(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)

Robin Assner and Adam Watkins, I Love You (remix) (music video), 2011

Laumeier Sculpture Park presents Electric is the Love, in the ninth installment of the Kranzberg Exhibition Series which features artists from the St. Louis region. Electric is the Love will bring together a range of practitioners: collaborative architects, a sound artist, a super gamer and a sci-fi sculptor. Opening October 29, 2011 and continuing through January 22, 2012, the exhibition will examine how personal devices, mobile networks and surveillance technologies now unite us by creating an inexorable conduit that organizes our contemporary lives through new works by Dave Derington, Eric Hall, Christopher Ottinger, Yo_Cy (Christine Yogiaman and Ken Tracy) and Robin Assner and Adam Watkins.

Exhibition Opening: Saturday, October 29, 2011
4–5 PM Member Preview Reception and Artist Talk [free for members]
5–7 PM Public Reception and Gallery Talk [free]
Laumeier Sculpture Park Museum Galleries

• Learn more about the exhibition at www.laumeier.org
• Check out photos at our Facebook.com/LaumeierSTL photo gallery

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)

Tomás Saraceno, 32SW Iridescent/Flying Garden/Airport City, 2007. Air pillows, elastic rope, webbing, iridescent foil, and pump system, 67" diameter. Courtesy of the artist, Andersen’s Contemporary, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, and pinksummer contemporary art.

The Kemper Art Museum’s fall exhibitions will open with a special celebration on Friday, September 9, with a member preview from 6-7 pm and a public reception from 7-9 pm.

Openings are an opportunity to celebrate and enjoy the latest special exhibitions: Precarious Worlds and Tomás Saraceno. In fall 2011 the Museum will also be marking the reinstallation of the Bernoudy Permanent Collection Gallery, with a completely new layout exploring works in the Museum’s permanent collection through three new thematic arrangements: Nature | Culture, Body | Self, and Abstract | Real, as well as the fall Teaching Gallery exhibition Performance and Performativity in Contemporary Art.

Throughout the evening, a free shuttle will run between the fall openings at the Kemper Art Museum and Grand Center, where there will be events at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, and Bruno David Gallery. more details

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.

You are invited to join us for the public opening celebration at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum this Friday, May 6 from 7-9 pm featuring two new exhibitions:

Cosima von Bonin: Character Appropriation
Conceptual artist Cosima von Bonin’s creative practice is distinguished by an exceptional interweaving of sculpture, installation, video, textiles, music, performance, and her own social network. The exhibition roughly spans the last decade of the artist’s career, including a selection of her textile “paintings,” her signature sculptures and outsized stuffed animals, as well as her latest pieces that embrace themes of idleness and mental and physical fatigue. more info >>

2011 MFA Thesis Exhibition
The exhibition will feature thesis projects by the 2011 Master of Fine Arts candidates in Washington University’s Graduate School of Art, part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. 2011 MFA candidates: John Talbott Allen, Meghan Bean, Shira Berkowitz, Darrick Byers, Jisun Choi, Zlatko Cosic, James Daniels, Kara Daving, Andrea Degener, Kristin Fleischmann, William Frank, Nicholas Kania, Jordan McGirk, Zachary Miller, Esther Murphy, Kathryn Neale, Katherine McCullough, Christopher Ottinger, Maia Palmer, Nicole Petrescu, Lauren Pressler, Bryce Olen Robinson, Whitney Sage, Donna Smith more info >>

RELATED EVENTS
Opening Afterparty
Friday, May 6: 10 pm at Atomic Cowboy (4140 Manchester Avenue)
The celebration continues at an afterparty featuring Moritz von Oswald—an influential electronic music pioneer and frequent von Bonin collaborator—at Atomic Cowboy (4140 Manchester Avenue) starting at 10 pm ($3 cover; free passes will be available at the opening reception). 21 and over only

Gallery Talk
Saturday, May 7: 1 pm
Meredith Malone, curator of Cosima von Bonin: Character Appropriation, will lead a talk in the galleries offering visitors an in-depth look at the exhibition’s works and themes.