Lee and Leah Singer, along with 3 others, are in a small group show at the Boothuis Brauhaus (it’s a converted boat!) in Turnhout, Beligium, the ‘Cultural Capital of Flanders 2012’, organized by long-time cohort, curator Jan Van Woensal. Show opens Sept 28, 2012 and closes October 7. Address: Nieuwe Kaai 29, 2300 Turnhout, Belgium.

More info HERE and below.

NO PERMANENT LANDSCAPE
Yves Beaumont, Kristina Delmeire, Lee Ranaldo, Leah Singer, Peter Van Impe
Curator: Jan Van Woensel

A collection of related thoughts: Iceland; Scandinavia; travel; on the road; from here to infinity; disappearance; journals; spoken words; weightlessness; gravity; light; burning totems; floating objects; loops and knots; layers; waves; soundscapes; transparency; shifting meanings; reflections … endless sleep.

The artists in“No Permanent Landscape”, an artist from Ostend, Belgian’s seaside, a duo from Antwerp, Belgium, and a duo from New York, United States, share a deep-rooted interest in travel.It was in 1997 when artists Peter Van Impe and Kristina Delmeire told me how “in the summer [they] travel to Iceland, rent a big jeep and drive into the volcanic hills and to the inland’s, stretched out, barren plains to disappear in the clouds”. It was a few years later when I first saw Lee Ranaldo’s self-made, handheld camera, music video for his introvert and dreamy song “Hoarfrost”. The film features Leah Singer visiting her family in the cold, snow-covered, suburban Winnipeg, Canada. The movie is a road trip, filmed mainly from the passenger’s seat and sometimes taking subtly edited detours to blurred images of personal imagination and memories. The journey is both physical and introspective. More recently, I saw Yves Beaumont’s one man show at galerie Jan Dhaese. Walking through his exhibition it felt as if I was walking in the night, only now and then recognizing a contour of something against a backdrop of a weak light in the far distance: both mysterious and breathtaking.

The artists in “No Permanent Landscape” work in different media: printmaking, drawing, painting, photography, video, performance, sculpture and installation. For this occasion, a modest selection of etches, lithography’s, silkscreens and sculpture form the fragmented, visual landscape of the art show. The contradiction between the quality of permanency of the art image, as well as the artwork’s reproducibility, and the fluid and transitory conceptual undertone of the exhibition’s theme is deliberate. The artworks appear both as scaled simulations of vast and deserted landscapes and mindscapes, and as windows that look out to such imagined sceneries. Yves Beaumont’s secret landscapes linger between dusk and dawn as in a permanent state of night; the most quiet time of life. The mysterious, misty, almost ghost-like images of Kristina Delmeire remind us of both the beauty and the uncanniness of nature. Lee Ranaldo’s works, made on the road, recall the endlessness of the journey, during which feelings like boredom, homesickness and melancholy could occupy his mind. Peter Van Impe’s boat-like models remind us of the departure, great solitude and disappearance: the sensation of setting out to sea, floating alone, on an immense mass of water, like artist Bas Jan Ader once fatally did. Leah Singer’s transparent, multi-layered images of mountains and grasslands, strings and loops, portraits and stars enable a complexity of perspectives to the viewer; there is no one possible view; there is no exclusive route; there is no permanent landscape.

Jan Van Woensel, Fire Island, NY (2010)

NO PERMANENT LANDSCAPE
Boothuis Brauhaus
September 28th, 2012 –
Nieuwe Kaai 29, 2300 Turnhout, Belgium
Part of “Turnhout Cultural Capital of Flanders 2012”