In Guided Growth, Misako Inaoka revamps Johansson Projects into a zoological garden run wild, existing in a strange parallel world that we are perhaps too familiar with. Inaoka's work echoes the alchemy of food processing by cross-breeding high art and toys, flirting with the familiarity of kitsch. Ceramic fawns with surveillance cameras for heads and a moose with ears-turned-bicycle-handlebars frolic in a wonderland impossibly sweet with an unsettling aftertaste. Inaoka's serious play addresses issues of cloning, bioengineering, alternative energy in pint-sized figurines suited for text books or toy chests.
Inaoka, born in Kyoto, Japan, had received BFA in printmaking ’01 from RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), and MFA ’06 from Mills College, CA. From 1999-2000, Inaoka spent a year in Rome, Italy, as a part of EHP (European Honors Program). She works with mixed media in sculpture and site-specific installation. Her work has been shown at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, de Young Museum, de Saisset Museum, San Jose ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts), as well as galleries in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Texas, in Japan, England, China and Italy. She is a recipient of Irvine Fellowship for Montalvo residency, National Endowment of Arts for MacDowell Colony residency, and has been an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Art, de Young Museum, and Vermont Studio Center.
Show runs September 17- November 6
Opening Reception October 1, 5-8pm
Pop Subversion contains a healthy dose of both established and emerging artists from the realms of street art, pop surrealism, lowbrow, illustration, print making, tattoo and so much more. Through this group exhibition, promising young artists will have the chance to exhibit side by side with some of the more established artists in these fields. This mixture will allow the viewer to experience a plethora of varying styles and techniques rising out of this powerful New Contemporary movement in art. At the center of this exhibition lies the original artwork of Juxtapoz founder (and quite arguably the 'father' of this New Contemporary movement in art) Robert Williams!
Participating artists include: Robert Williams, Jenn Porreca, Aaron Horkey, Kris Lewis, Sarah Joncas, Genevive Zacconi, Molly Crabapple, Joe Vaux, Lady Pink, Carlos Nine, Brendan Danielsson, Fawn Fruits, Lisa Alisa, Gil, Kenichi Hoshine, Jaeran Won, Elisabeth Timpone, Elbowtoe, Wayne Coe, Chris Stain, Jeremyville, Joshua Hagler, Connie Wang, Lisa Bloodgood, Pagan, Aiko, Brian Life, Camilla d'Errico, Benjamin Lacombe, John Breiner, Robert Steel, LauraLee, Francesco LoCastro, Ian Fagan, Martina Secondo Russo and more!
Robert Williams "In The Pavilion of the Red Clown"
Pop Subversion starring Robert Williams Ad Hoc Art
Feb 8th thru Mar 2nd, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, February 8th, 7:00PM-9:00PM
Open Space has the honor of hosting one of the far and few between screenings of the inspirational film "Beautiful Losers." This film basically features all of our favorite artists such as Barry Mcgee, Margaret Kilgallen, ESPO, Geoff McFetridge, Shepard Fairey, Jo Jackson, Chris Johanson, Harmonie Korine, and many others and focuses on a culture and period of time we find very close to our heart. This film is a must see and once you see it you will leave inspired to make art.
Here is a link where you can view the trailer:
www.beautifullosers.com
Below are the details for the screening.
Sunday July 20th
6pm to 9pm
The Howland Cultural Center
477 Main Street
Beacon NY
this is the only screening we will do for this film. The Theatrical release is not untill September, So this is your only opportunity to see this film until then.
Seating at the Howland is very limited ( about 80 people) so we have set up a place where you can pre purchase tickets to assure that you get a chance to see this amazing film.
Reception-Friday, September 17, 5-9pm
Reception-Saturday, September 18, 1-5pm
Open by appointment September 20-24
Art Studio at 503 Tunnel Ave.
Environmental Learning Center Gallery at 401 Tunnel Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94134
Admission is free and open to the public, all ages welcome, wheelchair accessible.
San Francisco, CA. The Artist in Residence Program at Recology San Francisco will host an exhibition and reception for current artists-in-residence Val Britton and Zachary Royer Scholz on Friday, September 17th, from 5-9pm and Saturday, September 18th, from 1-5pm. This exhibition will be the culmination of four months of work by Britton and Scholz who have scavenged materials from the dump to make art and promote recycling and reuse. An exhibition of paintings and drawings by student artist Tanner Griepentrog-Wenzel will be held concurrently at 401 Tunnel Avenue. Work by all artists will be viewable by appointment the week of September 20th.
Val Britton: Index to Selected Stars
Val Britton’s collages have the quality of planning a trip in a dream. Clearly these are maps of some sort, but nothing is truly recognizable. Continents look oddly familiar, but aren’t where they should be, and possible routes are dizzying arrays of lines. Britton’s pieces are often large-scale, and blend cut paper, drawing, and pours and absorptions of color resulting in elegantly rich and textured abstractions. The work comes out of Britton’s meditations on her father’s travels as a long haul truck driver, so are deeply personal for the artist whose father died over ten years ago. Yet, they speak more broadly to the potential and complicated nature of journeys of many forms—physical, emotional, and psychological. While at Recology Britton has worked with scavenged materials that inform her collages in new ways. Routes now shimmer with lines made from foil tape normally used in heating ductwork, and washes of saturated color are courtesy of printer cartridge inks. Britton has made thick textured paper using recycled books, stationery, and reclaimed window screens, and has subtly incorporated antique domestic items—wallpaper, blinds, paper ephemera—which bring along their own secret histories as part of these journeys.
Zachary Royer Scholz: Replay
Scavenging materials affects each artist differently. While gathering materials in the Public Disposal and Recycling Area, Zachary Royer Scholz, was struck by the large amount of reusable wood and the multitude of cheap plastic toys being discarded. Inspired in part by the wooden blocks of his own childhood, Scholz has combined these dual aspects of the waste stream to create sculptural objects with broad and playful potential. Scholz, whose sculptural and installation work is informed by minimalism, has carefully cleaned and cut pieces of wood reclaimed from construction and demolition sites into forms akin to abstract building blocks for adults. Materials that were once something else have been deconstructed and cleverly reconstructed in ways that allow for multiple interpretations or configurations. The source of these materials, the Public Disposal and Recycling Area, is a giant metaphorical toy box filled with the broken—or even brand new—playthings of our daily lives. Scholz’s constructions illuminate the ingenuity and imagination lost when products for children and adults are designed for a single purpose or for rapid obsolescence. Ultimately, these are the items that are thrown away, instead of creatively re-invented.
Tanner Griepentrog-Wenzel: Cogitated Pile
Student artist-in-residence Tanner Griepentrog-Wenzel has spent the last four months working out of a shipping container studio making graphite drawings and skillfully rendered paintings in acrylics and oils. Paints were recovered from the Household Hazardous Waste Facility and found materials such as cabinet doors serve as canvases. Griepentrog-Wenzel’s figurative and still life compositions incorporate images of items scavenged in the Public Disposal and Recycling Area—such as a mysterious, wrapped package mailed in the 1960s—into urban scenes tinged with the fantastic. His work will be on view in the Environmental Learning Center Gallery at 401 Tunnel Ave.
The Artist in Residence Program at Recology San Francisco is a one-of-a-kind program started in 1990 to encourage people to conserve natural resources and instill a greater appreciation for the environment and art in children and adults. Artists work for four months in studio space on site, use materials recovered from the Public Disposal and Recycling Area, and speak to students and the general public. Over eighty professional Bay Area artists have completed residencies, and applications are accepted annually in August.
Garage Center for Contemporary Culture
4-14 September 2010
Garage Center for Contemporary Culture is showcasing Russian and international performance artists in Moscow's first International Performance Art Festival curated by Klaus Biesenbach, Director of MoMA PS1 and a Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art, and RoseLee Goldberg, Director and Curator of Performa in New York.
Tobias Putrih, Re-projection: Hoosac, 2010 Source: MASS MoCA
Is sound an element of design right alongside biggies like line, color, shape and texture? Teachers today are faced with the unseemly job of breaking outside “the” seven elements of design many of us grew up with, and now must educate students about a range of additional elements one really can’t skirt if you’re teaching with contemporary art.
Sound as an element of design was front and center at MASS MoCA this weekend as Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival hit North Adams, MA, and basically took over the town. What was impressive, along with the variety of bands featured, was the way sound created unique experiences as and with art throughout the museum, rather than serve as a backdrop to objects. Nels Cline’s installation on the second floor allowed visitors to sit and manipulate over a dozen electronic effects boxes and create waves of distortion, vibration, pulsation and other ations I won’t even mention here. I found myself creating a whole concert with a child across from me that couldn’t have been more than eight years old. We had a ball! But the placement of this installation next to (underneath) Tobias Putrih’s Re-projection: Hoosac made the dialogue between these works even more beautiful. The changes in volume, rhythm, and overall noise allowed for experiencing Putrih’s wall-to-wall sculpture in different aural settings depending on when you came through the gallery (for the purists at the festival, the installation was only turned on for 30-minute increments on the half hour, rather than having it running full time… and you needed a breather if you were making a lot of that kind of music).
Artists who use sound as a primary element such as Bruce Nauman and Christian Marclay allow us to consider it as an element of design that helps get an idea or experience across. Sometimes it is supported by other elements such as color or texture and sometimes it stands on its own. Becoming familiar with art and artists using sound in a wide range of settings has become part of what art educators need to consider when teaching about art today.
As if anyone in town needed a reminder... Source: MASS MoCA
If you weren’t able to attend the festival this past weekend, I really must recommend you check out many of the acts featured that played the smaller venues and courtyards, including: The Books (whom I may have stopping in for an interview soon), On Fillmore, The Baseball Project, Deep Blue Organ Trio, and the Nels Cline Singers.
ACA’s Leeper Studio Complex at dusk. Photo: Eric White
Atlantic Center for the Arts
Since 1982, Atlantic Center's residency program has provided artists from all artistic disciplines with spaces to live, work, and collaborate during three-week residencies. Located just four miles from the east coast beaches of central Florida, the pine and palmetto wooded environment contains award-winning studios that include a resource library, painting, sculpture, music, dance and writers' studios, a black box theater, and digital computer lab. Each residency session includes three master artists of different disciplines.
The WRO Art Center in Wroclaw / Poland presents an exhibition that shows films by the Canadian animator and film director Norman McLaren. Norman McLaren is known for his experiments with image and sound. He developed a number of groundbreaking techniques for combining and synchronizing animation with music. In this video by Ania Eysmont, the curator of Norman McLaren: Synchromie. Musique Optique at the WRO Art Center, Piotr Krajewski, is talking about these techniques and the concept of the exhibition.
The exhibition program includes the films Fiddle-de-dee, 1947; Begone Dull Care, 1949; Test A for Synchromy, 1960s; Test B for Synchromy, late 1960s; Synchromy, 1971; Lines: Vertical, 1960; Lines: Horizontal, 1962; Pas de deux, 1968; and the documentary McLaren’s Negatives, 2006, directed by Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre. Norman McLaren: Synchromie. Musique Optique at WRO Art Centerin Wroclaw runs until August 15, 2010.
Norman McLaren (1914-1987) was born in Stirling in Scotland. He studied set design at the Glasgow School of Art. As he didn’t have access to a camera, his early experiments included scratching and painting the film stock itself. His two early films won prizes at the Scottish Amateur Film Festival, where fellow Scot and future NFB founder John Grierson was a judge. Grierson, who was at that time head of the GPO Film Unit, hired him for the GPO as soon as McLaren completed his studies. After making a few films for the GPO in London, McLaren moved to New York City in 1939. At the invitation of Grierson, he moved to Canada in 1941 to work for the National Film Board, to open an animation studio and to train Canadian animators. During his work for the NFB, McLaren created his most famous film, Neighbours (1952). He made over 60 films there, winning close to like 200 international awards, including an Oscar, a Golden Palm and a BAFTA award.
Portugal Arte 10 is a new biennial show of contemporary art in Lisbon. One of the most spectacular works on display is Temple (2010), a site-specific environment by the Brooklyn-based artist collective FAILE (Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller).
FAILE’sTemple is a full-scale church in ruins in Praça dos Restauradores Square, one of the major squares in the center of Lisbon, Portugal. For this installation, FAILE used both the typical motifs they use in their work and styles and material that are typical for Lisbon, such as the ceramic tiles. The building also features wrought iron gating and concrete relief work, from local and foreign manufacturers, and familiar FAILE images, such as the barking dog logo that appear in the reliefs, and a white, blue, and gold color palette as a reference to the Portugese landscape.
FAILE is an artistic collaboration between Patrick McNeil (b. 1975, Edmonton, CA) and Patrick Miller (b. 1976, Minneapolis, MN) formed in 1999 and based in Brooklyn, New York. In addition to work painted and pasted on streets around the world, FAILE has exhibited with Lazarides, London; New Image Art, Los Angeles; Fifty24SF, Portland; Baltic Center for Contemporary Arts, Newcastle; Shanghai Sculpture Center, Shanghai; Andenken Gallery, Denver; and Les Complices, Zurich.
Temple by FAILE is one of the artworks in public space that are presented within the framework of Portugal Arte 10, the first edition of the international survey of contemporary art in Portugal. Coming soon: More information, video coverage of the event and an interview with the artistic director of Portugal Arte 10, Stefan Simchowitz.
> Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
> DVD available.
Project description Faile: Temple:
“The concept of freedom will be explored as a singular, unifying vision throughout PortugalArte10. This is of particular importance in Portugal, as it has only been within the last forty years that the country was able to release itself from dictatorship in a brave and bloodless revolution. This development in the country’s recent history has enabled Portugal to renew the spirit that drove the Portuguese to discover the New World. A massive undertaking and one of the largest public art projects in the world will be presented to express this notion. The world-renowned street art collective Faile will present the Cathedral Project, a giant sculptural installation in the heart of the city of Lisbon. Faile are known worldwide for their ambitious public projects that have been mounted in such cities as New York, Shanghai, and London. Using the physical street as a canvas for expressing their ideas, Faile is part of a global movement that has been embraced by audiences for its popular approach to artistic and creative expression. The integration of the Cathedral Project within the very fabrics of the city will serve a crucial role in granting audiences the ability to engage and interact on their own terms.”
