WANGECHI MUTU – A FANTASTIC JOURNEY

Posted on 2013-12-30

Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey is the first survey in the United States of this internationally renowned, Brooklyn-based artist. Spanning from the mid-1990s to the present, the exhibition unites more than fifty pieces, including Mutu’s signature large-scale collages as well as video works, never-before-seen sketchbook drawings, a site-specific wall drawing, and sculptural installations.

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Mutu scrutinizes globalization by combining found materials, magazine cutouts, sculpture, and painted imagery. Sampling such diverse sources as African traditions, international politics, the fashion industry, pornography, and science fiction, her work explores gender, race, war, colonialism, global consumption, and the exoticization of the black female body. Mutu is best known for spectacular and provocative collages depicting female figures—part human, animal, plant, and machine—in fantastical landscapes that are simultaneously unnerving and alluring, defying easy categorization and identification. Bringing her interconnected ecosystems to life for this exhibition through sculptural installations and videos, Mutu encourages audiences to consider these mythical worlds as places for cultural, psychological, and socio-political exploration and transformation.

Opposite – Riding Death in My Sleep, 2002

Exhibition runs through to March 9th, 2014

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn
New York
11238-6052

www.brooklynmuseum.org

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SHEZAD DAWOOD – WOLF PANEL

Posted on 2013-12-30

Comprising textile paintings, sculptures and neon work, Dawood’s installation plays with the gallery space suggesting doubling and assonances.
Seduced by an ambiguous Harvest Moon, the visitor is introduced into a suspended and mysterious eco-psycho-landscape inhabited by the ghostly figure of the wolf, a mythological omen of destruction, war and death.

In a conceptual balance between the decorative and the perverse, the treasured still life sculptures function as vanitas evocative of a sense of emptiness. Here the predator becomes the prey like in a shamanic journey or ‘wolf trance’ of transition to undergo a spiritual re-birth. Through this transformation, knowledge and consciousness emerges.

Shezad Dawood’s work explores the multiple possibilities engendered by the play between cultures, histories and fictions. Notions of authorship and representation are deconstructed by working with a steady stream of collaborators mapping cross cultural influences and trajectories.

Exhibition runs through to February 1st, 2014

Paradise Row Gallery
74a Newman Street
London
W1T 3DB

www.paradiserow.com

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ADAM GREEN AND FRIENDS – HOT CHICKS

Posted on 2013-12-30

Bordering on architecture or furniture design, the works are only recognizable as female as each has at least one boob; though most have way, way too many boobs. The majority of the works in the show are a mere 12 x 9 inches, but capture in their small size the irreverence and urgency that comes from a direct link between the hand and the unconscious: and as we can see in the show, Green’s unconscious has a somewhat 8-bit sensibility. The bodies are often composed of proliferating blocks, with some including too many eye blocks, too many aforementioned boob blocks, too many mouth blocks, etc. It is as though the image inventory chip to his Nintendo cartridge was functioning properly, however the programming chip that assorted, organized and placed the blocks was malfunctioning.

Symbolically, the “hot chicks” here are extremely not hot, and you can imagine from the titles why: “Angry Chick”, “Burned Chick”, “Dog”, “Blackout Turtle Chick”, etc. Various female archetypical roles are touched on as well from “Stripper Chick”, “Queen Chick”, “Mom Chick”, “Sister Chick” or perhaps most disturbingly “Toddler Chick”. The works, however, bear no malice or violence and instead have an odd sense of humour that at times runs amok: “Polar Chick” looks like a white boob igloo and “Yankee Fan Chick” some eyeballs and boobs connected by pin-striped shapes.

Exhibition runs through to January 31st, 2014

The Hole NYC
312 Bowery
New York
NY
10012
USA

theholenyc.com

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