dominique blais

Bernhard Günter “Un peu de neige salie (Untitled I/92) 9'00 (1993)”, 2009
Powdered charcoal on paper, 31 x 42 1/2"

Dominique Blais's exhibition...hinges on oppositions and dualities. Eleven works play on the contrasts between sight and sound, resemblance and difference, intangibility and materiality, and question the process and limits of perception. The pieces near the entrance of the gallery are auditory or visual conundrums...

The most outstanding pieces here, however, are those that explore the interplay between the senses, generating interstitial sensory states and an almost palpable sense of the unreal. In the tenuous and insubstantial Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out, 2009, a video of a performance by a percussionist is projected onto a wall in broad daylight, while two speakers muffle the sounds instead of amplifying them. Viewers must reconstruct the performance by associating the barely perceptible sounds with the ghostlike flickers on the wall. The complementarity of sight and sound is also addressed in the charcoal drawing Bernhard Günter “Un peu de neige salie (Untitled 1/92)” 9'00 (1993), 2009, which is Blais’s visual equivalent to the nine-minute-long musical composition of the same name. Here, charcoal dust deposited by Blais on the loudspeakers was projected onto paper throughout the duration of the piece by the sound vibrations. The faint, blurred traces on the drawing materialize the passage of time. The tenuous materiality of sound is even more apparent in Distorsions Spectrales, 2008, in which a Plexiglas disc coated with ferrofluid turns silently on a turntable outfitted with magnets. Peaks and undulations form on the disc’s surface when it passes over the magnets, creating a tangible and ever-changing visual image of sound.

Rahma Khazam
Artforum.com

erika iris simmons aka iri5

Bob Dylan

Jimi Hendrix

Jim Morrison

iRI5 creates portraits of music legends made from recycled cassette tape. As she states "The idea comes from a philosopher's (Ryle) description of how your spirit lives in your body. I imagine we are all, like cassettes, thoughts wrapped up in awkward packaging."

ron mueck

The following video was filmed during Ron Mueck's residency at The National Gallery, London. The exhibition Ron Mueck is on view at the Brooklyn Museum, November 3, 2006 - February 4, 2007. Video courtesy of The National Gallery, London.

simon schubert

The main installation of “In Apnoesie,” Simon Schubert's first solo exhibition in Berlin, collects crisp, clean black-and-white sculptures that recall horror-film tropes. At first glance, its cool presentation suggests that our nightmares have become domesticated, maybe even sanitized. But somehow, they still do not feel safe. The distance that Schubert achieves by removing any hint of gore and by addressing his darkly surreal source material with a levelheaded aesthetic slowly accentuates the creepiness of his work, even for viewers jaded by graphic violence.

...The show’s most impressive images are almost invisible at first. Lining the walls and ceiling are stark white panels of paper, which Schubert has folded and layered over other white sheets to evoke subtle sculptural images of classic wall moldings, long corridors, staircases, and halls with mirrors, like a stately, but probably haunted, house.

Ana Finel Honigman
Artforum.com

sun k kwak

Sun K. Kwak: Enfolding 280 Hours
Brooklyn Museum



“My first reaction to the visual and emotional qualities of a given space is rendered through my spontaneous tape drawings.”
—Sun K. Kwak

When Kwak first visited the Brooklyn Museum to research the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, where she would install Enfolding 280 Hours, she noticed that the space was “like a square enfolding a circle” with “two concentric opposing circles of energy.” On the basis of these initial impressions, she created a digital rendering to indicate the lines she envisioned in the space and the direction in which they would flow. During the installation process, which began two months before the exhibition opened, Kwak used rolls of masking tape to create the sculptural drawing. Estimating that it would take 280 hours to install the work, she titled it Enfolding 280 Hours.

Audience interaction is an essential component of the work. Kwak was inspired by the diversity of the Brooklyn Museum’s visitors and its mission to act as a bridge between the collections and the experience of each visitor: “When I go to a gallery or museum, it often feels like a dead space. I want to create work that has life, vitality. I don’t want to produce another dead body. I don’t want people to stare at my work, but to feel it by walking into the picture. The space changes as the work and audience interact together.” She says that she chose abstract imagery for the installation “so that everyone can relate to it. Everyone sees something different through their unique interaction with the space.”

At the close of the exhibition, the tape will be pulled off the walls and discarded. According to Kwak’s artist statement, “This process of emptying the space is a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of life and my acceptance of the emptiness of that nature. Yet the drawing lives on in viewers’ memories as an imprint that leaves the space forever altered.”

See more of Sun K. Kwak's work

artists and the recession

Tight Times Loosen Artists' Creativity

by, Robin Pogrebin, New York Times

"Nobody wants me to do anything, so I'm just doing what I want."

Even in the best of times Sony Holland had to hustle.

Living in San Francisco, she got singing gigs wherever she could find them: concerts, corporate conventions, wine country gatherings, weddings, hotels or on the city streets. Now because of the economic downturn the company bookings have dried up, along with some of her regular bar engagements.

But Ms. Holland, 45, said she feels liberated, able to focus on the kind of music that she loves. Rather than serving up the usual Gershwin and Porter tunes typically requested at corporate events, she can sing Wainwright and Dylan.

This singer’s story is just one of hundreds that poured into The New York Times Web site in response to a request asking artists to share how the economy is affecting their lives and work. Perhaps most striking about the comments was the considerable number who were defiantly upbeat despite grim circumstances. Many artists echoed Ms. Holland, testifying that the recession had strengthened their commitment to their work or allowed them to concentrate on their art — since the time spent on side jobs had diminished — or had even been a source of creative inspiration.

Liz Fallon, 30, a visual artist in Portland, Me., started selling her paintings and drawings to private collectors about 10 years ago, when she was still in college. She has not sold an original work in almost a year. But in the Portland area, Ms. Fallon said, there seems to be a kind of artistic renaissance under way as various groups, like photography cooperatives and drawing collectives, form to connect creative professionals with one another.

“As for myself, freed from the constraints of creating for a specific buyer,” Ms. Fallon wrote, “I’ve experienced my own surge in creativity and have been producing a great deal more than I used to. While it would be nice to still be getting paid for my work, the need to be more resourceful is having a beneficial effect on the arts community around me.”

Read the rest of the article: Tight Times Loosen Artists' Creativity

Does the existence of a patron diminish or increase the success of arts? Can art exist without funding? But does creating art for a buyer affect the sincerity of the piece? Or has everything changed with the advent of found art, such as bricolage?

lili almog - portraiture in the 21st century

Lugu Woman #3, 2007
Chromogenic color print

Muslim Girl #14, 2007
Chromogenic color print

Video Portrait #3, 2007
Still from a color video, 2 minutes 40 seconds.

The Mosuo people, a populace that has surrounded China’s Lugu Lake for hundreds of years, have no word for war, but they do have Levis and Adidas. The women of this matriarchal society are one of the minority groups represented in Lili Almog's latest exhibition and book, part of the Israeli artist’s ongoing investigation into female identity. Referencing a quote by Chairman Mao, “The Other Half of the Sky” reveals the cultural paradox of today’s rural China through portraiture. Ancient customs and modern tastes compete in the richly textured photographs. Like the flash of blue jean beneath a religious gown, the exhibition is filled with surprising details. At first glance, a group of four screens seemingly presents a slide show of still images; on closer inspection, the stoic figures animate—a subject blinks or wets her lips, a chicken wanders through the scene. Though discrete works, these “video portraits” suggest broad paradigmatic shifts of tradition conceding to modernity. The cracked face of an elderly woman is projected alongside that of a young girl, as if the former had miraculously morphed into the latter. Almog conceived the project in six geographic sections: mountain, lake, factory, street, backyard, and land. Fittingly, it is the landscape which most aptly thematizes the dilemma; the artist cogently captures her subjects at sites of literal transition—atop factory rubble or at the intersection of land and water—holding up their half of the sky.

Cameron Shaw
Artforum.com