Archive | January, 2015
Piero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence, co-curated by Dennis Geronimus, opens on February 1 at National Gallery of Art
30 JanTONIGHT!!! Innovations in Adaptive Reuse in the UK: An introduction to the NYU M.A. in Historical and Sustainable Architecture
29 Jan
King’s Cross Regeneration Plan, 2010-pres.
Astley Castle, 12th century, before
Astley Castle, 12th century, after, restored by The Landmark Trust, Witherford, Watson, Mann Architects, 2007-2012 (Stirling Prize, 2013)
Mosette Broderick and Jon Ritter, Program Directors
Thursday, January 29, 2015, 6:30 pm
Silver Center 307
100 Washington Square East
Looking for a future path? Love old buildings? Why not make them new again? Join Professors Broderick and Ritter for a survey of recent innovations in adaptive reuse in the UK, as well as an introduction to NYU’s London-based M.A. Program. Come learn how to enter the field of adaptive reuse and sustainable building practice at our spring open house. Professors Broderick and Ritter will discuss recent projects and answer questions about admissions for 2015-16; our faculty and curriculum; and career opportunities in the field.
Sponsored by the NYU M.A. in Historical and Sustainable Architecture
For more information, see our web pages.
HOLDING THE BAG Davina Semo Opening reception: Thursday January 22, 6 – 8 pm
20 Jan
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Rawson Projects is pleased to announce the second installment of A Process Series, five mini-exhibitions that invite each artist to transform the gallery space in order to present and explore the inspiration behind their most recent work.
Rawson Projects: When you were approached to participate in the exhibition what were your initial reactions?
Davina Semo: I was touched and impressed that you invited me to make an exhibition about a side project, or about something that inspires me, and that you suggested two of the images on my wall as a starting point, because it signified to me that after leaving my studio, you spent time thinking about our discussions and the extra materials around my studio. I admit that you approached me to do this show during a period when I’ve been questioning the extent to which the thoughts behind my work are important to the work itself, and if they are important, what are some strategies I can use to try and foreground the ideas. I’m not a mind reader, and I’m speaking generally, so please apply all disclaimers and exceptions, but increasingly I have the sense that people are cramming studio visits into their already impossible schedules, and it’s hard for me to gauge how much is really shared during a visit. Studio visits are not unique in this way, the increasing degree to which the art world is acquiescing to being a community that embraces the massive circulation of reductive information is unsettling. Paradoxically, it seems that because people are so eager to learn about what many artists are making—which I will describe as an affirming phenomenon—the experience of sharing my work with someone can turn into a frustrating setup, wherein I feel pressure to explain my work in the quickest and most succinct way. I’m afraid the risk here is that the ideas behind the work are either outright ignored, or are passed over because of time constraints. Amidst these thoughts, being asked to make an exhibition that focuses on a side project or inspirational materials is welcome. Also: I’ve never been asked to do a solo project quite like this, organized around something besides my sculptures themselves.
RP: What is the relationship of the exhibition to your larger body of work?
DS: This exhibition begins with two photographs of an interrogation room in Guantanamo. These photographs are a somewhat random jumping off point for this exhibition, because I don’t work directly from sources, and it is not these images specifically that inspired the work in this exhibition. Rather, I’m showing sculptures and objects that I’ve been working on in my studio anyway, but selecting the pieces using these two photographs as an organizing aura for the exhibition.
RP: Did you find the idea of having the freedom to show something that was “inspirational” or unrelated to your primary studio practice challenging?
DS: I don’t find the exercise of organizing the exhibition as challenging as I find the mental hurdle of moving past my anxieties about people reading my work through an overly narrow, politicized lens. Generally speaking, I’m a big reader, and news junkie, and by revealing the source images I’m using to organize the exhibition, I’m afraid that people might read my works as illustrative of the literal and affective worlds pictured in the photographs. I don’t understand there to be a 1:1 relationship between an idea and an artwork, and I see my work as more of an intuitive distillation of many feelings and thoughts and experiences.
Davina Semo has had recent solo exhibitions at Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, and White Flag Library, St. Louis. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions both in the United States and abroad such as Cemeterium at Emerson Dorsh Gallery, Miami, curated by Regina Rex, and Another, Once Again, Many Times More at Martos Gallery, New York. Semo has work included in an upcoming exhibition at U.S. Blues, Brooklyn in February. She lives and works in New York City.
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Redidas® by Wendy White
15 Jan
Through January 18
Redidas® by Wendy White is re-purposed/re-branded pop-up shop conceived by the artist and will be the first installation conceived as part of the ‘A Process Series’ program of exhibitions on view at the gallery from January 11 – March 15, 2015.
Read the review on ArtInfo.com and see the full exhibition schedule.
An interview between the gallery and the artist follows:
Rawson Projects: When you were approached to participate in the exhibition what were your initial reactions? Did you find the idea of having the freedom to show something that was “inspirational” or unrelated to your primary studio practice challenging? How did you arrive at Redidas®?
Wendy White: I’d been thinking about how symbols and logos gain the power to make us want stuff through clever design and advertising. Brand loyalty. The garments underneath logos are pretty much the same. Polo made their logo giant size, and suddenly a whole new audience gives a crap. iPhone factories are evil, but we wait in lines for them because they’ve sold us on a lifestyle. It’s weird and basic but also profound in a way. This project appealed to me as a way to examine that, along with the crossover to art, within a gallery context. The idea of clothes in a store-like installation intrigued me because they are inert objects that will eventually be worn rather than just being stand-ins for the figure. Also clothing, mannequins and display are all current trends in art despite or perhaps because of their ubiquity in retail contexts. So I thought of a pop-up shop of rebranded clothing as the perfect way to investigate that, and it became Redidas®. It’s a participatory “installation” of wearable pieces. You can touch stuff. You can try them on. You can buy something right off the wall and take it with you. Everything may have started as a mass-produced item but now they’re DIY one-offs.
RP: Do you consider this project to be critical of either modern marketing practices or contemporary art itself? There seems to be a steady conflation of the two– Ruby Sterling and Raf Simons, for example. Does that interest you as an area for investigation?
WW: Yes! It’s crazy to me how fashion is vilified as being superficial or somehow not as serious as fine art. I love the Sterling Ruby/Raf Simons collaboration. In general, I applaud artists who have the guts to branch out into different creative zones. A lot of artists don’t wear any overt brands or show any sense of personal style, yet they’ll ruthlessly brand their work by doing the same shit over and over for forty years, all under a veil of authenticity and scholarship. Have a style, but whatever you do, don’t have style! It’s hypocrisy, and it’s boring. Very simply, what I’m trying to do with Redidas® is blur the line between what I make and what I wear. I’m co-opting my own style and repurposing it.
Wendy White has had recent solo exhibitions at Van Horn, Düsseldorf, M Building, Miami, Andrew Rafacz, Chicago and Maruani and Noirhomme, Brussels and has been included in numerous group exhibitions both in the United States and abroad. Her work is featured in Vitamin P2: New Perspectives in Painting, published by Phaidon Press and is also included in the recent publication Studio Life: Rituals, Collections, Tools, and Observations on the Artistic Process by Sarah Trigg. White has an upcoming solo exhibition ’12th MAN’ at David Castillo Gallery in Miami in February. She lives and works in New York City.
For more information please contact the gallery at info@rawsonprojects.com
Innovations in Adaptive Reuse in the UK: An introduction to the NYU M.A. in Historical and Sustainable Architecture
14 JanKing’s Cross Regeneration Plan, 2010-pres.
Astley Castle, 12th century, before
Astley Castle, 12th century, after, restored by The Landmark Trust, Witherford, Watson, Mann Architects, 2007-2012 (Stirling Prize, 2013)
Mosette Broderick and Jon Ritter, Program Directors
Thursday, January 29, 2015, 6:30 pm
Silver Center 307
100 Washington Square East
Looking for a future path? Love old buildings? Why not make them new again? Join Professors Broderick and Ritter for a survey of recent innovations in adaptive reuse in the UK, as well as an introduction to NYU’s London-based M.A. Program. Come learn how to enter the field of adaptive reuse and sustainable building practice at our spring open house. Professors Broderick and Ritter will discuss recent projects and answer questions about admissions for 2015-16; our faculty and curriculum; and career opportunities in the field.
Sponsored by the NYU M.A. in Historical and Sustainable Architecture
For more information, see our web pages.
Professor Lucy Freeman Sandler’s latest book published by The British Library and University of Toronto Press
13 Jan
Congratulations to Helen Gould Sheppard Professor Emerita of Art History and former department chair Lucy Freeman Sandler on the recent publication of her book, Illuminators and Patrons in Fourteenth-Century England: The Psalter and Hours of Humphrey de Bohun and the Manuscripts of the Bohun Family.
The book has as its focus London, British Library MS Egerton 3277, a richly illuminated psalter and book of hours that is one of a group of ten surviving religious and devotional manuscripts and fragments written and decorated from the 1350s to the 1380s for members of the Bohun family, earls of Hereford, Essex and Northampton, and among late medieval England’s most important aristocratic families. The Bohun manuscripts are noteworthy not only for the miniaturist, jewel-like quality of their illumination and the intricacy and ingenuity of their iconographic programs, but also for the degree to which they bear witness to the Bohuns’ religious and devotional priorities, the variegated dimensions of their cultural patronage, their strategies of self-representation, their social and political world-views, and, not least, the nature of their relationships with their artist-retainers, who were long-serving members of the Bohun household and their noble employers’ intimates. All of these issues are given magisterial treatment in the present book, which also gathers together all of Professor Sandler’s earlier, important articles on the Bohun manuscripts. The book is accompanied by a DVD reproducing every page in images that can be enlarged by the viewer to show the smallest details of the illustrations.
To celebrate the publication of Illuminators and Patrons in Fourteenth-Century England, and to honor Professor Sandler’s nearly sixty years of support of The British Library and her seminal work on its manuscripts, The British Library and AMARC (The Association for Manuscripts and Archives in Research Collections) organized a conference, held on Monday, December 1st, 2014 at the British Library. English Fourteenth-Century Illuminated Manuscripts: A Conference featured papers by Paul Binski (University of Cambridge), Nigel Morgan (University of Cambridge), Kathryn A. Smith (Department of Art History, New York University), Alixe Bovey (University of Kent), Julian Luxford (University of St. Andrews), and Professor Sandler herself. More than 140 delegates attended the conference.
For more information about Professor Sandler and her work, see our March 7, 2011 blogpost.
Kathryn A. Smith
Fields of Vision 