…
David Shrigley is best known for his sardonic, absurdist or just plain weird drawings, often compiled into volumes with titles such as Ants Have Sex in Your Beer and Drawings Done on the Phone Whilst Talking to an Idiot. However his new show at the Hayward Gallery in London is making waves for its unsettling sculptures. Bringing together work from as early as 2001, the exhibition features Shrigley’s darkly funny (or disturbingly demented, depending on your appetite for the macabre) take on taxidermy.
Category: sculpture
-
David Shrigley does sculpture, and it’s macabre as hell
-
“The Tie-Break” pt 2: Tibi Tibi Neuspiel + Geoffrey Pugen at Neubacher Shor Contemporary
…
The Ministry of Artistic Affairs hosted its first event of the season last Wednesday evening at the capacious Neubacher Shor Contemporary. Currently on view in the main gallery is new work by the collaborative duo Tibi Tibi Neuspiel and Geoffrey Pugen, made in the aftermath of their gripping Nuit Blanche performance, The Tie-Break. Conceived as a reenactment of what ESPN once called “the most riveting episode in the sport’s history”, Neuspiel and Pugen set out not only to memorize and execute the legendary fourth set tie-break from the 1980 Wimbledon Finals between Björn Borg and John McEnroe, but to do it over and over again, all night long. As anyone who was there that frigid evening last October can attest, their composure and sheer endurance in the face of blistering winds and a few too many drunken hecklers further electrified the atmosphere of tension and suspense, despite the audience’s assumed knowledge of the match’s outcome. -
Please touch the art: Derek Sullivan at The Power Plant and Jane LowBeer at Loop Gallery
…
Over the past few weeks we’ve been thinking especially hard about art. So hard, in fact, that recent encounters with art that foregrounds the physical experience have been a hugely welcome relief from all that heady cogitation.The first such encounter got us out of our chairs and walking up stairs as part of Derek Sullivan’s recent Power Plant show, Albatross Omnibus. Comprising three industrial-sized stepladders and 52 print-on-demand artist books suspended from the ceiling, Albatross Omnibus conceptually echoes Yoko Ono’s well-known 1966 installation, Ceiling Painting (YES Painting), whereby viewer initiative and participation is required to experience and complete the performance of the exhibition. However while Albatross has similarly playful, meditative, and uplifting moments, Sullivan’s books collectively embody a much more idiosyncratic and energetic profusion of words, images and ideas rather than a singular (albeit profound) experience. This is not to say that Sullivan’s work is superficial; in fact the many humourous concrete texts and visual koans which make up the body of Albatross belie a deeper love and engagement with the history of reading, print, and the book itself. Steering a ladder through space, ascending the steps, and stretching up to page through each slim volume in turn, one enacts a physical experience of the pre-digital library, wherein books occupy positions, not always easy to reach, in a specific place and time. At a moment when books are rapidly beginning to disappear into the cloud, we are reminded not only of the sheer pleasure of touching and turning a page, but also of the importance of preserving and protecting the printed format as one of the still-unsurpassed achievements of human social, political and cultural expression.
-
Actual size: the sculptural drawings of Jannick Deslauriers and Joan Linder
…
Jannick Deslauriers’ recent exhibition at Show & Tell Gallery is a study in contrasts. Utilizing the lightest of materials–crinoline, tulle, lace, and organza, she constructs life-sized sculptures of physically and/or politically weighty objects such as a pair of hand grenades, a sewing machine, a typewriter, a tank. Suspended from above, the objects exert a spectral presence on the space, appearing as literal materializations of creative or destructive human impulses. Seen through this lens, an unassuming brick, rendered in terracotta-coloured crinoline and black thread, becomes a symbol of both our collective capacity to build society, and–when taken in hand and thrown through the scapegoat-of-the-moment’s window–to destroy it in turn. -
Art by number: Ken Nicol (and Mel Bochner, and Mary Temple, and Roman Opalka)
…
On the tweeted advice of Leah Sandals, we stopped by MKG127 gallery for the last day of Ken Nicol’s show. Aside from an irrational desire for Cy Twombly books and a penchant for Bic four-colour pens, we personally share with Nicol a complete and not unwelcome inability to multitask. Perhaps this explains our delight in his show, titled Hundreds of Things, Volume 1, for which he executes extremely well-crafted permutations of the number 100 in a wide range of seemingly mundane, normally discarded materials. From his gallery’s website: -
The Power Plant Refresh inaugural exhibitions, review pt 3: To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong?
continued from The Power Plant Refresh inaugural exhibitions, review pt 2: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
…Upstairs in The Power Plant’s North Gallery, a more poetic and less overtly political mode of curatorial inquiry is represented, one which serves as a counterpoint to the ground floor exhibitions (see links to related posts below). To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong? is a group exhibition of young Canadian and American artists curated by Jon Davies, Assistant Curator at The Power Plant. Taking its title and cue from the poetry of American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, this show features fantastical landscapes from the imaginations of artists Andrea Carlson, Annie MacDonell, Kevin Schmidt, Jennifer Rose Sciarrino, and Erin Shirreff.