After visiting The Cloisters during Columbus Day weekend I headed over to view Tauba Auerbach’s HERE AND NOW/AND NOWHERE. The  exhibition explored philosophical conflicts including liminality, or intermediate state between two dimensionality and three dimensionality; the past and the present; Being HERE vs. Being THERE, and being both HERE and THERE at once; and Randomness vs. Determinism and the unpredictable order of chaos. Five bodies of work represented in the exhibition are crumple paintings, static photographs, fold paintings, and The Auerglass. The crumple paintings are perhaps the most mesmerizing and intriguing. The illusion of a crumpled surface is constructed from large Ben Day dots, and only visible upon standing far away from the work. This created an element of play for the viewer,  a visual sensory delight.  If you feel this amateur video making you dizzy, wait until the vertigo sets in when viewing the works up close and in person. The Auerglass, which is the central work in the show, is a two-person wooden pump organ designed by the artist with her friend Cameron Mesirow of the band Glasser. The instrument cannot be played alone. It requires two people to play. Performances are held daily at 5pm.

On view through October 27, 2009
18 Wooster Street, New York
www.deitchprojects.com

House Industries announces the opening of its Type as Object show at New York’s Type Directors Club. The show will open on October 20, 2009 and run until November 20, 2009. House Industries principals Andy Cruz and Rich Roat will give a short introductory lecture at the opening. Type as Object will feature the three dimensional objects that House has derived from its 16 years of creating a tangible experience around its digital type. House Industries has exhibited previously at Shepard Fairey’s Subliminal Projects Gallery and at 222 Gallery in Philadelphia.

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The acclaimed documentary, New Brow: Contemporary Underground Art, returns to San Francisco this month for a special screening event. New Brow is a feature film presented by The Shooting Gallery and Humble Pictures that showcases interviews with the artists, galleries, and collectors that sparked the new American art movement.

Featured artists include Van Arno, Shawn Barber, Gary Baseman, Shepard Fairey, Mike Giant, Sylvia Ji, Eric Joyner, Yumiko Kayukawa, Kill Pixie, Travis Louie, Isabel Samaras, Robert Williams and more.

Catch The Shooting Gallery’s Terrestrial Syndrome opening at 7pm and then zoom over to ATA Gallery for the the film screening. Details below:

September 12th, 2009 at 8:30pm

ATA Gallery (Artists’ Television Access)
992 Valencia Street (at 21st)
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 824-3890

©The Fantastic Nobodies Images courtesy of {CTS}creativethriftshop

HOWL! Festival Preview Benefit
Presented by Howl! Festival and Culture Shock Marketing
A Video, Music & Performance Event
Featuring: The Fantastic Nobodies

Thursday, September 3, 11 p.m. – 1 a.m.
Bleecker Street Theatre, Lobby Theatre
45 Bleecker Street (Between Lafayette & Bowery)
$10 Minimum Donation
For Advanced Tickets: Click Here

Culture Shock Marketing (CSM), the New York City-based creative marketing consultancy, is thrilled to announce its partnership with the HOWL! Festival for their 2009 Preview Benefit. The HOWL! Festival, which celebrates the vibrant community of East Village and Lower East Side artists, will kick off its 2009 schedule with a multidisciplinary, mash-up event featuring video art, performance art, music, variety theater and spoken word, curated and produced by Culture Shock Marketing. The preview, part of HOWL! Arts Project 2009: Performance Art, will benefit HOWL! HELP (HOWL! Emergency Life Project) and take place on September 3rd from 11 p.m. – 1 a.m. at the Bleecker Street Theatre. The event is CSM’s most ambitious production to date.

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Culture Shock Marketing is pleased to announce today the launch of artist Lauren Bergman’s brand new website and newsletter. After months of tireless design work, www.laurenbergman.net has become a place for curators, collectors, and fans alike to admire Bergman’s stunning paintings.  The new web design truly captures the essence of femininity – a perfect balance of strength and delicacy. In addition to viewing her work in the image galleries, visitors can purchase prints, as well as merchandise from the artist’s latest creation, The Little Bitches.

Bergman will also be sending out a periodical newsletter keeping you in-the-know on her upcoming gallery exhibitions, special projects she is working on, and issues that are close to her heart.  Sign up directly through her site here. Also check out her News section for frequent updates, like how you can bid on a Bergman limited edition print at the September 3rd Howl! Festival Preview Benefit!

Other CSM client site projects include www.loriearley.com, for artist Lori Earley, which launched this past February.

Weekend Pacifists group exhibition, showcasing five artists whose lives and works have crisscrossed the skateboarding and lowbrow art worlds throughout the better part of the ’90s and ’00s, opened last Saturday in LA. Here are a few photos from the evening, courtesy of Subliminal Projects. The show, featuring artists: RUSS POPE, ANDY JENKINS, CHRIS PASTRAS, MICHAEL SIEBEN, AND MIKE MYERS, will be on view through September 19. Check out the Subliminal site for more photos from the opening and to view the original, incredibly vibrant artworks in the exhibition.

Weekend Pacifists, opening tonight at Subliminal Projects, showcases five artists whose lives and works have crisscrossed the skateboarding and lowbrow art worlds throughout the better part of the ’90s and ’00s. Collectively, their art is dotted with both whimsy and sociopolitics, not exactly the voice of a generation but mabye just a voice of a generation. Make that five voices, actually. Here’s what they each have to say about the show’s title:

Andy Jenkins “I work a regular schedule during the week and it’s anything but passive. On the weekend I become passive, as my personal work steers me around by the hands.”

Michael Myers “To me, the ‘Weekend Pacifists’ is about the feeling of hope and renewal that happens weekend after weekend. The weekend pacifist is about comaraderie, spirituality, gratefulness, and the quest for being content in the now and for the week ahead.”

Chris Pastras “I’m a pacifist who loves the weekend, so I guess I fit the bill pretty well.”

Russ Pope “Weekend Pacifists? Pacified by the weekend on a weekly basis. Good Stuff. Living everyday like it’s a weekend, not saving the good times for two days a week.”

Michael Sieben “Weekend Warriors is an album by Ted Nugent that was released in 1978. It’s also a term used to describe people who follow their passions on the weekend. The phrase ‘Weekend Pacifists’ describes an individual who is dedicated to their passion full time thus leaving the weekend open to relaxing or taking a break from the war. Hopefully that doesn’t sound too pretentious.”

WEEKEND PACIFISTS
New Works by
Andy Jenkins, Mike Myers, Chris Pastras, Russ Pope, Michael Sieben
OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY, AUG 22nd, 8-11PM
EXHIBITION DATES: August 22nd – September 19th, 2009                                          www.subliminalprojects.com

After reaching a resolution with Boston officials regarding vandalism charges, Shepard Fairey stated in his blog that he is, “Glad to put this behind me so I can focus on making art and the other positive things in my life.” And what better way to do so than to DJ tonight at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston Obey Experiment REDUX with friends Z-Trip and Public Enemy’s Chuck D.

The event is taking place just two weeks before the close of his twenty-year retrospective, Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand; attendance for the has reached nearly 100,000 and will most likely become one of the highest-attended exhibitions for any contemporary art museum in the United States this year. Fans and followers of Shepard’s Boston trail and my previous blog post will recall Fairey was initially scheduled to perform for his sold-out Obey Experiment REDUX at the ICA on February 6, the opening day of his exhibition, but was arrested by Boston Police on his way to the museum for outstanding warrants.

Obey Experiment REDUX
with DJ’s Shepard Fairey and Z-trip + Chuck D (Public Enemy)

Date: Friday, July 31, 2009
Time: Galleries Close at 10:30 p.m.

Sponsored: by Converse, Obey Clothing and Karmaloop

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Artist Lori Earley today announced news of her first solo exhibition in London – Laments and Lullabies. The highly anticipated show will be the artist’s first at London’s Opera Gallery and is a major exposition in Earley’s prolific career. The exhibition opens to the public on Friday, October 16, 2009 with a reception from 5 p.m. – 7 p.m. and will be on view through Saturday, November 14.

Due to the time-consuming nature of Earley’s work and her meticulous technical process, her paintings are typically shown only once a year, at most. Laments and Lullabies, however, comes nearly two years after her last solo exhibition held in New York in February, 2008, making this exhibition her most ambitious and labor-intensive collection of works to date. “It has been an intense, yet rewarding process,’” stated Earley, “I’m extremely proud of what I’ve accomplished. I feel these are my best paintings to date and can’t wait to share them with the public.” With such a limited number of works available each year, her waiting list has grown in anticipation of her London show, with collectors already vying for an original. The exquisite new figurative paintings are Earley’s most intricate and continue to embrace the elegance and anguish of femininity and emotion. In addition to Earley’s signature portraits and if time permits, Laments and Lullabies could very well mark the debut of the artist’s very first self-portrait, which has been a popular request from her fans throughout the years.

After two works were stolen and not recovered from her 2008 New York solo show, Fade to Gray, just a week after opening, Earley refused to let thieves discourage. “I was really angry that my show was picked apart so soon after it opened, especially since everything was planned right down to the wallpaper, which I designed for the show.  I felt horrible that the fans were robbed as well and not able to see the show in its entirety, especially with my best piece missing,” stated Lori. ‘”But I was determined not to let the loss dissuade me’. Putting the unfortunate incident behind her, Earley then began to prepare with a vengeance for what she considers to be her best exhibition to date. With Laments and Lullabies, the artist has decidedly moved away from the monochromatic, muted color palette of her last solo show to her recognizably inherent style that showcases vibrant colors and dark tones, similar to that of 2006’s enormously successful sold out solo exhibition, Anima Sola, at Opera Gallery in New York. Laments and Lullabies employs a more refined and rich palette, however, that helps convey the artistic intensity and spectrum of emotion that permeates each of her unique and beautiful works.

As the narrative progresses so does Earley’s poetic and artistic ambition, revealing her commitment to her subjects and to her vivid imagination. “The Pinnacle,” Earley’s largest scaled piece to date, her pièce de résistance, is the premier example of this. The 55” x 70” work, which took about four grueling months to complete, depicts a woeful, lone female figure standing on a jagged terrain, surrounded by foreboding tornadoes gathering in the distance. This new and unprecedented collection is Earley’s purest work, a flawless display of the collection’s painstaking detail – a vast array of the dichotomy of the human condition.

Lori Earley grew up in New York and graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Select group exhibitions include Idols of Perversity (2005) at Bellwether Gallery and Made in New York (2008) at Opera Gallery, New York. Earley’s work has been published in NYArts Magazine, The New York Post, WeAr Magazine, Bon Magazine, Fefé Magazine, Juxtapoz Magazine, Elegy, Rojo Magazine, Direct Art Magazine, Traffic, The New York Sun, Fine Art Magazine, The L Magazine, Hi Fructose Magazine, and Home and Garden Magazine. For more information on the art of Lori Earley, visit www.loriearley.com.

Opera Gallery, London is located at 134 New Bond Street, London W1S 2TF, UK. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Sunday 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. For more information about Opera Gallery, please visit www.operagallery.com.

Lori Earley’s Facebook Fan Page

Lori Earley’s MySpace Fan Page

Join Lori Earley’s Mailing List

The San Francisco Film Society’s acclaimed SF360 Film+Club returns with a special edition, double-barreled mash-up program featuring the documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto directed by Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor and a live set by mash-up VJ legends Eclectic Method.

Thursday, July 23, doors 7:00 pm, screening 7:30 pm
Mezzanine, 444 Jessie St
Tickets are $12 for SFFS members and $17 for non-members. Must be 21+ to attend.

Read SFAppeal Interview
Read Amoeblog Interview

SIMPLE PLEASURES 02: LEAVING RECORDS FOR THE NEW UTOPIA

Studio Number One presents
SIMPLE PLEASURES 02: LEAVING RECORDS FOR THE NEW UTOPIA
curated by Jesselisa Moretti and Matthewdavid of Leaving Records

JUNE 13TH, 2009
6PM—10PM

Leaving Records has invited local musicians Dntel, Flying Lotus, Ras G, Professor Cantaloupe, Lucky Dragons and Matthewdavid to participate in a utopian sound exhibition. Amidst projections and surrounded by endless looping cassette islands, the entire happening will be recorded and re-broadcast at The New Utopia art show, opening June 27th.

*Please bring blankets or pillows to sit on.

SUBLIMINAL PROJECTS
1331 W. Sunset Blvd
Los Angeles CA, 90026

www.leavingrecords.com
www.studionumberone.com/simpleasures
www.subliminalprojects.com

FIGMENT is an arts event unlike any other.  This weekend, thousands will converge on Governors Island to transform this great public space into an explosion of creativity.  The event will include large-scale interactive sculpture, performances, music, visual art, games, and other activities by over 400 participating artists. Be sure to visit The Human Weeble Wooble, a classic early original sculpture first created by David Henry Brown Jr. (of the Fantastic Nobodies) in 1994 for a show called The Deviant Playground. Cast in a huge concrete mold, the artist will be hosting the Weeble for Figment visitors throughout the weekend.

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June 12-14th 2009

Curated by Rebekah and Sara Maysles

We decided to get in the act and bring it all back to the house that Grey Gardens built. STAUNCH! is a tribute to the documentary film and most of all, to its many, many fans. Hang out in our living, breathing diorama of Big and Little Edie’s bedroom as recreated by artists and designers, with ephemera, specialty foods and sound booths with outtakes of dialogue from the two ladies.

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