“The Miami Set” was a project by Ana Cardoso, Amy Granat and Flora Wiegmann for NADA Art Fair in Miami Beach, by invitation of Liutauras Psibilskis and co-produced by OUTPOST NYC DCG. The presentation included a sculptural fabric installation by Ana Cardoso that created environment for the project, an ongoing screening installation by Amy Granat as well as dance performances by Amy Granat and Flora Wiegmann. “The Miami Set” was a constantly changing venue, open to development through the interaction with the public. This ongoing performative presentation was displayed at a prominent place in the Lobby of the Deauville Beach Resort Hotel where NADA 2010 took place.
Amy Granat is best known for her experimental film installations featuring celluloid that has been manipulated by scratching, cutting, or chemical alteration. Her practice though, is wide-ranging and also includes video, sound, performance and photography. Granat experiments with the elements of basic photography – a method that emphasizes the intrinsic quality of film, and allows herself to “draw” with light. A physical and very unphysical action at the same time, in both her filmmaking and her photography these aspects of her work reveal a fascination with transparency and opacity, positive and negative space.
Ana Cardoso is an artist living in New York, working mostly in painting. She has recently had solo exhibitions at Carlos Carvalho Contemporary Art, Lisbon and Reflexus Contemporary Art, Oporto. Cardoso contributed work to “Besides, With, Against and Yet: Abstraction and the Ready-Made”,The Kitchen, New York and “Personal Freedom” Portugal Arte 10 EDP: International Contemporary Art Biennale, Lisbon. Forthcoming exhibitions include “Llama, Conduits, Milano and Expanded Painting” in the 2011 Prague Biennale. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Flash Art, ArtSlant and NY Arts Magazine amongst others. She has been a contributing writer to Artecapital and has produced several artists books. She also co-founded the international project TEST, based in Lisbon, with Joao Simoes.
Flora Wiegmann is a dancer/choreographer who is based in Los Angeles. She works in both live performance and film, often collaborating with artists such as Felicia Ballos, Amy Granat, Fritz Haeg, Drew Heitzler, Silke Otto-Knapp, Alix Lambert, and Andrea Zittel. Her projects have been presented the ICA in Philadelphia, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Kitchen, Highways Performance Space, the Banff Centre in Banff, Canada; the David Roberts Art Foundation, London; and Le 102 in Grenoble, France. She currently is in the midst of a four-month performance project at The Orange County Museum of Art as part of the California Biennial.
Liutauras Psibilskis is a New York-based independent exhibition curator. At the 51st Venice Biennale he curated a Jonas Mekas retrospective for the Lithuanian Pavilion. His recent projects include “Out of the Box” at Emily Harvey Foundation, New York, October 2010, that included work by Olivier Babin & Harold Ancart, Peter Coffin, Heather Guertin, Matt Keegan, George Maciunas and Alexandre Singh as well as “Roulette”, a multi-faceted project for Performa 09, co-produced by OUTPOST NYC DCG. It showcased performances and presentations by Michel Auder, Mai Ueda, Amy Granat, Jonas Mekas, Molly Gochman, Lola Schnabel and Ultra Violet.
Mary Beth Edelson McKinney Avenue Contemporary (the MAC) 3120 McKinney Avenue Dallas, Texas 75204
November 6 – December 12, 2010 Opening Reception: Saturday, November 6th 5:30 – 8:00 PM. The MAC is open Wednesday through Saturday, 11:00 AM – 9:00 PM.
McKinney Avenue Contemporary (The MAC) is pleased to announce one of the main events at the MAC this year: two exhibitions of work by two female artists of different generations who articulate strong views on social realities: Mary Beth Edelson and Molly Gochman. Both exhibitions are sponsored by OUTPOST NYC DCG – Deborah Colton Gallery.
Mary Beth Edelson, emerged in the 1960s on New York’s SoHO scene as a groundbreaking feminist artist. Her conceptually-based work activates a variety of women’s and human rights issues. Molly Gochman, a Houston and New York-based younger artist, formulates ideas of community and subjective interconnectedness in her growing oeuvre, characterized by fluid visuality and the use of multiple media. Edelson and Gochman will present both installed and performative works in their respective exhibitions “There is Never Only One Game in Town” and “Lullabies”at the MAC.
ARTIST ESSAY:
Mary Beth Edelson: Humor is the Best Game in Town Kathleen Wentrack, Ph.D.
New York-based artist, Mary Beth Edelson, is recognized internationally for her break-through art works in far ranging mediums and her contributions to the feminist revolution. Since the 1960s Edelson has been impacting art making and activism while challenging the entrenched cultural dogmas of the day.
On view at the MAC in Dallas from November 6th until December 11th is a select group of 24 painted drawings from 1981–97. Curated by Liutauras Psibilskis, Deborah Colton, and Liliana Bloch, this series is titled There is Never Only One Game in Town. Equally strong, the historically significant large-scale wall collages will be on view as well as the premiere of the video ” Making Eye Contact” conceptualized by Edelson with video production by Gregory Wendt.
Thematically, the exhibited body of work celebrates a variety of characters such as the femme fatale, the trickster, movie stars, and the mythological folk figures of Baubo and Sheela-na-gig. Diverse as these female types appear, they are connected through the trope of humor as Edelson states:
Humor is a mode of speech that is indirect and ambiguous and, therefore, can have multiple interpretations. It can potentially disrupt dominant meanings and the social order while protecting the joker from consequences that might occur if the same message were delivered in a serious mode. Humor sabotages critics, for unlike spoken language, laughter does not belong to a linguistic code and, therefore, has the possibility of creatively breaking that mold while taking advantage of humor’s natural attraction.
Humor is a political devise in the series There is Never Only One Game in Town. Many of the drawings use a variety of materials including silkscreen, ink, acrylic, and fabric on jute tag to form pictures based on Edelson’s desire to “re-script Hollywood” as it relates to the construction of women in their films. Edelson’s research of movies from the 1920s until the present day inspired her to be especially curious about films that place a gun in a woman’s hand—the ultimate symbol of male power—and how that representation changed over time according to women’s status and the circumstances of that time span.
She appropriated images of women played by movie stars including Marilyn Monroe, Gena Rowlands, Marlene Dietrich, Lynda Carter, Angelica Houston, Judy Garland, and Mae West whose sultry quote “there is never only one game in town” was borrowed for the title of this series. The artist then gave the characters a new identity as she describes:
My intention was to isolate these images from their original context in the film to project my own story on these subjects as self-defining agents that defy the production of Hollywood stereotyping.
Bursting with irony and humor, these drawings engage the viewer by way of the unexpected text and titles that accompany their forthright images. Several works are based on a silk-screened photograph of a sassy, young Judy Garland who asks questions that speak directly to the viewer. Other images draw on cross-cultural traditions for alternative spiritual histories as in the multi-armed Marilyn Monroe as the Hindu Goddess Kali.
Accompanying the painted drawing series are a selection of Edelson’s wall collages installed on a large scale for the first time in the United States. The wall collages developed concurrent with the artist’s well-known collage posters of the 1970s in which reproductions of historical paintings by male artists are parodied by pasting photographs of female artists’ faces over the male actors’ images. For example, Some Living American Women Artists/Last Supper (1971-72) is the first of the five collage posters in which the artist insisted on an alternative vision of society that included women in positions of power. For this first poster Edelson collected photographs of women artists and collaged their faces over those of Jesus and his disciples on a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (1498). All five posters in the series—recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York for their permanent collection —make use of appropriation in an effort to critique existing institutional structures and the history of western art. While these posters continue the social commentary of collage initiated by Dada artists almost a century ago, it is Edelson’s wall collages that make her contribution unique to the history of collage art and feminist art history.
The genesis of the wall collages, unlike the posters, was one of happenstance and playfulness, evolving from scraps leftover from the laborious pre-computer process of making the posters. These works celebrate women’s art collectives such as A.I.R. and Heresies, while others are cameos devoted to a specific artist and the women in her milieu. Each of the wall collages presents different subjects, stories, and themes while they all share a rambling unique vine or web-like structure. For example, Web Works/Heresies (1976) is built through a repetition of individual faces that creates the appearance of animation as in Good Meeting, (1976) sourced from the Death of the Patriarchy/A.I.R. Anatomy Lessons poster. At first glance Good Meeting appears to be a dragonfly but on closer inspection it is composed of a set of wings and the faces of several women. The dragonfly’s head begins with the image of Rachel bas-Cohain, then Ana Mendieta and Edelson, and concludes with ten prints of Nancy Spero’s face, diminishing in scale to form the tail. This collage provides an excellent example of how her repetitious progression creates a sense of movement influenced by the structural duplication of , in this case, Spero’s face.
Alongside, and often in conjunction with, the portrait-based wall collages, several themes reoccur in Edelson’s wall collages including Medusa, the Bird and the Snake Goddess of Egypt, Venus, Sheela-na-Gig, and Baubo. Laughing Medusa (1976) was made in a similar manner from remnants of poster pictures and other photographs of fellow A.I.R. members that the artist often took. The central face in this work is of Anne Healy with her head tilted back slightly holding a wide-mouthed laugh and framed by the smaller heads of A.I.R. members. Eight strands of wildly protruding hair—each strand repeating a separate individual’s head—moves with twists and turns like a snake, as if it were Medusa’s own hair.
The artist has frequently employed the figures of the Sheela-na-gig and Baubo in diverse mediums since the early 1970s, a moment when feminists sought out sources of power and spirituality that reflected not only an alternative to western religious structures but also spiritual histories in which women held significant positions and power. Found on the British Isles, especially in Ireland, the Sheela-na-gig is a female figure, crouching with legs splayed open exposing her genitalia. Dating back at least to the Middles Ages, these crudely shaped Sheela’s have been found near churches, bridges, and castles, and are generally regarded as folk deities imbued with powers of renewal, birth, and death according to the scholar Barbara Freitag in Sheela-Na-Gigs: Unraveling an Enigma (2004). Edelson combines the Sheela imagery with faces of women she wishes to acknowledge ultimately imbuing the figures with life-giving power as in Buffy Sheela (1976) that is composed of the heads of fellow artists Buffy Johnson, Michele Stewart, Betye Saer and Yoko Ono.
The web-like structure was expanded for the cameo series that focuses on and celebrates individual women. The format for each cameo is to collage the artists image on a reproduction of a bold self-assured nude, and it is from this central body that the web expands and unfolds to include the images of artists who may have mutually influenced each other, engaged in dialogue and thus created a circuit of people and ideas all active and supportive within this web. In the center of Cameo: Nancy (1979), a web presents the many faces of women associated with Nancy Spero with a special emphasis on her long alliance with the women of A.I.R. Gallery.
Many of the wall collages record women active in feminist art groups, but they also function as historical documents that describe the organizational and the working processes of a community in the process of implementing a revolution. The web-like shapes in the wall collages break from the confines of framing to visualize the collective and collaborative structures of these groups who are not represented in rows but are connected to each woman through the next. In Edelson’s hands, the portrait then becomes a living document in stark contrast to the western tradition of portraiture or historical painting.
MAC’s exhibition of Mary Beth Edelson’s art, presents a rich selection rarely seen together in the U.S. that delves into the artist’s deep oeuvre. Edelson remains one of the key feminist artists active and influential today, and the work in this exhibition gives testimony to its expansive relevancy.
November 6 – December 12, 2010 Opening Reception: Saturday, November 6th 5:30 – 8:00 PM. The MAC is open Wednesday through Saturday, 11:00 AM – 9:00 PM.
McKinney Avenue Contemporary (The MAC) is pleased to announce one of the main events at the MAC this year: two exhibitions of work by two female artists of different generations who articulate strong views on social realities: Mary Beth Edelson and Molly Gochman. Both exhibitions are sponsored by OUTPOST NYC DCG – Deborah Colton Gallery.
Mary Beth Edelson, emerged in the 1960s on New York’s SoHO scene as a groundbreaking feminist artist. Her conceptually-based work activates a variety of women’s and human rights issues. Molly Gochman, a Houston and New York-based younger artist, formulates ideas of community and subjective interconnectedness in her growing oeuvre, characterized by fluid visuality and the use of multiple media. Edelson and Gochman will present both installed and performative works in their respective exhibitions “There is Never Only One Game in Town” and “Lullabies”at the MAC.
Mary Beth Edelson (New York), Molly Gochman (Houston), Amy Granat (New York), Marina Rosenfeld (New York), Mai Ueda (New York), Ultra Violet (New York)
Curated by Liutauras Psibilskis
Knowledge Base offers propositions about knowledge that are out of the ordinary and go beyond the immediately visible: invented rituals and innovative representations of mental states ranging from hidden family histories to abstracted intimate relational notions. Such subliminal information symbolically overwrites the works on display. Some of the works intentionally revisit and distort truths that seem to be inherent in our historical experience, thus conceptually transgressing predominant social norms.
Knowledge Base explored ideas of knowledge and power represented in unconventional ways. It began as a reflection on artistically formatted rituals and spiritualist situations and developed into a search for works that employ a variety of elusive media while remaining rooted in spiritual experience. This includes transmuted sound and various visualizations of esoteric memories in re-cycled images or “disappearing” films.
The project includes six renowned artists of different generations:
Mary Beth Edelson’s work is rooted in feminism, political activism, collaboration, and public participation. A feminist, her work focuses on a female-centered spirituality based on Jungian archetypes. In 1977, Edelson traveled to a cave in Hvar Island, Yugoslavia, where she began her ritual performances. Three years later, she returned to painting and now lives in New York. She has been featured in over thirty art books and her work is widely exhibited and critiqued in the U.S. and abroad in the diverse literature of psychology, women’s studies, feminist theory, photography, theology and art. Edelson’s art has been collected by numerous museums, including the MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Corcoran Gallery and the Walker Art Center.
Amy Granat was born in Saint Louis, Missouri. She is a filmmaker and multi-media artist who has exhibited at such venues as the Swiss Institute, White Columns and PS1. She took part in the 2008 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is a co-founder of Cinema Zero, a collective that that fosters collaborations between artists across different media.
Molly Gochman works with installation, video, performance, and photography. Several galleries in Houston have presented her work, including DiverseWorks, Margolis Gallery, and her own space, Commune. Gochman debuted internationally in 2005 at the Sara Roney Gallery in Sydney, Australia. Since then she has been artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center and at Elsewhere in North Carolina. In 2007 she was invited to the Lincoln Center to introduce Waterfalls Wept, a 15-foot sculpture later installed at one of Chashama’s Manhattan locations.
Marina Rosenfeld is a composer and artist. Her work has deployed both musical and visual media, including a noted series of large-scale performance works comprising installation, video projection, photography and hybrid forms drawing on these. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of contexts: the 2002 and 2008 Whitney Biennials at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Artists’ Space in New York, Tate Modern in London, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in Los Angeles and Contemporary Exhibitions, a public art project for Creative Time. She has exhibited in galleries such as Curt Marcus, Greene Naftali, Rosamund Felsen or Deitch Projects, and participated in festivals including Donaueschingen, Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, Steirische Herbst, in Graz, Austria, Pro Musica Nova, Maerz Musik, Mutek, Wein Modern and The Wire’s Adventures in Modern Music.
Mai Ueda is a performance and multimedia artist. Shehas showed at the 2001 Lyon Biennale, Palais De Tokyo in Paris, PS1 in New York and Fargfabriken in Stockholm. ´Together with collaborators she used to run Electronic Orphanage in Los Angeles. She is a part of the art movement NEEN.
Ultra Violet was a central member of Andy Warhol’s Factory in the 1960s. Today she is a prominent and established avant-garde artist exhibiting throughout the world. She creates playful and intuitive works infused with energy, light, spirituality, symbolism, global meaning and humor. Ultra Violet’s paintings, 3-D constructions, mixed-media installations, and drawings reveal a visual universe filled with rainbows, angel, blue skies and white clouds, but they also contain material related to the chaos and destruction that challenges our 21st century world.
Deborah Colton Gallery 2445 North Boulevard Houston Texas 77098
Deborah Colton Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by the quixotic New York artist Marianne Vitale. With large, vibrant paintings, dense and thick with pigment, and relief sculptures suggesting enlarged body parts, Vitale hypertrophies the intricate intimacy of her pen and ink drawings into a churning no-fly zone over the contemporary. Accompanying the canvases I Got Rid of the Horse and Now There’s Just You, and Fifth Phase Handsome and two wall sculptures from her Healthcare Series – Navel and Elbow, (all 2010) Vitale has constructed one of her hybrid sculptures, in-situ, out of found material, debris, and a junked mini motor-bike – Presser (2010). Also on view are two series of drawings: Flushed Up and Ploughing (2009), five colorful and riddling pen and ink compositions, and Copper Line (2010), nine fast and forcible sequential graphite drawings on copper-coated paper (2010).
Vitale’s video Patron is currently on view at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York for the Whitney Biennial 2010, in which she delivers a nine-minute abusive rant “like a psychotic drill sergeant” parodying authoritarian posturing.
Marianne Vitale is a New York artist working in various mediums. Her sculptural practice often evokes an idea of the natural world remade from what has been discarded and abandoned. Vitale freezes forms into make-shift structures, fantastic creatures, hybrid animals and contorted beasts that can appear both fragile and menacing. Sometimes sympathetic, often uneasy, Vitale’s sculptures pull the tension between figure and abstraction, mid-process of either melting or forming, with skin dripping from their frames. These extracts stretch, move, coil, hide, and invite to mark an encounter of sinister illusoriness. When using performance and video, Vitale draws on the instinctive yet carefully sculpted absurdity apparent in her drawings and sculptures, with an added personal physicality that creates a visceral, even combative relationship between artist and audience. Vitale’s work has been exhibited internationally, including the 2010 Whitney Biennial, SculptureCenter, White Columns, Kunstverein NY, Brooklyn Museum, all in New York; Kling & Bang, Reykjavik, Iceland; Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden; Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston, Texas; IBID Projects, London, UK; and the Cass Sculpture Foundation, Sussex, England.
Roulette is co-produced by OUTPOST NYC DCG, Emily Harvey Foundation and Performa 09
The project is part of Performa 09
Michel Auder, Felicia Ballos, Salvador DalÌ, Molly Gochman, Amy Granat, George Maciunas, Maripol, Jonas Mekas, Lola Schnabel, Mai Ueda, Ultra Violet, Cecilia Widenheim
Curated by Liutauras Psibilskis
Roulette featured a performance by Jonas Mekas and the band Now We Are Here, with special guests. Mai Ueda hosted a dinner performance that included contributions from fashion designers, musicians and artists. A new video installation by Michel Auder was presented. Amy Granat, in collaboration with dancers Felicia Ballos and Cecilia Widenheim, showed an installation that incorporated performative film, movement and light. Documentation of performances by Salvador DalÌ, were screened, as well as rediscovered videos by Ultra Violet and Maripol. The show also included prints of the work by George Maciunas and the young artists Molly Gochman and Lola Schnabel.
By integrating the past and present, the viewer was presented with a variety of concepts and beliefs, past and now, all related to the idea of a performance and game. Roulette reflected on the risk-taking and possibilities of contemporary reality, marked by its gambles and potential rewards. The project changed with each successive event; as one event closed, another opened.
Events:
Friday, 6 November, 9-10pm
Jonas Mekas with friends and the band Now We Are Here, featuring Jonas Mekas as the lead singer.
Tuesday, 10 November, 7-9pm
Presentation of performance documentation and performative film. Rarely seen work, addressing themes of game, transmutation and the changing of social and gender roles, by George Maciunas, Ultra Violet, and Maripol, as well as documentation of Salvador DalÌís performances in New York filmed by Jonas Mekas.
Saturday, 14 November, 7-9pm
A Family Dinner in Parallel Universe by Mai Ueda and her friends. Ueda invited a selection of her friends: musicians, fashion designers, and artists to perform, dine together.
Sunday, 15 November, 7-10pm
Innocence in Extremis by Amy Granat in collaboration with dancers Felicia Ballos and Cecilia Widenheim. Collaboration between extreme cinema and dance: a variety of moving images and a simultaneous dance performance playing with light, darkness, shadows and sound.
Wednesday, 18 November, 7-9pm
The Good Life, new video installation by Michel Auder involved the poets Kathy Acker, Julien Blainem, William Burroughs, John Cooper Clarke, Ira Cohen, Gregory Corso, Brian Gyson, Harry Hoogstraten, Jean Jacques Lebel, Gerard Malanga, Michael McClure, Giulia Niccolai, Ron Padgett, Adriano Spatola and others performing for an audience and for Auder’s camera in 1979.
Michel Auder, Hubert Kretzschmar, Maripol, Jonas Mekas, Michael Portnoy, Agathe Snow, Marianne Vitale
Curated by Liutauras Psibilskis
Maripol, “Debbie Harry,” 1985, Sx 70 Polaroid on Canvas, 25 x 25 Inches
Deborah Colton Gallery is pleased to present Chemical City. The exhibition features several mediums that explore the creative climate of downtown Manhattan’s urban cultures over the last 30 years. Each of the artists have produced specific pieces for the project. The opening will be marked by a performance by Michael Portnoy from 6:30 to 8:30pm.
The title refers to the fusion, permutation, and exchange of elements, concepts and thoughts that are inherent to New York. It is an aspect of the city that can be thought of as its chemistry. Chemical City gives us a glimpse of creativity and brings together generations of artists who have found their experiences and inspiration in New York’s streets, music scene, and street cultures. Chemical City, like downtown Manhattan itself, is an experience revolving around combined elements brought together by the interaction of diverse forms of art. The featured artists open doors to reality and fantasy worlds that reflect the experience of living in downtown from the 70s to the present. The collection brings together highly respected artists who are regarded as the cornerstones for the downtown art scene and also younger artists who have become important contributors of the scene today.
Michel Auder shows a film based on footage he filmed in 1977 of a walk with legendary artist, poet and actor Taylor Mead on Christopher Street in New York. New photographic pieces by Auder will be also shown in the exhibition. For the first time Jonas Mekas will show a video film based on a footage filmed in 1990 as he walked through Soho and Lover East Side, giving us an informal tour of the city along with his Frozen Film Frames. Marianne Vitale’s work consists of crude oil drawings and paintings on silk, and an architectural structure built with found materials, reflecting elements of the metropolitan living experience, inspired by energy of life on the Lower East Side. Maripol will feature new selection Polaroids of legendary art and pop personalities in the 80s. Hubert Kreschmar has been closely involved both with music and art scenes of the city, his collages from 1988 will be shown in the exhibition. Previously unreleased footage by Agathe Snow documents the 2005 dance marathon art event she organized at Ground Zero, featuring an unprecedented gathering of more then 200 downtown Manhattan residents for a 24-hour dance-a-thon. Interested in games and human behavioral patterns, Michael Portnoy offers a new edition of his game table that debuted at the 2007 Moscow Biennale. This work reflects Fluxus strategies and, and to a larger extent, the ideas of play in the city and society as a whole.
Liutauras Psibilskis is a New York based independent exhibition curator and writer who holds a MA in Visual Culture from Goldsmiths College, University of London. He writes for Artforum International and has curated numerous exhibitions in museums around the world including Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Monash Museum of Modern Art and Australian Center for Contemporary Art. Melbourne, Helmhaus. Zurich, BAK. Utrecht, the Netherlands. For the 2005 Venice Biennale he curated the celebrated Jonas Mekas retrospective in the Lithuanian Pavilion that was awarded a Special Mention for extraordinary presentation of a contemporary classic artist. His upcoming projects include a film and video screening program for Tate Modern, London and an international performance and moving image project at Miami Beach Cinematheque for the upcoming Art Basel Miami Beach.
