at the blackbox

12 january  - 25 january 2020 

Anastasia Mamontenko

Emerging filmmaker Anastasia Mamontenko has been exploring the history of film making in her native Ukraine and has incorporated those narratives into her own work for the past three years. Deconstructing Soviet cinema from a philosophical perspective, Mamontenko incorporates personal interests in the power half-truths and unknowns in society today. The screenings of her most recent 2019 films - Pale People of Corruption, Bloody People of War, and Rizdvo - mirror current experimental short film making in Europe today. Based in Odessa and London, Mamontenko studied at the Odessa National University, New York Film academy, and London College of Communication. In 2019, she received the RAGFF Film Festival award for best surreal film in Venice, Italy. 

joël andrianomearisoa

12 january - 13 march 2020

Serenade Is Not Dead

Born in Antananarivo, Madagascar, in 1977, Joël Andrianomearisoa lives and works between Antananarivo and Paris. His practice explores many disciplines, from fashion to design, video to photography, scenography to architecture, and sound installations to text-based works.  For the artist “serenade is a sentimental act, but above all, an act of humanity – a way to put feelings, emotions and desires back at the center of discussion. A way to address something we have lost in our society today.” Furthermore, Andrianomearisoa’s exhibition affirms that “seduction is not dead, emotions are not dead and we are (all) still alive!” 

Serenade Is Not Dead highlights Andrianomearisoa’s architectural background through a carefully orchestrated grid presentation of his textile references to the body, serigraphic landscapes, appropriated and repackaged “sentimental products”, and sculptures offering a mini retrospective of the artist’s working methods.  Viewers will connect to the artist’s visual explorations of love and longing (or “territories of desire”) through abstraction, references to the figure, conceptual appropriation, and photography. 

Andrianomearisoa represented Madagascar in the 58th edition of La Biennale di Venezia International exhibition in 2019, and received the 2016 Arco Audemars Piguet Prize in Madrid.  He will participate in the 22nd Sydney Biennale in 2020. His work is held in numerous private and public collections, including the National Museum of African Art in Washington DC; Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa; the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York; and the Collection Revue Noire in Paris, France.

This exhibition is curated by Dallas Contemporary Senior Curator Laurie Ann Farrell. 

Joël Andrianomearisoa: Serenade Is Not Dead is supported by Nathalie Aureglia, Monaco.

jose dávila

12 january - 13 march 2020

Directional Energies

Born in Mexico in 1974 sculptor Jose Dávila lives and works in Guadalajara, Mexico. Trained as an architect, Dávila explores issues of form and content via large-scale installations, each unique composition of varying linear dimensions, paradoxical alignments and pictorial configurations.

The site-specific work for Dallas Contemporary resembles the artist’s studio in Guadalajara. Dávila makes use of the museum’s open floor plan, industrial concrete foundation and high ceilings as part of his creative process.  Using locally sourced materials from Dallas-area quarries, the artist will create balancing and stacked site-specific sculptures composed of steel I-beams, cables, large boulders and objects. 

Museum visitors will stand beneath typically hidden structural details and experience Dávila’s visual negotiation of materials through the carefully placed, and seemingly precarious suspension of objects--a metaphor for the constant struggle of opposing forces; a representation of the friction between modernity’s tendency to homogenize and humanity’s need for diversity. The erratic, freestanding structures defy the formal order and repetition commonly associated with modernity and minimalism.  Displayed in their natural state of oxidation, the angled lines of color and stacked I-Beams and rocks disrupt the clean precision of the modernist grid.

Dávila has exhibited at the Museo del Novecento (Italy); Hamburger Kunsthalle (Germany); Marfa Contemporary (Texas); Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag (Netherlands); MoMA PS1 (New York); Museu de Arte Moderna, Sao Paulo (Brazil), among others. He is represented by Travesia Cuatro and OMR in Mexico, Galleri Nicolai Wallner in Copenhagen, Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, and König Galerie in Berlin. Davila’s work can be found in public and private collections such as Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.

This exhibition is curated by Dallas Contemporary Adjunct Curator Pedro Alonzo.

Jose Davila – Directional Energies is supported by Galeria OMR, Mexico City, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, and Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen.

friendswithyou

12 january - 13 march 2020

The Dance

Founded in Miami in 2002 by Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III, artist duo FriendsWithYou centers their practice on ideas of inclusivity, shared experiences, and unity with the universe. Now based in Los Angeles, they aim to spread “magic, love, and friendship” through a spectrum of work including resin sculptures of anthropomorphized objects, animated short videos, and brightly colored large-scale installations. FriendsWithYou has exhibited at Art Basel, The High Line in NYC, Design Exchange, and Albright-Knox, collaborated with Pharrell, and is creating an animated children’s show for Netflix.

FriendsWithYou’s newest work, The Dance, makes an exciting debut in a forthcoming site-specific presentation at Dallas Contemporary.  An interactive and communal experience, the exhibition actively incorporates audiences: two moving orbs serve as ambassadors in the dark as they meander along in a spiritual, cleansing, and comforting ritual set to a custom soundtrack in celebration of the beauty and power of togetherness. Dallas Contemporary Executive Director Peter Doroshenko, who curated the exhibition, reveals that the installation was “designed with the mission to envelop visitors and transcend them into a higher state of self-awareness and tranquility.” 

Also on view for the first time are new paintings which are the largest the duo have created to date: the first, entitled A Beautiful Place II, is inspired by a set from Hayao Miyazaki’s feature Howl’s Moving Castle. This is the latest in a series of narrative works that take place against impressionist landscapes.  The second new painting, Interness, is made of plasticine and the latest of The Playworks Series, first begun in 2017. In this work, highly recognizable icons rendered from pop culture populate a pictorial field in soft, playful, and at times jarring representations of memory, memes, and the internet.

This exhibition is curated by Executive Director Peter Doroshenko.