Back to the Future

The threatened land of South Louisiana is one of the entities where the frailty of our environment can be physically felt and where Dawn Dedeaux found inspiration for her series MotherShip, a reflection on our planet earth and our future.
Following Aboard the MotherShip part 1: Postulations of Myth and Math which took place at the Centre for the Living Arts in Mobile, AL, the latest exhibition at the Acadiana Center for the Arts, MotherShip 2: Dreaming of a Future Past is displayed in a large space, allowing DeDeaux's work to take its full breath. At first sight, the somber colors give a sense of the prevailing bleak mood. The display can be viewed as a whole installation built from stories told in different media, each occupying a dedicated area like Test Tubes, 2010, related to water contamination and its effect on species, Chimes: Burnt Timber, 2005-2013, made with pieces of burned wood from Dedeaux's own studio or Step Home, 2007, a glowing minimalist sculpture symbol of Katrina's aftermath followed by Falling Junk Space with Shoes, 2013 and Back Pack, 2013, relating to recent terrorist activities carried out through everyday objects. If we feel somewhat touched by the allusions to events that concern all of us, our emotions are stirred by Souvenirs of Earth, 2014, a collection of worn out dusty objects which have lost their function but have gained a symbolic value. An old violin case, a broken toy, damaged photographs, the accumulation of  "things" filled with memories evoke abandonment and loss, allowing melancholy to seep in. Should they be left behind? Should they be part of our future? Questions we had to answer too many times following the Katrina disaster.
Hovering above abandoned farm equipment, rings of metal refer to the now defunct airships Zeppelins. In response to the drought and the subsequent food shortage, MotherShips offer an escape to a few so are the fragile ladders made of charred wood or clear glass spread throughout the exhibition. Wall pieces include figurative portraits like Guardian at the Levee Gate or landscapes like Evangeline, dark digital drawings on metal which heighten the eerie atmosphere reinforced by a few splashes of red, color of fire and drama adding to the apocalyptic vision offered by DeDeaux. Comments along the works help the visitor decipher the symbols: rings for the alliance of man and technology, ladders to reach higher consciousness, horse signaling the end of earthly time and triumph over evil... Our gaze is drawn to the centerpiece, a towering life-size sculpture of a horse perched on a high pedestal, vigorous, dynamic and free. A kind of a conclusion to a stirring exhibition which can be seen from a bird view point looking through the glassed mezzanine.
At the present rate of growth the earth will need to sustain nine billion inhabitants in 2045. DeDeaux brings a sense of urgency, an anxiety born from the numbers and the threat of cataclysms looming over our planet. Future Past resounds like a warning, we already have lost control over our future and there is a sense of inevitability in the artist's gloomy premonitions. Confronted to our powerlessness, her answer is a scenario of escape and abandonment.
A century ago, Futurism was a cry for change, action, filled with enthusiasm as opposed to the recent  statement from the philosopher Félix Guattari: "The future has lost its zest and people have lost all trust in it: the future no longer appears as a choice or a collective conscious action, but is a kind of unavoidable catastrophe that we cannot oppose in anyway."
Is there any hope according to DeDeaux? Is the artist describing realities we choose not to see?

photographs by the author:
Views of the exhibition at the ACA

White Linen Night

Saturday, August 2, I was at White Linen Night. It was a success considering the number of attendees. I did not see art, just got a whiff of it making my way through the crowd. For the 20th anniversary, I noticed more colors on Julia. This is not Saint-Patrick's day, a touch of white won't do, white should be worn from head to toes.

For a start, I visited the Ogden Museum of Southern Art which presents Rolland Golden's works in an exhibition aimed at highlighting his style of "Magical Realism" or as he calls it "Borderline-Surrealism". Born in New Orleans, raised in the South from Mississippi to Alabama to Louisiana, taught by the regionalist painter John McCrady and the owner of a studio/gallery in the French Quarter for a decade, Golden possesses all the needed qualifications to be called a Southern artist. Nevertheless, I had difficulty finding the South in his compositions combining realist and surrealist styles. Figurative, bathing in Fauvist colors, usually built with a quiet landscape in the background and the narrative in the foreground, the repetitive technique brings boredom. French countryside, bridge in Paris, church, southern landscapes are all looking soulless and empty, lacking the mystery and the suspense felt in Magritte's paintings, the Surrealist master Golden refers to in one of his works. There are no surprises while going through the seventy oil paintings, watercolors and drawings.

Encased in a dark room, Shawn Hall's Pastoral Universe is an experience for the senses. Immersed in the cosmic composition, the visitor walks around a central island bubbling like magma, spewing oval sparks of light on the floor and the walls. The installation includes "one mirrored terrain, two suspended projectors and one channel video loop with sound" and the well hidden machinery creates a world of reflections on the walls, through mirrors and projection of images. The meditative piece is spoiled by the number of visitors, chattering and taking selfies. This is not the best time to savor the work.
On the top floor, Shawn Hall is also represented by a diptych for Louisiana Contemporary, the annual statewide-juried exhibition assembling Louisiana artists. Two works from Bonnie Maygarden are prominently displayed at the entrance. Desert of the Real and Greyscale both pieces made in 2014 are evidence of her commitment to the world of "virtual reality" or hyperreality. One can also find a piece from Cynthia Scott, Punditry, 2014, a great satire with punchy images. There is art for every taste, figurative, abstract, sculptures and a walk through takes some time to discover all the artists.

Across the street at the Contemporary Arts Center, more female artists from New Orleans are featured for the exhibition Mark of the Feminine. The themes are enduring and treated through different media, like at the entrance, a work from Vanessa Centeno made with canvas, polyfill, glitter, LED lights, a psychedelic rendition with a provocative title Keep It Up which  made me think of a white version from Yayoi Kusama, 1962, Accumulation #1. Farther, Cristina Molina's  Saber, Sabor, Savor, 2011, is a gallant stereoscopic installation in which she relates twenty five sites with a meal, a romantic text with courtship in mind. From video like the untitled piece from Ariya Martin to sculptures like Annoint, 2014, from Kristin Meyers, all media is represented and no subject is taboo.
My wandering along Julia to visit the galleries was cut short when I got bogged down in the crowd...
an evening to enjoy the company, the food and have a drink like everybody else.

photographs by the author:

view of Julia Street
"Startled by Magritte", 1991, Rolland Golden
"Pastoral Universe", Shawn Hall
"Keep It Up", 2014, Vanessa Centeno

From South Africa, Uganda to Prospect.3

From South Africa to Uganda, two photographers and film makers at Prospect.3.

Pieter Hugo


Born in 1976 in Johannesburg, South Africa, Pieter Hugo is a self-taught photographer based in Cape Town. His interest in photography started at an early age when he received his first camera at 10 years old. He explains why he has chosen portraiture as his main practice:

"I am six foot tall. I have blond hair and blue eyes. I stick out like a sore thumb in the locations I visit. I quickly realized that the traditional photo-journalistic approach of capturing a fleeting moment wasn't going to work for me. Firstly, my reflexes are too slow and secondly I am not a fly on the wall, I have a presence."
 His is considered a leading photographer in Africa, known for his socially and politically charged works which include depictions of Albinism (2003-2006) to documentation of the aftermath of the massacres in Rwanda in 1994 (2004). His most famous series The Hyena and Other Men (2005-2007) is about
a group of itinerant animal handlers, peddlers and performers he followed during a two years period, living with them several weeks at a time to understand their culture and thinking.
Pieter Hugo professes skepticism toward the "power of photography": "I am of a generation that approaches photography with a keen awareness of the problems inherent in pointing a camera at anything."

Major museum solo exhibitions have taken place at The Hague Museum of Photography, Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Ludwig Museum in Budapest, Fotografiska in Stockholm,  MAXXI in Rome and the Institute of Modern Art Brisbane, among others. Hugo has participated in numerous group exhibitions at institutions including Tate Modern, the Folkwang Museum, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, and the São Paulo Bienal. His work is represented in prominent public and private collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, V&A Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, J Paul Getty Museum, Walther Collection, Deutsche Börse Group, Folkwang Museum and Huis Marseille. Hugo received the Discovery Award at the Rencontres d’Arles Festival and the KLM Paul Huf Award in 2008, the Seydou Keita Award at the Rencontres de Bamako African Photography Biennial in 2011, and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2012.

Zarina Bhimji


Zarina Bhimji was born in Mbarara, Uganda in 1963 to Indian parents and moved to Britain in 1974, two years after the expulsion of Uganda’s Asian community in the Idi Amin era. She is a photographer and film maker working in London and Berlin.
Zarina Bhimji was educated at Leicester Polytechnic (1982 – 1983), Goldsmith's College (1983 – 1986) and  Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (1987 – 1989).  Following a post-graduate program, she became an Artist in Residence at Darwin College in Cambridge.
In her works, she intermingles reflections on colonialism, global migration, diaspora, persecutions through images referring to cultural memory like dilapidated architectures, abandoned interior spaces and personal narrative. India and East Africa are her sources for inspirations and in Out of the Blue commissioned and produced by Documenta 11 in 2002, she returned to Uganda to film the ruins left by Idi Amin's reign of terror. Yellow Patch (2011) was inspired by trade and migration across the Indian Ocean and communicates the same aura of decay and abandonment. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2007 and was the subject of a mid-career retrospective tracing 25 years of her work at Whitechapel Gallery in 2012.

Back for P.3

Camille Henrot and Hew Locke , respectively featured at the New Orleans Museum of Art and at the Pérez Art Museum Miami are back to the USA for Prospect.3.


Camille Henrot


Camille Henrot is a French multimedia artist living in New York and Paris. Born in 1978, she graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs and was noticed in 2005 after an exhibition at the Cartier Foundation.
A prolific multi-disciplinary artist, known for her video clips, her work includes sculptures, drawings, photographs and displays on computers through which she translates her fascination with symbols of the past, myths which she reinterprets for a modern time.
She combines anthropology, philosophy, literature, history in her multicultural view of the world.
She participated to the Paris Triennale and was recently awarded the "Silver Lion" at the Venice Biennale with her video Grosse Fatigue.

The New Orleans Museum of Art presented her fist solo exhibition in the United States with Cities of Ys at the end of 2013.

Her work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Chisenhale Gallery in London, the Centre Pompidou, the Louvre, the Musée d’Art Moderne, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the New Orleans Museum of Art, Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin, and the New Museum in New York. In 2013, she was the recipient of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in Washington, DC, where she produced the video Grosse Fatigue awarded by the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Camille Henrot currently has a solo exhibition at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, which will travel to Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris and the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster. She is nominated for the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize. Camille Henrot is represented by kamel mennour, Paris; Johann König, Berlin; and Metro Pictures, New York. 

Hew Locke

Hew Locke was born in 1959 in Edinburgh to a British mother and a Guyanese father, both of them artists. Locke lived in Scotland until 1966 when the family moved by boat to Guyana, a former British colony on the Caribbean coast of South America. He earned a B.A. in fine art from Falmouth School of Art and Design (now Falmouth University) in 1988 and a M.A. in sculpture from the Royal College of Art in 1994. He currently lives and works in London. Through a wide range of media including painting, drawing, photography, relief, fabric, sculpture, casting, found objects and collage, Locke developed his practice which  first was misread as folk art and has now reached its full impact. Through his works, Locke tackles diverse subjects like globalization, colonization, immigration, power, trade, architecture, history. His ambivalent relationship with the British monarchy is treated with humor in House of Windsor, ultimately engaging in a reflection about power.    
Despite the variety of materials he employs, Locke regards all of his art as interconnected—“like DNA,” he explains, “it loops and twists around.”
His recent installation For Those in Peril on the Sea, (2011) at the Perez Art Museum Miami reflected the longstanding place of boats in Locke’s iconography.

Selected shows include  National Portrait Gallery (London), El Museo de Bario (New York),  Fondation Clément (Martinique), The Bell House (Prague), Kunsthal KAdE (Netherlands), Tate Britain (London), V&A Museum (London), The New Art Gallery (Walsall), Rivington Place (London), The Bluecoat Gallery (Liverpool), The British Museum (London), The New Art Exchange (Nottingham), The Luckman Gallery (LA), The New York Museum of Art and Design (New York), Atlanta Contemporary Arts (US) and at The Brooklyn Museum (New York).  In 2010 Locke's work, Sikandar, was shortlisted for the Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square (London).

Locke's work is represented in many collections including The Government Art Collection (UK), Miami Art Museum (US), The Tate Gallery (UK), The Arts Council of England (UK), The Collection of Eileen and Peter Norton (US), The Brooklyn Museum (New York), The Arnold Lehman Collection (US), The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (US), Kansas City Collection (US), The RSID Museum (Rhode Island), The New Art Gallery (Walsall), The Victoria & Albert Museum Drawing Collection (London), The British Museum (London) and The Henry Moore Institute (Leeds).

Meet the artist at Tate
represented by Hales Gallery


photographs by the author

 Detail of the installation "The Descendants of Pirogue", 2013, from Camille Henrot at the NOMA
Detail of the installation " For Those in Peril on the Sea", 2011, from Hew Locke at the Pérez Museum of Art Miami

Meow Wolf, Past and Present

The subject of two pages of reviews in the Summer edition of ARTnews, Santa Fe's art scene must not be that boring. The city is also hosting its own International Biennal since 1995. But what appears to be an energetic environment to outsiders like me is not perceived as such by all the members of the local community, mostly younger members who are feeling excluded. Their premises are that the establishment is getting stuffy and smothers creativity, prompting the creation of their own collective Meow Wolf born in 2008. Moving Still, the exhibition at The Front  in the St Claude Arts' District is a retrospective of a kind,  a recapitulation of the group's history. It allows the viewer to go through a detailed chronological timeline, starting in the gallery's front room, which includes a "manifesto" delineating the principles and goals: a collaboration between emerging artists of all ages, all levels of skills, in any artistic realm, fostering "creative expression and political activism, not supported by Santa Fe's current cultural landscape" which "omits local and youthful expression and supports boring elite and tired old ideals" in reaction to "boring galleries with white walls."
Illustrated by a clear display, the history of the group unfolds along the walls of two adjacent rooms. We meet  members like a poet, a psychology student, a musician, a self-educated artist, a show promoter, follow the collective's migration to a new location and discover the projects through photographs, texts, videos and a few small pieces of art. The fate of the multimedia collaborative works from their conception to their realization is described in details, including number of  man hours, time for completion, financial constraints... Successes like the ambitious Meow Boat project, failures like Auto Wolf , the first sponsored project like Glitteropolis,  impact on the destiny of Meow Wolf. A splinter group writes an operating manual, tries to organize the anarchic gathering, establishes rules to be broken. Success brings pressure to perform and financial responsibilities, to incorporate or not, become a business reality?
There are lessons to be learned from the experience which offers material for reflection about group dynamics, collective art including economic models and possibly for a study in sociology.

But art needs to be experienced and this is the goal of the two works in the backrooms, a journey back to the 60's, colors and smoke included for psychedelic effects. A subdued version of Kenny Scharf's Cosmic Cavern or decorations for a Halloween haunted house, the two installations are somewhat disappointing and fail to show a renewal of the art landscape. Dada, Gutai, were reaction to wars, social upheavals, Meow Wolf is a reaction to exclusion from a local art establishment and stays a local phenomenon. The collective needs to break barriers, promote creativity, have new visions to reach goals other than existing and surviving... which is a challenge in itself. Meow Wolf needs to take a deep breath and move on.

Known for creating immersive, theatrical installations or experiences, Meow Wolf has also been a music venue, a music promoter, a theater company, an arts educator and a voice of youth culture.  - See more at: http://www.sfreporter.com/santafe/article-6460-team-wolf.html#sthash.VvfMUSk7.dpufa book geodecadent for donors.geodome. 50 people weekly

photographs by the author at the Front

Deeper Questions

The latest show at the Staple Goods gallery is filled with energy. Colors, rhythms from the music composed by Carl Joe Williams hit the visitor attracted to the old revamped television sets aligned along the wall. With decorations, new attributes, bright Caribbean colors, he reinvents a common reality and finds a new status for the unavoidable TVs which brought the world in our living rooms. Now sculptures, they become kitschy symbols of the power of the object with their crowning adornments. But his transposition of the television set into an icon also signals its upcoming death in the age of the Internet.
Carl Joe Williams's message goes further, projecting edited episodes of Good Times, a sitcom from the 70's with an original soundtrack from the artist, a medley including cheering, laughing crowds interrupted by gunshot noises creating tension or with Deeper Questions, treating of race with its succession of portraits of males melting into females, African-Americans metamorphosing into Asians, Afros replaced by blond flat hairs. Some screens are partly covered by collages, like giant pixels and the images fade in the background. The new works from Carl Joe Williams include also Urban Series, figurative scenes, short visual stories accompanied by text, in the same verve than the multimedia pieces.
The artist tackles different subjects like politics, violence, the influence of media and through cliches and stereotypes, the divisive influence of bigotry. If the colors are bright and sharp, the innuendos are subtle (sometimes not) and the artist is not afraid of using light humor and even a touch of derision.
Re-staging objects, using visual cues to suggest ideas, the artist claims his role as a catalyst for thoughts and revives the concept of art for goals other than purely aesthetics.
An interesting exhibition which provides food for thoughts and conveys sobering conclusions.

photographs by the author:

Deeper Questions, 2014
I Knew Something Was Wrong, 2013
Urban Series, 2014

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