Whitechapel Gallery in London is currently showing Melanie Manchot: Celebration (Cyprus Street).   This project addresses concepts of individual and community identity by revisiting the tradition of public street parties and festivals popular in 20th century London.  Drawing inspiration from these past events captured in newsreels and photographs, Manchot creates and documents her own 21st century street party.

Manchot realized Celebration by working closely with Cyprus Street inhabitants and organizing a party in this Bethnal Green, East London neighborhood.  The artist captured gathered residents as they posed for a group portrait using 35mm film – a medium with historic connection to old newsreels.  Blending photography and film, Manchot used a single tracking shot that pivoted to create a comprehensive, durational group portrait.

Melanie Manchot:  Celebration (Cyprus Street) also includes  photographic portraits of individual Cyprus Street residents.  Manchot’s new film and photographic work is juxtaposed with archival footage selected by the artist of historic street celebrations such as peace parties that took place in 1919 and 1945.  This arrangement allows the gallery visitor to view the changing faces of communities that have coalesced around London’s streets over time.  Most importantly, Manchot’s work reveals the diversifying effects of global migrations on a particular contemporary community.

Celebration (Cyprus Street) is exhibited as a part of the Whitechapel Gallery’s Education Programme.  It was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and was funded by Film London (Digital Archive Film Fund) and Arts Council, England.

Melanie Manchot lives and works in London.  She is represented by Goff + Rosenthal in New York.  Manchot earned an MFA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in London and works in photography, film and video.

Melanie Manchot: Celebration (Cyprus Street) will remain at Whitechapel through 14 March 2010.

Gabriel "Specter" Reese, Guerrilla Billboard, via Gothamist

Opening today at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (MoCADA) in Brooklyn is the group exhibition, The Gentrification of Brooklyn: The Pink Elephant Speaks. Before it had even officially opened, the show generated a fair amount of controversy. It seems to have created a Brooklyn—and Internet—divided. The exhibition was guest curated by Brooklyn native, Dexter Wimberly, and features 20 artists working in various mediums whose work “investigates the controversial impact of gentrification on the great borough of Brooklyn,” according to the museum. Though MoCADA’s mission seeks to “give a more accurate portrayal of contributions to the historical, artistic and cultural landscape of the world by people of African descent,” Wimberly recently told The Brooklyn Paper, “As a curator, it was important to me to make sure this exhibition was not just an African-American perspective, or a white perspective or an Asian perspective or a Latino perspective.”

Josh Bricker, The Order of Things (partial), courtesy the artist

I talked to Josh Bricker, whose installation piece, The Order of Things, is on display in the exhibition. Bricker, who is an MFA candidate at Parsons The New School for Design, told me that The Order of Things—which is made up of ten Anatex “roller coaster” toys in various stages of manipulation—”confronts a lot of the major issues surrounding gentrification, through a slow process of homogenization and conversion.” Bricker says that the toys “were chosen for their iconic status and place in our memories to allow for a re-contextualization of the mundane, as well as an easy entry point into a much heavier and more serious issue.” The ten roller coaster toys follow a spectrum of visual shifts until the last piece becomes almost unidentifiable from the first. Of his process, Bricker says, “If you know color like most artists do then you realize that while white in light is the presence of all color, it is actually the absence of all color in pigments and, therefore, I felt the perfect representation of homogenization and the loss of individuality.”

Josh Bricker, The Order of Things (partial), courtesy the artist

Not everyone in Brooklyn, and elsewhere, though agrees with the message of the exhibition. A casual post about the show on the popular New York blog, Gothamist, turned into an all-out war of words and ideologies when commenters began discussing (not always eloquently) issues of gentrification, race and class. One commenter replied sarcastically to the image of Gabriel “Specter” Reese’s piece for the show, Guerrilla Billboard, saying, “Oh boy here we go… How dare you try to come in and actually contribute to the quality of life here. How dare you try to come in here and open up business, and create jobs. How dare you try to put a boutique clothing shop in place of the 3rd liquor store on this block. How dare you pay taxes!” Another disagreed by responding, “I don’t necessarily think: 3 starbucks per block plus several overpirced [sic] organic fairtrade coffee emporiums, plus…3x rent increase for the same shitty apartment is an ‘improvement’.”

The artists whose work will be on view in The Gentrification of Brooklyn: The Pink Elephant Speaks include: Josh Bricker (Installation), Valerie Caesar (Photography), Oasa DuVerney (Drawing), Zachary Fabri (Video), Rosamond S. King (Installation), Irondale Ensemble (Theater Performance), Nathan Kensinger (Photography), Jess Levey (Photography / Video Installation), Christina Massey (Painting), Musa (Sculpture), Tim Okamura (Painting), Kip Omolade (Painting), John Perry (Painting), Adele Pham (Video), Michael Premo / Rachel Falcone (Photography / Multimedia), Gabriel Reese (Painting), Marie Roberts (Painting), Ali Santana (Music Video), Monique Schubert (Mixed-media), Alexandria Smith (Painting), Sarah Nelson Wright (Installation).

Additionally, photos and essays by students at The Brooklyn Community Arts and Media High School and The Secondary School for Research will be on display in a vignette representing their study and documentation of the impact of gentrification in their neighborhoods. The exhibition runs through May 16, 2010 and features a roster of public events surrounding the issues it seeks to explore, including talks and documentary screenings.

Norwegian visual artist and writer Matias Faldbakken is currently exhibiting a new series of works titled Shocked into Abstraction at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, UK. This presentation marks the artist’s first major UK exhibition, and continues his interest into subcultures, vandalism, destruction and abstraction. Working through a variety of media including film, sculpture, installation, photography and wall painting, Faldbakken deliberately transforms acts of destruction into abstract and aesthetic forms. Within these works, acts of social and political aggression are nullified by manipulating the potent gestures into works of art.

The exhibition contains illegibly sprayed block letters in silver spray paint directly on the gallery walls. The letters have no defining edges and thus bleed together to form an reductive abstract painting. The gallery also contains a stack of Marshall amps which are sold as empty functionless shells. The amps are mere stand-ins for their would-be powerful counter parts. Through this piece the artist highlights the use of sound as an act of aggression by subcultures, while also casting light on the deafening silence of the piece as a minimalist form.

Shocked into Abstraction will remain on view at Ikon Gallery through January 24, 2010. The gallery produced a video with the artist that further explains many of the works on view.

Puerto Rico-based artist Jason Mena appropriates popular marketing tools, such as billboard and aerial advertising, to influence the way we perceive our surroundings. Mena uses these communication platforms to promote new ideas and provoke critical thought by inserting carefully chosen text where a company’s logo or catch phrase is typically seen. In doing this, the artist draws our attention to our passive consumption of visual imagery generated by branding, and subverts this persuasion to consume.

During the 2008 Bacardi Artisan Fair, Mena arranged to have an airplane flying overhead and trailing a banner with the powerful text TODO ES MENTIRA, which translates to “it’s all lies.” The flight lasted approximately thirty minutes and took place over the Castano distillery in Puerto Rico where it was seen by a crowd of over 117,000 people. The somber tone of the banner is coupled with a certain ambiguity, allowing the viewer to attribute his/her own meaning. The artist has also used this phrase on billboards, thus challenging advertising’s imposition on our subconscious.

Mena was born in New York in 1974 and received his B.F.A. from the Escuela De Artes Plasticas De San Juan in Puerto Rico, where he currently lives and works. The artist has had a solo show at Sagrado Corazon University’s Salon de las Artes in Puerto Rico and was nominated for the Emerging Artists Brugal ARCO Madrid 09 Acquisition Award.

At the site of the infamous 1982 Keith Haring mural located at the corner of Houston Street and Bowery, is the second installment of an ongoing mural program organized by Deitch Projects and Goldman Properties. On view from this July through March 31, 2010, is a large mural by Brazilian-born identical twin brothers Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo, otherwise known as Os Gemeos. The massive wall painting contains many of the characters popularized by the artists’ work. Common everyday scenes from the artists’ lives are mixes with explosive abstract patterns and vivid psychedelic colors. About the work, the artists’ have stated “we only report scenes from a magic, love and real place that live inside us, a real dream, the scene of our own universe.”

Os Gemeos have been featured in countless publications, and have been including in a wide range of international solo and group exhibitions. They are represented by Deitch Projects in NYC and Galeria Fortes Vilaca in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Last fall, during a forty-five day residency at Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, South Carolina, artist Josef Kristofoletti created a massive mural depicting a cross section of the CERN particle accelerator, the world’s largest and most dynamic laboratory for particle physics. The mural project at Redux was sponsored in part by DailyServing.com.

CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research situated in the Northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border. Once CERN discovered Kristofoletti’s impressive mural at Redux, the artist was invited by the group to visit the site and evaluate possible locations for a new mural. After initial meetings and discussions with project coordinators, a newly proposed large-scale mural of ATLAS, the largest generator where particles collide, on the outside of the prominent building above the underground detector was approved and slated to begin in late 2009 / early 2010. This will be an unprecedented major art project of its kind on the CERN site. However, due to the major economic constraints of CERN’s science laboratory, they do not have a budget for any art projects; therefore the completion of the mural requires funding from outside sources.

Kristofolletti and CERN are currently seeking financial sponsors to assist with the completion of this permanent large-scale mural. The proposed image of the painting is depicted above and will illustrate a dynamic cross section of ATLAS, perhaps the most important scientific experiment of our life time. The experiment at CERN is probing deeper into the invisible regions of matter, and Kristofoletti, like generations of muralist before him, will use visual art to express the complex and abstract ideas of CERN.

If you are interested in helping to ensure that is particular project is released, please contact Josef Kristofoletti.

Los Angeles-based artist Robbie Conal has made a name for himself over the past several decades for his poignantly irreverent and ultra-humorous political posters featuring unforgettable one-liner jokes. The artist wittingly simplifies issues that surround political figures and delivers the work to a mass audience by creating reproductions of his painting, pasting the posters in cities throughout the country. His clever insight can be seen over countless paintings such as a rendering of Dick Cheney with bunny ears bearing the simple phrase ‘Enronergizer Bunny’ over a hot pink ground.

In his current series of work, the artist has begun to move away from his well-known political poster portraits and has been investigating other, equally clever, connections between popular culture and politics.

The artist recently exhibited a new painting in the retrospective exhibition Beautiful/Decay: A to Z, which opened at the Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles last weekend. In addition, Conal recently teamed up with By Osmosis TV and Beautiful/Decay magazine to produce a short interview video that features the artist at work in his studio.