Today’s domestic chickens are genetically altered far from their original ancestors. With the release of documentaries like the 2006 “Fast Food Nation” and 2008 “Food, Inc.,” the poultry industry has come under harsh scrutiny in recent years, as the grotesque conditions in chicken farms across the country have been brought to light.  Though this has been a hot topic in the media and popular culture, the art world has largely overlooked the subject of genetically modified food. In his new show Leaving Paradise, Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen brings the ethical issues of factory farming into the space of the gallery. The show, currently on view at the CONNERSMITH Gallery in Washington D.C., features work from his so-called Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, including sculpture, photography, videos and live chickens in cages.

Koen Vanmechelen, Symbiosis C.C.P, 2011; selective lasersintering (polyamide), wood, stainless steel; 19.75 x 10 x 10 in. Courtesy of CONNERSMITH Gallery.

Upon entering the gallery, I was greeted by the squawking of the birds. In the back of the first gallery, a large wooden cage houses two Red Jungle Fowl chickens, a male and female, and their new offspring. Vanmechelen’s ongoing Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, which he began in 1999, involves interbreeding chickens from different countries in an effort to create “a true cosmopolitan chicken as a symbol for global diversity.” A giant family tree of this breeding experiment spans a wall in the second gallery of the exhibition. He uses the Red Jungle Fowl because it is the ancestor of all modern chickens. In breeding the chickens he seeks to bring them back to their original state of existence, one that is much more healthy and natural than those found in modern poultry processing plants.

Koen Vanmechelen. Leaving Paradise, 2013; installation view, CONNERSMITH Gallery, Washington, D.C. Courtesy of CONNERSMITH Gallery.

Vanmechelen’s work reaches beyond the gallery and involves scientists, scholars, a think tank founded by the artist, and eight farms around the world. Yet the works of art stand alone and provoke the same questions that have driven Vanmechelen’s research for years. Beautiful silhouette photographs on glossy plexiglas adorn the walls, and taxidermied chickens stand elegantly on pedestals. The first piece in the gallery is the 2011 sculpture Symbiosis, a striking bust of half human head, half chicken that underscores Vanmechelen’s understanding of the chicken project as a metaphor for biodiversity and the interrelation of distinct species. Symbiosis also speaks to the human role in genetically modifying these birds into creatures that only vaguely resemble their forebearers. While Vanmechelen’s artistic practice may be unusual, it is also effective; the show had me rethinking the chicken sandwich I had eaten for lunch and wondering how such a banal part of our lives and diets could have me questioning international issues of globalization, diversity, and evolution.

Koen Vanmechelen. Red Jungle Fowl, 2013; lambda print on plexiglass, diptych, 24 x 24 in. (each), edition: 5. Courtesy of CONNERSMITH Gallery.

Koen Vanmechelen: Leaving Paradise, is on view at CONNERSMITH Gallery through June 29, 2013.

For this edition of Fan Mail, the Masur Museum of Monroe, Louisiana has been selected from our worthy reader submissions. Two artists are featured each month—the next one could be you! If you would like to be considered, please submit your website link to info@dailyserving.com with ‘Fan Mail’ in the subject line.

For the upcoming exhibition Computer Aided, the Masur Museum is showing works by the artists Keliy Anderson-Staley (AR), Joshua Chambers (LA), Harold Cohen (CA), Craig Damrauer (LA), Hasan Elahi (MD), Jenny Holzer (NY), John Rodriguez (LA), Marni Shindelman & Nate Larson (GA & MD), Jes Schrom & Graham Simpson (LA), and Kate Shannon (OH), in addition to short video loops from well-known artists Mat Collishaw (UK), Damien Hirst (UK), Shepard Fairey (LA), Jenny Holzer (NY), and Bill Viola (CA), purchased online.

Computer Aided takes a hard look at hierarchy in contemporary art, considering the Masur Museum’s own position as a small institution in upstate Lousiana. By purchasing videos from s[edition], a company founded two years ago to sell limited-edition digital art, the Masur can exhibit these famed contemporary artists “who are otherwise beyond the Mansur’s means,” says curator Benjamin Hickey.

Since the works have been translated to a new kind of art object to be displayed on the screen and bought online, meaning is inevitably altered. Viewing these fabrications or reductions of esteemed visionaries is strange, as is the case with Hirst, Fairey, and Viola. Holzer and Collishaw seem better suited to this format: Holzer’s slogans move across the screen and feel like the kind of art that makes sense to be distributed as a digital file; Collishaw’s Whispering Weeds (a recreation of Albrecht Durer’s Great Piece of Turf, a watercolor from 1503) is beautiful and loops perfectly.

Mat Collishaw. Whispering Weeds, undated; still from s(edition) digital limited edition video; edition 129 of 10,000, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and s(edition), London. Pending accession to Permanent Collection of Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, LA.

Chun Kwang Young’s Assemblage at Art Plural Gallery is a series of three-dimensional sculptural works wrapped with Korean mulberry paper and assembled within the two-dimensional frame of a canvas. Taking the ubiquitous use of the mulberry paper in Korea—also known as hanji—as a material point of reference, the Assemblage series explores a desolate landscape of depressions, protrusions and coloured spots, all of which seem to reference abstract painting’s visual language of prioritising internal form over pictorial representation.

Chun Kwang Young. Aggregation 07 A135, 2007; mixed media with Korean mulberry paper; 171 x 139 cm. Image courtesy of Michael Culme-Seymour and Art Plural gallery.

Up close, the careful triangle arrangement that is an accumulation of basic units of information yields an uncompromising, ravaged topography that rises and falls within the canvas. In some Aggregates, waves of tightly-packed, forward-leaning triangles pushes uncomfortably against an opposing tide of edges then dip under the onslaught of sunken projectiles and circular masses. In others, the surfaces resemble natural rock formations, showing no particular form. Put together, Chun’s surfaces are abstract, quasi-sculptural spaces in continuous flux or crisis, with the broad, expansive swaths of colour reminiscent of Helen Frankenthaler and the gradients of Jules Olitski—a composite style that is the result of his efforts at reconciling two seeming opposing worldviews: the conservative values of a Korean upbringing and the overwhelmingly secular and material world with which he came into contact when he relocated to Philadelphia to earn his graduate degree in the Fine Arts in the 1970s.

Chun Kwang Young. Aggregation 07 DE146, 2007 (detail); mixed media with Korean mulberry paper; 250 x 205 cm. Image courtesy of Michael Culme-Seymour and Art Plural gallery.

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Cynthia Lahti’s work spans a multitude of mediums, from collage to ceramics, altered books, and painting. Populated by strange or uncanny figures—often children in masks and costumes—her works are odes to the off-kilter. If there’s violence in her mark-making, nearby is always a tender or vulnerable gesture. Tailing her solo exhibition Elsewhere at PDX Contemporary and a residency in Berlin, Cynthia Lahti was also recently named a Hallie Ford Fellow in the Visual Arts. I talked to Lahti at her studio in late May.

Cynthia Lahti. Dorme, 2013; ceramic and paper with watercolor; 8 x 18 x 11 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Jenna Lechner: You were in Berlin last September?

Cynthia Lahti: I was in Berlin for 11 weeks; it was a ceramics residency. My thing was, I went to a lot of museums—looking at art has always been a huge part of my process; I’d never been in a city that had that many museums.

JL: Was there anything in particular that you wanted to see?

CL: Yeah, I’ve always loved the Northern Renaissance painters—Rogier van der Weyden, Dürer—they seem more psychologically disturbed to me. German Expressionism has always been really important to me too. It was exciting to be there. You know when you’re in a foreign city, any place you’ve never been before, it somehow seeps into the art? Berlin has a darkness and an intensity which comes out in the artwork, and I felt like that fed into my work, which has always had that element. I was happy to come home to Portland, because it does feel…

JL: Lighter?

CL: Oh totally lighter, beyond light.

JL: Was the work at PDX Contemporary all made in Berlin?

CL: Yes. The circus seems to relate to Berlin in this weird way that I haven’t quite figured out. You know the movie Cabaret, with Liza Minnelli? It seems like that in Berlin. There are all those weird, scary, things—the costuming, the performance— it definitely felt like the circus.

JL: Do you have a personal relationship to the circus?

CL: I go to the circus when I can. In the late ‘80s, I remember going to the Ringling Brothers in the [Veterans Memorial] Coliseum. I did see the circus in Russia once, and it was incredible. I really want to see the circuses of the past, which, of course that’s impossible.

JL: What about Portland? We’ve talked about the zeitgeist in Berlin, and being influenced by the culture. You’ve been in Portland for a while—

CL: I grew up here. But I went to RISD for school, so I did leave. I visited my friends on the East Coast when I was on my way to Berlin, and we are really lucky here. In New York, it’s so big, you don’t even have a chance. You at least have a chance here of some sort. It’s a place where people try new ideas.

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Today we welcome a new feature to Daily Serving: Shotgun Reviews! Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short format responses (250-400 words) to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information.

Roger Shimomura. Classmates, 2007; acrylic on canvas; 24 x 36 in. Courtesy Sonoma Valley Museum of Art.

Roger Shimomura: Minidoka on My Mind at Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, by Satri Pencak

With the passage of time childhood memories can merge with dreams and stories told by others yet remain very powerful. In this way, Roger Shimomura employs his memories to create powerful visual imagery. The current exhibition at Sonoma Valley Museum of Art features paintings and lithographs representing snippets of Shimomura’s remembrances from the years he was detained as a child in Minidoka, a World War II relocation camp located in Idaho one of many relocation camps for Japanese Americans during that time. Addressing socio-political issues of ethnicity and discrimination, Shimomura brings together visual aspects of Japanese style ukiyo-e prints with western style pop art in his work. This combination points out the vague and uncertain border of where one culture ends and another begins. In the tradition of Lichtenstein, Warhol, and Teraoka, Shimomura captures our attention by depicting visually appealing images through the use of cartoon characters or historical figures. This is particularly evident in a painting titled Classmates. Here, two teenage girls stand together in their nice school dresses. They look so much alike—best friends—smiling, munching on shiny red apples. However, one girl is blond, the other, with black hair, stands behind a barbed wire fence. The message is quite chilling.

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As part of our ongoing relationship with the Boston-based Big Red & Shiny, today we bring you a review of Mark Cooper’s work at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Cooper was one of four artists of ”exceptional promise” shortlisted for the Foster Prize (along with Sarah Bapst, Katarina Burin, and Luther Price), and all four of the nominees had their ICA exhibitions reviewed on Big Red & Shiny’s blog Our Daily Red. This review was written by Stephanie Cardon and originally published on June 5, 2013.

Mark Cooper. yu yu tangerine, 2013; wood, aluminum brackets, screws, ceramics, fiberglass, silkscreen on muslin, acrylic, watercolor, marker, rice paper monoprints, digital photographs; dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist. Photo: John Kennard.

It is curious that Mark Cooper’s work, which is the most visually and spatially boisterous, the most materially lustful (though not the most fetishistic) of the four finalists’, is that which directly references Buddhist cultures, concepts and practices of meditation, contemplation, immateriality and emptiness. The jovial mess named yu yu tangerine isn’t the cast-off of a frenzied unburdening. It is the offspring of a creative process that harnesses visual language from a multiplicity of sources, pulling a commotion of color, line, shape, texture, form into a single space, and leaving it there like some gargantuan feast for our eyes. It feels compulsive and libidinous—devoid of restraint.

Cooper’s exuberant installation More is More colonized Samsøn in 2011 with greater elegance and aplomb than yu yu tangerine. Given that the assembled parts and the context of both presentations are roughly similar, one wonders what lacks in this iteration of the installation. The answer might be: more. Something closer to a cave, a womb, or a fortress of solitude—an accumulation of obstacles that forces the body into a particular navigation of space. But the answer could just as easily be: less. The argument for this approach would be that the individual parts that make up yu yu tangerine are, by and large, stronger than the whole. Because of a lack of visual hierarchy (resulting primarily from a similarity in scale and shape) no part can claim precedence, and therefore each appears to be a translation of the same concept through a succession different materials and forms: a photograph of a hillside paddy equals line drawings on rice paper equals the tiered, meandering sculptures.

Read the full article here.

On June 4, I was reminded of a critical moment in history when the eyes of the world were turned towards Poland and the Eastern Bloc. This date marks the anniversary of the first democratic election in Poland; and with its celebration, a cautious optimism pervades the formerly communist country as various events—such as the premiere of the documentary film Eastern Europe Strives for Freedom—take a critical look back at the predicaments of the past. In an effort to remember the lessons of history, some events point towards the unacknowledged vestiges of the former communist state that remain within the Polish government and beyond.

Chto Delat. Chto Delat of the Spirits, 2013; mural; originally installed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2010. Photo: BWA Wrocław

The radical questioning of both the past and present is felt especially within the Chto Delat: To Negate Negation exhibition at BWA Wrocław’s Awangarda Gallery, on view until June 16. As a survey of the Chto Delat collective’s activities over the last decade, it presents a critical reflection of historicized content within an economic and political context that was—and still is—fraught with contradictions.

Chto Delat. Negating Negation, 2013; installation view, BWA Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland. Photo: BWA Wrocław

Taking its name from Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s (1828-1889) novel Chto Delat, meaning “what is to be done,” the collective re-deploys Leftist ideology through its associated artists, philosophers, writers, and activists. Via a collection of posters displayed throughout the Awangarda Gallery, Chto Delat uses the interchangeable languages of advertisement and propaganda to subvert historical narratives and offer a timeline as radical alterity. These didactic presentations (with a constructivist flair) are only partially accessible to non-Russian-speaking viewers, yet they still manage to convey a spirit of resistance particularly in the context of the exhibition’s entirety.

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