2016-02-24

2185 - 20160327 - U.S.A. - NEW YORK - Photo-Poetics: An Anthology - 20.11.2015-27.03.2016

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This group exhibition features more than 70 works by ten artists: Claudia Angelmaier, Erica Baum, Anne Collier, Moyra Davey, Leslie Hewitt, Elad Lassry, Lisa Oppenheim, Erin Shirreff, Kathrin Sonntag, and Sara VanDerBeek. The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue examine an important new development in contemporary photography, offering an opportunity to define the concerns of a younger generation of artists and contextualize their work within the history of art and visual culture. Drawing on the legacies of Conceptualism, these artists pursue a largely studio-based approach to still-life photography that centers on the representation of objects, often printed matter such as books, magazines, and record covers. The result is an image imbued with poetic and evocative personal significance—a sort of displaced self-portraiture—that resonates with larger cultural and historical meanings. Driven by a profound engagement with the medium of photography, these artists investigate the nature, traditions, and magic of photography at a moment characterized by rapid digital transformation. They attempt to rematerialize the photograph through meticulous printing, using film and other disappearing photo technologies, and creating artist’s books, installations, and photo-sculptures. While they are invested in exploring the processes, supports, and techniques of photography, they are also deeply interested in how photographic images circulate. Theirs is a sort of “photo poetics,” an art that self-consciously investigates the laws of photography and the nature of photographic representation, reproduction, and the photographic object.

This exhibition is organized by Jennifer Blessing, Senior Curator, Photography, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum with Susan Thompson, Assistant Curator




Guggenheim Museum - Photo-Poetics: An Anthology - 20.11.2015-27.03.2016




 
 
 
 




2016-02-17

2184 - 20160626 - U.S.A. - NEW YORK - Michelle Stuart, Theatre of Memory: Photographic Works - 03.02.2016-26.06.2016

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Michelle Stuart
Maroc Shoes, 2015
Archival inkjet photograph on Hahnemühle paper
12 x 18 inches
Courtesy of the artist
Photo credit: Michelle Stuart

Widely recognized as one of the very few female pioneers of Land Art, Stuart is known for her nature-based art dating to the late 1960s and 1970s. Comparatively lesser-known are her remarkable photographic works, which constitute a crucial part of her oeuvre and have been her primary focus over the past several years.

Organized by guest curator Gregory Volk, Michelle Stuart, Theatre of Memory: Photographic Works consists of twelve recent large-scale works—including a major wall piece created specifically for this exhibition—as well as two important pieces from the early 1980s that can be seen as precursors to Stuart’s later direction.  This exhibition is the first museum treatment of Stuart’s photography-based works.

“Michelle Stuart is an innovator, and her turn to photography in the last few years, once again, shows that she is always exploring new ways to create unique perspectives on the world,” said Holly Block, Executive Director of The Bronx Museum of the Arts. “We are excited to present her recent and new work at The Bronx Museum.”

The exhibition will also debut My Still Life (2015-16), a major, large-scale work created for this show—“an autobiographical opus of sorts,” as Volk describes it. Photographs of a series of what might be called ‘sculptural vignettes’ bring together objects and images—including archival and vintage personal photographs, actual things (e.g., a whale bone, a ceramic frog, a pomegranate), maps, celestial landscapes, and fragments of writing on paper, among others—many of which Stuart collected and have been with her for years.

Also included in the exhibition are two works from Stuart’s early 1980s Codex series, with squares of earth-rubbed paper (the earth is from specific sites that Stuart visited, including a New Jersey quarry and the ancient Maya city of Uxmal in Mexico) surrounded by photographs of the same site. Stuart’s Codex pieces, with their incorporation of photos, herald her recent photography-based work.



Bronx Museum of the Arts - Michelle Stuart, Theatre of Memory: Photographic Works - 03.02.2016 - 26.06.2016


 
 
 
 
 

2016-02-10

2183 - 20160508 - U.S.A. - NEW YORK - American Folk Art Museum - Mystery and Benevolence: Masonic and Odd Fellows Folk Art from the Kendra and Allan Daniel Collection - 21.01.2016-08.05.2016

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Independent Order of Odd Fellows Plaque, artist unidentified, United States, 1850–1900, paint on wood, 16 x 15 in., American Folk Art Museum, gift of Kendra and Allan Daniel. Photo by José Andrés Ramírez, www.fotophoto.net.

Enigmatic, evocative, and often simply strange, fraternal references are a rich part of contemporary American popular culture. But the seductive mystique of secret societies, with their cryptic signs, gestures, and arcane rituals, has been inculcated in our American experience since the early eighteenth century. Before the age of mass production, the artist who painted a portrait or embellished a piece of furniture might have also decorated a parade banner, an apron, symbols on a chart, or a backdrop for a fraternal lodge. More important, he or she encoded the ideals of fellowship, labor, charity, passage, and wisdom—the core of fraternal teachings—into the many forms associated with fraternal practice. The iconic art and objects showcased in Mystery and Benevolence relate the tenets of fraternal belief through a potent combination of highly charged imagery, form, and meaning. The exhibition explores the fascinating visual landscape of fraternal culture through almost two hundred works of art comprising a major gift to the American Folk Art Museum from Kendra and Allan Daniel.

Co-curators: Stacy C. Hollander, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs, Chief Curator, and Director of Exhibitions, American Folk Art Museum, and Aimee E. Newell, Director of Collections, Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library.



American Folk Art Museum - Mystery and Benevolence: Masonic and Odd Fellows Folk Art from the Kendra and Allan Daniel Collection - 21.01.2016 - 08.05.2016
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2016-02-03

2182 - 20160427 - U.S.A. - NEW YORK - Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better - 05.02.2016-27.04.2016

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Peter Fischli David Weiss, Untitled, 1994–2013 (detail). Painted polyurethane, 164 parts, overall dimensions variable. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Collections Council and through prior gifts of an anonymous donor, Mr. and Mrs. Nathan L. Halpern, and the Andrew Powie Fuller and Geraldine Spreckels Fuller Bequest 2014.115 © Peter Fischli David Weiss. Photo: Jason Klimatsas, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

For more than three decades, Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012) collaborated to create a unique oeuvre that brilliantly exploits humor, banality, and a keen rethinking of the readymade to realign our view of the world. Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better offers the most thorough investigation to date of their joint production, revealing the ways they juxtaposed the spectacular and the ordinary in order to celebrate the sheer triviality of everyday life, while creating an open-ended interrogation of temporality, visual culture, and the nature of existence itself. The retrospective will demonstrate the intricate interrelationships among Fischli and Weiss’s seemingly discrete works in sculpture, photography, installation, and video, each of which they used to confront, examine, and lampoon the seriousness of high art. In particular it will establish a sustained dialogue between Fischli and Weiss’s work with the moving image and their sculptural practice, with signature projects like Suddenly This Overview (1981– ), hundreds of unfired clay sculptures that pillory established truths and myths alike, and The Way Things Go (1987), an inane filmic study of causational activity, appearing along the museum’s ramps. The exhibition will further consider Fischli and Weiss’s extended meditations on the banality of existence, with key objects from virtually every body of work within their oeuvre, including Sausage Series (1979); Equilibres (Quiet Afternoon) (1984–86); Grey Sculptures (1984–86/2006–08); Rubber Sculptures (1986–90/2005–06); Visible World (1986–2012); Airports (1987–2012); Polyurethane Installations (1991– ); Question Projections (2000–2003); Fotografías (2005); and Walls, Corners, Tubes (2009–12), among others.

Initially planned during David Weiss’s lifetime, Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better is organized by Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator, and Nat Trotman, Curator, Performance and Media, in close collaboration with Peter Fischli.
To coincide with this exhibition, two public works by Fischli and Weiss will appear on the streets of New York. From February 5 to May 1, Public Art Fund presents the text-based monument to labor How to Work Better (1991) as a wall mural at the corner of Houston and Mott Streets. At 11:57 pm nightly throughout February, the video Büsi (Kitty) (2001) will appear in Times Square as part of Times Square Arts’ Midnight Moment program.


 
Guggenheim NY - Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better - 05.02.2016 - 27.04.2016