If you’ve driven past White Flag Projects lately, you may have noticed our new banner featuring Jeremiah, a print from Tommy Hartung’s recent show Anna at On Stellar Rays in New York. The eponymous film will be on view in White Flag Projects’ new exhibition“Tommy Hartung & Uri Aran”. Hartung’s film takes its inspiration from Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel Anna Karenina. On the surface the film might appear to have a tentative connection to the source material, as Hartung does not borrow characters or scenes directly from the novel. Through a combination of different film languages, Hartung explores the themes that permeate the novel in a manner that resonates with contemporary societal issues.

Hartung’s actors are dismembered mannequins created from a wide range of materials that evoke the desperation and alienation of the titular Anna Karenina. The mannequins are clothed in a manner recalling the garb of peasants; their labor in the film recalls Tolstoy’s romanticization of the working class. Words like “dejected”, “dismal”, and “haunted” appear frequently in the reviews of the show, reflecting both the material aspect of Hartung’s actors and his eerily lit set, and echoing Hartung’s statement that the film incorporates “a language like that used in horror films.”

In addition to the stop-motion animation of the mannequins, the film includes superimposed clips from the Soviet film Earth and computer simulations, introducing a political element. Hartung’s inclusion of socialist realist clips and crowd imagery comments on the tendency of movements to create a political entity out of certain romantic ideals. The unsatisfied nature of his mannequins seems to point out how little this process serves individuals.

Hartung’s incorporation of varied materials and film styles seems to extend seamlessly into the environment in which the film is viewed. In the exhibition at On Stellar Rays,Anna was accompanied by a selection of sculptural objects that were created from elements of the film’s sets. Hartung utilized mannequin figures, various props, pieces of the set, and a camera track system used for panning shots. As in previous works, Hartung’s creative process is as much a part of the final piece as the film itself, and the viewer is drawn into that process and the unique environment that Hartung has created.

Anna and other works by Tommy Hartung will be on view at White Flag Projects in the exhibition “Tommy Hartung & Uri Aran.” The exhibition will open with a reception from 6-8 PM on Thursday, January 19 and will remain on view until February 18, 2012. For more information on this exhibit and other upcoming events at White Flag, please visitWhite Flag Projects.

(1/17/12 by Stephanie Trimboli, Intern)

Still from "Ghostwriter", 2006, Silent 16mm black & white film transferred to DVD

White Flag Projects’ office smells like sawdust and paint; a power drill echoes in the next room. Two rows of old-fashioned film projectors face a blank wall; orange and black electrical cords sneak across the floor, coiling around ladders and skirting a hanging tarp. In short, the space is in a state of minor chaos called “mounting an exhibition.” The exhibition in question is Amy Granat’s, opening next Thursday, September 8, between 6-8 PM.

Amy Granat, a St. Louis native, is known for her experimental 16-milimeter films created in her distinct visual language unified by movement, absence, dissonance, and exploration of the sublime. Granat’s films demonstrate a holistic approach to the total potential of film itself: as a technology, as a narrative form, as a physical object, and fundamentally as a document of activity transmitted through time and light.

Her most well-known films are her “scratch films”, which are exactly what they sound like: camera-less films made by scratching, drawing and punching holes in film stock. Two such earlier films will appear as part of the exhibition, Stars Way Out/White Stars for White Flag (2005/2011) and Ghostrider (2006).

Granat’s interest in motion and longstanding involvement with music, dance and collaboration are represented by two films in which Granat directs her subjects’ improvised movements, Felicia in Zurich (2009), and Lines in the Sand (2009). Both films further develop Granat’s translation of activity into form, articulating unifying conceptual relationships present throughout the artist’s entire oeuvre.

The exhibition will also include Granat’s newest work, Venice Flowers (2011). The most reductive of Granat’s films on view, Venice Flowers explores the artist’s interest in removing her familiar figurative and gestural motifs to investigate more minimal interactions among light, shadow, and projection surface, blurring the relationship between cinema and architecture.

The exhibition will open with a reception from 6-8 PM on Thursday, September 8 and will remain on view until October 22, 2011. For more information on this exhibit and other upcoming events at White Flag, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

(Allison Fricke, Intern)

Elements of Style is the third in a trilogy of exhibitions by Karthik Pandian based on two years of field research at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville, Illinois. Pandian’s exhibition at White Flag Projects stages a final encounter at the project’s place of provenance, continuing his rammed earth series and its investigation of the modern and the ancient, the monumental and the metaphysical, the artificial and the substantive.

Cahokia Byobu (Broken Screen), the large-scale sculpture that comprises the exhibition, is made of seven eight-foot-tall towers of rammed earth, between which four, repurposed mirror-glass panes have been inserted perpendicularly. Creating a set of three sculptures in the round, they bisect the gallery diagonally, yielding two equal triangular areas. Resembling Japanese folding screens, the sculpture carves out its profile in zigzag fashion, alternating between mirrored and semi-translucent glass surfaces. The slender, rectangular earthen bodies are punctuated with strata of cement, shells, mason’s line, 16mm film strips, and glass shards.

The second work, located in the gallery’s library, cites Pandian’s exhibition Unearth, which is showing concurrently at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Titled Shards, the two wall works were originally used as forms for producing rammed earth pillars. Marked with a series of cuts, the panels are surfaced with a grid, suggesting a potential function as drafting tools in an architectural or archaeological context.

The materials speak to Pandian’s process as the work itself progresses into a realm beyond physicality. What may seem a regular and constant shape in the gallery space becomes activated within the mind’s eye and ultimately the body. The mirrors project reflections that provide alternate perspectives and doubles – furnishing the work with added notions of the spiritual and the self-referential. Pandian constructs a dance of viewership that challenges the nature of the art-object, as the work and the viewer exchange roles demonstrating autonomy.

The duality that surrounds Elements of Style expands into the media of sound and light. For the exhibition’s opening, Pandian staged the works in a kind of son et lumiere production, using lighting design inspired by the Cahokia Mounds Interpretive Center and an ambient soundtrack recorded at dusk at Monk’s Mound that was also paired with a portion of text by Claude Levi-Strauss read by the narrator from the Griffith Observatory Planetarium. Featured as a one-night-only event, Cahokia Byobu (Broken Screen) was vivified by the cycling lighting program that simulated the full spectrum of light rendered from one earthly revolution around the sun. The work acquired a wholly different gravity as aspects of spectacle, entertainment, and storytelling colored the experience.

Karthik Pandian: Elements of Style is on view at White Flag Projects through Saturday, April 23. For more information about upcoming programs and exhibitions at White Flag, please visit our website at www.whiteflagprojects.org.

- Mel Trad, Intern

Jeremy Sigler is the type of person many students of the arts want to be when they “grow up”. If you don’t know much about him, learning about his extensive work in contemporary art and poetry definitely compells broad admiration. Having received his BFA from the University of Pennsylvania and his MFA in sculpture from the University of California, Los Angeles, Sigler has made a career out of crafting experimental work in multiple genres, earning him the position of Lecturer in sculpture at Yale University. Artists in the academic realm do not always cross over into the public sphere, but Sigler makes a consistent point of it, most recently with a two-page, malleable clay journal called Rational/Irrational, installed in the bookstore café of MoMA’s P.S. 1.

Sigler is also an artist with words, bridging the realms of prose and poetry. He has published four books: To and To (Left Hand Books, 1998), Mallet Eyes (Left Hand Books, 2000), Led Almost by my Tie (with Jessica Stockholder, Ruth Lingen Editions, 2007), and Math (Ubuweb Editions, 2008). In addition to publishing his most recent book, Crackpot Poet, with The Brooklyn Rail (Black Square Editions), Sigler also contributes regularly to the monthly journal as a columnist. In a recent interview with poet and novelist Eileen Myles, the two writers bonded over their common love of the film and novel Being There and how writing poetry is like releasing a valve (read full interview here).

Tomorrow evening at 8 PM, Jeremy will be reading his own humorous poetry at White Flag, to compliment the current exhibition Time Wounds All Heels, an examination of humor’s potential effect on form and perception.

For more information about tomorrow’s event, our current show and other upcoming programs and events at White Flag, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

What may seem like a mere supplement for the lack of gallery visibility from external view, White Flag Projects’ vinyl banners were initially produced to hide the street-facing garage door. Slowly evolving from a witty, ad-hoc solution that functioned as an oversized poster – including text to advertise events and exhibitions – the banner now operates as a public art initiative, enlisting artists to create new work within the 13 x 13′ space.

The banner’s transformation into an art object began with the 2009 exhibition FX3, when the banner revisited the most memorable bikini scene in cinema history, presenting an enlarged, cropped film still of Phoebe Cates just before unclasping her red bikini top. Themes and scenes from the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High were appropriated in fragmentary distillation as images to promote the third iteration of the Fast Times student exhibition series. Introducing the banner as public art, the provocative image at once became a platform for controversy as it elicited several complaints from the local government and members of a nearby senior living home. In an attempt to quell complaints, a citation was made against White Flag Projects but ultimately failed as an insufficient case of impropriety.

The second “fine art” banner was created for the exhibition Destroy All Monsters: Hungry for Death. Celebrating 1970s Detroit-based noise band, White Flag showcased items culled from the collective’s large archive. The exhibition’s banner, a recreation of an original collage by Jim Shaw, displayed a highly graphic image of Charles Manson’s face against a winsome blue and cloudy sky, with the text “Love means never having to say you’re sorry – Erich Legal, Love Story”. Juxtaposing the tagline of the popular 1970 melodrama with the image of the notorious 60s counterculture cult leader and serial killer generated both emotional and volatile responses from viewers. One evening at the building’s entrance, Matt Strauss recalls the angered reaction of a middle-aged woman drawing her knife in an agitated state of rage at the sight of Charles Manson. The lady showed ready signs of slashing the banner with her weapon, but was eventually calmed, as Matt assured her that a member of the arts collective would gladly answer any questions she had about the banner’s content if she attended the exhibition’s opening – thus redirecting her wrath.

In September 2010, the New York-based artist Garth Weiser produced a new painting as the banner for his solo exhibition. Starting with a blank square of white vinyl, Weiser rendered in water-soluble media a new work his highly graphic practice of geometric abstraction. Originally designed as a time-based piece that would erode from wind and precipitation, the blue acrylic paint remained steadfast, not bleeding into the white areas or disintegrating as Weiser anticipated. Thus the banner now remains a lasting piece from Weiser’s show, accompanying the his two other works exploring temporal effects.

In the following group exhibition, Which Witch is Which? and/or Summertime, artist Tamar Halpern created two original works using the exhibition banner as a template – producing one for the gallery floor and the other, titled See No Evil, for its usual spot at the building’s exterior. Resisting strict formal categorizations, Halpern presented the banner as a sculptural art object. For both works, Halpern printed a black and white image onto the banners’ surface, leaving a border of blank white vinyl instead of covering the whole area. This gesture plays against the banner’s parameters, asserting the work’s pictorial value while calling attention to the banner’s physical presence, material and form. The placement of Untitled on the gallery floor re-iterated this experience as viewers were allowed to walk across the work, as image and material exchanged roles.

Loosely constructed around ways in which humor informs art, the group exhibition Time Wounds All Heels presents the banner as an original artwork in a piece by Adam McEwen. Currently on view, McEwen’s banner enlarges publicly what was once a much more private, virtual form of exchange –a text message. In a practice that focuses heavily on society’s perception of human progress, this work emerges from McEwen’s collection of text messages sent from friends, as he refigures them into framed works on paper – or in this case, in a work on vinyl. Untitled Text Msg (Vicodin), an inkjet print on vinyl, displays a reproduced image of a private caller’s text to McEwan’s cell phone: “Hey happy new year. Do u know anyone I can buy vicodin from?”. This work, along with others from the text message series, upsets the banal and the familiar by thrusting it into a context with an unaccustomed degree of public exposure – i.e. the highly trafficked, municipal route of Manchester Boulevard.

The transformation of White Flag Project’s banner into an art object is traced along a natural line of collaboration between the curatorial and the art practice. No longer a means to merely advertise exhibitions, the banner is now property of several artists’ bodies of work. Whether facing the busy thoroughfare on the building’s exterior or within the gallery space, the banner has become absorbed as a signature fixture of White Flag Projects’ programming.

Time Wounds All Heels is open through Saturday, February 26, 2011. For more information about this exhibition and other upcoming programs and events at White Flag, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

Time Wounds All Heels makes the audience reconsider the purpose and creation of the works that it features. Upon first glance at the gallery space, one immediately questions the unity of the ecclectic pieces presented, but upon closer examination, the link becomes clear: duplicity.

A prime example of this is Do The Right Thing, 2009 by Donelle Woolford. The piece is composed of different pieces of wood put together like a puzzle. Each piece of wood has a different thickness than the one adjacent to it, making this work more of a relief sculpture than a traditionally hung rectangular composition. What makes Woolford’s work so interesting is that it is actually the product of a fictional character created by the artist Joe Scanlan, who hires actresses to play the role of Donelle. After completing a number of wood assemblages, like the one included in Time Wounds All Heels, Scanlan felt that they did not fit within his body of work; hence, he decided to invent the alternate persona of Donelle Woolford – a young African-American female who harnesses aspects of her cultural identity to create abstract compositions. In hiring an actress to claim responsibility for the works, Scanlan makes us question the importance of artistic ownership and the role of personal identity in informing a given artwork.

The Spanish-born artist Jaime Pitarch’s Theory of Evolution, 2009 also fits perfectly into the exhibition’s exploration of duplicity. This spiral arrangement of household cleaning products on the floor of the gallery immediately catches the viewer off guard and makes one question how cleaning products can be considered art. I walked around the piece for a while before I decided to look up its name. Then it hit me: Theory of Evolution was an arrangement of cleaning products that chronicle the creation of the earth, plant, animals, and mankind. Beginning with Big Bang, the spiral finds its end with Mr. Clean.

Finally, Adam McEwen’s Untitled (Richard), 2007 is a fake obituary written for the artist Richard Prince. The odd thing is, Prince is not deceased. This faux chronicle of Prince’s life makes the viewer question McEwen’s intent when he created the work. McEwen exemplifies again how multiple meanings can inhabit the same piece. What the underlying social critique of Untitled is, I am not able to tease out; but, perhaps there is no neat punch-line in this, or any of the displayed artworks.

Time Wounds All Heels is currently on view through Saturday, February 26. For more information about this exhibition and other upcoming programs at White Flag, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

It’s difficult to dig under the sheen of colored Plexiglas. You may scratch at its surface, tap it, and click your nails against its brilliant color, but still fail to uncover a point of entry. In Liam Gillick’s work, reticence of this nature is the point. Though it’s hard to deny the formal beauty of his objects, Gillick’s ambition lies not in the allure of their pristine surfaces but in the discourse surrounding them.

Gillick is an artist, critic, architect, designer, and writer, and his creative output reflects the synthesis of these roles. In addition to his signature Plexiglas sculptures, he creates installations of sculptural text, such as this one for his show Literally (with Projects 79) at the Museum of Modern Art:

These text works introduce a certain kind of discourse into the gallery space and remind viewers of the significant body of writing Gillick has produced in his ongoing examination of social structures and ideologies.

Gillick’s work is known for its evasive maneuvers, which shun singular interpretations in favor of opening up new avenues of thought. In 1848!!! (2010), a collaborative film recorded for No More Presence at the invitation of curator Ajay Kurian (organizer of White Flag’s current show, of which Gillick is also a part), the viewer sees the narrator address someone off-screen, but her words are made inaudible by the soundtrack of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. A paper banner displays the transcript of the narration, which relays the revolutionary historical events that took place in Europe in the late 1890s; but viewers are left to puzzle-out the unstated association. This maneuvering of relationships and shifting of content creates ambiguity within apparent historical and ideological authority.

Art, according to Gillick, is “a convenient term for a mid-space location,” and a “mid-space” is exactly the space he sets up for viewers. His work received a retrospective, entitled Three perspectives and a short scenario (2009-10), at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Gillick was also a representative artist for the German Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale. White Flag’s current exhibit, Which Witch is Which? and/or Summertime, curated by Ajay Kurian, includes a collaborative film of Liam Gillick’s, which is on view until December 18.

Vicinato 2 (made in collaboration with Douglas Gordan, Carsten Holler, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija) opens with a nighttime shot of Monte Carlo and a robotic narrator. The developing “narrative”, which consists of shots of the four friends conversing and occasional scenes of the city, is based on a conversation between the film collaborators. “When you feel good, you are more likely to speculate and less likely to plan,” says the the robot narrator, while one of the friends states, “Real change is right in front of your eyes. You’re just not lazy enough to see it. You have to be drunk, I guess.” The video piece introduces theoretical discourse into the space, functioning much as Gillick’s text pieces do. In this way, past ideologies float next to more present ways of thinking, in a seemingly endless open-ended dialogue.

Which Witch is Which? and/or Summertime is on view through Saturday, December 18.  For more information about this exhibit and other events at White Flag, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

Which Witch is Which? and/or Summertime is a group exhibition operating on a level of truthfulness that dips in and out of questionability without ever ringing conventionally false.

Liam Gillick’s video piece Vicinato 2 (made in collaboration with Douglas Gordan, Carsten Holler, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija) opens with a nighttime shot of a brightly lit city and a robotic narrator who states: “The camera pulls back from the city. The scene is being set. It could be daytime or nighttime. There will be four characters who think they are friends.” The scripted nature of the conversations of the four “friends,” the emotionless affect of the narrator, the references to the work’s own inevitable narrative (another voice-over: “This scene is only important to link what you saw before with what will happen next”) add up to an admission of artifice that might drown the work in self-consciousness. Instead, it opens up a profound space for questioning and demonstrates a curious emotional depth.

Scripted in a different way is Ajay Kurian’s “Studio Visit #1: Auder and Kurian,” an interview between artist Michel Auder and Which Witch is Which? and/or Summertime’s curator that intimates a false veneer the moment you pick up the earphones to listen to the supposed audio of the transcript. The first rift in the façade is that the voices in the audio are female. Holes in the conversation, then, can be heard – such as a “the” that goes unsaid but documented in the transcript, or a pause in a response doesn’t seem to logically follow the flow of the conversation. The listener, then, is pitched into uncertainty – Is it truth? Is it fiction?

And what about the text on the wall, claiming to be a note from Kurian regarding his thoughts about the exhibition? Does it relay an event that actually happened?

Bruno Latour, as quoted in Kurian’s essay for the exhibition, declares, “Truth is nothing but a chain of translation without resemblance from one actor to the next.” Which Witch plays with an investigation of truth through distortion; many of the works – particularly Maria Petschnig, Michel Auder and Leigh Ledare’s – present us with ostensible “truths” from the artists’ lives, fragments of their realities. Though they document real life, they nevertheless are not real life – instead creating a parallel universe that mirrors but do not reflect.

The truth, this show seems to say, exists in innumerable possibilities – from the works themselves, the lives referenced in the work, and our sense of the work as we navigate the context of exhibition. Darren Bader’s “Friends” is a collection of standard black combs affixed to the gallery walls, placed in unexpected locations that highlight the process of searching in-between – the truth lies not in the destination of the found comb, but in the act of looking for it. Our engagement with the piece, and not the significance of the locations themselves, is what activates it.

In the end we are left not with an ultimatum or a realization, but with an open invitation for conversation. Kurian’s essay attempts to guide us through this “this strange and unlit space”, and proffers: “Perhaps the life of a show is based primarily on what is left out, what remains to be said by others, allowing the organism to have not one center but many nodes of interaction, joining and separating without end or answer.”

Which Witch is Which? and/or Summertime is on view at White Flag Projects until December 18.  For more information on our current exhibition and other upcoming events, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

Ajay Kurian wears both the hat of the artist and the organizer for Which Witch is Which? and/or Summertime, a group show he’s assembled for White Flag Projects, to open here this Saturday, November 6. Kurian is the founder of Gresham’s Ghost, a gallery that operates more as a framework or philosophy than as an actual space. Gresham’s Ghost, the website explains, “was conceived … as a roving project. Its iterations consistently form and reform its intent and mission. Though golden in color, the grasshopper remains plastic.” Its mission statement, cryptic as it sounds, reveals much about the nature of the project.

ArtSlant lists Gresham’s Ghost’s address as: ROVING, New York, NY. Each exhibition takes place in a different location, depending on the artists involved and the themes of their works. “Each space is in connection with the idea for the show,” Kurian explains in an interview with James Kalm, creating what he calls “a reciprocal relationship.” The gallery/project does not seek to provide a stable, neutral space for represented artists; rather, it plays matchmaker, forging connections between artists and finding appropriate spaces in which to let those conversations play out. Each iteration of Gresham’s Ghost becomes a discrete project of chance, talent and concept.

While its first show took place on Wooster Street, its third and fourth show, each titled Cave Painting (split into two installments), took place, suitably, in a cave-like basement on 25th Street. Organized by Bob Nickas, the show included many of the artists featured in Nickas’ book, Painting Abstraction, and displayed a wide range of works in a setting that recalled the origins of art making.

What struck me most about the reviews of and assorted writing about Cave Paintings was its focus on the relationship between the artworks and the space, rather than simply the artworks themselves. This was a sign, I thought, not that the space detracted or distracted from the pieces, but that it did what Gresham’s Ghost set out to do, which was to offer an alternative to the typical gallery experience.

No More Presence, Gresham’s Ghost’s fourth show, included Uri Aran and Liam Gillick as its first two participants in an experimental project that involved an exchange of gifts between the two individuals. This idea of gift-giving extended to the acquisition of space for the exhibition – which was an exchange between the exhibition’s host and Gresham’s Ghost. Subsequent No More Presence shows will continue, independent of Gresham’s Ghost. Liam Gillick re-joins Kurian in White Flag’s current exhibit.

Gresham’s Ghost and its future endeavors remain, true to its nature, elusive and unpredictable, but for now you can view Ajay Kurian’s own work and his curatorial sensibility in Which Witch is Which? and/or Summertime – also a project independent of Gresham’s Ghost but similar in spirit.

The opening reception for Which Witch is Which? and/or Summertime takes place this Saturday, November 6, from 7 – 10 p.m. White Flag Projects is located at 4568 Manchester Avenue, at the intersection of Kingshighway.

If you’re unfamiliar with Golden Age, this is the perfect time to become acquainted. Hailing from the hot-bed of creative activity that is Chicago, Golden Age will set up shop in our space next weekend, from October 1-2. Join us Friday evening for the opening of Golden Age: Permanent Collection I and a first look at the goods on sale. This “pop-up” shop will feature a lovingly curated mix of artists books, exhibition catalogues, and limited edition tote bags, so you can carry that special book you’re eyeing safely home. Golden Age will stay open on Saturday from 12-5pm, after which it will be back on the road.

Their dynamic catalog includes everything from a North Drive Press box set containing artist multiples and interviews to a bootleg cassette of Javelin’s recordings. They have recently published Can I Come Over to Your House, a comprehensive 10th anniversary review of The Suburban, the Oak Park-based exhibition space co-run by Michelle Grabner, curator of White Flag’s exhibit Newtonland, from last season.

North Drive Press 05 – Various Artists | Can I Come Over to Your House

In addition to distributing books, zines, and albums, Golden Age hosts exhibitions and performances in-store. Cadaver Corpse presented a playful collection of exquisite corpse works from artists around the world. Zachary Kaplan’s Popular Reactions to September 11 invited participants to engage in a conversation centered around film, music, and text through the project’s weblog.

As a creative nexus, Golden Age works with an amazing variety of artists and idea-generators. Come see for yourself at our pop-up shop event – whether your obsessions lie in magazines, artist interviews, or sonic experimentation, Golden Age: Permanent Collection I is bound to satisfy that niche craving.

Golden Age: Permanent Collection I will open the evening of Friday, October 1st and continue through gallery hours on Saturday, October 2. For more information on Golden Age, visit www.shopgoldenage.com. For more information about White Flag and upcoming events and exhibitions, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.