Escape at the UNO Gallery

Kyle Bravo: Drawing on the Wall, the latest exhibition at the UNO Lakefront Campus Gallery, starts with a site specific work, a giant self-portrait, iconic for the artist who has livened up diverse spaces in New Orleans in the past, most recently The Front in the Saint-Claude Art District. Three massive white pedestals or separation boxes become a background for the cartoonish personage outlined in black, dressed in blue pants, loose T-shirt and wearing tennis shoes. Childish, "cool", he brings us on another adventure. This time, the playful hero takes a big jump, floating in space, disappears, sucked into another dimension. The last panel is white, empty. The rest of the story is on the other side where we can see him fall, head first, like a modern Icarus without wings, his  escape thwarted by... the laws of gravity.
Further, Kyle Bravo depicts landscapes of lines arranged in plaid like motives, in secondary warm yellowish colors or primary red and blue. The works are flat, without visual effects unlike Op art, but create an overwhelming, suffocating illusion of confinement. The obsessive pieces provide no way out, and the eyes cannot find a focal point to rest on.  One can take a step back and look at it as a plaid version of works from the Pattern and Decoration movement well represented in New Orleans by Robert Gordy.
Two portraits complete the exhibition, digitized drawings rendered in a larger scale, the male and female sitting on opposite side of a skiff surround the viewer who becomes the subject they are both drawing....unless they are drawing each other.
The piece again conveys a sense of confinement and could refer to the inescapability of life or loneliness, the personage appear so close in the same boat, but so distant with their lowered gaze.
The exhibition which appears lighthearted at first gains in depth as it progresses, bringing a thread to a conversation which includes also time. The drawings on the wall will disappear covered with white paint at the end of the show.
"A drawing is simply a line going for a walk." said Paul Klee...
and more adventures with Kyle Bravo.

photographs by the author

Music and Visual Art, two artists at Prospect.3

Terry Atkins

Terry Roger Adkins ( 1953-2014) was born in Washington, D.C., into a musical household. His father sang and played the organ, his mother was an amateur clarinetist and pianist. As a young man, Mr. Adkins planned to be a musician, but found himself drawn increasingly to visual art. He earned a B.S. in printmaking from Fisk University in Nashville (1975), followed by an M.S. in the field from Illinois State University (1977) and an M.F.A. in sculpture from the University of Kentucky (1979). A sculptor and saxophonist, his interest in music permeated the conceptual artist's career as illustrated in his genre-blurring pieces, combinations of visual art, spoken-word performance, video and live music. At his death, he was Professor of Fine Arts in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.
Early in his practice, he collected found objects with “an animistic approach to materials where you feel that they have more than just physical mass. There’s a spirit in them."
His sculptures were often inspired by, and dedicated to, historical figures, from musical heroes like blues singer Bessie Smith, guitarist Jimi Hendrix or composer Ludwig van Beethoven to the writer and activist W. E. B. Du Bois and the abolitionist John Brown.

He performed music throughout his career, forming the Lone Wolf Recital Corps in 1986, with which he performed widely and even forged immense, curious instruments like a set of 18-foot long horns he called arkaphones.
Atkins stated about his work: “My quest has been to find a way to make music as physical as sculpture might be, and sculpture as ethereal as music is. It’s kind of challenging to make both of those pursuits do what they are normally not able to do.”

His work is held in numerous public collections, including those of Tate Modern, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

link to Artsy

Frederick J. Brown

Frederick J. Brown (1945-2012) was born in Greensboro, GA and grew up on Chicago's South Side surrounded by musicians like the blues men Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters who were family friends. Brown attended Chicago Vocational High School (CVS) and studied architecture. After learning the fundamentals of architecture, Brown attended Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois (SIU). Brown graduated from Southern Illinois University in 1968 with a Bachelor's degree in Art and Psychology. At SIU Brown was also an assistant instructor of art and was included in the University's 1968 group exhibition. In 1970 Brown had his first one-man show at the Illinois Bell Telephone Gallery in Chicago. During that period, he traveled to Europe and in 1970 settled in SoHo where he mingled with other artists and musicians. In 1972-1973, he directed and produced "Be Aware", a show combining visual art, dance and poetry. For a time in the 1980's he lived in China, where he taught in Beijing at the Central College of Fine Arts and Crafts, a sojourn that ended with a retrospective of his work at the Museum of the Chinese Revolution (now the National Museum of China) in Tienanmen Square. Brown's exhibition was considered a success and made him the first Western artist to exhibit his works at that venue. Furthermore, during this time Brown was the subject of a short film which aired on Chinese national television and documented his first visit.
Influenced by the German Expressionists and Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning, who was his mentor for a time, the artist is best known for his hundreds of figurative portraits of jazz and blues musicians. He also produced works with religious, historical and urban themes. In 1993, Brown unveiled "the Assumption of Mary" at Xavier University of Louisiana.The painting is currently the largest religious work of art on canvas at three-stories tall. A year later Brown unveiled "the History of Art", a series of 110 paintings chronicling the progression of art through human history, through his own personal interpretation, now included in the permanent collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.  

 His work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo.

Brown called music “the catalyst for much of what I do” and often worked on a portrait while listening to the subject’s music.

  

Waiting for Prospect.3, four artists

Firelei Báez

Firelei Báez was born in 1980 in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, to Dominican and Haitian parents. She immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. Báez received a B.F.A. from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, NY, in 2004, attended the Skowhegan School Of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME, in 2008 and graduated from Hunter College, NY, with a M.F.A. in 2010. She has held residencies at The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace, The Lower East Side Print Shop and The Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace and presently lives and works in New York, NY.

Artist's Statement:

"My artwork consists of paintings, drawings and prints that regard my physical self, my personal history, and Caribbean folklore. Caribbean folklore allows for malleability in the creation of the self, but I find my status as an Afro-Latina in the United States static and limiting in comparison. In response, I try to disrupt the current system of social categorization through the creation of characters that refuse definition. As more people become multiracial, skin tone is no longer a sufficient signifier. Growing media presence and more commonplace interactions via technology in our daily lives reduce each individual to a small part of a larger demographic. I use symbolically loaded scenarios to metaphorically illustrate the multiplicities and hypocrisies that make up the current discussion about race and class within popular culture."

Ebony C Patterson

Ebony G. Patterson is a Jamaican artist born in Kingston in 1981. She has taught at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, the Sam Fox College of Design & Visual at Washington University in St. Louis. She has taught at the University of Virginia and is currently an Assistant Professor in Painting at the University of Kentucky. She lives and works in Lexington, KY and Kingston, Jamaica.
Her work includes paintings, drawings, collages and recently she added photography, installation and performance. The female body as an object is the subject of her early works with her "Venus", a search for "beauty through the use of the grotesque but visceral, confrontational and deconstructed."
One of Patterson's most recognized body of work, is a series entitled "Gangstas for Life," which explores conceptions of masculinity within  dancehall culture and subjects related to this, like homosexuality within a predominantly homophobic culture, race, stereotypes and beauty.
 She has shown her artwork in numerous solo and private exhibitions, such as Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art, Brooklyn Museum, (2007). National Biennial, National Gallery of Jamaica,(2006,2008,2010),Ghetto Biennale , Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Rockstone and Bootheel, Real Artways, (2010) Wrestling With the Image, Museum of the Americas,(2011)

link to National Gallery of Jamaica blog


Tavares Strachan


Tavares Henderson Strachan (born in Nassau in 1979) is a contemporary, conceptual artist whose multi-media installations investigate science, technology, mythology, history, and exploration. He lives and works in New York City and Nassau, Bahamas.
Initially a painter, Strachan earned his Associate of Fine Arts degree from the College of the Bahamas in 1999. In 2000, he moved to the US to enroll in the glass department at the Rhode Island School of Design and completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2003. Strachan went on to earn his Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture from Yale University in 2006. In 2006, Strachan joigned the international art scene with his piece titled "The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want" which involved a 4.5 ton block of ice from the Alaskan Artic displayed in a solar-powered freezer in the courtyard of his childhood elementary school. The work was later exhibited at Miami Art Basel and the Brooklyn Museum.
Strachan developed further the themes of exploration, displacement and the idea of pushing the body’s physical extremes, with a four-year, multimedia body of work "Orthostatic Tolerance" which documented Strachan’s experience in cosmonaut training at the Yuri Gagarin Training Center in Star City, Russia and experiments in space travel conducted in Nassau under the Bahamas Air and Space Exploration Center (BASEC), the artist’s version of NASA for his native country, with photography, video, drawing, sculpture and installation.
Last year a 20,000-square-foot overview of Strachan’s work from 2003–2011, subtitled Seen/Unseen,was presented at an undisclosed New York City location and was closed to the public. Tavares Strachan: seen/unseen is fully documented with a forthcoming catalogue, designed by Stefan Sagmeister. Strachan’s solo exhibitions include Orthostatic Tolerance: It Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea if I Never Went Home Again, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2010); Orthostatic Tolerance: Launching from an Infinite Distance, Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO (2010); Tavares Strachan: Orthostatic Tolerance, the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2009); Where We Are is Always Miles Away, The Luggage Store, San Francisco, CA (2006); and The Difference Between What We Have and What We Want, Albury Sayle Primary School, Nassau, The Bahamas (2006).
In 2013, Tavares Strachan represented The Bahamas in the country’s first national pavilion at the 55th International Venice Biennale.

link to Artsy
link to Prospect.3


Antonio Vega Macotela

Antonio Vega Macoleta was born in Mexico-city, Mexico, in 1980. He attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Mexico City, Mexico and obtained his BA in 2005. In 2011 he was accepted for a residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
The conceptual artist worked several years with the inmates of a prison in Mexico City and set up a "time exchange project" which resulted in a Series of works called Divisa , 2006-1010, a reflection on the concept of time. He also produced series like The Ungovernables for the Second New York Triennial, at the New Museum in 2012,
He participated in several group exhibitions, the latest at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Summer 2014.

Featured at Prospect.3

Tarsila do Amaral 


Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973) was born in Capivari, a small town in the countryside of the State of São Paulo. She grew up in a wealthy family of farmers and landowners who grew coffee and was encouraged to pursue higher education despite being a woman. As a teenager, she traveled to Spain with her parents and was noticed to have talent reproducing artworks she was exposed to.
In 1916, she studied sculpture in São Paulo with Zadig and Montavani and later drawing and painting with Alexandrino, all respected conservative teachers. In 1920, she moved to Paris and studied at the Académie Julian and with Emile Renard. Returning to São Paulo in 1922, she joined Anita Malfatti, Menotti Del Picchia, Mário de Andrade, and Oswald de Andrade modernist artists who had just organized  the Semana de Arte Moderna ("Week of Modern Art"). They became  the Grupo dos Cinco and their goal was to integrate Brazilian culture into modern art. Now known simply as Tarsila, the artist was described as "the Brazilian painter who best achieved Brazilian aspirations for nationalistic expression in a modern style."
During a brief return to Paris in 1923, Tarsila was exposed to Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism while studying with André Lhote, Fernand Léger, and Albert Gleizes. European artists were also finding inspiration in African and primitive cultures and Tarsila applied the same model in her practice, integrating her own country's indigenous forms with modern styles. While in Paris, she painted one of her most famous works, A Negra (1923). The painting marks the beginning of her synthesis of avant-garde aesthetics and Brazilian subject matter. She returned to Brazil at the end of 1923, traveled with the poet Oswald de Andrade and illustrated his book of poems entitled Pau Brasil published in 1924. She also made drawings of the various places they visited gathering ideas for future paintings. During that same period, she rediscovered the colors she "had adored as a child" and the hues became more vibrant on her canvas. Her initial painting from this period was E.C.F.B.(Estrada de Ferro Central do Brasil), (1924) which is a reflection of her interest in industrialization and its impact on society.
Tarsila married Andrade in 1926 and they traveled  throughout Europe. She also had her first exhibition in Paris and the positive reviews highlighted her use of bright colors and tropical images.
While in Paris, she was exposed to Surrealism and upon her return to Brazil, Tarsila began a new period where she began incorporating surrealist themes into her nationalistic art. She was in sync with the artistic movement in Brazil which strove to appropriate European styles and influences and developped an art typical of Brazil. Collaborating closely with Andrade, her first painting representative of this period Abaporu (1928), "Man Who Eats" was featured on the cover of Andrade's manifesto Anthropophagite Manifesto, which called Brazilians to create their own style and culture.  Another famous work, Antropofagia made the following year was in the same vein. In 1929, the artist had her first solo exhibition in Brazil and in 1930, she participated in exhibitions in New York and Paris. That same year saw the end of Tarsila's marriage and her collaboration with Andrade.
In 1931, she traveled to the Soviet Union where her works were exhibited at the Museum of Occidental Art in Moscow. There, she discovered the poverty of the Russian people and their struggle to survive and upon her return in Brazil in 1932, incorporated social themes in her work  like in Segundo Class (1931) which features impoverished Russian men, women and children. She was even emprisoned for a month, suspected of communist sympathies.
In 1938,Tarsila finally settled permanently in São Paulo where she spent the remainder of her career painting Brazilian people and landscapes. She also wrote a weekly arts and culture column for the Diario de São Paulo, which continued until 1952.
Her legacy includes 230 paintings, hundreds of drawings, illustrations, prints, murals, and five sculptures, but more important is her influence on the direction of Latin American art.The Amaral Crater on Mercury is named after her."


Lucia Koch

link to Prospect.3 blog 
link to the artist's website 
link to Artsy
link to biography (Christopher Grimes Gallery) 
link to statement 



Remy Jungerman

Remy Jungerman (1959) was born in Suriname of mixed parents with roots in Europe and Africa. He first studied art at the Academy for Higher Arts and Cultural Studies, Paramaribo (Suriname) then after moving to Amsterdam in 1990, at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. He presently lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Going back to his Afro-Surinamese-Dutch roots has brought him to find inspiration in his trans-cultural experience which he is expressing through his collages, sculptures and installations and art has become his "vehicle for considering what it means to be a global citizen, someone believing in the potential of art to raise social consciousness and inspire cultural awareness".

Staging traditional materials and objects in different contexts, he challenges the established notions of their representation within Western society. "By using the three-dimensional cube, grids and other geometric forms and combining them with traditional objects, this gives me the opportunity to question modernism from a different angle. By doing this, I create a reference to the traditional and the modern."

 Since his first group exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Jungerman has participated in several solo and group exhibitions worldwide.
His work has been acquired by various institutions and private collectors worldwide among which: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, MMKA Arnhem, Museum Het Domein Sittard, Zeeuws Museum Middelburg, ARC Collection Amsterdam, Droog, NY USA, the Rennies Collection Vancouver.
Private Collections in the USA, Canada, Suriname, Cuba, Brazil, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Belgium and The Netherlands.

link to website
link to interview

The objects/elements never die, symbolically, in the artwork. By using these elements in contemporary art, they do change from their religious meaning but the new context might serve to enrich the way we look at them – allowing us to see them from a different perspective. Even traditional religious forms are changing over time because of their flexibility, especially Diaspora Afro-traditional religions and their attributes. - See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/05/inspired-from-within-an-interview-with-remy-jungerman/#sthash.ogGz0iFs.dpuf

The online exhibition I curated for the March 2014 edition of the Dutch art magazine Mister Motley gave me the opportunity to see that not much has shifted in my ties to my rich Surinamese heritage, in the aesthetics I gained from the surroundings in which I grew up and in what I have learned at art schools. - See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/05/inspired-from-within-an-interview-with-remy-jungerman/#sthash.ogGz0iFs.dpuf

With creating artworks I have the possibility and freedom to use objects and materials from a traditional context – mixing them to give other aesthetic meanings. By using the three-dimensional cube, grids and other geometric forms and combining them with traditional objects, this gives me the opportunity to question modernism from a different angle. By doing this, I create a reference to the traditional and the modern. - See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/05/inspired-from-within-an-interview-with-remy-jungerman/#sthash.ogGz0iFs.dpuf

  In 2005 I returned to Suriname to bury my father. While there, I visited the ancestor altar of the Maroon heritage of my mother – I was born from mixed parents with roots in Europe and Africa. At that moment I realized the richness of my African roots and made the decision to do further research into that spiritual context. From that day, I knew my work would change. I knew it would take a more spiritual and religious direction, with a connection to Winti, which is an Afro-Surinamese traditional religion. I realized that there was so much aesthetic material from the practice of Winti, which I could connect to the knowledge I have gained from contemporary art, especially Modernism. All of the residue from the rituals seem like finished art pieces. The only thing I was missing was the “how” – how to make the link with contemporary art practice. - See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/05/inspired-from-within-an-interview-with-remy-jungerman/#sthash.ogGz0iFs.dpuf

Visual artist Remy Jungerman was born in Moengo Suriname and his lived in Amsterdam since 1990. Through his collages, sculptures and installations he brings various materials, symbols, socio-historical contexts and locations in the world into communication with each other in order to address ideas of the local and the global. Jungerman’s work draws on Maroon culture in Suriname and the Diaspora, specifically Winti, which is an Afro-Surinamese religion.
His latest piece entitled “FODU: Ultimate Resistance” demonstrates his sustained engagement with the intersections of traditional religious practices and current trends in art. The work is now on display as part of the group exhibition Bezield: Seven Artists on Religion, Rituals and Death, which opened on May 10, 2014 at CBK Zuidoost, Amsterdam. The word “bezield” translates to “inspired” in English. I used this term as an entry point for talking with Jungerman about his art. In the interview, he pinpoints traditional and modern inspirations but he also identifies an inner stimulus – a source within him that acts as a ground on which his art is built.
- See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/05/inspired-from-within-an-interview-with-remy-jungerman/#sthash.ogGz0iFs.dpuf

The online exhibition I curated for the March 2014 edition of the Dutch art magazine Mister Motley gave me the opportunity to see that not much has shifted in my ties to my rich Surinamese heritage, in the aesthetics I gained from the surroundings in which I grew up and in what I have learned at art schools. - See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/05/inspired-from-within-an-interview-with-remy-jungerman/#sthash.ogGz0iFs.dpulink to websitelink to interview

Sculpting Tires

Chakaia Booker's latest exhibition Eradication: A Form of Obsession at the Newcomb Art Gallery on the Tulane University campus is the occasion to rediscover the artist, famous for her sculptures made with rubber tires. Following my first exposure to her work at the New Orleans Museum of Art, then an encounter at Art Basel Miami Beach and lately a daily walk by FOCI, an outdoor sculpture located on Poydras Street in New Orleans, I assumed that I knew the artist. After all, what else can be said in the monochrome medium? The conceptual artist's practice has been discussed, analyzed, interpreted and the metaphors about her work abound, alluding to forced labor, industrial revolution, racial differences, scarification,  consumerism, global economy, colonization, social disparities... The artist states her goal in the introduction to the exhibition: "...how broad, complex cultural transformations can continue to be expressed through common material".
At first sight, the visitor is drawn to a relief sculpture Color of Hope, 2010, a haptic landscape, harmonious construction made of rough material overtaken by curly pieces of rubber resulting in an organic composition, vision of generous opulence and growth surrounded by two intimate, smaller sized wall pieces Misleading Circumstances, 2005 and Masked Appeal, 2012.
The show includes also six sculptures in the round, and the visit becomes an aesthetically pleasing experience looking at Conversion, 2006, a strange animal built with pipes on one side and a rubbery, reptile-like material on  the other, Mixed Message, 2005, black ribbons flowing to the ground, like water out of a fountain, Wrench (Wench), 2001, an over-sized industrial tool featuring a boa feather for a handle or The Nest, 2003, evoking sexuality and birth with its feminine shapes. Privilege of Eating, 2012, goes straight to the point with two shovels representing the voracity of an opulent world  in contrast with the crumbled signs "private property", "no trespassing" embedded in the work, pieces of food carts, a broken door lock, symbols of a deprived world and its resulting marginalization.
The New Jersey hills in Booker's neighborhood are not made of white marble but piles of used tires which have become her medium since the 1990's, bringing analogy to speed, machinery and also pollution. Tearing, cutting, shredding, tugging, carving the tires, the artist's violent gesture to "deconstruct" is  followed by the act of conceptualization and creativity, transcending the material to "reconstruct". The sculptures offer a dialogue between feminine and masculine, roughness and smoothness, wealth and poverty... inviting deeper thoughts, addressing diverse issues with one medium she has transformed into a palette of colors and textures.
What makes the visit at the Newcomb gallery so compelling? The show offers a walk through almost two decades of the artist's practice in a space where the sculptures come alive under the soft natural light diffused through the ceiling and allows to discover the tactility and the depth of the work. An enlightening experience.

photographs by the author:

"Misleading Circumstances", 2005
Detail, "Mixed Messages", 2005
"Industrial Perpetousity", 2001

South of South America to P.3

Analia Saban

Analia Saban was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Following her undergraduate studies at Loyola University in New Orleans, LA, where she obtained a BFA in Visual Arts (2001), she attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where she earned her MFA in New Genres (2005) and was instructed by John Baldessari.  . 

In her early works, Saban reduced the works of Modernists like Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, and Henri Matisse into individual swatches of color, which she then cut out, copied, and rearranged.
Shes describes her own method of working as both artistic and scientific. She questions the tradition mean of painting, what makes a picture a picture and states: "I find pictures are endless at a micro and macro-cosmic level. I am interested in our relationship to technology, to structures and to architecture around us." She uses a spectrum of materials depending on the idea to be conveyed through the conceptual work. Hovering between painting and sculpture, she explores the potential of canvas as textile, stretcher bars as pieces of wood and paint as clay. She is using laser cutters, silicone molds, acrylic and photographic emulsion to apply marks to painted surfaces.

Her work blurs the distinctions between mediums, using elements of painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, and architecture in a way that reinvents the very process of art-making.
Saban has been included in a number of group shows, including at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Marco Museum in Spain, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. 

Solo Exhibitions Her first solo exhibition was the same year while her success was solidified by subsequent solo exhibitions at Galerie Sprüth Magers Projekte, Munich (2007); Galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paris (2007, 2009, 2011); Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles (2009, 2011) and Josh Lilley Gallery, London (2010).
2013
Bathroom Sink, Etc., Spruth Maters Gallery, Berlin, Germany
Datum, Josh Lilley Gallery, London, England
2012
Gag, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York City, NY
2011
Derrames, 11x7 Galeria, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Dig, Gallerie Praz Delavallade, Paris, France
Grayscale, Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles
2010
Information Leaks, Josh Lilley Gallery, London, United Kingdom
2009
Light Breaks Out of Prism, Thomas Solomon Gallery@Cottage Home, Los Angeles, California
Living Color, Galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paris, France
2007
When Things Collapse, Galerie Praz-Delavallade. Paris, France
Wet Paintings in the Womb, Galerie Spruth Magers, Projekte, Munich, Germany
2005
Bit by Bit, Kim Light Gallery / Lightbox (Inaugural Exhibition), Los Angeles, California

link to Artspace
link to interview, The Huffington Post
link to Artsy

William Cordova

William Cordova was born in Lima, Peru and raised in Lima and Miami. He earned his MFA from Yale University in 2004 and his BFA from The Art Institute of Chicago in 1996. He currently lives and works in New York and Miami.

Artist's Statement:

"My work attempts to reconcile ideas of displacement and transition through the use of ephemeral residue and vernacular architecture that continually shifts and shapes what could be described as our contemporary situation."

Through his installations, collages, drawings and sculptures, he combines discarded materials to reconsider cultural, linguistic and economic differences, translating the reality of lived experience. Having lived in different countries like Peru, the United States, Europe, raised in different cultures, Cordova translates disparity and displacement through his work.
“Revealing the intersections between magical realism and social realism, he orchestrates collisions between ancient and recent histories, oral tradition and revolutionary texts to make way for an in-between, transitional, and ultimately transformative space.” (Rashida Bumbray)

Cordova's solo exhibitions include untitled (chicanas)>, LAXART, Los Angeles (2010); Laberintos, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York (2009); More than Bilingual, Fleming Museum, University of Vermont, Burlington (2009); Moby Dick, Artspace, San Antonio (2008); Pachacuti (stand up next to a mountain), Arndt & Partner, Zürich (2007); P'alante, Arndt & Partner, Berlin (2006); Drylongso (Pichqa Suyo), P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2006); I Wish It Were True, Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, New York (2006); and No More Lonely Nights, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2003).
Group exhibitions include Neo-HooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith, Menil Collection, Houston (2008); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); Prague Triennale, National Gallery (2008); Street Level: Mark Bradford, William Cordova, and Robin Rhode, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, N.C. (2007); The Beautiful Game: Contemporary Art and Fútbol, BICA and Roebling Hall, New York (2006); Scratch, Studio Museum in Harlem (2005); and Utopia Station, 50th Venice Biennale (2003).

link to ARNDT
link to Artsy
link to Whitney Biennal 2008
 


David Zink Yi

David Zink Yi, born in Lima, Peru (1973) is a contemporary artist working primarily in video, photography, and sculpture. He obtained a Woodcarving Diploma at the Berufsfachschule in Munich, Germany, 1995-1998 and studied at the Kunst Akademie, Munich, Germany, 1997-1999 followed by the Universität der Künste, Berlin, Germany, 1998-2003
He currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

His work often deals with the idea of the body and stems from his Peruvian, Chinese and German cultural heritage. The artist has an interest in the relation between Latin music, the body and performance and has been quoted as saying the "body is the space and the medium in which the process of questioning of identity takes place."
Over the past few years, David Zink has worked within the ceramic tradition to create a series of sculptures modeled on Architeuthis, the deep-sea-dwelling giant squid, prominent creature in myths and legends.

Solo Exhibitions

2014 Johann König Gallery, ‘David Zink Yi’, Berlin, Germany

2013 Hauser & Wirth, ‘‘Why am I here and not somewhere else – Independencia II’, Zurich, Switzerland Kunstverein Braunschweig, ‘Why am I here and not somewhere else – Independencia II’, Braunschweig, Germany Kunstfenster der Deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI, Berlin, Germany

2012 80m2 Livia Benavides Gallery, ‘Angel, is it you?’, Lima, Peru
MALI Museo de Arte de Lima, Lima, Peru
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, ‘David Zink Yi’, Berlin, Germany
2011 Hauser & Wirth, ‘Pneuma’, New York NY
Midway Contemporary Art, ‘HORROR VACUI’, Minneapolis MN

2010 MAK Gallery, ‘Manganese make my colors blue’, Vienna, Austria
Johann Koenig, ‘David Zink Yi’, Berlin, Germany

2009 Kunsthalle St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

2008 Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, ‘David Zink Yi. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Stipendium 2008’, Dusseldorf, Germany
Open Space / Art Cologne, ‘Roma 395’, Cologne, Germany

2007 Franco Soffiantino, Turin, Italy

2006 Johann König, ‘Geschlossen Kurve, bei der für jeden Punkt die Summe der Entfernungen konstant ist. Auslassung insbesondere inmitten von etwas’, Berlin, Germany
Museum Ludwig, ‘Independencia I’, Cologne, Germany

2005 Kunstraum Innsbruck, ‘Der soziographische Blick 12. David Zink Yi’, Innsbruck, Austria

2004 Hauser & Wirth Zürich, ’6 x Yta Moreno’, Zurich, Switzerland
Galerie Johann König, Berlin, Germany
Künstlerhaus Bremen, ‘Alrededor del dosel / Umgehen der Baumkronen’, Bremen, Germany

2003 Galerie Johann König, ‘De adentro y afuera’, Berlin, Germany

link to Artsy
link to MORFAE

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