Imagining the Tenth Dimension

Thirsty

RUSE at Ben Russell Gallery

by: Corinna Kirsch

Walking along Morgan Street in East Pilsen, it’s difficult to tell which brownstone might house an art space, but for the opening of RUSE, the second exhibition at Ben Russell Gallery, the eponymous Ben Russell made it easy—sitting on a plastic lawn chair outside his front door, he welcomed visitors while over the course of the evening, his arms held a rotating cast of objects: a dog, a beer, even fireworks.

Russell, an already established filmmaker and curator, alongside co-curator Brandon Alvendia, began putting the front two rooms of his apartment and environs to use as an exhibition space this past May. The premise of each show is predicated upon a set of limitations that includes the following: one artist must produce a wall-mounted work that fills at least three quarters of the 13 x 10 ft. wall of the main exhibition space and another must make a 15-30 minute long performance. The sermon-like list of commandments goes on, but the project of Ben Russell Gallery is meta: it’s an apartment gallery, but also a curatorial project that makes transparent the boundaries of putting on exhibitions in an apartment. Why not turn a backyard into a sculpture garden, use the alleyway as a performance space, and a closet—okay, maybe it’s a tiny, windowless bedroom—into a screening room instead of disguising its existence?

In the larger of the two indoor rooms, Miguel Cortez’s surveillance project “Quien te esta mirando?” consisted of a closed-circuit camera that transmitted its video to a website, http://www.mcortez.com/webcam.html . I accessed the website, but it wasn’t showing a live-feed at the time—maybe this was part of the ruse? Propped up against the wall across from Cortez’s installation was Kelly Kaczynski’s wooden maquette of a stage, See It Always Falls Around (The Sky). The stage’s diminished scale and vertical format severed it from any functional ties and instead showed the structure’s quasi-Minimalist, gridded underside. These motifs, of surveillance and multiple points of view, continued into the screening room playing Paul Chan’s Re: The_Operation (2002) from his Tin Drum Trilogy. Bruised and wounded cartoon heads of military officials from the Bush-era introduced a montage of footage and audio culled from a variety of sources, mashing up fiction, reality, and half-truths into an endless video loop.

After the sun set, Roxanne Hopper and Julie Rudder began their alleyway performance, No One Alive Today Will Ever See This Again. The performance included a moonlight sonata that left a usually talkative crowd quiet, with the whisper-tone hush of the words Ohhhh! Beautiful! Romantic! as the audience’s epilogue that closed the evening. Perhaps RUSE was a misnomer—there was no deceit, just a humorous, playful, and candid approach to the rules of art and exhibition as a game.

Ben Russell Gallery is located at 1716 S Morgan #2F.

Original post from Art Talk Chicago: http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/art-talk-chicago/2009/07/the-weekend-in-review-73-75.html

one f my fav songs

Wisconsin

I am in a show at Walker Arts Center in Wisconsin in March.

snowstorm this morning

I'm heading to Miami Dec 4th!

Antena @ Bridge Art Fair Miami Beach
December 4-7, 2008

BRIDGE MIAMI BEACH
Following its enormous critical and commercial successes in 2006 and 2007, Bridge is pleased to announce our third installment in Miami Beach. Held at both the Catalina and Maxine Hotels, Bridge Miami leads the South Beach satellite art market, located a mere two blocks from Art Basel. Visitors can browse nearly 80 rooms of the freshest and most innovative works in international emerging and contemporary art.

Arguably the largest convergence of contemporary art and design takes place during Art Basel Miami in this annual, star-studded, citywide celebration of new art internationalism. Consistently a muscular destination market, Miami shows absolutely no signs of stopping, and continues to astound as far and beyond the top-performing art-fair circuit in the United States.

The Catalina and Maxine Hotels
1732 Collins Avenue
Miami, Florida
GOOGLE MAP

ANTENA
Room #201

Artists exhibiting with Antena:
Edra Soto
Gisela Insuaste
Gretel Garcia
Huong Ngo
Jaime Mendoza
Jesus Oviedo
Miguel Cortez
Paola Cabal
Saul Aguirre

See full schedule HERE

Promt article

Sabina Ott wrote a great article on several artists in Chicago, yours truly included, in the current issue of PROMT Magazine. You can download the article HERE. It's a 1.7MB PDF.

another weird dream---last night

i dreamt i was at a party in someone's backyard and i was hanging out at the end by an area with a cement ground. From my view there were people dancing and socializing on the grass/yard. I noticed that from the grass emanated something and people started gasping for air and panicking. The people standing on the cement area were fine. From my viewpoint I saw the invisible substance come from within the grass and upward and affect the people on the grass.

weird dream

I dreamt this morning that I was able to lift cars, turn them vertical and bounce them around like basketballs. And in the dream I had my digital camera and was filming the event. I wonder what my subconscious is trying to tell me??

Pilsen fire

Practical Revolutions: WORK

I am going be in an article in a new art journal called PROMT and below is an excerpt from the mag which features my work. If the writer sends me the entire article then I will post it later:

Practical Revolutions: WORK
by Sabina Ott

Artists Burtonwood & Holmes, Miguel Cortez, Joan Giroux, Myra Greene, Anni Holm, Friedhard Kiekeben, localStyle (Marlena Novak and Jay Alan Yim), and Tracy Taylor don’t privilege one practice over others that they engage in, instead, they approach all their activities as an interlocking set of art practices. These artists work across a range of platforms including sound and installation, object and video making, curation and criticism. They explore social activism and identity formation, embodying a connectivist approach toward art that is non hierarchical and fluid. Over time, the art object in and of itself becomes one of a range of practices. In this new paradigm, the network, not only the making is privileged. At the heart of such relational art is a devotion to expanding what artists do and what artists can do in the social realm, a practical revolution to be sure. Displacing the solo artist, the collective, as well as the collaborative team is one of the ways these artists seek replace traditional means of exchange between maker and viewer. Many of these artists also take the role of curator and producer, further extending the reach of their production.

Born in Guanajuato, Mexico, Chicago artist Miguel Cortez also embraces a fluid relationship between various roles as artist (the situationist kind), curator, and founding member of the art collective Polvo. Polvo began in 1996 and opened an exhibition space (2003-2007) in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. Cortez has just started antena, a new project space dedicated to new media and installation projects on a local and global scale. Cortez’s art in all of its manifestations radically revises the role of the artist from solo practitioner to viral warrior. Some form of networking produces most of Cortez’s work –literally. His works are interactive- often made by
participants downloading stickers from the web and placing them in the urban landscape, thus de-centering the process of artistic production. “Recycle Your Ideas” is an ongoing project, in which the artist places decals at various locations, then photographs the site, draws or paints it and then generates an animation to be viewed online. Each incarnation influences the next one, and each piece is simultaneously independent and connected. His recent exhibitions include the Krannert Museum, Champaign, IL; the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago; VU Space in Melbourne, Australia. and at Mighty Fine Arts Gallery in Dallas.

See my "Recycle Your Ideas" project here: http://recycle-ideas.blogspot.com/
Purchase PROMT from the Chicago Artist's Coalition web site: http://www.caconline.org/default.asp?page=Prompt_Main

Public Enemy

The movie "Public Enemy" about John Dillinger and starring Johnny Depp has been filming in Chicago lately and today they were filming in Pilsen.

Burtonwood & Holmes - “I Support the War / The War Supports Me

Burtonwood and Holmes created a new wall installation at Gardenfresh and they invited over 20 artists to hang their work on top of it. I hung one of my surveillance computer prints. See below:





You can see a full set of photographs from the show here: http://www-us.flickr.com/photos/burtoholmes/sets/72157605329748211/

5 Years on the Run

June 7 – September 13, 2008

The Orleans Street Gallery celebrates 5 years of exhibiting contemporary Chicago art with an anniversary exhibition highlighting breakout artists, many of whom, have since exhibited nationally and internationally. Reception attendees will have the opportunity to meet many of the artists and learn about their work first-hand. Featuring live painting by Violet Jaffe (Arlington Heights), and Elizabeth Parker (Rolling Meadows), a happening by Chicago based performance artist Chris Roberts – and an opportunity to trade a T-Shirt for an original “I am Trying to Figure out Where I Fit In” T-Shirt by Nathan Keay.

Prominent artists include: Miguel Cortez, Mary Ellen Croteau, Kazuki Eguchi, Erik Fabian, Nathan Keay, Makeba Kedem-DuBose, Industry of the Ordinary, Anne Lass, Aimee Lee, Jason Reblando, Chris Roberts, Brandon Sorg, Brian Sorg and many more. Art Wall: Paintings by Rachel Weaver Rivera

The Five Years on the Run Anniversary Reception will be held on Saturday, June 7, 2008 from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. The exhibit will conclude September 13, 2008. Orleans Street Gallery is located in the Bourbon Street section of Pheasant Run Resort, 4051 East Main Street, St. Charles, IL 60174. Gallery hours are Thurs. 12–7 pm, Fri. & Sat. 12–8 pm, Sun. 11–4 pm. For more information contact Gallery Director Anni Holm at art @OrleansStreetGallery.com or 630.524.5048. Free and open to the public.

Opening Saturday June 7, from 6-10pm

Orleans Street Gallery
630.524.5048
art@OrleansStreetGallery.com
Located off Bourbon Street at Pheasant Run Resort
4051 East Main Street
St. Charles, IL 60174

Chupacabras: The Myth in the Era of the Internet

I came across this review online about an art show that I am currently participating in.

/mc
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contratiempo
number 54, march 2008

Chupacabras: The Myth in the Era of the Internet
Julio Rangel

Myths and legends have always been a vehicle by which civilizations have gained understanding of themselves and of other things. Studying them implies a stirring up of its deeper cultural mechanisms. In the era of the Internet, that resonating chamber in which rumors spread at light-speed, urban legends can be offered to everyone for examination, like an animal going under the scalpel of sociologists, anthropologists, and above all artists.

The exhibition, “Chupacabras (Artists Reinterpret the Myth)”, presented at the National Museum of Mexican Art offers a reinterpretation of this legend by a group of young artists that during the 1990’s spread throughout Latin America, and which apparently originated in . The entity, ubiquitous and monstrous, the Chupacabra has been seen stealing chickens, and attacking livestock like goats and cattle; resulting in peasants everywhere losing a good night’s sleep.

It was to be expected that the majority of these artists would opt to apply a political metaphor. Like the Judas figures that are burned during Holy Week, dressed up as Uncle Sam or some corrupt government official, they provide a catharsis for people. Here the Chupacabra takes on the form of George Bush (in the oil painting by Antonio Pazaran), the former president of Mexico, Carlos Salinas de Gortari (in the collage by Salvador Jiménez), multinational companies (in the painting of Patricia Acosta), and of NAFTA (Ricardo González), etc. Diverse leeches of society, represented in diverse degrees of fortune from the obvious to the proactive.


Two works are really outstanding, they are “My Chupacabras Escaped”, a digital image on fabric and decal by Miguel Cortez and “Chupacabra Gothic” by Judithe Hernández. The first one is a fresh and imaginative play on urban imagery and the physical limits of the space of the work. Slippery like the myth, out of its setting, Cortez’s Chupacabras is a decal glued to the wall that mocks the rectangular margin of the work, leaving an empty silhouette where its image should be.

The second is an allusion to “American Gothic”, a painting by Grant Wood that has attained the level of icon. His portrait of the quintessential spirit of Midwestern America has been parodied in a thousand ways. Hernández’s work, a very fine pastel (on paper), features the figure of a goat and a man dressed as a politician or Wall Street executive with his head covered by an American-like flag. The figures are united by a blood transfusion that drains the blood of the poor quadruped, while filling in the red stripes of the flag. In the background, bordered by a prodigious blue, is the immensity of the fields where immigrant workers labor (giving their life’s blood). It is in this work that the political background is most solid and of the greatest breadth: the humor, reflection, and formal resolution are united in a truly sucessful manner.

Also interesting is “San Chupa”, a mixed-media work by Juan Compean. It alludes to the tradition of religious stained-glass windows and its line quality recalls the engravings of Leopoldo Mendez.

As it has happened in other exhibitions at this museum, one would like to see the same care given to the Spanish texts that are given to the English texts. However, this group exhibition is definitely worth making the effort to see and to choose the work you like the best.

interview in Gaper's Block

Can you explain the Recycle-Your-Idea project?

It's a project that started 2 years ago and it pokes fun at the art making process; how artists come up with an idea for let's say a painting, that idea then manifests into a finished piece. The artist then repeats the same idea/ the same painting style over and over until the art no longer has the substance that it had at the begining. It now becomes a decorative pattern/product.

Is it just you, or others?

This is an individual project, but on the blog/site people can to request stickers to then post in their city, document them and then they can send me a digital image.

What was the inspiration?

I wanted to create a series or artworks that would not be limited to just one media. I think of it more like a tree branch. It started out with stickers. Once I placed several at various sites I documented them. I then traced the photos on the computer and the finished drawings became computer prints(these where shown at the Krannert Museum). After this I created a Flash animation piece for online viewing, plus others.... and so forth. Each piece influences the next one and they are independent but are still connected. So the series keeps growing.

What examples of idea-recycling come to mind when you describe your project?

You can probably compare it to the idea of re-use and recycling of actual materials like paper, plastic, glass, etc but on a conceptual level.

I mean, all art's recycled in some way, so how to differentiate between art that would fit with your project, and art in
general?

Yeah most art concepts nowadays are recycled from the past or taken from individual experiences. The end result may be innovative such as in cases where artists use new technology. Some have started to utilize new media to create fresh new work, such as creating art for cell phones, online projects, computer programs, mp3s, video for ipods, 3D environments for Second Life, etc...

How do you choose the locations for your stickers?

It's random. Wherever I go and if I have one I place one.

What was shown at Krannert -- the pictures of the stickers as placed?

I showed 2 computer drawings taken from previous documentations. Originally the museum wanted to show and distribute the stickers, but it turned out, some university people complained and felt the university students would paste stickers all over the campus, so instead the museum made business cards.

What is the ultimate project goal?

It will keep on growing until I become sick ot it.

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Part of the "Recycle Your Ideas" project is being shown at The Krannert Art Museum in Champaign, IL until July 27th in a show called Landscapes of Experience and Imagination: Explorations by Midwest Latina/o Artists (www.kam.uiuc.edu). You can see the blog at: http://recycle-ideas.blogspot.com

micro-projector for handheld devices

I just saw this article at engadget.com about a tiny projector being built into handheld devices. I had this idea about an ipod projector in 2006 and did a sketch. Check out my old post:
http://lapsus5.blogspot.com/2006/05/ipod-projector.html

/mc
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3M to showcase a micro-projector for handheld devices at CES

by Nilay Patel, posted Jan 4th 2008 at 2:45PM

The idea of stuffing a tiny projector into a handheld device isn't a new one -- we've seen a coupledifferent takes on the idea -- but it looks like it might be hitting the mainstream soon, as 3M has announced plans to demo a half-inch wide projection unit at CES that can put up a 40-inch image. The LCoS projector is about the size of a wireless headset, according to 3M, and tops out at VGA resolution -- which seems adequate, given the QVGA resolution of most handhelds. Apparently we'll be seeing devices with the projector built in later this year, and hopefully we'll get a chance to play with a couple at CES -- you'll know as soon as we do.

ST. PAUL, Minn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--3M is now providing consumer electronics manufacturers with a revolutionary advancement in the emerging field of miniature projection technology. 3M scientists developed a breakthrough ultra-compact, LED-illuminated projection engine designed for integration into virtually any personal electronic device. Roughly the size of a wireless earpiece and less than half an inch thick, the 3M mobile projection engine delivers brilliant VGA resolution images and is available today.

With the expansion of digital media now accessible by mobile devices, consumers need the convenience of larger displays. “3M mobile projection engines achieve the size, efficiency, image quality and affordability needed for consumer adoption of this promising new product category,” said Mike Kelly, executive vice president, 3M Display and Graphics Business. “This development continues 3M’s long history as a global leader in advanced projection display technology. What is really exciting is that this technology is available now.”

When deployed in a host platform, such as a mobile phone, 3M’s technology can project a 40-inch or larger image with no-speckle and a high-fill factor that ensures superior image quality. Each engine uses an advanced liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) electronic imager in conjunction with proprietary 3M optics technology.

3M is partnering with leading consumer electronics companies that plan to launch products in early 2008. 3M Mobile Projection Technology will be shown in the Advanced Display Technologies Zone, booths 25727 and 25627, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), in Las Vegas, January 7-10, 2008.

For more information on 3M, visit 3M.com.

Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg dies in Fla. at 82

By MITCH STACY

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg's mediums knew few bounds.

One of his most famous works or "combines" was "Bed," created when he woke up in the mood to paint but had no money for a canvas. His solution was to take the quilt off his bed and use paint, toothpaste and fingernail polish for his creation. He was also a sculptor and a choreographer.

Rauschenberg died Monday of heart failure at 82, it was announced Tuesday by Jennifer Joy, his representative at PaceWildenstein gallery in New York. His use of odd and everyday articles earned him regard as a pioneer in pop art, first gaining fame in the 1950s.

"The most famous thing he said was that he worked in the gap between art and life," said John Elderfield, chief curator of painting and sculpture at New York's Museum of Modern Art. "I think what he meant by this is life was his materials as much as art was his materials."

Rauschenberg didn't mine popular culture wholesale as Andy Warhol (Campbell's Soup cans) and Roy Lichtenstein (comic books) did, but his combines — incongruous combinations of three-dimensional objects and paint — shared pop's blurring of art and objects from modern life.

He also responded to his pop colleagues and began incorporating up-to-the-minute photographed images in his works in the 1960s, including, memorably, pictures of John F. Kennedy. He even won a 1984 Grammy Award for best album package for the Talking Heads album "Speaking in Tongues."

"I'm curious," he said in 1997 in one of the few interviews he granted in later years. "It's very rewarding. I'm still discovering things every day."

Nan Rosenthal, who curated "Robert Rauschenberg: Combines," a joint exhibition by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, called Rauschenberg a "tremendously imaginative artist."

Rosenthal said she believed Rauschenberg would be best remembered for his series of all-white, all-black and all-red paintings, as well as the combines. The Met owns about 25 Rauschenberg paintings and about 75 drawings and prints.

"A lot of the time he was tremendously ebullient, a kind of irrepressible person," who was also "quite a wonderful host and cook," she said.

Rauschenberg's more than 50 years in art produced such a varied and prolific collection that it consumed both uptown and downtown locations during a 1998 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes, in his book "American Visions," called Rauschenberg "a protean genius who showed America that all of life could be open to art. ... Rauschenberg didn't give a fig for consistency, or curating his reputation; his taste was always facile, omnivorous, and hit-or-miss, yet he had a bigness of soul and a richness of temperament that recalled Walt Whitman."

Rauschenberg split his time between New York and Captiva Island in Florida, where he kept a house stocked with his and his friends' art.

"I like things that are almost souvenirs of a creation, as opposed to being an artwork," he said in a 1997 Harper's Bazaar interview, "because the process is more interesting than completing the stuff."

He studied painting at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1947. He later took his studies to Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he studied under master Josef Albers (who supposedly hated his work), and alongside contemporary artists such as choreographer Merce Cunningham and musician John Cage. He also studied at the Art Students League in New York City.

Rauschenberg's first paintings in the early 1950s comprised a series of all-white and all-black surfaces underlaid with wrinkled newspaper. In later works he began making art from what others would consider junk — old soda bottles, traffic barricades, and stuffed birds and calling them "combine" paintings.

One of Rauschenberg's first and most famous combines was titled "Monogram," a 1959 work consisting of a stuffed angora goat, a tire, a police barrier, the heel of a shoe, a tennis ball, and paint.

"Initially, these were thought to be ugly and unpleasant, but as happens ... in time they are perceived as being beautiful," Elderfield said. "It's more than that these things were beautiful" but that he was using them to tell stories.

"Not in the way we are used to having stories told in narration, but more like the contents of a person's purse, you could tell the personality from the objects collected," he said.

By the mid-1950s, Rauschenberg was also designing sets and costumes for dance companies and window displays for Tiffany and Bonwit Teller.

He met Jasper Johns in 1954. He and the younger artist, both destined to become world famous, became lovers and influenced each other's work. According to the book "Lives of the Great 20th Century Artists," Rauschenberg told biographer Calvin Tomkins that "Jasper and I literally traded ideas. He would say, `I've got a terrific idea for you,' and then I'd have to find one for him."

Born Milton Rauschenberg in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, and raised a Christian fundamentalist, Rauschenberg wanted to be a minister but gave it up because his church banned dancing.

"I was considered slow," he once said "While my classmates were reading their textbooks, I drew in the margins."

He was drafted into the U.S. Navy during World War II and knew little about art until a chance visit to an art museum where he saw his first painting at age 18. He drew portraits of his fellow sailors for them to send home.

When his time in the service was up, Rauschenberg used the GI Bill to pay his tuition at art school. He changed his name to Robert because it sounded more artistic.

In recent years he founded the organization Change Inc., which helps struggling artists pay medical bills.

"I don't ever want to go," he told Harper's Bazaar in 1997 when asked of his own death. "I don't have a sense of great reality about the next world; my feet are too ugly to wear those golden slippers. But I'm working on my fear of it. And my fear is that something interesting will happen, and I'll miss it."

Associated Press Writer Ula Ilnytzky in New York contributed to this story.

Obama and PBR

Here's an image of Obama drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon at the Raleigh Times Bar in Raleigh, North Carolina. And supposedly... Barack tipped $18 on a $2 Pabst Blue Ribbon.