STUDIO-ONLINE

Wall Flowers Installation – View 1
Photo @ 2010 Francis Dzikowski

Wall Flowers, new works in sculpture and drawing by Norman Mooney.  The exhibition will feature brand new wall and floor sculptures by Mooney and will be on show at the gallery’s new location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn  at 92 Wythe Avenue.

Wall Flowers marks Norman Mooney’s first adventures in color sculpture having previously worked only in grays, blacks and whites.   Wallflower no. 1 measuring six feet in diameter is an explosion of pollen yellows.  The piece consists of over 500 aluminum castings all projecting outward four feet off the wall.    Another larger wall flower in crimson resin  having a diameter of 6-7 feet will also be a part of the exhibition.

In addition to the wall flowers,  Mooney’s exhibition will include the three final windseeds from a group of six he has executed.  The first three such sculptures are in the permanent collection of Richard and Helen DeVos in Michigan, founders of Amway International.  While like the wall flowers executed in cast aluminum, these white eight foot diameter sculptures seem light enough to move in a breeze and have been liked to  dandelion seeds among other natural objects.

In both styles of sculpture, Mooney is inspired by his larger experience of the natural world and his attempt to understand the joy, wonder and beauty one experiences when feeling the first rays of the sun on your face in the morning, the explosion of color bursting from a flower or the etherealness of seeds floating on the wind.  Formally, Mooney hopes to challenge the viewer to evaluate their place in the natural world and to engage them in a larger intuited reality.

Norman Mooney was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1971. He studied at Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork and completed his BFA at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin in 1992. He then had the distinguished honor of participating in the Third Degree Program at the Irish Museum of Modern Art from 1992 to 1993. In 1994 he relocated to New York City and has been exhibiting locally and internationally for more than 15 years. Recently his work has conjured the image of the actual and representational star shape, which conceptually deals with perceptions of contraction and expansion, the end of what previously was and the birth of something new, transformation on a global scale, and an origin of connectedness. Recent exhibitions include “Absence and Presence” at Causey Contemporary Gallery in New York, “Falling Short of Knowing” show at Milk Gallery in New York, and a sculpture exhibit at Collector’s Contemporary in Singapore. He also founded a successful design, engineering and fabrication firm dealing inarchitectural metals. He continues to reside in Brooklyn with his wife and three children.

Causey Contemporary
92 Wythe Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Phone:  718 218 8939
Web:  www.causeycontemporary.com

Female artistic expression in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries followed prescribed time-honored conventions. Most of the graceful works presented in this exhibition, all of which are in the museum’s collection, were created within the strictures of postrevolutionary Republican Motherhood and the Cult of Domesticity. The majority were made during years spent in the cultivation of skills that prepared a young woman to shoulder the many roles required of her in adulthood as a wife and a mother. Others demonstrate that women continued to nourish their creative selves by plying those skills throughout their lives. Yet these paintings, drawings, samplers, quilts, rugs, and other works were artful from conception to execution, were displayed in parlors and best rooms, and conferred status and taste upon both heads of household: male and female.

Stacy C. Hollander, senior curator

American Folk Art Museum
45 West 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019
Phone: (212) 265-1040
Web: www.folkartmuseum.org

Nina Yuen (b. 1981, Hawaii) approaches video as a tactile medium. Her seductively honest and visually striking narratives weave elements of her personal relationships with found stories and appropriated personae.

For this show, the main gallery space will become a cinema showcasing a selection of Yuen’s recent videos in sequence. The artist states, “My work as a filmmaker engages with the production of false personal memories and with stirring disagreements about the past in the accounts of my family and friends. I regard myself primarily as a passive artist; my work is created at the intersection of a recorded document and a lifestyle that I adopt. For the taping of each film, I live for at least a week in a constructed environment, with its own conventions governing ceremony, behavior, and dress. My work and living in my studio demand that there be no distinction between my personal and artistic development; I view my life as more than a subject.”

Yuen’s films are unabashedly romantic and quietly profound assemblages of performance, spoken monologue, soundtrack and montage, which create a flux of vivid imagery and feeling. In Alison, the loose narrative is inspired by a story of the artist’s childhood friend who wandered off one winter without a coat and was found dead months later. The piece incorporates the artist’s voice-over of an excerpt from the missing persons report filed by his mother (Alison), a snippet of Virginia Woolf’s suicide note, and a poem by Raymond Carver. As in many of Yuen’s films, a dream-like quality pervades the fragmented stories and richly textured visual elements.

Don takes as its subject the breakup of the artist’s mother with her ex-husband. Yuen recorded her mother speaking about various relationships and memories throughout her life, which the artist then transcribed and taped to the ceiling of her studio as cue cards. Yuen narrates the piece by lip-synching her mother’s words. The artist plays multiple characters in the video, creating a temporal disjunction between the stories as recalled by her mother and Yuen’s acting out their retelling.

White Blindness, a condition that causes one to see nothing but a white glare, is a film for which Yuen transformed her studio/living space into a completely white space as a way to experience the phenomenon. Blurring the line between her work and her life, for one year, anything she bought she spray-painted white. Preoccupied with naming and ordering, Yuen’s voice-over includes a history of the term “post-traumatic stress disorder”, instructions for an Islamic bathing ritual and an essay by Joan Acocella. As a lyrical gesture, Yuen invents props to carry out her idiosyncratic versions of everyday routines. InClean, she proposes alternatives to conventions of daily hygiene. The idiom “instead of” becomes the operative element in this work, emphasizing the deliberate transgression of accepted social behavior by creating one’s own set of rules to follow.

Nina Yuen completed her BA at Harvard University and a residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions include, An Imaginary Relationship with Ourselves, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Oregon; Performance, Manifestacao Internacional, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; De-narrations, PanAmerican Art Projects, Miami, Florida; The Sky Within My House, Contemporary Art Patios, Cordoba, Spain.

Lombard-Freid Projects
531 West 26th Street
New York NY 10001
Phone: (212) 967-8040
Web: www.lombard-freid.com

Nathan Sawaya has taken a childhood fascination with a ubiquitous building block and transformed it into a captivating artistic medium. Sawaya constructs large-scale sculptures with LEGO(R) bricks, utilizing their multifarious shapes and brilliant colors to create a wide range of subjects including desserts, planets, pop culture icons, and even a life-sized self-portrait. Sawaya, though working with a decidedly unyielding medium, is able to create expressionist images that affect lithe curves and forms. Within his oeuvre, one is struck by the endless possibilities of this medium; it is as limitless as his fertile imagination.

Moreover, Sawaya’s work is a testament to the bricks as a means for creating fine art, something that has great power, as is indicated by viewer’s reactions. “I am seeing children and families who have never stepped into an art gallery in their lives being drawn in because of my work.” His upcoming premier marks the first occasion of a solo exhibition comprised entirely of LEGO bricks in New York. Sawaya lives and works in Manhattan.

Agora Gallery
530 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
Phone: (212) 226-4151
Web:  www.Agora-Gallery.com

A Brief History of America and Its Peoples offers the viewer a rare opportunity to see highlights of John Kirchner’s artwork created over the past thirty years. Kirchner continues to question himself, our times and living in America. Through minimalism and subsumed form, he persists on deconstructing culture to create a unique vision of our lifetime.

Over the years, Kirchner has explored what he likes to refer to as “inert” materials such as Styrofoam and balsa wood that have almost an anti-matter aspect intrinsic to them. Playing with our sense of what we know and what we’re actually perceiving, Kirchner wavers between the transparent and the inaccessible, asking more questions than providing answers.

Kirchner states, “I don’t want the viewer to fall back on what they already know, I want to divert the imagination and our comprehension of formal aesthetics and craftsmanship by using fragile, expendable and immediate materials that challenge our perception of weight and permanence. To very carefully and exactly craft something that is non-utilitarian and to animate the inchoate, that is what I‘m really after.”

Kim Foster Gallery
529 West 20th Street
New York, NY 10011
Phone: (212) 229-0044
Web: www.kimfostergallery.com

The Secret Life of a Rustling Brush
2010
34 1/4″ x 24 1/4″
mixed media

The content of Edwin Ushiro’s work is as richly layered as the works themselves. Influenced by the memories and folklore of his childhood in Hawaii and with nods to Japanese Anime, he creates his own mythology populated with modern characters and contemporary references. With At Night, Lights Fell and Loved Ones Returned Home, Ushiro utilizes his technique of layering paint, ink, graphite, varnish and iron transfers on vinyl sheets to create romantic, luminescent works that focus on the mystery, and histories, held by abandoned and forgotten places.

Edwin Ushiro earned his BFA with honors from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Since he began exhibiting in 2006, his works have been shown at galleries and museums worldwide including LeBasse Projects and the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, Svenska Mobler Gallery in Chicago, Atticus Galeria in Barcelona, the Insa Art Center in Seoul and the Museum of Kyoto, Japan. Ushiro currently resides in Culver City, California.

Running concurrently with At Night, Lights Fell and Loved Ones Returned Home, in the main gallery, is So the Story Goes by Diane Barcelowsky.

Sloan Fine Art
128 Rivington Street
New York, NY 10002
Phone:  212-477-1140
Web:  www.sloanfineart.com

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We are pleased to present, Mary Heebner, an American artist who has been connected to the power of the natural world for most of her artistic career, observing exotic landscapes, working with earth and water, with minerals and pigments, or anything that dissolves in water.  She manipulates textures and handmade papers to communicate the beauty and knowledge she has acquired.  For Mary, art is all about finding line and shape.  Much like a cave artist, she crafts her work through spatters and spills, looking within that surface to reveal the form.  As she explains, “Once you have drawn something and really looked at it and studied it, you have owned it in a way.”  Mary preserves for us the natural beauty of landscapes, animating the exchange between words and images, images that lend to the creation of these earthy, vivid, and well-crafted works.  She strives to remind us how we all are interrelated.

Here we get a glimpse of her inspirational exhibition Intimacies/Intimismos, and see locations that led to these works as well as some techniques and processes she employs.  Through the poetry of Pablo Nerudo, translated and read by Alasteer Reid, we gain further insights into her paintings, Intimacies, the series inspired through his lyrical sounds.  Some of the paintings are on view until April 17, 2010 at the Edward Cella Art + Architecture Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.  www.edwardcella.com

Special thanks to Boston-based guitarist, musician, and writer Anthony Weller for allowing the use of his music from the album, Guitar of the Americas.  He is a personal friend of the artist and his talents are much appreciated. www.anthonyweller.com

An important new exhibition of rare portraits by some of the most notable photographers of the last six decades. Curated personally by the gallery’s director Ben Burdett, the subjects have been chosen from the fields of politics, sport, the arts, entertainment and science. The selection of works on show attempts to examine the way in which the camera portrait not only provides the individual with a visual memory and reference for the subjects of the portrait but in some rare cases, when reproduced enough times, provides an almost universal human record.

The works chosen have been selected not only for the status and influence of the subjects but for the importance of the image. Thus the faces on the walls of the gallery are not intended to be a definitive selection of the most significant figures of the last sixty years of our history but a survey of some of the most memorable photographic portrait images of our times. In some cases the image may have become almost more iconic than the individual. Thus, for instance, we have Alberto Korda’s Che Guevara but no Fidel Castro.

From politics and society, JFK hangs beside martin Luther King and Eve Arnold’s acclaimed portrait of Malcolm X, while Churchill, Mao and Nixon share wall space next to Mother Theresa and Nelson Mandela. From more recent years, the exhibition also includes Nadav Kander’s New York Times commissioned portrait of Obama and Platon’s supremely confident Bill Clinton.

The Arts are well represeted with works by Karsh (Hemingway). Halsmann (Hitchcock). Burri’s Picasso, Weegee and Halsmann’s Dali and from film, classic images from James Dean and Marylin Monroe by Roy Schatt (the famous jumper series) and Bert Stern (the last sitting), respectively. Amongst others the worlds of sport include Mohammed Ali and Jess Owens and the worlds of entertainment are represented by the inevitable facecs of Jagger, Lennon (also shown in the Robert Freeman’s rare album cover image for the album “Beatles for Sale”). Kate Moss (Testino) and Frank Sinatra.

As much a survey of photographic history as a survey of history itself, this ambitious exhibition brings together a powerful selection of images of icons, avatars (and some villains) from our recent history and offers a rare chance to see them assembled in one place.

Atlas gallery
49 Dorset Street
London  W1U 7NF
United Kingdom
Phone:  020 7224 4192
Web:  www.atlasgallery.com

Leigh Ledare is an artist working with photography, archives, video and text. Ledare’s first solo show at the gallery centres around a unique body of work which forms an archive of the artist’s relationship with his mother whilst creating a discursive site. As such the exhibition traces the negotiation of their respective relationships to agency, representation, self-presentation, and authorship, alongside issues proposed by the enactment of the contents of this project in the context of the real world.

At the age of fifty, already having begun to cultivate a highly sexualised persona, Ledare’s mother, Tina Peterson, a former professional ballerina, approached her son to document her for posterity. Occupying the main gallery, the resulting photographs exist neither as a diaristic work, nor simply as portraits of a highly sexualised persona, but as an investigation of the nature of our formation as subjects and its relation to broader shifting cultural forces. Shown alongside texts and archived ephemera, Ledare’s portraits of his mother reveal subversive responses, instances of sexuality and vulnerability tactically deployed to multiple economic, personal and psychological ends. Ledare proposes that his mother’s complex subjectivity stems not from a failure to perform a multitude of various roles, but from a simultaneous occupation of an abundance of imagined modes, rooted in the performative, that cannot be reconciled.

In the lower gallery, the continuous shifts between the performative and the real, and the public and the private are played out in three video works screened in London for the very first time. Shown together in close succession, Shoulder, The Model andThe Gift (all 2008) explore the agency carried as artist/muse, son/mother/, archivist/performer. The latter work The Gift was created from existing video footage originally intended for a soft-core commercial fetish video shot by Ledare’s mother and two family friends. The tapes were sent unsolicited to the artist on condition that he create something with the otherwise discarded material. Ledare responded by editing out all aspects of the filmaker’s original intention, making visible the real armature for the filmaker’s missing narrative.

The various registers of authorship related to the roles of model and photographer are further explored in the Personal Commissions series of 2008 in which the artist answered personal ads placed by women whose desires echoed those of his mother’s, and paid them to photograph him in their homes, in a scenario of their choice. Complicating this body of work are a number of photographs from a series entitled Collector’s Commissions in which a selection of collectors were invited to photograph Ledare within the context of their own art collection. These works bring the nature of the solicitation in these situations to the fore, exposing the differences in both the creation of value and the extraction of surplus value from each situation.

The Confectioner’s Confectioner serves as an investigation of how we are formed as subjects, not merely at the level of our own identities but also at the level of our desires, aspirations and needs – drives which often carry conflicting material, psychological and ethical demands.

Born in Seattle, Washington in 1976, Leigh Ledare received his MFA from Columbia University in 2008. A major solo exhibition of the artist’s work, Pretend You’re Actually Alive, was held at Les Rencontres de Arles, Arles, France in 2009. Ledare has also exhibited at the Swiss Institute New York (2009); Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2008); International Center of Photography, New York (2008); and Prague Biennale (2009). Leigh Ledare lives and works in New York City and Los Angeles. He is currently Visiting Professor of Photography and Media at California Institute for the Arts.

Private View:  Thursday, April 15th 6 – 8 pm

Pilar Corrias Gallery
54 Eastcastle Street
London W1W 8EF
Phone:  +44 (0)20 7323 7000
Web:  www.pilarcorrias.com

Cinematic posters go back to advertising the earliest public showings of films inside movie theatres. Modern cinema posters feature illustrations of a scene or overlay images from several scenes, in a wide variety of artistic styles. Artists have been employed to produce original movie poster artwork from modern cult classics to vintage legends, such as Gone with Wind, Calendar Girls, Edward Scissorhands, and Pulp Fiction.

The Flick nÂ’ Click Art exhibition is inspired by the teaser poster – an early promotional film poster, containing a basic image or design without revealing too much information on the plot, and characters. The purpose of the Flick ‘n Click Art exhibition is to incite awareness, and generate hype for a blockbuster art exhibition, artist or collection of artworks, rather than a film. To include artists such as Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, David Mckean, and Julian Opie.

Opening Reception: May 20th, 6 – 9 pm

The Gallery at Willesden Green
Willesden Green Centre
95 High Road
London NW10 2SF
Web:  www.brentartistsresource.org.uk