Events

FPS Fest is a film screening event that explores the transition from still photography to motion. The once separate industries of still photography and motion filmmaking are intersecting across a number of realms; from new technology to new demands from clients, today’s image makers are finding a new world in motion. FPS Fest provides information and stimulation about technology, techniques, and strategies to take on the future of a changing industry.

FPS Fest is presented by Dripbook, Resource Magazine, and ROOT Capture. 

With FPS Fest, Dripbook is announcing support of HD video across Dripbook’s promotional platform, continuing a leading-edge commitment to advanced promotion for today’s creative professionals. www.dripbook.com

ROOT Capture provides premier digital services for Drive In, TREC, & ROOT Brooklyn by working closely with photographers and DP’s to create customized, versatile still/motion capture packages for both location & studio. www.rootcapture.com

Resource Magazine presents RETV, an online video magazine presenting photo and video industry content to help creative professionals bridge the gap between stills and motion technology. www.resourcemagonline.com 

This major career retrospective on Tim Burton (American, b. 1958), consisting of a gallery exhibition and a film series, considers Burton's career as a director, producer, writer, and concept artist for live-action and animated films, along with his work as a fiction writer, photographer and illustrator. Following the current of his visual imagination from early childhood drawings through his mature work, the exhibition presents artwork generated during the conception and production of his films, and highlights a number of unrealized projects and never-before-seen pieces, as well as student art, his earliest non-professional films, and examples of his work as a storyteller and graphic artist for non-film projects. The opposing themes of adolescence and adulthood, and the elements of sentiment, cynicism, and humor inform his work in a variety of mediums—drawings, paintings, storyboards, digital and moving-image formats, puppets and maquettes, props, costumes, ephemera, sketchbooks, and cartoons. Taking inspiration from sources in pop culture, Burton has reinvented Hollywood genre filmmaking as a spiritual experience, influencing a generation of young artists working in film, video, and graphics. 

The third installment of Seven Easy Steps, a seven-part video series, will provide the appropriate equipment and creative stimulus in order to attain Technological Innovations. Featured video artists include Philippe Blanchard, Joost Conijn, Adam Frelin, Desirée Holman, Mads Lynnerup, Catherine Ross, Keith Telfeyan and JD Walsh.

Seven Easy Steps is a video screening series that will empower you to take the steps towards achieving happiness and leading a successful, fulfilled life. People feel happy when their desires are fulfilled. The series will continue with videos that offer the sacred guidance that will lead them towards Spiritual Ecstasy; supply the necessary information to make Scientific Discoveries; the titillations and delights that blissfully lead to Physical Pleasure; and finally the expertise, skill, and ingenuity that guides them towards producing Artistic Masterpieces.

Screenings will be held at Horton Gallery (located at 504 West 22nd Street, Parlor Level, New York, NY, 10011). Schedules for individual screenings will be released each month. 


Seven Easy Steps features video work by Ronnie Bass, Larry Carlson, Antoine Catala, caraballo-farman, Leidy Churchman, Martha Colburn, Cecelia Condit, David Coyle, Adam Cruces, Benjamin Dowell, Erica Eyres, Susana Gaudêncio, Joel Gibb, Kate Gilmore, Koen Hauser, Mae Hymn, Avi Krispin, Juliana Leite, Julie Lequin, Mads Lynnerup, Erica Magrey, Shana Moulton, Katarina Riesing, Michael Robinson, Liz Rosenfield, Catherine Ross, Melanie Schiff, Kelly Sears, Andrew Steinmetz, Jennifer Sullivan, Keith Telfeyan, Richard T Walker, JD Walsh, and Bryan Zanisnik, among others.

http://www.hortongallery.com/

Steven Sebring is the writer and director of the documentary film, Patti Smith Dream of Life. The exhibition “Objects of Life,” was inspired by the process of discovery during 11 years of filming. It features a selection of large scale photographs, video, and a rare unseen painting by Patti Smith, as well as personal belongings from both artists, whose collaboration is grounded in their relationship to the film and their individual experiences.

http://www.robertmillergallery.com/

Strip down, all the way down. Untitled Nude by celebrated New York multi-media artist, Amy Greenfield sends us into a raw repertoire of three timeless short films that transcend a collective account of the physical- entangled in the natural. Curated by Lynn del Sol

http://www.creativethriftshop.com/Exhibition/UpcomingExhibitions.htm

“I don’t deal directly with reality but with representations and stories. The truth basis of what I’m doing is not interesting to me. In an act of storytelling, there is a truth.” Omer Fast, as quoted in New York Magazine, December 21-28, 2009.

These exact words were never uttered in this order. But, like in Fast’s works, it is precisely in re-telling, editing, interpretation, misunderstanding and subjective recollections that we encounter the kernels of what is real.

Postmasters Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of two video works by Omer Fast. The show coincides with Fast’s exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“Take A Deep Breath” (2008)

In the summer of 2002, Martin F. was standing outside a Falafel shop in Jerusalem when it exploded. A trained medic, he went in and discovered the body of a young man on the floor. The young man had lost both legs as well as an arm, but his eyes were open and focused. Hoping for a miracle, Martin F. decided to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. After a few minutes though, the young man’s eyes rolled up into his head and he expired. A crowd of onlookers had gathered outside and the police showed up. They wanted to know how many casualties were inside. When he responded that there was only one, Martin F. realized the young man he had just left inside was the suicide bomber

In “Take A Deep Breath,” extracts from a conversation recorded with Martin F. in Jerusalem alternate with scenes filmed in Los Angeles in which a team of actors attempts to stage his ordeal for the camera. There are two cameras shooting simultaneously. Each shoots a different view.

“De Grote Boodschap” (2007)

Filmed on-location in Mechelen, Belgium, “De Grote Boodschap” presents the stories of paired Flemish characters who appear to be caught in a time-warp: A stewardess and her unemployed husband, an old junkie and her caregiver, a white beatboxer and his black girlfriend, a real-estate agent and a taciturn Arab. As the characters interact, the story of a family’s diamonds is revealed and retracted in an endless loop that mistakes the scatological for the profound.

“Fast is interminably drawn to the figure of “the witness”—the individuals un/officially earmarked to repeat their personal experiences for something like the greater good. And it is precisely in these active, “acted” retellings, in which memory is vocally rehashed, that Fast encourages his protagonists to stumble. Rather than drawing a fine-tooth comb through their dreams à la psychoanalysis, Fast surveys their seemingly-scripted public stories, and from stilted syllables and logical missteps excavates flashes of that abstract notion of the “real.” (…)Perhaps because of this interpretive flair, Gideon Lewis-Kraus has called Fast a “reanimator”; in particular, it is his ability to imagine an interviewee’s (beaten, dead) tale as something other than it is (alive). Trafficking in structural manipulation allows Fast to avoid the video artist’s inevitable gambit of camera-as-confessional, leaving critical, and even ethical, space for the viewer to wallow about in."? Kari Rittenbach “Dramatic Witness: The Art of Omer Fast (Art In America online December 2009)

Omer Fast was a recipient of the Bucksbaum Award at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. In October 2009 he has received National Gallery Prize for Young Art in Berlin. Most recently Fast’s works were shown at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Gallery of South London, Berkeley Art Museum, Lund Konsthall, Indianapolis Museum of Art and Performa 2009.

From 8:00 pm to midnight on Thursday, January 14, ICP will be the hottest nightclub in Midtown. Hosted by Kerry Diamond, Benoit Lagarde, and Jed Root, CLiCK will offer 400 of New York's trendiest young art enthusiasts, collectors, and photography and media industry professionals the opportunity to celebrate Dress Codes: The Third ICP Triennial of Photography and Video, and fashion's use as a rich visual language—and be rewarded for it...

DJ Dhundee will keep the crowd movin' and special guest, Eclectic Method, will captivate the audience with a bit of video magic.

Party goers will have their thirst quenched at the all night open bar by Belvedere and Grand Marnier and have their hunger satiated by hors d'oeuvres from Taste Caterers.

Guests wanting to capture the fun—or have a keepsake of the stranger(s) you're bound to meet—can strike a pose at Photobooth by Splashlight Studio.

Get an ICP Membership with your General Admission ticket for only $65, a $10 savings!

Purchase tickets online.

To purchase by phone, email your name, ticket quantity and type, and phone number with the subject line: "CLiCK January 14" to events@icp.org.

TICKETS:

General Admission for 1: $75

General Admission for 2: $100

VIP for 1: $250 includes the following—

 • Admission to VIP reception at 7:30 pm

 • 1-year ICP Individual Membership

 • Party portrait

The first 40 VIP ticket purchasers will receive a fabulous swag bag worth over $900 containing:

1. The Sixties by Richard Avedon (book valued at $75)
2. DJ Dhundee Take Flight CD download (valued at $10)
3. DVF Scarf (valued at $295)
4. Godiva Chocolatier
5. ICP Individual Membership (valued at $75)
6. Lancôme Secret de Vie Ultimate Cellular Reviving Crème (valued at $240)
7. Pentax P80 digital camera (valued at $220)
8. Adrienne Vittadini

Missed out on getting the swag bag? No worries. CLiCK guests can enter Pentax's raffle for the K-x Digital SLR (valued at $650).

Painter, filmmaker, and writer Hugues de Montalembert, who was blinded during an attack in New York City in 1978, presents a screening of the award-winning documentary Black Sun. He will also introduce his new memoir, Invisible, published by ATRIA Books.

As documented in Black Sun, de Montalembert faced crushing despair in the year after losing his sight; but then he did the unthinkable by learning to “see” without the use of his eyes.

The meditation on his loss is explored in his latest book, Invisible. In this memoir, the author reflects on the thirty years since he lost his sight. Without a trace of self-pity, he writes about how the loss of this vital sense invigorated him, leading him to take solo trips around the world and giving him a new appreciation of life.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A session, reception, and book signing with the author.

Black Sun
Directed by Gary Tarns, 2005. Color. 75 min.
In English

RSVP to mhulme@fiaf.org

tickets: $25 ($20 for FIAF members)

Thursday, March 4, in conjunction with the 1st Thursday DUMBO Gallery Walk, the powerHouse Arena and Powershovel present a special curated Harinezumi video art screening night! 

Featuring works produced with the digital Harinezumi 2 video camera, avilable now at our Powershovel Pop-Up Shop or online boutique. 

Huge simultaneous projections, music and complimentary beverages will be provided 7—8:30PM. No rsvp required. 

Dewa sono toki ni! 

Questions? Or submissions for our next screening email us at harinezumi@powerhousearena.com.

A.M. Richard Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by photographer Andrew Garn.

In the summer of 2008, Andrew Garn was assigned by the Smithsonian Institution to document biodiversity in a remote area of the Peruvian Amazon. This mission was an incomparable opportunity to photograph an unexplored region of the jungle. Accompanied by six scientists and a number of macheteros, the team traveled throughout the brush, many times creating new trails in untouched rain forest.
Soon the duplicitous nature of the expedition surfaced. The Smithsonian was in place to document the pristine conditions of the forest during the early stages of an extensive oil exploration project initiated by the Spanish energy giant Repsol. Leasing an immense 800 sq mile tract from the Peruvian government, Repsol created over 20 helicopter landing fields by clear cutting immense swaths of forest. Explosive charges were set off to measure the oil reserves under the jungle floor. Eventually, pumping rigs were flown in and a 50-mile pipeline was constructed to bring the oil to market.

Mr. Garn’s experience in the Amazon reveals a place of majestic beauty as well as one of overwhelming chaos, confusion and terror. His photographs and 8 minute video, Lost Amazon, depict a setting of obfuscation, where the boundaries of heavenly reprieve frequently dissolved into torment and wretchedness. 
Two series of photographs detail the jungle inhabitants in their grace and inevitable demise. The Shadow Series illustrates a troubling world where lies an artificial sense of safety. The main body of work, set in a darkened gallery, conveys both the seduction and fear that make up the Amazon.

This is Mr. Garn’s third exhibition at A.M. Richard Fine Art. Mr. Garn is the recipient of numerous grants. His works are in several private and public collections. Most recently, Mr. Garn was invited by the U.S. Consulate General in Russia to participate in the First Biennale of Contemporary Art in the Urals (September 2010).

In the project room, Toxic Molecules, welded steel and paper wall sculptures by artist Christy Rupp. Ms. Rupp has long been pre-occupied with global environmental issues. Her work, deceptively whimsical, is charged with dangerously lucid social concerns.

On Stellar Rays is pleased to present two new videos by NY-based artist Alix Pearlstein, Talent and Finale. Together the works explore the perimeters of the performance score, related shifts in subjective and objective perception, and the subtle difference between being, acting and performing.

Both videos share the same set, a dance studio which doubles as a performance venue, and the same cast, comprised of 10 professional actors. Talent consists of a sharply structured and edited sequence of acts, actions and interactions among the actors, alternately suggesting a contest, audition, rehearsal, performance and shoot. The camera bisects the studio as it tracks laterally, back and forth along a white line on the floor, creating a physical and psychic division between cast and crew. Further complicating the composition is a mirrored wall behind the actors, reflecting and exposing the activity of the camera, crew and artist / director, while implicating them in the scene. This construct recalls aspects of two widely divergent, iconic works that premiered concurrently in 1975: Michael Bennett’s A Chorus Line and Dan Graham’s Performance / Audience / Mirror.

Finale takes a decidedly more introspective mood. Shot at dusk, the studio windows reveal the sun setting behind the Manhattan skyline. A centrally positioned camera rotates continuously counter clockwise in the space. For the duration of a single long take, cast and crew refer and respond to actions from Talent. They circulate freely throughout the space, alternately stepping in and out of their roles, as the structured acts of the preceding hours unravel.

Running times for Talent and Finale are 10:30 and 10:20 minutes, both works are from 2009.

Alix Pearlstein’s work in video and performance has been widely exhibited internationally. Selected solo exhibitions include the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; The Kitchen, NYC; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge MA; Lugar Commum, Lisbon; Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, NYC; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum School of Fine Arts, Boston and Postmasters Gallery, NYC. Her works have been included in exhibitions at Internationale D’Art De Quebec; The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; Annual Exhibition of Visual Art, Ireland;BAM / PFA, Berkeley; SMAK, Ghent; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC; ICA Philadelphia; Biennale de Lyon, France; and The Museum of Modern Art, NYC. Pearlstein lives in New York.

http://www.brycewolkowitz.com/

In a major departure from his usual practice of working in the rural landscape, Andy Goldsworthy will present photographs, sculpture and videos made exclusively in New York City. In New York Dirt Water Light, Goldsworthy’s subjects include debris, passersby, and the interplay of natural and artificial light-demonstrating the artist’s broad, compelling understanding of nature. The exhibition at Galerie Lelong will include nine photographic suites, a triptych of “rain shadow” videos, and a sculptural installation made of dirt collected from the city streets. The exhibition will open to the public on Thursday, May 6 from 6 to 8 pm, and the artist will be present.

Since 1993, when Goldsworthy presented his first solo exhibition in New York City, the artist has sought to find a way to convey the nature in urban environments. The heart of New York Dirt Water Light is a series of time-based photographs that represent Goldsworthy’s most intensive work in an urban setting to date. On two separate trips, he spent several weeks in New York, choosing Times Square as the city epicenter and the site for most of his experiments. Often working at night, he drew lines and circles on the ground with water and documented them in the vagaries of natural and artificial light as they evaporated. Amid the frenzied activity of the city, Goldsworthy’s works are radically quiet, using the simplest of means.

Goldsworthy will also show a video triptych of his “rain shadows,” a motif he has revisited throughout his career. In these works, Goldsworthy lies outside as it begins to rain, remaining still until the surrounding ground is wet. After he stands, the dry imprint of his body lingers, fading slowly as the rain continues to fall. To make his rain shadows in an environment as congested and fast-paced as Manhattan posed an interesting challenge for the artist.

The final piece in the exhibition is a sculptural installation composed of dirt collected over several days from different locations in the city. By concentrating and displacing the common, unassuming substance, Goldsworthy challenges and heightens our perception of our physical environment. “People and dirt,” says Goldsworthy, “are nature in New York.” As displayed in the exhibition, Goldsworthy’s recurring themes-effects of time, the relationship between people and environments, the persistence of cycles-are as present and provocative on the densely populated, hyper-developed streets as they are in the remote landscapes of his most recognized works.

Since his last exhibition at Galerie Lelong in 2007, Goldsworthy has completed numerous public and private commissions, including Spire at the Presidio of San Francisco; three prominent works at Jupiter Artland, a sculpture park in Edinburgh; and En las entrañas del árbol, an installation presented by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. Thames and Hudson recently published The Andy Goldsworthy Project, a book on his work at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and other permanent commissions. Currently, the artist is at work on projects at the Saint Louis Art Museum, Albright Knox Art Gallery, and Storm King Art Center, among others

Elizabeth Dee Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new sculptural, photographic and video works by Josephine Meckseper. For this exhibition, Meckseper transforms the gallery into a mirrored achromatic showroom, drawing comparisons between current and past US political strategies.

Meckseper alters the gallery interior through a series of architectural interventions, including a reflective ceiling grid, mirror slat wall and dark fluorescent lighting installed on the perimeter of the gallery floor. The entire exhibition space is activated as a showroom and oversized display vitrine, reflecting its contents on the walls and ceiling. Reminiscent of chrome surfacing in 1980s architecture, the car dealerships along 11th Avenue and the discount stores of the Garment District, Meckseper’s signature shelves and industrial sculptures hang from hooks on a slat wall like merchandise in a discount store. Meckseper’s interventions emphasize both the display and retail functions of gallery space, while the dark fluorescent lighting casts a discomfiting, perpetual and artificial twilight.

Meckseper presents a number of new sculptures including chromed wheels on mirrored pedestals, and a double-sided metallic display rack showcasing disembodied car parts, metal chains, paintings and newspaper images of luxury watches, the US Supreme Court, and Iraqi Shiites protesting the US occupation. These conjunctions in the works manifest the nature of the mirror, both reflective and diatonic. Mirrored surfaces multiply, fracture and expand the space, creating infinite juxtapositions. Images of elusive affluence and phantom notions of economic recovery confront a judiciary declaring an interest in expanding the rights of corporations. Chains binding the hands of Iraqi Shiites echo the chains on the sculptures, evoking the shackling of the US to its automotive-centric industrial past; grids in the racks, ceilings and achromes conjoin to expand the space into an immersive minimalist geometry; and reflections of the viewers collide with subjects and images of American consume rism, media and foreign policy.

Additionally, two new films are exhibited in the context of the installation. Meckseper’s newest film focuses on the glorified depiction of the American oil industry and the perpetuation of US imperialism. Here, images from the 1980s television shows Dynasty and Dallas are juxtaposed with an acid house soundtrack from the same decade, creating the context for a renewed debate on offshore oil drilling and the recent catastrophic explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in Louisiana. Meanwhile, installed alongside empty display racks in the second gallery, Shattered Screen depicts a flickering image of television static on a broken monitor, echoing the smashed mirrors in the sculptural works and creating its own fiendish glow.

This is Josephine Meckseper’s fourth solo show with Elizabeth Dee and follows the gallery’s solo presentation of her work at The Armory Show earlier this year. Her film Mall of America is presently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, as part of the 2010 Whitney Biennial. In 2009, Meckseper had solo exhibitions at the Blaffer Gallery, The Art Museum at the University of Houston, Texas, the Ausstellungshalle zeitgenössische Kunst in Münster, Germany and the Migros Museum in Zürich, Switzerland. Her work was presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the exhibition New Photography 2008: Josephine Meckseper and Mikhael Subotzky, and in 2007, her work was the focus of a mid-career retrospective presented at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, which traveled to Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen. She has been featured in numerous national and international exhibitions including Brave New Worlds, Walker Art Center, Minnea polis, MN, touring to Fundación/Colección Jumex, Mexico City; Resistance Is, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Second Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville, Seville; USA Today, Royal Academy of Arts, London, which traveled to The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; Media Burn at the Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

The exhibition will open concurrently with New York Gallery Week, a new initiative presenting 50 solo gallery exhibitions and special programming by galleries around New York City, scheduled for May 7 – 10.

Book signing: Sunday, May 9, 2 pm

Extended hours during New York Gallery Week: Sunday, May 9 and Monday, May 10 open 11-6 pm

For his fourth solo show at Metro Pictures, T. J. Wilcox presents three new films installed within a series of free-standing collaged screens. In these films, Wilcox celebrates the eccentric, historic, personal and ephemeral using his signature romantic yet concise narrative. In each gallery space is one film and a series of related, large-scale collages mounted on hinged wooden panels reminiscent of traditional Japanese screens.

The Heir and Astaire tells the tale of Nebraska native Adele Astaire, sister of Fred and the biggest vaudeville star of her day, who became Lady Charles Cavendish upon her marriage to the second son of the Duke of Devonshire in 1932. The film explores Adele’s ill-fated fantasy of introducing American show business style to the English aristocracy at Lismore Castle, the family’s ancient home in the Irish countryside. Wilcox intercuts archival footage with his filmed interview with the 90-year-old Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, sister of Charles and the last of the famous Mitford sisters.

With a nod to nature films, L’eau de Vie strings together three stories: the tale of Wilcox’s young friend who discovers an endangered turtle in her swimming pool; a history of Ukai or bird fishing, a traditional method of Japanese river fishing that has been practiced for some 1300 years; and documentation of the artist’s own backyard-attempt at making eau de vie de poire, or pear brandy.

The third new film immortalizes the country and western star Patsy Cline whose wistful music of loss, sorrow and longing still captivates audiences nearly 50 years after her tragic death at age 30.

Wilcox was born in 1965 in Seattle and currently lives in New York. He attended the School of Visual Arts in New York (BFA 1989) and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California (MFA 1995). One-person exhibitions include the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kunstverein Munich; UC Berkeley Art Museum; Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London. His films have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Tate Modern, London.

“A man can be replaced at any time but a paybook is sacred if anything is.”
-Man equals Man by Bertolt Brecht

With chase, Liz Magic Laser reinterprets Bertolt Brecht’s 1926 play Man equals Man. The project includes a feature-length video, an installation of ephemera from the production of chase as well as a theatrical set that will serve as a backdrop for a live performance.

Working in collaboration with nine actors, Laser staged Brecht’s play in the ATM vestibules of banks throughout New York City. Videotaping each actor’s performance separately, she edited the scenes, creating a complete version of the narrative. The element of estrangement in the original play is heightened through jump cuts and spatiotemporal shifts. The actors were instructed to deliver their lines to the bank’s ATM machines and unsuspecting patrons. In the final edited version, the characters seem to converse with one another through mechanical and human conduits. Laser writes:

I see the ATM as a contradictory space that on one hand constructs an utterly private experience and on the other reduces the individual to a completely generic and anonymous subject. Man equals Man is an allegory about a man who relinquishes his private identity to assume power as an egoless machine.

Originally set in colonial India, Man equals Man is both a comedy and a disturbing social parable that recounts the dehumanizing metamorphosis of an ordinary man into an instrument of authoritarian and capitalist design. At the start of the play four soldiers drunkenly vandalize a temple. One soldier, Jeraiah Jip, is severely injured. His comrades decide they must find a temporary replacement for him in order to avoid being punished for their crime. They pick up a local simpleton, Galy Gay, on his way to buy a fish for his wife. The soldiers cajole him into pretending to be Jeraiah Jip, eventually manipulating Galy Gay into fully adopting the missing soldier’s identity through the use of Jip’s paybook. Predating the concept of brainwashing, Brecht presents a man who relinquishes his individuality to become a war machine.

In addition to presenting the videotaped production of chase, Laser will also stage a live performance during the exhibition opening. The Elephant Calf was originally a farcical play within the play Man equals Man, but Brecht later extracted it from the script and proposed that it be performed in the theater’s foyer during the intermission. With her production Laser takes up this project of bringing actor and viewer into closer proximity. After the performance, the set and costumes (made in collaboration with Felicia Garcia-Rivera) will remain as an installation.

This will be Liz Magic Laser’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Her work will be included in the upcoming Greater New York at MoMA PS1. A recent graduate of The Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and Columbia University’s MFA program, Laser’s work has been shown at The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Smack Mellon, The Prague Biennial, and The Art Institute of Chicago, among other venues.

Collaborators:
The performance work was developed in collaboration with actors Annika Boras, Andra Eggleston, Gary Lai, Liz Micek, Justin Sayre, Doug Walter, Michael Wiener, Max Woertendyke and Cat Yezbak.
Set and costumes for The Elephant Calf were done in collaboration with Felicia Garcia-Rivera and included production coordination by Mia Tramz.

A playbill booklet was designed by Lauren Adolfsen and includes texts by Carmen Dell’Orefice, Lucy Gallun, Jordan Troeller, Tom Williams, Alberto Pepe and Spencer Wolff.

Sikkema Jenkins & Co is pleased to present a dual exhibition of new video works by Burt Barr and recent photographs by Valerie Belin on view from May 21 through July 2, 2010.

Burt Barr has claimed that “black and white are the only two colors I’ll ever need.” The current exhibition maintains this assertion with works like The Sprinkler, The Ship, and The Arrows (all 2010). Each of these works are projected on the walls in approximate square shapes, shot and projected in 4:3 ratio. The nearly still images have no narrative content – intended to be pure visual works that “hang” on the wall.

There are two notable exceptions to Barr’s claim to only need black and white on display here. The ironically named Black and White (2010) is a two-channel installation in color showing the feet of two female dancers – one black, one white. The other exception, Self Portrait (2009-10), greets visitors on a monitor as they enter the gallery. As Barr puts it, “Self Portrait is the creeps,” with a sound track of laughter and showing the artist wearing a horse mask and smoking a cigar.

Burt Barr has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. He has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofi?a, Madrid; Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul; and P.S. 1, Long Island City. Other installations have taken place at The Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; The Museum of Fine Arts Houston; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL; and MUDAM, Luxembourg.

Barr is the recipient of numerous awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, The American Film Institute, The Andrea Frank Foundation, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Art, and The Massachusetts Council on the Arts & Humanities. In the summer of 2008 he was a visiting artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture.

Post-production for Burt Barr’s videos are provided by Steve Hamilton and Johnny Luisi at Whitehouse Productions.

Concurrent with Barr’s exhibition, the gallery will be showing recent works by Vale?rie Belin. Like Barr, Belin has worked primarily in black and white. Belin’s work captures her subject’s “object-hood” by isolating the subject from its contextual surroundings and accentuating abstract material qualities through the play of light and shadow. On exhibit here are examples from several recent series including a monumentally scaled photograph of a pair of ballroom dancers, four photographs of a single lido girl dressed in different performance costumes, and a still life of a bouquet of “Victorian flowers”- all in back and white.

Again, as with Barr, there are exceptions to Belin’s use of black and white. Her most recent foray into the use of color is a series of fruit baskets, two examples of which are on view here. These works are a response to still-lifes by Edouard Manet created for a solo exhibition at the Musee D’Orsay as part of the museum’s Correspondences series.

In addition to the Musee D’Orsay, Belin has been included in recent exhibitions at Galerie Je?ro?me-de-Noirmont, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; International Center for Photography, New York; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. A retrospective if the artist’s work traveled to the Huis Marseilles in Amsterdam, the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie in Paris and the Musee L’Elysee in Lausanne in 2007-08. In 2009, she had her first US museum solo exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

Belin’s works are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Maison Europe?enne de la Photographie, Paris; Muse?e des Beaux-Arts et de la Dentelle,Calais, France; the Cartier Foundation, Paris; and the Bibliothe?que Nationale de France, Paris.

Brooklyn-based artist Conrad Ventur is best known for his cinematic environments that raise questions regarding aspiration, longing, sincerity, ‘affect’ and captured historical performance. For his exhibition Screen Tests Revisited at Momenta Art, Ventur worked over the course of a year to author a kind of second-generation body of Warholian work, looking to the archive of Andy Warhol’s earliest forays into film-based portraiture, the ‘screen tests’. Initially conceived as quotations, Ventur worked intimately with key Factory ‘Fantastics’ Billy Name, Mario Montez, Ivy Nicholson, Ultraviolet, Bibbe Hansen, Penelope Palmer and Jonas Mekas to restage these films some 45 years later. The new films approximate the lighting, frame and delayed playback speed of the originals, as the subjects of then and now conflate with the two artists and the spaces between them. Formally, the sitters exude a candid familiarity with Ventur, suggesting a conspiratorial undoing of the youth-obsessed ground on which popular culture stands. Screen Tests Revisited is the first of ongoing collaborative works between members of this cast and the artist. For Conrad, the past and present intermingle in a filmic narrative that connects decades just as it reanimates our own particular links with popular culture and shared societal memories radiating with light.

Ventur’s recent solo shows have included The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Forever & Today, NYC; Rokeby, London, and 1/9 Unosunove, Rome. He founded the periodical USELESS in 2004 and received his MFA in Art Practice from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2008. Forthcoming group shows include Greater New York at MoMA PS1.

Momenta Art is located at 359 Bedford Avenue, ground floor, between S4th and S5th Sts. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. By subway, take the L train to Bedford stop (the first stop in Brooklyn). Exit on the Bedford side. Walk south 12 blocks. By car, take the outside lane of the Williamsburg Bridge to the first exit. Make a sharp right onto Broadway. Drive 2 blocks to Bedford Avenue and make a right. We are located a half block on the right after you pass under the bridge.

Momenta Art is supported by the Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, The Greenwall Foundation, , The Jerome Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), The New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and individual contributors.

Tonight’s screening will feature videos by: Larry Carlson, Jashin Friedrich, Koen Hauser, Kitty Huffman, Shana Moulton, Andrew Steinmetz, Jennifer Sullivan, Keith Telfeyan, Willie Thurlow, and Frank Zadlo

featuring artists:

Daniel Rich

Wieland Speck

Stephan Stux Gallery presents Barakat: The Gift.

Barakat: The Gift, curated by Italian curator and art critic Gaia Serena Simionati consists of paintings, sculptures, videos, sound installations, photos and works on paper from nine noted contemporary artists from the Middle East and Africa. Ms. Simionati believes that the language of art rather than dwelling on the theme of separation should communicate in ways that defy verbal, ethnic, religious, gender and age barriers.

The nine artists invited to participate: Moataz Nasr and Hamdi Attia from Egypt, Navid Azimi Sajadi, Shadi Ghadirian and Reza Derakshani from Iran, Halim al Karim from Iraq, Nabil Nahas from Lebanon, Maimouna from Senegal and Baris Saribas from Turkey, were specifically chosen for their strength and poetic approach to the theme of communication between different cultures, acceptance, identity and transformation. Their work includes spiritual or ironic socio-political content expressed both in verse and textures that resonate with the curator’s own artistic inclinations. Many of the works on view are shown for the first time in New York.

The show focuses on the word Barakat, meaning Blessing in Arabic and in a broader sense it is translated to “Gift”. Barakat acts as a bridge since it has different connotations in the Iranian, North African, Jewish and Arabic cultures. In addition, in French society the term has taken on a new meaning, that one of Luck due to the increasing Arab influence.

In Arabic, Baraka stands for “a gift from God” in spiritual terms. It is a gift one can choose to either improve upon or ruin oneself and the world in which one is submerged. The selected artists chose to interpret the idea of an ironic and spiritual gift, but there is the proposition of both acceptance and diversity as well. There is a knowledge between various cultures of the Great Gift. This is not a form of oppression; Barakat brings in the end luck and fortune. It leads to a transformation towards a better world, one made of intercultural understanding.

A fully illustrated English/Italian catalogue written by Gaia Serena Simionati with an essay titled Yes, We Can: Inshalla!accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue was produced in Verona, Italy by the art publisher Adriano Parise, it includes an interview with Hamdi Attia conducted by the curator Abdellah Karroum.

This exhibit has been made possible in part through the generosity of Paolo Ingegnoli of Leggiuno and the Gallery Olkay Art with the help of Baris Saribas and Selin Maldonado.

NY Studio Gallery is pleased to present the 4th Annual MISC Video and Performance. A multi-media experience featuring a variety of emerging, mid-career and established artists working in diverse genres ranging from video, animation, live performance, or video installation. Video loops and installations will be accessible during gallery hours, while performances are scheduled during reception night.

Video Installations include: 
Ron Diorio extends his documentary practices through What I did during the war. Peter Dobill presents his riveting Bloodbreather video. Interaction and attempted manipulation of natural landscapes makes up Murray Dwertman’s Upper Buttermilk Falls. Airline to Heaven, Part II is Annie Heckman’s animation projection at the end of a long tunnel of drawn dirt and bones. Lynn Herring’s Man’s Inner Reflections is a sculpture that is created with mirrors and video. In Mutes I-V Ryan Kuo dramatically slows down TV footage highlighting unnoticed glitches. Yuliya Lanina creates and exhibits racy animatronic characters in Mishka. In the intimate video Sex-Ed, Matthew de Leon attempts to fill in for an X-rated adult actress. Jennie Thwing creates a miniature diorama of forest with fields, tents and celestial projections. Undulating corner projections by Naho Tariushi come back for their second time at MISC. Ina Yun creates animation projections on made and found objects.

Projected Animation Loop: Jonathan Monaghan, Kanako Okazaki, Ben Pederson, Lai-Chung Poon, Elise Roedenbeck, Devlin Shea, Carmen Tiffany.

Video Loop: Arielle Falk, Jason Head, Morrisa Maltz, Liz Rodda, Bradly Dever Treadaway, Traci Tullius, Joy Whalen.

Rooftop projection: Weather permitting Kyung Woo Han projects two videos reconstructing well-known 2-D imagery from 3-D spaces.

Performances: Hector Canonge presents Malattia is a multimedia performance that evokes loss and remembrance through choreographed dance movements, video projections and sound narratives. Genevieve White performs Loss using a sculptural cocoon. Mike Richison improvises acoustic inventions on his vacuum-based instrument.

MISC images: French Penguin by Jonathan Monaghan is an animation of an emperor penguin fused with Gothic architecture.

Our awkward program name – photography, video, and related media – is becoming ever more apt. This year, the thesis show includes photographic prints, videos, multi-media installations, sculpture and oil paintings. With the swift advance of digital technology, students are using still or moving images merely as points of departure to invent a wide array of forms. Željka Blaskic, for example, produces a five-channel video installation inspired by her childhood in war-torn Croatia. Jan Ebeling (aka Janosch Parker) commissions oil paintings based on photographs of his witty performances. Irene Bermudez combines projected images, freestanding sculpture and a neon sign to create an immersive environment meant to evoke bodily sensations. Allyson Ross creates sculptural reliefs devoid of color based on iconic nineteenth-century photographs of Yosemite National Park. And John Messinger installs a small historical exhibit based on the life of a homeless man. These results and others are exciting to behold and, I confess, daunting for a curator trying to make visual or conceptual order from it all.

If there is an overall trend, it is the trust that students place in personal experience. Robert Gill, for example, embraces the obsession with fitness in our culture. Selena Salfen explores the crushing effects of post-traumatic stress disorder through the history of her own family. Tamar Latzman investigates themes from Jewish-European history by inventing memories of dreams and performing them for the camera. And Laura Oberg explores race in America by interviewing members of her mixed-race family. It may be that the confessional turn of our culture – much enhanced by social networking media – explains the willingness of students to reveal themselves in their work. But the students are not self-centered; they look inward in order to look outward. Growing up with the caveats of identity politics and challenges to the objectivity of representation, our students no longer feel at home with the relatively simple norms of documentary or straight photography. Instead, each student invents a new strategy for using images to make art.

Bonnie Yochelson Curator

Featuring the work of:

RENE BERMUDEZ
ŽELJKA BLAKŠIĆ
LORNE BLYTHE
JOHN CYR
BEATRIZ DIAZ
JOHN DUNWOODY
NATAN DVIR
JANOSCH PARKER
MARTHA FLEMING-IVES
J.A. FOLKS
ROBERT GILL
EUGENE GOLOGURSKY
KATE GREENBERG
DEBBIE GROSSMAN
STONE KIM
TAMAR LATZMAN
VIVIAN LEE
ELIZABETH LIBERT
DINA LITOVSKY
JOHN A. MESSINGER
LAURA OBERG
ALLYSON ROSS
SELENA SALFEN
ANDREA SANTOLAYA
LEIGH WELLS

artless is a group exhibition featuring conceptual and installation art, as well as film, photography and paintings. Located at Sacred Gallery 424 Broadway at Canal Street, NYC. Opening is Thursday June 10th from 7-11pm.Exhibition runs through June 27th.

Artist Lance Rautzhan produces artless, a group exhibition of works by artists parallel in their inartificial admission of responsibility to the creative impulse: artless, open and without reserve.

Featured artists include Jay Blohm, manipulator of 8mm and 16mm film, musician cum visual artist Ed Harris, best known for his work with the band Lake Trout, Hanna Toresson, photographer and apprentice of legendary rock and roll photographer Bob Gruen, painter and 2008 exhibitor at Art Basel Lance Rautzhan, conceptual artist and Fountain Art Fair Producer Brian Balderston, and Jackie Roman, rock and roll photographer and regular contributor to music institutions such as Spin Magazine and LimeWire Music Blog.

Curation and exhibition management by Michelle Halabura.

Horton Gallery is pleased to present Berlin, an exhibition of paintings by German-born Brooklyn-based painter Daniel Rich, and a video, photographs, and soundtrack by Berlin filmmaker, Wieland Speck. The exhibition centers on Berlin as a politically charged space, a sense embodied by the eponymous wall that divided the city from 1961 to 1989. The exhibition coincides with the gallery’s opening of a summer project space called Sonntag in the North Mitte / Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood of Berlin.

Wieland Speck’s 1978 video “Berlin Off/On Wall” depicts a young man, the painter Per Lüke, climbing the wall to play the harp seated on the structure. Though the musical instrument that he plays has generally peaceful associations – or at least peace-imbuing possibilities – the locus of Lüke’s performance makes it a transgressive act. The performance draws crowds on either side of the wall until the authorities intervene to end the protest-performance. It is a documentary short, shot with a hand-held Sony Portapack video camera.

Daniel Rich’s “Basement/Berlin Wall” continues the exhibition’s examination of the division between East and West through his depiction of a basement passageway sealed with brick because it happened to fall directly on the dividing line. Coupled with the artist’s series of three paintings of the Berlin airports, twenty years after the fall of the wall, these remnants of East and West Berlin become emblems of entrance and exit, articulating with equal potency the frustrating immobility dictated by Cold War politics. Depopulated scenes, as in all of Rich’s works, lend these structures a menacing quality, further enhanced by the technique Rich employs. The process and materials by which these paintings are produced – enamel on Dibond, and made using stencils – more closely resembles sign making than academic painting technique. In their depersonalized, mechanized quality they resemble Moholy–Nagy’s “Telephone Pictures,” or paintings bereft of the proverbial “artist’s hand.”

The work of both artists is formally divergent: Speck’s video is a shaky, cinéma-vérité reel, unmediated by any extraneous stylistic concern whereas Rich’s work is slick and considered. However, it is the notion of specificity of place, moreover specific built structures as articulators of political circumstance that constitutes the strongest relationship between Speck and Rich’s work. If Speck’s video deals directly with the physical symbol of political upheaval – i.e. the wall – Rich’s take on the same conflict is refracted in time and space, though it is rendered with comparable urgency.

Daniel Rich (b. 1977, Ulm, Germany) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received a MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art. In addition to Horton Gallery (Sunday L.E.S.), his work has been featured at Perry Rubenstein and Elizabeth Dee galleries, New York, NY, as well as the Maramotti Collection, Reggio Emilia, Italy. He has received grants from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, where he will have a studio in the fall.

Wieland Speck (b. 1951, Freiburg, Germany) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He studied Germanistik, theatre science, and ethnology at Freie Universität Berlin. As a director, writer, and actor, his films have received international acclaim at numerous festivals an on television – most notable is “Westler” from 1985, which depicted an east/west homosexual love story.

Wieland Speck’s “Berlin Off/On Wall” is exhibited in collaboration with Exile, Berlin

"TRUE! --nervous --very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses --not destroyed --not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acutley. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily --how calmly I can tell you the whole story." -Edgar Allen Poe, 1843

James Cohan Gallery is pleased to present The Tell-Tale Heart (Part 2), a group exhibition inspired by the classic story by American 19th century novelist and poet Edgar Allan Poe. The exhibition opens June 25th through August 13th, 2010 and will feature works by Barbara Bloom, Victor Burgin, Keren Cytter, Hanne Darboven, Maya Deren, Tracey Emin, James Ensor, Kota Ezawa, Nan Goldin, Jesper Just, Susana Mendes Silva, Li Ming, Cheng Ran, Dash Snow and Felix Gonzalez Torres. 

Much like the macabre drama of Poe's story, in which the protagonist's obsession with his upstairs neighbour drives him to murder, the works in this exhibition portray artists various modes of expression which explore dissolute scenarios through the lens of "obsession" that reflect an intensity of passion, guilt, rage, love, identity, death, and political beliefs. 

Maya Deren's seminal film, Meshes in the Afternoon (1943), serves as a cornerstone to the exhibition, embodying the dark impulses that drive human desire and imagination to their extremes. 

Andre Breton's novel about obsession titled Nadja inspired conceptual artist Victor Burgin to createFiction/Film (1991), a photographic work in which a mysterious female figure haunts the Parisian landscape. Hanne Darboven's systemic numbering and time-based collage "12 Months with Postcards from Today of Horses" (1982) posits that if symbolic handwriting and image are mirrors to the mind, then the unconscious keeps its secrets. 

In Felix Gonzalez Torres' video installation, Untitled (Portrait) (1971), two empty chairs sit facing a black television monitor that periodically displays lone statements that portend greed, solitude and unrequited love, examples of which include "a new supreme court ruling," "more failed banks," "long love letters," "a merciless cardinal," and "a patriotic mob". Gonzales presents a "picture" that is simultaneously personal and political while proposing that extreme actions can produce world shaking events. Dash Snow's black and white photograph titled TBT(2008) portrays a lone female lying face down on a bed in a darkened room; there is a sense of the possibility of violence or love lurking in the shadows. An older work on exhibit inspired by a short story by Poe titled "Hop Frog Hop-Frog; or, The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs" is James Ensor's gritty revenge hand-colored print titled "Hop-Frog's Revenge" (1898) depicting the sadistic murder of the king and his cronies. 

The show will also include the US debut of Li Ming, an emerging conceptual artist based in China. This work was also included in The Tell-Tale Heart (Part 1) at the James Cohan Gallery Shanghai, curated by Leo Xu. In Ming's single-channel video work, XX (2009), two young men sit bound by overlapping t-shirts, struggling to separate themselves from one another. Other works by young video artists explore the darker side of personal relationships such as Jesper Just's work, A Vicious Undertow(2007), Keren Cytter's Something Happened (2007) and Kota Ezawa's animation Who's Afraid of Black, White and Gray, (2003). All three aforementioned works are presented as disjunctive narrative stories which expose the extreme emotion and vulnerability of complex love relationships. The Tell-Tale heart lives within us all.

This exhibition is curated by Elyse Goldberg

For further information please contact Jane Cohan at jane@jamescohan.com or Peter Brandtpbrandt@jamescohan.com or by telephone 212-714-9500.

Lombard-Freid Projects is pleased to announce Heat Wave, a group show of works by Fikret Atay (b.1976, Turkey), Bani Abidi (b. 1971, Pakistan), Maya Schindler (b. 1977, Israel), Mounira al Solh (b. 1978, Lebanon), Eko Nugroho (b. 1977, Indonesia) and Noa Charuvi (b. 1979, Israel).

Heat Wave brings together six fresh voices from Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Turkey. Though varied in terms of geography, language and tradition, these international artists are bound generationally and unified by an interest in representing elements of cultural and political specificity through expressions and symbols of the everyday. Using humor, critique, irony and introspection, the work of each artist proposes a distinct strategy for active engagement – whether borrowing from popular culture (Atay, Nugroho) or photojournalism (Charuvi), expanding the language of documentary into the realm of fiction (al Solh) or examining tensions (Abidi) and repositories of national identity (Schindler).

Fikret Atay lives and works in his hometown of Batman, Turkey, a Kurdish city near the border with Iraq. In his most recent video work, Batman v. Batman (2009), the mayor of the city plays a superhero who brings a lawsuit against Warner Bros. over rights to the name of the famed comic book character. As with all his videos, narrative simplicity and modest filming techniques produce insightful works that insist on their local context without being didactic. Recent exhibitions include, Fikret Atay, Viafarini, Milan, Italy; Bonner Kunstverein, Germany; King of the Ring, E.N.S.A.D, Strasbourg, France; L’argent, Le Plateau, Paris, France. Atay has participated in the biennales of Lyon, Istanbul, Sydney and Cairo.

Bani Abidi’s Karachi series (2009) treats one of the central dilemmas of Pakistani nationalism at the level of quotidian experience. The six photographs that together constitute the series are all taken at dusk during the month of Ramadan when observant Muslims break the ritual daily fast. Each photograph stages an incongruous scene of a lone figure engaged in a domestic task under the glow of a street lamp. The names of the photographed, as indicated in the titles, call attention to the fact that they belong to the non-Muslim minorities (Christian, Hindu) in Pakistan. Abidi implicates the intersection of private and public space as the site of the increasingly problematic conflicts of this multi-religious city. Recent exhibitions include the 10th Lyon Biennale, France; Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan, Asia Society, NY; The View From Elsewhere, Queensland Art Gallery, Sydney; 7th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea.

Born in Jerusalem and living in New York, Maya Schindler addresses the aesthetics and semiotics of political, social and linguistic boundaries. Included in the exhibition will be, White Flags (2010), an installation of seven flags made of fiberglass and thick layers of white acrylic paint. The raw materiality of the colorless sculptural flags becomes a poignant way to reinvent a symbol and question expressions of allegiance that are commonly taken for granted. Recent exhibitions include, Present Progressive, California State University Art Museum, Long Beach; Seeing is Believing, Zaum Projects, Lisbon, Portugal; Wishful Thinking Wishful, Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania.

Heat Wave will showcase two works from Mounira al Solh’s series, The Sea is a Stereo, which focuses on a group of men who sit on the beach in Beirut everyday, without concern for weather or war. In the 13-minute video, Paris without a Sea (2008), the boundaries between reality and fiction are blurred as the artist interviews the men and then voices-over their lines herself. The comic effect of this technique and light-hearted jest of the dialogue masks a more profound, yet present, reflection on the habits and routines one holds onto in the face of uncertainty. A series of four photographs entitled Elvis (2009), depict the gesture of one character showing the artist photographs of himself as a young man and of his son living abroad with his family. Recent exhibitions include, Volkskrant Prize, Stedelijk Museum Scheidam, Netherlands; 2009 Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; Be(com)ing Dutch, Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands and the Lebanese Pavilion, 2007 Venice Biennale, Italy.

A native of Yogyakarta, Eko Nugroho is a self-made artist whose work has come to international attention in the past several years. Working in a diverse range of media, from murals to shadow puppets, video projections to paintings, Nugroho’s images reflect Indonesia’s politically charged environment through fantastic and darkly humorous satires populated by surreal characters that fuse human, machine, animal and plant. Featured in Heat Wave will be new pieces including a vibrant large-scale embroidery and several smaller scale works of textile and watercolor, whose graphic comic book quality portrays figures with alien-like heads. Recent exhibitions include, It’s all about Coalition, National Museum of Singapore; 2009 Jakarta Biennial, Indonesia; Dorodoro, Doron!, Hiroshima Contemporary Art Museum, Japan; 10th Lyon Biennale, France; Beyond the Dutch, Centraal Museum, Netherlands.

New York based, Israeli artist Noa Charuvi paints from photojournalistic images taken in Gaza. Her colorful canvases abstract the demolished buildings ravaged by the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Bedroom (2010) depicts the traces of life in what was once a domestic setting; furniture and belongings are strewn across the interior as the torn walls expose the room as a destroyed landscape. The site-specificity of the source images, in contrast with her process of deconstructing the photographed forms creates a body of work that demands attention and observation.

Team is pleased to present a group exhibition organized by Miriam Katzeff. Forced Exposure will run from the 1st of July through the 30th of July 2010. The exhibition will include paintings, video and sculptures by Lutz Bacher, Tom Burr, Ross Knight, and Bjarne Melgaard. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor.

This exhibition focuses on works of art that position the viewer as an interloper in the gallery. As technology encourages people to expose themselves to unknown audiences online, the idea of privacy has relaxed to reflect these developments. The works on view test whether this lack of boundaries extends into the physical world. While the artists in the exhibition do not have a strictly confessional style, the works force an immediate and awkward intimacy onto the viewer.

For over a decade, Lutz Bacher has produced an ongoing body of work entitled Do You Love Me? Interviewing curators, friends, and dealers about her life and her work, Bacher asks the questions but never appears on film. Using whatever technology was available, the seemingly casual interviews reveal more about the person answering the questions than the evasive artist. It is easy to imagine how Bacher’s relationship with the subjects must change as a result of uncomfortable revelations.

Using minimal forms and personal dedications, Tom Burr’s sculptures recreate private architectures as public stages. Through his transformation of domestic objects, Burr produces a sense of access to interrupted encounters. Black Wall Skirt simultaneously alludes to conceptual, physical and psychological spaces. The forms are loaded with possibilities of the fulfillment and failures of concealed desires.

Ross Knight’s formalist sculptures combine utilitarian materials with corporeal references to suggest secret rituals that are deliberately unresolved. In Void Fill, a cardboard box that is the height and width of an average man is punctured by a plastic bag filled with air. While Knight operates on his works with a reductive precision, the sculptures aspire to a precarious quality as though they were hastily abandoned in the gallery.

In Bjarne Melgaard’s most recent paintings, old pornographic magazines are defaced with crudely executed figures and scrawled texts from a continuous novel that relies on the violent mythology surrounding the artist. Like the rest of Melgaard’s work, the fragmented and diaristic qualities of the text lures the viewer into the artist’s constructed personas and manipulates the relationship between fact and fiction.

Team is open from Monday through Friday, 10am to 6pm. For further information and/or photographs, please call 212 279 9219.

Dumbo Arts Center (DAC) presents Field Transitions | Memory Screens, an installation of new video works by Sean Capone.

Sean Capone received attention for his large-scale, atmospheric video projections of computer-animated florals, seen most recently in the Archway tunnel beneath the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn, and in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art during the Armory Fair opening gala. This show will be Sean’s first solo gallery exhibition in New York.

The installation will include new videos that expand upon the pattern-and-decoration themes of previous works, while considering the surface effects of the video projection within the gallery space itself. The ‘special effects’ of media and cinema are explored as a shifting field of illusions, codes, and sensational desires; but, rather than appropriating or sampling, the artist creates his own high-tech visual grammar based on our shared experience of this media language. The title of the work is inspired by Freud’s notion of the “screen memory”, a form of remembrance that depends upon substitution and fantasy, displacements and false representations.

Sean Capone is from Rochester NY, and received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has lived and worked in New York City since 2004. His studio The Supernature was established in 2007 to explore aesthetic applications of the moving image in online and physical environments.

DAC extends a special thanks to Marvin J. Tumaneng for graphic design.

Introduced by Douglas Crimp

Day's End, Gordon Matta-Clark, 16mm, 1975, 23 mins
Pier Groups, Arch Brown, 1979, 57 mins

Driving down the pier along that empty highway in front, the façades are an incredible, animated grouping of different eras and different personalities. And I wanted to deal with one of the earlier ones, which this [Pier 52] is—a turn of the century façade. There’s a classic sort of tin classicism. And to cut at the façade. So the ones that I found originally were all completely overrun by the gays....

- Gordon Matta-Clark on Day’s End

Who’s the guy in the helmet?
I don’t know, never seen him before.
He looks straight. What’s he doing?
I don’t know, just checking the place out, I guess.
I’d like to check him out. He’s hot.

- Dialogue from Pier Groups

In 1975 Gordon Matta-Clark created a monument—or an anti-monument—to New York’s industrial history with Day’s End, his transformation of the dilapidated Pier 52, which stood at the end of Gansevoort Street. He cut a channel in the pier’s floor and another in the roof above, so that when the sun reached its high point at noon, it shone down into the water. And he cut cat’s-eye-shaped holes in the tin walls, one at the side of the channel, another at the pier’s west end so that the sun came streaming in as it set over New Jersey. He called the work an “indoor water park,” where he hoped the “peaceful enclosure” would “create a joyous situation.” His film made with Besty Susler is one of the few records we have of both this great work and of the abandoned Hudson River piers before they were torn down—but not the only one. In 1979, Arch Brown released a gay porn film called Pier Groups. In it, two neighbors head for the piers, one for some fun on a day off, the other because he has an assignment to prepare for his demolition company to put in a bid for the piers’ destruction—“No one uses them,” says his boss. The engineer, played by Johnny Kovacs, wanders through the piers checking out their architecture and again and again happens upon guys—including his neighbor, played by Keith Anthoni—getting it on. He stops, watches, moves on, checks out another part of building, stumbles upon more sex play. Straight-acting, wearing his hard hat, he might be the hottest guy in the film… - DC

Douglas Crimp is Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester. He was an editor at October (1977–1990) and is the author of Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (MIT Press, 2002), On the Museum’s Ruins (MIT Press, 1993), and AIDS Demo Graphics (Bay Press, 1990).

Tickets - $7, available at door.

John Jay College of Criminal Justice presents LIKE IT IS, an exhibition of new works by Nyeema Morgan. Through the mediums of drawing, video and text, LIKE IT IS is an ongoing investigation of the tenuous distinction between the banal and the exceptional.

Morgan explores systems as presented through familiar models (games, text, et cetera) to describe the interplay between personal and cultural knowledge as related to identity, behavior and navigation. LIKE IT IS introduces these examinations as a conceptual framework that posits that expressed ‘specialness’ is actually exponential normalcy, rather than a truly unique instance of singularity. By distilling elements of popular culture, LIKE IT IS reveals a commonplace phenomenon where the remarkable becomes a thing that is no longer outside the range of what’s expected, but a kind of super-mundane made obvious by its ubiquity.

Nyeema Morgan is a New York based artist who received her B.F.A from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2000 and M.F.A. in 2007 from the California College of the Arts. She has been a resident artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Maine), the Emerge 10 Program at Aljira Center for Contemporary Art (New Jersey), and is a current resident at the Henry Street Settlement/ Abrons Art Center (New York City). She has been a contributor to the artist-run publication Color&Color and has exhibited her work at Supermarket 2007 in Stockholm, Sweden; Ping Pong Gallery, CA; Temporary Autonomous Museum, CA; Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, NJ; FAB Gallery, VA and most recently Saint Cecilia’s Convent, NY.

The exhibition is curated by Kenya (Robinson), a New York based artist and independent curator. Her sculptural, sound, performance, and curatorial work focuses on mass consumerist culture.