Jaye Rhee
 
The Flesh and the Book
 
May 16~June 15, 2013
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 16, 6~8PM
 
DOOSAN Gallery New York is pleased to announce The Flesh and the Book, a solo exhibition of Jaye Rhee, from May 16 to June 15, 2013. The exhibition occupies her four-channel video and installation which explores the intersections between performance, the moving image, and sound installation.
 
Casting original dancers of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Rhee renders the human body as minimalist shapes that convey an improvisational selection of ‘notes’ within a musical composition co-created with Elliott Sharp. The dancers’ movements, both choreographed and organic, shift horizontally across the row of screens. At times, the movements flow synchronically with the sound while in other moments the relationship between the visual and aural becomes a series of independent juxtapositions.
 
As in many of Rhee’s works, at the heart of The Flesh and the Book lies an irreconcilable tension; here it exists between physical dance and musical notes. The dancers perform within a ‘musical staff’ made of five thick rubber bands that are suspended at different heights yet are equidistant from each other. A visual loss occurs when the two-dimensional music notes transition into the three-dimensional dance, and vice versa. As more notes are gained, more dancers are lost; the two must maintain a balanced yet opposed existence.
 
Jaye Rhee was born in 1973 in Seoul, Korea. She received her M.F.A and B.F.A from School of The Art Institute of Chicago. She has completed Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and artists residency program in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She has had solo exhibitions at Cais Gallery (2010, Seoul, Korea), Stephan Stoyanov Gallery (2010, New York, USA), Corridor Gallery (2010, New York, USA), KCCLA (2009, Los Angeles, USA) and Gallery Factory (2007, Seoul, Korea). Her works has also been included in Norton Museum of Art (2012, Florida, USA), Mori Museum of Art (2012, Tokyo, Japan), CU Art Museum (2012, Colorado, USA), Seoul Museum of Art (2011, Seoul Korea), and St. Cecilia (2010, New York, USA).

International Print Center New York presents New Prints/New Narratives: Summer 2013, consisting of some fifty projects by artists at all stages of their careers. The exhibition will be on view at 508 West 26th St, 5th Floor, from June 13, 2013 - August 9, 2013. New Prints/New Narratives: Summer 2013 is the forty-fifth presentation of IPCNY’s New Prints Program, a series of juried exhibitions organized by IPCNY several times each season featuring prints made within the past year. The exhibition will run concurrently with a small selection of prints and artists’ books from the collaboration, Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, which will be shown in the IPCNY Viewing Room.
 
Prints were selected by Andrew Raftery, an artist, engraver and print scholar, specializing in narrative scenes of American life. Born in 1962, he earned his BFA in painting from Boston University and his MFA in printmaking from Yale University. Raftery is a professor at Rhode Island School of Design and a faculty fellow at the RISD Museum. IPCNY received over 2,400 submissions from artists and presses worldwide, and out of this varied collection of work, he chose 55 works. An illustrated brochure with a curatorial essay by Andrew Raftery will accompany the exhibition.
 
The Artists’ List is as follows: Lynne Allen, Kathy Aoki, Miguel Aragon, Katie Baldwin, Kristin Becker, Mildred Beltre, Allison Bianco, Douglas Bick, Doug Bosely, Alice Leora Briggs, Veronica Ceci, Liz Chalfin, Ann Chernow, Nick Conbere, Madeline D’Aversa, Amze Emmons, Richard Falle, Leslie Golomb, Art Hazelwood, Ellen Heck, Marco Hernandez, Yuji Hiratsuka, Jill Ho-You, Erik Hougen, Cary Hulbert, Jon Irving, Hans Johansson, Gabriela Jolowicz, Mehrdad Khataei, Joyce Kozloff, Brian Kreydatus, Dinh Q. Lê, Jim Lee, Kate Logue, Joseph Lupo, Nicole Maloof, Michael Menchaca, Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, Florent Morellet, Kurt Pammer, Ryan Parker, Ester Partegàs, Lynn Peterfreund, Kahlil Rintye, Jenny Robinson, Bill Salzillo, Hannah March Sanders, Jesse Shaw, Dan Steeves, Ivanco Talevski, Matthew Van Asselt, Art Werger, George Whitman, Michelle Wilson and Erin Woodbrey.
 
Presses and publishers represented are: Cascade Press (OH); Centre for Fine Print Research (UK); Center Street Studio (MA); Connecticut Fine Arts, Inc (CT); Flatbed Press (Texas); the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies; Columbia University (NYC); Marginal Editions (NYC); Morakeb-e Siah Institute of Fine Art (Iran), Mullowney Printing (CA), Philagraphika (PA); Rocinante Press (CA).
 
New Prints/New Narratives: Summer 2013 consists of etchings, lithographs, monotypes, screenprints, books and video, and other manifestations of the printmaking process. Highlights include Richard Falle’s Ice Cream Inferno, an inkjet print from original vector artwork created entirely in Adobe Illustrator and printed at the Center for Fine Print Research in the UK; Allison Bianco’s glow-in-the-dark intaglio and silkcreen piece, the Old Man of the Mountain; a 35-second animation, Storm in a Teacup 124, created from 124 unique monotypes by Lynn Peterfreund; and Nicholas Conbere’s detailed and dreamlike invented world, Finding Niches. This exhibition explores visual narrative and the powerful presence it has had in printmaking since its origins. The prints shown here reinvent this tradition for contemporary viewers, and were selected through careful observation of specific details and then arranged into narrative categories such as direct address, layered narrative, aftermath, layered time, and implied communication.
 
New Prints/New Narratives is a counterpart to Visualizing Time: Narrative Print/fron the National Academy.

The Battle of Carnival and Lent, Judith Schaechter‘s new exhibition at Claire Oliver Gallery, tackles one of the most  fundamental struggles known to man, the war humankind wages between good and evil.  Dancing on the psychological border between spiritual aspiration and human suffering, the Artist questions the association of an environment of confinement/reflection in the name of self betterment and the harsh realities of the physical experience of imprisonment; She is  speaking about the ’prisons‘ we all encounter, be they mental or physical.
 
Schaechter’s title window in the exhibition (and the largest in scale), inspired by the 16th century Brugel painting with the similar name “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent”, contains 96 figures (almost all previous Schaechter works  contain only a single figure) locked in a mythic battle between virtue and vice.  Depicted here by somber monks and garish clowns, hilarity and mayhem seduce impulse control; no blood is spilled in the Artist‘s rendition; here, softened by humor, we see the constant battle we face between our will, our desires, and our choices.
 
Inspired by the history of Philadelphia’s notorious gothic castle-like structure,  Eastern State Penitentiary, where they were on temporary exhibition, these 17 works draw on mythology, the Bible, and even famous works of art from ages past.  Schaechter‘s archetypes struggle with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, exploring in turn the stories of Atlas, Prometheus, Noah, Icarus, Mary Magdalene and Andromeda.
 
Along with the figurative/narrative windows, there are a matching number of purely decorative patterned works which Schaechter calls “militant ornamentalist”, a nod to the great strength of 13th century European cathedrals, such as Chartres.  Although ornamentation suffered in popularity during the Modernist period of art history, its power to move people has not been diminished.  One has only to look to the great traditions of Islamic or Asian art to see the hypnotic and spiritual relevance ornamentation has.
 
Elisabeth Argo, Curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, says of the work, “When I saw Judith’s new works, my thoughts went to Guernica, Bruegel and Diego River‘s murals on industry or Otto Dix’s paintings looking at war.  She‘s (Schaechter) looking at this moment and the issues of humanity and those artists were too.”
 
Says Schaechter of these works: I have strong feelings about this work appealing to those who are in transition, those who have known pain, grappled with despair.  The parallels between cell and cathedral go beyond just appearances.  In a church the windows are charged with profound meaning; the “windows” here are more than a mere “ray of hope” for the churchgoer and incarcerated alike.
 
Judith Schaechter’s works of art are included in the permanent collections of many important museums worldwide including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, U.K. She has been included in preeminent Biennales including the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial. Among other prestigious awards, Ms. Schaechter is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a USA Artists Fellowship, and two NEA grants.

SERGEI ISUPOV: Call of the Wild
May 4 – June 15, 2013
 
NEW YORK – Barry Friedman Ltd, in collaboration with Ferrin Gallery, is pleased to present a solo exhibition of figurative sculpture by contemporary Russian artist, Sergei Isupov. This will be the artist’s second show with Barry Friedman Ltd, and will open with a public reception on Saturday, May 4 from 2-6pm.
 
Call of the Wild, a body of 14 new works in porcelain and ceramic, produced at Project Art, Cummington, MA, creates a conversation about conflict and resolution driven by the instinctual drives of man, woman, animal, and beast. Symbolic and metaphoric imagery gleaned from classical art training in the former Soviet Union, introduces allegorical biblical content and iconic presentations of portrait and landscape. The artist’s choice of ceramic materials provides the opportunity to create interlocking images with three-dimensional form and two-dimensional illustration. The human, male–female dilemma is examined throughout. Isupov explains, “Somebody saves somebody, someone loves the other more, they are mutually supportive and destructive, they are opposites — there are contrasts… One is more powerful, they are both survivors.”
 
Often called an erotic Surrealist for his daring representations of sexuality, relationships, and human encounter, Isupov takes narrative subject matter and merges it with ceramic sculptural form. Drawing on personal experience, and human observation, he creates works that integrate autobiography with universal narrative. He states, “Everything that surrounds and excites me is automatically processed and transformed into…an artwork. […] The essence of my work is not in the medium or the creative process, but in human beings and their incredible diversity. When I think of myself and my works, I’m not sure I create them, perhaps they create me.” While the robust, and racially distinct facial traits make each sculpture unique, they also make the body of work capable of representing universal experiences. The bold color palette, heavily tattooed faces, and textured surfaces relate these works to the aesthetics of traditional Russian art, as well as to contemporary styles of illustration.
 
Sonya Bekkerman, Vice President of Russian Art at Sotheby’s has written about Isupov and his artistic style within the context of Russian art history: “Sergei Isupov was born in the ‘60s, a decade in which Russian artists began to actively question and defy the prescribed artistic ideology dictated by the Soviet Union, and he left in 1983, just before the turbulent artistic breakthroughs incited by Gorbachev’s perestroika in 1987. […] Like many of his contemporaries who sought to express their individuality away from party control, Isupov emigrated to the United States, where he has never stopped looking inward and revealing truths, free associations, and sheer id, no matter how cryptic, filtered through an American and Russian lens.”
 
Sergei Isupov’s work will be featured in the upcoming exhibition “Bodies Speaking Out: New International Ceramics” at the Museum of Arts & Design, NY opening in September 2013, followed by a mid-career survey at Racine Art Museum in 2014.
 
Isupov’s work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Finae Arts, Houston; Racine Art Museum, Wisconsin; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Museum of Art and Design, New York; and Museum fur Angewandte, Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany. Isupov has had solo exhibitions at Mesa Contemporary Arts Center, Arizona and The Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Missouri. He has participated in group exhibitions at the 2009 World Contemporary Ceramics Exhibition at the 5th World Ceramic Biennale in Korea; The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft; Fuller Craft Museum, Massachusetts; and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Wisconsin. He lives and works in Cummington, MA.

Friedman Benda presents Campana Brothers: Concepts, the renowned Brazilian designers’ first solo gallery show in the U.S., from June 5-July 3, 2013.  An opening reception will be held at the gallery on June 5, from 6-8 PM.
 
Loose and experimental in nature, Concepts will see the Campanas exploring a series of new approaches to their practice while overturning previously held certainties and expectations. They will introduce several new bodies of work that demonstrate a different direction, while offering a complex and in-progress view of their practice as it stands during a pivotal moment in their careers.
 
The five new series exhibited at Concepts include:
 
Boca series—cowhide wall-mounted bookshelf, table, and standing shelf
 
Racket collection—chairs and a screen in bent brass with a nylon stitched base and a hand-stitched motif made from remnant Thonet chair backings
 
Fitas —a buffet, cabinet, and table made from bent steel
 
Ametista collection—a series of glass hanging panels adorned with Sao Paulo-sourced amethyst rocks
 
Alligator — new banquette this time created out of a series of life-like stuffed alligators

Nicole McCormick Santiago is a painter of the domestic narrative. Her autobiographical images explore the contrast between unabashed indulgence and the selfless constraints of motherhood.

HANSJOERG DOBLIAR: “HYSTERIE UND ABSTRAKTION”

May 3 – June 15, 2013
 
Johannes Vogt Gallery is pleased to announce German artist Hansjoerg Dobliar’s first solo show with the gallery, Hysterie und Abstraktion (Hysteria and Abstraction). For the exhibition, Dobliar presents a new body of paintings on canvas and aluminum. Additionally the artist has designed an immersive wallpaper scheme for the rear room that serves as backdrop for an installation of paintings.
 
Dobliar’s paintings engage with the oil medium on a very material level. In his works, Dobliar builds up thick but fluid brushstrokes to form images. Dobliar’s practice strongly recalls and builds upon the traditions of German expressionism. In Dobliar’s engagement with abstraction, he enlivens the tension between figuration and abstraction. Subjects can be recognized, but only uncertainly, as if through a haze. In this way, he prioritizes the expressive handling of the material, neither blending his strokes to render his hand invisible, nor abandoning a subject in favor of pure abstraction. The expressionist brushstroke is understood for its ornamental value. This exchange is a theme also explored in his works on paper. By overpainting onto old magazine pages, Dobliar selectively obscures and represses the figures in these images. By intervening in the imagery of mass circulation, Dobliar symbolically questions cultural narratives, and the ways in which reality is undermined by myth.
 
Among the works in the front gallery is a series of small paintings on canvas. Referred to by Dobliar as the “dot paintings,” these works appear like a series of bullseyes, or a string of echoed permutations. In exploring a similar composition over a large number of small canvases, Dobliar enacts the decorative concealment of abstraction, and expresses a fixation with the aesthetic surface. These issues of representation and presentation also inform his practice of designing the manner in which his works are displayed. Previously, Dobliar has installed wallpaper, constructed shelving, and painted on the walls to modify the atmosphere in which his works are received. Dobliar continues this practice for his show at the gallery.
 
Dobliar’s vibrant paintings evoke the psychic worlds of the subjective experience. In his energetic and tactile engagement with the paint, Dobliar creates works that point beyond the limits of our knowledge, and force the viewer to ask where the abstraction ends and their projection begins.
 
Hansjoerg Dobliar was born in Ulm, Germany in 1970. Dobliar's work has been exhibited internationally, including Sammlung Rheingold at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Sammlung Falckenberg / Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Daniel Hug Gallery, Los Angeles; Kunstverein Oldenburg; and Beijing Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions include Sies + Höke gallery, Düsseldorf; Galerie Akinci, Amsterdam; Galerie Ben Kaufmann, Berlin as well as a solo presentation at INDEPENDENT art fair in New York in 2011. He lives and works in Munich and Berlin.
 
Since its inception only two years ago, the gallery has taken on a challenging program leading to a change of location in November 2012. Johannes Vogt Gallery is committed to bringing attention to the complex artistic and cultural ties that bind New York to both Europe and Latin America.
 
Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11 am – 6 pm and by appointment
 
For further details please contact Samuel Draxler at samuel@vogtgallery.com or at 212.255.2671

African Photography from The Walther Collection
 
Distance and Desire:
Encounters with the African Archive
 
June 9, 2013 – May 17, 2015
 
The Walther Collection
Reichenauerstrasse 21
Neu-Ulm, Burlafingen 89233
Germany
info@walthercollection.com
www.walthercollection.com
 
The Walther Collection is pleased to present “Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive,” the third exhibition devoted to African photography and video art. This exhibition, curated by Tamar Garb, brings together late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century portraits, cartes de visite, postcards, album pages, and books from Southern and Eastern Africa, set in dialogue with recent photography and video by contemporary artists who have engaged with photographic archives. “Distance and Desire” offers new perspectives on the legacy of anthropological and ethnographic visions of Africans, reimagining the poetic and political dimension of the archive, its diverse histories, and its changing meanings. The culmination of a three-part exhibition series at The Walther Collection Project Space in New York, and the international symposium “Encounters with the African Archive,” co-organized by The Walther Collection, New York University, and University College London, the exhibition is accompanied by a major scholarly catalogue edited by Tamar Garb.
 
“Distance and Desire” unfolds in three thematic sections:
 
“Santu Mofokeng and A.M. Duggan-Cronin”
A juxtaposition of A. M. Duggan-Cronin’s “The Bantu Tribes of South Africa” and Santu Mofokeng’s “The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950” introduces the concept of the photographic archive as both a repository of documents and an assemblage of representations. Duggan-Cronin, an Irish South African who lived in the mining town of Kimberley, set out to depict what he considered the disappearing indigenous populations of South Africa. His monumental study, entitled “The Bantu Tribes of South Africa,” published between 1928-1954, includes photographs, descriptive captions, and anthropological essays. In addition to presenting all eleven Bantu Tribes books, a complete sequence of photogravure plates from “The Nguni: Baca, Hlubi, Xesibe” (1954) will be on view, alongside a selection of vintage gelatin-silver prints by Duggan-Cronin, which had previously circulated as individual objects.
 
In contrast to Duggan-Cronin’s renowned and contested ethnographic vision of African heritage, “The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890-1950” portrays the modern self-representation of African subjects. In the early 1990s, the artist Santu Mofokeng collected family studio portraits from late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century South Africa and transformed the images into a slide show, complete with narratives about the sitters. He also produced a series of gelatin-silver print reproductions of the portraits, which are on view together with a selection of the project’s original vintage prints and Mofokeng’s research notes. Envisioned as a “counter-archive,” The Black Photo Album challenges fixed ideas most often associated with images of Africans.
 
“Poetics and Politics”
The cornerstone of Distance and Desire is a presentation of previously un-exhibited vintage portraits, cartes de visite, postcards, and album pages, produced from the 1860s to the early twentieth century. Extraordinary in range and style, these images make visible both the ideological frameworks that prevailed during the colonial period in Africa and the exceptional skill of photographers working in the studio and landscape. “Poetics and Politics” offers a remarkable opportunity to view the narratives that emerge from this African photographic archive, describing in particular the experience of the studio: the curiosity between photographer and subject, the emergence and circulation of types, the range of portraiture, the negotiations of costume and pose, and the will for self-assertion.
 
The presentation investigates typical European depictions of Africans, from scenes in nature, to sexualized images of semi-nude models, to modern sitters posing in elaborate studios, critically addressing the politics of colonialism and the complex issues of gender, race, and identity. Original album pages of landscapes and ethnographic imagery are displayed alongside a series of carte de visite portraits of Africans, circulated in the 1870s from the Diamond Fields of Kimberley and popular “ethnic” post-cards from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The exhibition also features several double-sided displays of album pages, showing striking combinations of personal and stock images, and the juxtapositions of prominent figures in both African and Western contexts. Among over 150 images, the exhibition includes some of the finest examples of works by Samuel Baylis Barnard and the Lawrence Brothers of Cape Town, George T. Ferneyhough and the Caney Brothers in Natal, Barnett & Co from Johannesburg, W. Rausch from Bulawayo, and G. F. Williams from Port Elizabeth, as well as images by unidentified and unattributed photographers.
 
“Contemporary Reconfigurations”
Centering on contemporary photography and video by African and African-American artists who have engaged with photographic archives, “Contemporary Reconfigurations” shows how a stereotype or ethnographic vision in one era provides material for an irreverent reworking, satirical performance, or elegiac reenactment in another. Carrie Mae Weems, in her powerful series “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” appropriates mid-nineteenth-century anthropometric photographs of African-Americans, overlaying the images with poetic texts. Sammy Baloji, Candice Breitz, and Sue Williamson rework historic or ethnographic photographs onto collages. Samuel Fosso, Philip Kwame Apagya, and Kudzanai Chiurai create exuberantly staged studio portraiture, using backdrops and sets to critique stereotypes and identities. Zwelethu Mthethwa and Zanele Muholi examine sexuality, costume, and ritual, while David Goldblatt’s and Jo Ractliffe’s black-and-white portraits portray mineworkers and former military personnel as they chose to been seen in “traditional” clothing.
 
Sabelo Mlangeni’s photo essay “Iimbali” documents the reed dances of KwaZulu-Natal, showing the display of virgins vying to be chosen as brides. His series “Country Girls,” in contrast to the multiple visions of women posed “in nature” throughout the ethnographic archive, chronicles small-town transvestites who self-consciously perform their adopted identities for the camera. Pieter Hugo’s series “There’s a Place in Hell for Me & My Friends” examines ethnicity and skin tones through mug shots and Guy Tillim makes a typology of child soldiers training near Beni, in the eastern Congo. Jodi Bieber, in a reversal of previous voyeuristic visions of the black female body, presents women self-consciously posing in settings where they are in control of their own images. Working in video, Berni Searle performs as a statuesque deity engaged in domestic labor in “Snow White,” and Andrew Putter gives an indigenous voice to the effigy of Maria de la Quellerie, wife of the first Dutch settler in the area known today as Cape Town, in “Secretly I Will Love You More.” Together, through their work with the African archive, these artists pose compelling questions about identity and memory, leading to new readings of the exhibition’s vintage photographs.

The sculptures, drawings, photographs, mixed media works, and films in Ana Mendieta: Late Works 1981-1985 at Galerie Lelong reveal Mendieta’s translation of her ephemeral practices in the landscape to independent art objects. Beginning in 1980, Mendieta took several trips to her birth country of Cuba. These visits brought a resolution that allowed the completion of her identity-oriented works and the seeking of an aspect of universality. In 1983, Mendieta left New York to begin a fellowship and residency at the American Academy in Rome, a period that redefined her creative process. Her time in Rome influenced the organization of the current retrospective at the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Turin and inspired a documentary film currently in post-production, Itali-Ana, Mendieta in Rome, directed by Raquel Cecilia. The exhibition at Galerie Lelong opens during Frieze New York, with a public reception on May 10th from 6-8pm. The artist’s sister, Raquelin Mendieta, will be present.
 
In the 1980s, Mendieta began to shift away from performative, documented work as exemplified in two of her last films, Ochún and Birth from 1981. These films depict siluetas, potent traces of the artist’s body in the landscape, transformed by the ocean tide or ignited gunpowder. In 1982, she began creating numerous drawings directly onto fresh leaves she found in the landscape, using a variety of tools such as nails, needles, and pencils. Like her outdoor site-specific works, she embraced the natural effects of time on objects, such as the shifting color and texture of the leaves as they dried. Mendieta sought to fuse earth and form in her drawings, photographs, and sculptures. She created several sculptures that year including Fernwoman (1982), a unique sculpture standing close to five feet tall. Carved in an anthropomorphic shape from an Osmunda fern root, this work recalls primitive art. Mendieta often repeated imagery in different media, such as the “labyrinth” figure seen in La Concha de Venus (1981-82), a drawing on amate (bark) paper, and in outdoor sculptures molded in mud which she then photographed. Works like these not only show Mendieta’s continued interest in imagery of the female body, but also show her attempt to make her work more accessible to art audiences and collectors in the 1980s.
 
Mendieta’s late sculptures translate her familiar silueta-like forms into more tangible objects that became less specific to her own body and not tied to an exact location. This development can be seen in the floor sculptures Figure with Nganga (1984) and Untitled (1983-84), which show an affinity to works she made in the landscapes of places like Cuba, Iowa, and Mexico. A breakthrough in her practice at this time was combining imported sand and soil – from different locations significant to her including Cuba, the Nile in Egypt, and the Red Sea – with different binding materials to create indoor floor sculptures that carried the energy of these places. She also began making free-standing sculptures from hollowed tree trunks and wooden slabs that could rest against gallery walls. Ranging from five to seven feet tall, the wood pieces required physical rigor to transport from the forest to the studio, where she carved and burned organic patterns onto the surface. Mendieta’s archives from this period reveal that she had a strong interest in creating permanent works like these sculptures on a larger scale for public art projects. Unfortunately, some of these projects, such as her plan for an installation in Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park, were never realized due to her untimely death.
 
Ana Mendieta: Late Works 1981-1985 is the ninth solo exhibition of Mendieta’s work at Galerie Lelong, which has represented her Estate since 1991. Mendieta has had over 30 solo exhibitions worldwide, at museums including the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Kunstmuseum Luzern; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Museo Tamayo, Mexico City. This January, the Castello di Rivoli began the second wave of large-scale retrospectives with the exhibition Ana Mendieta. She Got Love, which closes on June 16, 2013. The Hayward Gallery in London will open a retrospective curated by Stephanie Rosenthal on September 24 this year. In 2015, the Katherine E. Nash Gallery of the University of Minnesota will present an exhibition devoted to Mendieta’s films curated by Howard Oransky.

SPENCER FINCH: FATHOM May 2 – June 15, 2013
Press Preview: Thursday May 2, 10:00 AM
Opening Reception: Thursday May 2, 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Artist Talk: Saturday May 11, 11:00 AM
James Cohan Gallery is pleased to present Fathom, Spencer Finch’s debut solo exhibition at the gallery, opening on Thursday, May 2nd and running through Saturday, June 15th. An opening reception for the artist will take place on May 2, 2013, from 6 – 8 PM.
To “fathom” is to comprehend the essence of something colossal or ineffable by translating it into terms we can grasp. For more than twenty years, Spencer Finch’s practice addresses such a need to capture and frame experience. In site-specific installation as well as drawing and sculpture, Finch has combined scientific calibration and calculation with a romantic’s engagement with nature and faith in the limitless rewards of observation.
A fathom is also a unit of measurement approximately six feet in length that is used to measure the depth of water, and a key reference point for the exhibition. After learning about Henry David Thoreau’s 1846 survey of Walden Pond, in which the famed polymath performed soundings to determine the lake’s depth at 102 feet and debunk a popular myth that it was bottomless, Finch received permission from the Walden Pond State Reservation to take a boat on the lake and perform that seminal survey for
the second time. Dropping rope into the pond, as Thoreau had, while also employing an electronic depth meter — combining old and new technology — Finch further measured longitude and latitude as well as color-matching the water at each sounding point.
The resulting work is a 120-foot long rope – the rope Finch used in the soundings, and the artist‘s description of the depth of Walden Pond. It serves as the physical record of the findings as well as an armature: paper tags for each of the approximately 700 soundings appear along the rope at their equivalent measure of depth along with their exact coordinates and a swatch of matched color, applied in watercolor. Neither entirely documentation nor sculpture, the long line may best be considered a drawing of Walden Pond.
The main gallery will include several other works delving into the idea of delineation, from continuous-line drawings of encircling vultures observed by the artist in Spain to abstract renderings of meteorological models used to predict weather patterns. Other new and recent works on view for the first time in New York address themes as varied as the color of the light on Mars, the breeze through Emily Dickinson’s bedroom window and the attempt to render wind through chalk pastel drawings of the movement of the curtains at Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s famous pavilion in Barcelona.
Spencer Finch was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1962. Recent solo exhibitions and commissions include: Following Nature, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN (2013); Painting Air, Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence, RI (2012); Lunar, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Rome, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA, Between the light - and me, Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst, MA (2011); My Business, With the Cloud, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Evening Star, Pallant House, Chichester, UK, Between The Moon and The Sea, Frac des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, France (2010); As if the sea should part and show a further sea, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2009). He has taken part in numerous group exhibitions, including Light and Landscape, Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York, NEON, La material luminosa dell’arte, MACRO, Rome (2012); More Light, Museum De Fundatie, Zwolle (2011); Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); Making Worlds: 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia (2009); 50 Moons of Saturn, Turin Triennial (2008); Refract, Reflect, Project: Light Work from the Collection, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C. (2007); Light Art from Artificial Light, ZKM Karlsruhe and Colour After Klein, Barbican Art Gallery, London (2005). Finch lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
For press inquiries, please contact Jane Cohan at jane@jamescohan.com or at 212-714-9500.
For other inquiries, please contact Jessica Lin Cox at jcox@jamescohan.com or at 212-714-9500.

In conjunction with the May release of the beach-bag-size edition of Life’s a Beach, Aperture is pleased to present an exhibition featuring the best selections from Martin Parr’s beach photography.
 
Parr has been photographing beaches for thirty years, documenting all aspects of them, including close-ups of sunbathers, rambunctious swimmers caught mid-plunge, and the eternal sandy picnic underway. His international career, in fact, could well be traced to the launch of The Last Resort, a 1986 book depicting the seaside resort of New Brighton, near Liverpool.
 
What may be less known is that this obsession has led Parr to photograph beaches around the world. This compilation, his first on the topic, presents photos of beachgoers on far-flung shores, including Argentina, Brazil, China, Spain, Italy, Latvia, Japan, the United States, Mexico, Thailand, and, of course, the UK. The exhibition brings to the fore Parr’s engagement with a cherished subject matter—that rare public space in which general absurdities and local quirks seamlessly fuse together.
 
This selection of photographs shows Parr at his best, startling us with moments of captured absurdity and immersing us in rituals and traditions associated with beach life the world over.
 
Martin Parr (born in Epsom, England, 1952) is a key figure in the world of photography, recognized as a brilliant satirist of contemporary life. Author of over thirty photography books, including Common Sense, Our True Intent Is All for Your Delight, and Boring Postcards, his photographs have been collected by museums worldwide, including the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Tate Modern, London. A retrospective of his work continues to tour major museums around the world since opening at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in 2002. Parr is a member of Magnum Photos.
 
RELATED EVENT:
Portrait Shoot and Beach Party with Martin Parr
Saturday, May 18, 9:00 am-6:00 pm
For more details, visit www.aperture.org/events

By adopting 17th- and 18th- century American folk motifs, Seattle-based Anne Siems’ portraits and still life paintings emit a haunting awkwardness. With rosy cheeks, haunted gaze and flattened features, Siems’ highly stylized figures inhabit a dreamy colonial landscape. As the world itself seems frozen in time, the transparent figures float in the foreground, forever youthful and mysterious. The delicate patterning found in traditional embroidery is the main element used to define their clothing. A thick application of paint, at times intentionally crackled to create the effect of an aged surface, emphasizes folk painting and faux antiquity. Siems' paintings ‘borrow backwards’ with a refreshing whimsy and off kilter grace, participating in the current revival of ‘old, weird America.’ ARTDAILY.ORG March 2011

Siems, who is German-born and now living in the northwestern United States, has drawn inspiration from the Guide on Wildlife in Europe, featuring unforgettable animal portraits. These, along with her youthful cast of human characters, celebrate the joys and mysteries of life. Distinct identities emerge in each portrait with fable-like stories becoming the narrative. Ritual elements from Native American medicine and culture, rabbits, deer, owls and mythological animals, their pelts and feathers, are prominent subjects in Siems’ menagerie. The muse of the artist is both real and imaginary.
 
ARTIST’S STATEMENT: In 2001 it seemed like I never recovered fully from a flu, I constantly felt fatigued and achy. Several years later I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. Ever since, I have been on a path to find healing. My work in psychotherapy has helped me to shift my nervous system to a calmer, less exhausting “gear” (in Fibromyalgia the nervous system is in a constant fight or flight pattern). This work has also gotten me more deeply in touch with the earth as a sacred being.
For a while now I have longed for more ritual and ceremony in my life. I was raised with little religion, but connected to Christianity through my time as a child in South America and my upbringing in Germany.
Lately, I have found my yearning for spiritual practice in the Native American traditions of shamanic medicine making. I believe in all of us is the genuine desire to connect first and foremost with that which sustains us. All of our ancestors were originally oriented toward ritual and ceremony that honored and celebrated the earth, the sky and all that exists in between.
I believe we can attain healing for the body, soul and planet by rediscovering our relationship to these roots of worship. Consciously thanking that which sustains us –the air we breathe, the earth that holds us to her and everything that surrounds us- allows for just that. — Anne Siems, 2013
 
Siems, a Fulbright Scholar, has exhibited in Canada and in Europe and widely throughout the United States.
Her work is included in such collections as the Arkansas Art Centre, Boise Art Museum, Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and the Tacoma Art Museum.

Jeff Bailey Gallery is pleased to present Mark Shetabi, The Grand Tour. In new paintings and sculpture, Shetabi explores ideas about travel, transition and escape.
 
Several sculptures of Campers serve as points of departure on this tour of relics. Their exteriors are neutral in color and the windows emit a soft, glowing light. Resting on cylinders, with no attachment to a car or a truck, they could be new or old, ready for use or abandoned. Their simplicity recalls early examples of modernist architecture or sculpture.
 
Another sculpture, Arcade, is a pared down version of a video game, circa 1980. Its outer form is like a shell, a repository for a technology that was once dazzling, now obsolete. Even so, the screen still gives off a faint light.
 
Girl on a Bicycle is a painting of a girl pedaling down a sun-dappled road - a moment of leisure drawn out in the slow time of painting. It is difficult to date the image, as the girl’s clothing might be from the 1950s, ‘80s, or even today. Caspian Sea Hyatt depicts the once chic lobby of a 1970s hotel. Like other hotels before and after it, its style has become passé.
 
Other paintings and sculptures recall forms that constitute the visual white noise of the adolescent memories of the artist: a double-kick drum set on a glowing stage is modeled after a kit played by Keith Moon; or the heroic opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
 
Within this framework of the familiar and archetypal, Shetabi seeks to depict objects and images in a way that invites further consideration. Addressing these subjects through the static forms of painting and sculpture, Shetabi provides a place for resistance against the eventual disappearance of things.
 
This is Shetabi's fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. His work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States. He is a 2002 recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Exhibition reviews have appeared in Art in America, The Philadelphia Enquirer, artnet.com and other publications. Shetabi lives and works in Philadelphia, where he is Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at Tyler School of Art.
 
For further information or images, please contact the gallery at 212.989.0156 or info@baileygallery.com.

Joshua Liner Gallery is pleased to present Renegade Trajectories, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Oliver Vernon. This is Vernon’s third solo show with the gallery, and the artist will be present at the opening reception on May 30.
 
Combining elements of landscape painting, figuration, and abstraction, Vernon’s practice pushes all of these categories beyond easy distinction, creating a hybrid visual language all his own. “The picture plane is a continuum of give and take,” says Vernon, “where positive and negative space give way to each other in rhythmic intervals. Energy oscillates and migrates, initiating changes along the way. And color is a navigational tool to guide the eye through the chaotic scape.”
 
Vernon lives in the Sierra Nevada region of northern California, and glimpses of these breathtaking vistas turn up frequently in his work. However, landscape is never a subject or even backdrop, per se, but instead a visual cue toward the expansive scale of Vernon’s abstraction. In many works, this takes the form of a wave-like torrent of arching brushstrokes and cascading patterns that dominate the canvas, devouring mountains, valleys, clouds, and the horizon, or nimbly swirling everything into the overall composition. The effect is destabilizing, imposing an abstract system on the more common notion of a fixed, physical reality—landscape gives way to visual frenzy, flights of imagination, and transformation.
 
In Renegade Trajectories, Vernon explores this dynamic with twelve medium-sized acrylic on linen or canvas paintings and a suite of twelve ink on paper works. The exhibition will showcase several large-scale paintings, the largest measuring nearly 8-x-7 feet. In the painting Excavation, a jagged cyclone of geometric shapes, architectural elements, and quasi-anatomical forms swirl about a distant horizon, pulling it in or ushering it forth. In the dramatic painting Flashback, this force takes the form of an orange and violet-tinted flood, inundating the picture with a chaotic rush of brushstrokes, graphic patterns, and semi-figurative material. As the artist notes, “These incidents or events take place in worlds within worlds. Everything is whirring with activity as parts of systems engage with other systems in a state of constant flux.”
 
In his works on paper, Vernon’s use of Sumi ink imparts an even sharper contrast of forces, of positive and negative space, in black, white, and subtle gray scale. Hard-edged but somehow serene, these pictorial spaces draw viewers into a spiral of connected facets (or dimensions)—cascading flower petals, lozenge forms, pulmonary or lung tissue, honeycomb—giving way to a brightening horizon beyond. Ultimately, the distinctions of figuration/abstraction, figure/ground, are not the artist’s primary interest. In all of his work, Vernon is most fascinated by the dynamic interplay between these surreally juxtaposed elements—in his own words, “not the what but the how.”
 
Reception Thursday May 30 from 6-8pm

New York, NY. Porter Contemporary is pleased to announce Never Ending Story, a solo exhibition highlighting the new works of Jennifer Murray opening with an artist’s reception on May 23 from 6:30 to 8:30 PM, an artist talk and music listening party on May 30 and continuing through June 22, 2013.
 
Charcoal, ink, acrylic, photography and animal skulls are simply the beginning of the story to Jennifer Murray’s second solo exhibition at Porter Contemporary. Murray imagines a totemic tribute to the power of mythology rooted in nature through a digital and technical lens. Murray will explore the ways in which we experience the power of the natural world using the color white in its varied patterns as the basis for inter-connectivity. In Ornament (Falcon) the white is the micro—the construction of space around living creatures that characterizes an era of surveillance and crowding. Tempest Drawing illustrates the macro of planetary movement, of weather patterns, of the increasingly interconnected ecosystem and world. Murray continues to explore this idea throughout Never Ending Story through various mediums and juxtapositions of work.
 
“The ‘story’ in these works is my contribution to the timeless practice of harnessing the primordial power of animals and nature to express the mythology of human imaginative existence. That this mythology must constantly be reimagined and retold for each new time is what makes it never ending,” says Jennifer Murray.
 
Listing Information
 
What: Never Ending Story – Solo exhibition of new works by Jennifer Murray
 
Exhibition Dates: May 23 – June 22, 2013
 
Opening Reception with the Artists: May 23, 6:30 – 8:30 PM
 
Press Preview: May 23, 4:30 – 6:30 PM
 
Artist Talk & Music Listening Party: May 30, 6:30 – 8:30 PM (RSVP required)
 
Where: Porter / Contemporary, 548 W. 28th Street, 3rd Floor, NYC
 
Gallery Hours: Tues & Wed by appointment; Thurs 11 - 8 PM; Fri & Sat 11 - 6 PM
 
General Inquiries: info@portercontemporary.com
Press Inquires: media@portercontemporary.com
 
About Jennifer Murray
 
Jennifer Murray is originally from Livermore, California. She utilizes both her study of visual art at Carnegie Mellon University, and, more recently, her study of sociology, history, and gender politics at NYU, to construct a body of work that chronicles her personal observations of social unrest, power structures, and the fallibility of culture. In addition to multiple locations in New York City, Jennifer has shown her work in Los Angeles, Seattle, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Miami, and Mermaid Beach, Australia. She has participated in International art fairs in both New York City and Miami, most recently the Aqua Art Fair during Art Basel Miami Beach. She lives and works in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
 
About Porter Contemporary
 
Launched in 2006, Porter Contemporary is dedicated to showcasing emerging and established artists from around the world whose work embodies both skill and risk taking. The mission of Porter Contemporary continues to be based on founder Jessica L. Porter‘s vision of opening contemporary art collecting to a broader audience. Over the past seven years, the gallery has earned a dedicated following of new and established collectors who value art that pushes boundaries.
 
In addition to presenting many distinctive exhibitions throughout the year, Porter Contemporary also provides art consultation services, collection management and artwork installation. Porter Contemporary is located in New York’s Chelsea district at 548 West 28th Street, just steps away from the beautiful High Line Park — like the gallery, a place to experience art and life from a new perspective.