Monday, February 25, 2013

Dress Design

Friday, February 22, 2013

Selma Parlour and Yelena Popova on Modernist Painting

SELMA PARLOUR AND YELENA POPOVA : JUN 14 – JUL 14, 2012

Horton Gallery is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition featuring the work of London based painter Selma Parlour and Nottingham based multi-media artist Yelena Popova. In this exhibition, the abstract paintings on view examine not only the visual iconography of Modernist painting, but also the rhetorical structures used to define both Modernism and its critique.

Parlour, who is currently working towards a PhD in Art at Goldsmith College, University of London, uses the content and process of her academic research to inform her artistic practice. Shapes and forms rendered in thin transparent washes of paint are conceived of as representing rhetorical elements such as subject matter and analogy. Visually, the works explore features of painting that have been subject to scrutiny throughout the medium’s history such as surface emphasis versus pictorial illusionism and the arbitrariness of the visual sign versus the directness of the gestural index. At times certain works become more representational, seeming to depict actual abstract paintings within an archetypal Modern gallery space. As a result, Parlour’s paintings make iconographic reference to a multitude of pivotal Modern artists such as Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and Ellsworth Kelly, while playfully glimpsing generalized moments in the evolution of the pictorial field throughout painting’s history.

In this series of pale paintings, Popova, a recent Royal College of Art graduate, uses the compositional sensibilities of Russian Constructivism as a departure point, but deviates from the movement’s aggression and boldness to take on a palette that introduces the visual culture of our IKEA dominated contemporary era. Like Constructivist predecessors such as Kazimir Malevich and Alexander Rodchenkco, Popova is interested in society’s relationship with machines, which today involves a familiarity with translucent digital surfaces and the immateriality of screen based images. Popova, who like Parlour works with thin layers of diluted paint, creates ethereal images to represent her view that the Modernist narrative is “the history of matter tamed,” and that, “everything, from producing better houses to using atomic energy, points to matter becoming domesticated at all levels.” As thin layers of paint appear to evaporate and expose the natural fibers of the linen substrate, the instability or submission of matter is suggested. Effects such as these in Popova’s paintings serve as metaphors for the progress, defeat, and competition involved in Modernist dialogue.

Selma Parlour (b.1976, Johannesburg, South Africa) lives and works in London, UK. She is currently attending Goldsmiths College, London, UK for a practice-based PhD in Art. She received an MFA from the University of Reading, UK and a BA from De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. The artist has been the recipient of numerous awards, most recently a Research Support Award from Goldsmiths. This is the artist’s first exhibition with Horton Gallery New York and her U.S. debut.

Yelena Popova (b. 1978, Urals, Russia) lives and works in Nottingham, UK. She received an MA from Royal College of Art, a Postgraduate diploma from Byam Shaw, Central St. Martins, London, UK and a BA from Moscow Art Theatre School. She is the recipient of the Red Mansion Art Prize and residency in Beijing, China, the second prize of RCA Oberon Book Award and a short-listed artist for the Celeste Art Prize. This is the artist’s first exhibition with Horton Gallery.

Installation View: Yelena Popova, Horton Gallery, Chelsea

Installation View: Selma Parlour and Yelena Popova, Horton Gallery, Chelsea

Installation View: Selma Parlour, Horton Gallery, Chelsea

Yelena Popova Interview

http://www.crane.tv/#video/v/211157094601-7f5fb0e4/Yelena-Popova-

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Yelena Popova - Achromatised Modernism

With their transparent, softened geometric forms, Yelena Popova’s paintings recall the graphics and aesthetics of both Russian Constructivism and Minimalism, and open up conversations about the materiality of painting today.

Popova’s practice encompasses painting, video and installation, and all her work is tied together by an interest in exploring the concept of balance, whether in politics, representation, or in our relationship with machines.

“I’m not interested in making single objects, but in creating a complex network of facts, fictions, emotions, gestures, materials and images, which could relate to the world outside it,” the artist explains.
For a recent project she made paintings and video inspired by the metaphor of the discus thrower; the elliptical curves and repeated, rhythmic shapes on her linen canvases articulate the kind of balance, external and internal, expressed through fixed rotation. Popova’s films, which deal with overt imbalances such as Cold War topics and radioactivity, seem the perfect counterpoint to her 2D work, the flipside of the same theme.

Balance of Probability is a multi-part installation of paintings on linen that plays with similar ideas. The canvases in a range of sizes combine graphic pattern and unpredictable shapes with a delicacy of touch and thin gradients of pale colour that sometimes even show the grain of their linen surfaces. Precariously arranged on each other or held in place with makeshift pallet supports and even a doorknob, the paintings convey a sense both of dangerous asymmetry and of harmonious interconnectedness.

Lupe Nùñez-Fernández

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Matthew Collings on Post-Irony of Our Age

Post-irony is real, and so what?

Depending on how much time you spend on the Internet, you might be familiar with the rap group Die Antwoord, a South African group which calls itself alternately “next level rap-rave” and “Zef rap” and whose members sport some preposterous haircuts. Die Antwoord, or “The Answer,” as their name translates to English, has left many stymied. Why, exactly? Because, despite how ridiculous they seem, they’re actually pretty damn good.

Die Antwoord are just one of many pop culture phenomena that have recently complicated our understanding of irony. With a proud “who cares?” attitude, recent trends in pop culture—like Tao Lin’s literature and last fall’s The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans—make it difficult to separate irony from sincerity.

Historically, this makes sense. Irony, so long a tool of the underground, is often tied closely to authenticity. An “authentic” person—someone who earned this title through certain signifiers (keffiyehs, tight jeans, etc.)—doing something decidedly “inauthentic” (listening to N*Sync) made for the best sort of late-90s/early-00s irony. In general, pop culture in the 1990s was pretty awful—resulting from attempts to make good products through big budgets, but without the soul that made first-wave pop so appealing (compare Michael Jackson’s Thriller to HIStory). In this climate, authenticity mattered. In the 00s, though, the underground unironically fell in love with a certain former N*Sync member and the mainstream learned who Wes Anderson was. Authenticity has gone by the wayside, and overt irony with it.

What we’re left with today is often called “post-irony,” although the term does a poor job of describing the state of things. We now have a smarter form of irony, irony used as a scalpel as opposed to a mallet. And it makes sense—even if irony can no longer serve its original purpose, it’s become such an integral part of American culture that it has become subtly embedded in everyday use.

Werner Herzog’s The Bad Lieutenant is perhaps the best mainstream example of this new, hyper-postmodern sense of irony. The film contains what a Snakes on a Plane-style irony-fest should: hokey plot, bad acting, and deliciously over-the-top glorification of sex and drug use. But the film does much more than revel in its genre’s campy history—The Bad Lieutenant is gorgeously shot and contains pervasive, incisive commentary on everything from race relations to police corruption and the definition of finding success in America.

Likewise, the increasingly popular Hipster Runoff blog—presumably written by Brooklyn author Tao Lin, whose style is remarkably similar to the anonymous persona behind the blog, “Carles”—directs irony back at hipsters through its hilariously self-conscious “hipster” writer. Carles, constantly concerned with “personal brands,” generally focuses on the marketability of people/bands/DJs/products/nations. Written in a deliberately obnoxious internet speak—lots of questions and air quotes, numbers substituted in words, “u” instead of you—Hipster Runoff reads like a joke but also raises concerns about society and our increasingly uncomfortable relationship with pop culture. See, for example, Carles’s piercing dismantling of popular street fashion blog The Sartorialist, which posted a fashion commentary about a homeless man. Relying on common wisdom encased in air quotes, Carles posts a picture of a homeless man lying in a puddle of his own urine, and pushes the need for the homeless to pursue personal branding—clearly, then they could just “get a fucking job” like “the plotline of that popular Will Smith joint ‘The Pursuit of Happyness.’”

The important distinction that needs to be made, though, is that irony and sincerity are now just sitting side by side—they’re inexorably linked. The Bad Lieutenant is a not a great film just because it’s a combination of a campy, “it’s so bad it’s good” mentality and smart directing—the unremarkable Planet Terror did that a few years back. It’s great because the ironic “badness” is threaded throughout its entirety, adding—in the most self-consciously postmodern way—a sense of surrealism and absurdity to a story that revels in the absurd.

We are, however, still used to being able to ask about sincerity and get a straight answer: yes, Andrew W.K. was just kidding all along; no, Snakes on a Plane isn’t a horror movie; yeah, my moustache is just for laughs. Today’s irony is far more ambiguous (there’s a reason Lin is “famous” for putting words in quotes—who knows what anything means when people are kidding most of the time?) and far richer for it. As the headline ran on Videogum: “Die Antwoord is ‘Fake,’ and So What?”

Blake 7 - 70's Future

Juan Bolivar - After Halley

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness..." 'A Tale of Two Cities'. Charles Dickens Juan Bolivar's paintings occupy seemingly extreme positions. They playfully exist somewhere between abstraction and the recognisable world and they hint both at humour and tragedy. Geometry Wars presents a new body of work, comprising twenty one paintings and two sculptures. Painted mostly in 'greyscale' and muted tones,Bolivar's palette presents a flipside to the witticism often associated with his paintings, reminding us, in the words of Peter Ustinov, that comedy is simply a funny way of beingserious. The phrase Geometry Wars describes Bolivar's'struggle with abstraction' - whether to subjugate 'the square', and present it as pure form or whether to animate it into the world of figuration.	Juan Bolivar, Silver, 2007. Courtesy and copyright the artist.
Juan Bolivar, Stupid Dog, 2006. Courtesy and copyright the artist	Paintings such as Silver, 2007, exemplify Bolivar'sapproach. The work could resemble a reflective surface such as the window in a lighthouse; a painting of a photograph (Silver as in silver nitrate) or even a painting of a painting. It is also a geometric arrangement; and it is suggestive of the work of other abstract artists such asElsworth Kelly or Kasimir Malevich. The exhibition title alludes at a political resonance reflected in a number of works featuring familiar war imagery - a battleship, a plane, a watchtower and a bunker. But Bolivar also point to his concerns for pure abstraction and formalism by the inclusion of two sculptures in this exhibition. Prototype Meter - a small gold bar and Prototype Kilogram - a black (25 Kg.) weight. Here the question remains - are these props simply reminders of our systems for weight and measures, or are we to read further meanings and associations suggested by these?
Bolivar's paintings hover between the ridiculous and the sublime. They allude at other worlds beyond the picture plane such as in paintings like Bell. However under closer inspection, paintings such as Raft of the Medusa orShack, show a battered side to modernism's promise of a new world. Juan Bolivar was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1966 and lives and works in London. He was selected for EAST International 2007, Norwich and has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions in the UK and internationally. Between 2001 and 2005, Bolivar curated and organised ten independent, contemporary art exhibitions in temporary locations in London under the banner of TRAILER. Geometry Wars is a John Hansard Gallery exhibition. Juan Bolivar is represented by Galerie Lucy Mackintosh, Switzerland. A fully-illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition will be launched on Saturday 26 July. Limited Edition Juan Bolivar Print: For a chance to win a signed copy of Stupid Dog, 2008 (part of an Edition of 10) pick up an entry form at our reception desk, simply answer a few questions relating to the exhibition and enter this free prize draw! Artist's Interview JHG Director Stephen Foster in conversation with Juan Bolivar. Video produced by e-media, University of Southampton.