WANAFOTO: conceptual artist

Showing posts with label conceptual artist. Show all posts

14/02/25

Sophie Calle Exhibition @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Sophie Calle

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

February 27 – April 12, 2025

Fraenkel Gallery presents an exhibition by Sophie Calle. For more than forty years Calle has made work that draws from her life, transforming elements from her public and private relationships into intimate narratives. The exhibition features several series exploring questions about legacy and loss, topics Sophie Calle approaches with her typical humor and candor. Making its U.S. debut, catalogue raisonné of the unfinished focuses on projects Sophie Calle previously conceptualized but didn’t pursue. Each piece pairs fragments from the project with Calle’s text about its failure. Another series, Picassos in lockdown, comprises photographs Sophie Calle made at the Musée National Picasso in Paris during the pandemic. Each shows a painting covered for protection while the museum was closed. The exhibition also features a selection of works looking at death and remembrance through the lens of Calle’s relationship with her parents. This is Sophie Calle’s fifth exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery, since 1994.

The series catalogue raisonné of the unfinished collects photographs, handwritten notes, comic books, and other documents, each paired with a short text describing the artwork Sophie Calle had originally imagined and how it came to (not) be. A red stamp across each text pronounces her reason for rejecting the work. The projects range from Calle’s request for museum visitors to propose ideas for her to enact (“Not exhilarating”), to an attempt to insert herself into a Mexican comic book collection that included the word “Calle” in the title (“Anecdotal”). Together, the series presents a sort of self-imposed salon des refusés, revealing glimpses of Calle’s process and celebrating the transformation of many dead ends into a final positive form.

In 2023, Musée National Picasso presented a solo exhibition of Calle’s work, timed to the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso. The deliberately retrospective exhibition, titled À toi de faire, ma mignonne, (“It’s up to you, my darling”) included photographs Sophie Calle made while the museum was closed during the pandemic, recording the cloth and paper coverings that shielded Picasso’s paintings from light and dust. Sophie Calle has described her encounter with the paintings: “The Picassos were under protection, wrapped up, hidden. Underneath — a ghostlike, less intimidating presence,” she writes. Titled after the works they conceal, the photographs in Picassos in lockdown encourage the viewer to recall the original painting.

A third gallery presents selections from Autobiographies and other elegiac, family-focused works, pairing photographs and texts in frames or urn-like wooden boxes. In Autobiographies (Morning), Sophie Calle awaits her father’s last words, while Autobiographies (My Mother Died) reproduces notes about death from Calle’s diary and her mother’s. A glass-fronted box titled Necrology presents the obituary Sophie Calle commissioned for herself, hidden behind pinned butterflies to remain unreadable. The piece incorporates Calle’s commentary about her decision to obscure the writing: “So as not to attract too much attention from death, I decided it was best to cover up what I did not want to read,” she notes. In these and other works, Sophie Calle addresses her own mortality with characteristic honesty and wit, taking on the question of how we remember and are in turn remembered.

Sophie Calle was recently featured in Sophie Calle: Overshare at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Absences: Sophie Calle & Toulouse-Lautrec at the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo. Her work was presented in the solo exhibition Finir en Beauté (Neither Give Nor Throw Away), held in the cryptoporticus at Arles as part of the photography festival Rencontres d’Arles in France. Her work has been shown in museums around the world and is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Tate, London, among many others. Sophie Calle is the recipient of numerous awards, including most recently the Praemium Imperiale Award in 2024, as well as the Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Medal, an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, among others.

FRAENKEL GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

fraenkelgallery.com

20/11/21

Hank Willis Thomas: Another Justice: Divided We Stand @ Kayne Griffin Gallery, Los Angeles

Hank Willis Thomas

Another Justice: Divided We Stand

Kayne Griffin, Los Angeles

November 12, 2021 - January 8, 2022

Kayne Griffin presents Hank Willis Thomas’ second solo exhibition at the gallery, Another Justice: Divided We Stand. Comprising large-scale sculptures and mixed media quilted works, the exhibition of new work continues Thomas’ exploration of American iconography, color theory, and language.

Hank Willis Thomas’ recent works investigate the fabric of our nation—literally and figuratively—through the deconstruction and reconstruction of U.S. flags and striped prison uniforms. In drawing attention to the similarities of these materials, the artist navigates the complexity of distinguishing patriotism from nationalism. The work is part of Thomas’ negotiation of an enduring conundrum of the United States of America: Can “the land of the free” also be home to the largest prison population in the world?

The artist uses textiles from flags and prison uniforms to form abstract patterns and labyrinths of text that make reference to the founding ideals and complicated realities, past and present, of the American experiment. Though the 13th Amendment is popularly believed to have abolished slavery, in fact it intentionally created a loophole wherein the practice was allowed to continue as “punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Through this loophole, the prison system has continued to exploit and trade human beings and profit from their free labor. In her groundbreaking book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander writes “Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.” Inspired by his desire to imagine the U.S. living up to its ideals of perpetually becoming “a more perfect nation,” Thomas embeds his own language into these charged materials, highlighting the significance across time and space of ideas such as “liberty,” “justice,” and “capital.”

Furthering the artist’s investigation into archival imagery and objects, Strike, a monumental sculpture, is also included in Another Justice: Divided We Stand. It is a continuation of Hank Willis Thomas’ Punctum series. The series is based on Roland Barthes’ photographic theory of the punctum, which refers to the detail in an image that pierces or wounds the viewer, creating a direct relationship between them and the pictured object or person. Hank Willis Thomas uses this concept to select or reframe areas of images, which he then transforms into large-scale sculptures. Rendered in stainless steel and painted aluminum, these works challenge the viewer’s positionality within scenes of oppression and resistance, encouraging reflection upon one’s own relation to systems of power.

By magnifying select frames in three-dimensional objects, Hank Willis Thomas choreographs a spatial confrontation between his audience and the fraught subject matter of the original image. Depicting one hand stopping another’s swing of a police baton, Thomas’ Strike is based on the 1934 lithograph Strike Scene by Russian-American painter and printmaker Louis Lozowick. In isolating these disembodied gestures, the work prompts questioning of the enactment of justice: is justice the arm swinging the baton, or is it the force stopping it? Reflecting the viewer back in its polished finish, the work asks its audience, “What is your role in justice?”

This exhibition comprises one part of the greater Another Justice: By Any Medium Necessary, produced in collaboration with For Freedoms, the arts collective co-founded by Hank Willis Thomas. Taking place over the course of a year, the larger Another Justice invitation is a series of interdisciplinary projects and programs that contemplate what justice looks like internally and externally as we attempt to define our own needs and responsibilities, and connect that back to systems of power. This includes a series of billboards commissioned by the LANDBACK.Art campaign, a partnership between the organizations NDN Collective, For Freedoms, and INDÍGENA, centering upon the theme of “Land Back” in reference to the campaign led by Indigenous activists regarding decolonization and Indigenous sovereignty. Visible above Kayne Griffin is the billboard designed together by The Gabrielino-Shoshone Tribal Council of Southern California, artist Tekpatl Kuauhtzin, and photographer Josué Rivas. Across the country, For Freedoms and LANDBACK.Art have invited 20 Indigenous artists, community members, and their allies to illustrate their answer to “What does land back mean to you?”

With Another Justice: Divided We Stand., Hank Willis Thomas’ masterful manipulation of American iconography serves as a poignant reminder of the work that still needs to be done, initiating a call to action for new ways of relating to this country’s promise.

HANK WILLIS THOMAS is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including the International Center of Photography, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; Musée du quai Branly, Paris; Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Netherlands. Thomas’ work is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth) and For Freedoms, which was awarded the 2017 ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform. In 2012, Question Bridge: Black Males debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and was selected for the New Media Grant from the Tribeca Film Institute. Thomas is also the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), Soros Equality Fellowship (2017) and is a former member of the New York City Public Design Commission. Thomas holds a B.F.A. from New York University (1998) and an M.A./M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts (2004). He received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute of Art and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in 2017. Thomas is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Ben Brown Fine Arts, London; Goodman Gallery, South Africa; and Marauni Mercier, Belgium.

KAYNE GRIFFIN

1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90019

www.kaynegriffin.com

01/07/17

Sophie Calle: Missing, Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, San Francisco

Sophie Calle: Missing

Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, San Francisco

June 29 – August 20, 2017

Missing add a new chapter to Sophie Calle’s special relationship with the San Francisco Bay Area. In the late 1970’s, her career began when she photographed the words “Mother” and “Father” engraved on headstones in the Bolinas cemetery. Sophie Calle had been wandering the world for several years looking to find meaning for her life, when chance led her to the house of a photographer in the small community of intellectuals and artists north of San Francisco. Calle’s relationship with California and the United States has never stopped. From the early 1980’s onwards, her work has been widely exhibited in American galleries and museums while Calle successfully created site-related projects like Los Angeles (1984), No sex last night (1992), and Journey to California (2003). More recently, Sophie Calle acquired a burial plot in the Bolinas graveyard where she took her first photographs.

Sophie Calle’s Missing at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture (FMCAC) is a major exhibition conceived as a journey which offers a survey of the French conceptual artist since the 1980s.

Missing emphasizes the analogy of mother and sea (“mère” and “mer” in French), while proposing a reflection on the universal concepts of disappearance, loss and absence, central in the artist’s work and exploration.

Rachel Monique (2007)—Installed in the former U.S. Army Chapel, the poignant and poetic multimedia installation features the personality and final moments of Sophie Calle’s mother.

Take Care of Yourself (2007)—Located in Gallery 308, Take Care of Yourself documents 107 women interpreting a break-up letter Calle received from an ex-lover. This body of work was originally created for the French Pavilion of the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Voir la mer (2011)—In the Firehouse, which offers a stunning view of the San Francisco Bay, viewers will experience the film installation featuring residents of Istanbul, Turkey, seeing the ocean for the first time.

Also displayed in the Firehouse, The Last Image (2010) is a series of photographs and texts that portrays the last visual memory of blind people.

Missing at Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture is curated by Ars Citizen, an independent art-commissioning and curatorial platform committed to advancing production and diffusion of contemporary art and ideas, founded by the San Francisco-based French curator Evelyne Jouanno.

FORT MASON CENTER FOR ARTS & CULTURE

2 Marina Blvd, Landmark Building C, San Francisco, CA 94123

www.fortmason.org