International Art News

The Fir-Palm (1991/2012) Silver Gelatin Print (Photomontage); 50h x 40w in (127h x 101.6w cm)

April 11 – May 19, 2012 – Alexander Gray Associates
Alexander Gray Associates is pleased to present Lorraine O’Grady’s second exhibition with the Gallery, entitled New Worlds. On view is the artist’s recent video work, Landscape (Western Hemisphere), 2011, in conversation with two photomontages from her iconic BodyGround series, conceived in 1991 and re-formatted in 2012.

The Fir-Palm (1991/2012), a black-and-white photomontage, depicts a hybrid New England fir–Caribbean palm tree sprouting from a female torso, clouds looming in the background. With this legible symbolism, O’Grady—born and raised in Boston to Jamaican parents—questions the nature of desire, identity, and stability in a society rooted in physical, psychological, and cultural hybridity.

Where The Fir-Palm identifies a new Western landscape, O’Grady’s photo-diptych The Clearing confronts the old one through narrative. The left panel presents an image of an inter-racial couple, ecstatic and intertwined, floating in the sky. Two children play in the forest clearing below, a pile of clothing topped with a gun laying haphazardly nearby. In the right panel, the Black woman’s vacant body is stretched out on the grass, and her White partner is masked by a skull and draped in a chain-mail vest. No children are in sight. Through its subtitle—or Cortez and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me—O’Grady reminds viewers that this most basic Colonial interaction, in all its pleasure, brutality, and complexity, paved the way for the Western hemisphere as it is known today.

Body/Ground (The Clearing: or Cortez and La Malinche. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me) (1991/2012) Silver Gelatin Print (Photomontage); Diptych; 40h x 50w in (101.6h x 127w cm) (each)

O’Grady’s amalgamation of the colonized body and landscape reaches its zenith in Landscape (Western Hemisphere), in which O’Grady’s own hair is transformed into landscape. For the duration of the video’s 18 minutes, the artist’s hair waves, rustles, and bends to the wind, against a subtle audio collage of sounds from the hemisphere’s natural and urban landscapes. The video was funded in part by The Albright-Knox Gallery and Beyond/In Western New York.

“My attitude about hybridity,” says O’Grady, “is that it is essential to understanding what is happening here. People’s reluctance to acknowledge it is part of the problem…. The argument for embracing the Other is more realistic than what is usually argued for, which is an idealistic and almost romantic maintenance of difference. But I don’t mean interracial sex literally. I’m really advocating for the kind of miscegenated thinking that’s needed to deal with what we’ve already created here.”

Gallery Hours

Craig Handley - who'sthatcrankybastard - oil on canvas - 66 x 76 cm

10 March – 28 March – Gallery Richard Martin
Craig Handley’s work has already found its way into private collections around Australia as well as overseas to Hong Kong, New York, Scotland and Singapore.

Craig Handley- incoming - oil on canvas - 76 x 92 cm

“I like … enigmatic and mysterious subject matter; the frozen, unreal atmosphere of a stage or film set; to deliberately juxtapose elements to aim for uneasy mood; to create a slightly unsettling feeling of the familiar but yet unknown.
My work is a medley, a collage of all the things I come across while travelling about. They are rearrangements, a hodgepodge of places and objects and light. Painting for me is also about introspection, an attempt to make sense of all the imagery of my mind and cobble it together into a painting; I like to delve into my personal history, both the emotional and the visual. My early training as a sign writer ingrains a tight control that is hard to shake. The years spent telling stories visually in animation give my work that ‘here is the camera’ sort of feel.”

Gallery Hours

Collage, 2011

From the 3rd of September to the 11th of October 2011 – Galerie Zürcher – Paris
Brian Belott is an artist currently residing in New York. He works in a variety of media, including performance, painting, collage, often including found objects in his artworks such as photographs, and in 2007 he published his first book, “Wipe That Clock Off Your Face.” Brian received his B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1995 and has since exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at CANADA Gallery, Cheim & Read Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Galerie Zürcher in Paris, France.

Galerie Hours

Agathe Snow Tower of Pisa, 2010 Arc de Triomphe, 2010 Collage for the catalogue All Access World, Photo: Kris McKay

January 28 until March 30, 2011 – Deutsche Guggenheim
Agathe Snow’s (b. 1976, Corsica, France) work balances visions of apocalypse and entropic decay with an earnest faith in the redemptive power of human ingenuity and community. Her performances, ranging from carnivalesque banquets to her legendary dance marathons, operate as scenarios for uninhibited social exchange, always enacted with a fierce conceptual commitment. Performative elements and elaborate fictions also underpin Snow’s sculptural installations, which she fashions from an exuberant array of debris scavenged from local streets. With the transformative addition of paint, plaster, and collage, she coaxes her found objects and their attendant histories into evocative new forms that frequently develop and mutate over the course of an exhibition. For her forthcoming Deutsche Guggenheim commission, Snow will present a characteristically multivalent project that explores the rich thematic valences of monuments and landmarks around the world.

Museum Hours