“Inside the Banana” at Algus Greenspon

Josh Brand 'Nature' at Herald Street

BORN 1980 IN ELKHORN, WISCONSIN LIVES AND WORKS IN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK Josh Brand creates unique photographic objects, or photograms, through an open-ended process of darkroom experimentation. Brand exposes photographic paper to light filtered through semitransparent materials, including sheets of punctured plastic or strips of cardboard. The result, visible in works such as Vertical Red White Light, is an abstract interplay of color, shape, depth, and surface. Other works contain fragments of representational imagery culled from photographs of objects, places, and people in Brand’s daily life. Brand’s images reflect his commitment to photography as a way of perceiving and signifying the everyday alongside the ethereal. His approach allows for continuous improvisation and dialogue between works because, according to the artist, the “fragment of one picture is the starting point for another”. Though all of his images are singular objects, by arranging multiple works in progressively larger groups, Brand introduces the possibility of seeing each picture as part of a sequence of images that interweave the processes of perception and memory, continuity and change. c. http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2010Biennial/JoshBrand/

Alain de Botton Living Architecture

http://www.living-architecture.co.uk/registration.asp A Room for London, designed by David Kohn Architects in collaboration with Fiona Banner, is a one-bedroom installation that will sit on roof of Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall and be part of the London 2012 Festival. The design competition for A Room for London, which attracted entries from around 500 architects and artists from across the world, was set by Living Architecture and Artangel, in association with Southbank Centre. The brief was to create a room on one of the most visible sites in the British capital, where up to two people at a time could spend a unique night in an exemplary architectural landmark. The winning design, A Room for London: Roi des Belges, is a boat perched on the Queen Elizabeth Hall roof which appears to have come to rest there, grounded, perhaps, from the retreating waters of the Thames below. David and Fiona drew inspiration from the riverboat captained by Joseph Conrad whilst in the Congo in 1890, a journey echoed in his most famous work Heart of Darkness. From the lower and upper ‘decks' of this beautifully crafted timber structure (see a plan here), there are extraordinary views of a London panorama that stretches from Big Ben to St Paul's cathedral. With an en-suite double bedroom, kitchenette, library and viewing deck, guests are invited to rest and reflect upon what they see and hear during their one night stay; logging their thoughts, observing cloud patterns, the character of the river and deeper undercurrents.

Paul Thek at The Modern Institute & Frieze Article

Despite the impermanence of Thek’s environments, the artist’s Pied Piper-like influence on current art production can be felt in contemporary works such as Sebastian Hammwöhner, Dani Jakob and Gabriel Vormstein’s I Cannot Forward, or Rewind This State of Being, This Aged Resign: Let the Wind Catch a Rainbow on Fire … (2004). This eccentric tabletop collection of objects – including a bronze honeycomb bisected by a mirror and a child’s galoshes graced with bells – bears the signature of what seems to be the collective mind of an uncharted civilization. Kai Althoff and Robert Elfgen’s Das Floss (The Raft, 2004), with its makeshift hut on a life-size raft, seemed to be broadcasting from the same evangelical channel as Thek’s Noah’s Raft, which he built with the help of street children at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1985. Many other works – Gregor Schneider’s Hannelore Reuen (2004), a middle-aged lady who has fallen flat on her face in her tights (but missing pants), or the grotesque mannequins of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Outgrowth Family (2006) – were linked, however, only by formal affinities. Which is ironic, given that Thek’s work was less about a succession of similarities than a secession from the compos mentis. April Elizabeth Lamm, Frieze Magazine, May 2008

Jan Verwoert

Apropos Appropriation: Why stealing images today feels different Jan Verwoert http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/verwoert.html

Pil & Galia Kollectiv