Gwenn Thomas

MIART, Milan

Posted on by admin

EXILE returns to MIART with a presentation of works by Kazuko Miyamoto, born 1942, Gwenn Thomas, born 1943, Brishty Alam, born 1988, and David Gruber born 1989.

In her move from painting to early string construction work, Kazuko Miyamoto replaced the confined space of the canvas for the architectural  expanse of her studio wall at 117 Hester Street. This move transformed the inconspicuous brick from a motif, as in the painting Progression of Rectangles (1969), into a site of measurement, structure, and spatial intervention. The visual field, in its immediacy and transparency, harbours a complexity that tends to spill from under its allocated borders or limits. The presentation expands on this very quality.

David Gruber’s paintings oscillate between the tactile immediacy of the microphone and the abstract detachment of material landscapes, employing pigment and composition to effect a kind of alchemical transmutation—rendering the familiar intangible.

A similar convergence of media occurs in the photographic practice of Gwenn Thomas, where the chemical processes intrinsic to photography extend the perceptual capacities traditionally associated with painting.

Whereas Brishty Alam furthers this trajectory through sculpture, translating the painterly surface into synthetic polystyrene forms that assert a presence at once corporeal and otherworldly. In each case, the painterly fails to remain a fixed category and is treated as a mutable field—expanded, translated, and reconfigured across material, spatial, and conceptual registers.

→Kazuko Miyamoto

→Gwenn Thomas

→Brishty Alam

→David Gruber

10×1000

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE and the participating artist have taken the ongoing global crises as a starting point to offer selected artworks at a reduced price to directly support various charitable causes. The ten selected artworks were offered at a fixed price of 1.000 EUR to be donated directly by the buyer to the cause selected by the respective artist donating the work.

We would like to thank everyone for taking initiative, acquiring an artwork and donating to the causes selected by each artist. Thank you!

The offered artworks of 10×1000 were:

Kinga Kiełczyńska: Hidden interface (beaver and Andrii), 2022. Garden waste of hand-carved hazelnut shoots, beaver-worked driftwood, reclaimed cables, 90 x 60 x 60 cm
Exhibited as part of the artist’s →solo exhibition at EXILE in 2022
1.000 EUR to be donated directly to →Polish Humanitarian Action

Erik Niedling: Future 01/19/17, 2017. Tin, Lead, 8 x 53 x 18.5 cm
Exhibited as part of the artist’s →solo exhibition at EXILE in 2017
1.000 EUR to be donated directly to →Doctors without Borders

Nschotschi Haslinger: Untitled, 2019. Color pencil on paper, 30 x 42 cm
Features on the cover of →Index Nr 86, Jan 2019
1.000 EUR to be donated directly to →Doctors without Borders

Kerstin von Gabain: Pear I & II, 2022. Wax, 13 x 6 x 6 cm each
500 EUR each to be donated directly to →Caritas Ukraine Funds

Gwenn Thomas: Standard Candles, 2017. Wood and black acrylic paint, 52 x 46 x 26,5 cm
Exhibited as part of the artist’s →solo exhibition at EXILE in 2017
1.000 EUR were donated directly to →Fight for Right Ukraine

Martin Kohout: Coll., Mongolia-Cambodia, 2016. Wood, stamps, plastic grid, 52 x 34 x 7 cm
1.000 EUR were donated directly to →Fight for Right Ukraine

Sine Hansen: Bohrer mit Birne, 1970. Screen print, 61 x 42 cm.
Exhibited as part of the artist’s →solo exhibition at EXILE in 2021.
1.000 EUR were donated directly to →Medeor Fund for Ukrainian hospitals

Pauł Sochacki: Waiting for the rainbow, 2022. Oil on canvas, 27 x 27 cm
1.000 EUR were donated directly to →United Nations Refugee Agency

Nazim Ünal Yilmaz: Tare, 2010. Oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm
Exhibited as part of the artist’s →solo exhibition at EXILE in 2020
1.000 EUR were donated directly to →Palestine Children’s Relief Fund

Tess Jaray: Untitled (Navy Blue), 2010. Unique inkjet on archival paper, 20.2 x 24.2 cm
Exhibited as part of the artist’s →solo exhibition at EXILE in 2019
1.000 EUR were donated directly to →Red Cross Ukraine Funds

Das stille Leben des Sammlers Kempinski

Posted on by Regina Regina

You are cordially invited to the inaugural Private Viewing of the imaginary collection of Mr Kempinski. This exhibition brings together works by over 60 artists, now presented for the very first time for collective viewing.

New York-based curator Mr Miller and Berlin-based Mr Siekmeier were asked by Mr. Kempinski to create a collage of artworks that reflects upon the relationship between art and collecting.

The Kempinski collection is by definition fluctuant and can move freely from one context to the next.

Exhibition events:

Sat, May 31, 7pm
Kinga Kielczynska: Power point lecture introducing
ARP- Art Related Progress. A business proposal for an art residency program to be set up in Colombia on a self-sustainable property

Sat, June 7, 7pm
Film screening with curator Billy Miller

Fri, June 13, 7pm
Martin Kohout: One-year anniversary of Kohout’s Gotthard Tunnel Run in Switzerland during LISTE Basel in 2013 and artist booklaunch

Participating Artists: Nadja Abt, Aggtelek, Joseph Akel, Peggy Ahwesh, Anonymous, Francisco Berna, Douglas Boatwright, Matt Borruso, Matthew Burcaw, Elijah Burgher, Luke Butler, Anders Clausen, TM Davy, Mark Dilks, Discoteca Flaming Star, Paul Gabrielli, Robin Graubard, Markus Guschelbauer, Frank Hauschildt &Valentin Hertweck, Adrian Hermanides, Dan Herschlein, Benjamin Alexander Huseby, Monika Paulina Jagoda, Stephan Jung, Vytautas Jurevicius, Renata Kaminska, Saman Kamyab, Kinga Kiełczyńska, Lisa Kirk, Martin Kohout, Marcus Knupp, Ulrich Lamsfuss, Cary Leibowitz, Hanne Lippard, Mahony, Katharina Marszewski, Darrin Martin, Rachel Mason, Howard McCalebb, Kazuko Miyamoto, Bob Mizer, Erik Niedling, Hugh O’Rourke, Joel Otterson, Rob Pruitt, Johannes Paul Raether, Annika Rixen, Matteusz Sadowski, Salvor, Dean Sameshima, Pietro Sanguineti, Fette Sans, Wilken Schade, Jason Seder, Barbara Sullivan, Gwenn Thomas, Goran Tomcic , Rein Vollenga, Jan Wandrag, Fresh White, Tara White, Norbert Witzgall, Carrie Yamaoka

 

Rare Earth Magnet

Posted on by Regina Regina

Rare       Earth     Magnet

Rapid     Eye        Movement

Dear Visitor,

I am writing this text that was commissioned for the exhibition Rare Earth Magnet by Gwenn Thomas with inserts by David Gruber and Alexander Jackson Wyatt while looking out of a window, thousands of kilometres removed.

I browse the streets attached to information zipped down from an immaterial sphere while colliding not only with my fellow walkers. My walk became directed the further I am in need of rare earth circuit boards as an organ permanently affixed to my palm. The world is my oyster, or so I am told, the window in my hand is my hand. On my path, I am an atom, colliding and producing information out of information.

In order to quiet my restlessness I open a book I never finished reading. The page the bookmark is left on, begins with a sentence I now decide to quote: “All of a sudden, as if a surgical hand of destiny had operated on a long-standing blindness with immediate and sensational results, I lift my gaze from my anonymous life to the clear recognition of how I live.” Written in 1930, published in 1982, in 1994 the sentence brought my reading to a stop, in 2022 I am caught by its poignant description of the contemporary human condition.

Thomas’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, includes inserts by two invited artists, with me, as the writer of this commissioned text, as the inevitable fourth participant. The flawless digital presentation of the works I received weeks ago is hovering in another window on my screen. Let me introduce, frame, create connection and meaningful content of the displayed works. I try to imagine the works’ collective physicalities, presence and setting within the white-walled gallery space I never visited.

Alchemic experimentations of color, shape and form, collectively considering the inner perspective in relation to an orbiting, partially fractured marginal frame. My device is seriously failing me, not connecting the atomic fractions of content orbiting around my mind. These are restless times and in accelerating speed, do you also feel as in constantly fracturing explosive fear? My job to introduce, to create context and to formulate in times that can’t be formulated I fail to fulfill.

It all began with a collision. A sudden, seemingly unimportant encounter, be it emotional or physical, results in a drastic change of course. At highest speed, particles collide. The mundane shape of a window seen a decade ago in my hometown of Lisbon, has burnt itself into the work of Gwenn Thomas. The artist’s windows into the self are deeply explored by new alchemist experimentation of glittering formulas of precious glass. As much fragile as infinite, these intricately precious, yet mundane materials held in metal encasements allow for the light of day to reflect its glittering mystery caught within. Metallic gold photographic paper, expired over two decades ago, is painted upon with chemicals revealing shapes and structures that abstract the three-dimensional Rare Earth shapes found in the gallery space.

Reassembled frames from frames filled with collaged content from previous content, somewhat precariously held together. Alexander Jackson Wyatt’s inserts into the exhibition are as individual as they are repetitious variations of form. The casual fragility of the collage is juxtaposed by a frame made up of seemingly discarded parts of wood. The frame makes its presence known, not unlike a medieval protective wall, sheltering the fleeting collage from all outside elements. The result is a battle for attention between margin and centre, between exposure and protection.

Sections of left-over beige frames, seemingly held together by painted brown tape are attached to beige paintings of almost classic comic appearing grey explosive devices. With their explosion near, the bombs circle towards a black abyss, smoke appears. David Gruber’s inserts into the exhibition allure to the precariousness of individual mental states. These paintings are like clairvoyants predicting what we all know all too well.

Obsessive repetition, repetitive obsession. Alchemist experiments, paintings of gold, collaged fortresses, explosive disasters with no miracle cure at hand. Looking out of a window as if a crystal ball into meaning and content, I am certain you will find your own sense, your own conversation with the works and their relation to ourselves.

“It was just a moment, and I saw myself.”

Yours faithfully,

O. Seraos

→Windows in our hands. Review by Robin Wart published by passe-avant.net

FEATURES
→OFLUXO

 

Standard Candles

Posted on by Regina Regina

Gwenn Thomas’ exhibition entitled Standard Candles, oscillates between two bodies of work – Moments of Place and Standard Candles – visually related, yet manifested in different emotional tones.

Moments of Place is a series of laminated photographs, presenting the same window from various angles and at different times of day: morning, late afternoon, and dusk. Irregular trapezoidal framings evoke changes in perspective, while color and tone express variations in daylight and weather. Each work insists on the moment of its inception, as if extracted from another place and time.

These asymmetrical photographic objects allude to actual windows in their construction, recalling Marcel Duchamp’s window of 1920. Thomas reveals complex spatial relationships, within and outside of the two-dimensional plane, accounting for each available axis of space.

Standard Candles exists in a similar conceptual space, creating the illusion of infinite depth beyond its windows. The largest piece in the gallery operates much like a standard candle in astronomy, its placement determining the constellation of all the other works. The known luminosity of its color measures the tone for each subsequent piece. These other hues radiate softly from their interior spaces, projected as light through glass.

The smallest works in the exhibition become recalls/signals of memory as the viewer moves through the space. Considering the philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s concept of lived space, the works contemplate a mode of inquiry into our environments, their spatial dimensions and emotional character. These qualities are absorbed by the individual, making each an extension of the space they occupy. Environment mediates the works from Moments of Place in a similar manner, coloring the act of perception. They create this environment, and their viewers project it back onto them.

 

Gwenn Thomas has previously shown at the gallery in selected group exhibitions as well as in two two-person exhibitions: in 2013, as part of a dialogue exhibition entitled →Gwenn Thomas <> Hanne Lippard, and, in 2009, together with Birgit Hein, as part of the exhibition →Jack Smith: Cologne, 1974.

→Mousse Magazine review by Ginevra Bria
→Artforum Critics’ pick by Mitch Speed

Features
→Art Viewer

NADA HOUSE, New York

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE is happy to participate in NADA House with a collaborative exhibition by Vienna-based artist Kerstin von Gabain together with New York-based artist Gwenn Thomas. The exhibition will be held at House 403, along Colonels Row on Governors Island, New York from June 4 – Aug 7.

Governors Island, NY is approximately 6798.57 km or 4224.43 miles removed from EXILE, situated on Elisabethstr 24 in Vienna. The island, originally known as Paggank (Nut island) to the local Lenape Native American tribe, was deceitfully acquired in 1637 by Dutch colonialist Wouter Van Twiller for reportedly “two ax heads, a string of beads, and a handful of nails”. In the 1870s the building that today houses EXILE was built upon the raised medieval city wall of Vienna as part of the Emperor’s Ringstraße Project. The island was eventually renamed Governors Island and six residential houses were built to accommodate officers and their families on what is now known as Colonel’s Row in 1870. Following WWII, EXILE’s current gallery space in Vienna functioned as a travel agency for the US Allied Forces. The island’s defensive importance decreased over time, its original purpose and relevance fading into history. Most likely sometime in the mid 1970s, EXILE’s current space was fully clad in wooden paneling and became the office of a chain-smoking Russian businessman. An engraved metal plaque attached to House 403 reminds of its use by Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev for the final preparations to the historic meeting with US President Ronald Reagan in 1988. The deceased Russian’s wooden smoking lounge became EXILE’s gallery space in 2018, eventually being transformed into a white cube during the pandemic. In June 2022, as part of NADA House, EXILE and House 403, Colonels Row, Govenors Island, NY meet inside an upstairs bedroom and adjacent bathroom. Layers of history intertwine and collide for a nanosecond of transitional time.

EXILE invited New York-based artist Gwenn Thomas and Vienna-based artist Kerstin von Gabain to respond to this temporal collision and create an immersive stage for their artworks. The selected works were deliberately not installed into but onto the existing space itself with some of the artworks’ material sources left in a state of flux themselves. Exposed to the elements, von Gabain’s soap pieces, shaped after human bone structures and arranged within the bathroom space, will begin to sweat and disintegrate over time. Thomas’s translucent glass shapes, their repetitive form taken from an abandoned found object and displayed in the bedroom’s cupboard, slowly pass the changing light of day. Both works respond to the spaces’ fluctuant nature and honor the opportunity to become short-lived, but active connectors between historical space and present visitor.

Thomas, who for many years has been researching window shapes as membrane-like metaphors for transformation and time, further places a single resin and copper object central onto the bedroom’s floor. The object consists of two intersecting shapes that seemingly depend on one another. The outer resin-made, opaque shape forms an enclosure for the negatively placed inner copper shape. Oppositional in material, both shapes together enclose a spatial volume that gives the artwork its final dimension and particular identity. Both materials together, one opaque, the other solid but changing its hue from bronze to green, again reference time while containing an inaccessible, hollow vacuum at its center. By scale, form and setting, the object appears like the marquette of a previously positioned piece of furniture and becomes an imaginary vessel for the domestic and intimate character of the space it is situated in.

Von Gabain’s two black and white photographs show limbs of human bodies that appear like anatomical wax models known from historical medical archives. Either crudely cut-off from the human body or cropped by the photographic frame and dipped into liquid, they directly refer to the historical use of photography to disect, analyze and compare the human body into defining categories. Initially these two photographs remind of the previous identities that have occupied these specific two room as much as the island itself. Further though, they are reminders of a violent history that is, even if passed for a long time, forever embedded into this island. Set in context with the bone-shaped soap works, an inability to wash-off historical pasts or one’s personal self lingers within the work. Constantly transformational, von Gabain refers to a pressing urgency to revisit and re-evaluate each individual history.

Collectively, the installed works by Thomas and von Gabain humbly express gratitude for their granted time of existence within the fabric of these two rooms. The selected materialities reflect onto the absurdity and lasting consequences of an uneven exchange of material value in 1637 of which they are now part of. History appears in layers. The dust never fully settles, the light never fully fades. The artists acknowledge and honor the particular history of these two rooms – their artworks imagine and reflect upon past, present and future spatial and personal interconnectivities. The displayed artworks are glitches of spatial time mirroring an uneven past onto an increasingly unpredictable future.

The project has been kindly supported by →Austrian Cultural Forum New York.

→Gwenn Thomas artist link

→Kerstin von Gabain artist link

→NADA HOUSE

→Directions to House 403, Governors Island, NY

Features
→Contemporary Art Daily

Ausstellung 61

Posted on by Regina Regina

↑At
Aggtelek
↑Night
Christophe De Rohan Chabot
↑Creatures
Erik Niedling
↑Come
Gwenn Thomas
↑Up
Jordan Nassar
↑From
Kazuko Miyamoto
↑The
Martin Kohout
↑Bottom
Nathalie Du Pasquier
↑Of
Patrick Fabian Panetta
↑Our
TM Davy
↑Oceans

→Click here to watch exhibition trailer by Patrick Panetta

Features
→Art Viewer

Document Performance

Posted on by Regina Regina

The exhibition Document Performance presents objects by artists Awst & Walther, Claudia Kapp and Benjamin Blanke, FORT, Gwenn Thomas / Joan Jonas, Hermann Nitsch, Johannes Paul Raether, Kazuko Miyamoto, Martin Kohout and Stuart Brisley.

A performance is an action in time. A document of said performance is a physical manifestation of a previous action encapsulated in various material forms.

However, such objects are never merely just documenting their source performance, but are rather autonomous in and of themselves. While they refer back to the source they are neither the past performance itself nor its direct representation. Their temporal source is embedded in the permanent. This doubled relationship to time results in a contextual shift: From questions of What-has-been? and What-has-happened-since? to What-is-now? and, in some cases, to What-will-be?.

Document Performance investigates the autonomous life of the documents as they exist in the here and now. Their fragmented, though transitional relationship with the past, present and future fuels the viewer’s imagination: What does each document mean? How is the source performance embedded in the object? How did the document come into existence? Who is the author? How has the object’s context shifted? How has time transformed the document itself? What does the object mean to the viewer?

The objects featured in the exhibition follow no historical or contextual narrative. Each of them has been produced as a result, a consequence or a mindset of a performative action. Some documents on display are:

– The photograph by Gwenn Thomas of Joan Jonas during her performance Twilight in 1975. This photograph is identified by both artists as a collaborative work and asks about their individual identities, the nature of their collaboration and the photograph’s authorship and existence in relation to the performance.

– The film Being and Doing by Stuart Brisley (with Ken McMullen) features Brisley’s performances in the context of a 50-minute documentation that investigates the origins of performance art, connecting it not to modernism but to ancient folk rituals in England and Europe.

– The object from Johannes Paul Raether’s performance Nationalfahnen zu Schwefelrosen shows a small, burnt German flag. When burning such flags, Raether transformed each into a rose with a thorn. He combines one of the highest visually charged expressions of protest with the creation of a vernacular kitsch object.

– The first vinyl recording of Hermann Nitsch from his 1972 performance Akustisches Abreaktionsspiel is displayed on a record player, although it is so rare and precious that it can no longer be played. The viewer is forced to imagine the performance solely by looking at the vinyl record and employing his/her knowledge of Nitsch’s body of work.

– The printout of a diary of an anonymous participant in Claudia Kapp’s and Benjamin Blanke’s drug-withdrawal project Cold Turkey, presented at Kunstwerke in 2010, undermines almost all expectations of artistic practice, performance and document with one single piece of text.

– The fur umbrella by Kazuko Miyamoto has not been used as part of a performance yet. It has been produced by Miyamoto for an upcoming performance as part of her exhibition at EXILE in the late spring of 2012.

→Read Review: Artinfo

Jack Smith in Cologne, 1974 & 2018

Posted on by Regina Regina

At ≈5 in Cologne, EXILE is proud to present works by New York-based artist Gwenn Thomas. The exhibition, entitled Jack Smith in Cologne, 1974 & 2018, is located inside two publicly accessible vitrines within the underground station of Ebertplatz.

The exhibition combines two distinctly different times and modes of artistic production for the artist. Two recent sculptural objects refer to the artist’s ongoing interest in modernist shapes and legacies was well as material membranes and optical transparencies. These works do not directly refer, but associate to the photographic process of light passing through a particular defined space and object to create impact.

With photography being a core medium and interest for the artist, Thomas became a regular contributor in the 1970s to the legendary NY-based art publication Avalanche. The two exhibited photos show the artist Jack Smith during his performance in Cologne Zoo in 1974. The extended series of over 50 photographs was photographed by Thomas for a feature in issue 10, Dec 1974 of Avalanche where they appeared collaged into a story-board entitled A Thousand and One Irrational Jingoleanisms of Lucky Landlord Paradise. Cologne Museum Festival of Fear, 1974.

It is the first time that these photographs are shown in Cologne. The complete set of photographs is now also in the collection of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

→Gwenn Thomas artist link

→≈5

→Avalanche Index

Jack Smith in Cologne, 1974

Posted on by Regina Regina

The exhibition Jack Smith in Cologne, 1974 brings together photographs by Gwenn Thomas and a film by Birgit Hein, both documenting a performance by Jack Smith in the Cologne Zoo as part of Projekt 74 organized by Kunsthalle Köln.

Jack Smith (1932-1989), while often under-recognized, is clearly one of the most influential artists of American postwar Art. He was arguably the inventor of an aesthetics which came to be known as ‘camp’ and ‘trash’, using no-budget means of production to create a visual cosmos heavily influenced by popular film and kitsch culture. Without Smith it is hard to imagine independent cinema, experimental theater and performance art in its current form.

His highly political and critical views disregarded essentially all notions of artistic production while his affinity for popular culture and his ability to transform the every day into art lead the way to what was later labeled Pop Art. Smith’s artistic practice was a major influence on filmmakers and artists such as David Lynch, John Waters, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Anderson and Andy Warhol who describes Smith as “the only person I would ever copy.”

In 1974, Birgit Hein produced a feature on Smith for the influential TV program Kino 74 on German TV Station WDR. Thomas went to Cologne to document Smith’s performance for the New York-based avant-garde magazine Avalanche.

Hein’s and Thomas’ works show a costumed Smith and reveal the artist in a comical yet serious project critical of the implications of national boundaries, landlords and the concept of rent. Thomas’ black and white photographs are organized as a cinematic sequence and give a intricate insight into Jack Smith’s work. Hein’s beautifully shot documentary feature introduced Smith to a larger audience well before he was recognized in the United States. Both their powerful documentations stand for themselves as artistic works as much as they offer a unique insight into the work and persona of Jack Smith.

Birgit Hein is a German film director, producer and screenwriter who has made experimental films since the 1960s. Hein has won many prestigious Awards and her films have been screened at festivals worldwide. She lives and works in Berlin.

Thomas’ artworks have been exhibited in numerous exhibitions in the US and abroad. Her work is included in many public and private collections, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia as well as numerous private collections. She lives and works in New York.

The exhibition is produced in cooperation with LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World from October 28 – November 1, 2009 at Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art and Hebbel Am Ufer Theater in Berlin.

 

Panel Discussion: Sunday, Nov 1, 2009: 1 – 3 pm
Lucky Landlordism of Taboo. Jack Smith in Germany: A panel discussion with Birgit Hein, Petra Korink, Klaus Mettig and Katharina Sieverding. Moderated by Fesival Curator Marc Siegel

 

This project has since been included in the following exhibitions:

Jack Smith: Cologne, 1974. Photographs
by Gwenn Thomas, Film by Birgit Hein
Space Studios, London
Nov 1 – Dec 22, 2013

Number Six: Flaming Creatures
(with John Bock, Lizzie Fitch, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Tony Oursler, Paper Rad, Peaches, Ryan Trecartin, Ed Ruscha and others)
Julia Stoschek Collection
Sept 07, 2012 – Jun 29, 2013

I was a male Yvonne De Carlo
(with John Baldessari, Guy Ben-Ner, Julien Bismuth and Jean-Pascal Flavien, Stanley Brouwn, Allen Ruppersberg, Jack Smith and others)
Museo de Arte Contemporaneo De Castilla y Leon, Leon, Spain
Jun 25 – Jan 08, 2012

ARTISSIMA, Turin

Posted on by Regina Regina

EXILE’s booth for Artissima 19 combines just two works by two gallery Artists: Aggtelek and Gwenn Thomas.

The large sculptural work Poéticas del Objeto by Spanish artist duo Aggtelek consists of 14 individual sculptures, each paired with a piece of text and presented on a large pedastal. Through these 14 pairings the artists approach various problems and crises of today’s social, economic as well as artistic situation.

This work by Aggtelek is juxtaposed by a set of two photographs taken by Gwenn Thomas of the performance Delay Delay by Joan Jonas in 1972. Their subtle shift of horizon and action represents a passage of perfomative time, frozen in these two phototgraphs.

Aggtelek’s quite personal though distinctly humorous approach to their situation as artists in Spain becomes a sobering contrast to Gwenn Thomas photographs that offer an almost utopian outlook into a past where artistic production and its commodification appear not as tightly interdependent.

Whitin the otherwise empty booth both works create a dialogue about issues of artist practice and production in the face of an ongoing global financial crisis.

Gwenn Thomas <> Hanne Lippard

Posted on by Regina Regina

With the exhibition Hanne Lippard <> Gwenn Thomas EXILE inaugurates a new series of exhibitions that pair two artists, each from different artistic backgrounds and generations. As the defining sign “<>” stands for a newly ignited dialogue between the two artists and their body of work.

Rather than a two-person show, these exhibitions are best described as an attempt to create a collaborative and immersive experience consisting of two equal parts that communicate individually but can further offer new cumulative readings of otherwise separate works.

The cloud touches us at equal length. We are now back to back to back. Equally wet. Wet equally. Back to back to back now are we. Length equal at us touches cloud the ….*

Back to back, bringing together two artists from two different generations and working within two different disciplines within art, the outcome from the collaborative curatorial process between the works of Gwenn Thomas and Hanne Lippard has created an exhibition with a focus on a phenomenological dialogue. Both Thomas and Lippard created their respective works in spite of and in absence of each other, something that perhaps seems paradoxical in a collaborative project but which has allowed each artist’s work to keep their autonomy and offers new cumulative readings of otherwise separate works.

Thomas’ silver-gelatin prints, objects determined as sculptures as well as photographs since they are neither square nor level, hang around the perimeter of the gallery walls. The traditional distinction between frame and the reproduction is removed; the frame is pigmented to correspond with the photograph it contains (in rose pink, green, black, white and silver hues), creating a filmic quality synonymous with images generated at the time of the mid-to late-1980s. The frames do not follow their own dynamic but are subsumed under the authority and shapes within the photographs themselves.

Not only do the content of the shots – window frames, various unidentifiable dilapidated buildings, exterior and interior empty architectural spaces – initiate portholes to the spaces within the images, but the multiplicity of these irregular photographs in the gallery constructs the illusion of actual windows from within the traditional ‘white cube’ container. Thomas plays with this further by omitting glass from the framing of the photographs (glass, as a long established devise where the viewer literally sees themselves reflected on the surface of a photograph) and its absence releases or “opens” the window of the photograph; the position of the viewer is one of safety and perception first: only that of somebody looking out. Thomas absolves the viewer from looking back at themselves.

In contrast, Lippard’s sound installation is a recording of a text-based piece Locus, which is presented in the gallery in the form of a two-channel audio piece on four speakers. The text, written in the first person, integrates rhetoric through being read out by the artist herself. Locus follows the position of a narrator who encounters ‘the other,’ creating a parallel between the perspective of the author and that of her speculation on the perspective of another. This coerces the listener, as an outsider, to situate themselves within this peculiar dynamic amidst the storyteller and the imagined and silent ‘other’.

Lippard immerses the listener even further by placing the speakers on the perimeter of the gallery, ensuring that the recording is heard at all angles, from all four sides of the gallery walls. Midway through the reading Locus then disorientates; what we understand as a linear form of storytelling is reversed: suddenly Lippard is reading backwards, the text slowly encircling and returning back to it’s beginning. A new perspective is introduced, our own position as a listener is awoken and we realize Lippard’s text can be interpreted as an exercise in perception itself. Where we were first outsiders, our philosophical position has now shifted: by the end of the reading we are perhaps ‘the other’ that Lippard perceived all along. Lippard enforces the viewer to become aware of themselves as listeners and engage with the recording with a heightened sense of attention.

Whereas Thomas has created an architecture of windows in the gallery for the viewer to ‘look outwards,’ Lippard has inverted this and has created a sensory environment for the viewer to ‘look inwards.’ A fresh view is brought to collaboration; two works that disjoint our position as viewers and seem to be the antithesis of each other, actually come to enrich and strengthen one another. This demonstrates that two very different artistic outcomes, produced at very different times, essentially have at their core the same sensibility and considerations for the viewer; to enhance and question our sense of lived experience.

Gwenn Thomas is also known for her performance documentation photographs of Jack Smith and Joan Jonas, amongst others, mainly as one of the main photographers for the NY-based Avalanche Magazine. Now, in her second exhibition at the gallery, Thomas is showing select works from the mid to late 1980s. Gwenn Thomas’ artworks have been exhibited in numerous exhibitions in the US and abroad. Her work is included in many public and private collections, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia as well as numerous private collections. She lives and works in New York.

Hanne Lippard graduated from the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in 2010. Her most recent exhibitions have been in MeetFactory, Prague, Minibar Art Space, Stockholm, Spike Island, Bristol and Marres, Maastricht. She has most recently performed at Berliner Festpiele, Badische Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, ARCO Madrid 2012, The Showroom, London, and Poesia en Voz, Mexico City. Hanne Lippard lives and works in Berlin.

*Excerpt from: Hanne Lippard: Locus, 2011

Text by Tanya Karina Pragnell Lopez

ART GENÈVE

Posted on by Regina Regina

Our presentation for artgenève combines the works of Gwenn Thomas (*1944, lives and works in New York), Kazuko Miyamoto (*1942, lives and works in New York), Nschotschi Haslinger (*1982, lives and works in Berlin) and Paul Sochacki (*1983, lives and works in Berlin). Beginning with the two photographs by Gwenn Thomas, all featured artworks investigate the relevance and importance of inter-individual engagement and co-dependency.

Gwenn Thomas’ photographs were taken in April 1975 at The Kitchen in New York and show experimental dancer and choreographer Steve Paxton and Group performing Contact Improvisation. Beginning in 1972, Paxton developed this practice based on the idea of collectively-experienced physical interconnectivity. Termed Contact Improvisation, this choreographic process pulls elements from martial arts, social dance, sports, and child’s play together to a new form of movement and physical interaction. Upon entering a Contact Improvisation structure, bodies must come together, give weight equally to each other, and create a movement dialog that can last for an undetermined amount of time. Contact Improvisation can be done by any person not just professional dancers because the emergence of a movement vocabulary depends on a specific touch and the initiation of weight exchange with another person. 

A piece of string, as a connector between two points, has been prominent in the work of Kazuko Miyamoto since her earliest string construction pieces in 1972. These iconic strings constructions follow a minimalist logic of drawing, in which each string becomes a spatial line between two points. In her later works this formal approach becomes more freely-adapted and organic, with the artist stating the birth of her son in 1980 as a turning point towards this more fluid and organic practice. Industrial string now turns to rope made from natural materials, often intertwined with other natural materials such as twigs or stones. The shapes no longer follow the logic of a straight line but are free in their individual form, expression and relation to one another. Often these structures take the form of bridges, in which the intertwined, almost woven structure becomes the connector between two points. 

The allegorical paintings of Paul Sochacki poetically describe the status quo as experienced and reflected upon by the artist. Often his works appear as fables or even visual haikus describing in quickly-rendered but at time painfully precise paintings experienced states in our contemporary world: a cat delicately balances in a treetop, seemingly dictating the treetop’s branches; a mythical beast has a heart of fire, yet it’s tail drips water allowing for a small seedling to grow. Entitled Fire department this work could well be an allegory of the urgency for socio-political action, despite the minute results that can be achieved. Finally, today’s sunset finds itself trapped in a cave. Sochacki’s poignant reflections remind quite painfully precise of the situation any individual faces within the alienation of the capital-fuelled anthropocene. 

In Nschtoschi Haslinger’s ceramic installation entitled Unkentreff ten toads gather around a campfire. In various global cultures toads play a specific mythical, medicinal or spiritual role. In biblical times the occurrence of toads raining from the sky was seen as a prophetic prediction, while in medieval times toads were compared to the female womb and often offered as religious sacrifice against infertility. Then again, if rubbed correctly, the cane toad can produce an LSD-like toxin used for psychedelic stimulation. Haslinger references these escapist strategies as analogies for her own production. Beginning with drawings, her ceramics are metaphors for experienced emotional states. The majority of Haslinger’s toads appear laying on their backs, either overdosed or dead pointing to a dystopian time, or a ritual going fatally wrong. 

The ten artworks on the walls surround ten frogs surrounding a campfire. Hung deliberately low, the artworks assume a viewing height of a child, an animal or a participant of a ancient ritual. As in concentric circles around a flaming fire, toads and artworks orbit the ritual’s focal sun present in the camp fire. The booth becomes itself an unanswered prophecy, a processional ritual of interaction. From Contact Improvisation to Contact High – let’s gather together around a campfire and create waves of movement.

 

 

 

Gwenn Thomas

Posted on by Regina Regina

Born 1943, lives and works in New York.