Congratulations ARLENE SHECHET!

The American Academy of Arts and Letters

2011 Arts & Letters Award Winner

David Frankel, Elaine Reichek & James Engel celebrate the opening of Reichek’s “Ariadne’s Thread” - Saturday, April 2

DINH Q. LE / ARTnews April 2011

“History in the Making” by Ann Landi

“Artists seem fascinated by the upheavals and conflicts of the last half century, but the impulse to create history paintings as vehicles of protest or of celebration has shifted to something more elusive, questioning, and often personal. An-My Lê, born in Saigon in 1960, fled Vietnam as a teenager. Her photographs and films take as their subject memories of her childhood home and reenactments on American soil, in which she has taken part, of key battles from the Vietnam War. Dinh Q. Lê’s recent project at MoMA featured a helicopter hand-built from spare parts by two Vietnamese workers and a three-channel video interweaving personal recollections of the war with clips from Western war documentaries.”

BRAD SPENCE / Artforum April 2011

The title of Brad Spence’s fourth solo show at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, “(figs.),” simultaneously bespeaks the open-endedness and closure of the fourteen immaculately airbrushed Photorealist paintings that were on view.  When abbreviated and bracketed, the word typically indicates a particular kind of “figure,” a reference image or diagram tied to a text.  Previously, Spence has organized bodies of work around themes straightforwardly declared in his exhibition titles- “The Afterlife,” “Art Therapy,” “As I Was Conceived” – so that even if individual pieces occasionally strayed into ambiguous territory, these overarching rubrics at least provided us with a serviceable road map.  The absence of any such hermeneutic frame here may encourage a greater range of interpretation, but the particular grouping of images that comprised “(figs.)” was no less interconnected or in any way arbitrary.  To the contrary, what Spence left unsaid this time around felt all the more demanding of an answer.

No doubt this is due to the cinematic quality that pervades all of Spence’s work and that her began to suggest a storyboard, however obliquely.  For example, the grouping of three pictures that opened the show- depicting a van parked on an empty street (Van) (all works 2010), a descending flight of stairs inside a home (Downstairs), and the sun (or is it the moon?) radiating through a chain-link fence (Fence)- operate like the establishing shots of a film, guiding the eye straight ahead, then down, then up, to “cover the ground” of some wan, ambiguously suburban context on a tense note of expectation.  Through intentionally awkward cropping; radioactive, bleached-out lighting; and a few chillingly stark figurative choices, every banal detail has been charged with a current of dread.  If in cinema tranquil normalcy tends to precede disruption, Spence has reversed the order, leaving us haunted by a climactic event that has seemingly occurred.

Registering what appears to be the aftermath of a violent crisis, two paintings in particular clinch this feeling – Battlefield, wherein a barely decipherable body is lying beside a trench, and Courtroom, which depicts a small room with simple benches, a space as bare-bones as it is abandoned. Between these poles of crime and punishment, every image in the exhibition took on the brief legal document, as if “to be evidence in the historical trial,” as Walter Benjamin wrote about the work of Atget – that is, to present exhibits, or again, (figs.). Other works, depicting such things as a fingerless glove, a cocktail, a deserted corridor, all carried the signature effect of Spence’s finely tuned technique – one that is more hypo- than hyperrealistic in the way that enfolds and occludes the work’s pictorial content. Just as the hand of the artist has been pulled back in the process of painting, so too has the product been pushed just out of reach. From a distance, these works resemble blurred photographs, often bearing the scars of analog facture: light flares, off-tinting, various other printing errors. Of course, as paintings, viewed at close range, the works display no harsh matrix of photographic grain, the images remaining uniformly smooth, vaporous, evanescent, and perhaps vaguely toxic. Within the space and time of Spence’s image world, something happened, and it does not mean that it could happen again, is not happening now.

The more time on spent with the work, the more pointed an allusion not only to figures but to figuration the show’s title became. Spence’s surfaces appeared to occupy the intermediate point of mental processing (or literal “figuring out”) in the transition from perceiving an image to comprehending it, to subsequently forming its representation. That the manifest content of these imaged is beset by a latent trauma is both depicted (figured) and enacted (figured out) in Spence’s hazy deposits of sprayed pigment. Perhaps the work’s value resides precisely in its potential to enfold the image in the traumatic atmosphere of its initial registration. In our culture of visual saturation, the timely question of Why this picture and not another? Finds a simple answer in these (figs.) that Spence offers as evidence: If an image is remembered, it is because its affective impact continues to hurt.

- Jan Tumlir / Artforum, April 2011

"Art review: Yuken Teruya at Shoshana Wayne Gallery"

by Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times

March 17, 2011

Stenciled street art goes indoors in Yuken Teruya’s recent work, made from elaborate patterns carefully cut with a knife into commercial packaging (boxes for shoes, cereal, crackers, fried chicken, etc.) and then spray painted onto gallery walls. The subtle images are diverse, including flowers, animals, bicyclists, barbed wire, birds and more.

Stylistically, the wall paintings and an overhead banner in the New York-based artist’s fourth solo show at Shoshana Wayne Gallery derive from traditional Japanese motifs. Where the work really takes off, however, is in four dyed-linen paintings that jumble cultural symbols in exquisite ways.

Works like “Ultraman,” which weaves the kitschy 1960s science-fiction character into a torrential cascade of vividly dyed natural designs, or “Obama” clipped from the cover of a news magazine and enfolded in Asian style employs a traditional Okinawan technique called bingata. Itself a distinctive, centuries-old fusion of Japanese, Chinese and Indonesian methods for decorating fabric, bingata is an ideal way to encapsulate modern Okinawa, where post-World War II geopolitical tensions dominate daily life, as well as the fraught globalization that characterizes so many societies elsewhere.

Teruya attempts to further this amalgamation in a video installation called “Flow,” which follows paper sailboats tossed by urban water (street puddles, open fire hydrants, gutter runoff, etc.) in images projected inside empty cardboard packing boxes strewn on the floor. However, this effort to evoke a macrocosm embodying the flow of goods in a global economy is mostly a clever illustration of familiar knowledge. Teruya’s lush paintings, meanwhile, offer heroic male subjects – Barack Obama, Emperor Hirohito, Geronimo and Ultraman – in feminine materials that complicate a power-narrative.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through March 26. Closed Sunday and Monday.

NICOLE COHEN / “The Mythology of Interiors: Live Video Performance”

@ The Mondrian Hotel, West Hollywood

Friday, March 11, 2011, 7:00 - 10:00 pm

TONY ORRICO / La Porta 2011

La Porta 2011: Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

March 6 - 10, 2011

DAY ONE of PULSE New York 2011 / Booth A5

ART + AUCTION / March 2011

L.A. Story Tellers: Behind every work in the home of collector-dealer couple Shoshana and Wayne Blank is a personal narrative waiting to be revealed

by Benjamin Genocchio, photographs by Gene Ogami

BRAD SPENCE / The Huffington Post

Brad Spence’s airbrushed paintings, inspired by filmic dream sequences, function like psychological screens. Spence chooses scenes at once familiar and obtuse – a winding staircase, a dimly lit hallway, a full moon – as a result, the paintings hover at the juncture between universality and individualism, a space inhabited as readily by Dali as by Jung.

Yuken Teruya

journey

February 19- March 26

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Yuken Teruya’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Teruya connects his ancestry rooted in Okinawan tradition and relates it to the American experience.  Best known for his body of work cutting trees out of paper bags, this exhibition extends the artist’s vocabulary by using the precision of stenciling and translating it to an American street idiom in his graffiti flowers which are spray painted directly on the gallery walls.  In his bingata portraits, Teruya utilizes the local Okinanwan craft, bingata, made popular by kimonos, and presents images of past and present icons- men of different eras and worlds, connected through an idealism and belief in heroism. Teruya chooses these powerful figures- ranging from Obama to Geronimo to Ultraman to communicate ideas of land and occupation, state and territory; the relationship between the Protector and those being protected, specifically pointing to the U.S. military presence in Okinawa.  He challenges the concept of the hero by placing Emperor Hirohito in the series of images, which is taken as a controversial statement in his homeland of Japan.

The small gallery is comprised of Teruya’s video installation which shows footage of small paper boats, bearing flags of various communities located within his adopted neighborhood in Brooklyn, down a city street gutter flooded with water.  Boxes and bags are again present; used as stencils themselves, and also to serve as a reminder of popular culture as seen in the remnants of packaging which once housed mass produced consumer goods, and for the artist, give a glimpse into American life. Linen fabric is draped from the ceiling light frame in the main gallery, and on the fabric Teruya infuses a pattern with dyed images that represent the fascinating mix of cultures between Okinawa and the U.S. culture as found on military bases located there.

Teruya expresses the fluidity of cultural information and identity.  His work utilizes the history of familiar Japanese art forms, bingata and origami; and places them in relationship to the popular and contemporary cultural identity most strongly influenced by common American cultural forms, graffiti and advertising.  Teruya uses the symbolism of flowers, birds, waves, and bicycles in all of his works.  This simple visual poetry focuses most on the feeling of movement; and in turn best relates the feeling of how fluid cultural identity can be.

Born in Okinawa, Japan, Yuken Teruya received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2001. He work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia including: The Okinawa Prefectural Art Museum, Japan(2009); The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2009, The Japan Society, New York (2008); The Museum of Arts & Design, New York (2008); The FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2008); Asia Society, New York (2007); Thermocline of Art - ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2007); the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007); Greater New York at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens, NY (2005); Yokohama International Triennial, Yokohama, Japan (2005); and Fuchu Biennale at the Fuchu Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2004). His work is included in collections such as: FLAG Art Foundation, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Daiichi Seimei Museum, Tokyo; Seattle Art Museum, WA; Saatchi Collection, London;  Sakima Art Museum, Okinawa, Okinawa Prefectural Art Museum and others.

For more information, please contact marichris@shoshanawayne.com

BRAD SPENCE / ArtScene Feb. 2011

Painted with his signature airbrushed haze, Brad Spence’s new show, titled “(figs.),” grows on you, so be sure to spend some time in the gallery. The subjects are deceptively simple: the sun shining through a bit of chain-link fence or an empty stairwell; subjects that are, as the press release suggests, “reminiscent of a cinematic dream sequence.” It’s easy to linger in front of one, perhaps because of the necessary time it takes to attempt to focus and then let the eye resolve the fuzzy image. But then, tellingly, the ambient sounds of the passing cars, the wailing sirens, and the far away ravens cawing, become the soundtrack of the painting. These images operate not so much as movie stills as fragments from one’s own memory - it’s as if Spence has accessed a collective memory - like the ones implanted in the replicants in Bladerunner (Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station).

- Jeannie R. Lee

KATHY BUTTERLY / Art in America January 2011

RACHEL LACHOWICZ Review / Artillery Magazine Jan/Feb 2011

RACHEL LACHOWICZ Review / Art Ltd. Jan/Feb 2011