“Soft Water Hard Stone,” the fifth New Museum Triennial, brings together works across mediums by forty artists internationally, including Jes Fan. It recognizes artists reimagining traditional models, materials, and techniques beyond established institutional paradigms. Their works exalt states of transformation, calling attention to the malleability of structures, porous and unstable surfaces, and the fluid and adaptable potential of both technological and organic media. The Triennial will be on view from 27 October, 2021 to 23 January, 2022.
Curators: Margot Norton, Allen and Lola Goldring Curator at The New Museum, and Jamillah James.
The Art + Technology Lab at LACMA has announced its 2021 grant recipients.
Emphasizing iteration and risk-taking over the completion of a finished work, the Lab continues to support artist projects that engage emerging technology. Selection criteria includes artistic merit, opportunities for public engagement, and the suggested forms of data, methods, and/or models that might be of interest to other artists. LACMA issued the 2021 Request for Proposals in December of 2020 and received over 900 submissions.
Among the four winning projects: Jaqueline Kiyomi Gork and Rhett LaRue will develop a multiplayer game space that uses sound as its main modality for navigation and interaction. Giving consideration to empathy and intimacy, they will disrupt the traditional structure of gaming experiences, developing an experience based on collaboration and listening. Gork and LaRue’s project is called Inhabit360.
We are pleased to announce that two recent sculptures by Jes Fan, Diagram IX (2021) and Diagram X (2021), have joined the Collection of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. Empty Gallery would like to thank the team at MHCAM who made this possible. A work from Fan’s ongoing Diagram series exploring the epidermis, Diagram X (2021) features two undulating forms of aqua resin fused in three points, above which a glass globule is situated in a custom-molded form. The organic geometry and fluctuating joinery of this piece evoke the permeable, semi-transparent layers of skin covering human bodies. In his deliberate openings and closings of skin-like waves, Fan questions where a body begins and ends.
The group exhibition Zeros and Ones investigates the ways artists operate within their surrounding institutional structures. Taking the algorithmic paradigm in scripting, scoring, instruction, or command, the works selected systematically complicate these procedures through lived experience. Tools and tasks are mobilized without measurable outcome while always returning to the material conditions of their labor. Through subtle redistributions, infrastructure and the body are both intimately as well as violently situated towards each other. The practices of artists such as Lutz Bacher, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, Hanne Darboven, Jana Euler, Jef Geys, Tishan Hsu, Ilmari Kalkkinen, Silvia Kolbowski, Pope L., Louise Lawler, Carolyn Lazard, Lee Lozano, Henrik Olesen, Sarah Rapson, Margaret Raspé, readymades belong to everyone®, Ketty La Rocca, Sturtevant, Otto Wagner, and Martin Wong, prompt us to question the metrics and hierarchies that are being reproduced in the field of art and beyond. The exhibition will be on view until 19 September, 2021.
Curators: Kathrin Bentele, Anna Gritz, Ghislaine Leung
Opening on Friday, June 25 in New York: Lantern Strike (Strong Loneliness) is a prelude on the dissolution of light. For her second solo exhibition at 47 Canal, Cici Wu begins an embarkation on the imagining and reconstruction of a proto-cinema. The works installed in this exhibition––paper lantern sculptures, drawings, and projection––embody trajectories made between an undetermined past and an unforeseeable future. The exhibition duration is June 25 through July 30, 2021.
ALIEN NATION, a group exhibition curated by Kenta Murakami opens at von ammon co (Washington DC) on Sunday, June 20th and runs until August 1, 2021. The exhibition’s artists include: Gretchen Bender, Colette, Catharine Czudej, Tishan Hsu, Helmut Lang, Peter Nagy, Kayode Ojo, Pope.L, Puppies Puppies (jade kuriki olivo),Julia Scher, SoiL Thornton and WangShui.
In collaboration with the film and video platform Normal Screen (Tokyo) led by Sho Akita, Taro Masushio will have a virtual-showcase of his recent Empty Gallery exhibition Rumor Has It online. This online presentation will include film programming (June 14—21) as well as on June 18th (10PM Japan Standard Time) a conversation between Masushio and graphic designer-publisher Yo Katami of loneliness books. The program will be conducted in Japanese.
Now on view at Miguel Abreu Gallery’s 88 Eldridge Street and 36 Orchard Street locations until July 24, 2021:
In a world increasingly described and experienced as regulated by immaterial forces – the digital revolution – there exists a discrete counter force, one fueled by what can be referred to as a renewed materiality. A tripartite condition of opportunity for artists has been in place for some time, but now might be the moment for an exhibition to focus on how 1. new materials, 2. advanced software, and 3. innovative fabrication techniques constitute a rare point in history in which, taken together, the availability of radical new tools offers the ‘Poet-Engineers’ working today a compelling invitation to explore unknown content and invent new forms.
Participating artists: Yuji Agematsu, American Artist, Nairy Baghramian, Dexter Sinister, Trisha Donnelly, Isa Genzken, Tishan Hsu, Pierre Huyghe, Flint Jamison, Jonathan Lasker, Sam Lewitt, Scott Lyall, Helen Marten, K.R.M. Mooney, Jean-Luc Moulène, Florian Pumhösl, R. H. Quaytman, Wacław Szpakowski, Cheyney Thompson.
We are thrilled to share that Tishan Hsu’s Outer Banks of Memory has joined the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art. We would like to express our gratitude to everyone involved who made this possible. It is significant that Hsu, a Chinese-American artist, is taking a place in the art historical canon during this pivotal moment when Asian-Americans are re-asserting their presence in American culture.
“Outer Banks of Memory (1984) is one of the prescient works [Tishan Hsu] created to address screen-based interaction and was just acquired by the Whitney. The large-scale painting-sculpture hybrid depicts illusionistic, organic folds and wrinkles in addition to orifices that resemble technological input/outputs. It brings together the artifice of the screen and its self-reflexivity with the contortions of the human body—the body that responds to and integrates with the technology it has created.”
