Jennifer Bolande

post conceptual objects and images

For our Wednesday art post, Dennis Kane features one of his favorite artists Jennifer Bolande. Her work uses photography/ sculpture to create quietly arresting moments that examine instances around the periphery of thought. She indexes and points to fault lines of power and ideological habit. Check more of her work at her website.

Coincident with Bolande’s conscious deployment of dichotomies is an intense concentration on the meeting places between objects, the points where two differences border and thus define themselves.

Bolande pays an almost surrealist attention to loci of simultaneous meeting and division as sites for potential transformation
— Paula Marincola, Art Forum

Photo Credit: jbolande.com

Quotation Credit: Art Forum, Something to Do with Jennifer Bolande, January 1989

Portrait Credit: Jennifer Bolande, Chambre D'amis

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Sam Durant

Public Protest

This week’s art post features the work of Sam Durant. Durant is a multi media artist whose works focus on hierarchies of power, referencing historical moments and social acts of resistance or response. Durant’s works are often made for public display outside of art institutions and attempt a larger public discourse.

Sam Durant, Untitled (drone), 2016-2021

Sam Durant, Proposal for Public Fountain, 2021, Sadie Coles HQ, London

Sam Durant, Like, Man, I’m Tired (of Waiting), 2021

Since the 1990s, Sam Durant has developed a research-driven artistic practice in which he dissects and reframes both dominant historical narratives and forgotten facets of our collective past...

(L)ight boxes are based on hand-drawn protest signs that the artist found in photos of street protests. By giving the personal phrases and slogans from protest movements an existence as a colourful light box, Sam Durant emphasises their necessity, and often also the humorous or utopian character of the messages.
— Art Lead

Photo Sources:

ArtNet, Unit London

Mousse Magazine, Sam Durant, Proposal for Public Fountain, Sadie Coles HQ, London

Unframed, Sam Durant, Like Man I’m Tired of Waiting, LACMA

ArtLead, Billboard Series #21, Sam Durant and the Art of Dialogue

Toward Freedom, Untitled (Drone), 2021

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Matias Faldbakken

creative vandalism

This week’s art post features the work of Matias Faldbakken. Faldbakken’s sculptures/ combines have an absurdity to them, a dark comic theatricality and resonant gestalt. He is represented by Standard Oslo. In addition to his visual art he has written several novels and a collection of short stories.

Faldbakken... (has an) ability to bite his own tail by making works that unite vandalism and creativity, while both celebrating and lamenting the constant commodification of rebellious acts.

More than anyone, he understands that frontal critique only reinforces the classic master-slave dialectic, and that true radicality consists of infiltrating and perverting the system from within.
— Sinziana Ravini

Photo credits:

Simon Lee Gallery, London, Hong Kong

Occula, Gallery Chant Grousel, Paris

Renaissance Society, “Fear of Property” Installation, University of Chicago

Mousse Magazine, Museum Boijmans, Rotterdam

kunstkritikk, Nordic Art Review, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo

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Erica Baum

photograph poetry

For the first Wednesday art post, Kane has selected the photo collage work of Erica Baum. Erica is represented by the New York gallery Bureau. Baum’s work is a quiet but intensely resonate examination of looking, fragments, slices, folds, traces. Dynamics of power enfolded in the mundane. A sly challenge to the habits and presumptions of form.

Untitled (Simbolismo), 1994, (Blackboards), gelatin silver print, 20 × 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Bureau, New York.

Untitled (Simbolismo), 1994, (Blackboards), gelatin silver print, 20 × 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Bureau, New York.

Erica Baum, A Methode of a Cloak, 2020, exhibition view, Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf

Erica Baum’s photographs examine the ways we use language to classify, index, and assert knowledge. Working primarily with obsolescent media from the twentieth century—card catalogs, player piano rolls, sewing patterns—Baum isolates serendipitous interactions among fragments of text and the surrounding visual field. Her carefully disorienting framing, as well as her more active interventions, grant a poetic charge to these encounters.
— Rajesh Parameswaran

Photo Credit: Bureau NYC

Artviewer, Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf, Germany

Quote Credit: Rajesh Parameswaran, BOMB Magazine

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