Jen DeNike Selected Press

signs and symbols 102 Forsyth Street, New York, NY | www.signsandsymbols.art https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/328571/julia-stoschek-presents-her-media-art-collection-online/ https://www.vogue.it/fotografia/article/signs-and-symbols-postcard-project

In this period of forced isolation we discovered ourselves musicians, painters, writers... but above all we enjoyed every artistic expression. If our spirits will come out intact from this quarantine it will also be thanks to those artists, curators and gallery owners who have always believed in the "power of art" to enrich the search for meaning that accompanies our lives. But how is the artistic community reacting to this unprecedented crisis? And how are the youngest and most experimental galleries surviving?

We spoke with Mitra Khorasheh, director of signs and symbols, a contemporary art space grounded in performance, based in New York. How would you describe signs and symbols? signs and symbols is a contemporary art space focused on performance and time-based media — but signs and symbols encompasses much more than that. We have always referred to ourselves as a collective, because we truly are a community/family. Our physical gallery space serves as a curatorial platform and multi-disciplinary incubator bringing together diverse artistic voices to stimulate dialogue and creative connection. Our program highlights the live arts – every exhibition has a live performance element, dance, sound etc. In order to sustain our program and support what we do, we do everything we can to thrive and survive in normal times. We maintain low overhead costs, we install almost everything by ourselves with our artists, and we balance our ephemeral and less sellable projects with more commercially viable exhibitions. This endeavor is truly a labor of love for the art, and a commitment to the artists we represent.

What are the challenges that you are facing as director of a startup gallery?

Every gallery is struggling right now, but we are particularly young, small and ambitious. We will celebrate our 2nd birthday this April 29th, and we are a team of just two people — myself and Bridget Casey.

Now, while our physical space is closed indefinitely due to COVID19, we and our artists face a completely unexpected and unprecedented financial challenge. Our programs hinge on the LIVE experience, from intimate and participatory performances to site-specific installations and project residencies. Many of the main pillars of our program are simply impossible during social distancing. We have also had to place our exhibition program on hold, a carefully planned and balanced schedule that is crucial to our financial security. As a young gallery, we do not have deep reserves to keep us afloat while we cannot operate at our storefront space.

We also do not qualify for the majority of small business loans and COVID19 assistance programs, given the fluctuating nature and structure of our business model. Our landlord is unwilling to negotiate rent. Most of our clients do not have the resources or stability to collect artworks in this market. We don't know when New York will ease social distancing mandates, so while we are indefinitely closed, we must tackle two distinct challenges: translating our program to the online realm, and surviving financially.

We are navigating this difficult situation together with our artists, with whom I am in constant daily communication. We don’t have a definitive solution, but we do have each other and we are doing the best we can to survive this pandemic together. What kind of initiatives did you create in order to face this unprecedented crisis?

We believe that it is our responsibility as a gallery to continue championing our artists, and we firmly believe that art plays a vital role in guiding individuals and society through such uncertain times.

We wanted our online program to stay true to our curatorial vision and reflect our commitment to performance and time-based media. In response, we have organized a series of online solo video exhibitions, featuring Jen DeNike, Ornella Fieres, Broomberg & Chanarin, Tony Orrico, Michelle Handleman and Rachel Libeskind. We felt that these video works were always intended to be shown on a screen, so showing them online wouldn't compromise their integrity. We are also regularly livestreaming performances on our Instagram @signssymbols, including Annabel Daou's nightly durational performance I will worry for you (from today until tomorrow).

In response to our current financial crisis, with our artists help we have launched a carefully curated online shop featuring some very special initiatives by our artists which will help us cover our rent and allow our artists to continue producing work, every dollar helps during this time and brings us closer to the ability of providing future exhibition and performance space for our artists.

One very special initiative on our online shop by our artists, is our signs and symbols postcard project (follow along on Instagram #signsandsymbolspostcardproject). For $35, our artists are creating unique postcard size artworks. For every postcard purchase, we select an artist that we think would speak to the recipient. One of our artists then creates an original 4 x 6 inch (10.16 x 15.24 cm) work on paper, with whatever materials they happen to have on hand during this time in quarantine. Some of our artists have access to their studios while others don’t… Once the postcard is complete, the artists directly mail it to their collector, from wherever in the world they are located, as an offering of hope and connection. On their way to the post office, the artist will send us a selfie with the artwork before they mail it off, and we’ll share this photo update to our Instagram @signssymbols. We have also tried to assign an artist who is geographically as close as possible to purchasers. Once the postcard arrives, it belongs to you completely. You are welcome to frame it, display it, photograph it or tuck it into a drawer as a memento of these times. We encourage people to post it on social media with the tag #signsandsymbolspostcardproject. Each postcard will have a return address of the artist who is mailing it to you (not the gallery’s address). This is a direct exchange between you and the artist we have selected for you — once you receive your small artwork, the exchange can end there, although we welcome you to reply to the artist and strike up a socially-distanced exchange. If you choose to reply, it could be the genesis or foundation of a potentially ongoing exchange.

We are excited to launch this postcard project and explore its many possibilities. We plan to offer these postcards size works on our website through the global lockdown, as an opportunity for interpersonal connection via mail, and we may continue it even afterwards as it truly aligns with our belief in community and participation. We wanted it to be at a low price that everyone could afford and have something by our artists whom they otherwise may not have been able to afford. Our artists have shown us such love and generosity during these difficult times.

Snail mail is often overlooked these days, but right now it is one of the only ways to tangibly communicate with others. And since many borders have closed and art shipping services have been suspended, it's also one of the only ways to receive art during the global lockdown. Some other special initiatives by our artists include:

A unique drawing by Tony Orrico, who is offering instructions to conduct your own at-home performance that yields 7 memories, specific to this moment in your life. Tony will hand draw a small tessellation of your memories in the manner of his ongoing series (Textile) and ship the drawing to your door; to mark this time, this effort, and your kind support.

Rachel Libeskind's special edition hand scan, released specifically for signs and symbols' online shop. hand scan exists purely in the digital realm — you can use it as a screensaver on your phone or computer. You may also translate it into the physical realm by printing at your own discretion (the file is formatted to be printed at 8.5 x 11 inches). You will receive a high resolution jpg file of Libeskind’s digital artwork along with a certificate of authenticity for your edition. We know that, in these uncertain times, many of our clients and supporters cannot commit to collecting artworks. Others simply don’t have remaining wall space. At the same time, every dollar contributes to maintaining our exhibition and performance space for our artists post-coronavirus. This digital edition is one of our special initiatives that will allow us to support our program and our artists during this time. We are also offering a virtual performance / ephemeral experience by a signs and symbols performance artist. Truly ephemeral — this one-on-one, virtual performance experience is made specifically for the purchaser by a signs and symbols artist. This will be a new, unique work. The selected artist(s) will be a surprise, and we will contact you to set up a date and time for your virtual experience. As we adapt our program to virtual spaces, these private performances are one of our special initiatives that will allow us to support our program and our artists during this time.

Finally what is coming up soon (and very exciting!) – we will be releasing a few Special Editions of work by our artists for our shop. We will soon be releasing a special edition of 20 of a new photograph by Jen DeNike from her new seris “Visions of the Daughters”. Notably – since I was close to Ulay for many years and his practice informs and anchors the curatorial mission of signs and symbols, we are working closely with Ulay Foundation to release a Special Edition of Ulay’s work as an official collaboration in support of the gallery, Ulay Foundation, Bowery Mission and also in memory of Ulay who recently passed away (March 2, 2020) for our special initiatives. Ulay did a Polaroid project with the Bowery Mission in the 90s, his connection to that place feels particularly fitting for this since he was a supporter of the Mission and that it was a subject of his. More importantly, Ulay not only inspired the curatorial vision of signs and symbols, but also encouraged me to open a performance gallery. I am grateful to the Ulay Foundation for their support of signs and symbols during this difficult time.

Who can contribute and how?

Anyone can purchase a postcard! We started this project mainly for friends and family, but people from all over the world have since participated — Australia, Germany, Canada, Sweden, and others, including some countries most affected by coronavirus like Italy. It's amazing to see the far reach of our humble gallery in New York, and it's beautiful to see these new relationships forged across countries and cultures.

We encourage people to write back to their artist and strike up a socially-distanced exchange. We are excited and inspired by the possibility of fostering interpersonal connection even while we cannot gather together.

Beyond supporting the gallery and our artists, we are donating 10% of all sales to Bowery Mission, an organization that continues to serve the homeless and the hungry during this pandemic. Our gallery is located just a few blocks away in the Lower East Side, and it felt important to us to give back to our neighborhood. Do you feel that the artistic community is effectively supported in this uncertain time?

We have received an outpouring of love and generosity over the past few weeks, and we have been so touched by our artists' unflinching support. I don't know how we would do this without their determination and encouragement.

We have witnessed support for one another within the arts community, particularly from the New Art Dealers Alliance and its member galleries. We will need support outside of our industry in order to fully recover from this crisis — currently, New York has not passed commercial or residential rent relief, and many arts institutions do not qualify for small business loans and COVID-19 assistance programs.

What are your hopes for the future?

We can't wait to return to our space and resume our exhibition program. Our 2020 schedule had intended to include solo exhibitions of Zander Blom, Drew Conrad, Tony Orrico and Ornella Fieres, and we do plan to pick up where we left off once we can safely re-open the gallery.

Of course we can't predict what the future holds, no one can… we are all in trouble more or less. I am just so grateful for the love and support of my artists. I am touched by our community and feel the collective stronger than ever. We are navigating this one day at a time as a collective, we were always close but this has defiantly brought the family of artists closer than ever before. We are leaning on each other for support, and we will fight together to ensure we survive as a gallery. It is in times like this that you really realize the value of community, and the communities ability to sustain together. We need art to guide us, our heroes and idols to guide us, for me that is our artists, my signs and symbols collective.

The response to our postcard project has been incredible so far, and I look forward to the day in a few years from now when we will sit together with our artists over bottles of wine and look back at this moment and remember how we saved the gallery through a pandemic with $35 postcards.

C O R O N AV I R U S A R T C O N T E M P O R A R Y P E R F O R M A N C E

Vogue Consiglia https://news.artnet.com/art-world/editors-picks-january-28-1439326

Editors’ Picks: 17 Things Not to Miss in New York’s Art World This Week From a Lunar New Year party at PS1 to a ‘Female Masters’ show at the Col- naghi Foundation, here are our picks for the week’s top events and openings. Sarah Cascone • January 26, 2019

Thursday, January 31–Thursday, February 28

Installation view of “Jen DeNike: The Scrying Trilogy” (2010). Courtesy of Anat Ebgi.

5. “Jen DeNike: Crystal Cut Levitation” at signs and symbols

In the follow-up to her groundbreaking ballet performance SCRYING, which debuted at MoMA in 2010, artist Jen DeNike is presenting the kick-off performance to her solo show, “Crystal Cut Levitation,” at signs and symbols gallery. The perfor- mance will be accompanied by a full-gallery installation of monochromatic collages, plus hand-woven hammocks and three ballet dancers.

Location: signs and symbols, 102 Forsyth Street Price: Free Time: Opening performance, Thursday, 7 p.m.–9 p.m.; Tuesday–Sunday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Caroline Goldstein https://hyperallergic.com/425481/jen-denike-and-katherine-bradford-ae2-anat-ebgi/

Two Fresh Takes on Portraying Female Bathers in Art Katherine Bradford and Jen DeNike remind me how much more there is to water in their gem-like show at AE2. Daniel Gerwin, February 7, 2018

Jen DeNike and Katherine Bradford: Being Like Water, installation view at AE2, Anat Ebgi (photo by Michael Underwood)

LOS ANGELES — Living in Los Angeles, I regard water in practical terms. I use it cautiously, and in winter I hope for rain. Katherine Bradford and Jen DeNike remind me how much more there is to water in their gem-like show Being Like Water at AE2, Anat Ebgi’s ancillary gallery space.

Bradford is a bewitching painter, masterfully achieving luminosity through color relationships rather than the illusionis- tic use of light and shadow. In “Swimming Under Planets” (2017), a thin veil of green, yellow, and rose washes turn patches of white paint into gleaming celestial bodies suspended in a brushy sky of luminous violet and midnight blue, while in “Glass Ceiling” (2017), white shapes edged with slightly acidic, butter yellow become incandescent bras. “Glass Ceiling” is at once overtly political and weirdly ambiguous. A figure of un- specified gender gazes out at a dark ocean upon which floats an armada of white bras, each as radiant as a lighthouse beacon. The canvas’s top margin is blotchy gray, a cloudy sky evoking the oppressive force of the painting’s title. A second, larger figure is barely visible, present mainly through its white hair and a dim outline against the surrounding night. The picture is a reverie before the sublime but also a massing of female power. Bradford’s image is altogether of this moment, digesting the professional barriers still faced by women in all fields, not least in the fine arts.

In this context, her remaining three paintings on adjacent walls, all of swim- mers, take on meanings that had not occurred to me before in Brad- ford’s long involvement with this subject. The swimmers in this exhibition, all women, seem to be enjoying a moment of self-possession in the wa- ter’s embrace. Recumbent, they extend across the entire width of the can- vas, the twilight ocean a shelter from the inevitable confrontations of daytime. Katherine Bradford, “Glass Ceiling” (2017), acrylic on canvas, 80 x 68” (photo by Michael Underwood) Jen DeNike and Katherine Bradford: Being Like Water, installation view at AE2, Anat Ebgi (photo by Michael Underwood)

Jen DeNike’s “Queen of Narwhals” (2018), a 10-minute, three-channel video installation, is enveloped by walls paint- ed a saturated blue, strengthening the sense of immersion. Like Bradford’s paintings, the video is populated entirely by women, but here they appear to be shapeshifters, devotees of a shamanistic cult of the sea. The color is rich, as is the sound (by Scott Haggart), and the slow pacing conjures the feeling of a séance. The core of the narrative concerns a young woman who has her tarot read, enters a bathtub, and through the remote magic of an elder is transformed into a narwhal at sea, recalling Irish myths of the selkie, a creature capable of morphing from seal to human (this association is strengthened by a Gaelic song in the soundtrack). The work is enchanting, but ends with a disappointingly crude CGI narwhal swimming a bit too stiffly — a letdown after the drenching beauty up to that point.

Bradford and DeNike turn away from art’s traditional treatment of (mostly female) bathers as objects of delectation, whether idealized, romanticized, abstracted, or portrayed with intimate realism. Bradford’s and DeNike’s women are close cousins whose relationship with water goes well beyond the pragmatic or recreational. Seawater, for these artists, becomes a mysterious source of power, earth’s amniotic fluid.

Jen DeNike and Katherine Bradford: Being Like Water, installation view at AE2, Anat Ebgi (photo by Michael Underwood)

Jen DeNike and Katherine Bradford: Being Like Water continues at AE2, Anat Ebgi (2680 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles) through March 10. https://artillerymag.com/jen-denike-katherine-bradford/

JEN DENIKE AND KATHERINE BRADFORD Annabel Osberg, January 24, 2018

Jen DeNike and Katherine Bradford have converted Anat Ebgi‘s small secondary space, AE2, into a mysterious bipartite chamber dominated by the theme of people at sea. Superficially, these two divergent artists’ collaboration seems surprising. Yet their palettes converge in rich violets and deep blues; their compositions jibe in figures bathing, floating and drown- ing. Cohesion despite contrast makes for an intriguing installation where DeNike’s slick premeditated video aesthetic coun- terbalances Bradford’s loose paintings that seem to have flown from streams of consciousness. Their idea for this show sprung from their mutual interest in water as stylistic device and evocative metaphor. Its title, “Being Like Water,” conjures the Tao Te Ching‘s recurrent postulation of water as a feminine principle to aspire towards. This notion seems a befitting point of departure for the duo’s imagery tinged with suggestions of mystical femininity. The dreamy mannerism of DeNi- ke’s Queen of Narwhals (2018, above right), with sound installation by Scott Haggart, appears as that of a contemporary music video with scenes of sorceresses and animals recalling the dark surrealism of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. Beside screens in DeNike’s cobalt-painted alcove, Bradford’s small painting, Floater for Queen of Narwhals (2017), integrates seamlessly. It’s difficult to tell whether Bradford’s floaters are dead, drowning, or simply enjoying moonlit swims. Bathers’ scarlet mouths in Red Lips (2017, above left) emanate unsettlingly incongruent luminance that no waterproof lipstick could provide. Bodies of water are propounded throughout as vital forces with dangerous undercurrents.

Anat Ebgi (AE2) 2680 S. La Cienega Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90024 Show runs through March 10 https://www.bizjournals.com/southflorida/news/2017/12/06/5-new-things-to-do-and-see-at-art-basel-2017-photo.html

5 new things to do and see at Art Basel 2017 December 6, 2017

The long overdue renovation of the Miami Beach Convention Center has brought big changes to Art Basel and organizers say it’s for the better.

Noah Horowitz, director of the Miami Beach show, said it has gained 10 percent more exhibition space with a new floor plan that allows for larger booths and wider aisles. The renovations have also yielded better lounge and dining options at the show. All galleries have new locations at the show. It even has a new color scheme: Art Deco Green.

“There’s a lot to look forward to,” Horowitz said. “We have an amazing show.”

Art Basel 2017, officially launching Thursday, will fill South Florida’s largest convention space with 268 galleries from more than 20 countries. About 70,000 people are expected to attend. Click on the photos for a preview of the show.

We asked the organizers behind Art Basel what attendees should not miss. Their recommendations:

See new exhibitors Twenty galleries will participate in Art Basel Miami Beach for the very first time, including 10 from the Americas, eight from Europe and three from Asia. They include: Applicat-Prazan, Tyler Rollins Fine Art, Múrias Centeno, Inman Gallery, Isla Flotante and Patron.

See a new curator’s selections

Independent curator and critic Philipp Kaiser will curate the Public sector of the show for the first time. Situated in Miami Beach’s Collins Park, Public presents site-specific sculptures and performances by artists from across the globe. It will fea- ture 11 large-scale works framed around the theme “Territorial.”

Listen to a panel in the Conversions series

Art Basel’s long-established talks program will be at a new location for the Miami Beach show, at the Banyan Room in the Botanical Garden at Meridian Avenue and Dade Boulevard. The series covers topics concerning the global contempo- rary art scene with a range of speakers including artists, gallerists, curators and collectors.

Check out the film programming

From December 7-9, Art Basel will present film and video works at Soundscape Park that focus on the universal lan- guage of dance and movement. This year’s program will present films by artists Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Jen DeNike and Tin Ojeda, as well as a series of short films drawn from the Chicago Film Archives collection.

See work by women

This year, Art Basel’s Kabinett section will feature 25 projects, with more than half of the participants presenting works by female artists. Projects range from thematic group exhibitions to art-historical showcases and solo shows for rising stars.

Bonus: Check out the new Miami ICA

The Institute of Contemporary Art Miami has opened its recently completed gallery in the Miami Design District in time for Art Basel. The museum is located at 61 NE 41st Street, with most of the land donated by developer Miami Design Dis- trict Associates. Norman and Irma Braman covered the ICA Miami’s design and construction costs. Click on the gallery for a closer look. http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/2513986/generation-loss-at-julia-stoschek-collection-dusseldorf

‘Generation Loss’ at Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf September 18, 2017

a Installation view Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (Courtesy: Artist and Julia Stoschek Collection)

Julia Stoschek Collection presents “Generation Loss” at their Düsseldorf venue.

To mark the celebration of its 10th anniversary, the Julia Stoschek Collection presents an exhibition organized in collaboration with artist Ed Atkins entitled “Generation Loss.” The basic idea of the exhibition concept is to show the ways in which generations of artists affect one another; the discourses that awkwardly straddle technology-specific periods of artists’ moving image makers; how influence may auger revolt, revision and renewed accord. The exhibition will feature works by Eleanor Antin, Ed Atkins & Simon Thompson and Charles Atlas, who is a pioneering filmmaker and video artist who has created numerous works for stage, screen, mu- seum, and television. Other practitioners include Lutz Bacher whose recent solo exhibitions include “Greene Naftali Garage,” Brooklyn (2016); 356 Mission Rd., Los Angeles (2016) and “Secession,” Vienna (2016). Other participating artists include Lynda Ben- glis, Bernadette Corporation, Johanna Billing, Dara Birnbaum, Hannah Black, Chris Burden, MATT CALDERWOOD, Patty Chang, Ian Cheng, Jen DeNike, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Cheryl Donegan, Trisha Donnelly and many others.

The principle behind the private collection of contemporary art at the gallery is contemporaneity. The Julia Stoschek’s Collection of works has constantly grown and is focused more on the moving and digital image from the 1960s onwards. Their collection spans a range of disciplines: video, single and multiple image projections of analogous and digital film material, multimedia environments as well as computer and internet based installations, not to mention ephemeral art forms such as performances. The collection currently comprises over 750 works by approximately 250 mostly European and American artists.

The exhibition is on view through June 10, 2018 at Julia Stoschek Collection, Schanzenstrasse 54 D 40549 Düsseldorf. For details, visit: http://www.blouinartinfo.com/galleryguide/julia-stoschek-collection/overview https://anatebgi.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Pages-from-Review_JenDeNike_ArtReview-Jan-Feb16-2.pdf

Jen DeNike: If She Hollers Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles 14 November – 19 December Andrew Berardini • November 20, 2016

If She Hollers, 2015 (installation view).Photo: Michael Underwood. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles http://flavorwire.com/116592/10-must-see-art-shows-for-fall/5

Flavorpill’s 10 Must-See Art Shows for Fall Shana Nys Dambrot • September 8, 2010

Jen DeNike: The Scrying Trilogy at The Company, Los Angeles

New York’s Jen DeNike’s first solo show in LA expands upon a dance-based work she premiered at MoMA earlier this year, incorporating ballet choreography, performance, documented action, sculptural installation, and personal mythology into a cross-genre cycle that confronts the human drive to search for pattern and meaning. Jen DeNike: Well actually it’s the reverse: the American flag is more of a symbol that is an object and the semaphore flags are more objects that carry hidden meanings. These meanings mean nothing to the average viewer unless you’re flu- ent in semaphore flag language. Using the American flag as a vernacular object was my point of entry for this work, and also something I hoped to depart from. Flag Girls, the new video at Smith-Stewart, was directly inspired by a postcard I found (printed circa 1918) of six young girls wrapped in flags, forming one large colonial American flag. https://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/34061/in-new-york-opening-this-armory-week

In New York: Opening this Armory Week Andrew Russeth • March 4, 2010

Armory Week has arrived, and New York has been flooded with artfairs, art dealers, and (hopefully) art collectors pre- pared to spendsome money. All around the city, though, local galleries are stayingbusy in their own spaces. For those seeking a break from the tumult ofthe fairs, gallery-visiting options range from a late-evening strollthrough SoHo — a solid stop after the nearby Pulse fair — to a limited-time performance all the way up in Harlem, a short subway ride north of the Scope fair.

Thursday

Walter De Maria,“The New York Earth Room,” 141 Wooster Street, and “The BrokenKilometer,” 393 West Broadway, on view 6–9 p.m as part of “SoHo Night.”

In the battle for control of SoHo’s development, 1977 was a definingyear, marking the opening of gourmet grocery store Dean & Delucasfirst market, on Prince Street, and the installation of Walter DeMaria’s New York Earth Room,which lined the floor of a second-story loft on Wooster Street with 22inches of fresh dirt. Of course, the luxury stores won most of theneighborhood’s real estate, but a few bastions of art remain, like DeMaria’s indoor earthwork. SoHo’s non-profit spac- es — the Drawing Center, Harvestworks, the Swiss Institute, Artists Space, and apexart(which is just across the border, in TriBeCa) — stay open late tonight,meaning that De Maria’s dirt room, a few yards from Houston, could be aconvenient starting space.

Friday

“Self-Fulfilling Prophecies,” at Leo Koenig Inc.,545 West 23rd Street, and Leo Koenig Inc. Projekte, 541 West 23rd- Street, on view through April 10, opening Friday, March 5, 10 a.m.–6p.m.

German dealer Leo Koenig is celebrating Armory Week in style, fillingboth of his Chelsea gallery spaces with art that evokes “swaggerless,off-handed confidence,” according to the show’s press materials. Expectsterling, mostly mid-career names, like Adam McEwen, Zoe Leonard, and Jessica Stockholder, to be represented by their signature work. A Banks Violette aluminum box, all black and metal, is graced with a shattered bottle, while Anselm Reylestrademark fluorescent pink is visible only at the edges of a massive,7-foot-tall canvas: he’s coated the rest with black acrylic. There’salso a Tracey Emin neon — every art fair’s guilty pleasure — that shares a private fantasy: “Sleeping with you.”

“Joseph Beuys: Make the Secrets Productive,” at PaceWildenstein, 534 West 25th Street, on view through April 10, opening Friday, March 5, 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.

Joseph Beuys is having a moment. The Museum of Modern Art devoted a gallery to him for the past 18 months, and earlier this year Mary Boone staged a formidable retrospective, curated by Pamela Kort,that won over some of even the most devout Beuys skeptics, this writerincluded. Now PaceWildenstein enters the game, mounting anambitious show of 12 sculptures, 90 documentary photographs by Ute Klophaus,and four performance videos in collaboration with the artist’s estate.The art-market recession, we have been told, is over. Pricey, shinybaubles could return any moment. Enjoy Beuys’s enduringly enigmaticwork while you can.

“Billy Childish,”at White Columns, 320 West 13th Street, enter on Horatio Street,between Hudson and 8th Avenue, on view through April 17, openingFriday, March 5, 7–10 p.m.

“Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! – Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!” British artist Tracey Emin once told her then-lover Billy Childish. Not long after, Childish and Charles Thomson formed Stuckism, an art movement that favors figurative art over the conceptual work championed by the Turner Prizeand the YBAs. It’d be wrong to peg Childish as a conservative, though.He’s been responsible for some of the best rock and roll produced overthe past 30 years, having been involved with bands like the Thee Mighty Caesars, Thee Heatcoats, and The Musicians of the British Empire, not to mention the estimable all-female pop group, Thee Headcoatees, for whom he penned songs. In conjunction with a retrospective of Childish’s brushy, rough-hewn art at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, White Columns presents a selection of his work, spanning three decades.

Jen DeNike,“Another Circle,” 492 West 128 Street, on view Fridays and Saturdaysthrough March 13, 1–5 p.m., open this week Friday, March 5, andSaturday, March 6, 1–5 p.m.

Fresh off the performance of her “Scrying” ballet at the Museum of Modern Artin January, Jen DeNike debuts a new video installation in a decidedlygrittier environment, an elegantly dilapidated warehouse in Harlemacquired by gallerist Amy Smith-Stewartfor the second show in her series of roving art exhibitions. Thebuilding’s somewhat dubious state means you’ll need to sign a waiver — children are not allowed, too — but the art is worth the hazards.The video, which shows a ballerina engaged in a perpetual pirouette, isprojected between two thick, brick columns, seemingly ready to spin offthe wall and into the space at any moment. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/arts/dance/11barak.html

Let’s Put on a Boundary-Crossing Show Julie Bloom • January 10, 2010

The video and performance artist Jen DeNike sent a marching band through the Brooklyn Museum in the fall as part of the Performa 09 festival. The piece, “Twirl,” which also featured a baton-spinning majorette, owed much of its energy to the movement of the musicians, and it anticipated her new work, “Scrying,” her first foray into the ballet world.

This dance installation, created with the choreographer Melissa Barak, will be performed on Tuesday night in the atri- um of the Museum of Modern Art as part of PopRally, its multidiscipline event series. Six dancers will perform the al- most-13-minute piece under Gabriel Orozco’s whale skeleton, “Mobile Matrix,” encircled by the audience.

Given Ms. DeNike’s approach to her work, it’s not so surprising that she would create an actual dance piece. “A lot of my videos are about choreography,” she said in a joint interview with Ms. Barak at the Juilliard cafeteria last week. “Not dance choreography, but different actions and movement, and a lot of times the camera doesn’t move, and so it’s chore- ography within a frame.”

Ms. DeNike, 38, said she had long thought about doing a piece about ballet because of its very specific vocabulary. “It’s really ballet, it’s not dance,” she said. “So many artists have used contemporary dancers in the realm of contemporary art, and I wasn’t really interested in that. I was more interested in the vernacular of ballet.”

“Scrying” is about forms, George Balanchine’s style of classical ballet and, more abstractly, about a style of spiritual communication that involves looking into a mirror to connect with a spirit. In the piece the dancers become the tool for “scrying,” or crystal gazing.

“The ballet itself,” Ms. DeNike said, “is what is bringing the spirits out of the mirrors.” It’s also a twist on the close relationships dancers have with mirrors and their reflections. Broken into three sections, “Divination,” “Transmutation” and “Magick,” it features music by Ligeti and Schubert.

“Scrying” was originally commissioned by the collector Julia Stoschek, who learned of Ms. DeNike’s desire to create a dance work when the two women serendipitously met at MoMA in March. Ms. Stoschek has several of Ms. DeNike’s works in her collection and invited her to submit a proposal. “Scrying” is to be performed again in Düsseldorf in April as part of the yearlong exhibition “Number Three: Here and Now” at Julia Stoschek Collection.

Just before the dancers step under the whale skeleton on Tuesday, Hisham Akira Bharoocha and his group Soft Circle will perform an original piece of experimental music. PopRally has showcased bands and films at the museum since 2006, but has never before offered dance. A proper floor for the dancers, obtained with the help of New York City Ballet, is being installed at MoMA for the performance. The choreographer Melissa Barak in rehearsal for “Scrying” with the dancer Grace McLoughlin. Credit Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

The setting is part of what makes this dance distinctive. The museum as a performance space, though still unusual, is becoming more common. In recent years institutions like MoMA, the Guggenheim and Dia:Beacon have begun opening up their spaces during and after regular museum hours to different kinds of artists in an attempt to draw younger audiences and to experiment across disciplines.

“We had been interested in doing a dance performance for a while,” said Eliza Ryan, a producer of PopRally. “I think within the institution it’s exciting to engage with an artist — whether it’s performative works, whether it’s dance or music — to have the audience feel a part of that shared experience is always really interesting. It’s another way of opening the doors of the institution in an experimental way.”

In preparation for the piece Ms. DeNike spent a year and a half attending as many performances as she could at New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater, with “Giselle” and Balanchine’s “Jewels” among her favorites. Once she started looking at ballet, she said, she homed in on Balanchine. “I feel like my video art is very much in the same vein of what he was trying to do with his plotless nonnarrative ballets in that it’s invoking a mood, a tone,” she said.

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She also watched some Balanchine dances on video. “It’s another thing watching it on a DVD and really looking at the formations and the lines that he created, almost like a drawing,” she said. “And it’s this very formal composition, and yet it’s infused with so much energy.”

After seeing Ms. Barak’s short work, “A Simple Symphony,” in February as part of City Ballet’s season, Ms. DeNike said, Ms. Barak became an obvious choice to bring that energy as well as a command of Balanchine technique to the new work. Originally from Los Angeles, Ms. Barak, 30, an alumna of City Ballet, left the company in 2007 and joined the new Los Angeles Ballet later that year. She has also choreographed works for Los Angeles Ballet, as well as for New York City Ballet and other troupes. She is now working on a new piece for City Ballet that is to have its debut in June.

Ms. Barak said working collaboratively was both challenging and instructive. “You’re working with somebody else’s vision,” she said. “For me, I was her voice, she knows what she wants to see. I had to sort of figure out choreographically how to make that possible and really understand what she’s going for and how to tell this story in that abstract way.” She added, “It’s definitely taught me about the collaborative process with people outside dance.”

The choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, whom Ms. Barak has worked with as a dancer, has also sought artists from other fields to contribute to his work, and Ms. Barak finds this approach useful. “As a choreographer I have my own ideas, but what I love is working with people who have great ideas, and I like feeding off of their ideas and that can only make my work better and stronger and more inventive,” she said.

Ms. DeNike and Ms. Barak spent 10 days in Los Angeles over the summer working with dancers to create the piece. Ms. Ryan saw it there and decided it would be a good fit for PopRally. “It’s a great way also to bring ballet to a young- er audience, giving it to them in a fun way,” Ms. Barak said. “I think it’s bringing ballet to people that could very well understand it, respect it and like it, but they just aren’t exposed to it. It’s going to be a good fusion of two worlds.”

Ms. DeNike said, “Yeah, definitely.”

Correction: January 13, 2010 A picture caption on Monday with an article about a dance installation, “Scrying,” created for the Museum of Modern Art’s PopRally event series, misspelled the surname of a dancer shown rehearsing. She is Grace McLoughlin, not McLaughlin. http://www.smith-stewart.com/documents/ReflectionsontheElectricMirror_NewFeministVideo-Reviews-ArtinAmerica.pdf

REFLECTIONS ON THE ELECTRIC MIRROR: NEW FEMINIST VIDEO Kirsten Swenson • October 22, 2009

NEW YORK The compact survey “Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video” brings together five artists work- ing individually and two collaborative duos, all of them 30-something women. Despite gender and generational uniformi- ty, these artists could not be more varied in their sexual politics. Still, we are urged to evaluate all their work in relation to feminist art of the 1970s. Borrowing the first part of its title from an essay of that decade by Lynn Hershman, the show also included, when it opened in May, a month-long presentation of such classics as Dara Birnbaum’s Technolo- gy Transformation (1978) and Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975); Judy Chicago’s iconic Dinner Party (1974-79) resides permanently in the adjacent gallery. In the younger women’s videos, it’s easy to detect key targets of established feminist critique (the media, futile and repetitive labor) and long-favored gambits (subversive behavior, autobi- ography). But this cohort distinguishes itself by exploring highly specific identities characteristic of the YouTube generation— post-punk queer urban youth, for instance, or Los Angeles glamazon—which supersede any shared feminist consciousness.

The Swedish-born, Berlin-based Klara Liden makes videos that are difficult to watch and just as difficult to turn away from. In Bodies of Society (2006), she tenderly probes and then, like an abusive lover, viciously pummels a bicycle in a bare hallway. Paralyzed (2003) documents her performance of a manic, intensely physical ballet in a Stockholm subway car; fellow passengers are at a loss for how to respond. In both, her ecstatic, youthful energy hints at real mayhem, even violence. Understandably, Liden has become a bit of a cult figure. Her brief, DIY videos enact psychological conditions with the same economy of means that propels viral Internet videos. In Black Out (2004), San Francisco artist Cathy Be- gien dispassionately narrates a lively night out; while she sits blindfolded, her friends support her story by thrusting drinks and cigarettes at her and having their way with her body. The video’s comedic tone upends its concern with the loss of identity and control. Whacker (2005), an absurdist drama staged by Los Angeles duo Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, finds Kahn, in heels, sunglasses and a sundress, desultorily mowing an overgrown suburban lot with a weed whacker.

Occasionally, she pauses to gaze wistfully into the sunset. Rough and handheld, the video nonetheless has the feel of a Hollywood movie, capturing the self-possessed heroine in long shots as she basks in the sun . . . and whacks weeds. Shannon Plumb, too, draws on Hollywood, using engaging physical comedy to inhabit a range of silver-screen personae. Plumb’s black-and-white Commercials (2002), in which she clowns her way through a series of product promotions in the manner of Charlie Chaplin, is also an homage to Cindy Sherman. K8 Hardy and Wynne Greenwood’s fictional feminist newscast New Report (2005) sends mixed messages: the absurdity of the artists/ anchors’ costumes, set and tagline (“Pregnant with Information”) undercuts its serious critique of broadcast news.

The video most grounded in 1970s second-wave feminism is Kate Gilmore’s Blood from a Stone (2009), which mocks modernism’s association with heroic masculinity. Dressed in a prim cardigan and skirt, the artist struggles to hoist 10 solid plaster blocks, dripping with white paint, onto a row of high shelves. As each block —plainly a stand-in for a Minimal- ist cube—is situated on its shelf, the paint splashes onto the wall and floor, creating a record of Gilmore’s labors (and mimicking Abstract Expressionism’s painterly splashes). Blood from a Stone was performed at the Brooklyn Museum; blocks and paint splotches remain, supplementing the video.

A compelling selection of work, “Reflections on the Electric Mirror” features several artists who have lately gotten consid- erable attention—Liden was featured last spring in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Projects” series, and Begien and Dodge and Kahn were included in the Getty Museum’s important 2009 survey “California Video.” Lauren Ross, interim curator at the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, has identified a range of recent video concerned with the vitiation of identity by commercial media and the Internet. But she leaves open the question of just what comprises feminist video today.

Photos: Kate Gilmore: Blood from a Stone, 2009, video, approx. 8 minutes. Right, Cathy Begien: Black Out, 2004, vid- eo, approx. 51/4 minutes. Both at the Brooklyn Museum. http://www.smith-stewart.com/documents/NYArtistsDictionary-M-A09.pdf

New York Artists Dictionary / Part 2 Kirsten Swenson • October 22, 2009

As the Bernadette Corporation put it, “New York itself strives to become the ultimate collective experiment in which the only thing shared is the lack of uniqueness.” Conceived as a conclusion to three important exhibitions — “Greater New York” at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, “USA Today” at the Royal Academy and “Uncertain States of America” at Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art — the following series of artists’ profiles (see also Flash Art International #264 January-February 2009 for Focus New York/Part 1) is an attempt to frame the polymorphous state of the New York Art scene.

A city of exiles, a “holographic rendezvous,” New York is a place where divisions between high and low culture, process and result, art making and curating, are abruptly erased. New York-based authors are detectives of “simultanous potentialities,” “complexity,” and “reflexive systems” (all keywords in Shamim M. Momin’s 2008 Whitney Biennial essay). I use the word “author” here instead of “artist,” since the nature of this complexity involves — in the name of collaboration — curators, editors, gallerists and collectors as part of what can be defined as cultural magma: Fruit and Flower Deli, Guild & Greyshkul, Continuous Project, Das Institut, New Humans, Lansing-Dreiden, Lee Williams and Grand Openings, to name a few.

This Artists Dictionary affirms this phenomenon by mapping the incredible variety of challenging art activities operating in the city and the undeniable flexibility of the New York art system.

Although it has always been nearly impossible to define any kind of trend in New York, we might try to recognize three macrocosmos — three kinds of reactions that emerged after the institutionalization of so-called Relational Aesthetics (as ultimately demonstrated by “theanyspacewhatever” at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum).

In doing so, Flash Art created another trio of key categories for a better understanding of these artists: Commodity & Agency (i.e. Fia Backström, Matthew Brannon, Roe Ethridge, Wade Guyton, Seth Price, Reena Spaulings, Josh Smith, and Kelley Walker), Urban Communality (i.e. Dan Colen, Dash and Agathe Snow, Ryan McGinley, Hanna Linden and Terence Koh), and finally, Crafting Modernity (Francesca DiMattio, Sara and Johannes VanDerBeek, Ohad Meromi, Lisi Raskin, Anya Kielar and Garth Weiser).

— Nicola Trezzi http://www.smith-stewart.com/images/brooklynmusreviewARTPULSE_000.jpg

Carla Acevedo-Yates • October/November 2009 http://www.smith-stewart.com/documents/rosenbergreviewnytimespinkpanther_023.pdf

Art in Review Karen Rosenberg • October 15, 2009 https://brooklynrail.org/2009/07/artseen/reflections-on-the-electric-mirror-new-feminist-video

SheTube: Female Voices on the Small Screen Kimberly Lamm • July 9, 2009

Brooklyn Museum of Art, May 1, 2009 – January 10, 2010

The mirror in the title of this modest, but thought-provoking exhibition of video art is not an allusion to the age-old link between femininity and vanity. It refers instead to the technology particular to video, which creates an illusory fusion of self and image. When the Portapak made video readily available in the late 1960s, women artists seized on its self-reflective capacities to scrutinize how pervasive ideas about women manifested themselves in private self-expressions. Lynn Hersh- man Leeson, a pioneer in feminist media art, coined the phrase “electric mirror,” and perhaps her video “First Person Plural” (1988) best exemplifies the medium’s potential for exploring the personal reverberations of gender politics. Narrat- ing the artist’s history of sexual abuse, “First Person Plural” strives to construct a coherent self-image by making video a form of life-writing. Looking right into the camera, Leeson states, “I have scars as long as this tape.”

Kate Gilmore, “Blood from a Stone,” 2009. Mixed-media sculpture with video, color, sound. 8 min. 9 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Smith-Stewart, NY

The work in Reflections on the Electric Mirror complicates this early feminist deployment of video by highlighting how the medium expands our experience of time and tests our habits of attention.The artists, all born in the 1970s, put them- selves in front of the camera, but not for raw, autobiographical purposes. Their bodies are conduits for the idea that the self is neither decisively composed nor thoroughly unraveled. In Cathy Begien’s “Black Out” (2004), the artist sits in front of a peach background wearing a grey polo shirt. With a bored, deliberately bland voice, she attempts to recall a night of debauchery that began in a sushi bar, moved to a surprise party for “some girl,” and ended in a sex club. To re-enact the events, a cast of characters enter the space of the screen, blindfold Begien, shower her with confetti, dance around her, and put drinks and cigarettes in her mouth and hands. Begien becomes a detached center around which the staged party swirls. After her friends pour beer over her head, it is hard to tell whether the artist is laughing or crying, which suggests that “Black Out” re-imagines the masochism of Marina Abramovič’s early work through the language of MTV’s “The Real World” to blur the line between victimization and self-parody.

Klara Liden’s “Bodies of Society” (2006) also challenges viewers to encounter muddled emotional states. In a small room with wood floors and white walls, Liden paces back and forth in front of a bicycle, a long metal pipe in her hands. She does not face the camera, and her gestures vacillate between adoration and aggression. First, the artist uses the pipe to trace the bike’s geometric forms with something like erotic tenderness; then she seems to mime the threatening moments before torture. When Liden finally and methodically pummels the bicycle into pieces, she orchestrates a tough ar- gument about waste, destruction, and physical vulnerability that connects the cool detachment of Marcel Duchamp’s “Bicycle Wheel” (1913) to the ecstasy Pipilotti Rist unleashes in “Ever Is Over All” (1997) when she smashes car windows with a tough long-stemmed flower.

Martha Rosler’s “Semiotics of the Kitchen” (1975) is perhaps the most well-known example of a feminist artist draw- ing on video’s particular capacity for portraying repetitive tasks to expose and defamiliarize the work women are “naturally” expected to perform. The artists in Reflections on the Electric Mirror show that this feminist meditation on work is far from over, and a few of the videos are interesting explorations of the work women put into producing images.

In Kate Gilmore’s “Blood from a Stone” (2009), viewers witness the artist struggle to lift ten one-foot cubes of solid plaster onto eye-level shelves. The white cubes are heavy—viewers hear Gilmore’s groans and heavy breathing—and once she shoves them into place, white paint splatters and drips down the dark-grey wall. “Blood from a Stone” does more than bring Abstract Expressionism into physical contact with Minimalist sculpture, it asks viewers to reflect on whether they themselves imagine women contributing to these revered and canonical bodies of work.

As television’s sarcastic half-sister, video is able to critique television’s ubiquitous visual codes and story-telling devices. In “New Report” (2005), Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy create a fictional feminist news channel: WKRH, “pregnant with information.” Wearing Patty Hearst berets, the artists appear as “Henry Irigaray” and “Henry Stein Acker Hill” (after Luce Irigaray, Gertrude Stein, Kathy Acker, and Anita Hill). The big pink papier-mâché balls they use as microphones give the video a Muppets touch. “New Report” manages to earnestly and enthusiastically stress feminism’s continued pertinence while also mocking how the mass media trivializes its history. The Henrys report on two women burning their bras at the waterfront to protest how reality television depicts women “like meat.” In another segment, they use—rather than reject— the tropes of reality television to interview Lisa on her bed after work. Lisa had a “really weird day” and tends to have anxiety, which Henry Irigaray speculates might come from “powerlessness.” The work in Reflections on the Electric Mirror cautions against rehearsing clichés about women’s victimization, but also exploits video’s play with time and attention to ask whether women’s powerlessness lurks unseen in the present. https://www.timeout.com/newyork/art/reflections-on-the-electric-mirror-new-feminist-video

“Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video” The third wave of feminist video comes ashore at the Brooklyn Museum. Jane Harris • May 12, 2009

Jen DeNike, Happy Endings; Courtesy of the artist and Smith-Stewart Gallery

When Sony introduced the CV-2400 Video Rover, commonly know as the Portapak, as the first relatively cheap, easy-to- use video camera in 1967, female artists were among the first to embrace the nascent technology. The democratic, DIY nature of the system—anyone could use it—encouraged them to challenge conventional representations of women by turning the camera on themselves. As both subject and maker, such early video artists as Joan Jonas, Valie Export and Carolee Schneemann were able to explore the complexities of female subjectivity through personal narrative and the pioneering use of their bodies. These explorations, many believe, helped to launch the feminist revolution—or so “herstory” would have it. Wherever one stands in the old-school-versus-new-school debate over who defines feminism, artists of the Second Wave (1960s--80s) certainly have a better claim than those of the Third Wave (1990s--present). Which is what makes the exhibition “Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video,” organized by Lauren Ross at the Brooklyn Museum, so refreshing. The interim curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art smartly avoids the matter of legacy and influence. Outside a month-long screening of early key works (Martha Rosler’s iconic Semiotics of the Kitchen from 1975 and Susan Mogul’s rarely seen Dressing Up from 1973, among them), references to the past are deliberately loose and suggestive.

“Reflections on the Electric Mirror” aims to be youthful and hip. It features the work of nine emerging women artists, all born during the Second Wave, four of whom work as collaborative duos: Cathy Begien, Jen DeNike, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Kate Gilmore, Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy, Klara Liden and Shannon Plumb. There’s even a rock star among the group (Greenwood of Tracy and the Plastics). All but one (Harry Dodge) appear before a stationary camera, aping the intimate immediacy of Second Wave video as well as its primitive aesthetic. A lo-fi, cozy atmosphere results, conveyed in everything from the short length of the works to the small, tented spaces we view them in (made out of soundproof blankets).

There are three subthemes Ross identifies in the work: the repetition of self-imposed tasks; the idea of acting out; and a parody of mass-media culture and formats—all definite echoes of the 1970s, as Kate Gilmore would likely agree. Her Blood from a Stone, made specifically for the exhibition, has the artist heaving 75-pound blocks of mortar from the floor to shelves on the wall. Remnants of the action remain, as do the blocks. Dressed inexplicably in high heels, which the accompanying video captures only through sound, Gilmore’s pointless exercise evokes the masochistic works of Gina Pane and Chris Burden, while also appearing to mock them.

Made between 2002 and 2009, most of the works are short, plotless vignettes. Klara Liden’s cathartic scenes of violent action depict the artist dancing frenetically on a Stockholm subway train (Paralyzed, from 2003), and beating a bicy- cle with a lead pipe (Bodies of Society, from 2006). Neither have any beginning or end, and both are fewer than five minutes long. Ross deliberately whittled the total viewing time here down to a manageable hour and a half—appealing, no doubt, to the limited attention span of contemporary audiences. And that’s a good thing. The longest work on view, Shan- non Plumb’s slapstick series of fake ads for women’s products, Commercials (2002), runs just over 25 minutes, but her silent-film burlesque can still be watched in segments.

Some works are wistful in tone, like Jen DeNike’s Happy Endings (2006), a continuous loop of the artist in a bucol- ic setting holding up placards, one by one, that spell out the dismal phrase: THERE ARE NO HAPPY ENDINGS. Cathy Begien’s recollection of a drunken night, Black Out (2004), is also funny and sad. In it, she sits blindfolded on a chair, reenacting—with the help of friends—her unsuccessful attempts at hooking up with a girl. Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, the oldest in the bunch, present Whacker (2005), a weird, meandering piece in which Kahn, vamped up like Lana Turn- er, swivels a weed whacker back and forth across an empty lot.

Second Wavers might call this exhibition feminism lite, yet it goes a long way toward opening up the possibilities of fem- inist art. And if you’re looking for vaginas or odes to goddesses of the mythic past, there’s always Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party just down the hall. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/arts/design/01mirr.html

SheTube: Female Voices on the Small Screen Ken Johnson • April 30, 2009

Kate Gilmore’s video “Blood From a Stone” (2009) suggests Jackson Pollock or Richard Serra.

Q. What is feminist video?

A. A good way to reduce overcrowding in museums. Unless, that is, you are referring to “Reflections on the Electric Mir- ror: New Feminist Video,” an entertaining exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.

Nothing in the show is politically strident or ideologically didactic. The videos — by nine artists, including a pair of two-member teams, and featuring the creators as performers — are variously funny, dark and poetic. If they are feminist, they express it in provocatively unpredictable ways. This well-selected exhibition was organized by Lauren Ross, interim curator of the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

In “Blood From a Stone” Kate Gilmore, dressed like a suburban housewife in a cardigan and knee-length skirt, lifts 10 one-foot cubes of solid plaster one by one onto shoulder-high shelves. The blocks weigh 75 pounds apiece, and as Ms. Gilmore manages to heave each into place, wet paint on the shelf splatters and drips down the wall. This calls to mind Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings and Richard Serra’s poured-lead works.

Ms. Gilmore’s performance is quite a show of strength and fortitude — huffing and puffing, she can just barely pick up the final block — but to what end? Is she mocking art history’s love affair with masculine power and ambition? Or might she be satirizing old-school feminists’ grim determination to equal men in all endeavors? The work’s ambiguity is a big part of its charm.

Parodic television news reports by Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy also have some fun at the expense of ’60s-style feminism. In one segment the correspondent Henry Stein-Acker-Hill, played by Ms. Greenwood, reports on two women who burn their bras to protest the treatment of women on reality shows.

But to frame videos as feminist just because they’re made by women and feature female performers could be construed as sexist. When, in two of her works, Klara Liden beats her bicycle with a steel pipe or dances wildly through a passen- ger train, it is more an expression of youthful, punkish energy than a challenge to gender prejudice. On the other hand, the freedom these artists assume to do whatever the heck they want is at least partly rooted in feminism, so maybe it’s a moot point.

Leaving the feminist question aside, “Whacker,” by Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, is wonderfully wry. Ms. Kahn appears in a short, flimsy halter-top dress, aviator sunglasses and high-heeled slip-ons, using an electric weed whacker to mow the tall, yellow grass of a vacant corner lot in a scruffy Los Angeles neighborhood.

Ms. Kahn is a brilliant comic actress, and much of the delight of the seven-minute video is in her subtle body language. She operates the machine as if she were a blasé fashion model, pausing to gaze out over the landscape with an enig- matic, Clint Eastwood-like expression. It is even funnier when you realize that the pose is a fake — she is not really mowing anything at all.

Shannon Plumb is another terrific comic performer. She makes mock television commercials in a flickering, silent-movie style and adds rousing soundtracks of jazz, rock, folk and country music. Portraying a student with attention deficit dis- order, an absurdly bewigged model for a shampoo ad, a patient suffering side effects from a stop-smoking pill and other characters, Ms. Plumb is hilarious. Comparing her to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton might sound like a stretch, but it’s not.

In addition to low-tech immediacy, a certain unifying spirit emerges from the exhibition: an attitude of hard-boiled sarcasm that masks, perhaps, a romantic vulnerability. It is poignantly expressed in Cathy Begien’s “Black Out,” in which she tear- fully narrates a night of aimless drinking, while supporting actors force her to drink bottled beer and shots of hard liquor and to smoke cigarettes.

That generational pseudo-cynicism — “Whatever” meets “Please love me” — is concisely captured by Jen DeNike’s con- tribution, in which she stands among trees at the edge of a beautiful lake, the reflective glare of the sun partly obscuring her face. In a constantly repeating loop, she presents a series of one-word signs that say all together, “There are no happy endings.” https://www.artslant.com/ny/articles/show/919-interview-with-jen-denike

INTERVIEW WITH JEN DENIKE Nicholas Weist • April 4, 2008

ArtSlant’s writer, Nicholas Weist, spent some time with Jen DeNike shortly after her show, Thirteen, opened at Smith-Stewart Gallery in February, 2008, in New York. They talked about the new work, as well as magic and ritual.

To learn more about Jen DeNike, visit her ArtSlant Profile (here)

Nicholas Weist: Jen, your new show at Smith-Stewart Gallery uses the American flag as an object rather than a symbol. How did you arrive at that decision? How did it impact your use of semaphore signs, which are symbols but barely objects?

Jen DeNike: Well actually it’s the reverse: the American flag is more of a symbol that is an object and the semaphore flags are more objects that carry hidden meanings. These meanings mean nothing to the average viewer unless you’re fluent in semaphore flag language. Using the American flag as a vernacular object was my point of entry for this work, and also something I hoped to depart from. Flag Girls, the new video at Smith-Stewart, was directly inspired by a postcard I found (printed circa 1918) of six young girls wrapped in flags, forming one large colonial American flag.

NW: You know it’s funny, I’d never thought of your work as vernacular before, but it sort of totally is. I’m thinking of a new kind of vernacular imagery, which involves the landscape and suburban interior spaces, and in your case two dudes rassling in a, um, a crick. Creek. River?

JD: Yes, in the video Dunking the boys wrestle and dunk each other, but in a pool. My reference point for the vernacular is Ed Ruscha, and his use of swimming pools, parking lots, a street, words... and how he translates objects into space and space in objects and language into form and form into nothing and nothing into something.

NW: Like a kind of art magic: the transmogrification of matter. There are some spells and rituals in your new work that weren’t really there before. Or I guess it started with Seasons In The Sun?

JD: Seasons In The Sun is mostly about death and memory. I wanted to reference the Terry Jacks song in a piece because it doesn’t whether or not you have a personal connection to it, it still remains nostalgic. It’s a prefabricated sadness that, no matter how much it’s sappy pop feeling makes you want to puke, still works. You brought up magic: my next semaphore flag secret message will be MAGIC. The first was SURRENDER; the second, WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IN. These messages started through an email correspondence with a friend that we wrote in Morse code.

The video Gold Stars definitely alludes to ritual. The five boys in the video march around in a circle chanting repetitive- ly after entering the video nude. I wanted to create an ambiguity regarding a ritual where you sense the actions of the figures carry meaning, but the message is never revealed. You have to question what happened before they entered the stage and why are they were nude. It’s a reverse counterpoint to the action of Flag Girls, where the women begin clothed and exit the video nude.

NW: The story of Flag Girls is pretty amazing.

JD: Well after finding it in a shop annexed to the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side, I decided to enlist the help of my mom to sew the six flags pictured in the original, and make a video recreating the photo. I went to Tucson for a month where my mom lives and we worked on sewing the flags together by hand. In the course of sewing, my mom remembered a scene from the Disney movie Polly Anna where a group of people sing America the Beautiful in the town square. In my version the girls hum the Star Spangled Banner.

NW: You made a video in Tucson, too, of a young man jumping up and down in a pool with a flag-a friend’s brother I believe? Is it way awesome that any dude will just take off his clothes for you and let you tell him what to do?

JD: Yes, Flag-Boy. It was my friend Sarah’s brother, and I made the video while I was sewing the flags. Sarah called me up one day and said, “Hey, I’m in Tucson visiting my brother who’s working on a theater production for a few months...” It was a serendipitous meeting for all three of us (Sarah, her brother who ended up being the Flag-Boy, and me) that culminated in a trip to the Titan Missile Museum. It’s an institution located in a remote stretch of desert going towards Mexico, an underground missile site that you can actually go down into. It’s straight out of an apocalyptic science fiction conspiracy film except its real. Just before we all went on this little adventure we stopped off at her brother’s temporary apartment, and on the wall in his makeshift bedroom the only decoration was a faded American flag (his grandfather’s from WWII). I believe that coincidences always find you if you let them.

I’m continually amazed at what people will do for the videos but it’s also a process of collaboration: of them wanting to reveal some element of their own vulnerability, sexuality, or desire that I recognize. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable or awkward, but that friction becomes part of piece.

ArtSlant would like to thank Jen DeNike for her assistance in making this interview possible.

- Nicholas Weist https://mapmagazine.co.uk/jen-denike

JEN DENIKE 2 June–21 July 2007, Site Gallery, Sheffield Stephanie Vegh • Fall, 2007

Jen DeNike, ‘Flag Girls’, 2007, video still

A constant tic of expectation lingers in the waiting room that is adolescence. Boredom before or after the event is drawn out by lack of anything better to do, a constant sentence rambling without the restraint of the full stop, over and over and over and under like the filmed infinite loop of a boy sinking and rising from the water of a backyard swimming pool, his intake of breath consequential to the American flag he holds aloft at each emergence—its desire for oxygen somehow ex- ceeds his own need for air. An electric orange sunset and shadowed palm trees identify this artificial oasis as the Califor- nian landscape of a disillusioned teenaged culture, its seeming pleasures triggering nostalgia, a youth’s first awareness that a precious phase of childhood has now been lost.

In American artist Jen DeNike’s first UK solo exhibition, her suite of three recent photographs, each marked by the prob- lematic presence of the American flag, stand out as signifiers of the sometimes-violent sacrifice of youth. The ambiguous tableau of ‘1882’, 2006, a year that does nothing to illuminate the scene, depicts a blindfolded boy waving a small flag below a cheap doll strung from a tree by the noose pulled taut by a second youth, prompting the viewer to wonder what obscure chapter of American history is being evoked by this act named for that particular year. For all attempts to match history to the date, there is something mistaken in the memory triggered by these new pastoral spaces of overgrown suburban lots. The implication of red’s danger against the banal white shirts and blue jeans of DeNike’s recurring models Mike and Kevin completes the semaphore of her obscure vision of suburban America; ambivalent and refreshingly without judgment, the ordinary resonance of these average boys with their unique physical quirks reduces any sense of the heroic.

‘Flag Girls’, 2007, contributes its own counter-mythic critique by its pastiche on a vintage postcard depicting girls tanta- lizingly wrapped in the Old Glory flag. DeNike’s video fulfills the winking promise of that image by progressively divesting each girl of her flag, but this striptease is a ritual robbed of its sexuality. From their discordant hum of ‘The Star-Span- gled Banner’ to the flags clenched in teeth in their efforts to sullenly cast them off, there is something petulant in the stiff pirouette that flings the literal weight of stars and stripes off the nude body.

This deliberately awkward defiance is complicated in its turn by the girls’ status as long-haired maiden archetypes who make their sulking exit from the screen once unveiled, until only one remains standing—serene with her flag still firmly wrapped, her survival alludes to the so-called final girl of horror films and their generic assertion that preserved purity will spare us from violent endings. At this uncomfortable point of becoming, DeNike’s teenage personalities heighten the threat of their own potentiality towards either the achievement of adulthood, or the failure of life cut short in the call of patriotism.

Stephanie Vegh is an artist based in Toronto https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2007/jun/23/exhibition.art

Preview Inside Outside, Edinburgh | Anne Madden, Dublin | Shreds Of Ev- idence, London | Choi Jeong-Hwa, Wolverhampton | Paradise Is For The Blessed, London | Jen DeNike, Sheffield | Zaha Hadid, London Robert Clark • Januar 23, 2007

INSIDE OUTSIDE Edinburgh

Chong Bin Park’s sculptures grab your attention through a deceptive simplicity of construction and an all-pervading atmo- sphere of innocence. Looking At Him, for instance, is a sculpture of a Doberman crafted from cardboard that has been polished to a soft sheen. The dog, gazing upwards as if towards its unseen master, is somehow both pretty and poignant, as if it has just escaped from a fairy story. The Korean-born artist points to feelings of alienation on his arrival in London as a primary source for the mood of monumental loss, but there is something more generally relevant here. Photographs of young and delicate-looking chicks underline a universal theme of mortal frailty. Robert Clark

· Corn Exchange Gallery, to Aug 9

ANNE MADDEN Dublin

Welcome retrospective of work by one of Ireland’s most powerfully evocative painters. Madden paints with techniques of lyrical grace that deepen into passages of haunting poetic suggestiveness. While her work is usually vaguely defined as semi-abstract, the underlying subject is as real as real gets. Particularly impressive is Madden’s intrepid pursuit of elusive depths as artworld trends would come and go. RC

· Irish Museum Of Modern Art, Wed 27 to Sep 30

SHREDS OF EVIDENCE London

Poetic interventions by the young artist Simon Woolham, whose exhibition at the Museum Of Garden History is the re- sult of a four-month residency that began in November. It seems he’s taken a unique response to archiving by chewing, tearing and twisting paper into elegant sculptures that are then littered among the garden tools on display. On the walls are animations of these sculptures come to life, creating a magical, after-dark impression of the gallery after closing time. Working with local children, Woolham’s exhibition combines playful fantasy with a rigorous investigation of the museum’s neglected spaces. Jessica Lack

· Museum Of Garden History, SE1, to Aug 25

CHOI JEONG-HWA Wolverhampton

It was a prone orange robot jittering in its death throes that first introduced the west to Korean artist Choi Jeong-Hwa’s bleakly comic installations. His sculptures are bright, often garish everyday objects inflated to extreme proportions. Alluding to Disney, manga and comic book graphics, his sculptures are more than an ironic reference to escapist entertainment, questioning the value of art and our attitudes to disposable items. JL

· Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Sat 23 to Sep 1

PARADISE IS FOR THE BLESSED London

Seven artists seek out mini utopias in our over-populated planet. Artists including Maria Benjamin, Toby Smith, Minou Norouzi and Tomoko Yoneda search for paradise among ruins from the scrubby banks of the River Lea to New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina. Yoneda finds beauty in landscapes once brutalised by war, while Norouzi’s film is an intimate study of the destruction of wildlife in suburban LA. But it’s Toby Smith’s haunting images of a cornfield in Lincolnshire that best captures the curatorial brief. JL

· Four Corners, E2, to Jul 21

OUT OF THIS WORLD AND UNNATURAL SELECTION Liverpool

Fantasy illustration rarely gets recognised as a legitimate form of fine art. Yet, occasionally, an artist such as Josh Kirby is rightly recognised as an imaginative force. Here we see the originals of his illustrations for Terry Pratchett’s Discworld se- ries alongside a poster for Star Wars and book cover portraits of Alfred Hitchcock. The accompanying exhibition of jewel- lery and objects by Peter Chang also has a sci-fi feel. Wielding precious metals, mirrors, lacquer, acrylic, resin and PVC, Chang fashions hybrid ambiguities such as salt and pepper mills spouting tentacles and an amoebic blob of a brooch. RC

· Walker Art Gallery, to Sep 30 JEN DENIKE Sheffield

Through a series of staged colour photographs and video fragments, Jen DeNike builds up a story of mock-patriotic rituals. The adolescent protagonists, caught with deadpan expressions, suggest scenarios of moral dilemmas. Two boys, dressed in jeans and white T-shirts, so as not to give away any uniform of conventionality or hint of subcultural rebelliousness, are posed in front of a white clapboard house on which the American flag has been pinned upside down. The upturned flag can be taken equally as a sign of revolt or as an SOS. In the video Flag Girls, six expressionless performers stand to attention, their nakedness wrapped in the flag. Throughout, there’s a brooding claustrophobia, a suspense and sense of uncertainty, a suggestion of American nationhood perhaps being transfixed by almost terminal self-doubt. RC

· Site Gallery, to Jul 21

ZAHA HADID London

Loud, vivacious and rarely seen without her spiky high heels, Zaha Hadid is that rare thing: a female architect in what is still a very macho environment. Over the past two decades, the Iraqi-born designer has constructed buildings in cities from Shanghai to Dubai, yet frustratingly, the flamboyant Hadid is better known in this country for her proposals. Although crit- ically acclaimed, there seemed a time in the mid-90s when her brutally elegant constructions endlessly played runner-up to designs of a more moderate appeal. Fortunately, the rest of the world, and in particular Germany, were more radical in thinking, enabling her to realise some extraordinary creations, including the Science Centre in Wolfsburg, recently shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling Prize. This retrospective features Hadid’s star attractions and includes her proposals for the Aquatic Centre for the 2012 Olympic Games. With Hadid’s installation for the Serpentine’s Summer Party up next month, it looks like 2007 is certainly her year. JL

· Design Museum, SE1, Fri 29 to Nov 25