Opening Thursday, May 6th, We have as much time as it takes is the final thesis exhibition of the Curatorial Practice program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. The following interview was conducted for the exhibition catalog between curators Nicole Cromartie and Courtney Dailey and two members of Red76. It is the first in a series of interviews to be published at Daily Serving with artists from the exhibition. The catalog is available as a free downloadable pdf at www.wattis.org/whamtait.

Red76 is a multi-artist collective founded in Portland, Oregon, in 2000. The project they conceived for We have as much time as it takes was executed mainly by two of its members, Sam Gould and Gabriel Saloman. Counter-Culture as Pedagogy: Pop-Up Book Academy is a yearlong series of events that take place in a variety of venues. The latest edition of The Journal of Radical Shimming, available for free in the gallery, includes interviews and a counterculture index created for this exhibition. It will accompany the project’s next iteration at the Walker Art Center this summer. Learn more at www.red76.com.

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The Great American Novel, Moby Dick, takes on new life at the exhibition of the same name currently showing at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute. The exhibition loosely traces the narrative of the epic (and episodic) tale with each of the three galleries dedicated to the story’s protagonists, Ishmeal, Ahab, and of course, the White Whale, Moby Dick. Thirty-three artists ranging from the established to emerging are exhibited, and a large number consist of specially commissioned works that reflect the artist’s own interpretation of the Herman Melville classic. Among the highlights are Marcel Broodthaers, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Buster Keaton, Richard Serra, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and even Orson Welles. A room-sized replica of the sperm whale has been executed by artist Andreas Slominski, and though a commissioned work (size, scale, and the dried, crumbling, clay material reveal this) Slominski’s interpretation of the harpoons which brought down the White Whale demonstrates his imaginative personal iteration of the novel’s denouement. Also of considerable interest is an eight-foot salt tower by Mexican artist Damian Ortega. Thick, crystal-white salt was rammed into a narrow, rectangular tower made of plywood. The wood was removed, leaving the salt tower to crumble to the gallery floor, an unplanned but satisfyingly rich effect.

The exhibition lay-out is perhaps the most striking part about the show, and it alludes to an atmospheric environment—with walls painted a nautical navy blue and the works hung low at what curator, Jens Hoffman, calculates to be the difference in sea level between the port of New Bedford, Massachusetts and the water level at the exhibition’s home in San Francisco, California. A fully-loaded voyage through historic artifacts, fresh art works, and this classic American tale is an experience worth staying on board for. Moby Dick will be on display until December 12, 2009.

“In order to educate man to a new longing, everyday familiar objects must be shown to him with totally unexpected perspectives and in unexpected situations”. This quote by Russian Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko is especially fitting when describing the work of artist Mitzi Pederson. Mapping extremely formalized landscapes, Pederson’s sculptural forms are made up of found material (much resembling construction debris) and are intentionally placed and arranged throughout the gallery space. For her current show at Ratio 3 in San Francisco, Pederson has created an abstracted city that appears as if it could have arisen from the rough, wooden gallery floor. The show’s title, I’ll Start Again, perhaps refers to the rawness and nakedness of the object’s material make-up. The works themselves, very much akin to the work of the Russian Constructivists, are grounded in roots of formalism, balance, and material. Much like Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin’s Corner Relief (1914-15) – a relief sculpture made of iron, copper, wood, and rope meticulously poised between two walls – Pederson has created a number of balance-based wall works using small wooden boards, string, and nails. Her fascination with geometry, order, and space places her work in line with the architectural model and the modes of structural-spatial relations – shapes and voids created by manipulating the materials draw the viewer closer to inspect. The essential concept of Pederson’s work is a reconsideration of the formal qualities of everyday materials.

Pederson received a B.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from California College of the Arts. Besides Ratio 3, she has exhibited widely both internationally and nationally including Hammer Projects, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, White Columns in New York, and at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Pederson currently lives and works in Berlin.

For her installation at Berlin’s Capitian Petzel, Polish artist Monika Sosnowska, in her signature style, emphasizes space through an array of constructed structures. Seven pieces fill the main gallery space, arranged in a line, beginning with the smallest–a metal stool whose legs have been bent so the viewer is actually looking at the stool’s underside–and concluding with a large, twisted sculpture resembling a railing or banister that is mysteriously hung upon a wall. Each of the structures represents an element of everyday Polish life. A picnic table with the seats folded over the table top, a open door and frame lacking a room to walk in or out of, and the cross-section of two walls creating four individual half-spaces that mimic a bar in a small Polish town. The sculptures engage in a dialogue about the former Eastern Bloc’s highly recognizable public architectural and structural elements, which is then accentuated by Capitian Petzel’s modernist gallery, situated along a wide communist-style boulevard in what was once East Berlin. The placement of Sosnowska’s objects in an incongruent line, and their manipulation speaks to a part of Europe still in transition, and an inability, or unwillingness, to forget the lived histories of the past.

Sosnowska lives and works in Warsaw and is one of Poland’s most recognized contemporary artists. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Europe, including the 50th Venice Biennale and Manifest 4. Capitian Petzel is one of Berlin’s newest galleries. Housed in a glass pavilion located along Karl-Marx-Allee in eastern Berlin’s East Mitte neighborhood, the gallery is a collaborative project of Gisela Capitian of Gallerie Gisela Capitian in Cologne and Friedrich Petzel of Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York. Their exhibitions feature a variety of international artists interacting with the unique and historic space.

Upon entrance into Ulla von Brandenburg’s colorful installation entitled Singspiel, one is confronted with a sensation of curious exploration coupled with the particular anxiety of entering the unknown. The labyrinthine structure is made up of a series of solid colored fabrics forming an intervention in space and architecture. These colors refer to the color scale of Swiss Psychoanalyst Max Luscher, who in the 1950s conceived a model for personality types based on specific color preferences. At the end of this vivid and modestly Constructivist structure is a film projected onto the soft fabric wall. The guests–an eerie sense of “being expected” surfaces at this moment–are invited to sit and watch the film. Much like the physical journey of the viewer, the film depicts a slower, black and white journey through an architectural space. Filmed at Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s famous building Villa Savoye, the voyage of the viewer continues through the historic ramps, partitions, and rooms of the Villa.

Like most of von Brandenburg’s work, Singspiel explores aspects of theater, performance, and psychological states and in this case, takes the form of a somber and still film. As the film travels through the Villa, a series of players appear and disappear, conjoin and separate upon the camera’s direction. The modernist imagery is juxtaposed with classical elements and mechanics of theater and performance, with much emphasis on the fundamentals of Brecht’s Epic Theatre. The transitions among the characters occur through song and the singer’s voice is high-pitched and peculiar, adding another layer to von Brandenburg’s tale. Sensations of melancholy and mystery are present in the film’s final scene which takes place in the house’s garden where the characters appear to be attending a performance of sorts (not coincidentally, they are sitting in stools that are identical stools of the viewer). A pronounced Brechtian curtain is drawn to reveal the players of this story in a sort of meta-situation–a play inside the play.

Von Brandenburg is a German-born artist who lives and works in Paris. Besides film and installation, she works in a wide variety of media including drawing, painting, and live performance.

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.

Over the next five days, DailyServing.com will bring exclusive coverage of this year’s 53rd Annual Venice Biennale. DailyServing writers Arden Sherman and Kelly Nosari traveled to Venice earlier this month and attended the exhibitions, and over the next five days will report on some of the most noteworthy work in this year’s Biennale.

Despite the tough economic times and talk of a more “serene biennale,” the 2009 Venice Biennale remains a fervent display of blue chip art and its dedicated following. Exhibition curator Daniel Birnbaum has stayed committed to his title of Making Worlds by including both established and emerging artists in the international fair. “My hope is that the Biennale does not merely present fragments of something that has been broken down” Birnbaum has said, contextualizing the Biennale in the current financial market, “but will offer a glimpse of something still to come–if not a new and totally coherent vision, then at least as an emerging plurality of possibilities” (interview with Artforum, May 2009).

The most notable change in this year’s exhibition is the opening of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. Formally the Italian Pavilion, the Palazzo houses half of the Making Worlds exhibition and will remain open to the public year-round, providing a place for future, multi-disciplinary projects. To emphasize this new permanence, Birnbaum invited artists Tobias Rehberger, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Massimo Bartolini to create functional spaces within the Palazzo. Rehberger, for his part–a fully functioning cafeteria–received the Golden Lion for the best artist of the exhibition, the highest of Biennale honors. In addition to the Making Worlds exhibition in both the Palazzo and the Arsenale (the former warehouse of the Venetian fleet), the historic national pavilions in the Giardini remained vibrant, and 2009 marked the inclusion of first-time participants Montenegro, Principality of Monaco, Republic of Gabon, Union of Comoros, and United Arab Emirates.

Bruce Nauman’s exhibition, Topological Gardens, represented in the first place United States Pavilion, was additionally exhibiting in two other Venice venues, the Universita Iuav di Venezia at Tolentini and the Exhibition Spaces at Universita Ca’ Foscari. American artist John Baldessari was also a big presence in Venice. Besides being presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award (alongside Yoko Ono), Baldessari’s works and interventions could be seen along the Grand Canal, most notably his photo-mural of an oceanfront which covered the entire front-facing facade of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. In addition to today’s art stars, Birnbaum made an effort to represent emerging and, at the other end, even deceased artists like Andre Cadere and Lygia Pape, whose inclusion supported Birnbaum’s concept of a more complete “world”.

The Biennale will be on display until November 22, 2009 and will continue to host collateral performances, lectures and events until closing.