As DailyServing continues to expand our network of contributing writers and partnering websites to offer more global coverage of the visual arts, we are proud to bring you the first of a series of posts from our pals DaWire, a Puerto Rico-based global online magazine. Their recent article featuring new work by Oscar Carrasco at Luis Adelantado Valencia is featured below.

In 2006 Oscar Carrasco started to explore Europe, embarking on a disturbing initiation journey through the unusual beauty of decline and abandonment. OFF Limits is the title of a new exhibition on view at Luis Adelantado Valencia that brings together a selection of his latest works which, like a testament of a forgotten and finite metropolis, explores the contemporary ruin, sublimates the strange locations of the not-city, the decomposition of the landscape, the orderly chaos from where everything originates.

A photographic show in which Carrasco grasps the Apollonian forces of architecture, pacifying it with oneiric impulse, confronting them with the forces of entropy and chaos. His gaze is dehumanizing and ethereal, revealing a vocation for the plasticity of space and a purified atmosphere, for a different point of view where the vanishing lines seems to delineate a whole untill the impossible. It’s his dialectic photography-architecture, his disturbing poetics of space.

Among other works, Hotel Kosmos and Inhóspita continues these formal lines, and attentive to the seduction which the colors, the volumes, and the symmetries exercise, we’re transferred to a frontier hotel, recently fallen into bankruptcy or an abandoned sanatorium on the outskirts of Berlin. They are like so many others, big rotten apples on the brink of prosperity and homogenization, a cry out silenced by history, a homage forgotten in the dark.

In his latest work The Last Passenger he takes us to a car cemetery, found in a secluded spot in the Ardennes. In a territory of diaspora, Carrasco seeks the inexorable triumph of a sublime green. The artist becomes the last passenger and he accommodates himself in his inhospitable interiors. He applies his deep and cyclopean gaze, sculpturizing the object which nature devours in its prodigious annihilation.

Educated in the area of digital art and audiovisual postproduction, Carrasco evolves searching new ways to show mortality, the devastating power of the urban masses, the irrevocable return of the organic against the built world. In 2009, he is awarded in the Prizes “Generation” from Caja Madrid and in the “76 Salon de Otoño” from the Spanish Association of Painters and Sculptures. In 2007 he becomes part of the Luis Adelantado Gallery, and since then his work has been shown in Madrid, Shanghai, Rome, México, Puerto Rico, Bogotá, Paris and Brussels, in group shows and art fairs.

The subway in any major city is a conduit, where thousands of lives flow like water through pipes in the journey from past to future. The subway station, however, is like a purgatory—a present-tense place where the journey temporarily hangs in the balance as one waits on the platform, maybe reading a book or reading the looks on the faces of passersby. Some people are hardened by years of public transportation; they pay no mind to who or what is happening around them. Others can’t help but assume the posture of human curiosity in such spaces and find fascinating the fleeting masses of strangers. Chilean-born, Berlin-based artist, Pablo Zuleta Zahr, belongs to a third category altogether. He surpasses the instinct to merely “people watch” and goes beyond to create elaborately curated photo documentaries of people moving through a particular station. The footage that he captures is true—real people passing through a real subway station—but the art that he makes from the video footage turns into a sociological exercise wherein people are organized by gender, style, and color of clothing and then regrouped into “patterned panoramas,” as the gallery refers to them.

For his first show in the United States, entitled Event Horizon at Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque, NM, Zuleta Zahr presents work from his series’ Baquadano and Madrid, as well as the four panel video installation, BUTTERFLYJACKPOT. Baquadano consists of large format photographic grids comprised of stills from ten hours of video footage of Chilean metro passengers. The results of the artist’s meticulous reorganization of people are almost abstract; the visuals of color and pattern become as strange and alluring as the orchestrated grouping of originally disconnected individuals.

Pablo Zuleta Zahr lives and works in Berlin and holds an MFA from Düsseldorf Art Academy. His work has been exhibited widely outside of the U.S., including at MITTAGEISEN, Berlin, Germany; Museo de Artes Visuales, Santiago de Chile; Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, Spain; Studio la Città, Verona, Italy; Gallery Bendana-Pinel, Paris, France; and Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, UK, among elsewhere.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Mickalene Thomas, "You're Gonna Give Me the Love I Need", 2010. Rhinestones, acrylic and enamel on wood panel 96" x 144". Courtesy Susanne Vielmetter Gallery.

A group called R.A.I.D. (Random Acts of Irreverent Dance) regularly performs at the Echoplex in Echo Park. They appeared at Bootie L.A., a monthly mash-up party, this past Saturday, wearing shimmering orange body-suits and making awkward movements that somehow still seemed organic. R.A.I.D. practitioners have all different sorts of bodies—beer bellies, jutting hip bones, love handles—and they’re not necessarily good dancers. “No formal dance training required, in fact, having two left feet might be a plus,” reads their recruitment blurb on tribe.net. Sometimes they look like Isabella Rossellini did dressed as a snail for her Green Porno video: confident, cartoon-like and uncomfortably seductive. In costume and on stage, the dancers have a not-quite-human, object-like aura that makes them seem empowered, though it’s difficult to tell exactly what they are empowered to do.

I first saw R.A.I.D. the same night I saw Mickalene Thomas’s second solo exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter Projects. The bodies in Thomas’s garnished paintings also exude an object-like prowess and, like watching R.A.I.D., looking at Thomas’s work makes object, objectification, and objection all slide into each other. The bodies Thomas depicts become part of the fragmented, textured décor around them. And becoming décor, it turns out, can be as much a crutch as an asset.

Mickalene Thomas, "Put A Little Sugar In My Bowl", Installation view, Solo Exhibition Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 2010.

Called Put Some Sugar in My Bowl, the exhibition includes ten glossy enamel paintings on panel, each embedded with rhinestones, Thomas’s favorite accoutrement. The exhibition’s title approximates the refrain of I Need Some Sugar in My Bowl, a saucily unhurried Bessie Smith song that later mellowed into a Nina Simone ballad. The exhibition, like the song, exudes a grown-up sense of longing that manifests through stuff—for Bessie and Nina, the stuff consisted of bowls, foodstuff and a little steamed-up clothing; Thomas’s stuff tends to be drapery, paneling and bling. But while the song has loose riffs and paced pauses between stanzas, Thomas’ paintings have jutting fragments of pattern and flourishes that collide with one another.

In Love’s Been Good #3, a black woman with daunting blue eye shadow and audacious red lipstick that makes her look like she could be in drag, sits in front of a sofa made up of so many collaged patterns it becomes difficult to identify. Her sarong falls open and drapes down onto the floor, leaving her legs exposed. Her feet—she wears purple, rhinestone-bejeweled heels—can’t seem to find a comfortable place to rest.

"Love's Been Good To Me #3", 2010. Rhinestones, acrylic and enamel on wood panel 96" x 72". Courtesy Susanne Vielmetter Projects.

Thomas’s work is often discussed in relation Ingres’s and Matisse’s Odalisques. This makes sense. Thomas plays with art historical poses, her figures lounging across the picture plane, and odalisques tend to look slightly uncomfortable in their painted poses—sometimes because, as in the case of Ingres’s 1814 The Grand Odalisque, they have a few too many vertebrae, or, as with Matisse’s 1921 Odalisque, they seem about to tumble off a sofa. In Thomas’s repertoire, the women haven’t been made uncomfortable as much as they’ve made themselves that way–the way the figure in Give Me the Love I Need stacks her legs on top of each other would require steady muscle power to maintain, but she seems to know that. “Uncomfortable” becomes a self-protective strategy augmented by the patterned stuff that populates each painting and competes with the figures for attention.

Odalisques are property, concubines that belong to someone. Thomas’s women have property, want property, embody property. “I feel like the rhinestones in my paintings are like the really glossy lipstick that women wear,” Thomas said in an interview with Nylon Magazine. “It’s another layer of masking.” Kara Walker wrote about Thomas for Bomb Magazine a year ago: “Thomas’s Soul Sisters gaze out from between contrasting arrays of color and pattern. In her hands, the Black woman is both a bright and polished Ebony ideal and a picture of womanist yearning.”

Making yourself an object is a way of objecting to being made into anything by anyone else, and such an objection suggests the desire for something more than the Ebony ideal or a lipstick-inspired layer of masking. But while yearning can certainly be expressed by bright, polished, posed, rhinestoned masks, can it be met? My favorite line in Bessie Smith’s song is “Maybe I can fix things up, so they’ll go.” Thomas’s figures are always fixed up but intentionally stationary. They’re captive to their personae, but that’s why you create a persona in the first place: so that you can stay inside of it.

Alex Lukas, Untitled (010), 20inx14.75in, 2010, Ink, Acrylic, Watercolor and Gouache on Paper

Due to the ubiquity of image and video today, we have become accustomed to witnessing disasters, both man made and natural, unfold in front of our very eyes. Because of the easy access of imagery and news media, it seems as if these disasters are growing at an exponential rate and are perhaps starting to spiral out of control. The recent onslaught of crisis’, be it economical, environmental or social,  has created a permeating feeling that we are now living in a highly uncertain time and the normals of stability are starting to slip away. This feeling has prompted many artists to create narratives that explore what happens when all of these disasters come together and finally threaten human life as we know it. However, it is too often that work in this vein focuses on the actual apocalyptic event, the spectacle, without much attention being placed on what happens to the world when there is only the scare of past human presence remaining.

The paintings and collages of Alex Lukas are centered on the days that take place after the “event”. The works offer a window to the future, a time that is oddly quiet, but that would look dismal to any human. In a new exhibition titled, These Are the Days of Miracle and Wonder, currently on view at the up and coming Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco, Lukas continues to explore the notion of looking to the future for information about the present, as well as documenting what it would be like to view a post-human world. The artist recently met Seth Curcio, founder and editor for DailyServing, at the gallery to discuss what events led to the moments depicted in his recent works, the time and place of these catastrophes, and what it feels like to view actual disaster images, which are currently taking place in the world.

Alex Lukas, Untitled (015), 18.875inx11in, 2010, Ink, Acrylic and Silk Screen on Book Page

Seth Curcio: The paintings that you have been creating in recent years depict a type of forgotten land that is in the process of being reclaimed by nature. Since it isn’t always clear, I’d like to get your thoughts on the possible events that led up to the quieter moments featured in your recent works?

Alex Lukas: The lack of a clear depiction of what came before is obviously very intentional. I know that the natural question raised by any depiction of “after” – which is how I think of these pieces- is “what happened?” And, that is a question that isn’t answered in the paintings. I’m interested in the idea of the confusion that will inevitably come “after” whatever has happened, be it war or disease or flooding, and how that confusion might grow with time. I imagine that the witnesses (if there are any) to the scenes depicted in these paintings might not have a clear idea of what has happened either. I think, given the breakdown of modern communications, rumors and false information will circulate and change over time – or there might be no information at all, no record of “the event” – yet it hangs over everything. I think of this sensation a little like an echo – there was a violent event, a loud clap of thunder, a tremendous bag, and in the silence afterward your ears are left ringing – even if you forget the sound, you can still hear it in the silence afterward.

Alex Lukas, Untitled (029), 2010, 42in x 90in, Ink, Acrylic, Gouache, Watercolor and Silk Screen on Paper

SC: The concepts of time and place are also interesting elements in your work. It is often difficult to discern if your scenes depict the aftermath of one catastrophic event, which is affecting several locations at once, or if we are seeing several different disasters that take place over a much longer period of time. Since time and place are so ambiguous in your work, how do you feel that you relate to these concepts and how do you feel they affect the viewer’s perception?

AL: I think of these paintings as scenes in a future – but they are depictions that reveal the past, they are focused on an after. In the paintings, this unknown “event” that I was talking about is something that has already happened, yet for us this event is still ahead – which makes for a very ambiguous time line. The locations for the drawings are created, composited or altered and generally generic, so they don’t reflect a precise place – they exist without firm landmarks that might give a clue as to where or when these places are (the tense is confusing – trying to determine where a location is from the perspective of the future looking back, but in our real time line, back is still forward). This ambiguity continues with some of the flooded cityscapes. Because I am using dated source materials, there are buildings that have now been altered or demolished or renovated, but here they stand as they were in the past, but again, they are in a future. All of this I hope leaves the viewer a little confused as to when the events happened, and it is with that sense of confusion that I hope people react to the scene.

Exhibition Installation

SC: It seems that there has been exponential growth with both man made and natural disasters happening in the world recently. The ubiquity of disaster related images and videos certainly make this growth seem more apparent. How do you feel when you see actual images of disasters that threaten life as we know it, such the events of Katrina or the recent oil crisis in the Gulf? It must seem strange after working on these images in your studio all day to view images of actual events, which are strikingly similar to your paintings.

AL: I have been making these drawings since just before Katrina, and it was a very odd sensation to see images similar to what I’ve been drawing on television. Obviously it is a little unsettling, and it feels somehow wrong to draw inspiration from the suffering of others, (I’m always worried it will seem exploitative) but the political implications of these events I think are important and worth of investigation. The fact that we are seeing the second destruction of the Louisiana coast in the past five years, it speaks to the fragility of our government and the system of safety nets that we have set up for ourselves as a society. I think we have witnessed how events can easily spin out of our control – and what happens if we cannot be brought back from the brink? One of the interesting ideas that was mentioned right after Katrina, I don’t remember who said it, but you couldn’t call 911, and that is such a staple of our society, being able to get help when needed. So what happens when the police leave or are unavailable? What happens when hospitals no longer accept patients or are no longer able to treat those already in their care? (There was an amazing, heartbreaking story in the New York Times Sunday Magazine a while back by Sheri Fink about this situation during the aftermath of Katrina). This sense of isolation really interests me, the idea that there might be a day when help will not come, and then what? It all falls apart. I’m interested in exploring what specifics will bring us to this point.

These Are The Days of Miracle and Wonder will be on view at Gurerro Gallery in San Francisco until June 3rd, 2010.

In the first installment of an ongoing series, we’re teaming up with our pals at Art Practical, a San Francisco Bay Area based website that is the nexus of four important chroniclers of art and visual culture: Bad At Sports, Happenstand, Shotgun Review, and Talking Cure quarterly. DailyServing will be partnering with Art Practical from time to time to bring you the latest in whats happening in the Bay Area. Our excerpt of their recent article The Great Contemporary Art Bubble, written by Lani Asher, is featured below.

Damien Hirst with For the Love of God, 2007; platinum and 8,601 diamonds. Courtesy of White Cube, London.

Damien Hirst is a brand, because the art form of the 21st century is marketing. To develop so strong a brand on so conspicuously threadbare a rationale is hugely creative—revolutionary even.   —Germaine Greer.

In 2007, London-based art critic Ben Lewis wrote an article for the Evening Standard newspaper entitled “Who put the ‘Con’ in Contemporary Art?” The article discussed the overinflated art-market bubble that Lewis thought was ready to burst. Doubting the compelling idea that capitalism nurtures art and creates a free-trade zone for ideas and feelings, he suggested that the current art market might actually not be good for either making meaningful art or for democracy and freedom of expression. Lewis notes that the art market is notorious for its lack of regulations and transparency. He also points out that, between 2003 and 2008, billionaire hedge-fund managers, as well as the new business classes from Asia, Latin America, and Russia, pushed the already inflated prices of contemporary art into overdrive. Additionally, according to Lewis, the world’s biggest galleries, dealers, and artists were buying work by their most prominent artists, propping up their ever-rising prices. He concluded that the art market’s recent roller-coaster ride was fueled by “cynicism, absurdity, and greed,” accurately predicting the art-market crash at the end of 2008.

Lewis is best known for Art Safari, his BBC series on contemporary art. Additionally, he has made films for European television—ranging from the history of French nuclear testing in the Pacific to the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu—and has written regular art columns for several London-based publications. In his most recent film, The Great Contemporary Art Bubble (2009), Lewis investigates the cynical romance between capitalism and the art world through an economic lens. The well-made and entertaining documentary was filmed over a two-year period, between 2006 and 2008, and it favors the reflexive style of documentarian Nick Broomfield. It is, in many ways, a movie about the making of a movie. After viewing the film at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco in January of this year, I interviewed Lewis, curious about his motivation for making the film and what he discovered in the process.

The film clearly shows the consolidation of money and power in an unregulated art market, in which the collusion of collectors, galleries, and artists is firmly enmeshed in the web of finance capital. Lewis introduces the reality principle into this game of smoke and mirrors. While Larry Gagosian and Jay Jopling refused to be interviewed, many art insiders spoke on the record, including art advisor Abigail Asher; hedge-fund manager Jim Chanos; Josh Baer, creator of the Baer Faxt Art Industry Newsletter; and collectors Alberto and Jose Mugrabi and Aby Rosen. It is notable that Lewis does not focus on art-historical perspectives for any of the work he discusses in the film. As he notes, My film had hardly any art criticism. It was an economic analysis of the art market. In a way that was my art-critical point―that most of the art in my film did not merit being assessed within the framework of art criticism, and should only be considered as products in a market.

Visit Art Practical to continue reading The Great Contemporary Art Bubble.

Brent Green, Leonard's House From Front, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. Mixed media, 2010.

Is it true belief’s unyielding determination that redeems and protects? This question lies at the heart of Brent Green’s solo exhibition Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then at Andrew Edlin Gallery. The issue of belief occupies both Green and the man whose work provided the inspiration for the project.

The story goes like this: a man named Leonard Wood once built a house entirely by hand in Kentucky—a chaotic house of multiple rooms with strange dimensions—believing it would save his wife Mary from dying of cancer. Green visited the house before it was torn down and acquired the hand-drawn plans. In examining the house and its meaning, Green was inspired to rebuild it on his own property in Pennsylvania, resurrecting a lost monument to love, devotion, hope, and delusion.

Brent Green, House Opened Up, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. Mixed media, 2009.

But Gravity is more than just a house. It is a multilayered project that is comprised of the house, its contents, sculptures, projections, and a feature-length stop-motion film. And the project is more than the story of a crazy man who thought he could heal his wife’s cancer with planks and nails: beyond the biography of Wood, it’s also the story of Green himself, as he explores his conviction and responsibility as an artist.

In the back room of the gallery, Green has installed the house in situ: bedroom, bathroom, sitting room with piano, kitchen; each element recreated with a palpable zeal. Avoiding the common pitfalls of outsider art created by an insider, there is nothing ironic, or cynical, or tongue-in-cheek here. The components are charming without being cloying or twee. Instead, one comes away with the feeling that Green is as much a true believer as Wood, though each in his own way. In the first iteration, the work of building the house was a testament to faith; in the second, it is a guileless exploration of belief itself, a willful belief in belief. The result reads as an authentic ode to desperate hope and an all-in commitment to hopeless causes.

Brent Green, Mary's First Memory, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. Video still, 2010.

A looped projection plays in the front of the gallery, showing Gravity Preview, the trailer for the film. Dark and dreamily restless in the way of all stop-motion, the fitful shots show Leonard and Mary in various scenes as Green’s voiceover narrates. The main characters build, plant flowers, and sleep in scenes of magical reality, stuttering and jerking in the frame while metal flowers grow and bloom, and galvanized nails roll into the gutters.

Toward the end of Gravity Preview, Green’s voiceover explains “…and so I decided to make this film about Leonard, and I rebuilt his house behind my barn in Pennsylvania, full-scale. And, you know, I’m making this film about him and just running everything down to zero to leave something wonderful behind, which is exactly what Leonard did.” In retracing Wood’s steps, Green presents a full-scale documentation of Wood’s doomed project, but what we also see is Green’s struggle to overcome his own skepticism and faithlessness.