Metanatural Landscapes
Berlin - Los Angeles Connect | Group exhibition with Aram Bartholl, Petja Ivanova, Gil Kuno, Rebeca Méndez, Iona Vreme Moser and Eric Vrymoed
About the exhibition
Panke Gallery (Berlin) and JAUS (Los Angeles) are delighted to present “Metanatural Landscapes: Berlin - Los Angeles Connect” presenting works by artists Aram Bartholl, Petja Ivanova and Iona Vreme Moser from Berlin, and Gil Kuno, Rebeca Méndez and Eric Vrymoed from Los Angeles.
The “Metanatural Landscapes” exhibition is not about nature or the landscape per se. Instead, this exhibition showcases divergent works with overt references to nature in an attempt to examine the filtered perception of nature rather than nature itself. Examples include a series of moving images of Icelandic sea and landscapes shot on grainy 16mm film transferred to an intentionally glitchy video ( Méndez), photographs of large scale color photographs of beaches situated within the context of a real tourist beach destination (Bartholl), a sound installation of leaves by Iona Vreme Moser or a cartoon-like owl sculpture perched on a tree branch constructed with the help of a CDC printer (Vrymoed). This exhibition will hopefully serve as an opportunity for visitors to contemplate and reflect upon how human awareness of nature and the landscape has been affected by the media, entertainment, and the internet, especially for the city dweller.
Artists
Berlin
Aram Bartholl
Born: 1972, Bremen, Germany
Education: UdK – University of the Arts Berlin, 2002
Aram Bartholl’s work creates an interplay between internet, culture and reality. How do our taken-for-granted communication channels influence us? Bartholl asks not just what humans are doing with media, but what media is doing with humans. Tensions between public and private, online and offline, techno-lust and everyday life are at the core of his work and his public interventions and installations, often entailing surprisingly physical manifestations of the digital world, challenge our concepts of reality and incorporeality. Bartholl has exhibited at MoMA Museum of Modern Art NY, Skulptur Projekte Münster and Venice Biennale as well as conducting countless workshops, talks and performances internationally. Bartholl lives and works in Berlin.
Petja Ivanova
Born in Bulgaria and based between Sofia and Berlin, Petja Ivanova graduated from the University of Arts Berlin in the class for Computational Art/Generative Art in 2015. In her trans-disciplinary practice she combines archeology, biology, physics, computation
and the poetic in order to promote the ‘poetic method’ as a counterweight to the socially dominating ‘scientific method’. This practice being understood in non-linear relation with Fluxus & the Avantgarde. She runs studio for poetic futures and speculative ecologies out of a caravan currently parked in Berlin-Kreuzberg.
Ioana Vreme Moser
is a transmedia narrator, visual artist and sound artist engaged with research activities, electronic poetics, and ludic notations. Her work currently involves electro-mechanical instruments, sound sculptures, kinetic installations, audio-visual performances, graphic notations, softly spoken recordings, data compendiums and video pieces.\
Los Angeles
Gil Kuno
Through careful social conditioning, the mind is guided to think within certain patterns. Gil tries to redirect the flow of the mind outside of the set patterns we are taught by society to construct. In his work, he attempts to displace natural activity from its context, revealing an otherwise hidden level of metaphorical absurdity within the ordinary patterns present before our eyes.
The goal of sublimating everyday perception underlies many of the projects he has exhibited or performed. He aims to push people away from paradigmatic thinking through various themes and methodologies – aleatoric systems (chance operations,) exaggerated perception, derailed reality and re-envisioning experiences common within everyday life.
He has collaborated with artists such as Eye Yamantaka (Boredoms,) Yoshimi (Boredoms, OOIOO,) Battles, Vincent Gallo, Ken Ishii, Tatsuya Yoshida (Ruins,) Carl Stone, Alec Empire (Atari Teenage Riot,) Steve Albini (Big Black, Shellac,) Cristian Vogel, Zbigniew Karkowski, Merzbow, GX Jupitter Larsen (The Haters,) Nissennenmondai, Christian Galarreta, Joseph Hammer, Patric Catani (EC8TOR)
Gil received his MFA at UCLA. He has achieved recognition from Ars Electronica, Japan Media Arts Festival, Canon Digital Creators Contest, Timothy Leary (Leary.com), among others.
Rebeca Méndez
was born in México City in 1962. She received her BFA (1984) and MFA (1996) from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California.
Méndez’s art practice is in various media—photography, 16mm film, video, and installation—with which she explores the nature of perception and media representation, specifically how cultures express themselves through the style of nature that they produce at a given time and the medium through which they construct this nature. She moves through different scales with ease—from photographic prints, to immersive sound and video installations, to murals of more than 25,000 square feet, to installations involving sixty-foot boulders and tons of lava rock. She considers the journey as a medium in itself and has produced a significant body of work based on travels to unfamiliar and extreme places such as Iceland, Patagonia, Svalbard archipelago in the high arctic, and the Sahara, where she is awakened to a heightened level of perception.
Méndez’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Latin America. Selected solo exhibitions include: Rebeca Méndez: At Any Given Moment at the Nevada Art Museum, Reno, Nevada (2012); Each Day at Noon: Rebeca Méndez, Café Hammer, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012); Rebeca Méndez, Museum of Contemporary Art, Oaxaca, Mexico (2011); Rebeca Méndez: Selections from the Permanent Collection of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1998).
\ Méndez was the 2012 recipient of the National Design Award bestowed by The White House and the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Méndez was awarded the 2010 California Community Foundation Mid Career Fellowship for Visual Artist. She taught at Art Center College of Design and is currently a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Eric Vrymoed
is a Los Angeles based artist working in sculpture. After graduating from UCLA in 2011 in Fine Art, Vrymoed has exhibited at Jaus Gallery, TJ in China, Mexicali Rose, New Wight Gallery, Institute of Art and Olfaction and has worked in collaboration with the Public Engagement Program at the Hammer Museum. Vrymoed currently works as the Sculpture Lab Supervisor in the UCLA Art Department.
curated by Ichiro Irie and Sakrowski
