Events: Exhibition

Conduit Gallery in Dallas, Texas will host Collecting & Collectivity February 15-March 15. Curated by Noah Simblist and Charissa Terrnova Collecting & Collectivity is an exhibition of international artists who engage the broad array of ideas and forms created by the coupling of these two seemingly disparate terms. If the act of collecting is a source of individuation from which emanates selfhood, then collectivity opens a field for self-abnegation and group performance. The exhibition also focuses on “objects” as ideas and material things – their exhibition and the institutional space in which they show, the way we collect them, and how they accumulate value by virtue of their juxtaposition. Objects are the means by which people connect in meaningful ways. They are also part of an economy of brute need and avarice. It is because of things, their manufacturing and ownership, that wars are waged and global inequalities perpetuated. The exhibition also includes various models of collaboration and collective models of praxis by artist teams that sit squarely within the tradition of collectivity and at the same time posit new possibilities for its application. Collecting & Collectivity is a multi-media show with work by Danica Phelps, Daniel Lefcourt, Michael Smith and Joshua White, Team SHaG, Basekamp, Julie Ault and Martin Beck, and Otabenga Jones & Associates.

Bios

Danica Phelps received her MFA from RISD in 1995. In 1994 she attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Solo exhibitions include Staub(g*fzk!) in Zurich, Ritter/Zamet in London, Galerie Schutte in Germany, Robert and Tilton in Los Angeles, Zach Feuer and Jack Tilton and in New York, and Art House in Austin, TX. She has also exhibited at the New Museum in New York, The Brooklyn Museum, Art House in Austin and The Center For Curatorial Studies at Bard College. She has been featured in several publications including The New York Times, Art in America, Flash Art and Art Forum. She lives and Works in New York.

Team SHaG is a collaborative team including New York artists David Humphrey, Elliott Green and Amy Sillman. Taking their cue from Surrealist artists Andre Breton and Paul Eluard, the artists create what they call “team paintings.” One artist begins the work, then passes it along to the other two to complete.


Michael Smith received his B.A. from The Colorado College and attended The Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York City. Smith has taught at numerous art schools and universities including University of California at Los Angeles, California Institute of the Arts, Cranbrook, Art Center, University of Illinois at Chicago, The Royal Danish Academy, Pratt Institute, and Yale University. He has exhibited extensively around the US, Canada and Europe at a variety of venues from museums and galleries to nightclubs and television. His works are in the permanent collections of The Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Museum of Radio and Television in New York City. Since 1997 he has collaborated with Joshua White on several large-scale installations that were shown at The New Museum and the Christine Burgin Gallery in New York City, The Vienna Kunsthalle, Art Metropole in Toronto, the Hales Galley in London and at the Basel Art Fair. In addition to his collaborative work with Joshua White, Smith has had recent solo exhibitions at Dunn and Brown Contemporary in Dallas, Galleria Emi Fontana in Milan and at Ellen de Bruijn Projects in Amsterdam. In the fall of 2007 “Mike's World: Michael Smith & Joshua White (and other collaborators)” a retrospective of 30 years of Smith’s work will be on view at the Blanton Museum in Austin, TX. He will be included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Ault and Beck work together to create projects including Social Landscape, at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, 2004, and the exhibition Outdoor Systems, indoor distribution at the NGBK, Berlin, 2000. Ault and Beck are the authors of Critical Condition: Selected Texts in Dialogue, (2003). Ault and Beck live and work in New York. Julie Ault, born 1957, is an artist who independently and collaboratively organizes exhibitions and multiform projects. Her work emphasizes interrelationships between cultural production and politics. She is the editor of Alternative Art New York 1965–1985 (2002). In 1979 Ault co-founded Group Material, the NYC-based collaborative, which was active from 1976 through 1996. Martin Beck, born 1963, is an artist whose exhibitions and projects engage questions of authorship, historicity, and display and they often draw from the fields of architecture, design, and popular culture. They include an Exhibit viewed played populated, Grazer Kunstverein (Graz, Austria, 2003) and storage (displayed) at Spot (New York: 1997).

Daniel Lefcourt was born in New York City in 1975 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has had solo exhibitions at Taxter and Spengemann in New York, in 2004 and 2006, and at Groeflin Maag in Basel, Switzerland in 2005. He has upcoming solo shows at Sutton Lane in Paris, France and at Mitterand + Sanz in Zurich, Switzerland in Autumn 2007. Lefcourt's work has been featured in numerous group shows including several exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art's P.S.1 venue including Greater New York in 2000 and The Gold Standard in 2006. Other group exhibitions include New Work From New York at the Cheeckwood Museum in Nashville, Do You Like Stuff? at Swiss Institute in New York and most recently in Concrete Works at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times, Frieze, The New Yorker, ArtNews, ArtNet.com, The Boston Globe and has been included in publications such as Artworks: Money, by Katy Seigel. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 and his MFA from Columbia University in 2005.

Otabenga Jones & Associates is an organization founded by Otabenga Jones and whose other members include artists Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Jamal Cyrus, Kenya Evans, and Robert A. Pruitt. The group works under the tutelage of Mr. Jones, who is named after Ota Benga, the African Pygmy brought to the United States in 1904 and later exhibited at the Bronx Zoo, and this historical reference to the pseudoanthro-pological penchant for exhibiting Africans and other non-Western peoples in world's fairs and other such exhibitions of the time is an indicator of the group's intent. Their pedagogical mission, realized in the form of actions, writings, and installations, is to highlight the complexities of representation across the African diaspora; to establish a cross-generational aesthetic continuum stemming from the transatlantic experience; and, as they write in their mission statement, quoting from Sam Greenlee's classic satirical novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969), "to mess wit' whitey." Most recently, they have been invited to create an exhibition-classroom-performance piece at the Menil Collection in Houston.

BASEKAMP + David Dempewolf
BASEKAMP is an artist-group and non-commercial space, which has researched and co-developed interdisciplinary, self-organized art projects with other individuals and groups for the past decade. For this exhibition, BASEKAMP will be collaborating with David Dempewolf, a former co-founding member. Scott Rigby continues to organize Basekamp's projects, international residency program, and exhibition space in Philadelphia with a rotating group of artists. Rigby and Dempewolf periodically collaborate together on projects and exhibitions, including 'Through the Pedagogical Looking Glass' at ICA, Philadelphia 2001, 'Connect The Dots' at Columbia University in 2004, and 'Flash on the Screen' in 2006.