Nicolas Sassoon

Work from PANDORA.

“Opening Times: Throughout your Opening Times residency, you’ll be creating new work under the title Pandora. Can you tell us what Pandora is or means to you?

Nicolas Sassoon: Pandora is the name of the street where I’ve been living off and on for the last 4 years. When I first moved here the name of the street stuck with me as a great location for a science fiction plot. The house where I live on Pandora Street is a slightly run-down small suburban home, with a big backyard and a dark basement. I have turned the basement into my studio, which means I have a desk there with my laptop, a dim light and a heater so I don’t freeze during the winter. It’s a great place to work on a computer, I can’t really see the outside world and I lose track of time pretty easily.

When I was first approached to do a residency for Opening Times, the idea of an online residency also stuck with me as a great basis for a science-fiction plot. Usually residencies involve specific sites, where, as an artist, you interact with your surroundings and produce works often based on these interactions. But in the case of Opening Times, the geography of the site isn’t very obvious, since the project is primarily happening online…

I began to inquire about the site of my residency and realised it would be my studio space, and by extension the space of my computer since it is my main work area. Pandora is a project based on this premise. It starts with the
depiction of my studio space and then quickly extends into the duality of the space that I work with on a daily basis. This duality interests me because it is in conflicting opposition in many ways; one space being very concrete and operating within the contingencies of reality, the other space being ethereal and operating within the contingencies of whatever fantasies it can be fed. ” – excerpted from an interview with Opening Times

Frameshift at Denny Gallery.

There is a gallery talk with useful pictures and some of the artists tomorrow (Saturday) at 3:00pm.

“The six artists in Frameshift collide with and attempt to negotiate the technical image as encoded by the camera. The practices represented occupy the divide between the hand-crafted image historically available and attributable to a visual artist and the technical language with which the photograph systematically attempts to replicate reality line by line. These artists examine a world in which the photographic image records, implicates, and shares every conceivable human action through a network of devices. This vast stream of visual communication offers an ever-increasing number of platforms for identities to take shape through a carefully crafted stream of data originating from the same device. The artists in Frameshift prod and transform existing images and fill the frame of their cameras with invented tableaus to coax out the seams of ideological structures encoded in the technically written network of images.

Frameshift is an investigation into practices that visualize linguistic edits to the technical language of the photographic image while compressing multiple histories of image making and vision technology. The catalyst for this investigation emerged out of the manipulation of a fixed image by literally altering the code. Barry Stone converts the binary data of a digital photograph into a text file, which he then edits, and then converts it back
into a corrupted form of the original image. Stone’s process introduces a genetic copying error that exposes the photograph to evolutionary forces. In another line of inquiry, the fixed technical image becomes a base layer upon which a construction of the self is built in response. Pieter Schoolwerth’s paintings compress multiple attempts to locate the body and identity over an edited photograph or a scan of a human figure, like an attempt to form an identity across multiple networked platforms. Wendy White modifies the real world contextual staging of a photograph and injects it into a system of painting structures as a self-contained object that lives in forced cohabitation with indefinite marks and textual remainders. Lorne Blythe, Erin O’Keefe, and Heather Cleary each appear to accept the fixed technical image on its own terms, but insist on forcing their own complicating system of change through the camera’s pixel sieve. Lorne Blythe creates atypical vision tests in which construction and appropriation methods are simultaneously placed into opposition and made indistinguishable. Heather Cleary decontextualizes mundane objects to create an image embedded with uncertainty through what appears to be a very particular set of instructions of mysterious mathematical or subcultural origin. Erin O’Keefe invents an unbound architectural language by arranging a network of objects and photographic elements for the camera, rendering unreliable spatial relationships into a single plane.

The resulting works from these investigations resist the finality of arrival and perfect replication advertised by the technically produced image. Instead, the course of execution changes due to the insertion of an unanticipated command or a failure to distinguish user input from system commands. In the end, we observe discoloration or informational errors or an awkward amalgam of elements that point to a belief in a process of continual reformation of the photographic image. The evidence presented through these works suggests that the laws that govern our reality are not fixed and that these artists are not merely subject to an all-pervasive technical language, but rather active participants in the continuing construction of a photographic language.

Frameshift is curated by useful pictures, an artist-run investigation into current directions in photographic practice. We focus on artwork created after photography and the internet co-evolved to produce a culture of instant and global image sharing. We highlight artistic practices that consider this torrent of image traffic and actively complicate photographic understandings alongside a networked digital culture.” – useful pictures

Walid Raad

Work from The Atlas Group and Scratching on things I could disavow.

“Walid Raad’s first major exhibition in a French museum covers two of his long-term projects: The Atlas Group (1989-2004) and Scratching on Things I could Disavow (2007-ongoing).

The Atlas Group (1989 – 2004) was a project Raad initiated in 1989 – or so his title suggests – and concentrated on the political, social, psychological and aesthetic dimensions of the wars in Lebanon. The Atlas Group (1989 – 2004) comprises an archive of found and created visual, recorded and written documents Raad attributed to historical and imaginary characters. The Atlas Group (1989 – 2004) is also an enquiry into the documentary process itself, into the kinds of facts that can constitute historical narratives.

Since 2007, Walid Raad has been developing another project titled Scratching on things I could disavow. His project in part engages the emergence of new art economies and museums in the Arab world, the increase in the visibility of Arab artists, patrons and collectors, as well as the marked interest expressed by Western countries and institutions in setting up annexes of major western museums (Louvre and Guggenheim) in the Middle East. Moreover and by leaning on Jalal Toufic’s writings, and more specifically his concept of the “The withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster,” Raad also considers the short and long-term material and immaterial effects of the various wars that have consumed the Middle East over the past few decades. Raad’s works address these less visible and traumatic (non-psychological) effects, and their profound impact on tradition.” – Carré d’Art

Jessica Labatte

Work from her oeuvre 

Jessica is the current artist in residence at Light Work

“Jessica Labatte was born in 1981 in Salt Lake City, UT and currently lives and works in Chicago, IL. She received a MFA and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Labatte’s photographic work is an investigation in the capabilities of space within a two-dimensional frame. Her work contains both sculptural and painterly nuances, however the work from conception is always a photograph. Labatte experiments with large format analog processing techniques, which can give the illusion of digital affects. Yet, her prints have had no digital manipulation, a keystone of her artistic practice. Labatte is represented by Horton Gallery, where she has been featured in a two person exhibition and at Art Brussels. Labatte is currently an adjunct professor at Northern Illinois University.” –Light Work

Christian Philipp Müller

Work from his oeuvre.

“When Charles Ephrussi received A Bunch of Asparagus painted by Édouard Manet in 1880, he paid Manet 200 francs more than the 800 francs originally agreed upon — apparently because he was so pleased with the result. Pleased in turn by the unexpected increase in his fee, Manet sent his patron an additional painting of a single stalk of asparagus and noted that this stalk had been missing from the original bundle. As Carol Armstrong writes in her essay “Counter, Mirror, Maid: Some Infra-thin Notes on A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,” what the painter meant is that this small painting would make up the difference and that Ephrussi thus had now received the appropriate amount of asparagus for the amount he had paid.1

Through this “illusionistic substitution” (Armstrong) of painted asparagus for edible asparagus, Manet brought into play an “exchange value” associated with both the form of production and consumption.2 According to Armstrong, however, the insinuated “relative price of vegetables and paintings” raises fundamental questions, namely, whether an illusionary painted bundle of asparagus has a value “unto itself” or whether — relative to the valuation of the “real” bunch of asparagus — it is a matter of a “countable or weighable” articles whose value is produced by the luxuriousness of the represented object and the quality of the color application.3 Thus, Manet’s system of equivalences and substitutions did not aim to create a basis of comparison between reality and illusion, although it did set up analogies between the two on the level of taste, value, and exchange. The material value of an individual stalk of asparagus — determined by the purchase price — only increased through the symbolic relativation of the represented subject.

Over one hundred years later, the bunch of asparagus would become the object of another reflection on the processes of valuation at Hans Haacke’s Manet-Projekt in the exhibition Projekt 74. — Kunst bleibt Kunst which took place in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne on the occasion of the museum’s 150th birthday. On ten panels, Haacke documented the chronological history of collectors who had owned the Bunch of Asparagus, which had been in the museum’s possession since 1967. Each panel showed an owner and included personal information about each one. Thus, we learn that the painter Max Liebermann, barred from working in 1933 due to his Jewish heritage, had owned the still life. Other owners included Hermann J. Abs, Chairman of the purchasing committee of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, who was also the Chairman of the Deutsche Bank.

Through a simple, uncommented listing of dates and facts, Haacke aimed to make visible historical relationships that had been absent in history books. In order to prevent any possible references to the Nazi past of Abs, who had held a leading position in the economic politics of the Third Reich, the directorship of the museum instructed the exhibition curators to remove Haacke’s work from the show” – Sabeth Buchmann, Signs in Abundance

Matt Lipps

Work from his oeuvre

“Matt Lipps recently confessed to me that, during his adolescence, he owned a lifesized poster cutout of the 1990s siren and Melrose Place habitué, Alyssa Milano, which was tacked above the frame of his bed. It was an early intimation of the themes Lipps now examines in his work: the transference of desire onto images of printed media and the need to physically locate them within intimate spaces. It’s an act of totemic association, investing a massdistributed image with the deeply personal. Lipps’s work today involves cutout images – often sourced from discontinued photographic publications – that are first arranged into carefully constructed and lit still lifes, then photographed with a largeformat, analogue camera.

In earlier work – notably from his time as a graduate student under Catherine Lord’s guidance at the University of California, Irvine – Lipps drew heavily upon themes of sexuality, appropriating pictures from gay magazines for use in his pieces. During this period, in which the artist came to grips with his queer identity, his use of pornographic materials followed a sexual bildungsroman common to many – a secretive education gleaned from the pages of lessthanseemly reading material. As with Untitled (blue) (2004) – part of his ‘70s’ series – Lipps constructed miseenscènes that literally transplanted the object of lust into the domestic sphere. Propped up by small dowels and toothpicksized sticks, the cutout eroticized figure is placed atop crests of heaving bed sheets, set against a blue, seemingly nocturnal backdrop, mordantly blurring the lines between the desired and the disembodied.

With his inclusion in the 2009 group show ‘Living History II’ at Marc Selwyn Gallery in Los Angeles, and his 2010 solo exhibition ‘HOME’, at San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman Gallery, Lipps traded the erotic for the domestic. Included in his ‘home’ series, the large photograph Untitled (bar) (2008) is set in his familial living room. Fractured into abutting coloured panes, the suburban location is foregrounded by a jagged, crevicescarred black and white form supported by a sliver of wood. True to his photographic roots, Lipps later told me this shape was taken from an Ansel Adams monograph. In all the images from the series, the disjointed planes of familiar interior scenes juxtaposed with displaced natural forms evoke something akin to the lurking sense of Sigmund Freud’s unheimlich, or ‘uncanny’. For Lipps, the great unknown would seem to begin at home. And it is, perhaps, a personal sense of dislocation that looks to have coloured the artist’s more recent fascination with structures of taxonomy. Lipps’s 2010 show ‘HORIZON/S’ took as its starting point the nowdefunct bimonthly arts publication Horizon, which ran from 1959 to ’89. Among the photographs presented in the series ‘Untitled (Women’s Heads)’ (2010), Lipps arranges a cast of female cutouts, all at various angles of pose – seemingly random women grouped together by their shared gender. Meanwhile, in the panel of six photographs that comprise Untitled (Archive) (2010), a grand assemblage of cutouts, used in the production of the other still lifes, falls somewhere between the sitespecific sculptures of Geoffrey Farmer and Aby Warburg’s search for art historical forms in his Mnemosyne Atlas (1927–29).

Lipps’s current body of work, ‘Library’ (2013–14), continues this interest in the disruption of the archival. Similar to ‘horizon/s’, the current series began with the discovery on an outofprint pub lication, in this case a 17 volume TimeLife series titled The Library of Photography (1970–85). With issues dedicated to topics including ‘Photojournalism’ and ‘Children’, the series intended to present a concise historical and technical overview of the medium. Lipps’s interest, as he explained it to me, lies in the systematicity the series applied to the photographic act and, by extension, to the photograph itself. In Nature (Library) (2013), neatly linedup black and white cutouts of wildlife and geological formations are intermixed with images of analogue cameras being adjusted by disembodied hands. Standing on glass shelves, they are set against a background colour photograph of a cactus, saturated in electric hues of purple and cyan. In many ways, Lipps’s ‘Library’ series photographs recall the portable protomuseums of the late renaissance. Those historic wunderkammers were intended to be symbolic of their owners’ control over the natural world, heralding a nascent enlightenmentera fervour to classify just about everything. However, while for the renaissance collector the cabinets symbolized humanity’s empirical rule over nature, Lipps’s ‘Library’ highlights the subjectivity underlying such claims to universal association. In the age of the collective hashtag, in which disparate images are grouped together by a communally archivehappy zeitgeist, Lipps draws upon narratives which are undoubtedly his own.” – Frieze

Fragments of an Unknowable Whole @ Urban Arts Space.

The artists in Fragments of an Unknowable Whole see the irresolvable question of photographic meaning as a launching point for their artistic inquiries. They are not concerned with seeking photographic truth. Instead, these diverse practices complicate the idea that a photographic image is a fixed view of a “transparent window on the world.” They search for new perspectives and directions that mobilize the shifting contexts of images, opening up the possibilities of the photographic rather than reducing it to a narrowly prescribed process.

The organization of this exhibition functions in a similarly discursive manner. This project embraces the boundless nature of these practices and is careful to avoid categorizing the individual artists as working with one kind of photographic genre or another. Many of the artists included in this exhibition do not identify as photographers. While most work with a camera and lens as a part of their process, they do so through approaches that unsettle the ‘transparent’ picture space. Many of the artists featured look to additional resources for gathering information, turning to sources in which images have already been embedded: web browsers, texts, archives, found objects and materials, and even their own artwork. Regardless of their approach, each artist is working with the photographic image in provocative ways in this contemporary moment.

Perhaps the most significant common thread between these practices is how they complicate and expand the spaces of the photographic image. While the most prevalent areas of exploration are located within the broader photographic spaces—the screen space, the picture plane, the physical and material spaces—it would be impossible to situate any one artist’s approach into a single spatial context. They are more inclined to traverse the boundaries of these spaces, and in doing so open up the potential for creating hybrid forms of image-making.

Hannah Sawtell

Work from ACCUMULATOR
currently on view at New Museum

“In her work, Sawtell considers the relationship between the surfaces of images and objects, and the multiplicity of structures that underpin them. Through a variety of media—installation, video, print, radio broadcast, sound, and performance—Sawtell renders the fluidity of digital images with spatial, physical, and temporal qualities, and critically points to their function as decoy indicators for larger and dominating systems of production, access, surplus, and consumption. Additionally alluding to the repetitive nature of contemporary production, Sawtell evokes an aesthetic of industrial design through her installations and objects. Much of her influence comes from her previous work as a DJ and in running Detroit’s Planet E Label, and she often integrates noise, rhythm, and beat as part of her video works and performances.

In “Vendor” (2012), a recent work exhibited at Bloomberg SPACE (part of a two-site show also at the ICA, London), Sawtell created an installation from online images that she repeatedly encountered during her residency at Bloomberg News Agency in London. Cutting the images with live screen-based digital tools and using close-up textures, Sawtell created a space that unpacks and reveals the contemporary virtual and digital image. Frequently collaborating with local manufacturers to produce her works, another recent piece, Re-Petitioner (2013), included a set of bespoke speakers that transformed the large screen in front of them into an acoustic mirror. Exposed to an intense experience of noise, audiences also witnessed computer-generated images of the brutalist Norwegian Y-Block building in Oslo and a landscape of what she considers “pre-fossilized CGI objects” projected onto the large screen.

For the New Museum, Sawtell creates a new sculptural installation and sound work made specifically for the Lobby Gallery, and realizes a subsequent edition of her “Broadsheets” publication series.

“Hannah Sawtell: ACCUMULATOR” is on view at the New Museum from April 23–June 22, 2014, and is curated by Helga Christoffersen, Assistant Curator.

Hannah Sawtell was born in London in 1971, where she also lives and works. Recent solo shows include Vilma Gold, London, Clocktower Gallery, New York, and two linked exhibitions at the ICA, London, and ICA at Bloomberg SPACE, London, for which she published Broadsheets 1-3, a publication distributed withBusiness Week magazine, and realized Sonic Lumps, a performance in collaboration with Factory Floor. Her work has been included in group exhibitions such as “SoundSpill,” Zabludowicz Collection, New York (2013), “With the Tip of a Hat,” the Artist’s Institute, New York (2012), “Novel,” a screening for Time Againhosted by the Sculpture Center, New York (2011), “Outrageous Fortune: artists remake the Tarot,” Hayward Touring/Focal Point Gallery, Southend (2011), and “The Great White Way Goes Black,” Vilma Gold, London (2011). She is included in “Assembly: A Survey of Recent Artists’ Film and Video in Britain 2008–2013” at Tate Britain and will have solo exhibitions at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway, and Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, in 2014. In 2013, she was shortlisted for the Jarman Award.”

Jaya Howey

Work from “Note to Self” at Bureau, New York.

“Bureau is pleased to announce Note to Self, Jaya Howey’s first exhibition with the gallery. Howey’s exhibition includes three new bodies of work, two modes of painting: narratives and respites, and the ceramic frame works. Howey’snarratives establish an emotionally fraught thread through the use of a rudimentary pictographic code. The respitesfeature groupings of similar symbolic icons, their communicatory function confused through layering and silhouetting. The frame works are cast ceramic picture frames that can either be attached to the paintings or left to function as distinct objects in space. Through previous bodies of work, Howey has explored how a subject can be fractured by the painterly gesture; his latest work continues this investigation resolving in a concise visual style. The new compositions push the potential of the flat, white stretched canvas as a semiotic field.

The paintings in Note to Self are composed in Adobe Illustrator and parody the language of layout which dominates our contemporary visual field. The drawn forms refer to Lettrist metagraphics and manga illustration. The compositions are arranged on screen and painted using a cut vinyl mask. An oil paint called Torrit Grey is applied with clean lines and contours that suggest the intimate point or colored-in field drawn by a pencil. The works imply the look of a doodle, laying the artist’s subconscious open for analysis.

The rebus-like narratives unfold with a view into the artist’s anxiety navigating the social context of the art world. In stick figure scenes we see a nervous artist with cartoon hands grasping a paintbrush or fumbling for a wine glass. Alongside these characters are symbols of the environs and consumables of the artist: both cliché and quotidian. In one work we see an anguished young man carving a peace-sign into his arm while an ink jet printer cranks out pages of simple shapes. The young man is not consoled by the cheery bubble tea menu above him, as the punch card from a time clock looms. The humorous, self-deprecating narratives are contrasted by the more densely abstract, patterned, silhouette works, the respites. In these forests of signs, layered shapes replicate and morph, allowing for more open interpretations. Socks, bunches of grapes and melting clocks fan out amidst abstract shapes resembling bunting, large drips and schematized script. These works create a dense scuffle of shadowy icons resisting clear identification, thus allowing the viewer to rest on an imaginative formal rhythm rather than decoding a narrative.

While the paintings play among the artist’s subconscious obsessions and allusions, the exhibition is buttressed by considered formal gestures. Howey’s chosen anti- palette of Torrit Grey is an oil paint produced yearly at Gamblin Artist Colors. Gamblin combines all the pigment dust from the factory’s air filtration system and uses this mixture as a pigmentary base. Each run of Torrit Grey is unique in its chromatic combination and because it cannot promise consistency, it cannot be sold, and is given away. The slight color variation throughout the exhibition is a by- product of this production method. The ceramic frame fragments form a figurative framework for the show. The ceramic shells have a material fragility that allude to a paradox: that any defensive mechanism is ultimately the most fragile aspect of a work. These protective shields, constructed out of brittle clay, reinforce the works’ willful vulnerability.” – Bureau

Viktoria Binschtok

Work from eclipse99

“eclipse99 is made up of clusters of photographic images built on visual and formal associations. In an ultimate response to recursive image production and use, Binschtok has turned the internet search engine in on her own artwork, opening up a conversation between herself and the computer – artist to machine. Using computer based search algorithms, Binschtok input her own photographic images to see what associated images would retur­n. From those results, she selected, restaged and manipulated the images, creating her own version once again in an effort to both complete and open up the cycle – beyond definitions of image source, result and authorship.
Binschtok closely studies developments in screen-based technology and how the visual language of communication is becoming more prominent. The growing ubiquity of ‘smart’ devices and photographic equipment has stripped away the uniqueness and mystery behind image production. Now, along with the rise in DIY (do-it-yourself) culture, photographic tools and images on the Internet are equally available to consumers. These images are viewed undifferentiated from one another, linked associatively, and bounded by the democratizing format of the computer screen. It is this equivalence toward images that Binschtok chooses to highlight – how images are so easily cut, copied, pasted, and how promotional advertising is viewed next to documentary war images or sandwiched in-between personal party snapshots, travel photography and traditional studio work.

In a parallel effort to translate the multivalent existence of photographic imagery seen on screens to the material world of the gallery space, Binschtok uses a range of printing, mounting and framing formats, specifically chosen for each cluster series. She takes advantage of the diverse possibilities of presentation format and material form such images can take and how these choices affect the reading of the image.

The title of the show eclipse99, is taken from a signature image she shot of the final solar eclipse of the last century. With this image, Binschtok froze the moment when the moon passes into the sun’s shadow. Here, eclipse99 functions as a poignant metaphor for the overlapping, hiding, replacing, altering and bypassing of objects and visual imagery she is working with. In this case, the digital C-print is made from a scan of an original analogue photograph. With the enlargement of the scanned image, details such as dust particles on the surface of the photograph are made visible. At first, the dust particles seem like planetary shapes far off in the distance, but upon closer inspection it becomes clear that these are physical objects – imperfections left intact, pulling the viewer out of the fantasy of the image and into the physical reality of the photograph.

Here, as with many other images in the exhibition, Binschtok reveals the details of her image making techniques and the functions of photography as sculptural object. Similarly, the other images from this cluster reveal visual imperfections such as the rough edges of the re-photographed collage plane window and the lens-flare on the still-life golden tool

Binschtok created each cluster intuitively using a rhizomatic approach like an expanding, organic root structure. She sees the possibility for building image associations in all directions, attesting to the multiple and non-hierarchical functions of image use today. However, with each cluster Binschtok envelops the viewer into the depths of her visual realms.” –KLEMM’S