MARCH 1 - APRIL 28, 2012
RECEPTION: THURSDAY MARCH 1, 5:00 - 8:00 PM
FREY NORRIS CONTEMPORARY
161 JESSIE STREET | SAN FRANCISCO | CA 94105
PHONE 415.346.7812 | FAX 415.346.7877
Feb 8, 2012
Mar 7, 2011
2011 paintings
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Untitled (blue nile), 2011 Mixed media on paper 51 x 80 inches |
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Untitled (sand storm), 2011 Mixed media on paper Diptych, 49 x 36 inches each panel |
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Untitled (three moons), 2011 Mixed media on paper 44.5 x 74 inches |
Mar 3, 2011
Artist Talk and Gallery Walk Through at OCMA this Sunday
SUNDAY SALON
Sunday, March 6, 2011, 2 pm
Biennial Artists in Residence:
Sherin Guirguis and Andy Kolar
Biennial Artists in Residence:
Sherin Guirguis and Andy Kolar
For more information please visit:
Contact Information
| Orange County Museum of Art 850 San Clemente Drive Newport Beach, CA 92660 Main Museum: (949) 759-1122 Email: info@ocma.net |
Feb 18, 2011
New work at Frey Norris gallery in San Francisco
161 Jessie St,
San Francisco, CA 94105
February 26 - March 26, 2011
Opening: Saturday, February 26, 4-7pm
Dec 22, 2010
Nov 18, 2010
Opening in Philly on December 3rd, 2010
Curated by Malik Gaines
December 3, 2010 – January 30, 2011
December 3, 2010 – January 30, 2011
Ei Arakawa & Sergei Tcherepnin, Xavier Cha, Zackary Drucker, Dynasty Handbag (Jibz Cameron), Mark Flores, Sherin Guirguis, Vishal Jugdeo, Nzuji De Magalhães, Wardell Milan, Meleko Mokgosi, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Taisha Paggett, Adam Pendleton, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Alexandro Segade, Kianja Strobert, Wu Ingrid Tsang, Nicolau Vergueiro
Bringing together the works of 19 diverse artists, Quadruple-Consciousness explores various tactics for representing the complex, contradictory legacies of cultural difference we bring to this contemporary moment. The title itself, a hyperbolic multiplication of W.E.B. Du Bois’ idea of Double-Consciousness, plays within the fractures of post-modern experience, transforming its alienated gaps into locations for possible expression. Through fictitious portraits, play acting, historiographic collages and alternate histories, these artists seek potential liberties within the uncertainty of irreconcilable identities. Performance, video, installation, painting, drawing, and sculpture all contribute to this mix of ideas and images.
Organized into two live events, performances will animate the exhibition’s premise with a variety of interventions. New York artists Ei Arakawa and Sergei Tcherepnin will collaborate on a performance event that assembles cultural and material strands to reflect a history of the AIDS crisis, using the film Philadelphiaas a starting image. The resulting installation with sound will echo throughout the run of the exhibition. New York-based Xavier Cha has choreographed an interaction between a dancer and a cameraman that plays in the space between live and mediated representations. Los Angeles artist Zackary Drucker uses the genre of the drag show to ask spectators “who is laughing at whom?” when gender is spectacularized. New York-based Dynasty Handbag (Jibz Cameron) uses the format of the one-woman show to frame her outrageous character, a smartly grotesque embodiment of degraded neurosis. Los Angeles artist Alexandro Segade uses acting techniques to theatricalize a speculative fiction set in a gay future, reflecting contemporary political debates around participation and exclusion. The performance resonates with Segade’s installation, which uses projected drawings of domestic life to add nuance to the public rhetoric around the administration of rights. Taisha Paggett, currently based in Chicago, will enact a critical dance performance that leaves a haunting trace in the gallery space. New York-based Adam Pendleton will collaborate with musicians on an original composition to be performed live. Pendleton’s work will also be reflected in a large print of his bold BLACK DADA manifesto.Video works will bring a variety of moving images to the conversation. Los Angeles artist Wu Ingrid Tsang’s video piece adapts his documentary feature, depicting the scene of an historic Latino transgender bar, and the complicated mix of cultures that partied there together. Filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu, currently based in Washington D.C., presents a lively meditation on West African cloth, finding spectacular differences among familiar patterns. Owusu’s short film Mi Broni Ba will also be screened. Nzuji de Magalhães, based in Costa Mesa, California, will present a video adapted from a live performance; four colorful hand-painted keyboards are played backwards by four players, as they execute a four-part composition that attempts to reflect an experience of daily life. Los Angeles-based Vishal Jugdeo offers a surreal televised world where staged interactions grow increasingly awkward and conventional programming gives way to disjoined lapses. Additional videos by Cameron, Drucker, and Segade will complement and complicate their live performances. Cameron performs a song using only her hands, Drucker and her collaborator enact both positive and negative fantasies of transgender life, and Segade offers a text and music video that imagines a radical outlaw boy-band.
Sculptures by Los Angeles artists Sherin Guirguis and Nicolau Vergueiro complicate modernist art historical concerns with beautiful objects that are culturally loaded. Guirguis’ wooden cloud of smoke that replicates an Islamic pattern and Verguiero’s tropicalist pyramid both reflect the mobility of an immigrant experience that applies polyvalent content to recognizable forms. Painters Mark Flores (Los Angeles), Meleko Mokgosi (Los Angeles), and Kianja Strobert (New York) each challenge form with their innovations. Flores’ four portraits of a classical historical figure deconstruct a long history of cultural travesty; Mokgosi’s text works critique the very modes of exhibition through which African cultures are rendered legible in the western context; and Strobert’s neon shards radically disperse the centralizing narrative of painting, leaving a trail on the gallery floor. New York artist Wardell Milan uses collage to insert brown, masculine flesh into historic botanical prints, mixing modes of naturalist knowledge with natural notions of desire, while New York-based photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya also uses elements of collage to conflate the image of a young Arab man with a photograph of the singer Nina Simone in Arabesque attire, outlining a circulation of images that have led to productively mixed up identifications.
A publication will accompany the exhibition. Contributors to a four-way conversation about the issues raised in the exhibition will include exhibition curator Malik Gaines; artist Michelle Dizon; Eungie Joo, Keith Haring Director of Education and Public Programs, New Museum; and Steven Nelson, Associate Professor of African and African American art history, UCLA.
Quadruple-Consciousness is organized by Malik Gaines, an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Gaines collaborates with the performance collective My Barbarian, and has organized exhibitions independently, and for LAXART, where he is Curator.
Oct 29, 2010
2010 California Biennial Images
The 2010 California Biennial at OCMA has opened. Here are some images of my work there.
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Bein El-Qasrein, 2010 Wood and lead kinetic sculpture 96 x 36 x 36 inches |
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| Installation shot of 2010 California Biennial |
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Installation shot of Bein El-Qarein, 2010 and Untitled (dome), 2010 |
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Untitled (dome), 2010 Mixed media on paper 51 x 96 inches each |
Oct 20, 2010
Oct 9, 2010
Preview of upcoming California Biennial in Riviera Magazine
the RadaR | art
Gender Bender!
Gender Bender!
OCMA puts the “bi” back in the California Biennial | By Grant Wahlquist |
Although the Guerrilla Girls began protesting the underrepresentation of women in cultural institutions way back in 1985, some 25 years later the art world still hasn’t gotten it together on the gender front. Even SoCal powerhouse MOCA, which brought us “Wack!: Art and the Feminist Revolution” in 2007, does not have a single major solo presentation by a female artist on the horizon. So while our friends in L.A. and San Francisco crack wise about life behind the Orange Curtain, we’ve always taken pride in the Orange County Museum of Art’s commitment to exhibiting work by women and LGBTQI people; from Catherine Opie to John Waters, the museum has boldly presented work by “outsiders” to an audience in need of a little gender trouble.
Te 2010 California Biennial opens October 24 under the baton of curator Sarah Bancroft, a talented Guggenheim transplant and newcomer to the state, and her take on the Biennial is notable for the breadth of styles involved—from traditional media like painting to performance, dance and text-based work. Te show also balances contributions from the state’s major cities, and continues the museum’s efforts at challenging the domination of the dude.
San Francisco artist Katy Grannan, whose work should be familiar to OCMA patrons from its inclusion in the museum’s “Girls Night Out” exhibition, is back for this Biennial. Grannan initially gained notice for her “Model America” project, shot in the Northeast, which involved the artist placing ads in newspapers identifying her as a female photographer seeking subjects. Te artist and her volunteers then collaboratively constructed portraits that were an examination of power dynamics.
Since relocating West, Grannan has shifted her M.O., approaching subjects and asking them to model for her in multiple sittings over the span of months or even years. Te resulting photographs depict the ever shifting and unfixed identities of each subject as they interact with the geography.
If Grannan is emblematic of a select group of more established voices the California Biennial celebrates, Dru Donovan represents the exhibition’s continued...
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| October 2010
...continued commitment to emerging artists. Donovan’s black and white photographs present suburban scenes that often seem haunted by boredom or malaise, but at other times present surprising hints of nonconformity and self-discovery.
Whereas Grannan’s subjects relate more directly to the camera (and through it, the photographer and the viewer), Donovan’s subjects are more often turned away, have their eyes closed, or face themselves in a mirror. Tis gives the pictures an attractively hermetic quality, as if they harbor a secret or ambiguity that they don’t desire to share.
Cairo-bred, Los Angeles-based Sherin Guirguis is known for her sculptures and paintings that combine diverse influences and references. For example, her recent exhibition at LAXART in Los Angeles was inspired by a pair of Bedouin earrings and resulted in a site-specific architectural installation that drew on minimalist sculpture and Arabic ornamentation.
Like Mary Heilmann—another artist beloved by OCMA— Guirguis colorfully rehabilitates painting and drawing while pushing in a historically conscious direction in a way at once personal and political. In contrast, San Francisco-based painter and bricoleur Luke Butler produces more explicitly figurative works that mine recent popular culture to present a critique of the interaction of gender and power in our supposedly enlightened times. Butler’s recent works involve appropriations of screen shots from Starsky and Hutch and Star Trek, the male leads painted against neutral backgrounds. Abstracted from their original narrative context, the sensitivity and anxiety of each character come to the fore, inducing a squirming eroticism that undermines the traditional conjunction of masculinity and authority.
Wu Tsang is a Los Angeles-based artist and activist whose deep involvement with transgender and community issues helped give birth to Wildness, a club and performance series that took place at Macarthur Park’s Silver Platter. Although Wildness is now defunct, the unique intersection of the club’s Hispanic transgender regulars and the artists that it sponsored is being memorialized in the artist’s Damelo Todo: Give Me Everything. Te film celebrates the Silver Platter as a refuge for our vulnerable trans community while presenting a meditation on the limits of the idea of community.
Whereas Wu Tsang’s gender activism dovetails into broader socio-economic issues, Jennifer Locke’s video and installation-based performances utilize the artist’s own physique to explore the interaction of the physical and the visible. Locke, a trained submission wrestler, stole the show at the inaugural exhibition of San Francisco’s Marina Abramovic Institute. Her Black/ White (ink), was a three-part action with camera live feed in which the artist transformed both her surroundings and her body by variously jumping rope in a pool of black ink, wearing white plaster blocks on her feet, and painting (in black latex no less!). Locke’s inclusion in the Biennial testifies to OCMA and Bancroft’s courage in presenting challenging, nuanced work of great intensity. She’s just the sort of strong lady OCMA has always loved. 
R
ROct. 24-March 13, 2011, ocma.net.
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| October 2010
Sep 7, 2010
Jul 5, 2010
New Painting
Jun 2, 2010
Review of Qasr El Shoaq in Art Lies
Thanks to Tucker Neel for a great review of the show. Read it here.
May 19, 2010
Limited Edition for LAXART
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Study for Qasr El-Shoaq, 2010 10 x 7 1/2 x 4 inches Plywood Edition of 10 Courtesy of the artist and LAXART |
May 14, 2010
Apr 21, 2010
Apr 3, 2010
Qasr El-Shoaq opens tonight 7-9pm at LAXART
L A XA R T is pleased to present a new site-specific sculpture by Los Angeles-based artist Sherin Guirguis. Guirguis’ work references various contradictory elements, both formal and social. Having been raised in Cairo and now living in Los Angeles, Guirguis’ project investigates the frictions between the contemporary and the traditional, the reductive and the ornamental. In LAXART s Project Space, Guirguis Qasr El-Shoaq, inspired in part by a pair of Bedouin earrings, engages both formal and social concerns by juxtaposing the reductive Western language of minimalist aesthetics with that of Eastern Arabic ornamentation. Titled after the second novel in Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, Guirguis' sculpture pairs architectural references of a specific Egyptian locale with the functional logic of one of its components--the mashrabeya. These wooden screens used for windows, while operating as a passageway between interior and exterior spaces, also delineate and distinctly separate these two domains. Like the mashrabeyas, Guirguis sculpture bifurcates the space of the gallery, generating a threshold between the public and the private, the flat and the 3-dimensional. Materially bold yet fragilely kinetic, Qasr El-Shoaq expands Guirguis navigation between two distinct worlds by giving shape to culturally divergent and opposing elements; bringing formal and informal dichotomies in contact with viewers and with each other. Sherin Guirguis was born in Luxor, Egypt in 1974. She received her BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1997 and her MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2001. Her work has been exhibited at Patricia Faure Gallery, Santa Monica; BANK, Los Angeles; Project Flower Shop, Brooklyn and POST, Los Angeles. Selected Group shows include Quickening, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tuscan; The Dreams Stuff is Made Of, ArtFrankfurt, Germany and Las Vegas Diaspora, curated by Dave Hickey at the Las Vegas Art Museum. Her work has been reviewed in the LA Times, Flash Art, Artforum and Artweek, among other publications. In addition to her own work, Guirguis has also curated several exhibitions featuring emerging artists in California. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Feb 22, 2010
Amir H. Fallah from Beautiful/Decay came by the studio last month. Check out the pictures at Beautiful/Decay.com
Jan 23, 2010
Mashrabeya sculpture at the Armory Center for the Arts
Mashrabeya, 2009
Plywood
92 x 94 x 77 inches
Under the Knife at the Armory Center for the Arts
March 22 – May 10, 2009
curated by Sinead Finnerty-PineThe origins of employing cutting to create art date back to Ancient China, and evolved into popular techniques over the centuries and around the world. At the beginning of the 20th century, art techniques such as decoupage, scrapbooking, silhouetting and decorative paper cutting coincided with the Arts and Crafts movement, which embraced the rejection of industrialization and commercialism. The Modern Art Movement, on the other hand, rejected the conformity to traditional academic and artistic rules and values.
An interesting coincidence occurred at this time when collage, a technique practiced for centuries, was elevated to high art status by Picasso and Braque. No longer associated with decorative cutting and pasting, this practice became synonymous with the avant-garde and comprehensively reexamined the relationship between painting and sculpture.
Today, at the start of a new century, a postmodern esthetic which embraces contradiction, allows for craft and fine art techniques to coalesce harmoniously. Artistic investigations into processes and materials have permitted contemporary artists to draw new conclusions without preconceived notions. What has emerged are graphically complex works that examine the pure technique of cutting and the endless possibilities that can occur when the paintbrush, pencil and chisel are replaced with the knife.
In the exhibition Under the Knife, twelve contemporary artists are using saws, lasers, Xacto knives, and scissors - and employing a variety of media - to sculpt, paint, and draw with cut lines and forms. Each artist possesses her/his own mastery of these seemingly violent tools to create delicate yet often commanding artistic gestures.
Paintings
Untitled (stars & strikes), 2008
Watercolor, ink and gold leaf on hand cut paper
50 x 75 inches
Untitled (smoke screen), 2008
Watercolor, ink and silver leaf on hand cut paper
49 x 76 inches
Untitled (serpent), 2008
Watercolor, ink and silver leaf on hand cut paper
75 x 51 inches
Untitled (scorpion), 2009
Watercolor, Ink, gold leaf on hand cut paper
49 x 69 inches
Untitled (island), 2009
Watercolor, ink and silver leaf on hand cut paper
49 x 58 inches
Untitled, 2009
Watercolor, Ink, silver leaf on hand cut paper
31 x 46 inches (framed)
Untitled, 2009
Watercolor, Ink, gold leaf on hand cut paper
31 x 46 inches (framed)
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