Review: Boots kicks in with a dose of reality
By Ivy Cooper, Beacon Art Critic
Posted 5 p.m. Mon. Jan. 26 - In the midst of all the hoopla, hope and humanity generated by the Barackalypse, it had to happen: a reality check, something to remind us that the world still is in a desperate state and one election won't — can't — change all that's wrong with this country. Actually, reality checks have been springing up all over the place, if you care to look for them, in magazines and newspapers and, naturally, the Internet. Now at Boots, "Bad Moon Rising 3" is the art-world's version of a reality check. Curated by Jessica Silverman and Jan Van Woensel, this traveling show is spreading serious cautionary tales in sometimes brutal, sometimes humorous language, and it ought to be required viewing. More than 50 artists and cooperatives have put together a noisy bunch of videos, prints, flags, collages, montages, paintings, you name it. Standing in the maw of the show, it's hard to know where one work ends and another begins, and that sense of collectivity is admirable, forcing your attention toward the message, and away from petty distractions like titles and dates and who-made-what. And what is the message? Not to abandon hope altogether, surely, but to temper it with a heavy dose of realism.
http://www.stlbeacon.org/visual_arts/review_boots_kicks_in_with_a_dose_of_reality
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Press :: Riverfront Times
St. Louis Art Capsules
Jessica Baran encapsulates the St. Louis arts scene
By Jessica Baran
Published on February 02, 2009 at 4:48pm
__
Bad Moon Rising 3
A cacophony of rage and ruin, this traveling group show takes a laundry list of individual work and re-contextualizes it to look like a dense, end-all hideout for the current spirit of discontent. On blaring TV sets, videos depict a middle-aged woman crouching in an alleyway, looting the stuffing from a discarded Spiderman toy; a tuxedoed lounge singer repetitively crooning that sorrow conquers happiness; everyday folk testifying to having succumbed to the radical Christianity of a gay hippie preacher; and a primly suited man opening a black umbrella, setting it on fire, then dropping it and walking away. Absurd and ineffectual tangents punctuate and mitigate the larger claims of other work that points directly at specific political indiscretions. By balancing the prescriptive with the intuitive, curators Jessica Silverman and Jan Van Woensel achieve a rare success: a politically driven show that refrains from shrillness, issuing instead a kind of ominous forecast. Through February 28 at Boots Contemporary Art Space, 2307 Cherokee Street; 314-773-2281 or www.bootsart.com. Hours: noon-5 p.m. Wed. and Sat. and by appointment.
http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2009-02-04/culture/jessica-baran-encapsulates-the-st-louis-arts-scene/
Jessica Baran encapsulates the St. Louis arts scene
By Jessica Baran
Published on February 02, 2009 at 4:48pm
__
Bad Moon Rising 3
A cacophony of rage and ruin, this traveling group show takes a laundry list of individual work and re-contextualizes it to look like a dense, end-all hideout for the current spirit of discontent. On blaring TV sets, videos depict a middle-aged woman crouching in an alleyway, looting the stuffing from a discarded Spiderman toy; a tuxedoed lounge singer repetitively crooning that sorrow conquers happiness; everyday folk testifying to having succumbed to the radical Christianity of a gay hippie preacher; and a primly suited man opening a black umbrella, setting it on fire, then dropping it and walking away. Absurd and ineffectual tangents punctuate and mitigate the larger claims of other work that points directly at specific political indiscretions. By balancing the prescriptive with the intuitive, curators Jessica Silverman and Jan Van Woensel achieve a rare success: a politically driven show that refrains from shrillness, issuing instead a kind of ominous forecast. Through February 28 at Boots Contemporary Art Space, 2307 Cherokee Street; 314-773-2281 or www.bootsart.com. Hours: noon-5 p.m. Wed. and Sat. and by appointment.
http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2009-02-04/culture/jessica-baran-encapsulates-the-st-louis-arts-scene/
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Thursday, December 18, 2008
BAD MOON RISING 3
Jason Kalogiros
double sunset no. 1
2007
analog c-print
BAD MOON RISING 3
at Boots Contemporary Art Space (St. Louis, MO)
January 16th, 2009 - February 28th, 2009
Opening reception January 16th, 6:30 - 10:00 pm
Artists: Vanessa Albury & Marthe Fortun / Tariq Ali / Julieta Aranda / Yossi Atia & Itamar Rose / Claire Beckett / Brice Bischoff / Zee Boudreaux / Greggory Bradford / Irma Cannavo / Mauro Ceolin / Lori Cheatle & Daisy Wright / Brian Conley / Meg Cranston / Custer's Revenge / Alain Declercq / Messieurs Delmotte / Blue Firth / Lonnie Frisbee & David di Sabatino / Tony Garifalakis / Daniel Goodwin / Deva Graf / Simon Gush / Hamza Halloubi / George Hennard / Pamela Jue / Jason Kalogiros / Paulus Kapteyn / Richard Kern / Ragnar Kjartansson / Wonder Koch / David Matorin / Christina McPhee / NECK FACE / Joe Heaps Nelson / Federico Nessi / Dustin Michael Pevey / Job Piston / Luther Price / Rage Against the Machine / Lee Ranaldo / Max Razdow / Ruth Sacks / Yoji Sakate / Joaquin Segura / Irgin Sena / Ben Shaffer / Elin O'Hara Slavick / Travis Sommerville / Ginger Wolfe-Suarez & Jeanne Moen Wolfe / The Weather Underground / Philippe Vandenberg / Ben Vautier / Pete Watts / Jackson Webb /
Curators: Jessica Silverman and Jan Van Woensel
Assistant Curator: Kara Q Smith
The traveling group exhibition Bad Moon Rising exposes some of the dark sides of the world's self-proclaimed greatest nation: the United States of America. With the election of a new President in November 2008, people are optimistic about the future of the USA's national and international politics, economy and warfare. Nevertheless, the country's continual increase in unemployment, poverty, the financial downfall, expensive and unreliable health care, equal rights and overprized education are problems that are yet to be resolved. Although the mantra-esque "Yes, We Can" encourages us to believe in a better future, we cannot start dreaming. Offensive, annoying, naughty and whimsical, Bad Moon Rising 3 helps to reminds us of some of the most disturbing facts of the USA's past and present. Through a selection of artworks, artifacts and a-historical references, major themes such as politics, religion, society, family, war and the media are disturbingly portrayed, casting a dark shadow over the USA's promised ideologies of freedom and prosperity.
With support from
and from ARENAMEXICO
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Lori Cheatle and Daisy Wright "This Land is Your Land"
Introducing: New work that will be in BMR 3
Lori Cheatle and Daisy Wright’s video This Land is Your Land (2O04) explores the influence of corporations on everyday life in the US.
www.hardworkingmovies.com
www.thislandthemovie.com
Lori Cheatle and Daisy Wright’s video This Land is Your Land (2O04) explores the influence of corporations on everyday life in the US.
www.hardworkingmovies.com
www.thislandthemovie.com
Thursday, October 2, 2008
BAD MOON RISING Special :: Review in Whitehot Magazine!
whitehot | September 2008, BAD MOON RISING Special curated by Jan Van Woensel
BAD MOON RISING Special
Curated by Jan Van Woensel
Artists:
Vanessa Albury / Diana Artus / Richard Ashcroft / Elena Bajo / Kelie Bowman / Greggory Bradford / Olaf Breuning / Bettina Cohnen / Body Count / Emily Coxe / James De La Vega / Liam Everett / Lonnie Frisbee & David di Sabatino / Tony Garifalakis / Charlie Halsey / George Hennard / Annegret Hoch / Pamela Jue / Paulus Kapteyn / Richard Kern / David Matorin / Clayton Patterson / Job Piston / Luther Price / Lee Ranaldo / Max Razdow / Yoji Sakate / Jan Serych / Marie Snauwaert / Philippe Vandenberg
Music:
Glass Ghost http://www.myspace.com/glass1ghost
Friday September 12, 2008
ISCP: 1040 Metropolitan Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11211
http://www.iscp-nyc.org
Review by Matthew Ladd
On September 13th, the vigorous and ecumenical talents of independent curator Jan Van Woensel brought BAD MOON RISING Special to Brooklyn’s ISCP (International Studio and Curatorial Program), a one-night exhibition of works that ran the gauntlet from painting to collage to installation, video, and graffiti. The ISCP’s narrow warren of gallery spaces—carved out of a former warehouse—proved a decisive advantage for such an eclectic show; each room seemed a gallery complete in itself, and those who were intent on, say, Philippe Vandenberg’s small cluster of quietly disruptive paintings (think Francis Bacon in miniature) didn’t seem bothered by the live music down the hallway.
Incidentally, the musicians included Lee Ranaldo (who generally plays as loud as he wants). So it’s worth mentioning that BAD MOON RISING is the name of Sonic Youth’s second studio album. Of course, it’s also the name of that Creedence Clearwater Revival song in which John Fogerty warns us that the entire country is about to go to hell. All of this may or may not matter. Suffice it to say that a song about anxiety—that creepy feeling that whatever’s about to happen, it won’t be pretty—is as fitting as any for a show whose works included, among others, a line of gleaming rifle cartridges and a painting of a man getting strangled by a giant rabbit.
The graffiti performance, which took place outside, offered a surprisingly serene approach to the works in the ISCP gallery proper. Charlie Halsey, the artist, spent roughly an hour spraying a bright geometrical design onto a large slab of plywood, and swaddled it in a cartoonish white cloud, eventually stepped back and walked away. A few minutes later, artist Elena Bajo approached and within ten minutes had erased half of the piece with a roller soaked in gray paint. It was painful to watch. But the strokes with the roller seemed methodical, almost thoughtful, as if erasing the piece were just as important as creating it.
Inside, the intensity grew. Tony Garifalakis’s stark, glittering lineup of rifle cartridges, each etched with a single letter, gradually spelled out the famous statement “THAT WHICH DOES NOT KILL ME MAKES ME STRONGER,” transforming cliché into an effective (and effectively troubling) fusion of irony and sincerity. In this context (as in Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, where it originally appeared) it was a sentence whose tone one simply could not pin down.
Van Woensel exhibited one of the most powerful pieces right on top of two of Garifalakis’s poster works: a small Gregory Crewdson-esque photograph by the Swiss photographer Olaf Breuning, which captured a delightfully surreal mise-en-scene of sweaty rednecks, black-denim-clad hipsters, dancers in waist-high pantyhose and face paint, an obese man in a green sweater (his head swallowed by an oversized rubber alien mask), and a few ragged children who looked like they’d just wandered off the set of The Grapes of Wrath, everyone slouching on cinder blocks or leaning up against corrugated aluminum walls like a post-apocalyptic circus troupe waiting for the bus. The photograph was set in a background of painted black paper, isolating it, as it seemed to demand.
No less surreal was Luther Price’s silent video projection, a montage of black-and-white footage that, one can only guess, was culled from the dustbins of a 1950’s B-movie soft-core studio. The projection chiefly featured a wasted Bettie Page look-alike, possibly transsexual, in various states of undress, lounging on a floral bedspread, turning to the camera with an expression of bland shock, as if rehearsing a particularly titillating—or violent—scene. Price’s video tended to veer toward the sort of faux-vintage footage that always seems to be playing behind the band at punk shows: white-faced actors scurrying like insects around the set, the camera’s foggy fish-eye. But it maintained an edge.
The exhibition was not all edge, of course. A subtler investigation of anxiety came in the form of Marie Snauwaert’s glossy photographs of women posing in wedding dresses. ‘Posing’ may not be quite the right word: Snauwaert’s brides were remarkably plain looking, the glare of the camera catching every wrinkle and vein. A few of the women frowned or scowled; others appeared merely uncertain. Most were middle-aged. Snauwaert’s take on the marriage institution may not have been overtly subversive—it didn’t seem to argue that getting married is any worse than not—but it was honest and sophisticated.
More risky was Lee Ranaldo’s installation “Paperbox,” which occupied most of the vestibule at the gallery entrance. I’m inclined to think that the piece couldn’t have worked as well on its own: the galleries of well-intentioned curators are stocked with pieces on 9/11, most of them either driven by angry political screeching or (decidedly worse) a desire to console or forgive. But “Paperbox,” a series of floor-to-ceiling columns of painted text in which the artist recalled the weeks surrounding 9/11, tried for neither and therefore succeeded. For all the contrast of cramped black words on white walls, it was a quiet piece, and every time this reviewer walked through the vestibule, there was another cluster of people reading the whole thing from start to finish. It wasn’t redemptive—who in his right mind expects good art to redeem? Its popularity at BAD MOON RISING, however, supported the notion that, as we live in an increasingly anxious age, we’re frequently drawn to art that manages, regardless of its medium, to reflect that feeling in a form that we can recognize.
Curated by Jan Van Woensel, Bad Moon Rising is an ongoing project launched at Silverman Gallery, San Francisco in December 2007. The project Bad Moon Rising Special was a one night only event organized in the framework of ISCP’s Picture Parlor series. Bad Moon Rising 3 will open in January 2009 at Boots Contemporary Art Space in St. Louis, MO.
Matthew Ladd graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2004 with an MPhil in Divinity. He has since taught classes at the University of Florida and the Columbus College of Art and Design, and he has written for such journals as The American Scholar, The Humanist and Berkeley's Threepenny Review. He lives and works in Brooklyn. mattrladd@gmail.com
BAD MOON RISING Special
Curated by Jan Van Woensel
Artists:
Vanessa Albury / Diana Artus / Richard Ashcroft / Elena Bajo / Kelie Bowman / Greggory Bradford / Olaf Breuning / Bettina Cohnen / Body Count / Emily Coxe / James De La Vega / Liam Everett / Lonnie Frisbee & David di Sabatino / Tony Garifalakis / Charlie Halsey / George Hennard / Annegret Hoch / Pamela Jue / Paulus Kapteyn / Richard Kern / David Matorin / Clayton Patterson / Job Piston / Luther Price / Lee Ranaldo / Max Razdow / Yoji Sakate / Jan Serych / Marie Snauwaert / Philippe Vandenberg
Music:
Glass Ghost http://www.myspace.com/glass1ghost
Friday September 12, 2008
ISCP: 1040 Metropolitan Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11211
http://www.iscp-nyc.org
Review by Matthew Ladd
On September 13th, the vigorous and ecumenical talents of independent curator Jan Van Woensel brought BAD MOON RISING Special to Brooklyn’s ISCP (International Studio and Curatorial Program), a one-night exhibition of works that ran the gauntlet from painting to collage to installation, video, and graffiti. The ISCP’s narrow warren of gallery spaces—carved out of a former warehouse—proved a decisive advantage for such an eclectic show; each room seemed a gallery complete in itself, and those who were intent on, say, Philippe Vandenberg’s small cluster of quietly disruptive paintings (think Francis Bacon in miniature) didn’t seem bothered by the live music down the hallway.
Incidentally, the musicians included Lee Ranaldo (who generally plays as loud as he wants). So it’s worth mentioning that BAD MOON RISING is the name of Sonic Youth’s second studio album. Of course, it’s also the name of that Creedence Clearwater Revival song in which John Fogerty warns us that the entire country is about to go to hell. All of this may or may not matter. Suffice it to say that a song about anxiety—that creepy feeling that whatever’s about to happen, it won’t be pretty—is as fitting as any for a show whose works included, among others, a line of gleaming rifle cartridges and a painting of a man getting strangled by a giant rabbit.
The graffiti performance, which took place outside, offered a surprisingly serene approach to the works in the ISCP gallery proper. Charlie Halsey, the artist, spent roughly an hour spraying a bright geometrical design onto a large slab of plywood, and swaddled it in a cartoonish white cloud, eventually stepped back and walked away. A few minutes later, artist Elena Bajo approached and within ten minutes had erased half of the piece with a roller soaked in gray paint. It was painful to watch. But the strokes with the roller seemed methodical, almost thoughtful, as if erasing the piece were just as important as creating it.
Inside, the intensity grew. Tony Garifalakis’s stark, glittering lineup of rifle cartridges, each etched with a single letter, gradually spelled out the famous statement “THAT WHICH DOES NOT KILL ME MAKES ME STRONGER,” transforming cliché into an effective (and effectively troubling) fusion of irony and sincerity. In this context (as in Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, where it originally appeared) it was a sentence whose tone one simply could not pin down.
Van Woensel exhibited one of the most powerful pieces right on top of two of Garifalakis’s poster works: a small Gregory Crewdson-esque photograph by the Swiss photographer Olaf Breuning, which captured a delightfully surreal mise-en-scene of sweaty rednecks, black-denim-clad hipsters, dancers in waist-high pantyhose and face paint, an obese man in a green sweater (his head swallowed by an oversized rubber alien mask), and a few ragged children who looked like they’d just wandered off the set of The Grapes of Wrath, everyone slouching on cinder blocks or leaning up against corrugated aluminum walls like a post-apocalyptic circus troupe waiting for the bus. The photograph was set in a background of painted black paper, isolating it, as it seemed to demand.
No less surreal was Luther Price’s silent video projection, a montage of black-and-white footage that, one can only guess, was culled from the dustbins of a 1950’s B-movie soft-core studio. The projection chiefly featured a wasted Bettie Page look-alike, possibly transsexual, in various states of undress, lounging on a floral bedspread, turning to the camera with an expression of bland shock, as if rehearsing a particularly titillating—or violent—scene. Price’s video tended to veer toward the sort of faux-vintage footage that always seems to be playing behind the band at punk shows: white-faced actors scurrying like insects around the set, the camera’s foggy fish-eye. But it maintained an edge.
The exhibition was not all edge, of course. A subtler investigation of anxiety came in the form of Marie Snauwaert’s glossy photographs of women posing in wedding dresses. ‘Posing’ may not be quite the right word: Snauwaert’s brides were remarkably plain looking, the glare of the camera catching every wrinkle and vein. A few of the women frowned or scowled; others appeared merely uncertain. Most were middle-aged. Snauwaert’s take on the marriage institution may not have been overtly subversive—it didn’t seem to argue that getting married is any worse than not—but it was honest and sophisticated.
More risky was Lee Ranaldo’s installation “Paperbox,” which occupied most of the vestibule at the gallery entrance. I’m inclined to think that the piece couldn’t have worked as well on its own: the galleries of well-intentioned curators are stocked with pieces on 9/11, most of them either driven by angry political screeching or (decidedly worse) a desire to console or forgive. But “Paperbox,” a series of floor-to-ceiling columns of painted text in which the artist recalled the weeks surrounding 9/11, tried for neither and therefore succeeded. For all the contrast of cramped black words on white walls, it was a quiet piece, and every time this reviewer walked through the vestibule, there was another cluster of people reading the whole thing from start to finish. It wasn’t redemptive—who in his right mind expects good art to redeem? Its popularity at BAD MOON RISING, however, supported the notion that, as we live in an increasingly anxious age, we’re frequently drawn to art that manages, regardless of its medium, to reflect that feeling in a form that we can recognize.
Curated by Jan Van Woensel, Bad Moon Rising is an ongoing project launched at Silverman Gallery, San Francisco in December 2007. The project Bad Moon Rising Special was a one night only event organized in the framework of ISCP’s Picture Parlor series. Bad Moon Rising 3 will open in January 2009 at Boots Contemporary Art Space in St. Louis, MO.
Matthew Ladd graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2004 with an MPhil in Divinity. He has since taught classes at the University of Florida and the Columbus College of Art and Design, and he has written for such journals as The American Scholar, The Humanist and Berkeley's Threepenny Review. He lives and works in Brooklyn. mattrladd@gmail.com
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
