Matthew Brannon - Thursday Feb 17

LINKS:

Friedrich Petzel

David Kordansky

2008 Whitney Biennial

Wikipedia

NYT

Matthew Brannon’s work turns on the opposition—and ever-mounting imbrication—of art and design. After an early stint as a painter, he began to draw his inspiration from those printed materials that mediate everyday life in late-capitalist, early twentyfirst- century America, from posters and advertisements to promotional flyers and take-out menus. But if Brannon’s iconography conjures mass-produced, throwaway sources, his methods are laboriously handcrafted, even old-fashioned: screenprint, letterpress, and lithograph works, often executed in a limited palette and consistent in their graphic rigor. His art seems on first glance disarmingly direct. But as one turns to the text paired with his images for explication or illumination, disorder intervenes. An early series recalls the conventions of posters for horror films: in Sick Decisions (2004), the driveway leading to a stately house is cloaked by shadows cast by bare, looming trees. In place of what look to be credits in the lower part of the work, however, is a string of pithy non sequiturs: this film is “A Desperate Appeal Release,” starring, among others, “Abuse of Education” and “Misplaced Trust,” with a screenplay by “101 Unanswered Phone Calls.”

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Matthew Brannon is known for his use of fine art and commercial printmaking alongside a classic sense of graphic design as a means of camouflaging his unpleasant and/or absurd content. This strategy is less a gimmick than an acceptance of the psychoanalytic model which believes that content is filtered before it is exposed. The balance of text and image in the letterpress prints provides the clearest example of this approach. One finds in them a word play dealing with career anxiety, alcoholism, insecurity, guilt, humiliation, sexual misadventure and so on, paired with bedside still-life images of lamps and statuettes. The consistent theme of success and failure here advances to a more literary like form both supporting and opposing the idea of the autobiographical. What Brannon began as mimicking the model of a film poster now operates on it's own visual terms with each print acting simultaneously as chapter and setting.

February 8th: Amy Granat

Whitney

The Kitchen

Nicole Klagsbrun

Amy Granat: Born 1976 in Saint Louis, Missouri; lives in New York, New York.

Ms. Granat received a B.A. in 1998 from Bard College, where she studied film and painting. After moving to New York City, she founded Cinema Zero, a nomadic film and performance series, and collaborated with artists such as Steven Parrino, Jutta Koether, and Richard Aldrich, among many others. Her 16mm films and photographs have been included in exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Ullens Center in Beijing, the Shirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, PS1, SculptureCenter, and the 2008 Whitney Biennial in New York City, and had one-person exhibitions at The Kitchen and the New Museum in New York in 2010. She has been teaching at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education since 2007. Ms. Granat was appointed critic in painting/printmaking at Yale in 2010.

She is best known for her experimental film installations featuring celluloid that has been manipulated by scratching, cutting, or chemical alteration. Her practice though, is wide-ranging, and also includes video, sound, and photography. Granat’s photograms, in which objects are laid on top of film and then exposed to light, are related to her films in terms of her physical approach to image-making. Both of these aspects of her work reveal a fascination with transparency and opacity, and positive and negative space. If Granat’s experimentations with the photogram—a method that emphasizes the intrinsic quality of film, allowing her to “draw” with light—conjures the work of Man Ray in the 1930s, her direct manipulation of film stock is an homage to avant-garde filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage. Non-narrative, Brakhage’s films are abstract compositions with affinities to postwar Abstract Expressionist painting. Granat’s work also recalls that of avant-garde filmmakers such as Hans Richter or Viking Eggeling, both of whom made some of the first light and film experiments in the early part of the twentieth century.

Taryn Simon February 1st

LINKS:

Gagosian Gallery

Almine Rech Gallery

tarynsimon.com

Wikipedia

Interview Magazine












Taryn Simon was born in New York in 1975. Her most recent work, Contraband, which includes 1,075 photographs of items detained or seized from passengers and express mail entering the U.S. from abroad, exposes the desires and demands that drive the international economy as well as the local economies that produce them. Her previous work, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, reveals that which is integral to America's foundation, mythology and daily functioning, but remains inaccessible or unknown to a public audience. Her earlier work, The Innocents, documents cases of wrongful conviction in the United States and investigates photography's role in that process.

Simon's photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum Fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. Permanent collections include: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum Fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; and Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She is a graduate of Brown University and a Guggenheim Fellow. Simon has been a visiting artist at Yale University, Bard College, Harvard University and Columbia University.

Her photography and writing have been featured in numerous publications and broadcasts including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Ted.com, CNN, BBC and Frontline. Steidl published An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar as well as Simon’s most recent work, Contraband, which was released in September 2010. Additionally, Simon is currently working on a global project that will be exhibited and published in spring 2011 at the Tate Modern, London and the Neue Nationalegalerie, Berlin. Simon will be exhibiting a new work at the Venice Biennale 2011.

She is represented by Gagosian Gallery & by Almine Rech Gallery in Paris and Brussels.

Cora Cohen: January 25th

Cora Cohen received a BA and MA from Bennington College. Cohen’s exhibitions include Michael Steinberg Fine Art, New York, Hering Raum Bonn, Germany, Stalke Kirke Sonnerup, Denmark, Jason McCoy, New York, Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, and Bentley Gallery, Scottsdale.

Cohen lives and works in New York City.

January 18th: Michelle Kuo and Josiah McElheny, "The Uses of History for Art"

Michelle Kuo

Michelle Kuo is the Editor in Chief of Artforum. She is also a PhD candidate at Harvard University in the History of Art and Architecture, writing a dissertation titled “To Avoid the Waste of a Cultural Revolution”: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), 1966-1979. Her research focuses on the relationship between art, technology, and the postwar think tank--as specifically realized in the organization E.A.T., founded by Robert Rauschenberg, Billy Klüver, Robert Whitman, and Fred Waldhauer in order to facilitate collaborations between artists and engineers. Kuo is a contributor to publications including Artforum, Bookforum, October, and The Art Bulletin and is the author of “9 Evenings in Reverse,” in the exhibition catalogue 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre, and Engineering for the MIT List Visual Arts Center in 2006. She co-curated the exhibition “The Carpenter Center and Le Corbusier’s Synthesis of the Arts” at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in 2004, and lectures frequently on modern and contemporary art.

Link: Industrial revolution: Michelle Kuo on the history of fabrication

Josiah McElheny

Josiah McElheny is a sculptor who draws from the decorative and functional traditions of glass to craft a new, multifaceted form of contemporary art. Often using narratives inspired by the histories of art, design, and glass as points of departure, McElheny creates objects of exceptional formal sophistication, exquisite craftsmanship, and conceptual rigor. While the beauty of his blown glass objects invite viewers into his installations, the narratives behind each piece encourage thoughtful reflection upon the objects’ significance. One of McElheny’s most ambitious projects, An End to Modernity (2005), consists of a twelve-foot-wide by ten-foot-high chandelier modeled on the 1960s Lobmeyr design for the chandeliers found in Lincoln Center. Through his massive sculpture of shining chrome and transparent glass, McElheny explores the convergence of modernist design and the Big Bang theory, both of which were invented in the early twentieth-century, only to reach their widespread acceptance in the 1960s. Earlier projects have focused on subjects ranging from Roman Imperial glass to twentieth-century fashion, from sixteenth-century Italian painting to the designs of Adolf Loos. To each of these topics McElheny brings the same boundless curiosity and ability to make connections across classes of objects, historical moments, and fields of inquiry. This artist’s technical virtuosity and deep knowledge of his medium’s history have produced a captivating series of sculptures and promise more stimulating, shimmering works to come.

Josiah McElheny received a B.F.A. (1989) from the Rhode Island School of Design and was an apprentice to master glassblowers Jan-Erik Ritzman (1989-1991), Sven-Ake Carlsson (1989-1991), and Lino Tagliapietra (1992-1997). He was an artist-in-residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (1998) and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (2000) and was a visiting critic at the Yale University School of Art (2001-2003). His works have appeared in numerous solo and group exibitions in the U.S. and abroad, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, and the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain.


LINK: Andrea Rosen Gallery

Mika Rottenberg: Friday December 10th, 4pm

Born 1976 in Buenos Aires, Argentina; lives in New York, New York

Video installation artist Mika Rottenberg envisions the female body as a microcosm of larger societal issues such as labor and class inequities. In her short films, women cast for their notable physical features and talents perform perfunctory factory-line duties, manufacturing inane items worth less than the labor required to make them. Her homemade machinery and decor are functional but crudely constructed. These contraptions, operating by pedal, conveyor belt, paddle, rubber band, or string, are reminiscent of Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s kinetic props, though the human interaction in her works adds a carnivalesque element to Rottenberg’s environments, the physical comedy implicit in her narratives recalling Eleanor Antin’s filmed performances. The bright colors of Rottenberg’s self-contained sets don’t disguise the close quarters in which her characters work or mitigate the sense of claustrophobia induced by a dead-end job. A blue-collar work ethic is conjured through the women’s uniforms, ranging from diner-waitress dresses to jogging suits. Her cast often use several body parts at once, reminding the viewer of the feminine capacity for multitasking while it suggests an ironic futility in her sweatshop-like situations.







A review of her newest video, Squeeze.

http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-07-21/culture/mika-rottenberg-s-squeeze-uses-real-people-to-imagine-unreal-worlds/

Michael Smith December 7

Michael Smith

He is best known for his performance persona named Mike, the central figure in an ongoing series of narrative projects. Mike, an innocent character who continually falls victim to trends and fashions and his own naive ambitions, allows Smith to comment on discrepancies and absurdities in American culture while creating an unsettling and poignant mixture of humor and pathos.

Links:

wikipedia
Whitney 2008
ICA Philadelphia
Electronic Arts Intermix
Sculpture Center