2005.03.10
Twenty proposals for imagining the future
Sala Rekalde presents The Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds: Twenty proposals for imagining the future
[via]
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2005.03.01
Diana Cooper
march 5 - april 2, 2005
Diana Cooper
"Swarm"
opening reception: saturday, march 5, 6-8 pm
"Swarm," an exhibition of new works by Diana Cooper will be on view from March 5 until April 2, 2005. This will be Cooper's fourth solo exhibition at Postmasters, her first after a year-long residency at the American Academy in Rome in 2003/2004.
"Sometimes I feel as though I am making flowcharts for an imaginary world. My mind is like a fiIter constantly translating the world around me. Everything catches my eye: bright orange traffic cones meandering between the street and the sidewalk; an enormous building sheathed in black mesh from top to bottom; duct tape adhering a handwritten sign to a newly polished subway tiled wall. These are all urban works in progress, part of the transitory, the ephemeral, and the makeshift. These are the environments we inhabit everyday."
Diana Cooper's works cannot be easily categorized; she engages in a unique practice that combines drawing, painting, sculpture and installation. Although essentially abstract, these unabashedly handmade visual hybrids suggest a narrative of cause and effect in which apparent chaos and randomness develops inherent logic, or conversely, orderly structures turn paradoxical.
"Digital, biological and medical systems are our life support but they can fail us too. In their complexity they become unstable and fragile. I am interested in how you can start with a logical structure and through sheer repetition and excess create something that unravels and stops making sense. Fragility is important to me because it underscores our own vulnerability. Like the makeshift improvisations on existing systems my work is fragile and grows organically."
Cooper's works are made from unorthodox but commonly available materials, such as foam core, felt, corrugated plastic sheeting, numbered map pins, acetate, Velcro, neoprene and pom poms. They incorporate her own photographs as building elements - a development inspired in part by the elaborate instruction manuals that she has been making since 1998 to accompany her installations.
"I want to transform materials and insinuate them into unlikely contexts. I want to create the sense that they don't quite belong but at the same time that they do. Often I like to make something be what it shouldn't be: scotch tape holds up a felt construction, plastic and pipe cleaners frame a heap of pom poms or a delicate felt-tip marker doodle covers an enormous canvas. I want the work to be both vital and vulnerable, like an ice cream cake in the sun."
Two new works included in this show, "Orange Alert (USA)" 2004-05 and "Swarm" 2003-05 make specific reference to real world events. "Orange Alert (USA)" refers to the US terror alert color code instated by the Bush administration after September 11, 2001. In "Swarm," one of the central free-standing structures were partly inspired by US barriers used during political protests in 2003.
In a recent review of Cooper's work in the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Knight wrote:
"Think of Diana Cooper's wall reliefs as visualization of the way a computer virus might work: Havoc occurs through precise channels of organization, manic energy merges with exacting control and data seem to wobble between ferocious and benign. The structure of her art is a hybrid of machine regularity and human caprice. In fact, maybe this is also what logic looks like - carefully composed yet far messier and more random than we assume."
(January 21,2005)
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Diana Cooper's works have been shown extensively in Europe and the US. In 2003-04 she was a recipient of the Rome Prize as well as an artist-in-resident at the Center for Drawing at the Wimbledon School of Art. She has recently had solo shows at the Center for Drawing in London and at the Carl Berg Gallery in Los Angeles. She has participated in group shows at the Museum St. Gallen in Switzerland, the Drawing Room in London and the Brooklyn Museum. In addition, she has shown at Hales Gallery in London, Galerie Anne de Villepoix in Paris and Galerie Staub in Zurich. In the United States Cooper has exhibited at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center and Sculpture Center in New York, Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Tang Museum at Skidmore College, New York, Rice University Art Gallery in Houston and numerous other institutions.
Postmasters Gallery, located in Chelsea at 459 West 19th Street (corner of 10th Avenue), is open Tuesday through Saturday 11am to 6 pm.
the installation views of the show will be posted online by March 7
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Barry McGee
Barry McGee, a street artist from San Francisco, is having his first European museum exhibition at Museum Het Domain Sittard. "Things Really Are Getting Better" is a series of drawings in pencil and ballpoint pen depicting faces in grotesque and/or psychedellic expressions. I do not know if there are installations at this exhibit, but in the past McGee has utilized many urban decay objects or urban demolition situations as reference for his work.
VIA e-flux:
From 22 January to 28 March Museum Het Domein is presenting the first European museum exhibition by Californian artist Barry McGee (born in San Francisco in 1966). The artist has compiled a publication with the same title to accompany the exhibition.
T w i s t
Barry McGee became involved in San Francisco's graffiti world in the mid-1980s, while still an 18-year-old high school student. There he found an immense stage and an even larger audience for his 'illegal' creations, long before he made his entrance into the art world. Since then, under the name 'Twist', he has left his signature (or 'tag' as it is known among graffiti artists) all over the world. After studying painting and graphic art at The San Francisco Art Institute, he has developed - alongside his illegal street art - a body of work that is entirely interwoven with graffiti, yet is separate from it. He finds his inspiration in chaotic city life, which is dominated by the most diverse images, from advertising posters and signs to political propaganda and the slogans opposing it. He is also utterly fascinated by the contrast and tension between inner cities and suburbs, between well-to-do neighbourhoods and slums. In his museum work McGee specifically tries to emphasise what is individual and hand-crafted in an impersonal urban landscape increasingly crowded with corporate logos, trademarks and advertisements.
Over the years, McGee has developed a number of elements which recur in varying combinations in all his installations. To begin with, there are panels covered with colourful geometric patterns which adorn the walls in great abundance and leave a shimmering sensation on the retina. His installations are also populated by large numbers of unwholesome-looking men with faces drawn in a style that was formerly cartoon-like and is now almost psychedelic. The faces, made up of fine pencil or ballpoint lines, have gaping mouths, glistening long hair and grotesque bags under their eyes.
Recently, overturned car wrecks have started to appear in his exhibitions, as dying machines just barely able to flash their lights and emit a last puff of exhaust. Like the wax figures of youths doing illegal or improper things in corners or cubicles, they add to the feeling of excitement, of unexpected and alienating events, of vitality and illegality that typifies the graffiti world. Another new element is the use of robots: sawn-off silhouettes of McGee characters whose monotonous motions depict the act of graffiti-spraying. Their mechanical stiffness, however, makes it quite clear that this is not reality, but a museum version of it.
McGee makes abundant use of the various elements in his installations, often adding more new drawings, panels covered with geometric patterns and so forth on the spot. These are then grouped or bundled into large clusters, or sometimes even piled up, like the television sets showing animated versions of his work. McGee always starts with unpredictable chaos, which allows chance, time pressures and decisions by assistants to play as important a part in the creation of the installations as the artist's own ideas and dexterity. This may well be as close as he can get to the working methods of the graffiti artist. In any case he wouldn't want it any other way.
B i o g r a p h y
Barry McGee has previously exhibited in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1998) and the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2000), at Deitch Projects in New York (1999 and 2001), the 49th Biennale in Venice (2001), the Fondazione Prada in Milan (2002), the Deste Foundation in Athens (2004), John Kaldor Projects in Melbourne (2004) and elsewhere. His tags can also be found in public spaces in most of the cities where he has exhibited.
The publication Things are really getting better is a 178 page full-colour picture book, including images of the exhibition in Museum Het Domein and older works. Order the book by sending an email to [email protected]., ISBN 90-75883-005.
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2005.02.20
"Isolarion"

Sophie Tottie's Isolarion is at Lunds Konsthall through May 15, 2005.
"Sophie Tottie's exhibition Isolarion deals with what is sometimes shocking and hard to describe - facts that exist in a void between loud headlines and what is left unmentioned in the news reports, facts that are protested on banners, but cannot be couched in words and images.
"Isolarion" is the term for the 15th century maps that describe specific areas in detail, but that do not provide a clarifying overview of how these places are related to each other. Now Sophie Tottie uses the term as the title for a work in progress, shown for the first time at the Lund Konsthall."
"In the exhibition, different subjects such as truth commissions and modernism open up new, shifting contexts where opposing concepts and events intersect. Examined by Tottie in a series of images, these themes appear in isolation, as well as juxtaposed in a drawing reminiscent of a network. Consisting of text and image, this large scale wall drawing intersects the room vertically and horizontally, in accordance with an invisible positioning system.
Sophie Tottie lives and works in Berlin and Stockholm. Her work moves between different forms of artistic expressions, from drawings and wall paintings to video and photography. Often of an existential nature, the subjects examined are related to political and historical contexts.
In conjunction with the exhibition, three seminars will be held in April.
At one of these, on April 14, the artist will talk with the critic and curator John Peter Nilsson about the show as well as her previous work.
Invited speakers will include Stefan Jonsson, author and critic at the daily Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, on April 21, and Nikos Papastergiadis Associate Professor at the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne, on April 28."
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2005.02.11
Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist's Eye
The MCA in Chicago is featuring Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist's Eye, a show of artists reacting to their experiences while traveling. "The works address issues related to tourism that include spectacle, architecture, authenticity, history, souvenirs, and anthropology", according to the curator, Francesco Bonami.
There is no online display of the work, but you can buy a catalogue of the show from the MCA Store. The catalogue includes essays from "Charles Baudelaire, Joan Didion, Umberto Eco, Julia Kristeva, the late Susan Sontag, among many others. The vibrant color reproductions and accompanying short texts lead us through the work of more than seventy-five artists including Vito Acconci, Doug Aitken, Darren Almond, Matthew Buckingham, Chris Burden, Maurizio Cattelan, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Katharina Fritsch, Thomas Hirschhorn, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Jeff Koons, Matthias M•ller, Gabriel Orozco, Martin Parr, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, Thomas Schutte, Simon Starling, Thomas Struth, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Kyoichi Tsuzuki, Piotr Uklanski, and Andy Warhol."
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2005.02.08
I Want to Love You Screening in Pittsburgh
Glowlab friend Laurel Beckman is spreading the LOVE. Earlier shown in the Los Angeles area, I Want to Love You is now being shown in an extended version on a Jumbotron in Theatre Square in Pittsburgh. The exhibition has been curated by Woods Streets Gallery in Pittsburgh, PA.
"IWTLY fairly pulses with excitement at the prospect of being watched. Designed as a continuous loop, it means to provoke the relations of affinity offered by images in the public arena. Recently seen on video billboards throughout Los Angeles, with a new extended version currently screening in Pittsburgh, IWTLY maintains a relationship with advertising that asserts the elliptical reciprocity of seeing and being seen."
"IWTLY screens on the Jumbotron Light Board at Theater Square, in the heart of Pittsburgh's Cultural District, on the hour from 6am-130am daily.
View the web cam feed (maximized for Internet Explorer)"
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A Walk to Remember
A Walk to Remember is a Los Angeles event, "for the flaneur, the passionate spectator".Curated by Jen Hoffman and featuring John Baldessari, Jennifer Bornstein, Meg Cranston, Morgan Fisher, Evan Holloway, Paul McCarthy, Rubén Ortiz Torres, Allen Ruppersberg, and Eric Wesley.
TALK February 8, 2005 @ 7:00pm
OPENING RECEPTION February 9, 2005 7-9 pm
A Walk to Remember is an exhibition that invites a group of Los Angeles based artists to conceive and carry out guided tours through neighborhoods and areas of the city with which they have a particular relationship or affinity and that deal specifically with the rich cultural history of the city.
The exhibition relates to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the flâneur as a figure who derives pleasure from the hustle and bustle of the city streets, who moves purposelessly among the urban crowd with the eye of an artist: a spectator of contemporary life and urban scenes. Yet, A Walk To Remember diverts from Benjamin’s idea when it examines a specific European phenomenon of the early 20th century: the postmodern condition of Los Angeles in which walking is clearly a thing of the past. In addition, in giving each walk a purpose and in trying to bring various locations and social and cultural relations of the city to the audience the exhibition reaches beyond what Benjamin described as an “aimless affair.”
Members of the audience taking part in a walk will each be given a disposable camera to document their individual impressions of the artists’ walks from their distinct perspectives. The cameras will be collected at the end of a walk and the developed photographs will be presented inside the gallery space along with maps of the city outlining the different routes. A small brochure including descriptions and maps of all the walks will be available enabling the audience to realize the tours themselves, should they wish.
Please visit the site to see the walks proposed by each artist
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2005.02.02
The Gates
Christo and Jeanne-Claude will have The Gates project on display in Central Park from February 12-27 2005. The drawings show orange/yellow fabric hung above 23 miles of Central Park's paths. Maps are available through the Central Park Conservancy so you can be sure to find all the sections of the installation.
As Christo and Jeanne-Claude remind people:
"To all visitors of The Gates:
There are no official opening events.
There are no invitations.
There are no tickets.
This work of art is FREE for all to enjoy, the same as all out previous projects.
If anyone tries to sell you a ticket, do not buy it. This would be an act of fraud because no tickets are needed.
Central Park is public space, open and free to all people. The work of art will be completed on February 12, weather permitting."
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2005.01.08
Cirrus | Exhibitions/Susan Logoreci 2005
Cirrus Gallery in Los Angeles is pleased to present the first LA solo exhibit for Susan Logoreci. Logoreci’s work allows the viewer to “experience urbanity as a unified whole” through the aerial perspective of tour guide maps and G.P.S. coordinates of the American City. Susan’s intricate pencil drawings are both detailed and yet seem out of range, generating a sense of a the flattened landscape in the same vein as traditional California Landscape painters such as Wayne Thiebaud. The gesture is a playful comprehension of the overwhelming macrocosm of Los Angeles. The “elements of crooked perspective and unmeasured lines provide animation to the normally static” reality, while “simultaneously depicting urbanity as a flawed and sprawling endeavor out of balance.” Through the use of a technologically omnipotent view, Susan repositions, re-plots, and re-engenders the coordinates as “urbanity’s proud accomplice and watchful critic”
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2005.01.06
the luggage store - NeckFace
Link: the luggage store is having an opening with Neck Face and The Date Farmers January 7 from 6-8pm in San Francisco.
Please read more to find out the specifics and see the press release.
Friday, January 7, 2005
Reception from 6-8pm
through February 5, 2005
Neck Face
The Date Farmers
Where:
the luggage store
1007 market street (near 6th)
san francisco, ca 94103
www.luggagestoregallery.org
415. 255 5971
Gallery Hours
Wed-Saturday, 12-5pm
The luggage store is pleased to present an exhibition of Neck Face; and The Date Farmers./curated by Darryl Smith/Laurie lazer and co organized by New Image Art/Los Angeles.
After 20 year old's Neck Face's first solo exhibition at New Image Art Gallery in Los Angeles, “Witch Hunt” and the subsequent publication of his book by KAWS, Satan's Bride!!! the luggage store/san francisco will feature metal sculpture masks, mixed media sculpture and paintings by Neck Face.
Neck Face is most known for writing NECK FACE -scrawled over the walls of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco (see recent article in The New Yorker)..
The Date Farmers, Carlos Ramirez and Armando Lerma of Coachella Valley (after meeting each other, they learned that both of their father's farmed “dates,” hence their name -- The Date Farmers), often collaborate in their art, collage drawings,and words on discarded signs. Reminiscent of Mexican Revolutionary posters ala/Pancho Villa, as if Cesar Chavez is knocking on our door., Ramirez and Lerma explore the essential reality of the roots of California past and present culture. Their art depicts Mexican American religious icons and their style resembles prison art - their lettering strong in a low rider tradition of bold sign painting.
Ramirez and Lerma explore the essential reality of the roots of California past and present culture. Their art depicts Mexican American religious icons and their style resembles prison art. Ramirez's and Lerma's lettering is strong in a low rider tradition of bold sign painting.
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