28 November 2007

re-title.com newsletter - Mixed Media & Photography November 2007

Home About Contact us Artist Opportunities Thinking of Joining Advertise with re-title.com

Merry Karnowsky Gallery Los Angeles DEAN PROJECT Long Island City David Risley Gallery London Thomas Dane Gallery London Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers London Fieldgate Gallery, London Galerie Gebr. Lehmann, Dresden / Berlin         sign up!

Merry Karnowsky Gallery Los Angeles SHEPARD FAIREY : IMPERFECT UNION 1 Dec - 5 Jan 2008 Merry Karnowsky Gallery is proud to present Imperfect Union, a solo exhibition of new works by Shepard Fairey. This show displays a provocative collection of politically charged paintings, screen prints, stencils, album covers and mixed media pieces rich with metaphor, humor and seductive decorative elements. Imperfect Union is derived from the first line of the U.S. Constitution "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union.." For Shepard Fairey, critiquing the imperfect union, far from disparaging the United States, is a patriotic step toward shaping a more perfect union. The exhibition is comprised of artworks which scrutinize the dynamics of the imperfect union, such as the unholy union of government and big business, and the dichotomy of symbols and methods associated with ideologies of the American Dream. Fairey's artwork comments on underpinnings of the capitalist machine and monolithic institutional authority critiquing those who support blind nationalism and war. Conversely, Fairey recognizes that most individuals would rather suffer than stand up for their beliefs, as illuminatingly expressed in the Declaration of Independence with the statement "all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." Fairey celebrates the role of counter culture and independent individuals willing to question the cultural paradigm and advocate peace. Fairey employs the graphic language of the subjects he critiques or celebrates, blending Art Nouveau, hippie, currency and revolutionary propaganda styles. His works utilize bold iconography coupled with decorative elements and, upon closer inspection, reveal sophisticated layers of collage. The resulting pieces are both boldly aggressive and seductively subtle. image: Shepard Fairey Ransom Note, 2007 silkscreen over mixed media collage, hand painted multiple 29" x 49" Courtesy of Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Los Angeles Merry Karnowsky Gallery 170 South La Brea Avenue Los Angeles CA 90036 Merry Karnowsky Gallery Read on... Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Los Angeles

DEAN PROJECT Long Island City Guys & Dolls: Seeing Stars 17 Nov - 5 Jan 2008 DEAN PROJECT is pleased to present "Guys & Dolls: Seeing Stars" a two person exhibition of photographs by Rose Hartman and Holger Keifel. With photographs dating from the 1970's through today Rose Hartman and Holger Keifel have been documenting revealing moments of personalities from two very different arenas: social celebrities and the world of professional boxing. The photographs in this show include world known figures, such as Jackie O, Donatella Versace, Naomi Campbell, Oscar de la Hoya, Evander Holyfield, and Don King. These seemingly diverse portraits displayed together in one-room raise questions about social class and status in contemporary society while also presenting us with a different view of beauty and power. Rose and Holger's photos also manage to capture successful individuals in intimate and telling poses that go behind the idealized image represented to the public. These groups of photographs are images from popular culture, history, and the personal quest of individuals who through personal dedication and achievements have contributed to the shaping of our current society. Both photographers have had their work published and exhibited extensively worldwide. Rose Hartman's work has been featured in publications including the New York Times, Harper's Bazaar, Vanity Fair, Vogue, W magazine; she has also exhibited in group shows including The Museum of the City of New York, The Paterson Museum, and The Whitney Museum. Holger Keifel's work has been published in Playboy, The New York Times Magazine, Der Spiegel, The Observer Sports Monthly and his work has been exhibited at The Corcoran Gallery, The Butler Museum of Contemporary Art, Florida Atlantic University, his work is in several museum collections including The Museum of the City of New York. Image: Holger Keifel Luis Collazo, 2007 New York September 28th Digital archival print, edition 12 18 x 22 inches Courtesy of DEAN PROJECT, Long Island City DEAN PROJECT 45-46 21st Street Long Island City NY 11101 DEAN PROJECT Read on... DEAN PROJECT, Long Island City

David Risley Gallery London Jonathan Allen : KALANAG 23 Nov - 6 Jan 2008 'Things that have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.' James Frazer 'The Golden Bough' (1890-1915). The 'contagious magic' described famously by anthropologist James Frazer in his study of 'savage' societies is one example of the many forms of magic reliant upon supernatural agency which cultural historian Simon During contrasts with the secularized illusions of the theatrical conjuror in Modern Enchantments (Harvard 2002). In KALANAG at David Risley Gallery, Jonathan Allen problematises clear distinctions between these different forms of magical enchantment in a photographic installation that focuses on Adolf Hitler's notorious 'minister of magic'. The reputation of German magician Helmut Schreiber (1903-1963), also known as 'KALANAG', lies in tatters within the magic community due to the confirmation late in his career of his sympathetic interaction during WWII with high-ranking members of the Nazi party, performing to amongst others, Hermann Göring, Martin Bormann, and Adolf Hitler himself. He was installed as the president of the German Magic Circle by 1936, presiding over its anti-Semitization during the following years, and was editor of the German Magie magazine from 1927-1945. Schreiber distinguished himself during the same period as a producer within the German film industry, benefiting from personal interventions by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Schreiber took advantage of the economic confusion following the cessation of WWII, to emerge within a few short years with one of the most lavish and indeed last touring illusion spectaculars of its kind. The KALANAG Magical Musical Revue carried the magician and his wife Gloria De Vos worldwide from the late 1940s until his death in 1963. Schreiber's largely forgotten story poisons the history of theatrical magic during the period, indicating a suggestive alignment between the traditional benignity of illusion on the magic stage, and the coercive use of illusion at the service of political might. In common with the extended oeuvre of Leni Riefenstahl, Schreiber's magic act casts audiences within a play of contradictions and commitments, balancing the amnesial pleasure of illusionistic spectacle with the problematic contextualisation of a protean figure devoted to self-interest on the fringes of power. Allen draws the viewer into this conflicted field. Over the past three years, the artist has circumvented the stigma amongst many magicians attached to KALANAG's props and ephemera, and obtained a range of items relating to the magician's past. A number of small framed photographs derived from this collection can be seen in the gallery, each re-photographed by Allen from their documentary sources and then meticulously reprinted: Kalanag saws a woman in two in the guise of a surgeon, holds the leash of Simbo the performing cheetah (a surprising gift from Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie), and works close-up tricks before the German Fuhrer. Nearby, a vitrine displays one of KALANAG's actual stage props, a tricked earthenware 'lota-vase', resting atop its stencilled transit crate. Throughout his show, the magician repeatedly poured water from this seemingly inexhaustible vessel as part of his signature illusion 'Waters >From India'. Allen performs Frazer's contagious magic simultaneously with KALANAG's theatrical magic through the gesture of reprinting each photograph with water passed through the magician's tricked vase. Now touched by water that has touched the vase, a vase touched in turn by Schreiber and all those contagiously linked to him, each photograph is re-animated, not through photography's indexical relationship with its subject - a contacting link to the real unimaginable in a digital era - but through the viewer's desire, or fear, or both, that contagious magic might work after all. Jonathan Allen is currently the Arts Council England Helen Chadwick Fellow 2007-2008 at the University of Oxford and the British School at Rome. He has recently guest-edited issue 26 of Cabinet magazine, and was commissioned for the 1st Singapore Biennale in 2006. KALANAG is the artist's second solo exhibition in association with David Risley Gallery, London (Tommy Angel - Jan- Feb 2006). Image: Jonathan Allen KALANAG Detail 2007 Courtesy David Risley Gallery David Risley Gallery 45 Vyner Street London E2 9DQ David Risley Gallery Read on... David Risley Gallery, London

Thomas Dane Gallery London LUISA LAMBRI 21 Nov - 21 Dec 2007 The Directors of Thomas Dane Gallery are pleased to present the first London exhibition of Italian photographer Luisa Lambri. The exhibition will feature new works which characteristically focus on Modernism and its legacies. The buildings featured in the exhibition include the Darwin D. Martin House, Buffalo, 1903-05 and the Hollyhock House, 1917-21, Hollywood (Frank Lloyd Wright), the Teatro Regio, Torino, 1973 (Carlo Mollino), the Cimitero Monumentale Brion, 1978 (Carlo Scarpa), the House in A Plum Grove, Tokyo, 2003 (SANAA) and the Rietveld Schroeder House, Utrecht, 1924-25 (Gerrit Rietveld). Lambri's almost abstract and ethereal photographs stand apart from typologies and documentary traditions of architectural photography. Lambri places herself and the viewer within the mostly domestic architecture, proposing a more personal and intimate recording of the building's atmosphere, her experience of the space and her developing relationship to it. Her approach could be described as a form of self-portraiture. It oscillates between empirical representation and abstract subjectivity. Lambri combines traditional means and new digital techniques in order to further liberate her work from pure documentation. This digital adjustment appears invisible yet it is fundamental to her photographic process, allowing her to create a final image whose atmosphere is capable of transcending not only the building's function but also its location. Her choice of titles become literal examples of this in that they refer only to the name of each building, mentioning neither the architect nor the location. Frequently working in series, Lambri isolates a detail - often an aperture, a window, some shutters or blinds - which is declined in delicate variations of light and shade. Here minute changes between images within the sequence emphasise themes of space and the passing of time, as well as referencing photographic and art-hist orical preoccupations. In this vein, a new suite of six views from Wright's Darwin D. Martin House are reduced to mysterious slivers of light interrupting the darkness in what might be read as an homage to Dan Flavin or even Vladimir Tatlin. In contrast, a pair of images taken within Scarpa's Cimitero Monumentale Brion, outside Venice, transforms brutalist concrete to a light- suffused abstraction. Rietveld's famous Rietveld Schröeder House is distilled to essential primary colours, conjuring Suprematist references, while the ceiling of Carlo Mollino's Teatro Regio in Turin, is metamorphosed into fractal, almost gem-like images. The work is given its ultimate meaning when it is carefully adapted to a new space, and the relationship between composition and space, and between the viewer, the object and the space itself is established. The exhibition will take place in the main galleries in Duke Street as well as in the nearby Annex at 14 Mason's Yard. Born in Como in 1969, Luisa Lambri studied Literature and Philosophy at the University of Milan. She currently lives in Milan and travels extensively. Her work has been exhibited in dAPERTutto, 48. Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte, Venice, 1999, and Dreams and Conflicts: The Viewer's Dictatorship, 50. Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte, Venice, 2003. Recent solo exhibitions include the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Carnegie Museum of Arts, The Menil Collection in Houston and Kettle's Yard, Cambridge. A solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles is scheduled for February 2009. Image: Luisa Lambri Untitled (Darwin D. Martin House, #02), 2007 laserchrome print framed with non-reflective plexiglass 81 x 65.3 cm Courtesy The Martin House Restoration Corporation Thomas Dane Gallery 11 Duke Street St. James London SW1Y 6BN Thomas Dane Gallery Read on... Thomas Dane Gallery

Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers London WHERE IS THE NEAREST CAMERA? Louise Lawler 28 Nov - 19 Jan 2008 Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present the exhibition 'Where is the nearest camera?' by New York based artist Louise Lawler in their London gallery space. Renowned since the 1980s for her photographs taken in private collections, museums and auction houses, Louise Lawler continues to question the ideas of authorship and the notion of identity that we invest in works of art. Throughout her career Lawler has often focused on the environments where artworks exist after leaving the artist's studio. As the place of creation, the artist's studio was rarely of interest to Lawler. It was rather the life of the work afterwards that raised important questions for her: in which surroundings is art presented to us and how does our perception of it depend on these? What are the mechanisms of the institutions and the art market, which determine the various locations where we can find art? By manipulating the focus and position of the camera, Lawler demonstrated how an artwork is determined by the paradigms of the art world: a label on the wall of an auction house would become the focus of an image, with only a small fraction of the work itself visible, and the idea of the artwork as a commercial entity would be brought to mind. Other images would show arrangements in private homes, consisting not only of art, but also of furniture and household goods, showing how an artwork can represent something much more private and intimate. In this way Lawler visualized doubts regarding the autonomy of the artwork itself and, simultaneously, demonstrated how the same work can trigger several different aspects of discourse, depending on the context in which it is seen. The photographs made earlier in Lawler's career were taken at a time when auction houses, private homes and museums functioned more as separate entities and were easier to tell apart. Today, the boundaries are blurred and the institutional and commercial aspects of the art market are beginning to merge. Auction houses aspire to museum level, with their complex catalogues and flawless presentations. Wealthy private homes are beginning to look like museums - and we can no longer tell whether the quality of an artist's work is to be determined by institutional appreciation or by success at the auctions. As this development is taking place, the world in front of Lawler's camera also changes. This exhibition of Lawler's work takes place in the vicinity of some of London's major auction houses, representing one of the 'living spaces' for art that Lawler has explored with her camera throughout her career. On a different level the exhibition title 'Where is the nearest camera?' motivates the viewer to question his own point of view and perception of the world around him. Louise Lawler was born in Bronxville in 1947 and works and lives in New York. She has had one- person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Projects, 1987); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1990); Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C. (1997); Portikus, Frankfurt (2003) and at the Kunstmuseum Basel (2004). A retrospective of her work was held last year at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio. This year, her work was included in Documenta 12 in Kassel, and also in group-shows at Museum Ludwig, Cologne and the Fundação Serralves, Portugal. The most recent show of her work was in 'Sequence One: Painting and Sculpture from the François Pinault Collection' at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Image: Louise Lawler, "Untitled", 2006 Cibachrome (Museum box) 49,2 x 58,7 cm Courtesy Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers London Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers 7A Grafton Street W1S 4EJ London Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers London Read on... Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers London

Fieldgate Gallery, London ANALOGUE & DIGITAL curated by Chris Meigh-Andrews 24 Nov - 16 Dec 2007 Artists have been experimenting with the electronic moving image since the early 1970's and recent developments in digital technology have further expanded and enhanced the creative potential of the medium. Moving image work is now widely accepted on a par with older, more established media such as painting, sculpture and photography, but this has not always been the case and there are several generations of UK artists whose work is less widely known but who have made an important contribution to the development of the medium. Analogue & Digital, curated by video artist and writer Chris Meigh-Andrews, presents a selection of new digital moving image works- projections, installations and screen-based video in dialogue with a wide-ranging selection of pioneering British single-screen videotapes from the 70s and 80s from the international touring exhibition "Analogue", featured last year at Tate Britain which was curated by Meigh-Andrews and Catherine Elwes, Reader in Moving Image Culture, Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts. Analogue The works in the historical section of the exhibition were selected to represent the diversity of themes and aesthetic concerns of artists working in the UK during the 1970s and 80's. This selection charts the development of video as a medium for artistic expression that developed alongside the rapid technological changes that took place during this period. Many of the issues and concerns that artists still pursue with the moving image were born during this early formative period when an engagement with the specific nature of the medium was at the centre of a revolution in art practices. The historical selection of the exhibition comprises of two one-hour programmes of short works or representative extracts from longer works made by artists who have made a significant contribution to the development of the medium during the first two formative decades of the history of the medium. The years covered in this exhibition represent a period in which the nascent form moved swiftly through its Greenbergian phase of discovering the medium's qualities, towards using them as raw material for a set of projects and performances that had, at the time as well as in retrospect, some kind of coherence, more perhaps of shared cooperative resources than of manifestos. Groundwork buries for almost forty years, they emerge once more blinking into the light to inspire another generation with the thought that it has not all been done before, that there is everything to play for. -- Sean Cubitt, Catalogue essay, Analogue, Pioneering Video from the UK, Canada and Poland (1968-88), EDAU, Preston 2006. Analogue & Digital premieres a number of significant and innovative new works by British artists and brings these together with videotapes by accomplished international artists such as Robert Cahen (France), Gary Hill (USA), Steina and Woody Vasulka (USA/Czech Republic/Iceland), The new and recent works in the Digital selection demonstrate and highlight the continuing development of electronic moving image work, celebrating its diversity and scope. The selection premieres a number of new works by established artists Peter Donebauer, Marty St James, Katherine Meynell and Stephen Partridge who are featured in the historical selection, as well as videotapes and projections by new and emerging artists such as Dallas Seitz, Cinzia Cremona, Vince Briffa, Andrew Demirjian, Denise Hawrysio and John Wynne. Image: Chris Meigh-Andrews Courtesy of the artist Fieldgate Gallery 14 Fieldgate Street London E1 1ES Fieldgate Gallery, London Read on... Fieldgate Gallery, London

Galerie Gebr. Lehmann, Dresden / Berlin GALERIE GEBR. LEHMANN ARE PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE OPENING OF A NEW GALLERY SPACE IN BERLIN Open reception at 6pm Open saloon from 10pm Galerie Gebr. Lehmann Berlin Lindenstrasse 35 10969 Berlin Wild West Olaf Holzapfel Jim Lambie Joep van Liefland Camilla Low Scott Myles Jack Pierson Mary Redmond Lara Schnitger Jannis Varelas 30 Nov - 2 Feb 2008 Galerie Gebr Lehmann