SAM LEWITT: Tuesday March 29

LINKS
Miguel Abreu Gallery
Frieze
Times
Contemporary Art Daily
Galerie Daniel Buchholz

BIOGRAPHY
Born in Los Angeles, CA, 1981 Lives and works in New York
EDUCATION
2005
Whitney Museum of American Art, Independent Study Program, New York
2004
BFA, School of Visual Arts, New York


FROM:
SAM LEWITT, 'PRINTER, SCRIPTOR: FOLIOS'
To 30 Aug 2008
Galerie Daniel Buchholz


In fact, much of the source material for this work was acquired from such establishments. Portfolio cases are displayed on pedestals within the gallery. As framing and storage equipment, these objects suggest themselves to a collected content making a momentary appearance. Paper - its role as support, its propensity to effacement, to abstraction and inscription - provides the model for such a thing as will be written, and read, out of existence. What exists in the hold of the portfolio often includes a memory for which the pulp of an unstable pH commingles freely with the acid-free backing of a durable existence.

Document holding devices serve as an exemplary case for value's heteronomy: singular products potent with the prospect of accruing a speculative surplus value convene with industrially printed paper. The storage logic of the portfolio facilitates an equivalency of value for its contents. But this with the trait of holding for posterity those moments when paper returns to view as an unsettled support, one for which the efficacy of images is fossilized into a fetish. Bordering these open cases: The work in Monograms is cobbled together around two tools for alphabetic inscription derived respectively from the realms of material production and exchange. Ink drawings of an image of two pens, clipped from a newspaper advertisement and re-scaled to approximate actual size, are multiplied and composed into iterations of their physical spacing with regard to one another. These images are manually re-produced using the ink that they ostensibly contain, traced and filled-in, excluding only logos and corrections to coherently pictured depth. These find counterparts in a series of photograms made using reams of outmoded, industrial "Phototype": long film negatives which have entire font families printed on them. The receding graphic/alphabetic symbols that are piled here index a material support for language - one made visible on condition of the enervation of communicative signs.

Lewitt explains: 'In both of these image collections, I imagine the ambiguity of what purpose possesses these objects to be in direct correlation to the dispossession of their instrumental worth: out-stripped in efficacy by pixilated information and equipment far more interface directed. But if current fantasies of flexibility and connectedness have accelerated new means of rendering and displaying old goods, then I appreciate the reproduction of these images - sourced from forms of production and consumption oriented toward disappearance - as having emblazoned their foundational supports with instabilities that call ahead a reservation for their successors to the width of closing portfolio folds. The material of a written world left behind by shifts in economy and conditions of legibility has recently been the material for my own production as a collector. By force of what concerns the perception of social-relations as objects - which in turn are made to stand with regard to their collection - I've disassembled some holdings for this exhibition.

Ohad Meromi: March 22

LINKS
Harris Lieberman Gallery
Artforum 500
FlashArt Studio visit
Art in General

About the Artist
Born in Israel, Ohad Meromi currently lives and works in New York City. Meromi graduated from Bezalel Academy (1992) and went on to receive his MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts (2003). He has exhibited internationally and nationally at venues including The Israel Museum, Tel Aviv; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; Lyon Biennial, France; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Magasin 3, Stockholm; De Appel Museum, Amsterdam; Sculpture Center, New York; and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. Meromi has received numerous scholarships and awards including a Percent for Art commission (2009), the Fund for Video and Experimental film (2004), I.C. Excellence Foundation (2003), Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation Israeli Art Prize (1998). He was recently granted the Foundation for Contemporary Arts 2008 Grants to Artists Award.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The term "stage" as a locus of special dynamics is central to my practice in sculpture, installation and video. I'm drawn to the shift a space might undergo from a concrete site to a fictional one. Thought of in the context of the social sphere, I'm interested in this moment of agency, a moment of potent reflexivity where the subject changes its relationship to an oppressive matrix. Thinking of architecture as stage allows me to read modernist space as a fiction, and then to reenact some of its myths: clashes of futurism and primitivism, international style and ethnic folklore, totalitarianism and utopic positivism.

March 8th: Laura Mulvey and Zoe Beloff

Laura Mulvey

Laura Mulvey was born in Oxford on 15 August 1941. After studying history at St. Hilda's, Oxford University, she came to prominence in the early 1970s as a film theorist, writing for periodicals such as Spare Rib and Seven Days. Much of her early critical work investigated questions of spectatorial identification and its relationship to the male gaze, and her writings, particularly the 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, helped establish feminist film theory as a legitimate field of study.

Between 1974 and 1982 Mulvey co-wrote and co-directed with her husband, Peter Wollen, six projects: theoretical films, dealing in the discourse of feminist theory, semiotics, psychoanalysis and leftist politics. These include: Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (1974), Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), AMY! (1980), Crystal Gazing (1982), Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1982) and The Bad Sister (1982). After these, Mulvey did not return to film-making until 1991 when production began on her solo project Disgraced Monuments, an examination of the fate of revolutionary monuments in the Soviet Union after the fall of communism.

Mulvey is best known for her essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen. It later appeared in a collection of her essays entitled Visual and Other Pleasures, and numerous other anthologies. Her article was one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework, influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Prior to Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz had attempted to use psychoanalytic ideas in their theoretical accounts of the cinema, but Mulvey's contribution was to inaugurate the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis, and feminism.

Laura Mulvey is the Mary Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London.


Zoe Beloff

Zoe Beloff grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1980 she moved to New York to study at Columbia University where she received an MFA in Film. Her work has been featured in international exhibitions and screenings; venues include the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Freud Dream Museum in St. Petersburg, and the Pompidou Center in Paris. In 2009 she participated in the Athens Biennale, and has an upcoming project with MuHKA Museum in Antwerp. Her most recently completed work is the exhibition “The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and their Circle. She has been working with the Christine Burgin Gallery on a number of artist projects that include books and prints.

Zoe works with a wide range of media including film, stereoscopic projection performance, interactive media, installation and drawing.Her artistic interest lies in finding ways to graphically manifest the unconscious processes of the mind. She considers herself a medium, an interface between the living and the dead, the real and the imaginary. Sometimes she uses archaic apparatuses, sometimes, new analog/digital hybrids. Each project aims to connect the present with the past, to create new visual languages where modern media will once again be invested with the uncanny. She has collaborated with artists from other disciplines including composer John Cale, the Wooster Group Theater Company and composer, singer and performance artist Shelley Hirsch.

Zoe has been awarded fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation (2003), The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts (1997) and NYFA (1997, 2001). She has received individual artist grants from foundations that include NYSCA, The Jerome Foundation and Experimental Television Center Finishing Funds Award. She has had residences at Harvestworks Digital Media Arts, Hallwalls in Buffalo and Tesla in Berlin.

Some links:

Dream Life of Technology was first published in a French cinema journal called "Trafic" in 1997 it was written to accompany my CD-ROM "Beyond".
"Beyond" is now online and can be accessed here:

http://www.zoebeloff.com/beyond/

"Staging the Unconscious" was also published in "Trafic" in 2008. A web version of the Somnambulists is online - the actual project is a gallery installation.

http://www.zoebeloff.com/somnambulistsWeb/


Check out the NyTimes review/slideshow of Amateur Psychoanalytic Society