Popcorn

Out

Again, I made it to far less than expected last weekend due to the mobility situation here. I took a couple pictures from the Vice Photo Exhibition but Fette (behind The Flog) documented the scene (and I mean Scene) far better than I.

Vice Photo Show

Beautiful space. 

As about one week is left of my time out here, I thought that I'd share a few images of and links to artists I have been lucky enough to have met while out here:

Thomas Muller, Emporer, unfired porcelain, asian pear, wood, plexi, photo, 34" x 20" x 12", 2006

Julie Hughes in collaboration with Pete Goldlust, Turned Out, site specific installation, clay sculptures and black vinyl shapes

C-print by Aaron Giesel

Rainbow Arabia's Music

Hecuba's Music

We Are The World's Music

Manimal Vinyl Records

Finally, tonight I am off to this show:

Gallerist: It's A Dirty Job

I actually googled "angry dachshund" and "dachshund growling" in order to find an image that best fit the one traumatically etched in my mind today. This is a fair representation of the results.

I don't like to go deep into personal matters and really, really dislike the posting of pet photographs. But it's been a rough week in the midst of an otherwise innocuous summer. After surviving a severe allergic reaction in Malibu this weekend, today I got chased down, cornered and bit by a neighborhood dog, much like this one, while exiting an artist's studio in a quiet suburban neighborhood north of LA. As the artist was cleaning my wound, she and the manager of the building told me that they didn't think the dog had had any shots and that he had been running around biting people lately.

You'll be glad to know that I am going to make it - but a word of advice: Do not show me mobile-phone photographs of your small dog(s) ever, ever...ever again. Cats still welcome.

Oliver

Anyway, this Saturday will be the first night in LA that I make the rounds to several openings, as there are many scheduled. I've tried to do this before but it's just not easy to make it to more than one neighborhood on a weekend night in this town. Anyway, I'll be taking my camera to at least these three exhibitions:

Jekyll Island at Honor Fraser

Michael Sherman at Little Bird Gallery

And the 2008 Vice Photo Show

Oh - and I know I'm late on this D.C. but I was terribly sad to read Kriston's DCist article about the Bobby Fisher Memorial Building. As mentioned in a comment, this was one of the only DIY music and art spaces in D.C. It's sad to see it go, and it's equally disappointing to read so many aggressive comments directed at the "Brigade". Maybe it's the west coast seeping into my morals, but it really saddens me to see how prevalent that sentiment is in D.C. It's archaic. I hope these kids find a new space.

Sorry for all the complaining. Photographs of current LA art exhibitions soon to come!

Lo-Fi: From Temporary Popcorn Headquarters: Burbank Senior Citizen Project Across From The Cartoon Network

Family Portrait by R. Stevie Moore

Sincerity draws us into outsider art.  Art made by those untrained by and uninvolved with the industry lacks the heady cerebral environment that Art trudges through.  It exists unrestrained by culture and when put up against mainstream art, can make the latter appear repressed and elite.  Many fine artists choose to use this association, incorporating outsider aesthetics into their work to take on a tone that reads more sincere and correspondent with the common, the low-to-the-ground. This tone touches more these days, as it situates itself below the wireless, impalpable network that drives our culture.  

R. Stevie Moore’s DIY home recordings have been composed and produced almost entirely apart from the institution of pop music (in his basement), purposefully.  The result is an overwhelmingly numbered series of eclectic recordings best described as manic depressive - containing severe and sudden shifts in mood and littered with delusions of grandeur throughout.  Moore's emotion is unmediated as he is free to be expressive of his influences without consciousness of intention, meaning or progress.  This process of responding only to one’s irrational imagination and desire stands far apart from any institutionalized industry, which operates in a very calculated manner.  

Since the heyday of DADA, artists have been continually questioning the elitist and transcendental qualities of fine art.  Showcasing the irrational and the impulsive, as done on Moore's recordings, has always been a popular technique for conducting this questioning. The integration of these techniques into the mainstream expresses the sustainment of this desire to subvert fine art conventions, but also the legitimization and assimilation of the phenomenon.  But such is the cultural cycle - as once radical collage techniques manifest today as decoupage, indie finds indie-pop, Ariel Pink follows R. Stevie Moore's model and folk art becomes one of the most prevalent styles in contemporary Art, etc, etc..   

Aurora Robson, Cosmic Wheel, ink and junk-mail collage, 7" x 7", 2007

Today, works of art that introduce imagery, materials and techniques considered pedestrian - or even lowbrow - to the fine art context, serve as certain examples of the weaving of anti-elitism into the mainstream.  These works are more easily seen as ironically interactive with ideas of artistic absolutism and idealism, than truly subversive of these ideas.  (Post-modern trends and techniques, after all, become situated in a certain hierarchy themselves.) Works in this genre portray reality, the everyday experience, and address the inevitable failures of reaching an ideal or absolute, but simultaneously continue to exist as works of fine art - part of the industry. The self, or cultural, depreciatory tone found in this expression of failure is found in different ways throughout works by artists using outsider aesthetics.

In this vein, artists Aurora Robson and Christine Gray merge craft with fine art as a contradictory designation of status.  Robson's junk mail collages are fantastical abstractions that hover between transcendence from the crude source material and being inevitably tied down to it.  Artists such as Jeff Soto and Daniel Davidson create pictorial paintings weaving a traditional technique with street art influences. Beyond depicting scenes, these paintings portray the artists themselves as receptors of their environments who are seeking a divine beauty, but are again tied down to their common existence.  While the pictorial technique suggests this divine beauty, these scenes are instead of a beauty - just as sublime - but informed by the actual visual experience of living in Los Angeles and Brooklyn. 

Michael Scoggins, Hold the Whole World, graphite, Prismacolor on paper, 67" x 51"

Michael Scoggins makes reference to Naive Art and Art Brut by creating large scale trompe l’oeil replications of scrawled sheets of notebook paper to voice obscured political and psychological opinions.  Many of the scrawls make self depreciatory statements, jab at the political state of America, and mock our values.  These pieces reveal ostensibly personal views, in a manner that's bold and direct, but distorted by humor and irony that is just as bold.  These works as well strive for grandeur in their larger than life size and in this boldness, but are restrained by angst.     

As the Information Age pushes pluralism to its limits, giving more people and more ideas validity than ever before, the interplay between what's been established to be art and what is outside of art becomes fertile ground.  Post-modern themes of failure, angst and fragmentation within the art-world continue to be further complicated by the changes in the nature of communication.  Today, direct inspiration and sincerity carry weight, as they stand far apart from the intangible experience of communicating within and comprehending our culture.     

   

SPACE RACCOONS (RACCOONS FROM OUTER SPACE)

So I have not been able to post for a very long time, I know. And the reason for this is that I've been EXTREMELY busy.  I'll be living in LA this summer, which has added greatly to this busyness. 

And so here is something that will totally refute this claim: A children's story that my boyfriend and I wrote about a midnight phone call that leads to a garbage man's run-in with SPACE RACCOONS (RACCOONS FROM OUTER SPACE).

Enjoy!

More to come on specific artists in our summer exhibition - The Sublime Landscape  - and on the musical genius of R. Stevie Moore.

Spring Thaw

Oracle Four, Christine Gray, Oil on birch panel, 42" x 46"

If this image doesn't attract you to the opening of our Christine Gray exhibition this Saturday, then I have nothing for you.

CHRISTINE GRAY

SPRING THAW

April 19 - May 24, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 19, 6:00 - 8:30pm

Christine Gray's paintings represent the translation from a constructed environment to an illusionistic world. Painted from models she creates using common craft materials, the works become fantastically abstracted scenes based on objects domestic and kitsch. While gestural marks and rich textures compose much of these surreal landscapes, Gray also interposes areas where her source materials are highly rendered. This brings both a compelling balance and an irony to the picture plane.

Gray sees her work as speaking to the dysfunction of the Martha Stewart institution for its presentation of perfect craft, food, entertaining, and interior decor as an "Everyday" goal that individuals try to imitate. She explains, "I represent landscape through several degrees of mediation (first by building modest micro-sculptures, then through painting) using themes of failed geometry, failed architecture, and failed illusionism. This removal from the real reflects what I find to be a prevalent contemporary anxiety toward not only so-called 'nature' but also toward 'the real' itself."

Christine Gray received an MFA from The University of California Santa Barbara, California in 2007 and a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin. She has exhibited in group shows in California and Texas. She currently teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University.

ARTIST NEWS / EXHIBITIONS

Washingtonian Magazine
ON THE EDGE - The area's contemporary-art galleries, many with bold spring shows, feature some of the brightest work on today's art scene.

Beau Chamberlain
"183rd Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art"
National Academy Museum New York, May 28th - Sept 7, 2008

Michael Scoggins
"Sunny Dispositions"
Gallerie Ernst Hilger - Hilger Contemporary, Austria, through May 4, 2008

Raymond Uhlir
"20 To Watch"
Austin Museum of Art, through May 11, 2008

Brian Ulrich
"Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes"
Walker Art Museum, through August 18, 2008
Carnegie Museum of Art, October 4, 2008 - January 18, 2009
"Variable Capital"
Bluecoats Arts Centre, Liverpool, UK, May 15 - June 29, 2008
"Branded and On Display"
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ, Jun 14 - Sept 21, 2008

A Relaxed Ambience

Project 4 leaves for Scope NY tomorrow! On my pre-Art Fair day of relaxation I've decided to point out two photographers who I've been thinking a lot about lately.

Christina Seely and Michael Vahrenwald are both photographing the urban and suburban ambient light as it affects outlying areas.

Christina Seely, Metropolis 35°00'N135°45'E, C-Print

Seely's series, Lux, documents the artificial flow produced by major cities in the three brightest regions, as seen on a NASA map of the world at night. The awe-inspiring images immediately achieve an irony in the contrast and interplay between the superficial beauty of ambient light and the aggressive human dominance which it represents. But the photographs are layered in both their process and resulting image. Using a long exposure time, Seely sets up the shots so that they become surreal, fantastical landscapes, all while using actual data, not manipulated.

Using research from NASA and photography without fiction, Seely creates landscapes that seem to be existing scenes placed in an illusory context, while really these are existing scenes being viewed in a way which highlights a specific, and real, phenomenon. This ostensible displacement reflects the distance between our (humans') perceived, experienced, everyday reality and the reality of a larger perspective - the effect our everyday reality has on the physical world within which we humbly exist.

Interestingly, this project sparked the formation of the collective, Civil Twilight. This collective's concerns are with "issues surrounding the intersection of nature and culture." One of the collective's projects is the creation of Lunar-Resonant Streetlights which are streetlights that dim and brighten based on the brightness of the moon. Read more about it here.

Michael Vahrenwald, Bramble, Wal-Mart, Boonton NJ, C-print

Michael Vahrenwald documents pedestrian landscapes. He romanticizes the outlying spaces of newly constructed "big box" stores. The dark, empty expanses surpass the initial nostalgia for pure land that they trigger. The use of ambient light, here, phenomenologically elicits the human attraction to light. The ambient light here connotes the warm and comforting indication of civilization as it is contrasted with the cold expanse of land around it.

More than inciting sadness in the viewer over the lost land pictured, the images reflect the homogeneity of suburban commercial culture. Further, as (according to Victor Burgin in Looking at Photographs, 1977) images of photography are "inextricably caught up within the specificity of the social acts which intend that image and its meanings", the real sadness and romanticism to be found in these photographs is not in the contemplation of the land but of the lone artist wandering off behind Target in middle America at night.

Scope

Mark Wentzel, XLounge, Eames Chair, leather and foam

Project 4 is proud to participate in
SCOPE NEW YORK 08 - BOOTH #9

LOCATION SCOPE Pavilion at Lincoln Center Damrosch Park
62nd Street and 10th/Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10023
SCHEDULE
March 26-30
First View - Wed, March 26 - 3pm - 9pm
rsvp rsvp@madmuseum.org
PressView - Wed, March 26 - 5pm - 9pm
rsvp dan@susagrantlewin.com

Thursday, March 27, 10am - 8pm
Friday, March 28, 10am - 8pm
Saturday, March 29, 10am - 8pm
Sunday, March 30, 10am - 6pm

ADMISSION First View - $100 Free for VIP cardholders
General - $15 Free for VIP cardholders
Student - $10
Featuring the work of
Beau Chamberlain
Christine Gray
Patrick Holderfield
Tricia Keightley
Laurel Lukaszewski
Brian Ulrich
Alexis Weidig
Mark Wentzel

NEW YORK - Building on Miami’s overwhelming success, SCOPE launches its 2008 season with its flagship fair, SCOPE New York 08. SNY08, an invitation only edition of SCOPE art fairs, proudly returns to Manhattan’s most famous cultural icon, Lincoln Center, with a glass facade pavilion situated in Lincoln Center's Damrosch Park, at the corner of 62nd Street and 10th Avenue. SCOPE New York is just blocks from the Armory Show and serviced daily by VIP Zipcars, shuttles and pedicabs.

Featuring galleries from four continents and 20 countries, including China, Mexico, Japan, Korea, Brazil, Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Germany, UK, Spain, and Canada, SCOPE New York 2008’s 50 invitees will uphold its unique tradition of solo and thematic group shows presented alongside museum-quality programming, collector tours, screenings, and special events.The fair opens to Press,SCOPEand Armory VIPs on Wednesday, March 26, 3-9pm with the FirstView benefit, a $100 charitable donation for all non-VIP cardholders.

Introducing artists, curators, and cutting-edge galleries to new audiences internationally has made SCOPE the most comprehensive destination for the emerging art world available anywhere. With art fairs in Miami, Basel, New York, London, and the Hamptons, SCOPE is proud to be an influential presence in the expanding global art market.

For more information go to : http://www.scopenewyork.com/
or contact:
Anne Surak, Director
Rebecca Jones, Assistant Gallery Director

Amy Ross in New American Paintings

Amy Ross, Woodpeckershrooms # 1, Collage on paper, 15" x 22", 2007

On stands now!

Scope NY

Project 4 will be in Scope NY this month:

Download Project4Scope.pdf

Gangi Wednesday, Pilgrim Saturday

Wednesday, 9:00 sharp, join me (speckled in white paint) at The Red & The Black to see Gangi.

And then this weekend...

Project 4 presents :

PATRICK HOLDERFIELD

Pilgrim

March 8 – April 12, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 8, 6:00 - 8:30pm

Collectors Preview: Friday, March 7, 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Project 4 is proud to present a drawing and sculpture installation by Seattle-based artist Patrick Holderfield.

Drawing from diverse associations and sources, Patrick Holderfield endeavors to create work that requires an emotional and intellectual engagement. His goal is to offer some type of authentic experience inciting the viewer’s contemplation of his or herself in relation to the larger world through the poetic use of both familiar and the idiosyncratic imagery.

This current body of work centers around a series of drawings portraying environments that suggest pilgrimage, inappropriate expressions of emotions, transformation and conflict. Using the landscape as a grounding element, these scenes of tragedy and eloquence make analogy to current political, social and personal happenings. The accompanying sculptures and site-specific installations are seen as an extension of the drawings referencing boundaries and nature: specifically, the space, physically and psychologically, that confines and defines an environment.

“My vision is of the individual setting off on a journey that is both benevolent and malevolent and where the two are not so clear. It is also what’s found along the way” Patrick Holderfield, 2007

Patrick Holderfield holds a BFA from State University College in Buffalo NY. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions across the Pacific Northwest including the Tacoma Art Museum, Frye Art Museum and James Harris Gallery in Seattle. His work is in collections including the Tacoma Art Museum, Altoids Curiously Strong Collection, and the City of Seattle.

For additional information please Contact:
Anne Surak, Director
Rebecca Jones, Assistant Gallery Director

DIRECTIONS AND INFORMATION :

Project 4

Contact: 903 U Street NW Washington DC 20001
tel: 202 232 4340 fax: 202 232 4341
info@project4gallery.com
Website: http://www.project4gallery.com/
Hours: Wednesday - Friday 2:00 - 6:00 pm, Saturday noon - 6:00 pm and by appointment.
Map: See our location on Google Map (We are located at the intersection of 9th Street and U street NW).
Metro Access: Project 4 is easily accessible by metro. We are located one block east of the green line U St/African-American Civil War Memorial/Cardozo metro station, 10th Street exit.