Art Hag

Happy Halloween!

In the spirit of All Hallows' Eve, check out Mourir Aupres de Toi (To Die By Your Side), a delightful video short directed by Spike Jonze and created by designer Olympia Le-Tan (known for recreating first-edition book covers of classic titles for her wonderful collection of handbags).  Featuring stop-motion animation of 3,000 charming felt pieces meticulously hand-cut and embroidered by Le-Tan, the story takes place inside a Parisian antiquarian bookstore after hours.  With Jonze's signature playful, funny, and slightly dark touches, characters come alive, rip themselves off their book covers, flirt, and fall in love.  It's a whimsical love story set within a perfect, enchanted storybook land.  Learn more at nowness.com.  

Happy Halloween!

Spike Jonze: Mourir Auprès de Toi on Nowness.com.

 

 

 

Lisa Yuskavage | David Zwirner

For over twenty years, Philadelphia-born Lisa Yuskavage has been painting female nudes in her own unique, innocent/erotic/caricaturish sort of way.  David Zwirner currently has on view an exhibition of new works by the artist.  Set against lush, gorgeous colors and dramatic, hazy, golden light, her subjects possess angelic faces and pornstar bodies.  Often posed in dreamy, bucolic scenes, Yuskavage's women appear equal parts earth mother and lascivious vamp.  Barely clothed and exposing pendulous breasts, the Yuskavage female often paradoxically looks sweet naif and wanton woman.

On display is Triptych, the artist's first three-part painting featuring a group of women on a hillside.  In one panel, a young girl lies seemingly innocently on her stomach with her socked feet playfully up in the air.  The center panel features another young woman with her legs spread eagle, uninhibitedly exhibiting her goodies for all to see.  In the last panel, a group of severe-looking, babushka-wearing woman approach -- as if to reprimand the two free-spirited, sexually liberated, scantily clad lasses.

Yuskavage's gorgeous, dreamlike canvases feature a cast of female characters who seem either unaware of their overt sexuality or who completely own it and control it.  Learn more at Davidzwirner.com.  Through November 5th.

Babushkas, 2011

The Mound, 2011

Triptych, 2011

Afternoon Feeding, 2011

Outskirts, 2011

Pieter Hugo | Yossi Milo

Have you ever wondered what happens to your old computers, laptops, Blackberries, and iPhones after you've finished with them and moved on to the latest model?  Photographer Pieter Hugo's Permanent Error, currently on view at Yossi Milo, sheds a bleak light on the afterlife of our electronics.  Documenting Agbogbloshie, a technological wasteland in Accra, Ghana, Hugo introduces us to the locals who root through the discarded electronics and "burn down the components to extract bits of copper, brass, aluminum, and zinc for resale," (from the show's press release).  Tons of outdated "e-waste" from the West is donated to Ghana "to bridge the digital divide" and provide "technology to developing countries."  Instead, the electronics are destroyed and stripped for their valuable parts.  The burned electronics are "transformed into noxious trash" that contaminates the land, air, and water surrounding the dump site, creating health hazards for those searching for parts as well as those living nearby.

The workers predominantly consist of young men, sent to work the electronic graveyard by their impoverished families.  Hugo's moving portraits document his subjects' despondent expressions against clouds of dark, toxic smoke, grey skies, and barren land -- a surreal, disturbing, purgatory-like backdrop.  Hugo's powerful and poignant images show the workers' desperation and determination -- in a land where purchasing the new iPhone 4S is not the main priority.

Learn more at Yossimilo.com and see my March 2010 post on Pieter Hugo's Nollywood exhibit here.  Through October 29th. 

David Akone, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana, 2010

Left to right:  Al Hasan Abukari, Agbogloshie Market, Accra, Ghana, 2009; Abdulai Yahaya, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana, 2010

Naasra Yeti, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana, 2009

Yakubu Al Hasan, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana, 2009

Untitled, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana, 2009

 

Do Ho Suh | Lehmann Maupin

Artist Do Ho Suh moved from his native Korea to Providence, Rhode Island in 1991 to study at RISD.  Feelings of displacement made the artist measure spaces "in order to establish relationships with his new surroundings," (from the press release).  This obsessive-compulsive habit came in handy a while later when Suh used the measurements to "replicate and transport spaces" in his artwork.  Home Within Home, currently on view at Lehmann Maupin, features a series of works by Suh that examine "cultural displacement and the co-existence of identities, as well as the perception of our surroundings and how one constructs a memory of a space."

Suh meticulously "constructs a memory of a space" with painstaking detail as evidenced in the centerpiece of the exhibition, Fallen Star 1/5.  The dollhouse-like piece represents the artist's experience relocating from Korea to New England, which he's described like being "dropped from the sky."  The work's narrative has a tornado carrying Suh and his childhood home in Korea to Rhode Island, dumping the artist, the house, and its contents onto his new home in Providence, merging the two houses and Suh's two worlds.  The catastrophically remodeled, miniaturized Rhode Island home is perfectly dissected in two, as if a giant took a chainsaw to the quaint New England dwelling and hacked it in half.  Viewers can easily be looky-loos and peer into the various rooms of the house.  Suh spared no detail in his scaled-down dreamhouse with the unconventional addition, showing fully furnished living rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens with stocked refrigerators and cupboards.  There are Lilliputian bicycles in hallways waiting to be ridden; band posters hanging on the walls of a teenager's messy bedroom; cleaning products waiting to be used; newspapers and catalogues strewn on coffee tables; paperwork cluttering desks; as well as the debris and wreckage caused from the Korean home's crash-landing Wizard of Oz style onto the Rhode Island house.  Instead of a crushed wicked witch's stripey socks poking out from underneath, a released parachute lying flaccidly on the gallery floor provides evidence of the abode's airborne journey.

Along with fabric reproductions of random household items (a thermostat, a door knob, holiday lights, and more) around the artist's current home in New York, Suh presents the ghost-like Home within Home, another merging of his two homes -- this one a cleaner, conjoined model made of translucent resin and cut into four parts.  Suh, who now divides his time between New York, London, and Seoul, presents personal works that invite viewers into his homes, revealing hints of his past and his psyche.  Learn more at Lehmannmaupin.com.  Through October 22nd. 

Fallen Star 1/5, 2008-2011

Fallen Star 1/5, 2008-2011

Fallen Star 1/5, 2008-2011

Fallen Star 1/5, 2008-2011

Fallen Star 1/5, 2008-2011

Fallen Star 1/5, 2008-2011

Fallen Star 1/5, 2008-2011

Fallen Star 1/5, 2008-2011

Fallen Star 1/5, 2008-2011

Fallen Star 1/5, 2008-2011

Home within Home, 2009-2011

Home within Home (detail), 2009-2011

Vik Muniz | Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Sikkema Jenkins currently has on view Pictures of Magazines 2, a series of new, large-scale, color photographs by Brazilian artist Vik Muniz.  Muniz is perhaps best-known for his Pictures of Garbage and the work he's done with the waste pickers in Jardim Gramacho, Brazil as documented in the Oscar-nominated film Waste Land (2010).

Muniz's latest series features recreations of famous works of art composed of thousands of scraps of images and text torn out of various magazines and books.  A close inspection of the works reveal diverse collages that include pictures of starlets, supermodels, celebrities, kittens, food items, porn, as well as images of other famous artworks and lines of text.  As the show's press release states, much like rapid-fire channel surfing or web browsing, the series "reflects modern life with its incessant influx of information... Western culture's continuous iteration of updating, overwriting and replacement leaves an endless stream of garbage in its wake."  Whereas Muniz's Pictures of Garbage were created with actual trash, in Pictures of Magazines 2 the artist "draws from the endless media onslaught of our culture, a recycling of mental 'garbage'." 

Behind his incredible, meticulous recreations of Courbet, Degas, van Gogh, and more, Muniz delivers scathing commentary regarding the West's ever-growing obsession with trash culture.  Learn more at Sikkemajenkinsco.com and see my February 2010 post on Muniz here. Through October 15th.

The Crucifixion, after Thomas Eakins (Pictures of Magazines 2), 2011

The Butcher's Shop, after Annibale Carracci (Pictures of Magazines 2), 2011

La Bacchante, after Gustave Courbet (Pictures of Magazines 2), 2011

New York City, after George Bellows (Pictures of Magazines 2), 2011

Wheat Field with Cypresses, after van Gogh (Pictures of Magazines 2), 2011

Detail of After the Bath, after Edgar Degas (Pictures of Magazines 2), 2011