On View

As part of a collaboration with Art21, hear news-making artists describe their inspirations in their own words.
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“Rear Window” online at White CubeThrough January 19, 2021

What the gallery says: “In the 1954 thriller, a photojournalist is confined to his New York apartment after breaking his leg and succumbs to an obsession with watching his neighbors. The audience is made complicit in his voyeurism as, unable to tear himself away from his window, he witnesses dramatic scenes unfold within his field of vision.
Featuring paintings and photographs by Ellen Altfest, Jeff Burton, Gillian Carnegie, Julie Curtiss, Judith Eisler, Celia Hempton, Danica Lundy, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Laurie Simmons, Jeff Wall, and Carrie Mae Weems, this exhibition invites us to consider how artists construct scenes and suggest narratives, whilst exploring the idea of ‘the gaze’ which Hitchcock’s film was instrumental in formulating.”
Why it’s worth a look: White Cube’s newly launched online viewing room kicks off with an homage to Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchhock curated by director Susanna Greeves. It feels right for this era of life under lockdown, as the pandemic resurges and cold weather creeps in. So many of us are now are limited to only looking these days, as the fear of spreading germs relegates us to a life mediated by screens.
The artists included in this show have focused on the idea of the gaze, exploiting and manipulating it—but also finding new and deeper meaning through looking slow, and long, and with interest. Artists Jeff Wall and Laurie Simmons both construct tableaux that are similar to film directors, while Jeff Burton’s photography is drawn directly from his experience working in the porn industry. A treat all around.
What it looks like:

Jeff Wall, Summer Afternoons (2013). © Jeff Wall. Courtesy White Cube.

Jeff Wall, Summer Afternoons (2013). © Jeff Wall. Courtesy White Cube.

Carrie Mae Weems, Scenes & Takes (2016). © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Darkroom Mirror (_2070021), (2017). © Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter, Los Angeles.

Celia Hempton, Jay, Minnesota, United States, 31st August 2017 (2017). © Celia Hempton. Courtesy the artist and Southarn Reid.

Laurie Simmons, Long House (Pink Bedroom), (2004). © Laurie Simmons. Image courtesy the artist and Salon 94, NY.

Julie Curtiss, The whispers (2020). © the artist. Photo © Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Courtesy of White Cube.

Julie Curtiss, Le serpent qui danse (2020). © the artist. Photo © Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Courtesy of White Cube.

Danica Lundy, Captain (2020). © Danica Landy. Courtesy of the artist and Super Dakota, Brussels.

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Playing harmonica) (1990-99). © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Laurie Simmons, The Boxes (Ardis Vinklers) Ballroom, (2005). © Laurie Simmons. Image courtesy the artist and Salon 94, NY.

Laurie Simmons, Study for Long House (Red Shoes), (2003). © Laurie Simmons. Image courtesy the artist and Salon 94, NY.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has not only killed nearly 1.3 million people worldwide—it has also made rituals of collective bereavement dangerous and practically impossible. 
“It’s not natural,” says artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, whose native country of Mexico is home to a particularly festive form of honoring the departed. “People feel like they’ve been suspended.”
A new artwork by the Mexico City-born, Montreal-based artist proffers a poetic alternative tailor-made for this globalized, techno-mediated moment.
For the work, Lozano-Hemmer developed an AI-operated machine that transforms user-submitted photographs of the deceased into temporary portraits plotted out in grains of sand. 
On a live stream, viewers can watch as the images take shape in the artist’s studio across 30 minutes, as a robotic arm methodically deposits granules until a figure coalesces.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, A Crack in the Hourglass (2020), detail. Courtesy of the artist.

But just as quickly, the board tilts forward, the sand slips, the image dissolves, and only a black backboard remains.
“That’s what helps you understand that this is over, and that you need to let go,” Lozano-Hemmer tells Artnet News. 
The title of the work, A Crack in the Hourglass, is a central metaphor about our broken sense of time in the pandemic.
“What happens if the hourglass has a fissure and sand starts to empty out?” Lozano-Hemmer told Artnet News. “More importantly, how can we move the hourglass to collect the sand that’s been lost [to put it] into something that’s meaningful?” 
The project was commissioned by the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City and was originally intended to be installed on site. But the logistical realities of the pandemic soon made that impossible. (The museum is officially closed for the rest of the year.)

As an alternative, Lozano-Hemmer devised a digital platform that would allow users to submit photos of the dead accompanied by personalized dedications. 
The pivot makes sense: the online format has shifted the work from a local memorial in Mexico City, to a more widely accessible snapshot of the pandemic writ large.
On the project’s website, you can scroll through the archive of portraits already completed. As of November 12, around 50 portraits have been made. (The project launched on November 7.)
Critically, the sand is recycled for each portrait—a reminder, Lozano-Hemmer says, that in death we’re all equal. 
Perhaps more meaningful, though, is that the artwork brings people together, which is harder—and more crucial—than perhaps ever before.
Watch A Crack in the Hourglass live, or submit your photo, at www.acrackinthehourglass.net.
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Often when looking at photographs, we assume they are true, that they recorded an actual event in a particular moment in time, captured with the alchemy of light and sealed with a chemical reaction.
But photographs are just as often—and perhaps, more often than not—faked. They are staged, cropped, edited, amplified, quieted, and tied to very specific perspectives. Photographs are rarely, if ever, “true.”
The Vancouver-based photographer Jeff Wall, who investigates precisely this in his work, is dedicated to probing this boundary between reality and fantasy, and seamlessly blending fact and fiction.
In an exclusive interview with Art21 as part of the Extended Play series, Wall explains his 2014 work Changing Room, which shows a woman in the midst of trying on clothes inside what looks to be a department store’s fitting room.
Her bottom half is clad in a floral-patterned skirt, while she pulls a wildly printed frock over her head, obscuring her face. We can see that she’s standing opposite a mirror, flush against the changing room wall.

Production still from the Art21 “Extended Play” film, “Jeff Wall: An Impossible Photograph.” © Art21, Inc. 2017.

“It’s not a mirror image, because if you look at the hangers, they say ‘Barneys’ on them, not backwards,” Wall says in the video. “Therefore, the only thing that you can be seeing is what the mirror sees. So, that’s a picture that can’t be made.”
This slippage between fact and fiction is at the heart of Wall’s work.
“If you pay attention to that picture and enjoy it and look at it—get involved in it—it’ll come to you. And when it comes to you, it’ll be exciting” he says.
So the next time you scroll through Instagram or flip through the pages of a magazine—or take a look at one of Jeff Wall’s photographs—remember his words: “The most beautiful artistry is hidden.”
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series Extended Play, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. 
[embedded content]
This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.
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Quarantining has no doubt had a dissociative effect on us. Think about the strange ways in which time passes, or the moments during video chats when you have to remind yourself you’re speaking to a real person and not just watching TV. 
It’s the old paradox of modern technology: the more it connects us, the more disconnected we feel. And it’s inside that paradox that Michael Mandiberg’s newest body of work, “Zoom Paintings,” lives. 
Stuck in place over the past seven months, the artist, who is immunocompromised, has meticulously painted the backgrounds of those with whom they’ve video chatted—albeit with the person removed. 
The resulting canvases, all the size of the artist’s computer screen, are going on view this week in a (fittingly) virtual exhibition hosted by Denny Dimin gallery. 

“What I was experiencing in that time was just a real feeling of aloneness and dissociation,” Mandiberg tells me over Zoom, looking up from their desk. The artist is painting my own backdrop as we speak; our conversation is punctuated with longer-than-normal pauses as they work through an unknown section of the scene.
“I was in all these different spaces but they all looked the same. Normally we would be in a specific room at a specific institution. Now it’s all this weird nowhere space,” Mandiberg says before nodding back to the artwork in progress.
So it goes for the project, which the artist has been working on since April. During most of Mandiberg’s Zoom calls—faculty meetings, studio visits, family members’ birthdays—they’ll quietly pick a participant’s video and paint the scene. Sometimes they’ll tell their subjects; often—especially in big group chats—they won’t.
Michael Mandiberg, Eyebeam Rapid Response For A Better Digital Future Welcome I, 12:00 — 2:00 PM, June 30, 2020 (#16) (2020). Courtesy of the artist.

The gesture of making the digital physical is one Mandiberg has turned to before. The artist’s best-known body of work, Print Wikipedia (2009–16), is built around the inherently sisyphean task of printing out the entire encyclopedia’s database. 
But this new project is not that. Though a literal materialization of an ephemeral experience takes place, the “Zoom Paintings” aren’t about capturing a particular combination of ones and zeroes. In true conceptual fashion, it’s in the act of painting—rather than the painting itself—that the heart of the artwork beats.  
Driving this point home is the fact that Mandiberg is not a traditionally “good” painter. The artist will be the first to tell you. (They were never formally trained in painting.) And for this upcoming exhibition at least, the works will be presented in the digital sphere where they were born. The gallery will present the artworks on a public Zoom every day through the run of the show.
“For me, it’s a way to think about how I can use these tools of the moment to talk about the tools of the moment,” Mandiberg says.
Michael Mandiberg, Sara Clugage wiknic, 3:00 — 4:00 PM, August 16, 2020 (#23) (2020). Courtesy of the artist.

Unlike so many articles written in April about “what your quarantine bookshelf says about you,” Mandiberg isn’t interested in the decor of their subjects’ self-made lazarettos. There’s a blurring of details in these paintings. Stare at them long enough, and they all start to blend—just the way the gridded videos do on our own screens during a long meeting.
That’s why the subjects are removed, too. “It’s not about you,” Mandiberg sums up. “It’s about the interchangeability of people and places. It’s not memorializing a particular event; it’s memorializing how unmemorable it is.” 
Before this article was published, Mandiberg posted the painting from my Zoom screen to Instagram. I only half-recognized at it first, like seeing oneself in an old picture.
“Michael Mandiberg: The Zoom Paintings” will be on view on Denny Dimin Virtual November 12–25, 2020.
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As we settle into winter, the waning daylight hours are becoming more and more precious. Pioneering light and space artist James Turrell has spent his entire career trying to help viewers understand and appreciate that fleeting light as something valuable, on par with gold or silver.
In an exclusive interview with Art21 filmed back in 2013, Turrell reflects on his journey to make art experiences through harnessing the power of light.
“It’s not something that you form in the hands, like wax or clay,” he says. “You don’t carve it away like with wood or stone. You don’t assemble it like welding.” 

Production still from the Art21 “Extended Play” film, “James Turrell: ‘Second Meeting.’” © Art21, Inc. 2013.

After bouts of experimentation, Turrell landed on the idea of the skyspace, where a square patch of a ceiling in an enclosed space opens up into the heavens, allows visitors to peer through void and into the sky.
In the video, he sits and contemplates the sky in his work Second Meeting, which was originally installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1986.
“I want to bring the space of the sky down to the top of the space you’re in, so that you really feel at the bottom of the ocean of air,” he tells Art21. “We do create the reality in which we live.”
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series Extended Play, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. 
[embedded content]
This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.
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“Inka Essenhigh” at Miles McEnery GalleryThrough November 14, 2020

What the gallery says: “As found throughout Surrealism and other modern avant-garde movements, Essenhigh’s paintings tend be uniquely episodic, while still sharing themes of flora and fauna. They are touched by a curious self-containment and an interiority of the force of imagination. Her works display dimensional narratives that require close-up viewing, creating a visceral dialogue, one viewer at a time. Each is marked by bright, rich color, and a decision to revel in the “little world” schema of psychology with a fluidity between people and their things.”

Inka Essenhigh, Mission Chinese Restaurant (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, NY.

Why it’s worth a look: Who couldn’t use a bit of escapism right now? In American painter Inka Essenhigh’s fantastical world, the goblinesque creatures and their environments seem to be lit from within, whether cast in the cool light of the predawn morning or in the deep burnt orange of a Chinese restaurant. With nods to surrealism and animation, Essenhigh’s landscapes are populated by characters from folklore and mythology, in some cases existing only as faceless shadows. At a time where the real world is filled with screaming headlines and endless stressors, Essenhigh’s magic garden offers a lovely, transporting respite.
Miles McEnery Gallery is located at 525 West 22nd Street.
What it looks like:

Inka Essenhigh, Forever Young (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY.

Inka Essenhigh, Mushroom King (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY.

Installation view, “Inka Essenhigh” at Miles McEnery Gallery. Image: Christopher Burke Studio. Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

Inka Essenhigh, Dawn’s Early Light (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY.

Installation view, “Inka Essenhigh” at Miles McEnery Gallery. Image: Christopher Burke Studio. Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

Inka Essenhigh, Orange Fall (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY.

Inka Essenhigh, Predawn in Early Spring (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY.

Inka Essenhigh, The Last Party (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY.

Inka Essenhigh, Purple Pods (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY.

Inka Essenhigh, Full Bloom (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY.

Inka Essenhigh, Purple Pod Beans (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY.

Inka Essenhigh, Queen Anne’s Lace (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY.

Installation view, “Inka Essenhigh” at Miles McEnery Gallery. Image: Christopher Burke Studio. Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

Installation view, “Inka Essenhigh” at Miles McEnery Gallery. Image: Christopher Burke Studio. Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

Installation view, “Inka Essenhigh” at Miles McEnery Gallery. Image: Christopher Burke Studio. Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

Installation view, “Inka Essenhigh” at Miles McEnery Gallery. Image: Christopher Burke Studio. Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

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The exhibition offers a fractured timeline of sartorial history that fits in perfectly with the topsy-turvy world of 2020.
The post The Latest Costume Institute Show at the Met Is All About the Cyclical Nature of Couture Trends—See Images Here appeared first on artnet News. More