Ron Nagle

Work from his oeuvre.

“Ron Nagle’s diminutive sculptural work is colorful, ironic, and layered with texture and detail. This seminal Californian artist, working in the professional arena for thirty years,continues his fascination with intimately scaled, finely crafted objects.

All of the new works are small, but with an intensity that will knock the viewer out. Resting atop delicate platforms, these forms refer to abstract painting. The color draws the eye to the edges, and the vibration that is set up spreads across the textured surface. The artist gives them names that are often humorous, and sometimes reminiscent of song titles: Finchilada, Dust to Dusk, and Triangular Tracy.

Other pieces belong to a continuing series of Smoove Wares, a closed cup form with a square painting and additional knife-blade appendage. Reviewing similar works in Nagle’s recent New York exhibition, critic Roberta Smith wrote, “Like Frank Stella, John Chamberlain or Ken Price, Ron Nagle operates in the gap between painting and sculpture.” An unusual color sensibility continues throughout the work, showing Nagle’s mastery of complex color relationships.” – via Frank Lloyd Gallery.

Lee Ufan

Work from his oeuvre.

“Marking Infinity presents the work of artist-philosopher Lee Ufan, charting his creation of a visual, conceptual, and theoretical terrain that has radically expanded the possibilities for painting and sculpture since the 1960s. Lee is acclaimed for an innovative body of work that revolves around the notion of encounter—seeing the bare existence of what is actually before us and focusing on “the world as it is.”

Lee was born in southern Korea in 1936 and witnessed the political convulsions that beset the Korean peninsula from the Japanese occupation to the Korean War, which left the country divided in 1953. He studied painting at the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University and soon moved to Japan, where he earned a degree in philosophy. Over the last 40 years, he has lived and worked in Korea, Japan, and France, becoming a transnational artist in a postmodern world before those terms were current. “The dynamics of distance have made me what I am,” he remarks.

In the late 1960s, in an artistic environment emphasizing ideas of system, structure, and process, Lee emerged as the theoretical leader of Mono-ha (literally, “School of Things”), a Japanese movement that arose amid the collapse of colonial world orders, antiauthoritarian protests, and the rise of critiques of modernity. Lee’s sculptures, presenting dispersed arrangements of stones together with industrial materials like steel plates, rubber sheets, and glass panes, recast the object as a network of relations based on parity among the viewer, materials, and site. Lee was a pivotal figure in the Korean tansaekhwa (monochrome painting) school, which offered a fresh approach to minimalist abstraction by presenting repetitive gestural marks as bodily records of time’s perpetual passage. Deeply versed in modern philosophy and Asian metaphysics, Lee has coupled his artistic practice with a prodigious body of critical and philosophical writings, which provide the quotations that appear throughout this exhibition.

Marking Infinity is organized to reflect Lee’s method of working in iterative series and spans the 1960s to the present. Whether brush marks on canvas or stones placed just so on the ground, his markings in space elicit momentary, open-ended situations that engage the viewer viscerally. His distilled gestures, manifesting an extraordinary ethics of restraint, create an emptiness that is paradoxically generative and vivid. Relatum (formerly Phenomena and Perception A, 1969) presents three rocks laid on a latex band marked as a measuring tape. The weight of the rocks causes the band to stretch and buckle, disrupting the system of measurement it codes and reminding us of the capriciousness of rational truth: what you see is a result of where you stand.

Lee’s early painting series, From Point and From Line (1972–84) present a minimal, gestural act that induces in the viewer a lived experience of passing time and physical (rather than depicted) space. In these works, Lee combines ground mineral pigment with animal-skin glue, traditional to East Asian painting on silk. Restricting his palette to a single color on a white ground—cobalt blue or burnt orange, evoking sky or earth, respectively—Lee loads his brush with this powdery, crystalline emulsion and, in From Point, marks the canvas with regular dabs from left to right until there is no more color left. He then repeats this act until rows of gradually fading marks fill the entire canvas. The From Line series pursues a similar systematic approach, moving vertically with single gestural strokes. Lee uses the means of abstract minimalism—seriality, the grid, and monochrome—to alternative ends, emphasizing the gestural mark, the edge, and surface as physical affirmations of existence.

Since his early Mono-ha period, Lee has restricted his choice of sculptural materials to steel plates and stones, focusing on their precise conceptual and spatial juxtaposition. The steel plate—hard, heavy, solid—is made to build things in the modern world; the stone, in its natural as-is state, “belongs to an unknown world” beyond the self and outside modernity, evoking “the other” or “externality.”” – text via the Guggenheim.

Wim Borst

Work from his oeuvre.

“Wim Borst became a professional ceramist at a rather advanced age. At the age of 31 he exhibited for the first time. As a self taught artist he took lessons in ceramics from Ru de Boer and Emmy van Deventer a.o.

His oeuvre and career are characterized by a great accuracy and a persistent mentality. His ceramics has its roots in the Dutch geometrical abstract tradition, although he uses the idiom in a non-academic, refreshing way. Within the boundaries of the self chosen restrictions of the geometric abstraction, he takes liberties with colors, materials and themes. His objects are (generally) made up of different parts.

Wim Borst is exhibiting regularly in the Netherlands and abroad. He is a member of the NVK (the Dutch Society of Ceramic artists) and of ‘de Vishal’, (a local society of artists in Haarlem, his native town).
He is part of a group of Dutch ceramists, CeramiCVision.nl who regularly join to discuss their profession; they are looking for opportunities to attract the attention of the public for their works and they are organizing exhibitions as a group.

His work is in private collections and in museum collections in the Netherlands and abroad, such as Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Boston Museum of Fine Arts in Boston USA, Frans Halsmuseum in Haarlem, Museum Keramion in Frechen Germany, ‘Magnelli Museum’, the Ceramics Museum of Vallauris, France, Museum Het Princessehof in Leeuwarden, and Stedelijk Museum Schiedam.”- Ceramics Now

Lucy Raven

Stills from “China Town”

“China Town traces copper mining and production from an open pit mine in Nevada to a smelter in China, where the semi-processed ore is sent to be smelted and refined. Considering what it actually means to “be wired” and in turn, to be connected, in today’s global economic system, the video follows the detailed production process that transforms raw ore into copper wire—in this case, the literal digging of a hole to China—and the generation of waste and of power that grows in both countries as byproduct.” – Lucy Raven

China Town is currently on view through October 7th as part of Image Employment at MoMA PS1, New York.

Jennifer Jupiter Stratford (and various collaborators).

Work from Telefantasy Studios.

“Jennifer Juniper Stratford is a multidimensional artist based in Los Angeles. Growing up in Hollywood, she became obsessed with the dreamlike realm of cinema while simultaneously coming to grips with the industry’s grubby realities.
Her work explores this influence through photography, journalism, filmmaking, and video art. Stratford’s work has been shown internationally -notably at MoMA, Cinemarfa, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, The New Beverly Cinema, and the Spectacle Theater New York.
In 2004 she opened Telefantasy Studios, a workshop for the creation of B-movies, practical special effects, and experiments in video. The studio makes use of cast-off and obsolete television studio equipment, analog mixers, and video synthesizers which are often mixed with modern computers in search of making new discoveries in the potential of media.” – Jennifer Juniper Stratford

Talia Chetrit

Work from her exhibition at Leslie Fritz.

“Talia Chetrit’s current exhibition at Leslie Fritz, her third solo show with the gallery, originates in the artist’s revisiting old contact sheets from the first rolls of film she shot as a thirteen-year-old in the mid-1990s. They were intimate, direct portraits of the subjects most immediately available to her: her own family in and around their home. Chetrit re-cropped and re-edited these old images, and returned to photograph her family again for the most recent work in the exhibition, mixing these two moments in this installation. In these images, we see her mother, father, brother, and the photographer herself, pictured today and as they appeared some eighteen years ago.

With these works, we find the artist rethinking her own amateur photography, revisiting a moment when taking pictures seemed to exist outside of any context of historical or professional knowledge. Her chosen subjects were expedient, of course, but photographing her family, and especially her mother – whose winsome visage appears several times – inevitably engaged dynamics beyond the merely formal. Whatever the intimacy of these images, for the young Chetrit photography offered a means to simultaneously be with and stand apart from the family – to see it through the distancing perspective of the camera lens.

The comparison of pictures of the same individuals separated by almost two decades materializes that gap in time, reminding us of the photographic image’s status as witness to what has been. Chetrit has remarked on the moodiness of this series, yet the pathos of these works does not really stem from the tragedy of the passage of time.

It seems rather to derive from Chetrit’s ongoing exploration of concealment, of what remains hidden even within a technology devoted to the visible. Closer examination of the photographs reveals patterns of occluded gazes, masked looks, and blocked faces, through which the kinship of this exhibition with the artist’s previous work, such as the Hand series (2012), becomes evident. What is new, however, and what defines these new photographs as so remarkable an achievement is that it is no longer simply a matter of physical concealment and its attendant erotics that Chetrit has taken up, but the alternating forms of emotional concealment and exposure characterizing the family romance itself.” -Thomas McDonough

via Contemporary Art Daily.

Ott Metusala and Erki Närep

Work from Take it from here @ Konstanet

“Far more people see art on screens than in museums. The gallery is no longer the primary exhibition space – the Internet is. Consequently more and more exhibits are carried out not in a physical form, but instead posted on websites as two-dimensional images. So what happens to a physical medium when it is not used for its main function – to present media? In one perspective, galleries (i.e. the medium) become useless and incomplete, having no purpose at all. On the other hand, the medium can be seen as the message or even art itself. Usually, mediums are designed and illustrated to provoke a certain emotion or create a certain background for media. Therefore, the medium becomes a part of the whole conception and still holds the emotion or characteristics of the existed or removed media.

A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect – a light bulb enables people to create spaces during night time that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. A light bulb is a medium without any content. A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.

Empty frames and pedestals in a room may not have a deeper meaning without any media. However, the mere existence of frames and pedestals creates an environment for an art gallery, just like the light bulb. It instantly gives the understanding that the medium exists for a certain reason – to present something. Medium without the media becomes a part of an environment – the gallery – and therefore, becomes something totally different. For instance, if you take an mp3-player, plug in the headphones and put them in your ears without turning the player on, headphones become a part of your appearance, having no actual purpose at all. Without any defined purpose, a medium becomes the purpose – the media or the message itself.

Since digital images are supplanting exhibition space, galleries have become a metaphor—not a physical necessity but a necessary intermediation. Artwork does not require installation within a physical space, and a gallery does not require art objects. Instead, art objects require the transitive value that the gallery implies and galleries need the creative value that the artwork implies.”

LIA

Work from Black & White.

“The Austrian artist LIA – one of the early pioneers of Software and Net Art – has been creating digital art, installations and sound works since 1995. Her works combine various traditions of drawing and painting with the aesthetic of digital images and algorithms. They are characterized by a minimalist quality, and by an affinity with conceptual art.

In the five works that LIA created for the teletext art festival she uses the single pixel as basic building blocks. The images play on the one hand with the idea of algorithms, by varying the distances between lines and pixels following algorithmically defined patterns; and on the other hand with the intense contrast between black and white elements demanded by the limitations of the technology. In four of the five works the teletext “flash” command is used to provide a hierarchical order of the elements without using animation as such. A clear boundary is formed between the permanent (static) and impermanent (dynamic) elements; this boundary appears and disappears as the blinking effect plays out. If the entire image were always visible, ie if there was no blink effect, the dynamic elements would be lost amongst the static elements.” – via TELETEXT

Rachel Harrison

Work from her oeuvre.

“Rachel Harrison (born 1966, New York) is a sculptor based in New York. Harrison’s work has been seen in many exhibitions including: ‘Posh Floored as Ali G Tackles Beck’ at Arndt & Partner [1] in Berlin, ‘Should home windows or shutters be required to withstand a direct hit from an eight-foot-long two-by-four shot from a cannon at 34 miles (55 km) an hour, without creating a hole big enough to let through a three-inch (76 mm) sphere?’ at Arena Gallery [2] in Brooklyn, ‘Sleeping Waters’ in Chantal Crousel in Paris and ‘24 Seven’ at Galerie Klaus Peter Goebel in Stuttgart.” – Wikipedia 

Milton Melvin Croissant III

Work from Presenter Mode

“Displays are an inescapable touchstone of contemporary society. They are the inward and outward eye of the User. Within the context of an Institution, the Display is revered as a necessary point of contact between humans- paramount to the transmission of ideas. However the Display has meaning in the absence of input. Consider the human-less function of the Display. It is an act of silent meditation: a golden ratio that is both void and charged, absorbing and emanating. Within an operating system, “presenter mode“ is a mechanism to remove human influence/personalization from a Display, to provide a clean plane for the dedicated function. Presenter Mode lays bare the display to highlight its essentialism, void of User.” –Milton Melvin Croissant III