Lisa Radon

Lisa Radon Wholeness Engine (2016) exhibition photos

7 October 2016
Lisa Radon, 'Wholeness Engine' (2016). Exhibition view. Photo courtesy the artist + Jupiter Woods.
Lisa Radon, Wholeness Engine (2016). Exhibition view. Photo courtesy the artist + Jupiter Woods.

Lisa Radon‘s solo exhibition Wholeness Engine at London’s Jupiter Woods opened on September 6 and is running until October 8, 2016.

The Portland-based artist has created an installation using white oak wood (‘Quaercus alba’), salt, flowers, soil, glass, nylon ropes and gold leaves; a sculptural displacement of objects that follow cardinal direction points, creating a physical mandala. Her practice is multi-faceted, weaving words and objects together to explore what she calls “‘speculative frictions,’ instances of ‘weird touching’ between previously disparate elements and ideas, which are surfaced as matrices of objects and poems, traversing physical and digital space.”

A reading will take place on October 8 to accompany the launch of Radon’s new book, also titled Wholeness Engine, available for purchase at Jupiter Woods.**

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Frieze 2016 offsite + fringe events

3 October 2016

Frieze 2016 is on this week in London, opening October 6 and running to October 9. The event draws an international community of artist and exhibitors to its location in the centre of the city, but is also host to an exciting and diverse range of events offsite and on the fringe, including Miracle Marathon at Serpentine Galleries, Sunday Art Fair at Ambika P3, 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair at Somerset House and more.

See below for our offsite and fringe recommendations, and here for the main event:

EVENTS

The ICA will be hosting a week of dance, performance, discussions and screenings, from October 3 to 8, with an accompanying program of DJs and other music guests including two after parties in collaboration with Berlin-based label PAN, one hosted by Bala Club on October 4, and another hosted by PAN on October 5. Artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas will be in conversation with professor Suhail Malik and writer Tirdad Zolghadr to speak about ‘Art Post Capitalism’ on the evening of October 6.

Lisa Radon will also launch her new book Wholeness Engine at Jupiter Woods, October 8.

An evening of performances at DRAF featuring Mary Hurrell, Goshka Macuga, Roman Ondak, Amalia Ulman, Mark Wallinger and a DJ set by Olof Dreijer (The Knife), October 6

Miracle Marathon at Serpentine Galleries, October 8 and 9

Sunday Art Fair, October 6 to 9

Frieze Art and Architecture Conference, October 4

Dream Fair London 2016: twelve participating galleries will host digital work by artists online, accessible to all with a computer or mobile. The site opens on October 4.

1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair at Somerset House, October 6 to 9.

Donna Huanca performance at Zabludowicz Collection, October 7.

Pompe – a dionysian canal procession ending at St. Mary Magdalene Church, October 7

A glass is empty of everything but simple passage @ Seventeen gallery, readings by David Raymond Conroy, Caspar Heinemann and Rebecca Jagoe – Oct 8

OPENINGS

Ash Ferlito @ White Cubicle Toilet Gallery, Oct 6 – Oct 31

END-USER @ The RYDER Projects, Oct 6 – Nov 12

I, Cyborg @ Gazelli Art House, Oct 6- Nov 12

Tala Madani @ Pilar Corrias Gallery, Oct 4 – Nov 11

Metahaven @ Auto Italia, Oct 4 – Oct 30

Lanzarote @ Union Pacific, Oct 2 – Nov 5

NOW ON

Gina Folly @ Almanac, Oct 1 – Nov 5

Amalia Ulman @ Arcadia Missa, Sep 30 – Nov 5

Candice Lin @ Gasworks, Sep 21 – Dec 11

Mike Kelley @ Hauser & Wirth, Sep 23 – Nov 19

Aude Pariset @ Cell Project Space, Sep 22 – Nov 6

George Henry Longly @ Studio Leigh, Sep 22- Oct 29

Darja Bajagić @ Carlos/Ishikawa, Sep 21 – Oct 29

Joseph Buckley @ Public Exhibitions, Sep 29 – Oct 12

Augustas Serapinas @ Emalin, Sep 27 – Oct 29

Georgie Nettell @ Project Native Informant, Sep 28 – Oct 29

Moist Heat @ The White Building, Sep 29 – Oct 15

Lonesome Wife @ Seventeen, Sep 29 – Nov 5

Piotr Łakomy @ The Sunday Painter, Sep 30 – Nov 5

Streams of Warm Impermanence @ DRAF, Sep 15- Dec 10

Chooc Ly Tan @ StudioRCA Riverlight, Sep 14 – Nov 1

Josh Bitelli @ UNION Gallery, Sep 17 – Oct 22

Eva Fàbregas and Rachel Pimm @ Enclave Lab, Sep 29 – Oct 28

Andrew Gillespie, Andrew Lacon + Joanne Masding  @ IMT Gallery
, Sep 2 – Oct 16

Andy Holden + Steve Roggenbuck @ Rowing, Sept 2- Nov 5

Ivana Basic @ Annka Kultys Gallery, Sep 7 – Oct 8.**

 

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Lisa Radon @ Jupiter Woods, Sep 2 – Oct 8

1 September 2016

Lisa Radon is presenting solo exhibition Wholeness Engine at London’s Jupiter Woods, opening September 2 and running to October 8.

The Portland-based artist works across a variety of media incorporating objects, poetry and publication through what is self-described as instances of “weird touching” or “speculative frictions” that move in and out of physical and digital spaces. This show in particular will deal with sculptural and written work that explores themes of what the press release outlines as ‘under consideration’ such as a “recuperation of the sun and her children” or “the operational potentials of a center and its polarities”.

Radon’s previous exhibitions include Unveiling (you embrace me as I am) (2016) at Jupiter Woods and The sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere (2016) at Muscle Beach in Portland, and her writing features in the 2013 Appendix retrospective publication which aqnb reviewed here.

See the Jupiter Woods website for details.**

Lisa Radon, 'A picture of the back of my eye (left)' (2016). Image on webpage. Courtesy of the artist.
Lisa Radon, ‘A picture of the back of my eye (left)’ (2016). Image on webpage. Courtesy of the artist.
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Unveiling (you embrace me, as I am) @ Jupiter Woods, Jun 18 – 19

16 June 2016

The Unveiling (you embrace me, as I am) group event is on at London’s Jupiter Woods, running June 18 to 19.

Featuring texts and on-site interventions by Sarah Boulton, Rebecca JagoeHanne Lippard, Lisa Radon, and Felix Riemann, the event launches the space’s new publishing programme contemplating writing, research and text-led collaborative projects.

Unveiling opens with an arrangement of texts published online on June 16, followed by a weekend of sporadic interventions and intermittent ‘events’, which will unfold as “points of concentration” exploring how artistic space becomes visible or withdrawn within the space of language.

Artists have been selected based on their relationship to the “intersection of writing and objects” and the event not only launches Jupiter Woods’ new publishing practice but a new programme of performance-based residencies, exhibitions and happenings “carefully fluctuating between the public and private, displayed and withdrawn”..

See the Jupiter Woods website for details.**

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Looking forward by looking back at Appendix

22 February 2014

The end is as good a place to start as the beginning, especially when it comes to American Medium. It’s an until recently nomadic online and offline project that’s been running for two years, now settling in BedStuy, Brooklyn, and extending its operations to a permanent exhibition space, “office, garden sanctuary and outdoor artist’s studio”. There’s a kickstarter campaign, ending February 28, to help fund it and it’s run by two of the past six curators of art space anomaly Appendix. As key members of the renowned and now defunct suburban gallery in Portland, Travis Fitzgerald and Josh Pavlacky (along with Extra Extra’s Daniel Wallace) have plenty of experience in creating a  supportive environment for interesting artists to work within.

A collective and an art space that established itself at the forefront of the drive to grasp “the divide between the physical and the digital”, as American Medium continues to do, the Appendix retrospective and elegy to a dynamic bygone era, was conceived by some of its core members and published by Container Corps on the gallery’s close in 2013. Starting at its end, the book becomes a document deconstructing documentation and a presentation of art that interrogates ideas of framing and interpretation through its own resulting abstraction.

Appendix. Image courtesy Container Corps.
Appendix (2013). Image courtesy Container Corps.

As Fitzgerald flatly puts it in the Kevin Champoux-led interview ‘It’s a Garage, Not a Gallery: Appendix at 5 Years’ –including past curators Fitzgerald, Pavlacky, Zachary Davis, Maggie Casey, Ben Young and Alex Mackin Dolan –the space was nothing more than “a garage in a house”. Maybe so, but as said Google Hangouts conversation reveals, what began as a naïve foray into a project begun by a bunch of recent graduates who “really didn’t know anything”, Appendix became one of the most vital hubs of what you might call the ‘post-internet’ conversation (“Net art merging with formalism? It’s hard to say”).

It’s in this ordinary house “that smells vaguely of three men cohabiting in little rooms” with its two car garage-come-gallery glowing “like a television set” –according to David Knowles in ‘Full Spectrum’ –that artists like Bunny Rogers and Darja Bajagić became some of the last exhibitors in 2013. It would take a highly supportive and independent space, driven on intuition, that would make something like Bajagić’s You Ve Been A Naughty Boy [C55]
1.e4 e5 2.♘f3 ♘c6 3.♗c4 ♘f6 4.d4 e×d4 5.0-0 ♗c5 6.e5 d5 7.e×f6 d×c4 8.♖e1+ ♔f8 9.♗g5 g×f6 10.♗h6+ ♔g8 11.♘×d4 ♗×d4 12.c3 ♗f5 13.c×d4 ♘×d4 14.♘c3 ♗g6 15.♖e8+! ♕×e8 16.♕×d4 ♕e5 17.♘d5!!, 1-0, exhibition title fit the pages of the Appendix ‘Exhibition History’. Also listed are Tabor Robak, Justin Bland and Brenna Murphy in the early days; Sean Joseph Patrick Carney’s Boyz Night Out, Dump.fm and The Jogging at its satellite sister-galleries Hay Batch and Little Field. Iain Ball and Katja Novitskova making appearances online.

Jasper Spicero, Bea Fremderman, MSHR, Brian Khek and Micah Schippa also make up just a fraction of the exciting artists to show through those garage doors between 2008 and 2013, for a short residency meant as a place to sleep and support a practice in the isolation of suburban Portland. Andrew Norman Wilson swung an Apple mouse by its cord around his head while dancing to Jackson Browne’s ‘Doctor My Eyes’, according to Gene McHugh’s collaborative short story ‘Andrew Norman Wilson at Appendix Project Space’. Daniel J. Glendening took time for an atomic description of a rotating rock at the exhibition on which ‘Daniel Baird, This New Ocean’ is based –all the while submitting to that realm that Knowles describes as where “rumor and memory begin their work”. Knowles compares galleries to tombs where “acts of life and labor end”, while Amy Bernstein’s incredibly evocative stream of thoughts on “the collective voice of expressive peoples giving form to contemporary experience” in ‘When the Walls Are White’, is underpinned by a question recurring throughout Appendix: “what if the new norm was that the documentation WAS the thing?”

In the context of the Appendix book –conceived by the art space curators, curating documents of exhibitions they already curated –it’s both interesting and overwhelming to consider the infinite  interpretations and abstractions of an artist’s work and the ‘creative degradation’ that happens within that. After all, Appendix the book is first hand experience, bound, framed and formatted through text and photography. Those exhibitions, in turn were the product of intense critique and conversation between artist and curator, constructing a unique exhibition tailored to the dimensions of a unique space. Even this very overview on this particular website is framing the book, the gallery, and the work in a way that is specific to its relevance to the continued and evolving ‘net art’ conversation at American Medium. It’s for this reason that perhaps the most thought provoking piece comes from Lisa Radon’s closing ‘APPENDIX’ (or Appendix appendix, Appendix appendix appendix, even). It’s a fascinating deconstruction of communication as embedded in and limited to its lexicon, building on Bernstein’s initial question: “when we look back at this time in art history what will we remember?”

Appendix. Image courtesy Container Corps.
Appendix (2013). Image courtesy Container Corps.

Equal parts enlightening and indecipherable, across computer coding, Finnegan’s Wake footnotes and seemingly endless postscripts, ‘APPENDIX’ interrogates Appendix as both art space and idea, through Minecraft, CSS and the history of the American residential garage. “Do you remember a time before things were so codified, ossified?” Radon asks, in relation to the visual signifier of “the ransom note typography of the Sex Pistols” that a Finnish punk band, also called Appendix, borrows as its logotype. Rózsa Farkas questions historicity in ‘Five Years’, outlining the progress of DIY gallery movements of the past to illustrate their effects on the present and leading to the conclusion that artist-run spaces “now have to deal with the marketability of art that older movements brought about”.

Hence, the vitality of Appendix and now American Medium, self-funded and caught in Knowles’ “looping progress of time”, where artists and curators return to carry on and build upon “the full spectrum suspended present available to us immediately and always”, within these realms of net art now contained within the walls of a space in Brooklyn. It’s here that one wonders whether this new more permanent space, with its defined public function, will no longer be the dynamic hinterland only a re-purposed residential garage “stuck somewhere between lost histories and unimaginable futures” could be, but the “relic, a piece of evidence” Glendining outlined in his fetishistic examination of a rock. There’s really only one way to find out. **

Appendix was a gallery based in Portand, Oregon. The kickstarter campaign for funding American Medium’s  new space in Brooklyn is running till February 28, 2013.


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