Janis, Marquart and Baker at the MPA

The three artists included in this exhibition, curated by Nancy Sausser and which just closed last Saturday at the McLean Center for the Arts in McLean, Virginia, Michael Janis, Allegra Marquart and Tom Baker, are all, according to the curator, storytellers. She is not only right, but I would add that they are superb storytellers who employ the visual arts in their own distinct ways to narrate their stories.

Both Janis and Marquart are commonly associated with the revolutionary artists of the Washington Glass School. It is people like them, along with artists like Tim Tate and Erwin Timmers, who have been redefining the way that we think, interpret and discuss glass in the modern dialogue of contemporary art.

For the revolutionary minds of the 20th and now 21st century, glass in the context of the postmodern art world has nearly always been defined as craft, rather than art. This absurd designation, in my opinion, has been levied upon this entire substrate because of the spectacular success of a couple of "crafty" glass artists such as the gigantic figure of Dale Chihuly.

A few years ago a former Hirshhorn Museum curator told me that the "Hirshhorn does not collect glass." Replace the word glass with any other art medium and you see how nearsighted that statement was.

And the "craft" brand has also stuck because the successful names of the craft world drifted apart over the years, and also over the years built a formidable collectors' base developed at fairs such as the Smithsonian, SOFA, etc. These fairs generally predated the now common "high art" art fairs such as Art Basel Miami Beach, Pulse, Scope, Red Dot, etc.

The "craft" world was doing hugely successful art fairs many years before it became more common for the "high art" world (and yes, I know that Art Basel in Basel itself has also been going on for decades).

And thus, for years glass artists and other "crafty" artists were happy with their vessels and bowls and organic marine forms that commanded good prices from a very specific (and limited) set of collectors.

And then a few years ago, centered around the Greater Washington, DC region, a new glass movement began to emerge. This group of artists saw glass as just another substrate to create artwork, all kinds of artwork, not just bowls and vessels and pretty organic forms.

They used those materials to develop narrative stories, as Janis and Marquart do in this show. And they married glass to technology, as Tim Tate does with his self contained video installations. And they had glass emerge as a powerful new form of "green art," as Erwin Timmers does with his recycled materials glass sculptures.

In this MPA exhibition, Janis shows us what he contributes to that incendiary new group of narrative galss artists, if we can even call them just "glass artists" any longer. In this show he exhibits seven pieces from his Tarot Card series. These wall hung glass panels, elegantly bordered in metal, each depict a card from the ancient fortune telling card system. Using the traditional process of sgrafitto, Janis essentially draws on glass with glass dust and then fuses it all to deliver what can best be described as a glass drawing. They are simply rendered in a minimalist style on sheets of translucent glass that forges a brilliant aura of ethereal context to his subjects.

Marquart is an enviable technician and astute artist who searches the world of fairy tales to discover and present in a new visual way a subject matter that often resides in our childhood memories. In this show she exhibited both kiln formed glass and relief printmaking to deliver the tales. It was a superb partnership of genres. These are sculptural stories.

Tom Baker had eleven intimate and exquisite silkscreen relief prints which unfortunately were a little overpowered by the larger works of Marquart and Janis, and yet, probably because of their intimate size, still managed to attract those of us who like to get nose-close to a work of art to explore it deeply and precisely. His dizzying visual dialogue includes pyramids, electric mixers, ballistic missiles, etc. all waiting for close inspection and interrogation to deliver the narration component of this artists works.

And the same narrative thread that joins all three artists' works into a cohesive exhibition, is the glue that joins the viewer to the conversation in the viewing of the show.

Here's a quick, minute-long video walk through the exhibition.

Civilian: Be there tonight!

Join Civilian Art Projects as they debut their new digs and the first exhibitions in their new space in the Warehouse Arts Complex at 1019 7th Street NW (at NY Avenue). Civilian is one of the District's hardest working galleries and we all wish them the best in their new spaces, which I can't wait to see.

And for the debut show Jayme will have Terri Weifenbach's "Woods" (with an essay by Gareth Branwyn) and new sculptures by artist, super chef and musician Carole Wagner Greenwood in a show titled "A Little Give and Take."

Nov. 13 - Dec 19, 2009

Opening Reception: Friday, Nov. 13, 7-9pm.

Mellema on local art shows

Kevin Mellema reviews several DC area shows and as usual hits the nail on the head on all of them and agrees with me on the key Novie Trump piece.

Nice as that series is, it's Trump's "Out of the Fire" piece that packs the hardest punch. Here we find 11 white bird wings singed by fire. Like several other pieces here, it deals with personal hardships, survival and the ability to fly onwards in the aftermath. It's a notion that all of us have to deal with in some capacity throughout our lives.

Read Mellema here.

Black & WTF


Trust me, you're going to be glad that I pointed you to this very weird photography website.

Goodbye Geocities

Just received notice that a while back Yahoo had decided to stop hosting the free Geocities webpages.

Back in the early days of the Internets, Geocities was the starting point for many websites, including mine, which I built there sometime in the very early 1990s. It was through Geocities that I taught myself HTML and it was through Geocities that I made my very first Internet art sale sometime in 1993 or 1994.

And when we first opened the original Fraser Gallery in Georgetown in 1996, it was Geocities that hosted the gallery website for a couple of years until the real name domain was available sometime in the 1998 and we snatched it up.

There were millions of websites and pages on Geocities, and now, just like that they are all gone, including (I suspect) loads of art websites (like my original one) and perhaps loads of business online histories, such as those early years of the gallery.

When Yahoo acquired Geocities a few years ago, the last thing that I thought was that they'd be shutting the servers down and immediately destroying some of the web's very first websites. This is a shame, considering how relatively inexpensive servers have become and what a moneymaker powerhouse Yahoo continues to be.

Goodbye Geocities...

Reaching Out with Tim B. Wride

A couple of interesting Weekend Seminars at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC:

Artist Seminar
Introduction to Critical Looking: A Seminar for Thinking Photographers
Friday, November 13, from 7:00 –9:30 pm

After all the practical workshops, after all the tech consultations, after all the seminars, after all the portfolio reviews ….now what?

How does all of the information apply to YOUR process and YOUR work? How do the trends and climate of the art world affect you and your work? Do you know how to look at photographs — including your own — and CRITICALLY ascertain the direction and relevance of them? What is the difference between the work you want to do and the work you SHOULD do? How do you know which way to turn in order to grow as an artist?

Curator/writer/educator Tim B. Wride will guide you toward a fuller understanding of the art climate in which you are working and the social, economic, and creative pressures that are affecting your photography. Through a dynamic program of lectures, Q&A’s, and group interaction, we will explore the state of the market, the directions of creative interplay, and, most important, the necessity of critically and intensely LOOKING at the work you see as well as the work you make. For too many artists this is the most overlooked aspect of their tools and talents; for all artists, however, CRITICAL LOOKING is the most basic skill that must be developed in order to challenge and advance their artmaking ability.

Cost: $95 (Students: $47)
No reservations necessary
Payments can be made by check or cash at the door

---

Workshop
Critical Looking: The Art of Conscious Creativity
Saturday, November 14, 9:00 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.

Do you know how to look at photographs—including your own—and CRITICALLY ascertain the direction and relevance of them? What is the difference between the work you want to do and the work you SHOULD do? How do you know which way to turn in order to grow as an artist? CRITICAL LOOKING is the key to expanding your awareness and applying a conscious understanding of your artistic process.

Tim B. Wride guides you through a dynamic series of historical perspectives, contemporary observations, interactive exercises, group critiques, and one-on-one portfolio reviews with the goal of awakening a fuller understanding of YOUR unique creative process and the directions that may be open to you with this new understanding. Open up your creativity and apply it to the way in which you approach images and imagemaking. Make the move to growth through self-awareness.

Cost: $375
Class size limited to 15; to make a reservation call 310/200-9477

BIOGRAPHY

Tim B. Wride is a voracious consumer of photographic images. He likes nothing better than to look at photographs and talk to photographers about their work.

As Curator of the Department of Photographs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for 14 years, Tim curated over 50 exhibitions, authored and contributed to a dozen books, and has lectured, participated in panels, juried exhibitions, and provided portfolio reviews internationally. In 2004, Tim became the founding Executive Director of the No Strings Foundation, a Los Angeles-based non-profit that provides individual artist grants to U.S. photographers.

Tim is currently developing and offering seminars, workshops, and individual consultations with photographers whose goal is to grow as an artist. Updates to his schedule and programs available in your area can be found at www.CuratorialEye.com

Warholian bucks

An Andy Warhol painting of 200 dollar bills was sold for $43.8 million at a New York art auction by London-based art collector Pauline Karpidas, more than 100 times what she paid in 1986.

Read about it here.