Vizcaya's Contemporary Arts Project

I love historic houses, the quirkier, the better.  One of my favorites is Miami's Vizcaya Museum and Gardens.  I once had a very strange experience there since I was the only visitor, wandering around the property all alone.  Built in the 1910s as a winter home for agricultural industrialist James Deering (who was an International Harvesters executive) the house is an interesting Italianate structure with a mélange of styles in its interior.  When I was there more than 10 years ago, the house felt a little run down and in need of some love.  What excites me now is the Contemporary Arts Program Vizcaya is curating.  The juxtaposition of contemporary artists working within a historical setting is so exhilarating!

To invigorate the museum Vizcaya has initiated a Contemporary Arts Project in which artists create art and installations that emerge from, capitalize on, and/or expand upon Vizcaya and its history.  Here's some information about the most recent exhibition with New York Artist Francesco Simeti.

From Vizcaya's site:  "Francesco Simeti's A seahorse, a caravel and large quantities of concrete, stone, fill, topsoil, tiles, piping, trees, and other plants is the winter/spring exhibition of Vizcaya Museum and Gardens' Contemporary Arts Project (CAP), a commission program that invites artists to develop site-specific projects inspired by Miami's most popular National Historic Landmark. The exhibition will be on view February 24–May 21, 2012.

New York-based artist Francesco Simeti transforms one of Vizcaya's outdoor fountains into a surreal theatrical set, providing a playful and melancholic commentary on the fragility of human endeavors. Inspired by the mechanical apparatuses that simulated natural phenomena in Baroque gardens, Simeti's animated assemblage is composed of floating sculptures representing elements of the estate. The project continues in the Main House exhibition room with an installation of historic artifacts pulled from storage and on display for the first time ever."

I would LOVE to see this exhibition at Vizcaya, so if you're in Miami, please go check it out and report back!  

World's Fair Comes to Kansas City

Keller Frères, France (1881–1922). Pitcher, 1900. 

The history of world's fairs staggers across the country in architectural fragments.  Queens, NY's Flushing Meadows, the Seattle space needle, and the Sunsphere in World's Fair Park in Knoxville, Tennessee, (where I used to live and gazed upon the sphere every day), are a few remnants of this wide-ranging, romantic, imperialist, exciting 19th century idea.  One of my favorite historical novels is Erik Larson's brilliant Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, which depicts fictionalized events surrounding the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.  If you haven't read it, I do recommend it!  I am anxious to read his latest book as well.
Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art opens the exhibition Inventing the Modern World:  Decorative Arts at the World's Fairs, 1851–1939, April 14.  The exhibition will feature 200 objects from multple world's fairs.  Those objects will be the cutting edge designs of their times.  The exhibition is co-curated by the Nelson-Atkins and the Carnegie Museum of Art.  

I can't wait!

Sarah Hobbs, Fantastic Georgia-based Photographer

Sarah Hobbs, a Georgia-based photographer, has a gorgeous new book of her photographs hot off the press.  Hobbs' work in this new book published by Charta is reproduced in beautiful imagery with two essays.

I first met Sarah in 2004 when I curated a solo exhibition of her photography at the Knoxville Museum of Art.  She creates large-scale images of installations that she makes that mine the fields of obsessions, anxieties, and the humor and absurdity of daily living.  The cover image Untitled (insomnia) with its omnipresent post-it notes suggests the insomniac's tortuous attempt at sleep while reminders of worries and to-do lists dangle above the bed, rupturing any idea of peace.  Here, the homey bed offers neither safe refuge, nor comfort.

Represented by Nancy Solomon of Atlanta's Solomon Projects, Hobbs continues to create complex and thoroughly engaging images.  And, she is one of the nicest people with whom I've ever worked.  Congrats, Sarah!

Marilyn Mahoney's Cinematic Drawings

First of all, I said that I'd follow up with my review of Ari Fish's installation at La Esquina.  Well, I tried to see it last Sunday, (suffering with a  monstrous cold), and it was closed, despite the fact that it was supposed to be open!  Grr.  There's too much to see and do in the world, so we're moving on.  

Here's my review, in the Kansas City Star, of Kansas City artist Marilyn Mahoney's work at Avila University's petite and nicely appointed Thornhill Gallery.  It's a really nice space; great for intimate works.

Arthur's Turn

Artist Marilyn Mahoney’s ‘Cinematic’ has tiny details, grand scope 

Drawings shine in a midcareer exhibit of her work at the Thornhill Gallery.

By DANA SELF, Special to the Star

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/02/08/3415080/cinematic-has-tiny-details-grand.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

If a body in motion tends to stay in motion, then Marilyn Mahoney’s drawings are images of perpetual kinesis.

Trusses, bridges, and other architectural fragments are the vehicles by which the midcareer Kansas City artist examines perspective, spatial relationships, abstraction, and underlying themes of dance, cinema, and memory.

The show in the Thornhill Gallery at Avila University has an enigmatic title, “Cinematic.” In its broadest definition, the name aptly conveys the essence of the work. Its scope is grand, yet Mahoney manipulates the most minute details with precision and dramatic flair.

By drawing, painting, and cutting on Mylar and paper in shades of gray, cream, black and rust, Mahoney designs and manipulates elements that dissolve from one thing to the next, suggesting contradictory notions of movement and immobility.

Everything can be seen in flux.

Out of the 14 works, two are traditional paintings on canvas while the rest are layered drawings on Mylar and paper. While the paintings are accomplished, it’s in the drawings that Mahoney really shines.

Interestingly, Mahoney cajoles more movement from her acutely precise, hand-cut shapes layered upon one another and manipulated with paint and graphite than she does from the relative freedom of acrylic paint. As illogical as it sounds, the paintings seem a bit staid by comparison. In “Scrimshaw — Truss,” those trusses feel stubbornly anchored to the striped background.

The paintings lack the drawings’ freedom.

“Licorice Twist,” the largest work on paper is, among all the works, the most bewitching. It is precise, lyrical, and shot through with dazzling choreography.

The drawing is a cross between an abstracted, elegant pavilion and a whirling dervish. Mahoney said it was influenced by her mother’s dancing pirouettes. Because the forms float unencumbered on the paper, the entire composition, with its sinuous curves and arching protrusions, feels changeable, unpredictable and cinematic.

In “South Pacific-Horizon,” Mahoney strips down to the basic elements that she embraces in all of her drawings. Here two nestling, recumbent trusses cut a sharp line through the ether.

Mahoney’s individual drawing components exist in a geometry of spatial relationships to one another and to the picture plane. At times the trusses and images coalesce into an abstracted object; they suggest a building or an architectural fragment, and at other times, the drawings exist in almost pure abstraction.

Mahoney meticulously investigates the push and pull of perspective in all of the work. She delves only into surface appearances in some drawings and in others she digs through layers and unearths spatial ambiguities. Even her earthy color choices imply the archeology of accretions.

In “Arthur’s Turn,” thick layers of trusses and sharp angles create a chaotic field that seems impenetrable.

In Mahoney’s abstracted choreography there is no movement without quiet and no quiet without some movement. Something is always stirring, or about to become.

The exhibition’s title, “Cinematic,” launches and summarizes this body of work. Mahoney leads us through stages of stability and instability, close-ups and long shots, as she pans across sections of changeable architectural fragments.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/02/08/3415080/cinematic-has-tiny-details-grand.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

February First Friday in Kansas City!

February brings us crazy warm weather (it has been in the 60s for the past week) and another First Friday.  I'm really interested to see Ari Fish's installation at La Esquina, 1000 West 25th St. Kansas City, MO, which opens tonight.  She has created a "temporary temple" mixed media installation called High Seas, Low Planes.  I'll be reviewing it, so, stay tuned.  I love a good installation, so, we'll see how she does.  

On Tuesday, February 21, my friend, composer Paul Rudy performs there with Heidi Svoboda, 6 p.m.