Darren Banks: BLOBS

all images courtesy Darren Banks and Workplace Gallery


Darren Banks: Blobs

The Blob first crept onto movie screens, and into the collective consciousness in 1958, as an unstoppable, flesh-eating, gelatinous mass. In the fifties as we pushed to the outer limits of Space (Sputnik was launched in 1957) and the innermost realms of DNA  (discovery of the double helix, Watson and Crick, 1953), so the Blob was found during excavations in remote territories...

Examined under a microscope, the Banks Blobs occupy the fragile states between animal instinct and artificial intelligence...we see visceral qualities of genetic material--held in a tenuous equilibrium with industrial looking elements, though warped and melting...with delicate menace...

In Larry Cohen's 1985 film The Stuff, an amorphous, sweetly tasting, highly addictive substance  is commercially marketed to the public, gradually permeating and infecting every corner of American society...the stuff is actually a parasitic alien substance which uses humans as its hosts, manipulates them until it finally discards their dead, husk-like bodies...

Post millenium,  Banks' Blobs are best viewed through a kaleidoscope...we catch glimpses of the potentially familiar debris of our everyday landscapes...could that be the arm of an easy chair, raising its head like a dinosaur from the primeval swamp?...are those collected globules the remains of an X-box controller, melted and deformed in a house fire?...

 

excerpt from an essay on Banks' blob drawings by Iris Aspinall Priest 2010

Leigh McCarthy: Doppelganger

 

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The project "doppelganger" developed as a response to the curator, Tricia Lawless Murray, who invited me to contribute photography to a group show titled "eros/thanatos" about the life/death drives.  "Doppelganger" functions both as an ethereal-double and a harbinger -- the self and its shadow – and incorporates a process whereby I double expose film to create ghost-like images.

For the Pharmakon Library, I present unedited contact sheets rather than individual cropped images in order to reveal the photographic process which initiates a game of chance that generates latent discoveries in which a filmic narrative emerges.  Paired with the seascape, this technique allows for the fecund nature of the dialectic to emerge: the self/shadow, love/sickness (madness), death/rebirth, beauty/sublime, and love as remedy/poison and the poison as panacea.  By simultaneously dissolving these oppositions, the meaning constantly shifts creating a permanent state of ambiguity.

The narrative that propels “doppelganger” derived from a dream that my brother had where we climbed to the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. In his dream, I was picked up by the wind and floated into marshy seagrass below.  Trapped by image-repertoire, my brother described the dream by referencing a Nestea commercial and an Aerosmith music video to depict my descent – his mind re-edited pop culture images he previously consumed. In my brother’s reformation of this imagery and in turn my remaking and doubling of his dream, meaning and essence become unhinged.  At the very end of the dream, just when he thought I was dead, I said, "that was fun, let's do it again", creating another doubling into an infinite narrative loop.

Leigh McCarthy is an artist and filmmaker who lives and works in San Francisco. She received her MFA from Goldsmiths College in London and has exhibited her work internationally including group projects at the Getty Center, Los Angeles; Torrance Art Museum, Torrance; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London. Special thanks to Jaime Beechum who assisted with photography.

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leighmccarthy.com

bdy dbl: new drawings

Kristen Alvanson: Spells (Poison-In Poison-Out)

Lucas Michael: Rough Magic (10 Years in LA)

LUCAS MICHAEL
Still Life (LM Squared), 2008
30 x 40 inches
Black and White digital print on Fujiflex
edition of 5 + AP   
courtesy Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

click on the detail above to see the full image...

ROUGH MAGIC

Lucas Michael:10 Years in LA

EGHQ, Los Angeles, Jan 8th – Feb 15th 2011

Lucas Michael traces. Literally. At Emma Gray HQ, a survey of subtle objects from the artist’s years in Los Angeles, takes on the complex relations between tracing, inscription, imagined identities and over-writing.  Michael superimposes his signature on meticulously hand drawn frontispieces from books on Sylvia Plath.A photograph shows him ‘being Borg’ kissing the iconic tennis player’s trophy. The artist superimposes his own face, barely visible, onto a classic Liza Minelli from the Cabaret era.

Oliver Sacks, in his new book Mind’s Eye, takes a hard look at recognition. He considers the condition of not being able to recognize things visually except by placement.  Even faces are unrecognizable: the sufferer must impose some clue, some note, some mental mark, to cope. A related condition is alexia, the loss of the ability to read while still being able to write.  Michael takes up tracing like that: writing, as if not being able to read.  Something about ten years in LA: can he (we) still see the lines of flight, like jet trails over Santa Monica?

Lucas Michael does not lay claim to impersonation. His objects are intrigues, shards left at a site, from which he himself is long gone. “A ruin is an accident in slow time,” observes Cocteau.  We look for patterns at the archaeological site, as if Emma Gray HQ has become a dig, the objects study samples in search of pattern recognition: but we cannot read the signs.  In a low res performance video, the artist films himself taking Polaroids. The footage unfurls repeated Polaroid images as his face emerges from the emulsion. Beyond this, nothing happens.  Lucas brings us right up to the edge of visibility.He overwrites just to the edge of the legible imprint....almost-Borg, almost-Minelli, almost-Plath, almost-Lucas Michael.

Autobiography is ‘a discourse of self-restoration - by which one’s name...is made  as intelligible and memorable as a face.” (Paul de Man, via Kristine Stiles, in “Correspondence Course: Letters of Carolee Schneeman, MIT Press 2010). Lucas Michael will write that ruin and finesse that face: evidence is  to the contrary.  Site and citation conflate.  Lucas Michael’s ambivalent attachments make light work of a heavy tranche, that deep desire to identify with the beloved who may or may not be there. Lucas Michael’s erotic economy limits love to the accidental meeting. If you want to know the glory hole in Silverlake, you have to be able to read the signs.

-cm

Bertien van Manen: "Tirana: Mother and Bride" in MOMA's Pictures by Women 2011

Jean Watters : My Great Recession #barbies

Jean Watters as Avon Representative Barbie with inventory

Barbie Legs with Shoes from the Gallery Opening Outfit

Midnight Tuxedo Barbie

Jean Watters as Midnight Tuxedo Barbie with inventory

alexandria morgue in near-realtime, egypt 29 January 2011 (courtesy Aljazeera/live video clips)

parker tilghman / pharma 1 - 7

pharma series parker tilghman 2011

Beverly Fishman: Future Natural + Pill Spill

new FIshman exhibition at Toledo Museum of Art 2011 

Fishman's new Pill Spill installation contains more than 120 unique glass capsules, ranging in size from 6 to 15 inches, placed in glass-enclosed architectural spaces at the Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion. Pill Spill treats the Glass Pavilion as a “body” by releasing capsules into the curved glass hollows between its exterior and interior glass walls, transforming them into an architectural circulatory system. The installation was created as part of the Museum’s Guest Artist Pavilion Project (GAPP).

Future Natural at David Richards Contemporary 2010

Interlude: Art Placebo

Don't you think the pharmakon library would be a perfect addition to their research 'hallway'?

Behring | Institute for Medical Research
CALL FOR: PLACEBOS FOR ART.

--I'm very confused by this CFP.

--I checked the medical references. They appear to be fictitious. The institutes, medical schools etc mentioned do not seem to exist. The pharmaceuticals don't exist. There is a Dr. Kristina U. who is a prof at University of Puget Sound, they mustve picked her name out of random searches for a cool doctor name.

-- I especially appreciate how close 'Behring' is to 'Schering,' which does fund a lot of art in their own self-interest. It's also amusing how the title is "Placebos for Art" but is asking for "Art Placebos." The latter is certainly more innovative. The world is full of 'placebos for art.'

--They at least have enough funding to buy an e-flux ad...

--very amusing! now what if e-flux is yesman-ized...

-- was seriously considering entering the pharmakon library. i mean. Get down.

-- ‎...by rich Dutch medical students who are tired of their government giving so much money to art...

-- I can't imagine a better placebo.

-- did you check out their 'research facilities' photo? it's called hallway.png.

-- After all the Museum of Hygiene is in Dresden, for real. Maybe that 's where "Mrs. Andersom" did her post-doc fellowship.

-- That hallway is great. Imaginary researchers sunning themselves in the hall... And they have an alliance with the "Banned Substances Control Group." What a riot!!

--AKA BS Control Group.

--I think the term "Paramedicine" is too good to be left to languish on a hoax website. I'm gonna resuscitate that one sometime...

-- Okay okay... one last thing: "Nocebo is used to label the harmful, unpleasant, or undesirable reactions (or responses) that a subject manifested (thus, "nocebo reactions" or "nocebo responses") as a result of administering an inert dummy drug or placebo, where these responses had not been chemically generated, and were entirely due to the subject's pessimistic belief and expectation that the inert drug would produce harmful, injurious, unpleasant, or undesirable consequences. "

-- The. Best.

-- "Exclusions (conditions that would prevent a volunteer from participating in this study):
Persons taking Rosiglitazone, Popglitazone, steroids, and immune suppersants."

Popglitazone!!! who knew??

Christine Callahan: Trine (3) Blz

TRINE: Finding the Cosmic in Queens

I am quick to tilt my camera at an arc, bending before the lightning ghosts dissolve. Pockets of grey places flicker in and out of grace.


Trine: Term in astrology, of or pertaining to the trigon aspect of two planets distant from each other 120°, or the third part of the zodiac. The distance between planets corresponding to one side of a triangle.

More trine....


christinecallahan.net

Christine Callahan: Trine (4) Fur

Trine: Finding the Cosmic in Queens



I am intoxicated by harsh lens flare, water, hair, the fringes of raw edges and parking lots. I hold still to harness the shine.



Trine: Term in astrology, of or pertaining to the trigon aspect of two planets distant from each other 120°, or the third part of the zodiac. The distance between planets corresponding to one side of a triangle.

More trine....


christinecallahan.net

Christine Callahan: Trine (2) Floyd

Trine: Finding the Cosmic in Queens


I wait for the guillotine of light. It splits the object's body from its soul. I try to catch it, severed, airy, bouncing and bowing.




Trine: Term in astrology, of or pertaining to the trigon aspect of two planets distant from each other 120°, or the third part of the zodiac. The distance between planets corresponding to one side of a triangle.


More trine.... 

christinecallahan.net

Christine Callahan: Trine (1) Trine

Trine: Finding the Cosmic in Queens



When I see a slant of light refracted, I feel the gods breathing.




Trine: Term in astrology, of or pertaining to the trigon aspect of two planets distant from each other 120°, or the third part of the zodiac. The distance between planets corresponding to one side of a triangle.

More trine.... 


 christinecallahan.net





Christine Callahan is a native New Yorker. She earned her MFA from the International Center of Photography - Bard  College and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts. She has had solo exhibitions in New York, Atlanta and Derry,Northern Ireland. She is a recipient of the ISE Cultural  Foundation Grant, National Lottery Fund, Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the British Arts Council in cooperation with the Cardiff School of Art and Design.
She teaches photography at the International Center of   Photography and Nassau Community College. Her work is represented by the Jen Bekman gallery.

Justin Kruse: Check out my new arm (D/DD)

Justin Kruse is an architect and designer living and working in New York City. His recent collaborative graphics project won an award in the competition White House Redux, Storefront for Art and Architecture, 2008.

Justin Kruse: Check out my new arm (C/CC)

Justin Kruse: Check out my new arm (B/BB)

Justin Kruse: Check out my new arm (A/AA)

Over my shoulder.