Gallery Archive
Anita Allyn, Josh Rickards, Linda Yun, Jaye Rhee, One is Silver and the Other Gold
Images
EXHIBITION DATES: February 6 - March 1, 2009
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, February 6 from 6 - 11 pm
GALLERY HOURS: Wednesday - Sunday 12 - 6pm
GALLERY TALK: With Lee Stoetzel, Director, The West Collection, and Zoe Strauss, Philadelphia-based artist, Sunday March 1 at 3pm.
Vox Populi is pleased to announce February's exhibitions. Featured in the galleries are Vox artists Anita Allyn, Josh Rickards, and Linda Yun. The Video Lounge features Jaye Rhee, and continuing with our alumni programming, a group show featuring Merrilee Challiss, Anne Schaefer, and John Lange rounds out the month's exhibitions.
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Anita Allyn
news from nowhere
news from nowhere references concepts of utopia and the book with the same title written by the artist, designer and socialist pioneer William Morris. The exhibition will include photographic wall murals and video projection exploring different approaches to traditional and political landscapes.
Anita Allyn is a Philadelphia interdisciplinary artist. She creates works in video, installation, digital media, and photography. Allyn is a graduate of Kansas City Art institute (B.F.A.) and the Museum School, Boston (M.F.A.). Her work has been exhibited most recently in Beijing, China (January, 2009). Other exhibitions have included Moscow, Russia; Columbia, South America; Tel Aviv, Israel; Calcutta, India; New York, Massachusetts and Philadelphia.
Her work explores questions of narrativity, immediacy, memory and indexing. The works include different formal strategies including documentary, personal narrative and abstraction/looping to investigate the positioning of truth telling in a post-video age.
Josh Rickards
Do Unto Others Then Run Like A Mother
These recent paintings continue Rickards' ongoing interest in the people who make up our information systems and how we choose to navigate that. The compartmentalization of who and what we associate with in order to further an interest or belief is the basis. The characters that inhabit those worlds and what they represent to others is the primary interest. How that gets furthered or ignored or simply shrugged off. Rickards is interested in what the formation of Esperanto or a quasi-religious group based around organic food or the everglades yeti seems to tell about what we filter out or make our own out of necessity or choice.
Linda Yun
It Is What It Is
Susan Dominus of the New York Times once wrote, "The attic is a home's subconscious, the repository for memories in the form of stuff, some of it buried so deep it may never be recovered."* Much in the same way, Yun's newest body of work makes the argument that life and one's existence is recorded in our thoughts, memories, and recollections of past experiences, all bundled up and perpetuated by the objects we interact with and the experiences we have on a daily basis, mundane and simple as those may be. At times, these objects and experiences are the result of an artistic endeavor within the gallery setting, thus adding yet another complex layer to human existence. Through the lens of photography, film, writing, music, and the Internet, these objects or moments are similarly recorded and transposed; however the viewer is conscious of the distance between the two, thus often interpreting that moment differently. In effect, when experienced through such a lens, the moment is often read as an index or snapshot of the real, but distant nonetheless. Yun argues the result, however, is often at times one and the same. In harnessing the delicate balance between such experiences, Yun's installation for IT IS WHAT IT IS creates moments for the viewer that aim to be filed away in each individual's repository of memories and experiences. For some, the past will be remembered. For others, the future will be enhanced. Regardless, Yun hopes the moment will be revisited and acknowledged, thus echoing back specifically to the gallery experience. And so it goes.
This will be Yun's fourth solo exhibition at Vox Populi.
*Dominus, Susan. "Some Attics Yield Treasures; One Yields Parallels." The New York Times 05 Jan. 2009: A16.
Vox Alumni:
Merrilee Challiss, Anne Schaefer, and John Lange
One is Silver and the Other Gold
Merrilee Challiss
The works in this show, simple ink drawings, portray fractured portraits of women. The vignettes depict vacillations between clarity and obfuscation -- fragility altered by trauma, and anomalies tempered by beauty. These anatomies (which, like memories, distorted and fantastical) represent "speculative fictions" of psychological states.
Merrilee lives in Birmingham, Alabama where she owns and runs an alternative music venue and cafe, called BottleTree (www.thebottletree.com). She received an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2000, and has since exhibited work at Square Foot Gallery (Nashville), Bucheon (San Francisco), Paperboat Gallery(Milwaukee), Space 301 (Mobile), and Cambodia, among other places.
John T. Lange
In Nostalgia & the Antiquated - The Landscape Series, artist John T. Lange toys with romanticized memories that are fuzzy and vague. Through his deliberate use of materials and objects, he creates the setting for a narrative that he invites the viewer to help complete.
John T. Lange is a former member of Vox Populi who currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA as an artist & curator. He works in a variety of mediums in his studio while his exhibitions often take the form of multi-media installations. His work is engaging, with narratives and concepts that challenge the viewer to stop and think for a moment.
Anne Schaefer
Anne Schaefer's work is comprised of large-scale installation, works on paper, and objects. In each, repeat pattern is employed to explore the opportunity for endless variables within limited modular systems. Complex relationships are arrived at through a combination of simple shapes, basic building structures, and color.
Anne lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. She received her MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2007. She has exhibited most recently at Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts (New York, NY) and The Gallery Project (Ann Arbor, MI).
Upcoming Alumni Show:
May 1- June 28: Joseph Hu and Mauro Zamora
IN THE VIDEO LOUNGE
Jay Rhee
Rhee's video performance work explores the evasive nature of authentic desire. She focuses on the tension between "real" desire and "fake" objects of desire, as embodied by images, presenting "real fakes" and "imageless images." For example, in her recent series, Swan, Polar Bear, Niagara, performers move in public baths against a background of wall paintings depicting swans in a lake, a North Pole scene with polar bears, and the Niagara Falls. These scenes exist in words, as well as in collective memory shaped by culture. But where do they actually exist? The swan, the polar bears of the North Pole, and the Niagara Falls, all exist without existing: they are idealized images of the nostalgic imagination. She thus presents "real fakes" through video performances that forthrightly foreground artifice. By acknowledging the "fake" substance of the materials used, the artwork actually reveals the authentic nature of these imaginary worlds. The product is a "real fake" that, notwithstanding its artifice, is authentic and thus genuine. Ultimately, her goal is to create a new visual space in which artifice evaporates through the candid presentation of images as naked materials. This "honest artifice" would ultimately lead one into an experience of reflection about one's own nostalgia.
Born and raised in Seoul, Korea, Rhee studied at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago (BFA, MFA). Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Kobe Bienniale 2007 (Japan), with solo exhibitions at Galerie Gana Beaubourg (Paris), Chicago Cultural Center, and the Gallery Factory (Seoul). Her work has also been featured in Carol Becker's essay, published in Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art by The University of California Press, and reviewed by the New York Times, Art Asia Pacific Magazine, and Art in Culture.
SCREENING
Kris Lefcoe
Tiny Riot Project
Screening presents Kris Lefcoe's Tiny Riot Project-an intricately detailed stop-motion animation. Using reconstructed stuffed toys and posable dolls, TRP offers a satirical spin on advertising aimed at children. After discovering that their local idyllic forest will be the site of the next Enormart, a young couple joins forces with a group of adorable anarchists in a peaceful protest. Little do they know that the powers that be-in a quest to protect their company's Infinite Growth-have trained an elite riot squad from an unexpected source : the warm and fuzzy characters that populate their Saturday morning cartoon commercials. Corporate mascots including Sugar Bear, Tony the Tiger and the Care Bears are reborn with gasmasks and killer instincts. Led by their sadistic captain Ronald McDonald, they unleash a reign of terror on the unsuspecting demonstrators, igniting an all-out street riot.
Kris Lefcoe is an award-winning writer-director based in New York and Toronto. Lefcoe's films occupy a space between entertainment and cultural critique, exploring themes of consumption, surveillance, and cameras as a virus. Her work has screened at Toronto International Film Festival, Miami Basel, Anthology Film Archives, Pulse Art Fair, SXSW, Berlin International Film Festival, BFI London, and many other venues worldwide. Tiny Riot Project was exhibited most recently at Galerie Thomas Shulte in Berlin.
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