Abbey

Artist, photographer, and poetess of magic and light Abbey Meaker in San Francisco for a visit from Vermont. Abbey Meaker's first solo show Boudoirs & Landscapes is on view for a final weekend at the Palazzo Barsanti in Pietrasanta, Italy. Stay tuned to Pas Un Autre for a full interview coming soon. Photograph by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. 

Lovers from the Hereafter

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Sculptor Jean-Marc Laroche shares with us his fantasy of eternal life with the installation, “Lovers from the Hereafter,” featuring intertwining skeletons embracing one another. The installation will be on view at the Museum of Sex in New York beginning October 5th, 2011 and includes two human-sized sculptures made of varnished resin and jointed with an invisible steel framework - an effect which resembles real bones. With regards to the "Lovers from the Hereafter" sculptures, Jean-Marc said, "They are themselves quite joyful and they thumb their noses at death and present the afterlife as a roll in the hay.” Throughout his career as a sculptor, he has created several erotic, sensual works, which have been brought together for this installation. Born in Paris in 1959, Jean-Marc Laroche began his career as a sculptor in the early 1990s.

Postmodernism: Style and Subversion

Vegas, Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, 1966

Wet Magazine, April Greiman and Jayme Odgers

Of all movements in art and design history, postmodernism is perhaps the most controversial. This era defies definition, but it is a perfect subject for an exhibition. Postmodernism was an unstable mix of the theatrical and theoretical. It was visually thrilling, a multifaceted style that ranged from the colorful to the ruinous, the ludicrous to the luxurious. What they all had in common was a drastic departure from modernism’s utopian visions, which had been based on clarity and simplicity. The modernists wanted to open a window onto a new world. Postmodernism, by contrast, was more like a broken mirror, a reflecting surface made of many fragments. Its key principles were complexity and contradiction. It was meant to resist authority, yet over the course of two decades, from about 1970 to 1990, it became enmeshed in the very circuits of money and influence that it had initially sought to dismantle. Postmodernism shattered established ideas about style. It brought a radical freedom to art and design, through gestures that were often funny, sometimes confrontational and occasionally absurd. Most of all, postmodernism brought a new self-awareness about style itself. Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970 to 1990 is on view until January 15 at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

MANIAMANIA: THE THIRD MIND part 3

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MANIAMANIA’S Spring 2012 Collection, ‘The Third Mind’ channels the dreamlike spirit and unpredictable visual collisions of the surrealist age. Free from the constraints of rational thought, the collection is constructed in ways that allude to the Exquisite Corpse technique - whereby words and images are collectively assembled and relish an absence of control. The range moniker pays homage to The Third Mind, a 1978 book and concept by William Burroughs and Brian Gysin, which showcased the ‘cut ups’ technique originating from the Surrealists - a form later adapted to film making by Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren. In this mode, unrelated texts and images where literally cut up and rearranged to form radical narratives and vistas. The concept signifies a shared consciousness and creative output, only reachable by two or more people; a place neither could reach alone. In MANIAMANIA tradition, primary metals and natural stones are transfigured. ‘The Third Mind’ meshes Brass and Sterling Silver with Pyrite crystal stone, Amethyst and Tourmalinated Quartz in a series of exquisite forms and symbols to free ones self from time and convention. This fourth range fromMANIAMANIA expands with extensions on signature best sellers from the Immortals series, including a Limited Edition exclusive ‘Abbey Lee Ring’, inspired by modern muse Abbey Lee Kershaw. Collaborating with filmmaker, Elle Muliarchyk and featuring Abbey Lee for a second season, a three part series of short films and campaign images were created using artful techniques of the avant-garde. This included a set built of a life size kaleidoscope which created hypnotic repeat mirror imagery which looks as technical and modern as the digitally mastered alternative, but has tell tale realism of warped angles and beautiful accidents; elements also achieved within MANIAMANIA’s ‘Third Mind’ collection. View film after the jump.

Perfect Tits

"On most afternoons, the only way I can keep my armor on is to take my clothes off. I’m heartbroken but I have perfect tits, isn’t that enough?" Photography by Rita Lino

30 Americans

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Xaviera Simmons, One Day & Back Then (Standing), 2007. Courtesy of Rubell Family Collection, Miami.

30 Americans is a wide-ranging survey of work by many of the most important African American artists of the last three decades. Selected from the Rubell Family Collection, the exhibition brings together seminal figures such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Hammons with younger and emerging artists such as Kehinde Wiley and Shinique Smith. Often provocative and challenging, 30 Americans focuses on issues of racial, sexual, and historical identity in contemporary culture. It explores how each artist reckons with the notion of black identity in America, navigating such concerns as the struggle for civil rights, popular culture, and media imagery. At the same time, it highlights artistic legacy and influence, tracing subject matter and formal strategies across generations. 30 Americans consists of 76 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and videos, and includes spectacular works of art such as Leonardo Drew’s massive cotton and wax sculpture Untitled #25, several of Nick Cave’s exuberant Soundsuits, and a large-scale silhouette by Kara Walker. On view October 1 to February 12, 2012 at the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washinton, DC.

TO LIFE, TO DEATH: Quinzaine Photographique Nantaise

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Nan Goldin - Battle of Sexual Dependency

Every year, by mid September, the city of Nantes celebrates photography. For the 15th year on a row, the Quinzaine Photographique Nantaise will be deployed all around the city from September 16th through October 16th, offering visitors free access to over twenty exhibitions. As many events of this kind, the festival will evolve around the theme “À la vie, à la mort” (To life, to death), the title for the 2011 edition.

Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone

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On view now at the Wiels contemporary art center in Brussels is an expansive survey of little known Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973) which coincides with the Polish presidency of the European Union and is one of the first major solo exhibitions of the artist's work outside of Poland. It concentrates on her most experimental period from the 1960s and 1970s, before her untimely death at age 47. As a Holocaust survivor who began working in the post-war period in a rather classical, figurative manner, her later experimentation and re-conception of sculpture left behind a legacy of provocative objects - at once sexualized, visceral, humorous, and political - that sit uneasily between Surrealism, Nouveau Réalisme, and Pop Art. Her tinted polyester-resin casts of her lips and breasts transformed into quotidian objects like lamps or ashtrays, her spongy polyurethane forms often embedded with casts of bellies or live grass, and her construction of resin sculptures that incorporate found photographs remain as remarkably biting, visionary, and original today as when they were first made. The exhibition features extensive archival materials as well as more than 100 artworks, including drawings and photography alongside Szapocznikow's sculpture and object-making. On view until January 8, 2012.

Sidi Touré First Ever U.S. Tour

Sidi Touré made his first guitar as a child, constructing it from his wooden writing slate in the ancient town of Gao, Mali. Once the heart of the Songhaï empire and burial place of its Askia kings, the town rests between the Niger and the encroaching ocean of sand known as the Sahara Desert. The Songhai empire was the last of the great empires of the Sahel, reaching its zenith under Soni Alibert (Sunni Ali) in the mid 400’s. Sidi Touré was born here in 1959, but to be born a Touré, a noble family who trace their lineage directly from the Askia kings, carried a significance and onus of a past that reaches directly into the present. Like another Malian noble turned singer, Salif Keita, Sidi Touré faced a conflict between the inexorable pull of music and the expectations of family and society. Touré’s family had been sung about, and sung to, by traditional griots for centuries, but until a small boy challenged the rules, the Touré’s did not sing! Sidi Touré is currently on his first ever US tour in support of his 2011 release, Sahel Folk, via Thrill Jockey Records.

Bon koum
Sidi Touré

Double Solitaire

The Davis Museum at Wellesley college presents Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy, the first major touring exhibition to explore the dynamic exchange of ideas that shaped the astonishing landscapes of these Surrealist artists. This groundbreaking exhibition, which features approximately 25 paintings along with selected ephemera by each artist, provides unprecedented access to the couple’s intertwined artistic and personal lives. Sage and Tanguy were inseparable throughout their 15-year marriage, sharing adjoining studios in Woodbury, CT and communicating only in French until Tanguy’s untimely death in 1955. As Karen Rosenberg writes in the New York Times, this “fascinating” exhibition “intently explores the couple’s sinister dreamscapes of polymorphous pebbles (his) and menacing monoliths (hers).” Both artists sought to create paintings that the French poet André Breton called “peinture-poésie,” a style influenced by poetry and dream-like imagery.  Double Solitaire: The Surreal Worlds of Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy is on view Oct. 19, 2011 - Jan. 15, 2012 - 106 Central Street Wellesley, MA, 02481