Universe Revolves ON (XVIII), Hema Upadhyay, Edition of 12, Etching, aquatint, open-bite and screenprint on machine made fabriano 100% cotton paper 71 x 92 (28" x 36¼”) © Hema Upadhyay/Singapore Tyler Print Institute

Hema Upadhyay creates works based primarily on photography and painting, and she resumed her foray in printmaking as a means of experimentation, after a decade’s hiatus. Her art practice revolves around issues of identity, dislocation, nostalgia and gender, often drawn from her family history of migration and her personal experience with the socio-economic inequalities present in Asia. The visceral impacts of these socio-political issues on the human condition are frequently represented through miniature and collaged bodies. In Universe Revolves ON (XVIII), cut-outs of flailing and falling bodies disrupt the intricate etchings of botanical tree forms shrouded in delicate silk-screened patterns, drawing attention to the attendant psychological and social upheaval and theme of human displacement arising from the rapid urbanization in Mumbai. Upadhyay completed her BFA (Painting) in 1995 and MFA in 1997 from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda, and is now based in Mumbai.

Break the Ice, Qiu Zhijie, Edition of 12, Etching and relief print, STPI handmade paper 107 x 81 (42¼" x 32”) © Qiu Zhijie/Singapore Tyler Print Institute

Qiu Zhijie is a Chinese contemporary artist and works with a diverse range of media including photography, video, calligraphy, painting, installation and performance, and combines writing and curatorial practice with his artistic explorations. In 2006, Qiu started the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge Project. Imbued with historical and national significance, as a symbol of modernity and resilience in China, Qiu excavates the meanings associated with the site by investigating the over 2,000 suicides occurring at the bridge since its completion in 1968. Break the Ice is emblematic of Qiu’s combination of traditional Chinese ink painting and Western-based lithography techniques, and the work reflects on the consequences of mammoth, industrial structures on a nation’s history and individuals’ personal lives. Qiu was born in Fujian, China and now lives and works in Beijing. He graduated from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in printmaking.

The works of Upadhyay and Qiu are on view at All Editions: A STPI Survey Show (16 January – 20 February 2010) at Singapore Tyler Print Institute. The exhibition also features works by Ghada Amer/Reza Farkhondeh, Ashley Bickerton and Lin Tianmiao, from their residencies at the institute.

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.

The Lever House, at 390 Park Avenue in New York City, recently commissioned artist Richard Woods to create a site-specific installation for the lobby of the Modernist structure. The installation, titled Port Sunlight, features colorful patterns that cover over forty columns, eight benches, and several areas of floor within the lobby. Each of the nine patterns utilized in the installation are created from a series of print blocks which are configured in a pattern of multiples.

For the commission, Woods explored the history of the Lever Brothers company and discovered that they founded a village near Cheshire, England, in the 1800’s  to accommodate the company’s rapid expansion. That village was named Port Sunlight. The artist grew up not far from the area, and is familiar with the Lever’s massive collection of British Victorian art, which was on public display at the Lady Lever Gallery in the village.

The patterns used by Richard Woods references the graphic nature of the Victorian decoration collected by the Levers. These patterns attempt to take over and colonize the otherwise modernist lobby, allowing for a playful opposition to develop between the two aesthetics.

Port Sunlight will be on view through January 31st, 2010.

Courtesy: Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo/ The Quiet in the Land, Laos/ the Artist

The Mizuma Art Gallery of Tokyo is showcasing artist Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s ongoing project Breathing is Free: 12,756.3 at Art Positions in Art Basel Miami Beach 2009.  This complex and meaningful project is a statement on the current condition of the refugee and, in Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s words, a ‘reflection and offering to the refugees whose lives are to run or to perish’.  As an artist with resources and a passport, Nguyen-Hatsushiba is part of the global elite, whose mobility effortlessly enables movement across national borders.  Through his step and sustained mental and physical discipline the artist physically embodies the desire and struggle of the powerless refugee that is on the move and longs, as the artist notes, ‘to be on “the other side” instead.’

The work is defined not only by Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s act of running, but by the deliberately plotted path the artist takes which crosses any national and ethnic divisions.  In his effort to run 12,756.3 miles – equivalent to the most direct circumference of the earth – Nguyen-Hatsushiba chooses urban areas with a history of forced displacement.  The artist has completed runs in places such as Geneva, Tokyo, Singapore, Manchester and Ho Chi Minh City.  The paths taken in each of these places forms a  shape – often organic – with metaphorical meaning.

Courtesy: Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo/ The Quiet in the Land, Laos/ the Artist.

On view in the Mizuma Art Gallery booth at Art Basel Miami Beach is video footage from a selection of Nguyen-Hatsushibi’s runs paired with ‘earth drawings’ or ‘running drawings’ which map his route from an aerial perspective.  These ‘drawings’ are actually lambda prints created by transposing GPS data of his movements onto aerial photographs of each of the cities chosen for the project.  These GPS transfer prints reveal the symbolic shapes formed by the path of his runs.

Nguyen-Hatsushibi’s film The Ground, the Root, and the Air:  The Passing of the Bodhi Tree from 2004-2007 (single channel video, 14 min, 30 sec) is also on view.  This video explores globalization and resulting loss of tradition in Luang Prabang, Laos.  The image of the runner, an empty stadium, the lantern, the Mekong River and the Bodhi tree serve as symbols of this economic change – as well as hope for the future.

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba has shown internationally and can be found in important collections such as the Centre Pompidou and the Whitney Museum of American Art.  He received his BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.  Nguyen-Hatsushiba currently lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City.  His current project for Breathing is Free: 12,756.3 is set in Chicago.

Art Basel Miami Beach ends 6 December 2009.

Viewing the work of Matthew Brannon is like watching a foreign film with no subtitles–you can understand and appreciate the imagery to the extent that you might even form your own idea of what the storyline might be, but there will always be a disconnect between your imagination and the true intention of the film, as told through its dialog. Similarly, Matthew Brannon’s letterpress prints offer charming and straightforward imagery via a highly accessible medium, but they tease your understanding with lines of text that do not expressly correspond with the image, as I learned upon first viewing Brannon’s work in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. While the intention of the artist might not be to confound, that may sometimes be the result; but in most cases the pieces invite the eager viewer into a cheeky game of wordplay.

Currently, Brannon’s new work is on display in a show entitled Nevertheless at The Approach in London, marking the New York-based artist’s first solo show in the city. Nevertheless marks a departure from the print-dominated exhibitions of his past, showing sculpture installation alongside only four letterpress pieces. The show explores “both the idea and the image of a transatlantic sea voyage. The outdated–once preferred–way to travel to London, now but a literary backdrop or an obnoxious tourist getaway,” according to The Approach, and runs through November 1st.

Matthew Brannon was born in 1971 and lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include: The Question is a Compliment, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York (2008); Grandmothers, Galleria Gió Marconi, Milan (2008); Where Were We, Whitney Museum of Art at Altria, New York (2007); Meat Eating Plants, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2005).

Deitch Projects in New York City is currently showing Tauba Auerbach’s Here and Now/And Nowhere, an exhibition which explores the collision of two conflicting states. The title (purposely composed as an anagram) reflects the artist’s fascination with the origins of language, both verbal language and the symbols used in written language. The multimedia show includes paintings, photographic works, sculpture, and a musical instrument, all investigating the space between order and randomness.

The exhibition showcases five bodies of work: Crumple Paintings, Static Photographs, Fold Paintings, a sculpture that is situated half inside and half outside of the gallery, and the central work of the show, the Auerglass. The Crumple Paintings require the viewer to stand far away from the work to perceive the illusion of crumples, created by large Ben Day dots. The Fold Paintings, painted on raw canvas with an industrial paint sprayer, are a series of incrementally sized fold paintings, which represent the conversion of a previous three-dimensional state to two-dimensionality.

The Auerglass, designed by the artist and her friend Cameron Mesirow of the band Glasser, is a two-person wooden pump organ. The instrument requires two people to play, as one must pump in order for the other to play and vice versa. The Auerglass was played at the opening on September 3rd, and will be played as a prelude to a Glasser performance at 8pm on September 11th. During the exhibition, it will be played daily at 5pm from Tuesday through Saturday.

Auerbach was born in San Francisco and received her B.A. in Visual Arts from Stanford University in 2003. She has had solo exhibitions at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco, and was included in the New Museum’s Younger than Jesus this year in New York. She published Tauba Auerbach-How to Spell the Alphabet with Deitch Projects in 2006.

Here and Now/And Nowhere will remain at Deitch Projects at 18 Wooster Street until October 17th.

Julie Garner

Tucked away amidst a tranquil, tree-shaded park in North Berkeley is the Berkeley Art Center, currently hosting an exhibition of mostly Bay Area artists who each have a refreshing take on traditional media. Eighteen artists were chosen by distinguished curators Rene de Guzman and Kate Eilersten, who have a wealth of experience in visual arts programming at cultural hubs like the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Museum of Folk and Craft Art. Eilersten and de Guzman chose artists whose technical expertise and conceptual ideas come together as equal factions in a quotient yielding sublimity. Ultimately, the theme of JURIED@BAC: Works on Paper is transcendence–an evasion of the perceived constraints of a two dimensional media.

Leigh Barbier

Leigh Barbier contributed paintings from her series, Mushroomville, an exploration of her fantasy world filled with women and their adolescent daughters on a mission to understand the insidious aspects of reality. The mothers take on a didactic role, using nature, particularly mushrooms, to explain the difference between the harmful and the nutritious. The scenes are absent of housework and other domestic chores, allowing the female characters to fully delve into their surroundings. Barbier’s ground planes are rocky and angular, treacherously winding underfoot, sometimes even extending out into the space of the viewer. Pushing out of the picture plane is a tactic that is reminiscent of the Byzantine painter, Giotto. However, Barbier’s figures are more volumetric and show more emotion than her Medieval predecessor.

Collaging, piercing, and weaving were some of the other techniques artists used to go beyond the flatness inherent to paper. Iris Charabi-Berggren’s piece, Bird Watching-Gyrfalcom literally weaves itself off the wall. Graphite tones describe the bird’s markings, texture, and brain-like headpiece, which flow into an undulating warp and weave. Julie Garner uses a similar technique in her work, Sugar Factory as she weaves multiple images of the same subject into one single image. Buoyant pneumatocysts and algae permeate the surface of Emily Clawson’s pinhole drawings that she creates by puncturing the paper with the sharp point of a needle or pin. Masako Miki demonstrates how shaded planes of patterned paper can indicate linear perspective and bring order to her precariously stacked items.

In addition to the aforementioned artists, works by Henrique Bagulho, Mariet Braakman, Morgan Ford, John Hundt, Lisa Martin, Liz Maxwell, Anthony Lazorko, Camilla Newhagen, Henry Navarro, Sarah Newton, Jonathan Solo, Hyewon Yoon, and Alex Zecca are also exhibited. The show will be on display through September 20th, 2009.