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Opening Reception Friday, October 1st. Through 3rd October 2010 The Gallery Soho, 125 Charing Cross Road, London.

The fine line between sculpture as an object and as a form of socio-historical interpretation is explored by Liane Lang in her new exhibition Monumental Misconceptions. This award-winning artist challenges society’s conventional understanding of historical monuments by taking a contemporary perspective that re-contextualizes them. Using life-size models and props intermingled with more traditional bronze or steel sculptures, Lang creates unnerving, humorous and thought-provoking installations. This dichotomy of contexts and mediums is further emphasized by capturing these alter-realities using new media such as photography, film and pre-cinematic zoetropes. In 2009 Lang spent a month photographing Soviet era monuments in Budapest. After the fall of communism most Soviet sculptures were quickly removed from the public eye, sometimes ripped from their boots, which were welded to the plinths. In a few places, however, such sculptures can still be found. Many of the visible remnants of Budapest’s communist history were relocated to a suburban field (now the Memento Sculpture Park) by the architect Akos Eleöd, in order to preserve their historic value and save them from destruction. Lang photographed sculptures in several other sites around the city of Budapest during her residency. Included in her forthcoming exhibition are images from the 19th century Kerepeszi cemetery (which also contains many Soviet era graves) and from the running track at Nepstadion. This all but forgotten site of Hungary’s sporting history is surrounded by groups of giant steel plated figures representing sportsmen and soldiers. In the video work The Track Lang animates these figures, apparently frozen in the act of movement, drawing out their strangely ambiguous message of sport and camaraderie, militarism and propaganda.

Consumption is a small but spectacular show of color photographs by Kelsey Zyvoloski within the larger group exhibition HOLY MOLY: The Spirit of Food and the People Behind It at Golden Belt's Room 100 Gallery in Durham, NC. Zyvoloski is motivated by the fact that many people are oblivious to the origin of their food. Her Consumption series focuses on the distance food travels to reach our local Food Lion, Harris Teeter, or Whole Foods. In one series she buys fruits and vegetables and then draws their country or state of origin with molasses to represent the amount of oil it took to transport it to NC. Even though she utilizes molasses instead of oil because it is non-toxic, I thought it was oil when I looked at the photographs. One tablespoon of molasses represents 100 miles the produce had to travel to North Carolina. In another series of photographs, she chews produce, spits it out, and forms the mush into the shape of its country of origin. Guatemala is cantaloupe orange and Mexico is mapped with pale green cucumber. Both series are elegant even though they are speaking about waste and excess. I am struck by the simple gestures of this work to reveal our complicity in the oily and rotten system of food production and consumption – gestures we are all familiar with: purchasing, chewing, spitting, consuming, and playing. Humor can be an excellent strategy to startle people out of their complacency and ignorance. Beauty is another. Zyvoloski employs both effectively. She makes me want to feast and fast, play and revolt, boycott and participate all at the same time. Zyvoloski is from Raleigh, NC. She received her BFA from UNC, Chapel Hill in 2009. She has been playing with her food since 1987.

To New York With Love, a show of new work by filmmaker and artist, Jonas Mekas, opened this past Friday at James Fuentes LLC on Delancey St. The gallery was packed full of people trying to find a comfortable place to watch the two films, Orchard Street, 2010 and World Trade Center Haikus, 2010. Both films are intimately obsessive and personal. The shaky clips of The Lower East Side, Mekas's brother and the Twin Towers come together in a nostalgic viewing of a past New York, revealing our inability to alter how its changing personalities and physical transformations affect the lives of the people living within its structure. “Looking through my finished and unfinished films, I was surprised how many glimpses of the World Trade Center I caught during my life in SoHo. I had a feeling I was Hokusai glimpsing Mount Fuji. Only that it was the World Trade Center. The WTC was an inseparable part of my and my family's life during my SoHo period from 1975-1995. This installation is my love poem to it. My method in constructing this piece was simply to pull out images of the WTC from my original footage, while including some of the surrounding scenes. To New York With Love will be on view until October 31st. http://www.jamesfuentes.com/main.html

In September and October of 2010, Lindsay Blatt and Paul Taggart will be working in Iceland on their short film and photographic project documenting the historic herding of the prized Iceland horses. Each year traditional herdsman take to the back country to round up thousands of the country’s hardy horses, which have spent the summer grazing in the highlands.  Throughout the three weeks of production Lindsay and Paul will shoot from land and air, foot and hoof across the vast Icelandic landscape following and living with the proud herdsmen to bring together a collection of media for print publications, a short documentary, and photo exhibition. Follow their daily updates HERE.

Leete’s Island: Photographs by Benjamin Donaldson

September 16 – 27, Davenport Art Gallery

Yale University

248 York Street

New Haven, CT

"Leete's Island" is the title of Benjamin Donaldson's current exhibit of photographs on view in the Davenport College gallery.  The pictures were made on the coast of Connecticut, in an area where the artist's family had once resided for 250 years.  For the last three generations of his mother's family, the relationship with Leete's Island was lost.   
By bringing his family back to this area that his relatives settled, Donaldson creates a fractured family portrait that acknowledges the present while looking into the past.

http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2010/sep/21/leete-island-explores-land...