Wanna go to an Alexandria opening tomorrow?

Linda Hesh's short video “In the Garden” has been chosen to be part of “Female Shorts: Film and Video Showcase” taking place at the Target Gallery in the Torpedo Factory Art Center, Alexandria, VA. This four day festival celebrates cinematic works by women in the arts from across the country and is a participant in “Minds Wide Open”, a Virginia initiative to highlight female artists.

The opening reception will take place on the evening of Thursday, June 3rd from 6-7pm in the Art League Gallery at the Torpedo Factory Art Center. The event will then continue in the Target Gallery from 7-9pm. Ten of the 22 selected film makers will have their works shown each followed by a brief discussion. The juror, Sydney-Chanele Dawkins, will lead the event.

The showcase will continue on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, June 4-6, with continuous showings of the 22 selected films in the Target Gallery starting at 10am each day until the evening event.

Opening Reception Thursday June 3rd 6-9 pm.

Festival all day showings Friday June 4 – Sunday June 6 Plus special evening screenings.

Award Evening and closing showing Sunday, June 6.

Artists Present and Screening their Work for the Opening evening Thursday, June 3rd:

In The Garden - Linda Hesh - Alexandria, VA - Experimental - 1min 48sec
Miriam's Song - Shabnam Piryaei - New York, NY - Narrative - 4min 20sec
Somebody's Son - Holly Villaire - Yonkers, NY - Experimental - 8min 23sec
Can She Be Saved? - Yasmin Shiraz - Chantilly, VA - Documentary - 27min 31 sec
A Hammer fell in Jerusalem: Anathem - Lori Bowen - Sarasota, FL - Narrative
Friday Night Fright - Ashley Maria - Los Angeles, CA - Narrative – 6min
Little Girl - Elizabeth Tolson - Fairfax, VA - Experimental - 1min 24sec
Let's Dance! - Anna Tsouhlarakis - Washington, DC - Experimental – 15min
You're Not Alone - Arlette Thomas-Fletcher - Reistertown, MD - Narrative - 3min
Trip To The Planetarium - Stephanie Batailler - New York, NY - Animation – 23min

For a full list of the Daily Schedule and Evening Special Showings, go to this website.

Artists' websites: Vincent Gallegos

This guy is just out of control! Vincent Gallegos is one of the best humans armed with a camera around our region.

Check out his images here

Jeffry Cudlin: BY REQUEST


OK... OK... work with me here... this is really cool.

Let's start with my good bud Jeffry Cudlin doing a set of performances this Friday where the very tall Mr. Cudlin dances in various DC art galleries (Conner, G Fine, Curator's Office, Hemphill, Irvine, and either Project 4 or Civilian), trying to get the directors to dance with him - that alone is worth tagging along to see Martin Irvine or George Hemphill doing the tango with Cudlin). He will be dressed the way he is in the PR photo above (by Josh Cogan) -- i.e., tucked, taped, and wearing a gold string bikini and go go boots. Video of it will be in the show.

Then Jason Horowitz is working on a 23' long, 8' tall photo for the show that I think we will all find interesting and will "make people at the opening uncomfortable."

Somewhere along the way Cudlin is doing a photo shoot with the highly talented and creative Victoria F. Gaitán that involves "realistic fake boobs (not like the ones in the PR) and a severed pig's head."

What is all this Mr. Campello? Just read the release:

This June, the ideal Washington, DC art show will take over Flashpoint Gallery. Artist, curator, and critic Jeffry Cudlin has engineered a celebrity-obsessed exhibition that purports to reveal in excruciating detail what collectors, critics, and museum administrators think area artists should be making.

For BY REQUEST, Cudlin approached seven DC art world luminaries and asked each to fill out a 20 page survey. Questions were all multiple choice, and attempted to uncover everything from preferences regarding paint handling techniques; to opinions about museum “fluff” shows and art blogs; to each patron’s personality type. Pink Line Project founder Philippa Hughes; blogger and critic Tyler Green; The Phillips Collection director Dorothy Kosinski; Irvine Contemporary gallery director Martin Irvine; National Portrait Gallery Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings Anne Collins Goodyear; collector and curator Henry Thaggert; and uber-collector Tony Podesta all agreed to play along.

Once the surveys were completed, Cudlin recruited an atelier of seven area artists working in a variety of media and styles. Torkwase Dyson, Victoria F. Gaitán, Jason Horowitz, Jenny Sidhu Mullins, Cory Oberndorfer, Kerry Skarbakka, and Trevor Young all accepted commissions from Cudlin to create personalized pieces based on the survey data.

There was one small catch: Cudlin insisted that he be depicted in every work of art, thereby inflating his own importance in brokering all of these transactions, and transforming himself into the show’s biggest celebrity. The resulting images are at times outlandish, featuring Cudlin cross-dressing, holding a severed pig’s head, and even sporting a pair of fake latex breasts, courtesy of an FX makeup artist.

In BY REQUEST, Cudlin plays with the notion—popular with many contemporary artists and theorists—that the chief content of art is social. If art ultimately depends on exchanges of information, capital, and power, then simply examining the agendas of people in positions of authority should tell us all we need to know about why art looks and works the way it does right now.

All of the finished pieces in the show will be assigned numeric scores by the seven patrons for whom they are intended. Critics need not second guess: the gallery will include informational displays of facts and figures indicating whether the patrons regard these works as successes or failures. BY REQUEST offers the promise of complete transparency for the DC art world and, perhaps, a model for other artists desperate to become relevant.

Sounds amazing uh? I'm really looking forward to this but I remember that the last Washington guy who promised "transparency" has really disappointed me lately; it's a good thing that I know that Cudlin won't.

Plug the damned hole!