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.

Munch Gallery is pleased to announce two solo exhibitions.
 
‘I Believe in Death after Life’ by Morten Hemmingsen (DK)
‘Summer Home Collection’ by Jeffrey Owen Ralston (US)
 
Both artists will be present at the Opening Reception Saturday, June 1 from 7-9 pm.
 
MORTEN HEMMINGSEN – I BELIEVE IN DEATH AFTER LIFE
Hemmingsen’s approach is not without humor, when he takes on the substantial topics of life and death. It’s not the loud slapstick humor, but a quiet subtle one that might make you chuckle, but there is often more at stake, an underlying thoughtfulness and sincerity. The exhibition contemplates our final destination, and invites the viewer to engage and reflect, but the artist himself has a significant view on life, and the aftermath in particular, which is expressed across multiple media.
 
With puns and play, Hemmingsen creates his iconic blue/white banners. Carved in wood but ceramic in appearance, they draw references to the tattoo and Danish/Dutch porcelain traditions. It’s an illusion of fragility paired with quirky lines and images. The banner with the exhibition title ‘I Believe in Death after Life’ emphasizes that life should be lived here and now - there is no “on the other side”. This is the artist’s conviction, and it is not the only work of art where Hemmingsen battles religious beliefs. Similar sentiment can be seen in the monochrome inverted black cross, with the carved text ‘Good God’. A work that attracts the viewer with its immediate exquisiteness, but behind the superficial glossiness the message appears cynical and questions the construction of our lives, and the faith in redemption. Death on the other hand becomes very tangible in the series ‘Victim’ where the remains of dead animals are explored – a dissected frog, a dismembered horse, an canidae autopsy.
 
Besides wood cuts carved with one-liners or illustrated with every day objects, the exhibition will also present some of his other work; paintings made on the back of vintage school posters along with selected gouache work. This is Hemmingsen’s second exhibition at Munch Gallery.
 
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JEFFREY OWEN RALSTON – SUMMER HOME COLLECTION
It’s a typical morning. I am sipping tea, flipping through a CB2 catalogue, and listening to HGTV’s ‘Design on a Dime.’ I’m dressed and ready for a day trip to Ikea. I’m not looking for anything in particular, but just feel like browsing. My cart fills fast with random and perfectly matching objects. They all make so much sense to me. I’m back home and anxiously unwrap the packaging. I’m disappointed. Nothing seems to be how I imagined; nothing matches anymore. Everything is too small to fit anything into, and everything looks really cheap. I get a spoon for my ice cream and click the remote. There is a commercial on the television for Cindy Crawford’s Home Collection. I feel like Cindy is looking directly at me as we both lay on the sofa. I notice how flawless her collection is, how perfectly relaxed she is, and then I ask myself, “Why does she have a home collection?” I want my own home collection.
 
I created a Summer home collection that demonstrates the harmony of a curated store display. The items have a close relationship to one another, undisturbed and in unison. However, this is easily interrupted when an object leaves the group. A person once told me “The painting is only yours until somebody else sees it.” The same goes for this show, only re-phrased, “The home collection is mine, until somebody takes something from it.”
 
‘Summer Home Collection’ is made with household trash bags and disposable plastic tablecloths, a medium that is usually used in my work. Although I have always been attracted to it’s aesthetic qualities, I feel that I should recognize that the plastic used for this installation has a much deeper voice than times before. Its semi-gloss appearance along with it’s cheaply produced and disposable history resembles the manufactured merchandise found at many retailers. Beautiful in the context of a gallery or showroom, the plastic becomes nearly trash when taken home.

The final exhibition of P!’s six-month cycle on copying revives recent histories through spatial fiction and wild expropriation. Like musicians who simultaneously “cover” and claim a favorite song as their own, the works in Permutation 03.4 rewrite the linearity of succession and influence. Techno-conceptualist Thomas Brinkmann reengineers the very instrument on which records are performed. Presented at Documenta X in 1997, his double-armed turntable stretches, syncopates, and contorts the playback of any track — effortlessly yielding albums that remix and elude their original source. In contrast, Semir Alschausky exhibits a 7 ½ foot wide “copy” of Paolo Veronese’s 1563 painting, The Wedding at Cana. Painstakingly rendered in a circular line pattern, Alschausky’s drawing challenges the amnesiac rhythms of cultural reference through its pen-on-paper hatchmarks and obsessive retracings. The impulse to resurrect and reimagine the past is also ingrained in Katarina Burin, who displays the archival publications of a little-known female Czech architect, Petra Andrejova-Molnár. Within the historicized narrative of Modernist architecture, these unlikely treasures question the curated canon as a “collective” memory. Cristina Goberna and Urtzi Grau of Fake Industries Architectural Agonism examine myths of autonomy through their reactivated structures. In “Night Curtain by Rey Akdogan Edited,” an original installation at P!, they “elaborate the dispersed kind of Situationist Post Minimalism” that is apparent in their recent architectural and exhibition projects. Their “interest in the specificities of light […] result[s] in the gallery shifting its hours” to the evenings, and also means that a system of periodically dimmed lighting units creates “an almost cinematic dance of shadows on the walls.” The final piece in the exhibition is a reinstallation of Oliver Laric’s video essay Versions, which first appeared at P! in March 2013 and is currently on view in the exhibition A Diferent Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial. Using Laric’s work as a basis, The Julliard School’s Center for Innovation in the Arts have created a multimedia performance version of the video that —overwriting its non-definitive predecessor — is presented at P! as a new work. Undermining inscribed architectures and black-and-white narratives, Permutation 03.4 proposes the copy as a mere historical fragment: a critical moment of repetition and repression.

Rosanne Olson
Rapture ( series )
May 8 – June 16, 2013
 
The Robin Rice Gallery is pleased to present Roseanne Olson’s third photography exhibition, Rapture. The opening reception will be held Wednesday, May 8th, from 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM.
 
“The magic of the pool—the un-weighted body, the solitude, the distortion, that has always fascinated me.” In the invitational image, Bournee, a woman is suspended in soft hues of blue water but appears to be floating upwards, ascending into the clouds. Arabesque, her model in the pool is turned gracefully upside down, arms outstretched, in a gossamer dress fanning against the backdrop of faint clouds in the sky. Her color images come off dreamy, surreal and mysterious. In most of the images there are reflections on the water and refractions of light, like watercolors bleeding together, with undefined shapes leaving us with more with the feeling of a painting.
 
Olson describes Rapture as, “a biography of my dreams,” intrigued by the world that lies just beyond our consciousness—where time shifts, gravity loosens and we slip into dreaming. She conveys the dreams she’s had since childhood—women donning 100 year-old vintage dresses suspend languidly as though they are defying space and time, floating through the sky. In reality, Olson is photographing them from above in swimming pools in Seattle, Oregon, where her female models appear to be tumbling and turning, falling and slipping out of dresses. The effect is ethereal. Her models could be construed as angels.
 
Despite each image’s balanced composition, Olson claims the process of capturing floating objects on film is haphazard and spontaneous. She shoots instinctively on the fly, reacting as clothing and body position continually change. Yet when it comes to her models she strives to create a meditative situation, “the subjects need to be relaxed so the water is calm, which is hard to do when gravity is pulling down.”
 
Rosanne Olson works in both fine art and commercial photography. She obtained her master's degree in journalism from the University of Oregon. Over the past 25 years, her photographs have won many awards and were included in numerous photography annuals including, Graphis and the cover of Communication Arts. Her work has also been featured in View Camera Magazine, Lens Work and Photo District News. In 2008 Rosanne authored a book titled, “This is Who I Am—Our Beauty in All Shapes and Sizes,” a book about women and body image. She teaches lighting, portraiture and creativity at various photographic schools, colleges, and conferences. Roseanne is represented by Robin Rice Gallery in New York and galleries in Aspen and Boston. This is her third solo show at the Robin Rice Gallery.
 
To view all the images from the exhibition go to www.robinricegallery.com

Katherine Wolkoff: Deer Beds
A solo show, Color Photographs
May 8-June 30, 2013
 
The exhibition will open on Wednesday, May 8th with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m.
Sasha Wolf Gallery is proud to present, Katherine Wolkoff: Deer Beds.
This is Wolkoff’s second solo show with the gallery.
 
Katherine Wolkoff’s show Deer Beds consists of seven pictures made on Block Island, located off the Rhode Island coast. The pictures are of the imprints made in the grass by sleeping deer. Wolkoff found these deer beds by following the paths of the deer to the nests where they spent the night. Each time she came upon a bed she felt as if the deer had just departed, leaving its warm impression on the earth. She was always aware of their proximity. The photographs are at once a physical reminder of a living breathing animal and an abstract rendering of a field of grass. In this work, Wolkoff continues her decade-long investigation of the flora and fauna of this small, unique island, where she also photographed the collection of birds for her previous show, Found.
 
This is Katherine Wolkoff’s second exhibition at the Sasha Wolf Gallery. Her photographs have been widely exhibited, including exhibitions at Danziger Projects, the New York Photo Festival and Women in Photography. Her photographs are included in the collections of the Addison Gallery of Art and the Norton Museum of Art and the Yale Library. Born in 1976, Wolkoff graduated from Barnard College and received her MFA in photography from Yale School of Art.

 
JONATHAN VANDYKE
The Painter of the Hole
 
Opening: Sunday, May 5, 5 - 8pm
Exhibition dates: May 5 - June 23, 2013
 
Scaramouche is pleased to present The Painter of the Hole, Jonathan VanDyke‘s second solo exhibition with the gallery. VanDyke’s new work evolves from his wall-mounted and free-standing sculptures, first exhibited at Scaramouche in 2009, that “perform” as they continuously drip paint directly onto the floor, and from his many recent live performances, in which actors and dancers move silently for hours while paint drips upon them and passes from body to body. The works offer signifiers we associate with painterly process - canvas, stained and marked with color, appears in objects and is represented in photographs - yet VanDyke has pushed and pulled painting in such a way that these signifiers are displaced. Undoing media-specific boundaries, VanDyke re-orients modernist conventions, conflating painting with fiber arts, fashion, dance, textile design, and photography. With multiple collaborators and processes involved, the work subverts notions of painting‘s singularity and challenges the idea of individual authorship.
 
The title of the exhibit is borrowed from a series made by George Grosz in the late 1940s. Grosz portrayed a figure who, searching for a new vocabulary of making, found himself endlessly painting an image of a hole. Into this void VanDyke proposes, “painting not as a form so much as a restless mood, a conduit, a matrix that includes the making, presenting, perceiving, desiring, acquiring and physical decaying of paintings...I want to perform The Painter and perform painting, this stubborn manner of coloring that doggedly mirrors, marks, and circles us.”
 
A series of large-scale, sewn canvas works in the exhibit evolved from a long-term collaboration with the dancers Bradley Teal Ellis and David Rafael Botana, who are also a couple. In a durational, live performance entitled Cordoned Area, the two improvise from VanDyke’s score, wrestling, dancing, and negotiating each other‘s bodies while liquid paint drips and seeps from their costumes: they start clean and conclude covered in sweat and color. In the midst of spectators, Ellis and Botana publicly navigate that space between a performed and an actual relationship. Following Cordoned Area, VanDyke invited the two back to the studio to work with him away from public view. There Ellis and Botana, with paint inserted in their clothing, interpret VanDyke’s directions, dancing and making contact atop raw canvas. The paint serves as an unconscious trace, a trail of their interaction. This studio process results in a group of massive, marked canvases. VanDyke uses the canvases as raw material, cutting them into pieces and intermixing them to form opulent geometric patterns, and then sewing them back together. The patterns themselves reference 19th-century Amish quilts, Sonia Delauney fabric designs, the pants of Picasso‘s harlequins, the brickwork of a modern Danish housing block - patterns found next to and near the body.
 
Each painting is displayed on a partition placed in the midst of the space. The backs of the paintings, with their web of seams, are revealed, while the walls of the gallery remain empty. Hanging behind each painting is a photograph. For the creation of this series, Ellis and Botana’s canvases (in their uncut stage) were used as backdrop and floor in elaborate studio sets. Models (friends and performers from other works) strike poses that exist somewhere between private ritual and fashion shoot. This image of the still body in front of the marked canvas recalls VanDyke‘s own 2011 solo performance The Long Glance, in which he stood and stared at a major Jackson Pollock work for 40 hours, making himself immobile in front of an “action” painting. The photographs also reference the work of artists who used the camera to explore private realms aside of their primary practice, such as the 1920’s self-portraits of Gertrud Arndt ­- an important fiber artist at the Bauhaus - and the charged tableau of George Platt Lynes, who made elaborately staged photos of performers, his lovers and friends. The heavily made-up models in VanDyke‘s series wear Mondrian necklaces and Jackson Pollock jeans amidst ab ex curtains and geometric partitions. We are reminded that, despite the value and language we add to it, despite the relentless preservation of its surfaces, painting exists, too, as swaths of fabric: like an outfit or piece of clothing, it moves out into the world, embedded with its own histories, posing and projecting meaning, always becoming something else.
 
Jonathan VanDyke is a visual artist based in New York City. Recent solo projects include The Long Glance at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo; With One Hand Between Us, a project for Performa11 in New York; and Obstructed View, a performance and installation commissioned by The Power Plant in Toronto for the exhibition Coming After. VanDyke received an MFA in Sculpture from Bard College in 2005, attended the Skowhegan School in 2008, and in 2007 attended the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where he was mentored by the artist Paul Pfeiffer. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, Modern Painters, TimeOut New York, White Hot, Artslant, Art Papers, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. VanDyke’s work has been featured in exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park, and Islip Art Museum, both in New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Tallahassee, Florida; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Rutgers University, New Jersey; University of Wolverhampton, England; and Exile Gallery, Berlin, among others. He has received awards from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and has served as a Visiting Artist Fellow at the University of Chicago and Illinois State University. Upcoming VanDyke's work can be seen in No Name at On Stellar Rays, New York, and do it (outside), the newest iteration of the instruction-based exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist at Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City.
 
Image: Jonathan VanDyke, Painting No9 (detail), Performance canvases, stained linen shirting, and waxed cotton in S. Delauney cloak pattern, 47 x 66 in.
 
Special thanks to fiber artist Brenda Colling for her work sewing the paintings.