Cli-Fi goes to the Ljubljana Biennial art show this week with CLIFI poster by Will Benedict

[Will Benedict is an American artist, born in 1978. He lives and works in Vienna, Austria.]

......The lights sent shadows dancing across a neighboring biennial commission, the 120 posters constituting Will Benedict’s Bad Weather, which alternated portraits of environmental activists with collaged images like the one branded “mutacija,” picturing an angry shark about to let loose on a cronut, or another centering on a pregnant nude, her genitals stamped with the word “CLIFI.”

“It started off being about landscapes and bad weather,” biennial curator Nicola Lees said earlier. “But then it just morphed into this whole other body of work that was more about climate change and other kinds of environmental disturbances.”

The teenage couple pawing at each other under the CLIFI poster seemed fine either way.

The history of the Ljubljana Biennial is .......SEE MORE AT LINK


http://artforum.com/diary/id=54770

''Bad Weather'' is a series of 240 posters designed by Will Benedict for the 120 poster frames which line Jakopič Promenade. The posters focus on how we read and interpret the images and rhetoric used to describe our environment and how language as diverse as bad weather, a nasty atmosphere, climate change or climate shame are employed like weapons to establish a political position.

Will Benedict (b. 1978, Los Angeles.) He currently lives and works in Vienna. HE is a versatile artist, who uses different media to create hybrid and complex images and installations that have been defined as “picture in the picture”. After making a name for himself in 2008 with the series Post Card – out-and-out post cards with address, scratched notes and short ironic messages, where small paintings turned into a kind of stamp –, Benedict focuses on various combinations of gouache paintings and cut-out studio portraits, glued and mounted on foam core panels and aluminum frames. Pro Choice (2010), Black Friday (2012) or Bonjour Tourist (2012), are just some examples of his unusual and hardly contextualizable compositions, that represent people, friends and models: they were asked to pose in front of paintings and photographed alone or in couples, seating behind a table or office desk, having dinner, reading the newspaper, smoking, or gazing at each other.

Ten things you need to know about WILL BENEDICT:

1. he is an american artist
2. who lives and works in Vienna
3. he studied at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena (1999–2004) before reaching Frankfurt am Main and the Städelschule in 2004
4. he made a name for himself in 2008 with a series of artworks titled Post Card which turned painting into a kind of stamp
5. more recently his works rely on various combinations of gouache paintings and cut-out studio portraits, mounted in customized aluminium and foamcore frames
6. these works includes large photographic portraits of people seated behind desks, or couples having dinner and small paintings in the corners that look like the small boxes of news program containing capsule descriptions of current events
7. his strange carefully crafted photo-hybrids explore the gaze of individual lives within their cultural contexts, often triggering absurdities and misinterpretations
8. since 2008 he runs the exhibition space Pro Choice with LUCIE STAHL
9. he is having solo exhibitions at Gió Marconi in Milan and at Galerie Meyer Kainer in Vienna with JULIE VERHOEVEN (both exhibitions on view until June 16, 2012)
10. He
    
    1. is an american artist
    2. who lives and works in Vienna
    3. he studied at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena (1999–2004) before reaching Frankfurt am Main and the Städelschule in 2004
    4. he made a name for himself in 2008 with a series of artworks titled Post Card which turned painting into a kind of stamp
    5. more recently his works rely on various combinations of gouache paintings and cut-out studio portraits, mounted in customized aluminium and foamcore frames
    6. these works includes large photographic portraits of people seated behind desks, or couples having dinner and small paintings in the corners that look like the small boxes of news program containing capsule descriptions of current events
    7. his strange carefully crafted photo-hybrids explore the gaze of individual lives within their cultural contexts, often triggering absurdities and misinterpretations
    8. since 2008 he runs the exhibition space Pro Choice with LUCIE STAHL
    9. he is having solo exhibitions at Gió Marconi in Milan and at Galerie Meyer Kainer in Vienna with JULIE VERHOEVEN (both exhibitions on view until June 16, 2012)
    10. he will also curate an exhibition Commercial Psycho at Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York in June 2012