News

Tau Lewis’ forthcoming solo presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach is featured on Art Basel.

A conversation with Tau Lewis is an exercise in looking back as much as in looking forward. In discussing her figurative sculptures, she circles her art ancestry as frequently as she projects fresh narrative threads onto the work. Running this temporal gamut, she typically pivots around three themes: the potential for emotive transference in found materials, the imagining of new geographies for black existence, and the production of something generative, even as she incorporates the painful legacy of the Black Diaspora. As such, Lewis’ practice – which has become increasingly recognized internationally during its brief six years – feels at once melancholic and hopeful, and somewhere in between, tenacious and inventive.

Kate Newby’s current solo exhibition Nothing in my life feels big enough has been featured in Mousse Magazine.

To view the full article please visit Mousse Magazine.

For more information about Kate Newby please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Kate Newby’s solo exhibition Nothing in my life feels big enough is featured on Contemporary Art Daily. 

To view the full article please visit Contemporary Art Daily. 

For more information about Kate Newby please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Kara Hamilton’s current solo show Nothing is wild is featured in tzvetnik.

To view the full article please visit tzvetnik.

For more information about Kara Hamilton please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

In advance of the inaugural Toronto Biennial this fall, Canadian Art is publishing a weekly series of behind-the-scenes features from artists, curators and participants in which they discuss the research and processes that inform their practices.

Curtis Talwst Santiago was a musician before he decided to devote himself solely to visual art. As a multidisciplinary artist, he first gained attention with his miniature dioramas; he’s now presenting performance, sculpture and painting projects in Canada, the United States, and abroad. He’s shown at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, the Studio Museum in Harlem (New York), Perez Art Museum (Miami), as well as the 2018 SITELines Biennial in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the 2018 Biennale de Dakar, Senegal. This fall, he’s participating in the inaugural Toronto Biennial. Here, he talks about some of the themes that inform his practice.

To view the video please visit Canadian Art.

For more information about Curtis Talwst Santiago please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Vikky Alexander’s solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery is reviewed by Jayne Wilkinson in Canadian Art.

One of few Canadian artists associated with the Pictures Generation in 1980s New York, Alexander is known for her use of appropriation to critique the conventions of the advertising industry. That’s where “Extreme Beauty,” her first career-spanning retrospective, begins, with a series depicting ’80s supermodel Christie Brinkley in cropped and enlarged images framed under yellow glass. Obsessive and voyeuristic, their overt manipulation still startles, raising questions around authorship and image ownership anew. Her use of highly reflective coloured glass (elsewhere it’s black for full mirrored effect) implicates viewers too, such that one’s own gaze becomes simultaneous with the model’s, two sets of eyes staring back from within the frame.

To view the full article please visit Canadian Art.

For more information about Vikky Alexander please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Geoff McFetridge’s solo exhibition at Cooper Cole is reviewed by Kelsey Adams in Canadian Art.

Geoff McFetridge’s solo show was a utopian dream. His subjects are all configured in balanced symmetry: people free from hegemonic hierarchy. A functional collectivity emerges through McFetridge’s trademark symbolic language of clean lines and rounded shapes. There’s little detail to these ambiguous characters, and the simplicity of the artist’s linework points to his graphic-design tendencies. Everything is reduced to its purest form.

McFetridge’s depictions of colourful figures set against muted tones that hold, lean on and create congruence, feed into my naive wish for human solidarity. This motif of everyone being united could easily be dismissed as shallow kumbaya-togetherness. But at a time when humanity seems irreparably stratified and disconnected, collective understanding is a crucial artistic and philosophical endeavour. Rather than overtly critiquing the world as it is, McFetridge attempts to rebuild it in a more optimistic image. In A Positive Future Built of Incremental Change (2019), dozens of figures lean in, their heads forming a circle. In Another Kind of Agreeing (2019), floating heads form an oval and bodies seem to melt into each other. Both paintings suggest caretaking with simple gestures like a hand on a shoulder. There’s a closeness to the bodies that suggests they’re equal parts of a whole: if one is missing, the entire form falls apart.

McFetridge has worked at the intersection of painting and design for much of his career. He lays out his figures in hexagonal, square and circular shapes emblematic of logos. Some of the titles allude to design, such as Us as Kerning Not the Font (2019) and A Logo For Parenting (2019). None of the figures have faces, imbuing them with a universality that makes them relatable. These are blank slates for viewers to project upon, and they work as a form of advertising—McFetridge is selling us a dream.

Some of the paintings resist easy ideas of togetherness. An Escalator for Understanding (2019) depicts three people walking on others’ heads, and could signify an oppressor being bolstered by the exploitation of the less powerful. However, these characters could, as the title indicates, merely be benefiting from shared knowledge. There’s a cheeky playfulness about these works that reminds us to not treat them too earnestly.

Our lives have been individual-focused for such a long time—some might say since the onset of Western capitalism—that McFetridge’s vision of collectivity seems far from attainable. But by creating works that are both accessible and comforting, his offering is a sliver of hope.

— Kelsey Adams

To view the full article please visit Canadian Art.

For more information about Geoff McFetridge please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Kate Newby announced as a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant recipient in Artforum.

The Joan Mitchell Foundation announced today the twenty-five recipients of this year’s Painters and Sculptors Grants, which provide $625,000 in unrestricted funds to artists annually. In addition to receiving $25,000 in financial support, each grant recipient is eligible to apply for residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. Among the 2019 grantees are Lauren Halsey, Baseera Khan, Daniel Lind-Ramos, Kate Newby, and Young Min Moon.

“The Painters & Sculptors Grants are a cornerstone of our work at the foundation,” said Christa Blatchford, the foundation’s CEO. “The program fills what we see as an ongoing gap in arts philanthropy—the scarcity of direct support to artists for them to continue their practices, to try new things, and to take risks. While the art market is strong, and public sentiment about ‘art’ remains enthusiastic, the opportunities for financial support for artists themselves continue to be limited. We know, from talking to and working with artists for more than two decades, that providing unrestricted funding is necessary and essential.”

Since the grant program launched over twenty-six years ago, the foundation has supported more than five hundred artists at varying stages of their careers. To be eligible for a grant, artists must be nominated by fellow artists and arts professionals selected from throughout the United States. The nominated artists are then invited to submit applications. Grant recipients are chosen through a multiphase jurying process and are typically individuals who have contributed to important artistic and cultural discourse and who deserve greater recognition on a national level.

The 2019 grant recipients are:

Anila Quayyum Agha, Indianapolis, Indiana

Morehshin Allahyari, Brooklyn, New York

Candida Alvarez, Chicago, Illinois

Frida Baranek, Coral Gables, Florida

Debra Baxter, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Keren Benbenisty, New York, New York

Paul Stephen Benjamin, Atlanta, Georgia

Juan William Chávez, Saint Louis, Missouri

Jamal Cyrus, Houston, Texas

Patricia Fernández Carcedo, Los Angeles, California

Lauren Halsey, Los Angeles, California

Andrea Heimer, Ferndale, Washington

Suzanne Jackson, Savannah, Georgia

Baseera Khan, Brooklyn, New York

Arghavan Khosravi, Natick, Massachusetts

Candice Lin, Altadena, California

Daniel Lind-Ramos, Loíza, Puerto Rico

Cannupa Hanska Luger, Glorieta, New Mexico

Gabriel Martinez, Houston, Texas

Wardell Milan, New York, New York

Young Min Moon, Amherst, Massachusetts

Kate Newby, Brooklyn, New York

Shikeith, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Salman Toor, New York, New York

Lien Truong, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

To view the full post please visit Artforum.

For more information about Kate Newby please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Georgia Dickie’s upcoming solo exhibition Agouti Sky at Oakville Galleries is featured on Canadian Art.

For Agouti Sky, artist Georgia Dickie has brought a host of objects off the street and into the gallery. Staging, grouping, balancing, and placing are a primary focus of this artist’s practice, activities that makes her presence integral to the presentation of the work.

The installations of Toronto-based artist Georgia Dickie are composed from an ever-growing collection of found objects that she accrues in her studio. She selects and positions these according to an ulterior logic that eschews the values and meanings we usually assign to things. Staging, grouping, balancing, and placing are a primary focus of this artist’s practice, activities that makes her presence integral to the presentation of the work.

Agouti Sky is a solo exhibition of new work by Dickie that transforms Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square into a landscape of sorts, made up of the bric-a-brac refuse of a society built to consume and discard. Dickie plucks objects—a lampshade, a satellite, boxing gloves, metal stands, baseball caps, tills, a pair of shoes, two carved wooden birds—out of this circuit, and sets them into new constellations. She rarely alters them, choosing instead to present them as they are, either singled out for individual attention or swept into a larger ecology of forms.

Dickie’s objects are often dismantled at the end of an exhibition and then repurposed at a later date. This lends her installations a sense of material transformation that raises questions about a work’s beginning and end. With Agouti Sky, as with each of Dickie’s exhibitions, a new set of relations comes into view—the work coheres momentarily and then passes into other forms.

To view the full article please visit Canadian Art.

For more information about Georgia Dickie please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Sara Cwynar’s exhibition at Blitz in Valletta, Malta is featured on Flash Art.

“My mission is to spark joy in the world through tidying,” says a smiling Marie Kondo — the pop-culture tidying guru whose mission is to get rid of all negative things — in the trailer for the show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. Her method of decluttering involves asking whether a given object sparks joy; if not, it should be discarded. Out of sight, out of mind. Landfills around the world are overflowing with things that don’t spark enough joy and don’t fulfill our expectations for a “good life,” to put it in the words of Lauren Berlant. Indeed, in her pivotal essay Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, North Carolina 2011), Berlant reveals the injurious attachments we have formed to fantasies of the good life that are no longer sustainable in the present.

Titled “Good Life,” Sara Cwynar’s exhibition at Blitz in Valletta, Malta, unpacks this ideal, dismantling stereotypes under the hegemonic nature of images. The exhibition surveys her practice since 2013, showing Cwynar’s multifaceted approach to the languages of photography, collage, and filmmaking. Found objects and images play a vital role in her compositions, which suggest modern trompe-l’oeils. Her prints, from Toucan in Nature (post it notes) (2013) to A Rococo Base (2018), are a result of a process of re-photographing printed images, on which found objects, transparencies, and archival images are superimposed. The tension between two and three dimensions is tangible. These multilayered pictures, which combine elements of photography, sculpture, and collage, reveal their fictional status to the viewer and “tackle the critical concept of visual truth” (to quote Dolfi Agostini in her curatorial essay).

But it is in video that Cwynar perfectly reflects the iconic bombardment to which we are subjected every day. Exploring the notion of standardization, she shows what it means and how it influences our user experience. In Cover Girl (2018) she examines how standards of beauty are imposed on women, intertwining images of Tracy (a model and friend of the artist) with footage of a make-up company. Her first video work, Soft Film (2016), addresses the “soft misogyny” that dominated the news at the time she was making it. Here, an overlapping voice-over presents a taxonomy of personal objects.

Cleanfluencers, lifestyle masters, and fitness gurus are retooling our cognitive biases, stuffing our Instagram feeds with yoga exercises, healthy food, and clever ways of cleaning the closet. This unending display of living life to its fullest is meanwhile tainting our notion of reality. In this sense, Cwynar’s exhibition offers itself as a keen inquiry on the economy of images and their circulatory power. Red Rose (2017), Magenta Rose (2017), and Pink Rose (2017) are three macro photographs of roses with perfect colors — so perfect they seem artificial. Today, as Steven Shaviro has observed, “the opposition between reality-based and image-based modes of presentation breaks down, and the most intense and vivid reality is precisely the reality of images” (Post-Cinematic Affect, O Books, 2010). Are Cwynar’s roses real or synthetic? The answer is that it doesn’t matter in an era of simulation.

To view the full article please visit Flash Art.

For more information about Sara Cwynar please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

ektor garcia is featured on Artforum.

ektor garcia’s work traverses the psychological and the political, quietly contending with the ways in which power structures invade the most intimate spaces of the self. Incorporating ancient craft techniques, found artifacts of personal significance, and allusions to Mesoamerican myths, his sculptures and installations might appear to retreat into the past or emerge from a solipsistic inner world. But through gestures that summon ancestral memory and systems of belief, he materializes a search for belonging in the present and in the liminal spaces between different cultural identities. Even centuries after the first points of contact, colonial forces and hegemonic frameworks of thought continue to inscribe lived reality, and garcia’s practice probes the internalization of this violence. In his hands—wielding needles that can pierce or mend with care and turn bound fibers into diaphanous woven cloth—personal narratives of survival and healing never resolve, but instead transform implements of pain and repair into sources of pleasure and the means by which to conceive new, itinerant futures.

Like the lowercasing of his name, garcia’s art possesses a transgressive humility and embraces improvised play and mutability, largely in response to his past and in accordance with the way he exists in the world. The artist grew up moving between Northern Mexico and California, where his parents worked as migrant farmers; he identifies as an individual with an unfixed sensibility. In his words, “If I must identify myself, I am a queer Chicanx world citizen, belonging somewhere else.” In bozales (muzzles), 2015—an assemblage of plastic, steel, and leather dog muzzles—garcia draws on his haunting memories of crossing the border as a child, but as in many of his works, the reconfiguration of materials and references suggests displacement, constraint, and yet a sense of agency. Like his nomadic practice—based for now in New York and central Mexico, but frequently moving from place to place when he is offered employment—the elements garcia uses to create his sculpturescan migrate endlessly to become parts of new pieces. He conceives his art to remain unfinished; when a work is acquired, he considers it “on pause.” A sculpture might in one installation be scattered across the floor and in another aggregate through impromptu vignettes with added objects, based on a particular space and the artist’s intuitive “internal matrix.”

Following an improvised set of conditions, garcia constructs environments in which something uncontrolled might develop. These installations are inhabited by materials that behave in ways they aren’t meant to, and objects that accumulate new and multiple meanings. Delicate ceramic links are pieced together to resemble rugged metal chains in works like cadena perpetua II (life imprisonment II), 2018. For matanza (slaughter), 2012, skeins of flayed animal hides are tenderly hand-sewn into a leather wall hanging that evokes an empty body bag and references the Aztec god of both war and agriculture, Xipe Totec. garcia transforms raw goatskin into patchwork rugs like luna llena (full moon), 2016, which recall antiques stores and street markets he visits in Mexico, “‘ranch homes’ as an aesthetic,” and “rustic country whitewashed cowboy paraphernalia.” Meat hooks both threaten and connect (as in más o menos [more or less]), 2016; spools of copper wire are perpetually crocheted into lace. His formal collisions suggest the seemingly contradictory qualities of fragility and strength, of bondage and machismo as expressed through “feminine craft.” He reframes now-ubiquitous decorative objects as symbols of class, the appropriation of vernacular culture, and violence against nature, discreetly relaying a critique of a binary, hierarchical worldview that intersects with his own family history.

Refraining from what artist Aria Dean has aptly called “cannibalizing biography,” garcia evokes the personal by leaving almost imperceptible imprints of a body, often his own, on the work and by incorporating symbolic threads that resist the legibility of narrative. The sense of an unseen hand propels his rigorous labors of sewing, weaving, and welding, all possessed of the vitality of the indigenous traditions that endure in Michoacán and Zacatecas, Mexico, where his family lived for generations. The hand-mottled figurine in mitla, 2018; the crocheted workman’s glove in manos a la obra (let’s do it), 2016: Such works give shape to unseen bodies—often erased from historical narratives—and their obscured subjectivities. In mitla, titled after the important spiritual site in Oaxaca (and also the Zapotec word for “underworld”), the pinched ceramic statuette abstracts human form to mere signifier, while a shimmering glaze of metallic palladium renders it an object of devotion. In manos a la obra, garcia’s meticulous threadwork foregrounds the manual labor that produced the empty glove, its wearer unknown. Such motifs of resolute absence and presence recur, pointing to the invisibility of systems that render individuals as well as entire cultures as such.

Although garcia gleaned many of his material processes from watching members of his family and community perform them, he gained his knowledge of the work of the Zapotec, Aztec, Olmec, Maya, and other indigenous Mesoamerican civilizations through research, exploring his relationship to histories that remain only partially intact, and art that is popularly presented as archaeological remains. Wrestling with how these histories (largely fragmented due to colonization) and the related systemic issues manifest in his private and psychic life, the artist turns to tactility, surface, and structure to register not only the feeling of what is missing or has been undone, but also that of what can be reclaimed. This might seem to imbue his sculptures with a sense of loss, but it reveals too how disappearance—as an artistic strategy—can disrupt; this affect is captured in the title of his 2018 show at Mary Mary in Glasgow, “deshacer, or: to undo.”

Sara Cwynar acquired by Charli XCX and featured in Architectural Digest celebrity homes.

The U.K.-born music sensation filled her 1927 Tudor-inspired home with “pop-tastic” personal flair.

Charli XCX reclines in the reading nook in one of the kitchen windows, which is decorated with candles and multipatterned cushions. Two of her three housemates (both childhood chums from the U.K.) have stopped into the sun-soaked room to see the singer—whose third studio album, Charli, was released this month.

The English-born music sensation has inhabited this charactered manse since she relocated from London to L.A. in 2015. She has since decorated its three floors (and four bedrooms) with bold-colored furnishings—and close friends. “I feel like it’s the people in your home that make it a home,” she says. “The house feels very full and lively, so we get to meet a lot of other creative people just through the house. I really enjoy that, and I think that’s part of the reason why the house is what it is.”

The retro residence is Tudor-influenced, featuring details like dark-wood beams and diamond-shaped windows—a warm and welcome sense of the U.K. on the West Coast. “It’s funny that I moved across the world and still ended up in an archetype of a British house,” she comments. “I liked that this was an old place and immediately loved it. I love the dark wood. I love that it’s a little creepy and weird. It just felt really right for me.”

The house is located in the city’s Beachwood area, which is just south of the Hollywood sign, once, the “Hollywoodland” sign). This historic stretch is home to the gated communities that started construction in 1923—the former Hollywoodland. “This house is pretty old for L.A.,” she says. “It was built in 1927, and I think it was one of the original Hollywoodland houses.”

The interiors are bohemian and multicolored, and the bulk of the furniture has been collected from secondhand sources (including Chairish and stores like Nick Metropolis and This Is Not Ikea). This has resulted in a charmingly mismatched selection of fabrics and materials. “It’s quite jumbly, where I got the stuff from—I do love antiques stores,” she says.” There have been estate sales that I’ve gone to in Palm Springs, which are particularly good. Palm Springs is where all the amazing older gay men with great taste move to—and I just want everything they have!”

Charli XCX is currently focused on her art collection (her first piece was a photograph by Heji Shin). “I watched this documentary about Daniel Johnston and got two drawings from his website,” she recalls. “I just bought this piece by Sara Cwynar, who’s a collage artist. The other day, I bought two sculptures by this artist called Seth Bogart. He made a collection of 100 ceramic toothbrushes and they’re really fun. I bought one that’s a cigarette and a toothbrush.”

The house is also scattered with candles—“Some of them I get from the dollar store, but there are some bougie ones upstairs”—and with memories. Charli XCX has lived (and lived it up) here: “I use my house for everything. We work here and we do shoots,” she says, looking around the space. “We throw a lot of parties here—well, we used to throw more parties. I just like the house to feel busy; I like that this house has just seen a lot of stories and fun things happen.”

To view the full article please visit Architecture Digest. 

For more information about Sara Cwynar please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Shawn Kuruneru’s recent collaboration with CELINE is featured on Highsnobiety.

After releasing the first round of its Fall/Winter 2019 artist collaborations back in July, pieces from Celine’s Shawn Kuruneru collaboration have started to make their way online.

For his first official collaboration with the French House, the Canadian artist lends work from his ongoing series of shape paintings. Inspired by Chinese calligraphy, Western comics, and geometric abstraction, Kuruneru creates a series of abstract paintings that adorn sneakers, a denim jacket, a T-shirt and matching crewneck. His designs also feature on a series of leather accessories and a phone case.

“I want the paintings to read from a distance as bold and graphic, but reveal subtle details the closer you get,” Kuruneru explains. “The longer you spend in front of the works the more the nuances of the material and brush marks show the intrinsic history of the painting.”

Though he’s best-known as a painter, for Kuruneru, drawing is the center of his art practice. “Everything I paint comes from my desire to draw,” he says.

When he begins painting, Kuruneru describes his working process as intuitive. “It starts with quick loose gestures that develop into slow precise marks. I give a lot of attention to the spaces in-between the shapes,” he explains. “There is a sense of tension and release when the shapes almost overlap but don’t, like two bodies about to hit each other but stop on impact. In the most recent works, I consider the black shapes as shadows for invisible shapes that form and dissolve at the same time.”

To view the full article please visit Highsnobiety.

For more information about Shawn Kuruneru please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

ektor garcia is featured in Virginie Puerlotas-Syn’s summer art chronicles on Artlyst.

Later in July, in another beautiful part of Europe, I attended the opening of Progetto, a newly-opened Artspace in the Baroque city of Lecce, Italy. The New York artist Jamie Sneider raised over US$16,000 on Kickstarter and decided to open a 2,300 square feet residency/ exhibition space in a historical building from the 16th century in an ancient Jewish palazzo. Ektor Garcia from Mexico and New York was the first artist-in-residence. Garcia spent a month’s residency in Puglia and put together a stunning yet delicate show “ Fortaleza”. He bridges the Mexican and Pugliese tradition of ceramics and textiles. Garcia’s copper crocheted sculptures seem to reflect the labyrinth of his thoughts and meditations, following him from one city (he started making them in New York) to another, Lecce. He explored different materials such as the clay from Grottaglie, a ceramic village, to make fragile and metaphorical terracotta sculptures like his piece, Cadena Perpetua II: clay chains, an oxymoron, fragile yet full of strength.

To view the full article please visit Artlyst.

For more information about ektor garcia please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Six Portraits by the Artist Featuring Tracy Ma and Miu Miu’s FW19 Collection on Ssense

In a gorgeously musing and meandering essay published last year, titled
“Should Artists Shop or Stop Shopping?” the writer Sheila Heti considers the work of artist Sara Cwynar, whose photography and films examine themes surrounding—among other things—beauty, advertising, the recent past, visual bias, desuetude. Heti holds, while accounting for and scrutinizing her own consumer habits, that shopping and writing are mutually related. Both require the act of selection. Both are expressions of the self. Both are creative, though shopping liquidates Heti’s creative energy, leaving her anxious, excitable yet prone to dread. Both play into desire as a state which is achieved so long as it isn’t exactly served. Both involve deciding on the best thing: “Shopping is choosing the best thing. Writing is choosing the best thing (the thing to write about, and the best way of writing it).”

Heti inquires: does Cwynar experience shopping as a writer might experience writing, or does she experience shopping as a writer might experience shopping? Or is there, Heti wonders, some other third thing? “What would it feel like to be like Sara Cwynar; to every day buy a postcard of the Twin Towers on eBay?” She continues: “Sara Cwynar looks for what there is to buy, but the meanings of the objects for sale—their meanings are entirely hers.”

Value comes from how Cwynar sees and systemizes, and sticks tape on the corners of large scale print-outs. Bouquets of objects in full bloom. Clocks and ring boxes. Dish gloves, dice. A rose carefully propped against a green background. A hand carefully adjusting a phone case or placing a sea shell beside a pink razor, knitting needles, and other shapes. A red boot, Nefertiti’s bust, promotional pencils, plastic grapes, paperclips, expired pills. Altar-like color-stories erected with faded Melamine and homewares, or even, how a simple bar of soap bargains with and implicates the worth of a particular shade of blue—all of these choices create the phenomenon of attraction. They petition from the viewer a little game of longing. Of wanting just one taste. “Delicious” is how Heti describes Cwynar’s films.

It’s worth noting the parallels between this feeling and what we, as consumers, derive from shopping online. How we scroll past a purple sweater and now, suddenly, we are stricken by the need to own that purple sweater. How we fill our cart with the purple sweater and the pink Nikes, and the pair of freshwater pearl earrings, and then we get carried away and add the handsome loafers and deliberate on the bag that’s shaped like a ball. And yet, we rarely proceed to checkout.

This e-comm universe of mass reluctance similarly absorbs Cwynar. In a triptych titled, 141 Pictures of Sophie, 1, 2, and 3(2019), Cwynar photographs a model named Sophie, (who regularly models for SSENSE), in various configurations, mimicking the e-comm studio’s “views.” Different angles, same girl. Cwynar then collages her photograph of Sophie with stratified images of Sophie taken from the SSENSE site. The juxtaposition is surreal and somehow sincere in its unaffected redundancy. The staid quality of the e-commerce model, styled in luxury products, becomes all at once flattened and dynamic.

“The photographs force us to confront ostensibly ordinary images, highlighting the disjuncture between Sophie depicted in the studio and her sleeker digital twin,” notes a review in The Nation of Cwynar’s first East Coast solo exhibit currently showing at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. “A homage to the Photoshop proletariat, the piece hints at the labor that goes into making SSENSE Sophie, who has far dewier skin and much brighter crimson hair than the real, nondigitized Sophie.”

Comparison is, after all, essential to Cwynar’s project—a sort of holy mess is at play. Collapse as a tool for linking what is considered obsolete (over time) with what disappears (in a flash): trend cycles, chromatic design, beauty standards, optimism. Appraisal, accrual, and how value can be reframed; these are the topics that focus Cwynar’s work. Be it a compilation-wallpaper titled 72 Pictures of Modern Paintings, where fragmented Picasso paintings (and Modigliani, Pollock, and Lichtenstein) become decorative art. Or her current work for the MoMA, wherein Cwynar was invited by the museum as it prepares for its opening in October, to create a series of videos. She describes her project as loosely inspired by John Berger’s seminal 1970s video series Ways of Seeing, though updated to feature social media, contemporary feminism, the #MeToo movement, and technology.

Here, in an exclusive editorial and interview for SSENSE, Cwynar photographs Miu Miu’s FW19 collection with her friend and muse, Tracy Ma. We talk to Cwynar about shopping habits, self-portraiture, and applying logic to beauty.

Vikky Alexander’s solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery is reviewed by Donald Brackett in Critic At Large.

Vikky Alexander: Extreme Beauty runs July 6 – January 26, 2020 at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The catalogue/book of this show is well worth ordering from the VAG.

Coming of age in the heady photo-conceptualist decade of the 1980s, Vikky Alexander quickly ascended to the upper ranks of the most visually challenging and thought-provoking Canadian contemporary artists. Becoming well known for her insightful investigations of the found and appropriated image, the artificial representation of enclosed nature and the cultural seduction of both space and place, it was almost as if she was holding up a dark mirror to our beauty-obsessed era and showing us who we were really were beneath the surface of all that bright and shiny glitter.

Irony literally drips off the smooth textures of her multi-panel piece Obsession, from 1983, for instance, with sacred supermodel Christie Brinkley, the ultimate golden uptown girl, standing in as an airbrushed female Saint figure. Peering into a piece of deep blue void such as Between Dreaming and Living, #5, from 1986, subtly reminds us that we can never really be sure if we’re awake or asleep. Which is exactly the way that both mass media and consumer society prefers its customers to be: interstitial, liminal, hovering between hyper-desire and permanently suspended satisfaction.

– Donald Brackett

To view the full article please visit Critics At Large.

For more information about Vikky Alexander please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Age Of You, group show at Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto features Sara Cwynar and is featured on e-flux.

Age of You is a timely exhibition about how the self has become more extreme, and what it means to be an individual today. Curated by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist, with graphic design by Daly & Lyon, it includes over 70 visual contributors from the worlds of art, design, filmmaking, photography, performance and electronic music. Age of You has been commissioned and produced by MOCA Toronto.

Guess what this century’s most valuable resource is? It’s you—and all your online behaviours, enriched data sets and millions of meta-data points. In this process, a large part of you is extracted from you, and now exists everywhere and nowhere, independently of your five senses. Is this why the inside of your head feels so strange? Are you really built for so much change so quickly? And, what if individuality is, in fact, morphing into something else?

Age of You previews a forthcoming book by Basar/Coupland/Obrist, The Extreme Self, a sequel to their previous title, The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present. Set over two of MOCA’s gallery floors, Age of You presents 13 immersive chapters that chart how individuality is currently changing, emotionally, socially and spiritually. Wry words and slogans by the curators are juxtaposed against portraits sourced from:

Agnieszka Kurant, Amalia Ulman, Amnesia Scanner, Ana Nicolaescu, Ania Soliman, Anna Uddenberg, Anne Imhof, Asad Raza, Barry Doupé, Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Cao Fei, Carsten Höller, Cécile B Evans, Chen Zhou, Christine Sun Kim, Craig Green x Moncler Genius, Dennis Kavelman, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Emmanuel Iduma, Farah Al Qasimi, Fatima Al Qadiri, GCC, Goshka Macuga, Heman Chong, Ian Cheng, Isabel Lewis, Jarvis Cocker, Jenna Sutela, Johannes Paul Raether, John Menick, Jürgen Klauke, Koo Jeong A, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Liam Gillick, Liam Young, Lorraine O’Grady, Lucy Raven, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Michael Stipe, Miles Gertler, Miranda July, Momus, NVIDIA Research, Pamela Rosenkranz, Pan Daijing, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Peter Saville & Yoso Mouri, Philippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe, Precious Okoyomon, Rachel Rose, Raja’a Khalid, Samuel Fosso, Sara Cwynar, Satoshi Fujiwara, Simon Denny, Sissel Tolaas, Sophia Al-Maria, Stéphanie Saadé, Stephanie Comilang, Suzanne Treister, Tabita Rezaire, Thomas Dozol, Thomas Hirschhorn, Trevor Paglen, Urs Lüthi, Victoria Sin, Wang Haiyang, Yaeji, Yazan Khalili, Yu Honglei, Yuri Pattison.

Interspersed are major works in film, photography, fashion, sculpture and installation, each articulating a salient aspect of the extreme self. Throughout Age of You, visitors will encounter a recurring presence of “the face,” today’s dominant data metric, as well as new ways in which crowds are being composed, computed or even weaponized.

To view the full article please visit e-flux.

For more information about Sara Cwynar please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

ektor garcia’s exhibition Fortaleza at Progetto, Lecce is featured in tzvetnik.

6th day in Italy, first time in this country
Crocheting copper wire purchased and brought from Mexico to New York to Lecce. I make many granny squares.

I began making these copper squares in New York when I agreed to spend a month here in Puglia to work on a solo show at Jamie Sneider’s new Progetto in Lecce. I am slowly but consistently working on joining the squares by sewing them into a copper lace t-shirt.

I crochet everywhere I can, almost daily, especially while traveling. I imagine the people of a village in Mexico who weave straw hats while walking from town to town, they can tell you that the distance from one town to the next is the equivalent of any number of hats woven while walking.

I constantly learn and make new crochet patterns; they become labyrinths I get lost in, only to find myself. A single strand of wire is looped in around itself with the help of a steel hook, becoming an organized network, with occasional mistakes. I embrace them and keep them to break up the monotony.

No two crochet doilies are alike; they are trips I have taken. I unpack them and lay them out to measure and visualize the time and distance from one place to another, from a couple hours, days, months, to years, to the places I have been while making them.

I’m working on new terracotta sculptures, made of local clay from Grottaglie, a ceramic village. I don’t know what I am making but feel the need to coil and press each coil onto itself, rotating each piece, going around and around, just like the movements of crochet.

I made a few large chains that loosely mimic handmade steel chains, but they are made out of soft terracotta. I was thinking how in crochet language a row of stitches is called, a chain. There is a really nice quote from Truman Capote, I see it being about art too, «One day I started writing, not knowing that I had chained myself for life to a noble but merciless master. When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely.”

I like this idea of chained in language — chained to my past. The clay chains are extremely fragile and not meant to function as chains — they are the opposite of what a chain can do: they can’t hold weight. They are so fragile they can break in your hands, but they are made with care.

The piece ​cadena perpetua II​ means life sentence or endless chain and I feel that’s what my practice is: an endless chain of events, of artworks.

It’s nice to have so much clay at my disposal. It’s a fun challenge to use it all. I like feeling the physical weight of the material in its raw state; when it’s just clay. To know this body of work is 300 kilos of Grottaglie clay.

The works I’ve been making are very organic, coil-built shapes that mimic vessels; some are parts that can be stacked once fired. I didn’t plan anything; I’m letting each piece plan itself.

Some textures are made by the motion of my thumb dragging the clay down. I like that it leaves my thumbprint. The other piece I made today uses pre-Colombian geometric patterns – patterns that are graphic symbols found on the facades of pyramids and in ancient textiles.

At the Castellana Caves I learned that stalactites grow less than 10 cm every thousand years. Stalagmites, which grow from the ground up, take even longer.

The opening is on the 18th of July, and I am sure I will be working until the last minute. Once I’m on the airplane I will begin crocheting my next project, which I don’t know what will be, I like knowing that I will bring the copper back to Mexico.

To view the full article please visit tzvetnik.

For more information about ektor garcia please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Family Practice, a two-person show featuring Zachary Leener and Anders Oinonen is featured on Art Viewer. 

Artists: Zachary Leener, Anders Oinonen

Exhibition title: Family Practice

Venue: COOPER COLE, Toronto, Canada

Date: August 1 – 31, 2019

To view the full article please visit Art Viewer. 

For more information about Zachary Leener or Anders Oinonen please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Yorkshire Sculpture International is featured in iNews UK. 

Dreamy landscapes, horizontal rain, forced rhubarb, stout shoes, strong tea… and sculpture. There’s a new arrival on the list of Yorkshire’s glories. The first Yorkshire Sculpture International – a festival celebrating the art you can love from all angles – launched in Leeds and Wakefield earlier this summer.

As part of its varied exhibition programme, this 3D jamboree anoints one-time bad-boy of Brit art Damien Hirst as the latest in a line of celebrated modern sculptors associated with the region, following in the footsteps of Henry Mooreand Barbara Hepworth. As well as four massive bronzes at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Black Sheep With Golden Horns (2009) floating in formaldehyde amid the Victorian sentimentality at Leeds Art Gallery, two works by Hirst have been installed in the city centre.

The monumental bronze Hymn (1999–2005) – an anatomical study of a male torso – stands in the middle of Leeds’s pedestrianized Briggate shopping street. The red of Hymn’s exposed musculature echoes in the signage of the neighbouring H. Samuel store and a branch of Santander. Nearby, in the city’s beautiful Edwardian shopping arcade, is the white marble Anatomy of an Angel (2008), also part-dissected.

Installed without fanfare, both have gone down a storm. Gangs of sixth-formers photographed one another holding Hymn’s muscular backside or in repose on its plinth, groups stopped to chat and stare. I asked a jeweller looking eagerly through his window in the arcade what he thought of having Anatomy of an Angel on his doorstep: he thought it was wonderful, couldn’t have been happier.

The art world – this critic included – can be a bit arch about Mr Hirst, but there are very few sculptors who elicit this kind of public response. It’s not just celebrity: the works themselves appeal and engage. People were playing with them, gawping at them, fondling them and interacting in an irreverent way not usually permitted in the context of a museum. We can’t help wanting to touch sculpture: particularly not works of art that offer a material illusion (bronze masquerading as plastic masquerading as flesh) as these do.

Hirst is not the whole story. Extending through four institutions as well as public sites, YSI offers sculptures ancient and modern, authored and anonymous, eminent and emerging. Leeds Art Gallery is showing an architectural installation by Ayse Erkmen: the framework of the gallery’s Victorian lantern ceiling, reproduced as a pavilion balanced at floor level. It’s elegant, if a little cool.
On the ground floor, installed in a thickly carpeted room, black and white photographs from Joanna Piotrowska’s Shelter (2016-18) series show adults making refuges and dens out of their possessions, suggesting a human instinct for construction.

A historic exhibition explores wood as a sculptural medium: contemporary and modern works appear alongside ancient and non-Euro American artefacts, suggesting a debt of influence. The display also shines a spotlight on less-seen art from the collection, including a carved relief by the Jamaican-born Modernist sculptor Ronald Moody whose career feels ripe for celebratory re-appraisal.

The adjacent Henry Moore Institute carries five small displays of new work. These include Rashid Johnson’s presentation in shea butter, both carved into crude sculptural forms and presented as piles of raw stuff to be modelled by visitors or massaged into the skin as moisturiser.

Through video and historic displays, Sean Lynch – a reliably engaging artist storyteller – tells the tale of “Flint Jack”, a manufacturer and peddler of arrow and axe-heads, many of which were erroneously purchased for archaeological collections in the nineteenth century.

Never mind Yorkshire: Hepworth Wakefield is one of the best museums anywhere in which to see sculpture, bringing together great architecture and great programming. Their YSI display includes older pieces exploring materials and our relationship with them by Jimmie Durham (a US American artist now dogged by controversy surrounding his claim to Cherokee ancestry, which tribal representatives deny.)

A quieter work by Wolfgang Laib occupies the side-lit adjacent gallery: a grid of rice, arranged in piles, each about the size of a handful, around small, rough stone sculptures. The space smells deliciously of Basmati, and invites meditative calm.

One of the great discoveries of YSI is the young Canadian artist Tau Lewis,whose work using textiles, ceramics, and marine debris occupies two small galleries at the Hepworth. Lewis has gathered clothing – mostly denim – from friends and family as well as her own wardrobe to create floor-based sculptures and a hanging wall piece that propose new legends of the sea.

Octopus, ray, hammerhead shark and jellyfish appear, interspersed with haunting faces, their teeth made of shells and pebbles: hybrid mermen and mermaids with ancestral origins, perhaps, in the devastating transatlantic trade in human bodies.

As well as four mega works by Hirst – including Charity (2002-3) and The Virgin Mother (2005-6) – Yorkshire Sculpture Park is staging the first major British exhibition of work by David Smith, a US American artist associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement. There are hints of Alexander Calder, Eduardo Paolozzi and early work by Giacometti, but Smith developed a sculptural language all his own, painting his welded metal works in bright colours and incorporating shapes inspired by his young daughters.

Smith died in a car accident in 1965, aged 59. Not much of his work is held in European collections, so this show is a rare treat: beautifully installed and full of fascinating insights into his early career. Half a dozen metal sculptures are shown outdoors, notably Untitled (Candida) (1965) which sits on the hilltop above the gallery and frames a view out over the park.

As well as bringing international sculpture to Yorkshire, YSI is supporting work by sculptors in the region, selected for exhibition via an open call. These five associate artists – all female – are showing in the Bothy Gallery at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Highlights of this small display include a series of striking, stained, bodily casts taken from clefts in rock by Rosanne Robertson, and a film and textile piece exploring movements in digital space by Rhian Cooke.

Stationed on the route into Wakefield itself is Huma Bhabha’s Receiver (2019) a sturdy, rough-hewn figure of heroic proportions cast in bronze, which glares ominously over the crossroads at the statue of Queen Victoria. The New York-based artist installed related works on the roof of the Met museum last summer: they suggest both war-torn antiquities and otherworldly totems.
Commissions for YSI have been inspired by artist Phyllida Barlow’s suggestion that “sculpture is the most anthropological of the art forms”.

Rounding off this sculptural study of human behaviour is a commission for the public realm by Tarek Atoui, an artist whose improvised music machines in turn create a sculptural environment from sound.

YSI was proposed, originally, as part of Leeds’s bid for a stint as European City of Culture in 2023. The region had that hope dashed by Brexit, but has defiantly committed to this celebration of sculpture in the face of political uncertainty. The institutions involved have stepped up with a slick and outward-facing celebration of sculpture: it deserves to pull in the crowds.

To view the full article please visit iNews UK. 

For more information about Tau Lewis please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Sara Cwynar’s solo show at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is featured in Architectural Digest.

Sara Cwynar doesn’t make decoration, but she deftly nods to interior design in her first East Coast solo exhibition, now open at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. The Vancouver-born artist—a trained photographer and former designer for the New York Times Magazine—explores trends, commercialism, and the amorphous and ever-changing ideals of beauty. Titled “Sara Cwynar: Gilded Age,” the varied presentation features photographs, film, and a site-specific wallpaper making its first appearance Stateside. The show will be open through Sunday, November 10.

Cwynar’s wallpaper toys with the idea of art as decoration. Sheathing a corner gallery wall, the wallpaper entitled 72 Pictures of Modern Paintings immediately captivates. This expansive decorative work, a first for the artist, is a compilation of famous modern paintings that she digitally manipulated to blend into an almost unrecognizable pattern that’s eerily ornamental until one recognizes a face, or perhaps arm, tucked into the dusty pinks and blues. Sure enough, fragments of 72 works by the likes of Lichtenstein, Picasso, Pollock, and more live amid the chaos. “l wanted to take these art objects that have been given a place of great importance in our culture, mash them together, and turn them into this big decoration to see and whether they’re just beautiful, and whether that makes them valueless,” Cwynar explains. “I think there’s still great value in just being beautiful, but the wallpaper kind of foregrounds the aesthetic components of modern art.” This inquiry is a substantial one: When even the most known artworks can so easily become purely ornamental, what inherently sets a meaningful work apart?

Sara Cwynar explores power of imagery at the Aldrich in ‘Gilded Age’.

The walls are talking at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield.

The artworks in the exhibition, “Sara Cwynar: Gilded Age,” are in conversation with each other, examining color, stereotypes and beauty standards harvested from an oversaturation of messages we are bombarded with today. Images of Nefertiti, architectural landmarks, overly bright nail polish bottles and cosmetic samples are repeated and rearranged among various works, in collage-like layered creations that blend photography, installation and bookmaking with historical reference points and themes.

This is the Canadian-born artist’s first East Coast solo exhibition and it is on view through Nov. 10. Cwynar has a background in graphic design and her artistic practice is clearly informed by conceptual art. In “Gilded Age,” she looks at what beauty means, what makes for a “pretty picture” and the power of images in the real and digital worlds.

Curated in conjunction with the artist, the exhibition features a sampling of Cwynar’s color photographs from 2014 to 2019 (including new work); “Kitsch Encyclopedia,” 2014, her first artist book; “Cover Girl,” 2018, a 16mm film on video with sound making its East Coast debut); and “72 Pictures of Modern Paintings,” 2016, a site-specific wallpaper being shown for the first time in the United States.

Combing through a wealth of imagery that runs the gamut from art history to advertising, Cwynar astutely ferrets out the important from the trivial to explore several themes. Color is a prominent theme explored and one that weaves itself throughout her works to open up important dialogues.

“I was thinking about many different ways color is used to create desire or to trick people,” said Cwynar. “For example, I am thinking about which colors film can reproduce and how things that seem totally natural and technical, like what red film can reproduce or how the color of a sky looks or a skin tone, are decided on by technicians with biases.”

“I was also thinking about how certain colors take us back to certain times, and how color can contain meaning and emotion. I also have spent a lot of time researching the way color is used to sell things, especially examples like melamine plastic cups from the ’50s or the rose gold iPhone from 2016 where color was used to sell us something we already owned as if it was something new.”

Bias among image makers, particularly in advertising, is another key theme Cwynar explores, revealing hidden intents and biases in vintage advertising images that she upends. Taking on popular photographic clichés, including the portrait, still life and product images, Cwynar asks important questions about deep-seated stereotypes.

“I really hope viewers come away thinking about the power of images, and the way that even our most benign seeming photographs — for example, an architectural picture in an encyclopedia, or an advertisement of a smiling woman, or a picture of a watch, contain many layers of politics and intention,” she says. “These types of images shape the way we see ourselves and our (Western) culture in ways that we may not be able to recognize all the time. And as they proliferate more and more it becomes even harder to see.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog — the artist’s first — and the cover image is a bright pink rose, which evinces Cwynar’s mastery of consciously layers upon layers of messages in her work. The rose here is a vibrant pink hue and the rose is a quintessential symbol of beauty but roses fade just as beauty fades.

“The roses are some of the only straight or unaltered pictures in the show, and yet somehow they look fake. I was thinking about roses as this sort of unimpeachable symbol of beauty, something most people in Western culture would agree on, but making them in these garish bright almost synthetic colors so it’s not entirely clear if they are beautiful or real at all,” she said. “And also having all these advertising images in the show that sort of started as the height of style but then fell out of favor (the way most advertisements do), I wanted to connect this to something that has a much briefer life span, that is really only beautiful for a few days or for the moment I photograph it, then is gone.”

“This show thinks a lot about the cycles of value of things we consider beautiful and how some images stand the test of time (like an image of a Greek ruin, for example), and others, like a lipstick ad, have a very brief life span before we no longer want to look at them. And ultimately, particularly in ‘Cover Girl,’ I am trying to parse an idea that the way we cycle through and discard objects and images has bearing on the way we treat others and ourselves too — particularly when it comes to female standards of beauty.”

To view the full article please visit The Wilton Bulletin.

For more information about Sara Cwynar please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Tau Lewis part of Yorkshire Sculpture International and featured on The Arts Desk. 

Sculpture is as much a part of Yorkshire as cricket and a decent cup of tea, with the “sculpture triangle”, comprising four prestigious museums and galleries, feeling almost as well-established as the county’s famed rhubarb triangle. Now the Hepworth Wakefield and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park have collaborated with the Leeds Art Gallery and the Henry Moore Institute next door to launch a sculpture festival.

Yorkshire Sculpture International, which runs until 29 September, showcases work new and old against the backdrop of the county’s considerable sculptural heritage, with Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, two of Yorkshire’s most illustrious offspring, rarely far from sight or mind. Their commitment to the modernist maxim of “truth to materials” provides a thematic anchor for 18 artists from 12 different countries, united by their interest in exploring the physical and cultural attributes of their chosen materials. New commissions from local and international artists, all at different points in their careers, respond also to a statement by Phyllida Barlow in 2018, that “sculpture is the most anthropological of the artforms.”

A unifying theme is vital for a festival as ambitious as this one, but Barlow’s insistence on sculpture as a human imperative is sufficiently ambiguous that it can accommodate just about anything. At the Henry Moore Institute it embraces the clankingly literal, with Rashid Johnson’s sculptures made from shea butter a striking example of concept triumphing over execution. Shea Butter Three Ways attempts to channel the exotic overtones of this luxury cosmetic ingredient into a broader critique of cultural appropriation and western cultural imperialism. The ideas are good, but the cloying smell is the memory that endures.

In Leeds and Wakefield city centres, Barlow’s statement might well have provided an opportunity – sadly wasted – for a re-evaluation of public sculpture and its role. Instead Leeds city centre hosts a self-serving homage to another of Yorkshire’s sons, Damien Hirst. Hymn, 1995-2005, a giant anatomical model in playschool colours towers over the city’s main shopping street, while inside the elegant Victoria Arcade, something similar bares its organs, as neatly packed and decorative as if they had been parceled up in one of the chichi boutiques nearby.

In Wakefield city centre, Receiver by Huma Bhabha is another dispiriting addition, the more so perhaps because it was specially commissioned. Vaguely humanoid, archly naive, the piece is an artist’s inadequate internal dialogue located in a civic space in a way that shows an extraordinary lack of judgement by both artist and curator. The piece shows no empathy with its location in the city’s fine and dignified square, eliciting well-deserved snorts of  derision from passing youth on BMX’s.

If misplaced self-importance is the scourge of public sculpture, self-searching work by west Yorkshire artist Rosanne Robertson brings insight and feeling to big topics. Her casts of rock formations, made on long walks in the countryside near her studio in Hebden Bridge, test the natural states of fluidity and solidity with dedication and originality. For her, these interrogations serves as a means to consider the nature of gender and sexuality: beautiful to look at, sensitive and responsive to the artistic antecedents that surround it in the gallery at Hepworth Wakefield, Robertson’s work combines sculpture and performance in works that are both personal and universal.

In a similar vein, Jamaican-Canadian sculptor Tau Lewis’s work is infused with the power of memory. Pieced together from fabrics collected from different places and people, Lewis’s handsewn sculptures of sea creatures and others are envisaged as reincarnations of victims of the slave trade, lost at sea but perpetuated through private and public acts of remembrance.

The highlight of the offering from the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and perhaps of the festival overall, is an exhibition dedicated to David Smith (1906-1965), an American sculptor little known outside the USA, with few works in European collections. Though he died very young, he was prolific, and sculptures dating from 1932 until his death seen both outside and in, present a sustained dialogue with sculptural developments of the 20^th century.

Though Smith can clearly be seen responding to surrealism and kinetic art, for example, it was industrial practices rather than artistic ones that motivated him in the first place. Works from the 1930s and 1940s recall the surrealist constructions of Giacometti, the erotic casts of Duchamp and Louise Bourgeois’s cells, while a piece such as Hudson River Landscape, 1951, a drawing in metal, relates to the work of his friend Alexander Calder.

In his Medals for Dishonor series, 1939, Smith’s antecedents reach back still further. The series of 15 large scale reliefs recall Renaissance medals, their theme of protest against the horrors of war echoing Goya’s print series, The Disasters of War, 1810-20

Much as fine art provides an intellectual and formal backdrop for Smith’s work, his training as a welder was every bit as influential, a stint at the Studebacker car factory while a student proving formative. A decade or so later, in 1934, Smith rented workspace at the Terminal Iron Works in Brooklyn, so that he was in the remarkable and surely at that time unique position of prdoucing sculptures surrounded by industrial metalworkers.

Works from the 1950s and 1960s combine an industrial aesthetic with fields of colour reminiscent of the paintings of that era. In fact, Smith’s work often challenges the very fundamentals of sculpture itself, insisting on flatness and rejecting mass and volume, traditionally the very essence of sculpture.

Long-awaited, difficult to stage, and including the rare chance to see Smith’s sculptures out of doors, this exhibition is by far and away the high point of the inaugural Yorkshire Sculpture Festival, and a reason to go in itself. Smith’s works add a further, enlivening dimension to the possibly rather overawing dual presence of Hepworth and Moore. Along with an impressive outreach project that is not only supporting early careers of promising young artists like Roseanne Robertson, but also introducing school children to sculpture, this is what will be remembered from this first edition of a festival that has every reason to grow into an annual monument.

To view the full article please visit The Arts Desk.

For more information about Tau Lewis please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

As part of Yorkshire Sculpture International, The Hepworth Wakefield sat down with self-taught artist Tau Lewis (b.1993, Toronto) while she spoke about her first solo show outside of North America, taking place in Wakefield. Yorkshire Sculpture International, the largest festival of sculpture in the UK, runs at The Hepworth Wakefield, Leeds Art Gallery, Henry Moore Institute and Yorkshire Sculpture Park from 22 June – 29 September 2019.

For more information about Tau Lewis please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com
+1.416.531.8000

Sara Cwynar’s solo exhibition at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art is featured on Zukus.

Sara Cwynar’s video Cover Girl (2018), the artist’s meditation on femininity and the history of cosmetics, includes scenes shot in the depths of an unnamed makeup factory. In one scene, the camera pans over sterile jars filled with flesh-tone liquids to be eventually sold as foundation. In another, thin sheets of oily rose-colored wax—pink lipstick in progress—cascade down a slide looking like slices of finely shaved deli meat, delectable and disgusting.

There is something jarring about seeing the cold realities of the beauty industry—a sector that is growing rapidly among millennials, shilling self-care, individuality, and most important, the capacity to be Instagram ready. And after one views Cover Girl in Cwynar’s “Gilded Age” at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut—the artist’s first East Coast solo museum show—it’s hard to resist seeking out more footage from inside cosmetics factories. My favorite, a YouTube video by L’Oréal on its lipstick-making process, stands out for embracing the contradiction between the product’s associations and its mode of manufacturing, stressing that “as glamorous as it is, lipstick is still a high-technology product.” As the video elaborates, lip color is mixed according to tested, standardized procedures. To achieve each shade, multiple pigments are needed, and each tube contains about 20 ingredients.

Images, especially those of women, are just as manufactured—comprising ingredients that cohere into one appealing or comprehensible vision. And many of Cwynar’s videos and photographs are designed, like Cover Girl, to offer something like a behind-the-scenes look into the making of feminine ideals. Her work forces viewers to question why certain tropes of femininity appear beautiful or at least normalized. Why does a synthetically produced red lip, for example, read as sultry rather than machinic? And when and why do we embrace artifice in women? How much makeup is too much? At what point does self-enhancement slip from tasteful to garish?

Cwynar’s work is also interested more broadly in identifying the palettes, cinematographic moods, and media formats we are subconsciously drawn to. For example, her best-known film, Rose Gold (2017)—shown in a 2017 exhibition at her New York gallery, Foxy Production—highlights our attraction to soft colors and faded analog film. (Soft Film is the title of a 2016 video showing the artist arranging her vintage eBay purchases by look, date, and function.) Shot on 16 millimeter, Rose Gold centers on color trends and takes its name from the popular, since-discontinued iPhone color option. Through a series of montages and voiceovers, Cwynar reveals how our reception of different hues changes over time by comparing our appreciation of the titular iridescent pink to our revulsion for older, harsher metallics like harvest gold, a mustardy shade that was a staple of 1970s fridges and shag carpets.