dana turkovic

2011-06-04T10:14:00.000-07:00

Isolation Room

2010-05-22T05:50:00.000-07:00

2010-04-28T13:00:00.001-07:00

Table Manner: The Role of the Table in Contemporary Art

This is an ongoing project based on research during my studies at Goldsmiths in London in 2005. This exhibition was conceived in 2005 and I have been adding to the artist list over the past 5 years. Below is an excerpt from my dissertation. Please stay tuned for details on the publishing of the book about how this project will evolve from the published form to 5 small scale exhibitions.

"The first stage of this project, as you will see explained here, is a book comprised of the chosen artists’ table works. Certain combinations of work may be problematic, but grouping the works is solely linked by the physical presence of a table. The purpose of the book is to illustrate the range of exploration and the multiple uses and interpretations of this everyday object. As an exhibition, the pieces could represent a single horizon line in a vast sea of artist’s tables. In an effort to categorize without misinterpretation, a flow chart shows a “spanning of the eras” where each artist and piece connect to a time period or stylistic moment in art history. With this subheading in mind, Table Manner must not be a monotonous installation, but a productive exercise in sculptural art history where tables (readymade or constructed) are used as the common element that link artist tendencies to present tables often over looked. Table Manner is an exhibition that wholly focuses on the "objectness" of the table when used as sculpture. Looking back, there becomes a shift with Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel and his harsh introduction to the readymade that sets the trend that will make the role of the plinth in sculpture, virtually obsolete.

Although Table Manner has a taxonomic and typological organization (a species of furniture— ‘tables’ divided into various subgenus categories— ‘ritual’, ‘social’ etc) its main objective is to highlight the continual embrace of the pure physicality of the art object. Trying to avoid a tendency to lump the works together by literal means, realizing the nearly infinite number of artists who make ‘tables’ at some point in their career, Table Manner is a conscious attempted to organize an exhibition that focuses solely on the sculptural presence of the table. This arduous research process led to a discovery of an interesting challenge in analyzing the distinctions between the chosen artists’ and their pieces that force the viewer to ‘unsee’ the ‘table’ as a table and instead focus on its aesthetic qualities." -Turkovic, London, 2005

2010-04-22T11:22:00.000-07:00

Bring Me a Lion:
An Exhibition of Contemporary Indian Art

Cecille R. Hunt Gallery - Webster University
March 19 - April 16, 2010
Curated by Jeffrey Hughes and Dana Turkovic

Jaishri Abichandani

Dhruvi Acharya

Rina Banerjee

Chitra Ganesh

Tushar Joag

Jitish Kallat

Reena Saini Kallat

Bari Kumar

Yamini Nayar

Rakhi Peswani

2010-02-22T11:27:00.000-08:00

Re(SOUND)
February 5 - March 5, 2010
Curated by Dana Turkovic and Adam Watkins

Martin Atkins
Maria Blondeel
Keith Bueckendorf
Loren Chasse

Seth Cluett
Mark Early

Robert Goetz

Helena Gough

Joe Gilmore

Eric Hall
John Hardecke
Thomas Harris
Daniel Hockenson
Patrick Hunt

Emilie LeBel

Jay Lizo
Ed Osborn
Andrea Polli
Tony Renner

Steve Roden

Jodi Rose
Patrick Savage

Micah Silver
Nicolas Wiese
Thank You Earth For This World
-Bo Chung
-Chris Compton
-Dan Hayhurst
-Magdalena Jitrik
-Alexander Khodchenko
-Arthur Lager
-David Roberto
-Sterling Roswell
-Sky Sunlight Saxon
-Stanton Warren
-Adam Watkins

The Hunt Gallery is pleased to present Re(sound), an exhibition that explores the sonic medium by compiling a long list of current musings by sound artists from around the world. Re(sound) hopes to build physically on the concept of the periphery, using one sensory input, and providing an alternative metaphor for demonstrating that the idea of an art center has now become more like an invisible node, connected by infinite tentacles by digital networks, thereby displaying the borderless qualities of the sonic medium. As sound flows through space it has the ability to navigate geographically, placing and displacing, bouncing in all directions. In this exhibition, we hope to reveal these unique properties that sound imparts as an artistic medium, and its relational abilities as a creative practice. Because sound can be both borderless and site-specific and imply immediate involvement upon its reception, the physical construction of the exhibition is a reflection of its universal and relational qualities. Presenting the work as a weather vane of sorts, using St. Louis as the central axis, listening stations will be installed marking the North, South, East and West, a compilation of sound works spanning the globe from artists working locally and in Berlin to Los Angeles to Sydney to Toronto. Ultimately extending the notion of sound’s current location as multiple and expansive, the intention is to play on the structure and diverse nature of sound by setting up an environment where the “visitor” is asked to enter the space and simply listen.

yield

2009-05-17T14:38:00.001-07:00

Yield

Schmidt Contemporary Art

April 10 – May 9, 2009

KRYSTEN CUNNINGHAM

JIM ISERMANN

ERIK SPEHN

HADI TABATABAI

ANNE WILSON and SHAWN DECKER

Curated by Dana Turkovic

Schmidt Contemporary Art is pleased to announce its new exhibition: Yield, including artists Krysten Cunningham (Los Angeles), Jim Isermann (Los Angeles), Erik Spehn (St. Louis), Hadi Tabatabai (San Francisco), and Anne Wilson (Chicago). The artists selected create a rewarding and intensive study of color and shape; their collective warp and weft also deliver a high yield in art historical terms. In the textile industry, ’yield’ is a word that helps describe the linear density of a roving of fibers. Building on this definition, Yield is a small exhibition of both complex and sometimes deadpan historical relationships in art, design and handicraft. Focused specifically on the linear quality referenced through the delicate material of thread, the work here teeters between its rigid intent and beautiful accident. Erik Spehn’s textile-like paintings pull the viewer in to read his technique; a series of built up ridges made of torn strips of canvas and trills of pastel paint demand an intimacy with the viewer. His additive action is woven with an ideal geometric purity, and an abstraction tied to the trace of his hand–a representational illusion of a textile. In Jim Isermann’s quilts as in hand me down modernist painting from the early to mid 90’s, we get different but complimentary takes on his humorously obsessive core of abstraction. Investigating high modernism in America and its design concerns, his entirely hand-loomed fabric wall hangings, a series of simple plaid patterns using friendly color schemes, are a take on how this particular style had become ubiquitous in culture and modern life. This work is an attempt to bring popular design back into a high art context perpetuating a tradition of appropriation and migration. Moving this idea into sculpture, Krysten Cunningham’s work is a posed balancing act between pedestal and spindly object. She severs ties with traditional weaving techniques by resisting its flatness and creating a series of both contemplative and structured geometric lines through three dimensional object making. Using thread, Cunningham’s pivoted pure forms are created with an angularity that is sensitive to the Constructivists’ objective for heightening of spatial presence through specific materials coupled with shapes recognizable in early modern furniture design. In Anne Wilson’s animated threaded needles we see not only the bare elegance of non-representational sculpture but also its fragile delicacy. The frame-by-frame hand constructed double projection animation mimics how lace is constructed. Using actual needles and fibers, the work is a bustling scene of repetition and accumulation of line and shape. Experienced with a sound installation by Shawn Decker, Wilson’s handcrafted animation displays aspects of imperfection, and irregularity, sharing these properties with the more traditional media in the exhibition. As both a visual and physical link, Hadi Tabatabai’s small grid paintings deliver an uncanny depth of field from the shallows of three-dimensional space with his gossamer web of thread and cast shadow, exhibiting almost ethereal sensitivity to materials. An artist of Persian heritage, Tabatabai’s subtle, abstract work is stripped of the ornate complexity of popular carpet design, and is loosely connected through a labor-intensive act connecting the legacy of his work to the history of carpet making as an essential part of Persian art and culture that dates back to ancient times. As is often the case with abstraction the work in this exhibition speaks for itself in its fragile simplicity and deft execution by reveling in the materials of its construction.

Amass at Monte Vista Projects

2009-05-17T14:11:00.000-07:00

amass

Monte Vista Projects

Brandon Anschultz (St. Louis)

Sarah Baker (London)

Fantastic Nobodies (Brooklyn)

Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard (London)

Robert Goetz (St. Louis)

Wendy Mason (Los Angeles)

Erick Michaud (Austin)

Brandon Morse (Washington D.C.)

John Watson (St. Louis)

Curated by Dana Turkovic

Amass is an exhibition with multiple intentions and various definitions. First realized at Boots Contemporary Art in St. Louis, the exhibition’s second incarnation will respond directly to the space and mission of Monte Vista but will also maintain its original curatorial premise. The title is a reference in its most direct translation a metaphor for curating an exhibition; to gather artwork, to assemble ideas, to group, and to collect. The exhibition at Monte Vista will bring together new video work from a selection of national and international artists. Under this headline,

Amass is also blurring the boundaries between, art, design, and information by questioning the conventional configurations of how we view video art. By commissioning two artists to design “sculptural support” that invites, and in some ways, compels the audience to assemble and come together as viewers, the exhibition will aim to provide a series of smaller encounters within one collective social experience, thereby highlighting the existence of a 'closed temporal loop' between creation, interpretation and reception. This approach touches on Nicolas Bourriaud’s observations on what he coined “relational art”: “the audience is envisaged as a community. Rather than the artwork being an encounter between a viewer and an object, relational art produces inter-subjective encounters. Through these encounters, meaning is elaborated collectively, rather than in the space of individual consumption.” These experimental display interventions also set up a system for response and conversation within the work, providing a complimentary transference between the space, the curator, the artists, and ultimately the viewer to develop through a sustained professional critique. By tweaking the dynamic, the challenge of this installation will aim to illustrate the possibility of complex associations that come together in one space, where video art and display connect, ultimately pinpointing and exploiting the meeting place between these art forms, the gallery space as social environment and collective spectatorship.

homegrown: a con(temporary) archive

2008-08-09T09:44:00.001-07:00

Homegrown: a con(temporary) archive

CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM ST. LOUIS
THE FRONT ROOM
April 1 - 13, 2008

Project Description:

Local,independent curator Dana Turkovic will present
"Homegrown" a readingroom and temporary archive
(designed by local artists Sarah Colby and Kim
Humphries) that gathers together the art, printed
matter, and ephemera in the collections of St. Louis’s
visual arts community. Inviting local artists,
curators, art historians, critics, collectors, dealers
and writers to loan meaningful pieces from their
personal collections, from art works to films to
novels, essays and letters Turkovic presents an
assemblage of voices that each help to shape St.
Louis’s cultural landscape.

grounded: photography and our contemporary environment

2008-08-09T09:43:00.000-07:00

Grounded: Photography and Our Contemporary Environment

Ellen Curlee Gallery
March 14 - May 10, 2008

Chase Browder
Isabelle Hayeur
Jenny Kendler
David Maisel
Maslen and Mehra
John Pfahl
Nichole Van Beek
Caroline Voagen Nelson
Voshardt/Humphrey
Scott Wolniak

Curated by Dana Turkovic

Project Description:
Grounded: Photography and Our Contemporary Environment
is an exhibition that brings together international
photography and video art that focuses on the
fundamental relationship between humans and nature and
show the complex and dynamic interrelationship between
humans and the earth, and to the environmental
troubles we are currently confronted with. In
partnership with the St. Louis Earth Day organization,
the theme of the exhibition was developed through an
ongoing discussion with about their interest in adding
a collaborative and artistic component that directly
involves the community. The group of photographers
represented in Grounded are among an intensifying,
global movement of artists who are addressing
environmental concerns and critically engaging in
issues like climate change, extinction, conservation,
environmentally sensitive building and planning and
waste management and believe that art can play a
critical role in providing creative insight into these
challenges. Grounded proposes art as a way of creating
a better understanding about our relationship with
nature and the environment and to explore the renewed
role of contemporary art as a leading force in the
global debate about the future of the planet. The
Ellen Curlee Gallery specializes in contemporary fine
art photography with a special emphasis on the work of
international photographers.

Odavde/Otuda

2008-02-09T09:40:00.000-08:00

Odavde/Otuda (from here/from there)

An International Exhibition of Contemporary Bosnian Artists

February 8 – March 14, 2008

Alen Basic

Isak Berbic

Zlatko Cosic

Sejla Kameric

Margareta Kern

Damir Niksic

Nebojsa Seric Shoba

Curated by Jeffrey Hughes and Dana Turkovic

Project Description:
The Cecille R. Hunt Gallery is pleased to present Odavde/Otuda (from here/from there): An International Exhibition of Contemporary Bosnian Artists. This exhibition will be an opportunity to engage the St. Louis public in a dialogue addressing the Bosnia-Herzegovina diaspora and will include works by seven contemporary artists born in Bosnia, including representatives of those who emigrated as a result of the Bosnian War (1992-1995). To date, about 50,000 Bosnians settled in the St. Louis area in the 1990s after the war in the former Yugoslavia and is thought to be the largest outside of Bosnia. The exhibition brings together work by artists who incorporate issues of individual and group identity, land and politics, the laws of art and war, tradition, belonging and place. An exhibition of this nature is particularly pertinent as a means to examine and emphasize the important contributions made to the broader fabric of St. Louis cultural life by the local Bosnian community. Odavde/Otuda will also aim to not only bridge a gap but open a door of consideration on an important new community in St. Louis of people rebuilding their lives in the aftermath of one of the twentieth century's most brutal conflicts. One way to better serve this community is to understand its culture and religion through the work of these international artists, as the events of the war are undoubtedly now part of the history of the city of St. Louis.

This exhibition made possible by The Arthur and Helen Baer Charitable Foundation.

amass

2007-10-29T09:46:00.000-07:00

amass

boots contemporary art space
November 9 – December 23, 2007
Curated by Dana Turkovic

Participating artists:
Sarah Baker
Kim Collmer
Chris Doyle
Wendy Mason
Brandon Morse
Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard
Pascual Sisto

Exhibition Design:
Brandon Anschultz and John Watson

Project Description:
Amass is an exhibition with multiple intentions and various definitions. The title is a reference in its most direct translation a metaphor for curating an exhibition; to gather artwork, to assemble ideas, to group, and to collect. The exhibition at Boots Contemporary Art Space will bring together new video work from a selection of national and international artists. Under this headline, Amass is also blurring the boundaries between, art, design, and information by questioning the conventional configurations of how we view video art. By commissioning two local artists to design "sculptural support" that invites, and in some ways, compels the audience to assemble and come together as viewers, the exhibition will aim to provide a series of smaller encounters within one collective social experience, thereby highlighting the existence of a 'closed temporal loop' between creation, interpretation and reception. Quoting curator Chris Dearcon, art historian Liz Kotz references some similar preoccupations that Amass will seek to address:

"The situation of video manifests a new set of structural conflicts, arising among different historical modes of "exhibition." If earlier experimental film, video, and performance practices ostensibly sought to disturb the form and function of the gallery – newer, media-savvy art is designed for reproduction and display. Despite the long association of media-based forms with some type of "critical" or politically oriented practice, current gallery-based video art is all too eager to please – even as this requires total submission to the dictates of spectacle culture."

This approach touches on Nicolas Bourriaud's observations on what he coined "relational art": "…the audience is envisaged as a community. Rather than the artwork being an encounter between a viewer and an object, relational art produces inter-subjective encounters. Through these encounters, meaning is elaborated collectively, rather than in the space of individual consumption." These experimental display interventions also set up a system for response and conversation within the work, providing a complimentary transference between the space, the curator, the artists, and ultimately the viewer to develop through a sustained professional critique. By tweaking the dynamic, the challenge of this installation will aim to illustrate the possibility of complex associations that come together in one space, where video art and display connect, ultimately pinpointing and exploiting the meeting place between these art forms, the gallery space as social environment and collective spectatorship.

elaine bradford: new work

2007-08-29T09:49:00.000-07:00

Elaine Bradford

August 24 – September 21, 2007

Organized by Dana Turkovic

Project Description:
In Elaine Bradford's recent sculptural work she explores implications associated with the handmade. Her sculptures suggest an enthusiastic hobbyist, pairing carefully crafted sweaters, meticulously constructed of yarn, with taxidermied animal heads. The works are homey in their conception, and are both warm and blank, sad and amusing while displaying a labor-intensive craft that teeters on the edge of absurdity. Exploring how each could live in a domestic setting, she works to conceal and reveal these forms simultaneously by pairing peculiar moments with familiar surroundings. The combination of materials and her imagery blend masculine and feminine associations, highlighting the social commentary inherent in her production as they both come from a world of home craft, leisure activity and sport ultimately infusing these everyday objects with a surreal comfortability. The act of making sweaters brings to mind hours of labor, she is particularly interested in referencing something that is unwanted and unneeded, with concepts of comfort and warmth. Her work evokes traditionally feminine pursuits such as quilting, yet her imagery would most readily invoke unsettling masculinity. Using crochet, Bradford has also made sweaters for items including trees and vacuum cleaners. Utilizing familiar items and referencing the domestic, she introduces the viewer to an uncanny reality that is strange but equally morbid and pathetic but also brings them new life and altering the way we view these truncated forms.

the lit room: who watches the watchers?

2007-08-09T09:50:00.000-07:00

THE LIT ROOM Series: WHO WATCHES THE WATCHERS?

Ellen Curlee Gallery
Friday, August 3, 2007

Curated by Dana Turkovic

A multi-media installation and event exploring art using ideas of surveillance, exhibitionism and voyeurism.

Featuring local band Tone Rodent.

Project Description:

The Ellen Curlee Gallery is pleased to present its second installment of The Lit Room, "Who Watches the Watchers?" a multi-media installation and event exploring art using surveillance, exhibitionism and voyeurism by using a combination of fiction, theory and reality. "Who Watches the Watchers?" will aim to highlight where these concepts begin and end and pointing to places in which they overlap and interact in society and in art. The concept for the installation is inspired by a prison design called the Panopticon by the late 18th century English philospher Jeremy Bentham, a circular design with a central control tower, designed to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not. Bentham described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind" successfully leaving the watching to the watched in hopes that they would internalize the disciplinary gaze.

The central component of this Lit Room is the realization of a simultaneous panoptic atmosphere including a performance by local band Tone Rodent. To exploit the psychology behind this idea, they have been instructed to play in "lockdown" at a secret location in order to create an experience that will aim to be both frightening and enlightening. During the opening night, the band will be playing across town and via live webchat projected onto the wall at Ellen Curlee Gallery. In turn, the viewers/visitors at Ellen Curlee Gallery will be projected behind the band, creating a simultaneous viewing experience of watching the performance and watching ourselves watch and interact with the band at another location. Also included will be a small projected survey of the influence of surveillance in digital culture, video, photography, and installation. Although, the practices and experiences of surveillance have long been examined by political theorists, sociologists, and philosophers as well as many artists, "Who Watches the Watchers" will ideally and subsequently tie in the idea of sousveillance or "observing the observer", to showcase the perversity of those who take pleasure in spying and punishing.

Megan and Murray McMillan - "The Oldest Song We Know"

2007-08-09T09:45:00.000-07:00

Megan and Murray McMillan

"The Oldest Song We Know"

To read my essay about Megan and Murray McMillan's residency at Qbox Gallery in Athens, Greece - click here: http://www.meganandmurray.com/2007/10/the-oldest-song.html

free rein/full play: new chicago photography

2007-02-09T09:50:00.000-08:00

FREE REIN / FULL PLAY: New Chicago Photography

Ellen Curlee Gallery

February 16 – March 31, 2007

Participating Artists:

Adam Ekberg

Jenny Kendler

Mayumi Lake

Lilly McElroy

Lindsay Page

David A. Parker

Sabrina Raaf

Esteban Schimpf

Curated by Dana Turkovic and Anne Wischmeyer

In his essay, "On Inventing Our Own Art," Ibram Lassaw describes the attitude being formed by artists of his generation: "They feel that the important thing for art is to be alive, to be full of suggestion and possibilities, to enlarge our sensibility and to intensify experience…." It is precisely this synergy that becomes apparent in the work of these new Chicago photographers. Free Rein / Full Play is an exhibition that attempts to explore this phenomena, to capture this energy, with a combination of fantasy and performance, whether it utilize the body, object, or material. Although each work maintains its conceptual individuality, this association of freedom and playfulness produces a common uninhibited conceptual approach, which is enhanced by the photographic medium. Lassaw also suggests: "The artist no longer feels that he is 'representing reality,' he is actually making reality… Reality is something stranger and greater than merely photographic rendering can show." This is apparent in the collection of works by these artists, each of them produces images that in some ways, reveals a subconscious effort at Lassaw's idea of a "new reality". Free Rein / Full Play is a small, but concentrated attempt of capturing a spirit of art-making, in this case Chicago, and one that continues in its claim of "endless opportunity."

modular: new art from los angeles

2007-01-09T09:51:00.000-08:00

modular: New Art from Los Angeles

White Flag Projects

Participating Artists:
Hollis Cooper

Danny Jauregui

Nicole van Beek

Louisa Van Leer

Kevin Wingate

Bari Ziperstein

Curated by Dana Turkovic

White Flag Projects is pleased to announce its third exhibition, modular: New Art from Los Angeles, curated by Dana Turkovic. The exhibition brings together six emerging artists living and working in one of the most important cities for art in the United States, and explores its radically fragmented visual culture that seems to simultaneously threaten its residents with the risks of the city spinning off into space or collapsing in on itself like a dying sun. Each work in the exhibit is set in the complex structure of the city itself, Los Angeles being the constant factor influencing each artist's work. modular is arranged as a kind of construction kit, assembling a structure of young LA artists working through the same social, visual, architectural and natural landscapes as individual artists producing work related more by shared experience than shared philosophies. Each of the artists embraces an IKEA-like philosophy of art-making: simple construction methods, cheap materials, all employed toward objects which are ideally modern and seemingly disposable. modular attempts to define a fragmented style which is manifest in the sprawling city of Los Angeles itself, synthesizing the languages of architecture, geometry, furniture design, and biology to express distinctly fractured perspectives and deceptively complex art.

Jessika Miekeley

2006-08-29T09:46:00.000-07:00

Jessika Miekeley

Cecille R. Hunt Gallery
October 13 – November 10, 2006

Organized by Dana Turkovic

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

-William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

Project Description:

Cecille R. Hunt Gallery present's recent work by artist Jessika Miekeley. A fresh transplant to St. Louis from Berlin, Miekeley's video and photographic work bring a new voice to the city's art scene. The work explores the space between the still life and the moving image. In Birthday, Miekeley physically scans a still image of a Birthday party, adding a twist of motion. As she carefully frames the surface area of the projected image, previously unseen narratives and emotional poignancy are added to the frozen memory of a birthday celebration. Pool, filmed with the same process, creates an incipient threat of drowning; at other times the view is like that of the shark in Jaws as she stalks human prey.

Pluto has recently been downgraded in status to a dwarf planet by the international astronomy society; Miekeley's photogram series Sky instead, elevate the sweepings of the studio floor to that of celestial bodies. If a ball of ice can be a planet one day and then an oversize comet the next, why not misrepresent a small ball of dust and lint as a cosmic body? The difference, as Miekeley suggests, is the small matter of seeing the world in a grain of sand.

Born in Berlin, Germany. Lives and works in St. Louis. In 1999, Miekeley completed study at Hochschule der Künste, Berlin. In 2002, she received her M.F.A. from Goldsmiths College – University of London. She has shown in numerous group exhibitions including: A Beautiful Game, Roebling Hall, NYC, 2006; Flatfiles, Contemporary Art Museum – St. Louis, 2006; Co-Dependent, The Living Room – Miami Art - Basel, 2005; Temporada de Projetos, Paço das Artes, São Paulo, 2003 ; Park 4 DTV, Amsterdam; 2002. This is Miekeley's first solo exhibition in St. Louis.

office space

2006-08-11T08:38:00.000-07:00

Office Space

Los Angeles, California

Operated from 2002-2004

Participating Artists:

Ben Ritter

Daniel McGrath

Steve Putz

Jay Lizo

Jason Moore

the lit room

2006-08-09T09:49:00.000-07:00

"THE LIT ROOM"

The Ellen Curlee Gallery is pleased to present "The Lit Room", the first installment in an ongoing series designed to instigate a dialogue about the current trends in photography and the future of the medium as a fine art.

"The intention of the artist must therefore be to unsettle conventional thought from within, to cast doubt on the normalized perception of the 'natural' by destabilizing the means used to represent It." –Tom Lawson

The medium of photography is still in its infancy if compared to painting and sculpture. However, the impact of the photographic image has transformed the way that we perceive beauty, nature, social issues, and even ourselves.

Now we are on the cusp of a transformation within fine art photography. Artists are exploring the potential of photography as a source material, hybridizing the photograph with sculpture, drawing and painting. As they are mapping out the uncharted territory of the digital image, photography is quickly becoming a part of the natural environment of the artist. The intent of this new work is not to give an objective slice of reality; instead, it offers a chance to question our fundamental meaning of perception.

"The Lit Room" uses projectors, reading areas and critical text installations, to present current photographic trends that aim to challenge notions of the medium and highlight current trends that are enriching it. The concept for the installation and the list of artists featured were inspired by, in most cases, viewing the works or closely following the development of these artists via reviews, articles and websites. It is intended to be a sampling of emerging work rather than comprehensive list of artists currently exploring the medium.

By presenting a night 'beyond' traditional photography, 'The Lit Room' invites the viewer to ask new questions, raise new doubts, and debate the dynamic processes shaping photography today. These new approaches deserve a candid review.

jay lizo: spectacle of power

2006-08-09T09:47:00.000-07:00

Spectacle of Power: New Work by Jay Lizo

Cecille R. Hunt Gallery
September 1 – 29, 2006

Organized by Dana Turkovic

Project Description:
Inspired mainly by DJ culture, Jay Lizo's paintings are an explosion of text, vibrant color and abstracted images. His obsession with mixing, sampling and phenomenology become focal point in most of his paintings and sculptures, referencing movies, books, and pop culture in general. Mostly taken from his immediate surroundings, such as geography or places with historical significance, text and images are collected and gathered, and beautifully remixed into one experience and one final form. Lizo's newest body of work is an even more intense study of text, type and the roots of slang and street talk. Dialogue from films such as Red Dawn and Fight Club provide his initial layer of images and color. Nothing is sacred or without comparison, layering the words of Nietzche with the poetics of Ice Cube, Lizo produces extremely detailed and decorative works. Writers such as Guy Debord, Dick Hebdige and Ludwig Wittgenstein, influence Lizo's process of choice and application, and always haunted by their words, Lizo builds architecturally around them. By taking images from different histories and remixing into a new context creates new dialogues for an absurd yet possible worldview as it reflects on ideas of Power. It's a collection of words and images that are related to some form of power, such as Remington's rifle, Robert McNamara's "Thoughts on War", Heart's typewriter, Delacroix's spears, Wu-Tang's lyrics on capitalism, Debord's text on the Situationists, and many others images culminate in the paintings and sculptures to immerse a viewer in a Spectacle of Power.

Born 1975 in Sarasota, Florida. Lives and works in Los Angeles. Lizo received his B.F.A. from Ringling School of Art and Design in 1998 and in 2005 he received his M.F.A. from University of California - Santa Barbara. He has shown in numerous group exhibitions including: High Desert Test Sites 5, Joshua Tree, CA, 2006; Supersonic, Los Angeles, CA, 2005; LA Tap - Curated by David Pagel, Melbourne, Australia, 2004; and Stray Show, Chicago, IL, 2003. This is Lizo's first solo exhibition.

2006-07-09T09:48:00.000-07:00

I-70 Series: Kansas City

Rebecca Dolan

Leo Esquivel

Peregrine Honig

Miles Niedinger

Davin Watne

Curated by Dana Turkovic and John Watson
Cecille R. Hunt Gallery
March – April 2006

Ethereal Locations

Interstate-70 is spattered with fresh road kill, porn stores and modest churches. The route linking St. Louis and Kansas City is a threateningly dangerous and bumpy car ride, through a raw level plain. Punctuating this --at expanse, exit signs guide the eye to gun-marts, XXX stores, chapels and run down strip malls. Fellow travelers, proudly sporting their "W" bumper stickers and the litter of burst open skunks, possums and stray dogs drive home the reality of the area's thinly concealed violence, isolation and confusion. The Interstate hovers unapologetically between the piety of the Sunday service and the vulgarity of the whorehouse. Is this cultural landscape a result of hard-pressed farmers --finding a precarious economic niche or enterprising ex-urbanites making a quick easy buck? Pick either and you would be right. It's a mix of bleak desperation and vibrant commerce. The I-70 is a modern pastoral vision. The intention of the series was to merely introduce two art scenes and provoke an ongoing dialogue that will produce complimentary exhibitions in both cities. But while daydreaming beneath the wide blue sky and the green pastures, I momentarily glimpsed the subconscious preoccupations of this violent terrain. Our shared experience of Missouri via this lethally rutted asphalt path connects Dolan, Esquivel, Honig, Neidinger and Watne to each other as artists. The outcome is an exhibition of the impression embossed on the mind by this stretch of road revealing the nature of the two cities it connects: open sky, crushed mammals, litter, wrecked cars, and spent passion. The I-70 show is a wild drive through the tension of this peculiarly dark but optimistic place.

thomas harris: orchard project

2005-08-09T09:48:00.000-07:00

Thomas Harris: Orchard Project

Burford, Oxfordshire, UK
April - May 2005

The reconstruction of Harris' past encompasses three major components: Firstly, physical items from his life in the form of clothing and items with social relevance to the west country of England in the form of farming tools and agricultural produce. Second, deconstructing the leisure pursuit of creating music and experimenting with alcohol, reinterpreting these experiences in the form of performance, sculpture and drawing. Thirdly, by reconfiguring imagery from the music genres like heavy metal, doom metal, sludge rock and hardcore to illustrate ideas of personal growth and their relationship to the cyclical quality of development when formative experiences unexpectedly reappear and offer continuous guidance in surprisingways.

In Harris' current work, he has chosen to use the filters of geographical distance and the passage of time to investigate his life as a teenager growing up in Wooten-Under-Edge. Similarly to the use of the Sunn amp (the band Sunn named themselves after the American guitar amplifier company Sunn. When Conrad Sunholm first made his guitar amps available in the mid 1960's and they became popular with a number of British bands such as Black Sabbath, Cream and The Who, due to the high power provided in the portable amplifier to transform the blues into heavy metal through distortion and high volume), he has used distance to translate the memories of his youth into a form that is more engaging than the crude material of personal experience. This transformation has combined memories from his adolescent years with the maturity of a prodigal journey a continent away allowing him to present a more fully realised depiction of the development of his personality from a teenager into adulthood.