CHART Art Fair & Art Book Fair: Looking Back & Forward

text by Lara Schoorl
photographs by Niklas Adrian Vindelev

Last weekend (August 25-28) the Nordic art world gathered in Copenhagen for the 10th edition of CHART. For four days visual art, books, music, performance, architecture, talks, food and people filled the rooms and courtyard of Charlottenborg. The art fair was founded in 2013 by six cross-generational, Copenhagen-based gallerists—Claus Andersen, Bo Bjerggaard, Jesper Elg, Mikkel Grønnebæk, David Risley, and Susanne Ottesen—as a not-for-profit. This year they expanded their board with six new members hailing from tech, politics, business and cultural fields. The impetus behind the founding of the fair was to put an international spotlight on the region and to strengthen the local and Nordic art market; now, with the installation of these additional board members, the fair will be steered into a new non-traditional art world business model. 

Like all art institutions, CHART was also challenged to reconsider its format and question its purpose during these past years of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, the fair decentralized in 2020 and instead took place in galleries across the Nordic capitals Copenhagen, Helsinki, Oslo, Reykjavík, and Stockholm. At that same 8th edition, 100% of the exhibiting artists were women; a collective response from the participating galleries to “highlight the structural challenge of gender imbalance in the art market.” This year’s fair was their “first fully gender-balanced art fair.” For the international audience that was unable to visit all these Nordic galleries, CHART organized a series of online talks and published a reader that is still available for free as a PDF. 

 
 

The following two years, the fair continued to expand its public programming with a focus on inclusivity and sustainability, introducing an Experimental section with artist-run and alternative art spaces as well as the CHART Art Book Fair in 2021. For this year’s CHART Architectural Competition the theme was Bio-Architecture, inviting architects, artists and designers to create symbiotic relationships between nature and architecture. Reaching wider or different audiences triumphed during this year’s fair. In addition to exhibiting work at Charlottenborg, CHART invited fifteen artists, among whom are Austin Lee, Jasmin Franko and Nanna Abell, to present work inside the Tivoli Gardens—one of the world’s oldest theme parks, which opened its doors in 1843. Rather than your fair ticket, a ticket to the rides at Tivoli will allow you access to these works. The expanse of visitors continues with The Museum of Nordic Digital Art (MoNDA), which launched at the fair with works by ORLAN, Sabrina Ratté, and Morehshin Allahyari that can be found in the foyer of Charlottenborg and with an AR sculpture garden in the courtyard. MoNDA’s first exhibition, “Flags of Freedom,” a solo NFT show by Mette Winckelmann, can still be visited via the QR code on their website. It quickly became clear that new initiatives were a defining imperative of CHART 2022.

Noticeably different from the past years is that about a dozen more spaces participated in the fair, thirty-eight in total. All of them located in the Nordic region, although some galleries have spaces or viewing rooms elsewhere, such as Carl Kostyal in London and Milan. Others collaborate or engage in projects in the US such as the Norwegian Galleri Brandstrup with Sean Kelly Gallery in NYC and Loyal Gallery as a NADA member respectively. While the fair is structurally and conceptually moving forward, many of the works in the fair still felt more traditional materially, in the sense that the majority were wall works. Some beautifully refreshing nonetheless. Such as Emma Ainala’s surrealist paintings in which fairytale and nightmare meet shown by Helsinki Contemporary, or Anna Tuori’s gestural canvases presented in a collaborative installation with Jani Ruscica’s wall painting and video work for Galleri Anhava. But also the solo presentation at Carl Kostyal of Camilla Engström’s warm paintings that leave us longing for a gentle end of summer—especially in the northern Northern Hemisphere. Remarkable as well was Tacita Dean’s ten-meter-long photogravure, Inferno (2021), at BORCH Editions. The print, inspired by the stage and costume design Dean made for The Dante Project, a ballet on the occasion of the 700th anniversary celebration of the poet’s death, asks you to follow Dante and Virgil, depicted as two dots, across eight parts through the circles of hell, in an upside-down landscape scattered with textual fragments from the Divine Comedy and occasional satanic references like 666—leaving us hover between punishment and play for ten big steps. 

 
 

The art book fair, equally manageable in size with twenty-seven tables, hosted publishers, (art) book and print makers also all based in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. And also ranging from 1980s staples such a Space Poetry to brand new initiatives such as Halden Workshop. Interestingly, however, several operate between various languages and continents. Kinakaal (Norwegian for Chinese cabbage), a multilingual press run by Ben Wenhou Yu and Yilei Wang, which exists alongside their art space Northing in Bergen, for example, fosters communication between Norway and East Asia. To facilitate dialogue and connection between these different cultures, their publications often have Norse, Chinese, and English texts presented together. Then, Halden Workshop, a new (residency) program for book arts, in Halden, Norway offers workshops and studio space with access to letterpress, bookbinding and paper making assistance. The program is organized by Radha Pandey, a letterpress printer, and papermaker, and scholar of paper and book arts, and Johan Solberg is also a papermaker and scholar, letterpress printer, and a bookbinder. While the workshop is located in Halden, they spend half of the year in Delhi, India where they both teach and continue (to share) their practice. 

Tacita Dean, Inferno, 2021. Detail. Photogravure with screen print in eight parts, 89,5 x 956 cm framed. Image courtesy the artist and BORCH Editions

 

Many of the publishers and presses are one, two or three-person endeavors, some are part of institutions, others run small art spaces alongside their publishing arms. Although definitely a labor of love—see CULT PUMP’s multi-color silk screen printed comic and art books and zines—these publications and their makers form a tight regional community that reaches far beyond the Nordic countries. Hour Editions, run by Kristina Bengtsson and Kevin Malcolm, came into being in 2013 out of the communal question “What is the artist’s work?” and the sentiment “If we can’t change the system, at least we can try together.” Malcolm also runs the exhibition space Vermillion Sands, for which Hour Editions has made poetic extensions of several of their shows, with the most appealing titles. Calling All Divas on the occasion of “Inside me with Incredible Intensity” with Martin Jacob Nielsen and Tyler Matthew Oyer is a beautiful and empowering tribute to many known, lesser known, and overlooked “queer artist mentors” who lost their lives to HIV/AIDS; and I like to stare at things that cannot be read. Only in that way can the present be remembered. I need a menu to wash my car. on the occasion of the eponymous show by Mikko Kuorinki brings together the poetry of Jenny Kalliokulju, Karl Larsson, Henning Lundkvsit and Amalie Smith.

For four days a lot was to be seen, listened too, talked about and tasted, but not too much. The size of CHART, including its new and additional programs and collaborations, invites you to linger, take time, and revisit. It is, after all, just a walk across the courtyard between Diana Al-Hadid’s sculptural wall panels (of which the layering and myriad of materials ask for multiple observations) and At Last Books to read Lindsay Preston Zappas’ text on David Risley’s watercolor series Against God. Against Guns. Against Energy. 

Diana Al-Hadid, In the Year AD 832 Large Stones Were Thrown From the Sky, Breaking the Copper Earth, Etc., 2019. Polymer gypsum, fiberglass, steel, plaster, copper, leafing, pigment. Dimensions: 160 x 210 x 10 cm. Image courtesy the artist and Galleri Brandstrup, Oslo

Dozie Kanu's World Building Tools: An Interview From The Biodiversity Issue →

 
 

text by Oliver Kupper
portraits by Parker Woods 

Dozie Kanu’s practice is a conceptual exploration of colonial and hegemonic politics, architecture, spatial narratives, and so much more. Born in Houston, Texas in 1993, and now based in Santarém, Portugal, Kanu’s investigation of cultural artifacts belies an America still grappling with not only its troubled past, but also its troubled present. Razor-sharp, anti-climb, raptor spikes, a visual and physical deterrent for vandals and undesirables, find their way onto one of his sculptures modeled as a baby crib, an emblematic nod to the countless divisions that are psychologically embedded at birth. There is something alchemical about Kanu’s reimagined objects of our urban visual landscape, like an ATM blasted with a thick layer of black epoxy sculpting clay, or a poured concrete chair in “crack rock beige” that sits on a spoked tire rim, that gives Kanu’s work a kind of authentic reclamation of power in a grief-stricken zeitgeist. We caught up with Kanu on a rare visit to Los Angeles, before the opening of his exhibition, to prop and ignore, at Manual Arts, to discuss tools for building a more socially equitable world. Read more.

FOOD For Thought: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Restaurant For Artists Changed The Culinary Discourse →

In 1971, artists Gordon Matta-Clark, Carol Goodden, and Tina Girouard opened FOOD, a landmark New York restaurant on the corner of Prince and Wooster Streets in SoHo. In the urban wilds of a not-yet-fully developed or gentrified Lower Manhattan of the early ‘70s, FOOD was a revolutionary laboratory for fresh sustainable cooking and unusual culinary collaborations. Artists like Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage created meals at FOOD. Although never realized, Mark di Suvero had plans to serve dishes through the windows via a crane—he would then instruct diners to eat with tools such as hammers and screwdrivers. As a hub for young artists in the nascency of their careers, the menu was affordable and simple, which created a unique atmosphere of camaraderie and community. Although FOOD, in its original incarnation, only lasted three years, the restaurant became a fabled institution and paradigmatic lesson for the possibility of food at the intersection of art.

Originally published in Autre’s Biodiversity Issue, FW 2021

[Review] Kaari Upson's Powerful Posthumous Exhibition At Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles

 

Kaari Upson “Kris’s Dollhouse” 2017-2019 (detail)

 

A pierced clit from beyond the grave—its folds and sensuous creases climb like a corpse flower too shy to bloom. A sheath covers something secret. A Christmas tree, covered in plastic, sutured closed forever by two rings. This sculpture, a detail from Kris’s Dollhouse (2017-19), is one of Upson’s many abstract and mysterious enlargements—part of a grander picture, a paroxysm of materiality, a puzzle piece from the infiniteness of memory. A hazy, drunken recollection of a family home in a dream. Profane, but holy, and nearly archaeological. In her posthumous exhibition, now on view at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles, Upson mines the psychosexual miasma and violent ecological grandeur of the Southern California suburbs and its surrounding environs, always tiptoeing on the edge of danger, which is even more haunting now in her mortal absence (Upson died after a long battle with cancer in 2021). Memory is both the canary and the lantern, guiding her into the carbonized cave of our deepest desires. She looks to Freudian and Lacanian analysis as a mirror and the obtuse chromium coating behind the mirror, which renders glass not as a window to peer through, but our reversed double. Walking through the exhibition is like walking through the ruins and artifacts of an artist rushing through the pangs of mortality like a flash flood. Each work is a notation on an emergency: paintings thick with the impasto of life’s sediments, sculptures tortured by unrecognizability and large-scale drawings become like maps of the artist’s psyche, now frozen in time.

Kaari Upson never, never ever, never in my life, never in all my born days, never in all my life, never is on view through October 8, 2022 at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles

Read Our Interview Of Dan Colen From Issue 13: Biodiversity →

 
 

interview by Gideon Jacobs 
photographs by David Brandon Geeting  

 

Many urbanites dream about farm life. They sit in front of their screens, filling out expense reports or arguing with coworkers on Slack, the blue light slowly irradiating whatever constitutes their unique human spirit, and they imagine that digging their hands into soil and pulling out some kind of root vegetable might cure what ails them. That wasn’t Dan Colen. Colen, an artist who is very much a product of New York City, with a name synonymous with the downtown Manhattan art scene of the aughts, didn’t end up owning and operating Sky High Farm out of manifested romantic notions about the rural, agrarian lifestyle. In fact, as I learned over the course of this interview, when he purchased the forty-acre chunk of Hudson Valley land, farming wasn’t even part of the plan. Like much of his art, he allowed form to develop on its own, following some combination of instinct and medium until he ended up with his biggest project yet. Since its first growing season, Sky High has donated 90,000 pounds of produce and 20,000 pounds of protein to help fight food insecurity in New York State, and they are currently working on developing an agricultural training program to support self-empowerment among those affected by the carceral system. The farm is a nonprofit, a complex machine that straddles the complex ecosystems of upstate New York agriculture, food justice, the art world, and more. That Colen ended up here at this stage in his career, devoting his life to this mission, might come as a surprise to many, maybe even to Colen himself. But in a way, that’s what makes the whole endeavor somehow unsurprising. That’s what makes it make sense. Read more.

Curator Paige Silveria Presents "Daisies" Group Exhibition In Biarritz

After making massive waves in the New York art scene with her all-star lineup in the group show Daisies during the summer of 2019, Paige Silveria brought an international edition of the exhibition this summer, first to Paris and then Biarritz, the chic seaside town in the Basque region of Southwestern France. The show includes works from over twenty artists of varied disciplines, including Quentin De Briey, Apo Broche, Larry Clark, Pierre Touré Cuq, Efron Danzig, Beatrice Domond, Thibaut Grevet, Jeanette Hayes, Sang Woo Kim, Julian Klincewicz, Zakarie Melloul, Terrence Mongo, Jasmine Monsegue, William Strobeck, Seven Strong, Melchior Terson, and Graham Wiebe.

 
 

A review of Cole Sternberg´s Exhibition "Departed for the curve" @ Praz Delavallade

 

Cole Sternberg
a boisterous stream in a boulder-choked channel, 2019
mixed media on linen

 

text by Stella Peacock-Berardini

Cole Sternberg scratches against the cheek of humanity, inviting the ideals of people in, while simultaneously belittling or questioning our existence, present and future. Sternberg's work provides a sort of kaleidoscopic effect veiling over images or winding paths and curves throughout the works, almost as if to represent the blurred lines and alternative routes our future plays as we grow in our society. It is not quite misanthropic, but provides skeptic views around human life itself, in examples such as the titles, but what may we say ourselves and the flock?,  and questions he proposes in other pieces. Within this show, he provides a distinct visual of how little we, as humans, really are, in which these curves of nature stand taller and stronger then we have been for centuries. We idolize these monuments throughout earth, while we simultaneously destroy them. This ironic analysis of nature's play within the avaricious mindset of the world today provides a start into deeper queries or fascination with the environment, especially considering current climate change worries. It proposes this idea, what if nature fought back, what if it already is? In, by reason of the high hills, the long green hills and thick wilderness juxtapose the wet, layered rocks that compete with the humans attention, the rocky wetlands win that battle, as the people consume nature's beautiful curves and ridges. The hard surfaces and towering landscapes devour the humans in, who stand miniscule compared to the surrounding land, enthralled by the natural entertainment of water rushing past, and the breeze through the rugged trees. A milky storm blue encloses this piece, as a film between the lives of the humans in the work, and the enjoyers of this piece. As the audience, we interrupt this moment between a family and the vast wilderness, becoming a part of the phenomenon once again, fascinated by the view we have been seduced by, unaware of our effect on the future of this landscape, or ignorant of our effects at the very least. The meandering and complex lines or curves in this show as well, which shape the pieces with its x-ray appearing layer in parts of the work, summons you in deeper, unsure if we are staring at a birds eye view of a lengthy canyon or the grips of a pterodactyls claws. The abstraction of the images provided in this show, allows Sternberg to reference and evolve common ideals and values of our cultural identity. It provides a memory you may relate with, or find yourself creating fictitious familial trips, yet also questioning the consciousness of people, and our ability to reflect on the intersectionality between the industrialization of the world, and the earth we have molded to our needs, for better or worse. How or will we depart from the trends of destruction we became attuned too? Sternberg pleases the eye with this work, and positively disrupts the human mind with fears we wish to avoid. Departed for the curve will be on view until July 30, 2022 at Praz Delavallade.

 
 

A Forsaken Place: Andrea Zittel's A-Z West Is A Laboratory For The Future →

Andrea Zittel
A-Z Wagon Station customized by Giovanni Jance
2003
Powder-coated steel, MDF, aluminum, Lexan,cushions, iPod Nano, headphones, solar iPod chargers
91 x 82 x 57 inches
© Andrea Zittel, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles


The desert is an unforgiving, but magnetic landscape. Agnes Pelton, Georgia O'Keeffe, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and many more artists have all been drawn to the desert of the American West. Its barrenness, its potential, its raw heat, its solitude, and liquid mirages all provide a contemplative and hot combination of all the right ecosystemic ingredients for artists to experiment and conceive of cosmic ideas. Even the word desert is alluring: it comes from the ecclesiastical Latin root desertum, which means a “forsaken” or “abandoned” place. Lately, though, the desert has become less a quirk of America’s multifold topography and more a frightening, but beautiful prelude to an arid, lifeless future on Earth. 

Andrea Zittel fits into the historical canon of artists lured to these forsaken and abandoned landscapes—abandoned by time and most botanic nature—but she isn’t so much a land artist as she is an artist of the land. Like the late artist and sculptor Noah Purifoy before her, Zittel is not a visitor—she is a guardian of the desert’s inexplicable potential as a testing ground for future civilizations who might live in a world that is going through a rapid process of what geologists call desertification.  According to scientists, over a third of the world is going through this process, and every year 120,000 square kilometers of land turns into an actual desert. Studies show that if global carbon emissions aren’t curbed, much of the Earth will become a desert by 2050. Read more. Originally published in Autre’s Biodiversity Issue, FW 2021

Dennis Osadebe Looks To Heritage For Answers To The Future In MODERN MAGIC @ König London

With the starting point of the influence of Black culture, the works of Dennis Osadebe’s MODERN MAGIC present themselves like a theatre filled with visual challenges and rich experimentation. Viewers are given a front-row seat to an unfolding show as Osadebe’s painted characters take on the role of performers captured amid moments of magic; their masks symbolic of divine protection. Abstracted architectural spaces are lit by variegated sources, along with exaggerated shadows, and heightened perspective, to create an atmosphere of a dreamlike stage. Drawing from a wellspring of metaphysical, Surrealist, and Renaissance painting, Osadebe conjures a realm where viewers can only question the location of the powers that be.

Lavish cultural motifs reflect Osadebe’s fascination with craftsmanship. References to the Magic 8 Ball are found throughout the paintings and act as a point of focus for Osadebe’s first-ever conceptually guided sculptural installation, with objects employed as vessels aimed at preservation. These include the traditional Nigerian fan — a ubiquitous, accessible object, necessary for everyday life — highlighted by a pristine, symbolic framing that celebrates its cultural significance. This one motif is exemplary for Osadebe’s take on preservation, which looks to heritage for answers to the future, consciously speaking of Blackness and its pivotal role in shaping contemporary culture.

Osadebe’s radical approach to self-portraiture manifests his philosophical basis for contemporary Nigerian art, fusing Western techniques and indigenous traditions to construct a new paradigm for the evolution of art. As said by prolific Nigerian painter Ben Enwonwu, “It is setting the clock back to expect that the art form of Africa today must resemble that of yesterday otherwise the former will not reflect the African image.”

MODERN MAGIC is on view though July 16 @ König London 259-269 Old Marylebone Road

Naima Green Performs Rituals Of Intimacy In "A Sequence for Squeezing" @ Baxter St In New York

A Sequence for Squeezing is a solo show of lens-based work by 2021 Baxter St Workspace Resident Naima Green. Featuring new and recent photographs, as well as a recent video work, the exhibition continues Green’s practice of collaborating with her community to create intimate portraits and record personal scenes of play, exploration, and pleasure. Focusing on the experiences of Black, Brown, and Queer individuals, the exhibition builds on and expands the themes of Green’s previous work, exploring water as a site for pleasure and freedom, the sensuality of enjoying food, and the rituals of intimacy. 

On the back wall of the exhibition, a giant vinyl double-exposed image of the Rockaways serves as the  backdrop for Green’s video work The Intimacy of Before. The Rockaways — and water — are an important  reoccurring site in Green’s life and work, and water is featured across much of her new work, even if as a  subtle suggestion. At Baxter St, the Rockaways frame Green’s intimate video self-portrait, a sensual  exploration of self the artist shot in her apartment during the early days of the COVID pandemic. The audio  from the video, including the sounds of waves and Green’s own voice, becomes a soundtrack to the exhibition  as a whole, asking, as she does in the video, “Is it too much to want a tender and complete intimacy?” 

A Sequence for Squeezing is on view through July 23 at 126 Baxter St

Suspended in Memory: Read Our Interview Of Veronica Fernandez →

Standing in front of Los Angeles-based artist Veronica Fernandez’s paintings you may start to feel as if you’re part of a fever dream or someone else’s past life regression. They are raw and autobiographical, a place where the viewer is invited to float through fragments of extremely personal memories while being entertained by the various textures and materials Fernandez has thoughtfully arranged in each work. There are painterly aspects that divide you from reality, yet it still feels as if you're walking into someone else's actual space and you’re welcome to stay as long as you’d like. 

The paintings are in essence a mapping of her family lineage, their struggles and their persistence captured through the lens of old photographs passed down from her grandmother. Through these photographs, Fernandez is navigating her own identity as it relates to her childhood and her closeness to family. She manipulates these images to tell a story of adolescence that most of us couldn’t comprehend and yet she finds strength in these memories, weaving them into a narrative about what it means to call somewhere home and to make a place for yourself. 

I visited Fernandez in her studio as she put the final touches on her first solo exhibition entitled When you hold onto my spirit, will you let your spirit grow?  at Sow & Tailor in Los Angeles. Read more.

Moving Past Giants: Read Our Interview Of Artist Devon DeJardin →

Devon Dejardin sits in front of a couch, arm resting on the cushion, looking into the camera.

text by Stella Peacock-Berardini

Devon Dejardin’s exploration of art may have started from the humble encouragement of a sugar daddy psychic, but it has grown into a journey of healing and reflection that continues to drive his success in the art world. Within his cubist-influenced style of work, Devon Dejardin, an LA-based painter, processes through the elements of life demanding answers to all of its most urgent lingering questions. Dejardin employs his work as a way to unpack and understand the entropic nature of the universe through his lens of belonging, going deeper into the storms he's faced that brought him to the clear sky of his creation. This 29-year-old, self-taught artist originating from Portland juggles depression and anxiety within the creative realm and expresses his gratitude for the therapeutic release his art supplies to himself and its viewers. His newest project, Giants dives into this preconceived idea of spirituality and shifts its narrative to his ideas surrounding the guardians of the world, those that protect, aid, and grow in strength and vulnerability within the boundaries of our world. His art, huge in size, mimics the ideas of giants and how they are commonly perceived, yet it develops further than that. These feelings, or challenges in life, such as sadness or grief materialize as giants, but represent the deception life can have on us all. We sat down with this artist to explore his influences, conceptions around his work as a whole, and his first New York solo exhibition at Albertz Benda. Read more.

How Do You See The Now: Read Our Interview Of Artist Jillian Mayer →

RACHEL ADAMS: When I think about your work, I often see objects that provide assistance. Slumpies help your body adjust to the onslaught of technological devices, sculptures that become flotation devices, and the works in our show TIMESHARE were prototypes for living in a future where you couldn’t go outside–a fountain that doubles as a hydroponic garden, blueprints for life underground, etc. How do you see this new glasswork fitting into the idea of assistance?

JILLIAN MAYER: I have always loved the appeal of any object that does more than one thing. Whether it be a mop that can convert to a broom, a reversible clothing item, or anything else that fits into the  “Well that’s not all…” rhetoric. I love to think of these items as suggestive and simultaneously insecure and self-aware of their limit if they could only be one thing… that objects have to try to justify their existence as well as place amongst your other objects. Along with pressure for us to perform many tasks, our items are not excused from this weight. There is only so much room in our lives so these objects plead the case for their acceptance. Read more.

Nadia Lee Cohen "HELLO, My Name Is" Opening At Jeffrey Deitch Gallery and Private Dinner in The Hollywood Hills

Friends gathered for the opening of Nadia Lee Cohen "HELLO, My Name Is,” the artist’s first major solo exhibition in the United States, now on view at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. After the opening, friends gathered at the home of Jeffrey Deitch in the Hollywood Hills for a private dinner. photographs by Aaron Sinclair, Becky Hearn and Myles Hendrik

Lust, Aliens and Summer Nights: Aryo Toh Djojo's Crepuscular World Stuns and Frightens

Aryo Toh Djojo’s world is a crepuscular world where the distant buzz of alien spacecraft whirs like a high voltage transformer, arcing between coils with the secret blue language of electricity. This is also the language of Djojo’s paintings, which were recently on view at Sow & Tailor in Los Angeles. They are hard to pin down, they are elusive and evocative, which makes them hit that spot between nostalgia and eroticism. This is your brain on UFOs, weed, and the hot magnesium flash of lust. Inside the hinterlands of Djojo’s hyper-realistic airbrushed canvases, there is the feeling of eternal summer, but also alien abduction, which could be seen as a metaphor for the amnesia of youth—for the forgetting of yesterday to live for today.

House & Garden Is A World Of Domestic Bliss @ Stroll Garden In Los Angeles

Conceived as a singular installation, House & Garden welcomes viewers into a home of domestic items rendered in clay by Analuisa Corrigan and a garden of working ceramic fountains by Lily Clark, complimented by live plant vignettes created by Alice Lam of A.L. BASA. In recontextualizing the familiar, the artists invite a moment of pause to reengage our senses and reconsider our relationship to often overlooked elements of the everyday, both domestic and elemental. Corrigan creates organic, figurative forms that unite material exploration and personal expression. Corrigan’s pieces are deceptively labor intensive, taking up to a month to make. After sketching and prototyping, each is carefully built up through a coil technique, then dried and sanded to achieve the desired silhouette. The resulting work feels simultaneously robust and delicate.

Whereas Corrigan works intuitively, Clark’s process embraces precision, reflecting her interest in engineering. After drafting a design, she rolls slabs of clay and cuts using a template, then carefully joins the seams. The surface is left unglazed to contrast with the water’s luster. For her large-scale fountains, Clark incorporates stones that she spent six months sourcing from the Whitewater quarry just outside of Palm Springs, fine tuning the design to achieve her desired water flow and sound. Clark’s fountains are arranged within an “indoor garden” by Alice Lam, whose Los Angeles-based creative studio A.L. BASA specializes in sculptural floral installations. Lam’s site-specific design references Buddhist Zen gardens created around works by Isamu Noguchi, as well as plants that are representative of California’s biodiversity. Immersive and temporal, House & Garden contemplates notions of interior and exterior — both somatic and psychological, experienced and subjective.

House & Garden is on view through June 11 @ Stroll Garden 7380 Beverly Boulevard.

 
 

Kate MccGwire Mines Tension Between Nature & the Manmade World In Undertow @ galerie Les filles du Calvaire in Paris

Known for her muscular, writhing forms made with feathers, and reminiscent of Classical sculpture and creatures from mythology, Kate MccGwire’s works explore dualities of aesthetics, being simultaneously seductive and repulsive; form, being both organic and abstract; and movement, appearing fluid yet being static. As she has noted, “I am interested in the interplay of opposites which runs like a leitmotif through everything I do. It is as if the work needs that tension to create its own internal equilibrium; it is an expression for me of the duality I see all around me and the materials I choose need to be able to physically embody this.”

Influenced by the cycles, patterns and currents of water, these works explore conflicting relationship between nature and the manmade world. Observing the dichotomies of nature on her daily wild swims and walks, MccGwire makes work inspired by visual rhythms and sequencing observed in flowing water, but also its rupture, control and diversion through human interference with dams and weirs.

The artist’s process of creation begins with the intense and repetitive method of collecting and preparing the feathers, each of them carefully examined and classified according to its size, shape and natural color. In a compelling and meditative process, MccGwire arranges the feathers to mimic the overall form and patterning of the pieces informed and inspired by the anatomy of birds’ wings. Discarded, impermanent and overlooked materials have always fascinated the artist. In her piece TAINT she contrasted lead sheet with intricately arranged feathers, creating an anaemic, skin-like surface. In the visceral forms of UNDERTOW, the artist is seduced by the beauty, flow, power and turbulence of flowing water and ultimately drawn to the danger that lies beneath the surface.

Undertow is on view through May 7 @ galerie Les filles du calvaire 17 rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, 75003 Paris

 
The Artist holding a feather in her hand and sitting over an art piece.

Kate MccGwire
Making of SASSE/SLUICE, 2018
Photo : Jo Scott

 

Linda Stojak Paints Memories Like Ghosts In It's ok to do nothing @ Lowell Ryan Projects In Los Angeles

 
 

Linda Stojak’s It’s ok to do nothing is a series of solitary female figures painted in an ambiguous space between identity and anonymity. While personal in nature, these works allow for a range of interpretation and emotional response. Stojak’s works conjure a feeling of remembrance and the uncertainty that can come when time has passed—layers of memory that shift with a perspective that only age and time can bring. They are enigmatic renderings of women, lushly executed and textured by the build up of paint—methodical applications with the palette knife, layers of washes, and considered brushstrokes. A kind of burnishing effect emerges that creates a luminous glow in the surfaces. Each painting provides a journey for the viewer, but within the realm of this expressionist figurative painter there is also the emergence of a portrait—unfinished, evolving and transforming. Stojak’s figures are often incomplete in nature. The eyes, or often the whole face, smudged or blurred creating a feeling of recalling the memory of a loved one, while the shape of the hair, the color of lipstick or gesture of the body remain—a floating image or “stillness” as Stojak says. “These paintings deal with moments in time where you cannot move forward and you cannot move backward.” The figures read less as individuals, but instead as timeless memories that hover on the canvas like ghosts.

It’s ok to do nothing is on view through May 7 @ Lowell Ryan Projects 4619 W. Washington Boulevard.

Transmundane Economies: Queerness, Spirituality & Heritage Overlap in the Work of Theodoulos Polyviou →

 
 

Theodoulos Polyviou is an artist whose practice explores the multilayered spaces where queerness, spirituality, and cultural heritage overlap across physical and digital worlds. Often utilizing virtual reality (VR) technology, Theo’s work also features architectural and sculptural elements, text, and sound, resulting in installations that are at once intellectually deep and sensuous to experience. He has participated in numerous exhibitions and residencies throughout Europe, and has a forthcoming project in Lecce, Italy, later this year. I met Theo on the occasion of his recent exhibition Transmundane Economies at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, where he has pursued a long-term artist residency. As an art critic, I’m usually hesitant and skeptical regarding the experience of art in virtual reality. But I found how Theo uses VR in Transmundane Economies to construct a “ritual space” that conjoins queerness, religion, and Cypriot cultural heritage to be profound and compelling. So I’ve met with him again to find out more. Read more.