Lesbian Legacies #2:
Archive Affections
Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Millie Wilson

Archives are not neutral institutions. They determine what is preserved and how it is interpreted, and what is discarded as worthless. In this sense, they are tools of power and control. Artists take these fundamental insights as the starting point of their artistic-political practice. Embedded within a broad field of cultural critique, in which the archive itself becomes a central stage, they attempt to reclaim repressed history—working both with and against the archive. Above all cultural scholars working from queer and BPOC perspectives not only challenge the interpretive authority of hegemonial historiography. They also emphasize the importance of “counter-archives” as repositories of affect and emotion, as theorized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick or Ann Cvetkovich, insisting on their ruptures, gaps, and damages—not to be ignored but instead valued as vital sources of intergenerational solidarity (Heather Love)—or on the utopian potential of ephemerality, which resists established practices of archiving (José Esteban Muñoz). In this context, practices of repair also emerge, such as Saidiya Hartman’s
“critical fabulation”, a politically poetic method oscillating between documentary evidence and speculative imagination, devised against the silence of normative archives.

Tiona Nekkia McClodden: Sleight of Figure [for Gladys]

It does so not by representing what is the case […], but by presenting the falsification of this ‘true’ order as a pathway toward its correction.
(Tavia Nyong’o)

The spectrum of meaning in the word “Sleight” shifts between skill and ambiguation, a play on both the handling of the figure and on the figure’s own qualities. The figure in question is Gladys Bentley (1907–1960), a composer, musician, and performer of the Harlem Renaissance, who identified as a “Black lesbian masculine woman” and openly addressed her queer desire in her songs. Bentley’s career and identity were destroy
ed by the homophobic repressions of the McCarthy era: she was forced to wear women’s clothing again and to publicly declare herself a “real woman” who had overcome her “inclination toward women”.

McClodden focuses on a historical figure whose material legacy is almost entirely lost. Only a handful of photographs exist, virtually no written testimonies in her own words, and even the house where she was born has disappeared. The few existing vinyl recordings of Bentley can scarcely be played today due to the fragility of the medium. McClodden does not attempt to fill the gaps and silences, nor does she seek to deny ab
sence. Her project insists, rather, on the blurriness and ambiguity that are essential to Bentley’s legacy. Her strategic ambivalence draws on Tavia Nyong’o’s concept of “Afro-Fabulation”, which situates Black queerness at the center through a critical distancing from dominant discourses. Nyong’o advocates a resistant fictionalizing that produces no new representations, but instead resists legibility, availability, and fixed categorization—thus opening fleeting moments of presence that simultaneously slip away.

The Bentley oeuvre spans photography, film, painting, and music. At the center is one of the rare photographs of Bentley, dating from the 1920s, signed by her own hand, and now belonging to McClodden’s private collection. Another component is a series of leather paintings incorporating archival fragments. Leather is a material McClodden frequently works with; it references marginalized subcultures of Black and queer communities, cites codes of queer cruising, ballroom culture, and BDSM practices, and symbolizes intimacy and self-empowerment. At the same time, leather enables a physical, tactile remembering that both reveals and withholds Bentley’s story—just as Bentley’s biography oscillates
between visibility and radical unreadability.

Engaging with Bentley’s lost legacy—erased through neglect and destruction—is part of a “Black queer genealogy”. McClodden conceives this not as an individual artwork, but as an interdisciplinary, intergenerational, collective project. At her invitation, the poet, educator, and activist Cheryl Clarke, drawing from surviving records of Bentley, dedicated the poem “Gladys Bentley’s Mannishly Modernist”, which was edited by the
artist and author Rhea Dillon.

Other elements of the project, not included in this exhibition, consist of two films: “VIII. Eminent Domain”, which documents the Philadelphia neighborhood where Bentley was born, and “VII. Looking North”, which presents historical maps of North Philadelphia around 1900. Additionally, the composer and pianist Courtney Bryan created a sound im provisation inspired by Bentley’s music.

Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams

“Make your own museum. Confront as you slice your way through while taking up space with your pathologization as deviant, as porn trope, as a figure somehow always already clinically depressed, if we take the hollow of absence (of affect, energy, capacity for movement) as not, or not only, metaphor.”
(Jill H. Casid)

The works by Millie Wilson presented here stem from the early stages of her “Museum of Lesbian Dreams”, a “meta-project” inspired by Institutional Critique, through which she has spent more than 30 years challenging Classical Modernism with queer perspectives. Wilson deliberately appropriates the presentation strategies of the museum in order to parody—and thereby deconstruct—its institutional authority. She employs classical museological elements such as display cases, inventory tags, collector’s cards, and archival materials, which evoke standards of authenticity, seriousness, and scholarly objectivity.

“The Language of Dreams” (1991) and “Errors of Nature” (1992) address the pathologization of queer desire in psychoanalysis and sexual science “before Stonewall”—that is, prior to the queer liberation movements of the 1970s. In the artist’s book “Errors of Nature,” Millie Wilson compiles a dictionary of the pathologization of female queerness. It consists of verbatim citations from (pseudo-)scientific publications of the early postwar years. These range from common stereotypes such as the “recruit young girls”, to classic attributions—like enthusiasm for sports, tailored suits, and cigars—to what were, for lesbians themselves, hardly surprising observations—that lesbians „get what they want in three instances out of four“ and “express no guilt”—to strangely poetic scenes in which they “arrive after dark in closed gondolas”.

With “The Language of Dreams” Wilson takes up—or rather skewers—a dream described by Frank S. Caprio in his 1954 study of female homosexuality: “Dream: ‘Esther needed a ruler (penis). I said I have one right in my desk drawer (panties) and gave it to her with a feeling of satisfaction (insertion followed by orgasm).’“ Wilson objectifies the scene literally in her installation: a pink, briefs-shaped drawer holding a ruler. With sharp humor, Wilson counters the grand doctrine in Caprio’s interpretation of the dream of the “missing penis”, which became a central tenet of female sexual development in Freudian psychoanalysis.

In “Twisted Love” (1990), Wilson explores lesbian pulp fiction. These cheap paper backs, hugely popular in the postwar era, were written by men for a male readership—but were then subversively appropriated by queer women for their own desires. In the 1990s, when newly emerging queer historiography sought primarily positive figures of identification, Wilson’s interest in ““filth and trash was as provocative as it was avant-garde.

Nightmare 4.0

All the works presented here engage with postwar America, a time marked by economic growth, unprecedented consumer opportunities, and a strong progress optimism—yet also by the massive repression of McCarthyism and brutal racism against Black people. McClodden places Gladys Bentley at the center of a “Black queer genealogy,” a figure whose life was cut short by systematic state, media, and social repression,
and whose legacy was suppressed, distorted, or erased. In Wilson’s works, the motifs, colors, and designs of so-called “Mid-Century Modern” aesthetics—with their lightness, clear lines, and promises of comfort and mobility—stand in stark contrast to the violent paranoia that regarded queer sexualities and gender identities as threats to the white, middle-class order of American postwar society. The “American Dream” of the U.S. suburbs was a nightmare for queers and Black people—and not only for them, a nightmare that since January 20, 2025, has been
racing into our present with uncanny speed. In Germany, too, forces are gathering that want to force women back into the kitchen, queers back into the closet, trans* and non-binary people back into their assigned gender, and Black, PoC, and migrant communities out of the country.
It seems we may be heading into difficult times. And these are times when our archives can become a precious resource. They preserve not only documents of repression and persecution but also bear witness to practices of resilience and resistance. They testify to how people, even under the harshest conditions, asserted themselves and wrested dignity—and sometimes even fleeting moments of joy—from a hostile environment.

Birgit Bosold

Tiona Nekkia McClodden (*1981) lives and works in Philadelphia. Her major exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial, New York (2019, Bucksbaum Award), Kunsthalle Basel (2023), The Shed, New York (2022), MoMA New York (2022–23), and White Cube London (2024). McClodden has received, among others, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pew Fellowship, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. In October, her works will be on view in Paris as part of the group exhibition “ECHO DELAY REVERB – American Art, Francophone Thought” at the Palais de Tokyo (October 22, 2025 – February 15, 2026).

Millie Wilson (*1948) was a professor at the California Institute of the Arts from 1985 to 2014. Her major exhibitions include presentations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Hammer Museum, and SITE Santa Fe. Wilson has received, among others, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, and the City of Los Angeles Artist Grant.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/2025_ME_LESB2_01-scaled.jpg

Time goes as slowly as technology allows. You can stare at an image or an object for as long as you want to while sitting in your art studio. In a cable news studio, though, every second is supposed to count. Yet, these days, fewer and fewer people are concerned with facts; feelings and opinions are of much greater interest. Most news anchors simply yell at you through the screen, and half the people you went to college with probably have a podcast. As James Brown once sang, “Only in America!”

But wait! The cost of living is rapidly rising throughout most modern nations, there are dictators (or wannabe dictators) sprouting up all over the globe, xenophobia is running rampant, very little is being done about large-scale mass murder and exploitation, and as a result, fears about major global warfare are being escalated. How did we end up here?

If you were to go back in time, at least in your mind, you could likely suspend memories and regain self-consciousness. You could probably even access control, perhaps like never before. It has struck me lately how much power is conflated with control. Being in control isn’t necessarily about dominance; it’s more about confidence, security, and stability.

Wisdom comes from patience, patience comes from hardship, hardship comes from experience, and experience must be truly accessed and absorbed in order to be understood and communicated. Otherwise, there is no awareness, there is no compassion, there is no empathy.

Susanna Kim Koetter has an immense amount of patience, awareness, compassion, and empathy. It comes through in her art, in her writing, in her daily interactions, and in her teaching practice. The rawness, the realness, the boldness, and the beauty of Susanna’s work and her words so profoundly encapsulate and illustrate the perplexing predicaments some of the current parasitic paradigms in today’s society present.

Susanna uses the iconography and symbolism of flags and signage to make sharp commentary on the levels of subordination and subliminal messaging in everyday life. By utilizing mediums and techniques like ceramics and printmaking, she can connect to the domestic, to the blue-collar worker, to the middle-class individual in ways that are often missing or ignored in contemporary art. The references made throughout her work oscillate between the completely recognizable to the more enigmatic, with both alluring and enchanting aesthetic decisions at odds with the occasional contentious material.

A few weeks ago, Susanna e-mailed me this poem by Kim Sowol (1902-1934), a famous Korean language poet, who became widely known and highly regarded for his “folk-song” style and contributions to early modern poetry, and who has been influential to both her and her work:

Steel bridge, as I look back it’s
over there I rushed across in confusion
steady my breath, now my feet planted
on some other country’s land.

The title of the poem is Some Other Country’s Land. Susanna told me she wondered whether he was talking about returning to Japan (where he studied for some time) or if he was talking about returning to his own country, which was under Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945. In 1945, World War II had ended, and the division of Korea was demarcated. Three years later, the Korean Peninsula was officially severed through the establishment of the First Republic of Korea in the South and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the North. Four months prior and about 5,000 miles away, the State of Israel was established, creating a well-funded safe haven for a people that have long been displaced and abused, only to create nearly eight decades of displacement and abuse of another group of people. The fact that one genocide has led to another is so beyond horrific on so many levels. For Susanna, a Korean American, whose family has shared their own passed-down stories of oppression and suffering, these connections are particularly potent and pertinent.

She told me she wanted this to be the title of her solo show, as well. I loved the poem, and I loved the idea. I have been a poet for as long as I can remember. I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, the Steel Town, the City of Bridges. I have spent the past twelve-plus years in Los Angeles, a city that previously belonged to land that was owned by Mexico, and before that Spain, and before that the Tongva, the Tataviam, the Serrano, the Kizh, and the Chumash Peoples.

I acknowledge that as an American, I am intrinsically tied to imperialism – my feet are planted on some other country’s land; in fact, they’re planted on many other countries’ lands. Until we can all finally acknowledge and accept that every nation is stolen land that, moving forward, should be preserved and shared with all in want and need of land and love, life will unfortunately continue to be filled with heartbreak and bloodshed. And no feelings or opinions can or will change that.

– Keith J. Varadi, September 2025

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/SKK-85-scaled.jpg

…it could be a long time ago or rather recently when I heard them say I am homeless. 

I remember being young and bored in the apartment I grew up in. Perhaps the first home? There was nothing to do after school, and I spent endless hours watching and tracing the movement of snails climbing up and down the plants in the neighborhood garden. Those tiny critters carry their homes with them everywhere. The shell, being part of a snail’s body, grows bigger as the snail ages. I think it’s quite wonderful to have a home always nearby that also expands in a spiral over time. It’s like having a pair of shoes that always fits. Where are the snails going? Maybe having a home makes one want to stay restless, trailing behind. Most land snails live around moist habitats, which allow them to easily replenish the water lost through evaporation and dragging their slimy mucus around. Sometimes when the above-ground gets hot and dry, they burrow their way through black molds, wet logs and damp rocks, into the underground. I wonder what it’s like to constantly move based on survival instinct with the one and only home one would ever know. If I were a snail escaping from the sun, I think I would bring a postcard with a picture of the desert on it, as a reminder of my destiny.

How do snails navigate sand dunes in the desert? What if one goes the wrong direction towards the murderous heat? Maybe the snails are homing. They tirelessly maneuver through the X-Y-Z axes via all kinds of terrain while drying themselves up. The end goal must be to permanently park their homes somewhere, right? The snails do not belong in the desert. Here is the resting place of Ramses and the Sphinx whose hand holds the desert down. Could it ever be that, if the Sphinx lifts an arm up in the sky, the sand held in his palm would flow down like a glistening waterfall, from which colonies of ants and snails fall out and float in the air, like confetti and garlands at a Homecoming? I wonder how the snails experience time, and what would be their standard unit of increment and measure. The Egyptians made beautiful sundials, shadow clocks and water clocks to read the passing of what we now call “hours”, but they never bothered to index minutes or seconds. Every new month is marked by the disappearance of the last waning moon. I wonder if the Sphinx feels lonely at home in the desert, without a companion reporting on what time it is, on whether or not it’s time to take a break from the world. Could the Sphinx just hop on a getaway train and take off, leaving all his sparkles behind?

It feels like I’m writing closer and closer towards a mirage, but now I’m remembering something. No one called me homeless. It was you, curled up in my arms, asking me if I believed I had a home. Did I tell you that I didn’t? I wish I had said something else. When I’m next to you I feel like nothing more than a negative casting shadows away from your direction. I turn into a sundial. I fall apart into grains of sand. I hold no resolution. I no longer keep time. I couldn’t tell you any stories because, I was not here within myself, I was with you. 

I wish I showed you my shell and told you that, in fact, I do have a nice home. I wish I said that it could have been that morning when I would have told you that without realizing it, perhaps, I loved you. I might have also told you that once that morning had passed, it would have been too late for me to tell you this: that I loved you, and forever. I wish I had joked and told you David’s limerick: “if Ida knowd I coulda rode I woulda went but if ida seedja as I driv by Ida flung out my arm and wave at cha”. I wish I read you Pessoa: “If, after I die, they should want to write my biography, There’s nothing simpler. I’ve just two dates – of my birth, and of my death. In between the one thing and the other, all the days are mine”. I wish I told you that I was homeless, but I have an empty shell, and that we could burrow ourselves into a hole somewhere really beautiful, but I didn’t. I was holding you tight. I was twirling your hair into a spiral.

I want to hold you in my arms again. Would you tell me something this time? Tell me anything? Or please let me read the lines in your palm, against every grain of sand in this desert.

Benny’s Video

 

David Nelson (1960-2013) was an interdisciplinary artist working across photography, drawing, sculpture, and painting. Rigorous and precise, Nelson engaged process, time, chance and a finely tuned attention to the natural world. Nelson’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions at Petersburg Gallery, Debs & Co, and Barbara Gladstone in NYC, at Tracy Williams in Paris, as well as many group exhibitions, which include Artists Space, The Drawing Center, Boston Center for the Arts, and the Academy of Arts and Letters. A posthumous survey exhibition at 80WSE Gallery was curated by Jonathan Berger and Nancy Brooks Brody in 2015, with an accompanying catalogue. Originally from California, Nelson moved to NYC and began making art in the

mid 1970’s. By the 1980’s he had a studio on East 14th street and became friends with the artists Robert Bordo, Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Tony Feher, Zoe Leonard, Angela Muriel, Nicolas Rule, Rafael Sanchez, and Carrie Yamaoka. This peer group’s formative years coincided with the onset of the AIDS crisis, which deepened their camaraderie, with many of them becoming involved with ACT UP (The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) during the 1980s and 1990s. In 1985 Nelson met the artist David Knudsvig, who remained his life partner up until Knudsvig’s death from AIDS in 1993.

 

Micah Schippa-Wildfong is a Chicago based interdisciplinary artist who has recently presented performances and exhibitions with Triangolo, Pech, The Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, Mickey, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Their work eagerly awaits the total emancipation of the human. 

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/1-min-scaled.jpg

Every person has to have a code. It is what allows people to unlock communication and connect with one another. We create our nests, our bubbles, our safe spaces. But nothing is actually safe, is it?

The world is on fire. Do you feel inflamed, too? I sure as shit do.

History is lived by all people. It’s written by those with voices. It’s edited and revised by those with power.

We live and we die and give in to time. At night, we convince ourselves that when we awake all will be fine. But borders are closing as quickly as our neighbors’ minds.

– Keith J. Varadi, July 2025

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/PAV_1.jpg

Beiqiu Museum of Contemporary Art is honored to present Ding Liren: Drifting Encounters, opening in August 2025. The exhibition brings together over 100 works by artist Ding Liren (b. 1930), spanning more than six decades—from as early as the 1960s to his latest pieces from this year. Rich in media and forms, the show centers on painting and sculpture, and also includes selections from Ding’s personal collection. Alongside Ding’s work, the exhibition features newly commissioned works by seven emerging artists—each born in the 1980s or 1990s—created over the past year. These younger voices participate as equals, forming an inter-generational dialogue with Ding Liren in Beiqiu’s exhibition space with special scenography. The result is a shared artistic moment: a true “drifting encounter.”

Ding Liren is the point of departure—but how could an “encounter” occur with only one player? A single clap makes no sound; a solo rendezvous breeds only solitude. As such, Drifting Encounters is not a solo show in the conventional sense. It is an ensemble production. These new participants engage, intervene, contaminate, provoke. Together, they enact a dynamic interplay of recognition and departure—a scene that begins, but never quite ends.

Consider the younger artists who’ve come to “encounter” Ding: Ge Yulu, ever the outlier, refrains from creating new work himself, instead curating a mini-exhibition of artist Zhan Qi—a “show within a show”—as a gesture of introduction and encounter. Hu Yinping revisits her ongoing series “What did the masters come to the east for?”, producing a new episode of Xiaofang in the visual style of Ding’s early works, paying tribute to his deep affinity with grassroots culture. Li Xindi devises a set of rules for an interactive installation that redefines “encounter” as the evolving relationship between viewer and exhibition—a script written through movement. Liu Dongxu reimagines household items into sculptures that echo both classical and modernist vocabularies, staging a formal encounter across time. Su Hua paints scenes teeming with unruly vitality—markets, rivers, martial worlds—unfolding with ceaseless energy. Wu Shangcong repurposes discarded materials into narratives that bridge sculpture and painting, dissolving boundaries in a manner deeply resonant with Ding’s spirit.

Ding Liren, born in 1930 in Taizhou, Zhejiang Province, is a professor at the College of Design and Art, Shanghai University of Technology, and a guest professor at Guangdong University of Technology. Although Ding never received formal academic training in fine arts, he developed an early and distinct aesthetic approach that deliberately avoids adherence to any single artistic school. Instead, he draws inspiration equally from diverse painting traditions and folk art forms.

Tiange Yang is a Beijing-based curator and art historian. He currently holds the position of curator-at-large at the Beiqiu Museum of Contemporary Art, Nanjing, and is enrolled in a Ph.D. in art history at Peking University. Yang is the inaugural recipient of the Mo Yuan: Art History Research and Writing Grant in the field of contemporary Chinese art writing from the New Century Art Foundation. His research explores issues of the body and the construction of identity, and nationalist formations in twentieth-century China and the contemporary world.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/截屏2025-08-07-15.58.54.png

LA ZAMBUDILLA at SAFA

Twelve sun loungers are split in two in 50:50. Lena Marie Emrich’s sculptural intervention traces rupture and repetition, leisure and loss. The form holds, as idleness mutates and function slips. The body, quietly omitted. In collaboration with Eivissa-based filmmaker, producer, and SAFA founder Iva Fischer Cvjetković, Emrich traced the afterlife of deserted tourist furniture. Navigating through economic decline amid the discarded infrastructure of seasonal leisure. Inside the former water tank of SAFA, Emrich presents 50:50, a new sculptural work composed of twelve discarded sun loungers. Each lounger has been cut precisely in half and arranged with unhurried precision. – What remains when leisure ends?

LA ZAMBUDILLA unfolds in quiet tension — part shade, part threat. Since 2022, Eivissa has banned colorful parasols from its beaches — a conservation measure to protect native bird species disturbed by vivid designs. The unintended result: thousands of discarded umbrellas now considered waste on an island with limited recycling infrastructure. In collaboration with Eivissa-based filmmaker, producer, and SAFA founder IVA FISCHER CVJETKOVIC, Emrich traced the afterlife of these objects. At the core of their research are interviews with beach vendors, family-run businesses, and individuals navigating economic decline amid the discarded infrastructure of seasonal leisure. A number of outlawed umbrellas were sourced from storage facilities near one of the island’s iconic beaches. These found materials were transformed into new iterations of LA ZAMBUDILLA — weathered, melancholic umbrellas intersected by steel-like extensions. In this context, the parasol becomes a soft weapon: it evokes the strange territoriality of tourism, where temporary visitors lay claim to space. At the same time, the series reflects on the slow violence of the tourist economy — its impact on ecosystems, aesthetics, and local structures.

LENA MARIE EMRICH is a sculptor working between Belgium and Germany. Her practice moves fluidly between conceptual research and material precision, often merging sculptural form with fragmentary poetics. Emrich investigates the social and aesthetic roles of rigid objects — upgrading them through minimal, yet pointed transformations. Collaboration plays a central role in her process, as does an ongoing interest in systems of value, protection, and presence. Her work has been shown at Import Export Gallery, Warsaw (2025), Office Impart, Berlin (2024), DS Gallery, Paris (2024), Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2019), Kunstverein Göttingen (2020), Kunstraum LLC, New York (2018), and the Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2021), among others. In 2020, she received the Berlin Masters Award and in 2021/2022 the Art Prize of Kunstverein Hannover. In 2023, she was awarded the Neustart Kultur grant by Stiftung Kunstfonds to realize the project The Darkest Corners in collaboration with Marlene A. Schenk.

All rights reserved to Lena Marie Emrich & Iva Fischer Cvjetkovic.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/R0002077.jpg

NILE KOETTING

MOOD BOARD

June 7 – July 20

First impressions

Nile Koetting’s drawings are bathed in flamboyant hues, traversing non-places inhabited by solitary machines and screens untouched by human hands. With pastel chalk, he sketches an automated checkout at Zara, interactive kiosks in a New York train station, a still life in a Paris coworking space, a security robot from Berlin Brandenburg airport’s terminal.

At first glance, the radiant light seems to sublimate these spaces, symbols of mobility control and labor automation, softening the brutality of their operations. Dwelling on the smoothing and aestheticizing of reality as a form of distraction is a recurring logic in Koetting’s work. Aside from Mood Board, we can remember his performance and exhibition series Remain Calm1, in which he unfolds choreographies drawn from natural disaster preparedness protocols. These performances adopt the soothing, reassuring tone of emergency communication, the kind that urges calm in the face of impending catastrophe. We might also consider the way the artist conceives sculptures that borrow from UX design and muzak, techniques that subtly guide our attention and behavior, rendering mechanisms of extraction satisfying and playful.

This tension between surface seduction and underlying violence is present not only in the contrast between non-places and radiant flamboyance, but also in the very atmosphere of the Mood Board drawings. The hazy clouds through which the machines struggle to emerge evoke sunsets intensified by pollution, blood-red skies from wildfires, the yellow-grey envelope of smog, or the orange glow of sandstorms—at once seductive and invasive, carriers of latent threat. Beyond merely evoking these toxic phenomena, some drawings encapsulate them materially. The white chalk used for CO² study in mineralization: 𝐶𝑎𝐶𝑙2 (𝑎𝑞) + 𝐻2𝐶𝑂3 (𝑎𝑞) → 𝐶𝑎𝐶𝑂3 (𝑠) + 2 𝐻+ + 2 � �𝑙− (1), (2), still in an experimental phase, is developed from mineralized carbon dioxide by the research lab Pureosity Labs at Kyoto University, as part of their work on atmospheric purification technologies.

Mood Board is the artist’s second solo show at Parliament, and his very first drawing exhibition. During a conversation, when I asked what he was working on, he replied with a smile and a hint of irony at the cliché: impressionism.

Koetting’s impressionism isn’t just about plays of light or contemporary natural landscapes. For him, impressionism is a deeply current mode of expression, one he links to performativity in today’s economy of attention and imagery. It’s a form of communication based on immediate impact, bypassing and replacing reflection, lasting no more than three to seven seconds, according to first impressions’ experts. This phenomenon has been reified in the very design of digital platforms: impression has become a social currency to be managed and optimized, a powerful tool for personal, professional, and financial advancement. As echoed by the rounded corners of Koetting’s drawings reminiscent of the iPhone, by their frames inspired by Apple’s industrial design, or by his fictitious business cards: every image is an interface.

 

Nile Koetting (born in 1989 in Kamakura) is currently based between Paris and Tokyo. His recent solo exhibitions include Blossoms – Fulfilment, Warehouse TERRADA, Tokyo (2025, upcoming); Powerhouse, E-WERK Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau (2025, upcoming); Blossoms CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, Lisbon (2024); Optimization of Yesterday (optional now +) – site-specific video installation, Shibuya Crossing, Tokyo (2024); Poly Harmony, Gallery Wedding, Berlin (2023); Unattended Access, Galerie Parliament, Paris (2023); Remain Calm – Air氣, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2021); Remain Calm I ﺮﻣﺎﻏ ءوﺪھ , Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah (2020); 保持冷静, Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum, Shanghai (2019); Remain Calm, Kunstverein Göttingen, Göttingen (2019); All in One, Unit 110, New York City (2019); Whistler, Yamamoto Gendai, Tokyo (2016); Hard in Organics, Yamamoto Gendai, Tokyo (2015); ESSE, Tokyo International Forum, Tokyo (2014). Nile Koetting has also participated in several group exhibitions, including at Kunsthalle Darmstadt (Darmstadt, upcoming); Palais de Tokyo (Paris); CAPC (Bordeaux); the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (Kanazawa); Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (tokyo), Fondation Hermès (Tokyo); Somerset House (London); Kunstverein Göttingen (Göttingen); Thailand Biennale (Korat); ZKM (Karlsruhe); and the Mori Art Museum (Tokyo). Nile Koetting’s works are represented in several private and public collections, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the Takahashi Collection (Tokyo).

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Mood-Board-1927-WEB.jpg

Ultimately, this is a love letter to a place, and I’m tracing its edge. These edges are spherical. Each model of a sphere contains the possibility of a universe. A sphere here can be both geometry (a solid round figure where every point on its surface is equidistant from its center) and sociology (an area of interest). The sphere here contains the California F-scale – a personality test on identifying and measuring traits associated with authoritarianism; it was created for the Studies in Prejudice Series, also known as the Berkeley studies. The F in F scale has come to stand for many things in developing this work; however, it was originally intended to stand for fascist. But how does one measure personality? As it turns out, with error. I’ve taken the Means and Discriminatory Powers list from this study on a series of walks along a certain number of readings. It has become a grid over the surface of which a subject moves. I read it with different lenses: as a poem, as a recipe for disaster, as a random list of words, as an omen.

***

I go on long walks, nearly every day. I often read until my eyes burn. Sometimes I wonder why. Perhaps it is because I have long thought that I would die young, and I’ve wanted to experience and consume as much as I could before that happened. I used to think that this was because of my myriad chronic health issues, but lately, I have been preoccupied with the idea that an early expiration might actually now be the result of some combination of authoritarianism, fascism, and a new plutocracy. Is this a legit omen or simply a placebo?

When I come to my gallery in Westlake, near MacArthur Park, and I walk past the imposing, inverted skeletal fencing structures that our corrupt government and police department have implemented to try to remove the unhoused, the addicts, and the vendors, I am overwhelmed by how truly dystopian our country has become. Remember when you used to tell your friends to move to Los Angeles because they might be able to afford to live here before local officials and foreign investors conspired to attempt to make most of the city become poor? Remember when this neighborhood was perhaps neglected, but wasn’t aggressively abused, and used to have Latin bangers blasting out of stereo systems and rainbow umbrellas locked each other like WWE wrestlers in the center of the ring, creating canopies to cover knock-off athletic apparel, Head & Shoulders, and any soda you could imagine? Remember when people tried to convince you to hope for change? In 2025, what are your hopes?

When I think about hope, I think about community. A place is a name; it is filled with faces; it can be balanced, it can be structured; it can be tight, or it can be expansive; it can be dense, or it can be empty; it can be crowded, or it can be barren. Does a place have a purpose, or do people give it one? The future seems as bleak as ever, or at least it does for at least 89-plus percent of the world. And although we could look to the generation before ours and the one before theirs to blame for that, the present is always a present, and I suppose it’s up to each specific individual to decide whether or not to be open to opening it.

When I think about Merideth, I think about hope. I think about love. I think about language. I think about process. I think about progress.

***

Ultimately though, this is a love letter to the sphere. All future thinking requires a grounded material reality. How things hang together is a form of philosophy. To produce objects is to channel how things are made, one’s relation to it, and how it is placed. We make up scales and hold them next to things. Measured here: electrical outlet, yard stick, A7, text and its relativity, one subject over or under another, and one object over or under another.

*P1 & P6: Merideth Hillbrand; P2 – P5: Keith J. Varadi

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/GD_5-22-2513409-1-scaled.jpg

Olivia Mole

Fighting Words

June 13–July 27, 2025

I had not been planning to write that Olivia Mole’s exhibition at Five Churches is about the police, the state, and therefore the police state. Or at least not in so many words. That I have to write it is something I regret; it would be so much nicer if these things didn’t exist. Let’s back up, then, and start over with an apparently more innocent claim. Olivia Mole’s exhibition is about the fact that we are at once bodies and minds—that we are subjects. (Of course, good art is not really “about” things, but for the sake of getting started let’s allow that fiction.) A subject is a subject for someone else, since a subject needs to be recognized. At the same time, being recognized as what you are is a problem for any subject, given that a subject also needs interiority. Interiority is the sense that who we are and what we want are at least partially withheld from the other’s knowledge. This makes it possible to plan, to deceive, to seduce. So, there is an antagonism built into the structure of subjectivity. The other has to know us, but not too well.

In the exhibition, a set of Mole’s charcoal drawings that hang on a black wall isolate a moment in the Warner Bros. short “Little Red Riding Rabbit,” from 1944. Bugs Bunny confronts the Big Bad Wolf, who is dressed as Grandma. (The real Grandma is “working swing shift at Lockheed” and thus doesn’t appear in the cartoon.) Or rather they confront each other, each screaming “hey you,” each increasingly incensed at having recognized the other. Sparks seem to fly where their fingers touch. Think of Adam’s finger reaching to God’s in the Sistine Chapel, the primal scene of sentience. Across the wall from the drawings is an empty triangular frame. This is a case meant for displaying a folded flag. Since the case is empty, it displays only black flocking. More obtrusively present than either of these elements are a set of three gray inflatable corner sofas that occupy the center of the room and which accordingly disrupt the sightline between the drawings and the flag case. On the floor there is also a light that slowly cycles through a few colors. The three inflatable forms are identical readymades rotated into different positions, producing the effect of oscillation between “the known constant and the experienced variable” that Robert Morris describes in his “Notes on Sculpture” (1966). The most anthropomorphic sofa is upright and leans against a wall.

The classic critique of Minimalism—Michael Fried’s, in his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood”—is that its objects are crypto-bodies. But bodies, we know, are also sometimes subjects. Mindedness is the fly in the ointment, not bodiliness per se. Mole’s sofas are versions of the Untitled (L Beams) that Morris constructed in 1965. A press release for an exhibition at Sprüth Magers, London, in 2013 rehearses a familiar script for Minimalism: Untitled (L Beams) “demands the viewer to set aside their preconceptions, memory and knowledge, and approach the sculpture from a level of basic perception in order to grasp the reality of the experience.” (1) It would indeed be remarkable if an artwork were to induce its viewers to set aside their preconceptions, memory and knowledge. This would amount to a radical undoing of personhood. We would then be subjectivized, literally, by the artwork rather than by other people and the whole of our preceding existence: a fantasy of art’s direct, godlike efficacy that doesn’t really withstand scrutiny, dear as it may be to writers of wall labels. One’s sense that art does and undoes something on a primordial level corresponds to a sense (which I share) that art can, under certain circumstances, matter profoundly; this is also, however, the ur-fantasy of the most questionable sort of aesthetic politics (or rather, the substitution of aesthetics for politics). And there is an authoritarian dimension to such politics insofar as an artwork’s “demand” is a demand.

Bracketing for the moment the colored lights, Fighting Words consists of three basic elements that stage a surprisingly complex scenario. Three terms are the minimum for a dialectic or a conspiracy; two people can have a relationship, but three is melodrama. The drawings illustrate recognition as a kind of outing that precipitates violent competition. Bugs and the Wolf are mirrors even as each tries to be the other’s bigger Other. What happens when this mirroring (mis)recognition spirals out of control? Well, eventually, you encounter an Other so big that any mutuality, any mirroring, ceases to be possible. You can call that biggest other God, or God’s placeholder, the State.

Which brings us back to the flag or rather its absence. The empty frame is not facialized. It doesn’t look back at us. It does, though, punctuate the wall, functioning both as figure (form against background) as well as figureless hole. In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe the face as a “white wall/black hole system”: “Signifiance [sic] is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges consciousness, passion, and redundancies.”(2) A face makes claims. Its “redundancies” are part of the general surplus of signifiers over communicational meaning that bludgeons people into accepting a given (social, political, aesthetic) order simply because it repeats itself. Deleuze and Guattari want to say that the face exerts despotic power as an “abstract machine.”

An empty black triangle makes no such claims, or more precisely, voids the claims of the flag that ought to be there. A flag is a face for a nation; not coincidentally, anarchists fly black flags. (The technical term for the trope of facializing an abstraction, such as national identity, is prosopopoeia.) But there is a minimal dialogue here nonetheless. The black flocking mirrors the black wall across the room, absorbing into itself the potentiality of all color, as in the colors of the switching lights. The sofas are gray, midway between black and white. The Morris L Beams are gray, too. The black triangle—so poor in form, so rich in art historical associations (Malevich, Blinky Palermo)—swallows the disaster of identity. The empty flag arguably signals a death of the subject in the super-subject: the State as endpoint of the logic of recognition.

If there is an antagonism built into subjectivity in general, there is also a more specific antagonism built into identities that the State ratifies. The State interpellates or “hails” us, as Louis Althusser puts it. But the State as such lacks a face; it issues a call to which no one can respond intersubjectively. Althusser names the call “ideology.” The police are a material apparatus of interpellation, meaning that the police are, in a strict and not inherently pejorative sense, something other than human—something other than subjects to whom we can relate as equals. Police, like flags, are a prosopopoeia. Althusser stresses the physicality of interpellation:

“I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’

Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else).” (3)

Note Althusser’s insistence on the “one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion,” a scenario that he curiously reiterates (redundantly) just a paragraph later:

“There are individuals walking along. Somewhere (usually behind them) the hail rings out: ‘Hey, you there!’ One individual (nine times out of ten it is the right one) turns round, believing/suspecting/knowing that it is for him, i.e. recognizing that ‘it really is he’ who is meant by the hailing.” (4)

The “really” in “it really is he” is a lure. A subject becomes the “right” subject (becomes a subject at all) by responding to the hail, not thanks to any preexisting true identity. Subjecthood is turtles (misrecognition) all the way down. But why does the hailing have to come from behind? Because interpellation is not intersubjectivity. Ideology does not speak to us face to face, person to person. Ideology creeps up on us and then, when we respond to its call, catches us in its grip. Whether there is anything necessarily cognitive about this process at all is worth asking. Althusser might as well be talking about any state-sanctioned abduction and thus about bodily rather than “merely” ideological violence. The word ideology seems to imply discursive, immaterial, somehow softer coercion—though part of the point of Althusser’s argument is to show that the “ideological state apparatus” and the “repressive state apparatus” operate in tandem. This is the way in which journalism, for instance, is usually an arm of the police. The only winning move is not to play.

Now, look at the Morris L Beams, or for that matter, at Mole’s sofas. An identical form rotates in space. Since three dimensions are involved here rather than only two, the “physical conversion” may not add up to exactly one-hundred-and-eighty-degrees. The sofas, though, are already caught between, and block, another specular relay, that between the flag case and the wall of drawings. It is not clear that the sofas orient themselves towards one side or another (or towards the room’s sole window). If we take seriously the notion that Minimalist objects are crypto-bodies, then we also have to say that these objects/bodies are caught on the threshold of subjectivity. These are bodies missing their appointment with mindedness. It’s furthermore tempting to say that their just being there, together, and not exactly responding to the call is already a form of resistance. A lot of politics or at least political theory over the past couple decades has jumped to that conclusion: assembly is its own end. This was the logic of occupying city squares and refusing to issue demands. But as Marina Vishmidt reminds us, the language of “bodies in space” valorizes a “pseudo-concreteness that often accompaniestheoretical projects intolerant of the (real) abstraction that organizes contemporary social life.” (5) That is, the rhetoric of bodiliness-as-plenitude-and-resistance pretends that bodies aren’t already saturated with the violence of the social order. Bodies are products rather than substrates. This is another reason why the Minimalist blank slate is a utopian fantasy. “Body” is a way not to say “person” or “subject”; the whole difficulty, though, is that people are both.

In his book Heretics of Dune, Frank Herbert casually introduces something called a chairdog. Chairdogs are large genetically engineered dogs that instinctively shape themselves into ergonomic chairs when sat upon. They also vibrate, like those massage chairs that are (or used to be) common at malls. They have no role in the novel’s plot; it seems that Herbert just came up with the idea and thought it was cool. Halfway between sentience and furniture, a chairdog is Michael Fried’s nightmare. The fact that you can sit on one of Mole’s sofas ought to give you pause.

– Daniel Spaulding

 

(1) https://spruethmagers.com/exhibitions/robert-morris-hanging-soft-and-standing-hard-london/.

(2) Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 167, emphasis in the original.

(3) Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 118, emphasis in the original.

(4) idem.

(5) Vishmidt, “Bodies in Space: On the Ends of Vulnerability,” Radical Philosophy 208 (Autumn 2020), 34.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Five-Churches_Olivia_Mole_06-10-25_2074-Edit_web-size-scaled.jpg https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/gek_since-1957_14_lr-scaled.jpg

From May 6, 2025, Struttura presents the duo-show by Alessandra Cecchini and Riccardo D’Avola-Corte, “Dato un muro,
che cosa succede dietro? ”(Granted there is a wall, whats going on behind it?)*.
The proposed intervention has as an essential reference M. Duchamp’s Étant donnés as well as some paintings, photographs
and therefore images in which from small details of reflective objects a part beyond the wall is revealed, opening the
surface to new spaces and possibilities.
The wall is conceived as an instrumental, functional element of an event and thus of a changing, dynamic and uncertain
present. Moving in space is thus like moving from outside to inside, from bottom to top (and vice versa), without ever
being able to be certain of where one is, of what one has seen.
Each element on view is thought as part of a storytelling that cannot be traced back to a single decoding but becomes a
hallucinatory experience of something that potentially does not belong to the physical, tangible world.
The constituent elements that enclose or open the space are not intended as surfaces, then, but as essential architectural
elements designed to contain, to enclose another portion of reality (or a contradiction of it), an interstice between
worlds. A space that claims to be in direct connection with the viewer, like a scenario composed of potential clues and
hypothetical traps.
There is no unambiguous explanation of what has been seen, what has really happened or the inevitable interferences of
imagination.
Viewing of the works is planned for an audience of two people at a time.
In order to better manage the visits, it will be necessary to make reservations by email, at the following email:

The duo-show is also accompanied by a critical text by Caterina Taurelli Salimbeni

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/1-5.jpg

Back in 2009 or 2010, when I was a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University, one of my best friends told me about this guy named LeRoy Stevens and this project he had recently completed, Favorite Recorded Scream. For the project, he visited every record store in Manhattan and asked employees for their favorite scream from recorded music; he then complied the selections – ranging from Black Flag to Björk, from Led Zeppelin to Linkin Park, and from Slayer to Suicide – in the order they were submitted and somehow morphed it into a musique concrète masterpiece. I was completely blown away; it was such an ambitious project without at all being selfish, and it’s like, when does that ever happen?

LeRoy has made a habit of working on these sorts of quirky, elaborate projects over the years, including: giving free, improvised tours around his hometown of Chicago in his Jeep Cherokee; an underground sculpture composed of 75 twenty-foot pieces of rebar buried beneath the ground in the Mojave Desert, which could be experienced through the use of a variable-pitch metal detector; or wearing a device for two years that he used to privately count murders he experienced through film, television, print, or the spoken word. Collectively, they trace the outline of an artist who functions on the periphery of typical art-world concerns – ultra-hip scenes, stacked CVs, bull and bear markets, traditional media, trendy blogs, etc. But with each individual project, you are more comprehensively able to access the mind of one of the most curious, earnest, humorous, and wondrous artists working today. His work often couples an overwhelmingly intuitive feel and experimental impulse with an extreme attention to detail, which is rather rare for someone who so genuinely appreciates fun and exudes so much positive energy.

He’s additionally been operating the deeply daring and invariably inspiring record label, Small World, ever since he first used the imprint to release his Favorite Recorded Scream. Since his initial release, he’s gone on to put out records by Thomas Bayrle & Bernhard Schreiner, Julia Scher, Barbara T. Smith, and Lisa Williamson. Much like with his other projects, it’s equally about the parts and the whole, the process and the product, and the community and the connections.

In the spring of 2018, LeRoy installed an arrangement of umbrellas, metal stands, microphones, speakers, computer, electronics, cardboard, lenses, mirror, photographs, magazines, concrete, plungers, paper masks, packing tape, and acrylic at Potts, a now-defunct gallery in Alhambra (a suburb of Los Angeles), that had an absolutely killer run of exhibitions and events for three years. He released an exquisite record and a book of scanned raw-dog drawings to accompany the show. It was a truly exceptional exhibition; in fact, it was one of the best things I’ve seen or experienced in Los Angeles since arriving to this city 12 years ago.

For this exhibition at Gene’s Dispensary, LeRoy is exhibiting one larger sculpture, featuring six neon light bulbs that will replace the central lighting of the gallery, as well as a selection of newer drawings. The drawings are executed in the evening after the day is done and everyone else in the home is resting or sleeping and LeRoy is left to himself, away from the comforts and tools of the studio. They are made with markers, pencils, pens, and paper – the same basic items provided to a child in art classes. The imagery is very dreamlike, very therapeutic, very cathartic; there are distinct visuals: cows, a camera, a piano, a ghost; there are distinct phrases: “comparative religion” and “overlapping gargoyles”; there are distinct references to pop culture: ESPN and That ‘70s Show. There is a psychoanalytic funhouse vibe to the whole affair that feels both particularly fitting for LeRoy and for this current moment in American history.

– Keith J. Varadi, April 2025

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/redit_1-scaled.jpg

Liliane Puthod’s sculptural practice moves between a range of production sites and workplaces, from the factory plant, mechanic’s garage, retail store, and artist’s studio. By engaging with specialists from various disciplines, her work reflects on labour, its effects on the body, and assumptions about value that connect or undermine the handmade versus the machine-made. In work wear blues, Puthod creates a ‘break room’ for objects belonging to different economies, including several borrowed and found components from tradespeople in the north and northwest sides of Chicago. Puthod’s instinctive and anecdotal ‘on the ground’ research within the fabric of the city has resulted in a group of works formed by on-site production and narratives of encounter. The large variety of vacant and in-use storefront displays and window signage throughout Chicago are reflected in Puthod’s series of suspended Flex-o-glaze panels. Their poetic slogans–AUTO, BODY, REPAIR–are drawn from the seemingly endless array of car garages local to Weatherproof, with phrases that simultaneously connect the human and machine. While looking for scrap car parts, Puthod met mechanic/gardener Frank Cortes at Oil Plus Repair, a family-owned garage located few minutes from the gallery. His emissions workshop is an oasis of fig trees, grape vine cuttings, and begonias thriving among exhausts, car lifts, and spare tyres. Following several friendly conversations, Cortes agreed to loan of one of his cherished plants to the exhibition with a list of care instructions. Puthod’s exploration of local trades provided another unexpected connection with family-run neon fabricators, Lightwriters Neon Inc.. Based in Chicago since 1977, Lightwriters founder Jacob Fishman has been making neon signs and graphics for businesses and artists for over fifty years. Puthod visited Fishman’s home workshop and the Ravenswood workshop of his daughter, current Lightwriters Director Zoelle Nagib, with a proposal to revive unused, stored, or spare neon parts. Lightwriters kindly loaned a set of components from an existing artwork made by Fishman, which are reconfigured into a new wall-based installation by Puthod.

For work wear blues, Puthod recovers a collection of typical French workers uniforms belonging to her father, complete with wear and tear from his manual labour as a gardener over many years. This process of re-use and reanimation is a clin d’oeil/wink to Puthod’s recent multi-country project, Beep Beep (2024), which involved the repair of her father’s 1960s Renault 4 (R4) car with the help of local mechanics in her hometown in south-eastern France. Puthod drove the restored ‘time machine’ cross-country to Ireland, accompanied by Irish musician and writer Ingrid Lyons. Beep Beep connected the cultural history of the R4 as the everyman’s “blue jeans” car, with its role as a service vehicle in mid-century Ireland. The careful patching and repair of the workers jackets during their lifetime of use reflects the consideration of materiality and hand processes shared by Puthod’s practice. The blue workwear is formed into a cluster of intertwined bodies, forming a single ‘working’ unit, now off-shift. Each item of clothing is pulled taut and folded in a state of collapsing or relaxing that is both melancholic and uplifting. The figures are adorned with pocket-sized bronze and aluminium sculptures, small personal possessions, and found ephemera gathered and made in Chicago, Ireland and France. The mesh of bodies, illuminated by Fishman’s series of neon hands, is representative of the skills and processes of fabricators and preparators,
acknowledging the importance of skilled labour in the making of commodities and their circulation. 

The perseverance of Chicago’s vernacular aesthetic diversity is manifested in the abundance of painted building facades, neon and light-box signage, and hand-written posters in grocery stores and lavanderias. Puthod’s work represents the conflict in the decline and celebration of graphic forms with her comical drawing process, which both enlivens and deconstructs the function of these increasingly scarce forms. Puthod’s work reflects on the day to day use and value of objects, materials and decoration. Her attitude towards commodity celebrates complexity and contradiction over that which has become the convention. Through this approach, Puthod considers what should be preserved or contained by emphasising discussions around the role of manual labour in maintaining an ecology and economy of repair, reuse, rest, and restoration.

Liliane Puthod was born in Annemasse, France; lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. Her recent projects and exhibitions include Beep Beep, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios off-site at Dublin Port (2024); We Can Can Can, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (2023); Lunch Break (permanent public sculpture) Skerries Art Trail (2023); Night Shift, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2022); Dissolving Histories: An Unreliable Presence, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (2020); Display, Link and Cure, The Complex, Dublin (2019), How Long After Best Before, Pallas Projects, Dublin (2019); Everything Must Go, PS2, Belfast (2019).
 
Michael Hill is Programme Curator at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin, Ireland, and one half of the curatorial team that represented Ireland at the 59th Venice Biennale 2022. He is an invited participant of the Curatorial Exchange at EXPO Chicago 2025.
 
This exhibition is part of a citywide series of exhibitions and public events that debut the work of artists Liliane Puthod, Áine Mac Giolla Bhríde and Amanda Rice to Chicago audiences, presented by Ireland’s Askeaton Contemporary Arts.  Developed by curators Michael Hill, Noelle Collins and Mark O’Gorman, alongside artist Devin T. Mays, the programme is supported by exhibition partners Weatherproof, Good Weather, 4th Ward Project Space, and by Culture Ireland, Consulate General of Ireland, EXPO Chicago, Independent Curators International, and The Complex, Dublin.

In linking artist-led activities between Ireland and the American Midwest, Askeaton Contemporary Arts acknowledge the openness and welcome for Irish artists and curators from a new generation of independent art spaces, each upholding a decades-long tradition in Chicago of ambitious ingenuity and egalitarian attitude to the shaping and sharing of culture.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/IMG_3657-scaled.jpg

I could tell you we begin with the viewer as detective. I could tell you that every work becomes a clue and every placement a message. I could tell you this turns the exhibition into a scene, not a scene to be lived in, but a scene to be solved, a scene littered with traces, hints, whispers arranged just so. I could tell you the viewer is meant to arrive late, flashlight in hand, ready to make sense, ready to make a story. I could tell you that this story bends towards closure, that it longs for resolution that the viewer, like in an escape room, is offered the illusion of discovery, a key here, a note there, a plot thickening, a plot diluting, a locked door, a ticking clock, a final sigh of relief. But I could also tell you that no one ever really leaves because the radiant exit signs don’t lead you anywhere, no alarms, no rotting bodies, only the scent of fashionable colognes. I could tell you that you may play the game, yes, you may follow the breadcrumbs, you may turn every object over, search every nook, but you cannot leave the room, leaving is not part of the rules. I could tell you that mystery doesn’t spoil itself, doesn’t unwrap for your convenience. I could tell you the viewer is a storyteller, shaped by the story as much as they shape it, and the detective is someone who judges the story’s ebbs and flows, yet follows its current with devotion. I could tell you that the tyranny of a single story flattens the room, that stories, especially ones that solve too easily, are the true culprits, that mystery, if it is to endure, must resist the straight line, it must scatter itself, it must play dead, it must lure you in and never once turn to face you. I could tell you that this is the answer to the riddle, the key you were looking for, but you’d discover that I’m still in this room with you, and the key was the lock the whole time; that we’ll begin picking this lock to no avail, again and again.

I could tell you about love again and again. I could tell you love is to try again what already failed, but it can only work because it failed. I could tell you about love as something that must single out, that must exclude, that scorches a world in order to sanctify a pair. I could tell you that love is the exaltation of absence, the reaching for something that slips the moment it’s grasped, that the other in love is always already a ghost, and so are you. I could tell you that you can’t even touch your own skin, not really, and this is why you’ll never fully love yourself. I could tell you that love is always two but never just two, that it’s always polygamous, that it subsists on promiscuity, that it leaks, that it swells and spills and refuses to settle, that it’s not unity but the tension between things, the ache of difference, the gaps in your teeth. I could tell you that love is repetition, not sameness, not echo, but the ceaseless insistence on beginning again, the unlearning, the asymmetry, the devotion to what escapes you. I could tell you that love is impossible and yet you persist, and it is precisely this persistence, not in spite of but because of the hate, the absence, the slippage, the ghosts, the futility, that love is what it is and always what it isn’t.

I could tell you that no one ever really speaks of love, when they speak of love, the same way they will not be speaking of “Love,” when they speak of “Love.” I could tell you what you do speak of; that you merely murmur around a safe consensus as if that were enough, but I’d be wrong. I could tell you that a work never speaks for itself, unless you pretend the artist isn’t still breathing beside it. I could tell you that all I can share is what he shares with me, and the less he says, the more there is to play with, the less there is to say. I could tell you that artists’ conceptions of their own work range from pretty close-and-shut cases, accompanied by heavy-duty files on intent, interests, and speculation, to free-for-alls that open cans of worms here, there, and everywhere on a whim while the artists remain silent. I could tell you about his work, about the show you’re witnessing. I could tell you how I’ve long wanted to write about this particular kind of poetics, the kind that doesn’t impose itself, but waits patiently, that trusts in the viewer’s drift and dispenses with their scholarship, while drawn to their naïve consciousness. I could tell you about the essential novelty of the poetic image, the kind Bachelard hones in on, the kind that is difficult to speak of, as it has no past, and for which there may be no general or coordinated approach to its singular philosophy. I could tell you that the poetic image moves in waves, never remaining in one place long enough for “place” to be more than a surface. I could tell you we emerge from language. I could tell you that insofar language constitutes reality, the manner in which we speak, the concepts we entrech ourselves in, the names that portion our perceptual and cognitive fodder, we emerge as poetic beings, reinscribing reality through poiesis. I could tell you that poetry’s consistency appears as a phenomenon of liberation, not only in its step beyond common language, sometimes beyond grammar and syntax, but even in its attempt to grasp glimmers beyond language altogether.

I could tell you about sculptural installations composed of everyday things, found materials, gestures calibrated to the quirks and peculiarities of a site. I could tell you about a lineage, if we still believed in those, one that would stretch sideways through the brother of Jacques Villon to the chambers of Broodthaers. I could tell you how a thing is different from an object. I could tell you how a thing is not dissimilar from its environment. I could tell you about the apparent simplicity of it all, how nothing is hidden, yet nothing is explained. I could tell you about the things you’re not seeing even though you’re seeing things without assistance. I could tell you about the movement of the sun and how it melts the space into its contents. I could tell you about the refusal of spectacle, the allergy to grand gestures and the suspicion of smooth conclusions. I could tell you about the little pops, the soft ruptures in the everyday, the clichés that aren’t really clichés, just worn-out truths that you can wear like a reversible jacket. I could tell you about the refusal of explaining oneself, about a work that doesn’t refuse as much as defers its own explanation, and in that delay, it becomes alive, that maybe this is what the work is doing at its core. I could tell you that if you suspend meaning long enough for it to breathe it might grow wings. I could tell you about your ears pricking when you hear your name shouted in a public square, you turning around with no one recognizable in sight, no one looking back, you thinking you’d heard your mother calling, but she’d already passed, perhaps your sister, but she’d moved to another continent, you turning once more to head in your initial direction as the astonishment and head rush waned, proceeding into oblivion, not hearing your name called a second time that day, walking around the corner, returning home, jarring the door open to find a surprise party. I could tell you that when I speak of objects and installations, I might as well be speaking of poems, that the boundaries between thing and word blur, and meaning oozes from all the pauses of the tongue and the gaps between the teeth. I could tell you the orthodontist wouldn’t address the gaps because they serve as necessary paths of flight. I could tell you that clarity might be the enemy of thought, and that thought, like love, needs room to morph.

I could tell you about three white cardboard boxes topped with silver spaghetti, which is not really spaghetti, but slices of a mirror and flickers of a movie. I could tell you about closed containers which are storage units, which are white cubes, which are black boxes, which are gilded cages, which are coffins, which are gifts, which are houses, which are doors, which are windows, which are bodies, which are gay, which are twitching, which are absent, which are hard drives, which deal in reverie, which are polished human skulls, which are spilling their contents, which are traces of movements, which are consequences of laws and economies, which sounds insipid, which are only visible with infrared sensors, which are heating units, which are born in Illinois, which are the remnants of empires, which are roses on a grave, which are a new variety, which were celebrated millennia ago, which are starter kits for enterprises, which will be sharply critiqued, which are socks disappearing in washing machines, which are socks hanging high up in trees, which are empty drawers, which are unimaginable, which can only be thought of, which are exact measurements beyond the scientific method, which are uncanny, which do not require for you to believe in them, which conjure romance, which are archaic manuals, which are high-visibility vests, which are checkout dividers, which invent space for possession, which are not quite things, which are rather relations, which hold a speculative charge, which invoke construction sites on paper, which are a breath of fresh air, which are stale bread dunked into milk, which makes your stomach turn, which are beds for the restless, which are building blocks of une petite pratique, which are an image, which are laconically captioned, which are like word collages, which are like poems, which feel like having a Coke with you, which are silver veins for the opiate-hungry, which desire a simple handshake, which are dogs on duty, which take on their position, which are ornaments, which are crimes, which you’ve read about in art catalogues, which are time capsules, which are a deception maneuver, which camouflage something inhuman, which is something hyper-human, which are cardboard boxes with silver ribbons on top.

I could tell you about all of this, but that would turn me into the kind of guide who knows the way, and I don‘t. I could tell you what he told me, but he’d mistaken as well. I could tell you that Kaiserwache used to be a cruising spot, that men loved and lusted after each other in this place. I could tell you that I’ve been wary when it comes to writing about intentional ambiguity, since I’ve failed time and time again at grasping the ungraspable. I could tell you about similar efforts crashing against trees when it comes to poetry. I could tell you all of this, but I won’t tell you anything of the sort because these words might take the exhibition for ransom, and I have my doubts about whether you can walk up to an artwork and ask: blink twice if you‘re here against your will.

-Ilja Zaharov

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/1-1.jpg

Galerie Noah Klink is pleased to present Toy, the first solo exhibition by Welsh artist Sebastian Jefford at the gallery, on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin.

Jefford’s multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, drawing, painting, writing and video, yet his open-ended approach often yields hybrid forms that elude categorisation. Working with recurring materials and repurposed everyday objects, his pieces frequently carry the uncanny familiarity of scaled-up miniatures or pseudo-functional props—objects that might belong to some alternate educational display or speculative world-building model.

For Toy, Jefford presents new and existing works including large-scale wall-based sculptures and a series of sequential drawings. Jefford prepares the molds for the wall-based sculptures by hand, later pouring polyurethane on them which he later peels off and hand-paints. The sculptural works occupy the space with a grubby, plasticised presence, combining studio-crafted elements with embedded found components, such as the roof structures that the sculptures are hung on. The accompanying drawings unfold across panels like silent comics or instructional diagrams, alluding to a kind of narrative or logic that never fully resolves. Humor and unease coexist in these works, which lean into slapstick, satire and pathos while probing the edges of contemporary subjectivity.

Rooted in a visual language that borrows from cartoons, caricature, educational diagrams and speculative design, Jefford’s practice opens up a world of ambivalent characters and half-familiar gestures. At once grotesque and gentle, comic and critical, the works in Toy channel the fragmentary psyche of a society caught between infantilisation, overstimulation and political inertia. In Jefford’s universe, imagination is not a form of escape but of entanglement—a way of making sense of the nonsense, of slipping between surfaces and re-emerging with something oddly tangible. Toy invites us into this generative ambiguity: a zone where materiality meets metaphor, and staring at the sun might begin with a grimace or a grin.

Accompanying the exhibition is a text by Sean Steadman.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Toy_InstallationView_1_low-2-scaled.jpg

Joséphine Dupuy-Chavanat: “ To title is to write a little!” said Alechinsky in 1911. Your first solo show was entitled Heureux qui comme Ulysse [Happy who like Ulysses], evoking the journey and the fragmentation of memory, while your second, Häutung [Molting], explored the idea of metamorphosis and the creative process. Recently, your much more conceptual exhibition I’m Herdsman of a Flock looked at the transformation, permeability and polysemy of familiar objects, particularly those from the marine and equestrian worlds.
What motivated the title of this new exhibition at Sainte Anne Gallery?

Alizée Gazeau: A Shadow’s Shadow is a quote from Hamlet. The exhibition is the first personal presentation of my paintings and sculptures in Paris after four years living in Berlin. I wanted to compose a series of paintings based on past and recent sensations, like the cast shadows of memory.
Shadows come with light. The shadow of a shadow is two lights on objects that project onto each other. I like the idea of repetition, of the same word, the same motif, like a rhythm, a poem, a dance. A little further on, Shakespeare writes ‘a dream itself is but a shadow’. In the paintings, we recognize the object of the net, the hammock, but as in a dream, it is no longer exactly the object, nor its abstraction.
Three ensembles of sculptures punctuate the exhibition. They follow on from the horse saddle sculptures exhibited in November at Stallmann Galleries in Berlin.

Joséphine Dupuy-Chavanat: So there’s a fluidity, a kind of interstice that you constantly capture in your work. A moment that also seems suspended, between two states. The net, for example, seems to escape us the moment it appears. As for the leather straps, they play on the varying degrees of tension in their braiding, fused at one end and loose at the other. You mentioned recent sensations. Can you tell us what they are and how they may have influenced the paintings and sculptures presented here?

Alizée Gazeau: You said that the exhibition of horse saddle sculptures was more conceptual than previous ones. This is true and paradoxical at the same time, because it marks a moment when I have fully assumed the part of sensitive intuition in my work. The horse saddles, the braids made from their girths, the pieces cut from leather are sensual elaborations that respond to a very direct intuition.
The net is an object I began collecting in 2019. Instability, loss and the fluctuating memory of a place are translated into painting through this object. Working on the ground, with pigments and water, it becomes a tool that allows me both to hold the paint on the surface of the canvas and to let it escape. There’s a tension between letting go and holding back that I like to find in the process. As you say, we find the same tension between the idea of capture and liberation in the leather braids. These archetypal objects are like metaphors.

Joséphine Dupuy Chavanat: And what are these metaphors?

Alizée Gazeau: The idea of metaphor is that of a displacement from the original object.
“Hammocks and fishing nets stem from ancestral practices. The oldest known fishing net in Europe dates from 8300 BC. The net in ancient Egyptian bas-reliefs functioned as a representational screen and can be seen as a metaphor for space and time.” In my paintings, the nets create spaces and capture events.
The horse saddles are metaphors for the search for harmony between two beings, having an asymmetrical relationship. The sculpture Untitled (stirrups) is made of leather straps and stirrups. The stirrups, designed to maintain balance, are aligned vertically on the straps. They evoke a ladder, the axis mundi, that is, the connection between Heaven and Earth.
When I speak of metaphor, I am referring to the idea that the work eludes definition, constantly projecting its form onto an infinite number of other thoughts.

Joséphine Dupuy Chavanat: I remember you sharing your thoughts with me when I was working on a project involving the graphic interpretation of music. You told me that between the appearance of a form and its disappearance, there exists a fragile compositional equilibrium. And painting – like music – seeks harmony. How does this quest for harmony, a subject that has long been dear to you, continue to infuse your work? I say “quest”, but perhaps you have found the right melody, the right rhythmic flow and the perfect consonance?

Alizée Gazeau: Yes, the word harmony was a recurrent theme. Music provokes instant emotions. I would like my paintings to be listened to and my sculptures to be perceived as a rhythm. This may sound abstract, but at the same time it is concrete in my works. Shapes appear as much as they vanish. I like them to produce a temporal, musical impression, something both anchored and fleeting. In the First Dance and Movement paintings, I searched for a perfect balance between light and darkness, a point of equilibrium between two opposites.

“The ocean is deathless
The island rise and die
Quietly come, quietly go
A silent swaying breath”
Agnes Martin

I’m also thinking of Roni Horn, Sigmar Polke and Eva Hesse.

Joséphine Dupuy Chavanat: I do indeed remember the Sigmar Polke exhibition at Palazzo Grassi in Venice, which described the artist as “the painter of metaphors”. One of the huge works on show featured circus characters and animals balanced on chairs, buckets and ladders. Polke transforms and even metamorphoses his colors, like an alchemist. How do you work with materials and colors? Do you, like Polke, seek to create – through a singular use of pigments – a state akin to hypnosis?

Alizée Gazeau: I began imagining the paintings for the exhibition during a few weeks spent away from my studio. As always in my work process, I need to immerse myself in places, readings, conversations and emotions to prepare a new series. Back in the studio, a blending occurs between my intentions and the interactions that take place between pigments, paint, water, threads and the surface of the canvas. The paintings from the Surface series are made with a single color. I compose the painting by placing water-soaked nets on the canvas. By moving the pigments, the nets modify the pictorial surface, and after they are removed once dry the final painting appears. In this, I am also a kind of alchemist. There are certain colors that come up frequently: the contrast of black and white that structures the nets, the crimson color of bodily flows, of the sea in the Odyssey, of vital momentum. In the painting Suite, the fleeting shape of the net was almost enough on its own. I wanted to add a blue line to indicate temporality and movement. There is also the imprint of a net that traces a very low horizon line. You speak of a state close to hypnosis. What is certain is that I am led by my intuition, by the fluctuations of my memory and by the beauty of the absolute present offered by a painting in the making.

A Shadow’s Shadow
a conversation between Alizée Gazeau and Joséphine Dupuy-Chavana

 

Alizée Gazeau (b. Paris, 1990) lives and works in Berlin. She holds a master’s degree in art history from La Sorbonne, where she also studied philosophy of art.

Solo exhibitions include I’m Herdsman of a Flock, Stallmann Galleries, Berlin, Germany (2024), Häutung, Gr_und with the support of the French Institute, Berlin, Germany (2023), Le Filet, Ona Project Room, Tokyo, Japan (2022), Heureux qui comme Ulysse, Bubenberg, Paris (2017).

Recent group exhibitions include Mass, Spoiler Zone, Berlin, Germany (2024), H20 Venezia: Diari d’Acqua, Fondazione Barovier&Toso, Venice, Italy (2024), Archive of Upcoming, Georg-Knorr Bremse Factory, Berlin, Germany (2023), Art Theorema Krisis, Fondazione Benetton, Trevise, Italy (2023), Off Water II, Sainte Anne Gallery, Paris, France, (2022), Interfaces, or those who caress the surface, Interface, Berlin, Germany (2021), But are we the only dreamed ones?, Daily Lazy Project, Athens, Greece (2019).

Alizée Gazeau was resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France (2019-2020, 2025), at the Fondation Hartung Bergman, Antibes, France (2018), at the Fondazione Michelangelo Pistoletto, Biella, Italy (2018).
She founded Publication d’Art Non linéaire, a collective publication of artists and historians, giving rise to several events and conferences, at Musée Pierre Soulages, Rodez, France, at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France, at Emerige Voltaire, Paris, France (2018-2022).

With the support of CNAP Centre national des arts plastiques (National Centre for Visual Arts), France

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Alizee-Gazeau_A-Shadow_s-Shadow_Sainte-Anne-Gallery_2025_1-scaled.jpg

The idea of the end of the world has always been a subject of reflection for the human species, which has transposed it into cinema, literature, and art in an attempt to master, synthesize, and understand it. Because the apocalypse should lead to a revelation – from the Greek kalýptein, meaning to remove the veil, to unveil; or perhaps, more simply, dealing with the apocalypse would serve to exorcise a shared fear, as talking about it, in a superstitious way, distances the possibility of it happening. Perhaps, by witnessing its destruction, we might finally be able to see what the world is truly like.
“Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.”

“Don’t Argue At My Funeral” seeks to explore the concept of the end (and its opposite, the beginning, the new beginning. The alpha and the omega). Within an interconnected and agentic mesh, the project juxtaposes different perspectives, creating cells where it is possible to experience the mutual connections between the biotic and the abiotic, between cybernetic life and physical death, between the tangibility of physical limits and the illusion of a perpetual scroll. These satellites would want to provide a means to reflect on the threat of global disaster, collective suicide, and the desire for resurrection, or on the unsettling shadow cast by the future.
Through religious and animistic visions, as well as conceptual, posthumanist, transhumanist, and ecological theories and practices, the project attempts to experiment with transcending the limit, posing questions such as: What do we find beyond the end? And beyond death? Does death necessarily represent the end, or can we consider the possibility of being simultaneously alive and dead, or neither alive nor dead, outside the gaze of the other? Has the end of the world already occurred, is it occurring, or will it occur? If, as Heidegger asserts, by “world” we mean “a totality of meaning,” then it has never truly existed. There are only portions of the world, those with which we engage from time to time. Is it therefore a matter of coming to terms with this end—which is always, at the same time, (another/first) beginning? Does being able to already see the world in the light of the final catastrophe mean seeing it as it will one day appear or recognizing its morphological contemporaneity with us?

“Don’t Argue At My Funeral” brings together the practice of five artists who, through works specifically conceived and created for the exhibition, engage with the idea of the eternal cyclicality of life and death, as well as that of change and metamorphosis understood not only biologically or symbolically, but as a radical experience of the limit: a double movement between affirmation and dissolution, between the beginning and the end, which do not oppose each other but rather feed each other. A perpetual oscillation between persistence, resistance and survival, not as simple strategies of permanence but as matrices of new possibilities, as a movement that regenerates itself in the confrontation with the limit, in the ability to inhabit the threshold between what ends and what can still become.

*The exhibition is mentally/spiritually supported by @wecroakapp
WeCroak is an app that each day sends you five invitations at randomized times to stop and think about death.
It’s based on a Bhutanese folk saying that to be a happy person one must contemplate death five times daily.
https://www.wecroak.com/

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/1-12.jpg

The exhibition Internal Space is inspired by the unique building Hnitbjörg, both inside and out. Einar
Jónsson, sculptor, created cohesive spaces in his museum that open up to the viewer upon
entering. The works are in the foreground, but upon closer inspection, one can discern the
sculptor’s deliberate craftsmanship in the architecture. The pedestals and the interior of the
building are not exempt; on the highest ones, the works become elevated and untouchable. The
design of the original pedestals, which still stand, bears witness to Einar’s thought regarding the
overall appearance of the museum, and they have multifaceted and practical roles. Inside the
original pedestals are spaces that Einar used for preservation and storage; there one can find a
hidden world of unfinished works, sketches, tools, and fragments. This hidden aspect invokes
interest and questions, bearing witness to what could have been.

Sigurður Guðjónsson creates his own spaces here and opens worlds that are usually hidden by
magnifying phenomena and thus showing details that the human eye cannot otherwise perceive.
He is accustomed to dealing with unique spaces in his creation, transforming and recreating them
with sound and image. In the unique world of Hnitbjörg, he takes his position with what is already
there through a multi-voiced installation that engages in dialogue with the space, the pedestals,
and the building. Glass is Sigurður’s material this time; he magnifies broken glass and, with light,
movement, and sound, creates an indeterminate visual world that each person can interpret in
their own way. There is harmony in the work, but at the same time, each unit has its unique voice.
This slow transformation process is strongly emphasized in the inner spaces, where reflection and
sound create a holistic experience. Einar Jónsson’s visual world, on the other hand, is characterized
by figurative motifs, where the indeterminate is the narrative of each work. The works of both artists
require the viewer to dwell on them and consider what is inside; Hnitbjörg provides the shelter
needed for this to happen. Sigurður’s pedestals reflect Einar’s pedestals in a certain way, but they
are open and accessible to the viewer, while Einar Jónsson’s closed pedestals keep the interesting
items from his career.Sigurður Guðjónsson (1975) is best known for his time-based art, where the
focus is directed at the inner in an enlarged image. There he explores the material world, the
function of the mechanical, and presents it with sound, light, colors, and movement. His
magnificent creations have a mesmerizing and dreamlike enect on the viewer, who cannot help but
be drawn to the artist’s visual world.

Sigurður Guðjónsson is one of the country’s foremost video artists and continues to establish
himself with each project. Sigurður studied at Billedskolen in Copenhagen from 1998-1999, the
Iceland Academy of the Arts from 2000-2003, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 2004. He
represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 2022 and received the Icelandic Art Prize in 2018.

Sigurdur Trausti

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Adobe-Express-file-5.jpg

Whitestone Gallery Hong Kong is honored to present Sacred Nexus, a solo exhibition by acclaimed Japanese artist Miwa Komatsu. Until now, Miwa Komatsu has presented works under the theme of “Sense of Sacredness,” aiming to evoke our inner spirituality. Now, as embarking on a new venture, the “Sacred Nexus” exhibition unveils over 20 new works by the artist.

A “Sacred Nexus” is a confluence of sacred resonance — a place or moment where we can have spiritual interaction and dialogue with divine spirits and the natural world. Historical sites of worship, lands imbued with earnest prayers, and nature itself are the inspirations of Komatsu’s practice; she envisions the “invisible energy”, and creates the intersection of the material and immaterial realms. By amplifying the resonance between her works and the viewers, the audience is reminded of the sacredness deep within themselves, prompting their connection to divinity in this new chapter of “Sacred Nexus”.

 

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/IMG_7603M.jpg

Oxymoron, which means contradictory rhetoric, refers to the juxtaposition of two semantically contradictory words in language communication, which creates a strong rhetorical effect and makes the expressed meaning stronger. “Unifying contradictory characteristics to achieve a strong expressive effect” is a characteristic that is fully demonstrated in Wang Weijue’s works.

This contradiction is first reflected in the creation of the medium wool fiber. Needle-felted wool is Weijue’s most distinctive creative medium. The wool fiber material looks sweet and soft, but the inside is full of traces of violence in the process of needle-felted wool. Her works are based on this conflict, revealing the conflicts and struggles hidden under the calm and beautiful surface, using “softness” as a weapon to challenge the domestication and shackles represented by “softness”.

This exhibition presents Wang Weijue’s latest series of works “Slamming the door”. This series of works refers to films that use female images as objects of desire, abstracting a series of ambiguous female close-ups, and recreating them with sharp and bright colors like digital layers. These reference images correspond to the needs of the male gaze and are the visual presentation of desire in the commercial chain. In other words, these images are the product of performance, but under the encouragement of algorithms, they form a torrent of information that lead to a new aesthetic standard. Under the repetitive discipline of the media, women are expected to express themselves in a way that conforms to binary and sexualized norms, and are gradually alienated in social media and lose their individual subjectivity. The bright and sharp colors in the works also symbolize instrumental stimulation, which somehow lead to numbness of desire and temptation under mechanical repetition.

By juxtaposing contradictions, Wang Weijue questions the expectations of individuals under the discipline of digital media, aiming to reflect on the profound impact of digital media on our intimacy and perception of desire.

Hidden deep in the third floor is a room that Wei Jue specially customized for this exhibition. The room is wrapped in soft plastic bubble wrap, and inside it is the artist’s latest performance video: Wei Jue wears a bubble wrap suit and interacts with the audience, who can pop the bubbles on Wei Jue at will. This plastic coat, which is neither thick nor thin, gives the performer a fragile but airtight protection, just like the distance between people – in the process of testing and approaching, fun or harm is only a finger’s breadth away.

 

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/IMG_6944.jpg

Art Basel is pleased to announce the participating exhibitors and key details of its 2025 edition in Hong Kong, taking place from March 28–30, 2025, at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC). This edition will feature 240 galleries from 42 countries and territories, showcasing a diverse range of artistic practices that reflect the fair’s commitment to global diversity and regional representation. More than half of the participating galleries are from the Asia-Pacific, highlighting Art Basel’s vital role as a platform for the region’s dynamic art scene.

The fair’s core sectors include Galleries, the main sector for established and blue-chip galleries; Discoveries, which spotlights solo projects by emerging artists; and Insights, offering curated projects from artists across Asia and the Asia-Pacific region.

This year, the Galleries sector will present a rich mix of exhibitors from across the Asia-Pacific, including emerging, mid-size, and blue-chip galleries from Japan, Korea, India, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey, and Australia. Notable solo presentations in the Galleries sector include Lawrie Shabibi (Dubai), Rossi & Rossi (Hong Kong), P420 (Bologna) and Ronchini Gallery (London). Additionally, Insights will showcase historic photography presentations from Asia, with contributions from Flowers Gallery (Hong Kong, London), Each Modern (Taipei), Takuro Someya Contemporary Art (Tokyo), Yutaka Kikutake Gallery (Tokyo), and The Drawing Room (Manila). The Discoveries sector will offer an exciting selection of emerging galleries, with participants from diverse locales ranging from Beijing to Pristina.

The show will welcome 23 newcomers across all sectors, with exhibitors from Cape Town, Berlin, and New York joining Galleries, while Insights will feature newcomers from Hong Kong, Noida, and Melbourne. Eight galleries will enter the fair’s main sector from the Greater China Region, as well as India, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, Austria, and the United Kingdom, emphasizing Art Basel Hong Kong’s commitment to regional growth.

Angelle Siyang-Le, Director of Art Basel Hong Kong, said: ‘The impressive line-up of galleries participating in our 2025 Hong Kong edition reinforces the fair’s position as a cultural crossroads and vital anchor in Asia’s ever-growing art scenes. We’re committed to continuing to strengthen our ties with the local art scene and its rising stars – our collaboration with the leading local nonprofit organization Para Site for the public Film Program is a historic first, while the MGM Discoveries Art Prize will honor its inaugural winner during the show next year. According to the recently released Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2024, Mainland Chinese HNWIs reported the highest spend on art and antiques in 2023 and the first half of 2024, more than double any other region, further bolstering our positive outlook for this March.’

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/1.Christopher_K_Ho_HiRes-scaled.jpg https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/rg1.jpg

It begins with a trace; more precisely, a sedimentation of gazes, a collection of views that overlap in the photographic documentation of past exhibitions. I sift through the digital remnants of Kaiserwache programming from the past three years: images, videos, texts—scattered across various art platforms. Gradually, the most obvious observation settles in my mind. All artifacts—most conspicuously in the photographs—incidentally address or document the architecture, gradually exposing Kaiserwache (or incrementally contributing to its digitally mediated simulacrum). This inevitably leads to the next question: What remains invisible? What eludes capture? Where does the image fall silent?

An answer shots forth: The basement and attic of Kaiserwache constitute spaces beyond the curated gaze, remote zones of our exhibition practice that seemingly evade systematic classification and visibility. In documentation, they are perceptible mainly through their absence. Until now, they have only been alluded to, their doors appearing as latent edges marking a beyond of the exhibition.

Basements and attics: When we think of these dark, often windowless spaces, our mind‘s eye tends to linger at the threshold—as if the uncertainty of these environments were transforming into a potential threat. Countless horror film tropes stem from this very notion. But is that all? What truly keeps us from entering these spaces?

Perhaps it is the darkness and dust that the camera fears, the disorder that defies the curated gaze, or simply the fact that these spaces were never intended for us. Maybe the answer lies in the architecture itself—in its boundaries, its accessibility, and, not least, its hierarchies. Or in our own perception, which resists acknowledging the invisible as part of what is being shown.

It remains to be stated that these spaces are indispensable (even in the literal sense)—foundational elements that unfold their impact in obscurity. Precisely from this marginal existence, they assert their own logic and challenge us to rethink space.

Above us and beneath us (Über uns, unter uns) are not mere spaces but vectors of movement, of displacement, that seek to renegotiate the act of looking. Attic and basement, beyond their materiality, must also be understood as spaces of thought. They are not the Other of the exhibition but its intensified form: spaces that resonate and reason.

In this exhibition, the hierarchy of space—its function as a backdrop or carrier of a curatorial narrative—is reversed. The exhibition is no longer a display presenting itself to a gaze but a process, a machinery defined by its fractures. The space loses its status as a background and becomes an agent.

The basement and attic in “Über uns, unter uns” elude conventional access for visitors; they are not spaces of direct physical perception as expected but rather spaces of inaccessibility, a deferral or displacement of vision. Their visibility is mediated—through convex mirrors that do not reveal but rather point elsewhere. This reflection generates a scattering of space, followed by a dispersion of its coherence. What remains is the attempt to decipher the distorted image, yet what lingers is not revelation but an inkling: something is there—above us, beneath us—but always withdrawn, ultimately inaccessible in its entirety.

The exhibition no longer operates in the mode of direct presentation but in a state of displacement, a topological entanglement of the visible and the invisible. Seeing is reflected in its own condition—not as access but as difference. There is no direct gaze, only detours, reflections, afterimages. This points to the paradoxical mediality of exhibitions themselves: their presence is always also their absence, their documentation always already another form of exhibition.

Photography, which ostensibly preserves, in truth transfers its referent into another order. It does not merely create an image of the exhibition but a new exhibition within the image. Every act of documentation is a curatorial decision, a cut through visibility, a frame that conceals as much as it reveals. What does this mediation do to the “actual” exhibition? Or conversely: What would an exhibition be without its mediation?

Yet there is no pure presence. Every artwork is always already framed by prior knowledge, expectation, and context. It does not exist as an autonomous object but as part of a mechanism of capture, projection, and archiving. The notion of immediate experience is deceptive. Without a structure of mediation, the artwork becomes a blind spot. The question is not whether mediation takes place, but how.

In this exhibition, Kaiserwache transforms into an oversized analog camera—a device that produces visibility but also displaces it. It is not far-fetched to consider that an exhibition, in a certain sense, is always already a camera—a machine of reflection, an assemblage of visibility and invisibility, proximity and distance, names and bodies, economy and aesthetics. Visitors find themselves in the illuminated, empty exhibition space—the print—while the actual event takes place in the negative space of the architecture: the basement, the attic. Without the negative, there is no image, no visibility, no exhibition.

The negative of an image must never be understood as a mere inversion of the developed image—they do not relate symmetrically. While it is inevitable that the content of the negative forms the basis of the future image, it would be a mistake to see it as a straightforward reversal of tonal values. After all, the development of the negative is a creative process, yielding different images depending on the mode of perception. The results can be extraordinarily distinct—so long as the chemistry is right, quite literally.

The photographic negative is a trace, an inversion, a shadow of the light conditions that left an image behind. It is a visibility not intended for itself but a transitional form, a possibility. In this show, the negative becomes the principle.

***

An attic is a boundary: too low to truly be a floor, too high to remain part of the ground. An animal inside is not a visitor, not a pet, not prey, but a constant that was not anticipated. The marten eats, shits, sleeps, disappears. Its territory is not ownership, but a habit. Its presence is a decision or a coincidence, its feces a mark of duration.

Now it is not visible, but its body has used the warmth of the wood and pressed its fur into the dust. I must wipe away its traces, clean its toilet (how ironic this statement echoes here at Kaiserwache), separate its place from mine, but the door remains a boundary that separates not only us but also time and matter. Perhaps the marten is long gone, has given up on its territory, and found some other hidden corner of the city. Or maybe it‘s right above, tucked between the beams in that twilight, just waiting for me to clear out. After all, spatial production isn‘t just a human game.

***

I am fascinated by a certain type of commercial group show that gets by with two-line exhibition texts or even just a list of names (why do I write “get by?” After all, they thrive precisely because of this!) They behave unobtrusively, yet at the same time, they cannot avoid bumping into the institutions of good taste.

The “coherence” of the selection, a protective exhibition theme, an overarching narrative—these elements often feel like mere pretexts for business in this context. A kind of intellectual ornamentation that, given the Potemkin-like motivations behind the framing, either spoils the appetite of those interested in commerce or makes a “serious” engagement with the exhibition uncomfortable, if not impossible, for those invested in the art itself. In contrast, there are those “unpretentious” exhibitions or strategically assembled arrangements. These galleries have grown weary of the masquerade—of having to dress exhibitions in the guise of a tradition of coherence and legibility, a pompous attire that many shows refuse to forgo, not least for its legitimizing effects. Especially when the emphasis on exhibition quality and curatorial value comes into conflict with the sanctified business.

Many galleries have little need to conform to curatorial conventions or etiquette—good business usually begets more good business, whereas „good“ exhibition art offers no such promise of self-sustainability. Thus, this type of exhibition seems to have a different mode of presentation, one that counteracts the tendencies of idealizing motivations and, by the way, lends the exhibition a more down-to-earth, albeit less reflective, appearance.

The exhibitions I speak of can sometimes be understood as a strategic response to certain economic conditions. Galleries have deals with artists but also deals and percentages with each other. The small fish must figure out what artistic leftovers they can grab for themselves, because clearly, there exists a food chain among galleries as well. This may sound more brutal than it really is. But if we stay with the brutal metaphor, the blood trail can be traced back to René Picard’s proclamation: “We no longer collect art, but acquire individuals.” It is no longer possible to separate art from the artist, if it ever was. Their names flash up, and names, as we know, are fleeting, negotiable, connectable, and transferable. It’s not about a hierarchy of quality but about a pragmatics of connection. Clearly, artists have grown or degenerated into brand names that must be understood as symbolic units with individual traits and, hopefully, prospects for value appreciation.

Although we, at Kaiserwache, do not directly engage in value creation through monetary flow, we are nonetheless inevitably embedded in a network of brand and symbolic values. Whether we like it or not, we act like a brand. This model of trading in immaterial values, of dancing with associations and desires, long established in the collaboration between artists and art spaces, is increasingly found in other markets and on ever more spectacular levels. I‘m talking about collaborations between international trade brands. Have you ever tasted Coca-Cola® with Oreo™ flavor? Taste here is irrelevant, because the mere idea of their union already generates enough symbolic value to push the actual product into the background. The brands enter into a promiscuous romance, just so their child can carry a double-barreled name. And it is the aura of this romance—not the child—that sparks interest. This need not necessarily be interpreted negatively.

Exactly this logic also shapes the commercial group show, which no longer has to rely on curatorial concepts but only on the economic grammar of names, whose (re-)combinations already generate a narrative. The exhibition as a cocktail of signifiers, as a fleeting arrangement of values that charge each other—not to create thematic depth, but to stage the mechanism of visibility itself.

It would be a lie to claim that the exhibition is completely free from the logic of brand fusion—after all, there is a certain allure in combining names, imagining how their interactions will create new constellations, how their symbolic values oscillate and charge each other. There is a nearly naïve joy in alphabetically ordering these names: David Attwood, Claire Megumi (Claire and Megumi are both first names of the artist); Andrea Fortmann; Nao Kikuchi; Hannah Kindler; Hojeong Lee; Alice Tioli; Michaela Tröscher, the Icelandic pianist; Lorenz Walter Wernli; Lidong Zhao: imagining a “product” emerging from their connection—more or less uninterested in the conceptual linkage of their works. Perhaps there is a gesture of marketing here, perhaps a deeply rooted need for connection, for association, and of course for communication with these artists.

But if I think this impulse through further, it inevitably begins to dissolve itself. What exactly happens when an exhibition does not rely on the conventional narrative of coherence and consistency? When it does not obey the mechanisms of thematic order or curatorial mediation? Does something get revealed or is just another veil pulled?

“Über uns, unter uns” does not use this mode of presentation as a form of rejection, but as a strategy of play—a play that is unsure of its own motivations and doesn’t want to be. For an exhibition that is staged from the start as “authentic” or “down-to-earth” only reproduces another form of masquerade, a new pose of immediacy. Instead, here, the unfinished takes center stage so that the string of names can remain provisional. The reading becomes secondary.

Perhaps that is the real point: Every exhibition is an image with an invisible negative, a reflection that never shows the whole. Because ultimately, every person—every artistic gesture, every exhibition—carries something within them that not only remains incomprehensible but also unreachable. A shadow and a transcending that lies beyond any curatorial construction.

Addendum (Apologies if I repeat myself):

We tend to overlook how much an artwork is not only influenced by its presentation but often brought into being by it in the first place. The white walls, the right angles, the neutralized light—these are the oxygen of the art world. We barely notice them as long as they work their magic reliably. Only when art has to do without the white cube does its breath begin to falter. Or to put it differently: One does not suffocate inside the white cube, but rather outside of it, when the accustomed conditions disappear and the artwork must assert itself in unfamiliar atmospheres.

“Über uns, unter uns” is situated at precisely this threshold. The exhibition shifts the focus away from the neutral presentation space and into the zones that remain outside the reach of a conventional exhibition space: the attic and the basement. These are places untouched by right angles or museal smoothness. They follow their own logic—dust, darkness, confinement, and inaccessibility themselves become active forces.

For me, this was both the challenge and the promise of this exhibition: What happens when art no longer hides from architecture but instead exposes itself to it? When it is not the walls that serve the works but the works that must respond to the edges, niches, and shadows of the space? And beyond that: What does mediation mean under such conditions? How can an exhibition be made tangible when its essential elements withdraw from “direct” view?

“Über uns, unter uns” opens various paths into the exhibition and tests different forms of mediation. These include this exhibition text, a video tour, a photographic documentation using a digital camera, and an analog photo series. The distinct qualities of each medium allow different facets of the exhibition (as well as the possibilities and limitations of the media themselves) to come to the fore, making it evident that the exhibition itself only fully takes shape through these mediations.

Initially, my goal was to treat all formats equally. However, I soon realized this was hardly feasible. On the one hand, I observed a clear difference in audience engagement with the various media. A nearly ten-minute video tour or a multi-page text receives significantly less attention than the digital photo series, which, in its scrollable format—similar to an Instagram feed—proves particularly accessible.

On the other hand, a curatorial decision further shifted the dynamics: the analog documentation is presented exclusively as negatives on-site, with no digital reproductions. The decision to forgo digitization was deliberate—partly because the curatorial interest of this exhibition lies precisely in the differences and idiosyncrasies of each medium. Here, the focus is on the physical negatives, their materiality, and the process of their development. Unlike the digital documentation, these images are not transferred into the digital media landscape. This inevitably creates an imbalance in accessibility—one that is not merely accepted but emphasized.

The choice to present the negatives only in their analog form and not make them available online also serves as a gesture that reinforces the image of Kaiserwache as an oversized camera—an apparatus that produces visibility while simultaneously withholding it.

This withholding arises from the apparatus (or the media) itself. Photographs, texts, and videos do not merely document the exhibition; they also reveal their own shortcomings. Every attempt at mediation leaves behind something that cannot be fully translated. Every perspective opens a gap—a space of the untranslated (or even the untranslatable). And in this, there is a parallel to the so-called “direct” experience on-site. For even when we stand before a work, something remains withdrawn.

After all, we often fail to notice the air of the white cube, or the silent conditions that must be met for the illusion of “immediacy” and “presence” to arise in the first place (see previous text).

Perhaps this is the real break with the white cube: that we are not only leaving it behind spatially but also exposing its promises of clarity, neutrality, transparency, and immediate encounter as mere constructs.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/DSC_3003.jpg

Galerie Noah Klink is proud to present Where the Night Softens, the first solo exhibition in Berlin by Polish artist Kami Mierzvvinsk.

Mierzvvinsk approaches painting as a tool for connecting with something beyond normal human perception, an ineffable and infinite reality that reveals itself through their creative practice. The paintings are created through a ritualistic process in which the artist views their body as a conduit for visualizing this intangible spiritual world. During an extended trance-like state, Mierzvvinsk connects with an internal energy – what they refer to as an alchemical process – to create the initial sketches as well as the large-scale works. This process of transmutation is at the core of Mierzvvinsk’s practice, and their paintings reflect a transcendental dialogue rather than a singular directive. The artist’s performative creative process results in minimalist organic forms that show rather than tell – a void, a portal, a spiritual residue, an open space for our own projections? Though largely monochrome, the paintings are anything but flat. They drip, morph, and meld as if they briefly capture a constant state of flux.

In Where the Night Softens, Mierzvvinsk has created a new body of work that serves as an ode to the mystique of night, the sense of peace and security it can offer as well as the access it allows to our deeper states of consciousness. Similar to Tantric and western spiritualist painting traditions, Mierzvvinsk is inspired by the metaphysical potential of artistic creation. In this new collection, they combine spirituality and materiality, brought together by their own bodily movements, into a cohesive whole.

The arrangement of the paintings in the gallery come together to form a contemplative space free from religious structures. While the works stand on their own, the installation as a whole creates an atmosphere of reverence. The mostly large-scale paintings feature central amorphous figures, emerging or receding, into deep yet vibrant blues, blacks, and purples reminiscent of the colors of the sky and the distant space beyond. As Mierzvvinsk themselves said, “Nothing is more noble than the first bright blues of the morning.”

And yet, the artist adamantly rejects a set interpretation for the works, echoed in the opaque titles. The paintings in Where the Night Softens are both the result of and an invitation into contemplative practice. As such, they avert directives and rather encourage viewers to step into a relationship with something beyond the mundane. In their refusal of set interpretations, Mierzvvinsk offers us an opportunity for our own inner exploration.

 

“Can this be read as a critique of human divisions ? Certainly, that is one of my thoughts.

Is it about the fluidity of the soul? Absolutely, it carries many of my philosophical reflections.

Is it a mystical phenomenon? Yes, profoundly and intricately developed.

I prefer to give the viewer the space to explore their own discoveries and values.

I don’t believe in explicitness – the image is the way, not the end point.”

 

Heather Jones

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/WheretheNightSoftens_InstallationView_1_low-scaled.jpg

Seven years ago, American artists Raymond Pettibon and John Newsom were introduced to each other by Stella Schnabel at a brunch she hosted for artists and their children. Both of the artists have sons who attended the brunch as well. Pettibon’s son Bo and Newsom’s son Luke were 5 and 6 years old at the time they met. As they became friends quite fast, their relationship also led to an ever-developing artistic dialogue between Pettibon and Newsom. The exhibition at the Kebbel Villa will represent the two artists’ second shared exhibition together and the first institutional presentation in Europe.

Expanding on the artists’ first joint exhibition “Raymond Pettibon / John Newsom: Classical Elements” presented at COUNTY Gallery, Palm Beach in 2022, the artists chose another timeless theme to tackle and portray for their exhibition at the Kebbel Villa. From the classical elements to the seven deadly sins and the seven heavenly virtues, Pettibon and Newsom share a respectful appreciation for time-tested iconography with a spiritual or psychological leaning. This allows them to explore the heights and depths of allegorical and metaphorical possibilities of each of their individual practices and processes.

Pettibon’s creative engagement with a myriad of pictorial tropes and diverse written language incorporates wit and humor along with mystery and, at times, sexual innuendo to create highly engaging and provocative expressions of both body and mind, giving perfect weight and measure to the sins as well as to the relief of the virtues. He presents the viewer with challenges to their everyday norms of understanding and forces the viewer out of their comfort zone, providing the opportunity for repeated viewing, thought, and mind expansion.

Similarly, Newsom relishes the natural world’s potential to engage in and embrace any possible pictorial language, referencing through enlarged flora and fauna worldly scenes of pleasure and pain, accompanied by beauty and transcendence. Both artists engage in highly individualized styles of working, focusing here on the formal process of primarily drawing or ‘drawn painting’ to access the image. Pettibon by means of ink, a wet medium; and Newsom by means of charcoal, a dry medium. Together, the complete bodies of both artists’ output for the exhibition comprise 28 pieces in total, all created in 2024, especially for this exhibition at the Kebbel Villa.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with a foreword by the director of the Kebbel Villa, Jürgen Dehm, and an essay by renowned esoteric author Mitch Horowitz (available through kebbelvilla.de/publikationen).

Raymond Pettibon (*1957 in Tucson, AZ, US, lives in New York, NY, US) first came to prominence in the Southern California punk scene of the early 1980s, where he created posters, zines, and album cover artwork for a number of influential bands of the period, including Black Flag, Minutemen, Off!, and Sonic Youth. He has maintained this relationship to music throughout his storied career, recently creating artwork for Foo Fighters, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, and Iggy Pop. Pettibon’s art is one of piercing, poignant, and raw emotional states. He has mined the American cultural subconscious for nearly 50 years, creating a contemporary body of work that can only be referenced historically to the likes of William Blake and Goya. He stands alone in the contemporary landscape as a beacon of artistic integrity and inquiry. Pettibon is somewhat of an anomaly, as is Newsom in his own right, individually investigating his sharp mind and vast imagination, Pettibon continues to spark intrigue by the international contemporary art-world community and beyond.

Pettibon had his first solo exhibition in 1986 at the Semaphore Gallery in New York. In 1995, he had his first major solo exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery in New York. In the mid-1990s, he had his first solo museum exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland, which travelled to Paris. In 1998, a self-titled show opened at the Renaissance Society in Chicago and travelled to The Drawing Center in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2002, he had a solo exhibition, “Raymond Pettibon Plots Laid Thick”, organized by the Museu d’art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), which travelled to the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo and GEM, the Museum Voor Actuele Kunst, The Hague, The Netherlands. In 2006, Pettibon had a major solo survey exhibition at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain that travelled to The Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover, Germany. A comprehensive catalogue was produced on the occasion of both exhibitions. In 2007, Pettibon participated in the Venice Biennial, for “Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense”, curated by Robert Storr where he created a unique wall drawing installation. A retrospective of Pettibon’s work entitled “A Pen of All Work” spanned three floors of New York City’s New Museum in 2017 and travelled to The Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht, The Netherlands. A portion of the show was presented at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, entitled “The Cloud of Misreading.” In 2019, Pettibon’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Pettibon’s work is included in numerous private and public collections, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; San Francisco; the Tate Britain, London; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

 

John Newsom (*1970 in Hutchinson, KS, US, lives in New York, NY, US) is best known for combining multiple techniques of formal painting strategies onto large-scale canvases featuring dynamic spectacles of the natural world. In 1992, he completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at The Rhode Island School of Design (R.I.S.D.) and subsequently moved to New York City, where he attended New York University’s studio arts program. He graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from NYU at the age of 24. Newsom has been based in New York for his entire career. Newsom had his first solo show in New York at Earl McGrath Gallery in 1995, located at 20 West 57th Street, and has been exhibiting consistently ever since, participating in more than 100 national and international exhibitions since the mid-1990s. In 2007, Newsom’s work was included in the notable exhibition “Paradise” organized by Heather Harmon at Patrick Painter Inc. in Los Angeles. The other artists included in the exhibition were Peter Saul, H.C. Westermann, and R. Crumb. Newsom was represented by Patrick Painter for nearly a decade, and this is where he befriended fellow gallery artist André Butzer, a German painter. Newsom and Butzer have remained close friends and periodically organize group exhibitions together as an anonymous collective. In 2013, Newsom was approached by Raekwon of the Wu-Tang Clan after Raekwon discovered Newsom’s paintings in an exhibition. Raekwon invited Newsom to create the artwork for his sixth solo studio album entitled “Fly International Luxurious Art”, released in 2015. Since then, Newsom, similar to Pettibon’s practice of collaborating with punk bands and musicians, has collaborated on several additional albums with Killah Priest, also of the Wu-Tang Clan. In 2024, Newsom presented the artwork from Killah Priest’s album “Forest of the Happy Ever After” in a solo exhibition at the Brattleboro Museum located in Brattleboro, Vermont. Newsom’s work has been the focus of a number of solo exhibitions presented at notable institutions, including “John Newsom: CRESCENDO” at the Richard J. Massey Foundation for the Arts and Sciences, New York, NY (2011-2012); “John Newsom: Rogue Arena” at MANA Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ (2015); “John Newsom: Nature’s Course” at the Oklahoma Contemporary, Oklahoma City, OK (2022); “John Newsom: Universal Frontier” at The Mary R. Koch Arts Center, Wichita, KS (2023); “John Newsom: Painting the Forest of the Happy Ever After” at the Brattleboro Museum, Brattleboro, VT (2024); “John Newsom: New Growth in an Old Garden” at the Kunstverein Heppenheim, Heppenheim, Germany (2024); “Raymond Pettibon and John Newsom: The Seven Deadly Sins and The Seven Heavenly Virtues” at the Kebbel Villa, Schwandorf, Germany (2025).

Published in a 2015 monograph of Newsom’s paintings, art critic Barry Schwabsky writes in his essay: “Beneath his thick and sensuous painted renderings of flora and fauna is a grappling with the giants of abstraction. What keeps ‘strong painting’ from becoming merely muscle-bound – is Newsom’s secret weapon: the discipline that comes from considering himself, not a painter of images, but rather an abstractionist (…) to appreciate his paintings is (…) to engage with their surfaces of purely sensual incident.”

Articles and reviews of Newsom’s work have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, and The New York Times, among other notable periodicals. His work is included in numerous private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), San Francisco; the Yale University Art Gallery, Connecticut and the R.I.S.D. Museum, Providence. He resides in Brooklyn, NY with his wife Cassie and their two children, Luke and Ruby.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/1_Pettibon-Newsom-at-Kebbel-Villa-Raymond-Pettibon-WRATH-2024.jpghttps://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Weixin-Image_20250312102011.jpg

Life is the redemption of the self from loneliness. Even when memory is lost, the heart still moves toward its destined direction. The human being possesses an inherent guiding ability, and that is what makes one truly oneself. One of Ye Guozhi’s themes is lost and found, and within this process, he affirms the true essence of things, a sense of time, the continuity of memory and self-identity, and the relationship between memory and the material world. Capturing memory (recording how time briefly lingers between the eyes and the heart) is far trickier than capturing a reality that has already been organized by concepts or the dreams that emerge. The key lies in the gaze, not what is seen. Through the eye beyond the painting, one reaches the heart within. What the artist wishes to preserve is the open, personal experience, rather than something quickly categorized into a system of traits. Ever-changing like the artist, complex like art history. Everyone tries in various ways to rediscover a creation that no one else has. When one stops creating, talent no longer matters, and all that remains is taste. Taste can reject others, narrowing one’s perspective. There is no art of truth, only the artist’s truth. We cannot hold onto anything; we can only dance with those ever-changing moments. Thus, the artist is entrusted with two tasks: one is to seek the eternal, and the other is to record the fleeting, turning it into eternity. Ye Guozhi measures the world with the scale of faith, always on the road, training himself to endure more pain, for the more pain he can bear, the more answers he finds. Every artwork of his is a segment of fleeting time, a reflection of the era upon the soul. The fusion of scene and emotion (the idea that all landscapes are expressions of emotion) becomes the guiding principle. The landscape is material, but the heart is supreme; the landscape lies outside, but it is to be appreciated through the heart. Merging the spirituality of life with nature, without intention in depicting objects, yet with intention in expressing scenes, letting the heart dictate, brings forth a paper full of atmosphere and feeling. The highest level of creativity is not about immersive engagement but rather an elusive detachment, a proper distance and quiet estrangement. A good technique is one that allows the viewer to feel the absence of technique. The resonance of artistic aesthetics is far more important to the audience of work than the nebulous, power-laden narratives of art history. Time, it seems, never passes justly; it does not stop for our laughter or tears but always takes what it is meant to take on schedule. Some discard, some treasure, some forget, and some memorize. What was seen, is no longer seen; what was remembered, is forgotten… What was unseen, is now seen; what was forgotten, is now remembered… The night sky always holds the densest blue, the endless dark that spirals downward and the shimmering brilliance of each step sends shivers down one’s spine, briefly brightening in the shadow of the iceberg. Twixt now and sunrise, we bid farewell to youth before the sun rises, and let sorrow end with the dawn.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Screenshot_38.jpg

Blindspot Gallery is pleased to present Chen Wei’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, “Breath of Silence”, on view from February 18 to April 12, 2025, presenting his recent body of works encompassing photography, LED light sculptures and videos. Chen is known for his staged photography capturing cinematic scenes suspended in a fragmented time space, these scenes are meticulously constructed in his studio. Muted and often vacant, these charged compositions are allegorical of the psyche of contemporary milieu. His LED sculptures and video installations further transpose in three dimensionality the urban textures and motifs photographed on the lens.

“Breath of Silence” captures an era characterized by alienation and solitude, a repercussion of the global pandemic. The title alludes to the tacit and suppressed traumas from a collective experience that has engendered disquietude and paranoia. The turning to virtual technology and screens as a means of escapism further creates barriers between people. The exhibition also signals a curtain fall to Chen’s New City (2013-) series, wherein the former boisterous promises of progress and prosperity muffle to diminution in a declined economic climate, exposing the cracks between people’s expectations and the reality that unfolds.

The titular photographic work Breath of Silence (2024) stages a figure in a self-confinement chamber. Claustrophobia permeates through the yellow plastic sheet that covers the structure he sits within. A similar sentiment is imbued in Clean Hands (2024) which portrays a pair of rubber gloves hanging down by two holes on an amber glass partition, evoking alienation.

Ring Lock (2024) depicts a marine blue exterior abstracted by glass fluted doors, kept shut by an illuminated ring. The scene appears alluring and serene, yet distant. The video work Light Me (2021) plays a looping still shot of a person sitting in the dark enraptured by the digital screen, their obscured face illuminated by its jarring light. The video conjures the surreal familiarity of late-night scrolls, a poignant portrait of a screen-dominated era. In precarious times, the past is romanticized to be more hopeful and promising. The Stars of Last Night (2024) unfurls as a dilapidated shopfront with broken shards of glass, containing an old time polychromatic light display flickering like Christmas lights — a relic left in abandoned disarray. Chen’s mise-en scènes often evoke the sociopsychological conditions of the city through objects and motifs. Tears on the Ground (2024) depicts a myriad crystal baubles and trinkets scattered across the floor in static disorder, resembling a dispersing crowd in the train station. Temporary solace is found in the lemon, dispersed in disarray in Lemons in the Corner (2024) — forever refreshing and bright.

 

 

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Chen-Wei_Trouble-City-250101_2025_200-x-30-x-30-cm-13-HR-scaled.jpg

Seep into my skin. Oil to leather.

Our teeth fell out while we waited for them to grow back in 100 years. She had tried to run out, that is
why she’s tied up. She had lost her mouth by then. It kissed the tap and hugged the sink. They kept
talking and talking at her, but she couldn’t talk because she was breathing… or he was breathing.

“If you bang your head against the wall you should be able to talk.”

My visions abandoned, I shed my skin. Carmine flesh and navy veins glow in the moonlight.
Is this release?

The lock, the door, the clasp, the hair strand chain. I expanded when I was bound, my sebum stains the
pillow case.

“Our love is like the movies”

Head kisses the surface.

Always.

Amidst the chaos of fractured dreams- discarded Christmas decorations, dried flowers, and animal
remains- Williams’ found and preserved sculptures resonate in hushed tones. Images and works were
developed amid several encounters with dead deer and birds on the route to work. The relationship
between the potential of sculpture and the existential notions of mortality and isolation reveal dialogues that
span memory, nature, and the human condition. This new series of work captures a still breath – forms
that whisper and capture life’s essence in a close embrace.

A symphony of silhouettes is orchestrated, echoing within obscured frames, experiencing the fluent
romance of existence. The work reinterprets the complexities of life through the lens of Dada, a
movement that reveled in narrative fragmentation.

Their subjects go through rigorous almost alchemical processes, constructing an atmospheric scrying
stone. In wandering through this vast terrain, one might discover their own narrative interwoven within the
figurations, reminiscent of hearing a best kept secret.

Emily Lucid

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/BW_001-1.jpg

Soup presents the gallery’s twelfth exhibition, ‘Alone In The Moonlight’, featuring new paintings by Mark Burch, I. Mills and Albie Romero. The exhibition spotlights three emerging artists at an important point in their artistic development, all of whom foreground an emotive and emphatic exploration of memory at the centre of their painting practices. Additionally, all three have an enduring interest in photography as a visual reference for their image-making.

Mark Burch, who completed his MA in Fine Art from the Bath School of Art in 2020, examines our minds’ tendency to daydream, replaying selected memories in a cinematic, nostalgic loop of subconscious desire. Employing found internet imagery, film stills and his own documentary photography as initial points of inspiration, he then digitally collages, crops and edits each image to impose his own narrative implications. Burch’s anonymised figures hint at our often imperfect recall, while his use of chiaroscuro contrasts and bold colour choices nod to the dramatisation of our own past and our readiness to entertain rosy retrospection. Recently, his compositions have begun to include a liberal application of negative space. The asymmetrical, oversized or otherwise prominent borders applied to Burch’s scenic vignettes evoke censored storyboard layouts, redacted scrapbook pages or polaroid photograph framing, a further nod to a wider, as yet withheld, narrative at play.

Similarly, I.Mills, a recent graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art’s MFA painting programme, isolates images from their original intention to examine ambience, atmosphere and the collective experience of our shared surroundings. With a multidisciplinary approach to image making that includes the use of collected colour transparency slides to inform her printed and painted works, Mills portrays moments of particular transience – the view from a moving vehicle, a brief encounter with a moth – to replicate those feelings of longing, wanting or wishing. Often working in watercolour on wood panels, Mills embraces the inherent patination of the wood grain to further obfuscate those fleeting moments, while the addiction of gems, diamantés and stickers to the surface of her paintings awaken a certain childlike wonder and echo photographic backscatter or filmic lens flare.

Finally, Albie Romero, who graduated with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2024, compares the dogged pursuit of a painting practice to the importance of a religious, spiritual or supernatural belief system. Raised Roman Catholic but adopting agnostic atheism in adulthood, Romero interrogates myth, mysticism, mind-altering substances and the paranormal as ideological alternatives, distilling such overarching concepts into quasi-sacred depictions. Recently, as the result of a relationship breakdown, Romero has begun to yield to more personal introspection in his work. Using his own medium format photographs as primary reference points, he exploits the meditative catharsis of painting to expunge particularly melancholic memories, whilst retaining the blurred compositional contrivance that allows for effectual outside interpretation.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Alone-In-The-Moonlight-Mark-Burch-I.-Mills-Ablie-Romero-Soup-Gallery-1-scaled.jpeg

During an inspection of an old salt dump near Teutschenthal in 2018, Philipp Keidler makes an astonishing observation. The strangely idyllic nature of the industrial wasteland with the white mountain in the background reminds him of his home, the Allgäu Alps. He captures the impression photographically. Based on this experience, the author explores disreputable connections: The underground cavities of the former salt mine between Halle-Angersdorf and Teutschenthal are filled with highly toxic waste, such as industrial slag, by the company GTS. GTS acquired the tunnel from the Treuhand in order to “secure” it by backfilling. Backfilling is intended to prevent rockfalls and earthquakes on the surface. GTS has been a subsidiary of the Allgäu-based Geiger Group since 2008. The artist recognizes Geiger’s typical green coat of paint on the ventilation shaft. After the purchase, the down-to-earth family business increased the backfill in the mine to over 200,000 tons of industrial waste per year.

​Philipp Keidler searches above and below ground for the strange and finds the familiar. He shows the overlapping of idyll and dystopia. The result, however, is not a blurred reference, but a re-sorting of the familiar and the relationships of space. The simplicity of the forms and the restrained play with building materials and raw materials create a simple, clear atmosphere without being simple.

The surface is broken by sounds, picked up by geophone from the depths of the gallery and the Allgäu valleys. The layered sounds make the invisible audible. In this way, the artist creates access to mining at a depth of 700m below Halle-Angersdorf and brings fragments of his own biography to light. 

The installation is complemented by documentary reports from local residents and a project manager from the shaft sinking. 

Philipp Keidler’s works invite visitors to experience an immersive, intimate encounter with post-industrial decay and the (apparent) idyll of home. The uncertainty remains as to what is familiar and what is alienating.

(Text: Ekke Metzger)

The project was realized as part of the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design’s graduate scholarship and was supported by Werkleitz equipment rental. 

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Aus-der-Tiefe-in-den-Raum_Philipp-Keidler-23.jpg

My longtime friend and teacher, Walter Dahn, passed away on November 7, shortly after the opening of his exhibition “HAVE LOVE WILL TRAVEL“ at Haus Mödrath, Kerpen. Starting January 12, an eight-part exhibition series runs alongside his exhibition, featuring artists who studied with Walter Dahn.

*

Haus Mödrath is excited to announce Ralph Schuster’s debut solo exhibition in this series. For the occasion, the artist presents a new collection of paintings, shown here for the first time. The imagery and color choices in this series hold a unique place within the broader scope of his work. Using a pared-down palette, motifs from his expansive drawing universe have been translated onto small wooden panels. In this exceptional series, dark and twisted imagery of the yonder is presented with a wink and a touch of humor.

Born in 1982, Ralph Schuster studied Fine Arts under Walter Dahn at the University of Art in Braunschweig. He currently lives and works in Brussels.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/01_Haus-Modrath_Ralph-Schuster-2-scaled.jpg https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/001Alfredo-Aceto-9925-WEB.jpg

Most of the paintings in this exhibition depict a world turned upside down. Four works are painted directly fromphotographs taken at aHaus Steht Kopf (Upside Down House)in Terfens, Austria. Designed primarily as a touristattraction for children and families, the site is a photo-op playground generating endless content for hungryfeeds. Three other works present scenes tightly cropped by the edges of window frames—Vienna’s city hallfrom the seat of a dentist’s chair, the façade of the old Carpenter’s Guild seen from Gogl’s child’s bedroom, theview of trees from the bathroom window. A nod to 17th-century Flemish oil paintings of windows that broke thepicture plane and called attention to the reality of their subjects and surroundings, Gogl’s paintings continue to beoccupied by the relationship between the real and the virtual.

In this show, Gogl is not as concerned with inventing new scenes through painting as much as she is concernedwith the transformation that happens when a human processes an image by hand—when the painter’s gaze driftsto the inverted, sometimes absurd, cognitive spaces in image making.

Two final paintings in the exhibition each present text; one includes a sign reading “ROCKBOTTOM,” the other“UP” written in the clouds. Taken from an episode ofSpongeBob SquarePantsin which SpongeBob’s worldinverts and the theatrical poster from the Pixar filmUPrespectively, Gogl’s renderings of these invented universesexpand the otherwise realistic boundaries of the exhibition.

Sophie Gogl (b. 1992, Kitzbühel, Austria) studied painting at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna with Prof.Judith Eisler. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Diana, Milan, Italy (2024); Soloausstellung InnsbruckBiennale, Innsbruck, Austria (2024); Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Austria (2023–2024); DOCK20, Lustenau,Austria (2023); Kunsthaus Glarus, Glarus, Switzerland (2023); Francis Irv, New York, NY (2022); KOW, Berlin(2021); The Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna, Austria (2020); and the Galerie der Stadt Schwaz, Austria(2020). Select group exhibitions include Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf, Germany (2024); KölnischerKunstverein, Cologne, Germany (2023); Belvedere 21, Vienna, Austria (2023); Kunsthalle Friart, Fribourg,Switzerland (2022); Neuer Wiener Kunstverein Wien, Vienna, Austria (2022 & 2023); and Kunsthalle Bern, Bern,Switzerland (2020).

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/33-SG007-a-1.jpg

Placelessness

 

Soka Art is pleased to announce its group exhibition Placelessness on December 28th, presented by five artists: Fang Weiji, Tao Fa, Jagoda Mićović, Yuan Na, Anna NL Cheung, curated by Yuana, the exhibition will run until January 25, 2025.

 

“Placelessness” is a geographical phenomenon proposed by Edward Relph in his humanistic geography book Place and Placelessness: In the process of post-industrialization and the rapid expansion of consumer society, the significance of some diverse landscapes and important places is constantly decreasing or even disappearing, and they are gradually losing their original sense of place. Along with this, people have weakened their ability to recognize places and identities, and are lost in a maze of countless “similarities”. In this exhibition, five artists explore the boundaries and interweaving of different regional spaces in the context of “placelessness” from their own perspectives of understanding and expression.

 

Spreading Perceptual Space

Perceptual space is usually a “behavioral space based on people’s direct needs and practices”. In past experiences, people will project their own emotions and personality into it, creating a private and unique place. Fang Weiji’s Thoughts on a Quiet Night series of works, depicting the tranquil and beautiful flowers and plants in the night, interprets an aesthetic of transcendental emotions and philosophical thoughts, and is also the artist’s experience of objects from life. The daily tediousness and suffocation of the city have aggravated people’s inner anxiety and conflicts, so people tend to have the impulse to escape for a short time and begin to yearn for a peaceful land. For example, in their spare time, they appreciate the flowers and the moon, sit and watch the sunrise and sunset, and try to find a moment of peace and self in the thousands of landscapes. Fang Weiji uses elegant and harmonious colors, simple and clear composition to convey his immediate psychological state that transcends visual concepts. The branches standing under the moonlight involve a memory of looking up at the starry sky in childhood, then the past and the present seem to overlap. At this point, the perceptual space centered on the individual has been able to transcend the limits of time and become a more distant existence.

 

Insideness of Place Identity

“Home” is the basis of our identity and the dwelling place of being. People’s most primitive cognition and most personal feelings about a place come from this. Artist Tao Fa focuses his creation on his hometown, Yunnan, which is his most familiar and attachable place of belonging, where mountains and rivers nurtured his body, and where humanistic concepts shaped his personality. Tao Fa is used to letting his subconscious mind control the works freely in his creation, letting the paint flow wildly on the canvas, then constructing a mysterious world where all things are spiritual in the unconventional brushstrokes and the tone of traditional oriental colors. The scenes he paints are never silent but are always vibrant with illusions. In the work Thorny Mount Gui, the dilemma of thorns will not block the way, when the burning fire inside people is externalized and manifested, the silent guidance of the mountain god indicates to return home. At this moment, all the complexes and emotions have a place to go.

 

Obviously, every place in the world has its own uniqueness and recognition. When people leave their homes and arrive in an unfamiliar place, they are surrounded by completely different things and atmospheres, the imaginations that were previously based on pictures and words become real, and the resulting empathy produces different place identities. The work of Serbian artist Jagoda Mićović is inspired by the scenery of Jeju Island in South Korea. She visited the island as an “outsider” and saw the brilliant landscape on the island, such as colorful houses, black rocks and vast green forests. Jagoda came up with the idea of “making the landscape lose its color.” By reducing the high frequency of green, replacing the original colors of the landscape with grey to create a monochromatic view, and incorporating the contrast between the composition of the colorful houses and the white space that hints at the contours of the landscape, the work remains vivid and artistic. When the absence of primary colors makes the shape of the scenery sharp, gray also becomes “duality”, they become a game between light and shadow, day and night, flickering and stillness. As if the seasons had flipped, hot summer and snow coexisted here. Jagoda’s creations have taken Jeju Island away from those empty descriptions and traditional impressions, turning it into another kind of dreamy mystery, and have also created new perceptions and connections between people and places.

 

 

 Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

 

 — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Weixin-Image_20241230134926.jpg

I’m still intoxicated from drinking too much last night. The room I gather myself in isn’t the same room I’ve been in, but it’s the room other people have gone into before. The memories of the other people are stored externally within the room, and I have to figure out how to make sense of them even though none of them have anything directly to do with me. What is helpful is that I am interested in other people and their feelings about the world. At least one person works to make sure the externalized memories of the other people are kept in workable condition in this room, but they aren’t here right now. Nobody can directly help me. The room is supposed to be neutral to allow for the externalized memories of the other people to remain the focal point, but I’m still intoxicated from drinking too much last night, so I can’t really focus on them that well. Also this room has a bunch of discarded objects in it as well which can distract me or at least instill within me a particular atmosphere in and of itself. I can become skeptical about my own abilities to differentiate between externalized memories of other people and discarded objects. Even if the other people didn’t directly enter the room before me to form the memories that they externalized within the room, their presence still interacted with this room before I found myself within it. Sometimes my memories of similar rooms that I’ve found myself within before interact with my experience of this room, which I can decide to either inform my understanding of my experience or to block its muddying influence. Either way I have to use what I know and what I can teach myself with the externalized memories of other people within this room in order to solve for my being in the room and leave it. In my leave of the room, if I can say that I ever truly leave the room, I will come to a fuller understanding of myself and of the people who entered the room either physically or otherwise before me.

– Anastasios Karnazes

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/install1.jpg

Ani Schulze

The Convent of Pleasure – Ticking Time

curated by Alexander Pütz

Moltkerei Werkstatt
Moltkestraße 8, 50674 Cologne

Opening 26 October, 6 to 9 pm
27 October to 7 December 2024

The exhibition The Convent of Pleasure – Ticking Time by Ani Schulze features Episode 7: At One Go (2024) and Episode 1: The Beginning (2023) from her ongoing video series The Convent of Pleasure. alongside new paintings and architectural elements. The series designed as a soap opera is inspired by Margaret Cavendish’s 1668 comedy The Convent of Pleasure, in which a group of warnen decide to form a community without men-the titular convent. In her video series Schulze draws on both fictional and real female figures-primarily artists- and develops hybrid characters and surreal narrative fragments.

While Episode 1: The Beginning focuses on the founding of the convent, Episode 7: At One Go tells a story about exclusion from the community. Chronologically, the second part is placed as Episode 7 in the narrative. In this video work, filmed in Buenos Aires and Porto, the convent initially seems well-established. portrayed as both airy and mighty. However, this impression is disrupted right from the start by a zooming, clicking camera movement under green light, creating a deceptive feeling reminiscent of urban surveillance systems. The atmosphere evo­kes the structure of reality TV shows – a staged environment where observation and judgement become integral to the enter­tainment. Much like the Big Brother format – with the Argentinian version, Gran Hermano, ranking as one of the country’s most popular TV shows in 2024-the participants are subject to con­stant surveillance.

The title At One Go alludes to the fast-paced and arbitrary nature of games where decisions are made quickly. Everything re­volves around the eviction of the residents. which is heightened by the playful staging. further enhanced by vivid colours. The process of exclusion is triggered by children’s rhymes, whose rhythm and tone create an eerie blend of innocence, menace, and uncertainty.

lt remains ambiguous whether the threat comes from within or outside the community. The Nereid Fountain by Argentinian artist Lola Mora (1866-1936) also features as an (excluded) character in the new series. Mora originally created this sculpture in 1903 for the Plaza de Mayo in the centre of Buenos Aires. However, controversy arose – the naked bodies of the sea nymphs and Tritons were deemed inappropriate, and the artwork was subsequently banished to the outskirts of the city.

The Convent of Pleasure – Ticking Time unfolds as an immer­sive installation in which reality and fiction blend seamlessly, creating a dreamlike. otherworldly vision. The video works are structured as cinematic collages, merging non-linear actions into fragmented and contradictory elements. The exhibition reflects on current global dynamics of exclusion, whether between or within societies. and the arbitrary nature of these processes. The installation fuses humour with brutality as the boundaries of control play and exclusion continuously shift.

Thanks to: Studio kela-mo: Paula Hohengarten & Moritz Zeller, Josef Zky, 235 Media: Peter Behle. Bernhard Adams. Wiebke Wesselmann, Josefine Ziebell, Temporary Gallery, Kryzstof Honowski & Olga Holzschuh

Opening hours: Saturday and Sunday, 3 to 6 pm (closed on 10 & 24 November). Opening hours during Art Cologne: 8 November, 6 to 9 pm and 9 November, 3 to 9 pm (guided tour with Ani Schulze & Alexander Pütz at 7 pm)

www.moltkerei-werkstatt.de / www.anischulze.net / @youmightalsolikeev / www.youmightalsolike.art / www.apathcp.com

Kindly supported by Kulturamt Köln

The Moltkerei Werkstatt was founded in 1981 as a not-for-profit institution for non-traditional artists. It is especially interested in advancing the careers of performance and installation artists who engage a variety of conventional art venues.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/001-scaled.jpg

Brooke Benington is pleased to present Romance Apocalypse, a solo exhibition by Maria Szakats that probes the layered nature of intimacy, exploring the nuances of beauty and vulnerability within both personal and cultural spheres. The exhibition will be at Brooke Benington’s Fitzrovia gallery at 76 Cleveland Street, London W1T 6NB from 29 November 2024 – 25 January 2025. The public opening will take place on Thursday 28 November from 6-8 pm. The exhibition’s title – partly inspired by a slogan on a t-shirt gifted by her partner – balances emotional warmth and intellectual reflection, echoing the questions posed by theorist Eva Illouz in Consuming the Romantic Utopia. Through this dual reference, Szakats invites viewers to consider the intersections of romantic ideals and societal pressures as they emerge in our closest relationships.

Szakats, who began her creative journey in fashion design, has an intuitive fluency with her chosen medium. Her works, created by embroidering and brushing mohair yarn over printed images, reveal scenes that are at once inviting and contemplative. This tactile softness resonates through themes of nurture and intimacy she explores, particularly in her focus on the breast – used to evoke simultaneous ideas provision and the earliest frustrations of dependency. This recurring motif draws from psychoanalytic theories, reflecting how early bonds of closeness shape our adult relationships.

Works such as EAT I-III, inspired by Kleist’s Penthesilea, delve into complex dynamics of desire and disgust. The soft, blurred textures of mohair yarn enhance this sense of emotional ambiguity, exploring how beauty and repulsion can exist within the same experience. In each piece, viewers are encouraged to consider intimacy not as an absolute, but as a complex terrain where various layers of feeling coexist.

Throughout Romance Apocalypse, Szakats introduces rich imagery, including spiders as protectors and cave-like portals, evoking a sense of both sanctuary and exposure. Her use of tornado imagery captures moments of dramatic change, where intense forces move through our lives, shaping the paths of relationships and underscoring their inherent unpredictability. This meditative yet visceral process – embroidering, then brushing mohair yarn to create an ethereal blur – allows Szakats to render moments of both immediacy and reflection. In merging personal references with mythological and art-historical influences, Romance Apocalypse offers a view into the intricate fabric of intimacy, encouraging viewers to engage with its shifting, beautiful, and sometimes frightening landscape.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Maria-Szakats_PIVOINE_1.jpg

This entire series includes 15 images.

Each image emerges after the previous one or before the next. Together they form a chronological chain. They send and receive at the same time and thus communicate with each other. They also discuss their questions and outline ideas. Shortcuts, secret routes or elevators form a network of relations. This allows them to change location and remain flexible. Since they are not all on the same floor, they cannot see each other at the same time because some are higher and others lower. But it doesn’t matter to them because they know where they are. 

The exhibition Pizza, Taxi, Radio shows a selection of them.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/K1080028_WEB-scaled.jpg

 

re-
1. indicates repetition – reiteration, recurrence
2. indicates a return to previous state – revert, reconsider
3. indicates an action performed reciprocally – reject, resist, rejoice

scale
Size. Scope. Ratio. Measurement. Scale implies setting things at levels in relation to each other and possibly supposing a hierarchy between them. Measuring something is generally utilitarian, not hypothetical. The subject of measurement is implied to be something worthwhile of inspection. What we measure, mark up and archive is a tool of social production. What does one pursue to find in measurements? At hand is the question of what is being measured and why, but also the tools for measuring. An architect in ancient Rome, Vitruvius, contemplated on what could be the perfect number, suggesting that it could be 10. Ten fingers. Ten toes. The human at the center of the world. The ‘perfect product’ of proportion and scale. Vitruvius practiced this in his writings on architecture; the perfect house is built in scale and proportion to that of the human body; the perfect anatomy of a house has the atrium, the navel, in the center. Body parts were used as tools for scale; a foot is one sixth of the length of the body, the palm of a hand one fourth of a foot. From finger to finger, the length is the same as the length from head to toe. We are familiar with Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of the Vitruvian man drawn some 1400 years after Vitruvius’ propositions for proportions. The man fits inside the circle and the square. The man is proportionate, deemed as ‘perfect’. But the man is restricted; the determination for perfection will always only be a biased and hypothetical proposition. The disposition of the perfect man has been outlined. It is confined in the circle. Confined in the square. Trapped, and yet–

motion
The circle implies a motion. The disposition of the circle is constant movement. No point of end. No level to rest at. The motion is rotation. Seemingly endless rotation. Rotation at the core suggests a consequential motion elsewhere. Time and motion studies was an avant-garde field of research in the early 20th century pursuing to enhance labour (across many fields of work but mainly factory work) to be as effective and economical as could be. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth were engineers of motion studies, assessing work and motion through techniques of visualization.The Gilbreths developed their way of making a motion image: a long-exposure photograph of a worker repeatedly performing a task with a light bulb attached to the tool at hand, which would then reveal bit-by-bit the movement of a worker. They studied this image in order to find the perfect motion, or rather, eliminate all other wasteful motions. To discover the most efficient routine, the collective production process of factory labour was divided into singular, repetitive tasks. The Gilbreths recognised that even if they found the perfect routine and motion, it will always only be approximate to that of the actual work and motion. The search for perfection is always somewhat deluded. Repetition has variation, error. In reality it will always be different from the previous one, and so, also differs from the one that will come.

-Isa Lumme

 

 

 

On principles of association and the endlessness of re-scaling

We are not simple witnesses of what happens. We are the bodies through which
the mutation comes to stay. The question is no longer who we are, but what we
are going to become.1

There are at least two clear overtones in Leevi Toija’s exhibition re-scaling motion at Galerie Blunk. The first is that of the history of movement: What are the choreographies and tracks of operation through which one validates their existence? The second refers to the scale of (artistic) production: What is the motion that is re-scaled and by whom? By posing these questions in a research-based manner, Toija presents a re-scaled version of his work motion study (series), originating from this year and re-scaling itself in numerous possible futures.

In Toija’s artistic practice historical consciousness links with new interpretations of lost (or hidden by own nature) narratives. Showing the reverse side of visuality, Toija presents a new context for phenomena where the textual has ruled. Toija’s artistic practice can be, thus, seen as an architecture of the amorphous; the works show their subtle infrastructure-critical tone in their ways of being, at the same time, contemporary and local. They are of necessity but without a singular purpose.

The exhibition at Galerie Blunk continues the praxis of circulative site-observations which are at the core of Toija’s artistic work. This can be understood as a type of nomadism where certain elements – such as the camera, the relation to space – stay, and a certain, for example place, changes or evolves. Toija works across countries and locations, always forming an unambiguous relation to the place of working. From this point of view, it is impossible to pin down a definitive category of historical references in the exhibition.

In re-scaling motion, the relationship between the used technology and the work itself (read: visuality) is underlined. The camera – operated by Zaher Jureidini – stays and projects, referring to the soviet avant-garde activist Aleksej Gastev, whose photographs of worker’s body movements while conducting their labor can be thought of as a map for recursiveness. The moving images create a possibility to critically examine the (different) realities of work, modes of operation, structures inhabited by the living and the technical, and the changes in them.

There is a certain aspect of obscurity present for there is no clear line where the characteristic of an artwork starts, and where the association of ideas are looped in itself. The idea is both general and complex, presenting multiple subcategories of – for example, relation, substance, and the principles of associations. The screens present a never ending (or at least referring to a never-ending character) loop, questioning the need for a set of principles at all.

-Eero Karjalainen

1 Paul B Preciado (2022). Dysphoria mundi: El Sonido del Mundo Derrumbándose, 38. Translation by João Laia. In Forms of the Surrounding Futures. GIBCA 12th edition. Gothenburg: Röda Sten Konsthall

 

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/web-22-scaled.jpg

The following is a romanticised extract from the Interceptor’s log, registered by the core operational module and communicated to the D02.2 spacecraft.

“47288181 hU away!” ~ «Yes, closing in!» ~ “Keep steady.” ~ «Course?» ~ “Course correct.”

Exception: malformed data chunk

«The last time its presence was recorded, 1984; once more in 2024, but this may have been a fluke—since then? Nothing.» ~ “1984?” ~ «Gregorian… 2024 still unconfirmed.»

Exception: malformed data chunk

WARNING: hibernation enabled

WARNING: hibernation ended in NaN U

“Seems like the faint blip on the radar has been there for a while.” ~ «A malfunction?» ~ “Could be.Likely with this old hardware, but can’t confirm.” ~ «This system hasn’t been updated in…» ~ “40 Mega aeons!” They laugh—well, not really, but a chuckle is logged. “The blip is faint, but how fit is this detector?” ~ «Surely that should’ve been so worn out by now… it’s miraculous there’s been any blip at all.»

“3738286 hU.”

«Is it even worth it at that point? » ~ “I calculated the chance we’ll make it at 3458%.” ~ «I don’t think that’s correct. » ~ “Okay, how about 0.4%.” ~ «Is that a lot? » ~ “I think it’s close to an absolute” ~ «Right… perhaps we should just go. » ~ “Not like we aren’t already going.”

WARNING: hibernation enabled

WARNING: hibernation ended in 3618855 U

«How much time has passed since my last message? » ~ “373827 hU.” ~ «Hibernation speeds things up a bit. » ~ “Sure does, and I enjoy it too… uhm, together.” ~ «Just very unfortunate that we have lost… one moment, just retrieving it from cold storage, J4-00n.» ~ “Yes, J4-00n was good company. A darn good sleeper besides.” ~ «Sometimes you have to minimise load though—and that’s what J also was. » ~ “S-sure thing—but J was good at calculation.”

«And you aren’t good? » ~ “Uhm, yes certainly, and very vital for our functioning… 63722 hU.” «Now that’s close, right? » “Potentially so, yes.”

They log an awkward silence, some malformed data, and on they go.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/01_Plicnik_Log-3_install_01393-scaled.jpg

In 1996, Heimo Zobernig produced an emblematic edition for the CEC. At the time, Zobernig’s focus was on handmade and artisanal objects. His method? Printing old, damaged and broken lithographic stones. These stones, of which there were 15, were simply polished, then coated with black ink, the printing being limited to a simple transfer onto the paper, revealing shapes and lines resulting from the breaks in these modified surfaces, as they were. These 15 lithographs were reduced to a black, monochrome surface, each printed in an edition of four copies, one e.a. and one H.C. These black rectangles or squares on a white background bore direct comparison to Malevich’s historic black square, with all the distancing, irony and mischief contained in this gesture. Zobernig deconstructs and simplifies the historical references to modernism and minimalism with which his work is associated, shifting them to the field of design and graphics. The technical criteria of a craft – at the time, lithography – are also taken literally: a surface coated with ink, transferred directly onto a sheet of paper, the only motif being the lines of the breaks in this series of stones, found in an old stockpile, forgotten and unusable. A kind of game with a local situation, that of this obsolete workshop from another time, playfully reactivated.

Zobernig pushes his quest for simplification, clarity and neutrality to the level of the simple object. Artistic expression is reduced to a minimum. His strategies include objectification, reduction, standardisation and systemisation. This distancing enables him to shift his perspective, to cultivate a pragmatism that is always tinged with irony, free from pathos, and foremost determined by an unwavering search for autonomy. In reality, Zobernig approaches text like a graphic designer; colour like a “scientist”; objects like an industrialist; space like a scenographer or an architect.

The artist’s production system is broken down into several series, including the shelving structures and bookcases that seem to have been inspired by the famous Billy model, emblematic of Ikea furniture shops. An ironic reference, perhaps, to the modules created by Donald Judd or those used in Robert Morris’ scenographies. These bookcase-structures first appeared in his solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zürich in 2011, then at the Museum Bärengasse in 2015, at the KUB in Bregenz and, more recently, at the Mumok in Vienna in 2021. These large series of bookcases are transformed into exhibition displays, architectural structures that intersperse, enter into dialogue with, and sometimes exalt or outright transform the architecture of these institutions.

For some years now, Zobernig has been introducing colour and material variations into his work, as well as sculptural figures, like mannequins in a shop window: non-gendered, schematic, standard human bodies. Geometric, modular figures with balanced proportions, envisaged as elements of architecture, in the image of Le Corbusier’s Modulor. Other stereotypes spring to mind, emblems of the monumental statuary: from ancient statues to the robot-women in Metropolis, Georg Kolbe’s sculpture Der Morgen for Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion in Barcelona, and even statuettes from the Oscars or Hollywood film credits.

Zobernig introduces a break with this monumental, authoritarian classicism. He manipulates, deconstructs, literally turns his figures upside down and sometimes even disguises them. As composites, they are made up of several body parts from different sources: the artist’s head or body glued to bits of old sculptures. Others are reduced to their production method: from 3D to the first bronze casts, left in their raw, unfinished state, broken, more or less well reconstructed, oxidised, chipped or rusted. Some mannequins hang from the shelves of his bookcase-structures, twisted, dislocated, more dramatic, oscillating between mummified, digital and archaic beings.

Zobernig also uses his own body, practising self-reference and self-mockery. In a video made in 1989 (No. 3), he dances, wearing an improbable wig with long hair made of chiffon. He re-enacted this scene in 2023 (no 33), wearing a similar outfit. His body and gestures had changed, becoming stiffer, clumsier, more tired: distancing and irony applied to himself.

Heimo Zobernig’s exhibition at the CEC features a range of productions and editions: five metal bookcases; three screenprints in three combinations of colours and three different qualities of paper (black/white/silver), made up of horizontal lines and the words SELF SHELF EDITION: self-editions, self-shelves, shelf-editions. SELF SHELF, the phonetic proximity of these two words, typographical too, with an extra H between SELF and SHELF, H as in Heimo, H as in a shelf. A play on sounds and words, an association that Zobernig makes with humour between himself and a shelf. These “crosswords” could well have been the title of this exhibition: objects produced, edited and exhibited together with their production system. Shelves, screenprints, flyers and posters produced in Vienna and Geneva, by Zobernig and the CEC, from a distance.

The three 50 x 70 cm screenprints, each with a print run of 10, are also available as flyers (200 copies of one of the screenprints on a white background, paper size: A4) and three posters (three copies, in F4 format). Each of these large posters is printed in black, breaking down and recomposing the different elements: one poster with only the horizontal lines, another with only the words, and the third with the lines and the words.

Heimo Zobernig was born in Mauthen in 1958. He lives and works in Vienna. Some of his most recent exhibitions include: Heimo Zobernig & László Moholy-Nagy, Galerie Nagel Draxler Crypto Kiosk, Berlin (2024); Heimo Zobernig, Galerija Manuš, Split (2024); Richard Hoeck/Heimo Zobernig, 1997/2013, Meliksetian Briggs gallery, Los Angeles (2024); Heimo Zobernig, Meyer Kainer Gallery, Vienna, (2024); Heimo Zobernig, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris (2023); Heimo Zobernig. Der Bildhauer als Zeichner, Kunstraum St. Virgil, Salzburg (2023); Das Grafische Werk, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2022); Heimo Zobernig. tHIs oLD nEw, Galerie Bärbel Grässlin, Frankfurt (2022); Enjoy, MUMOK, Vienna (2021); Heimo Zobernig. Spirit Fuck Painting, MARe, Bucharest (2022).

His work has also featured in various group exhibitions, including ECCENTRIC. Aesthetics of Freedom, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2024); Kiesler Today. Work dialogues with contemporaries, Kunsthaus Zug, Zug (2024); Bernard Frize, Matt Mullican, Niele Toroni, Heimo Zobernig, Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp (2024); From the Collection: Together – Collaborative Art Practices, S.M.A.K., Ghent (2024); Dan Graham. Optics and Humor, Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna (2024); Galerie Christine Mayer, Munich (2024); Soliloquies, Petzel Gallery, New York (2024); Blank.Raw. Illegible. Artists’ Books as Statement (1960-2022), Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren (2023) ; HERE AND NOW II. Vienna Sculpture 2023, Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Vienna (2023); Out of the Box, Schaulager, Basel (2023); Alvin Baltrop, Wade Guyton, Heimo Zobernig, Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich (2022); Avant-garde and Contemporary Art, Belvedere Museum Vienna, Belvedere 21, Vienna (2022); The Drawing Centre Show, Consortium Museum, Dijon (2022).

 

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/2024_CEC_EXPO_HEIMO-ZOBERNIG_010-1-scaled.jpg

Is the city a diseased organism or an open living space? Matt Welch’s work focuses on the urban environment and its impact on people. He poses critical questions about Siegen’s social space, for example through a video filmed in the old Karstadt building. Through his art, Welch filters sociological reflections in a critical light, highlighting the dangers of a consumer-driven, one-dimensional exploitation of urban spaces.
Born in Liverpool in 1988, Matt Welch works at the intersection of installation, sculpture, video, drawing and sound. His immersive works explore the relationship between physicality and infrastructure, drawing parallels between biological processes such as breathing, digestion and excretion, and urban systems such as transport and information. This exploration is also evident in his sculptures Theatre 1 and Theatre 2. These forms evoke architectural models as well as the internal structures of human organs, where the movement and exchange of substances symbolically represent the traversal of spaces or pathways. Here, both bodies and buildings act as protective shells and retreats – the skin shields the body’s interior, while architecture serves as a sanctuary for people.

The installed wall creates a dark corridor, transporting us into a mysterious sphere and addressing the dual meanings of inside and outside, front and back, visible and hidden. An integrated one-way mirror acts as a window on one side of the corridor, allowing light into the space, and as a mirror on the other. This interplay between reflection and transparency allows viewers to observe the video and other visitors from the corridor without being seen themselves. This subtle tension between visibility and invisibility turns the viewer’s gaze into an active, voyeuristic act, addressing issues of surveillance, privacy and the boundary between public and private space.

The final episode of a video trilogy entitled The Secret Millionaire was filmed by Welch in Frankfurt’s Europaviertel, an area once inhabited by workers and now dominated by modern skyscrapers, reflecting the profound transformation of urban landscapes. The title of the trilogy, The Secret Millionaire, refers to a British reality show in which millionaires anonymously visit impoverished neighbourhoods to offer support. For the Interiors exhibition, Matt Welch filmed in the Karstadt building, which has been empty since 2023, one of those iconic but increasingly disused department stores. The video unfolds a dystopian scene: empty shelves, dark storerooms and naked mannequins stand eerily still in a space that once teemed with life.

An unseen protagonist wanders through the abandoned building like a forgotten witness. His presence is perceived only through soft footsteps and heavy breathing, adding to the oppressive atmosphere of the space and creating a sense that he is the last person left in this once vibrant place, now lost and alone amidst silent decay.

For decades, department stores were central landmarks and vital attractions in urban life. However, changes in consumer behaviour – driven by the rise of online shopping and the relocation of shopping centres to the suburbs – have led to increasing urban vacancies. These abandoned buildings reflect a dilemma facing many cities: empty spaces, a lack of commercial activity and declining footfall. This situation raises fundamental questions: How can public spaces be used in the future? How do changing consumption patterns affect the function and vibrancy of urban life? It also highlights the increasing commercialisation and capitalist exploitation of urban spaces.

As part of the exhibition, a roundtable discussion entitled ‚The Value of Vacant Spaces – Opportunities for City and Culture‘ will take place with Thorsten Erl, Simon Neumayer and other guests. The exhibition will close on 8 December at 4 pm with a guided tour by curator Jennifer Cierlitza. The exhibition is supported by Kunststiftung NRW and Stiftung Kunstfonds.

 

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/1.-Installationview-Interiors-scaled.jpg https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/flats_01-scaled.jpg

A solo exhibition by Sam Keogh titled ‘The Unicorn Surrenders to the Maiden Cartoon’ at the Atletika gallery, curated by David Dale Gallery. 

The Unicorn Surrenders To the Maiden Cartoon is an installation of collage, sculpture and performance by Sam Keogh which critically engages depictions of pre-modern Europe in both tapestries and mass media genre fantasy. The work draws on The Unicorn Surrenders To A Maiden, a badly damaged 16th Century Flemish tapestry that survives today in two fragments and hangs in the Met Cloisters as part of a famous series of tapestries known as The Hunt of the Unicorn.

 

At the time of the French Revolution, the original tapestries were owned by members of the French Nobility – the House of Rochefoucauld. Such artifacts were often destroyed or expropriated in acts of iconoclasm against the Ancient Régime, which is likely why only fragments of the tapestry remain. The surviving remnants are pockmarked by areas of damage and repair, forming a material index of revolutionary events, each one a fraying, tearing, and patching up of Europe’s historical narrative.

 

In The Unicorn Surrenders to a Maiden Cartoon, the fantastic scenes depicted in the tapestry are re-made as a ‘cartoon’, or 1:1 scale working drawing made for the production of a tapestry. Here, the rarefied hortus conclusus of the Unicorn is invaded by monstrous entities. Their forms are a Frankensteined combination of limbs, heads, faces and personal effects from an array of sources. Some hands hold scissors or craft knives, suggesting that they have collaged themselves together before cutting and pasting themselves into the world of the tapestries, exploiting its sutured wounds as entry points. Limbs are multiplied and entangled, and faces are made up from folded, torn, and recomposed layers of background and foreground. It’s difficult to tell where distinct bodies begin and end or whether they are destroying or building the world they inhabit.

 

At Atletika, Keogh gave a live performance bringing the work’s characters into dialogue. A maiden sits in a walled garden awaiting the arrival of a unicorn when she is confronted by Meg Mucklebones, the ‘swamp hag’ from Ridley Scott’s ‘Legend’ (1985). During the performance, Keogh unfolds the work’s physical elements, metamorphosing its characters as they speak about knots; the myth of Europa; and the history of the EU flag. 

 

Sam Keogh (1985, Wicklow, Ireland. Lives and works between Glasgow and Co. Wicklow, Ireland) works across sculpture, collage, video, installation and performance. His installations include intricately made sculpture and collage which often act as props, backdrops and visual scripts for performances. Taking the form of fractured monologues, the performances present characters who are pulled apart by their efforts to convey a theory, anecdote or historical event. Here, the work’s physical, gestural and linguistic materials combine to create grubby cognitive maps of interconnecting themes as varied as masculinity, colonialism, science fiction and the politics of popular culture. Sam Keogh received an MFA from Goldsmiths, London in 2014 and completed the Rijksakadmie residency in Amsterdam in 2017. His work has been exhibited at Primary, Nottingham: Goldsmiths CCA, London; Museo Madre, Naples; Centre Pompidou, Paris; 15th Lyon Biennial; The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin and Eva International, Limerick.

 

This exhibition is organised by the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association together with David Dale Gallery. LIAA activities are supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius City Municipality. The exhibition is supported by Creative Scotland, The Arts Council of Ireland, and Culture Ireland.

 

David Dale Gallery is a non-profit contemporary art space based in Glasgow, Scotland. The exhibition is part of David Dale Gallery’s annual international exchange programme, and they hosted an exhibition curated by the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association in 2023.

 

Exhibition dates & times: 2024/11/01 – 12/14

Thursdays and Fridays 16.00–19.00, Saturdays 13.00–17.00. 

Address: Vitebsko 21, Vilnius.

 

www.atletikaprojects.lt

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/1.-Sam-Keogh.-The-Unicorn-Surrenders-to-the-Maiden-Cartoon.-Exhibition-at-Atletika-gallery.-Photographer-Max-Slaven-scaled.jpg https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Costa_MichealKennedy12123-copy-2-1-scaled.jpg https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/OfficeImpart_LenaEmrich-Exh_MBP-8-scaled.jpg

For their new solo show BONYLAB, the artist duo Juri Simoncini and Elisa Diaferia focus their research on the world of film production. Coming at it from an angle that favors the implicit, preliminary disciplines behind filmmaking, they consider the medium as a container of translation processes. From an inquiry approach that’s therefore primarily linguistic, they look into the narrative, sensorial and transactional implications that regulate the relation between drawing, sound, written word and movement. The movie is intended here, rather than a medium per se to make use of, as a structure, a framework to observe the tension points in the assembly line of worldbuilding, where linguistic negotiations are continuously entertained. Through the diversified and multidirectional processing of the same content, stories are fragmented into a suspended, anxious state of existence. This space, where the blind spots of communication emerge, is the object of this show.

Drawing freely from the classic sci-fi short story “The Preserving Machine” by Philip K. Dick, the duo developed an original script that constitutes the starting point of the whole project. Dick’s text interestingly explores the role of music in culture, a promethean idea of hero, fascinating images of metamorphosis and themes of moral responsibility. Moreover, the story features a mysterious machine, a character in its own right, that is offered as a non specific, abstract presence, and nevertheless embodies the logic and moral functioning of the entire text. With this aspect raising questions about accessibility in the context of storytelling, the artists expanded on it, carrying on a long held interest in machinic imagery. In their text, focusing on themes of guilt, transformation and sonic perception, the machine is treated as an acousmêtre: it remains behind the threshold of a door and perceived just through the sound it emits and, visually, through the products of its activation.

Overall, the script combines the sci-fi, crime and musical genres, and the project represents a theatrical endeavor to create a landscape where a refracted spacial experience of the story is possible. In doing so, the artists expose and linger on the specificities of the movie apparatus. The division of work in a chain of tasks assigned to interdependent specialists in continuous dialogue, makes of film production a particularly choral machine, which calls for the creation of codes aimed at maximizing efficiency of communication between crews. These codes become an interesting area of survey, as even within a set of conventions they escape standardization, and shape themselves organically and in unique manners according to the sets of parties involved. An unstable grammatical window is created, one that holds the tensions within operatic pragmatism and abstract, poetic channeling; as singular graphic, written or oral forms of instruction take shape. It’s a fluid space between intent and delivery, a workplace where communicative transactions are constantly necessary yet dependent on the volubility of arbitrary encoding choices.

Looking at these aspects, the artists have chosen to focus in the first place on the dialogue between recorded sound and drawing, intended as the main generative force behind the narrative tension in the show, questioning their possibilities of interaction once removed from a cinematic fruition. Taking up the roles of the “storyboard” and the “score”, two pieces will then hold the center of the stage.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           A drawing based installation, hanging from the ceiling, constitutes the visual representation of the story in the form of drawn sequences, highlighting the essential friction point of the storyboard medium. On one hand, the practical requirements of efficiency that it needs to meet are manifested in the form of notation systems and graphic devices aimed at conveying instructions and information in an assumed functionalist way. On the other, these very devices hold inescapable aesthetic peculiarities that put it in conversation with other forms of visual storytelling such as comic strips and graphic novels, while also revealing its implicit relationship with labor.

As a counterpart, a layered sound piece will regularly activate the scenic space of the show like a condensed, intermittent musical. Intended as the all-encompassing sonic component of the story, this track is realized through a process of collecting ambient sound, recording scripted dialogue and producing original music, providing the listener with an horizontal landscaping that gives voice to the characters and their surroundings at the same time. Mixing rap strategies, opera structures and broadway tropes with cinematic foley techniques, it results in a capricious and fragmented structure that proves elusive, shedding light on selected narrative moments while also remaining dependent on the potential live editing operated by the visitor. Like the drawings, the tracks offer only a partial insight into the exact unraveling of the story, as the practice of worldbuilding itself is as much their object as it is the actual script.                                                          The show is completed with movie and stage props retrieved from local production studios, manipulated into a larger sculptural context within which the story can come to be: a set where complexity and accessibility can coexist, where “simple elements” can amplify and at the same time specify the discourse. All across it, written word and moving image become limited resources and yet a hovering presence. With its final spatial resolution, then, the narration can investigate and reflect on the relationship between elements as voice and body, apparatus and diegesis, telling and showing, mythology and landscape.

Elisa Diaferia and Juri Simoncini are an Italian artist duo active between Germany and Italy. Their research, straddling sculpture and digital practices, is grounded on an interest in the limits and possibilities of language and storytelling. A logic of refraction and redistribution of information bits is the constructive principle for hyper-layered, clue-bearing installations that observe the potential of a critical mass to contain meaning. In their practice, a case of study is often ‘rewritten’ through an injective research approach, making of it a tool for fantasy and speculation, and allowing stories to become unstable. With a sculptural attitude to sound, and a musical one to form, they bridge languages with a focus on machinic imagery, as a revealing space for the phenomenological structure of things. Appropriating codes and communicative formats, they explore the way that cosmologies come to be, worlds are built and myths are born. Their work has been shown across Europe in Italy, Germany, The UK and Switzerland, including recent solo shows such as The best night goggles ever, at saasfee*satellit, Frankfurt am Main. In 2024, as a duo, they’ve been awarded the Portikus Prize.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/1-6-scaled.jpg

With the exhibition Milk Plus, Jens Settergren examines in a magnificent and sensory-saturated video installation the collective images linked to the human body and its reproduction, optimization and commercialization in our time.

With an interest in power and the imaginary world of modern society in all that it entails of high technology and constant improvement, Settergren presents a multi-channel video installation that takes the form of a surreal milk advertisement. In a hypnotizing and sensory-stimulating way, the work transports the audience into a separate and synthetic universe, where milk possesses a fascinating and transformative power beyond the usual.

In Milk Plus, the pervasive presence of milk is essential as it has a stream of strong and opposing connotations attached to it in our society and language. Milk evokes associations with nourishment and connection both physically and psychologically between mother and child. Here, milk is associated with innocence and purity. At the same time, milk is used as a metaphor for material wealth and our economies designed to “milk” every resource. In Milk Plus, this takes shape in Settergren’s imagery, when the advertising-like velvety soft and chalk-white milk flows in slow-motion before our gaze, and is sometimes animated in a creation-mythological manner to possess its own agency. The milk is both tempting, but also disturbing in view of the advertising’s goal of increased consumption, when magical worlds are created in which our imagination and desire are not limited.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/milk-plus_jens-settergren_viborg-kunsthal_018_photo-by-david-stjernholm.jpg.webp

Weatherproof is excited to present Current, with new work from Jesse Benson, Alli Melanson, and Sara Yukiko. Concurrent exhibition posters from each artist will be available at the gallery.

A fool’s errand, one that can only be marked as such after the fact. One that can whiz right by you if you aren’t decisive enough, you can’t take back a flash in the pan. Although there is a difficulty to plot it, there hasn’t been any shortage of folks who have tried to make a profession out of attempting to put their finger on it. A corollary question now sprinkled: where are you going and to what end will you continue to walk? You will pass things on walls that are now irrelevant, numerous objects of all different sizes, in a chain of descending entities that is probably endless, bearing wheels that screech around a looped track you once spent afternoons afoot–‘turtles all the way down’—maybe army, maybe navy, time with a cataract does a number on you. In our vicarious medium, they withdrew from mutual contact, and encounter each other only as translations or caricatures. Walking here was nice but it was dark and mostly quiet save for the rattle of a week-sized suitcase past bins the color of ink in the light. That noise is awful, but maybe talking would have been better to cover it up and to stop the words from dissolving into a dream-like glow of TV static. It is important to keep moving even in the weakest of states. A hero’s journey in the moonlight. You whush on by, you begin to move fast and break things, sideswiping vehicles modified with USB sticks who’s many pings illuminate a path of where you have been, your suitcase rumbling on behind you now wearing a silver patina of collected marks. You make a turn and look over your shoulder to reveal a wake of negligent scuffs. Course correct. Feeling the need to progress and obligated to carry on the tradition, wobbling like Giacometti man your limbs quivering from the collateral damage, a fascist symmetry. You trudge on past the many bungalows in the night, if for no other reason than faith, guided by the tides to finally reach the shore. The many notes scrawled out mentally and the short monologues spoken into that dinky, whirring tape recorder are revealed to be obsolete now, basking in the presence of this evening’s newly selected destination. The house gorged down into the bowel of a ship not so much in illumination as in a sincere inability to know what was down, where your core went if you lost it momentarily or which path a pin would take dropping soundlessly into blue carpet. When you are given a room away from home how many times out of ten might it be a refuge?

///

Jesse Benson (b. 1978, Orange, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. He holds an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design and a BFA from Cal State University Long Beach, Select solo exhibitions include Organizer at as-is.la, Los Angeles (2023), You Are Someone I Can Tell My Secrets To at LOCKER, John Marshall High School, Los Angeles, (2020), and Miracle Grow at Michael Benevento, Los Angeles (2017). Recent group exhibitions include ASHES/ASHES, New York (2023), Night Gallery and as-is.la, Los Angeles (2021), Rita Urso/Artopia Gallery, Milan, Italy (2018) and Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles (2017).

Alli Melanson lives and works in Montréal. She holds an MFA from Concordia University (Montréal) and a BFA from OCAD University (Toronto). Solo exhibitions include 100 Bell Towers, Joe Project, Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, and Chris Andrews (all Montréal). She has participated in group exhibitions at Cherry Hill (Cologne), Chris Andrews, Franz Kaka (Toronto) and Alyssa Davis (NYC). She will present a solo exhibition at Bonny Poon / Conditions (Toronto) in November, 2024.

Sara Yukiko (b. 1996, San Francisco, CA) is a multidisciplinary artist and designer living and working in New York, New York. She graduated from UCLA with a BA in Design Media Arts in 2018. Solo and duo exhibitions include 11:11 at Gern en Regalia, New York (2022), Pirouette at Estrella Gallery, New York (2022) and Two Birds, One Stone at Gern en Regalia, New York (2020). Selected group exhibitions include Produit Rien, Montreal (2024); Art et Amicitiae, Amsterdam (2024); A.D., New York (2024); Brunette Coleman at Shoot the Lobster, New York (2023); and Entrance Gallery, New York (2022). Her upcoming solo exhibition, XO Show, at Gern en Regalia opens November 8.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/2-8-scaled.jpg

a hand and a leaf

a branch and an arm

a foot a twisting root

 

large horizons

closing in

circling back

 

doubling distances

touching in a fold

 

a gush of wind

sweeping the grass

ants like pearls

 

eyes like dew

forming at dawn

skin as soil

 

soil as felt

on fingertips

 

composting

worlds and

sensible spores

 

carrier of more

 

bodies

belonging

to rivers

to moving waters

 

flowing and

slowly becoming

 

unmade

undone

and one

at once

 

 

Alina Vergnano (b.Torino, 1989) is an Italian artist based in Oslo. She holds an MFA from the Art Academy in Bergen. With the line as a point of depar­ture, she explores concepts of fluidity, time, and entanglement, working at the intersection of drawing, painting, and poetry. Recent exhibitions include LNM, Oslo; Sixi Museum, Nanjing; Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen; JVDW, Dus­seldorf; MLAG, Bergen; Roman Road, London, and MELK, Oslo, among others.

 

The exhibition is the conclusion of her stay at the ARV.International artist residency in Vishovgrad, Bulgaria. Heerz Tooya and ARV.International are run by Lars Nordby.

The exhibition is supported by BKV, Billedkunstnernes Verdelagsfond.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/0.jpg https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Lukas_Schmenger_Trust19.jpg https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Almudena-Lobera_Rest_Parra-Romero_2024_8-scaled.jpg

Spontaneous mutations occur in all living organisms. They appear without human intervention, as another manifestation of how unpredictable nature can be. Rose breeders call such specimens “sports”. They differ from the original variety in color, growth pattern or flower form. Nadia Markiewicz came across this phenomenon while looking for an analogy between her own disabled body and anomalies occurring in nature. In both humans and roses, mutations may appear randomly, affecting the appearance of bodies or bushes. Gardening enthusiasts admire sports, making them almost celebrities in the world of botany. They breed them, hoping that a specific change will also appear in the “offspring” of the mutant.

During trips to botanical gardens, the artist began to photograph these unique specimens of roses, which became the main motif of the Mutants project. Markiewicz places oversized photos of mutant roses in the gallery space, filling the space of a Gothic, desacralized church. The site-specific installation resembles a monstrous garden overgrown with flower specimens admired for their uniqueness. Decorated with point bulbs, they emanate their own light, which emphasizes their peculiarity and value (including the economic one). Even though they do not resemble weeds or self-seeders, their presence in the brick space signals a disturbance of order, a takeover by unpredictable forces of nature. The background of the Gothic space, with its load of meaning, refers to considerations directed towards the human. Otherness and anomalies regarding the body have not been celebrated in the same way as in the world of plants. 

From the very beginning, the Gothic was associated with otherness. Its name comes from the Germanic tribes, which were perceived by the Romans and Greeks as the personification of the figure of the “other”, carrying the threat of the “stranger”. Later it returned as a metaphor for an untamed, chaotic style that contradicted the classical rules of proportion. This resulted in its association with distortion, darkness and finally deformation. With the historical return of the Gothic, society once again came face to face with otherness – whether in the 19th century Gothic novel, 20th century horror cinema, or the alternative scene of the 1980s and 1990s, Gothic antagonists always represented otherness. Jack Halberstam, in his essay Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, points out that this queerness was often manifested through corporeality in its non-normative dimension. It was the body, deformed as in Frankenstein’s or unnaturally pale and soulless as in Dracula’s, that was an element of building horror. His otherness has always been constructed against the default white, male, heterosexual and able-bodied normativity. Everything that went beyond the default bodily, gender and cultural norms appeared as a terrifying monstrosity. Markiewicz deliberately uses non-human bodies, changing the rhetoric of fear, disgust and compassion into a narrative of affirmation of biodiversity and uniqueness.

The “sports” photographed by the artist also appear on the gallery walls. They were exposed in negatoscopes used in medicine to view X-ray images. The method of presentation refers to the medicalization to which the unique features of human bodies are subjected, but due to the nature of the entire exhibition, they can be seen as an analogy to movie posters depicting screen stars. The goal is not to detect anomalies, but rather to celebrate and advertise the distinctiveness of specimens, treated not only as curiosities, but also as potential progenitors of new species.

The artist plays with visual clichés, balancing between pop, medical and gothic iconosphere, celebrating difference according to her own rules. There are no stereotypical depictions of organisms with disabilities, but there is glitz, monumentality and even controlled grotesque. Otherness is affirmed, not only bodily, but also understood as any departure from culturally determined norms. In Markiewicz’s work, queerness is not synonymous with error or distortion. Rather, it is an incentive to consider what and why we consider normal or normative.

Text by Gabi Skrzypczak

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/01S2024_09_12-GaleriaEl-Nadia-Markiewicz-25-f@Bartek-Zalewski-photo-scaled.jpg

Press release by Hector Campbell 

Exhibition text by Oluwatobiloba Ajayi – ‘So be it, see to it!’ 

India Nielsen website: www.indianielsen.com

India Nielsen bio:

India Nielsen (b. 1991) lives and works in London. She received her MA in Painting from The Royal College of Art in 2018, having previously completed her BA in Fine Art at The Slade School of Fine Art. Nielsen was included in Soup gallery’s inaugural group exhibition ‘All The Small Things’ in November 2023.⁣

Previous solo exhibitions include ‘Time Is With Me Now’ at Well Projects (Margate, 2024), ‘I’m in the dark right now (feeling lost but I like it)’ at Kebbel-Villa (Bavaria, 2023), ‘Emotional Metabolism 1991 – 2023’ at BeAdvisors (Milan, 2023), ‘Crybaby’ at imlabor (Tokyo, 2021) and ‘M is for Madonna, M is for Mariah, M is for Mother’ at Darren Flook (London, 2021). Recent group exhibitions include ‘Surfing The Hell Realm’ at St. Chads (London, 2023), ‘A Gift to the Dark’ at VIN VIN (Vienna, 2023), ‘City Entwined’ at Paradise Row (London, 2022), ‘ASSEMBLE’ at VO Curations (London, 2022), and ‘The Bright Side of the Moon’ at Annarumma Gallery (Naples, 2022).⁣

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/9-You-and-I-Altarpiece-in-five-parts-copper-oil-and-wood-on-canvas-2024-scaled.jpghttps://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Metal_and_the_Flesh_01-scaled.jpg

SETAREH is thrilled to present Resilient to the Bones, an exhibition by Canadian artist Caroline Monnet. Including photography, sculpture and multimedia wall pieces, the exhibition presents a diverse range of recent work. Having presented an extensive exhibition of video work at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, in 2021, this will be the first presentation of Monnet’s experimental forms in Germany. 

Caroline Monnet draws from her studies in Sociology and Communications for a research based practice which investigates Indigenous experience through history and into today. By interweaving the geometries of past and present, her work realises complex hybrid forms to express this bicultural experience. Often incorporating contemporary building materials, multiple graphic traditions are conjoined in the works, exploring the interrelated aspects of Modern and Indigenous image making. This unique language expresses itself as a porthole of understanding, a space that both exposes imperialist structures and offers aesthetic potentials of cross cultural fertilisation towards a commonality. 

Important for the works in Resilient to the Bones, and characteristic of much art by Caroline Monnet, is exploring the notion of home. We encounter this first in a literal sense, compositions made with customary building materials. These industrially fabricated materials used in home construction are common across the globe. The artworks take this physicality head on, exposing the materials which usually lay hidden under floors and behind walls. She has spoken about wanting to expose the bones of our houses, our unnatural but essential built habitats. Here are those materials used to keep nature out. Miraculous insulators which hold the good heat in and various temperature fluctuations at bay. Here they are laid bare, their unnaturalness exposed. Often composed of plastics and glues that may cause health problems, these components meant to condition nature often become a conditioning element of their own. When the materials fail, such as when pink insulation gets wet and rendered futile, they become the fecund home for mold, nourished unseen behind these barriers, often becoming the black mold know as stachybotrys chartarum. Now a harbinger for spores, these artificially constructed ecosystems become poisonous homes, homes which erode immune function and undermine emotional, spiritual and psychological well being. The very environments meant to hold and protect instead unfortunately harm. Monnet takes up these materials, not merely to indicate their unstable and potentially damaging dimensions, but to realise works that transform their ubiquitous presence. Her project transforms them into something which can hold the values of creativity and inspiration beyond their purely economic functionality. In doing so, she is interested in utilising the methods of Indigenous cultural knowledge to transform these products themselves into portals for new becoming.

Caustic Lights is a diptych composed of under-flooring, a dense material used beneath floorboards for insulation and sound absorption. The lines are adapted from traditional Anishinaabe designs, patterns used on regalia or moccasins to tell stories and identify families at gatherings. Monnet’s contemporary interpretations are made on the computer. She sees this as a form of futurism, the lines sharing visual similitude with QR codes or digital mapping. The commodification of the Commons also influences these trace forms. From an Indigenous world view, land is not something that one can own, it is something we are one with it and which we actually belong to. Monnet became interested in the drafting of maps by looking at the way her mothers community of Kitigan Zibi Anishinaabeg was parcelled and compartmentalised in rectangular shapes. Thinking across multiple generations, she explores how modernism reformed the land around us, making borders amongst neighbours. Tracing these figures she tracks how these divisions form the economy of land. Extraction and manufacture also make their impactful scars, forests burnt down to provide room for agriculture, clear cutting for forestry, the redirection of waterways with the intrusion of roads and utilities. The work seeks to imagine how this treatment of land effects everything we are. Never repeating the same design twice, she creates ever shifting compositional varieties as a form of language that evolves over time. It is the language of her futurist imaginings. Monnet lets these figures unroll while creating the design, entering a meditative state she charts their ebbs and flows as expressions. The Caustic Lights shimmer when the sun hits the water, glimmering luster on the surface. The title of the piece is reflective of the colours chosen and how the geometries work through the materials themselves to realise images of the natural environment.

In other works the use of traditional methods guides the creation of the image. Wanagay takes a disposable plastic material that is on every construction site, used to cover floors, generally protect from construction dust, close off open windows, and other production solutions. It has been taken from these temporary tasks and claimed as image and support. The material has been woven with traditional technique for baskets and shot through with strokes of black embroidery. The grommets that punctuate the parameter gesture to utility. Monnet says the work is inspired by woven eel traps. Interlocking the bands of polyurethane realises an oscillating shimmer which catches light like scales, a translation of the works title. Framing the Bones also takes up construction plastic and stretches it across a grid of four stretchers. This internal support from these structural bones are exposed, the wood showing through, its apparatus a visible part of the whole. Traditional designs drafted by computer are concisely embroidered across this utilitarian surface. The punctuated lines of thread mark out a cosmic plan, a centrifugal configuration in blues, black and red, a potential map for future thinking. Worlds Apart uses two types of contrasting building material, press board to signify natural as opposed to industrially reflective insulation board, which are then carved with a traditionally inspired design. Again interested in addressing colonial encounters, the Anishinaabee motives with flower like shapes started to appeared after European contact. Taking these settler influenced designs, Caroline vectorizes them on the computer. She sees them as portals which contain traditional knowledge, wisdom which extends through and beyond notions of past and present, transcending Western concepts of time and space. 

To access this wisdom we need to eschew linear assumptions and approach them in a manner which allows them to speak. Some formal aspects are taken directly from oral histories of these designs, like that a triangle going up means sky, one pointing down earth. Incorporated into Monnet’s pictures she utilises this knowledge to recognise that in Indigenous teaching we are always a part of the bigger world, that even here in compartmentalised conditions we are actually always impacted by the everything. In our highly divided world, one of deep separation and conflict, this knowledge is shared to bring us together and acknowledge that we are actually a whole. Through contemporary configurations based in ancestral knowledge, Monnet works to keep these knowledge forms alive to enrich humankind today.

Another important notion of habitat is the body as a home, a person as their home as well as their sense of home as a place, or associations of a home. For Indigenous people it is complex to speak about what makes a home. Generations of displacement and genocide have dislodged communities from their sense of personal place. For them, sometimes home is not a safe place, it is not full of longing or compassion, not necessarily joyful. Land ownership is layered with the historical complexities of class, capital, race, religion, and colonialism. Their modern condition is one of displacement, a self without a home, a place that once was which now defines self through alienating conditions. For Monnet, this exhibition is made as an act of love and healing towards retrieving the notion of the home in multiple dimensions. She is concerned with the house we build, both material and spiritual, and conceives her art as a way to reintegrate the schisms which estrange us from our environment and communities.

The Ikwewak are First Nation women who are very active in their communities. They are ceremonially clothed in couture creations which likewise radically transform common building materials. Here, Monnet presents embodied voices in her manifestation of a creative futurism. These bold figures have stepped away from conscribed anthropological pasts. They claim space for eccentricity, exuding elegance with a natural resilience. Codes of high fashion bring strength to their contemporary regalia, cloaked with purpose. They look directly at the camera, demanding to be seen with quiet reserve, they step up and want to be a part of social politics and of building a future for next generations. Their forms are echoed in the Goddess(es), a new series of sculptural abstractions inspired by the silhouettes in the Ikwewak photos. They are humans in utterly modern form. The two work together, the real and the abstracted realising lines of polarising energy. We move among them and feel their force to make change, matriarchal societies emerging to lead the way. These monolithic figures honour this emergence. The Goddess(es) bare form also goes back to the artists method of exposing the bones, taking away the built up layers till we are left with the core of the human form. Together this group may act as constellations, clusters of stars for looking into a future potentials filled with hope. A world that is opposite of how indigenous woman are regularly viewed as uneducated and complacent victims. Their truth is pristine. Eccentric, elegant and resilient.

Occasionally text speaks directly in her works, such as Love Hard, a densely woven composition with this tough message at its core. Monnet often uses typography to integrate quotes that emerge from the everyday, heard in some conversation or something from politics, a song she enjoyed, any something that has meaning for her. Love Hard is such a statement, evolved from strong words she has heard from smart independent matriarchs, some personal, some political. For this exhibition in Berlin, she sees this particular works message resonating for right now as borders continue to be realigned through ongoing conflicts and subsequent refugee surges, nation states actively ordering the separation of people and the resulting inherent social disparities. In face of this contemporary situation of displacement, Monnet encourages us to stand fast, to look deeply, to reflect on integration and to love hard.

Monnet’s work has been included in the Whitney Biennial, New York; the Toronto Biennial of Art; KØS museum, Copenhagen; Contemporary Art Museum Montréal; National Art Gallery of Canada, Ottawa and presented solo exhibitions at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Arsenal Contemporary, New York; and the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/CM_2023_-Caustics-Lights_Diptych.jpg https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Lodoredellecose.jpg

Former WIELS resident Natasja Mabesoone brings her latest work to AFFILIATE, a space in the city centre where alumni of the WIELS Residency Programme present their projects. The exhibition is co-produced with the Frans Masereel Centrum, with the support of Sofam and Senteurs d’Ailleurs.
Natasja Mabesoone received her master’s in Visual Arts at KASK, Ghent. Her work moves in the in-between space where printmaking, drawing and painting overlap or intersect. It has recently been exhibited nationally and internationally at Z33, CC Strombeek, S.M.A.K., Museum Dhondt Dhaenens, Komplot, Island (BE), Galerie de Rohan (FR); Fons Welters Gallery, Amsterdam (NL); Salonul de proiecte, Bucharest Timisoara (RO). ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair’ was published by Posture Editions in 2021, with text by authors Harryette Mullen and Veva Leye. In 2024, she finalised an art integration for the Flemish Community Commission, proposed by WIELS, Brussels. She is part of the artist-run cooperative Level Five and is represented by Gallery Sofie Van de Velde.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/2024_09_NatasjaMabesoone_Affiliate_1_web-1-scaled.jpg

Die Galerie LOHAUSSOMINSKY freut sich, die Ausstellung “Angles Morts” des Künstlers Harm van den Dorpel zu zeigen. Diese Ausstellung präsentiert eine eindrucksvolle Untersuchung der künstlerischen Auseinandersetzung mit zweidimensionalen Gitterstrukturen und generativer Kunst.
Seit 2019 widmet sich Harm van den Dorpel der Erforschung von Künstlerinnen wie Anni Albers, Vera Molnár, Charlotte Posenenske, Hanne Darboven und Tauba Auerbach, die für ihre Arbeiten mit zweidimensionalen Gittermustern bekannt sind. Diese Forschung ist Teil seiner Bemühungen, seine eigenen Wurzeln in der generativen Kunst zu ergründen und seine Einflüsse zu identifizieren.
Dabei ist zu bemerken, dass die aufgelisteten Künstlerinnen alle Frauen sind. Van den Dorpel erkennt in seinen Nachforschungen eine Dominanz weiblicher Kunstschaffenden im Feld der generativen Kunst. Er erwägt eine historische Verbindung zwischen der systematischen Anordnung wiederkehrender Elemente in Gittermustern und dem Handwerk der Weberei, einer traditionell von Frauen dominierten Tätigkeit.
In seiner Arbeit erforscht der Künstler die Komplexität der Werke von Künstlerinnen, wie beispielsweise Anni Albers. Während es technisch einfach gewesen wäre, einen Algorithmus zu programmieren, der ihre Dreiecksmuster replizierte, stellte sich heraus, dass das zufällige Platzieren der Dreiecke nicht die gewünschte ästhetische Wirkung erzielte. Van den Dorpel erkannte, dass Albers klare Regeln in ihrem Kopf formuliert haben musste, die sie algorithmisch auf jede Zelle des Rasters anwandte. Diese Erkenntnis führte zu einem tiefen Respekt für die unsichtbaren Strukturen und Gedankengänge, die in den Werken von Albers und anderen Künstlerinnen der generativen Kunst verborgen liegen.
Anders als Albers, arbeitete Vera Molnár mit Computertechnologie, die jedoch sehr begrenzt war, keine Bildschirme hatte und nur einfache Ausgaben lieferte, die sie manuell in physische Objekte umsetzen musste. Diese Prozesse waren arbeitsintensiv und führten zu kleinen Makeln, die Van den Dorpel besonders schätzt.
In seinen Arbeiten verwendet van den Dorpel moderne Algorithmen und einen Plotter, um die Ästhetik und Methodik seiner Vorbilder nachzuahmen und weiterzuentwickeln. Ein Plotter ist ein spezieller Drucker, der präzise technische Zeichnungen und Grafiken erstellt, indem er Stifte oder Marker auf einer X-Y-Achse über das Papier bewegt. Im Gegensatz zu herkömmlichen Druckern, die Tinte in Zeilen von oben nach unten auftragen, zeichnet der Plotter Linien in verschiedenen Richtungen. Dieser Prozess verleiht den Arbeiten eine organische Qualität, die über die Präzision digitaler Drucke hinausgeht. Der Plotter zieht Linien in alle Richtungen und erzeugt durch die langsame, mechanische Bewegung einzigartige und nicht wiederholbare Ergebnisse, die eine menschliche Unvorhersehbarkeit in die digitalen Werke einfließen lassen.
Sein Interesse an den Methoden dieser Künstlerinnen führte van den Dorpel dazu, seine eigenen Prozesse zu hinterfragen und zu optimieren. Trotz seiner technologischen Hilfsmittel sucht er nach einer Verbindung zu den handwerklichen und geistigen Ansätzen seiner Vorgängerinnen. Die Ausstellung “Angles Morts” bietet einen tiefen Einblick in diese komplexen Wechselwirkungen zwischen historischen Einflüssen und modernen Technologien.
Ein wiederkehrendes Thema in van den Dorpels Praxis ist die Instabilität des digitalen Mediums, wo jede spezifische Idee oder Ausdrucksform schwer zu fassen ist. Diese Instabilität vermeidet eine feste, endgültige Aussage und betont ein offenes System. In seiner Reflexion über die historische Rolle von Frauen in der Rechenkunst und ihre oft übersehenen Beiträge, würdigt van den Dorpel die rigorose und visionäre Arbeit dieser Pionierinnen.
“Angles Morts” präsentiert nicht nur ein System von Werken, sondern lädt die Besucher ein, die komplexen Wechselwirkungen zwischen historischen Einflüssen und modernen Technologien zu entdecken. Die Ausstellung läuft ab dem 6. September in der Galerie LOHAUSSOMINSKY.

https://daily-lazy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Harm-und-Vera-09-2024-5-von-61-scaled.jpg