Aki Sasamoto, Talking in Circles Talking (Installation View), via Soloway Gallery

“My grandfather died when I was fourteen and became an abacus. In the way ice turns into water, he became this object he left behind.”  So begins the performance of Japanese artist Aki Sasamoto’s Talking in Circles Talking, an immersive performance and installation at Soloway Gallery in South Williamsburg.  Exploring the notions of value and vibrancy at play in the space between human relationships and physical objects, Sasamoto effectively fuses personal discourses with her surrounding environment.

Aki Sasamoto, Talking in Circles Talking (Installation View), via Soloway Gallery (more…)

In a recent discussion with writer Jonathan Lethem at Cooper Union, Patti Smith was asked if it was possible for young artists to come to New York City and find the path to stardom that she did.  In response, Smith told the crowd, “New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling.”  On Sunday, May 23, PS1 MoMA opened the third iteration of its quinquennial celebration of emerging artists who live and work in New York – Greater New York – which will run through October 20, 2010. This year’s show features some 68 artists which marks a steep fall from the 160 artists in the 2005 edition, perhaps adding some truth to Smith’s words.

According to the press release, this year’s show – overseen by P.S.1 director Klaus Biesenbach, Museum of Modern Art drawings curator Connie Butler, and P.S.1 curatorial adviser Neville Wakefield – will center “largely on the process of creation and the generative nature of the artist’s studio.” Leading up to the opening of Greater New York, artists including Franklin Evans, Dani Leventhal, and Kalup Linzy utilized PS1 as studio space to create new work on-site.  This sort of artistic production will be ongoing throughout the exhibition in locations like the Boiler Room, where Whitney Biennialist Aki Sasamoto has invited the artist Saul Melman to collaborate. The Bruce High Quality Foundation also engages with this notion with their commission to develop an “art pedestal exchange program,” a seemingly minimal installation that groups beautifully refined new “art pedestals” that will be offered to art schools in exchange for their old worn pedestals. Over the course of the exhibition what began as a pristine white installation will transform into an amalgam of used exhibition furniture.

Conrad Ventur’s “This Is My Life (Shirley Bassey)”

More text, videos, related links and a full photo story after the jump…

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Curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari announce the artist list for the Whitney Biennial, 2010 – video by Pierce Jackson via Whitney.org

Today the Whitney Museum of American Art announced the list of fifty-five artists who will participate in the upcoming Whitney Biennial, 2010, which is to take over the Museum from February 25 through May 30 2010. The Biennial is the Whitney’s signature panoramic survey of the latest in American art that blends well established artists together with a predominance of emerging artists from all over the country. This is the 75th in the ongoing series of Biennials and Annuals presented by the Whitney since 1932.  Traditionally the Whitney Biennial seeks to reflect the way in which art is shaped by the particular historical moment in which it was created and so in 2010 the curators, Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari, have told us to expect works reflecting diverse responses to the anxiety and optimism of the past two years.

More text, related links and a full list of participating artists after the jump…..

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