Miami

Into The Void: The Ballad of The Martyr as Told by Ingres
October 7-November 21, 2009

charest-weinberg gallery
250 nw 23rd st space408 miami fl 33127
charest-weinberg.com 1 305 292 0411

“Let me hear no more of that absurd maxim: ‘We need the new, we need to follow our century, everything changes, everything is changed.’ Sophistry- all of that! Does nature change, do the light and air change, have the passions of the human heart changed since the time of Homer? ‘We must follow our century’: but suppose my century is wrong?
Because my neighbor does evil, am I therefore obligated to do it also? Because virtue, as also beauty, can be misunderstood by you, have I in turn got to misunderstand it? Shall I be compelled to imitate you!” Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, c.1834.

Miami, FL — Charest-Weinberg Gallery presents the first Miami exhibition of artists Davis/Langlois, Into The Void: The Ballad of The Martyr as Told by Ingres, taking place October 7 – November 21, 2009. This exhibition will showcase work fresh from their exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (September 5 – 28, 2009), as well as new pieces made specifically for their Miami debut. An opening reception will be held on Wednesday, October 7 from 6 PM to 9 PM.

Davis/Langlois conceived Into the Void as a meta-fable narrated by a resurrected Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. The story features Iman, a 15-year-old Palestinian-American, as she contemplates the plight of Suquamish leader Chief Seattle, who is forced to relinquish his sacred land to the tune of Black Sabbath and the howls of Soundgarden. In her quest for honor, Iman finds herself hanging on to every prophetic line. Through the tradition of martyrdom in Baroque and Neo-Classical painting, Davis/Langlois explore contemporary notions of assimilation, empire, xenophobia and environmentalism. The exhibition invokes the question ‘what is honor, and what is honorable? What price does one pay for steadfast commitment and profound devotion?’

Rob Davis and Mike Langlois have been artistic collaborators since 1997 after meeting at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Redefining the conventional notion that paintings are made by a single artist or hand, each takes an equal role in developing ideas, choosing subjects and executing the works.

Known for their contemporary representational paintings, the duo constructs narratives, each painting acting as part of a larger story and by their proximity, forcing viewers to make a conceptual jump from image to image. With a vocabulary derived from popular culture and subcultures, the artists are committed to applying classical techniques to contemporary art. Their seemingly dissimilar installations center on themes ranging from desire, family, identity, martyrdom, utopia and politics.

Monet’s Water Lillies

From the MoMA’s website

“For the first time in the Museum’s new building, MoMA presents an installation featuring the full group of Claude Monet’s late paintings in the collection. These include a mural-sized triptych (Water Lilies, 1914–26) and a single-panel painting of the water lilies in the Japanese-style pond that Monet cultivated on his property in Giverny, France (Water Lilies, 1914–26), as well as The Japanese Footbridge (c. 1920–22) and Agapanthus (1914–26), depicting the majestic plants in the pond’s vicinity. These paintings have long held a special status with the Museum’s audiences and, much like MoMA’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, they provide a modern oasis in the center of midtown Manhattan. These works will be complemented by two loans of closely related paintings.” See the exhibition here. Read the New York Times review here.

Copper Union Building

From New York Magazine

“New York’s institutions of higher learning have regularly botched their expansions, inflicting arrogant towers and cut-rate boxes in the name of education. So it’s a relief to see the Cooper Union start the school year with a tough and beautiful new academic building that merges showmanship with sensitivity. The graduates of this private, tuition-free school of art, architecture, and engineering help shape our visual culture, and it benefits us all to have them spend their student days in such a fertile place.

At first sight, the nine-story structure, from Thom Mayne and his Santa Monica–based firm Morphosis (with Gruzen Samton), appears bent on sucking up all attention. With a contoured steel façade parted by exhibitionistic slits, it projects an attitude that makes tourists reach for their point-and-shoots. But the building also plays a fine ensemble scene. Its armored exterior echoes that of the Foundation Building, Cooper’s glowering pre–Civil War brownstone castle. Strategic openings allow views of the Ukrainian church next door, and the upturned hem of the metal cladding resonates with the mansard roof across the street. That last unexpected harmony links Mayne’s industrial toughness with Belle Époque glamour. At Cooper Union, he has produced an East Village homage to the Left Bank. Read the rest here.  See pictures here.

Time lapse of the demolition and construction.

MacArthur grants

From the New York Times

“A papermaker dedicated to preserving traditional Western and Japanese techniques; a scientist developing theories of global climate change; and a journalist who helps uncover details of unsolved murders from the civil rights era are among the 24 recipients of the $500,000 “genius awards,” to be announced on Tuesday by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

While many of the fellows are known mostly among their peers, others — especially those in the arts — have won renown. They include Edwidge Danticat, a 40-year-old writer who has won critical acclaim with her depictions of Haitian immigrants in works like the novel “The Farming of Bones” and the memoir “Brother, I’m Dying.”

“It felt incredibly, wonderfully surreal,” Ms. Danticat said in a telephone interview from Miami. “What artists crave and need most is time. It will definitely buy some time. It’s wonderful to have a sense of security, especially in these economic times.”

This year’s MacArthur fellows range in age from 32 to 69 and are evenly divided between men and women. As in years past, most live on the East or West Coasts, but a photojournalist is based in Turkey and an infectious-disease physician in Sudan. All will receive $100,000 a year for five years, no strings attached. Since the inception of the program in 1981 and including this year’s fellows, 805 people ranging in age from 18 to 82 at the time of their selections have been named.

Besides Ms. Danticat, other winners in the arts who have received public recognition are the documentary maker James Longley, 37, who explores Middle East conflicts with portraits of communities under stress; Deborah Eisenberg, 63, a short-story writer; Mark Bradford, 47, a mixed-media artist; Camille Utterback, 39, a pioneer of interactive art installations; Heather McHugh, 61, a poet known for her syntactical twists; Rackstraw Downes, 69, a realist painter of urban landscapes; and Lynsey Addario, 35, the Turkey-based photojournalist whose work in war-torn countries has appeared in The New York Times and National Geographic.”

Read the rest here. See videos here.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

From the Dia Art Foundation’s website. Read more at the New York Times.

“DIA PRESENTS CHRONOTOPES & DIORAMAS, A NEW PROJECT BY DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ-FOERSTER AT THE HISPANIC SOCIETY

Dia’s commission represents the artist’s first major solo exhibition in the United States

Aug 17, 2009

New York, NY- Dia Art Foundation is pleased to announce chronotopes & dioramas, a new project by Paris- and Rio de Janeiro based artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. For this site-specific project, the third in a series of contemporary art exhibitions commissioned by Dia for The Hispanic Society of America, Gonzalez-Foerster takes as her point of departure the Hispanic Society’s internationally renowned research library. On view September 23, 2009 through April 18, 2010, and organized by Dia curator at large Lynne Cooke, chronotopes & dioramas is Gonzalez-Foerster’s first major solo exhibition in the United States. There will be an opening reception on Tuesday, September 22, 2009 from 6-8pm.

For this project, Gonzalez-Foerster has chosen to treat a 3,700 square foot gallery located within the former Museum of the American Indian as an “annex” to the Society’s main library. (Recently renovated by Dia, this gallery is located in a traditional Beaux-Arts style building reopened to the public in 2008, after a 14-year closure.) Here, the artist will augment the library’s holdings of contemporary Iberian and Latin American literature with a selection of texts, both well-known and personally significant.

In the center of the gallery space, Gonzalez-Foerster will construct an approximately 40 foot wide, floor to ceiling structure containing three large-scale dioramas. Inspired by traditional natural history museum displays, the dioramas will depict three terrains – the tropics, the desert, and the North Atlantic. Traces of man-made interventions will be evident in each landscape, whose scenes will be rendered by a team of specialists from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Additionally, a variety of quotations and texts will be printed onto the exterior of the dioramas in a panoramic calligram and will be immediately visible upon entering the gallery.

Gonzalez-Foerster’s three topographies will each contain various forms of literature ranging across works by J.G. Ballard, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Delany, and Clarice Lispector. Books will be sited in the dioramas, like the flora and fauna specimens of natural history habitat displays, as if they were the ‘indigenous inhabitants’ of each terrain.

The “annex” will amplify the Society’s historical holdings with works that span the 20th century, offering narratives of fiction and diaspora that parallel the institution’s geographically based model of collecting.”

Performance

“Big Dance Theater’s new work, Comme Toujours Here I Stand, re-invents Agnès Varda’s classic New Wave film, Cléo From 5 to 7, as a piece of theater. Shot in Paris in 1961, the film captures the early evening hours in the life of a marginally-talented pop singer waiting for the results of a medical examination. The ensemble uses the film’s script as a found object, moving three rolling walls and low-budget video to collide the agility of film and the endearingly burdensome nature of theater. In this unique collaboration, costumes, set, and wallpaper merge through video into one expressive medium that brings the vivid, colorful interiors of a cinematic world to life.”

at the Kitchen through October 10th

Read more about the artists at the New York Times

Icons of the Desert

ICONS OF THE DESERT:
EARLY ABORIGINAL PAINTINGS FROM PAPUNYA
Grey Art Gallery through December 5, 2009

“In 1971, at Papunya, a government-established Aboriginal community in Central Australia, a Sydney- based schoolteacher provided a group of men with the tools and the encouragement to paint. Known as “Papunya boards,” these works constituted the beginning of the Western Desert art movement where indigenous Australian artists explore images and experiences in a new medium and on permanent surfaces. Drawn from the John and Barbara Wilkerson Collection, the exhibition includes masters of the Papunya School such as Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, and Mick NamararriTjapaltjarri.”

Read the New York Times review here.

Two

Sara Greenberger Rafferty | Tears
at Rachel Uffner Gallery through October 25, 2009

“ In this new series, as in her past work, Rafferty explores the subject of mid to late 20th century comedy, using it as an entry point to approach a set of broader thematic preoccupations. The portraits – selected and printed in CMYK ink on a desktop printer, then manually worked upon, digitally manipulated and reprinted as exposed photographs – depict signature comedic personalities and props, such as Bill Cosby, Goldie Hawn, Madeline Kahn, as well as a rubber chicken, a whoopee cushion, and Groucho glasses. Rafferty’s modest interventions into the images create a washed out palette – evoking the colorful but faded feel of watching 1970’s television in 1980’s reruns.

 

Tauba Auerbach | Here and Now/And Nowhere

Deitch Gallery through October 17th

“The collapsing of two conflicting states is the central theme of HERE AND NOW/AND NOWHERE, Tauba Auerbach’s new exhibition at Deitch Projects. The artist deliberately composed the title as an anagram. The paintings, photographic works, sculpture and the musical instrument that comprise the show are all structured around the threshold between order and randomness. The philosophical conflicts explored in the work include:

The liminality, or intermediate state between two dimensionality and three dimensionality.

The past and the present.

A combination of the two: a past three-dimensional state and a present two-dimensional state.

Being HERE vs. Being THERE, and being both HERE and THERE at once.

Randomness vs. Determinism and the unpredictable order of chaos.

In the marrying of two conflicting states, the work is also about the number 2, a concept that is inherent in the remote interdependence central to the sculptural works in the exhibition.”

Dan Flavin

From David Zwirner’s website

“THE ESTATE OF DAN FLAVIN IS NOW EXCLUSIVELY REPRESENTED BY DAVID ZWIRNER

David Zwirner will mark its representation of the Estate with the exhibition, Dan Flavin: Series and Progressions, opening in November 2009, and a new website (www.davidzwirner.com/danflavin) to launch on September 18, 2009. This on-line presence for the artist, available for the first time, features an illustrated history of Flavin’s life and work, solo and group exhibitions, publications, as well as other information. Steidl/David Zwirner will also publish a fully-illustrated monograph of the artist’s work.

Dan Flavin (1933–1996) was an American Minimalist artist recognized for his pioneering installations of light and color made from commercially available fluorescent lights. During his life, he was represented primarily by the Green Gallery, Kornblee Gallery, Dwan Gallery, John Weber Gallery, Leo Castelli Gallery, and PaceWildenstein. His work was also widely exhibited in other American and international galleries. In the late 1970s, he began a partnership with the Dia Art Foundation that resulted in the making of several permanent site-specific installations and led most recently to the organization of the traveling exhibition, Dan Flavin: A Retrospective (2004–2007). Zwirner’s relationship with the Estate began when Dan Flavin: the 1964 Green Gallery exhibition, a recreation of Flavin’s legendary show, was mounted at Zwirner & Wirth in 2008.” Read more here.

Ree Morton

From The Drawing Center website:

Ree Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning World

September 18 – December 18, 2009

“An exhibition of drawing-based works by the late American artist Ree Morton (1936 –1977), will be on view in the Main Gallery and Drawing Room from September 18 – December 18, 2009. Ree Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning World highlights Morton’s influential body of work, remarkably all produced in a single decade between her decision to turn to art full-time in the late 1960s and her tragic death in an automobile accident in 1977, shortly before her 41st birthday. While reflecting many of the currents of post-Minimal art of the 1970s, Morton’s work also looked to a pioneering use of personal narrative, intimacy, humor, and poetic imagination. Yet the scope of her artistic production remains largely unrecognized, as does her vital contribution to feminist art practice and the importance of drawing to her development as an artist. The exhibition is comprised of a selection of early drawings, several of which will be on view for the first time, along with major drawing-based sculptural works and a selection of notebook sketches. Ree Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning World is curated by João Ribas, taking its title from a T. S. Eliot poem Morton kept above her studio desk.”

Read the New York Times review here.