DIALECT – FLAME NOT STONE
2021-03-08Flame Not Stone from the album Under~Between.
Video by Marija Avramovic & Sam Twidale
CELER – BEING BELOW
2021-03-08CELER, an American artist living in Japan, has crafted a sublime mini-album, Being Below. With a mixture of digital and analogue equipment, he has created a set of short songs which could go on forever. Through the gently evolving pads and profound harmonies, CELER evokes calmness, nature and peace within. Press play, sit back, close your eyes and drift off.
TweetWILLIAM BUCHINA – LOW INFORMATION SETTINGS
2021-03-08The discovery, examination, and reimagining of a vast array of visual and conceptual references is essential to Buchina’s creative process. His works meld seemingly disparate figures, places, and scenarios into Surrealist-style compositions, offering viewers hints at a narrative trajectory only to leave the trail unfinished or abruptly shifting in a different direction. Produced with the line precision of graphic novels and the bold, flat monochromatics of Pop art, Buchina’s paintings and works on paper are filled with rich detail that compels active viewing and invites personal interpretation.
The open-ended nature of Buchina’s work takes on particular meaning in his two latest series, Scenery and Low Information Settings—the latter of which also gives the exhibition its name, as he draws on the news cycles and happenings that have captivated and divided our nation and the world in recent years. Indeed, Low Information Settings was inspired by Buchina’s reading on a recent conflict in a remote mountainous region, which a news report referred to as a “low information setting” or an area where access to news and outside information is limited. For Buchina, this idea offered a dynamic contrast to places like the United States, where access to content is not only easy but overwhelming, but where misinformation and mistrust of institutions have equally proliferated to detrimental effects.
Opposite – Low Information Settings #2
Exhibition runs through to April 24th, 2021
Hollis Taggart
521 W 26th Street, 1st Floor
NY 10001
New York
THILO HEINZMANN – MY TIME YOUR TIME OUR TIME TIME
2021-03-08On view are paintings that combine the compositional elements from various series from his past practices, pigment paintings, Tacmo, Aicmo, and polystyrene paintings with glass, in a new way for the first time.
The chromatic intensity of loose pigments, the reflections of broad brushstrokes, the traces of speedily inscribed hand movements, and the luminosity of sprinkled colored glass vibrate in overlapping layers to form a polyfocal visual space. A significant voice in a generation of German painters scrutinizing the medium and its history, Heinzmann is known for his inventive, precise work that is driven by an inquiry into what painting can be today. Using a diversity of materials, from chipboard, Styrofoam, porcelain, aluminum, to nail polish, resin, pigment, fur, cotton wool, and hessian, the artist has for the last twenty-five years worked on developing new paths and a unique visual language in his practice.
The works in the main room of the gallery are characterized by his consistent and subtle approach to light, tempo, composition and color. Although each painting exists in its own right, the rhythmic sequence of their presentation facilitates the idea of a garden, a landscape, in which a figure appears and disappears. Its imagined presence activates the pictorial space, which thus becomes a stage.
Opposite – O.T., 2019
Exhibition runs through to March 20th, 2021
Perrotin
Piramide Building, 1F, 6-6-9 Roppongi, Minato-Ku
106-0032 Tokyo
JON HENRY – STRANGER FRUIT
2021-03-08Stranger Fruit was created in response to the senseless murders of black men across the nation by police violence. Even with smart phones and dash cams recording the actions, more lives get cut short due to unnecessary and excessive violence. Who is next? Me? My brother? My friends? How do we protect these men?
Lost in the furor of media coverage, lawsuits and protests is the plight of the mother. Who, regardless of the legal outcome, must carry on without her child. I set out to photograph mothers with their sons in their environment, reenacting what it must feel like to endure this pain. The mothers in the photographs have not lost their sons, but understand the reality, that this could happen to their family. The mother is also photographed in isolation, reflecting on the absence. When the trials are over, the protesters have gone home and the news cameras gone, it is the mother left. Left to mourn, to survive.
The title of the project is a reference to the song “Strange Fruit.” Instead of black bodies hanging from the Poplar Tree, these fruits of our families, our communities, are being killed in the street.
Opposite – Untitled #2, Co-Op City, NY, 2015
Exhibition runs through to March 27th, 2021
Blue Sky Gallery
122 NW 8th Avenue
Portland
OR 97209
WORKING TOGETHER
2021-03-08Working Together is an unprecedented exhibition that chronicles the formative years of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of Black photographers established in New York City in 1963. “Kamoinge” comes from the language of the Kikuyu people of Kenya, meaning “a group of people acting together,” and reflects the ideal that animated the collective. In the early years, at a time of dramatic social upheaval, members met regularly to show and discuss each other’s work and to share their critical perspectives, technical and professional experience, and friendship. Although each artist had his or her own sensibility and developed an independent career, the members of Kamoinge were deeply committed to photography’s power and status as an independent art form. They boldly and inventively depicted their communities as they saw and participated in them, rather than as they were often portrayed.
Exhibition runs through to March 27th, 2021
Whitney Museum Of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York
NY 10021