Dans La Lune 2007 photo by Nash Baker

Kirsten Hassenfeld‘s ambitious paper sculptures far exceed what most would imagine could be created with the material at hand. A legion of delicate intricacies store like gems in the chest of treasure that is each piece she produces. The results of presumably painstaking hours spent folding, snipping, coiling and chaining, Hassenfeld’s sculptures are as elaborate as they are elegant. Recently, two of her bodies of work–Blueware and Dans la Lune–were on view at Brown University‘s David Winton Bell Gallery. The new series, Blueware, focuses on embodiments of nature, and both the Eastern and Western traditions of decorative arts. Meanwhile, Dans la Lune, which was a highly celebrated installation first exhibited at the Rice Art Gallery in Houston, Texas in 2007, thrills the senses with its ornate ceiling hung sculptures. The work glows with light from within and bathes in its own projection of baroque shadows.

Dans La Lune (detail) 2007 photo by Nash Baker

Kirsten Hassenfeld lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from the University of Arizona, Tuscon and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Her work has been exhibited extensively, including at: Bellwether, New York, NY; The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY; Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY; Phillips de Pury, New York, NY; The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY and White Columns, New York, NY. She is a 2006 recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.

Currently exhibiting at the N2 Gallery in Barcelona, Spain are the works of Spanish artist Aurelia Munoz. The works on display are delicate, yet formidable, sculptures made of materials ranging from handmade paper to textile fibers. The piece Entre Social, 1976, is a large-scale macrame sculpture that serves as testimony to Munoz’s ability to beautifully marry geometry and abstraction with natural textiles, creating an entirely new three-dimensional artistic vocabulary. Mandala con flores, 1988, gives new meaning to the term “work on paper”. Made from tiny pieces of handmade paper, suspended on tiny strips of flax linen, Munoz successfully straddles the two and three-dimensional planes, capturing the ever-elusive medium of shadow. This exhibition, which will be on view through November, marks the first gallery exhibition for the 83 year-old in nearly thirty years, as her work primarily is shown in museums.

Aurelia Munoz was born in 1926 in Barcelona, Spain. Her works are included in many museum collections worldwide such as the Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Stedelijk van Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh, Scotland; Museum of Contemporary Art Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain and theMuseum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, Spain just to name a few.

Play With Your Own Marbles is the title of a new exhibition currently on view at San Francisco’s NOMA Gallery. The exhibition, which is curated by Betty Nguyen, Creative Director of First Person Magazine, brings together three Los Angeles-based artists in an examination of artistic process and its relation to utility, both in object and image. The exhibition highlights the objects and cyanotypes of Walead Beshty, the meticulously rendered photorealist drawings of Karl Haendel, and the formal concrete “paintings” of Patrick Hill.

Play With Your Own Marbles is not only linked through the evident formal and aesthetic concerns of each artist, as the show is remarkably connected through its homogenized temperament, graphically monochromatic palette, and overall deconstructionist sensibility, but each artist also plays with a strong sense of irony through material, form and method of display.

Patrick Hill

Patrick Hill has applied thick bands of concrete, absorbed and stained into a black velvety surface revealing small crevices of color, opening a dialogue between a strictly modernist approach to painting and the everyday utilitarian material of concrete.

Walead Beshty’s FedEx Kraft Box………… sculpture, which contains custom shatter proof glass cubes placed inside standard Fed-ex boxes, displays the evidence of wear as an object travels from one location to another. These ready made materials are further “improved” by the imposing alteration of travel. In addition to the sculpture, Beshty also presents several photographic images of isolated objects produced by placing the otherwise utilitarian forms on photosensitive paper, rendering them useless of their original function. Images of crumpled paper and eyedroppers begin to resemble abstracted paintings, drawings and monoprints further removing the viewer from the object’s original state and placing it more in the realm of the artifact.

Karl Haendel’s photorealist graphite drawings subvert functional objects by manipulating scale, content and source imagery. Haendel’s imagery and method of presentation is generous in it ability to be easily recognized though careful rendering and specific depiction of everyday materials such as paper, razor blades, nails and paper clips. However, the work subtly unfolds and challenges the viewer through its coded symbols and methods of display. Haendel presents a delicately drawn image of ripped paper on a plywood platform supported by stacks of art magazines, which plays with the viewer’s physical perspective to drawing and the repetition of material (paper) through multiple forms. This work is presented along side images of blades mounted to wood gently resting against a wall and large scrolls of paper containing references of would be titles for the exhibition, all of which playfully discuss the relationship between concept and material.

The collections of work in Play With Your Own Marbles are subtly seductive, engaging the viewer first through a whisper and later through a tug of the ear. Each work takes the utilitarian object and subverts it to reveal new potentials that have the ability to exist on a sliding scale of completion, remaining in a state of flux both formally and conceptually.

Play With Your Own Marbles will be on view in San Francisco through October 3rd.

Article by Catherine Wagley for DailyServing – Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

“Eat Drink Swan Man”, 2008 Watercolor and collage on paper Overall dimensions 43″ x 63″ (nine parts) Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Mutu and Walker both probe the ways in which women’s bodies have been caricatured and both use craft-inspired materials to create compositionally seductive images. Both also provoke the same question: is this work compelling because of what it says or because of the way it speaks?

Mutu received her BFA from Cooper Union and her MFA in Sculpture from Yale. Since leaving Yale, Mutu has participated in celebrated group shows internationally and her inclusion in Saatchi Gallery’s USA Today made her, at least fleetingly, an art world sensation. The critical discussion surrounding her work often hovers around terms like mutilation, fashion and empowerment, emphasizing the contrast between representations of gender in Africa and the West. But there’s something missing from the discussion of Mutu’s art. The compulsive, sentimental, and seductive quality of her imagery overwhelms any social criticism that she might be articulating.

Kara Walker, Philadelphia, Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

Like Mutu, Walker jumped through the hoops of academia. She graduated with a BFA from Atlanta College of Art and received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. After her breakthrough show, Selections 1994, at The Drawing Center in New York, Walker became controversial. Despite, or perhaps because of, accusations that she promulgated stereotypes, Walker’s career flourished and she won a Macarthur genius grant in 1997. Walker’s mid-career retrospective, “My Complement, My Enemy, My Opressor, My Love,” is on exhibit until June 8 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Mutu’s current show, “Little Touched” at Susan Vielmetter Projects in LA, runs through May 3.

Mutu’s and Walker’s concurrent exhibitions call to mind a gut wrenching scene from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. In Morrison’s novel, a heartbroken Hagar tries to reclaim the self-esteem her lover took from her. She buys panties, a night gown, heels, a little yellow dress, perfume, red lipstick. Walking home with her purchases, she gets caught in a storm that destroys her finery. Still, Hagar is determined to make her self beautiful and lovable. She uses the soiled finery to turn herself into ca garish, overly made-up caricature. Then she collapses in exhaustion. By the end of the chapter, Hagar dies, destroyed by her desperate attempts to feel attractive.

Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

“You pretty, no you pretty”, 2008 Watercolor and collage on paper Overall dimensions 14 ¬º ” x 23 ¬Ω” (two parts) Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

A similar self-destroying occurs in “Little Touched.” Mutu’s “You pretty, no you pretty” consists of two drawings in which opulent water color stains morph into approximations of faces. Mutu has collaged photos of vegetation, leopard skin, and a human figure onto the stains, inviting sleek magazine imagery into the discussion of prettiness. But the discussion can go nowhere since the materials silence each other. The magazine imagery allows no room for the stains to assert themselves and the drawings become passive. Like Hagar, “You pretty, no you pretty” disappears in a puddle of aimless finery.

Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

“A’gave you”, 2008 Mixed media collage on mylar 93″ x 54″ Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Mutu’s “A’gave you” pushes the problem of passivity to a further extreme. A large work on Mylar, “A’gave you” uses an assortment of materials and collaged body parts to depict a woman’s figure. Her body is in an excruciating position, exploding as if struck by a grenade. Yet the lusciousness of the materials turns the violence into something decorative. This seems to be Mutu’s obsession: the violent seduction of mass media images and the places where the violence and beauty converge. Violence appears so natural that we react to the opulent imagery of Mutu’s work more strongly than we react to its confrontational content.

Bette Sayre waged war on Kara Walker in the mid-1990s because she feared that Walker turned stereotypes into seductive, formally compelling imagery. Sayre had reason to fear: Walker’s art is lyrical. Her large paper cut-outs and her projections work together like a perfect poem; each word plays an irreplaceable role in the overall composition. Yet the work also has an unavoidable brutality.

Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

Walker: “Excavated from the Black Heart of a Negress.” Cut paper on wall. 13 x 99 ft. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkea Jenkins & Co.

While an unsuspecting viewer could approach Walker’s “Excavated” innocently enough, the narrative portrayed by the installation will eventually set in: baby-knapping, genital grabbing, defecating and other vulgarities. This contrast between visual lyricism and content does not make Walker’s work didactic; instead it makes the work unsettling in the worst possible way. There is nothing we can do about 19th Century representations of slavery and Walker’s work does not give us an easy prescription for making the world a better place today.

The videos in the show depict lyrical scenery reminiscent of Gone with the Wind — silhouette hand-puppets move rhythmically across the frame with sunsets and mystic rivers in the background. But Walker’s narratives uninhibitedly probe rape, mutilation and death. Anyone who does not leave the exhibition feeling sick to the stomach has not truly seen Walker’s work.

Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

Walker: “Excavated from the Black Heart of a Negress.” Cut paper on wall. 13 x 99 ft. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkea Jenkins & Co.

The problem with Walker’s work is that it’s as deadly and confrontational as it is lyrical. On the other hand, Mutu’s is as visceral as it is beautiful, but it is not confrontational in the least. The two artists occupy different spheres — Walker the sphere of context-specific, historically driven art and Mutu the sphere of diffuse, media-driven art. Yet both artists have a similar net affect: they seduce us with sensual, rich imagery but ultimately leave us feeling destroyed.

The characters found in artist John Casey‘s drawings are often deformed and humorously dark. Each piece is created with dense line work and minimal color on a white ground and is said to reference a different psychological state experienced by the artist. While these “psychological” self portraits have an apparent dark side, they also embody a sense of fragility and vulnerability. This seems to be a consistent characteristic of the artist’s work. Casey is a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art (1988). This year, the artist will be exhibiting “Metamorphorsis Chamber” with FPAC Gallery in Boston, Mass., and “New Works” with TAG Art Gallery in Nashville, Tenn. Last year, the artist exhibited with Boontling Gallery and 33 Grand, both in Oakland, California Next month, Casey will be featured in a group exhibition that highlights drawing at OKOK Gallery in Seattle.