Tyson Skross was born in 1978 in Illinois, and spent his childhood in Texas and Geneva, Switzerland. In Geneva, the western European landscape and geography had a profound impact on him and led him to question notions of reality and place. Situated between Lake Geneva and the Swiss Alps, Skross witnessed many natural phenomena, which he refers to as “glitches.” These glitches alter the reality of the particular place and expose the fragility of perceived truths. The artist’s paintings often depict built structures within a landscape, sometimes real, sometimes remembered, and sometimes imagined. Skross is interested in the intangible aspects of a certain locale rather than its physical construction, insisting he paints places, not things.

The works, which are oil on canvas and mixed media such as silver and gold leaf on board, have titles referring to various plants and trees (among them Bulrush, Aleppo Pine, Horse Chestnut, and Redwood). Each plant has a certain characteristic or symbolic meaning and is chosen based on its relationship to the composition, which is not necessarily a geographical one. While the plants can sometimes be native to the place of the painting, they may reference a personal, historical, or literary event as well. Thus, the paintings are constructs of collective memories and the artist’s own personal experiences.

As the artist states, “This is a world made of memory. It is at the same time gathering and dispersing. It is a composition of heres and theres. Memories are formed on a sub-atomic level by a mixture of experience, imagination, and symbolism, the real and the unreal, of truth and deception.”

Skross graduated from L’Ecole Internationale de Geneve in 1997 and studied under the painter Janis Pozzi-Johnson from 1993-1997. He graduated from The Maryland Institute College of Art in 2001. Earlier this year, the artist had a solo show titled Spectral Rearrangements at Kunstraum Gruenerhund in Berlin.

Currently on view in the exhibition Contemporary Outlook: Seeing Songs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is the video installation, Queen (A Portrait of Madonna), by Berlin-based artist Candice Breitz. The piece assaults the museum-wanderer’s ears far before it is seen, a jumble of incomprehensible collective voices shouting through the MFA’s white walls. Only when one rounds the bend into the gallery where Queen is on display, does the inscrutable chanting of strangers become recognizable: it’s Madonna’s “Holiday,” and it’s being sung a cappella by thirty wild, Italian strangers.

Breitz’s 2005 video installation runs over 73 minutes in length, performing the entirety of Madonna’s “Immaculate Collection” album (a greatest hits of her songs from 1982-1990). To create the piece, Breitz solicited devoted Madonna fans in Italy by newspaper and online, to come to the Jungle Sound Studio in Milan to sing all 73 minutes of the album. Whether they spoke English or not, the thirty applicants that Breitz chose for the piece knew every lyric to every song and were willing to be filmed and recorded performing them.

The resultant Queen–which is part of a larger body of portraits of other pop icons, including different musicians such as Michael Jackson and Bob Marley, manifested through similar recordings–is a visual and audio symphony of the human experience. Though the different personalities express themselves uniquely in the video, and of course, the Madonna tracks are nostalgia-inducing for many of us, the music being sung and danced to becomes secondary to the overall, mesmerizing collection of momentary joy and rawness of character that we see and hear.

If you can’t make it to Boston for the show, which runs through February 21, 2010, to see this stunning video live, you can view part of it on the artist’s website, or see her piece Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon) at the SFMoMA beginning this week. There is also a survey of her work currently on view at The Power Plant in Toronto and she has an upcoming show at Yvon Lampert in New York in February.

Candice Breitz was born in Johannesburg, South Africa and lives and works in Berlin, Germany, where she is a Professor of Fine Art at the Braunschweig University of Art. She holds degrees in art and art history from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, the University of Chicago and Columbia University. Her work is included in several prominent public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; and The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA. Her work has been included in solo exhibitions internationally, including at White Cube in London, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

Mica-encrusted, ebony swirls weave through Camille Rose Garcia’s most recent body of work, Hydra of Babylon, on display at Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles, CA through October 10th, 2009. In addition to her highly calligraphic black lines, Garcia layers translucent hues, silver leaf, and iridescent sheens to depict her usual suspects – winged creatures and desperate divas, all signaling disdain for the world around them. If oozing toxic drips, tear stained eyes, or nonchalant hand gestures don’t fully reveal the artist’s message, viewers can usually find a title written on an embedded coil of ribbon within the piece. Titles include names like Gloom and Doom, Destroying Angels, Poisons for Unthinkable Pains, and The Witch of Silent Spring, to name a few.

Garcia’s most persistent subjects are the illustrative animals that populate her melancholy scenes. In the 60″ x 84″ acrylic on panel painting, The Hydra of Babylon, a nine-headed serpent fatally injures an eagle, which weeps incessantly as it’s strangled with writhing tentacles. Most likely, Babylon is a geographical reference that, in conjunction with the dying eagle, is meant to summon ideas of annihilation, grief, and war in the Middle East.

Sickness and pain are also recurrent themes, seen in doe-eyed fawns that choke on malignancies that thoroughly permeate scenes like The Witch of Silent Spring. Ironically, there are tonics that promise solace and healing, but those solutions are the same deadly ones that infiltrate the animals’ surroundings, subsequently furthering their demise. In the midst of all the malaise are trumpet-like Easter Lilies, the quintessential symbol of virtue and hope. Those same lilies are present in Why Can’t You Just Be Happy, a painting of a quite corpulent vulture stewing in her woeful sorrow.

Occasional splashes of warm color and hopeful metaphors are planted sporadically throughout these psychedelic views, making them more accessible and alluring. Garcia creates a world of her own, yet one that is heavily influenced by the kaleidoscopic realities of Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland, or, perhaps more pertinent to her Orange County upbringing, Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands. It was no surprise to find out that Garcia is currently working on an illustrated Alice In Wonderland book that will be released from Harper/Collins in March of 2010. This will be the fourth published book featuring her work, the others being The Saddest Place on Earth, 2005, The Magic Bottle, 2006, and Tragic Kingdom, 2007.

Other publications that have showcased Garcia’s work are Flaunt Magazine, Nylon, Paper Magazine, Modern Painters, Art Prostitute, Juxtapoz, and Hi-Fructose.

Karl Haendel

Play With Your Own Marbles is the title of a new exhibition currently on view at San Francisco’s NOMA Gallery. The exhibition, which is curated by Betty Nguyen, Creative Director of First Person Magazine, brings together three Los Angeles-based artists in an examination of artistic process and its relation to utility, both in object and image. The exhibition highlights the objects and cyanotypes of Walead Beshty, the meticulously rendered photorealist drawings of Karl Haendel, and the formal concrete “paintings” of Patrick Hill.

Play With Your Own Marbles is not only linked through the evident formal and aesthetic concerns of each artist, as the show is remarkably connected through its homogenized temperament, graphically monochromatic palette, and overall deconstructionist sensibility, but each artist also plays with a strong sense of irony through material, form and method of display.

Patrick Hill

Patrick Hill has applied thick bands of concrete, absorbed and stained into a black velvety surface revealing small crevices of color, opening a dialogue between a strictly modernist approach to painting and the everyday utilitarian material of concrete.

Walead Beshty’s FedEx Kraft Box………… sculpture, which contains custom shatter proof glass cubes placed inside standard Fed-ex boxes, displays the evidence of wear as an object travels from one location to another. These ready made materials are further “improved” by the imposing alteration of travel. In addition to the sculpture, Beshty also presents several photographic images of isolated objects produced by placing the otherwise utilitarian forms on photosensitive paper, rendering them useless of their original function. Images of crumpled paper and eyedroppers begin to resemble abstracted paintings, drawings and monoprints further removing the viewer from the object’s original state and placing it more in the realm of the artifact.

Karl Haendel’s photorealist graphite drawings subvert functional objects by manipulating scale, content and source imagery. Haendel’s imagery and method of presentation is generous in it ability to be easily recognized though careful rendering and specific depiction of everyday materials such as paper, razor blades, nails and paper clips. However, the work subtly unfolds and challenges the viewer through its coded symbols and methods of display. Haendel presents a delicately drawn image of ripped paper on a plywood platform supported by stacks of art magazines, which plays with the viewer’s physical perspective to drawing and the repetition of material (paper) through multiple forms. This work is presented along side images of blades mounted to wood gently resting against a wall and large scrolls of paper containing references of would be titles for the exhibition, all of which playfully discuss the relationship between concept and material.

The collections of work in Play With Your Own Marbles are subtly seductive, engaging the viewer first through a whisper and later through a tug of the ear. Each work takes the utilitarian object and subverts it to reveal new potentials that have the ability to exist on a sliding scale of completion, remaining in a state of flux both formally and conceptually.

Play With Your Own Marbles will be on view in San Francisco through October 3rd.

Emily Floyd, The Cultural Studies Reader (2001) Photo; Eva Fernandez

For the exhibition, Why do we do the things we do, nine artists turn the mirror on their creative process with honesty and biting self irony. This group exhibition at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Australia, curated by Jacqueline Doughty, tackles the often misunderstood process of making art, with many of the artists playing on the ambitions, anxieties and pressures that filter into their practice.

The romantic image of the artist as genius, or perhaps idiot savant, receives particular scrutiny. Doughty positions this selection of mostly text-based works in relation to the written artist’s manifestos that accompanied many 20th century movements, which she notes “are generally characterized by a boldness of language and a utopian conviction in their objectives and their methods”. While the text works in this exhibition are manifestos of a sort, they also lack any trace of the optimism, certitude and confidence of the heroic modernist artist.

Tom Polo’s Continuous One Liners are a collection of roughly painted phrases on ready made surfaces which quote offhand remarks: “sore winner”, “well done”, “I’m worst at what I do best”, “maybe try video art”. This stream of consciousness narrative parodies the insecurities of the emerging artist trying to make it big.

Rose Nolan’s monumental text work “Big Words – LESS IS HARDER” uses the visual language of 20th century propaganda to express the private uncertainties that would ordinarily be kept from public view.

Rose Nolan, Big Words – LESS IS HARDER (2009) Photo: Eva Fernandez

Emily Floyd’s The Cultural Studies Reader: 38 Topics for a Group Show parodies the theoretical impulse that can afflict artists in academic contexts – bunnies scrawl ambitious proclamations in wavering chalk script between building blocks, sporting key quotes: “My work is about the relationship between Malevich and electronica”, “I am making a post-colonial critique of history by restaging colonial paintings in alternate color schemes”, and “I am subverting the dominant paradigm”.

Despite its pathos, the playfulness of “Why do we do the things we do” keeps it from descending into melancholy, with each artist still striving to transmit an experience to the viewer. Doughty reflects, “It is the optimism of this gesture that encapsulates why we do the things we do”.

Josh Azzarella Untitled #27 (Unknown Rebel) (2006), Video

Mark Moore Gallery has been organizing its annual Ultrasonic exhibitions for four years now, featuring emerging artists from the U.S. and elsewhere. This year’s installment, Ultrasonic IV: Fresh Perspectives, more subdued than its high-strung title suggests, seems to confront the present through the lens of the past, rephrasing visual legacies in a way that suggests nostalgia can be prescient.

It’s a fascinating trend: in a time when technology allows the production of slick, seamless images, artists return to the antiquated media of the past.

Josh Azzarella Untitled #46 (The Awful Grace of God) (2007), Video

Josh Azzarella’s videos, collages of grainy found and reedited footage, turn profound political moments into silent lulls. In Untitled #46 (The Awful Grace of God), just over two minutes in length, Robert Kennedy stands before a crowd that appears loyal but listless. Kennedy doesn’t ever speak – or, at least, he doesn’t look like he does – and the soundless, blurred film makes a melancholic moment out of something that should have been empowering. Though of course, in retrospect, any footage of Bobbie Kennedy is melancholic.

Tim Barber’s cinematic photographs, with their the-world-is-bigger-than-you-are presentiment, evoke 1960s Cinema Verite – they approximate in-the-moment truth except, once framed, truth becomes another form of fantasy. Barber’s subjects don’t acknowledge the camera. For the most part, their faces are obscured, directed away or literally distorted by a flash of light or suspended foliage. But in one image, Untitled (wrapped in plastic), a woman’s perfectly legible, pristinely made-up profile rests inside a plastic bag. Exaggerated yellows make the image look like it’s been imported from a past decade and the plastic wrapping suggest an attempt to keep a dead face picturesque. Does this attempted preservation act as a protest against immediacy? Or is it simply an inability to let go?

Tim Barber Untitled (pillow) (2008) Digital c-print

While Ultrasonic IV certainly deals with nostalgia’s heaviness, it also offers plenty of levity. Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz re-imagine the snow globe, taking sentimental keepsakes and making them sinister. As objects, the globes are kitschy as the real things; as narratives, they’re absurd and callous. Had the Coen brothers depicted Narnia, the result might have been similar: miniature figures climb through stony ruins, find themselves chained together in the midst of forests, nearly fall from cliffs, and use boulders to stomp one another into the snow. It’s winter wonderland gone terribly wrong.

Looking back, remixing and sampling are things art, like music, has gotten good at, and they’re things Ultrasonic IV does well. The urge to revisit what already exists makes sense; the world has so much information in it already (and so much misunderstood, overlooked information) that taking the remix approach seems economical.

Walter Martin & Paloma Munoz Traveler CCLVII (2009)

At the end of her novella The Dog of the Marriage, Amy Hempel wrote, “I see the viewfinder swing wide across the lawn, one of those panning shots you always find in movies, where the idea is to get everybody in the audience ready for what will presently be revealed” – Except that Hempel’s characters never really get past the panning shot, and neither does contemporary art. The lingering question seems to be whether we should keep anticipating the reveal, or accept that rear-views are the closest we can get to looking forward.

Roxy Paine’s Maelstrom is a massive stainless steel sculpture that stretches from one end of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cantor Roof Garden to the other, rising 29 feet overhead. Weighing more than 7 tons, the tree-like sculpture is 130 feet long and 45 feet wide, making it Paine’s largest and most ambitious work to date. The arboreal structure is composed of 10,000 pieces of stainless steel which range from three-eights of an inch to 10 inches in diameter. Visitors are able to walk within and around the steel branches in the garden-like atmosphere of the roof garden, overlooking Central Park.

Maelstrom asserts that man and human culture are not removed from, but very much a part of nature. The sculpture’s network of branches mimics organic and biological systems as well as industrial systems, such as plumbing and piping, thus pointing to the connection between the natural world and the built environment. Poised above Central Park, Maelstrom echoes the element of controlled nature represented by the urban park, which was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and is in fact almost entirely landscaped. However, as the title suggests, there are certain elements in nature that remain unbridled by man.

Roxy Paine, born in New York in 1966, studied both at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico and Pratt Institute in New York. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in major collections such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. For the 2002 Whitney Biennial, he erected a 50 foot stainless steel tree in Central Park. The artist was previously featured on DailyServing in 2006.

Maelstrom opened in April and will remain on the roof until November 29, 2009 (weather permitting).