NONOTAK

Work from Daydream V.2.

“DAYDREAM is an audiovisual installation that generates space distortions. Relationship between space and time, accelerations, contractions, shifts and metamorphosis have been the lexical field of the project. This installation aimed at establishing a physical connection between the virtual space and the real space, blurring the limits and submerging the audience into a short detachment from reality. Lights generate abstract spaces while sounds define the echoes of virtual spaces. Daydream is an invitation to contemplation. The frontality of the installation leads the visitors to a passive position.” – NONOTAK

via Triangulation

Tabor Robak

Work from Next-Gen Open Beta @ Team

“Tabor Robak’s work employs computer generated imaging to create videos of invented worlds. Working in programs including Unity, After Effects, Photoshop and Cinema 4D, the artist explores a secondary, digital reality, rendered in what he refers to as a “Photoshop tutorial aesthetic” or a “desktop screensaver aesthetic.” His meticulously produced and filmed environments are cobbled together from sources both sampled and hand-modeled. The works are appropriative, both in their subject matter and aesthetic, using elements purchased and then edited for his purposes. They adopt the visual vocabulary of contemporary video games in order to isolate and comment upon digital space as an abstract fact, while simultaneously pushing up against the increasingly tenuous separation between perceptions of the digital and the real.

A single-channel piece titled 20XX explores an invented cityscape, made up of the artist’s favorite existing skyscrapers. The video acts as a tour of Robak’s city, consisting of ten-second still shots followed by pans to new locations. The glowing nighttime atmosphere, replete with neon lights and flickering, changing advertisements for real corporations, harkens to science fiction and cyberpunk. The title nods to a convention in videogames and anime, in which dates in the far future are listed as 20XX. The piece is a bittersweet ode to open world-video games, playing on their seductively immersive qualities, but aware of their isolation from the “real world” and human interaction.

Another work consists of two videos of roller coasters, each on its own screen, one traveling through interior spaces and the other through exterior spaces. The environments are taken from sourced panoramic photographs, which the artist has edited extensively in order to make them appear three-dimensional, as well as to remove all instances of human life. With the people gone from the interiors, the work takes on a voyeuristic quality, traveling through lifeless rooms that seem by all measure to belong to others. There is tension between the two channels: the public and the private, both devoid of humanity, strive for the viewer’s attention.

Robak has also programmed and designed a self-playing “match-three” video game, similar to such popular products as Bejeweled and Candy Crush Saga, in which the player tries to align three or more similar items on a grid in order to make them “break” and disappear. The artist used a purchased package of two hundred thousand commercial icons, which he trimmed down to seven thousand, for his source images. The process of production is deeply transformative — the artist has sampled his visuals as well as written a great deal of code to produce this program. Every fifteen breaks, the grid takes on a new, random pattern; the same combinations never appear twice. Displayed on four stacked screens, the computerized gameplay produces a mesmerizing pattern of movement and images.

Xenix simultaneously shows the modeling of four different weapons. The artist is interested in the connoisseurship of firearms, as well as their presentation in popular media, particularly video games. While the weapon in one corner appears dreamy, sleek with psychedelic colors and little implied violence, another takes the form of a sinister pipe bomb built of household materials. A sniper-rifle looks similar to the guns appearing in such mass-market video games as Call of Duty and Battlefield, and is neutered by this familiarity – the weapon’s immediate association is with gaming, rather than actual violence.”

Daniel Eatock

Work from Mini-Manifesto

“Using my background knowledge from working as a graphic designer, I employ a rational, logical and pragmatic approach when making work. I have an ongoing interest to proposing and finding solutions to problems, often problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved, the shaping of the question is part of the answer. I look for things to fix or improve, working like a tinkerer/inventor, I propose alternatives to existing models, preferring to find ways around doing things properly, bypassing the struggle. I make work for museums, galleries, television, cinema, design, advertising, branding, and education. I use self referentiality as an objective guide to reduce the extraneous and subjective, and strive for a conceptual logic. The idea is paramount and the material form secondary. My website is a tool where I both create works, and index and exhibit projects chronologically. I propose systems, templates, invitations and opportunities for collaboration, creating social networks where contributors shape the outcome and participate in the building of works. I build work both individually and collaboratively often leading teams on large projects. I embrace contradictions, and dilemmas. I am always interested in new ways of working and making connections with people to enable works, large and small, to materialise. I like gray areas, oxymorons and the feeling of falling backwards. My favorite colour is the purple found in a soap bubble. I like to swap and exchange things as an alternative to money. I seek alignments, paradoxes, chance circumstance, loops, impossibilities and wit encountered in everyday life. I often change my mind, go full circle, and arrive at the beginning.”

Arslan Sükan

Work from INtheVISIBLE at Galerist.

“Through a process of eradications and slight additions, Arslan Sukan assembles photographs based on the formulaic codes that dominate the installation views of white-cube gallery spaces. His digital images document international venues, many of them familiar and some even identifiable, prompting seasoned art viewers to engage in a memory game of sorts. Each photograph seems to depict a blank space—a pristine gallery emptied of art. A bit like the way Robert Rauschenberg took a Willem de Kooning drawing for the sole purpose of obliterating it, Sukan appropriates installation views from the Internet, erases all traces of visible art, and digitally transforms each interior into a cool white expanse (even removing the architectural corners of rooms)—like a Minimalist vandal effacing conventional images.

Sukan defines his own spaces via a hybrid of appropriation and elimination. In some instances, the shine of the floor reflects what hung on the walls before his interventions. He empties the rooms to emphasize the sites of exhibitions, but in doing so he disrupts the space of display, making the invisible visible—a duality emphasized by the title of the show, “INtheVISIBLE.” The emptiness that pervades the sites creates an uncanny, alien sensibility and highlights the three essential shots—medium, wide, and detail—that make up the classic installation view, interrogating the art-historical record and its standardized documentation practices. Sukan’s photographs are in turn installed to highlight Galerist’s architectural space: One is placed near a doorframe at shin height. By pointing to some of the more quotidian visual experiences offered by the art world, Sukan infiltrates their meaning, even if he ironically reinforces the codes of the white cube and the installation view through his challenge.” – Kathleen Madden

Mitsuko Miwa

Works from Rendition at Longhouse Projects.

“Rendition focuses on multiplicity within the medium of painting. In one body of work, Miwa offers seemingly typical “abstract paintings”—bands of color that are derived from stacks of nameless books, providing a pictorial dilemma, in which the viewer is asked to read but cannot. In another body of work, she produces partially abstracted images, repetitive depictions of several forms of a still-life in flux—a molded piece of clay, which slowly proves to be a boisterous revamping of rendering, revealing slight and shifting discoveries in every new composition. In a third body of work, she accumulates quick strokes of Prussian Blue oil paint to make pared down, monochromatic, illustrative pictures of wine glasses—banal portraits of a simple vessel for the most cheerful or somber of times, a symbolic duality gleaned from an unexpected icon.

Dualities are integral to the overarching scope of Miwa’s practice. She is both faithful to and skeptical of the medium of painting, yet her paintings evidence her giving in to the medium time and time again. Despite her initial plans for each body of work, she allows the paintings to speak for themselves, claiming to refute a specific “style,” much in the tradition of Kippenberger, Polke, Richter, etc. Similar to her refusal of any sort of subscription to style, she also refuses to be didactic; instead, she uses the diversity of depictions and endless referents to humbly hand her paintings over to the viewer to piece together.” – Longhouse Prohjects

  
Rob Pruitt

Work from “The Suicide Paintings” at Massimo De Carlo

“Massimo De Carlo gallery in London inaugurates its new season with The Suicide Paintings by American artist Rob Pruitt. Pruitt in his third show at Massimo De Carlo presents new paintings that explore infinite space and blankness, purity and pollution, and optimism and desperation. The work in the show represents a culmination of previous bodies of work, from his fountains to face paintings. While so much of Pruitt’s previous work has dealt with cultural subject matter, in this new body of work, content has been drained, leaving only a psychological and emotional residue.

In the new paintings, two gradient fields of colour are juxtaposed, creating a picture within a frame. The images suggest both heavenly and hellish vistas, evoking everything from the clouds in a Botticelli painting to the screensaver on an iPad. While the gradient fields suggest depictions of space and the changing times of day, they are also a visual metaphor for transitioning psychological states.

Composing a full room installation, a number of chromed TV Sets: having become useless as means of information and entertainment, replaced by flat screen TVs, these objects from the 80s and the 90s survive through their shape, reconstructed with a glamorous and glittery patina. Even this body of works refers to the classics: these TV sets deliver a strong sense of nostalgia.

These new sculptures are standing on hundreds and hundreds of black and white cubes. Part sculptures themselves, and part plinths for the other works in the show, these cubes are configuring a new modular system of exhibiting Rob Pruitt’s sculptures through a new radical, pixelated signature pedestal. These cubes can even take the form of a new floor for one of the rooms in the basement of the gallery, as if Carl Andre had suddenly turned digital.” – Massimo De Carlo

via Contemporary Art Daily

Larry Bell

Work from his oeuvre.

“Larry Bell’s art addresses the relationship between the art object and its environment through the sculptural and reflective properties of his work. Bell is often associated with Light and Space, a group of mostly West Coast artists whose work is primarily concerned with perceptual experience stemming from the viewer’s interaction with their work. This group also includes, among others, artists James Turrell, John McCracken, Peter Alexander, Robert Irwin and Craig Kauffman On the occasion of the Tate Gallery’s exhibit Three Artists from Los Angeles: Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler, Michael Compton wrote the following to describe the effect of Bell’s artwork:

At various times and particularly in the 1960s some artists have worked near what could be called the upper limits of perceptions, that is, where the eye is on the point of being overwhelmed by a superabundance of stimulation and is in danger of losing its power to control it… These artists sometimes produce the effect that the threat to our power to resolve what is seen heightens our awareness of the process of seeing…However, the three artists in this show… operate in various ways near the lowest thresholds of visual discrimination. The effect of this is again to cause one to make a considerable effort to discern and so to become conscious of the process of seeing.[2]” – Wikipedia / Michael Compton

Martin Kippenberger

Work from his oeuvre.

“”Everything in moderation,” counseled Aristotle. Martin Kippenberger never got this message, as a good friend pointed out after the artist’s death at age forty-four in 1997. Kippenberger’s artistic career—based in his native Germany but encompassing such far-flung locations as Florence, Madrid, Vienna, New York, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Syros, and the Yukon—was a twenty-year commitment to unrestrained excess. It began in the late 1970s, at a moment when the greatness of modern art seemed suddenly distant—a century-long celebration whose door was now closed to newcomers. Kippenberger’s response was to create his own party and cast himself as an artist-jester whose antics both disguised and permitted a piercing analysis of contemporary art and society. The scores of posters he designed for his exhibitions begin to suggest the creative energy channeled into his thousands of works, including paintings, sculptures, installations, drawings, prints, multiples, books, and recordings. Embracing the full range of his output and yet by no means comprehensive, this exhibition contributes to the ongoing process of absorbing one of the most inventive and influential bodies of artwork of the late twentieth century.” – MoMA, New York

Ebbe Stub Wittrup

Work from Overgarden.

“The question of what is real has been debated throughout the entire history of humanity: Is it what our senses tell us, or is there a world beyond what we can immediately perceive? In this philosophical field, Ebbe Stub Wittrup explores life’s enigmatic layers by highlighting phenomena and material drawn from the periphery of culture. His work emphasizes the ’otherness’ of reality which, as the art historian Rune Gade has put it, runs like an esoteric undercurrent beneath the realistic subject matter. Since the late 1990s, Stub Wittrup has been extending his photographic prac- tice, in a movement from a neo- realistic snapshot aesthetics to a more conceptual sensibility with historical and literary dimensions. In the solo exhibition The Voice of Things, this movement finds expres- sion in a cross-media field in which fiction, mythology and theosophy are interwoven with optical and co- lour-psychological phenomena….” – Anna Holm

Suga Kishio

Work from his oeuvre.

“The term Mono-ha, which translates roughly as “school of things,” refers to a group of artists working in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s who developed a radically elemental language, combining natural and industrial materials in a manner that echoed aspects of Western Minimalism and Arte Povera while developing material poetics quite its own.

Suga’s works tend to revolve around provisional interactions between a few common objects — “situations,” created by the artist, that serve to emphasize the nature of the existence of each object, however illogical their association.

In one of the most beautiful works, a site-specific installation called “Tabunritsu (Law of Multitude)” from 1975 (like many of the older works, it has been re-created by the artist for the current show), a large plastic sheet suspended horizontally at knee level between the four walls of a room is scattered with football-size stones, each supported from beneath by a short concrete column.

In another, “Shachi Jokyo (Left-Behind Situation)” from 1972, a similar horizontal plane is created by the wall-to-wall crisscrossing of a single length of thick wire, at every intersection of which the artist has balanced a stray scrap of wood.

It is difficult to pinpoint what makes these and many of the other works so magical, except to say that in their diligent yet oddly purposeless refinement they draw from each material some deep intrinsic resonance, as if coaxing it into being exactly what it is. Stones are heavy; plastic sheeting is thin and transparent; concrete is solid and stable. Drawn into collaboration, the three materials generate a curious harmony.

Large-scale installations from the 1970s predominate on the gallery’s ground floor, to stately, often elegant effect. In the upstairs gallery, one finds a very different scene: several dozen smaller, wall-mounted assemblages, most dating to the last 10 years.” – LA Times