Michael Ned Holte

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  print March 2011

  “ACP”

  West Coast artists Eve Fowler and Lucas Michael (the latter newly based in New York) founded Artist Curated Projects with the goal of fostering opportunities for a community of artists to “develop their curatorial ideas and show the work of their peers while promoting, engaging in dialogue, and creating connections among artists from multiple disciplines and at different stages in their careers,” according to the ACP website. While apartment exhibitions are hardly new and innumerable artists have historically acted as curators, ACP embraces both these approaches in a nomadic synthesis—one

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  print February 2011

  OPENINGS: CARTER MULL

  CARTER MULL’S DELICACY, 2010, is a compact, ungainly tabletop composition, an intriguing and idiosyncratic mixture of still-life photography, miniature audiovisual equipment, batteries, sound, and video. Its title suggests the faculty of taste, of course, both literally and metaphorically. Indeed, the apparatus-heavy arrangement calls to mind the mad-scientist routines of molecular gastronomy; the silvery tablecloth underneath the mise en place is itself an actual-size photographic image of a lemon, rock salt, Danish Creamery butter, and macarons on a concrete floor. A tiny projector, powered

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  print January 2011

  Zoe Crosher

  The suggestive title of Zoe Crosher’s recent exhibition, “For UR Eyes Only—the Unveiling of Michelle duBois,” might have been lifted from a mass-market paperback at the airport bookstore. Appropriately enough, a flight attendant is what duBois (one among a handful of aliases used by the stated subject of this show) aspired to be. Through the evidence on display here—costume changes, pseudonyms, mysterious sugar daddies—in a variety of photographic formats, we also learn that she freelanced turning tricks. And though plenty about this character remains unknown, there is little

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  print December 2010

  Michael Ned Holte

  1 Joel Kyack, Superclogger (LAXART, Hammer Museum, and various freeways around Los Angeles) This summer, a random sample of LA’s commuters were treated to an unexpected puppet show from the back of a Mazda truck, with a sound track transmitted to its audience via short-range radio. The subject of the four occasionally heartbreaking acts, written and mostly performed by Kyack, was chaos. And depending on who witnessed it, Superclogger either added to the insanity of the freeways at rush hour or provided an improbable calm at its center. While in the works for several years, the mobile guerrilla

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  print October 2010

  OPENINGS: STEPHEN G. RHODES

  STANLEY KUBRICK’S THE SHINING (1980) has no shortage of famously chilling moments. Yet the most haunting of these might be a brief shot, from the POV of beleaguered wife Wendy Torrance (Shelley Duvall), of two ghosts in flagrante delicto, one dressed in a bear costume, on “his” knees and apparently servicing a tuxedoed man seated on the edge of a bed. The camera rapidly zooms in; the ghosts appear to glower back. It’s over in a flash, and does little or nothing to advance the film’s narrative, but on repeat viewings the ambiguous plushie blow job image implies significant trauma: a primal scene.

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  print October 2010

  Aaron Wrinkle

  “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting,” Douglas Huebler famously observed in 1969, with this twist: “I do not wish to add any more.” While the late artist’s statement was certainly a personal manifesto—he had just turned away from blocky geometric sculpture toward slighter, slier modes incorporating text and photography—it was surely meant as a challenge to the whole artmaking enterprise, from the studio to the site of exhibition. In recent years, Los Angeles–based Aaron Wrinkle has operated close to the margins of visibility, if not viability, implied by Huebler’s statement.

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  previews September 2010

  Frances Stark

  The title of Frances Stark’s first US museum survey, “This could become a gimick [sic] or an honest articulation of the workings of the mind,” not only confirms the Los Angeles–based artist’s ongoing investment in language but also gamely foregrounds the self-critical deliberation that frequently emerges as the subject of her work.

  The title of Frances Stark’s first US museum survey, “This could become a gimick [sic] or an honest articulation of the workings of the mind,” not only confirms the Los Angeles–based artist’s ongoing investment in language but also gamely foregrounds the self-critical deliberation that frequently emerges as the subject of her work. Comprising more than fifty works made between 1992 and the present, this exhibition will highlight the full range of Stark’s nimble practice— elegant works on paper incorporating found text (from Emily Dickinson’s to Robert Musil’s), collages

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  previews September 2010

  Manfred Pernice

  Grouped together, often with video, photographs, and found objects, these works further suggest urban sprawl and allude to the unfulfilled utopian promise of modernity.

  Constructed of common building materials such as Masonite, concrete, and particleboard, Manfred Pernice’s unfussy sculptural objects resemble maquettes—stand-ins for vacated plinths or scaled-down socialist housing projects. Grouped together, often with video, photographs, and found objects, these works further suggest urban sprawl and allude to the unfulfilled utopian promise of modernity. For his first major exhibition in the UK, the German artist is shifting focus inward—toward furniture, food packaging, and other dross of contemporary domestic interiority. Employing

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  print May 2010

  “Joint Dialogue”

  A pervasive sense of slippage—between the personal and professional, between art and life—governed this group exhibition, curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, that tied together work by Dan Graham, Stephen Kaltenbach, and Lee Lozano. The show’s title puns on Dialogue Piece and Grass Piece by Lozano (both 1969, and represented in the show as actual-size facsimiles of notebook pages), two durational, diaristic works that overlapped in execution; but it also points to personal entanglements between Lozano and Graham, and between Kaltenbach and Lozano. Works by the former pair (mostly text based) mingled

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  print April 2010

  Ginny Bishton

  In her first solo show at Richard Telles Fine Art, fifteen years ago, Ginny Bishton presented a band of twelve hundred small black-andwhite contact photos, wrapping around the gallery, of herself in a kitchen mixing bread dough. Not unlike Martha Rosler’s canonical 1975 video Semiotics of the Kitchen—in which the gendered codes of a television cooking show stand in as analogues for artmaking—Bishton’s untitled bread-baking piece represented a complex mixing of art and (mediated) life, albeit one without didactic narration. Such obsessive, daily devotion to process—of making food and making

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  print February 2010

  Michele O’Marah

  ACCORDING TO HER WEBSITE, Pamela Anderson is “the millennium’s most recognizable icon.” The claim may seem a bit premature, but there’s no doubt that in her twenty-year career, Anderson has proved a remarkably durable cross-platform pop-cultural presence—the “most downloaded star,” per Guinness World Records. This ubiquity surely stems not only from her more obvious attributes but also from the fact that, paving the way for the antics of Paris and Britney, she was among the first mass-media celebrities to thoroughly blur the line between scripted performance and the performance of celebrity

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  film January 06, 2010

  Digital Watch

  JAMES BENNING is as synonymous with observing the evolving American landscape as he is with 16-mm filmmaking, so it makes perfect sense that his first feature-length work in high-definition video would be an investigation of a German territory largely unfamiliar to the artist. In many ways, the construction of Ruhr, 2009, will be familiar to Benning’s followers: For each of seven shots that constitute the two-hour work, Benning’s frame remains fixed, allowing events—often subtle and frequently located at the threshold of wilderness and industry—to unfold before the camera in “real” time, unhurried