LATITUDE

curated by Andréa Stanislav, Isha Bøhling, Patricia Healy McMeans


Latitude is a traveling group show of emerging artists drawn equally from London, Minneapolis, and New York, and will evolve as it travels to exhibitions in each city.

Latitude at Fieldgate Gallery, London, is the second stage of this migration. It premiered as 8x8x8 at the Soap Factory in Minneapolis, in May 2006 and concludes in New York in 2007.

With the ubiquity of technology expanding we have instantaneous access to vast quantities of information and viewpoints; geographical distance need no longer separate us and increasingly, local information is becoming a trans-national commodity. Are artists embracing this interconnectedness, or are they reacting to, for, or against it?

In Latitude, artists of widely differing practices and locales are brought together in an attempt to explore their fluid geographical identities. The artists are informed by both their immediate surroundings and the knowledge that their artistic production is part of a global dialogue. As such, common and uncommon themes are revealed as the artists’ respond to each other’s work and
the evolution of their own work over time and in each location.

With the notion of artistic “movements” changing as quickly as art magazines are published and the “-ism” relegated to the past, the intention of this show is to reveal the disparate / resonant nature of contemporary art practice from three major cities. It is hoped that in the very act of this artistic migration a further complication of this global cultural milieu will result.

London: Sarah Baker, Diann Bauer, Isha Bøhling, Doug Fishbone, Matt Franks, Neil Hamon, Andy Hsu, Mandy Lee Jandrell, Sharone Lifschitz, Vicky Wright

Minneapolis: Ryan Chamberlain, Katinka Galanos, Suzy Greenberg, Abinadi Meza, Liz Miller, Kirsten Peterson, Andréa Stanislav, Erik Ullanderson, Marc Willhite, Rosemary Williams

New York: Daniel Bouthot and Christopher K. Ho, Blane de St Croix, Clive Murphy, Erika Harrsch, Emily Lutzker, Diana Shpungin, Nicole Tschampel, Michael Zansky

The curators: Isha Bøhling is an artist and curator living in London. Andréa Stanislav is a multimedia artist and curator based in Minneapolis and New York City. She is also an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Minnesota/ Minneapolis. Patricia Healy McMeans is an artist living Minnesota.



12 January - 11 February 2007


SARAH BAKER   


Sarah Baker has been examinig superficiality of image and expectations of cultural representation reinforced by the mass media. Most recently, a series of opulent collages and cut outs is based on the repetition of iconic monograms.  She incorporates her own signature, which is used as a branded symbol, much like the status symbols of luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton. Colliding high and low culture, her work becomes a mixing pot of iconic images that imply association through the repetitive unification of the, often contrasting, icons.  

DIANN BAUER   


Diann Bauer’s Field of work lies somewhere between painting and installation. She does large-scale sight specific paintings working either directly with the given architecture of the gallery or altering the architecture itself to both manipulate the viewing of the painting as well and using space and architecture itself to impact the viewer. The paintings are replete with detail using violent images form a number of cultures and integrates diverse visual styles and techniques. An excess of visual information in Bauer’s work generates a sense of confusion and dissolution between space, object and subject, and leaves us trying to decipher a narrative that seems graspable, but is just out of reach. Sourcing material and influence from nineteenth century Japanese woodcuts, European Baroque painting, experimental contemporary architecture and spectacular elements of cinema Bauer situates the viewer within a swirling visually complex representation of space, time and movement.  

ISHA BOHLING   


I see my paintings as fragments of a bigger picture. Beyond the observed lies the observer, also being observed. Like a nested set of Russian dolls that goes on forever. Representations of self similarity, like in chaos patterns. The outcome is a landscape of infinities. I do not predetermine the outcome of paintings. I do not have a system, but beyond my control it appears that there is. Random decisions become ordered into a structure. Ie a cluster or bubbles   The paintings, and sculpture evolve as some natural law of mathematics takes over. Patterns merge in and out of each other multiplying and mutating, like a plant or virus, or like life itself, continually evolving and eating away at the landscape as it looks for new territory. 

RYAN CHAMBERLAIN   


The world is increasingly metered. At times, the patterns, systems, and structures are directly evident, more often appearance relies on adjustments in scale and vantage. Beginning with a series of propositions, I am investigating the instability in growth and the uncertainty in novelty. Life itself is an elaboration – an amalgamation of ornament and essence. My project is a return to intuition as a method for examining these complexities (and complexity itself) in my daily life and recognizing them as creative forces of change.   Ryan Chamberlain (b. 1976) is an artist born and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He received a Bachelor of Fine Art degree from the Rhode Island School of Design (2002) and recently received a Master of Fine Art degree from the University of Minnesota (2006). 

BLANE DE ST. CROIX   


With the cool remove of an anthropologist, De St. Croix observes natural history and human folly to create tableaux that haunt us with harsh truths and wry ironies about the world and our obligation to seriously heed history's lessons. Using a distinct vocabulary he extracts from nature rather than industry, De St. Croix has developed a language of images that serve his motivations well. His commentaries on the present are dependent on his respect for the past. - Daphne Anderson Deeds Blane De St Croix's work Forced Migration consists of numerous Common Crows penetrating the wall as if the birds are flying through it. The birds are not fazed as if they have some greater knowledge and ability. The flock has become captured as a still image, as a moment frozen in time, linking itself to fable, dream imagery as well as playing with notions of space and dimension.  

DOUG FISHBONE


Doug Fishbone recycles the language of the mass media in order to critique some of the more unseemly aspects of life in the modern age. Appropriating photographic and digital imagery from the internet, he constructs witty and occasionally shocking film narratives from apparently unrelated material, questioning the way the mind processes controversial visual images and concepts. Fishbone works in a variety of media including installation, film, and performance. In recent films he has utilised the televisual tool of the voice over, constructing stream of consciousness narratives that blend word and image in unexpected and often uneasy combinations. Fishbone’ s films recalling slide shows or school lectures focus on such themes as corporate greed and violence, obesity, indifference, and the seeming inability of different cultures to understand each other at all. But despite the apparent seriousness of his subject matter, Fishbone’s work is infused with humour. Co-opting the strategies of stand-up comedians in his performances, he disarms his audience: racist or sexist jokes are told with a deadpan manner so that you laugh, even when you know you shouldn’t. In more recent works, Fishbone has expanded upon his interest in stand up-comedy, investigating the operation of humour from a number of different perspectives and media. In his current series of digital prints he depicts individual jokes in a story-board format that adds a visual component to what is usually a strictly verbal process, subverting the rhythm with which jokes normally function. He is particularly interested in the operation of jokes as commodified pieces of language and thought. Doug Fishbone completed his MA at Goldsmiths College in 2003, and was awarded the Beck’s Futures Student Prize for Film and Video in 2004. He has installed giant mounds of bananas in numerous public spaces, including Trafalgar Square, as a comment on international trade and consumerism. His work was included in the British Art Show 6, which toured England in the past year.  

MATT FRANKS


text taken from catalogue‘ of Contrapop’ curated by Suhail Malik, shown at vamiali's November, 2004 text taken from catalogue‘ of Contrapop’ curated by Suhail Malik, shown at vamiali's November, 2004 


"The intensification of common dumb cartoon imagery is at the heart of Matt Frank’s sculptures. Taking conventional reduced two dimensional renderings of images such as skulls, nuclear bomb explosions, swirls and vortexes, Franks solidifies these graphic simplifications into three dimensional forms in ludicrously bright acidic or pastel colours. Composited into intricate near baroque, comical and outlandish objects, Franks’ sculptures don’t seem to be depictions of either straightforwardly inanimate things nor of creatures in their own right. Rather they seem to be bodies that lie somewhere between the two, hybrids with their own mysterious exuberance.”


 Copyright Suhail Malik 2004

Lives and works in London


KATINKA GALANOS

SUZY GREENBURG   


My current exploration stems from a fascination with vintage illustrated medical journals. The images capture a sense of pain and emotional fatigue that speak to me of life traumas rather than physical distress.  In response, I wish to capture the expression of pain while erasing the disease.   

NEIL HAMON


My current practice uses established forms of re-presentation such as photography, sculpture and film to investigate our relationship with loss and how we are lured into fictions or narratives in an attempt to grasp on to that which is constantly slipping away from us. At first glance the works may appear as familiar documentation, but upon closer inspection reveal themselves as carefully constructed conceits that question how we are lured into falsehoods because of our often-fatal desire to preserve, restore and remember. I generally focus on mediums of representation that lay claim to a depiction of truth through an indexical link to their subject. These are processes that rely on such a claim in order to function as accurate re-presentations, such as documentary photography and the more obsessive approaches of historical re-enactment and taxidermy. In earlier works I travelled the British Isles in order to meticulously document historical re-enactors and their re- enactments. The large-scale colour photo-works and smaller nostalgically tinted images that resulted, capture the objects, costumes and activities these war-weekenders assume in a bid to authenticate and re-live a lost past. Each image is printed and toned to match the photographic style of the time, pushing the re-enactors aim one step further by re-presenting them back into the two dimensional world from which they draw their references. The films and photographs are then combined with sculptural elements, such a taxidermised hare that breathes or a cast of a fish’s head, which appears to have attracted a group of fishing flies. It is the point at which the viewer is made to question the nature of the photographs and the relationship between the images and accompanying objects that interests me and how, through such questioning, the hold of a fiction can weaken. In more recent work I have taken on the role of both documentary photographer and subject by presenting a series of suicide self-portraits based on crime scene photography from 1920’s America. Each of the suicide works consist of a group of images that describe a single scene from varying viewpoints imitating the style of early crime-scene photography and re-presenting it in a fractured, non-linear way reminiscent of contemporary cinema. These works are often shown along side more substantial taxidermy dioramas that reference those found within natural history museums but within which something has gone seriously awry. All of these works take up a position somewhere between documentary and fiction.

CHRISTOPHER HO & DANIEL BOUTHOT     


CHRISTOPHER K. HO: The guideposts for my practice are two: context and collaboration. Both are informed by the position that art making is less a form of self-expression than a process of problem-solving, whereby a problem is generated by a given site (whether this be a physical, institutional, or discursive) and its solution arrived at through dialogue with an interlocutor. 


DANIEL BOUTHOT: My interests lie in creating conceptually-based installations for non-traditional sites. Recent works appropriate an extant object and modify it, thus often escaping immediate discovery and, when found, leaving the viewer unsure as to their status as a work of art. In blending into the environment and going unnoticed (if only temporarily), these works reflect my broader interest in complicating the line between art and everyday life by finding new means of inserting art into life.   

ANDY HSU   


As you know, art is said to have derived from carving to show one’s existence and cave paintings to pray. I think the standards of beauty have changed with the times, the basic thoughts which put emphasis on nature and human being have been unchangeable. Therefore it is considered that we understand the artists message through the art works for nature and human beings.

                                - Lee, Joon-Won, Mayor, Gongju. S Korea. 2006 


Andy Hsu is a London based artist.   

MANDY LEE JANDRELL


The global spread of consumerism and its effects on culture, art and society, is a major area of interest to Jandrell, and one that she continues to explore in her photographs of constructed leisure environments around the world. Of her work she has said ‘When photographing places like theme parks, which exist within the realm of tourism, I wish to reintroduce some of the real by juxtaposing the fake environment with the reality not only outside its fence but the reality of people’s interaction with the place…The cultural ritual of the “holiday snapshot”, for example, often highlights the gulf between the economic realities of the lives of the people involved and the economic aspirations of the theme park.’ Shot on location in popular local and international attractions in different countries around the world, Mandy Lee Jandrell's work reflects on our enduring emotional investment in utopian dreams of paradise. Mandy Lee Jandrell scours the constructed leisure environment – wildlife parks, zoos, botanical gardens, historical recreations and theme parks – for her subject matter, exploring the pre- packaging of our perceptions of the ‘real’ and the belief systems that sustain them. Her photographs bring into focus the mutually dependent nature of ideologies and cultural practices, where leisure environments are constructed to appeal to the aspirations of the economic and ideological systems with which they are intertwined. She is currently working on a series entitled “Eidyllion”, exploring presentations of the idyllic landscape within these environments. The discordant images which result point to a disharmonious relationship between man and nature. Nature is tidied up, contained, controlled and owned. For this series her inspiration has come not only from the environments in which she photographs but also landscape painting, in particular 17th Century Dutch Landscapes and those post-industrial revolution, John Constable and the Barbizon School Realists based in France in the late 19th Century (Theodore Rousseau, Jean-Francois Miller, and Corot), whose representations of the nature and the rural allude to a culturally tainted viewing of it. Jandrell’s mode of operation veers between the amateur snapshot, evoking the engrained practices of cultural tourism, and the apparently more objective full frontal gaze of the professional documentary photographer. The casual humour of her work toys with our unblinking acceptance of these pictorial languages.

SHARONE LIFSCHITZ


Intimacy versus exposure - these antithetical poles play a major role in Sharone Lifschitz’s work.


Sharone Lifschitz was born in Beer Sheva and grew up in kibbutz Nir Oz in Israel’s Negev Desert. She has lived and worked in London for 15 years. Initially trained as an architect at The Architectural Association, London, and a visiting student to the Architectural Department of the Cooper Union, New York, she left architecture for the visual arts in 2000. In 2002 she graduated with an MA in Fine Art from Central St. Martins, London. Sharone Lifschitz works with text, video and photography. She has taken part in several group exhibitions in London, as well as at the Centro Cultural Recoleta Buenos Aires, ‘The Soap Factory’ Minneapolis/USA and ,in 2005, at Berlin’s House of World Cultures as part of the “Dreams and Trauma” Israeli film festival and exhibition. In 2004, she won the QUIVID public art competition for the Jewish Museum Munich, due to open in March 2007. For her winning project “Speaking Germany” she criss-crossed Germany in 2005 meeting over 45 individuals. In 2006, a residency at the City of Munich’s Villa Waldberta enabled her to develop the project further in situ. This will be her first solo exhibition. Currently the artist is also working on a collaborative project with Saarbrücken Stadt Gallery, to be shown in October 2007 at Musée de la Ville de Luxembourg. Earlier projects by Sharone Lifschitz:“CiLiLove”, 2003; “InTheMoodForLove”, 2000; “Sleeping Germany”, 2000; “The Royal Café”, 2000: “Daying” 2003 - ongoing with Martina Jenne. www.speaking-germany.de A website dedicated to Sharone Lifschitz’s project will go online on 28 February 2007.

EMILY LUTZKER   


The Un-Karaoke Project is a series of performances in which I become an iconic musical figure from each city where I am performing. I organize a band, and play one song. In each case, myself and the other bad members wear headphones with the original song playing while we perform. No performer is permitted to play an instrument they were trained to play. What is produced is a pure emotional interpretation of the song. The audience witnesses the resonance of the desire to become the rock star, without the virtuosity of being the rock star. Reality, more often than not, fails to live up to imagination. How do I illuminate the space between what we want to be, or who we think we could be, and what we are? Expectations and results, fantasy and actual life are at the core of my work. Having experience in dance and performance, in addition to my fine arts background, I explore this question in terms of presentation, rather than represented, pictorial imagery.   

 ABINADI MEZA

 

I am inspired by ideas of transformation, ephemerality, and intimacy, and try to engage viewers in both a physical and conceptual way. I am drawn to time-based media such as video and sound as a means of creating immersive zones for viewers to navigate. My work often involves improvisation, and seeks to blur distinctions between truth and fiction.


  LIZ MILLER

 

Inspired by systems that contain examples of simultaneous order and chaos, my mixed media drawings and installations reference biology, natural disasters, and computer imagery.  Imagined interactions between disparate systems, and the unpredictable outcomes of such encounters, provide a point-of-departure for works that divulge equal parts fact and fiction. The systems that appear in my work are hybrids, borrowing freely from a wide range of existing patterns and departing from them at will. Saccharine colors and intense repetition seduce the viewer, subscribing to an underlying logic that allows playfulness to lead to sinister conclusions. Beauty and whimsy are catalysts for events that are increasingly aggressive. The initial logic of inventive and seemingly coherent systems is called into question by their untimely demise as they explode, disintegrate, and morph into new forms. In this manner, I comment on both the inherent failures and possibilities that result as we struggle with a world that is increasingly complex and multi-layered


  CLIVE MURPHY

 

I’m constantly interested in ideas relating to the position of the individual in terms of an increasingly ‘mass’ oriented environment. Through a combination of humor, pathos and incongruity I infiltrate commercial, urban and visual literacy, deconstructing rhetorical systems and prepackaged aspirational frameworks in an effort to carve out some sense of human space in my work. My approach is heavily informed by Arte Povera, Situationist, Pop Art and Duchampian concepts.


KIRSTEN PETERSON



DIANA SHPUNGIN

 

In Diana Shpungin's most current works she is exploring the idea of the grand gesture as it may relate to love, life and death. Trying to make the intangible tangible in order to understand timeless great mysteries is the ultimate goal in the work. Additionally, Diana Shpungin works as part of a collaborative team with Nicole Engelmann investigating the interaction of friends and enemies. Inner struggles of their interactions are examined through an ongoing series of experiments involving the voluntary de-individualization of power, denial of the selfish vantage point, and refusal to compromise.


  CHRISTOPHER HO & DANIEL BOUTHOT

 


CHRISTOPHER K. HO: The guideposts for my practice are two: context and collaboration. Both are informed by the position that art making is less a form of self-expression than a process of problem-solving, whereby a problem is generated by a given site (whether this be a physical, institutional, or discursive) and its solution arrived at through dialogue with an interlocutor.


DANIEL BOUTHOT: My interests lie in creating conceptually-based installations for non-traditional sites. Recent works appropriate an extant object and modify it, thus often escaping immediate discovery and, when found, leaving the viewer unsure as to their status as a work of art. In blending into the environment and going unnoticed (if only temporarily), these works reflect my broader interest in complicating the line between art and everyday life by finding new means of inserting art into life.


  ANDRÉA STANISLAV

 

My work begins in free and calculated associations. By exploring ‘scapes (dreamscapes, landscapes, cityscapes) I set the table for a dialogue that the visitor must self-initiate to order their perceptions in an environment of sense and nonsense. 


My apparent concerns are straightforward - the failure of empire, manifested with formal surfaces and with the icons of shop-worn ideas and failed aspirations.


 NICOLE TSCHAMPEL

 

Employing a diverse range of media including photography, installation, performance, and video I constantly return to autobiographical stories and emotional states filtered metaphorically through the creation of my personal iconography for content. Much of my work thematically stems from ongoing fascination with elemental dichotomies: real and artificial, living and dead, the inevitabity of change and the human urge for preservation and control.


 ERIK ULLANDERSON

 

Erik Ullanderson focuses on the complexities, difficulties and confusions of personal communication, while systematically considering distributed intelligence and probabilistic "ifs”. Concerns over getting through the day, coping with powers that secretly control the laws of the universe, and getting some action, have recently been surfacing in his work. This conceptual point of departure combined with a modicum of personal iconography becomes Ullanderson’s attempt at communication. While examining this interconnectedness of objects and situations, Ullanderson elaborates on the humorous or awkward misunderstandings that may occur in these contexts though his art. Using materials that can be found in the “weekend art drawer” in combination with the traditional, Ullanderson creates work that shows the reality which exists just under the surface everyday life.


 MARC WILLHITE

 

The ordinary, the commonplace, the unspectacular- in these I find inspiration. My work seeks to facilitate visual awareness and prompt a re-evaluation of the way we habitually see the world in which we live. With a particular interest in surface as it relates to design and architectural conventions I create altered conditions and subtle transformations, interventions that serve as catalysts for a renewed sense of wonder and of the miraculous in the mundane.


 ROSEMARY WILLIAMS

 

All of my work involves stepping out of the studio and engaging with the world outside in some way. This interest in the non-art world stems from a belief that art has a social and communicative potential that is not limited to those actively engaged in making or working with art. I have often used my work as a source of connection between myself and others: for example contacting and interviewing CEO’s, or talking with strangers on the street trying to convince them to whisper a secret into my microphone. The work also offers viewers the opportunity to make connections, through recognizing the image being presented to them in their own lives, and empathizing with the emotional content offered in the work.


  VICKY WRIGHT

 

"Wright depicts animals in the process of becoming human, and humans in the magical rites of returning to the realm of beasts and spirits. Wright's paintings can be situated in the realm of outsider art and folklore, yet they are inspired and informed by such diverse cultural sources as Deleuze, Friedrich Nietzsche and August Strindberg".                                               

- Vita Zaman, Ibid Projects. London 


Vicky Wright lives and works in London, has had solo shows internationally and is on the Goldsmiths Masters of Arts Degree. She also has currently been curated as a finalist in the Jerwood Contemporary painters show in London.


 MICHAEL ZANSKY

 

 Michael Zansky’s kinetic sculptures with giant Fresnel lens simultaneously suggest and explode a classically ordered universe, magnifying and manipulating the detritus of modernity to offer a darkly comic alternative cosmology.


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