October 2010 Archive

Letter to a sunken ship

Please let us get on with our lives. Love, The rest of us Recently there has been a lot of hate being dished around our little art world of Philadelphia via several contentious blogs. Most thought it to be over months ago. Suffering the fate of most Internet trends, it went away as interest waned and attention spans dissipated. We all moved on with our lives and put the issue at our backs. Unfortunately it seems that this sunken ship refuses to stay sunk.

Video Served Three Ways – Little Berlin, Great and Terrible Collective and Rebekah Templeton

I am sometimes impatient with video art. I complain about the seating (or lack thereof) the tiny screens, weird sounds conflicting as you move from one display to the next, but I am here to sing the joys of three shows where video is a pivotal element. This weekend is your last chance to see the shows at Little Berlin and Great and Terrible Collective, while the wonderful live!infili! at Rebekah Templeton has already finished. These shows include sculpture, drawing, animation, installation, and sound and light displays, but each showcases video in a unique or adventurous way.

FIAC 2010 in Paris – A ramble unearths some deep thoughts

Despite nationwide strikes that continue to hobble the country the french international art fair, FIAC, came to town (Oct. 21-24th) for a week and enabled collectors and artists get down to the business of selling art. Not a riot could be heard within its walls, and business was brisk. Attendance was up. Prices were up  5.4% ( after a 42% plunge  in 2008/09).  Art is more affordable now then during the boom, and the volume sold is stable, according to the Financial Times. Good news, then,  since the crisis broke.

Letter From Paris: Everything & Nothing At The FIAC

Does contemporary art swing from one pole of “everything” to its opposite of “nothing”?  This very casual notion stems from two French artists, Yves Klein and Arman.  In the late 1950s Klein famously exhibited “Le Vide” (The Void), an empty space “sensitized” by the artist, at Iris Clert’s gallery in Paris. About a year later, Arman countered with “Le Plein (The Full-Up), filling the gallery with a ton of garbage. (Arman’s sardine can souvenir multiples from the show can be seen here). This year’s Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain (FIAC) (October 21 -24) dances around this idea in ways probably unknown ... More » »

I won the POST lottery–the studio of Bohyun Yoon and WonJung Choi

A dreamy utopianism underpins Philadelphia Open Studios Tour, the annual event in which art lovers and artists get to connect with each other without galleries in the middle. It’s the equivalent of discovering a starlet-to-be sipping a black-and-white at a Hollywood lunch counter.

Hey, it’s Philly Photo Day today-take a picture!

The nice people at Philadelphia Photo Art Center organized this project.  Take a picture of something in the city limits, submit it electronically (upload it at PPAC’s website, one picture per person) and they will print your picture out and include it in the exhibition opening at Crane Arts on Nov. 11.  More information here on how to submit.  The show could be the surprise hit of the season–a Philly portrait of the people, by the people and for the people.

Light Drift and Philly Works – Design Philadelphia 2010 out-takes

I still remember being introduced to Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a child. For a long while after my first viewing of the film, the five variable notes and flashing colors of the climactic mother ship scene stuck with me. They evoked a magic redolent of youthful innocence, which later television would dissipate through endless reruns on AMC. Eventually, even Richard Dreyfuss’s eternally boyish charm could no longer salvage an image made stale with repetition. Last Friday, October 15, thanks to the Light Drift display on the banks of the Schuylkill River, I was transported momentarily back to ... More » »

GL Brierley at Madder139

The captivating and skillful paintings of GL Brierley are appropriately exhibited at Madder139, located at the fore of Vyner Street. This street in east London is one of many avenues with a concentration of galleries that, every first Thursday of the month, hosts a free late night open-gallery event. GL Brierley served as a beacon to my inaugural First Thursdays in London, her paintings immediately captured my fascination. They are abstract yet anatomical, precious while also grotesque. Deft displays of painterly ability, Brierley’s canvases hover in an ambiguous space, all while triggering reactions both sensual and intellectual.

Not the Brady Bunch

Kara Crombie’s video Mother’s Birthday [Vox Populi, October 1-31, 2010] offers a new take on the cobbled-together American family. A rag-tag collection of characters from different races and centuries offer a play-within-a-play in honor of their drunken plantation-belle of a mom. Basking in the unreal glow of computer-generated twilight, they remind us how we as Americans have come to know each other through the shallow representations of popular culture. Crombie’s ability to piece together high and low, new and old is compelling, and likely a factor that helped win her a 2010 Pew Fellowship.  Along with the other artists featured ... More » »

Canadian humor survives and thrives at Slought

The dry, geeky humor of Canadians is still up at Slought Foundation — until Oct. 29. Hurry hurry. The two artists, John Oswald and MIchael Snow, put me in mind of Rodney Graham–cool, cerebral, cosmic and silly.