Resistance, 2006; Courtesy the artist; Courtesy gb agency, Paris; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; Johnen Galerie, Berlin

The work of Slovakian artist Roman Ondák has been referred to as “intervention,” a label which makes reference to the way a piece confronts the viewer with an unexpected experience. Ondák, who is currently participating in the Berlin Biennale through August 8, 2010, creates work that is at once mischievous, hilarious and stone serious. He deals with social issues of both the grand and trivial scales and swaddles participants—whether knowingly or not—inside the folds of each performance. In the manner of a social scientist, he is wont to stage “temporary situations and imaginative sitespecific constructions that predict various communication patterns in behavior and in the perception of things.” (source) In his 2009 presentation of Measuring the Universe (2007) at Museum of Modern Art in New York, Ondák urged museum visitors to mark their height and first name on a white wall—the same way a child might over the years in a hallway at home—until the thousands of black ink markings became as visually dense as they were socially significant.

In Loop, his installation for the Slovakian Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale, he brought the lush grounds of the Giardini Publici into the interior pavilion, causing guests to take pause before realizing that the artist’s installation was in fact the well-ordered plant-life which surrounded them. His 2006 video Resistance, originally staged during an opening at Viennese Museum of Modern Art, plays with ideas of social status by following the feet of a group of guests with untied shoelaces. As reported by Kontakt, the Art Collection of Erste Group (whose artists were being presented in the exhibition during which Resistance was staged), “Fellow visitors were puzzled by this intervention, since there was no direct clue as to why certain people were posing this way. Thus Ondák queries the bondage, not necessarily visible, of certain peer groups, in this case through the need of people working in the field of art to proclaim otherness as a means counterbalancing social standardization.” (source)

Loop, 2009; Courtesy the artist; Courtesy gb agency, Paris; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; Johnen Galerie, Berlin

Roman Ondák was born in 1966 in Zilina, Slovakia and now lives in Bratislava. He was recently included in I’m Not Here. An Exhibition Without Francis Alÿs at De Appel, Amsterdam—a “solo exhibition that takes the form of a group exhibition in which works by the contributing artists evoke the atmosphere of the work of an absent Francis Alÿs.” He has been included in numerous solo presentations internationally, including at MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; 2009 Venice Biennale; and 2008 Shanghai Biennale.

I've Been Shot, installation view, courtesy XPACE Cultural Centre

In the 1988 action film, Die Hard, John McClane (played by Bruce Willis) hustles around a Los Angeles skyscraper—sweat-soaked and shirtless—in an effort to save his wife and other hostages from a ruthless terrorist group. At various points throughout the film, McClane (an NYPD officer) survives a partial jump from an exploding building and smashes through a plate glass window. Basically, he is injured to the extent that he arguably would not be able to still perform such heroics as he does (saving everyone in the end) if this were real life. But this is not real life, it’s Hollywood. And so the hero always perseveres.

The themes of personal danger, machismo and pain have been explored by artists in the past, namely Southern California performance artist Chris Burden. Burden is perhaps best known for his 1971 piece, Shoot, in which he had a friend shoot him in the left arm from a distance of about fifteen feet. Shoot, and the many other performances by Burden throughout that era (during which he crawled over broken glass, spent weeks on a high-up gallery platform with almost no food and no human interaction, and was nailed through the hands to a Volkswagen) prompted serious discussion around the subjects of fear, war (Vietnam), consumerism and the role of art in society. While there is no shortage of people who considered Burden insane at the time, many continue to consider his work monumental. (Incidentally, if you’re interested in reading more about Burden’s work, I recommend this particularly well-rounded New Yorker essay by Peter Schjeldahl.) What if, however, an artist were to take a more humorous–and admittedly less painful—approach to the same overall theme? Enter Toronto-based artist, Robert Lendrum.

I've Been Shot, installation view, courtesy XPACE Cultural Centre

Lendrum’s I’ve Been Shot consists of a looping video in which a man grasps his bloody chest and crawls in pain toward a red phone to call help after having been shot. Just as he reaches his goal and goes to lift the phone, the video loops back to the beginning where he enters the frame, grasps his chest, exclaims that he’s been shot, and drags his body toward the phone. And it goes on and on. In his statement about the piece, the artist says, “This humorous re-articulation of the Sisyphean myth…satirizes machismo in both the art world and Hollywood films.” I’ve Been Shot does well to continue the dialog that Burden once started, and at the same time consider the extremism of Burden’s approach, but it can easily be argued that the younger artist’s work is just as reactionary and extreme (albeit in a different way) than that of his predecessor.

Robert Lendrum is currently included in the group exhibition, THIS IS UNCOMFORTABLE, at Gallery TPW in Toronto, Ontario. He earned his BFA in Visual Arts and English at University of Western Ontario; his MA in Media Studies at Concordia University, Montreal; and his MFA in Documentary Media at Ryerson University, Toronto. He has been included in solo and group exhibitions all over Canada and in the U.S., including at: Xpace Cultural Centre, Toronto, ON; University of Colorado New Visual Arts Complex, Boulder, CO; and Spark Contemporary Art Space, Syracuse, NY.

Annelle's Cornbread (Marks, Mississippi), 2006. Courtesy the artist and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

I’m a sucker for a storyline involving a protagonist’s search for identity across generations and distant lands. More often than not this fascination is satisfied by reading a novel or watching a film, maybe listening to a three-verse country song. It’s not often that such a sprawling narrative emerges from within a work of art, but such is the case with the series of photographs by San Francisco-based artist Danielle Nelson Mourning in her debut solo exhibition at Taylor De Cordoba Gallery in Culver City.

Homecoming presents large-scale ink jet prints of the artist’s pilgrimage across the country and the Atlantic to understand herself and her ancestry. This is no documentary, though; Mourning has visited old family homes in Marks, Mississippi and Niagara Falls, New York to make self-portraits in which the self is more fictional than real. She assumes the dress and style of domestic women from decades past, recalling in part Cindy Sherman’s Complete Untitled Film Stills, though in a decidedly less aggressive way. Mourning goes to Ireland as well to recreate haunting scenes of life during the potato famine of 1845. The work is endearing in its earnest investigation of family history and self, and in its multidimensional presentation of women of certain eras and of domestic life. It seems to be an intensely personal practice, as if the project would mean as much to the artist regardless of whether it had an audience. Sometimes work comes across as so prepared for an audience that there is a paucity of the artist’s own identity, but there’s none of that here.

Rhubarb (Cavan County, Ireland), 2006. Courtesy the artist and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

The most affecting work in the show is the 8mm film, Memories from a Pleasant Visit, which mimics vintage 8mm home movies authentically with its camera shake, jumpy scene cuts and film noise. In it, the characters from Mourning’s Mississippi and Niagara Falls photo narratives are brought to life, though there is still a sense of disconnect between the intent of the characters as they move about, and any narrative that the viewer should draw from the quick scenes. Perhaps the film is the least narrative piece in the show because its presentation of ideas is so hectic, like scraps from the reel of life lying in disjointed piles on the cutting room floor of one’s mind. I actually wonder if I’ve ever been more taken with a work of video art, however. Maybe I relate to each of these divergent female characters, respond to grandma’s chatter as she flips through old photo albums, and possibly—most of all—enjoy the private thrill of being frightened by the subtle Hitchcockian tones of the film. The dull tapping of ivory keys, the lone voice of a choir girl singing, the black-and-white footage capturing the manic twirling of a woman in a gown—it’s chilling. But more so, it’s entrancing.

Paten Circle II (Marks, Mississippi), 2006. Courtesy the artist and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

Danielle Nelson Mourning lives in San Francisco, CA. She earned her MFA at Royal College of Art, London. Her work has been included in several group exhibitions, including at Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito; Hoopers Gallery, London; and the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Prague. Homecoming closes today, June 26. The film Memories from a Pleasant Visit can also be viewed at this link.

Jessica Hilltout; Domingos Ball, Mozambique; Chicome, Mozambique; from Amen series

Contemporary art, with it’s postmodern penchant for theory-riddled subtext and quirky aesthetics, doesn’t often fall under the category of “feel good” entertainment. That’s not a degradation, it’s a generalization by someone who looks at a lot of contemporary art. And nobody ever said that the role of art is solely to make the viewer feel good. However, when one comes across a series of work that is both visually and intellectually compelling, as well as inspiring, one takes notice. Perhaps one (that would be me) is even seeking it out on a subconscious level. Humans and their pesky yearning to be inspired. We seek this kind of joy and inspiration in other forms of art and entertainment as well, including: film, literature and sports. And in the case of sporting events, I can think of no better example of people coming together from around the world to be inspired and compelled than the FIFA (Soccer) World Cup. Sure, the Olympics draws upon that enthusiasm and serves up its share of inspiration every four years as well, but not like the World Cup. These fans are dedicated; they know the game, they follow the teams and players 365 days a year, every year. They play the game themselves.

Jessica Hilltout; petit-poto, Burkina Faso; James Town, Accra; from Amen series

As the 2010 World Cup kicks off its first full week in South Africa, the culmination of joy and inspiration seems even more heightened in comparison to previous years. Its host country is a historical nerve center for racial strife, social tension and high crime, with a rapidly increasing rate of disease, including HIV/AIDS. It is also a “model of racial reconciliation following decades of apartheid, with a burgeoning black middle class” (source). And, as often happens when a country finds itself climbing out of the trenches of tragedy, an event such as the World Cup—or even a simple pickup game of soccer—acts as a natural binding agent, suffusing hope far beyond the reach of sports enthusiasm. I should note that, certainly, not everyone takes such an optimistic view of the World Cup in South Africa, and of course my view is that of an outsider in any case; an observation more than an opinion. But by in large, the World Cup and the game of soccer (er, football) are inspiring a nation and a world at the moment.

Jessica Hilltout; Orlando, Chicome; Michael Sarkodie, Ghana; from Amen series

But what if the grandiose spectacle of the World Cup is removed from the sport? Will a nation—a continent—still be inspired by the game? In a new solo exhibition at Joao Ferreira Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa, Belgian photographer Jessica Hilltout presents a series of work entitled Amen, capturing images of rural football players from all over Africa. Equally inspiring to the aforementioned global match, the matches played by the rural footballers offer none of the World Cup’s fanfare. Their equipment is makeshift, their pitches (fields) are crude. There are no Nike logos or Gatorade sponsorships. But the essence of joy—of hard work, inspiration and coming together around a game—translates the same. As the artist says, “Amen, above all else, captures the strength of the human spirit.”

Jessica Hilltout; Demble, Ivory Coast; Unknown, Bukina Faso; from Amen series

Born in Belgium, Jessica Hilltout has had a nomadic that has taken her across Europe, Asia and Africa. She earned her BA in Photography at Blackpool College of Art, UK. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at The National Portrait Gallery, London and Aliceday Gallery, Brussels.

For nearly a century, Disney’s eclectic assembly of animated characters have persisted the hopeful notion of Happily Ever After. (And the certitude that a duck without pants is always quick to anger.) Like modern-day mythology, Disney stories take seemingly ordinary characters and place them into extraordinary circumstances, through which they eventually persevere and often learn a lesson along the way. Boy meets genie and earns the heart of a princess after he discovers that true value lies not in material riches but in love. Girl meets a gang of small men and learns that a prince’s kiss will revive her after she has been poisoned by a witch. (This one’s less about perseverance and more about Happily Ever After.) Mouse, Duck and Dog take an unpredictable drive through the countryside in a house-turned-precariously hitched trailer, during which time their bond of friendship strengthens. In any of these cases, the ultimate lesson or happy ending is revealed via the entertaining exploits of characters whom we grow to love. Disney characters are iconic and far-reaching. They are recognized the world over for bringing joy to children and adults, alike.

One community of particularly exuberant Disney fans has caught the eye and intellect of Cyprus-born artist, Christodoulos Panayiotou. In researching the city of Limassol’s Municipal Archives, Panayiotou has discovered that Limassolians have a decades-long tradition of dressing up as Disney characters during the town’s annual carnival parade. Since the 1970s the people of Panayiotou’s native town have adopted some of Disney’s most beloved personae. In his 2008 piece, Wonder Land, Panayiotou depicts this curious tradition through 80 color slides. While the phenomenon might appear as nothing more than eccentric to some of us, the artist—who refers to it as an “obsession”—has a much deeper interpretation. In a conversation with Nicos Charalambidis, published in Art Papers, Christodoulos Panayiotou says, “The parade is a kind of revelation of everything we would like to be, of everything we know we cannot be, and of everything we cannot afford to accept that we are.” In explaining how Wonder Land came to be, he says, “When I began my research at the carnival parade’s archives, the unusually large number of Disney-themed floats, costumes, and masks struck me…I interpreted it as an indication of a kind of popular, subversive reformatting of the official aims of the parade, which presents itself as a continuation of the Hellenic tradition, in both historical and mythological terms. I then tried to isolate the many Disney themed photographs, as I realized that their inner logic reflects my concept of the complexity of the island’s identity.”

Wonder Land and other new and recent work by Christodoulos Panayiotou is currently on view in a solo exhibition curated by Michelle Cotton at Cubitt Gallery in London. Panayiotou was born in Limassol in 1978 and studied dance and performing arts in Lyon and London. He has exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art Oxford; The National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens; Taipei Biennal (2008); Busan Biennale (2008); MoCA Miami; Rodeo Gallery, Istanbul and Künsthalle Zurich.

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.

Roy McMakin, My Slatback Chair with a Pair of Attached Chairs (2010)

Maybe it’s a case of seeing something a lot because I am hyper-interested—like when you suddenly notice that every other car on the freeway is a VW Jetta after you begin to drive one yourself—but I have been seeing a lot of design making its way into the fine art world of late. I’m talking about capital “D” Design, which for the purposes of this piece refers to furniture and other functional objects that also assume a glossy aesthetic that reach beyond pure functionality into the realm of art. Design is actually a process, but as a noun these days it is used to describe what we see when flipping through an issue of Dwell or the pages of the Design Within Reach catalog. Because even the great academic of our time, Wikipedia, can’t pin down a true definition, I can’t either in so many words. But I recognize that so-called fine art and design maintain separate identities (and followings) in large part.

I would be doing my Art History degree an injustice if I didn’t acknowledge that, yes, design has been an important player in the fine art world for a long time. What I’m seeing these days is in fact a resurgence of the Bauhaus-like interest in the coexistence of all arts, and a Meret Oppenheim-like playfulness in approaching the definitions of each genre. Still though, design hasn’t penetrated the white cube of the contemporary art gallery as much as painting or non-functional sculpture has over the years, until recently. As design makes its way into the exhibition scene, definition derives from context more than anything. Who among us hasn’t feared taking a seat at The Museum of Contemporary Art because we had doubts as to whether the bench was for resting upon or a part of the exhibition?

Roy McMakin A Wall Sculpture of a Drop Leaf Table (2010)

In his recent solo exhibition, In and On, at Lora Reynolds Gallery in Austin, TX, artist Roy McMakin presented a body of work that dives head-on into the ever-murkening waters of design and fine art. McMakin, who is also a furniture designer (again, the artist’s bio requires a distinction between his trades), combines found objects of the minimalist and much celebrated Mid-Century Modern design traditions with his own sculpture work, essentially reassigning all components new roles, or stripping them entirely of their original intentions. A minimalist drop leaf table hangs on the wall as a purely visual object; a duo of Mid-Century chairs gets tacked to McMakin’s slatback chair to form a disjointed piece wherein the latter loses its functionality and all parts become simply “art.” Click here to listen to the artist discuss his work from a March 24th gallery talk.

Roy McMakin lives and works in Seattle, WA where he owns and operates Domestic Furniture. He earned his BA and MFA at the University of California, San Diego. His work has been exhibited widely, including at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR. He has been commissioned by The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle and The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, among other institutions.

Anthony Discenza, Teaser #1 (2009)

Opening Thursday, May 13th and running through Saturday the 15th is a flash project at Catherine Clark Gallery’s New York space, the 14th Street Studio. The show, entitled Everything Will Probably Work Out OK, will feature recent work by Oakland, CA-based Anthony Discenza. Discenza’s text-based work is both literary-minded and low-brow laugh-inducing, and references the artist’s interest in what he calls an “internal viewing experience,” which is born of the freedom offered when one steps back from the constant heckling of image-based culture. His aluminum “street signs” offer the sort of one-liners that the Age of Twitter has become known for, though their enigmatic sentiments require a deeper dive into the murky waters of the wasted adult imagination than most 140 character witticisms.

When I spoke recently with gallery Owner/Director, Catherine Clark, she responded to Discenza’s new work—his so-called “non-visual source material”—by noting that “the new body of text-based projects, while in some ways a media or stylistic departure from his videos, remains consistent with his interests in appropriation and re-contextualizing cultural information.”

Everything Will Probably Work Out OK is the second pop-up exhibition being held at the 14th Street Studio—which is not so much a gallery in the classic sense (there is no “Catherine Clark Gallery, New York”), as an experiment into the way collectors and the public commingle with work. The first show at the space opened in March of this year—during the swarming of Manhattan that is New York art fair week—inspired by the idea that this season the gallery would like to present work in a more personalized setting in lieu of doing a fair.

The Discenza exhibition is a similar, though slightly altered, East Coast incarnation of an eponymously titled show at the Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco in January/February 2010. According to Clark, while many of the pieces from the original exhibit will be re-presented in the new space, “there are some significant additions and changes,” including the addition of a large digital photo-based work featuring the Olsen Twins. Additionally, she notes that “some of the text-based signs and works on paper are either newer pieces or feel more appropriate in relationship to the space and the other works selected for the exhibition.” While Everything Will Probably Work Out OK is only on view for three days this weekend, including during several cocktail receptions, the body of work will be up through the beginning of September and can be arranged for viewing by appointment.

Anthony Discenza, ELECTIVE PROCEDURE (2009) and LOW-KEY BASICS (2009)

Anthony Discenza earned his BA from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT and his MFA in Film and Video from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA. His work has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Australian Center for the Moving Image, the Getty Center, the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive and at the 2000 Whitney Biennial at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Seattle-based photographer Adam Satushek would like to play tricks on your eyes and your mind. His work, currently on view in the solo exhibition, Annex, at Platform Gallery in Seattle, does just that. Often many layers deep, Satushek’s works read like visual puns. The images he captures depict seemingly ordinary spaces and situations, only to reveal upon closer inspection that things aren’t quite as they seem. A stunning landscape is actually a painted backdrop, an elegant sailboat is dwarfed by a monstrous dock—or, more likely, the standard-sized dock appears massive aside a toy boat that glides by. In a way, one is reminded of Rene Magritte—the witty presentation and the questioning of images rings similar. But Satushek appears more earnest in intention. He says that his work “investigates the interactions and integration into the world by humans. As I explore the space between what I assume about the world and the realities of how the world exists, I reconsider the relationships between these objects and their environment. I am attempting to understand my own place in the world.“

Adam Satushek lives and works in Seattle, Washington. He earned his BFA in Photography from the University of Washington. His work has been exhibited at Rake Gallery, Portland, OR; SAM Gallery at the Seattle Art Museum Seattle, WA; Pingyao International Photography Festival, Pingyao, China; and SOIL Gallery, Seattle, WA. His work was part of a two-person show at Platform titled In Between Days in 2007.

Cory Arcangel, The Sharper Image, installation view. Image by Steven Brooke.

On view through May 9th at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami is a retrospective of  work made by Brooklyn-based artist, Cory Arcangel, from 2002 to present. The solo exhibition, entitled The Sharper Image, examines the prolific artist’s diverse practice, featuring a virtual grab bag of media—video, print, sound, performance, sculpture, drawing and web-based work. An artist, computer programmer and web designer, Arcangel was first featured on DailyServing in 2007. He is best known for his explorations of consumer technology and digital culture, including cheeky modifications to old-school Nintendo games, such as in the 2002 piece I Shot Andy Warhol—an interpretation of the 1980s NES game Hogan’s Alley. Other works on view in The Sharper Image include: several prints of Photoshop Product Demonstration Gradients; Space Invader (2004), the modification of the old Atari Game Space Invaders; and a temporary re-design of the MOCANOMI website by changing the font to Comic Sans, which is live throughout the tenure of the exhibition.

Cory Arcangel, The Sharper Image, installation view. Image by Steven Brooke.

Cory Arcangel lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been included in numerous international group exhibitions such as Younger than Jesus at the New Museum, New York (2009), The Possibility of an Island at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2008); Color Chart at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007); Speed 3 at the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia, Spain (2007); Time Frame at P.S. 1, New York (2006); Database Imaginary at The Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada (2004); and the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2004). A solo show of his work just closed at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. He is represented by Team Gallery in New York.

Aurélien Froment, still from Pulmo Marina (2010)

On view through May 1st at Khastoo Gallery in Los Angeles is the two person exhibition, Dark After After Dark. The show features the new work of French artist, Aurélien Froment, and English artist, Ryan Gander. Each is presenting a separate film or video projection, a meditation on a singular object in motion. Froment’s Pulmo Marina—a dayglow documentary of sorts about the Egg-yolk Jellyfish—reads like a psychedelic seventh grade science class video, which you can’t take your eyes off of. The academic sounding narrator, whose voice graces Gander’s piece as well, soothingly lectures on the anatomy of this particular type of jellyfish (formally known as the Phacellophora camtschatica), and then jarringly shifts in tone with a quirky aside, saying, “Jellyfish just don’t fit the categories.”

Ryan Gander, still from Best work EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER (2010)

This tongue-in-cheek narration intensifies in Gander’s Best work EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER—a 16mm film projection of a sequence of a mini DV tape floating through space. Over the visual homage to the 1989 flying toaster screensaver, the narrator earnestly discusses the piece, saying at one point, “This particular work has been a challenge to make, a work that talks about the notion of cliché without simply remaining one. And I’m still unsure whether I’ve succeeded. A video tape floating through space is, of course, a cliché.” Both pieces provide a humorous—and eerily unsettling at times—juxtaposition between this trusted voice and visual of academia and science, against the humanized and self-doubting interjections of the narrator.

Aurélien Froment is a French artist who currently lives in Dublin, Ireland. Ryan Gander was born in Chester and currently lives and works in London, England. Both artists’ work has been exhibited extensively internationally. Dark After After Dark is their first collaborative show in Los Angeles.

Currently on view at Blindside in Brisbane, Australia, is the collaborative exhibition, At the time of atmospheric precipitates—exhibition is not function. An exercise in creative flexibility of sorts, the collaboration between Brisbane-based artists Danielle Clej and Ruth McConchie consists of a constructed “kaleidoscopic labyrinth,” which explores the architectural boundaries of the space. During the short installation period, the duo arranged and rearranged objects and improvised the form of the elaborate installation, which will continue its fluctuating state of development throughout the course of the show. This is not the first collaboration between Clej and McConchie—they’ve constructed spaces in site-specific installations before. As Blindside notes, “Clej and McConchie have distinct, individual art practices; yet share a desire to shape provisional, sensuous systems of order. These works are mutually driven by their obsessions with creating spatial-object-bodily dialogues within the structure of gallery sites. Employing formal and conceptual tactics of compulsively working to the excess, they play with repetitive processes of material collection to arrange stuttering rhythms of form, colour and light.” At the time of atmospheric precipitates—exhibition is not function is on view through April 24th.

Danielle Clej recently earned a Ph.D in practice-led research at the Queensland University of Technology. She is a co-director of Brisbane based artist-run-initiative inbetweenspaces and recently co-curated the international art project, Constellations. Her work has been exhibited at Block Gallery, QUT, Brisbane; First Draft Gallery, Sydney; Karen 19 Gallery, Gold Coast, and beyond.

Ruth McConchie is a current MA candidate at Queensland University of Technology. She is a co-director of Brisbane based artist-run-initiative inbetweenspaces. She has exhibited at No Frills Gallery, Brisbane; !Metro Arts, Brisbane; Accidentally Annie Street Space, Brisbane; and First Draft Gallery, Sydney.

Elizabeth Berdann, Emoticons (2008), oil on steel

The Contemporary Art Museum Honolulu is currently presenting four concurrent solo exhibitions by New York and Los Angeles-based artists, including Daily Serving featured artist and interviewee, Allison Schulnik, as well as Elizabeth Berdann, Judy Fox and Fay Ku. New York-based Elizabeth Berdann’s solo show, entitled Wonders Curiosities and Conundrums, is the first museum retrospective of the artist’s work over the past two decades. The work on view, created from 1989 to 2009, adheres to TCM’s theme for all four shows “in which the artists work in different media and styles but have a common denominator in their interest in the figure.” Berdann describes her own work as “highly focused, detailed examinations of bodies (frequently human, but not exclusively so),” and says she is “continually fascinated by the plasticity of bodies and the underlying psychological terrain.” Berdann’s collective works—from the 1990 installation, The Wall of Tongues, to the more recent Emoticons—are whimsical, fierce, peculiar and beautiful at once.

Elizabeth Berdann, The Wall of Tongues (1990), oil on copper, installation view and detail view

New York-based Elizabeth Berdann earned her BA at Smith College and has studied at Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris, France; Yale University, New Haven, CT; Instituto Allende, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; and Parsons School of Design, New York, NY. Her work has been exhibited wildely, including at Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art & Design, Los Angeles; Lesley Heller Gallery, New York; Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; White Columns, New York; and Betty Rymer Gallery at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, among several other prestigious awards.

Ray Tomlinson. @. 1971. Here displayed in ITC American Typewriter Medium, the closest approximation to the character used by a Model 33 Teletype in the early 1970s. Courtesy MoMA.

Days ago, the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architecture and Design announced their acquisition of a new work into the collection. The piece is one that we of the age of email and Twitter know well—the @ symbol. Since the announcement, the Internet has been abuzz with the news, mostly because its implications reach far beyond the art and design world. It’s so familiar to us all. It’s either momentous or silly, depending on your personal view, but it can’t be denied that the acquisition marks a poignant point in the history of art, in that “It relies on the assumption that physical possession of an object as a requirement for an acquisition is no longer necessary,” as was stated by MoMA Department of Architecture and Design Senior Curator, Paola Antonelli, in her essay on the matter of the acquisition published on March 22, 2010 by MoMA.

In her essay, Antonelli explains the history of the @, and how it came to be valued as a piece important enough for the permanent collection at MoMA. Though the symbol “dates back to the sixth or seventh century,” it’s Ray Tomilson—creator of the first email system in 1971—who elevated it “to [be a] defining symbol of the computer age,” according to Antonelli. She goes on to defend the symbol as a design, saying, “Tomlinson performed a powerful act of design that not only forever changed the @ sign’s significance and function, but which also has become an important part of our identity in relationship and communication with others,” and that “His (unintended) role as a designer must be acknowledged and celebrated by the one collection—MoMA’s—that has always celebrated elegance, economy, intellectual transparency, and a sense of the possible future directions that are embedded in the arts of our time, the essence of modern.”

What do you think about the acquisition? You can always comment below, email us at info@dailyserving.com, or let us know on Twitter: @DAILYSERVING. (Get it? Basically you can’t escape the symbol, which is now a precious work of art. Something to consider when crafting your responses.)