Viewing articles from 2017/07

Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street, New York

So I traveled a great deal…

So I traveled a great deal... Installation shot, 2017

Featuring six Northern California artists, So I traveled a great deal... is organized by the artist Vincent Fecteau and the curator Jordan Stein, and reflects their interest in the lesser-known, the ahead-of-its-time, the hard-to-classify, the ecstatic, the hermetic, and the strange.

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PM/AM, 259-269 Old Marylebone Road, London NW1 5RA

Ivar Wigan: Young Love

Aligator Pond, 2015

PM/AM’s current exhibition, Young Love, showcases a new body of work by Ivar Wigan documenting two years spent living within the dancehall communities of Jamaica.

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New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002, USA

Kaari Upson: Good thing you are not alone

Kaari Upson: Good Thing You Are Not Alone, 2017. New Museum, New York.

‘Good thing you are not alone’, the Los Angeles-based artist Kaari Upson’s first solo museum exhibition in New York City’s New Museum, immediately follows her also having participated and contributed to the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2017 Biennial, which took place not too far uptown in Manhattan. Timing aside, the exhibition is also notable for its size, promising to be of particular interest in providing a glimpse into what Upson’s been up to in the last number of years, especially since having possibly moved on from the monumental ‘Larry Project’, an omnipresence in her practice since the early 2000s. Review by Arthur Ivan Bravo

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The Power Plant, 231 Queens Quay W, Toronto, ON M5J 2G8, Canada

Ydessa Hendeles: The Milliner’s Daughter

Ydessa Hendeles, detail from THE BIRD THAT MADE THE BREEZE TO BLOW (Aero-Car No. 500), 2011. Automaton sculpture with key, displayed in mahogany-and-glass vitrine, 511 x 253 x 369 cm.

In her solo show currently on at The Power Plant, Ydessa Hendeles performs the simultaneous roles of collector, curator and artist. ‘The Milliner’s Daughter’ is a complex exhibition showcasing Hendeles’ interest in fables and stories. Her work investigates how narratives, from cultural narratives to fairy tales, inform our individual and collective identities and structure our perceptions of the world. Emma Rae Warburton reviews

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Manchester International Festival, various venues

Manchester International Festival

What is the City but the People launch event for Manchester International Festival.

Incorporating a programme of music, dance, theatre and contemporary art, Manchester International Festival is expansive. With daily broadcasts by BBC 6 Music’s Radcliffe and Maconie and regular email updates on what to do at MIF landing in my inbox, it can be difficult to find one’s own way into and through the programme beyond the mediated story of the festival with its pervasive marketing and slick imagery. Yet perhaps this very mediation provides an additional facet to the theme of storytelling that seems to echo throughout MIF’s varied programme. Laura Mansfield reviews

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Chisenhale Gallery, 64 Chisenhale Rd, London E3 5QZ

Luke Willis Thompson: autoportrait

Luke Willis Thompson, autoportrait, 2017. Installation view, Chisenhale Gallery 2017.

‘autoportrait’ is an eight minute and 50 second 35mm black and white film produced collaboratively between artist Luke Willis Thompson and its subject, Diamond Reynolds. It is also intended as a ‘sister image’ to the video documenting the fatal shooting of her partner, Philando Castile, by a police officer in Minnesota, which she broadcast via Facebook Live on 6 July 2016 and which has consumed Reynolds’s identity over the past year. Review by Alice Bucknell

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39 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

concrete realities

concrete realities, 2017, installation view, Bortolami, New York

Bortolami’s current exhibition, concrete realities, is a two-person exhibition by Tom Burr and Andrea Zittel. Since the 1990s, Burr and Zittel have trained their attention on the built environment, addressing questions of site-specificity, subjectivity, and the body. This exhibition focuses on their ongoing projects in sites outside of art world centres, which find the artists developing distinct, but congruent methods of tackling their overlapping spatial concerns.

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Helper Projects, 495 Rogers Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11225

Bonded Warehouse

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Alina Tenser and Chris Domenick’s latest sculptural and performance work is currently on view at Helper Projects, New York.

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De La Warr Pavilion, Marina, Bexhill-on-Sea TN40 1DP

Simon Patterson: Safari: an exhibition as expedition

Simon Patterson, rehearsal of Seascape, 2017, with Bexhill Sailing Club

Simon Patterson’s ‘An Exhibition As Expedition’ takes you on a discursive and peripatetic journey, one which is immaterially played out in the mind of the visitor as they traverse the De Le Warr Pavilion. While doing this the artist sets out to undermine traditional bodies of 'stable' knowledge such as maps, museums and archives. Suggesting that meanings, not just in the world of art, are always in a state of shape shifting flux and that truth is just another strange sub-genre of fiction. Review by Matthew Turner

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Scotland Pavilion, Chiesa di Santa Caterina, Fondamenta Santa Caterina, 30121, Cannaregio

Venice Biennale 2017: Rachel Maclean: Spite Your Face

Installation view, Rachel Maclean, Spite Your Face, 2017.

The large portrait format screen in place of the altar of the deconsecrated church creates an ambience of a religious service and the audience are made to sit in pews. Maclean's previous work has taken Old Testament stories retelling them as contemporary fables that poked fun at cults and fads. 'Spite Your Face' presents the story of Pinocchio – one of those children's tales that having only known from the cleaned up Disney version is far darker than I assumed. Review by Piers Masterson

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Tenderpixel, 8 Cecil Court, London WC2N 4HE

CONGLOMERATE: Station ID

CONGLOMERATE, Still from Desde el Jardin, directed by Sol Calero and Dafna Maimon, 2016.

An elaborate installation is the ‘absurdly complicated’ stage-set for the newest piece of ‘Gesamkunstwerk’ by Berlin-based artist collective CONGLOMERATE, presented at Tenderpixel as their first London-based project. The group comprises a core squadron of 5 artists and filmmakers including Sol Calero, Ethan Hayes-Chute, Derek Howard, Christopher Kline and Dafna Maimon, converging and disbanding at will in different cities and contexts in order to produce 30-minute ‘Blocks’ of programming that make a mess of traditional genres. Review by Alice Bucknell

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