George Kuchar (Chrystie St. Gallery)  
Snapshots & Twisted Tales
March 1-25, 2012

John Pollard is pleased to present Snapshots & Twisted Tales, an exhibition of works by the late filmmaker at Mulherin + Pollard, NYC, 
opening, Thursday March 1st, from 6-9pm

In the 1970s, Kuchar actively returned to his childhood interests in comics, and the current exhibition Snapshots & Twisted Tales will focus on the graphic work that he produced during this period and published in Arcade: The Comics Revue, a magazine begun with the noted underground artists Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith, neighbors of Kuchar’s in San Francisco. Arcade included work by a variety of other artists, including George's twin brother Mike, as well as R. Crumb. The show will also feature a few of George's childhood drawings, early cartoons made in the mid 1950s when he was a student studying commercial art at the School of Industrial Art (later the Manhattan School of Art and Design). These drawings prefigure some of his signature future themes and preoccupations centering on food, heartthrobs, and the struggles and mortifications of everyday living. The exhibition will also include a selection of his photographs—portraits and personal snapshots of friends and various locales encountered on his many travels.

He has recently garnered new attention and recognition in the contemporary film and art worlds marked by his retrospective exhibition at MoMA PS1, “George Kuchar: Pagan Rhapsodies,” as the subject of a recent article in the February Artforum, and his inclusion in the forthcoming 2012 Whitney Biennial (at the Whitney Museum of American Art, March 1–May 27, 2012), which will be showing a selection of his Weather Diaries, a series of video works produced between 1986 and 2011. 
 
Kuchar produced many paintings, works on paper, comics, and photographs during his lifetime, some of which were featured in the recent show at PS1. His works are represented by the ADA Gallery of Richmond, Virginia, whose director and owner, John Pollard, is also co-owner of Mulherin & Pollard, ADA’s sister gallery.
 
With a catalog that includes over 200 films and videos, George Kuchar's artwork has been recognized through countless awards and grants, including The National Endowment for the Arts, The Eureka Fellowship Program, and a Ford Foundation Fellowship from United States Artists. He is the recipient of the prestigious Maya Deren Award for Independent Film and Video Artists from the American Film Institute, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Independent/Experimental Film and Video. Kuchar's work has screened around the globe in cinemas, festivals, and major museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Pompidou Center in Paris.  
 
His films include Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966), selected by the Village Voice as no. 52 on its list of the 100 Best Films of the 20th Century; Eclipse Of the Sun Virgin (1967); and I, An Actress (1977), selected by the Library of Congress this past year for inclusion to the National Film Registry. His video works include Weather Diaries (1986–2011), and Secrets of the Shadow World (1989–99).

Bill Burns (Freeman Alley Gallery)
A Brownnoser's Story
March 1-25, 2012

Katharine Mulherin is pleased to present A Brownnoser's Story, an exhibition of works by Canadian artist Bill Burns at Mulherin + Pollard, NYC, 
opening, Thursday March 1st, from 6-9pm

"A Brownnoser's Story is the story of my relations with art critics, editors, dealers, museum directors and curators. The story is told in carved logs, photographs, words and watercolours. Many of the events that I describe take place while on hike, at log cabins, on northern lakeshores and in boreal forests.

The show consists of about 100 carved logs, some log carrying cases, a machine that tests artworld celebrity gloves, a photo and a set of watercolours. The logs are carved with the names of the top 100 people in the art world from Art Review. The photo is remade after a film still from "Thee Film" circa 1957 by Brion Gysin, Ian Sommerville and William Burroughs. The people in the picture are discussing the previously mentioned carved logs. The machine that tests art world celebrity gloves is a simple robot. The gloves are embroidered with the names of people who have either helped me, wronged me or who I still hope will help me. The watercolours tell of singularly important episodes in my life as an artist.
A Brownnoser's Story tells how I got into the art world and how I manage my life in it. It's a catalogue of misadventure, failure, and success. One increment tells of how I nursed a visiting Taiwanese curator whose testicles had swollen, now to the size of navel oranges, now to the size of grapefruits, now to the size of melons. Since we were deep in the woods I jerry-rigged a sling for him from my own tee shirt and some birch saplings and I applied a poultice that I concocted from reindeer moss, pine needles and way-bread to sooth the pain and extract the contents of the grub coloured pustules that had erupted all over the afflicted area. Another increment tells of how, sometime after my first exhibition of Safety Gear for Small Animals in New York, television's Homer Simpson became a conceptual artist and began making safety gear for animals. Neither of these events proved to be particularly bankable. I was not, as I had hoped, invited to the Biennale in Taipei and the Simpsons episode has yet to have any tangible effect on my career." -Bill Burns, February, 2012

Bill Burns' work about animals and civil society has been shown and published widely including solo projects at the Fondacion Cristina Enea, San Sebastian, Spain (2010); Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, England (2008); and the  KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Germany (2007) and group shows at the Kunsthallen Nikolaj in Copenhagen, Denmark (2009); Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Lausanne, Switzerland (2006); Museum of Modern Art in New York (2005-06); the Seoul Museum of Art in Korea (2002); and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1995).

He has published more than ten books including Dogs and Boats and Airplanes told in the form of Ivan the Terrible, (Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 2011); Bird Radio, (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Koenig and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Cologne and Berlin, 2007) and The Guide to the Flora and Fauna Information Station: 0.800.0FAUNA0FLORA, (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England, 2008). His writing and artist’s projects have been published in Publicsfear, Art Monthly, Re/Search, and Semiotext(e).