British artist Lucy Williams redefines the idea of collage. Her detailed, low-relief work focuses on mid-20th century Modernist architecture and involves the careful layering of materials such as card, Perspex, fabric, thread and pillow stuffing. Each material is layered precisely by the artist to illustrate railings, lamp cords and other structural elements. In an interview with Wallpaper Magazine Williams said she sees her vacant images as spaces to be inhabited. “The era was about belief, ideas that we now no longer hold, of social cohesion through the design of a building, Utopian dreams long dissipated,” Williams says in her interview. She recently had her first solo exhibition in London Beneath a Woolen Sky, at the Timothy Taylor Gallery. Williams has also exhibited with the McKee Gallery in New York in 2004 and 2006. She has her B.A. in fine art from the Glasgow School of Art and her postgraduate diploma in Fine Art and Painting from the Royal Academy.

The Whitney Museum of American Art has recently announced artists for the 2008 Whitney Biennial, taking place March 6-June 1. Of the 81 participants, installation artist Carol Bove has been selected in addition to Rita Ackerman, Oliver Mosset, and Spike Lee. Bove has gained attention for what she calls “forced collaborations” with other artists. In a recent solo exhibition at Maccarone Gallery in New York, collectors lent Bove a 1963 eight-inch sphere by sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro, which she placed on a platform surrounded by concrete blocks, bronze cages, driftwood and steel. In the same exhibition, she covered part of the gallery’s ceiling with rigid metal mesh and then suspended thin copper rods from it. Each rod corresponded to the exact location of a star in the night sky above the gallery on October 21, 2007. She did this same installation with bronze rods on March 2, 2006 in Berlin. The immediacy of this work demonstrates that Bove’s work is “not nostalgic” as admirer (and co-curator of the 2008 Whitney Biennial), Shamin M. Momin states.

Bove earned her degree in studio art from New York University and has been reviewed by the New York Times and W Magazine. She began her career with installations of bookshelves containing cultural paraphernalia from the 1960s, such as the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and framed drawings of Mia Farrow. The books and various objects chosen referenced revolution, LSD, suicide, and radical politics, among other things. Alluding to a time when creative freedom was seemingly unrestrained, Bove transcends simple nostalgia by taking a conceptual approach to the cultural ideals of the 1960s. Uniting her early works and her new installations is the allusion to the ephemeral quality of life, both in the cultural “moment” of the 60s and the temporal “moment” of the alignment of the stars.

On view from January 12 – February 10, 2008 at Gallery 94 in Soho is a group exhibition featuring James Brittingham, Devon Costello, Michael Greathouse, Jim Lee, Sylvan Lionni and Pete Pezzimenti titled CHANGECASE – curated by Steven Stewart and Yasha Wallin, co-directors of Freight + Volume. Bringing diversity and individualism while sharing common concerns in extending the traditions, language and possibilities of painting; CHANGECASE will aim to spotlight the properties inherent within painting as an art object and consider the interaction of painting with alternative media. By uncovering and combining essential characteristics from multiple modes of art making, the work challenges the notion of definability.

British installation artist Simon Starling has an upcoming exhibition at Toronto’s Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery opening March 1, 2008. The Power Plant commissioned the 2005 Turner Prize winner for a site-specific piece based on Henry Moore’s 1954 bronze, Warrior with Shield. Moore had a close but controversial relationship with the city of Toronto, having several sculptures placed throughout the city. Canadians became resistant to this public support of a foreign artist.

For the commissioned piece, Starling submerged a replica of Moore’s sculpture in Lake Ontario in 2006, providing a host for the invasive Zebra mussels native to the Black Sea. This species was accidentally introduced to the Great Lakes in 1988 by boat, the same way Moore’s sculpture arrived in Canada. They have since proliferated, stimulating the ecosystem by flushing out pollutants and diminishing the population of the native species, thus becoming controversial themselves. The replica will be extracted and the shells of the mussels will remain, resulting in the central piece of the show, Infestation Piece (Musseled Moore). Starling uses the metaphoric mollusk to point to the tension between regionalism and globalism, both environmentally and artistically. The parallel between Moore’s artistic “invasion” of the city and the mussels’ biological invasion of the Great Lakes has both international significance and local relevance. Nine other works by the artist, all created in the past five years will accompany Infestation Piece.

Starling attended the Glasgow School of Art and had his first solo exhibition in 1995 at The Showroom in London. He has also shown at London’s Camden Art Centre. Starling’s interest in how human history affects the natural world pervades his work. By taking an existing artwork and altering it, the artist makes the audience aware of the greater social and historical contexts of a particular piece. The elegance and simplicity of his message, despite the complexities of its execution, allow the viewer to perceive the interconnectedness of nature, geography, society, and art.

Art director turned professional commercial and editorial photographer Phillip Toledano turns out personal projects that get picked up left and right. His newest body of work titled “HOPE&FEAR” is no exception to the rule that he has created for himself. “HOPE&FEAR” is the physical manifestation of the desires and paranoias that are adrift in american society today. The suits are our dreams and nightmares made real. Toledano graduated from Tufts University, Boston and has shown with Jenkins Johnson Gallery, New York. He has been published in New York Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair and at the top of his portfolio is the famous Absolut vodka bottle. You can read a full feature interview that discusses process and ideas with Toledano and The F Stop here.

Brazilian artist Jorge Mendes has created a group of work titled “Tide” for the Dennis Anderson Gallery, Belgium. It took place on the Saint Annake Strand, on Antwerps Linkerover, where the tide rose so high that part of the work was blown across the Schelde and landed in the gallery. What’s left of the work will be on view in the gallery until Jan 19. The title, “Tide”, is a reference to the unstoppable flow of water around the world; it’s also a play on words for the Flemish word for time, “Tijd”. The work explores the difficulties an emigrant faces trying to find his place in a strange land and nature vs. civilization, ecological issues, and arts place in society.

Concrete Color is a new body of work by artist and photographer Sarah Charlesworth on view at the Baldwin Gallery in Aspen. Living with artist Joseph Kosuth during a greater part of the 1970’s, Charlesworth has said that what was “gained from this period was a sense of the need for artists to reflect critically on their practice, acknowledging both the internal dialectic of art and the external ground of social and economic conditions” (Find Articles). With Kosuth, Charlesworth founded 7We Fox in 1975 , a magazine devoted to art theory; it only survived three issues. She received her BA from Barnard College and has shown with SITE Santa Fe and Margo Leavin Gallery.