NEW YORK, NY.- David Nolan Gallery presents Five Artists, curated by Matthew Schum. On view from June 25 through August 1, the exhibition brings together an international group of artists – Ana Prvački, Clarissa Tossin, Vesna Pavlović, Steffani Jemison, and Pilvi Takala – whose art explores vernacular, political and art historical cultures across a variety of media.
Two Los Angeles-based artists – Ana Prvački (b. 1976, Serbia) and Clarissa Tossin (b. 1973, Brazil) – retrace the legacies of key twentieth-century cultural figures. Selections from Prvacki's series Stealing Shadows here alternate the gendered politics of appropriation art by borrowing the silhouettes of Koons, Degas, Duchamp, and Giacometti. Connected to Tossin’s Study for a Landscape (Brasilia) and the utopian plans architect Oscar Niemeyer and urban planner Lucio Costa made for a new capital (Brasilia), Study for a Landscape (Mars) imagines such aspirations preparing for a futuristic life beyond our hemisphere and on another planet.
In The Fabrics of Socialism, Vesna Pavlović (b. 1970, Serbia) presents archival footage of former Yugoslavia’s President Josip Broz Tito in a suspended glowing sculptural photo installation. In the work, Cold War-era divisions are cast as cinematic apparitions. Brooklyn-based Steffani Jemison’s (b. 1981, California) art concerns the notion of progress, its assumptions and its narratives. Jemison’s text works are part of a larger project, "Same Time," which uses repetition to discover new ideas within expired cultural forms.
In Players (2010) Pilvi Takala (b. 1981, Finland) integrates herself into a group of young men living as expats in Bangkok. Portraying each member of a community of six poker professionals, who make their living gambling online, Takala reveals their decadent behavior. According to the artist, these men “ignore their original [European] society” to build a new way of life, and in so doing, overlook their apparent sense of purposelessness.
According to the curator: “Five Artists is loosely based on Robert Altman’s 1977 film, 3 Women. Set somewhere in the California desert, the sparse narrative depicts three characters who occupy, overturn and eventually abandon their male-dominated community. Taking inspiration from the eroded landscape and classical mythology, the appropriation of patriarchy in the film’s conclusion involves the characters becoming an amalgamation of archetypal roles. Myth-making within recent art became a consideration when selecting artworks for the present exhibition. The various works suggest a displacement of political orders predicated on male values. They resist gendered formulas of making and art’s market-driven desertification, just as Altman’s most experimental film, in its time, did.”
Steffani Jemison’s multi-part work Promise Machine is commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, and includes performances presented at the MoMA on June 25, 27, and 28, 2015. Other current and forthcoming exhibitions include: Steffani Jemison: Maniac Chase, Escaped Lunatic, and Personal at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, and Name It by Trying to Name It: Open Sessions 2014-15 at the Drawing Center, New York. Jemison has recently exhibited at the New Museum, LAXART, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Brooklyn Museum.
Ana Prvački has developed projects for venues and institutions such as the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Art in General and Artists Space, both New York. Recent inclusions in dOCUMENTA 13, Sydney Biennial, Singapore Biennial, and the Turin Triennale were followed by her first solo show, currently on view at 1301PE, Los Angeles. Upcoming shows include Contour Biennial in Mechelen, Belgium, Elevation–86, Death Valley, the ICA Singapore and REDCAT, Los Angeles.
Vesna Pavlović’s recent solo exhibitions include the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, the Museum of History of Yugoslavia, with group shows at the Istanbul Biennial, the New Art Gallery Walsall, UK, Paço das Artes, São Paolo, Bucharest Biennale 5, Photographers’ Gallery, London, and NGBK, Berlin. Upcoming shows include Inside Out at the City Art Gallery of Ljubljana, and Lost Art at Zeitgeist gallery in Nashville. Pavlović was recently granted an award from the Art Matters Foundation.
Pilvi Takala has exhibited in institutions including the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Kunstverein Munich, The Kitchen, New York, and the Moscow and Istanbul Biennials, among others. Current exhibitions include “Visitors” on Governors Island, New York, “Le Nouveau Festival du Centre Pompidou,” Paris. Upcoming shows include Office Space, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco and solo exhibitions at Stacion Center for Contemporary Art, Pristina, and at Helsinki Contemporary. Recent awards include the EMDASH Award Commission at the Frieze Art Fair, London. Takala is currently a resident at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York.
Clarissa Tossin’s work was included in the most recent Los Angeles biennial Made in L.A. 2014 at the Hammer Museum. She has shown at Artpace San Antonio, the Wattis Institute, San Francisco and SITE Santa Fe, with solo exhibitions at Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, and in L.A. at Samuel Freeman (currently on view). Recent awards include a California Community Foundation Fellowship (2014), an Artists’ Resource Completion Grant (2013), and an Artistic Innovation Grant (2012) from the Center for Cultural Innovation.
Matthew Schum is a writer and curator based between Los Angeles and New York. Recent curatorial projects include: David Hartt, Interval, Eamon Ore-Giron, Morococha, Sanya Kantarovsky, Happy Soul, Mark Boulos, Antigone and the Gates of Damascus, Orit Raff, Priming, Nir Evron Endurance, Patricia Fernández, Paseo de los Melancólicos, and Isabelle Cornaro, This Morbid Roundtrip from Subject to Object for LAXART in Hollywood. Schum is currently editing a monograph on artist Mark Boulos with Forma Arts, London, a co-curator for Elevation–86, Death Valley, and a cofounder of Publication Studio Los Angeles.
