Sampling at the Contemporary Arts Center

Be ready to spend a few hours at the Contemporary Arts Center to discover or rediscover twenty-four artists from far places like China, South Africa or closer to home Louisiana, gathered for Prospect.3: Notes for Now. The works were selected by Frank Sirmans, the Artistic Director of the biennial (now officially a triennial), due to their power to incite a reflection on "the everydayness and the strangeness of the world around us, to bridge fissures in the past-present and to imagine the possibilities of an interconnected future".
The three floors at the CAC are filled with paintings, videos, photographs, installations, and the visit can start or end anywhere. Each artist is assigned an area, with the exception of Analia Saban whose works are randomly dispersed throughout the exhibition. I started in the oval room where Yun-Fei Ji's wall paintings depict a modern tale of population displacement and urbanization on a backdrop of droughts, starvation, pollution and political corruption. On the second floor, two geometric abstract painters set across each other initiate a conversation. McArthur Binion's paintings are characterized by monotonous colors and labor intensive repetitive marks on the canvas. They represent erasure and rebirth through delicate compositions, legacies of the menial work.  Hayal Pozanti on the other hand, transforms the dullness of technology into a new language of organic shapes, bringing life and fantasy to a boring reality. Following these, Douglas Bourgeois's figurative paintings seem easy to interpret. Like a magician, he transports common souls into a perfect world of artificial happiness and transforms their dreary surroundings into fantastic landscapes. Next, Sophie Lvoff and Lisa Sigal are focusing on the local scene, respectively with photographs and through architectural adventures.
Tank, 2014, Glenn Kaino's installation is attracting visitors with corals in clear water glowing in a bluish light. A lengthy wall text describes the work and provides a cue to the title. The cumbersome technology required to keep the corals alive undermines the project which is focused on the oceans' pollution, especially by the military, a subject somewhat off the exhibition's theme. The show gets back on track with Joe Ray's work, a thought provoking juxtaposition of symbols followed by the images from Thomas Joshua Cooper, a photographer of light.
Among the four videos displayed (two on second and two on the third floor) Mohamed Bourouissa's Temps Morts, 2009, held my attention with its depiction of grey, fuzzy, pixelated Paris's outskirts, reflecting the malaise of marginalized populations. On the same floor, one can see Felliniesque photographs from Pieter Hugo, staged scenes by Pushpamala N., the Cyndy Sherman of India, or the installation from Manal Al Dowayan, a historical view of a culture born from the oil boom.
Leaving through the first floor, one cannot miss the installation from Lucia Koch, giving a new outlook on the street through colored glass. The works selected to represent Theaster Gates in the hall include Civil Tapestry-4, 2011, an accumulation of fire hoses previously used during civil unrest, and two monochrome paintings made with tar and rubber playing with the light reflections.
The number of works and artists make such exhibition challenging for the viewer. Political with Charles Gaines, poetic with Thomas Cooper, feminist with Pushpamala N., epic with Yun Fei-Ji..., but one realizes that the works have been selected carefully to fulfill the goals clearly stated by the curator.

photographs by the author:

"The Family Drone", 2014, Hayal Pozanti
"TC/0168.13 (Anthropophagst Wading in the Artibonite River", 2014, Firelei
"Mood Disorder", 2014, Lucia Koch

At Prospect.3

Hayal Pozanti

Hayal Pozanti was born in 1983 in Istanbul, Turkey, obtained a BA in Visual Arts and Communication Design at Sabanci University in Istanbul and an MFA in 2011 in painting/printmaking at Yale where she studied with Peter Halley. She is presently living in New York City.
Collecting images found on the Internet, she started making digital collages that referenced the visual culture issued from the new tool and created digital collages.
Multilingual and with a background in graphic design, she developed a cross-cultural "alphabet" composed of 31 letters born from a single image inspired by the formats in which we receive digital images: the 4:3 ratio of iPhone screens and the 612 pixel square Instagram image, creating an abstract universal language born from simple shapes like a circle or square.  
Hayal Pozanti states her goal “To me, the world of the screen is an infinite universe of daydreams, much like the Surrealists aimed to reconcile the world of dreams and reality, I would like to explore the possibility of inventing a new reality from the merging of the virtual and the tactile.”

studio visit from the Paris Review
review from the Los Angeles Times
Jessica Silverman Gallery



Mohamed Bourouissa

Mohamed Bourouissa is a well known photographer who has chosen to depict the tensions and issues affecting daily life of young people living in the suburbs of France. Born in 1978 in Blida, Algeria, he currently lives and works in Paris. He graduated in Visual Arts from the Sorbonne in 2004 and from the photography department of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. His documentary-style images are careful compositions influenced by traditional paintings from Masters like Caravaggio, Delacroix or Géricault. After planning the elaborate scenes in note and sketches to the minute details, the artist allows a chance to hazard and hopes for the unexpected, catching emotions and ultimately the threat of violence. While depicting stereotypes about life in the suburbs of Paris and other cities in France, the artist explores the social and economic issues of the surroundings in which he grew up.
His work has been presented in a number of solo and group exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, the Palais de Tokyo, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Palazzo Grassi – François Pinault Foundation in Venice, the MAXXI in Rome, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the SCAD of Atlanta, the Finnish Museum of Photography of Helsinki, the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, the Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, the Nikolaj Kunsthal of Copenhagen, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art of Berlin, as well as during the Berlin Biennale and the 2011 International Biennale of Contemporary Art in Venice. He is represented by Galerie Kamel Mennour in Paris.

press release Yossi Milo Gallery
biography
review Art in America


Piero Golia

Piero Golia, born in 1974 in Naples, Italy, is a conceptual artist based in Los Angeles where he has lived and worked since 2002. He studied engineering at Universitá Federico II. His work is defined by "constant accuracy" and humor. From the outset of his career, Golia’s principal focus has been the theatrical and the conceptual in art, specifically supreme gestures and the completion of seemingly impossible acts. As artist, organizer, teacher, innovator, and catalyst for broad experimentation in culture, Piero Golia celebrates the paradox of seriousness and its impossibility. In his practice, the artist pushes situations to absurdity and erases the boundaries between reality and fiction, the real becomes unreal and the fictive becomes plausible.
A solo exhibition “Double Tumble or the Awesome Twins,” was presented at the Stedeljik Museum, Amsterdam in 2010. His work has been shown in major exhibitions in the United States and Europe, including “The Gold Standard,” P.S.1, New York (2007); “Vesuvius,” Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2007); “Artist’s Museum,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art (2010), and “Premio Italia,” Museo MaXXi, Rome (2011). In 2004, his film Killer Shrimps was selected for the Venice Film Festival. Golia founded the Los Angeles-based Mountain School of Arts with Eric Wesley in 2005.

Gagosian Gallery
blog Ceci n'est pas...
biography