Mira Dancy: Up and Coming: In London, Paris, and New York, Mira Dancy’s Nudes Reclaim the Female Body
Article: Up and Coming: In London, Paris, and New York, Mira Dancy’s Nudes Reclaim the Female Body
"When Mira Dancy entered undergrad at Bard College in 1997, it wasn’t for painting. “I went there with the intention of studying writing and poetry, but the art teachers were totally electrifying,” she says, sitting in her high-ceilinged Gowanus cubicle amid black-and-white murals and colorful paintings of muscular female nudes, diving or in states of languorous repose. “Amy Sillman and Elizabeth Murray were two of my first painting teachers. Working with them versus the professors in the poetry department—who were mostly 80-year-old men? They just had this energy.” more at Artsy
Dana Schutz: DANA SCHUTZ Fight in an Elevator
Article: DANA SCHUTZ Fight in an Elevator
"In her twelve new paintings currently on view at Petzel’s Chelsea location, Dana Schutz surprises her audience yet again with exuberant pictures that simultaneously depart from, and are consistent with, her previous work. Narrative, humor, and saturated color remain tantamount, and her figures’ faces still look as if they’ve been made from Sculpey. In this new body of work, though, she constructs more dynamic spaces in order to deliver her wonky narratives. Space becomes a substitute for time, allowing us to glimpse a bustling scene or to observe multiple, concurrent moments colliding and overlapping across her large canvases.
In a 2012 interview in the Rail, Schutz described the complexity of narrative in painting: “It’s interesting to think how narrative works in a painting—it’s not dictated in real time, but it does have its own time. So you can read the painting and it can unfold, but in a slightly different way for everyone. Because paintings are typically still, it’s awkward to think of them as time-based.”1 Media like film and novels string together moments to create a narrative. It occurs over time, offers causality, and predetermines a set viewing speed. Paintings, as Schutz points out, are “typically still,” showing a singular moment, a frozen present, rather than a story that involves past, present, and future.
In her pre-2012 work, the magical weirdness of her fantastical vignettes occurred in a fictional yet recognizable world populated by recognizably human characters. They were mostly unaware of the viewer and engaged in horrific activities, like eating their own faces. Schutz also maintained a clear distinction between figure and ground in her compositions, and continues to work in this mode intermittently. In the hilarious, and completely accurate, Swiss Family Traveling(2015), Schutz places her subject in a familiar context, still delineating figure (a family with roller bag and map) from ground (airport). Larger than life, they stand close to the edge of the picture plane, and the airport recedes in deep space behind. When Schutz prioritizes her figures, we focus on the interpersonal relationships, rather than the places they inhabit: the disinterested mom, the stunned son, the sulky teenage girl, and the confrontational character who looms behind.
In the earliest and largest painting in the show, Assembling an Octopus (2013), Schutz abandons any consistent perspectival structure and intentionally blurs figure-ground relationships to incorporate unlikely, concurrent situations. By painting this picture wet-on-wet, Schutz suggests that random, unrelated actions all occur at the same time, at the same densely crowded beach. All portions of the painting feel equally important, especially because Schutz’s figures grow in size near the top of the canvas, completely eliminating any sense of receding, familiar space.
Schutz squeezes multiple vignettes together, her characters bumping into physical boundaries. A man steps over the sandbox’s wooden slats, which meet at unlikely angles in the bottom quadrant; students draw on the disjointed paper on easels, a doctor examines her patient’s tongue as a beach ball flies toward them; a young boy stares at a woman’s vagina. By cropping her figures and by blocking portions of the painting with the students’ drawings, Schutz creates a dynamic composition that allows us to navigate and connect a multiplicity of colliding, concurrent moments." more at brooklynrail.org
Margolles: Common Thread: Teresa Margolles at the Neuberger Museum of Art
Article: Common Thread: Teresa Margolles at the Neuberger Museum of Art
"Six pieces of embroidered cloth—the smallest about as big as a baby blanket, the largest the size of a bedspread—lie on flat plinths, waist high, illuminated from underneath in the otherwise lightless room that houses Margolles’s “We Have a Common Thread” at the Neuberger Museum of Art. The works aren’t protected by glass, and it’s easy to lean over to observe the stitching, getting close to the material. One barely notices the spotty discoloration in the first two encountered in the room, but by the third, the rusty stains become more pronounced—the mark that blood leaves on fabric.
Five of the six tapestries bear these stains. Margolles acquired cloths from Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Brazil, and Mexico, and each carries the dna of a person (mostly female) who died a violent death in a crime that was mishandled, or even ignored. Margolles returned each marked fabric to the victim’s community, where a group of artisans worked over it using decorative methods specific to that region. A sixth textile was created in New York, but instead of blood, this one bears an imprint of the ground, with small scraps of detritus and scuffs from being pressed and dragged along the section of concrete in Staten Island where Eric Garner lost his life in July 2014 after a mishandled arrest by New York City police officers."
more at blouinartinfo.com
Wiley: Artist Kehinde Wiley Explains Why Empire Is So Successful
Article: Artist Kehinde Wiley Explains Why Empire Is So Successful
When one of Empire‘s masterminds, creator and director Lee Daniels, asked New York-based artist Kehinde Wiley to be a part of the show, he added—according to Wiley—”[The show] will either be the hugest success or the biggest car wreck known to man.”
And we all know how that turned out. Empire was one of the highest-rated shows on television last season, edged out in its demographic only by Monday Night Football. And its season 2 premiere is highly anticipated. The show stars Terrence Howard as the head of Empire Entertainment and Taraji P. Henson as his ex-wife newly released from prison. Together—and sometimes in opposition to each other—they work to make the record label the stuff of legend.
Kehinde Wiley’s art—colorful, bold and attention-grabbing—graces the walls of the Empire set, earning him a growing following on social media.
“I get tons and tons of comments from people who knew nothing about my work, much less the work of some of my peers, ” he said, “and by virtue of this little television show, it’s starting to change the conversation.”
Wiley believes Empire is a reflection of America. “It’s music, it’s panache, it’s love of art and bling. America is Empire. The surprise was that Empire is also seeded with levels of complexity that people had not expected.”
Watch the video above to see why Wiley thinks Empire is blowing up.
Renée Cox, Chitra Ganesh: 13 Artists Explore Female Empowerment in American Art
Article: 13 Artists Explore Female Empowerment in American Art
(The Creators Project)
The exhibition features an array of female artists—Jaishri Abichandani, Renée Cox, Ayana Evans, FlucT, Angela Fraleigh, Chitra Ganesh, Rachel Mason, Marilyn Minter, Sophia Narrett, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, Michele Pred, Ventiko, and Shoshanna Weinberger—who each use their art practices to critically consider the past and future of feminism in American culture. “Each artist gracefully embraces the topic in a way that elevates women, hence the title, (em)power,” explains Jampol. “Michele Pred's blinking vintage purses tell the tale of the fight of ownership over one's body and ongoing lessons in women's rights. Shoshanna Weinberger's large scale painting, Backlit Smoker, glorifies bedroom pleasures. And Angela Fraleigh explores fantasy, sexuality and nostalgia in large-scale, heavily gold-leafed canvases unveiling what never was.”
Razvan Boar: Stump Lunch by Razvan Boar
Article: Stump Lunch by Razvan Boar
"Introducing the young pretender, Razvan Boar.
Coming fresh off recent solo exhibitions including ‘Inanimate Objects Obey My Thought!’ and various exhibits across the US and his native Romania, Razvan’s latest project, titled Stump Lunch, is a series of paintings highlighting an eclectic cast of characters. Layered amongst geometric patterns of circles, diagonals and framing devices the characters take on their own identity that enchant the eye time after time.
Fading in and out of the abstract ground of the canvasses are mesmeric scenes from an imaginary park inhabited by joyful holiday makers, animals and natural elements of the landscape.
The title Stump Lunch, suggests a benevolent picnic spot- that acts as a quiet place of contemplation while walking through the forest. Simultaneously, the tree stump doubles as the site of playful activity- a table, stage or treehouse per say.
Boar’s inventive eye and innovative approach covers surrealism and fantasy in his own trademark, lucid style. Encapsulated perfectly in Stump Lunch, where Boar’s canvases set forth a mythology that invites mystery and allegory into play.
Be sure to check out Razvan Boar’s Stump Lunch Exhibit this month at Ibid. London, showcasing until 3rdOctober 2015."
Pedro Reyes: Pedro Reyes' Ambitious Installation Opens At Turner Contemporary
Article: Pedro Reyes' Ambitious Installation Opens At Turner Contemporary
"This autumn Turner Contemporary presents the second installation in its Sunley Gallery as part of The Year of Mexico 2015 with Pedro Reyes’ Disarm (Mechanised), 2012. Disarm (Mechanized) is an ambitious installation, comprising of 8 mechanical musical instruments, resulting from Pedro Reyes’ international project in which illegal firearms were used to fabricate musical instruments. This is the first time Disarm (Mechanized) has been exhibited in a UK public gallery.
Musical instruments were created from firearms, including revolvers, shot-guns and machine-guns, which were crushed by tanks and steamrollers to render them useless. These were offered to the artist by the Mexican government following their confiscation and subsequent public destruction in the city of Ciudad, Juarez. From the 6,700 destroyed weapons the artist received from the Mexican Secretary of Defence, Reyes created two groups of instruments including Disarm. This installation of mechanical musical instruments can either be automated or played live by an individual operator using a laptop computer or midi keyboard. Disarm (Mechanized) will be automated to play in Turner Contemporary’s Sunley Gallery at intervals throughout the duration of the installation period.
For Pedro Reyes the process of transforming weapons into objects of positive utility was more than physical. “It’s important to consider that many lives were taken with these weapons; as if a sort of exorcism was taking place, the music expelled the demons they held, as well as being a requiem for the lives lost.”" more at Artylst
