IAN McDONALD

"Wearing"
@ Rena Bransten Gallery, SF
March 17 - April 23, 2011











"Ian McDonald’s exhibition, Wearing, refers to the displays of non-functional ceramic objects hung, assembled, or arranged to evoke clothing or containers re-configured for puzzling purposes. As in past bodies of work, multiple forms in different sizes and shapes are grouped to suggest mass produced items of quotidian or even specific functionality – in this case, “things” that are worn down or out or hung up to be worn later."

















"The hardness of fired clay makes it difficult to relate the hanging forms to “things worn” or to imagine what their industrial use might be, but McDonald has long enjoyed stretching the possibilities of both forms and functions. His title urges viewers to process the physical inventory and its functions as a mental exercise, but otherwise, to enjoy the shapes, colors, and arrangements for the aesthetic harmonies they may suggest. "











for all those in SF, go see this show!
plus upcoming interview with Ian on YHBHS.




Rena Bransten Gallery
77 Geary Street (between Kearny and Grant Streets)
San Francisco, CA 94108

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

Sheila Hicks: 50 Years,
March 24 – August 7, 2011

"Hicks's exceptional body of work blurs boundaries between art, design, and architecture just as deftly as it crisscrosses cultures. "

The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) presents Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, the first major retrospective to honor this extraordinary American artist. Sheila Hicks has built an international reputation with her two- and three-dimensional works in fiber. Her remarkably far-reaching artistic focus has encompassed painting, sculpture, photography, weaving, fabric design, writing, publishing, teaching and collaborations with architects. Her early work of the 1960s was at the forefront of experimentation in sculpture. By the 1980s it had taken hold. Since that time, her unique work has explored the dynamic interactions of color and the skills required to hone an aesthetic vision in multiple media.

Featuring more than 90 of her most important works, including a major installation of a work on loan from Target's headquarters in Minneapolis displayed in an entirely new iteration, this exhibition offers insight into Hicks's thinking, her processes, and her approach to materials, both fibers and found objects. The project reveals the continuities between the artist's small weavings, and free-standing wrapped sculptures, and a colossal 20-foot high work suspended from ceiling and cascading from wall.

Hicks's exceptional body of work blurs boundaries between art, design, and architecture just as deftly as it crisscrosses cultures.

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

T R E E S

the stone tree of Los Angeles
the steel tree in Central Park.

"I've processed the idea of a tree and created a system for its form. I take this organic majestic being and break it down into components and rules."
-Roxy Paine


































the trees are made of stone.
the trees are made of steel.


1. Jud Fine, Los Angeles
2. Roxy Paine, Bluff 2002, Central Park

Jud Fine took his cue for the station artwork from the Greene & Greene-designed Oaklawn Waiting Station, built in 1906 on Fair Oaks Avenue. For the station project, Fine created an 18-foot tall copper-bound “Stone Tree” with bluntly cut limbs that rise staunchly amidst a backdrop of heavy wood beams and arroyo stones. Referencing the mythical tree of life, it stands as a formidable icon to the Craftsman Style of architecture known throughout the area, and represents the movement’s joining together of natural elements and human design. text taken from here....

Roxy Paine uses both mechanical means and the innate logic of natural forms to create his "Dendroid" tree-like sculptures. Paine's meticulous research and observation of a variety of tree species help him to understand the "language" of how a tree grows, and from there he creates fictional tree species that grow to a logic of their own.














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

wolfgang tillmans
at LACMA











Wolfgang Tillmans, go here...
Wednesday, March 9 | 6:30 pm

"Wolfgang Tillmans is known for photographs that appear casual, authentic, and immediate. Constantly shifting in scale and subject, his work explores the nature of the medium: exploiting numerous formats (Polaroid, Xerox, inkjet) and presentation styles. Whether pinned to the wall or on the pages of a book, Tillmans's imagery is at once very personal and embedded in contemporary culture, politics, and art history."

This lecture is a collaboration between the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, the USC Roski School of Fine Arts, and the Otis College of Art and Design, Fine Arts Department.





(thanks rodney!)




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

Marc Hundley
These numbers are
a futile attempt to capture
fleeting moments.














"I generally make things that advertise the way I feel — or celebrate things I have chosen to have meaning. My work takes the form of posters and t-shirts and incorporates text from books, song lyrics and found images I collect. (These pieces of information may express something that I'd like to share or reveal how I'd like the world to work.) In order to anchor the feelings or thoughts first evoked by the texts or images, I often add dates and times as part of my designs.


These numbers are a futile attempt to capture fleeting moments.


The prints I have made here are unique — but say the same thing. I am interested in graphic design, and I have used the simple exercise of rearranging elements on a page to figure out which layouts work. Ultimately though, this is of no real consequence. If the final placement means something to me, then it does, and if not, then it doesn't. The same thing goes for the words. In a way, the information on the print meanders — aimlessly and idly. "






Marc Hundley
These numbers are
a futile attempt to capture
fleeting moments.




Element Editions here..


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

Matt Connors
new work
"You Don’t Know"












Matt Connors
You Don’t Know, October 22 – November 21
at Canada, go here..

you lucky new yorkers!
this Friday..






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

Gio Ponti
vs
Gabriel Orozco

"I have built a hotel in Sorrento" wrote Gio Ponti "And, although there wasn't really any need, I wanted each of the hundred rooms to have a different majolica pattern on the floor''.






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

" The circle for me is a very useful Instrument in terms of movement,
in relation to gravity and erosion. It's the tendency of objects when they're
in movement and are eroded by friction..."

Gabriel Orozco

Gio Ponti
vs
Gabriel Orozco





1. Have you ever seen a floor more beautiful?
Parco dei Principi in Sorrento, Italy
The luxury hotel remains as Gio Ponti intended. He designed everything in the hotel, from the pale wood furniture upholstered in blue fabrics in the bedrooms to the 30 different geometric patterned blue and white tiles that adorn the floors to the design of the blue ceramic pebbles and tiles that cover the walls next to the lifts and the pillars in the lobby. Even the crockery is specified as Melotti majolica plates..




2. "What is most important is not so much what people see in the gallery or the museum, but what people see after looking at these things, how they confront reality again." - Orozco

Gabriel Orozco's MOCA show here in Los Angeles 10 years ago changed the way I look at art. I left the building that afternoon in silence. These circles, the toilet paper spinning on the fans, tables full of ceramics and memorabilia of some sort of journey left me confused. Ever since, I've been looking for wet tire marks on the pavement. Simple delights after a city's summer rain.

image above: From the Samurai Tree series, IM (2006), egg tempera on red cedar panel with gold leaf, 21 5/8 x 21 5/8"














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

Albers!

Prefatio
Preface









Josef Albers
(1888-1976)
“Prefatio”
1942 Ink on graph paper
Signed and dated lower right


"In this auction we are offering a unique example of one of Josef Albers rarest graphic works. Once more the optical illusion created in “Prefatio” from 1942 (Lot 28, Estimated at $5,000-7,000) precedes the optical styles of Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, and other Op Artists by 25 years. Notably, this example was a gift to James Prestini on the occasion of Prestini’s successful curated show on Albers work held at Texas Teachers College in 1942."




Current LAMA Auction.
Go read the blog here!




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

melissa
manfull,
pattern
constraints

MELISSA MANFULL:
Pattern Constraints

September 18 – October 23, 2010

"Seeking inspiration from metaphysics and mysticism, Melissa Manfull creates hyper-detailed structures that straddle the worlds of reality and imagination. Working in a palette that ranges from the subdued and earthy to the mystical and otherworldly, Manfull inserts her stiff geometric shapes within pools of bleeding ink. Thus bringing to mind the idea of a building’s lost limb, detached and floating in space.

The artist’s interest in utopian societies and the ways in which architecture can reflect belief systems inspired these organic yet repetitive drawings. And in some ways, the resulting structures, created by fractal patterning, reflect the artist’s personal understanding of the intricate workings of the universe and the mind. Due to the obsessive nature of her process, Manfull has often viewed the meditative act of drawing as a way to approach her fear of vast, open ended space (the unknown). By creating her minute sculptural drawings, she gives this abyss a meaning and in essence, gains control. With her amorphous ink stains, she tries to mimic this emptiness rather than flight it."

melissa manfull,
pattern constraints

at taylor de cordoba,
culver city, los angeles

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

rim jobs
and
sideffects












"I don't want my art to be timeless,
but to be time itself"


Al Taylor
1948-1999












David Zwirner
Sept 14 - Oct 23



"While he began his studio practice as a painter, in 1985 Taylor devised a uniquely innovative approach to process and materials that encompassed two-dimensional drawings and three-dimensional objects. Taylor ultimately sought to expand the possibilities of vision by creating new ways of experiencing and imagining space, and his work provides the viewer with an insight into the artist’s thinking and his investigations of perception across several dimensions. Taylor saw no distinction between his three-dimensional works and his drawings, even going so far as to dismiss the term “sculpture” altogether for his constructions, referring to them instead as “drawings in space” or as “drawing instruments.”













During an interview in 1992, when he was asked by Ulrich Loock about the relationship between drawing and three-dimensionality in his work, the artist responded, “It’s one and the same…Working on paper or on pieces really is the same thing; it’s all one activity that I am not interested in separating.”






all text and images
via david zwirner...









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

3 L.A.
shows
opening
this weekend.
















































3 L.A.
shows
opening
this weekend.

Gonna be a busy weekend!

1. Mimi Lauter at Marc Selwyn, Sept 10, at Marc Selwyn... go here.
2. Ester Partegas, Less World, at Christopher Grimes, go here..
3. Brad Eberhard, New Paintings, Sept 11, 2010 at Thomas Solomon Gallery, go here..















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

YHBHS Interview
with
Eva Berendes, Pt 1.

"folding screens & paravents"

Paravents: noun,

A wind-screen; a shelter from wind.

--- --- --- --

"Questions of construction and design collapse into one which is also mirrored by the fact that the back side of the works is usually exposed.


In fact, that is probably the reason for some works having turned into sculpture,
I simply did not want to neglect their back side."




- Eva Berendes


-------

YHBHS: Eva, thank you for taking the time to answer some questions regarding your work. I’m transfixed by your “screens.” The manner in which the colors and the forms interact. Can you tell me more about how & why they originated?

Eva Berendes: There are various works that you could call screens but I suppose you are addressing the folding screens or "paravents“, 4- or 5- part hinged wooden frames filled with compositions of color fields made from suspended, kind of "woven“ cotton thread. Those fields change a lot in transparency/opacity when you move around them (beside the strong moiree effect) and that makes them very elusive, a quality that made the actual making of them in the studio rather tedious.










I found it hard to find a technique that would render a similar kind of effect to help deciding about the colours by means of a model or a sketch. But to come back to your question, the screens are connected to a number of earlier works of mine, the earliest of them perhaps being a large tie-dye curtain that I did for my MA show in London in 2002.

I had made a couple of paintings with tie-dyed fabric on a strecther and had collaged other, more geometric elements onto them. All of it was part of my experiments with various ways of referencing historical work, back then it was the Russian avant-garde. I was aiming at a peaceful reconciliation of contradictory visual elements and eventually I decided to treat the elements more like two different individuals when I brought them together in one space rather than on a stretcher. Which means that in one way you can relate most of my works back to the matrix of stretcher and canvas. In the screens I am dealing with both these components, a wooden frame and cotton, but have lead them into a more symbiotic relationship.

Questions of construction and design collapse into one which is also mirrored by the fact that the back side of the works is usually exposed. In fact, that is probably the reason for some works having turned into sculpture, I simply did not want to neglect their back side. And then all this is met by strong interest in material culture, craft, the Applied Arts and the beginning of abstract Art.



Or else, perhaps this is just another angle of looking at the same thing.






----------

YHBHS Interview with
Eva Berendes, Pt 1


.
"folding screens, paravents"





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

Nicolas Carone,
1917-2010

"One of the last surviving Abstract Expressionist painters,
died on July 15 at his home in Hudson, N.Y."
















"Mr. Carone was present at the beginning of the New York School and friends with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Lee Krasner. But his best work may have come long after the style faded, in the large paintings in shades of black, white and gray that he made during the last two or three decades of his life. The shifting lines and layered brushwork of these works most completely integrated the classical figurative tradition he absorbed during his earliest art studies and the instinctive painting processes of Abstract Expressionism.



Mr. Carone was born in June 4, 1917, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the eldest of seven children of Italian immigrants. He grew up in Hoboken, N.J., where his father was a bartender, and began drawing at age 4. When he was around 11, his mother sent him to the Leonardo da Vinci Art School on East 10th Street in Manhattan, which offered instruction for a small tuition. "




read Roberta Smith's NYT article here..







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

COLOR STUDY FOR A NEW ROOM.

the darkness
will lead
us home.

---




"A colour is transparent or opaque, lighter or darker, pure or broken, ex or introverted. To these measurable qualities come the sensations that they cause, which are affected by individual associations.

The factors which affect these qualities allude to the interplay of material and structure, of size, format and position in space, of what is meant and not meant."

---

"the darkness will lead us home"

two paintings:
1. Caro Nieder,"View fro the Pink Sofa" 2009 c/o Hauser and Wirth
2. Emanuel Seitz, Untitled 2010 c/o Jacky Strenze Galerie

quiet
fires
on
strings.

Untitled, 2005;
nickel-plated steel, cast bronze, steel cable;

Richard Rezac

"If I can put this correctly, Richard Rezac is an artist of whom I am wary. His work at first seems so simple, it’s modest in scale (considering the ambitious trumpeting of much modern sculpture), rarely the most immediately dramatic piece in the room, stunningly subtle and imbued with a quiet fire that only eventually becomes all absorbing, that might be missed with a too cursory glance.

I know that I’m going to have to bring my lunch, so to speak, that Rezac’s work requires time, almost meditation-like time, that it does not give up its secrets easily, that I have to get my heartbeat and breathing slowed up enough to enter this work, that I have to puzzle out the path he has pursued. It’s always a journey worth taking."

- James Yood
(via here...).

no sign, no signal

new york:
Alexander May

curated by
Sarah Walzer
July 1 7-10.

































new york:
Alexander May

curated by
Sarah Walzer
July 1 7-10.

45 Canal Street, New York



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

Lucio Fontana

lucio
fontana

the red works.
2 sightings.





























2nd image, Lucio Fontana above the sidetable. Perfect. (via Tom Scheerer Interiors, here..) And in the first image, at Marianne Boesky's new gallery on 118 East 64th Street, New York..





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

Michael Smoler

“bodies and celestial backdrops coalesce
as if made up of the very substance of the universe itself”

via light and wire gallery














Michael Smoler
the Universe is Part of Ourselves....

-----


Light & Wire Gallery presents an exhibition of new and recent collages by Los Angeles-based artist Michael Smoler. The exhibition, 'the universe is part of ourselves' will display twenty-six works from an on-going series of collages that combine reprinted Hubble images of the cosmos with such things as historical figures, animals and other iconic elements.

The collages are accompanied by a serialized poem entitled this here and now, written by the poet Lisa Johns for the occasion of this exhibition.







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

Ashes to Ashes

at Amp Work.
via
Unchanging Window, here!









Ashes to Ashes is a spectral assemblage of material facts and artefacts from Greece, carefully chosen from the antique store Martinos, and works from ten contemporary artists, where the old is exhibited back-to-back to the new. In one way or another, all participating artists use a specific source as their starting point, which they manipulate and coax until it becomes something completely different. The exhibited works are presented side by side with antiquities, a juxtaposition coming close to emulating the sort of psychedelic experience one gets while visiting Athens, with its ancient ruins shifting so easily into modern day realities.
In Martinos Art, the antique store located near the gallery, one can find fragile figures, statuettes, vases, vessels and pottery, which, rather than depict, actually bring forth the definition of humanist expression. While the artists involved think deeply and tactilely about references and associations within their own work, the artefacts exhibited can only draw upon the reference of existence and ritual as they arguably predate any other piece of “art” in time.



Ashes to Ashes is an exhibition of the unusual and circumstantiated personal interpretations of both these archaic and modern aspects of the everyday.


















The sources used by the participating artists to develop their work are wide-ranging and broad in scope, coming from nature (as, for instance, in Anne Eastman’s moon video and Ara Peterson’s wave patterns), speech and text (as, for instance, in Matthew Higg’s reframing of printed matter and Johanna Billing’s recordings), technology as, for instance, in Jo Jackson’s prints of cracking bowls, Hayley Tompkins’ painted laptop and cell phone, and Andrea Longacre-White’s digital photographs of photographs, choreography as, for instance, in Jennifer Cohen’s dance shoes-, found objects as, for instance, in Francis Upritchard’s second hand finds, and photography itself as, for instance, in Anne Collier’s photographic works.







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

L I G H T I N G

outer
space
and
semen.




























outer
space
and
semen.



1. Spencer Finch. Outer Space (25 Brightest Stars) 2008 Dimensions Variable, Custom Fluorescent fixtures, Tubes, Filters, Bulbs. 25 Fluorescent tubes and fixtures representing the temperature spectrum of the 25 brightest stars in the night sky.

2. Roger Hiorns. Untitled, 2006, Semen, lighting

"Spencer Finch carefully records the invisible world, while simultaneously striving to understand what might lie beyond it. Whether he is relying on his own powers of observation or using a colorimeter, a device that reads the average color and temperature of light, the artist employs a scientific method to achieve poetic ends. . . .

Contrary to what one might expect, Finch's efforts toward accuracy- the precise measurements he takes under different conditions and at different times of day- resist, in the end, a definitive result or single empirical truth about his subject. Instead, his dogged method reinforces the fleeting, temporal nature of the observed world, illustrating his own version of a theory of relativity. In Finch's universe if you wait a few hours, the sun may very well change a leaden hue into gold. Like the ancient practitioners of the hermetic arts, who saw changes as the most fundamental truth of the universe, the artist doesn't always provide an answer in his investigations. For Finch art can do more; it can "ignite our capacity for wonder."

taken from here..

about Roger Hiorns

"This often difficult relationship between objects, their materials and industrial, man-made and natural processes and substances runs throughout Hiorns’s work, with past sculptures including detergent-filled ceramics slowly pumping out columns of white foam. He’s also made sculptures using perfume and his own semen. For his next trick, Hiorns will be combining huge ceramic filters used in air conditioners with biological matter from calves’ brains. ‘All these works relate in some way to hygiene and obsessive-compulsiveness and a fear of losing control of one’s personal structures – such as in the brain disease CJD,’ Hiorns explains, ‘so while they’re sculptural objects, they’re also an extension of psychological thought."

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