You Going to Brazil Soon? See Marco Maggi.

Marci Maggi

If you are in the neighborhood of Saö Paulo anytime before May 13, then please, go see Marco Maggi's exhibition at Instituto Tomie Ohtake.  Maggi, who divides his time between New York State and Montevideo, Uruguay, has installed an exhibition titled Functional disinformation, drawings in Portuguese.  Maggi, truly one of the nicest people in the world, works with concepts of time and language in his exhibition.  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 Kemper Museum in Kansas City owns one, plus a couple of his other works.

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."

Julie Chang at Hosfelt Gallery

Julie Chang, studio view

I've been following Julie Chang'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.  She's having her first solo exhibition in New York through June 16 at Hosfelt Gallery.  In Chinese. Japanese. Indian Chief—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.

Need A Grant Source? Try Fractured Atlas

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 here.

Headed to London This Summer? NYC? Portland? Chattanooga? Get a Street Art App!

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 this post about public art apps in London, NYC, and Portland, OR.  

Street Art London app for iPhone offers a comprehensive map of London's outdoor art.  The Arts for Transit app lets New York City's subway riders search the Art For Transit collection by artist or subway line.  The Public Art PDX app helps Portlanders find the city’s public art.

My friend Matthew Carroll is cofounder of SecondSite LLC, which provides a mobile app for the public art of Chattanooga.   Check it out!

New Gallery Space in Kansas City's West Bottoms Could Use Some Love

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 Kansas City Star here.  Or read it below!  

Katie Ford, "The Science of Idealism + Social Graces," detail

Viewers struggle to decipher meaning of gallery’s exhibit based on random words

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/04/11/3546881/muddled-dialogue.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

Should you be leery of an exhibition whose theme “was generated randomly”?

The answer may depend on your patience.

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.

Kansas City artists Erika Lynne Hanson, 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 Katie Ford.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Isn’t this idea straight out of reality TV, with little regard for expertise?

Despite the admittedly careless challenge imposed by the artists in charge, Ford produces an earnest, if somewhat impenetrable, artistic response.

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.

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.”

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. 

“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.”

Although she is trained as a printmaker, Ford’s interest in different materials is wide-ranging and generous.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/04/11/3546881/muddled-dialogue.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

Mother-Daughter Duo at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art

Judy Onofrio, Flux

Judy Onofrio and her daughter Jennifer Onofrio Fornes  have an exhibition whose spooky undertones are sometimes successful, and sometimes not.  Here's my review in The Kansas City Star.

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.

Artists who use bones in their work surely realize the slender edge of disturbing upon which they dance.

Wisconsin self-taught artist Eugene Von Bruenchenhein suggested visionary worlds with his delicate chicken and turkey bone thrones and towers.

Bones eerily suggest death since they are only available once a being is finished with them, or more precisely, dead. 

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.

Perhaps more interestingly, Onofrio untethers herself from the female figure, visual cacophony, and the carnival colors that dominated her work for so long.

In the “Earth Bound” sculptures, Onofrio gathers bones in decorative clusters, which she paints in delicate pale greens and creams.

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.

“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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/03/21/3503289/sherry-leedy-displays-a-mother.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

New York's Exit Art Has Its Final Exhibitions

Exit Art

I'm sorry to say that after 30 years, Exit Art is closing doors.  On March 24, Exit Art's final exhibitions open.  Every Exit is an Entrance:  30 Years of Exit Art, 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, Collective/Performative 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.

It seems sad, but things end.