Jenny Holzer’s “READY FOR YOU WHEN YOU ARE” at Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood.. and More
California_ West Hollywood
Jenny Holzer’s “READY FOR YOU WHEN YOU ARE” at Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood
Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood presents “READY FOR YOU WHEN YOU ARE,” a solo exhibition by American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer (b. 1950), on view through October 21.
Jenny Holzer has been placing text in public spaces since the 1970s. Her poetic, political, and personal texts are presented through electronic signs, inscriptions in stone, paintings, billboards, and prints, and evoke the viewer’s experience of power, violence, joy, despair, and idealism.
The exhibition presents Holzer’s first works created using artificial intelligence. Recent paintings and LED works using automated machinery are also on display. The texts Holzer used for the exhibition are declassified government documents and Trump’s tweets. The electronic text slides in an unpredictable cadence and the letters engraved on the metal plates are sharply etched and corroded, reflecting the hyperbolic and enraged rhetoric of the contemporary political and media landscape.
USA_New York
“Michael Snow: A Life Survey 1955-2020” at Jack Shainman Gallery
Jack Shainman Gallery (The School) presents “Michael Snow: A Life Survey 1955-2020,” a solo exhibition by Canadian multimedia artist Michael Snow (1928-2023), on view through December 16.
Although Snow is best known as an iconic avant-garde cinema director for his 1967 film ‘Wavelength,’ he worked extensively in various media, including drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, holography, animation, film, sound, and performance. His multidisciplinary art has attracted the attention of leading institutions and researchers. Snow explored the multiple meanings that arise when images are reproduced and translated through different materials. His signature motif was “Walking Woman,” a five-foot-tall silhouette of a woman cut into a large plank, which he had transformed into a series of photographs, a live-action film, and a video projection installation.
Snow’s themes included ways of seeing, image reproduction, temporality, memory, illusion, and subjectivity, but his ideas were not confined to a single concern or conclusion. The exhibition notes this openness and explains that for Snow, art was a way to get closer to ambiguous ideas through repetition, variation, and continuation.
USA_New York
Ali Cherri’s Solo Show “Humble and Quiet and Soothing as Mud” at Swiss Institute
Swiss Institute (SI) is a non-profit contemporary art institution in New York. SI presents “Humble and quiet and soothing as mud,” a solo exhibition by Lebanese videographer and sculptor Ali Cherri (b. 1976), through January 7, 2024. The show marks the first solo exhibition in the United States of the artist, who won the Silver Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale.
The exhibition focuses on the primordial nature of mud in terms of creation mythology, civilization, and ecology. Not only has mud been a fundamental part of life since the earliest civilizations, but it is also frequently invoked as the origin of humanity, from ancient Sumerian mythology to Jewish folklore, and Chinese creation mythology to Hindu and Yoruba cosmology.
The exhibition features the video ‘Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022),’ which won the Venice Biennale in 2022, and a newly commissioned sculptural installation. The video captures the brickmaking for the construction of the Merowe dam in Sudan. The new work combines mud sculptures of figures from the Gilgamesh mythology with the moving light effects.
