A little gossip for your morning joe

Libby, Andrea and I went to Friday’s opening at Maze Gallery/Art Syndicate. Skullphone, whose wheatpaste images of a skull talking on the phone are all over New York and elsewhere (he’s a Los Angeles artist) had his imagery in the front. And Andrew Jeffrey Wright had his drawings, t-shirts and paintings in the downstairs back space. Good show and although I’ve seen some of the AJW pieces before I’m always happy to encounter them because they make me smile.

The place was filled with young folks and while we initially felt a little out of place, ahem, being shall we say a little older than everyone else, we found ourselves having nice conversations with people anyway. Conversations full of newsworthy items. Like that Wright is working on an album cover for Plastic Little and is having a show in London — the London of Ontario that is, in a gallery I think he said was called Community Resources or something a little non-art-gallery-sounding.

Also, Ted Passon of Space 1026 and a founder of Padlock Gallery is working on a music video as well as his ongoing documentary of Space 1026 (you can see a sample of the documentary–as well as Passon’s music video for Sweatheart in the Ewok Village at ICA (see the Sweatheart video on their website, too–highly recommended viewing).

Liz Rywelski of Space 1026 is back in town and happy to be here after spending time in San Francisco at California College of Art and discovering, she said, that things were pretty much the same for young artists in SF as they are here and so if you’re going to be in a second tier city it might as well be Philadelphia. But we ARE the best little second tier city in the universe aren’t we?

And Annette Monnier of Black Floor is in a show in Williamsburg at Nurture Art. That’s East Williamsburg she said–even more off the beaten path than W’burg. Both Monnier and Rywelski are very happy to see Ryan Trecartin here in Philly (see his show at the Icebox, please). And Rywelski encouraged us to go see the FUEL show which includes work by one of Trecartin’s collaborators, Jesse Greenberg.

OK, that’s all the content I can do this morning. Gotta go work on the piece I’m writing about Second Life for the Weekly’s “Next” issue, as in what’s next. While doing research I signed up to become a Second Lifer, and although I can’t figure much of it out and confess that it weirds me out muchly I do have a moniker– just call me sokref1 Mulligan.

Wait, one more thing. Did you see Jason Scott Musson’s column in the Weekly last week? Hope it they let the Space 1026er do this on a regular basis.