Cindy Sherman: Retrospective

Cindy Sherman: “Untitled #465”, 2008, C-Print, 161,9 x 145,4 cm

Cindy Sherman, Retrospective, February 26-June 11, 2012
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Throughout her career, she has presented a sustained, eloquent, and provocative exploration of the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation, drawn from the unlimited supply of images from movies, TV, magazines, the Internet, and art history.

Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting.

To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and wardrobe mistress. With an arsenal of wigs, costumes, makeup, prosthetics, and props, Sherman has deftly altered her physique and surroundings to create a myriad of intriguing tableaus and characters, from screen siren to clown to aging socialite.

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/cindysherman/

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Norwegian Painting: Christian Tony Norum

1 November 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Artists Main 1 Comment

Christian Tony Norum, Installation view, Untitled, 2015 and Colours of All Time, 2015

A beautiful bird, a drum, the stars and the ancestors, a river, the sea, the wind and the sun. I am blinded by being a human being, searching wondering about everything and nothing. I am a universal human being that live and breath for art, poetry, performance. My main focus is painting but with all this intensity and shadow, I even have to use my self as a medium.

The problems I’m dealing with or try to solve, is how a specific painting or situation have any value or effect at all in this world. I cant change the world or solve any big problems but only believing that small organs like a catalyst can present some kind of nerve that show a little hope of healing in all this killing. Ambitious initiative, which addresses issues of storage and research in addition to exhibitions, museums-represents a substantial attempt to cement this reputation.
Possibilities available for the fundamental artists to negate, stripping away until nothing remains, or to accumulate, to embrace additively until one has reached the limit of fullness. The subversive, at the times contrarian loving and caustic, chaotic and prec—has pursued both paths at once both tendencies arc visible in the presents of artistic practice.

Working with painting, performance and sculpture I need to examine strategies and issues in post structural and modernist theories by using dialogue and communication with my contemporaries and earlier artist.
I use the art-history as a innocence open source to use this old knowledge as a catalyst for new deeper meanings and generate it into a self-reflecting understanding of how I preside the world.
Its not always a issue, its to amuse your self in this reality of ours.
The issues that already exist, or you are put into this world and by using experimental natural methods to meet this experiences with closed eyes while staring at the sun and you know what it is for what it is and that is the color orange.

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Iman Issa

1 August 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Artists Main No Comments

Iman Issa, Material for a sculpture representing a monument erected in the spirit of defiance of a larger power, 2010 and Making Places (c-print), Series of ten c-prints, 2007

Iman Issa, born 1979, Cairo, is an artist based in Cairo and New York.

The cryptic work of Iman Issa rarely denotes its subject matter nor reveals the artist’s creative process. In many of her recent projects, there is a tacit insistence that Issa’s materials – which include sculptural objects, photographs and video – speak of far more than their content suggests.
This is also true of Issa’s work in that most content-laden of media: fiction. Her book of one-page stories, Thirty-Three Stories about Reasonable Characters in Familiar Places (2011), which she considers both a work of literature and of art, almost completely omits names, places or adjectives. The stories are more like fragments in which the reader must locate a narrative arc from a brief spark of disappointment, a passing thought or a disagreement between a handyman and his client. Issa’s writing suggests that what ultimately characterizes a situation, event or concept may not lie in its own self-evident, specifically described form or content. Rather, it might extend itself from an association, a memory or an otherwise insignificant detail.

In making a work, Issa often proceeds as though she has a hypothetical relationship to the medium or subject matter, then alters her position during the development of the piece as a tactical measure. For example, in her series ‘Triptychs’ (2009), Issa created the three elements in each work by assuming a different artistic subjectivity in relation to a source. In Triptych #1, for instance, she began with a snapshot she had taken of a bland communal waterfront space. Treating the photograph as though she had never seen it before, Issa then developed a second piece in response. The third work in the triptych was likewise created as though she were unaware of the first two, and had simply imagined the connections between them. Whilst this may seem a curious process to adopt in order to communicate a personal memory or sensation – involving as it does more alienation than proximity – the elements of the triptychs nonetheless resonate with one another.

Her group and solo exhibitions include Trapped in Amber: Angst for a Reenacted Decade, UKS, Oslo, 2009, 7th Gwangju Biennale, 2008, Cairoscape, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin, 2008 , Making Places, Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, 2008, Look Around, Arte Ricambi, Verona, 2008, Memorial to the Iraq War,ICA, London, 2007. Her video work has been screened at several venues including Tate Modern, London, Spacex, Exeter, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, and Bidoun Artists Cinema.

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Photography: Yaakov Israel

28 May 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Books Culture Main No Comments

Yaakov Israel, The Quest for the Man on the White Donkey, 2012

“As per the Orthodox Jewish tradition, the Messiah (the Prophet) will arrive riding on a white donkey.

A few years ago, as I was photographing near the Dead Sea, a Palestinian man rode past me on his white donkey and I took a picture of him. It was after having developed this plate that I realized that I had encountered my “Messiah”; it was this chance encounter which brought me to initiate the body of work that carries the name: The Quest for the Man on the White Donkey.

As my messenger started to reveal the “message”, the search for a deeper understanding of my country and what defines me as an Israeli became an urge to look for the in-between places, the unexpected situations; suddenly a detail requested my attention as I stood for hours waiting for a meaning to reveal itself, or pushed me away, puzzled. But in the end I had to hold on to it. I could not let go until that detail was made mine, until the elusive and enigmatic found their place in my understanding of what I deemed as an authentic, real encounter.

In Israel I feel that the evidence of the past is strongly intertwined with the marks of the present and the questions about our future. This is why it is sometimes possible to see the past, present and future revealed in front of one’s eyes at the same time.Part of my identity as an Israeli is to question everything, not to take anything for granted, to show the tensions that constantly exist, to convey the truth behind the reality. Religious, social aspects filter into everyday life and their meanings are revealed as the journey moves on. Jewish missionaries, lost souls and individuals living on the fringe of society, all blend into this landscape of humanity.” Yaakov Israel, January 2012

Yaakov Israel was born in 1974 in Jerusalem, Israel where he lives and works.He graduated in 2002 (B.F.A) with honors from the Department of Photography at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. Following his graduation he received a scholarship from the Academy for an additional year of research and work on a project. In his work he constantly investigates the Israeli identity as perceived through architecture, landscape and the people living in his country. He finds that he is drawn to document places that are from one point of view characteristic of the Israeli landscape but on the other hand are not noticeable to most.

http://www.yaakovisrael.com/

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Artist: Pennacchio Argentato

2 April 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Artists Main No Comments

Pennacchio Argentato, Survival Upgrade, 2013 and Dude where is my career?, 2009

In May 2013, footage emerged in the media of a man waving a bloodied meat cleaver in the air whilst reciting the mantra to the camera: ‘You [people] will never be safe’. The phrase formed part of a political message delivered in the style of a home video to the British public by the man who, along with one other, had hacked a British soldier to death on the streets of Woolwich just moments before. The footage was threatening, macabre and darkly arresting; its rapid dissemination on the Internet pointed to a grim, voyeuristic fascination with the brutal crime and its motivations.

It is this interaction of human events with the complex machinations of technology that appears to fascinate collaborators Pasquale Pennacchio and Marisa Argentato. The two artists wrenched the phrase ‘you will never be safe’ from this context as part of their exhibition ‘Survival Upgrade’ and hung it in the centre of Van Horbourg, a non-profit curator’s collective operating within a temporary art space in Zurich run by founders and co-directors Sandra Oehy and Roger Meier. Far from the original setting of the crime, the sinister words were objectified by the artists, who frequently use the technologies of fabrication and projection to attempt to engage with the hypnotic and transformative powers of technology.

Pennacchio Argentato cut the words out of Perspex with a light-transmitting film on one face. Behind this, a projector was set up at a distance to transmit swirling fractal images through the Perspex and onto the front surface of the text. The overall effect was that of gaudy kitsch, visually arresting when you first enter the space and face the text, but less convincing as you move around and to the rear of it. This was largely due to the material itself, which is flat and flimsy, slightly undermining its own apparent status as the centrepiece of the exhibition. The flatness of the material did however have one curiously confounding effect, which was to negate the very depth of the images projected onto it. By turning the freestanding words into a screen upon which the abstract receding fractals were projected, the artists managed to debunk any conventional optical illusion of depth commonly associated with filmic projection, or indeed with any projection onto the solid wall of a gallery, because in this case the audience could walk behind the ‘screen’. The projection, in other words, was revealed for the ruse it really is, while at the same time the words lost their meaning in deference to the hypnotic optical effects they have become a latent surface for.

In past exhibitions, notably ‘Five o’clock shadows’ at T293 Gallery, Rome in 2010 and the group show ‘Where Language Stops’ at Wilkinson Gallery in London in 2011, Pennacchio Argentato have exhibited immense planar forms cast from concrete, wood and fibreglass that slide, fold, slither or droop lazily across the floors and walls of galleries. But in the second part of ‘Survival Upgrade’, the artists’ almost comically anthropomorphic sculptures were reinterpreted as prosthetic human limbs cast out of Carbon-Kevlar, a material favoured by the US army for the manufacture of soldiers’ combat helmets and other protective gear. This is a new material for the artists, who have previously worked with cast concrete and Perspex, yet the experiment seems successful. The Carbon-Kevlar appears both sleekly organic and awkwardly mechanistic, able to mould itself symbiotically with the human body whilst retaining the appearance of a hard, shiny shell, cast off like the plasticized robotic detritus of some future world in which the technological extension of the body has already outlived its usefulness. These apparatuses occupied the periphery of the space in which the text formed the centrepiece, yet they were by no means secondary to it. Flung to the edges of the white room by some centrifugal force, either adhering to the walls or scattered about the floor for the viewer to pick his or her path between, the prosthetic limbs were rendered as junk, as the bodies they were made for have evolved – or mutated.

http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/pennacchio-argentato/

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Charles Harlan, Sculpture

22 December 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Artists Main No Comments

Charles Harlan, Stack, 2015, Roll Gates, 2012 and Counter, 2013

Drawing inspiration from Land Art of the 1970s, Harlan avails himself of the most common materials at hand – including such hardware store staples as ladders, shipping palettes, and one-ton metal pipe – in his large industrial works. Huge in scale, Minimalist in form, and shown both indoors and out, Harlan’s art has often been referred to as Duchampian in its reliance upon readymade components, its deceptive simplicity, and it spatial humor. His stacking and layering of recognizable, utilitarian materials renders surprisingly potent forms that invite unexpected associations.

Charles Harlan sculpture and work invites contemplation of the ways in which we adapt to and absorb the toughness of the urban landscape. Pristine, immutable walls are made from the same sheet metal fencing that encloses myriad outdoor parking lots and construction sites, and hosts graffiti and flurries of advertisements throughout the cityscape. But whereas the world around us is wild and feral, Harlan’s work is carefully ordered, throwing into higher contrast the realms of tumult inside.

Harlan was raised in Smyrna, Georgia, and his work exhibits a vernacular, domestic flair, as if the suburban housing tracts featured in Dan Graham’s Homes for America (1966) were taken apart and repurposed as elegant, redneck Minimalism. With Shingles (2011), for example, Carl Andre’s floor-based metal works meet their working-class counterpart, as copper plates are exchanged for patterns of overlapping asphalt roofing tiles; Siding (2011), meanwhile, replaces Donald Judd’s shiny metal cubes with the work’s namesake – and very plebeian – exterior vinyl wallcovering found on many a tract house; and by simply lifting a marble countertop off the bathroom sink and onto the wall, Counter (2012) proves that even the slightest of gestures, such as a change of orientation and context, can render foreign something familiar – the everyday as convincing art object. Similarly, with Pipe, it’s as if one of Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1976) was transported from the desert to this small, white cube gallery on the Lower East Side.

Equally industrial as Holt’s work, though perhaps more refined-looking with its clean metal surface and, when struck, resonant timbre, Harlan’s invasive culvert more closely pressures the thin distinction between rote object and institutionally legitimated artwork. Even if they’re in the middle of nowhere, Holt’s tunnels are art because the artist presents them as such; Pipe is equally authored and institutionalised. That it’s a pipe is precisely the point. While it’s a beautiful object, it illustrates how arbitrary ‘art’ really is. The term may designate anything, from a painting to a pickle in a jar. The latter, displayed in the gallery’s back office, is sold by Harlan’s mother in her hardware store; it could be an artwork too, if he willed it.

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