Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

Make Believe: video work by Desiree Holman opens tomorrow!

2009-03-11T12:25:00.001-07:00

Thursday, March 12

3 p.m. Artist Conversation
McLaren 251

4 p.m. Reception
Thacher Gallery

Desirée Holman is an Oakland-based visual artist. As with many of her works, the three video installations in "Make Believe" explore the tension between reality and fantasy. An interdisciplinary artist, Holman fabricates costumes and masks to be worn by herself and actors in portrayals of role-playing scenarios. Her use of primitive animation techniques and handcrafted costumes create a tension between passive and active modes of reception, allowing viewers a critical distance even as they find themselves pulled into the fantasies. These videos are the result of long-term research and a many-layered process often involving drawing, photography, sculpture, and writing.

Holman is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts as well as a recipient of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SECA award. In 2007, she received the Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue award. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, Hessel Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Milan’s BnD, Toronto’s YYZ, The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Berkeley Art Museum and Lisa Boyle Gallery in Chicago. She is represented by the Silverman Gallery in San Francisco. In 1999, directly after completing her BFA in sculpture at CCA, Holman attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and graduated with her MFA from UC Berkeley in 2002.

Artist Statement

Engaging in make-believe provides practice in roles one might someday assume in real life. It helps one to understand and sympathize with others. It enables one to come to grips with one’s own feelings. It broadens one’s perspectives.

—Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts

All the works in "Make Believe" involve role-playing games that utilize handcrafted figurative sculptures as props. The sculptures are effigies, and include life-size dolls, wearable full-body forms and masks. I use fantasy play with these effigies as a means of discovery. The process of playing and animating the figurative forms that I create allows for the probing and expression of the fundamental (but normally taken for granted) dynamics of human relationships and emotions.

In "Art as Therapy" (2002), I posed as a family therapist who is giving therapy to a family of life-size dolls. The aim is for the family members to better understand and accept their individual responsibility in the emotional life of the family unit. My initial “consultation” with the family begins with their appearance on a popular television talk show. From this television program, I created life-size dolls representing each family member, which I then animated in the video. In effect, I am both the therapist and the clients. The video provides a window into the transformation we experience as we struggle to change relationships, alleviate symptoms, and improve the emotional functioning of the family system.

Again, in "I would do almost anything that you asked me to do..." (2005), I act as multiple characters with the use of figurative sculptures. In this piece, however, I actually inhabit the effigies and animate them from within the forms. I was inspired by a type of extreme cross-dressing in which (usually) a man puts on a full-body latex suit of a woman’s body and face. From four adult male models, I created four flesh-like, stretchy suits that I could literally step into and wear. Robed in these skins, I enacted the roles of four distinct male characters in relationship to myself, engaging in a romantic, yet failed, attempts to waltz with the various male suitors.

Similarly, "Troglodyte" (2005) features inhabitable sculptural forms. In this work, however, the characters are played by multiple performers including myself. The term "troglodyte" describes a simpleton or brute who is emotionally reactive and potentially dangerous; s/he is without acute powers of reasoning. For this piece, I sculpted multiple life-size, wearable, latex, hair and fabric, chimpanzee-like forms. Whether in the spotlight of academic investigations or popular culture, the chimpanzee has often been the focus for human projection. By inhabiting the sculptural forms and pretending to be a chimpanzee, the work investigates human emotion and behavior.

These games always revolve around relationships and reciprocity (or lack there of). I wonder what games of make-believe, like the ones I create in my work or the ones created in multi-user online games or elsewhere, can tell us about our behaviors in the "real" world.

Desirée Holman, 2009

Desiree Holman in the Press:

The gallery is grateful to Steve Rhyne, Director of Technology for the Art + Architecture Department, for his technical expertise in presenting this work.

Susanne M. Winterling - updates and shows!

2009-02-26T23:42:00.001-08:00

UNTITLED (FORMATION: THE CIRCLE,THE LINE)

Super 16mm, 5min 23, 2009

DP: Tobias Peper, Music: Matteah Baim,

special thanks to Athea, Luca, Lina, Christina Steiner, Simonetta Rocchetti

Eastman Kodak

will be presented for the first time on Sat 28 2009

at THE FRONT ROOM, Contemporary Art Museum St.Louis

http://www.contemporarystl.org/current.php

other things going on:

till beg of March Alliance, Sisterhood and the Rope at Hiromi Yoshii, Tokyo

till beg og March BAWAG Contemporary, Vienna

till March 21 Don't expect anything, Francesca Minini, Milano

http://www.francescaminini.it/

till April Zendai Museum Shanghai

http://www.zendaiart.com/En/Default.aspx

http://www.intrude366.com/en-US/intrude366/Project.aspx?articleid=979

Susanne M. Winterling - updates and shows!

2009-02-26T23:42:00.000-08:00

UNTITLED (FORMATION: THE CIRCLE,THE LINE)

Super 16mm, 5min 23, 2009

DP: Tobias Peper, Music: Matteah Baim,

special thanks to Athea, Luca, Lina, Christina Steiner, Simonetta Rocchetti

Eastman Kodak

will be presented for the first time on Sat 28 2009

at THE FRONT ROOM, Contemporary Art Museum St.Louis

http://www.contemporarystl.org/current.php

other things going on:

till beg of March Alliance, Sisterhood and the Rope at Hiromi Yoshii, Tokyo

till beg og March BAWAG Contemporary, Vienna

till March 21 Don't expect anything, Francesca Minini, Milano

http://www.francescaminini.it/

till April Zendai Museum Shanghai

http://www.zendaiart.com/En/Default.aspx

http://www.intrude366.com/en-US/intrude366/Project.aspx?articleid=979

Desiree Holman - SFBG talks about Holman in SECA and what is to come!

2009-02-25T13:50:00.000-08:00

She's a magic woman

SECA: Try to understand — the play is the thing in Desirée Holman's masked wonderlands

By Matt Sussman

SECA ART AWARDS

There is a lot of play going on in the work of Desirée Holman. As evinced by the handmade masks, props, and costumes that populate her multimedia pieces — a family therapy workshop comprised of dolls in 2002's Art as Therapy; a clan of Bigfoot-like sapiens in 2005's Troglodyte; and most recently, the estranged visages of television's Huxtable and Conner families in The Magic Window — an anarchic "let's raid the dress-up box" impulse is often her guiding force. Family sitcoms, pop cultural junk food, and mediated existence in a thoroughly televised culture are her source materials.

From Cindy Sherman's faux film stills and prosthetic body part augmentations to Paul McCarthy's return-of-the-repressed performances using all manner of foodstuffs and costume shop detritus, the act of playing dress-up has its art-historical precedents. While Holman's work superficially brings Sherman and McCarthy to mind (the influence of the former is certainly apparent in 2006's Bucolic Life, where she plays mother and wife to a mannequin family within a series of supposedly candid snapshots), her art is not as routinely fixated on confronting the viewer with the grotesque and abject.

"I can see why people would find my work creepy, but I don't see it that way," laughs Holman over the phone. Judging from the opening night crowd's response to The Magic Window — which takes pride of place at the SECA Art Award show — the most common response to Holman's work seems to be nervous laughter. But when Roseanne Conner resembles Leatherface, it's not hard to see why.

However palpable, unease is just a surface response to Holman's rough-hewn masks and bodysuits. As fellow Guardian critic Glen Helfand noted in an Artforum review of Troglodyte, the empty costumes of the piece's hirsute, apelike creatures "still channel our evolutionary connection to them" — a connection underscored by videos and photographs of the costumed creatures smoking cigarettes and dancing. No matter how funny or scary we find the ape family, we remain inescapably tied to them. Holman's art teases out these strange channels and treats them as invitations to play along.

This invitation to connect beyond familiar comfort zones — even if, as viewers, we are frequently stuck, costumeless, on the outside looking in — is what animates The Magic Window, a project originally conceived for and shown at SF's Silverman Gallery, which is showing work by Holman this April. Comprised of a three-channel video on one wall and colored pencil drawings on the wall opposite, The Magic Window takes its title from a 1939 ad campaign used to sell early, primitive TV sets to American consumers. But the name could just as easily be applied to the sculptural masks worn by Holman and her cast.

The video starts off with parallel narratives loosely modeled after incidents from Roseanne and The Cosby Show, and ends with both families leaving their respective screens to visit each other's homes/sets. For a finale, the two clans come together for a center-screen psychedelic dance-off set in a purely virtual space where everyone glows with a green-screen aura. (This aura effect is rendered beautifully through tensile wisps in Holman's delicate drawings). In other hands, the Huxtables and Conners would be mined for parodic laughs or used for nastier ends (see McCarthy's and Mike Kelley's assault on family life in their 1992 video Heidi), but Holman has a deep affection for her source material. "I personally like both television shows, which were really progressive for their time," she says. "And I really wanted to look at the similarities between the two families."

Holman's collaborative fantasy union — in which one of television's most popular, white, middle-class families gets down with its first-ever affluent, upper-middle class African American kin — could not resonate more with our country's current political moment. The Huxtables are now, in a sense, the First Family, and the notion of a "post-racial America" has never had greater currency or been as thoroughly debated. To wit, Holman recently revealed in an interview with the blog Future Shipwreck that she created the masks for The Magic Window by attempting to combine the facial characteristics of her cast members with those of the actors who portrayed the characters on television.

In light of the recent election and current events, Holman has, understandably, been thinking a lot about The Magic Window. "On the one hand, [it presents] a critique of reenacting something that is already a fiction," she says, when asked about the piece. Then, as if channeling the zeitgeist on cue, she continues, "But on the other hand — and more powerful for me — are the acts of hope that these families act out in the video."

SECA ART AWARD EXHIBITION: TAUBA AUERBACH, DESIRÉE HOLMAN, JORDAN KANTOR, AND TREVOR PAGLEN

Through May 10; $12.50 adults, $8 seniors, $7 students (free for 12 and under)

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

Riley John Donnell and Job Piston - upcoming shows - flyers!

2009-02-24T15:19:00.000-08:00

Job Piston's work in Paper Exhibition

2009-02-16T16:05:00.000-08:00

Job Piston: Review for "Paper Exhibition"

2009-02-16T14:58:00.001-08:00

Paper Exhibition

Artists Space, New York, USA

Judith Braun, The Line Between Fiction and Reality (2009)

Entering ‘Paper Exhibition’ at Artists Space is like taking a leap through a distorted looking glass - or better through the hole in one of Job Piston’s cocktail napkins Untitled (Etiquette) (2009), included here.

The maze-like collection of lost, found and made-up fragments and artifacts, all of which respond to cryptic narratives, is mesmerizing - but it can also be confusing. Lucky, then, that Judith Braun’s drawing The Line Between Fiction and Reality (2009) functions as a guide to the exhibition. Taking on the longest wall of the central space, Braun’s life-size charcoal work is a response to the curator’s challenge to draw a line between reality and fiction. The wall-piece was drawn simultaneously with both hands, tracing concentric movements that work outwards from an empty centre. Most of the works in the exhibition, about 37 in total, depending on who’s counting and who’s counted (works seem to have the tendency to appear and disappear over the course of the show), linger in a similarly indiscernible centre that evades taking shape. Though not all of the works here are on paper, the uniting quality is an ‘exchange between the literal and the literary’ - as the press release puts it. The divisions between substance and content are floating, as in Mark Geffriaud’s Small World Hobbies (2007), which presents a delicate origami recreation of a crumpled piece of paper next to its original.

Mariana Castillo Deball, Visage faux (detail, 2008)

‘Paper Exhibition’ is oddly reminiscent of Morten Harket’s struggle between physical and paper versions of himself in the video for a-ha’s ‘Take on Me’ (1985). A similar struggle can be seen in Mariana Castillo Deball’s paper masks that adorn the other wall of Artists Space’s central room. Visage faux (2008) consists of 24 replicas of indigenous masks made from folded A4 paper. The masks originate from the pages of art history books, though all imagery has been erased to leave only blank pages and image credits. These pages were then folded to mimic the shapes of the masks they once depicted, and the captions that once classified the masks according to terms foreign to their original context define the abstract folds instead.

Trong Gia Nguyen, Flaubert: Madame Bovary (Last Chapter-3062 words) (2009)

Shifting forms or the unstable essence of material is also a central idea in the work Trong Gia Nguyen’s Flaubert: Madame Bovary (Last Chapter-3062 words) (2009). Nguyen wrote the complete last chapter of the 1856 novel word for word on 3,062 kernels of rice. He collected the rice in a little bag that now hangs in the gallery space. The bag doubles as its own library card and has the information provided by a New York Library card imprinted on its surface. Like a Dadaist word game or the magnetic poetry on refrigerators, every movement of the bag creates thousands of new possible endings.

Gareth Spor, Dreamachine (Illusion is a Revolutionary Weapon) after William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Cerith Wyn Evans and Loris Gréaud) (2008)

The collective speculation of curator, artists and visitors that characterizes ‘Paper Exhibition’ is united in a search for the missing masterpiece or the missing link, something that grants a fleeting yet momentarily satisfying feeling of comprehension and legitimization. However, this link might not even be missing, rather just masquerading as something else in the show. The show should possibly be viewed like Gareth Spor’s Dreamachine (2008), with closed eyes - and what counts is not the object but rather its reflection on the retina of the viewer. And to escape from the alluring abyss of confusion and bewilderment that opens up one needs only to open one’s eyes. Still, something stays behind, faintly staining our vision just like the repetitive sounds of Robert Rauschenberg erasing a de Kooning in Mario Garcia Torres’ recording An undisclosed month in 1953 (2007), which remains audible long after one has left the paper space.

Anna Gritz

Tammy Rae Carland: Hysteria: Past yet present

2009-02-09T21:57:00.000-08:00

Hysteria: Past yet present

February 5 – April 9, 2009
Opening Reception - Thursday, February 5, 5pm – 7pm

Hysteria is an elusive, psychosomatic, even mythical disorder, impinging on our physical, cultural, and moral concerns. It is often characterized as a mercurial state of disturbance that can be manifested in both a psychological and physical sense. The word “hysteria” comes from the Greek work hystera, a term applied to disturbances of the uterus. Addressing this topic, a number of contemporary artists have dealt directly with the work of European medical professionals Sigmund Freud and Jean-Martin Charcot by creating artwork that mirrors aspects of their studies. This exhibition will explore hysteria in relation to gender construction, feminine identity and pathologization, and sheer physical form given to the condition in the imagination of artists.

Artists in this exhibition:
Cortney ANDREWS,
Beth B, Zoe BELOFF,
Mary BILLYOU,
Tammy Rae CARLAND,
Jennifer DUDLEY,
Carson FOX,
Guerrilla Girls,
Lynne HELLER,
Ruth HUTCHINSON,
Georgette MANIATIS,
Jennifer MAZZA,
Cindy REHM,
Babs REINGOLD,
Sarah SUDHOFF,
Claire WATSON,
Shoshanna WEINBERGER

LA TIMES: Yuval Pudik Angles Gallery

2009-02-07T19:05:00.000-08:00

Review: Constance Mallinson and Yuval Pudik at Angles Gallery

Strangeness abounds at Angles Gallery these days, where two technically exquisite, darkly fantastic bodies of work are paired. It’s been more than 10 years since Constance Mallinson’s last solo appearance in L.A., and this is Israeli-born Yuval Pudik’s first. The show is noteworthy on both counts, but mostly for its enduring, disarming qualities.

Mallinson’s approach to the natural landscape has long braided the contemplative, critical and collage-like; here she ventures into related terrain, with a more concentrated focus. In her four figurative paintings on paper, measuring up to 8 feet per side, human forms are defined entirely in terms of wood and natural debris: patches of bark, frizzles of roots, slender, twining twigs. The visual gamesmanship harks back to Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s famous composite portraits as well as to the spell-induced transformations of fairy tales, but with a more subversive edge.

One pair of figures is locked in intercourse against a stained white field, a shriveled apple core beside them. Another couple enacts the biblical consequence, expulsion, striding forward naked out of ashen depths. With tremendous acuity, Mallinson renders human anatomy out of the anatomy of trees — gnarled burls, sinuous knots and fungus-blooming bark. The gorgeous offsets the grotesque; homage tempers horror.

The beautiful “Wallpaper” comes as something of a reprieve, invoking far less psychic duress. In direct tribute to the sensual integrity of the dead and dying, Mallinson traces arabesques out of dried branches, split seed pods, faded blossoms and rotted pomegranates. The painting is bittersweet and ravishing.

Pudik’s graphite drawings, in a range of sizes, are a curious mix of the carnivalesque and cartoonish, with a little sexual deviance thrown in for spice. No figure or scene is carried to a logical conclusion. Instead, figures starting out with thigh-high boots and riding crops end up with palm trees for heads or twin cars jutting out of their collars. The rendering is skillful and convincing, a performance that matches the theatricality of the vision.

Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Feb. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

-- Leah Ollman

SF Chronicle: Neil Ledoux "Light in the forest prevades painter's imagination

2009-02-07T19:03:00.000-08:00

Art BUsiness: Silverman Gallery: Neil LeDoux - The Fountain of Giant Teardrops.

2009-02-06T15:04:00.001-08:00

Silverman Gallery: Neil LeDoux - The Fountain of Giant Teardrops.

Comment by AB: Neil LeDoux tells me his paintings are based on a vision he had as a young boy. While wandering deep in the Louisiana woods one day, he saw a fountain within a fountain. He hightailed it back to where his friends were playing, took 'em straight back to see it, but nothing was there. With this hallucinatory incident as his guiding pyre, he concocts hauntingly engaging compositional configurations of seemingly disparate elements including the fountains he once saw, Duchamp's urinal, Tibetan wall reliefs, and even a little Jan van Eyck. The good news? They work. Check 'em out. Priced $400-$3500.

Desiree Holman press and links!

2009-02-06T11:35:00.001-08:00

http://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/39114212.html

http://badatsports.com/2009/episode-179-seca/

Susanne Winterling at Bawag Contemporary

2009-02-04T18:03:00.000-08:00

http://www.bawagcontemporary.at/

Eröffnung 4. Februar 2009, 19 Uhr

tägl. ab 5. Februar 2009 bis 1. März 2009, 14-20 Uhr

Tammy RAe Carland in Sweet and Matchless

2009-02-01T18:09:00.001-08:00

Sweet and Matchless
February 9th – March 5th
PLAySPACE Gallery, 1111 8th St., 2nd Floor, San Francisco
Opening Reception: Monday, February 9th, 7 – 9 PM

Using the love letter as a point of departure, Sweet and Matchless brings together various expressions of love—from romantic love to the affinities and complexities of families and friendships. The show includes artworks, personal documents, and objects not necessarily
intended to be shown to anyone.

Featuring works by Zina Al-Shukri, Mara Baldwin, Jeremiah Barber, Ellen Black, James Bradley, Tammy Rae Carland, Margaret Coleman, Patty and Blade Corwin, Benjamin Crotty, Torreya Cummings, Lauren Friedman, Linda Geary, David Gilbert, Julia Goodman, Jamil Hellu and Darrin Martin, Bevan Herbekian, Queena Hernandez and Anna Simson, Michael Hilsman, Zara Katz, Cameron Kelly, Christine Kesler, Claire Kessler-Bradner, Emily Korson, Eric Kuhn, Ace Lehner, Forrest Lewinger, Liesa Lietzke, Elyse Mallouk, Brigid Mason, Justin Olerud, Patricia Patterson, Leah Rosenberg, Hilary Schwartz, Elizabeth Sher, Mary Snowden, Marta Spurgeon, Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, Kat Stewart, Margaret Tedesco, Suné Woods, Jane Yakowitz and James Williams.

Nel Ledoux - 2009 paintings - "Cosmic piss" - Ignacio Valero

2009-02-01T08:58:00.000-08:00

Best quote - optomism is key.

2009-01-30T16:30:00.001-08:00

Peter Michael, husband of trustee Eileen M. Michael: "If you have any money left, now is a great time to buy art." The message was loud and clear- the dealers are dealing.

Neil Ledoux drawings - graphite on paper, 2009

2009-01-30T13:07:00.000-08:00

Come check out our new show and these stunning drawings! Each work has a unique and handmade frame. Works range from $400 - $600 and are going fast!

Susanne M. Winterling: DON'T EXPECT ANYTHING

2009-01-28T15:49:00.002-08:00

DON'T EXPECT ANYTHING
Becky Beasley, Nina Beier & Marie Lund, Karla Black, Katinka Bock, Kate Davis, Annette Kisling, Lorna Macintyre, Rosalind Nashashibi, Lisa Oppenheim, Susanne M. Winterling
Opening January 28th, 2009 7pm

Intangible messages journey through time and space through the viewer's perception of the works on show. Images understood as a return to the past of ideas and ideals, events and icons, symbols and stories. The images are translated physically by the artists into photographs of historical characters, into revised material, stills taken from old films or graphic reworkings oelectronic images. But do not expect anything, since it is precisely the act of perception, more than the objects of perception, which is important. The physicality of that which is exhibited rises to a documentary residue, to memory and evocation, thanks to the in-depth research that has been conducted. Be ready however to welcome these forgotten thoughts, these fragments of the past as evocations of that which space and time have physically distanced from us and which the artists let us see in a manner both poetic and deliberately indeterminate.

FRANCESCA MININI
VIA MASSIMIANO 25
I - 20134 MILANO
T 02 26924671
F 02 21596402
INFO@FRANCESCAMININI.IT
WWW.FRANCESCAMININI.IT

7x7: Desiree Holman's Spooky Videos at the SFMOMA

2009-01-27T09:19:00.000-08:00

Desiree Holman's Spooky Videos at the SFMOMA

The shadow play speaks louder than words.

by Robin Rinaldi

posted January 25, 2009 9:26AM

Photo by Claude Shade

If you feel a sense of unease looking at Desirée Holman’s videos, as if something important is going unsaid, then the artist has succeeded. “My formula is performer plus prop, but I’m not necessarily interested in those two parts. I’m interested in what happens in between the two. It’s an intangible space, the story that’s not being explicitly told.” Take The Magic Window, for instance, on view at SFMOMA this month as part of its SECA Art Award show (Holman, along with three other local artists, won the award for 2008). In it, two separate video screens show actors—hooded in eerie masks—playing out typical scenes from the sitcoms Roseanne and The Cosby Show, while, on a third screen in the middle, they break character, join together and dance in a green-on-black glow. It certainly reads as a statement on the ’80s, the artist’s formative decade, but the viewer is left to decipher what, exactly, the message is. And while the prop part of the equation (those spooky masks) is evident from the beginning, that’s not the case in Holman’s Babies, a video installation opening in April at the Silverman Gallery. Not to ruin the element of surprise, but those aren’t real infants the actors are cradling. They are sculptures that Holman based on Newborn Nursery dolls, lifelike figures that collectors “adopt” from “nurseries” complete with “birth certificates.” “I’m interested in all of these women engaged in this massive fantasy game,” she says. “The prop allows the expression of fantasy in a way that’s different than without it. It’s like when you give a child a toy and with it, they express feelings they aren’t comfortable talking about.” Yes, Holman’s work is exactly like that—like giving an intelligent, perceptive child a toy and watching as she indirectly speaks to you through it. You’re not sure what she’ll say, but you instinctively brace for it.

Jean Paul Gaultier printed mesh dress ($550) at Barneys New York, 415-268-3500. Marc by Marc Jacobs black leather motorcycle ankle boots ($495) at Barneys New York.  Vintage black-and-gold wood bangles, stylist’s own. Black cotton/wool tights, model’s own. Black leather croc-embossed belt, stylist’s own.

http://www.7x7.com/content/e/desiree-holmans-spooky-videos-sfmoma

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough @ Headlands Front + Center.

2009-01-21T14:45:00.000-08:00

Headlands January 2009 eNEWS

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough, L. Ron Hubbard: Your Scientology is My Science Fiction, 2006. Duct tape and contact paper on astronomy calendar page. Courtesy of the artist and Silverman Gallery.

Happy new year from Headlands Center for the Arts, and welcome to 2009! Before we put 2008 fully behind us, we'd like to send out one last resounding THANK YOU for your support last year. Your attendance at programs, your efforts to share Headlands with friends and family, and your contributions of time and finances made 2008 a year of new highs for us.

Moving onward and upward, 2009 will be an exciting year here at Headlands, and we hope you'll visit often. Between artist talks, Open Houses, our annual Benefit Auction and more, there will be many opportunities for you to be a part of the Headlands community.

First up on the calendar: Front + Center opens this Sunday, January 18. After six successful years of launching its residency season with an annual exhibition, Headlands, in collaboration with Kimberly Johansson, has reimagined this show and calls critical attention to noteworthy California artists from Headlands' 2009 applicant pool. Exhibition details and hours are below, and mark your calendar for the official opening reception coming up on Sunday, February 8 from 2-4PM.

And keep an ear to the ground in the next few weeks: Headlands is about to announce its roster of 2009 Artists in Residence. See you at Headlands soon!

1. Front + Center January 18 - February 22

2. In other news... Alumni AIRs exhibiting in the Bay Area

-------------------------------------------
Front + Center

Tamara Albaitis, Lick, 2009. Raw speakers, audio wire and audio soundtrack (site-specific). Courtesy of the artist.

When: Sunday, January 18 - Sunday, February 22. Exhibition Hours: Sunday - Friday, noon - 5PM *Headlands will be closed Monday, January 19, Tuesday, January 20 and Monday, February 16
Where: Headlands Center for the Arts, Building 944, 3rd Floor
How: FREE admission. On Sundays and holidays, MUNI bus #76 runs every hour between 9:30AM and 5:30PM. Click here for transit details and timetables.

Front + Center Opening Reception: Sunday, February 8, 2-4PM. (Members reception 1-2PM: Become a Memberand join us for a curator-led tour of the exhibition as well as presentations from a group of featured artists!)

Headlands Center for the Arts is pleased to present Front + Center, a dynamic group exhibition guest-curated by Kimberly Johansson and featuring new and recent work by Tamara Albaitis, Brice Bischoff, Todd Bura, Matty Byloos, Ajit Chauhan, Joshua Churchill, Lori Esposito, Mayumi Hamanaka, Taro Hattori, Rachel Mayeri, Jennie Ottinger, Erik Parra, Francesca Pastine, Alison Pebworth, Tara Tucker, Paul Urich, Lindsey White, Noah Wilson, Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough and Ayelet Zohar.

SFBG: Local Artist of the Week: 'hallucinatory memory'

2009-01-21T14:39:00.001-08:00

Local Artist of the Week: 'hallucinatory memory'

LOCAL ARTIST Neil Ledoux

TITLE Pigna (60" x 48", oil on canvas)

STORY This is part of a series based on a hallucinatory memory LeDoux imagined during his childhood. He recounted seeing a fountain in the thick Louisiana forests. The fountain's beauty was so astonishing that he immediately wanted to share it with his friends and family, but when he took them back to see it, it was nowhere to be found.

BIO LeDoux was born in 1976 in Louisiana. He is currently a BFA candidate at California College of the Arts.

SHOW "The Fountain of Giant Teardrops," Fri/23 through Feb. 28. Silverman Gallery, 804 Sutter, SF (415) 255-9508. Opening reception Fri/23, 7–10 p.m. Conversation with Larry Rinder and Neil LeDoux, Feb. 29, 7 p.m.

WEB www.silverman-gallery.com

http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision/

Performing tricks in San Francisco by Alex Hetheringont

2009-01-21T12:45:00.000-08:00

Silverman Gallery has some new press: http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/article/498526

"Jessica Silverman, Silverman Gallery, and This is A Myth, Ben Shaffer
www.silverman-gallery.com

Silverman Gallery has occupied two spaces in San Francisco: it started in a basement space in an industrial district of the city, however its present home is a white store-like space in Sutter Street, closer to the activities of the financial and retail quarters. It retains, though, a vigorous on-the-edge mind-set, occupying a territory between its Fluxus inspirations (Sliverman’s grandparents own North America’s largest collection of Fluxus work) and an explicitly ‘emergent’ program working with local and international artists.

Jessica Silverman, who has run the gallery since its inception in 2006, has created a forceful voice in the San Francisco scene by generating a program that neatly links the city and its artists with operations across the globe. Her roster of artists includes TV addict visual artist Desirée Holman, currently a recipient of a major award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the beguiling pencil drawings of Israeli, Los Angeles-based Yuval Pudik and the photography of artist Job Piston, exploring sexuality, intimacy and voyeurism

It is though a more spiritually considered magical installation that takes over Silverman for the transition from 2008 to 2009. Los Angeles-based Ben Shaffer’s This Is A Myth fills the gallery with numerous drawings, paintings, sculptures, liquor (‘spirits’) and mirrored video projections that ruminate on chaos and order, myth, consciousness and narrative. The installation is the result of a series of emails he sent to friends, a kind of electronic train of thought rendered here as sketchy, imprecise, colourful, golden interactions: part-painting, part-drawing, part-object. Shaffer is obsessed with the construct of meaning within symbols and here he explores gender, the sacred, religion, spiritualism and alchemy through the distortion of their symbolic terminology. The effect is a poetic tangle of restless ideas and subtle gestures that rely on sympathy and acquaintance with spiritualism and its codes and an openness to experience their hallucinatory persuasions. Shaffer’s myth making is an alluring activity, one that questions our belief systems and the potency of these symbols that turn ‘beliefs’ and ‘truths’ from abstractions to realities."

Artist Updates

2009-01-18T19:10:00.000-08:00

Vaness Albury in http://unscr1325.blogspot.com/
Check it out! Opening: Thursday, March 5th, 2009, from 6 to 9PM

Job Piston in BMR 3 and Paper Exhibition at http://www.artistsspace.org/
Open Studios at UCLA on January 30 and 31.

More updates soon!

Remember to check out atripdown-false-memorylane.blogspot.com!

Yuval Pudik @ Angles in LA

2009-01-03T17:40:00.000-08:00

SILVERMAN GALLERY ARTIST BEN SHAFFER MENTIONED IN NYTIMES, 1/1/09, Dress Worldly, Spend Locally

2009-01-02T20:40:00.000-08:00

THE cherry on top of 2008, the year that the predatory capitalism virus binged itself to death by accidentally killing its host, was what I dubbed “The Christmas That Nobody Wanted.”

“I think everyone is finally burned out on ‘stuff,’ ” my uncle Rick said. “People are realizing that having 1,300 teddy bears didn’t make their life any better.”

I bought my first good belt — sturdy, plain, timeless — at MAC (Modern Appealing Clothing) on Post Street in San Francisco in 1993. At the time, I was way too broke for this reckless expenditure. But I still have the belt, and I still wear it.

Today’s MAC is a 3,500-square-foot shop in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley. In the foyer a huge farm table holds a sprawling prehistoric pleasure garden of potted cacti and euphorbia from Flora Grubb Gardens.

MAC, run by Ben Ospital and his sister, Chris (their mother, too, has a hand in the business), has been a beloved San Francisco retail destination for more than 25 years. Arguably, the core attraction has always been the family’s gleefully eccentric personalities, their affection for quality and their dedicated cultivation of lesser-known talents, which has kept the store vibrant as long as its doors have been open.

In 2007, MAC celebrated the holiday season by offering small gifts made within 100 miles of the store. For 2008, their motif was “Artists Like the Holidays, Too,” a collection of works ranging from $25 to $50, all original pieces by local artists. MAC took no commission; 100 percent of the proceeds went to the artists.

“Art has always sustained us through depressions,” Mr. Ospital said, offering me a shot of artisanal chestnut soup, imported every day from the celebrity chef next door, Elizabeth Falkner of Citizen Cake.

Let it not be said that MAC doesn’t also go out of its way to support literature. A book on Geoffrey Beene by Kim Hastreiter of Paper magazine was on display; also “Poems about anything for $25” by Zach Houston, a local poet who writes wild, wobbling lines on a vintage red Olivetti typewriter right in the store. A selection of hand-painted bottles of homemade (and allegedly drinkable) moonshine by the artist Ben Shaffer was also included in the $25 to $50 gift range.

In the last two decades, Mr. Ospital has done considerable work for the Creative Growth Art Center, an organization that supports disabled artists. His appreciation for the work of these artists is genuine and wholly infectious. One of Creative Growth’s rising stars, the self-taught William Scott, was commissioned to draw the MAC holiday card: a slightly too glamorous pencil portrait of Barack Obama, next to the words CITIZEN PRESIDENT in block letters — an image, ever so slightly off, that blazes with unfiltered pride.

The clothing in the shop shows a clear bias toward Belgian and Japanese designers. Chris Ospital walked me through her current favorites: a collection by Dirk Van Saene of whiplash-collar sweaters, massive mohair coats in bright Muppet colors, and wool party dresses exaggerated into primary triangles with big bows.

“All the Belgians are ‘on the bow’ right now,” Ms. Ospital said. “See? You’re a present!”

She showed me how one reversible gown with an obi-size Audrey Hepburn bow could also be used as a kind of fashionable arm restraint.

Other items beloved of Ms. Ospital included a pair of Martin Margiela cotton leggings in a faux fishnet print, and a Tsumori Chisato skirt inspired by the movie “Helvetica,” featuring the designer’s name, laser-cut and layered into black Helvetica frills ($748). “Fonts are the new accessory!” Ms. Ospital enthused.

MAC has a truly superlative men’s section, with selections from Engineered Garments, which has rediscovered Woolrich Woolen Mills and made masculine plaid shirts worthy of Jack London. “Sometimes it takes a Japanese man to reinterpret American style and show what’s good about it,” Mr. Ospital said.

This statement also held true for Yoshi Kondo’s beguiling reinterpretations of classic wool melton schoolgirl coats, which Mr. Ospital described as “French ingénue peacoats for the girl who shops at L. L. Bean but is also a stripper.”

I was taken by the work of Ryan Roberts, a men’s designer specializing in Italian knits. I bought his black wool sweat-kilt ($198) and would have bought the matching zipper jacket had it not been $400 (a fair price had my wardrobe budget not already been damaged beyond sanity this year).

“Our model is really the farmers’ market,” said Mr. Ospital, who speaks in free-associative bouquets of enthusiastic appreciation and well-tuned mission statements. “The farmers honor labor. They sell the freshest stuff at its most perfect point in time. Disposable fashion is like fast food! We honor the hands that make clothes. Like ‘slow food’? We like to think of our clothes as ‘slow clothes.’ We’re not fashion victims. You want to find that jacket that is your most perfect tomato, and wear it for 20 years. If it’s all going to end up as landfill anyway, it should all be really good-looking.”

How does one reconcile the relatively expensive price of perfect tomatoes and/or perfect clothing?

The answer, according to Mr. Ospital, lies in one’s personal values. “We have customers who buy a Jil Sander coat, then to save money they’ll stay home at night and learn to make beer.”

At the finish of any regrettable life episode, we invariably go back to basics to distinguish values that are real and indissoluble from those that are false and temporary. In doing so, we rediscover joys we forgot during our manic race to the dead end.

MAC is a good place to remember that you really can’t buy style. Style is evolutionary, egalitarian, deeply curious, often weird and always personal — the accidental costume of any character with a wide-open mind, enjoying a constant bumper crop of new discoveries. But for those having trouble finding their own inspirations, MAC has almost always been there.

MAC

387 Grove Street (between Gough and Franklin Streets), San Francisco; (415) 863-3011.

Luke Butler: Group show "Capiltal Jewelers" curated by Glen Helfand in Las Vegas

2008-12-29T23:20:00.000-08:00

"...Luke Butler’s collages from the series Leader of Men dominate the exhibition. In the series, vintage gay porn meets Life magazine in darkly funny contemplations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and JFK. The presidents’ heads are grafted onto Herculean bodies, shiny and erect, as they proudly dominate dramatic mountains and crashing oceans. The landscapes call to mind fascist articulations of the natural sublime, and there is an unmistakable thread of propaganda to the work. “Bald Mountain” and “Citizen” are particularly majestic in their depictions of Ford, where the former president emerges as if a Roman god. Sex is part and parcel to power, and myth collides with necessity in the stories we spin around our heads of state..."

Full review: http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/news/2008/oct/30/capital-ideas/

Ben Shaffer THIS IS A MYTH, Images Pt. 1

2008-12-16T14:36:00.000-08:00

Skinny black alter
Acrylic and spray paint on concrete
2008

Pyramids of infinite detention,3
Acrylic and spray paint on concrete
2008

Motherbeard
Acrylic and magic sculpt on concrete
2008

Baby beard
Acrylic and magic sculpt on concrete
2008

A creature like us
Spray paint, acrylic, magic sculpt on concrete
2008

Christina McPhee Pharmakon Library Blog is up!

2008-12-15T15:02:00.001-08:00

http://pharmakonlibrary.blogspot.com/

Sneak peak "THIS IS A MYTH" by Ben Shaffer

2008-12-10T15:42:00.000-08:00

Silverman Gallery @ MAC "ARTISTS LIK ETHE HOLIDAYS TOO"

2008-12-10T14:36:00.000-08:00

NOW SHOWING, December 13, 12-5pm @ Silverman Gallery

2008-12-05T15:38:00.000-08:00

Please join us for “Now Showing” on Saturday December 13th from 12 - 5. At 2pm Ben Shaffer will be reading from his new book titled “THIS IS A MYTH” a special collection of monthly emails that Shaffer has sent out to a select group of friends for the duration of one year. The book will be available for purchase and there will be homemade moonshine for tasting.*

Come early and stay after the reading to check out our collection of artist produced publications, zines, and magazines of all forms from all over the world. We assure you that this is NOT a myth, we really do sell books, zines and periodicals. All for sale, all the time. Each title is a conversation-starter, and complements the curatorial point-of-view of Silverman Gallery.

Some highlights include: A.R.T. Press, Capricious Magazine, Piktogram from Poland, a selection of publications from artist Alejandro Cesarco, WOUND from London and numerous queer publications. New items include “Black Icebergs” by Leslie Shows, PICNIC Magazine from Israel and lovely zines from interstatial.com

Come to “Now Showing” and receive %10 off your entire purchase. Valid on December 13th only. Recession-proof art and gifts for today's economy.

*Remember Ben Shaffer’s opening THIS IS A MYTH is the night before so be sure not to miss it! December 12, 7-10pm.

twice upon a time at Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna - Opens November 22, 2008

2008-11-20T19:08:00.000-08:00

twice upon a time
Carla Åhlander, Kaucyila Brooke, Tammy Rae Carland, Carola Dertnig, Desiree Holman, Judith Hopf, Christina McPhee and Susanne Winterling.

twice upon a time is a group exhibition organized by Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco. The two met in Berlin in 2006 and realized they both worked with artists whose practices engaged with conceptual, feminist, political and gender issues. Curating a collaborative show highlights the commonality between the programs of Huber and Silverman. The show first opens in Vienna on November 22, 2008 and then travels to San Francisco in March, 2009. twice upon a time is also a moment for each gallery to interrupt their solo show format, to provide a new context and use the gallery as a hub for a larger network.

The title underscores the fact that the exhibition will happen twice and is also a reference to the history of the fairy tale. Historically women fairy tale writers, also called conteuses, a term given to 17th century French women, were silenced and relegated to a more domestic literary sphere. However the conteuses saw their tales as amusements for sophisticated adults in the salon and not for children. Like the conteuses, the artists in twice upon a time challenge gender expectations, engage with playful techniques, collect and urge us to rethink our conception of storytelling and its history.

Desiree Holman’s playful video, I would do almost anything you asked me to do documents the artist wearing flesh-like suites that allow her to enact the role of male character’s by stepping into new “skin”. By wearing the skin of the male character Holman investigates the dynamics of romantic relationships as well as the male gaze. Like Holman Judith Hopf’s practice defies authorial positioning and investigates both behavior and identity. Romantic relationships often start at seedy bars, clubs and lesbian parties which is the starting point for Kaucyila Brooke’s ongoing body of work titled “The Boy Mechanic” (various media, 1996 ongoing). In this excerpt from "The Boy Mechanic/San Francisco"(2007-200?) she shows drawings (ink on paper) of lesbian bar names from San Francisco's past and present reorganized into her own idiosyncratic and fantasy narrative categories . Tammy Rae Carland’s Photoback works document the back of the photograph. Now the trace; who it was for, when, where, why it was taken and how it has lived its life is the focus rather than the initial image. Carland, like Brooke’s work documents memories produced in public identity and social spaces and allows the viewer to insert his/her own memories like a make up your own story. Through these personal and public memories and narratives twice upon a time explores looking for, the trace and the re-invention of ones self.

Tammy Rae Carland lives and works in Oakland, CA. Photobacks is an ongoing photographic series of found personal photographs from the 1910's to the 1970's

Desiree Holman lives and works in Oakland, CA. I would do almost anything you asked me to do is part of an installation-based project call “Breath Holes” which incorporates video, sculpture and large format photography.

Christina McPhee lives and works in Atascadero, CA. 47 Reds is a series of drawings where the artist presses black paper onto colored pigment left on the floor and draws over them. The drawings on top of the pigment are reminiscent of an illustrator adding imagery to a book that already existed.

Susanne Winterling lives in Berlin, Germany. Winterling applies a method of working that weaves ideas and visual structures, both personal and collective, past and future. Like in lovemindmiddleheart, which layers an image of actress Tilda Swinton and a library in a castle close to Prague in an attempt to capture sensuality, memory and dreams.

THIS IS A MYTH by Ben Shaffer, December 12, 2008, 7-10pm

2008-11-20T19:07:00.000-08:00

Silverman Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of new sculpture and wall-mounted works by Ben Shaffer on view from December 12 – January 17, 2008 with an opening on December 12, 7-10pm. “THIS IS A MYTH” is Shaffer’s second one-person exhibition at the gallery and is themed around the space between chaos and order or rather an attempt to order chaos. “THIS IS A MYTH” embodies Shaffer’s interest in posing questions related to notions of truth, myth, survival and consciousness.

The work produced for “THIS IS A MYTH” contains the artist’s hand perhaps more than ever. Working with concrete, Shaffer sculpts pillar like totems that watch over the room and ouroboros, or serpents swallowing its own tail and forming a circle. Shaffer’s totems are made to live indoor or outdoor and should be treated as sacred, meditative and protective objects. The ouroboros symbolize the cyclic nature of the universe: creation out of destruction, life out of death. The ouroboros has been important in religious and mythological symbolism, alchemical illustrations, and is often associated with Gnosticism and Hermeticism. For "THIS IS A MYTH" the metaphor of the self-sustaining ouroboros foregrounds Shaffer's interest in renewal and mythology.

"Mother Beard" is one of Shaffer's concrete sculptures, covered in colorful triangles and shaped like an upward pointing pyramid which represents the monumental, the ancient and powerful, the spiritual and meditative. Associated with the number three, triangles and pyramids have very complex meanings. For instance, a pyramid pointing upwards can symbolize fire and male power while pointing down; it can symbolize water and female sexuality. Throughout "THIS IS A MYTH", Shaffer highlights the dichotomy inherent in the subtle gesture of turning a shape upside down to change its meaning.

“THIS IS A MYTH” is also the culmination of a monthly email that Shaffer has sent out to a select group of friends. The emails started on December 31, 2007 with this first thought “Written with rainbows all along the bottom a horizon line is now there and the words float above we’re looking all at the same time. This is a Myth.” A collection of all these texts will be available alongside Shaffer’s visual imagery. Spirits made by Shaffer will also be available at the opening.

Ben Shaffer lives and works in Los Angeles. He recently curated the group exhibition “Joy and Misery” in Los Angeles at FIVE THIRTY THREE Gallery.

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

WISH KEY by Ben Shaffer, November 2008

2008-11-20T19:05:00.000-08:00

60

This wish key is 32 years old.

61
All these thoughts that flowed up to this exact point needed to be
written and transferred and released from this maze inside with all
the lights turned out. Couldn't find the way about before because,
it's been so dusty and hard to breathe in here. Hard to touch
anything without leaving a trace behind

The sunsets are wonderful and beautiful all these redpurples,
orangeyellows, lights. Colors you've never seen before or could
imagine ever existing outside of science fiction. Los Angeles has
many sunsets like from all the stuff that floats in the air from what
we burn to move us.

62

With interlocking triangles the smallest shape with lines except the
circle. My favorite shape that is a sound, motion, seen in the sky,
in your eye, and on someone's lips, you can make it with your hands
and make it your life. This movement from here and back to here. I
saw a horseshoe in the sky this morning. This long contrail that came
from infinity and made a turn back from where it came from to
infinity. I use to draw circles with a line through them. I guess I
got it from a Mad Max movie or something. Now I'm making these
shapes. Making them heavy and colorful and something I can leave
outside.

63

Just in one night it all changed. This dramatic shift in
consciousness. People cried involuntarily. They didn't know they
would. It just happened that way and we all felt it in our own
indescribable ways. A realization beyond words. Straight to
emotions. Lived with cultivated grown inside and waiting for a day to
open up. Physical reaction, uncontrollable and completely natural.

So it could all change just like we want it to. Maybe all those fires
don't need to start. Just prisms thrown in the air. Follow the path
to the end and buy all the land there. Put your hands in it and touch
your lips. Crawl to the bottom of a tree and prostrate yourself
however you feel like.

64

what truth is it?
we sit high and look at the sky of the made things being in it
with the home made spirits inside and even more riddles to our lives
coming forth.. . .

eyes and movements seem to say more than anything else
the way it all feels right just a strange everything

sitting here and knowing it will end and start over again. . .
hold those secrets in your hair. . .

65

The Sun came down and weaved itself around me, forming an interlocking
cage of understanding that I couldn't escape from. The earth became
my temple and I prayed to it and saw nothing else but, nothing else.
All those points connected and extended into the visible consciousness
and attainable a pattern of recognition that must have always been
here and when those two sides meet they form something new entirely
with each other. How could all these voices not be heard falling from
above and coming into each of us giving life?

All these new mandalas are going to be introduced. Some of them the
same and some new from dreams I had. Not really what they would look
like more about how to make them. You ever think about what you'll
dream tonight? It's good practice for controlling your dreams.
Projecting to another world within you.

Ben Shaffer, 11/20/08

Tammy Rae Carland, One love leads to another

2008-11-15T08:51:00.000-08:00

New and amazing boxset edition by Tammy Rae Carland.
One love leads to another
Boxset of 16 digital c-print
Edition of 10 +3ap

Email us for full PDF of all images included in boxset.
*Photos by Kelly Puleio

Obama. Thank you. Congratulations to us all!

2008-11-04T23:25:00.000-08:00

NEW EDITION: TRIS VONNA MICHELL

2008-10-31T12:17:00.000-07:00

For Tris' exhibitions he has decided to make his Press Release into an edition that also functions as a chapter in a story. As he has more shows he will produce more chapters and add onto the edition and/or make more editions.

It is a stunning piece produced on the Heidelberg Press, the first press in London. He keeps a collection of all the plates he makes for the works. So eloquent, well written and it comes with a nice photo inserted into the second part/chapter.

NY Art/Book Fair, 2008

2008-10-31T09:07:00.000-07:00

New show: Yuval Pudik, "Naked Crinolines"

2008-10-31T09:02:00.000-07:00

Yuval Pudik, "Naked Crinolines" @ Gavlak Projects, West Palm Beach

Pharmakon Library by Christina McPhee

2008-10-19T22:35:00.000-07:00

Pharmakon Library is an ongoing series of graphic folios created and curated by Christina McPhee. The folios comprise a series of open works by artists who address, through image and/or text, the principle of critical reversibility, or proximity of poison and cure. "Pharmakon" in Greek may mean antidote, recipe, poison, drug, spell, remedy, drug, talisman, gift and paint. Each folio consists of a series of between 8 and 12 digital pigment jet archival prints by a single artist or a small group / collective of up to 3 artists. Each folio is produced as an edition of three. The scale of each folio images is 13 x 19 inches each (Super B). Print stock is Epson exhibition photographic paper and/or Hahnemule German Etching archival paper; archival inks, with, in some instances, hand drawings.

A list of initially participating artists is TBA soon in connection with the project debut at the New York Art Book Fair in late October 2008 http://www.nyartbookfair.com/about.php (A related speculative architectural installation brief for a possible library with a new media component, involving transcoding of Twitter messages into a sound space at the center of a temporary structure, is explored in a text online here, together with pharmakon images: http://christinamcphee.net/pharmakon_library/index.html )

The project is produced in association with Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

La Superette 2008 OPEN CALL

2008-10-18T22:09:00.001-07:00

La Superette 2008 OPEN CALL

La Superette 2008 is looking for:
Survival crafters, conceptual product makers, DIY game producers,
micro distributors, fashion hackers, electro-gadget inventors

We want to see what you've got!

++La Superette IS:
An annual hybrid event mixing art, shopping, music, and community spirit
---La Superette is NOT:
An ordinary exhibition or craft fair

La Superette WANTS:
++ To promote and sell commodities made by artists and designers of
all career levels
++ To offer shoppers unique superettenly affordable items
++ To incite and inspire participation, collaboration, and conversation

La Superette 2008 is happy to announce that this year's event is
supported by LMCC

Deadline for online submission is November 10
All products must be delivered to La Superette by December 1

La Superette will be held on December 13 and 14

Please visit our website http://lasuperette.org/call.php to complete your
application and carefully read all guidelines.

Joy and Misery, curated by Ben Shaffer

2008-10-15T22:50:00.002-07:00

Joy and Misery
Christopher Badger, Jackson Fledermaus, Sarah Lowing, Center for
Tactical Magic, Anna Mayer, Deirdre McConnell, Karthik Pandian, Devon
Tsuno, and Conrail Twitty
October 25 to November 22, 2008
Opening Saturday October 25 from 7-10pm

Five Thirty Three is proud to announce Joy and Misery, curated by Ben Shaffer, as a continuation of their exhibitions focusing on contemporary art crafted by young and emerging artists.

Joy and Misery are emotions that exist together, both in contradiction
and collaboration. The work in this exhibition creates a space in
which these dualities simultaneously emerge. It poses questions,
raises possibilities, and meditates on the current state of
contemporary events and individual views.

The exhibition subconsciously addresses the human ability to manifest
and regard how opposites create a contradictory understanding of the
center of existence, and questions what that center is.

"Whenever one moves out of the transcendent one comes into a field of
opposites. One of the problems of life is to live with the realization
of both terms, that is to say, I know the center and I know that good
and evil are simply temporal aberrations, and that in God's view,
there is no difference."-Joseph Campbell

Artists presenting work in the show are Christopher Badger, Jackson
Fledermaus, Sarah Lowing, Center for Tactical Magic, Anna Mayer,
Deirdre McConnell, Karthik Pandian, Devon Tsuno, and Conrail Twitty.

Five Thirty Three is located at 533 Los Angeles St., 2nd Floor in
downtown Los Angeles between 5th and 6th Streets. The exhibition
opens on Saturday October 25 and runs until November 22. An opening
reception for the artists will be held on Saturday October 25 from
7-10pm. The Gallery is open from Monday to Friday from 7-10pm and
Saturdays from 11am-5pm. Phone: (213) 627-1541.
www.fivethirtythree.org

The opening will also feature live performances by Fresher Flesh,
Telematique, and Squarepeg Roundhole.

Joy and Misery, curated by Ben Shaffer

2008-10-15T22:50:00.001-07:00

Joy and Misery
Christopher Badger, Jackson Fledermaus, Sarah Lowing, Center for
Tactical Magic, Anna Mayer, Deirdre McConnell, Karthik Pandian, Devon
Tsuno, and Conrail Twitty
October 25 to November 22, 2008
Opening Saturday October 25 from 7-10pm

Five Thirty Three is proud to announce Joy and Misery, curated by Ben
Shaffer, as a continuation of their exhibitions focusing on
contemporary art crafted by young and emerging artists.

Joy and Misery are emotions that exist together, both in contradiction
and collaboration. The work in this exhibition creates a space in
which these dualities simultaneously emerge. It poses questions,
raises possibilities, and meditates on the current state of
contemporary events and individual views.

The exhibition subconsciously addresses the human ability to manifest
and regard how opposites create a contradictory understanding of the
center of existence, and questions what that center is.

"Whenever one moves out of the transcendent one comes into a field of
opposites. One of the problems of life is to live with the realization
of both terms, that is to say, I know the center and I know that good
and evil are simply temporal aberrations, and that in God's view,
there is no difference."-Joseph Campbell

Artists presenting work in the show are Christopher Badger, Jackson
Fledermaus, Sarah Lowing, Center for Tactical Magic, Anna Mayer,
Deirdre McConnell, Karthik Pandian, Devon Tsuno, and Conrail Twitty.

Five Thirty Three is located at 533 Los Angeles St., 2nd Floor in
downtown Los Angeles between 5th and 6th Streets. The exhibition
opens on Saturday October 25 and runs until November 22. An opening
reception for the artists will be held on Saturday October 25 from
7-10pm. The Gallery is open from Monday to Friday from 7-10pm and
Saturdays from 11am-5pm. Phone: (213) 627-1541.
www.fivethirtythree.org

The opening will also feature live performances by Fresher Flesh,
Telematique, and Squarepeg Roundhole.

Bailout Biennial - call for submissions

2008-10-14T21:47:00.000-07:00

Bailout Biennial

Call for Submissions

The first (and perhaps only) Bailout Biennial will be held at Golden Belt – www.goldenbeltarts.com – an extraordinary site of artists' studios, exhibition spaces, loft apartments, creative office and retail spaces – all housed in 6 old tobacco buildings in downtown Durham, North Carolina. Bailout Biennial seeks work that addresses the current economic "crisis" or "scandal", the 700 billion dollar bailout, capitalism, global economy, post-industrialism, greed and profit. All media will be considered. Bailout Biennial will be curated by elin o'Hara slavick and Jeff Waites. Planned exhibition dates are January 15 – March 15, 2009.

Please note: All shipping and insurance costs must be covered by the artists. While there is a security guard at the main entrance where every visitor must sign in before going to the gallery, the gallery is open to the public during regular building hours and there is no security guard inside.

Please submit via email: 3-5 jpegs of examples of your work (if you plan to make new work for this show, that is fine, but curators reserve the right to exclude it from the exhibition if it does not "fit".); a brief statement about how your work addresses the above-mentioned issues (please include in this statement any descriptions of new work you plan to make for this exhibition.); a 1-2 page resume; and an acknowledgement that you are willing to cover the cost of shipping both ways for this exhibition. DEADLINE for submission is NOVEMBER 21. Please email all of the above requirements to BOTH curators:
elin o'Hara slavick eoslavic@gmail.com
Jeff Waites jwaites@meca.edu

Other Than History: Torreya Cummings, Patricia Esquivias and Airyka Rockefeller

2008-10-13T20:54:00.000-07:00

Other Than History
Torreya Cummings, Patricia Esquivias and Airyka Rockefeller
October 17 - November 22, 2008
Opening, Friday, October 17, 7-10pm

Silverman Gallery presents Other Than History featuring new work by Torreya Cummings, Patricia Esquivias and Airyka Rockefeller that will be on view from October 17 – November 22, 2008. Other Than History deals with issues of representation and appropriation that exist in anthropology, art and documentation. Themes of fictionalization that come from sourcing from real and imagined artifacts, people and places will be presented through a variety of media.
Each artist evokes the material residues of history in order to suggest how fictions and fantasies emerge out of actual artifacts, archives and collections.

Torreya Cummings, lives and works in San Francisco. Cummings will present new sculptural works, which include “Mail Order Tumbleweeds”and “Bearsuit”. Given that a tumbleweeds job is to travel, Cummings has ordered these from an online website and they travel to her but not in the way one might expect. Tumbleweeds move through the landscape, a path that is dictated solely by the weather and therefore have no clear destination or history. “Bearsuit”
is a mythical creature from the West that never existed. For Cummings it is part of her desire to propose a queer takeover of what is known as the Wild West. For Other Than History it also functions as a kind of relic that invites the viewer into the new West, filled with fur, costuming, glitter and fantasy.

Patricia Esquivias, lives and works in Spain. Esquivias will present a new video work that investigates measures of time and sculptural works with Spanish sayings that deal with measures of physical space. In these works Esquiviasdescribes in a detached and utterly convincing manner.

Airyka Rockefeller, lives and works in San Francisco and central and eastern Europe. For Other Than HistoryRockefeller will present two new bodies of work. "Honza's Diary (Skazka/Legend)" is a series of re-photographedphotographs from the Czech Republic, whose quietly monumental self-portraits ask what a personal archive conveysonce removed from its original context and catapulted into the realm of skazka/legends or skanzens/museums. "The Castle That Started It All" investigates the ongoing transformation of castles, from the functional to the vestigial,
and from the mythical to symbols of contemporary kitsch. In both bodies of work, recontextualization brings the viewer's attention not to fact or history, but to the gaps between experience and representation, a story and it's storyteller, between reportage and memory.

All three artists relate to certain geographical places, making work which emerges out of their own experiences in particular landscapes. Other Than History questions how we look at our collections, chronologies and archives, and how through sorting and re-presenting we often speak more to our hopes and longings than to the actual histories they are derived from.

For more information please contact Jessica Silverman at Jessica@silverman-gallery.com or visit Silverman-gallery.com.

The Colony Room in San Francisco this Saturday, 18th.

2008-10-13T20:53:00.000-07:00

The Colony Room

Anne Colvin and Guests

Bar 7pm - 11pm

Event starts at 8.30pm

Saturday October 18th: Marc Arthur, Mike Kuchar.

The Undead is a performance event developed in Berlin by Marc Arthur. Multiple and contradictory performers will journey through a hypnotic landscape of video, poetry and subconscious scenarios where time has been destroyed and identity demolished. Featuring Vaginal Davis on screen, this performance spectacle based on the epic of Morpheus in Ovid's Metamorphoses will be documented and later made into its own piece by filmmaker Mike Kuchar.

Marc Arthur has been produced by and in residency at the Emily Harvey Foundation, Venice; the Living Theater, Dixon Place and LaMama, New York; and the Poets Theater, San Francisco.

The Garage at New Langton 1246 Folsom Street SF CA 94103: 415 626 5416

Art for Obama, check out your options!

2008-09-26T12:48:00.000-07:00

#1 http://artforobama.net/
ART FOR OBAMA is an online auction of photographs to benefit the Obama Campaign. Fifty of the country's most prominent artists and photographers have donated their work for this cause. The auction will launch on October 1st and will run for one week. All proceeds from the auction will go to the Obama Campaign, to the Democratic National Committee and to non-profit organizations such as MoveOn.org, which are currently devoting their energy to helping the Obama campaign. Proceeds will be distributed in strict accordance with Federal Election Commission regulations.

Or

#2 http://www.geminigel.com/
Here are 13 artists who seem likely to go Democratic: John Baldessari, Jonathan Borofsky, Frank Gehry, Ann Hamilton, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Julie Mehretu, Ken Price, Susan Rothenberg, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra and Richard Tuttle. All of these blue chip stars have created new limited-edition prints to support the presidential campaign of Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee . The portfolio of artworks was assembled by Sidney Felson and Stanley Grinstein, the principals in L.A.’s Gemini G.E.L. They reached out to the artists, though the fundraiser is run through the Obama campaign, which is giving away the portfolio in exchange for a donation of $20,000

News on Silverman Gallery artists plus more!

2008-09-24T15:00:00.000-07:00

Christina McPhee in: "War as a Way of LIfe," Saturday, September 27, through December 19, 2008, at the 18th Street Art Center, Santa Monica, California. Curated by Clayton Campbell, with new project work by Susan Crile, Binh Danh, Barry Frydlender, Hometown Baghdad, Marty Horowitz, Cindy Kane, Ronald Lopez, Christina McPhee, Catherine Opie, Stacey Peralta, David Reeb, Sinan Leong Revell, Daniel Ruanova, Larry Scarpa, and Mark Spencer, as well as “Threshold of the Innocents and Martyred,” an installation in the project room by Amitis Motevalli.

Desiree Holman presents: "The Magic Window," opening Saturday, October 11 @ 8pm - November 2, 2008 at Machine Project, 1200 D North Alvarado Street (just north of Sunset Blvd.) Los Angeles, CA 90026

Job Piston has begun his MFA at UCLA - congratulations Job!

And

Bid Now: New project by Darius Miksys:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&item=300259467714

Other Certainties: Curated by Summer Guthery and Amy Owen

2008-09-15T09:43:00.000-07:00

Other Certainties

Curated by Summer Guthery and Amy Owen

September 19th - October 24th, 2008

Opening September 19th, 7-9pm

October 24th Closing Performances by Melissa Brown, Carla Edwards, Pablo Helguera, and Rachel Mason

For more information: www.summerguthery.com/othercertainties.html

New York Center for Art and Media Studies

44 West 28th Street, 7th Floor. Between 6th Avenue and Broadway

Gallery Hours - Thursday through Saturday 1-6pm and by appointment 917.574.8365 or 917.968.1831

Tyler Coburn - Catherine Czacki - Patricia Esquivias

Tommy Hartung - David Maljkovic - Rachel Mason

Paulina Olowska - Lisa Oppenheim - Walid Raad

Other Certainties presents nine international artists whose diverse practices question accepted histories through alternative accounts of the distant and not so distant past. Here, history is retooled, or sometimes even invented, to reveal slippages in authenticity, often proposing an arguably more accurate and nuanced chronology. The artists' malleable approach to narrative, at times bold in motive, audacious and absurd, is infused with intimacy and humor through a hyper-personalized voice.

The works presented take many forms, including homemade history lectures, a film that examines the past through a makeshift time-traveling car wrapped in foil, and a raw animation of an imagined historical figure made from found objects and knick-knacks. These pieces, while wide ranging in subject matter, are linked by their shared embrace of farce and fabrication through low-tech or transparent means, revealing their process to gain credibility while also highlighting the assumptive and approximate elements of history making.

By taking an authorial role, these artists complicate and disrupt traditional methodologies of archival documentation. The seemingly fixed realm of fact becomes the basis of dialectical inquiry, opening the door to new possibilities. The works presented here expose complex circumstances that beg for further analysis, prompting us to become speculative readers of the histories that shape us. In this way, they suggest that known or documented accounts are never the last word, rather they are slippery, mutable, and hence, open to revision.

The exhibition will close on October 24th with a night of lectures and performances that blur the boundaries between past, present and future including: Rachel Mason, Pablo Helguera, Melissa Brown, and Carla Edwards.

About the works:

Tyler Coburn's photographs Chroma Blue/Chroma Green examine the process by which individuals construct and assume political identities and cast themselves into the annals of history. Here, the artist modifies two images from the New York Times taken on the day when Tony Blair left his prime minister post at 10 Downing St., and current prime minister, Gordon Brown, assumed this post. By hanging chroma blue and chorma green screens (commonly used in feature films and broadcasting) in the foreground of the photographs, the artist alludes to the often fabricated nature of the political realm.

Catherine Czacki's installation Ineffectual descriptor )1937( juxtaposes an array of seemingly unrelated objects and texts that investigate both personal and impersonal histories: tapestries bleached beyond recognition, a handmade stool that has circulated amongst friends and returned home for a time, a ghostly image of two silver pendants, a time capsule. The relationships between Czacki's "curated" items pose more questions than they answer, challenging the viewer to fill in the gaps, cobble together the story, and slow down to examine the multiple layers of history present in her collage of material things.

Patricia Esquivias' videos Folklore 1 and Folklore II present deadpan lectures on Spanish History that combine vernacular culture with subjective readings of "textbook" history. Embracing a DIY aesthetic, Esquivias captures these on-the-fly presentations through a focused view of her own hands, often schizophrenically grabbing at an amalgam of collected imagery, ephemera, and handwritten notes. As she displays these props to the viewer, her extemporaneous narration crafts a tapestry of unrelated facts, a revised history that oddly becomes believable through its embrace of the absurd.

Tommy Hartung's video work and sculptural installation, The Story of Edward Holmes, uses modest materials and low-tech animation to tell the chaotic adventures of fictional protagonist Edward Holmes. An omnipresent narrator weaves the tale of Holmes traveling by sea and eventually becoming shipwrecked on a small island inhabited by native people. In the style of Jules Verne, the story is told from the perspective of Holmes with a mock authorial voice. Hartung's social critique becomes clear as the reliability of the narrator fades with the whirling absurdist animations and dramatic play in scale.

David Maljkovic's filmic trilogy Scenes for a New Heritage takes a step into the future to gain perspective on the past. Each segment takes place at a different time over the next one hundred years at the same location, the foot of a modernist monument in Croatia's Petra Gora Park, which is dedicated to the victims of the Second World War. Unaware of the loaded history of the undulating metallic monument, young visitors at first speculate on the building' function and meaning. As time moves forward, interest in the building's significance is lost as it becomes an ominous setting.

Rachel Mason's sculptural installation and performance is an extension of a larger ongoing project initiated in 2005 entitled The Ambassadors. The work features small ceramic busts of political figures that correspond to the leaders of various international wars and conflicts that have taken place during each year of the artist's life, including self-portraits of the artist herself as an ambassador to each war. This aspect has led to Mason's eventual attempt to inhabit the minds of each of the political figures she depicts, writing and performing songs in their own words. Nodding to the portrait busts of Honoré Daumier, her caricatures and musical performances imbue these figures with humor, questioning who and how such individuals enter a historic canon.

Paulina Olowska's collage, Sketch for Nowa Scena, is part of a body of work by the same name that explores the complicated relationship between the US and the Soviet Bloc as seen through the lens of propaganda and pop culture imagery received by Soviet youth. Beginning with references to the multi-faceted and swift political changes in her native Poland, Olowska weaves together a new subjective history by redefining objects of culture. Her materials are gathered from politically biased culture magazines, punk aesthetic, and commercial imagery to form a new collage fore-fronting women protagonists as well as Olowska's own subjective interests and history.

Lisa Oppenheim's photographic series Killed Negatives, After Walker Evans, conceptualizes the missing visual information of a series of unpublished 1938 photographs by Walker Evans for the Farm Society Congress. "Killed" photographs refer to rejects of the film rolls through which holes were punched in the negative to prevent publication. With visual acuity Oppenheim reconstructs the missing information with one or more possible scenarios, simultaneously repairing history and revealing the archive as an opportunity for subjective reinterpretation.

Walid Raad's ongoing project The Atlas Group, documents, presents and critiques the contemporary history of war and violence in Lebannon through film, video, photography, and essays. Questions are posed on the representation of physical and psychological trauma within archival documents and photographic evidence as well as the role of the subjective versus historical accounts. The two works included here from the series Notebook Volume 72: Missing Lebanese Wars show documentation of the unusual gambling habits of a group of Lebanese historians who, at horse races made bets not on the winning horse but the accuracy of the finish line photograph. Cryptically detailed, these works exemplify Raad's nuanced investigations.

Susanne Winterling: Current projects/shows/curation

2008-08-27T17:11:00.000-07:00

Open until August 29, 2008 - "A Member of the Wedding" curated by Susanne Winterling: http://www.danielreichgallery.com/

Upcoming:

Susanne Winterling, "Isadoras Scarf" at http://www.parrotta.de in Stuttgart

and

THE KRAUTCHO CLUB / IN AND OUT OF PLACE

allsopp&weir, Markus Amm, Reza Aramesh, Julieta Aranda, Sue de Beer, Tjorg Douglas Beer, Nina Beier & Marie Lund, Guy Ben-Ner, Olivia Berckemeyer, Eva Berendes, Michael Beutler, boyleandshaw, Ulla von Brandenburg, Candice Breitz, Laura Buckley, Susanne Bürner, Ruth Claxton, Tobias Collier, Michael Conrads, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Björn Dahlem, Amie Dicke, Graham Dolphin, Hannah Dougherty, Vito Drago, Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez, Tracey Emin, Haris Epaminonda, Doug Fishbone, Ian Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Ryan Gander, Ludovica Gioscia, Andreas Golder, Tue Greenfort, Brian Griffiths, Eva Grubinger, Beate Gütschow, Alban Hajdinaj, Neil Hamon, Eberhard Havekost, Mathilde ter Heijne, Alexander Heim, Jeppe Hein, Sophie von Hellermann, Uwe Henneken, Gregor Hildebrandt, Susan Hiller, Myriam Holme, Andreas Hofer, Karl Holmqvist, Olaf Holzapfel, Judith Hopf, Julia Horstmann, Graham Hudson, Volker Hueller, James Ireland, Lisa Junghanß, John Kleckner, Gustav Kluge, Rachel Kneebone, Daniel Knorr, Karsten Konrad, Alicja Kwade, Tonico Lemos Auad, Kris Martin, Eline McGeorge, Isa Melsheimer, Mark Melvin, Alexej Meschtschanow, Laurent Montaron, Frank Nitsche, PaulMart, Julia Pfeiffer, Magnus von Plessen, Bettina Pousttchi, Bernhard Prinz, Henrieke Ribbe, Damien Roach, Kirstine Roepstorff, Pamela Rosenkranz, Karin Ruggaber, Yorgos Sapountzis, Dawn Scarfe, Thomas Scheibitz, Hanna Schwarz, Norbert Schwontkowski, Daniel Silver, Andreas Slominski, Florian Slotawa, Peter Stauss, Dirk Stewen, Matt Stokes, Jack Strange, Katja Strunz, Mark Titchner, Charlie Tweed, Malte Urbschat, Paloma Varga Weisz, Richard T Walker, Corinne Wasmuht, Nicole Wermers, Claudia Wieser, Susanne Winterling, Johannes Wohnseifer, Haegue Yang

Invited by Anna-Catharina Gebbers and 176/Zabludowicz Collection, London

30 August 2008, 18:00-22:00

FORGOTTEN BAR PROJECT, Berlin

Schönleinstr. 28, 10967 Berlin Kreuzberg, Germany

www.galerieimregierungsviertel.org

11 September - 14 December 2008

(Community Preview: 7 September 2008; Preview: 8 September 2008)

PROJECT SPACE 176, London

176 Prince of Wales Road, London NW5 3PT, UK

www.projectspace176.com

Christina McPhee: Take note "War as a way of life"

2008-08-14T16:37:00.000-07:00

WAR AS A WAY OF LIFE
Curated by Clayton Campbell
September 27 – December 19, 2008
Reception: Saturday, September 27, 6:00-9pm
Main Gallery

War as a Way of Life, concludes our four part series, The Future of Nations, a year long conversation about important election year issues. Presenting a stellar group of international and Californian visual artists, War As a Way of Life examines the phenomenology of how people who are exposed to long term effects of war or conflict are transformed. Using photography, video, mixed media, and painting, the artists look at how war which is either abroad, in our own neighborhoods, or even in our families, is affecting future generations perceptions of themselves and their communities.

Artists Include: Susan Crile, Binh Danh, Barry Frydlender, Hometown Baghdad, Marty Horowitz, Cindy Kane, Ronald Lopez, Christina McPhee, Catherine Opie, Stacy Peralta, David Reeb, Sinan Leong Revell, Daniel Ruanova, Larry Scarpa, Mark Spencer, and: Amitis Motevalli , 18th Street Artist Fellow

The exhibit will open on Saturday September 27, 6 to 9PM.- that night the entire center will be open (all studios) in addition to the gallery exhibition. Plus, Azatlan Underground will be playing a free concert. There will be a 36 page catalogue with the exhibit.

Job Piston & Vanessa Albury: BAD MOON RISING special

2008-08-12T10:00:00.000-07:00

BAD MOON RISING ^special

Vanessa Albury, Diana Artus, Richard Ashcroft, Elena Bajo, Kelie Bowman, Greggory Bradford, Bettina Cohnen, Emily Coxe, James De La Vega, Liam Everett, Lonnie Frisbee and David di Sabatino, Tony Garifalakis, George Hennard, Annegret Hoch, Pamela Jue, Paulus Kapteyn, Richard Kern, Clayton Patterson, Job Piston, Luther Price, Lee Ranaldo, Max Razdow, Yoji Sakate, Jan Serych, Philippe Vandenberg

Curated by Jan Van Woensel

September 12^th, 2008, 7PM

Live performance by Glass Ghost: 8PM

ISCP www.iscp-nyc.org

Designed for ISCP's Picture Parlor 2, Bad Moon Rising ^specialfocuses on a sociological and anthropological observation of contemporary life. Bad Moon Rising ^specialexposes some examples of how the contemporary human navigates through unstable environments.

We've lost the center in our culture. There's no common ground any more. The horizon has been lost. There are no boundaries any more. You know, everything's been transgressed. For the last forty years, if you're really smart, and you're part of the intelligentsia—whether you're in the media, whether you are making movies, whether you are writing books, whether you're teaching school—the thing that this culture rewards you for is doing what? Transgressing every boundary you can find. (From J. Ligon Duncan III)

Press: Stark Guide

2008-08-11T20:42:00.001-07:00

Silverman Gallery: Shades of Fluxus

Mini Market through August 30, 2008; Silverman Gallery; 804 Sutter Street at Jones; San Francisco; 415.255.9508; Tuesday–Saturday, 11am–6pm; http://www.silverman-gallery.com/; jess@jessicasilverman.com

Click here for images: http://look-boutique.blogspot.com/

This is a great time to visit Silverman Gallery. "Mini Market," on view through the end of the month, brings “the art of shopping and shopping for art” under one roof. It follows in the summer tradition of a group show, which is timed to give the gallery and its loyal collectors a respite after a spring season of solo exhibitions, as well as to take advantage of a city-tripping audience.

A plywood booth dominates the gallery floor, crammed with hard-to-find items: canvas totes branded with the word “shoplifter” by exhibition collaborator CITIZEN:Citizen ($27); lace jewelry from Airya Rockefeller’s May in December line ($40–$60); and ceramic butt plugs by California College of the Arts MFA and MA grad Eric Scollon ($100), whose work is also featured in Yerba Buena Center for the Art’s Bay Area Now—if you have to ask, you don’t need one. Acrylic on panel cereal boxes by '08 CCA MFA grad, Luke Butler, are a steal at $800 each. Mini Market was co-curated by Carolina Aramis, Silverman’s partner on this project and in life.

Jessica Silverman is serious about curating. She has had art on her mind since she was a kid hanging out with her grandparents, renowned Fluxus collectors Gilbert and Lila Silverman. Her exposure to the most important private collection of Fluxus art in the world gave her a big head-start among her art-world peers.

The Fluxus movement is advanced stuff—not found in Art History 101 like Impressionism or Cubism. This arcane yet influential conceptual art movement was active from 1962–1978. Fluxus artists often blended different artistic media including music and literature, in fact, the name implies movement and a flow of ideas. Fluxus work is simple, short, and often humorous. Note to civilians: Yoko Ono, John Cage, and Joseph Bueys are identified with this movement.

Silverman’s exhibition program is unique in that she often borrows important works from private collections and encourages her artists to create new work for their Silverman Gallery shows based on the influence of these pieces. New work is then displayed side by side with the inspiration piece, an art history lesson for the viewer, and for the artist it's a chance to grow from the exposure to important historical work. Silverman also has relationships with galleries abroad and sponsors an exchange program of sorts, introducing emerging international artists to San Francisco and facilitating the same for her artists in other countries.

When Silverman moved her gallery from edgy Dogpatch to the border of Union Square earlier this year, it was as much a political statement as a business decision. Artists and curators loved the old location for being underground—literally—but there was simply no foot traffic. So Silverman relocated to this upper block of Sutter just four short blocks away from Sak’s, where the Academy of Art students fade out and a hipster crowd fades in for HUF’s sneakers and Canteen restaurant.

Silverman’s c.v. proves that she’s been using her time wisely since entering L.A’s Otis College of Art and Design (class of ’05) as an undergrad majoring in painting. In 2004 she spent the summer at flashy Deitch Projects in New York as the curatorial assistant dedicated to electroclash performance art band Fischerspooner. In 2005 she was the assistant to Andrea Feldman Falcione, curator of the art collection of entertainment mogul Michael Ovitz.

She arrived in San Francisco in the fall of 2005 for the Masters in Curatorial Studies program at California College of the Arts. Armed with an introduction to Steven Wolf, she guest curated “International Waters” in his gallery in June 2006, mining her connections to borrow work by Nam June Paik and Ed Ruscha for the exhibition. Now, just two years later, Silverman sits on the board of venerable non-profit New Langton Arts and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. This summer she is guest curating a show called “A trip down (false) memory lane” at Lexington Club, “your friendly neighborhood dyke bar.”

In her own gallery, Silverman works with a few queer artists exploring queer themes, but this is a coincidence. As a professionally successful, queer, female gallery owner, she is often approached by artists who may not feel welcomed by more conservative curators. Silverman artists include critically acclaimed Bay Area based artists, including Desiree Holman who won this year’s SFMOMA SECA award; and Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough, ‘08 SECA finalist.

Silverman’s mix is a dynamic, intellectually challenging program—San Francisco art history in the making.

URL: http://starkguide.blogspot.com/2008/08/jessica-silverman-gallery-shades-of.html

If you missed Tammy Rae Carland's show - heres your chance:

2008-08-08T12:26:00.000-07:00

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=d53TB6w1MrE

Job Piston: I WANT A LITTLE SUGAR IN MY BOWL @ ASS

2008-08-08T10:24:00.000-07:00

I WANT A LITTLE SUGAR IN MY BOWL @ ASS

ASS (Asia Song Society) has a HUGE group show -- I WANT A LITTLE SUGAR IN MY BOWL -- opening this Saturday 08.09.08, but unless you've received an invite, I can't tell you the address or the time, because you're not invited.

The show is curated by Anat Ebgi, Terence Koh, and Jenny Schlenzka, and was inspired by the Nina Simone song of the same name.

I want a little sugar in my bowl
I want a little sweetness down in my soul
I could stand some lovin' oh so bad
I feel so funny and I feel so sad

I want a little steam on my clothes
Maybe I can fix things up so they'll go
Whatsa matter Daddy Come on, save my soul
I need some sugar in my bowl
I ain't foolin'
I want some sugar in my bowl

You been acting different I've been told
Soothe me
I want some sugar in my bowl
I want some steam on my clothes
Maybe I can fix things up so they'll go
Whatsa matter Daddy
Come on save my soul
I want some sugar in my bowl
I ain't foolin'
I want some - yeah - in my bowl.

Let's not forget the artists. Here's a super abbreviated list, as there are close to 100 artists in the show.

Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Tim Barber, Jean-Michael Basquiat, Dan Colen, Jules de Balincourt, Patrick Ervell, Rachel Feinstein, Kathy Grayson, Brian Kenny, Sophia Lamar, Slava Mogutin, Yoko Ono, Rick Owens, Jack Pierson, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, and many many many more.

The show's up till 08.24.08. If you'd like to try your luck at getting in for a private viewing, first you have to find them. Thank GOD some things in New York are still a secret.

Today: MINI MARKET

2008-08-01T09:57:00.000-07:00

Installation images: Tammy Rae Carland "An Archive of Feelings"

2008-07-29T22:00:00.000-07:00

Gossip from back in the day: Kevin Killian

2008-07-23T16:59:00.001-07:00

--> Posted by Kevin Killian @ February 19, 2008 at 4:45 pm

I’m at the Silverman Gallery and Larry Rinder has just done his best to make Poland’s Pavel Kruk seem fascinating in their onstage interview, but Kruk, who looks so commandingly Olympian in his videos, keeps reminding me of the posts in a fence I once had to plant on the prairies of Manitoba. Afterwards in a dark corner of the cellar space I ask Marc Arthur and Job Piston their ideas on the box. First thought best thought, I urge them. “Off the record?” “Yes,” I lied. “In that case how about The Cell with Jennifer Lopez?” asks Marc. Job nods enthusiastically, adding, “And you know what was my favorite—Cube!” I hadn’t thought of horror movies, how the box permeates horror cinema. My brow frowns as I try to recall what The Cell was about. I think it was to save the life of a kidnapped girl, brave Jennifer Lopez goes to a desert laboratory where she gets strapped into the “cell” and virtual memory electrodes are taped to her temples and she relives the horror of the other girl’s ordeal. I know I saw it, but not during my formative years unlike Marc who must have been an extreme version of nine or ten. And what about Boxing Helena, I intersperse, but neither boy seems to know that film, despite the enormous furore of its production when its lead, Kim Basinger, dropped out due to the disgustingness of the material. If I remember right, weird stalker scientist Julian Sands captures the heroine, cuts off her arms and legs, and keeps her in a box because he loves her so much, yuck. It was made by David Lynch’s daughter—case closed—get it? Job’s still talking about The Cube and how everyone wakes up and they’re all in a cube and each of them represents something else and they have to figure out what. “Story of my life,” think I.

Pavel Kruk at Silverman Gallery

Kevin Killian and Job Piston, photo by William E. Jones

Photos and Press: PDF show, 2008

2008-07-22T19:56:00.000-07:00

Link for press in Norway: http://oslopuls.no/kunst/article2551421.ece

Plus, images from Silverman Gallery installation:

Vanessa Albury @ Ox-Bow

2008-07-22T13:46:00.001-07:00

Vanessa Albury finished a three weeks residence at Ox-Bow. She made a series of polaroid-studies capturing the light in her studio and experimented with film projections in the woods.

Ox-Bow, school of art and artists’ residency, has served as a haven for visual artists since 1910. Founded on the shores of Lake Michigan as an escape from the city, Ox-Bow’s campus encompasses 115-acres of pristine natural forests, dunes, a lagoon, and historic buildings. It is both defined and protected by the landscape that inspires the artists who live and work here.

Review: Tammy Rae Carland, Shotgun-Review.com

2008-07-18T09:34:00.000-07:00

Shotgun Review:
An Archive of Feelings - Tammy Rae Carland at Silverman Gallery

by Jano Cortijo

"Things belong to those who need them", my grandmother used to say, meaning you would hardly ever find clothes or appliances lying around her house indolently collecting dust. Life had taught her about precariousness and she had learned to share and give away things that somebody, anybody, else might need. Just as clothes and school books went from older to younger to youngest daughter, a worn chair or a chipped pot quickly found a new home when they were replaced by newer items, their life span extended well beyond their average life.
Still, she held on to a few things until her last day: a wooden trunk, a hand knit bedspread, a clear acrylic cube holding 5 pictures on each of its exposed sides. These three items probably witnessed a lot more than could have ever been observed by any of her daughters or grandchildren. After she passed away, my mother kept the wooden trunk and to this day it is inevitable -Spielberg-ish corny as it sounds- to be immediately transported to the endless afternoons I or any of my cousins spent sitting on top of it or to the evenings when we stared at the small color TV on top of it watching whatever soap opera was in fashion.
All this textual foreplay is -hopefully- an introduction to Tammy Rae Carland's austere and magnificent photography exhibition "An Archive of Feelings" on view until July 26th at Silverman Gallery in downtown San Francisco.
Carland has slightly steered away from photographing herself and her surroundings to focus on a series of objects that, engulfed in a sea of white as we see them in the show, form a very intimate cabinet of personal curiosities, the items both offering sufficient information and barely hinting at the anecdotes and stories behind and around them.
A literal installation of all these carefully conserved items would not be as beautifully effective as their current presentation, like immobile prehistoric remains captured in amber, their sentimental value exponentially augmented by the pristine conservation of their meaningful patina. While keeping some of these mementos' tactile qualities, the photographs create the necessary distance for the viewer to wonder and wander in what we can only speculate are Tammy Rae's archived feelings.
The larger pieces on display in the gallery may be more effective in threading what seems like clear, almost explicit narratives; but the smaller, single or double item photographs are none less persuasive in transporting us to the time(s) and place(s) when they started to become important for the artist, slowly and serenely accumulating a history that is now made tangible by the wear and tear they proudly flaunt, almost infinite memories gradually seeping into each and every corner of these vessels of affection.
I've read that the show's title has been borrowed from a book I am not familiar with so instead of futilely trying to figure out the intellectual aspect of Tammy Rae Carland's project, I will just relate it to my own experiences, even at the risk of cornering it in the niche of subtly female artwork rooted in the domestic universe. I just can't think of any male artist caring as much to keep vestiges like these (my limited art history knowledge only brings up Felix Gonzalez-Torres' name) and enshrining them to such delicate and potent effect.
Carland's achievement lies in both referencing and transcending a sort of housekeeping aesthetic by elevating the immaterial qualities of apparently banal items to convey the resonance of relationships past.

Mini Market, August 1 & TIGER BEER

2008-07-17T22:51:00.000-07:00

We are thrilled to have sponsorship from this amazing company:

Thanks to Marco and Shannon!

Staying open late: July 19, 2008

2008-07-14T21:06:00.000-07:00

We will stay open until 8pm in honor of PDF:

GROUP SHOW OPENS IN 14 CITIES INTERNATIONALLY

(July 14, 2008 New York, NY) TKTKTKTKTK in partnership with Why + Wherefore is pleased to announce PDF, a one-night-only show co-curated by Summer Guthery, Lumi Tan, and Nicholas Weist that will be held simultaneously in 14 cities internationally and each of the 5 boroughs of New York City on July 19 from 6 to 8pm. The show includes commissioned works from Fia Backström, Bozidar Brazda, Brian Clifton, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Rachel Mason, Sean Raspet, and Jordan Wolfson, and a contribution from Dexter Sinister.

For the PDF show, the curators asked each of the artists to respond to their medium, PDFs—specifically how digital work can be infinitely and exactly reproduced. Each was also invited to interrogate the idea of worldwide, collective action—connected to the simultaneous, international openings. Select artworks are currently available for download at http://www.whyandwherefore.com/pdf, and the complete show will be available on July 19.

PDF will also open at the following commercial, alternative, and artists-run galleries and institutions on July 19:

SELECT VENUES

Please contact for opening details; for a complete listing of venues please visit whyandwherefore.com/pdf

Atkinson Space, Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA
Bastard, Oslo, Norway
Brown Gallery, London, UK
La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain
Circus of Books, Los Angeles, California, USA
Golden Age, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Hiromi Yoshii Gallery, Osaka, Japan
Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, California, USA
Galleri Loyal, Stockholm, Sweden
Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon, USA
Showroom, Hamburg, Germany; Leipzig, Germany; Zurich, Switzerland
Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, New York City, USA
Vox Populi, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Y Gallery, Queens, New York City, USA

ABOUT WHY + WHEREFORE
Why + Wherefore is an online curatorial project co-founded and -directed Summer Guthery, Lumi Tan, and Nicholas Weist. Since December 2007 they have presented work by over 100 artists, in experimental group shows that explore the structure of curatorial practice and the expanded field of internet-based curation. Why + Wherefore is seen by thousands each month, visiting from across North and South America as well as Africa, Asia, and Europe. http://www.whyandwherefore.com

KQED Art Review : Tammy Rae Carland: An Archive of Feelings

2008-07-14T20:15:00.000-07:00

July 10, 2008
Art Review : Tammy Rae Carland: An Archive of Feelings
POSTED BY VICTORIA GANNON

When my dad died last year, my brother and I inherited everything. Not money, but things: toothbrushes and oak boxes and expired prescription bottles. Sorting through it all, I was struck by each object's ability to conjure a scenario, and with it, a piece of my dad's personality. A worn duffel bag with a travel agency logo on its front, filled with headphones, a book of crossword puzzles, and a pair of flip-flops, still packed from his last trip to the beach, reminded me how much he loved the ocean. Each tangible object referred to an intangible memory or quality. Rather than meaningless junk, the mundane contents of his apartment became a stand-in for all that was immaterial: his impulses, motivations, losses, and loves.

We often cling to heirlooms left behind by a past relationship or loved one, aware but unfazed by their failure to fully recapture the experience or person they represent. Our sentimental attachment and its inevitable failure is the subject of An Archive of Feelings, photographer Tammy Rae Carland's current exhibit at the Silverman Gallery. The title refers to a seminal text on queer identity and trauma by Ann Cvetkovich. It also refers to an impossible task: the preservation and organization of emotion. Carland knows this impossibility, and so she presents us with an archive of photographed objects, a series of purposely imperfect substitutes for feelings and memories.

I thought One Love Leads to Another and My Inheritance were the strongest pieces in the exhibit. The former is a collection of mix tapes photographed against a white background. The tapes face us like artifacts in an archaeological exhibit, and we mine their labels and song lists for meaning. The collection of obsolete technology points to a bygone community of givers and receivers. Titles and playlists convey emotion and meaning. The network of cassettes also references Carland's history in the music business as one of the co-founders of the Mr. Lady record label. But the tapes also fail. We can't hear the music, and we can't see the faces of the tapes' makers. We can't experience the long hours Carland spent with her friends listening to the tapes. Like an incomplete body of evidence, the cassettes hint at a world that has already happened, a place we can't visit or recreate. Does anyone even still own a tape player?

Maybe I liked My Inheritance so much because it related so directly to my own experience. In it, Carland has gathered together and photographed objects left after her mother's death. The materials suggest a life interrupted, a task started and left unfinished. We see the frayed knot of a "Born to Bingo" cross-stitch project, a box of stationery with numbers and equations written on its front. Inside, a recipe for holiday fruitcake and a receipt. An unfinished crossword puzzle and the beginnings of a quilt. The objects capture her mother's motions, her jotted down thoughts and scribbles, her intentions and activities. More than death, the objects in the photograph reference her mother's life. But they are also unsatisfactory. The collection feels paltry. That's it? That's all that's left? The loss is amplified by the objects' inability to represent the deceased in all her complexity and humanity.

Carland uses photography to great effect in this exhibit. The photograph is a trace, Roland Barthes famously wrote, a document of something that has already happened. It is always in the past tense. By photographing, rather than displaying, these artifacts, Carland further removes them from the present tense. She multiplies the sense of loss on display. A folded broadsheet of My Inheritance is available at the exhibit. Printed on its backside is the question, "Who will record the history of tears?" It has no answer, but the asking reflects a natural urge -- to hold and quantify the intangible. That impulse underlies all the works in this exhibit.

An Archive of Feelings is on display at Silverman Gallery, 804 Sutter St., San Francisco, through Sunday, July 27, 2008.

Desiree Holman @ Mineral Park, presented by Alex Hetherington during Garlands

2008-07-14T20:13:00.000-07:00

Just in: Ari Marcopoulos, "Corpus"

2008-07-10T23:09:00.000-07:00

Corpus - Ed. 50, Silkscreen
Thanks to Peter Kirkeby for beautiful production/packaging.

If Love Could Have Saved You, You Would Have Lived Forever

2008-07-08T22:53:00.000-07:00

July 10th - August 8th, 2008 Opening Reception: Thursday, July 10th, 6-8PM

Vanessa Albury, Tanyth Berkeley & Todd Chandler, Tammy Rae Carland, Patricia Cronin, Amrita Das, Leela Devi, Rob Hauschild, Paa Joe, Joss paper effigies, Roy Kortick, Lisa Ross, Victorian hair wreaths, Marc Swanson & Joe Mama-Nitzberg

Curated by Becky Smith

If Love Could Have Saved You, You Would Have Lived Forever is an exhibition of art and objects that reference the aesthetics, material culture, and traditional gestures surrounding death and remembrance.

On view is Vanessa Albury’s Funeral (Projection), in which a darkened room is filled with a single-slide projection of a still image taken by Albury at her grandmother’s funeral. Tanyth Berkeley and Todd Chandler will present a video made in memory of their friend Brad Will, an anarchist and documentary filmmaker who was shot and killed during a teacher’s strike in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2006.

Tammy Rae Carland has photographed a range of idiosyncratic items taken from her childhood home after the death of her mother, creating a poignant portrait through quotidian objects. Patricia Cronin will exhibit a bronze sculpture from her Memorial to a Marriage Series, in which she created a grave marker for the Woodlawn Cemetery plot she has reserved for herself and her partner Deborah Kass.

Ghanaian fantasy coffins are constructed in shapes that reflect the lives, careers, and aspirations of their inhabitants – cocoa beans, pineapples, airplanes, boats, and Bibles are common forms. We are pleased to present a coffin replica of a slave castle by Paa Joe, the foremost maker of figural coffins. The anonymous nature of mourning will be addressed through disposable-camera snapshots of impromptu roadside memorials, taken and collected by Rob Hauschild.

Joss paper effigies are burned at Chinese Taoist funerals as a way of sending gifts and comforts to loved ones who have crossed over to the spirit realm. This age-old tradition has become heavily influenced by Western pop culture, creating a new market for paper replicas of luxury objects like LV wallets, Rolex watches, credit cards, sneakers, and beer. Rob Hauschild and Becky Smith accumulated this collection for a forthcoming book, Funny to Burn.

Roy Kortick, an artist working in ceramic and mixed media, has made a memorial for his beloved dogs K and Sammy, which also addresses the communal trauma of living in New York during 9/11. Paintings by Leela Devi and Amrita Das, from the Mithila region of Southern Nepal/Northern India, will be exhibited in New York for the first time. The paintings depict the devastating effects of the tsunami in Sri Lanka, and a long-distance tribute to the victims of 9/11. Lisa Ross photographs the adorned burial mounds of the Uyghur people from the Xinjiang area of Western China, a tradition of ornamenting twigs and branches in the desert to venerate local saints and mystics.

Victorian hair wreaths, a memento mori tradition that became popular after the death of Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert, makes use of the hair of a loved one to create intricately woven floral tableaus. Marc Swanson and Joe Mama-Nitzberg have collaborated on a series of photographs of floral arrangements designed in memory of gay icons Darby Crash, Anna Nicole Smith, Sam Wagstaff, and Halston.

Finally, Becky Smith will exhibit her personal collection of photographs of blank grave markers, which are used to sell headstones – a macabre reminder of the inevitability of everyone’s future demise.

BELLWETHER is located at 134 Tenth Avenue, between 18th and 19th Street.
*Summer hours are Monday – Friday, 11 AM – 6 PM.

Review: Loaded and subtle discourses in Queer Artists’ exhibitions

2008-07-08T20:53:00.000-07:00

A group exhibition by Hispanic gay visual artists and a solo show by a lesbian photographer showcased the current issues that populate the work of queer artists in San Francisco. "Maria: Politics. Sex. Death. Men." on view at Galeria de la Raza ending Friday, and "An Archive of Feelings" at Silverman Gallery through July 26, offer an inspiring and interesting collection of images that resonate both in and outside of the gay community.

"Maria" is a multimedia exhibition by Keith Aguilar, Roberto Guzman, Ernesto Soprani, Jody Jock, Jonathan Solo and the brothers Allan and Leo Herrera. It is part of the Annual Queer Latino Arts Festival and includes photography, video, drawing and installations to illustrate the experience of growing up gay in the local Hispanic community. While the title of the exhibition is an obvious wink at the virgin mother, she is nowhere to be found in the show specifically, yet the common thread amongst the artwork on display at the Mission gallery is still religion.

The pieces that deal with this aspect of Latino culture are the most successful of this collection: Jonathan Solo’s "Glory Hole," a laconic and effective assemblage that would irritate many a priest were they to see the show, Ernesto Sopprani’s "CBT," a text installation built around the definition of homosexuality, and finally Allan Herrera’s colorful "Touch Me," a sculptural installation made up of--what else--pink condoms.
In the accompanying essay for the exhibition, curator Leo Herrera (half of the Homochic collective), says that: "gay and Hispanic cultures are incredibly similar in the way that immigration, polarizing politics and unchecked consumerism have left both with a deep loss of cultural identity." This aspect is better explained by the addition of the words "Politics. Sex. Death. Men" to the title than by the glossy photographic pieces included in the show. It is not clear where both cultures intersect and how the experience of growing up as a homosexual man from Latino descent in San Francisco has permeated or is explicitly present in the work of these artists. While visually compelling and technically accomplished, these pieces attain cohesiveness as a collection of personal accounts by gay Latino artists more than as visual support for a loaded rhetoric.

On the other hand, the photographic constructions of Tammy Rae Carland in "An Archive of Feelings" are a subtle and evocative illustration of life and love that transcend the gay sphere. Culled from a personal assortment of objects that have a particular meaning for her, these items appear before our eyes in a flat and literal manner that is a welcome yet discreet invitation to speculate about their origin and relationship to the artist.

Carland, an Oakland based photographer with a steady presence during the past decade in the national queer art scene, has put together a new body of work that feels like a departure of sorts from her previous projects. She is using digital photography for the first time and is also isolating the subject of her photographs from their original surroundings. The domestic flair that made her earlier work so quietly alluring is definitely present in the pieces that comprise "Archive" even if the exhibition as a whole feels more cerebral and minimalistic.

Creating a taxonomy from her personal museum of conserved mementos, Carland sets up the portions of an incomplete, on-going and open ended narrative that is a delight for the observer to follow or just stare at. While the smaller pieces serve as anecdotes or more peculiar stories, the bigger collections of objects (there are three such pieces at Silverman Gallery’s new downtown space) create fables that have the enduring appeal of grandmotherly bedtime stories.

It is always great to see the work of homosexual artists outside of the usual queer enclaves that keep these discourses from reaching a wider and more heterogeneous audience. Both "Maria: Politics. Sex. Death. Men." and "An Archive of Feelings" flaunt museum-worthy art that deal with the travails of gay life in atypical and challenging ways.

The Queer Latino Arts Festival reopens at Galeria de la Raza July 11 with "Narrating Identity, (Dis)locating Bodies." Partipating artists include Monica Enriquez-Enriquez, Sonali Gulati, Vanessa Huang, Mujeres y Cultura Subterránea (Ines Morales and Susana Quiroz) and Rebeka Rodriguez. For more information on the exhibit, see .www.galeriadelaraza.org. For information on the Silverman Gallery, visit .www.silverman-gallery.com.

Jano Cortijo is a professional homemaker. Between ironing long and short sleeved shirts, making salads and fried rice, he manages to find time to take pictures, make videos and write.

Originally printed here: http://www.edgesanfrancisco.com/index.php?ch=entertainment&sc=fine_arts&sc2=&sc3=exhibits&id=76946

"IF YOU COULD" CALL FOR ENTRIES

2008-07-08T05:46:00.001-07:00

IF YOU COULD CALL FOR ENTRIES

G&B DIARY 2009

Hello,

After a long wait, we are very pleased to announce a brand new ‘If You Could’ open call for entries for our third publication.

We’ve teamed up with G&B Printers to bring you the ‘If you could do anything tomorrow, what would it be?’ Diary 2009.

On the same theme as their two previous sold out books and limited edition print series, 2009 will see a third publication printed, in the shape of a year long diary. Drawing responses from the same question ‘If you could do anything tomorrow, what would it be?’ artists will get free reign on one of the 52 weeks of 2009, embellishing a double page spread template.

More information at: http://www.ifyoucould.co.uk/contribute

SUBMISSION DEADLINE AUGUST 11TH

Alex and Will

www.ifyoucould.co.uk

Thomas Jeppe - Serps Press

2008-07-01T23:32:00.000-07:00

Today I met with Thomas Jeppe who owns www.serpspress.com.
Thomas Jeppe was born and raised in Perth. He is founder of Melbourne-based publisher Serps Press. His book 'Home Made Tattoos Rule' was released in 2006. Photography projects on the horizon include the HMTR followup 'Old Men's Tattoos'. He is co-editor of Now Now Gallery, and so on.
Here is a sampling of his beautiful work:

If you are in Berlin: "THE FORGOTTEN BAR PROJECT"

2008-06-30T18:01:00.001-07:00

The FORGOTTEN BAR PROJECT will open on Tuesday, July 1, 2008 with a GRAND OPENING and will run throughout the summer with a program of an exhibition opening every day!

The FORGOTTEN BAR PROJECT is initiated by GALERIE IM REGIERUNGSVIERTEL, BERLIN in cooperation with the artists and others to provide an interface for contemporary strategies and activities in art and culture as well as a resort for artists in Berlin Kreuzberg. Food and drinks are available.

Forgotten Bar Project

Schönleinstrasse 28

10967 Berlin Kreuzberg

T +49 1638476690

www.galerieimregierungsviertel.org

open daily 12 – 2 pm and 6 - 11 pm

Participants of the FORGOTTEN BAR PROJECT in July are:

Nevin Aladag, Kenneth Anger, Julieta Aranda, ASSUME VIVID ASTRO FOCUS, Cynthia Beatt, Tjorg Douglas Beer, Margherita Belaief, Tobias Bernstrup, Ellen Blumenstein, Robert Breer, John Bock, Andre Butzer, Bruce Conner, Maike Cruse, Amie Dicke, Nathalie Djurberg, Iris van Dongen, Hans Jörg Dobliar, Jürgen von Dückerhoff, Antje Ehmann, Erro, Harun Farocki, Federico Fellini, Abel Ferrara, Oskar Fischinger, Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Tatjana Greiner / Tim Voss, Andreas Golder, Brion Gysin, Mathilde ter Heijne, Thomas Helbig, Judith Hopf / Deborah Schamoni, Sofia Hultén, Christian Jankowski, Lisa Junghanß, Frank Kalero, Dionisis Kavallieratos, John Kleckner, Dirk Lange, Jeppe Laursen, Joep van Liefland, Atelier van Lieshout, Norman McLaren, Jonathan Meese, Christopher Miner, László Moholy-Nagy, Aaron Moulton, Stefan Mörsch, Samuel Nyholm, Julia Oschatz, Maeghan Reid, Daniel Richter, Patrick Rieve, Markus Selg, Seb Patane, Nina Paley, Raymond Pettibon, Javier Peres, Jon Pylypchuk, Pirat Byran, Benja Sachau, Dean Sameshima, Arcangelo Sassolino, Paul Sharits, Christoph Schlingensief, Ian Somerville, Katja Strunz, Alexandros Tzannis, Heike Tosun, Malte Urbschat, Gabriel Acevedo Velarde, Slavko Vorkapich, Sebastian Zarius

FORGOTTEN BAR PROJECT / PROGRAM JULY 2008

01 TUE GRAND OPENING / with Nevin Aladag, Julieta Aranda, ASSUME VIVID ASTRO FOCUS, Tjorg Douglas Beer, Amie Dicke, Iris van Dongen, Hans Jörg Dobliar, Antje Ehmann, Harun Farocki, Andreas Golder, Thomas Helbig, Christian Jankowski, Dionisis Kavallieratos, John Kleckner, Annika Larsson, Joep van Liefland, Christopher Miner, Maeghan Reid, Patrick Rieve, Dean Sameshima, Arcangelo Sassolino, Alexandros Tzannis, Malte Urbschat, Sebastian Zarius

02 WED DOUBLE ANGER / 2 Films by Kenneth Anger

03 THU CHRISTOPHER MINER

04 FRI UNCLE SAM’S MOTHER / Group Material

05 SAT PICTURES / works by Dean Sameshima

06 SUN THE BRUCE CONNER ONE MAN SHOW

07 MON GUILIETTA DEGLI SPIRITI / Movie by Federico Fellini presented by Amie Dicke

08 TUE ALEXANDROS TZANNIS
09 WED MATERIAL / Amie Dicke
10 THU NEW WORKS / New films by Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki

11 FRI CHOOSE 1 / Groupshow with 10 artists initiated by Ellen Blumenstein, starting with Gabriel Acevedo Velarde who will be invited by the curator and who then invites another artist ...

12 SAT FRA, DIRTY SOCKS, NEON LOVE, PIRATE FILM AND MORE... / with Tobias Bernstrup, Annika Larsson, Samuel Nyholm, Pirat Byran

13 SUN AARON MOULTON PRESENTS...

14 MON Four Films by Antony Balch in collaboration with William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Ian Somerville presented by Cynthia Beatt
15 TUE MEN AND DEPRESSION / Joep van Liefland
16 WED SAMMLUNG TAUBENSTRASSE / with Atelier van Lieshout, John Bock, Andre Butzer, Jürgen von Dückerhoff, Erro, Tatjana Greiner / Tim Voss, Jonathan Meese, Stefan Mörsch, Raymond Pettibon, Daniel Richter, Markus Selg

17 THU CLASSICS AL DIA 08 / Experimental Films by László Moholy-Nagy, Robert Breer, Oskar Fischinger, Paul Sharits, Norman McLaren and others selected by Xavier Garcia Puerto and accompanied by original soundtrack mixed with life improvisations by Frank Kalero

18 FRI HIPIC / project initiated by artists in China, presented by Sine Bepler

19 SAT THIS IS MOST MODERN AND SAFE / Julieta Aranda

20 SUN LANGE ROCHADE / Malte Urbschat

21 MON THE DRILLER KILLER / Movie by Abel Ferrara, presented by Anna-Catharina Gebbers
22 TUE THE DRILLER KILLER II / Videos by Nathalie Djurberg, Judith Hopf/Deborah Schamoni, Sofia Hultén, Lisa Junghanß, Julia Oschatz, Christoph Schlingensief, Katja Strunz, Mathilde ter Heijne and others presented by Anna-Catharina Gebbers
23 WED JAVIER PERES AND JEPPE LAURSEN PRESENT...

24 THU DIRK LANGE, SEB PATANE, JON PYLYPCHUK, BENJA SACHAU / Group Show presented by Heiko Tosun
25 FRI ASSUME VIVID ASTRO FOCUS

26 SAT works by THOMAS HELBIG and MEGHAN REID

27 SUN VOICE OVER / works by Nevin Aladag and Daniel Knorr

28 MON BRAZIL / Movie by Terry Gilliam

29 TUE VIELE KAMEN UND WAREN INTERESSIERT / Andreas Golder

30 WED IRIS VAN DONGEN, DIONISIS KAVALLIERATOS, SAMANTHA REES, BAS ZOONTJENS

31 THU JULIA BÜNAGEL / PATRICK RIEVE

PROPOSAL, NYC: Capricious Space: Summer Reading

2008-06-27T09:34:00.001-07:00

Capricious Space: Summer Reading

This August, Capricious Space will be transformed into a magical, sunlit library – a haven for reading, reflection and retreat from reality – through the display of a very special collection of photo-based artists’ books, submitted by you!

With your help, we will showcase Books as artworks, books about artists, scrolls in jars, carefully sewn Xeroxes, one-of-a-kind and weird books, books created by and/or about you!

Please mail us your photography-based artist book and we will display it for the duration of the exhibition. Then if you choose to include return shipping fees, we will very happily return it to you, OR we would love to give your book a permanent home in our Capricious Space archive.

Send an email letting us know that you'll be participating and then send a single copy of your artist book to the following address, no later than Friday, August 1, 2008:

Capricious Space
Summer Reading Submissions
302 Bedford Avenue #114
Williamsburg, Brooklyn 11211

Thanks in advance! We look forward to giving a summer home to your book!

Warm regards,

Capricious

www.becapricious.com

www.capriciousmagazine.com

mailing:

302 Bedford Avenue #114
Brooklyn, NY 11211

visiting:

103 Broadway

Ground Floor

Brooklyn, NY 11211

+1.718.384.1208

Tammy Rae Carland, SFBG Review, 2008

2008-06-25T17:15:00.000-07:00

If your in NYC, "The Left Hand of Darkness"

2008-06-23T18:46:00.000-07:00

The Left Hand of Darkness

June 26 – August 15, 2008
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 26th, 6-8 pm

Group show with works by

Michael Bilsborough
Monica Bonvicini
C.R.E.E., P
Kathryn Garcia
Matt Greene
Paul Kopkau
Sarah Lucas
Tara Mateik
Slava Mogutin
Michael Portnoy
Tracey Rose
Ryan Trecartin
Matthias Vriens
Tobaron Waxman

Curated by Sarvia Jasso and Yasmine Dubois

The Project
37 West 57th Street, 3rd floor
New York, NY 10019
T 212.688.1585

http://www.elproyecto.com/

Tammy Rae Carland Opening, thanks to sid sarshar

2008-06-23T09:18:00.000-07:00

Babylon Falling, ONE YEAR PARTY!

2008-06-23T09:14:00.001-07:00

Join us as Babylon Falling celebrates one year as an independent bookstore on Thursday, June 26, at 7 pm. David Choong Lee will be the dj for the night and we will also be unveiling a new line of t-shirts featuring artwork by the various artists who have shown their work at Babylon Falling within the past 12 months

Printed locally the Babylon Falling t-shirt line is the result of an organic process of community and collaboration and will be exclusive to the store. The following artists have contributed designs: Emory Douglas, David Choong Lee, Peter Simon, Le Bijoutier, Robert Bowen, D Young V, John Felix Arnold III and Simon Benjamin/Kingston 6.

Drinks and music as always! The reggae photography of Peter Simon will still be on display and we will also have most of the source artwork from the tshirts above the bar, including the original Black Panther Newspaper from June 27, 1970 featuring the artwork on the Emory Douglas tshir

Our one year anniversary sale will continue through Wednesday. Take advantage while you can.

50% off all tshirts - Com-Raid (Babylon Falling is the only Com-Raid retailer on the west coast), Proletariat, Scum Life, Jask, David Choong Lee, and Listen Clothing

20% off all toys & DVDS - This includes the new releases that are coming in next week from MindStyle and Jamungo. Really there is no other time that we would have a sale on the toys. Same goes for the DVDs.

10% off all books - This includes already discounted Hardcover New Releases allowing you to pick up great new titles at 30% off retail. Craziness.

Babylon Falling
1017 Bush St (@Jones)
San Francisco, CA 94109

415-345-1017
www.babylonfalling.com

Store Hours

Tues-Fri: 12-9pm
Sat & Sun: 12-7pm
Closed Mondays

SFBG "Best of the Bay", 2008

2008-06-20T16:24:00.000-07:00

Vote SILVERMAN GALLERY for "BEST ART GALLERY" @ http://www.sfbg.com/bob/2008/

Make sure to check out TULIPS & ROSES

2008-06-19T08:57:00.000-07:00

TULIPS & ROSES is a new art gallery based in Vilnius, Lithuania.
http://tulipsandroses.lt
http://tulipsandroses.lt/blog/

Opening reception // Tammy Rae Carland // June 20, 7-11pm

2008-06-18T00:18:00.000-07:00

For her first solo exhibition at Silverman Gallery An Archive of Feelings selects new photographs and video works by Tammy Rae Carland that are themed around holding on to or at least remembering the things that are hard to let go of. On view from June 20 – July 27, 2008 An Archive of Feelings embodies Carland’s personal experiences and relationships to family, friends and ex-lovers. Borrowing its title and sensibility from Ann Cvetkovich's book by the same name, An Archive of Feelings reaches out to the viewer without being overly sentimental.

Grief can often be so monumental that we resort to erecting monuments in it's honor; things and places bigger than us, that tower over the delicacies of our experience, rendering our feelings inefficient and inept. But what of all the little things we save, or purge, the things that are supposed to survive when bodies, moments and love do not? What becomes of all the personal hand held monuments that can electrify memory and experience? They become photographs because for Carland, a photograph is literally a trace, a sign, a symbol or evidence of something that was, something that existed somewhere - however fleeting that existence might have been.

Depicted in An Archive of Feelings are what serve us when the love object goes missing and we attach ourselves to the thing, the fetish, the photograph, in order to fill the void, in order to mend the gap and not sit empty with ourselves, with our feelings. My Inheritance, the largest work in the exhibition is comprised of all the objects Carland took from her mothers house after her passing. These are not the objects left to Carland but rather the items that triggered an emotional reaction, a memory or a moment. The work is in that sense an homage or an archive, and leaves the viewer with an intense, sincere and uncomfortably emotional impression.

Of the 21 objects in My Inheritance most of them show wear or seem to have been used in everyday life. There is a beat up map of San Francisco, perhaps when Carland's mother would visit, a crossword puzzle yet to be finished, a burnt crochet coaster and a box full of scraps. While My Inheritance is perhaps more embedded in the context of loss, One Love Leads To Another (tapes), is more closely related to the issue of time, personal taste and gifting. The personal mixtape is in many ways an art form and carefully selecting and ordering the tracks a mixtape can create an artistic statement that is greater than the sum of its individual songs. For One Love Leads To Another (tapes) cassettes, cassette covers hand painted by friends and personal playslists lineup like an army. In this work, the songs, chosen by friends and lovers give us insight into some of Carland’s most personal relationships and at the same time acts as a gathering of distinct artistic practices.

What emanates from bodies, relationship and experience imprints itself in our memory via things and sensation, the thing itself holding and transmitting the sensation. An Archive of Feelings is an attempt to archive the impossible, the nebulous, the disappeared and the intangible – an incoherent archive of feelings.

Tammy Rae Carland “An Archive of Feelings”, June 20 – July 26, 2008

Opening reception, June 20, 7-11pm

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

Silverman Gallery // Look Boutique - recent press!

2008-06-14T09:26:00.000-07:00

http://www.whyandwherefore.com/

2008-06-13T23:37:00.000-07:00

THIS ONE GOES UP TO 11
40 works of video selected by Summer Guthery, Hanne Mugaas, Lumi Tan, and Nicholas Weist. Hosting by Vimeo. Thanks to Mark Beasley for our title.

Featuring Uri Aran, Bad Beuys Entertainment, Tricia Baga, Chris Bors, Michael Bell-Smith, Charles Broskoski, Robert Cauble, Tyler Coburn, Jen DeNike, Carla Edwards, Lars Holdhus, Desiree Holman, Brian Kenny, Oliver Laric, Annika Larsson, Lars Laumann, Kalup Linzy, Guthrie Lonergan, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Gene McHugh, Jenn Norton, Geoffrey Pugen, Hayley Aviva Silverman, Jennifer Sullivan, Joshua Thorson, Skye Thorstenson, Brina Thurston, Whoop Dee Doo, and Damon Zucconi.

GLU CD party - Susanne M. Winterling

2008-06-13T13:26:00.000-07:00

New/Recent articles at whithotmagazine.com

2008-06-12T17:18:00.000-07:00

Jeff Koons @ the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago by Keith Brown, Chicago
In an interview with Rolling Stone in November of 2007, hip-hop mogul Jay-Z revealed that he owns works by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Takashi Murakami. Within this very same month two Jeff Koons pieces Diamond (Blue), 1994-2005, and Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold), 1994-2006, sold for a combined $35.4 million, which shattered auction totals for a living artist. Ironically, we live in a world where rapping can provide you with the quality of wealth required to collect highly expensive works of fine art and artists' can make more money in two nights than most people can gross in a life time...
http://whitehotmagazine.com/whitehot_articles.cfm?id=1396

What Comes Naturally @ Fake Estate by Ana Finel Honigman, New York
Doing "What Comes Naturally," usually refers to something racier than floral painting. But New York's Fake Estates, the experimental group show by that name demonstrates that a sharp and gritty artistic imagination can make even modest flowers appear more raw and earthy than nature intended. In the gallery's 80 square foot space (it was once a utility closet for a photographer's studio in the Chelsea Arts Building) the eleven works on view offer a variable bouquet for the senses...
http://whitehotmagazine.com/whitehot_articles.cfm?id=1390

New Art Forum in San Francisco by Jessica Silverman
New Art Forum began on May 31 with visits to the artist's studios of Ali, Naschke Messing, Eric Reyes-Lamothe, and Leo Estevez in San Francisco and Oakland. Our group was intimate, myself, Maria del Carmen Carrion (Curator of New Langton Arts), Langton Arts; with Langton Board Kate Connally,Vice President, Addicting Games; and Verda Alexander,Partner,Studio O+a and some new faces! Art collectors keep surprising me – they're younger than I thought, more approachable, thoughtful and inquisitive...
http://whitehotmagazine.com/whitehot_articles.cfm?id=1369

Neo Rauch @ David Zwirner by Emily Schroeder, New York
Neo Rauch's paintings are said to be of dreams or by dreams. Rauch's work was described as a "neo-romantic socialist realism by way of Courbet, Delacroix, surrealism and Kippenberger," but also touches on Pop Art. The light seems to come from underneath in early canvases as any good Renaissance painting should, post conservation. Rauch's 2005 at David Zwirner, Regeneration, was aptly so...
http://whitehotmagazine.com/whitehot_articles.cfm?id=1391

Opening, Closing, Still have, Soon

2008-06-11T23:35:00.000-07:00

Opening tomorrow:

Headlands Auction - go!

SFAC Gallery
A Complicated Dominion: Nature and New Political Narratives
June 12 - August 16, 2008
Opening June 12, 6pm

Closing soon:

Ratio 3 Gallery
Ryan McGinley : Spring and By Summer Fall
Closes June 21, 2008

Still have some time:

Jancar Jones
Sean Talley
Closes June 28, 2008

Triple Base
Suzanne Husky, YOU MAKE ME MAKE YOU
Closes June 29, 2008

Opening soon:

Silverman Gallery
Tammy Rae Carland, An Archive of Feelings
June 20, 7-11

"Dynasty Handbag: Tales from the Purse" - put it in your calendar

2008-06-10T13:10:00.000-07:00

SF Guardian Review: Written on Spiders

2008-06-05T16:25:00.000-07:00

Many Mini Residency - Apply now!

2008-06-03T16:13:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends:

This is just a reminder that the deadline for Many Mini Residency is coming up on June 12th.

Many Mini Residency will be held during the first week of July at The Berlin Office, located in the Kreuzberg/Neukölln district of Berlin.

If you have any questions about this project, please let us know!

APPLICATIONS DUE BY EMAIL JUNE 12TH

Residency awards will be announced by email and posted online June 15th.

Please see the website www.manymini.org for more information.

Thanks!

Sarrita and Ryan

Many Mini Residency is a collaboration between Sarrita Hunn and Ryan Thayer in coordination with The Berlin Office.
Special thanks to Heidi Hove Pederson for her tremendous assistance and Jason Mortara for his inspirational project, The Dream House Residency

Artist Talk at Silverman Gallery by Lisa Jugert

2008-05-29T14:10:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-05-24T12:09:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-23T11:02:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-05-23T09:32:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-05-18T18:08:00.000-07:00

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"

2008-05-18T11:53:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-18T11:39:00.000-07:00

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.