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Laurel Nakadate’s Only the Lonely is on view through August 8th at MoMA P.S. 1 in Long Island City.

“This 10 year survey of Nakadate’s work had me laughing and squirming at the various predicaments she puts herself in. Rarely do I find it necessary to force myself to stand in front of a work of art, but on more than one occasion in this show I deliberately fought the urge to turn away from the awkward and confrontational feelings it evoked. Her work is trivial, sexy, exploitive, juicy, insensitive, naive, gross and unapologetic. I’ve since gone back to the show twice in an attempt to take it all in.”

-Jenn Dierdorf, Soho20 Gallery Director

The show fills the majority of the second floor of the museum and is paired with Modern Women: Single Channel, a group exhibition focusing on the work of eleven women artists in single-channel video. Jeffrey Kastner of the NYTimes has also reviewed the show, in which Nakadate encounters men in various, often awkward or even taboo, circumstances, and yet manages to capture respect and poignancy. The show combines Nakadate’s work over the last several years in both video, photography, and feature-length film.

Dean Daderko, juror for Soho20′s upcoming 16th Annual International Exhibition, was recently named Curator at the Comtemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH). Daderko, who has mounted shows in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Montreal, Quebec; and Vilius, Lithuania; as well as some of New York’s most well-known alternative art spaces, will take the position this month. Daderko has been a graduate instructor at Yale University and a visiting curator at Cooper Union School for the Arts and M.I.T. in Cambridge, MA. For more information, please see the CAMH Press Release below.

Soho20′s 16th Annual Exhibition will run from July 26 – August 20, 2011, with an opening reception on Thursday, July 28 from 6 – 8 PM.

The Second Annual Chelsea Art Walk will take place at over 125 galleries and art institutions on Thursday, 28 July from 5 – 8 PM. Each location will have extended hours and many will have talks from artists, curators and gallery owners, as well as live performances, book sales, book signings, and receptions.

A guide to the Walk will be available in the next week, and we will post it here as well. In the meantime, visit the Chelsea Art Walk website for more information.

Soho20 will be hosting the Opening Reception for its 16th Annual International Exhibition (see show card below) during this time, and we hope you will stop by during the Art Walk. The exhibition features the work of Jesus Aguilar, Salwa Aleryani, Firelei Baez, Princess Dennis, Pamela Dodds, Ayana Evans, Sunhee Jung, Sofia Perez, Surabhi Saraf, Clifford Tisdell, Cullen Washington Jr. (best in show), Arin Yoon and Greta Young.

The juror is Dean Daderko, who was recently appointed Curator of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH). He has taught and lectured at Yale University, Cooper Union, Centro de Investigaciones Artisticas and M.I.T.. Dean has curated shows around the world, and is the recipient of the 2008-09 Curatorial Research Fellowship from the French American Cultural Exchange. In his practice, he is dedicated to establishing productive opportunities for dialogue between art, artists and audiences.

A selection of images from the current exhibition of SOHO20′s National Affiliate Artists…

Fran Bull, "Dark Matter series: a cyclone of broken hemispheres" (L); Elizabeth Michelman, "GENE-A-LOGIC" (R)

Eve Whitaker, selections

Ann Rowles, "Pouch" (fore); Laura Cloud, "Untitled" (L); Deb Clem, "Synchronicity" (R)

Virginia Tyler, "An Hour's Work for Abena Duffee: Breaking 40 Pounds of Gravel"

Gail Hoffman, "The Bell Didn't Ring"

Ann Rowles, "Dreads" (fore); Rosie Thompson, "Witness Series R" (L)

June 28 – July 23, 2011

For Soho20’s National Affiliate Artists, the moment to be confronted is always now and always new. Fifteen artists from eight states engage with feminist issues, formal/aesthetic values, and individual artistic growth through their work.  The annual group exhibition draws together conceptual and interdisciplinary experimentation, non-traditional forms and materials, sociological observation, and political engagement.  The works span mixed-media assemblages and painted reliefs, woven constructions in newspaper and encaustic, crocheted fiber abstractions, video-installation, artists’ books and works on paper, as well as miniature environments in bronze.  Other artists critique stereotyped representations of the female form, identity, and sexuality through oversize clay busts, oil painting/collage, and sensual prints employing resurrected photographic technologies.  Political and personal content addresses war, genocide, immigration and colonialism, the sensually charged body, family, aging, and loss.

National Affiliate artists have followed career paths as university professors, curators, writers, poets, and arts activists. They are united in exploring new forms and strategies for understanding female experience and generating dialogue.

ARTISTS AND THEIR ART

B. Amore (Vermont) shows small to mid-sized mixed-media sculptures and wall-reliefs employing street-found paper and gloves as symbols of both the private and interpersonal experience of immigration. Evolving from carved forms to complex installations involving text, ancestral artifacts, alternative photo processes, stone, fabric, and the found object transformed, Amore’s installations and sculptural ruminations bridge the past and the present. www.bamore.com

Karen Baldner’s (Indiana) drawings “The presence of Your Absence” are a combination of ink pen, charcoal line drawings, washes and photo copy transfers on handmade paper with embedded horsehair.  The fluid surfaces allow the images room to shift as they explore the space between absence and presence of an experience of potential and suspense.  www.karenbaldner.com

Fran Bull (Vermont) presents large-scale reliefs of muslin, Italian plaster, and Styrofoam from her “Dark Matter” series. Moved by the mystery of invisible underpinnings to the universe and borrowing from Classical and Renaissance traditions, Bull references the human body through the illusion of fabric draped over flesh.    www.franbull.com

Deb Clem (Indiana), who identifies herself as feminist, liberal, and lesbian, makes it her life’s work to restore these images to our cultural conscience.  Clem paints non-traditional portrayals of women, combining photographic emulsion and digital printing on canvas with traditional techniques of oil and acrylic painting in order to present the female image as subject, not object.  Also often introducing objects to her canvases, Clem’s transparent oil glazes allow the image underneath to show through while opaque paint obscure other areas of the image, resulting in a complex relation of her subjects to their environment.  http://homepages.ius.edu/dclem/artist.htm

Laura Cloud (Michigan) creates installations involving large sculptural forms and multiple sensory pathways that include sound, smell, and the poetry, voices, words, and cultural records of others.  Her interdisciplinary structures play with and deconstruct cultural traditions, stereotypes, and mythologies, including her own personal myth of identification with the name “Cloud.” www.art.msu.edu/?page_id=106 

Louise Farrell (Massachusetts) often works site-responsively, seamlessly combining common and theatrical materials to simulate naturalistic forms in unnatural arrangements.  She says of her current series of wall hangings woven of rope and newspapers.  “While my focus is on process, the use of stained newspapers shows that beauty can be the result of recycling.” www.studioswithoutwalls.org.

Sculptor Gail Hoffman’s (New York) miniature bronze cityscapes and video installations based on lost-wax castings from toys and make-believe environments invent problematic communities where the viewer can become lost in the work. http://soho20gallery.com/New/artist_pages/GhoffmanBio.html

Elizabeth Michelman’s (Massachusetts) installations and video explore the subjective experience of time by mixing elements of language, music, found objects, architecture, and drawing.  Juxtaposing the curves of broken marble mantelpieces with a metronome, her installation “Accompaniment” evokes the human form and its vibrations as a source of music and interpersonal connection. www.elizabethmichelman.com www.wmaastudios.org  www.studioswithoutwalls.org

Guest artist Barbara Rehg (Georgia) exhibits “Vessel,” a large-scale 2-D mixed-media work using charcoal, watercolor, colored pencil, paper collage, wire, string, and foam tiles.  In this work seeking to visualize the constant necessity of change, Rehg proposes that the mind is an ever-expanding vessel, meant to hold all the complex experiences a person brings into her life. www.masonmurer.com/artist/rehg_barbara.htm

Ann Rowles (Georgia) crochets site-adaptable hanging abstractions of mixed fibers, vinyl tubing, and wire.  “Spew” and “Squeeze” are forms related to the aging process, relics of time spent caring for her elderly mother who suffers from dementia.  Rowles’s non-traditional sculptural practice appropriates and elaborates on her great-grandmother’s expressive craft.  Her work offers a survival mechanism to retain sanity in the midst of decline and decay.   www.annrowles.com

Georgia Strange (Georgia) generates vivid surrealistic gestures by combining over-sized clay body-parts and polychromed imaginary heads with expressive steel armatures.  http://www.art.uga.edu/people.php?id=5024&dt=p

Rosie G. Thompson (North Carolina) shows recent work from her 2011 “Witness Series” of five human-sized, figurative missed-media and wood constructions.  Her voiceless, innocent witnesses in environments reflecting global happenings are interconnected and timeless. www.tristatesculptors.org  www.frankisart.com

Virginia Tyler’s (North Carolina) photo/sculptural installation attacks child labor. It explores the effect a 10-hour day of breaking rocks has on the mind and spirit of a 14-year-old girl in Ghana.  Tyler also uses her art to economically empower the local village culture:  she ahs collaborated with workers in a Ghanaian foundry, designing small bronzes of western gadgetry for an American market while returning the profits to the African makers. http://soho20gallery.com/New/artist_pages/tylerBio.html

Kalamazoo, MI photographer Mary Whalen embraces the romance of the human subject.  Rejecting the compulsion of the multiple, Whalen employs antiquated photographic processes to produce unique prints.  Her atmospheric studies of athletic competitors under stress are both intimate and subtly erotic. www.marywhalen.com

Eve Whitaker’s (Texas) large expressive figure drawings (several of which are included in the traveling exhibition “The Veil:  Visible and Invisible Spaces”) project “inescapable presence.”  Their highly worked surfaces reflect the difficult process of loss and responsibility for an aging and disintegrating parent.  Her “doll” sculptures, of wood, carved plaster, and textiles, are haunting yet playful, intended to be held and moved about.  The current series of dolls began with a glimpse of Susan Hilferty’s designs for the Queen in “Wonderland.”  www.evewhitaker.com  www.buttonpettergallery.com