One of the drawings on the wall of Charlotte's studio.
In fact, this Meet yer Maykr is an audio studio visit which will be heard on The Dead Hare Radio Hour on WVKR 91.3 FM in Poughkeepsie NY. My conversation with Charlotte, and fellow Beaconite artist Peter Iannarelli who joined us will be aired on Tuesday April 19th at 5pm on WVKR, 91.3 FM in Poughkeepsie, NY. If you can't pick up the station, you can listen to the live stream at wvkr.org.
As usual, the podcast version of the show will be available to listen to and available for download on iTunes later in the evening of April 19.
Listen to the conversation with Charlotte here and now:
Check back here soon for more images and details on our visit to Charlotte's studio.
Images from the installation Object Lesson, curated by Karlos Carcamo at Para/site in 2005.
courtesy, the artist, via: charlotteschulz.com
There are more images from the Para/Site exhibit on Charlotte's website,
This week's ECF is a belated stream of consciousness addendum to the ECF of the week before last in praise of the found object.
Our recent Art Book Club (ABC) selection was W.J.T. Mitchell's What do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images; a really astute investigation of images (totems, fetishes, idols) and their presence and power society. It's well worth a read, or two. It's one of those reads that asserts itself as framing overlay for how you (I) relate to images. I also surmise that it's a book that due to the subject and structure is timeless in its relevance; it added a layer of insight and reflection on recent events in Egypt, Libya, Japan and the National Portrait Gallery and more distantly Iraq, as well as the even more quotidian visuals we encounter without noticing.
Mitchell articulates the essence of the found object in a way that I meaningful and recognizable, noting the very finding of which is, by nature a 'fortuitous circumstance'.
What better place, though, to locate the roots of the found object than in the foundling, a poor, orphaned creature that might just amount to something. The moment of finding the found object is the moment when one feels oneself to be pregnant or about to adopt something (which comes to the same thing). This is, I think quite distinct from the moment of finding the lost object (fetishism) or the sublime object of ideology (the idol), neither of which are capable of surprising anyone or of binging newness into the world.
The excerpt above, paired with a portion of a conversation I captured between Angelika and Peter Iannarelli as part of the Beacon Art Salon's Contemporary Artists on Contemporary Art series, in which Peter talks about his penchant for claiming authorship of found objects..even when those objects aren't lost crystallized the thought in my head that in some way, the studio is a place where conditions can be set in such a way as to create an instance - one that approximates that sensation of an object found.
I don't work in an overly determined manner in the studio. In fact, I leave a lot of room for randomness and automatism in the pursuit (unconsciously) of the found object. I don't think he'd agree, but when I visit Peter Iannarelli's studio, I see the mechanism found object cloning at work. But then, we're all just trying make personal discoveries...
So, slightly appropos of nothing other than through the stream of consciousness and fortuity of time, we come to the visual portion of your Eye Candy Friday serving.
Today's images come from the pre-MAYKR photo archive that I happened to be perusing through recently. I came across these images of an installation that Peter Iannarelli did in his studio at Spire Studios back in 2004, when Spire was still very much the beating heart of Beacon's art life (to my mind). This installation probably stands as the high water mark of Peter's Walmart phase. His studio was bedecked as a crazy post big box rave, complete with strobe lights streamers and giant shopping bag windsocks. Come to think of it, if I'm correct, it was a rave that sported only the sound of oscillating fans and rustling plastic. I was a majorly cool visual experience, and I treasure these photos of it. I feel fortunate that I uploaded these images two weeks ago since my external hard drive crashed to the floor last week, and possibly along with it, a substantial chunk of the unpublished MAYKR photo archive (along with a boatload of other data). I haven't yet had the stomach to really try to investigate what might be salvageable.
BTW, if you're looking for other treats in the found object category, look no further....yes, indeed, look further, but don't miss looking at......than Joy Garnett's Unmonumental series of images.
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.
The holidays that have just passed and a bit of ruminating on Peter Iannarelli's work currently on view at kork, in Poughkeepsie through April 30 have all had me considering notions of the search for meaning and communion, and the difference among people in recognizing whether they've found it in such a way as to suit their souls. A wheat-paste Peek-A-Boo Jesus by Maki105 placed on a wall outside of a video store in Boston earlier this month had folks falling to their knees. I first caught wind of this, courtesy of Hrag Vartanian. On his blog thisrecording.com, Will Hubbard chronicles the rosy patch of enlightenment he found on a recent pilgrimage to Hermitage. These are small, but parallel items that give me an added context in which to hawk Iannarelli's recasting of his Untitled work of 2007 for the environment of the kork space in the offices of Bailey Browne CPA and Associates. Given the pencil snapping pressure this season of tax bears as a gift under its arm every year, a genuine photocopy of Iannarelli's fully customizable correspondence with the God of one's own making could be wonderfully suitable for that loved one ready to make a deal with the powers that be. Just shoot us an email to kork[at]maykr[dot]com with the subject line: "let's talk" before April 30th, include your mailing address in the body of the email, and we'll send you your very own copy, straight from Poughkeepsie! Check out the press release for more details.
"While there I admired some of the art and was baffled at others. For example how does one tack two pieces of bread to a wall with thread and sell it for $800?" This one line review of Peter Iannarelli's June 08 exhibit at Van Brunt Gallery comes by way of this blog.
Peter Iannarelli at Van Brunt Gallery
I'm sure for some, wandering into Van Brunt's back room to see Peter Iannarelli's work was akin to stepping into an artmaking meth lab freshly abandoned; The illicit chemists, just ahead of a raid, taking leave out the back or through the trap door in the floor. For me, this naked work needed time and effort to digest and a second visit did much to allow me to start seeing it. Experiencing this exhibit brought to mind a piece of Peter's that was discussed at studio group critique last Summer to which I felt unable to respond beyond feeling a satisfaction that he had made it. It was rough, raw and wrong somehow, but it felt fresh and although I couldn't get my head around it, I felt he was on to something and it felt like something natural to Peter.
I like the fact that one had to decipher what was what in the exhibit by checking the materials listed on the price list against the tangle of media in the work itself. (I couldn't identify the Baccarat Crystal compost)
This recent work feels naked to me because it's shed the cloak of metaphor and stepped away from its role of presenting emotional vignettes enlisting common materials as surrogate sentient protagonists. I've long seen his combinations of materials as surrogates of human emotional interaction in a direct one-to-one relationship. Manipulating laws of gravity and magnetism, his choice of media; balloons, magnets, glass vessels equate to scientific paraphernalia investigating the physics of social interaction. The anthropomorphic connection is more tenuous in this current work and the objects used are stand ins for themselves, challenging the viewer find something of himself in the work.
James Westwater's pervasive truncated losenge (or "hard edged oval") floating front and center of his images were on exhibit at Van Brunt in June in the front gallery. This losenge form draws a clear line in my mind to the black monolith in the film 2001, insinuating itself into the center of Everything.
James Westwater
By contrast to that brooding enigmatic form, James' monoliths provide a less threatening, more psychotropic effect given the user friendly rounded corners and cheerily pure hues.
Van Brunt's new exhibit will be opening tomorrow evening with a reception from 6-9pm. New Work by Peter Iannarelli and James Westwater will be on exhibit through July 7.
This recent work feels naked to me because it's shed the cloak of metaphor and stepped away from its role of presenting emotional vignettes enlisting common materials as surrogate sentient protagonists. I've long seen his combinations of materials as surrogates of human emotional interaction in a direct one-to-one relationship. Manipulating laws of gravity and magnetism, his choice of media; balloons, magnets, glass vessels equate to scientific paraphernalia investigating the physics of social interaction. The anthropomorphic connection is more tenuous in this current work and the objects used are stand ins for themselves, challenging the viewer find something of himself in the work. 
