CrossMediale 1 04.-28.08 Gosia Koscielak Studio & Gallery , Chicago USA

CrossMediale 1

Austria – Germany – Japan – Netherlands – Poland – USA

An exhibition of American and International art in new media curated by Gosia Koscielak.

Exhibition Dates: August 4 – 28, 2006

Opening reception/vernissage: Friday, August 4th, 2006, 6:00 pm – 10 pm

Special events:

August 4th, 2006 6 - 10 pm
Annette Barbier and Drew Browning
You Are Here, Pure Data & GEM projection onto the exterior of the gallery building, visible from the Kennedy Expressway (I-94), near exit 48B (North Ave.)

August 4th and 25th, 2006 6 - 10 pm
La Bande Sans Fin electro-audio-visual performances

Participating artists:
Mark Baldridge, Annette Barbier, Hans Bernhard, David Blum, Drew Browning, Ben Chang, Miroslaw Chudy, Melinda Fries, Catherine Forster, Scott Kildall, Toshihiro Komatsu, Lizvlx, Zbigniew Oksiuta, Erik Olofsen, Richard Purdy, Silvia Ruzanka, Galina Shevchenko, UBERMORGEN, David Zerlin, La Bande Sans Fin.

CrossMediale 1 is an international exhibition focusing on new media art. The concept of the installation of this show allows the viewer to move freely between artworks produced in vr, photography, and video, amid images derived from quantum mechanics, cosmology, computer programming, and fractal geometry – as exemplified by the encaustic on wood pieces by New York artist Richard Purdy. Artworks included in this exhibition traverse media and concepts.

Chicago digital artists Ben Chang, Silvia Ruzanka, and Mark Baldridge present virtual reality works. Mark Baldridge’s vr work ChiSky is inspired by the paintings of Roger Brown, a Chicago Imagist, while Ben Chang’s vr work is a virtual kinetic sculpture based on permutations of pieces from the IKEA catalog

Video works are by Catherine Forster, Scott Kildall, Erik Olofsen, Galina Shevchenko, and Zbigniew Oksiuta. The exhibition includes a special video project, Spatium Gelatum (congealed space), by Zbigniew Oksiuta. This project, which examines dynamic systems that transfer information and energy through liquid medium, is a crossover of architecture, art, and the biological sciences. It was presented at the 2004 La Biennale di Venezia, the 9th International Architecture Exhibition and ArchiLab, La Ville à Nu, 6e Rencontres Internationales d ’Architecture d ’Orléans in France.

Erik Olofsen, and Toshihiro Komatsu display photographs. Dutch artist Erik Olofsen presents Mugshot photo as well as Shift, a video installation consisting of a double video projection of wooden shapes gliding over and past each other like drifting continents. The projections touch, causing the images to move from and towards one another. Sometimes both projections fall “into the fold” and create a new entity. The blank spaces–the emptiness in between–become as tangible as the saw-toothed wooden forms. The scale and perspective transform, hinting at geopolitical shifts.

UBERMORGEN presents the ART FID (2005) painting series, featuring digital prints on canvas, which portray, magnified on a monochrome background, the structure of round RFID chips. UBERMORGEN.COM’s focus on “the pixel as the molecule” and technology as a hidden demon relates also to the technology industries newest gadgets -- RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips are one of the leading technologies of the future: an identification system that can collect diverse information about the products it is attached to as well as the person that has made purchase of the product. The ART FID series was shown for the first time during ART 36 Basel, announced by a press release – a media hack in pure. UBERMORGEN.COM's style – talking about an experimental initiative by the same Art Basel: the introduction of the RFID technologies into the art system, providing visitors immediate access to information about all artistic works being presented, as well as access fot gallerists into the financial situation and the purchasing power of potential buyers. Recently reviewed in ARTFORUM, UBERMORGEN’s collaborative project GWEI—aka Google Will Eat Itself—tackles Google's dominance of the Internet. UBERMORGEN is an artist duo from Vienna, Austria–Lizvlx and Hans Bernhard–and represents contemporary European techno-fine-art avant-garde.

Special events include YOU ARE HERE, Pure Data & GEM projection by Drew Browning and Annette Barbier onto the outside of the gallery building at the 4th floor level and visible from the Kennedy Expressway (Interstate 94), near exit 46B. Further, two electro-audio-visual performances by La Bande Sans Fin, a Chicago based multimedia artistic team formed by David Zerlin and David Blum, will take place.

Ma Jun & Huang Min 29.07- 29.08 L.A.Gallery Beijng

Porcelain is not a widely used media in
contemporary art, but its unique character shown in the art works of Ma Jun and Huang Min does make me believe that porcelain improves the variety of art greatly. Porcelain has been a symbol of Chinese art for more than one thousand years. On one hand, artists find porcelain a very important media because it carries the sense of history; on the other hand, it is a burden because of its great history. So in spite of the power of porcelain, porcelain may play a very weak role in modern art because of the limitation of the artists.

Ma Jun and Huang Min transformed the traditional taste of porcelain in their
recent works. In their works, porcelain is not only the form, but also the content.
Form and function meet in their works. When contemporary artists play with the
ideas of Chinese traditional culture, past and present are connected.

L.A.Gallery site

"Once upon a Time in the West - Part One" - Groupshow

Cecily Brown, Christopher Wool, Dana Schutz, Daniel Richter, Raymond Pettibon, Georg Baselitz, Peter Doig, Tal R until

until July 29, 2006

CONTEMPORARY FINE ARTS
Berlin

Jack Pierson until 29.07 Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac presents an exhibition of new works by American artist Jack Pierson.

His photographic works have often been compared to images from road movies, movies whose rapturous race toward fulfilment have become etched into the American landscape. His favourite subjects are drawn mostly from his daily life as a contemporary artist: fragments of urban landscapes, still lives of ordinary objects, homoerotic nudes, evocative words worked into collages or transformed into neons. Far from simply seeking to create traditional variations on the American Dream, the artist seeks instead to explore the flip side of the concept, searching to express what he calls "the tragedy inherent in the pursuit of glamour".

'Bennie's Games' by Anita Van Tonder, Bell-Roberts Gallery, Cape Town

This month Bell-Roberts hosts 'Bennie's Games' by Anita Van Tonder, a finalist for the Kanna award at the Klein Karoo Nasional Kunstefees earlier this year.

'Bennie's Games' comprises seven sculptural pieces each either accompanying a typical video arcade game or transformed to become such a game. By creating detailed and luridly kitsch renditions of notions of the ideal and stereotypical, van Tonder uses notions of play and competition to expose issues such as abuse of power and substances, media-induced obsessions with food, physical appearance, sex and excess.

Opens: July 19

Jessica Ciocci until 04.08 Foxy Productions, NY

Ciocci's work explores the process of consumption through the examination of desire, incorporation and detritus. She appraises childhood as a time when individuals are psychically hardwired to consume, using a primitivist pig-like character as a primary motif to disarmingly critique the dynamics of demand, supply
and surplus.

Employing at times a junk-store aesthetic that revels in a world of bric-a-brac, the unwanted and hidden treasures, Ciocci delves into the psychology of our emotional attachment to popular symbols, characters and narratives. Key to her approach is a profoundly intuitive re-presentation of the all-too-familiar as
the uncanny.

A grandly–scaled fabric work combines everyday found textiles and repeated motifs, colors and patterning to produce an almost hypnotic effect that pushes figure and form to their limits. Together, diverse snapshot-like photographs - of Bart Simpson dolls, money blowing away on the street, a paper fish, an arm too close to the camera to be in focus - gel into a poignant, downcast whole. A series of collages, using fabric, paint, and found images of Barbie, pets and fairy tales, deftly explore the pleasures and terrors of the childhood experience. An animation-based print and a video use a flatness of texture and color, not unlike that of children's cartoons, to create bright semi-abstract character-scapes that are undercut by an almost claustrophobic disquiet. A large acid-hued knitted yarn piece, comprising a number of individual panels, appears to be a totem to the pig-like figure, to venerate it, or perhaps, acting like a gargoyle, to ward off its potential for harm.

Jessica Ciocci is a member of artists' group Paper Rad. Selected exhibitions with Paper Rad include: Green on Red, Dublin (upcoming, October 2006); PaceWildenstein (2005); Carnegie Arts Center, North Tonowanda, NY (2005); The ArtReview 25 at Phillips de Pury, New York (2005); Deitch Projects (Paper Rad & Cory Arcangel) (2005); Foxy Production, New York (2004); the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu (2003); Tate Britain, London (2003); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2003); the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2003).

Jessica Ciocci and Paper Rad have received critical acclaim in a range of publications, including: The New York Times; ArtReview; Artforum; Art in America; Rolling Stone; Mute; Vice; Issue; and Select. Publications include “Internet Art” (Thames and Hudson, 2004), and an artist’s book designed by Ben Jones and Paper Rad (Picture Box, 2005). Jessica Ciocci and Paper Rad are online at www.paperrad.org

MISS MAO opening 14.07 Blacklist Projects , London

“ Pinocchio was a persistent liar and in Mao's time it was told that the communist party was the mother of all people.”

MISSMAO celebrates the inauguration and opening of Blacklist Projects with a unique and diverse international collaboration. The exhibition marks the beginning of a new dialogue and debate between artists and curators examining modes and myths in an information driven age.The catalyst for the show, the Gao Brothers’ ‘Small Silver Idol’, is seen here for the first time outside China. ‘Small Silver Idol’ is one of a series of red, silver, goId and white idols originally made in mud before being cast in fibreglass, and ranges in size from 2-20 feet high. Prior to its journey to Europe, it was shrouded in sack-cloth to avoid confiscation during police inspections. In fact, until 2003 the Gao Brothers themselves were on a government blacklist and unable to leave China. In recent years, Gao Zhen, 50, and Gao Qiang, 44, both from Shandong Province, are part of a new wave of Chinese artists showing at an international level. Due to censorship laws in contemporary China, and as a response to cultural sensitivities, MISSMAO will change her clothes when she tours to Beijing in September 2006. Updates will be posted regularly on http://www.missmao.co.uk