Suunto And Lander & Core Watches

Working closely with performance watch purveyors Suunto, BEAMS will be releasing two models, the X-Lander and Core. Both feature detailing the Finnish company is known for including a compass, clock features, waterproof casing and more. The X-Lander will come in an all-black colorway while the Core sports a white or yellow accenting. The collection will be available at BEAMS flagship stores.

Supreme 2008 Fall/Winter Collection

The wait is over as Supreme has previewed their 2008 fall/winter collection. The obvious efforts due to the fall/winter season revolve around another strong outerwear program as well as a dedication to patterns with some well-designed sweaters and tops. The always unpredictable accessories releases from Supreme for this season include the just recently seen collaboration with Everlast on boxing gloves, a simply branded ash tray, Masterlock, reflective puffy and boxing glove keychains. Also worth noting, despite the Olympics being over, Supreme has done up a 5-rings inspired beanie as the frontrunner among three other styles. This update also comes two video pieces including living legend Christian Hosoi @ Supreme LA and Kid Chocolate over at the Trinity Boxing Club in New York. For release dates, the following applies… NY/LA – Thursday, September 4th, Japan – Saturday, September 6th and Online – Monday, September 8th at 11:00 am EST.

Erik Ellington Answers Back Video

Skate pro, Erick Ellington, widely regarded as one of the best around has made a name for himself not only by being an awesome dude and superb skater but for his signature collections from Krew/Supra and Deathwish boards. In a question and answer segment, we get tons of answers from the pro including whether he is becoming a satanist and why is only the Supra team on Deathwish? Definitely an entertaining piece, look out for the Neckface cameos as well.

Reserve LA – Edward Colver Photo Exhibit

As a very well respected photographer, Edward Colver has been a key figure, documenting the early days of the punk rock scene in Los Angeles not to mention being responsible for so many iconic images, including covers for over 250 albums with legendary labels making Mr. Colver a legend in his own right. Capturing remarkable black and white imagery, he reminds us that classic can always be modern in its own way. To celebrate this artist, Reserve which is the Freshjive flagship store, will be holding a photo exhibit showcasing some of his work. The event will take place August 29th 2008 from 7pm – 10pm, along with the reception will be limited edition Edward Colver shirts.

Banksy visits New Orleans

Most certainly my favorite stencil artist, Banksy has made a living ruling the streets of England with his provocative, political and damn good masterful execution of stencil graffiti. With his pieces collecting ridiculous amounts of money, any city should be honored to get tagged up but the legend, well at least everyone except the authorities. Recently taking a visit to New Orleans, Banksy attacks yet another flurry of buildings with his trademark style, obviously referencing some of the latest political problems troubling our nation.

San Diego Museum of Art hosts ” Eleanor Antin – Historical Takes “

Organized by the San Diego Museum of Art, SDMA, this solo exhibition features the work of celebrated conceptual artist Eleanor Antin. The exhibition is the first to focus on Antin’s recent series of large-scale tableaux photographs based on Greek and Roman history and mythology, which are presented together for the first time.  On exhibition through 2nd November, 2008.

The exquisitely staged photographs from Antin’s three new series, Roman Allegories, Last Days of Pompeii, and Helen’s Odyssey, are witty and psychologically complex melodramatic enactments of mythological and fictional classical narratives. The artist’s friends and models pose in various locations throughout San Diego (including SDMA’s a classically transformed James S. Copley Auditorium) that are suggestive of sites from the ancient world.

In her new works, created from 2001 to 2008, Antin engages photography in a dialogue with nineteenth-century European salon painting, evident in the staging and backdrops of her photos that were inspired or transformed from the grand tradition of European history painting. The works are affectionate spoofs on classical culture with metaphorical parallels to the excesses of contemporary consumer economy.

Antin’s most recent photographs are presented along with a selection of works from three of her earlier quasi-historical projects from the 1970s and 1980s, The King of Solana Beach (1974–1975), The Angel of Mercy (1977), and Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev (1981–1987).

Eleanor Antin was born in New York City in 1935. She is considered one of the most influential artists to emerge from the feminist art movement of the 1960s and 1970s and is also one of the most highly regarded women conceptual artists of the period. An influential performance artist, film and video maker, and photographer and installation artist, Antin delves into history as a way to explore the present. She lives and works in San Diego, California, and is an Emeritus Professor at the University of California, San Diego.

Eleanor Antin: Historical Takes is organized by the San Diego Museum of Art and made possible by the generosity of Pam and Jerry Cesak, Sharon and Joel Labovitz, Gordon Brodfuehrer, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, SDMA’s Artists Guild, Supervisor Pam Slater-Price and the County of San Diego, and an anonymous donor. Additional support is provided by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, and the County of San Diego Community Enhancement Program.

Josephine Meckseper & Mikhael Subotzky’ ‘New Photography 2008: To Present At the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) ‘New Photography 2008:

The Museum of Modern Art presents New Photography 2008: Josephine Meckseper and Mikhael Subotzky, the latest installment of its annual fall showcase of significant recent work in contemporary photography. New Photography 2008: Josephine Meckseper and Mikhael Subotzky is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, and will be on view from September 10, 2008, through January 5, 2009.

This year’s exhibition features the work of two artists, Josephine Meckseper (German, b. 1964) and Mikhael Subotzky (South African, b. 1981). Three works from Meckseper’s Quelle International series were created specifically for the exhibition, and the photographs from her Blow-Up series are making their North American premiere. Meckseper makes photographs and mixed-medium installations that cunningly expose the links between politics and the consumer worlds of fashion and advertising. Her signature installations involve various displays—sleek mirrored shelves, chromed glass vitrines—filled with eclectic scraps from consumer society and political culture. Subotzky’s recent body of photographic work, Beaufort West (2006-2008), shown here for the first time in North America, portrays a small desert town in South Africa’s Western Cape blighted by unemployment, rampant crime, domestic violence, poverty, and segregation.

Twenty-three years after the first New Photography exhibition, the series continues to highlight the Museum’s commitment to the work of less familiar artists and seeks to represent the most interesting accomplishments in contemporary photography. Since its inception in 1985, work by 65 artists from 14 countries has been featured in this forum. New Photography has featured such influential artists as Rineke Dijkstra (1997), Olafur Eliasson (1998), JoAnn Verburg (1990), and Philip-Lorca diCorcia (1986), among many others.

Explains Ms. Marcoci, “While the objectives of Josephine Meckseper and Mikhael Subotzky are surely diverse, the work of each artist exemplifies recent developments: the reinvention of documentary practice in contemporary photography in Subotzky’s case, and the expanding of the medium of photography into a series of artistic operations to expose the gray area between advertising, politics, and fashion in Meckseper’s case. Both artists’ endeavors attest to photography’s potential for constructing, documenting, enacting, and engaging with meaning in the world today.”

Josephine Meckseper
In her photographs and signature vitrine displays, Meckseper explores the media’s strategy of mixing political news and advertising content. The eleven Meckseper works in the exhibition are from the artist’s Blow-Up and Quelle International series, as well as one mixed-medium work, Kriegstrasse (2008), created specifically for the show. Included are five photographs from the Blow-Up series, shown here for the first time in North America; two mixed-medium works that are also part of the Blow-Up series; two Quelle International photographs; and one Quelle International wallpaper. The works from the Quelle International series were created specifically for this exhibition, and the installation of Blow-Up photographs hanging on top of the Quelle International wallpaper represents a never-before-seen configuration of the work.

Meckseper’s works use the conventions and imagery of advertising—posing models, flashy backdrops, and end-of-season sales—to address the industry’s persuasive impact and to investigate the ways in which political power is articulated in advertising in a world consumed by appearances.
After growing up in an artistic family with ties to the revolutionary left, Meckseper moved from Berlin to the United States and studied at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. It was there that she produced her first photographic and film works, during the 1992 riots following the verdict in the Rodney King police-brutality trial in Los Angeles. On television news shows, continuous media coverage of the escalating tension between local African Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department was punctuated with advertisements, prompting Meckseper to question the way protest culture is aligned with fashion in our media-saturated age.

Mikhael Subotzky
Subotzky’s most recent project, the Beaufort West series (2006-08)—which makes its North American premiere in this exhibition with 21 photographs on view—is named after a small town in the Karoo Desert along the busy route between Cape Town and Johannesburg. The artist was drawn to this subject by the local jail, which is strangely situated in the center of the town, in a traffic circle at the intersection of the main highway. His photographs of Beaufort West’s various populations—inmates, outcasts, families, residents, and passersby—formulate a stirring vision of South Africa’s strained post-apartheid condition. 
 Taken with a medium-format camera in existing light, Subotzky’s pictures articulate multiple narratives: a preacher leads a prayer session in the prison; a well-dressed man attends the Agricultural Show, an annual social event for the wealthy; the residents of Vaalkoppies, Beaufort West’s garbage dump, scavenge for food; members of the Ai 26s gang abuse drugs; a police officer interrogates a suspect who has just been arrested. Subotzky records white domination and black dispossession without relying on politicized reportage. His scenes are at once introspective and direct, reflecting both the individual and the systemic aspects of South Africa’s colonialist legacy in the post-apartheid age. 

For his student thesis project, completed in 2004, Subotzky created a series of panoramic photographs of prisoners in the notorious Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison, in which former South African president Nelson Mandela spent several years of his political imprisonment.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Zhang Xianyong solos at Limn Gallery in San Francisco

Limn Gallery is hosting Zhang Xianyong’s first solo exhibition outside of China.  His works was first introduced last year during the tenth anniversary of LIMN gallery’s presentation of contemporary Chinese art. On exhibition 6th September through 25th October, 2008.

Inspired by both traditional story telling of Chinese Opera and contemporary images of the West, Zhang Xianyong carefully stages tableaux in photographs that are fresh and humorous. He mixes Eastern and Western civilization in multiple combinations whose disorders of time and space form the special characteristics of his work. 

Zhang creates “a self” over and over, searching for an identity in a society where the collective takes precedent over the individual.  However, Zhang still believes that “we” is everywhere and that each of us cannot exists without the other. His process is an accumulation of poses, expressions and an acute attention to visual space. Once shot over the course of a few weeks, Zhang painstakingly composes the final scene.  Like a painting from the renaissance masters, Zhang reworks the light as he incorporates each element. The “Last Supper, the workers” (referring to Da Vinci’s “Last Supper”) is a group of thirteen construction workers stuffing their faces in a smoke filled room.

Zhang’s work is a constant observation of the present meshing with the past. Zhang shoots in the street of Shanghai, which, because of its European colonial past is the perfect background for his stories and for making his points. In the second series entitled “Sleepwalking”, Zhang takes a personal journey through his childhood and revisits the cultural and social history of Shanghai.

Zhang Xianyong will be present for the opening reception.

In 1996 Limn Company opened a 4,000 square foot exhibition space in the south of Market district of San Francisco. Specifically designed as an environment for LIMN’s continuing effort to bring art and design together, LIMN Art Gallery exhibits emerging to well established artists from the Bay Area and around the world with a strong emphasis on contemporary Chinese art. The gallery presents solo and thematic exhibitions every six weeks covering most mediums such as painting, video, sculpture and photography. LIMN gallery continues to reach out by inviting once a year an artist from a foreign country. LIMN gallery has collaborated with artists from China, Japan, Italy, Finland, and Switzerland.