LEO VILLAREAL

Posted on 2014-12-29

Leo Villareal’s most recent light sculptures manifest in the form of two nesting spheres, Buckyball, 2014 is composed of 180 custom-made LED microtubes arranged in a series of pentagons and hexagons. The artwork takes on the form of a ‘fullerene’, discovered by nanotechnologists at Rice University in the 80’s and named after Buckminster Fuller, the American systems theorist and architect.

Domestic in size and housed indoors, Villareal’s newest Buckyball is similar in design to the monumental light sculpture the artist presented in Madison Square Park in 2012-13, and shares elements familiar to the artist’s work: software programs that sequence light patterns in an infinite combination and with the possibility of realizing 16 million distinct colors, evolving randomly and changing constantly. Through basic elements such as pixels and binary codes, Villareal allows for a better understanding of the underlying structures and systems that govern everyday function. As the artist builds these simple elements into a full-scale sculptural installation that moves, changes and interacts, this work ultimately grows into a complex, dynamic form that questions common notions of space, time, and sensorial pleasure.

Opposite – Buckyball, 2014

Exhibition runs through to January 10th, 2015

Sandra Gering INC
14 East 63rd Street
New York
NY 10065

www.sandrageringinc.com

  

THANKS TO APPLE, AMAZON AND THE MALL

Posted on 2014-12-29

“Thanks to Apple, Amazon, and the Mall,” attempts to bring some of the themes that many of the artists threaded through the ebooks; how technology distributes feelings, emotions, and embodied experiences, manifesting a fantasy version of humanity and leaving behind the constraints of biology. Artists explore grossly distorted versions of both the human form and evolving digital visual systems, amplifying urges in surprising and strange ways.

These themes will be presented in the physical gallery space in a variety of mediums, drawing a parallel between online stores such as iTunes and Amazon with the gallery’s white cube, whose crisp linearity echoes another achievement of 20th century architecture, the mall. These spaces, physical and digital, homogenize our encounters with objects/products/content. The show also hints at the social aspects to these commercial spaces, where interactions are placed within a corporate structure. The show also hints at the social forms that emerge in these commercial spaces, which are formalized by power structures yet still hold potential for spontaneity, conflict, failure, and decay.

The title of the show comes out of a credit line in Isaac Richard Poole’s ebook Alien She, and points to the project’s dependence on corporations to sell and distribute the work.

Exhibition runs from January 6th to February 8, 2015

Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery
54 Ludlow St
Lower East Side
New York
10002

klausgallery.com

  

JUAN MUÑOZ

Posted on 2014-12-29

Three key works by Muñoz will be featured: the sculptural installations Thirteen Laughing at Each Other, 2001, Many Times, 1999 and a Figure Hanging from One Foot, 2001. These will be accompanied by works on paper and early wall sculptures. Including works such as empty or occupied balconies, isolated figures, and those laughing and in conversation, this group of works often puts viewers in an ambiguous position, looking but also seemingly being looked at. The work suggests, as Russell Ferguson writes, “the tension between the comfort of the group and the desire for individual autonomy.”

Regarded as one of the most important sculptors of his generation, Juan Muñoz was known for his return to the human form in art and for his emphasis on the relationship of sculpture, architecture and the viewer. In sculptures, drawings, ‘conversation pieces’, and immersive installations, he often placed the viewer in dramatic relationship to space and objects that were at once architectural and implied narrative or silence, a sense that something had happened or was about to happen. His sources ranged from literature, architecture, mythology, to music, film, theater, poetry. Ever the storyteller, his artistic activity extended to plays for radio and theater, writings and essays. Frequently, Muñoz’s sculptural tableaux offer the viewer an experience of physical passage through interior spaces, suggesting a psychological landscape of presence and distance, labyrinths and solitudes, urbanscapes and empty interiors, the collective and the individual.

Opposite – Thirteen laughing at each other (2001)

Exhibition runs through to January 29th, 2015

Marian Goodman Gallery
24 West 57th Street
New York
NY 10019

www.mariangoodman.com

  

OKAMI BY FAKIR DESIGN

Posted on 2014-12-29

Okami, which is based off of the main character, Amaterasu, from the 2006 Capcom game produced by Clover Studios. Only 10 ex available, each is signed and numbered. The release will drop on Monday, January 5th, 2015.

fakirdesign.com

  

MORGAN FISHER – PAST PRESENT, PRESENT PAST

Posted on 2014-12-29

My father taught me photography in 1955, when I was twelve years old. I made my first movies (they were conventional home movies) with a Brownie 8mm camera in 1956. I believed that photography and film as I found them in the 1950s would last forever.
M.F

All of the works in this exhibition were made as photographs or films. I didn’t do this to sustain my belief, it was the way I wanted to do things, and they were easy and normal things to do. But in treating some of the works after their original production I have chosen to work digitally because it is simpler.

The photographs of unused boxes of still film from the 1950s, shot recently, express the pathos of how I thought about photography and film those many years ago. Most of the manufacturers have disappeared or have stopped making film. At the time these objects were made they carried the promise of future use. Now, their expiration dates long past, they are useless, at least with respect to their original purpose, their uselessness underlined by the fact that photography on film as an amateur practice is essentially extinct. The photographs were shot on film, a practice still current in commercial photography, but scanned and then printed as archival pigment prints.

Opposite – Agfacolor Negativfilm K 24 x 36 mm August 1955, 2014

Exhibition runs through till January 25th, 2015

Maureen Paley
21 Herald Street
E2 6JT
London

www.maureenpaley.com

  

LUC DELAHAYE

Posted on 2014-12-29

With these photographs, Luc Delahaye continues to reflect on the representations of the human condition in the contemporary world. With freedom and precision, he carries forward his pursuit of images that declare their autonomy while transcending their photographic nature. This quest is above all the restless wandering of someone who, through his impersonal presence, aspires to an awareness of the world.

Starting from theaters of war, it takes him towards a more ordinary reality: that of an Indian village, of a suburb of Athens or of a financial institution. It also prompts him to broaden his modus operandi: whereas the documentary approach remains central to his work, he is now also integrating certain artifices usually linked to fiction. Thus, of the four photographs taken in the Indian village, two are classic documentary images taken directly from real life (Coal Gleaner, The Tree), another is the re-enactment of a scene witnessed during a previous visit (Father and Daughter), and the last (Boys Fighting) is the creation of an imaginary situation, using “actors”. Another example, in a very different domain, Trading Floor is a digital composition made from pictures taken at the London Metal Exchange. Death of a Mercenary and House to House, both made in Libya during the 2011 war, are more in the line of Luc Delahaye’s earlier works.

Opposite – House to House (Tawargha), 2011

Exhibition runs through till January 17th, 2015

Galerie Nathalie Obadia
3 rue du Cloître Saint-Merri
75004 Paris
France

www.galerie-obadia.com