Gravel by Beth Dow

Anne Wehr of Time Out New York reviews Land Use Survey in the magazine’s latest issue, writing:

These days, the U.S. of A. has ever fewer places where one can tremble before the natural sublime, so “Land Use Survey” offers a proportionate representation of strip malls, tract housing and swaths of paradise blighted and paved over.

She discusses several works from the exhibition, including the Beth Dow photograph above, noting:

Re-inhabited Circle K: Mr. Formal, Phoenix, AZ (2006), a photograph by Paho Mann, and two small canvases by Michelle Muldrow (both 2009) are all severe, frontal views of single-story suburban stores, each grimmer than the last. Other works underscore nature’s diminishment: In Gravel (2006), photographer Beth Dow uses shifting focus and the sensuous subtleties of palladium printing to make falsely romantic mountains out of rubbish-dotted molehills.

Read the complete review at Time Out New York and stop in to see the show before August 15th!

Untitled (Goleta) by Liz Kuball

Over at Dwell.com, Aaron Britt had a few things to say about the current show, and featured a quote from me about the curation of Land Use Survey.

A group show that ranges across media that tries to understand how we use land in America, and it’s at once elegiac, angry, and bedeviled by the strange geometry of our present day infrastructure. Ranging from views of a single plant to aerial shots of our squirreling highways, Land Use Survey investigates where we are while still managing to suggest where we’ve been and intimate where we might be heading. ‘I think it is easy to focus on the dire, overdeveloped imagery but in the show I wanted to show as much of the diverse ways that the land is used alongside the diverse ways artists are capturing the land around them,’ says curator Jeffrey Teuton.

Come check out the show before it closes on August 15th!

John Seed, a Huffington Post art journalist, recently interviewed one of our artists, Sarah McKenzie, whose painting Aerial 62 is currently on view in our Land Use Survey exhibition.

Below are some highlights of Sarah’s work discussed in the article:

Aerial 62, 2002, oil on canvas, 48” x 48” by Sarah McKenzie, currently on view in Land Use Survey at Jen Bekman Gallery, New York

Her strongest images flirted with abstractness. In Aerial 62 newly paved roads and darkly shaded McMansions are crisp design elements that give the canvas graphic punch. White fabrics fences held tense by the wind provide strong, interesting linear effects. Consistently working from photographic sources – some of them gently tweaked in Photoshop – McKenzie demonstrated formalist inclinations and a knack for alternating between visual clarity and painterliness.

Interior 5 (Wall), 2009, oil on canvas, 30” x 30” by Sarah McKenzie

Seam, 2008, oil and acrylic on canvas, 72” x 72” by Sarah McKenzie

Seam, for example, is quite literally looking at the seam of a building, where interior and exterior meet. The canvas offers a sort of inventory of the various materials, surfaces, and textures that comprise that structure.

Interior 6 (Coil), 2009, oil and acrylic on canvas, 30” x 30” by Sarah McKenzie

Interior 6 (Coil) is a highly formal, even minimal, piece. There is a metaphor at work: I am thinking of the bundle of wiring as an abstract expressionist “gesture” against the blank white canvas/drywall. Of course, even if the viewer gets that reference, and that’s a real “if,” it’s still a formal concept. Other paintings deal with weightier issues.

Exterior 1 (Plastic Trees), 2009, oil and acrylic on canvas, 30” x 30” by Sarah McKenzie

Site, 2007, oil on canvas, 48” x 72” by Sarah McKenzie

Read the full Huffington Post article and interview, “Sarah McKenzie: A Nation of Builders, and of Artists,” here.

Offering by Gregory Krum

Gregory Krum’s ...Practice..., on view at the gallery for just one more week till Sunday, June 27th, has been reviewed by Vince Aletti in The New Yorker, available to online (now) and in the forthcoming print issue of the magazine.

Aletti writes:

There are pictures of gravestones in the snow, artfully decorated interiors, and what appear to be night skies dense with stars. But a series of twenty-four unframed color photographs hung in a grid across from these images brings the exhibition into focus. Collectively titled “Offering,” they’re shots of the coconut-leaf baskets of flowers and food left at various public sites in Bali as gifts to the gods. Seen from above, these colorful packages are a more exotic form of Irving Penn’s urban debris, but even more allusive and alluring. Through June 27.

Zermatt (2007) | 18” x 13” | Archival Pigment Print

Sarah Fones of the The New York Times T Magazine Blog, The Moment writes about Gregory Krum’s ...Practice… exhibition.

Photographic evidence — say, the kind of indefatigable proof that one has, in fact, visited the Great Wall of China — typically suffices as testament to having actually been there and done that. The photographer Gregory Krum (who is also the director of retail for the shop at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum) has been to the base of the Matterhorn and has seen the tombstones erected there in a climbers’ cemetery. The photos he took are on display as part of his first solo exhibition, “…Practice…,” at Jen Bekman Gallery in SoHo. These images, along with shots of flowers, dust, still-lifes and interiors also seek to illuminate something inherently more tenuous: devotion. “The idea behind the show is those things that become true solely by belief,” he says.

Belief is twofold in this instance, with Krum both exploring the confines of his own (in the guise of photographer) and that of others (embodied in inanimate objects left behind). The tombstone portraits, for example, are literal markers of a failed endeavor. Five interior shots evocative of Dutch still-lifes, including a tiny bedside porcelain skull (a nod to the tradition of vanitas) and a copy of Alcoholics Anonymous, examine the extent to which all manmade objects more literally communicate meaning. An orange rind might imply a sense of inevitable decay, while Ettore Sottsass’s Memphis-style lamp — not to mention Krum’s own corkboard of inspirations — impart the boundless capacity for human innovation and endurance. Finally, a series of 24 small photographs of devotional, sculpturelike offerings convey the idea of repetition and quotidian ritual, or as Krum puts it, “the daily practice.” Just as the spiritually inclined are compelled to participate in these rituals, so the artist is consumed by the desire to create.

Such belief systems are self-reflexive, Krum explains, and in fact the show itself became a sort of meta example of his own devotion. It also coincided with Krum’s fascination with the kind of books that act as personal bibles, outlining an artist’s rules of conduct and recasting the process as a daily spiritual/intellectual/aesthetic regimen. “A particularly good one is Gerhard Richter’s The Daily Practice of Painting,” Krum notes, “from which I ultimately stole the title of the show and postcard design.”

Read the article full article and view the accompanying slideshow here. ...Practice… is on view through June 27th, 2010.

We’re busy preparing for Gregory Krum’s upcoming solo-show but we were excited to stop and see that Sight Unseen, an online magazine founded by two former editors of I.D., has featured a peek inside Gregory’s “perfectly appointed” Brooklyn home. In addition to being a fantastic photographer, Gregory daylights as Director of Retail at the Cooper-Hewitt Shop in New York, curating one of the city’s best spots for design shopping.

Gregory’s certainly got a knack for mixing high-design with thrift store finds to create a space that is uniquely his own. Throughout the house you will find Italian chairs and a custom-made bed frame mixed in with eclectic objects, art found at a thrift store, and several of Krum’s own photographs.

The slideshow is accompanied by an article on Gregory’s experience as an artist, in design retail, and details about his upcoming exhibition ...Practice…, which opens May 15th at Jen Bekman Gallery.

Gregory’s sold out edition Chateau Pool can be spotted behind this plant with a pair of googly eyes (an homage to SNL).

Make sure to check out the full tour on Sight Unseen and then head over to Gregory’s 20×200 page to see his four gorgeous editions.

Jen Bekman artists Holly Lynton and Kate Bingaman-Burt served up a double dose of visual goodness on the virtual pages of Daily Candy this week. Holly’s photo, Les, Amber, Honeybees, New Mexico, 2008 is included in “Femme Photographer,” a selection of images curated by Women in Photography founders Cara Phillips and Amy Elkins. The slideshow exhibits a breadth of work being made by contemporary women photographers, many of whom have been interviewed at greater length on WIP. Holly’s honeybees make a special mark on New Yorkers this spring, as the ban on urban beekeeping has just been lifted. Perhaps we’ll see more folk like Les in and around our fair city soon, but for now, you can enjoy her image online.

Les, Amber, Honeybees, New Mexico, 2008 by Holly Lynton

Ms. Bingaman-Burt notes “black chucks are bad workout shoes” in an illustration accompanying this morning’s Daily Candy weekend guide, which highly recommends you go out and pick up a copy of Kate’s new book, Obsessive Consumption: What Did You Buy Today?” Also the name of her long-running website, which documents her purchases of both the mundane and the occasional indulgence, Kate’s book delights in its printed form. Or, as DC puts it, “Because buying it is delightfully meta.” Signed copies are available if you order directly from Kate’s website.

Kate Bingaman-Burt in Daily Candy’s Weekend Guide

Untitled, 2006 by Nina Berman

TIME Magazine has named Jen Bekman Gallery artist Nina Berman, alongside Lesley Vance and Kate Gilmore, as one of three artists to watch at this year’s 2010 Whitney Biennial. Twenty of Nina’s photographs from her series Marine Wedding are on display at the Biennial.

About the work, Richard Lacayo writes:

It’s the real world you see in Nina Berman’s tender but unflinching photographs of Ty Ziegel, a former Marine sergeant so badly disfigured by a suicide-bomb attack in Iraq that back home small children stare at him, even after 50 reconstructive surgeries. It would be obscene to aestheticize his situation, and Berman doesn’t aim to. What she does is present it forthrightly, with compassion but without pathos — bravely, which is how he presents himself. We have to read a lot into Ziegel because his face sometimes seems to have a limited range of expression. Gently but firmly, Berman directs you to see the man behind the mask. Do these pictures belong in an art museum? Of course they do, because as long as one of the things art does is use images to teach, this is art.

The 2010 Whitney Biennial runs through May 30th in New York and, as TIME Magazine says, Berman’s work is “not to be missed.”

A photograph by Jen Bekman Gallery artist Nina Berman is featured in the Wall Street Journal today as part of an article titled “The Whitney Biennial Lightens Up”. Kelly Crow writes, “The country’s pre-eminent survey of new American art has a reputation for focusing on angry or anxious young things. But the latest edition, opening Feb. 25 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, aims to be something else: fun.”

About Nina’s work Kelly writes:

The biennial doesn’t abandon politics altogether, but Mr. Bonami says he went looking for art that reflects the American psyche about war without being “bombastic.” New York photographer Nina Berman is showing a series about the postwar daily life of former Marine Sgt. Ty Ziegel, who was severely disfigured in a car bomb in Iraq but returned home and married his fiancée, Renee Kline.”

You can read the full article, which features a slideshow as well as profiles of Charles Ray and Aurel Schmidt, online or in today’s print edition. More information about The Whitney Biennial: 2010 is available at the Whitney’s website.

Image of Jen Bekman’s apartment by Youngna Park

Every week design*sponge invites our collective desire for voyeurism to come out and feast on images posted in their sneak peeks column. Sneak peeks lets us into the homes of talented folks, and just yesterday Ms. Jen Bekman had the spotlight turned in her direction. It should not shock you to know that Jen’s space is overflowing with art as colorful as a box of macarons from Ladurée. She is a lady who lives by her word: LIVE WITH ART, IT’S GOOD FOR YOU.

See more of Jen’s home photographed by JBG artist Youngna Park here.

I came home this afternoon delighted to see in my mailbox Jorge Colombo’s second iPhone sketch for the cover of The New Yorker since May! Two covers in less than six months is really extraordinary, but unsurprising given Jorge’s mastery of the iPhone application, Brushes. Incidentally, Jorge’s success has made it to the top of Brushes website, and The New York Times reports that Jorge’s talents have increased sales for the application since his first New Yorker cover.

I have it on good authority that the folks over at 20×200 are planning an upcoming announcement regarding Jorge, so be sure to sign up for the 20×200 newsletter to be in the know!

Jen Bekman is interviewed in the June/July issue of HotShoe International. Jen talks to Bill Kouwenhoven about the gallery, 20×200, and Hey, Hot Shot! The article features the work of Christian Chaize, Allison Grippo, Joe Holmes, Holly Lynton, Youngna Park, and Colleen Plumb. You can read the full interview with a paid online subscription to HotShoe International.

Here is what Jen had to say about the witty bit that graces the door of this establishment, “Live With Art, It’s Good For You.” – “People think it is a tag line, but it is real. It really is what drives me. I want to help as many people as possible live with art.” You have and you do! Read more online.

Border Watcher With Dogs by Nina Berman

Nina Berman’s Homeland work was featured in an article and slide show on The New York Times blog Lens. Nina talks about her role as a photojournalist and about the work from her book and second show at Jen Bekman Gallery, Homeland.

Nina is able to walk the line between photojournalist and the fine art world through her eye and decision to shy away from objective photography by allowing her passion and voice to come through in her images. Nina say’s, “I don’t believe in the notion of the objective photographer, that somehow a photo is balanced and you’re dispassionate,” she said. “I don’t think that would have value. That’s like a security camera.”

Marine Wedding from Nina’s first solo exhibition Purple Hearts is currently on view at The New Orleans Museum of Art!

Read the full article and see the slide show HERE.
Limited edition prints by Nina Berman on 20×200.
Copies of Homeland by Nina Berman are available at Jen Bekman Gallery.

Praia Piquinia | 06/08/04 15h40 | 44” x 37” Lambda print | Edition of 9

Opening Reception | Wednesday, May 20, 2009 | 6pm-8pm
images | artist statement | press release

Please join us at the gallery this Wednesday, May 20th, from 6-8 p.m. We’ll be celebrating French photographer Christian Chaize’s debut US exhibition, Praia Piquinia. Comprised of nine large-scale color photographs, the exhibition will remain on view through Saturday, July 11th.*

Jen Bekman Gallery
e: info@jenbekman.com | w: www.jenbekman.com | p: +1.212.219.0166

6 Spring Street
(between Elizabeth + Bowery)
New York City 10012

The gallery is open Wednesday — Saturday from noon-6 p.m., or by private appointment.

* Please note that our regular gallery hours will be in effect for the duration of this exhibition and throughout our upcoming group show, Summer Reading.

The work of JBG artist Carrie Marill has been featured on the website BOOOOOOOM!. BOOOOOOOM! is a multimedia blog dedicated to “fostering a community of people excited to go out and be creative!” Other JBG artists have been featured on this site as well such as Amy Ross & William Crump.  

BOOOOOOOM! also listed 20×200’s blog as one of the ‘17 creative websites to bookmark (unless you are dumb)’ saying, “It’s a great cross-section of artists and all the work you see is available for purchase.” Ain’t that the truth? I should probably mention here that I just bought my first piece of art off 20×200 a couple of weeks ago and now that I’m looking again, I kind of want this one to be my second. I just can’t get enough!

Now, I think I’ll spend the rest of the day surfing BOOOOOOOM!. Happy Friday, everyone…

Exciting news! Jen Bekman Gallery’s booth at NEXT Art Fair in Chicago was named as one of Time Out Chicago’s ‘fave booths!’ Lauren Weinberg reports on a more compact fair this year noting, “NEXT, an invitation-only fair for ‘emerging’ (often hipper) galleries, dropped from 192 exhibitors in 2008 to roughly 86.” Due to this downsizing, the fair is more easily navigable so your “eyes won’t glaze over before you reach our fave booths, [...] NEXT’s Jen Bekman [...].”

Click here to read the full article.

If you happen to be in Chicago, stop by and see Sarah McKenzie’s work and our booth’s sweet digs courtesy of Design Within Reach! We’d love to see you… We are here at The Merchandise Mart in Booth 7-8033 until Monday, May 4, 2009. Don’t have passes? Drop us an email at info at jenbekman dot com and we’ll give you some!

Robert Frost once wrote, “No surprise in the poet, no surprise in the reader.”  Sitting behind the desk here at JBG, I have the wonderfully unique experience of seeing the reactions of the people who visit the gallery.  Just now, I watched a woman react to the image above with disbelief and amusement.  It is a sure testament to Beth Dow’s current work “Ruins” when visitors to the Gallery question what they see.  This is one of the many magical instances where art photography is uniqely engaging.  In her artist statement, Dow admits to us that she “[approaches] these pictures as a tourist.”  This sort of honesty speaks to that engaging element of surprise from both the artist’s perspective and, subsequently, the viewer’s.

What surprises me about these pictures is the way in which they offer the uncanny reality of an unknown American landscape. Visitors to the gallery often ask if the images are enhanced suspecting that the artist may have digitally inserted these ‘ruins’ onto the scene. No, we say, these places actually exist!  William Meyers, photography critic for the Wall Street Journal, seems to suggest that Dow’s work contains a kind of layered irony in the fact of the existence of the ‘ruins’  and in the way that they are then found, photographed, and printed.  In his review of the show, he writes that “Ms. Dow’s platinum-palladium prints have the look of 19th century photographs of actual antiquities, a final jest.”

Joke or not, the work contains multitudes.  On certain days, the images read as unusually depressing indications of cultural decline; other days, they become humorous depictions of surreality.  This transformation that the photographs undergo, describing something different in the eye of the beholder, creates space for the possibility of continual surprise with every viewing. And that the pictures ultimately ask us to reflect on our own humanity is, in my opinion, Dow’s greatest success. “While genuine ruins remind us of our own mortality,” Dow says. “[T]hey also suggest the opposite by showing it’s possible to endure, even if only in a reduced and degraded form.”

To be surrounded by such poetry is a rare treat.

“Ruins” will be on display until May 16, 2009. Click here to read the review from the Wall Street Journal.

Image via Design*Sponge

20×200 and JBG artist Kate Bingaman-Burt’s cozy home was featured on the blog Design*Sponge yesterday, April 3. Only 600 square feet, Kate and her husband Clifton live comfortably in their LEED certified home designed by Portland architect Kevin Cavenaugh. Visit Design*Sponge to see images and short video showing off their amazing live/work space. You can tell how much they “love the space that Cavenaugh created[, which they] quickly managed to fill … with their stuff (those are Kate’s words). But it’s the stuff that continues to inspire and act as wonderful reminders of their friends and the supportive community they are a part of.”

Kate’s illustrations can be seen at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts this weekend at the North West premiere of Handmade Nation. From director Faythe Levine, Handmade Nation is a new film “documenting the indie craft movement—a new wave of craft marrying historical technique, punk culture, and the do-it-yourself ethos.” The screenings in Portland are all sold-out but check out the movie’s website to see when it will be showing near you.

The L.A. Times blog Culture Monster has just given 20×200 artist William Crump a dazzling review for his exhibition “Lonesome Ghosts” at the LittleBird Gallery in Los Angeles. Art critic Leah Ollman notes that Crump’s work “manages [...] fantastic incongruity[...], mixing pale graphite renderings with bold veins of opaque gouache. The push-pull that results is not just formal (the pencil lines faint and receding, the vibrant colors coming forward) but temporal, as if a collision of past and present visual idioms.” She also indicates a kind of ‘vague anachronism,’ “like the so-called antiquarian avant-garde photographers who favor obsolete techniques but whose images often contain contemporary references.” Mainly, however, Crump’s Los Angeles debut “reads as a thoughtful meditation on the discrepancies between external and internal journeys, the real and the ideal.”

The piece shown above, “The Mountain of Tomorrow’s Sunrise,” was featured in the gallery’s show X Marks the Art back in December and there are still prints available for purchase on 20×200. If you’re in or around L.A., stop by the LittleBird Gallery to see Crump’s show on view until April 8, 2009.

(LittleBird Gallery, 3195 Glendale Blvd., L.A., (323) 662-1092. Closed Sundays and Mondays.)

On the heels of her solo show at Pulse New York, Jen Bekman Gallery artist Beth Dow is featured in the April, 2009 Black & White Magazine out on news stands now.  

 The eight page spread has images from three of Beth’s series; In The Garden, Fieldwork, and her work from her upcoming solo exhibition at Jen Bekman Gallery, Ruins.

Beth Dow’s solo exhibition of new work, Ruins, opens at Jen Bekman Gallery on April 9th, 2009.