calendario eventi  :: 

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28/10/2006

8 Exhibitions

MoMA PS1, New York

Defamation of Character

October 29, 2006 - January 8, 2007

(Long Island City, NY - August 11, 2006) P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center is pleased to present Defamation of Character, an international group exhibition exploring the iconoclastic impulse as an engine of recent creative progress. It draws primarily from work created in the post-punk era by approximately thirty artists, and explores the relationships between face and fame, notoriety, disclosure, and erasure. Some of the artists mine popular culture to produce scathing or defamatory indictments of consumer mores; others take the moral corruptions of public and political acts as their defamed subject; and others practice detournement—using elements of well-known media to create new work with a different or opposing message—to elevate injury and injustice into the realm of high art. Defamation of Character will be on view in the first floor Main Gallery from October 29, 2006, through January 8, 2007.

The cradle of much of this aesthetic impulse is England, where pop culture and anti-establishment attitudes have thrived concurrently. The progenitor of this position may be the British artist Richard Hamilton (b. 1922) whose body of work created in response to the so-called dirty protests in Northern Ireland speaks to the political defamations of the notorious Maze prison in the stylized language of pop. Fed through the language of punk and the graphic design of Jamie Reid (b. 1947) such attitudes became the form of the Young British Artists generation, represented here by works from Jake and Dinos Chapman (b. 1966/62), Sarah Lucas (b. 1962), and recently Adam McEwen (b. 1965).

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John Latham: Time Base and the Universe

October 29, 2006 - January 8, 2007

(Long Island City, NY - August 10, 2006) P.S.1 proudly presents Time Base and the Universe, an exhibition of approximately thirty works by the late British artist John Latham (1921-2006). Conceived with the artist prior to his death in January 2006, the show surveys the major stages of his career, spanning over fifty years. Time Base and the Universe is on view in the second floor Main Gallery from October 29, 2006 through January 8, 2007.

"John Latham is an artist's artist," notes David Thorp, curator of the exhibition. "His significance places him between Joseph Bueys and Robert Rauschenberg as someone whose ideas and influence have helped to shape late twentieth century art."

With his uncompromising endeavor to explore some of the most complex cosmological ideas through art, and due to his criticism of the art market, he was both acclaimed and vilified in his lifetime. Visceral and enigmatic, his work encompassed sculpture, performance, installation, film, conceptual, and book art. Creating a unified theory of existence, Latham combined art, science, and philosophy, thus challenging the views of professionals in each field. "even tstructu re" was the main sustaining principle of his art and suggests that the most basic component of reality is not the particle, as understood through physics, but a "least event" - or the shortest departure from a state of nothing.

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Katri'n Sigurdardottir: High Plane V

October 29, 2006 - May 7, 2007

(Long Island City, NY - August 14, 2006) P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center is pleased to present High Plane V (2006), Katri'n Sigurdardo'ttir’s first solo project in New York. This site-specific architectural intervention, which will inhabit P.S.1’s second and third floor corner galleries, will be on view from October 29, 2006 to May 7, 2007.

High Plane V will depict an artificial landscape, made of the most basic construction materials: blue insulation material and white paint. The panorama, which is a mix of imagined and real Arctic topographies, will be constructed on the floor of the third floor corner gallery. In order to view the landscape, visitors will be invited to climb up one of two ladders in the second floor gallery, and raise their heads through one of the two holes in the ceiling above. Upon reaching the third floor, the two viewers will be confronted not only with the icescape, but also with each other. As the topography is elusive in its source, it invites diverse interpretations - mountain ridges, icebergs, glaciers, or perhaps archipelagos seen from above the clouds.

In her work, Sigurdardo'ttir merges nature, architecture, and design, inspired by her native Iceland as well as New York, her home for the last twelve years. From conventional woodshop materials, such as plywood, polystyrene, and foam core, she creates miniature versions of imaginary and real environments that are often presented in crates, suitcases, or room-sized installations. These complex architectural structures encourage direct participation, and also evoke references to fragile childhood scale models and places of the imagination.

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Sam Samore: The Suicidist

October 29, 2006 - January 8, 2007

(Long Island City, NY - September 18, 2006) P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center is pleased to present Sam Samore’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. Comprising two photography series shown together for the first time—“The Suicidist" produced in 1973 and the recent “The Suicidist (continued)"—the bodies of work parallel one another in theme: the artist in various post-suicide situations. Sam Samore: The Suicidist is on view in the Second Floor Mini-Kunsthalle gallery from October 29, 2006 through January 8, 2007.

Playing the role of both actor and director, Samore stages his own death in various ways—strangled with a telephone cord, asphyxiated, overdosed—and examines a macabre psychology in works that are both cinematic and documentary. These black and white pictures evoke both contemporary film noir and a crime scene investigation, and also offer an eerie take on the self-portrait. A sense of absurdist humor and the tragicomic is evident in a number of works in the exhibition. In one picture from the 1973 series, a poster in the background offers an image of a hand holding a flower, and the encouraging words: “Hang onto life for all it’s worth." In another, the victim has had the air sucked out of his lungs with a vacuum cleaner. Samore’s work suggests a narrative beyond that which is immediately evident. The viewers, questioning what appears before them, are themselves investigators at the scene of a drama.

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Loris Cecchini: Cloudless

October 29, 2006 - January 8, 2007

(Long Island City, NY - October 4, 2006) P.S.1 is pleased to present Cloudless (2006), a large-scale installation by Italian artist Loris Cecchini. For this project, the artist will suspend an enormous biomorphic white form high above the floor in P.S.1’s Duplex gallery. Cloudless is on view from October 29, 2006 through January 8, 2007.

Comprised of thousands of plastic balls surrounding an internal framework of aluminum ladders, the work continues Cecchini’s investigation of how space is defined. Utilizing a formal vocabulary and lines of inquiry reminiscent of architects like Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Cecchini creates a nearly abstract, voluminous mass, evoking a weightless body of epic proportions. The resulting form refers specifically to a cloud but, as such, is also open to a wide variety of other interpretations. With Cloudless, Cecchini investigates the borders between the natural and the artificial, and the relationships that human perception and cognition have to these divisions.

Loris Cecchini (b. 1969) works in a variety of media including photography, sculpture, drawing, and installation. His work re-examines the broad notion of “model" by reworking familiar, everyday forms into a modified vision that challenges the viewer’s perceptions. Trained in Siena, Florence, and Milan, Cecchini began exhibiting internationally in 1995 and has since had numerous solo shows in Italy and elsewhere in Europe and in Asia. He lives and works in Prato and Beijing.

Organized for P.S.1 by Director Alanna Heiss, Cloudless was previously installed at Galleria Continua in Beijing and at the Shanghai Duolun MOMA. It will travel in January 2007 to the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and in May 2007 to the Villa Medici in Rome.

This exhibition is made possible by FENDI and the support of Rosa and Gilberto Sandretto.

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Music is a Better Noise

October 29, 2006 - January 8, 2007

(Long Island City, NY - September 15, 2006) Music is a Better Noise brings together musicians who make art and artists who make music, or for whom music is an integral part of their creative process. The exhibition, featured in two parts in P.S.1’s first floor Drawing and Painting Galleries, also includes a video program in the Vault. The title of the exhibition is taken from a 1979 song by the English post-punk group Essential Logic, led by teenage saxophonist Lora Logic. Music is a Better Noise is on view from October 29, 2006 through January 8, 2007.

The first part of the exhibition, organized by P.S.1 Curatorial Advisor Nick Stillman and featured in the Drawing Gallery, focuses on New York-based artists/musicians who emerged during New York’s remarkable mid-1970s to early 1980s period, and who continue to make music today. Artists included in this gallery are Barbara Ess, Rammellzee, and Alan Vega. Ess, a photographer who has made records with several bands, including Y Pants, the Static, Ultra Vulva, and Radio Guitar, will show a selection of her trademark photographs made with a pinhole camera, as well as a series of new works. Legendary rapper Rammellzee will include a group of his “Letter Racer" tanks made from scavenged trash, a doll representing the artist, and a variety of new works. Alan Vega, who formed the iconic electro-punk group Suicide with Martin Rev in the early 1970s, will unveil a suite of new sculptures from New York City’s detritus and discarded junk to accompany works from the 1990s

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The Gold Standard

(Long Island City, NY - September 14, 2006) P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center is pleased to present The Gold Standard, on view in the Kunsthalle from October 29, 2006 through January 8, 2007. All of the works in the exhibition are gold in color, and deal with the iconographic complexity of gold. The exhibition examines the idea that otherwise uninflected objects, through material and surface transformation, become objects of desire, expanding upon and negotiating the chimerical presence—both materially and symbolically—of gold. Themes such as alchemy and religion, symbols of power and wealth, the ostentatious and the sublime, are also of chief concern. The exhibition includes historical figures alongside younger artists, and numerous works commissioned especially for The Gold Standard.

The formal groundwork or strategies that seem most urgent for these artists raise questions of substitution, doubling, copying, decoys, and spectacle in relation to a material that has, as its base, a sense of unrelenting authenticity and power, a fantastical foundation for exchange—both literally in an economic sphere, and in a more general social sense.

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Continues:

Robert Barr: Recent Works

September 21, 2006 - January 8, 2007

(Long Island City, NY - September 20, 2006) P.S.1 is pleased to present Burt Barr: Recent Work, an exhibition that showcases four new works by the New York-based artist. With themes drawn from nature and culture, Barr’s low-tech and deliberately understated videos effectively heighten our awareness of time passing. This exhibition is on view from September 21, 2006 through January 8, 2006.

In Summer 2005 Looped (2005), which debuts here, Barr turns the camera on the idyllic setting of a yard behind a shingled house on Long Island. Rivulets of water that run over and distort this scene of the artist relaxing on a bench set amidst grass and trees lend a hallucinatory quality to an otherwise uneventful sequence. Barr achieved this “special" effect by shooting into a mirror onto which he also aimed a sprinkler gun.

Nature once again provides the setting for Fall (2003), which features two turtles mating in the rain. The rich colors of the turtles’ patterned shells and the background vegetation contribute to the drama of this slow-paced event. Moving indoors to the more rarefied world of the artist’s studio, Watching The Paint Dry: Red (2005) and Watching the Paint Dry: Blue (2005), shown here for the first time, allow visitors to engage in this proverbial activity by watching larger than life size images of brushstrokes.

Opening Day, Sunday, October 29, 7 pm

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Avenue 718 - New York

P.S.1 is open from 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., Thursday through Monday. It is closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years Day.

Admission is a 5.00 USD suggested donation; 2.00 USD for students and senior citizens; free for MoMA members and MoMA admission ticket holders. The MoMA ticket must be presented at P.S.1 within thirty days of date on ticket and is not valid during Warm Up or other P.S.1 events or benefits.

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