Your neighbors, out in the world

Ok, let's start playing a bit of catch up here. 

 

Alison Moritsugu, Paradise Revisited installation view, from left to right:

Big Pineapple (oil on panel, koa frame),King Cane (oil on panel, koa frame)

Early Warning repeat (digitally printed wallpaper)

Alison Moritsugu's work is included in the group exhibit American Story at the Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan MI. which will remain on view through January 2010.

I missed posting about Steve Rossi's participation in the Lilliput exhibit at Seton Hall which ended on July 23.  Steve was represented in the exhibit in which no work was larger by 1.5" in dimension by two of his miniature chewing gum camouflage modules. A pdf version of the exhibition catalogue of the exhibition contains images of the work.

Shawn Trail and Jennifer Trail will be setting up house in Copenhagen for the coming year.  Shawn has received a Fulbright Scholarship with which he plans, according to a story in LoHud.com, " to design and develop an electro-acoustic, midi-equipped zylophone."

The working portion of my Summer vacation, had me assisting my own little piece of Germany, Angelika Rinnhofer, with the installation of her two person exhibit with Beatrice Haverich at the Museum Industrie Kultur in Nuernberg, Germany.  PDN Magazine sported one of Ms. Rinnhofer's images on the cover of July's "Fine Art" issue.  The cover story covers the role of non profit galleries in the world of photography and includes some words of wisdom from CPW director Arial Shanberg.

 

Above and below, Angelika's collaboration with her seamstress mother.

 

Peter Iannarelli is one of the artists selected to participate in the 2009 Mohawk-Hudson Regional Exhibition  by this year's juror Matthew Higgs.  The exhibit will remain on view at the University of Albany's University Art Museum through August 8.

I'm taking part in the 10x10x10 exhibit in Ellenville this year.  Instead of a singular installation in my given storefront location, I'm doing a series of consecutive projects through the run of the show which ends in October.  The first installation TORRENT or FORRENT which will be on view for another week or so includes For Rent signs created by Todd Sargood, Erica Hauser, Heather Sardanopoli, Franc Palaia.

If you're a Beacon area artist and you've got something going on anywhere, send me the info, and if I can, I'll share it with your neighbors.  Also if there's a postcard or other printed paraphernalia that accompanies any of your activities, please reserve a copy for the Beacon Art Postcard Archive.

Eye Candy Friday: Amateur Hour

Karen Brummund lives in Utica.  She was one of the WOMS artists last year.  And she's turned me onto various interesting items.  The most recent such item is One & Other is a project of Antony Gormley.  Mr Gormley's premise is to fill the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square with living figures in place of the classical monumental statues who over the course of 100 days will constitute a living portrait of the UK.

Antony Gormley on the Fourth Plinth from One & Other on Vimeo. 

Twenty four hours a day through October, participants will spend an hour atop the plinth doing as they please.  I've just been tuning in sporadically over the past few days and thus far its been a cavalcade of banal and the inane.  Each plinther chosen to stand aloft can do whatever he or she wishes to do with the allotted hour.  As I'm writing this, it's 4 am in London and there's a guy wearing some generic soldier's dress uniform of navy coat, grey slacks and navy coat crossed by a red sash with a saber scabbard hanging from a white belt.  He's holding a flag of  broad bands and squares in tones of sage.   The guy is whistling.  He's now ....stating that what he is doing is an act of treason, at least according to his own view.

The project is yet another consummation in the marriage of the homebound voyeur and the cult of individual in this age of the internet.  Each person's 15 minutes of ostentatious obscurity is stretched to one hour.  Now he's photographing himself.  Other plinthers I've seen have included mostly women (dowdy ones - of all ages),  most of whom have some cause to champion or some point to make - several of them with illegible signs of one sort or another.  Our current plinther's cause is Old Rectoryland. 

The most interesting segment I've seen thus far featured a guy riding a stationary bicycle.  The vision of this semi- static visual worked more and his continual futile pumping perfectly exemplifies the exercise in its fullest respect - in an a freudian dream analytic way. 

I'm just waiting to see some nudity. But not from this guy. 

Dawn is breaking in London and our man is being picked from his perch and making way for the next superstar.

Openings happening at Van Brunt Gallery and Hudson Beach gallery, Saturday Aug 1, 2009

Van Brunt Gallery is opening a pair of exhibits this coming Saturday.  The gallery's space at 130 Main will play host to an exhibit by Thomas Huber and Susan English.  Across the street, Hudson Beach Glass's second floor gallery will be hosting a group show called What's the Story featuring work by Emil Alzamora, Richard Deon, Deborah Davidowits, Louis Fatta, Karlos Carcamo, Stanford Kay, Kirsten Kucer, W. David Powell, Charlotte Schulz, Michael Sibilia, Carl Van Brunt and Zoe Van Brunt.

Receptions for both exhibits will be held from 6-9pm and they'll both run through August 31. 

Eye Candy Friday: Scholar's Shopper's Rock

Here's another post that honors those instances where the roadside of daily life intersects with elements of modern and post modern aesthetic.  Sometime back I shared the presence of an almost- Alberto Giacommetti work out on I-84.

Today's siting pays homage the work of Rachel Harrison whose survey exhibition  Consider the Lobster is on view at the Hessel Museum at Bard College through late December.  Holland Cotter wrote a review of the exhibition for the NY Times, and there is an accompanying slide show on the Times website.

Harrison's work marries the trappings of pop culture with confounding, often stone-like, abstract forms create moments that undercut the fetishistic tendencies of value attribution. Her artwork reposes at the crossroads of the cheap and the sublime.

In a sort of related, but reversed methodology, the Hudson Plaza strip mall on Rt 9 just south of Poughkeepsie injects a shorthand representation of the sublime into a structure of commercial messaging in its collosal signage.  The traditional form of the sign, includes an open area near the bottom, at the base of which is a medium sized boulder, mounted on a pipe which is illuminated by a transitioning selection of rainbow hued light.  The addition of the lighted rock is not not intentionally integrated enough into the whole to qualify as decoration and it's presence is not expressed passionately enough to qualify as poetry.  In fact it's rather crudely stated, though beautified(?) with a partial skein of celestial-like illumination.  The result is a perplexing drive by moment that is not any further elucidated if gazed upon for any extended period.  It's bizarre, and its an oddly true expression of art, one that presents a static familiar image which is very slightly and subversively skewed.
The floating rock and garish lighting scheme the Hudson Plaza sign presents rhymes uncannily with Harrison's globular, cementitiousl forms painted in equally garish, glitzy opalescent colors.

Your moment of immersive meditation for the weekend is here, in this 5 minute video of the rock shot at dusk sometime in June. 

Beacon Open Studio registration events this weekend.

I signed up earlier in the week to participate in the Beacon Open Studios scheduled to take place on the weekend of Sept 26 and 27.
The plan for the weekend is that the participating studios will be divided into two groups depending on their location in the city and each group of studios will be open on one of the two days.  This scheme will allow artists to checkout other studios and not be chained for two entire days.
Additionally, if artists are interested in participating, but are not interested in making their beds or don't have a studio, arrangements can be arranged for temporary "studio" space at the Beacon Studios.

There will be two registration parties this weekend.  Tonight, take in happy hour at Max's while you sign up for BOS from 5-7pm, and tomorrow from 10-noon at Zuzu's. 

More information on the event, how to apply, and incentives for making it out to one of this weekend's parties, visit the BOS website link above. 
You can also apply to participate at anytime by downloading the registration form, also available on the website.

Doings in Peekskill: Young Blooded opens, Sean Kelley gives talk.

The Hudson Valley regional exhibit of young artists called Young Blooded is opening on Friday at the Paramount Center for the Arts in Peekskill.  There are 15 artists in the show.  I have not seen a list of artists  and the only one I'm aware of being in the show is Will Walker.....if I'm not mistaken. (if ya'll are reading this and want to send me an artist list, I'd be happy to post it.) There is a reception happening on Friday July 24 from 5-7pm and the exhibit will remain on view through Aug. 16.  

The Paramount Center is located by 1008 Brown St. in Peekskill.

On Sunday July 26 HVCCA is hosting a talk by gallerist Sean Kelly from 4 to 6pm.  Mr. Kelly's talk will relate to his experience in representing artists whose work is ephemeral in nature and follows up a talk of a similar vein by Mary Sabbatino earlier in the year.  The talk Sunday will wrap up the museum's exhibit Origins which will be closing that same day.

Speaking of Art

This morning I was listening to a podcast episode of Fresh Air which aired last July 8, 2009.  This episode ended with a review of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston's exhibit "Tintoretto, Titian, Veronese:  Rivals in Renaissance Venice".  Lloyd Schwartz, classical music editor for The Boston Pheonix, presented an interesting and well described review, but I almost couldn't absorb it because my mind was dwelling on the odd occurrence it represented.  An episode of Fresh Air will typically end with a 5-10 minute review from one of  a handful of contributors which focuses on music, books or film or television.  I don't know the last time I heard a review of visual art on the program - if ever.  I listen to a couple of art specific podcasts to get my fix on the subject, and there are few of them out there, but it's no secret that the level of visual art content in broad based media is virtually null, and shrinking.  WNYC does pretty well in covering visual art in that it's not so rare to have the topic of visual art come up on one program or another, and an occasional bone is thrown by Sunday Morning on CBS.  Even our local WAMC would at one point regularly included an audio version of Beth Wilson's art reviews in Chronogram.  I imagine they may still do the same for her replacement, and they do give coverage to regional art happenings (although I must say, I simply can't stomach most of the station's original programming...I can appreciated what they're aiming to do - I just have a hard time listening to it.)  

Is the subject of visual art really so moribund, of such marginal interest that it doesn't make the cut on a NPR program, like Fresh Air, that regularly covers other aspects of "culture"?  Schwartz's segment was very listenable and well presented, and I appreciate the turn of his gaze   I encourage the program to include more such reviews in its rotation, and propigate a manner of speaking about visual art in an intellegent way just as it does with other disciplines.  There's certainly a bevy of capable art reviewers all around the country who've got more free time on their hands these days.

INSIGHT: Contemporary Approaches to Drawing opens July 18 at Ann Street Gallery in Newburgh, NY.

Detail: An insufficiency in our screens: during the incubation of a dream a center is marked for the extraordinary, 2006.

Charlotte Shulz is among the artists featured in Ann Street Gallery's exhibit INSIGHT: Contemporary Approaches to Drawing, opening Saturday, July 18.

Also appearing the in exhibit are:  Shaun Acton, Jorge J. Aristizabal, Jill Auckenthaler, Megan Canning, Nancy Cohen, Frances Jetter, Jason Mager, Lorene Taurerewa, Takashi Usui.

The exhibit runs through August 29.  An opening reception will be held from 6-9pm on Saturday.

Ann Street Gallery is located at 104 Ann Street in Newburgh.

Deadline in Ellenville NY: 5 artists working for 5 days in 1place, July 13-18.

Michael Asbill, Sara MacEachen, Kristopher Perry, Susan Ross and Judy Sigunick will be conducting a weeklong open studio of sorts, working together for one week in the ArtsWave Center at 12 Market Street in Ellenville, NY.  Processing Place is the name given to this action by the members of the Deadline Art Group.

Folks are invited to stop in and interact with the artists during the week.  There will be a reception held on July 18 from 4-8pm  during which results of the week's labors will be presented.

"Connecting Arts to Tourism" Workshop being held at Locust Grove in Poughkeepsie, July 16, 5:30 pm

Jim Cypher Jr. passed this item along for all who might be interested:

A Workshop for Artists and Art Organizations
The Dutchess County Arts Council, the Center for Research, Regional Education and Outreach (CRREO) along with the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (SDMA) at the State University of New York at New Paltz will host a program for artists and arts organizations throughout the region, titled "Developing Shared Marketing Tools and Other Ways to the Tourist Market in the Hudson Valley." 

The Workshop will be held on **THURSDAY** , July 16, 2009; 5:30pm-7:30pm at Locust Grove Estate at 2683 South Road (Route 9) inPoughkeepsie, New York. Admission is Free, however, reservations are encouraged. Email reservations to info@artsmidhudson. org or visit www.artsmidhudson. org for more information.

Lydia Higginson, Deputy Director of Dutchess County Tourism will be leading this workshop. Lydia, an Arts Council Board Member, has more than twenty-five years experience in the areas of Marketing, Tourism, andFundraising.

The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (www.newpaltz. edu/museum) is a not-for-profit educational institution located on the New Paltz campus. The museum comprises more than 9,000 square feet of exhibition space distributed over six galleries. The SDMA is one of the largest museums within the SUNY system. 

The mission of The Center for Research, Regional Education and Outreach (CRREO) (www.newpaltz. edu/crreo) is to conduct studies on topics of regional interested; bring visibility and focus to these matters; foster communities working together to better serve citizenry; and advance the public interest in our region.

About the Dutchess County Arts Council 

The Dutchess County Arts Council, founded in 1964, is a non-profit arts service organization dedicated to strengthening and supporting artists and arts organizations in the Mid-Hudson Valley region. The mission of the Dutchess County Arts Council is to provide the leadership, funding, encouragement, and services necessary for the highest quality of art to thrive in our county and region, and for citizens to value the arts as an important part of daily life, economy, and social fabric of our communities. Programs and activities include: grants to established organizations, community based projects and Arts in Education programs; folk arts research and presentation; technical assistance, professional development, and cultural community networking opportunities; awareness and advocacy; and community-wide fundraising efforts including the Dutchess County Art Fund. Programs are funded by the County of Dutchess, the New York State Council on the Arts, and
private donors.

Back home - July in Beacon

I returned from Germany on Friday night.  I finished up my initial offering in the 10x10x10 exhibit in Ellenville, in which I'm participating, and which opened last night.  I was in Ellenville briefly for the opening there, and since I've been wading through tiny waves of jet lag, I decided to forego Beacon's Second Saturday openings.

If you also were unable to attend any of the openings, here's a bit of what we both missed last night.

 Chris Marchin

Zahra's is back with work by NUBS and Chris Machin in the Pinstripe Show.  Were not talking zoot suits or Vanessa Tellez's show describes the ethos of the the gallery at Zahra's personified by this exhibit: 

The rise of trendy hip bullshit art is rising by the second.  Lowbrow is in, so that means everyone is trying to cash in on any kind of street art or gritty conceptual trite.  We ain't gonna give you art done by a hipster that just decided the way to sell his paintings is to get in touch with his lowlife side. 

 Jonathan Allen, "Away We Go" 2009 paint and paper on paper

Go North's new exhibit of collage and mixed media paintings by Jonathan Allen called Terminal Daydream.  A reading was scheduled prior to the opening featuring writers Chris O Cook, Greg Fuchs, Joe Millar, Chris Ross and Lauren Russell.

bau has an exhibit of paintings by member Michael Gaydos called Temptation.

 Josh Jenkins

Floor One's new exhibit features the work of Josh Jenkins.

Open Space was planning for a massive caravan/happening/cook out for We Are Familia, the group exhibit that will run through Sept. 6.  The show features work by Holly Stevenson, Yoh Nagao, Peter Kienzle/Superette, Jesse Brown, Marc McAndrews, Hisham Bharoocha, Amy Rupple, Chris Yormick, Nightwood, SEEE.  Here's a rundown of the concept behind WE ARE FAMILIA.

Gallery G is showing photography by Sonya Shabinsky. 

I read on the BCN site yesterday that 400 square will be closing at the end of this month, and Hermitage has recently closed.  The guys at Go North announced in early May that they'll be closing at the end of this month as well...I'll have more on this soon.

It appears that a new shop/gallery called Dream in Plastic will be opening at the beginning of August at 177 Main St. The joint is accepting submissions for its first gallery exhibit in the space.  Analog will be on exhibit from August 8 through Sept. 7 and will feature images taken with a plastic camera.  Submission guidelines are on the blog.