“…I’m beginning a new book to have a companion, someone with whom I can talk, eat, sleep, at whose side I can dream and have nightmares, the only friend whose company I can bear at the moment.” —Hervé Guibert
 
To The Friends Who Saved My Life,
…an exhibition prompted by the introduction of Francesca Woodman’s work to Heinz Peter-Knes and Danh Vō. They in turn suggested a parallel to Hervé Guibert, unknown to us at the time. About a year later, we learned that Nightboat Books, the companion enterprise to Callicoon Fine Arts, was newly engaged with Guibert translations, a publication plan that in turn prompted the gallery to introduce Guibert’s photographs to an American audience. Shared images and writings closed a circle that we hadn’t known of before, including our own works, those of Rona Yefman, an Israeli photographer living in New York, Heinz, Danh, and a single Francesca Woodman, as our starting point.
 
Guibert’s best known book, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, is a memoir of crisis and roller-coaster years of rushing between doctors and lovers. With extraordinary recall and dispassion, that is, with a photographic voice, even towards his own diagnosis and decline, Guibert maps the early years of the AIDS crisis. In those times when human friends became “friend[s] whose company I can bear at the moment,” perhaps it was photography that eased them through the door.
 
Among the many formal similarities between Woodman and Guibert, it should be noted that both spent time living and photographing in Rome, where Heinz and Danh were recently in residence, and that the images Woodman and Guibert made there are steeped in its light and shadows. Rona Yefman did not know of Guibert, but she was known to us through her extended photo essay on her brother, and through a pair of striking one-minute films. Moyra’s bottles, Jason’s Polaroids and Rona’s sibling study, all keep the images close to home. Danh and Guibert absorb the Villa Medici residence through its physical effects upon its residents, past and present: the erotics of place carry by association, the knowledge of who was there before. So too does Heinz’s discovery of his own face plastered on the red-lit bathroom wall of a bar, and in his portfolio of black and white prints. Seemingly following an order that appeared in the unedited rolls of 35mm film, flared end frames included, Heinz’s box of prints return us back to the place of the photographer sorting the moments of seeing.
—Jason and Moyra
 
To The Friends Who Saved My Life: Moyra Davey, Hervé Guibert, Heinz Peter-Knes, Jason
Simon, Danh Vō, Francesca Woodman, Rona Yefman
 
Exhibition dates: May 19 - June 21, 2013.
Opening reception: Sunday, May 19th, 6 to 8pm
 
CONTACT: Photi Giovanis, info@callicoonfinearts.com, 212 219 0326

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
 
Maria E. Piñeres
PLAYLAND
May 17 – July 7, 2013
 
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 16, 6-8pm
 
DCKT Contemporary is pleased to present PLAYLAND, MARIA E. PIÑERES’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. PIÑERES’s signature medium of stitched needlepoint places the nude figure in an optical duel with the eye-catching graphics of the pinball machine playfields and backglasses of her adolescence.
 
PLAYLAND, a now defunct 1980s’ Times Square gaming arcade, stood as a shiny, visually stimulating beacon to youth, nestled in perverse contrast with the then ubiquitous porn palaces, peep shows and sex shops. PIÑERES’s works set youthful rent boys and pin-up girls into the contextual backdrop of pinball, where their sexuality can be seen in a playful and sentimental light void of shame and smut. Preserving the common pinball themes of luck and chance, the Latin phrases that appear as machine names lend airs of levity and existentialism, alluding more to the real game of life than one of fantasy.
 
Hic et Nunc (Here and Now), Ex Malo Bonum (Good out of Evil) and Caveat (Beware) are among PIÑERES’s largest works to date and their heroic nude figures enliven more narrative landscape scenes. Varied stitching patterns and angles create a mixture of textures and added shading, allowing for the expansion of the image graphics while referencing historic Bargello needlework. The Latin phrases recontextualize the imagery and mask the actual pinball game names, which are often double entendres.
 
PIÑERES lives and works in Los Angeles. Other solo exhibitions include Walter Maciel Gallery (Los Angeles). Group exhibitions include Stitched at the Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena, CA), Pricked: Extreme Embroidery at the Museum of Arts & Design (New York) and Celebrity at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (Scottsdale, AZ). She has been included in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time Out New York, The New Yorker, Time, The Village Voice and V.
 
The exhibition will be on view at DCKT Contemporary, 21 Orchard Street (between Canal & Hester).
Hours are Wednesday through Sunday, noon -6pm.
For further information, please contact Dennis Christie or Ken Tyburski at the gallery.

Eleven Rivington is pleased to present a solo exhibition of recent work by French artist Anne-Lise Coste, on view from June 20 – through August 9, 2013 at our 195 Chrystie Street location. The artist has shown extensively in Europe for almost 15 years and this is her first with Eleven Rivington.
 
The exhibition will feature new paintings executed primarily in spray-painted acrylic. In the main gallery, an immersive series of 12 black and white canvases based on details of Picasso’s Guernica breaks down the highly complex and visually dense painting into singular appropriated and abstracted scenes. In the smaller second space of the gallery is a display of a new series of text-based works and abstract paintings. All share a unique balance of severity and airiness, in addition to sharp wit. Impulsiveness is characteristic for her work—often painting over previous attempts with gesso until satisfied. Treating letters as units of words allow her to bypass the strict rules of language and convention. With her decisive use of a spray gun to articulate with pigment, she fuses the vitality of expressionism (direct and intuitive mark-making) with the aloofness of Pop (mechanized paint application). Coste frequently raises existential questions - the social and political content of Picasso's regarded masterpiece is undeniable - articulating them by cropping details, re-articulating or subverting specifics, or executing gestures or texts in the form of direct statements / re-statements that expose every single pore. The tangled whole of her practice is a many-voiced inner monologue, a maze whose paths seem to know only two ways out: either an implosion of meaning via repetition, or an explosion through pure overload.
 
Anne-Lise Coste was born 1973 in Marseille, France and currently lives and works in New York. She studied in Marseille at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and in Zurich at the Hochschule fuer Gestaltung und Kunst. Recent and upcoming shows include Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle, Bonn, Germany; Fundacio Caixa Madrid, Spain; Esslinger Kunstverein, Esslingen, Germany; Museo de Bellas Artes de Santander, Santander, Spain. This exhibition is presented in association with Nogueras Blanchard, Barcelona.
 
Eleven Rivington’s two locations are at 11 Rivington St and at 195 Chrystie St, NY, NY 1002, USA. Summer Hours are Tues – Fri 11 AM – 5:30 PM. The gallery is closed July 4 and 5 for Independence Day Holiday. Please contact gallery@elevenrivington.com or 212-982-1930 for more info.

James J. Williams III
Leave a stain
30 MAY— 6 JULY 2013. WED – SUN. 12 - 6
OPENING 30 MAY 6-8PM
 
envoy enterprises is pleased to present our third solo exhibition of new work by James J. Williams III, Leave a stain. Each element of the show represents a farewell letter. Together they form a set acting as and waiting for the curtain call.
With each work Williams expresses how ritual and objects can be a method of release, even as the person, the place, the self has already said goodbye.
The installation is a series of pleas for acknowledgement as they hover over farewells. Some somber, some bitter, some vicious and vacant. As the viewer moves through the set each piece is a skin shed, a bridge burned. Leave a stain is one last plea for regard and becomes the voice calling back, “Let go.”
 
James J. Williams III is a Brooklyn native, is an artist, curator and creative director. He has had solo exhibitions in New York, Miami, London, Paris, and Washington DC. Since 2003 James has served as the director and founder of the Thorstein Foundation. His work has been reviewed in Opium Magazine, Art Cal, NY Art Beat, Lapiz, Double Magazine and The New York Times.

Signing, sealing, swallowing, flogging, revealing, casting, unsealing, regurgitating, healing, releasing. Reflection, nested in opposites, is betrayal—this has to be the axiom that marks our starting point, even if we have always already started, always already find ourselves halfway down the road to perdition. Perdition is grace. We have cast our inconsolable eyes on the heavens. We’ve call this Genesis as a way to absolve ourselves. To look up then, this is what eyes are for—eyes in the universal absence of consolation. And this is why the wise, as the Assyrians remind us in their sand-blasted books, sometimes gouged them out with sharpened flint and fed them to the hogs. To see in blindness the blindness of seeing. The binary falters and fails. It fails us. It fails at the moment that the demons are cast out. Masterfully cast out. Dark castings. To cast is to release, to pull from a mold, to make a figure by filling negative space. The opposite of—not the reflection of. From the cast of the godly, then, something ungodly. Legion is not the name(s) of the problem. Only its prompting, the road—a road that bifurcates from the one that leads to graceful perdition—to unsealing the location of the always open but hidden Secret Text, spread out like the firmament itself, that is, the very theological substrate, that reveals that the One is not reflected in the Other, that Good is not the counterpart of Evil. Sealing and unsealing, swallowing and regurgitating, flogging and healing, casting and releasing. Evil and Evil are Two—both released from the same godly mold, but neither, as the shape of its negative hollow, congruent with it. This, then, will be about bearing witness, but not from a margin, not even the margin of seeing. The witnessing of the released. So it will be about failure instead, insofar as “being about” can still sustain itself at the cliff’s edge of incomprehension. Bearing witness in the unwitnessing opened up by the plunge of the witness into the void. The witnessing of the dead witness, the witness without perception. This will be about witnessing and about theology as bearing witness: attestation, testimony, testament. The voiceless testament. The binary falters and fails. The leaping over the side of the cliff can “bear witness” to a theology. It can promise it, it can be a response to it, as to a testamentary promise. Indeed it must, it cannot not, do so. But it is an unworded promise. It’s very unwording is the promise. It can so not do so. And in doing so, it reinforces the very commitment that safeguards it as a testamentary promise. But not with the idea of applying a previously existing form of theology, or of referring to one as to a charter written somewhere else, or of obeying its laws like a transcendent authority, but rather by itself promising, in the act of its event, which is also the act of its debasement insofar as suicide is the graceful disgracing, the foundation of a theology. Of an a-theology. An other theology. A theology of filth. A theology with no believer. Always witnesses, always multiple. But not a theology of the pack, either. Not wolves, not rats. Despicable shit-eaters, never gorging the fecal pies in unison. A theology, an a-theology, of grovelers, of mud-inhabitants. A theology that is no cast, no model, no laws, just pure release. It would be a matter, then, of the suicided witness constituting, through its decision, collective always but never of a collectivity as such, its own theology, a-theology, an un-atheist a-theology that must also, through its generality, become, invent, institute, offer for reading, in an exemplary way, signing it, at the same time sealing it and unsealing it, the possibility of this a-theology, of this bearing witness through death. In the singular. In this instance only. For it can only happen once—this unveiling of the good Evil, of what the good or the godly releases without this release being like itself. Inscribed with the hoof of the suicided in protest, in an effort to illustrate. But this is the space of the un-illustrational. The binary fails here again. The a-theology comes, emerges, consolidates, in the event itself, in the double-event of the suicide and the witnessing of the suicide, false of mirror or no mirror but a witness of the double-event of the Christ’s casting out and casting in the demonic. It is the mastery of casting in, of possessing the living with the demonic, guiding this event. This double-event is its singularity (suicide as witnessing), even as it imperfectly doubles, while un-doubling it, another singularity (Christ jamming the demonic in the bodies of the innocent). It’s its repeatable—insofar as it is theology—unrepeatability. At a particular date, on the day that the Christ cast the demons across the species-boundary, in an absolute violation, a violation of not any law in particular, by a violation as itself, as such, as Event, abominable enough to instill mortal fear in the villagers, at the both unique and repeatable—that is, unrepeatable repeatable—date of a signature, of a signed abominable act of exorcism and possession, the negation of itself already nested in the act, canceling it out, making it the historical negative act par excellence, the Evil Event, something—or rather a nothing—that could be answered, that could be attested to, that could be witnessed, and, at the same time, flogging the binary one more time, witnessed only by an act of negation equally radical, radically enough to establish a counter-theology, an outside to theology—the leaping of the hogs over the side of the cliff. The immaculate assumption of the impossible task.The generation of a reminder, a trace that vanishes with the life of the suicide, outside of the Two—of the evil of the demonic and of the evil of the Christ. The jump, in other words, is the inscription of evil in the world, not the evil of the leapers, the porcine evil, but the very evil that is at the heart of the figure of the Christ, the evil that marks the release—the figure—constituted in the hollow of the godly cast. The swine are the lambs that unmask the Lamb as Goat, that establish the undeniability of the Two. The leap carries reference beyond itself, beyond reference, to where evil establishes a different kind of world, clocked in the veils of theology, of ungodly Son birthed by the God-Father, the Cast of Perfection, establishing the universal absence of consolation. The swine is inedible because it belongs to a world we can’t measure up to.

The Hole is proud to present a sister exhibition to our current survey of figurative painting, XSTRACTION, that surveys new approaches to abstraction. Expanding upon the themes introduced in the two exhibitions at Deitch Projects “Substraction” curated by Nicola Vassell and “Constraction” curated by Kathy Grayson, this show will present all the various strategies young and established artists are using to make abstract painting exciting and urgent. The exhibition will be accompanied by an “encyclopedic” book of the same title available June 1.

Sheryo and YOK created a body of work that portays the modern world using an ancient technique – painting on porcelain vases. They combined eastern & western elements to portray the values of ideology, devotion, relationships, dharma and karma, depicting a narrative from the rich tales of their journey in SEAsia. They re-interpret the traditional folklore and fables of old Chinese times by injecting their own personal stories with their iconic styles. They use a variety of media to bring these stories to life including the treasured fine art of porcelain vase making. Working in the very factories that have produced these exquisite vases for centuries they paint their warped characters and modern stories using the same age old techniques that produce a bold and unique body of work.

Launch F18 is delighted to present 1XX, a group exhibition curated by Sam Trioli. The exhibition opens Saturday, June 1st from 6:00 - 8:00 PM and will remain on view until Saturday, July 27, 2013.
 
In the May 2011 issue of Frieze magazine, Ronald Jones wrote an article titled Whatever Works, a discussion on design methods and the integration of systems thinking in the 1950s. In the article Ronald quotes Jack Burnham from a 1968 issue of Art Forum, in which he writes: “In the past our technologically conceived artifacts structured living patterns. We are now in transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done.”
 
1XX discusses this very concept within the parameters of the artist book and the forum in which this medium has been used on the contemporary art stage. Collectively, the work within the exhibition addresses the diversity of design and social structure that has reshaped the cultural standard of the medium, allowing for it to become more than only a product of simply purpose. As a result, many believe that the medium will slowly vanish as technology advances and the idea that printed matter could become obsolete to functional form. However, is this very idea merely a shift in design, as Burnham discusses, rather than being a truly undesirable product?
 
Within 1XX this thought is explored as it traces through a range of styles, printings, functions and techniques. Each of the works examines the function and identity of the art publication by delving further into its text, at a page, its binding and the cover. The books are experienced, not just through sight, but with the rare pleasure of tactile stimulation that is often missing from fine art exhibitions. At their roots, these works are relatives to a medium that traces back to the 27th and 26thcentury BC, which through its history has been continuously redefined and re-designed.
 
Participating artists and works by or on them include: Joshua Abelow, Ross Bleckner, Joy Drury Cox, f.ART magazine, Dianna Frid, Gypse Eyes, Johanna Heldebro, Sean Lamoureux, McDermott & McGough, Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Adam Stennett and Peter Young. A selection of books will be traveling to the Sharon Art Center in September for the exhibition con(TEXT) which is being curated by Tim Donovan.
 
Sam Trioli is a artist, curator and musician based in New York City.

LMAKprojects is pleased to announce Claudia Joskowicz’s solo exhibit Intersections. The exhibit consists of a large video installation and photographs of her project Every Building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte - After Ruscha. The work is an exploration of the urban landscape of the city of El Alto in her home country of Bolivia through a look at the intersections between everyday life and historical events that resonate in the collective memory of that city and, the country at large.
 
The photographic series and two-channel video installation Every Building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte - After Ruscha takes as its inspiration Edward Ruscha’s photo book Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). A selection of photographs from the series ponders the juxtaposition of the continuum of time and a still reenactment of an affecting moment in Bolivian history.
 
The video is installed in the back section of the gallery with two projections on opposite walls, with a true to life ration. As the viewer stands in between the two projections, one is taken along a continuous tracking shot on the major thoroughfare in El Alto. The video takes inventory of a quotidian Bolivian scene reflecting a contemporary developing city. El Alto is one of the largest urban centers and one of the fastest growing cities in Bolivia as well as one of the sites where violent protests related to the Bolivian gas conflict in October 2003 took place. In a continuous take, the mundane is juxtaposed with ritual and social conflict inserting one single still scene of violence into the register of the typical scenery of daily Bolivian life thus capturing the variegated reality of El Alto, and, by extension, also that of all developing countries.

John Opera, a priori
Opening Reception: May 30th, 2013, 6–8pm
Exhibition Dates: May 30th-July 3rd, 2013
 
Longhouse Projects is very pleased to present a priori, by John Opera. This is his first solo exhibition with the gallery.
 
John Opera’s recent introduction of the cyanotype into his repertoire of photographic approaches symbolically reflects his gradual evolution from empirical research to a more clinical, methodical study. His trajectory began with carefully honed and cropped landscape photographs, moving to abstract anthotypes—a photosensitive process of bleaching out images created from a fruit or vegetable based emulsion. His latest body of work centers around a focused meditation on seemingly everyday objects translated in a very specific Prussian Blue on a residue-washed linen surface. The process of the cyanotype is a now almost obsolete technique that is not too far removed from the anthotype, using liquid chemicals and ultraviolet rays to develop the images. It was originally conceived to reproduce notes and diagrams, and later blueprints. Opera’s photographic paintings curiously address this explicit objective by making notes out of rock collections and label-free bottles and diagrams out of ropes, chains, and posed hands.
 
There is a linearity that is often avoided within today’s art trends, given the progressive shift toward interdisciplinary activities and confluence of media, but part of the power in Opera’s work comes from his voracious consumption of his own personal previous bodies of works and the accumulated integration directed back into new projects. a priori literally means “from the earlier” and Opera willfully chooses to pull from the earlier and push forward. His landscape photography came from his interest in better understanding the world around him, the anthotypes came from an interest in scrutinizing and creating directly from the same locations (the fruits and vegetables used to create the photographic emulsions are sourced from the same places), and the cyanotypes come from an interest to further understand his own investigation into the history and process of photography. From one project to the next, one can trace the complicated contrapositions inherent in each of the works—particularly the heightening of contrasts between formal techniques and conceptual concerns specifically tied to photography and painting, as his work has always been mutually comprised of these two mediums. The cyanotype represents for the artist a refreshing return to an earlier mode in order to look at things anew.
 
John Opera (American, b. 1975) lives and works in Chicago. He received his MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. He is currently represented by Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago, where he has had four solo exhibitions. Other recent exhibitions include a two-person show with Matt Sheridan-Smith at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO and group shows at Carter and Citizen and Country Club in Los Angeles, Monya Rowe in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.
 
For further information, please contact Keith J. Varadi at keith@longhouseprojects.com

Aaron Williams tends to work with cheap, fallible materials like book pages and posters, interested in the populist, stock imagery that has very little physical value but maintains great cultural and emotional currency. While examining the differences between a hand-made mark and a photographic image ( particularly one that has the popular appeal of a music or film star ) they become abstracted images: “ideas of portrait” rather than an actual portrait.
In this sense a famous picture of the Alps exists as an idea of a landscape rather than a singular, personal record of an experience. This critical distance allows the artist to move more freely in manipulating the imagery and also opens up questions and unexpected visual directions in the studio.
Working at the intersection between image and material; the space between the emotive capacity of the image and the physical reality of the paper and printing process, Williams questions the validity and reality of the images he works with, particularly in light of them being so broadly disseminated.
 
Aaron Williams was born in Rhode Island and holds a BFA from the Maine College of Art and an MFA from Rutgers University. His work has been included in venues throughout the United States, including Bill Maynes, Max Protetch, Lu Magnus and Stephan Stoyanov galleries (NYC), Howard House (Seattle) and Rosenwald- Wolf Gallery (Philadelphia). He has had solo shows at Baumgartner and Max Protetch galleries in New York as well as at OH+T gallery in Boston. He has received reviews in the Boston Globe, the NY Times, the Seattle PI and L Magazine in addition to several online sources. Upcoming shows include the Portland Biennial at the Portland Museum (ME) and a solo show at LaMontagne Gallery in Boston in the fall. Aaron Williams lives and works in Queens, NY.