Savory Sessions

Savory Sessions was four one-artist presentations each lasting one day only. Initiated by Rakett during the ISCP Open Studios, New York. Four artists’ work was shown as separate one artist exhibitions in the Rakett studio nr 221 temporarily turned into an exhibition space. The artists were present.

Savory Sessions at Rakett studio nr 221, ISCP Open Studios 2008. Photo: Rakett

Contemporary art for sale (2008), installation, Mom & Jerry. Savory Sessions at ISCP, New York. Photo: Rakett

Installation detail, Contemporary art for sale (2008), Mom & Jerry. Savory Sessions at ISCP, New York. Photo: Rakett

Floodland (2008), wall drawing, Johannes Høie. Part of Savory Sessions curated by Rakett.

Brokenbird (2008), drawing, Johannes Høie. Part of Savory Sessions curated by Rakett.

Video still from No Mas (2008) by Kjetil Kausland

Together with invited chefs, Rakett cooked and served guests a meal in the lounge area of ISCP, every day between 3pm and 5pm.  

Savory Sessions was kindly supported by Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Municipality of Bergen and the Norwegian Consulate in New York. www.iscp-nyc.org 

Program and list of participants:

Friday November 7th. 
Michael Baers
Presentation of Metacomics presents: A day at the Opera, or Rakett meets New State Management (2008).
(Scroll down to read the comics)

Baers in an American artist living in Berlin. He was extruded from CalArts and the Whitney ISP, before hardening into his present shape. His work has been exhibited internationally and has also appeared in many art publications. He sometimes works in collaboration, notably, with Robert Hamelijnk and Nienke Terpsma, editors of the Dutch artzine “Fucking Good Art”.

Saturday November 8th.
Kjetil Kausland 
Screening of No Mas.

Fighting his way across borders  - A very short text on only one of the aspects to be discussed in relation to Kjetil Kausland’s work 2005-08.
Crossing the line is what has been going on in Kjetil Kausland’s project the last years, firstly crossing the line between private and public, by bringing his personal interest for cage fighting into his professional realm. In the photo project No holds barred from 2005 fights are frozen, for us to take a closer look at where one body ends and another begins. As spectators we can take a moment, and are also given that moment, to try to identify with the forces, both physical and mental, at play. But then, he decides to cross another border. He enters into a state of empathetic action, as he also enters the cage in the performance No más (2008). The trauma of this process has just been made public in his latest exhibition at Lautom Contemporary, Oslo, Norway. Insisting on investigating something to the point of exhaustion is one of the things that has been the most impressive. Kausland has apparently exhausted all possible possibilities.
Text by Anne Szefer Karlsen, Curator and director of Hordaland Art Centre, Bergen, as well as pharmacy shopping assistant for the No más-performance.

Sunday November 9th.
Mom & Jerry 
Installation on view: Contemporary Art On Sale (2008)

Mom & Jerry could be a lifestyle. Or, it could be a universe existing parallel to our own, inhabited by the two cartoonish characters, Mom and Jerry, performing as the personifications of Chaos and Dissidence.  Mom and Jerry consider themselves living, nomadic, pieces of art. They see their surroundings, wherever they are, as the stage for their everlasting protest and rebellion against established values, political correctness and snobbery. As artists, provocateurs and outsiders, Mom and Jerry attempts to criticize and mock the excluding, elitist, hierarchical structure of the high art machinery. By acting out the privileged classes spoken and unspoken prejudices against the non-educated masses’ perception of high culture, Mom and Jerry ridicules and questions the validity of the establishments’ defined moral values, as well as the matter of good and bad taste.
Living their lives in late capitalist society, where the economic, abstract forces makes daily life unreal, and where the individual itself is the operating tool for the techno-marketing power, artists like Mom and Jerry can be seen as recycling machines in the monstrous, virtual city of garbage. By pirating private property and copyrights, by mixing brands and products, they take part in the ongoing production of knowledge, forms and spaces that people will interact with and recreate in new ways.

Monday November 10th.
Johannes Høie
 Presentation of Floodland (2008), wall drawing and Broken Bird (2008), drawing.

Høie is working in a drawing practice that is based in a classical manner but has an experimental take on every angle of his work. He is moving in a vast field of the figurative genre, and combines his drawings with text, music and performance. Now he is currently working on his comprehensive gesamtkunstwerk Floodland, a dark and gloomy gothic fantasy tale where horror, mythology and the occult play head-on with twisted emotions and disturbing eroticism. Partly a love story, partly an apocalyptic elegy, and partly a grotesque portrait of corruption and evil Floodland is a poetic saga where the surreal mixes with reality in a dystopic universe not necessarily very different from our own. Each drawing is a part of the tale as a whole, and they are now being developed into graphic novel books. This last year a significant part of Floodland has involved gigantic wall drawings freehand drawn directly onto the walls like temporary drawing stunts. This drawing practice is very similar to those of the older east-Asian masters of ink drawing, where the zen aspect of controlling the line with precision in one single hand movement is a central part of the drawing practice. In his wall drawings Høie is interested in the physical experience of the monumental size, and how it amplifies the escapistic as well as the expressive aspects of his images.

Meta Comics presents … by Michael Baers: