Jennifer Packer @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York - Quality of Life

Jennifer Packer: Quality of Life
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
November 29, 2018 - January 19, 2019

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. presents Quality of Life, a solo exhibition of new paintings by JENNIFER PACKER. This is Packer’s second solo show at Sikkema Jenkins. 

Jennifer Packer’s painted figures and still lifes are exceptional for their expressive fields of color, worked tenderly by the artist’s hand. They are images made with the utmost care–for the subject, and for the artist herself.

Jennifer Packer’s subjects are often friends and family, loved ones who serve as an emotive force in her life. Her representations critique the positionality, autonomy and power of the marginalized subject. Her work intends to address the primacy of the gaze within painting as a locus for accountability and representation. In Jennifer Packer’s work, distinct features fade against the color of their environment, creating a protective distance between the direct gaze of the viewer and the subject’s interiority.

The floral still lifes echo the same fragility and tenderness of life expressed in her portraits. Situated within the historical tradition of still life painting, Jennifer Packer’s floral images are concerned chiefly with painting as a language for the transmission of information through touch; a delicate working of the painted medium in response to loss and trauma. Jennifer Packer’s flowers serve as an act of grief, commemoration, and healing.

Born in 1984 in Philadelphia, JENNIFER PACKER received her BFA from the Tyler University School of Art at Temple University in 2007, and her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2012. She was the 2012-2013 Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and a Visual Arts Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, from 2014-2016. 

Jennifer Packer’s first solo museum show, Tenderheaded, was exhibited at The Renaissance Society, Chicago in September 2017 before traveling to the Rose Museum at Brandeis University in March 2018. The catalogue that accompanied the exhibition includes a conversation between Jennifer Packer and Kerry James Marshall, essays by Jessica Bell Brown and April Freely, a poem by Safiya Sinclair, and an introduction by curator Solveig Øvstebø.

SINKKEMA JENKINS & CO.
530 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
www.sikkemajenkinsco.com

teamLab @ Pace Gallery, Palo Alto - Continuous Life and Death at the Now of Eternity

teamLab: Continuous Life and Death at the Now of Eternity
Pace Gallery, Palo Alto
November 15, 2018 - January 13, 2019

teamLab, Continuous Life and Death at the Now of Eternity, 2017 
Digital work, 9 channels, endless 

© teamLab
Courtesy Pace Gallery

teamLab: Continuous Life and Death at the Now of Eternity, at Pace’s downtown Palo Alto gallery, features six monitor works in various scales. Each work embodies teamLab’s long-standing interest in the possibilities and meaning of what they call ‘Ultrasubjective Space,” the shallow spatial structure of traditional Japanese painting.  As in Japanese styles as varied as Ukiyo-e prints from the Edo period to contemporary Manga illustrations, figures and objects in teamLab’s compositions exist on a single plane of depth focusing on vertical and horizontal relationships to express dimensionality. It is different but equivalent to western one-point perspective as a system for representing space. Compared to classical western space, the viewer does not hold a dominant perspective over the subject matter but rather, is immersed within an integrated experience with it. Neither subordinate nor superior to western perspective, the implication of this alternative vantage point raises questions regarding how different cultures perceive the world. For instance, what does it mean when systems perceived as opposites are equally true and sustainable?

The exhibition includes a 2017 nine-monitor work of the same name that generates images of flowers and plants, evolving and changing in real time, and never repeating itself. New multi-monitor works include Waves of Light, 2018—a continuous loop of mesmerizing motion of white waves on a gold ground—and Reversible Rotation – Continuous, Black in White, 2018 in which calligraphic lines roam from screen to screen as three-dimensional forms on a two-dimensional surface. Another example of spatial calligraphy, Enso, 2017, is a continuous looped image of the Buddhist symbol of wholeness. Two additional single channel digital works featured in the exhibition include Chrysanthemum Tiger from Fleeting Flower Series, 2017—a brightly colored continuous loop of a tiger rendered with thousands of flowers forming and dissolving before the viewer—and Impermanent Life, 2017—an endlessly evolving, abstracted natural image, eliciting a meditation on the subtle quality of change.

teamLab (f. 2001, Tokyo, by Toshiyuki Inoko) is an interdisciplinary group whose collaborative practice seeks to navigate the confluence of art, technology, design, and the natural world. Rooted in the traditions of pre-modern Japanese art and on the forefront of interactive design, teamLab operates from a distinct concept of spatial perception, which they refer to as Ultrasubjective Space. Driven by their investigations of human behavior in the information era, teamLab proposes innovative models for societal development through immersive and participatory installations that employ computer graphics, sensing, sound, and light. Rather than using prerecorded animation, teamLab’s artworks are often rendered digitally in real time, and the actions of viewers cause continuous changes in their appearance and behavior.

Toshiyuki Inoko (b. 1977, Tokushima, Japan) was inspired to form teamLab in 2001 after graduating from the University of Tokyo, where he studied mechanical engineering and physics. Co-founded with his friends, teamLab was conceived as a space for collaborative learning and experimentation, following a common belief in the cogency of digital art and installation. Inoko had long considered the potential of a computer-generated space as a catalyst for change and regarded art as a vehicle to incite thought; within this framework, he committed himself to creating art with digital technology.

teamLab has been the subject of numerous monographic exhibitions, including Dance! Art Exhibition and Learn and Play! teamLab Future Park, at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, Tokyo (2014); and What a Loving and Beautiful World, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge (2015). Recent exhibitions dedicated to teamLab include Ever Blossoming, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2016); Graffiti Nature, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2017); Homogenizing and Transforming World, National Gallery Singapore (2017); teamLab: Au-delà des limites, Grand halle de La Villette, Paris (2018); A Time When Art Is Everywhere, Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, North Carolina (2018); and Massless, Amos Rex, Helsinki (2018). In 2018, teamLab partnered with leading urban landscape developer Mori Building Co., Ltd, to open MORI Building Digital Art Museum: teamLab Borderless in Tokyo—a digital only art museum encompassing over 60 artworks installed across all elements of the building.

PACE GALLERY PALO ALTO
229 Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94301
www.pacegallery.com

Joan Lyons @ Steven Kasher Gallery, NYC

Joan Lyons 

Steven Kasher Gallery, New York 

November 15 - December 22, 2018 

Steven Kasher Gallery presents a major solo exhibition of pioneering feminist artist JOAN LYONS. Lyons (American, b. 1937) is one of the great unsung artists of her generation. The exhibition features nine of Joan Lyons’ pivotal photographic projects. This is the first gallery solo exhibition of the artist’s work since 2013. Joan Lyons’ groundbreaking work freely combines feminist theory and personal experience. Her work is intimate and introspective, questioning the indexical quality of photography.

Over the past six decades, Joan Lyons has employed a variety of difficult and obscure image-making processes. Her work spans a broad range of media including archaic photographic processes, pinhole photography, offset lithography, Xerography, screen-printing, and photo-quilt making. In the 1960s and 1970s, Joan Lyons was one of the earliest artists to adopt xerography as an artistic practice and was recognized as an innovator in the use of Haloid Xerox drawing as an image making process. In a 1982 artist statement Joan Lyons said “I work with what is available, a variety of optical devices. I work through complexity, to something simple and direct. This distillation process becomes more evident as time goes on. I work at those things that are evident; how I see, not conventions of seeing.”

Joan Lyons’ work defies every artistic taboo of the 1950s. She had been taught that contemporary art should be universal, gestural, abstract, monumental, qualities which are inherently masculine. After trying and failing to follow these mandates, Joan Lyons’ realized that her work could not be separated from her own experiences as a woman. Her personal narrative, different in content and tone from the dominant male voice, pushed her to establish new artistic structures.

Highlights from the exhibition include Untitled (Bedspread), 1969, the earliest work in the exhibition, is a sharp, ironic commentary on the status of women in the late 1960s. The repeated image of an anonymous, nude woman that has been screenprinted onto a fabric bedspread is a fierce response to the idea that women are best “barefoot and pregnant.” The work also references practices widely considered to be women’s work including sitchery, quilting and the “lesser” decorative arts.

 

In the Haloid-Xerox portraits, taken between 1972 and 1980, Joan Lyons’ utilized her own body in as a means of questioning photographic portraiture and female archetypes. The work is a deliberate attempt not to objectify women but to internalize their representation. Working in opposition to an instantaneous snapshot or a decisive moment, each image is a composite created over the course of many hours. The prints are the result of multiple transfers onto large sheets of paper using the original view-camera based flatbed Xerox equipment that yielded a carbon image on plain paper.

Artifacts, 1973, is a portfolio of 11 offset lithographs created in part as a response to Andy Warhol's soup can and other pop culture images. This body of work was informed by a desire to pay homage to the power objects in the artist’s home, items that ruled the artist’s everyday world.

Joan Lyons’ seminal 1974 work Prom is a ritual artifact, a trompe l’oeil deconstruction of her teenage daughter’s first prom dress. Like most of Joan Lyons’ work, Prom is conceptual and process based. The piece is comprised of six life-size sections of the dress, pressed like flowers onto six pages. The weave of the fabric itself replaces a conventional halftone screen, emphasizing the connection between printing and weaving. Prom was personal, concrete and feminine, a forceful contradiction of everything Lyons’ was taught that art should be.

In addition to her artistic practice, Joan Lyons was the Founding Director of the influential Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1972 – 2004. Under Joan Lyons’ direction, the VSW Press has been active in the evolution and definition of the field of artist’s books over the past three decades. Joan Lyons was responsible for the publication of over 450 artist’s books. The VSW Press also designed and produced books by photographers and writers, and titles relating to theory and historical inquiry in the visual arts. Joan Lyons is the editor of the highly influential annotated bibliography, Artist’s Books: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1972–2008 (2009) and of Artist’s Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, (1986, 1988, 1991, 1993, 1995).

JOAN LYONS (b. 1937) completed a BFA at Alfred University, New York (1957), and an MFA at SUNY Buffalo, New York (1973). Since 1963 her work has been exhibited at major institutions worldwide including Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, DeCordova Museum, Arts Council of Great Britain, Center for Creative Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Sevilla, Art Gallery of Ontario, National Gallery of Canada and the Bibliothéque Nationale de France. Lyons’ work is found in permanent collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Norton-Simon Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, DeCordova Museum, Museum of Modern Art, New York and the National Gallery of Canada. Lyons has published over 30 editions of her artist’s books since 1972. A retrospective exhibition, Maker/Mentor: Selected Work from Four Decades, appeared at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center in 2007.

STEVEN KASHER GALLERY

515 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.stevenkasher.com

Alexander Archipenko @ Eykyn Maclean Gallery, NYC - Space Encircled

Alexander Archipenko: Space Encircled

Eykyn Maclean, New York

November 9 - December 14, 2018

Eykyn Maclean presents an exhibition devoted to the work of Alexander Archipenko (1887-1964), the artist’s first solo-exhibition in New York City since 2005. The presentation focuses on Alexander Archipenko’s pioneering use of negative space within the human figure. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Matthew Stephenson and with the support of the Archipenko Foundation, which lends a number of works to the show. Matthew Stephenson is an independent fine art consultant and worldwide representative of The Archipenko Foundation and Estate.

“We are thrilled to reintroduce one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century to a New York audience and to explore his groundbreaking use of negative space, a term he entitled ‘space encircled’,” said Nicholas Maclean, co-founder of Eykyn Maclean.

The Ukrainian born artist is one of a small number of early 20th century masters to have immigrated to the United States, alongside such visionaries as Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Max Beckmann. A pioneer amongst contemporary avant-garde artists in Paris, Alexander Archipenko was one of the first to apply Cubism to sculpture. Upending traditional sculptural methods, the artist developed a new way to evoke the human form by inserting free space within the sculpture, an aesthetic play of interwoven solids, curves and voids that presents multiple contrasting views at once. This play of negative space would go on to directly influence such artists as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

In addition to this novel and sensual approach to space and shape, Alexander Archipenko experimented with materials both traditional and unexpected, using methods of construction that departed from conventional modes of carving and molding. His work across disciplines produced a new term, “sculpto-painting,” as demonstrated with Oval Figure, a piece that draws upon the fundamental elements of both art forms to achieve its particular vitality.

Eykyn Maclean’s exhibition includes works from all periods of the artist’s life and in a variety of media, including terracotta sculptures, works on paper, sculpto-paintings and bronzes. 

A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue features essays on the title theme by Dr. Alexandra Keiser, Archipenko Foundation Research Curator and Professor Christina Lodder, Honorary Professorial Fellow in Art History at University of Kent, Canterbury. The catalogue also includes a new interview with the artist’s widow, Frances Archipenko Gray.

EYKYN MACLEAN

23 East 67th Street, New York, NY 10065

www.eykynmaclean.com

Johannes Hägglund @ Galerie Forsblom, Stockholm - Happy Without You

Johannes Hägglund: Happy Without You

Galerie Forsblom Stockholm

9 November – 21 December, 2018

Johannes Hägglund works with abstract painting in which texture and composition have a clear presence. The paintings are based on an organic construction in which form and color take precedence over the selected motif. He approaches painting as a process, in which he first sketches with ink on paper and then transfers colors and patterns to the canvas. The challenge lies in creating the same feel on canvas as on paper. Brush strokes have powerful energy and movement, and the pattern must continue in a repetition beyond the canvas frame. References to various ornaments and decorations recur, along with a love of gingerbread trim, pastels, and Basset’s Allsorts wine gums.

Color composition has deep significance in Johannes Hägglund’s work. Primary and complementary colors intermingle with one another and common shapes such as ovals, circles, rhombuses and squares are depicted, but without perfectionism. Spatters of color are permitted to remain; childlike elements and the artist himself become part of the work. Nothing should be too perfect or corrected. In one painting, a circle is unexpectedly transformed through the addition of two straight lines and one curved one: Johannes Hägglund recreates the smiley face and elevates its meaning. Sometimes the shapes are intentionally cut in half, forming a type of punctum. It chafes a little bit, which is entirely the point.

JOHANNES HAGGLUND (b. 1993) studied at the Gerlesborg School in Stockholm. After completing his bachelor degree he entered the Master Programme in Fine Arts at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, which will be completed in 2020. His work has been shown at the bachelor degree exhibition at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in 2018 and at Liljevalchs Spring exhibition 2017 in Stockholm. The exhibition at Galerie Forsblom is his first solo presentation.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Karlavägen 9, 114 24 Stockholm

www.galerieforsblom.com

Tala Madani @ 303 Gallery, New York

Tala Madani, Corner Projections
303 Gallery, New York

November 1 - December 15, 2018

303 Gallery presents their first exhibition of new work by Tala Madani.

Tala Madani's work posits a world where primal desires are unrestrained by convenient norms. Her works are subsumed by light that points both outward and inward, at human instinct and upended social ritual. Paintings can be grotesque, violent, tender, obscene, and hilarious.

For this exhibition, Tala Madani presents new paintings and animation works. In two large corner paintings, men point handheld projectors at the wall, screens flashing in the distance. Behind the wall, short films combine live imagery with painted animations. In one of them, a group of men struggle to prevent themselves from being crushed by a giant pink penis that has fallen from the sky. In another, a man is trapped in a loop of stairs and escalators in a faceless atrium, eventually caught and dismembered by a crowd. This is one step removed, cinematic, there is an audience looking on; there's something natural in it all.

In a group of paintings, infants are portrayed innocently discovering their imagination. One child crawls toward a light source with his hand outstretched, projecting a mammoth shadow of himself. Another canvas shows a billboard of a child carving glowing lacunae into a body, multiplying the sun. These base instincts hold a puerile allure, where a lack of inhibition is infantile and callow, but also human and liberating. You find these humans crawling into glowing gas ovens to stick their heads inside, returning to a fetal posture of sincere and relatable ignorance. Exploring from beginning to end.

Born in Tehran in 1981, Tala Madani received her MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2006. Recent solo exhibitions include: La Panacée, Montpellier, 2017; First Light, MIT Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, 2016; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, 2014; Nottingham Contemporary, 2014; Rip Image, Moderna Museet Malmö & Stockholm, 2013; The Jinn, Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, 2011. Tala Madani has also been included in: The 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York; Hope and Hazard: A Comedy of Eros (Curated by Eric Fischl), Hall Art Foundation, New York 2017; Los Angeles – A Fiction, Musée d’art Contemporain de Lyon, 2017; Zeitgeist, MAMCO, Geneva, 2017; Invisible Adversaries, The Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, 2016; The Great Acceleration: Art in the Anthropocene, Taipei Biennial (curated by Nicholas Bourriaud), 2014; Made in L.A. 2014, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Where are we Now?, 5th Marrakech Biennale, Marrakech, 2014; Speech Matters, La Biennale di Venezia, 2011; Greater New York, P.S. 1, New York, 2010; Younger than Jesus, New Museum, New York, 2009. Tala Madani lives and works in Los Angeles.

303 GALLERY
555 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011
www.303gallery.com