Ryan McGinley -Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere @ TEAM Gallery 3/18/10

Algo B

Ryan McGinley

2010, gelatin silver print, 13.5 x 18 inches, edition of three

Another big show 3/18/10 where Photography Rules. Wear comfortable cha-cha heels ...long evening... lots of good shows!

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

Ryan McGinley
March 18th – April 17th 2010
Reception on Thursday March 18th at 6:00PM
Team is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by the New York-based photographer Ryan McGinley. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere will run from the 18th of March through the 17th of April 2010. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor.

For his latest exhibition, Ryan McGinley has shifted his focus away from constructing a youthful sublime within the boundless American landscape and has concentrated instead on creating imagery within the confines of his New York studio. The result is a surprisingly restrained, open-ended study of black and white portraiture. Here we see McGinley not as a chronicler of youthful adventure, but as an engine for an almost scientific cataloguing of a kind of emotional optimism.

McGinley’s portraits are the result of a meticulous studio practice, in which thousands of images are taken of each sitter; each shoot eventually being edited down to its one defining “moment”. During the course of two years, McGinley photographed about 150 hand-picked subjects from across the globe. Bringing these models into his studio and stripping them of their clothing, the artist has succeeded in answering his own question: “What would a classical Ryan McGinley black and white portrait look like?”

In this body of work, McGinley’s subjects are not presented in an active outdoors; they are not shown within a locatable space - a place where image conjures memory - rather, these figures are suspended in an eternal artifice, a strategic nowhere, so that our attention rests solely on the sitters’ state of mind. In this way the portraits can reflect back onto the viewer, becoming surrogates for emotional possibility. There is joy as well as uncertainty in these intimate photographs, and our access to the subjects and their interaction with the photographer seems limitless.

In addition to the black and white photographs, the exhibition will also include three large-scale images in color, which locate the other works within the continuity of McGinley’s oeuvre. Characteristically exuberant, these photographs add a narrative backdrop to the exhibition, which initiates an ambiguous loop between the two approaches. McGinley’s photographs have always mined the space between chaos and control, negotiating the space between the really-real and the only-apparently-so. In this exhibition the push and pull of nature and the studio, of sumptuous color and its absence, create a dynamic tension.

McGinley’s photographs are included in the collections of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., and many others. The 32 year-old artist has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of Art and at PS1 in New York, at the MUSAC in Spain, and at the Kunsthalle Vienna. Last year McGinley had solo gallery shows in London and in Athens.

This is McGinley’s third solo show at Team. A new monograph published by Dashwood Books will accompany the exhibition. Included is a conversation between McGinley and photographer Catherine Opie.
http://www.teamgal.com/artists/ryan_mc_ginley/exhibitions/171/everybody_knows_this_is_nowhere

NOT TITLED YET-Banks Violette @ TEAM Gallery

ARTmostfierce liked this show. It was a real mob scene like most opening shows at TEAM Gallery.

Go and see it!

Team is pleased to present an exhibition of new drawings, alongside one sculpture, by the New York-based Banks Violette. The exhibition will run from the 7th of May through the 20th of June 2009. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, between Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor.

Sculptor Banks Violette has always referred to his drawings as “film cells from the world’s slowest movie.” As with the cinema, meaning does not adhere solely to individual images but rather to their accretion over time. Viewed singly, these exquisitely rendered pictures seem miraculous transfigurations of realism, but when seen in groups they form a continuous landscape of memory, regret and melancholy.

The iconography on which Violette built this show includes the ace of spades, a grinning skull from a B-movie campaign, a famous Vietnam-era image of human suffering, a roadside death shrine, discarded party balloons, a theater spotlight, and the Crimson Ghost from the 1940s Republic film serial. When taken together, the drawings touch on themes of redemption and faith, death and transformation.

Central to the exhibition is a portrait of Bela Lugosi as Jesus Christ. Before coming to the U.S. to make his name as the cinema's most famous vampire, the Hungarian actor made his living playing the lead in passion plays. Violette’s Dracula/Christ manages to take the perceived goodness and suffering of the Jesus figure and "confuse" them with the monstrous evil that Lugosi would so successfully embody as the Count. Lugosi's well-documented drug addiction and late-period decline into poverty and obscurity are also clearly a part of what attracts Violette to this image. A seemingly benign religious portrait, in Violette’s hands, becomes a container for Hollywood’s lies, America’s morbid fascination with disposable celebrity, and our constant need to construct mythologies of total success and absolute failure.

Violette’s drawings are also, at their very core, terribly American works of art, a fact foregrounded here by an eight by four foot drawing of the U.S. flag rendered in black and white and mounted onto a slab of aluminum which is then simply propped against the wall. This monolith helps underline the physicality of Violette’s drawings – images struggle to the surface from a dense mass of graphite applied sometimes laboriously and vigorously; sometimes with a gentle and persuasive sensitivity.

The show’s lone sculpture is a motorcycle that has been cast entirely in resin and salt. The stark white presence will be paired with a drawing of a shrine left at a scene where someone had died in a motorcycle crash. The way in which the image has been rendered makes the drawing seem to appear and disappear as one looks at it. A very strange sense pervades that you are both looking at something specific and looking at nothing at all.

Violette’s drawings are always coming together and falling apart in the eye of the spectator. Soft edges, hardened into image through cognition, vanish into nothingness and slip from legibility. Violette’s work, sometimes crushingly monumental and brutally hard-edged, always so present, is actually, delicately, about the “after” of things. It is not the photo-realistic clarity of the drawings that gives them their power but rather the way in which they remain vague and unreal impressions with a ghost-like presence.

The commemorative and the evidentiary, posed as poetry and prose, have remained central in Violette’s work. The contradictory and the elusive are the continent of his travels. If one looks for the development in Violette’s work one finds a movement towards abstraction: from his earlier works, which sprang from specific social, usually criminal, phenomenon to his most recent investigations of staging and the spectacular as vessels of oblivion.

Violette has been exhibiting his work for the past ten years. This is his fifth solo show at Team. His work has been shown at, and collected by, major museums around the world, and he has been the subject of numerous articles. Recent solos include the Kunsthalle in Vienna; the Modern Art Museum in Forth Worth, Texas; the Kunsthalle in Bergen, Norway; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He’s also participated in group shows at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst; the Andy Warhol Museum; the Museum of Modern Art; the Frankfurter Kunstverein; the Palais de Tokyo; the Royal Academy; the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; PS1; the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, among others.
www.teamgal.com

Ryan McGinley @ Team Gallery

Untitled (Black Bear) 2007 c-print 24 x 20 inches edition of three $ 6,000

ARTmostfierce loves the photos of Ryan McGinley.

April 3rd – May 3rd 2008
Reception on Thursday April 3rd at 6:00PM

Photos courtesy of Team Gallery

Dusk Flip Smoke Strip
Ryan McGinley
2007, c-print, 7 x 5 inches

$2,500.00

Fireworks Hysteric
Ryan McGinley
2007-08, c-print, 40 x 30 inches

Ryan McGinley’s “snapshots” have been evolving steadily since his guerilla show at 420 West Broadway in 2000. In the intervening eight years he has moved away from an artistic practice that was the soul of casual and towards an elaborated production schedule that raises the ante on “being there.” McGinley has gone from being perceived as the hottest young photographer in town to being considered a serious artist with a rare gift for creating enduring color photographs — photographs that show us the best of youth. The title of this exhibition, taken from an early B-side by Belle & Sebastian, is more than just a piece of poetic musing. McGinley does, in fact, know where his summers go. In the summer of 2007, for example, he traversed the United States with sixteen models and three assistants, shooting 4,000 rolls of film. From the resulting 150,000 photographs, he arduously narrowed down the body of work to some fifty images, the best of which are on display here at the gallery.The inspirational images for the project were culled from the kinds of amateur photography that appeared in nudist magazines during the 60s and early 70s. McGinley would sit with his models and look through all of the ephemera of the period that he had collected, discussing with them the mood that he was hoping to capture that day. McGinley had chosen a very specific itinerary that would bring his troop through the incredible range of landscapes that are available across the US and carefully planned a battery of activities, sometimes orchestrating the use of special effects. He has always been quite fond of fireworks and fog machines and in this new work they play a major role.The very artificial constructedness of the project allows for situations in which the models can both perform and be caught off guard. The resultant pictures of nude young men and women playing and living in the great outdoors are innocent yet erotic, casual yet calculated. McGinley’s photographs are included in the collections of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and many others. The 30 year-old artist has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of Art and at PS1 in New York, in Spain at the MUSAC, and last year mounted an ambitious public project in conjunction with the Kunsthalle in Vienna.

Check out this show! It is a must!

http://www.teamgal.com/exhibitions/131