Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Forking Sprawl

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Charles Avery has been constructing a narrative in his work since 2004. Between fantasy and reality, The Islanders is a very particular universe he has created in which to gather his disparate ideas. His practice primarily involves drawing, sculptures, texts and installations which participate in the epic and dreamlike narrative whole in the course of making.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Since 2005, Charles Avery has devoted his practice to the perpetual description of a fictional island. Replete with its own population and constantly shifting topography, Avery’s intricately conceived project amounts to an ever-expanding body of drawings, sculptures, installations and texts which evince the island. Exhibited incrementally these heterogeneous elements serve as terms within the unifying structure of the island – as multiple emissions of an imaginary state, and as a meditation on the central themes of philosophy and the problems of art-making.

Installation (Installation)

Ongoing Time Stabbed with a Dagger was Farmer’s first kinetic sculpture that added a cinematic character to an “ever-reconfiguring play presented in real time.” The assembly of various objects and props on top of a large platform constitutes not only a work, but, to a certain extent, a show in itself. The title of the piece comes from the literal translation of René Magritte’s painting from 1938, La Durée Poignardée , whose more familiar translation is “Time Transfixed.”

Film & Video (Film & Video)

246247596248914102516… And then there were none narrates a semi fictional account centered around the ambiguous history of the Democracy Monument in Bangkok, and on the aftermath of the 1973 demonstration of 400,000 people who marched against the military junta from Thammasat University to the monument. Built on archival and oral history, the story interweaves the personal with grand historical narratives to consider the complicated history behind the monument – symbolic of the unrest and violence that led to the Thammasat University massacre on October 6, 1976.

Photography (Photography)

San Pedro is a seaside city, part of the Los Angeles Harbor, sitting on the edge of a channel. California Stories: Attempt to correlate social class with elevation above main harbor channel (San Pedro, July 1975) (1973–2011) is a series of coupled gelatin silver prints that show the artist using his hand to measure the elevation of various pieces of real estate, ranging from a manicured mansion to a ramshackle beach house. A direct equation becomes evident between the social strata these homes represent and the height at which the artist holds his hand.

Photography (Photography)

Rotation presents the image of a crowd, a re-appropriation of 19th or beginning of 20th century photographs published in newspapers and magazines. This artwork is composed of the same image repeated four times with different resolutions. The last image in Rotation is less focused than the original one.

Photography (Photography)

La Cultura de la Felicidad (The Culture of Happiness) is a series of five photographs addressing everyday life—a couple in a bed, lovers on a bench and a family reunion. The subjects wear masks made of white cardboard. The series suggests the idea of a reality hidden under the appearances of the power in place that denies violence to citizens.

Installation (Installation)

End of 2008, Pierre Leguillon presented at KADIST, Paris the first retrospective of the works of Diane Arbus (1923-1971) organized in France since 1980, bringing together all the images commissioned to the New York photographer by the Anglo-American press in the 1960s. This exhibition, destined to tour in various locations, presents the original pages of the magazines, including “Harper’s Bazaar”, “Esquire”, “Nova” and “The Sunday Times Magazine”. As Pierre Leguillon states: “The mythology surrounding Diane Arbus’ character is willingly set aside to offer a more neutral point of view on a more unfamiliar part of her work, although it was mass-distributed.” Many of the characters portrayed in these commissioned works seem less sensational at first glance than the “freaks” that made Diane Arbus’ work so famous, since the retrospective MOMA organized in 1973 in New York, two years after her suicide.

Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films. Indeed rather surprisingly Kim seems to have had a huge collection of Western videos and he published a book called “On the art of the Cinema” in 1973. As the final acknowledgments indicate, Garcia Torres’s work was produced following in depth research, consulting information given by director Shin Sang-ok who has been kidnapped by Kim in 1978, as well as Jerrold Post (The George Washington University) and Timothy Savage (Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The film Line Describing a Cone was made in 1973 and it was projected for the first time at Fylkingen (Stockholm) on 30 August of the same year. This piece, which was initially screened in independent film contexts, it soon began to be shown at art museums and ended up becoming one of the key works of the artistic movement that opened up the visual arts towards cinema. With a duration of 30 minutes, the film shows the creation of a white curve being projected onto an empty space.

Photography (Photography)

Vandy Rattana’s Bomb Ponds series was made following a transformative encounter with the craters left over from 2,756,941 tons of bombs dropped by U. S. forces during the Vietnam War between 1964 and 1973. Dissatisfied with the level of documentation on the bombing and its repercussions, the artist began to study the historiography of his country. He travelled to the ten most severely bombed provinces, engaging villagers in locating and testifying to the existence of the craters, and how they are lived with today.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Real. Retrato de Norman Mejía. (The Real. A Portrait of Norman Mejía.)

Film & Video (Film & Video)

I’ve heard stories (2008) is one of Marwa Arsanios early works. It is a short animated film staging a story that took place at the Carlton hotel in Beirut. This work is the first part of a longer project on this iconic building.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This score is a graphic record of the detailed choreography of one of Anthony McCall’s Landscape for Fire performances. These took place between 1972-74 in the UK at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, Colchester School of Art, in Reading and in North Weald as well as in Sweden at Fylkingen Society of Contemporary Music and Arts, Stockholm, and in the USA at the William Patterson University, Wayne, New Jersey. Many of these events were photographed by David Kilburn and Carolee Schneemann, only one in 1972 was filmed.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Pratchaya Phinthong’s work has explored the mineral and karmic economies of Laos, a country that shares language, beliefs, and a long border with his own native region of Isaan (Northeast Thailand). The most bombed nation on earth, Laos still bears the physical and mental scars of the U. S. military’s epic aerial offensive, launched largely from bases in Isaan, during the Second Indochina War. Between 1964 and 1973 the US dropped an estimated 250 million cluster bombs on Laos.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This video was filmed in the middle of the Zagreb fair which took place in the 1960s and 1970s under the rule of Tito. Tito created the fair to signify the exemplary economic exchange between the East and West. The film’s setting takes place at the Italian pavilion, where several young people are seen sitting in cars, trying to repeat sentences in English.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Bad innovation in the name of protection is not a ready-made, but was made entirely by the artist, representing a stroller. Its interior is shielded and designed for babies in the case of conflict. Camouflaged, it resembles a small tank.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Calderón & Piñeros (La Decanatura) refer to Sólheimasandur as a work that tackles the issue of “the ruin as a tourist destination.” As they say, “at the end, tourists become an essential part of this unusual, beautiful, and—at the same time—banal landscape.” The video features a plane wreck on Sólheimasandur beach in Iceland, where a navy plane belonging to the United States Army crashed in 1973 due to fuel exhaustion. The plane appears as an anthropomorphized figure: lying on the sands of the beach without its wings, it resembles a sculptural torso that has lost all its limbs, with cables coming out of its body appearing as internal organs. These injuries remind the viewer of the danger inherent in these artifacts, and the potential for both heroism and death implicit in flying them to far-away territories.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In keeping with her mythological proclivity, Minotaur (2009) casts a new light on an old narrative. The film takes the ancient Greek story of the half-man, half-bull as its title subject, but at its core, Minotaur is an homage to pioneering modern dancer and choreographer, Anna Halprin. Along with Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer, Halprin’s fearless and lifelong dance practice paved the way for the evolution of modern and contemporary dance as we understand it today.

Painting (Painting)

In his new series of collages, Eichelmann takes his starting point from the “Belvedere Torso” in the Vatican Museum. In taking over and consuming the image of the sculpture, Eichelmann deconstructs its appearance by cutting it up, covering it, rendering the sculpture an allegorical ruin. Subverting the autonomy of the ancient sculpture in art history, Eichelmann creates a palimpsest through adding a new layer to the work in deconstructing and collapsing the famous sculpture.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Pratchaya Phinthong’s work has explored the mineral and karmic economies of Laos, a country that shares language, beliefs, and a long border with his own native region of Isaan (Northeast Thailand). The most bombed nation on earth, Laos still bears the physical and mental scars of the U. S. military’s epic aerial offensive, launched largely from bases in Isaan, during the Second Indochina War. Between 1964 and 1973 the US dropped an estimated 250 million cluster bombs on Laos.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Elizabeth McAlpine’s work frequently deals with time based issues as well as the experience of watching. In The Height of the Campanile , McAlpine has calculated the height of the tower and timed her shooting of it so that the length of the film in meters is exactly that of the height of the tower. Thus the time it takes to view the film, and the pace at which the camera pans up the tower are equivalent to the height of the tower.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Soft Materials is a curious, touching but also disturbing sequence of confrontations between two people: a man and a woman, and machines. Shot in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Zurich, the humans and the machines mirror each other’s actions. It is unclear which party takes the lead.

Photography (Photography)

A young settler girl, dressed in a bridal outfit for Purim, stands in a street in Hebron waiting, perhaps for her parents or other children to join her. In the background three soldiers scan the buildings and the rooftops for threatening presences. Turning her back to the soldiers, the little girl pays no attention to what surrounds her.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Rosier’s body of films, gleam with that indeterminate in-between glow of twilight. Things hardly move at all in her films. They are, quite simply, often without plot, without spoken voice and without narrative elements.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

For the collage U. S. Treasury Nose Segalove appropriated an image of a governmental-type agent inspecting an object on a table with a magnifying glass. By inserting written comments like “not a straw,” “not a spoon,” “not a razor blade,” the artist equates the inspector with a cocaine user. In this way, with keen, deadpan humor, the artist refers to all the stereotypes and social clichés associated with drug abuse particularly in the 1970s.

In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text. The otherwise banal scissors become suggestively violent in relation to the text, which was originally the title of a print in Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War series. However, Baldessari is less interested in the logical relationships between text and image than he is with the conceptual leaps that the viewer makes with the limited information provided.

Photography (Photography)

Arms & Legs (Specif. Elbows & Knees), etc. : Arm (with Bottle) belongs to Baldessari’s most recent series of paintings in which the artist brings together photographic, painted, and three-dimensional elements, to juxtapose unlikely body fragments such as noses and ears, elbows and knees, or eyebrows and foreheads.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive. In Person with Pillow: Desire, Lust, Fate , a woman’s facial expression is obscured by such void, leaving only her posture to suggest her emotional state. The two images stacked above the woman can be read as comic-style thought bubbles, intimating that she has lust, desire, and fate on her mind.