Lets talk about art! » Exhibitions

Applications for Urban Art @ Minto Park 2010 Now Being Accepted

admin — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 06:20:11 +0000

Hello Artists:

Urban Art @ Minto Park is a go!

WHEN: Saturday July 24th, 2010
WHERE: Minto Park in Ottawa
HOURS: 10 am to 5 pm

APPLICATION DUE DATE: April 30th, 2010
Late Applications will be considered if there is space.

Applications are available via email here: urbanartshow@hotmail.com
Please write “application 2010″ in your subject line

Haunting

admin — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:12:29 +0000

Jun Takahashi’s Graces and photos of Fever Ray/ Fever Ray Video-When I grow up. Both are reigning my visual world at the moment. I’m drawn like a moth to a flame, and they work so well together.

Far Away So Close

admin — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 18:34:12 +0000

The San Francisco LAB just closed their 25th-year-anniversary exhibition called PastForward, where they made an open call to young artists to respond to works of the established ones who came out of The LAB. The result seems to have been quite exciting – you can take a look at some pictures at this site (with some great jazz playing on the site – which unfortunately can’t be turned off…).
My favorite work, especially given the distant perspective (I’m in Warsaw now) is the Viewing Platform by Ellen Babcock:

Perfect for any vernissage! (And after all, what would contemporary art be without the vernissages!) It plays with an essential trait of contemporary art: centrality. You are taller, you see further, and as if by chance you are hence appreciated. You become the spectacle. Very tiring indeed. And fun, if you forget the impossibility of an intimate contact with the remaining works. I know, the people become the work, and still…
I would love to create a portable version of this. Like a small podium with railings that you could carry around the opening (wheels?), or rent, or receive if you are a VIP guest. Or just have one of my own, though the most enjoyable part might be having several people on this higher level, among the crowds. And believe you me, at the exhibition openings of the main Warsaw art centers, it would come in handy.

–
Here is what the curatorial note says:

Ellen Babcock responds to Lauren Davies with a sculptural installation
that addresses Davies’ engagement with representations of the natural world. Based upon Babcock’s visit to a tiny museum in Twillingate, Newfoundland – a visit Davies herself had made prior to Babcock – the sculpture teases out the differences between the two artists’ approaches to the tropes of natural history display. Encountering a stuffed polar bear in the museum, Davies responded with a gently mocking mixture of humor and pathos meant to remind us of the absurdity of the way taxonomies simplify and freeze the fluid mysteries of life. Babcock, on the other hand, found the quasi-encounter visceral and beautiful. While she sees Davies as opening up a space for the Real in an iconoclastic rejection of the traditions of natural display, Babcock looks for vestiges of the Real in the moment of encounter when disbelief is suspended.

Reconnaissance – installation view

admin — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:00:48 +0000

The Actors – Reconnaissance, by Wojtek Ziemilski

admin — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 08:43:12 +0000

This is a short fragment of my work called The Actors. The first volume -Reconnaissance lasts 50 minutes. You can see this excerpt in sort-of-HDhere.

The big Fuss: Who Killed Barack Obama?

admin — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 04:03:42 +0000

Once again, Peter Fuss (remember his “For the Laugh of God“?) manages to poke the finger in the right spot.
His most recent work, exhibited at the Out Of Sth exhibition in Wrocław(Poland) (which also has blu’s animation on display) plays on our sense of reality.
What I like most about this work is something I didn’t notice at first. The first reading, to me, was simple: knowing the fate of the liberal Americans who came to positions of power, it is difficult not to think of the risk Obama is facing. This also might be seen as a cool and lucid way of looking at politics. Can any ideal manage to survive? Isn’t Obama, the Obama we know as fighting for “change”, somewhat dead, already? Who killed him?
But what I really like about this work is not this seemingly political message. It is the way it portraits us and our own patterns of looking at reality.

The problem is not that Obama may get killed. The problem is our thinking of it as a fact. It is not Fuss’s work that is cynical. We are.
Seeing the work on a billboard makes it even more obvious: we take it for granted that things are the way they are, and even if they aren’t, too bad for the facts. The billboard is there, so Obama is dead. Who killed him? Guess who.

update/ps: A couple of months ago an Israeli designer created a shirt with a similar text. I think the differences between the two projects prove my point. Having/seeing this on a T-shirt and seeing it on a billboard are two completely different experiences. (Not to mention the completely different level of design). And that’s what sets apart a good artpiece from a, well, another one. (Also notice the context – one is set in NY, the other- in Wrocław). Suffice it to say that already a few days after the opening of the exhibition two French tourists entered the gallery (you can see the entrance to the right on the second picture) saying they haven’t had the chance to follow the news and they were quite terrified. Now, just to add another level ofartsy-fartsy commenting, the person attending them answered they weren’t to worry because it was “just an art installation”. Ouch, now that’s not what I would call effective art guidance. Or what she being ironic?