Best of 2009

Yayoi Kusama
Originally published on April 27, 2009

Gagosian Gallery is presenting two major exhibitions in New York and Beverly Hills to celebrate Yayoi Kusama’s eightieth year. The artist, born in Japan in 1929, started painting with polka dots and nets as motifs around the age of ten. She moved to the United States in 1957, where she showed large scale paintings, soft sculptures, and environmental installations using electric lights and mirrors. From 1998-1999, a major retrospective opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and traveled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.

The exhibition in New York, which opened on April 16th, features a large yellow pumpkin sculpture with black spots in a specifically designed space at the front of the gallery. This piece is based on a similar work Kusama showed at the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1993 – a mirrored room filled with pumpkin sculptures in which the artist resided in color-coordinated attire. The pumpkin, made of fiberglass and reinforced plastic, represents a type of self portrait or alter ego for the artist, whose compulsive covering of surfaces and infinite repetition of dots, patterns, and forms is characteristic of her entire body of work.

Best of 2009

Venice Biennale: Union of Comoros
Originally published on June 24, 2009

For their Biennale debut, the Union of Comoros is in participation with a project, Djahazi, by the Italian artist Paolo W. Tamburella. Comoros is a small series of islands located off the coast of Mozambique in East Africa, and Djahazi gets its name from the classic wooden boats the Comoros people used for centuries to transport goods and heavy cargo through the Mozambique Channel and the Indian Ocean. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the international use and presence of the Comoros islands greatly decreased. The djahazi vessel, however, remained a propitious means of transport within the African industry until 2006 when modern freight methods subverted these traditional modes. The boats were forsaken at the docks of Moroni, the main port of the Comoros, and continued to deteriorate on the sea floor.

For the Biennale project, Tamburella resurrected and restored one of the twenty-eight boats found on the sandy ocean floor of the port. With the help of local Comorians, Tamburella restored the vessel to its original state. During the last decades of the djahazi’s use, it was common to see the boats carrying modern cargo containers from large ships to the port of Moroni. As a gesture towards the tradition, Tamburella has loaded a shipping container inside the restored djahazi. In Venice, the vessel is exhibited at the waterfront of the Giardini entrance. As described in the project summary by Octavio Zaya, “[the restored Djahazi] will stand as a metaphor for an ambivalent globality, bringing together hope and despair, hyper-rationalization and avant-garde extravagance, anti-modern nostalgia and exuberant narratives of progress, emergence and emergency…” While these semantics are, perhaps, idealistic, the Djahazi project is a simple and delicate gesture towards the power of tradition in today’s post-modern world.

Deb and Johnny Branning of Navarre, Florida emailed to say that Cy Twombly’s recent exhibition Eight Sculptures was their favorite feature of 2009 on DailyServing. Send an email and let us know your favorite feature of the year. info@dailyserving.com

Best of 2009
Cy Twombly: Eight Sculptures
Originally published on November 24, 2009

Artist Cy Twombly has created a new series of sculptures, under the humble title Eight Sculptures. These new objects are currently being presented at Gagosian Gallery’s 980 Madison Ave location in New York City. The exhibition is a companion to a new series of paintings, titled Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves, on view at Gagoisian’s Athens gallery. In addition to the shows at Gagosian, the acclaimed artist also had two major museum exhibitions on view this fall, Cy Twombly: The Natural World, Selected Works 2000-2007‘ that inaugurated the new wing of The Art Institute of Chicago, and Cy Twombly: Sensations of the Moment at Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna.

Eight Sculptures is a continuation of Twombly’s acclaimed formally driven, pedestal-based objects. While the earlier forms were created from accessible materials and objects, generally coated in gesso to create hauntingly white forms, the new sculptures are cast bronze with a white patina creating a very similar effect. Each sculpture references the unearthed fragility of an object of antiquity, while remaining distinctly modern in its formal presentation.

Best of 2009
Carlos and Jason Sanchez
Originally published on June 16, 2009

Currently in its last week on view at Catherine Clark Gallery is a solo show of work by Montreal-based photographers and brothers Carlos and Jason Sanchez. The exhibition marks the brothers’ second at the San Francisco gallery, and displays a survey of their work over the past seven years, since their collaboration began. The twelve large-scale photographs on view depict scenes that have been exhaustively staged by the artists and are rich with Hollywood-rivaling sets, props and lighting. These moments on display are like fleeting beats of time caught as stills on a film reel, and at the same time appear openly contrived– unashamed that they have been so heavily orchestrated. The artificiality of these moments, in the darker themed photographs, evokes an eerie sensation that grips the viewer. The discomfort is that these scenes seem to be depicted as fantasies in some twisted mind. In Abduction (2004), a generic, mustached and pasty white man kneels ominously at a little girls bedside as she seemingly opens gifts from her suitor that are intended to lure her to his windowless van.

The star of the show is John Mark Karr (2007), a portrait caught in mirror’s reflection of the pedophile who made a false confession to the murder of child beauty pageant queen Jon Benet Ramsey. While in many of the photographs the models are members of the brothers’ social circle, only the real John Mark Karr could perform as authentically and disturbingly as the artists imagined for this shot.

There are quieter, more subtle moments in the show, such as Drifter (2007), wherein a stained denim-donning vagrant pauses for reflection at a spot in the urban wilderness where a train track meets a chain link fence.

Carlos and Jason Sanchez have exhibited their work internationally at Caren Golden Fine Art, New York; Torch Gallery, Amsterdam; and Parisian Laundry, Montreal, among many others. Their work is in several public and private collections, including Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and 21c Museum, Louisville, Kentucky. Both men studied at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, where Carlos earned his BFA.

Best of 2009
Dalek (aka James Marshall): Broken, Beaten and Buried
Originally published on January 26, 2009

Earlier this year DailyServing.com partnered with Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC to produce a new site-specific installation by the artist Dalek. Over a two week period a group of 12 artists, under the direction of Dalek, created the entire exhibition which called for every square inch of the gallery to be custom painted. At the closing of the exhibition, DailyServing.com created a full color catalog that documented the entire exhibition process. The signed catalog, which is available for purchase, contains a foreword by DailyServing.com founder and curator of the exhibition, Seth Curcio, as well as a full interview with the artist led by Redux Contemporary Art Center’s director Karen Ann Myers.

Broken, Beaten and Buried is the title of a new site specific installation by the artist James Marshall (aka Dalek), currently on view at the Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, South Carolina. The exhibition was organized by DailyServing founder and editor Seth Curcio, and was completed in its entirety over a seven day period by a team of 10 assistants led by Dalek himself. The show broke new ground for the artist, being his most ambitious exhibition to date. Featuring an entirely new and more reductive style of painting, the immersive installation focuses on the psychological effects of color. Dalek painted every part of the exhibition space, literally placing the viewer directly in the artist’s paintings with little to no room for escape.

In April of 2008, Dalek appeared on the cover of Juxtapoz Magazine and in late 2007 he was a featured artist in Swindle Magazine. In years past, Dalek has been featured in countless publications including Tokion Magazine and New American Paintings. In addition, he had his first monograph printed in 2003, Dalek: Nickel Plated Angels, published from Gingko Press.

The artist is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in 2001/02 he worked as an assistant to Takashi Murakami. He is currently represented by the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York, Irvine Contemporary in Washington, D.C, Elms Lester in London and Galerie Magda Danysz in Paris.

Broken, Beaten and Buried will be on view until March 7th, 2009. Upon the closing of the exhibition, DailyServing and Redux Contemporary Art Center will release a full-color catalog, featuring full documentation of the installation with rare photographs, articles and interviews featuring the artist.

Here at DailyServing.com we are excited to say goodbye to another year of original daily features, articles, interviews, reviews and videos, and say hello to a new year. In celebration of everything that has happened in 2009, we have decided to revisit some of our favorite artists that appeared on the site this year. Feel free to email us info@dailyserving.com to recommend your favorite features of 2009 too.

Best of 2009
Daniel Gordon: Portrait Studio
Originally published on April 1, 2009

Earlier this year, DailyServing.com visited NYC-based photographer Daniel Gordon at his studio in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Gordon is currently exhibiting in the MOMA: New Photography 2009 in New York City through January 11, 2010.

Daniel Gordon, Portrait Studio from sam fleischner on Vimeo.

Artist, Daniel Gordon, creates amazingly innovative, albeit low-tech photographs. His photos begin as cheaply printed internet-based images constructed into temporary sculptures which are re-photographed for their final presentation. The process resembles something from Frankenstein’s studio, as the artist assembles body parts and objects to reconfigure them in an endless cycle of creation. During a much anticipated visit, DailyServing.com had the pleasure to meet the artist in his Brooklyn-based studio to catch a rare glimpse of his unique process.

Pregnant, 40“ x 50”, C–Print 2008

Daniel Gordon graduated from Yale University School of Art in 2005 and has since exhibited with Zach Feuer Gallery in New York and Groeflin Maag in Basel and Zurich, Switzerland. The artist is currently presenting new work in the exhibition Portrait Studio with Groeflin Maag in Zurich, on view through April 10th. This year, Gordon was selected for the annual New Photography exhibition, opening this fall, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition will highlight a selection of only six young artists who each address the concept of image collection, assembly, and manipulation beginning in the studio or darkroom. For more information, check out Daniel’s previous feature on DailyServing.

Best of 2009
Bas Louter: Dust/Asphalt
Originally published on March 11, 2009

DUST (ASPHALT), Ambach and Rice, Seattle

Bas Louter recently concluded the exhibition, Dust at Kopeikin gallery in Los Angeles and is currently exhibiting Dust/Asphalt at Ambace and Rice in Seattle. A fitting title for Louter’s ethereally haunting visages–referencing perhaps the black soot of charcoal used to create his works, or the ashes and dust of human remains. Louters works uncannily examines the fleeting and transitory nature of existence, and humankind’s attempts to immortalize ourselves through representation and art. Louter notes, “What interested me most about these portraits was how elapsed eras can crop up in result, like time condensing in a flash of lighting. When this flash is over it seems all detail is lost, like the portrait is somehow haunted or hollow.” Time within these portraits is obfuscated– set within grainy washes of charcoal, in timeless voids devoid of setting or temporal indicators. Of this, Louter notes: “I am attracted to take things out of the past in the now, the actuality. In general I think time can be a non-chronological cycle, things from now can be old and things from the past can be contemporary. It’s my interest to question the way we look at these whole container of images.”

In a recent interview, Louter discusses the nature of his works, his creative process and sources of inspiration with DailyServing.com’s Sasha M. Lee.

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