About me:
Dear Friends!
STYX Project Space is pleased to announce "20:1", the first solo exhibition of London-based artist E.M.C. Collard.
The title, 20:1, refers to the scale shift in the paintings that form the main part of the exhibition. Here, densely layered images give rise to a unique collage technique dictated partially by chance. In the diptych "Zahnderzeitpasta Delta Second" (2007), for instance, a kitsch postcard image of a sunrise seems to have been sat on top of graph paper, while paper dots from a hole-puncher – each enlarged to the approximate size of a fist – form an integral part of these narratives-as-image, which only someone with a pronounced poetic sensibility could pull off.
Then there’s the toothpaste. A red-white-blue whirligig snaking its way through many of these paintings, Collard mixes paint with actual toothpaste in order to get the chalky effect that smudges its way into the canvas. These paintings form a series, “Zahnderzeitpasta”, which refers to the German colloquial expression, “the tooth of time” translatable into English as the ravages of time.
In "Zahnderzeitpasta 4.1 fragment" (2007), the toothpaste takes up the entire background, while we are forced to contend with a decrepit black object, half phallic and half fecal, in the foreground. It takes the eye a minute to recognize this as two burnt matches, tied together by thread to form a cross and stuck into the pile of dental hygiene product, magnified some twenty times. The discordant combination of colors is what endows this painting – a fragment, according to its creator – with its winning combination of brashness and vivacity.
Whether she’s giving us rotten broccoli, burnt matches, or toothpaste, E.M.C. Collard’s art distinguishes itself through a rambunctious sensibility that values distortion and magnification as investigative tools. Endlessly inventive, hers is a provocation that need not overstate itself. Oscillating between the expressionistic and figurative, E.M.C. Collard is a new type of abstract painter – one content to define her own terms in assigning new visual identities to everyday objects.
E.M.C. Collard was born in Frankfurt am Main. She studied at the Royal College of Art, Slade School of Fine Art, and Chelsea College of Art and Design in London, where she currently lives and works. In 2007/ 08 she curated the touring exhibition "Divination" with Michael Rade and Juniper Daumier, which showed works by 20 international artists. Her work has been shown in Great Britain, Germany and France.
The exhibition will be accompanied by an essay by London based critic and curator Martin Holman.
Opening Reception: 8 July 2009 7-10 pm
Closing Reception: 29 July 2009, 7-10 pm
Opening hours: Thursday-Sunday 2-3pm or by appointment
STYX Project Space
Old Brewery Friedrichshöhe (2nd floor)
Landsberger Allee 54
10249 Berlin
http://www.styx-berlin.de/collard.html
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The only conceivable way of unveiling a black box, is to play with it.
-René Thom
Dear Friends!
STYX Project Space is pleased to announce »Black Box« with artists Benjamin Laurent Aman, Sébastien Maloberti and Marcel Türkowsky.
Benjamin Laurent Aman, who will be exhibiting in Berlin for the first time, has invited the two other artists to help him actualize the as-of-yet theoretical conception of the »Black Box«.
»Black Box« is the idea of externally perceptible behavioral patterns of a particular system, of a complex transitional space, or a non-space. In everyday language, the simplest model has advanced towards being a paradigm: through the reproducibility of sense perceptions, analogous to the black box of an airplane, an archive of memories and associations is constructed. It is a transistor, able to absorb and transform information. But, following La Mettrie’s »L‘homme machine«, the theoretical conception of a black box can also be seen to extend beyond allegory to an all-encompassing surveillance of future, possible and so far impossible events. Attempts to define mental states solely through the input and output behaviour of a black box are increasingly popular, and radically question the self-perception of modern man.
What, then, discerns man and machine, if at the same causal efficiency they are simply different but seemingly equivalent physical realizations of the same pattern of behavior?
How can we counter the purely syntactic symbol manipulation of complex algorithms? Fundamental questions of this kind evade clear answers and call for analysis in the area of tension provided by individual introspection and artistic work.
The three artists approach the subject »Black Box« as experimenters, thereby creating a system of tests in which events can be followed, but which also lends itself to substantiating different modus operandi. Oscillating between possible and impossible implementations, they transform notions of reality and illusion into a dimension of functional describability, while revealing the character of the exhibition space as an in-between place.
The artists’ approach is closer to an unveiling than a usage of the space, marking less an attempt at organization than the activation of forms of behavior and conditions. The artistic media used in this range from photographs and drawings to installation and sound.
Not least of all, the exhibition is marked by a moment of ignorance, in which none of the artists are aware of each other’s intentions and strategies.
Benjamin Laurent Aman (* 1981 in Rouen) graduated in 2004 from the Nancy Academy of Fine Arts. Since then his work has been shown in several French and international group exhibitions. In 2007 he had his first solo exhibition in Luxembourg, presenting a mixture of performance, drawings and installation. In the last 5 years he has released almost 20 records, some of them on his own label »Razzle Dazzle«. He has also done cover art for other musicians. Benjamin Laurent Aman works in Rosières aux Salines and Berlin.
Sébastien Maloberti (* 1976 in Paris) graduated in 2001 from the Clermont-Ferrand Academy of Fine Arts. His works have been shown in several solo shows in French galleries such as La Malterie in Lille, as well as in several French and German group shows during the last 10 years. Some of Maloberti’s works are part of the public collections FRAC Auvergne and Fond D‘Art Contemporain Clermont-communauté. He lives and works in Clermont-Ferrand.
Marcel Türkowsky (* 1978 in Berlin) studied Philosophy/Musicology at Humboldt University, Berlin and received his MA in Sound Studies/Sound Art from the Berlin University of the Arts in 2008. As an artist, composer and musician he combines the worlds of audio and visual with recontextualizing different media - appropriating ideas from music, film, literature and collecting - in performances, installations and film projects. He did numerous national and international performances (amongst others at the Transmediale in Berlin), released several works as a soundartist and film composer and participated in several group shows. A recent collaboration in a solo exhibition with Elise Florenty could just be seen in 2009 at Centre D‘Art Contemporain in Delme, France.
Opening Reception: 29 April 2009 7-10 pm
Closing Reception: 29 May 2009, 7-10 pm
STYX Project Space
Old Brewery Friedrichshöhe (2nd floor)
Landsberger Allee 54
10249 Berlin
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Dear Friends!
STYX Project Space is pleased to present the first German solo exhibition of Jacqueline Brown.
In her drawings, installations, videos, and sculptures, Brown turns an inquisitive eye on nature and its strange formations. Rather than relying on the clichés of German or English Romanticism in grasping for some lofty implications of truth within the sublime, Brown largely focuses her concerns on the manipulation of natural phenomena by humans for normative purposes that often seem comical or simply bizarre upon closer inspection.
Cultivating material from the English countryside, where Brown spent her childhood, the artist’s interest in hunting as sport led to the creation of 38 ½ Couple, a video work that documents the “hidden lives” of a clan of hounds as they await the next hunt. The presence of the camera, of course – and the artist behind it – imbues the hounds with a self-consciousness and curiosity they would otherwise lack, while the supplemental pieces – a video listing each of the dogs’ names and an audio interview with their trainer – further situates these hounds’ lives as an extension of a larger human project.
Brown’s training as a sculptor emerges at the forefront of her large drawings of conifer trees. The artist takes photographs in the forest of a seemingly infinite hatch of foliage, then “edits” her footage – effectively sculpting the material – into peculiar shapes that are then drawn on paper in painstakingly exquisite detail. Even here, seemingly undisturbed nature is not allowed to rest; rather, it is the artist herself who intervenes, mimicking an act of God through her re-structuring of flora.
More recently, Brown has taken inspiration from the urban environs of her new home, Berlin. Walking the streets shortly after the Christmas holiday, Brown became fascinated by the discarded Christmas trees laid out on the streets awaiting rubbish collection. In their state of abandonment, Brown became curious as to the human lives they temporarily enriched, even going so far as to scribbling the street address of each one she “discovered” in her diary. At STYX Project Space, Brown will premiere this new series of miniature drawings, which, again, implies a poignant instrumental usage on the human side of the equation.
Through her sculptures, video, and extensive drawings, Brown’s voyage as an artist has been spurred on by an inquisitive curiosity as to the ways in which we interact with the world we have inherited. The real accomplishment of Jacqueline Brown’s “New Naturalism,” though, may be the artist’s anti-programmatic approach towards her subjects – a process that isolates and substantiates fragments taken from a confused and often violent world.
Jacqueline Brown (*1982, Oxford, UK) studied at the Royal College of Art in London (MA Sculpture, 2007) and the Winchester School of Art in Hampshire (BA Hons Fine Art Sculpture, 2004.) Her work has been exhibited throughout the UK and abroad. In 2007, she was short-listed for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries. That year, she also took first prize for short film at the Totnes Short Film Festival. Brown currently lives and works in Berlin.
Opening Reception: 29 April 2009 7-10 pm
Closing Reception: 29 May 2009, 7-10 pm
STYX Project Space
Old Brewery Friedrichshöhe (2nd floor)
Landsberger Allee 54
10249 Berlin
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Dear Friends!
STYX Project Space is proud to present the first German solo exhibition of New York-based multimedia artist and musician Gio Black Peter, “This is My Gun.”
If New York in the 21st century suffers from an identity crisis mitigated by a myriad of social, economic, and political factors, the city’s countercultural life has managed to maintain an edge thanks to the work of multi-faceted artists such as Gio Black Peter. He continues a legacy of outsiderdom that refuses assimilation into the mainstream American culture industry, while simultaneously exploiting the fruitlessness of such conceptual binaries, effectively producing a medium-spanning oeuvre, the accessibility of which lies in its very roughness.
Born Giovanni Paolo Andrade Guevara in 1979, Gio immigrated with his family to New York at the age of five from Guatemala. In the words of the artist, “I’ve been making art for as long as I’ve been pissing. When I was a little boy I spent my time fucking, drawing, and writing stories.”
After spending much of his adolescence hanging out in New York’s club scene, Gio first entered the spotlight as the star of James Bolton’s independent feature film, Eban and Charley, in 2000. Since then, he has pursued art and music in equal measures, while occasionally returning to his acting roots, most notably as co-star of Bruce LaBruce’s Otto; or, Up with Dead People!
The visual universe of Gio Black Peter engages in equal measures with the highly sexualized politics of queer outsider culture and the colorful syntax of the street. He is prone to using a combination of found materials, such as New York City subway maps, and traditional media, such as acrylics and oils, in creating a cacophonous deluge of collages, installations, paintings, and drawings. Many of the works shown in Berlin were created specifically for the exhibition at STYX Project Space.
In addition to his solo output, Gio Black Peter also collaborates with artists Slava Mogutin and Brian Kenny as part of the artist group SPUTNIK 3.
In 2008, Gio’s band, the Black Peter Group, released their first EP. Co-written and produced by Andrew “Friendly” Kornweibel, It’s Fucked Up! fuses such diverse musical influences as punk rock and hillbilly 2-step into a collection of highly danceable tracks and features Gio’s distinctive vocals. Like Gio’s artwork, It’s Fucked Up! is reminiscent of the old New York – a graffiti-covered urban jungle where a feeling of lawlessness reigned and every night out promised a wild new adventure.
Thus, an exhibition of Gio Black Peter is perfectly suited to the city of Berlin, which has in recent years garnered comparisons to New York in its glory days, and more specifically the squat-like environs of STYX Project Space, where street style meets the white cube. The opening of “This is My Gun” will feature a live performance by Gio.
Opening and Performance by Gio Black Peter: 20th February 2009 19-22h
Finissage: 6th March 2009, 19-22h
STYX Project Space
Old Brewery Friedrichshöhe (2nd floor)
Landsberger Allee 54
10249 Berlin
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On Thursday, 4th December STYX and hairentertainment.com will host a night of performance sound & video art with:
James Blackshaw
www.myspace.com/jamesblackshaw
Seiji Morimoto
www.myspace.com/seijimorimoto
Vstavai
www.myspace.com/vstavai
Please join us at 9pm
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Dear Friends!
STYX Project Space is pleased to present three international artists in a cross media context. Sue de Beer, Derek Holzer and SIX will be showing from the 7th to 28th of November 2008.
In the Pervateen series, London born, Prague based photographer SIX highlights aspects of Czech youth culture and underground movements, previously relatively little known in the West. The portraits spanning several years bring social outsiders into focus, always matter of fact and close to the protagonists; showing us demanding, brash glances; disruption caused by the drug Pervertin; affliction and resentment drowned out by cool Dean- and Brando- gestures.
Injuries, physical and mental, are visibly part of these poses: lacerated, pale skin and numbed gazes begin to function as trophy status, turn from irregularity to matter of course and finally become components of integral, irreversible self.
The visual language resonates with advertorial and fashion aesthetics, helped by the stylised typography and colour choices of the photographer. What serves as tools for staging individuality and glamour in advertising and fashion, sees a re-interpretation in SIX’ work that generates authenticity. The unconditional closeness to the subjects enables the photographer to portray their individuality with all its vulnerability and fading innocence. At the same time his aesthetic choices and use of space allows the youths to present themselves self-confidently in their adolescent beauty.
Teenage inner worlds and their abysses are also a recurring theme in the work of American Sue de Beer. The exhibition will show select stills of her film Hans und Grete, realized in Berlin.
Instead of internalised aggressions and fears, and the production of a self-confident pose without alternative, she looks at the projection of suppressed emotions resulting in assumed self destruction and destruction of the hated environment. Her processes zoom in on narcissistic moments and the forceful demand for prestige. Characteristic for de Beers work is the play with dark fantasy elements and a use of horror movie aesthetic, or one close to Goth and Metal movements. Her stills emphasise the emotional captivity and contraction of perspectives experienced by her characters.
The installations of American sound artist Derek Holzer react to the hidden resonance bodies in objects and spaces. The sounds are those that could develop in the space, but also those, which the room makes possible via objects and a multiplicity of known and new instruments. His two performances, at the opening and finissage of the exhibition, will see him conduct a room-filling installation of piano chords; leaving the tightrope walk between narrowness of the project space and freedom of sound to the spectator for the duration of the exhibition.
STYX project space is an independent gallery space in the former brewery Friedrichshöhe, a building which was left unused until recently since 1990. The current exhibition is part of an interdisciplinary event series, which aside visual art also presents musical performances and readings.
Opening and Performance by Derek Holzer: 7th November, 2008 19-22h
Finissage and Performance by Derek Holzer: 28th November 2008, 19-22h
STYX project space
Old Brewery Friedrichshöhe (2nd floor)
Landsberger Allee 54
10249 Berlin
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CLOSING RECEPTION - JEREMIAH PALECEK
Wednesday, 8 October, 7-10 pm
Jeremiah Palecek - Straight Outta Naperville (2006)
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PERFORMANCE BY TENNESSEE CLAFLIN
Friday, 26 September, 7 pm
Join us on Friday night for a fiery performance by wild child Tennessee Claflin.
Writer, activist and performance artist Claflin was Born in Boise, Idaho and spent most of his young life in Salt Lake City before moving to Los Angeles at the age of seventeen. Since then he has lived and worked in several cities around the world including New York, Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Istanbul, Madrid and Portland, Oregon. He is now based in Berlin.
STYX project space
Old Brewery Friedrichshöhe (2nd floor)
Landsberger Allee 54
10249 Berlin
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JEREMIAH PALECEK - PAINTINGS
3 September - 8 October
"Suburban Black Helicopters", Jeremiah Palecek, 2005
Dear Friends!
The third of September will see the opening of the first solo exhibition by Prague based artist Jeremiah Palecek at STYX oroject space.
The US American national Palecek has attracted attention through his simultaneous activity as blogger and painter.
In his figurative paintings the artist reacts subtly to the iconography of digital media: many of his paintings depicts stills taken from videogames, sections of user interface or fragments of HTML code.
Palecek has coined the term ‘Nerd Arts’ for this type of aesthetic production, which also shapes the artist’s self-perception. The specific logic of digital communication moreover governs the distribution of the work: Palecek consistently paints one painting per day and immediately publicizes these on his blog, through which they are also sold.
The choice of subject matter is often reactive or incidental, combining references to the artist’s surroundings or resulting from interaction with other internet users.
Often they are also phenomena of the digitally mediated day to day, particularly stereotypes of the American ‘way of life’ that are at the centre of Palececk’s work: scenes of family and suburban life are transformed to allegories of temporal and social absolute zero.
In these moments of forced stillness the seemingly real and familiar begins to slip into the uncanny; boundaries of a recognizable fiction become porous. Clichés that were previously held dear tip into monstrosity, fissures pervade a normality that seemed safe.
STYX project space is an independent gallery space in the former brewery Friedrichshöhe, a building which was left unused until recently since 1990. The current exhibition is part of an interdisciplinary event series, which aside visual art also presents musical performances and readings.
JEREMIAH PALECEK - PAINTINGS
Opening reception: 3 September 2008, 7-10pm
Closing reception & Performance: 26 September 2008, 7-10 pm
STYX project space
Old Brewery Friedrichshöhe (2nd floor)
Landsberger Allee 54
10249 Berlin
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