Tag Archive "video"

1967 and 2011 – Nadia Hironaka and Matt Suib at Locks Gallery

The gigantic first floor space at Locks Gallery is occupied this month by the massive, multi-channel video installation 1967 by Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib. The collaborative project by the husband and wife team uses appropriated footage from cinema and protest videos to raise questions about political dissent, utopian movements and the role of mass media in driving protest movements in general.

Rivane Neuenschwander in Dublin, Lygia Pape in London, and a book on Art under Conditions of Political Repression

Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other opened at the New Museum, New York in June, 2010 and I caught up with it at its final stop, the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA, on through January 29, 2012). Organized by the two museums, the exhibition was also seen in in St. Louis, Scottsdale and Miami. Neuenschwander is from the first generation of Brazilian artists to come to international attention early in their careers, but she inevitably stands on the shoulders of the Frente and Neo-Concret artists of the late 1950s-1960s (Helio Oticica, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and others). Some ...

‘Resonance; Looking for Mr. McLuhan’ at Pratt Manhattan Gallery

2011 was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Marshall McLuhan and to mark the occasion, Pratt held an exhibition, Resonance; Looking for Mr. McLuhan, curated by Berta Sichel, director of the department of audiovisuals and chief-curator of film and video at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and Mariano Salvador, also of the Reina Sophia; it ran Oct. 21-Dec. 21, 2011. In the 1960s McLuhan was widely derided by fellow academics for his extremely popular books that dealt with the implications of changing technology upon human relations.   Forty-five years after the publication of Understanding Media (1962) and ...

U.S. debut–Bill Viola comes to Pafa and leaves behind a gem

Bill Viola came to Pennsylvania Academy last month for the opening of “Ocean without a Shore,” his three-channel video installation in its American debut! The installation –a new purchase by the museum to be permanently on display in the Morris Gallery — is installed as a triptych in what’s now a dark, chapel-like space, where the piece casts a moody, elegiac spell. The work seems to conjure up the spirits of the dead with cinematic special effects and sound right out of the Matrix.

Jennifer Levonian’s life stories–hers and ours, on artblog radio

Clashes of contemporary values and tastes permeate the familiar and the imagined in Jennifer Levonian‘s hand-painted stop-action animations. Fuming SUVs belch noxious smoke in a Whole Foods-ish parking lot as inside a naked woman practices yoga among the pumpkins. The engaging clarity of her watercolor images and ideas belie their complexity. We’re reluctant to call her work social criticism because she describes more than criticizes, tweaking with humor and leading viewers to draw their own conclusions. Levonian (BFA William and Mary; MFA RISD) first assisted on video animations as a child, with her father and sister. She is currently in ...

Scaling up – Chris Davison makes a mural

Christopher Davison usually works small. His drawings and prints are dark, fairy tale dreamscapes that involve enormous numbers of details made with a wide variety of mostly tiny marks. But when the opportunity arose to create a wall-scale piece — a mural, in fact, on a gallery wall — Davison took a leap of faith and plunged right in. The resulting black and white mural in Gallery 817 at University of the Arts was a triumph of content, style, imagination and just plain hard work — a perfect scaled-up translation of the artist’s dreamy and threatening aesthetic into gargantuan proportions.

Artists’ Projects in France

During a week spent visiting buildings of Le Corbusier in France, one of the happiest surprises was the number of artists who have been invited to produce work in French monuments and sites. We began at the Villa Savoye in Poissy,  just outside Paris.  As we circumnavigated the building to reach the entrance (designed for visitors who arrive by car, the ‘front’ door is 180 degrees from the façade that’s visible on entering the grounds), we saw a large, open structure on the grounds, made of rough logs and thatch, that looked to me like an extravagant version of chickees, ...

CONSTRUCT, from CFEVA, at the Ice Box

Big is what the Ice Box exhibition space requires. CONSTRUCT, CFEVA‘s show there, delivers the goods.

Kari Altmann’s Core Samples at Extra Extra Gallery

by Dennis D’Alesandro Core Samples, a one-person show featuring internet and new media artist Kari Altmann at Extra Extra Gallery, attempts to uncover the common denominators that exist between people, the exterior environment, and all of the images, products, and information that populate our existence. (The show can be seen at Extra Extra until the end of the month.)

Jennifer Levonian at the Library Company

Murray thinks about history and I think about art. I think we might have similar motives–trying to figure out the meaning of life and what is real–but just come at it in different ways. So when video artist Jennifer Levonian, a 2009 Pew Fellow in the Arts, gave a talk at the Library Company to introduce her new work on exhibit there alongside Civil War-era printed materials, we happily joined hands and caught a trolley to Center City.