Röntgen drawings by Ben Kruisdijk

Beautiful paintings by Hung Liu

In Halso’s works, the festival of authenticity, veracity, naturalness and objectivity that is manifested in almost everything is then transformed precisely in its gaily confusing totality to become partly an antithesis of the culture that it represents. Halso says that he gives his works the degree of “excess” that one will notice perforce that they cannot be research, that these constructions cannot be realism.

Pessi Rautio about Ilkka Halso’s photographs

White dots, and eventually clusters of dots, suddenly become visible against a black ground, their appearance synchronized to percussive bursts like the clatter of hail on a tin roof. When the screen becomes an opaque concentration of dots, a cello begins playing an etude…and the dots softly and slowly begin to fall, like snow. Chong’s drawings and animations evoke ephemerality, the appearance and disappearance of things in time.

John Yau about Theresa Chong at the Danese gallery. January 12 – February 10.

For over 30 years, Wessel’s photographs have documented the architecture, landscape, and lifestyle of the United States and its inhabitants. Focusing on the quotidian charms of the American West, Wessel directs the viewer’s attention to the minute while revealing a grander observation. His themes are classic of mid-century America: consumerism, mass production, the expansion of suburbia and pleasure seeking. Though his images are not filled with the euphoric optimism that marked the rise of these trends, nor are they a critique of what are now considered to be American foibles. Instead, throughout his project, Wessel treats his subjects with a headcocked curiosity that documents the regional characteristics with humorous affection.

At The Charles Cowles Gallery. January 11 – February 17.

Struck by eccentric droplets and overloaded with flections, they evoke the tantalising style of the showcases of the entertainment society. This is however a rather ambiguous borrowing. For the cultural industry itself has taken a considerable amount of its showy imagery from the Pop art and Op art repertoire. The shifting geometry of the kings of optical illusion was indeed very quickly taken up by couturiers, fashion designers or graphic designers. To such an extent that all of these are credited with a visual landscape that actually comes from elsewhere. With no hard feelings, contemporary artists cultivate abstraction without claiming to recover its initial, original aspect. Rather they pick up the lines and chromatic ranges, where they are (have got to), where they have infiltrated into the urban, commercial or cultural landscape under the influence of TV, marketing and advertising. They reappropriate this abstraction part two, out of it, out of its frame, decked out.

Judicaël Lavrador About the work of Emmanuele Villard

April Tillman / Opening: Wednesday, January 31st 6:00-9:00pm at Gallery 10G

In the Carbomb project a relation is made between the quotidien world of experiences and the world of the media. The images of allegedly-assaulted cars suggest various current happenings that are pursued and recorded daily in the media but are in no way directly related to our daily existences. In the Carbomb project these aforementioned images are reduced to graphical elements without a specific history or external specifications that justify the reasons for why they have become targets for this seemingly premeditated assault.

The Carbomb project is an attempt to reduce and syphen the stream of information that is maintained by the media to end up with a kind of ‘media-iconography’, which relativizes the two worlds of experience and non-experience. These two worlds rarely, if ever, overlap each other. Carbomb presents images representative of the current and symbolic happenings of this particular point in time.

By Jonas Staal

“A coffee stain, mould, lichen, brown rims, inadvertent residue; these forms of life are all around us. The contours of brown damp spots accentuate a room, infesting the architecture whereby the edges and corners determine the shape the water takes. Penetrating the protective layers to create natural decoration in our homes. The patterns in a stain fascinate me, as does the stain’s affinity with a specific place.”
Lizan Freijsen

See how Mark Wallinger has dramatically brought the Iraq war to Tate Britain – one of the most extraordinary installations ever seen in the gallery.

By Helen Verhoeven

Never Missing a Line is a concise exhibition featuring two text-based sculptures. The word Desire, cut from polished stainless steel and mounted on a billboard-like structure, greets visitors as they enter SculptureCenter’s courtyard. The cold, quiet space of the courtyard is almost overwhelmed by the sculpture’s sensual, but hard-edged reflective presence. Inside SculptureCenter’s large central hall, Built for Crime, a forty-foot long light sculpture, spells out the eponymous phrase. Constructed of shattered safety glass and light, Built for Crime performs like an advertisement. However, the phrase floats without a subject reference. What is built? And what crime is to be committed?

Monica Bonvicini, Never Missing a Line: January 7 – March 25 in theSculptureCenter New York.
Via e-flux newsletter

New data and an improved interpolation algorithm has led to revised depictions of air traffic over the U.S. and Canada. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment, and the frames were composited with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya.

By Aaron Koblin

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Some nice paintings by Randy Wray

Fantastic & bizarre installations by Claire Morgan

Inspiration is found on the road, in film, literature and songlyrics.
Holiday pictures found on the internet are, because of their being clichéd and their generality, interesting as a source. Also commercials with their idealisation and escapism are relevant in this perspective. Especially car commercials capitalise on the sensations of freedom and longing.
References to travelling: roads, touristical destinations, give the landscape its meaning. Cars and roads, rivers and boats become signs of freedom and longing.

Adzer van der Molen about his work

“Branded by words, commemorated by memory, Tim Hailand’s topographies map the private and estranged place of human desire. Enmeshed within his photographic vistas is a longing for transcendance. Like the finest landscape painters, Tim has a unique feel for the complexities that exist between man and nature. Heroic and hopeful, his work has the capability of moving us beyond the apprehensions of reality so that we may take refuge in its splendor.”
- Clare Bell, 1999, Associate Curator, The Guggenheim Museum, New York

Adventure Ecology uses the magic, excitement and uniqueness created by its field missions as the inspiration behind driving positive change.

Through our expeditions to some of the world’s most environmentally challenged zones, you will not only gain a first hand insight of what it’s really like to be an adventurer in the field but mission control allows you the chance to really learn for yourself about the devastating effects global warming is having on these fragile ecosystems.

visit Adventure Ecology

January has been long regarded as the darkest of months, but a formula from a part-time tutor at Cardiff University shows it gets even worse this Monday. (that was 2005)

Foul weather, debt, fading Christmas memories, failed resolutions and a lack of motivation conspire to depress, Cliff Arnalls found.

GPs say exercise and reading up on depression are ways to beat the blues.

It is the worst day of the year!

Jen Stark