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.

For Immediate Release
 
Geoff Chadsey
Angela Dufresne
Vera Iliatova
Jake Longstreth
Marcial Ramos
Cynthia Talmadge & Kevin Zucker
Craig Taylor
Andrew Witkin
Alexi Worth
 
June 20 – July 26, 2013
Opening reception: Thursday, June 20, 6 - 8 PM
 
slap that cunt • autumn • failure • cars • fear • cages • ephemerality • shadows • chaos • duality • escape • violence • hotels • the subconscious vs. the self • breakage • cocaine • redemption • pornography • honesty • the periphery of society • Armani • not giving a shit • loneliness • transcendence • alcohol • grit • sex • killing • insomnia • glamour • aggression • morality • voyeurism • darkness • deceit • narcissism & superficiality=tools for avoiding intimacy • I’m dripping • anxiety • ego • let’s disappear • beauty • relief • night • anger • obsession • the road • prostitution • style • self-destruction • dreams • loneliness • starting over • trash • escape • light • perversion • a man alone in a room • sex is not about sex • guns • mood • Pandora’s box • disconnect • flesh • suicide • sacrifice • instability • decay • isolation • let’s fuck • redemption through violence • homosexuality • writing • Mercedes • alienation • mirrors • blood • taupe • guilt • vanity • revelation • defiance • depression • decadence • discovery • self-reflection • venetian blinds
 
"What fascinates me are people who want to be one thing but who behave in a way contradictory to that. Who might say, ‘I want to be happy, but I keep doing things that make me unhappy.” - Paul Schrader
 
- Katherine Kennedy and Monya Rowe, 2013
 
Curated by Monya Rowe Gallery
 
Katherine Kennedy is the singer for Autodrone and is currently studying Russian Language and Culture at Columbia University, New York.
 
Gallery summer hours
June: Tuesday – Saturday, 11- 6 PM
July: Tuesday – Friday, 11- 6 PM
August: Closed
 
For more information or images please contact the gallery at 212 255 5065 or info@monyarowegallery.com
###

James Weingrod: Hush Open Window Project
April 11 - July 27, 2013
 
Lori Bookstein Fine Art is please to announce a new installation by James Weingrod. This will serve as the inaugural exhibition of The Open Window Project and the artist‘s first solo-exhibition with Lori Bookstein Fine Art and his first solo-exhibition in New York.
 
The Open Window Project was conceived as a project space by which to showcase the work of emerging artists and those artists who may not necessarily fit into the gallery’s program. While the gallery has always maintained the tradition of representing a focused group of core artists, it is excited about the ways in which working with other artists through the Open Window Project will enhance the dialogue surrounding the gallery's primary agenda. The Open Window Project will occupy the street front window on Tenth Avenue between 18th and 19th Streets.
 
James Weingrod: Hush will feature a singular, kinetic installation that actively engages street viewers. Comprised of a twirling birdcage and a series of two-way mirrors, the installation becomes an other-worldly environment where images are repeated ad infinitum within the eerie enclosure. Fascinated by the complex scientific and mathematical principles by which we have come to understand the expanses of the universe and infinity, Weingrod attempts to visually depict the ways we have come to understand the universe through theory instead of observation. Admitting the inevitable failure of such lofty ideals, he has developed an artistic practice more akin to experimentation, whereby, through trial-and-error, he hopes to develop a larger dialogue around the ways we have come to understand the incomprehensible.
 
James Weingrod received his BA in visual arts from Brown University (2004) where he was the recipient of the Roberta Jocelyn Award for Excellence in Art. He received his MFA from Hunter College (2009). Weingrod has been exhibited in several group shows in New York, including “Big Drawing” in 2008 at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, and in his hometown of Providence, RI. Weingrod was an artist in residence at The Wassaic Project in 2010 and 2011. Upcoming exhibitions include his first Philadelphia Solo Exhibition, which is scheduled for September 2013. Weingrod lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
 
James Weingrod will be on view from April 11 - July 27, 2013. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, April 11th from 6:00 - 9:00 pm. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:30 am to 6:00 pm. Summer hours begin Monday July 8th and will be Monday - Friday, 10:30 - 6:00. For additional information and/or visual materials, please contact the gallery at (212) 750-0949 or by email at info@loribooksteinfineart.com.¬

SIMON DENNY
All you need is data: the DLD 2012 Conference REDUX rerun
 
June 20 – July 27, 2013
 
Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by Simon Denny entitled, All you need is data: the DLD 2012 Conference REDUX rerun, from June 20 to July 27, 2013. This is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery. A catalogue published by Koenig, including an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, texts by Karen Archey, digital law expert Michael Littger and an introduction by co-curators Bart van der Heide and Saim Demircan, will accompany the show.
 
All you need is data: the DLD 2012 Conference REDUX rerun focuses on the 2012 edition of Munich’s annual Digital Life Design (DLD) conference dld-conference.com/. The conference is a high caliber platform for the exchange of ideas between digital media, the sciences and culture, which had the theme “All You Need Is … DATA?” in 2012. Denny’s exhibition was first presented at the Kunstverein Munich at the beginning of the year, alongside the 2013 DLD conference.
 
For his exhibition, Denny has created a display structure for 89 canvases that represent a visual summary of events that took place at DLD12, harvesting insights from the many speakers such as Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), Chris “Moot” Poole (4chan) and David Karp (tumblr), among others. The viewer is lead through the exhibition following a railing system that displays individual canvas “screens” that feature photos, pull-quotes and reconfigured stage and graphic designs from the conference. This content is flattened and depicted using iOS “skeuomorphic” style with app-like components. Only print media is used to illustrate the entire high-tech conference chronologically from beginning to end, forming what critic Kevin McGarry has described as “a structuralist memento mori”.
Simon Denny explores the materialization and commodification of “future visions and experiences,” and the lifespan of information in the context of fast paced, tech-driven commerce. The exhibition is a revealing format for how predetermined futures are promoted from the perspective of the digital economy. As such, the ‘REDUX’ in the title suggests a revisit of these future forecasts and is also indicative of the ‘Director’s Cut’ or a re-edit as a means of artistic appropriation.
Simon Denny was born in New Zealand in 1982 and received his degree at the Städelschule, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt. He has had numerous solo exhibitions, with shows at the Aspen Art Museum and Kunstverein Munich in the past year. He will be included in this year’s Venice Biennial as well as have an exhibition at MuMOK, Vienna this summer as a winner of the Art Basel Statements Baloise Preis in 2012. He is also a nominee for this year’s German Nationalgalerie Preis at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Simon Denny lives and works in Berlin.
Petzel Gallery is located at 456 West 18th Street New York, NY 10011. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM. Gallery hours will switch to our summer schedule, Monday through Friday from 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM starting July 8th through the end of the exhibition. For press inquiries, please contact Andrew Black at andrew@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.
For general inquiries, please email andrea@petzel.com.

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition of photographic works by ten Nigerian artists who are among a new generation of African photographers that explore unique visions, strong emotional and aesthetic perspectives to tell their own stories and challenge assumptions about the African continent. Each of the artists is widely traveled and well exposed to Western art modernism both by training and contact. Each represents a resonant voice, one that achieves it's own distinction and clarity amidst changing realities. Their creative voices are simultaneously instrumental, reconstructive if not interrogative and in some cases seek to retrieve both individual and collective memory. For many of the artists, this would be their first show in New York.
 
The reception is on Thursday, May 30th, 6-8pm
 
GO-SLOW: Diaries of Personal and Collective Stagnation in Lagos
New Directions in Contemporary Photography
 
Aderemi Adegbite
Ade Adekola
Akintunde Akinleye
Uche James Iroha
Chriss Nwobu
Adeniyi Odeleye
Abraham Oghobase
Charles Okereke
Uche Okpa-Iroha
Adeola Olagunju
 
Exhibition dates: May 30th - July 31st, 2013
 
In spite of the dynamic, lively, and often intensely volatile elements of life in Nigeria’s largest city, all who live there share in a daily narrative of delay. Lagosians experience go-slow in the form of impenetrable traffic jams, on the part of political leaders who make promises quickly followed by excuses, and when even a simple task becomes a major undertaking.
 
While the phenomenon of go-slow is a common cultural reference, its effects and impacts are as individual as the people who experience them, resulting in reactions that range from frustration, exhaustion, and anxiety to resignation, acceptance, and innovation in the face of a seemingly immutable reality.
 
Most showing for the first time in New York, ten Nigerian photographers explore the particular phenomenon of the Lagos go-slow through the context of personal or collective experiences demonstrating a keen awareness of the role that photography plays in strengthening the crucial links between culture, politics, and social agency.
 
Curator: Amber Croyle
 
10 LIVELY FRAMES - ONE SUBJECT: GO-SLOW-GO-SLOW
 
“Go-slow: Diaries of Personal and Collective Stagnation in Lagos”, as this photography exhibition is titled and focused, is a reality as well as a metaphor for the drudgery that characterizes diverse aspects of structural mobility in cosmopolitan Lagos. Fela Anikulakpo-Kuti, the veteran Afro-beat musician, satirist and social critic in 1978 put out a record track titled “Go-Slow”. The track explored the metaphoric gradations of “Go-Slow” as a reality in the day to day life of the Lagosian. The refrain of the track “go-slow, go-slow” aptly conjured the truth of the phenomenon while assuming landmark status of a resonating rhyme in the collective consciousness of Nigerians.
 
The diverse social and historical contexts that frame this seeming eternal characterization of Lagos have often provided photographers the contexts to invest their creative time and thoughts. The result is a corpus that keys into the testament projected by the city of Lagos as it allows for the exploration of the nuances of “go-slow” beyond a spatial identity.
 
The lively frames that the concept “go-slow” yields are thus presented in this exhibition from the experiences or encounters of cosmopolitan Lagos by the artists. Thus, from Aderemi Adegbite, Ade Adekola, Akintunde Akinleye, Uche James Iroha, Chriss Nwobu to Adeniyi Adeleye, Abraham Oghobase, Charles Okereke, Uche Okpa Iroha and Adeola Olagunju comes a bouquet of visual interpretations of the Lagos “go-slow” experience in representational and conceptual frames.
 
The exhibition plan designed to introduce to the New York audience “new directions in contemporary photography” by a crop of modern generation photographers from Nigeria is apt considering how identities are constructed. However, this objective presupposes a hierarchy that hosts these artists. Hence, I engage a brief narrative which situates the genre in Nigeria. Early uses of photography in the West Coast of Africa, from Gambia to Nigeria were documentary commissions from the English colonial authorities (Erin Harney, 2010). These include the works of J. P. Decker, a Gambian, and N. Walwin Holm, a Ghanaian who had a branch of his photography studio in Lagos. Apart from the portraitures associated with his studio, he also worked for the British as a documentary photographer. A Nigerian of note of Ijo nativity from Bonny, Jonathan Adagogo Green (1873 – 1905) was similarly engaged by the British colonial administration in Nigeria. His many choreographed portraits and group images are counted among over three hundred photographs from his atelier between 1897 and 1905. One of his very famous works that entrenches the memory of the British punitive expedition against Benin City is the apparently dehumanized Ovoramwen N’gbaisi, the Oba of Benin in the expedition year 1897.
 
It is interesting to note that Adagogo Green’s seal for his photographs bore his name with an added inscription; “Artist Photographer”. In spite of this claim, considering also the strong foregrounding of photography in the practice of the visual arts, it is only recently that its status as high art was acclaimed. This recognition has inspired new initiatives to track the multilayered history of the genre in Nigeria. Equally, exhibitions of photography now compete with those of other arts. However, an austere history of photography in Nigeria accommodates the following personalities; George S. A. Da Costa, J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, Dotun Okubanjo, Sunmi Smart-Cole and Don Berber. Don Berber is, within this history, a mentor to many new generation photographers who have featured in this exhibition with their visual interpretation of go-slow in Lagos.
 
In reality, the history of photography in Nigeria is in tandem with the global history of photography. This is that photography, as an expressive mode that documents phenomena as fleeting time permits, is governed by epistemes, which are palimpsest, and allow a loose ordering of identities. The image-turn, which is on the ascent in the contemporary, bears witness to deep creative exploits with the lens and the digital interface. Invariably the production and consumption of images in the artistic-scape in Nigeria has remained strong probably because of the power of the image to determine our demands upon reality. These realities shape the metaphors of focus here their enduring vehicular and often pedestrian gridlocks. This is Lagos.
 
Frank Ugiomoh, 2013
Art Historian
University of Port Harcourt
Port Harcourt, Nigeria

OPTIC NERVE: The Prints and Multiples of Sean Mellyn (1993-2013)
JUNE 20 - AUGUST 1, 2013
 
CURATED BY MICHAEL STEINBERG
 
UNDERLINE Gallery is pleased to announce a major retrospective of the prints and multiples of Sean Mellyn. From a 1993 drypoint, Boy In The Bubble, to two new digital prints created to celebrate the exhibition – Tour Group and The House What Eye Built – the artist’s innovative utilization of a broad range of printmaking techniques will be on view. Commenting on the various modes of editioning, Mellyn writes:
 
“There seems to be a pecking order with perfection in print-making - Silkscreen being the most accident-prone and the now almost perfect digital techniques are flawless representations. I've been working on how to make accidents before the image is scanned, or to try and do something that will corrupt the file.”
 
Mellyn has worked with such distinguished master printers as Jean-Yves Noblet, Jennifer Melby, Andre Ribuoli. Additionally, he was invited to create several editions at New Mexico’s Tamarind Institute, where he worked in collaboration with master lithographer Bill Lagattuta. One of the works he produced there, Boy With Mask, is included in a traveling exhibition and book celebrating Tamarind’s fiftieth anniversary. Among the significant print collections that have acquired prints by Sean Mellyn are New York’s Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The New York Public Library and The Brooklyn Museum of Art.
 
While the current show encapsulates many of Mellyn’s major themes, his on-going concern with issues of vision – seeing and being seen; surveillance and paranoia; and art historical issues such as the cataracts in Monet’s eyes – emerges very clearly.
 
Mellyn notes: “I really started using eyes after 9/11 as it was clear that we would soon become a people watched. I always thought it’s so ironic that reality tv shows would be such a big deal; that it’s less Warholian 15 minutes of fame, and more scrutiny in government - judgement- busted kind of way.”
 
In addition to the print editions on view, the show will feature the highly-collected three dimensional multiples Mellyn has created. These include t-shirts, handkerchiefs, Paper Monet plates and a number of small sculptural objects. Some of these works were originally done as to benefit such institutions as The New Musuem.
 
Optic Nerve: The Prints and Multiples of Sean Mellyn (1993-2013) has been curated by Michael Steinberg, who, as a publisher, gallerist and collector has had a long involvement with Sean Mellyn’s work.
 
UNDERLINE Gallery is a visual arts gallery that underscores important, innovative works by some of today’s most talented artists. The Gallery’s unique perspective–often marked by color, dimension, humor, and spirit–reflects an intimate and non-exclusive environment that facilitates art appreciation. A variety of price points and a range of small and large-scale works bring together a community of artists, curators, art lovers, and collectors.

“I was born to a father who wore an airline uniform. For most of my childhood, he lived and worked in another country. Each summer I would be flown from Beirut to Dhahran as an unaccompanied minor, but he always made sure he booked me on a flight where he knew at least one, if not all, of the Flight Attendants, or rather stewardesses as they were then known.
 
I always flew First Class, looking like Lily Tomlin’s Edith Ann, a tiny kid in a huge chair. I was totally coddled, fed, and entertained by the stewardesses who took personal care of me until I was delivered either to my dad or to my aunt, when returning to Lebanon. Flight Attendants epitomized international glamour and adventure to me. Growing up, I often dreamed of becoming one, until I took my first class in photography as a junior in high school in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC.
 
Like most Lebanese parents, mine would have greatly preferred my becoming a doctor, a lawyer, or an architect. Although I did have an interest in medicine, I had been passionate about photography ever since I developed my first print—an abstract array of shopping carts—in a tray of Dektol. As my eighteenth birthday approached, I also realized that my airline benefits would soon come to an end. I wouldn’t be able to jaunt around the world at will, for free—something I had been used to all my life.
 
My only solution was to follow my childhood dream and become a Flight Attendant. A few months before turning twenty, I started sending applications to Pan Am and TWA, two of the major international airlines at the time. I was hired by¬ Trans World Airlines on my twentieth birthday, and on February 26, 1978, I reported to Breech Training Academy, the most renowned and modern flight attendant school in the industry.”
-Lucien Samaha, April 2013
 
Lombard Freid Gallery is pleased to present New York-based photographer Lucien Samaha’s The Flight Attendant Years: 1978-1986, the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. Samaha has been a photographer since high school and has obsessively documented his personal and professional life for over 40 years, producing a rich, highly autobiographical body of work. This show will debut vintage color and black-and-white photographs from his time as a Flight Attendant for Trans World Airlines, giving a behind-the-scenes look at a bygone era. These striking, intimate images will be exhibited with a variety of archival objects, including Samaha’s golden flight wings, personal correspondence, and TWA memos.
 
Samaha’s photographs from the late 1970s and early ‘80s record a particular intimacy between Flight Attendants, pilots, and passengers that was rarely revealed at the time—and is certainly not seen in today’s climate of heightened airline security. The Flight Attendant Years covers all aspects of daily life: training sessions, uniform fittings, in-flight fraternization, and layover breaks. Samaha’s eye for detail and composition, matched with his direct access to his subject matter, allows for his documentary photography to exist within an extremely personal and aesthetic milieu. His images—Polaroid snapshots, elegant candid portraits, and group photographs—emphasize the spirit of adventure and conviviality integral to his surroundings.
 
Samaha has continued to be in touch with many of his former colleagues, and the gallery will serve as a portrait studio for current and former flight attendants who are being invited (through postings at airlines and hotels) to visit the gallery on Saturdays, June 8, 15, and 22, from 12:00 to 5:00 PM. The portraits will be on view in the gallery and posted to lombardfreid.com and luciensamaha.net.
 
Lucien Samaha (b. 1958, Beirut) is a New York-based photographer whose work has been shown internationally, including in exhibitions at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt and at the Cooley Gallery, Reed College, Portland. He was a finalist for the 2004 Nam June Paik Award. After his time at TWA, Samaha worked for Eastman Kodak Company and then as a DJ on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center, continuing to document his hours at work and his personal life.

For Immediate Release
 
Season Review Group Show
June 13 - July 31, 2013
 
Edward Thorp Gallery is pleased to announce Season Review a group exhibit comprising of works from gallery artists and a selection of works from artists who participated in the gallery’s 2012 - 2013 season. This overview will reflect a diversity of approaches in a wide variety of mediums from ink on paper to mixed media multi-panel works, large scale paintings on canvas to steel and tin sculpture.
Artists to be included:
 
Andrea Belag
Matthew Blackwell
Cora Cohen Neil Farber
Sarah Gamble
Clare Grill
June Leaf
Rachel Malin
Henri Michaux
Judith Simonian
Andrew Spence
Gary Stephan

“In the early 1990‘s it was very evident the computer was changing the mystery genre as we knew it. ’Place' as we know it does not exist in the cyber world, this confluence of media is redefining the lines between what we refer to as fiction and reality. Each diptych from the ”Mysteries“ has a chronology: the scene on the left is the past of the scene on the right, which is its future. But the chronology is incomplete. The time n the pictures is as broken up as the space.”

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.

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Sunsets and Pussy. This exhibition brings together two classic themes of summer wonder – so saccharine and ubiquitous we forget their awesome power. Spanning three generations, artists Ed Ruscha, Lucien Smith, Betty Tompkins, and Piotr Uklański each engage in the delight of exposing the clichéd beauty and banality inherent in these timeless images.
 
For further information regarding Sunsets and Pussy or images of the works, please contact Veronica Levitt at 212.680.9889 or veronica@marianneboeskygallery.com.

RICCO/MARESCA GALLERY is pleased to present Rebecca Norris Webb: My Dakota. This exhibition brings together works from Webb’s acclaimed book recounting the sudden loss of her brother through intimate landscape portraits of her home state of South Dakota. My Dakota serves as a lyrical elegy, depicting the hypnagogic process of grieving and visually chronicling the fragility of life and the inexplicable changes that occur while mourning.
 
Rebecca Norris-Webb moved to South Dakota at the age of 15. The artist originally found expression as a poet, before exploring photography after college. For Webb, language could not fully capture the totality of the world around her, nor satisfy her innate curiosity for visual exploration. The artist’s latest book, My Dakota, blends poetry with photographs of her home state as a multi-layered portrait that marries aesthetic representation with lyrical record. The heart of the book lies in the enigmatic photographs where the artist is seemingly searching for significance behind continuation and meaning beyond an emotional chasm. Reflections and windows play a significant role in the series as a way of capturing memory within the present while exuding a sense of abandonment and disconnect from life’s fleeting moments. Rooted in sentient exploration, each work is open to interpretation – giving viewers an outlet to draw their personal recollections and emotive conclusions.
 
My Dakota transcends artistic privy and instead maintains a core universal empathy. The artist states, “Looking back at My Dakota, I now realize that I was photographing this dark time in my life in order to try to absorb it, to crystallize it, and, ultimately, to let go of it. Not only did my first grief change me, but making My Dakota changed me as well, both as a human being and as an artist.”
 
My Dakota was first shown in 2012 at the Dahl Arts Center in Rapid City, South Dakota, and will be exhibited at the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks, North Dakota from June 5 - August 6, 2013. Friday, June 21: Lecture at Aperture Foundation, 547 W. 27th, 4th fl., 7:00-8:30 pm (with Alex Webb) and Q&A led by Sean Corcoran, Curator of Prints and Photographs, the Museum of the City of New York, and Denise Wolff, Aperture Senior Editor; book signing to follow; Saturday, June 22: Artist talk/walk through of “My Dakota” at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, 5-6pm.
 
REBECCA NORRIS WEBB, MY DAKOTA
June 20 - August 17, 2013
Opening reception Thursday, June 20, 6-8PM

Mike Weiss Gallery is pleased to present a questionable low point in our program: Birth of a Legend, by nomadic artist Cameron Gray. Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz claim that “Cameron Gray is too big too fail,” and Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City asked for “more cheddar” with her order of Cameron Gray. Gray’s latest exploit serves up a Dionysian smörgåsbord of state-of-the-art digital technology, where kaleidoscopically bright palettes and hypnotic kitsch run rampant. With your senses utterly titillated and suitably doped, you‘ll discover his artistic touch is as light as his work is raucous; speed of play carefully calibrated, execution satirically dead-pan, and content spot-on HOT. Straddling the line between comfort and the disquietingly uncanny, Gray’s gargantuan installations flash, blink, twirl, and pulsate off the walls in utter pandemonium, culling visual and auditory white noise from the vast Internet in something akin to a holy art apocalypse. As Gray descends into the deepest realms of the web world, we can only look on and marvel at the chaos that we have created.
 
Frequently likened to the second coming of Koons and thoroughly rooted within postmodern sensibilities, Gray is an incredibly articulate forager of the irreverent. In I Was Made For Dancin’, All, All, All Night Long, Gray achieves near tantric nirvana, emblazoning a glossy, hollowed Leif Garrett poster with psychedelic patterns and prismatic forms; two all-seeing eyes flicking every which way as he sluggishly sings the work’s eponymous and utterly cheeky song. Acid Zen Garden imbues a glowing cherub figure and assorted fauna with Gray’s unrivaled knack for mischief. Like-wise, in Ice Cream for John Wayne, a duo of melting waffle cone treats take residence upon John Wayne’s dreamy visage. Not content to simply tear the ‘mask’ off such iconic machismo, Cameron spatters many a surrounding wall with fluorescent, glow-in-the-dark paint—effectively taking on Abstract Expressionist bravado as well.
 
A shaman of digital technique and reprographic means, Gray sets forth an alternate universe rife with under-auto black lighting and over-the-top pop, instinctively splaying nonsensical sights and sounds across an ambitious range of mediums: video collages chock-full of outlandish abstractions, including an all-encompassing 12 foot wide work comprised of 27 monitors; an epic 7-foot-tall pin bricolage in which 3,000 photographic images abut embedded 3-D video, spinning disco-lights, and utterly unrelated bric-a-brac; manipulated c-prints of classic American icons; and circular, Archimboldo-like smiley-face sculptures in which fake food is adhered to densely-patterned, wood-mounted table-cloths, with fake plastic ‘turkey dinners’ forming the eyes of one piece, and a glazed faux Jell-O mold its nose. Simultaneously chaotic, organic, orgasmic, and narcotic, Gray delivers the Cadillac of collage, the epitome of hyper-stimulation, and the ultimate state of transcendence – a meaningless yet tantalizing void, where nothing is sacred. Indulge yourself this summer in this orgiastic, optical feast and celebrate with us the 10-year anniversary of Mike Weiss Gallery.
 
Cameron Gray, Birth of a Legend.
 
Born in Geneva in 1980, Cameron Gray lives and works in London, Basel, and Los Angeles. Graduating egregia cum laude from Bruce High Quality Foundation University, Gray also holds no less than six degrees from such prestigious institutions as Yale, Columbia, and UCLA. Prior to his ascension into the upper levels of the art historical pantheon, Gray will have participated in two Venice Biennales, including the one to take place in 2015, and three Whitney Biennials, including those in 2016 and 2018. In 2012, Galerie Eva Presenhuber included his work in the seminal show I Wanna F*ck You But We‘re Just Gonna Cuddle, and one of Gray’s massive pin collages was a show-stopping success in The Gag Reflex is Mysterious at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2011. Grey‘s work is included in the Ludwig-Forum für Internationale Kunst in Aachen, Germany; the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in Kaohsiung, Taiwan; the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, CT; and 17 other prominent collections. Cameron Gray is currently represented by Mike Weiss Gallery, David Zwirner, Thaddaeus Ropac, Sprueth Magers, White Cube and Pace Beijing, amongst others.
 
Your mom loves Cameron Gray’s work. Ask her, she told us so.

Fred Torres and Alain Briscadieu-Farjas are very excited to present works by nine French masters. An opening reception will be held this Thursday, May 30th from 6-8pm.
 
The exhibition marks a unprecedented demonstration of contemporary French talent, the first major New York exhibition of painter Jean-Claude Farjas, and an introduction to our newest artist, photographer Seb Janiak. A limited-edition catalogue will be available to accompany this exhibition, featuring a critical essay by Carter Ratcliff, The Art of Reverie.
 
“From the earliest days of the republic, American artists followed France’s lead. So did the artists of many other countries. Then, in the aftermath of the Second World War, Americans felt a new sense of independence. New York took the place of Paris as the capital of advanced art and New Yorkers paid little attention to the world beyond their city—or, to be more precise, beyond the island of Manhattan. In recent decades, borders have been blurred. Visions have enlarged and the world of art has become international. Nonetheless, French art is still underrepresented in New York, which has meant that the legacy of a great visionary tradition has not been felt for decades... As the title of this exhibition notes, we share the same sky. We share as well the power to determine for ourselves the nature of everything the light of that sky reveals.”
 
— Carter Ratcliff
 
from The Art of Reverie

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.