On view thru November 28, 2010, the exhibition at the Front Room, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, presents an installation of the Belgium-based organization, Agency, alongside a series of photographs by Miriam Böhm.

Agency, the invention of Kobe Matthys, serves as a platform for highly systematic investigations that make formal inquiry into issues of authorship, copyright, and intellectual property. Existing as a compendium amassed and catalogued by Matthys, Agency gathers facts, subjects, objects, collectives, humans and non-humans to perform speculations and conduct Agency’s exhibitions. In this installation, titled Assembly, Agency displays evidence for the copyright infringement of a certain artist’s renderings of Place des Terreaux – Fontaine Bartholdi et Hôtel de Ville, wherein dubious distribution was enacted. “Thing 001408 (Lyone (Rhône)” bears witness in the Front Room, as testament to the problematic events that take place in the realm of artistic property.

Miriam Böhm, Berlin-based artist, presents a series of recent photographs that, like Agency’s Assembly, demonstrate shifting events of perspective. Böhm’s process begins with photographing marble slabs and faux marble paintings, followed by staging the prints against a textured backdrop, which she then re-photographs – producing a different image altogether. The work emerges, much like the marble slab itself, as a layered tablet of materiality – a compression of pictorial illusion, revealing the limitations of representation.

Image Credits:

Agency & Miriam Böhm, Installation in The Front Room, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2010. Photos by Alex Elmestad.

London-based filmmaker John Smith screens Lost Sound at the Front Room today thru December 5, 2010.  From his compendium of over 40 videos, films and installations, which he presents across a variety of platforms including movie theatres, exhibition spaces and televisions, Lost Sound is specific case of film that obscures the roles of representation and abstraction, documentary and fiction.

Developing this specific kind of cinematic language, Lost Sound composes footage taken on the streets of East London: the subjects are pieces of discarded audio tape inhabiting barb wire fences, tree branches, and other miscellaneous locations within the city’s sidelines.  In collaboration with sound artist Graeme Mille, the ambient sound is skillfully mixed with audio data from the remnant music tapes found on-site, which was re-recorded and inserted back into the film’s sound design. Smith and Mille layer image and sound into an elaborate experience for the viewer to de-code, addressing traditional roles of environment and viewer, perception and narrative.

Image Credit:

John Smith, Flag Mountain (Southern Nicosia, looking towards the border with the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus), 2010. HD video, color, sound, seamless loop (8 minutes cycle). Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton Gallery.

The current exhibition at the Front Room announces itself as a domestic space inside the Museum Walls.  The three artists – Zipora Fried, Margarete Jakschik and Sam Windett – contribute individual works that come to collectively resonate impressions of intimacy and domesticity.  Upon entering the Front Room, Fried’s black knit dining room table fills the space with sensations of dinner-table etiquette while its wool covering mystifies the art-object’s connotations.  Margarete Jakschik presents a collection of photographs that evoke the unceremonious but majestic sensibilities of American iconography.  The paintings of Sam Windett display his deep appreciation for the still-life tradition, recalling tropes of Modernism in their small but intense forms.

The exhibition closes October 31, 2010.  Visit www.camstl.org for more information.

The Exhibitions Hair and Sum of Limited Views make for an unusual pairing, however the juxtaposition of such highly particular work present a freeing and refreshing experience.

Elad Lassry, Israeli-born, Los Angeles based artist, exhibits his most recent collection of lacquered-framed photographic prints and 16mm films.  Lassry’s jewel-box sized monographs encapsulate still-life arrangements of objects and images.  These works not only convey Lassry’s nostalgic and highly realistic visual language, but also function as pieces that are not confined to their medium.  Lassry’s photographs pose as sculptures as well as images. The gleaming lacquered frames that hold each monograph print emphasizes each captured image as a singular phenomenon within a three-dimensional world.

Richard Artschwager’s exhibition Hair in the second main gallery, exemplifies, in a much different way, art that is not confined by its medium.  Artschwager’s sculptural oeuvre is familiar to us in its subject matter but unfamiliar in its peculiar process and materials.  Rubberized horsehair, paint, Celotex, and Formica, the materials of a former furniture maker, are transmuted into a medium for Artschwager’s art practice.  Requiring close inspection, the works bring awareness to their textural qualities.  But from a distance, the forms assemble into clean images on the gallery’s white walls, unexpectedly yielding into their two-dimensional forms.

With such formal subversion, Artschwager and Lassry’s works activate an analogous set of visual and sensory responses that challenge classic modes of perception employed when encountering an art object.  They bring to our attention the ways in which art objects are not confined by their mediums.  They can exist in a more transitive state – right before the point of clear perception and lucid familiarity.

From baseball fans to art lovers, it seems all of Saint Louis is abuzz with the new public downtown space, Citygarden. I had the opportunity to work with Assistant Curator of the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis, Laura Fried, in assembling a program of nine international video artists for the featured video installation in the garden. With anticipation for this new and lively acquisition, videos were selected that reflect a similar excitement and curiosity.

On Wednesday, July 1st, the evening of the public opening, I was very pleased with how engaged people were with the videos. What’s great about the Citygarden space is that it reaches an audience who might not otherwise interact with contemporary art. The most common mode of communication in our everyday life is of course technology, so what better way to present art to the public than through the medium of video? What’s different about video art as supposed to a movie or television show is that there are no real guide lines or conventions to follow. While most video media is set out to entertain, video art has a different agenda; to spark an appetite and ignite a curiosity for the world around you. It does not necessarily provide a story, lesson or conclusion but rather gives way to new questions.

I hope that the video installation compliments the sculptures and atmosphere of the garden by introducing a contemporary medium to the space. Citygarden is an exciting and lively addition to the downtown area and the video installation enhances the movement and enthusiasm in this contemporary public art garden.

Featured Artists:
Wood and Harrison: England, United Kingdom
Euan Macdonald: Los Angeles, California, United States
Kathy Slade: Vancouver, Canada
Ron Tran: Vancouver, Canada
Jennifer West: Los Angeles, California, United States
Rini Hurkmans: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Kate Gilmore: New York, New York, United States
Laurent Grasso: Paris, France
Alex Hubbard: Brooklyn, New York, United States

*If you’re interested in broadening your video art repertoire, I would suggest a trip to the Contemporary Art Museum before August 2nd. The main gallery exhibit is currently Belgian video artist, Chantal Akerman. Acclaimed for her documentary and feature films, Akerman has adapted her work into installations for her first museum survey.