Art in General for the opening of four new exhibitions for winter 2009. “Double-Bill,” curated by New Commission artist Redmond Entwistle, including his film Monuments and works by Mary Billyou, Suzanne Goldenberg, Rafael Sanchez, and Kathleen White will be in the sixth-floor front gallery. Anti-Prow, a project by Prow—the collaborative duo Peter Rostovsky and Olav Westphalen—will be in the sixth-floor rear gallery. In the storefront gallery will be a new project by Art in General’s current artist-in-residence, Lukasz Jastrubczak, from Poland, and Judith Hoffman will debut a new video in the elevator.
For Distant Drum Polish Resident Artist Lukasz Jastrubczak draws on the feeling of deja vu he has experienced exploring the New York cityscape—familiar through movies and television—for the first time. Jastrubczak explores this sense of disconnect in time and space through a series of illusions undermined as the artist reveals the methods of their creation, like a sad magician.
Lukasz Jastrubczak is a multimedia artist who observes his surrounding reality through the filter of culture – often through classic and cult movies, television and pop-culture. He inserts discreet actions into ordinary situations, playfully subverting our perceptions of the line between fiction and reality. Jastrubczak records these vignettes through video, photography, sound and drawing, mimicking in his installations the disconcerting experience of the passerby who stumbles across his public interventions. His work has been exhibited at venues including the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Gallery Taik as part of the Berlin Biennale, the OFF Festival in Myslowice (Poland), the Centre for Contemporary Arts
Ujazdowki Castle in Warsaw, the Polish National Museum in Zielona Gora, and the main railway station in Ankara, Turkey.
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Double-Bill
Redmond Entwistle
“Double-Bill” is a group exhibition curated by New Commissions artist Redmond Entwistle that includes his new film Monuments along with works by Mary Billyou, Suzanne Goldenberg, Rafael Sánchez, and Kathleen White.
Starting with Monuments, a retelling of Post-Minimalism’s relationship to the landscapes of New York and New Jersey, “Double-Bill” brings together a series of works that share B-cinema’s ethics of independent production and it’s achievement of magical and critical effects through minimal means. Echoing the format of self-organized cinema spaces, a temporary cinema will be assembled in the gallery featuring twice-daily screenings of Monuments. Beyond the removed fourth wall of the cinema space, Billyou’s text paintings, Goldenberg’s delicate paper-and-fabric constructions and drawings, and Sánchez and White’s long-running, situational project BOOKS RECORDS TAPES reflect and refract concerns raised by Monuments’ exploration of the legacies of Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Dan Graham. In considering the uneasy relationship between artists’ intentions – both aesthetic and conceptual – and social realities, “Double Bill” complicates traditional conceptions of artistic communities, their milieus and the social context out of which they emerge.
Anti-Prow
Peter Rostovsky, Olav Westphalen
Anti-Prow is a project by Prow – the collaborative duo Peter Rostovsky and Olav Westphalen – that addresses fantasies of empowered authorship and rational control in the creative process. Taking the artist’s manifesto as a starting point, Prow presents a series of hand-drawn portraits, sculptural assemblage, and wallpapered collage that test the boundaries of both self-proclaimed definition and open-ended experimentation, as realized by Anti-Prow’s contrasting collaborative process. Anti-Prow investigates the contradictions, doubts and folly that accompany any moment of artistic proclamation (or collective action), but that are almost always repressed in the stultifying performance of seriousness that constitutes a finished and professional artistic practice.
Running concurrently with Anti-Prow is The Prequel, on view at Sara Meltzer Gallery January 22 February 27, 2010. The Prequel is the first solo exhibition of PROW in a commercial setting, and Anti-Prow was developed for Art in General specifically to counter the Sara Meltzer Gallery presentation, a context in which PROW is operating according to the objective of a commercial enterprise. PROW proposes that contemporary art practice has become a province of the entertainment industry and so is structured like an independent movie studio, collectively producing various types of spectacle but without hierarchy. For more information please visit www.sarameltzergallery.com
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I’ve Heard That Disembodiment is the New Black
Judith Hoffman
In a short video created for Art in General’s elevator, Judith Hoffman mines stereotypes of the female artist to unveil the struggles of marginalized creative communities. Through the presentation of a cross section of Hoffman’s own artistic colleagues, the artist probes the uneasy balance between individuation and acceptance in the pursuit of recognition.
