Analia Saban Explores the Intersection of Humanity and Technology in Synthetic Self @ Sprüth Magers and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles

Analia Saban, Flow Chart: Drawing a Hand, 2023. All images courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers.

text by Mia Milosevic

Analia Saban’s Synthetic Self ventures into the human instinct to quantify virtually everything. The exhibition—a unique two-part feature with different showings at Sprüth Magers and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery—encompasses nearly all aspects of technology's intersection with human civilization…from the heating of the universe to pornography. The mechanization of the world is intricately realized in her work, where minneal entities of the everyday are applied to the AI-entrenched craze of the present. 

Upon entry to Sprüth Magers—the site of the first half of Saban’s exhibition–and my first encounter with her work, the contrast between black-and-white coloration seems unapproachable, sterile, even unnerving. The work is, at first glance, not captivating and evidently not meant to be—that’s not the point. As we explore the nuances of natural phenomena we are simultaneously led to blend in with it. We become embedded in the mechanics of life and come to find out that this is actually our perpetual resting state.

To the left of the entrance at Sprüth Magers are rows of tapestries, detailed and glistening with copper thread which consecutively form the same shape as the marble structure residing on the floor of each room in the exhibition—it’s a computer fan. Its intended purpose is explained by the name, but what it symbolically represents in Saban’s exhibition is the cooling of the planet and broader stratosphere. It serves to comment on what has actually become the center of our universe, and what has the power to fix it. This allegory to climate change is present throughout the entirety of the exhibition, using technology as an emblematic resource with which to further delve into the problematic nuances of society. The computer fan is also symbolic of what powers contemporary life. This specific sculpture is equal in power to the engine it depicts. 

 
 

Saban seeks to replicate the encyclopedic age, invoking an omnipotent approach to nature. But there’s a lot of irony in this—she’ll never be able to define all of the variables. What characterizes this omnipotence to nature is the compulsive human tendency to quantify and define it. Saban’s work poses a multitude of questions, but seeks to answer none–this is the beauty of her work. What does it mean when a serious academic takes a selfie with a mouse filter? Saban’s work is filled with these kinds of satirical dichotomies. Her self-portrait of internet log-ins is another example of the individual identity we have inevitability entrenched in the technological realm; there’s an extreme absence of privacy, and invasive expectation to share. 

Images of the quotidian are almost all wrapped in the grid overlay that is quintessential of photoshop. Upon closer inspection, these figurative panels are full of errors–extra body parts and augmented facial features. She even includes an AI-generated “deep fake” of her own face. We see the world through the lens it’s run by. Saban’s art informs everyday life in simple terms. Not one image is spared the obstruction of a technological interface—of AI’s recognizable touch. It’s interesting to see the interplay between human nature and the artificial; to see how human instinct folds into the context of the invented. Even though the human instinct Saban depicts is the urge to quantify, define, explain, understand, her work actually achieves the opposite.

Synthetic Self is reminiscent of an iPhone, with the exhibition at Sprüth Magers being the front of the phone, and the one at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery being the back. The front represents a more human aspect, pervaded mostly by our own instinctual habits. The back represents the consumption of energy; it’s the burnt out crevice of humanity and the promiscuities that are hidden in our private browser. 

Upon entry to the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, a series of computer circuits rendered in thick printer’s ink line the walls. Historical computer graphic cards are engraved with their countries of origin; this is where the natural and manmade come head-to-head. These variant computer parts highlight the global effort towards intelligent development. Embedded within each work is the irony of our reality in coexistence with worldwide industry—our rather insignificant role in the broader technological stratum becomes abundantly clear. 

The very last portion of the exhibition is pornographic—incorporating one of the most provocative uses of the innovation that rules the world. Images of black-and-white penises harbor a small squarespace, all of them slightly obstructed by different forms of measurement or anatomical labeling. The involvement of measurement is at its most satirical in this context, where the urge to quantify and define appears all the more trivial. The finale of the exhibition reverberates its most intriguing purpose, which is to unveil the inner-workings of the most up-to-date status of human instinct. 

Analia Saban, Cooling Rack (4 x 4), 2023.

Synthetic Self is on view through October 28 @ Sprüth Magers and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Rose Wylie Captures Atemporal Resonances in CLOSE, not too close @ David Zwirner Los Angeles

Rose Wylie Spindle and Cover Girl, 2022 © Rose Wylie Photo by Jack Hems Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Rose Wylie’s CLOSE, not too close presents a group of canvases that evoke in the viewer a feeling of immediacy, each depicting Wylie’s observation of a particular moment that is atemporal yet also grounded in her everyday existence.

Wylie has become known for her uniquely recognizable, colorful, and exuberant compositions that at first glance appear aesthetically simplistic, not seeming to align with any discernible style or movement, but on closer inspection are revealed to be wittily observed and subtly sophisticated meditations on the nature of visual representation itself. The artist has long been interested in exploring perspectival and compositional strategies other than—and along with—traditional Renaissance perspective, frequently making numerous iterations of a given motif as a means of advancing her formal investigation. Working in both single- and multi-panel formats, she regularly juxtaposes apparently disparate imagery, creating visual rhymes and resonances that coalesce into a unified composition. As curator Tanja Boon aptly notes, Wylie’s “paintings exemplify the artist’s ability to absorb powerful impressions from her immediate surroundings. They also illustrate her broad knowledge of cultural production, spanning popular and cliche styles as well as underexamined and non-Western visual traditions.”

CLOSE, not too close is on view through October 14 @ David Zwirner, 612 North Western Avenue, Los Angeles

EJ Hauser Reclaims the Natural and Technological Aesthetics of Language in 'Song of Summer' @ Haverkampf Leistenschneider in Berlin

 
 

Most of us are so used to reading that we forget that each letter is a shape and each word is a composition. The type we read every day–in emails and books, on packaging and signs–has a significant aesthetic dimension. U.S. artist EJ Hauser has adopted graphic and typographic strategies for their philosophical purposes and works, revealing a new view of what we no longer see in everyday life among all the texts. EJ Hauser’s quasi-abstract, fabric-like paintings are composed of layers of pixels, text fragments, and chimerical figures that refer to networks both in nature and the plant world, as well as to digital systems and interconnections in our human communication world. For them, letters form a sculptural framework, a compositional structure that sometimes dissolves into pure text images, sometimes leads to text in combination with images, or sometimes is buried under successive layers of paint. Some are very explicit, others require a closer look to find the spine and curves of different letters jumbled together to dissolve the boundary between word and image, mixed with chimerical figures and totemic symbols representing the interconnectedness of life on earth. EJ Hauser is interested in the Wood Wide Web, the complex subterranean web on the planet. Plant communication takes place via the mycelium, a network of microscopic fungi beneath the forest floor, through which information is exchanged. This is not unlike the way we are connected today through our cell phones, social media, and the “invisible” Internet.

Song of Summer is on view through October 14th at Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Mommsenstraße 67, 10629 Berlin.

Somerset House Studios presents Sonya Dyer’s first major London solo show: Three Parent Child

Somerset House Studios resident Sonya Dyer undertakes a new commission to be presented throughout the River Rooms from 29th September, marking the artist's first solo exhibition in London. 

The installation, Three Parent Child, will be the final stage of Dyer’s Andromeda trilogy, as part of her ongoing project Hailing Frequencies Open. HFO reimagines the history and radical potential of human space travel, exploring the intersections between scientific enquiry and science fiction. Sonya weaves influences including Star Trek, the legacy of HeLa cells, and mythology, to engage with ongoing conversations around monumentalism, memory and the role of speculation. Three Parent Child features two works: Action>Potential, and Lucy.

The title Three Parent Child takes its name from the recent scientific development of Mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT), a new technique that incorporates DNA from three people to create a child, which mirrors Dyer’s adherence to trilogies throughout her practice. Whilst in residence at the Studios, Sonya Dyer’s research has been supported as part of the King’s College London x Somerset House Studios Programme.


’Three Part Child’ will be on view through November 12th at Somerset House Studios, Somerset House, Strand, London

‘Genetic Automata’ By Larry Achiampong and David Blandy @ Wellcome Collection In London

Larry Achiampong & David Blandy
GOD MODE 2023

This June, Welcome Collection will present Genetic Automata, a major exhibition of collaborative video works by artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, exploring race and identity in an age of avatars, videogames and ancestry DNA.

The exhibition will present a series of four films exploring scientific racism – the false belief that there are innate differences and abilities between races. It will reflect on where deeply ingrained ideas about race come from and the role that science has played in shaping these perceptions. The series highlights how scientific racism is reproduced in contemporary society, from education to healthcare, science, politics and more.

Genetic Automata at Wellcome Collection will allow visitors for the first time to view the four video installations together, unpacking the relationship between science and race injustice through the artists ’lens. It will premiere the latest work of the series _GOD_MODE_ (2023), a co-commission between Wellcome Collection, Black Cultural Archives (BCA), and Wellcome Connecting Science.

Each film employs a spoken word soundtrack and includes imagery drawn from contemporary video games, in particular those with dystopian sci-fi plots that feature the misuse of genetic material. The series begins with A Terrible Fiction (2019), which addresses the complex history of classification, categorization and segregation. It references the history of the theory of evolution and highlights the figure of John Edmonstone, a formerly enslaved Black man living in Edinburgh who taught Charles Darwin taxidermy – but whose contribution to science remains largely unacknowledged.

‘Genetic Automata’ is on view through February 11th at Welcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London

Berlin Atonal Combines Ritual, Installation, and Performance in an Exploration of Ephemerality

 

Florentina Holzinger
Etúde for Church (2023)
Image credit: Mayra Wallraff

 

Berlin Atonal immerses audiences in constant states of change and fluctuating intensity, where seemingly static artworks defy any rigidity. In Florentina Holzinger’s Études, stunt effects meet the world of music to create scores for bodies as instruments. At Atonal, the artist presents Étude For Church, a performance in which a two-ton iron bell is asked to ‘call in the canonical hours, summon tempests and awake the sleeping soul’.

Bridget Polk
Reclaimed Damages (2023)
Image credit: Frankie Casillo

Bridget Polk will be present throughout the exhibition, reconfiguring Reclaimed Damages by assembling precarious sculptural forms over time, in dialogue with the audience and other works in the exhibition that manifest in ephemeral reflections on the past, present, and personal.

Mire Lee
Installation view
Image Credit: Frankie Casillo

Mire Lee has created a hanging fabric installation, where worn-out, torn, and ripped fabrics are dipped in viscous liquid clay. Over the course of its exhibition, the clay absorbed by the "skin" of the work will be slowly thinned down by water. It promises a misty viscerality as a space to question human fantasies of technologies that contradict the realities of subjects that decay and deform through time.

Cyprien Gaillard
Absorbent Figure (2023)
Image courtesy of artist

Cyprien Gaillard’s "Absorbent Figure" is based on an existing object found by the artist at the Kijk-Kubus-museum house in Rotterdam. While the meaning of the statue is widely debated, the design is similar to the ‘weeping Buddha,’ and one interpretation is that those who touch it will feel a mysterious alleviation of their sorrows. With its new industrial skin, the figure sits outside Kraftwerk amidst those gathering, taking part in the collective experiences of music and nightlife.

Atonal features visual art and concert nights intermittently through 9/17 at Köpenicker Str. 70, 10179 Berlin.

Augustas Serapinas Excavates Nostalgia from Discarded Houses in Roof from Rūdninkai @ Klosterruine Berlin

 

Augustas Serapinas 
Roof from Rūdninkai (2023)
Installation view Klosterruine Berlin
Photo: Juan Saez

 

For his exhibition Roof from Rūdninkai, Augustas Serapinas produces a new expansive sculpture that takes its point of departure in a deserted house in rural Lithuania. The artist continues exploring his interest in questions of how space is constituted, how it reflects lived realities, and what memories are inscribed in it. Serapinas often finds the material for his sculptural interventions through online classified ads, where entire houses are given away on the condition that all materials be removed from the owners’ property. From these discarded materials he reconstructs sometimes recognizable objects such as a roof or a wall, sometimes more abstract artworks that open into a dialogue with the history of minimal art. In contrast to the use of anonymous industrial materials, Serapinas’s wooden elements and shingles bear clear markers of history, place, and use.

Roof from Rūdninkai is on view through September 17th at Klosterruine Berlin, Klosterstraße 73a, 10179 Berlin.

Aubrey Levinthal Explores the Absurdity of Existence in Tourist @ M+B Gallery in Los Angeles

Aubrey Levinthal, Airport, 2022. Courtesy of the Artist and M+B, Los Angeles.

M+B presents Aubrey Levinthal’s Tourist, an escapade into the accumulated mundane which breeds an entire life. Levinthal’s paintings take the strangeness of every-day encounters as their muse, cataloging the soft melancholy of a life in transit with a diaristic sense of levity.

At once both insider and outsider, Levinthal’s figures arrest the slippery interplay between the lonely voyeurism of the tourist and the studied absurdity of feeling like a stranger in one’s own home, collapsing any strict distinction between the two and exposing the mutable oddity of being at once both perceived and perceptive of others in public space.

In an almost paradoxical fashion, Levinthal employs restraint as a tool for arresting rich complexity. She deliberately whittles away at charged dynamism and linear storytelling until only the formal structure of the scene itself remains, forcing the space of each painting to turn in on itself with a sense of contemplative surprise. In the absence of heavy-handed action or emotion, the viewer is left to sit with the charming discomfort of a pure exchange of outward gazes, passing back and forth between both Levinthal’s figures and the viewer themself in a quietly kaleidoscopic ricochet of glances.

Tourist is on view through October 7 @ M+B, 612 N Almont Drive, Los Angeles

Revisiting Summer Dreams: Four Exhibitions in Nordrein Westfahlen, Germany

Illiberal Lives, installation view, Ludwig Forum Aachen, 2023. Photo: Mareike Tocha

text by Lara Schoorl

Once known for its booming post-war mining industry, Germany’s Nordrein Westfahlen region has since developed into a thriving art hub (the last coal mine closed in 2018). With Art Cologne forming out of Kunstmarkt Köln in 1967, a host of academies and contemporary art institutions generating dialogue, and the city cluster (including Düsseldorf, Essen, Cologne, and Wuppertal) taking a central position in West Europe’s post war art world, the Ruhr Region is a hidden cultural oasis. While arguably operating in the shadows of larger art attractions, such as documenta, Manifesta, the Venice Biennale, Art Basel and its satellite fairs nearby, as well as the Berlin art scene, these four exhibitions in the river’s valley were a breath of fresh air during the market driven Basel week and the following summer lull in the commercial art world. 

Etel Adnan: Poetry of Colors at K20 (Kunstsammlung NRW), Düsseldorf

Etel Adnan in her studio in Paris, 2014. © Galerie Lelong & Co.

Hot, 1960 Oil on canvas, 51 x 40,5 cm Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022 Photo: Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris

It is hard to put into words how much sense the work of Etel Adnan makes, her art and her poetry, and how they are connected. How the lines of letters in her handwriting become the onset of shapes we see in her paintings. How she wrote in multiple languages, alternating between them, in proximity to one another; Adnan shows their perceived differences while keeping them as part of one connected form of expression. As such, the work in its various forms epitomizes the essence of a human life and its multitude of contexts. The unique narrative of an individual and the relationships connected to her, the places she knew both real and imagined, the politics she stood by, and the materials her hands beguiled. And then, there is just the pure beauty of color, often circling out of the squares centered in her paintings that reference the sun: light, the original facilitator of color. Like her work, this exhibition was a lasting gift; it followed a retrospective at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam last summer and hopefully will continue to find future iterations around the world. 

Illiberal Lives at Museum Ludwig Forum, Aachen

Illiberal Lives, installation view, Ludwig Forum Aachen, 2023. Photo: Mareike Tocha

Illiberal Lives, a continuation of the 2021 Illiberal Arts at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, extends the conversation about present day liberalism in society and questions the freedom of liberal promises of progress, revealing its “unfreedom” instead. It is an exhibition that keeps unfolding, visually and conceptually, post visit, triggering as much thinking as viewing. Upon entering the museum, one enters five large installations by Henrike Naumann and is completely immersed by nationalistic German design. While it initially seemed off-balance to have five installations of such scale by one artist in a group show, this dense core, which also includes works from the museum collection selected by the artist, forms a conceptual map for the exhibition overall. While it is dense, central and arguably local, Naumann’s presentation is so far and wide, it carries the weight and narratives of all other works, reverberating well beyond the museum walls into ancient and current histories. Melika Ngombe Kolongo’s work Nzita Dia Nza (2022), literally spirals out from the edge of Naumann’s installations in the central hall and into another gallery. Small mounds of earth holding metallic sculptures, a cassette recorder, and small plants form a divine route rooted in ancient Congolese geomantic practices that lead us to a video installation, Invisible Gestures (2022), and dovetail Kolongo’s practice as a DJ with her visual art through sound, drawing, the body, and nature. An interdisciplinary practice continues in this same gallery with Bassem Saad’s videos and prints. Concise and beautifully written textual fragments overlay visual landscapes of Beirut in the films and perhaps of Berlin, Marseille, and Eastern Mediterranean places in the prints. The series of prints Suppose that Rome is not a human habitation (2022-23) are poems from anonymous locales, or at least a word from elsewhere that holds the power to influence the future of its destination or recipient by expanding their view. Saad’s video works, Kink Retrograde (2022) and Congress of Idling Persons (2021) rooted in specific events, do not only inform us of what happened––the October 2019 Lebanese uprising, the aftermath of the 2020 explosion in Beirut, the murder of George Floyd––their imagery form the context of the lives of the speakers in the film, how it formed and influenced their personal existence within community and the potential of alternative futures. The exhibition goes into a hundred directions through art from the 20th and 21st centuries referencing multiple wars, murders, and trials. It creates and untangles myths, it is through those myths that love, beauty and hope, an array of ingredients for the future persist, and is precisely as well where freedom can be found or can be narrated into existence, some day.   

Jenny Holzer at K21 (Kunstsammlung NRW), Düsseldorf

Exhibition view: JENNY HOLZER, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany, 2023 © 2023 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Photo: Achim Kukulies

Spread across multiple galleries, Jenny Holzer brings information we (may) have heard before right in front of us (again); on a large scale, in speaking colors and materials. In isolated and personal bouts we are confronted with a variety of history’s atrocities. Upstairs we see formerly classified documents from US government institutions––now available, although redacted, through the Freedom of Information Act––about prison camp tortures, crime against civilians, and military operations in Iraq. The size of the works fits the weight of the knowledge they carry. Blown up, Holzer’s Redaction Series (2005-) of paintings and silkscreens not only puts a looking glass on isolated events, but in doing so, they shine light on the information that is kept in the dark. The application of metal leafing onto the silk screens and oil paintings echo an aesthetic of weapons, ballistics, and dog tags; but the munition these works carry is a call to the freedom of knowledge. Downstairs, all walls of the gallery are covered with Holzer’s Inflammatory Essay (1979-82), posters that immerse the viewer in hundreds of the hundred-word manifestos on politics, gender, violence, and, of course, abuse of power. Despite an overwhelming entry of color and messaging, the space conveys a solemn feeling, accumulating with every text that one reads, but instilled instantly and visually through seventeen of the red granite Survival benches, reminiscent of tombstones and placed in a circle holding engraved phrases that float between promise and discomfort. The curatorial decision to place two floors between Jenny Holzer’s earlier work downstairs and more recent work upstairs provides an inevitable but necessary pause in viewing and processing the weight of almost every word in every work. 

Protect Protect metal, 2023 24 gold, moon gold, platinum, palladium and red gold leaf and oil on linen 79 x 102.25 in. / 200.7 x 259.7 cm Text: US government document © 2023 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Photo: Sveva Costa Sanseverino

Ruhr Ding: Schlaf, at Urbane Künste Ruhr 

Ruhr Ding Schlaf Nora Turato who wants to tell her 2023 c Henning Rogge

The final iteration of the public art exhibition trilogy Ruhr Ding, fittingly, titled Schlaf closed this summer following Ruhr Ding: Territorien (2019) and Ruhr Ding: Klima (2021). The exhibitions, organized out of Urbane Künste Ruhr are the brainchild of Britta Peters, who has brought together artists from all over the world as well as local artists to speak to universally experienced themes in the geographical context of the small but economically, financially, and culturally influential Ruhr Region. The theme of Schlaf (or in English sleep) represents a criticism of the capitalist clock. Through the contradictory and modern idea of the eight-hour night and eight-hour work day, resting itself has become a commodity and is applied in order to maintain productivity. The works in Schlaf are scattered throughout the Southern and more quiet area of the Ruhr Region, in the cities of Essen, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Witten, and Gelsenkirchen-Erle––these were feared to become ghost towns after the closing of the mines. While the previous iterations of Ruhr Ding were connected to the soil and the air, Schlaf brings us to the body. Of course, the body is inherently connected and dependent on both soil and air, and so, dialogues with the locale and its political and environmental crises continue in Schlaf as well—to such a degree that connections to sleep are at times far-fetched. Often, instead of sleep, however, we encounter a response to its absence, the night, or in a broader understanding, acts of (self-)care. And, often the angles were utopic, providing a “dream” for an alternative future. Sleep thus came into the conversation via its various interpretations and associations that arose in the particular public spaces where the works found a temporary home. Nora Turato created an ASMR-like audio installation in Witten’s Schwesternpark, a former hospital garden, that encouraged listeners to not “just do something, [but] stand there,” for example. While the reversal of meaning of this well-known phrase initially makes one smirk, upon hearing it several times it begins to lose its meaning altogether. Only the monotone but inviting voice of the artist remains, the sound becoming a mantra. Elsewhere in Witten, in a cultural center, Melanie Manchot showed a new film, Liquid Skin; the viewer closely follows multiple people, one at a time, at night, always with their back towards the camera, as they walk through distinct yet unrecognizable buildings. It is as if they are sleepwalking and we are in a state of submission, following them in a near trance, glued to the screen and in anticipation of the end of this dream or nightmare. But, there are instances in which sleep is very literally present, such as in the must-see idiosyncratic Museum für Fotokopie in Mulheim. For Schlaf, the museum opened the exhibition We’re Closing. Taken from the advertising slogan often used by competing mattress stores to drive up sales, the show presented bed linens, pillows, and pajamas onto which various artists had copied their art, including copy artist Klaus Urbons and David Hockney.

Ruhr Ding Schlaf Melanie Manchot 2023 Liquid Skin c Henning Rogge

Ruhr Ding Schlaf Melanie Manchot 2023 Liquid Skin c Henning Rogge

The Gelatinous Abjection of Mire Lee's Black Sun @ New Museum in New York Invariably Turns Us On

“Mire Lee: Black Sun,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum.
Photo: Dario Lasagni

text by Hannah Sage Kay


Entering Mire Lee’s installation at the New Museum—passing through plastic strip curtains into a moist, greenhouse-like environment—seems, I can only imagine, like a trip up a vaginal canal. It recalls one time that, in warm, sud-less water, I looked down to see a brownish-red gelatinous mass emerge between my legs. With an ovular center and porous, mane-like tentacles, it moved, not in a bloody mess, but as a neatly self-contained collection of blood clots and uterine lining. The wet porous fabric that lines the plastic walls of Lee’s installation recalls this same murky, brown fluid that accompanies the expulsion of an egg and, not at all coincidentally, overlarge egg sacks dangle from the ceiling, entwined with rope, metal chains, and what looks like a prematurely formed exoskeleton.

Strange whirring, rotating devices—simultaneously technological and organic—churn in mud-filled recesses of the grated metal floor below. One such contraption wound with sodden, fleshy cables rotates over a pool of dense brown liquid: a loose member makes a distinctly phallic flop; an art handler man-handles the entrails; a viewer becomes a casualty of the splash impact—its localization on the front of his pants unveiling the very male shame at the heart of all female subjugation. A cum shot to the patriarchy? A territorial spraying? A cyborgian golden shower? However you spin it, I like to think the installation staked its claim, via a forced confrontation with those bodily functions and oft-taboo fluids that make up the stuff of all life and sex, feces and death.

This pseudo-maturation chamber, in all its arousing repulsiveness, posits the female body as the original site of body-horror as a genre and sexual stimulant—not because any real violence has occurred, but rather because violence is inextricably associated with the female experience: vaginas tear in childbirth, babies emerge as purple as eggplants, walking down the street is a physical liability. And yet, the genius of Lee’s installation is its unabashed admission that depravity is sexy. It recalls those paraphiliac misadventures recounted in Georges Bataille’s The Story of the Eye, where omorashi fetishism and corporeal mutilation are the result of adolescent musings; it simultaneously transports you inside an episode from Star Trek: Enterprise, wherein Captain Archer develops an obsessive interest in the unhatched Xindi-Insectoid eggs hanging from the ceiling of an abandoned ship after one sprays him with a neurotoxin. What is, there, a simple illustration of the chemically-induced power of maternal instincts and the resulting shame when those same instincts are displayed by a man, here manifests as a voracious unease: the uncanny pleasure and discomfort of an unfulfilled orgasm.

Titled after Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun, Lee’s installation extends Kristeva’s characterization of melancholia to the asshole and all its attendant forms as another forbidden, shameful, non-speakable void in which language and symbology no longer function, but that same characterization can, it seems, engulf our prescribed and highly shielded perspectives of the female body. So, while many may simply be disgusted by Lee’s exhibition and what it stands for, I instead see a feminist refusal to quiet those life-giving functions that in the secret recesses of the mind invariably turn us on.

 
 

Artist Mario Ayala Curates 176 Artists For Group Shoe 3 At House Of Seiko in San Francisco

Image courtesy of House of Seiko.

House of Seiko is currently presenting Group Shoe 3, a group exhibition curated by Mario Ayala featuring work by 176 artists from his community of friends and collaborators.

This is the third iteration of Ayala’s group show series (the last occurring at Public Access in New York, opening the same week as his solo show at Jeffrey Deitch), and features artists working in various mediums, scales, and at various points in their careers. 

Ayala writes that “it's been important to me to highlight my community and the people who have been alongside me during my time as an artist, whether they are childhood friends or new acquaintances. It's been a steady reason to celebrate and gather together in new spaces.”

An additional layer of personal importance comes from the fact that San Francisco is where Ayala began to focus as an artist, where he completed his undergrad degree at SFAI and had some of his first exhibitions, and now, his first institutional show. 

Group Shoe 3 is on view through September 17 @ House of Seiko, 3109 22nd Street, San Francisco, CA

Read Our Interview of Artist Emma Webster Ahead of Her Upcoming Exhibition @ Jeffrey Deitch →

Emma Webster
The Rehearsal (Harvest Moon) (2023)
60 x 84 in
Oil on linen

How does one go about staging a stage? Emma Webster’s upcoming exhibition, Intermission at Jeffrey Deitch, answers this question by erasing the line between prop and (back)stage. This boundary erasure is nothing new for Webster, whose work combines the supernatural, unnatural, and natural realms, merging this paradoxical triad into a cohesive, uncanny space that reflects the inescapable presence of human viewership on nature and art. Her landscapes exist in a variety of intermediary spaces: between heaven and horror, nature and technology, fiction and reality, and theater and visual art. In Intermission, she gives physicality to these liminalities while highlighting previously behind-the-scenes sculptural stages of her process, creating an environment of borderless voyeurism that invites us, the viewers, into her creative world, while reminding us of our separation from it, reinforcing our roles as witnesses. Read more.

Photographs by "Kids" Lensman Eric Alan Edwards Exhibited for the First Time in Tokyo

Whippets marks the first solo exhibition by photographer Eric Alan Edwards on view at the Galerie Hideout at Mustard Hotel Shibuya. For the first time, ten of Edwards’ photographs, taken during the production of Kids in the late ’90s, are shaped into a non-linear photostory and presented as part of a larger installation documenting that era and Edwards’ process.

Edwards worked as the lensman on Larry Clark’s debut feature narrative film, Kids. As Edwards was filming the movie, he simultaneously captured and chronicled the unfolding history, scene by scene.

In the golden age of independent cinema, Edwards took it upon himself to intuitively photograph the world in front of him, an act he has carried on since age ten. What is uncanny about the artworks is how they question what is cinematic, what is real, or what actually took place during the making of this storied American film.

Accompanying the exhibition is various ephemera including movie artifacts, as well as documents of the creative process of Edwards’ involvement in the film-making process that work alongside the artwork to offer a new glimpse into both the subculture and his artistic process, reflecting life, passion, and craft.

Whippets is on view through September 11 @ Galerie Hideout at Mustard Hotel Shibuya
1 Chome-29-3 Higashi, Shibuya City, Tokyo 

Moki Cherry: Here and Now @ Institute of Contemporary Arts In London

Moki Cherry
Malkauns Raga 1973
Textile appliqué
235x190cm
Courtesy of Artist


Here and Now displays over 30 artworks and archival material of Moki Cherry including works that have never been shown in the UK. The exhibition celebrates her exploration of where art and life meet, her collaborative and interdisciplinary practice, and her inventive resolve in the face of gendered challenges working both as an artist and mother – issues which remain pertinent to artists and audiences today. Drawn entirely from the Estate of Moki Cherry, this exhibition presents a rare chance for the public to view these privately held works, which remain preciously cared for by her family.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by an untitled drawing, an abstracted figure with arms outstretched embracing the words ‘Here & Now’ against a cloudlike landscape alongside a star and birds. It reflects the artist’s longstanding study and practice of Buddhism and its teachings which focus on being in the present, rather than dwelling on the past or speculating on the future. Characteristic of Moki’s playful use of language, it recalls her jazz musician husband Don Cherry’s 1976 album Hear & Now, for which Moki designed the cover using appliqué and collage.

Moki Cherry: Here and Now is on display through September 3rd at the Institute of Contemporary Arts at The Mall, St. James's, London

The Corporeal Grotesque Proposes A New Relationship to Social Justice In Gil Yefman's "It Ain't Necessarily Soft" @ Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles

All images courtesy of the artist and Shoshana Wayne Gallery.

In his debut solo exhibition It Ain’t Necessarily Soft at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Gil Yefman exhibits sculptural and two-dimensional installations created over the past decade. Yefman’s practice explores a unique artistic language defined by brightly colored knitted sculptures of grotesque, fluid, multi-organ beings. The knitted work becomes an extension of the body, and felting becomes a memorialization of the experiences held within that body. Though knitting and felting are commonly associated with female, queer, and domestic tasks that would traditionally fall into a strictly decorative category, Yefman redefines them into works that honor a memory within the individual to provide a sense of justice and new presence in the world. These soft objects that were once read as defense mechanisms representing a vulnerable or threatened body are transformed into a new relationship with social injustices.

It Ain’t Necessarily Soft is on view through September 15 @ Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 5247 W Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90016

Tomás Saraceno In Collaboration: Webs Of Life @ Serpentine In London

Tomás Saraceno
Cloud Cities: Species of Spaces and Other Pieces*, 2023
Three clouds with cohabitational spaces for thirteen species and...
Courtesy the House Sparrow, Blue Tit, Robin, Starling, Barn Owl, Jackdaw, Great tit, Wren, Yorkshire Terrier,Domestic Short-hair Cat, Red Squirrel, Solitary Bees, Butterflies... with Tomas Saraceno

From 1 June to 10 September 2023, Serpentine will present Web(s) of Life, the first major exhibition in the UK of artist Tomas Saraceno and collaborators, including spider/webs; the communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc, Argentina; spider diviners in Somit\ Cameroon; the ongoing research-driven community projects Aeroceneand Arachnophilia initiated by the artist; as well as the life forms of the Royal Parks.

Tomas Saraceno will create a porous environment where Serpentine's building and operations will respond daily to the immediate landscape of the surrounding park and weather conditions. It will bring together new and recent interactive works to propose how it is possible to take a more responsible, and responsive, approach to one's actions in relation to other people, interspecies co-habitation, and the climate injustices unfolding across the world. Challenging the ways in which exhibitions are conceived and enacted, Web(s) of Life will become a 'living organism' that responds to the weather outside and the gallery's unique location in the biodiverse habitat of the park and beyond.

Saraceno is a multimedia artist, who for more than two decades has produced a body of work that draws attention to our role in a complex network of relationships that make up an ecosystem. Web(s) of Life at Serpentine will delve into the many ways in which life forms, extractive technologies, and energy regimes are inextricably linked to climate injustice.

Tomás Saraceno
The birds will keep calling you, 2023
Twenty-one repurposed wood and glass cabinets, minerals, tokens, mobile phones, low consumption LEDs
Courtesy of Artist

Tomás Saraceno In Collaboration: Webs Of Life is on view until September 10th at the Serpentine at Serpentine South Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA

Niki de Saint Phalle's Tableaux éclatés Is a Posthumous Ballad to Her Beloved Jean Tinguely

text by Barbara Norton

"Hymn of love. Cannibalism. Communion. 
Jean - I devour you. I absorb your strength. Your soul joins mine. 
Breakdown, movement, now belong to me too. 
Waiting for the breakdown, waiting for Godot, waiting for the mishap, life.
I am even looking forward to the breakdown (perhaps to experience the infinite joy of things working again).
Through my new works, Jean, we continue to collaborate. You are present even if these paintings don't look like you. 
ORDER. CHAOS. CONCRETE. ABSTRACT. COMPOSITION. DECOMPOSITION. ETERNAL RETURN.
These ideas took shape in my mind through intuition.
My first subject was Hindu deity Ganesh, bearer of luck and happiness. 
The 'tableaux éclatants' have become my pals, my companions.
A photoelectric cell activates them, so someone walking by is enough to animate them. 
If I go down in the middle of the night to eat a banana, I am accompanied by a light show, sound, movements and soft noises. 
I have taken down all my older paintings and live only with them."

Niki de Saint Phalle, Letter to Jean Tinguely, 1993

Addressed to her artistic partner and second husband who died two years prior, Niki de Saint Phalle’s Letter to Jean Tinguely was written in 1993 to accompany her new series of works, Tableaux éclatés. Thirty years later, and over sixty years since de Saint Phalle first met Tinguely, Tableaux éclatés is on display at Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois in Paris. The title can be roughly translated to “burst paintings” or “shattered paintings”—both of which embody the fragmentary heartbreak and movement of the exhibition. 

Technically, Tableaux éclatés draws on Tinguely—activated by photoelectric cells, the paintings move as the viewer approaches, similar to Tinguely’s own work. Skulls are cut open, bodies are ripped apart, and the moon rises. Then, all is put back together again. Through photoelectric sensors and hidden motors, de Saint Phalle engineers the chaos of visual death and mechanical reincarnation. 

She herself says, “I am even looking forward to the breakdown (perhaps to experience the infinite joy of things working again).” Here is the crux of Tableaux éclatés: breakdown, and in its wake, strange joy. Niki de Saint Phalle’s paintings burst and shatter and then, loyally, they work again. 

Though the form may draw heavily from Tinguely, the works themselves are unabashedly de Saint Phalle’s. Her thick, famous Nana figures sunbathe among multicolored elephants. Pink skies and pink breasts cavort while a golden-trunk Ganesh, “bearer of luck and happiness,” is flayed open, then slid back into one. 

There is a jumbled chaos to Tableaux eclatés—as if Niki de Saint Phalle’s grief itself engineered the wires and motors. The image of a widowed Niki de Saint Phalle eating a banana in the dark with only the company of her gently whirring paintings is as dystopian as it is comfortingly domestic. In Niki de Saint Phalle’s own words, none of her older paintings remain. Tinguely is also gone. Now, she lives with Tableaux éclatés; inevitable, mechanical death and then a masterful putting-together—perhaps not of the one who left this world, but of the one who remains. 


Tableaux éclatés is on view through October 28th at Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois in Paris, 36 rue de Seine

14 Artists Question the Possibility of Human Benevolence & Ecology in Ce que nous donne la terre @ Afikaris in Paris

text by Barbara Norton

Much like nature itself, Ce que nous donne la terre (What the earth Gives Us) is an exhibition comprised of many disparate parts: resin, beads, and acrylic are to the show what beetles, silt, and chlorophyll are to our natural world. Also like the natural world, Ce que nous donne la terre is undeniably united. With fourteen different works on view, each artist challenges what it is to be a human who is both part of that precious, quivering equilibrium of the Earth and a disruptor of it.

While the human is centered throughout the show, we are always in our most early context—nature. In doing so, the relationship between us and world is reimagined countless times, a testament to its eternal loamy dynamism. In Beya Gille Gacha’s haunting Lady Mirror, a blue Mother Nature bathes in black water and algae. She is tranquil, but perhaps not kind—humid anger billows from her like steam from a bath. Though she is a humanoid figure, her lapis lazuli-colored skin is jarring and unnatural against the dirty porcelain.

A blue-bodied figure also appears in Omar Mahfoudi’s Hidden behind the sun. Shielding his visage from the violent, lone smear of sunlight, Mahfoudi’s blue man is blurry with cool, wet anguish beneath the red-yellow light. 

The people of L’Eden are—perhaps—more at peace with their world. Blending into the foliage entirely, their jewelry, clothing, and hair are the only denotation of where the leaves end and their bodies begin. Maybe they have returned to the earliest beginning among the lush, green leaves. But there is also a more sinister possibility: are the figures making a return to their roots, or are they trapped behind the rapidly encroaching leaves? Will the foliage continue to grow and twist across the canvas until it blots them out entirely? 

This tenuous relationship winds itself through each work in Ce que nous donne la terre, on view through 23rd September at AFIKARIS Gallery. What is our place in a world where we are both the product and demise of natural creation?   


Ce que nous dans la terre is on view through 23rd September at AFIKARIS Gallery 7 Rue Notre Dame de Nazareth.

Color Becomes an Agent of Transmutation in Shaping Color @ VSF in Los Angeles

VSF’s exhibition Shaping Color, conceived by LA-based textile artist Diedrick Brackens, brings together six artists to explore the relationships between color and process in their respective practices. Many works in the exhibition are monochromes or utilize a restricted palette. Historically monochromes often signal an intent to emphasize mastery and skill; also, in parting with all information save the essential, artists attempt to access the ineffable and the spiritual.

Color, as employed by these makers, is intrinsically tied to their mediums and modes of production. Color becomes an agent of transmutation, not just a mere surface or mask for form; these objects are altered in ways that inform their subjects radically and color is treated as material rather than surface or ornamentation.

Shaping Color is on view through September 16 @ VSF, 812 N HIGHLAND AVE, LOS ANGELES