Justin Berry at INTERSTATE PROJECTS



Only a few days left to see Justin Berry's show Fissure and Fracture at INTERSTATE PROJECTS. 

This is Justin Berry’s first solo show in New York.  Berry looks at imaginary worlds with the same sensibility that he uses to look at the real one.  His photographs of video game landscapes and fantasy novel covers reveal nuanced portraits of the worlds that we long to visit but can never attain.  He explores the legacy of the photograph and addresses its future at the same time.  His pictures are taken with scanners and screen captures that are altered and cropped and laboriously reconstructed.  In a world suffused with imagery, and with new tools for image making emerging daily, Berry does not add to the profusion of images, he refines those that already exist.


Berry scans used book covers into the computer and removes all of their text, characters, creatures, and buildings - meticulously filling the absence left behind with fragments of the larger picture.  Without their fantastical subjects these images of landscapes retain their essential character, the over-saturated colors of a paradise or the ominous shadows of a dystopian nightmare, but at the same time they appear as though they have the potential to exist.  The original compositions are structured around a subject and, once the subject is removed, they frame themselves around an absence, a void to be filled with our own expectations and desires.


In playing violent, war-themed, video games, Berry chooses to act against the intention of the game designers.  Turning aside from the battlefield he regards the world around him as a photographer in the tradition of Ansel Adams or Edward Weston.  He captures the virtual space through numerous and overlapping screenshots, composing formal observations of these fictional worlds.  From afar we take them for granted as traditional photographs, an index of something true.  Only after seeing them up close, where their authenticity is undermined, are we able to appreciate and notice the details, such as the gun that has been left behind or the soldiers hiding behind the rocks, reminding us that the image is an index of something else altogether.



Justin Berry (USA, 1980) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received his BFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and TUFTS University in 2003, and his MFA from The School of The Arts Institute of Chicago in 2008. His work has been exhibited at The Pigeon Wing, the Deptford X festival in London, The Chelsea Art Museum and Interstate Projects in New York, The NEXT Fair and Rowland Contemporary in Chicago, and Barbara Davis Gallery in Houston, among other locations. From 2007-2008 he was the co-director of the artist-run curatorial space Alogon, in Chicago, IL. He currently runs the fictional exhibition space Waymaker Gallery.

Interstate Projects focuses on young, emerging artists, works to connect artists and ideas from across the country. The gallery is located in Bushwick at 56 Bogart St, Brooklyn, NY 11206. 

Elmgreen and Dragset



Diving Board/Powerless Structures, Fig. 11, 1997

Diving board penetrating the window in the museum’s reading room MDF, slide-proof rubber, aluminum, glass, 60 x 75 x 200 cm
The Louisiana Exhibition, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, 1997; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2000
Courtesy of the artists and Victoria Miro.

Brian Kenny's "the hole truth"



Only a few days left to see Brian Kenny's "the hole truth" show at envoy entreprise gallery in New York (until 20th June).

Working with fabric for the first time, Kenny learned how to sew to construct a series of iconic objects -- altered and reconfigured US flags, reflecting on what it means to be a disaffected gay American in the age of Occupy, the issues of social inequality and injustice. Devalued and depraved symbols, fallen or removed stars and stripes, the distortion and disfiguration evoke feelings of this discontent.

Mastering his primary medium of free-associative drawing, Kenny also created a series of large-scale drawings on vintage police shooting targets -- obsessive and intricate compositions depicting personal fantasies, fears and fetishes, as well as esoteric symbols and hand signs borrowed from sign language and urban subcultures. This new body of work serves as both artist's intimate diary and passionate commentary on gender and sexuality, religion and guilt, finding inspiration in chaos while fighting the demons within -- the hole truth and nothing but the truth.

Brian Kenny is a New York-based American artist. Born 1982, in Heidelburg, Germany, he works across drawing, painting, sculpture, text, sound, video and blogging. In 2004, Brian and his partner Slava Mogutin formed SUPERM, an ongoing collaborative art project.

Joseph Beuys - Interview (1980)

Topman Fall / Winter 2012


Leif Podhajsky is an amazing artist




Crocker Art Museum presents first survey of Contemporary photography from its collection



Yousuf Karsh, “Pablo Picasso,” 1954. Gelatin silver print, 19 ½ x 15 ¾ in. Crocker Art Museum. Gift of Rex Backman.

The first survey of the Museum's photography collection in more than a decade, this exhibition showcases the history and artistic development of contemporary photography. “Brought to Light,” on view June 16 through September 3, 2012 features more than 35 works from the 19th through the 21st century, with images by artists ranging from Peter Henry Emerson to Chris McCaw. The beauty of the medium and its embrace of aesthetic, social, and conceptual concerns moves from the darkroom to the digital in this exhibition. 

Additional artists featured include Irving Penn, Robert Heinecken, Eikoh Hosoe, Marion Post Wolcott, Dean Burton, Carlotta Corpron, Thomas Annan, Lewis Wickes Hine, Laura Gilpin, Geoff Winningham, Ruth Bernhard, Harold E. Edgerton, Edmund Teske, Tracy Snelling, and Daniel Kasser.