Marvelous-Hairy-Girls-Gonzales-Sisters

Alicja Wasielewska

Polish designer Alicja Wasielewska has got some interesting work. Among it is Morph Chandelier, combining the traditional element of crochet with the use of modern fibre optic technology that result in is this strangely wild chandelier.
www.wasielewska.com

Death of a Propane Salesman. Anxiety and the Texas Artist

When: Opens Friday, October 30, 2009 at 6:00pm
and closes Sunday, December 13, 2009 at 9:00pm
Gallery Hours: Thursday-Sunday 1-6pm
FORT WORTH CONTEMPORARY ARTS The Art Galleries at TCU, 2900 W Berry St. Fort Worth, TX 76109
Seth Alverson, Michael Bise, Matthew Bourbon, Vernon Fisher, Lawrence Lee, Margaret Meehan, Amy Revier, Ludwig Schwarz, Edward Setina, Kevin Todora, Terri Thornton, Jeff Zilm, Eric Zimmerman

Relevant artists are barometers of their environments, and whatever form their art takes, their tendency to tell the truth leads them to create work that mirrors otherwise unseen, undiscussed or repressed phenomena and ideas.

After all, Texas is many things: polite and aggressive, lacking in urbanness with a desire to duck the searing sunlight; it’s part of the Bible Belt, it’s famous for doing things in its own time and it often seems unrattled by world events, and of course it’s known for stetsons, big hair, and plastic surgery. This, when viewed from afar, can appear to be an unnatural environment for contemporary art.
So what kind of art is being made here? Texas, as an environment, makes for a rich place of contradictions for an artist to probe. Discomfort is a key element that takes many forms in this exhibition: erasure of content, degradation of material, violence, miscommunication, an attempt to organize and name uneasy thoughts, and dire tension about the kinds of cultural “norms” we’re all meant to take in stride.
So unlike artists working in the more progressive or art-lofty spheres of the two coasts, the Texas artist—especially the highly reactive, imaginative, and sensitive one—finds himself fighting battles of cultural contradiction from the inside. But really, no matter where he lives, this reactive artist would be grappling with the high stress of modern living or the hostile chemical bath of his own brain. Having to fight that good fight in the lone star state merely adds a new dimension of melancholy, if not poetry, to the work, not to mention a lack of commercial compatibility. Unlike news headlines, stress in art doesn’t always sell, and yet the artists in this exhibition keep on telling their truths, and they keep spelunking their personal obsessions as a way of better understanding and navigating the world. The work itself often seems destined for museums, gallery shows, or back in storage in the artist’s studio; even the most hale Texas art collector doesn’t necessarily want a nervous breakdown permanently affixed to the wall of his living room.
Thus, around here, the coming together of artists in exhibitions is one of the clearer manifestations of the desire for an expression of liberty, of honest dialogue about the state of our culture, and often what you see in art galleries is the stuff that doesn’t belong anywhere else. And for every imaginable personal reason, Texas artists stay in Texas, and they keep making their work. -Christina Rees

Support art, kids, and educators!

Buy an Art Camp T-Shirt for $20 to support The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth's Art Scholarship Program.
Proceeds go to the Art Scholarship Endowment Fund for children’s programming. I've taught several summers and worked with some fabulous artists, kids and volunteers. The Modern's education program is top notch... spread some art love and buy a t-shirt or two.
Below is one of my favorite classes. We made a full installation of MONSTER PIECES!
ps. This is one week of work. I hope my college classes are feeling lazy right now...

The 53rd State

Nice little piece on my friend Karinne for WYNC in New York:
"If you’re reading this, you’re online, which means you’re just a click away from the 53rd State — the 53rd State Press, that is, a marvelous boutique press dedicated to publishing contemporary performance texts. Everyone with a stake in live art, from audience members to practitioners, should be heartened by this small but mighty endeavor.

“I was always the person who kept everyone’s scripts from readings,” 53rd State founder Karinne Keithley explained to me one raw afternoon last week at the Outpost cafe in Clinton Hill. “And I was backing away from performance personally, thinking of other ways a work could be completed. I started thinking about plays that came in boxes rather than were performed.”
READ MORE and watch a sweet little video short called “Say You Will (Kanye West at the Scale of my Household)”http://culture.wnyc.org/articles/performance-club/2009/oct/26/press-our-own/

The Museum of Innocence

Alexander McQueen

alexandermcqueenlive.showstudio.com

My work, your casa: Los Angeles.

"frog, Meehan, Budda, cactus"

Open Studios & Group Show: The Shamrock Hotel

You're invited to visit the studios and see the work of Lauren Gray, Lily Hanson, Eric Harvey, Peter Ligon, Brian Ryden, Noah Simblist, Sunny Sliger and Saul Waranch.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
5:00pm - 9:00pm
4312 1/2 Elm St., Dallas, TX
http://www.shamrockhotelstudios.com/Open_Studio.html

Poor Frankenstein...

Click Here

My work, your casa: Brunswick.

Akio Takamori at Barry Friedman Ltd. NYC

Yesterday was the last day! Oh no! Those of you in NY I hope you got a chance to see it. Akio is my former professor at the UW in Seattle and one of my greatest inspirations working with clay as sculpture today.

Here is a little snippet from the press release: "With Alice/Venus, Takamori explores the fundamental difference in adolescent girls before and after puberty. His figures may represent the same young woman, but at different times in her life. “Alice,” with her ruffled collar and dress directly appropriated from a Velasquez painting represents the younger child, while the post-pubescent girl is depicted as “Venus” whose nude body resembles a Roman marble interpretation complete with missing arms. The theme of assimilation runs through both series of work with the decidedly Japanese features of the heads contrasted with their Western torsos."

Jenny Gawronski

New friend and maker of lovely things... to check out her work on her website:Click HERE

From Whence The Rainbow Came

Ambach and Rice Presents
From Whence The Rainbow Came
Featuring new works by
Jeffry Mitchell, Joe Park, Dan Webb and Claude Zervas

"Jointly envisioned by the artists themselves—who have been both colleagues and friends for decades—the exhibition represents neither a thematically curated group show nor a series of miniature solo exhibitions of each artists’ oeuvre. Instead, these four artists bring forth their work as an active gesture to confiscate their practice from the business of art.They set out to tangibly celebrate the freedom they feel inside their friendship and endeavored to operate on their own terms, finding consequence outside of the preset norms and expectations of group exhibitions.
... the works act as active juxtapositions of parallel and opposite artistic approaches that celebrate their years of dialogue and a preserved difference."

How I wish I could see this show. If you are in Seattle go for me! It's closing tomorrow :(

My work, your casa: Seattle.

MCA Denver

Matthew Buckingham
roof top cafe
Kim Dickey
Visited the MCA Denver this weekend. Beautiful space designed by architect, David Adjaye, and solid programming as a general rule. We were slightly disappointed that the Matthew Buckingham exhibit wasn't open yet, but it gives me a good reason to go back for that, as well as visit the bookstore again before I leave Colorado next month. The roof was a beautiful surprise with its raised garden beds and a cafe that held several beautiful pieces made by Kim Dickey, a colleague of mine here at CU for the semester.

Tim Hawkinson's SHRINK

Thinking about scale and material...this piece popped into my head:
In Tim Hawkinson's "Shrink, the little ghost chair is made from tiny core samples of the original chair held out by threads that are attached to the points from which the samples came.

Michaelene Walsh

Below is the most wonderful mug I recieved from Mikey Walsh. An old friend and fellow artist who teaches at LSU.I've added some images of her sculptural work as well.



To visit her website: CLICK HERE!

so long for now...

Next week looks to be one of non-stop academic action, its been a struggle to get into the studio and balance life and next week will be more of the same... so for now, so long, farewell and see you soon I hope... Until then here are some studio shots of my humble little space and its going ons at CU.

Daily Serving does Dallas!

Noah's review on Daily Serving of Blueprint curated by James Cope at the MAC.

Dario Rableto

"THE MELANCHOLIC REFUSES TO SURRENDER"
2003, Cast and carved bone charcoal and melted vinyl record of Leadbelly’s “The Titanic,” broken male hand bones, ground coal, horse hair, dirt, pigments, lead salvaged from the sea, string, rust, 14 x 11 x 5 inches.

Her Fearful Symmetry

"Audrey Niffenegger explores some of those darker themes in her new book Her Fearful Symmetry, which features identical twin sisters from America who inherit their aunt's apartment in London. Though the aunt dies in the novel's first line, the author says she wanted to hold onto the character — so she turned her into a ghost.

"The more I thought about their aunt, Elspeth, the more interested I got in her, and the more I wanted to write about her. And I felt very, very sorry that I had killed her before she even got into the story," Niffenegger says.

While Niffenegger recognizes that the setup of her novel may be cliched, she says it is intentionally so: "One of the things I'm doing in this book is taking all the old cliches and the workings of the 19th-century English novel and trying to use them in a 21st century novel in a way that makes sense." READ MORE ON NPR's WEBSITE