Femmes D’Interieur
Elene Usdin
Photographs and Illustrations
February 18 – March 27, 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 18, from 6-8PM
The Farmani Gallery presents the New York debut of Femmes D’Interieur, the latest series from Paris based artist Elene Usdin, with an opening reception on Thursday, February 18, 2010 from 6-8PM. In this series, Usdin combines both her talents of photography and illustration and creates stunning imagery that also provides social commentary regarding the place of women as the decorations within their own domesticated situations.
Usdin, a member of the creative collective Hartland Villa, which includes art directors Lionel Avignon and Stefan Vivies, was recently awarded with the London Photographic Associations Gold in Fashion for the “fair-etale” series. She has also been awarded the 2008 Px3 Prix De La Photographie Paris and the International Photography Awards honorable mention for her earlier series “Self Portrait with Mattress.” Her editorial and fashion work can also be seen in Eyemazing, Twill, and The World Magazine.
This latest series “Femmes D’Interieur,” which has already exhibited at the Gallery of Graphic Arts in Paris, Usdin reflects upon the representation of women as a decorative element, morphing objects like common household items, furniture, and even the countryside with that of women painted in the style of portraits from the Classical Era. This offbeat reinterpretation of “woman-as-object” is at one time unsettling and yet Usdin has the ability to convey this strong subject matter with wit and charm in her stunning artworks. It is has been said of Usdin’s work, “it is always about women – the women of fairytales, of mythology, and of fantasy,” and she provides that same ideology in this series.
Each artwork is a unique original, hand painted C-print mounted on aluminum. For the exhibition the gallery will show a mix of originals and reproductions available in two sizes. For more information please visit www.farmanigallery.com or email us at info@farmanigallery.com. We can also be reached via phone at 718-578-4478.
The Farmani Gallery is located at 111 Front St., Ste. 212, Brooklyn, NY in the DUMBO neighborhood between Washington and Adams St. By subway take A or C to High St., F to York St. or 2 and 3 to Clark St. Station. Gallery hours: Wed. – Sat.: 1 – 6PM. Information: www.farmanigallery.com or info@farmanigallery.com or ph# 718-578-4478.
February 4 – March 13, 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 4, 6-8pm
P•P•O•W is pleased to present Elegies, our sixth solo exhibition with Dinh Q Lê. Elegies is an installation of two videos, From Father to Son: A Rite of Passage (2007) and South China Sea Pishkun (2009) and related large scale photographic works. This will be the first New York screening for both videos. The videos focus on the specters that embody the psychological and physical inheritance of the Vietnam War. They also act as endings, one as an ending of the journey of a father and a son, and the other as an ending of America's misadventures in Vietnam. South China Sea Pishkun has been shown in Hong Kong and at the recent Fukuoka Triennale.
Click here for full press release...
Elegies is connected to the upcoming solo exhibition Dinh Q Lê will be having at MoMA in June 2010 entitled The Farmers and The Helicopters.
A Queens Affair
Photography by Kris Graves and Eric Hairabedian
Book pre-Launch and Exhibition
February 04-13, 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 04, from 6-8PM
(January 15, 2010, Brooklyn, NY) The Farmani Gallery will host the book pre-launch for A Queens Affair, a collaborative photography endeavor by Kris Graves and Eric Hairabedian, due out summer of 2010. The opening reception will be held on Thursday, February 4, 2010 from 6-8PM at which time book pre-orders will be made available. A Queens Affair is priced at $40 and for the first 100 individuals to pre-order will receive one 8x10” signed archival pigment print from each photographer. These artists prints are exclusive to the book pre-order and will not be reprinted in this style once they are sold out. Both artists will attend the reception and the exclusive artists prints will be made available to take home with a pre-order during the reception.
A Queens Affair is a culmination of eight years of photographing the development, fixed characteristics and spirited nature of Queens, New York. Both Kris Graves and Eric Hairabedian were born and raised in and around Queens and through their photographic partnership share a visual history of their beloved borough.
A special selection of images from the book will be on exhibit and available for purchase for the duration of the show. After which these images will be available in small editions at the Farmani Gallery web site.
Kris Graves, photographer and creative force behind the +kris graves projects is a graduate of SUNY Purchase College and is currently exhibited in Versus, a group show at Haus Projects in New York. His Queens photography will have its debut with this exhibition at the Farmani Gallery.
Eric Hairabedian, photographer and graduate of both SUNY Purchase College with a B.F.A. and the School of Visual Arts with an M.F.A. has been exhibited in the group show, Ten Photographers, Ten Days and his solo show, Remembrance.
For more information please visit www.farmanigallery.com or email us at info@farmanigallery.com. We can also be reached via phone at 718-578-4478.
The Farmani Gallery is located at 111 Front St., Ste. 212, Brooklyn, NY in the DUMBO neighborhood between Washington and Adams St. By subway take A or C to High St., F to York St. or 2 and 3 to Clark St. Station. Gallery hours: Wed. – Sat.: 1 – 6PM.
EL ANATSUI / / OPENS WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10TH, 2010
EL ANATSUI
February 11 March 13, 2010
Opening reception: Wednesday, February 10, 6 - 8 pm
Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of large-scale sculptures by internationally acclaimed artist El Anatsui. Several monumental wall sculptures made from thousands of discarded bottle tops, will be on view. Anatsui transforms simple materials into large shimmering forms by assembling elements into vibrant patterns with a unique visual impact. An astute observer, he composes his sculptures with meticulous orchestration, masterfully managing material and color. Here Anatsuis palette ranges from black and red to silver and gold.
Fluidity of form is a significant quality inherent to the sculptures. As Alexi Worth from the New York Times Magazine pointed out in a recent feature on Anatsui from Spring 2009, Their most peculiar feature is that they are physically unfixed: Anatsui insists that his hangings be draped rather than hung flat, but he doesnt insist on draping them himself, and in fact is perfectly happy to have galleries or museums do so. He has preferences horizontal ripples are better than vertical ones but he doesnt regard any particular arrangement as final. Naturally, professional curators are disconcerted by this freedom; Anatsui has little patience with their scruples. Museum people are trained not to be creative, Anatsui complains. I find that very frustrating. To Storr, the provisional, shifting shape of Anatsuis art is one of the keys to its originality. In the catalog to the coming Museum for African Art retrospective, Storr argues that Anatsuis work is f undamentally anti-monumental: it does not stand its ground. . . . Rather it takes the shape of circumstances and so epitomizes contingency. For Storr, that is no minor innovation: Anatsui opens a new chapter in the history of sculpture. Its possible that the appetite for contingency that Storr praises is particularly African. Lisa Binder, the curator in charge of the Anatsui exhibition, points out thattraditional African objects, unlike European paintings and sculpture, are often highly adaptable, designed to be reused. Anatsuis work brings this adaptable, unfixed quality into sculptural practice as jazz brought an African unfixedness into Western music.
El Anatsui was born in Anyako, Ghana in 1944, and holds degrees in sculpture and art education from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana. He is Professor of Sculpture at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he has lectured since 1975. His work has been exhibited extensively in international solo and group exhibitions, including the 1990 and 2007 Venice Biennales, the 1995 Johannesburg Biennale, the 2004 Gwangju Biennale, Prospect.1 New Orleans in 2008, and the 2009 Sharjah Biennale. A solo show, Gawu, traveled throughout Europe, North America, and Asia. His work is in numerous public and private collections throughout the world including The British Museum, London; The Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City. Most recently, Anatsui created an installation on-site at Rice Gallery at Rice University, Houston, TX, on view through March 14.
A major retrospective of Anatsuis work, When I Last Wrote to You About Africa, curated by Lisa Binder from the Museum for African Art, New York, begins a North American tour at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada, on October 2, 2010, followed by its presentation at the Museum for African Art, New York, as one of the inaugural exhibitions at the museums new building.
This is El Anatsuis second solo exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery. A hardcover catalogue is available.
Upcoming exhibitions at the gallery include Ross Rudel and Todd Hebert opening March 18, on view through April 17, 2010, and Lynette Yiadom Boakye and Carrie Mae Weems opening April 22 on view through May 22, 2010.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 6 pm. For additional information and photographic material please contact the gallery at info@jackshainman.com.
The Academy Awards nominations are in and this years crop of Oscar nominees are fan favorites, longshots and even a battle between ex's.
Lee Daniels and his groundbreaking drama Precious was nominated for several awards including Best Picture, Best Actress (Gabourey Sidibe), Best Supporting Actress (Mo’Nique) and Best Director (Lee Daniels). James Cameron's Avatar and his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker were both nominated for 9 major awards each (and counting as the technical nominations are still being announced). It's gonna be fun watching people do that silly thing we do as people choose team Cameron vs. team Bigelow. Of course people of color and those who love the underdog will choose team Precious.
Home : Awards : Academy Awards : Nominees
Nominees for the 82nd Academy Awards
View by Category View by Picture
Actor in a Leading Role
* Jeff Bridges in “Crazy Heart”
* George Clooney in “Up in the Air”
* Colin Firth in “A Single Man”
* Morgan Freeman in “Invictus”
* Jeremy Renner in “The Hurt Locker”
Actor in a Supporting Role
* Matt Damon in “Invictus”
* Woody Harrelson in “The Messenger”
* Christopher Plummer in “The Last Station”
* Stanley Tucci in “The Lovely Bones”
* Christoph Waltz in “Inglourious Basterds”
Actress in a Leading Role
* Sandra Bullock in “The Blind Side”
* Helen Mirren in “The Last Station”
* Carey Mulligan in “An Education”
* Gabourey Sidibe in “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire”
* Meryl Streep in “Julie & Julia”
Actress in a Supporting Role
* Penélope Cruz in “Nine”
* Vera Farmiga in “Up in the Air”
* Maggie Gyllenhaal in “Crazy Heart”
* Anna Kendrick in “Up in the Air”
* Mo’Nique in “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire”
Animated Feature Film
* “Coraline” Henry Selick
* “Fantastic Mr. Fox” Wes Anderson
* “The Princess and the Frog” John Musker and Ron Clements
* “The Secret of Kells” Tomm Moore
* “Up” Pete Docter
Art Direction
* “Avatar” Art Direction: Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg; Set Decoration: Kim Sinclair
* “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” Art Direction: Dave Warren and Anastasia Masaro; Set Decoration: Caroline Smith
* “Nine” Art Direction: John Myhre; Set Decoration: Gordon Sim
* “Sherlock Holmes” Art Direction: Sarah Greenwood; Set Decoration: Katie Spencer
* “The Young Victoria” Art Direction: Patrice Vermette; Set Decoration: Maggie Gray
Cinematography
* “Avatar” Mauro Fiore
* “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” Bruno Delbonnel
* “The Hurt Locker” Barry Ackroyd
* “Inglourious Basterds” Robert Richardson
* “The White Ribbon” Christian Berger
Costume Design
* “Bright Star” Janet Patterson
* “Coco before Chanel” Catherine Leterrier
* “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” Monique Prudhomme
* “Nine” Colleen Atwood
* “The Young Victoria” Sandy Powell
Directing
* “Avatar” James Cameron
* “The Hurt Locker” Kathryn Bigelow
* “Inglourious Basterds” Quentin Tarantino
* “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” Lee Daniels
* “Up in the Air” Jason Reitman
Documentary (Feature)
* “Burma VJ” Anders Østergaard and Lise Lense-Møller
* “The Cove” Nominees to be determined
* “Food, Inc.” Robert Kenner and Elise Pearlstein
* “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers” Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith
* “Which Way Home” Rebecca Cammisa
Documentary (Short Subject)
* “China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province” Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill
* “The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner” Daniel Junge and Henry Ansbacher
* “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant” Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert
* “Music by Prudence” Roger Ross Williams and Elinor Burkett
* “Rabbit à la Berlin” Bartek Konopka and Anna Wydra
Film Editing
* “Avatar” Stephen Rivkin, John Refoua and James Cameron
* “District 9” Julian Clarke
* “The Hurt Locker” Bob Murawski and Chris Innis
* “Inglourious Basterds” Sally Menke
* “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” Joe Klotz
Foreign Language Film
* “Ajami” Israel
* “El Secreto de Sus Ojos” Argentina
* “The Milk of Sorrow” Peru
* “Un Prophète” France
* “The White Ribbon” Germany
Makeup
* “Il Divo” Aldo Signoretti and Vittorio Sodano
* “Star Trek” Barney Burman, Mindy Hall and Joel Harlow
* “The Young Victoria” Jon Henry Gordon and Jenny Shircore
Music (Original Score)
* “Avatar” James Horner
* “Fantastic Mr. Fox” Alexandre Desplat
* “The Hurt Locker” Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders
* “Sherlock Holmes” Hans Zimmer
* “Up” Michael Giacchino
Music (Original Song)
* “Almost There” from “The Princess and the Frog” Music and Lyric by Randy Newman
* “Down in New Orleans” from “The Princess and the Frog” Music and Lyric by Randy Newman
* “Loin de Paname” from “Paris 36” Music by Reinhardt Wagner Lyric by Frank Thomas
* “Take It All” from “Nine” Music and Lyric by Maury Yeston
* “The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart)” from “Crazy Heart” Music and Lyric by Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett
Best Picture
* “Avatar” James Cameron and Jon Landau, Producers
* “The Blind Side” Nominees to be determined
* “District 9” Peter Jackson and Carolynne Cunningham, Producers
* “An Education” Finola Dwyer and Amanda Posey, Producers
* “The Hurt Locker” Nominees to be determined
* “Inglourious Basterds” Lawrence Bender, Producer
* “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” Lee Daniels, Sarah Siegel-Magness and Gary Magness, Producers
* “A Serious Man” Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, Producers
* “Up” Jonas Rivera, Producer
* “Up in the Air” Daniel Dubiecki, Ivan Reitman and Jason Reitman, Producers
Short Film (Animated)
* “French Roast” Fabrice O. Joubert
* “Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty” Nicky Phelan and Darragh O’Connell
* “The Lady and the Reaper (La Dama y la Muerte)” Javier Recio Gracia
* “Logorama” Nicolas Schmerkin
* “A Matter of Loaf and Death” Nick Park
Short Film (Live Action)
* “The Door” Juanita Wilson and James Flynn
* “Instead of Abracadabra” Patrik Eklund and Mathias Fjellström
* “Kavi” Gregg Helvey
* “Miracle Fish” Luke Doolan and Drew Bailey
* “The New Tenants” Joachim Back and Tivi Magnusson
Sound Editing
* “Avatar” Christopher Boyes and Gwendolyn Yates Whittle
* “The Hurt Locker” Paul N.J. Ottosson
* “Inglourious Basterds” Wylie Stateman
* “Star Trek” Mark Stoeckinger and Alan Rankin
* “Up” Michael Silvers and Tom Myers
Sound Mixing
* “Avatar” Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, Andy Nelson and Tony Johnson
* “The Hurt Locker” Paul N.J. Ottosson and Ray Beckett
* “Inglourious Basterds” Michael Minkler, Tony Lamberti and Mark Ulano
* “Star Trek” Anna Behlmer, Andy Nelson and Peter J. Devlin
* “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” Greg P. Russell, Gary Summers and Geoffrey Patterson
Visual Effects
* “Avatar” Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham and Andrew R. Jones
* “District 9” Dan Kaufman, Peter Muyzers, Robert Habros and Matt Aitken
* “Star Trek” Roger Guyett, Russell Earl, Paul Kavanagh and Burt Dalton
Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
* “District 9” Written by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell
* “An Education” Screenplay by Nick Hornby
* “In the Loop” Screenplay by Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche
* “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” Screenplay by Geoffrey Fletcher
* “Up in the Air” Screenplay by Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner
Writing (Original Screenplay)
* “The Hurt Locker” Written by Mark Boal
* “Inglourious Basterds” Written by Quentin Tarantino
* “The Messenger” Written by Alessandro Camon & Oren Moverman
* “A Serious Man” Written by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
* “Up” Screenplay by Bob Peterson, Pete Docter, Story by Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Tom McCarthy
Nicholas Robinson Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Robert Zungu. The exhibition, entitled Poor Theater, includes sculptures and photographs that examine environmental conservation and the formation of marginalized social communities.
The exhibition's title references Jerzy Grotowski's eponymous Polish theater company that rose to prominence during post-war Europe. In Grotowski's Poor Theater, the stage is reduced to its bare elements, props are made from impoverished materials and the actors rely on the rigorous physicality of their bodies.
Using Grotowski's theories as a point of departure, and through a collaboration with the US Holocaust Museum, Zungu creates a makeshift backdrop of the Podgorze Ghetto as the locus for his exhibition. The image of the gates explores how communities can be sequestered and endangered by social isolation.
The exhibition investigates the ethics of science in relation to cultural and medical advancement. The photograph Untitled (Five Gorillas) depicts five plaster death masks made from a family of Mountain Gorillas. These masks, made by Dr. Carl Ackley in the 1920s, and hunted under the auspices of science, became the foundation for the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History. In addition, Zungu's sculpture Untitled (Horseshoe Crabs: Dialytic Grouping) is composed of three horseshoe crabs cast in bronze, each with a white patina to appear as if they were bled dry. Horseshoe crab blood is essential to contemporary medical research and is widely harvested to test the purity of vaccines and intravenous medical equipment.
Each artwork in the exhibition incorporates natural materials; the sculpture Eridanus, for example, is composed of 30 white, North American tiger moths pinned to the gallery wall in the formation of The River constellation. Each moth, signifying the location of a corresponding star, composes an abstract wall drawing. Other works in the exhibition include materials such as cast paper, painted bags of flour, bronze, stalactites, plaster, ebonized wood, and rolled copper.
Poor Theater also addresses issues of environmental conservation. In the photograph Striped Land Snails (X), ten snails are documented on a vintage map of an elevator circuit board. The composition maintains a surreal tone by relating the circles and spirals found in nature with the hand drawn lines of an electrical blueprint. The photograph considers the formation of communities and the consequences of industrialization on the biological world; what was once a forest is now an urban grid.
Last Saturday was the opening reception for Derrick Adams solo debut at Collette Blanchard Gallery. Derrick is my artworld mentor and big bro (though I'm older..lol) and one of the coolest dudes you'll ever meet. Though it's difficult for me to be impartial the show is of course fantastic. You should def get down to Collette Blanchard Gallery and check out the show. Below is the official release with all the pertinent details about the show.
The Root of it All, 2010 digital photograph 30 x 24 inches Edition of 3
Derrick Adams
Welcome to Monument City
23 January - 28 February, 2010
Derrick Adams' solo exhibition and debut at Collette Blanchard Gallery speaks of fallen empires, resilience and childhood impressions. It also speaks of shiny, glittery memories against muted realities, of broken landscapes and those who once resided within.
Welcome to Monument City draws inspiration from documentaries on ancient civilizations and of societies that end in destruction, left for historians to later cobble together provocative stories of money, power and respect from the scattered evidence that remains. The work is also a reflection on Adams personal witness to the transformation to ruin - architecturally and socially - of his hometown of Baltimore City (designated "Monument City" by President John Quincy Adams in 1827). The exhibition addresses the universal relationship between man and monument, both coexisting in the landscape as a fragmented and distorted representation of each other.
Muted faux-brick panels shelve pseudo-symbolic objects; digital images are combined with hand painted elements and glittered surfaces. His work fuses fairytale perceptions with a current need to search for meaning in fragments and artifacts.
Mr. Adams, who lives and works in New York, is a is graduate of Columbia University and a recent recipient of the 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. He participated in the inaugural PERFORMA 05; PS1/MoMA's 2005 Greater New York; Open House The Brooklyn Museum of Art; and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Past solo exhibitions include Jack Tilton Gallery (2003), Triple Candie (2004), Participant Inc (2005), and Momenta Arts (2006) The spring Mr. Adams will attend the Fountainhead Residency and will debut Go Stand Next To The Mountain at The Kitchen. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, New York Magazine and Artforum.
Collette Blanchard Gallery
26 Clinton Street
New York, New York 10002
+1 646 249 7720
LeBasse Projects presents:
'One Leads to Another'
New work from Andrew Hem
January 16th through Febrary 13th
LeBasse Projects is excited to present, One Leads to Another, an exhibition of new works from Los Angeles based artist Andrew Hem. In this anticipated solo project, Hem confronts the viewer with themes of history and tragedy based on his native Cambodia.
Influenced by the idea of the 'Butterfly Effect,' where small differences in decisions or movements can produce large variations in the long-term outcome of events, Hem creates a series of 'what if' scenarios where one storyline diverges at the moment of a seemingly minor event resulting in two significantly different outcomes. In this case the artist imagines if the violent Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia had never taken power and how the lives of the people would have been altered.
Hem's paintings return to acrylic after several shows of using oil in order to create a more fluid and layered effect. The detailed characters portrayed are layered over hauntingly sublime backgrounds of a past that has been re-imagined based on the 'Butterfly Effect' and leads to the title of the show: One Leads to Another.
January 16th through Febrary 13th
Artist reception: Saturday, January 16th, 7 to 10pm
For additional inquiries please contact the gallery:
contact@lebasseprojects.com or 310.558.0200
www.lebasseprojects.com
Stefanie Gutheil / Kopftheater / 2009 / oil and mixed media on canvas / 102 x 158 inches
Mike Weiss Gallery presents Kopftheater, a new exhibition of paintings by Berlin based artist Stefanie Gutheil. This is the artist’s first exhibition in New York and at Mike Weiss Gallery. Stefanie’s bold, multi-dimensional paintings are tactile depictions of her own life. The patterns of unexpected fabrics and aluminum foil adhere to the oils, acrylics and spray paint applied to the surface and come together to form scenes from the artist’s excessive imagination, both playful and grotesque. Her paintings provide the cast and set for her own kopf theater, or theatre of the mind.
Born and raised in a small conservative town in southwest Germany, Stefanie moved to Berlin ten years ago and since that time has witnessed the growth of Berlin’s contemporary art scene; an international mish-mash of artists converging on the city after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her monsters and creatures, both miniature and giant, are gross caricatures of the people in her daily life; artists, musicians, dancers, poets and revelers in the city of Berlin. Tucked into the center of the city’s nightlife pocket, the scene around the artist’s studio provides the visual fodder for what becomes her larger than life imagery.
Influences from the chaotic and cramped compositions of Bosch and Brueghel are evident. In Berg I and Berg II, a massive heap of excrement and bodies rises up from the marred landscape of skulls and stumps; pyramid shaped in subtle homage to Brueghel’s The Tower of Babel. Mostly dirt colored in appearance; the landscapes are punctuated by flecks of silvery aluminum foil and hints of glitter and cheeky floral fabrics. In Kopftheater, for which the exhibition is titled, a Boschian landscape of monsters and gnarled animals peek and crawl out of the angular cave-like structures, one losing its eye in a cinematic projectile thrust from its socket.
The applications of materials to the canvas denote object and action. Sticky, dripped acrylic froths from the mouths of radioactive dogs; globs of oil, shot like bullets at the canvas, spew vomit from the mouths of behemoth monsters; stark geometric, bright floral or swirling blue textiles glued flat and then painted on top of indicate plant life, sea and sky or rooted structure. The diverse stylistic processes used on each painting’s surface bond the chaos within the imagery. Through their variety, they are united, much like the characters in Stefanie’s own life that inspired these scenes.
Stefanie Gutheil lives and works in Berlin, Germany. The artist received her Masters of Art and Bachelors of Art at the Universität der Künste, Berlin. She has exhibited previously throughout Germany and Europe and this is her first exhibition in New York.
Mike Weiss Gallery
520 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011
Between 10th and 11th Avenues
Nearest Subway: A/C/E 23rd Street & 8th Avenue
Tel. (212) 691-6899 / Fax (212) 691-6877
info@mikeweissgallery.com
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Charles Seliger
Primal Markings III, 1943/oil on canvasboard
16 1/8" x 12 1/4" /signed and dated
Charles Seliger (1926-2009): A Memorial Exhibition
January 9-February 27, 2010
“My paintings always begin with free improvisation. Then I become fascinated with how I can explore my first creative impulse and develop imagery, through the paint itself, associating shapes and experiences to enrich my work. I am not able to sketch out a painting in advance or to determine where I am headed. . .I begin with an unself-conscious approach, a subconscious, non-rational approach to the painting. But later, I feel that I use all of my knowledge, instinct, and technique to make the painting work, delineating the latent forms and images that I both feel and see.”
— Charles Seliger
(New York City, December 19, 2009) —For its inaugural exhibition of 2010, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is pleased to present a retrospective honoring the life and work of Charles Seliger. Scheduled to be on view from January 9 to February 27, Charles Seliger (1926- 2009): A Memorial Exhibition, A Retrospective of Paintings features approximately thirty-five paintings covering the full span of Seliger’s career.
For the first time since Michael Rosenfeld Gallery became Seliger’s exclusive representative in 1990, rarely seen works from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s will be on view alongside those from more recent decades. Presenting artworks from each decade of Seliger’s career, the retrospective offers a unique opportunity to trace his development as a painter. The exhibition’s focus on progression and change in Seliger’s oeuvre is a fitting tribute to an artist for whom process, transformation, and the notion of becoming were central to both his subject matter and his approach to creating art.
Seliger was equally celebrated for his meticulously detailed abstractions as well as for the techniques he invented and used to cover the surfaces of his Masonite panels—building up layers of acrylic paint, often sanding or scraping each layer to create texture, and then delineating the forms embedded in the layers of pigment with a fine brush or pen. This labor-intensive technique results in ethereal paintings that give expression to aspects of nature hidden from or invisible to the unaided eye. In his work, texture is as important as line; materials coagulate, freezing time and arresting the fleeting processes of nature long enough for us to apprehend their significance. Like the abstract expressionists with whom he was closely associated, Seliger valued the tangible properties of his materials as much as he did the overall composition; his paintings are about the processes of nature, and they are about the processes of art; the work’s meaning is in the symbiosis between the two.
Although he never completed high school or received formal art training, Seliger immersed himself in the history of art and experimented with different painting styles including pointillism, cubism, and surrealism. In 1943, he befriended Jimmy Ernst and was quickly drawn into the circle of avant-garde artists championed by Howard Putzel and Peggy Guggenheim. Two years later, at the age of nineteen, Seliger was included in Putzel’s groundbreaking exhibition A Problem for Critics at 67 Gallery, and he also had his first solo show at Guggenheim’s legendary gallery, Art of This Century. In 1949, the De Young in San Francisco gave Seliger his first solo exhibition at a major museum.
By the mid-1940s, Seliger had become the youngest artist exhibiting with the abstract expressionists, although his place in the movement is sometimes overlooked in part because of the scale of his work. However, as the current exhibition reveals, he also worked on canvases and Masonite boards in larger dimensions. More importantly, though, this memorial exhibition demonstrates that although Seliger’s paintings lacked the physical enormity typically associated with abstract expressionism, they remain vast in their endless exploration of dynamic inner worlds. Seliger’s work resonates with the vibrant contradictions of an intimate monumentality.
Seliger passionately pursued this inner world of organic abstraction, celebrating the structural complexities of natural forms. Influenced by surrealist automatism (like many artists of his generation), he cultivated an eloquent style of abstraction that explored the dynamics of order and chaos animating the celestial, geographical, and biological realms. Attracted to the internal structures of natural objects and inspired by a range of literature in natural history, biology, and physics, Seliger paid homage to nature’s infinite variety in his abstractions. His paintings have been described as “microscopic views of the natural world,” and although the characterization is appropriate, his abstractions do not directly imitate nature so much as suggest its intrinsic structures. As he once explained: “I attempt through my imagination, to make visible the structure of matter…. I do not observe parts of nature under the microscope; I am not dissecting or analyzing. I have an emotional and intuitive awareness of nature.”
During his lifetime, Seliger exhibited in over forty-five solo shows at prominent galleries in New York and abroad. In 1986, he was given his first retrospective, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which now holds the largest collection of his work. His work is represented in numerous other museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut; and the British Museum in London. In 2003, at age seventy-seven, Seliger received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation’s Lee Krasner Award in recognition of his long and illustrious career in the arts. In 2005, the Morgan Library and Museum acquired his journals—148 hand-written volumes produced between 1952 and the present—making his introspective writing, which covers a vast range of topics across the span of six decades, accessible to art historians and scholars. He died of a stroke in October of 2009, and together with his singularly insightful artwork, his gentle manner, generous nature and keen intellect remain an important part of his legacy.
The fully illustrated exhibition catalogue features an essay titled “The Forms of Nature’s Fractions: Charles Seliger (1926-2009) and His Natural World,” by renowned independent art historian and critic, Francis V. O’Connor, who has written extensively on abstract expressionism and on the New Deal art projects of the 1930s. Among his many publications is his 2003 volume on the art of Charles Seliger published by Hudson Hills Press, Charles Seliger: Redefining Abstract Expressionism.
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is located at 24 West 57th Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY. Gallery hours are Tuesday–Saturday, 10AM-6PM.
DOUG KEYES: featuring work from Collective Memory and Becoming Language
KLOMPCHING GALLERY cordially invites you to the solo exhibition of artworks by the US photographer, Doug Keyes—showcasing photographs from his Collective Memory and Becoming Language series.
Collective Memory is a provocative series of photographs, in which Keyes condenses the content of an entire book into one photograph, through the multiple exposure of the book’s pages onto a single sheet of film. The resulting layered image, re-presented at the same size as the original book, provides a wonderful symphony of color and texture, of opaque pages rendered transparent and which conceal as much as they reveal.
The Becoming Language series, too, elicit photography’s relationship with time, memory and knowledge. In this series, multiple exposures of ubiquitous urban landscapes incorporate subliminal markers of public information. Keyes calls into question the building blocks of our knowledge of these spaces—whether it is developed through direct experience or whether it is a phenomena resulting from experience altered by the unconscious data collected from elsewhere.
Doug Keyes lives and works in Seattle. Over the course of 20 years, his photographs have been exhibited at numerous venues across Northern America. Keyes is the recipient of a number of awards including the Ned Behnke Artist Fellowship, Behnke Foundation (1999), Review Americas (Photolucida) Photographer of the Year, Photo Americas (2001) and Juror’s Choice Award, Project Competition, CENTER (2007). His photographs can be found in several notable collections including the Akron Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art amongst others.
KLOMPCHING GALLERY
www.klompching.com | info@klompching.com | +1 212 796 2070
111 Front Street, Suite 206 | Brooklyn NY 11201
Gallery Hours: Wed-Sat, 11am-6pm and by appointment.
Extended Hours: 1st Thursdays DUMBO Gallery Walk, 11am—8:30pm
Well it seems as if 2010 is starting with a bti of a hangover from the general vibe of 2009 - tragedy. Firsth the terrible earthquake in Haiti and then the premature death of another black music icon Teddy Pendergrass. I was trying to take the month of January off from blogging in an effort to revamp the site and get two new projects launched, but events have decided that isn't possible.
Check out the bio of Teddy Pendergrass below (courtesy of wikipedia) as well as some of the great music he leaves behind. Have a wonderful day and remember to live each day like your last because, well..it could be.
BIO
Theodore DeReese "Teddy" Pendergrass, Sr. (March 26, 1950 – January 13, 2010) was an American R&B/soul singer and songwriter. Pendergrass first rose to fame as lead singer of Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes in the 1970s before a successful solo career at the end of the decade. In 1982, he was severely injured in an auto accident in Philadelphia, resulting in his being paralyzed from the waist down. After his injury, the affable entertainer founded the Teddy Pendergrass Alliance, a foundation which helps those with spinal cord injuries.
Teddy Pendergrass, a native of Kingstree, South Carolina, was born to Ida Geraldine Epps and Jesse Pendergrass. Later, Jesse left the family when Teddy was young and was not a part of his son's life. Tragically, the elder Pendergrass was murdered in 1962. Years later, Teddy moved to Philadelphia. He was a student at the old Thomas Edison High School for Boys in Philadelphia. Teddy sang with the Edison Mastersingers. However, he dropped out in the 11th grade to go into the music business. According to author Robert Ewell Greene, Pendergrass was ordained a minister as a youngster. Later he was to become a drummer for a band, and later lead singer. The church was his initiation for talent and eventual success.
Career
Pendergrass' career began when he was a drummer for The Cadillacs, which soon merged with Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes. Melvin invited Pendergrass to become the lead singer after he jumped from the rear of a stage and started singing his heart out. Months later the group signed with Gamble & Huff on the then-CBS subsidiary Philadelphia International Records in 1972. The Blue Notes had hits such as "I Miss You," "Bad Luck," "Wake Up Everybody," the two million seller "If You Don't Know Me By Now" and many more. Following personality conflicts between Melvin and Pendergrass, Pendergrass launched a solo career and released hit singles like "The More I Get the More I Want," "Close the Door," "I Don't Love You Anymore," "Turn Off the Lights" and others.
His first solo album was self titled Teddy Pendergrass (1977), followed by Life is a Song Worth Singing (1978), Live Coast to Coast and Teddy (1979), 1980's TP and the final Philadelphia International Records album It's Time for Love (1981). He also sang a duet with Whitney Houston on "Hold Me", from her self-titled debut album.
Later career
On March 18, 1982, in the Germantown section of Philadelphia on Lincoln Drive, Pendergrass was involved in an automobile accident. The brakes failed on his 1981 Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit, causing the car to hit a guard rail, cross into the opposite traffic lane, and hit two trees. Pendergrass and his passenger, Tenika Watson, a transsexual nightclub performer with whom Pendergrass was casually acquainted, were trapped in the wreckage for 45 minutes. While Watson walked away from the accident with minor injuries, Pendergrass suffered a spinal cord injury leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.
In August 1982, PIR also released This One's for You, while Pendergrass was recovering from his accident. In 1983, the album Heaven Only Knows was released. This was his last album containing his pre-accident recordings. Ten years after the accident, he recorded a version of "One Shining Moment," the theme for March Madness Basketball on CBS.
After completing physical therapy, he returned to the studio to record the album Love Language, featuring the 1984 ballad "Hold Me", a duet with a then-unknown Whitney Houston. He also returned to the public for a performance on July 13, 1985, at the historic Live Aid concert in Philadelphia, then continued to record throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In 1996, he starred alongside Stephanie Mills in the touring production of the gospel musical Your Arms Too Short to Box with God. In 1998, Pendergrass released his autobiography entitled, Truly Blessed.
Though generally inactive in his later years, Pendergrass' “Wake Up Everybody” has been covered by a diverse range of acts from Simply Red to Patti LaBelle and was chosen as a rallying cry during the 2004 Presidential campaign by Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds to mobilize voters. In addition, Little Brother, Kanye West, Cam’Ron, Twista, Ghostface, 9th Wonder, DMX and DJ Green Lantern have utilized his works.
In 2006, Pendergrass announced his retirement from the music business. In 2007, he briefly returned to performing to participate in Teddy 25: A Celebration of Life, Hope & Possibilities, a 25th anniversary awards ceremony that marked Pendergrass' accident date, but also raised money for his charity, The Teddy Pendergrass Alliance, and honored those who helped Pendergrass since his accident.
Death
In 2009, Pendergrass underwent surgery for colon cancer and had difficulty recovering from that disease from which he eventually died on January 13, 2010, at age 59, while hospitalized at Bryn Mawr Hospital in suburban Philadelphia.
In his recent paintings, Martinez expands an ever-widening visual vocabulary. Thoughts this cacophonous and grandiloquent do not translate to mere language, they are the stuff of dreams. Here, exclamations of color are object enough. Still lifes explode with vibrant flora; a tugboat is distilled to its most elemental, abstract parts; imperious tabletop constructions serve as psychologically charged landscapes or transform into a thought bubble’s torrential rant; and, finally, where the figure emerges, ducks and skulls shed a knowing tear, while bright eyed, helmeted child warriors stand guard. All boldly conceived in thick, juicy clots of pigment— these hieroglyphs and barely delineated figuration teeter on the edge of decipherability.
One of three six by nine foot canvases features four figures holding court at a glimmering green table strewn with shapes and colors, makeshift fragments created with Martinez’s signature urgency. An empty chair to the left of the scene invites the viewer to join in and let the gamesmanship begin. In direct challenge to the bright detritus of the aforementioned works are two sets featuring new modes of working: all white tableaux whose gestures come straight from the tube and black canvases incised to reveal previous layers of subtle coloration, reductive scratchiti of primal immediacy.
Accompanying the suite of paintings are works on paper, small pieces that are crucial to Martinez’s practice, and a suite of hand-colored etchings produced in a collaboration with Forth Estate. Martinez’s work was recently seen in “New York Minute” at MACRO, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome and has been included in shows at Blum & Poe, Deitch Projects, Peres Projects, Alexander & Bonin, and the Deste Foundation, among many others. He was named one of 2009’s top fifteen young artists by Interview Magazine. This is his third solo exhibition at ZieherSmith.
ZieherSmith / 516 West 20th Street / New York, NY 10011 / 212-229-1088 / info@ziehersmith.com / www.ziehersmith.com
In his recent paintings, Martinez expands an ever-widening visual vocabulary. Thoughts this cacophonous and grandiloquent do not translate to mere language, they are the stuff of dreams. Here, exclamations of color are object enough. Still lifes explode with vibrant flora; a tugboat is distilled to its most elemental, abstract parts; imperious tabletop constructions serve as psychologically charged landscapes or transform into a thought bubble’s torrential rant; and, finally, where the figure emerges, ducks and skulls shed a knowing tear, while bright eyed, helmeted child warriors stand guard. All boldly conceived in thick, juicy clots of pigment— these hieroglyphs and barely delineated figuration teeter on the edge of decipherability.
One of three six by nine foot canvases features four figures holding court at a glimmering green table strewn with shapes and colors, makeshift fragments created with Martinez’s signature urgency. An empty chair to the left of the scene invites the viewer to join in and let the gamesmanship begin. In direct challenge to the bright detritus of the aforementioned works are two sets featuring new modes of working: all white tableaux whose gestures come straight from the tube and black canvases incised to reveal previous layers of subtle coloration, reductive scratchiti of primal immediacy.
Accompanying the suite of paintings are works on paper, small pieces that are crucial to Martinez’s practice, and a suite of hand-colored etchings produced in a collaboration with Forth Estate. Martinez’s work was recently seen in “New York Minute” at MACRO, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome and has been included in shows at Blum & Poe, Deitch Projects, Peres Projects, Alexander & Bonin, and the Deste Foundation, among many others. He was named one of 2009’s top fifteen young artists by Interview Magazine. This is his third solo exhibition at ZieherSmith.
ZieherSmith / 516 West 20th Street / New York, NY 10011 / 212-229-1088 / info@ziehersmith.com / www.ziehersmith.com
Parisian Laundry opens its winter 2010 program with the highly anticipated solos of Canadian painter Rick Leong and sculptor David Armstrong Six, two artists interested in the monumental be it man made or natural. This same evening, the gallery plays host to the launch of Issue 5 of Hunter & Cook, a contemporary art magazine out of Toronto.
RICK LEONG
I AM NATURE
For his second solo at Parisian Laundry, Leong continues to observe and explore the unknown in nature. After a fall research sojourn in Banff, Alberta, Leong’s newest landscape paintings are dense with the fieldwork intensity of a botanist or naturalist. Often biomorphic or transformative, Leong’s amplified imagery includes trees, fungi, mosses and rocks that sometimes become skeletons of animals or graffiti like script. On view will be 10 new paintings in which the artist locates phenomena in the everyday sensorial experience of being in nature; entering woods, stumbling along a river’s edge, observing and magnifying the extraordinary worlds of lichen on the forest floor or the moon at night. Leong’s paintings depict a meeting place of micro worlds translated into macro-majestic pictorial fields.
Rick Leong is a Montreal based artist; he obtained his MFA from Concordia University. His work is found in the collections of The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The Canada Council Art Bank, Senvest, ALDO Group, as well as privately.
BUNKER
DAVID ARMSTRONG SIX
THE DRY SALVAGES
For his first solo presentation at Parisian Laundry, Armstrong Six pays homage to the modernist monument. Working in situ and using the gallery as a process based laboratory, Armstrong Six has thoughtfully built a mapped man-made constructed space that houses a massive sculpture and has been slowly contaminating it with everyday objects such as vases, plexi-glass, mattress foam and paint. This anti-decorating accentuates the problematic of these iconic structures in public space such as, vandalism, time and weather while illuminating a personal narrative of the artist at work. Accompanying this major sculpture will be a selection of new spray-paint drawings as well as 2 smaller sculptures.
David Armstrong Six has exhibited widely, most recently at the musée d’art contemporain de Montréal as part of the inaugural Québec triennial "Nothing is Lost, Nothing is Created, Everything is Transformed", 2008.
PARISIAN LAUNDRY
3550 St-Antoine Ouest Montréal QC H4C 1A9
t +1 514.989.1056 | f +1 514.989.7550
info@parisianlaundry.com www.parisianlaundry.com
Jered Sprecher - Monumental Dust / January 9 - February 13, 2010
Jered Sprecher, Dry Leaves, 2009. Oil on canvas, 20" X 16".
Jered Sprecher's (b. 1976) paintings explore the "handwriting" of humankind. Taking cues and samples from our visually cluttered landscape, Sprecher incorporates and imports them into his abstract painting and drawings.
In 2009, he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Most recently, Sprecher's paintings were exhibited at Jeff Bailey Gallery (New York), Steven Zevitas Gallery (Boston), ADA Gallery (Richmond, Virginia), Cheekwood Museum of Art (Tennessee), and Calvin College (Michigan). In previous years Sprecher's paintings were included in group shows at The Drawing Center (New York), Mark Moore Gallery (Santa Monica, CA), Wendy Cooper Gallery (Chicago), and solo exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), The Flourescent Gallery (Knoxville) and Arthouse (Austin, TX) among others. Sprecher received his M.A. and M.F.A. from the University of Iowa and is currently an Assistant Professor at The University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Kinkead Contemporary | 6029 Washington Blvd. Culver City, CA 90232 T 310.838.7400 F 310.838.7474
This is one of those times when I am more than happy to join the chorus and sing the same tune everyone is singing. By now you are all aware of the extremely tragic events unfolding in Haiti as we speak. Please join me in doing everything we can to reach out and help the people of Haiti survive and recover from this terrible tragedy.
Text yele to 501501 and a $5 donation will be billed directly to your phone or go directly to http://yele.org to donate larger amounts.
Gabriel Orozco
December 13, 2009–March 1, 2010
The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor
In conjunction with the exhibition Gabriel Orozco: Samurai Tree Invariants
With a body of work that is unique in its formal power and intellectual rigor, Gabriel Orozco (Mexican, b. 1962) emerged at the beginning of the 1990s as one of the most intriguing and original artists of his generation—and one of the last to come of age in the twentieth century. Orozco resists confinement to a single medium, roaming freely and fluently among drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, and painting. From one project to the next, he deliberately blurs the boundaries between the art object and the everyday environment, instead situating his contributions in a place that merges "art" and "reality," whether in exquisite drawings made on airplane boarding passes or in sculptures made from recovered trash.
Many of Orozco's works—which are often created specifically for the occasion of an exhibition—have become indisputable classics of 1990s art, such as the Citroën automobile surgically reduced to two-thirds its normal width (La DS, 1993) and a human skull covered with a graphite grid (Black Kites, 1997). This exhibition presents many of these works for the first time in New York, alongside rich selections of work from Orozco's vast body of smaller objects, paintings, and works on paper.
The exhibition in New York will be followed by presentations at Kunstmuseum Basel, April 18–August 10, 2010; Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, September 15, 2010–January 3, 2011; and Tate Modern, London, January 19–April 25, 2011.
Leonardo Nierman, Paintings & Sculpture
Mike Lash, Stuff
* Artists' Reception Friday, January 8th, 2010 - 6-8PM
* Exhibition dates: Friday, January 8th to February 5th, 2010.
* Gallery hours: Monday - Saturday 11-7, Sun. 12-6.
* Gallery located on the NE corner of 20th and 7th Ave.
* Nearest Subway: C, E exit 23rd @ 8th Ave., 1,9 exit 23rd @ 7th Ave.
* Contact: Michael Lyons Wier, gallery@LyonsWierGallery.com
Lyons Wier Gallery is pleased to announce Paintings & Sculpture by Leonardo Nierman.
At 78 years old, Mexican artist Leonardo Nierman is still in his studio every day, painting and synthesizing five decades of personal investigations into physics, mathematics, color theory and music.
The Abstract Expressionist's work has played a leading role in the extraordinary drama that is modern Mexican art. Nierman started to exhibit at a time when art in Mexico was undergoing a period of drastic change--the influence of the long-established Muralists was being challenged by the ideas of a new generation open to modernist internationalism.
In this newest body of work, Nierman hearkens back to his Mexican predecessors, as well as to the modern lessons of cubism and abstraction, combining Western artistic revolutions. His hyper-real paintings of crumbled paper employ many old tropes yet read surprising fresh as the mind wanders from the sheer technical deftness of hand to the conceptual recognition of subliminal images or words, real or imagined, within these densely rendered compositions.
Nierman's "flame sculptures" echo the elements of infinity, straight and curved lines, and reflected light that rise toward the sky. "A candle is constantly creating sculptures," says Nierman. "The form of the flame is always perfect, [it] represents hope, light out of darkness, a form of happiness". His sculptures combine the forces of nature and intellect, referencing contrasting aspects of the physical world released as turbulent energy and then frozen into intricate structures whose forms are a visible expression of physicality.
Leonardo Nierman's work is featured in major collections around the world including the Vatican Museum of Contemporary Art & Vatican Gardens, Rome, Italy, the Museums of Modern Art, Haifa and Tel Aviv, Israel, the Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City, Mexico, the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art, Madrid, Spain, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, Harvard University Art Museum, Cambridge, MA, the Detroit Institute of Fine Arts, Ml, the Albert Einstein Institute of New York, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives in Mexico.
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Lyons Wier Gallery is pleased to announce Stuff by Mike Lash.
Mike Lash's new work is a marked departure from his well-known figurative work. While he maintains his wry sense of humor without losing the base banality he has become known for, Lash's new work is less focused on image and concentrates on ideas or "stuff".
Whilst his works still may have renderings of things one may recognize, Lash moves towards a more abstract, if not conceptual, picture plane. Many of the pieces are in fact simply text-based works.
The artist pushes the viewer to expect the unexpected, taking the viewer between the boundaries of hard science and the inner angst of the individual. His paintings maintain a ready-made feel as well as the immediate gesture of his rendering style.
Lash flatly proposes in his artist statement: "I make stuff, mostly paintings and drawings. The stuff I make kind of documents things I'm personally interested in and think about. Sometimes people like them. I hope you like them."
Mike Lash was included in "To Have it About You: The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection," Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum University of Minnesota and "Lies for Leo, A Book Signing and Exhibition" at Agnes b. Tokyo, Japan, & Agnes b. Madison Ave, New York. He is the author of "Lies for Leo", "Pervert" and "Draw Your Own Conclusions." Lash received a Master of Arts from Northern Illinois University, DeKalb in 1985. He currently resides in New York.
To each of you from little ole me have a wonderful day, a blessed holiday season and make sure you spend a little time remembering all the things you should be thankful for. Whenever you start to feel bad about the things you want or need, GIVE a little something to someone else who needs it. You will feel so much better in the process.
2009 has been one of the most trying years of my adult life in many ways, but it has provided a wonderful opportunity for growth and self reflection. I am blessed to have been given this opportunity to see who I really am as a man and an artist. This tough year has also provided an opportunity for those who I consider friends to stand by me and show who they really are.
My cousin Melvin, my dear friend Jeff F. and road dawgs and best friends Akim B. and Adam Irby have all been with me every step of the way providing moral support and even some material support when the recession came home. Of course my family has been better than ever and this has been a banner year for renewing ties with family (both paternal and maternal).
I will be taking a much needed break from blogging for a bit to celebrate the holidays and focus on a great new nightlife project that has fallen into my lap. To those who know me, I know what you're thinking and I don't really believe I'm going to take this break either (lol), it is my intent.
No worries art lovers, Urban Pop Life will be back better than ever at the top of the year. I'm planning new features, new content, and eventually an updated look and feel. There are also plans to add contributors so if you are a writer, photographer or artist interested in contributing contact me at uptownsun@aol.com to express your interest.
Apparently the Vatican likes The Simpsons. Check out the story I found earlier here: (Vatican paper praises The Simpsons) and then watch this great clip from the 20 year old series.
