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Viewing Recent Press
18 July 2008
Art In Review - David Ellis
New York Times
The work in David Ellis’s latest show alternates between routine and ingenious, and ingenious invariably involves sound and motion. This is not surprising: Mr. Ellis excels at percussion, animation and the form of action painting known as Graffiti Art; he also has a tendency to build idiosyncratic musical instruments. (For this show he collaborated with the musician Roberto Lang.) For example, “Heap” is a very large pile of trash from Brooklyn and Manhattan that regularly bursts into gadget-driven drumming. Paint cans, spackle buckets, aluminum beams and tinfoil are among the noise-makers and they’re all miked. “Ok Superman” is a reinterpretation of a player piano, which plays Laurie Anderson’s classic performance piece “O Superman” — albeit quite faintly — using small fans directed at a series of empty wine bottles; its moving parts also include a computer that prints out the song’s lyrics in the shape of the airborne action hero’s S-logo. The tour de force occupies a separate space: “FAMS 1 (Fine Art Moving and Storage)” is one of Mr. Ellis’s exhilarating stop-action painting performances which uses the floor as the canvas and is shot from above. During this 10-minute work, Mr. Ellis and the occasional assistant transform the floor with rapid-fire sequences of cartoons, speech balloons, graffiti lettering (words like okay, fly and see) and abstraction (geometric, monochrome and swirling deluges of color). A signature design of billowing lines that Mr. Ellis calls “flow” recurs repeatedly. A high point is a splash of blue paint that eventually evolves into a peacock. The catchy percussive soundtrack is provided by a series of paint trays, bottles, cans, paint buckets and paintbrushes, miked like the trash in “Heap,” but arranged in orderly fashion in their own shipping crates. Two less ambitious videos and a mass of large drawings in which the flow motif swirls across collages of letters and manuals pertaining to the construction of the work in the show are handsome but understandably inert. His best efforts operate in terrain populated at various points by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Tim Hawkinson, Tom Friedman, Jon Kessler, Christian Marclay, Aaron Young and Ian Burns. His particular kind of Rube Golbergian, street-wise Guy Art veers closer to pure entertainment than any of his neighbors, but that doesn’t mean he’s out of the running. ROBERTA SMITH
13 June 2008
Paying Tribute and Talking Trash
The Villager
Paying tribute and talking trash Giving new meaning to common materials, from the discarded to the domestic By Debra Jenks Ever since Marcel Duchamp turned a urinal upside down and deemed it art, the use of common materials has prevailed in sculpture. The canon of “non-conventional” mediums has informed generations, from the “Combines” of Rauschenberg to the varied mediums of Fluxus (a Latin word meaning “to flow”), to the consumer-culture kitsch of Jeff Koons. David Ellis leaves no trashcan unturned. His musical kinetic sculptures (collaborations with composer Roberto Lange) are scavenged from refuse he finds on the street. Paint buckets, bottles and cans, shopping carts, broken bikes, cardboard boxes and the artist’s personal detritus are all given equal regard. The title of Ellis’ phenomenal show, “Dozens,” comes from a practice called “playing the dozens” or “doin’ the Dozens” (a.k.a. “Yo Momma Fights”), an African-American oral tradition where two competitors trade insults or “trash talk.” Here, it’s literally the trash that does the talking. Ellis’s “Heap” is a rowdy hip-hop orchestra of percussive junk, a mountain of rubble animated by player piano actuators. Syncopated cans and bottles bang and clink. The work is playful, though it also calls attention to the enormous amount of waste we produce. The most elaborate and layered piece in the show is “Oh Superman,” which pays homage to Laurie Anderson’s premonitory performance (and eponymous song). Ellis’s rhythmic “Oh Superman” is a combination typewriter and player piano. In the shape of Superman’s emblem, Anderson’s lyrics are typed on the piano rolls then mechanically cut and inserted into glass bottles, which roll off in random directions to deliver an S.O.S.: “Here come the planes. They’re American planes. Made in America.” We see the same Superman emblem in a bird’s-eye view projection of Ellis’s painting the top of packing crates. Another reference to planes appears in a found text for airplane safety, used in one of a series of college panels hung throughout the gallery. The panels are composed of various texts and drawings, including his to-do lists, and a wave-like form resembling a graffiti tag. Everything in this show moves or suggests movement. Flow is a key dynamic in Ellis’s art. The wave is a leitmotif that connects the various mediums used by the artist and carries us from one piece or room to the next. Jessica Jackson Hutchins at Derek Eller Gallery takes her show’s title from an Emily Dickinson poem and a Richard Hell album cover. Her work weaves personal remnants with domestic objects—leftovers from her daughter’s birthday party, a video of the family vacation, vows spoken at her wedding, images cut from flower catalogs, furniture and misshapen ceramic vessels. By drawing attention to deformity, Hutchinson challenges our notion of beauty that is flawless. In “Rocking Horse with Birthday Party Turf,” a child’s rocking horse is transmogrified into a cancerous monster à la Francis Bacon, its head and saddle covered with collaged lumps of plaster. A ceramic bottle resembling an ice pack sits on top of the shrouded head as if to relieve a headache or hangover. It’s humorous yet painfully sad — something has gone terribly awry. “Convivium” is an odd feast. Ceramic dinner plates, pitchers and utensils sit on top of plaster forms that resemble an organic growth or geological outcropping in the Badlands. “Loveseat and Bowls” is a floral-patterned couch filled with plaster and topped with ceramic pots. It looks as if it has suffered some catastrophic event, like an artifact dug from the ruins of Herculaneum. Forlorn objects, they have witnessed the calamities of time and bear the consequent sheen of purpose. Andrew Sexton has a carney’s charm. He has a big moustache and a gold tooth. He comes from the populist vein of tattoos and comics (Joe Coleman came to his last opening). In addition to his ballpoint drawings of friends and family members as cartoon characters from naughty fairytales, there is Sexton’s folksy “Tribute to the Best Mom in the World” made of fake flowers and needlepoint. In the center of the gallery is “The Enigma of Kevin Sexton,” an ice-cream “portrait” of the artist’s brother as a wild boar, following in the iconoclastic practice of making sculpture of such unexpected material as wax, chocolate or even frozen blood. At the opening of the show, Sexton’s brother was dressed like a Good Humor man in white with a bow tie, serving up his doppelganger to an enthusiastic crowd. They say you are what you eat. But one thing’s for certain, Andrew Sexton is no “bore.”
10 June 2008
Brooklyn Dispatches
The Brooklyn Rail
The Brooklyn Canon: Airbrushed Out of History. By James Kalm. (Excerpt) Strength in Numbers. The mid-nineties is a period of consolidation and recognition. Other galleries, some with public funding, join the fray and form a core community. Momenta Art, begun in Philadelphia by Eric Heist and Laura Parness, pitches camp in 1995 on the north side and features a program of conceptual work, much of it with a biting institutional critique. Feed, founded in 1992 by Lisa Schroeder and Barry Hylton on North 3rd, starts casually and goes through several mutations, eventually partnering with Sara Jo Romero and absconding to Chelsea as Schroeder Romero in 2006. Roebling Hall is kicked off in 1997 by Joel Beck and the controversial Christian Viveros-Fauné. Taking their name from their Roebling Street location, they move in 1998 to larger digs on Wythe Avenue and present artists Eve Sussman, Christoph Draeger, Sebastiaan Bremer among others before heading to West Chelsea in 2005. The Williamsburg Arts & Historical Center at Broadway and Bedford anchors the south end of the Bedford strip. Housed in the landmarked Kings County Savings Bank, this edifice was home and studio to the notorious time-traveling art team of McDermott & McGough before being purchased for the museum by Yuko Nii in 1996. Under the direction of “eccentric anarchist” Terrance Lindall, the WAH Center presents Brave Destiny in the fall of 2003. Bombastically billed as the largest Surrealist exhibition in history, Brave Destiny includes nearly 400 artists, with big names like H. R. Geiger and Ernst Fuchs taking part. Though originally skeptical of the gamy tang of this “outmoded” genre, I’m now thinking that Brave Destiny could, in part, be credited with many local artists’ current infatuation with Pop Surrealism.
5 June 2008
Winged Victory
Art News
David Ellis's painting performance at the Theory Flagship store in April is featured in the June Issue of Art News.
4 April 2008
Lane Twitchell: Leap With Me
NY Times
Through Saturday Artists at all levels, even those with budgets far below that of a Jeff Koons, are turning to fabricators. For his latest show, “Leap With Me,” Lane Twitchell has shifted from folding and cutting paper to making drawings that are later translated into laser-carved polyester film. The technique lends an industrial edge to Mr. Twitchell’s hippie-craft-inspired patterns. His symmetrical compositions deftly intertwine strands of folk art, science fiction and psychedelia. “Peaceable Kingdom — Evening Land” and “Peaceable Kingdom — Morning Light” (both 2008) suggest an Edward Hicks landscape populated by the Grateful Dead’s dancing bears. In “Cheer Up” a pigtailed girl sits astride a turtle in an Asian-inspired cityscape. In these scenes the laser’s precision works to Mr. Twitchell’s advantage. The prettiest works, however, show the artist’s hand. Two smaller pieces from a 2006 series called “Alt Country Abstraction,” made in pencil, pastel and acrylic on cut paper, resemble William Morris patterns left out in the rain. In a stunning pair of square panels, “Suburban Showdown (Santa Cruz)” (2008) and “Suburban Showdown (Atherton)” (2008), creased paper adds depth and tactile richness to the hallucinatory field. KAREN ROSENBERG
19 March 2008
Bewitched - By Charlie Finch
Artnet.com
"For the first time, Charlie, I am using a fabricator," Lane Twitchell revealed about his show at Roebling Hall on Eleventh Avenue through Apr. 5, 2008. What? No more obsessive paper folding and cutting to create psychedelic prisms equating the Westward journey of Lane’s tangential ancestor Brigham Young with modern suburban sprawl and the growth of the Interstate? "I’ve always thought that Lane needed time for his drawing," remarked Joel Beck, the mystic maven of Roebling. Apparently, Twitchell now digitizes his drawings and hires some latter-day saint to cut his new pieces out of vellum before urethaning on them. The result is a series of symmetries which open the doors of perception through the central figures of a little girl, a wolf and a frog. Concentrating on these three friendly faces, reminiscent of John Tenniel’s drawing of the Cheshire Cat, permits the viewer to twitch open his third eye and travel the lanes of the inner human highway. Each piece is a drug on the wall, concentrated glee. It’s hard to believe that aging pothead Fred Tomaselli has become an auction star while clean-cut Lane Twitchell dances through a serviceable career, because The Twitchings are far more hallucinatory when viewed over time than those of Pillboy Fred. Four years ago at Greenberg Van Doren a decent Twitchell fetched $14,000 and the new, more integrated work at Roebling Hall ranges from $7,500 to $25,000, peanuts in today’s market. The real value of Lane’s pieces is that, if you are properly stimulated, they will start to talk to you, even ask you out on a date! Roebling Hall has also dumped some fellow named Young in with the Twitchell show, whose signature work is a spinning tire magically suspended in an industrial-sized clothes drier, suggestive of Duchamp’s Rotorelief, which rumbles along with a deafening noise. I begged Joel not to turn it on, but he insisted. This is the sort of low stuff that often passes for amusement in the art world these days, but Lane Twitchell will survive it -- he always has. Lane Twitchell, "Leap with Me," and Doug Young, "One Soft Infested Summer," Feb. 29-Apr. 5, 2008, at Roebling Hall, 606 West 26th Street, New York, N.Y. 10001. CHARLIE FINCH is co-author of Most Art Sucks: Five Years of Coagula (Smart Art Press).
1 February 2008
Bjorn Melhus
Art Review
It ' s a different , more literal kind of echo that (3) BJORN MELHUS created at Roebling Hall, titled If You See Something Say Something (the title itself is a triumph: the direction having been cribbed from public-service placards recently plastered across New York City at the behest of the Police Department and meant to remind the populace of its civic duty to remain vigilant against such terrorist threats as unmanned i.e. , lost luggage and handbags, or the occasional ornery Sikh taxi driver). Melhus filled -literally filled - the gallery's two main and many interstitial spaces with monitors and projections playing The Meadow, The Castle, The City and Captain (all 2007) , the last of which is the first work for which Melhus has used actors other than himself to mouth lines culled from, in this case, old episodes of Star Trek. The video is replete with the show's campy sound effects, sets and rudimentary special effects, which never fail to give one the impression that the characters are being attacked by lights from a broken disco ball . In other episodes, Melhus redubbed scenes from Bambi (1942) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955) to create David Lynchian noir and absurdist encounters. It all takes a bit of time. But it's refreshing to see videowork presented this way : many channelled and variably installed, two monitors placed at ceiling height like they do in hospitals, a column of four others in a hallway, a grid of LCD panels, three straight-up projections and three singlechannel works) . I should note that Roebling Hall's installation makes the way other galleries present video appear rather precious, as if we don' t live in a world saturated by moving images on myriad screens. Of course this is in no way a commentary on the art, only on the fact that the white cube/black box dichotomy that Chrissie Iles pressed into service a few years ago at the Whitney with her otherwise excellent show Into the Light (2002) seems even more untenable today, unless we're willing to accept that the artworld, as Peter Plagens once noted (but regarding different circumstances), really is the 'poor man's Hollywood'.
1 February 2008
Rebecca Horne
White Hot
Rebecca Horne, The Corner of Your Eye Roebling Hall, Chelsea, January 17–February 23 By Marika Josephson Rebecca Horne is a Brooklyn-based artist who has been showing her work around the city for nearly the last ten years. “The Corner of Your Eye,” however, is her first solo exhibition in New York City. It couldn’t be a better showing of her recent work. The majority of photographs in the exhibition at Roebling Hall are seemingly typical still lifes that, upon closer inspection, reveal strange qualities that jar our immediate categorization of familiar phenomena. They are the things that catch the corner of our eye, making us linger for a second longer, throwing our confident assessment of the scene into distress: What is going on here? In one exemplary photograph entitled, “Automatic Pitcher,” a pitcher stands upright with water pouring from the spout into a nearby glass. “Still Life with Pitcher and Glass,” we might call it, right? Yes, but then the pitcher isn’t tilted—so how is the water in fact flowing? (And there are no machines, so how would it flow “automatically”?) In another photograph, “Paper Water,” water streams from a kitchen faucet into a wine glass, making a similar movement as in the “Automatic Pitcher.” The eponymous “paper” in the photograph seems to refer to the synthetic blue in the dishes surrounding the glass—color that fills the otherwise ordinary scene with a cyan that resembles the glow of an iceberg. And, upon closer inspection, the water flowing from the faucet seems (only seems, for the precise construction of the scene—as in every scene in the exhibition—ultimately eludes us just enough that we will never know for sure) frozen, as if an icicle hangs from the tip of the faucet. But how does this help us to interpret what’s going on in the “Automatic Pitcher”? Is it a piece of ice, or paper, or is it time-lapsed photography that creates the strange, liquid-like movement between spout and glass? We are left in wonder. The subtle and brilliant thing about Horne’s work is that you cannot uniformly apply some “trick” in order to understand each picture. Indeed, in that way, what she accomplishes in her photographs isn’t a “trick” of the eye at all, but rather the careful and seamless construction of an uncanny world. Meaning resonates through the overall effect created by her use of each individual material and photographic technique. But the obsessiveness on the part of the viewer with how the photograph is made belies an underlying question that one poses to oneself while looking at Horne’s photographs: “Is there some way that this scene is actually possible?” Or rather, one finds oneself valiantly making the assertion that there has to be some way this scene is actually possible. And part of the reason one tries so desperately to make sense of the scenes she presents is precisely in their uncanniness; they otherwise seem to fit so nicely into a comfortable portrait of the furniture of our everyday lives. The linens, the tablecloths, the bowls, the pitchers—all of them remind me of hand-me-down objects that used to adorn my grandmother’s-then-mother’s kitchens and dining rooms. But Horne doesn’t focus on the nostalgia of these objects. Rather they fill the moods of the photographs with their sedated palate and faded threads. The objects feel like they are caught resting after certain moments of being held, used, and embodied. And then, in their solitude, they dance. The strange things we notice in the “corners” of the photographs give us a sense of wonder akin to that which surrounded the linens and pitchers of our youth. Horne does a skillful job of utilizing the camera and each of the individual objects in her photographs to create a protracted sense of magic that envelops the viewer and re-invites her back into the early afternoon of the imagination. Marika Josephson writes about art and politics, and is a graduate student in philosophy at the New School for Social Research.
1 February 2008
Conversations - Mary Cook Talks to Bjørn Melhus
New York Arts Magazine
Mary Cook Talks To Bjørn Melhus March - April 2008 - Conversations Bjørn Melhus is Berlin-based artist. Mary Cook is a Brooklyn-based artist. Mary Cook: First of all, I would like to congratulate you on your fourth show at Roebling Hall, The Castle, The Meadow and The City. You certainly have been quite busy over the years. You have been studying film, and you have exhibited extensively overseas at the Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the LUX in London, as well as the Whitney Museum in New York. Bjørn Melhus: Thank you, Mary. It’s my pleasure. MC: Your work is so multi-faceted. You are known to explore a hybrid of figures and constellations by way of a narrative fragmentation of pre-existing sounds and images from popular film and music. Your work also appropriates from many feature films, such as “The Wizard of OZ” in Far, Far Away and “Rebel Without a Cause” and “East of Eden” in Auto Center Drive, while touching on the rhetoric used in advertising, a field that you formerly worked in professionally. Would you view the question of communication in the media world as your primary concern? BM: Many people cook it down to that point. But yes, my work is multi-layered. Communication, of course, is one aspect of the work. There are other aspects in the work and often it is maybe the most obvious aspect and maybe that is why people often only write on that point. MC: So, who is Bjørn Melhus? You use yourself as the central character in your video works. Your work must be very personal. BM: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean I feel it is really important to bring the critical point of view into the personal, into an intimate sphere because that’s how we function. We share our intimate sphere with the public sphere all the time. The public sphere, what I mean is not just the media—everything includes our personal and private intimacy and make something with it. I see my stories and my characters—I mean the characters are, as you can see, templates to create a story, but the story is just like a psychological model for itself. The dialogue that is exchanged between these templates can be seen as an inner dialogue between art of an own ego or personality. MC: How do you begin a project? Do you start off with a particular idea or format and then build around that? A specific storyline? What you want from beginning to end or have you—how do you choose your dialogue, in terms of appropriation? BM: It is very different each time, with each piece. First off I can begin with any idea. If there is any idea such as a topic that I really find interesting for a while and then I decide I really want to do something with that. At that point I am going into research and looking at more and more stuff, if it’s movies or TV shows or whatever. I need voices for my work. My work is based on text, on time, and on researching and finding these parts that I can appropriate the story. So the story happens. I am doing the sound editing first. I am doing my little storyboard and I worked out the details of the stories. It is still a narrative because I am the storyteller. The overall idea is there before and that is like the way I work from the piece and sometimes I even just start with some images. MC: Great! Let’s talk about your recent show at Roebling Hall. In terms of your references, you appropriated from “Rebel Without a Cause,” a lot of “East of Eden” as well. BM: Yes. Cool. Auto Center Drive is an important piece for me. Because the Meadow is an “open continuation” of Auto Center Drive, so what happens with the Jimmy character, the main character of the film, I wanted to keep Jimmy’s lines as he has in Auto Center Drive generated with “Rebel Without A Cause” and “East of Eden.” Basically, these are all lines when James Dean had addressed his father. MC: Like when James Dean’s father was wearing the apron in “Rebel Without A Cause?” BM: Yeah, yeah. That and even later when “East of Eden” when he is at his father’s bed, when his father is dying. It has something to do with a certain search—I was interested in these lines and to oppose lines from Jim Morrison Play, that is the fire scene from Auto Center Drive. But Auto Center Drive at that time plays a lot with the self-invention of identity of what are we, how we create our own identity. This of course relates to what is perpetuated by American capitalism. MC: Growing up with the television on. Being exposed to marketing… BM: Yeah, but not just that. I think it is a basic idea. It goes back to when the first immigrants came here and left Europe. Europe is always much more connected to a certain tradition. Now it had changed. But look in the past, you couldn’t just leave your family tradition, the class where you came from, and do something completely different. Which is, basically, the American idea from the dishwasher to the millionaire. MC: You were born in the 60s. Part of the earliest generations to experience television’s increasing popularity. BM: Yeah. Yeah. 1966. But let’s go back to Auto Center Drive. This is a story of these invented characters and all the characters in Auto Center Drive dialogues are taken from icons at a young age. And through that they got really immortal. They live forever. They are young forever. Because they died early. MC: They are immortalized by their popularity. BM: Yes! Yes. I mean look at aging icons. MC: Elvis Presley. BM: Yes. But I mean he died still at the right time. Yes, he had aged but he was still young when he died. He was my age when he died. But how about someone like Michael Jackson. See his problem is that he is still alive. He should have died a long time ago. Yeah, I mean this is true. I mean his albums they would sell even still much better if he was dead by now. MC: But of course we still hear about him. Press. Press. Press. BM: Yeah, but I think the two people who sold the most, who did the best merchandising, were Elvis Presley, number one and I think Kurt Cobain, number two. Now he sells even more in merchandising. MC: 1992. An unforgettable year for many. BM: Yes, but it had to come. I mean this is important. So in Auto Center Drive all my voices are taken from Jim Morrison, James Dean, and Janis Joplin. MC: Tell us who says, “Can I tell you a secret?” BM: This is James Dean. MC: In what part of the film does he say that? BM: That is the male character sitting in front of the TV and this female alter ego sitting inside of the TV. MC: And the man sitting in front of the TV is stroking the screen with his hand, saying “Are you in there?” BM: Yes, yes, exactly. She appears in the beginning and disappears at the end and of course it a mirroring. It’s an image of the other side of both the other gender part of the character. That is one side. Yes. On the other side of course they want to come together but they are divided by two different worlds. They cannot cross the line and really come together.
11 January 2008
Danny Simmons’ Corridor Gallery - Transformers
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle
David Ellis at Corridor Gallery listing