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.

MINUS SPACE is pleased to present the exhibition Vincent Como: Paradise Lost. This is the Brooklyn-based artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and it will feature a suite of small-scale black monochrome paintings illuminated by candlelight.
 
Working in a wide array of media, including installation, painting, drawing, printmaking, and artist books, the subject of Vincent Como’s artistic practice is the color black and he draws on divergent concepts from fields, such as art history, color theory, astrophysics, science, alchemy, philosophy, religion, mythology, and the occult. Como states, “The common denominator and unifying factor in all of these fields is rooted in some form of belief and the human capacity for prehension”.
 
For his new body of work, Como channeled John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), which chronicles the Biblical story of the fall of humankind, the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan, and their subsequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The paintings in this series are produced using the classical oil painting methods and materials of the Old Masters – successive layers of warm and cool black pigment glazes varnished to a highly reflective surface resulting in a profoundly deep pictorial space. Shelves with varying numbers of lit black tapered candles are installed directly below each of the paintings. The flames are reflected in the paintings’ glossy mirror-like surfaces and leave faint traces of heat, smoke, and soot behind.
 
Como remarks, “The works are catalysts; manifest ideas that contain multiple meanings. They are meant to challenge the viewer’s sense of history, memory, evolution, and transcendence”. He continues by saying, “This paradise, as an intellectual or utopian ideal, has failed. It has been misplaced and forgotten”.
 
Vincent Como (b. 1975, Kittanning, PA; lives Brooklyn, NY) has exhibited his work throughout the United States and abroad, including in Mexico, England, and Vienna. Recent solo and group exhibition include Art in General, BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Momenta (all NYC); Samson Projects (Boston, MA); Illinois State Museum (Lockport, IL); Western Exhibitions, University of Illinois (both Chicago, IL); Evanston Art Center (Evanston, IL); SPACES (Cleveland, OH); Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (Grand Rapids, MI); Art Museum of the University of Memphis (Memphis, TN); and House Gallery (Salt Lake City, UT), among many others.
 
Como’s work was included in two recent group exhibitions with the gallery: Neither Here Nor There But Anywhere and Everywhere (Brooklyn) and MINUS SPACE en Oaxaca (Oaxaca, Mexico). His work has been discussed in publications, such as The Wall Street Journal, ArtSlant, Progress Report, WagMag, The Boston Phoenix, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Journal, and Salt Lake Tribune, among others. He holds a BFA in Drawing from the Cleveland Institute of Art (Cleveland, OH).

Chloë Bass
The Bureau of Self-Recognition
May 31 - June 30, 2013
Opening Reception: Friday, May 31, 6 - 9pm
 
Events:
Friday, June 14, 7pm: Book Launch Party + Artist‘s Talk
Friday, June 21, 7pm: Free Consultations Post Mortem
Sunday, June 23, hourly 3 – 6pm: Closing Performance
 
The Bureau of Self-Recognition is a single installation capturing the results of an long term conceptual project. From October 2011 through December 2012, Chloë Bass performed as the Bureau of Self-Recognition: a business designed to track self-recognition as a process. The project attempts to define the nature of the “daily” as either fully formed within us or as a social construct. Bass conducted various exercises (with herself, with single participants in one-on-one performances, and with larger groups) that used various standardized lenses (a therapist’s office, a bank, a restaurant) as strategies to identify and modify habitual behavior. Individual works within The Bureau of Self-Recognition include Practice of the Daily, Everyday Interiors, Free Consultations, The Bank of Self-Recognition, and Tea Will Be Served.
 
At Momenta, Bass will be presenting phase four of the project. Previous phases examined the theory, practice, and dissemination of the work. Phase four involves both an installation and live performances, allowing viewers to take part in the Bureau both as an art object and as a lived experience. The installation will showcase photo, video, and found object materials produced and/or collected over the course of the full conceptual work. Bass will track three routes through the installation that encourage different experiential outcomes for each viewer. The exhibit coincides with the release of the Bureau of Self-Recognition monograph, published by am i human Press.
 
Friday, June 14, 7pm:
Book Launch Party + Artist‘s Talk
To document some of the experiential work of the Bureau of Self-Recognition, Chloë Bass produced an artist’s book with Jessalyn Wakefield and am i human Press (Portland, Oregon). The book includes essays by Esther Neff and Eric Heist, images produced both by Bass and other project participants, and text by Bass and Wakefield. This event will feature a discussion with both Bass and Wakefield about the art of turning a conceptual performance project into a story, and the collaborative processes shared between performance and book-making. Copies of the book will be available for purchase.
 
Friday, June 21, 7pm:
Free Consultations Post Mortem
From July - December 2012, The Bureau of Self-Recognition held a Free Consultations program: one-on-one performances between Chloë Bass and individual participants. These performances took the form of therapy sessions, during which each participant was asked a standardized set of questions and then asked to complete a simple mirror exercise. Following the initial session, each participant was assigned a personalized exercise, which he or she then conducted for 30 days, sharing the results with Bass.
 
This discussion invites the participants in these performances to share their experience of working with Chloë Bass in a process both intimate and distanced. The conversation will be moderated by Esther Neff.
 
Sunday, June 23, 3 - 6pm:
Closing Performance
For the third and final event associated with the Bureau of Self-Recognition exhibit, Chloë Bass will reprise the private performance offered for the opening. In this performance, Bass will take on the docent's role and lead visitors through a guided tour of the exhibit. Tours will be offered on the hour, and will last for approximately 30 minutes.
 
Chloë Bass is a Brooklyn based performance and conceptual artist. She has received commissions from the Culture Project’s Women Center Stage Festival, the Bushwick Starr’s Bushwhack Festival, and 3rd Ward’s Moviehouse, and residencies from POGON (Zagreb, Croatia) and D21 Kunstraum/5533 art space (Leipzig, Germany and Istanbul, Turkey). Recent artistic work has been seen at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart, Exit Art, Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit, ITINERANT Performance Festival, Glasshouse Project, Panoply Performance Laboratory, SCOPE Art Fair, Fountain Miami, Agape Enterprise, and the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas for the New City. Bass received her MFA (Performance and Interactive Media Arts) in 2011 from Brooklyn College and her BA (Theater Studies) in 2006 from Yale University. For more information: chloebass.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.
 
————————-
 
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.

Erin Murray “Settling”
 
Opening May 9, 6-8pm through June 15, 2013
 
Nancy Margolis Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Erin Murray’s first solo New York exhibition, “Settling”, on May 9, 2013 and on view through June 15, 2013. The artist’s reception will take place May 9 from 6-8 pm.
Murray’s landscapes take built environments as their subject and formalize their banality as art. The show’s series of graphite and charcoal drawings features Murray’s characteristic austerity and, like the exhibition’s oil-on-panel paintings of unsettling landscapes, examines the real world in a surreal way. Devoid of people, Murray’s landscapes are permeated by an intensity that creates an anthropomorphic connect and imbues their mundane architecture with a significance otherwise unrealized.
Murray skillfully and innovatively employs different approaches to each drawing and painting so that, while the works in “Settling” vary in medium, the show’s mood and theme are consistent. Murray’s drawings are defined by their meticulous execution, striking perspectives, and high contrast, rendering these works near-portraits of the structures they depict, albeit cold and aloof. Through these techniques Murray monumentalizes her subjects, as in the large-scale Body Building (2012, 36″x108″). Intentionally stark, but dramatic, the drawing compels the viewer to empathize with the forgotten structure and find beauty in its symmetry.
The series of paintings offers a different mode of reductiveness. In contrast with Murray’s drawings, the paintings are replete with lush colors, radiantly rendered skies, depth of space, and lyrical, curvilinear forms. Nevertheless, they exude a similar timelessness and theatricality. Through titles such as Settling (potential energy) (2013, 24”x24”), Murray makes oblique references to the scene—the presence of a propane tank, electrical panel and solar array—while alluding to her landscapes’ emptiness, engendering nostalgia and contemplation.
A set of smaller paintings, titled Block Party (2013), likewise exposes the inherent artfulness of everyday structures. Each work hones in on a block-built wall, making abstract compositions of its colors, lines, shapes and patterns.
Interested in both the architectural history from which even the most humble of structures derive, and the cultural and economic realities they represent, the artist seeks meaning in seemingly meaningless spaces. In their precision and quietude, Murray’s works call attention to the oft-overlooked essence of built environments, making us see the extent to which we settle for our surrounds.
Erin Murray earned her B.F.A from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2001. She first showed at Nancy Margolis Gallery in 2011 with significant success. Since then, she has continued to show widely in Philadelphia and her work has been featured in several publications, including The Artblog, The Philadelphia Inquirer, New American Paintings Magazine, Tabletop Zine, and The News Journal. Her work is included in the collections of The Center for Emerging Visual Artists, Philadelphia, PA, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, and The West Collection, Oaks, PA.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work stems from my suspicion that the forms of the built environment carry an abundance of embedded meaning, which is reflective of our collective humanity even in the most humble of structures. A building or built form can be understood to represent our physical body, our cultural history, our economic reality, our long-formed habits. We naturalize our environment by reenacting the forms of the past, and we settle for the inevitable distortion. But with this distortion we also find things like sincerity, absurdity, failure, idealism and – hopefully – a sense of empathy.
EDUCATION
2001 Bachelor of Fine Art, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD. summa cum laude
SOLO & TWO-PERSON EXHIBITIONS
2013
Settling, Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, NY
2012
Wind Challenge I, Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia, PA
Municipalia, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington, DE.
2011
Solo Series, Abington Art Center, Philadelphia, PA.
Strata, Cerulean Gallery, Philadelphia, PA. two-person exhibition.
Erin Murray and Mark Masyga, Mount Airy Contemporary Artist’s Space, Philadelphia, PA. two-person exhibition.
Architecture Parlante, Slingluff Gallery, Philadelphia, PA.
2007
(un)Built, Painted Bride Art Center, Philadelphia, PA
SELECT GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2013
Spark Gap, Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA
Salon Zurcher, Galerie Zurcher, New York, NY
2012
THIS END UP, The West Collection at PULSE, Miami, FL
Earth and Artifice, Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA
West Collects, City Hall, Philadelphia, PA
Artists We Admire, Abington Art Center at the William Penn Foundation, Philadelphia, PA
Landscape, University of Delaware @ Crane Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Permanent Collection, curated by Edward Rosario and Jordin Isip, Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, NY
High-Low Density, Rowan University Art Gallery, Glassboro, NJ
2011
Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, NY
LOOK! On Lancaster Ave, public art project, Philadelphia, PA
2010
VOX VI, Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia PA
I Can’t Get You Out of My Mind, Seraphin Gallery, curated by Hiro Sakaguchi
Drawings, The Art Trust, West Chester, PA
2008
Underground, Center For Emerging Visual Artists, curated by Lee Stoetzel
Fall Collection, F.U.E.L. Collection, Philadelphia, PA
Landscapes on the Edge, The Art Trust, West Chester, PA
2007
New American Paintings Show, Lancaster Arts and Culture Center, Lancaster, PA
2006
From The Studio III, Center For Emerging Visual Artists, Philadelphia, PA
Projects Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
2005
Artist’s House, Philadelphia, PA Four-person exhibition
2004
Artist’s House, Philadelphia, PA Emerging Artist Exhibition
Creative Artist’s Network @SEI Investments, Oaks, PA.
2003
Creative Artist’s Network, Philadelphia, PA. Fall Group Exhibition
Baltimore Bound, Creative Artist’s Network @ MICA, Baltimore, MD.
Off The Wall, Creative Artist’s Network, Philadelphia, PA.
Creative Artist’s Network, Philadelphia, PA. Spring Group Exhibition
Creative Artist’s Network, Philadelphia, PA. Winter Group Exhibition
2002
Creative Artist’s Network, Philadelphia, PA. Fall Group Exhibtion
AWARDS
2012
West Collects, acquisition prize
PRESS
2012
Ben Meyer, “Fleisher Wind Challenge will blow you away–,” The Artblog
Victoria Donohoe, “Delaware Center Builds Worthy Show,” Philadelphia Inquirer
“Buildings and Contraptions R Us–DCCAs 2012 Gretchen Hupfel Symposium,” The Artblog
Maureen Milford, “Influence of buildings, objects on art explored at symposium,” The News Journal
2011
Victoria Donohoe, “‘Solo Series 2011’ explores art’s middle ground,” Philadelphia Inquirer
Edith Newhall, “Planes, panes, pallets,” Philadelphia Inquirer
Daniel Forrest Hoffman, “Erin Murray’s haunted architecture at Slingluff Gallery,” The Artblog,
Holly Otterbein, “First Friday Focus,” Philadelphia City Paper
2010
Edith Newhall, “Low-key Vox Pop,” Philadelphia Inquirer
Roberta Fallon, “VOX VI,” Philadelphia Weekly
Montana Torrey, “Curating the personal – I Just Can’t Get You Out of My Mind at Seraphin Gallery,” The Artblog
“Green Tease,” Philadelphia Magazine, April 2010, page 99
2008
Victoria Donohoe, “Range of Styles, Jewish Theme,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Galleries and Museums
2005
Laurence Liss, “Artist’s House,” Art Matters, June 2005, page 15
PUBLICATIONS
2012
Tabletop Zine, Issue 004, July-August
New American Paintings, #98 January-February
2007
New American Paintings, #69 April-May
PUBLIC LECTURES/PANELS
2012 “Boring” Architecture Tour and artist lecture, Fleisher Art Memorial
2012 Slide lecture, Art Salad Lecture Series, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts
2012 Panelist, SUPERstructure, Gretchen Hupfel Symposium at Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts
COLLECTIONS
Center for Emerging Visual Artists, Philadelphia, PA
Temple University, Philadelphia, PA
The West Collection, Oaks, PA
REGISTRIES
Irving Sandler Artist’s File, Artist’s Space, New York, NY
The Drawing Center, New York, NY
MEMBERSHIP
2012-current Vox Populi Gallery
2002-2004 Center for Emerging Visual Artists

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.

Carolee Schneemann
 
Flange 6rpm
 
May 11 – June 22, 2013
 
Reception: Saturday, May 11, 6-8pm
 
P·P·O·W is pleased to present Carolee Schneemann’s fourth exhibition at the gallery entitled Flange 6rpm. Originally a painter, Carolee Schneemann is a pioneer of extended media, from her explorations of ‘geometry of motion’ in Lateral Splay, 1963, the provocative group performance Meat Joy, 1964, her self-shot erotic film Fuses, 1965, and the meditation of solitary movements in Up To and Including Her Limits, 1973-76.
 
Upon entering the gallery the viewer is immersed in the projected foundry fires of Schneemann’s latest multi-sensory installation, Flange 6rpm. Seven motorized sculptural units; containing hand-sculpted components are uniquely, cast in aluminum from a lost wax process. The aluminum sculptures are not polished, but maintain a rough textured sill marked from the fire of the foundry. The sculptural units are each mounted on a motorized base which moves them at six revolutions per minute – slowly, side to side, as well as forward and back – in a continuous motion so that the sculptural elements are almost touching, creating a sense of tension and unpredictability.
 
Schneemann notes ‘The fundamental life of any material I use is concentrated in that material’s gesture — gesticulation, gestation, source of compression (measure of tension and expansion), resistance, developing force of visual action. Manifest in space, any particular gesture acts on the eye as a unit of time.' This statement reigns true to the materials of the four Dust Paintings, 1983-86, that occupy the walls of the second gallery. Degraded materials, ashes, soot, layers of dust, spilled paint, circuit boards, posit a visual correlative to the endless bombardments of Lebanese and Palestinian villages.
 
Saw Over Want, 1980-82 and Vulva’s Morphia, 1995, are composed from photographic grids separated by strips of text that accentuate and destabilize their associated images. The text in Saw Over Want, is taken from Schneemann’s childhood alphabet exercises. The words “saw”, “want”, and “over” have been repeatedly practiced. Strips of text underline images of ordinary objects and self-shot erotic body details. This contrast produces an aesthetic seepage. Vulva’s Morphia consists of thirty-six images which address normative taboos within an undulating grid of Paleolithic vulvas inscribed on rocks as well as sacred, obscene, scientific, and self-photographed vulvic images. Each sectional grid is underlined with a taboo reflection. For instance, “Vulva reads biology and understands she is an amalgam of proteins and oxytocin hormones which govern all her desires....”
 
A feature length film on Schneemann’s work and history entitled Breaking the Frame by Marielle Nitoslawska has recently been completed and shown at the Telluride Film Festival, BFI/London Film Festival, FNC Montreal, Glasgow, Cleveland and this month at the WRO Biennial, Wroclaw, Poland and Videoex, Zurich. Schneemann’s work has been exhibited worldwide, at institutions including the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her published books include Cezanne; She Was A Great Painter (1976); Early and Recent Work (1983); More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings (1979); Correspondence Course (2010) by Kristine Stiles and Imaging Her Erotics–Essays, Interviews, Projects (2002). Color brochure to accompany the exhibition with essay by Melissa Ragona.

JOHN ZURIER
 
A spring a thousand years ago
 
April 25 – June 22, 2013
 
Peter Blum is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by John Zurier entitled A spring a thousand years ago at 20 West 57th Street. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, April 25th from 6-8 pm. The exhibition continues through June 22nd.
 
On view are new monochromatic paintings created in 2012 and 2013, influenced in part by Zurier’s travels in Iceland. The title of the exhibition comes from a poem by the Icelandic poet Stefán Hörður Grímsson.
 
John Zurier explores colors and hues, nuances of light and shadow, and various atmospheres; by doing so he creates a material response to the phenomena of the natural world. His paintings are pared-down, lyrical and yet stark, highly poetic in their condensed expression of emotion and feeling.
 
His choices regarding the physical materials of the paintings — canvas or linen for the support, oil or distemper (dry pigments mixed with rabbit skin glue and water) — are influenced by traditional Japanese aesthetics, particularly mono no aware; late-medieval wall paintings in Swedish churches, as well as modern painters such as Cézanne, Matisse, Edvard Munch, and Franz Kline.
 
Above all, he is questioning the quality and meaning of painting. He aims to find the right balance between the raw materials (which he calls “the given”) and the transformation of these materials into the finished paintings. In doing so, he keeps the inherent quality of the materials present and visible.
 
John Zurier was born in Santa Monica, CA, in 1956 and lives in Berkeley, CA. He received his MFA in painting from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2012 Zurier participated in the Sao Paulo Biennial. He has exhibited at the California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art (2010), Berkeley Art Museum, CA (2009, 2004, 2002, 2001), Gwangju Biennale (2008), New Langton Arts, San Francisco, CA (2006), the de Young Museum, CA (2005), and the Whitney Biennial, NY (2002). In 2010 he was awarded the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.
 
For additional information and photographic material please contact Renée Albada Jelgersma or David Blum at art@peterblumgallery.com (Tel: 212 244 6055). Gallery hours: Tuesday-Friday, 10am-6pm; Saturday, 11am-6pm.

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.

Pierogi is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Daniel Zeller. In his sixth exhibition at Pierogi, Zeller’s drawings continue to oscillate between micro and macro views of invented worlds and organisms. Using only graphite or ink and acrylic on paper, he explores incredible nuances of texture and structure that develop into powerful extensions of perceived reality.
 
The language of mark-making and imagery in his drawings to date has been entirely invented based on his interest in satellite images, topographical maps, electron micrographs, anatomical drawings, among others. Recently, Zeller has begun adding to this language elements referencing actual man-made structures and natural phenomena. In one work, “Vatican / al Haram,” his abstract marks surround and coalesce into the footprint of the Vatican complex with a river-like form leading to the mosque structure. In another, “Tar Sands Woodlands,” the organically shaped footprint of the oil sands mining operation in Alberta Canada, is juxtaposed to the rectilinear shape of the Woodlands Church Fellowship Campus, a mega-church in Texas. In each work an actual site is referenced but, as Zeller notes, fact and fiction merge to become something else, and of primary importance is invention through the drawing process.
 
All documents, images, and ideas grow increasingly fictitious with the passage of time and distance from their original context. Fiction, like most things, encompasses a scale ranging from wildly outrageous, to that which can seem indistinguishable from fact. We are inundated with information, virtually all of it containing an unknown ratio of fact and fiction. Each of these drawings incorporates features which have their origins in specific factual information, culled from a variety of sources, satellite imagery predominant among them. While the embedded information acts as something of a scaffold or a seed from which the work develops, the process of drawing remains central and is what ultimately determines the result. (Zeller, 2013)
 
Zeller’s process is direct — a fluid series of spontaneous choices governed by self-imposed rules and conditions. The main rule is to respect what has already been put on the page, not to cross or obscure lines already laid down. A tension between spontaneity and predictability is central to this process, allowing for its inevitable evolution.
 
“A spectacle can be created from the most modest means…. Daniel Zeller manages with just pen and ink, and sometimes just pencil. His drawings…are pulse-quickening, reason-defying wonders, testaments to the boundless potential of the human mind and hand.” He “…traces complexity itself, as a condition, a matter of connections, divergence, transitions and completions, the known and the imagined reconciled with extravagant finesse.” (Leah Ollman, The Los Angeles Times)
 
Zeller’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions and is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC), the Albright Knox Museum (NY), among others. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

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

Eve Bailey, Rachel Bernstein, Ryan V Brennan, Artists: Diana Heise, Roxanne Jackson, Coralina Meyer, Sono Osato, Malingering Uvula (Camilla Ha and Michael Merck) Gabriela Vainsencher.
 
Curated by Sarah Walko
 
The exhibition “The City of K. Franz Kafka and Prague” permanently on display at the Kafka Museum was the impetus for this exhibition. Kafka’s relationship with cities through his surreal lens coupled with his imagination and during the context of his time brought the simultaneous nightmare/dreamscape of the budding technological age into the realm of the real in his stories, projecting super psyches onto our cities.
 
The artists in this exhibition are all exploring the surreal space of our time now. Large cultural and philosophical shifts due to massive environmental and economic challenges and the level of technology we are reaching and working with daily is all ushering in new branches of consciousness and new approaches to how we live. The artists, like Kafka did, address our current cosmic predicament in various ways; our relationship with nature, our relationship to self within today’s technological tools, and with objects of alchemical/shamanic ritual and ceremony. They are writing out the dreamscapes of our now and a vision of the future that lacks the pasts’ patriarchal aesthetic and imagines the opening up of a future with more feminine traits, including acts of reclamation and the healing of our past and ourselves within our cities.
 
About the curator:
 
Sarah Walko is a multimedia artist and writer. She is currently the executive director of Triangle Arts Association. El Cadaver Exquisito, a feature length experimental documentary collaboration film she created with with director Victor Ruano and Rossemberg Rivas, is currently in festival circuits and her second film Lux/Nox with collaborator Malado Baldwin is in post production. Her fiction and non fiction essays have been published by While Whale Review Literary Journal and Hyperallergic Art Blog where she is a regular contributing writer. Her visual artwork has been published by The Dirty Goat, Redivider, Blood Lotus, Apple Valley Review, 2 River, A Capella Zoo, Awosting Alchemy, 5x5 Literary Magazine, Bathhouse, Cincinnati Review and Host Publications. Her recent exhibitions include Preternatural at the Museum of Nature, a science museum in Canada, Codex Dynamic in New York and Wonder Cabinet at Flux Factory in New York. She has participated in many artists residency programs including one currently at the Elizabeth Foundation in New York and she is working on new sculpture/installations, film and a novel.

Ricco/Maresca is pleased to present Marcos Bontempo: Dancing in the Void. This show marks the first time the gallery has brought the intricate and enigmatic works of the artist together in a solo exhibition. Born in Argentina in 1969, Bontempo moved with his family to Spain at the age of 6. He currently resides in Ronda, a culturally edifying city known for its stunning views and rich history. Bontempo, often viewed as complex and elusive, spends his days walking his dog through the town pocketing inspiration from the creative energy and natural beauty of the world that surrounds him.
 
In addition to his kinship with nature, Bontempo’s ingenuity can also be traced to his intermittent battles with schizophrenic episodes. Unencumbered by the outside world, the artist finds clarity in his work. Driven by both his environment and personal demons, Bontempo sits alone in his studio every day painting his own emotionally charged world filled with mental dissonance, adversity, and subtle glimpses of the hope aroused by the healing power of creation.
 
The exhibition brings together a powerful selection of paintings from Bontempo’s highly personalized and unique body of work. Bold in color and marked by ardent brushwork, the pieces portray a multifarious array of distorted bodies, floating in the pictorial plane while engaged in a disconcerting yet mystifying dance. His figures- some human, others more animalistic- emanate a personified amalgamation of cognitive agitation and freedom through physical malformation and cathartic expression. To create these lively and emphatic paintings, Bontempo uses ink or acrylic paint in combination with salt or iron. His dark palette of deep reds, blue, gold, and black embodied in fervent gestural abstraction are seemingly indicative of a primacy, misplaced and overthrown, and serve as a gentle reminder that both pain and normality are relative to one’s own experience.
 
Marcos Bontempo’s gentle and honest deportment is memorable on both a personal and professional level and he remains a welcome addition the gallery. His work is in several private collections in both the United States and Europe. Marcos Bontempo: Dancing in the Void will be on view at Ricco/Maresca May 16- June 15, 2013.

Galerie Richard is pleased to present the New York debut solo exhibition of Chinese photographer Yang Yi. Yang Yi was born in Kaixian in 1971, a small town overlooking a tributary of the Yangtze River. In 2009 Yang’s hometown was completely submerged underwater due to the Three Gorges Dam Project, which displaced over 1.2 million people and destroyed 11 cities. Using photography with digital editing techniques, Yang creates strikingly truthful portrayals of Kaixan and its inhabitants in a submarine universe.
 
Upon first view of Yang’s photographs, one’s eyes first adapt to the photographs’ darkness with a sepia rendering. You see a mysterious landscape with few people, adorned in masks and snorkels. The light comes from the upper part of the photographs, expanding into shadows on the walls of a submarine city. These disconcerting images question the viewer in a manner similar to Gregory Crewdson’s photographs.
 
Yang Yi’s digital manipulations of the photographic medium are particularly relevant because they are deeply connected with his personal life. His work raises the question, how can one build one’s life when one’s home, roots, and childhood memories have been lost forever? Yang replies by recreating the past in capturing the remaining scenery before it disappears forever and people in their daily life. Even after the artist transformed the image by submerging the villagers, they display wit and poise.
 
“It is about all that we have in common there: our accent, our spicy coriander, the nod we give each other, a friendly signal to say hello when we pass one another on the street, these streets that we have traveled alongside our ancestors, that have herded us along together... this series was created for all of that. It will be my personal memoir.”
Yang Yi
 
Yang captures and preserves the nuances that once distinguished this beloved village as an expression of defiance to imposed plight and destitution. Inspired by dreams, the visual documentation opposes the physical reality of the expropriated site. The confrontation between the past and present transforms the topology of the landscape into a place of curiosity and apprehension. Yang’s series records a haunting legacy that proves the fortitude of the human spirit.
 
The Uprooted series has been recently exhibited at the San Jose Museum of Art, California and the Katonah Museum of Art, New York in the exhibition “Rising Dragon – Contemporary Chinese Photography.” Yang Yi has exhibited throughout Asia, Europe, Canada and Mexico. The artist currently lives and works in Chengdu China.

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