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jeremystrele · 4 years

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10 Unmissable Exhibitions To See In 2021!

Art

by Sasha Gattermayr

Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future at the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York. Photo – David Heald.

Left: The Ten Largest, Group IV, No. 3, Youth by Hilma af Klint, 1907. Right: Group IX/UW, The Dove No.2 by Hilma af Klint 1915.

Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings 12th June – 19th September 2021 Art Gallery of New South Wales

You might recognise the pastel tones and soft, mystical forms of Swedish visionary Hilma af Klint. The 2019 exhibition of her newly discovered paintings at New York’s Guggenheim drew record-breaking crowds, and was broadcast all over Instagram. But nothing substitutes for the real thing!

The 100 works that comprise The Secret Paintings will premiere in the Asia Pacific at the Art Gallery of New South Wales this winter, which will be the first major survey of the experimental artist’s work in the region. The existence of the enormous, ambitious canvases was not known until recently when they found in storage after being kept there for the last few decades… unbeknownst to the art world!

Now brought to light, the dazzling exhibition represents an outpouring of appreciation for the trailblazing modernist artist. Don’t miss this international art sensation!

‘Friend Under the Tree‘ by Mirka Mora.

MIRKA 14th February – 19th December 2021 Jewish Museum of Australia, Victoria

It’s no secret we’re HUGE Mirka Mora fans, but this is big… even for us! MIRKA is the most expansive survey of the late, great artist’s work and dives deep into her rich personal history as well as her vibrant creative oeuvre.

After pushing back the opening due to last year’s restrictions, the Jewish Museum of Australia will transform into a ‘Mirka-world’ on Valentine’s Day, featuring more than 200 unseen pieces from the Mora family home and Mirka’s studio and archives. These will be featured alongside pieces from Heide’s permanent collection to create a vivid account of her life as a Holocaust refugee in Australia.

Visitors will be guided through the exhibition of artworks and personal effects by an audio soundscape of stories and memories – narrated by Mirka herself! This will be a truly immersive show of a Melbourne icon.

Left: The Royal Tour (Self Portrait 1), 2020. Right: The Royal Tour (Vincent and Elizabeth), 2020.

The Royal Tour (Charles, Vincent and Elizabeth), 2020.

Vincent Namatjira 8th – 25th September, 2021 This Is No Fantasy

2020 was Vincent Namatjira’s year. The artist received an Order of Australia in June, and then took out the prestigious Archibald Prize a few months later, becoming the first Indigenous artist to win the country’s most prestigious portrait prize. AND he released a book in December!

Originally from Ntaria (Hermannsburg), Northern Territory (125km South West of Alice Springs), Vincent identifies as Western Aranda. Today, he is based at Iwantja Arts in the remote community of Indulkana in South Australia’s APY (Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara) lands.

Vincent’s bold, unique paintings position notable historical figures (often political leaders or members of the British monarchy) in the vivid Australian desert, or himself in diplomatic scenes between international heads of states. His subversive style questions the nature of history and politics we understand today.

This Is No Fantasy gallery represents the of-the-moment artist and will host an exhibition of his recent works later this year. Details are yet to be finalised but mark the date in your diary, it’s going to be excellent!

Left: Cloud formations by Cecilie Bendixen, 2020 and Capitolviscera appliances mural by Jim Shaw, 2011. Photo – Tom Ross. Right: C=O=D=A by Cerith Wyn Evans, 2019–20. Photo – Tom Ross.

Triennial 2020 December 2020 – April 18th, 2021 National Gallery Victoria

Given this all-encompassing contemporary showcase only happens once every three years, its pretty much the defintion of ‘unmissable’.

With pieces scattered throughout the NGV’s permanent collection, the Triennial displays the work of over 100 contemporary designers and artists across many mediums and creative disciplines. From enormous digital landscapes by Refik Anadol to colourful installations by interior designer Danielle Brustman and an enormous iridescent Jeff Koons sculpture, the exhibition celebrates the diversity and of contemporary creatives around the world.

And to really sweeten the deal, entry is free! Make sure to book ahead.

The Lume at MCEC presenting Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.

The Lume Permanent installation – opening Autumn 2021 (stay tuned!) Melbourne Convention Exhibition Centre

Digital art isn’t usually our arena, but an epic-scale digital rendering of classic masterpieces that deposit you INSIDE the painting? Sign us up! The Lume is an immersive art experience that casts projections around a large observation room, enveloping the roaming visitor in the world of a painting.

Opening with the masterpieces of Vincent Van Gogh, visitors enter the world of the Dutch master via a symphony of light, colours, sound and even smells. The moving imagery guides viewers through the Netherlands, Paris and the French countryside, allowing them to visit the locations of the artist’s most famous scenes before arriving at the paintings themselves. The multi-sensory experience gives a sense of Van Gogh’s own thoughts, feelings, emotions and surroundings as he painted.

If quiet, white galleries is not your ideal art-viewing environment, The Lume is for you. It’s like the planetarium of art galleries!

Improvisation No III (Munich) by Erica McGilchrist, 1961.

House of Ideas: Modern Women 1st May – 31st October, 2021 Heide Museum of Modern Art

One of the best things about Heide is the history of the grounds itself, the bedrock of the Australian modernist art movement. House of Ideas: Modern Women celebrates the creative women connected to the iconic site.

From writers to artists, poets and progressive thinkers, these visionary female creatives have been largely forgotten by history, though making just as significant contributions to the bohemian movement as their male counterparts. The exhibition includes the work of Sunday Reed, Cynthia Reed Nolan, Barbara Blackman, Mary Boyd, Joy Hester, Mirka Mora and more to illustrate the central role these women played in creating the cultural and intellectual environment we understand today.

Left: Assemblage of the Fragmented Landscape by Mehwish Iqbal, 2020. Right: Fragile Ecologies by Lauren Berkowitz, 2018.

The National 2021: New Australian Art

The National is a six-year long partnership between three key galleries in New South Wales: the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carriageworks and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. This year’s show is the last in a series of three biennial exhibitions, with works spread out across all three locations.

The National: 2021 is a sprawling survey of contemporary Australian art, bringing together artwork from artists of different generations and cultural backgrounds around the country. Thirty-nine artists, collectives and collaboratives present their responses to present-day Australia through a chosen medium, from sculpture to mural to bark painting.

Museum of Contemporary Art Australia 26 March– 22 August 2021

Carriageworks 26th March – 20th June, 2021

Art Gallery of New South Wales 26th March – 5th September 2021

The 2020 finalists on display. Photo – Charlie Bliss.

National Aboriginal And Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA) Museum and Art Gallery Northern Territory

The Telstra National Aboriginal And Torres Strait Islander Art Awards is a milestone event in the art calendar every year, and the 37th iteration will be no different!

The awards program and accompanying exhibition unites emerging and established Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists at the Museum and Art Gallery Northern Territory in Darwin. The diversity of media displayed among the finalists in the last few years represents the richness of the contemporary art practices among leading Indigenous artists, and the fresh perspectives they bring to the artistic fabric of contemporary Australia. This show is knock-out every year.

Dates are yet to be finalised for this year’s program, but fingers crossed for an IRL ceremony and exhibition!

Left: ‘Sunflowers’ by Vincent van Gogh, 1888. Right: ‘Hillside in Provence’ by Paul Cézanne, c1890–92.

‘Four scenes from the early life of Saint Zenobius‘ by Sandro Botticelli, c1500.

Botticelli to Van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London 5 March – 14 June 2021 National Gallery of Australia

Hold onto your hats, there’s a masterpiece blockbuster on its way to Australia!

Spanning five centuries and seven key artistic periods, Botticelli to Van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London brings together 60 paintings by big time European heavyweights including Titian, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez, Goya, Turner, Renoir, Cézanne and Gauguin. These titans bookend Western European art history, starting with the Italian Renaissance and ending with the birth of modern art, catching the Dutch Golden Age, 17th-century Spanish movement and British portraiture in between.

This showstopper is presented in partnership with the National Gallery, London and is exclusive to the NGA.

The Green Room (Omega Project) by RONE, 2017.

RONE in Geelong 27th February – 16th May, 2021 Geelong Gallery

Rone is a longtime favourite in the TDF office, so just try and stop us from getting down to Geelong to see this!

From stencil works to archival photographs of his signature street murals and digital recreations of his installations, this is the first comprehensive solo survey of the artist’s iconic work. The exhibition culminates in a site-specific piece where one of the gallery’s rooms has been completely transformed into a RONE-style space.

The new multimedia commission will respond to the architecture and history of the building, reforming the grand reception area into a decayed and derelict room – reminiscent of his installations at the abandoned Burnham Beeches building in 2019. It will also contain a new soundtrack by composer Nick Batterham.

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wetagconsulting · 5 years

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Culture in Ticino by Pamela Pintus

The Swiss region of the Canton of Ticino can be an interesting and stimulating destination both from a naturalistic point of view and in terms of art and culture. In fact, there are many appointments that are renewed every year at the museums and places of interest in the main cities of this canton, as well as are particularly varied activities and events planned this year for the coming months. Locarno, Chiasso, Bellinzona and Lugano, in addition to offering the opportunity for relaxing holidays, thanks to the presence of the beautiful Alps with breathtaking views, also offer the opportunity to participate in numerous activities, exhibitions and events to experience a day of culture. The offer reflects, in a certain sense, the very variety of the Canton: from the imposing structure of the LAC with a full daily program of events, to the smaller and more intimate exhibitions, suitable for a selected public. Don't forget, then, the Sanctuary of the Madonna del Sasso in Locarno, in whose museum you can admire precious works of art, or the Castelgrande in Bellinzona with its medieval shows or the natural Amphitheatre of the marble quarries in Arzo. In just over half an hour by car you can easily move from Chiasso to Lugano, while in an hour from Lugano you can reach Locarno to visit, in the same day, the largest number of places of interest in the Canton.

Let's see, then, which are the proposals planned in the near future in these cities and which galleries, museums or foundations to visit.

One of the main artistic and cultural landmarks of the Canton Ticino is represented by the LAC, the Lugano Art and Culture, a multifaceted and international center, created to give space to all forms of art, whether visual, scenic or musical. In this way, an increasingly heterogeneous and vast public is involved, but above all, the new generations are brought closer to culture, thanks to the programming of high quality and particularly innovative events. The structure, in fact, was designed and built to give space to different events at the same time. There are a museum, the Teatrostudio, several multipurpose rooms and conference rooms, the Agorà and Piazza Luini overlooking the beautiful lake and welcomes visitors who arrive at the LAC. Thanks to this structure, Lugano is an essential destination for all art lovers in all its forms; the calendar of events scheduled for the months of May and June is also very varied.

Here is an overview of the most interesting ones. On May 3rd the Berliner Philharmoniker directed by Daniel Harding performed at the Sala Teatro, with a selection of pieces from Wagner's Parsifal and Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet, interspersed with other music by great artists such as Debussy. On May 4that at the theater was staged "Family Party", a show born from the assembly of various texts by Luigi Pirandello on the family theme, expertly revisited thanks to the advice of Andrea Camilleri. On May 5th and 7th there was guided tours of the two exhibitions "Surrealism Switzerland" and "Hodler, Segantini, Giacometti" are scheduled at the "Museo d’Arte della Svizzera Italiana"; participation is free of charge by booking online a day before. Both exhibitions are open until June 16th and July 28th respectively. In May, the LAC Atelier will host the "Bambini in scena" and "4 stagioni" (May 11th at 10 a.m.) workshops; the first is an unprecedented experience in the museum's rooms, dedicated specifically to children, while the second is a journey through the seasons of life through the works of Giorgio Vicentini. The Church of the Angioli, instead, will host spiritual concerts and organ Vespers on May 12th, 26th and June 27th from 8.30 pm.

The exhibition dedicated to the works of Franz Gertsch will be held at MASI LAC from May 12th September 22nd; in fact, on the artist's 90th birthday, his woodcuts and wood carvings will be exhibited. Also, at the MASI, on June 7th at 18.30 is planned a guided tour of art, music and poetry with a reading of literary pieces and live musical moments. On June 13th at 6 p.m. there will be a pleasant convivial meeting entitled "Let's toast to Art", an opportunity to meet experts in the field and talk about art in front of a good glass of wine. Another exciting event is the one scheduled for June 9th at 3 p.m. at the Atelier, wholly dedicated to portraiture with the creation by the participants of personal works to take home as souvenirs.

The Museum of Art of Italian Switzerland (MASI), mentioned several times before, is an important cultural reality of the city of Lugano. It was born from the merger between the Museo Cantonale di Arte and the Museo d'Arte della Città di Lugano in order to give greater impetus and diffusion to the projects carried out. It has two offices: the first at the LAC and the second at the Palazzo Reali. The MASI LAC has an area of over 2’500 square meters, entirely dedicated, as seen, to temporary exhibitions thanks to the modernity and flexibility of the spaces. For art lovers, there is also the Olgiati Collection, open until June 16th, entitled "A Collection in Progress" with the new exhibition Nature is What We See, with works strongly linked to the theme of nature and the environment.

The opportunities offered by the city of Lugano in terms of art and culture certainly do not end here. Anyone who wants to can dedicate a day to the Villa of the Ciani brothers, dating back to 1840 and built in the park that runs along the lake. The visit is particularly interesting for the historical memory that it evokes, linked to the Risorgimento and liberalism of which the Ciani were witnesses. Interesting are the original furnishings of the time, the interactive projections, the historical archive and the surrounding park.

The Hermann Hesse Museum is in the Camuzzi Tower, part of the homonymous historical house. It is a small collection entirely dedicated to the Nobel Prize winner, who decided to live in Ticino. It is also an international reference point that promotes activities, meetings and seminars on the figure of Hesse and exhibits his watercolors, made between 1919 and 1938.

An interesting alternative route in Lugano is the Parco delle Sculture (Sculpture Park), created at the end of the 1970s with the acquisition of various works of art by local and international artists. At the Belvedere Garden, therefore, you can walk admiring sculptures by Carlo Ciarli, Massimo Ghiotti, Remo Rossi, Nag Arnoldi and many others, in a pleasant and stimulating path thanks to the presence of a bike path, relaxation areas and special lighting.

Moving from Lugano to Chiasso, there are also opportunities to organize a different parenthesis from the usual. The Cultural Centre of Chiasso, in fact, offers a wide range of exhibitions, shows and events. Among these, the Biennale dell'immagine should be mentioned: Marcello Dudovich and photography and Franco Grignani: polysensory between art, graphics and photography, both on display at the M.A.X. Museum. The poster of the Cinema-Theatre is equally rich and varied with performances of comedies, concerts and ballets. At the Spazio Officina on May 11thit will be possible to attend the "CON - SCIENZE THEATRE - dar VOCE" a performance that revolves around culture and humanistic innovation, with a virtual bridge between Chiasso and San Francisco where the event won a prestigious prize. From May 25thto June 5th, instead, there will be the exhibition "Young artists prize - Synesthesia in the world of art", a competition to promote the contemporary art of emerging young people.

In Locarno, it is worth visiting the Pinacoteca Casa Rusca, located in a beautiful eighteenth-century building that houses works from the city's museums, and the Ghisla Art Collection, a building in the shape of a red cube, which does not go unnoticed and which houses paintings by modern and contemporary artists from the private collection of Martin and Pierino Ghisla.

Finally, here are some of the most interesting Art Galleries in the area, located mainly in Lugano, which is a real cultural hub for fans of the sector:

La Galleria La Colomba di Nag Arnoldi a Lugano

Fondazione Anna e Gabriele Braglia a Lugano

Artrust a Melano

Little Nemo Art Gallery a Lugano

L’Imago Art Gallery a Lugano

As we have seen, therefore, the cultural offer of the Canton Ticino is very heterogeneous and varied and allows art lovers in all its forms to carve out their own space to live a different day at the gates of Italy.

#Lugano #Culture

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: Embracing Femininity in Florid and Fierce Portraits

Del Kathryn Barton, “Weird Seed” (2017), acrylic on French linen, 71 x 63 inches (all images courtesy Albertz Benda and the artist)

Sydney-based artist Del Kathryn Barton isn’t afraid to embrace all aspects generally associated with femininity, from frail to fatal. Her paintings often depict women with large, dark eyes, pale flesh, and spindly limbs rendered in a dizzying amount of dots and set against a rainbow of pulsating color that makes the viewer feel hypnotized. The figures, despite their pallid coloring and twiggy compositions, don’t appear frail or sickly. Although their arms and legs are often bent at startling angles, they boast stoic faces and brazenly bared breasts.

The artist’s latest show, r u a bunny?, currently at Albertz Benda, features 12 brand new paintings, along with four photomontage works, and her short but darkly powerful film, “Red,” featuring fellow Aussie Cate Blanchett. While the exhibition represents her first solo show in New York, Barton is well known Down Under for her ecstatic, frequently sexually explicit work. In the past 10 years, she has won Australia’s prestigious Archibald Prize for Portraiture twice and made sensational headlines in 2008 when her work in Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art’s group exhibition Optimism invoked a public outcry because of her playfully raunchy drawings of, among other things, an erect penis with giant pineapples for balls.

Installation view of r u a bunny? at Albertz Benda, New York

Phallic fruit aside, Barton routinely incorporates themes or imagery drawn from the natural world — such as flowers, feathers, and animals — into her fierce female portraits. The conflation of women with nature (and, vice versa, men with culture) is an arbitrary but deeply encoded psychological gender binary the Western world has long promulgated. But rather than resist it, Barton leans into it. Consider her latest Dada-esque photomontages that splice together the bodies of women in short, frilly dresses with heads made of images of giant flowers and moths. It’s easy to dismiss these compositions — they seem too on the nose, too simple, too unironic. Yet the near lack of imagination behind them, coupled with their abstract, pleasingly passive titles like “soft cake in the wind” and “to speak of anger, i will take care,” underscore how ridiculous it is that our society is not only anesthetized to but continually produces these rote representations of womanhood.

Nevertheless, the artist almost gleefully explores the floridness often identified with femininity. The namesake piece of the current exhibition, “are you a bunny – a real live girl,” features a woman with exceptionally erect nipples whose head is enshrined with leaves; she gazes almost adoringly at a rabbit perched on her upwardly bent arm. The woman’s hands gesture as if she were performing the age-old trick of pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Yet her hands don’t touch the animal; the bunny is balanced on her arm of its own volition. There is no coercive magic or physical mastery. This is a relationship born of mutual understanding and appreciation between one creature and another, suggesting that perhaps to be a “real live girl” is to delight in one’s animality and connection to nature.

Del Kathryn Barton, “are you a bunny – a real live girl” (2017), acrylic on French linen, 78 3/4 x 71 inches

Barton’s bright, candy-colored palette and sketchy line work recall dreamy teenybopper doodles. Her unflinching nude figures riff off the male-dominated 20th-century legacy of symbolic portraitists, like Egon Schiele and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, which puts her conversation with a host of contemporary female painters currently exploring similar psychological themes through polychromatic portraiture, such as Mira Dancy, Natalie Frank, and Mickalene Thomas.

Like her precedents and peers, Barton doesn’t use a panoply of color to hide the darker aspects of femininity, which is especially evident in her first ever live-action film, “Red.” Taking the female Australian redback spider — which cannibalizes its mate during copulation — as its inspiration, it plumbs the depths of life, death, sex, and love in an impressively short 15 minutes. Filmed noir-style and set to epic music that sounds like a Hans Zimmer score, the film flits between intense scenes of aggression and tenderness. Blanchett writhes on the floor as she cuts away her fishnet costume; attacks her suitor before ecstatically succumbing to his touch (and then promptly wrestles him to death); screams at the top of her lungs, first alone, and then later with her progeny who has emerged from dark waters and experienced her own fishnet-shearing fit. Spiders were often used by Louise Bourgeois as a symbol for her mother (most notably in her series of large-scale bronze sculptures entitled “Maman”), since she saw them as clever, patient, smart creatures that were able to defend themselves and demanded a certain amount of fear. Similarly, Barton turns the small but terrifying arachnid into a consuming force larger than life. If her paintings rely, sometimes perhaps too heavily, on stereotypical signifiers of femininity, “Red” reveals the less easily defined qualities of female pleasure, pain, and potential.

Del Kathryn Barton, “RED” (2016), film duration: 15min, format: 1080p, HD Edition 2 of 5

r u a bunny? continues at Albertz Benda (515 W 26th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through July 14.

The post Embracing Femininity in Florid and Fierce Portraits appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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sheetalmafatlalblog-blog · 7 years

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Frieze London by Sheetal Mafatlal

As Art Dubai successfully closes, I can’t help but relive the iconic Frieze London art fair, easily the highlight of my art almanac. Being an avid art lover, I look forward to being at the ground-breaking and soul-searing Frieze London art fair each year. It’s a cornucopia of culture and color, a collage of crafts and couture, a petri-dish of ideas and influences – all coming together and giving birth to some visually arresting and thought-provoking artworks. As they say, the arts make life more bearable and in this case, the artworks threw some intelligent questions, rare insights and broadened one’s horizon and shaped up one’s world view. Unquestionably, the epochal and the game-changing Frieze London has always been the unrivaled Mecca of the Masters, Contemporary and Modern art from the most cutting-edge sources! This prestigious platform, which is hosted twice a year, features more than 160 of the world’s leading galleries and is the ultimate bastion to enjoy and buy art from over 1,000 of today’s celebrated artists, and soak in the fair’s critically acclaimed Frieze Projects and dynamic Talks programs.What made Frieze remarkably epic this time was Jeff Koons’s phenomenal showcase at Almine Rech’s new Mayfair space. A major coup, indeed! Bravo to Almine Rech gallery for pulling it off! Powerful, potent and compelling – The Gazing Ball or the Eye of Janus was truly spectacular and intoxicating. The onlookers were greeted by Tintoretto’s masterwork The Origin of the Milky Way – or rather, Koons’s version of it. Along with the seven other historical compositions displayed in the gallery, it was a replica. The lower centre of each canvas was dominated by the contemporary artist’s addition of a glass ball in the same deep lapis lazuli that is so prominent in the Venetian’s painting. There were other significant artworks on display here, such as the seated ballerina in the centre of the room made of Koons’s impeccably shining steel.The inspiring Almine Rech is the daughter of fashion legend Georges Rech and is married to writer and poet Bernard Picasso, the grandson of Pablo Picasso. The elegant and charming gallerina cut an elegant figure in Chanel haute couture and was the metaphor for unparalleled style. She’s well-known and idolized for her understated elegance and timeless style – whether it’s her house or her personal style. She has a penchant for chalk drawing that hangs in a corner of her Brussels house. It’s a sketch that Picasso made in 1963 for his grandson Bernard, who’s now Rech’s husband. At the time, Bernard was about four, preparing for his first day of kindergarten, and he proudly showed his Granddad his school supplies, including a new miniature blackboard. Picasso, taking the board in his hands, couldn’t help himself: With a few quick strokes of chalk, he drew a seagull. What an incredible story!The magnificent must-have piece was ‘The Stool’, which is limited to a series of three pieces only – dedicated to the phenomenal artist Duchamp – the father of conceptualism, who shaped the tastes of Western art in a more direct way too, since he was known to advise modern art collectors, such as Peggy Guggenheim. Besides, there were other splendid Renaissance paintings on oil canvas with the blue ball attached to them. All in all every artwork was beyond brilliant and spelled out a narrative of its own! A social commentary of sorts! Sometimes a thought-provoking satire and other times just a curious chronicle of observations!Frieze opened on Wednesday and interestingly, there were two VIP cards. The blue one was for the serious collectors giving access at 11 am and there was an orange one for the not-so-serious ones or should we say the swivel-eyed dilettantes, also called “the viewers” in the rarefied art circles, which gave access at 2 pm. Ruinart was the official drink of Frieze with trolleys serving champagne placed at strategic places around the exhibition area. I enjoyed lunch with Jérôme Sans, curator, artistic director, director of institutions and co-founder of the Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and his wife Morgan at 34 Mayfair owned by Richard Caring of Caprice Holding. Sans is also the former director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing).

Among all the coming-of-age artworks, I have to admit that the most magnificent must-have piece was the Anish Kapoor installation. A rare vertical installation of Kapoor’s towering (Dimensions) instillation – Stave (Red) 2015. Each year he manages to hypnotize the art world with his game-changing art installations. Totally a maverick!

http://sheetalmafatlal.com/

#fashion #celebrity #fashionshow

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jeremystrele · 4 years

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The Winners Of The 2020 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards

Art

by Sally Tabart

Tjala Women’s Collaborative with their artwork Nganampa Ngura 2020. Collaborators: Amy Scotty, Angela Burton, Freda Brady, Glenda Adamson, Iluwanti Ken, Janie Kulyuru, Mary Pan, Naomi Kantjuriny, Nita Williamson, Nyurpaya Kaika Burton, Rachel Lyons, Sharon Adamson, Shirley Adamson, Tanya Brady, Tjimpayi Presley. Photo – courtesy of Tjala Arts.

Shortlisted artworks. Left: Ngayuku ngura – My Country 2020 by Wawiriya Burton. Right: Nganampa Ngura 2020 by Tjala Women’s Collaborative.

Shortlisted artwork. No Respect 2020 by John Prince Siddon.

Shortlisted artists and artworks. Left: Ginger Wikilyiri. Photo – courtesy of Tjungu Palya Arts. Right: Kunamata 2020 by Ginger Wikilyiri.

Shortlisted artists and artworks. Left: Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country) 2020 by Betty Muffler. Right: Betty Muffler. Photo – Courtesy of the Artist and Iwantja Arts.

Left: Wanampi Tjukurpa (Piltati) 2020 by Leah Brady. Right: Antara 2020 by Betty Kuntiwa Pumani and Marina Pumani Brown.

On Friday the country’s most prestigious awards for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists were held, under slightly different circumstances than usual. Gamilaroi woman and host of The Today Show Brooke Boney presented the first-ever live online broadcast for NATSIAA, a dynamic and exciting celebration of the seven category winners chosen from 65 shortlisted entries.

The biggest win of the night went to Ngarralja Tommy May, a Wangkajunga and Walmajarri artist who took out the Telstra Art Award for his work Wirrkanja depicting his family’s Country, with a prize of $50,000. The six other category winners – Adrian Jangala Robertson, Iluwanti Ken, Marrnyula Munyngurr, Siena Mayutu Wurmarri Stubbs, Jenna Lee and Cecilia Umbagai – each took home $5,000 for their achievements.

There was a wide variety of mediums represented in the winning artists. Multidisciplinary artist and graphic designer Jenna Lee, who won the Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award for her work HIStory vessels, used the cover and pages of the Ladybird History Book ‘The Story Of Captain Cook’ to create a series of sculptures based on ancestral vessels. ‘For me, it was never about winning. I love the community that’s formed around the NATSIAA – all the artists follow each other and get to know each other’, says Jenna. ‘It’s so nice that industry experts agree that what I’m trying to say, and make, and the stories I’m trying to tell are important.’

There’s still one major award to be decided – The People’s Choice Award. Take a tour of the NATSIAA virtual gallery to see all the incredible shortlisted projects and cast your vote!

Left: Wirrkanja 2020 by Ngarralja Tommy May. Right: Ngarralja Tommy May, winner of the 2020 Telstra art Award. Photo – Damian Kelly.

Telstra Art Award – Ngarralja Tommy May

Ngarralja Tommy May is a Wangkajunga and Walmajarri man born in Yarrkurnja in the Great Sandy Desert, and currently living in Fitzroy Crossing. He is a founding member of the Karrayili Adult Education centre where he learnt to read and write his own language and English.

Using etching on metal and enamel paint as his medium, Wirrkanja tells the story of Tommy May’s Country.

‘This is about my Country. There is a claypan, near to Kurtal it’s also called Helena Springs, a well on the Canning Stock Route’, explains Tommy May. ‘My brother was born here. There’s living water (jila) at Kurtal, when it rains it fills up and makes a spring. It runs out this way, flows around the rocks and caves.’

‘Thank you mob in Darwin for this business. Thank you. At last. I feel proud. I’ve been trying all my life, all the time second, fourth, last, sometimes nothing. But I got it now, today. My days, my time this year, I’m the winner. At last.’

Left: Artist Jenna Lee, winner of the Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award. Photo – Rhett Hammerton. Right: HIStory Vessels 2020 by Jenna Lee.

Left: Muṉguymirri 2020 by Marrnyula Munuŋgur. Right: Marrnyula Munuŋgur, winner of the Telstra Bark Painting Award. Photo – courtesy of NATSIAA.

Left: Walawulu ngunytju kukaku ananyi (Mother eagles going hunting) by Iluwanti Ken. Right: Iluwanti Ken, winner of the Telstra Works On Paper Award.

Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award – Jenna Lee

Jenna Lee is an artist and graphic designer living in Melbourne (Naarm), whose highly symbolic work seeks to reclaim agency over the historic representation of Aboriginal people in Australia. Created in response to the 250-year anniversary of Lieutenant James Cook’s arrival, HIStory vessels work with the pages and cover board of the Ladybird History Book ‘The Story Of Captain Cook’, stripping back the pages and breaking them down using steam and heat to form modern-day coolamon (ancestral vessels), literally reclaiming history.

Telstra Bark Painting Award – Marrnyula Munyngurr

On a single piece of bark Marrynula has created a series of smaller works. In Muṉguymirri (which means ‘in small pieces’), Marrnyula uses the cross-hatching grid pattern which is the sacred design for the freshwaters of the Djapu clan at their homeland.

‘Sitting down and doing like on the small bark first, I changed my work like to do like bigger square ones, those big bark. But it’s about same story – about freshwater, but different way, style. I love painting because I learnt with family and with my dad.’

Telstra Works On Paper Award – Iluwanti Ken

Originally from Watarru, Illuwanti is an artist with Tjala Arts in Amata on APY lands in South Australia, where she has lived with her family since 2003.

Walawulu ngunytju kukaku ananyi (Mother eagles going hunting) tells the story of mother eagles bringing food back to their babies, a subject matter Illuwanti is known for painting. She makes the connection between the eagles and Anangu mothers, and how they can teach women important lessons about survival, protection and shelter.

Left: Yoogu 2020 by Cecilia Umbagai. Right: Cecilia Umbagai, winner of the Telstra Emerging Artist Award. Photo – courtesy of NATSIAA.

Left: Adrian Jangala Robertson, winner of the Telstra General Painting Award. Right: Yalpirakinu 2020 by Adrian Jangala Robertson.

Left: Still from Shinkansen 2019 by Sienna Mayutu Wurmarri Stubb. Right: Sienna Mayutu Wurmarri Stubb, winner of the Telstra Multimedia Award.

Telstra Emerging Artist Award – Cecilia Umbagai

‘I’m a young Worrorra woman and live in Mowanjum community 10km outside of Derby in the West Kimberley of Western Australia’, says Cecilia. ‘The three tribes who live in Mowanjum: Worrorra, Ngarinyin, and Wunumbal share their belief of the Wandjina who are sacred ancestral spiritual beings and created the land and control the elements, the flora and fauna, and the humans. We are custodians of Wandjina Wunggund law. I’ve been painting all my life, learning from the elders, sitting with them while they worked, listening’.

Telstra General Painting Award – Adrian Jangala Robertson

Adrian is a landscape painter based in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) who works with a restricted palette. His work refers to the desert mountains, ridges and trees that are part of his mother’s country, Yalpirakinu.

His winning work, Yalpirakinu, captures the drama, energy and memories of this important place.

Telstra Multimedia Award – Siena Mayutu Wurmarri Stubbs

At just 18 years old, Yolŋu girl Sienna Mayutu Wurmarri Stubbs was the youngest finalist and now winner in this year’s NATSIAA. Her practice is focused on capturing moments and memories realised through the medium of film. Her winning work, Shinkansen, was captured on the bullet train from Nagoya to Kyoto.

‘This artwork was created when I went overseas to Japan. I actually left home three days after my grandma died – and it was a shock. So I guess this video was a response and how I was feeling in this moment, sitting on that bullet train in Japan’, says Siena.

Take a virtual tour of the amazing 2020 NATSIAA finalists exhibition here!

National Aboriginal And Torres Strait Islander Awards Exhibition MAGNT Darwin 19 Conacher Street The Gardens, Darwin NT

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caveartfair · 7 years

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The 20 Most Influential Artists of 2017

It’s a daunting task to name the individuals who most profoundly shaped and inspired the global art world in 2017. Decades ago, creative scenes were relatively tiny and cliquish, but the ongoing explosion of interest in contemporary art has meant more of everything: more artists; more galleries and museums; more biennials, art fairs, and unconventional projects; more excitement and energy. Still, there remain artists whose vision and influence find them towering above the crowd. Here, Artsy’s editors offer up our take on the 20 who continue to have a pervasive, undeniable impact on artistic production and culture at large.

B. 1962, Paris. Lives and works in Paris and New York

The single most ambitious work of contemporary art created in 2017 wasn’t in Venice’s Giardini but in a disused ice rink behind a Burger King in the German city of Münster. Enabled by the rink’s coming demolition, Huyghe (pronounced hweeg) was given carte blanche for After ALife Ahead: He excavated its floor and installed panels into the roof that opened and closed according to a musical score. The composition was based on the triangular patterns present on the shell of a venomous sea snail, placed in a tank on a central island of concrete left in the carved-out rink’s center. Human cancer cells multiplied in an incubator on the far side of the rink, while an augmented-reality app let viewers witness pyramid-like representations of those cells be spawned, most of which eventually fly out the rink’s roof openings. (For a deeper look at the mechanics of this complex piece, read Artsy’s coverage here.)

Huyghe, who this year won the Nasher Prize, has been a revered figure of the conceptual art movement known as Relational Aesthetics since the ’90s, though popular recognition of the 55-year-old artist has sometimes lagged behind that of peers like Philippe Parreno. After ALife Ahead marked the culmination of several experiments and preparatory works over recent years. And it continued the unique brand of environmental installation in which viewers themselves become actors within the work (each exhale of CO2 caused the cancer cells to multiply more quickly) that he used to acclaim at Documenta 13 in 2012. There, Huyghe’s contribution involved a surreal, living sculpture garden (complete with a pink-legged dog) hewn out of a compost heap in Kassel’s Karlsaue Park. Huyghe’s installations strike a canny balance between his viewers’ simultaneous participation in and subjection to the system that he creates—a system that, once set off, is also outside of his control. The results, with their infinitely intertwined elements and cascading effects, create environments that mirror the complexity of our own, a fact that has earned Huyghe his status as one of the most important artists of his generation.

B. 1939, Philadelphia. Lives and works in New Paltz, New York

Schneemann is a touchstone for the feminist art movement in America during the 1960s and ’70s. But it took over half a century for the Body Art and performance pioneer to get the recognition she’s long been due. This year she netted the prestigious Golden Lion lifetime achievement award at the Venice Biennale, and in October, MoMA PS1 opened “Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting,” the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s 60-year-long career.

The exhibition features over 300 works, beginning with her rarely seen bright and brushy semi-abstract paintings from the 1950s and ephemera from her Fluxus-inspired collaborations from the 1960s—including her famed Meat Joy (1964), a pivotal work that features men and women rolling around in raw meat and fish to a rock soundtrack. More recent installations from the early 2000s showcase Schneemann’s ability to easily shift from painting and performance to digital media, as seen in More Wrong Things (2001), which intermingles footage of major public disasters with archival footage from the artist’s own archive. It loops across 14 screens suspended from the ceiling, with a mess of wires and chords charting a chaotic, networked relationship.

Along with peers like Judy Chicago, Mary Beth Edelson, and Rachel Rosenthal, Schneemann was part of a second wave of feminist cultural discourse that challenged taboos about the female body and sexuality while subverting the long-held (white) male gaze. Her more recent work continues this legacy of speaking out against oppressive and outmoded social norms. Consider Precarious (2009), which relies on a rotating mirror system to implicate the viewer into a cage-like setting, surrounded by video projections of prisoners, animals in captivity, and Schneemann dancing. And as the charming 78-year-old made clear during a recent conversation with uberfan Ragnar Kjartansson at the New Museum, she’s continuing to innovate and explore new avenues of artmaking—including collaborating with her cat.

B. 1961, Los Angeles. Lives and works in Los Angeles

With every passing year, Bradford’s art grows larger, his themes more ambitious. For “Tomorrow is Another Day” at the 2017 Venice Biennale, he transformed the American Pavilion into a decaying wasteland, host to a giant, festering, abscess-like form. Visitors to the pavilion (which the artist, speaking with the New York Times, noted loosely resembles a smaller-scale White House or a Jeffersonian plantation) found Spoiled Foot, a thickly textured, malignant red-and-black outgrowth composed of layers of paper, canvas, and varnish with the familiar skin-like pockmarks that so often feature in his paintings. It nearly consumed the front gallery space. Elsewhere, palimpsests of peeling paint and paper reinforced the sense of moral bankruptcy emanating from Bradford’s metaphorical representation of the United States.

Just months later, he unveiled Pickett’s Charge, a vast, site-specific work in the American capital, at D.C’s Hirshhorn Museum. A 360-degree mural, or “cyclorama,” the piece reimagines the 1883 Gettysburg Cyclorama, by French artist Paul Dominique Philippoteaux, which placed visitors at the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. Recreating the panorama in abstract form—using digital printouts of the original painting, blown up and reconfigured—Bradford updated the immersive mural in a contemporary vocabulary, capturing the weight of this history and asserting its continued relevance.

Next September, the artist will be taking his Venice Biennale presentation to the Baltimore Museum of Art and combining it with a monumental new “waterfall” work—his series of paintings-turned-sculptures composed of cascading ribbons of painted and dyed fabric suspended from beams. It is set to be his most impressive iteration to date, and will continue his ongoing preoccupation, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, with themes of water and flooding; this particular “waterfall” will extend dramatically from the museum’s second-floor galleries down into the lobby, like a biblical torrent.

B. 1978, Paris. Lives and works in New York

There are never enough hours in a day, or so goes the tired adage of the perpetually busy. Henrot must agree. In addition to her inclusion in nearly a dozen group shows across the globe this year—including “The Message: New Media Works” at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and the National Gallery of Victoria’s triennial in Melbourne, Australia—the 39-year-old French-born, New York–based artist netted her first major solo exhibition in her hometown of Paris this fall, a sprawling exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo that takes as its theme the days of the week. “Days are Dogs” divides up the 64,500-square-foot space into seven sections to question the arbitrary structure of how we mark time and ritualize our lives, as perhaps best exemplified in Saturday, a stark 20-minute film that immerses viewers in the Sabbath celebrations of the Seventh-day Adventists, who observe the Sabbath on Saturdays rather than Sundays, like most other Christian sects.

Henrot’s career has been gaining steam since she won the Silver Lion award at the 2013 Venice Biennale for the video Grosse Fatigue, a visually snappy meditation blending scientific facts and creation stories through items in the Smithsonian Institution’s archives; a subsequent companion installation, The Pale Fox, which debuted at London’s Chisenhale Gallery in 2014, explored our collective obsession with objects.

“Days are Dogs”seems almost like a mini retrospective for the artist, who has gained a reputation for poignant, essayistic multimedia works that interrogate the stories we tell ourselves, whether through ancient myths or everyday objects. Henrot shines through as an artist truly unafraid to blur media and categories of making, whether she’s placing abstract sculptures in a rural field, creating a series of comically bulbous “telephones,” or experimenting with drawings and paintings that explore everything from the lives of animals to the dregs of her email inbox.

B. 1957, Beijing. Lives and works in Berlin

Ai has swiftly become the art world’s conscience when it comes to the plight of displaced peoples around the world. (The artist himself spent his childhood in exile from his native Beijing, as a result of pressure put on his father, a poet.) He has fervently dedicated himself to raising awareness of the global refugee crisis. Last year saw the occasional misstep—a self-portrait in the pose of a drowned Syrian infant refugee, reenacting a viral news image, raised a bit of ire—but that was followed by four concurrent gallery shows across New York City, all adeptly addressing the sheer scale of the global refugee crisis.

In 2017, the artist unveiled his largest work to date at Prague’s National Gallery: Law of the Journey, a 70-meter inflatable boat sculpture filled with 258 sculptural figures intended to call out the “shameful” politicking in Europe and abroad that ignores the plight of millions seeking shelter on other shores. He also made his first foray into film with Human Flow, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival in September: a visually stunning and emotionally wrenching documentary that follows the migrant passage of millions across the globe, with Ai’s camera turned on Berlin, Calais, Gaza, Turkey, Bangladesh, Jordan, and the U.S.-Mexico border, among other locations. (The film snagged an Oscar nominee for Best Documentary.) Ai then brought this issue home in New York with a 300-piece exhibition, “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” on view through February 11, 2018. The city-wide public art project includes banners of refugees strung above the Lower East Side’s Essex Street Market; portraits of New York immigrants installed on bus shelters in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx; and, most notably, a much-Instagrammed large steel cage sculpture constructed under Washington Square Park’s iconic arch.

B. 1954, Zanzibar, Tanzania. Lives and works in Preston, United Kingdom

Himid made history this year when she took home the 2017 Turner Prize, Britain’s most prestigious art award. The artist is not only the first woman of color to win, but at 63 she is also the oldest awardee thanks to the Tate’s announcement earlier this year that artists of any age can be considered. Himid is known for her darkly witty yet challenging works that explore black identity and creativity, the legacy of colonialism and racism, and institutional biases against women and people of color.

Take, for instance, her range of traditionally fashioned British crockery works festooned with scenes of slavery, or her well known “Negative Positives” series begun in 2007—for which she paints decorative patterns over large swaths of pages from newspaper The Guardian that feature black subjects, underscoring the often unconscious stereotyping lurking in the accompanying text. (She pursued a similar approach with the New York Times for a recent show at New York’s FLAG Art Foundation.)

Though prolific, Himid’s work has been under the radar for decades. But she took the U.K. by storm in 2017, with exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary, Spike Island in Bristol, and Modern Art Oxford, as well as a site-specific commission for this year’s Folkestone Triennial: a human-scale jelly mould installed on the seaside town’s beach that plays on the connection between the rise of sugarcane plantations and the popularity of jiggly British tea-time treats.

B. 1968, Remscheid, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin and London

While Tillmans’s visionary artistic practice has been progressing since the 1980s—including figurative and abstract images, made using both analog and digital technology—the past two years have seen the artist reaching a new level in terms of critical and popular recognition. The once-prevalent ghettoization of photography apart from the mainstream art world has thankfully continued to break down, thanks in no small part to creatives like Tillmans. (And part of what makes his images exciting in the white cube context derives from his signature installation philosophy—which experiments wildly with scale, and can happily pair a professionally framed photo next to one that hangs loosely from clips).

Tillmans was the first non-Brit to win the prestigious Turner Prize in 2000, and this year was the subject of further English accolades when Tate Modern mounted its major survey exploring work made since 2003 (a period ripe with digital and abstract experiments, as well as a focus on political issues, like the invasion of Iraq). However, it was a major retrospective at Switzerland’s Fondation Beyeler, concurrent with Art Basel in Basel, that had his name on everybody’s lips. The exhibition’s 200-odd works spanned the artist’s career from 1986 to 2017, ranging in scope from still lifes and candid portraits to non-representational texture-and-light studies, Xerox-manipulated images, photographs made without a camera at all, and a brand new audiovisual installation. The masterful exhibition suggested that Tillmans is still capable of transforming his practice with ease, not to mention the field of photography in general.

B. 1983, Enugu, Nigeria. Lives and works in Los Angeles

Through her collage-based paintings depicting intimate, personal scenes, Nigerian-born, L.A.-based artist Akunyili Crosby is pulling focus onto a larger trend, what’s become known as “Afropolitanism”: the shifting multicultural identity of African citizens and members of the African diaspora as they move to more urban centers across the globe. The artist’s career has risen rapidly over the past few years, culminating this year with a highly coveted MacArthur “Genius” grant.

Her works—mingling acrylic, textiles, Nigerian magazine cut-outs, photographic image transfers, and other media—are currently on view in New Orleans’s Prospect.4 triennial, and are the subject of two concurrent exhibitions this fall at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs. Akunyili Crosby creates densely patterned scenes that explore moments of personal reckoning that span generations, from her grandmother’s isolated upbringing in a village to the artist’s own Western, urban life. Akunyili Crosby’s latest works, as seen in Baltimore, take a decidedly heavier turn, however, exploring the implications of casual racism faced by the artist as an immigrant in America.

B. 1983, Paris. Lives and works in Paris and New York

In September, a 70-foot-tall baby was spotted crawling across the arid borderland between Mexico and California. The brainchild of 34-year-old French photographer and street artist JR, Kikito—as the gargantuan black-and-white toddler is affectionately named—peeps curiously from the Mexican side of a fence erected at Tecate, roughly 45 miles southeast of San Diego. JR is known for his deeply humanist, architecturally scaled outdoor works that often appear in areas of socioeconomic disparity or cultural contention. These include Women are Heroes (2008), which featured the eyes of local women smattered across the sides of buildings in Rio de Janeiro’s oldest favela, and Wrinkles of the City, a collaboration with José Parlá for the 2012 Havana Biennial that included depictions of elderly Cubans who lived through their country’s revolution in the 1950s. His habit of surreptitiously muralizing public walls has prompted some to call him the French Banksy.

Thanks to the help of Tecate-area residents, Kikito went up in a matter of days after President Trump’s decision to repeal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which offers legal protection to some who entered the U.S. illegally as minors, often with their parents. It’s hard to disassociate the image of a giant child behind an imperious metal barricade from the contentious presidential mandate. But the work also effectively makes light of Trump’s campaign promise and Executive Order to build an expansive, high-security border wall, making the existing stretch of wall at Tecate seem flimsy indeed: surmountable by a baby.

2017 also saw JR install a 150-square-meter mural at the Palais de Tokyo, take over the Renzo Piano pavilion at Château La Coste, and notch a show at the Paris location of Perrotin. He also debuted Faces/Places, a documentary created with legendary 89-year-old Belgian filmmakerAgnès Varda. It documents their interactions with the rural France people whom the unlikely duo meet while traveling around the country creating portraits of those they encounter. The understated and poignant film—in which Varda likens JR to a young Jean Luc-Godard—won the L’Œil d’Or award when it premiered at May’s Cannes Film Festival, and it was met with critical acclaim when it was released in October (and later landed on the shortlist of Oscar nominations for Best Documentary).

B. 1945, Newark, New Jersey. Lives and works in New York and Los Angeles

The “Pictures Generation” member has been a pioneering influence for decades—her work cropped up in the influential 1973 Whitney Biennial, and she had a solo at MoMA PS1 in 1980—but it continues to resound in an age of political division and sloganeering. Kruger has remained faithful to her own best format: appropriated imagery mixed with brash, in-your-face, Futura text. But this instantly recognizable style is as impactful as ever, translated by the artist into an endless variety of contexts, including on billboards (a format the artist has worked in since the ’80s). Prefer your Kruger in wearable form? There was a wicked t-shirt available at “Anger Management,” a pop-up store organized by Marilyn Minter and hosted by the Brooklyn Museum between September and November. The artist’s fashion-ready messaging was as acerbic as ever: “Admit nothing. Blame everyone. Be bitter.”

In 2017, Kruger closed out a retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and, at Sprüth Magers in Berlin, presented FOREVER, an installation for which she plastered a borrowed Virginia Woolf text across the walls and floor to dizzying effect. In New York, for the 17th Performa biennial, Kruger went all out, commandeering a school bus, a skatepark, a MetroCard design, and a billboard for components of an interconnected project that jabbed at the streetwear brand Supreme (whose logo cops Kruger’s signature typographical treatment). The centerpiece of her participation was Untitled (The Drop), billed as the artist’s first foray into performance, in which the only performers were store clerks, offering Kruger-branded schwag (skate decks, hats, hoodies) to a consumer audience. Not everyone was sold on the affair, but it certainly got people talking outside the normally hermetic confines of the art world. Like a number of feminist artists who came of age in the 1970s, Kruger’s work has gained wider acclaim this year, becoming a calling card for progressive politics at a time when those values are under attack.

B. 1955, Newark, New Jersey. Lives and works in Chicago

The prevailing memory of the 2017 Whitney Biennial will likely be the outrage over Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till, but it would be a shame if that overshadowed Pope.L’s strange, complicated, and typically irreverent 2017 work, Claim (Whitney Version). A large, pink-colored cube, the installation was festooned with pieces of bologna, as well as small photographic portraits of what the artist claimed were Jewish people. (“Fortified wine” was also used as a material.) The enigmatic work proves especially complex amidst the current resurgence of identity politics, and in June, it netted the artist the coveted Bucksbaum Award.

Since the 1970s, Pope.L has developed a layered practice that combines performance, video, painting, and sculpture. Some of his most iconic works were acts of endurance in which the artist donned various costumes and crawled for great lengths; at 62, he’s still making the same sort of sacrifices, and still taking risks. For Documenta 14, he unveiled Whispering Campaign (2016–17), a sound piece sited in both Kassel and Athens for which performers whispered lines from a script into mini headsets that were then broadcast via speakers placed in offbeat locales around the cities. Also in 2017, at the Detroit alternative exhibition space What Pipeline, the artist launched a simple but loaded project: He took lead-damaged water from Flint, Michigan, bottled it, and sold the results as a kind of unhealthy readymade. “Flint Water” turned the gallery into a sort of factory or store, with 100% of the proceeds going to a charity (a signed bottle of Flint’s chemical tap can still be yours for $250).

B. 1929, Matsumoto, Japan. Lives and works in Tokyo

Kusama’s career spans seven decades, but 2017 might have been her biggest year yet. The prolific 88-year-old Japanese artist’s immersive installations bridge Pop Art and Minimalism, putting her on the map by the middle of the 20th century—and helping make her one of the highest-grossing female artists at auction today. Meanwhile, Instagram has provided a new platform for a younger generation of fans to engage with Kusama’s glittering, mirrored installations, giant polka-dotted pumpkins, and energetic abstract paintings. (For even younger art lovers, 2017 also saw the publication of a children’s book about Kusama’s life.)

The artist kicked off this past year with an attendance record-shattering solo exhibition at Washington, D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden that will continue to travel North America through 2019, while another major retrospective, “Life is the Heart of a Rainbow,” originated at the National Gallery of Singapore in June, and travelled to Australia’s Queensland Art Gallery in November. In October, a five-story museum entirely dedicated to the artist’s career opened in Tokyo. Kusama is closing this monumental year out by storming New York with a solo show at Judd Foundation’s SoHo space and two concurrent exhibitions spanning both of David Zwirner’s Manhattan galleries. Blockbuster-worthy lines have greeted her fan-favorite “Infinity Mirror Rooms” at Zwirner’s West 19th Street location, while its East 69th Street outpost showcases 10 new paintings that harken back to Kusama’s “Infinity Net” canvases from the late 1950s and early 1960s—bringing an illustrious career full circle.

B. 1977, London. Lives and works in London

2017 was a year of transcendence, artistic and otherwise, for British artist Mirza. Known for his kinetic, sculptural assemblages that exude sound and light, the artist kicked off the year with his first solo show in Canada at Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery, titled “Entheogens,” debuting a series of new works emulating the psychedelic sensations of plants like peyote and magic mushrooms. He then realized a hefty commission from the Zabludowicz Collection, commemorating the 10th anniversary of its London space, a show which quickly became the talk of Frieze Week. The resulting four works respond to or otherwise intervene in visitors’ experience of the building and the artworks within it; one of them, a sensory deprivation chamber, aims to create an altered state of consciousness for participants.

Mirza also started working on a large-scale outdoor sculpture inspired by megalithic structures like Stonehenge for Ballroom Marfa, to be unveiled in the winter of 2018. The institution’s most ambitious commission since Elmgreen & Dragset’s now-iconic Prada Marfa from 2005, stone circle will be situated in the remote high desert grasslands of West Texas. There, eight black marble boulders integrated with LEDs and speakers will emit electronic sound and light. A ninth “mother” stone (festooned with solar panels that help power the piece) creates a sound and light score activated each month by the full moon, making stone circle a suitably mystical experience for the new millennium.

B. 1978, Giessen, Germany. Lives and works in Frankfurt

At this year’s Venice Biennale, Frankfurt-based Imhof’s minimalist, goth-inflected performance Faust drew the longest lines—and ultimately netted the German Pavilion the illustrious Golden Lion Award for Best National Participation. (If you missed it in Venice, you can relive the experience with our own 360 video.) The 39-year-old artist considers her choreography-based practice to be rooted in drawing and painting, but she’s become better known over the past decade for her gruellingly long and sometimes uncomfortably voyeuristic performance works.

Faust was no exception. Lasting roughly five hours, performers clad in black athleisure and denim casualwear performed a choreographed sequence of dancing, climbing, and crawling over—and under—raised glass floors and partitions, occasionally interjecting some sort of communication ranging from banging on a wall, yelling, or just mindlessly checking their phones. At the prompting of a rhythmic beat, however, the performers would march in formation, like militarized normcore fashion models. Imhoff managed to make fashionableness into something foreboding, no less so because the performance was staged in a Nazi-era building surrounded by fences and guarded by Dobermans. Faust was touted as a masterpiece of modern-day angst, ceaselessly investigating the power structures both past and present that dictate our lives and enslave us with their promises of freedom and self-expression.

While certainly not as high-profile as the Golden Lion, Imhof also scored the 2017 Absolut Art Prize, which comes with a nearly $120,000 budget to stage a new performance, this one to be set in the harsh desert of Death Valley, California.

B. 1965, Bristol, United Kingdom. Lives and works in London

“Undoubtedly one of the worst exhibitions of contemporary art staged in the past decade,” wrote Andrew Russeth of ARTnews, reflecting on “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable,” Hirst’s two-part blow-out at both locations of the Pinault Collection in Venice that opened in April. That level of critical vitriol directed at the 52-year-old artist is representative of the consensus among members of the art press and the vast majority of those in the inner circles of the art world. But, more so than any artist, Hirst has purposefully cultivated a different and much larger audience, hoards of whom lined up outside the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana to see his entirely for-sale show.

Hirst’s Venetian outing, as well as its critical reception, generated some welcome and uneasy questions: What sort of audiences matter in 2017? When is appropriation cultural theft? Is it even possible to discuss the line between art and commerce with a straight face anymore? “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable” was crazily dramatic, uneven, at times knowingly stupid, blatantly spectacular—and also undeniably entertaining. Trying to unpack it in the context of the so-called serious art world would be a bit like comparing the later works of Shakespeare with Season 16 of Law & Order: SVU.

The show presented a postmodern jumble of references, styles, and materials. One of its hallmark works was Demon with Bowl (Exhibition Enlargement) (2014), a several-story-tall painted resin sculpture of a headless man with an action-hero physique; a time-lapse video of its piece-by-piece completion suggests that it required a level of effort on par with a small Hollywood film. Elsewhere, much tinier faux-artifacts were presented in vitrines, aping the style of a natural history museum. The whole conceit was bound together by a fiction of Hirstian proportions—the sculptures supposedly being the reclaimed booty following a shipwreck. Whether you loved it or hated it, the outing affirmed that the brash, take-no-prisoners artistic ego is alive and well.

B. 1976, Buenos Aires. Lives and works in New York

The Argentine-born, Israeli-raised, New York-based artist says her goal is “to make work that’s as accessible as possible, while being intelligent.” Rottenberg, primarily a video artist and sculptor, squeezes thorny subjects (labor, globalization) through her distorted, technicolor lens. The resulting films and their whimsical, immersive environments are undeniably odd, cerebral, and fun, as evidenced by a standout installation at the 2017 Skulptur Projekte Münster. The centerpiece there was a film, Cosmic Generator, shot on both sides of the United States/Mexico border, as well as in China. As is her style, Rottenberg combined quasi-documentary footage with dreamlike sequences—like a scene in which tiny men, dressed as tacos, burrow through underground tunnels before arriving to be eaten at a Chinese-Mexican restaurant.

In December, Rottenberg opened an exhibition at the freshly reopened Bass Museum of Art in Miami, bringing her eccentric vision to the broad audience in town for Art Basel in Miami Beach. There, a new version of Cosmic Generator was joined by sculptural installations (incorporating emergency food supplies, ceiling fans, and inflatable palm trees) and a second video, NoNoseKnows, which debuted at the 2015 Venice Biennale. It imagines the globalized economy as a fleshy machine, powered by raw muscle (and mussels), absurd actions, and more than a few bodily secretions. Rottenberg cannily mixes footage of actual labor (women scooping and sorting pearls out of shellfish) with surreal moments (a drab bureaucratic office where a woman sneezes out plates of pasta).

Much like Pipilotti Rist or Ragnar Kjartansson, Rottenberg has earned popular acclaim while resolutely following her own passions and curiosity, which often involves engaging with communities other than her own. In an art world that might scoffingly consider “accessible” a dirty word, she continues to prove that brainy and big-hearted aren’t mutually exclusive.

B. 1974, Camp Springs, Maryland. Lives and works in Berlin

Over the last decade, American artist (and 2017 MacArthur “Genius” grantee) Paglen has been probing the technology behind governmental surveillance and data collection, and how it alters the world around us both psychologically and physically. Paglen uses his unique skill set and background—he trained in both photography and geography, and had an itinerant childhood on military bases across the U.S. and Germany—to document obscure military installations, satellite launches, and hidden National Security Agency locations. He’s also evinced a curiosity for how technology can be put to less nefarious aims: an exhibition at New York’s Metro Pictures this past fall, “A Study of Invisible Images,” explored his research into computer vision and artificial intelligence’s applications for artmaking.

Things are only looking up for Paglen in 2018, which promises to be literally astronomic for the 43-year-old Berlin-based artist’s career. Paglen is turning his sights skyward as he works on completing the world’s first space sculpture, with support from the Nevada Museum of Art. Set to launch in the spring of 2018, the mirrored inflatable, dubbed Orbital Reflector, will be visible in the night sky for roughly eight weeks before it disintegrates. Although he’s already traveled to extremes for his work (including to the depths of the ocean, where he captured images of internet cables buried on the seafloor) the artist’s low-orbiting satellite is a feat unprecedented in contemporary art. Soon thereafter, Paglen will be the subject of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibition “Sites Unseen,” the first major survey of this pioneering artist’s work in the U.S., opening in June.

B. 1970, Euclid, Ohio. Lives and works in Los Angeles

Long a touchstone for and key figure in the Los Angeles art community, Owens got an overdue East Coast spotlight with a major survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art that opened this fall. There are plenty of artists who continue to expand the field of contemporary painting, but few do it with such verve, playfulness, and rigor. The Whitney’s entire eighth floor, for instance, is given over to a multi-part sculpture in which Owens enlarges and remixes drawings and a short story appropriated from her own son, who is in middle school.

Another installation pairs artist-designed wallpaper with an interactive component: Text a question to a dedicated number, and pre-recorded audio answers play in the gallery space. (I asked “What is art?” A rather blasé voice answered, “I don’t know, but his gallery moved away from there.”) Owens was previously lauded in the (somewhat controversial) 2014 Museum of Modern Art survey “The Forever Now,” and her turn at the Whitney—which follows inclusion in two of the institution’s biennials—should cement her future as a kind of godmother for younger talents.

Meanwhile, back home in L.A., she continues to oversee 356 Mission, the art space that she co-founded with Wendy Yao and Gavin Brown in 2012. It’s been a point of contention this year, as protestors in the Boyle Heights neighborhood have turned their ire on it (as well as other venues) for being the advance guard of gentrification. But, despite the pushback, the artist-supportive venue has undeniably become a centerpiece of the city’s art scene, holding exhibitions with the likes of Seth Price, Maggie Lee, Wu Tsang, and many others.

B. 1937, Bradford, United Kingdom. Lives and works in Los Angeles

In his 80th year, the venerated British artist is still pushing the boundaries of painting, most recently unveiling a series of vividly colored compositions of interior and outdoor settings with wild fun-house perspectives and peculiarly shaped canvases. (He’s also recently made much-publicized forays into digital painting using apps on his iPad). Best known for his depictions of crystalline swimming pools (and the attendant Californian lifestyle), Hockney has for some six decades experimented with media and subject matter of all kinds—including landscapes, still lifes, and nuanced and life-affirming portraits of friends, often painted in pairs. That tonal range has been on view in his retrospective this year, beginning at the Tate Britain in February—where it broke attendance records—before going on to the Centre Pompidou this summer and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it is on view through February.

The exhibition confirms Hockney’s position as one of our greatest living artists and one whose influence on painting cannot be underestimated. Drawn to Los Angeles’s intense light, abundant vegetation, and unabashed pleasure-seeking, the artist has long excelled as a colorist, incorporating garish Fauvist hues into his work and mastering the technicalities of his materials. Hockney has explored how paint can be manipulated to create different textures and degrees of luminosity—as well as exploring a catalogue of perspectival and compositional effects, from a near-Cubist flatness and angularity to a greater depth of perspective and receding space. He is also celebrated for having expressed queerness in his work long before the Culture Wars, painting supple male nudes in the shower or swimming in sun-soaked L.A. bliss.

B. 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey. Lives and works in New York

The self-portrait pioneer had her share of shows in 2017, including a multi-decade survey at Mnuchin Gallery in New York and her retrospective, “Imitation of Life,” which moved from the Broad in Los Angeles to the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Throughout her career, Sherman has kept pace with changing trends. And it was her canny transition to Instagram that unexpectedly caught the art world’s attention this year, as she began using simple apps like Facetune to unnerving effect. Another favored tool, Perfect365, is a go-to for social-media users who want to add digital makeup effects to their selfies. (“It’s like having a glam squad in your pocket!”, the app’s marketing claims.) While the original intent of these programs was to help users cheat a sort of artificial beauty, Sherman exploits them to different ends—as a meditation on self-presentation and how we show ourselves to the world.

Sherman isn’t alone among an older generation of artists who are hooked on the image sharing app (count photographic icon Stephen Shore among them), but her account is unique in how it extends her practice into a more casual space. “I feel pretty,” she comments, annotating a way-close-up selfie in which her shocked eyes pop in surprise over a comically distended mouth. In other posts, she seems to inhabit the role of a high-society alien—her skin jaundiced or purple—as she indulges in various luxuries and then pays the price (in one case ending up, horrifically shriveled, in a hospital bed).

For W’s annual art issue in December, Sherman contributed an Instagram-style selfie for the cover. “They’re just fun, like a little distraction,” she said regarding her social media postings. Still, the buzz that sprung up around this “little distraction” in 2017 is a testament to Sherman’s ongoing influence and relevance. She remains a star that nearly any young artist—especially those engaged with identity, beauty, and the self-portrait—must reckon with.

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: Looking Back at the Strange and Surly History of Bay Area Funk Art

View of the Funk show (1967) in the Powerhouse Gallery at U.C. Berkeley (image courtesy BAMPFA)

SAN FRANCISCO — It was sometime after 8:15 pm on April 28, 1967, in the Physical Sciences Lecture Hall at the University of California, Berkeley. In progress was a symposium about Funk, the latest art show exhibited in the school’s University Art Museum. The symposium seemed to promise a lively discussion among several of the artists with work in the show, while moderator duties were covered by Peter Selz, Funk’s curator and the executive director of the museum. Instead, the symposium delivered total chaos.

The conversation went off course as the panelists let slip their grievances with the way Selz had approached the show. Figurative painter Joan Brown felt that Funk failed to present funkiness in context. Avant-garde ceramist Peter Voulkos decried that funk was strictly delimited to a Bay Area oddity. Experimental assemblage-maker, filmmaker, and altogether creative outlaw Bruce Conner denied the premise of Funk altogether. For Conner, the art was too diverse to fit under an umbrella so small and outdated. Conner was probably the most vocal of the artists who believed that whatever art qualified as funky was out of style years before the opening of Funk. Painter and ceramist Jim Melchert went on record with, “[Good funk] attempts to resolve those two essences of mankind: one a striving toward perfectibility, the other a kind of gross realization that we’re all just animals.” Melchert drilled down further into this by wryly lamenting all the funky artists that Selz had left out— like William Shakespeare and Albrecht Dürer.

Funk Symposium, April 28, 1967; University of California, Berkeley (photo by Ron Chamberlain)

Things fell apart when the artists voiced their dissent more creatively. A shoe flew across the stage. Someone began an impromptu jam session. One of the artists poured a glass of water over their own head. Despite the histrionics, the panelists had a great point. The premise of Funk was flawed. “Notes on Funk,” the essay Selz authored for the show’s catalogue, offers clues regarding where this creative fissure might have occurred.

Funk April 28–May 29, 1967; Powerhouse Gallery, University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley (photo by Ron Chamberlain)

“Funk art,” Selz wrote, “so prevalent in the San Francisco-Bay Area, is largely a matter of attitude.” I agree with Selz that this notion is a fundamental component of funk. There are no goals or agendas, only a je ne sais quoi accepted on a pass/fail basis. Conversely, as of this writing, the Wikipedia page for Funk Art offers a digest of how the subject is all too often conveyed: as a movement with certain practitioners. Both of these terms imply a shared goal or motive. However, there was neither a credo nor manifesto behind funk that would inspire the pursuit of perfection. If anything, funk artists avoided being labeled funky. The only definition for funk with staying power seems to be, as phrased by Selz in “Notes,” “When asked to define Funk, artists generally answer: ‘When you see it, you know it.’”

Despite the diffuse nature of funk, Selz takes a page of his essay to explore the pedigree for the show’s eponymous attitude. Marcel Duchamp’s readymades as well as the works of Jean Arp, Joan Miró (especially “Object” from 1936), and Méret Oppenheim are each singled out as possible prototypes, or distinct examples of funk. Selz continues by citing recurrent themes in funky art, especially: private metaphor, self-deprecation, “erotic and scatological” motifs, ambiguous intent, and moral ambiguity. Selz emphasizes this last point by opening the catalogue with a quote from The Bald Soprano (1950) by the absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco:

Mrs. Martin: What’s the moral?

Fire Chief: That’s for you to find out.

Selz wanted to respect the spirit of the artwork by steering the show away from making “a definitive statement” about funk. Nicole Rudick quotes Selz in her essay in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition What Nerve! (2014) at the Rhode Island School of Design: “I was merely interested in pointing out something that was going on right now with a few examples … from the background that have to do with the developments as I see it [sic].” The point of Funk was to offer viewers the chance to judge the art at face value. Selz amassed nearly sixty objects (we now recognize funk as extending into any medium, but Selz focused his exhibition on sculptural objects) for the exhibition and implicitly gave each equal billing under the singular title of Funk. Some pieces were small, while others were gargantuan installations. Some were created by Beat writers in the mid-1950s while others were created by hippies in the mid-‘60s. Some of the objects were pale while others were as brightly decorated as a venomous creature. Some were figurative, some surreal, and some vaguely squishy. The diversity of works ensured that a single definition of funk was impossible. If everything in Funk was funky, then sure, why not throw in the works of Shakespeare and Dürer?

Peter Saul “Relax in the Electric Chair (Dirty Guy)” (1966) exhibited at the Funk show (image courtesy Israel Valencia and the di Rosa Preserve)

No one, Selz included, presumed that the show would make an impact beyond its run through May 1967. Selz said years later, “We never expected that [Funk] would become a part of art history.” After the show, knowledge of the aesthetics associated with it quickly spread across the country. Reviews of the exhibition appeared in Artforum, Time magazine, Chicago Daily News, New York Times, and outlets abroad. While some of these were unflattering (Artforum was scathing, which Selz pinned on the magazine’s permanent relocation from Los Angeles to snobby New York City), the march of funk from sea to shining sea continued.

The term “funk artist,” first entered the American lexicon as shorthand for anyone with work in Selz’s 1967 show. The most famous example is John Perreault’s 1967 article titled “Metaphysical Funk Monk,” about a William T. Wiley show in New York. Notoriety followed the designation as Funk artists later showed with increasingly prestigious institutions and gained representation in the Big Apple. Joan Brown, for example, was in the Whitney’s Young America 1960 exhibition prior to Funk, while ceramist and painter Robert Arneson and ceramist David Gilhooly showed there just a few years later. Over the years, the definition of funk expanded, until today, when any artist whose art is difficult to categorize is at risk for being labeled funky, or worse, inspired by the funk “movement.”

To be clear, none of this historical account is meant to suggest that funk is bunk. A very real phenomenon of art that could be considered funky cropped up around the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid- to late-1950s. This art was made during a short period of time between the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, roughly aligning with the rise and collapse of Beat culture in the Bay Area. Artists went to New York to sell out, but they made the pilgrimage to San Francisco to create. Between World War II and the early 1960s, two or maybe three real galleries made up the corpus of the Bay Area art market. Despite this paucity of places to show their work, and a very small chance to earn a living off art alone, artists poured into the area seeking camaraderie and the freedom to pursue their vision. Artists felt the financial squeeze of trying to make a living in a small city without art buyers and a dearth of available day jobs. So, many sought refuge in the ivory tower. Teaching not only provided a steady income, a sense of community, and encouraged the free flow of ideas, but also offered artists the opportunity to use school facilities for their own projects after work. Most funky artists crossed paths while teaching or studying at the San Francisco Art Institute or the University of California, Davis.

Teaching was supplemented by the artists’ fascination with life outside the classroom — the streets, coffee houses, and houseboats or abandoned garages hosting single-serving exhibition spaces. In Selz’s words, funk looked “at things which traditionally were not meant to be looked at.” Without patrons or buyers to impress or woo, artists were open to risks. They experimented with challenging materials and unconventional ideas. They made art that was ugly rather than beautiful, rough rather than refined, and funny rather than respectful. The art was intimate, meant for very few eyes or no eyes at all. This is the essence of true, honest-to-god funk art.

Harold Paris, “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme” (1966) plastic and rubber, 4 x 5-1/2 in., (courtesy of University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, gift of the artist)

It is disheartening to see this fiftieth anniversary of Funk pass by without so much as a nod from the art world. No heavy tome about funk is set to roll off the presses, no symposium gather to discuss funky tropes, and nary one prominent museum open an exhibition to celebrate funk and explore the directions of its scholarship. Still, some modern and contemporary art museums have examples of funk or funk-adjacent art, and some of the best are in Northern California. If you are in the area, check out the excellent Recent Gifts exhibition at the brand new Manetti Shrem Museum in Davis (which is free) and book a viewing for the di Rosa Collection outside Napa Valley (not free, but still very good). Further examples are on view at the Cantor at Stanford University and hither and yon in San Francisco MOMA.

The lessons of funk are available to contemplate if we find the art and, as Selz suggested, make up our own minds.

The post Looking Back at the Strange and Surly History of Bay Area Funk Art appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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nofomoartworld · 8 years

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Hyperallergic: Like Long-Held Echoes: On Two Projects Made Possible by the Waste Stream

Installation view, Galleries at Moore, Philadelphia (all images courtesy The Galleries at Moore, photos by and © Joseph Hu)

PHILADELPHIA — The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), with its Greek Revival architecture, is perhaps the most iconic symbol of the art establishment in the city. Completed in 1928, the museum sits at the end of Benjamin Franklin Parkway, where a majority of the city’s prestigious museums are located.

Philli, Ana Peñalba’s current exhibition in The Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design, presents photographs that re-create a number of iconic buildings in Philadelphia, including the PMA and Robert Venturi’s Guild House, with detritus found at Revolution Recovery, a recycling yard in the city’s Northeast.

In 2010, Billy Dufala, who is also an artist, and Fern Gookin founded the Recycled Artist in Residency (RAIR), in cooperation with Revolution. Since that time they have hosted over forty artists from around the world, providing access to roughly 350 tons of goods that the rest of us throw away. As I mentioned in a piece about an exhibition of Billy and Steven Dufala’s artwork, it’s possible to find anything at the Revolution site, from old magazines to records, beds, and knickknacks. One day, in 2015, Billy encountered a Donald Trump doll from the eighties and moved it into his office. (I wonder if it’s still there.) Dufala’s experiences at Revolution, I wrote, “[force] him to confront the tendency to become sentimental about the objects in our lives.”

Installation view, Galleries at Moore, Philadelphia

Likewise, Peñalba’s photos ask viewers to reconsider the buildings that define the establishment. “(Re)Production 06” (2016) re-creates the PMA’s Greek columns with stacks of plastic trash cans and 55-gallon drums. The corrugated metal structure behind the columns represents the building. For each re-creation, there is a small accompanying photo of the real thing. The interplay of the two photos offers a contrast between makeshift and enduring materials, creating a humorous tension that upends the hierarchy of the establishment.

Accompanying Peñalba’s photos is a series of sped-up videos, reminiscent of the Keystone Cops, in which Billy Dufala and the artist fuss over how to build the museum’s columns. The depiction of the labor involved in re-creating the iconic buildings implies that an institution’s cultural significance is never a prohibition on reimagining it.

But Peñalba’s photos aren’t only about the art world. She also turns her eye towards city government in “(Re)Production 04” (2016), which renders City Hall with an excavator and a cheap wall clock. Tellingly, no one sits at the excavator’s controls. I am of two minds about this work. In part, the photo knocks the grandeur of this building down a few pegs, suggesting, perhaps, the notion of small (or weak) government. However, it also seems to indicate the promise in a government that is willing to dig in, to literally excavate, for the sake of its citizens.

RAIR: Filthy Rich – Projects Made Possible by the Waste Stream, which runs in conjunction with Peñalba’s show, takes up that task of excavation, with projects that explore obsolete technology and lifestyles. Mary Ellen Carroll, in her collaboration with Dufala on “Waste Music: A Festival of Metal” (2014), sculpted an amphitheatre using 1,400-pound bales of compressed metal, the most valuable material at Revolution. With the amphitheatre as a backdrop and a few guest musicians, Carroll and Dufala performed an audience-free heavy metal concert. Included in the Moore exhibit is a 5-minute and 32-second digital video of the event.

Installation view, Galleries at Moore, Philadelphia

As I watched the video and listened to the performance with the accompanying headphones, I was happily amused by the absurdity of staging a live event with no one but the performers in attendance. It reminded me of being a child, when my friends and I would use our parents’ camcorders to record our own versions of The People’s Court. The difference is that we were doing it without a sense of irony. It’s clear that Carroll and Dufala, who MC the event in deadpan voices, have a distinct sense of irony. Perhaps it’s this element that turns their performance into art, while the kiddie version of The People’s Court was simply an attempt for my friends and me to pretend we understood the world more than we did.

More than a few works in the show brought to mind William Faulkner’s famous lines, from his novel Requiem for a Nun (1951), “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Christina P. Day’s sculpture “Frequencies” (2015), which consists of a stacked arrangement of old radios and cassette recorders, reminded me of the day, sometime in the early ’80s, when my older sister bought a boombox at Kmart on the way to the Jersey shore. I inherited it, eventually, and would pretend I knew how to breakdance on my friend’s porch.

During her 2014 RAIR residency, Day was drawn to the “fractured patterns” and “coincidental duplicates” found in the piles of discarded goods at Revolution. The radios in “Frequencies,” tuned to stations that may not even exist, are like ghosts of old technology. As the artist puts it, the artwork makes this “broken material, dormant in its state, wake back up and blink.” A glance at the radios’ brands — Sony, General Electric, Precor, Royal – also reminds us that corporate power is never consistent. Trends, like brand names, come and go.

Memories are similar. Sometimes they fade out, other times they stick around and mutate, or they are preserved in photographs. In “Songs of Memory and Forgetting Quilt #2” (2016), Martha McDonald constructed a quilt made with fabrics and photographs found at Revolution. McDonald spent six months sorting through personal items that were part of house cleanouts after someone died or moved into a home for the elderly. She and Dufala also developed a song tour of the site, using instruments found at the dump.

Installation view, Galleries at Moore, Philadelphia

I found the quilt captivating. The photos, circa the late 1950s, depicted participants in Philadelphia’s Mummer’s Parade, which has taken place every New Year’s Day since 1901. The subjects include high school graduations, dads on couches, and people standing on a tarmac with an Israel Airlines plane in the background. Before seeing this quilt, I hadn’t realized that “dads on couches” could be its own genre. I had thought only my family took pictures of such things. But what really caught my attention was the overwhelming number of white faces on this quilt. As far as I could tell there was only one non-white face— the graduation photo of a young African American woman. McDonald’s subtle gesture seems to criticize white dominance rather than endorse it.

These days most of us are less likely to make prints of our photographs. Instead, our photos live in our phones or on hard drives. It’s these chunks of plastic and metal that will end up at the dump. More sculptures like Day’s will be made, but very few quilts like McDonald’s. What does that mean for our future? I’m not certain it means something wicked. But it absolutely changes the ways our memories will work. Imagine if the only photos preserved as prints in the future are Peñalba’s. Our ancestors may wonder what on earth was happening.

What RAIR’s entire project makes clear is how profoundly significant context is, and will always be. As Charles Baudelaire wrote in his poem, “Correspondences,”

Like long-held echoes, blending somewhere else

Into one deep and shadowy unison

As limitless as darkness and as day,

The sounds, the scents, the colors correspond.

These artists who have worked at RAIR have captured these “long-held echoes” and directed them back at us. They remind us at this late stage of human civilization that we can’t ignore our memories any more than we can ignore the junk we might think we’re rid of.

Ana Peñalba: Philli and RAIR: Filthy Rich – Projects Made Possible by the Waste Stream continue at the Galleries at Moore (1916 Race Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) through today.

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