Allison Schulnik "Salty Air" at Mark Moore Gallery, Culver City, California

Showcasing her distinctively textured canvases, ceramics, and works on paper, "Salty Air" stages a narrative born of the wistful sailor's tale – its characters loyal to the tragic, farcical beauty consistent within Schulnik's evolving cast. Yielding to the capricious plight of her unlikely protagonists, Schulnik embraces their trials and imperfections through dignified portraiture, a ceremonious haven in an otherwise inhospitable world.

 Drawing upon divergent renditions of the same fable, The Little Mermaid (as presented in its original incarnation by Hans Christian Anderson, and its jovial Disney counterpart) notably serves as influence upon Schulnik's recent works. She candidly portrays elements of the contrasting versions as an allusion to the irreconcilability of seafaring life, her mermaids and sailors personifying the vulnerability inherent to want. The sailor is free from society, but privy to isolation, while the mermaid shares a discordant existence between acceptance and solitude. Further modeled upon autobiographical figures and experiences, Schulnik's pensive characters exude a muted nostalgia, at once otherworldly in their awkwardness, yet eerily familiar in their strife. As James Ensor paints the grotesque surrealism of the human condition, Schulnik confronts the theatricality of being, her heavily impastoed canvases forging dramatic terrains both sinister and endearing. Her tactile backdrops prompt us to navigate the uncharted mindscape of her creatures and misfits, and deliver an allegorical odyssey equivalent to our own.

Born in 1978 (San Diego, CA), Schulnik earned her BFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (CA). She has had significant solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Montreal, Rome and London, and has exhibited in both group shows and film screenings around the world, including those at the Garage Center for Contemporary Art (Moscow), St. Louis Contemporary Arts Museum (MO), Contemporary Arts Museum (LA), The Hammer Museum (CA), and the Hafia Museum of Art (Hafia), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), among others. Her work can be seen in the public collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (KS), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA), The Santa Barbara Art Museum (CA), Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art (Montreal), Museé de Beaux Arts (Montreal), and the Laguna Art Museum (CA) – where she will have a solo exhibition in 2013. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Mark Moore Gallery
5790 Washington Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232

Tel 310 453 3031
Fax 310 453 3831
info@markmooregallery.com

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday - Saturday 11-6, and by appointment daily

Victor Mann "The White Shadow of His Talent" at Blum and Poe, Culver City California

Memory – deconstruction

"Painting for me is a daily routine that enables me to avoid falling into boredom and inactivity. I need to 'do' things every day." The objects and images used by Victor Man hark back to a more or less recent past and focus precisely on the actions of passing time. Certain objects out of context suggest new stories. By voiding the images of their initial contents and extirpating their original meaning, Victor Man allows for possible new readings. Only a part of the original remains intact: stealing their soul is the last action that the artist performs before he reintroduces them in a new context.

What is important in the images is the impression of déjà-vu that they inspire, the innuendo-filled story they imply as if they were ghosts of something that they used to be. In his paintings and in certain drawings, the artist demonstrates particular attention to the past and a will to reconstruct a personal memory.
- Victor Man

Man’s work brings together disparate references to his birthplace with its ‘folk’ traditional and myths, as well as allusions to more recent Eastern European history.

Richly evocative, dark in both palette and imagery, to suggest a voyeuristic gaze, Man’s works signify an alternative world beyond familiar experience. This is enhanced by the artist’s technique of using a ‘black’ mirror, a device which distances the act of visualization for both himself and us. Images of women, wolves and gloves recur across several pieces, sometimes eroticied; notions of the unconscious, a surreal nether-world where new codes exist are conveyed.

Motifs repeatedly hint at acts of subversion, fictions half-uttered as if time had momentarily stopped, the present dissolving. Here, Man’s work considers notions of desire and its various manifestations along with fragmentation – geographical and ideological – coming together to create new narratives. Images and objects used by the artist are captured and recycled from a wide range of sources, found near his studio and home, then juxtaposed in a representation of his changing world and the Romania of previous generations. The transformation occurring within Eastern Europe, reflected in the re-contextualized diversity of Man’s work, is obliquely examined, ensuring that a history is not lost but reconstituted with new meaning.

    from http://www.re-title.com/artists/VICTOR-MAN.asp 
    re-title.com - International contemporary art

7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art

The Berlin Biennale was founded in order to promote contemporary art in Berlin. In 1998 the first Berlin Biennale took place. Since 2004, KW Institute for Contemporary Art has been the supporting organization of the Berlin Biennale.

The 7th Berlin Biennale, curated by the Polish artist Artur Żmijewski has its focus on social and political issues. Żmijewski is particularly interested in the power of art and its relation to politics.

The Berlin Biennale is organized by KW Institute for Contemporary Art and funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation). The 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art in Berlin / Germany runs until July 1, 2012.

7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, opening reception, April 26, 2012. Video by Astrid Gleichmann.

Cory Arcangel Interview

“Cory Arcangel talks about video games, computers, and his work, Super Mario Clouds.”
- The Whitney Museum

Elizabeth Neel: "Routes and Pressures" at Suzanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA

 Neel’s paintings on canvas and paper and her sculptural assemblages participate in a triangle of influences. Intersections between organic and inorganic architecture, the tensions between calculation and accident, and the constant energy of becoming through memory, action and recapitulation characterize Neel’s two and the three-dimensional works. Shifting relationships between architecture and the body, between hard and soft surfaces and materials, her work conflates both experiential and imaginative attempts to grasp at reality.
In her paintings, she traces and punctuates pathways emphasizing the activity of mark making as a temporal record and as a method of creating narrative potential. A paint smear left by a hand gesture, a circle reflecting a missing penny, a square registering a once present piece of paper, a line as evidence of provisionally affixed masking tape – each of these inscriptions hints at the empirical within the transformative space of abstraction.

Neel’s sculptures incorporate found objects, flat images and handmade elements to complicate notions of perspective and proximity. She manipulates intimacies between things and representations of things in three-dimensional space, bringing back additional readings to painting, underlining architecture as a method of framing events and images.

Elizabeth Neel graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in 2007. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Pilar Corrias, London, UK; Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York, NY; Monica De Cardenas, Milan, IT; Deitch Projects, New York, NY; and at The Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY. Recent group exhibitions include the Prague Biennial 5, Prague, Czech Republic; “Modern Talking” at the Cluj Museum, Cluj, Romania; “A Painting Show” at Harris Lieberman, New York, NY; “Going Where the Weather Suits My Clothes” at Mother’s Tank Station, Dublin, Ireland; “Living with Art” at The Neuberger Museum, Purchase College, Purchase, NY; and “Abstract America” at the Saatchi Gallery, London, UK among others.

SUSANNE VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES PROJECTS
6006 Washington Blvd
Culver City, CA 90232
USA
phone 310.837-2117, fax 310.837-2148