bittle

THE WEEK/WEEKEND: September 6-13.

| The 22 Magazine

VALERIE HEGARTY: Figure, Flowers, Fruit
Nicelle Beauchene Gallery
September 9, 2012 – October 21, 2012

In this exhibition, Hegarty takes her point of departure from themes of consumption, lust,reproduction and greed. Playing with traditional still life and figurative painting, Hegarty cites as inspiration the cult comedy Little Shop of Horrors along with current newsheadlines concerning the enhancement and mutilation of body and food. These four new paintings metamorphose sculpturally, as the paintings burst, grow and propagate in bodily gestures, leading the overgrowth to travel ominously beyond the canvas boundaries.

Strange Tales of Liaozhai
Friday, September 7
HERE Arts Center

Through choreography and manipulation, master puppeteer Hanne Tierney conducts an intricate counterweight system of over 100 strings, transforming a full stage of inanimate objects into the players of two emotionally charged tales.

Nancy Davidson: Dustup
Betty Cunningham Gallery
9/6/2012 To 10/6/2012

Betty Cuningham Gallery is pleased to open its 2012-13 season with Nancy Davidson, featuring her inflatable sculpture, Dustup. This will be the artist’s first exhibition at the Gallery. The artist will be present for the opening reception. Davidson, a sculptor and video artist, is known for her unique media – larger than life inflatable sculptures – and for her interest in American icons and gender issues. In 2005 with the support of a Creative Capital Grant, she began her exploration on the myth and reality of the cowgirl. After researching western women’s history Davidson focused on the rodeo cowgirl.

Thomas Allen: Beautiful Evidence
Sep 9 – Oct 14, 2012
Foley Gallery

Allen’s signature use of cutting and repurposing book illustrations has not vanished. Instead of the pulp fiction genre, Allen plays with 50’s era versions of clean cut youths and domesticated moms. His unmistakable talent for creating the illusion of 3D in photography with his deft cuts and crimps, establishes a magical world in which a boy and girl play tag creating their own kind of electricity, a milkman makes a very special delivery in space, young toughs play marbles with the solar system and a mother busily sews her own version of “string theory.”

David Stoupakis/Matthew Bone
September 8th – October 19th
Last Rites Gallery

David Stoupakis is an internationally recognized painter who creates eerie portraits of beings that appear wise beyond their years. The self-taught artist adds both haunting imagery and grim fairytale-like elements to his work to juxtapoz childhood innocence with macabre surroundings. InAshes to Sorrow, his new collection of drawings and oil paintings, David creates a continuation of his previous body of work-Walking with These Shadows./With his new work, Matthew Bone continues to explore the visual language he created as a child when massive unmonitored media consumption informed his worldview. A latchkey kid from an early age, pornography, comic books and movies formulated his ideas of sexuality, masculinity, and femininity- in essence reality and perception were sculpted by imaginary worlds steeped heavily in sensationalistic imagery.

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THE WEEK/WEEKEND: August 30-September 6.

| The 22 Magazine



Shea Hembrey: dark matters
Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery
September 6 – October 20, 2012

Following his acclaimed project SEEK, featured as a 2011 TED Talk, Hembrey’s new work attempts to visualize his 20 year exploration of dark matter and dark energy (scientifically hypothesized to comprise over 95% of the cosmos). Hembrey’s paintings and sculptures are a collective meditation on the unseen structure of our universe. Painted with trompe l’oeil technique, the series Unstill Lifes attempts to visualize the tangible structures of matter pared down to bits. Ghostly wisps of smoke appear to the viewer at certain angles and improbable assemblages of matches, tree branches, and string appear to float off of the inky blackground.

MERNET LARSEN: THREE CHAPTERS
Vogt Gallery
CHAPTER 1: HEADS AND BODIES (SEPT. 6 – 26)
CHAPTER 2: PLACES (SEPT. 27 – OCT. 10)
CHAPTER 3: NARRATIVES (OCT. 11 – 27)

Larsen is an accomplished painter who has always challenged herself to invent new styles and ways of composition. Her recent oeuvre marks a synopsis of previous works ranging between abstraction and figuration. Using modernist Russian constructivist paintings as a point of departure for numerous compositions, she also engages ideas of reverse perspective and conflicting vanishing points, as can be found in Japanese narrative scrolls. Her pool of inspirations is vast, ranging from masterpieces of Renaissance through 20th century art, to traditional Japanese puppet theatre, to photographs she has taken of classrooms and faculty meetings during her 35-year long Professorship in Florida.

Ghostly International & Rvng Intl. Present: Jacaszek (Poland) / Holly Herndon (USA)
Roulette
Thursday, September 6, 2012 @ 8:00 pm

Roulette with Ghostly International and Rvng Intl. are pleased to present an evening of electroacoustic music, featuring a rare US performance by Polish composer Jacaszek and San Francisco based Holly Herndon.

ERIK PARKER: BYE BYE BABYLON
Thursday, 6 September, Opening Reception 6-8PM
Paul Kasmin Gallery

Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of eleven 2012 still-life and jungle-landscape paintings by Erik Parker (b. 1968 Stuttgart, Germany; lives and works in New York City). Updating these traditional art-historical genres through the pictorial idioms and sly humor of satirical cartoons, psychedelia, and underground comic books, Parker’s paintings provide vistas into brilliantly colored worlds of semi-sentient flora and idiosyncratic geometries.

Julia Haltigan / Rusty Belle
Joe’s Pub
August 31

The members of Rusty Belle swagger between raw blues, tiny tangos, country waltzes and backyard symphonies. Sometimes a walk with the Roma, a twisted tale in metered time, or a yell-along-after-dinner drunken opera. A dance band that tries to tie your shoes together. The music is littered with dented paint cans, smashed up trashcan lids, old hacksaw blades, and broken glass. Like junkyard songbirds, they sing sweet through all the rubbage.


Stephen Powers: A Word is Worth A Thousand Pictures
Joshua Liner Gallery
September 6 to September 29, 2012

After seven years since Stephen Powers’ last solo exhibition in New York, Joshua Liner Gallery is pleased to present A Word is Worth a Thousand Pictures. In this new exhibition series, the prolific artist will present a panoramic assemblage of paintings that will occupy the entire breadth of the gallery. A Word is Worth a Thousand Pictures will consist of a multitude of enamel on aluminum paintings, ranging from 10-x-8 inches to 10-x-10 feet.

ECLIPSE (Jonah Bokaer x Anthony McCall)
BAM
Sep 5—Sep 9, 2012

Choreographer Jonah Bokaer and artist Anthony McCall explore total motion in this breathtaking collaboration that places dance within an installation built from shifting avenues of light and spatialized, sonic images. Featuring four dancers as well as a special appearance by Bokaer,ECLIPSE utilizes the unique flexibility of the Fishman Space, with a four-sided seating configuration to create an utterly intimate experience between artists and audience.

MICROCOSMOS with live soundtrack by LDP, David First, and Matthew Regula
Nitehawk Cinema
Friday September 7th with composer David First
Saturday September 8th with Telecult Powers mem Matthew Regula

LONG DISTANCE POISON play live music & soundscape to the film. Composer David First will be sitting in with LONG DISTANCE POISON on Friday and TELECULT POWERS member Matthew Regula will be sitting in on Saturday.

Bushwick Blackout
The Shirey
August 31 – September 21, 2012

The Shirey is pleased to present Bushwick Blackout, an immersive multi-media exhibition and video screening of luminous works that twinkle and glow in the dark.In this exhibition, traditional gallery lighting is abandoned. The only sources of light are ultraviolet lamps and the works themselves. Emerging from the walls, ceiling, and floors, the works create a three-dimensional constellation, encompassing the viewer and transforming the conventional gallery space into a spellbound landscape.

FLASH POINT/ NYC: WRITERS AND COMPOSERS
Thursday,  Aug 30 – 6:00PM
Cornelia St Cafe

A multidisciplinary call-and-response experience, the FLASH POINT/ NYC ensemble of writers and composers interweave new hybrid texts, flash fiction, micro memoir and prose poems across the harmonic rhythms, inversions, melodies and lines of original live jazz. Synchronicities and spontaneities emerge, converge and diverge to cross genres, provoke tradition and explore the territories ahead.

Butoh Electra
August 29 – September 8
Irondale Center

The magnificent, intense and intelligent Butoh Electra is created and performed by the highly acclaimed ensemble, The Ume Group. A “beautiful and disturbing” piece (NYTheatre.com), Butoh Electra presents Sophocles’ Greek revenge tragedy as the story of a woman whose vibrant inner life is corrupted by the world of walking dead in which she lives.

Joianne Bittle: On My Way Gone
September 6 – October 13, 2012
Churner and Churner
Churner and Churner is pleased to present “On My Way Gone,” an exhibition of new work by Joanne Bittle. With an installation, over twenty-five paintings, and the artist’s first film, the exhibition is Bittle’s largest and most ambitious to date. This is her second show with the gallery.

KWANG YOUNG CHUN
Brötzmann/ Adasiewicz Duo and Joshua Abrams Natural Information Society with Chad Taylor
JISOO LEE/Marie Sivak/Sylvia Netzer
Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep
Sweet Corruptions
LIEBE LOVE AMOUR!
MICHAEL ANDERSON ABJECT STREET WALLPAPER
Governor’s Island Art Fair
Elad Lassry: Untitled (Presence)
Harry Pussy Record Release Party with Bill Orcutt & Chris Corsano
The Snow / C. Gibbs/Annie and The Beekeepers with special guest Wilsen
Fujiya & Miyagi, Hess Is More, Wishes
THE FEVERISH LIBRARY
DO IT AWAKE! (on Mysterious Mountain)
Riitta Ikonen: Post
How Not to Read: Harnessing The Power of a Literature-Free Life”
Jiha Moon: Stars Down to Earth (Artist Talk)
SAUL WILLIAMS Presents CHORUS – A spoken word tour
SoundWalk 2012
Maria Martinez-Cañas
Drew Shiflett/Shift
PILC MOUTIN HOENIG
Slice Magazine Issue 11 Launch Party
The Emily Dickinson Reader
Matthew Miller: “Fools Are Those Who Lose Their Mirrors”
AMRAM & CO
Final opening  of: …Is This Free?
ERIC YAHNKER: Virgin Birth ‘N’ Turf
DANCENOW Joe’s Pub Festival
KILL LIES ALL / JAVIER ARCE
Bridget Everett & The Tender Moments
The Performing Garage Presents: Findlay//Sandsmark’s Fractured Bones/Let’s Get Lost
Todd Sickafoose’s TINY RESISTORS
SARAH ALDEN
I THOUGHT WE WERE THE SAME PERSON
ASUKA OHSAWA 

COMING UP:

Happy Birthday, Conlon! A Tribute to Nancarrow on his 100th Birthday
w/ The Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo
David Stoupakis/Matthew Bone
EatSleepDraw (5 Years)
Arnold Dreyblatt: Turntable History / Spin Ensemble
Ryan Turley’s Hi/Lo
ELISA LENDVAY: Small Sculpture
Strange Tales of Liaozhai
Thomas Allen: Beautiful Evidence
Wondering Around Wandering
Pauline Oliveros with Doug Van Nort and FILTER
Pictures from the Moon: A Symposium on Holograms and Art
Steve Reich: complete string quartets (Different Trains, Triple Quartet, & world premiere of WTC 9/11, all-live version) performed by ACME
Jozef Van Wissem and Noveller
Odd Job @Fowler Arts
THE NY ART BOOK FAIR
Next wave Festival
The Mountain Goats
Devotchka
Origins of the Forest
POST NATURAL

 

LAST CALL: NO MAN’S LAND BY JOIANNE BITTLE @ CHURNER AND CHURNER.

| The 22 Magazine

No Man’s Land
Joianne Bittle

24 March – 27 April 2011

Opening Reception
24 March, 6-8pm

see more images
video
press release
artist biography
poster

“No Man’s Land” presents the multiple facets of Bittle’s artistic practice. As a professional diorama maker for the American Museum of Natural History, Bittle works with a technical precision honed through years of adherence to the strict conventions of her craft. Such precision is found in her paintings and drawings as well; the works from the studio, however, are noticeably freer in execution, and they manipulate subjects in a way that blends scientific research and artistic invention.

A prominent theme in Bittle’s work is natural history:  “the history of animals that exist in large numbers, with consideration of the unknowable nature of the animals’ instinctual motives within their environment.” She is fascinated by the intersection of abundance and fragility, as her jackrabbit painting attest; this animal of prey is known for its reproductive power and ability to survive in the scrappiest of conditions.

Shown together for the first time, the paintings in Bittle’s series depict solitary, gnarled jackrabbits in a desert landscape. The hares’ agitated expressions disconcert the viewer in a reciprocal gaze, denying any attempt at anthropomorphization. “No Man’s Land” allows the viewer to observe a certain loosening of Bittle’s style over the four years that she produced the series. Since 2008, the works have become larger, often consisting of multiple panels, and freer in terms of framing and technique. They have also become more metaphorical, alluding to fifteenth-century Italian painting and Egyptian statuary.

Nestled in a cargo trailer, Bittle’s diorama Preserving Mass Extinction is an imagined landscape of Marfa, Texas as it may have looked 250 million years ago, featuring fluorescent sponges, red tube coral, sea urchins and trilobites. During the Permian period, shallow seas covered much of what is dry land in present-day Southwest Texas; it was the mass extinction that ended this period that created the rich oil reserves of the region, known as the Permian Basin. A quotation of the American Museum of Natural History’s 1960s diorama of the Permian Sea, as well as a memorial to her own time in the West Texas desert, the installation connects ancient geological time to the present environment. As Bittle notes, “It is a collage of past and present,” one that calls forth the primordial sense one feels while traveling through this dusty no man’s land. It is the first in Bittle’s series Portable Landscapes. 

Preserving Mass Extinction also playfully pokes fun at the town’s status as an art center: with its kitschy presentation of an fantastical scene in a cargo trailer, it resists not only the omnipresent minimalism of Donald Judd’s work, but also the division of art and entertainment that such high-brow seriousness can imply. It is the first in Bittle’s series Portable Landscapes.

Born 1975, Indiana, Joianne Bittle has exhibited in Marfa, TX at Eugene Binder Gallery and in the Bronx at Wave Hill. She has participated in several group shows, including “Entomologia” at the Observatory Room, Brooklyn; “Rubber Sheets” at C.R.E.A.M Projects, Brooklyn; “Bioluminescence” at Akus Gallery in Willimantic, CT; and “Viridis II” at the Hewitt Gallery of Art, Marymount College, New York. In 1998, she earned a BFA at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, and was awarded an assistantship at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy.