Cody Critcheloe aka SSION: BOY @Peres Projects (January 16 – April 3, 2010)
From the press release:
First things first! It’s SSION, pronounced “shun,” as in mission, fission, ambition-all apt words to describe the gesamtkunstwerk that is Cody Critcheloe and the queer punk/performance/art band he invented ten years back as a high school student in Lewisport, Kentucky.
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Critcheloe’s songs are catchy, not abstract, and his visuals and live shows are crafted to appeal to more than an art-going crowd. SSION could easily cross over to become a pop phenomenon-a potentiality (or prophecy) which, in a stroke of self-reflexive genius, Critcheloe has already written into the narrative arc of his work to date. The story of SSION is a raucous, louched up, camp parody of Critcheloe’s own life, in which a small-town punk kid hooked on doughnuts and pizza follows his dreams with razor focus to emerge as a svelte, smoky-eyed pop star embraced by adoring crowds.
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Justin Bower, Sush Machida Gaikotsu, Patrick Lee, Russ Meyer, Mark Dean Veca, and Liz Young: Cherry Pie @Western Project (January 16 – February 20, 2010)
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Patrick Lee.
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Russ Meyer.
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Tom LaDuke: Auto Destruct @Angles Gallery (January 16 – February 20, 2010)
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Performance by Stacie B. London @MOCA part of the exhibition Collection: MOCA’s First Thirty Years (November 15, 2009 – Ongoing)
Chris Burden, Big Wheel, 1979. February 11, 2010.
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Bifocals resting on his nose, Chris Burden mounted the scrawny Benelli motorcycle and kicked the machine to life. Revving the motor in first gear to make sure the 41-year-old beast would stay awake, he upshifted to second, then third, forcing the rear wheel of the tiny bike to spin faster and faster against the big wheel with which it was making contact.
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Big Wheel in action is striking in its simplicity, mesmerizing in its movement and awe-inspiring in its scope and scale. The entire piece weighs 5,000 pounds, including the 3,200-pound steel flywheel (which was originally part of a generator and found in a Long Beach scrap yard), the 300-pound bike and the 1,500-pound trestle, which Burden engineered himself using building timbers.
Susan Carpenter for the Los Angeles Times, November 2009.
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Artemio: ChakrAK-47 @LAXART (January 29 – March 20, 2010)
From the press release:
The ornamental patterned design on the tiles, while seemingly abstract and decorative, reveals an intricate assemblage of rifles, guns, knives and other violent weapons that formally contemplate Mexico as an increasingly complex and violent locale. The accompanying neon sculpture in the gallery space echoes the visual ornamentation of the exterior tiles to evoke a mandala-like structure that is both aesthetically rich and iconographically loaded. Artemio’s project coincides with the beginning of Mexico’s year-long bicentennial celebrations, while providing a distinct model of rigorous contextual responsiveness. His poetic treatment of Mexico’s current tumultuous political condition is reminiscent of a shadowy reality that permeates the intensely visual festivities, thus putting forth a provocative interrogation of a nationalistic climate dependent upon celebratory complacency.
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Adrian Ghenie @Mihai Nicodim Gallery (January 23 – March 6, 2010)
From the press release:
In this new body of work, Ghenie offers a contemporary position on a universal theme of those abusing power and those abused by them. It’s not just the execution of his paintings that reminds us of the heavy substance of the mantle of history, but also their content, which is narrative filled with historical facts, though not explicitly telling a clearly defined story. That’s the case for the „Berlin Zoo“ series which carry the metaphor of the traumatic collective experience of the Iron Curtain. The Iron Curtain was the way Europe was viewed after World War II. Physically, it took shape in the Berlin Wall.
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Daniel Dove @cherry and martin (January 16 – February 20, 2010)
From the press release:
Daniel Dove’s recent paintings depict structures in states of transition, either half-ruined or partially reconstructed. The subjects of Dove’s pictures range from suburban landscape detritus to charged contemporary artifacts (such as reconstructed bombed airplane fuselages), meticulously re-built to understand or reinvent their original trauma. In this rebuilding, Dove’s objects reveal a longing for completeness that can never be restored, much the way that his highly composed canvases offer distilled, ordered fictions based on chaotic and often dangerous real-world events.
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Benjamin Swaim: Fertilité du Diable @Le Palais de Tokyo (February 2 – 28, 2010)
From the press release:
Oscillant entre imaginaire et autobiographie, la série compte autant d’œuvres que de questions : sa mère a-t-elle vraiment été artiste? Sont-ce véritablement ses œuvres qui sont représentées? Est-ce une fiction? Un exercice de mémoire de formes perdues?
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And this. Which is receiving first prize for best genuine installation using fire extinguishers, a fan and blue lockers.
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Keren Cytter @Le Plateau (December 9, 2009 – February 14, 2010)
From the press release:
Somewhere between cinema-vérité and sitcom, home movie and reality TV, filmed performance and auteur film, Keren Cytter offers us a succession of scenes where reality seems to be constantly at loggerheads with fiction.
From the angle of this conflict – a conflict which thus representers others – everything is fair game, and each one of the parameters inherent to the execution of these works – from scenario and script to editing, by way of the filming itself and the actors’ performances – is entirely devised and introduced in a logic of tension, matched only by the heightening of the feelings at issue.
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For her show at Le Plateau, Kerem Cytter juggles with the architecture of the place like a logical extension of what the structure of her films represents: loop and repetition effects are combined with duplications of spaces and artificial symmetries.
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Martin Barré and Jorge Queiroz @Galerie Nathalie Obadia at Esther Schipper. In the occasion of the Berlin-Paris Exchange. (January 15 – March 13, 2010)
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Martin Barré.
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Jorge Queiroz.
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