17 Apr - 17 May 2008

 

James Cohan Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Yinka Shonibare, MBE. Shonibare's three-part installation of sculpture and photography revisits the collision between irrational mysticism and logical reason that occurred in society during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment period. The artist's work often concerns itself with the history of colonization and its ensuing struggles. Here, the artist intimates that western democracy's current conquests may similarly invoke physical or psychological conflict.

 

The installation opens with a room-sized, battered frigate, which dangerously lists as if it is about to sink. Set against the photographic backdrop of the same model ship perilously afloat in a stormy sea, Shonibare's sculpture appears as both a dramatic stage set and a two-dimensional image come to life. The work recalls the devastating wreck of the French ship, Medusa, off the coast of Senegal in 1819; the appalling conditions faced by its survivors were imagined by Théodore Géricault's 1819 painting, The Raft of the Medusa. The artist also alludes to William Shakespeare's 1611 play, The Tempest, which tells the story of the sorcerer Prospero, who, marooned on an island, conjures a shipwreck to lead his jealous brother, Antonio, to him. The shipwreck, which is never staged in the play, here is given a tangible form. The sculpture introduces the artist's exhibition and is the visual equivalent of Shakespeare's "tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning" with which he begins his tale.

 

The main gallery space features five sculptural vignettes based upon the key thinkers of the Enlightenment: Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Gabrielle Emile Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Immanuel Kant, Antoine Lavoisier and Adam Smith. It is a pivotal arrangement around which the exhibition's ideas coalesce, as Shonibare uses theater and history to metaphorically discuss the current political climate. Each sculpted figure is depicted with a different disability, which references the artist's own autobiography- Shonibare was left disabled by a virus contracted in his late teens- but which also employs disability to introduce a different perspective into the liberated world of ideas and reason. Just as the part-man, part-beast character of Caliban in The Tempest was empowered through poetic language but never fully gained his freedom from Prospero, so the Enlightenment thinkers who caused civilization to flourish also burdened its members with the desire to conquer.

 

On view in the back gallery is a photographic series based on Francisco Goya y Luciente's etching, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, from his 1799 Los Caprichos print series. In each of the five photographs, menacing animals swirl about the sleeping figure, whose ethnicity changes with every image. All wear Victorian-style garments made from richly-hued African textiles- in fact, materials that were previously imported by the Dutch to Africa and have become so closely associated with the continent that they are assumed to be indigenous. Shonibare emphasizes the complexity of cultural identity while arguing for a delicate balance between fantasy and the real, a sentiment shared by Goya, who warned, "Imagination deserted by reason, begets impossible monsters. United with reason, she is the mother of all arts, and the source of their wonders."

 

Yinka Shonibare, MBE (b.1962) is a painter, photographer, filmmaker, and installation artist. His art is influenced by both the cultures of Nigeria, where he grew up, and England, where he studied and now lives. He has exhibited widely throughout the world, and was shortlisted for the prestigious Turner Prize in 2004. The artist's work was included in the African pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, and his numerous group shows include William Hogarth (2006, organized by Musée du Louvre, Paris); War and Discontent (2007, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts); and African Art Today: An Unbounded Vista (November 2008, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri). His public sculpture proposal for the Fourth Plinth site in London's Trafalgar is one of six included in the final round of consideration, and it is presently on view at the National Gallery in London. Among Shonibare's recent solo exhibitions are a 2006 self-titled exhibition at the Speed Museum (Louisville, KY), The Hayward Flag Project (2007, The Hayward Gallery, London), Le jardin d'amour (2007, Musée de quai Branly, Paris), and Scratch the Surface (2007, National Portrait Gallery, London). His film Odile and Odette is presently on view at the Savannah College of Art and Design, ACA Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia, and the artist will be the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia in Fall 2008, which will then travel to the Brooklyn Museum in Summer 2009. Shonibare was awarded the prestigious title of Member of the British Empire in 2005.

 

James Cohan Gallery
533 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001

 

 

 

 

3 May - 8 June 2008

In this solo exhibition Price presents the first episode of a new body of work, comprising fragments from an imaginary Institutional Structure.

The works exhibited include photographs, paintings, ephemera and video, and collectively they begin to reveal the logic and psyche of the imagined organisation. It resembles a Collection of Art - a Public Institution perhaps. However, the superstructure Price invites us to piece together, through the various works presented, is not an ideal one. It is clearly damaged and disordered - a kind of Conceptual Ruin.

In O Fontana, we encounter some of the mongrel artefacts and unstable categories of the Institution. We are introduced to a series of sculptures, presented as photographs, under the heading Monuments to United Artists & Other Record Labels. Each of these sculptures is extrapolated from the emblematic logo of a record label, possibly identifiable, but occluded somewhat by other recognitions. The sculptures are assembled as stacks using found and made things (broken, defunct, expendable, mimicked). Arbitrary points of contingency are exploited so that categories can bleed (Fontana Records becomes related to Lucio Fontana via a fountain of chocolate). The first of a series of paintings is exhibited, under the heading (Flawed) Paintings of Surface Patterns, in which the signature monochrome design of the Black Magic chocolate box is refurled over the front and sides of a stretched canvas.

Price draws upon the history of the readymade, the surrealist photograph, the documents of conceptual art and the rhetorics of institutional critique, but is interested in collapsing remainders of these back into a mess of social history, as ghostly, damaged detritus, impossible to distinguish amongst the stuff of an unredeemed world. Ideas of grotesque assembly are borrowed from Gothic literature, whilst the cinematic construction of space ships (Dark Star, 2001) - fictional places we know in common - inspires the conceit of 'building' a parallel place, an Institutional habitat which might be both recognisable and estranged.

Price finds a point of connection between John Carpenter, Andrea Fraser, JG Ballard, Marcel Broodthaers and Fritz Lang in identifying what the space inside an institution feels like, which shapes the atmosphere of this Institutional structure - a tense, airless zone. In a video entitled "WELCOME" we are invited to enter in. The first in a planned series of videos, this work opens in the 'Atrium', and features the Monument to Fontana Records, a fountain: a heap of shoddy and beautiful things, spouting glistening bile.

Elizabeth Price lives and works in London. She recently exhibited in Strange Events Permit Themselves the Luxury of Occurring, curated by Steve Claydon at Camden Arts Centre; and The Affirmation, curated by Andrew Hunt at Chelsea Space. Recent solo exhibitions and projects include At the House of Mr X, Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston, 2007; and A Public Lecture & Exhumation at Studio Voltaire, London, 2006. Price has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Spike Island in May 2009, and is represented by MOT International.

This project has been generously funded by The Elephant Trust and the Arts Council.

 

 

 

MOT INTERNATIONAL
Unit 54 / 5th floor, Regents Studios
8 Andrews Road
London E8 4QN

 

 

 

 

 

 

26 Apr - 31 May 2008

 

Shot in coastal waters and regions from Iraq to Antarctica, An-My Lê's latest series of photographs examine intersecting themes of scientific exploration, military power, environmental crises, fantasies of empire and the vast ungovernable oceans that connect nations and continents. In a continuing practice that explores photography's ability to describe natural forces and geography as backdrops against which human ambitions are weighed and scrutinized, Lê turns toward the seascape as both a historical tradition in visual art and as the site of a wide range of contemporary issues and anxieties.

 

"Landscape is truth" muses a highly trained ex-soldier in Don Delillo's "Running Dog" (1978).
Lê's various terrains are rife with physical obstacles and incontrovertible political realities. The photographs offer a complication of truths, both human and epic in scale: a soldier stands watch over oil platforms off the coast of Iraq scanning the North Arabian sea for potential threats. In Antarctica, the only continent never to have hosted a war, a group of recently deposited scientists look on as Oden, a Norwegian icebreaker makes a slow departure and in Australia an exhausted unit of U.S. Marines pauses to witness dusk in an emerald forest. While echoing traditions ranging from 19th century romantic painting to contemporary social landscape photography, Lê makes dynamic speculations on our capacity to occupy spaces as we attempt to control the potentially uncontrollable while pondering the infinite.

 

Produced between 2005 and 2008, the photographs in "Events Ashore" were made during visits to Australia, Japan, Antarctica, Kuwait, Iraq and California.

 

Born in Saigon in 1960, An-My Lê came to the United States as a political refugee in 1975. She received an MS at Stanford University and an MFA in Photography at Yale University. She is the subject of a traveling exhibition entitled "Small Wars" currently on view at SFMoMA, San Francisco and her series "Trap Rock" 2006-7 commissioned by the DIA Foundation is on view at Dia: Beacon through September 2008.
This is An-My Lê's second solo show at Murray Guy. She lives and works in New York.

 

 

Murray Guy
453 West 17 Street
New York, NY 10011

 

 

 

 

 

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