Currently on view at Mary Boone Gallery in New York City is a series of neon sculptures by artist Keith Sonnier. The exhibition includes two distinct bodies of work, the artist’s Oldowan Series, which features sexually charged gestures and materials such as silk, as well as his Chandelier Series, which were originally designed for the artist’s home and were later expanded for use in larger public spaces.

Sonnier has exhibited internationally since the late 1960’s. The artist has recently exhibited Just What Are They Saying at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in new Orleans and Geometry as Image at Robert Miller Gallery in NYC.

Sonnier’s exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery in NYC will be on view February 6th.

Off Book is the title of a current exhibition by acclaimed New York based conceptual artist Glenn Ligon. The exhibition, which is on view through January 23rd at Los Angeles’ Regen Projects, continues the artist’s investigation of cultural identity, social and historical constructs, language, race, and gender. Similar to previous exhibitions by the artist, Off Book explores these ideas through text-based work, installation, and video. This new series of works investigate many themes discussed in James Baldwin’s essay entitled Figure, originally published in 1953. For this series, the artist has silk screened versions of existing text-based paintings onto colored backgrounds, and then dusted the surface with coal particles. The result is a semi-abstracted surface where the test is obscured through the application of the screen print.  Also on view is a 16 mm black and white film titled, The Death of Tom, and a neon piece, which features the word AMERICA backwards, titled Rügenfigur.

Ligon’s work has been the focus of several major international exhibitions. The artist’s work was selected by the Obama’s to be on loan at the White House. This inclusion made Ligon the youngest artist ever to receive this honor. Recent solo exhibitions for the artist include, ‘Nobody’ and Other Songs at Thomas Dane Gallery in London and Figure/Paysage/Marine at Yvon Lambert in Paris and Love and Theft at Power House in Memphis. The artist is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Rhode Island School of Art and Design. Ligon lives and works in New York City.

Chicago artist Josue Pellot deploys several mediums and styles in order to examine his Puerto Rican roots as transplanted into the quintessential American experience – that is, as mediated by pop culture and consumerism in his current exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center.  Thus, he displays a photomontage of the iconic fortress El Morro in Puerto Rico in which it is conflated with a supermercado/laundromat/liquor store.  In fact, many architectural structures in the United States do mimic this famous castle, and his neon sculpture of conquistadors and the native population’s revenge, 1493, was originally installed in the windows of La Municipal, a supermarket in Humboldt Park, during the last Puerto Rican Day Parade.

In Temporary Allegiance, the artist has placed in the gallery a flag that is an amalgam of U.S. and Puerto Rican flags, more specifically the remains of what was originally used by the artist in a installation/performance in Puerto Rico, after damage sustained by local police interference.  Sitting limply in the gallery as sculpture, one can only guess at the resonance and tensions encapsulated in its history.

Josue Pellot received a BFA from the University of Illinois in Chicago in 2003 and an MA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University in 2006.  His work has been presented in several exhibitions in the Chicago area and in San Juan, Puerto Rico including a performance at the Museo de Arte de San Juan.

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Paddington is currently hosting new installation works by Indigenous-Australian artist Jonathan Jones. Untitled (The Tyranny of Distance), 2008 is positioned within the main exhibition space and is composed of a series of six blue tarpaulin covered walls, each extending to over eight meters in length. Each of them radiate with light from fluorescent tubes positioned to make arrow like chevron patterns. The audience is not allowed access between the walls, and are instead allowed only to move around the perimeter of the installation. This makes reference to the Australian government’s 2006 intervention of the Northern Territory’s Aboriginal community, raising issues of land ownership and civil rights. Positioned outside the gallery space is Jones’ installation Genesis, 2008. Comprising of a series of stacked emu eggs illuminated by florescent light, this work also makes reference to indigenous issues as a symbol of traditional art and new life.

Jones is of the Kamilaroi/Wiradjuri people of South Eastern Australia. He has worked as a curator for Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative; the only Aboriginal owned and operated contemporary art space in Sydney. He has received numerous awards for his art practice including the 2002 New South Wales Indigenous Artists Fellowship and the 2006 Xstrata Emerging Indigenous Art Award. He currently lives and works in Sydney, while acting as a museum educator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Tracey Emin’s first Los Angeles solo show, “You Left Me Breathing”, opened at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills on November 2nd. Emin, who was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999, is one of the hyped Young British Artists whose work gained notoriety in the mid 1990s. She recently represented Britain at the 2007 Venice Biennale, installing large-scale neon signs and drawings on the walls of the British Pavilion. Emin openly uses her life as her subject matter and her work vacillates between virtuosity and one-liner candor. Paintings, like “Reincarnation III” (2005), explicitly play on the expressive style of Edvard Munch while neon works, like “Very Happy Girl” (1999), are gaudy and blunt. Emin’s expansive oeuvre includes sculpture, drawing, video, photography, and needlework and “You Left Me Breathing” emphasizes her ambiguous, controversial breadth. At Gagosian, Emin’s confessional drawings, including “Family Suite II” (1994), hang alongside her crude, tongue-in-cheek textile assemblages and her flashy neon signs contrast her large, expressionistic paintings. The Gagosian show also features a recent series of delicate jesmonite sculptures that incorporate bronze, bundled wood, cement, and glass.

The artwork and writings of David Batchelor investigate the properties of color and how it operates outside of the functional realm, becoming a unique phenomenon all on its own. The artist is also interested in the symbolic meaning attached to color and how it affects those in its presence. Batchelor’s work often takes form as sculpture, using brilliant colors with fluorescent light, neon and plastics shown through light boxes and shelving but is also known to exist in drawings, photographic series and even large-scale public works. The Scottland-born artist has exhibited recently with the Wilkinson Gallery, Gloucester Road Underground Station in London and Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, UK. Batchelor is listed as a Saatchi Gallery artist and has participated in group shows at Galerie Leme in Sao Paulo, curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, and “Extreme Abstraction” at the Albright Knox in Buffalo, N.Y.

The work of Dan Attoe is often rooted in painting, but through recent projects and exhibits such as “Loaded, Nailed, Short on Cash,” Attoe has expanded his artistic vocabulary to encompass neon- and light box-based works created from his paintings. Attoe’s work employs a blue-collar, working man’s aesthetic, often featuring humorous text with serious undertones. Attoe, along with fellow artists Jamie Boling and Bill Donovan, founded and currently direct the collective Paintallica, with a proclaimed manifesto, “Don’t be fooled though, we don’t give a shit about your art, your politics or your whiny, black-horn rimmed, Prada-wearing ass. We are Paintallica.” The group usually begins their work with a drawing session, led by unstructured all-nighters of work, easily resulting in a completed exhibition by the morning. Attoe currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon, and has had several international solo exhibitions, including works with Peres Projects in Berlin and Los Angeles, Galleri Christina Wilson in Copenhagen, Denmark, and with 404 Arte Contemporanea in Naples, Italy.