Search Filter
Tony Tasset’s Latest Sculpture is a 30-Foot Eye for The Joule Hotel in Dallas
Hypebeast, November, 20, 2013
Visitors of the five-star Joule Hotel in Dallas will now be greeted by more than a welcoming staff with the addition of Tony Tasset‘s newest work. The maverick artist, whose year has also been decorated with a secured position in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, has taken his talents to Texas to expand the Joule Hotel‘s growing art collection. The sculpture – which was seen in a similar form back in 2007 – is a 30-foot, three-dimensional sphere modeled after Tasset’s own eye. While many outlets might be quick to assign a profound meaning to the piece, the artist insists that “it’s [just] a big eyeball” – a refreshing approach to such an ostensibly serious work.
Read More…
Download PDF: 
KaviGupta_Review406.pdf
Related Artists: Tony Tasset
Understanding Apparatus: Notes on Roxy Paine’s Aesthetics of Knowing
by Christian Viveros-Fauné
I. The Studio Visit and the Cheat Sheet
Here’s a few super-concentrated ideas Roxy Paine tossed my way—in the form of a neatly folded sheet of paper—as I prepared to write this essay about his most recent eye-opening, mind-boggling sculptures.
His printed notations began thusly: “The translation between entities—between modes of thought/between languages of thought/between material languages/between processes and systems.” A gnomic set of pronouncements that matched up neatly with a few other favorite concepts I’d heard Paine talk about in his Long Island City, Queens, studio, these observations stuck to his Natural History Museum-scale dioramas like a stack of invisible Post-It Notes.
Read More…
Related Artists: Roxy Paine
Related Exhibitions: Apparatus
Theaster Gates: The Chicago Artist on Regenerating Communities through Shared Knowledge
by Francesca Gavin, Dazed & Confused, October Issue, 2013
Theaster Gates is an artist who thinks big. His socially engaged practice veers from archive and living performance spaces to paintings made from tar, old fire hoses and magazine covers. In the past year, he has emerged from the academic enclaves of Chicago to become one of the most politically cognisant rising art stars of his generation. Some of his archival projects are incredible, such as a library of records created from the final inventory of closed record store Dr Wax and an African-American-focused magazine and book collection donated by Johnson Publishing Company (publisher of Ebony). These projects have permanent homes at Dorchester Projects, a series of abandoned buildings on his city’s South Side that he is transforming into a local resource of culture and knowledge.
Read More…
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review337.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
Collecting Chicago
by Robin Dluzen, Art Ltd. Magazine, September/October 2013
In Chicago, some art collectors keep their ears to the ground, immersing themselves in gallery shows, alternative spaces, studio visits, and thesis exhibitions in order to bolster the best new talent within the sea of emerging artists living and working in the city. Others find their calling in stepping up to the plate, in lending to, and sponsoring, museum exhibitions of established artists, and backing the kinds of high-profile initiatives that garner the city national attention. Collectors Scott Hunter, and Linda and Paul Gotskind are each a bit of both. While Hunter primarily collects emerging artists, and the Gotskinds tend to acquire more well-known figures, both are realizing their roles as patrons in enhancing the cultural life of the city they call home.
Read More…
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review324.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates , Antonia Gurkovska , Angel Otero
Theaster Gates
by Diana Nawi, The Miami Rail, Winter 2012
Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates opened his first solo exhibition in Miami at Locust Projects this November. Soul Manufacturing Corporation transforms the gallery space into a site for the actual production of goods, making the labor of the artists who will work in the space available for public consumption. This project is the outgrowth of a practice that encompasses sculpture, painting, performance, singing, ceramics, and installation, alongside urban planning, construction, and community engagement. In anticipation, Gates and Diana Nawi, Associate Curator at the Miami Art Museum, exchanged emails and phone calls in late October of this year.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review218.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
Hand: Memory a Meditation
by Glen Mannisto, Catalogue, House:Work at College for Creative Studies, November 7-December 9, 2009
Back in the early 19870s, McArthur Binion taught himself to ambidextrous. He did it by drawing a line on the wall of the freight elevator of his Chelsea studio in New York City and then another on the floor, the distance from the wall of a basketball's foul line to the basket, and, standing on the foul line, repeatedly threw a tennis ball at the wall's line with his left hand.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review206.pdf
Art, Culture, Chicago
by Rachel Wolff, Departures, October/December 2012
The September 19 opening of Expo Chicago--a new hotly anticipated art fair housed on the Lake Michigan-adjacent Navy Pier--had a warm feeling uncharacteristic of such events. The crows was chipper, the vibe was inclusive a partygoers raved about the quality of the exhibitions and the art--even before most of them had a chance to fully take in everything. Indeed, it was a "We're bac, baby" kind of night, lacking in the been-there-done-that ennui that can permeate art-fair previews (but with just the right hint of deja vu for those of us who had attended the once-great now-defunct Art Chicago).
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review190.pdf
Related Exhibitions: EXPO Chicago
Interview with Clare Rojas
by Chris Lux
Clare Rojas is painter, musician, and writer, living in San Francisco. She records and performs music under the name Peggy Honeywell. Rojas has exhibited internationally, showing paintings, installations, and performances. She is, needless to say, a very busy woman. She also has an amazing family to top it off.
After recently visiting Clare’s studio, I was struck by how her collection of work together forms an expression for a thing difficult to articulate, navigate, or portray: the vibrancy of human feelings and interactivity in a vast, engulfing world.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review167.pdf
Related Artists: Clare E. Rojas
Theaster Gates: Radical Reform with Everyday Tools
by Hesse McGraw, Afterall, Summer 2012
Theaster Gates is viral. In 2011--the year Gates 'broke'--the socially engaged work shifted in the U.S. One critic lauded Gates for providing contemporary art with sorely lacking purpose, and Jeffrey Deitch, contemporary art's greatest pitchman, got to talking with him about art and real life on Mercedes-Benz TV.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review159.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
The New Revolutionary
by Michele Robercchi, Mousse Contemporary Art Magazine, Issue 32 February - March 2012
What role can a revolutionary play today? Starting with this question, Michele Robecchi zooms in on the practice of Theaster Gates, the artist from Chicago who through the creation of soul food restaurants and the construction of temporary temples generates multicultural dialogue. Programmatically eluding classification, Gates institutes physical and non-physical spaces in which to exercise the right to say challenging things without getting trapped in facile categories..........
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review131.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
Theaster Gates
by Christian Viveros-Faune, Art Review, Jan/Feb 2012
Great art according to the American poet Emily Dickinson, is what makes the hair on on the back of your neck stand up. So it is with the relentlessly civic-minded performance, sculpture, installation and urban reclamation work of Theaster Gates. continued...
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review130.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
New York Minute
by Kathy Grayson, Garage Center for Contemporary Art, March - May 2011
New York Minute features sixty artists in and around New York City who capture the drama, danger, speed and savvy of the vibrant and diverse art activities happening in the city today. For the first time, this exhibition brings together a complete survey of the multiple exciting new tendencies coming out of New York City and its extended networks. It captures the best practitioners in each unique area of exploration and brings them together in a logical and collaborative way.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review105.pdf
Related Artists: Chris Johanson
Melanie Schiff: Spider
by Laura Schleussner, Flash Art International, January - February 2011
Atmospheric, light-infused and highly evocative of the moment, Melanie Schiff's photographs recall modern traditions of American romantic photography (Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander come readily to mind). Unlike these photographers, SChiff is more interested in observing transient moments that suggest youth culture and an alternative milieu. Staged individual portraits, still-lifes with beer bottles, CDs or decaying plants, a hotel room once occupied by Kurt Cobain, album covers floating in an abandoned pool -- too open-ended to be a personal chronicle, Schiff's imagery has an immersive, ambient quality. Multiple references to music and pop icons suggest a sound track that is somehow imbedded in the images and that becomes stronger and more compelling when multiple photographs are brought together.
For her first solo exhibition in Germany at Kavi Gupta, Schiff shows only seven moderately sized photographs taken while on residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. In comparison to earlier works, these are more still, almost silent. The images are also imbued with a certain minimalism, which is perhaps inspired by the context of Donald Judd's former living and workspace. Like the minimalists, Schiff turns her attention towards the landscape and seemingly abandoned spaces, yet she counters all notions of purism and perfection. Nature is the subject of most photographs, but always as touched by human hand. An outcropping of rock bears a spray of graffiti; decaying silk flowers are superimposed over a field of grass; Halley's comet appears merely as a poster hung on an unused door.
There is something highly introverted about this collection of works, whose concentrated field of vision never pulls back to show the landscape. Several photographs inhabit a rough, white-washed interior with an opaque window giving no hint of the world outside. The only creature seeming to populate the space is a tiny spider clutching her eggs against a brilliant white wall that has been irreverently dirtied by her tiny brown droppings. - Laura Schleussner
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review96.pdf
Related Artists: Melanie Schiff
Related Exhibitions: Spider
ARE YOU a ZOMBIE or a WITCH?
by Elijah Burgher, C Magazine #106, Summer 2010
Originally from Toronto, and now based in Paris, Scott Treleaven first achieved notoriety in occult and queercore circles for his zine This Is the Salivation Army. He has subsequently created a large body of work consisting of darkly erotic works on paper, hypnotic films......
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review95.pdf
Related Artists: Scott Treleaven
BLEACHED : Opening Up Limits of Truth and Photography
by Kristen Carter, Jettison Quarterly, Spring 2010
...According to the artist, he has always been curious about the physical nature of the photograph. "Paying attention to the photograph as an object exposes it as something impermanent, fallible and extremely malleable," explains Mann. "Coming from a mechanical engineering background, I have always been curious about the chemicals and inks used to produce photographs. The flat, conventional, image holds potential."...
JettisonQuarterly.com
Related Artists: Curtis Mann
A Q&A Session with Theaster Gates
by Steve Ruiz, Jettison Quarterly, Fall 2010
With an artistic practice broad enough to include urban-planning inspired social projects, spiritual musical performance and an ability to critique large cultural institutions while still attracting their interest, it's no surprise that Theaster Gates has had a busy time the last few years...
JettisonQuarterly.com
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review79.pdf
Related Artists: Theaster Gates
Cordy Ryman
by Stephen Westfall, BOMB Magazine, Summer 2010
Stephen Westfall inspects the typical Cordy Ryman sculpture discovering it to be a seemingly autonomous entity complete with its own agency and the ability to miraculously self-propagate.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review70.pdf
Related Artists: Cordy Ryman
Rewind: 1970s to 1990s Works from the MCA Collection March 13 - September 5, 2010
MCA website, March 13th- September 5th, 2010
During its forty-year history, the MCA has distinguished itself with groundbreaking exhibitions that have contributed substantially to the evolving history of contemporary art. These exhibitions have, in turn, stimulated the museum and its supporters to acquire important and often numerous pieces by these artists. A resulting hallmark of the MCA's collection is the presence of significant, in-depth bodies of work by artists. By displaying several examples of an artist's work, visitors can gain a better understanding of their working process and development of ideas over the span of several years.
Rewind presents concentrations of work by artists whom the MCA has collected in depth, or whose pieces in the collection are definitive examples of their singular aesthetic. Showcasing key artists of the last forty years whose work has been and continues to be defining to international contemporary art underscores the MCA's role as a leader in and incubator of artistic innovation.
Rewind focuses on works from these particular decades to show how the groundbreaking work from the recent past is only now becoming historicized for its critical take on art institutions, identity politics, and new approaches to video and photography in the late-20th century. It includes works by Vito Acconci, Richard Artschwager, Matthew Barney, Alfredo Jaar, Mike Kelley, Sharon Lockhart, Richard Long, Richard Prince, Lorna Simpson, Tony Tasset, and Gillian Wearing.
This exhibition is organized by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Pamela Alper Associate Curator.
Related Artists: Tony Tasset
Sleepaway For the Rejected Scott Hug and friends squat at the gallery
by Wayne Northcross, Gay City News, August 31 - September 6, 2006
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review52.pdf
Related Artists: Scott Treleaven
Scott Treleaven
by Michael Workman, Flash Art, January/February 2005
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review51.pdf
Related Artists: Scott Treleaven