THE RE-ENACTMENT

One of the most compelling pieces in the exhibition is Mexican artist Yoshua Okón’s Octopus (2011). Created during a residency at the Hammer Museum, the 4-channel video piece grapples with what is both humanizing and alienating. Day laborers re-enact the civil war in Guatemala, wearing in black or white clothing, depending on which side they had fought for. On the set of a Home Depot parking lot, the laborers replay scenes from their country’s history, but now the opposing sides point invisible weapons at an invisible enemy, not at their historical foes. “Octopus” is Guatemalan slang for the United Fruit Company, alluding to the company’s ambiguous role in Guatemalan politics and complicating the narrative further.

THE ARCHIVE

The pliableness of the document becomes evident through Zoe Leonard & Cheryl Dunye’s The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1993-1996). A fictional African American performer is created through an archive of snap shots, film stills, and head-shots. Photography’s role in the construction of history becomes clear as we are left to conjecture about the possibilities of this figure.

While The Fae Richards Photo Archive plays with the divide between fact and fiction, Mike Tribe’s The Dystopian Files (2009-present) solemnly takes on the task of chronicling history. An archive of clips from footage of protest and the policing of these actions is gathered together as something that Tribe refers to as “ritualized conflicts”. The single channel video is disrupted by omnipresent black bars slowly creeping across the screen as eerie, unidentifiable tones collectively moan, the audio’s consistency giving a sense of a cohesive moment from the catalogue of moments.

THE PERSONA

Eric Garduño & Matthew Rana, “People v. Bruce (Parrhesia)”, cardboard, comedy club lights, and audio track, 2011

A cardboard fabrication of a courtroom witness stand and judges bench illuminated with the theatrics of comedy lights and the occasional laugh track enact notions of truth in The People v. Bruce (Parrhesia) (2011). The term “parrhesia” loosely translates to free speech with an obligatory edge. In this installation, collaborators Eric Garduño & Matthew Rana engage with the trial and conviction of obscenity against comedian Lenny Bruce as a way to address the fluidity of truth and free speech amidst the conflicting territories of where one can expect to hear truth spoken – the comedy stage and the courtroom.

In the series The First and Last of the Modernists: (Charles and Michael), Lorraine O’Grady links the public personas’s of poet Charles Baudelaire and performer Michael Jackson through the language of conceptual photography, implying modernism’s hand in the cult and commodification of celebrity.

THE INTERVENTION

Perhaps the least convincing of containers is The Intervention, in which “works recall charged events in history that register cautions about the future”. Maybe it’s a matter of semantics, but I don’t equate “registering cautions” to “intervention”, which for me has a very active implication. At any rate, Geof Oppenheimer’s Mason Dixon Lines, Raised and Lowered (2007-11) is a “two-unit” piece that encapsulates a formal tightness with a conceptual looseness. A neon portrait of Alan Greenspan leans against a wall, somehow in dialogue with a distant placed steel geometric form wrapped in red bandana material perched askew on an unfinished pedestal. There is something about systems and structures here, but ambivalence reins.

Geof Oppenheimer, Mason Dixon Lines, Raised and Lowered (2007-11)

If you are after the redemptive, look elsewhere; what this exhibition offers are objects of discontent, agitation. In the context of our current political climate, we encounter the spiral of history in these works, rather than it’s unfolding.

Agitated Histories will run through January 15, 2012 at SITE Santa Fe, in New Mexico. It was presented earlier in 2011 at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore.

Survey at San Jose Museum of Art - Installation view

It’s hard to know where to look upon entering Leo Villareal’s exhibition. Light literally dances on every wall and even on the ceiling—the blinking lights bridge the many large light sculptures and installations, melting the exhibition space into one monumental light show. Villareal’s first traveling museum survey, on view at the San Jose Museum of Art, is an exhibition of the artist’s work using strobe and LED light, which he has coded himself to animate into various patterns and movements.

Many of the works feel almost filmic. It is as if the frames and supports are actually sets for an array of movements that are calculated just enough to feel random. Star (2008) is a set for a brilliant patterning of light that flicks and courses through the spokes of the circular frame hung on the wall. On closer inspection, one can see the data chips of the LED bulbs meticulously placed and exposed; the visible guts of the piece are a nice touch, reminding the viewer that Villareal composed and conducted this visual symphony.

Leo Villareal Flag, 2008, 75 x 144 x 4"

Firmament (2010) is a ceiling-mounted light installation that involves viewers’ reclining in custom-built couches and staring up at an animated light display that Villareal also programmed. The installation is jarringly hypnotic; it possesses a little bit of James Turrell’s disorienting and quiet light spaces and just a splash of the overwhelming grip of the Studio 54 dance floor.

There is a playfulness to the sculptures that winks back to the lighthearted seriousness of the classic children’s toy, Lite-Brite, which involved carefully inserting small multicolored plastic pegs into an illuminated surface to create “light drawings.”

Villareal exists within a long history of artists whose primary interest is the study of light, from the Impressionist painters to photographers. But Villareal’s exploration of light is not through the creation of an image; rather, it is through the manipulation of light itself as form. He is a remarkable composer and conductor of sorts, leading and organizing lights to fade, glow, and blink in ways that manage to make the viewer have a moment, even if it’s a fleeting one, when they forget they are looking at art.

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.

courtesy of the artist

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.

courtesy of the artist

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.