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: Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Great Rivers Biennial April 11 - August 8, 2010 Cameron Fuller: From the Collection of the Institute for the Perpetuation of Imaginal Processes

From the Great Rivers Biennial trifecta, Cameron Fuller’s exhibition is comparable to a musical composition based upon familiar tunes. Combining basic melodies of recollection, wanderlust and adventure, the exhibition rekindles the juvenescent enchantment of the natural world. Creating a museum within a museum, Fuller’s exhibition - video, diorama, photography, and installation - brings the viewer into a world beyond the Contemporary and into the fantasias of imagination.

The Institute for the Perpetuation of Imaginal Processes is assembled from Fuller’s virtuosity of set design, taking cues from theater production to create moments of static cinema. Entering into Fuller’s Institute, the exhibition begins with a contemporary, sci-fi slab of the natural world. Titled As it is, this full-scale diorama displays taxidermy forest animals inhabiting their portion of an astro-turfed earth, roaming at ease under the cover of a starry and geodesic sky. What, at first, may seem akin to the tradition of a natural history museum, is Fuller re-appropriating the conventions of historicizing presentation. Creating this fantastical version of the natural world, Fuller causes the audience to conjure up a story of their own. As it is revives the notion of the frontier, claiming its existence within our own imaginations.

Through the templates of diorama and performance, Fuller aims to preserve the storytelling apparatus, creating a platform for its preservation and transformation. His technique facilitates a self-analytical, self-historicizing reaction – where we can see ourselves more readily from the outside, to realize the ways in which we define our world, the interconnectedness of our ideas, and ways we relate to one another. The Institute for the Perpetuation of Imaginal Processes is on view at the Contemporary until its closing date August 8, 2010. Come by and visit The Institute.

• Art Organization: Kemper Art Museum

Kemper Art Museum Summer Exhibitions Close July 26

Andy Warhol, Carolina Herrera, November 1978. Gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., 2008

Don’t miss the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum’s summer exhibitions before they close on Monday, July 26! In addition to the annual MFA Thesis Exhibition, the Kemper Art Museum is featuring its permanent collection in an installation of recent photography acquisitions titled Focus on Photography; according to the Riverfront Times “This exhibit of new additions to the Kemper’s collection concisely and powerfully charts the development of photography from its early, documentary-inflected use to its transformation into a contemporary expressionistic medium.”

Visit today >>

• 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: Laumeier Sculpture Park

Anschultz Discovers the Joy of Wood Chipping

While Brandon Anschultz was preparing for his upcoming show at Laumeier Sculpture Park, I was lucky enough to observe the construction (or deconstruction) of what I consider to be one of his most intriguing pieces—Approximately 1350 hours of painting and 2 hours of wood chipping. While I waited with Anschultz for the wood chipper to arrive at Laumeier, we discussed his show, and specifically the piece he was working on that day.

I couldn’t hide my horrified expression when I saw the back of his truck piled high with paintings, all sawed into five inch strips, in preparation for their demise. He showed me a painting that had been exhibited in New York, laid the pieces on the ground, shrugged his shoulders and suggested that he actually preferred it sawed apart. I asked why he was destroying work that he liked. “It’s just part of the process,” he replied. That’s when I began to understand that with Anschultz’s work, the process is as important as the finished product.

When he started up the wood chipper and began feeding his paintings into it one strip at a time, I snapped a few pictures. I couldn’t watch for long—it almost seemed intrusive for me to witness simultaneously the destruction of past work and the creation of new work.

If you would like to view the finished work, Approximately 1350 hours of painting and 2 hours of wood chipping, and meet the artist, attend the opening reception of Stick Around for Joy on Friday, June 11 from 6-8 p.m. at Laumeier’s Indoor Galleries.

— Rebecca Lee, Laumeier Intern

Brandon Anschultz: Stick Around for Joy, runs from June 11-September 26, 2010 at Laumeier Sculpture Park.

• 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

• Art Organization: The Pulitzer

This Saturday: Transformation Project Walk

http://www.vimeo.com/10633699

Holy Trinity Catholic School students make a video with 2010 Whitney Biennial winner Theaster Gates about what they want to see in their neighborhood. Gates’ exhibition Dry Bones and Other Parables from the North will open this Saturday as part of the Transformation Project Walk.

Join the Pulitzer this Saturday, May 15, for the Transformation Project Walk, the grand finale to the Transformation projects. Since last fall, the Pulitzer has been implementing community programs in relation to the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, which combine art, social engagement and the urban landscape. On Saturday, these programs will showcase their achievements at various sites in Grand Center and the neighborhood of Hyde Park. For a full description of this event, visit the Pulitzer’s website.

Robert Longyear spray paints a battered trashcan inside the Woolworth Building. The St. Louis-based artist collected various objects around Grand Center to be incorporated into his show for Transformation. For an explanation on this exhibition, visit the Urban Evolution blog.

Interview with Greg Stimac

Greg Stimac is a Chicago-based artist who currently whose solo exhibition of work is currently on view at White Flag Projects. Below is an interview I did with Greg, where he discusses his artistic process, the White Flag show, and some of the themes that recur in his work.

Lynna Borden: I’m interested in the idea of the photographs depicting dead bugs accumulated on small Plexiglas sheets attached to your car. Can you discuss the origins of this project and where these works fit into your oeuvre?

Greg Stimac: Three years ago, I was with my friend Billy Joyce in Portland, Oregon. We had just driven up from Oakland, California and the front of my car was covered with bugs and dirt from the drive. We taped some pieces of mat board to my bumper and drove to Chicago. Most of the debris just flaked off by the time we arrived and we forgot about it. After some time I started thinking about how to bring that idea into photography. I settled on using Plexiglas sheets fastened to the grill with bailing wire.

Untitled (Chicago to Memphis to Little Rock) was the first one made in the series. Arriving in Little Rock at night I pulled over, removed the Plexi, connected a flatbed scanner to my cigarette lighter and made a scan at roadside with the lid of the scanner removed making the background of the image black. It worked out that the black of the image was actually the dark of the night sky.

I enjoyed making photographs that were composed by driving and the road itself, and not really knowing what imagery would emerge. All I could control was the time of night/day, season and rate of speed. I imagined the process to be somewhat akin to the collodion process of old, where the photographer coated their glass plates, photographed and developed in the field.

LB: Travel and cars, specifically, are featured directly or indirectly in many of your artworks, including most of the work in the White Flag show. Would you discuss how the automobile figures into your process as both a means of production and as a motif?

GS: To me the car is just as important an instrument as the camera. I often make work that features automobiles and the road because it is something very present and close to me, it has become part of my lifestyle.

LB: Do you think being a first-generation American has much to do with your perspective on American culture?

GS: Not so much. I was born and raised in Ohio (the heart if it all).

LB: Do you consider your work to be documentary or autobiographical in any way?

GS: I think about documentary photography and the work may have some documentary attributes, but often in more of a ridiculous, mundane, and playful way such as in the series’ Bottle of Piss and Mowing the Lawn.

LB: Do you think road photography and other road narratives as an inherently masculine subject? Do you ever consider your work as being gendered in any meaningful way?

GS: History shows us many woman photographers who engage in this mode of photography. Dorothea Lange for one.

LB: Is your work dependent upon being American and in America?

GS: It’s where I live and work right now. I can’t tell what I’d be making if I lived elsewhere, but why would I? America is a fascinating place.

LB: Do you see your work as any kind of critical commentary on American culture?

GS: I suppose at times certain works carry those layers more than others, such as Bison Silhouette, which is represented in the White Flag show. I had been thinking about the vast herds of bison that had once roamed the Great Plains and the West, now absent except places such as Yellowstone National Park and the occasional meat ranch. I came across this black rusting metal cutout of a bison positioned in the landscape along Hwy 20 in the Methow Valley in north central Washington state, and to me it sadly represented that negative space.

LB: The work in the White Flag exhibition was made over the last several years. Is there anything you’re working on currently that you can discuss?

GS: I’d like to do some aerial video work this summer.

Greg Stimac is on view through May 22, 2010. For more information on this exhibition and upcoming events, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

-Lynna Borden, Intern