Ivory & Black Soho proudly presents “Around Us & Between Us”, the first solo exhibition in London since 2005 by the Los Angeles based artist Geoff McFetridge – A multidisciplinary artist without creative boundaries who’s life work ranges from poetry to installation, painting to graphic design and many other practices in between. For his “Around Us & Between Us” exhibition, Geoff has created a series of 10 new acrylic paintings on canvas on his distinctive and reductive style, giving each different subject the same treatment and refinery. In the artist’s own words:
Images are central to my painting. The images are varied, while my treatment of them is very consistent. The imagery is refined to a point of anonymous functionality. The paintings are meant to feel as if they were pulled directly from the lexicon.I paint some things because they are things that I have seen, but more importantly, I believe they are things that the viewer has seen. I am painting from life, but not life purely found in the landscape, but the also psychological, mediated, and transcendental world that infects our consciousness.

Geoff McFetridge is an artist based in Los Angeles California. Born in Canada, he was schooled at the Alberta College of Art and the Graduate Design Program at the California Institute of the Arts. Known for his reductive graphic style, Geoff began to show his work in galleries in 1998 at George’s Gallery. His first large scale show was in Japan at Parco Gallery Tokyo. He was part of the Beautiful Losers Exhibition which toured the world, and has made solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, Paris, London, Seattle, Milan and the Netherlands. Most recent exhibitions include solo shows at V1 Gallery, Copenhagen and Half Gallery, NYC and a large installations as part of “Art in the Streets” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and for “Graphic Design Worlds” at the Trienalle Design Museum in Milan Italy.
His work is in the collection of the SF Museum of Modern Art, Exhibited in the Cooper Hewitt National Design Biennial, and the California Design Biennial. His animations have screened at Cannes, Resfest, Fotokino and South By Southwest. Geoff continues to work as a commercial designer adapting his personal work for an international client list. Over the years he has designed shoes for Nike, created the graphics for the film “Where the Wild Things Are” and designing wallpaper, carpet and blankets for the Standard Hotel NY.

September 14 – October 26, 2012
Private reception with the artist: September 14 – RSVP: rsvp@ivoryandblack.com
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 2-8 PM

?Ivory&Black Soho
94 Berwick Street, W1F 0QF, London UK
www.ivoryandblack.com

 
 

 
 
Coral Anderson RISD’s (Rhode Island School of Design) 2010 graduate in Illustration has his first solo show “A Distasteful Beautiful Show” this Friday August 31 @ The MFA Gallery in Washington DC. If you happen to be in the Washington DC area be sure to stop by The MFA Gallery between 7-9pm and catch a very Distasteful Beautiful Show.

View More of his work

“A Word is Worth A Thousand Pictures.” is Stephen Powers’ highly anticipated solo exhibition at Joshua Liner Gallery. The artist returns to New York for the first time in 7 years sharing his hand painted assemblages which will fill the entire gallery with works up to 10′ x 10′. The opening reception is on Thursday September 6 from 6-9 pm.

Images and press release courtesy of Joshua Liner Gallery.

Stephen Powers—well known for public artworks that fuse sign painting, graffiti, word, and image—creates a new form of public art that is collaborative and personal. Since 2009, his Love Letter projects in the United States and abroad have brought his unique visual communication style to new and larger public arenas. Inspired by conversations with community residents, these colorful interventions leave painted text and graphics on buildings, rooftops and bridges, turning blight to light and illuminating communities in six cities on three continents, as of yet.

Powers paints daily, what he terms “Metaltations”—small-scale works on 10-x-8 inch metal sheets painted with enamel. These endlessly inventive pieces serve not only as daily diary but also as a laboratory for the graphic treatments that bring such punch and potency to the artist’s larger paintings. Though the typography and bright colors feel almost carnival on first glance, the artist’s pithy statements on the vicissitudes of life, love, and work are surprisingly intimate (“I paid the light bill just to see your face”).

Oftentimes, Powers transposes words in old bromides to achieve the effect of new insight, such as “a word is worth a thousand pictures” for Powers, that one word is ADORE, a word he describes as “being the base element in every great painting ever.” In other Metaltations, his pictograms strive for the immediacy of cave painting, with a much brighter palette. Powers claims no artistic forbears: “If what I did looked like anything else I’d change it,” but acknowledges debts to Jenny Holzer and Chris Johanson. Pop, graffiti, sign painting, and at the center, a loving eye for the human face, all dance together in his work, or as Powers notes, “The paintings closest to my ideal visually represent what’s in my head, a cacophony of wants and needs and hopes and fears and dreams.

Stephen Powers: www.firstandfifteenth.net
Joshua Liner: www.joshualinergallery.com

Caitlin Cherry‘s narrative paintings ease in and out of reality by employing material simulacra. Hooks rip through White Santa Urban Assault and Black Santa Air Raid in a two painting installation collectively titled Full Metal B&W Santa. The names, colors and hanging mechanisms all have a boldness that adds to the spectacle of the work. I catch up with Caitlin to chat about another of her two painting installations — The Loyalists.

C&S: The Loyalists features two paintings across from each other with a canon, which exists in the space of the viewer connecting the two. What is the situation that we are caught in the middle of?

CC: The Loyalists is a painting installation about moving through some different realities – the pictorial space of the painting, sculpture, and actual reality of the cannon. A theatrical cannon shot has affected and scarred both the painting delivering the shot and the receiver painting across the room – this all affects the real space of the cannon in the room the painting that it’s a part of, America Provides, was rigged with a cannon fuse and lit before showing and has been scarred with the soot – the painting receiving, Queen Victoria Royale, attempts to protect itself with the sculptural resin, 6 gallons of it poured and cured on the surface and the only damage a trompe l’oeil cannon crack that has been screen printed on the layers of resin and painted over. The resin has caused the Queen Victoria painting to age and yellow significantly. Both paintings are visibility hurt by their battle.

C&S: But there is more going on conceptually than a Revolutionary War re-enactment in paint…

CC: Conceptually I’d like to think of the piece being about the passing of the torch of imperialism between Great Britain and America. We can start at the Revolutionary War – where these two countries were actually at war and how America has evolved into it’s own world power. It now points to it’s origins literally with the cannon. The viewer essentially gets to be in the middle of it. Not quite a victim but at least acknowledging their participation in decadent ideas of war and power and lust. Both are self-destructing as they overreach their resources to obtain more of this power.

C&S: What about each piece individually?

CC: Individually, America Provides could be as celebratory as it is menacing. It’s a very nationalistic piece. The golem figures, which I’ve employed in a lot of my work, are politicking and drumming into war. They’re playing at idea of humanity, specifically, reenacting these symbols of American culture – decked out in full regalia. And you want to be behind it all. But if you are, you’re as dangerous as the cannon.

Queen Victoria depicts a golem as the queen on her throne, which a male figure behind her receiving a blow job. She’s petting a lion – a symbol of Great Britain, on the coat of arms, and he’s getting pet too in a different way. Both are both very sexual. The lion is the cannon equivalent, guarding the painting. After I made it I realized the male figure would most likely be Prince Albert. The maid giving the blow job has violently been pierced through her eye. It’s a bit of a joke on the origin of the Prince Albert piercing on the head of the penis. Anyway, I knew Queen Victoria would always be the companion painting to America Provides and so I wanted it to match it’s decadence in the way I think of Great Britain. With the ornate interior backdrop and all black and grey palette. I wanted it to look as dated as Queen Victoria’s reign but still powerful. The resin completes that by sealing the painting, but making it look like old varnish. Both of these paintings are set in each countries’ hey day.

C&S: And the cannon?

CC: I used the cannon to pick the time period for Queen Victoria as she was on the throne during the time of the American Civil War, and the cannon is a civil war replica. At the time of thesis show opening the cannon smoked subtly and the space smelled a bit of it, as if the cannon had just been shot off. And the viewers are witnessing the aftermath of it all.

1)home? 2)treasure? 3)fame? 4)engine? 5)wisdom? 6)heroes? 7)time journey? 8)sacrifice? 9)vice? 10)cats/dogs?. The answers to these 10 questions plus one shot of their studio is all that the artists featured on www.tenwordsandoneshot.com had to contribute and yet Kevin Krumnikls ambitious project is quite astounding both visually and content wise. Despite their minimalistic form the interviews offer a deep first impression of the presented artists and the photos of their working spaces present another very intimate insight into the artists’ worlds. But tenwordsandoneshot is much more than just a website. It is also a book project, an art trading platform and a series of exhibitions. Curbs&Stoops talked to Krumnikl about his brainchild, his love for art and what lengths he has to go to in order to keep the project running.

C&S: Sometimes it happens to me that when I read an interview with an artist I end up being somewhat disappointed, because the answers did not fit the image of that person that I had created for myself. What made you want to keep the concept of tenwordsandoneshot so minimalistic?

KK: I’d say it was mainly pragmatical reasons. The internet is a fast moving space and sometimes the life expectancy of certain internet phenomena can be quite short as well. When I was creating the concept of tenwordsandoneshot I was mainly considering my own habits when I surf the web. I personally don’t like reading long texts online and that is why all I need is 10 words for questions. They will help you to get a basic idea of the artists I present and if you then become interested in them and their work you can still check out their websites or you can even get in touch with them. I think a single word question also allows the artists to answer much more freely because everybody for example has a different understanding of the concept of fame and associates different ideas with it.

C&S: What surprised me was that the answers are oftentimes fairly short as well.

KK: I guess some of the questions like “Cats/Dogs” don’t really leave many options for extensive answers. People will usually answer something like: “I have a cat and her name is such and such.” But other questions have indeed been answered quite extensively by some of the artists. I don’t really know what makes people want to answer the way that they do. But it is great to see that different artists have different styles of answering. I have been asked once what my answers to my own questions would be and I seriously had no answer to that. I think it really depends on what phase of your life you find yourself in at the moment. If I had to answer the questions I think the answers to some of the them would vary quite dramatically from one day to the next. Quite a few artists answered the question “Heroes” by saying: “This week it is X. Next week it might be Y”.

C&S: How much time do you allow the artists to answer the questions? Do they have to do it quite spontaneously or do they have time to ponder over their answers?

KK: They have as much time as they need. Usually I just send out the invitations with an explanatory text of the tenwordsandoneshot concept and then see what happens. Just the other day I got the answers from an artists that I had asked to join the project two years ago. Some answer the very next day, some need a little longer than that.

C&S: How do you find and select the artists that you want to feature on tenwordsandoneshot?

KK: In the beginning I was mainly featuring the people that I had come in contact with personally through my own art collection. I also surf the net a lot and by now the pool of participants has grown so much that I get a lot of recommendations that I look into and then simply invite the ones that I like. Also people have started to apply for the project which I find very pleasant because it means less work for me (laughs).

C&S: Would you say that your project is a springboard for up and coming artists?

KK: To me it really doesn’t matter if the artists that I feature are well known or not at all known. All I care about is the quality of their works. Of course I am also checking out the artists’ CVs but that is something that is not really that important to me. Sometimes I am trying to invite well known artists in order to have something of a crowd puller on the website, but these people can sometimes be quite difficult to convince. Now that the project is gaining more and more recognition it has become a little easier, but that still doesn’t change the way I feel about the selection of the featured artists.

C&S: You mentioned before that when you surf the web you are looking for readily accessible and compact info. If that is how you go about your intake of information, why do you still feel that it makes sense to publish the featured tenwordsandoneshot artists in book form?

KK: Because I was born in ’78 and I have grown up without the internet. To me books have a soul but the internet does not. With a book you spend time, on the internet you waste time. The idea to publish the book only started to grow after the blog had been online for some time. And then the idea of having an actual exhibition that would once more unite the artists that have been featured on the website and in the book sprung from those two previous steps. That is how the cycle works. The internet makes it quite easy to get in touch with artists and I use the book as a swap medium that allows me to generate an art collection that I can exhibit. To travel, to meet the artists in person and to see the artworks and the studios is the best part about the whole project for me. My utopian goal is to meet every single featured artists in person. So far 297 artists have answered the ten questions and I have canceled my home loan savings contract in order to be able to pay for the publication of the books. Every book features 100 artists and very soon now the production of the third book needs to be paid for. To save money I bought enough material for five publications so I am pretty much forced to publish at least five books. I am now the proud owner of tons of paper that are just waiting in the storage facility of the printers for the next edition of the project. I also own many square meters of white linen and a few kilometers of bookbinding thread. The people at the printers always laugh at me because nobody ever wanted to have an edition of just 100 copies printed. I want to raise the number of copies printed by 100 per edition so that in the end the money I make selling the books would be enough to secure the print of the next issue.

C&S: One part of the tenwordsandoneshot concept is that the artists that you present in your publication trade one piece of art for a copy of the book. How is this working out for you and how do the artists go about deciding what pieces to give to you?

KK: The artists just give me whatever they feel would be something appropriate to swap for the book. Sometimes the artists offer a selection of pieces to choose from to me but I’d rather not even make that choice and just take what they think would be best to give to me. Some of course also say: “This guy must be nuts. My pieces cost several thousand euros and all I get is this book? Forget about it!” I can live with that and I understand why they think that way. Especially with the first edition of the book it was quite difficult to convince artists to swap with me because nobody really knew what to expect. Nobody had seen a copy of the book yet or knew what the quality would be like. Now with the second issue the swap part has become a lot easier. But it is still up to the individual artists of course to decide how to handle this part. The artworks I have gotten so far cover a wide range of forms and formats.
Some artists also produced pieces especially for the book swap which I think is really dope.

C&S: How can people get their hands on a copy of your book?

KK: The first issue was quite exclusive. I swapped 70 of the 100 copies I had printed with artists and the rest I sold privately. Now for the second issue I have 100 copies that I can trade and 100 copies that will be up for sale. We will present the project on different blogs and websites and people can get in touch with me if they want to purchase a copy. Another idea that I have is to contact the galleries that represent that artists that I feature on the website and have them buy some copies to give to their customers as goodies. That way they would get a nice present and at the same time have the chance to find out about another 99 artists.

C&S: Do you see yourself as a curator?

KK: It is true that I select the artists that I want to feature on the website and in the book and I have also been thinking about how to go about the actual exhibition, how to arrange the pieces and how to best present them to an actual audience. But really I just see myself as a guy who just has a lot of fun with art.

C&S: Thank you very much for the interview.

If you are interested in applying for the project go to www.tenwordsandoneshot.com
All applications are welcome.

SKULLPHONE “LONDON XX12″ INSTALLATION

London XX12 by Skullphone opened last friday the 20th of July at Ivory & Black Soho in London. The first solo exhibition in London by this LA-Based artist was a big success, and in addition to the exhibition, Ivory & Black and Skullphone released several limited edition products including silkscreen prints, socks, t-shirts and iphone covers.

For more information please visit www.ivoryandblack.com or contact info@ivoryandblack.com

If you are in New York, be sure to stop by our pop-up exhibition featuring the works of recent RISD Painting MFA Francisco Moreno. For those who can’t make it, we are sharing images, literature and other media here.

It is often said that the brightest stars are not stars at all, but planets. In this exhibition we present 10 rising stars whose bright light and way-out orbit challenge easy categorization.

The paintings of HILARY DOYLE make a world most fluid where there is much fact and little friction … but wait! … we can hear that little rhyme that kids say as they pull the petals off a daisy one by one. There stirs here in its early days a new imagined world never before seen and a new way to paint it. We see before us -Trompe Doyle!

Characteristic of the most recent paintings of ANTHONY GIANNINI is a great press forward like the surge of a crowd toward the stage. The noise and the urgency are inescapable. These works can be maverick or can define forward-looking for us all – or do both.

RACHEL KLINGHOFFER paintings like the flying buttresses outside the walls of the Temple of Earthly Delights create a space for elegance and lift. As they serve the beauty inside and can themselves be frightening, these paintings separate blossom from bloom, bosom from boom.

Between the territory of Outside-looking-in and Inside-looking-out FRANCISCO MORENO travels so easily as to be more or less borderless. An observer whose strategic acquiescence and stubborn resistance crossover in collaborative self-definition…significantly Francisco collaborates with Moreno.

The only paintings that could lower sea levels and restore the polar ice caps are here in the work of KIMO NELSON. Not because of ‘cool’ though they bring that, but because they are a most hopeful map of possibilities. Nelson is a chaos-tician studying complex systems.

Vexingly chimerical, but wonderfully alchemical, one could say that ART PEÑA’s paintings have an Ionic soul in a Doric body. Like fulgurites (ZAP!) he presents mysterious compounds from outer space made of familiar elements in unknown proportions.

Familiar elements in unknown proportions propel LAUREN MICHELLE RAWLINGS protean and quixotic adventures in self-portraiture. Subject and object switch roles back and forth in self or any portraiture making them necessarily motion pictures. So it is with Rawlings’ mercurial installation.

Our Bard said the Land of Milk and Honey has become the land of money. PAGE WHITMORE sees this as an historian of the Future and her paintings move from the quotidian to an imagined world ahead where deception is employed with both humor and critical consequence.

BRUCE WILHELM can be called a Master of Disguise, but only if properly seen as all “Master”, much “guise”, and no “Dis”. His studio is a research lab producing more tower than tunnel. That is, we don’t dig deep in critique, we build up high for vista.

Channeling and funneling light ASTRID TOHA works with light’s leaking fluidity to create a kind of visual glissando in her resplendent prints and projections … And … Yes, dear, you will be in her headlights!

- Dennis Congdon

532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel
532 West 25th Street, 917-701-3338 Chelsea
July 11 – July 26, 2012
Opening: Tuesday, July 10, 6 – 8 PM

SKULLPHONE – “London, XX12? Ivory & Black Soho, solo exhibition, July XX12

July 20 – August 24, XX12

Private view with the Artist: July 20, 6-9 PM – RSVP at rsvp@ivoryandblack.com
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 2 – 8 pm

Ivory & Black Soho

94 Berwick st, W1F 0QF
+44(0)2077343520
www.ivoryandblack.com

 “…the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle.”

– The XXXXXXX XXXXX

 Ivory & Black Soho proudly presents London, XX12, Skullphone’s much-anticipated solo exhibition in conjunction with the XXXXXX XXXXXXXX. Comprised of Skullphone’s hand-painted Digital Media series and sculpture installation, London, XX12 encapsulates the spirit of the XXXXXXX XXXXX within the context of contemporary Great Britain. Reflection paintings depict the United Kingdom’s celebration and tumult. Rectangular paintings show Skullphone’s “advertisement” in rotation with British branding. The adjoining sculpture installation features a work cast from the artist’s foot and adorned with customized running socks — a reflective display of street art, studio practice and marketability — equally representing mankind’s life on the run and the eternal desire for faster, higher, stronger.

Skullphone’s Digital Media paintings are calculated fabrications for indoor viewing, a departure from the large-scale outdoor work for which he first became known. The paintings document our modern world – one which is increasingly defined by connection and communication via brief technological encounters. Here, advertising, government, private enterprise signage, real- and digital-scapes are represented. This work employs a deliberate grid system of red, blue, and green paint applied to reflective aluminum panels one dot at a time, creating pointillistic images that dislocate when approached.

In addition to the exhibition, a lot of limited edition products will be released in the opening, as well special skullphone collaboration to give away.

For more information please visit www.ivoryandblack.com

 
Danae Valenza’s contribution to this year’s Next Wave Art Festival in Melbourne, which features artists from all over Australia, is a truly stunning, melancholic and aesthetically beautiful site specific installation. The piece was installed at the Mission to Seafarers, a temporary home to a community of 60,000 seafarers who dock in Melbourne’s ports each year. Massive spheres of ice are hanging from the cupola of the building and as the ice is slowly melting away, the drops of water that fall into the barrels placed under the spheres trigger the choral voices of the singers of the Chinese Methodist Choir who rehearse at the mission. The melting ice spheres, which appear incredibly heavy, yet at the same time almost weightless, and the echoing voices create a dense and awe-inspiring atmosphere which pays tribute to the passing of time, the many stories that have been told and re-told within the walls of this historic building and also the many lives lost at sea. Just like the patience and hope of the wives of the mariners staring out to sea from their widow’s walks, the ice is still strong in the beginning, but is wearing thinner and thinner with every falling drop. Until one day, after the last echo has faded, there is no one there anymore to remember those who will never return.
 
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