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Mathew Sawyer “Please Take All Your Rubbish With You” at Maria Stenfors, London

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Mathew Sawyer, FUCK YOU to the future (without me), 2014, C-Type Print, 103 x 70 cm. Courtesy the artist and Maria Stenfors, Lonodn

MATHEW SAWYER
Please Take All Your Rubbish With You

16 January – 21 February 2015
Maria Stenfors, London

I meet with friends
no one but me is aware
I’ve tied one of my shoelaces
tighter than the other
it’s barely noticeable
but at times all-consuming
I bury the words FUCK YOU
set in concrete
to be discovered at some unknown point in the future
how big is the invisible trap?
I stack pennies
37 precarious
one from each year I’ve been here
the newest the brightest
stupid music
I drink myself drunk as I walk
collecting feathers
in the morning a sculpture
please take all your rubbish with you
Continue reading “Mathew Sawyer “Please Take All Your Rubbish With You” at Maria Stenfors, London”

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Andro Semeiko & Shino Yanai “Comedy and Menace – The Birthday Party” at White Conduit Projects, London

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Shino Yanai, “Screen Memories”, detail, single channel video installation (HD, color, sound) [11’50”] 2012. Courtesy the artist & White Conduit Projects, London

Andro Semeiko & Shino Yanai
Comedy and Menace – The Birthday Party

16 November – 28 December 2014
at White Conduit Projects, London

White Conduit Projects opens its central London location at 1 White Conduit Street N1 on 15th November 2014. It will be showcasing Japanese artists and designers alongside British and international artists in a programme of innovative exhibitions across a variety of media.

The inaugural exhibition entitled Comedy and Menace – The Birthday Party is an ambitious project showing works by two artists, Andro Semeiko from Georgia and Shino Yanai from Japan.

Semeiko has exhibited in various group and solo shows in England. This time he will produce work based on the history of the neighbourhood of the gallery, referring to knightly quests and cycling in Islington. Semeiko’s projects often feature knights. – “These clanking, forlorn knights, in their tragicomic search to find something authentic in this synthetic universe. Never perceiving that their mistake is to look for authenticity elsewhere, when it can already be found in their own purposeful, yet hopelessly misdirected quest.” (JJ Charlesworth) Continue reading “Andro Semeiko & Shino Yanai “Comedy and Menace – The Birthday Party” at White Conduit Projects, London”

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Oli Sorenson: La Société de la Place des Spectacles at POPOP Gallery, Montréal

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Image courtesy of Oli Sorenson

Oli Sorenson
La Société de la Place des Spectacles

4 – 13 December 2014
at POPOP Gallery, Montréal

Vernissage: Saturday 6 December 2014, 14h – 17h
Performance: Saturday 6 December 2014, 16h

“[…] the very means of damaging these monitors in a performative context, to leave these marks will give exclusive properties to each of them: products of mass consumption will be transformed into unique objects …” (O. Sorenson)

Lodged under the signs of paradox, Oli Sorenson’s performance entitled La Société de la Place des Spectacles is presented on December 6th at 4 pm in Montreal’s Belgo Building. This performance taps right at the heart of spectacular fervor, while investing in the denial his own representation by continuing his series of “revisited works.” This corpus, triggered by a will to comment on the existing work of other creators as much as mass-produced objects, is here explored under the logic of destruction. Strangely, Sorenson’s exercise in transfiguration aspires to restore a stamp of uniqueness onto already original creations. Continue reading “Oli Sorenson: La Société de la Place des Spectacles at POPOP Gallery, Montréal”

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“Confusion in her eyes that says it all” at Maria Stenfors, London

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Confusion in her eyes that says it all. Installation view. Courtesy Maria Stenfors, London

Confusion in her eyes that says it all

7 November – 13 December 2014
at Maria Stenfors, London

Artists: Tamsin Casswell, Jennifer Douglas, Hans Rosenström

Confusion in her eyes that says it all brings together three artists who each in turn explore perceptions of intimacy and communication, deceptive illusion and control. Humble, everyday materials are transformed, creating new narratives and spaces that draw us in and make us question the nature of experience. Hereby, the exhibition examines the unique perspective an individual experiences at a particular moment in time, and the altered perceptions evoked by an artwork. Continue reading ““Confusion in her eyes that says it all” at Maria Stenfors, London”

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Emma Nourse/Chris Van Eeden/Sidy Diallo/Zina Saro-Wiwa at Brundyn+, Cape Town

cave1Brundyn_564Emma Nourse, Cave I, 2014. Wood, Brass, glass beads. Courtesy the artist and Brundyn+, Cape Town

Room 1
EMMA NOURSE
Pause
4 September – 18 October 2014

Emma Nourse’s first solo exhibition since graduating from the Michaelis School of Fine Art will be exhibited at the BRUNDYN+ gallery. Titled Pause, this body of work continues Nourse’s preoccupation with representations of environmental entropy and the deepening influence of human interference.
Continue reading “Emma Nourse/Chris Van Eeden/Sidy Diallo/Zina Saro-Wiwa at Brundyn+, Cape Town”

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Leslie Mutchler / Jason Urban “UNIVERSAL” at Atelier Circulaire, Montréal

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UNIVERSAL, exhibition view at Atelier Circulaire, Montreal. ©Photo: Jason Urban

Leslie Mutchler / Jason Urban
UNIVERSAL
18 September – 17 October 2014
at Atelier Circulaire, Montréal

It is a representation of purpose.
It is a shared workplace.
It is a place of tools, materials and making.
It is a site of production.
It is where the magic happens.

As artists and collaborators, Leslie Mutchler and Jason Urban are interested in the handmade (or in this case, hand-printed) and the duality of actual and virtual, experience and meta-experience. In an increasingly digitized world, traces of the human hand are often revered as signs of authenticity and reality, even when viewed on a screen. For the exhibition, UNIVERSAL, their first large-scale collaborative project, Mutchler and Urban are showing a body of work developed at Artists Image Resource (AIR), Pittsburgh, PA. While in residence at AIR, the pair generated prints and recorded the act of printing, an inherently tactile experience, to be presented as a meta-experience alongside the physical. The creation of three nearly identical prints – a silkscreen, a lithograph, and a woodblock – started an inquiry into the nature of making and the nature of documenting making. Continue reading “Leslie Mutchler / Jason Urban “UNIVERSAL” at Atelier Circulaire, Montréal”

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Review: Dora Garcí­a, Of Crimes and Dreams or the infinite power of human mind


Dora Garcia, Of Crimes and Dreams, exhibition view at Darling Foundry 2014. Courtesy Darling Foundry, Montréal. Photo © Maxime Boisvert

Dora García
Of Crimes and Dreams
Darling Foundry, Montréal
21 May – 14 September 2014

Review by Cécilia Bracmort

Of Crimes and Dreams strips the threshold between reality and fantasy where the two worlds interpenetrate and nourish each other. Upon entering Dora Garcí­a’s exhibition curated by Chantal Pontbriand, one figuratively experiences a journey into the human psyche and all its complex richness, sequences of altered states and perceptions from waking life to unconsciousness, assisted by Garcí­a’s use of Finnegans Wake, James Joyce’s last and most experimental novel.

Three videos works projected on the walls of the gallery underline recurrent visual and structural patterns such as circle overlays and echoing effects. Indeed, all videos mirror Joyce’s narrative structure, a never-ending novel, starting and finishing through reconstituted sentences. These seemingly aim to trigger different psychological desires from sexual or voyeuristic desires to the repression of violence or even murderous pulsions.
Continue reading “Review: Dora Garcí­a, Of Crimes and Dreams or the infinite power of human mind”

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Philip Newcombe “COMPANY” at Maria Stenfors, London


Philip Newcombe, ‘6 pink gym balls liberated from a lifetime of physical abuse’ 2014, 6 gym balls; ‘Clap’ 2014.Rubber band snapped to the sound of a loud clap. Installation view. Courtesy the artist and Maria Stenfors, London. Photo: Mike Taylor

Philip Newcombe
COMPANY
2 May – 7 June 2014
at Maria Stenfors, London

Newcombe often uses familiar and democratic objects such as lollipops, darts, folded up paper, thread, perfume, other people’s business cards and scent dispensers. By adding to or subtracting from these with subtle and well aimed interventions, the possible narratives seem ambiguous, contradictory, open ended and looped; revealing truths, half-truths, red herrings and trip-ups. Sometimes not all is what it seems to be. Although titles can describe an activity (’20 pints of milk dispersed throughout a city’, for example), there is rarely any photographic documentation of the event or a date or any other superfluous conceptual padding to justify the action. There seems no need. Instead they stubbornly hover in the territory between fact and fiction. Continue reading “Philip Newcombe “COMPANY” at Maria Stenfors, London”

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HeHe: Anthroposphere at Aeroplastics contemporary, Brussels

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HeHe, Nuage vert, Saint-Ouen, 2009. Inkjet print on dibond. 120 x 120 cm. Ed. of 3. Courtesy of Aeroplastics contemporary, Brussels

HeHe
Anthroposphere
16 January – 15 March 2014
at Aeroplastics contemporary, Brussels

The duo HeHe (Helen Evans, 1972 and Heiko Hansen, 1970) personifies a new generation of artists who create a link between the sphere of technological/digital art (too self-referential, and frequented solely by the initiated), and that of contemporary art (reluctant to accept new modes of expression based on subverting new informational/communicational technologies). Each of these spheres has developed its distinct circuits of communication and ‘diffusion’, and common points of contact between the two remain rare. Continue reading “HeHe: Anthroposphere at Aeroplastics contemporary, Brussels”

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Yannick Desranleau & Chloe Lum (Séripop): Vexations at Access Gallery, Vancouver

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Yannick Desranleau & Chloe Lum (Séripop), Vexations, installation view, 2014. Screen printed paper, rubber, wood, paper mâché, rope, paint, polyethylene film, pigment, pulleys, electrical chord, nets, found objects. Courtesy of the artists. Photo by Yannick Desranleau

Yannick Desranleau & Chloe Lum (Séripop)
Vexations
11 January – 8 March 2014
at Access Gallery, Vancouver

In Vexations, Yannick Desranleau and Chloe Lum consider the space and surfaces of the gallery as a receptacle for a visual response – a vessel that will be both present and formless in the support of a resulting “sentence” that will be uttered. Through the manipulation of coloured paper against other materials, Desranleau and Lum’s sculptures react to both planes and void, to create tension between volume and flatness, mass and fragility, material stress and failure, and inertia.
Continue reading “Yannick Desranleau & Chloe Lum (Séripop): Vexations at Access Gallery, Vancouver”