this week in art

SUE DE BEER: DEPICTION OF A STAR OBSCURED BY ANOTHER FIGURE

Sue de Beer’s latest multimedia installation closes on Saturday with a bonus presentation of THE GHOSTS (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Marianne Boesky Gallery
509 West 24th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through March 19, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-680-9889
www.marianneboeskygallery.com
www.suedebeer.com

New York-based visual artist Sue de Beer has always incorporated sculptural elements into her video installations, but for her current show at Marianne Boesky, she has reversed her method, with sculpture taking center stage. In “Depiction of a Star Obscured by Another Figure,” de Beer has placed just a handful of objects throughout the gallery, transforming it into a captivating visual landscape of light and memory. Utilizing several pieces that were on view at the Park Ave. Armory for her recent presentation of her latest film, The Ghosts, de Beer shines spotlights through standing partitions cut with geometrical shapes and patterns, casting long shadows across the space. She has installed a lower ceiling in the first room, signaling to visitors that they are about to enter another reality, in this case a dreamlike world that delves into the unconscious. The second room is centered by the praxinoscope from the armory show, which depicts the Antarctic glacier referenced in The Ghosts. Meanwhile, in one far corner, de Beer projects a miniature short film directly onto the wall, creating a persistence-of-vision effect, the continually flashing light leaving a lasting impression on the eye. The exhibition closes on Saturday, but as a bonus, the gallery will be screening The Ghosts that day in the project room; don’t miss it.

COKE WISDOM O’NEAL: BLUE NUDE

Coke Wisdom O’Neal’s “Blue Nude” traps its subjects in a Plexiglas box

Mixed Greens
531 West 26th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through Saturday, March 19, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-331-8888
www.mixedgreens.com
www.cokewisdomoneal.com

Since 2005, New York City-based artist Coke Wisdom O’Neal has been filling Mixed Greens with enchanting photos of men, women, and children standing in a twenty-two-foot-tall unpainted wooden box. Although the photographs appear to be digitally manipulated, they are not; the subjects are encouraged to dress however they want and bring objects with them, but their identity gets lost inside the mammoth specimen box, making them look minuscule and unreal until visitors get up close and spend time with them. For his fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, O’Neal has turned things around with “Blue Nude,” a series of striking photographs of naked men and women who have squeezed into a small, transparent Plexiglas box, folding and twisting their bodies to desperately try to fit in the cramped space. From a distance, it appears as if the people are trapped in the white walls of the gallery itself, trying to burst free, but up close their contorted bodies are both beautiful and painful to look at. While O’Neal’s previous shows offered his subjects several layers of freedom, these claustrophobic photos snatch that away from them, robbing the anonymous men and women of any identity whatsoever, making the viewer both awestruck and uncomfortable — and wondering if they would be able to fit in the box themselves. As with O’Neal’s earlier work, many of the photos seem unreal, primarily the ones in which the bodies push up against the box, at times looking more like paintings. “Blue Nude” is another fascinating show from this inventive photographer.

THE AIPAD PHOTOGRAPHY SHOW 2011

Denis Darzacq, “Hyper no. 10,” chromogenic print, 2008 (courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery)

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
March 17-20, $25 per day, $40 run of show
www.aipad.com

The thirty-first annual Association of International Photography Art Dealers Photography Show New York will feature more than eighty galleries from around the world in the Park Avenue Armory, running March 17-20. (A gala benefit preview is being held in conjunction with MoMA on March 16, with tickets ranging from $100 to $5,000.) Comprising early, contemporary, and modern photography, the event will highlight work by such artists as Mark Seliger at Steven Kasher, Abelardo Morell at Bonni Benrubi, Naomi Leshem at Andrea Meislin, Alec Soth at Weinstein, John Baldessari at Barry Singer, Alex Prager at Yancey Richardson, Denis Darzacq at Laurence Miller, Arkady Shaikhet at Nailya Alexander, and Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, Eugene Atget, and Thomas Eakins at Alan Klotz. Among the other participating galleries are New Orleans’s a Gallery for Fine Photography, La Jolla’s Joseph Bellows, Toronto’s Stephen Bulger, Munich’s Galerie f5,6, London’s Eric Franck Fine Art, Beijing’s Jade Jar Fine Art, Cologne’s Galerie Priska Pasquer, and such New York favorites as Howard Greenberg, Edwynn Houk, Robert Mann, Yossi Milo, Julie Saul, Bruce Silverstein, and Bryce Wolkowitz. AIPAD will also host a series of panel discussions ($10 each) with a bevy of prestigious guests on Saturday, including “Photography Now: How Artists Are Thinking Today,” with Larry Fink, Shirin Neshat, and Alec Soth, moderated by Julie Saul (10:00 am), “Pictures into Pages: Photography Book Publishing Now,” with Abrams’s Eric Himmel, Aperture’s Lesley Martin, Rizzoli’s Anthony Petrilose, and Steidl’s Gerhard Steidl, moderated by Steven Kasher (12 noon), “New Curators / New Directions,” with the Tate’s Simon Baker, MoMA’s Roxana Marcoci, LACMA’s Britt Salvesen, ICP’s Brian Wallis, and the Art Institute of Chicago’s Matthew S. Witkovsky, moderated by Rick Wester (2:00), “The Voice of Experience: Behind the Scenes at AIPAD Galleries, with Howard Greenberg, Peter MacGill, Yancey Richardson, and Martin Weinstein, moderated by Jill Arnold (4:00), and “AIPAD and the iPad: New Technology and Photography,” with Jen Bekman, Bill Charles, and Scott Dadich, moderated by Barbara Pollack (6:00).

nothingtoodooterencekoh

Terence Koh takes a break while walking around salt pyramid on his knees at Mary Boone Gallery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Mary Boone Gallery
541 West 24th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through March 19, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-397-0669
www.maryboonegallery.com
www.asianpunkboy.com
nothingtoodoo slideshow

Born in Beijing and raised in China, Terence Koh has staged such events as “Buddha Fly Earth,” in which he marched through Chinatown covered in a red sheet, “The Voyage of Lady Midnight Snowdrops Through Double Star Death,” a musical experience by the Kohbunny Beiijing Opera Company, and “Koh & 50 Most Beautiful Boy,” in which the artist formerly known as Asian Punk Boy performed in an all-white Peres Projects space in Los Angeles with a white sheet over his head, accompanied by a young white man banging away at a white drum kit. For his latest installation, “nothingtoodoo,” now in its final week at Mary Boone, Koh has been slowly circling a forty-seven-ton, eight-foot-high, twenty-four-foot-wide mound of salt eight hours a day, five days a week since February 12. Dressed in white pajama-like clothing, Koh makes his way around the salt on his knees, occasionally stopping to lie down flat on his stomach before continuing. His eyes staring straight ahead, the emotionless and silent Koh appears to be deep in meditation and prayer, a call for peace throughout the world. One press release offers a reason why he’s doing this to his knees: “dear friend / peace iz non-violence / peace is now / a perfect mountain of salt at the beginning of the show / a perfect field of salt at the end of the show / peace iz nothingtoodoo.” The floors and walls of the gallery have been turned white as well; be warned that if you lean against the wall, you’ll get covered in a white dust. Visitors are allowed to interact with the installation, which recalls the work of Marina Abramovic and Tehching Hsieh. Try not to view the piece merely as spectacle, getting in Koh’s face with your camera or blocking his path; instead, hang back, sit on the floor, and let yourself be taken away by his intense, mesmerizing concentration and dedication, allowing your mind to wander where it may.

TARA DONOVAN: PINS & MYLAR

Tara Donovan’s pin drawings are on view at the Pace Gallery on West 25th St. through March 19 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The Pace Gallery
510 West 25th St.: “Drawings (Pins),” through March 19
545 West 22nd St.: “Untitled (Mylar),” through April 9
Tuesday – Saturday, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
www.thepacegallery.com

Using such everyday materials as Styrofoam cups, plastic drinking straws, paper plates, fishing line, rubber bands, and toothpicks, Brooklyn-based artist Tara Donovan creates large-scale sculptures and installations that take on a life of their own. In the summer of 2008, for the site-specific solo exhibition “Tara Donovan at the Met,” she lined the walls of the Gioconda and Joseph King Gallery with thousands of tiny silver Mylar loops, giving the walls a fascinating texture evoking water bubbles, topographical maps, and other formations. In September 2009 at Lever House, she transformed more than a ton of transparent polyester film into a horizontal kaleidoscope visible from inside the gallery as well as from the street outside the front window. The first Calder Prize winner and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Donovan currently has two shows up in Chelsea, again using unusual materials in unique ways. At the Pace Gallery on West 25th St., “Drawings (Pins)” consists of a dozen works that from a distance appear to be shaded gray-and-white ink or pencil drawings but up close are revealed to have been made with nickel-plated steel pins. While some of the works resemble Hiroshi Sugimoto’s peaceful, contemplative photographs of the sea, others are more graphic and dynamic, with circles and rays of light jumping off the white-painted gatorboard canvases.

Tara Donovan’s large-scale Mylar sculpture is on view at the Pace Gallery on West 22nd St. through April 9 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The more abstract pieces work better than the more fanciful creations, which have too much of a wow effect and lack subtlety, although seen as a whole, the exhibit does a fine job of exploring what catalog essayist Jonathan T. D. Neil refers to as “the phenomenology of perception, the psychology of vision, and the opticality of modernism.” Meanwhile, there is also too much of a wow effect at the Pace Gallery on West 22nd St., where Donovan’s large-scale silver Mylar installation, reaching eleven feet high and spreading out like a fungus across the space, sparkles and shines as visitors walk around it, watching it glitter with the changing light. As with the pin drawings, the Mylar monster is impressive when viewed up close and the process becomes more apparent, but the piece is ultimately more style over substance.

TWI-NY TALK: JANET BIGGS

BRIGHTNESS ALL AROUND is one of three stunning videos by Janet Biggs set in the Arctic (photo courtesy Janet Biggs)

JANET BIGGS: THE ARCTIC TRILOGY
Winkleman Gallery
621 West 27th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through March 12
212-643-3152
www.winkleman.com
www.jbiggs.com

New York–based video artist Janet Biggs has traveled around the world capturing remarkable images she pairs with eclectic music, melding physical, often ritualistic movement with investigations into gender identity and the natural environment. Vanishing Point features motorcycle speed-record holder Leslie Porterfield on the Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah and the Harlem Addicts Rehabilitation Center Gospel Choir, Enemy of the Good explores Santiago Calatrava’s City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain, with concert pianist José Luis Hernández-Estrada, and Duet combines a NASCAR pit crew in Charlotte and an aria from the Léo Delibes opera Lakmé. For her current solo show, continuing at Chelsea’s Winkleman Gallery through Saturday, the former equestrian, who has an undergraduate degree in painting and sculpture and a master’s in glassblowing, has installed “The Arctic Trilogy,” three gorgeous short films that were shot in the vast, isolated Svalbard archipelago: Fade to White cuts between a kayaker and a mournful, operatic song by performance artist John Kelly, Brightness All Around follows the exploits of woman coal miner Linda Norberg along with an original, propulsive dance-floor incantation by Bill Coleman about actual near-death experiences, and In the Cold Edge traces the path of a spelunker emerging from an ice cave. After writing a grant for her next secretive project, Biggs generously answered a series of questions about her creative process for twi-ny.

twi-ny: At Winkleman, Brightness All Around and Fade to White are shown in succession, one after the other, at opposite sides of the main space, creating a sharp contrast between them and a fascinating dialogue that involves performers Bill Coleman and John Kelly as well as a male kayaker and a female engineer. How did that installation choice come about?

Janet Biggs: Brightness All Around and Fade to White are polar opposites in their representations of the Arctic landscape, gender, race, awe and terror, loss and change. I wanted the audience to experience the two videos as counterpoints in their extremes. My decision to project them back-to-back on opposite walls allowed me to place the audience in one immersive, physical space while still emphasizing contrasts. The audience had to physically turn around to view the successive videos, creating both a physical and psychological shift.

In each of these two pieces, I alternate footage of individuals struggling in extreme environments to define their identity with shots of singers performing the music that is heard in the soundtrack. By incorporating performance artist John Kelly and music guru Bill Coleman as both visual and audio elements into my videos, I explore the way these performers’ physical intensity can be interwoven into a narrative to create new meaning.

In Brightness All Around, singer/dancer Bill Coleman, dressed in black leather against a black backdrop, presents a fetishized, macho image as he delivers a demonic chant of near-death experiences. In Fade to White, I integrated the Arctic imagery with countertenor John Kelly, clad in all white, whose age, androgyny, and mournful voice parallel the vanishing Arctic landscape and signal the erasure of male dominance.

I intend to invert the traditional gendered dynamics of heroic exploration by portraying a male explorer as a passive, vulnerable figure, in the white-on-white landscape, while a female Arctic miner aggressively drills, violates, and transforms the black depths of the earth below. The musical performances in the two pieces as well as the juxtaposition of a pristine landscape and the dark, gritty mine interior complicate the power dynamics.

By presenting the two videos back to back I hope to expand the narrative, prompting questions about power hierarchies, social structures, and individual relationships to desire within existential themes.

twi-ny: In many of your videos, including the three in the current exhibition as well as Vanishing Point, Sollipsism Syndrome, and Enemy of the Good, you seem drawn to big, wide-open spaces, usually very bright, with solitary figures primarily in natural environments. Would you consider that a motif of your work, or is it just a coincidence? Like Werner Herzog, would you consider yourself an adventurer as well as a filmmaker?

JB: I tend to revisit elemental and extreme landscapes, from the icy fjord in Glacier Approach, to the broiling hot salt flats of Bonneville in Vanishing Point, to my most recent videos that were filmed in the High Arctic. I am interested in using the landscape as a surrogate character or equal subject to the individuals who struggle to maintain a sense of self within it.

Janet Biggs makes her first on-screen appearance in IN THE COLD EDGE (photo courtesy Janet Biggs)

I am drawn to the ends of the earth. Locations that represent empty lands and blank spaces are ripe for interpretation. Even though these once unknown places have been mapped and surveyed, increased knowledge has not replaced my endless fantasies of discovery in these regions. I am interested in individuals who dedicate themselves to a search for perfection often through athletic pursuits. In their willingness to take risks and endure isolation, they strive to attain an extreme state of being. By filming solitary figures within vast natural environments I am able to focus on both their vulnerable fragility as well as their manifest strength.

I use grand stories and heroic efforts as my point of departure, then slide sideways into small gestures or esoteric tasks as seen from deeply personal perspectives. I am interested in how repetitive or ritualized movements, the incidental, small movements, are as wondrous as the stupefying wild and beautiful landscapes where many of these actions occur.

twi-ny: Seeing humans deep underground in a cave or a mine, the viewer is always aware of your presence as cinematographer, and you get to experience much of what your subjects are experiencing, but in In the Cold Edge, you make a critical appearance at the end. What made you decide to come out from behind the camera at that point?

JB: I’ve hung off the back of trucks in specially made chairs that ride inches above the ground at more than one hundred miles per hour. I’ve paddled kayaks in Arctic weather where water temperatures are so cold you would die of hypothermia in fifteen minutes if you capsized. I have paddled under huge glacial walls, hoping that they wouldn’t calve, and in waters with polar bears swimming nearby. I have squeezed through glacial ice caves so tight that I couldn’t get my head up to see with my headlamp, and I have descended into Arctic coal mines where methane fires ignite with terrifying regularity.

There is clearly a performative side to my work that has to do with me physically and psychologically pushing myself or assuming some kind of risk in order to capture the images and action needed for a piece. I didn’t realize I was such a thrill seeker until I set out to make this kind of work. This part of my process is compelling enough that I often find myself looking for new challenges, although my exploration of the addictive nature of risky behavior is primarily as a witness to someone else’s action and off-camera.

By taking risks and challenging myself in the production of my work, I strive to understand my subjects’ choices and motivations, and also experience some of the thrills that are part of what they do. I hope that this process will translate to the viewer, allowing them a vicarious experience that will become an element in the final reception of the work.

I made my first on-camera appearance at the end of In the Cold Edge. I am seen shooting a flare into an archetypal image of the frozen north. This personal appearance was necessitated by practical considerations (I was the only one of my crew who was certified to shoot a firearm) but also by a personal need to represent my relationship to this haunting location. On my first trip to the Arctic, the landscape kept me in a state of romantic awe. By the second trip, my relationship to the region had changed to include a degree of terror as well as awe. I had a profound sense of displacement in a region that neither needed nor desired human presence. The act of shooting a flare was both an aggressive assertion of self and also a cry for help in a landscape where assumptions about self and reality are radically altered.

KATHY SMITH: TIME, SPACE AND ANIMATION

Tamarind Arts Council
142 East 39th St.
Wednesday, March 9, free with RSVP, 6:30
212-200-8000
www.tamarindarts.org
www.kathymoods.org/slippages

In 1967, Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock was published without one of its chapters, which was finally released twenty years later, shortly after Lindsay’s death. Inspired by that missing chapter eighteen, Australian artist Kathy Smith is in the midst of the work-in-progress “Slippages,” currently on view at the Tamarind Arts Council on East 39th St. The multimedia, multidisciplinary exhibit, which uses cutting-edge digital technology to “explore the mysteries of time, life and consciousness,” closes on March 9 with an artist talk by Smith. “I want to show the correlation of three-dimensional time to three-dimensional space and how the evolution of creative processes such as drawing, painting, holography, animation and installation map the non-linear or multiple time perception that is core to this project,” Smith explains. It’s a complex work with lots of scientific detail, which should make for a fascinating illustrated lecture.