+ all of the above

Ashley Wood is a favourite of mine and so I was excited to hear about his involvement in an upcoming gallery show in Beijing. Flyer is below.

I was lucky enough to catch the Asia Pacific Triennial at GoMA right before it ended, and this work by Kohei Nawa was the best out of a very wonderful collection of work. Hosted in it’s own small white room, visitors were reflected innumerable times in the surfaces of the sculpture. Certainly one of the most impressive works which I’ve seen in recent years. You really need to be standing right in front of it to appreciate the spectacle.

I was lucky enough to see this on display at the Heavy Light exhibition at the ICP a while back. via Ruguru

Boogie currently has an exhibition on, in SoHo. I went to the opening last night and while I was impressed by the work, I always forget that an opening has little to do with looking at what’s on the walls. From what I did see (in between the live band, the open bar and the shoulder to shoulder gallery patrons), Boogie has continued to develop his raw street style which is most on show in his new book “Belgrade Belongs To Me.” I only had a casual flick-through but it seemed that Boogie had left behind some of the more overtly shocking images in favour of a more mature style (and I think more powerful). This may have much to do with the subject matter of the book, Boogie is a native of Belgrade.

Certainly see the exhibition if you can, and check out “Belgrade Belongs To Me,” I think it’s going to be his best thus far.

So this took me a little longer than it should have to post, but if you’re interested I’ve put photos of the exhibition over on my flickr account. Also, check out the exhibition website and Banksy’s website for videos and photos.

This was fantastic to see as it was the first work by Banksy which I’d seen on anything other than a computer screen. The animatronics were absolutely flawless, the swimming fish stick being a particular highlight (which wriggled and swam around its fishbowl). Often you need to look past the technical problems in works such as this to appreciate what the artist is trying to do, however that was certainly not the case here.

Also, in case you were wondering, nothing was for sale. Not even the shelves and shelves of plastic wrapped meat, chew toys and kitty litter, all of which caused the place to have an eerily authentic feel.

On the Road of Knives is an ongoing battle pitting illustrator versus illustrator. Below is Move #87, see the rest of the series over at the Road of Knives website or see the exhibition at the Fredericks & Freiser Gallery in NYC.

Patricia Piccinini has some new work on display at the Roslyn Oxley9 gallery. You should definitely try and catch it if you’re in the area.

Click here to see a few more photos from the exhibition I was involved in back in August, “Face First.”

I was lucky enough to attend Luciano Fileti’s opening in the west village last week. Apart from being held in a spectacularly renovated home, I thought that the body of work on show was fantastic. I was impressed by how well he was able to remove the rest of the city and to hijack advertisements for his own ends.

via Lifelounge

If you’re in or nearby Brooklyn then I invite you to come out on Tuesday evening for the opening of the group photographic exhibition ‘Face First.’

This is exciting as it marks the first time I’ve had my work on display in NYC.
The flyer is here: Face First 03
And the details are:
Goodman Gallery
Tuesday August 12th
6pm to 9pm
311 Columbia Street, Brooklyn.

I blogged about this exhibit when it was upcoming and hadn’t yet opened. I finally managed to see it on the second last day, just before it ended. Yeah, I’ve been working a lot.

The actual exhibition was decent, with a few works standing out from the rest. I thought that the whole thing lacked identity which was disappointing. There were a couple of problems with space, it felt like we were in a storage closet or some other place that they’d had to create to accommodate the event. And of course the last-minute-crowds didn’t help at all. The other point I’ll make is that the exhibition offered very little that would encourage anyone to come and visit the Museum. Almost all of the works featured have their own dedicated websites and the material shown was the same on the website as in the exhibition. But any way, onto the work.

FRONT’s Sketch Furniture was a highlight. I have actually blogged about them in one of my first blog posts, but this was the first time I’d seen the furniture in person. I was struck by how much the furniture looked like it could be functional as well, which was a surprise, I wanted to sit on it. Check out their website for more.

Graffiti Research Lab’s L.A.S.E.R Tag was there, but unfortunately it was just the video and nothing that we could actually play with. The Troika SMS Guerilla Projector was there right next to GRL however we weren’t allowed to play with it either. The Painstation and Bitfall were also present and were also similarly switched off with only documented material on display.

The New York Talk Exchange from Senseable Laboratories was a highlight. It’s a visualisation of the connections of both voice and data made by New Yorkers with the rest of the world. It was impressive to see so much data represented so fluidly and in such an easy to understand form.

Similar to the work from Sensable Laboratories and in the field of data visualisation was Cabspotting from Stamen Design a beautiful work that tracks the Cabs in San Francisco’s bay area. Another was the Million Dollar Blocks Project by the Spatial Information Design Lab which dealt with a massive amount of different data sets all to do with the US Prisons and highlighted the disparities and contradictions of the system. Also in data visualisation, but with more of an appeal to emotion than is usual in this area was I Want You To Want Me by Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar If you go here, you can watch a video explaining it’s applications in the dating world.

A cab being tracked in Cabspotting:

Dimitri Taylor worked well with Processing to create a program that looked for conversational language on the web based on a search query and generated visualised social landscapes from its finds.

At the opening/exit to the exhibit we had Simon Heijdens’s Lightweeds greeting us. And although the photograph below is pretty poor, and the documentation on his website isn’t very good, I thought it was one of the highlights of the exhibit.

All in all, it’s something that I would recommend, but maybe if you can manage it, go on a thrusday evening when admission is free (that is, if it hadn’t already closed last week… I have to get some more free time).

Cai Guo-Qiang has a mid-career retrospective currently on display at the Guggenheim in New York City.

This is something that really has to be seen and experienced. So if you can make it to the Guggenheim before the end of May then you really should go, rather than reading about it or watching any of the videos or photos that just will not do it justice. However, if you can’t then here are some pictures and some links, along with a few thoughts of mine.

Cai Guo-Qiang makes incredible use of the very unique space in the Guggenheim. This is quite an achievement considering how intimidating the area must be for an artist to exhibit in. However Cai succeeds in making us believe that it is the most perfect space for his work, and is nothing if not ambitious. I’ve often found that an iconic exhibition space comes at the cost of an ideal place to view the artwork within and I think that the Guggenheim is an example of this (Please don’t kill me Frank Lloyd Wright groupies), the relationship between the artist/architect and the artist/exhibitor is often tenuous at best. Right from the very beginning however, Cai Guo-Qiang melds seamlessly with the space and tells us to expect big things.

A poor quality video of ‘Inopportune: Stage One’

Photos from the exhibition via the NY Times

Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows

Inopportune: Stage Two

Inopportune: Stage Two

The size of Cai Guo-Qiang’s work is incredible, his lack of compromise is very inspiring. You can watch one of his works titled ‘Same Word, Same Seed, Same Root’ (not in the exhibition) being made by following this link and it’s amazing to watch what you think is an audience hurry along and help Cai make sure that the work’s creation isn’t also it’s destruction by putting out all of the tiny lit flames created by the gunpowder explosions. Another of his explosion works:

At the end of the exhibition, at the very top of the museum we are met with the last of Cai’s works on display. ‘Reflection — A Gift from Iwaki’, a shipwrecked boat that was rescued from decay on the shores of Iwaki, Japan. Cai enlisted the help of the local villagers and government to excavate and install this work, and the villagers were invited to install it again in its move to the Guggenheim.

CaiGuoQiang.com
Guggenheim – Exhibitions – Cai Guo-Qiang