September 25 - November 6, 2010
Opening reception, Saturday, September 25, 7-10pm
Artist talk and book signing, Saturday, October 16, 1pm
 
SALTWORKS is pleased to present mythologies and mash-ups, new paintings by New York-based American artist, iona rozeal brown from September 25 to November 6, 2010.  This is brown's first solo exhibition at the gallery.

mythologies and mash-ups depicts an elaborately crafted universe of fantastical creatures with the purpose of creating an allegorical history rooted in African-American hip hop culture and synthesized with Japanese art historical and contemporary aesthetics.  The works are painted in flat planes of color and strong lines in the style of the Ukiyo-e woodblock prints of the Edo period.  brown continues her investigation of the power of consumer society to undermine individual identity introduced in her highly successful Blackface series (2001-5).  This new body of work reads like an epic fable, lush and hallucinatory, in which lessons of the hip hop-era gods and goddesses are preached to the young, often falling on deaf ears.  The spiritual and the material worlds co-exist in a chaotic realm of good versus evil, which is at once contemporary and timeless.

brown first embraced Japanese culture and aesthetics as a young child with a fondness for anime.  Soon, she found herself introduced to Japanese puppet theatre (Bunraku, Kabuki).  As a young adult, she received a fellowship to study the elements of Kabuki and Noh theatre in Japan.  brown then delved into the study of Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints and this style continues to influence her work today. 
 
brown portrays he path of the hero (in this case, heroine), a common theme in Japanese folklore, in the mixed media on panel piece, a children's story (2009).  A swarm of evil cherub-like demons impose their infectious consumerism upon a young schoolgirl who becomes overwhelmed by the deluge of materialism from which she cannot escape.  In the lower right sits the menacing character, E.I.N. (Everything I'm Not), masked and dressed provocatively next to a pool of sinister eel-like creatures.  The abstracted calligraphy characters are fictitious language based upon a number system, which, when translated quotes a Slick Rick song of the piece's title, "This ain't funny, so don't ya dare laugh, just another case 'bout the wrong path."  As in true fable style, the image is dark and the lesson poignant.

One of the more empowering pieces in the series is E.I.N. intrusion (watch out for the big girls) (after Yoshitoshi's "onogawa Kisaburo, from One Hundred Tales of Japan and China"), 2006.  In the piece, a female DJ is clearly neither afraid nor intimidated by the E.I.N. character, as expressed by the DJ blowing smoke in the monster's face.  E.I.N. suffers from a Gollum-esque obsession for material possessions which has turned her into a hideous creature.  Yet as a DJ controls the quality of the sound and volume of her music, so this DJ maintains control of her values, ideals and therefore, self-worth.  The Edo-period artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-92), on whose work this piece was based, was a great influence on brown's new body of work.  Yoshitoshi's works were renowned for their drama and cleverness and often depicted Kabuki scenes and actors.

Many of the core works that form this exhibition were commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland for the exhibition iona rozeal brown:  all falls down and received the 2009 Joyce Award for Visual Art. The MOCA Cleveland museum catalog published by Hatje Cantz.  Essay by Megan Lykins Reich.  Interview with the artist by Isolde Brielmaier.  The catalogue will be available for sale at the gallery.  Signed copies will be available from the October 16 artist talk and book signing.
 
iona rozeal brown received her MFA in painting fro the Yale University School of Art, and her BFA in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute.  brown also completed a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. brown currently lives and works in New York City.  She has had solo exhibitions at the following institutions: MOCA Cleveland, the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Spelman College Museum of Art.  brown's work has been acquired for the collections of the Norton Family Collection, the New Museum New York, NY, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum, Yale University,  the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Altoids Curiously Strong Collection, the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL and the Hirshorm Museum, Washington, DC. brown will have a solo exhibition at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Jan - May 2011.

Image:
iona rozeal brown
a children's story, 2009
Mixed media on framed panel
60 x 48 inches
Courtesy of SALTWORKS

SALTWORKS
664 11th Street NW
Atlanta, GA 30318
T +1 404 881 0411
E info @ saltworksgallery.com
Wed-Sat, 12-5 and by appt

 

 

 

September 4 - October 16, 2010

Galerie Chantal Crousel is pleased to announce its third exhibition with artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. For this exhibition, the artists present five works organized around the principle of physical and temporal displacement. Gathering material elements from different social, geographical, and cultural systems into the field of a single image/form, the works presented here use metaphor as a structuring and distributional force to expand the frame through which normal circuits of meaning are determined. The artists likewise privilege the aberrant, excessive, and disruptive workings of metaphors and other tropes to destabilize the functional stability of these ordering structures.

Occupying the main space of the gallery floor is Scale of Justice Carried by Shore Foam, 2010, a realistic hand crafted sculpture of shore foam, on top of which is positioned a readymade "Scale ofJustice" precariously out of balance atop the turbulent crest. This mass of bubbles of gas and air is given permanent form through the use of synthetic polymer foam, a chemical substrate found in everything from household, sport, and leisure products to transportation, industrial, and military applications. The image of shore foam has come to occupy the public imaginary more prominently in recent years as a result of countless media depictions of man made catastrophes from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the now annual flooding worldwide caused by global warming. With these ecological events cutting across national and territorial borders, the scale of justice has become an object of explicit struggle. Presented here in sculptural form, this ephemeral froth stands as the remains of something that has come to pass, frozen in time, with the final balance of the scale left undetermined.

A Man Screaming is Not a Dancing Bear, 2008, sets the frame of ecological witness-bearing and environmental justice within the traumatized landscape of post-Katrina New Orleans. The film focuses on two scenes: the interior of a flooded house in the Lower Ninth Ward, the historically poor predominately African American neighborhood that was completely destroyed by the failed levee system, and the wetlands of the lower Mississippi River Delta out of which the city of New Orleans was carved. The film depicts a resident of the Ninth Ward, Isaiah McCormick, "playing" a set of window blinds in his house. The percussive rhythms he creates on this homegrown instrument - a gesture that inevitably evokes the great musical experiments of the Mississippi - expose the home interior to the light outdoors, generating an inconstant flutter of light that reveals the sediments, marks and uneven traces left by the events of a recent history.

Processes of sedimentation are at work in Petrified Petrol Pump, 2010, an abandoned gasoline pump that appears to have turned into stone. Made from fossil-filled limestone, the indexes of ancient life forms that are visible throughout the sculptural body attest to the organic plentitude of the earth's pre-history, the very life forms whose long process of anaerobic decomposition provides the material used today to generate energy.

The Camel's Humps and the Ironing Board, 2010 is a hybrid assemblage consisting of the stuffed upper hide of a Bactrian camel placed on top of a readymade ironing board. The camel's humps, the part of the animal's anatomy where fatty deposits are stored and thus enable it to withstand extreme temperature changes, are here radically disembodied. If the physics behind ironing is the liquid-glass transition: when fabric is heated above the transition temperature of 100° Celsius causing the fibers to become mobile so that the weight of the iron can impose onto them a preferred orientation, then, in this sculptural scenario, the violently truncated appearance of the camel's back upon an ironing table, present a monstrous wrinkle, an ingenious trick whose peak shape imposes a new orientation that reconvenes an image of landscape, domesticity, figure/ground and animal/ human relations.

Forecast, 2010, uses the photographic apparatus to present the precise moment of formal stasis in the trajectory of a fishing net's casting into the water, where the lift of flight and the pull of gravity act equally upon its woven matrix of threads. The result is an amorphous shape that presents a possible form to come as well as its simultaneous disappearance. The collection of vertices, edges, and faces that define the shape of this polyhedral object form a temporary map across physical, conceptual, and poetic domains.

Jennifer Allora (born 1974, USA) and Guillermo Calzadilla (born 1971, Cuba) have been collaborating since 1995. They have been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, including presentations at Haus der Kunst and Kunstverein Munich; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; San Francisco Art Institute; Serpentine Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Zurich; and The Renaissance Society, Chicago. They have also been included in group exhibitions such as "Prospect 1 New Orleans"; the 8th & 9th Lyon Biennales; Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night; 51st Venice Biennale; "Ailleurs/Ici," Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC Paris, "How Latitudes Become Form," Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, and "Common Wealth," Tate Modern. Allora & Calzadilla are based in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla will represent United States at the 54th Venice Biennale
(June 4 - November 27, 2011)

Image:
Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla

Scale of Justice Carried by Shore Foam, 2010.
Polystyrene, synthetic polymer foam / Polystyrène, mousse polymère synthetique
300 L x 520 l x 290 H cm. Photo credit: Florian Kleinefenn
Courtesy of Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

GALERIE CHANTAL CROUSEL
10 rue Charlot
75003 Paris
France
T +33 1 42 77 38 87

Sam Still | Open Studio | Burnished India Ink Drawings
 
805 6th Ave., between West 27th and West 28th Street, NYC
 
4th floor, PLEASE RING BUZZER #1
 
Friday, Sept. 24th, Noon - 6PM
Saturday, Sept. 25th, Noon - 6PM
Sunday, Sept. 26th, Noon - 5PM
 
212-874-2610
 
Statement:

My practice is the push and pull of the rapidograph barrel against the paper grain, with the paper grain. The delight in the ink's power to overcome, obliterate, saturate the white as the barrel passes calculatingly along the paper. The smell of the ink, the sound of the barrel scratching a pathway as the ink is pulled out of the pen. The almost giddy anticipation of the act of drawing, the chase. Oh, what animalistic pleasure is derived. These drawings are also a record of a journey. A journey of thought and contemplation Sometimes brief, other times long and involved. My drawings record the time spent. With the most current drawings, I am attempting to confuse the eye. When I'm looking at my large format drawings my eye "bounces" back and forth from seeing the white in the center as an object floating on a black surface and then as a hole in a black film/surface. What is real? What is not real? IS everything the same? Is everything everything?

Sam Still

Image:
Sam Still

burnished India ink drawing on Lenox 100 paper ground
80 x 72 in. / 203.20 x 182.88 cm.

 
Sam Still
805 6th Avenue, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10001
Cell 212-874-2610

Sam Still

Read On... Sam Still, New York