Leandro Erlich, Swimming Pool, 2004, The 21st Century of Art of Kanazawa, Permanent Collection.

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Avenue
718-784-2084
Long Island City
Leandro Erlich: Swimming Pool
October 19, 2008-April 13, 2009

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents Leandro Erlich: Swimming Pool, an extraordinary and visually confounding installation by the Argentine artist Leandro Erlich. Leandro Erlich: Swimming Pool will be on view in P.S.1’s unique, double-height Duplex gallery from October 19, 2008 through April 13, 2009.

Leandro Erlich is known for installations that seem to defy the basic laws of physics and befuddle the viewer, who is introduced into jarring environments that momentarily threaten a sense of balance or space. For this exhibition, Erlich presents one of his most well-known and critically acclaimed pieces, Swimming Pool. Speaking about the project, Erlich says: “When I first visited P.S.1, I remember thinking how perfect the Duplex space would be for the installation of Swimming Pool. This space divided the experience of seeing the work perfectly, and in the correct order. Almost ten years since its creation, Swimming Pool is finally in the exhibition space for which I have always felt is so perfectly suited.”

Erlich has constructed a full-size pool, complete with all its trappings, including a deck and a ladder. When approached from the first floor, visitors are confronted with a surreal scene: people, fully clothed, can be seen standing, walking, and breathing beneath the surface of the water. It is only when visitors enter the Duplex gallery from the basement that they recognize that the pool is empty, its construction a visual trick fashioned by the artist. A large, continuous piece of acrylic spans the pool and suspends water above it, creating the illusion of a standard swimming pool that is both disorienting and humorous.

Leandro Erlich (b. 1973, Buenos Aires) has been exhibiting internationally for over ten years. He has had solo shows at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona (2003); MACRO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma (2006), and Le Grand Café, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Saint-Nazaire (2005). He represented Argentina at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), where he showed Swimming Pool, and was also featured in the Singapore Biennale (2008), the Liverpool Biennial (2008), 7th Havana Biennale (2001), the 7th Istanbul Biennial (2001), the 3rd Shanghai Biennale (2002), the 1st Busan Biennale (2002), and the 26th Bienal de São Paulo (2004). His work will be shown in the upcoming Prospect.1 New Orleans Biennial in 2008. He lives and works in Buenos Aires.

Leandro Erlich, Swimming Pool, 2004, The 21st Century of Art of Kanazawa, Permanent Collection.

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Avenue
718-784-2084
Long Island City
NeoHooDoo:
Art for a Forgotten Faith
October 19, 2008-
January 26, 2009

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith, an exhibition co-organized by The Menil Collection that brings together a multigenerational group of North, South, and Central American artists who address the value of ritual in the artistic process and the wider implications of spirituality in contemporary art. On view in the 2nd Floor Main Gallery, Project Rooms, and Corner Gallery.

Including some 50 works of sculpture, photography, assemblage, video, performance, and other media, NeoHooDoo asserts that the drive towards a spiritual practice is as relevant today in our burgeoning global society as it has ever been. Artists have long engaged with ritualism to enrich their work, drawing on the traditions of shamans, griots, and oral historians. NeoHooDoo “grew out of a desire to explore the multiple meanings of spirituality in contemporary art,” states P.S.1 Curatorial Advisor and Menil Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Franklin Sirmans.

In the late 1960s poet Ishmael Reed adopted the 19th-century term “HooDoo,” referring to forms of religion and their practice in the New World to explore the idea of spiritual practice outside easily definable faiths or creeds and ritualism on contemporary works of literature and art. “Neo-HooDoo,” he writes in his 1972 collection of poetry, Conjure, “believes that every man is an artist and every artist a priest.” His seminal poems, “The Neo-HooDoo Manifesto” and “The Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic,” delve even deeper into this artistic practice to demonstrate its vitality as an international, multicultural aesthetic that embraces spiritual creativity and innovation.

From Vancouver to Havana, Guatemala City, and Bahia, the artists in NeoHooDoo began using ritualistic practice as a means to recover “lost” spirituality and to reexamine and reinterpret aspects of cultural heritage throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. Visual artists from across the Americas, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988), José Bedia (b. 1959), Rebecca Belmore (b. 1960), Jimmie Durham (b. 1940), and Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) have freely combined disparate materials and mediums to create spaces where art and audience can interact unhindered by history or societal constraints. For these artists, ritual practice often emerges as a form of catharsis and political critique to approach issues such as race, gender, slavery, and colonization. This exhibition also will look at younger artists such as video artists Michael Joo and Regina José Galindo, who carry on many of these practices and themes decades later, reconfiguring the work of their predecessors into performative displays of ritual through film and gallery installations.

Challenging conceptions of “insider” and “outsider” art, the artists in the exhibition frequently create work using everyday objects that resonate both within the confines of a gallery or museum and among their own localized audiences who may or may not visit art institutions. Situating their work in a vernacular aesthetic, the meaning of the work fluctuates according to its context. Items such as light bulbs, wine bottles, artificial flowers, piano keys are repositioned in assemblages confronting themes of exploitation, genocide, and poverty. The 53 pieces of discarded waste paper comprising Jimmy Durham’s A Street-level Treatise on Money and Work are brought to the center of a dialogue on the destruction of native cultures and Dario Robleto addresses American notions of manifest destiny in Deep Down I Don’t Believe in Hymns by taking a military-issued blanket and “infesting” it with hand-ground dust made from vinyl recordings of Neil Young’s Cortez the Killer and Soft Cell’s Tainted Love.

Franklin Sirmans developed NeoHooDoo as one of P.S.1’s curatorial advisory programs, a unique system that allows diverse curators to present experimental exhibition work. Current curatorial advisors include Chief Curatorial Advisor Klaus Biesenbach, Senior Curatorial Advisor Neville Wakefield, Andrea Bellini, Phong Bui, Lia Gangitano, Susanne Pfeffer, and Franklin Sirmans.

NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring texts by Arthur C. Danto, Greg Tate, Robert Farris Thompson, Jen Budney and Julia Herzberg. The catalogue also includes an interview with Ishmael Reed by Franklin Sirmans and a work by poet Quincy Troupe. The fully illustrated, color catalogue will be available for purchase at Artbook @ P.S.1 (144 pp., $45.00).

Exhibition rtists include: Terry Adkins, Janine Antoni, Radcliffe Bailey, José Bedia, Rebecca Belmore, Sanford Biggers, Tania Bruguera, James Lee Byars, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, William Cordova, Jimmie Durham, Regina José Galindo, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Hammons, Michael Joo, Brian Jungen, Kcho, Marepe, Ana Mendieta, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Pepón Osorio, Adrian Piper, Ernesto Pujol, Dario Robleto, Betye Saar, Gary Simmons, George Smith, Michael Tracy, Nari Ward

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Avenue
718-784-2084
Long Island City
Børre Sæthre
October 19, 2008-January 26, 2009

Børre Sæthre (b. 1967 in Oslo, Norway) is a Norwegian artist whose exhibitions combine many skills, including those of the architect, the interior designer and the set dresser. His installations comprise interconnected environments that take the visitor into a fantastic, dreamlike universe which is both aesthetically pleasing and psychologically disquieting.

In 1996, he launched LUSTLUX, under which his spatial environments (incorporating walls, furniture, light, sound, and different props) are produced. The structures are spectacular and are created with painstaking precision; the rooms, corridors, pits and dark corners take you into another world, an enigmatic labyrinth populated by unlikely juxtapositions of stuffed animals, furniture and environmental sculptures, with carefully controlled lighting, recorded sound and music, video, living plants, motorized walls and sliding doors.

In the past, Sæthre has spoken of his fascination with Freud's concept of "the uncanny". So instead of trying to shock his media-saturated audience, he draws visitors into active participation in his synthetic dreamlike worlds and gives them a true taste of the uncanny.

Sæthre lives and works in New York, Berlin and Oslo. He is represented by Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris, France.

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Avenue
718-784-2084
Long Island City
Yael Bartana
October 19, 2008-
January 19, 2009

Yael Bartana's work investigates society and politics. Over the last several years, she has become known for her complex visualizations in the forms of photography, film, video, and sound works and installations. Whereas largely known in Europe, her work has not been as present in the U.S. until now. On view in the First Floor Drawing and Painting Galleries from October 19, 2008 until January 26, 2009, this is Bartana’s first solo exhibition at a New York institution.

The exhibition is comprised of five works, including Trembling Time (2001), Kings of the Hill (2003), Low Relief II (2004), Wild Seeds (2005), and Summer Camp (2007), which provide an introduction to the past seven years of Bartana’s artistic practice. Her work creates a revealing ambivalence between playfulness and serious topics, time looped and halted, material from documentation and re-enactments.

Yael Bartana (b. 1970, Afula, Israel) lives and works in Amsterdam and Tel Aviv. She has had numerous solo exhibitions including: Foksal Gallery, Warsaw, Poland (2008); Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2008); The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada (2007); Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany (2006); Museum St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland (2005); Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2004); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (2004).

Group exhibitions include: Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, United Kingdom (2008); Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon, Spain (2008); Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany (2007); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA (2007); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2007); 27th Bienal de São Paulo, Brasil (2007); Tàpies Foundation, Barcelona, Spain (2006); 9th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2005).

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Avenue
718-784-2084
Long Island City
Gino De Dominicis
October 19, 2008-
February 9, 2009

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center is proud to announce the first major American museum exhibition of the Italian artist Gino De Dominicis, presented in P.S.1's first floor Main Gallery and basement Vault, with additional works concurrently on view in Here is Every. Four Decades of Contemporary Art in the Contemporary Galleries of The Museum of Modern Art. 

An Italian artist who purposely shrouded himself in mystery and stood apart from popular artistic trends, De Dominicis exhibited very little in North America. He worked in a variety of mediums including sculpture, painting, film, and installation. This exhibition focuses primarily on the paintings the artist made in the 1980s and 1990s, as he considered this art form the pinnacle of visual expression. Important historical works such as Palla, 1970, first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1972, will be included, as well as D'IO, 1971, an audio recording of the artist's laugh. The exhibition also features drawing, as well as sculptural works on wood, paper, and in a few cases, canvas.

De Dominicis' paintings are figurative and often produced using materials as basic as tempera and pencil on board. Concentrating on the human figure, De Dominicis often referenced mythical and epic leaders like Gilgamesh, the Sumerian king who sought immortality, and Urvashi, the Hindu Veda goddess of beauty. De Dominicis' paintings convey notions of immortality, beauty, and esotericism. A mysterious element pervades these works as the figures undergo various facial and bodily compressions: noses, eyes, mouths, and eyebrows are elongated and occasionally become fine fissures, while surreal imagery such as tiny fork-like hands and beak-like crania are paired with out-of-proportion arms, torsos, and legs. For Gino De Dominicis, painting performed a primary and extraordinary function, reaffirming the legacy of the artist as a powerful and creative force.

Gino De Dominicis (1947, Ancona, Italy, 1998, Rome, Italy) has had solo exhibitions at Galleria De Dominicis, Acona, Italy (1967); Palazzo Taverna, Rome, Italy (1972, 1977); Galleria Lia Rumma, Naples, Italy (1988); The Murray and Isabella Rayburn Foundation, New York, NY (1989); Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France (1990). He has also been featured in major exhibitions such as Documenta V, Kassel, Germany (1972); 40th Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (1980); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (1981); 44th Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (1990); 47th Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (1997).

The exhibition was organized by Alanna Heiss, P.S.1 Director, and Andrea Bellini, P.S.1 Curatorial Advisor and Professor of Art History at the Brera Academy of Milan.