DaWire

An image from our most popular post in 2010: Luis Adelantado’s Inaugural Exhibition in Mexico City This year has been quite a ride for DaWire. We have grown in numbers and expanded our network of contributing writers and websites. But most importantly, we have successfully carved our little niche in the online world. DaWire is [...]

View from my end of the table at AO&’s curated dinner

Coming down from Chelsea Piers on a taxi on my way down to NYC’s Lower East Side, I wasn’t sure where exactly I was supposed to meet my friend for dinner. She told me earlier that evening to be there at 8pm, but I had just finished working a fair and wasn’t sure if I could be there on time. Arriving at Broome and Forsyth, there was no restaurant in sight. Looking around, I saw a couple that seemed just as lost as I was. “Are you here for the dinner?”  ”Yeah,” I replied. As we called our respective friend, a door opened on Broome right next to Simon Preston’s gallery inviting us in. Walking up the stairs, (this was no restaurant I realized), we arrived at an abandoned storefront set-up with a makeshift kitchen and a long nicely lit dining table. This was no ordinary dinner. It was the performance/experiential work of the Austrian collective AO&; a part of their Fall residency at Simon Preston Gallery.[...]

For his third solo exhibition at Andrea Rosen Gallery in NYC, José Lerma takes on three ideas that have preoccupied him in the past couple of years: the Bankers, the Reflective Curtain and the Keyboards. Under the title I am sorry I am Perry, the show gathers painting and installation. The title, although possibly strange for many, is the punch line of a popular joke in Puerto Rico, where an English-speaking fox (zorro) and a Spanish-speaking dog (perro) bump into each other and in apologizing, reflect the complexities of bilingualism, translation and a jagged political situation.[...]

Carlos “Mare139” Rodriguez, WU/StyleWriter, an illegal public sculpture in Wuppertal Germany.

One of the hardest working women in New York City is Martha Diaz. Dedicated to community empowerment through institution building for over a decade, her most recent project, The Hip-Hop Education Center for Research, Evaluation, and Training [H2ED Center], finds her in partnership with New York University. Launched in June 2010 at New York University’s Metropolitan Center for Urban Education [Metro Center] in the Steinhardt School for Culture, Education, and Human Behavior, The H2ED Center is the premiere institute formed to explore and advocate the potential of Hip-Hop education.[...]

Cuban School (Community 5th of October), 2010

There is something eerily mysterious about John Gerrard’s images. They look like desolate, ordinary landscapes; an oil rig or an abandoned building, but they are actually virtual sculptures, carefully built with skilled technicians and a complex software program. Currently on view at Simon Preston Gallery in New York’s Lower East Side, Irish born artist John Gerrard presents his most recent major work, Cuban School (Community 5th of October), shown as a large scale double-projection.

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Chicks on Speed, Bawag Contemporary performance, Vienna, 7 May 2009.

Lying somewhere between performance art, DIY fashion and electroclash music, Chicks on Speed is a multimedia art collective formed in 1997 by Melissa Logan, Kiki Moorse and Alex Murray-Leslie while studying together at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany. Making records, music videos, live performances and fashion statements, Chicks on Speed’s practice is a mash-up of different creative disciplines that resists any type of definition.

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Regina José Galindo, Hermana, video still, 2010

ROLLO Contemporary Art’s exhibition Regina José Galindo: 12 Years presents works from 1999 to the present date, including two new commissions, and surveys the dominant themes of Galindo’s ground-breaking performative practice, where the artist typically uses her own body as a raw material that is subjected to violent and dangerous acts. The exhibition brings together performance-video works from Galindo’s 12 year career in the artist’s first solo exhibition in London, including two new works never before exhibited, which Galindo has created especially for ROLLO Contemporary Art’s exhibition; Hermana and Joroba.[…}

We are happy to continue our partnership with DailyServing, an international forum for the contemporary arts based in California. Today we feature an article written by Catherine Wagley on the exhibition The City Proper currently on view at West Hollywood’s Margo Leavin Gallery. Read on… it’s good.

Ger van Elk, “The Co-Founder of the Word O.K.-Hollywood,” 3 color photographs, 1971.. Courtesy the Artist and Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: by Brian Forrest.

The first time I visited downtown Los Angeles, I was surprised by its bareness. A friend and I, both of us art students, had driven in from Claremont for an opening, tackling the congested Santa Monica freeway for the first time, too. A fellow student and L.A. veteran had warned us that, even if we experienced smooth sailing through Covina, we’d hit an out-of-nowhere stand still once we’d “cleared that hill and past the Westfield [mall].” He was right, and we slowed to a laborious crawl 20 miles from the city. Braving traffic felt like initiation and we were proud of ourselves. However, once we arrived in the city proper and exited the I-10, all the people seemed to evaporate. The galleries we wandered through may have been well-populated, but, otherwise, downtown felt weirdly gutted of life.[...]

Ivan Puig, Hasta las narices 2004

Ivan Puig presents viewers with visual metaphors that combine poetic frailty with conceptual rigor. Through installation, intervention and other media, Puig creates situations that challenge our notions of reality. In Hasta las narices, a seemingly sinking car is echoed in a smaller sacle installation in a glass of milk, where relativity and the viewer’s perception is placed into question.[...]