LESLIE SHOWS

Posted on 2012-04-30

Shows initiated this body of work while in residence at the Bemis Center in the summer of 2011. Beginning with digitally scanned images of pyrite, Shows constructs and collages large-scale paintings on aluminum panels, with materials including ink, acrylic paint, Mylar, Plexiglas, metal filings, sand, crushed glass, and canvas. The works are spectral, reflective, and aim to accurately depict their object source, yet engage the alchemical mythology of the material. A second body of work includes a series of cast sulfur objects. Shows’ casts of everyday forms—remotes, telephones, toys—conjoin cast-away objects with an element that is used heavily in industrial processes.

Shows has built deep resonance between the two series and a video work, The Cares of a Family Man(2012). The iron pyrite landscape works are illusory, artificial representations of fool’s gold, an economically useless yet psychologically and historically charged sulfide mineral. In contrast the sulfur sculptures are chalky, a waxy opaque yellow copy of senseless objects. The Cares of a Family Man utilizes Kafka’s story about an object named Odradek to illustrate the disorienting dimensions and unstable perceptive qualities shared by all her works.

Opposite – Face A, 2011

Exhibition runs through to July 28th, 2012

The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
724 south 12th street
Omaha
NE
68102
Nebraska

www.bemiscenter.org

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ADRIAN NAVARRO – REFLECTIONS

Posted on 2012-04-30

These large scale paintings, part of the two series Rings and Loops, are reflections in its two meanings, i.e., mental and optic or physical. Adrian Navarro puts in front of us a clear equivocation of figure and ground. The classic geometries of ring and helix are carved as reliefs with precise ambivalence -sometimes the circular holes are opaque, sometimes transparent, revealing their painted matter. These volumes are intermittently altering their own figure-ground revealing technique: they are themselves defined against a veiled ground of formless paint; the ring is self-contained, whereas the loop is an open-ended figure cropped by the frame of the canvas; both contain figures within them, and are the ground to their own figures as well.

What Navarro is presenting here is the Battle of the Paintings that has been taking place at his studio for the last half decade, three centuries after The Battle of the Books at the King’s Library – both in London. What Jonathan Swift satirized in 1704, was the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. The beehive and the spiderweb were the metaphors of that day. Today, the battle is that between: abstraction and figuration, craft and design, the eye and the hand, movement and confinement, and ultimately between totality and infinity. The work of Emmanuel Levinas of 1969 (Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority) finds in these series and in the gallery as battleground – its best pictorial equivalent.

Opposite – Loop 02, 2012

Exhibition runs through to June 15th, 2012

Maerz Contemporary
Weimarer Str. 16
D – 10625
Berlin
Germany

www.maerzcontemporary.com

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JENNY HOLZER – ENDGAME

Posted on 2012-04-23

Entitled Endgame, the exhibition includes a series of paintings marking the artist’s return to the medium after more than thirty years.
Jenny Holzer searches for ways to make narrative a part of visual objects, employing an innovative range of materials and presentations to confront emotions and experiences, politics and conflict.While looking for subject matter for electronics and projections, the artist located a number of redacted, declassified government documents including policy memos, autopsy reports, and statements by American administration officials, soldiers, detainees, and others, generated during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These opaque documents became the foundation for Holzers silkscreened paintings in 2005; she began to create the fully handpainted works on show in the gallery in 2010. Color, scale, and the mark of the hand are the only alterations that the artist makes; the graphic geometric shapes are the censor’s, and the surviving text is original. Holzer’s subtle alterations exacerbate how much one isn’t allowed to see.

Opposite – Top Secret 8 aqua merge, 2011

Exhibition runs from April 27th to June 16th, 2012

Sprüth Magers Berlin
Oranienburger Straße 18
D-10178
Berlin

www.spruethmagers.com

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SCOTT MYLES – THIS PRODUCTION

Posted on 2012-04-23

This Production features significant new works including an expansive site-specific installation, new sculptures and a body of work produced with DCA Print Studio.

Displaced Façade (for DCA) is a dramatic new large-scale installation made from bricks that references built architecture and personal memory. Myles has created a brick wall separated into three segmented parts that align to appear as one complete structure depending on the viewer’s perspective. Analysis (Mirror) is a new sculpture consisting of bus shelters upturned one upon the other and painted with a highly reflective paint. An ongoing series of wall-based sculptures take their form from manilla document folders Myles himself uses in his studio. These have been enlarged to the artist’s height of 194cm, thus setting them in relation to the artist’s body while making reference to containers and systems of index.

Exhibition runs through to June 10th, 2012

Lazarides Gallery
11 Rathbone Place
London
W1T 1HR

www.dca.org.uk

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IAN FRANCIS – 10,000 YEARS FROM NOW

Posted on 2012-04-23

10,000 Years From Now examines the fragility of this lifetime in contrast to geological timescales.
Inspired by his fascination with the Internet and other technological forms of mass communication, Francis isolates popular scenarios from the present and examines their inherent fragility against collapsing architectural backdrops as they exist within digital formats. His latest body of work highlights the perilous nature of our constructed world and brings into focus the futility of our social legacy.

Francis continues to draw inspiration and raw material from cinema, pornography, street culture, and images sampled from the Internet, synthesizing these sources into a quasi-literal vision of the “mediated” landscape. Through his work he explores society’s obsession with popular culture and the detachment he personally undergoes in relation to this pervasive sense of societal collapse and impending apocalypse.

Exhibition runs from April 27th to May 24th, 2012

Lazarides Gallery
11 Rathbone Place
London
W1T 1HR

www.lazinc.com

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BRETT AMORY – WAITING 101

Posted on 2012-04-16

The compositions in the exhibition focus on Amoryʼs newfound relationship with technology, and the implicit freedom it allows in his work. Delving into documentation methods which new modes
of ambulatory technology offer, Amory experienced a metamorphosis in his painting preparation and application. With intimate, firsthand knowledge of the many ways that technology can affect the lives of those it touches, Amory explores the avenues itʼs opened up for him as an artist in Waiting 101.

Inspiration has never been so easy to manipulate and document. Amory expertly wields the tools available to him, with the intent of maintaining and evolving the series that has garnered
him international acclaim. Prior to Amoryʼs use of the camera phone, his process involved painstaking research and meticulous stake-outs at chosen locations. This was always with the hope of capturing a moment and individual suitable to his artistic vision. His compositions show a radical departure from his historical works in their obvious spontaneity, yet remain true to his unequivocally distinct technique.

Opposite – Waiting #121, 2011

Exhibition runs from April 20th to May 26th, 2012

The Outsiders
77 Quayside
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 3DE

www.theoutsiders.net

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