CCAI: Grad Night

I can't hope to do a better job of summarizing the Capital City Art Initiative's current show, "Grad Night," than Brett M. Van Hoesen did. Hoesen is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at UNR, and her essay on the show is here. The show itself features work by recent graduates of the Art Departments of both Sierra Nevada College and UNR, and runs at the CCAI Courthouse Gallery through September 2. The exhibiting artists are Bryan Christiansen, Aimee Doran, Jeff Erickson, Jonathan Farber, Jonah Harjer, Ahren Hertel, Christina Lee, Jocelyn Meggait, James Nagel, Dominique Palladino and Melissa Swanson. Here are a few pics I snapped at the reception:

FANTASTIC interactive on Cambodian Art

Today I am all excited about this gorgeous new interactive by National Geographic exploring Angkor Wat. NatGeo published some of the best graphics of the site in the 1980's and now they have outdone themselves:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/07/angkor/angkor-animation

Nada Dada Motel

For those of you who don't already know about the Nada Dada Motel event happening in Reno this weekend, check it out at the link below. Some good friends, and great talent, perform/exhibit at this event, which is accidentally in its third year at the El Cortez Motel downtown. If you go, leave your squeamish, prudish, dull, traditional, and conservative sides at home:

http://www.newsreview.com/reno/content?oid=1016226

Pop-up

Click here to see some examples of Thomas Allen's Book Art Photography -- it's very clever stuff. He uses photography to freeze 3-D collages, so that book covers can talk directly to other book covers:

Through the Windo

Here's a link to a great new interactive game/environment called WINDOSiLL. It was created by Patrick Smith, who has been making interactive animated environments in Flash for some time now; I included his "Vector Park" work in a show of animation I curated for the Ottawa International Animation Festival back in 2003.


The game presents a very meditative experience. There is a goal, where you progress from one screen to another, but there's no urgency to get on to the next thing; part of the pleasure of the game is to dawdle, and explore the strange doodads and creatures that inhabit each environment. Part of what's effective about WINDOSiLL is the way it introduces its own logic to the player. What's even better is the overarching sense of mystery that permeates everything-- there are suggestions of deep and probably fundamentally inexplicable cosmologies lurking behind the images and facades. Over the course of the game, Smith lightly tips his hat to Bosch, Magritte, Brueghel, Rube Goldberg, and Dr. Seuss.

You can play the first half of the game for free; I plunked down the three bucks to play the remainder of the game, and it was money well-spent.

Patrick Smith's sketchbook blog is located here, and you can see WINDOSiLL sketches and tests here.

Becca's Neanderthal's Monsters

Becca Jane recently posted up a stop-motion animation on her blog -- here it is:



It gave me flashes of both Martha Colburn (who I had the pleasure of meeting at the Ottawa Animation Festival many moons ago) and Ladislas Starevich.

An Anatomy of Melancholy

Jocelyn Meggait's BFA show, "Melancholy Objects," had its reception last night. She marvelously transformed the space -- a bright jeweled beaded curtain snakes through the gallery, making a scrim that captures and seems to project light.



There is a chair entirely covered in jewelry and watches. It's as if a Thrift Store had a case of indigestion and ended up belching out a throne. There's something regal about it, and something marine about it too -- it's no longer fit for human comfort, and has the ragged outlines of a piece of coral, covered with an armor of varicolored barnacles.






The main recurring image is that of an old doll's dress, or baby's dress. Sometimes they show up in ghostly rayograms, sometimes they've been inked and printed on paper, sometimes they've been pressed into clay tablets, and a few of them are encased in wax, and made to stand like tiny, hollowed-out tipis. Jocelyn mentioned, in her talk, that she'd inherited the small dresses from her mother. She took them all for doll's dresses, but then, going over family slides given to her by her sister, realized that she herself had worn some of the dresses as a child. There are two imposing life-size rayograms of adult dresses, as well. One is a wedding dress, in a state of dilapidation, that she bought off ebay for $10. Which she described as a fairly depressing transaction.





Above: a picture of the artist, seen through her own meticulous curtain.

It's tricky to rummage through family detritus and show it off as art. It can be trying enough to be marched through your own family's slides -- being marched through some other family's slides can amount to cruel and unusual punishment. In my eyes, Jocelyn actually pulls it off. There's a feeling of repose and distance that carries the objects out of their cocoon of hermetic nostalgia. The objects are able to to stand in their own object-ness, with their own dignity and their own mysteries. They seem to play out (or in the case of the twisted dresses, to dance out) their own stories, related to (yet independent of) the stories of the people who wore them.




Two "pedestals" in the show are flat files, each drawer filled with more artwork, jewelry, and ephemera (I think Jocelyn, in this show, is trying to close the gap between artwork and ephemera). It gave the feeling of rifling through the drawers of a house you've broken into. That's part of the pleasure of wandering through an antique store -- a circumscribed permission of trespass. It's particularly heightened when you find boxes of old postcards, or lines scribbled in the margins of a book.





The show's title comes from a Susan Sontag essay, which describes photographs themselves as "melancholy objects," since they necessarily mark people and places that are constantly rushing into the past, to obscurity and ultimately to non-existence. So take these photos as melancholy objects of "Melancholy Objects."

Clay Club Pottery Sale

The Clay Club's pottery sale is ongoing: 10am-6pm through this Sunday, the 24th. Some pics of the fine wares are posted below. Some of them may already be sold, so get thee to Patterson Hall, before it all goes...

Special Topics: Los Angeles- revisited

The Special Topics: Los Angeles field course is gathering again, after taking a few weeks to let the trip settle, to begin to put together a book about the course. I wanted to post more images of the trip. One of our tasks was to bring a work of art to L.A. and place it on site somewhere in L.A. Above is my color transparency of a video still. I placed it in the urban landscape of building tops downtown.

Cherie Louise Turner is on the far right. Cherie is an editor and writer of art criticism. She flew down to L.A. to meet with the students, talk about their work and their impressions of L.A. Cherie is going to contribute an essay to the book we are pulling together for the field course. The book should bring the evidence of the trip together and perhaps include little works of art. Russell Dudley and I will also contribute to the book.

This gentleman is showing Russell Dudley and Elizabeth Deer his collection of vintage slides. We saw a cardboard sign on the road in the Echo Park neighborhood that read: "art, antiques and smut." He was selling many items out of his house. and around his house. I think he was on speed.

Outside of the Box gallery in Chinatown, just north of downtown (within walking distance of our hotel). We saw a portion of a kind of disparate retrospective of Stan Vanderbeek's art. Stan Vanderbeek was another Black Mountain College student. A doctoral candidate and Stan's daughter were there to answer questions specifically about Stan's Movie Drome (1963-?) in Stony Point New York- his early multimedia experiences in the 1960's. During the presentation a cat meandered thru the crowd making small noises. This mangaged to equalize the experience towards what seemed to be the casual experience Stan attempted to create with his work. Chinatown used to contain more of the stronger small exhibition spaces in L.A. Several remain there.



Babs in front of light box photos by Melanie Pullen at Ace gallery. Ace is a huge gallery, cavernous and imposing, that affords some of the photos their own private installation space. The Ace building had an elevator operator, small and missing teeth, who demanded about a foot of space around him for his comfort.

Jeff Mohr's studio in the Inglewood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Jeff showed us his work- kind of acted as a warm up for a meeting he was set to have with a curator in his studio. He also took us to a great Japanese cafe.

Chuck Moffit's studio/house in the Los Angeles hills. Chuck had all of us over for a bbq and conversation. He's currently represented by Christopher Grimes gallery and has shown at the LACMA in the exhibition Thing that got him some notoriety.

Logan watching a video art piece by Charlie White at the Hammer Museum in L.A. This exhibition attempted to show work from 9 compelling artists working in L.A.