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Steph Zimmerman
Annette Kelm



Ivan Seal


Morgan Fisher
Exterior and Interior Color Beauty
"The booklet Exterior and Interior Color Beauty represents the wish to rationalize relations among color, expressing in the realm of the decorative the wish of General Houses, Inc. to rationalize the design and production of housing. At the root of such rationalization is the imperative to limit choice, to simplify, to standardize. Morgan Fisher’s wish to make work that escapes the pitfalls of composition expresses similar principles, of which the paintings in this exhibition are examples."



Camilla Wills
Dictated from the Bed

Dictated from the bed, 2011 from Camilla Wills on Vimeo.


Charlie Kaufman
I run in my neighbourhood, and one day I ran past this guy running in the other direction: an older guy, a big hulky guy. He was struggling, huffing and puffing. I was going down a slight hill and he was coming up. So he passes me and he says: "Well, sure, it's all downhill that way." I loved that joke. We made a connection. So I had it in my head that this is a cool guy, and he's my friend now.

A few weeks later, I'm passing him again, and I'm thinking: "There's the guy that's cool." As we pass each other, he says: "Well, sure, it's all downhill that way." So I think: "Oh, OK. He's got a repertoire. I'm not that special. He's probably said it to other people, maybe he doesn't remember me ... but OK." I laughed, but this time my laugh was a little forced.

Then I pass him another time, and he says it again. And this time he's going downhill and I'm going uphill, so it doesn't even make sense. And I started to feel pain about this, because I'm embarrassed for him and I think maybe there's something wrong with him. And then it just keeps happening. I probably heard it seven or eight more times. I started to avoid him.

I like the idea that the story changes over time even though nothing has changed on the outside. What's changed is all in my head and has to do with a realisation on my character's part. And the story can only be told in a particular form. It can't be told in a painting. The point is: it's very important that what you do is specific to the medium in which you're doing it, and that you utilise what is specific about that medium to do the work. And if you can't think about why it should be done this way, then it doesn't need to be done.

Paulina Olowska
"Oscillating between branding, self-recognition, sexuality, political uniform, and economic indicator, our adornment always reflects a chosen position in and with society."



Charline von Heyl


Tommo Gokita


John Miller and Takuji Kogo
ROBOT


Phil Collins
The Unfortunate Thing Between Us
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York


Lawrence Weiner: "Every morning we have an existential crisis; we have to convince ourselves why we are going to participate in certain structures of society. Art is the physical manifestation of a person trying to place themselves in the world. That’s what art is supposed to do—show another way to approach things. [...] It's not about material transcendence; it's about material transformation.

Lucy McKenzie


Animation Masks
Jordan Wolfson


Julia Dault



Metahaven
Criticize the Old World in Content and Advocate a New One in Form

No-stop City by Archizoom


The Jogging
From Press Release for installation "Soon" shown at Still House: Through one lens, our digital lives are training us to care less about permanence, to focus our attention on the fleeting beauty of connectivity. But it’s hard to live in the moment, and the devices that could teach us how to do just that more often than not separate us from the reality we seek through them. There is a togetherness in the approaching catastrophe, one that threatens to level all political and religious difference as surely as it threatens to nullify the entirety of land space and the national distinctions that geography provides. It is perhaps more difficult to acknowledge the uniformity of the fate we march towards than the imminent catastrophe itself; to change is to admit defeat. [...] Today’s lifeguards will be tomorrow’s installation photographers.

Rationed Water (2013); Hydrophobic coating, Tempered Glass, Water, Plastic Bottles,Fierce Apple Gatorade, Blueberry-Pomegranate Gatorade; 58 ⅛ x 33 ½ x 20”
P.H.I.S.H: Pink Hydrographic Integrated Fish Swims Horizontally (2013); Piranhas, Hydrographic film, Screws
Wayfarer (2013); Vinyl, brass grommets; 60 x 36”
Ceramic Pitcher Pours Water Onto Extremely Rare Genetically Modified Triplet Watermelon (2013); Chain, Metal Carabineer, Porcelain Pitcher, Museum Gel 24 oz.; Dimensions Variable

Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory and Art
"Art is the art of affect more than representation, a system of dynamized and impacting forces rather than a system of unique images that function under the regime of signs...Art and nature, art in nature, share a common structure: that of excessive and useless production--production for its own sake, production for the sake of profusion and differentiation."

Olivier Messiaen's Chronochromie






Luigi Ghirri


Oliver Laric


Jim Lambie


Esther Tielemans


March 1, 2013: Inspired by (and unrelated to) Kafka...

Johan Rosenmunthe


Lisa Shahno


John Divola


Alex Da Corte


Roger Hiorns


Martin Soto Climent
Through simple gestures, Climent captures the transformative potential of common, functional items. Banal objects such as wallets, blinds, beer cans, and underwear become anthropomorphized, and often sexualized, through allusions to bodies, tongues, hair and genitalia. I first learned of him through a work of twisted, painted blinds he had exhibited in a group show at the Johann König Gallery in Berlin. In much of his work, such as that which was shown in 2010 at Clifton Benevento in New York, Climent transforms old-fashioned feminine items with the same tendencies as the 20th century Surrealists. The frequent use of objects and images relating to the early 1900's has less to do with a nostalgia for the past, and more to do with a desire to deal with source material prior to any digital alterations. In his yearbook series, Climent twisted and turned pages in a black and white yearbook and then rephotographed them to create unexpected, poetic juxtapositions. Regardless of the era of his materials, all of Climent's manipulations are subtle and provisional. Materials are treated with intentional preciousness so that no change is final and no material permanently estranged from its original, unified form.

Analia Saban
Lately, I've been spending unhealthy amounts of time at work not working and instead looking through the work of L.A.-based, Argentinian artist Analia Saban. Previously a student of John Baldessari in the "New Genres" major at UCLA, Saban deconstructs the traditions of image-making with the same dead-pan wit as her mentor. After noticing the consistent market success of her fellow painting students at UCLA, Saban--out of curiosity, irritation, or both--began to explore (and loosen) all the formal qualities of painting. Her early works consist of unraveling paintings--forming the threads from the canvas into a giant ball, a scarf, or framing a single thread from a 7.5 ft.-wide landscape painting. In her "Decant" series, acrylic paint is poured down canvases into plastic bags, which are then removed after the paint has dried. The pooling paint bulges off the canvas in perfectly smooth, geometric pouches. In "Representation of an Apple," Saban sculpts an apple out of encaustic acrylic paint and attaches it to the canvas, blurring the line between painting, sculpture, image and object. In "Acrylic in Canvas with Ruptures: Two-Point Perspective" Saban goes a step further and removes the stretcher bars completely, displaying a canvas bag overloaded with beautifully messy, wet paint. The canvas is presented as what it is--a container for paint. Through straightforward gestures (and titles) Saban's work operates less as a critique of the traditional medium and more as an analytic dissection of painting's formal and social structures. Ironically (or not), her current practice deconstructing painting and its market success has achieved her market success. She is now represented by the Thomas Solomon Gallery in L.A. and the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York, the latter of which will host a solo exhibition of the artist this fall.

Gerhard Richter
Overpainted Photographs
Although hardly publicized, Richter completed an extensive series of overpainted found and personally taken photographs. A catalogue of these works is set to be published in 2015, but for now, a majority can be viewed on the artist’s web site. Looking through these photos makes it clear why Richter is considered the most financially successful living artist—he made good work through making a lot of it. (For the “Museum” series, he painted the same photo 234 different times.) Through patient persistence, Richter finds simple, effortless gestures to achieve poignant relationships between the image and the paint’s materiality. We may have become indifferent to imagery, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot slowly be trained again how to look.

Samara Scott
Time Magazine just named Scott one of the 100 Top Modern Painters. Based in London, Scott has a knack for the gooey, visceral, and delicious that was once described by her close friend as simultaneous “glory and vomit.” I was sold after I read this quote taken from an interview with LVL3.

"Also – I had this really vivid memory of when I was a teenager cleaning this clarinet and I had this fluffy wand that you had to poke inside it and it all smelt of your own spit but was kind of clammy and cold. I have been really thinking about that – I really want to find a way for people to experience those really lucid sensory things, where the pleasure is really confusing."
-Samara Scott

Shimabuku
In the current exhibition at NoguerasBlanchard in Barcelona, Japanese artist Shimabuku presents Leaves Swim (2011), a recent video piece, along with two installations–Onion Orion (2008) and Something that Floats / Something that Sinks (2008). In Leaves Swim, the exotic image of an ornate seahorse is filmed underwater–a straightforward documentation of a creature both real and mysterious. In his work, Shimabuku often playfully displays simple, microcosmic wonders, leaving their ambiguities undefined and unclassified. In Onion Orion, seven onions are placed in the arrangement of the Orion constellation, motivated by the semantic similarity between the two words. The tongue-in-cheek juxtaposition is reminiscent of the wordplay of the literary nonsense genre–where new possibilities arise from well-intended, but childlike confusion. (Imagine if the onion was viewed as mystical and the constellation banal.) In Something that Floats/Something that Sinks, two aquariums hold several pieces of the same type of fruit–some float on the water’s surface while others sink to the bottom. “This is something I always noticed while cooking” says Shimabuku, “and always found mysterious. So I decided to make a work about something mysterious, leave it mysterious and have people experience it just as it is.” In his work, Shimabuku emphasizes the value of the art sphere that allows this experience to exist by attaching no agenda to mystery–allowing the unfamiliar to exist and be appreciated solely for its unfamiliarity.

Agnes Meyer-Brandis
Agnes Meyer-Brandis describes her practice as “bio-poetic investigations,” which navigate the line between art and science, fact and fiction, the probable impossible and the possible improbable. In her latest exploration, “Moon Goose Colony,” Meyer-Brandis embodies the 16th century science fiction novel “The Man in the Moone” by Francis Goodwin. In the story, the main character is transported to the moon and back by a colony of moon geese. It was the first time the concept of weightlessness was described in literature and was published long before the concept of zero gravity was studied by Newton during the 17th century. In her study, Meyer-Brandis raised twelve live geese from birth, giving them each the name of a famous astronaut, and imprinting them on her as goose mother through early communication while they were in an artificial incubator. She has since enlisted them in a strict regiment of moon goose training, which includes flying lessons, taking them on mock expeditions, and housing them in a remote Moon analogue habitat. Live video feed of the geese occupying their quasi-Moon-like space will be broadcast to Meyer-Brandis’s “total installations” exhibited at the Foundation for Art and Creative Activity in Liverpool in December of 2012.

“In the end its what we believe, and what type of story we tell.” -Meyer-Brandis

There is an old tale, almost certainly apocryphal, that is told about Picasso…
A man approaches Picasso at an exhibit of his work and says with great exasperation, “"Why can’t you paint more realistically?"” Picasso thinks for a minute and says, “"Realistically. I guess I don'’t know what that is."” Frustrated, the man takes a photograph from his billfold and says, "“Look! Like this. This is my wife."” Picasso takes the picture in his hand and looks at it. “"She’s so small,” he says, and turning the photo sideways, “and so thin!”" What could this man do to help Picasso see who his wife really is? Bring him a life-size photograph? Too flat. A statue? Too rigid. How about his actual wife? But which one? The happy one? The one who is angry with him for going off to the Picasso exhibit without doing the dishes?(Taken from press release for Rachel Harrison's exhibition The Help at Greene Naftali, New York--images shown below)



Excerpt from “Education by Infection” by Boris Groys
“The triple infection of the market, politics, and globalization, as they enter art practice and art education now, are joined together by this fundamental modernist viral strain. Indeed, this is not so much a strategy of tolerance and inclusion as a strategy of self-exclusion—of presenting oneself as infected and infectious, as being the embodiment of the dangerous or the intolerant. While so much contemporary art today that is socially based would seem to be just the opposite of this notion of self-exclusion in its focus on the agency of community, in fact the dissolution of the artist’s self in the crowd is precisely this act of self-infection by the bacilli of the social. And so this infection of the market and politics, of what was once conceived as intolerable to the rules of art’s identity, is unavoidable and the artist’s body undergoes within the academy all the stages of the bacilli’s intrusion: shock to the system, weakness, resistance, adaptation, renewal. This self-infection by art education must go on if we do not want to let the bacilli of art die.” (32)

Misshapen Pearl


In this film from the Startle Reaction exhibit shown at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Torsten Lauschmann uses the motif of the street lamp to discuss the ideological and social shifts that accompany consumer culture. He muses over the implications of the assertion of the street lamp in society–what this reveals literally (Light allows man to have success over night and therefore, body.) and socially–all in a streaming narrative of poetic clarity.

“A streetlamp is not a small sun, but since the existence of street lamps, has the sun not become but a gigantic street lamp?”

“The street is a space motivated by aesthetics rather than discourse; you are witnessing it by watching this film.”