ART NEWS:Feb.04
Once a month artists from the 34th Bienal de São Paulo open their studios and speak about their trajectories, the works they are producing for the 34th Bienal and their current research, beginning with questions and provocations set forward by our curatorial team. The artist of this month is Emerson Uýra. Born in 2016, during the process of Dilma Roussef’s impeachment, when biologist Emerson decided to expand their academic research and search for ways to bring debate about environmental conservation and LGBT rights to communities in and around Manaus. In biology classes or photographic performances, in make-up and camouflage, in texts and installations, Uýra talks both from and with the forest. In the 34th São Paulo Bienal, two preexisting photographic series, “Elementar” and “Mil quase mortes”, are interconnected in a montage inspired by the undulations of a snake’s body in motion. The images are records of performances also put on for the camera, sometimes for the camera alone. They are at once actions of denunciation and evocations of ancestral or futuristic beings, between utopian and apocalyptic, of disturbing beauty. The forest at threat, deforestation, fire; water submerged by the garbage that drowns the streams; the forest that swallows the body and the body that transforms itself. Watch here.
For “Curbed Vanity” his first museum commission and solo museum presentation, Dallas-native artist Chris Schanck created a contemporary work inspired by the late-19th century Martelé dressing table in the DMA’s collection. Made of found objects from the immediate neighborhood of the artist’s Detroit studio, Schanck’s dressing table is coated in resin and aluminum foil—a reference to the Dallas aluminum factory where, along with his father, Schanck worked when he was young. The two dressing tables are presented together in a conversation across time about craftsmanship, material, and the vanity that drives them. Chris Schanck embraces contradiction in his work, finding a comfortable place between the distinctions of dilapidation and assemblage, individual and collective, industrial and handcraft, romanticism and cynicism. His efforts deviate from the mass-produced, instead reviving mundane materials by transforming them into unique objects of uncommon luxury. Schanck is perhaps best known for his “Alufoil” series, in which industrial and discarded materials are sculpted, covered in aluminum foil and then sealed with resin. Info: Dalas Museum of Art, 1717 North HarwoodDallas, Duration: 7/2-29/8/2021, Days & Hours: Thu-Fri 14:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, https://dma.org
“Response: Our Land Narrative” is the culmination of the Response program, a new multi-year collaboration between The Polygon Gallery and First Nations Student Services and the Indigenous Digital Filmmaking Program at Capilano University. Participants engaged in a series of workshops during Fall 2020. The work produced by participants will be on view over the course of two presentations. The first presentation, features installation-based works using a range of media including photography, video, sculpture, drawing and audio. This will be followed with screenings of video works. The projects activate stories and conversations about connection, resistance, and migration, often through experimental approaches. Thinking through ways of being that recognise land as Knowledge Keeper, these works consider humanity in relation to lands and waters in various ways, and highlight shifts that take place over time both within and around us. Our Land Narrative asks: how do we affect nature, from our positions of being situated or unsettled, and what is its impact upon us, from our experiences with displacement and return? Info: The Polygon, 101 Carrie Cates Court, North Vancouver, Duration: 10-21/3/2021 (1st cycle) & 7-17/4/2021 (2nd cycle), Days & Hours: Wed & Fri-sun 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, https://thepolygon.ca
With the “Perfect Shop-Fron” by Kasper Bosmans, the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro presents the first instalment of the new Project Room exhibition cycle, an “observatory” project dedicated to the most recent developments in the international artistic panorama. In his practice, Kasper Bosmans associates socio-political themes and different historical-cultural contexts in forms which draw on heraldry, folkloristic symbolism, the tradition of the ready-made, and the history of decoration. Combined in a completely subjective way, these elements merge into works that narrate new mythologies, in an attempt to find new ways of communicating knowledge. Anecdotes from different times and places are translated into paintings, installations, and elegantly witty, sometimes ironic objects. For Project Room #13 the artist has designed an intricate intervention in which the elements of his lexicon are deployed to address strictly contemporary issues such as the breaking apart of natural ecosystems and the physical limitations imposed by the pandemic. The group of works triggers a dimension of flânerie that is anything but disengaged, in which the viewer encounters references to political consciousness in forms that take their cue from a radical approach to folk art, between concept and history of materials. Info: Curator: Eva Fabbris, Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, via Vigevano 9, Milan, Duration: 17/2-14/5/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-13:00 & 14:00-19:00 (Reservation is recommended), www.fondazionearnaldopomodoro.it
The main exhibition of 2021 Atlanta Biennial, “Of Care and Destruction” brings together the work of over thirty artists living, working, exhibiting, and in-residence in the Atlanta metropolitan region and across the southeastern quarter. Ranging from emerging to well-established individuals and collectives working within and between painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, video, and photography, this gathering of artists and projects presents a bold “snapshot” of contemporary art in a time of great grief, loss, isolation, and struggle. While the range of projects and themes in this exhibition are many, key issues and approaches emerged across the many virtual studio visits and conversations during the development of this exhibition. These include: A confrontation with America’s many mythologies and historical failures; a reckoning with the intersectional inequities of our present; a belief in craftsmanship as a form of care and communion with the past; profound consideration of artistic labor and its relationship to race, gender, precarity, and lived experiences of the body; and a desire to foreground notions of tenderness, beauty, quietude, spirituality, and community within the conceptual structuring of the work, categories often dismissed by White, patriarchal, Western-centric values of representation, art historical or otherwise. Many artists found expression for these concerns in the physicality of their materials and the mutability of their chosen processes, whether in textiles, ceramics, found materials, or photographs. Info: Curator: Dr. Jordan Amirkhani, 2021 Atlanta Biennial, Atlanta Contemporary, 535 Means St NW, Atlanta, GA 30318, Duration: 20/2-1/8/2021, Tue-Wed & Fri-Sat12:00-17:00, Thu 12:00-20:00, Sun 12:00-16:00, https://atlantacontemporary.org