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May 17 - June 28, 2008 http://www.carolinanitsch.com Carolina Nitsch is pleased to present IN AND AROUND THE HOUSE, the first comprehensive survey of Laurie Simmons’ early black and white photographs from 1976 - 78 at her Project Room in Chelsea, New York. This seminal body of work put Simmons at the forefront of a new generation of artists, predominantly women, whose photographic works began a new dialogue in contemporary art. The use of set-up photography combined with the notion of child play – the images were shot in the rooms and before the facades of disassembled dollhouses – enabled Simmons to control perception and make reference to both general stereotypes and her own personal memories. As she arranged and rearranged the small vignettes, consisting of female dolls, dollhouse furnishings, miniature props and postcards, she was in her own words “... looking for the way your memory white-washes the image when you think about something from the past - making it far more perfect”. Simmons, while sharing strategies with the artists known as the Pictures Generation – Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Louise Lawler and Sarah Charlesworth – and their documentation and appropriation of cultural memory, forged her own identity more closely aligned with surrealism and artists such as Man Ray, Rodchenko, Bellmer and Gordon Matta Clark’s mysterious black and white photograph collages that Simmons’ use and manipulation of dolls and interiors, marked by intentional dislocations and unexpected conjunctions, created a nonlinear narrative and abstract pictorial plane that echoes the skewed images of personal memory and dreams. Her subjects, which swell with a faux-tone of a simple, safe and secure home life, feel as relevant today as when Simmons first shot them. Laurie Simmons has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe. She has had more than a dozen solo exhibitions in New York City. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC; the Hara Museum in Tokyo; and the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam, among others. In 1997, the Baltimore Museum of Art organized a twenty-year retrospective of her work. Simmons’ work was prominently featured in MOMA’s Open Ends exhibition and in the Whitney Museum’s American Century in 2000. Simmons graduated in 1971 with a BFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. She has been a visiting critic in both Columbia and Yale University’s graduate photography departments. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1984, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1997 and the Roy Lichtenstein Residency in Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome in 2005. Her film The Music of Regret premiered at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2006 and has been screened at the Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, The Walker Art Centre, the Centro Reina Sofia and elsewhere. Simmons was a featured artist in the PBS TV Series Art: 21-Art in the 21st century in 2007. She is represented by Sperone Westwater Gallery in New York. Simmons lives and works in New York City with her husband, the painter Carroll Dunham, and their two daughters. A fully illustrated catalogue raisonné of the complete early black and white work is available for this exhibition, with 62 duotone reproductions, of which 54 are full page. The book also features a critical essay by Carol Squiers, a leading voice on photography and a curator at the International Center of Photography in New York, as well as an autobiographical account by Laurie Simmons. Laurie Simmons, IN AND AROUND THE HOUSE, hardcover, clothbound, 96 pages, The exhibition is on view from Saturday, May 17 through June 28, 2008. For more information please contact info@carolinanitsch.com or call (212)-645 2030. CAROLINA NITSCH PROJECT ROOM
Cringe Opening exhibition reception: http://www.deanproject.com Included artists: DEAN PROJECT, in collaboration with Y Gallery, is pleased to present “Cringe” a five-part performance-based exhibition series curated by Cecilia Jurado. Opening exhibition reception and performance by Laurence Chirsteby Litt - Saturday May 17th Considering the current state of the art market -- an unlimited oasis and supply of commercial art goods ready to be exchanged in multiple venues around the world -- Cecilia Jurado questioned, “What about those in search of a small piece of an artist’s idea and not merely their detritus?” The answer she found: five culturally critical performance artists who ask, “why not be critical of one’s own world? Art has thousands of followers and many creators, but let’s be honest, much of the world’s population lives fine without it.” Some artists, while they agree with those who cringe at the art world and its financial excesses, still have a deep desire and love for art that stimulates, provokes, and makes them think. Larry Litt, Brina Thurston, Elena Tejada-Herrera, Noritoshi Hirakawa and Nicolás Dumit Estévez remind us that the unmediated and unrecorded performance experience cannot be acquired and collected itself. This exhibition is a conversation about contemporary art and its arbitrary values; like gold, art is only valuable when someone is willing to pay for it. Yet the collecting of art has an intellectual and cultural status far superior to the crass collecting of gold. When considering the idea of collecting art the average man in the Each of the participants will present original first-time-exhibited work. These performers have a razor sharp attitude towards their subjects and they clearly display their opinions. Sometimes these opinions make us cringe as well. Be prepared to cringe. "CHRISTEBY'S ART AUCTION TONIGHT! WE DON'T CARE WHO YOU ARE...LONG AS YOU A performance by Laurence Christeby Litt on New York's bottom feeder fundraising live auction art events. Larry Litt was born in New York. He has been working with performance, video and photography for the last 20 years doing shaman rituals, burning books and making TV-series among other things. He performed his ‘Video-Mudang' ritual with several Korean artist/musicians in the 1993 Venice Biennale, sharing the award winning German Pavilion with Nam June Paik and Hans Haacke. He has since performed it worldwide. Since 2001 Litt has written and produced 30 short films as part of his Blame Show series. The videos were seen on Time-Warner cable television from 2005 to 2007. His videos are in the collections of many museums and art libraries. His ‘Hate Books-Holy Fires' has been seen at the Moscow Biennale 2007, in New York at the Emily Harvey Foundation's Blago Bung Festival and at Magnan Projects, Litt's Chelsea gallery. Larry Litt lives and works in New York. DEAN PROJECT is located at the back right corner of the P.S.1 Museum in Long Island City DEAN PROJECT Your May issue of ArtReview:Digital is available now, FREE www.artreviewdigital.com NEW - you can login and revisit the current issue whenever you wish, AND search across the archive back to July 2006 In the May issue
Creativity is central to Ruby; her quality of life depends on its existence and practice. Her work is deeply rooted in personal experience and past identity. As the fourth daughter of a traditional Pakistani family, her life was not considered valuable by those around her and her developing self-esteem suffered. Howe
ion, choosing to view this neglect as a perverse type of freedom. She filled the expanses of empty time with her passion for making things and used creative endeavour as a type of therapy. Later, as an artist attempting to find her own ocabulary, she recalled this experience of making dolls as a child and reverted to fashioning dolls out of scraps of cloth. Using dismembered old quilts and sacking, which she collects, her work bridges the gap between traditional dollresonance for her. The crow |