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Wednesday, May 16, 2012

On the street-Wei Ling Amil

Wei Ling Amil is an artist and curator who is known as a recluse. In her 14 year work span her projects have always been one day events that bring in thousands of spectators, onlookers, and critics. Its difficult to follow her trajectory whether it be artist or curator as she blatantly refuses to acknowledge or work within what she considers technological avenues. Thus Facebook, Twitter and any other social network is non relevant to her. Here lies the issue where its practically impossible to know what she is working on and where her work will be shown. 

Her current project was shown yesterday in a pop up show in Taipei and it focused on minimalism (no photos allowed). The show consisted of stark white walls, stripped floors, and all windows painted white. Everything was crisp and impulsively clean. The space was austere and verged on uncomfortable were it not for the attendees circulating throughout the room. Wei Ling described the work as "modern and filled with light". The work was engaging and ritualistic in a very direct manner. I amongst others will continue to hope to see and be aware of more of her work. And perhaps one day we'll all have the benefit of experiencing Wei Ling's work directly. 

Gabriel Keldon

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Artist Interview Series! Kanishka Raja

interview by Johon Masterson
The third installment of our artist interview series is Kanishka Raja! His work at the Armory this year was a stand out (represented by Greenberg Van Doren). We're always looking to share new talent so give us a shout!  
Switzerland For Movie Stars, 2012
installation view with limited edition artists' book
oil and block printed silk on panel, 24 x 336 inches
Share a brief bio, where are you from and how you began in the visual arts? I was born in Calcutta. My parents are shopkeepers.  Calcutta was once the capital of British India and, from 1977 until some months ago, capital of the longest running elected communist government in the world.  It has always considered itself the intellectual and aesthetic heart of the country.
I arrived in the United States in 1987 to attend Hampshire College: a small, experimental liberal arts school in Amherst, MA.  It confirmed my childhood assumptions that America was an open, experimental, liberal and secular society (I didn’t get out much).  
Apart from Calcutta and Amherst, I’ve lived since then in Dallas, Boston and New York.
Tell us about your work. What themes do you pursue? Well, before anything else, I am a painter – I make pictures.  So I think primarily about pictures: how they’re constructed, how they’re read, how painting is different from other ways of making pictures and how best to allow painting to speak in all of the voices I want my paintings to speak in.
Currently I am working on a body of work for which the starting point is Switzerland: Switzerland’s self-definition as the standard bearer for the ‘neutral’; Switzerland as a repository of a certain kind of worldly ideal; the importance of – in fact, the necessity of Switzerland’s existence as some kind of imaginative model in the world.  The thought that if Switzerland did not exist, it would be necessary for the world to invent it.
This is of course, a starting point – both the research and the paintings themselves have already taken me down several bewildering, exhilarating rabbit holes that involve Hindi movies, Kashmir (“The Switzerland of the East”), the Hadron collider, pattern and textile design, Norman Rockwell and by extension, systems of belief and the search for an ideal. 
Confused enough yet?
You can read a more involved and detailed discussion about the genesis of this project in a conversation I recently had with the painter Mary Jones here:
Switzerland For Movie Stars, 2012
installation view
oil and block printed silk on panel, 24 x 336 inches
How has your practice changed over time?As a younger artist, I think that I assumed that one has to bring the whole world into the work to make it mean something. I am learning slowly that the best way to have the whole world in the work may be to leave out as much as possible.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given? This could be art related or not.
Occasionally for the better, but mostly for the worse, I can’t remember ever paying attention to any advice anyone’s ever given me.
Who have been your greatest influences? My parents, who are textile designers, built something that’s lasted 45 years at this point, with no training, no resources and zero access – based purely on intuition and love and sweat.
I didn’t know it then, but it was the first model for me of how to be and live as an artist in the world. It remains the model I hold closest to my heart.
Do you find yourself more attracted to work that is not like your own, or work that has similarities to yours? I am attracted to work that I feel like I can steal the most from.
Some things I’ve returned to again and again have been the films of Antonioni, Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red and Outside the Whale, an essay Salman Rushdie wrote in 1984.
It’s probably too early to tell, but a show at the Met from last fall, Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India, 1100-1900 may be the single greatest show of paintings I’ve ever seen. I want to steal it all.
What is your dream project and why? Let’s just say sky’s the limit. 
MY DREAM PROJECT:
1.   To live in a very dense, massively diverse, mostly secular, somewhat vulgar, urban environment with a very good mass transit system.
2.   To be able to go to a room in that city, shut the door and play by myself all day, every day. 
3.   To eat something fabulous at the end of the day.
4.   Oh wait…
What do you do for fun other than your work of course? Cook. Eat. Read, watch or listen to something made by someone else that makes me envious. I’m reading a book of conversations between Michael Ondaatje and the editor Walter Murch, which I am finding extraordinary (“The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film” by Michael Ondaatje).

I just watched Steve McQueen’s “Hunger” and while I could never bring myself to make something that strident, I deeply admire the fiction and invention necessary to make something so deeply committed to fact. Beautiful.

The music I’m replaying the most from this last year are Death Grips’ “Ex-Military”, the new Shabazz Palace record and everything Flying Lotus makes.  And how not to adore Das Racist?

Upcoming shows? Most immediately, I am in a group show opening next month at D.C. Moore Gallery in NY, curated by the painter Barbara Takenaga which includes Carrie Moyer, Tom Burckhardt and several other great painters, which I am excited to be in. Long term: having just finished a fairly complex project at the Armory in March, I feel the itch to work things out in my studio, so I’ve postponed making any other commitments.
The artists' book for Switzerland For Movie Stars is available as an ebook at: www.postwest.in
All images copyright and courtesy of Kanishka Raja. 

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Launch of Curator Interview Series! Evan J. Garza

interview by Johon Masterson

We are thrilled to launch our curator series with Evan J. Garza. It was a pleasure getting to know Mr. Garza and we are excited about his upcoming projects. Don't miss the show he recently curated william cordova: this one’s 4U (pa’ nosotros) up at The Mills Gallery, Boston, MA through April 15th.

Share a brief bio, where are you from and how you began in the visual arts.
 
I am exhibitions and public programs coordinator for the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and editor-at-large for New American Paintings. I’m also proud to be the co-founder and assistant director of Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR).

I was born and raised in Houston, Texas, where I lived for 25 years. I grew up around a lot of artwork. My parents would take us to museums every weekend and on trips. But for as much as I was exposed to art, I didn’t really gave it much thought when I was young. Growing up in a city with such incredible and important museums, like the Menil Collection, the Rothko Chapel, and the CAMH, I naively assumed everyone was aware of art and its impact. (As a kid, the Art Institute of Chicago scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off seemed to affirm this for me.) It didn’t occur to me, however, that art was a formative interest of mine or that it was a bona fide career path for me until I was nearly out of college and had been working in commercial galleries for a couple of years.

After curating my first show in early 2008, I moved to Boston for my partner (now husband), Michael Brodeur, with no job and no network. I hit the ground running and have been going ever since.

You have a vast and diverse résumé (critic, curator, writer) what kinds of experiences have helped you establish where you are today?

Many of the most formative experiences for me have been largely unexpected. I started working in commercial galleries because a friend opened a space and needed help starting out and thought I would be the right fit. My first art review was plagiarized by a monthly arts and culture magazine in Houston, after which the editor fired the writer and hired me instead. Later, I met the man who would become my husband, and he whisked me away to Boston. You can’t really plan for surprises like these to a certain degree; you simply ride them out with equal parts caution and passion, and lots of thought and coffee and cursing.

As well, I’ve always been a writer, ever since I was kid writing bad poems about boys in my livejournal (and it’s best not to go there). I could never have predicted that I would come to write about art, despite how much sense it makes when I look back. My parents collected nudes and work by Chicano artists, and my father was into astronomy. His engagement with those issues – apart from my biologically predetermined/subsequent interest in cosmology – has translated into my own interest in the investigation of big questions, which I recently explored with John C. Gonzalez in a collaboration at sübSamsøn. Artists, curators, and critics are constantly mining new and previously unexplored areas, hunting for answers and implications, understandings, and the influential nature of major events across time. They’re just big questions of a different sort.

Who have been your greatest influences throughout your career?

The artists that I’ve had the fortune to work with. By pushing the limits of their respective practices, they frequently force me to do the same to mine. William Cordova and John C. Gonzalez have really done that for me. Highly-engaged and thoughtful curators like Bill Arning and Jose Luis Blondet have also been greatly influential to how I think about exhibition-making and my relationships with artists.

Was there a point in your arts trajectory that caused you to completely change your direction?

Early on in my career in Houston I worked for commercial galleries in directorial positions. I enjoyed working with artists and discussing their work and putting exhibitions together. The transformation from idea and studio to physical site was an exciting process to participate in. However, I came to realize that I preferred to talk about relationships and art history and ideas and concepts and about practice and theory. Most of all, I learned to really value the friendships I formed with artists, based entirely around our relationships to, and engagement with, those ideas.

A month after moving to Boston in May of 2008, I got a job at a nonprofit space as the curator and gallery manager for Villa Victoria Center for the Arts in the South End. This produced a noticeable shift for me. It felt right to focus on exhibition-making, on the programmatic engagement of issues in contemporary art and global culture, and to do this while continuing to work directly with artists, which I also get to do now at the Museum School. That distinction is very important to me and was not immediately clear early on. I needed the experience of working in both contexts to discover which was the right fit.

Your current project is at the Mills Gallery in Boston, william cordova: this one’s 4U (pa’ nosotros). Please share how this project was realized and whether there were discoveries along the way.

I was introduced to William at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard in 2008, where he and I discussed his work for a speaker series with DRCLAS fellow Jose Falconi. I was immediately excited by our conversation, and I knew I wanted to do a project with him, but for his work it would require the right space. I was the curator at Villa Victoria Center for the Arts at the time, and the gallery there was not large enough for what I had in mind. In early 2011, Kristina Newman Scott and the Boston Center for the Arts were very excited about the project and the Mills Gallery was a brilliant spot for the kind of engagement with space and architecture that William is interested in.

There have been several discoveries along the way. A piece William had originally conceived for Boston had to be scrapped because of a problem with the material, and when I returned to the gallery that evening, he and the preparators had fashioned a wall that had been placed flat on the floor. I watched as William cut lines into the sheetrock, and placed stones at the points where the lines collected. The piece immediately reminded me of the Nazca Lines of Peru, which I’ve been interested in for years for their relationship to ancient forms of star mapping. So it was exciting when William mentioned the wall-drawing-turned-floor-sculpture had in fact been informed by the same ancient Nazca geoglyphs. I kind of nerded out and was really excited. It also solidified a lot of ideas about temporality and pre-Columbian forms of architecture in his work for me, and how William is able to bring these ideas ‘down to Earth’ in a sense.

Like most curators, you maintain a mental Rolodex of artists you have worked with, would like to work with. What turns you off/on about working with an artist?

I would argue with any assumption that I maintain a mental Rolodex of names. In a field forever married with name recognition (be it in the art world or art history), I am terrible with names. I can go into great detail about someone’s work – what they showed and when, what it looked like and what it meant, what influenced it, what was at stake, what it was made of, where the artist was from – but it can take a minute or two sometimes to draw up their name. I’ve always been more concerned with concepts and ideas than names. But one cognitive shortfall always seems to enhance another.

I’m really drawn to artists who push the limits of conventional medium specificity and who challenge themselves and the viewer with the materials they use and the physical presentation of that work. I’m turned on by artists who know what they want to communicate and don’t hesitate to do so. I’m drawn to artists who challenge perceptions and create new understandings and new ways of seeing. I’m interested in pioneers.

I’m turned off by artists who don’t know how to talk or write about what they do. And divas.

What is your dream project and why?

I have to be honest and say that I feel like I’m in the midst of organizing it right now. Last summer, I co-founded the country’s first artist-in-residency program exclusively for GLBT artists, Fire Island Artist Residency, with one of my best friends. A couple of years ago we recognized that Fire Island had an extraordinary GLBT history that we felt needed preserving, and we also had a real interest in adding to that queer art-making legacy. Through the project we’ve been host to renowned visiting artists like AA Bronson, Nayland Blake, Marlene McCarty, and this summer we’ll be hosting Jim Hodges, Jack Pierson, Taylor Davis, and Mary Ellen Strom. ARTINFO.com just included us in their list of top 20 residencies in the United States, and we haven’t yet begun our second year. The most incredible part of the project is knowing that we’re adding to the queer art-making narrative that has taken place on Fire Island while contributing that of the art world at large. It’s a total dream.

Upcoming projects, shows etc..

Apart from my exciting work in Exhibitions at the Museum School, I’m organizing an exhibition for the deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum with co-curator Dina Deitsch, opening January 2013. Paint Things: Moving Beyond the Stretcher will navigate a 20-year history of contemporary artists expanding painting into sculptural and installation forms that have breached the medium’s traditional spatial and material limitations, from the 1990s to the present. It’s a very exciting project, and we’re working with some incredible and highly influential artists. And Dina is a total blast to work with. 

I’m also putting together the 2012 summer program of Fire Island Artist Residency with my co-founder, Chris Bogia. 

Application deadline is May 4! www.fireislandartistresidency.org


Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Artist Interview Series! Cynthia von Buhler

The second installment of our artist interview series begins with Cynthia von Buhler. We're always looking to share new talent so give us a shout!

Photo by Kamila Harris
Share a brief bio, where are you from and how you began in the visual and performance arts?
My parents were from the Bronx. They wanted to get out of New York City and take their children to safer place to grow up. I grew up with six siblings in the Berkshires of Massachusetts.

We were an artistic family-- like the Von Trapps, but with art instead of music. I remember working on family art projects from the time I could hold a pencil. Once, we made a gigantic flying witch for a Halloween parade float. The witch head alone took up our whole basement. The wart on her nose was 3 feet tall. We had to make her in pieces with paper-mache and then attach her body parts together. A crane lifted her in the air for the parade! 

I attended theater camp every summer and we were constantly staging plays. Later, I joined my high school theater troupe. After college (I studied art in Boston and London) I began dancing for a performance art band called Sleep Chamber. That led to my own infamous performance art troupe, Women of Sodom. Our show always culminated with “The Doctor Song” and an enema. That project ended in 2000 and I have been creating short performance pieces ever since.

I have also been making art installations and immersive events for years.  When I lived in Boston I became known for my outlandish performances in clubs, disturbing installations in art galleries, and decadent parties in an old Victorian house named Castle von Buhler (I am named after this house). The whole second floor of the house was an art gallery. Each month one artist was given free rein to create an installation. The Whitney Museum sent a curator to check it out on more than one occasion.

I moved to NYC one month before the twin towers fell. It was a 4,500 square foot loft in the Meatpacking district. I hosted art openings and parties there. The rent was paid in collaboration between myself and an Italian curator named Stefania Carrozzini. We called it The Carrozzini von Buhler Gallery. Shoots for fashion, television, and film also helped out. 

In 2010, on my birthday, I staged an event called Freaks! It was held in a two-story 10,000 square foot Manhattan loft right next to the Empire State building.  There was a merry-go-round on the roof, contortionists, fire-eaters, and mermaids. I myself wore a swimable mermaid tail and greeted my guests from a water-filled clawfoot bathtub in the middle of a large all white room. This was right after the oil spill. I was surrounded by oil spill mermaids who hadn’t been cleaned off yet.

Some people say that immersive theater is a new thing. I disagree. I have been creating it my whole life.  Now it just has a name. 

Photo by Kate Black

Tell us about your work. What themes do you pursue? This past October we experienced the spectacular magic that is Speakeasy Dollhouse. Walk us through this charmed menagerie…. Themes in my work have changed over the years. For a long time I was obsessed with Renaissance art. Leonardo da Vinci did my family’s plumbing, after all (you need to read the Speakeasy Dollhouse book http://speakeasydollhouse.com/book to find out more about that). Religion was a focus of mine for many years. I’m fascinated by religions although I don’t really have one to call my own. I’m agnostic. I believe it is the most open-minded religion. Atheists are as closed-minded as religious zealots. They believe 100% that there is nothing. I like to keep an open mind to all possibilities. . . although I do tend to marry atheists. Other themes I have explored include sex, circus, and animal rescue. I  also write and illustrate children’s books http://comeinsidekitty.com http://butwhowillbellthecats.com. Books are another important mode of expression for me. 

Speakeasy Dollhouse http://speakeasydollhouse.com is a book and immersive play about my grandfather’s murder. “My Italian immigrant grandparents, Frank and Mary Spano, owned two speakeasies in the Bronx during Prohibition: one that masqueraded as a bakery, the other a secret nightclub. Shortly after Prohibition ended, my grandfather was shot and killed on the street in Manhattan. My grandmother was pregnant with her mother at the time, and upon hearing the news of the murder she went into labor. My grandfather’s body was laid out in one room of their small Bronx apartment while her mother was born in the room next to it.

Photo by Margee Challa

Nobody still living in my family knows why my grandfather was shot. When I began my search, nothing was known about the killer, his motive, or a trial. My grandmother took these secrets to her grave. And so, over the past year, I have been dusting off a complicated tale of bootlegging, mafia, infidelity, and murder set in Prohibition-era New York City.

I was inspired by Frances Glessner Lee’s miniature crime scene sets. She established the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard in 1936. At that time, innumerable murders went unsolved because evidence was mishandled or downright ignored. To train investigators of sudden or violent deaths (like my grandfathers) and to better assess visual evidence, Lee created the Nutshell Studies: dollhouses that students could examine from every angle.  Inspired by Lee’s murder dioramas, I decided to create the scenes from my own family mystery using handmade sets and dolls. Utilizing evidence from autopsy reports, police records, court documents, and interviews, I built a dollhouse-sized speakeasy, a hospital room, a child’s bedroom, and a pre-war apartment. I also created lifelike dolls with moveable limbs to live in these sets.
But dolls don’t make their own decisions. By adding actual human recreations of the characters and placing them in an interactive theater setting, I am taking Lee’s method of dollhouse crime scene investigation one step further. The play stages these events in mobster Meyer Lansky’s former Lower East Side speakeasy. The location is elaborately set up to mirror the dollhouse sets from the book. I like to think of the speakeasy as my dollhouse and the actors as my dolls.”
Walk you through it? I’ll let my assistant Rachel Boyadjis-- or Dominick Spano, rather-- walk you through it. Rachel is also an actor, and plays my uncle as a young boy. 
Photo by Margee Challa
Dominick Spano: “My Pa owns the best speakeasies in the whole Bronx. He’s the biggest man around. Mister door man runs the club at night, but really my Pa runs it because he knows everybody and everybody knows him, and his place is better than stupid old Dutch’s place. Mister Dutch Schulz owns a place too, but it isn’t as good as my Pa’s place. And it doesn’t have the best cannolis in the city, either-- my Ma makes those. She makes the tea and soda pop too, but I help, I’m always helping and I’m getting better and better at it, really I am. I made the last batch of tea all by myself even, and Pa says it’s real good.
If you come by the club or the bakery you can try some tea or special coffee. In the bakery the nice lady sometimes gives me coffee if I ask real polite-like, and if that bad police man isn’t looking I can snatch some candy from the jars. Nobody but the mean old police man minds. Sometimes my Uncle Frankie is down there too, playin’ cards with the boys. But my Aunt Anna always beats the boys, and she leaves messy lipstick on Uncle Frankie’s cheek.
If you go up to the club you have to know the password to get in. Mister door man only lets me in without the password, because my Pa is important and that means I’m important too, because someday I’m gonna run the whole place myself, because I’m the biggest. If you get into the club, you can hear some real good music and meet some real nice people-- some bad people too, though. Sometimes big old mister Tammany Hall man is there, his name is Jimmy Hines. He comes with his friend with a real nice top hat, Hulon Capshaw. He talks to Jimmy Hines but Jimmy don’t say much because he’s just drinking and singing Irish songs. You can dance up there too, but be careful if you see those pretty ladies Mrs. Guerrieri and her friend Lena. . . they’re friendly, but Ma thinks they dance too much. She says they should go to church and ask the Lord to forgive them. My Ma prays to Mary, the Mother of God all the time. Ma might give you a special present if you’re nice to her.
Frankie Guerrieri goes to my school. We were friends before when he lived in the Bronx. Now I hate him. I’ll tell you why if you buy me a drink. I’m old enough, promise, I just don’t want to go and bother the bartender right now. . .
His Pa, Mr. Guerrieri, is one of those quiet types. He owns a barbershop and sometimes he cuts my Pa’s hair, but I don’t like him either. I think he’s got funny eyes and I don’t think he likes my Pa very much.
My Ma is pregnant with a little baby boy. I know it’s gonna be a boy because the Spanos are big and strong, and boys are big and strong. If you want, you can come see my house where my Ma and my Pa and me live, and where my little baby brother will be born.
But if you do come by (and you should, you’re such a good friend of the family and we haven’t seen you in such a long time!) you should keep your eyes and ears open. You never know what will happen around here, and I got something to tell my Ma that she isn’t gonna like very much. . .” 

Photo by Margee Challa
What are some of the greatest influences in your work? 
Life and death are probably my two biggest influences. I have been working on a series called “What I Am Now You Will One Day Be.”  Many years ago I visited Rome. I happened to end up in the basement of a church which was filled with the bones of thousands of monks formed into chandeliers, wall moldings, and arches. http://www3.sympatico.ca/tapholov/pages/bones.html The moldings are human vertebrae pieced together. It’s gorgeous and haunting. You walk through a long hallway of this and at the very end there is a tiny plaque that reads, “What I am Now You Will One Day Be” in Italian. I have been making art around this idea ever since. This saying will be the epitaph on my grave. That way, my death itself will become and art installation.  I’m also going to be buried in the casket we are using in Speakeasy Dollhouse.

Do you find yourself more attracted to work that is not like your own, or work that has similarities to yours? This is a fascinating question. I enjoyed Sleep No More http://sleepnomore.com. It reminded me of how I decorated the various homes I have lived in.  I feel very comfortable in the Sleep No More installation. I like to go there and just lay on a couch or bed. I’m attracted to it, but I want to create it myself. I think this is why I like throwing parties. I enjoy going to wonderful parties, but I prefer throwing them. I like to give people experiences, rather than receive them. 

For years I was making 3-D painting sculptures. I utilized drippy paint and aging techniques. The art looked very faded and decayed like the old master paintings before restoration. An artist friend of mine told me that my work reminded him of Ed Keinholz. I had never heard of him before so I checked it out. I loved it. In fact, Ed Keinholz’s piece, The Wait, at The Whitney Museum, houses a live bird. This inspired me to start using live birds in my own work.

My paintings are inspired by the Renaissance, but I prefer visiting modern art museums.  I find them more inspiring. It is hard to answer this question because when I see something inspiring that isn’t like my own work I tend to take elements from it and add thm to what I do. My answer to these two questions will have to be yes and yes.

What do you do for fun, other than your work of course?
I rescue and rehabilitate cats, dogs and wild animals. I help any animal in need that crosses my path.  It is the most important work I do.  I’m so busy doing it I haven’t had time to make a website yet. The children’s books I write and illustrate are always about animals. http://comeinsidekitty.com and http://butwhowillbellthecats.com

I also scout locations for film and television. I’m a bit of a house collector, dollhouse-size and life-size. http://www.cvbspaces.com

Upcoming performances?
Speakeasy Dollhouse:
Dates & Time: Speakeasy Dollhouse will be held on the first Monday of every month beginning in February 2012 from 7:30PM – 11PM
Mon Mar 5 - Luck  

Mon April 2- Faith
Mon May 7 - Beauty
Mon June 4 - Sex
Tickets: Call Brown Paper Tickets at 1-800-838-3006 or order online at www.brownpapertickets.com/event/214593

Upcoming Exhibit:
I’m also going to be exhibiting my dollhouse sets from all of my books at The Mark Twain Museum http://www.marktwainmuseum.org/ in Hartford, CT in the Fall.
 
For more about Speakeasy Dollhouse please visit http://speakeasydollhouse.com
For more information about Cynthia’s art and books visit http://cynthiavonbuhler.com

Amit Gilberto 

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Welcome 2012!



Welcome 2012! And the launch of our new blog format! We will be working with exciting new contributors who are working on upcoming interviews. We also decided to kick start things with having artists we've worked with recommend others for us to interview. Its what we like to call "passing the baton"! There is just such an abundance of amazing work out there and who better to get us on the pulse then those part of it. We will also be launching "curator corner" snap interviews with curators we'd like to introduce. 

If you see, hear, smell, experience something that you feel we should cover please drop us a line, give us a shout, or send a good ole messenger pigeon.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Year End and Quick Picks

Dear readers,
We decided to cap off the year with your quick picks of artists who are burning up the scene and who we should watch in the New Year. The response was staggering thus we picked two from each city. We hope you enjoy!

Germany
Yutaka Makino. Extraordinary work, this young artist hands down received the most votes both from his Germany crowd and elsewhere. His work engages his audience by his multi dimensional use of music.  Usreihe  “Mr. Makino also uses installations and performances to explore the various dimensions of human perception.”

Stephanie Kiwitt. Ms. Kiwitt explores the visual of everyday life.  She works with recognizable imagery in found objects, interior furnishings, spaces, and still life. Galerie b2” Within the setting of interchangeable structures and monotonous urban forms, Kiwitt discloses distinctive situations, in which human presence and action interferes with the urban architecture and public order.” http://www.weingruell.com/index.php?/stephanie-kiwitt/

New York
Carol Bove. We’ve been familiar with Ms. Bove’s work for some time. It was no surprise to see her name come up again and again.  From her carefully structured drawings(Playboy vintage issues 60’s) to the sculptural aspects of her work she is constantly surprising and enthralling the viewer.  “Her work is not nostalgic,” says Shamim M. Momin, “It’s really a way of rethinking [that era’s] failed structures and strategies and examining how they’ve shaped our present.”






David Ellis.  Mr. Ellis’s familial background in his exposure to music is clearly evident in his work.  His work also focuses on the collaborative aspect of making art. All who recommended his work for a shout out referenced his prize winning work at Pulse "True Value (paint fukette)" (2011).  People went crazy for that piece and you will see why check it out on vimeo.

Boston
Karl Stevens.  It’s a gross understatement to say Mr. Stevens work is beloved in Boston. He’s been a Boston Phoenix artist/cartoonist since 2008. And he’s also published three books. His work is personal, reflective, and always engrosses the viewer. Comics Reporter “What makes this approach fun as comics is that you get to see those pages as work product, visual narratives themselves like the ones before and after them, or as a way to track what's on the author's mind that breaks with other parts of the story being told.” We applaud his body of work and look forward to more. http://karlstevensart.com/

Fredo Conde. Mr. Conde's work continues to enthrall New Yorkers and Bostonians alike. His work focuses on the marriage of painting and sculpture in articulating themes of consumerism, faux, and social hierarchy. His briefcase shown at Exit Art filled to the brim with bling watches was a favorite of the curators. Greg Cook “ Bostonian Fredo Conde's sculptures are like portraits of living-large America. There's a glib and shallow feel to Conde's art that perhaps echoes the society it portrays. "Scratch the surface and it's paste," this make-believe bling seems to be saying.” http://fredoconde.com/

 




All images copyright of artists showcased.

As always we want to hear from you on new topics, shows to see, thoughts to ponder, what you want more of, give us a shout! We know our readers aren’t bashful and we do respond to every email, comment, and carrier pigeon that comes our way. Look for our new format coming soon.

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Buy local!

We hear this often buy local, please buy local, support your local community. But do we apply this to buying art? Now this discussion has come up many times over the course of the last few months. Particularly since it is the so called holiday season and we should all be shopping to help bring the economy back to its glory.

But what I have learned is that in reference to buying art we buy it when we travel outside of our local communities. Now I can almost see the collective head nod of "no not me". This is a fact that you wind up in another city see some great work and then snap it up. The reality is you are then back home and don't have the cash to spend on your local artists.

So please buy local art and support all those hard working artists.