Matt Sheridan Smith and 24 young international artists will present their work in an exhibition titled A.D.D. Attention Deficit Disorder, curated by Benjamin Godsill, at Palazzo Lucarini Contemporary, Trevi, Italy. The show is open from July 16 through September 19, 2010. For more information and the press release, please see Palazzo Lucarini Contemporary.

"The artists in this summer roundup give rituals and relics a contemporary spin. 

Ten up-and-coming artists examine the place of rituals and relics in modern life in “Green Honey,” a show curated by former Deitch Projects director Andrea Cashman and artist Borden Capalino. Many of the works hover between fine art and folk object and combine mystical and pop cultural references, giving the gallery’s cavelike basement space the feel of an underground settlement inhabited by the technologically savvy. Anna Betbeze’s distressed and overdyed flokati rug is part textile art, part gestural painting.

Tony Cox’s talismanic embroideries incorporate scraps of fabric, metal findings and hairpins. Joanna Malinowska’s feather-work wall hanging resembles a Peruvian artifact, if the ancient Peruvians had known about video games. Capalino himself updates the old-fashioned circus sideshow banner with crudely printed digital photographs of snakes. Lucas Blalock, who does fascinating things with commercial-photography tropes, is represented by a mysterious triptych of pictures whose quotidian subjects—an electricalcord, a primitive wooden church, a plastic hoop—have little in common save an inexplicable air of portent. Peter Simensky’s carpet piece, printed with a computer-generated image of a natural spring, includes the dowsing rod he used to find a spot for it. Ruby Sky Stiler weighs in with a pieced-together foam-core amphora; Christian de Vietri with a camper’s pyramid of kindling cast in aluminum.

One of the most arresting works in the show is Frank Haines’s totemic witch’s head, with a single bulging eye and Pinocchio-like nose, which seems to have spontaneously coalesced out of drips of wet paint. Most disturbing is footage, collected and edited by Gilad Ratman, created by someone called the Boggy Man, whose films of himself pretending to drown in mud cater to quicksand fetishists. (Yes, really.)

This exhibition has its tongue-in-cheek moments. But its consideration of the process by which objects acquire value—from high-end commodities to lucky beans—makes for a seriously magical summer show."

-Anne Doran

Time Out New York / Issue 773 : Jul 22–28, 2010

In the group show Real Estate, Andy Coolquitt will be exhibiting his sculpture alongside artists Kathryn Andrews, Neil Beloufa, Christian Frosi, Alan Michael, and Amir Mogharabi at Zero Gallery in Milan. The show opens 20 July 2010 and will be on view through 11 September 2010. For more information please see Zero Gallery.

Presentation of the Abstract Image: Universal Reasoning of ‘The Self.’

From the exhibition of J. Parker Valentine

Within the world of contemporary art in which significant proximity towards subculture has become the norm, honestly speaking, one finds oneself enlisted with a feeling of pall when viewing works who’s images have been extracted from the array of manga (comics), animation, games, and entertainment magazines which surround us.  

In such a current situation present in our country, J. Parker Valentine’s works present a sense of viridity. The drawings made on old pieces of cloth and non-descript sheets of paper installed upon the white walls present the gallery with a tranquil atmosphere. 

One cannot help but reminisce the numerous portrayals of reticence in the past, yet beyond that we have been led to contemplate anew the power instilled within the abstractive picture plane, which strongly commands the viewer to actively take part in the act of ‘seeing.” 

The lines which have been drawn are bold and dynamic, and have momentum. The works not only consist of thin lines, but also include thick, bold lines which have been drafted by placing charcoal on its side and making one single stroke, and does not necessarily present itself as highly sensitive. The work is enlisted with a daringness; the artist’s eyes the moment in which she faces the picture plane, the relationship between the movement of the hands and the support medium, can be directly felt by the viewer. Moreover, as if presenting the will to make adjustments, one is able to witness a sense of the original line under the traces of erasure made by using a rubber eraser, and at times through the use of white out. 

One feels the importance of her work lies within the act of leaving traces –the space created as a result of that, and the notion that one was present at that specific moment of time in which it took place. 

The works presented in this exhibition were created during her one moth visit in Japan, yet show no signs of anticipated ‘images of Japan.’ 

One places hope within the young American artist whom within the aura of Post-Modernism, undauntingly questions and presents the universal reasoning of what it means for ‘the self’ to exist.

-Madoka Moriguchi, The Kyoto Shimbun

"7.12.10 — DE-DEFAMILIARIZATION

“Knight’s Move” has more than one false start. Outside SculptureCenter through July 26, a few plywood stairs by Matt Sheridan Smith and Nikolas Gambaroff lead exactly nowhere, other than into a blank wall. It blends into the debris on a dead-end street, and I missed it entirely on my way in. David Brooks picks up where it leaves off with his Buried Boardwalk—except for the mountain of gravel that blocks progress. Its “observation deck” at the end overlooks pretty much nothing anyway, give or take people like me wishing we could climb up. Even if we could, we might find ourselves trapped like criminals on a scaffold.

One gets a third chance on entering the building and at least a fourth heading into the basement tunnels. In practice, almost every work involves repeated starts and inconclusive endings. It might be Alex Hubbard on video, puttering around his studio without ever quite appearing, much as in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. It might be Mika Tajima, leaving paintings on a rack as if waiting for someone to display them. The entire show could serve as an allegory of the art world, where anything seems possible but success. For all the talk, big installations are giving way to smaller experiments, at the risk of no one breaking through.

Not that uncertain progress means futility. Brooks’s walkway gently twists and soars as an actual boardwalk never could, and it leads the eye from debris to greenery—much like his demented sidewalk in a gallery this spring. At the far end of the sculpture court, he stacks dumpsters like colored blocks, with flora growing on top, high overhead. Downstairs, Joanna Malinowska piles her polished imitation walrus tusks next to a washer-dryer as In Search of Primordial Matter. In art apparently, evolution can go through cycles and still clean house. In fact, the show combines any number of interdisciplinary trends, to the point that I could almost have curated it myself.

One, as with Brooks or Allyson Vieira, is the transformation of Minimalism into what Mark Dion would might urban archaeology. Vieira’s plaster fragments bring the Parthenon to industrial walls, while Esther Kläs’s horizontal slabs form a broken pyramid. Others, like Erin Shirreff and Sara VanDerBeek, transform photography into abstraction, but based on real sculpture and model architecture. For Tamar Halpern, that leaves the space of abstraction and of imagery difficult to tease apart. For still others, like Hubbard or Uri Aran, process art leaves a real-world mess. Aran’s shavings and shredded wheat suggest a compulsion to create something, even if no one will see it—or, one hopes, eat it.

“Knight’s Move” in fact feels less like a chess endgame than a grab-bag of tricks, trends, and opening gambits. When Virginia Poundstone leaves flower boxes on brightly printed vinyl, appropriation veers on the decorative arts, especially as it might make a nifty shower curtain. When Ohad Meromi sets a primitivist sculpture next to an early modern tower, it approaches identity politics, without having much of an identity. With Cassie Raihl’s TigerStack, Alexandre Singh’s assemblages modeled on magic acts, and 

Tom Thayer’s low-tech animations, trashy installations come close to incompleteness for its own sake. It is not so easy to break free of a static and divided art world. I might turn out a lousy curator after all.

The actual curator, Fionn Meade, finds an old-fashioned optimism behind it all. The show’s title quotes Victor Shklovskii, the Russian formalist critic who coined the term defamiliarization. Shklovskii might enjoy the irony of turning to him to justify so much that is now so familiar. But maybe the trends are converging for good reason, in a revisioning of the city as a site for art. Brooks’s mound might well have risen up from the stones of the Maya Lin sculpture court, and Smith’s stoop might mourn the new glass apartment tower with its back to the museum. Shirreff closes the show with the United Nations as seen from Long Island City, in distorted color—like so many artists with dreams of Manhattan."

"Photographs That Tell Unsettling Tales

Is a mosquito bite a form of travel? Maybe, according to a photograph by Dennis Oppenheim. It shows the pest alighting on human flesh but offers this thought to compensate for the inevitable itchy welt: “The blood now conforms to the interior configuration of an insect, thereby placing part of you in a state of aerial displacement.”

You can see Mr. Oppenheim’s piece in a lively little collection show at the Metropolitan Museum, “Between Here and There: Passages in Contemporary Photography.” It asserts that many artists from the 1960s to the present tried to relay or reflect some experience of dislocation.

That experience might be Ed Ruscha’s drive down the Sunset Strip, Doug Aitken’s airplane flight or Richard Long’s walk through the British countryside. It could be Bruce Nauman’s jerky, robotic march across the floor of his studio, seen in one of several videos in the show. Or it could even be the movements of an actual robot: the unmanned lunar probe Surveyor, equipped with a tracking camera.

Like past exhibitions in this narrow slip of a gallery, which is permanently devoted to contemporary photography, “Between Here and There” works harder than it has to. The effort pays off in some of the unorthodox choices, like the NASA photos; less so in the heavy-handed wall texts, which had visitors on a recent holiday Monday scratching their heads.

Going with the split-room layout, the associate curator Douglas Eklund uses the 1980s as a chronological and conceptual fence. Viewers may remember that Mr. Eklund also organized the Met’s recent survey of the “Pictures” generation, which highlighted that decade. Here he vaults right over it, with the exception of two modest works by Félix González-Torres and Anne Turyn.

The first half of the show, drawn mostly from the 1960s and ’70s, takes “displacement” to mean serial or peripatetic motion: textbook Minimal and Conceptual art, in other words. But this section isn’t as humdrum as it sounds, thanks to the dry wit of many of the works.

Here, for instance, is On Kawara’s “I Got Up,” part of a series of postcards this globetrotting artist sent to friends or colleagues, each stamped with the time he happened to arise that day. His circadian rhythms were erratic, to say the least, though the work’s title hints that sleep wasn’t the only thing on his mind.

Nearby you can see the Austrian artist Valie Export lying down — not in bed, but on the curved curb of a traffic island in Vienna. The image is from her series “Body Configurations,” in which Ms. Export and other female artists played up the physical hostility of urban architecture.

Another performance artist, Vito Acconci, made photography a ticklish form of experimental theater. Working quickly from the stage just after the house lights dimmed, he took a set of flash photos of the audience. You can see his guests, including the artists Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt, looking bored and slightly irritated.

Next to the Acconci, Mr. Smithson’s set of photographs “For Bern Snow — Mirror Displacement in the Alps” shows tiny mirrors embedded in snowdrifts. This test run for a larger project in Switzerland was done in New York, on the roof of Mr. Smithson’s Greenwich Street apartment building . You might think of it as a landscape twice removed.

Even more disorienting is a postcard by the contemporary artist Matthew Buckingham, a vision of Canal Street storefronts facing an actual canal. It was inspired by a never-realized 1791 proposal to build a “Venetian-style” waterway across Lower Manhattan.

Mr. Buckingham’s piece (from 2002) makes a neat segue to the second half of the show, which contains larger, splashier color photographs and videos from the past decade or so. Here displacement becomes a subject as much as an artistic strategy.

One whole wall is given over to Rineke Dijkstra’s portraits of Almerisa, a Bosnian refugee girl living in the Netherlands. Ms. Dijkstra photographed Almerisa regularly from 1994 to 2008, in more or less the same setting and pose. The pictures have a soothing consistency and, though they’re not intrusive, a sense of accountability — as if the photographer were a family doctor or case worker.

There are some big names in this gallery, including Jeff Wall and Thomas Struth, but the most memorable piece comes from a younger artist, Erin Shirreff. Her video “Roden Crater” appears to have been taken at James Turrell’s unfinished earthwork in the Arizona desert. The color of the sky changes as the sun rises and sets over the crater; gradually you realize that you’re looking at a photograph, transformed by a succession of lighting effects in Ms. Shirreff’s studio. (There’s a telltale flash reflection on the print’s surface.)

Ms. Shirreff is making a clever point about the complex relationship among earthworks, photography and tourism. Other works take the travel theme more literally: Mr. Aitken’s photograph of a distant plane in flight, taken from his window seat on another plane, and Darren Almond’s inverted film of a German monorail (with a propulsive techno soundtrack).

These are the voyages we already know about, the stuff of countless exhibitions on the alienating and exhilarating effects of globalization. But “Between Here and There” shows us some more unusual trips, like the one that starts before you even feel the itch.

“Between Here and There: Passages in Contemporary Photography” continues through Feb. 13 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org."

-KAREN ROSENBERG

Change We Can Believe In

"....Josh Faught's art is not easily accepted, either. He's the other artist featured now, in a solo show of crocheted and handwoven sculptures called Procedures to Reduce Contamination and Stimulate Better Living. A banner at the entrance addresses itself, in scrawled hot-pink spray paint, "TO ALL THOSE PERSONS WHO ARE SUFFERING FROM THIS PREVIOUSLY UNNAMED DISEASE..." Next to this banner is a smaller, blank one—bringing to mind Warhol's enigmatic "blanks," like the one in Double Elvis at Seattle Art Museum—and a mirror resting on the floor in which you see yourself. The disease is unknown, but judging from the show's crafty/queer materials—sequined scrapbooking stickers, French manicure press-on nails, potpourri pies, and political pins with slogans like "Someone You Know Is Gay"—its chief, systemic symptom is shame. Bleached hemp yarn, a "cleansed" substance, is the base material for this new series. That's in part a response to the fact that Faught's sculpture got moths when it was exhibited last year at SAM, he explained during his talk. "I remember when Marisa [SAM curator] called to tell me," he said. "I felt like I'd given the museum an STD."

Procedures to Reduce Contamination is based on a list of rules from a defunct bathhouse that the artist found rummaging through the Pacific Northwest Gay and Lesbian Archives in Portland. They sound like rules from an office: No food except in the break room, no lit candles, no moving of furniture. The rules are numbered and appear in gold and sequined letters, crowded at the edges of the textiles, which Faught intends as a sign of urgency, as if they've run out of room to speak. Each piece is a self-contained mess of hairy yarn, woven protuberances, glittery and shiny texts, and streaks of paint (some of which is nail polish) on top of finely woven surfaces that look like afghan blankets or feature folksy patterns like holiday wreaths.

The bathhouse and the farmhouse joined in such physical proximity brings a familiar American shiver. There's both promise and threat in the sense of encroaching formlessness, of spreading, of the erasure of reassuring separations. Change of all kinds—from the unclear shifting of political alliances to the decay that happens every second in every person—is uncomfortably popping out of Faught's and Schweder La's surfaces like a rash. Are we about to be doomed or about to be saved? It makes you want to do something."

-Jen Graves

"For this Brooklyn-based transplant from Texas, a sculpture is more than a thing to be bought, sold, or looked at—it’s a conduit for connecting to the rest of the world. (Cue references to Allan Kaprow and Joseph Beuys; note affinities with the formalist high jinks of Andre Cadere.) Coolquitt’s second show at the gallery is a jam-packed affair, in which objects cobbled together from scavenged materials—disposable lighters, metal rods, fabric remnants, a curly blond wig—lean casually against walls, nestle in corners, and dangle from the ceiling. The gang’s-all-here air of sociability (one upholstered wall piece is titled “A Nice Soft Place for Meeting People”) has an undercurrent of melancholy, as if the objects were conspiring to alleviate the strain of being alone in a crowd. Through June 27."

-Anonymous