Top Shows of 2009! part 3

JUSTIN LIEBERMAN : THE CORRECTOR IN THE HIGH CASTLE @ Zach Feuer Gallery

The Corrector in The High Castle is a sculptural tableau vivant inspired by Nobusuke Tagomi, the protagonist of Philip K. Dick's prophetic novel, The Man in The High Castle. The book posits a fictional future fifty years after Germany and Japan defeat the Allied forces in World War II. The gallery installation depicts the domestic interior of an apartment inhabited by Tagomi, a Japanese collector of American (and occasionally European) pop cultural artifacts, who is afflicted with a severe case of neotoma. His illicit collections of comic books, newspapers, VHS cassettes, records, Beanie Babies, lunchboxes, baseball cards, toys and other ephemera are piled everywhere, and like the Corrector himself, seem frozen in amber. Nearly everything in the installation is covered in a thick coating of clear acrylic resin, which drips off the collections in thick clear stalactites. The only exception to this are the objects Lieberman designates as placeholders, a term used by completists to refer to the homemade replicas they themselves make to fill in missing gaps in their collections. In the case ofThe Corrector in the High Castle, most of the items in the collections themselves will be junk; the placeholders, on the contrary, will be hand-made replicas of extremely rare artifacts. Included in these sets are a Gutenberg Bible in a Plexiglas case, the inverted Jenny 1¢ stamp, The Beatles'Yesterday and Today album with first state Butcher Block cover and the Princess Diana Beanie Baby. Each of these placeholders is flawed in one of two ways. In some cases the placeholder is not a replica of the original artifact itself but of a later reproduction of this artifact; in other cases Lieberman employs caricature and other illustrational motifs to differentiate the placeholder from the original.

Justin Lieberman was born in 1977 in Gainesville, Florida. He lives and works in upstate New York. This is his third solo exhibition at Zach Feuer Gallery. In celebration of the concurrent shows at Zach Feuer Gallery and Marc Jancou Contemporary, JRP Ringier will publish a monograph on Justin Lieberman's work.

Nevan Lahart : Ugly Love @ Kevin Kavanagh

Blah Blah Blah

Circumventing the narrative

Gobble-d-gook, Gobble-d-gook,

non linguistic forms of

Yady, Yady, Ya.

active forces that

Blah Blah’s

subjective subliminal perception

yiddy, yiddy, ya

Contextualises the context of underlying structures

That navigate empathetic analoguious analogues

Ummmm………………………………………………………………………Interesting

Put simply, Nevan won’t stray too far from flowers.

Top Shows of 2009! part 2

Banks Violette : Not Yet Titled@ Team Gallery

Team is pleased to present an exhibition of new drawings, alongside one sculpture, by the New York-based Banks Violette. The exhibition will run from the 7th of May through the 20th of June 2009. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, between Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor. Sculptor Banks Violette has always referred to his drawings as “film cells from the world’s slowest movie.” As with the cinema, meaning does not adhere solely to individual images but rather to their accretion over time. Viewed singly, these exquisitely rendered pictures seem miraculous transfigurations of realism, but when seen in groups they form a continuous landscape of memory, regret and melancholy. The iconography on which Violette built this show includes the ace of spades, a grinning skull from a B-movie campaign, a famous Vietnam-era image of human suffering, a roadside death shrine, discarded party balloons, a theater spotlight, and the Crimson Ghost from the 1940s Republic film serial. When taken together, the drawings touch on themes of redemption and faith, death and transformation. Central to the exhibition is a portrait of Bela Lugosi as Jesus Christ. Before coming to the U.S. to make his name as the cinema's most famous vampire, the Hungarian actor made his living playing the lead in passion plays. Violette’s Dracula/Christ manages to take the perceived goodness and suffering of the Jesus figure and "confuse" them with the monstrous evil that Lugosi would so successfully embody as the Count. Lugosi's well-documented drug addiction and late-period decline into poverty and obscurity are also clearly a part of what attracts Violette to this image. A seemingly benign religious portrait, in Violette’s hands, becomes a container for Hollywood’s lies, America’s morbid fascination with disposable celebrity, and our constant need to construct mythologies of total success and absolute failure. Violette’s drawings are also, at their very core, terribly American works of art, a fact foregrounded here by an eight by four foot drawing of the U.S. flag rendered in black and white and mounted onto a slab of aluminum which is then simply propped against the wall. This monolith helps underline the physicality of Violette’s drawings – images struggle to the surface from a dense mass of graphite applied sometimes laboriously and vigorously; sometimes with a gentle and persuasive sensitivity. The show’s lone sculpture is a motorcycle that has been cast entirely in resin and salt. The stark white presence will be paired with a drawing of a shrine left at a scene where someone had died in a motorcycle crash. The way in which the image has been rendered makes the drawing seem to appear and disappear as one looks at it. A very strange sense pervades that you are both looking at something specific and looking at nothing at all. Violette’s drawings are always coming together and falling apart in the eye of the spectator. Soft edges, hardened into image through cognition, vanish into nothingness and slip from legibility. Violette’s work, sometimes crushingly monumental and brutally hard-edged, always sopresent, is actually, delicately, about the “after” of things. It is not the photo-realistic clarity of the drawings that gives them their power but rather the way in which they remain vague and unreal impressions with a ghost-like presence. The commemorative and the evidentiary, posed as poetry and prose, have remained central in Violette’s work. The contradictory and the elusive are the continent of his travels. If one looks for the development in Violette’s work one finds a movement towards abstraction: from his earlier works, which sprang from specific social, usually criminal, phenomenon to his most recent investigations of staging and the spectacular as vessels of oblivion.

MICHAËL BORREMANS : Taking Turns @ David Zwirner

For the current show at David Zwirner, Borremans has created five new paintings and is presenting three films: The Feeding, The Storm, and Taking Turns.

For this exhibition, the gallery (519 West 19th Street) has been divided into two relatively equal spaces. Upon entering the first space, a 35mm film projector shows a loop of The Storm as a large-scale projection, reaching close to 15 feet in height and 23 feet in width on the gallery wall. In the film, three black men, wearing identical cream-colored uniforms (a mix of work clothes and stage costumes), are sitting slumped in chairs in the corner of a white, empty room. The harsh light of a naked bulb alters the shot by modifying the intensity of the shadows moving imperceptibly on the surface of the wall.1

The second gallery space introduces an intimate presentation of two other 35mm films, The Feeding and Taking Turns, both which have been transferred to DVDs and viewed within wall-mounted wooden frames. The films are shown alongside the exhibition’s five oil on canvas paintings: The Apron, Earthlight Room, The Load, The Load (II), The Load (III).

In The Feeding, the three figures from The Storm reappear, standing around enormous reams of white cardboard that give the impression of levitating above a table covered with a spotless cloth in the middle of a room.2 In Taking Turns, a woman holds the torso of a life-sized mannequin, and slowly moves and spins the torso on top of a horizontal surface. There is an ambiguity between what is real and what is artificial, as their two faces and figures overlap and rotate in the film’s frames. Once again, the theme of the double, or the doppelganger, is a device encountered throughout Borremans’ oeuvre.3

Formally and thematically, Borremans’ films are closely related to his two-dimensional work. They are shifting ‘tableaux vivants’ with poetic titles, in which the artist very gradually, with subtle camera work, creates an oppressive atmosphere. He uses a fixed camera position or deliberately zooms in on certain details of the scenery, body parts, faces, or clothing. With slight light-dark fluctuations, flowing edited shots or the repetition of certain actions, Borremans builds up a gripping but subdued suspense.

Top Shows of 2009! (in no particular order) part 1

Brendan Earley - Ghosts of the Future @ Mother's Tankstation

Nothing can be neglected. There are no poetic objects, as opposed to others that are not. Genuine purity has nothing to do with the choice of objects but more of means: it is that which courageously faces up to the harshness and impurities of the world, and returns to the light of day having lost nothing of its whiteness. The poet has a right to all words, as the artist has a right to all imagery and the architect to all materials: their only sin would be a lack of love for some fragment of the universe.1

A pyschoanalist might take pains to point out that Brendan Earley’s art is unrelentingly optomistic, in its (near compulsive) need to fix broken things, to make things right, or to map routes through shifting spaces that are almost impossible to navigate – like abandoned cities or JG Ballard’s disused space station2. This desire to search out ‘the good in things’ is evident in the particular taxonomic passion Earley exhibits for clumsy bits of off-cut timber or discarded fragments of styrofoam packaging, which he transmutes into sculptural objects and architectronic installations of piognant delicacy. Most of us would, evidently mistakenly, overlook or find little poetry therein, but life is of course rewardingly richer when another’s passion for entropic structures shows us an alternate and ultimately happier way of seeing bits of our shared and mostly grumpy world.

Looking through an ecological eye, Earley’s work suggests that it is perhaps time to raise the standard of ‘enough’ – as in; there is enough in the world already, thank you! – by fixing things that are broken rather then throwing them away and getting new ones. An anecdotal example from Earley’s recent artistic history illustrates this point well: Earley’s exquisite temporary sculpture ‘Large Complex’, built for the Douglas Hyde project in 2008, was constructed from a flat-pack IKEA kitchen, once the exhibition was over the sculpture reverted to its former and originally intended state and was advertised in a local free paper as an ‘unassembled’ kitchen available for ‘free’ pick-up. The kitchen’s perverted natural path was properly re-aligned and now resides in service somewhere in Kildare - with just a few surprising holes, otherwise continuing its secret life as a conceptual sculpture.

This new body of work epitomizes Earley’s sensibility of weltmodesty. He employs restraint and compromise and marries it to a sense of resignation and even a slight amount of dissatisfaction and sadness, but carries on regardless with a self-evident pleasure in the application of ‘craft’ techniques for their own sake, his objects appear just happy ‘to be’, content in an engagement with the here and now. This same sentiment can be found in Earley’s large drawings, made up of thousands of strokes from black markers. Process is paramount in the overall effect of the drawing and rather than attempting to depict specific buildings, he considers them as architectural in themselves. The constant rhythm of a pen on paper renders a space not unlike that space made by a building, creating a border, a safe place.

Earley’s sculptures, installations and drawings have a nostalgic patina of botched Utopia about them, mustering a quiet critique of familiar, more heroic kinds of angular, muscular, modernist hegemony. The architectonic structures in his works are frequently informed physically by echoes of large and futuristic, or ‘visionary’ kinds of architecture, such as Michel Heizer’s ‘Complex One’, built in the Nevada desert, that which commonly alludes more to an idealized future, or even science fiction rather than the prosaic present. In comparison, Earley’s consciously impoverished and self-effacing restorative acts – reinforcing, refacing, repairing, etc…. usually employing the commonest of common building materials; reclaimed timber, styrofoam and plasterboard, return unloved, ‘unreported’ objects3, from a lost state of grace. Earley professes to worry about the future and as a hedge-bet against impeding dissastor tries to make do with the present, remaking the future out of the past, or as Fredric Jameson has put it: “…transform[ing] the present into the past of something yet to come.”

Earley cites a conversation with his former sculpture professor, Robert Morris as formative in the conception and direction of his current practice: Morris suggests that objects, which are plain and unadorned, tend to be universal and accommodating. “I asked him a question as he was going out the door. It had been on my mind all semester after some lengthy debates concerning the health of post-modernism, now that it seemed to be going the way of Modernism. “Bob, what’s next?” I asked. After a brief consideration he replied, “ Emmm, I think this is it.”

Brendan Earley studied sculpture at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin and combined media at Hunter College, New York as the recipient of a Fulbright Award. He has exhibited major installational projects at The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Void, Derry; Pallas Heights and Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin. Ghosts of the Future is his first solo show at mother’s tankstation.

1 Jean Rousselot, ‘L’Evangile selon Rainer Maira Rilke’, in Les Lettres Nouvelles, 1952

2 For this first solo show at mother’s tankstation, Brendan Earley has employed the lens of narrative, JG Ballard’s classic short story; Reports from an Unidentified Space Station. Wherein the protagonist lands on a small space station to make repairs. Although it initially appears as a station of insignificance proportion, through the course of the story it is discovered that it is actually of immense size and mutating form. Once the crew starts to explore their new home they venture further into the strange interior where spatial kinks in the architecture lead the narrator to speculate that one is really a solitary voyager, moving through vast areas of transport lounges full of stacked furniture waiting for the next crowd to disembark. The story highlights ideas of obsolescence and what has been described as the redemptive potential of out-moded practices and forms. An audio work occupies the first gallery of Earley’s installation, with Ballard’s text read aloud by the artist and theorist, Brian O’Doherty. The narrative unlocks the potential of the central work in the show, that of a sculpture which uses the very fabric of the space (apparently) to complete or fix itself, becoming new every time it is shown.

3 The acknowledgement of our relationship to consumer goods allows the real, the social and the weird to merge into sculptures that reference or employ what Ed Ruscha once described as the ‘unreported artifacts’ of the urban landscape.

Petri Ala-Maunus - There is a place in heaven for me and my kind @ Mother's Tankstation

Although Petri Ala-Maunus (born Finland 1970) is best known for his expansive production of awe-inspired sunsets rendered lovingly onto everyday objects, the keys that actually unlock his greater conceptual practice are music and popular culture incisively negotiated with satirical wit.

“Visual artist has never been my number one profession. I have always rather wanted to be a rockstar. Unfortunately I can’t sing, let alone play any instrument. I’m incompetent in music and too lazy to practise. But the sex, drugs and rock’n-roll lifestyle has always been very fascinating for me, a distant dream, which may be far from the truth. Endless tours around the world, and all you have seen in the end are hotel rooms. What a life! Still, to release a record is every boy’s dream. Like to build your own house is for every man. You have to make something of your own that will stay forever.
I’m almost 40, which means that I’m about 25 years late to start learning any instrument. That’s a fact. But a few years back I made a surprising discovery from an old c-tape of mine, a song which I have made when I was 16 years old! I used to have a guitar, which I never learned to play or even get in tune. I made this one song, just wanted to hear what my playing sounded like. This year I decided to release the only song that I have ever made. It may be my last chance to feel even a bit like a rockstar. I don’t have time to learn to play any instrument, make songs, play live, release a single or CD. I want to go straight to the top. I want to release a tribute LP so that real musicians make versions of my song!
With this record, I have a feeling that I have achieved something in my life. I don’t know any other musicians who have made only one song in their lifetime and released a tribute LP from this song. I haven’t built my own house, but at least I have released a record!
I want to thank all the invited musicians for making my dream come true. They have turned my song into some really great versions, which make this record a true tribute to one boy’s teenage dream”.

Petri Ala-Maunus (sleeve notes to the eponymous tribute vinyl LP, Oh Baby, Baby, Baby, Baby, 2009)

For the past ten years Ala-Maunus has hooked himself up to metal music and painted meticulous images from his imagination. However, during this time he has also been gestating alternative subversive plans. Much of Ala-Maunus’ practice pivots around characterisations wherein he explores the potential of the melancholic lone outsider trapped within the confines of the social world. He has created a number of alter egos where he re-invents himself as a smooth, black-haired Tango King or a karaoke-singing Little Heidi.

In this new body of work, There is a place in heaven for me and my kind (made for his second mother’s tankstation exhibition), Ala-Maunus looks forward to his own past, re-inventing a new possibility for an old self. He has invited favoured metal bands to re-create – or re-invent – his one and only musical composition, Oh Baby, Baby, Baby, Baby. In addition to losing a projected self in the actualised imagined possibility of his own music, Ala-Maunus adds his passion for masked Mexican wrestling into the mix. Much of Ala-Maunus’ time is spent developing work on international studio residencies and a recent period spent in Mexico is made manifest in the remarkable canvas, Metal Paradise, painted to the scale and almost in the manner of a grand history painting. It depicts himself and ‘others of his kind’, clad in wreslting outfits and metal postures in a perfect Claudian paradise landscape. Other lost musical artistes from the real past are reconfigured by Ala-Maunus into his preferred conception of the musical present by his overprinting of their LP covers to attune them to his model metal world.