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

Kelley Walker and Scott Rothkopf November 30

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KELLEY WALKER

Kelley Walker (b.1969 Columbus, Georgia) is an American artist.

Walker graduated with a BFA from the University of Tennessee in 1995.

Walker’s work has been shown internationally at galleries and museums including the Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Vigo in Spain, the New Langton Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and FRAC Franche-Comté Musee des Beaux-Arts de Dole in France. His work was included in the Greater New York exhibition at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York and USA Today at The Royal Academy in London. He participated in the 7th Sharjah Biennial. He is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery in New York.








LINKS:
Paula Cooper Gallery
Thomas Dane
Interview
wikipedia
Whitney
NY TIMES

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Scott Rothkopf

LINK:

Whitney-Walker/Guyton

Scott Rothkopf comes to the Whitney from Artforum, where he has been Senior Editor since January 2004. During his time at the magazine he has been intimately involved in planning its editorial direction and has worked closely with many distinguished writers and artists on essays, projects, and special issues. He was a guest curator at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum, where he organized Mel Bochner Photographs 1966-1969 (2002), a survey of Bochner’s photographic works and related drawings, which traveled to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. At the Fogg, Rothkopf was also co-curator, with Linda Norden, of Pierre Huyghe’s This Is Not a Time for Dreaming (2004), a site-specific installation, performance, and film made by Huyghe in response to Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. The work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Tate Modern, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, where it has entered the permanent collection of the Musée national d’art moderne. Scott Rothkopf was a contributing curator of the 2007 Lyon Biennial, for which he selected and installed the work of Wade Guyton.

“I’m delighted to join the Whitney and its distinguished curatorial team at this pivotal moment for the museum,” said Scott Rothkopf. “The Whitney has long been a venturesome advocate for contemporary artists and an imaginative steward of a rich historical collection. I look forward to advancing that dual mission and to exploring new approaches to our understanding of art in the United States within a broader international context.”

As a frequent contributor to Artforum, Scott Rothkopf has written on exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial, and on topics ranging from the art and architectural criticism of the 1980s to the writings of 1960s critic Gene Swenson. His texts for the magazine have addressed the work of Ed Ruscha, Sol LeWitt, Paul Chan, Carroll Dunham, Josiah McElheny, T. J. Willcox, Katharina Fritsch, Richard Aldrich, Diller & Scofidio, Francesco Vezzoli, and Karen Kilimnik, who was the subject of his 2007 book, Period Eye: Karen Kilimnik’s Fancy Pictures, co-authored with Meredith Martin. Scott Rothkopf’s museum and gallery catalogue contributions include essays on Jeff Koons, Wade Guyton, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Kelley Walker, Terry Winters, and Takashi Murakami, as well as interviews with James Rosenquist and Laura Owens, for, among others, Tate Modern, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Kunsthalle Zürich, the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Le Magasin, Grenoble, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In addition to writing for the catalogue of Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, on view at the Whitney from November 6, 2009, through January 24, 2010, Scott Rothkopf is contributing to a book on Paul Thek, which will accompany the Whitney’s retrospective in the fall of 2010.

Scott Rothkopf has served as a visiting critic at the Yale University School of Art and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and has participated in numerous public lectures and panels, as well as having organized and chaired “Photography and Conceptual Art” with Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Jan Dibbets at Harvard University, and “Transatlantic,” a College Art Association session devoted to the interchange between American and European artists in the 1960s and ’70s. He received his undergraduate and masters degrees in the history of art and architecture from Harvard University, for which he is completing his Ph.D. on the work of Jeff Koons and the art of the 1980s

Tuesday Nov 23rd Jonathan Berger and KIOSK

Jonathan Berger’s work encompasses the fields of sculpture, drawing, architecture, installation, performance, design, education, and curatorial projects. Since 2006, Berger has been a part-time lecturer, teaching art and art history in the Department of Art and Art Professions at NYU and the Department of Sculpture at the University of the Arts.

His most recent curatorial projects include “Stuart Sherman: Nothing Up My Sleeve,” presented in November 2009 at Participant Gallery, NYC, as a major contribution to the 2009 PERFORMA Biennial. He is presently organizing “Peter Schumann: Black and White,” the first major retrospective exhibition of Bread and Puppet Theater Founding Director, scheduled to open at the Queens Museum in 2012. In process is “Andy Kaufman: On Creating Reality,” a retrospective exhibition scheduled for 2013. Past curatorial projects include “Where Art and Life Collide: Ron Athey, Vaginal Davis, Franko B,” a series of premiere performances, lectures, and events (presented in 2006 at Artists Space, Participant Inc., and Siberia, NYC), and the 2005 exhibit “Founders Day: Jack Smith and the Work of Reinvention,” at Grimm-Rosenfeld NY.

Jonathan Berger was born in New York City in 1980. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1998-2000, completing his BFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 2002, and receiving his MFA from New York University in 2006. He has been awarded multiple fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Corporation of Yaddo.


artforum
paticipant
nothing up my sleeve
vaginal davis

Images from "Andy Kaufman: On creating Reality"







KIOSK



Every six months, Alisa Grifo and Marco Romeny (KIOSK) prepare to take a trip. The outcome of each trip is a collection of sorts, or rather, a portrait of a place in the form of a collection. The objects that constitute each collection challenge the way that we see, value, appreciate, historicize, consume, exoticize, understand, and learn. KIOSK is as specific to itself as it is to the vast array of practices and formats by which it is influenced and upon which it comments. Their work, and the venue it inhabits, navigate a hybrid terrain that incorporates aspects of the formats of the store, museum, academy, studio, gallery, and design collection. What KIOSK is and does puts all of these contexts, along with their baggage, in a constantly evolving dialogue with one another. Grifo and Romeny take on the roles of historian, anthropologist, ethnographer, tourist, curator, designer, user, producer, critic.

It is the accumulation of expansive narratives, the investigation of aesthetics, representation, and shifting perspectives and contexts that become the substance of each collection. In viewing a KIOSK collection in its entirety, we are presented with an alternate truth of that place: what we assume it is, what we want it to be, what we have been led to believe, what we don’t know.