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30/4/2010

Mayday!

MONA Museum of New Art, Detroit

MONA is pleased to co-sponsor MayDay! an exhibition of work by Olaf Breuning, Yisook Sohn and Woojin Choi, in the first exhibition at the Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography. Titled not only in reference to the day of the exhibition’s opening, the multiple meanings of MayDay! resonate throughout the work on view. Originally a celebration of spring and the rebirth it represents, “Mayday” is also the distress signal used in times of emergency.

All at once art exists. And it is desired and celebrated. It is also mocked, attacked, and rejected. Yet, its sudden existence provides the moment for creating a vision of something unexpected and confusingly new. It confuses us with its pronounced individualism and yet surprises us with its conflation of styles, both old and new. Simply put, this young art sets out to arouse the most disparate and the most contradictory of reactions.

Olaf Breuning
In playful, surprising ways, Swiss artist Olaf Breuning combines the real and the illusory, the authentic and the contrived, the barbarous and the civilized. Brevity and intelligent humor make Breuning’s works subtle and comprehensible to the intellect, while always concealing the element of surprise and the ‘charm of simplicity’. In a typically postmodern way his works recount several stories at once: ‘Not just a story within the content of my images, but the story of my personal attraction to certain details floating in the mainstream – the details that “pop” for me, the story of the public’s obsession with codes that represent power, the story of our degenerated relationship to second-hand information: the story of photography, the story of future relations between art and the popular landscape of images.’

Yisook Sohn
Yisook Sohn received her BA literature from the Ewha Womans University in Korea and completed her MFA in photography from the Graduate School of Art & Design, Sangmyung at Seoul in 2007.
Her work has been exhibited in Korea and in the United States, including 15th Griffin Juried Exhibition, International Exhibition of Fine Art Photography in the Center for Fine Art Photography, 19th Annual Juried Show in the Contemporary Arts Collective, Las Vegas, as well as featured on Women in Photography. Yisook was the recipient of Lens Culture International Exposure Awards in 2009 as an Honorable Mention, 3rd annual photography masters cup in 2009 as an Honorable Mention, and 1st edition of Hey, Hot Shot! 2008, Honorable Mention. She had her first solo exhibition Madame C in 2009 in Seoul, Korea.

Woojin Choi
Woojin Choi lives and works in Detroit. He received his BFA in Filmmaking from Chungiu University in Korea also his BFA in Fine Art from University of California. Woojin is expected to receive his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2010. Woojin has received Audience Award from Korea Youth Film Festival in 1999. His images will be shown at Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit as his MFA graduate exhibition through Cranbrook Academy Art.

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PICASSO'S GARDEN
photographs by Stig Eklund

When Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973, at his chateau in Mougins, his friend the French art critic and political activist, Andre Malraux was invited by the artist's widow, Jacqueline Roque, to have a last look at his collection of "junk". Malraux mentions discovering “in the mess” of Picasso’s studio a small tin box with early photographic experiments. We can only assume these are the few surviving photographs taken with Picasso's "broken" camera. Malraux later writes in his memoirs, recalling them as “diversions”, and advises Jacqueline they are of no real value, adding: "Obviously nature has to exist so that we may deride it."

Picasso's camera, with its brittle stack of negatives and several discarded drawings eventually found their way into the hands of Swedish collector Peter Hallstrom. Hallstrom, guessing their importance, then directed the Bergen University professor Dr Åke Neilsen and his team of assistants to supervise the meticulous task of bringing them all back to life.

The astounding results of these efforts have rewritten art history forever and have been on loan to be viewed by the public for the first time at the Museum of New Art, with the museum's exclusive American engagement of PICASSO'S CAMERA. It was with this specific camera, with its broken "cubist" lens that the famous photographer Stig Eklund shot this short series of work currently on view, titled PICASSO'S GARDEN.

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JOHN MILLER & TOM PARR
New Paintings from Detroit

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CONNECTING HIRST'S DOTS
Post-Art in the 21st Century

We should really understand the history of art as the history of dialectical mutations and not just within a historical epoch, but also within the development of an artist’s individual work. The exciting development of art throughout the centuries shows the explosions, the dreams, the utopias, and the setbacks that keep recurring from generation to generation, from decade to decade: A titanic battle, seething with contradictions, before the walls of Paris and Berlin and New York, and no matter how these walls have been torn down by history, they still resurrect a revised vision and engage our minds.

Image: Olaf Breuning

The show opens on Saturday, May 1, with a reception from 6 to 10 p.m.

The show continues through May 29, at 7 N. Saginaw St., Pontiac.

Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography
7 North Saginaw Street Pontiac, MI 48342
Gallery Hours
Thursday, Friday, Saturday: 1:00- 5:00

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