NYC Art Shows- Thomas Scheibitz at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Apr 172025
 

Currently on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is the Thomas Scheibitz exhibition Argos Eyes. The show includes paintings, sculptures, and in the upstairs gallery, a table of tools and objects related to the work.

From the press release-

Internationally renowned for his mastery of painting, Scheibitz subverts traditional notions of the medium with radical juxtapositions of color and a unique formal language that lands ambiguously between abstraction and representation. Drawing from classical painting and architecture, the contemporary urban landscape, and popular culture, Scheibitz deconstructs and recombines signs, images, shapes, and architectural fragments in ways that challenge expected contexts and interpretations.

Scheibitz’s practice has been at the center of contemporary artmaking since the late 1990s with early solo exhibitions at the ICA London, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, as well as breakthrough presentations at the German pavilion of the 51st Venice Biennial, MUDAM Luxembourg, Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, and more recent major shows at Kunstmuseum Bonn, MMK Frankfurt, and Pablo Picasso x Thomas Scheibitz at the Museum Berggruen, Berlin.

In an age of infinite images and visual information, Argos, the multi-eyed, all-seeing guardian giant of Greek mythology, serves as a kind of avatar for Scheibitz. Like the panopticon-esque figure, the artist’s painting and sculpture absorb and dissolve visual material, encoding and decoding, mapping, measuring, penetrating and exploring a pictorial inventory. For Scheibitz, Argos Eyes are the observers of events and circumstances; that which we see directly, or indirectly via our ubiquitous technological devices, lenses, and screens. For the artist, a picture has always been a summary of different sources of observations and experiences which remain in the mind’s eye like “double exposures”. The eye, or by proxy the lens, is the entrance to the conscious or unconscious processing of what we see or do not see. A fundamental question for the artist remains the philosophical question: do we only see what we already know?

In the main ground floor gallery, Scheibitz presents a dynamic range of painterly compositions and a sculpture. Bringing together selections from his vast lexicon of images, Scheibitz builds up these compositions meticulously yet intuitively, using maquettes, drawings, collage, photography, and sketches. Recognizable forms such as eyes, cubes, droplets, and pyramids are translated into multilayered and complex pictorial structures that urge the viewer to consider multiple perspectives.

In the upstairs galleries, more intimately scaled paintings encircle the room, in addition to an Atlas-like master table filled with models, stencils, and other tools representative of the repeated motifs found in the artist’s studio. This conceptual landscape illustrates the core nature of the work, offering interrelated exercises in form, color, and material.

This exhibition closes 4/18/25.

NYC Art Shows- Laura Owens at Matthew Marks Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
Apr 162025
 

The images above are of two sections of Laura Owens’s immersive multi-media exhibition on view in two of Matthew Marks locations. It’s a lot to take in with so many details in the layered paintings and throughout the various rooms.

Walking through a door to the brightly colored green of the second room gives the feeling of entering a magical secret world, an impression that continues throughout the galleries. Adding to this is a humorous video tucked away in a tiny space behind another door, and small panels that open from the walls revealing additional paintings.  In the other gallery location are more rooms, including one with boxes containing various items and handmade books. It’s an overwhelming but wonderful show best seen in person.

From the gallery-

Laura Owens began exhibiting her work in the mid-1990s and quickly became known for her innovative approach to painting. Her work synthesizes traditional methods with unconventional ones, including printmaking and digital manipulation, to create destabilizing illusions of depth, extending her paintings beyond the confines of the canvas into three-dimensional space. Her paintings are often self-referential and draw extensively from art history, decorative arts, and craft traditions, as well as mass media and personal anecdotes.

The exhibition demonstrates Owens’s both meticulous and experimental approach to artmaking. Each element is hand-made in the artist’s studio through labor-intensive processes pioneered by Owens. A single panel may have over one hundred fifty layers of hand-printed silkscreen, on top of which Owens then paints further. The exhibition also includes kinetic elements, moving pieces within the artworks that continually point to their spatial and temporal contexts. “Though Owens is a master of composition, and the dynamism of her works has much to do with her sophisticated resolution of the problems that occur within the picture plane, it is at the edges, relations to external aspects such as architecture, interior space, landscape, time, geography, subject matter, style, and discipline, that their restlessness is found,” Kirsty Bell has written. “There is always more room to be surprised.”

This exhibition closes 4/19/25.

NYC Art Shows- Joan Jonas at Gladstone Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Books, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Quotes, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
Apr 102025
 

Joan Jonas’s exhibition Empty Rooms at Gladstone Gallery combines drawings, sculptures, video projection, and a score by musician and composer Jason Moran to explore issues of loss.

From the gallery-

“I didn’t see a difference between a poem, a sculpture, a film, or a dance. A gesture has for me the same weight as a drawing: draw, erase, draw, erase —memory erased.”

—Joan Jonas, In the Shadow of a Shadow

This presentation includes new work while also exploring the artist’s process of revival. In Empty Rooms, Jonas’ cultivation of a resonant, fragmented space brings together objects and imagery that invite viewers to contemplate the throughlines that connect familiarity with loss.

Typical of Jonas’ practice, her work is not illustrative but highly interpretive; meaning is not fixed but emerges and recedes in poetic layers. Central to the exhibition are a series of 12 hanging sculptures constructed of handmade Japanese Torinoko paper sewn onto custom designed steel wire frames. Simple, white, and austere without adornment or embellishment, the 12 aerial sculptures embody the titular “empty rooms” and float above visitors as specters of absence. Felt as deeply as they are seen, these powerful vestiges vibrate in their repetition and multiplicity.

Jonas includes a video, quoted from the performance aspect of the installation, shown in the U.S. Pavilion, at the 2015 Venice Biennale They Come to Us without a Word. Projected on one wall of the gallery space, this sequence was partly inspired by the ghost stories of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where Jonas has visited and worked since the early 70s. Incorporating drawings, video, and sound, this performance was restaged at The Kitchen in 2016.

For its most recent installment at Gladstone, Jonas’ long-time collaborator, musician and composer, Jason Moran, will present a newly-configured score. Through the artist’s practice of revisiting and reconfiguring past elements, she enacts a process of transmission and produces a visual archive that has shaped her unwaveringly experimental body of work.

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.

NYC Art Shows- Camille Henrot at Hauser & Wirth

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Glasswork, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Apr 102025
 

For Camille Henrot’s imaginative installation for A Number of Things at Hauser & Wirth, a variety of sculptures, including several from her Abacus series, are surrounded by paintings from her Dos and Don’ts series. There’s a playfulness to both, but something a bit darker too. Walking on the soft floor among the sculptures there is a feeling of childlike wonder, while at the same time, in combination with the paintings, you are reminded of the rules and restrictions that are imposed on us, starting when we are very young, and how they become more oppressive with age.

From the gallery’s press release-

Evoking children’s developmental tools, shoes, distorted graphs and counting devices, new large-scale bronze sculptures from the artist’s ‘Abacus’ series (2024)—presented alongside recent smaller-scaled works—address the friction between a nascent sense of imagination and society’s systems of signs. The exhibition will also feature vibrant new paintings from Henrot’s ongoing ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series.

Initiated in 2021, the ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series combines printing, painting and collage techniques where etiquette books become the palimpsest for play with color, gesture, texture and trompe l’oeil. The artworks will emerge from a flooring intervention—conceived and designed with Charlap Hyman & Herrero—that transforms the gallery into a site of sensory experimentation. Henrot’s exhibition vivaciously sets the stage for the arbitrary nature of human behavior to circulate freely between rule and exception.

As viewers enter the gallery, they will be greeted by a pack of dog sculptures tied to a pole, as if left unattended by their walker. Shaped from steel wool, aluminum sheets, carved wood, wax, chain and other unexpected materials, Henrot’s creatures speak to the ever-unfolding effects of human design and domestication. As an extension of Henrot’s ongoing interest in relationships of dependency, the dogs stand in as the ultimate image of attachment.

Henrot’s latest ‘Abacus’ sculptures unite the utilitarianism of the ancient calculating tool with the arches and spirals of a children’s bead maze—a toy popularized in the 1980s as a heuristic diversion in pediatric waiting rooms and nursery schools. Through these formal associations, an instinctive sense of play collides with the learned impulse to search out patterns and impose order. With their biomorphic contours, opaline patinas and quadruped or biped anatomies, these works seem charged with a lifeforce of their own. Hovering between pure abstraction and their multivalent referents, Henrot’s bronzes invite our unfettered, sensuous engagement, even as they allude to the symbolic systems that tyrannize our imaginations.

Behavioral conditioning is a central concern of Henrot’s ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series. These richly layered paintings consider the idea of ‘etiquette’ as it relates to society at large: its codes of conduct, laws and notions of authority, civility and conformity. The works feature collaged fragments of invoices from an embryology lab; a note conjugating the German verb ‘to be;’ dental X-rays; digital error messages; children’s school homework; and to-do lists, among other things. Together, they build on Henrot’s interest in making sense of the urge to organize and categorize information—a theme that has been prevalent in her practice since her groundbreaking film ‘Grosse Fatigue’ (2013). The ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series distorts its source material to reveal the constructed, performative nature of any social identity, while acknowledging the emotional security that behavioral mimicry and groupthink can provide.

As the exhibition’s almost childlike title suggests, ‘A Number of Things’ brings together a disparate but related group of works that collectively address the enormously difficult task that is living, learning and growing in society. With tenderness for the most banal traces of our existences, Henrot offers a meditation on the competing impulses to both integrate and resist the unquestioned structures of society in our everyday lives.

‘There’s a reason why, in English, the word ‘politics,’ ‘polite’ and ‘police’ all sound the same—they are all derived from the Greek word polis or city, the Latin equivalent is civitas, which also gives us ‘civility,’ ‘civic’ and a certain modern understanding of ‘civilization.’

—David Graeber, ‘The Dawn of Everything’ (2021)

In the video walkthrough with Henrot (below) she discusses many of the inspirations for the work.

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.

NYC Art Shows- “The Writing’s on the Wall” at Hill Art Foundation, Curated by Hilton Als

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Books, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Design, Digital Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Glasswork, Illustration, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Quotes, Sculptors / Sculpture, Sound Art, Video and Film, Writers
Mar 262025
 

Jennie C. Jones, “Fluid Red Tone (in the break)”, 2022, Architectural felt, acoustic panel, and acrylic on canvas (left) and Steve Wolfe, “Untitled (Bookends)”, 1990, Bronze, lacquer (bottom right)

Unrecorded Betsi-Nzaman artist, Fang peoples Male Reliquary Guardian Figure (Eyema Byeri), 19th Century Wood, metal, pigment (center sculpture), Andy Warhol, “Close Cover Before Striking”, 1962 Acrylic and collage on linen, (right) and Judy Linn “James Joyce on 23rd st.”, early 1970s, Archival pigment print (on window)

Ronny Quevedo, “body and soul (Reflection Eternal)”, 2022, Pattern paper, gold leaf, and metal leaf on muslin (left) and Christian Marclay and Steve Wolfe, “La Voix Humaine”, 1991, Wood console, oil and screenprint on aluminum (right)

Larry Wolhandler, “Bust of James Baldwin”, 1975, Bronze, and Rudolf Stingel, “Untitled”, 2016, Electroformed copper, plated nickel, stainless steel frame (right)

Medardo Rosso, “Rieuse”, 1890, Wax on plaster, and picture of Joan Didion

Ellen Gallagher “DeLuxe”, 2004–2005 Grid of 60 photogravure, etching, aquatint and drypoints with lithography, screenprint, embossing, tattoo-machine engraving; some with additions of plasticine, watercolor, pomade and toy eyeballs

Writer Hilton Als has brought together a wonderful collection of works exploring art and language for The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence in the Visual Arts at Hill Art Foundation.  Quotes from several authors are included alongside the art, adding another dimension to the show.

From the gallery-

This group exhibition presents artists whose work explores the relationships between communication and language. In the curatorial text, Als explains: “for this exhibition, I wanted to show what silence looked like—at least to me—and what words looked like to artists.”

“Writing and erasure have been important sources of inspiration for many of the artists in my family’s collection, including Christopher Wool, Rudolf Stingel, Vija Celmins, and Cy Twombly,” says J. Tomilson Hill, President of the Hill Art Foundation. “Hilton Als has identified a fascinating motif and introduced important loans to illustrate the rich history of these lines of inquiry into the present day.”

In his accompanying essay, Poetics of Silence, Als probes the power of visual art to skirt the written or spoken word. The works included convey “the sense we have when language isn’t working,” evoke “EKGs of rhythm followed by silence, or surrounded by it,” reveal “painting as language’s subtext,” illustrate “what we mean to say as opposed to what gets said,” and “find beauty in the tools that one uses to erase words—and then to make new ones.” He reflects on his own entry into the art world as an art history student at Columbia in the 1980s, and his efforts as a writer and curator to create a democratic “language of perception” that transcends traditional connoisseurship.

The Writing’s on the Wall encompasses a range of mediums, from video installation to printed zine. Artists in the exhibition include Ina Archer, Kevin Beasley, Jared Buckhiester, Vija Celmins, Sarah Charlesworth, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Fang: Betsi-Nzaman, Ellen Gallagher, Joel Gibb and Paul P., Rachel Harrison, Ray Johnson, G.B. Jones and Paul P., Jennie C. Jones, Christopher Knowles, Willem de Kooning, Sherrie Levine, Judy Linn, Christian Marclay, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Claes Oldenburg, Ronny Quevedo, Irving Penn, Umar Rashid, Medardo Rosso, David Salle, Rudolf Stingel, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Steve Wolfe, Larry Wolhandler, and Christopher Wool.

Als’ essay provides not only more information on the show and the art included, but also his own experience of learning about and experiencing art.

Below is a brief excerpt but it is well worth it to read the essay in its entirety.

Part of the experience I hope to evoke here draws a line between language, which is to say active contemplation, and being, which requires nothing more than your presence first and language second (or third). You know what being is. It happens to you all the time. You may be in a museum, or a public park, or sitting dully in your house, with “nothing” on your mind, and then there you are—a kind of walking phenomenology, language-free, but not feeling. In fact, you are suffused with feeling. Your feet are on the ground, and your body, released from the chatter of the everyday, is porous to the surrounding world with its various silences—a world where everything and nothing speaks to you. The clouds; some pictures on a white wall; a beautiful, hitherto-unknown sculpture reaching for eternity; that blank wall standing between you and the wonders of a garden that manages to grow right here in the middle of Manhattan—they all became part of your being, the self that is always on the verge of discovery, if only you can listen to its silences.

Silence says so much, if you listen. (From Marianne Moore’s 1924 poem “Silence”: “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.”) And since I have been a writer all my life, it’s a relief not to think in words sometimes, and to look at pictures, which do not so much deny verbalization but are without language, only the experience of here and now. Sometimes being simply means that we are somewhere, and we are porous to contemplation. When we think about visual culture or production, words aren’t the first things that come to mind. What does is the thing itself. And for this exhibition, I wanted to show what silence looked like—at least to me—and what words looked like to artists. The struggle to speak, to say, to reveal language or an attempt at language—communication—in a visual medium that has a complicated relationship to speech.

Als’ website includes his older writing ,but you can read more of his recent essays and reviews on The New Yorker’s website and he frequently posts on Instagram.

This exhibition closes 3/29/25.

NYC Art Shows- Robert Grosvenor at Paula Cooper Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Installation Art, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture
Mar 182025
 

Robert Grosvenor’s sculptures and photographs on view at Paula Cooper Gallery capture your attention with their familiarity, but on closer inspection their strangeness becomes apparent.

From the press release-

I’ve got this hobby, making things: boats and cars. Until recently I’ve always kept them at a recreational level, just having fun.

– Robert Grosvenor

An exhibition of recent sculpture and photography by Robert Grosvenor will survey his prolonged fascination with the aerodynamics of machinery. Since the 1980s, Grosvenor has applied his subtly elusive formal vocabulary to the vernacular of American car culture by transforming obsolete vehicles into inoperable sculptures. A series of exhibitions of uncannily altered vehicles isolated in striking or purpose-built spaces have frequently enshrined these works. Here, numerous sculptures are gathered under one roof in a lively installation that enhances their individual narrative qualities.

In the main room, a reflective deep purple sculpture is flanked with a vibrant green form on one side and a heavily rusted object on the other. Each work is a found object, perfected through small adjustments that enhance its existing form. The purple sculpture (Untitled, 2023) has no windshield and its headlights have been sprayed matt black, but it otherwise looks like it could be spurred into action. The green sculpture (Untitled, 2022) is smooth and pure, rocket-like, inanimately still. The rusted work (Untitled, 2022) was already romantically sculptural, the wooden planks of the truck bed aging like driftwood and its patina warm with wear. The machine still bears the name of its maker on its back, but the roof has been lowered to remove it completely from the realm of functionality. Arranged in a triangular formation facing the street with other smaller works surrounding them, the vehicles recall the gallery’s previous incarnation as a parking garage.

The front gallery contains a nautical sculpture (Untitled, 2023) stripped of its operative apparatus and leaning to one side. Painted in white and vibrant turquoise to accentuate its curves and points, the work is both familiar and ambiguous, imparting a distinct strangeness. On the surrounding walls are photographs of unlikely objects pictured against blue skies and green lagoons, complementing the sculpture in theme and tone. Some images depict vehicles and structures so characteristic of Grosvenor that one wonders if he made them himself. Animated with humor and vivid color, the photographs depict a compelling alternate reality.

This exhibition closes 3/22/25.

Reading List- “The Work of Art” by Adam Moss

 Architecture, Art, Artists, Books, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Dance, Design, Digital Art, Drawing, Fashion, Fiber Arts, Films, Glasswork, Illustration, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Music, Musicians / Bands, Painting / Painters, Performance Art, Performances, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Public Art, Sculptors / Sculpture, Sound Art, Video and Film, Writers
Mar 172025
 

The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing by former New York magazine editor Adam Moss is a fascinating look at the creative processes of several famous artists. Each artist discusses specific works and gives the reader an inside look at how they came about.

The 43 artists included are visual artists, writers, musicians, editors, designers, and many other creative categories. Moss is also an artist and you can see that in his desire to both inform the reader, and to learn for himself, what makes these individuals tick.

Many of the names will be familiar, but these behind the scenes looks are incredibly enlightening. These discussions often also inspired, for me, a deeper dive. I found myself watching videos of Twyla Tharp‘s choreography, reading Guy Talese’s essay and Sheila Heti’s book, listening to Moses Sumney, watching Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and so on, as I progressed through the book.

While some artists will appeal more than others depending on your interests, all of them had something interesting and valuable to say. This book was one of my favorites of 2024.

 

Throwback- Los Angeles Art Shows- Gustav Metzger at Hauser & Wirth

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Events, Los Angeles Music, Mixed Media, Music, Musicians / Bands, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
Feb 272025
 

“Liquid Crystal Environment” (1966)

Last year Hauser & Wirth presented several works by artist and activist Gustav Metzger for And Then Came the Environment at their downtown Los Angeles location. Metzger was an artist and an activist with strong concerns about environmental issues, ones that continue to this day. Works that address these issues are mixed with others that are explorations of science and technology including his use of liquid crystals before they became a common part of our technology, and the delightful energy of Dancing Tubes (videos of both below).

The press release provides more information on the exhibition and the artist’s history-

And Then Came the Environment presents a range of Metzger’s scientific works merging art and science from 1961 onward, highlighting his advocacy for environmental awareness and the possibilities for the transformation of society, as well as his latest experimental works, created in 2014. The exhibition title comes from Metzger’s groundbreaking 1992 essay Nature Demised wherein he proclaims an urgent need to redefine our understanding of nature in relation to the environment. Metzger explains that the politicized term ‘environment’ creates a disconnect from the natural world, manipulating public perception to obscure pollution and exploitation caused by wars and industrialization, and that it should be renamed Damaged Nature.

An early proponent of the ecology movement and an ardent activist, Gustav Metzger (1926–2017) was born in Nuremberg to Polish-Jewish parents, and fled Nazi Germany to England when he was 12 with his brother via the Kindertransport. While working as a gardener, he began his art studies in 1945 in war-embroiled Cambridge, a nexus for scientific experimentation and debate as the Atomic Age was dawning. By the late 1950s, Metzger was deeply involved in anti-nuclear protests and developed his manifestos on “auto-destructive” and “auto-creative” art. These powerful statements were aimed at “the integration of art with the advances of science and technology,” a synthesis that gained wide recognition in Europe in the 1960s through his exhibitions, lecture-demonstrations and writing.

Metzger’s quenchless curiosity about new materials and gadgets—from projectors and electronics to cholesteric liquid crystals and silicate minerals such as ‘mica’—led him to conduct experiments in and out of laboratories in collaboration with leading scientists in an effort to amplify the unpredictable beauty and uncertainty of materials in transformation: ‘the art of change, of movement, of growth.’ By the 1970s, increasingly concerned with ethical ramifications, Metzger became closely involved with the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science, raising awareness of ‘grotesque’ environmental degradation and social alienation and arguing for ‘old attitudes and new skills’ to bring science, technology, society and nature into harmony. He initiated itinerant projects to draw attention to the immense pollution caused by car emissions, a pursuit that gained momentum with his proposal for the first UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972 and was later partially realized in 2007 at the Sharjah Biennial.

The artworks on view in And Then Came the Environment reveal Metzger’s lifelong interest in drawing and gesture, presenting works on paper from the mid-1950s alongside models, installations and later, Light Drawings that underpin the artist’s desire for human interaction amidst the reliance on technology that continues to this day. Following his death, The Gustav Metzger Foundation was established to further Metzger’s work and carry on his legacy.

Exhibited for the first time in Los Angeles, works here include the earliest film documentation of Metzger’s bold chemical experiments on the South Bank in London (Auto-Destructive Art: The Activities of G. Metzger, directed by H. Liversidge, 1963); his first mechanized sculpture with Liquid Crystals—Earth from Space (1966)—and the stunning, large-scale projection, Liquid Crystal Environment (1966), one of the earliest public demonstrations of the material that makes Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs), now omnipresent in our computer, telephone and watch screens.

And Then Came the Environment also presents Dancing Tubes (1968), an early kinetic project Metzger developed in the Filtration Laboratory of the University College of Swansea; various iterations of his projects against car pollution including the model Earth Minus Environment (1992); and the Light Drawing series (2014), using a plotter machine, a technology he first used in 1970, with fiber-optic light directed by air or hand.

The exhibition will be complemented by a new short film created by artist Justin Richburg, who animated Childish Gambino’s 2018 hit Feels like Summer, which references climate change. Richburg’s piece was inspired by and responds to Metzger’s 1992 essay Damaged Nature. The film represents the first time Metzger’s ideas have been directly expressed through a new medium, thus reflecting his interests in ongoing transformation and his conviction that younger generations were the most essential, urgent audiences for his work. In 2012, five years before his death at the age of 90, Metzger wrote:

“The future of the world is what we are after. We start with the young and then when the young are twelve, fifteen, and then twenty-one, they can enter politics, and if they have got this initiation/introduction to key issues … it will make an enormous difference to the future of the world.”

Below are videos from two of the most engaging works- Dancing Tubes and Liquid Crystal Environment.

For Gustav Metzger’s Liquid Crystal Environment (1966/2024), five projectors each contain a single slide with liquid crystals that is projected through a heating and cooling system causing them to change form.

Also worth a read is Forbes’ article on the exhibition which provides additional background including Metzger’s influence on The Who’s Pete Townshend.

This exhibition was also part of The Getty’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide programming. On Saturday, 3/1, The Getty is hosting Open House at The Ebell in Los Angeles- “a free day-to-night exploration of science and art” that will include a pop-up art book fair from Printed Matter; panel discussions; a Doug Aitken multi-screen installation with a live performance by Icelandic musician Bjarki; a performance by Julianna Barwick, and more.

Los Angeles Art Shows- “Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)” at The Getty

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Design, Drawing, Films, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Performance Art, Photographers / Photography, Public Art, Sound Art, Video and Film
Feb 212025
 

As part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, The Getty is highlighting the incredible work created by the engineers and artists that made up the group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T). The exhibition focuses on the history of the group and two of its most ambitious projects- 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering (1966) and the Pepsi Pavilion from Expo ’70 in Japan.

From the museum-

In 1966, engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman founded Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting and supporting collaborations between artists, engineers, and scientists. These partnerships brought disparate fields together, bridging the gap between culture and emerging technology. E.A.T.’s debut event, 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering (1966), integrated art, theatre, and engineering at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City, resulting in a technology-aided performance experience that proved to be a launchpad for artistic exploration. Their second major project, the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan (1970), presented a multisensory environment featuring experiments with sound, light, lasers, a mirrored dome, and fog. Through their collaborations, E.A.T. artists and engineers came to believe that such team efforts could benefit society; subsequent multidisciplinary endeavors, such as Projects Outside Art (1970), addressed issues of housing, education, environmental sustainability, and communication.

About 9 Evenings–

In 1965, Swedish electrical engineer Billy Klüver and American artist Robert Rauschenberg gathered 10 avant-garde artists and 30 Bell Labs engineers to participate in a collaborative, multidisciplinary project combining new technologies with theatre, dance, and music. The event,9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, took place at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, from October 13-22, 1966. More than 10,000 people attended performances by John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Oyvind Fahlström, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Rauschenberg, David Tudor and Robert Whitman. These performances incorporated technological equipment such as photocells, doppler sonar, remote controls, infrared cameras, and transistors. In addition, 9 Evenings engineers created the Theatre Electronic Environmental Modular, a flexible, wireless, networked control system, and the Proportional Control System (PCS), which used photocells to adjust light and sound levels. The event led to the founding of Experiments in Art and Technology the following month.

Below are images and objects from two of the nine evenings, Open Score and Physical Things–

Performance description of “Open Score” by Robert Rauschenberg

About Open Score–

Open Score began with a tennis match between professional player Mimi Kanarek and painter Frank Stella. Engineer William Kaminski wired their rackets with transmitters that caused every strike of the ball to emit a loud sound and extinguish an overhead light. The game continued until the Armory was completely dark. At that point, a cast of 300 volunteers walked onto the court and performed a series of loosely choreographed movements while infrared cameras projected their images onto large screens. Rauschenberg described the action as “the conflict of not being able to see an event that is taking place right in front of one except through a reproduction,” an idea that resonates in today’s world of social media, streaming, and smartphones. For the second performance, Rauschenberg added a third section in which he carried dancer Simone Forti around the Armory in a burlap bag while she sang an Italian ballad.

About Steve Paxton and Dick Wolff’s Physical Things–

For 9 Evenings, Paxton created an enormous, inflated sculpture using Polyethylene and box fans and invited visitors to walk through the structure at their own pace, confronting different environments and performances along the way. After climbing through a 100-foot inflated tower, participants emerged into an enclosed area with wire loops suspended above their heads. Using modified transistor radios, they could listen to an array of sounds, including animal noises and sports commentary. One’s location underneath the sound loops determined which part of the score was audible, allowing people to choose where to linger and what to listen to.

One of the group’s most ambitious projects was for the Pepsi Pavilion (pictured above).

From the museum-

In 1970, the Pepsi-Cola Corporation commissioned E.A.T. to design a pavilion for Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. Artists Robert Whitman, Robert Breer, David Tudor, and Forrest Myers made early contributions to the design of the pavilion; eventually the design team included 20 artists and 50 engineers and scientists.

Outside the pavilion, a water-vapor cloud sculpture by the artist Fujiko Nakaya covered the white, faceted dome. On the plaza, seven of Breer’s Floats, six-foot-high dome-shaped sculptures, glided in slow motion while emitting sounds.

Visitors entered the pavilion through a tunnel and descended a staircase into a clamshell-shaped room lit by moving patterns of laser light. On the far end, another staircase led up into the Mirror Dome, a 90-foot diameter, 210-degree spherical mirror made of aluminized Mylar. Within the Mirror Dome, visitors’ reflected images appeared to float upside down above their heads.

You can find more images and further documentation here.

This exhibition closes 2/23/25.

California Art Shows- “From the Ground Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments” at Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Illustration, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, Sound Art, Video and Film
Feb 212025
 

Hillary Mushkin, “Groundwater”, 2024, Four-channel video installation, wall drawing, sound and “The River and the Grid”, 2024 Artist’s book: ink, watercolor, graphite, and glue on paper

Woven work by Sarah Rosalena

“Source”, 2023 by Lez Batz (Sandra de la Loza and Jess Gudiel)- Mixed media installation including seventy felt bat masks, baleen whale cardboard puppet, graphic mural and single- channel video

Currently on view at the Armory Center for the Arts is From Ground Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments. For the exhibition, part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, the artists use a variety of materials, cultural practices, and traditions to explore aspects of our changing environment.

From the gallery-

What can seeds tell us about the future? Seeds and the plants that grow from them have provided us with food, clothing, shelter, and medicine for millennia. For just as long, humans have used sciences, technologies, myths, and art to peer into an imagined future. As we stare out toward our own future, one threatened by climate change and complicated by social unrest, the From the Ground Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments exhibition looks to the seed—such as those seeds that lie at the bottom of the forest floor waiting for the cyclical fire season that promotes new growth and diversity to sprout—for inspiration and guidance on how to navigate current and coming hostile environments.

From the Ground Up presents works by 16 contemporary artists and artist teams who explore diverse technologies, histories of contested spaces, and traditional understandings of nature as they imagine alternative, sustainable futures. Organized for the Armory by curator Irene Georgia Tsatsos, the exhibition bridges familiar distinctions between art and science while exploring practices and traditions that predate contemporary understandings of those disciplines. In this exhibition, artworks, knowledge traditions, and histories converge in space and across time.

Artists in the exhibition- Charmaine Bee, Nikesha Breeze, Carl Cheng, Olivia Chumacero, Beatriz Cortez, Mercedes Dorame, Aroussiak Gabrielian, iris yirei hu, Lez Batz (Sandra de la Loza and Jess Gudiel), Malaqatel Ija, Semillas Viajeras, Seed Travels, Hillary Mushkin, Vick Quezada, Sarah Rosalena, Enid Baxter Ryce, Cielo Saucedo, Marcus Zúñiga

Below are a few additional selections and information on the work from the gallery-

Nikesha Breeze, “Stages of Tectonic Blackness: Blackdom”, 2021, Dual-channel video with sound

Nikesha Breeze (they/them) is a direct descendant of Blackdom, a homesteading community founded by thirteen African Americans near Roswell, New Mexico in 1903 that existed until about 1930. This video portrays a site-specific, collaborative dance ritual that honors the landscape and grieves the transgressions against Black and Indigenous communities at Blackdom.

Enid Baxter Ryce, “Shed (Mapping the Devil’s Half Acre)”, 2024, Mixed media, including hand-printed silk, dried plants, hand-printed cotton, antique tobacco sticks, cherry wood, cedar wood, glass, botanical inks, papers, crates

Enid Baxter Ryce with Luis Camara, “Devil’s Half Acre Tarot”, 2024, Hand-processed botanical pigments on paper

Dried plants such as indigo and woad, handmade books and maps, tarot cards and runes, and glass jars of plant-based pigments are among many tools of early scientific exploration and pre-scientific divination. Enid Baxter Ryce (she/her) has assembled these elements of medieval science into a contemporary witch’s office, adorned with fabrics painted with inks and dyes made from plants she grew from seed.

Aroussiak Gabrielian, “Future Kin”, 2024, Soil, video, sound, ceramics

In Future Kin, Aroussiak Gabriellian (she/her) connects a composting ritual to the life cycles of humans, the biome in our digestive tracts, and the bacterial, fungal, and animal life that emerges from decomposing organic matter. Undulating hands gently caress composted soil, suggesting human engagement, empathy, and awareness of ecological interconnectedness.

iris yirei hu, “mud song dream sequence”, 2024, Video and rammed earth; animation by Shoop Rozario

iris virei hu (she/her) uses diverse media to share her journeys with all living beings, whom she understands to be inextricably linked. Her practice is rooted in “collaborative optimism,” in which trauma can inform healing, solidarity, creativity, and liberating futures for folks who are Indigenous, Black, and people of color.

Olivia Chumacero, “Dispersing Time”, 2024, Plant pigments, ink, organic acrylic, burlap, muslin, manzanita branches, feathers, Cahuilla acorn harvest song

Indigenous cosmology recognizes trees as human relatives. Olivia Chumacero (Rarámuri, she/her) offers a portrait of an oak downed by wind and rain, yet alive with a lush canopy and deep roots. She compares the tree’s resilience to that of Indigenous peoples, whose lines of existence have been disrupted yet not destroyed. Following this exhibition, the piece – which is an offering to seeds – will be buried in the Sequoyah National Forest.

This exhibition closes Sunday, 2/23/25. The gallery is open Fridays 2-6 PM Saturdays and Sundays 1-5 PM.

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