Still image from Erik Levine's Grip, 2005

As we witnessed over the past two weeks at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, athletes are under perpetually extreme pressure. During practice and performance—be it game, match, run or race—athletes in all sports carry the weight of victory on their shoulders, which of course is why the best of them are so uniquely admired.

Currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) is a presentation of Erik Levine’s 2005 large-scale video projection, Grip, which the museum has recently acquired. Grip, a two-channel DVD in an edition of six, deals with the complexities of athleticism, as it features teenage boys playing tennis. The kaleidoscopic images in the two-channel video bend inward and out in a hypnotizing way as well as showing silent side by side shots of the young players in various states of sportsmanship on and off the court.

At first the quick-cuts of boys at play make up a montage that looks almost like a Gatorade commercial, but the clips quickly segue from displays of athleticism to the torture of self-punishment as boys slap their foreheads, kick their rackets, and fall to the green court on their knees in defeat. One boy shouts, “I quit tennis, man,” as he throws the racket to the ground, with not so much rage as a sense of what seems to be complete despair.

Many of us would argue that, within reason, the pressures of competition help to build character in adolescents, even if the athletes never go on to compete professionally, but that doesn’t make it any less heartbreaking to watch a teenager bury his face in a towel to hide his tears after losing a match. However, too much of this mounted pressure can be dangerous for athletes of this age. As Erik Levine asserts in his discussion of the piece, “This despair can lead to extreme expressions of anger and frustration at a time in their lives when perspective can often be elusive, and alludes to the startling and revealing analogous microcosm for life outside the demarcations and boundaries of the playing field.”

Grip will be on view at MCASD’s La Jolla location through March 21, 2010. If you can’t make it to San Diego by then, you can view the video online here.

Erik Levine was born in Los Angeles and lives and works in both New York and Boston. He is an Assistant Professor at University of Massachusetts Boston. He is a recipient of multiple Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant awards, National Endowment for the Arts grant awards, New York Foundation for the Arts awards and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally.

There’s a lot happening in Vancouver, British Columbia right now, if you hadn’t noticed. Of course, I’m talking about art. Currently on view at Monte Clark Gallery is a solo show of new work by Vancouver-born Greg Girard. The exhibition, entitled Half the Surface of the World, presents photographs taken by Girard on his visits to more than twenty US military bases across the massive area of the world known to the Pentagon as “PACOM.” PACOM is the largest of six “territorial constructs that exist solely on the Pentagon’s map of the world,” according to the exhibition’s materials, which go on to explain that “The US military influence in this region is mainly anchored with bases in Japan, Korea and Guam.” Girard, who has been living in Asia since 1983, reveals through his work how reminiscent these bases—which are home to family members as well as soldiers—are to typical Middle-American suburbs. One imagines that if you were drugged and dropped into a few of these scenes, you would be none the wiser that you were half way around the world from the birthplace of hamburgers and milkshakes. While the images are eerie, the sentiment might be the exact opposite for those who live in these locations for any length of time, as they find themselves surrounded by the consolation of “home.” However, void of any human interaction within the shots, they appear distant and industrial as they glow with the deeply saturated colors of street lamps at twilight. I’m reminded of the work of Richard Ross, both aesthetically and thematically. In a certain way they remind me most of his Waiting for the End of the World series of bomb shelters.

Greg Girard has exhibited internationally, including in multiple solo shows at Monte Clark Gallery and in group shows at Amelia Johnson Contemporary in Hong Kong, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA in Helsinki.

Lara Viana’s paintings look as if they might have been chiseled down from thick blocks of oil paint, rather than the media having been applied to the surface. The layers of paint in her hauntingly rendered scenes tangle and fold onto one another like rumpled bed sheets. Abandoned dinner parties and smudged, silhouetted flower arrangements are presented in a muted palate that suggests faded memories—so long gone that one might never grasp onto them again. Viana’s new work is currently on view in a solo exhibition at Domo Baal in London—her first solo show at the space, following the 2009 group exhibition, Time is a Sausage.

In an essay for Viana’s recent solo exhibition at Exeter Phoenix, London-based writer, Rebecca Geldard, said of the work, “…back in the studio, and drawn into a Viana Rorschach–image conundrum, one remembers that these works are as much about the nature of living as the removed technical recording of it.”

Lara Viana was born and raised in Salvador, Brazil. She earned her BFA from the UK’s Falmouth School of Art and her MFA from the Painting Department at the Royal College of Art in London She was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2008 and the Whitechapel Gallery’s East End Academy 2009: The Painting Edition. Her work has been exhibited in numerous group shows around London, including at Blyth Gallery, Contemporary Art Projects, Transition Gallery, Tricycle Gallery, and many more. Viana is also currently exhibiting in Psychic Geography at Workplace Gallery in Gateshead.

Currently on view at The Company in Los Angeles is Predicting the Present—a solo presentation of work by Tacoma, Washington-based Elias Hansen. Showing concurrently at The Company with a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist, Adam Janes, Hansen approaches his chosen artistic medium of glass in much the same way as Janes does his wax, due to “a shared interest in the alchemic conversions in sculpture,” as the gallery notes, meaning that “both artists engage the process of altering solids into liquids and back into solids by their respective glassblowing and candle making.” Hansen’s work is made up of various reassembled pieces of discarded furniture and other items, which he has then attached hand-blown glass circles to. These convex windows—whether attached to furniture or the gallery wall—allow the viewer to peer into a sort of proverbial rabbit hole, wherein the other side reveals an aged-looking photograph taken by Hansen of a rundown house or vehicle. With titles like Just because you’re careful with your meth lab, doesn’t mean your house won’t burn down because of bad wiring and “Blame your son,” he said, slamming the door on his way out to the truck, the pieces recall disturbing narratives from the supposed lives of each item. It’s as if these are the dialogues you might hear whispered up from a desk in passing at a flea market or yard sale, if it could speak.

Elias Hansen studied glass at the New Orleans School of Glass and Print in New Orleans, LA and printmaking and bookarts at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA. His work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group shows, including Kodiak at Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Wood at Maccarone, New York, NY; Sack of Bones at Peres Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Suddenly: Where We Live Now at Cooley Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR; Kultur der Angst at Halle 14, Leipzig, Germany; and more. He was the artist in residence at Tacoma Museum of Glass in 2007 and 2008, and his work has been reviewed by the New York Times, Seattle Weekly, Seattle P.I. and elsewhere.

Gabriel "Specter" Reese, Guerrilla Billboard, via Gothamist

Opening today at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (MoCADA) in Brooklyn is the group exhibition, The Gentrification of Brooklyn: The Pink Elephant Speaks. Before it had even officially opened, the show generated a fair amount of controversy. It seems to have created a Brooklyn—and Internet—divided. The exhibition was guest curated by Brooklyn native, Dexter Wimberly, and features 20 artists working in various mediums whose work “investigates the controversial impact of gentrification on the great borough of Brooklyn,” according to the museum. Though MoCADA’s mission seeks to “give a more accurate portrayal of contributions to the historical, artistic and cultural landscape of the world by people of African descent,” Wimberly recently told The Brooklyn Paper, “As a curator, it was important to me to make sure this exhibition was not just an African-American perspective, or a white perspective or an Asian perspective or a Latino perspective.”

Josh Bricker, The Order of Things (partial), courtesy the artist

I talked to Josh Bricker, whose installation piece, The Order of Things, is on display in the exhibition. Bricker, who is an MFA candidate at Parsons The New School for Design, told me that The Order of Things—which is made up of ten Anatex “roller coaster” toys in various stages of manipulation—”confronts a lot of the major issues surrounding gentrification, through a slow process of homogenization and conversion.” Bricker says that the toys “were chosen for their iconic status and place in our memories to allow for a re-contextualization of the mundane, as well as an easy entry point into a much heavier and more serious issue.” The ten roller coaster toys follow a spectrum of visual shifts until the last piece becomes almost unidentifiable from the first. Of his process, Bricker says, “If you know color like most artists do then you realize that while white in light is the presence of all color, it is actually the absence of all color in pigments and, therefore, I felt the perfect representation of homogenization and the loss of individuality.”

Josh Bricker, The Order of Things (partial), courtesy the artist

Not everyone in Brooklyn, and elsewhere, though agrees with the message of the exhibition. A casual post about the show on the popular New York blog, Gothamist, turned into an all-out war of words and ideologies when commenters began discussing (not always eloquently) issues of gentrification, race and class. One commenter replied sarcastically to the image of Gabriel “Specter” Reese’s piece for the show, Guerrilla Billboard, saying, “Oh boy here we go… How dare you try to come in and actually contribute to the quality of life here. How dare you try to come in here and open up business, and create jobs. How dare you try to put a boutique clothing shop in place of the 3rd liquor store on this block. How dare you pay taxes!” Another disagreed by responding, “I don’t necessarily think: 3 starbucks per block plus several overpirced [sic] organic fairtrade coffee emporiums, plus…3x rent increase for the same shitty apartment is an ‘improvement’.”

The artists whose work will be on view in The Gentrification of Brooklyn: The Pink Elephant Speaks include: Josh Bricker (Installation), Valerie Caesar (Photography), Oasa DuVerney (Drawing), Zachary Fabri (Video), Rosamond S. King (Installation), Irondale Ensemble (Theater Performance), Nathan Kensinger (Photography), Jess Levey (Photography / Video Installation), Christina Massey (Painting), Musa (Sculpture), Tim Okamura (Painting), Kip Omolade (Painting), John Perry (Painting), Adele Pham (Video), Michael Premo / Rachel Falcone (Photography / Multimedia), Gabriel Reese (Painting), Marie Roberts (Painting), Ali Santana (Music Video), Monique Schubert (Mixed-media), Alexandria Smith (Painting), Sarah Nelson Wright (Installation).

Additionally, photos and essays by students at The Brooklyn Community Arts and Media High School and The Secondary School for Research will be on display in a vignette representing their study and documentation of the impact of gentrification in their neighborhoods. The exhibition runs through May 16, 2010 and features a roster of public events surrounding the issues it seeks to explore, including talks and documentary screenings.

Eric Ogden, untitled (penelope cruz), 2009

Currently on view at Hous Projects in New York is the exhibition Versus—a unique sort of survey featuring 18 seminal photographers of our time. Curated by Ruben Natal-San Miguel, whose work is also exhibited in the show, Versus pairs these emerging and established contemporary photographers with one another according to similarities—and striking contrasts—in subject matter, theme and aesthetics. The photographers explore ideas of ideal beauty, subjects of idolatry in America, relationship dynamics, juxtaposing stages of life and architectural and environmental moods. Some of the comparisons and contrasts between the paired photographs are more subtle, while other times the images seem to mirror one another. The visual motifs presented by the photographs on view are equally striking. Deep shadows conceal some scenes while others employ repetitive pattern to contrast with meek looking portrait sitters.

Jen Davis, untitled, 2005

The full roster of pairings includes: Mickalene Thomas VERSUS Nadine Rovner, Hank Willis Thomas VERSUS Cara Phillips, Jen Davis VERSUS Eric Ogden, Brian Ulrich VERSUS Alex Leme, Amy Elkins VERSUS Molly Landreth, Matthew Pillsbury VERSUS Kris Graves, Zoe Strauss VERSUS Ruben Natal-San Miguel, Phil Toledano VERSUS Elizabeth Fleming and Michael Wolf VERSUS Gina Levay. Selected work from Versus was also recently on view at Photo LA in Los Angeles, courtesy Hous Projects.

Phil Toledano, Looking at the Sunset, 2008

Kara Walker: A Warm Summer Evening in 1863 (2008), courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, Banners of Persuasion and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Currently on view at James Cohan Gallery in New York City is the exhibition Demons, Yarns & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists, which runs through February 13, 2010. The show features hand-woven tapestries created by thirteen international artists, most of whom are widely known for their work in other media. Included among the artists whose work is on view are: Kara Walker, Grayson Perry, Shahzia Sikander, Jaime Gili and Peter Blake. The artists were commissioned by the London-based art organization, Banners of Persuasion, to create the tapestries specifically because the medium is so far removed from their usual practices. In the catalog that accompanies the exhibition–which includes an essay written by Sarah Kent–each artist discusses their unique approach to the unfamiliar medium in an interview.

Shahzia Sikander: Pathology of Suspension (2008), courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, Banners of Persuasion and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

The subjects explored in the tapestries on view range from American race relations, such as is seen in Kara Walker’s A Warm Summer Evening in 1863, to an investigation into the tradition of so-called “craft” or “decorative arts,” as seen in the imagery in Shahzia Sikander’s Pathology of Suspension. Demons, Yarns & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists at James Cohan marks the exhibition’s first showing in New York; it was previously on view at The Dairy in London and at Design Miami.