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DCKT Contemporary, New York |
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ZOE CROSHER
The Unraveling of
Michelle duBois
January 8 - February 14, 2010
DCKT Contemporary is
pleased to present ZOE CROSHER's The
Unraveling of Michelle duBois, a reconsidered archive
culled from crates, boxes and albums consisting of endless
flirtatious smiles, tourist shots, cheesecake mementos and
suggestive poses in every film type and size.
It is simply an archive. But nothing is
ever simple. Michelle duBois, one of a number of aliases, kept
a lot of pictures of herself.. Turning tricks in the Pacific
Rim during the '70s, she took on many guises for her
particular profession and kept fanatical documentation of her
many dramatic transformations. Until one day, she didn't. Time
passes, things fall apart, and the photographs record its
circuitous and histrionic conclusion.
duBois adopted CROSHER and bequeathed to
her the dubious legacy of this archive. CROSHER has gotten
lost in this archive. But an archive by itself, like an
artwork by itself, is a static notion, a thing activated only
when it is being handled, witnessed, experienced. And CROSHER,
the artist with a vaguely similar appearance, is making
pictures. In this instance of duBois's images, but pictures
nonetheless. Pictures of pictures. Of obfuscated faces, of
repeated shadows in dark black & white doorways, of tiger
prints and arched backs, of backs of backs of photographs and
backs of necks, of eyes and mirrors and reflections, of notes
taken and rewritten, scanned and scratched, kept and held and
returned - all of which are coming undone in various shades of
magenta and yellow and cyan. The photographic archive itself
is dissolving, the pictures are fading, new surfaces are
showing through. The two archives are collapsing into each
other, conflating the history of the reordering of the
unraveling and the unraveling itself.
Their material, the photograph as a thing,
is itself ending. Framed and reframed, duBois's Asianesque
escapism viewed through the lens of CROSHER's transience
obsessions provoke our own fantasies, encapsulating an
imagined amateur history. One that is almost gone, never to be
discovered or, as in this case, bequeathed ever again. Except
here, momentarily halting the process for another peek, coyly
giving us something vibrant to see.
CROSHER holds a MFA in Photography &
Integrated Media from Cal Arts (Valencia, CA). She lives and
works Los Angeles. In 2008 her solo exhibition The
Reconsidered Archive of Michelle du Bois was shown at the
Claremont Museum of Art (CA). She was included in the recent
group exhibition Suddenly: Where We Live Now at the
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College
(Portland, OR) and the Pomona College Museum of Art, (CA). Her
work is included in the permanent collection of the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This is her third solo
exhibition with DCKT Contemporary.
Image:
Zoe Crosher, Obfuscated 2,
2009
archival inkjet print, ed. of 5 + 2 AP
23 ½ x 34
¾in
Courtesy of DCKT Contemporary, New York
DCKT Contemporary
195 Bowery, ground
floor
NY 10002
New York, NY
+1 212 741 9955
Tuesday through Friday, 11am - 6pm
Saturday, noon -
6pm; Sunday, noon - 5pm
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Galleri Tom Christoffersen,
Copenhagen |
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COUNTRY & SEA
Thomas Bangsted
(DK/US)
8 January to 6 February 2010
COUNTRY & SEA is
Thomas Bangsted's first solo exhibition at
Galleri Tom Christoffersen. The pictures have been selected
from large-scale photographs produced over the past two years
while the artist travelled the American Midwest and the
coastline of the Eastern Seaboard. The work makes a return to
photography's extraordinary capacity to imagine and articulate
the landscape at the intersection between nature and
civilization.
Drawing upon a wide historical context
surrounding landscape and its representation, Bangsted depicts
the American exterior from the point of view of an outsider.
The work is at once descriptive and metaphoric, as the artist
in some pictures looks underneath the glib surface of a
contemporary commonplace, while in others uncovers a
melancholic and monumental beauty found in the outdoor
ordinary.
The subjects are diverse and Bangsted's
ever expanding narrative is populated by a wide range of
protagonists: A horse and rider paused midair, hungry pelicans
in a shabby harbour, a lineup of patriotically decorated
cement trucks and tea party vessels bobbing in a pool of
reflections. With an acute sense of the uncanny, these tightly
composed pictures examine the fissures between human and
natural infrastructure. The quiet tension produced vacillates
between unbearable familiarity and rich pictorial
sensation.
Technically, the meticulous photographs are
the result of multiple exposures of the same scene recorded
over a period of time ranging from a few hours up to several
months. These parts are later combined into a single
transparent image. The work pushes the boundaries of the still
photograph, using technology to represent land and sea in
subtle but significant ways without undermining the viewer's
suspension of disbelief. In this way, Bangsted's work tests
the precarious balance between composing pictures and
capturing the world.
Thomas Bangsted (DK,1976)
earned degrees in fine art from Glasgow School of Art (2004)
and Goldsmiths College, University of London (2005). He
graduated with an MFA in Photography from Yale University,
School of Art in 2007. Thomas Bangsted lives and works in New
York.
His photographs have been exhibited at venues in
Europe and North America. Notably at The Barbican Centre,
London (2004), The Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art
(2004), New York Photo Festival (2008), and more recently at
The Prague Biennial 4 (2009). In Denmark Bangsted's work has
been shown at Gl Holtegaard (2009) and Fotografisk Center
(2006) among other places. Concurrently with this exhibition,
a selection of Bangsted's maritime photographs will be on
display in the exhibition Lost at Sea at Heather James Fine
Art in California, and later in 2011 at the Bronx Museum of
the Arts in New York.
Thomas Bangsted is represented by
Galleri Tom Christoffersen.
Image:
Thomas Bangsted, Plantation Field.
2009
Archival Pigment Print
149x195 cm, edition 1/6
(+2AP)
Courtesy of Galleri Tom Christoffersen,
Copenhagen
Galleri Tom
Christoffersen
Skindergade 5
1159
Copenhagen
Denmark
+45 33917610
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Postmasters Gallery, New
York |
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January 9 - February 13, 2010
"I don't deal directly with reality but
with representations and stories. The truth basis of what I'm
doing is not interesting to me. In an act of storytelling,
there is a truth." Omer Fast, as quoted in New York
Magazine, December 21-28, 2009.
These exact words were never uttered in
this order. But, like in Fast's works, it is precisely in
re-telling, editing, interpretation, misunderstanding and
subjective recollections that we encounter the kernels of what
is real.
Postmasters Gallery is pleased to announce
an exhibition of two video works by Omer Fast. The show
opening on January 9th coincides with Fast's exhibition at the
Whitney Museum of American Art.
"Take A Deep Breath"
(2008)
In the summer of 2002, Martin F. was
standing outside a Falafel shop in Jerusalem when it exploded.
A trained medic, he went in and discovered the body of a young
man on the floor. The young man had lost both legs as well as
an arm, but his eyes were open and focused. Hoping for a
miracle, Martin F. decided to administer mouth-to-mouth
resuscitation. After a few minutes though, the young man's
eyes rolled up into his head and he expired. A crowd of
onlookers had gathered outside and the police showed up. They
wanted to know how many casualties were inside. When he
responded that there was only one, Martin F. realized the
young man he had just left inside was the suicide
bomber.
In "Take A Deep Breath," extracts from a
conversation recorded with Martin F. in Jerusalem alternate
with scenes filmed in Los Angeles in which a team of actors
attempts to stage his ordeal for the camera. There are two
cameras shooting simultaneously. Each shoots a different
view.
"De Grote Boodschap"
(2007)
Filmed on-location in Mechelen, Belgium,
"De Grote Boodschap" presents the stories of paired Flemish
characters who appear to be caught in a time-warp: A
stewardess and her unemployed husband, an old junkie and her
caregiver, a white beatboxer and his black girlfriend, a
real-estate agent and a taciturn Arab. As the characters
interact, the story of a family's diamonds is revealed and
retracted in an endless loop that mistakes the scatological
for the profound.
"Fast is interminably drawn to the figure of "the
witness" - the individuals un/officially earmarked to repeat
their personal experiences for something like the greater
good. And it is precisely in these active, "acted" retellings,
in which memory is vocally rehashed, that Fast encourages his
protagonists to stumble. Rather than drawing a fine-tooth comb
through their dreams à la psychoanalysis, Fast surveys their
seemingly - scripted public stories, and from stilted
syllables and logical missteps excavates flashes of that
abstract notion of the "real." (...) Perhaps because of this
interpretive flair, Gideon Lewis-Kraus has called Fast a
"reanimator"; in particular, it is his ability to imagine an
interviewee's (beaten, dead) tale as something other than it
is (alive). Trafficking in structural manipulation allows Fast
to avoid the video artist's inevitable gambit of
camera-as-confessional, leaving critical, and even ethical,
space for the viewer to wallow about in."
Kari
Rittenbach "Dramatic Witness: The Art of Omer Fast (Art In
America online December 2009)
Omer Fast was a recipient of the Bucksbaum
Award at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. In October 2009 he has
received National Gallery Prize for Young Art in Berlin. Most
recently Fast's works were shown at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin,
Gallery of South London, Berkeley Art Museum, Lund Konsthall,
Indianapolis Museum of Art and Performa 2009.
Image:
Omer Fast
"Take a Deep Breath", 2008
- production still
single channel HD video
running time:
27 minutes
Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New
York
Postmasters Gallery
459 West 19th
Street (at 10th Avenue)
New York, NY 10011
+1 212 727
3323
Open tuesdays through saturdays between 11 and 6 pm
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gb agency, Paris |
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Elina Brotherus
"Retrospective"
January 9 - February 13, 2010
First part of two consecutive solo
exhibitions dedicated to the work of the Finnish artist
Elina Brotherus at gb agency, this
"Retrospective" presents a wide selection of photographs from
different series in a scenography inspired by the 19th century
French Salons.
If this "Retrospective" obviously plays
with the codes that those kind of exhibitions may suggest, it
differs however by avoiding any strictly chronological or
thematic approach.
The photographs from the different series
«Das Mädchen sprach von Liebe», «Suites Françaises», «The New
Painting», «Model Studies», «Artist and her Model» or «Etudes
d'après modèle, danseurs» are mixed one with the others and
confronted to create a constellation echoing the concerns, the
structure and the obsessive nature of Elina Brotherus' work
throughout the years, allowing a timeless perception of her
work.
The second part of the exhibition (February
20 - March 20, 2010) will be dedicated to the presentation of
a new series of photographs entitled «Artists at Work» as well
as a new video work.
Elina Brotherus (1972)
works with photography and video.
She lives in Finland and
France.
She was a recipient of the Prix Niepce de
la Photographie in 2005 and of the Prix Mosaïque du Centre
National de l 'Audiovisuel du Luxembourg in 2001.
She has
published three monographic books:
«Decisive days ,
photographies 1997-2001» (Kustannus Pohjoinen, Finland 2002),
«The New Painting» (Next Level, U.K., 2005) and «Etudes
d'après modèle, danseurs» (Textuel, with the support of the
Opéra de Paris, France, 2007).
Her new book on the «Model
Studies» series is currently under process.
Image:
Elina Brotherus
Fuji-Mi 2,
Artist and her Model, 2008, 70 x 55 cm
Courtesy of gb
agency, Paris
gb agency20 rue louise
weiss Paris 75013 France + 33 1 53 79 07 13
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re-title.com - Independent directories of
emerging & professional contemporary art
Coming Next
January 20-21 Painting /
Drawing January
27-28 Sculpture / Installation
February 3-4 Multi / Mixed Media
February 10-11 Painting / Drawing
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BM Box 5163
London
WC1N 3XX
United
Kingdom
+44 (0) 870 922
0438 |
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