Getting ready for the opening SLinger 3 style

Things are coming together for the opening.

David Johnson installing

Slinger 3 May 7th – June 5th

Opening reception May 7th 6:30 pm – 10:00 pm

Performance by Larry Krone with special guest FRAN starts at 8:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Artists- Larry Krone, Sandra Marchewa, Karin Hodgin Jones, RJ Messineo, Josh Meyer, David Johnson

Larry Krone installing

Slinger 3 with Performance by Larry Krone

Slinger 3

May 7th – June 5th MAY 7th

Opening reception May 7th 6:30 pm – 10:00 pm

Using the “Slinger” dish as a STL cultural metaphor, Slinger 3 is a group exhibition that explores the current temperature of the St. Louis visual landscape.

Artists

Larry Krone

Sandra Marchewa

Karin Hodgin Jones

RJ Messineo

Josh Meyer

David Johnson

Performance by Larry Krone with special guest FRAN starts at 8:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Great Rivers Biennial 2010 Opens

Details (from top to bottom) of Martin Brief's "Amazon God," Sarah Frost's "Arsenal," and Cameron Fuller's "From the Collection of the Institute for the Perpetuation of Imaginal Processes"

The fourth iteration of the Great Rivers Biennial opened Friday night, April 30. The Biennial is a collaboration between the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and the Gateway Foundation designed to strengthen the local art scene in St. Louis. This innovative program identifies talented emerging local artists and mid-career artists whose work explores new directions, and provides them with financial support as well as local and national visibility.

This year’s Great Rivers Biennial 2010 artists, Martin Brief, Sarah Frost, and Cameron Fuller, each received $20,000 to help support their practice, in addition to the opportunity to mount an exhibition in the Contemporary’s Main Galleries. The Great Rivers Biennial is one of the most widely anticipated exhibitions presented by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. The energy it has generated has galvanized the arts community in St. Louis, contributing to an enhanced quality of life for St. Louis area residents.

This year’s exhibition includes the following:

Martin Brief’s suite of twenty-eight new drawings, collectively titled Amazon God, appear at first glance to be seismographic in nature, the recording of tectonic shifts. In fact, they meticulously inventory the results of a search for “God” on Amazon.com. Brief records the thousands of book titles his search unearthed on scroll-like sheets of paper with a Rapidograph pen.

Sarah Frost’s installation, Arsenal, had its beginnings on the internet, too, though YouTube provided the impetus. Frost found there a community of young boys who self-publish instructional videos for making elaborate paper guns. Guided by the boys’ videos, Frost fashioned a paper cloud of weaponry suspended from the gallery ceiling, which shares the space with YouTube stills.

Cameron Fuller’s The Institute for the Perpetuation of Imaginal Processes reveals his interests in folk art, Native American artifacts, and the natural history museum. Upon entering his “museum within a museum,” you’ll encounter As It Is, a life-size diorama, and then, in adjoining rooms, Remembering Washington, The Guidance of Disaster, and Where My Heart Will Lead Me, an allusion to the itinerant tinker.

The Great Rivers Biennial 2010 runs through August 8. For more information, visit http://www.camst.org/.

• Art Organization: White Flag Projects

Interview with Michelle Grabner (Part 4 of 4)

Michelle Grabner is an artist, curator, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also the curator of Newtonland, the current exhibition at White Flag Projects. I had the pleasure of interviewing Michelle on the morning of the show’s opening; this is the final of installment of that interview.

Lynna Borden (White Flag Intern): Did you and Brad make your piece specifically for the show and did you do it before or after you found the other artists?

Michelle Grabner: We’ve been making mobiles for some time and they always include some of my static silverpoint drawings. We like the contradiction between drawings comprised of silverpoint on panel and something vernacular, in this case, aluminum sections of bleacher seating, which implies a kind of spectatorship. So they’re formal, there’s mathematical proportion being played out and so forth, but there’s always this collision between something vernacular and recognizable in terms of material, and then degrees of abstraction.

So we’ve been working with those collisons for a long time. For the piece here, we were drawn to the structural space and the I-beams articulating the physical space and volume of White Flag Projects. Again, this work is more of a hanging screen than a mobile. What I really like about this piece and how it echoes the main space of White Flag is that you have these secessions of I-beams that horizontally dissect the volume of the space, and then you have the suspensions of these horizontal bleacher sections that echo the I-beams. I like to see it as a metaphorical gesture of flattening out the space that is White Flag Projects.

LB: It’s interesting that you talk about spectatorship because the piece really does change the way you view the rest of the show. You can only enter from the left side of the gallery and if you’re standing on the right, you’re forced to look through this kind of screen.

MG: Yep, it was funny because my concern was that it was going to be much more obtrusive or opaque. That the viewer wasn’t going to be able to penetrate it, but you’re right, to get a clear view of the work you do have to be in one space or the other. You can see work through the horizontal stretches of the bleachers, but not clearly, so you start playing with strikingly horizontals frames.

LB: Do you think that doing this show and working in this space will inform or influence what you do next?

MG: Well, I can tell you that it already has influenced my new work. In the past, the mobiles were true mobiles, where things were moving in multi-directions, balanced out and so forth. We’re working on a piece for New York, a show that will open in April that elaborates on the piece here though, it’s more suspended sculpture than mobile. There are also some architectural elements and references involved in the new works that come directly from working through Newtonland.

LB: Thank you so much for your time!

• Art Organization: White Flag Projects

Interview with Michelle Grabner (Part 2 of 4)

Michelle Grabner is an artist, curator, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also the curator Newtonland, the current exhibition at White Flag Projects. I had the pleasure of interviewing Michelle on the morning of the show’s opening; this is the second of four installments of that interview.

Lynna Borden (White Flag Intern): You’ve worked with a couple of the artists in this show before, Jan Van Der Ploeg and Elizabeth Bryant, what attracts you to their work?

Michelle Grabner: Good question. They have a really solid foundational practice. Jan is a classical abstract formalist—interested in elemental, two-dimensional vocabulary and known primarily for his wall paintings that explore architectural constructs: interior/exterior, public/private. There is a kind of great graphic sensibility with Jan’s work that is super compelling and I am always pulled to it.

Elizabeth Bryant is really interested in the negotiation of nature and culture, and you see that with her work presented here—a manufactured photograph of a landscape. Playing with an innocuous mass-produced vista, she pulls out shapes, looking for other types of topographical elements that get worked into this clichéd landscape. And she’s been doing that for a long time, looking at gardens, looking at different kinds of landscapes and integrating cultural objects into that. At what point do these integrations break? When do they create balance and harmony? I think the piece here does that with a sense of balance, movement, and physical and illusionary space.

Also, both Jan and Elizabeth are solid mid-career artists, which is something I am really committed to. They’ve really been slugging it out for years and all too often that doesn’t get rewarded in the larger contemporary art apparatus. The contemporary art landscape prefers the new and the young so I have a commitment, as a mid-career artist myself, to look at the work of those who have been around the block a few times.

LB: Did Jan create his piece specifically for this show? His other work is very different, especially in the way it’s bound to the wall.

MG: My guess is that his mobile is a prototype. It has this kind of sketchy potential—color and movement overlapping. When we were installing it, Matt was astute to notice that maybe it’s supposed to be this flat viewing plane that is at the heart of this work. Identifying where these colored circles are overlapping each other is at the core of this mobile. Jan has made objects before, but my guess is that this may be the first time he’s integrating movement in the form of a mobile. I look forward to seeing more from him in the future.

LB: When I was first looking at the artists in this show and thinking about their work, the one I had trouble relating was Jean Painlevé. Can you talk a bit about why you chose to include his videos and how they relate to the other works in the exhibition?

MG: Some of it has to do with my own love of his film making, which is vast, funny, and erudite. There’s fantasy and surrealism as well as delight in the formal investigation of movement, shape, balance, and color, which this show features. Even the straightest documentary- nature-oriented videos, the ones that are looking at nature in the most empirical way, still have a soundtrack or a narration that is not “good science.” So, there is this great subjectivity that he brings to the natural world exploiting our wonder. There are hyperbolic-like spaces that get articulated in the underwater creatures he films. But formally, the movement of some of those animals, how they are suspended and move through another realm, is formally exquisite.

LB: Yeah, after spending more time with the works and watching the videos, you can definitely see the similarities in movement and form but, at first, on the surface, I found it difficult to relate.

MG: That’s right and this is why I brought Elizabeth’s mobile into the exhibition, to give context to the nature videos with another piece that negotiates images or constructs of nature.

When we were installing the show, what I really liked was that you can see the show as three distinct spaces— and each space is shaped around an investigation of distinct formal elements and movements. You have the front space with Greg Bogin, and then the piece that I did with my husband Brad Killam that starts to make reference to text and has signifiers, and then there are the works that play with reflection and dynamic movement and so forth, and then you have the two works that pull suspensions of nature into the exhibition.

-Lynna Borden, Intern

• Art Organization: White Flag Projects

Barbara Kruger would like to have drinks with you.

If you missed the first installment of this season’s DRINKS series at White Flag Projects, don’t worry: the next artist interview will be screened (with free happy hour drinks) on Wednesday, November 18th. This time, the featured artist will be Barbara Kruger, an American conceptualist known for pairing black and white photography with alarming red slogans that target the viewer and question the status quo of consumerism and standards of beauty.

After earning her MFA from Parsons School of Design in 1965, Kruger worked in publishing as a graphic designer, photo editor and art director. Following her job as chief art director at Mademoiselle magazine and a number of other notable Conde Nast glossies, Kruger moved to the Los Angeles area, where she began teaching at CalArts. It wasn’t until 1977 that Kruger began to experiment with photography and collage. At first, she took photos of architecture; then she began appropriating mid-century American ads and adding her own text to the imagery – an approach resulting in the singularly identifiable work that’s garnered her current reknown. Kruger continues to make art today, working in the form of public installation and other alternative media, and splits her time between New York and L.A.

The interview to be screened was filmed in 1980, when Kruger’s coupling of photo and text was making its first public appearances. It will be interesting to see how she articulates her design-influenced aesthetic and theoretical inspirations at this budding stage of her career. Cocktails will be served from 5 to 7 p.m.; the interview screens at 6 p.m.

For more details on the DRINKS series, other WFP events and our current exhibition PRETHUNDERDOME, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

• Art Organization: The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts

Community Engagement and Environmental Advocacy

As my friend Courtney said the other day of Ideal (Dis-) Placements, stick a fork in it. It’s done. St. Sebastian has peered down from his post in the Entrance Gallery for nearly a full year, and in one month, he’ll journey back to Harvard Art Museum, as the other masterworks return to their respective dwellings.

We have another show to look forward to—Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark. As the title suggests, this exhibition will focus on how Gordon Matta-Clark, an artist in New York in the 1970s, transformed what was labeled useless–mainly abandoned buildings–into enchanting elements. One piece to be in Urban Alchemy is Garbage Wall, which will be of course a wall made from garbage. Might it be more than that, though?

The original Garbage Wall (Matta-Clark made three) was built in 1970 at Manhattan’s St. Mark’s Church. Celebrating the first Earth Day, Matta-Clark orchestrated its construction over three days by inviting passers-by to dump urban refuse into a mould with tar and plaster. For our 2009 re-creation, the Pulitzer is also asking the community to partake.

Our garbage collection is led by Jenny Murphy, a freelance “Garbage Specialist.” Yesterday, she went to two neighborhood schools to call for contributions, leaving behind cardboard bins. She’ll visit two more to again talk about Matta-Clark and the possibilities of art classes working on their own garbage sculpture; similar to what happened for last year’s Community Light Project, when students were invited to make light pieces during The Light Project.

To prevent the Pulitzer from becoming a landfill, we’re mostly taking donations from those specific schools at the moment. In addition, Jenny, and sometimes I, will make garbage runs. (Bulk trash days are coming up.) Jenny is also organizing a neighborhood trash clean-up with Big Brothers Big Sisters and Washington University Undergrads. You can get updates about these excursions on 2buildings1blog.

If you’d like the chance to play with urban waste, come by the Pulitzer’s booth during Earthways Green Home Festival on September 26. Jenny will be there crafting kites, seed starter cups, and handmade paper out of old newspapers with anyone who would like to join her. A tall Plexiglas box, trash, and gloves will be available  for people to simulate their own garbage wall. We’ll also be taking public donations there–nothing perishable please.

• Art Organization: Amy Broadway, The Pulitzer

A Neighbor’s Look into Open Studios

As Web Communications Assistant for the Pulitzer, yes, I’m on Facebook a lot, and for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been getting daily updates, invites, and reminders from artists and spaces on one of the most anticipated art events in St. Louis, Open Studios. Even electronically, the excitement is palpable.

When Mad Art founder Ron Buechele wrote in his Facebook status “getting ready for open studio,” I messaged him to find out what getting ready entailed as well as what he thinks the artists’ weekend show-and-tell does for St. Louis.

He replied, “The greatest effect is that the event has the potential to expose an underexposed artist. That, and it humanizes the artists to the general public and takes a little of the mystery out of what we do. I completely revamped my studio from top to bottom, so it has a whole new look and feel, although I am the only one that will know that. I hope that the event draws a large and eager crowd, and personally, that it brings some people to Mad Art who have never been here before.”

To learn more about Open Studios, on Wednesday afternoon, I actually got off the computer and walked next door to our neighbor/the presenter of City-Wide Open Studios, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and spoke with its Assistant Curator, Laura Fried, and curatorial intern Brittni Zotos. Fried plays a major role in organizing the event, including communicating with the hundred-plus artists involved. She explains some details behind Open Studios in this video I took that afternoon:

Zotos talks about her important role in Open Studios:

As Laura Fried mentioned, Open Studios gives people the opportunity to glimpse artists in their natural habitats, and it also can take people to parts of St. Louis they might not have seen otherwise. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it to all the studios this weekend, but I have a few mapped out. Currently, I have a soft spot for a St. Louis art sub-community off of Broadway on Ohio, where you can find a cluster of artists participating in Open Studios–Arcadia studios (Sarah Paulsen, Emily Hemeyer), Gary Passanise, and Floating Laboratories, near a vegetable factory on the Mississippi River.   

Wednesday night, I went to the the recently founded Floating Laboratories, the studio of Kevin Harris, to see what was happening there in preparation for the big event. Harris said he might sweep the floor, but really what people will be getting is what his studio would look like with or without a tour of people coming through–just like the Discovery Channel. None of Harris’ work is sampled in CAMSTL’s preview show, because it’s all too big. If you’d like an idea of what you might find there, watch this video of Harris working on his “Snuffleupagus,” with a base of wood and bubble wrap:

• Art Organization: Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Citygarden: Video Installation

From baseball fans to art lovers, it seems all of Saint Louis is abuzz with the new public downtown space, Citygarden. I had the opportunity to work with Assistant Curator of the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis, Laura Fried, in assembling a program of nine international video artists for the featured video installation in the garden. With anticipation for this new and lively acquisition, videos were selected that reflect a similar excitement and curiosity.

On Wednesday, July 1st, the evening of the public opening, I was very pleased with how engaged people were with the videos. What’s great about the Citygarden space is that it reaches an audience who might not otherwise interact with contemporary art. The most common mode of communication in our everyday life is of course technology, so what better way to present art to the public than through the medium of video? What’s different about video art as supposed to a movie or television show is that there are no real guide lines or conventions to follow. While most video media is set out to entertain, video art has a different agenda; to spark an appetite and ignite a curiosity for the world around you. It does not necessarily provide a story, lesson or conclusion but rather gives way to new questions.

I hope that the video installation compliments the sculptures and atmosphere of the garden by introducing a contemporary medium to the space. Citygarden is an exciting and lively addition to the downtown area and the video installation enhances the movement and enthusiasm in this contemporary public art garden.

Featured Artists:
Wood and Harrison: England, United Kingdom
Euan Macdonald: Los Angeles, California, United States
Kathy Slade: Vancouver, Canada
Ron Tran: Vancouver, Canada
Jennifer West: Los Angeles, California, United States
Rini Hurkmans: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Kate Gilmore: New York, New York, United States
Laurent Grasso: Paris, France
Alex Hubbard: Brooklyn, New York, United States

*If you’re interested in broadening your video art repertoire, I would suggest a trip to the Contemporary Art Museum before August 2nd. The main gallery exhibit is currently Belgian video artist, Chantal Akerman. Acclaimed for her documentary and feature films, Akerman has adapted her work into installations for her first museum survey.

• Art Organization: Katherine Jolliff, Boots Contemporary Art Space

Citygarden Saint Louis

Landscape architect Nelson Byrd Woltz successfully created an environmentally friendly space to display sculpture, preserve nature, and incorporate the city’s rich, geographical history.  A unique aspect to the design of Citygarden is the reference to elements of St. Louis’s natural history.  The landscape is divided into three bands, each representing geographic features of the area: the River Bluffs, the Floodplain, and the River Terrace.  The extraordinary sculpture garden consists of 23 modern and contemporary sculptures in all, including works by George Rickey, Aristide Maillol, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Mark di Suvero.  Visitors can explore the works as they walk along the terrace, wander down the tortuous path, or as some young enthusiasts prefer, climb over the sculptures.  On the Eastern end of the park is another magnificent sight, the classic view of the Old Court House framed by the Arch.  

West of the park, Richard Serra’s long standing sculpture, Twain, presents an interesting contrast.  Until my visit to Citygarden, I had only seen the venerated Serra sculpture from the street.  However, as I walked through the dwarfing interior, I was confronted with graffiti messages reading “get rid of this,” written across the large slabs of steel.  Twain, among many of Serra’s other works, is controversial, but walking through this sculpture offers a unique experience with St. Louis’s landscape.