Read Our Interview of Katharina Kaminski and Hanne Gaby Odiele on Queerness and Fertility →

The iconography of fertility holds a timeless power over us. Our paleolithic Venuses defined this obsession, encapsulating fertility as a powerful force of creation, rooted in the divine feminine while remaining paradoxically universal. Intersex artist Katharina Kaminski expands upon this understanding in her new show, Womb, which embraces our individual potentials for transformation and innovation while interrogating our gendered ideas about fertility. As we find ourselves in the throes of a gender revolution, Kaminski reckons with the intersection of gender and creation in her abstractions of the womb: soft vessels fill the Sainte Anne Gallery, distilling the Venus to its core sense of creation and transformation. In recognition of National Intersex Awareness Day, Katharina comes together with intersex model and activist Hanne Gaby Odiele to discuss creating while Queer, finding community, and claiming ownership of the self in the wake of bodily alienation. Read more.

Justin Urbach Uses Silicon to Unveil the Symbiotic Relationship Between Man and Machine @ Max Goelitz in Berlin

Justin Urbach’s Fractal Breeze is a three-channel video installation that addresses transformation processes in the digital age as a fragmentary sci-fi narrative.

In Fractal Breeze, two characters move on the borders of virtuality and reality in a metafictional representation of our technological future. The starting point for the video work is silicon, which is used to manufacture microchips and upon which the artist reflects in its many stages of production. In the form of wafers, thin reflective information carriers, silicon enables crossing over into a hybrid world in which virtual spheres increasingly materialize and the characters experience a new physicality. Through the symbiotic connection of body and technology, a transhuman circuit is formed that refers to social developments and the multidimensional processes of raw material extraction and energy storage.

The artist creates a multimedia installation in which the wafers merge into real space as sculptural objects and information carriers. Still blank in the film, in the exhibition they are engraved with body-related data of the actors, collected through MRI scans, 3D scans and motion capture. Fractal Breeze was realized in collaboration with specialists and researchers from the semiconductor and film industries, as well as the medical field, in order to unite these diverse branches. The music produced especially for the project was created in collaboration with musician and sound artist Jonas Yamer.

Fractal Breeze is on view through July 29th at max goelitz gallery, rudi-dutschke str 2610969 Berlin

an exit from this room and others like it: New Paintings & Ceramics By Hana Ward @ Ochi Projects In Los Angeles

Hana Ward’s newest oil paintings and ceramic works offer a visual narrative for what the artist describes as “a liberation in the mind.” With so much time spent trapped in divergent states this past year, reading and reflecting, watching the news – vacillating between feelings of hopelessness and anticipation – Ward found herself thinking about the experience of transformation, of coming into one’s power – specifically about how this experience might unfold for Black women.

Taken individually and as a whole, Ward’s most recent paintings and ceramic works invite viewers to create more loving space within themselves, allowing for the potential to thrive during an otherwise unforgiving and isolating time. Each portrait relays a deeply personal inner metamorphosis that also manifests outwardly, through an individual’s outlook and approach to life, and even possibly, optimistically, as a society at large.

an exit from this room and others like it is on view through May 8 @ Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Blvd. Los Angeles

 
 

Gisela Colon: Meta Minimal @ Gavlak Los Angeles

Through her syncretic process of exploring and expanding upon past history, sculptor Gisela Colon has succeeded in creating sculptures that convey the fullest possible array of sensory and intellectual experience, projecting cosmic energy and power outwards into the world. With her astute practice of Organic Minimalism– an idiosyncratic sculptural language that imbues life-like qualities into reductive forms– Colon approaches her sculptural practice from the expansive perspective of phenomenological concerns: addressing the physical laws of the universe such as gravity, time, movement, energy and transformation. Colon’s oeuvre is the result of a synthesis of pointed historical reflection and visceral raw energy.

Colon’s practice of Organic Minimalism simultaneously expands and challenges the legacies of Light and Space, Minimalism, Kinetic and Latin American Op Art, merging industrial inertness with transformative biological mutability. Her sensual, gender-ambiguous sculptural forms further connect her practice to a history of female artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Linda Benglis and Judy Chicago. By channeling Bourgeois’ notions of sexualized energies and Chicago’s nascent feminist atmospheric works, Colon similarly posits her sculptures as vehicles for conversion of classic masculine forms into feminized power.

Meta Minimal will be on view throughout March 7, 2020 at Gavlak 1700 South Santa Fe Avenue, Suite 440, Los Angeles, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery

The Opening Of "Nose Job" A Group Show Curated By Adam Beris @ BBQLA

Nose Job groups together artists who work knowingly/unknowingly within the process of transformation: to look at material as character and alter its identity into something aesthetically functional. Featured artists include: Bjorn Copeland, Andrew Dadson, Trulee Hall, Ariel Herwitz and Joshua Miller. The exhibition will be on view through April 14 at BBQLA 2315 Jesse Street Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock