July 2011 Archive

Monnier on Department of Alternative Affairs at City Hall

Annette Monnier’s One Review a Month blog continues its thoughtful reads of the one show per month that Monnier covers. Her newest is a post on the collectives Little Berlin, Fluxspace and Extra Extra’s exhibit Department of Alternative Affairs in the art gallery in City Hall. This post is surely worth your while.  

The black male image – an interview with JD Dragan about his photos in Modern Slave at AXD

JD Dragan knows how to light pigmented skin with exquisite finesse. His photographs of black male bodybuilders on exhibit at AxD Gallery are lush, sexy and very disturbing. Upon walking into the gallery I thought I was being confronted by the works of a black artist dealing with his or her own internalized racism (a subject worth exploring), until the gallery director informed me that the photographs were by a white man. In my mind that changed everything. My first instinct was to leave as quickly as I came in but instead I decided to ask a few questions. I ... More » »

Ryan Trecartin’s Any Ever at P.S.1

I finished viewing Ryan Trecartin’s Any Ever and left bloated with images, memes, and satires. The exhibition, which runs at P.S.1 through September 3, is composed of seven independent but interrelated videos. Trecartin’s work relies heavily on references to reality television and leaves viewers rattled by the ever-blurry distinction between his video world and our own. Any Ever carries a lot of virtual hype, but invites you and your emotional reaction to roll around on a real world couch made of walkers and hospital mattresses.

News: Lucien Freud, Magic Garden, Delaware Art Museum juried centennial show

News Lucien Freud dies at 88 Painter Lucian Freud – grandson of Sigmund Freud – died on July 20 in London at age 88. Copious commentary everywhere for this master portraitist and figure painter. The Washington Post obituary is is a good overview of the artist’s story.

Thinking about materials, memory and and process at Little Berlin

The artists in Materialism of Encounter want to dispel the idea that a focus on the physical is a sign of a lack of ideas or superficial thought. With the viewer’s experience being in part, physical, material qualities can not be ignored.

The Seduction of Virtual Flesh: Pastel Portraits: Images of 18th-Century Europe at the MMA

If you’re not already familiar with the form, Pastel Portraits: Images of 18th-Century Europe at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA, or The Met, through Aug. 14, 2011)  will introduce an under-appreciated medium at its height; and high it was. Popes and royalty chose pastels rather than painted portraits on occasion, as anyone will know who saw the wonderful exhibition of Jean-Étienne Liotard at the Frick Collection in 2006. It included the marvelous pastel portraits that Maria Theresa, Archduchess of Austria, commissioned of her children, including the 7 year old Marie Antoinette (see below), who would marry Louis XV of ... More » »

Young Country at Rosenwald-Wolf

The exhibit Young Country at UArts‘ Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery is as slippery as its title. Are we talking deep South? The Wild West? Our dreams as a baby nation only 225 years old? Either way, we are talking about something American in the bone, a kind of iconic ur-culture exaggerated by movies and stereotypes to they point that they have become our reality of the imagination.

New podcast-Joe Leroux and Stacey Lee Webber, from Madison to Port Richmond and why they love it here

Locks Gallery sponsors this episode. Joe Leroux and Stacey Lee Webber live in Port Richmond, where they also have a studio nearby. They both have MFA’s from the University of Wisconsin, and while they are both sculptors.  Joe’s work combines performance, photography and sculpture, in which the artist is the featured figure – kind of like Matthew Barney, only without all the makeup. Stacey’s a metalsmith and makes use of found coins and paper money which she transforms into new objects including a complete step ladder out of pennies. They both teach at local art schools and they’ve both had ... More » »

Photographing the Baker family – an interview with Andrea Modica

The photographic series “Fountain” by Andrea Modica gives an insider view of modern industrial hunters, aka the Baker family. The Bakers run a small slaughterhouse that has been in the family for three generations. The collaboration between artist and family created a series of photographs that are like a well-developed philosophy of the expired, expressed with the gentle and careful use of tone and mood that constantly challenges a carnivore’s contribution to animal slaughter and its often quiet consequences (i.e. health). In this series of photographs, animal and human merge within the shadows without ever showing the blood and guts ... More » »

artblog radio slide show–see the peeps

Here’s a slide show of images from our podcast interviews.  Check it out on the jump page