Not to be missed this Friday at the ASU Art Museum: Brent Green
Brent Green is an artist, filmmaker and musician whose newest installation, Gravity was Everywhere Back Then, opens at the ASU Museum on Friday.
It’s a complicated work: Green discovered the story of a Pennsylvania store clerk who, in some sort of obsessive, pained way, began building an extravagantly large house after his wife was diagnosed with cancer.
Green made a group of short movies about the man, his house and the couple’s love affair; for his installation at ASU, he’s also rebuilding as much of the house as will fit in the venue’s galleries.
The films are an odd amalgam of documentary, narrative, and stop-motion animation. It’s gotten some poignant reviews:
There are tons of bad movies in this world that you can’t wait for them to be over…. Brent Green’s debut animated feature film, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then -— which is a magnificent movie —- contains a scene of such devastating heartbreak and sadness that I was practically praying that the film would end before I would have to witness it.
He’s been working on the installation as an artist-in-residence for the past three weeks; on Friday you can see the construction and various of Green’s films, with Green accompanying the showing on guitar.
The event runs from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Friday at the museum, at Tenth Street and Mill in Tempe on the ASU campus.
Details from the museum here.
Green’s web site is here.
The video above shows Green talking about the project.
Full press release below.
From the museum:
Gravity was Everywhere Back Then, A New Installation by Brent Green
Sep 4, 2010 – Dec 31, 2010 Location: ASU Art Museum Cost: Free Curator: Heather Sealy Lineberry
This fall, the ASU Art Museum will host a new exhibition by well-known artist and filmmaker Brent Green titled, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. The project is inspired by the true story of an idiosyncratic house in Louisville, owned by hardware store clerk Leonard Wood. When his wife Mary was diagnosed with cancer, Leonard started building the house room by room, with the tragic hope that his labor would save his wife. Even after Mary’s death, Wood continued to build the house. Over the next 20 years, he strove to bring something as tangible and powerful as his love for Mary into the world.
Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then will feature Green’s version of Wood’s house, transplanted and reconstructed from the artist’s studio in rural Pennsylvania. The house, along with sculptural elements and structures, will be installed in one of the ASU Art Museum’s galleries, where it will appear to be both constricted by and bursting out of the space. Video and sound pieces will be shown inside and around the house to create an immersive environment.
Green will be in residence for three weeks at the ASU Art Museum, Aug. 16 – Sept. 3, installing the exhibition and interacting with students and school groups. Students from MetroArts High School in Phoenix, guided by Sue Chenoweth, and ASU Intermedia students, guided by Angela Ellsworth and Gregory Sale, will work closely with Green in the gallery as he installs his house, sculpture and films.
Green lives and works in a barn in Cressona, PA. His work is a regular feature at Sundance and he has performed at The Hammer Museum, The Wexner Center and The Getty Museum of Art. In 2007, Green screened three works and performed a live soundtrack at the 11th Annual ASU Art Museum Short Film and Video Festival. Recent solo shows include Site Santa Fe (2009) and the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (2008). Upcoming exhibitions and performances include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Berkeley Museum of Art, CA; Site Santa Fe Biennial; the American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore; and Diverse Works, Houston. As part of MoMA’s exhibition of Creative Capital artists (Green is a 2005 Creative Capital Grant recipient), the Museum will host a screening of several of Green’s short films followed by a live performance with members of the music group Califone and indie rock legends Fugazi.
3:41 PM
2011 Scottsdale Arts Fest call for artists
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Aug. 28, 2010
2011 SCOTTSDALE ARTS FESTIVAL – CALL FOR ARTISTS
(SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.) – Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts is seeking artists working in all media to exhibit at the 41st annual Scottsdale Arts Festival on March 11–13, 2011. A jury of arts professionals will select the artists to participate in the Festival and will award prizes in numerous categories, including ceramic, furniture, glass, jewelry, mixed media, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, textiles and woodworking. All artists must apply online at www.ZAPPlication.org before Oct. 12, 2010. The application fee is $30.
Long recognized for its high-quality arts and crafts and beautiful setting, the award-winning Scottsdale Arts Festival features some 200 artists from throughout North America who display their work among the gardens and fountains of the Scottsdale Civic Center. Works of art are available for purchase directly from the artists and from the Festival’s online art auction. The event attracts tens of thousands of Scottsdale-area residents and visitors, who also enjoy live music, entertainment, fine food and wine and activities for children.
The Scottsdale Arts Festival is produced by Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, a division of the nonprofit Scottsdale Cultural Council. Proceeds benefit the Center’s arts and youth-education programs.
For additional information about the Scottsdale Arts Festival visit www.ScottsdaleArtsFestival.org or e-mail festival@sccarts.org.
# # #
5:09 PM
The NYT blogs about quondam Phoenix artist Liz Cohen
Cohen grew up in Phoenix and until recently worked on her longterm Bodywork project in town. Two years ago, she left to teach photography at Cranbrook.
The centerpiece of the endeavor is a car—an East German Trabant that, improbably, morphs itself into a Chevy El Camino, those car-cum-pickups popular back in the 1970s. The contraption is also outfitted with low rider-style hydraulics. The resulting melange represents the cross-cultural meshings that mark our society—east and west, north and south, suburban and urban—as well as Cohen herself, whose father was a Jew from the Middle East and whose mother is Colombian.
Here’s the pic by the writer, Tamara Warren, illustrating a Times post about Cohen’s work today in the paper’s Wheels blog:
From the post:
In 2002 [Cohen] began building a lowrider out of a 1987 Trabant and a 1973 Chevrolet El Camino. Since then the Trabantimino, as she calls it, has been an ongoing work of art, part sculptural installation and part functional custom-build — an eight-year immersion into the heart of American car culture in which Ms. Cohen’s own self-transformation has played a significant role.
“I wanted to design a project in which I could participate in the culture,” she said.
The project pairs the massive mechanical and fabrication project that is the car with a large photography component that chronicles both the car’s construction and Photoshopped photos of Cohen herself. She’s near completion of the years-long project in anticipation of a show in New York’s Salon 94 gallery, currently scheduled for this fall.
Full post with video here.
A New Times cover story on Cohen from a few years ago here.
8:42 AM
Walter Salas-Humara update
A few months ago PHXated bumped into singer-songwriter Walter Salas-Humara at the Sail Inn in Tempe. He was the frontman of the acclaimed early Amerindie band the Silos back in the day and has since been recording solid solo albums, and was in Tempe with the Bloodshot Records roadshow.
Bloodshot is out of Chicago, but the gig wasn’t a long trip for him; Salas-Humara lives in Flagstaff now, where he still writes songs and paints. Indeed, his art—you can see a sample of it above or on his web site—has garnered a strong following, and can even be seen in Elisabeth Moss’s apartment in the new movie, Get Him to the Greek
Fans of his music can see him July 24 at Club Congress in Tucson. Details here.
1:40 PM
First Friday recommendations
Local ad agency E.B. Lane is using a new social media tool called Sticky Bits to promote the First Friday event and local merchants.
Sticky Bits allows iPhone and Android users to scan any barcode and instantly view, tag and upload photos, videos and information about a particular place or topic.
In partnership with Local First Arizona, E.B. Lane put stickers with Sticky Bits barcodes all over downtown for April’s First Friday event. Since then, people from all over the world have scanned and uploaded pictures, videos and comments to the barcode more than 140 times.
Our friend Jane Redden, owner of Practical Art, is featuring the show “Inside Outside” by Karrin Taylor:
Karrin’s paintings “come from within.” Which means she paints what she feels, as opposed to what she sees. Her paintings are comprised of layers— personal memorabilia, newspaper articles, obituaries of relatives, and found textures.
While the final images tend toward botanical images, she thinks of her final product as metaphors. She works on panels she constructs herself, and on found remnants such as old pallets. The artist says “the organic rawness of wood adds another layer of complexity” to her work.
The free artist reception is tonight, starting at 7p.m., and open to the public.
Beverages and snacks will be served.
For more information on what’s going on downtown tonight, check out Jackalope Ranch’s Field Guide to Downtown’s First Friday. It includes a snazzy pdf map to help you make sense of it all.
For Light Rail fans, Tony Arranaga, aka the Light Rail Blogger has some good First Friday suggestions. Mr. RailLife, Nick Bastien, offers his suggestions here.
Shooze, Booze Schmooze at Blueberry Deluxe
Come enjoy some “wining, dancing and shopping” at the Melrose Curve’s newest boutique.
- All shoes 50% off
- Play Dance Dance Revolution and get 10% of your entire purchase
- Free wine inside the shop (21+ only)
6=10 pm, 702 W Montecito Ave (in the Wagon Wheel building, next door to Melrose Pharmacy)
Live Music @ Royal at the Market
Royal Coffee Bar at the Downtown Phoenix Public Market will be featuring LIVE music with Laila Hirtz. Enjoy some freshly roasted coffee and delicious pastries as you hear the lovely sounds of some talented musicians! The show will start at 7 p.m. and go til around 10-10:30.
At After Hours Gallery, on McDowell just west of Central, the “Fridge-A-Thon Show.”
The gallery says it will have fifteen uniquely painted recycled refrigerators.
It’s part of an SRP project to get energy-inefficient refrigerators out of homes; the company will come pick up old refrigerators and give you $30. Details here.
After Hours site here.
9:32 PM
More on the Sydney Biennale
As Scott Andrews noted on PHXated the other day, a contingent of Arizonans will be at the biennale in Sydney beginning this weekend, including artists Angela Ellsworth and Claudio Dicochea. Also there will be their gallery owner, Lisa Sette; her husband, designer Peter Shikany; Dicochea’s wife, Adriana Gallego; writer and performer Tania Katan, and journalist Deborah Sussman Susser.
One of Dicochea’s works in the show grace one of the event publicity posters up around Sydney:
Dicochea and Gallego’s work can be seen here; Ellsworth’s here.
11:13 AM
PHXations—Thursday, March 4
Artist Claudio Dicochea’s long-awaited opening is tonight at Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale from 7 to 9. In previous work Dicochea puts a genre of formal Spanish portrait painting through a series of conceptual rethinkings. A set of six of his paintings were to me the highlight of the Phoenix Art Museum’s Locals Only show last year.
Here’s Hearsight’s Scott Andrews on his work:
His painting today continues in a hybrid mode, with Disney characters and Norteño balladeers cohabiting in a Pop-Abstract world of high-low art. Drawing and cartoon transfers are placed on the sheet like collectible toys on a shelf, but don’t confuse these tableaux with facile repetition. Encoded within the play of all- too-familiar stereotypes and candy colors are not only the artist’s childhood memories but a meditation on art’s culpability in the construction of racial classification, a process that ran in tandem with the mixing of peoples after 1492.
A selection of Dicochea’s work, and that of his wife, Adriana Gallega, can be seen here. Details on the show and how to get to it here.
9:53 PM
An interesting photography-about-Warhol show in Tucson
Scott Andrews at Hearsight has a preview of a large upcoming photography show in Tucson featuring a wide variety of shots of Warhol and his world by a lot of different people. The potential for a voyeuristic hall of mirrors is lost on neither Andrews nor the organizer.
The curator, Eric Kroll, tells a story of one photo shoot at which his daughter was playing nearby. Warhol began taking pitures of her, and then …:
As was the norm for Warhol, a crowd had gathered around rows deep, and people in the crowd pulled out their own cameras, too. Soon one row of paparazzi was taking pictures of Andy taking pictures, and behind them the next row was taking pictures of people taking pictures of Andy taking pictures, and the next row took pictures of people taking pictures of people taking pictures of Andy taking pictures…
The show, titled “Warhol: From Dylan to Duchamp,” is up from Feb. 27 to April 11. Details here.
11:13 PM
Three suggestions for Third Friday
1) The ASU Art Museum spring reception notes the opening of three exhibits: “Altered States: Paintings by Gordon Cheung”;“Wanxin Zhang: A Ten Year Survey”; and “Forged Power: Ferran Mendoza, Alvaro Sau and William Wylie.” It starts at seven and it’s free. Details here.
2) SMOCA has a spring reception as well, centering around “Rewind Remix Replay: Design, Music & Everyday Experience,” an industrial design show of sound technology devices, like turntables and boomboxes. There’s also “Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaborations.” There are gallery talks on the shows at 7:30 and 8 p.m., respectively. The whole event runs from 7 to 9 p.m., with an early 6 p.m. reception for members.
3) At the Icehouse, Adria Pecora’s “Exchanges,” two installations, each an aetherial sculpture, dramatically lit, that hangs in one of the gallery’s cavernous rooms. It’s open from 7:30 to 9 p.m. tis evening. Details here.
3:24 AM
SMOCA shakeup!
One of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s senior curators, Claire Schneider, has been laid off. It’s a fairly significant loss for the museum, brought on by the continuing budget cuts that have already severely lowered the organization’s exhibition fund.
Sources in the museum say its new director, Tim Rodgers, was presented with the fait accompli of having to lose a senior position in the organization when he took the job late last year. (Director is the museum’s top position; Rodgers came from the Santa Fe Museum of Art.)
Schneider was for ten years a curator at the Albright-Knox, a contemporary art museum in Buffalo. She was brought to SMOCA in 2008 by longtime director Susan Krane, who a few months later left for San Jose. The museum had been without a director for a year, ending with the appointment of Rodgers in November.
Schneider, like many museum leaders, had been frustrated with the ever-contracting attention museums were getting from the mainstream press. She’d lately organized a periodic meeting between local curators and local writers and editors, PHXated among them, to discuss how local art institutions should attack that problem head on.
An Arizona Republic story on Schneider’s arrival in town here.
Her departure comes at a time of no little chaos in the Scottsdale city arts infrastructure of which SMOCA is a part. The museum, the performing arts center and a public art organization all exist under the umbrella of the city’s cultural council. The cultural center’s artistic director left after being on the job less than a year last month; a few weeks later, four of the cultural council’s board of trustees resigned en masse.
11:54 PM
PHXations, January 20, 2010
Stephen Lemons has been covering the disputes over who caused a spate of violence at the immigration march on Saturday. A mounted police officer got involved with a crowd of self-styled anarchists who had attached themselves to the march. The cop ended up hitting the crowd with pepper spray, with predictable results. Lemons has been looking at video of what happened, noting along the way that he hadn’t seen anything that backed up the anarchists’ contention of being aggressively attacked by cops. In fact, today he notes some photos that seems to show a black-clad protestor hitting a cop’s horse.
… As part of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Arts’s ongoing Rewind Remix Replay exhibition, which explores the design of electronic musical instruments and sound systems, there’s a DJ night at the museum Thursday, Jan. 21. Featured: Mark Chan and World Famous Rani “G.” It starts at 7 p.m. and its free. Details here.
7:00 AM
Installing a major new work at the Phoenix Art Museum
PHXated went down to the Phoenix Art Museum today to see the final laps of a three-day marathon of art installation in the contemporary wing.
The work is Peter Wegners “Guillotine of Shade, Guillotine of Sunlight.” Here’s a shot of how it looked as of about 8:30 this a.m.:
This is just one side of it: The work consists of two walls, each fronted with colored card stock—no fewer than 1.4 million individual cards set upright and perpendicular against the walls. A total of nearly three dozen people have been working on the piece since Monday.
Wegner achieves the spectacular color effect by slowly altering the ratio of red to yellow cards in each successive row.
The cards are specially cut to hang on brackets:
Each row uses four boxes of cards; there are 22 rows on each wall, or 44 total, meaning 176 boxes, if I’m doing the math correctly. Peter Nelson, who with Adan Mendoza is in charge of the installation, told me he figured the boxes were 80 to 100 pounds each … meaning the whole thing might weigh more than seven tons.
Indeed, the wall itself is 18 inches thick; Sara Cochran, the museum’s contemporary art curator, said the museum considers the work permanent.
Here’s the other side:
Peter Wegner’s web site is here, incidentally. And here’s a pretty good interview with him.
The work will debut before the public Dec. 4, which is not only First Friday but the museum’s 50th anniversary. Wegner’s piece is one of more than fifty new works donors have come together to give the museum for the occasion, all of which will be on display for the first time that day.
Cochran pointed out one other new work, a large-scale painting by Kehinde Wiley, from a series on young men from the favela slums in Brazil posed in heroic positions taken from famous works of art in that country. Here’s a detail of it:
12:00 AM
Jen Urso: The long walk home
Jen Urso’s latest project, “White Space,” is a fifty-plus-mile walk—from Reading to Lansdale, Pennsylvania, two towns she lived in growing up. She’s chronicling the trek here. Poke around on her White Space website and you can also see various portfolios of drawings and photos and other related work.
She’s on day seven. From her latest post:
I’m becoming concerned about my sister Tina and her blistered feet. All 3 of us are sore and in pain but she keeps pounding the pavement where it could get worse. I think I have either lightly sprained my ankles or the tendons around my feet or I’m developing some other tendon issues. Physical pain is not something I factored in to this trip and I’m hoping it doesn’t become a dominant force. The walk is weakening and strengthening me at the same time.
6:00 AM
A few words with the Phoenix Art Museum's Sara Cochran
One of the more interesting local museum exhibitions in town recently has been “Locals Only,” a selection of works by a dozen Valley Chicano and Latino artists, now in its last days at the Phoenix Art Museum.
Besides being a tour de force display of local talent, the show was significant just for what it isóthe first major PAM exhibit of local artists.
When the museum agree to host a local viewing of “Phantom Sightings,” a raucous sampling of work from Latino artists originating at the LA County Museum of Art, PAM’s point person for the project, Sara Cochran, decided that the local scene had talent enough to hold its own in conjunction with it.
So she rounded up a slew of local works from artists like Annie Lopez; Hector Ruiz; the grafitti artist who goes by the name DOSE; and Claudio Dicochea, and created a companion show. It was dubbed ìLocals Only,î and given a distinctive logo that included the various Valley area codes.
She is the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary artóa newly prominent role at the museum after the opening of a lavish new contemporary wing four years ago.
The works ranged from the grafitti-flecked collaborations of Ruiz and DOSE to a very pointed series of small works by Lopez that mocked what she saw as the Valley art establishmentís historical condescension to local artists.
“Phantom Sightings” packed up and left some time ago, but ìLocals Onlyî continues to draw interest. As the show finally draws to a close, PHXated checked in with Cochran to reflect on it. Cochran is Scots by birth and grew up in Sweden; she got her Ph.D from the Courtauld Institute in London. After years of postgrad work at the Sorbonne she did time at the Guggenheim, the Getty and, most recently, LACMA before coming to Phoenix last year.
PHXated: The Locals Only show leaves the museum October 26. From this perspective, how do you feel about it? Was it a success? What’s changed?
*Sara Cochran: *I’m incredibly sad to see the works leave. It really feels like the end of the summer holidays when you have to say goodbye to new friends and go back to school and the everyday. They were a fresh and joyous intervention within the permanent collection galleries and the museum. I very deliberately installed the pieces through-out different spaces in the museum because I wanted the visitors to have a sense of discovery. I think it allowed them to see things they may not have seen before and also to see works they know well in a new context.
There were just so many interesting conversations going on. Fausto Fernandez’s painting Demographic Fabric of America was a compelling juxtaposition to the abstract composition of Al Heldís Pisa II, which is part the Phoenix Art Museumís permanent collection. Hector Ruizís bronze tire Super Swamper was a great foil to Margarita Cabrera soft Volkswagen Vocho from the summer temporary exhibition Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement.
Even within Locals Only, it was fascinating to look at all of the works and see the different styles and personal preoccupations that it encompassed. This was especially true in the work of Martin Moreno and Luis Gutierrez — two generations of Chicano painters whose work confronts social issues and older and newer traditions of painting but in very different ways.
Over and over one hears how novel the show was for the museum. Indeed, some of the works made direct reference to that. What do you see happening going forward?
As someone who has worked on the bad-boy of modernism Francis Picabia, I am very aware of the fact that art history is an ever changing dialogue that is greatly influenced by newer generations of artists who are search out new figures and works to serve them as different models and examples. Nothing is set in stone. It is all a negotiation of ideas and forms. I hope the exhibition went some way to opening up the discourse about art in the Valley and allowed visitors to see the museum in a new light. It was tremendously important to have Annie Lopez’s cyanotypes series The Almost Real History of Art in Phoenix here. I want the museum to be at the centre of a vibrant conversation within the arts community. I want to bring more of this excitement into the museum.
Installers on the third day of preparing Wegner’s “Guillotine of the Sunrise”
12:47 PM