Monthly Archives: November 2015

4 posts

Tuesday December 1st: Nayland Blake

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Interracial desire, same-sex love, and racial and sexual bigotry are recurrent themes in Nayland Blake’s sculptures, drawings, performances, and videos, which reflect his preoccupation with his own racial and sexual identities. Blake explores ideas about whiteness and blackness, not only as they relate to race, but as skin itself and how that skin determines one’s identity. Blake, whose mother is white and father is black, work has often dealt with role-playing (puppets and theatricality and sado-masochism) and asks questions about the search for identity and the notion of passing for something you are not. The exaggerated role-playing and costumes of sado-masochism and drag are for Blake another type of “skin.” The bunny is a recurring theme for Blake as he expands on the rabbit and hare’s traditional portrayal as symbols of lust and fecundity. Blake’s “rabbit” has evolved into the artist’s iconographic surrogate for gay men (playing off the stereotype of the promiscuous gay man) as well as a threshold figure for black/white and male/female. Many works incorporate bunny suits that the the artist constructs for himself, such as, Starting Over (2000) is a video projection that depicts Blake wearing a bunny suit lined with weights that match his boyfriend’s total body weight and feverishly tap dancing–the weights affecting each movement, sometimes moving in tandem with Blake’s body and sometimes imposing constraints.

Blake has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and his work has been included in the Whitney Biennial and Venice Biennale. Survey exhibitions of his work have been presented by the Center for Art and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland in College Park, Tang Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs and Location One in New York. He has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as Yerba Buena Arts Center in San Francisco, Henry Art Gallery at University of Washington in Seattle, Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, and Berkeley Art Museum at the University of California. HIs works have been included in group exhibitions at Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, New Museum in New York, Institute of Contemporary Photography in New York, Artists Space in New York, Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Tate Liverpool, and Center for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, among many other venues.

See more of his work here.

Tuesday November 24th: Nancy Lupo

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Nancy Lupo (b. 1983, Flagstaff, AZ, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) received a BFA from The Cooper Union and a MFA from Yale University School of Art. She attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013 and is a 2015 recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Recent exhibitions include Old Zoo Food, LAXART, Los Angeles (2014) and Taster’s Choice – curated by Christopher Y. Lew, MoMA PS1 (2014). Her work is currently included in A New Rhythm, Park View, Los Angeles and Apple of Earth, High Art, Paris. She will have a solo presentation in the Art Statements section of Art Basel in June. This is her first one-person exhibition at Wallspace.

See more of her work here.

Tuesday November 17th: Alex Da Corte

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Alex Da Corte was born in Camden, N.J., in 1980 and currently lives and works in Philadelphia. He received his BFA from the University of the Arts and his MFA from Yale University in 2010.

Da Corte has recently mounted solo shows and presentations at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Carl Kostyal, Stockholm; David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen; Artspeak, Vancouver; Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Maine; and Nudashank, Baltimore. His work has been shown at MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art and the deCordova Museum, and he has participated extensively in gallery and non-profit exhibitions in the US and internationally. In 2012, Da Corte was named a Pew Fellow in the Arts by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Philadelphia.

Tuesday November 10th: Matthew Barney

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Matthew Barney was born in San Francisco in 1967 and raised in Boise, Idaho. He attended Yale University, receiving his BA in 1989, then moved to New York City, where he lives today. From his earliest work, Barney has explored the transcendence of physical limitations in a multimedia art practice that incorporates feature-length films, video installations, sculpture, photography, and drawing.

In 2002 Barney completed the CREMASTER Cycle, a five-part film begun in 1994. The Cycle, along with related sculptures, photographs, and drawings, was the subject of a 2002 retrospective organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and traveling to Museum Ludwig, Cologne and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. His ongoing series DRAWING RESTRAINT has been the subject of exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Serpentine Gallery, London; Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; and 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan. Barney’s most recent project is RIVER OF FUNDAMENT, an operatic film made with composer Jonathan Bepler. A solo exhibition of related sculptures, drawings and storyboards, opened at Haus der Kunst Munich, 2014; traveled to the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania in November of that year; and is now on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles through January of next year.

Barney has received numerous awards including the Aperto prize at the 1993 Venice Biennale; the Hugo Boss Award in 1996; the 2007 Kaiser Ring Award in Goslar, Germany and the San Francisco International Film Festival’s Persistence of Vision Award in 2011.