NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Joy Garnett: Being There @ Platform Gallery, Seattle

Exchange of Fire, 2013, oil/canvas, 38×44 inches

 

Joy Garnett Being There

@

PLATFORM GALLERY
114 Third Avenue South, Seattle, WA 98104
Telephone: 206-323-2808
Email: [email protected]
Hours: Wednesday to Saturday, 11AM to 5PM

http://platformgallery.com

 

October 23 to November 29, 2014

IMAGES FROM THE EXHIBITION

 

Platform Gallery is pleased to present our first solo exhibition of works by New York-based Joy Garnett. Joy’s work deals with the theme of “the unquiet image in the media” as her general subject, within which there are more specific subcategories: machine vision; images of conflicts in and around the Middle East; images from screen grabs of leaked US classified military videos, for example. She has been “circumnavigating the same subjects and mediating them or filtering them through painting over the years.”

Regarding this exhibition Joy writes, “Media images of natural and man-made disasters function not to bring us closer to these events, but to give us the illusion of ‘being there.’ Moving along a different trajectory than reportage, painting walks the line between metaphysical engagement and story-telling without giving us clear guidelines for interpretation. By not offering contexts for the events depicted, painting sidesteps the journalistic urge to explore other possibilities.

“The paintings in Being There merge fact with fantasy as they draw upon found news images for subject matter. By absorbing media images and ‘re-making them,’ they exploit our expectation and desire to witness events we can’t experience firsthand. Purposefully ambiguous, the paintings in Being There stir unexpected associations, partial recognitions, unlikely comparisons, and far-flung projections. There is no one correct way to read them since they reflect the varied viewpoints and expectations of the viewers themselves.”

Joy Garnett is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who works with archives. Her projects use painting, online repositories, and social media performance to explore the crossroads of our digital and material worlds. Her work has been shown at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Craft Portland, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (Newcastle), aeroplastics (Brussels), Boston University Art Gallery, MoMA PS1, CUNY Graduate Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and is included in the permanent collections of the National Academy of Sciences, Philip Morris, and The West Collection. She has received grants from Anonymous Was a Woman, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Wellcome Trust, and The Chipstone Foundation. Garnett writes the column ‘Copy That!’ for Art21 Magazine and has served as Arts Editor of Cultural Politics, a refereed journal published by Duke University Press, since 2005. Her writings have appeared in a few anthologies as well as in Harper’s, Journal of Visual Culture, and Ibraaz, the leading critical forum on visual culture in North Africa and the Middle East. She continues to edit her blog NEWSgrist, which she launched in the spring of 2000. Garnett is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Digital and Interdisciplinary Art Practice (DIAP) MFA program at The City College of New York. She hopes to further realize projects drawn from her family archive. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

 

 

A Gift to Birobidzhan @ 21ST.PROJECTS

21ST.PROJECTS is pleased to announce a viewing of Yevgeniy Fiks’s A Gift to Birobidzhan from September 11 to October 19, 2014. For more information or to make an appointment to see the collection contact Yevgeniy Fiks. Viewing is by prior appointment only.

A Gift to Birobidzhan

In 2009, artist Yevgeniy Fiks originated a project called A Gift to Birobidzhan. Established in the Soviet Union in 1934 as the Autonomous Jewish Region of the USSR, Birobidzhan was for a time considered a rival to Israel. Although located in a remote area near China, Birobidzhan caught the world’s imagination. In 1936, two hundred works of art was collected in the United States by activists as the foundation for the Birobidzhan Art Museum. The collection included works by Stuart Davis, Adolf Dehn, Hugo Gellert, Harry Gottlieb, and William Gropper among others. The collection was first exhibited in New York and Boston, and in late 1936, it was shipped to the Soviet Union. The collection never reached its final destination in Birobidzhan. By late 1937, Stalin had purged the leadership from Birobidzhan at which time the collection vanished into government or private hands.

Taking this microhistorical narrative as his starting point, Fiks invited 25 contemporary international artists to donate works of their choosing to the existing museum of Birobidzhan. After initially agreeing to exhibit and accept the works into its collection, the museum in Birobidzhan conditionally retracted the offer, in part to avoid confrontation with a conflicted past and the fact that Birobidzhan now consist of a small Jewish population. Granting Fiks the role of steward, the artists agreed to let Fiks store the collection until it could reach its intended destination.

A Gift to Birobidzhan of 2009 was an attempt to repeat and complete — seventy years later — the gesture of “a gift to Birobidzhan” in 1936. As of 2014, it remains still a rejected gift and a “state-less collection,” packed in boxes in Fiks’ apartment in the Lower East Side. A Gift to Birobidzhan evokes the utopian promise of Birobidzhan — a Socialist alternative to a Jewish state — as a point of departure for discussions on broad 20th century’s impossible territorial politics, identity, national self-determination, and a common “seeking of happiness.” At present, we find that many of the same questions from the early 20th century have resurfaced again.

Yevgeniy Fiks thanks Erin Sickler, Anya Pantuyeva, and Sara Reisman.

Artists in the Collection:
Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri
Eric Anglès
Lene Berg
Mark Boswell
Laura Carton
Christoph Draeger
Åsa Elzén
Joy Garnett
Barbad Golshiri
Dmitry Gutov
Pablo Helguera
Carla Herrera-Prats
Christopher K. Ho
Jesal Kapadia
Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev
Olga Kisseleva
Lasse Lau
Lin + Lam
Lize Mogel
Nikolai Oleynikov
Freya Powell
Gregory Sholette
Haroutioun Simonian
Dmitry Vilensky with Chto Delat
VyDaVy

more info and images

Critical Practices Inc. is a response to the complex and changing conditions that affect the emergence of new practices and ideas within the field of cultural production. By means of artists projects (21ST.PROJECTS) and roundtables discussions (LaTableRonde), Critical Practices seeks to provide platforms for the exchange of the diverse points of views necessary for the evaluation of those current critical, theoretical, and practical objectives that impact cultural production.

21ST.PROJECTS is located at 162 West 21 Street in Chelsea.

Summer update

Rupert Murdoch, inked (2007) (joy garnett / flickr.com / Creative Commons). On ABC RN Media Reports (Australia): Illustration: ...Rupert makes a move on Time Warner

 

A few personal updates before we hit the dog-days of summer:

Installation view, Sargent's Daughters. (Infra)Red Herd, center.
Joy Garnett: Red Herd, (2014) o/c 20x30 inches.

 

Sargent's Daughters

'Sargent's Daughters: An exhibition of women artists exploring the legacy of John Singer Sargent' through Saturday, July 26, 2014

179 East Broadway - map/directions

Press:

The New Yorker
 
July 18, 2014
 
Goings on about town: Art
 
"Sargent's Daughters"
 
A young gallery celebrates its first year with a show named for itself, crowded with works by forty female artists, most of them painters, who engage with the legacy of John Singer Sargent—his style, his social acuity, and his male gaze. Portraitists, as you’d expect, get top marks. Caris Reid subverts Sargent’s classicized eroticism, depicting a flower-crowned ephebe in a white tank top, while Jesse Mockrin’s painting of a sun-starved adolescent updates old-school technique for the “Twilight” age. One wonders what Sargent would have made of Betty Tompkins’s drawing of a woman whose lips, as dainty as Madame X’s, undertake a sex act that no Edwardian would admit to performing.

Through July 26.
 
 

Joy Garnett, “Piss & Vinegar (art and ferment)” installation, based on her grandparents’ beekeeping, along with her own home fermenting (photo by Allison Meier for Hyperallergic: Artists Probe Urban Agriculture)

 
FOODshed: Agriculture and Art in Action

curated by Amy Lipton at Smack Mellon

Through Sunday, July 27.

 

 

Edham the Orientalist (from the series “Tracing the Covers of Nonexistent Books”), 2013. Oil on birch panel. 16 x 12 inches. Based on the cover of Sources of Islamic history and other texts, by Ismail Ahmed Edham. Banned book (ca.1935) re-issued in 2009.

 

The Wayland Rudd Collection

organized by Yevgeniy Fiks

First Floor Gallery, Harare, Zimbabwe

Due to tremendous interest and positive feedback, the Wayland Rudd Collection exhibition is extended to August 7, 2014.

Press: "Exhibition on racism at First Floor Gallery," The Herald, June 24, 2014

 "The Wayland Rudd Collection," Art in Review, Holland Cotter in The New York Times, Feb 6, 2014

 

Book Cover illustration: Joy Garnett, Foo Fighters (detail) 2010. o/c 54x60 inches.

 

Walter Benjamin and the Media, by Jaeho Kang

published by Polity

 

Just dropped July 21, 2014.

Now available from Polity, Amazon...

 

Joy Garnett: Skiff (2013) oil on canvas, 12x16 inches

 

UPCOMING SOLO Exhibition:

Joy Garnett: Being There

Platform Gallery

Seattle, WA

October–November, 2014

Media images of global events often give us the illusion of ‘being there’. Painting sidesteps the journalistic urge as it walks the line between metaphysical engagement and narrative story-telling to explore other possibilities. The seven works in ‘Being There’ merge fact with fantasy as they draw upon found news images for subject matter. By absorbing media images and ‘re-making them’, they exploit our desire to witness events we can’t experience first-hand. Purposefully ambiguous, the paintings in ‘Being There’ stir unexpected associations, partial recognitions, unlikely comparisons, and far-flung projections. There is no “correct” way to read them since they reflect the varied viewpoints of viewers themselves.

 +++

Sargent's Daughters: An exhibition of women artists exploring the legacy of John Singer Sargent

Rebecca Campbell: Call her green and the winters cannot fade her,

2012 oil on canvas 36x36 inches

 

Sargent's Daughters

June 25 – July 26, 2014

OPENS WEDNESDAY, JUNE 25th | 6-8

179 East Broadway - map/directions

An exhibition of women artists exploring the legacy of John Singer Sargent.

L.C. Armstrong
Sarah Awad
Whitney Bedford
Ellen Brooks
Rebecca Campbell 
Jordan Casteel
Holly Coulis
Zoe Crosher
Jennifer Dalton
Inka Essenhigh
Katie Fischer
Natalie Frank
Joy Garnett
Orly Genger
Elizabeth Glaessner
Isca Greenfield-Sanders
Jenna Gribbon
Nora Griffin
Jeila Gueramian
Tamara Gonzales
Ellen Harvey
Brad Jones
Field Kallop
Jemima Kirke
Marcia Kure
Saira McLaren
Jesse Mockrin
Kristine Moran
Caris Reid
Jackie Saccoccio
Lola Schnabel
Sandi Slone
Jessica Stoller
Emily Sudd
Betty Tompkins​
Michelle Vaughan
Emily Weiner
Jessica Williams
Robin Williams
Amy Wilson
Letha Wilson

...

The Wayland Rudd Collection travels to Zimbabwe

 

The Wayland Rudd Collection

@

First Floor Gallery Harare, Zimbabwe

Opens June 20, 2014

First Floor Gallery Harare is very pleased to present The Wayland Rudd Collection, a collaborative project organized byYevgeniy Fiks that focuses on the representation of Africans and African-Americans in Soviet visual culture. A point of departure for this project is Fiks’ collection of over 200 Soviet images (paintings, movie stills, posters, graphics, etc.) of Africans and African-Americans spanning from the 1920s to the 1980s. Fiks invited contemporary artists and academics to select one or more images from this collection and to respond to it, either via artwork or other forms. Some of the participants chose to react to Fiks’ invitation with artworks tha t were already premade, but which reflect on the issues that are raised in Fiks’ original call for participation.

Wayland Rudd was an American actor who began performing in the Hedgerow Theater in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania under the directorship of Jasper Deeter. Rudd first received critical acclaim for his performance in Eugene O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones.” Frustrated over racism in the entertainment industry, Rudd moved to the Soviet Union in 1932 where he began a successful career in Soviet Theater and Film including work with the famed Russian Director Vsevolod Meyerhold. He later received a degree from the Theatrical Art Institute in Moscow and worked at the Stanislavsky Opera and Drama Theater. Rudd died in Moscow in 1952.

During Wayland Rudd’s twenty year-long career in the Soviet Union, he appeared in numerous films, theatrical performances, and plays. He was also used as a model for paintings, drawings, and propaganda posters and, in many respects, defined the image of the “Negro” for generations of Soviet people. Although only a small section of the assembled images in The Wayland Rudd Collection are of Wayland Rudd, the project is given his name to commemorate this American-Soviet actor’s personal story as a case in point of the complex intersection of 20th century American-Soviet narrative.

The historical Soviet images present a very complex and often contradictory mapping of the intersection of race and Communism in the Soviet context. They present this issue as unresolved, revealing the Soviet legacy on race as a mix bag of internationalism, solidarity, humanism, Communist ideals as well as exoticization, otherness, racist stereotyping, and hypocrisy.

Artists in the exhibition: Ivan Brazhkin, Michael Paul Britto, Suzanne Broughel, Maria Buyondo, Zachary Fabri, Joy Garnett, Alexey Katalkin, Kara Lynch, Nikolay Oleynikov and Arkadiy Kots Band, Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya (Gluklya), Jenny Polak, Dread Scott, and Haim Sokol

In conjunction with the exhibit, we are also very pleased to present an artist talk and panel discussion:
Saturday, 21 June 2014. 3.00 - 5.00 pm

This exhibition is travelling from New York where is showed at the Winkleman Gallery in January 2014. Also, a book will be produced as the result of this project.
http://www.winkleman.com/exhibitions/1489

Yevgeniy Fiks thanks Daria Atlas for her help with research on this project.

Yevgeniy Fiks was born in Moscow in 1972 and has been living and working in New York since 1994. Fiks has produced many projects on the subject of the Post-Soviet dialog in the West, among them: “Ayn Rand in Illustration,” a series of drawing pairing descriptive text from Atlas Shrugged with uncannily complimentary Soviet Socialist Realism classic artworks; “Lenin for Your Library?” in which he mailed V.I. Lenin’s text “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism” to one hundred global corporations as a donation for their corporate libraries; “Communist Party USA,” a series of portraits of current members of Communist Party USA, painted from life in the Party’s national headquarters in New York City; and “Communist Guide to New York City,” a series of photographs of buildings and public places in New York City that are connected to the history of the American Communist movement. Fiks’ work has been shown internationally. This includes exhibitions in the United States at Winkleman and Postmasters galleries (both in New York) Mass MoCA, and the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art; the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and Marat Guelman Gallery in Moscow; Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City, and the Museu Colecção Berardo in Lisbon. His work has been included in the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2011, 2009, 2007 and 2005), Biennale of Sydney (2008) and Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (2007).

Collaborators in other installments of this project include Dr. Kate A. Baldwin, Dr. Allison Blakely, Dr. Joy Gleason Carew, Alvyn Haywood, Dr. Matthew Jesse Jackson, Dr. Meredith Roman, Dr. Romy Taylor, and Dr. Jacob Zumoff.