DaWire

Revealing the unseen world of how mail is delivered to the farthest corners of the UK, Royal Mail gave Tim Knowles unique access to its delivery system. Creating an artwork that captures the experience of a parcel in the post – carried by foot, Royal Mail vans and trucks, a Boeing 737-300 cargo plane, a small Shorts 360 propeller Aircraft and a ferry – this object traveled 20 hours 22 minutes. A specially constructed parcel recorded its own 902-mile journey through the postal system from London to the Isle of Barra, in a sequence of 20,000 images, a continuous audio recording and a GPS track.[...]

cover image: Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos

Having spent the last 5 months in Brazil as a outsider peering in, I’ve tried to pull back the curtain to discover what is essentially Brazilian about artistic modes of production. It eludes me. The constant state of flux it impossible to pause and properly articulate. Much like the boom of the Brazilian economy, the art fervor here can be hard to grasp. From this touristic snapshot view, it appears that the infamous notion of antropofagia, or cannibalism – Brazil’s successful incorporation and reinvention of external influences (a notion popularized by the Tropicália movement in the late 1960s) – has been corroded from the inside out. Artistic practices in Brazil seem to be more concerned with a dissection and alteration of systems that involve the relationships between Brazil and other countries (specifically Latin American) and a reciprocation of influence. What I can see from this viewpoint is a particularly strong process of working through.

Casa Rota is literally a house, but also an exhibition space in Levittown, Puerto Rico where exhibition maker Bryan Arocho presented last week a collection of small format collages titled Violation. At a time when alternative art venues seem to be anonymously sprouting amongst galleries and art institutions, it seems necessary to reveal alternate ways to exhibit works in a rapidly changing dire economy. This is one of the places where art is happening, but few seem to know about.[...]

Rae McGrath’s SUGAR JUNKIE; a Winnebago turned gallery turned school bus

One of the most enticing legacies of the tradition of writers and their multiple identities as graffiti artists, aerosol artists, street artists, or simply artists, is the spontaneous intensity of a particular type of art making. A certain “Live Art”, in dialogue with the moment. It is precisely this paradigm that Rae McGrath’s Brooklynite Gallery has engaged with for the last 3 years on Malcolm X Boulevard, not far from Fulton Street, in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Now at a crossroads, McGrath is looking to take this living art practice into new territory.[...]

Respublica acier, aluminium, cablage, ampoules 370 x 1240 x 150 cm, 2009.

For his first solo exhibition at Galerie West in the Netherlands titled Blue, White, Red, Black, French artist Nicolas Milhé (1976) presents a politically charged oeuvre that examines notions of nationalism, language and politicized individualism. The title of the exhibition plays off the colors of the French flag (the infamous symbol of ‘liberty’ bleu, blanc et rouge) and adds to it the color black, manifesting a dark and somber reality behind the quintessential French symbol of national pride.[...]

Installation view at AREA’s project room

Supported in its entirety by business man and collector José Hernández Castrodad, AREA has been now for five consecutive years one of the only artist residency programs and project rooms in Puerto Rico, providing a space for young artists to show their work and develop projects. For its 5th anniversary celebration, artist Norma Vila Rivero organized a collective project titled “Construcciones, instalaciones y ensamblajes” that comprised works by Migdalia Luz Barens Vera, José “Quique” Rivera, Christto Sanz, Manolo Rodríguez, René Sandín, Melissa Raymond, Omar Obdulio Peña Forty and the tinsmith DUA, which comprised Michelle Gratacós-Arill’s conceptual proposal; while artist Abdiel Segarra presented a documentation project of AREA’s history.[...]