Hugh Steers: Strange State Of Being @ Alexander Gray Associates In New York

Strange State of Being is an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Hugh Steers (1962–1995). A figurative painter, the artist was diagnosed with HIV in 1987, ultimately succumbing to AIDS-related complications in 1995 at the age of 32. The gallery’s show takes its title from a 1994 quote by the artist, “There seems to be a buzz. … I’m in such a strange state of being, and nothing’s ever going to be the same.” Reflective of his state, Steers’s compositions, enigmatic scenes of sickness and tenderness, unflinchingly bear witness to the true cost of the AIDS epidemic while speaking to our present health crisis and political fragility.

the majority of Steers’s compositions articulate his inner fears and desires as he made art under the specter of the virus. Highlighting the influence of the Western canon on his practice, a series of images, including Girl in Blue and Red (1987), feature an imp-like child whose eerie presence recalls that of the creature from Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781). In Gold Box (1988), Steers presents this being blinding a man as a snake slithers from an open box. Referencing the myth of Pandora, who released sickness into the world, this menacing painting—created one year after the artist tested positive for HIV—expresses his despair at the diagnosis. Similarly ominous, additional canvases from this period also contain snakes, as well as harbingers of death like crows.

Despite these portents, while indelibly shaped by the AIDS crisis, Steers’s work always rises above its grim realities. As the writer Justin Spring suggests, at the core of the artist’s oeuvre is “… a lingering desire for something transcendent.” Searching for transcendence in the midst of the epidemic, Steers’s paintings gain new resonance in 2021. Their imagery, limned by what the artist once described as the “soft glow of brutality,” anticipates the isolation, loss, and uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Strange State of Being is on view through April 3 @ Alexander Gray Associates 510 West 26 Street, New York

Devendra Banhart's The Grief I Have Caused You @ Nicodim Gallery In Los Angeles

“Nothing is more gall-bitter than suffering, nothing more honey-sweet than having suffered.” 
— Meister Eckhart

The recursive abstracted forms within Devendra Banhart’s canvases are a non-hierarchical alphabet of allegories for the diminishment and destruction of ego. Each mouth, prick, eye and ass breaks apart and reconstructs itself until they become a collective commune of equally all-important, yet weightless pieces of the tantric universe. They are a cycle of mala beads through the fingers of time.

The Grief I Have Caused You is on view through March 20 @ Nicodim Gallery 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, #160. photographs by Lani Trock

Simphiwe Ndzube Presents Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon @ Nicodim Gallery In Los Angeles

My skin is tightening
soon I shall shed it
like a monitor lizard
like remembered comfort
at the new moon rising
I will eat the last signs of my weakness
remove the scars of old childhood wars
and dare to enter the forest whistling
like a snake that had fed the chameleon
for changes
I shall be forever.
— excerpted from Audre Lorde, “Solstice,” 1978

With Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon, Simphiwe Ndzube continues to develop and expand his cosmology, reimagining Black bodies as mythical and fantastic beings capable of inhabiting multiple dimensions. His figures fly, flail, fall, and dance their way from sculpture, to sound, to canvas through multiple environments, highlighting the fluidity and permeability of identity itself. Like the snake, his characters can be cold-blooded and stealthy; like the chameleon, they are capable of change.

Whereas the bodies in Ndzube’s earlier works are often faceless or headless, this series includes detailed portraits of a number of the individual characters and further develops their unique personalities. In prior exhibitions, Ndzube’s figures reckoned with drought and desolate environments, but the landscapes in Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon have grown fertile and sensual along with the humanoids that populate them. Where once the earth was dry and barren, it has now been sown and is ready for harvest. Within the paintings, pink flowers rise to the sky and spread their fleshy petal-tongues to the sunlight, begging to be kissed. Around them, a sculptural cornfield grows throughout the exhibition. A seven-foot dandy traipses throughout the proceedings, peacocking his vibrant couture to anyone who will pay attention. A Bacon-esque figure in a Garden of Earthly Delights, perhaps he is trying to draw the eyes of the couple making love in the sunlight on a canvas nearby.

Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon is on view through March 20 @ Nicodim Gallery 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, #160. photographs by Lani Trock.

Joe McKee Releases Ultra Letizia Album On Salmon Universe

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Over his varied career Californian-based Australian Joe McKee has been an ever curious sound-traveller, from singer to field recordist and conceptual sound artist. Here he has created the other-worldly musical experience of ULTRA LETIZIA - a cargo ship, on which he crossed the North Pacific ocean from Japan to Vancouver, Washington.

As Joe says: "The sounds you are hearing were collected from me 'playing' the ship like a giant gamelan. I hit, scraped, listened and spoke to the strange industrial beast." Every sound collected is turned into a musically engaging and spiritually elevating piece, reflecting an experience of isolation but in turn revealing a connection to the vessel, it's workers, and the vastness of the ocean itself.

Ultra Letizia is available now on bandcamp and soundcloud. Watch an excerpt of the accompanying film below


Stephen Neidich Presents New Kinetic Sculptures @ Wilding Cran In Los Angeles

Two years ago, at the end of the summer, Stephen Neidich set about creating a new kinetic sculpture, Wake Me Up When It’s Over for the L.A. On Fire group show at Wilding Cran Gallery. The piece was constructed from a fully fabricated Venetian blind, rendered in steel with exposed motor sprockets, roller chain, and backlit by a fiery red light. When Neidich began thinking about five more minutes please, his second solo show with Wilding Cran—his 2019 debut with the gallery, oikkm56, which featured a single kinetic installation fit with over a dozen steel chains affixed to 14 camshafts that monotonously smashed the chains against rubble sourced from construction sites around the artist’s Frogtown studio—he wanted to reexamine the movement of kinetic blinds, this time using the chain as a more painterly line within the works.

“Without the light you only see the movement, but with the light you get this eerie flicker, the shape and projections of fire masked by these sharp, simple movements that are a result of the shapes and shadows of the blind. The kinetics of the sculpture become the fire. But it’s not fire, it’s this hollow idea of a fire…. Ultimately these are machines, and the integrity comes not from their obsolescence, but from the grace of their intended performance,” says Neidich. “I started to think about the movement of this often dysfunctional object and how best to enhance it to the point of being performative.”

The gallery is lit only from the glow of each work and visitors to the space activate the dozen works in the exhibition (each varying in blind orientation and size, from 24 x 24 inches to 9 x 16 feet) by tripping a motion sensor upon entry that sets off a subtle symphony, placing each visitor inside a surround sound panopticon, a voyeuristic platform with a vantage upon a series of abstract horizons.

five more minutes please is on view by appointment through April 3 @ Wilding Cran Gallery 1700 S. Santa Fe Avenue, unit 460. photographs by Lani Trock

Alexander McQueen & Vestiaire Collective Are Pioneering Circular Practices In Luxury Fashion

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN VOSS finale photograph: Chris Moore Catwalking.com

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN VOSS finale
photograph: Chris Moore Catwalking.com

Alexander McQueen and Vestiaire Collective have just launched a pioneering collaboration aimed at empowering a move towards sustainability and circular practices. Supported by innovative technology, the collaboration marks the launch of Vestiaire Collective’s new ‘Brand Approved’ programme and reinforces Alexander McQueen’s growing commitment to the durability of luxury fashion.

A select group of clients will be contacted by a sales representative at Alexander McQueen. Any pieces the clients wish to sell will be assessed and if eligible assigned a buy-back price. Once the pieces are received and authenticated by Alexander McQueen, the client will be issued with a credit note with which they will immediately be able to purchase new items from specified Alexander McQueen stores. Once processed by Vestiaire Collective the pieces will carry an external NFC tag giving prospective new buyers access to information confirming the authenticity of the piece. The pieces will be available to purchase on a dedicated ‘Brand Approved’ page on the Vestiaire Collective app and site.

There are currently two pieces available for purchase.

Tuxedo jacket ALEXANDER MCQUEEN Sarah Burton’s first show as creative director SS11 photograph: Chris Moore Catwalking.com

Tuxedo jacket
ALEXANDER MCQUEEN
Sarah Burton’s first show as creative director SS11
photograph: Chris Moore Catwalking.com

Tartan skirt ALEXANDER MCQUEEN ‘Widows Of Culloden’ AW06 photograph: Chris Moore Catwalking.com

Tartan skirt
ALEXANDER MCQUEEN
‘Widows Of Culloden’ AW06
photograph: Chris Moore Catwalking.com

Nikita Gale's Thank God You're Here @ 56 Henry In New York

“Thank God you’re here” is an exclamation of relief at the presence of another person. This presence offers a sense of safety or comfort—delivery from whatever was occurring before they arrived. The phrase is also a simple instruction: thank God—a body that is both present and absent, a body whose presence is contingent on social agreements that are substantiated through ritual and repetition—that you are here.

The differences in meaning are less important than the situation that is implied: an experience of the presence of others. Each of the works presented in this exhibition is a meditation on the indeterminate boundary between presence and absence, and, in particular, how presence is read in the absence of bodies.

Like lungs, caves are hollow spaces within solid forms. They delineate—and facilitate exchanges—between inside and outside, whether by providing people with shelters or forums for sharing information. Caves are the ancestral homes of homo sapiens. In caves, we began to tell stories to one another with sounds and images—around fires, surrounded by walls inscribed with records of our experiences. (In a cave in Indonesia, archaeologists recently discovered a life-size painting of a wild pig that was made 45,500 years ago, making it the oldest known cave drawing.) Just as caves were spaces in which domestic, social, and theatrical life coalesced, COLLAPSE I–IV, a series of collages, compresses images of caves onto those of coliseums, arenas, and other types of performance venues. The formal gesture of collapsing these images into a single plane allows the prehistoric to haunt the present. The erasure of the distinctions between the contemporary categories of domestic, social, and theatrical throws into relief the discursive relationship between them.

Thank God You’re Here is on view through March 22 at 56 Henry Street New York

Patrisse Cullors' New Short Film Whispers: Pray for LA is a Meditation on a City Reeling from Compounded Crises

Whispers: Pray For LA is Patrisse Cullors’ latest work developed amidst an unprecedented surge in COVID-19 cases in Los Angeles this past winter. As part of a larger ongoing project entitled ‘Pray for LA’ launched by her artist collective The Crenshaw Dairy Mart at the beginning of 2021, the initiative and forthcoming works are an offering to the thousands of Angelenos and their families suffering from the intersections of COVID-19, racism and the ultimate neglect of a county, state and country that has deliberately focused on profit over people.

Cullors’ Whispers specifically calls us to the ocean to offer up our hearts, our grief and our fight to see the death and sickness that surrounds los angeles county as it fights to keep afloat amongst the terror of COVID-19.

Whispers asks all of us to call for a world where every family has access to healthcare, to food, to shelter.

Whispers asks us to dream and practice this vision through abolition.

This video project was commissioned by Tilt West, a denver-based arts nonprofit. It will be included in the third volume of the Tilt West journal, devoted to the topic of art and labor, scheduled for release on september 2, 2021. You can check out the second volume of the Tilt West journal, on art and community here.

Directed and produced by: Patrisse Cullors 

Edited by: Giovanni Solis

Scored by: Meshell Ndegeocello

Headlines: Recent Drawings By Derek Boshier @ Night Gallery In Los Angeles

Derek Boshier’s practice has taken many forms over the years: he has produced films, paintings, sculptures, album covers as well as theatrical sets, but drawing has remained central the entire time. Magazines and newspaper clippings are the primary source for his “Headline” drawings and the immediacy of the medium has allowed him to react to current events in real time. While the drawings exhibited here are all recent, they are the culmination of decades of dedication to drawing and conviction to understanding the world at large through lines on paper.

Headlines is on view through March 13 by appointment and online viewing room @ Night Gallery 2276 E 16th Street

Christine Wang & Luke Murphy Present Screen Time @ Night Gallery In Los Angeles

Screen Time is an exhibition of new work by Luke Murphy and Christine Wang. Both artists address the screen as a digital intermediary for experience. Though its trajectory began long ago, the screen's total encroachment upon daily life reached new heights in 2020, becoming the primary tool of community engagement, creative exploration, and consumer activity in response to long-term shelter-in-place restrictions. Murphy and Wang consider the omnipresence of the screen without dogma, addressing its cultural and perceptual implications with a sense of humor and an appreciation of unexpected beauty.

In equal parts euphoric, critical, escapist, hilarious, and mournful, their work presents a kaleidoscopic approach to a moment of cultural inundation and mass uncertainty, finding value in the sheer play of perception and the long standing role of art to illuminate through confusion.

Screen Time is on view through March 13 by appointment and online viewing room @ Night Gallery 2276 E 16th Street

Jeffrey Gibson's It Can Be Said of Them @ Roberts Projects In Los Angeles

Jeffrey Gibson’s solo exhibition, It Can Be Said of Them, features new work exploring themes of identity–as it relates to diversity and inclusivity–to uplift the unique experiences, struggles and personal victories shaping the current fight for LGBTQIA visibility. It Can Be Said of Them takes its title from a print produced by Sister Corita Kent in 1969. Kent’s print was part of her “Heroes and Sheroes” series, undertaken after she formally left the church as a serving nun, and depicts images of Jesus, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy. The men are surrounded by a quote by author E.B. White that reads, “It can be said of him, as of few men in like position, that he did not fear the weather and did not turn his sails, but instead, challenged the wind itself to improve its direction and to cause it to blow more softly and more kindly over the world and its people.”[1] A strong supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, Kent viewed these four figures, among many others, as modern day martyrs, especially during a time of aggressive political and social unrest.

It is in these works and others on view, that Gibson expands on how gender, as identity, is a liminal space; one that occupies and explores the in-between, the threshold, the reconfigured and the temporal. As a transitory space or state, it is characterized by ambiguity, hybridity and fluidity, with the great potential for subversion and radical transformation. Writing about anti-structure, cultural anthropologist Victor Turner argues that this liminal state is “a conceptual space where the ordinary world falls away, and the hierarchies of everyday life are no longer applicable.”[2] It is in this sublimation of surrender where joy can be found; where one re-articulates a new identity beyond the restricted spheres tied to tradition, geography, or social construct, and lives openly after abandoning the constraints of the everyday. Gibson’s most recent work is a reaffirmation of this profound and total freedom.

It Can Be Said of Them is on view through February 27 @ Roberts Projects 5801 Washington Boulevard Culver City. photographs courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California

California African American Museum Hosts Virtual Screening of Body and Soul

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Oscar Devereaux Micheaux, a pioneer of African American cinema, produced more than forty films during the dawn of the 20th century, including Body and Soul (1925). The silent film features the acclaimed stage actor and activist Paul Robeson, who performs as both a mystifying preacher and doting inventor, capturing the seduction of faith and the complicated power structures that can surround it. This new digital restoration, which is included in the Pioneers of African American Cinema collection, has been produced by the artist Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, who also contributed a new score for the 2015 re-release. The online screening of Body and Soul is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Enunciated Life, which utilizes Black spiritual beliefs as a point of departure for considering modes of surrender and includes work by Steffani Jemison, a contemporary artist whose practice is in dialogue with Micheaux’s films.

CAAM will host the screening Thursday, February 25 5:00 - 6:30 p.m. RSVP for screening instructions.

Friday Playlist: Space Is The Place

Film still, Barbarella, 1968

Film still, Barbarella, 1968

A trip though the cosmos, one cloud, one star, one planet at a time. A collection of soul ballads, sonic love letters, and eccentric oddities.

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Something Vexes Thee? New Paintings By Jessie Makinson @ François Ghebaly Gallery In Los Angeles

 
 

The title of the exhibition, Something Vexes Thee? is a rhetorical question, at once sarcastic and decorous. It’s what’s up with you? wrapped ironically in genteel robes. It is also what the witch asks of The Sheriff of Nottingham after his plans have been foiled once again by the trickster Robin Hood in the 1991 film adaptation of the English legend. Jessie Makinson’s painting of the same name is a decentered diptych crawling with potentially vexing vignettes. A couple of fighting dogs have upset a basket of peaches, a parlour game in a backroom equivocially suggests sensuous and sinister play, various limbs jut in and out of frames and doorways, suggesting narrow escapes. Along the right foreground, where painters traditionally place a repoussoir to gently guide the viewer’s eye back into the composition, the eyes of a steely, nymph-ish character gaze back at you over a crooked arm, annoyed, perhaps, at the intrusion. Makinson reimagines the hierarchical grid of the painting into a complex and generous container for many stories at once.

In her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” Ursula Le Guin explains how the vessel, as opposed to the weapon, is the earliest and most significant “cultural device.” What has been gained, she asks, by characterizing history as a spear, an arrow, a sword piercing lines of victims and losers that span the centuries? What if we see the human story as a container, a sack, a vessel allowing for the jumbled freeplay of many narratives at once? Jessie Makinson takes this as an invitation to muss up the fixities that haunt historical painting. Instead of villains, heroes, or even genres, she offers story—not as an escape from reality, but as a tool for imagining a new one.

Something Vexes Thee? is on view through February 27 @ François Ghebaly Gallery 2245 E Washington Blvd.,
Los Angeles

magic passed life Features Work By Mike Linskie & Lucia Love @ darkZone In New Jersey

This place changes a little each time I come back to it. Even through a mask, the dust can find a way to settle into the back of your nostrils. The light has shifted, and the air has a frenetic energy in it. There’s a leak in the crawlspace in the far back corner, which has collected in a pool and traveled down the gentle slope of the retaining wall all the way to the opposite corner. The space seems to be salivating, maybe in expectation of my arrival, or maybe in the anticipation of being one step closer to an impending finality. Or is it bleeding? What will it’s scabs look like? This peculiar codependence has done damage to us both. Visit by visit, wounds are inflicted, moved passed, and brushed over. How will we heal together?

magic passed life was on view February 1 @ darkZone in New Jersey

Bojan Sarcevic: L'Extime @ Galerie Frank Elbaz In Paris

Bojan Sarcevic’s ensembles explore the technoid fascination of our society today while offering unsettling relics of a future in which bodies and machines commune with an intimacy so odd that it becomes an extimacy.

Each marble block is scored with geometric cuts and hosts a functioning industrial freezer inserted into or placed atop of it. Like alien sarcophagi, the marble blocks in a deeply veined blue, green, or rose tone seem to engulf the machines. Three slightly larger-than-life muscular figures surround and engage with the marble sculptures. Their distinct postures and carved stone heads create an eerie unison. Contrasting with their seemingly unbridled masculinity, the figures are draped in delicate silk blouses cut in characteristically 1980’s silhouettes, while shibari rope bondage dresses their hips and feet.

The title of the exhibition, L’Extime (extimacy), sets a stage. The term denotes how even our most intimate feelings can be strange and foreign to us.

L’Extime is on view through February 27 @ galerie frank elbaz, Paris 66 Rue de Turenne

Haim Steinbach: 1991 – 1993 @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

For more than four decades, Haim Steinbach has explored the psychological, aesthetic, and cultural aspects of collecting and arranging found objects. In selecting items that range from the obscure to the ordinary, the private to the ethnographic, Steinbach emphasizes notions of circulation and human connection.

The exhibition highlights a concentrated three-year period in the artist’s career and draws upon memory, offering a recontextualization of his own historic practice and an occasion for reflection. Comprising a seminal large-scale “display” and objects from the same time period, the exhibition is populated by individuals who are both named and unnamed, touching upon family gatherings and traditions, intimacy, and the personifying power objects can hold.

Haim Steinbach: 1991-1993 is on view through February 27 @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery 521 W 21st St, New York

KW Institute For Contemporary Art Celebrates It's 30th Anniversary With Year-long Program Of Exhibitions

Founded on July 1, 1991 by Klaus Biesenbach, Alexandra Binswanger, Philipp von Doering, Clemens Homburger, and Alfonso Rutigliano, KUNST-WERKE BERLIN e. V. put down roots in a derelict former margarine factory located on Auguststraße 69 in the Berlin-Mitte district. After organizing the pivotal innovative exhibition project 37 Räume in 1992, artistic director Klaus Biesenbach continued to present ground-breaking exhibitions that won the institution critical acclaim, both nationally and internationally, and in 1996 he initiated the now widely renowned Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art.

In its thirty years, KW has considerably shaped the development of contemporary art by critically examining current tendencies and discourses within society. To mark its 30th anniversary, KUNST-WERKE BERLIN e. V. is is hosting a year-long program of exhibitions featuring artists Renée Green, Leonilson, Michael Stevenson, and Amelie von Wulffen; group exhibitions co-curated by artists Iman Issa and Ghislaine Leung; and a new performance piece by Michele Rizzo.

This series of new commissions, featuring Susan Philipsz’s acoustic work in KW’s courtyard in homage of political activist Rosa Luxemburg on the anniversary of her execution, was created during Philipsz’s residency at KW in 2002; the re-installation of Katharina Sieverding’s monumental print Deutschland wird deutscher (1993) is to be displayed in the entranceway of KW as well as on billboards across Berlin in April-May; and artist Sissel Tolaas will create a limited edition of soap carefully composed from particles she collected at the KW building, a former margarine factory.

Complementing this program, a major two-part art auction, organized in collaboration with renowned Berlin-based fine art auction house Grisebach, will take place in June and December 2021, featuring works by over 60 artists who have significantly contributed to KW’s legacy. The annual program’s key event will be a weekend-long celebration on July 2 – 4, 2021, featuring an extensive program of events, performances, and the launch of the first publication retracing KW’s history.

KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s full 30-year anniversary program can be found here.

Appalachian Spring: Rare Performance of Martha Graham's Iconic Masterwork Available Via Planet Classroom

Premiering in 1944 with an original score by Aaron Copland, set design by Isamu Noguchi, and costuming by Martha Graham.

Cast and Credits
DIRECTOR: Peter Glushanok
PRODUCER: Nathan Kroll
EDITOR: Eleanor Hamerow
CAST: Martha Graham as The Bride, Stuart Hodes as The Husbandman, Bertram Ross as The Preacher, Matt Turney as The Pioneering Woman, and Miriam Cole, Helen McGehee, Ethel Winter, and Yuriko as The Followers.

Autre Exclusive Premiere: Cat Power "From Fur City" An Elegy To Benjamin Smoke

Autre presents an exclusive premiere of a never-before-seen live video of Cat Power (Chan Marshall) performing "From Fur City" at Tonic in NYC in 2003, a powerful elegy to radical and legendary musician and songwriter, Benjamin Smoke who died on January 29, 1999. The song "From Fur City" has never been on a proper studio album. Filmed by Scott Crary (Kill Your Idols, 2004).