Tilton Gallery is very pleased to present Music for Pure Waves, Bass Drums and Acoustic Pendulums, a sound installation by the pre-eminent musician, composer and sound artist Alvin Lucier. This is the seventh time Lucier has shown work at Tilton and his second solo exhibition with the gallery. A reception for the artist will take place on Tuesday, February 19th from 6 to 8 pm.

Alvin Lucier is a pioneer of sound art and a composer of experimental music whose performance pieces and sound installations explore the boundaries, or lack thereof, of acoustic phenomena and auditory perception. Lucier is part of the generation of avant-garde musicians of the 1960s and 1970s that included John Cage and David Tudor (whose work he first saw performed in Italy in 1960 when there on a Fulbright Scholarship and with whom he subsequently worked), Philip Glass, Steve Reich, La Monte Young and many others whose approach to making music included the experimental use of electronic technology, often devised by the artist himself, random chance and just about anything - from a piece of scotch tape being pulled, a piece of paper being rattled, to brain waves and the acoustic phenomena created within different types of chambers.

Particularly influenced by John Cage's chance operations employed to achieve a non-subjective music and David Tudor's radical configurations of found electronic devices, Lucier's own ground-breaking contributions to the creation of this new musical form are in his investigation of interference waves and of how sound changes when it bounces off of or interacts with objects or the walls of a specific chamber. Inspired both by scientific experiments and by what happens in nature, like a rainstorm, or thunder, Lucier explores the variations, repetitions, similarities, continuations and undulations of sound in different situations. He places these occurrences in an artistic context, transforming neutral sound sources into expressive music and sound pieces. This transformation is, as he's written, "...perhaps closer in spirit to alchemy, whose purpose was to turn base metals into pure gold."

What distinguishes Lucier as a musician and sound artist from many of his colleagues is that his pieces have a tangible sculptural quality and can exist independently after performances. His influence on younger generations of musicians extends to artists as divergent in practice as the late Butch Morris and the contemporary artist Christian Marclay.

Music for Pure Waves, Bass Drums and Acoustic Pendulums (1980) has been exhibited countless times, including at Tilton Gallery in 1984. In this piece, a constantly ascending sine wave flows through loudspeakers hidden behind four bass drums. As it does so, Ping-Pong balls, suspended in front of the drumheads, are caused to bounce away from the heads in unpredictable ways, in greater or lesser excursions, depending on the force of the resonances or the resonant characteristics of each drum. The balls' ensuing return bounce on the drum skins generates a rich, audible percussive music.

Alvin Lucier was educated at Yale and Brandeis University, where he taught from 1962 to 1970 and conducted the Brandeis Chamber Chorus. In 1966 he began a collaboration with composers Robert Ashley, David Behrman and Gordon Mumma to form the Sonic Arts Union, a live electronic music ensemble devoted to the performance of each other's works. From 1968 to 2011 he was John Spencer Camp Professor of Music at Wesleyan University where he has influenced many younger artists and intellectuals. His works have included sound installations, works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles and orchestra. Lucier was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States and in November 2011 Wesleyan University celebrated his retirement with a three-day festival of his works. Lucier performs, lectures and exhibits extensively throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.

Tilton Gallery is pleased to present We Come Undone, a solo exhibition of wall collages and drawings by Yashua Klos. This is Klos' first one person show at Tilton. A reception for the artist will take place on Tuesday, February 19th from 6 to 8 pm.

Yashua Klos explores issues of identity, memory and biography through the lenses of mythical blackness and mythical maleness. Working against the audience's pre-existing views, Klos consciously engages in a strategy of cultural resistance, using scale and form as well as subject matter to push back against cultural ideas of blackness and marginalization.

Klos' formal construction of disparate collaged images mirrors the constant fracturing and reconciliation of blackness, masculinity and family structures within the black urban environment. Klos sees collage itself, as a medium, as a metaphor for the fragmentation of African American identity. Informed by his personal history of growing up without a father on the South Side of Chicago, the artist also references the larger ideas of ancestry, mythology and cosmology. His constructions lead one into an imaginary landscape, at once ancient and futuristic, classic and sci-fi, where identity is both in question and shockingly evident.

Klos creates his own shallow cubist space by juxtaposing and overlapping smaller collage elements, twisting and turning their orientation to create the illusion of spatial movement and three-dimensional wall sculpture. The impression of fractured space is furthered by the angled vantage points and foreshortened views of recognizable images.

These are collages hung directly, unframed, on the wall that appear to be intricate patterns composed of multiple, repetitive elements that appear from afar as abstract units. What distinguishes Klos' work is that these small elements are as often representational or figurative as abstract. They converge to create the larger, whole, images, also representational, often portraits and figures emerging out of an unidentifiable pile of rubble. Heads and faces emerge out of abstract shapes that double as both building blocks and debris. Assembled out of woodblock prints and ink, larger intricate worlds come into being: ambiguous half abstract, half recognizable images, challenging spatial norms as well as art history's stylistic categories. This physical complexity echoes the psychological ambiguities that comprise Klos' subject. Perhaps a sculptor at heart, Klos transforms his two-dimensional collages into three-dimensional illusions, works that are at once flat on the wall and appear built out, more like sculptural reliefs.

Born in Chicago, Klos currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and teaches at Hunter College where he received his MFA and at Parsons The New School for Design. He was a resident of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2005. His work is currently included in Fore at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.  

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce a new large-scale installation by Miroslaw Balka. Employing non-traditional art materials, Balka will create a monumental work that draws on historical tragedy to reflect on the limits of the world, continuity, and catastrophe. Balka will transform the 21st Street gallery space, constructing a private room in which to encounter his work and creating an intimate atmosphere for viewers to contemplate the massive, elegiac sculpture before them. Meditating on trauma, the discourse of nature, and the resulting wounds of historical events, the work encourages viewers to confront the past and to bear witness to the events that have come to define our present.

Over the course of the past thirty years, Balka has created a diverse body of work that engages notions of historical memory, the limits of representation, and the power and veracity of language. Encompassing installation, sculpture and video, Balka’s oeuvre has a bare and minimalist quality, exhibiting a particular sensitivity to materials that generate multilayered associations for the viewer as witness. Balka utilizes symbolic abstraction rather than discrete monument to address places and events sometimes related to the legacy of Nazi occupation in Poland and to investigate notions of trauma and collective memory.

For “The Order of Things,” Balka will contemplate both the possibility for and the limits of language and structural representation as a means for understanding history and its aftermath. Looking at the way conventions of truth and cultural discourse shift over time, Balka will contemplate the limitations of our usual modes of classification and depiction, moving beyond them to introduce the viewer to new modes of thought.

Miroslaw Balka was born in 1958 in Warsaw and was raised in Otwock, Poland, where he kept his studio until recently. Balka now lives and works in Warsaw. He has been the subject of many solo exhibitions at international venues, including Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; K21, Dusseldorf, Germany; National Museum of Art, Osaka; Museet for Samtidskunst, Oslo; IVAM, Centre Del Carme, Valencia; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld; and The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Balka has also been included in a number of important group exhibitions, including: “The Carnegie International 1995,” Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Documenta IX, Kassel, Germany; The 44th, 50th and 51th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; The 9th and 15th Sydney Biennale, Sydney, Australia; and the 2006 SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Balka was awarded the 2009—2010 Unilever Tate Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern, and in 2011 was included in the exhibition “Ostalgia” at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.

Edelman Arts is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new five new large-scale works by Doug Argue: The Art of Translation. Argue is best known for his monumental abstract paintings that incorporate text, as he equates letters, numbers and symbols to atoms. Drawing from such sources as The Book of Genesis and Moby Dick, Argue rearranges the characters on the canvas, stretching and contorting them to construct new meaning from found writing.

Argue explores the concept of infinite time and space in his paintings by fusing abstraction with math, science, and the anthroplogy of language. The results are momentus, ethereal, visceral - boardering on spiritual. Argue embraces the tradition of painting while employing modern techniques of realism, abstraction and expressionism. His work embodies all the questions one might contemplate, and yields all the answers the viewers choose to see.

Argue's work is represented in numerous publich collections including the Walker Art Center, Minnesota Museum for American Art, Weisman Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Grand Rapids Art Museum. Argue has also been the recipient of many awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Rome Prize, a Bush Foundation Fellowship and a Pollock-Krasner Grant.

New York, NY. Porter Contemporary is pleased to announce GRINDHOUSE, a solo exhibition of paintings by Australian pop artist Johnny Romeofrom February 21 through March 30, 2013 with an opening reception with the artist on February 21^st from 6:30 – 8:30 PM. Romeo sees this exhibition as his love letter to grindhouse cinema, with the new series being a celebration of all things sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. “Romeo’s pop-savvy approach lends the series an air of witty nostalgia in this tongue-in-cheek examination of the grim world of grindhouse,” says Jessica L. Porter, Founder and Director of Porter Contemporary.

This is Romeo’s debut exhibition in New York. Like the films of its namesake, the series exudes seductive, violent energy. With Romeo’s arsenal of brash, expressive colours, pop-inflected punk grit, and graphic imagery, each work is a visual cocktail of seductive vixens, high-octane cars and skulls that laugh in the face of death.

Highlights from the exhibition include Death Stare, pictured above and Smoke House, pictured right, featuring phrases such as ‘Love Gun None’ alluding to a world where love ends with the kiss of death. “Drawing on the quirky nihilism of Tarantino and the vixens of classic Russ Meyers, GRINDHOUSE is my exploration of our fascination with death and destruction,” says artist Johnny Romeo.

Listing Information:

GRINDHOUSE, Paintings by Johnny Romeo

Exhibition Dates: February 21 – March 30, 2013

Opening Reception with the Artist: Feb 21, 6:30 – 8:30 PM

Press Inquires: media@portercontemporary.com

Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce the fifth solo-exhibition in New York by the German artist Dirk Skreber. The show, consisting of new paintings and a large sculpture, will run from February 21 through March 30, 2013, with a reception for the artist February 21st from 6 to 8pm.

In his new exhibition, pain(t)ology and other trials, Dirk Skreber continues to mine the contradictions of popular imagery through both conceptual and formal variations. These polarized elements exist in tandem but simultaneously threaten a collapse or confusion of pictorial meaning. Skreber’s subjects tumultuously balance violence and beauty, catastrophe and calm, safety and fear, both in their immediate aftermaths (billowing explosions and the wreckage of terrorist attacks) and their potentiality as a quiet threat (a single missile-mounted predator drone taxis across two canvases worth of an unidentified American floodplain). Contradiction manifests physically, as the serene neutral blue of an unmoored diver in the painting Diver (with anti-matter gatling gun) 2.0 transforms into an apocalyptic orange sea in its doppelgänger Diver (with anti-matter gatling gun) 2.0, Inversion and large painted portraits of models torn by formalist abstractions.

Center to exhibition is the sculptural installation PRC. Through researching an archive of images found on the internet, Skreber has scrupulously reconstructed the brown metallic cage used in the trial of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, the three members of the feminist punk collective Pussy Riot. This odd piece of furniture, used in Russian courtrooms for dangerous criminals, ironically became the stage set that propelled the punk band to international fame after their conviction of hooliganism (a two-year sentence for staging a protest song in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior). The sculpture raises questions about the distribution and control of speech in a world in which the internet’s real-time free flow of information can coexist with autocratic rule.

Dirk Skreber (born 1961, Lübeck, Germany) has had solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; the Museum Franz Gertsch, Burgdorf; the Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem; and the Aspen Art Museum. His most recent survey exhibition, Dirk Skreber. NDAA - Der Na(h)tanz Hummer II at the Leopold-Hesch-Museum & Papiermuseum in Duren in 2012 was accompanied by a comprehensive monograph. He will have an upcoming exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum later this year. Dirk Skreber lives and works in New York.

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce The Phantom Sex, an exhibition of new work by Dana Hoey. The exhibition opens on Thursday, February 21st, from 6:00 – 8:00 PM and remains on view through March 30th.

The Phantom Sex is a series of twelve new photographs. As if engaged in the futile search for the elusive, essentialist “woman,” Hoey’s photographs of figurative casts and molds record the shell of a female, both literally and figuratively. An Art Nouveau figure, a Dutch Orientalist sculpture, a “death mask” of the actor Sean Young - all of these perversely unrealistic objects serve to unseat and unmask the girlish ideal. Among other materials, Hoey has cast her face and her best friend’s body in such grotesque detail that they leave only a trace – not a picture of a person – but a picture of a three dimensional record of a person, a ghost.

In 2012 Dana Hoey had a survey exhibition at the University Art Museum at Albany, New York. Her work is included in numerous collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; University Art Museum, Princeton University, New Jersey; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She received a B.A. in philosophy from Wesleyan University and an M.F.A. in photography from Yale University. She lives and works in upstate New York.

Team Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by the Romanian-born, Köln-based artists Gert & Uwe Tobias. The exhibition will take place in both gallery spaces and run from the 21st of February through the 31st of March 2013. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene, and at 47 Wooster Street, cross streets Grand and Broome. 

Since the early 2000s, Gert and Uwe Tobias, artist collaborative and twin brothers, have developed a unique and multivalent practice that covers the spectrum of media from drawing, collage, typography, painting and printmaking, to ceramics and installation. Their work typically incorporates such contradictions as abstraction with figuration, modernism with folklore, technology with craft, and comedy with tragedy. Tobias installations frequently include organizational arrangements of colorful, architectonic wall painting and structural effects that act as both connectors among disparate elements — all “untitled”— and enactors of the mirroring strategies of reflection and symmetry. The many forms which their work takes help locate the images within a wider vocabulary of art history, collective memory, and political and personal history.

The Tobias brothers have become known most prominently for their large-scale woodblock prints on paper and canvas, where they utilize the ancient stamping technique of black-and-white small scale illustrative printmaking in anachronistic, elaborate, and oversize chromatic compositions. The artists develop flat, matte, and dark grounds onto which graphic patterns, organic forms, and ambiguous, amalgamated figures are set. The objects and bodies of the Tobias tableaux are often drawn from archetypal folk figures of their Transylvanian heritage, including the notable character Vlad the Impaler, as well as Romanian political lineages of dictatorial urbanization and Socialist architecture. The mingling of abstract and faintly gridded grounds with mysterious physiognomies acts as a way to line up the experiences of rigid geometric and abstract modernism with the popular symbols and narratives of figurative art history.  

The tableaux of the new works on view include the macabre and fractured figures the artists are known for, mounted to inky black color fields with baroque furniture centerpieces. In one massive canvas, a luminous, pastel-hued daybed that could double as a crenellated coffin is the setting for an overturned bird, a hybrid figure somewhere between bat and butterfly, and a cross-section of a fruit with insides resembling human organs. A figure at the foot of the bed is more courtly costume than body, shaped like a lampshade or an umbrella with a single leg that ends in a hoof. Another woodblock painting presents a long dining table as if from a Renaissance vanitas still life, classically laid with fruits and meats in various states of ripeness and decay. In this case, the still life elements are amorphous forms somewhere between autumn leaves, sea animals, and strange beasts. A third large-scale woodcut has no central furnishings, but instead presents an arabesque of razor-sharp flowers, fruits, starbursts positioned on thorny black vines against a luminous silver grid. In each vague bud are geometric kernels reminiscent of seeds, eyes, or other orifices—elusive composite sites of myth, nature and ornament, ripe with latent violence and symbolic potential.

Also included in this latest exhibition are over two-dozen new works on paper which locate printed found images within lushly painted backgrounds. The space of the drawings is created by the placement of delicately cut book and magazine reproductions of animals, limbs, windows, furniture and the like against ridges of paint and modulations of hue. A body of new sculptures furthers the Brothers’ investigation of the collage effect. Small, beautifully fired and painted ceramics, ambiguously shaped like creatures, sit atop towers made from agglomerations of functional household artifacts like butter dishes, teapots and ashtrays. The resultant personages are called forth from the juxtaposition of the hand-made heads and the cobbled-together found objects that complete their bodies.

This is the Tobias brothers’ third solo show at Team. They have had solo exhibitions in the US at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In 2012, the artists had solo museum shows at FRAC Auvergne, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and Der Kunstverein Hamburg. Solo shows have also been mounted at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway, the Kunsthalle Wien, and the Franz Gertsch Museum in Switzerland. An upcoming solo is slated for later this year at Whitechapel Gallery in London.

“ . . . And turning from the future's emptiness
I watch within me all the past arise.”

—Guillaume Apollinaire, “Cortège”

Laurel Gitlen is proud to present Cortège, an exhibition of new work by Allyson Vieira. Using contemporary building materials, standards, and tools, Vieira’s work interrogates the relationship between form and material across eras. As history itself is recycled, relocated, and rebuilt through the succession of societies and the passage of time, forms and motifs are repurposed, creating new pedigrees and lineages that reverberate the signs of the past. At the same time, the structures we inhabit, quotidian trash, and raw materials comingle and compress into the literal bedrock of successive generations.

In his poem, “Cortège,” Apollinaire beckons to himself, “Guillaume, it's time that you came.” From blocks of stacked drywall, pairs of nascent figures emerge in a burdened contraposto, as if answering an echo of his call. Carved with a Sawzall from solid, rectangular columns — the dimensions of which are a tense negotiation between standard construction dimensions and those of the artist’s body — fuse female form and workaday architecture. Neither solid block nor figure, existing between material-as-form and form-qua-form, these faceted caryatids support steel I-beams above their heads, creating post-and-lintel structures. In this fundamental object type, both modern and ancient, two upright posts support the weight of a perpendicular lintel, distributing it to the ground. Creating doors, windows, warehouses, temples, and tenements, these structures are the unit-forms of basic architecture.

Two towers of cast drywall studs, formed from successively smaller post-and-lintel units, bracket the gallery. Wavering rolls of mirrored Mylar push the towers' reflections beneath the floor, extending them from our materially positive present through the membrane of zero, underground into the imaginary past, counting backward through negative numbers we cannot actually reckon. The units of Vieira’s constructions are themselves copies. Studs made of laminated drywall are simultaneously a waste-product of inexpensive construction and an essential tool in storing and delivering large stacks of the material from which they are made. They are what’s left over when the job is done. Here, drywall stud remnants from the construction of the artist's studio are cast in plaster (the historical material of three-dimensional duplication) and mixed with concrete to make a new, original building material that masquerades as marble. Along one long wall lies a pile of more drywall stud casts: a schematic big-box store in hypothetical collapse.

In the side gallery, a rudimentary apsidal structure of balanced drywall sheets ensconces a bronze, cult-like, figural pair, Hygra Physis, in arrested action. The winged phallus and the octopus invite a new mythology: an animated portrait of the generative conflict between optical, search-and-destroy power and an encompassing, chthonian threat from the deep, acted out in perpetuity.


Allyson Vieira (b. 1979) lives and works in New York. She currently has two public commissions on view in New York: in the Highline exhibition Lilliput and in Public Art Fund’s Configurations at MetroTech Center Commons. Her work is currently included in A Handful of Dust at Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, and will be included in Remainder, a forthcoming exhibition at the Philbrook Museum of Art, and in a two-person exhibition at Non Objectif Sud, Tulette, France. Vieira will also be the subject of a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland in September 2013.

Josef Albers wrote that “the origin of art [is] the discrepancy
between physical fact and psychic effect.”

Anne Vieux and Martha Mysko developed Down the Pigeon Hole by
examining the relational meaning of objects and their abstraction
through framing. The work developed through several video chat conversations,
where they created malleable compositions through the
frame of the screen. Experimenting with various video chat software led to a dialogue between the artist's household objects and tchotchkes -- one that probes the state of being bored within a domestic setting.

Reflecting on conventions of painting and applying
them to the objects which recur in projection and printed materials,
cultural meaning is complicated and disordered as objects are  transformed
into an immediate abstraction. Themes of fertility, religion, and the cosmic
emerge through categorization and formal play within a disjunctive narrative
that takes a gestural approach to abstract painting. Down the Pigeon Hole is a
collaborative effort that reflects a desire to find some re-enchantment in our
secular realities.

Bortolami is pleased to present Ben Schumacher's first solo show at the gallery, running from February 22 - March 30, 2013, with an opening reception on February 22nd from 6-8 PM.  Titled D S + R and the bar at the Orangerie, the show will include a collaboration and exchange with New York based architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro; an employee from the firm will work in the gallery for the duration of the show, restoring early models from competitions and realized projects. At the office of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Schumacher will install several works available to the public through images.

The exhibition will be an interconnected weaving of different elements: beside the architectural models and the employee's desk, there will be marble sculptures of cable management racks; lights made from reconfigured Ikea fixtures wrapped in handmade leather sleeves; a series of free-standing glass sculptures with three-dimensional composite prints and vinyl imagery; small figurative paintings; still packaged Ikea shelves set in plexi boxes with inserted rapid prototypes; functioning tablet screens set into marble slabs. The diverse elements form a fluid, layered effect, both in the exhibition as a whole, and in the individual works.

The title refers to the architecture of modern modes of information transmission, comparing the contemporary use of data centers as storage to the cultivation of foreign plants year-round in orangeries. The greenhouse acts as a chassis for the preservation of botany that could otherwise not be sustained locally, rendering fruit available regardless of season or location, just as the internet provides immediate global information, available at the same time everywhere. Looking at the Orangerie as the 20th century architectural space for cultivation and storage, the gallery becomes a metaphor for the internet "cloud",  a hub of communication and data storage.

Ben Schumacher was born in 1985 in Kitchener, Canada. Recent exhibitions include "Greek" with Hugh Scott Douglas at Croy Nielsen, Berlin; "1867, 1881, 1981" with Elaine Cameron-Weir at Bodega, Philadelphia; James Fuentes, New York; Martos Gallery with Ryan Foerster, New York; "Short Stories" at the Sculpture Center, New York; "Reverse Boustrophedon" at Tomorrow Gallery, Toronto; "Of the Andirons" at Galerie Desaga, Cologne, Germany. He graduated from New York University's Steinhardt program with a Masters in Fine Arts in 2011.

The Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative identifies and supports a network of curators and artists from South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa in a comprehensive five-year program involving curatorial residencies, acquisitions for the Guggenheim’s collection, international touring exhibitions, and far-reaching educational activities. The first exhibition, No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, organized by June Yap, Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, South and Southeast Asia, will open at the Guggenheim Museum on February 22, 2013. The exhibition focuses on the artistic practices and cultural traditions of that region, which includes Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India. The artworks in the exhibition, along with others acquired as part of Guggenheim UBS MAP, will enter the Guggenheim’s permanent collection under the auspices of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Purchase Fund.

Following an exhibition model that is both integrative and contextual, No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia investigates the notion of culture as fundamentally borderless, revealing networks of influence and exchange within the region. Drawn from the opening line of William Butler Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium” (1928), which later inspired the title of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men (2005), the exhibition title underscores a central question: How is the designation “South and Southeast Asia” defined and understood internationally? No Country considers the impact of ethno-nationalism, historical colonization, and present-day globalization on identities in the region and how the region is marked culturally by its intertwined histories and shared social, religious, and creative traditions.

No Country examines the region from within, looking at the geopolitics of South and Southeast Asia through the work of a cross-generational selection of artists. The exhibition includes painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance documentation, and examines a range of topics including cross-cultural encounters and negotiations; conceptions of nation, identity, and religion; historical interpretation and narratives; quasi-archival responses to cultural appropriation, and new developments in media and aesthetics.

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 Pier Paolo Pasolini - the filmmaker, poet, sentimental leftist, and transgressive legend - lived a life marked by curious contradiction and unimpeachable integrity. Sculpted by a nomadic Italian childhood filled with religion, war, Socialism, Facism, and run-ins with the law, Pasolini reconceived, in a prodigious obsessive body of remarkably diverse work, the entire patrimony of post-WWII-Italy as a personal mythology refracted by the urgent demands of modern continental life and contemporary politics in an age of extremes.  

 Beginning with his first film, Accatone (1961), Pasolini worked in an era in which avant-garde artistic gestures felt still truly dangerous, in which artists retained the power to shock, and in which the imposition of a personal artistic vision felt still like a radical, rather than narcissistic, act. Pasolini made the most of that power, and has become in the decades since an object of personal obsession for thousands of contemporary artists, many of whom offer up here, in a showcase that is as much open-call tribute as it is narrow appreciation, their own idiosyncratic homage to a person who has had an outsized influence on a whole generation enamored of radical gestures in a skeptical, ironic age.

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Harbor is pleased to announce Residual Volume, a two-person exhibition featuring JJ Miyaoka-Pakola and Cassie Raihl.  Works will be on view February 23rd through April 7th, 2013 with an opening reception Saturday, February 23rd, from 6 – 9 pm. Additionally, Harbor will be participating in Bushwick Gallery Late Night during the Armory Show. There will be extended hours for the exhibition on Saturday, March 9th, from 1 - 10 pm.

Residual Volume couples two artists who focus on the presence or absence of objects in dichotomous ways. Their vocabularies of common objects are redefined by perpetual transformation, creating spatial tension between the negative/positive volumes of form and material.

JJ Miyaoka-Pakola creates his own visual language through the manipulation of a single image, in a process of removal and re-arrangement of several motifs. Using an array of painting techniques and  a color palette that incorporates hues borrowed from diverse sources including Islamic art, he reconfigures the original object into something transient that retains the residue of its former self. The resultant diptychs are meditative visions of memories. Employing pattern, optical illusions, and expert use of color, the altered planes of vision in Miyaoka-Pakola’s work engage the viewer with a metaphysical understanding of space.

In her recent work, Cassie Raihl engages with quotidian objects used for sports and exercise to comment on the body through it’s absence. Her recontextualized subjects are transformed sometimes beyond recognition: barbells, soiled gym towels, donuts, and dog bowls, meticulously arranged to form fragile and balanced compositions. Materials such as latex, wax, and foam often hint at notions of fetish culture, sexuality, and body issues. They ask the viewer to consider the object’s relationships to each other and themselves.

The works in Residual Volume point to the space that was once filled. Miyaoka-Pakola and Raihl share a poetic and formal approach that leave ambiguity while also suggesting elements from the tangible realm.

JJ Miyaoka-Pakola (b. 1976) received his M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, CA and his B.F.A. from Tyler School of Art, PA. His work has been exhibited at Roger Brown Study Collection, Chicago, IL; Side Car Gallery, Hammond, IN; Jay Jay Gallery, Sacramento, CA; the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA. Miyaoka-Pakola was a Fellow Artist in Residence at the Montana Artist Refuge in 2011. Miyaoka-Pakola lives and works in New York City.

Cassie Raihl (b. 1983) in New York, NY. Raihl received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA in 2005. She received her MFA from Bard College, NY in 2010. She has exhibited at Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, NY; Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY; Mika Rollins Fine Art, New York, NY; Deitch Gallery, Long Island City, NY; 119 Gallery, Lowell, MA. Raihl participated in the 2012 Brucennial. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

DODGEgallery is pleased to present Room for Myth, an exhibition with three artists: Barney Kulok, Roy McMakin, and Arlene Shechet, curated by Mark Shortliffe.

Room for Myth is an exhibition featuring sculpture, photography, and works of paper that confronts structural creation and the complex construction of myth in artistic practice and personal memory. Despite working in a variety of media these artists are united by a fascination with physical objects and their making, employing the very ideas of building in their practice. In all these works the line between start and finish, construction and destruction, is blurred, creating vessels and spaces that collapse time and open truths.

Barney Kulok’s photographs highlight several months spent visiting the construction of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island. Designed as a memorial by Louis I. Khan just before his death in 1974, the park was only recently realized some forty years later, becoming something of an ad hoc memorial to the great architect himself. Although the fruits of endless daily pilgrimages, Kulok’s images are not traditionally documentarian but instead offer focused abstract details of the work site’s evolving landscape: scattered cinder blocks, piled sand, discarded wooden jigs. Treated centrally and geometrically stark, these parts become poetic icons—classic photographic indexes—of the building process, quietly marking a collective effort towards a future but capturing an ever shifting and immediate past—relics of a coming memorial.

Roy McMakin presents sculpture from and about furniture. An artist working with furniture design and making for over thirty years, McMakin’s original works are acutely aware of iconic forms and repeated pastiches in American furniture and architecture. Here though this awareness goes further through the manipulation and combination of vintage furniture with new constructions—diving deeper into his personal relationship with the object as well as expanding the collected viewers’ archetypal understanding of their solid surroundings. Furniture is something we all have but is also intensely intimate with regular touch and private use: a dresser drawer the vessel for our secrets and memories, a chair’s arm literally holding our own. In one such piece, a Stickley desk that McMakin purchased as a teenager is split directly down its long vertical middle, a one-inch removal that referenes his position as a middle child and splits every drawer in two. These dissected ends are then painted a crisp white showcasing the bones of the former structure, an act of destruction but also preservation, focusing the pieces’ history and current truth.

Arlene Shechet offers new sculptures of clay and cast paper reliefs. The sculptures playfully combine glazed and blocky ceramic forms with kiln bricks and shelves. Such bricks are normally only used to construct a kiln, the ancient oven central to all ceramic making—the hot architectural vessel from which all other vessels are birthed. Here instead the bricks are brightly glazed and intricately surround or support the fleshy sculpted forms. Through the brick’s physical inclusion process is shown to be part and parcel to the finished piece but still allows a very present humor and literal room within the vessels’ hollow cores for other contained thoughts and memories. Also on view are unique cast paper wall works completed at Dieu Donné in 2012. These pieces are made of thick cotton and pulp cast from molds made from kiln bricks and hand worked clay with vibrantly colored compositions that are both in harmony and conflict with the ever-present cast topography.

Mark Shortliffe is an independent curator and artist living and working in New York. He was most recently director of Schroeder Romero and Shredder and was formerly editor of the annual art journal The Sienese Shredder. He is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design.

Barney Kulok was born in New York, New York. He received his BA from Bard College in 2004. lives and works in New York, NY. He has exhibited nationally and internationally in both group and solo exhibitions, including Galerie Hussenot, Paris; Galerie Elisabeth Kaufmann, Zürich; de Pury & Luxembourg, Zürich; Nicole Klagsbrun New York. Kulok’s work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and The Cleveland Clinic. In 2012 Aperture published a monograph of his body of work, Building. He lives and works in New York, NY.

Roy McMakin was born in Lander, Wyoming. He received his BA from the University of California at San Diego in 1979 and his MFA in 1982. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgfield, CT; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA. He has a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL. McMakin has completed commissions for several institutions including The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Missoula Art Museum, Missoula, MT. He lives and works in San Diego, CA and Seattle, WA.

Arlene Shechet was born in New York, New York. She received her BA from New York University and her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Shechet has exhibited her work extensively in the United States and abroad including recent solo shows at the Anderson Gallery, VCU, Richmond, VA, the Nerman Museum, Overland Park, KS, the F.Y. Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO, Dieu Donne, Scottsdale Museum of Art, AZ, ICA Philadelphia the Walker Art Center, MN. In 2010, Schecht was the recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman Individual Artist Award, Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. She has also been the recipient of the American Academy of the Arts and Letters Award, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Visual Artist Fellowship and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Shechet's work is included in both public and private collections including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, the Walker Art Center, and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS. Shechet lives and works in New York, NY.

DODGEgallery is pleased to present Homatorium I, an exhibition of new work by Rebecca Chamberlain. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Stemming from a long-standing captivation with the early modernist era, specifically the period between the two world wars, Chamberlain’s moody paintings of vacant interiors read like love songs for a lost world. Each room is a stage for a perfectly lived life forever trapped in amber. Her monochromatic compositions, painted in lithography ink, provide a window through which to look as one might into the villas of Pompeii. There was life here! Look how they lived! Much like the architects of the period, Chamberlain choreographs these spaces within and between compositions. She fetishizes their detail while abstracting their geometry. Painting reflective and textured surfaces with rich ink washes over the glean of vintage architecture paper, her paintings themselves allure and reinforce a sense of longing.

For Homatorium I, Chamberlain creates an environment in the inner gallery resembling the feeling of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Zimmerman House; marking a shift for Chamberlain, as she focuses for the first time on a singular site. Through a residency at the Currier Museum of Art in 2012, she witnessed the influence of modernist sanatoriums in Wrights’ interior and exterior design. Chamberlain experienced the house as, “a sanitized version of reality,” a combination of both home and sanatorium.

Often working from vintage photographs of the period, Chamberlain heightens her presence in Homatorium I by combining the photos of Yukio Futagawa and the Zimmermans’ with her own, captured on her visit to the Zimmerman House. Creating multi-panel pieces of different images of the same spaces, she offers a collective, and therefore unfixed perspective and memory of the site. Chamberlain further fragments views by splicing and editing the original source material. Unlike her previous bodies of work, the images chosen all depict windows and views looking from the interior; Chamberlain positions the viewer inside the Zimmerman house but directs the gaze outward.

Regimenting the height of each piece in the inner gallery to 27 inches and composing all the paintings in a deep red harkening the warm brick and wood of the Zimmerman house, Chamberlain fabricates a complete environment for her viewer. Using hand-crafted frames, some that mirror actual windows in the Zimmerman house and others that reference the aluminum of modernist sanatoriums, Chamberlain frames an already framed view, heightening a sense of displacement. The panels appear cinematic lining the walls of the gallery each scene abutting the next, presenting the viewer with an edited and fragmented perspective. Chamberlain’s photo-realistic style seemingly offers comfort in the “known”; however, when subsumed by the environment in the inner gallery an unfixed sensation arises as one can only look out, not in.

Squared Views Arrangement Screen places the viewer as if on a couch in the living room gazing out the window to the garden. Wright designed this garden and framed these views; however, despite his attempts to construct a complete environment, nature is not fixed. Chamberlain reflects this sensation, in her more textured, broad and frenetic brushstrokes focusing on a feeling of chaos that vibrates against the clean, crisp architecture. The hermetic perfection of a protected interior is unsealed.


Rebecca Chamberlain was born in 1970 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. She received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Chamberlain is known for her accomplishments in fine art, fashion and performance. She has exhibited at VOLTA NY, 303 Gallery and Knoedler Project Space, New York, judi rotenberg gallery, Boston, Champion Fine Art, LA and Agenzio04, Bologna, Italy. She was the recipient of Artlog's best booth at VOLTA NY 2010 and Joan Mitchell Grant. Chamberlain's work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, Art in America, Artinfo.com, The Boston Globe, Flash Art and Tema Celeste among other publications. Her work is included in the collection of Fidelity Investments and Torys LLP. In 2012, Chamberlain was awarded a NYFA Fellowship for Painting. Raised in Pennsylvania, Chamberlain currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

This exhibition presents ten works by the contemporary Cambodian artist Sopheap Pich (born 1971), who lives and works in Phnom Penh. Pich works principally in rattan and bamboo, constructing organic open-weave forms that are solid and ethereal, representational and abstract. Much of his work is inspired by elements of the human anatomy or plant life. His constructions combine his training as a painter with the spatial conceptualization of a sculptor, creating three-dimensional objects that are largely defined by their graphic character. Pich's art consciously embodies his memories of culture and place. The exhibition will be installed in three spaces in the Asian galleries, including an integration into historical displays, and is part of the Museum's contribution to the New York–wide Season of Cambodia.