richard Prince, James Casebere and James Welling. and she spoke for many of them when she told Bomb magazine in 1990, “I’ve engaged questions regarding photography’s role in culture for 12 years now, but it is an engagement with a problem rather than a medium.”

Ms. Charlesworth is probably best known for large, exquisite photographic works in which rarefied images — ancient masks, figures lifted from Renaissance paintings, disembodied Hollywood-starlet gowns — are isolated against fields of lush monochrome color. At once seductive and didactic, they compete with painting in visual strength, wink at advertising and slyly raise questions about cultural and sexual stereotypes, personal symbolism and the role of pleasure and beauty — in both art and life — as perhaps particularly female pursuits.” – Roberta Smith, NY Times

Erin O’Keefe

Work from The Flatness

“The title of this series of photographs refers to both the material flatness of the photograph itself, as well as the perceptual flattening of the still life space. The images in this series explore the tendency of the camera to flatten pictorial space, and as a result, foster ambiguous spatial readings. The still life arrangements are comprised of painted plywood boards, physical prints of Photoshop gradient patterns, and photographs. I am interested in the tension between the compressed space of the image and the visual clues that allude to the dimensionality of the still life. The camera is the agent of uncertainty that invites seeing as both an intimate and critical exercise.”

Nick Darmstaedter

Work from “Fuddruckers” at Bugada & Cargnel, Paris.

“For his second exhibition at Bugada & Cargnel gallery, Nick Darmstaedter (born in 1988 in Los Angeles, lives and works in New York) takes a look at the ultra-contemporary aspect of electronic spamming through a new series of oil and silkscreen paintings. The exhibition explores the notions of readymade and reappropriation, a thread that weaves through much of the artist’s work, questioning the aesthetic aspect of the most mundane contemporary productions. The title of the exhibition, Fuddruckers, is borrowed from an American fast food chain that tends to compensate for the lack of quality by quantity, just like spams. This reference immediately sets the show in an ambiguous relationship to a form of culture that is both massive and personal, despised and popular, oriented towards efficiency more than aesthetics, while possessing a certain beauty.

Electronic spamming appeared in the early 1980s, and has since burgeoned with the development of the Internet, gradually invading our mailboxes on a global scale. From the very beginning, it takes the name “spam” after the Spam® food product, a salty canned meat widely consumed during World War II, because it was a practical and economical source of protein for the soldiers.

Thanks to a 1970 Monty Python sketch, which mocks this product as unappetizing yet ubiquitous, the name was extended to the spam message. Indeed, the invasion of the world by electronic spam is what most characterizes this phenomenon: the facility with which this scam system spreads to massive amounts of email addresses explains the persistence of these messages until today, even though their efficiency may seem questionable. A range of fantastic promises emerges from the messages, offering simple and immediate solutions to basic desires: sexuality, health , travel, money. Even if they don’t systematically succeed in extorting our bank details, spam messages inevitably occupy a few seconds of our attention, an annoying presence we can’t escape, costing too much to an economic system that can’t afford wasting time.

For this exhibition, Nick Darmstaedter shows four oil paintings that meticulously reproduce the appearance of screenshots, popup messages, and email interfaces, playing with the contrast between the very slow traditional technique of oil and the rapidity with which these elements move from screen to screen. Enhanced and magnified, retrieved from their underground existence, the “spam paintings” reveal a cartography of anonymous and unfulfilled desires. They become the portraits of an era, as portraits of ancestors were kept in other times. In comparison, the plain text of the Scam Mail series,silkscreened directly on raw canvas, proves striking with its speedy execution. Under this new aspect, the spam messages seem to question their own raison d’être. Who still believes in their lies? Who gets caught up in their obvious traps? How has spamming been able to survive to its own saturation?

Paradoxically, while revealing the invalidity of spam’s content, the artist transforms them into images and reveals their formal beauty. Each screenshot is chosen for its aesthetics. In this case, Nick Darmstaedter has chosen simple, rudimentary designs that are already about fifteen years old – a time that the artist calls “the golden age of spam”, when he first encountered them, and perhaps believed they were real on this unique occasion.

Along with this series of spam paintings, Nick Darmstaedter presents sculptures that extend the theme of the trap through assemblages of disparate objects not without a hint of humor. Pickup wheels with chrome rims stuck in brightly colored security boots set on the floor like minimal sculptures. They seem stuck in their tracks, literally and in the search for aesthetic refinement. A giant game trap made out of everyday objects – a hammer, a fishing rod and a wire – embodies the notion of imminent danger and relates to the urban environment as an ecosystem, where someone’s misfortune makes another person’s happiness.” –  Bugada & Cargnel

Valerie Green

Work from Look Up at Charlie James Gallery.

“All the world may once have been a stage, but it is certainly now a screen. In her solo gallery debut at Charlie James, L.A. artist Valerie Green gives us a smartphone eye’s view of the sublime: the sky above our heads.

The nine images in the series “Look Up” were taken through the moon roof of the artist’s car, adorned with the phone’s screen protector, a slip of plastic that would be transparent were it not for the marks and scratches of restless fingers.

The skies range from gray and rain-spotted to blissfully blue, but the screen protector creates a ghostly image of the phone itself, something like a self-portrait. What’s more, Green has painted the prints’ frames to extend the edges of the image. We are increasingly aware of how what we see is filtered through multiple frames.

In the back room are three cellphone images of a computer monitor sprayed with screen cleaning solution. Like the raindrops on the moon roof, they are physical, not virtual phenomena, here lighted not by the sun but by the inner glow of pixels. It’s one computer literally “face-to-face” with another.

Then there is a large sheet of neon pink plastic that visitors can touch and “draw” upon. Like the screen protector and cleaner, the piece reminds us that no matter how absorbing our virtual worlds, we are still resolutely earthbound.” – Sharon Mizota for the LA Times.

Matter at New Shelter Plan

Featuring work from Caleb Charland, Matthew Gamber,Mary Voorhees Meehan, Johan Rosenmunthe, and Bill Sullivan.

“In cataloging technology’s effects on culture, Marshall McLuhan wrote, “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” The five artists adopts this observation as a motive to examine photography’s equal but opposing powers: The photograph aptly informs and misleads our perceptions of information and history.

The installation will be an amalgamation of individual studies. Artists will work, somewhat siloed from one another, not unlike scientists each to his station in the lab, investigating the paradox of the photograph. They will present the resultant videos, prints, and constellations of objects together, as a body of evidence.

Concurrent with the exhibition opening, the artists will release a book – another study – but this one worked on together, simultaneously. They will utilize Matter as a starting point. Published in 1963 as the inaugural title of the Life Science Library Series, and written by Ralph Eugene Lapp, a renowned Manhattan Project physicist, the book was designed to match the popular layout of Life Magazine, with a focus on educating readers on the wonders of physical world. The reconstituted book will echo the original thematic arc, but the new layout will be an augmentation of its default reading. The visual approach will maintain photography’s ability to illustrate ideas, rather than explain them.” – New Shelter Plan

Metahaven

Work from Black Transparencyat Future Gallery

“Metahaven’s practice entails research, design, and visual journalism engaging in intense relationships with the present. Their presentation at Future Gallery is also the first show at the gallery’s new space at Keithstraße 10, 10787 Berlin.

WikiLeaks scarves and t-shirts
Since mid-2010, Metahaven have undertaken a body of research that revisits the visual identity of the online whistleblowing platform WikiLeaks. With the nominal consent of its founder Julian Assange, this expansive design project has functioned on several fronts, at the heart of which is an investigation into the politics and aesthetics of transparency. Metahaven have sought to map the relations through which WikiLeaks functions, looking not towards the mechanics of its operations but to the media relations and reputational networks that have sprung up around it. The organization is constituted by a necessary sense of opacity—employed in order to offer anonymity to the whistleblower and abstract the leak from its source—while paradoxically asserting the principle of transparency. Within a number of propositions for revisions to the WikiLeaks identity, Metahaven references the image economy circulating around the organization, alongside the notion of “transparent camouflage” as both aesthetic gesture and political strategy.

Applying the visual syntax at work in their identity proposals, they have created a series of scarves and t-shirts, sold by WikiLeaks through both online and offline venues. WikiLeaks has been since a few years under a de facto financial embargo by MasterCard, VISA and PayPal, which prevents the site from receiving direct donations. Metahaven’s project functions as a platform for a polemical mode of commercial transaction.

Black Transparency
The WikiLeaks collaboration has led Metahaven to investigate a phenomenon which it calls “black transparency,” meaning the involuntary transparency invoked on organizations and nation-states by whistleblowers and hackers. Metahaven’s Black Transparency is a nomadic, re-iterating design project as well as a forthcoming book publication with the same title (Sternberg Press, 2014), focusing on the geopolitical aspects of this phenomenon.

The appearance and shape of black transparency is always changing to fit the legal and political loopholes of the states and entities whose legitimacy it opposes. It finds temporary homes in jurisdictional enclaves while forming short-lived informational tax havens. Because its architecture depends on acts of evasion, black transparency is not only transparent, but also black.

Black Transparency collectively explores and proposes potential designs of these evasive acts, and investigates the political mentality of a densely interconnected population whose principle instrument of freedom—the internet—defines at the same time its ubiquitous subjugation to abstract power. Included in the show is a video manifesto for the current generation of digital nomads; the video combines footage from anti-austerity riots in Athens with imagery from popular culture and of deserts—spaces which Metahaven views, metaphorically and literally, as blank canvases for a more distributed and decentralized network.

The project presents a series of Skype recorded video interviews with prominent internet activists, politicians, and academics, such as Smári McCarthy, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Alexa O’Brien, Amelia Andersdotter, and Gabriella Coleman, whose activities with Pirate parties and alternative software practices, lawmaking, and voting models point at both the re-decentralization and re-localization of now abstracted political and technological processes. Black Transparency further comprises of a set of proposals for data hosting in the form of utopian architectural models, one of which is a bedouin tent which will be on display in Future Gallery’s previous venue at Mansteinstraße.

For this show, Metahaven has also teamed up with fashion designer Conny Groenewegen to create a large garment in further pursuit of the connection point between fashion and information.”