Ant Macari and Mike Pratt: [Im]Perfect Articles, VOLTA Show, New York, USA

Imperfect Articles announce participation in VOLTA NY.  VOLTA NY runs this week Thursday 2PM-8PM and Friday - Sunday 11AM-7PM.  It is located at 7 West 34th Street, between 5th Ave. and 6th Ave.  They will be releasing 8 new t-shirt editions by: EliKuka Misaki Kwai Ant Macari Mike Pratt Mark Schubert  Oliver Schultze Jered Sprecher Zack Storm Additionally, they will be showing edition shirts by Atsushi Kaga, Sterling Ruby, David Shrigley, Claire Sherman, David Godbold, Rachel Niffenegger, Rashid Johnson, and Clare E Rojas. http://www.imperfectarticles.com http://www.voltashow.com/ Founded in the balmy summer of 2004, Imperfect Articles is the collaborative effort of artists Noah Singer & Mike Andrews. Based in the Humbolt Park area of Chicago, Illinois, Imperfect Articles has been featured in Time Out Chicago, The Chicago Reader, Chicago Magazine, The New City (Chicago), Flare Magazine, Venus, XL8R, Cargo and W Magazine. Merging a clothing brand and site-less gallery, Imperfect Articles takes an experimental approach to curatorial practice with limited-edition, hand-dyed and hand screen-printed t-shirts. Imperfect Articles challenges the relationship between image, audience and "exhibition" space with a new model of distribution that highlights work by emerging and established artists alike, conflating concepts of fine art, design and fashion. Each shirt is an original, one-of-a-kind, numbered edition; our newest shirts are pressings of 30, 40 or 50 shirts only. Once the shirt is sold that's it. All our shirts are hand-dyed, 100% cotton American Apparel short sleeve, fine jersey tees. Imperfect Articles is an on-going project and usually print between 50-100 new designs a year. We also can be found at various art fairs in Chicago, New York, Miami and Switzerland -- join our mailing list to keep up on our latest project! image: Mike Pratt Rubber Neck Edition of 30

Jennifer Douglas: 'The Short Score', DLI Museum and Durham Art Gallery, Durham UK

Jennifer Douglas The Short Score DLI Museum and Durham Art Gallery Preview Friday 5th March at 6:00pm www.durham.gov.uk/dli The Short Score is a newly commissioned work by Jennifer Douglas that brings a sense of playful, but also demanding, investigation of 'matter' through her creation of intricate worlds of fantasy. Viewers are invited to test their boundaries and notions of objects and space, fiction and reality. Spanning drawing, sculpture, and installation, Douglas's work reveals structures of thought that are both abstract and literal. Among the variety of ways in which artists produce their work, two predominate.  The artist may either engage in extensive research and planning prior to the work's execution, in which case the work's 'problems' have been more or less 'solved' in what might be called its preliminary design process; or, they may adopt a more intuitive approach, responding to materials and entering into an open dialogue with them as the work develops. It is the latter that characterises the working process of Jennifer Douglas. Such extemporization does not necessarily result, however, in the inconsistency or arbitrariness that one might expect from unregulated freedom.  Certain techniques, formal arrangements and aesthetic preferences recur, giving the artist's work - in this case Douglas's - the coherence of a virtual language. (Extract from Passage Through The Wood by John Calcutt) Currently based in Gateshead, Douglas's recent projects include a billboard commission for the Jerwood Space in London and numerous international solo and group exhibitions including those at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Workplace Gallery, Gateshead,  and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. The Short Score runs until Sunday 18th April

Workplace Gallery at The Armory Show, New York : Eric Bainbridge & Marcus Coates

Workplace Gallery is pleased to present new work by Eric Bainbridge Marcus Coates THE ARMORY SHOW PIER 94 Booth 541 MARCH 4-7, 2010 http://www.thearmoryshow.com Eric Bainbridge (b.1955 UK) has presented numerous solo exhibitions in museums and galleries including Supercollage Galleria Caroline & Salvatore Ala, Milan 2009, Forward Thinking MIMA, Middlesbrough 2008, DELFINA, London 1997, The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1989, ICA, Boston 1987, and Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis 1986. Forthcoming exhibitions include British Sculpture, Royal Academy, London and The Economy A Foundation, Liverpool. Group exhibitions include Monologue/Dialogue at Bangkok University Gallery, Collage at The Bloomberg Space, London, Glad That Things Don't Talk at Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Anxious Object, STORE, London, Etc, Amagerfaelledvej Art Project, Copenhagen, and New Generations - Sculpture in Britain 1951-2000, Leeds City Art Gallery. Marcus Coates (b.1968, UK) has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally. Forthcoming projects include Sydney Biennial 2010, Serpentine Gallery London, 2010. Exhibitions include: Psychopomp, Milton Keynes Gallery 2010, Kunsthalle Zurich 2009, Altermodern, Tate Triennial, London 2009, Diawa Prize Winner at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo 2009, New Orleans Museum of Modern Art, USA, Manifesta7, Trento, Italy 2008. Coates received the Paul Hamlyn Visual Arts Award 2008 and the Daiwa Foundation Art Prize 2009 and was the Calouste Gulbenkian Artist in Residence in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, 2008. Coates lives and works in London. image (top): Eric Bainbridge Untitled, 2010 Cut Paper 28.5 x 21.5 cm Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery image (below): Marcus Coates Vision Quest with Chrome Hoof (detail) Coronet Theatre *1, London 2009 digital c-type print 115 x 163 cm photography: Nick David  Produced by Nomad, Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery The Armory Show is America's leading fine art fair devoted to the most important art of the 20th and 21st centuries. In its eleven years, the fair has become an international institution. Every March, artists, galleries, collectors, critics and curators from all over the world make New York their destination during Armory Arts Week. For a full list of available works please contact info@workplacegallery.co.uk

Catherine Bertola: "Walls are talking: Wallpaper, Art and Culture" Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK

Walls are talking: Wallpaper, Art and Culture

Whitworth Art Gallery, Oxford Road, Manchester

6 February - 3 May 2010
Preview: Friday 5 February, 6-8pm

The first major UK exhibition of artists' wallpapers with work by over 30 artists including Andy Warhol, Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst. Kitsch ideas of home decoration are turned upside down as artists subvert the stereotypes of wallpaper to hit home messages about warfare, racism, cultural conflicts and gender.

The exhibition is grouped around themes: subversion, commodification, imprisonment and sexuality. In Sonia Boyce's work Clapping, a feeling of claustrophobia and menace is strengthened by the repeated design of the black and white hand print. Zineb Sedira uses wallpaper patterns to illustrate social inequalities and gender difference from her French-Algerian Islamic perspective.

Thomas Demand, one of the foremost conceptual artists working today, covers the entire South Gallery in his Ivy wallpaper - intricate pieces of paper cut out and photographed make up a lifelike work of imprisoning beauty. In stark contrast to this are popular commercial papers that reinforce cultural and gender stereotypes; from Barbie or the Spice Girls to the use of male symbols such as beer cans, football teams or idealised female bodies.

Whether amusing, like David Shrigley's Industrial Estate, or startling, like Bashir Makhoul's Points of View, the rolls of paper in this exhibition provide an unprecedented insight into a bold and progressive contemporary art form. Wallpaper has long been thought of as a backdrop to the main event. With so many prominent designers and artists using the medium as their primary method of expression, this exhibition provides a timely exploration of the possibilities and power of print.

http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk

image:
Catherine Bertola
Beyond the looking glass (detail)
2010
ash and paper
New Commissioned work for 'Walls are Talking'
Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery

Cath Campbell, Peter J. Evans, Ant Macari, Richard Rigg: "Brick by Brick" xsite Architecture, Newcastle, UK

XSITE ARCHITECTURE, FOUNDRY LANE STUDIOS, FOUNDRY LANE, NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, NE6 1LH.
http://www.xsitearchitecture.co.uk/

Exhibition runs until 5th March 2010
Open Monday - Friday 10am - 4pm or by appointment

Last chance to vote for Matt Stokes: "Northern Art Prize 2009" Leeds Art Gallery, UK

To vote for Matt Stokes to win this years Northern Art Prize 2009 Click here Northern Art Prize 2009 Pavel Buchler, Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson, Rachel Goodyear, and Matt Stokes 27 November 2009 - 21 February 2010 at Leeds Art Gallery, The Headrow, Leeds LS1 3AA Open Mon-Tues Thurs-Sat 10am-5pm, Wed 12-5pm, Sun 1-5pm Selectors The selectors for 2009 are Patricia Bickers (Editor, Art Monthly), Richard Deacon (Artist), Paul Hobson (Director, Contemporary Art Society), Peter Murray (Director, Yorkshire Sculpture Park) and Tanja Pirsig-Marshall (Curator of Exhibitions, Leeds Art Gallery). The winning artist will be announced on 21 January 2010, scooping the £16,500 prize money whilst each of the runners up will receive £1500. Image: Matt Stokes These Are the Days (Production Still), 2009 Dual Channel video 16mm Film Transferred to Hard Drive (MS0033) Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK and Ziehersmith, New York

Psychic Geography - Preview: Friday 22nd January, 6pm - 9pm

Psychic Geography Eric Bainbridge Sophie Lisa Beresford David Blandy Dan Ford Laura Lancaster Mike Pratt James Richards Daniel Silver Lara Viana 23rd January – 20th February 2010 Tues - Sat, 11am -5pm (or by appointment) Preview: Friday 22nd January, 6-9pm “…The psychic geographer specializes in spotting that place where humans and their environment meld and we can no longer speak of individual will as such, but only communal or sometimes corporate imperatives, the desires of the space as it speaks through the body politic that inhabits it” 1 Workplace Gallery is pleased to present Psychic Geography a group exhibition of new and existing works by nine diverse artists. The exhibition includes Collage, Painting, Photography, Sculpture, and Video that examines the interaction between spaces and people, places and identity. In a new series of collages by Eric Bainbridge, base elements taken from interior design and fashion magazines are cleverly disguised through simple manipulation. Eyes, mouths, sinks, stairs are all hidden, replaced with abstracted patterned forms themselves cut from the same source to leave us with hybrid unsettling images that are both familiar and absurd. In The First and Second Creation part of an ongoing series of intimate and revelatory ‘to camera’ videos Sophie Lisa Beresford attempts to communicate her complex and unified world view whilst also exploring with her own problematic and paradoxical relationship to making ‘Art’ and to ‘Being’. David Blandy’s work highlights the slippage and tension between fantasy and reality. In Hollow Bones Blandy performs Syl Johnson’s underground soul classic "Is It Because I’m Black" in an inverted “whiteface” version of the racist stereotype from American theatre of the 19th Century, popularized until 1978 in the BBC Television’s “The Black & White Minstrel Show“. Blandy’s film takes an alternative position: by appropriating the politically ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ he finds an antiheroic and morally ambiguous alter-ego that becomes archetypal and symbolic of Blandy’s quest for identity and cultural position. Dan Ford’s paintings and drawings examine the design industry aesthetics found in disparate pockets of visual culture such as knitting patterns, S&M magazines, sauna brochures and comic books. In Sheet 2009 a page of Dildos is the starting point for a small delicate painting in which shapes become merely motifs that expose the quality of the image against the artists sense of placement and appropriation. Laura Lancaster’s new series of 21 portrait paintings deconstruct the photographs they are copied from to such an extent that faces and features are obliterated with painterly gesture. The almost monochrome works leave us guessing as to the period, class, and identity of the subjects. Short Back And Sides (Bombay Bad Boy) is a new sculpture by Mike Pratt in which 12 classic art school plaster busts are reduced to the role of plinth for an assemblage of furniture and found objects. Through a process of re-enacting, borrowing and re-appropriation Pratt comments upon the cycle of assimilation constantly evolving from an affecting voice or act into popular culture. James Richards uses the accumulation and reassembly of imagery as a devotional and elegiac process. In his looped video Misty Boundaries Has Left the Room he entices us with a quick fire sequence of brief vignettes: a puff of steam, a hand being held, soap bubbles, a blizzard, followed by a clip from a television programme about how to draw until a girl zones out in a classroom as the tutorial explains how to realistically depict an eye. Daniel Silver’s sculptural installation Studies for Adam and Eve (1-3) mixes found objects with small sculptures presented in a series of altar like cabinets. Silver’s works play with universal values and tradition presenting us with ambiguous figures that echo religious artifact, iconic sculpture, mutation, and disfigurement. For Lara Viana painting itself is a tool for transport. In her recent paintings we are taken to the tabletop aftermath of opulent dinner parties. The fluid marks symbolise an experience of these forms and subjects, dreamlike in their foggy depictions, and at the same time, as substantially real as the memory of a past experience. To celebrate the opening of Psychic Geography there is an Afterparty at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art from 9pm onwards, with special guest DJ's and drinks promotions. Dan Ford and James Richards are shown Courtesy of the artist and Moot Gallery, Nottingham. Daniel Silver is shown Courtesy of the artist and IBID PROJECTS, London. Lara Viana is shown Courtesy of DOMOBAAL, London. For more information contact info@workplacegallery.co.uk Kindly supported by: 1 Extract from A Brief Explanation of Psychic Geography by Matthew Everett, published in The Agenda, Issue #15, 2006

AFTERPARTY - BALTIC Centre For Contemporary Art, Friday 22nd January, 9pm - Late

AFTERPARTY Friday 22nd January 2010 BALTIC Cafe/Bar: 9pm - Late BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art South Shore Road, Gateshead, NE8 3BA Special Guest DJ's and Drinks Promotions Admission Free AFTERPARTY is an event organised by Workplace Gallery and Sailor Girl Ltd to co-incide with the preview of the group exhibition Psychic Geography at Workplace Gallery. For more information please contact: info@workplacegallery.co.uk or visit: www.workplacegallery.co.uk

Marcus Coates: 'Psychopomp' Milton Keynes Gallery, UK. 15 Jan - 4 April 2010

Marcus Coates Psychopomp Milton Keynes Gallery 15 January - 4 April 2010 Preview: 14 January 2010, 6pm until late 7pm: Speeches followed by drinks, canapés and music Milton Keynes Gallery 900 Midsummer Boulevard, MK9 3QA www.mk-g.org Preview: Getting Here Ride in style from London to Milton Keynes by coach with onboard performances: Seats Of Learning by Brown Mountain College Depart: 15 Jan 5.15pm from the Whitechapel Gallery Return: 9.30pm from Milton Keynes Gallery Cost: £5 (booking essential) Call Joanne Trotter on 01908 676 900 or email j.trotter@mk-g.org Alternatively, there are frequent trains from London Euston with a short taxi ride to Gallery