tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16256596766888304582024-03-05T05:48:49.625-08:00Dana SelfAs a former contemporary art museum curator, I've had the pleasure of working with fascinating artists, dealers, and collectors over the years. Now I write freelance art reviews, mostly for the Kansas City Star, work with private clients, and in general, write about art and ideas that I love from the edge of the Kansas prairie.Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.comBlogger28125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-24342954237352805352012-07-14T00:00:00.000-07:002012-07-14T00:00:01.381-07:00Hillbilly Kama Sutra Is a Yawn!<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">This four-person exhibition is over, but you can check out the artists' work at their web sites. This review was in the <a href="http://www.kansascity.com/2012/06/13/3654942/bizarre-to-sublime-at-sherry-leedy.html#storylink=misearch" target="_blank">Kansas City Star</a>, June 13, 2012.</span></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AOvvzrf52ns/T_41890AcyI/AAAAAAAAADs/hC848S3RAr4/s1600/chameleon.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AOvvzrf52ns/T_41890AcyI/AAAAAAAAADs/hC848S3RAr4/s320/chameleon.png" width="256" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Chameleon, by Marcus Cain</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>F</b></span>iendishly disturbing, “The Hillbilly Kama Sutra” is also often predictable.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">St.
Louis printmaker <a href="http://evilprints.com/site/?page_id=217" target="_blank">Tom Huck</a>’s inelegant suite of linoleum cut prints,
“The Hillbilly Kama Sutra,” is a study in, among other things,
disparities. The prints at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art are beautifully
detailed, drawing influence from the historical thematic print series
of William Hogarth and Honore Daumier.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"> Huck’s suite maps out in
graphic detail humans, skeletons and other beings — costumed and
otherwise — in multiple stages of violent sexual activity. Yawn.</span></div>
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If the results are wince-inducing and mostly grotesque, this printmaking
process is strikingly intricate, which is, of course, part of the
point. Huck has said he wants “to make bad things beautiful.” By setting
up the age-old and stale don’t-want-to-look-but-can’t-help-but-look
paradox, he creates a disquieting print suite with indeterminate and
perhaps simply gratuitous purpose.</span></div>
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> <a href="http://anneaustinpearce.com/" target="_blank">Anne Austin Pearce</a> and <a href="http://marcuscain.com/home.html" target="_blank">Marcus Cain</a> are 2012 Charlotte Street Foundation visual artist fellows.
Pearce’s “Undertow” feels like a sea change. Having finally shed the
fragmented body, these new paintings surpass her previous work. Painted
on paper and framed, the giant 84-by-54-inch paintings “Inverted” and
“Overlooking a Well” are staggeringly accomplished.</span></div>
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Using water as
a metaphor for her thoughtful examination of “the unnamable corridors
of emotion,” Pearce’s free-flowing works suggest sophisticated yet
enchanted underwater fairylands. Now untethered from the human form,
Pearce is free to utilize space with more authority and creative
freedom. The movement in all of these works feels completely alive and
complicated in ways that her previous work did not.</span></div>
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> The five
paintings of “Disruptive 1-5” enjoy a velvety surface. The flowing
paint, partially absorbed into the wood panel surface, has a magnetic
effect, pulling us along. “Undertow” is an apt title for Pearce’s
metaphysical paintings inspired by water and its energy.</span></div>
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> Marcus
Cain continues his interest in stippling. Abstract paintings with little
quirky eyes could feel banal, but Cain’s earnest soulfulness keeps
cliché at bay. His carefully plotted paintings radiate dense precision
and yet something unknowable and mysterious. Cain’s meticulousness
embodies a sense of order out of disorder and control over chaos.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">
While Cain notes that he approaches the world with “wonder and dread,”
we can’t help but find the wonder in each of his delicate, but
definitive paintings. The dots radiate energy; the paintings pulsate and
vibrate. Painted as sheer dynamism, shadowy faces and heads emerge from
the space of these paintings as if in transformative states of being
and becoming.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> <a href="http://kentmichaelsmith.com/home.html" target="_blank">Kent Michael Smith</a> also has the ability to stay
true to a particular process or theme, yet continually advance it in
engaging ways. In this latest group of paintings suspended in resin,
Smith works in the round and has also begun to use larger geometric
acrylic shapes within all the paintings. Where those geometric forms
have been smallish in the past, they are now large and commanding,
giving the works a new feeling of heft and difference.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> While his
backgrounds are typically gestural, as a counterpoint to the strict
geometric forms that float suspended above, in two of the works he has
scraped the paint off of his studio floor to create the background.
These multihued scrapings add an alien depth to his already hypnotic
works. The scrapings are dense, a little dirty, and he layers them so
they become a contentious and unfamiliar surface upon which his sharp
geometric forms smoothly ride. </span></div>
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> My advice? Hightail it to the gallery for a jam-packed free ride with four artists doing what they do best.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />Read
more here:
http://www.kansascity.com/2012/06/13/3654942/bizarre-to-sublime-at-sherry-leedy.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy</span></div>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-7715853143103922352012-07-11T19:15:00.000-07:002012-07-11T19:15:17.387-07:00Gallerist Bernice Steinbaum To Close Miami Gallery!<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5ID0L0Dk7w4/T_4yvZ5_UCI/AAAAAAAAADg/Vet93Tte0uw/s1600/bernice.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="224" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5ID0L0Dk7w4/T_4yvZ5_UCI/AAAAAAAAADg/Vet93Tte0uw/s320/bernice.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">photo, Liam Crotty</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Bernice Steinbaum, one of the most energetic and dedicated gallery owners I've ever worked with—in New York and then Miami—is closing her Miami gallery after 12 years. I remember when she left her New York Soho gallery to open her Miami gallery, I was shocked then, and shocked now that she won't own her own gallery any longer. At 70 (which surprises me, as she seems ageless), it's time for a change. Bernice has always worked with extremely talented artists, with whom I've had the pleasure of working, including Ken Aptekar, Hung Liu, and MacArthur "Genius" Award winner Deborah Willis, to name a few.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Bernice, you are a force of nature! You shall be missed!</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Read Lydia Martin's article in the <i>Miami Herald</i> <a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/07/08/2883299/miami-gallery-pioneeer-bernice.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</span></span>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-63116300087482341502012-06-11T19:00:00.000-07:002012-06-11T19:00:09.958-07:00Kansas City artist Jarrett Mellenbruch's Fantastic Sculpture<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qb1Uw5KlgeY/T9aiP8kM3lI/AAAAAAAAADU/0dNpUWWZuz0/s1600/Picture+1.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qb1Uw5KlgeY/T9aiP8kM3lI/AAAAAAAAADU/0dNpUWWZuz0/s320/Picture+1.png" width="214" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>A Busy Solitude</i>, Jarrett Mellenbruch</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Kansas City artist <a href="http://www.jarrettmellenbruch.com/" target="_blank">Jarrett Mellenbruch</a> has a gorgeous sculpture in Bill Brady's gallery in the West Bottoms. See my review<a href="http://www.kansascity.com/2012/06/06/3643610/art-review-unique-materials-stand.html#storylink=misearch" target="_blank"> here</a> in the <i>Kansas City Star</i>, or read it below. Mellenbruch is also participating in this year's Avenue of the Arts public art project. His site specific installation FLOAT is a field of hammocks facing the iconic Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Here's my review that includes Mellenbruch's <i>A Busy Solitude</i> sculpture.</span></div>
<h1 class="entry-title" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Unique materials stand out in ‘East West Shift to the Middle, Part II’</span></h1>
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<br />Read
more here:
http://www.kansascity.com/2012/06/06/3643610/art-review-unique-materials-stand.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy</div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Garbage bags and gongshi have nothing in common. But as strange and
alluring bedfellows, they inspire Kansas City artist Jarrett Mellenbruch
and Brooklyn-based Andrew Sutherland, two of the 16 artists exhibiting
at Bill Brady’s gallery. These two artists are the highlights of
“East West Shift to the Middle, Part II,” the second of Brady’s
exhibitions aimed at establishing his presence in the Kansas City
gallery arena.</span></div>
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Mellenbruch and the self-taught Sutherland are
acutely engaged with the material processes of their work, adding a
layer of context beyond the conceptual impulses that inform them.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Mellenbruch’s
satisfyingly chaotic “A Busy Solitude” initially may suggest Petah
Coyne’s wax-covered objects. But Mellenbruch writes that his sculpture
emerges from his interest in Chinese scholar rocks, or gongshi.</span></div>
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">
His cacophonous work has a counterintuitive empathy with the
contemplative nature of the curious scholar rock. The beautiful and
sculptural gongshi were removed from their natural locations to serve as
focal points of personal reflection, as microcosms for the whole
natural world.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">The artist’s incorporation of absurdist objects
such as tiny clown and kitten sculptures, branches and berries creates a
visual Tower of Babel, perhaps also exciting in us deliberation of the
weird world at large.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> Sutherland’s three works reveal his
material eccentricity. Both “Untitled (Red Tape)” and “Untitled (Garbage
Bag Painting)” look exactly like red tape and black garbage bags
mounted on canvas and covered with a glazy, shiny surface. However, the
painstaking process involves applying about 40 coats of paint —
pigmented and clear medium — onto garbage bags and a taped box, and then
carefully peeling it off the objects to obtain the skin of a painting,
which Sutherland mounts to canvas.</span></div>
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">The pieces are uncanny,
magical and obsessively detailed. While “Red Tape” is his best work in
the exhibition, his sculpture “Geode” — plaster, chicken wire and tiny
shards of car glass individually glued — is also an exciting triumph of
material and process.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Robert Greene’s “Scott,” in his standard
semi-monochromatic palette, is composed of his trademark vertical
painted lines in horizontal rows. Greene’s rhythmic paintings pulsate.
The lines optically undulate up, down and across the canvases.</span></div>
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Kate Shepherd and Gordon Terry explore the vast quietude of space in their dark panel paintings. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Terry’s
trippy hallucinogenic blobs floating in space are a delicious
counterpoint to Shepherd’s strict geometric forms that divide up her
infinite space clustered with tiny white dots.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Other than
Mellenbruch’s and Sutherland’s works, Brady’s exhibition is missing a
major wow factor that might have felt inventive and unusual. While Brady
writes in an email that his goal is “to inform and be a reference for
local artists, collectors, and museums of what is current and trending
on both coasts,” simply racking up 16 artists on white gallery walls
fails, so far, to uncover innovation.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> The exhibition is diluted,
not strengthened, by the high number of artists. Fewer artists showing
multiple works would resonate more deeply, because everybody knows that
too many artists spoil the vichyssoise.</span></div>
<div style="-moz-font-feature-settings: normal; -moz-font-language-override: normal; color: black; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; height: 1px; line-height: normal; overflow: hidden; text-align: left; text-transform: none; width: 1px;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />Read
more here:
http://www.kansascity.com/2012/06/06/3643610/art-review-unique-materials-stand.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy</span></div>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-66461332461282397812012-04-30T19:10:00.000-07:002012-04-30T19:10:22.259-07:00You Going to Brazil Soon? See Marco Maggi.<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IYMSBf0-Cj4/T59Disky0VI/AAAAAAAAADI/U2MSlEUaJsQ/s1600/Picture+2.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="129" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IYMSBf0-Cj4/T59Disky0VI/AAAAAAAAADI/U2MSlEUaJsQ/s200/Picture+2.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Marci Maggi</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">If you are in the neighborhood of Saö Paulo anytime before May 13, then please, go see <a href="http://hosfeltgallery.com/index.php?p=artists&a=Marco%20Maggi" target="_blank">Marco Maggi</a>'s exhibition at Instituto Tomie Ohtake. Maggi, who divides his time between New York State and Montevideo, Uruguay, has installed an exhibition titled <i>Functional disinformation, </i></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i>drawings in Portuguese</i>.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> Maggi, truly one of the nicest people in the world, works with concepts of time and language in his exhibition.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> The exhibition includes a large scale paper installation, in which he stacks sheets of paper and carves into some of the sheets. Maggi is known for this type of installation; the <a href="http://www.kemperart.org/" target="_blank">Kemper Museum</a> in Kansas City owns one, plus a couple of his other works.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Maggi notes, "All my work lies on the threshold between two and three dimensions: engraving and drawing, plan and installation, the line that cuts the paper and the micro sculpture."</span></span>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-21426244363140830012012-04-25T03:48:00.001-07:002012-04-25T03:48:23.204-07:00Julie Chang at Hosfelt Gallery<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju46KnFZw6T3QemJWspMVzQDZuxuzfCZAIXWoYYvZJKts7aUwodsentjBtpKi0RUygENdidZolXmAZ7V4T-_S0ih9TE_v6313zPMQxj4wniaYsyMsJRn5yVOqPB6lLihRGnid_-2-1yeGp/s1600/chang.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju46KnFZw6T3QemJWspMVzQDZuxuzfCZAIXWoYYvZJKts7aUwodsentjBtpKi0RUygENdidZolXmAZ7V4T-_S0ih9TE_v6313zPMQxj4wniaYsyMsJRn5yVOqPB6lLihRGnid_-2-1yeGp/s320/chang.png" width="267" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Julie Chang, studio view</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I've been following <a href="http://juliewchang.com/" target="_blank">Julie Chang</a>'s work for a couple of years and I love it. She stitches so many influences into her work—her Chinese heritage, social expectations, to name a couple—layering her art with meaning. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">She's having her first solo exhibition in New York through June 16 at <a href="http://www.hosfeltgallery.com/" target="_blank">Hosfelt Gallery</a>. In <i>C</i></span><strong style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-weight: normal;"><i>hinese. Japanese. Indian Chief</i>—she takes the name from a game she played as a child—she exhibits beautiful panel paintings with multiple cultural influences. If you're in NYC, stop by the gallery and see this gorgeous work.</strong></span>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-71021396605365458522012-04-23T04:18:00.000-07:002012-04-23T04:18:45.734-07:00Need A Grant Source? Try Fractured Atlas<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">I get posts from Fractured Atlas in NYC and have been interested in their granting opportunities for artists and arts organizations. There is a fee to be a member, but it might be worth your time to check them out <a href="http://fracturedatlas.org/" target="_blank">here. </a></span></div>
<br />Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-50592358589556109682012-04-19T18:59:00.000-07:002012-04-19T18:59:40.633-07:00Headed to London This Summer? NYC? Portland? Chattanooga? Get a Street Art App!<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">If you're headed to London for the Olympics in a few months, that's cool, but you don't want to miss some of the best art in the entire world in London's museums, galleries, and on the streets! How do I find all that street art you ask? Why, on your Street Art App for your iphone, that's how! Cassandra Daily gives us<a href="http://www.cassandradaily.com/tech/art-uncovered/" target="_blank"> this post</a> about public art apps in London, NYC, and Portland, OR.</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><strong> </strong> </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/street-art-london-geo-street/id471746725?ls=1&mt=8" target="_blank">Street Art London</a> app for iPhone offers a comprehensive map of London's outdoor art.</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> The <a href="http://www.mta.info/art/app/" target="_blank">Arts for Transit app</a> <strong></strong>lets New York City's subway riders search the Art For Transit collection by artist or subway line.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"> The <a href="http://publicartpdx.com/" target="_blank">Public Art PDX</a> app helps Portlanders find the city’s public art.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">My friend Matthew Carroll is cofounder of <a href="http://www.secondsitellc.com/projectsPAC.html" target="_blank">SecondSite LLC</a>, which provides a mobile app for the public art of Chattanooga. Check it out!</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-20961441816768015632012-04-12T18:34:00.000-07:002012-04-12T18:34:51.755-07:00New Gallery Space in Kansas City's West Bottoms Could Use Some Love<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Three Kansas City artists are running a new gallery space, 1522 St. Louis, in Kansas City's West Bottoms. In their first exhibition they are working a little haphazardly, suggesting that they need to put a little more love and attention into exhibition organization. This is their first exhibition, so they have lots of time! I reviewed it in the <i>Kansas City Star</i> <a href="http://www.kansascity.com/2012/04/11/3546881/muddled-dialogue.html#storylink=misearch" target="_blank">here</a>. Or read it below! </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Uc9nuB4HFsM/T4d__yur9YI/AAAAAAAAAC0/v9XwJqBm6qY/s1600/katieford.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="197" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Uc9nuB4HFsM/T4d__yur9YI/AAAAAAAAAC0/v9XwJqBm6qY/s200/katieford.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Katie Ford, "The Science of Idealism + Social Graces," detail</td></tr>
</tbody></table><h1 class="entry-title"><span style="font-size: small;">Viewers struggle to decipher meaning of gallery’s exhibit based on random words</span></h1><div style="color: black; font: 10pt sans-serif; height: 1px; overflow: hidden; text-align: left; text-transform: none; width: 1px;"><br />
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/04/11/3546881/muddled-dialogue.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Should you be leery of an exhibition whose theme “was generated randomly”? </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The answer may depend on your patience.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">A project space is a different animal from a commercial gallery or an institutional space. It can be freer and looser, which can be good or not. It can work if managed properly, but if the goal is to broaden a conversation with an audience, then a more specific vision may be the first order for the folks running the 1522 St. Louis space.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Kansas City artists <a href="http://www.elhanson.com/" target="_blank">Erika Lynne Hanson</a>, Justin Gainan and Mike Erickson are operating 1522 St. Louis, a small space in the West Bottoms. Their inaugural exhibition, “Naamah, Uliginous, Laborer,” features an installation by Kansas City artist <a href="http://katiefordstudio.com/about" target="_blank">Katie Ford</a>.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Hanson said the gallery exists as an experimental, organic space in which invited artists respond to ideas or arbitrary words presented by the three artists running the space.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The gallery’s stated model “is that of the studio practice where one action, be it a random or well-researched decision, informs the next.” </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Isn’t that simply everyday life, one action informing the next? Wake, get out of bed; stay in bed, skip work; action, consequence; and so on until your days are filled.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">For this inaugural installation, Ford was asked to respond to the three words of the title, which Hanson said were randomly chosen — “a dictionary was thrown into the air” — with no thought to content or meaning.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Isn’t this idea straight out of reality TV, with little regard for expertise?</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Despite the admittedly careless challenge imposed by the artists in charge, Ford produces an earnest, if somewhat impenetrable, artistic response.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">In an installation composed of bundled sticks, plastic-wrapped cardboard and other detritus, Ford’s materials seem to denote place, with common debris defining the space — Thomas Hirschhorn in miniature.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">She said by email that her interest in the failed social/scientific experiment Biosphere 2 informed her work.“In looking for a way to interpret these words in a way that rang true with the concepts in which I’m already interested, using these experiments in isolated living and re-created biospheres seemed to make a lot of sense.” </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">There’s a platform covered with cardboard mimicking hardwood flooring, bundles of sticks and a flag that seems to suggest a landing or colonialist land claim. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">“I enjoy playing with the interactions between the materials themselves and also let the materials remain fairly obvious or bare because I like the human implication, the levels of manipulation,” she said. “Also because of this, I mostly like to start with fairly raw materials.” </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Although she is trained as a printmaker, Ford’s interest in different materials is wide-ranging and generous.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The installation, which Ford titled “The Science of Idealism + Social Graces,” is raw but not overwhelming like some accumulation-based installations can be. Although the tiny gallery space allotted might have curtailed her work.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">However, audiences need conceptual and visual access; we can’t all have long email exchanges with artists about their art. The meaningless title should have been dropped because it provides no reference or access point for viewers, and, in the end, the artist produced a respectable installation based on her own interests in spite of, not because of, the title she was given.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">It’s a good thing to have another exhibition space in town, but “studio practice” may be an insular academic conceit that is difficult to translate to the actual world of casual visitors.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Isn’t the goal for a larger conversation than the one you can have with your friends? In the future, the goal to expand artistic and conceptual ideas to include an ever-wider ring of participants might be more winningly achieved with a more thoughtful approach.</span></div><div style="-moz-font-feature-settings: normal; -moz-font-language-override: normal; color: black; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; height: 1px; line-height: normal; overflow: hidden; text-align: left; text-transform: none; width: 1px;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/04/11/3546881/muddled-dialogue.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-43576232988805766302012-03-23T07:49:00.000-07:002012-03-23T07:49:47.791-07:00Mother-Daughter Duo at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-w88Yfo8GB1U/T2u5Xfh6LRI/AAAAAAAAACo/qX97gixtsuQ/s1600/flux.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-w88Yfo8GB1U/T2u5Xfh6LRI/AAAAAAAAACo/qX97gixtsuQ/s320/flux.png" width="212" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Judy Onofrio, Flux</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.judyonofrio.com/" target="_blank">Judy Onofrio</a> and her daughter <a href="http://www.jenniferonofrio.com/" target="_blank">Jennifer Onofrio Fornes</a> have an exhibition whose spooky undertones are sometimes successful, and sometimes not. Here's my review in <a href="http://www.kansascity.com/2012/03/21/3503289/sherry-leedy-displays-a-mother.html#storylink=misearch" target="_blank">The Kansas City Star</a>.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">If you think “Danse Macabre” is just a delightfully overplayed Camille Saint-Saens tone poem, you should hasten to see this odd mother-daughter exhibition at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art. Haunting bone sculptures and ghostly photographs create a new dance macabre.</span><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Artists who use bones in their work surely realize the slender edge of disturbing upon which they dance.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Wisconsin self-taught artist Eugene Von Bruenchenhein suggested visionary worlds with his delicate chicken and turkey bone thrones and towers.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Bones eerily suggest death since they are only available once a being is finished with them, or more precisely, dead. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> And yet, Judy Onofrio turned to them after confronting a serious illness, as if to deny bones their death relation and confirm them as life affirming and spiritual, even. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Perhaps more interestingly, Onofrio untethers herself from the female figure, visual cacophony, and the carnival colors that dominated her work for so long.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> In the “Earth Bound” sculptures, Onofrio gathers bones in decorative clusters, which she paints in delicate pale greens and creams.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Most of the sculptures deploy cattle and other large mammal bones. These bones feel uncomfortably human in scale, and generally fall into two categories, freeform and attached to wall-mounted bases. The freeform works feel active, engaging, as if they might jettison from the wall, and Onofrio presents them in surprisingly varied ways.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">“Twist” is one of the largest free-form sculptures into which Onofrio incorporates curvaceous horns with the bones. Smooth and ribbed, the horns weave through the bones, gracefully tying the work together. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">There are a few sculptures with tiny bones. In “Dig 1,” “2,” and “3,” Onofrio crams diminutive mouse bones into a decorative trough-like mount. These fragments, all jumbled together and painted a creamy hue, feel old, as if they have been unearthed from an antique cabinet of curiosities.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The 2009 works, which are displayed on oval wall-mounted bases, are more closely related to her former works — they incorporate mirrors, pearls, fruit, teeth, branches, glass orbs and other non-bone detritus. And yet by painting them with monochromatic pale colors, Onofrio encourages serenity rather than chaos. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Onofrio’s daughter Jennifer Onofrio Fornes cuts close to the spooky bone with her ghostly photographs. While she uses her own body in the images, they are not self-portraits; in fact the body is scarcely discernible. Instead, the grainy, velvety, wispy images suggest otherworldly beings. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Borrowing from 19th century spiritualism and ghost photography, Fornes capitalizes on the romantic notion of communicating with beings from the spirit world. Her large silver gelatin prints are beautiful, lush, full of dramatic movement and have evocative titles such as “Deep Sleep,” “The Space Between,” and “Falling Away,” which emphasize her narrative.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Fornes uses her body, ethereal textiles, and the studio to create images that suggest an absence and a presence. As she moves through the studio, her camera captures ghostlike movement, suggesting something or someone.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> The small, white-framed oval images of her “Trace” series are even more ephemeral. Blown out to almost indiscernible imagery, the photographs have only the slightest grey-to-white contrast. An image is just barely apparent. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Fornes’ work suggests the disembodied spirit of things or beings that are present, but not quite there, while her mother’s work unearths the presence of beings that have been, and what remains behind.</span></div><div style="color: black; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; height: 1px; line-height: normal; overflow: hidden; text-align: left; text-transform: none; width: 1px;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/03/21/3503289/sherry-leedy-displays-a-mother.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-42395971378526183572012-03-21T19:39:00.000-07:002012-03-21T19:39:19.299-07:00New York's Exit Art Has Its Final Exhibitions<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw6kspvQuMO35vNw9_Umh2LYGc9OKqXCV1RLYGIBuVeK4uis4sIbNxtN_o3CbaM9-sK397qyKS0S64SxrdyBevjxb0NVBHmjGmoke_XW_3tdAtPESrQirU76b1u5k76TG7P5Pc5qonJkun/s1600/exitart.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw6kspvQuMO35vNw9_Umh2LYGc9OKqXCV1RLYGIBuVeK4uis4sIbNxtN_o3CbaM9-sK397qyKS0S64SxrdyBevjxb0NVBHmjGmoke_XW_3tdAtPESrQirU76b1u5k76TG7P5Pc5qonJkun/s1600/exitart.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Exit Art </td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I'm sorry to say that after 30 years, <a href="http://www.exitart.org/" target="_blank">Exit Art</a> is closing doors. On March 24, Exit Art's final exhibitions open. <i>Every Exit is an Entrance: 30 Years of Exit Art</i>, runs through the space's closing, May 19, 2012. The exhibition documents Exit Art's history from its founding in a loft apartment on Canal Street to its current location in Hell’s Kitchen. A second exhibition, <i>Collective/Performative</i> is an exhibition and event series focusing on performance practices that require the participation of an audience. The exhibition will include new works by eight commissioned artists and organizations that will utilize Exit Art's space during gallery hours for a public project, as well as an "artist's history" of performance art told by seminal performance artists who have exhibited at Exit Art.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">It seems sad, but things end. </span></div>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-17261833596452503812012-03-13T18:53:00.000-07:002012-03-13T18:53:32.564-07:00Los Angeles's True Rock Star!<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg675p4ii1_vHHbEAU7-5G_FJLL6hto6ZKvZyScobRV9R6mg9SIdbB-MZCfQxkmuipphjkiF9-nvgEfSg0S0_U5cRTSlEBg151vbcGIgUcW9TpTsoOGY6U3i_JzIWrcGLGen5mOKm_nnggm/s1600/heizer.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="207" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg675p4ii1_vHHbEAU7-5G_FJLL6hto6ZKvZyScobRV9R6mg9SIdbB-MZCfQxkmuipphjkiF9-nvgEfSg0S0_U5cRTSlEBg151vbcGIgUcW9TpTsoOGY6U3i_JzIWrcGLGen5mOKm_nnggm/s320/heizer.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The boulder in its quarry (from LACMA's blog).</td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Oh how I wish I were in LA to see Michael Heizer's gargantuan boulder finally appear at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. LACMA has always been one of my favorite museums. I love its vibe and I've seen some really outstanding exhibitions there.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">And I love the idea of this fantastically ambitious </span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">work titled </span><a href="http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/levitated-mass" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" target="_blank">Levitated Mass</a><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Here's some <a href="http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=54110" target="_blank">press</a> on the boulder's journey, and LACMA's <a href="http://lacma.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/michael-heizer%E2%80%99s-levitated-mass-is-coming-to-lacma/" target="_blank">blog</a> about the work. While the cost is staggering ($10 million!), I love this devotion to an artist that enables him to carry out this monumental Earthwork.</span></span>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-87661859015755037442012-03-11T12:30:00.000-07:002012-03-11T12:30:13.522-07:00Lawrence Artists Michael Krueger and Mark Cowardin at Rockhurst University<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Here is my latest review in the <a href="http://www.kansascity.com/2012/03/07/3472620/lawrence-artists-offer-a-naturally.html#storylink=misearch" target="_blank">Kansas City Star</a> of <a href="http://www.michaelkrueger.us/" target="_blank">Michael Krueger </a>and <a href="http://markcowardin.com/home.html" target="_blank">Mark Cowardin</a>'s exhibition at Rockhurst University's Greenlease Gallery. The artists' work made a dynamic combination.</span></div><h1 class="entry-title" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Lawrence artists offer a naturally unnatural exhibit</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></h1><div> </div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPnWef3Nra3Vizke9E25fzcv-WwU_i0zmtWD0yD0vOyiB82GWiiJSajrW181yJj1jhUSXqVny_fkEWY5eypHPLUlKv-Sjl-2Avq7YYGEPhhoyAloGW43b9c4zsIJe6itPeqGmDHkeZqIk9/s1600/krueger.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPnWef3Nra3Vizke9E25fzcv-WwU_i0zmtWD0yD0vOyiB82GWiiJSajrW181yJj1jhUSXqVny_fkEWY5eypHPLUlKv-Sjl-2Avq7YYGEPhhoyAloGW43b9c4zsIJe6itPeqGmDHkeZqIk9/s320/krueger.png" width="257" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Michael Krueger</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />
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</tbody></table><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The unpredictable combination of Lawrence artists Mark Cowardin and Michael Krueger unearths smart yet idiosyncratic gestures.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">While their work is visually dissimilar, both artists articulate reverence for nature and as often, a lament for its diminution.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Cowardin’s smoothly graceful sculptures juxtapose materials and conflicting ideas. In “The Great Escape,” a taxidermied pheasant attempts to break from a sculptural, ebonized walnut branch with roots clawing at absent earth. Like all of Cowardin’s sculptures here, the wood is deliberately too beautiful and highly crafted, perhaps a suggestion of our dissociation from the natural world.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">As a native Midwesterner, Cowardin questions and accepts his Midwesternness and the complexities that it embodies.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">In “Get a Grip,” a circular sculptured branch morphs into a hand, grasping its own roots. A single green leaf juts out of the top. Cowardin explains that it is “a piece that illustrates contrasting desires to hang on to and let go of one’s roots with a dash of optimism. This piece works as both a personal narrative and an illustration of the dangers of interrupting the natural cycle.”</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Other sculptures are ambiguous. In “Milk & Honey,” a blindfolded pink flamingo hovers over a trinity of three-rooted branches.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Michael Krueger’s pencil-on-paper drawings are studies in hot neon hues and paradoxical relationships. The drawings are unpeopled, except for “Night Falls,” a riff on the romanticism of Hudson River School paintings. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Here, groovy hippies are at home with the land, yet the scene is odd and slightly disturbing, despite the idealized overtones. A blood-red, pink, yellow and brown sky compresses the composition, suggesting discord.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Curiously, two of Krueger’s drawings combine furniture and pottery with the land. For Krueger, the exquisite craftsmanship of highboys and Arts and Crafts pottery emphasizes a particular utopian quest for perfection. In “Highboy,” Krueger faces two dressers on a cliff’s edge, as if they are chatting about the precarious place in which they, oddly, find themselves.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">“Arts & Crafts Stack” is a totemic mystery. A stack of pottery vessels balances on another cryptic rock edge, juxtaposed against an egg yolk-yellow background.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">For Krueger both drawings suggest a specific American arts and crafts idealism. He notes, “the movement was all about creating a utopian balance in life through art and design and living with these objects that resonated with hope and optimism. I have (the highboys and pottery) in the landscape in tenuous situations but they still (in my mind) ring of hopefulness and optimism. It’s about finding a way that the images can be both hopeful and doomed at the same time … tragic and glorious.”</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Only Krueger, Mel Ziegler and the late Kate Ericson could suggest that furniture is tragic and glorious and make me believe it.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Other drawings depict dying trees and landscapes with colors that are beautiful, perhaps toxically so. Bitter yellows, greens and pinks envelope branches scattered about on a parched ground. Jagged lines and great slashes of unnatural color bubble to the surface of Krueger’s drawings where the landscape has become unknowable and even alien.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The land is both precious and yet not quite right. Something is amiss where perfection and imperfection coexist. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Cowardin and Krueger lay claim to and reject our typical relationship to the natural world. While beautifully articulated — the wood is perfect, the colors are crystalline — the work also suggests we are often unrooted, and those colors may be toxic. The world is familiar, yet not utopian, and still cruelly at odds with itself.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-55770055273448880652012-03-06T18:51:00.000-08:002012-03-06T18:51:12.792-08:00Sharon Louden Reviewed in Art In America<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-j1GcZ0GnVUI/T1bLndrLAjI/AAAAAAAAACI/O-ImbUmbWfE/s1600/louden.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="208" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-j1GcZ0GnVUI/T1bLndrLAjI/AAAAAAAAACI/O-ImbUmbWfE/s320/louden.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Merge, Weisman Art Museum</td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">My dear friend, artist <a href="http://sharonlouden.com/" target="_blank">Sharon Louden</a>, created a fantastical, enormous site-specific installation to celebrate the reopening of the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis. Responding to Frank Gehry's iconic architecture, Louden's installation, <i>Merge</i>, is a dazzling tour de force, made of 250,000 aluminum strips</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">. The work is at the Weisman until May 20, 2012. Janet Koplos has reviewed the work in <i>Art in America</i>. Read her review </span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/sharon-louden/" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" target="_blank">here</a><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I worked with Sharon on <i>The Attenders</i>, her 2003 solo exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, when I was curator there. That was also a beautiful exhibition.</span></span> <span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> Congratulations, Sharon!</span></span>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-52297944404259028842012-02-23T18:30:00.000-08:002012-02-23T18:30:10.335-08:00Vizcaya's Contemporary Arts Project<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9k8TqDS9ksUuQF-YV4FdvvNtsWcUitXzawp9UdDc5uq-xDQyJ__POhEB_54D9aPKuBXqL48gYBL43RZeB8W4YA4DP2yLyq1hlq8UEMyZOpIu5teEnyA1KWwvcC73W4GX5kKXt2VOlpBAy/s1600/simetti.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9k8TqDS9ksUuQF-YV4FdvvNtsWcUitXzawp9UdDc5uq-xDQyJ__POhEB_54D9aPKuBXqL48gYBL43RZeB8W4YA4DP2yLyq1hlq8UEMyZOpIu5teEnyA1KWwvcC73W4GX5kKXt2VOlpBAy/s320/simetti.png" width="213" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I love historic houses, the quirkier, the better. One of my favorites is Miami's <a href="http://www.vizcayamuseum.org/home.asp" target="_blank">Vizcaya Museum and Gardens</a>. 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! </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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 <a href="http://www.francescosimeti.com/" target="_blank">Francesco Simeti</a>.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">From Vizcaya's site: "Francesco Simeti's <i><b>A seahorse, a caravel and large quantities of concrete, stone, fill, topsoil, tiles, piping, trees, and other plants</b></i> 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.</span></div><br />
<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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."</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I would LOVE to see this exhibition at Vizcaya, so if you're in Miami, please go check it out and report back! </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-86060921996743719462012-02-19T16:59:00.000-08:002012-02-19T16:59:37.147-08:00World's Fair Comes to Kansas City<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oHFO30lB5q0/T0GYp3iSzXI/AAAAAAAAAB4/mligCOPGR2Y/s1600/vase.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-oHFO30lB5q0/T0GYp3iSzXI/AAAAAAAAAB4/mligCOPGR2Y/s200/vase.png" width="153" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Keller Frères, France (1881–1922). Pitcher, 1900. </td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />
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</tbody></table><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">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 <i>Devil in the White City</i></span><i><span class="st" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America</span></i></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">, 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.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art opens the exhibition <i>Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World's Fairs, 1851–1939</i>, 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. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I can't wait!</span></span>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-14325621978912121542012-02-13T04:23:00.000-08:002012-02-13T04:23:13.411-08:00Sarah Hobbs, Fantastic Georgia-based Photographer<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NUx7xiKGcMo/TzhBLqpp6RI/AAAAAAAAABo/YJwnToxdEM0/s1600/sarahhobbs1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br />
</a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWQPSJrK_eCn7FkLkxpaRtvXYvBP82456iKmaFxQYDRN5-pauApUeyBKVoyZj8c0Qf-Hg4HQnq13IYZeNifpgtqTyfxBFbWcpx_ibIlyhQXX5OyKxvX0ImhXvoa-U2T5TJumm6tV0J0V8m/s1600/hobbs.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="190" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWQPSJrK_eCn7FkLkxpaRtvXYvBP82456iKmaFxQYDRN5-pauApUeyBKVoyZj8c0Qf-Hg4HQnq13IYZeNifpgtqTyfxBFbWcpx_ibIlyhQXX5OyKxvX0ImhXvoa-U2T5TJumm6tV0J0V8m/s200/hobbs.png" width="200" /></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.sarahhobbs.net/" target="_blank">Sarah Hobbs</a>, 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.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I first met Sarah in 2004 when I curated a solo exhibition of her photography at the <a href="http://www.knoxart.org/" target="_blank">Knoxville Museum of Art</a>. 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 <i>Untitled (insomnia)</i> 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.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Represented by Nancy Solomon of Atlanta's <a href="http://www.solomonprojects.com/" target="_blank">Solomon Projects</a>, 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!</span></div>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-46833984349186144562012-02-09T17:11:00.000-08:002012-02-09T17:11:31.230-08:00Marilyn Mahoney's Cinematic Drawings<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Here's my review, in the <a href="http://www.kansascity.com/2012/02/08/3415080/cinematic-has-tiny-details-grand.html#storylink=misearch" target="_blank"><i>Kansas City Star</i></a>, 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.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Wj05JD9Mjbg/TzRsDCRJfVI/AAAAAAAAABY/PKvsqBqlZi4/s1600/mahoneyjpg.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="159" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Wj05JD9Mjbg/TzRsDCRJfVI/AAAAAAAAABY/PKvsqBqlZi4/s320/mahoneyjpg.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Arthur's Turn</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><h1 class="entry-title"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Artist Marilyn Mahoney’s ‘Cinematic’ has tiny details, grand scope</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></h1><h1 class="entry-title"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Drawings shine in a midcareer exhibit of her work at the Thornhill Gallery.</span></h1><div class="byline_creditline"> <h4><span style="font-size: x-small;">By DANA SELF, Special to the Star</span><div style="color: black; font-family: sans-serif; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 10pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; height: 1px; line-height: normal; overflow: hidden; text-align: left; text-transform: none; width: 1px;"><br />
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/02/08/3415080/cinematic-has-tiny-details-grand.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy</div></h4></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
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</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">If a body in motion tends to stay in motion, then Marilyn Mahoney’s drawings are images of perpetual kinesis.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Everything can be seen in flux.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The paintings lack the drawings’ freedom.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">“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.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">In “Arthur’s Turn,” thick layers of trusses and sharp angles create a chaotic field that seems impenetrable.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">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.</span></div><div style="color: black; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; height: 1px; line-height: normal; overflow: hidden; text-align: left; text-transform: none; width: 1px;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/02/08/3415080/cinematic-has-tiny-details-grand.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
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</span></div>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-26024321614463281762012-02-03T04:32:00.000-08:002012-02-03T04:32:52.661-08:00February First Friday in Kansas City!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbvD9oUwsqPUnClCUJcXaFBBA1tSX4SroK55kMXoJkMH1KKA9fV15Moru-PqenF0xcEURTpFWU4oTXLQCMFZqS-NhpWDIt0PdkTqH4LsF143La-T_bz5t1AZtr4b4_d-zkOsjchjKH0yPQ/s1600/Picture+1.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="68" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbvD9oUwsqPUnClCUJcXaFBBA1tSX4SroK55kMXoJkMH1KKA9fV15Moru-PqenF0xcEURTpFWU4oTXLQCMFZqS-NhpWDIt0PdkTqH4LsF143La-T_bz5t1AZtr4b4_d-zkOsjchjKH0yPQ/s320/Picture+1.png" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">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 <a href="http://arifish.com/home.html" target="_blank">Ari Fish</a>'s installation at La Esquina, </span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">1000 West 25th St. Kansas City, MO, </span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">which opens tonight. She has created a "temporary temple" mixed media installation called <i>High Seas, Low Planes</i>. I'll be reviewing it, so, stay tuned. I love a good installation, so, we'll see how she does. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">On Tuesday, February 21, my friend, composer <a href="http://www.paulrudy.com/Paul_Rudy/PR.html" target="_blank">Paul Rudy</a> performs there with <a href="http://www.heidisvoboda.net/" target="_blank">Heidi Svoboda</a>, 6 p.m.</span></span>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-58429938907091374862012-01-29T12:20:00.000-08:002012-01-29T12:22:23.577-08:00Kansas City Artists Are Feeling the LOVE<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zVZHEATsvn0/TyWpEnXU9tI/AAAAAAAAABI/wL8qbPHCnVw/s1600/nerman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="160" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zVZHEATsvn0/TyWpEnXU9tI/AAAAAAAAABI/wL8qbPHCnVw/s320/nerman.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://nermanmuseum.org/" target="_blank">Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art</a></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />
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</tbody></table><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">We've known it for a long time. Kansas City artists are ambitious, rigorous, and without a doubt, worthy of any personal or institutional collection. Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art director Bruce Hartman has curated an exhibition that's a love letter to Kansas City artists, artists who are associated with Kansas City, and to the Johnson County Community College, where the Nerman Museum lives. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Here is my <a href="http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/27/3395212/nerman-museum-exhibit-showcases.html#storylink=misearch" target="_blank">review in the <i>Kansas City Star</i></a>, Jan. 29, 2012.</span></div><div class="byline_creditline"><h4><span style="font-size: x-small;"></span><div style="color: black; font-family: sans-serif; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 10pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; height: 1px; line-height: normal; overflow: hidden; text-align: left; text-transform: none; width: 1px;"><h1 class="entry-title">Nerman Museum exhibit ‘Abstract Kansas City’ showcases local artists</h1><div class="byline_creditline"><h4>By DANA SELF</h4><h4>Special to The Star<div style="color: black; font-family: sans-serif; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 10pt; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; height: 1px; line-height: normal; overflow: hidden; text-align: left; text-transform: none; width: 1px;"><br />
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/27/3395212/nerman-museum-exhibit-showcases.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy</div></h4></div><br />
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/27/3395212/nerman-museum-exhibit-showcases.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy</div></h4></div><h1 class="entry-title"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Nerman Museum exhibit ‘Abstract Kansas City’ showcases local artists</span></h1><div class="byline_creditline"><h4><span style="font-size: x-small;">By DANA SELF, Special to The Star</span><div style="color: black; font-family: sans-serif; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; height: 1px; line-height: normal; overflow: hidden; text-align: left; text-transform: none; width: 1px;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/27/3395212/nerman-museum-exhibit-showcases.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy</span></div></h4></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Nobody believes in you like your mama. And sometimes success comes with talent and a little nudge from someone who loves you.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">At least that’s what Jered Sprecher, assistant professor at the University of Tennessee and former Overland Park resident, might say. He is one of the 32 artists in the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Abstract Kansas City” exhibition. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Sprecher’s mother suggested to museum director Bruce Hartman that the work was worth a peek, and Hartman took notice. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Turns out Sprecher’s mother was right. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">And while this isn’t a story about a mother’s pride, it is a story about love — for art, for students and for establishing a cultural legacy.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">“Abstract Kansas City” is a love letter in the form of a museum exhibition honoring an unlikely contemporary art collection in an unlikely place: the middle of a former farm in Kansas.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">It all started in 1981. What is now the dazzling collection of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art at Johnson County Community College was at one time the dream of a collection for a small community college made up of a few buildings in a field.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Landon Kirchner, who was the assistant dean of humanities and social sciences at the college, decided his students needed and deserved exposure to actual works of art. He established an art acquisition committee, and the members wisely resolved that the collection focus on contemporary art. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">One of the visionary and guiding principals of the collection was that it be accessibly installed throughout the campus so that students could have a daily encounter with vital and authentic works of art. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The committee consulted, commissioned and purchased, looking to the artists in the community and beyond.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Fast forward to 1990, when Hartman became the director of the JCCC Gallery of Art, where he found a collection of 100 very strong works. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">“I inherited a good collection and came into a situation where the school was looking at art with a critical eye and a seriousness of intent, which set the tone for future collecting. With the mandate that the collection be visible to students and visitors, the museum was a natural progression,” Hartman says.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">All along, the acquisition committee realized the importance of collecting the work of Kansas City artists and artists associated with Kansas City. One of the first works was “Galileo’s Garden,” a commission from Dale Eldred. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Through the years, Hartman has remained devoted to the art of his hometown. He adds, “With a sense of continuity, the members of that committee collected art that reflected the strength of the college’s studio practice: ceramics, sculpture, photography and painting.”</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">In 2011, when the collection exceeded 1,000 works of art, Hartman concluded it was the right time to further recognize the collecting efforts of the institution, and “Abstract Kansas City” was conceived.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">It’s fair to say that no other local collecting institution has devoted the same energy and attention to Kansas City artists. The exhibition — and the collection itself, of which a full 30 percent is devoted to Kansas City artists and/or artists with a Kansas City connection — is a phenomenon.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">And as at any collecting institution, the exhibition also reflects the passion and interests of Hartman and patrons Marti and Tony Oppenheimer, who have been essential in the collecting process and who always recognized the importance of including Kansas City artists.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Some of the most commanding works in the exhibition suggest that the acquisition committee and these artists love color. James Brinsfield, Eric Sall, Lester Goldman, Nate Fors, Andrzej Zielinski, Kent Michael Smith, Larry Thomas, Stanley Whitney and Mary Wessel all rely on vivid, saturated color. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">It’s a heady visual experience, and Hartman’s sensitive installation nurtures relationships between these artists who embrace abstraction as a vehicle with which to process the multiple ideas of modernity.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Many of the paintings are often wildly gestural, and yet there are delicate, ephemeral works here, some of which are narrative. Corrie Baldauf, Ke-Sook Lee and Anne Lindberg trend toward the intimate. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Baldauf’s refined drawings are the most plainly autobiographical. Narrating personal anecdotes from her life, she pencils in diminutive stories along the sides of a large image of concentric circles. Vanishing into her short stories — “Mom called” — is the central experience of the work, validating the minutiae of our daily living.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Lindberg’s work is as intimate as Baldauf’s, yet through a wordless graphite language. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Lee’s delicate needlework emerges from the history of women’s work, domesticity and childhood memories of her grandmothers sewing. Rachel Hayes’ “Return to the Easy System” trades on fiber and stitching, but she manipulates copper wire and acetate rather than thread and fabric.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Artists committed to drawing include the irrepressible Amy Myers, whose monumental and psychedelic abstract bubble drawings draw us in as much as they send us out to some unknowable place. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Garry Noland’s tape panels, “Cripples,” comprising 88 units, feel almost as linear and hand-drawn as Lindberg’s graphite work. The staccato effect that emerges from his repeated yet slightly different panels suggests a hieroglyphic, indiscernible language.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Drawing with light in her “Worldscape” series, Mary Wessel works on light-sensitive photographic paper. A liquidy pink shape snakes across the work’s surface radiating an energy field that seems confusing and disordered, yet soothing.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The exhibition’s works span 50 years, starting in 1961 with an abstract Wilbur Niewald watercolor. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">At 87, Niewald is the elder and elegant statesman of this wide-ranging exhibition. “Mountains II” is a field of crystalline blue paint strokes that still shimmer with clarity. This abstract landscape is a surprising precursor to the steady, realistic paintings that distinguish Niewald’s oeuvre.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Hartman’s thoughtful installation capitalizes on relationships between artists and styles. The triumvirate of Dan Christensen, Warren Rosser and Ron Slowinski vibrates with a subtle dynamism that characterizes their three paintings.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Christensen’s painting, “Cape Crozier,” is one of his finest and most haunting. A ghostlike white form hovers in a calm peach-colored background. This delicate apparition pulsates with movement, revealing the artist’s tender yet graceful hand.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Hartman juxtaposes Christensen with one of the most quiet and least colorful of Rosser’s paintings, “Play Continued.” Articulated in shades of gray, the graceful ovals that are typical of his work include a white one that seems to be exiting the dreary painting to join the more sparkling Christensen. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Slowinski’s equally restrained and ambiguously metaphysical “Untitled (Pollen Painting)” completes the triangle.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The giant abstractionists with sweeping gestures dominate the first gallery. Eric Sall, Andrzej Zielinski, James Brinsfield, Sharon Patten and Lester Goldman telegraph their passion for painting’s formal processes, the act of putting paint to canvas to study spatial relationships, and they excavate the modern world’s vast choices and ultimate ambiguities.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Amy Myers’ and Sandy Winters’ work straddles the visual distance between these artists and the more delicate and restrained work of Baldauf, Lee and Niewald, all of whom share that first gallery.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">JCCC professor Larry Thomas’ mixed media on canvas work, “The Problem With Curiosity,” is one of the few recognizable images. A swirling vortex containing snakes, feathers and other things destabilizes the painting’s elements, suggesting chaos. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Side by side with Lauren Mabry’s earthenware cylinder, whose surface is beautifully articulated with glazes, and Nate Fors’ carnivalesque and vividly green sculptural painting, Thomas’ work seems to tether the three together.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Hartman’s juxtaposition of Kansas City Art Institute alumni Stanley Whitney with younger artists Sprecher, Grant Miller, Kent Michael Smith and Matt Wycoff resonates with stylistic linkages that collapse time and distance. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Despite their varied media, generational differences and range of material application, the exhibition artists are linked through their devotion to systems of discovery and, of course, their Kansas City connections. Personal narrative, chaos, metaphysical ideas of the sublime and pure formal processes are the schema through which each artist deploys his or her own sense of self and place. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The exhibition is a vital tribute to 30 years of collecting and identifies the museum as Kansas City’s most essential institution devoted to Kansas City artists’ significant accomplishments.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Hartman concludes, “I walk through the galleries, look at the individual works of art, can see how each work fits into each artist’s body of work, and think, this is what it’s all about.”</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">As love letters go, it’s one of the best.</span></div><div style="color: black; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; height: 1px; line-height: normal; overflow: hidden; text-align: left; text-transform: none; width: 1px;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/27/3395212/nerman-museum-exhibit-showcases.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-70664013193788895852012-01-26T06:43:00.000-08:002012-01-26T06:43:12.430-08:00Loving Maya Lin<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivfBKsc7r6tM3crzHbrbcUV-OdNt4Y62-XXKxmupETQ5NfM4YsaWNzA4TS862LSpWqNT-NiGTDXvR5j2Su46ZEokOhmUvsCULGlj2946RpQbM4WFVKlDYmD8kmFtlmH8jofGPLN2O_g3hV/s1600/MV5BMTgzNTU0NTQ1Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwODMxNDAxMw%2540%2540._V1._SX640_SY451_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivfBKsc7r6tM3crzHbrbcUV-OdNt4Y62-XXKxmupETQ5NfM4YsaWNzA4TS862LSpWqNT-NiGTDXvR5j2Su46ZEokOhmUvsCULGlj2946RpQbM4WFVKlDYmD8kmFtlmH8jofGPLN2O_g3hV/s320/MV5BMTgzNTU0NTQ1Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwODMxNDAxMw%2540%2540._V1._SX640_SY451_.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I have always loved Maya Lin, ever since she wowed the world (and bravely faced incredible turmoil and ugly backlash) when she was awarded the commission for her powerful and game-changing Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. If you have never watched the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110480/" target="_blank">Oscar-winning documentary <i>Maya Lin: A Strong, Clear Vision</i></a>, you need to do that, stat! It is truly inspirational.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Maybe we have Maya Lin on the brain (and in our hearts) since my daughter just finished her "Hero" report on Lin for her class. Daughter was thrilled to relate to Maya Lin as a Chinese person and for her love of math and art! Learning she could combine those two loves was a thrill for her!</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">If you happen to be anywhere near Pittsburgh, PA, there's a Maya Lin exhibition opening February 11 the <a href="http://web.cmoa.org/?page_id=47" target="_blank">Carnegie Museum</a>. She's scheduled to give a talk on <a href="http://web.cmoa.org/?p=4358" target="_blank">Feb. 10 at 6 p.m</a>.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">In this opening of the year of the dragon, we are loving Maya Lin.</span></div>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-17630304138613222832012-01-23T04:28:00.000-08:002012-01-23T04:28:18.596-08:00Happy New Year! Wishing You Peace and Prosperity in the Year of The Dragon!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFMtXuoBuOeMLhUnQWx9BHqVRz-QkNTFO49cNXNaYuR3Kn_mhz-ZbcLNuH_14EDbVSP9PC1_T_fCJ3SZyhbOspYqmI9cpKT7jcwcX7jgfSfER5HP19rUcgwJpJwzIKwySiTrHifS0__2xo/s1600/04chdr.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFMtXuoBuOeMLhUnQWx9BHqVRz-QkNTFO49cNXNaYuR3Kn_mhz-ZbcLNuH_14EDbVSP9PC1_T_fCJ3SZyhbOspYqmI9cpKT7jcwcX7jgfSfER5HP19rUcgwJpJwzIKwySiTrHifS0__2xo/s200/04chdr.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">We've cleaned house and swept out the old year and we welcome in the year of the dragon. Since we have a dragon living in our house, </span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">we are doubly excited for the Chinese New Year! </span></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">(I, myself, am a pig, which my daughter thinks is hilarious. Or, more elegantly put, a boar...) </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">We will be celebrating our new year at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art's giant celebration this Friday. We're thrilled because on Friday the museum also opens four renovated galleries devoted to its famed Chinese art collection. The collection is one of the finest in this country.</span></span><br />
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</span></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Alice Thorson, the <i>Kansas City Star</i>'s art critic told me that it is fantastic! <a href="http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/20/3381748/star-magazine-a-new-dynasty-at.html#storylink=misearch" target="_blank">Here's her early preview in the Star.</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">We can't wait, so, Gung Hay Fat Choy—have a prosperous new year! </span></span>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-68524065832419882352012-01-17T06:37:00.000-08:002012-01-17T06:37:33.370-08:00Todd Hido at Stephen Wirtz Gallery<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Bay area artist <a href="http://www.toddhido.com/" target="_blank">Todd Hido</a>, whom I've had the pleasure of working with in the past, has a new exhibition at <a href="http://www.wirtzgallery.com/exhibitions/2012/2012_01/Hido/Hido_frame.html" target="_blank">Stephen Wirtz Gallery</a> in San Francisco.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Hido is known for his eerie photographs of houses and suburban streets of Ohio, his home state, and other places. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6c2OKbe9dPM/TxWGpPVRsFI/AAAAAAAAAAw/V4R1RYQ7bcw/s1600/toddhido.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="255" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6c2OKbe9dPM/TxWGpPVRsFI/AAAAAAAAAAw/V4R1RYQ7bcw/s320/toddhido.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: xx-small;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: x-small;">Todd Hido</span></b><em><br />
Untitled #10106</em><br />
2011<br />
chromogenic print<br />
20 x 24 inches, ed. 10<br />
30 x 38 inches, ed. 5<br />
38 x 48 inches, ed 3</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">In <i>Excerpts from Silver Meadows</i>, his new series, Hido examines the lonely streets and landscapes of Silver Meadows, a housing development outside of Kent, OH.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The press release notes, "Sequenced to form an almost cinematic narrative, atmospheric landscapes of in-between, and isolated places in America provide the setting, and portraits of female subjects, broken starlets in suburban dress, stand in as the main characters. While the subject matter is mined from Hido’s own experience growing up in Kent, Ohio, what results is a collectively familiar, yet entirely imaginary and dreamlike melodrama untethered from a specific time and place, a visual pulp novel of Midwest mythology."</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I find the unpeopled images of the streets and the lonely houses more compelling than the images of the women. The suburban-scapes and landscapes provide a richer, more provocative and haunting narrative for me, maybe because, as a Midwesterner, I recognize these places. But I love his work. If you're in the Bay area, the exhibition is at the gallery through February 25.</span></div>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-39812034080083127882012-01-12T07:39:00.000-08:002012-01-12T07:39:43.305-08:00Kansas City Artists Dazzle at the Dolphin Gallery<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Colors are blazingly hot and fresh at the Dolphin's Push exhibition. See the review I wrote for the <a href="http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/11/3362932/the-new-year-gets-a-push.html#storylink=misearch" target="_blank">Kansas City Star here</a>. I especially loved <a href="http://ke-sooklee.com/" target="_blank">Ke-Sook Lee</a>'s work and <a href="http://www.michaelkrueger.us/" target="_blank">Michael Krueger</a>, who teaches at the University of Kansas, is always interesting to me.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><h2 style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">A group show at the Dolphin brings bright colors and a fresh outlook to winter.</span></h2><div class="byline_creditline" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> <h4><span style="font-size: x-small;">By DANA SELF, Special to the Star</span></h4></div><div style="height: 1px; overflow: hidden; width: 1px;"><br />
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/11/3362932/the-new-year-gets-a-push.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">It’s all tangerine trees and marmalade skies at the Dolphin’s gallery’s “Push” group show.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Several artists, whose work is typically uttered in sober shades of grey, black and muslin, have embraced the fantastical side of the spectrum, and the gallery feels trippy and new.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Anne Lindberg, who just was awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant, here shifts away from grey graphite. In her two works, “thread drawing 06” and “07,” Lindberg trades pencil for wildly cheerful Popsicle-colored thread.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Interestingly, these thread drawings don’t carry the same sense of corporeal movement as her graphite pieces. While the graphite line drawings suggest the body’s breathing and being, these thread pieces have a more mechanical sensibility, oddly, less organic, yet no less affecting.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Elevating thread to main character, rather than as just supporting stitching, in “Bosul Bi (Drizzle)” Ke-Sook Lee hand-dyed more than four dozen skeins of heavy thread in turquoise, aqua, blue, and yellow.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> A single thread from each skein undulates from the floor to the ceiling. Lee writes in an email, “All those female bulbs are awakened and growing like they should, free and beautifully.” This simple, yet elegant, installation suggests growth, movement, and a sublime feeling of infinity.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Del Harrow, who last exhibited at the Dolphin in May 2010, presented an installation of dark grey and black ceramic pieces, then. Here, he’s abandoned the dark and emerged with “Copper Fade,” an incandescent blue ceramic wall installation.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The geometric ceramic panels, tinted with copper oxide, begin with saturated blue at the bottom and fade to very light blue at the top. The juxtaposition of the hard-edged ceramic forms with the soft, undulating color evokes an ethereal transcendence similar to Ke-Sook Lee’s work.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Lawrence-based Michael Krueger, known for his detailed, colored pencil drawings, continues his interest in images of the American West. In “Big Falls,” a rainbow appears from the misty falls, suggesting something totemic and magical. He writes, “I was (and still am) looking at depictions of the American West by 19th century artists such as Thomas Moran and Alfred Bierstadt. These new drawings create warm but cautious vignettes of escapism and beckon a review of how we as a nation reconcile nature. I am also using color as a way to bring a heightened sense of spectacle to the work and the depiction of nature.” </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Krueger is straightforward in his devotion to the intimacy and immediacy of drawing and his iconoclastic work radiates confidence.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Andrzej Zielinski, like Michael Krueger, draws from the physical world. “Blue Industrial Paper Shredder” materializes from his ongoing series of paper shredders, ATMs, phones, and laptops. Zielinski explores an abstracted and distorted object in spatial relationship to canvas, space, and the viewer. Building the paint to sculptural volume, Zielinski’s shredder nips between comic relief and serious abstract inquiry, reminiscent of the late Philip Guston’s work.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Using vintage silks, Debra Smith’s geometric, pieced textiles cleave to her usual palette of reds and muslin, while Archie Scott Gobber’s “Image” vibrates and agitates. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Working in enamel on canvas, and creating a three-dimensional image, Gobber’s play on words celebrates the push and pull between surface, illusion and metaphor, scrutinizing what is real and what is not.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Sharing Gobber’s energy, Anthony Baab’s white-on-black print “Untitled,” suggests grids, imaginary structures, a computerized skin surface or multiple geodesic domes, flattened atop one another, into infinity.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">David Ford’s “Persephone,” a slapped-together massive concrete block wall, is undercooked and overly empowered. It’s a sharp contrast to his lyrical work on paper, “I’m Coming,” in which we look through a proscenium arch to a bucolic landscape. The graceless “Persephone” unfairly overwhelms Nate Fors and Aaron Wrinkle’s paintings in the same gallery. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Pressing comfort zones into difference, some of the “Push” artists have recalibrated expectations and achieved unexpected newness. How fresh and satisfying. And isn’t that what a new year should bring?</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; height: 1px; overflow: hidden; width: 1px;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/11/3362932/the-new-year-gets-a-push.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy</span></div>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-384064563247813382012-01-09T18:28:00.000-08:002012-01-09T18:28:05.535-08:00Pantone Announces Tangerine Tango as Color of the Year!<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WPOvNRoGCLE/TwugGAwskrI/AAAAAAAAAAo/eTmPbuX9RcA/s1600/pantone.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WPOvNRoGCLE/TwugGAwskrI/AAAAAAAAAAo/eTmPbuX9RcA/s1600/pantone.jpg" /></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Every year <a href="http://pantone.com/" target="_blank">Pantone</a> declares the color of the year and 2012 brings us Tangerine Tango!</span></span> <span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> I love seeing Pantone's choice every year. It's fascinating to see how color trends change across time, respond to our social, cultural, and economic circumstances, and how graphic, interior, clothing, and other designers and artists respond to the trends. I love this hue, and this quote from the site. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #666666; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-weight: normal;">“Sophisticated but at the same time dramatic and seductive, Tangerine Tango is an orange with a lot of depth to it,” said Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute®. “Reminiscent of the radiant shadings of a sunset, Tangerine Tango marries the vivaciousness and adrenaline rush of red with the friendliness and warmth of yellow, to form a high-visibility, magnetic hue that emanates heat and energy.” </span><br />
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</div><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Does this trend influence you?</span></span><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> Will you notice orange wherever you go now? Will you incorporate orange into your art, your clothing choices, or your home? I know that looking at this color swatch raises my spirits. I see more orange in my future.</span></span>Dana Selfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17314497821513418898noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625659676688830458.post-89065275563439387332012-01-05T14:07:00.000-08:002012-01-05T14:07:56.243-08:00Upcoming Kansas City Exhibitions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhszwevtDbB2KA8hW7h6xftnca8KcUMqJ_YPLw9q7yeVeX5O_iFCMy_3rYFVXYLNOKnwADXhycSCG9hJADbpr47JD6BcHi8Zy-uv6wNTb__FEUlLtPPmp_BlLfKxWJYRpKLtSy6uE2CyVvY/s1600/Rusty+Leffel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="128" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhszwevtDbB2KA8hW7h6xftnca8KcUMqJ_YPLw9q7yeVeX5O_iFCMy_3rYFVXYLNOKnwADXhycSCG9hJADbpr47JD6BcHi8Zy-uv6wNTb__FEUlLtPPmp_BlLfKxWJYRpKLtSy6uE2CyVvY/s200/Rusty+Leffel.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Friday, January 6 is First Friday in Kansas City! I'm looking forward to seeing <b>Rusty Leffel</b>'s street photography at <a href="http://lateshowgallery.com/" target="_blank">The Late Show</a></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> gallery. As a photographer who loves the history of street photography, his images from New York, Paris, and Los Angeles hum and vibrate with authenticity. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b>Steve Gorman</b>'s sculptural ceramics—look at this beautiful octopus—are on view at <a href="http://www.sherryleedy.com/" target="_blank">Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art.</a></span></span><br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zX6Fa8QtJQA/TwYemmKufvI/AAAAAAAAAAg/-i_EgE6qYrY/s1600/octopus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="132" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zX6Fa8QtJQA/TwYemmKufvI/AAAAAAAAAAg/-i_EgE6qYrY/s200/octopus.jpg" width="200" /></a><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b>Garry Noland</b> opens his exhibition at <a href="http://cityartsproject.org/" target="_blank">City Arts Project</a>, and the images I've seen look promising.</span></span><br />
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