WESTERN PROJECT

“The Displaced Person” at Invisible-Exports: Critic’s Pick on artforum.com with Ron Athey mention

admin — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:41:36 +0000

For original post on artforum.com click here

“The Displaced Person”
02.02.12
Author: Joseph Akel

01.06.12-02.12.12 Invisible-Exports

Alienation, it would seem, can be a creative force for inclusion. And, as each of the artists in “The Displaced Person” proves, one is rarely found without the other. Freud viewed alienation as the by-product of a cultural divorce between man and his natural impulses. For the artists exhibited, it’s in the very gaps between body and ideology that one finds reconciliation between the two.

Performance artist Ron Athey’s installation Foot Washing Set w/ Blonde Hair Towel, 1996, typifies the artist’s melding of religious and BDSM rituals. A nod to the Christian practices of foot washing (see Luke 7:44), Athey’s twist on the tradition includes a handwoven towel made of hair, and a bloodstained cactus-spine brush. Here the body, or rather its sanguineous traces, becomes a symbolic site on which, as with Christian theology, dogma supercedes the physical. In Sue Williams’s My Oeuvre, 2005, the presentation of the body in fragments lays bare perceptual attitudes towards it. A cartoonish bioamorphous mass of sphincters, orifices, and bulbous mounds, Williams’s anatomical fantasy points far less to any recognizable specific sex organ than to collective impressions forced upon them.

With Walt Cassidy’s The Weeping Tower, 2011, the artist examines structures that impose both conformity and alterity on the body. Carbon photographic prints of idyllic male youths, framed within hand-drawn structures, reflect an eroticization of, and dislocation from, the male form. Tellingly, Cassidy’s choice of settings includes New York’s Jacob Riis beach—honoring a man who documented the blight of the industrial era’s downtrodden. Each of the works in this exhibition reminds us that those on the fringe often find themselves center stage.

For original post on artforum.com click here

Under The Big Black Sun – Art in America Review

admin — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:27:25 +0000

Link to original post here: www.artinamericamagazine.com

ART IN AMERICA
Under The Big Black Sun
12/22/11 / Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
By Annie Buckley

Los Angeles As one of more than 60 “Pacific Standard Time” exhibitions, “Under the Big Black Sun,” organized by MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel, sheds light on the energetic, nonhierarchical ethos of California art during the years bookended by Nixon’s resignation in 1974 and Reagan’s inauguration in 1981. While introducing the sprawling exhibition, Schimmel compared it to a “block party,” an apt analogy given the sheer number of artists included—more than 130—and its inclusive sensibility, evoking a gathering of neighbors who may not share more than a friendly hello but together constitute community.

The years highlighted in the show, although not characterized by catastrophe, were marked by convulsive change and a widespread and deep-seated uncertainty.For the art world, as Schimmel remarked, “The linear march of modernism [had come] to an unimaginable and disturbing end,” and what was next remained unclear. “Under the Big Black Sun” takes its title from the third album of the Los Angeles punk band X and points to the dark anxiety and vibrant creativity of the time.

As the nation shifted from the idealistic tumult of the ’60s to the hardened materialism of the ’80s, a group of artists in California were engaging in a wide variety of new approaches to art. The exhibition effectively captures the intense eclecticism of the period and the breezy intentionality of the artists, who did not know at the time if their work would even be seen outside of the area. News photographs of iconic events displayed on large monitors and framed ephemera provide historical context. The artworks are loosely organized according to thematic groups, but Schimmel resists toppling the airy sense of possibility inherent in the time with the weight of strict categories. Though it includes more than 400 paintings, photographs, sculptures, films, videos, installations, crafts, zines, books and pieces of ephemera, “Under the Big Black Sun” feels surprisingly spacious.

The show offers the chance to see pieces by less familiar artists as well as early or underknown works by key figures, such as Mike Kelley’s first installation, Untitled (from The Little Girl’s Room), 1980, consisting of objects and images obliquely suggesting a young girl’s bedroom, and Eleanor Antin’s cardboard airplane with cutout figures that served as the set for her feature-length video The Nurse and the Hijackers (1977). At times, surprising relationships unfold between distinct and seemingly unrelated works. For example, visitors peruse the script and sculptural objects from Guy de Cointet’s play My Father’s Diary (1975) before turning the corner to encounter Stephen J. Kaltenbach’s large painting Portrait of My Father (1972–79). At once fiercely realistic and ethereal, Kaltenbach’s painting of the elderly, seemingly infirm man embodies the depth of intimacy and emotion that exists as profoundly but more subtly in de Cointet’s work.

Views of society, culture and politics abound, and, with so many perspectives, the concept of “other” is refreshingly reflected as an aspect of a multifaceted whole. Ilene Segalove’s videos and photographs feature elements of her day-to-day life. In the photos All the Pants I Had Except the Ones I Was Wearing (Front and Back), 1974/2010, the artist, dressed only in jeans, is surrounded by a baker’s dozen of additional pairs, cannily critiquing the dispassionate chronicling characteristic of early male-dominated Conceptual art. Carole Caroompas’s intricate collage series “The Dreams of the Lady of the Castle Perilous” (1978–79) takes the shape of mandalas and evokes the spiritual as readily as punk rock.

Chris Burden’s powerful installation The Reason for the Neutron Bomb (1979), comprising 50,000 nickels each topped with a red-tipped matchstick, visually represents the number of Soviet tanks in the era of the Cold War.

That the exhibition shifts from process to punk to the personal, and from conceptual to collage to critique, is one of its charms, and though its pluralism seems to mirror the current state of art, contemporary practice is left wanting in comparison to the freewheeling experimentation and direct engagement resonating here. Perhaps it is unfair to look back through rose-colored glasses, but the show’s vision of nonhierarchical acceptance is well worth revisiting at present.

Link to original post here: www.artinamericamagazine.com

Samantha Fields: Be Careful What You Wish For : New Paintings and Works on Paper

admin — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 23:18:57 +0000

For Immediate Release:

SAMANTHA FIELDS

Be Careful What You Wish For: New Paintings and Works on Paper
February 18 – March 17, 2012

Opening Reception: Saturday, February 18, 6:00 – 8:00 PM

Western Project is proud to present Be Careful What You Wish For, a new body of work by Los Angeles artist, Samantha Fields. Traditionally, the artist begins by researching weather and landscape phenomena, photographing hundreds of shots for the perfect image to paint. In this most recent body of work the artist has culled from over five years of archives, of ‘failed’ images, those where the camera did not pick up what she intended due to heat, water, or movement, and those where she is in the scene rather than reporting from afar. This marks a distinct shift in point of view, from observational to experiential. Additionally, the work is conceptually tied by the idea of chance rather than systematic investigation. The theme of the unexpected vs. study is important for the artist as it moves the work into a more subjective arena, though not with out ironies; Nature is observed through veils: a camera lens, car windshields, or dense fog. As the artist is immersed in her surroundings, very few clear details are apparent; traffic headlights are soft focused in the rain, a spectacular Los Angeles sunset/cityscape is blurred by movement, and a deer amongst the trees is a monumental but momentary vision. There is never pictorial clarity. It is the sense of movement, or glimpse of a scene or shrouding atmosphere that creates a mysterious quality, as an enigmatic memory or recollection. As most of the works have a large scale, the pictures are cinematic, historically linked to 19^th and early 20^th century paintings of the West by artists such as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. While these two artists painted theatrical works, Fields’ airbrushed paintings reference the camera ready culture of the 21^st century. By using such momentary glimpses, another paradox exists in the work; technological speed and the sense of silence, and/or stillness. Her painting of the sunset from Beverly Blvd in Los Angeles hints at the continual rotation of the earth, while another work of a log on the misty forest floor quietly points to the organic cycle of life and death. Both urban and forest images though observed through a lens, are painted with innate reverence, similar in tone as the writings of Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau. Each work of Fields’ is a moment of experience, private awe of the fleeting present caught in the reflection of wet city streets and obscured mountain forests.

Fields is currently in, No Object Is An Island, at the Cranbrook Art Museum, Detroit, Painting (Los Angeles) at Another Year in LA, 10 Years LA @ Foundation Kaus Australis, The Prospectus, Los Angeles. She has exhibited at Kim Light/LIGHTBOX Gallery, Melanee Cooper Gallery in Chicago, The Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, Solway Jones Gallery in Los Angeles, Dirt Gallery in Los Angeles, POST Gallery in Los Angeles, Domestic Setting Gallery in Mar Vista, California, Suzanne Hilberry Gallery in Detroit, Lemberg Gallery in Birmingham, Michigan, The Jones Center for Contemporary Art in Austin, Texas, and Galerie Enholm Englehorn in Vienna, Austria. Her work has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, ArtWeek, Art in America, The Detroit News, The Detroit Free Press and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Arne Svenson: “About Face”,The Andy Warhol Museum

admin — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:57:34 +0000

Arne Svenson: “About Face” February 4 – May 9, 2012
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA

Arne Svenson, a New York photographer working in collaboration with The Warhol, created a series of portraits on view in the exhibition About Face. In February 2011, Svenson was the artist-in-residency at Pittsburgh’s Wesley Spectrum Highland, an Approve Private School for students with special needs, grades 4 – 12. Svenson’s residency, which led to this exhibition, is part of an ongoing partnership with Svenson, The Warhol, the Cognitive Psychology Department at the University of Victoria, British Colombia, and Wesley Spectrum Highland. The goal of this partnership is to improve autistic youth’s communication skills by developing and piloting activities that utilize Warhol’s portraits and the practice of contemporary portrait artists to teach facial recognition skills to students within the autism spectrum.

The exhibition features three-dimensional, large-format photographs which are fixed open at a 55 degree angle, and mounted directly the gallery walls. From one perspective the viewer sees only a neutral portrait of the student, while from the other angle one views an open spread, which reveals an expressive image of the student and an accompanying emotional motivator. Motivators range from an image of a birthday party to a spider. For Svenson, “the photo sessions with the students were not only central to the final project, but the time we spent working together became an essential component of the process and learning experience. They responded well, engaged beautifully, and, as I told each one as he or she left the studio, are the true stars of this project.” About Face is curated by Tresa Varner, curator of education and interpretation at The Warhol.

Special thanks to Linda Abraham-Braff, art teacher; and Jan Kustron, speech language pathologist, at Wesley Spectrum Highland School.

This exhibition is made possible by the McGuinn Family Foundation

TANYA BATURA: “Achromic”: New Sculpture

admin — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 10:08:57 +0000

For immediate release:

Tanya Batura
Achromic: New Sculpture

January 7 – February 11, 2012
Opening reception for the artist Saturday January 7th 6-8pm