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Friday 13 September 2013
Thursday 5 September 2013
Under The Volcano
Under the Volcano
On the occasion of Hanarart festival | Nara, Japan
curated by Anissa Touati
From September the 2nd to the 15th | everyday from 10 am to 5 pm | in the old post office of Nagara Gose
Wilfrid Almendra, Maria-Thereza Alves, Matthias Bitzer, Kolkoz, Marie Maillard, Theo Michael, Nico- las Milhé, Bruno Persat, Iris Touliatou, Lucille Uhlrich.
Under the Volcano will take place in an abandoned and empty traditional Japanese house where there is still traces of former inhabitants. The artists will interact with the backbone of this deserted place playing with the concept of reality, the way we perceive it, and the various readings we can do of it. They also set up a dialogue with the past, and take an interest in the notions of myth and history.
Maria-Theresa Alves video, Bruce Lee in the Land of Balzac, takes the image of a mountainous landscape and insert on it the sound-track of a scene of a Bruce Lee fight, suggesting a movement through this sound even though it is a still shot. The two Kolkoz will film at the same time some every day life places in Nara (Nara Dreamland, a tea ceremony, the baths), but place them in a tangent world by introducing a distortion by the way they capture them. Matthias Bitzer, with his neon, I used my skin as your skin, introduces a duality in time, between masks and parallel identities and inserts into it a little poetry.
Some of the artists also take over well-known objects and forms, but make a slight shift to transfer them in a tangent world, a kind of mental reality, giving them new forms. Marie Maillard takes a picture of a french cup of tea and will send it by email so that it will be produced in Nara. This sending process deform its image and the spectator will be seeing with this work, Black tea, an imbricated object, almost petrified. The artist here interrogates the point of view that we have of an uncertain world with unsuspected dimensions and contours. With her piece Wall 1309, she singles out an element of the old post-office of Nagara-Gose and stretches it to reveal its essence; with this extension, she implements a virtual image in the real.
Iris Touliatou’s work, Three sins of my Past, plays with forms to lose the spectators, and uses the silk almost as an extension of the house’s architecture. This smooth material participates in evoking this tangent world by showing or hiding the architecture depending on the moment.
Bruno Persat, with Meter, tips his hat to the Japanese culture by creating inside this traditional house sheets of paper where the writing has completely disappear, leaving holes in the paper, reminding us of the house’s deteriorated Shoji.
Wilfrid Almendra’s work, as for it, leads to instantly recognizable shapes but unrelated to their original function. His sculpture, not far from a stained-glass windows, brings out a dimension both decorative and sacred; giving to these discarded materials a new value between fragility and nostalgia of a bygone era.
Then, this Japanese abandoned house is also becoming a pedestal, a sanctuary, enabling the artist to play with historical references and to base their works upon the past to reinvent the future. Lucille Uhlrich’s Tip of the tongue, questions this phenomena, as it is a moment where our spirit is in no place, where the word is as present as it is absent and where the images we picture in our mind are drifting towards an elsewhere. Theo Michael, with The Splendour Of The Heavens uses video, and by mixing incompatible and anachronistic elements, he makes up false chronologies in order to make the spectators lose their temporal guidelines.
At last, Nicolas Milhé, with his piece Locus Pyramidus, wonders on the symbolic of the pyramid: he will project a series of slides showing these structures, playing with their meaning, and their historic and mythological strength. By doing this archiving work, he insists on the fact that the polyhedron is universal. The pyramid has indeed be the first and purest form of the sanctuaries since the dawn of time, and here this form embraces the Japanese house, acting like a shrine for this already mystical place.
On the occasion of Hanarart festival | Nara, Japan
curated by Anissa Touati
From September the 2nd to the 15th | everyday from 10 am to 5 pm | in the old post office of Nagara Gose
Wilfrid Almendra, Maria-Thereza Alves, Matthias Bitzer, Kolkoz, Marie Maillard, Theo Michael, Nico- las Milhé, Bruno Persat, Iris Touliatou, Lucille Uhlrich.
Under the Volcano will take place in an abandoned and empty traditional Japanese house where there is still traces of former inhabitants. The artists will interact with the backbone of this deserted place playing with the concept of reality, the way we perceive it, and the various readings we can do of it. They also set up a dialogue with the past, and take an interest in the notions of myth and history.
Maria-Theresa Alves video, Bruce Lee in the Land of Balzac, takes the image of a mountainous landscape and insert on it the sound-track of a scene of a Bruce Lee fight, suggesting a movement through this sound even though it is a still shot. The two Kolkoz will film at the same time some every day life places in Nara (Nara Dreamland, a tea ceremony, the baths), but place them in a tangent world by introducing a distortion by the way they capture them. Matthias Bitzer, with his neon, I used my skin as your skin, introduces a duality in time, between masks and parallel identities and inserts into it a little poetry.
Some of the artists also take over well-known objects and forms, but make a slight shift to transfer them in a tangent world, a kind of mental reality, giving them new forms. Marie Maillard takes a picture of a french cup of tea and will send it by email so that it will be produced in Nara. This sending process deform its image and the spectator will be seeing with this work, Black tea, an imbricated object, almost petrified. The artist here interrogates the point of view that we have of an uncertain world with unsuspected dimensions and contours. With her piece Wall 1309, she singles out an element of the old post-office of Nagara-Gose and stretches it to reveal its essence; with this extension, she implements a virtual image in the real.
Iris Touliatou’s work, Three sins of my Past, plays with forms to lose the spectators, and uses the silk almost as an extension of the house’s architecture. This smooth material participates in evoking this tangent world by showing or hiding the architecture depending on the moment.
Bruno Persat, with Meter, tips his hat to the Japanese culture by creating inside this traditional house sheets of paper where the writing has completely disappear, leaving holes in the paper, reminding us of the house’s deteriorated Shoji.
Wilfrid Almendra’s work, as for it, leads to instantly recognizable shapes but unrelated to their original function. His sculpture, not far from a stained-glass windows, brings out a dimension both decorative and sacred; giving to these discarded materials a new value between fragility and nostalgia of a bygone era.
Then, this Japanese abandoned house is also becoming a pedestal, a sanctuary, enabling the artist to play with historical references and to base their works upon the past to reinvent the future. Lucille Uhlrich’s Tip of the tongue, questions this phenomena, as it is a moment where our spirit is in no place, where the word is as present as it is absent and where the images we picture in our mind are drifting towards an elsewhere. Theo Michael, with The Splendour Of The Heavens uses video, and by mixing incompatible and anachronistic elements, he makes up false chronologies in order to make the spectators lose their temporal guidelines.
At last, Nicolas Milhé, with his piece Locus Pyramidus, wonders on the symbolic of the pyramid: he will project a series of slides showing these structures, playing with their meaning, and their historic and mythological strength. By doing this archiving work, he insists on the fact that the polyhedron is universal. The pyramid has indeed be the first and purest form of the sanctuaries since the dawn of time, and here this form embraces the Japanese house, acting like a shrine for this already mystical place.
Thursday 15 August 2013
Thursday 6 June 2013
Saturday 6 April 2013
Wednesday 3 April 2013
WhiteHotMagazine Review: I DIDN'T THINK OF ANYTHING I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO
by Emmy Skensved
Theo Michael, I Cancelled The Best (Magnetic Mistakes) 13 & 12, mixed media on paper, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist and Preteen Gallery.
Theo Michael: I DIDN'T THINK OF ANYTHING I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO
Preteen Gallery, Mexico City
January 31st - February 20, 2013
Preteen Gallery, Mexico City
January 31st - February 20, 2013
One of the most striking aspects of Mexico City is its history. It is a place where the present intermingles with the past in a palpable way. Take the center for example, where sixteenth century Spanish palaces were built atop the ruins of the conquered Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, giving rise to the present day archaeological site where the evidence of this history is layered like sediment in the ground.
Greek artist Theo Michael, who moved to the Distrito Federal in 2010, makes work that resonates with the agedness of his new home. His practice consists of mining history and pop culture, unearthing and recycling images and objects and reconfiguring these to produce drawings, collages and vitrines that re-imagine history and question the present order of things. His drawn works and sculptures look convincingly like illustrations and artifacts from the past, and toy with notions of what we think we know. In his collage work, Theo Michael culls images from the extensive collection that he has amassed over the past several years in order to create all-over compositions comprised of tiny cut-outs. Bearing some resemblance to the results of a Google image search, these collages imply an array of complex relationships between seemingly unrelated forms.
For his recent solo exhibition, I didn't think of anything I don't know what to do, Theo Michael punctuated the stark, white space of Preteen Gallery with a series of dog-eared, sepia-tone collages. At first glance these look like pages torn out of old science or geography magazines. It was only after talking with Michael, that I learned that he had crafted these carefully by hand. Subjecting the paper to multiple washes of paint, chemical solutions and other tools he effectively "aged" the prints. Through the veil of this yellowed, worn surface, the images looked deceptively older than they were. In comparison to the hand-cut forms in his other collages however, they had a markedly digital cut-and-paste appearance. Tiled on the page, they overlapped in some areas and formed negative geometric shapes between others, challenging their antique appearance and suggesting that they had been composed on a computer.
Theo Michael, I Cancelled The Best (Magnetic Mistakes) 14, mixed media on paper, 2013.
Image courtesy of the artist and Preteen Gallery.
Image courtesy of the artist and Preteen Gallery.
Despite the amount of information and the delicate surface treatment, the most striking thing about these collages was not what Michael added to them, but what he took away. Unlike the cumulative process used to produce most collage work, the signature characteristics of these pieces were made using a reductive approach. After printing and painting them, Michael removed several of the images, leaving gaping holes in the surface of the paper. Hung unframed in the gallery, these pieces seemed to hover over the walls, the bright white surface visible through the amorphic voids. Slight shadows were also created around the edges of the holes, lending the two dimensional work a sculptural quality.
When considering the themes of history, archeology and systems of categorization that Michael's work suggests, these collages conjure up even more associations than his previous pieces. With the series at Preteen, Michael invites his audience to use their imaginations to fill in the blanks and to forge links between the clues presented. When viewing these pieces, one's eyes cannot help but to jump from one absence to the next, connecting the dots, trying to solve the puzzle. What was there and then removed? This work not only speaks to things erased from a narrative or a history, but also to a story that is yet to be written and gaps that are yet to be filled.
When considering the themes of history, archeology and systems of categorization that Michael's work suggests, these collages conjure up even more associations than his previous pieces. With the series at Preteen, Michael invites his audience to use their imaginations to fill in the blanks and to forge links between the clues presented. When viewing these pieces, one's eyes cannot help but to jump from one absence to the next, connecting the dots, trying to solve the puzzle. What was there and then removed? This work not only speaks to things erased from a narrative or a history, but also to a story that is yet to be written and gaps that are yet to be filled.
Theo Michael, I Cancelled The Best (Magnetic Mistakes) 09, mixed media on paper, 2013.
Image courtesy of the artist and Preteen Gallery.
Image courtesy of the artist and Preteen Gallery.
Theo Michael, Exhibition view from I didn't think of anything I don't know what to do at Preteen Gallery, Mexico City, 2013.
Image courtesy of the artist and Preteen Gallery.
Image courtesy of the artist and Preteen Gallery.
Friday 1 March 2013
Friday 4 January 2013
'I DIDN'T THINK OF ANYTHING I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO'
| 'I DIDN'T THINK OF ANYTHING I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO' THEO MICHAEL JANUARY 31 2013 |
PRETEEN GALLERY IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE ‘I DIDN’T THINK OF ANYTHING I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO’, A SOLO EXHIBITION BY MEXICO CITY-BASED ARTIST THEO MICHAEL.
A. MAGNETIC MISTAKES
PHOSPHORIC CROSSWINDS AGAINST IDEAS CONCEPTS TACKY SUBJECTS INTELLECTUAL POVERTY OUTDATED FASHION EMBARRASSMENT AND BILLIONS OF TRILOBITES YETI CRAB PSYCHOANALYSIS NAUTILUS YOUTUBING GOOGLEMAPPING ARTHROPODS.
COGNITIVE SUBMARINE: LAWRENCE WEINER SUCKS. ARTHROPOD IN YOUR WATER THE ONLY ANSWER YOU CANT SEE WELL I DON’T KNOW I WILL ACCEPT I ONLY DO THINGS I LEFT TWO QUESTIONS IN THE FRIDGE I DON’T UNDERSTAND AND YOKO ONO SUCKS.
THE AFTER PARTY WAS CANCELLED PLANET WITHOUT LANGUAGE A FALSE SEMBLANCE OF THE REAL PLANET WITHOUT PIZZA A RIGHT SEMBLANCE OF THE UNREAL I AM NOT IMPOSSIBLE DIMENSIONS SYNTAX AND PERCEPTION I DON’T THINK OF THIS IS NOT POSSIBLE THEY CANCELLED PHYSICS PARALYMPIC FLAME SPOT THE NANOTUBE.
B. I CANCELLED THE BEST
CITY IS FULL OF PEOPLE THE FUCK WITH CONSISTENCY IT’S ONE IDEA IT’S NOT CONGRUENT A RIDICULOUS WORLD. IMPOSSIBILITY OF IDEAS INEVITABILITY OF STUPIDITY: ASK A MEMBER OF THE STAFF. RIGHT FAR LEFT EXTREME LEFT EXTREME RIGHT CENTRE EXTREME CENTRIST EXTREME ANARCHIST OR CONSERVATIVE FASCIST OR BOTH OR NONE: EXTREME TOP.
THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY, AMPHIPODS TIME, ARTHROPOD TRUTH ARTHROPODS ILLUSION, DELUSION. BILLIONS OF BARNACLES AND TEN THOUSAND TYPHOONS ECTOPLASM (SPOT THE NANOTUBE):
NOTHINGNESS, NOT MUCH JUST A BLOW-UP. INDECISIVE NIHILIST UTTER CONFUSION AND DIGITAL OBESITY. DAWN OF THE SATYR OUT OF THE COFFIN SMOKE MACHINE ASHTRAY; ROCK IN WOODEN STRUCTURE (DAMAGED) ZOMBIE HAND TEXTING (IN GLASS?) THE PLANET OF THE FOOLS NO ONE WILL KNOW FUCK THE INTERNET I’M GOING TO SPACE.
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THEO MICHAEL LIVES AND WORKS IN MEXICO CITY. HE HAS EXHIBITED HIS WORK IN MARSEILLE, DÜSSELDORF, ATHENS, NEW YORK, MIAMI, LONDON, TORINO, BANGKOK, MEXICO CITY AND THESSALONIKI. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: "INTERNATIONAL DRAWING ANNUAL 6", MANIFEST PRESS; "EXHUMING THE HUMAN", MUTE; "PUBLIC SCREEN" CATALOG, CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE OF THESSALONIKI AND "PART TIME PUNKS", DESTE FOUNDATION.
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