The Pre-empty group exhibition is on at London’s Evelyn Yard, opening July 29 and running to September 17.
Curated by George Unsworth, the show includes work byJosh Bitelli, Hamishi Farah, Caspar Heinemann, Felix Melia, and Gili Tal. There is little information on the press release aside from excerpts from a narrative text or poem that might be suggestive of the show’s possible themes: boredom, anxiety, danger, loss, and safety.
The press release states “give yourself more time to interpret safety spiritually and apply greater meaning to your future sacrifice. don’t be scared. think of family and complete the sentence, you are to truth what I am…”
Ry David Bradley has solo show, Unvalley Valley at London’s Evelyn Yard, opening April 28 and running May 28.
The press release talks about the thrill of being seen and performing, gaining an audience versus the fear of total transparency. Melbourne-based Bradley has made a new series of digital portraits that “combines the clichés of 20th century abstraction with WWII techniques for naval camouflage” hiding the subjects that have been imaged on live video app. Periscope, a smart phone software that lets you see the world through other peoples eyes, as they experience it.
In an age where the question around privacy and its privilege is being both desired and contested, for this Bradley will leave the surfaces unfixed and available to manipulate in a parallel editing programme by the viewer in this particular series for Unvalley Valley, which, as a title rhymes somehow with the wave-y painting process Bradley often works with.
The show is curated by France-Lise McGurn and Lucy Stein, who will also present work in the space. McGurn and Stein hold practices that share a similar soft and nervous aesthetic touch, which has a swirling energy around the work as much as it does in them.
Guest curated by Whitechapel Gallery Film Curator Gareth Evans, the event will present the work of Jamie Jenkinson, Sasha Litvintseva and You QI, as well as a guest artist Cordelia Swann, in a survey of moving images that seek to highlight how “image is physically restrained within the frame, mirroring our own visual perspective and the frames of other image producing media”.
The survey examines the consumption of images within cinema, film photography and digital photography, and explores sentient experience and personal histories within broader notions of “nostalgia, familiarity and cultural memory”.
Trevor Shimizu‘s Selected Works solo exhibition is on at London’s Evelyn Yard, opening September 9 and running to October 10.
The multidisciplinary artist works across a range of media including performance, video, sculpture, painting and drawing, taking part in the Melbourne’s Silly Canvas group show last year.
This new exhibition carries on with Shimizu’s concerns with the generic clichés of daily life, as informed by its representation in popular media. According to the press release, his paintings depict “sadly mundane and introspective household activities, [and] also suggest tragic psychologies of his protagonists.”
Evelyn Yard is bringing in New York artist Jordan Nassar for his first solo exhibition, AND A NIGHT, running at their London space from June 3 until July 3.
As one of the driving forces behind Printed Matter Inc. and the associated Printed Matter Fairs, Nassar is now also making his way into the world of visual art, combining traditions of Semitic, Islamic, Slavic and Native American image making and his own Palestinian, Polish, and American heritage to create his own visual language.
Deriving the leitmotifs from the craftworks of his diverse influences, Nassar creates the patterns digitally by masking and layering in programs like Adobe Illustrator, then meticulously hand-stitches and screen-prints the designs using heat and light-sensitive inks that allow the images to drift between colours.
London’s Evelyn Yard is bringing in artist Héctor Arce-Espasas for his first UK solo show, Royal, opening at the gallery on April 28.
The exhibition will introduce a new body of work by the Puerto Rico-born and New York-based artist, including paintings, sculptures, and installations designed to transform the Evelyn Yard gallery space.
By way of a descriptor for the show, there is only the mention of exotic fruits, dancers, and Chichaitos (shots containing Palo Viejo brand white rum mixed with anise liqueur) occupying a “colourful space”.
In London, Rye Lane Studios is winding down its days at the Peckham studio space-cum-soon-to-be-luxury apartments with a screening event aptly-titled INVENTORY on the week starting March 9. Limehouse Town Hall reinforces said notion of endings with its clothing pun in THE OVER BALL dance party, featuring some suspected visual artist DJ sets and garment-making. Flat Time House is hosting the first of a monthly programme of film, performance and discussion at Peckham Plex and Jupiter Woods is opening a group exhibition featuring Andrew Norman Wilson, Harry Sanderson, Susan Schuppli and Tom Tlalim. Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski have their own show at Evelyn Yard.
“The new L.A. art fair” Paramount Ranch is running this weekend at their Agoura Hills, CA location, opening tomorrow night and running until February 1.
Located in the rolling grasslands just outside LA, the cluster of desert buildings know as Paramount Ranch was originally a Paramount Pictures film set, used intermittently over the years for an array of films and programs. Still equipped with a Western-style Sheriff’s office, a blacksmith, and a salon, the location is now running it’s second annual art fair, described by organizer Liz Craft as something “between an art fair, a party, a curated show and a performance”.
“People walk around because they are looking for shops. I walk around because I am looking for you.” A line from the first issue of Holly White‘s Feelings Offline zine. It’s one of a short series of A4 sheets of paper, photocopied and folded in half, with content taken from online sources – namely Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube – where the London-based artist ‘stores her feelings’. Two years later White’s soul still lingers within these networks of affective commodity, whether it’s in the defunct Baskin Robbins as envisaged at her recent solo exhibition No one is going to go there anymore (photos top right) at Evelyn Yard or the story of a shopping aisle/coffee table split in her Supermarket Cafe video series.
Part one, published last year, presented a partition of consumer spaces between White and Lyndon Harrison; a break up that saw the two protagonists respectively restricted to Starbucks and Sainsbury’s, while each of them navigated the privations of the single life within the infrastrucutre of the shopping complex: “it’s not that great being in the supermarket, I never sit down”.
For the sequel, ‘Supermarket Cafe 2 (Christmas Special)’ (2015), White and Harrison explore the possibilities of reuniting under the dazzle of festive tinsel and branded Christmas coffee mugs to the tune of Barry White’s ‘It May Be Winter Outside (But in my Heart it’s Spring)’, as performed by Adam Christensen singing to an accordion (“I miss my baby’s arms”).
The video offers 20-minutes of Harrison roaming the terrain of teeth whiteners, christmas crackers and magazines before finally folding and asking White to join him, “just one day. You could come in the supermarket. I could come in the coffee shop, for Christmas”. With matching Mockingjay™ pendants and take-away coffees in hand, the two rebuild their relationship over vegetarian-option readymade meals and speculations on gluten-free crustless bread. That’s before resolving to send a message to their past selves via the 0s and 1s of a binary-numbered coding system sent via baked goods and a wormhole in aisle 25. It warns, “DON’T SPLIT”. **
CTM and Transmediale 2015 kick off in Berlin this week, while Art Genève is also running in Geneva, and will include Arcadia Missa and Preteen Gallery as exhibitors with work by Amalia Ulman and Babak Ghazi; Phoebe Collings-James, Deanna Havas and Leslie Kulesh, respectively.
Events in Berlin around CTM include performances by Evian Christ, Young Lean and 18+ (who are also doing a few dates across Europe), as well as a collaborative concert with Transmediale on the weekend. Sandy Brown is hosting its ☁︎ cave kino screening in the city outside of that, while in London Paul Kneale and Natalie Dray have solo openings, and Candice Jacobs‘ EXHALE (to her earlier INHALE at Project/Number) is opening in Liverpool.
Elsewhere there’s another double-opening at Birsfelden’s SALTS, an exhibition in Reykjavík including work by Sæmundur Þór Helgason and another group show at Johannesburg’s The Goodman Gallery featuring work by Candice Brietz and Mikhael Subotzky among others.
London’s Evelyn Yard wraps up the year with a new exhibition by Tiril Hasselknippe titled Sophanes and running from December 17 to January 23.
The opening brings a performance work by artist Jesse Darling and reading by Harry Burke, the editor behind I Love Roses anthology and the author of the newly released book, City of God, which we will be reviewing shortly.
As far as a description of either the exhibition itself or the opening’s performance and reading, Evelyn Yard only offers a string of cliché phrases and random-seeming words that has become something of a staple with London galleries.
“Tug of war.” “Into the abyss.” “So stark. You scamp.” They don’t reveal much, but the show’s single released image shows sand gradients and the echoes of an ‘organic’ installations that seem in line with some of Tiril’s previouswork.
“The ceiling’s fallen down here”, says Emma Siemens-Adolphe while clearing up a small pile of fallen debris at the corner of the floor at Jupiter Woods’Genuine Articles. I’m warned it’s not part of the exhibition on entry but, regardless of it being an incidental, I think it kind of is. As one of the best of many good things orbiting the opulent centre of Frieze London 2014 in mid-October, it’s an indication of the glaring economic inequalities between spaces that sometimes, but not always, become a fairly accurate gauge of how good a gallery’s going to be. The Barnie Page-curated show is in the two-storey space in a largely industrial suburb of South Bermondsey and shows reproductions of other works, including a bin full of crushed cans, cheap souvenirs and an A4 print of a meteor. They’re copies of copies that interrogate ideas of authorship and appropriation through co-authored and appropriated objects. One gets the sense that if it weren’t for the cash poor context of its organisers – not mentioning that as the root of DIY digital culture – it’s an idea that would have never existed.
That might be a bit of an obvious observation: Life presents a thing, the artist reflects in kind. But in a week that thrusts both the struggling and the stupidly wealthy into a shared timezone, it’s hopeful at best, interesting at least, to see what can come of the resulting interactions. There’s the boutique branding display of ‘urban’ street wear at Dean Blunt’s New Paintings, where a life lived in the rapidly gentrifying area of Hackney extends to the body commodified; stretched denim becomes the canvas for an art object for sale at Space gallery. Up near the heart of the CBD in Mayfair, Project Native Informant presents the off-site edition of Shanzhai Biennial‘s Frieze ‘Live’ installation, Shanzhai Biennial No. 3: 100 Hamilton Terrace. It’s a less lurid display of luxury real estate advertising with a house-shaped key floating above a mirror in its own vitrine, as well as glass doors and a wall-length image reproduction of the pool one stands to inherit for an easy £32,000,000.
The collective of artists and collaborators involved in the final product literally inhabit the Frieze-emulating branding and flipped Deutsche Bank logos decorating images of bodies presenting a lifestyle in a light box. Except these bodies reveal more about the exploitative foundations of said lifestyle by drawing parallels between power centres and systems, across time and place, suspended in poolside poses taken from China’s Rent Collection Courtyard. That’s the garden of life-sized Socialist Realist sculptures depicting feudal oppression (and eventual revolt) inside the estate once owned by a pre-Revolution property owner in Sichuan Province. A call for the oppressed to “unite to settle the blood debts with the landlords!” is concealed in the Chinese characters in a corner.
Property. Space. Time. Money. They’re concepts that are thrown into sharp relief and problematised inside and outside the official Frieze week walls as distinctions begin to blur. The video work of Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin‘s Priority Innfield installations at Zabludowicz Collection takes a starkly, almost absurdly, more menacing turn in its dark labyrinth of diamond fencing, blue tiles and park benches littered with iconic red kegger cups and screening the suburban self-destruction of Trecartin’s Ohio teens in ‘Junior War’. There’s a cover of Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ in a big green room featuring the rolling credits from old video works, while Rachel Lord‘s ‘Basic Jenny’ CGI avatar bounces on a bed. Said artist later materialises IRL at a night of performance called Burning Head Collage, curated by Total Freedom,to play Judas as part of Jesus Christ Superstar‘s ‘Blood Money/ Damned for all Time’ score, with Jesse Darling and Leslie Kulesh filling the roles of the High Priests who suggest: “think of the things you could do with that money/ choose any charity/ give to the poor”.
Allegedly Lord does just that with her fee from an institution funded by a fortune built on SOLTAM Systems. But that’s not before flinging an iPhone at Darling mid-performance, citing microphone interference as the motive in an email: “As an indigo, I am highly sensitive to electro-magnetic radiation”. I don’t see the event myself but hear about it repeatedly, procuring this slightly abstract explanation from Lord herself:
“The physical repulsion/separation I felt from the people watching because of their phones allowed me to channel the torment of a 1970s Bible-era Judas in a very real way. My intention was to demonstrate how peoples’ perceptions of a politically charged environment create a politically charged environment. The by-product was that in my attempt to break the 4th wall, I encountered the 5th.”
I’m just wondering, ‘if Rachel Lord is the traitor, and Darling and Kulesh her conspirators, then who’s Jesus?’ I don’t think anyone is .
“If love hurts and work makes you suffer, I think we should reconsider”, says the voiceover ofMaja Cule‘s ‘Do What You Love’ (2014) video for her Facing the Same Direction exhibition at Arcadia Missa. Launched along with an indiegogo campaign aiming to raise $80,000 so its subject – writer and illustrator Anna Kachiyan – could “pursue independent interests in projects”, the installation, with its wall-print of a deskchair and video projection of ‘DWYL’, brings the office into the art space and wonders whether there’s a difference. The POLYMYTH x Miss Information exhibition at Auto Italia doesn’t even question the apparent oxymoron of the term “creative practitioner” by inviting working designers, including Metahaven, Pablo Jones Soler, April Greiman and Pinar&Viola, to take over the art gallery space. The shift in context shifts the works’ resonance, whether it’s the impressive clarity of scale in the Metahaven x Holly Herndon music video collaboration, ‘Home‘ – viewed through a large LED screen rather than YouTube – or Jones’ CGI product design painstakingly rematerialised as physical object.
“This is your future”, announces the Auto Italia press release, while Serpentine galleries’ intensive two-day Extinction Marathon questions whether that future is a desirable one. Inspired by the announcement that half of the world’s wildlife was lost to human ‘progress’ in the past 40 years, posters and UV brochures by David Rudnick and Raf Rennie appear at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, along with an installation by Katja Novitskova of her famous stock animal cutouts set to the backdrop of alien planets as an example of the accelerating and“never-ending relationship of image into object”. Extinction Marathon companion site EXTINCT.LYstreams the presentations while writer Huw Lemmey summarises them live on a blog. Kari Altmann, UBERMORGEN, Alex Mackin Dolan and Emily Jones contribute online commissions to the site with its header of a redesigned extinction symbol by Marathon co-curator Ben Vickers, with Kei Kreutler and Lizzie Homersham. It’s the same one that flashes across the Third Line booth wall at the end of Sophia Al-Maria‘s devastating tour of Frieze Art Fair proper. In a continuation of its theme of catastrophic endings, Al-Maria presents‘Whale Fall’ (2014) as it narrates yet another pending extinction of a species through a largely blank blue screen. Jack Halberstam’s polemical ‘The Homosexual Says Yes to Sterility’ appeals to a humanism less concerned with individualism, reproduction and self-preservation at all costs, instead calling on an end to the human itself (“No Future”).
Anna Zett on the other hand imagines a Jurassic Age where humans are yet to exist at all, with a premiere screening of the artist’s This Unwieldy Objectfilm-essay and its companion ‘DINOSAUR GIF’ (2014) video lecture, exploring the ultimately destructive mythology of a young US superpower that’s embedded in the fossils of pre-historic dinosaurs and the film culture to follow. Trevor Paglen envisions the end of the Athropocene era as he contemplates the eternal cosmic debris of communications satellites and their potential for sharing human history with a species of the future in ‘From Fibre-Optic Beings to Fossils in the Sky’. It’s a foresight that looks further than the 10 years Ed Atkins is allocated in carrying out his decade-long epilogue to Extinction Marathon in the www.80072745.netonline commission. He’ll send personalised email correspondence to mailing list subscribers via email, which is probably the most resilient form of communication in an ever-evolving technological landscape. But perhaps the artist knows he doesn’t need to look that far ahead anyway, when you consider his inaugural email subject line: “U R G E N T”.
Jesse Darling, Federico Campagna and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi discuss communication via a spoken language that’s changing with the written online, as Darling proposes a ‘Yolar’ verb for the root acronym of YOLO while suggesting not everyone perceives the world through sight and sound. Marguerite Humeau‘s Cleopatra, on the other hand, is granted a subjectivity beyond her historical objectification via a synthesised voice for the ‘Cleopatra “That Goddess”‘ (2014) music video at the Marathon, while Aleksandra Domanović‘s job applicants are not so lucky at Sunday Art Fair. The artist’s readymade ‘Disney Letter’ (2014) at the Glasgow International booth is dated “June 7, 1938” and kindly informs “Miss Mary V Ford” that “women don’t do any of the creative work”.
Ceaselessly referred to as the “indie” art fair by major media during Frieze, booths from High Art, Seventeen, The Apartmentand Lüttgenmeijerpresent at the Ambika P3 event, among a Laura Aldridge installation of string, soda cans and prints at Studio Voltaire. Florian Auer‘s digital prints of fibreglass and resin t-shirts – body-free but frozen into the shape of a torso – are hung on a wall at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in one corner. Sandy Brown‘s presentation of an installation from Jean-Michel Wicker and two wall hangings from Aude Pariset are in another. The latter’s inverted whitewash of lurid inkjet prints revealed within the white tiles on ‘Rehabilitated Scribble (blue swallowtail / Vyal one)’ (2012), echoes the similarly noxious, though oddly alluring sterility of Amalia Ulman‘s The Destruction of Experiencesolo exhibition at Evelyn Yard. There’s a collector at the gallery just off Oxford Street discussing the price for a piece of her performed and embodied Facebook timeline, under a clock circled with self-portraits inspired by Frida Kahlo. It reminds me of one of Matthew Higgs‘ framed prints hanging at the White Columns booth back at Sunday Art Fair. All it says is, “You get what you pay for”. **
Evelyn Yard will be hosting the latest installation from Amalia Ulman, titled The Destruction Of Experience and running at the London space from October 19 to November 13.
As the press release offers, “The Destruction Of Experience is a show about time, body clocks and stretch marks”. The Buenos Aires-born artist is working with sound, scent and sculpture as well as standard wall-based works in her first immersive London installation to “explore the status of the human body as a perishable asset”.
The human body, of course, is that of a woman. With primarily first-person voiced pieces, Ulman’s work intentionally blurs the line between object and artist, using the iconography of femininity to explore the concept of ‘prettiness’.
Ulman’s exhibition will also features parallel works by Japanese artist, Hajime Sorayama, whose detailed illustrations of female cyborgs are “‘enhanced’ with inorganic, machine-like connections and protrusions to create further perfected visions of female form for erotic consumption”.
London’s Evelyn Yard is presenting a new group project, titled June Snow, that will run at the gallery from June 6 to July 4.
The gallery –founded by Oliver Robb as a collective project and aiming to engage with critical young artists –will feature a host of young artists, including Paul Kneale, Jamie Jenkinson, Amalia Ulman, and Holly White, among others, as well as a special book presentation by Charles Veyron.