(L-R) John Stezaker, Balázs Kicsiny: Killing Time, and Art and the Mind-Brain installation shots.

The galleries of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum are buzzing with activity as installation of three compelling exhibitions nears completion.

The photographic collages of London artist, John Stezaker, employ classic movie stills, vintage postcards, book illustrations and other found materials to bring new meanings to old pictures. Adjusting, inverting and slicing them together to create collages that are at once captivating and unsettling, eerie and elegant, nostalgic and absurd in the first U.S. museum exhibition of this influential artist’s work.

Hungarian artist, Balázs Kicsiny, has created an installation that explores the nature of service through unconventional three-dimensional representations of the army, the circus and the restaurant. In Killing Time, Kicsiny both investigates and conflates these institutions and their raisons d’être—to protect or kill, to entertain and to feed—immersing viewers in fragmentary, disquieting and sometimes absurdist narratives that challenge assumptions about who is serving whom, and to what purpose.

This season’s Teaching Gallery exhibition is curated by Mark Rollins, professor of philosophy, in conjunction with his course “Art and the Mind-Brain,” offered by Washington University’s School of Arts & Sciences in spring 2012. The exhibition presents works from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection by Joseph Albers, Romare Bearden, Georges Braque, Tom Friedman, Naum Gabo, Roy Lichtenstein, Joan Miró, Rembrandt van Rijn, and others that reveal important aspects of how we see and think.

The three exhibitions open Friday, January 27, 2012 with a member’s preview from 6-7 p.m. and a public reception from 7-9 p.m.
On Saturday, January 28, the Kemper Art Museum will host a panel discussion with Stezaker, Karen Butler, assistant curator of collections, and Michael Newman, associate professor of art history, theory and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, at 11 a.m. in Steinberg Hall Auditorium.
Kicsiny will lecture about his work at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, January 30, in Steinberg Hall Auditorium as part of the Sam Fox School Public Lecture Series.
Mark Rollins will offer a gallery talk of Art and the Mind-Brain in the Bernoudy Permanent Collection Gallery on March 7 at 5 p.m.

John Stezaker
January 27, 2012 – April 23, 2012
Kemper Art Museum, Ebsworth Gallery

Balázs Kicsiny: Killing Time
January 27, 2012 – April 16, 2012
Kemper Art Museum, Garen Gallery

Art and the Mind-Brain
January 27, 2012 – April 16, 2012
Kemper Art Museum, Teaching Gallery

If you’ve driven past White Flag Projects lately, you may have noticed our new banner featuring Jeremiah, a print from Tommy Hartung’s recent show Anna at On Stellar Rays in New York. The eponymous film will be on view in White Flag Projects’ new exhibition“Tommy Hartung & Uri Aran”. Hartung’s film takes its inspiration from Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel Anna Karenina. On the surface the film might appear to have a tentative connection to the source material, as Hartung does not borrow characters or scenes directly from the novel. Through a combination of different film languages, Hartung explores the themes that permeate the novel in a manner that resonates with contemporary societal issues.

Hartung’s actors are dismembered mannequins created from a wide range of materials that evoke the desperation and alienation of the titular Anna Karenina. The mannequins are clothed in a manner recalling the garb of peasants; their labor in the film recalls Tolstoy’s romanticization of the working class. Words like “dejected”, “dismal”, and “haunted” appear frequently in the reviews of the show, reflecting both the material aspect of Hartung’s actors and his eerily lit set, and echoing Hartung’s statement that the film incorporates “a language like that used in horror films.”

In addition to the stop-motion animation of the mannequins, the film includes superimposed clips from the Soviet film Earth and computer simulations, introducing a political element. Hartung’s inclusion of socialist realist clips and crowd imagery comments on the tendency of movements to create a political entity out of certain romantic ideals. The unsatisfied nature of his mannequins seems to point out how little this process serves individuals.

Hartung’s incorporation of varied materials and film styles seems to extend seamlessly into the environment in which the film is viewed. In the exhibition at On Stellar Rays,Anna was accompanied by a selection of sculptural objects that were created from elements of the film’s sets. Hartung utilized mannequin figures, various props, pieces of the set, and a camera track system used for panning shots. As in previous works, Hartung’s creative process is as much a part of the final piece as the film itself, and the viewer is drawn into that process and the unique environment that Hartung has created.

Anna and other works by Tommy Hartung will be on view at White Flag Projects in the exhibition “Tommy Hartung & Uri Aran.” The exhibition will open with a reception from 6-8 PM on Thursday, January 19 and will remain on view until February 18, 2012. For more information on this exhibit and other upcoming events at White Flag, please visitWhite Flag Projects.

(1/17/12 by Stephanie Trimboli, Intern)

Still from El Matador (X5), 2010, silent 16mm color film

Amy Granat came to art through music. “Growing up in St. Louis, I didn’t really have much of a connection to contemporary art as a teenager. The music world of the early ’90s was my culture.”

At Bard College, where she received her undergraduate degree, she was in a band with then-boyfriend, Sebastian, where she played bass, sang, played drums and wrote music. (Here’s a link to a review of an Amy!Pop performance, circa 2004).

When she moved to New York after college, she began playing her music in the subway; meanwhile, she participated in The Film Collective and other film-creating pursuits. Enter Steven Parrino, introduced by a mutual musician friend. Steven, a painter, began including Amy in art exhibitions, where she met more artists – and the ball started rolling.

Knowing all of this, one thinks of Amy Granat’s films differently. Most of Granat’s films in this exhibition are silent, while a select few have prominent soundtracks – such as El Matador, which is accompanied by the crackling, whirring sound of 16mm film running through its projector.

The music at first seems out of place, resonating against the white walls and concrete floor. But it eases into the rhythm of the films, particularly Chemical Scratch (Return of the Creature) and Ghostrider, transforming their disorienting, slightly chaotic, strobe light quality into something that makes sense. The films keep rhythm with the beat of the song, as if they were having a conversation.

The song, “Oui oui non non” from 1999 (the era of Amy!Pop), plays for 2-3 minutes every half hour. Someone could easily visit the exhibition more than once and still not experience the auditory art.

The magic of the song is its ability to transform a formal exhibition environment into a more casual, inhabited space. The music brings viewers out of their reverie. They look around for the source of the noise and wonder if it is happening on purpose. The presence of the music fills in the silence of the films, and even after the last note, the gallery space holds on to the energy generated during the brief musical entr’acte.

The exhibition will be on view until October 22, 2011. For more information on this exhibit and other upcoming events at White Flag, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

(Allison Fricke, Intern, 9/22/11)

Still from "Ghostwriter", 2006, Silent 16mm black & white film transferred to DVD

White Flag Projects’ office smells like sawdust and paint; a power drill echoes in the next room. Two rows of old-fashioned film projectors face a blank wall; orange and black electrical cords sneak across the floor, coiling around ladders and skirting a hanging tarp. In short, the space is in a state of minor chaos called “mounting an exhibition.” The exhibition in question is Amy Granat’s, opening next Thursday, September 8, between 6-8 PM.

Amy Granat, a St. Louis native, is known for her experimental 16-milimeter films created in her distinct visual language unified by movement, absence, dissonance, and exploration of the sublime. Granat’s films demonstrate a holistic approach to the total potential of film itself: as a technology, as a narrative form, as a physical object, and fundamentally as a document of activity transmitted through time and light.

Her most well-known films are her “scratch films”, which are exactly what they sound like: camera-less films made by scratching, drawing and punching holes in film stock. Two such earlier films will appear as part of the exhibition, Stars Way Out/White Stars for White Flag (2005/2011) and Ghostrider (2006).

Granat’s interest in motion and longstanding involvement with music, dance and collaboration are represented by two films in which Granat directs her subjects’ improvised movements, Felicia in Zurich (2009), and Lines in the Sand (2009). Both films further develop Granat’s translation of activity into form, articulating unifying conceptual relationships present throughout the artist’s entire oeuvre.

The exhibition will also include Granat’s newest work, Venice Flowers (2011). The most reductive of Granat’s films on view, Venice Flowers explores the artist’s interest in removing her familiar figurative and gestural motifs to investigate more minimal interactions among light, shadow, and projection surface, blurring the relationship between cinema and architecture.

The exhibition will open with a reception from 6-8 PM on Thursday, September 8 and will remain on view until October 22, 2011. For more information on this exhibit and other upcoming events at White Flag, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

(Allison Fricke, Intern)

Exhibition curator Liane Hancock speaks on the exhibition “Material Landscapes,” Wednesday, July 13 at 11:30 a.m. at the Sheldon Art Galleries.  Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of the Materials Resource Center at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, Liane has assembled an exhibition of work by internationally recognized landscape design firms including: D.I.R.T. studio, dlandstudio, ESKYIU, Kaseman Beckman Advanced Strategies, Legge Lewis Legge, PEG Office of Landscape + Architecture, Stoss Landscape Urbanism and W-A-N-T-E-D.

The  exhibit showcases a selection of contemporary landscape architecture projects that focus on the use of materials in design – and includes a living chia-scape suspended in the center of the gallery.   The exhibition runs through January 21.

The lecture is free, but lunch may be purchased for $12.50.  Reservations are required for lunch. Call Rebecca Gunter at 314.533.9900 x 18 to reserve your place. Please reserve by July 6.

This summer CAM takes the St. Louis public into artist studios across St. Louis with our 6th Annual City-Wide Open Studios. City-Wide Open Studios offers a unique opportunity for the St. Louis public to explore the creative and personal spaces of local artists while providing the ability to enjoy one of the most exciting parts of contemporary art – the chance to talk with the artists themselves. Through the CWOS program local artists are connected to the museum, while the museum connects participating artists to the larger St. Louis arts community.

Eligible artists must maintain working studios in St. Louis City, University City, or Maplewood to participate in the program, and must be able to open their studios to the public from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm on either Saturday, July 30 or Sunday, July 31, 2011. CAM will allocate, based upon neighborhood, which day your studio will be open. On a first-come-first-served basis, a limited number of studio spaces will also be made available at an alternate venue to those artists whose studios lie outside the prescribed limits.

In addition to promoting a tour of your studio, CAM will display ONE work from your collection at the Open Studios Preview from July 26-31. Please note, the artworks act as a small representations of an artists’ studio practice. The Open Studios Preview allows visitors a glimpse into an artists’ practice and enables them to plan their weekend itinerary based upon the physical artworks they are most interested in. Because of the volume of artworks received, 2-D works will be hung salon-style and 3-D works will be organized appropriately within the limited floor space.

Click here to find out more information about City-Wide Open Studios and to register online. The last day to register is Monday, June 6.

Elements of Style is the third in a trilogy of exhibitions by Karthik Pandian based on two years of field research at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville, Illinois. Pandian’s exhibition at White Flag Projects stages a final encounter at the project’s place of provenance, continuing his rammed earth series and its investigation of the modern and the ancient, the monumental and the metaphysical, the artificial and the substantive.

Cahokia Byobu (Broken Screen), the large-scale sculpture that comprises the exhibition, is made of seven eight-foot-tall towers of rammed earth, between which four, repurposed mirror-glass panes have been inserted perpendicularly. Creating a set of three sculptures in the round, they bisect the gallery diagonally, yielding two equal triangular areas. Resembling Japanese folding screens, the sculpture carves out its profile in zigzag fashion, alternating between mirrored and semi-translucent glass surfaces. The slender, rectangular earthen bodies are punctuated with strata of cement, shells, mason’s line, 16mm film strips, and glass shards.

The second work, located in the gallery’s library, cites Pandian’s exhibition Unearth, which is showing concurrently at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Titled Shards, the two wall works were originally used as forms for producing rammed earth pillars. Marked with a series of cuts, the panels are surfaced with a grid, suggesting a potential function as drafting tools in an architectural or archaeological context.

The materials speak to Pandian’s process as the work itself progresses into a realm beyond physicality. What may seem a regular and constant shape in the gallery space becomes activated within the mind’s eye and ultimately the body. The mirrors project reflections that provide alternate perspectives and doubles – furnishing the work with added notions of the spiritual and the self-referential. Pandian constructs a dance of viewership that challenges the nature of the art-object, as the work and the viewer exchange roles demonstrating autonomy.

The duality that surrounds Elements of Style expands into the media of sound and light. For the exhibition’s opening, Pandian staged the works in a kind of son et lumiere production, using lighting design inspired by the Cahokia Mounds Interpretive Center and an ambient soundtrack recorded at dusk at Monk’s Mound that was also paired with a portion of text by Claude Levi-Strauss read by the narrator from the Griffith Observatory Planetarium. Featured as a one-night-only event, Cahokia Byobu (Broken Screen) was vivified by the cycling lighting program that simulated the full spectrum of light rendered from one earthly revolution around the sun. The work acquired a wholly different gravity as aspects of spectacle, entertainment, and storytelling colored the experience.

Karthik Pandian: Elements of Style is on view at White Flag Projects through Saturday, April 23. For more information about upcoming programs and exhibitions at White Flag, please visit our website at www.whiteflagprojects.org.

- Mel Trad, Intern

South African artist William Kentridge talks about Max Beckmann’s manipulation of physical space and its influence on his work. Max Beckmann’s The Dream is on view in the exhibition Dreamscapes. Watch the rest of this panel discussion on the Pulitzer’s YouTube channel.

What’s happening this month and some recent Pulizer highlights:

Panel Discussion on Psychology of Dreams
Thursday, April 7, 7:30 p.m. (Doors open at 7:00 p.m.)

The artist Max Ernst noted that painting gave “objective form to what is visible inside him.” This panel explores the varied and complex symbolism of dreams from different traditions in Western psychology. Panelists will introduce their particular traditions and then interpret some of the artworks in the exhibition as they would dreams.
Panelists include:
Britt-Marie Schiller, Dean, Faculty Member at the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute and Professor of Philosophy at Webster University, St. Louis

Rose Holt, Jungian analyst in private practice in St. Louis and Chicago and active in the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago Analyst Training Program

Moderator:

Francesca Herndon-Consagra, Senior Curator, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts

Social Dream Matrix

Saturday, April 9, 1:00 p.m.

Art therapist Shelly Goebl-Parker and artists Hap Phillips and Nita Turnage lead a dream matrix. The act of dreaming is normally a solitary one. Through dream matrices, it becomes a shared experience, building a small temporary community when participants enter a dream matrix together. Sharing dreams in this way enables the discovery of new meaning and significance in dreams. The dream matrices are followed by art making as a way to reflect on newfound discoveries, reflections and inspirations. 
Read the rest of this entry »

Internationally-known photography icon Larry Fink will give a free gallery talk on Saturday, February 19 at 11 a.m. at the Sheldon Art Galleries in conjunction with the exhibit, Larry Fink: Attraction and Desire – 50 Years in Photography. This overview of work by Fink includes over 120 photographs spanning his 50-year career and runs through May 21.

Visit www.thesheldon.org for more details about this major retrospective.

Jeremy Sigler is the type of person many students of the arts want to be when they “grow up”. If you don’t know much about him, learning about his extensive work in contemporary art and poetry definitely compells broad admiration. Having received his BFA from the University of Pennsylvania and his MFA in sculpture from the University of California, Los Angeles, Sigler has made a career out of crafting experimental work in multiple genres, earning him the position of Lecturer in sculpture at Yale University. Artists in the academic realm do not always cross over into the public sphere, but Sigler makes a consistent point of it, most recently with a two-page, malleable clay journal called Rational/Irrational, installed in the bookstore café of MoMA’s P.S. 1.

Sigler is also an artist with words, bridging the realms of prose and poetry. He has published four books: To and To (Left Hand Books, 1998), Mallet Eyes (Left Hand Books, 2000), Led Almost by my Tie (with Jessica Stockholder, Ruth Lingen Editions, 2007), and Math (Ubuweb Editions, 2008). In addition to publishing his most recent book, Crackpot Poet, with The Brooklyn Rail (Black Square Editions), Sigler also contributes regularly to the monthly journal as a columnist. In a recent interview with poet and novelist Eileen Myles, the two writers bonded over their common love of the film and novel Being There and how writing poetry is like releasing a valve (read full interview here).

Tomorrow evening at 8 PM, Jeremy will be reading his own humorous poetry at White Flag, to compliment the current exhibition Time Wounds All Heels, an examination of humor’s potential effect on form and perception.

For more information about tomorrow’s event, our current show and other upcoming programs and events at White Flag, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.