Pierre Faure, Büro für Fotos, Cologne

Pierre Faure

Büro für Fotos, Cologne

28 October - 16 December 2000

The large color photographs of PIERRE FAURE are images of urban civilisation in the metropolis of the present. They show people and situations in a city space that has long ago lost, or perhaps never owned, a human measure: industrial zones at urban peripheries and in city centres, traffic junctions, urban no man's lands.

The films and photographic work of Pierre Faure are based "as he himself says in an interview" on constant observation. As an observer, he becomes attentive to situations in which individuals maintain their presence in relation to lifeless surroundings. A group of taxi drivers sits between two rows of cabs, under one of the countless pillars at a Parisian airport. Waiting for hours in this space, they play chess. A man and a woman meet on the Plateau of La Defense before the stereotypical cold facades of a wall of office buildings. A traveller reads, quiet and alone, in the waiting room of a train station, oblivious to the garbage around her. The urban situations that Pierre Faure describes show how parallel worlds with invisible boundaries evolve out of "non-lieux"(non-space) realms and point the way to the choreography of the everyday.

Through this rich and complex net of relationships we find ourselves in unknown spheres where nothing belongs to anyone, but also where signs of the human condition blink off and on. In this respect, Pierre Faure seeks to frame the way our hidden compasses guide us across the public stage. Pierre Faure prevents the viewer from penetrating his work by keeping him at a certain remove from the space represented. He reveals no recognisable social classifications of his subjects; his interest lies in the diversity of appearance and sense of reality each person projects alone or in relationship to others.

Pierre Faure was born in 1965, studied photography in Arles at the Ecole Nationale de la Photographie. He lives in Montreuil near Paris.

BURO FUR FOTOS

Ewaldistraße 5, 50670 Köln

www.burofurfotos.de

Cutting Edge Israeli Art at Israel Museum

 

A DOLL’S HOUSE

IRINA BIRGER - KAREN RUSSO – RUTI NEMET – ZOYA CHERKASSKY

 

A Doll's House is the fourth exhibition in the framework of the Joint project for young art at the Israel Museum. The four women artists taking part in this exhibition: Irina Birger, Karen Russo, Ruti Nemet and Zoya Cherkassky, are showing three installations in the exhibition. On the surface, their installation works differ one from the other both in character and in creative process, yet the common element is almost immediately apparent. Each work is made up of images taken from different 'artistic' fields: painting, sculpture or photography as well as images drawn from media sources such as voices taped from the television and internet, animation and especially cinematic images.

These many sources do not only serve to concretize the interdisciplinary characteristic of contemporary culture, each one in its own way also raises and interprets images connected to the more hidden worlds of mythology, folktales, fairy stories and the research of the sub-conscience. In Karen Russo's installation, The Mute, for example, the descent into a complex, hidden world is immediate and concrete. The work opens with a staircase leading down into a mine, a dark passage that receives the viewer in a physical manner and 'initiates' him into the other aspects of the installation. Russo sees her installation space as a cave in the depths of the earth, representing hell, madness, the kingdom of darkness and irrationality. The space contains scientific data, archaeological finds and figures and objects from folktales, horror stories and movies.

Part of a Russian animated film, The Snow Queen, is at the center of Irina Birger's installation, also entitled The Snow Queen, - a nostalgic passage into the world of folk tales as seen through the cinematic experience of childhood. The scene shown here can be read as an index to the entire story, which depicts the boy Kay's exit from the world into the Ice Kingdom and the palace of the Snow Queen, who represents all that is irrational and lacking in emotion. Kay is eventually redeemed from his imprisonment and returned to the world and the realm of reality with the help of his love, Gerda. Birgir brings this tale of dark magic to life by screening her images on, and through, a screen of glass stalactites.

Through doll-like figures of themselves and their friends, Ruti Nemet and Zoya Cherkassky replicate the intimate world of their circle. In their installation entitled Study-cases, they are recreated as frozen bodies, dense and tactile, healthily "dead", without having died or been killed. Ruti and Zoya use the dolls as a game that becomes an alternative world, created by the precise copying of their existing one. The extended time taken to create the dolls and their environments sharpens their reality and dialectic existence, until there is no contradiction between the "real" and the alternative, illusory time and place. Dream markers and realms of the imagination are only hinted at within the doll's bodies. The figures' faces are slightly contorted, bordering on the edge of a grotesque countenance, which hints at the possibilities of their belonging to a species of harmful figures.

The immediacy and concreteness of these installations, on the one hand, and their complexity as stories which also hint at a secret world, on the other, gives these works by Ruti Nemet and Zoya Cherkassky, Karen Russo, and Irina Birger an allegorical touch, a dimension of a fable whose meaning has vanished.

The exhibition was curated by Sarit Shapira.

Closing: January 2001

Mario Reis, Fassbender Gallery, Chicago - From Nature to Abstraction

Mario Reis: From Nature to Abstraction

Fassbender Gallery, Chicago

October 20 - November 25, 2000

Fassbender Gallery's Project Room presents From Nature to Abstraction by German conceptual artist Mario Reis. Calling the final product of his artistic output 'Nature Watercolors', this artist has travelled for many years throughout the world, seeking out rivers in which to complete his ongoing artistic project. The artist floats stretched two-foot square canvases in various natural bodies of water for up to three weeks. Slowly, sediment is deposited, minerals are soaked up and pollutants settle out of the surrounding water. After collecting these canvas 'traps', the artist unstretches the works and freezes interesting results with spray adhesive.

The end results of all this process are ghostly, ethereal and often beautiful. The panels are displayed in grids to heighten their minimal qualities and draw attention to their relative color saturations. While listing the origin-river on each panel, the artist downplays any environmentalist connotations, choosing instead to highlight purely visual and sensual aspects of these artworks.

Nonetheless, by drawing attention to these quiet, earthy and restful palettes, Mario Reis has no choice but to draw attention to notions of the natural world and Arcadian splendor. Especially when viewed in an urban gallery environment, these works serve to remind the viewer of all that he or she is missing. Besides the generic 'natural' surroundings they conjure up, they additionally hint at all the exotic places their author has been. Much like the always popular travelogue, they allow us to vicariously share in Mario Reis's extensive journeys. These monochromatic and naturally pigmented artworks give concrete evidence of the endless ebb and flow of life that surrounds us all.

FASSBENDER GALLERY

835 W. Washington, Chicago, IL 60607

www.fassbendergallery.com

Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000, LACMA, Los Angeles

Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000

LACMA, Los Angeles

October 22, 2000 – February 25, 2001

Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000, is a landmark exhibition that addresses the relationship between the arts in California and the state’s evolving image over the past century. Organized by LACMA – The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the exhibition goes beyond a standard presentation of California art to offer a revisionist view of the state and its cultural legacy. It considers both "booster" images of California and other coexisting and at times competing images, reflecting the wide range of interests and experiences of the state’s diverse constituencies. The core organizers of the exhibition are Stephanie Barron, vice president of education and public programs and senior curator of Modern and Contemporary Art; Sheri Bernstein, exhibition associate; and Ilene Susan Fort, curator of American Art. Made in California is the largest exhibition LACMA has ever organized or hosted, representing an unprecedented collaboration among nine curatorial and programmatic departments.

Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000 features more than 800 works of art in a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, graphic art, decorative art, costume, and video, as well as several period rooms. About 20 percent of the art in the exhibition is drawn from LACMA’s permanent collection. Also included are more than 400 cultural documents such as tourist brochures, rock posters, labor pamphlets, and documentary photographs from important public and private collections from across the nation, that convey California’s fascinating history and changing popular image. Installed throughout the exhibition are sixteen specially commissioned film and multimedia stations, two music stations, and three mural reconstructions to further enrich this examination of the fine arts and popular conceptions of the state.

"Because the year 2000 marks the 150th anniversary of California’s statehood as well as the end of the twentieth century, this is the perfect time for LACMA to undertake this expansive and innovative examination of the culture of our state," said Dr. Andrea Rich, president and director of LACMA. "This stimulating and in-depth presentation of California imagery, through both popular and fine art, will appeal to a wide ranging audience and will offer our members and visitors an opportunity to consider California from new perspectives."

"With Made in California, LACMA has pushed the envelope with an exhibition that is unlike anything we have ever done before," said Stephanie Barron, LACMA vice president of education and public programs and senior curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. "What makes the show so important is not its massive size and scope. This exhibition has a methodology – the finished product is a direct result of the cross-fertilization that has occurred among various different departments at the museum during the last five years. It has been exciting to work with the multi-disciplinary team to create something truly wonderful."

"Made in California approaches the past 100 years thematically, presenting works that engage in a meaningful way with the California image. As opposed to a survey exhibition, Made in California moves beyond the established canon of artists and art works to include lesser-known works by celebrated figures as well as a wider range of artists, more in keeping with the diversity of California’s population," said Ilene Susan Fort, curator of American Art and one of the core organizers of the exhibition. "It is the shared conviction of the exhibition organizers that this approach, intended to initiate a broader dialogue on California art rather than establish a new canon, befits this period of transition to the next century."

"The design of the exhibition functions as a whole to facilitate an intelligent and seductive museum experience," said Sheri Bernstein, exhibition associate and one of the core organizers of the exhibition. "The members of the exhibition design team participated in meetings for more than a year at which the exhibition concept was developed and refined. They then devised solutions for communicating the ideas of the exhibition through materials, arrangement, space, and various forms of didactic and visual communications working together."

Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900–2000 is presented thematically in five chronological sections spanning approximately twenty years each, plus a coda to the exhibition that focuses on the current moment, and occupies more than 45,000 square feet of gallery space within the Hammer and Anderson Buildings and LACMA West. While the sections are most powerful when viewed together, each section is designed to stand alone as a single exhibition. In conjunction with Made in California, LACMA is mounting a kaleidoscope of related activities and events including ongoing film and music programs, live performances, readings, family days, and lecture series.

In each section of the exhibition, diverse examples of art in a variety of media and styles are presented thematically, in tandem with relevant examples of ephemera and multimedia stations featuring film footage, music selections, and California murals.

Section One, located on the plaza level of the Hammer Building and covering the 1900s and 1910s, lays the conceptual groundwork for the exhibition. In this section visitors consider the various facets of the mythologizing of California as a pre-modern paradise, primarily by the state’s boosters, to a largely middle-class, Midwestern constituency escaping the influx of European immigrants. In addition to presenting the land itself as bountiful and unpopulated, boosters romanticized California’s cultural heritage by means of the Mission myth, and exoticized its contemporary Asian population.

Visitors then move to the second floor of the Hammer building for Section Two, which addresses the proliferation of a wider range of conceptions of California in the 1920s and 1930s. This section explores the impact of urbanization, new industries such as the Hollywood movie sector, and changing demographics – the influx of Mexicans in the 20s and the westward migration of North Americans during the Depression – on the image of California. For the first time, critical images of California began to proliferate, many of which were sympathetic to working class labor.

Section Three brings visitors to the third floor of the Anderson Building for California in the 1940s and 1950s. This section considers California’s image during and immediately following World War II, when the state emerged first as a center for war production, and then as a trend setter for the postwar suburban lifestyle. The prevalence of racist and xenophobic attitudes toward ethnic minorities during and after the War will be explored. Also considered will be other, coexisting images of California promoted by its urban subcultures, as well as dystopic views of mainstream culture promulgated by the Beats in San Francisco and the Los Angeles area.

Section Four, covering the 1960s and 1970s, examines how California and particularly the Bay Area became widely associated with non-conformity and anti-authoritarianism. During this period of pervasive protest and struggles for equality along ethnic, class, and gender lines, definitions of California and its populace came to be defined by a more diverse range of figures, who challenged homogeneous, Edenic images of the state. The exhibition will explore the participation of artists in this process of redefinition, as well as their immersion in aspects of popular culture such as beach and car culture.

Section Five of Made in California brings visitors to the plaza level of the Anderson Building to consider the 1980s and 1990s. This section addresses a multiplicity of California images that have existed over the past twenty years, fostered by the increasing diversity of the state’s constituency. Also considered is the impact of globalization, which in some respects has blurred boundaries between California and elsewhere. As visitors leave Section Five, they will enter a transition space that is free of visual images, filled with audio recordings that reflect the wide variety of cultures and languages coexisting in contemporary California. This profusion of the many competing/coexisting voices that define California today sets the stage for Made in California: Now, presented by LACMALab in the Boone Children’s Gallery in LACMA West.

This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Exhibition Team: Organized by Stephanie Barron, vice president of education and public programs and senior curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, with Sheri Bernstein, exhibition associate, and Ilene Susan Fort, curator of American Art.

With Ian Birnie, head of Film Programs, Bridget Cooks, assistant museum educator, Carol S. Eliel, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Howard Fox, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Dale Gluckman, curator of Costumes and Textiles, Sharon Goodman, associate curator of Prints and Drawings, Peter Kirby, adjunct curator, new media (Made in California only), Jo Lauria, assistant curator of Decorative Arts, Kaye Spilker, assistant curator of Costumes and Textiles, Dorrance Stalvey, head of Music Programs, Sharon Takeda, curator of Costumes and Textiles, Tim Wride, associate curator of Photography, and Lynn Zelevansky, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036

www.lacma.org

T.L. Solien, Fassbender Gallery, Chicago - Innocence Transfigured

T.L. Solien: Innocence Transfigured

Fassbender Gallery, Chicago

October 20 - November 25, 2000

Fassbender Gallery presents Innocence Transfigured, a new body of work by Midwestern painter T.L. Solien. Here, the artist continues his investigation of the inner life of self-portraiture. While employing Pop imagery as a starting point, Solien as an artist is almost impossible to pin down. He borrows and incorporates influences from all spheres of his life experience and knowledge. Utilizing compositional techniques from classic portraiture, Solien's 'sitters' nonetheless transgress all rules of decorum. Starting off as light-hearted, almost vacuous Pop characters from advertising and cartoons, they quickly veer off into the realm of the macabre. They transmogrify before our very eyes from cute and cuddly girls and puppies into horned goats and cursed wraiths. More than this, the flesh and substance of these characters has a tendency to melt and vaporize into pure brushwork and painted surface. Solien obliterates and overpaints until the space of his picture planes becomes claustrophobic and unhealthy.

Throughout all this, however, T.L. Solien retains his sense of humor and wonder at all that life brings his way. Admittedly autobiographical in his output, the artist presents grave situations, but in ambiguous and universal fashion. Despite mystical and paganistic titles and vertiginous, kaleidoscopic settings, these paintings address normal middle class life in Middle America in the present day. They hold up the artist's life as an example of the soap opera we are all living. With a cast of characters that frequently resurface and, no doubt, represent specific people in the life of the artist, these artworks are strangely familiar. They are classic examples of the power of satire to instruct and draw us all together.

FASSBENDER GALLERY

835 W. Washington, Chicago, IL 60607

www.fassbendergallery.com

Vous avez dit photographie ? Guide Pratique

Rubrique Livres > Photographie - Guide professionnel

La Documentation française publie dans sa collection « Photodoc » un ouvrage intitulé « Vous avez dit photographie? Les adresses utiles de la photographie en France ». Pour sa troisième édition entièrement réactualisée qui comprend 100 nouvelles adresses, "Vous avez dit photographie ?" confirme sa place de répertoire de référence pour les professionnels de la photographie et pour ceux qui en sont passionnés. Guide pratique, l'ouvrage fournit une présentation claire et détaillée de 700 organismes jouant un rôle dans le domaine de la photographie en France. Organisé en sept chapitres, il répond aux différentes demandes d'information pour promouvoir la photographie, s'organiser, se financer, exposer-vendre, s'informer, se former, restaurer. Une liste des organismes classés par département permet de repérer d'un coup d'œil les lieux de la photographie dans sa région. Un index de 2000 termes facilite la recherche d'un organisme, d'un journaliste spécialisé, d'un photographe diffusé en galerie. Vous avez dit photographie ? La Documentation française Collection Photodoc 258 pages, 18 €

Bernard Meninsky at University of Liverpool Art Gallery - A singular vision

Bernard Meninsky: A singular vision

University of Liverpool Art Gallery

19 October - 21 December 2000

Brilliant draughtsmanship and an exquisite sense of colour combine to create the 'singular vision' of BERNARD MENINSKY (1891 - 1950). Widely considered one of Britain's finest young artists in the 1920s, Meninsky's work has been gradually eclipsed since his untimely death in 1950. This exhibition is the first held in a public gallery for twenty years. The show brings together forty-five drawings, watercolours and oil paintings from his early family studies through to the late pastoral landscape and figure scenes of the 1940s.

'Minky', as he was known to friends, was a Jewish emigré brought to Liverpool as a baby from the Ukraine. He studied at Liverpool School of Art, in Paris, and at the Slade. After a brief but successful period as a war artist Bernard Meninsky achieved critical success in 1919-20 for an exhibition and book of mother and child studies. Over the next three decades he exhibited regularly, and was an elected member of the London Group and New English Art Club. Bernard Meninsky was a gifted teacher of drawing attracting students from London and abroad. In 1935 he designed the sets and costumes for the ballet 'David' produced by the Markova-Dolin company and in 1946 published an illustrated limited edition of Milton's 'Il Penseroso and L'Allegro'.

Tragically, Bernard Meninsky was afflicted by a highly self-critical and sensitive nature, resulting in periods of breakdown and ultimately his suicide in 1950. Driven by "uncertainties, mysteries and doubts" Meninsky was "indefatigable in extending the boundaries of his art". This exhibition, traces his development from the early, tender studies of friends and family, through sensitive and poetic landscapes of the twenties to the monumental and elegaic figure paintings of the 1930s and 40s.

The exhibition has been organised by the University of Liverpool in conjunction with the Contemporary Art Society. The show marks the generous bequest of the artist's estate by his widow, Nora Meninsky, to the CAS. The exhibition tours during 2001 to Leeds, Sheffield, London and Kingston-Upon-Thames. 

UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL ART GALLERY

3 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7WY

www.liv.ac.uk

Kathryn Spence, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco - New Works

Kathryn Spence: New Works

Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco

October 5 - November 11, 2000

The STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY presents an exhibition of new works by KATHRYN SPENCE.

Kathryn Spence's work explores the relationship between our emotional and physical comfort and the way it relates to our surroundings. Spence's pieces and installations involve the piling, layering, and thus transformation of previously used and cast off materials and encourages us to look at these pieces made from trash, mud, string etc. in a new context.

For this exhibition, Kathryn Spence has created installations that suggest the transformative aspects of sorting, organizing and cleaning. The new installation plays with aspects of scale and the relationship between the real and the made, the specific and the arbitrary, the concrete and the abstract. Amongst the exhibited works will be small squirrels and piles made from various cloths and materials, as well as birds, sparrows and robins made out of street trash, wire and string. In recent past exhibitions, Spence made Mud Animals that were literally coated with layers of dirt from her garden and appeared to be dejected and leaden. The effect is one that elicits both pathos and a sense of humanity. Her created objects are made to look both vulnerable and fragile by her use of ephemeral materials.

KATHRYN SPENCE (b.1963, Stuttgart, Germany) received her M.F.A. from Mills College in 1993. She has participated in such recent exhibitions as "Of the Moment: Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection", at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, "Skin-Deep: Surface and Appearance in Contemporary Art", at The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, The 1999 Biennial Exhibition at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach and "Present Tense: Nine Artists in the Nineties" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Kathryn Spence had her first solo museum exhibition at The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in 1999, and will have a solo show at The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in Spring 2001.

STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

www.wirtzgallery.com

Heribert C. Ottersbach, University of Liverpool, Senate House Exhibition Hall - Between Strategy and Attitude

Heribert C. Ottersbach: 

Between Strategy and Attitude

Senate House Exhibition Hall, 

University of Liverpool

6 October - 10 November 2000

Heribert Ottersbach has achieved success internationally but his paintings are little known in the UK. In the second showing of his work in this country ten recent paintings are brought together at the University of Liverpool's Senate House from 6 October to 10 November.

The demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of Iron Curtain politics have had a strong impact on the work of Heribert C. Ottersbach. His interest in the fall of the Berlin Wall is part of a broader interest in the cultural traditions of the twentieth century.

Ottersbach often works with 'found images' in his painting. He works freely often adding invented 'archival pictures' to the images he has discovered from existing sources. The images are manipulated using computer software to create a "digital sketchbook or imagepool".

There is nothing mechanical about the creation of Ottersbach's finished paintings. The creative process remains vital: "The moment at which the images generated digitally are transferred to the canvas something different is created: Painting. Painting includes a physical impact, it is 'body-work' far away from written language or computer generated images." This intimate relation between artist and canvas is conveyed to the viewer in the subtlety and delicacy of the paintings themselves. Although primarily an artist of ideas Ottersbach's skill as a painter draws us into a deeper sensory engagement with his art.

'Between Strategy and Attitude' is part of 'Eight Days a Week', an exchange of art exhibitions bringing the work of Cologne artists to Liverpool. 'Eight Days a Week' is being showcased at many Liverpool galleries between 6 October and 10 November 2000.

Senate House Exhibition Hall 

University of Liverpool

Oxford Street, Liverpool L69 7WY

www.liv.ac.uk

Teresita Fernandez at SITE Santa Fe

Teresita Fernández

SITE Santa Fe

October 7, 2000 - January 14, 2001

SITE Santa Fe presents New York-based artist TERESITA FERNÁNDEZ in an exhibition of new works. The exhibition is organized by SITE Santa Fe and curated by Louis Grachos, the Director & Curator of SITE Santa Fe. An exhibition catalogue specific to her SITE Santa Fe exhibition and published by SITE Santa Fe is available.

For SITE Santa Fe, Teresita Fernández has chosen a 5000 square foot space that she will alter and modify for her new works. Teresita Fernández writes, "I am currently developing a body of work which deals with the impossibility of wilderness. I am interested in landscape in terms of exotic place, extreme place and objectified space. The concept of wilderness in particular is at the core of these new works‹thought as a kind of place where one loses one's way, goes astray and becomes literally bewildered. But this very notion of wilderness already implies human presence because in fact, this wandering remains an act of human presence, and the wandering becomes about finding, choosing, marking sites that are most grand, most extreme, most exotic."

The SITE Santa Fe exhibition consists of an entirely new body of work. It will focus on large-scale sculptural works and wall pieces where, unlike the installations, it is the viewer who surrounds the individual works. Teresita Fernández elaborates, "These works will incorporate abstracted references to natural phenomena, sites in the landscape and states of arrest and movement. For example; references to frozen waterfalls, land formations, and foliage will be used as vehicles for situations that place the viewer as witness to the objectified "site" in nature.

Teresita Fernández was born in Miami in 1968 and holds a M.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions in New York, Miami, Washington, Chicago, Toronto, Tokyo, and Amsterdam, among others. Teresita Fernández has received fellowships from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and a Cintas Fellowship. She had a residency in 1998 with the American Academy in Rome, Italy. This year, she received a Tiffany Foundation artist grant.

SITE Santa Fe

1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, New Mexico

www.sitesantafe.org