Jennifer Steinkamp, "Moth, 5," 2012. Computer generated light projection. Approximately 7.5 x 10 feet.

Standing within Jennifer Steinkamp’s most recent solo exhibition, “Moth,” at ACME (Los Angeles, CA), I was reminded of this detached relationship with actuality. Esteemed for her captivating 3-D animation projections and installations, the new media artist has steered away from her recent room-engulfing environments for something quieter, though still digital. A few swatches of tattered fabric are suspended by unseen pins, silently fluttering and twisting in a simulated breeze. Their pastel hues evoke a Southern spring, like garments abandoned on the clothesline for the alluring indulgences of a lazy afternoon. Steinkamp’s mastery of movement simulates the kind of nostalgic hypnosis found in nature’s many gestures – a beckoning tree branch or a nodding lilac coax you to stay for awhile, like a child meandering through the park. “Moth” is alluring in its unpretentious grace, the cloth reminiscent of a neglected, tangible past, elegant despite its imperfections. Hinting at the nettlesome insects of the same name, “Moth” brings to mind abandonment, or human experience left to decay in favor of e-simulacra. Consumed by a persistent need for a personal repository, we often overlook the ephemeral in our desperate plight for eternal imitation – a notion best illustrated by Steinkamp’s moth-eaten textiles, which reveal a reoccurring choreography after several moments.

Jennifer Steinkamp, "Moth, 2," 2012. Computer generated light projection. Approximately 7.5 x 10 feet.

Much like “Madame Curie,” (2011) the artist’s recent commission for the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, “Moth” alludes to the increasingly complex kinship we share with nature and technology. While both share the unwavering observation of time and evolution, each faction poses ever more conflicting interpretations of mortality. Whether our sensory consciousness or our intellectual annals prove our livelihood remain to be seen; until then, we may continue to twist in Steinkamp’s imitation wind.

“Moth” is on view at ACME through March 10th, 2012.

Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Screen capture using Google Earth.

When I was a child, I spent countless hours poring over a Cold War–era National Geographic photo atlas. I traced every road and river, in every country, some which no longer existed or were currently in the process of brutal disintegration (à la balkanization). Sometimes, when I was really lucky, a country would be represented by two or three photographs. Some countries earned no photographic representation. Nonetheless, these photographs helped me learn that Thai women had really long fingernails, Brazilian men wrestled anacondas naked, and Africa was an untamed land bereft civilization and modernity. This photo atlas provided a seven-year-old me with irrefutable evidence about my world, but it also left so many questions. Malawi and Kyrgyzstan had no photos; what were they like? As I grew older these questions became more nuanced: Are all Algerians really Tuaregs? Might South Americans actually wear clothes? Are Western Europe and the United States as idyllic and perfect as the amber waves of grain imply? As much of a colonial travesty as that book was, it sparked an intense interest in the world and provided me with enough information to later deconstruct its own narrative.

Jump forward a few decades. Croatia is firmly established as a tourist hotspot, Dubai is megalopolis, and Burma is now Myanmar. So much has changed. We also now have a qualitatively different kind of atlas: Google Earth. This new atlas—a seven-year-old technology that allows me access to every nook and cranny of the planet’s surface—ostensibly offers a potential antidote to the inaccuracies of older atlases. This computer software exposes the mysteries of the world; every single village, building, and street on the planet is immediately viewable to me, save those hidden beneath thick canopies.

Prior to photography, atlases were geometric abstractions, lines representing places that were theoretically real, but unconfirmed to those people who had never been to them. The dragons and mythical creatures that sometimes populated these maps speak to their susceptibility to distortion and myth making. But with the advent of photography, people believed they could see the unmediated reality of these places. Photography offered a form of documentation that then (and now) carried more authority than technical illustrations. A “higher” form of knowledge was now available. But as my childhood photo atlas shows in hindsight, nominal and highly selective representation does little to demystify those places we’ve never been, and this epistemic pitfall can be found in Google Earth as well.

On the surface, Google Earth is far from a medieval abstraction aided by a few self-fulfilling photographs. When I look at the Congo, I see it exactly as it was at a distance of 2,300 feet on Tuesday June 29, 2010. Google Earth also contains millions of geotagged photos. Provided primarily by tourists and amateur photographers, these images offer much more than a bird’s eye view of a particular locale. In many parts of the world, Street View offers an even more in-depth view. While planning a potentially hypothetical trip to Monaco, I traveled around the streets of Monte Carlo noting where restaurants and adequate parking are (note: there is a lot of one, and very little of the other). By having an on the ground look, I will know that town inside out before I even land in Nice.

Does this deluge of specific, visual information foster only an armchair interest in the world? Why even go to Monaco? I’ve seen it. So what is left of the experience? I can visit San Diego if I want warmth, visit Vegas if I want wealth, and visit Napa if I want wine. Does our easy access to so much information about the places viewed render them “known” and negate our search for a deeper understanding of a place or a visit to it?  However, my desire to visit Monaco—or Saint Helena, or Iceland, or the Mongolian steppes—is not diminished one bit. That intense yearning to learn more about these places and really see them (whatever that means) still persists. This suggests two things: that there is something more to the places we visit than what we see, and that there is something lacking in the apparent omniscience of the digital atlas.

Boulevard Princesse Charlotte, Monte Carlo, Monaco. Screen capture using Google Earth.

There is really no easy way for someone in Monte Carlo to document her experiences of taste, touch, and smell. Sight and hearing, on the other hand, are easier senses to capture; images and sounds less complicated to disseminate. It is easy then to equate places with their sights, those buildings, monuments, and natural wonders that are named for the sense that we most associate with them. And until virtual reality and holograms are perfected, the first-hand experience of a distant place is absolutely unattainable. So while I am zipping down the rues and avenues with Street View, I am missing out on the sounds of the horns and seagulls, the mild Mediterranean breeze, the coconut scent of the artificially buxom and bronzed starlets, and the taste of the latte that tops it all off. More importantly, I am missing out on the first-hand experience of all it all. I engage in no conversations with locals, no arguments with merchants, and no drinks with fellow tourists. That is, all that I enjoy about visiting a place is completely missing. Even sightseeing, the most Flickrable activity imaginable, is nothing without the phenomenological experience of feeling the mass or the emptiness of a building in the pit of your stomach.

Yet we use Google Earth as much more than a surrogate for tourism. It is a compendium of knowledge about the world—knowledge that may provide the basis of how we think about the world. Popular, specious knowledge says that to see is to believe and that a picture is worth a thousand words. By my count then, Google Earth is worth untold billions of words, constituting many, many beliefs. Given the scientific satellite imagery and seemingly exhaustive photo documentation provided, viewers may erroneous take these “beliefs” to be objective approximations of the world when sometimes they are incredible aberrations.

For example, North Korea is a starving nation. It has been reported that in 2011, authorities reduced the daily caloric intake for each individual to 700, or one Venti Double Chocolaty Chip Frappuccino from Starbucks. The average official salary for workers is $2 per month. The country is wracked by poverty and oppression, but Google Earth provides scant acknowledgement of this. To the uninformed, the geotagged photos of Pyongyang provide evidence of a wealthy nation. Magnificent architectural achievements abound, great stadiums suggest that the city may have once been host to the Olympics, and nary a starving child is to be found. Ever the skilled curators, the North Korean government finely crafts how the rest of the world sees it. They disseminate few images from their country and those few outsiders who are allowed in are taken on highly orchestrated and monitored tours that show them only what the officials want to be seen. In turn, these visitors can only rarely (and very illegally) document those starving and dying in the streets.

Disneyland, Anaheim, California. Screen capture using Google Earth.

But even outside dystopian societies, Google Earth remains a world of selective documentation. Take, for example, the city I was born in. It has a population of over 300,000. It has shopping malls and theaters, rich and poor neighborhoods, hospitals and offices. Some of this is made visible by Google Earth, but very little. The reality of this city is almost entirely obfuscated by an eighty-five acre lysergic Zion: Disneyland. To Google Earth, outside of Disneyland, Anaheim and its hundreds of thousands of residents do not even exist. This phenomenon can be found, to varying degrees, in every city in the world.

The fact is, most of us simply do not photograph liquor stores and gas stations. We photograph that which we find interesting and that which we think others will find interesting. This leaves us with a digital photo atlas of the world that is entirely unreal. The slums of Anaheim are not photo worthy, nor are the well-kept buildings of Freetown, Sierra Leone. All regions of the world are affixed with preexisting narratives, and tourists, journalists, and Google users often reinforce these narratives through the photographs they shoot and share.

But let us not forget the lesson of my childhood atlas. While it promoted a racist and NATO-centric view of the world, it nonetheless gave me knowledge for critiquing that very viewpoint. I must first know that Freetown exists before I can even imagine challenging how it is represented to the world. After witnessing countless photos of shanties and dilapidated buildings in Freetown on Google Earth, I eventually came across a photo of a sleek, Mies van der Rohe–inspired bank building—a stark contrast to the narrative of a rural and bush sub-Saharan Africa. But then again, thank God for the photos of the shanties; it would be a tragedy to forget them.

Zenith Bank, Freetown, Sierra Leone. Screen capture using Google Earth.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Comprising only a large installation at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir’s Crepusculum – Latin for “twilight” or “dusk” – is a mixed-media, polyphonic, physical exploration of metaphysical structures that govern the human psyche, and speculates that an enigmatic and irrational system of signs, meanings and forms counterbalances the deceptively ordered exteriors of our existence.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Above all, it is an experiential and tactile show that prioritises evoking a multitude of emotions over engaging the intellect. A large, white spherical entity around which alchemic instruments are scattered sits on a pile of sand; music seems to leak out from all sides of the wall, surrounded by glass-protected ancient Icelandic calfskin parchments that record supernatural accounts of a medieval Scandinavian world inhabited by witches, trolls and dragons. The installation is populated with elemental components of the earth such as dust, dough, fire, blood, burlap and fur, but also overlaid with textures that are fur- or hair-roughened. An accompanying video bolsters the already-surreal installation as a narrator weaves a showy mythological universe with his droning words: a man guts slimy fish, a figure lithely unfolds itself out of clay “legs” and “helmet”, a figure wrapped in tattered cloths hikes laboriously across a sandy wasteland with another strapped to his back towards the self-same spherical entity.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Crepusculum’s allusive and mystical atmosphere appears to be as much a personal aesthetic journey as it is a collective memory of Iceland’s histories. Materially, the exhibition is about Friðriksdóttir’s continued creative experimentation with diverse materials and media that has been in part influenced by the breadth of Swiss/German Dieter Roth’s artistic processes and vocabulary. Friðriksdóttir’s starting point for Crepusculum is rooted in her own dreams – intangible tendrils of thoughts that bleed into each other are first allowed to drift unassisted into esoteric realms and subsequently thematically developed through a combination of simple sketches, sculpture and film. The overall effect is an imagistic universe comprising a choir of overlapping voices, an aggregate of signs and diverse earthy components, but it is hard to see beyond Crepusculum as an oracular endeavour to present nebulous connections to sexual psychology and pop culture while casting light on deconstructing traditional patterns of narratives located within Norse mythology .

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

But Crepusculum is also Friðriksdóttir’s personal re-imagination of a time in Iceland when folklore, gods and magic were fundamental tenets of existence, and where elaborate stories of creation were punctuated by moments of horror, melancholy and unquestioning didacticism. Augmenting her exhibition are twelfth century manuscripts and almanacs loaned from the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík for the first time; such is the reinforcement of the historical investment in Iceland’s national cultural heritage and the revelation of the intense grip that these traditions and mythology still have on twenty-first century Icelandic culture. Perhaps then, for Friðriksdóttir, this is simultaneously a profound ambassadorial undertaking on behalf of the Icelandic people, a cultural burden so complex that it could only be presented in ambivalent spaces as metaphysical considerations.

***

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir: Crepusculum will be on show at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt until January 8, 2012.

Christine Ay Tjoe, The Famous One from Lucas, 2011, Installation view. Photo: Edward Hendricks.

A biblical parable tells of a wayward son who leaves home for a distant land after demanding his inheritance from his father. Squandering his riches quickly, he repentantly returns to his father’s house hoping to be hired as one of his father’s servants but find instead, his father’s unexpected kindness and forgiveness. Christine Ay Tjoe’s current site-specific show The Famous One from Lucas # I at the Hermès Art Space references this well-known narrative of prodigality, articulating the interdependency of loss/gain and despair/hope through soft-fabric sculptures constructed out of goose-feathers, tulle fabric, stockings and industrial felt.

Christine Ay Tjoe, 24 of Us 65, 2006, Mixed Media and Glass Box, 65.5 x 50 x 6 cm.

Attempting to sublimate the profound personal workings of hope and despair into rituals of healing and rebirth has been a recurrent theme in Tjoe’s artistic practices. Unlike what we’ve come to expect from many contemporary Asian artists who respond to political or social change, Tjoe’s sensibility veered off this course early on. In 2003, her installation Santa/Satan at the CP Open Biennale was an acerbic critique of government authorities encumbered by bureaucracy and its trappings. But at some stage, her artistic gaze had turned inward, probing out suitable platforms on which questions of the transcendental could be raised. “I’m interested in the relationships between theology and humanity, which give rise to perceptions on the range of human emotions, motivations and experience,” she writes in an email interview, when asked if there were indeed, fundamental questions about art and religion that she had always sought to answer. “It relates to universal human experiences and emotions such as joy and grief and human expressions in extreme situations – this is something I’ve been curious about and continually investigate in my works.”

Christine Ay Tjoe, Santa/Satan, 2003, Installation, mixed media, 80 x 52 x 37 cm.

Steered by spiritualistic meditations and cosmological perspectives, her works are unsurprisingly attuned to the allegorical and the symbolic, utilising ephemeral spaces and fragmentary images that comment on the irreducible essence of flawed human nature. Lama Sabakhtani Club (2010) compares the tragic scale of loneliness and anguish to Christ’s ordeal on the cross in a series of installations assembled by strings, nails and fabrics. In Interiority of Hope (2008), Tjoe’s imagines the psychological state of the criminal Barabbas – the man Pilate released instead of Christ at the demand of the people – as one caught between the joy of his release and the unrelenting guilt of the crimes that he committed. In both shows, the forms of her work often appear as impressionistic renderings of complex lines or as misshapened entities whose purpose remain ambivalent. They share an allusive and elusive quality that often suggests that materials from without exist only to reveal the malleability and flux found within, elucidating an artistic vision that treads dangerously close to rehashing Renaissance humanist patterns of self-knowledge and its limitations.

Christine Ay Tjoe, Barabas Lights no. 07, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 170 x 135 cm.

The Famous One from Lucas # I continues Tjoe’s exploration of materiality as metaphor for the esoteric nature of the human condition. Textiles are primarily transformed into both familiar and non-familiar objects – a worn-out sofa and a teddy bear being the more recognisable ones –, their surface textures and form adding, according to Tjoe, an interesting dimension of sensation especially for the object art she creates. But like wanderers in a labyrinthine environment, it is hard to tell where The Famous One from Lucas # I starts and ends, despite Tjoe’s assertion we are walking through memory markers (displayed as physically undefined objects along cocooned walls) that express the journey of one’s life. We know the show’s conceptual starting points: the sheer greyness of the human psyche dictates that hope and despair are faces of the same coin, defined by their relation to one another. Yet the lack of linearity in its atmospheric spaces, soft curved walls and winding pathways seems to scope out a more cosmic intersection of nature and nurture; it introduces into the visitor experience a hint of the tenuous boundaries separating the cerebral and the emotional, the past and the present, the spiritual and the carnal.

Christine Ay Tjoe, The Famous One from Lucas, 2011. Photo: Edward Hendricks.

The physicality of the work reflects its metaphorical framing; we inexplicably find ourselves wandering in its pathways numerous times, beginning where we end, ending so that we could start once more. In this visual text, we can participate in the shameful indulgence and repeated transgressions of prodigality while simultaneously walking the passage of redemption and liberation.

***

The Famous One from Lucas #I was on show at the Hermès Art Space until November 27; this article could not have been completed without the contribution of Christine Ay Tjoe herself in an email interview and the support of Hermès Art Space and the Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

Between train cars and mopeds, and over the course of thousands of miles, Pat Perry slowly realizes his dream of busting outside the confines of the mundane. All too often that monotony can squelch creative impulses, but this intrepid illustrator is pretty determined to avoid that at all cost. After getting in touch with Pat over email, we exchanged a few wayward text messages and in the end, missed each other in Chicago. It was between stops on this summer expedition of his, that he was able to answer some questions about the nature of his incredibly detailed work.

In a modern art era where so much is done digitally, Pat’s calculated and surreal illustrations bend back the paradigm by once again elevating the work elaborated by a traveler’s hands. His illustrations feels perfectly proportioned, almost as if in motion. Less reliance on symmetry and more focus on flow. There’s an energy about the continuity and vibrance of his images, whether the color scheme is brilliant or tempered, and his ability to satisfy a breadth of clients while still solidifying his fine art itch is admirable. Pat is dedicated to staying on his creative toes, which only means good news for those of us who know he’s on to something.

Read full interview here.

Installation view of Create, curated by Lawrence Rinder with Matthew Higgs. Photo: Sibila Savage.

The growing spotlight on artists with developmental disabilities simultaneously questions ethics, challenges definitions in Art and inspires viewers. The current exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Create, features the works of 20 artists from three pioneering Bay Area centers for arts and disability – Creativity Explored, Creative Growth Art Center and the National Institute of Art and Disabilities.

Once in the museum, I found myself at an ethical crossroads. The only information provided was a brief introductory wall text at the beginning of the first gallery, and a slightly longer anecdote in the take-away, written by the co-curators Larry Rinder and Matthew Higgs, respectively. Both texts note that the artists included all have a developmental disability of some kind, but little else about their process, experience or intent. Except, of course, to clarify that the artists are not performing art therapy in a drab gray room with bars on the windows. The paradox for me remains in determining for whose benefit exactly, is the mention of the artists’ conditions made? In the introduction, Rinder mentions that the artists’ “status as outsiders is rapidly shifting to that of insiders.” This can be taken in a few ways: for my Mom, and others like her, who insist they were among the first to discover the phenomenon of outsider art, they may be greatly bereaved to hear that outsider art has hit the mainstream, and now even their t-shirts are $60 a pop. For others it can be seen as an advancement that has been a long time coming. The artists featured in Create all possess the level of talent, individual voice and depth to be expected of the those supported by the Berkeley Art Museum and other major institutions. This issue elicits a nagging feeling that questions the motivation of listing the artists as developmentally disabled. I cannot help but wonder how I would have viewed the art if I had not known this facet of the exhibition.

Michael Bernard Loggins, 'Fears of Your Life' Installation View. Photo: Sibila Savage

Trying to look at the artwork as untainted by the knowledge of the artists’ conditions, I saw three galleries filled with pieces so creative and uninhibited, my eyes hungrily devoured the unique detail in each piece. Four examples of Attilo Crescenti’s sprawling, surreal and abstract figure drawings demonstrate the potential of an unrestricted vision of the human form. Written in huge, black scratchy handwriting on the entire back wall of the first gallery, is Michael Bernard Loggins’ text piece “Fears of Your Life.” Loggins included all fears in his list, both the profound and the mundane:

13. Fear of being lost.

21. Fear of spiders and roaches.

And mouse raccoons and rats too.

52. Fear of rolling down a hill backwards.

82. Fear that if you are bad or naughty noone’s isn’t going to love you anymore.

Carl Hendrickson and Jeremy Burleson both created sculptures that blur the line between practical application and surreal artistic liberty. Hendrickson’s wood sculptures resemble recognizable structures at first glance, yet further inspection reveals that their construction negates their utilitarian function. Burleson’s sculptures of medical equipment made from tape, plastic and paper, maintain an amazing amount of detail and accuracy, yet cannot be forgotten as non-functional art objects.

Carl Hendrickson. Image courtesy of Creative Growth

Create brings up several important questions that remain unanswered, and perhaps will not be answered for some time. How are these artists different or the same as others featured in major institutions? How does an artist’s past or present condition affect the reception of their work? Is the image of ‘outsider’ art exploited by the mainstream in the same way as other minorities, subcultures or fringe societies? The success and importance of the exhibition is in its posing of these questions, and the opening of a dialog that may be continued by the art world, both inside and out.

Create was curated by Larry Rinder, the director of BAM/PFA and Matthew Higgs, the director of White Columns. On view from May 11, 2011 – September 25, 2011.

This article was originally written by Arden Sherman on March 17, 2008

The current exhibition at Kips Gallery, Fay Ku: A Survey of Works 2004-2008 curated by Brendon MacInnis, demonstrates Ku’s most significant works to date. Ku’s exhibit coincides with Asian Contemporary Art Week in New York, which runs from March 15-24th. The Brooklyn-based artist is simultaneously showing at Sam Lee Gallery in Los Angeles in a two-part group exhibition, her part titled, Deviance.

Born in Taiwan but raised in suburban America, Fay Ku’s work explores the dichotomy of two worlds. Her sparse graphite, watercolor, and ink drawings on paper display Eastern influences, at times referencing the Japanese woodcutting technique, ukiyo-e or “pictures of the floating world,” though the subject matter is purely her own. Children and women figure predominately in Ku’s work, often presented precariously straddling the divide between myth and reality. Because of the scale of Ku’s chosen canvas and the subject matter therein, the viewer is forced to investigate every minute limb and figure floating among the large stark white paper. In Deviance, there is a metamorphosis of Ku’s subjects where feminism, coquettishness and innocence are faced with uncertainty and the treacherous adult world.

Fay Ku received her MFA from Pratt Institute (2006) in Brooklyn and bachelor’s degrees in visual arts and literature from Bennington College, Vermont (1996).

Andy DuCett is a Minneapolis- based artist working with a multitude of media, utilizing sculpture, collage, drawing and installation.  His installations predominantly feature site-specific pilings of mostly found objects.  The sculptures are temporary, and are most typically indicative of the cultural location in which they are built. His first solo show, entitled AOT Has Been Here Forever, Except When It Wasn’t,  recently on view at Art of This gallery in Minneapolis chronicles the history of the buildings, residents and streets around the gallery. The installation uses items from thrift stores and cast objects in order to draw attention to our interactions with the world. This assemblage of objects typical in his sculptural work is mimicked in his drawings, which pull together various occurrences and locations, illustrating for instance, events taking place over the course of a month.  His interest in found objects is apparent in his collage work, as well.  Using only found photographs and illustrations, DuCett constructs impossible scenes that subvert comfort, utilizing imagery of youthfulness to depict hazards and barriers.

DuCett received his Masters in Fine Arts from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006.  He is also currently presenting work in a group exhibition of artists using collage entitled CUTTERS: An Exhibition of International Collage at Cinder’s Gallery in New York.

]]> http://dailyserving.com/2009/11/andy-ducett/feed/ 0 http://dailyserving.com/2009/07/jennifer-davis/ http://dailyserving.com/2009/07/jennifer-davis/#comments Sat, 11 Jul 2009 07:00:00 +0000 Emily Rosser http://localhost:8888/?p=971

Minnesota-based artist Jennifer Davis paints a world of folkloric fantasy reminiscent of childhood reverie. Her storybook depictions of animal-like children, whimsical trees, and candy-colored creatures may at first glance seem sublimely playful, but a look beneath the beautifully delicate exterior unveils a narrative deeply seated in emotion. This tension between the illusory and reality hints at the darkness within Davis’s work, but her use of pastel colors mixed with peculiar imagery strikes a balance between sweet and melancholy.

Davis uses acrylic and graphite on panel or paper to create ethereal people, plants, and animals. She continually layers, strips, and reapplies her media. This process adds to the surreal quality of her work, as ghostly images subtly appear behind a smooth surface. The result is an imaginary world established through the combination of vivid descriptions and fanciful colors.

Jennifer Davis attended the University of Minnesota where she received her Bachelors of Fine Arts Degree in 1998. The Cerasoli Gallery in Los Angeles, CA and the Walker Contemporary in Boston, MA housed her two most recent solo exhibitions this past June.

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York City’s Lower East side opened Ruby Sky Stiler’s first solo exhibition, High and Low Relief, on Saturday, May 9th. For the show, the artist has transformed the gallery into an attic space by shortening the headspace and installing distressed (and creaky) wooden floor boards. This altered space houses four of Stiler’s recent sculptures: An Earlier Vessel, A Second Hand Market, Stretch, and No Legend, all constructed of utilitarian materials such as foam, wood, nails, acrylic, and resin.

The converted gallery space reframes Stiler’s objects, which often evoke human attributes while referencing classical and authoritative art history. An Earlier Vessel, 2009, composed of acrylic gouache, archival foam core, and hot glue recalls red and black figure vase painting techniques from ancient Greece, but drips with thermoplastic adhesive. The juxtaposition of modern materials and classical iconography question ideas of authenticity, value, and historical accuracy.

Courtesy Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

Stiler received her B.F.A. from Rhode island School of Design and her M.F.A. from Yale University in 2006. The artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. High and Low Relief will remain at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery until June 14th.

Jaguar Shoes will present Tonight I am an Owl, new work and the first solo exhibition by Hannah Waldron, one of London’s hottest emerging artists and illustrators. The exhibition, which will be located at The Old Shoreditch Station, will focus on the artist’s imaginative drawings which feature an abstract vocabulary built from the artist’s own world. The works will include glow in the dark screen prints, fantastical landscapes and images of the animal kingdom.

The work often exists as a hybrid of art and design and includes animation and film. Waldron grew up in Lewisham in South East London, close to where the artist continues to live and work. She attended the Chelsea College of Art and Brighton University, where she began her career as an illustrator. Since her graduation, the artist has completed several major projects including the design of a new magazine Counterpart, a music video for Good Shoes and various book covers.

The exhibition’s title Yo.n.I is derived from yoni, the Sanskrit word for “divine passage” or sacred space rooted in the worship of female creativity and sexual organ. With layers of visual metaphor, Mutu likes to force her viewers to question assumptions about race, gender, geography, history and beauty. Mutu received her BFA from Cooper Union, New York and her MFA from Yale University School of Art. The artist was born in Nairobi, Kenya and currently lives and works in New York City.