Airborne today

Hellooooooooo Betty!

I'm heading home late tonight; on the redeye to Dulles.

On the flight home I will be finishing Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe.

Busy weekend, as I arrive early tomorrow morning and then immediately drive south for an art fair over the weekend.

Should be fairly exhausted by Monday...

2005 Lucelia Award Announced

A few days ago the Smithsonian sent a news release to everyone announcing the winner of the Lucelia Award:

The Smithsonian American Art Museum announced today that Andrea Zittel is the fifth annual winner of its Lucelia Artist Award, established by the museum in 2001 to encourage leading contemporary American artists. This award is part of the museum's commitment to contemporary art and artists through awards and acquisitions.

An independent panel of jurors chose Zittel for the award in recognition of her ability to "create objects and total settings that reconsider the relationships between art and life. A utopian yet rigorously formal sensibility dominates."

"The timing of the Smithsonian American Art Museum couldn't have been better," said Zittel. "I have been working on a number of new ideas recently and the Lucelia Artist Award will really help me continue with the projects."

"Andrea Zittel has shown a sustained commitment to distinctive work that challenges conventional thinking and expectations about the nature of art, which is exactly what the Lucelia Artist Award is intended to celebrate and support," said Elizabeth Broun, the museum's Margaret and Terry Stent Director.

The jurors continue in their statement, "Zittel's art is shaped by a serial-based comprehensiveness in which discrete works are part of ongoing experiments and the continuous development of ideas. An investigatory attitude prevails. Her practice embraces the recycling of materials and large-scale, public-art projects as much as the creation of custom-made objects and an extreme attention to personal, particularizing details. She has become a leading figure in the international art world and a strong influence on generations of artists worldwide."

Locally, the three jurors are now in the second phase of downselecting from the first set of semi-semifinalists for the $14,000 Trawick Prize.

Ms. Trawick has also added another $10,000 for the Bethesda Painting Awards, also being selected now.

Today Bake Gopnik in the WaPo has a nice story about the award. It would be nice if Gopnik also did a piece on whoever gets selected as the Trawick Prize winner; this would give Gopnik a chance to actually focus some of his printspace on an area art event of some significance.

Congratulations

To our own Tim Tate (represented by us), who recently signed on with WeissPollack Galleries in New York, which will represent his work there.

Tate will also create an installation for WeissPollack Galleries for SOFA New York, this coming June.

Important Opening this Weekend

"I really want to see..." a group show of new work or work never shown in the area by Laura Amussen, Maria Anasazi, Noah Angell, Ken Ashton, Mark Behme, Natalia Blanch, Margaret Boozer, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Noche Christ, Lynden Cline, John Dumbacher, Joseph Dumbacher, Susan Fenton, Thom Flynn, Inga McCaslin Frick, Marc Ganzglass, Francie Hester, Jason Hughes, Berta Koltenuik, Maggie Michael, Galo Moncayo, Brandon
Morse, Lee Newman, Foon Sham, Claire Sherwood, Richard Vosseller and John Winslow.

Reception to meet the artists: Saturday, April 30, 2005 6 - 9pm. Free and open to the public. Gallery Four, 405 West Franklin St. 4th Floor, Baltimore, MD, or call 410/962.8941.

San Diego

Spent all day indoors lecturing... but last night I visited my usual secret dining spot, Ortega's again for my fix of poblano mole and of Carnitas.

Tuesday Arts Agenda

The DCist Tuesday Arts Agenda is here.

Anderson on Flynn

Thom Flynn at Osuna Gallery
By John Anderson

For some the talk of collage in art receives a yawn and a "been there, done that." And though their applications have probably been beaten like a dead horse well throughout the last hundred years - since Picasso glued the caned backing of a chair to a canvas and framed it with rope - there is still something intriguing about a bunch of trash glued and stapled together into something. Or, at least, when it is done well it is intriguing, and sometimes seductive.

This seems to be the case for Thom Flynn, who currently has work on display at Osuna Gallery in Bethesda, MD through May 12, 2005.

Though ample work is not on display throughout the space, it does command the gallery well enough to attract attention at the very least from the simple curiosity of the people, if not some time for reflection.

While initial glances at Flynn’s work might evoke the work of artists like Mimmo Rotella and Jacques Villéglé, the relationship ends with poster material and some method of adhesive. Whereas Rotella and Villéglé were prone at times to treat their décollage as found objects, Flynn’s compositions involve both additive and subtractive elements of collage and décollage until so much of the image is lost in the development that what remains is a series of rips across the picture plane.

Flynn’s work reads as drawing. The rips are gestural across the surface with their varied thicks and thins. And, like the master draftsman he is with these rips, Flynn mixes it up just enough to keep the eye moving throughout the composition, yet controlling enough to maintain our attention in the gallery.

Sometimes the rips repeat, piling up one after the other. They intersect, lines lost in the overlap. Flynn lets us know just how much control he has over the compositions, and the compositions do not lose intensity and fall apart with a shift in scale.

The other point of major interest is the thickness of his pieces. They are constructed like topographical maps, with so many peaks and valleys the surface is begging to be touched. Guests of the gallery can often be seen looking from one side of the piece to the other to determine just how thick the pieces are, and how many layers back they can see.

Where things become problematic is twofold. First is the simple way the pieces are unified.

Constructed with staples adhering layer to layer, the final piece is shellacked with a gel medium that provides additional bonding strength to the staples, and arguably holds the whole piece together. While this act of preservation offers an interesting dialogue in contrast to the deteriorating condition in which these posters were found, as a solution it feels "too quickly arrived upon" and not as well planned in consideration to additional issues of texture, variety of surface throughout the composition.

Secondly is a more pressing issue, where does the work go from here? In the last few years Flynn has demonstrated his ability to work in this method throughout several exhibitions. While some might be frustrated trying to "read" the piece through the fragmentary images, it is obviously not necessary, as it is not the artist’s intention. Unfortunately, in the quest to see what information is peering around the tears becomes akin to a Where’s Waldo game, searching for what might be some random body part. In addition, without this style moving forward, it is likely to be relegated as furniture.