Artist Talk at Silverman Gallery by Lisa Jugert

Artist Talk at Silverman Gallery by Lisa Jugert
Friday, 13th, 7-9pm. Artist talk begins at 7:30pm.

The real life and the freedom cage

For her Artist Talk at Silverman Gallery, the German artist Lisa Jugert will discuss her work in relationship to her experiences in the U.S. and the differences of American and German culture. Arguably, her work and her American experiences seem to work together as thesis and anti-thesis. For the last 12 months the artist travelled from NYC to the midwest and down the Mississippi river towards New Orleans and then up the West Coast. Early july she will return to her home-base, Berlin.

Limited edition posters by STARSHIP, only $25!

Starship
Seinesgleichen geschieht / The Like of it now happens
Series of Posters 19 / A1
single poster 25.- $
series 19 poster 400.- $
Various artists:Simone Gilges, Judith Hopf, Daniel Pflumm, Bless, Nils Norman, Stefan Dillemuth, Christof Schaefer, Nina Rhode, Sebastian Lütgert, Henrik Olesen, 4000, Michaela Eichwald, Can Altay, Gunter Reski, Klaus Weber, Florian Zeyfang, Deborah Schamoni, Ariane Müller, Martin Ebner and Hans-Christian Dany. (For a full PDF of images email jessica@silverman-gallery.com)

Hans Christian Dany

Klaus Weber

Simon Gilges

Martin Ebner

Henrik Olesen

Daniel Pflumm


Ariane Muller

4000

Starship review by Alex Hetherington

Starship: Written on spiders

Online link here:

Silverman Gallery, San Francisco
15 May - 14 June 2008

Reviewed by: Alex Hetherington

Starship Magazine was established in Berlin in 1998 by Hans-Christian Dany, Martin Ebner and Ariane Müller. The rationale behind the publication is based on the artists’ speculation that it will be produced to accompany the final one hundred years of mankind, with the last issue expected in 2098. Their self-imposed rules and regulations subject its contributors and producers to refrain from alcohol, cigarettes and drugs in order to meet this timeline, to use the magazine as a stimulus for longevity, to use its rationale to stay alive long enough to see it all be destroyed by a reasoning that depicts our society as uniformly unsustainable, comprehensively defective, wilfully flawed.

The artists behind the magazine are also responsible for numerous presentations, exhibitions, their own gallery space and cinema, a concert hall and publishing houses based in Berlin, Hamburg, London, Paris, Cairo and New York City underscoring a commitment to their philosophy, their rational of, as this shows attempts to establish, of the inconsistencies inherent in combining ideas about excess and sustainability. “Written on Spiders” hypothesizes, from a position, therefore of impossibility.

The show consists of a number of interlocking elements: editions of the back catalogue of the magazine displayed on a blanket, a framed large-scale sculptural cube enclosing a multiple edition text, illuminated by a green glowing light bulb, a series of prints papered to the walls, a tree branch decorated with silver foil, and a suite of framed drawings/collages. Silverman shares a space sometimes awkwardly with its store, the Look Boutique, so on occasion works in the show seems to merge with the for-sale items: limited edition clothing, books, publications, jewellery and music. This confusion of random interchanges between art and commerce may be deliberate but it serves to underline a sense of disquietingly uptight, edgy values evident throughout this show, throughout this space.

A set of questions are prominent in the show: what is the value of production and function? What relationship do we really have with our environment? What use is the city when the city is such a site of aggravation and flux? The posters papered onto the wall deliver statements, attempts to deliver answers with explanations on what to do if you live in a flood-risk area, statements on the deliberate censoring of images; random visual acts which explore histories of dissent, change, upheaval. The text multiple meanwhile gives us a fragment of a mingling of intangible narratives about love, computer desktops and characters, rain in times of drought, mental disease, the World Health Organization and calls to Keep Your Distance, obediently observed. The suite of drawings are similarly disengaged from linear movement, nervously drawn with fine ink lines and scratches, as if made by the spiders of the title.

The provisional sensibility of the show is reflected by the fresh occupation of the gallery in this building in Sutter Street in downtown San Francisco (it has moved from its original basement space across town). The work seems hurriedly constructed, easily dismantled, premature and hasty. And perhaps this is its true strength: if we are to consider notes on excess and sustainability, on impossibilities, failures and nervous actions what better way to achieve this than through its delicate membrane of fragmented transitory illuminations like the tiny green light bulb glowing pitifully and artificially against the punishing, giant summer Californian sunshine.

Writer detail:
Visual artist and writer based in Scotland and the USA.

www.alexhetherington.com

Venue detail:
Silverman Gallery
804 Sutter Street San Francisco, United States 94109

www.silverman-gallery.com

Congratulations to Silverman Gallery artist, Desirée Holman!

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art today announced the 2008 winners of its SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) awards, handed out every other year to promising Bay Area artists. The four chosen this year, out of a field of 200, get an exhibition at the museum, which publishes a catalog about their work, and "a modest cash prize." The museum prefers not to specify the sum, which varies from year to year.

This year's SECA recipients are Tauba Auerbach, a conceptual artist with a Stanford degree who makes drawings, paintings and books; Desirée Holman, a video artist who studied at California College of the Arts and UC Berkeley; painter Jordan Kantor, who went to Stanford, then earned a doctorate from Harvard in the history of art and architecture; and Trevor Paglen, who makes photographs and mixed-media installations. He got his master's at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a doctorate in geography from UC Berkeley, where he was an undergraduate. Their work will be shown at SFMOMA from Feb. 14 to May 17, 2009.

The show that everyone is talking about.

Illusion is a revolutionary weapon by Gareth Spor

Black Poinsettia (after The Man Who Taught Blake Painting in his Dreams (after William Blake)), Graphite on paper, 11 ¾ x 15 by Yuval Pudik, 2008

Dreammachine by Gareth Spor, 2008

On April 22nd Silverman Gallery hosted Hypnotic Show, Curated by Raimundas Malašauskas
Julieta Aranda, Deric Carner Asli Çavuşoğlu, Torreya Cummings,
Gintaras Didžiapetris, Cerith Wyn Evans, Michael Fliri, Loris Gréaud, Joachim Koester, Jennifer Di Marco, Nicholas Matranga & Francesca Bennet Piero Passacantando
Yuval Pudik, Gareth Spor and Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough as well as a one night séance conducted by Marcos Lutyens

Review by:
KEVIN KILLIAN
1020 Minna Street, San Francisco, CA 94103/(415) 863-6798

HYPNOTIC SHOW
April 22-28, 2008, Silverman Gallery (San Francisco)

At the door of the Silverman Gallery you had to sign two releases before being allowed entry. “Basically this one says you waive liability in case you get possessed by a demon while within these walls,” explains the gallery girl, “and this one’s stating you won’t sue if the dream machine gives you an epileptic seizure.” Possessed? Dream machine? We were positively fibrillating by the time we took seats in the dimly lit gallery space on Sutter Street. Job Piston and I sat warily, cameras in our laps, ready to snap any sign of ectoplasm or wrathful spirits, but apparently this was just part of curator Raimundas Malasauskas’ Barnum-like showmanship, and when he promised a “séance of hypnosis,” he was using “séance” as a metaphor, as one might say, “a whole bunch of hypnosis,” or, a “quiet evening of hypnosis.” I don’t know how they say it in Lithuanian, but the philosophy of the studio heads of Hollywood’s golden age was, get those asses into the seats by any means necessary. Malasauskas might well be the William Castle of modern curatorial projects.

I never felt that I was actually going to be possessed by an incubus, but artist slash hypnotist Marcos Lutyens certainly had us all going pit a pat as he entered and prowled through the space, dividing the audience into two groups, those who were volunteering, and those like myself afraid to participate, who wanted merely to watch. Malasauskas had commissioned hypnosis scripts from a group of international artists, and Lutyens had worked four of them into a running spiel. The ring of chairs was soon deep in a trance, the sitters nodding and blinking like rabbits, while he spoke on in a velvety, Michael Ondaatje baritone redolent of summer, with a poignant tang of autumn surprising some of his labial consonants. Like I say, he worked the space, reaching out here and there to clasp shut a pair of hands a –trembling on a knee, to touch a supplicant’s forehead with his thumb, all the while counting us down, five, four, three, two, one. At one we were in the deepest possible trance state, and then he’d have us count down yet again, from ten to one, deeper still. One girl wound up so out of it her hair touched the ground in front of her, I’ve never seen anything like it, not even back in college when we took massive doses of animal tranquillizers to get over the outrage of having Nixon as president..

Meanwhile Lutyens was droning on in that intimate, simpatico way, walking us into Joachin Koester’s script about a park, a sidewalk, a civic building called the “Department of Abandoned Futures,” after which we crossed the threshold and descended a stairway, entered a hall, found a box filled with—with what? We each were invited to imagine what lay within. Deric Carner’s script was more ominous, I thought, a dark, cloudy horizon along which an unimaginable object began to evince itself—in a color we could not name, as it was not a color we had ever seen before—and the name of the large object came to us little by little as its Lovecraftian shape began to struggle in shadows and gleams across the sky. I called my object “Zephyr.” I don’t know why. You’ll gather that my status as a spectator did not prevent me from joining into the general trance; Marcos Lutyens’ voice is so seductive that, were you in that room that night, you too would be dreaming these dark visions. He leaned on some catchphrases that, perhaps, judged objectively, he used too often (“went back to the well one too many times,” as my dad used to say), but I never got tired of hearing him say, “And you’re drifting and dreaming—drifting and dreaming.” Indeed I’m now engaged to Marcos Lutyens and cheerfully I am bearing his children without anesthesia. I’ll just be drifting and dreaming in a bower of erotic bliss somewhere, bent to the floor, my hair soapy and washing his high-instepped feet.

Before I knew it we were waking up, one, two, three, four, five. Kylie Minogue had that song on her LP, Body Language, which I should have listened to before exposing myself to Hypnotic Show.


Count backwards 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

Before you get too heated and turned on (and turned on)

You should've learned your lesson all in times before

You've been bruised, you've been broken

And there’s my mind saying think before you go

Through that door that takes me to nowhere (yes boy)

I stopped you all romantic crazy in your head

You think I listen, no I don't care . . . .

The truth is, I do care, and when Raimundas Malasauskas proposed hypnotism as an avenue of total interaction, a room full of mirrors in which objects create themselves from the swept floorboards of the Silverman Gallery—the birthplace of the golem—I went there. You know how Susan Sontag coined that expression, “Don’t go there.” Well, I went there, ignoring Sontag, thrusting myself in a post-Sontag space of risk, interpellation, and impending childbirth, drifting and dreaming, drifting and dreaming, in the Alterjinga of the Australian aboriginal people—the dreamtime.

Starship "Written on spiders"

New - photos from Martin Ebner:

Starship: Our second opening at our new space, 804 Sutter Street. Ariane, Marin and Hans-Christian were in town and the opening was the perfect hot summer night. Here it is from last to first.

Selection of Starship publications for view and sale.

Set of posters are for sale - $25 each or $400 for the set. Limited quantity.

Text by Ariane Muller - the beginning of the story.

Bird silkscreen by Adam Prince. Original concept by Starship

Front of Silverman Gallery // Look Boutique

Starship: Hans-Christian Dany, Martin Ebner, Ariane Müller presents "Written on spiders"

May 15 - June 14, 2008

Silverman Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of film, sculpture and wall-mounted works by Starship: Hans-Christian Dany, Martin Ebner, Ariane Müller, on view from May 15 – June 14, 2008. Titled "Written on spiders" this, their first West Coast exhibition, also marks their inaugural exhibition at Silverman Gallery.

Starship Magazine was established in Berlin in 1998 and is to be produced for the final one hundred years of mankind, with the last issue expected in 2098. The rules and regulations of Starship Magazine subject its contributors to refrain from alcohol, cigarettes and drugs in order to meet this timeline. Starship is also responsible for presentations, exhibitions, a gallery space, a cinema, a concert hall and publishing houses in Berlin, Hamburg, London, Paris, Cairo, New York. They are currently working on an Arab issue.

For Silverman Gallery, Starship artists Hans-Christian Dany, Martin Ebner and Ariane Müller have produced new works as well as a site-specific installation with multiple projections. In the space and around San Francisco, Starship will install a series of posters under the title "Seinesgleichen geschieht/The like of it now happens," a visual research project on excess and sustainability. Other artists included are: Simone Gilges, Judith Hopf, Daniel Pflumm, Bless, Nils Norman, Stefan Dillemuth, Christof Schaefer, Nina Rhode, Sebastian Lütgert, Henrik Olesen, 4000, Michaela Eichwald, Can Altay, Gunter Reski, Klaus Weber, Deborah Schamoni, Ariane Müller, Martin Ebner and Hans-Christian Dany.

On the day after their opening reception we hope you will join us once again for a very special presentation, Plusplusplus: Introducing Starship Magazine and Shuffle, May 16, 4pm.

804 Sutter Street @ Jones, San Francisco CA, 415.255.9508, www.silverman-gallery.com

Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11-6pm and by appointment.

For further information and images please contact Adam Prince at 415.255.9508 or info@silverman-gallery.com

Silverman Gallery artist, Susanne M. Winterling - Berlin Biennale, 2008

Susanne Winterling and I at her installation.

Eileen Gray, the jewel and troubled water
2008, 2-part installation, 2 16mm films, approx. 3 min, color, no sound, loop; 7 photographs, framed, each 20 x 30 cm; 1 photo collage, framed, 40 x 50 cm; 1 mixed media object, framed; 2 sculptures, each 40 x 50 x 30 cm; postcards

This text is taken from the 5th Berlin Biennale web site.

The starting point of Susanne M. Winterling’s new installation is the Irish designer and architect Eileen Gray (1878–1979). Film, photocollages, and research materials come together to produce a complex reference system exploring a range of modernist ideas as well as gender-determined power relations. Winterling’s impetus is an anecdote about the architectural masterpiece maison en bord du mer E. 1027, which Gray built in 1924–28 in the South of France for Jean Badovici and herself. The house so fascinated another contemporary architect, Le Corbusier, that he secretly visited it repeatedly and later went so far as to apply his own murals, including representations of nude women, to its walls, without permission. Gray experienced this “vandalism” as a kind of rape, particularly because her thinking on modern architecture was so different from Le Corbusier’s—whereas he was interested in an all-purpose modular system, for Gray, architectural elements had individualized features and functions, like parts of the human body.
Winterling takes Gray’s approach as a guide for the occupation of another modernist masterpiece: the artist transforms the two wooden in-built checkroom areas of the Neue Nationalgalerie into the “lungs” of the building, artistically reworking Mies van der Rohe’s space in a gesture a bit like Le Corbusier’s appropriation of Gray’s building. Winterling thus deconstructs architectural space and uses a variety of media to reflect on and uncover discontinuities in (a predominantly male controlled) modernity. In the refunctioned checkrooms, the irregular flickering of two 16mm films transforms the cold structure into something like a breathing being. Its endlessly replayed images display water vapor condensing on the glass panes of the Neue Nationalgalerie—a reality of the building under certain thermal conditions—thus exposing Mies’s supposedly perfect dissolution of the border between inner and outer architectural space as failed.