TIM BERG & REBEKAH MYERS – ON THE BRINK

Posted on 2011-10-03

Continuing with their exploration of ideas of material value and the consequences of the actions we take to satisfy
our desires, Berg-Myers have created a new body of works. This current exhibition is meant to provide the viewers with objects-situations where our choices are put to the test in how we understand the value of the things we do.Some of the works in the exhibition have titles such as “All that glitters” and “As good as gold” which echo marketing tools employed in our contemporary culture to attract with a promise of guaranteed satisfaction if consumed.

Other works, such as “Against the tide “ and “Souvenirs” are examples of how the polar bear could become extinct do to our treatment of the environment. Eventually nature will remain present in our culture in the form of manmade objects that represent what once was real. These man-made objects end up in our homes where we will value them without realizing that they represent the real thing.

Opposite – Here today, gone tomorrow, grape, 2010, Fiberglas, wood, paint

Exhibition runs through to October 29th, 2011

Dean Project
511 West 25th StreetRoom 207
New York
NY
10001

deanproject.com

  

GREG DRASLER – ON THE LAM

Posted on 2011-09-26

Drasler, in these highly polished uncanny paintings, constructs the elsewhere and disruptions of travel as if reinventing the wheel. With auto interiors, patterns and suspended objects, the manifold directions of the imagination is a back seat driver steering into bursts of symbolic coincidence. The objects have the capacity of vehicles and the vehicles are all interior. Littered with cameras, trailers, books, tents and a ski lift, the paintings remain unusually vacant yet preoccupied. This pile up of instruments, tools, patterns and apparel accumulates and reads as words in a sentence, a visual sentence, which is the painting.

Taking its title from the largest painting in the show the exhibition insinuates encampment as a destination. On the Lam (70 x 160 inches) is crowded with trailers, tents and wagons that attract with a variety of doors, windows, vents and flaps. In the constructed panoramic sky, complete with camp fire plume, hovers a bicycle wheel, either spun out or loosened from its sprockets. In the place below, where the rubber hits the road, the painting gives us means-to-move and places-to-be.

Opposite – Rain Dance , 2011

Exhibition runs through to October 15th, 2011

Betty Cuningham Gallery
541 West 25th street
New York
NY
10001

www.bettycuninghamgallery.com

  

CHRIS BARNARD – TOWARD TRINITY

Posted on 2011-09-26

Toward Trinity continues Chris Barnard’s personal and passionate exploration of the gap between the visible and invisible aspects of military representations and war time realities. Questioning the systems that celebrate destructive force and technological achievement, and the subversive measures used to eclipse the darker side of imperialist motives, Toward Trinity offers a fresh exploration of power and spectatorship.

It is an examination of contemporary American culture – one that is increasingly in a state of militarization and perpetual war – questioning the underlying structures of power that are framing the discussion and our understanding of these issues. Barnard implicates the role of art and visual culture in the process of social conditioning, exposing strategies that paradoxically disguise while also disclosing information.Employing techniques and mechanisms inherent to different pictorial traditions, such as history painting (popularly utilized to glorify imperial conquests), American 19th-century landscape painting (used to invoke Manifest Destiny, an ideological dominion over the land), and European religious paintings (produced to convey reverence and incite obedience), Barnard’s new work addresses the contentious relationship between the veneration of the American military-industrial complex and the ecological damage and human suffering caused by it.

Exhibition runs through to October 15th, 2011

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
2685 S. La Cienega Boulevard
Los Angeles
CA 90034

www.luisdejesus.com

  

FERTILITY

Posted on 2011-09-26

Fertility, in all its literal or metaphoric meanings, is cyclic and timeless. At its most basic, to be fertile is to bear fruit-whether humans making children or the land producing crops. In a broader sense, fertility speaks to inventiveness, abundance, possibilities, ideas. Involved in the show are works from Marina Abramovic, Jonathan Borofsky, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Mueller, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin, Andres Serrano and Daniel Spoerri.

Grouping works dating from the late 19th century to the contemporary moment by eleven artists, the show looks at its theme from many angles – factual and symbolic, erotic and tender, visceral and humorous. The contemporary artist Marina Abramovic immediately commands attention with the assertiveness of her female imagery. Abramovic’s 2005 chromogenic print “Women in Rain #2,” taken from her video piece “Balkan Erotic Epic,” shows traditionally dressed village women in a field lifting their skirts and thrusting their exposed vaginas to the heavens. In equal parts startling and comic, the image is part of Abramovic’s exploration of ancient Balkan beliefs in the power of human genitalia to ensure the fertility of the land.

Opposite – Louise Bourgeois, Pregnant Woman, 2008

Exhibition runs through to October 29th, 2011

Side by Side Gallery Akim Monet GmbH
Potsdamerstrasse 81b
10785 Berlin

www.alminerech.com

  

THREE KINGS

Posted on 2011-09-19

In classic NYC Subway Graffiti lore, a “King” is one who has achieved the most recognition for not only excellence in style but for the mark they have made on the culture. For over thirty years these “3 Kings” have been at the top of the game, Fred Brathwaite aka Fab 5 Freddy, Lee Quinones and Leonard Mcgurr aka Futura 2000.
Their history-making rise to international prominence from the subway tunnels of New York City was recently chronicled in MOCA’s “Art In The Streets” exhibition.

Opposite – Spanish Harlem, 2011, Fab 5 Freddy

Exhibition runs through to October 8th, 2011

Subliminal Projects
1331 W Sunset Boulevard
Los Angeles
CA 90026

www.subliminalprojects.com

  

RICHARD JACKSON – THE LITTLE GIRL’S ROOM

Posted on 2011-09-19

The Little Girl’s Room, an exhibition of new work by Richard Jackson. His first solo gallery exhibition in Los Angeles in 20 years, the show is a significant milestone for an artist whose work has continually expanded and redefined the physical and conceptual reach of painting since the 1970s.

The work’s centerpiece is a monumentally-scaled sculpture of a unicorn balanced on its horn, embraced by a life-size sculpture of a strangely doll-like little girl, that spins atop a motorized platform. Like many of the objects that Jackson has developed over the course of his career, the piece will be activated at the time of its installation in the gallery space. As it spins, paint will be pumped through the horse’s genitals and spray and drip across the other elements of the installation. These include the large-scale canvases that depict fluffy clouds and geometric forms borrowed from Frank Stella, as well as an array of other objects that feel at once familiar and disturbingly out of place in the context of a child’s room.

The sculptural figures that serve as both sources and supports for paint represent extremes of physicality in which the infantile and the archaic resemble each other. A larger-than-life Jack-in-the-box will be draped over one of the gallery’s trusses, and when activated will emit paint downward from the pointy tip of its hat; a hobby horse, its head lodged in a bucket of paint, will rock back and forth, dumping the bucket’s contents onto the floor around it; a sculpture of a baby will sit with a collection of baby bottles, filled and overfilled with paint; and, half-hidden in a closet, a comically aroused clown will communicate an aura of unsuccessfully repressed sexuality.

Exhibition runs through to October 20th, 2011

David Kordansky Gallery
3143 S. La Cienega Blvd
Unit A
Los Angeles
CA 9001611

www.davidkordanskygallery.com