Popcorn

Useless Drunks

Useless Opening, Friday August 3rd!

Also, go see the fabulous Jake Koenig in the Sola Nua production of The Drunkard, playing at Georgetown University's Davis Art Center until August 5.

Building Down

Building's coming down this weekend so come see it if you haven't.

Next week our industrial design show, Useless, goes up. A link to the PR is soon to come.

Also, Pink Line is holding a Happy Hour Fundraiser on Wednesday night, 6 pm - 8 pm at the 18th Street Lounge. The fundraiser is for Pediatric AIDS/HIV Care Inc. and will feature some interesting video work.

And amidst all of this, I am trying to get a little rest which is proving difficult in the new place. Besides my front door being situated about 24 inches from the building's washing machine, when the neighbors upstairs use their shower a loud tuba-ish alarm sounds throughout my apartment. I learned that this morning.

Cedric Delsaux

Cedric Delsaux, from his Landscapes series, archival print on Diassec

Somoroff Off Site

When I arrived in front of BravinLee's off site space, Michael Somoroff's producers informed me that the man who had just exited announced having experienced an epiphany while inside the video installation.

An ironic read on Somoroff's Illumination would describe how the Modernist idea of ultimate truth emerges from fragmentation socially and among multiple new media techniques. Or how Somoroff's architecture and video ("archi-video", as he calls it) comes closer than most video work to emulating real experience while displaying a fictional setting. Using sophisticated equipment like one of the only existing fish-eye lens projectors, Somoroff creates a complete environment to simulate reality, all the while actually displaying renderings of a computer-generated space. But Somoroff's completely designed and constructed space that hides behind closed doors on 26th Street, is sincere, profound and uses research and processes that set it apart from the rest of Chelsea as well as much of the contemporary art world.

The experience includes walking into a beckoning and immersing light upon entering the otherwise dark caverns. There is a circular room that projects a 270 degree pan of the computer-generated space. When standing in the middle of the room, there is a point when the viewer, once again, faces an intense light which this time pours in from two windows. The light pouring in through these windows becomes a motif in this project. The image is translated in the other videos and eventually three-dimensionally, in the triumphant monumental sculpture that correlates with this installation. The computer-generated space is a mosque, created as a composite of actual ancient mosques and ruins in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The light that comes from these two windows is generated using data collected from the patterns of light coming in from the skylight at the Rothko Chapel, where the original three dimensional representation of the light (Illumination I) resides. Made from cement, the monumental sculpture looks more like draped fabric. The Chapel holds a series of paintings by Rothko that were specially commissioned, and no artist has ever been commissioned to create a work there since. This event was not without controversy but completely appropriate. Both Rothko and Somoroff place social justice and peace at high priority in their work. There is light that calls out from deep within the concavities of Illumination I just as it does from within Rothko's dark paintings at the Chapel.

In the NYT article about Somoroff, he explains trying to achieve a "completely immersive environment". We all know how short video work can fall at the hand of distracting borders and visible hardware. Video wants to be reality and the only way to come close to that is to recreate everything around the viewer, to fabricate a complete environment. And that's a huge part of what Michael Somoroff is exploring with his "archi-video".

Somoroff himself seems set apart from the scene. As pointed out in the NYT article, he is a 50 year old emerging artist who is a senior partner at MacGuffin Films Ltd., creator of the Matrix Art Collective and a member of the Directors Guild of America. The Matrix Art Collective is a full-service art production facility allowing Somoroff the flexibility to create such comprehensive projects.

This installation is deeply spiritual, displaying epiphanies, revival and evolution.

For further reading check out this beautiful article by Donald Kuspit.

Settling...Settling...

I'm honestly still recovering from the busiest trip to NYC ever imaginable. And I'm moving. Today. And I haven't actually started packing. Here's some pictures from the last couple of weeks.

Obligatory mediocre firework photo from rooftop

17th and T NW

Frank Stella, roof of the Met

Michael Somoroff's offsite installation at BravinLee in Chelsea is incredibly interesting. More thoughts and information about this installation, the larger project and Somoroff's work in general coming soon...once settled.

In New York

I'll be running around New York until Friday. Some of the main attractions:

Michael Somoroff's exhibition at BravinLee

The Black Market at Anna Kustera

The grand opening of 31 Grand (at their new location)

Frank Stella at the Met

I should have lots to say once returned...

Everybody

needs this.

Harry Benson

Harry Benson, Andrew Wyeth, 1996

I can't stop thinking about Benson's portraits at The National Portrait Gallery. The show includes both photographs of staged events and those that are true photojournalism. The staged photographs could definitely be described as advertising. Benson does use the manipulated event to exacerbate (the Michael Jackson portrait - just go see it), exaggerate or counter the established viewpoint of the public towards an individual for his own self gain, I suppose. However the line gets fuzzy here as to when expressing an opinion in any work of art becomes a form of advertisement, just because the artist also uses his medium commercially. Photojournalism (or photojounalism-ish) work will always be related to functionality, but I think that the boundaries can be pushed and played with so that the work egresses from a completely linear act.

Also, Free Tetris.

Happy Fourth!

More Machines, Sex, New Media

(Breath V) Pink Bliss by Sabrina Raaf explores the seduction of technology today with the most appropriate of approaches: pure sophistication. The reationship between this machine and Hans Bellmer's Machine Gun(eress) in a State of Grace (shown in my earlier post) is strong.