January 2011 Archive

State of the art–precarious

I got this email yesterday from Americans for the Arts and thought it was worth passing along. The National Endowment and arts education need our support:

Diverse Meanderings at CFEVA and Tiger Strikes Asteroid

There is a smorgasbord of styles at the Center for Emerging Visual Artists right now. The show, entitled Beyond Abstraction, was assembled by visiting curator Katrin Elia and consists of eight artists with mediums as wide-ranging as video and encaustic to fabric and wood. With such disparity even within the realm of abstractions, it is necessary to focus on a few aspects of the show.

Leah Bailis on film and longing, an artblog radio interview

Our series sponsor is Fleisher Art Memorial. Leah Bailis is known for architecture fragments, which she makes, painstakingly, out of paper and cardboard. In 2010 she was a finalist for the West Prize with a large paper-architecture installation. Her recent solo show at Vox Populi, where she is a member, took a new turn, away from architectural fragments and into art about the human figure. Sculptures of a couple kissing, where one person seems to be consuming the other and photos of herself in costume as Gustav von Aschenbach, the main character in the movie version of Death in Venice. ... More » »

Truth or Fiction? Clemens von Wedemeyer at Project Arts Centre, Dublin

The epitath for Clemens von Wedemeyer‘s The Fourth Wall, through Jan. 29, 2011 at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, might be Anthropologist, heed thyself. The three-channel installation, supported by a printed guide, explores story-telling, the search for human origins, the credibility of film, the responsibility of anthropology and our tendency to view the world through expectations honed by legend and desire. The video one sees on entering the gallery, Found Footage, centers on the first contact, in 1971, with the Tasaday, a tribal group in the Mindano rainforest of the Philippines.  The tribe had been living a Stone Age existence in ... More » »

Interview: Edward Maeder’s paper dresses, in Mt. Airy

Edward Maeder is the former curator of Costumes and Textiles at the L.A. County Museum of Art and later at historic Deerfield. Maeder has more recently taken up the mantle of artist and “needleman.” His exquisite paper dress creations are made of Q-tips, coffee filters and other found papers. The inspiration for these art objects are 18th-century fashion. The public can view the creation of one of these masterpieces during Edwards Maeder’s MaederMade Pop-Up Studio residency Feb. 5 to 20 in the Green on Greene Building, Greene Street and Carpenter’s Lane, Philadelphia (artist’s talk and workshops information at the bottom ... More » »

Weekly Update – Subversive, excellent Virtual Assistance at Extra Extra

Virtual Assistance is great, and a great rarity: political art that’s poetic and elliptical. Without being heavy-handed or preachy, the videos, photos, printouts and objects in the show deliver a story of successful human interaction in the face of globalization and a corporate-dictated power structure.

Knight Arts Challenge finalists include artblog!

We are very happy to be finalists for the Knight Arts Challenge for Philadelphia, sponsored by the Miami-based Knight Foundation.  The list of the 63 finalists (out of 1.752 applicants) includes local big fish and small fry like us, with about a third of the finalists from the visual arts realm.  Here’s the list below.  The winners for the matching grants will be announced in April. Read the full press release from Knight.

Smart fare at an exciting new venue – Our Farm at Underground Arts

Philadelphia artists and audiences have something to be excited about—a smart new play in a hot new space. This month, the New York-based collaborative Fresh Ground Pepper presents the Philadelphia premiere of Our Farm, an original work by Andrew Farmer, running at Underground Arts in the Wolf Building.

ICA’s new shows–Tyng, videos, Boyle & Duke

The search for a single unifying principle–a mathematical formula, or the atom, or God–is the sort of romantic obsession that underlies the Institute of Contemporary Art exhibit Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry.

Leah Bailis next week on artblog radio

Leah Bailis changed up her art significantly in her last solo show at Vox Populi.  From sculptures of forlorn and fragile architectural fragments, her show Magical Thinking was a mix of photos,  sculpture, and wall works whose focus was on forlorn and macabre relationships taken from the cinema.  We met Leah in her studio to talk with her about her new direction.  Below is a 38-second promo; hear the entire episode next Monday. leah bailis 38-second promo