Lorne Blythe

Work from his oeuvre

“Lorne Blythe uses the still life to investigate how photography has historically shaped and manipulated the way we see the world, and to transform simple structures into forms loaded with mental or metaphysical qualities. In his photographs of tooth brushes, white sugar cubes and pink Gillette razors piled before pastel studio backdrops, Blythe removes these industrial devices from their accepted context, transforming them into miniature sculptures.”

via Culturehall

Scott Reeder

Work from 365 Mission

“On view through March 16 at 356 South Mission Road, Scott Reeder has created something akin to the abandoned set of a film in process, which it may in fact be. According to IMDB, Reeder is in post-production on a film called Moon Dust starring some one named Tyrone Love. This show is comprised of clunky constructions of brightly colored space ship interiors that remind me of Flash Gordon and even its goofy porn film spoof, Flesh Gordon.

If Pee Wee Herman ever devised a space ship to transport him to the outer limits, it might look like this installation. Tangerine snack bar, lemony console, ultraviolet lounge with views of a galaxy far, far away. One wall is covered in large panels painted in atmospheric colors with a roller while other vibrant paintings offer hand drawn lists of names and ideas, many of them quite funny. “Lazy vs. Ugly” as a potential exhibition title? The sets have already been the background for Reeder and his brother Tyson Reeder’s performances but they activate the imagination even without the participation of the artist.”

text via Art Talk on KCRW

Sylvan Lionni

Work from his oevure.

“One particularly interesting aspect of Sylvan Lionni’s art is that he makes seemingly impersonal items feel personal. His is not the art of the hand-rendered, yet his sensibility is very much in evidence in his choice of materials, scale, craftsmanship, color, and probably minute details that are not even obvious to me. The choice of subject matter is extremely important – important precisely because it involves selections that might generally be considered unimportant, objects from daily life that could so easily be overlooked. The energy in the work emanates from the lavishing of crafted attention on such quotidian wallflowers.

The work also expresses a sharp awareness of the history of art. A sense of play is evident as things are presented to us in a traditional gallery or museum context. The objects seem to beg the question, “How do we compare to traditional paintings?”
I get such pleasure just saying what the subject matter of some of the works are: pieces of paper, rulers, and dust.

–B. Wurtz, February 2014

Sylvan Lionni’s practice continues to find resource in the notion of social geometry; the means by which we order our daily lives in response to the spatial and structural relationships that passively inform our thoughts, movements, and impulses. Fascinated by the overlooked details embedded in the American mundane, his work aims to qualify material, aesthetic, and conceptual properties within our revolving banality.

Lionni will present two new bodies of work. In a series of dust paintings, the artist has created a generative brand of trompe l’oeil that addresses the surface of a painting itself. Lionni starts with a dusty, industrial aluminum panel, photographs it, primes and prepares the ground, and then screen prints the image of dust onto the aluminum – a recursive gesture that points to the material bedrock of origin. In a series of ruler paintings, Lionni has meticulously recreated groups of framing squares by cutting, painting, and screen-printing steel in a process akin to industrial manufacturing. The artist takes the ruler as symbol and tool of both designer and engineer and transforms it into utilitarian artifice. The resulting paintings refer to the history of geometric abstraction and examine the porous boundary between image and object.” – text via Kansas Gallery

Aaron Garber-Maikovska

Work from “Being One and Then Sum“.

““Chopin’s small forms (nocturne, impromptu, waltz, mazurka, scherzo, ballade, prelude) are rooms, single-occupancy, open to hauntings.
Chopin assists my quest to imagine a vocation of pleasure, and to find value in the tiny, the out-of-date, and the wrong.”
– Wayne Kostenbaum: Hotel Theory, Brooklyn, 2007

“Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.”
– Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red, New York, 2013

Think of a colour. It could be any colour (I am thinking about breakfast and hence thinking of the yellow of egg yolk, but that is insignificant; you’re free to choose something else). Think of just the colour itself: its hue, its vibrancy and its depth. Then think of a line that makes enough curves to give this an appearance of a face. Then think of another line that is trying to cross and cancel that out. Then think of a third line that is annoyingly close to being a letter without being one. Then think of all of these things at the same time.

I am trying, but my concentration is poor. I am traveling. I am sitting at the desk in my hotel room. It is too small, even after I have put all of the brochures, the hotel stationery, and the various glossy cards to greet me in the drawer. I have turned off CNN. I have tidied the room. I have put the “Do Not Disturb” sign on my door knob. Yet, I am too painfully aware of this being a place of not belonging and of not working. “The nature of a hotel room, uniform, can´t be determined by its occupant”, as claimed by Wayne Kostenbaum. “The hotel room’s fixed structure enforces the inhabitant’s passivity.” Like the minibar itself it is a place of minimum needs and maximum compromises. And, to make matters even worse, I just leafed through the weekend edition of the New York Times and ended up reading an article in T Magazine about writers and the rooms where they do their work. The imperfections of this interior are even further exposed. “I spend much of my time gazing out of the window of any writing space I have inhabited”, says Joyce Carol Oates and turns away from her Macbook to face the photographer for the portrait shot. There is snow on the trees outside her window. There is a restaurant named “Big China” facing my window.

I draw the curtains and think that not only am I missing a view, but that I am also missing a view of the works that I am supposed to write about. Instead there is a framed print of a sailboat above my desk. It is in the middle of Germany. Both me and the sailboat are a tad too far from home. I imagine that a work of Aaron Garber-Maikovska would not only help me here but make good companionship in any room intended for writing – that and a view. He equally lacks the latter (his studio has skylights), but faces the opposite problem when it comes to the former: there are too many of these works keeping him company. His most recent group of paintings – executed in ink and pastel on gator boards – so easily smear with contact, and it is not possible to store them or stack them unless you frame them. Hence, they are all present, and like an audition line for a TV talent show, they wrap around one corner after the other with various degrees of hope and signs of artistic ability. With this constant confrontation of the many stages the series has moved through and assurance in the words by Bruce Nauman – that “An awareness of yourself, comes from a certain amount of activity” – Aaron Garber-Maikovska attempts to move further. Always restarting same way: upper left corner; lower left corner; switch off the GPS (read the traffic and terrain); make it back to the top of the board and its upper right corner. The ink seeping into the gator board, leaving a faint line but enough of trace evidence.

Garber-Maikovska’s movements are both utterly mechanical and unavoidably meaningful. As inane as these paintings might appear, any attempts at gestural abstraction inevitably invites an investigation of meaning and possibly also an exhaustion of such. Doubling in terms of gesture, Garber-Maikovska applies pastel on top colours of the ink in his paintings. Even in the cases where he is using the ink lines to trace his colours the consequence is a dissonant layering, a certain stumble, stutter or desynchronization. The pastel is rubbed out and another layer of ink and pastel goes on top; further adding in terms of rhythm and repetition, and once again fading in and out of sync. This switching between syncopation and in-syncopation brings to mind the modulation and movement of his performance-based video works and earlier text-based works. The former – this exhibition contains three recent videos: “Target Tree”, “Cabazon” and “Fast Red Robin” – sees the artist engaged in a semaphore of movement and a mapping out of the interior where the film is shot. The other works would have him flex, fold and force an abstraction of language. As would be the case in the work from 2009, “Always Quoting Emily Dickinson”, where the title is the very same set of words uttered over and over again. Each repetition is seeking to find its own pace and pitch while nevertheless stating the same, until the words and the viewer are equally exhausted and language turns liquid. As pointed out by curator Catherine Taft: “by riffing on the rhythms and textures of words, he is able to slacken their meanings, test their parameters and unhinge them from our more concrete systems of exchange.” Or, as stated by Jan Tumlir: “No particular urge to make effects that might otherwise predominate. No particular urge to make oneself understood or, conversely, to thwart understanding drives this work; rather, the point is to suspend any such readings on our part in favor of accessing language in a state of emergence.” Possibly taking shape of a letter, a sign, a portrait, a cartoon strip, or as calligraphy, these paintings end up resembling the form and function of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs where a stylized picture of an object could equally represent a word, syllable, or sound. Like the minibar being both the symptom, solution and surrender, they all collapse in one. On my way out I notice that the wall across the corridor has two of the same framed sailboat prints stacked on top of each other. They are heading in different directions; even the draft of the hotel corridor got it wrong.” – STANDARD (Oslo)

Anna-Sophie Berger

Work from KE-17 JIGSAW KE-03 LARGE PINKING KE-24 SCALLOP KE-16 POSTAL

“The same images that are made into photographs are also reproduced onto silk scarfs of the exact same size. The difference between the two objects lies within their haptic reality, their ideal value in terms of fashion versus art, merchandise versus edition, handcrafted versus manufactured, static versus the mobile possibilities of site – a scarf and an image.

In marketing, colors are used as means of distinction, as well as to create an elaborate ordering of the needs of any given consumer—the possibility of choice, red over green. Hard, medium, soft, ultraflex.”

Like a Virgin @ VI, VII.

“This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream…i

Before arriving at the cloudberries and crème, the fluffy desert of choice that completes the holiday meal here, one must endure a traditional Christmas Norwegian dinner that is all about survival.
Two of the most popular dishes to mark this event are meant evoke the hardships of times past, and both are borrowed from a time when living in the mountains and making it through the next few months meant the key concept of preservation: getting what food you had in the autumn to keep you fed until the spring.

Out of this concept, comes Lutefisk. A transformative event in which whitefish, first meticulously dehydrated with Lye, is bloated back to life, and sits in a jellied state, quivering next to a side of peas and gravy. On other tables and other plates for example, Pinnekjøt, or dried sheep’s ribs, evoke the biblical story of an infant revered by shepherd men of modest means.

Interestingly enough, despite all of this moderation, the partaking of lutefisk became most popular as a holiday tradition in the noughties, and consumption rose by 72% between 2005 and 2008, years that were, at least economically speaking, fairly cushy times.

Was this deep reach into the past a form of soul-searching? A ribbon, nervously tying us to the past? What prompted the rise of reconstituted fish as a symbol of the hard working and innocent days of old? Was it the mere austere tendency of the melancholy protestants, or something more contemplative that allowed this delicacy to appear as the holidays’ more modern logo?
____________

‘Like a Virgin,’ VI, VII’s eleventh exhibition, takes various positions around gallery economies, newly built architecture and the gallery’s recent move from cellar to storefront.

Some works engage with the ‘shop’ aspect of the gallery’s new location, by presenting cash and carry commodity structures while others deal simply with cash…” – VI, VII

via Contemporary Art Daily

Tilman Horning

Work from his oeuvre.

“The central component of the work
Before and After: An image about potential
Before and After: about the ideas motivation
Before and After: I am familiar with mandarins
Before and After: December, November, October
Before and After: the central component of the work
Before and After: I am familiar with potential
Before and After: about the image, idea, work
Before and After: I am well as web based works with mandarins
Before and After: the best part: there’s no extra potential
Before and After: A image about central components” – Tilmin Hornig


George Henry Longly

Work from “Hair Care” at Jonathan Viner, London.

“Whoever thought that Samson’s power would be in his hair? Not Delilah, or anyone else for that matter. A magnificent Biblical warrior, with superhuman powers, Samson tore a lion limb from limb with his bare hands with the help of his magical hair, but without it, he found himself to be utterly average. Hair is primarily an accessorial human feature: a way of wearing identity even on a naked body. It is soft and flexible, yet strong – one strand of human hair, should, according to shampoo commercials, be able to bear the weight of an egg. It is also the part of the human body that is approached most like a sculptural material – shaped with the hands into sculptural weaves, slick wetlooks and power bouffants.

The tradition of magic potions and spells lives on today in the world of beauty products, particularly those that are ascribed with magical properties that promise to revive the body’s fading powers. George Henry Longly’s recent marble sculptures, each of which is a standard size of 160 x 110 x 55 cm, carved with au courant phrases, acronyms and dates, are also regularly inlaid with exactly this type of mythic beauty product. Yves St. Laurent’s iconic make up product Touche Eclat, a golden wand receptacle that contains a ‘touch of light’ for disappearing dark circles around the eyes, appears several times, as does Rogaine, a product that promises to bring back lost hair. These potions work via a combination of materials and faith, and are invested in by those who fear giving up the powers that they draw on from bright skin and thick hair.

The conferring of power and desire onto bodies and objects is a recurring concern in Longly’s latest series of works, a trinity of vitrines, in which softness and liveness is repeatedly turned into permanence. Longly has also transformed a living body into a museum object via a casting process. The intimacy involved in the process of casting an attractive body is subverted by the holding of the resultant cast behind glass, resting on a garment from Issey Miyake’s Pleats Please line in a vitrine that is close to a coffin. As with the artist’s work in marble, the ephemeral is made permanent, encased in loaded materials and displayed. The price we pay, however, is that we are not granted to touch this body: important, powerful objects here are kept away from grubby, lascivious touch of hands and fingers. We can vicariously touch objects such as meteorites and helmets, however, in a second vitrine, via live geckos, who are able to stick to objects via electrostatic attraction, thereby entering into a closer, and more intimate relationship with objects than we can ever hope to have. The third vitrine contains an abstract hangerlike sculpture that Longly created from his sketch of an ancient statue of a hermaphrodite that he saw on a visit to Rome.

Longly’s treatment of materials of levity and those of gravitas is equally reverential, and keeps them away from the clamor and mess of the everyday. However they exist in a reverential space that is somehow half serious. Though we can’t touch anything behind the glass, we can sit on the vitrines like they don’t mean a thing. Reptiles climb over precious objects while sculptures are dressed up with nowhere to go, giving a sense of both the genuine power of self-image, and its vulnerability to vanishing into nothing. ” – Jonathan Viner

Simon Denny

Work from “Disruptive Berlin”.

“The title “Disruptive Berlin” uses a term that is commonly applied in this context to game-changing businesses. A great startup will always aim to “disrupt” an existing industry. An obvious example of this is how Apple “disrupted” the mobile phone industry with the iPhone in 2007. That product completely changed an entire market and made all other players at the time totally irrelevant. So “Disruptive Berlin” is a portrait of a highly motivated community intent on changing the way commerce (and life) is done in Berlin and around the world.

The exhibition is an exploration of what this community produces culturally, the values, the rhetoric, the images, and visual content they transmit.”- Simon Denny

Greatest Hits

Work from Idle Resources at Tristian Koenig.

“Tristian Koenig is delighted to present Idle Resources, Greatest Hits first solo exhibition with the gallery and the first exhibition of the

2014 season. Idle Resources engages with the fallout of the attention economy. It reflects on the extremes of cognitive connection and

disconnection, focus and distraction, within our highly mediatized society.

Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies

economic theory to solve various information management proble ntemporary [sic] consumption.

For the exhibition, Greatest Hits will present three suites of new work that probe different areas of the attention economy – from the

aesthetics of acoustic damping and pharmacological treatment of attention deficit disorder (ADD), to a soliloquy on the pervasive

presence of screen-mediated experience.