Art News and Updates from Gallereo
All the latest news from the art world, as well as what's happening here at Gallereo. If you've built a gallery at Gallereo, let us know about your experience and you and your site could feature in our blog in the coming weeks.
Friday 20th May 2016Artist Spotlight: Mike Tyka
Mike Tyka is an interesting artist for a number of reasons, one of which is that art is only part of his work. Not only does he work in a wide variety of media, he's also an engineer at Google working on their neural network program. As you may or may not remember, the part of the project we find the most fascinating is the Deep Dream image processing algorithm, which we've written about extensively.
Tyka was involved in the very initial stages of the entire Deep Dream project, and was among the first to get the chance to play around with it from an artistic perspective. He also had four pieces featured in the Google Deep Dream art show that auctioned off pieces created with the system, including one that has one of the most appealing names of all the pieces in the entire show: Ground Still State of God’s Original Brigade.
The piece itself isn't one of the better ones in the show, but the name is top-notch. What makes it even more curious is that it wasn't completely of Tyka's devising: the same neural net that enabled the pieces was used - albeit in a slightly different way - to generate the names of the pieces themselves.
Tyka has a fairly extensive career outside of the whole Deep Dream project, which is arguably more of a conceptual art piece than something that generates a particularly attractive output. There are exceptions of course, such as the piece 'Instrument 3' attached to this post, but most of the neural network pieces are less visually appealing.
Unsurprisingly, he's been fascinated by interactivity and motion-responsive work, but also with sculpture. As a collaboration with several other artists, he helped design and construct the massive interactive piece Groovik's Cube, which is a collaboratively-solvable gigantic version of the classic Rubik's Cube puzzle. A crowdfunded effort, it recently made an appearance at the massive festival-slash-performance art piece known as Burning Man.
This isn't his only foray into the world of sculpture, as he has created a vast body of work in various types of metal. Blending both science and art in his practice, his sculptures are intricately crafted examples of protein synthesis, a seemingly-sterile yet remarkable engaging series. .
"Life is a dynamic equilibrium of creation and destruction. Inside our cells the protein nano-machines, to which we owe our distinction from the inorganic, are perpetually recycled and rebuilt, forever battling the inevitable fate of entropic decay."
If that's not an artist statement, I don't know what is.
Posted on May 20th 2016 on 04:23pm
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Wednesday 18th May 2016Super 8 Does Comedy
It's a running joke about motels and hotels that they are the patron saints of terrible artists. Nothing caps off the perfect cheap room like a terrible painting, whether it features sloppy brushwork, lazy composition or just general bad taste. Often, the cheaper the room, the cheaper the painting, and there are some very cheap motels out there..
This joke has been ongoing so long that one of the biggest motel chains in the United States decided to have a little bit of fun with it as part of their latest rebranding effort. Super 8 is a fairly wide-ranging chain across North America, and they are probably one of the largest purchasers of truly awful art in the world (aside from our elderly relatives) - but that isn't going to work with their newest plans.
WIth all this in mind, they partnered with star comedian and author Amy Sedaris in a joke art show, where the old pieces that graced the walls of Super 8 rooms across the continent will be given away free, first come, first served. Of course, that's assuming anyone would actually *want* them. If so, the comedy/art show will be held in New York City at the Openhouse Gallery.
"That art could not be uglier. The hardest thing I ever did in my life was to come up with names for it all. That was really hard. You're just looking at something, and I don't know what to call it — 'That (expletive) Duck' — mindless art," she explains.
The plan for the new art apparently will be to avoid the generic nature scenes and pastoral hilarity that covered the walls in the past, and replace them with scenes that reflect the actual location that you're in. When every motel room looks like the same, it can be rather disorienting to wake up in a room after a long trip and suddenly lose all sense of where you are.
No matter what you think about the art, it's impossible to deny that they have a sense of humour about it. Wouldn't it be nice if hotels and motels around the world suddenly became some of the foremost patrons of the arts? With the rise of AirBNB and similar crowdsourced accommodation websites, it's possible that an individual proprietor's sense of taste would work in their favour, as good art can help attract clients - rather than just make them laugh.
Posted on May 18th 2016 on 02:00am
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Friday 13th May 2016The Birth of Glitch
It's not very often that you get to see a new genre developing right before your eyes. In the past, artistic movements took time to gain steam, to gain followers and eventually reach a critical mass when it suddenly tips and begins to be considered a genre in its own right.
The digital world has dramatically accelerated this process, thanks to the speed that ideas are disseminated across the globe. The smallest genres that would have fizzled and died before the internet suddenly become viable because everyone around the world can pool their collective ideas.
Take glitch art. Don't worry that you haven't heard of it before, it's still it's infancy - or it may still even be in utero. There isn't an exact nomenclature to discuss how this process works that is readily accessible to most people outside of academia, and even then it's still fairly fluid.
Glitch art is based around the premise of what happens to digital information (which is to say information encoded in 1's and 0's, as all computer files are) when some of the 1's and 0's get scrambled or dropped. You've seen this phenomenon watching modern television, or looking at an internet video that was poorly encoded. Across the arts, creative people were sitting up and taking notice, and glitch was born.
Brian Eno, the famous electronic music artist who helped pioneer the genre, said it best in his book A Year With Swollen Appendicies:
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
The same holds true with the nascent genre of glitch art. The digital artifacts that come from missing data *become* data in their own right; they transcend themselves even as they transmogrify themselves. Already at least one major music group (The Glitch Mob) has arisen from the glitch movement, and there are many visual artists who are also eagerly awaiting their breakout moment of recognition.
Posted on May 13th 2016 on 07:42pm
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Wednesday 11th May 2016The New Gallery Experience
The modern gallery experience began with the advent of the self-guided tour. It eventually progressed to a podcast that you could download to your iPod, and then eventually to the ultra-modern app-based experience that is still the leading choice for the forward-thinking gallery. Now that's all changed.
Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that the next wave of art appreciation would arrive from California. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA to those in the know, whatever that means) has recently unveiled it's newest digital approach to the guided tour.
Naturally, it's based in an app for your smartphone, but instead of simply guiding you through the space, they've taken it one step further. Thanks to the advanced location technology that is standard in almost every smartphone on today's market, the museum can pinpoint your location within the space and provide you with commentary related to the piece that you're looking at.
SFMOMA has partnered with Apple, who created a high-resolution map of the museum space that enables their technology to pinpoint your location precisely, and play you the appropriate element of the tour without having to enter any codes or mess with your phone at all.
The voice of a veteran radio announcer is the first thing you hear upon loading the app, with a hilarious and reassuring message: “The guides will tell you where to go. They’ll wait for you, because they know where you are too. *pause* Oh, that sounds creepy—it’s not.”
They've taken it one step further, though, providing a number of different and sometimes wildly contrasting tour guides, sort of in the same way that you can download the voice of Homer Simpson for your car's GPS navigator. Homer has yet to make an appearance in the SFMoMA guide app, but it may just be a matter of time.
Instead, you can listen to actors from the popular HBO show Silicon Valley discussing your pieces, or perhaps the French tightrope walker Philippe Petit analyzing the balanace of light against brushstrokes.
No matter how you choose to interact with museums, this is surely going to change your perspective. Personally, this writer prefers to be dropped in at the deep-end to experience things without the benefit of a guide, but perhaps the best balance would be to work ones way through the museum as deep as possible and only then to enable the app, so it can act as a guiding light out from the darkness.
Posted on May 11th 2016 on 06:46pm
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Friday 06th May 2016Artist Spotlight: Rosemarie Fiore
This week on Artist Spotlight, we're going to take a look at some of the incredibly dynamic work of Rosemarie Fiore. While the abstracts are exciting and intriguing in their own right, they way that they are created somehow manages to be even more dynamic that the pieces themselves: Her work is frenetic and beautiful, chaotic and colourful, and it's no surprise when you realize how she works. Fiore paints with fireworks.
Yes, you read that right. While it's not immediately clear how she manages to avoid setting her canvases on fire when she does so, she developed an entire series of works that are created with a wide variety of fireworks.
Her series of fireworks drawings was exhibited in New York by the Priska C. Juschka Fine Art gallery in 2009 under the title Pyrotechnics, but that's not the only way she has created. No matter what medium she's working in, whether it's fire, explosions or smoke, the process of creation is almost as important to her as the final piece.
In an interview with Second Street Gallery owner Leah Stoddard, Fiore explains her connection to her process: "I am interested in process, for it is through process that I am able to connect to a deeper meaning in my artwork. I use video as a vehicle to record some of my artmaking experiences. To me, all my videos can standalone, and the actual painting serves as evidence of the video. You can see that something occurred on its surface but you are not sure what it was until you view the video."
Watching her work is captivating, even hypnotic. You can find the videos of her working and the works themselves at her website, rosemariefiore.com, as well as learn more about her upcoming shows and her latest series, Smoke Paintings.
"Fireworks are explosives. They are violent, destructive and chaotic in nature.” How could one appreciate that and then not want to capture the beauty of their chaos? Not in the admittedly a bit prosaic (by now) visual displays that accompany our New Year's Eve and national holidays, but the beauty of how they operate, the force and dynamism that truly makes them what they are at their very core.
Posted on May 06th 2016 on 06:22pm
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Wednesday 04th May 2016Take that, Duchamp!
In one of the most famous modern art pieces of all time, Marcel Duchamp made a name for himself and secured his place in history. At the time it was arguably a stunt and wildly derided by those in the artistic establishment, but Duchamp didn't give a hoot what they thought - they were exactly the people he was trying to offend. The piece in question? A public urinal that had been ripped off a wall and submitted to a gallery, titled 'Fountain' and signed 'R. Mutt'. At the time, it was rejected, of course, but Duchamp's point was rather clear about his views of the state of the art world at the time. That was in 1917.
Fast-forward to 2016, and cross the Atlantic to the Guggenheim, New York City. Maurizio Cattelan, whose works have made him one of the most expensive and sought after living artists, has decided to come out of 'retirement'.During an interview on his reasons for a return to practice, he said, “Actually, it’s even more of a torture not to work than to work.” Understandable, almost immediately so, for when you have a vision, not acting on it can be more painful than a root canal. .
Also immediately understandable is his first piece of work since his return, which is being installed in the Guggenheim this month. In the spirit of Duchamp but updated for the modern era, the piece is entitled 'Maurizio Cattelan: America' and instead of hanging in one of the gallery spaces, will be installed in a public washroom.
Because it is a working toilet made out of 18-karat gold.
99 years to the month after Duchamp failed to get his urinal installed in an exhibition, New York will finally get its artistic toilet.
Curiously enough, it's actually intended to be used for it's evident purpose, although it's hard to imagine that the lines for a public restroom can get any longer than they already are. “There’s the risk that people will think of it as a joke, maybe, but I don’t see it as a joke,” Cattelan explained, and commented that it really only becomes an artwork when it's actually being used by someone.
The commentaries on the state of modern America are obvious and rife with charged debate concerning wealth distribution and the unity of humanity, but it's also a hilarious jab at the self-importance of the rich. After all, everyone needs to use one.
Posted on May 04th 2016 on 05:52pm
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Friday 29th April 2016Artist Spotlight: Memo Akten
For our Artist Spotlight this week, we're going to change things up a bit and look at an artist who works in decidedly non-traditional media. Working in digital media - it's probably not still fair to call it 'new media' any more, since it's been around for quite a while by now - is one of the most exciting areas of the art world. Much of the cutting edge of art is about pushing boundaries, and few things do that better than the work of Memo Akten.
Akten was born in Istanbul, Turkey, but moved to London to attend the Goldsmith University where he is a practicing fine artist, and a PhD candidate - in artificial intelligence research. As such, much of his work is related to technology and interactive installations, and he's already amassed a long list of projects and press accolades.
One of his latest pieces of work was actually discussed in our recent article about Google's Deep Dream neural network. As part of an exhibit dedicated to showcasing the possibilities of the artificial intelligence system, Akten was commissioned to create various works, one of which titled the post then and has been included again here, titled GCHQ after the secretive signals intelligence and national security office.
For those of you who missed the discussion on Deep Dream, Akten has a few brief words about how it works.
“It might look like Deep Dream is generating say, sparrow’s faces in clouds, but what it is actually doing is generating patterned noise, which our brains try to find meaning in.” Akten. “It creates just enough of a sparrow’s head in a cloud, so that our brains find the rest. Visually, our minds and Deep Dream are doing exactly the same thing. It’s such a perfect mirror. I love that conceptual aspect.”
Akten's work isn't just limited to artificial intelligence, and has begun to break through many of the traditional boundaries that have, until recently, delineated various forms of digital media and how they can be integrated and co-opted for use in artwork. Just recently he collaborated on a dance/tech hybrid performance/installation piece titled Pattern Recognition, which was on display at Central St Martins in King's Cross in April for a very limited engagement.
“This is a new landscape. Working with these technologies is very much like cinema in the 20th century when people were just discovering the film camera, what worked and what didn’t,” he said in an interview with the Guardian.
Here's hoping that he keeps pushing the boundaries and amazing us with his work!
Posted on April 29th 2016 on 05:09pm
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Wednesday 27th April 2016Nazi Art Stash Finally Going On Display
Whether or not you read about it here, you may remember the story from a year or so ago about a huge stash of paintings that were discovered in Germany. The owner of the property where they were found, Cornelius Gurlitt, was the son of now-deceased art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt who was active during the Second World War.
The collection contained a huge number of pieces which were looted by the Nazis during this horrific time, including works by the European master painters Renoir, Picasso and Monet, among many others.
Once the pieces were discovered, there was a huge conflict about their provenance and Gurlitt refused to cooperate with authorities, which lead to the seizure of the entire collection. Some may have been rightfully his, but many pieces were suspected of being looted from Jewish owners, either taken by force or "sold" for a fraction of their real value.
After Gurlitt eventually agreed to cooperate to discover the true provenance of the works in 2014, he died suddenly a month later and ostensibly left the entire collection of work to the Bern Fine Arts Museum. They eventually reached an agreement with German authorities to accept the works that were clearly the rightful property of Gurlitt, and they will be going on display shortly.
The other works that have dubious or contested ownership will be investigated by German authorities as they try to determine the rightful owners of the works. In the meantime, they will be available on display as part of an exhibit in Bonn.
The two museums issued a joint statement about the exhibit:
“The exhibitions at the Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn and at the Fine Arts Musuem in Bern are planned for winter 2016/17 and their content will be coordinated.
“The exhibition at the Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn will deal more specifically with the history of the collection, and it is hoped it will contribute to further investigation of the provenance of the works.
“It will also focus on the fates of persecuted art collectors and their collections.”
That last part seems a bit dubious, although it turns out that only 5 of the works in Gurlitt's collection have proven to be looted - so far. Two of those have since been returned to their rightful owners.
Posted on April 27th 2016 on 04:23pm
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Friday 22nd April 2016Artist Spotlight: Alex Timmermans
April seems to have been a fairly surreal month in general, whether due to the completely schizophrenic weather patterns or just the way April Fool's kicked things off this year. With that spirit in mind, this week on Artist Spotlight we're going to look at some equally surreal photography by Alex Timmermans.
Timmermans is an interesting person both in terms of his work and his process, which isn't like that of other photographers. Instead of taking advantage of the advances in digital photography and post production that generally make a photographer's life easier, he's decided to go the other direction. He chooses to work with some of the most antiquated and recondite photographic processes, and produces some hauntingly surreal pieces with it.
He uses a process first developed by Frederick Scott Archer known as collodion wet plate photography, and it's incredibly time consuming and difficult to manage. It's an interesting departure from the photographic process that many of us have become familiar with. When shooting digitally, it's typically easier to shoot a thousand frames and pick through them to find the best one instead of taking the time to get it right on the first try.
As he explains on his website:
"I always have been fascinated by photography.
But with the introduction of the digital camera it all became too easy, too predictable …to me.
So I forced myself to go back to the roots of real analog photography.
Not just by making the photograph itself, but by controlling the entire photographic process.
This brought me back to the middle of the 19th century, to the amazing Collodion wet plate process.
And every single day I feel challenged to refine and improve myself."
The results of his efforts are haunting, enchanting and surreal, and worth a look. While you might be interested in his full body of work, the pieces that truly captured our attention were the 'Story Telling' series that are located on his website, which can be found at
www.alextimmermans.com . His portraiture is also quite appealing, although the inherent difficulties in the photographic processes he use don't always lend themselves to the same degree of success as they do on the Story Telling side. Regardless, be sure to take a look!
Posted on April 22nd 2016 on 04:10pm
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Wednesday 20th April 2016Massive Cairo Mural
Over the last few years, one of the most interesting types of visual trickery to emerge has become almost a fixture in the public art world. The idea is that from a particular location, a three dimensional illusion is constructed that exists only when the viewer is standing in that one spot. A single step away to either side breaks the perspective and the illusion is gone, leaving only a strange collection of disconnected shapes that don't seem to form anything at all.
Street art is many things, but it is rarely grandiose in scope. The nature of the social climate in which it's painted - that is to say, secretly, illegally, and usually in the dead of night - makes it difficult if not impossible to work on a scale larger than a single wall canvas. This massive mural, located in Cairo, is a perfect example of how the two techniques can be blended together to create something truly staggering.
The brainchild of a French-Tunisian street artist who goes by the name eL Seed, the piece is actually composed of a staggering number of individual pieces that, when taken singly, amount to virtually nothing. Standing atop a nearby hill, however, the pieces click together into a giant piece of so-called 'calligraffiti' in Arabic, which says: "If one wants to see the light of the sun, he must wipe his eyes."
Due to the extremely repressive government currently in power in Egypt, the development and construction of the piece had to be completed in total secrecy from the government. Current Egyptian law prohibits public artist expression, as it is no doubt likely to inflame a populace that is already in a state of near-constant turmoil after the Arab Spring uprising that started in Egypt several years ago.
Fortunately for us, eL Seed and his collaborators documented the entire process, from planning to execution to the final reveal. While the piece was kept secret from the powers that be, the rest of those involved were aware of the intentions. "We got the blessing of the priest," he says. "He gave us permission and everyone in the neighborhood knew about it."
The piece is ambitious, daring, and unique among street art, and it's an incredible example of what can be accomplished under even the most difficult conditions. Sometimes out of the worst situations, the most amazing creations emerge.
Posted on April 20th 2016 on 02:02am
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