The size of the works, and their placement around the room sit somewhere between a museum and your grandmother’s home. Both sentimental and anonymous, the works range in material and content from masks, a cigarrette packet, empty bottles, miniature paintings and figurines and other objects.
Yung Jake presented solo exhibition Caution: Wet Floor at Los Angele’s Steve Turner, opening June 17 and running to July 22.
Yung Jakesonic (and amy rose and spike mario), 2017
The Los Angeles-based artist, who came onto the Internet scene in 2011 when he became well-known for “his rap videos that integrate the worlds of hip-hop, technology, social media and contemporary art,” presented a mixed-media installation with 2-D works as well as a truck placed in the middle of the gallery space.
He uses a range of materials, including yellow powder-coated steel panels, found metal, hand drawn, painted and printed works mixed with monitors playing videos, and appropriated imagery from pop culture, consumer products and graffiti. The opening evening featured performances by Kreayshawn, Matt Ox, and Chief Keef and organised in collaboration with Illroots. **
From Discovery to Rediscovery is the titular theme of this year’s Art Brussels fair, which is on at the large former industrial building, Tours & Taxis, running April 22 – 24
This year the organisers have decreased the size of the fair by about 50 galleries, promising quality over quantity, and have opened up a strand titled ‘Rediscovery‘ —dedicated to art from the 20th century by artists who are either under-represented or have been forgotten about. In with the rediscovery will be the following, whose booths aqnb recommends to go and see if you are in the capital:
At the same time, there is Independent —the smaller art fair that was founded in New York in 2010 is coming to Europe (and Brussels) for the first time —running April 20 to 23.
Also happening in Brussels (no fair) and opening on April 19 running June 4 at GalerieJeanroch Dard is a solo show by London-based artist Dominic Samsworth called Lounge Elopes and Oscar Tuazon’s General Contractorat dépendance.
Milan’s MiArtis on at Fiera Milano exhibition venue of the Italian city, running April 8 to 11.
This year the stated intention of the event is to communicate “constant references with explicit echoes” linking the past with the present and defined by a thematic thread running through interdisciplinarity, networks and “the Economics of Experiences”. Artist Massimiliano Bomba produced a video for the fair that touches on these notions in image and text, through a root analogy of beekeeping and nudges to the link between production and global destruction in ‘Octagon’ (2016): “Sunday, sabbath, rest. Monday, depressed.”
Exhibiting galleries will be split into sections: ‘Established’ (along with its ‘Masters’, ‘Contemporary’ and ‘First Step’ sub-sections), ‘Decades’, ‘THENnow’ and ‘Object’, along with ’Emergent’ curated by Berlin-based independent curator Nikola Dietrich.
Galleries and artists to keep an eye out for include Brand New Gallery with Ori Gersht, Josh Reames and Kate Steciw, Steve Turner with Jonas Lund, C L E A R I N G with Eduardo Paolozzi, as well as Rirkrit Tiravanija and Korakrit Arunanondchai in collaboration with Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. Mathew Gallery will present work by Than Hussein Clark and Exile’s 2156 – Volume 237 Acta Zoologica presentation will show Martin Kohout, Nathalie Du Pasquier and Paul Sochacki.
Curated by guest curators Nadim Samman and Anja Henckel of Berlin non-profit space Import Projects, the show playfully addresses the quixotic and ‘quirky’ history of the Southwest United States and its landscape, in parallel and as an interaction with its modernist architecture and the “legacy of Land Art”.
The exhibition takes the form of a sort of museum of curiosities (ie in alternating displays of “kitsch, infotainment, the prim, the profane and the pedagogical”), inspired by and taking from these unique spaces that dot the Californian desert: “From sand dune and atom bomb to gift shop and washroom, Desert Now surveys the strange panorama of Southwestern imagery in its many charms and contradictions.”
Yung Jake is presenting his solo exhibition, Hydration, at LA’s Steve Turner, opening February 13 and running to March 12.
The LA-based artist will be showing “powder-coated steel panels and furniture” marked with the graffiti tags and online and offline symbols of his contemporary reality, including “bottles of Fiji and Volvic water, Xanax pills”, along with text and image.
The opening will also mark the launch of a new music video by the artist-rapper called ‘I don’t remember’, as well performances by DJs Softest Hard, Sonny Digital and Lil Yachty, organized in collaboration with IllRoots. The event is listed as central to the exhibition, starting at 10 pm and running into the early hours.
Yung Jake recently took part in Steve Turner’s The Real Worldgroup exhibition and played the LA Art Book Fair opening closing party on February 11 (the fair runs to February 14).
The artists involved in The Real World are no strangers to the internet. Running at LA’s Steve Turner from December 12 to 30, the work in the exhibition by Ann Hirsch,Jayson Musson, Casey Jane Ellison, Yung Jake, Petra Cortright and Ryder Ripps speaks to the space between art and the online, and how that space takes its form, be it in Coogi sweaters or ethereal data.
Four partitioned video pieces are located in the center of the gallery, installed on a free-standing kiosk. The main gallery space is filled with the sound coming from Yung Jake’s music video piece ‘Both’(2015) which sits at the exhibition’s natural middle. The video plays panoramically between two flat screen television monitors, oriented vertically on the wall. It’s a reference to it’s initial release in September via Yung Jake’s personal Snapchat, available in two parts and requiring two smartphones to be viewed correctly. The video follows Yung Jake and two woman companions through a variety of lively party scenes, cutting between places and people, non-sequentially playing out like a contemporary advertisement for Hypnotique brand liqueur.
The Real World (2015). Exhibition view. Courtesy Steve Turner, Los Angeles.
The kiosk is bookended by Hirsch’s paintings ‘Ann Mirsch’ (2015) and ‘50 Shades Wedding’ (2015) on one wall and Musson’s mercerized cotton canvas ‘Black Bisector’ (2015) on the other. Mounted directly across from Yung Jake’s ‘Both’ is the kiosk that houses Musson and Hirsch’s respective webcam pieces, ‘How To Be A Successful Artist’(2010) and ‘Physical Contractions’ (2015), creating a unique triangular dialogue of success. Hirsch’s video piece and paintings all reference marriage and procreation. Musson performs as ‘Hennessy Youngman’, an invented vlog persona instructing his viewer on how to succeed in art (being both white and ambiguous are key). ‘Black Bisector’ comprises the shreds of several Coogi sweaters to create one huge composition as iconic as those worn by rapper Biggie Smalls himself, while Yung Jake’s opulent music video reminds us that he’ll take both, specifically when he can’t decide between “two bad bitches”. Also included is Yung Jake’s ‘Hypnotiq and Cîroc Bottles’(2015) wall-hung sculpture, made from found metals and digitally manipulated liquor bottle vinyl wrap transfers. It’s a mash-up of digital and physical spaces referencing the drinks’ history of promotion and advertising in hip-hop music and culture.
Installed directly opposite is Ripps’ ‘Unidentified Person 2 and 3, Sotheby’s Contemporary Curated Auction Party’ (2015) – a contrasting diptych of two portraits pulled from grainy surveillance footage and then UV-printed immaculately onto brushed aluminum. Ripps’ ‘dump.fm’(2010), a seemingly endless voyeuristic view into an online chatroom, is simultaneously entertaining and frustrating. The viewer has no control over pace, content, and can in no way interact. This frustration is complemented by Cortright’s video ‘banksi unbrush ponitaeyel’ (2015), which plays beside Ripps’ piece, showing the artist trapped in a corner by an endless barrage of colorful digital interference. It’s a reference to Cortright’s early video works posted originally to YouTube and serving as defining works of early online video art where the artist digitally manipulates her own face via webcam.
Casey Jane Ellison, ‘It’s So Important to Seem Wonderful Part II’ (2015). Installation view. Courtesy Steven Turner, Los Angeles.
Casey Jane Ellison’s ‘It’s So Important to Seem Wonderful Part II’ (2014) utilizes a separate room to house a three-channel projection with accompanying sculptures and a smaller video piece at the room’s entrance.The moving images most prominently feature a crudely animated 3D self-portrait of the artist that glitches and meanders alongside the audio, obviously out of sync. It amounts to a sense of discomfort and fascination as the artist carries her monologues at a stand-up comedy pace.
Site-specific art is historically the anti-gallery practice. It is art created to exist in specifically one place. At its most refined form, it is a rejection of the commodification of art. This theme plays out conceptually in The Real World as the viewer is confronted with works that exist both in ethereal sites online, and within the commercial gallery itself. The exhibition title could be a tongue-in-cheek reference to the ‘real’ world as we know it becoming ever-more digital, or an obvious nod to the 3D pieces included in the show. It feels more as if it comes full circle, back to the digital origins of these six millennial artists and their website-specific works. **
Milan’s MiArt 2015 art fair will be running this weekend from April 10 to 12, with an invitation-only preview on April 9.
The fair, which focuses on modern and contemporary art, has carved out special sections and parallel events designed to cross disciplines and to nurture the varied structures and realities of the art scene, including sections concentrating on established international galleries, and emerging and avant-garde ones.
The solo exhibition by the Amsterdam-based artist will present a collection of forty abstract digital paintings, all of which contain elements sampled from the works of other artists as a nod to the current trend of collectors purchasing abstract works and flipping them for quick profits.
Mexico City-based artist Michael will be presenting a collection of his intricate drawings while the Sao Paulo-based Borges shows some of her photography.
Aiming to facilitate the experience or mental state of “no mind”, the artists’ work with concepts that make sense less than they provoke emotion, distort narrative, and bring the viewer to a point of present mindlessness.
New York-based artists Brendan Lynch and Alex Ito are presenting a joint exhibition, Single Image, at LA’s Steve TurnerContemporary, running January 4 to February 8, 2014.
Taking a found photo of a sheet billowing in the wind, the two artists make installations, paintings and sculptures inspired by said banal image to maximise the imagination required by each artist in an attempt to present “open scripts” of interpretation for its viewers. A laptop, text, plaster and office materials abound, while a painting by Lynch’s brother will surely bring questions of authorship, as well as ‘art as interaction’, into play.
LA’s Steve Turner Contemporary will have a booth at this year’s UNTITLED. art fair in Miami, one of the fringe events running during Art Basel Miami Beach, running December 5 to 8, with previews December 2 and 3.
As one of the 90 galleries and not-for-profits exhibiting from 19 countries, artists Petra Cortright, Pablo Rasgado, Camilo Restrepo and Michael Staniak from LA, Mexico City, Medellín and Melbourne, respectively, will feature. Cortright recently exhibited a film commission for Frieze London last month, and has an exhibition, ✖✗✘ BLank BLANk bLANk •・∘ , running at the gallery until December 21.
Artist Petra Cortright will be launching her first solo exhibition, ✖✗✘ BLank BLANk bLANk •・∘, at LA’s Steve Turner Contemporary on November 9, to run until December 21.
As one of the first net-based artists of her generation to make significant headway in the major art world with her recent Frieze London film commission, Cortright’s works, across webcam videos, flash animation and paintings on aluminium, silk and polyester, are potentially some of the first to request viewers to “check the internet for pricing.” Drawing from the internet, working on her computer and utilising only the tools and default settings made available through them, her practice is as inventive as it is concentrated on “avoiding invention while championing reuse”.
The work, created in the past five years, explores the influence and ubiquity of major tech corporations based in California’s Silicon Valley, from which the show draws its name. See the gallery for install images and read an interview with curator Lucy Chinen here.**
