Yvonne Venegas: The Personal View of Things

The award-winning photographer Yvonne Venegas, originally from Tijuana and now based in Mexico City, got her start at the age of 16 and took her first official photo class a year later. Her father, a social photographer in Tijuana, gave Yvonne her first camera.

Yvonne is a graduate of the certification program at the International Center of Photograhy in New York and she received her MFA at the University of California San Diego. She has shown her work individually and in group shows throughout the US, Mexico, Poland, Spain, France and Canada. Her work is part of collections in the US and Mexico, including the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Fundación Televisa, Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City and the Anna Abello Collection. She has published two photobooks, “Maria Elvia de Hank” and “Inédito.”

Here Yvonne discusses her latest project, for which she used the new Leica X Vario to document her father, José Luis Venegas, at work.

Q: What type of photography do you do?

A: When I started I wanted to be in fashion, then I wanted to be the Annie Leibovitz of Mexico and now I’ve been really focused on creating my own language and my own identity through my work.

Q: You usually take a couple years to do your projects. Can you tell us about your process?

A: I like to focus on one subject at a time. In 2000 I started my first long-term project and it lasted four years. I discovered I was trying to create something that paralleled my own identity. It was a wonderful experience.

I guess an important part of my process is that I’m often confused. I don’t really know what I am doing. It does parallel how I’m feeling or thinking. It is a bit abstract and hard to define in the first couple of years, but as I keep working at it, it starts to come together. I did a project called “Inédito” between 2006 and 2010 and I published a book with it. That was particularly a revealing experience because I worked on it during my graduate degree. I was living and doing the project in Tijuana and I was going to school in San Diego. I was doing the duel life of creating the work in Tijuana and then working with my fellow students and teachers and formulating something with it. My process tends to be blurry and then it comes together at the end.

Q: Tell us about your latest project documenting your father. Where did the idea come from?

A: This project is kind of a fragment of what I’ve been thinking lately. It is kind of an extension of it because I have been wanting to photograph social photographers, but I don’t know any in Mexico City. So I’ve been focusing more on the photographers I do know. When I had the opportunity with Leica, I thought it was perfect to shoot this idea but with a photographer that I have access to. I proposed it to my dad and he was very happy. It was a wonderful process.

Q: Your style is very different from your dad’s. Can you tell us the differences between how your dad shoots and how you shoot?

A: I don’t think there is another way to say it besides we are completely opposite. I am looking for moments that are imperfect or just a little bit off that make those perfect moments that he was formulating for his customers. They don’t have to be a terrible mistake where someone looks awful, but just wrong enough to make you want to throw it out and not include it in a photo album. That has been our dynamic. Unlike his perfect pictures, home life wasn’t perfect and I’ve always thought that photographing like this is a way of sort of fighting him.

Q: Can you tell us about the experience of shooting your dad?

A: It was very intense. It was seeing my dad in a later stage of his life where he is not the young man he used to be. He used to go to weddings and work 15-hour nights and then just sleep it off and be okay the next day. Now he is almost 70. It was an emotional thing to see him grow up and to see me grow up also. When your parents grow old that means you are old too.

It was a beautiful process. It had all the kind of feelings I like for a project to have. It was uncomfortable and emotional. The feeling was a bit more intense than my other projects because it was my dad. I was crying a lot and it was really odd. I would tell my dad’s customers about the project and they love him. Some of them have been his customers for 20 or 30 years.

Luckily, I got to photograph the 50th wedding anniversary of a couple and their family who have always had my dad photograph their events. When this beautiful, wealthy lady from Tijuana started to tell me about my dad and how wonderful and important it was to have him around then I see my dad photographing this private dinner party for them, I had to hold back the tears. They all obviously respected him.

Q: You’ve talked before about your father wanting the perfect picture and how that reflected him aspiring to a different social class. Can you tell us about why your father is obsessed with the perfect picture?

A: I think the perfect moment is a fantasy. My father grew up in a different circumstance than I did. His father worked for the law in Mexico in the ‘60s. So my dad had this strong conviction to have his own business, to be a stable person and send all of his kids to the best school. He was part of the building of a social class. He became crucial to a lot of people. But the way he had grown up didn’t allow him to be this perfect father so it was a bit of a tense upbringing compared to other girls. He had this idea that we were going to belong to this social class and marry rich guys and do all this stuff, but then our ideas became very different. My twin sister and I both became artists. She is a musician. The rest of my family did other things. But my twin sister and I never fantasized about marrying a rich guy or being a part of that social class. We liked to be different.

Q: How has your view of your father as a photographer changed through the years?

A: A few years ago I went into his archives and looked at all his negatives from 1972-1975 and I did my own edit of them. I plan on doing a book with them. The pictures I found were pictures that I wish I would’ve taken. A lot of people who have seen the pictures see a lot of similarities with my work. My dad as a beginning photographer was seeing things the way I see them. But then he became a commercial photographer so he started eliminating those moments that were not going to be bought. When I saw that work together I thought it was my eye as an editor, but it wasn’t. We come from the same place. I inherited something from it. It isn’t necessarily beautiful. It is a little bit dark sometimes. I also inherited how to make portraits, how to talk to people and make them feel comfortable.

After so many years of fighting with him and being pushy about things, I come back to this moment where I feel that he gave me so much. I admire how he treats people and makes portraits. I used to think they were cold and stiff, but they really weren’t. When you see his portraits compared to other photographers that follow all the same rules he does, they were alive. His portraits do have a feeling of character. I think that feeling is something I have inherited from him. Also, he is always trying to learn. I have the same feeling about my work. It is an addiction to just getting better. I got that from him.

Q: Can you talk about how using the Leica X Vario fit into your recent project?

A: I had never done a project with digital media. This was the first time. It was a surprising and refreshing experience. It was a different rhythm. Sometimes film will sit there for weeks before you develop it and look at it. This way you can look at the images as you’re working and it is like someone just sped up my process. It was exciting. I came back from this project feeling refreshed. I had this idea of photographing photographers in mind and suddenly I did it in three weeks. I edited it in four weeks. It got me really excited to do other projects. It just showed me the possibility of a different rhythm of working.

Working with a compact camera is a completely different experience. I feel like I’m in places I wouldn’t be otherwise. A compact camera is comfortable to carry everywhere. It allowed me to go into spaces that I probably wouldn’t have gone into. The image quality of the Leica X Vario is amazing. The RAW files are beautiful. It made me doubt my film addiction for a moment when I saw the RAW files from this camera.

Q: How was the Leica X Vario special for the project?

A: Working with the Leica X Vario was special for so many reasons. It was easy to bring to situations and not intimidate people with a bigger camera. It had beautiful RAW files that came out of every moment. The flash is really cute too. It’s like an alien! And you can use the Leica X Vario in manual. To get the moments I wanted, I had to shoot a lot. The camera has to shoot when I want it to shoot. I loved that about this camera because it was shooting when I wanted to. To focus manually and have manual controls was important while I was working. I was better able to be in control of the situations.

Q: Over the past 15 years you have been working on defining your voice. How would you describe your voice right now?

A: Recently I had a revision of my work from when I first started to now that made me see my work in a new light. I initially thought it was a bit of a mess and didn’t know where I was going. It made me realize that many things have happened with my work. I did a project in 2006 that was supposed to be published and shown and nothing happened with it. These things happen in my work and I just have to be patient. It shouldn’t have surprised me that people weren’t always going to understand it. After finally seeing the show and publishing the book, which both happened in September of last year, it kind of set me straight. I see this as a new beginning. It sounds corny but it’s true. It made me reflect on my past work. It made me confident and helped me find my voice.

Thank you Yvonne!

-Leica Internet Team

To see more of Yvonne’s work, visit www.yvonnevenegas.com. For details on the new Leica X Vario, visit Leica’s website.

Borrando la Línea Gallery Talk + Opening

Thanks to everyone who joined us on Saturday!

Our Upcoming Fall Artist, Jeff Gibson, Featured in the NY Times

Jeffrey Gibson in his studio in Hudson, N.Y., with his dog, Stein-Olaf.

At Peace With Many Tribes

By Carol King

Published May 15, 2013

HUDSON, N.Y. — One sunny afternoon early this month Jeffrey Gibson paced around his studio, trying to keep track of which of his artworks was going where.  

Luminous geometric abstractions, meticulously painted on deer hide, that hung in one room were about to be picked up for an art fair. In another sat Mr. Gibson’s outsize rendition of a parfleche trunk, a traditional American Indian rawhide carrying case, covered with Malevich-like shapes, which would be shipped to New York for a solo exhibition at the National Academy Museum. Two Delaunay-esque abstractions made with acrylic on unstretched elk hides had already been sent to a museum in Ottawa, but the air was still suffused with the incense-like fragrance of the smoke used to color the skins.

“If you’d told me five years ago that this was where my work was going to lead,” said Mr. Gibson, gesturing to other pieces, including two beaded punching bags and a cluster of painted drums, “I never would have believed it.” Now 41, he is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and half-Cherokee. But for years, he said, he resisted the impulse to quote traditional Indian art, just as he had rejected the pressure he’d felt in art school to make work that reflected his so-called identity.

“The way we describe identity here is so reductive,” Mr. Gibson said. “It never bleeds into seeing you as a more multifaceted person.” But now “I’m finally at the point where I can feel comfortable being your introduction” to American Indian culture, he added. “It’s just a huge acceptance of self.”

Judging from Mr. Gibson’s growing number of exhibitions, self-acceptance has done his work a lot of good. In addition to the National Academy exhibition, “Said the Pigeon to the Squirrel,” which opens Thursday and runs through Sept. 8, his pieces can be seen in four other places.

“Love Song,” Mr. Gibson’s first solo museum show, opened this month at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, with 20 silk-screened paintings, a video and two sculptures, one of which strings together seven painted drums. The smoked elk hide paintings are now on view in “Sakahàn,” a huge group exhibition of international indigenous art that opened last Friday at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. And an installation of shield-shaped wall hangings, made from painted hides and tepee poles, is at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla.

Mr. Gibson also has work in a group exhibition at the Wilmer Jennings Gallery at Kenkeleba, a longtime East Village multicultural showcase through June 2. Called “The Old Becomes the New,” it explores the relationship between New York’s contemporary American Indian artists and postwar abstractionists like Robert Rauschenberg and Leon Polk Smith who were influenced by traditional Indian art. Mr. Gibson’s contribution is two cinder blocks wrapped in rawhide and painted with superimposed rectangles of color, creating a surprisingly harmonious mash-up of Josef Albers and Donald Judd with the ceremonial bundle.

The work’s hybrid nature has given curators different aspects to appreciate. Kathleen Ash-Milby, an associate curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Lower Manhattan, said she loved Mr. Gibson’s use of color and his adventurousness with materials, and that he has “been able to be successful in the mainstream and continue his association with Native art and artists.” (Ms. Ash-Milby gave Mr. Gibson his first New York solo show, in 2005 at the American Indian Community House.)

Marshall N. Price, curator of the National Academy show, said he was drawn by Mr. Gibson’s drive to explore “both the problematic legacies of his own heritage and the problematic legacy of modernism” through the lens of geometric abstraction. (Which, he noted, “has a long tradition in Native American art history as well.”)

And for Jenelle Porter, the Institute of Contemporary Art curator who organized the Boston show, it’s Mr. Gibson’s ability to “foreground his background,” as she put it, in a striking and accessible way. Ms. Porter discovered his work early last year, in a solo two-gallery exhibition organized by the downtown nonprofit space Participant Inc.

“People were raving about the show,” she said. “So I went over there and I was absolutely floored.”

The work was “visually compelling, and not didactic,” she added. And because “he’s painting on hide, painting on drums, you have to talk about where it comes from.”

Mr. Gibson only recently figured out how to start that conversation. Because his father worked for the Defense Department, he was raised in South Korea, Germany and different cities in the United States, so “acclimating was normal to me,” he said. And one of the most persistent messages he heard growing up was “never to identify as a minority,” he added.

At the same time, because much of his extended family lives near reservations in Oklahoma and Mississippi, Mr. Gibson also grew up going to powwows and Indian festivals. He even briefly considered studying traditional Indian art, but instead opted to major in studio art at a community college near his parents’ house outside Washington. In 1992, he landed at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.

There, Mr. Gibson, who had just come out as gay, often felt pressured to examine just one aspect of his life — his Indian heritage, with its implicit cultural sense of victimhood — when what he really yearned to do was to paint like Matisse or Warhol. At the same time, he was learning about that heritage in a new way as a research assistant at the Field Museum aiding its compliance with the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

As he watched the Indian tribal elders who frequently visited to examine the drums, parfleche containers, headdresses and the like in the Field’s collection, Mr. Gibson was struck by their radically different responses. Some groups “would break down in tears,” he said. “Or there would be huge arguments.”

He came to see traditional art then “as a very powerful form of resistance” and to better “understand its relationship to contemporary life.” And nothing else he’d encountered “felt as complete and fully formed as the objects themselves,” he said. “It certainly made it difficult for me to go into the studio and paint.”

Yet paint Mr. Gibson did — mostly expressionistic landscapes filled with Disney characters, like Pocahontas, and decorated with sequins and glitter. His work continued in a similar vein while he was earning his M.F.A. at the Royal College of Art in London. Although the Mississippi Band paid for his education, the experience gave him a welcome break from grappling with concerns about identity, he said, and a chance “to just look at art and think about the formal qualities of making an artwork.” (Along the way, he also met his husband, the Norwegian sculptor Rune Olsen.)

After returning to the United States in 1999, this time to New York and New Jersey, Mr. Gibson began painting fantastical pastoral scenes, embellishing their surfaces with crystal beads and bubbles of pigmented silicone, recalling 1970s Pattern and Decoration art. Those led to his first solo show with Ms. Ash-Milby in 2005, and his inclusion in the 2007 group show “Off the Map: Landscape in the Native Imagination” at the National Museum of the American Indian, as well as other group shows.

At the same time, Mr. Gibson was making sculptures with mannequins and African masks. While struggling to understand Minimalism, he also began to see the connection between Modernist geometric abstraction and the designs on the objects that had transfixed him in the Field’s collection.

His 2012 show with Participant, “One Becomes the Other,” proved to be a turning point. In it, he collaborated with traditional Indian artists to create works like the string of painted drums, or a deer hide quiver that held an arrow made from a pink fluorescent bulb. And once he set brush to rawhide, Mr. Gibson said, he was hooked. As well as being “an amazing surface to work on,” he said, “its relationship to parchment intrigued me.”

Its use also “positions the viewer to look through the lens that I’d been working so hard to illustrate.”

But the underlying change, Mr. Gibson added, came from his decision to shed the notion of being a member of a minority group. Suddenly all art, European, American and Indian alike, became merely “individual points on this periphery around me,” he said. “Once I thought of myself as the center, the world opened up.”

A version of this article appeared in print on May 19, 2013, on page AR21 of the New York edition with the headline: At Peace With Many Tribes.

Congratulations to Kathy Butterly on the 2013 Visionary Woman Award

Kathy Butterly and Ann King Lagos to Receive 2013 Visionary Woman Award

Kathy Butterly (left) and Ann King Lagos (right)

For Immediate Release

April 26, 2013

(Philadelphia PA) Moore College of Art & Design will present the 2013 Visionary Woman Award to Kathy Butterly’86 and Ann King Lagos on September 18, 2013.

Now in its eleventh year, the annual Visionary Woman Awards celebrate exceptional women who have made significant contributions to the arts and are national leaders in their fields.

Kathy Butterly is known for her colorful mixed earthenware and porcelain, small-scale, semi-abstract, whimsical sculpture and sculptural vessels. Ann King Lagos is known for her unique and dramatic jewelry designs.

The 2013 Visionary Woman Award gala will be held at 6 pm at Moore College of Art & Design, located at 20th Street and The Parkway. The Elizabeth Greenfield Zeidman Lecture featuring the two honorees will be held earlier that day at 2 pm in Stewart Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public.

The festivities will also include individual Visionary Woman Award exhibitions of the work of both honorees.

Kathy Butterly

Kathy Butterly is the winner of the 2012 Smithsonian American Art Museum’s 10th Contemporary Artist Award. The biennial honor recognizes artists younger than 50 who have produced a significant body of work. Other awards include the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2011), the Painters & Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2009), the Ellen P. Speyer Award from the National Academy of Art in New York City (2006), and a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant (2009). Butterly earned a BFA at Moore College of Art & Design in 1986 and an MFA at the University of California, Davis in 1990.

Ann King Lagos

Ann King Lagos played a major role in helping LAGOS become one of the most successfully marketed luxury brands in America. She has been recognized locally and nationally, including the Women’s Jewelry Association Fine Jewelry Design Award of Excellence, the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce Retailer of the Year Award, and Philadelphia Phasion Phest Honorary Award. She has been profiled by Modern Jeweler Magazine, recognized by JCK Magazine as a “Philadelphia Trendsetter” and featured by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is a graduate of Philadelphia College of Art with a degree in jewelry and metalworking.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   _________________________________________________________________________                                                                                        

Moore College of Art & Design educates students for inspiring careers in art and design. Founded in 1848, Moore is the nation’s first and only women’s art college. Moore’s career-focused environment and professionally active faculty form a dynamic community in the heart of Philadelphia’s cultural district. The College offers nine Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees for women. A coeducational Graduate Studies program was launched in summer, 2009. In addition, Moore provides many valuable opportunities in the arts through The Galleries at Moore, a Continuing Education Certificate program for adults, the 91-year-old acclaimed Youth Art Program for girls and boys grades 1-12, The Art Shop and the Sculpture Park. For more information about Moore, visit www.moore.edu.

Beverly Semmes featured on the Spring cover of BOMB Magazine!

Art Collector Magazine Interview: Zadok Ben-David

17 April 2013

Zadok Ben-David’s current exhibition, The Other Side of Midnight, is the artist’s seventh solo show at Annandale Galleries. Art Collector interviews Ben-David about the direction of his latest work.

The centerpiece of your exhibition is The Other Side of Midnight, a large-scale work made from hand-painted stainless steel illuminated by UV light, the installation of the work involved painting the interior of the gallery black. It is not unusual for you to create work on this scale, but the use of paint and UV light seems like a definitive shift, what brought upon this striking introduction of colour?

It is true that this is the first large-scale installation being installed in a complete darkness. In the past, I worked with holograms and video installations that had been projected from floor and ceiling simultaneously, all required different preparations, but none had gone that far into total blackness.

The Other Side of Midnight deals with a theme of extreme, in order to maximise the effect I had to use glowing colours under UV lights in a complete darkness, any other colour on the walls except black might appears too bright.


In recent years the image of a human-butterfly creature has featured repeatedly in your work, given that in the past your iconography has related to a more clear-cut scientific source, where does this mystical hybrid find its origins?

It is the third decade that the subject matter of my works concentrates around the theme of human nature, (with the) human figure as part of our natural environment. Surrounded by natural species, like animal, plants or even invisible natural forces (like gravity and light, explored in the installation Evolution and Theory), all used as metaphorical images and tools to human behaviour.

In the 1980s, the sources of the metaphors in my works came from classic old fables where the animals behaved like human beings. In the 1990s it was Magical Reality, involving hidden elements, anti-gravity and illusion.

In the past decade the work I am more concentrating on visible nature. Like trees made of human figures, or vice versa, human figures inspired by trees and vegetation. A similar kind of hybrid is being expressed now via combination of human and insects.

You have been quoted as saying you are interested in ideas around beauty and repulsion. In The Other Side of Midnight the two sides of a world (or moon) are presented, one side is tessellated with a brilliant and colourful collection of human-butterflies and the other a mass of beetles and cockroaches lit in a solid, luminescent blue. Delicate and lace-like in appearance, these two worlds appear to coexist on a knife’s edge, what inspired this pairing?

The Other Side of Midnight is a direct development from the Blackfield installation with 20,000 miniature flowers.

Blackfield is more of psychological installation, very moody, developing and changing while you walk along. It has also black and colour, symbolising state of mind, leaving a choice by showing both side of the coins.

The Other Side of Midnight is similar with its back and front presentation. Unlike Blackfield with its dark front, in this new installation the frontal side appears with an ultimate beauty, which immediately might turn into a nightmarish experience, hence the title of the piece.

We tend to marvel at the beauty of the butterflies wings ignoring the insects in the middle, while being repelled when the insects appear on their own, since they are lacking of visual appeal, here we have an attraction at first, then repulsion. Seeing the insects being presented in such a glorious glow make us think the opposite, a kind of curious and unexpected attraction to the ugliness.

Historically your freestanding sculptures have often involved a strong sense of grounding. Many have heavily foreshortened shadows rendered in stainless steel connecting them permanently to the earth/ground/plinth that they rest upon. The Other Side of Midnight moves away from this grounding to an ethereal, suspended double-sided tondo. The viewer is naturally drawn to comparisons with the moon and a mandala, is it an example of the magical or mystical becoming a stronger influence on your work?

My work is constantly moving from the spiritual and mystical to down to earth presentations. From floating to reflection. The total air space always attracted me more than the floor space, trying to ignore the restrictions given by gravity, wishing to retain the freedom that a painter has when using the canvas while confronting a real space.

The free-standing works are usually a study for the large installation, they are frontal like drawings on papers. Yet, the images stand on their own … (In The Other Side of Midnight) these two circles differ radically and symbolically from each other, just like the distance from air and ground, close, yet too far.


Hannah McKissock-Davis


Zadok Ben-David’s exhibition The Other Side of Midnight continues until Saturday 11 May at Annandale Galleries in Sydney.

Please join us this evening, 5 - 7 PM for the opening reception of THESE CONSTELLATIONS ARE OUR CLOSEST STARS!

Juxtapoz Magazine features Pieter Hugo

“South African photographer Pieter Hugo’s series The Hyena and Other Men, photographs of animal wranglers in Lagos, Nigeria have recieved ‘varying reactions from people - inquisitivieness, disbelief and repulsion.’ While some were fascinated other saw marketing potentials with the men, while animal-rights groups wanted to intervene. 

"These photographs came about after a friend emailed me an image taken on a cellphone through a car window in Lagos, Nigeria, which depicted a group of men walking down the street with a hyena in chains. A few days later I saw the image reproduced in a South African newspaper with the caption ‘The Streets of Lagos’. Nigerian newspapers reported that these men were bank robbers, bodyguards, drug dealers, debt collectors. Myths surrounded them. The image captivated me.” Read more about Peter’s series and the men in the photos here.

All photos courtesty the artist.“

Brad Spence in LA Weekly and Art21

“of Age” is featured in LA Weekly’s “5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week” and Art21 Blog!

“Brad Spence’s show Of Age, up now at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica, is a meditation on memories of kitschy colors. The hues in his acrylic-on-canvas paintings are the kind you might find in a Teen Vogue circa 1990 or in  Saved by the Bell cast photos. Soft pink, hot pink, and baby blue appear most often. In the painting Baby World (2013) a diffuse blue, with bumps like zits on its surface, spreads out from the center and fades to pink as color nears the edges. In another work, Showtime (2013), transparent baby blue paint at the top fades into pink at the bottom, and a glittery gray rectangle of what look like lights around a vanity mirror overlays the color. Small samples of pinks and maroons, single strokes painted near the bottom edge of that gray rectangle recall thick smudges of lipstick on glass, as if testing or comparing shades. The smooth turquoise cylinders that spread out in four directions, superimposed over a spread of hot pink, resemble legs in bright leggings.

Previous exhibitions by Spence, an LA based artist who has shown with Shoshana Wayne since 2000, have been hazily photorealistic images of landscapes, an empty room, a picture of a group seated on folding chairs (the scene painted and based on an iPhone photo). The color palette for these works tended to be softer and quieter, colors muted as they would be if seen through a screen door. Color was something you absorbed rather than confronted, whereas the boldness of this current show’s palette means you can’t help but confront the moods the colors evoke.

There’s a story repeated in Adam Alter’s book Drunk Tank Pink about a study performed by Alexander Schauss in 1979: He asked 38 men to stare at a colored piece of cardboard for one minute and then tested their strength using a device called a dynamometer. The men who stared at blue cardboard seemed to retain their strength. The strength of men who stared at pink cardboard was temporarily depleted. Later, at a filmed-for-television event, Schauss demonstrated his study by asking Mr. California to do bicep curls, which he did effortlessly at first but could barely do at all after staring at pink cardboard. I like the idea that color could take something from you and yet, as it stands in Spence’s work where colors are mostly buoyant and bright, it still demands that you take it seriously.”

–Catherine Wagley

Please join us at the gallery for the FINAL WEEK of Brad Spence's  “of Age”!

Art in America reviews Kathy Butterly

The 15 small clay sculptures in this exhilarating show were lined up on three platforms like contestants in a misfit beauty pageant, each entrant flaunting what might elsewhere be considered indignities: bulges, protrusions, pooling fluids. Butterly has referred to her works as psychological self-portraits. Simultaneously evoking psychic conditions and bodily attributes, they have a discerning presence. Most of the pieces in the exhibition (all 2012) are only about 5 inches tall, but they radiate large, honest personalities: endearingly vulnerable, unabashedly sensual and defiantly imperfect.

Butterly, 2012 winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum Contemporary Artist Award, has extrapolated from the ceramic vessel form for 20 years, exploiting its analogies to the human body and investing that body with irreverent, sometimes salacious vigor. She borrows from and bends ceramic traditions already fabulously tweaked by George Ohr (pliable, collapsed vessel walls), Ken Price (vibrant color, goofy shapes, secret-bearing orifices) and Ron Nagle (sleek and sexy wit).

Cool Spot typifies Butterly’s finessed fusion of the clumsy, charming and ceremonial. The vaguely defeated stance of this two-handled goblet belies its bold, assured hues, among them ripe persimmon and freckled mustard. The cup’s skinny arms meander distractedly, wiggling and looping before reconnecting to the main body. A necklace of tiny white beads droops tipsily on the neck, where a crackled aquamarine crust has formed. Deep inside the vessel rests an odd little platform consisting of a blue-black ring with glacial white bits. Supporting all of this is a round, attached base of the utmost incongruous propriety, pale pink and ringed with neat repeating scallops, little blue beads and a slim yellow band.

All of the sculptures have at least vestigial pedestals, some of them intact and symmetrical, others seemingly weighed down and torqued by their burden. Either way, the bases remind us of the protocols of display, and how Butterly savors their subversion. She champions the irregular and audacious, challenging conventional notions of refinement that can apply to both decorative objects and people. Her pervasive use of pink evokes flesh, but also references stereotypes of the feminine, of only to defy them. The beauty in these pieces is not restrained or deferential but active, verb-driven, all about impolite squeezing, pinching, and pushing. The glazes, too, are generally far from demure, running to electric orange and green, dark plum and vivid cherry. Butterly makes surprising and sometimes disconcerting neighbors of an array of textures: glossy and wet, like the interior of a cheek; delicately fuzzy, as in moss; creepily granular, as in spreading mold; pocked and desiccated, like earth; rubber-band matte; and congealed into hardness, like old chewing gum.

Titled “Lots of little love affairs,” this show suggested, over and over again, the sense of something private exposed. Such uneasy contradictions abound in Butterly’s complicated and sympathetic work. Each of her humble objects is a declaration of pride, every peculiar and awkward little vessel a testament to grace.

—Leah Ollman           

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the opening!

Join us TOMORROW for the opening reception!

Saturday, March 2, 2013 5:00 - 7:00 PM
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Exhibition Dates:
March 2 - April 6, 2013

Happy Valentine’s Day from Shoshana Wayne Gallery!

Please join us for the last few days of “The Other Side of Midnight”!

Zadok Ben-David in Antarctica!

A few days after attending the opening exhibition at our gallery, Zadok found himself adventuring through the temperamental polar weather. Enjoy the video here!

Edward Goldman on "The Other Side of Midnight"

Art critic Edward Goldman recently released a podcast on Zadok Ben-David’s new exhibition at the gallery! You can listen to it here!

ARTFORUM review on Yvonne Venegas

Mexico City

Yvonne Venegas
MUSEO DE ARTE CARRILLO GIL (MACG)
Av. Revolución 1608
September 20–January 13

Yvonne Venegas, Nirvana, 2006, C-print, dimensions variable. From the series “Maria Elvia de Hank,” 2006–2009.

Yvonne Venegas’ photography, possessing elements of portraiture and social documentation, tends toward individuals used to attention: adored actors, detested socialites, proud brides, or a famous twin sister. Her museum survey chronologically arranges six photographic series made from 1990 to 2012.

In 2006, Venegas photographed the production of Rebel, a hugely popular Mexican telenovela. Following the show’s third season, the cast became a pop group and performed to sold-out arenas. In Cumpleaños (Birthday), 2006, actress Anahí Puente sits primped between film takes at a hospital bedside as another actor lays connected to an IV line. With filming paused, Puente stares fixedly at Venegas’s camera with a comfort and seduction that suggest she may still be performing. Fans1, 2006, shows a group of girls outside a concert, decked out in white blouses and plaid pleated skirts styled as their adored performers. The girls’ slouchy postures and exposed skin, squeezed within ill-fitted clothing, differentiate them from their larger-than-life idols. Alongside piles of handwritten fan mail, scattered news clippings reveal Puente is romantically paired with an emerging Mexican politician—if past Mexican politics is also prologue, her enormous popularity on- and offscreen will manifest strong election chances for her beau. The series outlines a curious network in which reality and fiction overlap alongside private and public governance.

Another hall presents a collection of large photographs documenting the home life of Maria Elvia de Hank—wife to Tijuana’s billionaire ex-mayor, and famous as a socialite, philanthropist, and matriarch. Images reveal de Hank and her family in their elaborate domestic paradise, complete with pink flamingos, extravagant dollhouses, gold-plated dinners, and her husband’s pet bear. Bolsa (Handbag), 2009, shows de Hank flanked by female family members as a suited male arm gestures to receive her handbag. The women’s manicured sartorial elegance (lush pinks, gold sequins, white lace) and the routineness of the pass-off illustrate a contradiction between de Hank’s tireless self-fashioning and her concurrent desire to appear effortlessly at ease. The exhibition opened days after de Hank’s unexpected death, adding a note of raw fragility to Venegas’s aptitude for capturing individuals in their most tenuous moments, as both subjects in images and objects in life.

— Nicolas Linnert

Please join us this Saturday, 5-7 PM, for the opening of Zadok Ben-David’s The Other Side of Midnight!

Cheers to a great holiday season and a happy new year!

Please join us at the gallery for the last week of Kathy Butterly’s Lots of little love affairs!