TONY COKES – ON NON-VISIBILITY

Posted on 2018-05-14

Since the early 1980s Tony Cokes has developed a precise visual and discursive style marked by videos that feature animated text, found images, solid-color slides, and pop music. In his work Cokes samples and subverts modes of representation and cultural fragments from the media—in particular news, advertising, and Hollywood cinema—reframing the images and ideas that are designed to construct our habits and identities. By extracting source texts from their original contexts and layering elements that often clash, Cokes analyzes media’s operations and the ways in which they manifest power. On Non-Visibility, Cokes’s first gallery exhibition, presents a historical cross section of his practice, focusing in particular on the titular theme.
The earliest piece in the exhibition, Black Celebration (1988), is projected in the gallery’s center room. In the video Cokes pairs footage from the 1965 riots in Watts, Boston, Detroit, and Newark with text by The Situationist International, Barbara Kruger, Morrissey, and Depeche Mode’s Martin L. Gore, along with music by the industrial band Skinny Puppy. The piece “[introduces] a reading that will contradict received ideas which characterize these riots as criminal or irrational,” Cokes has said.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to June 9th, 2018

Greene Naftali
508 West 26th Street
NY 10001 New York
NY USA

www.greenenaftaligallery.com

  

CAMERON JAMIE

Posted on 2018-05-07

In his latest exhibition, Jamie is exhibiting his new series of ceramic works which he has expanded and merged into his own personal language as an extension of his graphic and sculptural disciplines. With his video works, photographs, performances, sculptures and drawings, Jamie has been a major figure on the international arts scene for the last thirty years. His practice, enriched by appropriations and collaborations, has often been compared to anthropology, and continues to stretch the notion of identity, highlighting the resurgences of myth and fantasy in everyday life and popular culture. His investigations into ritualistic practice in marginal or underground cultures deconstruct the overarching processes of normalization. His most recent work, however, forces us to rethink his role as the amateur documenter of backyard and urban culture that he has been assigned.

Opposite – Untitled, 2018

Exhibition runs through to May 26th, 2018

Kamel Mennour
47, rue Saint-André des arts
75006 Paris
France

www.kamelmennour.com

  

SOUFIANE ABABRI – HAUNTED LIVES

Posted on 2018-05-07

Ababri was born in Tangiers, a city famous for its verbal jousting which was observed by many a wandering author and immortalised in the works of Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kessel. He brings to bear on Tangiers what Genet called his “magnifying judgements”, in this case an outlook that transforms the reality of East and West and which is asserted in Ababri’s aesthetic and literary choices.
It is easy to imagine the artist giving into the pleasure of simply wandering, catching unposed, candid photos (in moments of Genet-like complicity) of fleeting fragments of desire to inspire his drawings; sketches that portray his favourite themes that are seemingly thrown in the observer’s face without regret. Right from the start, it’s all about virility, but a different kind of virility, an abrupt analysis that goes from dialectic to tragic thoughts. “I think a lot about the role violence has played in the history of forms and the mechanisms of domination and how I can produce work that negates them”, Ababri explains.

Opposite – Bed work, 2017-2018

Exhibition runs through to June 16th, 2018

Praz-Delavallade
5 rue des Haudriettes
75003 Paris

www.praz-delavallade.com

  

KERLIN GALLERY GROUP SHOW

Posted on 2018-05-07

Kerlin Gallery is honoured to present new work by Dorothy Cross, Aleana Egan, Siobhán Hapaska, Isabel Nolan and Kathy Prendergast.
This intergenerational exhibition presents five Irish contemporary artists who, operating at different stages in their careers, have each developed a distinct and innovative approach to sculpture that has won international recognition from museums, biennales and contemporary art publications. Each artist will present new or recent work for this exhibition, fixing artworks to the floors, walls and ceilings of the space.
The tips of fingers and mountains alike hover between heaven and earth in sculptures by Dorothy Cross: bronze digits are suspended with steel wire; the peaks of Everest emerge from white marble slabs. Aleana Egan’s looping, signature wall works are cast in the chalky patina of untreated bronze; their wobbly edges find counterpoint in a linear steel sculpture by Isabel Nolan, suspended from the ceiling to plot geometric arches across the airy interior of the gallery. A glossy fibreglass apple looks set to burst, squeezed between snakeskin girders in a new work by Siobhán Hapaska, while Kathy Prendergast’s sombre black architectural construction resembles a garden shed, built to the approximate dimensions of a human figure.

Exhibition runs through to June 21st, 2018

Kerlin Gallery
Anne’s Lane
South Anne Street
Dublin 2 Dublin
Ireland

www.kerlingallery.com

  

MARIA BARNAS – WE ARE TURNING CORNERS

Posted on 2018-04-30

Visual artist, poet and writer Maria Barnas focuses her work on the power of language in shaping reality. Her long-term research on whether words can be trusted as carriers of anything solid, converges in Sputter Fiction: presented first at the Nationaal Glasmuseum in Leerdam, the group of glass objects now on show in The Bakery further investigates the capacity of words to create new images. Does language consist of images? Can you pronounce a shape? Barnas builds narratives and alternative histories around history-as-we-know-it and what is presented as factual. An image, like a text, is not a closed container. It rarely depicts or describes what it sets out to. She works against the notion that language should have a specific form, aware of the fact that our grasp of reality is closely linked to the words we (don’t) choose to describe. Her work delves into the power structures that language exudes on a day-to-day, art-historical and political level. Moreover, her work sits at the heart of poetry’s ability to both heighten and obscure our notion of reality.

Opposite – Sputter Fiction, 2018

Exhibition runs through to June 16th, 2018

Annet Gelink Gallery
Laurierstraat 187-189
NL-1016PL Amsterdam
Netherlands

www.annetgelink.com

  

PHOEBE UNWIN – PREGNANT LANDSCAPE

Posted on 2018-04-30

The title of Phoebe Unwin’s next show Pregnant Landscape simultaneously invokes the traditions of portraiture and landscape painting. It also imbues the idea of a landscape with a sense of the bodily, as pregnancy suggests gestation and fecundity. Unwin does not work from pre-existing images or photographs, and the frenetic circulation of visual materials in 2.0 culture has no direct impact on her practice. Instead she makes paintings. In this case, a series of oil paintings that, as objects in themselves, conjure an image somewhere between the surface of the painting and the viewer’s observation of it. She describes her way of working as a kind of abstraction in reverse; rather than a drawing away from the observed world and a distillation of its actuality, it is more a case of ‘the abstract triggering the figurative.’ Yet it is not so much a tension between the ideas of abstraction and figuration, or a revision of the modernist prioritisation of form, but the objectification of the painting as a ‘thing-in-itself’ that can surprise, seduce and connect with the individual viewer to create novel content and unique meaning.

Opposite – Whisper, 2018

Exhibition runs through to May 26th, 2018

AMANDA WILKINSON
1st Floor, 18 Brewer Street
W1F 0SH
London

amandawilkinsongallery.com