Thursday, April 10 to Sunday, April 13.
643 Park Avenue at 66th Street
11AM to 7PM (6PM Sunday)

The Association of International Photography Art Dealers [AIPAD] is currently holding its annual New York fair, the Photography Show. The event, which opened April 10, runs through this Sunday at 6PM at the Park Avenue Armory at East 66th Street. This year the Photography Show features around eighty international galleries focusing on “contemporary, modern and nineteenth-century photographs, as well as photo-based art, video, and new media” according to the association.

Major works by old masters such as Eugene Atget, Henry Fox Talbot, Alfred Steichen, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Tina Modotti, nestle beside the works of living artists including Philip Lorca di Corcia, Stan Douglas, Alec Soth, Tanya Marcuse, and Gustavo Lacerdo. The juxtapositions this creates are often interesting and frequently the legends manage to outshine the contemporary.

There is an international line up, as befits its name, with exhibitors from the UK, Japan, China, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Canada, Belgium, and Argentina, with Daniel Blau, for instance, from Munich and London, and Feroz Gallery, Bonn, who are showing key photographs from August Sander’s mammoth anthropological series People of the 20th Century. Sander (1876 –1964) aimed to take photographs of types and professions to characterize the entire German nation, including “The Baker” (1928).

US dealers form the majority of booth holders and include New York galleries David Zwirner, Howard Greenberg, Staley-Wise and Julie Saul, showing Tanya Marcuse’s Fallen No. 439 for instance.  Notable American dealers also include from California Weston Gallery from Carmel and M+B from Los Angeles.

New to AIPAD this year is Robert Heinecken (1931–2006) who worked during his life primarily as a teacher, establishing the photography program at UCLA in 1964, where he taught until 1991. Heinecken described himself as a “paraphotographer” and frequently employed collage. His sculpture “Figure Sections/Multiple Solution Puzzle” (1966) (at Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco is a “photo-puzzle” composed of images of female body parts mounted onto 24 individual blocks. It is a timely inclusion as the Museum of Modern Art has just opened the first museum retrospective of Heinecken’s work, running through June 22.

The post Uptown Exposures: The Photography Show at the Park Avenue Armory appeared first on artcritical.

August 15 to 31, 2013
547 West 27th Street, Suite 529, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 946 1685

Darren Jones is a New York-based Scottish artist whose work encompasses text, installation, photography and drawing. His work is concerned with ephemerality, the misheard, the pun, and the fragile systems of nature.

For his most recent show, “Eden’s Remains” at Illuminated Metropolis Gallery, Jones focused his attention on Fire Island Pines, a beach community off the southern shore of Long Island, internationally known since the 1970s as a Mecca for “A-gays” – that is to say, gay men who make loads of money and/or go to the gym a lot.

It is a perfect subject for Jones as it encapsulates several of his key concerns.  An ecologically fragile spit of land, the island is reachable only by ferry and is prone to hurricanes and other ravages of nature. Added to which, the Pines community – renowned for its hyper-promiscuity in the 1970s and ‘80s – was decimated by AIDS. It remains a remarkably beautiful place and its current denizens are the top dog, hyper-functional, makers-and-shakers of the East Coast gay elite. It is like the Hamptons but with bigger muscles.

The show’s title, “Eden’s Remains,” refers to this paradisiacal location but also its mythic and sometime-tragic history. Jones presents seven small works arrayed around the gallery. They are quirky, poignant, precise in wit, and formally adroit. They are often presented on little Plexiglas shelves.

Several works are text-based.  A series called “Anagrams,” for instance, scrambles gay-beach-resort-related phrases into surprising and revealing linguistic reconfigurations. The word “Paradise” eerily recombines into the phrase “Aids Rape,” and “Muscle Daddy” uncannily morphs into “Cuddly Dames.” Jones’ word collages are illuminating, elusively poetic and playful, and they also allude to broader unspoken social worries. His playfulness belies a deeper moral texture, suggesting complex histories lurking beneath the surface.

In another language-related series, “Pumping Irony,” Jones shows photographs of a series of witty graffiti détournements he made on a midtown Manhattan gym’s motivational blackboard. Subverting the gung-ho rhetoric of NYC gym culture, Jones cheekily chalks up the phrase, “Giving Up is an Option.” Another gym user amends Jones’ sacrilegious message: “Giving Up is NOT an Option.” The anonymous back-and-forth between Jones’ Scots down-to-earth wit and the gym member’s corrective rejoinders gently probes gym culture’s “Think Positive,” “Don’t be a Loser” jingoism. Jones, with his knack for finding unsayable language, catches the fleetingly awkward intersects of the transatlantic cultural gap.

The cult of the “body beautiful” and the passing of time are central themes of the exhibition. Another work features a sand-filled hourglass slowly running out due to a crack in the back of the timepiece, while nearby a delicate sketch renders a labyrinthine, hand-drawn map of all the paths through the “Meat Rack,” Fire Island’s notorious cruising zone forest. These two works, seen in conjunction, allude to the temporality of this fascinating but claustrophobic landscape, legendarily inhabited by the ghostly presence of generations of youth-obsessed gym bunnies who have spent their time cruising the forest in search of sandy trysts.

Jones maps the Fire Island community deftly in these seven small works, never overstating his point, creating subtle, poetic, visual meditations on a complex, many-layered society. The A-list beach town is both a natural paradise and an intensely competitive cultural watering hole, a microcosm of the shifting mores and dreams of American life. These works metaphorically address gay culture’s desires, its obsession with health and vitality, and its struggles with decline and mortality.

This is a provocative show on a quintessentially New York subject, a diaristic record made by a European artist wryly observing, but never judging contemporary East Coast life at an endlessly metamorphosing beach resort. And Fire Island continues to change. Now the first gay kiddy strollers are beginning to roll onto the beaches of the Pines. Jones’ show prompts us to consider how each wave of inhabitants re-sketches its parameters.

The post Pumping Irony: Darren Jones on Fire Island appeared first on artcritical.

Suzanne Anker recently organized, and showed her own work in Cerebral Spirits: Stalking the Self at the William Paterson University Galleries in Paterson, New Jersey (January 30 through March 9, 2012).  The exhibition explored ways in which research concepts in neuroscience have been incorporated into visual art practice and contemporary culture.  The other seven artists in the show were Phil Buehler, Richard Dupont, Thomas Eller, Frank Gillette, Michael Rees, Katy Schimert, and Jeanne Silverthorne, and featured sculptures, installation, photographs and video, all taking the brain as their subject.

Hallucination, memory, and the nervous system were some of the themes that emerged in a show brought up questions such as: What makes us fundamentally human? Can the “self” be identified? What mechanisms are in place to frame our concepts of the “self”? The artists addressed these questions concerning neuroscience and art, referencing advances in understanding the nervous system, measuring brainwaves, somatic responses, technological imaging, and studies of consciousness.

Anker’s own installation featured tiny parachutes, silver-leafed figures and “rapid prototype” sculptures referencing the brain. She also showed a video and photographs featuring a cross-section of a human brain together with a butterfly.

Phil Buehler showed two video loops that compare the eyes and faces of inmates of a long-term mental institution, taken from old black-and-white mug-shot photographs.  Frank Gillette’s large-scale digital prints pictured hallucinatory sensations of the interiority of psychic life.

In works that reference the body’s nervous system, Michael Rees isolated the hearing mechanism in a sculpture cast in “stereo-lithography” resin.   In a similar work, he presents a sculpture of a spine made through “selective laser sintering.”

Richard Dupont’s large sculptural heads were made out of amber-colored resin filled with personal ephemera, books, and photographs. Jeanne Silverthorne’s installation featured tiny yellow cast sculptures of family members sitting beneath clouds or on the edge of pedestals.  And Thomas Eller exhibited large cutout photographic self-portraits on laser cut aluminum that referenced a swimming accident.
Suzanne, can you tell us briefly about the genesis of this show?

“Cerebral Spirits: Stalking the Self” is the third exhibition I have curated on the theme of neuroscience and art.  Advances in imaging techniques have been at the forefront of much of the research in the neurosciences which is altering perceptions of identity and personhood. Although the 1990’s were granted the title of “decade of the brain” it is much more recently that the neurosciences have become part of the public dialogue. For example, it is now possible to move a cursor on a computer screen by employing the subject’s own eye movements. The Brain Computer Interface allows a person with “locked-in” syndrome to communicate with the external world. This technology, on the other hand, is also being marketed by computer gaming enthusiasts who create entertainment scenarios of characters engaged in battle.

You recently curated a similar show in Istanbul; you got a great space for the show at Paterson. How has the switch of location and slight change of artists changed this show, or do you see the shows as unrelated?

The exhibition at the Pera Museum in Istanbul, “Fundamentally Human: Contemporary Art and Neuroscience” focused more on the anatomical and physical structures of the nervous system. Images of neurons and their metaphorical associations with trees, a mechanical robot drawing images perceived as similar to Andreas Vesalius’ early anatomical representations, and Michael Joaquin Grey’s computational video were all technologically-based. That exhibition also showcased several European artists such as Andrew Carnie from the UK and Leonel Moura from Portugal. “Cerebral Spirits: Stalking the Self” although still involved with anatomical associations had more of a focus on psychic states and the emotions. The work was more figurative as well, focusing on ideas of portraiture. Jeanne Silverthorne, Richard Dupont, Phil Bueuler, Katy Schimert and Thomas Eller exhibited work in this genre.

Can you talk a little about how science has developed as a theme in your own work?

My work has always been about the natural world. However, it was in 1989 in an exhibition at the Greenberg/Wilson Gallery in NYC did my work take a “scientific turn.” Besides several bronze sculptures fabricated from tree limbs and 100-year-old ash-covered eggs, I used kaleidoscopes as “altering viewing” devices. By looking through a small vase with a lens on it, the spectator experienced an image of repetition and multiplicity, an image somewhat related to looking through a microscope. The periphery of the image appeared as circular. The name of the piece was “Fixed Gaze” and later went on to be exhibited at the Philips Collection Washington, D.C.  Influenced by this optical experience, I researched microscopic images from biology’s vast data bank. I was not interested in portraying disease in ways that limited my palette. I then came across an image of a chromosome that I immediately perceived as a sign of the body’s writing itself. The rest is history.

As you reflect on these two shows now, any thoughts?”

Science has spilled out of the laboratory and into our lives…from the food we eat to the clothes we wear to the pharmaceuticals we are prescribed. It is no wonder that many visual artists are interfacing with concepts in science both conceptually and even in science labs.  Most recently, I have created a Nature and Technology Lab at SVA, where students work with living matter, engage in field work and employ the metaphors inherent in nature and science to their own work.  Our lab houses plants, fish, frogs, sets of microscopic slides, three microscopes (with camera and video equipment) as well as an autoclave, incubator and fume hood. Visiting lecturers have included artists, scientists and theorists.

And where do you see connections between art and science progressing from here?

Many artists have integrated scientific notions in their work, which is not particular to our current time frame. However, the molecular genetics revolution, advances in neuroscience, and sophisticated  visualizing technologies as well as concerns over bio-terrorism place the artist in a fertile mind-set for the 21st century. Science has become a framing device for artists, much like popular culture in the last century. As new technologies continue to open up recombinatory practices and as visualizing technologies reframe garnered biological data, we are all in for a bit of a spin.

A final question: 1980s art school education was typically focused on Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory. Now we’ve moved on. As head of the program in Fine Arts that includes New Media and Bio Art at SVA in 2012, what new theorists and fields of ideas are shaping thought and progress in this area now, and how?

Whereas theory was a hallmark in the 1980’s, I think its role in the visual arts has become greatly reduced. Although Ranciere, Bourriand, Groys and Zizek have added much to the lexicon, other central issues have emerged in this time of uncertainty. Social media, film and science fiction have had a crucial role in expanding the ideology of the present. The TED series, YouTube, Facebook et al have all contributed to a multi-dimensional network of thought. War, rogue governments and propaganda machines have also been relevant in regard to the ways in which we theorize the here and now. In a sense, deep thought has merged with fantasy. Margaret Atwood, Bruce Sterling, Werner Herzog to name a few, have opened up contentious territories with regard to environmental, technological and philosophical propositions. Media has trumped many other forms of knowledge production and terror has become a buzzword. Jürgen Habermas’ insights continue dissect the current moment, while art criticism, per se, has become merely descriptive. Re-formatting platforms of investigation into what issues are at stake in a transglobal world are being incorporated into art practice, at least at the School of Visual Arts. We have recently built out a state of the art facility in which digital sculpture, media art and the bio arts figure prominently, alongside traditional forms of painting and drawing.

The post Spilling Out of the Laboratory: A Conversation with Suzanne Anker appeared first on artcritical.

March 5 – April 16, 2011
521 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues,
New York City, (212) 629 6100

Inka Essenhigh’s paintings flit between abstraction and representation. Populated by a cosmology of figures that appear surreal and distended, they draw from her own very particular if perverse psycho-architectural interior world.

Her work has been described as both “exotic and operatic.” Critics cite 19th-century caricatures, oriental art, Arabic miniatures, and contemporary comics as influences.  Other references that come to mind are the mad machines of 1920s British illustrator W. Heath Robinson, and the Rabelaisian folk scenes of another Brit, Sir Stanley Spencer.

Essenhigh’s images unfold her own internal mythologies and legends. They show figures caught frozen in dynamic moments of suspended animation. Abstracted hydras mutate into melting organic shapes, human figures are caught in exaggerated grotesque gestures, as they morph with mouths open, cavorting and yawning in the evening light.

Her earlier paintings in enamel were first celebrated for their flat surfaces, the detached perfection of virtual reality, and their sense of hyper-artificiality. But in her newer work, Essenhigh has progressed to deeper space, more eternal and more earthy themes. She switched from enamel to oil paint, and now she has added a new medium for her, monoprint. Her series of monoprints – along with new editions of intaglio prints – at Pace Prints Chelsea draw their  subjects from nature, the seasons, mythology, and theater.

Inka, can you tell us about the genesis of the work you are current showing at Pace Prints? How you did you come to make this body of work?

It’s an extension of what I’ve been working on with my paintings for the past couple of years. With the monotypes I would go in every day, sit down and make an image and it’s very fast. All these things just come out of my head: I don’t worry about their meaning.  What I’m going for is an inner vision. or at least the feeling of an inner vision.

Can you explain what you mean by “inner vision”? Is it an internal world?

Yes, it’s an internal world. But it’s an internal world where I feel I’m tapping into everybody else’s internal world.

The collective unconscious?

Exactly. When something feels sacred then I feel I’m on to something. I don’t know what that looks like but that’s the feeling I’m going for.

There are forty in the series, quite an expansive body of work.  So, they’re one-of-a-kind prints.

They are basically paintings on paper. I paint on a steel plate and then a sheet of paper gets pressed down on it picking up the image. The quickness and liquidness of painting on a smooth plate really works for me. I can make something small, substantial, and complete.

Right, it’s a fast medium for you. There seem to be two dominant motifs in the series: the natural environment, seas or forests, and then corridors and stages.

Theater stages.

Exactly, theater stages. I sense a connection to paganism, the outdoor world, with forest gods or sea gods, different mythologies, anthropomorphism and archetypes. But can you say something about these stages, these corridors with what appear to be arms reaching out holding lights.

The stage is a metaphor for having arrived somewhere, or I suppose it’s a place of consciousness in a public setting. And perhaps I’m not there yet but I’m on my way. I’m on a path to being able to articulate something or know something. And being backstage of something is like a metaphor for just that.

I think of Manhattan as being one big stage. It’s kind of a small, compacted stage, as opposed to other cities where you drive around and you don’t see it. You can actually walk around New York like a stage.  You run into characters. You perform.

And there’s a certain kind of lighting in the stage paintings that is reminiscent of the Bowery and that vaudevillian tradition, of Judy Garland or Ethel Merman. There’s a quality to the light where the subject is bathed in, well, a very different kind of light to the lighting at the Oscars which is this all-consuming, every-wrinkle-visible light. This is much more of a golden, bathing type of light. Is that referencing something particular for you?

No, I just like it. In twilight things can emerge and disappear and can be ambiguous, and I sort of use that. I don’t want to say as a crutch, because god, I feel that, for so long now, I’ve pursued taking art out of my art.

Taking out all of your tropes.

Right. I’m attracted to twilight in terms of making things appear and disappear and flatten things out and bring things to shape in an easy light.

… in a mythological sense, the magic of twilight.

It’s not like Manhattan where you get sunny days, you get rainy days, you get twilight, you get all sorts of things.  I just set it all to twilight.

You prefer twilight because there’s more of a blend going on?

Or more ambiguity.

Not so claustrophobic, not so oppressive?

Right. I was making one that had light in it and I thought, Oh god! (laughs) I hate making light and shadow. There’s something so oppressive about that formula.  You’ve got to have a light source but then the next thing you have to do is to make it somewhat logical. It’s so oppressive, I can’t stand it.

In your earlier work there were certain kinds of figures that make me think of institutional settings with uniforms – jackets with particular kinds of buttons being used. In these later works, the clothes are more like shrouds and rags, something more decaying…

When I was making the earlier work I think that I was very consciously trying to make something contemporary, taking a color sense and a design that is from today.  But these new ones are not attempting to be contemporary at all costs. These are inspired, if anything, by timelessness. So I just don’t have those ideas any more. I mean, they just don’t come to me. I don’t sit there and think “How can I make this contemporary?” which is what I would have done before and it’s very easy, you know, you can see something you just saw, like uniforms or things like hazardous waste, “Haz.Mat” suits and things like that. They just look like they don’t come from any other time, because those materials didn’t exist before.

Do you see the clothing now as shrouds sometimes?

Not so much. No, it’s just a feeling. No I don’t necessarily see them as shrouds. I see them as amorphous, unformed energy.

Contemporary references in that earlier series bring one right into the now. But these newer works are more eternal. I’m seeing Father Christmas in one of the works, for instance.

Yes. Often it’s about representation of energy forms on an elemental level.

And I was thinking in terms of the cycle of images that you have at Pace Prints right now, they seem to be seasonal, maybe we could talk about how that works in the show. Are they arranged in a particular sequence?

The Pace people arranged it, but what you see is Spring, Fall, and Winter. I wasn’t there during the summer so I don’t have any Summer prints but yes, when I was on my way there and I was wondering what am I going to do this morning images that come to mind are part of where I am at.

So there is a diarist quality to them?

Yes there is a diarist quality.

So there’s a seasonal flavor. The stage ones, are they more Fall/twilight?

Yeah, Fall and Winter.

I always feel that asking an artist like you to specify what you’re doing in your work spoils the elusiveness of your work. There’s a quality of “Does this mean this?” That said, do you feel like you’re heading more into abstraction or you’re coming more into figuration as you progress?

I think I’m probably heading more into figuration. But figuration isn’t necessarily that something means one thing or another. When I come out with an image of something, you could say that it’s a stage, and I want it to be a stage, but whether I put one person there or two people there is based on feeling, it’s basically that I’m still working on an abstract level. I mean there is abstraction in all figuration and figuration in abstraction. I have a rule that if you can name it, it’s not abstract.  “What is it?” (laughs).

I really think with painting you can tell what people are thinking and feeling for each thing. So if you are making work where you are totally not into it, you can see it. Maybe you can see that in sculpture too. I can’t read it as well because I’m not a sculptor. But with painting you need to be clear. “Oh, here I felt like I needed to do something. Here I needed to make this look more like this.” And any time you start to go and make art where you have a certain set of rules, like “I can’t be too much this way and I can’t be too much that way, and I’m only going to go here and not so far because it gets too cheesy or this way because that’s no good, too figurative, too literal,” all these criticisms, you’re not really making art. If all you’re doing is negotiating these rules, that’s not art, that’s sort of like you’re patching together various things. But when you’re onto something for real, all those rules fly out the window, when you want to do something.

And when you really have something to say. But how does that relate for example to your shift into a deeper, three-dimensional space?

Because I could feel more and more that in the flatter work, “You can’t be too much this way, you can’t be too much that way”, and I started to want to expand but I couldn’t figure out how. “You can’t put a face in, you can’t make it too illustrative. You can’t.”

It’s more limited, you’d be stuck with your facility to draw and paint, which is phenomenal but you’d be stuck in the role of “She’s the one who does these incredible line drawings” but whereas you needed to expand your range.

Right, to be a real human being, not just somebody who is afraid to be this, and afraid to be that.

You’re taking on a more canonical type of painting in some sense.

Well I think I always loved that kind of canonical painting, I always did. That is what I really love. I love older work more than I like most contemporary artwork, and I also understand that what the contemporary art world is actually trafficking in is contemporary art. It’s got to be current on some level. I don’t know what to say beyond saying that I want that and I feel happy and easy and right making these paintings. And I trust the ease of it. The inspiration of it. The rightness of it.

… in that it’s not a contrived position?

Yeah. I was a young person trying to be a part of things but that’s not my main focus any more.

Inka Essenhigh will appear in conversation with Alexi Worth at the New York Studio School on Tuesday, March 29 at 6.30 pm.  8 West 8 Street, between 5th and 6th avenues, New York City, 212 673 6466

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