Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Elizabeth Bryant's Photographs at Wave Hill

Wave HillWAVE HILL

A public garden & cultural center
 (Not So) Still Life

April 05 - July 04, 2016
Glyndor Gallery


Artists: Adam Brent, Elizabeth Bryant, Nicole Cohen, Ori Gersht, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Sue Johnson, Laura Letinsky, Beth Lipman, Erin O’Keefe, Donna Sharrett, Nicolas Touron, Michael Vahrenwald, Rodrigo Valenzuela and Alex Verhaest.

(Not So) Still Life presents novel ways that contemporary artists are transforming the still life genre to engage with current culture. As a subject, the still life gained popularity in the Early Renaissance as an alternative to landscape, portraiture or religious subjects. Compositions of natural and inanimate objects were often presented with allegorical connotations. Today, artists are creating new variations by working in photography and sculpture to conflate interior space with landscape, or by using video and animation to convey still life in motion. Several artists will be creating new works that respond to the domestic interior of Glyndor Gallery, once a private home. 
To reactivate the genre, several artists are looking directly at historic paintings. In a new site-specific work, Nicole Cohen creates a video overlay of an animation of 18th century Dutch master Jan van Huysum’s, Fruit Piece (1722), on an image of a gallery window with a view of the Hudson River that brings to life the changing and rebirth of seasons rendered in the Dutch masterpiece.Ori Gersht’s photographs On Reflection capture the split-second moments of creation in destruction of exploding mirrors reflecting faithfully recreated floral arrangements based on paintings by Jan Brueghel the Elder. Michael Vahrenwald’s photographs from his series, Forest Floor (after Otto Marseus van Schrieck), capture found still lifes on sidewalks in Brooklyn’s industrial areas, in a nod to the paintings of 17th century Dutch botanist and entomologist Otto Marseus van Schrieck. Alex VerhaestTemps Mort: Table Props reference the vanitas imagery of Pieter Claesz and Willem Claesz Heda, while combining contemporary technology and classical themes to recreate visual narratives.
  
Other artists are using materials such as ceramic, glass or fabric to create vignettes to probe memory, ephemerality and other concerns of the traditional still life genre.  Nicolas Touron sets porcelain-cast cicada carapaces in a miniature porcelain terrain composed like a still life and containing a projection of macro greenhouse footage that conjures memories of natural landscapes. Beth Lipman’s hand-sculpted crystalline installation reflects modern-day notions of mortality, consumerism, materiality, fragility, and temporality. Laura Letinsky’s candid photographs of tabletop remnants allude to human presence in tension between ripeness and decay, fertility and void, familiarity and distance.  Adam Brent creates whimsical domestic assemblages modeled on narratives of personal history, place, and memory via 3D scanning and printing technologies. Donna Sharrett deconstructs and reconstructs worn items of deceased loved ones through meticulous handiwork of sewing, stitching, quilting and embroidering particular elements intomomento mori textile mandalas. Sue Johnson recreates the “American Dream” on a dining table featuring both printed imagery and ceramic objects through traditions of vanitas and trompe l’oeil, in an investigation of material culture contextualized within ideals of the postwar suburban home.
  
A number of other artists in the exhibition utilize the illusionistic techniques of trompe l’oeil (trick the eye) to break the boundary between two and three-dimensional space.  Elizabeth Bryant’s photographic tableaus feature found objects, magazine clippings and live plants in spatial arrangements that create complex and often humorous hybrid forms. Grounded in the history of photography as well as architecture, Erin O’Keefe’s photographs consider the layers of distortion and optical illusion generated from the transformation of complex arrangements in three dimensional space into two dimensional image plane. In further dialogue with the use of spatial effects in themes of still life, photographs from Rodrigo Valenzuela’s Still Life series explore the way images, such as landscapes and tableaus, are inhabited and the ways in which space, objects and the natural world are translated into images.



Elizabeth Bryant, Greenhouse/Golden Cheeked Warbler, 2012, archival inkjet print, 34” x 40”. Courtesy of the artist.

Read the press release for the show here.




Friday, March 25, 2016



Tom Marioni · Dry Fresco, Drawing and Bronze 
Elsa Hansen · R. Kelly thru R. Crumb
Opening reception
Friday, April 1, 5 – 8 PM 





Tom Marioni, Life for MD, 2015, graphite on plaster mounted on wood, 33.5 x 33.5 inches

Tom Marioni is a San Francisco first generation conceptual artist and sculptor originally from Cincinnati, Ohio. His exhibition at Carl Solway Gallery will include new dry frescos, two site-specific wall drawings, a blown glass cigar ashtray and a selection of bronze sculptures.

Marioni created the dry frescos by attaching graphite to a piece of bamboo and using it as a drawing instrument. In tapping against the fresco surface, he uses the graphite as a percussion instrument, much as he has done since 1972 with his ongoing series of “drum brush drawings”. In this work, he leaves metal marks by drumming w
ith jazz drummers’ steel wire brushes against large sheets of sandpaper. The visual record of this action results in a marriage of visual art and music. His new fresco drawings, a departure for Marioni, are figurative in nature and relate to San Francisco’s figurative movement of the 1950s.  Marioni’s conceptual performances of the 1970s were about body measurement and this concern will be evident in his site-specific wall drawings titled Out of Body Free Hand Circle (on prepared wall). These drawings relate to Drawing a Line as Far as I can Reach from 1972. The bronze sculptures are more abstract, but also relate to the body.

As a conceptual artist, Tom Marioni allows specific ideas to dictate the medium for each artwork. Many of his piecespresage artists today who use sound, duration and social interaction as subjects. He is best known for his social artwork, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art, introduced in 1970 and repeated in various contexts internationally. In 1970 he established the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA), which functioned as an alternative space, providing a forum for artists to explore the then-new genres of performance and installation art. He organized many groundbreaking shows there until the museum closed in 1984.

Marioni’s installation/performance works have been presented at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (1972), the Institute of Contemporary Art in London (1973), the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1980), and the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany (1982) among other institutions. He has produced sound works for radio stations KPFA in Berkeley and WDR in Cologne, Germany. In 1996 he organized The Art Orchestra and the group performed at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco.

Marioni was included in For Eyes and Ears (1980) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, Live to Air (1982) at the Tate Gallery in London, and From Sound to Image (1985) at the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie in Germany. His work was shown in Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object (1998) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia (2009) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Drawing is central to Marioni’s art, and in 1999 the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland presented a drawing retrospective. In 2006, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati exhibited a survey of his work. Marioni is the author of Beer, Art and Philosophy, 2003, a memoir, also Writings on Art 1969-1999 and Fabliaux Tom Marioni Fairy Tales.

Tom Marioni received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981 and three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts during the 1970s. His work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stadtische Kunsthalle in Mannheim, Germany, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and numerous other museums. He was born in Cincinnati in 1937 and attended the Art Academy of Cincinnati. He moved to San Francisco in 1959.
 
Tom Marioni · Art History, Philosophy and Dirty Jokes
••Tuesday, March 29, 7:30 PM••
The Littlefield
3934 Spring Grove Ave
Cincinnati, OH 45223



Elsa Hansen, R. Kelly thru R. Crumb, 2016, silk and cotton embroidery on linen, 13.5 x 18.5 inches

Elsa Hansen creates deceptively simple cross-stitch embroidery pieces on fabric. Her embroidered figures often depict provocative comparisons of public and religious figures, offering an unexpected take on popular events, politics and society. Cross-stitch embroidery flourished during the Tang dynasty (618-906 AD) in China and spread via trade routes through the Middle East, Africa and Europe. In its most elaborate form, including the famed Bayeux Tapestry, embroidery became a device for storytelling. Imbuing the technique with a minimal, stripped-down aesthetic and portraying contemporary figures, she intertwines tradition and pop culture.

Hansen took up cross-stitching while collaborating on film projects. It was a way to fill time during the editing process. She experimented with various designs until she came across Minipops, small pixelated drawings of famous people created by the British artist Craig Robinson. At first inspired by the figures found on his hit cult website, she realized that pixels translated directly to cross-stitching and began to create her own cast of characters.

Elsa Hansen currently lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky, where she was born in 1986. She studied outdoor recreation at Western Kentucky State University in Bowling Green and in 2008 took a summer internship as an Urban Park Ranger in Brooklyn, New York. She became an assistant to well-known sculptor Tom Sachs and collaborated with experimental filmmaker Van Neistat. Her work was recently shown at Dickinson Gallery in New York City.

Tom Marioni · Dry Fresco, Drawing and Bronze
Elsa Hansen · R. Kelly thru R. Crumb
continue through July 9, 2016

Kirk Mangus · Ceramic Sculpture and Drawing
continues through July 9, 2016

Upcoming Exhibitions
Summer Group Show
July 15 – September 3, 2016

Alan Rath · New Sculpture
Duane Michals · Sequences and Tintypes
September 9 – December 23, 2016






Carl Solway Gallery
424 Findlay Street
Cincinnati, OH 45214
513.621.0069 

Hours:
Monday – Friday 9:00 – 5:00 pm
Saturday 12:00 – 5:00 pm









Jace Ewing Performs at Co-Prosperity Sphere in Chicago, March 25, 2016


Cynthia Greig's "Exhibitonism" Opens at Stephen Bulger Gallery



Stephen Bulger Gallery
1026 Queen Street West Toronto Canada
T 416.504.0575    bulgergallery.com

The gallery is pleased to present “Exhibitionism,” our first solo exhibition of work by American photographer Cynthia Greig.

CYNTHIA GREIG
Exhibitionism

Exhibition Dates: April 2 – April 30, 2016
Reception for the Artist: Saturday, April 2, 2-5pm

In this exhibition, Greig surveys contemporary art galleries from across the globe, placing the exhibition space itself on display. Deconstructing the white cube down to its most essential elements, her elegantly minimal photographs present an unexpected shift in perspective, rendering its interior spaces as vast landscapes or archaeological sites—uncharted territories with their own particular histories. Greig’s photographs also scrutinize the minute and overlooked details, revealing the interstitial evidence of each building’s trajectory, and the continuous flux of time brought to bear on an impossibly pristine Modernist ideal. Reflecting on the delicate balance between the permanent and ephemeral, Greig visits the themes of vanitas, manifest destiny, and the economic theory of “too big to fail” from within the microcosmic framework of this mythic space.



Matthew Marks (Brice Marden: New Paintings), 2012 from the series, Gallery Horizons
The exhibition presents photographs and video from four related bodies of work each centered on the contemporary art gallery as a site of inquiry, and continue Greig’s investigation into the illusory nature of the photographic image and perceived reality. “Gallery Horizons” and “Gone (Circles and Squares)” transform close-up views of drywall and/or concrete into ambiguous topographies suggestive of rugged terrains or the traces of and ancient civilization. For her series entitled, “Threshold,” Greig digitally removes the art on view to shift our focus to the expanding scale of the contemporary exhibition space. “Gallery Interventions” mark the white walls of commercial galleries throughout Chelsea as “sold”—whether as art or real estate— making ironic reference to the current geographic shift as some galleries play out a Darwinian drama by expanding their brands to multiple locations across the globe while others close, migrate to new areas, downsize, or go completely virtual.


Meditating on the white void and the idea of nothingness, “Exhibitionism” demystifies the context of art’s display and commerce to reveal the forces of entropy at play, regardless of hierarchies of status or influence. As if in search of an extinct species or a lost empire, she has photographed the contemporary art gallery as a metaphor for a world on the brink of dramatic change.




Biography

Cynthia Greig was born in Detroit, Michigan. She studied printmaking at Washington University and attended graduate programs at the University of Iowa and the University of Michigan where she received her MA and MFA in 1988 and 1995 respectively. She is the recipient of several major awards including the Light Work Artist Residency (2001), the Houston Center for Photography Fellowship (2003), and the Santa Fe Center for Photography Singular Image Award (2004). In 2015, Greig received a Visual Artist Fellowship from the Kresge Foundation.

Her photographs and videos have been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums, and are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, International Museum of Photography and Film at George Eastman House, Museum of Fine Art Houston, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Light Work Collection, Smith College Museum of Art, as well as corporate and private collections. An avid collector of 19th-century photographs, Greig also co-authored the book, Women in Pants: Manly Maidens, Cowgirls and Other Renegades (Harry N. Abrams, 2003). Greig lives and works in metropolitan Detroit.

A short video interview with Cynthia can be viewed here.
FREE Saturday Afternoon Screenings at CAMERA @ 3:00 PM
Join us on Saturday afternoons for a series of films selected by our featured artist, Cynthia Greig.

April 2
BLOW-UP
Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni (UK: 1966), 111 min.

April 9
THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH
Dir. Nicolas Roeg (UK: 1976), 139 min.

April 16
PECKER
Dir. John Waters (USA: 1998), 87 min.

April 23
CACHÉ
Dir. Michael Haneke (France: 2005), 117 min.

April 30
STORIES WE TELL
Dir. Sarah Polley (Canada: 2012), 108 min.

Only films in languages other than English will be shown with subtitles. If you require subtitles for English language films we can accommodate a special screening the same day at noon provided we receive 48 hours notice.

Please visit us at:





Copyright ©  2016 CYNTHIA GREIG, All rights reserved.




Tom Marioni and Elsa Hansen Exhibitions to Open on April 1, 2016




Tom Marioni's studio


Tom Marioni · Dry Fresco, Drawing and Bronze 
Elsa Hansen · R. Kelly thru R. Crumb

April 1 – July 9, 2016
Opening reception
Friday, April 1, 5 – 8 PM 

Tom Marioni studio, San Francisco, 2016
Tom Marioni is a San Francisco first generation conceptual artist and sculptor originally from Cincinnati, Ohio. His exhibition at Carl Solway Gallery will include new dry frescos, two site-specific wall drawings, a blown glass cigar ashtray and a selection of bronze sculptures.

Marioni created the dry frescos by attaching graphite to a piece of bamboo and using it as a drawing instrument. In tapping against the fresco surface, he uses the graphite as a percussion instrument, much as he has done since 1972 with his ongoing series of “drum brush drawings”. In this work, he leaves metal marks by drumming w
ith jazz drummers’ steel wire brushes against large sheets of sandpaper. The visual record of this action results in a marriage of visual art and music. His new fresco drawings, a departure for Marioni, are figurative in nature and relate to San Francisco’s figurative movement of the 1950s.  Marioni’s conceptual performances of the 1970s were about body measurement and this concern will be evident in his site-specific wall drawings titled Out of Body Free Hand Circle (on prepared wall). These drawings relate to Drawing a Line as Far as I can Reach from 1972. The bronze sculptures are more abstract, but also relate to the body.

As a conceptual artist, Tom Marioni allows specific ideas to dictate the medium for each artwork. Many of his pieces presage artists today who use sound, duration and social interaction as subjects. He is best known for his social artwork, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art, introduced in 1970 and repeated in various contexts internationally. In 1970 he established the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA), which functioned as an alternative space, providing a forum for artists to explore the then-new genres of performance and installation art. He organized many groundbreaking shows there until the museum closed in 1984.

Marioni’s installation/performance works have been presented at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (1972), the Institute of Contemporary Art in London (1973), the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1980), and the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany (1982) among other institutions. He has produced sound works for radio stations KPFA in Berkeley and WDR in Cologne, Germany. In 1996 he organized The Art Orchestra and the group performed at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco.

Marioni was included in For Eyes and Ears (1980) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, Live to Air (1982) at the Tate Gallery in London, and From Sound to Image (1985) at the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie in Germany. His work was shown in Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object (1998) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia (2009) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Drawing is central to Marioni’s art, and in 1999 the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland presented a drawing retrospective. In 2006 the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati exhibited a survey of his work. Marioni is the author of Beer, Art and Philosophy, 2003, a memoir, also Writings on Art 1969-1999 and Fabliaux Tom Marioni Fairy Tales.

Tom Marioni received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981 and three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts during the 1970s. His work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stadtische Kunsthalle in Mannheim, Germany, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and numerous other museums. He was born in Cincinnati in 1937 and attended the Art Academy of Cincinnati. He moved to San Francisco in 1959.

Tom Marioni
Art History, Philosophy and Dirty Jokes
Stand-up
The Littlefield
3934 Spring Grove Ave
Cincinnati, OH 45223
Thursday, March 31, 8 PM


Elsa Hansen, Passing, 2015, cross-stitch embroidery on fabric, 8 x 23 inches
Elsa Hansen creates deceptively simple cross-stitch embroidery pieces on fabric. Her embroidered figures often depict provocative comparisons of public and religious figures, offering an unexpected take on popular events, politics and society. Cross-stitch embroidery flourished during the Tang dynasty (618-906 AD) in China and spread via trade routes through the Middle East, Africa and Europe. In its most elaborate form, including the famed Bayeux Tapestry, embroidery became a device for storytelling. Imbuing the technique with a minimal, stripped-down aesthetic and portraying contemporary figures, she intertwines tradition and pop culture.

Hansen took up cross-stitching while collaborating on film projects. It was a way to fill time during the editing process. She experimented with various designs until she came across Minipops, small pixelated drawings of famous people created by the British artist Craig Robinson. At first inspired by the figures found on his hit cult website, she realized that pixels translated directly to cross-stitching and began to create her own cast of characters.

Elsa Hansen currently lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky, where she was born in 1966. She studied outdoor recreation at Western Kentucky State University in Bowling Green and in 2008 took a summer internship as an Urban Park Ranger in Brooklyn, New York. She became an assistant to well-known sculptor Tom Sachs and collaborated with experimental filmmaker Van Neistat. Her work was recently shown at Dickinson Gallery in New York City

Kirk Mangus · Ceramic Sculpture and Drawing
continues through July 9, 2016

Upcoming Exhibitions
Summer Group Show
July 15 – September 3, 2016

Alan Rath · New Sculpture
Duane Michals · Sequences and Tintypes
September 9 – December 23, 2016





Carl Solway Gallery
424 Findlay Street
Cincinnati, OH 45214
513.621.0069 

Hours:
Monday – Friday 9:00 – 5:00 pm
Saturday 12:00 – 5:00 pm







The Cincinnati Art Museum Opens an Exhibition Honoring Carl Solway on April 30, 2016


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contact • Jill E. Dunne Director of Marketing and Communications

513-639-2954 •   media@cincyart.org
953 Eden Park Drive │Cincinnati, Ohio│45202
www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org

*Images Available Upon Request

 

Cincinnati Art Museum presents
Not in New York: Carl Solway and Cincinnati
Highlights of 20th century art from April 30-October 30

CINCINNATI –The Cincinnati Art Museum presents Not in New York: Carl Solway and Cincinnati April 30 through October 30. The exhibition explores many of the most compelling contemporary artworks in the museum’s permanent collection that connect to Carl Solway’s transformative influence on the Cincinnati arts scene.

About 50 artworks, including paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings and multi-media, will be on display, some for the first time. The exhibition will feature works by John Cage, Ann Hamilton, Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, Judy Pfaff, Pat Steir, Helen Frankenthaler and many others. Solway’s unique role in the museum’s history is evidenced in these works, drawn solely from the permanent collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum.  The exhibition is independently curated by the Cincinnati Art Museum and part of an ongoing series examining the 140 years of development of the museum’s encyclopedic collections of over 66,000 objects.

Solway’s generosity and relationships with artists, artmaking processes, museums and the community indelibly raised Cincinnati’s place in 20th century contemporary art discourse. Born in Chicago and raised in Cincinnati, Solway is a publisher, donor, gallerist and most importantly, an educator. He played a vital role in building contemporary art discourse and awareness in the Midwest and beyond, including many public and private collections.

Away from the art centers of New York and Los Angeles, Cincinnati became an influential place for late 20th century artists not because of the size or heft of the market, but because of Solway and others who created it. Solway and his former wife, Gail Forberg, opened Flair Gallery in 1962. It was later renamed the Carl Solway Gallery in 1970. For a period of time Solway simultaneously operated his namesake gallery and the Not in New York Gallery on West Fourth Street in Cincinnati, as well as shared space in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood. Not in New York brought the emerging Midwest art scene to the attention of the art world, and in return brought leading international artists to Cincinnati.

“The Cincinnati Art Museum is thrilled to recognize Carl Solway’s contribution to the Art Museum’s collection. He has made his mark in Cincinnati homes and the Art Museum’s permanent collection and has made a name for himself as a leader in contemporary art collecting in the Midwest,” says Kristin Spangenberg, Cincinnati Art Museum’s curator of prints. Spangenberg is co-curating this exhibition along with Matt Distel, exhibitions director at The Carnegie, Covington, KY.

Not in New York: Carl Solway and Cincinnati is solely supported by the Cincinnati Art Museum and the generous sponsorship of community partner Procter & Gamble Co., founded in Cincinnati in 1837.  The exhibition will be on view in Galleries 103–105. Admission to the exhibition is free.

About the Cincinnati Art Museum
The Cincinnati Art Museum is supported by the generosity of individuals and businesses that give annually to ArtsWave. The Ohio Arts Council helps fund the Cincinnati Art Museum with state tax dollars to encourage economic growth, educational excellence and cultural enrichment for all Ohioans. The Cincinnati Art Museum gratefully acknowledges operating support from the City of Cincinnati, as well as our members.

General admission to the Cincinnati Art Museum is always free. The museum is open Tuesday – Sunday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m. and is closed Monday.
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NOT IN NEW YORK SPECIAL EVENT

Art After Dark: Swingin’ with Solway
April 29, 2016, 5–9 PM
Travel back to the 1950s-1960s with an evening of swing dancing and music in celebration of our new exhibition Not in New York: Carl Solway and Cincinnati. Additional details will be announced via our website, Facebook (Cincinnati Art Museum) and Twitter (@CincyArtMuseum, #artafterdarkcincy) by April 1. Free admission. Reservations not required. Parking is $4. Free for Art Museum Members. Cash bar and appetizers available for purchase. Learn more http://www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org/artafterdark