On view thru November 28, 2010, the exhibition at the Front Room, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, presents an installation of the Belgium-based organization, Agency, alongside a series of photographs by Miriam Böhm.

Agency, the invention of Kobe Matthys, serves as a platform for highly systematic investigations that make formal inquiry into issues of authorship, copyright, and intellectual property. Existing as a compendium amassed and catalogued by Matthys, Agency gathers facts, subjects, objects, collectives, humans and non-humans to perform speculations and conduct Agency’s exhibitions. In this installation, titled Assembly, Agency displays evidence for the copyright infringement of a certain artist’s renderings of Place des Terreaux – Fontaine Bartholdi et Hôtel de Ville, wherein dubious distribution was enacted. “Thing 001408 (Lyone (Rhône)” bears witness in the Front Room, as testament to the problematic events that take place in the realm of artistic property.

Miriam Böhm, Berlin-based artist, presents a series of recent photographs that, like Agency’s Assembly, demonstrate shifting events of perspective. Böhm’s process begins with photographing marble slabs and faux marble paintings, followed by staging the prints against a textured backdrop, which she then re-photographs – producing a different image altogether. The work emerges, much like the marble slab itself, as a layered tablet of materiality – a compression of pictorial illusion, revealing the limitations of representation.

Image Credits:

Agency & Miriam Böhm, Installation in The Front Room, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2010. Photos by Alex Elmestad.

London-based filmmaker John Smith screens Lost Sound at the Front Room today thru December 5, 2010.  From his compendium of over 40 videos, films and installations, which he presents across a variety of platforms including movie theatres, exhibition spaces and televisions, Lost Sound is specific case of film that obscures the roles of representation and abstraction, documentary and fiction.

Developing this specific kind of cinematic language, Lost Sound composes footage taken on the streets of East London: the subjects are pieces of discarded audio tape inhabiting barb wire fences, tree branches, and other miscellaneous locations within the city’s sidelines.  In collaboration with sound artist Graeme Mille, the ambient sound is skillfully mixed with audio data from the remnant music tapes found on-site, which was re-recorded and inserted back into the film’s sound design. Smith and Mille layer image and sound into an elaborate experience for the viewer to de-code, addressing traditional roles of environment and viewer, perception and narrative.

Image Credit:

John Smith, Flag Mountain (Southern Nicosia, looking towards the border with the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus), 2010. HD video, color, sound, seamless loop (8 minutes cycle). Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton Gallery.

The current exhibition at the Front Room announces itself as a domestic space inside the Museum Walls.  The three artists – Zipora Fried, Margarete Jakschik and Sam Windett – contribute individual works that come to collectively resonate impressions of intimacy and domesticity.  Upon entering the Front Room, Fried’s black knit dining room table fills the space with sensations of dinner-table etiquette while its wool covering mystifies the art-object’s connotations.  Margarete Jakschik presents a collection of photographs that evoke the unceremonious but majestic sensibilities of American iconography.  The paintings of Sam Windett display his deep appreciation for the still-life tradition, recalling tropes of Modernism in their small but intense forms.

The exhibition closes October 31, 2010.  Visit www.camstl.org for more information.

The Exhibitions Hair and Sum of Limited Views make for an unusual pairing, however the juxtaposition of such highly particular work present a freeing and refreshing experience.

Elad Lassry, Israeli-born, Los Angeles based artist, exhibits his most recent collection of lacquered-framed photographic prints and 16mm films.  Lassry’s jewel-box sized monographs encapsulate still-life arrangements of objects and images.  These works not only convey Lassry’s nostalgic and highly realistic visual language, but also function as pieces that are not confined to their medium.  Lassry’s photographs pose as sculptures as well as images. The gleaming lacquered frames that hold each monograph print emphasizes each captured image as a singular phenomenon within a three-dimensional world.

Richard Artschwager’s exhibition Hair in the second main gallery, exemplifies, in a much different way, art that is not confined by its medium.  Artschwager’s sculptural oeuvre is familiar to us in its subject matter but unfamiliar in its peculiar process and materials.  Rubberized horsehair, paint, Celotex, and Formica, the materials of a former furniture maker, are transmuted into a medium for Artschwager’s art practice.  Requiring close inspection, the works bring awareness to their textural qualities.  But from a distance, the forms assemble into clean images on the gallery’s white walls, unexpectedly yielding into their two-dimensional forms.

With such formal subversion, Artschwager and Lassry’s works activate an analogous set of visual and sensory responses that challenge classic modes of perception employed when encountering an art object.  They bring to our attention the ways in which art objects are not confined by their mediums.  They can exist in a more transitive state – right before the point of clear perception and lucid familiarity.

Artist and former New Art in the Neighborhood (NAN) student Stan Chisholm recently led a NAN workshop. During the workshop, Stan introduced the students to a collaborative project he has been working on for the past year. Called MoneyBags, the project “reevaluates wealth, worth and currency.”

Joined by Stan’s fellow artist and collaborator Lisa Kim, NAN students were invited to think about art as currency and created actual money bags filled with objects of their own making. Students screen printed designs, sewed their own bags, and created a wealth of drawings, art items, and secret messages to include in their bags. The money bags were designed to be placed in public spaces for unsuspecting passersby to discover and keep.

Some students gave their bags to Stan, asking him to place them around the city, while other students took them home to leave in their own neighborhoods.  Those taking their money bags home were asked to take photos of them in their new locations and send them to Stan. He plans to post the photos on his MoneyBags website.  You can visit the site to learn more about the project and see pictures of the money bags NAN students created: http://www.dropmoneybags.blogspot.com/

Keep an eye out for a Money Bag near you!

The world premiere of Stephen Prina’s Concerto for Modern, Movie, and Pop Music for Ten Instruments and Voice will take place this Thursday, March 18th, at the Contemporary.   Just a few days ago we had a nine-foot grand concert Steinway, which is truly stunning, installed in the performance space.  At the moment, a rehearsal for the event is taking place downstairs and, I assure you, this music is worth hearing.

Prina is not only a talented visual artist, his photographs, drawings, and video work appear in our Main Galleries, but he’s also an extremely talented musician, having released albums both under his own name and as part of the band The Red Krayola.  His Concerto combines an amazing complexity of sounds from flutes, violins, clarinets, and more, with his soothing voice merging with and complementing the score.  Get ready for a night that will engage your senses both visually and aurally.  We hope to see you there.

Doors open at 7:00 pm and the concert begins at 8:00 pm.  Admission is free; seating is limited.

Anthony Huberman, Chief Curator of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis introduces the new exhibition For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there. Click here for further information on the exhibition.

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:

Tuesday, March 31 was a busy day of programming for the Contemporary. Around noon, the Winnebago for Jeremy Deller’s project: It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq pulled up in front of the Vintage Vinyl record store in the Delmar Loop area—pulling behind it a wreckage of a car that was bombed in Baghdad in 2007. Visiting St. Louis were Artist Jeremy Deller who conceived of the project, Jonathan Harvey (an Iraq war veteran and recently demobilized Psychological Opera­tions platoon sergeant), and Esam Pasha (an Iraqi refugee, artist, and former translator for the Chief Advisor in the British Embassy of Baghdad). Also on the trip were Nato Thompson from Creative Time, Benjamin Brown (documentary extraordinaire) and Lonnie Cooper (road manager).  They provided a forum where they encouraged unrehearsed discussions about Iraq in a non partisan open atmosphere. It was great to see active soldiers currently serving our country engage in discussions about the present circumstance and the future of Iraq.  More can be read about on their excellent blog.

After being on the Loop at the Vintage Vinyl from 12–5 pm, the discussion continued at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis 6-8 pm. We also want to thank Matt Strauss of White Flag Projects who hosted the St. Louis style BBQ to feed our tired traveled visiting guests. We also owe much thanks to the unofficial mayor of the Loop Joe Edwards of Blueberry Hill for making this day go so smoothly.

Last night British artist Tris Vonna-Michell delivered a dizzying fifteen minute performance in the Contemporary’s Front Room. Some of our guests were still seated in our new lobby cum living room, engrossed in conversation with Jonathan Harvey and Esam Pasha, two guest experts on the road with Conversations About Iraq. Meanwhile, the rest of the crowd crammed in to The Front Room gallery to catch Tris. Clutching a stack of 500 A4 photocopies, blank side out, he began to fire off an improvised narrative, dropping single sheets on the ground as if turning pages in a book. The result was a kind of vertiginous autobiography, told through stream-of-consciousness fragments, anecdotes, mappings, and repeat descriptions. Moving from Japan to Berlin, Tris pulled us through an abstracted landscape and personal history, which ended, very simply, with a conclusion that the story, however labrynthian and interconnected, could never be complete.

In the space now sits those strewn papers on the floor, illuminated at intervals with the projection of clicking white slides. On the wall sits a pair of headphones from which, standing among the fragmented photocopies, one can listen to a recording of last night’s story.