Friday, October 29, 2010

International Shows 2010-2011

Laurel Nakadate will be on view at MoMA Ps1 NYC, USA in January 23, 2011 - May 2, 2011
  Laurel Nakadate "Lucky Tiger #87" 2009, unique type-c print with fingerprinting ink
 Laurel Nakadate "Lucky Tiger #231" 2009, unique type-c print with fingerprinting ink

 Fever Dream with Rabbit (2009) Digital print

Laurel Nakadate is known for her works in video, photography, and feature-length film. This is Nakadate's first large-scale museum exhibition and will feature works made in the last ten years in all three media, including her early video works, in which she was invited into the homes of anonymous men to dance, pose, or even play dead in their kitchens, bedrooms, and living rooms. Also included will be Good Morning, Sunshine (2009), a more recent work in which Nakadate enters the bedrooms of young women, waking them, and instructs each to strip to their underwear for the camera. Nakadate's two features, Stay the Same Never Change (2009) and The Wolf Knife (2010) mine similar terrain-the power and fragility of the adolescent female body. The exhibition will also be the premiere of Nakadate's latest photographic series 365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears, currently in progress. These photographs document a year-long performance that began on January 1, 2010 in which the artist documented, and continues to document herself before, during, and after weeping each day. The exhibition brings together bodies of work that touch on voyeurism, loneliness, the manipulative power of the camera, and the urge to connect with others, through, within, and apart from technology and the media.

Chalk Horse represent Laurel Nakadate in Australia and currently have a number of works in stock also held in the Saatchi collection and at MoMA NYC, USA.


Ai Weiwei is currently on show at the TATE Modern, London UK

 Ai Weiwei "Sunflower Seeds" 2010 Photocredit: Tate Photography


Juliet Bingham, Curator, Tate Modern

"Ai Weiwei's Unilever Series commission, Sunflower Seeds, is a beautiful, poignant and thought-provoking sculpture. The thinking behind the work lies in far more than just the idea of walking on it. The precious nature of the material, the effort of production and the narrative and personal content create a powerful commentary on the human condition. Sunflower Seeds is a vast sculpture that visitors can contemplate at close range on Level 1 or look upon from the Turbine Hall bridge above. Each piece is a part of the whole, a commentary on the relationship between the individual and the masses. The work continues to pose challenging questions: What does it mean to be an individual in today's society? Are we insignificant or powerless unless we act together? What do our increasing desires, materialism and number mean for society, the environment and the future?"

Ai Weiwei recently exhibited at Chalk Horse in 2010 as a part of "The Problem of Asia" curated by Alvaro Rodriguez Forminaya from Para/Site gallery in HK.

Sanné Mestrom: Shaker Peg 14th-30th October 2010













Shaker Peg, 2010 circulates around the Shaker, Quakers, Shaking Quakers or "Friends" an American religious sect whose core principals are social equity and a rejection of sexual relations. Interestingly the peg is not a peg that holds up garments or objects, but rather one that fills a void to hold things together. Quite a phallic notion really for a group of people who don't go there.

According to Sanné "They designed a lot of things, but its the peg that they're most known for... [they] believe that idle hands are the devil's playground."

The exhibition reveals human intimacy with objects. A collection of some cast resin door handles as well as their 'original' wooden counterpart lay measured into a grid on the floor; the prophecy of these objects is that they invite the palm to cup and turn them opening forth new possibility. The stagnation, sculptural recontextualisation and our own natural familiarity with handles lends the objects a new romantic indentity; they are our ticket to a hypothetical door somewhere, somehow that leads us to where we most want to go. In Sanné's mind the door handles would be taken home for $75 and integrated into the emotional landscape of the home; attached to a door, drawer or portal within the house and thereby transform the space beyond it to a new zone for contemplation.
Also in the exhibition is a bronze cast of a prosthesis to force the wearer into a smile. The terrific thing about this particular object is its incredibly effective application. Whilst it is a totally unwearable non-functional and aesthetic trophy, it is the communication of its intended function that delivers the desired result; you can't help but smile when you're told.

In the centre of the space is a seemingly cumbersome, mangled table composed of odd-looking detritus; the legs are extended and resolved with resin casts and a broom handle seems to be awkwardly lending itself at a crutch. The two indents in the centre of the table are echoic of human presence, as is the carved out enclave. Sanné's weird table starts to finally make sense when you insert yourself into the ergonomic philosophy behind it; positioned with your gut in the return of the table, elbows wedged into the bronze-cast crevices, hands cupping your forwards leaning chin. Suddenly all becomes patent- it's a thinking table!

For Sanné it is the intervention of the viewer that is the key to resolving the odd juxtapositions of form and components.

Her connection to The Shakers she deems to be about their concept of manufacture being the pathway for connection to God: "Keeping their hands busy seems to bind them with a golden thread to God's side. It's really pretty simple: The Peg & God is not so dissimilar from the cup of tea & the Dali Lama, or Joseph Beuys & the Fat Corner."

Born ’79. Lived – the Netherlands // New Zealand // Australia. Programming committee member – West Space. RMIT University - PhD (Fine Art) ’08 (with APA). Arts Victoria grants - ’07, ’09. For more details - www.mestrom.org

Anthony Lister COMING SOON



Anthony Lister was born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1979, and later completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the Queensland College of the Arts. He helped pioneer the stencil and street art movement in Brisbane before moving to New York in 2003 to work with his mentor, Max Gimblett. He met the New Zealand-born artist at the opening of Gimblett’s major solo exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery.

Lister borrows from his immediate surroundings, painting parodies of modern life. His influences are varied: graffiti, stencilling, installations, Pop art, comic book imagery, cartoons and his recollections of childhood when everything seemed fascinating and animated super-heroes ruled his television screen.

With bold and brash spontaneity and remarkable confidence he paints the complex contradictions of everyday life, and does so with an element of humour. He admits: ‘What I read, what I see, what I do, who I know and what I eat for lunch, it’s all relevant to me. I guess I am in a perpetual state of accepting the obvious as a valid source of inspiration. And it’s also very important that my work continues to be fun and exciting to me.’

Lister doesn’t separate art from social meaning. His imagery can be read as having a political and social message – good versus evil; right versus wrong, and Batman versus the Joker. His working method, with the subject-matter painted on large areas on monochromatic ground, has been developed to create a tension between figuration and abstraction which is evident in his series of Super-heroes. The subjects, often drawn from the media, indicate concern for how the human condition will evolve within the electronic and communications culture and the ever-changing, recyclable environment of today.

He has presented solo exhibitions in London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Milan, New York, San Francisco and Sydney and is represented at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Ken McGregor
2009

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