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Delirium I: the Creator, Alex Da Corte, and Jayson Musson at ICA

admin — Sat, 02 Aug 2014 14:00:38 +0000

Delirium I is the latest instalment in a series of works created by American artist Alex Da Corte in response to Arthur Rimbaud’s seminal poem in prose, A Season in Hell.

It transpires that hell, 140 years after the French poet published his masterpiece, isn’t other people but their mobile phones. According to Da Corte, these devices can act as a portal to our dreams or to a considerably less pleasant place. At David Risley Gallery in Copenhagen, the two rooms of Delirium I used colour, smell, texture and imagery to explore how hope and expectation can turn out to be the stuff of nightmare.

Photo: davidrisleygallery.com

Alex Da Corte was born in Camden, N.J., in 1981 and currently lives and works in Philadelphia. He received his BFA from the University of the Arts and his MFA from Yale University in 2010.

Da Corte has recently mounted solo shows and presentations at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Artspeak, Vancouver; Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Maine; and Nudashank, Baltimore. His work has been shown at MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art and the deCordova Museum, and he has participated extensively in gallery and non-profit exhibitions in the US and internationally.

In 2012, Da Corte was named a Pew Fellow in the Arts by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Philadelphia.

Photo: davidrisleygallery.com

We live in our phones although we sometimes occupy space beside other people. The telephone is our closest ally, the mediator between the present and our projection of the present. It is in some ways a portal to our dreams. It can be a portal to hell if used properly.

Scene One Room One
The viewer (you) enters the room. The smell of Calvin Klein’s Obsession lingers. There is an acrylic tiled floor. Its pattern is a lattice-type grid; the spaces in between the lattice lines are mirror. It appears as if you might have to walk only on the lines for fear of falling into nothingness. There is a green mirror shelf on the wall. As you enter you see yourself in green. You are comforted. You think of money. You are happy with what you see. You are hopeful that you may find someone like that after the opening at the gallery. You walk further into the space because you see a tapestry/quilt with roses on it. You think it’s an Hermes scarf; it makes sense since you are in a fancy part of town. There are beautiful roses on it. You see red. You are lustful. You see a photo of a woman lying on the floor. You pass by the other side of the green mirror shelf. There is a bloody knife on the shelf. You wonder if the woman is okay. She is clutching the beautiful Hermes scarf. You look at the scarf closely. and realize it is covered in blood drops and spiders and scabs. This scarf is in disguise. It is covered in blood drops and spiders and scabs. It is not the silk you imagined it would be, it is a horrible nylon banner, a cheap knockoff, a myth. You didn’t notice the broken eggs on the floor because you were cloudy from the CK perfume. This place is Hell and you hope to wake up. End scene.

Photo: davidrisleygallery.com

Scene Two Room Two
The space is divided by laminated Ikea shelves. There are several knockoff Hermes scarves on the wall. There is food on the shelves and on the scarves. You want to eat it. You see two pictures of your lover. She is your monster and you are her doctor Frankenstein. You have made her all that she is and could be in your mind. You find that you are on the other end of the telephone. You have her by the bolts. You can bring her joy. You understand she is lost without you. You are cocksure. This is your home, your poem, so do what you want. You are in this space and feel comfortable, warm. You are the maker. You believe you are in control now.

Alas, all is not well. You grow hungry in the space and reach for the food. It is rubbery and tart. It provides no comfort. A telephone rings. But you see no phone. It may be your lover calling but you cannot pick up. Maybe she is calling you back. Maybe the love you made is truly the only thing that will cure your Hell. But in dreams, unfortunately, time is long and slow.

Photo: davidrisleygallery.com

Da Corte’s delirious installation is bright, striking and overwhelming. He says, “The stage sets are comprised of quilts, photographs, perfumes, plastic tiles, and sculptures. It is the fifth installment of an ongoing series of work created in relation to ‘A Season in Hell.’”

The poem was written when Rimbaud was just 18, after a tempestuous affair with his contemporary Paul Verlaine. The poem has served as inspiration for artists for over a century, and has been published alongside the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Photo: davidrisleygallery.com

Photo: coolhunting.com

Longtime friends and first-time collaborators Alex Da Corte and Jayson Musson create a major new commission for ICA. Featuring lesser-known strengths in their practices—video for Da Corte and language for Musson—Easternsports is a four-channel, multilingual soap opera starring the artists, both of whom have deep Philadelphia roots. A vignette-driven update of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town—equal parts Peter Greenaway and Jim Henson, David Lynch and Duck Amuck—the work will be presented as an in-the-round video installation.Scripted by Musson and directed by Da Corte, this institutional telenovela willbe developed and filmed in the summer of 2014.

Organized by Assistant Curator Kate Kraczon. Accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Exhibited SEPTEMBER 19–DECEMBER 28, 2014 – at Institute of Contemporary art, University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Alex Da Corte & Jayson Musson: Easternsports, 2014, video still, color, sound.

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Gabriel Orozco at Marian Goodman

admin — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 15:10:50 +0000

The exhibition continues Orozco’s investigation into intersections, mobility, rotation and dispersion. The new works maintain an elegant balance between geometry and the organic, the intentional and the accidental.

In the North Gallery is a new installation titled Inner Cuts, 2014. The installation recombines boomerangs with the scraps of raw wood from which they were carved. The shapes float and hover in the space as if the act of throwing a boomerang has been caught in stages and suspended onto the walls, moving the viewer’s eye and body in a circle around the room. The open, airiness of the gallery is reminiscent of the open field in Bucks County, Pennsylvania where Orozco practices throwing his ever-expanding collection of boomerangs. When considered, the sport makes perfect sense within the terms of his work. A boomerang itself is a curved surface, and when successfully thrown the object cuts through the air in the shape of a broad circle. Orozco recently began designing his own boomerangs, experimenting with the creation of wooden prototypes. Inner Cuts focuses on the leftovers of this process, the shapes organically and accidentally formed from the negative space in the wood.

photo mariangoodman.com

In the North Viewing Room Orozco arranges various objects on display alongside a painting from his new Satellite series. The paintings are created using a slow technical process that employs a machine to spray oil onto the canvas. The process has a blurring effect on the original image of the earth. In the center of the room is a vitrine containing an ashtray Orozco found at a flea market long ago. The ashtray is rounded and displays a map of the earth laid onto a grid pattern. The name of a former owner is etched into the side and the object displays the evidence and traces of many years of use. Within the ashtray Orozco placed a small commemorative replica of Sputnik, the first satellite ever to be launched successfully into space in 1957. The Soviet satellite ushered in many changes and circled the earth for three months before falling from space.

photo flat-surface.com

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New Gravity at Overduin & Co.

admin — Thu, 08 May 2014 09:11:33 +0000

In 2009, the European Space Agency launched the Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) with the intention of mapping Earth’s gravity field
with unrivaled precision, though, according to an ESA press release, nobody really expected
the data to show changes over time.
Gravity has no history is propelled by disaster, lurching forward, like capitalism itself, from one crisis to the next.

photo overduinandco.com

We have drawn together works of art that suggest, envision or are otherwise poised for the next crisis—and what lies beyond.
Some embrace physical or material precariousness, threatening to spill, crash, melt or collapse; others interrogate the instability of the image, quivering, chimerical, infinitely protean. Each in its way offers an extraordinary anticipation.

photo overduinandco.com

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Do Ho Suh Drawings at Lehmann Maupin

admin — Sat, 03 May 2014 09:02:11 +0000

Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present Drawings, an exhibition of new works by renowned Korean artist Do Ho Suh. On display at both 540 West 26th Street and 201 Chrystie Street, the exhibition will highlight the significant role and varied forms drawing plays in Suh’s oeuvre. This two-part show will feature the range of his works on paper, including drawings using pencil, pen, ink, and watercolor, his unique “thread” drawings, as well as his large-scale rubbings. The artist will be present for an opening reception on Thursday, September 11 from 6-8PM, and at a book launch on Saturday, September 13 at 540 West 26th Street from 4-6PM.

photo lehmannmaupin.com

Primarily known for his room-scale installations made of transparent fabric that recreate spaces in which he has lived, the artist has consistently utilized drawing throughout his career to explore and develop relationships between common themes of his practice including notions of home, physical space, displacement, identity, and memory. A focus of this exhibition, and Suh’s most elaborate use of drawing to date, is his Rubbing/Loving Project. Here Suh painstakingly covered the flat walls and three-dimensional fixtures of the interior and exterior of architectural spaces that hold great personal, cultural, or historic significance to him with vellum and rubbed each surface with colored pencil or graphite. These rubbings create imprints of the spaces, uncovering a particular location’s history, memories, and traces of its use.

photo artobserved.com

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Christopher Williams At MoMA

admin — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 08:57:19 +0000

Now at the Museum of Modern Art through November 2nd, 2014, Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness serves as a comprehensive overview of the 35-year-long career of the influential artist. Part of the first wave of West Coast Conceptual artists, Christopher Williams graduated from the California Institute of the Arts and went on to become a preeminent conceptual artist and art professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. His artistic legacy has fervently pursued notions of commercialism, production, capitalism, and process, and the execution of this retrospective very clearly outlines those themes.

photo artobserved.com

Throughout, Williams flows smoothly through ideas of the object and its nature, subverting curatorial signifiers while creating a museum experience that is simultaneously invigorating and jarring. The images on the walls are hung noticeably lower than is customary, and images often repeat themselves, as though the directions for hanging the show had somehow been scrambled. One wall is constructed of cinderblocks, and boasts only one image, while another is boldly interrupted by a line of blue paint, while a photograph hangs directly over the streak. There is also a series of appropriated imagery of John F. Kennedy that seemingly exists in world all its own.

photo artobserved.com

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