Neighbor Institutions, Le Palais de Tokyo and Musée d’Art Modern de Paris joined forces earlier this summer to open an exhibition dedicated to young emerging artists called Dynasty. After a long search, the two curatorial teams selected 40 French artists — including those living abroad and foreign artists living in France — to produce a work for each venue. The result is one exhibition with two, almost mirror exhibits.
With the same infatuation for the next young artist-du-jour as The Whitney and The New Museum’s recently-curated Biennale and “Younger Than Jesus” Triennale in New York, Dynasty’s premise is a fashionably hyped one. But their duo object and duo venue idea gives it a structured feel the other two shows lacked. The approach also offers a more comprehensible introduction to the artists’ work and is an apt reflection of one of contemporary art’s overarching themes: the agency of the institution on the production of art.
Amoung many other things, you’ll get to see a coagulation of a year’s worth of ominously hanging museum dust (Yuhsin U. Chang’s “Poussière dans le Palais de Tokyo,” photo at left), a beautiful film on impotence (no joke) filmed in Angola (“Liberdade” by Gabriel Abranted and Benjamin Crotty), cell phone-quality videos of everyday life in Paris (Mohamed Bourouissa’s “Temps Mort”) and a taxidermized hyena (“untitled” by Nicholas Milhé). In other words, there’s something for every taste, form and medium.
The exhibition runs until September 5th in Paris. For more information, check out the “Dynasty” website at www.dynasty-expo.com.
Best friends with late rising art star Dash Snow and renowned for openings that demand police reinforcement to disperse the crowds, Ryan McGinley is quintessential Lower East Side art scene royalty. Like most aristocrats, he sticks to his own and recently convinced American beauty queen Carolyn Murphy (Estée Lauder’s lead face since 2002) to partake in his short film creation entitled, “Entrance Romance (it felt like a kiss).” Backed with monastic chants, the frames capture Murphy’s slow motion facial physiognomy dealing with exposure to fire, the lick of a dog’s tongue and collision with a fish bowl (and live goldfish). The result is a combination of the intimate intensity from McGinley’s more recent black and white nude portraits, and the perverse awkwardness of his more famous earlier work, in which apparently unstaged carefree – and usually naked – teenagers run through highways or cavort in trees. As for whether this film is inspired, spiritual art or just a misguided, misogynistic mess? Well, that’s up for you to decide. Check out the video below:
After Misha Barton put Keds back on the wish lists of the rich, the famous, the OC fan, the hipster and the creative type, the 94-year-old shoe company is re-releasing some of their iconic models or producing them with a twist. Reminiscent of the 1930s, this month they came out with a shoe with a jute sole and a pair with a vintage colored canvas.
While they are offering one limited edition pair drawn from their century old collection every month, they’re also extending the realm of possible Keds by initiating a “Design Your Own” program on their website. Something already quite familiar to all Nike fans, it, as suggested, lets anyone design their own pair based on the brand’s most popular models. While the site offers a number of basic colours and ideas, the apprentice designers can download images from their own photographic collections and even sell their final designs via the Keds’ website. While mother’s day has already passed, your father’s is coming up, and no dad look cooler than with photos of his kids on his feet. (Check out the customized version our editorial assistant Dan made for his dad, above).
While the video he co-directed with Patrick Daughters introduced plaid-adorned scenesters to this artist’s creative mind, austere, tie-wearing curators and gallerists already had him under their radar. After moving from Winnipeg to New York to get closer to David Zwirner (one of the top contemporary art galleries today) in 2003, his pieces are now featured in the MoMA collection and have been shown at the Whitney Biennale and all over Europe.
So it is with some excitement that Montreal welcomes this solo exhibit. Dzama’a ghosts and soul-searching amputees are there, as well as his armies of Napoleon-like figures and mini skirt dancing terrorists. Presenting a multitude of his drawings, sculptures, dioramas, and collages, the show gives an overview of the artist’s signature style; works with a muted palette, melancholic figures and eerie scenery that very often hide uncanny topics charged with sexuality and violence. To all our readers in Montreal: this show is not to be missed.
Earlier this month, five multidisciplinary urban and architectural design firms chosen by the MoMA presented their visions for the future of New York City’s waterfront in the face of global warming –- in particular the rising sea levels and torrential storms.
Organized by the museum’s Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Barry Bergdoll, the teams used P.S.1, MoMA’s innovative young affiliate, as an incubator to develop infrastructures that will adjust the metropolitan’s coastlines and urban structures to the consequences of climate change. With a specific area assigned to each team -– from the bottom tip of Manhattan to parts of Brooklyn, Staten Island and New Jersey — all came up with solutions to accommodate rather than ignore the process.
The Liberty State Park area, with 68% of its land submerged, was envisioned as a water park with nature viewing platforms and education centers, as well as a research hub for urban coastal adaptation and experimentation (photo above), while the downtown core would be suspended over Venice-like canals to absorb high-tide waters. But our personal favorite is the firm Skape’s plan to fill, or rather refill, Red Hook’s polluted Buttermilk Channel with oysters – and reestablish an industry, oyster farming, that was thriving in the area 300 years ago. Not only would these little marine habitants feed off the water’s toxins, but their eggs would float into nests settled at the entrance of the Upper Bay to harden as they grow into porous walls to protect the area from high tides. And no, they would not be edible any time soon.
These designs, results of an eight week in-residence collaborative workshop at P.S.1, will be exposed in the MoMA’s exhibit, “Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfont” opening on March 23rd. For more info check out the MoMa website.
