Garth Weiser at White Flag

It’s hard to believe that in just a couple of weeks White Flag will inaugurate its fifth year of shows, and it seems similarly odd that the forthcoming exhibition by Garth Weiser is the first time we’ve presented a one-person exhibition by a painter. It’s a little interesting to see how that first-ever invitation to a painter has taken form in the current exhibition: While Weiser is earning growing attention internationally for canvases reflecting his thoughtful treatment of abstract painting’s history (FlashArt’s “Top 100 Emerging Artists” listed him at #14…in the world…), there won’t be any canvases on view. Instead, Weiser will take this opportunity in St. Louis to execute the largest painting of his career directly on the gallery wall — a 57 foot-long temporary mural that will be one of three paintings of differing form, each emphasizing “discrete intentionalities and temporal relationships to their substrates and mediums.” The other works include a momentary, monumental painting in water-soluble media on the exterior of the gallery and an installation of 150 pages torn from I wouldn’t have worn mascara if I knew I was going to be taking a trip down memory lane, an artists book reproducing Weiser’s 2008 painting of the same title. (More on the very cool Onestar Press in Paris that published it in a future post…)

We’re expecting Garth’s show here at White Flag to provoke a lot of substantive conversation, which you can be part of when it opens on Saturday, September 11 from 7-10 pm. It will be added to Weiser’s impressive record of exhibitions elsewhere, including one-person shows at Casey Kaplan in New York and Altman Siegel Gallery in San Francisco, in addition to serious group shows like “The Triumph of Painting; Abstract America,” at the Saatchi Gallery, London, and “Greater New York,” at PS1 MoMA, New York. Good for him, good for us, good for anyone else who decides to come by and see it. More updates on the installation next week.

• Art Organization: The Pulitzer

stylus: a Project by Ann Hamilton Calls to You Tonight

stylus: a project by ann hamilton opens tonight at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. Ann Hamilton will be present for the reception that runs from 5-9pm and is free and open to the public.

Hamilton, with the collaboration of Composer and Sound Designer Shahrokh Yadegari, has installed stylus, a multimedia exhibition that works in harmony with the Pulitzer’s Tadao Ando building.  The installation incorporates, among other things, video projections, jumping beans, taxidermy birds, an opera singer, over five hundred paper hands and church bell speakers, which sound from the Pulitzer’s rooftop. Have a look-see at a Disklavier in the Lower Gallery:

http://www.vimeo.com/13209208

Visitors will have a chance to play that player piano in a most unusual way, and there will be other opportunities to participate in stylus. You can phone a google voice account and leave a message that may be weaved into the sound system of the building. You can wave to your friends while wearing a pair of your favorite paper hands. And as you arrive this evening, you can wave back to a hand the size of a building (you’ll know when you get there).

These factors add up to an immersing sensory experience, in which visitors are free to listen or participate in exercises of call and response.

From the Pulitzer’s website:

“The installation asks the following questions: How do we communicate? What external forces act upon or inhibit our collective need for social contact and response? How are relationships enacted (or not enacted) by the architectural spaces we inhabit?”

For more information, please visit www.pulitzerarts.org.

• Art Organization: The Pulitzer

Free Art/Food Tomorrow

Kathryn Adamchick, an Art/Food organizer, talks about how Art/Food relates to the work of Gordon Matta-Clark and a 1971 pig roast under the Brooklyn Bridge.

As part of the Contemporary’s “Homegrown Summer,” and to celebrate the closing of the Pulitzer’s Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark, the two institutions will together host Art/Food tomorrow, June 5, from 1-4pm. For full event details, please visit our event page.

To get an idea of how this multi-layered event came together, I interviewed one of the key organizers, Anna Poss, Administrative Assistant to the Departments of Curatorial and Community Engagement at the Pulitzer.

AB: What has your role been for Art/Food?

AP: I have been working with Kathryn Adamchick, an independent art education consultant, and Alex Elmestad, from Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, in developing and planning this event. We wanted to create a collaborative event that represented the themes of our respective shows. For the Contemporary and their Great Rivers Biennial, the goal is to feature local and sustainable food. For the Pulitzer, the aim of the event is to incorporate the ideals of Gordon Matta-Clark from his restaurant Food and his performance pieces that incorporated food, like the pig roast he had under the Brooklyn Bridge. Food and art both have this amazing capability of bringing people together from diverse backgrounds and uniting them. Art/Food really highlights this connection and celebrates it in a way that is rarely done. Read the rest of this entry »

• Art Organization: White Flag Projects

Ernest Trova (1927-2009) at White Flag Projects

This Saturday night June 5 from 7 to 10 pm White Flag Projects invites everyone to join us for the opening reception of Ernest Trova (1927-2009), the first posthumous survey of artwork by the St. Louis native who died last year at the age of 82. Focusing on the artist’s serial use of abbreviated human forms, the exhibition will include sculpture, painting, and prints spanning Trova’s 60-year career, including major works from his notable Falling Man series, as well as many artworks that have gone unseen for more than 40 years. The exhibition remains on view through July 17, 2010.

In the 1960s and 70s Ernest Trova was among the most successful and widely acknowledged sculptors working in the United States. In 1969 his work was heralded by the New York Times as “among the best of contemporary American sculpture,” and for two decades significant examples of his work were prominently displayed in The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and The Walker Art Center among a dozen other major museums. But despite the long ago success that resulted in Trova being invited to participate in a Documenta, three Whitney Annuals and three Venice Biennales, today the eccentric art of Ernest Trova is largely forgotten.

Ernest Trova (1927 – 2009) presents the artist’s morose and uniquely comic expressions of the human condition for reconsideration, and includes many of his most significant sculpture and paintings from every important phase of his development. Ernest Trova (1927 – 2009) is accompanied by www.etrova.org, an all-new website featuring hundreds of artworks, studio photographs and clippings from the Trova archives collected especially for the exhibition.

• Art Organization: Boots Contemporary Art Space

Larry Krone Performs at Slinger 3

Performance by Larry Krone with special guest FRAN

Photo by Ronald Krone

FRAN is  (Tom Buescher, Erin Gulley, and Merv Schrock) and Alex Mutrux & Carol Crudden as back  up. The ladies on the stairs: Connie Su & Mel Trad. Video by Brett Williams

Photo by Mamie Lane                                          Photo by Ronald Krone

New Exhibitions Open Friday at the Kemper

Member preview: 6-7 pm
Public opening reception: 7-9 pm

Please join us for the opening of the Focus on Photography: Recent Acquisitions, a diverse exhibition of photographic works from the permanent collection and the MFA Thesis Exhibition, which features art works by all 2010 Masters of Fine Arts candidates in the the Graduate School of Art.

See www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu for more information!

• Art Organization: Sheldon Art Galleries

House Tour Explores Architecture of Harris Armstrong

Innovative St. Louis modernist architect Harris Armstrong (1899-1973) was one of the first architects in St. Louis to employ the tenets of the International style, and took inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs. A House Tour, sponsored by the Sheldon Art Galleries will showcase four of these homes, three of which he designed for himself.  Each are examples of some of the best modernist/mid-century designs in St. Louis. Tickets for the Harris Armstrong House Tour are $25 in advance, $35 at the door.  Visit www.TheSheldon.org for all the details.

• Art Organization: White Flag Projects

Greg Stimac at White Flag Projects

White Flag Projects is pleased to announce the opening of a solo exhibition of artwork by Greg Stimac, which will take place this Saturday, April 24th from 7-10 p.m.

In the summer of 2009, Chicago-based photographer Greg Stimac set out on a cross-country road trip with a sheet of Plexiglas adhered to the front of his car. Each time Stimac stopped and set out toward a new destination, he attached a fresh sheet of Plexi, removed the old one, and scanned it to make a printed image of the smashed insect carcasses and other debris collected on the plastic surface. Not your typical roadside activity (plugging a flatbed scanner into your car’s cigarette lighter and creating art) but each image turned out strikingly beautiful. The flattened bodies of insects, flecks of dirt, and other airborne particles transform from waste into constellation-like collages against a stark black background. Each image in the series, though similar in terms of theme and material, has its own distinct pattern and character. The works stand as documents of Stimac’s journeys, evidencing the conditions he encountered as he traveled.

Continuing in the tradition of the American road narrative, Stimac also takes photographs along the way; however, he doesn’t capture images of the stunning scenery or historic sights. Instead, he serially documents the arguably more mundane traces of human life such as bottles of piss that litter the side of the road. This series of works, titled only by their location will also be on view at White Flag alongside a video of Stimac’s, showcasing three identical white Mustangs wearing out their horns in an atonal chorus.

Most of Stimac’s work focuses on the American cultural landscape. Whether it is the mowing of lawns in suburbia, lone campfires against the Pacific, or a group ready to fire at a shooting range, Stimac’s work sheds light on American identities and ideologies that are too easily forgotten by mainstream culture.

Greg Stimac opens Saturday, April 24th, 2010. The opening reception will take place between 7 and 10 PM. The exhibition will remain open through May 22nd. For more information on this exhibition and upcoming events, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

• Art Organization: White Flag Projects

Join White Flag for a Marathon Screening of Twin Peaks

On Saturday April 17th, White Flag Projects will be hosting an all-day, all-night screening of David Lynch’s campy television series Twin Peaks. All 30 episodes will be shown consecutively. Doors open at 8 pm and the screening beings at 9 pm.

David Lynch is one of the last filmmakers you’d think to see with their own T.V. series, and that’s part of what makes Twin Peaks compelling. Famed for his complex, surrealistic, and often-unsettling films, such as Eraserhead (1976) and Mulholland Dr. (2001), Lynch has garnered a following that’s a far cry from mainstream. Transitioning from obscure films to primetime television is no doubt a difficult task, but Lynch has succeeded in doing so without compromising his signature style.

Set in a small town somewhere in the Pacific Northwest where diner coffee and cherry pie predominate, Twin Peaks offers a gaze into the secret lives of its seemingly simple characters. Like many of Lynch’s films, the series follows the unraveling of a mystery—the murder of a high-school girl named Laura Palmer (it also features dreamscapes and creepy little men that dance and speak enigmatically, things you’re probably familiar with if you’ve seen a lot of Lynch films).

The series first aired on ABC in the 1990’s and, while its mainstream success was short-lived, it developed a cult following and even spawned an annual festival. The show’s relevance lies in its ability to offer an engaging escape into the uncertain; packed with eccentric characters, strange happenings, and unfulfilled desires, Twin Peaks brings us into a mythical world that can only live on in one’s mind.

This is a FREE event and we encourage you to bring whatever you’d like (BYOE- Bring Your Own Everything), from snacks (pie, doughnuts, and “bacon, super-crispy, almost burned, cremated—that’s great”), to beverages (damn fine coffee!), to sleeping bags and chairs. You’re also welcome to come and go as you please. The screening will last until approximately 9 pm the following day.

For more information on this event and upcoming White Flag Projects exhibitions, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

• Art Organization: White Flag Projects

Three Short Films by Bruce Yonemoto at White Flag

On Friday, April 7th at 8 pm, White Flag Projects will be screening three short films by Japanese American artist, Bruce Yonemoto. He is currently a visiting artist/professor at Washington University in St. Louis and the recipient of 2009-10’s Freund Fellowship.

Yonemoto has worked in collaboration with his brother Norman Yonemoto since 1975 and is known for his focus on media-based social commentary and trans-cultural investigations. While Yonemoto employs strategies gleaned from mainstream television, cinema, and advertising as a means to manipulate his audience, he also strives to make viewers aware of how these strategies are working. With a mix of parody, psychoanalytic undertones, and broadly attuned cultural awareness, Yonemoto examines the shaping of a collective consciousness. His films stand as both a critique of current social constructs and rich artistic documents.

The 1986 film Kappa deals with the tales of Oedipus and Kappa, a malevolent Shinto god of water. By dissecting themes of reality versus fiction, this film demonstrates the power of cultural mythos. 1984’s Vault assembles a clichéd narrative of love and loss in order to explore themes of desire through subversion and Freudian tropes. Lastly, 1980’s Garage Sale II follows a troubled punk couple played by video artist Tony Oursler and actor Wendon Baldwin.

Yonemoto has shown widely in the United States and Japan. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, among others. He has also received numerous awards and grants for his films including the Maya Deren Award for Independent Film and Video Artists in 1993.

The evening’s program is curated by Washington University Professor, Robert Gero. The event takes place Friday, April 7th; doors open at 7 pm, screening begins at 8 pm. For more information on this and upcoming WFP events, please visit www.white-flag-projects.org.