calendario eventi  :: 

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9/3/2006

Two exhibitions

Esso Gallery, New York

Julian Dashper - Two works

Jennifer and Filippo Fossati are pleased to present the first solo show in New York by New Zealand based artist Julian Dashper in their project room at Esso Gallery opening March 10 through April 15, 2006

For his show at Esso, Julian Dashper will present two works; the first titled Future Call 1994-2006 and the second Untitled (C.V.) 1979-2006.

Future Call is made by repeatedly ringing a phone in the gallery at various times every day from Dashper’s native New Zealand which, being 18 hours ahead, is already well into the next day. A call from the future made at the exact same moment. Forget your existing broadband connection, this is a message coming back to you so fast you haven’t even woken up and sent yours in the first place yet. A call back to a ''phone alone'' in New York, left all by itself in the gallery, like some sort of abandoned sculpture.

A phone left unanswered in today’s instant `must answer it now’ society leaves a chilling message in one’s brain. Is it simply the wrong number? Is it bad news? Is it good news? Are we screening still? One can only fantasise over the millions of connotations: yet another artist ringing the gallery seeking reviews of their latest work? the Whitney ringing to tell of an inclusion in the Biennial? or simply last week’s blind date still pestering you? Lists float dreamingly on. Yet Dashper, snug in the comfort and knowledge of the future, simply demands that no one picks up the phone. Instead it is left to ring and ring and ring and ring. A call from his own personal new world in the future back to our old world in the present.

Dashper’s Untitled (C.V.) work consists of the artist’s complete resume, of 23 pages, dating back to his first show in New Zealand in 1979.
''...my interest in showing my C.V. as an artwork draws attention to the accepted idea in the art world of an artist’s exhibition history providing an immediate context for the understanding of any artwork that they make... the fact that many artists already pin their C.V. to the gallery wall, as a way of validating their work, suggests that the C.V. has a certain neutrality about it in the art world...''

Dashper has been trying to sell the copyright of his C.V. for a number of years. He asserts that, as one example of a potential purchaser, a fine arts student in today’s user-pays educational culture would get a far better and much more immediate return from their proposed investment in study by simply swapping their name for his, after purchasing his C.V. As such, this work of Dashper’s questions the validity of all artistic reputation.

Julian Dashper was born in 1960 in Auckland, New Zealand were he still lives. This show at Esso Gallery marks his 123rd solo show.
His work has been in many curated solo and group shows internationally. Notably, in 1994, in Canberra, Australia in a large solo exhibition entitled Chain Chain Chainge curated by Trevor Smith and Thin Ice in 1999, curated by Rudi Fuchs; a survey of the last 20 years of the Stedelijk Museum’s acquisitions.

In 2001 Dashper was based as an artist in residence, funded by a senior Fulbright Fellowship, at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas where he held his first solo exhibition in the U.S.A. Dashper’s work is currently the subject of a major touring 25 year retrospective in America organized by the Sioux City Art Center in Iowa and co-curated by Sioux City curator Christopher Cook and art historian/writer David Raskin (School of the Art Institute of Chicago). This exhibition, with fully illustrated catalog, offers the first ever American museum retrospective of a resident New Zealand artist, whose critical notice has been previously limited to Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.

Dashper’s work is represented in public and private collections around the world including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Ludwig Forum fur Internationale Kunst, in Aachen, Germany and the MCA in Sydney.

A strictly limited edition 12" record (in an edition of 20 with a letterpress cover) of Dashper’s phone in his Auckland studio ringing the Esso opening will be available (for pre-order) in the spring.

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Possibly Being: Larry Bamburg, Fabienne Lasserre, William Villalongo

The exhibition brings together for the first time the work of these three young artists demonstrating three completely different possibilities of making art. Without analyzing similarities or differences between their practices, this exhibition defines and describes three different approaches and the functions fulfilled by these artists in the use of images for the creation of their own personal language. Much of the work subverts traditional forms with an unconventional use of materials and content. A sort of aesthetic rebellion and subversion of institutional languages where unsettling imagery and idiosyncratic formal strategies are combined with traditional elements in a resistance towards ideological uniformity.

The materials chosen for their work is found in cheap, unfavorably looked upon substances and visual traditions (comic books, industrially produced paper and hardware), are assembled with different vocabularies in the narrative structures of each personal syntax. While perception is concerned with the grasping of significant forms, the mind finds it hard to perceive images without structural properties of shapes, lines and colors. Like in an alchemic laboratory, unrefined appearances are transformed in valuable objects and reprehensible poses, bad taste and disputed history gradually lose their weight in front of the eyes of the viewer.

Larry Bamburg's installations work without the dominant presence of these meaningful forces; his dynamic sculptures, objects and plastic forms are reduced to the presentation of pure symbols, matter, energy, fields of tension. His realistic images have the capability of giving a body to the bone structure of ideas conveying a desirable sense of lifelike presence. By a careful examination of the whole picture, the viewer will come to realize that for example, the dead deer on the floor or the woman dancing behind the mountain is not only a maquette or a model to the artist, at the realistic level of the representation, but also his muse, the traditional allegory of truth and the fullness of life at the same time. In his work there is a fascinating interplay between the desire and the need to comprehend the total range of a phenomenon in his whole dynamism and the attractive simplicity of static concepts.

Fabienne Lasserre's work represents the variety of her artistic interests. Her imagery is inspired by a mix of elements standing in between the abundance and power of high and of popular cultures, from religion to rural mysticism to political propaganda that she manipulates re-creating a new, personal iconographic language, whose grammar is made up of pictographic and poetic components that transcend the cultural barriers thanks to their simplicity and their universality. The anarchy and profusion in the creation of her images reminds of the exuberance and contrasts of rural myths.

The principle of change and mutability, a principle found at the heart of classical and other myths, and that governs the practice and scope of magic, is central to William Villalongo's work. Exploring the landscapes of identity, memory, repression, and power, he re-visions images of world cultural myth and spirituality in order to produce new effigies that connect the personal and political to the natural world of the earth and body. Notions such as authenticity vs. fakeness are leveled; polymorphous and transient meanings are created and unsettle pervasive themes and associations regarding cultural identity, sexuality and the role of the artist.

Esso Gallery
531 West 26th Street 4th floor - New York

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