Sanford Biggers, Seen, 2009, Video still, Digital C-print, 30 x 40 in. Courtesy the Artist and Michael Klein Arts, New York

Currently on view at Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum is a solo presentation of new work by internationally renowned, New York-based artist, Sanford Biggers. The work on view in the exhibition, entitled Moon Medicine, encompasses the breadth of Biggers’ practice. As he tells the SBCAF, “It is a thematic, multi-disciplinary exploration of past themes and new themes meant to broaden and complicate our read on American history.” In a recent video-recorded conversation between Biggers and CAF executive director, Miki Garcia, Biggers discusses his avoidance of artistic labels, such as “post black.” These labels are not rejected by the artist for the sake of radicalism but, rather, because he says that no matter how you mean it to sound, a label is always “predicated on there being an other.” Biggers further explains that he rejects labels even in his discussion of artistic medium, saying he’s “not interested in being a sculptor [or] a performance artist…I just make things.” Of his process, he says, “The more confused I am while making a piece now, the more successful it is to me regardless of what it ends up looking like.”

The recurring imagery of mandalas in Biggers’ work reflects a strong interest in Buddhism, the exploration of which is found in his past and current work. Biggers gained interest in the Buddhist tradition while living in Japan and traveling all over Asia years ago. Of the work he made upon returning to the US from Asia, Biggers says it became autobiographical in part—in the sense that he “fused some of what [he] had been studying and researching in terms of Buddhism, but also bringing in some things from my childhood, growing up in Los Angeles, and being a B-boy.”

Sanford Biggers, Constellation, 2009, Steel, Plexiglas, LED’s, Zoopoxy, cotton quilt, original printed cotton tile. Dimensions variable, Installation at Harvard University. Courtesy the Artist and Michael Klein Arts, New York, NY.

Biggers is a master of alluding labels, as we’ve learned, and the “elliptical” nature of his work (as Garcia refers to it), creates an open-ended dialog that spans a range of subjects from religious practices, to themes of racial tensions in the American South, to pop culture iconography. Moon Medicine will be on view through May 2, 2010.

Sanford Biggers lives and works in new York. He earned his BA at Morehouse College, Atlanta, GA and his MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL. He has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, including at Mary Goldman Gallery, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; Okinawa Museum, Okinawa, Japan; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Olafur Eliasson’s Multiple Shadow House opened Thursday, February 11th at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.  Eliasson, who has been described as “an ecstasy-inducing Danish-Icelandic artist,” has perfected the concept of smoke and mirror art that consistently wows its audience and draws crowds (including a Michael Bloomberg and numerous body guards).   The packed opening felt a bit like Disney World meets the hands-on section of a science museum; particularly because the exhibition involves the viewer in a collaborative creative process.  Opening attendees played obsessively with their color-split shadows on the wall, made shadow puppets with their hands and basically behaved as if this was the first time they had even seen light divided into color spectrums or their own corporeal outline for that matter.  This  behavior illustrates Eliasson’s emphasis on the visitor’s experience and his tendency to create work in which the potential lies in the exchange between the piece and the viewer.

Courtesy of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

The first floor of the two-floor exhibit consists of clusters of rooms comprised of a simple wooden framework supporting large projection screens.  Each room allows for the viewer to stand in front of projected light, thus causing the light to fracture into colored shadows on the wall.  These projections, like much of Eliasson’s work, causes the viewer to re-examine even the most common familiarities, such as light, with renewed appreciation and wonder.  Eliasson is particularly interested in how we understand, see, and experience space. Multiple Shadow House does not disappoint on this level. The user negotiates and constructs his or her own surroundings while experiencing subtleties of color, thrill of participation, and magic of science.

The theme of perception of visual imagery and viewer involvement is continued upstairs in Intangible Afterimage Star (2008).  Six spotlights project geometrical forms in magenta, blue, yellow, green, magenta, and turquoise onto a wall, layering and intersecting.  As explained in the press release, “the intense projections fade in and out, and complimentary afterimages stay on the visitor’s retina and appear to multiply the color compositions.  As a result, the film is only partially produced by the spotlight’s projection; the rest is contributed by the viewer.”

Also upstairs is a stunning collection of what appear to be studies in color, sequences, and shape done in watercolor and pencil on paper.  Minimal and intimate, these stationary works are a refreshing change from the rest of the exhibition.  Configured in sequences, the watercolors use ellipses and circles as narrative exercises on the perception of space and movement.  Another piece, Colour Experiment no. 3, is a circular oil painting that at first glance appears to be a basic study in color or a large color wheel.  However, the painting is actually an expansion of the traditional model of a color wheel, wherein each of the 360 degrees is painted in one color and corresponds to its complementary afterimage located directly across from itself.

Eliasson has cited the work of close friend Einar Thorstein, a philosopher, scientist, and engineer, as a constant source of his visual vocabulary.  He has found inspiration in Thorstein’s spatial ideas such as geodesic domes, fivefold symmetries, spiral spheres, towers and pavilions, the golden ratio, and kaleidoscopes.  Eliasson uses these concepts to create works like Multiple Shadow House which exist as experiences more than material objects.  Presented via transparent means of constructions, these experiences illustrate the nature of perception-based stimulation as well as the artist’s ability to manipulate the experience.

Current solo exhibitions for Eliasson include Olafur Eliasson: Your Chance Encounter at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan and Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia.

Each Sunday we reach deep into the DailyServing Archives to unearth an old feature that we think needs to see the light of day again. This week we found a video presentation by artist Josiah McElheny discussing the role of models as both sculpture and as direct tools of information sharing. If you have a favorite feature that you think should be published again, simply email us at info@dailyserving.com and include DS Archive in the subject line.

Originally Published on July 31, 2007

On March 22, artist Josiah McElheny presented a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City called “Artists and Models” to discuss his investigation of models and how they operate in relation to sculptural thought rather than direct function or information. McElheny is interested in the idea of a model as an “aesthetical utopia that could never be built.” In a 1929 conversation between sculptor Isamu Noguchi and architect Buckminster Fuller, the idea of an experimental environment containing no shadows was determined feasible if a totally reflective form was constructed in a completely reflective space. While never completely realized by Fuller or Noguchi, McElheny, who is known for working with glass, used this reflective principle to create a series of sculptural models, both large and small, called “Extended Landscape Model for Total Reflective Abstraction,” which contained a mirrored glass table with hand-blown mirrored glass objects placed directly onto the table. These works were eventually, over a period of about four years, extended into other works that illustrated the same principle through other environments and models. Many of these examples can be viewed currently at the Donald Young Gallery in Chicago in “Josiah McElheny: Cosmology, Design, and Landscape Part Two,” while other projects and ideas are discussed in season three of the ART:21 series.

Now at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Production Site reexamines the artist’s studio as subject, presenting work that documents, depicts, reconstructs, or otherwise invokes that space, revealing how the studio functions as a place where research, experimentation, production, and social activity intersect.

The exhibition reflects and addresses the pivotal role of the studio in artists’ practice while alluding to its enduring status in the popular imagination. The works that comprise Production Site include multi-channel video projections, photographic light-boxes and installations, and life-sized fabrications of artists’ studios — real and imagined — that either extol the virtues of the studio or problematize the preconceived and often highly romanticized notions associated with it. The exhibition provides the viewer with a look at how some of the most compelling artists of our time have demystified, remystified, and reconsidered this site within the physical and conjectured space of the work of art.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, February 9 and 10, Mumbai-based Nikhil Chopra performed Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing XI in the MCA galleries. Chopra brought the artist’s studio into the gallery using a variety of costumes and props, and wall drawings that he created during the performance. These will remain in the gallery as an installation for the duration of the Production Site exhibition. During his performance, Chopra assumed the fictional persona of a Victorian-era figure named Yog Raj Chitrakar, who is based loosely on his grandfather. His last name, Chitrikar, literally translates into picture- or mask-maker in Sanskrit. Chopra inhabited this character for the two days, changing into masculine and feminine costumes that challenge assumptions about race and gender. While performing, Chopra made drawings that reflect on Production Site, blackening the walls with his obsessive charcoal drawings to emphasize the studio as a place where an artist’s internal anxieties and struggles are confronted and resolved.

The exhibition is organized by MCA Curator Dominic Molon, and features the work of Nikhil Chopra, Deb Sokolow, Justin Cooper, Tacita Dean, Amanda Ross-Ho, William Kentridge, Andrea Zittel, Kerry James Marshall, Rodney Graham, Ryan Gander, Bruce Nauman, and John Neff.  Production Site is presented as part of Studio Chicago, a year-long collaborative project that focuses on the artist’s studio through October 2010.

Copyright of John Gerrard. Courtesy of the Thomas Dane Gallery.

The Thomas Dane Gallery in London presents an exhibition of new work by John Gerrard from 2009.  Sow Farm (near Libby, Oklahoma) depicts a particular instance of animal factory farming facilitated by a large computer-controlled complex devoid of human presence.  Lufkin (near Hugo, Colorado) presents an oil derrick in action.  Like related previous works such as Animated Scene, Sow Farm and Lufkin acknowledge the artificial and detrimental ways we manipulate the environment.  Effectively set in the visually bare plains of middle America, Gerrard underscores the alarming depletion of natural resources that supports our culture of consumption.

Copyright of John Gerrard. Courtesy of the Thomas Dane Gallery.

Gerrard’s technique is as compelling as his subject matter is relevant.  The artist builds upon traditions of painting, photography, cinema and sculpture while actually working with the video game technology Realtime 3D.  Like many contemporary artists working in complex new media, Gerrard develops the creative concept behind each work while relying upon specialists to help realize it.  The artist photographs each site from a complete 360 degree radius.  His production team in Vienna, led by long time collaborator and producer Werner Poetzelberger, then completes the work – turning the artist’s photographic stills into continuous, animated cinematic panning shots.  Complex details are accurately replicated at each site by 3D modeling, which is guided by topographical and satellite data.  It typically takes a few years to replicate each site over a particular period of actual time – showing changes in light, weather and season.

The end result – a subdued hyperrealism – hardly points to the immense efforts of its creation. Sow Farm (near Libby, Oklahoma) and Lufkin (near Hugo, Colorado) are shown throughout an entire 365 day year.  The work’s projection on a large-scale screen engulfs the viewer in a calm and contemplative viewing experience well suited to serious subject matter.

Copyright of John Gerrard. Courtesy of the Thomas Dane Gallery.

John Gerrard is represented by the Thomas Dane Gallery in London as well as the Simon Preston Gallery in New York City.  Gerrard lives and works in Dublin, Ireland – where he was born – and Vienna, Austria.  He received his BFA in Sculpture at the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing at the University of Oxford in 1997.  He earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000 and an MSc from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland in 2001.

Following Daily Serving coverage of John Gerrard in February of 2009, Gerrard presented Animated Scene as a collateral project at the 53rd Venice Biennale.  Currently, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden houses the artist’s exhibition, Directions, which will remain through 31 May 2010.  In late March 2010, Gerrard’s public projection, Oil Stick Work, will open at the Canary Wharf underground station in London as part of London’s Art on the Underground Programme.

Copyright of John Gerrard. Courtesy of the Thomas Dane Gallery.

John Gerrard’s exhibition at the Thomas Dane Gallery – his first in London – opens 3 February and remains through 6 March 2010.

Courtesy of the artist and Civilian Art Projects

Civilian Art Projects in Washington, D.C. is currently presenting Don’t Look Now, a multimedia exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist George Jenne. Don’t Look Now consists of manipulated movie posters, sculpture, and graphite drawings, all reflecting the artist’s interest in the horror movie genre. Jenne sees a correlation between the unease and trauma delivered by such films and the unsettling experience of early adolescence. The artist states in the press release, “For me, there is a strong connection between the act of warning or revealing and the portentous atmosphere of pre-pubescence, thus a strong connection between the abject, mutated form of the monster, and a person’s tenuously pristine state of mind during early adolescence.”

Hellion (2007), a mixed media sculpture constructed of plastic, resin, embroidery, Fun Fur, polyethylene, wood, sound and light, both tantalizes and torments the viewer. The sculpture resembles a boy scout, but the formidable stance, monster’s head, and bloody knees indicate something more malevolent. Upon closer examination, the viewer encounters such sinister details as cigarette and swastika “merit” badges carefully adorned to the sash, and a wooden plank with the words “Be Irreverent” emblazoned beneath a crest.

Courtesy of the artist and Civilian Art Projects

George Jenne, who currently lives and works in New York, received his B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995. He is the founder of Bandolier, Inc., a commercial prop making company. Jenne has recently shown his work in New York at Exit Art, Jack the Pelican Presents, Envoy Enterprises, and PS122.

LIKENESS is the current group exhibition at the Mattress Factory Museum of Installation Art that examines human depiction during a post-Warholian era in which new technology has played an influential role. It includes the work of artists Jim Campbell, Paul DeMarinis, Jonn Herschend, Nikki Lee, Joseph Mannino, Greta Pratt and Tony Oursler. Elaine A. King, who is a freelance critic and curator as well as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University teaching Art History/Theory/Museum Studies, has guest-curated the exhibition.

Among the offerings is Paul DeMarinis’ new work, Dust.  With this work DeMarinis explores facial similarities, pairs of faces, and the abstraction of images into the dust. DeMarinis presents a fragment of this collection of likeness-pairs, scanned sequentially into the light-memory of phosphorescent powder. After a few minutes of exposure to the projected image, the powder retains a faint green image of the two faces on its surface, something akin to the ‘latent image’ of photographic film or the veil of memory. Unlike photographic film, though, the image starts to distort. Propelled by low frequency sound vibrations, the powder starts to flow and dance, first distorting the faces and erasing their likeness, then distorting them into patterns of abstract light in motion, with form and beauty all its own.

On the other end of the spectrum is Jonn Herschend’s many-sided conceptual, Self Portrait as a PowerPoint Proposal for an Amusement Park Ride.  The installation is characterized by a strong sense of narrative, not strictly limited to straightforward vignettes or mimetic representation. In his complex self-portrait one finds a narrative that resembles fantasy, role-playing, fiction and a touch of reality. Herschend’s choice of subjects and materials contribute to the kind of story he opts to tell and show his audience.