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HEZI COHEN GALLERY, Tel Aviv

Rashaad Newsome
Shade Compositions SFMoMA 2012
Still image from a live performance at SFMoMA, 2012
 
 
RASHAAD NEWSOME
Shade Compositions
 
25 April – 29 May 2013
 
Hezi Cohen Gallery is pleased to present Shade Compositions, first solo exhibition in Israel for New York artist Rashaad Newsome.
 
Shade Compositions, Rashaad Newsome’s ongoing project, is a series of performances, combining improvisatory orchestral music with live video-mixing, conducted by the artist using hacked Nintendo® Wii™ game controllers.
 
The exhibition at Hezi Cohen Gallery is dedicated to a sequence of video works that combine documented performances with 'Screen Tests' by which Newsome explores how culturally specific or stereotypical gestures, movements, and vocalizations are performed by different people. These videos also act as the material used in his choreographed sound score.
 
Through collage and repetition, Newsome divorces gestures of speech and movement from their original context and conventional significance. In this way, he de-semanticises the codes of body language. Newsome transforms his staged performers into aesthetic figures, whose fragmentary nature allows them to function as a collection of universal codes. The set of polyrhythmic, serial compositions arranged by Newsome reveals an expressive power that leaves these gestures open to interpretation, rather than fixed to the labels from which they were removed.
 
The set of works featured in the exhibition includes the latest version of the series, which debuted in October 2012 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA).
 
Rashaad Newsome (b. 1979, New Orleans) lives and works in New York. His previous exhibitions include Centre Pompidou, Paris (2012), New Museum, New York (2011), Marlborough Gallery - Chelsea, New York (2011), MoMA PS1 (2010), the Whitney Museum, New York (2010), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2012), the last three also featured a live performance. In addition, he participated in the Venice Biennale (2011) and the Whitney Biennial (2010). Among his upcoming projects this year is an exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art. His works are included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York, the Whitney Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
 
 
HEZI COHEN GALLERY
54 Wolfson Street
66042 Tel Aviv
Israel
T: +972 (0)36398788
E: info@hezicohengallery.com
 
HEZI COHEN GALLERY
 
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VON LINTEL GALLERY, New York

John Chiara
Simmons: Fort Barry: Bunker Road, 2012
image on Ilfochrome paper, unique photograph
34 x 28 inches (86.4 x 71.1 cm)
Image courtesy of the artist and Von Lintel Gallery, New York
 
 
UNIQUE
 
May 30 – July 12, 2013
 
FEATURING
 
Matthew Brandt
John Chiara
Pierre Cordier & Gundi Falk
Agnes Eperjesi
Curtis Mann
Klea McKenna
Amanda Means
Floris Neusüss
 
Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present UNIQUE, a group show of non-editioned photography. Often made without negatives or a camera, the exhibited work is created with unique and diverse techniques that result in one-of-a-kind photographs. The included artists represent several generations, including Pierre Cordier and Floris Neusüss, who have been pioneers in the field of camera-less, unique photography since the 1950s.
 
In 1956, the Belgian artist Pierre Cordier invented the chemigram, a technique that employs resists to protect areas of the photosensitive paper from successive submersion in developer and fixer. Since 2011, Cordier has collaborated with the Austrian painter Gundi Falk. Floris Neusüss, a German photographer, explores the technical and visual possibilities of the photogram to create an innovative body of work that includes ethereal silhouettes of nude women and mysterious images of the natural world at night. Cordier and Neusüss share a spirit of experimentation and a desire to explore the infinite possibilities inherent to the chemistry of photographic paper and processes with the younger artists in the show. Following in Cordier’s chemigram tradition, Amanda Means delicately scores light-sensitive paper with a grid pattern and flows developer over it, creating organic abstract compositions that are inspired by her close connection with nature. Means worked for many years as a master printmaker for other artists, including Robert Mapplethorpe, and the fluid process she employs is liberating in contrast with the exacting precision that work required. Matthew Brandt uses the subjects of his Western landscape photographs as ingredients in their production. He soaks images of lakes in water from the same source, distorting colors and abstracting the captured vistas. John Chiara travels the California coastline with a room-size camera obscura of his own creation hitched to his car, capturing landscapes directly on photographic paper. His method invites exposure and processing anomalies, making the process part of the imagery. Although he starts with representational photographs, like Brandt and Chiara, Curtis Mann moves toward abstraction by obstructing journalistic scenes of conflict with chemically etched circles and stripes. Drawing on the tradition of photograms of the human body and of the natural world that Neusüss explores, Klea McKenna uses light-sensitive paper to capture images of elements, such as raindrops, while the Hungarian photographer Agnes Eperjesi projects multilayered and brightly colored shadows of hands, flowers, and household objects.
 
 
VON LINTEL GALLERY
520 W. 23rd Street
Ground Floor
New York, NY 10011
T: +1 212 242 0599
 
VON LINTEL GALLERY
 
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YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY, New York

Terry Evans
Weapons range target: tires September 30, 1990
Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York
 
 
TERRY EVANS
The Inhabited Prairie
 
May 23 - July 3, 2013
 
Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present Inhabited Prairie, an exhibition of vintage black and white aerial photographs taken by Terry Evans between 1990 and 1994, which explore the complexities and contradictions in America’s heartland, specifically the artist’s local landscape in her native Kansas.  This particular region has a deep and varied history of use. For instance, Smoky Hill Weapons Range, the nation’s largest Air National Guard bombing site, is contained within fertile fields and agro-industrial lands, and is only a short distance from the Tallgrass Prairie Natural Preserve, the last uncultivated tallgrass prairie ecosystem in North America.
 
Having photographed the ecology of the prairie floor from ground level for several years, Evans determined that the story of the land was incomplete without a macroscopic perspective of what she described as the "disturbed, cultivated, militarized" prairie.  In 1990, Evans began taking flights in a 25-mile radius around her home in Salina, Kansas, cataloguing the farms, flooded fields, cemeteries, ancient Indian village sites, highways, train tracks, bridges, military sites, cattle ranches and industrial gravel pits comprising the land below. Flying at 700 to 1000 feet, Evans could read specific pieces of visual information on the ground, without the entire landscape veering into abstraction. This distinction is critical to Evans’ practice, and it allowed for her unflinching look at the relationship between human intervention and the natural prairie. As Evans writes: "The thing I love the most was learning to read the landscape history from the air. I felt I was acquiring a sort of visual literacy of the ground. It was about reading the clues that told me whether or not the ground had ever been plowed, where the cemeteries were, what part was military, and what the history of all those markings meant."
 
Richly toned and precisely detailed, Evans’ aerial views possess a rigorous formalism.  They are starkly beautiful visual records of the land. Like Robert Adams, Evans takes an objective, sensitive and non-ironic stance toward the relationship between the people and the land. When Evans describes her process of "reading the clues" of the landscape, she posits what curator April M. Watson calls an "aesthetic neutrality." In her essay As Above, So Below: The Humane Perspective of Terry Evans’s Aerial Landscapes, Watson suggests Evans' aesthetic neutrality is neither condemnation nor glorification of the various military and agro-industrial practices which have reconfigured the land, but rather an "artistically conceived record" of the layers of history on the land.
 
Time is central to Evans' consideration of the land, both as a fleeting moment and as an epoch, A river flooded over its banks, creating an oxbow in an adjacent field, will disappear into the ground in a matter of days; a family cemetery surrounded by tilled fields suggests generations of a farming family; an intersection of dirt roads overlays a Native American village site dating from hundreds of years before European settlement.
 
Combining both aerial and ground photography, Terry Evans (b. 1944) has photographed the prairies and plains of North America and the urban prairie of Chicago since the mid-1970s. She has recently completed a long-term project about the town of Matfield Green, Kansas and the surrounding Flint Hills. She is currently photographing the North Dakota oil boom in collaboration with writer and producer Elizabeth Farnsworth.
 
Evans has exhibited widely, including one-person shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and The Field Museum of Natural History.  Her traveling museum retrospective Heartland opened at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City in 2012. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of an Anonymous Was a Woman award. Several books have been published on her work including Prairie: Images of Ground and Sky, The Inhabited Prairie, Disarming the Prairie and Heartland.  Her work is in major museum collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, among many others.
 
 
YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor
New York, NY 10011
T: 1 646-230-9610
 
YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY
 
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