Sandroni.Rey

	Sue de Beer Permanent Revolution October 20 - December 20, 2007 “Ich war, ich bin, ich werde” (“I was, I am, I shall be”) – Rosa Luxemburg, 1919 Sandroni Rey is pleased to present the US premier of Sue de Beer’s video installation, Permanent Revolution. This is de Beer’s third solo show with Sandroni Rey. Karl Marx coined the term “Permanent Revolution” in 1850 to describe the perseverance of a revolutionary group against a political majority—a choice that favored independent thought and action over the alternative, which he described as “permanent war.” Nearly seventy years later, amidst impending social revolution in post-war Germany, Rosa Luxemburg echoed Marx’s ideology. She believed that social change could not be stopped, that “…tomorrow the revolution will “rise up again…” and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be.” Walter Gropius, a contemporary of Luxemburg and founder of the Bauhaus, shared in her efforts toward definitive action. They worked from similar bifold platforms; Luxemburg believing that constructive revolution demanded unification of both organization and spontaneity, and Gropius practicing innovative design that integrated mass production and modern aesthetics. In her newest work, de Beer inherits these legacies while reinterpreting their allegations in a contemporary light. The result is a didactic and sensual experience that intimately addresses these two forces as de Beer explores their respective roles in relation to one another. Throughout the piece de Beer interweaves historical texts presented as organized lectures with spontaneous dance interludes, a cyclical interplay that echoes the teachings of the Bauhaus and its political context. In preserving elements of the youthful energy of her earlier works, Permanent Revolution is peppered with moments of light-hearted hilarity. From flagrant dancing to characters dressed in grotesque puppet masks, de Beer infuses an intellectually weighted subject matter with her own sense of playfulness. As she muses, “we work and then we dance.” In keeping with de Beer’s practice, the video will be projected amidst sculptural elements. For Permanent Revolution this will be in the form of a constructed viewing room within the gallery—a white box built in the golden mean proportion and bathed in cool green light. Sue de Beer currently lives and works in Berlin and New York City. She is a graduate of Columbia University and teaches at New York University. Her work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. She has shown at the Whitney Museum at Altria, at P.S. 1 as part of the “Greater New York” exhibition in 2005, in Frankfurt in “Youth of Today” in 2006, and most recently in Karlsruhe, Germany as part of “Between Two Deaths” curated by Ellen Blumenstein and Felix Ensslin.
	SCOPE Miami 2007 December 5 - December 9, 2007 Sandroni Rey will have a booth at Scope Miami with new work by Hernan Bas, iona rozeal brown, Ian Cooper, Henning Kles, Chloe Piene, Nate Harrison, Matty Byloos, Soo Kim, Lia Halloran, Adam Putnam, John White Cerasulo, Yanai Toister, Johan Nobell. For more information please visit http://www.scope-art.com
	John Espinosa Odd Sympathy September 15, 2007 - October 13, 2007 Sandroni Rey is pleased to present Odd Sympathy, an exhibition of new works by John Espinosa. This will be Espinosa’s first solo show with Sandroni Rey. Odd Sympathy” is a term coined by the 17th century physicist Christiaan Huygens to denote inexplicable natural synchronicity. One example of this phenomenon can be found during a crowd’s applause—at first the clapping is unorganized, but rapidly that randomness strangely adjusts to a synchronized rhythm. This type of unusual and often inexplicable synchronicity involving sentient beings negotiating natural phenomenon and supernatural energies has often been a thematic preoccupation present in John Espinosa’s works. For this exhibition, Espinosa will present two new large-scale sculptures. “Seconds After, Years Later” is the second phase of an ongoing sequential sculpture project begun in 2002. In the first phase of this project “Frozen Upon Entry,” three fawns positioned in a triangulated pattern negotiated an inexplicable energy presented as a retinal burst that formed a three-dimensional symbol alluding to electrical energy flows or a telepathic-like cognition. The second phase of this sequential project presents a nearly exact scenario; only the fawn’s bodies have turned to a smooth nebulous colored stone. Their legs have begun to crystallize into translucent amber where the electric current can be seen leaving the fawns’ bodies and lifting them off of the ground. These material transformations are utilized by Espinosa to create a ‘sequential object’. In Espinosa’s sculptural project, time-lapse occurs such that the narrative of the original sculpture has advanced by mere seconds but in real time five years have actually passed. This type of sequential structure normally exists in the world only in two dimensions. In Espinosa’s project, this structure becomes kinesthetic, a sequential image experienced in a three-dimensional world and slowed to the point where seconds are years. In the second sculpture, “This Wreckage (The Long Count)”, chronology is not a device but the subject. Espinosa presents a set of wooly mammoth tusks that thrust out of a rocky Mayan-like ruin shaped like a geometric mammoth skull. The back of this skull/ruin opens to a cavern whose interior walls are quadrangular panels airbrushed with galactic formations of deep space. This sculpture alludes to the infinite parallel expansion of time and knowledge; time expands backwards as we move forward; the more time and human understanding progresses, the further back we can imagine. John Espinosa, born in Bogotá, Colombia, is a graduate of Yale University (MFA Sculpture 2001). His work has been exhibited internationally including a solo show at the Miami Museum of Contemporary Art. He has participated in shows at The Renaissance Society, Chicago; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY; Metro Pictures, NY; Marianne Boesky, NY; Vilma Gold, London; and Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris. John Espinosa lives in Los Angeles.
	Anthony Goicolea The Septemberists September 15, 2007 - October 13, 2007 Sandroni Rey is pleased to present Anthony Goicolea’s video “The Septemberists” in the video project room. The Septemberists is a thirty minute black and white film that chronicles the preparations and processes associated with traditional religious ceremonies. A group of boys harvests materials in a dream-like landscape in order to construct the clothing and elements necessary to enact a series of semi-sacrificial rites of passage. Taking inspiration from Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf," the musical score becomes a substitute for dialogue. Each group of boys functions as a pack of mute workers accompanied only by the sound of their designated musical instruments. Set on a farm reminiscent of an old southern plantation, the characters appear almost like a refined tribe or community living an existence removed from society; half military academy, half monastery. Like cloned worker bees, each group moves in silent, pre-choreographed unison, carrying out their individually assigned tasks. As one group herds and sheers sheep, another picks cotton growing in a steam filled greenhouse, while still a third group meets at a moonlit marsh to catch octopi and harvest their ink sacks. Done in collaboration with designer Thom Browne, the ritualistic preparations, dress and customary uniforms associated with different, traditional, western, ceremonial rites shifts the focus from the macro to the micro. Gathering the raw ingredients and materials to create uniform garments and dawning the vestiges of tradition becomes a ritualistic ceremony in itself. Each member’s assigned station or role is designated by the built in hierarchical dress code attributed to each costume and its association with each custom. In the final scenes, a first communion, wedding and funeral blend together and culminate as a make shift wooden coffin is rowed down stream and crosses paths with a baptismal ceremony. Traditional rituals such as matrimony, baptism and funeral rites merge together in mystical outdoor settings to create new, dream-like hybridizations of seemingly recognizable, established, western customs. Goicolea received his MFA from the Pratt Institute of Art in 1996. He currently lives and works in New York City. In 2005, Goicolea was awarded the BMW Photo Paris Award for his photograph “Ghost Ship.” Goicolea’s work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston
	Yanai Toister Scope Basel June 11, 2007 - June 18, 2007 Sandroni Rey will have a booth at Scope Basel with new work by Yanai Toister in Basel Switzerland, Monday June 11th through Sunday, June 17th. For more information please visit http://www.scope-art.com/.
	iona rozeal brown the epidemic of excess, the detriment of denial June 30, 2007 - August 11, 2007 Sandroni Rey is pleased to present the epidemic of excess, the detriment of denial, an exhibition of new work by iona rozeal brown. This will be brown’s third solo exhibition with Sandroni Rey. In this new body of work brown continues to take cues from ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Meaning “pictures of the floating world,” ukiyo-e were produced throughout the 17th- 20th centuries to explore burgeoning youth culture in modern day Tokyo and other rapidly developing Japanese urban centers. brown works from both compositional and conceptual elements from these works, ultimately rendering her paintings on panel and paper with a unique contemporary approach. The themes she explores involve society’s obsession with material consumption, vanity and greed as well as the exchange between different cultures and personal identity. brown’s figures attempt to make up for their perceived inadequacies by donning fake hair and elaborate clothing. The material excess represented in these new pieces obscures and dilutes the identities of the individual figures themselves. What were cultural stylistic identity markers have become exaggerated adornments and products to be consumed and desired. Brown currently lives and works in Washington DC. She received her MFA from Yale University in 2002. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Spelman College Museum in Georgia and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT. She has been awarded the 2007 Richard C. Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship to teach and pursue studio work at the San Francisco Art Institute for the upcoming fall semester.
	Yanai Toister New Work May 26, 2007 - June 23, 2007 Sandroni Rey is pleased to present an exhibition of new photographs by Tel Aviv and Los Angeles based photographer Yanai Toister. This will be the US premiere of Yanai Toister’s work. An essay by Chris Balaschak will accompany the exhibition. Throughout recent work, Toister investigates aspects of photography such as its division into genres, its social functions and its possible uses and misuses. His interests in photographic theory and in applications of architecture drive his conceptual exploration. In his newest body of work Toister photographs contemporary housing developments in Israel. He employs color as an organizational structure to the body of work to underline the relationship between his architectural subjects and their barren surroundings. Toister focuses on this distinction to draw attention to development in contemporary aesthetics and the sociological consequences of architecture. “The logic these photographs suggest goes beyond color alone. Toister’s careful selection of these pre-configured housing tracts reveals less an incongruous relationship between home and landscape, than a predetermined coordination… Toister’s images communicate a sense of unease that lies dormant in the incongruous, continual spread of modern rationality across untenable geographies.” – Chris Balaschak Yanai Toister received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA in 2006. He lives and works in both Tel Aviv and Los Angeles, CA.
	Rainer Ganahl, Mario Garcia Torres, Hugo Hopping, John Menick April 14, 2007 - May 19, 2007 Rainer Ganahl, Mario Garcia Torres, Nate Harrison, Hugo Hopping and John Menick have agreed to participate in an exhibition organized by _________________________ at Sandroni Rey, April 14 through May 19, 2007.
	Henning Kles Harvester of Heröes March 3, 2007 - April 7, 2007 Henning Kles’s paintings belong to the artistic tradition of dream representation. Images of urban street life point towards Kles’s interest in the darker aspects of the human psyche and the horrendous and incredible madness of everyday life. The mysterious and grotesque are placed at the center of his works, with particular attention devoted to fin-de-siècle symbolism. Kles’s paintings reveal connections to the symbolist paintings of the 19th-century not only in terms of subject and choice of color, but also in regards to compositional devices. His arrangements recall the phantasmagoria works of Gustave Moreau, James Ensor, Arnold Böcklin, Odilon Redon and Edvard Munch. In his paintings, Kles combines the traditional formal language of art history with contemporary imagery. His visual narratives are culled from movies, newspaper photographs, magazines and comics. Kles’s pirates, outlaws, renegades and sheriffs represent, and perhaps even challenge, our conventional moral ideas of good and evil. Social conundrums regarding the perception of authority and trust become apparent in Kles’s work. With “Harvester of Heröes,” Kles has been influenced by The Watchmen, the DC Comics’s 1980s cult classic graphic novel. In The Watchmen, American citizens appear as costumed characters who face the threat of war. In both Kles’s works and The Watchmen, ordinary people are presented as superheroes who must confront larger moral issues and struggle with their personal failings in a world that is simultaneously believable and unfamiliar.
	Soo Kim, Mary Temple Photographs and Light Installation January 20, 2007 - February 24, 2007 Soo Kim will be exhibiting “They Stop Looking at the Sky,” a series of three photographic collages mounted on translucent plexiglass panels on which Kim has densely layered and reconstituted photographic imagery to explore various aesthetic connections between conditions of interiority and exteriority. In these works, Kim reconstructs cities and the interior and exterior spaces of their built environments. The works ultimately transcend specificity of time and place, suggesting completely re-imagined urban environments. Mary Temple investigates the experiential qualities of specific environments through several bodies of work and multi-disciplinary approaches. In her site-specific installations, light and shadow seem to be cast on walls from nearby windows. However, in actuality, the images are installed in rooms where there is little or no natural light, nor corresponding windows. The artist thus relies on the viewer to complete the architectural intervention by conceptualizing a window and borrowing from past experiences with light in space. Temple is interested in what informs the emotional sensibility of a site, how tenacious and fragile our memory of an environment is, and how an artist might affect conceptual modifications to such physical places.
	Jennifer West Yeah Film January 20, 2007 - February 24, 2007 Jennifer West’s film-based work is rooted in an interest in structural practices, alchemy and the experience of synesthesia. West will be presenting "Yeah Film (#22)" from the ongoing Cameraless Film Series. Using language as a departure point, West produces her films by marinating 16MM film negative in concoctions based upon the names of cocktails and energy drinks, the description of perfume scents and/or other disparate codes of sensual experience as literal recipes for the film marinades. The results are abstractions that relay time, language and visual abstraction amongst one another to produce hypnotic, even hallucinatory effects.