Photo: pingpongdeath, via Flickr

What a question from this totally awesome interview with Anthony Discenza, Oakland-based artist whose eerie and totally awesome piece, A Viewing: The Effect, is on view now as part of Data Deluge. In case you can’t see the piece here in Marfa, you can also catch it at SFMOMA, where it is on view as part of the exhibition Descriptive Acts through June 17. Cool! – RM

Photo of Roberto Pugliese’s A Voice in the Desert by Robert D. Junior. Where is he from, who is he, we love his photos. They are rad (be sure to check out his photo of Matthew Day Jackson’s Sculpture for My Right Hand and every single shot from At the Drive-In). Just saw that his book, You Will Live Forever, a series of photographs exploring architectural apathy and personal isolation, is available from Shabazz Projects. Yours for $8, and only 100 copies printed. –NI

British artist Anthony Gormely, whose work will be included in Ballroom’s upcoming exhibition Carbon 13, has a new show up in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Facts and Systems is a special project of the White Cube gallery, and the recent work included in this show is a counterpart to a concurrent retrospective at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil. Check it all out here! –RM

Lake — Erin Shirreff, 2012 Colour video, silent

Board member, artist and awesome guy Matthew Day Jackson just curated a show, Science on the Back End, that opens tomorrow, May 1, at Hauser & Wirth in New York. As Matt says in his curator’s statement (written “from a hotel in Frankfurt unable to sleep”):

I am not a curator. I merely selected the five artists for this exhibition and left to them the decision of which artworks to present. These artists inspire me. Their artistic reality is full, expansive, and not contingent on the studio environment. … I neither suggested nor requested specific works for the show. My interest lies instead in the larger creative impulse that the six of us share and the way in which each one of us processes and reorders our life experience into formal strategies, according to our personal priorities. I believe those formal strategies develop as we systematically gain knowledge through the experience of life every day, and they become a language we use to communicate with each other and the larger world.

The lineup includes five of our personal favorites (and almost all Marfa alums): Larry Bamburg, Marc Ganzglass, Rosy Keyser, Erin Shirreff, and Nick van Woert. Don’t miss it. Tomorrow night, May 1, from 6 to 8 pm. Show runs until June 16. –nicki

Scott Hug, whose collaged pie charts are included in Data Deluge, has a new show right now at Rawson Projects in Brooklyn. Titled Hell to Pay, the show is the second in the gallery’s series of poster projects, in which they invite an artist to design an open-editioned, un-signed poster. Hug designed his posters, pictured above, by remixing found graphics and text from advertising, a process inspired by the little-known California artist/poet/publisher/gallerist/physicist Bern Porter (1911-2004). As Hug puts it in an interview: “Basically, I filter the visual pollution of our printed world via magazines, newspapers, catalogues, junk mail, etc. and export it through a sharpening lens.” Looks good! Up through May 6. More info here.

The Hammer Museum just announced its list of artists for its first Los Angeles biennial, Made in L.A. 2012, and Ballroom Marfa’s chosen Artists’ Films International artist, Dan Finsel, is on the list! The exhibition will offer a snapshot of the current trends and practices coming out of Los Angeles, one of the most active and energetic art communities worldwide. Featuring works by 60 artists from the L.A. region, with an emphasis on emerging and under-recognized artists, the exhibition will debut new installations, videos, films, sculptures, performances, and paintings produced for the biennial. Dan is working on a new video and installation for the project entitled The Space Between You and Me. More more information, click here.

Friends, big weekend in Marfa, with the all-night dublab Tonalism event on Saturday (for those with good taste and stamina), and most especially our friend Dan Chamberlin’s first ever solo show, Ecstatic Camouflage, at the Marfa Book Co., featuring 10 photographic prints on canvas. As Dan points out, it’s only up for the weekend, so make sure to visit while you can. The opening is on Friday, March 9, from 6-8p. Learn more on Dan’s site or at Marfa Book Company.

Jennifer Dalton
Only in America (or, I Can't Trust Myself), 2011
two vending machines, approximately 500 temporary tattoos, on pedestal
68" x 22" x 22"
Courtesy of Winkleman Gallery

Lots of news this week: first off, Data Deluge artist and great sport Jennifer Dalton is part of Solo Projects, a section of the Armory Show dedicated to single artist presentations, where she’ll be hosted by Winkleman Gallery. (Clifford Owens is also part of Solo Projects, presented by On Stellar Rays.) More info here.

Next up: Immaterial artist Erin Shirreff is in a new show, Today, the first exhibition at Lisa Cooley’s new space at 107 Norfolk Street in New York. The inaugural exhibition features work by each gallery artist, and is titled after a Frank O’Hara . Opening reception is Friday, March 16th, from 6 until 9 pm.

Great news: Fellow Immaterial alum Barbara Kasten’s show at Gallery Luisotti just got a great review in the March issue of ARTFORUM. Read it.

For the tuneheads out there: check out Ballroom alum Adam Helms‘ new mix “Acoustics for Tundra” on triplecanopy.

For those abroad: AutoBody alum Jonathan Schipper is making (crash) waves in England as part of As Slow As Possible, the fifth AV Festival of Art, Technology, Music and Film, which goes on for all of March. Jonathan’s piece, Slow Motion Car Crash, showcases a VW Golf in an empty shop, slowly being pressed into the wall. Check out the progress here.

Jonathan Schipper
Slow Motion Car Crash, 2012. DAY 2
© The Locus+ Archive

Re-enactment (365 days)
Long Durational Performance Duraton: 7 hours
MUSEO DEL BANCO DE LA REPUBLICA Bogota/Colombia
2011

Maria José Arjona, who performed Vault for us in 2003, as well as endurance pieces in Treading Water and at our 2011 benefit, has a new work, All the others in me, which will premiere at the VOICE gallery as a parallel project of the Marrakech Biennale. She will perform Friday, 2 March 2012, 7:30 pm, at Dar Cherifa; the opening follows on Saturday, 3 March 2012, at VOICE gallery.

In All the others in me, “the artist’s body proposes itself as a result of a metis entity which is continuously in transit, it undertakes a metaphorical travel through a series of possible and never definitive identities to remember, another time, that art exists to exceed differences and accept the diversities.” If you happen to be in Morocco in March, don’t miss this.

(And for more on Maria: be sure to watch this video, “RIGHT AT THE CENTER, THERE IS SILENCE”, which documents some of her recent work.)

Also of note: Tinariwen, who played here in November, won a Grammy Sunday night for Best World Music Album. Amazing. Now all we have to do is get Adele out here.

Erin Shirreff
Four Sides, 2012
Four archival pigment prints, 61cm x 61cm each
Installation view from Recto/Verso, The Approach, London

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Kelowna-born, Brooklyn-based artist (and Ballroom alum) Erin Shirreff has a new touring solo exhibition, Available Light, which will travel across Canada through 2012 and 2013. Curated by Sandra Dyck and Jan Allen, the show will open at the Carleton University Art Gallery next Monday, February 13, and Shirreff will give a short talk about her work at 6:30 p.m. Carleton University Art Gallery has a great piece about the show (bolding my own):

Shirreff’s delicate, shape-shifting abstract sculptures of compressed ash are informed by her interest in our encounters (whether in person or through photographs) with the enigmatic and often unyielding forms of classic mid-20th-century minimalist sculptures. Her silent videos of iconic objects like the 30 Rockefeller Plaza building in New York, or the moon, or the monumental Roden Crater in the Arizona desert, are based on photographs sourced on the Internet and in books, reshot serially and used to generate not-so-seamless montages that subtly reveal their constructed nature while drawing attention to the ways images mediate our understanding of the world. The handmade clay forms that are the subject of her spare “documentary” photographs do not call to mind particular objects, creating a space, as she has said, “for wondering and the potential and pleasures of ambiguity.”

Shirreff is also in a group show, Recto/Verso, currently at The Approach in London. The exhibition includes work by Michele Abeles, Robert Heinecken, Alexandra Leykauf, and Lisa Oppenheim, amongst others, and examines how the six artists engage with photographic image making and the ambiguous perceptual relationships between object and representation. Londoners: You have till March 11 to make it happen!