September 7th, 2013 – September 21st, 2013

http://nycartscene.info/post/60850377096/ted-riederer-the-lodge-gallery-nyc

Opening Reception: Tuesday, September 10th, 6-8pm
(Featuring performance by HOLYMAN)

The Lodge Gallery invites you to experience the work of Ted Riederer. This two week ensemble set will consist of paintings, sculpture, photography, and interactive old media analog assemblage, all of which provide a deep view into a more intimate body of work by Riederer, best known for his critically acclaimed international performance project, “Never Records.”

“In My Memories, Wheels Make Melodies,” an interactive bricolage of guitar and bicycle parts, allows visitors to produce looped melodies from a fixed set of notes and percussive elements. The melodic elements are constant, but, by varying speed and direction, an infinitely variable melody is possible. It is here that we are introduced to the leitmotif of this exhibition and Riederer’s continuing body of work: We are empowered to create our own path. Paired with a single devotional painting of a woman entitled “Rose”, we can add: love enables us to break life’s fixed loops, to find beauty within the banal.

An array of flaming guitars (“Your Love Is Never Going to Survive The Heat Of My Heart”) line the gallery, oil paintings made with old master mediums and leaded glass powder that, as Riederer explains, “is related to a quasi Shinto belief that objects can be conduits of the divine. The guitar is an existential symbol. Are we instruments? Are we being played? The flames engulfing the guitars depict transmutation. Of course there is also the rock and roll references which are tongue and cheek, but I am always exploring the redemptive power of music and music communities by manipulating the symbols of music.”

Also filling the space is the warm sound of Bing Crosby’s voice, a looped vinyl record repeating the words “Only Forever” on a vintage turntable. This repeated phrase simultaneously answers and raises questions that Riederer continuously brings forth with this work. At the center of the record is a label stamped with an overhead view of a spiral staircase which, as the record spins, infinitely ascends or descends.

A “one-time refugee from punk and sometime band member,” Ted Riederer has armed himself with painting supplies, electric guitars, amplifiers, old LPs, record players, drum kits, hard disk recorders, photography equipment, a vinyl record lathe, and long-stemmed roses as he’s ambled artistically from the Americas to the Antipodes. His work has been shown nationally and internationally including exhibitions at PS1, Prospect 1.5, Goff and Rosenthal Berlin, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, Jack Hanley Gallery (San Francisco), Marianne Boesky Gallery, Context Gallery (Derry, Ireland), David Winton Bell Gallery (Brown University), The University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, the Liverpool Biennial, and the Dhaka Arts Center, Bangladesh. His “Never Records” project has traveled from New York, to Liverpool, to Derry, to New Orleans, to Texas, and to London, which was sponsored by the Tate Modern.

Curated by Keith Schweitzer and Jason Patrick Voegele

September 25 – October 12, 2013

http://art-nerd.com/newyork/the-expatriate-parade/

http://www.papermag.com/2013/09/_the_fall_gallery_season.php

John Dunivant has achieved notoriety throughout the city of Detroit, and internationally, as the mastermind behind Theatre Bizarre. Self-funded and built by dozens of artists over the course of months the Theatre Bizarre would take place for one night each year and featured massive carnival rides, pyrotechnics, elaborate lighting rigs, and Coney Island-esque performers. Theatre Bizarreoperated for ten years before its discovery and subsequent closure by Detroit city authorities in 2010.

The Expatriate Parade features a series of paintings and bronzes inspired by the closure of Theatre Bizarre. Facing an existential crisis, Dunivant chose to embrace the turmoil of the situation, with the resulting works on view in The Expatriate Parade serving as a celebration of his “exile”.

“Once upon a time, there was an enchanted amusement park, hidden on the edge of a ragged city. For one night every year, this secret kingdom made itself known and sprang to life with fire and music and dance. – until the day it was exposed – and cast out.

The Expatriate Parade began as a single sketch of a scapegoat with a ferris wheel on its back. It bore my burden as it was driven from its home by an unfeeling and unseen power. This sketch led to many more, and the resulting parade of drawings – with its ceaseless forward motion in spite of the ever changing circumstances of the moment – led me to reflect on my own life. In the face of disintegrating relationships and a riot of personal challenges, I continue on. As we do. Each in our own exile from where we imagined we would be. This piece is a celebration of that exile.

My work grows from a variety of obsessions and fascinations; natural history museums, dioramas, Halloween, souvenir postcards, the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, roadside attractions, reliquaries and religious iconography, traveling carnivals, ghost stories, children’s books, the Grand Guignol, John Singer-Sargent’s work, tribal rituals, folk and fairy tales, paper-toy theaters, secret societies, Dr. Suess, New Orleans funerals, wax museums, medical illustrations, P.T. Barnum and death. I paint the beautiful and the grotesque as a metaphor for both my internal struggles and the general state of mankind.  I paint life as seen through a lens of papier-mâché, poster paint and wax edifice.  I paint the characters that fill my life and my dreams and ultimately, tell my story.”

– John Dunivant, 2013

Theatre Bizarre now operates legally at the Detroit Masonic Temple where it will hold its 13th edition on October 19, 2013 and and is the subject of an upcoming documentary. Macabre in their imagery and sitting across numerous pop cultural narratives, the joy Dunivant takes from the subject matter inThe Expatriate Parade is evident, and fitting for an artist working far from the art world capitals in Detroit, facing its own existential crisis, with the attendant anxiety of loss, displacement, and fantasy of an unknown, perhaps better, future.

Dunivant, an artist, visionary and founder of Detroit’s “Theatre Bizarre,” discusses his current exhibition, “The Expatriate Parade,” and the nationally renown immersive theatre he has created over the last decade. The paintings on view at The Lodge Gallery explore the world of “Theatre Bizarre” by depicting its inhabitants celebrating and embracing a dark and glorious march toward the unknown. Dunivant is a Kresge Fellow and was recently named as recipient of a Knight Foundation award.

Since the turn of the century, Theatre Bizarre has been rollicking in the darkness. First, by creating a phantasmagorical (and entirely illegal) theme park in the shadows of one of Detroit’s most dangerous neighborhoods. Providing an event worthy of its legendary status, built by an army of volunteers, it emerged for only one indescribable night a year. Each year it grew in scope and in detail, The New York Times exclaimed Over-The-Top! and Bizarre Magazine (UK) called it One of the greatest Halloween parties in the world! Until the city was forced to shut it down in 2010. Not to be dissuaded, Theatre Bizarre birthed a new world and revealed a new path in 2011. Lifting a veil on their own carnivalesque secret society and inviting the revelers to join them on a journey once more.

November 8 – December 1, 2013

http://artefuse.com/picture-this-noah-beckers-sense-of-self-the-lodge-gallery/

This November the Lodge Gallery is excited to present the work of renowned artist Noah Becker with a solo exhibition of his portraiture and collage-like reconsiderations of art history.

Noah Becker’s interest in masterworks from different art historical periods is the foundation upon which he has built bold and ordered compositions. In his self portrait “photo bombing” series which references pop art or his audacious remix paintings made from renaissance and 19th century sources Becker surprises us with his daring subjective interpretations. When he appropriates Warhol and Basquiat, Becker injects his own image front and center. There is an immediacy in Becker’s work that serves to underline the “selfie” generation we have come to embrace as an inherent visual component of life in the twenty-first century. In this era, anyone with a smart phone or digital camera can take a photograph. The mass produced self images of artists as varied as Cezanne, Warhol and Caravaggio adorn both the walls of the worlds greatest museums and the cheapest of tote bags and refrigerator magnets. What purpose then do figurative paintings and self portraits continue to serve?

Even when appropriating and integrating the most expressive artistic styles such as Jasper Johns or Dash Snow into his work, Becker’s rendering of each stroke remains calculated. While Becker makes every effort to place himself into the cannon of master painters from history we are reminded in works such as Hamburger, 2013, that Becker’s head is firmly in the here and now. Advertisements for contemporary beer and soft drinks appear in the composition of Becker’s Caravaggio remix creating a hip hop and sports bar atmosphere within an art historical context.

Juxtaposed against these new works are a more recognizable series of beautifully rendered portraits that at first may seem to be fairly straightforward, however a deeper exploration of this earlier work reveals many of the same uniquely provocative suggestions that challenge the temporal parameters that define any artistic movement. Historical mash-ups of recurring celebrity themes in works such as Phillip IV in the costume of Tim Tebow, 2012 question how much the purpose and practice of portraiture has ever really changed.

Noah Becker is an acclaimed oil painter with exhibitions at numerous international museums and galleries. Becker is a jazz saxophonist and the founding editor of Whitehot Magazine. Noah Becker is also a contributing writer for Art in America, Interview Magazine, Canadian Art, the Huffington Post and ARTVOICES. Becker lives and works in New York City.

Curated by Jason Patrick Voegele and Keith Schweitzer. On view from November 8 – December 1, 2013