Her video Dough (2005-2006) depicts a fat woman
suffering from allergies; when she sniffs a flower, tears well up in her
eyes, run down her legs, and evaporate on a hot tile at her feet.
While
the women in Rottenburg's works are cooped up like laborers in a
sweatshop, the production of bodily fluids seems like a parable of
capitalist conditions of production – a true Sisyphean task. The Lobby
Gallery is also showing drawings that arose parallel to Rottenburg's
installations and accompany them – diagrams that teem with pollen,
flowers, and irritants.
Mika
Rottenberg, e21, 2005
|
© courtesy the artist & Nicole
klagsbrun Gallery
|
"Subtle" is what Holland
Cotter, art reviewer for the New York Times, called the work of
1975-born Jennie C. Jones
, whose filigree collage series Record & Listen in Yellow and Brown
(2004) combines the formal languages of Classic Modernism and Abstract
Expressionism with elements of jazz culture. At first glance, her
small-scale pictures resemble abstract compositions, but then the lines
emanating from the squares and rectangles or intertwining with one another
turn out to be microscopically fine cables and microphones – all of which
joins together to form an overall sound system. Jones' work investigates
how African American culture has left its mark on notions of "modernity."
"Some historic intersections are clear," Jones asserts, "a Jackson
Pollock as the cover
of an Ornette Coleman
album, the 'scat' talk that influenced the 'Beat'
generation or the exchange between black expatriates and French Left
Bank intellectuals." Her latest installations implement legendary jazz
recordings along with drawing to research various black modernist utopias.
Charles
LaBelle, Driftworks: London, 2004
The
question of cultural localization takes on key significance for many of
the exhibition's participants. With his psychogeographic works, the Situationist-influenced
Charles LaBelle
examines the boundaries between art and reality, critically investigating
the social constructs of sexual, social, and racial identity. A selection
of his Sugar Hill Suite can be seen at the Lobby Gallery; made
between 2005 and 2006, it is a series of 800 drawings of buildings
documenting his daily walks through the Harlem neighborhood of Sugar Hill:
late 19th-century brownstones, churches, barber shops, jazz clubs,
dilapidated tenement buildings, and liquor stores. Next to these, in an
allusion to his own bodily movement and the innumerable invisible "bodies"
populating the buildings in his drawings, are his so-called "Bloodmaps,"
on which he draws diagrams of the paths he takes through the district in
blood – as though he were moving through a gigantic system of arteries.
Carlos
Motta, Traktornaya Street
Gorky
Entertainment Complex,
both from
the series Leningrad, Petrograd, Petersburg, 2006
|
Carlos
Motta also pursues urban trails, albeit in St. Petersburg, where he
embarks on his search for the places and sites portrayed in Leningrad
, an illustrated volume from 1954 that was published in the USSR during
the Cold War. His diptychs juxtapose the earlier illustrations with
photographs of the locations today. On the other hand, Carrie
Moyer uses historical material in a completely different way. Her
prints are based on poster motifs from the sixties, individual elements of
which she isolates and transforms into abstract, rhythmic forms. The
Brooklyn-based artist Chitra
Ganesh also incorporates images from mass culture in her surreal
drawings: images from Bollywood posters and comics are paired with motifs
from Greek and Hindu mythology, television and internet images. The female
body appears doubled, dismembered, fragmented – as an amorphous site of
cultural conflict on which predetermined sexual roles collide with
repressed fear and longing.
Gareth
James, An image of something for which a strong social taboo or
legislation prohibits actual indexical repredentations, 2005
Gareth
James' elaborately folded origami works frequently pick up on motifs
from newspapers; they are three-dimensional models of thought that
formally investigate abstraction and reduction as well as temporal and
spatial perception. Ignacio
Gonzalez Lang's reconstruction of a CNN website is an astonishingly
pragmatic translation of a virtual image into "reality." The improvised
"imitation" of the internet site reporting on a prison escape is fashioned
from an appropriate material: toilet paper.
Ignacio
Gonzales Lang, Fake, 2004
pa.per.ing is an exhibition of cartographies, models, and
methods of appropriation in which the majority of the artists reference
media images as their point of departure. A good example is the sports fan
and confessing experimentalist Lee
Walton, whose works can take on a variety of forms: drawing, video,
web performance, public action, and theater. In all of his projects,
Walton is interested in generating new experiences to expand
consciousness. This also applies to the sign series he has been making for
years from baseball games broadcast on television. Each individual play is
recorded as a diagram on a small slip of paper; pictures of entire games
join together to form rhythmic images whose modernist elegance recalls a
cross between Mondrian
and de
Kooning. The virtuosity Walton brings to bear in combining conceptual
solutions with formal and aesthetic approaches is amazing – as amazing as
this exhibition, which sets the tone in every respect.
|
Lee Walton, Yankees vs Boston, Sept
30, 2005
|
|
© Lee Walton & Kraushaar Galleries,
New York
|
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
|
