Cell Project Space presents “Fata Morgana” a solo project by Irish born, London based artist Laura Buckley. For “Fata Morgana,” Buckley has initiated an ambitious single screen installation commissioned specifically for the CYcLORAMA series and produced with the assistance of Cell, The Arts Council of England and The Irish Arts Council. The title “Fata Morgana” refers to a highly complex superior mirage where inverted and erect images are stacked one on top of another causing an object on the horizon to be distorted beyond recognition. The name also refers to Morgan le Fay, mythical figure from the Arthurian legends at once a villain, seductress, witch, healer or goddess, her unquestionable power is dictated by her ability to shape-shift throughout the myths and legends in which she appears.

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at Herald St, London

until February 26, 2012

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For Virginia Overton, the truck is a working tool embodied with stored labor. Rather than a symbolic object of desire in the mode of the co-opted muscle car, she recognizes the truck as a worker. Like most of her tools and materials, the truck functions as an agent for labor production.

Overton once drove an old pickup truck from Norfolk, Virginia to Memphis, Tennessee.  This act became a means for a sculptural gesture. Along the way she casually collected material found roadside, including: discarded lumber, furniture and other commodities drained of their use value. Arriving in Tennessee she invited friends to install work inside a borrowed RV that she rigged to her truck bed full of refuse. Taken together, the drive, the truck bed full of junk and RV installation allowed Overton to regard them collectively as an act of construction, retrospectively building her mode of working into new structures and practices.

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“one and the other are another” is the first exhibition by Clara Meister, the 2012 Curatorial Resident at the contemporary art space Ludlow 38. The group show includes new and recent works by five mostly Berlin-based artists. It deals with language and translation in a reflection about the emergence of new meaning in communication – in text and speech as well as in well-known images and shared concepts.

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Conceived as a response to the gallery’s physical setting and name, “Crime is on both sides” is a group exhibition constructed in two symmetrical parts, in “stereo”. Four artists have been invited to present works in relation to a symmetrical installation, echoing the shape of the human brain and one of its main functions: memory. Traditionally, the right hemisphere of the brain is known to relate to emotions and intuitional affect, whereas the left one is supposed to express reason and scientific logic. Following the duality of this simple neurological understanding, the space of the gallery has been divided between two entities: a light room and a dark one. All of the pieces presented bear the tension of reason versus passion, while, using internal symmetries and palimpestic forms, they gravitate around the axis of the central wall.

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Mathieu Mercier’s work is an indecisive crossing of the avant-gardes’ project, which attributes a practical value to the artistic object, with the Duchampian gesture that imparts a symbolic value to the object that normally serves a useful function. Mercier’s output constantly redefines the production modes of objects and their passage into the field of art. The project championed by modernity (De Stijl, Bauhaus) involved linking industrial mass production with the artist’s creativity and making design an integral part of everyday objects. Meanwhile, a century ago, Marcel Duchamp did the opposite, taking an object produced by industry and making it an integral part of art, notably with his Bicycle Wheel (1913), considered the first readymade. One of Mercier’s favorite subjects is the particular relationship to objects that modernity introduced and how it is carried on today, where each of us in this part of the world possesses twenty times the number of objects that one would have had in the past.

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For the exhibition “VIP Showroom”, Annet Gelink Gallery brought together physically the highlights from the gallery’s presentation at the VIP Art Fair. With works by Yael Bartana, Anya Gallaccio, Ryan Gander, Roger Hiorns, Kiki Lamers, David Maljkovic, Wilfredo Prieto and Glenn Sorensen, the exhibition “VIP Showroom” offers the visitors the possibility to see the artworks in real life.

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In an old English folk song, ‘John Barleycorn’ suffers brutalities of all kind that correspond to the various stages of barley cultivation — he is then extolled in spirit, celebrated as alcohol ‘put in the old brown jug’.

Ancient and medieval ritual, rural and craft culture (both originary and revivalist) are key to Aaron Angell’s diverse set of references. Juggling with many marginal concerns a time, the artist anticipates their collision, collapse. His idiosyncratic use of material/ity throws one back on the very process of ‘making’: Starting from diverse basic types or materials, Angell aims at their oddness, formlessness, or their capacity to induce aesthetic disjunction. Unexpected amalgamations of pleasurable incorrectness may in turn arise — and herein perhaps certain parallels between Angell’s artistic practice and the making of ‘John Barleycorn’.

The philosophical, political and psychoanalytic concepts form the very essence of Emily Wardill’s films. They retrace a history of thought by means of multiple narrations, embellished with numerous soundtracks composed by the artist. Her filmic grammar is mysterious, to say the least, because the classic codes of interpretation are obsolete. We therefore have to penetrate into what seems to be a fascinating representation of the unconscious. Several levels of narration intertwine, often evoking Fassbinderian forms of melodrama, and allowing us to associate an eminently political idea with more popular visual references. All of her work thus seems to be a vast scientific experiment that catapults the spectator into a suspension between the initial premise and the final result, there, where the irrational becomes a requirement for being able to understand a given situation.

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In his oeuvre, Bojan Šarčević takes an uncommon approach to basic questions regarding structures of our society. The presentation at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein is the artist’s first exhibition to be mounted in a museum.

Šarčević does not simply inquire into the impact of mediality and the physical immanence of art but specifically into the potential of art to contribute to contemporary society in the West. Thus, fundamental questions about communal, social, human and artistic structures inform his sensually Spartan works and make the elementary visible.

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Presented by Friends of the High Line, High Line Art commissions and produces public art projects that take place on and around the High Line, a public park built on an historic freight rail line elevated above the streets on Manhattan’s West Side.

High Line Art invited Anne Collier to conceive a new commission for the 25-by-75 foot billboard next to the High Line at West 18th Street and 10th Avenue. This is the second work to be presented as part of HIGH LINE BILLBOARD. The new billboard follows the iconic and much celebrated presentation of John Baldessari’s The First $100,000 I Ever Made, a gigantic reproduction of a $100,000 bill that dominated the skyline in Chelsea during the month of December.

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The Nouveau Musée de Monaco presents its latest exhibition, “LE SILENCE Une fiction” currently on view at Villa Paloma, NMNM.  The work of 25 artists invite the visitor, via a fictional approach, to reconsider the trace that our civilisation will leave behind. The curator, Simone Menegoi, states that this exhibition offers a “fantastic account, a form of narrative décor which tells the story of a planet that has become uninhabitable for reasons unknown…” see more

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T293 presents Martin Soto Climent’s double exhibition at the gallery’s two venues in Naples and Rome. One project for two shows that the Mexican artist develops from functional objects used to identify multiple relations with the reality.

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Bortolami gallery presents Eric Wesley’s third solo show at the gallery.

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Kunsthalle Basel presents the first institutional solo shows by Istanbul-based artist Cevdet Erek and Swiss artist Hannah Weinberger.

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“Vanille” brings together sculptural works by artists Nicolas Deshayes and George Henry Longly that explore frameworks of taste and desire in domestic and public settings. The choice of “vanilla” as the exhibition’s title invokes a tongue-in-cheek sense of “taste” as both aesthetic judgment and a flavor. Considered an exotic spice in Europe until the 19th century due to the difficulty of importing it from Central and South America, vanilla (derived from the same etymological root as vagina) is now ubiquitously used as a warm, gooey, comforting note at the heart of sweets. In colloquial terms, “vanilla” is a pejorative reference to normative behaviors, especially sexual propriety. The works in Vanille approach the materials of advertising display, public information and urban design with a subversive yet oblique touch. From the playful twisting of signifiers and liberal use of stylized motifs to hinting at the psychosexual underbelly of public life, Deshayes and Longly whet the appetite for tastes beyond pure vanilla.

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Chisenhale Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Christina Mackie, comprising a number of new works across sculpture, video, photography and drawing. Mackie has titled the exhibition “Painting the Weights”, a term used to label the process of establishing the physical make-up of an object within the field of digital animation.

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