Starkwhite at Sydney Contemporary

We presented a two-person exhibition at this year's edition of Sydney Contemporary - photographs by Fiona Pardington (NZ) and paintings by Michael Zavros (AUS), and three of our artists - Richard Maloy, Grant Stevens and Clinton Watkins - were included in the Video Contemporary section curated by Serena Bentley.

Images: Starkwhite booth at Sydney Contemporary 2017 

Auckland Art Fair launches new Projects Programme

Grant Stevens is represented in Pacific Real Time, the inaugural edition of Auckland Art Fair Project Programme curated by Jarrod Rawlins, curator at MONA, Hobart, and Simon Rees, Director, Govett Brewster Art Gallery / Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth.

The curators have selected Stevens’ multi-channel video installation Sky in which a virtual camera floats across a panorama of endlessly generating digital clouds. Created with a single photograph as its starting point, Sky explores the possibilities for the proliferation of the digital image, while also seeking space for quietude and contemplation. Accompanied by a dreamy soundscape, which is similarly digitally generated to create infinitely variable patterns and loops, Sky’s panorama is without progression or climax. Instead, as a counterpoint to our ‘culture of distraction’, it offers a kind of meditation on the perpetual present; an ever-changing, yet consistent experience of the present moment. 

Image: Grant Stevens, Sky 2016, HD video with surround sound, multiple display formats, infinite loop, edition of 5 plus a/p

In Motion at Starkwhite

In Motion runs at Starkwhite this week and through to 8 August. The show includes work by Rebecca Baumann and Brendan Van Hek (AUS), Alicia Frankovich (DE), Len Lye (NZ) Laszlo Moholoy-Nagy (US) and Grant Stevens (AUS). Read more here...
Images (top to bottom): Rebecca Bauman & Brendan Van Hek, Untitled (2015), acrylic and aluminum; Alicia Frankovich, Becoming Public: Actor (2015), C-print & The Female has Undergone Several Manifestations (2015), curtain, ribbon, fan, cord, plug; Len Lye, A COLOUR BOX (1935), Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,  Ein Lichtspiel: schwarz weiss grau (A Lightplay: Black White Grey), (1930), film still; Grant Stevens, Particle Wave (2013), six lenticular panels. A COLOUR BOX (1935) is presented in In Motion courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation and the British Postal Museum and Archive, from material preserved by the BFI National Archive and made available by Nga Taonga Sound and Vision. The Len Lye Foundation also acknowledges the support of Technix Group Ltd. Ein Lichtspiel: schwartz weiss grau (A Lightplay: Black White Grey) is presented in In Motion courtesy of the Moholy-Nagy Foundation.

Final week for Grant Stevens' Hold Together, Fall Apart

Grant Stevens' exhibition Hold Together, Fall Apart enters its final week at Starkwhite, closing on Saturday 2 August. You can read a review of the exhibition here.  You can also catch Stevens' work at the City Gallery Wellington. What We Had Was Real runs to 7 September.
Image: Grant Stevens, Haven (2104), video still

Grant Stevens opens at Starkwhite

Grant Stevens exhibition Hold Together, Fall Apart opens at 5.30pm today and runs to 2 August.
Image: Grant Stevens, Haven (2104) video still

Australia's new art fair launched tonight

Sydney Contemporary gets underway this afternoon with a collectors preview followed by the  vernissage. Located in Sydney's historic Carriageworks, the fair includes two curated sections - Video Contemporary curated by Artspace's Mark Feary and Installation Contemporary curated by Aaron Seeto, the director/curator of 4A centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
Images: Grant Stevens' Supermassive and Clinton Watkins' Continuous Ship #1, presented by Starkwhite in Video Contemporary curated by Mark Feary

Bazinga!

IMA Director Robert Leonard is curating an exhibition for Starkwhite to coincide with the opening of the Auckland Triennial in May. Titled Bazinga!—the notorious catchphrase of Dr Sheldon Cooper from the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory—the show will explore a nerd sensibility in recent Australian art. It will feature work that touches on science (especially astrophysics) and science fiction (particularly Star Trek); mathematics and statistics; technology, computers, computer games, and the internet; and obsessive fandom, autistic behaviour, and inane pranks. The artists are Rebecca Baumann, Botborg, Antoinette J. Citizen, Gabrielle de Vietri, Danielle Freakley, Daniel McKewen, Ross Manning, Grant Stevens, and Stuart Ringholt. Bazinga! opens Saturday 11 May at 6pm, with a video/sound-feedback performance by Botborg, and runs until 8 June.
Image: Grant Stevens, Matter (2007), digital video

Grant Stevens' Supermassive show at L.A. Louver

Grant Stevens' Supermassive is showing L.A. Louver to 23 February. You can read an Los Angeles Times review of his exhibition here.

Image: video still from Grant Stevens' Supermassive at LA Louver

Auckland Art Gallery patrons centre stage in a suite of collection-based exhibitions

The Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki is highlighting the role of patronage in collection-based exhibitions drawing on works gifted by its patrons group and the Chartwell Collection, which is on long term loan to the gallery. The shows include works by a number of Starkwhite artists: Grant Stevens features in Whiz Bang Pop; Phil Dadson, Gavin Hipkins and John Reynolds are in Partner Dance: Gifts from the Patrons of the Auckland Art Gallery, both curated by Natasha Conland; and the evolving downstairs show Toi Aoteroa includes a new section, also curated by Conland, with works by Martin Basher, David Hatcher, Gavin Hipkins and Jae Hoon Lee.
Image: David Hatcher, The Simplest Surrealist Act (Andre Breton), 2002, silkscreen on plexiglass, 2000 x 1430 mm, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki; Gavin Hipkins, Dunedin (Landscape), from The Homely series, 1997-2000, C-type colour photograph,  600 x 400 mm collection of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki; Phil Dadson, Echo-Logo, 2003, DVD, 7 mins, collection of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki.

Grant Stevens' Rogue Wave Project

Grant Stevens' Supermassive is the latest Rogue Wave Project at L/A Louver. The exhibiton runs to 23 February.
Image: LA/Louver, Venice CA

The art opening experience made over as art

Grant Stevens has been commissioned by Sydney's MCA to make a video work for the museum foyer to sit alongside the piece by Imants Tillers' featuring the names of the MCA's patrons. For between $1,000 and $20,000, a new generation of patrons can see their names in the video with its audio component echoing the conversations that might be heard at an opening.

Stevens says he is less interested in the politics of patronage than in drawing out the sometimes uncomfortable conversations between people in personal and social settings. "The starting point for the work is thinking about the experience of attending openings, specifically MCA openings, and my personal associations with the Imants Tillers painting in the foyer," he says. "Hovering above the crowds...the work has a slightly intimidating presence for me. It is a reminder that art's history is intrinsically linked with people and money."

Image: Grants Stevens, Crushing (2009), video still

Grant Stevens: Horizons

Grant Stevens' exhibition Horizons opened at GBK last night and runs to 4 September 2010.

Image: Grant Stevens invitation image for Horizons, GBK, Sydney, August 2010

Grant Stevens to take up a residency in China

Grant Stevens returns to China soon to take up the annual international residency at OCAT Contemporary Art Terminal, He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen. The residency runs from 16 August to 16 November 2010.

Image: Grant Stevens, It will be tonight (2009), digital print, custom cabinet, speakers audio track.

Grant Stevens: Burst at PICA

PICA (Perth) is presenting a trilogy of video works by Grant Stevens developed in response to his time in Los Angeles. If things Were Different (2009), Crushing (2009) and Really Really (2007) "...oscillate between the fanciful and romantic to the abrasively cynical by drawing on tropes of Hollywood film, advertising or bad day-time TV and purposefully mishandle media devices of editing, framing, cropping, and incorporating text or muzak". PICA website

The artist who now lives and works between Queensland and California explains that "...unpacking and testing out these ambiguities and ambivalences are what drive me to make art - to try and make works that draw you in while making you feel uncomfortable or unsure about what you are looking at." Eyeline 2008)

Grant Stevens: Burst runs at PICA until 5 April 2010.

Image: Grant Stevens, If Things Were Different, 2009, digital video, 18 min 17 sec, edition of 5

LA bound

Sydney/LA-based artist Grant Stevens is also in our lineup for Art Los Angeles Contemporary with a selection of video works including Crushing.

Image: Grant Stevens, Crushing, 2009, digital video, 4 min 13 sec, edition of 9

Featured work

For the past few years Grant Stevens has explored the languages of popular culture through his text, images and sound videos. His works appropriate and de-contextualise a range of cultural cliches and conventions that seem to surround us every day. Whether it's through the over abundance of mixed metaphors or the incessant onslaught of predictable plotlines, his works seem to disrupt and challenge the way we read mainstream culture.

Stevens' video In the Beyond is a mandala-like circular display of people's self-descriptive words from internet MySpace pages - a work exploring notions of spirituality and self-reflection. For further information on this work or others by the artist please contact us at starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz

Image: Grant Stevens, In the Beyond (video still), 2008, digital video, edition of 9

Grant Stevens awarded Australian Emerging Artist Prize

Sydney-based artist Grant Stevens picked up the Blake's Emerging Artists Prize for his In the Beyond video. You can see images of his most recent exhibition at Starkwhite here. Stevens is also one of the artists we will be presenting at Art Los Angeles Contemporary (the new art fair replacing ART LA) in January 2010.  

Image: Grant Stevens, No Bad Days (detail), 2008, digital print, edition of 20

Fazed from the street

Grant Stevens' exhibition Fazed closes this Saturday (29 August '09). You can contact us at starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz if you'd like more information on Fazed or images of works in the exhibition. 

Image: Grant Stevens, Fazed, installation views from Karangahape Road, Auckland, New Zealand

Review of Fazed

John Hurrell's review of Grant Stevens: Fazed is published here at eyeCONTACT and Nicola Harvey's review of WORD at the Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney (which includes a video work by Stevens) is published here in Frieze magazine.

Image: Grant Stevens, Flow (2009), lambda print, 290 x 410 mm, 1/8

Fazed

Three works from Grant Stevens' Fazed exhibition. For further information on these works and others by the artist you can email us at starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz.

Images (top to bottom): Grant Stevens, Blow Out (2009), lambda print, 1510 x 950 mm, edition of 8; Dormant (2009), lambda print, 760 x 1010 mm, edition of 20; Crushing (2009), digital video, edition of 9