SanArt

currents 2010 will open June 17, coinciding with SITE Santa Fe’s Eighth International Biennial Exhibition, The Dissolve. While SITE Santa Fe’s exhibit will focus on video art and its integration of other media, the currents 2010 exhibition is designed to broaden the conversation about the current trends in experimental video art.

currents 2010, co-sponsored by Parallel Studios, El Museo Cultural, Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, and SITE Santa Fe, will be located at El Museo Cultural in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Artists are invited to submit work for exhibit in two categories:
Single Channel Video and Video Installation.

Please visit our website for Guidelines and Application.

Postmark deadline for submissions: February 23, 2010.

Notification of acceptance will be made by email on March 15, 2010.

Ukrainian Institute of America
2 East 79th Street, 212-288-8660

Upper East Side

May 20 – June 13, 2010
Opening: Thursday, May 20, 6 – 8 PM
Web Site

The Ukrainian Institute of America presents an exhibition of mosaic icons created in the tradition of Byzantine masters. Fashioned from tiny bits of glass fit together to bring forth a divine image, the icons are created by Oksana Prokopenko, a Russian-Ukrainian artist, now living New York.

Oksana’s work received new impetus and divine inspiration following the tragedy of September 11th. Oksana found a way to reassemble the shattered pieces of glass that fell out of the sky when the two World trade centers came crashing to the ground. Oksana was present in downtown Manhattan on the morning of 9-11 with her baby boy and through her fortitude and courageous insight was able to create strikingly beautiful artwork. As stunning as the collapse of the WTC’s was the stunning creation of these other worldly icons, each composed of hundreds and in some cases thousands of tiny pieces of colored glass.

Oksana is a rarity in today’s contemporary art scene. Her focus on detail is akin to that of artists that worked hundreds of years ago. Her works are mosaic icons – in step with the current interest in art from Russia and Eastern Europe. Often described as a colorist, her colors inspire the viewer to spiritual and emotional heights similar to those achieved by Prokopenko during her creative process. Her works have been recognized for their spiritual strength. They allow the viewer to glimpse behind the veil that shadows the divine and reveal the energy as displayed in human and worldly forms.

Priska C. Juschka Fine Art
547 West 27th Street, 2nd Floor, 212-244-4320

Chelsea

February 11 – March 27, 2010
Opening: Thursday, February 11, 6 – 9 PM
Web Site

Priska C. Juschka Fine Art is pleased to present re: The Mirrored Veil, Jenna Gribbon’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, a collection of meticulously and delicately constructed paintings—engaging the viewer in a revealing dichotomy between the Apollonian ideal and the Dionysian struggle, between the Imaginary and the Real. re: The Mirrored Veil illuminates the moment of the split between the reflected wholeness of the external body—as in Lacan’s Mirror Stage—and the real, internal, fragmented nature of the individual experience.

At first sight, Gribbon’s works startle with visual riddles—seemingly open and inconclusive narratives, interwoven with letters and symbols—propelling their audience into a world of phantasmagories and ambiguity. Their titles, Idyll vs. the World, Allegory of Painting as Humpty Dumpty, Still Life with Tome and Time, and Unicursal, point to a state of prosopagnosia, a cognitive disorder—leaving the individual in a mental state of peripheral, intuitive recognition.

As ‘veiling’ or ‘glossing over’ becomes an integral part of concealing the truth—_Idyll vs. the World_, portrays an idyll landscape draped by a painted black curtain on its right—it also refers to the duplicity of covering up while simultaneously unveiling what lies beneath or beyond. According to Saussure, whereas a sign is composed of the signifier and the signified_, Gribbon’s foremost ‘symbolic’ use of the medium painting becomes more than an obvious representation (signifier_) of an object’s primarily assumed meaning (signified)—applying a dyadic system in her practice and conjuring multiple levels of interpretation. Gribbon’s painting Unicursal depicts the back of a person with a long braid, suggesting a young woman, wearing a sweater inscribed with multiple patterns of straight edges meeting at four vertices. The real becomes that which resists representation—what is pre-mirror, pre-imaginary, pre-symbolic and cannot be symbolized, and, ultimately, loses its ‘reality’ once it is signified. Using symbols in visual language with application of paint, Gribbon leads us into a terrain of archetypal imagery, seductive cryptograms and a constantly revolving enigmatic world.

Jenna Gribbon was born in Knoxville, TN and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been the subject of several solo and group exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad, including shows at the Georgia Museum of Contemporary Art in Atlanta, GA; the National Academy Museum & School of Fine Arts in New York, NY; Kunsthalle Emden in Emden, Germany; the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Finland; and most recently, at the National Arts Club in New York, NY. She was also commissioned to paint three works for Sofia Coppola’s film, Marie Antoinette, which premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2006.

Charles Atlas, "Son of Sam and Delilah", 1991. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Greek tragedy, cross dressing, cooking shows, needlework, rowdy teens, storytelling, nighttime walks, and a few mystery plays in this week’s roundup:

• Virtuoso Illusion: Cross Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde at the MIT List Visual Arts Center explores how experimental art has been enlivened and advanced by artists who cross dress as part of their conceptual process. “The show is not intended,” according to MIT, “as an exploration of identity issues specifically, but more as an in depth look at current and historical strategies of cross dressing as an art of the irrational, the unexpected.” Artists include Charles Atlas, Matthew Barney (both Season 2), Claude Cahun, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Marcel Duchamp, Michelle Handelman, John Kelly, Katarzyna Kozyra, Kalup Linzy, Ma Liuming, Manon, Pierre Molinier, Yasumasa Morimura, Brian O’Doherty, Ryan Trecartin, and Andy Warhol. Atlas created video mock documentaries about the evolving twentieth-century performance avant-garde during the years he collaborated with Merce Cunningham. In Son of Sam and Delilah (1991), Atlas provides “a transporting view of a flock of gender indiscriminate performers.” Virtuoso Illusion, organized by guest curator Michael Rush, former director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, is on view through April 4.

• The highly anticipated exhibition Kiki Smith: Sojourn opens at the Brooklyn Museum this Friday. Smith (Season 2) draws on a variety of experiences in the cycle of life, from the milestones of birth and death to the daily chores of domestic life, with particular attention to the lives of women artists. An eighteenth-century silk needlework by a woman named Prudence Punderson that inspired Smith’s installation is on loan to the museum from the Connecticut Historical Society and included in the exhibition. Via the museum website: “Punderson’s stark depiction of a woman’s journey from childhood to death in the years leading up to and immediately after the United States gained its independence intrigued Smith because rather than following the stereotypical rites of passage in a woman’s life of the period…this young woman chose to depict a life of the mind for her subject, presenting a woman engaged in creative work.” Smith will install her work in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art as well as in two of the museum’s eighteenth-century period rooms. Sojourn closes September 12.

• Works by Laylah Ali (Season 3), Kara Walker (Season 2), Ghada Amer, Shary Boyle, Amy Cutler, Chitra Ganesh, Wangechi Mutu, Annie Pootoogook, Leesa Streifler, and Su-en Wong are on view at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery in Ontario, Canada. The exhibition, titled Pandora’s Box, offers a new twist on the myth of Pandora in which it is no longer about what is hidden inside of the box, but what is metaphorically reflected on the outside. Pandora’s Box continues through March 21.

• Through February 28, Tank.tv is showing two works by Season 5 artist Paul McCarthy: Family Tyranny and Cultural Soup. Both works — cut from two days of taped performance at a community television studio in 1987 — feature Season 1 artist Mike Kelley. Tank.tv calls the videos a “disturbing tableaux of familial horror, steeped in the stomach turning abjection” of McCarthy’s practice. Performed within a “barely credible domestic set,” the format and characters in the videos enact several tropes of television entertainment: the unruly teenager (Kelley), and the how-to format of cooking and DIY programs.

• Fifty photographs of nocturnal landscapes by Robert Adams (Season 4) are on view at Matthew Marks Gallery in the exhibition Summer Nights, Walking. These images of trees and houses, mountains and streets, fields and sidewalks captured between dusk and approaching dark were made between 1976-1982 near Adams’ home in Longmont, Colorado. Adams first showed photographs from this series in 1985. He recently said of editing his night pictures: “When I have looked again at the photographs that I might have chosen but did not, it has seemed to me that if I had included a wider variety, the result would have been, though less harmonious, more convincing, closer to our actual experience of wonder, anxiety and stillness.” This exhibition celebrates the publication of Summer Nights, Walking, co-published by Aperture and the Yale University Art Gallery, a revised and updated version of an earlier book. The exhibition continues through April 17.

• Delusion, a new work by Laurie Anderson (Season 1) will premiere at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company, February 16-21. The piece is described as “a series of short mystery plays” populated by “nuns, elves, golems, rotting forests, ghost ships, archaeologists, dead relatives and unmanned tankers.” Delusion was commissioned by the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games and The Barbican Centre in London. Tickets can be purchased here.

• The lecture series Critical Conversations at the Roski School of Fine Arts in Los Angeles features talks by visiting artists, curators, theorists, writers, and other cultural producers, who engage in open conversations with graduate students and attending members of the public. Season 4 artists Mark Dion and Mark Bradford will speak on February 23 and March 2, respectively.

• Season 5 artist William Kentridge will lecture at The Cooper Union in New York City tomorrow, February 9. The event begins at 8pm and is free and open to the public.

• ?BMW has announced that Season 5 artist Jeff Koons will design their 17th art car. Read more about the project here.

(circa Stg 20,000 per annum, 2 years fixed term contract)

The INSTITUTE OF CREATIVE TECHNOLOGIES at DE MONTFORT UNIVERSITY is looking for someone with a degree which has a new media focus, e.g. Design Management & Innovation, Arts Management, Arts Marketing, Curatorial studies, Museum studies (min. 2:1 or equivalent) who will drive this KTP project. The project aims to enhance the reputation and build recognition of PHOENIX SQUARE and its digital arts programme (see www.phoenix.org.uk). The successful candidate’s task will be to investigate, design and implement an audience development strategy to support the national & international positioning of Phoenix Square. The key aims will be to:

• Work with the creative director to identify and target networks of artists and organisations and develop strategic partnerships.
• Carry out continuous research into audiences (national and international) in order to support development of marketing plans for achieving revenue generation.
• Develop and implement a positioning strategy that improves knowledge and understanding of digital arts and creative technologies among target audience groups.
• Develop a specialist programme of engagement for artists, producers and curators and organisations that builds reputation and enables the organisation to develop its strengths in digital arts and creative technologies.
• Embed knowledge of developing and engaging new audiences on a national and international level within the business.

We are looking for someone who is proactive, self-motivated and passionate, possessing good presentation skills, including oral and written communications. It would be advantageous to have some experience of developing and managing networks in a cultural and creative industries context.

Phoenix Square holds charitable status and is an independent arts organisation with over 30 years history in delivery of performance arts and cinema in Leicester, UK. Phoenix Square is seeking a recent graduate as Digital Arts Development Officer in collaboration with De Montfort University through the Knowledge Transfer Partnership scheme www.ktponline.org.uk. The Successful candidate will work at the company premises but be employed by De Montfort University.

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More information and application pack at http://bit.ly/dDpvsA

Call for Entries

The West Virginia University Department of Art, in association with the Appalshop organization, is pleased to announce a call for entries to the West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film Festival. Screening works under 20 minutes, programming categories include: documentary, narrative, animation/experimental, young filmmakers (under 18) and works that focus on Appalachian culture and themes. There are no rules governing content or artistic approach. There are no entry fees for submission. We only seek well crafted, compelling or conceptually challenging works in video, film and multimedia.

Deadline: March 1, 2010

Location/Dates: The West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film Festival will be held on March 12th and 13th at the historic Warner Theater in downtown Morgantown.
(Warner Theater )

Categories of Competition: Documentary Short, Narrative Short, Animation/ Experimental Video, Appalachian/Regional Themes or Topics and Young Filmmakers.

Juror: Hasan Elahi is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines issues of surveillance, simulated time, transport systems, borders and frontiers. His work has been presented in
numerous exhibitions at venues such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Sundance
Film Festival, Kassel Kulturbahnhof, The Hermitage, and at the Venice Biennale
(Hasan Elahi )

Appalshop: The West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film Festival is sponsored in part by the Appalshop organization. Appalshop is a non-profit multi-disciplinary arts and education center in the heart of Appalachia producing original films, video, theater, music and spoken-word recordings, radio, photography, multimedia, and books. Appalshop is dedicated to the proposition that the world is immeasurably enriched when local cultures garner the resources, including new technologies, to tell their own stories and to listen to the unique stories of others. The creative acts of listening and telling are Appalshop’s core competency.
(Appalshop )

Awards: $500.00 Best of Festival, $200 Best Documentary, $200 Best Narrative, $200 Best Animation/Experimental, $200 Best Appalachian/Regional themed work, and $200 Best Young Filmmaker.

Submissions: The organizers encourage ALL interested artists, film-makers, and multimedia enthusiasts to submit work for consideration. NO ENTRY FEE is required to submit
work for consideration. The only restriction for competitive entries is a 20-minute maximum running time. All entries must be received by March 1, 2010. Submissions should be sent on standard definition DVD (NTSC) or data DVD in Quicktime movie format. Works should be sent to:

Gerald Habarth, WVMSFF
Division of Art and Design
College of Creative Arts
West Virginia University
Morgantown, West Virginia 26506-6111

Email: wvmsff@gmail.com
Phone: 304-293-4841 ex. 3147
Website: www.mountaineerfilmfest.org/

Goodwin’s quietly powerful portraits of London Underground staff capture the mystery and melancholy of life in the capital

Ordinary faces look back at you from posters at London Underground stations, drawn in intense black lines, almost like forests of wiring. There is a hum of represssed energy, as if you were approaching power lines on a wasteland. There is also a solitude, a silence in the portraits that reach out, with their eyes, to you the stranger … and then you’ve moved on, carried by the crowd, the connection is lost.

Dryden Goodwin’s portraits of London Transport staff are the latest – and some might say the most conventional – in the series of artworks commissioned by Art on the Underground. Goodwin made drawings of 60 underground workers. They’re engaged, emotional, hardworking sketches. For those who need a bit of video to make them feel they are seeing some proper modern art, he has also made films of the drawing sessions. For me, though, what’s interesting is the vision of London this artist is pursuing; these drawings continue the themes of solitude in the crowd that made his 2008 show at the Photographers’ Gallery so quietly powerful.

It is an old-fashioned London he is drawing, more reminiscent of the 1950s city of a Frank Auerbach than the happening metropolis of now. Both Londons are mythic, of course. There is no one, fixed truth of London; this city is both a heaven and a hell, depending on your point view. But in contemporary culture, the point of view is almost always remorselessly upbeat and promotional. Goodwin’s London is a more melancholy, mysterious place whose streets, in these winter days, we actually seem to walk. They’re gripping, thought-provoking and evocative of life in the big city.

More here.