Tag Archive "xiang-yang"
Words, words, noise and a melon on First Friday
First Friday was full of goodies. We started at the Fab. Here’s some pictures and a short video and some gossip at the bottom so be sure to scroll down. Ed Ruscha at the Fabric Workshop last Friday night Ed Ruscha was looking like a little leprachaun in front of a packed audience at the Fabric Workshop’s new space last Friday. The 2nd floor gallery space — which makes a great lecture hall — was certified for only 200 people with a live feed downstairs for the big spillover crowd. Ruscha and his slide of the Barnyard Rembrandt According ...
The fab fiber four: the second stitch
This is the second of two posts on some fiber exhibits I saw. Here’s the first one. 6th International Fiber BiennialSnyderman/Works Galleries About 100 artists from far and wide were selected for this exhibit, now in its 6th year, curated by Snyderman Gallery director/exhibition curator, Bruce Hoffman. This show is the seed from which the full extravaganza of fiber exhibits in Philadelphia grew. The range of materials and methods is as astounding as ever, from quilted film to plastic discs arranged in a grid to suggest the grid of woven fabric. The craftsmanship was uniformly outstanding. Here’s what I found ...
News blast: Xiang Yang in New York and here
One of Xiang Yang’s embroideries from his series Relationship–Bushism and Sadamism. In this piece, which was at the Painted Bride a year ago, the embroidery links portraits of Kim Il Jung and Mao Tse Tung A year ago, the folks at Snyderman stopped in the Painted Bride and were as blown away as we are by Xiang Yang’s emboidery, which mixes contemporary political and cultural issues with the ancient art of embroidery and Chinese and Western visual traditions. Snyderman now represents Xiang, and placed him in an exhibit at the Museum of Design & Arts, opening Nov. 8. The exhibit, ...
Hollow men: revisiting Xiang Yang at the Bride
Relationship:Buddhism-Saddamism. This one shows Saddam. Bush is on the far side. The execution by hanging of Saddam Hussein served as a nice reminder that I wanted to bring up Xiang Yang’s exhibit, Beyond the Duplicated Voice at the Painted Bride. Even though Roberta wrote a great post on it, I wanted to add my two cents because I’m such a fan. George W. Bush’s portrait is paired with Saddam Hussein’s, and it seems like a dead-on coupling, the two of them undone by one another. They are each framed, several feet apart, with the embroidery threads that edge the portraits ...
Weekly Update 1 – Holiday the global way
This week’s Weekly is the Holiday Guide issue including my holiday art round-up. Below is the copy with extra pictures. Holiday DiversityArt with a global sauce. As we celebrate Thanksgiving with ritual turkey and pumpkin pie feasting, there are a few exhibitions like the salsas, chutneys and rice dishes that also grace some American tables this time of year. Henry Bermudez. Catalog cover. This is Projects Gallery’s second show this year with a catalog. It’s a great idea for the show, for the gallery and for the artist. Henry Bermudez’s “Fragmented Dream” at Projects Gallery and Xiang Yang’s “Beyond the ...
Space is the place at Vox Populi
Beautiful backyard scene in Nadia Hironaka’s Crack. Note the satellite dish, air conditioner, tv antenna (?). The mix of old and new, the voyeuristic view through the window, the snapshot of a time and place that tells nothing. Space — internal, external, fairy tale and architected — is on the table at Vox Populi this month. Looking at the work here, I kept feeling like Marty McFly in Back the the Future when Doc would explain the space/time continuum. Sure, Doc, whatever. Let’s just get this jalopy moving. It’s apt that space is an issue though since Vox the gallery ...
Light pours at Pageant
Hunter StablerOriginally uploaded by sokref1. Sonic Pretzel Mastadon, virtuoso cut paper, (detail) by Hunter Stabler. Click to see it bigger. Cut paper to die for and thread used in un-thread-like ways — that’s the big news from Pageant Gallery this month in Everything is Lightpour, a two person show pairing Penn MFA candidate Hunter Stabler and Vox Populi member Xiang Yang. Xiang Yang, piece with embroidery at two ends with thread spanning the void in the middle. Very nice piece. Yang, whose embroidered images (from sources like magazines and the newspaper) and set in plastic take-out boxes have appeared at ...
Guilt I and II
Guilt I: I’m posting this because I’ve been worrying about how I didn’t say anything about the excellent piece by Xiang Yang at Spector Gallery Great (re)Masters exhibit, partly because his work is an outlier. But that doesn’t make it any less worthy of mention. Xiang is the person who did the terrific crewel-in-a-lunch-container pieces (see post). Here, he’s doing a take-off on Leonardo Da Vinci‘s “Lady With Ermine” (left). The original was oil on wood, but Xiang’s quirky, yet elegant version is mylar layered over a map with some pencil and with some embroidery holding it together. I came ...
More on comic book crewel
I was wondering about a thing or two after I wrote the previous post on Xiang Yang, so I talked to gallerist Shelley Spector. The show included 72 pieces, and the images come out of popular magazines and other pop culture sources. If the tension on the threads is uneven, they will sag or pull, so Xiang stays focused on each piece until it is completed. Some of the pieces take four of five days (and he does eat and sleep; he just doesn’t switch to another project or put the project aside). I had been thinking about how this ...
Earnest youth and comic book crewel at Spector
If you’re not familiar with the portraits of Rebecca Westcott, you can see them this month at Spector Gallery. Westcott’s portraits of young adults–her crowd–against fairly blank backgrounds capture their earnestness, their tentativeness, and their everyday clothes. Unlike Elizabeth Peyton, who’s working the same age group and paints only the cool, flattened stares of languid youth posing for Ralph Lauren, Westcott gets personal. I also like the contrast between traditional portraiture–of people who can pay for their likenesses–and these pictures of the young, not-yet-successful who are still a little unformed (like the backgrounds) and finding their way in the world. ...
