Martin & Munoz hover between photography and sculpture.  Their work surrounds the idea of the snow-globe.  What is traditionally viewed as a cheap vacation tchotchke has been transformed into a storybook world full of dark deed and misadventures.  What has always caught my eye are the actual snow-globes that they create.  Small in scale, and usually keeping with the snow theme and actual snow, they are small self-contained stories.  Murder, accidents, war, animal attacks, the narratives are full of terrible things that belay the almost pure and innocent nature of the chosen sculptural medium.  Someone with a more active imagination might view these sculptures as the all seeing-eye that is often used in fantasy stories (think: Wizard of Oz, or The Lord of the Rings).  I tend to see them as captured memories, in this case horrible events that have been bottled and put on a shelf; in this way, they can no longer torment, but should never be forgotten.

I admit that I am more drawn to the globes than to the framed photographs that Martin & Munoz also show.  The imagery in the photographs is similar to that of the globes (the works in this exhibition are based on The Night), and I enjoy investigating them, tracking the actions of all the characters.  The sets are beautifully photographed.  However, the large photographs lose the sense of intimacy.  The flat nature of the prints removes them from the viewer a bit, they tend to become a recording of a world, as opposed to a whole world in and of itself.  Interestingly, the globes in this show were installed on a wall mount, all in a row, in the back room of the gallery space, as opposed to being spread throughout the gallery on pedestals.  This not only prevents viewers from walking around the globes, but also seemed to make them seem less important, whereas I think they deserved much more attention and light.

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“Night Falls” is currently on view at P.P.O.W. Gallery.  You can visit the artist’s website here.  All photographs were taken by me.

I have an awful lot of catching up to do, so the next couple of posts will be short.  Tomo Matsuyama’s show at Joshua Liner Gallery closed in October, but was a great collection of new work, showcasing not just paintings and drawings but sculptural and installation motifs as well.

Tomo’s work is a great hybrid of both traditional Japanese themes and contemporary urban style.  Often one will come across a large canvases with a feel of historical narratives, such as horsemen in battle, but using bright neon colors with built-up layers of paint.  There is a dynamic looseness to the work even though the compositions are tightly constructed.  Tomo also creates murals, and is influenced by street art, and some of the scale and levity of these pursuits can be seen in these works, especially the small works on paper he had on display here.

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Additional installation images and information can be found on the Joshua Liner site.

The 1970′s (at least, everything that the 1970′s was supposed to be) is still alive and well in the drawings and paintings of David Kramer.  The NYC-based artist has just opened a new show at Heiner Contemporary in Washington D.C.  I first came across him at the Laurant Godin booth in last year’s Armory Show, and it is a pleasure to be able to see more of his work now.

The main image sources for Kramer are magazines from the 70′s, with their colorful ads and glossy pages, the cars and the cigarettes and the naked women and the hot tubs.  Crazy color schemes and clashing clothes, turtlenecks under tweed jackets, headbands, swingers, hi-fi, jai-alai.  Kramer utilizes these sources to great effect, giving his work an older visual reference style but keeping it fresh and contemporary.  The fact that the works are more sketchy than completed helps keep them from being just windows on a time period.  A number of artists use porn magazines from the 70′s and 80′s, and it is good that Kramer looks beyond that.  His is a broader scope, his quest isn’t for a pre-AIDS sex romp, he wants a pre-Regan smoothness.

The artist also includes text in his work: thoughts, funny stories, observations.  Kramer doesn’t want to re-live the 1970s, he wants the kind of life that was promised to him when he was growing up there.  The words, then, are personal and intimate, funny and a little sad, as the artist struggles with adulthood.  The fact that the works tell us he has come up shorter than he would like make them accessible to anyone who views them; we are all part of the same club.

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All artworks are copyright David Kramer.  A nice interview of the artist by Matthew Smith can be found on the New American Paintings blog.  All images were borrowed from Heiner Contemporary, where the exhibition continues through October.

Pick a God.  There are many here to choose from.

Huston Ripley’s beautiful exhibition at Adam Baumgold Gallery ends today.  These obsessive drawings are made with ink on thin Japanese paper.  The effect is almost that of a Mandelbrot Set, in that the closer you get the more you see (hence the inclusion of detail shots above).

Ripley’s drawings have a devotional spiritualism to them, they feel like the by-product of meditative acts of atonement.  Their density recalls both Tibetan Buddhist mandalas and Christian gothic cathedral portal sculptures.  There are distnct references being made: the snake, the virgin, the Christ-figure, rivers, the she-wolf; a collection of the icons of religious art have all been brought together. The effect isn’t so much to build a narrative of religious training as to assemble these forms into an overall patina of design, much as a Persian Rug would.  His drawings are devotional, but what they are devotional to is left up to the viewer.

The artist’s draftsmanship is impressive, as is his attention to detail, patience and dedication.   The density of the image combined with the lightness and simplicity of the materials is a beautiful combination.

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All artwork is copyright Huston Ripley.  All images were borrowed from the Adam Baumgold Gallery website, which has additional information on the show.

The work of Jakob Roepke seems to inhabit one room.  Granted, it is a room of endless possibilities, where patterns layer on top of patterns, and fish can fly, and dinosaurs are pets.  Each work is populated by an everyman, sometimes two, in subdued casual office clothes.  He never seems surprised by the weirdness he finds himself in, each work is a new, twisted situation through which he saunters with relative ease, or labors in oblivious to the implications.

Roepke is a German artist, whose body of work is an endless re-creation of this basic format with paint and collage.  The works are a bit surreal, but colorful and playful.   While they are limited in scope, when viewed as an overall group one can’t help but admire the variation used.  Limits force us to work in interesting ways, to look at something from more than one angle.  Roepke’s works are filled with a dedicated sense of nuance.

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All artwork is copyright Jakob Roepke.  All images posted above were borrowed from the site of Jarmuschek + Partners Gallery, who represent him.

James Gallagher works solely in collage.

His is a hybrid of styles, where influences can be seen but he still manages to maintain his own style and pattern.  The age of Hannah Hock can be seen in his selected images, which come from vintage skin mags, old stationary, National Geographics, finance charts, etc.  One can see the sense of negation that is so central to Baldessari’s work, and the playful cropping with paint that Franz West so brilliantly achieves in his gouache / magazine page works.

Gallagher uses vintage porn imagery quite a lot in his work, and I have chosen to focus on other aspects of his work here.  Not because I am a prude, or am opposed to re-purposing porn, but because his other series have a little more going on in them, they work on several more levels. The Finance Series (top two images) and the Domestic Series (bottom two) are more interesting to me: the use of design furniture, or facts and figures, are denied their purpose and real look but maintain their identity, and they interact with the more decorative elements in a way that the nude works don’t, because the focus of that series is on the nude images themselves.

In this age of DIY rugged construction and Mad Men mid-century nostalgia, these works sum up the current aesthetics quite well.

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All images are copyright James Gallagher, and are borrowed from his website.

The series is a central example of Yang’s attempt to meld traditional Chinese artistic methods with foreign and / or contemporary forms (in this case the European Momento Mori, perhaps).

I really want one.

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To purchase, or learn more, visit the Ullens Center online store.

Dagmara Genda will have an exhibition opening next weekend at 3rd Ward in Brooklyn, as the winner of their most recent Open Call competition.

Genda’s work is a mix of site specific all work and intricate drawing.  Genda’s works on paper are beautifully rendered, organically growing and twisting phantasms.  One really needs to zoom in to see just how much is going on in them.  Often they are full of contrasting imagery: buildings and hair, birds and communists, all amid flowery ornamental motifs.  There is an energy and level of detail that reminds me of Manabu Ikeda (whose work I loved so much in the recent Bye Bye Kitty exhibition).

Unlike Ikeda, Genda’s works have no sense of gravity.  There is no real sense of up or down, of backwards or forwards, of in or out.  The compositions seem to twist their way in and out of existence, and we are not sure if we are seeing something be born or torn apart.

The upcoming show at 3rd Ward, called Building Disaster, will open August 19th.

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All artworks are copyright Dagmara Genda, and were borrowed from the artist’s website.  More information on the upcoming exhibition can be found here.

Gallery Ver in Bangkok has just closed its exhibition of Taiwanese artist Hou Chung-Ming’s third installment of his “Asian Fathers Interview Project.”  In each of these happenings, the artist will interview locals about their fathers.  He will present them with a series of questions about their relationship with their father, memories of and experiences with the father.  He will sketch ideas and make notes while each interview occurs.  Afterwards a portrait of the father figure will be created, and the artist will then interview the person about their reaction to the depiction.

This sort of location-centered and evidence finding sort of relational aesthetics has become quiet popular.  The theme of the interviews seems a little thin: was your father important to you?  One would have to argue that a father figure is important and leaves an impact, whether it is for good or ill.  Even the total absence of a father figure leaves a significant impact on a person.  The visual creations that stem from the interview are a little more interesting, in that they are more symbolic than documentary.  The overall effect is stronger than if this was just a video project, for example.

The drawing portraits above seem to have been made on children’s flash cards, or pages from an early language book.  These add color and context to the drawings, but one has to wonder about the effect of children’s books on a symbol of the father.  One continues to have experiences, both good and bad, with one’s father well into adulthood.

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All images are copyright Hou Chung-Ming, and were borrowed from the Gallery VER website.