SanArt

Now in its 75th year, the Whitney Biennial is still the big kahuna—the show every American artist wants to be in and every art lover wants to see. This year, the career-boosting show includes no Philadelphia artists. Instead, the curators of this national show sought talent in Chicago, Oregon, Los Angeles and, of course, New York. They rounded up 55 artists and, for the first time, more than half were women. Reflecting our times of war and global recession, the show is a somber parade, sometimes tedious, sometimes achingly beautiful, with a surprising number of photographers and video artists channeling anthropology á la Margaret Mead. It’s a good show—you should see it.

One of several Portland, OR artists in the Whitney Biennial. Storm Tharp, Pigeon (After Shunsen), 2009 Ink, gouache, and colored pencil on paper, 58 x 42 (147.3 x 106.7) Collection of the artist; courtesy PDX Contemporary Art, Portland

But why should you have to travel all the way to New York to see such a high-cailber show? Here’s an idea. Let’s have a Philadelphia Biennial—a large curated show of regional contemporary art hosted by all of our major art museums, organized by museum curators and with a catalog. Though staging a biennial in Philadelphia would be expensive, Whitney’s 75-year track record proves that it can be a lasting investment.

Rocco Landesman, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), recently spoke at a panel titled “Can the Arts Revive Our Cities and the Nation’s Economy?” Landesman and the other panelists—practitioners from Austin and New Orleans, an academic from Penn and the head of the National Council for the Traditional Arts—all delivered a resounding “Yes, we can.”  (More on that panel in another post. Meanwhile, read Gary Steuer’s post and the Inquirer’s story on the panel.)

The NEA is offering 15 grants of $250,000 to cities (including Philadelphia) to fund bold arts initiatives. Proposing a Philadelphia Biennial is just the kind of move that could win the city that money. PEI (Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiatives, an arm of Pew Trusts) could match that as an initial priming of the money pump locally. But it’s going to take more.

The Whitney Biennial 2010 is sponsored by Deutsche Bank, Tommy Hilfiger, Sothebys, a couple foundations and the Friends Committee of the Whitney Museum. Philadelphia corporations like Comcast, PNC Bank and others could step forward. Local donors and art museum trustees could create a Friends of the Philadelphia Biennial fund.

The exhibit could be at the Institute of Contemporary Art one year; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts the next; Philadelphia Museum of Art after that. It could be split between the museums and our premier big-box space, the Icebox at Crane Arts Center. There are no rules to break and creative thinking can pull this off.

Biennials, like museum shows in general, are democratic—they are shows for the people. A Philadelphia Biennial would bring the public to contemporary art and educate them about it. In the local art community, people bemoan the lack of educated art consumers in Philadelphia. Buying art is essential to retaining artists here and keeping the arts economy going and growing. Create the Philadelphia Biennial and you will be taking the first step in educating this new group of collectors.

What is needed to make this happen is leadership. Mayor Nutter and art czar Gary Steuer need to get on board and exert political clout. Financial leadership from foundations, the city, universities, corporations and private donors is a necessity.

Who is the audience for the Philadelphia Biennial? It’s the Flower Show attendees—people interested in the city, the arts, beauty and discourse about things that bring joy and meaning to life, that and the thousands of artists, gallerists, collectors, museum professionals and arts lovers in the region.

The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance’s research shows that people in this region spend twice as much on culture as they do on sporting events—and these same people report more satisfaction from those art events than from sporting events. Give the people what satisfies them—a grand, blockbuster contemporary art show to talk about for months with their friends.

If Whitney can do it, so can we. We have the beginnings of a model for this in Philagrafika 2010, the citywide print festival. It’s risky and it’s going to cost money, but the payback could be huge.

Read this story at Philadelphia Weekly.

PS122 Gallery
150 First Avenue, 212 288 4249

East Village / Lower East Side

March 20 – March 20, 2010
Opening: Saturday, March 20, 6 – 9 PM
Web Site

Using home movies, found footage and handmade film techniques, these four short films by filmmaker Sara Strahan explore the complex relationship between media, storytelling and the construction of memory. Sound by Melissa Grey.

About Sara Strahan:

A Chicago native who spent years in Japan, Sara Strahan is an artist, producer & video-maker now residing in the East Village. She is a graduate of the Masters in Media Studies program at the New School and a member of the Paper Tiger Television Collective. An avid supporter of community and youth media—an a 20 year veteran of the field—Sara is devoted to making critical, non-commercial media in fun, thoughtful way.

Project and screening made possible by a generous grant made by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Manhattan Community Arts Fund.

PS122 Gallery
150 First Avenue, 212 288 4249

East Village / Lower East Side

March 20 – March 20, 2010
Opening: Saturday, March 20, 6 – 9 PM
Web Site

Using home movies, found footage and handmade film techniques, these four short films by filmmaker Sara Strahan explore the complex relationship between media, storytelling and the construction of memory. Sound by Melissa Grey.

About Sara Strahan:

A Chicago native who spent years in Japan, Sara Strahan is an artist, producer & video-maker now residing in the East Village. She is a graduate of the Masters in Media Studies program at the New School and a member of the Paper Tiger Television Collective. An avid supporter of community and youth media—an a 20 year veteran of the field—Sara is devoted to making critical, non-commercial media in fun, thoughtful way.

Project and screening made possible by a generous grant made by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Manhattan Community Arts Fund.

Sloan Fine Art
128 Rivington Street, 212-477-1140

East Village / Lower East Side

March 24 – April 17, 2010
Opening: Wednesday, March 24, 6 – 8 PM
Web Site

Sloan Fine Art is pleased to present So the Story Goes, by Diane Barcelowsky in the front gallery and At Night, Lights Fell and Loved Ones Returned Home, by Edwin Ushiro in the project room.

Diane Barcelowsky returns to Sloan Fine Art with a new body of work So the Story Goes. With an installation that includes mixed media elements and abstract and representational works on both paper and panel, Barcelowsky transforms the main gallery at Sloan Fine Art into a continuous, flowing narrative. Elaborate patterns of color, line and texture act as portals to another world. Vacant landscapes, flowing waterways, mysterious trails and roads all entice the viewer from one dreamlike narrative to the next. Once arrived, Barcelowsky’s impossible perspectives, saturated colors, fantasy characters and peculiar, yet familiar situations captivate the viewer in a voyeuristic trance. Each individual work is a stand-alone piece with a message of its own. Together they are an epic saga, rich with humor, tragedy and the contagious optimism that makes Barcelowsky’s work consistently engaging and compelling.

Diane Barcelowsky is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work has been shown at BravinLee, Giant Robot and Alona Kagan Gallery in New York, Cinders Gallery in Brooklyn, Found Gallery in Los Angeles and Beaver Projects in Copenhagen among others. She has participated in performances at Rivington Arms in New York, Black Diamond in Los Angeles and Space 405 in Brooklyn. Diane Barcelowsky lives and works in Brooklyn.

The content of Edwin Ushiro’s work is as richly layered as the works themselves. Influenced by the memories and folklore of his childhood in Hawaii and with nods to Japanese Anime, he creates his own mythology populated with modern characters and contemporary references. With At Night, Lights Fell and Loved Ones Returned Home, Ushiro utilizes his technique of layering paint, ink, graphite, varnish and iron transfers on vinyl sheets to create romantic, luminescent works that focus on the often mystery, and histories, held by abandoned and forgotten places.

Edwin Ushiro earned his BFA with honors from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Since he began exhibiting in 2006, his works have been shown at galleries and museums worldwide including LeBasse Projects and the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, Svenska Mobler Gallery in Chicago, Atticus Galeria in Barcelona, the Insa Art Center in Seoul and the Museum of Kyoto Japan. Ushiro currently resides in Culver City, California.

Now in its 75th go-round, The Whitney Biennial is still the big kahuna, the show every American artist wants to be in and every art lover wants to see. This year the career-boosting show includes no Philadelphia artist.   We had representation in 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008 — so much for that trend.  Instead, the curators went to Chicago, Oregon, Los Angeles and, of course, New York for the 55 artists, more than half of them women (a first) and many of them under the national radar.

One of the 28 women featured in this year's biennial, Aki Sasamoto, performed at the press preview. Strange Attractors, 2010. mixed media, dimensions variable, collection of the artist

The show is a somber parade, with some work that’s tedious and some that’s breath-takingly beautiful. A surprising number of artists are channeling anthropology ala Margaret Mead this year, a trend among Philadelphia artists as well — see Zoe Strauss, Sarah Stolfa, Phil Jackson and Gabe Martinez for starters.

Sharon Hayes. Parole, 2010. multi channel video, color, sound, 36 minutes. collection of the artist; courtesy Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin

Whether intended or not, this is a populist show dealing with issues of war, gender, alienation, the slipperiness of truth and longing – things very much on people’s minds. War victims show up in photographs of a disfigured American soldier by Nina Berman. Stephanie Sinclair’s photos of desperate Afghani women who self-immolate are stomach-wrenching. Sharon Hayes’ multi-channel videos about political protesters create a kind of faux-reportage that questions the reality of the news. The artist, a chunky, tousle-haired young woman, who appears throughout, exudes no star power but she’s charismatic. She’s the anti-Christiane Amanpour.

Rashaad Newsome. Untitled, 2009. silent single channel HD video, 8:07 min. collection of the artist: courtesy Ramis Barquet, NY

Some of the documentary films are mesmerizing, like Rashaad Newsome’s two silent videos of  “vogue” dancers — athletic young men in t-shirts and jeans who spin, twirl, prance and contort themselves for the camera from small prison-like rooms.  One of the dancers makes eye contact and just won’t break — it’s a challenge to pull yourself away. These silent pieces force you to concentrate on the dancers’ personalities and gender identities. Their stylized movements are not seductive but the perpetual motion alone casts a spell.  It’s all very poignant.

Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher BETTER DIMENSION, 2010. This cave-like installation, with a hollographic JFK head spinning above a music disc surrounded by projections of slides that look like they're of tissue samples — weird and satisfying. Silkscreened wood panels, four ektapro slide projectors, one 16 mm eiki projector, resin and steel projection screen. 102×236x276" courtesy of the artists, Gagosian Gallery, NY

Ari Marcopoulos’ video, on the other hand, is static, colorful and loud. But it, too is hypnotic. The piece documents two teenage boys making noise music in their Detroit bedroom and, in a nice touch of curatorial pairing, the sonic screeches of Marcopoulos’ video wash over the nearby photographs of suburban tract houses by James Casebere — the very houses this noise might be coming from.

Josephine Meckseper. Mall of America, 2009. video, color, sound, transferred to DVD, 12:48 min. collection of the artist, courtesy V6 Bild-Kunst, Bonn

The bone-rattling machine noise soundtrack of Josephine Meckseper’s video “Mall of America,” turns what is a rather beautiful (albeit ham-handed) slap at capitalism into something mesmerizing as well. Maybe I didn’t have enough coffee the day we saw the show but I felt myself grow roots when watching this one even though I knew its message was nothing new.

Roland Flexner, a work I saw at Gallery Joe in 2007. untitled 2007 sumi ink on paper 5 3/4 x 7"

Roland Flexner’s wall of small sumi ink landscapes is the oasis into which you can escape. These drawings (like some of Flexner’s I’d seen Gallery Joe) are dark, dreamy paradise scenes. Sublime with a bit of threat they are not afraid of beauty or the infinite, something we’re very much in need of.

R.H. Quaytman R. H. Quaytman, Chapter 12: iamb, 2008. Oil, silkscreen, and gesso on wood, 32 3/8 x 20 in. (82.2 x 51 cm). Collection of Laura Belgray and Steven Eckler; courtesy Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York. Photograph by John Berens (Image of representative piece)

Tedium sets in with several inclusions that seem to be there merely to toot the museum’s own horn. I have to believe Maureen Gallace’s chalky and standard-issue landscape paintings are there to call attention to the Whitney’s Edward Hopper and Milton Avery holdings (you can see Hopper in the Whitney Collects show on the museum’s fifth floor.) R. H. Quaytman’s photo collage prints, which feature the museum’s Marcel Breuer-designed windows, likewise seem geared to feature the museum as much as the artist.

Whitney Biennial 2010 catalog — with the majority of pages devoted to other biennials.

But really, the Whitney Biennial has always been about the Whitney Museum. As if to prove that point, the show’s catalog ($45, softcover) devotes more than half its pages to past biennials. This book is a big disappointment. With eight shiny card stock “billboard” pages inside showing nothing but a horrible concentric square design in black and grey with a photo (in green and white) of the sitting American president at the time of biennials in 1930, 40, 50, etc, the book is borderline annoying.  And with more than half of it devoted to press clippings about past biennials — and pages and pages of lists of names of who was in each and every biennial — the book seems an almost desperate attempt at institutional cheerleading.  I don’t know, maybe you have to remind people how wonderful you are when you’re in the middle of a big capital campaign.

Charles Ray, Untitled, 2009. Ink on paper, 47 x 31 1/2 in. (119.4 x 80 cm). Collection of the artist; courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York (Image of representative piece)

The biggest disappointment of the Biennial is Charles Ray’s drawings of flowers, or something that looks like flowers drawn by a teenage girl who just got a new set of magic markers. I read Peter Schejldahl in the New Yorker (see and hear his audio slide show here) and I’m not convinced. The work is slight and bad to look at, and this from an artist whose sculptures can knock it out of the ballpark. I don’t get it.

Robert Williams The Inside Out House, 2009. watercolor on paper. 14×17" collection of the artist; courtesy Tony Shafrazi Gallery, NY. We saw works by Williams at Art Basel Miami. Asking price, $10,000 each. I am not shocked to see them in this show. We saw lots of Biennial artists' works at the NY art fairs.

Biennials are a way for museums to claim the leadership they once had from the marketplace (art fairs/auctions) which has taken over defining what’s good and worthy. There should be more biennials. That said, no curated group show is “the answer” to the big mystery of what is art today. But, bottom line, a curated show will give you more satisfaction than the art fairs will.

More photos at Flickr.
>>Whitney Biennial 2010, to May 30. Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave. at 75th St. New York, NY 212 570 3600

Open Call: Short Films and Videos
Deadline: 20 March 2010
Website: www.shadowandlightfestival.blogspot.com

Storyline Transport: Shadow and Light Festival is seeking video submissions for a mobile festival occurring in Chicago in Summer 2010.

The mobile festival will visit multiple locations over the course of three days, engaging arts oriented audiences as well communities for whom access to the arts is limited. Through the use of converted trucks and vans we will transport a shadow and light themed video screening, three artists run workshops, and a public-collaborative mobile installation to multiple locations throughout the Chicago metropolitan area.

Submissions should address the festival’s theme of shadow and light, but creative interpretations of this theme are encouraged. Any genre of video work is acceptable including narrative, animation, documentary and video art.

All submissions should include the following and may be submitted via email or post:

(1) A half-page artist statement
(2) Current resume/CV
(3) Video Work – URL link by email (preferred) or a DVD mailed to the address below.

The deadline for submission is March 20, 2010 at midnight for email submissions. DVD’s may be mailed to the address below, postmarked by March 20th.

Email application materials to:

wooleeprince@gmail.com

Or mail application materials to:

Storyline Transports: Shadow and Light Festival
P.O. BOX # 221479. Chicago, IL 60622

More info at www.shadowandlightfestival.blogspot.com

UC SAN DIEGO NEWS RELEASE

March 5, 2010

Media Contact: Doug Ramsey, 858-822-5825, dramsey@ucsd.edu
Gallery Coordinator: Trish Stone, 858-336-6456, tstone@ucsd.edu

Sustainability and Art on Display at UC San Diego’s gallery@calit2

The University of California, San Diego has built a reputation for being one of the “greenest” campuses in the nation, and that reputation extends to an art gallery in the university’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), which is staging a new sustainability-themed art exhibition.

The gallery@calit2 goes green this spring with an exhibition by Chicago-based artist Sabrina Raaf, whose custom-built robotic sculptures and site specific installations include a series of experiments that address issues of sustainable practice, the construction of social spaces, and prototyping for modular green architecture. Curated by Steve Dietz, “A Light Green Light: Toward Sustainability in Practice” opens Friday, April 2, 2010, with a 6 p.m. panel discussion moderated by UC San Diego visual arts professor Jordan Crandall, followed by a reception.

Dietz has selected five of Raaf’s electronic and responsive artworks to be included in this exhibition: Translator II: Grower, Icelandic Rift, Light Green Light, (n)Fold, and Meandering River. Translator II Grower, a robotic sculpture, measures carbon dioxide levels inside the gallery as they are generated by visitors, and actively draws the measurements in green ink as a field of grass on the gallery walls. Examples of these ink drawings will be on display on the first floor of Atkinson Hall. The Icelandic Rift sculptures are electronically-powered works that include mechanical systems, representing far-future visions of agricultural production and mineral mining in zero-g environments. Prototypes and concept animations for Light Green Light, a lamp that unfolds into a netted tent for sleeping, and (n)Fold, a flat-fold design for dew harvesting and passive solar cooking, are also on view in the gallery. Meandering River is a sculptural installation made up of thermal screen material that has had its surface milled robotically with meandering river designs. Its installation form is derived from self-organizing and meandering river mathematics. This thermal screen installation is also designed to cascade vertically in order to create a climbing surface for vines and thus support the growth of a vertical garden. A cascading instance of the Meandering River sculpture is hung in the six-story window of the Atkinson Hall stairwell, and a second, river-type instance will be viewed in the hall area on the first floor.

Raaf works in experimental sculptural media and designs responsive environments and social spaces. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at the Brandts Art Center (Denmark), Transitio_MX (Mexico City), Sala Parpalló (Spain), MejanLabs (Stockholm), Lawimore Projects (Seattle), the Edith-Russ-Site for Media Art (Germany), Stefan Stux Gallery (NYC), Ars Electronica (Linz), Museum Tinguely (Basel), Espace Landowski (Paris), Artbots 2005 (Dublin), Kunsthaus Graz (Austria), ISEA (Helsinki), the San Jose Museum of Art, and Klein Art Works (Chicago). The artist is the recipient of a Creative Capital Grant in Emerging Fields (2002) and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship (2005 &2001). Reviews of her work have appeared in Art in America, Contemporary, Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, Leonardo, Washington Post, and New Art Examiner. She received an MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1999) and is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Steve Dietz is Founder, President, and Artistic Director of Northern Lights.mn. He was the Founding Director of the 01SJ Biennial in 2006 and is currently Artistic Director of its producing organization, ZERO1: the Art and Technology Network. He is the former Curator of New Media at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he founded the New Media Initiatives department in 1996.

“A Light Green Light: Toward Sustainability in Practice”
by Sabrina Raaf
Curated by Steve Dietz
Friday, April 2, 2010 – Friday, June 4, 2010

Friday, April 2, 6 p.m. in Calit2 Theater, Atkinson Hall, UCSD
Panel Discussion with Sabrina Raaf and Steve Dietz
Moderated by Jordan Crandall, Associate Professor, Visual Arts, UCSD
Welcome by Ramesh Rao, Director, UCSD Division, Calit2

Friday, April 2, 7 p.m. in gallery@calit2, Atkinson Hall, UCSD
Opening Reception

Events are FREE and open to the public.
RSVP requested to Trish Stone, Gallery Coordinator, at tstone@ucsd.edu
http://gallery.calit2.net

Johansson Projects presents The Velveteen Order, where powder and paint mask flesh in favor of fiction, serving up Rococo thrills yummier than brioche.

Christina Corfield crafts moving dioramas which flaunt the brush of a gaze and the stroke of a sword. Her videos hyperbolize the Old Regime’s pretend-sion, ignoring distinctions between historical documentation and fairy tale musings. Redundancy and stripped down actions append significance to the subtlest minutiae. Keer Tanchak’s aluminum glamscapes, which mix 1800’s lackadaisical malaise with the 2000’s self-awareness, quietly invite circumspection of modern wealth and frivolity. Tanchak’s exploitation of Old France’s artificial flavoring sweetens the modern epidemic dubbed “bourgeois ennui.” With seductive visuals and witty commentary, absolutism was never so liberating.

A 2003 MFA graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Tanchak completed her BFA at Concordia University in Montreal in 2000. She has exhibited extensively in Canada and the USA as well as London, Kuwait, Puerto Rico and Mexico City. Tanchak has received recognition and acclaim from publications such as UR Chicago, Montreal Mirror, and Vie Des Arts. Christina Corfield received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute along with a BA from the Glasgow School of art in 2003. She has exhibited in London, Glasgow, San Francisco, Berlin, and Chicago and her work has been written about in The Sunday Times and The Glasgow Herald.

Show Runs April 2 – May 15, 2010
Reception on April 2, 5-8pm

You have a few days left to get to Isolated Fictions, an evocative exhibit at FLUXspace of work related to the publication of The North Georgia Gazette, a beautiful reprint of an 1821 shipboard journal, by Chicago’s Green Lantern Press.

Bookmark/postcard from nowhere to nowhere, that comes with the North Georgia Gazette. Like this bookmark, everything in this bookmark is thoughtful and artful.

Green Lantern Press is the artist-run organization that also publishes the Phonebook, a national directory of artist-run spaces. (The most recent edition, 2008-2009, Philly’s artist-run spaces are severely underrepresented, but then even we can’t keep up.) And of course this show is at an artist-run collective space. There’s a theme here.

The story behind the book goes back to when a British fleet of exploration ships got stuck in the Arctic ice while searching for the Northwest Passage. Trapped for eight months, waiting for the ice to melt, they published a ship’s journal, The North Georgia Gazette, on orders from the fleet’s Captain Parry to keep spirits lifted. No whining allowed.

Amanda Browder, Installation, 2010 and Nike Desis standing there for scale

The original publication included letters to the editor, recipes, poems and reviews of on-board performances. The Gazette’s contents are reprinted here in their entirety, and embellished with an essay by contemporary Arctic explorer John Huston, as well as contemporary art work.

Nick Butcher, Grain Advance, wood glue cast of vinyl record on paper, 7 inches, 2009.

The exhibit, curated by Green Lantern Gallery & Press founding director Caroline Picard, includes fewer than a dozen pieces, which are touring the country to publicize the release of the book. Most of the art included in the exhibit is included in the book, including a limited edition 7″ record–a wood glue on paper print of a vinyl record. It can actually be played, the music of the original distorted by the wobbly backing and the iffy process. The resulting pops and squeaks and musical swoops, if you’re feeling imaginative, are quite evocative. You can hear and see this work, by Nick Butcher, on a small record player in the exhibit. The book, a small edition of 250 with silk-screened covers, is available at Flux for $30, an amazing deal!

Carmen Price, Normal Floe, mixed media on paper, 22×11 3/4 inches.

Other works include a marvelous, delicate seascape by Carmen Price that captures the white-out isolation of 24-hour Arctic days. A hilarious map of the arctic north, part fiction part real, by Rebecca Grady, and a wonderful soft-sculpture iceberg made of patchwork fabric with a fuzzy toupee of fake fur on top. Grady’s other piece, three draped rolls of somewhat crinkled paper in front of the windows has a makeshift, thin feel, making it the only piece in the show that is less than satisfying.

Rebecca Grady, detail of Map of the Polar Regions, pen and ink on paper, 19 x 22 inches

Also in the exhibit are artists Jason Dunda, Devin King and Deb Sokolow. I have images of their work–all pretty interesting–up at my Flickr site.

The show, one of the Philagrafika independent projects, is a lovely evocation of the past and the sense of awe that the sailors must have felt isolated in that barren landscape with no promise of escape.

The bookcase at the Flux reading room–the very beginning of an archive of Philadelphia contemporary art.

I went to the exhibit with Andrea, and while we were there we visited Flux’s temporary reading room, erected in conjunction with Isolated Fictions. It is part of Flux’s new project–an archive of Philadelphia-related art-ifacts. At this point, the reading room has a small collection that includes zines from Machete to old New Art Examiners to various Philadelphia exhibition postcards and printed materials. But, as in everything they do, Flux is ambitious and wants more.

The reading room, a temporary adjunct to the archive.

So help yourself out by helping Flux out. If you have exhibition catalogs, postcards and zines from shows in the city, old copies of Eye Level, this would be a good place to send a couple of copies. This project to preserve and make accessible contemporary Philadelphia art history parallels the Vox book on collectives, by Richard Torchia, and if I were to guess, it may have been inspired by the talk Torchia gave about the necessity of documenting. This is a breakthrough, with Philadelphia taking itself and its art history seriously!

Nearly 125 years of the New York Times, on microfilm at Flux.

There’s one more great feature at the reading room–microfilm of the New York Times, from 1886 to 2008, and a microfilm reader and printer, that Montgomery County Community College gave up when it switched to digital versions. The advantage of microfilm is that the articles are on their pages, with the ads and everything. And they won’t become inaccessible and unusable when the digital programs go through their annual sweeping changes. So, artists, as material-oriented people who are contrarians, seem to me to be saving our culture.

PICK

Nicelle Beauchene
21 Orchard Street, 212-375-8043

East Village / Lower East Side

March 4 – April 11, 2010
Opening: Thursday, March 4, 6 – 8 PM
Web Site

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to announce Cosmic Collisions, a new exhibition of sculpture by Valerie Hegarty.

For this exhibition, Hegarty expands her dialogue between American master paintings and catalytic events by drawing upon a broad range of influences to include the sublime, quantum physics, alchemy, origami, abstract expressionism and imagery produced from the Hubble telescope. As in works past, Hegarty reconfigures the paradigms of American painting through interventions that appear to be the result of natural events. With works that recall Rothko, LeWitt and Pollock, Cosmic Collisions pushes the parameters of such events, to suggest the effects of the quantum mechanics of space on these iconic works, creating almost petrified relics.

Curving off the gallery wall, Starry Rothko appears nearly singed beyond recognition, with the implied heat or fire causing it to crumple up on itself. Shaped after an explosion in space seen from the Hubble telescope, Starry Rothko’s canvas surface seems to be tearing away, revealing a glimpse of the cosmos with burn holes that mock the twinkling of stars. Here, Hegarty attempts to literally transform the atmospheric painting of Rothko into pure atmosphere, trying to catch the pivotal moment before the piece falls to the ground in a pile of ashes.

In Space Cubes, Hegarty measures the interiors of Sol LeWitt’s open cubes (1’x1’x1’) and creates her own blocks of space from compacted paper. Toying with traditional constructs of two- and three- dimensionality, Hegarty’s molded paper depicts ephemeral images from the Hubble telescope. These chunks of ‘space,’ stacked in a LeWitt building block formation, start to unfurl as the cubes get higher in their configuration. While referencing LeWitt’s ideas of form and their relationship to philosophical and mathematical concepts, Hegarty’s representations of the sublime nod to the elements of chance, irrationality and perception that inspired the creation of such scientific systems.

Valerie Hegarty received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. She has shown internationally including solo shows at Guild & Greyshkul, New York; MUSEUM 52, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and CTRL Gallery, Houston. Additionally, she has been included in group exhibitions at the Depart Foundation, Rome; The Drawing Center, New York and White Columns, New York. Her work is currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum as part of their permanent collection and at the Highline as part of their public art program. Hegarty lives and works in Brooklyn.

VIDEO LOUNGE:: Shannon Plumb, ‘Olympics (Track and Field),’ 2005

Inspired by the stoic, silent comedy of Buster Keaton and Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 documentary Olympia, Olympics (Track and Field) follows a group of aspiring athletes through their Olympic events. Relying on spontaneity and character traits, Plumb presents the humor in going for the gold.

Total running time: 18 minutes.