“The mission of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is to welcome all to celebrate the American spirit in a setting that unites the power of art with the beauty of nature.

Crystal Bridges takes its name from a nearby natural spring and the bridge construction incorporated in the building, designed by world-renowned architect Moshe Safdie. A series of pavilions nestled around two spring-fed ponds house galleries, meeting and classroom spaces, and a large, glass-enclosed gathering hall. Guest amenities include a restaurant on a glass-enclosed bridge overlooking the ponds, a Museum Store designed by architect Marlon Blackwell, and a library featuring more than 50,000 volumes of art reference material. Sculpture and walking trails link the museum’s 120-acre park to downtown Bentonville, Arkansas.

Crystal Bridges acknowledges and pays respect to the Osage, Caddo, and Quapaw people and elders past, present and future, offering deep gratitude to the ancestral land and water that supports it.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“Regen Projects is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Alex Hubbard. On view will be a selection of new works comprising multimedia paintings and two handmade projectors streaming animated videos. Hubbard has often experimented with various media to extend the prescribed characteristics of both painting and video.

The moving image has always been an integral thematic of Hubbard’s practice. His early video works often render a series of alternating acts of construction and deconstruction across a flattened plane while proposing a visual allegiance to painting. With these new works comes a series of questions concerning the position of video in a post-YouTube era. The two projectors display referential animations – recycling elements of Hubbard’s past videos while alluding to the history of structuralist films. Each projector’s animations – one a surrealist landscape, the other a hand-drawn layered composition – feature colorful kinetic forms that play out on the gallery walls.

Hubbard’s paintings combine the language of abstraction with nontraditional, industrial materials like resin, fiberglass, pigmented urethane, and auto-body paint. In this series of paintings Hubbard has employed a new UV printing technology. Each composition is achieved through a multi-layered process of paint pours and printing. While still employing abstract compositions, traces of the figurative are present through cut-out prints of machinery and quotidian objects.

Alex Hubbard (b. 1975 Toledo, OR) received a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art. In 2003 he attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He lives and works in Los Angeles. 

He has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions including Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham (2014); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012); The Kitchen, New York (2010); and Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2009). Hubbard’s works have also been featured in group exhibitions at Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro (2016); Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach (2016); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); Museo Experimental del Eco, Mexico City (2014); Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2012); Le Consortium, Dijon (2014); and the 2010 Whitney Biennial; among others.” – per website

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“Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition with multidisciplinary artist Jónsi, on view at the gallery’s Los Angeles space from November 16, 2019 through January 9, 2020.

What is the shape of sound? What does it feel like? Can we smell it? How does it move through your body and what kind of sensations does it trigger? These are the questions that are posed by Jónsi in his first exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles. Best known for producing distinctive musical sounds ranging from hypnotic ambient incantations to driving sonic waves as a member of the band Sigur Rós, Jónsi has expanded his artistic practice over the past few years in a series of collaborations with visual artists such as Doug Aitken, Olafur Eliasson, Merce Cunningham and most recently the artist and composer Carl Michael von Hausswolf with whom he formed the musical duo Dark Morph. In the wake of these collaborations, Jónsi’s most recent solo aesthetic explorations have resulted in a series of immersive installations that sculpt with sound as they ask us to meditate on the liminal threshold between our bodies and the world around us.

In a series of three new gallery-based works, Jónsi riffs on the invocation of sensory inversion in Goethe’s fifth Roman Elegy in which the Romantic poet makes a connection between the experience of a lover’s body and a classical marble sculpture with the phrase, “see with a feeling eye, feel with a seeing hand.” In Jónsi’s remix, Goethe’s advice to experience the world in a different way is given a sonic update that might read as follows: “hear with a feeling ear, feel with a hearing hand.” Seeing, hearing, feeling – each of these senses collapse upon one another in Jónsi’s work as sound takes a concrete form and the tactile and the auditory merge into a surprising synesthesia. While one might read these works within the lineage of bombastic noise experiments harkening back to those of the Italian Futurists who championed the revolutionary aspects of noise in opposition to formal music, Jónsi’s approach is far more interested in exploring the phenomenological complication and extension of the senses as an antidote to a world in which we are constantly confronted by the agitated white noise of contemporary civilization. In his work there is an overarching attempt to assert the primacy of the auditory, the tactile, and the visual in helping the human organism navigate its way through this unmoored and volatile world.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“Founded in 1931, the Nevada Museum of Art (the Museum) is the only art museum in Nevada accredited by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM).

Co-founded in 1931 by Dr. James Church, an early climate scientist, humanist, and lover of art, the Museum in its early days was run by a small group of outdoor landscape painters. As a result, the Museum has long understood the importance of examining how humans interact with their natural, built, and virtual surroundings. Designed by internationally renowned architect Will Bruder, the present Museum facility opened in 2003 at the heart of Reno’s downtown Liberty district. The four-level, 70,000-square-foot building is inspired by geological formations in northern Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, and serves as a visual metaphor for the institution’s scholarly focus on art and environment.

The institution’s identity continues to be shaped by the geographic location and environment. The Museum’s proximity to the San Francisco Bay Area, the Sierra Nevada, Lake Tahoe, and the surrounding Great Basin desert region places it at the nexus of both awe-inspiring scenery and a rapidly changing landscape. It is an ideal place for dynamic conversations about the ways that humans creatively interact with environments. This idea is reflected in the Museum’s permanent collection, which is divided into four thematic focus areas: the Robert S. and Dorothy J. Keyser Art of the Greater West Collection, the Carol Franc Buck Altered Landscape Photography Collection, the Contemporary Art Collection, and the E. L. Wiegand Work Ethic in American Art Collection.” – per website

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“Until the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Japanese language did not have a word for fine art. The word bijutsu was constructed, combining Chinese characters bi, for beauty, and jutsu, for craft. This hybrid term reveals the unique trajectory of Japanese contemporary art, different from the foundations of contemporary art in the West.

Tokyo Pop Underground, curated by Tokyo gallerist Shinji Nanzuka, explores the complex history of Japanese contemporary art from the 1960s to the present through the works of seventeen artists who emerged from pop and underground culture.

Shinji Nanzuka explains that “originally in Japan, most of what is referred to as art are practical items, developed together and in integration with popular culture.” He cites examples from calligraphy to folding screens, paintings on sliding paper doors, lacquerware, netsuke, and the Ukiyo-e prints that served as posters and commercial portraits. He also mentions art historian Naoyuki Kinoshita’s study of intricately realistic handicrafts such as iki-ningyou, life-like dolls that were made for exhibitory performances. Nanzuka’s mission in this exhibition is to present contemporary artistic commentaries on this Japanese artistic heritage.” – per website

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“The Venet Foundation is the culmination of more than fifty years of artistic creation and Bernar Venet’s encounters with an impressive roster of other major artists, who have become his friends, which has led to an extensive collection that is emblematic of minimal and conceptual art. Created in 2014, the Venet Foundation aims to conserve its collection, and to ensure that Bernar Venet’s work is presented in an ideal setting.

The Venet Foundation loans artwork to other cultural institutions around the world, providing access to a larger audience, and hosts annual exhibitions of works by other artists.” – per webiste

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Mary Corse: A Survey in Light

“Mary Corse’s first solo museum survey is a long overdue examination of this singular artist’s career. Initially trained as an abstract painter, Corse emerged in the mid-1960s as one of the few women associated with the West Coast Light and Space movement. She shared with her contemporaries a deep fascination with perception and with the possibility that light itself could serve as both subject and material of art. This focused exhibition will highlight critical moments of experimentation as Corse engaged with tropes of modernist painting while charting her own course through studies in quantum physics and complex investigations into a range of “painting” materials. The survey will bring together for the first time Corse’s key bodies of work, including her early shaped canvases, freestanding sculptures, and light encasements that she engineered in the mid-1960s, as well as her breakthrough White Light Paintings, begun in 1968, and the Black Earth Series that she initiated after moving in 1970 from downtown Los Angeles to Topanga Canyon, where she lives and works today.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

Isaac Julien: Playtime

“Isaac Julien CBE RA (United Kingdom, b. 1960) is an artist and filmmaker whose multi-channel film installations and photographs feature fractured narratives reflecting his explorations into race, class, sexuality, postcolonialism, and representation. Co-founder of Sankofa Film and Video Collective in 1983 and Normal Films in 1991, Julien has won numerous awards and honors and has had over 60 solo exhibitions worldwide. Marking the artist’s first major presentation in Los Angeles, Playtime (2014) is a captivating critique of the influence of capital in the art world. It stars James Franco, Maggie Cheung, Colin Salmon, and auctioneer Simon de Pury, among others. The seemingly disparate narratives of six vignettes demonstrate the various levels at which the flow of money has an affect on the production, dealing, and collecting of contemporary art, and the lives impacted by the system. Playtime has been exhibited at Fort Mason, San Francisco (2017), Platform-L Contemporary Arts Center, Seoul (2017); and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2016); among other venues around the globe.” per LACMA website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson