September 12, 2010 – January 30, 2011

Venus Pareve, 1982-84, painted plaster of Paris, each: 9 7/8 x 5 3/16 x 3 5/16 in. (25.1 x 13.2 x 8.4 cm), The Jewish Museum, New York. Copyright © Hannah Wilke Collection and Archive © Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt

Over the past fifty years, feminists have defied an art world dominated by men, deploying direct action and theory while making fundamental changes in their everyday lives. Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism explores the widespread influence of feminist practice on the styles and methods of painting from the 1960s to the present. The provocative paintings on view here embody the tension between individual expression and collective politics, between a traditional medium and radical action.

While not a survey of Jewish feminist art, Shifting the Gaze is drawn primarily from the collection of The Jewish Museum, and features seven new acquisitions from the past three years. Some art historians have argued that Jewish
feminists are particularly attuned to sexuality, radical politics, and injustice because of Jewish involvement in modernism and leftist politics. Indeed, Jewish painters have played decisive roles in founding and sustaining major feminist theories and art collectives. This exhibition explores how social revolutions take place not only in the realm of ideas and politics, but in style and form.

Shifting the Gaze is organized into six sections: self-expression, the body, decoration, politics, writing, and satire. These topics reflect the variety of styles and forms that individual painters, often working within activist groups, created to challenge viewers to rethink memory, home, art history, and ritual, and to confront
anti-Semitism. Some of the paintings address issues specific to women artists, such as the representation of the body or the legitimacy of craft and decorative arts, while others address social issues that galvanized radical protest. As seen in these works, feminist painting generated new ideas and challenged old ones, shifting the gaze to encompass women’s history, experience, and material culture.

Since the 1980s, The Jewish Museum has supported the work of feminist artists through acquisitions and exhibitions in all media. To offer a historical framework for Shifting the Gaze, the curatorial staff is creating a list of over 550 women artists, from Renaissance Italian weavers to contemporary video artists, who have been represented in special exhibitions at the museum since 1947.

Installation view. Collection of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Hammer Projects: Tom Marioni
By Corrina Peipon

In 1970 Tom Marioni was invited to make an exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California. He asked sixteen friends to come to the museum on a Monday evening, when it was closed. The curator brought enough beer to go around, and everyone “drank and had a good time.”  The empty beer bottles, tables, and chairs were left in situ for the run of the exhibition. Rather than a performance, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art (1970) consisted of an action and its evidence. “Since I didn’t want to subject my friends to being performers, the public was not invited. . . . It was an important work for me, because it defined Action rather than Object as art. And drinking beer was one of the things I learned in art school.”  At the start of the same year, Marioni had founded the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) in San Francisco, where he presented work by artists—including himself, under the pseudonym Allan Fish—experimenting with new art forms, such as conceptual art, sound art, performance and action art, installation, and video. Open to the public as a nonprofit, membership-driven museum, MOCA presented pioneering exhibitions and projects until 1984. In 1976 Marioni started Café Society, a Wednesday afternoon social club that met at Breen’s Bar, down the street from MOCA, where invited guests assembled to drink beer and talk about art. Evolving out of The Act of Drinking Beer, Café Society was a social artwork that brought people together under contrived circumstances to interact freely. Café Society has continued over the years in various iterations, including video screenings with free beer at MOCA and Marioni’s ongoing weekly Wednesday salons at his studio.

Tom Marioni drawing the circle in the Guggenheim

Organized by Anne Ellegood, Hammer senior curator.

August 1 – November 1, 2010

The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor

Hannah Wilke
S.O.S.- Starification Object Series
1974 – 82

Ten black and white photographs with fifteen chewing gum sculptures in plastic boxes mounted on board, 41 x 58 inches. Copyright © Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt – Hannah Wilke Collection and Archive, Los Angeles

go to MoMA

The advent of photography in 1839, when aesthetic experience was firmly rooted in Romanticist tenets of originality, brought into focus the critical role that the copy plays in the perception of art. But if the photograph’s reproducibility challenged the aura attributed to the original, it also reflected a very personal form of perception and offered a model for dissemination that would transform the entire nature of art. The distinctive expression of the photograph, the archival value of a document bearing the trace of history, and the combinatory capacity of the image, open to be edited into sequences in which it mixes with others—all these contribute to the status of photography as both an art form and a medium of communication.

In his 1947 book Le Musée imaginaire (Museum without Walls), French novelist and politician André Malraux postulated that art history, and the history of sculpture in particular, had become “the history of that which can be photographed.” Sculpture was among the first subjects to be treated in photography. There were many reasons for this, including the immobility of sculpture, which suited the long exposure times needed with the early photographic processes, and the desire to document, collect, publicize, and circulate objects that were not always portable. Through crop, focus, angle of view, degree of close-up, and lighting, as well as techniques of darkroom manipulation, collage, montage, and assemblage, photographers have not only interpreted sculpture but created stunning reinventions of it.

The Original Copy presents a critical examination of the intersections between photography and sculpture, exploring how the one medium has been implicated in the analysis and creative redefinition of the other. Bringing together three hundred pictures, magazines, and journals by more than one hundred artists from the dawn of modernism to the present, the exhibition looks at the ways in which photography at once informs and challenges our understanding of what sculpture is.

The exhibition is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography.

The exhibition is made possible by The William Randolph Hearst Endowment Fund.

Additional support is provided by David Teiger and The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/originalcopy/

Contemporary Art from the Collection

June 30, 2010–September 12, 2011

MoMA

The works selected for this installation highlight the debates around economics, politics, gender, and ethnicity that have permeated artistic practices since the late 1960s. Including approximately 130 works drawn from all of the Museum’s curatorial departments, the installation features a variety of approaches to art-making and follows a chronological path. The exhibition begins with works such as a haunting “body print” by David Hammons (1969), which depicts the artist in an act of prayer, and Pino Pascali’s Machine Gun (1966), a sculpture he made out of parts from a Fiat 500 during a period of intense social unrest in Italy. Concluding the show are two projects that explore larger themes of humanity and loss through current events: Huma Bhabha’s expansive print series Reconstructions (2007), in which the artist memorializes lost civilizations in her native Pakistan, and Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot (2007), a project based on the artist’s restaging of Samuel Beckett’s play in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

also…new publications, go get ‘em

Hannah Wilke @ Neuberger Museum of Art (August 30, 2010)

Hannah Wilke / Prestel / Nancy Princenthal

NASA explorations, ‘50s science fiction films, and household electronics are springboards for Altaira. The sculptures resemble lunar probes, modernist sculptures, and Exquisite Corpses with faux marble bodies on spindly legs. These forms stem from a landing pod that safely transported the Mars Exploration Rovers to the Martian surface.  Altaira refers to a character in the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, who grew up surrounded by astounding futuristic appliances and her wild animal friends. The references in Forbidden Planet are multi-faceted, captivating, and yet ridiculous.  Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Freud, Greek mythology, popular science, the American military, and an amazing electronic score all blur to create a fascinating slippage of time.  Like the science fiction films of the ‘50s, the sculptures are layered with faux surface treatments, futuristic efficiency, and simulation.  Klutch Stanaway’s Altaira celebrates the objects we use to explore.

In the artist’s own words, “ I’ve made a fake boulder and some freestanding structures to transform the floor of the gallery into an unknown landscape. Wall units with colored lights transform the walls of the gallery into an interior of an unknown vessel. The boulder can roll through the space via remote control, flipping the notion of which objects are static and which objects are dynamic.  I’ve tried to embody a slight sense of anachronism in the space, and I used 1950s science fiction films as a model.”

To get a preview…follow this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyca45lLx7I


Los Angeles based artist Klutch Stanaway received his M.F.A in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2004, and is currently a sculpture professor at Fullerton College.  Stanaway has had recent solo exhibitions at Haus Gallery in Pasadena and Spacecraft Gallery in San Diego, and in the group exhibition Sound & Motion in 2007 at SolwayJones.

For more information, please contact:

Michael Solway or Angela Jones

solwayjones@sbcglobal.net

http://www.solwayjonesgallery.com/

By Christopher Knight

link to Los Angeles Times

In 1962, Andy Warhol used a stamp technique to reproduce 210 bottles of Coca-Cola on canvas as they might appear in a big supermarket cooler, 30 bottles across and seven rows high. Some were pictured full, others empty and still others only partially filled.

In “Naked Coke,” sculptor Koh Byoung Ok ups the numerical ante while adding a considerable degree of mystery. Eleven rows high, his aluminum shelves feature 264 unprinted, silver cans, polished to a high reflection, in regimented rows of 24. Their tops have not been popped. Whether the mute, light-reflective array of stripped commercial goods is full or empty is a question inducing an unexpected state of meditative stillness and tranquility.

Nearby in his show of eight sculptures at SolwayJones (his first with the gallery), an illuminated light bulb suspended from a cord dangles into water that puddles in the seat of a modern, mass-produced plastic chair. Potentially shocking, in a literal sense, the work twists Warhol’s 1960s silkscreen paintings of electric chairs into conceptual and perceptual knots.

Sculptural koans, where intuition transcends logic, Koh’s work draws its forms from Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual art, especially the work of Warhol, Donald Judd and Felix Gonzalez-Torres (perhaps significantly, all now deceased). Two of the most compelling works stop time — again literally, simply by affixing thread and yarn to the second-hand of battery-powered clock mechanisms affixed to the wall.

The tension and weight of the slender material is enough to cause the second-hand to jerk and quiver, rendered unable to move forward through the curve of space. The most compelling works in the show, Koh’s simple clocks warp expectation

Photo: Naked Coke, 2010

Copyright © 2010 Tribune Company

To be exhibited at SolwayJones, Los Angeles

May 22 – June 26, 2010

Naked Coke III, 2010,  polished coke cans, dimensions variable

Koh Byoung Ok: G Sculpture Show opens Saturday May 22nd, with a reception for the artist from 6 – 9 pm.  The exhibition continues through June 26, 2010.

Continuing the artist’s use of musical scales for exhibition titles and as his archive of past solo shows since 2001, Koh Byoung Ok: G Sculpture Show brings together a group of new and recent sculptures by this Korean born Los Angeles based artist.  G Sculpture Show, his first solo presentation with SolwayJones, will include several works that explore issues of duration, gravity, balance, and volume.  Koh’s ephemeral sculptures float and dance back in forth somewhere between performance, conceptual and minimal art humorously bridging with twists of absurdity and disbelief.

In the artist’s own words, “I approach art as the articulation and encounter of the unexpected, the mundane, and the temporal.  I contemplate the processes and objects of daily life that surround us and define our lives, but that often are seen as small and insignificant due to their commonplace—a snail inching its way along the ground, a person drinking water, a clock ticking, the wrinkles on your fingers after a bath, strands of hair lifted by a breeze.  I isolate these actions and objects, strip them down to their inner energy, put into conversation seemingly unrelated forces, and leave them for viewers to do as they will.  I see my practice as a type of performance art that captures a moment in an encounter, one that I transform and that takes on other articulations in my absence.  I am interested in the meaningless.“

Koh Byoung Ok works were included in the group exhibition Instruments at SolwayJones in 2009.

Recent exhibitions include Near West, Makii Masaru Fine Art, Tokyo, 2008, Humor Us, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, 2008, E Sculpture Show, The Substation, Singapore 2007, Exquisite Crisis And Encounters, Asian/Pacific/American Institute of New York University, New York, 2006, 2002 Gwangju Biennial, Korea.

By Anne Martens

If Channa Horwitz wasn’t female and 78 years old, she’d perhaps—and deservedly—be as well known as her male, L.A. artist contemporaries Robert Irwin and James Turrell. At the time of Ferus Gallery’s emergence, she lived in Tarzana—then as Channa Davis—raising three children, where she created remarkable works of art. One wonders, had she hung around La Cienega Boulevard often enough, would the boys have let her in the clubhouse? This Jet Setter doubts it.

In 2005 and 2007, SolwayJones Gallery exhibited Horwitz’s contemporary work. The gallery’s current two-part exhibition, one at its main space on Hill Street; the other at kunsthalle LA on Chung King Road, showcases the artist’s seminal work of the 60s, 70s and 80s, as well as a piece from 2000 and one from this year. Upon a recent visit to both gallery spaces, Michael Solway pointed out a 1971 LACMA exhibition catalog in a vitrine — tangible evidence of the type of historical exclusionism female artists face. On the cover, about a dozen artist-faces, all male, stared back. Nearby hangs Davis’ 1968 notated sketch for a sculpture, Suspension of Vertical Beams Moving in Space. The sculpture would have included eight moving parts and eight light beams, suggesting the complexity and ambition that any “Light and Space” project would have entailed. The artist had submitted the drawing as part of a proposal for an installation she planned to execute if accepted into the prestigious “Experiments in Art and Technology” program—in which artists were paired with scientists and engineers to explore perceptual phenomena—that culminated in the LACMA show. Although she was admitted into the exhibition, the more significant installation proposal got rejected.

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Channa Horwitz at SolwayJones and kunsthalle L.A

“Sequences & Systems,” a terrific two-part show (split between SolwayJones and kunsthalle L.A.), skims across 40 years of visual investigation by the L.A. artist Channa Horwitz. By the time Horwitz earned her B.F.A. from CalArts in 1972, she had already submitted a proposal (included in this show) to the landmark “Art & Technology” exhibition at LACMA and was well on her way to developing methods of articulating space, typically in ink on paper, using the orderly rigor of predetermined systems.

Her work falls somewhere between game and exercise, mathematics and music. Its key ingredients are rhythm, pattern and repetition, its precursors the minimal, serial art of the ’60s. The entrancing “Composition #8 Augmented Variation #2 reads like an elegant score, following the momentum of a single thick ink line that rises, falls, breaks into separate staccato beats then resumes its sustained visual hum. Some of Horwitz’s works over the years have been performed live, using dancers, synthesizers and projected imagery. Even when not actualized physically, her notations are dynamic and usually involve a sense of progression, so that time and process are actively engaged.

In the Canon series of 1982, for instance, Horwitz draws a simple geometric pattern on separate sheets of graph paper, then draws images that represent the sum of the individual parts. “Eight Layers From the Canon Series, Exposed” presents a grid of 64 such basic components, and the lacy tapestries of line that result when the patterns of each row or column are combined. The austerity of the system gives way to sensual ebullience, and the images, however prescribed, feel immediate and fresh.

– Leah Ollman

Copyright 2010 Los Angeles Times

Channa Horwitz: Sequences and Systems to be exhibited at SolwayJones and kunsthalle L.A., Chinatown March 13 – April 25, 2010


64 Variations on the Canon Series, 1982

Channa Horwitz: Sequences and Systems will be presented in two exhibitions in both the SolwayJones gallery space located at 990 North Hill Street, #180, and in the kunsthalle L.A. exhibition space located at 932 Chung King Road in Chinatown.  Channa Horwitz: Sequences and Systems will include new works and selected early works from the 1960s to 1980s.  Both exhibitions open Saturday March 13th, with a reception for the artist from 6 – 9 pm. The exhibitions continue through April 25, 2010.  The gallery hours are Wednesday – Saturday 11 – 6 pm, Sundays Noon – 5 pm.