BRIAN JUNGEN

Posted on 2016-02-15

Using new Air Jordan trainers, which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2015, Jungen returns to a material he is both familiar with and continues to experiment through. Adopting an alternative approach to dissecting and rearranging the material that was developed in earlier work, these new sculptures are produced using the same tools that were utilized to manufacture them: band saw, punches, rivets, drills and an industrial sewing machine, personalizing their industrial production.

As the shoes themselves have changed in terms of design and colour schemes over time, so has the artist’s strategy of using them as representational objects of colonial and First Nation art histories merging with contemporary collective imagery. These new works become more abstract and colorful, continuing to allow the material of the shoe itself to guide his decision about their form and assembly while pushing the possibilities of material depiction. Utilizing as much of the shoe as possible in their production, these objects minimize extraneous material and armatures and act as free standing sculptures.

The resulting works are less a direct representation and contain more a suggestion of animal and human faces, taking advantage of how we innately search for and recognize these particular patterns. This phenomena, oscillating between representation and abstraction, has historically been used in the visual representation of diverse mythologies. It could be argued that myths are always born from trauma and intertwine with the uncanny and supernatural, itself by definition unknown and indescribable. Considering our continued abstraction of faces and bodies through masks and dress, these works can be considered in direct relation to the diverse but unified aesthetics of contemporary global economic, political and cultural conflict.

Opposite – Broken Arrangement, 2016

Exhibition runs through till February 27th, 2016

Catriona Jeffries
274 East 1st Avenue
Vancouver
British Columbia
V5T 1A6 Canada

catrionajeffries.com

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SUZANNE TREISTER – HFT THE GARDENER

Posted on 2016-02-15

HFT The Gardener will feature artworks created by the fictional character Hillel Fischer Traumberg, a banker turned ‘outsider artist’.

At work one day Traumberg, a British high frequency trader (HFT), enters a semi-hallucinogenic state that alters his perceptions of the trading algorithms he is working with. Inspired by this experience, he starts to experiment with psychoactive drugs and explore the ethno-pharmacology of plants from which they are derived.

Utilizing the ancient Hebrew tradition of Gematria, which assigns a numerical value to each letter of the alphabet, Traumberg calculates the numerological equivalents of the botanical names of the psychoactive plants and cross-references them with companies in the FT Global 500 Financial Index. Pairing the botanical plants with the companies they correspond to on the FT Index, he spends his days creating groups of prints and drawings inspired by the work of Ernst Haekel which he had loved as a child, and of Adolf Wölfli, whose drawings he had more recently seen on a banking trip to Bern in Switzerland.

Released from his job in the city, Traumberg communes with the traditional shamanic users of the plants whose practices include healing, divining the future, entering the spirit world and exploring the hallucinatory nature of reality. He develops a fantasy of himself as a techno-shaman, transmuting the spirituality of the universe and the hallucinogenic nature of capital into new art forms.

Opposite – HFT The Gardener / Botanical Prints / Rank 4: Google – US – Software & computer services, 2014-15

Exhibition runs through till March 12th, 2016

P.P.O.W
535 West 22nd Street
3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001

www.ppowgallery.com

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JUDITH BELZER

Posted on 2016-02-15

Belzer’s painting has long concerned itself with the uneasy relationship between the natural and commercial worlds, and she will often use the borderlands between the two as a motif. She adopts aerial perspectives, surveying the contested zones between back country, cultivated field, industry and the overlay of her own organizing principles. Her theme is not so much the encroachment of civilization as one finds in the pervasive brand-scape, but the crimping effect on worlds caught in the collision of economy and ecology. She paints with the critical eye of a journalist reporting back on the condition of an endangered habitat. She uses oil paint at times like watercolor and at times like colored pencil, folding her surfaces in ribbons of thin wash and sharply meandering line.

Exhibition runs through till April 9th, 2016

George Lawson Gallery
315 Potrero Avenue (at 16th St.)
San Francisco
CA 94103

www.georgelawsongallery.com

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