PENELOPE DAVIS | SMACK | NALLIE CASTAN GALLERY

A beautiful, hypnotic installation; one outstanding photograph (out of four); and a distance between elements, installation and photographs that, in the gallery space, seemed almost insurmountable.

The installation is intoxicating, taking the viewer into a world outside of reality – inverted, convoluted creatures “after the things of nature” (meta ta physika) - in this case mobile phones, camera lenses and electrical plugs and leads, the skin of these objects flayed, extruded and made in silicone. These filamentary ‘jellies’ are wonderous. As Susan Fereday observes they are like detached skin, which “can become a kind of negative, a reversed memory, a perverse relic of its previously animated form … Detached, distraught, dangling. But there is also something slippery in these forms, something visceral, uterine, umbilical …”. The installation reminded me of the chthonian nature of the womb, our birth and that first gasp of breath – do you remember? was it all that you ever needed?

Water, blood, the detritus of birth and the emergence of life into light. Floating, gliding to the surface.

Only one photograph, Fluther (2011, below), approaches this detachment. A beauty it is too. The other three photographs felt more like addendum than adding anything further to the work and failed to achieve a ‘presence’ when compared to the installation. I suspect one of the problems was the scale of the three photographs and the fact that they are so tightly framed. Evidence of this can be seen in the installation shot below, the photograph of the blue ‘jellie’ so tightly prescribed and enclosed so as to not allow any interaction between installation and photograph. Perhaps making the photographs slightly larger and face mountingthem behind PlexiGlass would have softened the edges of the photographs allowing a malleable (meta)physical air to breathe across the gallery space.

The highlight is the installation. Go and see, it is well worth the visit.

Many thankx to Nellie Castan Gallery for allowing me to publish the text and the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All photographs courtesy and © the artist and Nellie Castan Gallery.

Stretched Skin

“Where my inside meets the outside, where my body’s surfaces curve or stretch, dimple or fold, they create sensory cavities that are designed to respond to the outside world, at least to some degree. More difficult to resolve is the place that’s made when my inside turns out and there and no pickets to hide the private things – things I don’t want to look at myself, things too fleshy for the world to see, too soft, raw and pink to be exposed. Bringing the inside out, I am turned outside in and where does that leave me? In the edgeless space of the everyday saturated by grief.

Penelope Davis’ ‘jellies’ make me think about how a person’s skin can record their body’s history through marks – scars, distentions, swellings, bruises and wrinkles – just as a photograph can record a body’s outward appearance through light. We could say that skin is an index to its experiences, but it is not iconic. Skin does not reproduce the body’s image the way a photograph does, unless the skin is lifted to make a new shape. Then, just as hot wind can suck the life out of a fallen leaf and turn its veins into a street map, or sun and sea can batter a plastic bottle into a miraculous Marian figurine, detached skin can become a kind of negative, a reversed memory, a perverse relic of its previously animated form.

That’s what the ‘jellies’ look like: skin, turned inside out, photographic skin turned outside in. Detached, distraught, dangling. But there is also something slippery in these forms, something visceral, uterine, umbilical …”

Except from pamphlet text by artist and writer Susan Fereday, March 2011

Penelope Davis

Smack installation
2011
silicone
dimensions variable

“In Smack, Penelope Davis’ latest body of work, jellyfish-like forms have been assembled from a collage of components. These elements include the detritus of contemporary technologies. Among these are cameras, computer parts, mobile phones, wiring and electrical parts. Organic source materials such as leaves and seaweed (many sourced from the community garden plots surrounding Davis’ studio) are cast and intermixed with these forms . After being cast in silicone, the works are sewn together to create forms that resemble jellyfish. The resulting swarm – or smack, as the collective noun is properly known – is displayed as an installation of semi transparent, suspended forms.

A selection of these ‘jellies’ have also been placed in the digital scanner and ‘photographed’. Some digital post-production work is also employed to create large scale photographic images.

The materials and techniques used allow Penelope Davis to play with some of the procedures and assumptions central to photographic practice. The central motif of the jellyfish is a vehicle to examine critical contemporary issues of consumption and environmental degradation.”

Text from the Nellie Castan website

Penelope Davis
Fluther
2011
Type C photograph
120 x 100 cm

Nellie Castan GalleryLevel 1, 12 River Street
South Yarra 3161
Tel: +61 9804 7366

Opening hours:
12pm – 5pm Tuesday – Sunday

Nellie Castan Gallery website

http://artblart.wordpress.com/

BELA KOLAROVA-LUCIE STAHL | KOLNISCHER KUNSTVEREIN

Artists: Bela Kolarova, Lucie Stahl

Venue: Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne

Date: April 14 – May 29, 2011

Press Release:

Prague-based artist Bela Kolarova (1923-2010) began experimenting with photographic techniques in the early 1960s, creating photograms and X-ray photographs that continued the Bauhaus tradition of photography as an abstract medium. Thus, for a series of photograms she called vegetages, she produced miniature “artificial negatives” by pressing natural materials into soft paraffin and using them for the exposure of the photographic paper instantaneously as “negatives”.

Despite its formal similarities with avant-garde experimentation, Kolarova´s work has only gained international attention in the last few years. The exhibition at Kölnischer Kunstverein provides a comprehensive overview of Kolarova’s oeuvre, featuring around 40 of her works, ranging from early examples such as the X-ray photographs and vegetage photograms to her more explicitly feminist works, such as drawings made using make-up, a series of assemblages of knots of hair and the very personal collages from the 1970s and 1980s. husband was denied permission to return home after a grant had allowed him to stay. In recent years, Kolarova’s work was featured at the documenta 12 (2007), at the Raven Row gallery in London (2010) and in solo shows at the Museum Kampa in Prague (2008) and Muzeum Umìní in Olomouc (2007).

The Kölnischer Kunstverein is showing Kolarova’s works together with those of Lucie Stahl (*1977), which possess certain formal similarities despite the fact that they were produced much later and under very different conditions. Lucie Stahl uses a contemporary photographic technique for her poster-like works, arranging mundane objects such as spices, ties, women’s magazines and wheel rims on a scanner and then encases the resulting inkjet prints in polyurethane like distant objects. The works are annotated with brief text fragments in which Stahl humorously provides her subjective perspective on social and political events and on the competitiveness between artists and the almost-hysterical hype that characterises the art world. Her aphoristic commentary is reminiscent of the language of American stand-up comedy, with short anecdotes in rapid succession and witticisms, recounted as if in a soliloquy, that relate awkward or embarrassing situations, pointed observations on society and her own and others’ comments. The juxtaposition of the texts and the spontaneously reproduced iconic objects creates a tension that has a distancing effect.

Lucie Stahl lives and works in Vienna. She is represented by the Dépendance gallery in Brussels and Galerie Meyer Kainer in Vienna. Her work has been featured in solo shows at the Kunstverein Nürnberg (2009), the Dépendance gallery in Brussels (2005 and 2008), the Michael Neff gallery in Frankfurt (2007), and at the Flaca in London (2005). She has also participated in exhibitions at the Temporary Gallery Cologne (2009), the Croy Nielsen gallery in Berlin (2008), and at kjubh in Cologne (2004). Alongside her work as an artist, Lucie Stahl also manages the Pro Choice gallery space in Vienna in conjunction with Will Benedict.

This exhibition was organised in cooperation with Stadtgalerie Schwaz. An artist’s book by Lucie Stahl will be published to accompany the exhibition featuring an essay by Chris Kraus, among others.

The exhibition of work by Bela Kolarova and Lucie Stahl was made possible by funding from the Czech-German Fund For The Future, the Schroubek Fonds, Munich, and the Karin Abt-Straubinger Stiftung. We would also like to thank the Seilern Collection in Vienna, Werkladen in Cologne, Artex Art Services, Ulrike Remde, Kurt and Claudia von Storch, Koellefolien and Filmclub 813 for their support.

BORIS MIKHAILOV | CASE HISTORY

"It is a disgraceful world, populated by some creatures that were once humans, 

but now these living beings are degraded, ghastly, appalling." This is how Ukrainian photographer 

Boris Mikhailov explains the places in the Soviet Union, he walks through the late 90s in order to 

pursue his work. In 1999 he released the haunting images of a once glorious nation in his book 

"Case History". "Many are here BOMJIs," explains the now 72 years old. "Many of them are BOMJIs. 

It is a term made of capital letters, recently coined. It literally refers to those people without a 

stable residence, practically living in the streets, wherever they can stretch their bones.”

By Marcel Winatschek
Published: Wednesday, May 25, 2011

AMY & PINK

"It is a disgraceful world, populated by some creatures that were once humans, but now these living beings are degraded, ghastly, appalling." This is how Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov explains the places in the Soviet Union, he walks through the late 90s in order to pursue his work. In 1999 he released the haunting images of a once glorious nation in his book "Case History". "Many are here BOMJIs," explains the now 72 years old. "Many of them are BOMJIs. It is a term made of capital letters, recently coined. It literally refers to those people without a stable residence, practically living in the streets, wherever they can stretch their bones.”"It is a disgraceful world, populated by some creatures that were once humans, but now these living beings are degraded, ghastly, appalling." This is how Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov explains the places in the Soviet Union, he walks through the late 90s in order to pursue his work. In 1999 he released the haunting images of a once glorious nation in his book "Case History". "Many are here BOMJIs," explains the now 72 years old. "Many of them are BOMJIs. It is a term made of capital letters, recently coined. It literally refers to those people without a stable residence, practically living in the streets, wherever they can stretch their bones.”"It is a disgraceful world, populated by some creatures that were once humans, but now these living beings are degraded, ghastly, appalling." This is how Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov explains the places in the Soviet Union, he walks through the late 90s in order to pursue his work. In 1999 he released the haunting images of a once glorious nation in his book "Case History". "Many are here BOMJIs," explains the now 72 years old. "Many of them are BOMJIs. It is a term made of capital letters, recently coined. It literally refers to those people without a stable residence, practically living in the streets, wherever they can stretch their bones.”

MUSIC 3.0 | MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK

"TELLUSTools", 2001, Double-LP, The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. 

Gift of Harvestworks. Cover Art by Christian Marclay. 

Produced by Carol Parkinson, Harvestworks. 

Image courtesy Kanji Ishii

Where were you when the Music Television Channel was first introduced in 1981? 

I was seven years old and had a babysitter who, in her early twenties, was the 

coolest person I had ever met. I would follow her around just in the hopes that 

this perceived “coolness” would somehow rub off on me. It was through her that 

I was exposed, for the first time, to the brand-new phenomenon of the music video. 

Her family had just gotten cable and we would sit around and watch this small 

American network running loops of film shorts that visually illustrated the 

concepts and narratives of song by popular musical bands at the time. 

What we didn’t realize at the time, was that visual and popular culture as 

we knew it was changed forever.

Looking at Music 3.0., now at the Museum of Modern Art, New York through 

June 6, 2011, is an in-depth look at this moment in time and its effect on our 

cultural history. The third in a series of exhibitions exploring the influence of 

music on contemporary art practices, Looking at Music 3.0, focuses on 

New York in the 1980s and 1990s and the birth of the “remix culture.

” The exhibition features 70 works from a wide range of artists and 

musicians: Beastie Boys, Kathleen Hanna and Le Tigre, Keith Haring, 

David Byrne, Miranda July, Christian Marclay, Sonic Youth and Run DMC.

Spike Jonze, Sabotage, 1994, Music by Beastie Boys. The Museum of Modern Art. 

Gift of the artist. © Capitol Records, Inc.

The exhibition begins with the German band Kraftwerk, positing that with tracks such 

as Trans-Europe Express, 1977, they had a large influence on the decades of music 

to come with their pioneering usage synthesizers and computer-speech software. 

It then expands into a wide array of issues and movements that were occurring 

during this time:  the birth of hip-hop and its growing strength in voicing the 

ongoing discrimination against the black community; activist movements seeking 

to counteract the AIDS epidemic and the increasing drug usage that was threatening 

New York; the introduction of art theory to new music as well as the rise of the digital 

domain; and the growing voice of artists commenting on the complicated 

relationship between commercial entities and its control of mass communication 

and the shaping of modern culture.

Le Tigre, "From the Desk of Mr. Lady," 2000, CD. 

Cover Art by Kathleen Hanna and Johanna Fateman. 

Image courtesy Le Tigre Records

A highlight of Looking at Music 3.0 is the in-depth look into the wave of Feminism 

that was grounded in the riot grrrl capital, Portland Oregon, in the 1990s. On display 

are photocopied zines and posters by artists Miranda July and Johanna Fateman, 

as well as audio tracks from the band Le Tigre. These recordings serve as examples 

of the impromptu punk bands that were forming all over and the band’s usage of 

humorous lyrics and electronic dance music to confront a myriad of social ills that 

existed in New York.

Anyone interested in the history of music and visual culture will enjoy this exhibition. 

But for those of us who remember where we were when the music video was first 

introduced, you will walk out asking yourself, “What happened to the revolution?”