Sexy and sublime. Sensual. Cui Fei marries tradition and thoughtful contemporary response to create pieces you're afraid to touch, but that you can't help look at. Nature and humanity are in delicate balance in her work, which is a record, a response, a memory. Her work is currently up at the New York Public Library, but she can be found all over, most recently Brooklyn (her exhibition at Causey Contemporary just closed). She has participated in three solo exhibitions along with over fifty shows worldwide.
She has earned accolades in Art in America, The New York Times, and The New Yorker Magazine. Fei has received grants and awards, including The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the NYFA Fellowship from New York Foundation for the Arts, the BRIO Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts and was selected into the Artists-in-the-Marketplace program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.
Alicia Ross (featured in earlier bloggery) has a nice book for sale. It's a sexy way to see the progress of her work, including performance, sculpture, and, of course, the cross-stitching.
Enjoy and support! Oh, and shipping is free before August 31st.
Inspired by Amy's previous post I shall volley the modern landscape shuttlecock back over the net with the art of Chris Ballantyne. I first saw Chris's work in New American Paintings, IDK, like 2 or 3 years ago? It jumped off the page with its simplicity. It made me want to know more about the quietness of these spaces. Often Chris's work employs tensions. He sets up scenarios of human outposts that seem to be under siege from hostile nature. House's and buildings huddled up like circled wagons. Caves dangling from cliff sides or structures on the verge of washing away from an encroaching body of water. I really love the washy hush of the images that contradict the struggle of humans and nature.-brandon
Erik Benson's work is both soft and ominous. Plumes of black smoke, fences and graffitti, cities left to their inevidable crumbling. I'm not surprised to learn that Benson grew up in Detroit. These paintings have delicate moments: beautiful details...swallowed by a quiet kind of sadness. It reminds me of that strange beauty that reveals itself only in tragedy.
A little secret behavior I have when I lose out on a juried exhibition is to check out all the work that did get excepted in hopes of dismissing it all with the only criteria of quality is that it's not mine. A sort of cleansing ritual. The sad part is I'm always, well not ALWAYS, pleasantly surprised by the work I find and more time than not feel okay about losing out because well jealousy is too bitter a pill and I ain't mad at ya.
So I lost out to Erin O'keefe for the annual Camera Club of New york juried show. A bit of a hard pill to swallow since the juror was James Casabere, an influence and master of the false landscape and fake photograph. But Erin was for sure an exception to my rejection. Her work is very exciting.
Working in photography and by implementing color and form she transforms a flat space of both subject and medium ( photography ) and transforms it into a labyrinth of perspective. It is a dizzying experience of spatial fluctuation. In her pictures there are table top or room sized set ups of colored blocks, mirrors and cut out pictures of interiors that work together to maximize the illusion of depth and space and perspective in an economy of area. When you look at them you get lost in the interplay of what is a reflection, a photograph or what is the actual place these items are set up in. All that and still I find them rooted in renaissance perspective studies and historical still life.
I have been noticing an emergence of relatively young painters, mostly Eastern European, whose work is both historical in nature and current in spirit. I'm a big proponent of looking back, of realizing that the innocence is lost, that we can't just wash our hands and move on. Some art reminds us of that, sticks our faces into the suppressed corners of our memory where most chose not to venture. There is a number of American artists (Kara Walker for example) who realize the importance of such dirty work. Romanian-born Adrian Ghenie is one of these artists. At first his paintings may appear surreal and even schizophrenic. However, to me they show our reality quite clearly in all it's glory of shame, guilt, inhumanity and madness. Here's a link to the death statistics resulting from the 20th century's big four - the First and Second World Wars, Communist China and the Soviet Union. The number comes to roughly 141 Million. Think about that number for a second.
I am up again past midnight, having sworn I would crash old-lady style. I am g-chatting with Alicia Ross, who is trying to finalize a name for her upcoming solo exhibition for the moment entitled Hot Mess. I like it. The name and the new work, which is based on phrenology, the study of two-dimensional maps outlining the sections of the human head that drew correlations between the shape of one’s skull and specific mental faculties. This diagram of the head as well as the basic theory of phrenology—“reading” the surface of the head to determine personality, morality or character—is what inspired the aesthetic and concept of this series. Having previously interviewed Alicia for the Art:21 blog, I am familiar with her approach to the exploration of the woman's place from a moral standpoint, as well as in the media. Her past subjects (pardon the pun) have hung tightly suspended between power and subjection, cliche and self-expression. They screamed and yet were faceless, symbolic, distorted by the internet images Alicia uses for her references. These women are different. I know them. Or I feel like I do. I have already judged them along with the media,condemned some and celebrated others. Their faces are iconic in shame and exposure, recognizable even in distorted color and broken pixels (which, in this final form, are cross-stitches). Miley Cyrus, the Octumom, the Tot Mom, Lady Gaga, Mrs. Duggar....they have all been stitched into a hot mess of the contradictions and parallels of womanhood, motherhood, and celebrity.
It might seem kind of obvious to say... "Kerry Marshall, you're a genius." But I'm going to say it anyway.
Kerry James Marshall's work references "history" painting, grounding itself in narrative. His work explores the stories that make up his identity personally and more broadly within the culture, exploring the history of artmaking and the history of society's social/civil evolution simultaneously. One quote from PBS's website that strikes me particuarly is when Marshall states "you still have to earn your audience’s attention every time you make something." You said it, mister. Marshall doesn't disappoint this audience, ever.
Kerry James Marshall was featured in the Art21 segment on "Identity". (Clip below)
Ok, so I am a fly to the trap of sensation. Does the fact that the video of her flylashes has been making its rounds on Facebook deter me? Not one bit. On the Vimeo page, where her two sculptural video pieces (Flylashes and Mouth Eyes) are posted, Jessica writes:
"The piece was a video installation as part of a series of works looking into genetic manipulation, experimentation and xenotransplantation - about balancing our scientific and medical developments with our cultural strive for perfection, at the same time exploring and acknowledging society's underlying fear and general mistrust of modified bodies. Flylashes was part of a small series of works using fly parts with other materials, playing with the myth of the chimera in different formats. The work obviously pushes the boundaries of what is and what is not acceptable, in its creation and use of animal parts - the flies came from maggots bought from a fishing tackle shop that were destined for the end of a fishing line. They hatched in my studio, flew around quite a lot and after a few days died naturally. At this point I used the legs and wings for explorative sculptural purposes, in the case of Flylashes, gluing them to my own eye using eyelash glue. The work dates from 2006, during a time I was doing in-depth research into the issues surrounding genetic manipulation and the use of animals and humans in testing - it is intended not as a call to pull apart flies to use as beauty enhancements, but a device to prompt questions about our thoughts and fears surrounding genetic manipulation and the integrity of the body."
As someone who still finds run-of-the-mill plastic surgery to be Aphex Twin creepy (and fascinating) and will not eat a tomato cross-bred with swine genes, I am all for this work.
There are certain places that everyone knows are magic. The night sky...a snow-driven wood...a library. Michiko Itatani's paintings capture that magic with each delicate stroke. Whether in pieces the size of the room or the size of a kindle, Michiko's environments pull you into an intimate wonderland where you know something amazing is happening. There is storytelling going on here...descriptions of inner worlds and the unfolding of a personal fictional space. In the immortal words of Tina Fey... "I want to go to there."
Do we wait to see what destruction will befall us next? Have we been de-synthesized to explosions and collapse to the degree that we welcome an opportunity to see the gory inner-workings of a human construction? Ben Grasso's paintings confront us with that which we most fear, but that which most excites us. His images are picturesque. We love to see things destructing and exploding. We build and destroy. Like Ikea diagrams for how each board comes together, full of anticipated motion and tense with what remains, these paintings create in the viewer an awareness of historical curiosity towards disaster and a guilty voyeuristic appreciation of its beauty.
This annual listing of galleries is a great resource to have on hand. Galleries are listed by state and city, alphabetically, and are categorized and give general information including a sampling of artists exhibited, business hours, addresses (both web and live locations), and a short description of the kind of art typically featured at each location. This is a great start for visitations when travelling, or just for online browsing.
The gallery guide does come as part of the regular Art in America subscription...or you can purchase it at your local magazine rack or awesome independent bookstore of choice.
The 2010 Vice photo issue is here. This year the installation is curated by the theme of still life and the breadth of talent and subject matter is very well done. With something like 40 or fifty photos picked to represent the theme the well thought out selection marries up some surprising and unlikely pictures. There are still life images from the early twentieth century through now and the choices share such a common thread of raw and profound vision of stuff and humanity that it doesn't matter if the scenes are found objects or meticulously staged and set up tableaux. Vice really did a good job of curating on this issue. Some stand outs are Jeanine Oleson photo of collection of hanging decorations made from discarded bottles and maybe tape or paint dangling from an evergreen in what looks to be a back woods trailer enclave. A testament to artistic expression and human nature's need to express and be creative. Also I oddly am drawn to the slurpy and moist pile of pasteled chewed gum wadded up and placed on a table top. Its got it all color, texture and the gross gaudy distillation of the desire of the still life. We chew it up and spit it out and what's left is a nasty pile of drippy and colorful garbage. Then there is Martin Fengel and his skewed version of the image the flat and odd hollowness of images and objects. Twisted and off putting he seems to be calling out the image as object and its often misleading intent.So go through the whole slide show and enjoy. Oh and look for the fantastic Stephen Shore and Cathrine Opie `brandon
