calendario eventi  :: 

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29/4/2004

Two exhibitions

Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery, Chicago

Main gallery
KEN FANDELL - From Up and Down, and Still Somehow

Project room
KORI NEWKIRK - New Work: 7 & 7

BODYBUILDER & SPORTSMAN Gallery is pleased to announce From Up and Down, and Still Somehow, an exhibition of new work by Ken Fandell. In the Project Room will be New Work: 7 & 7, featuring LA-based artist Kori Newkirk who is concurrently exhibiting at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland and the Chicago Cultural Center. Kori Newkirk appears courtesy of the Project, NY and LA.

MAIN GALLERY: Ken Fandell's From Up and Down, and Still Somehow presents three new works in which he explores the psychological implications of disrupting narrative, specifically upsetting viewers' expectations within the media of video, text and photography. The central piece of the show, All the Skies Above (Berkeley, Chicago, Hartford, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Venice, Vienna and various points in between: October 14th, 2002 - March 8, 2004), 2004 is a 4.5 foot x 10 foot photographic image that is the fourth in a series of large-scale photo montages. Created by methodically photographing the sky wherever he was and at various times of day over the past year and a half, and montaging the photographs into one seamless image, the piece combines an intellectualized and system-based process with a more intuitive and formal painterly approach. Here, an utterly impossible, fantastical image of a single sky is realized: the duration of both the day and night as well as the accumulation of various locations. The horizon-less sky, devoid of the telltale signs of direction, place, time or scale serves both as a document of varied atmospheric conditions and as a backdrop for a type of pathetic fallacy - whereby strong feelings falsely affect our impressions of the world around us.

A Complex Imperative is a short video loop that compresses time through acceleration. Fandell is shown falling asleep/passing out, dreaming of a spectrum of colors and a raucous crowd and then waking up. The piece occupies a unique physical and psychological space in that it is both external and internal to the voice/vision of the narrator. While examining significance, inspiration, and consequence in individual practice, the piece questions how to separate the artist making the art from the artist within the art, the "real time" of the recording of the video from the lapsed time presented in the video, and the dream within the video from the reality/fiction that is the video.

In the third piece, Fandell presents a diptych showing a handwritten message that is in a style reminiscent of an epic science fiction prologue, with words emerging from a void in one print, and disappearing into the distance in the next. Each panel reads "Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again." Different interpretations of this hyperbolic text (taken from sports writer Red Smith's article on the New York Giants' 1951 winning of the National League pennant) is represented. Is the message a revelation or a prophecy? Is the tone one of exhilaratingly euphoria or catastrophic despair?

This will be Ken Fandell's second solo exhibition at Bodybuider & Sportsman Gallery. He has exhibited widely in Chicago and nationally. Recent exhibitions of his work include venues such as The San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA; Indiana University's SoFA Gallery, Bloomington, IN; Traywick Gallery, Berkeley, CA (solo); Howard House, Seattle, WA (solo); and Revolution Gallery, Detroit, MI (solo). He is currently in a group show at Gavin Brown's Enterprise at Passerby, New York, NY. His work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Born in Evanston, IL in 1971, Fandell currently lives in Chicago, works in a variety of places and feels like he has been utilizing various narrative Mobius strips in his work forever.
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PROJECT ROOM: Kori Newkirk's new work, 7 & 7, is a site specific diptych. Employing his signature plastic pony beads and artificial hair, 7 & 7 illustrates an indeterminate American cityscape at both dawn and dusk. Newkirk's vignettes reassign meaning to the decorative hair beads and microbraids to present both formal and conceptual depictions of an individual's presence within the larger urban landscape.

Kori Newkirk was born in 1970 in the Bronx, NY. He is currently living and working in Los Angeles. He received his BFA in 1993 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA in 1997 at the University of California at Irvine. He also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. He is represented by the Project Gallery in both New York and LA. This is his first show at Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery and his first solo show in Chicago.

BODYBUILDER & SPORTSMAN Gallery is honored to be selected for this years International Invitational section at Art Chicago 2004. You can find us at booth B240 where we will be presenting new work by the following artists: Leslie Baum, Don Doe, Ken Fandell, Charles LaBelle, D'nell Larson, Jeff McMahon, Tracy Nakayama, New Catalogue, Paul Nudd, Michael Peter Smith, Dannielle Tegeder, Kerry Tribe and Georgina Valverde The focus of this year's booth will be a special section of photographs and editions by New Catalogue, whose work will be featured simultaneously at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art in the 12x12, New Artists New Art series, opening May 6 and running through May 30.

"Through a production strategy that simultaneously parallels and challenges the corporate stock image company, New Catalogue- artists Luke Batten and Jonathan Sadler- creates a mass of original editions. Each series individually expands on traditional photographic genres while all the series culminate to propose a new and universal visual language."

We are further pleased to announce that addition to our own honored invitation, Kerry Tribe's video installation Florida, 2003 was selected for special presentation at the fair and will be featured in its own project space at At Art Chcago 2004. Florida consists of video (21 min), sound (46 min) and photographs produced during a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and subsequent visits to several small towns in rural central Florida. Conceived as an extended meditation on an imaginary Edenic site where people essentially go to die, Florida's audio track is comprised of interviews conducted with elderly residents of nursing homes and retirement communities in the region. These tend toward the personal and particular (specific memories, desires, regrets) but also touch on larger philosophical topics as participants muse on the nature of paradise and death. Each voice is disembodied yet distinct; in the video the individuals are never seen. Instead, the projection features a series of meandering long takes, shot in Steadicam, of the Floridian landscape -- its lush savannas, dense jungles, and steamy swamps. Florida uses traditional documentary strategies as a point of departure, but the installation's sound and image loop independently from one another. This deliberate non-synching produces sensations of amnesia on one hand and deja vu on the other.

Image:
Ken Fandell- All the Skies Above (Berkeley, Chicago, Hartford, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Venice, Vienna and various points in between; October 14th, 2002 Ð March 8th, 2004), 2004. photograph montage, ink on paper. 4.5' x 10.5'

Opening reception: Friday, April 30, from 6-9 p.m.

April 30, 2004 - June 5, 2004
Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11a.m - 6p.m.

Contact: Tony Wight
312.492.7261

Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery
119 N. Peoria St. #2C, Chicago, IL 60607
tel. #312-492-7261. fax #312-492-6796

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