“Drinks with Louise Bourgeois” at White Flag Projects

This Wednesday March 10th, an archival 1975 interview with Louise Bourgeois will be screened as the last installment of the season for White Flag’s DRINKS series. It’s a free event with free drinks (compliments of WFP and Schlafly Beer.)

Louise Bourgeois’ (b. 1911) long and notable career has endured several decades of art historical movements without swerving from its singular and uncategorizable identity. Her work, which spans every medium, mines the intensely personal, traveling a precarious line between psychological menace and childlike naïvity while maintaining an astute dialogue with abstract and formal concerns. She lives and works in New York.

A major traveling retrospective of her work was inaugurated at the Tate Modern in London in 2007 and ended at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2009. Further information about Bourgeouis’ life and work can be found here.

DRINKS with Louise Bourgeois will be held Wednesday, March 10th from 5-7 p.m.; interview screening beings promptly at 6 p.m. For more details on the DRINKS series and other events at White Flag Projects, such as our current exhibition Newtonland, visit www.white-flag-projects.org.

Newtonland at White Flag Projects

Science and art can sometimes be seen as being at odds with one another—fact versus feeling, the tangible versus the intangible. It’s rare when the objectivity of science and the subjective nature of art come together in a harmonious pairing; however, artist and curator Michelle Grabner bridges the gap in Newtonland, an exhibition that opens this Saturday, February 27th from 7 to 10 p.m., at White Flag Projects.

The artworks featured in Newtonland are both whimsical and astute as they play on space, geometry, perception, and movement. Greg Bogin frames white space with shifting neon colors, prompting viewers to take note of what isn’t there as their eyes trace the border of his shaped canvas. Elizabeth Bryant also works with negative space by removing cutouts from an otherwise saturated photographic landscape and then hanging the fragments around the image for the viewer to piece together. Several other pieces in Newtonland also deal with the concept of negative space – Ib Geertsen’s torqued metal mobile confuses perception, while Jan Van Der Ploeg’s circular forms allow for an appreciation the pureness of color and the simplicity of shape. Anne Eastman’s mirrored mobiles skew our reflection and observation, as does Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam’s large-scale aluminum and silverpoint mobile bleacher material. Alternatively, Jonas Wood translates tenets of mobile sculpture into 2-D drawings, taking inspiration from the forms of Alexander Calder and tethe organic geometry of houseplants. Finally, the avant-garde score and movements of marine life in Jean Painlevé’s short films serve to complement both the implied and literal movement of the mobiles and the ever-present pull of gravity itself.

Newtonland opens this Saturday, February 27, 2010. The opening reception will take place between 7 and 10 PM. The exhibition will remain open through April 3rd. For more information on this exhibition and other upcoming events, please visit www.white-flag-projects.org.

-Lynna Borden, Intern

Engaging with Asher Penn

Kate Moss has inspired countless fashion designers and artists; W Magazine even had a special issue purporting just that— the timeless and boundless nature of Moss’s influence. Moss has been a muse to so many because her ubiquity has rendered her somewhat of a blank canvas. Most of the art she’s present in really isn’t about Kate Moss, it’s about the work’s creator. In this case, it’s about Asher Penn and his 300-part artwork Kate Moss Rorschach.

In his riff on the now-unreliable psychological test designed by Hermann Rorschach in 1921, Penn literally uses Moss’s image as ground for his improvised near-Rorschachs, appropriating three Wolfgang Tillmans’ photographs of the model and overlaying them with vibrant red patterns. By using a Tillmans photograph, Penn is not only taking on the model and all of the associations that come with her, but he’s also taking on high-art. The gritty photocopy method he uses to reproduce the original photographs removes the image from its glossy, high-profile context and makes it more accessible.

The accessibility of these images is heightened by both the gritty photocopy method he uses to reproduce the original photographs and the fact that they strongly imply a viewer. Moss’s gaze, which is either framed or obscured depending on the individual pattern, serves to implicate the viewer through a direct stare that draws you in or a sideways glance that suggests your presence. Looking at the images, the viewer is forced to come to terms with their desire for meaning and for possession—possession of images, of commodities, and even of others. Moss’s status as one of high fashion’s most sought-after advertisers coupled with the interpretive nature of Rorschach patterns allows viewers to project their own meaning and desires onto Penn’s work and engage with it on a level beyond the surface.

Love & Theft is on view through this Saturday, February 13, 2010. For more details on this exhibition and other events at White Flag Projects, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

-Lynna Borden, Intern

• Art Organization: Laumeier Sculpture Park

Mark Newport: Self-Made Man at Laumeier

The early February weather may not be all that inviting, but that’s no problem for Sweaterman!

Join us tonight (February 5) for the opening reception of Laumeier’s spring exhibition, including a performance by the artist as Sweaterman.  Laumeier Sculpture Park presents Mark Newport: Self-Made Man, an exhibition that explores the role of modern man and modern-day heroes.  Newport’s human-scale, hand-knit superhero costumes, photographs, video and embroidered comic book covers will be shown in the Park’s indoor galleries.

Mark Newport is a man who knits like no other.  The Michigan-based artist creates human-scale, acrylic-knit superhero costumes that question the role of heroes in contemporary culture. Some of these costumes reflect the comic book legends that many of us grew up with.  Newport also expands on the genre with creations of his own. Batman and Captain America are presented on equal terms with Newport’s Sweaterman and Y-Man.

Free Opening Reception: February 5, 6-8 PM

Robert Ryman at White Flag Projects

The next installment of White Flag’s DRINKS series will take place Wednesday, February 10th from 5-7pm and will feature a 1979 interview with American artist Robert Ryman (in addition to free happy hour drinks, of course).

You could say that Robert Ryman (b. 1930) came to painting by accident. His first artistic interest was jazz music, which he pursued at the George Peabody School for Teachers in his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. It wasn’t until 1953, when Ryman took a job as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, that his interest in painting began to take shape.

A self-taught artist, it’s as if Ryman’s paintings are a series of experiments playing with the effects of texture, brushstroke, thickness, and surface in order to call attention to the work’s physicality. This individualized method of painting calls for a similarly unique method of viewing. Since Ryman’s paintings are purely non-representational, they are not about symbolism, narrative, or even abstraction. Instead, they muse on their relationship to broader elements, such as the behavior of their medium and the environment in which they exist. The conceptual dimension of Ryman’s work is dependent upon his essential commitment to white paint, which, through its neutrality, brings forth more with less. The almost transparent quality of the tone allows viewers to consider the light, space, surface, and other such elements that usually fade into the background of a work.

Ryman is a much-lauded artist who’s had major exhibitions at the Tate Gallery, London (1993); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1993); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1994); and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1994) to name a few. He has also participated in national and international exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial (1977, 1987, 1995), Documenta (1972, 1977, 1982), and the Venice Biennale (1976, 1978, 1980).

DRINKS with Robert Ryman will be held Wednesday, February 10th from 5-7 p.m.; interview screening beings promptly at 6 p.m. For more details on the DRINKS series and other events at White Flag Projects, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

-Lynna Borden, Intern

• Art Organization: Kemper Art Museum

Kemper Art Museum Spring Exhibitions Open February 5

Stop by the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum on Friday, February 5 from 7-9 pm for the public opening and reception for two new special exhibitions:

Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break

Sharon Lockhart, Outside AB Tool Crib: Matt, Mike,Carey, Steven, John, Mel and Karl, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

Contemporary artist Sharon Lockhart is well known for her films and photographs that often explore social subject matter. To create the works in Lunch Break, Lockhart spent one year in Bath, Maine, at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector US naval shipbuilding company—observing and engaging with workers during their daily routines. The resultant film installations and series of photographs focus on the activities of these workers during their time off from production.

Allison Smith: Needle Work
Allison Smith’s work draws on “living history”

Allison Smith, Untitled, from Needle Work, 2009. Inkjet print on exhibition paper, 22 x 16”. Courtesy of the artist.

museums, battlegrounds, and most recently the Internet to explore gendered conventions of craft, constructions of national identity, and experiences of violence. Needle Work centers on Smith’s recreation of European and American gas masks from World War I and World War II, and includes staged photographs with the masks and images of the masks on silk parachutes printed by Washington University’s Island Press.

And mark your calendar for these related events:

Sharon Lockhart Walkthrough
Saturday, February 6, 2 pm
Artist Sharon Lockhart and curator Sabine Eckmann lead a walkthrough of the Lunch Break exhibition.

Allison Smith Lecture
Monday, February 8, 6:30 pm, Steinberg Auditorium
Artist Allison Smith will discuss her work, including the Needle Work exhibition.

• Art Organization: Amy Broadway, The Pulitzer

Panel Series Starts: The City as Studio

Panelist Juan William Chávez talks about the art experience provided at Boots Contemporary Art Space, an alternative art space in St. Louis, MO.

Tomorrow at 7:30pm, the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts will begin its panel series related to the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, alongside its current exhibition Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark and tailored programming entitled “Transformation” (tour the show’s mind-blowing catalogue for a primer). The basic question posed in these conversations will be, “How do communities evolve, and in what ways can their members guide the process?”

Tomorrow’s “The City as Studio” will focus on how art spaces and creative acts invigorate urban neighborhoods, spotlighting examples of this happening in St. Louis. Panelists include Juan William Chávez, Theaster Gates, Mary Jane Jacob, Luis Croquer, and Christy Gray, all of whom have exceedingly impressive bios you can read on the event’s webpage. The intention, though, is that the panelists won’t be the only ones comparing notes, and that the occasion will provide an arena for all attendees to contribute thoughts on revitalization.

We hope you’ll join us tomorrow and for future panel discussions. For more information on upcoming events at the Pulitzer and to subscribe to our e-newsletter, please visit www.pulitzerarts.org.

Love & Theft Opening Reception at White Flag

This Saturday, January 23rd, between 7 and 10 p.m., White Flag Projects celebrates the opening of Love & Theft, a group exhibition currently on view and featuring artists Mike Bidlo, Dutes Miller, Asher Penn, and Sara Greenberger Rafferty. Each of these artists explores preexisting figural motifs in order to either reinvigorate or dismantle the appropriated image.

Mike Bidlo’s Not Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawings reference both Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg’s infamous 1953 erasure of a de Kooning. Appropriation isn’t new to Bidlo–-he’s been replicating the work of 20th century Modernist masters for decades in paintings and sculptures usually titled “Not (insert artist’s name here).” Bidlo has also tied a performance aspect into many of his projects, such as his 1984 recreation of Andy Warhol’s factory in the attic of New York’s P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center or his public replication of Picasso’s Guernica in L.A.’s Gagosian Gallery. Bidlo’s oeuvre is as impressive as it’s extensive. His pieces are witty (he called his version of Picasso’s Desmoiselles d’Avignon, She Works Hard for the Money) and layered in their associations and references.

Chicago-based multimedia artist Dutes Miller’s pornographic collages provide a literal layering of images suggestive of the stacking of bodies. At once lewd and honest, Miller’s collages, as well as many of his other works, place gay male experience at their forefront. The lowly frames used to encase the work complement the gritty, no-budget aesthetic that the barrage of unrestrained body parts evokes. The abundance of images allows Dutes’s collages to have quite the opposite effect of Bidlo’s Drawings—they become over-stimulating in both a visual and figural sense.

Brooklyn-based artist and Interview magazine contributor Asher Penn uses three different and somewhat bizarre Wolfgang Tillmans photographs of British model Kate Moss as the raw material for his series of Kate Moss Rorschach works on paper. In this series, Penn layers red acrylic paint over the photocopied Tillmans photographs (most of which I personally and painstakingly placed in clip frames) to create images reminiscent of out-moded Rorschach psychological tests. The sheer volume of the images coupled with the non-repetitious and questionably arbitrary paint-blot patterns, make the work viewed as a whole quite a spectacle.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from Columbia University’s School of Arts. In the early 2000’s, Greenberger Rafferty became interested in the subject of entertainers and performance – an interest that her three works on view (all portraits of 70’s-era female comedians) evidence. Like Penn, she also works with the photographic image, but instead of using photocopy as her means of reproduction, she re-photographs each image, digitally manipulates it, and stains it with unknown fluids (???), thereby transforming the original photograph into a specter of its former self. The disparity between the vibrant sharpness and saturation of the printed photograph and the blurry washed-out quality of the fluid-soaked spots creates an uneasy visual discord.

Despite the many differences between their images and their aims, one thing each artist has in common is their use of appropriation to further complicate an original image (or lack thereof) in order to reveal something original through reproduction.

Love & Theft opens Saturday, January 23rd from 7- 10 pm at White Flag Projects. For more information about this exhibition and other White Flag events, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

-Lynna Borden, Intern

• Art Organization: Kemper Art Museum, Kemper Art Museum

Chance Poetry Reading Dec. 4

detail from Untitled “Cadavre ezquis” (”Exquisite Corpse”) by André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Yves Tanguy (1938). Collage on graph paper.

Chance Poetry Reading
Friday, December 4
6-8 pm, Kemper Art Museum

Poets and lovers of poetry alike are invited to join us for an informal poetry reading at the Kemper Art Museum. Read your own work inspired by chance, bring your favorite Surrealist poem to share, or simply come to listen and enjoy. Light refreshments will be available.

Offered in conjunction with the Chance Aesthetics exhibition, on view through January 4.

Day With(out) Art at MOCRA - 12/1/09

December 1, 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of Day With(out) Art (DWA). Over those twenty years, this annual day of mourning and action has metamorphosed from emphasizing loss (signaled by removing artworks or draping them, or dimming the lights in galleries) to encouraging the creative energy and insight that art can bring to a devastating and demoralizing situation. As the Visual AIDS website notes:

… Day With(out) Art has grown into a collaborative project in which an estimated 8,000 national and international museums, galleries, art centers, AIDS Service Organizations, libraries, high schools and colleges take part.

Saint Louis University’s Museum of Contemporary Religious Art (MOCRA) has participated in DWA regularly since 1994. In addition to highlighting particular works of art, three times we have hosted and helped organize observances involving members of the wider arts community.

Adrian Kellard, "The Promise," 1989. Courtesy of the Estate of Adrian Kellard.

This year, MOCRA observes DWA by exhibiting The Promise, by the late Adrian Kellard, a rising artist in 1980s New York. His large-scale carved wood block panels evoke both medieval shrines and the woodblock prints of 20th-century German Expressionists, but their bright colors and folk-art quality make them accessible to a wide range of audiences. The Promise riffs on images of St. Christopher, a legendary giant who unwittingly carried the Christ child across a river. The image expresses endurance and perseverance in the midst of suffering. Its enigmatic text, “I will never leave you,” seems to assert love, hope, compassion, and loyalty. It is an especially poignant message when we consider that Kellard’s own life was cut short by AIDS. He died in the fall of 1991 at the age of 32.

The Promise was included in the 1992-93 international traveling exhibition From Media to Metaphor: Art about AIDS, and in the 1994 exhibition Art’s Lament: Creativity in the Face of Death (organized by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

MOCRA is pleased to be able to share The Promise with St. Louis audiences for this year’s Day With(out) Art. MOCRA will have the work on display beginning Tuesday, December 1 through December 13. Find more information here.

MOCRA’s current exhibition, Michael Byron: Cosmic Tears, also continues through December 13. Although not directly connected to HIV/AIDS, this exhibition does engage the ambiguity of suffering and the challenge it poses to us as a fact of our human existence. I suspect that Byron’s works speak to many of our visitors of the ways in which we can creatively elicit meaning out of all of life’s experiences, both the joys and the tears.

In whatever fashion makes sense to you, we hope you will join MOCRA in observing World AIDS Day and Day With(out) Art.