Saturday, April 09, 2011

Photogs at BlackRock

Since I had something to do in getting this show together, and these are some very talented camera wielders:

The three photographers exhibiting in the BlackRock Gallery this April give new perspectives to the everyday by layering images and creating intriguing multi-faceted art. The work of Alexandra Silverthorne, Erin Antognoli, and Beamie Young will be exhibited through April 30 with a free artists reception tomorrow, Saturday, April 9 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.

Alexandra Silverthorne uses the camera as a means to understand and explore spatial environments and encounters. As projects evolve, her photographs often move beyond the mat and the frame to become sculptural objects, projections, and installations. Current projects include the examination of conceived, perceived, and lived space, instinctual explorations of architectural structures, and nocturnal documentation of unfamiliar landscapes.


Her current project A Building In Which... is a photographic series that systematically explores the perceived physical structure of each room in a house. “Through the layering of multiple perspectives, the photographs create a visual record of the room while escaping singular concepts of time and space. Simultaneously, they mix the narrative of the house with the narrative of its residents to depict a unique, intertwined history,” said Silverthorne.

Originally from Washington, DC, Alexandra Silverthorne graduated from Connecticut College with a major in Government and minors in Art and Philosophy and from Maine College of Art (MECA) with a Master of Fine Arts. In 2003, Silverthorne co-founded Panorama Community Arts with the goal of providing art experiences to all residents of DC. Through this she taught workshops in photography, ceramics, and mural painting to youth and elderly in Washington. Since 2010, she has taught undergraduate darkroom photography courses at American University and the University of the District of Columbia as well as additional courses through MECA’s Continuing Studies program. In 2009, Silverthorne co-initiated the MFA Alumni Residency Program at MECA and currently serves as the Residency Coordinator.

Silverthorne received a fellowship to travel to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan for the 2004 annual World Conference Against A&H Bombs. She has also received several grants from the D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities as well as one from the Puffin Foundation. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the John Wilson City Hall Building in Washington, DC and the Smithville Mansion Gallery in Eastampton, NJ. While she is based in Washington, DC, she can often be found zigzagging her way around the East Coast. For more information on Silverthorne visit: www.alexandrasilverthorne.com

Beamie Young embraces the technological advances of photography. “As an artist, I have been creating photographs for the past 36 years. My evolution as an artist parallels my professional development. In the past, I had darkrooms both at home and work. Today, I use my digital camera and Adobe Photoshop in both locations,” she said.

Young said she enjoys capturing unique colors, patterns, reflections, and light. “It is my hope that my images speak for themselves. I hope to share with the viewer a sense of wonder of the natural world and of the beauty that surrounds us, sometimes found in the most unexpected places,” she said.

Young has worked as a photographer and visual artist for the National Institute of Standards and Technology for the past 30 years. Recently, she said she has been working with High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography. “This technique allows me to create images with more detail in the highlights and shadows with almost surreal color saturation.”

Young is a member of the National Association of Photoshop Photographers and a Webmaster and Newsletter editor for The “Frederick Camera Clique” a photography club in Frederick MD. In 2010, she was awarded the Vincent Versace Award for Photographic Excellence. More information on her photography can be found at beamie.smugmug.com.

“By over overlapping multiple images in a single frame of film, I am unable to make connections that are not otherwise apparent, and was unable to uncover a spirit in a city that I initially viewed as cold, corporate, and soulless,” said Erin Antognoli. “I use my Holga camera as a way of digging deeper beneath the surface of my environment,” she said.

Upon moving to the Washington, D.C. area, Antognoli said she was challenged with taking photos in an environment that was completely foreign. She used her high tech camera with little success, and decided to go back to basics and use her Holga camera to take photos in the city. “The camera itself is incredibly simple – plastic, very few controls, and prone to irregularity. This method of making images placed much more of the emphasis on my own mind, for I have to decide what I want to say and how I want object to relate to each other, and then figure out how to translate that vision to film with minimal technical options,” she said.

“This process inevitably forced me to become more intertwined with my own environment, for I am taking the time to look for objects and shapes and textures that strike me, and might compliment each other well when overlapped in a frame. During all this. I found myself becoming more in tune to and comfortable with my surroundings while making my images,” she concluded. For more information on Antognoli visit: erinantognoli.org

Airborne

I'm heading down to Bailey's home turf as the family and I will be in New Orleans for the weekend as the Professor is presenting a paper at some conference in the Big Easy.

Friday, April 08, 2011

Tap Project

The UNICEF Tap Project celebrates the clean water we enjoy on a daily basis by encouraging supporters to give this vital resource to children in developing countries. UNICEF has saved more children’s lives than any other humanitarian organization, and UNICEF is committed to doing whatever it takes to achieve the goal of reaching the day when ZERO children die of preventable causes.

On Sunday, April 17, 2011, the UNICEF Tap Project DC campaign will be hosting a FUNdraising event to raise money for the UNICEF Tap Project with an extra raffle donation for UNICEF’s Japan relief. Purchase a ticket to paint your own umbrella and help UNICEF provide clean water to kids around the world!

They supply the materials and mission, you supply the vision! A $40 ticket (one umbrella and up to 4 artists) will provide a child with clean drinking water for 4 years!

To learn more about the world water crisis visit uniceftapproject.org for more information.

Thursday, April 07, 2011

Perfect example...

Keiko Sofía Fujimori HiguchiThe current candidates for President in Peru are a brilliant example of the cultural sillyness of the term "Hispanic" or "Latino."

Running for that Spanish-speaking nation's top office are Ollanta Moisés Humala Tasso - an indigenous Peruvian from one of the Native American tribes of that nation.

Also former president Alejandro Toledo, and lawmaker Keiko Sofía Fujimori Higuchi, a Peruvian lawmaker of full Japanese ancestry and daughter of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, and lastly former prime minister Pedro Pablo Kuczynski.

Humala, Toledo, Fujimori and Kuczynski... all good Hispanic names... Humala is expected to win, but I'm betting on Fujimori.

Call for artists

Deadline: Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Public Talk: Monday, April 18, 2011, 4‐6pm with Alyson Baker, Executive Director, Socrates Sculpture Park and Dan Steinhilber, 2010 Public Art Residency Artist, at the WPA Office at 2023 Massachusetts Ave. NW.

Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities (DCAAH) have announced the 2011 Public Art Residency (PAR) Program, in partnership with Socrates Sculpture Park (SSP, the Park) in Long Island City, NY.

Now in its second year, the PAR Program is designed to instruct and inform artists about practical and conceptual issues related to the creation of public art. Through this program, artists will learn the fundamentals of developing a proposal for public
art work, identifying sources for materials and funding of projects, and access a support network for technical assistance and future opportunities related to creating and presenting art in the public realm.

One artist who resides in the District of Columbia will be selected to receive a two month paid residency and exhibition opportunity at Socrates Sculpture Park. The work will be exhibited under SSP’s “Open Space” program from September 10, 2011 to March 2012 (exact end/deinstallation date to be determined and agreed upon by the artist and SSP). Once the exhibit has ended, the artist will re-fabricate or re‐install, in Washington, DC, the work made through the residency. The artist will be required to give a public presentation about his or her residency experience and may also be asked to advise WPA on other public art initiatives.

Details here.

Wednesday, April 06, 2011

I think this is supposed to be a joke...

In reaction to the Paul Gauguin masterpiece at the National Gallery of Art that was attacked last Friday by yet another idiot, the very weird article "Three Works at the National Gallery We’d Have Defaced Before Gauguin" is a post in the Washington City Paper where CP art critics Kriston Capps, Jeffry Cudlin and John Anderson each pick a work of art at the National Gallery of Art they'd rather see "defaced."

I know these three guys, and I think that this is supposed to be an attempt at humor... but from reading the comments, it seems that a lot of readers missed the joke and some of the words in the article read to me as contemptuous (or as commenters noted) "openly hostile", and as "stuffy cultural elitism."

Apparently, the LA Times didn't think it was a joke and they write:

If she is deranged, one wonders: What is the excuse for the Washington City Paper, which Tuesday published a story with the headline "Three Works at the National Gallery We’d Have Defaced Before Gauguin"?

The alternative tabloid proceeded to "recommend" three works in the museum's collection more suitable for trashing than the Post-Impressionist picture, which is on loan from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art to a popular traveling exhibition. One of the three writers even explains, "Actually, I've been defacing a work of art very subtly since September last year," claiming to regularly add colored pencil marks to a Sol LeWitt wall drawing at the museum.
So, dear readers... what do you think? Should these erudite and gifted writers hang up their Onion-wanna-be aspirations? or is this just a case of the WCP's "inject irony into everything" approach?

Personally I think that these three guys are pretty good art critics and really suck as comedy scribes.

And by the way, I know John Anderson well enough to know that he would never, ever actually deface any artwork, no matter how much it sucks.

And my good bud Jeffry Cudlin responds here.

When tyrants rule...

The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who disappeared into police custody in Beijing after he was arrested on Sunday while trying to board a flight for Hong Kong, is a fully 21st-century figure, global-minded, media-savvy, widely networked. He is also the embodiment of a cultural type, largely unfamiliar to the West, that dates far back into China’s ancient past.
Read the NYT article here.

Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Wanna go to a Bethesda opening this Friday?

Friday 8 April from 6-9PM.

More TV Drawings

These are all pen ink and then smeared with my wet finger; they are all done while watching TV and most likely than not, somewhat influenced by whatever I am watching...
2011 Pen and Ink smears drawing by F. Lennox Campello

Woman Carrying Pig
Done while watching Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love

2011 Pen and Ink smears drawing by F. Lennox Campello
Woman Howling (Homage to Paula Rego)
Done while watching a documentary on Paula Rego

2011 Pen and Ink smears drawing by F. Lennox Campello
Rock Devil
Done while watching the National Geographic channel

2011 Pen and Ink smears drawing by F. Lennox Campello
Woman with Crow
Done while watching the new Camelot series on Starz

2011 Pen and Ink smears drawing by F. Lennox Campello
Woman Sewing Her Own Wound
One of those commercials for anti-depression drugs... I think

2011 Pen and Ink smears drawing by F. Lennox Campello
Woman Carrying Pig on Her Head
Done while watching Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love

Monday, April 04, 2011

ChiComs Arrest Artist

Chinese artist and designer Ai Weiwei was detained by police at the Beijing airport before he could take a flight to Hong Kong yesterday. Even if you haven’t seen his current exhibition at London’s Tate Modern or those at Munuch’s Haus der Kunst and Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, you still may know his work. Ai Weiwei helped design the “Birds Nest Stadium“ for the 2008 Olympics, the National Stadium of the People’s Republic of China.
Read Mike Licht's report here.

In the current issue...

American Craft magazine's current issue has a gorgeous multi-page piece on DC artist Tim Tate and his recent collaborations with Marc Petrovic:

Ask Tim Tate about the origin of his recent collaborations with Marc Petrovic - if you can beat him to the punch. The friendly, boisterous artist has a habit of plunging into stories, leaping ahead and around, as if his brain were a rocket fueled by honesty.
Read the article online here.

Tate's solo show at Chicago's Catherine Edelman Gallery opens next May 6; check out the new work here.

Sunday, April 03, 2011

The curious case of Gov. LePage and the labor mural

For the most part I try really hard to keep politics out of this blog, and being a very proud independent able to discern the usual double standards of both the vast left wing nuttery and the even vaster right wing conspiracy, I think that I do a pretty good job of that task.

Except when politics cross over into art.


The above image is a 36-foot-long mural depicting Maine's labor history. The mural used to hang in the lobby of that state's Department of Labor.

Last weekend, Maine Governor Paul LePage ordered the mural removed from the Labor building. According to LePage spokesman Dan Demeritt, the administration felt that the mural depicted "one-sided decor" not in keeping with the department's pro-business goals.

"The message from state agencies needs to be balanced," said Demeritt, adding that the mural had sparked complaints from "some business owners" who complained that it was hostile to business.

The mural (which apparently will be relocated to the Portland City Hall) was created in 2008 by Maine artist Judy Taylor via a $60,000 Maine Arts Commission grant. There are excellent details of the mural in the artists' website here.

Politicians (and locally some museum executives) just don't seem to learn the lesson that every time they try to mix politics with art censorship, they lose.

And this ability to make these boneheaded decisions is not just restricted to local government, as both the Clinton and Bush administration found out when they both covered up the 1934 WPA murals on the 5th floor of the Ariel Rios building here in Washington, DC.

The Taliban tears down and destroys art; the brutal Castro dictatorship censors art and punishes artists; the ChiCom government censors art; the nut with the Elvis hairdo in North Korea decides what art is and artists there better toe his Soviet-realism line... What do all of these regimes have in common? They are all dictators.

But in our society, anytime that a politician enters into this arena, he or she is bound to lose. We don't suffer dictator-like behavior around here.

And hopefully Maine's governor and self appointed chief interior decorator now realizes that not only did he make a stupid (and needless) decision here, but also managed to paint himself (pun intended) in a really negative light to all of us, who will never accept art censorship, no matter from which nutty wing of the right or left it comes.

Next Saturday

Saturday, April 02, 2011

TV Drawings

Being one of those persons who can often do two things at once, I used to always have a pad of paper and drawing instruments around me whenever I used to watch TV.

That sort of went away a few years ago, and then just as sudden, this process began a come back a few days ago. The below drawings are ink pen and then smeared on the paper with wet fingertips.

Original pen and ink drawing by F. Lennox Campello


Woman Dancing with Pig
(Inspired by one of those commercials that no one has any idea what's being adverstised)

Original pen and ink drawing by F. Lennox Campello
Homage to Goya (Los Caprichos)
(Done while watching a film on Goya)

Original pen and ink drawing by F. Lennox Campello
Homage to Goya (Los Caprichos)
(Done while watching a film on Goya)

Original pen and ink drawing by F. Lennox Campello
Leda and the Swan
(Inspired by an Aflack commercial)

Original pen and ink drawing by F. Lennox Campello
The Policeman's Wife
(Inspired by watching a documentary on Paula Rego)

Original pen and ink drawing by F. Lennox Campello
Woman with Hooves
(Inspired by a shoe commercial)

Original pen and ink drawing by F. Lennox Campello
Woman Dancing with the Devil
(Inspired by a cheap Science Fiction movie on SyFy channel)

Original pen and ink drawing by F. Lennox Campello
Dwarf Painting
(Inspired by the Paula Rego documentary)

For all you early lookers...

My pick for Best of Show? Easy: Ben Tolman.

Friday, April 01, 2011

Opportunity for Artists

Deadline: June 9, 2011

s.h.e. gallery in New Jersey is now accepting submissions for future shows. All media is being considered. Please submit jpegs of your work along with artists resume to tracy@shegallery.com. Accepting submissions by emerging and established artists. Send jpegs to tracy@shegallery.com.

Looking for studio space

Flux Studios is now accepting applications for two studio spaces:

Available May 1, 2011- 10 x 16 ft- $400 a month

Available June 1, 2011- 14 x 17 ft- $595 a month

Flux Studios is a 3000 square foot arts space in the Gateway Arts District that houses the studios of six professional artists. Each individual studio has ten-foot ceilings, concrete floors and walls of finished drywall over plywood.

They offer a friendly and collaborative atmosphere, 24 hour access, free on-site parking, a large flexible common area available to all members for projects, installations or teaching, an exhibition area with gallery lighting, a computer controlled studio kiln available for rent and a loading dock with garage doors.

If interested in applying, please contact Novie Trump at novie@novietrump.com

Tomorrow: Gilliam at the Katzen

On Saturday, April 2, from 6:00 to 9:00 pm, is the opening reception for "Close to Trees", a site specific installation by Sam Gilliam on the entire third floor of the American University Museum at the Katzen Center.

"Sam Gilliam first took his paintings off their stretchers in 1965, using the liberated canvases to transform gallery walls into three-dimensional abstractions. He has continued to experiment with the practice of painting and the line between painting and sculpture. For this exhibition, Gilliam will transform the 8,000 square foot space of the third floor of the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center into an exciting and colorful work of art."
April 2 to August 14, 2011.

Gilliam also broke my heart when he declined to be included in my 100 Washington, DC Artists book (in spite of a joint press front that included several artists who tried to convince Sam to join in the project). Anyway, do not miss this opening and exhibition of work by the DMV's leading artist and a true innovator.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Opening this Friday in DC

International Art & Artists, Washington Project for the Arts, and Black Artists of DC have all gotten together to put together a show titled Process: Reaffirmation (at Hillyer Art Space, 9 Hillyer Ct. NW), curated by Gina Marie Lewis, Assistant Professor of Art, Bowie State Univ.

Opening Reception: Friday, April 1, 6-9pm

Artists Talk: Saturday, April 23 at 3pm

Featuring work by Anne Bouie, Daniel Brooking, Joel D'Orazio, Victor Ekpuk, Corwin Levi, Barbara Liotta, Adrienne Mills, and Cleve Overton.

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Aperture magazine

Judy and the Boys by Lida Moser"Judy and The Boys," currently in the collection of the Library of Congress, is perhaps Lida Moser's most iconic image and a gorgeous example of her work around the streets of New York City in the 1960s.

Aperture Magazine will feature this image in their April issue as part of a piece on the Photo League.