Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer, ”Under Nomadic Surfaces”

Sarah Cooper / Nina Gorfer
Cooper and Gorfer, Women Boats Left, 2008-10, image: Christian Larsen

Based in Göteborg, Sweden, the artists Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer began to collaborate in 2006, for they share an attraction to issues of place and the act of site-specific storytelling. “Under Nomadic Surfaces,” the duo’s latest exhibition, presents images from their travels to Kyrgyzstan and Qatar; all of the works depict individuals who crossed their paths. The artists emphasize the personal narratives of each subject, eschewing the obvious political or religious connotations that could be extracted from these pictures. Instead, Cooper and Gorfer attempt to portray the memories of each person to communicate the passage of time. The works also highlight the countries’ ongoing transformations in order to reflect on changes that may not be readily visible. More »

Gunilla Klingberg, Parallelareal Curry Lines

Gunilla Klingberg
Gunilla Klingberg, Parallelareal Curry Lines, 2010, image: Galerie Nordenhake

Stockholm-based Swedish artist Gunilla Klingberg presents an installation with five accompanying art objects reminding art lovers why it remains important to personally experience art in real life. The focus of this examination is on Klingberg’s oversized display of red grid lines entitled Parallelareal Curry Lines, 2010 that make their way across Galerie Nordenhake’s floor, creeping up walls and weaving their way through the open space. Many artists possess a longstanding historical and intrinsic interest in the occult, superstition and spirituality; Klingberg’s installation consisting of these fiery markers of vinyl tape persuade the viewer to consider Manfred Curry’s mystical invention of curry lines. Once used to help decipher the world’s electromagnetic energies―both positive and negative―through dowsing, these rods were part of an effort to unleash or locate natural phenomena buried within. More »

Anders Petersen, From Back Home

Anders Petersen
Anders Petersen, From Back Home, 2008, image: Anders Petersen

Well-known Swedish photographer Anders Petersen has been taking photographs since he left home at eighteen, beginning in Hamburg, Germany in the ’60s with outsider figures and acquaintances at a bar called Café Lehmitz, leading up to his latest show at Stockholm’s Fotografiska Museet displaying a fine-tuned collection of 100 black and white photographs taken in Värmland, Sweden. With so many photographs displayed side by side, it is easy to overlook some, focusing more on others that more permanently find their way into the viewer’s domain of interest. More »

Janice Lee, Kerotakis

Janice Lee
image: Janice Lee

Much is happening on the pages of contemporary literature. Yet, it cannot be concluded that events on the page are closely inspired by those occurring in the world. Sometimes, a writer throws its readers for a loop, and it can be a pleasant sensation. Los Angeles-based writer Janice Lee introduces her literary debut Kērotakis: an offering of strangeness, constructed to allow a number of poetic voices ample stage to be heard—these creations sometimes emerge with the intention of folding in on themselves or exploding already-existing limits, reaching far from reality, hinting towards blissful escapism. More »

Lily Hoang, The Evolutionary Revolution

Micro chapters that can stand alone or be read in a linear fashion, Lily Hoang’s The Evolutionary Revolution is a book of sly stepping stones, stepping away from the world as it is now. The world as it is now is assumed by many to be out of our hands, something unstable, something that both affects us yet is not within our reach to fix or improve at moments of strife or general concern. Hoang’s chapters have grandiose names such as “The Imperial Council,” “Man Emerging” and “How the Sea Became Salty,” for the times beg for at least grounded, surefooted beginnings—even if many find themselves wading in obscurity after a story unfolds. More »

Daniel Andersson, Big Block Beauty

Daniel Andersson
Daniel Andersson, Big Block Beauty, 2009, image: Daniel Andersson

In Sweden—where public transportation is quite sufficient and considered to be superior to competing modes of mobility—it is an oddly welcome change of pace to see one’s creative focus shift towards the automobile culture. Swedish artist Daniel Andersson recently presented Big Block Beauty, 2009 alongside the work of twelve other artists in “Bilen i våra hjärtan” (i.e. “The Car in Our Hearts”) at Skövde Kulturhus. Situated in the heartland of Sweden, works in this group show expressed nostalgia towards what the car once was, appreciation for the its power and speed, as well as evaluate the environmental impact that these machines have on today’s volatile era. More »

“Runaway Train”

Jenny Lindblom
Jenny Lindblom, Untitled (Limited Ambition), 2010, image: Bonniers Konsthall

Every spring at Bonniers Konsthall, an effort is made to share the work of emerging Swedish artists  that are considered to be cutting-edge, contemporary, and altogether de rigueur. The curators this round tried a different spin; they chose to focus on the works of eleven Swedish artists who now make work and reside outside Sweden—in other words, expatriates who have chosen to produce work under the influence of other cultures. Which begs the question: what makes these artists Swedish anyway? (Though nationality as an aesthetic construct has long passed out of vogue at places such as the Whitney Museum of American Art or at the Venice Biennale where Liam Gillick last represented Germany.) When examined more closely, does an artist possess a right or responsibility to identify with one’s origin, considering morphing notions of immigration, homeland and patriotism? More »

Tony Matelli, “The Constant Now”

Tony Matelli
Tony Matelli, The Constant Now, 2010, image: Andréhn-Schiptjenko

“The Constant Now,” Tony Matelli’s fourth solo exhibition at this gallery, presents five new sculptures and three paintings that are reminiscent of his previous explorations. For example, there are obvious similarities between his sculpture Josh, 2010, and Sleepwalker, 2001: Both eerily depict displaced human figures and appear to be conspicuous mockeries. This show more fully formulates a question that his earlier work touched on: What particular value can be found in art that overstates a seemingly directionless, wasted state of being? More »

Macgregor Card, Duties of an English Foreign Secretary

New York City-based poet and bibliographer Macgregor Card is taking readers along for a ride that isn’t always comforting, but neither is reality. In Duties of an English Foreign Secretary, which is the 2009 Fence Modern Poet Series winner, we might find ourselves careening between Card’s unusual humor, his penchant for flourishing outpours and confessions, and a heavy honesty reminiscent of trying to chat with a distant relative but not really reaching them despite wholehearted attempts—a kind of honesty not always accepted or even recognized. More »