Modern Painters West Coast editor Doug Harvey has an exhibition opening tomorrow at L.A.’s Jancar Gallery (reception 6-9pm.) Here’s Harvey explaining things in his own words, from press materials:
“The major portion of this exhibit came to me in a dream about 6 months ago – the giant sculptural/architectural painting/installation in the front, leading into the series of collages in the backroom. In the dream it was specifically installed in Jancar Gallery, and I pitched it to Tom on that basis, without expecting him to take me up. I often dream of artworks, but this one was unusual because all the elements for the main piece – some very specific – were materials that I had on hand.
Plus I had been looking for a new modular configuration for my collage works, which the dream prefigured. The resulting collages will eventually comprise an experimental non-linear novel of sixty-four 50 X 38 inch pages, entitled ‘The Cryogenic Angel’, the first chapter of which (‘History Lessens’) was recently shown at Beacon Arts Building as part of the LOOP show. ‘Never Paint Again’ debuts the second and third chapters, “Eradication Age” and “Lorem ipsum Über Alles”.
‘Never Paint Again’ also marks the release of a hand-crafted zine entitled Pussy Pussy in a limited edition of 40, edited by me and created in collaboration with other artists. Seven of the 40 are deluxe collectors editions, housed in a set of chairs – unauthorized collaborations with designers Mark Zuckerman and Monty Lawton, a stack of whose transparent plexi “pocket chairs” I found legless on the streets of Culver City, and made whole to the best of my abilities. The idea of using pocket chairs as display/distribution racks for a DIY publication I stole from Mark Dutcher.”
Zefrey Throwell–instigator of nude protests, nude card games, and unlicensed relay races through Times Square–returns with an impromptu session of ping-ping tomorrow near Bryant Park in New York. Zefrey being Zefrey, it’s more than just fun and games; there’s a political subtext, kids! “We will be playing a slight hybrid of regular table tennis,” organizers write, “where each couple tapes a line about waist high on the wall and plays with the one bounce rule, similar to handball, but with paddles and ping pong balls. This game serves as a metaphor for the current back and forth power struggle happening between the American people and the financial powers today.”
Interested parties should email midtowngames@gmail.com immediately. Players will need to show up at as-yet-undisclosed meeting spot around 12:45p.m.
Here’s why we’ll be lined up at New York’s apexart at 11a.m tomorrow: The gallery “invites visitors to exchange pictures from their lives with selections from the photo archive of Brooklyn artist Kambui Olujimi. Come with an image of any size, medium, style, and subject and leave with a photo of your choice. For those unable to bring pictures to the event, there will be limited facilities for on-site printing. A Life in Pictures blurs the lines of biographical authorship in a world moving towards dematerializing means of communication, allowing guests to interject moments from their own lives into this larger life in pictures.”
There’s plenty of good stuff in Luhring Augustine’s current exhibition, “Mix/Remix,” on view through June 9. Our personal highlight, though, has to be the collection of works from Dieter Roth’s “Picadilly Series” in the back gallery, including our favorite, pictured above: Self Portrait as Telephone Wire, 1974.
Liz Mager Laser is showing video work from tomorrow, May 12, through June 16, at L.A.’s Various Small Fires. (Might this be our new favorite gallery name? Indeed.) That includes I Feel Your Pain, her 2011 Performa Commission, as well as Flight (a performance based on cinematic chase scenes that took place in Times Square) and Digital Face (pictured above, with choreographed movements modeled on the gestures of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.)
For tomorrow’s opening, there will be a special performance of Preview, “a live performance in collaboration with Katie Simone Nehra, an interactive monologue that adapts language from movie trailers that command audience members to imagine losing their identity.” It’s a rare chance for Angelenos to see this New Yorker in action.
More information on the opening can be found here. And while you’re at it, go back and read past Modern Painters and Artinfo.com coverage of Laser here and here.
On view through June 16 at New York’s C24 Gallery: the first North American exhibition of the 54-year-old Turkish artist Irfan Önürmen, whose work mimics and illustrates our feeble ability to fully grasp our reality, both personal and societal, from minute to minute.
In the first room, brand-new portraits from his “Gaze” series float against the walls. They are composites, the artist explains, with elements taken from any of the millions of faces that haunt our mass media. Working without source material or a drawn guide, Önürmen lays down strips of tulle in layers to conjure these faces in a kind of weightless relief, almost like a hologram. The texture of the tulle itself calls to mind the pixilation of digital images and their transmission and re-substantiation on our screens. Though beautiful, they are ultimately elusive. Perhaps unconsciously, says the artist, he was thinking of his imagined subjects as witnesses—in effect turning their gaze back around to us. “It’s about the encounter,” he says through his translator.
The back room is taken over by a different kind of work entirely: Panic, 2009, a sprawling wall piece fashioned from layered, glued newspapers (Önürmen is a self-professed pack rat of the printed image) that directly engages political content. The boxy layout suggests both cutaway architecture and Istanbul’s metropolitan sprawl, with select objects carved out or built up in relief. More than a formal experiment, thematic correspondences exist between news headlines and advertising images, allowing the viewer to piece together relationships. Presiding over this societal excavation is a life-size golem (puppeteer or patron saint?) in glued and carved newsprint, surveying his domain.
Both strains coalesce in the most impressive piece in the show, Crime Watching (2006–12), pictured above, a 12-paneled tulle-and-oil on canvas composition that seizes images from the nightly news (Önürmen took snapshots of his television as source material) to highlight dramas of corruption, recrimination, and the unmasking of members of the “deep state,” Turkey’s shadow ruling class. Here, Önürmen’s signature tulle takes on an explicitly political dimension, becoming an agent of transparency. Hung up high, we are finally able to see the big picture. –Sarah P. Hanson
This is just an educated guess and an unsupported rumor, but we’re saying that the buyer of Munch’s Scream last night is Leonard Blavatnik. You heard it here first.
Ofri Cnaani's Cyanotypes on view at Andrea Meislin Gallery
We all know that live radio plays produce chaos, at least in the case of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds. But on Saturday afternoon, a live radio play will be broadcast from Andrea Meislin Gallery on 26st Street, which promises to deliver less chaos than the party planned on that same street in the evening.
As part of the artist Ofri Cnaani’s solo show at the gallery, “Special Effects,” Cnaani collaborated with artist Cheryl Kaplan to create Press Hold to Talk, a drama and spy story set against a backdrop of political intrigue and espionage.
Saturday, May 5 at 4:30pm at Andrea Meislin Gallery, 526 West 26 Street, #214
