Braddock: Follow Up

Here's a little more dope on the goings on in Braddock from a recent city paper article and a little fist fight on another blog-- mostly related to the mayor's fashion sense. I guess by know it's pretty obvious that I don't know too much about Braddock and I don't. What interests me with a place like this is that in so many way's the town's virtual life is almost more important than it's real one. It's now like a start up company, with little more than a vague vision and hollow marketing campaign. But that's how everything starts.

Shots From Blogger Show In Brooklyn

Here's some shots from the opening of that show in Brooklyn from the blog of one of the curator's James Wagner. I am sure he will be posting more images and updates.

Joshua Tonies: Epic A

Josh Tonies


This is a subtlely powerfull piece that you can still see in the Everything is Possible group show at Future Tennant, an alternative space run by CMU, downtown. To a large extent, most of that show got lost on me, during the gallery crawl, but this piece, managed to hold it's own. I am not sure how the artist did it, but he transfered a series of drawings into onto micofilm so that they could be run through the simple film reader. The result is a mesmerizing panorama that can be run slowly through the viewer, stopped and speeded up at will. The shots above don't capture it at all. Please see this in person, it closes on October 27th.

Here are some thoughts that Joshua, sent me about the piece. Joshua has work in my flat files.

Epic A was the result of a daydream I had. Having just returned from New York city , I had been visiting family, and during my train ride back to Pittsburgh I was marvelling at the passing landscape from the window of my seat. Having a background in time based media, and a continuing interest in time and its relationship to space, I had been meditating or rather stewing over a way of transmuting the experience I had looking out the window of the train car, at the passing landscape.

While on the train I had though of many possible solutions including making differing types of scrolls, and playing with the physical context in which they could be viewed. The solution to use microfilm came quietly, as I was returning from Carnegie library in Oakland. I had spent the day researching imagery, and had been looking through the stacks as well as the archives (using microfilm viewers).

I have always been enamored with the convention of microfilm, its tangible, physicality. I enjoy the way one can physically navigate the information stream of the film, rotating, panning, raising and lowering the image. I often would go and just play with the machines, dismissing the content on the spools of film, and lose myself in the visual experience of manipulating the information.

In order to create the continuous landscape of Epic A, I employed a variety of working processes, all occupying the same visual neighborhood. The imagery used in Epic A is the result of pencil drawings of propeller planes, paper collages of mountains from grid drawings that I xeroxed and cut and pieced together, and for the cloud information, I enlarged and cropped volcanic eruptions . As a limitation, I choose to use black and white, and focused of line and value. Epic A turned out to be 45 feet long and one foot high.

Epic A is titled as such to imply the first of multiple incarnations ( Epic B, Epic C etc). I plan to gleam and augment new strategies and mutations for future microfilm projects. This working process forces me to develop and cultivate my visual language, and allows me to consider analogous manifestations (paintings, videos and books ) that pull from the reservoir of visual material that I accumulate while making the microfilm scroll.

The Future Tenant Space, has a surprisingly big impact on the scene here. CMU has a very fancy gallery space on campus, that would rank as one of the better exhibition spaces in town, and it certainly hosts some great shows. But, the very act of walling the space off on it's campus creates a huge separation from the city.

Tales From The Art World: Art Advisors

I want to thank Ann @ Detroit Arts, for posting this NY Times Article. It opens a window into a part of the art world that few people see and confirms what most average people think; that art is an inside power game that they are not invited to play. Art advisors of various kinds have always existed- partly because, many people who have a lot of money are also not fully confident in thier judgements. In recent years and especially now that there is a hot art market ( Didn't you get the invite? ) the art advisor has come to the fore as the purveyor of access.

Here's some quotes from mega dealer David Zwirner:

"There are a lot of novice collectors out there who don’t realize that you can’t run through the door and make your first purchase,” Mr. Zwirner said. “You have to finesse your way to that. Primary market galleries like us often have three-year waiting lists. We’re very picky.”
This means that while advisers are selling the merits of a particular artist to their clients, they must also sell their clients to the gallery.
“I’ve definitely felt that there’s a certain hazing ritual in art buying,” said Lowell Pettit, an art adviser in Long Island City, Queens, who often works with first-time buyers and young collectors. “Galleries literally want your C.V. and that of your client” before they will part with their best inventory."

To a large extent, the situation in the major galleries right now is entirely fair and understandable. Markets are not always hot and galleries want to sell to collectors who supported them when times were tough, and also try to make sure that potential buyers are not just looking to buy and sell artist's work for a quick profit.

I don't have much else to say, other than that I know very little about this world. There have been some great comments on Detroit Arts.

Associated Artists of Pittsburgh 96th Annual

The Word - Genesis

It is my pleasure to be included in this year's Annual exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art. The show is previewed in the Carnegie Online magazine. The juror for the exhibit was Douglas Fogle and you can view his juror's statement on the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh site.

Save the date!
96th Annual Associated Artists of Pittsburgh Exhibition
October 27, 2006-January 14, 2007
Opening reception: October 26, 6:30 - 9:00pm
Carnegie Museum of Art - Heinz Galleries
4400 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-4080

Each year the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh invites artists living within 150 miles of the city to submit work for this survey exhibition. Douglas Fogle, Carnegie Museum of Art Curator of Contemporary Art and organizer of the 2008 Carnegie International is the exhibition's juror.

Figures Of Thinking: Convergences In Contemporary Cultures

Nina Katchadourian
Mona Hatoum

Adrienne Heinrich

Ok, Here's another show that is likely kick ass, that I missed ( anyone wana give me a ride ). It's in Youngstown Ohio and was co- curated by Vicky A. Clark and Sandhini Poddar. and includes a number of major woman artists, ( anyone wana email me images? ) and Pittsburgh's Adrienne Hienrich.

Here's some dope from the curators statement-- which is not on the museums website.

While not immediately obvious, all of the artists are women, but unlike exhibitions of the past decades from Making Their Mark: Women Artists Moving into the Mainstream, 1970-1985 (1989) to Inside the Visible (1996) to Sexual Politics (1996), feminism isn’t foregrounded in this show. Issues of gender, race, and religion inform the work of these artists but do not define it. We have assembled a group of artists we deeply respect to initiate a conversation about our world. This dialogue will hopefully offer up possibilities for confrontation with how we sometimes too easily define and limit understanding. The curators and artists will present possibilities, but so too will the viewer, whose own experiences and insights will continue the conversation in new venues.

Some of the artists Rina Banerjee, Lesley Dill, Ellen Gallagher, Mona Hatoum, Adrienne Heinrich, Nina Katchadourian, Wangechi Mutu ( anyone wana give me a ride??? )

Drink and draw

It's 9:30 on Sunday morning. I have a hangover. Not a bad one, just a little fuzzy around the edges. Mostly very happy. Man, you all missed a great party last night.

But do not despair! Renee has already scheduled another Drink and Draw for October 28, from 5:30 - 8:30. I'll post details later in the week, so stay tuned.

Drink and Draw at the brillobox had its first session last night. Our host at the brillobox, Renee Ruth Ickes.

The models costmed themselves as burlesque queens for the evening. David Grim and Niki during a break.

Olga takes a dinner break.


Christiane d. joined us last night. She told us that it has been several years since she has drawn from a model. She got these wonderful depths in several small drawings. This drawing is from the last pose of the evening.

One of Renee's drawings. There is something so tongue-in-cheek about the drawings she did last night.

David Grim had shown some older telephone book drawings at Digging Pitt. He has recently started doing this again. He attends several open model sessions every month and always shows up with these telephone books.

Okay, so here's mine. Not bad for someone who was three sheets to the wind, huh? I think i'm gonna drink more when I draw.

Fiji Island Mermaid Press

I guess this is a follow on to the post on Pittsburgh's emergence for small press and self publishing. Marc Snyder, who is a very recent transplant to Pittsburgh puts out these almost always amazing little books. A few border on just didactic propaganda and yet almost always get beyond that with the pure humor and economy of means. Some of them border on genius. Of the sample set he sent me-- so far my favorites are- How To Draw Jean- Paul Sartre; Understanding Quantum Mechanics and Threat Gestures.

Marc was just buzzed about on the Size Matters blog and will have a show at Kent State that will open on October 26th ( any one wana give me a ride? ) Oooops, that was last year. Marc sent me the show card with his books and I kind of assumed it was coming up.

Show I Missed

Here is a strange post about a show I didn't see at Seton Hill that just closed. The show is reviewed by a blogger, who also didn't see it. I think that we both very much wish that we had.

"The artist, starting four years ago on the anniversary of 9/11 -- and triggered by the media's replaying of the horror of that terrorist act -- started taking photos of media stories about terrorism she saw on her tv. She set up a tripod and camera in her living room and snapped black and white photos in a random, scatter-shot way documenting the drumbeat of terrorism entering her home. School shootings, sniper shootings, Iraq shootings and bombings, the London Underground bombings...the list is long

The idea that we are randomly but continuously bombarded by images of terrorism (is there ever a time when "breaking news" -- the code words for "drop everything and pay attention this is going to scare you" -- is not the screen crawl at the bottom of the all news channels?) is a thought we all know but mostly choose not to deal with."

Braddock: City Of The Mind

These are pictures of the town of Braddock, PA. If I were still living in New York and had not pluncked my life savings into the region, I think that I would have a lot of guilt about posting them. I dont think that even the most ardent fan of it today would call it much more than a ghost town or a corpse, so it borders on morbid voyeurism to show it. But, places like Braddock are not too uncommon around here and the issues they raise are pretty real.

To start with a little backround, Braddock wasn't always a corpse, it was actually SLIGHTLY, important and very much alive. So the mayor of Braddock ( and don't you want that job ) has put up a web site with his own money and put out all these pictures of the town and he actually hopes to revive it. He is showing these pictures with the hope that someone will see something or have an idea or whatever.

Well, it's in places like this where the rubber really meets the road, and a town's history, memory and virtual reality faces it's physical one. There is the mostly dead physical place and then there all the very real people who came from there and all thier memories and they are not dead. And, of course there are all the new people who might see some posibility there. The internet puts this in your face and makes it in some ways harder to forget things and places. I think that can be good.

Shrinking Cities

Leipzig
Detroit
Detroit

I have to admit to just becoming aware of this facinating project called shrinking cities.
The project was started in Germany and I think that the first lines of the web intro imply that all cities are shrinking-- which is not close to being true and even the website has to slip that in.
(6.1 billion people currently live on the earth, 3 billion of them in cities. By 2030, the population of the world will have increased by 2 billion (+33%). This increase will be stem almost exclusively from the growth in urban population. Every day, 190,000 new city-dwellers are added all over the world, 2 in every second. In the year 2030, 4.9 billion people will live in cities)
The shrinking city is however an important area for study.

Intro from the Website:

The Project ///
Shrinking Cities, a three-year initiative project of Germany's Federal Cultural Foundation, seeks to expand Germany's city-planning debate - until now concentrated on questions of demolishing surplus apartments and improving residential quarters - to address new questions and perspectives. The project also places developments in eastern Germany in an international context, involving various artistic, design, and research disciplines in the search for strategies for action. The emphases of the research and exhibition project, Shrinking Cities, are, first, an international study of processes of shrinking (first project phase) and, second, the development of strategies for action for eastern Germany (second project phase).International Study /// Since 2002, four local interdisciplinary teams have been commissioned to study and document urban shrinking processes in the urban regions of Detroit (USA), Manchester/Liverpool (Britain), Ivanovo (Russia), and Halle/Leipzig (Germany). Each site stands as an example of a specific form of shrinking: In Detroit, the issue is the consequences of suburbanization; in Manchester/Liverpool, of deindustralization; in Ivanavo, of postsocialism; and in the greater Halle/Leipzig region, several of these factors are compounded. People from various disciplines, including urban geographers, cultural experts, architects, journalists, and artists, take part in the work.

The project has also developed a touring exhibition.

Merge On Film Kitchen

Here's some thoughts by merge about last Tuesday's Film Kitchen showing.

The City Of The Mind

My recent posts, posts, posts, on Detroit seem important on some deep level I cant explain fully. Pittsburgh and Detroit seem to have huge amount in common. It's not just that they were industrial cities; they were the birth places of huge industries and had built there identities so completly around them that they were the global symbols of those industries. No doubt the size of the industrial complexes made them look like permanent and unmoveable forces that could not be changed. Perhaps, unwisely people built thier lives as if they could not be moved or at least never killed.

Every city is the interaction between a real place and a mythology that people build around it and with these two places the interaction is traumatic. I think that my memories of NY in the late 70's were facing that interaction. On the one hand, you knew that NY was like the greatest city in the world and yet the day to day facts showed you it wasn't that great. But, what happened to places like Pittsburgh and even more so Detroit has to be on a totally different level. New York, somehow found it's greatness again ( to a large extent imigrants came who believed in it ) and for the most part, it never really faced becoming irrelavant. But, both Pittsburgh and Detroit have faced becoming footnotes or even in the case of Detroit epic symbols of America gone wrong.

The other major thing that links the cities is their huge diasporas. So anyway, I am hoping to here from some people in Detroit and people from Detroit and perhaps involve them in my diaspora project. I am particularly interested in hooking up with artist's from Detroit and those that live there now. Please pass this post along. I still am very much looking to develop build my links to the Pittsburgh diaspora.

Drunk Driving Capital Will Now Try Drunk Drawing

The city that is my pick for drunk driving capital of America, will now try drunk drawing. Take advantage of this one before they shut it down.

Some Recent Pittsburgh Gallery News

Moxie Moving To North Side
Tai + Lee exhibition space in Polish Hill

Here's a somewhat futile attempt to keep you up on the fluid art scene in Pittsburgh.

Moxie Dada-- Moving from Bloomfield to the North Side.

Tai + Lee opens a storefront exhibition space in Polish Hill

Gallery On Grant is shooting to open in the spring in Milvale.

Most Wanted Fine Art will open a studio/exhibition space on Penn Ave in Garfield ( any day now )

Bloggers Curate Show In Brooklyn

I wish very much that I could make this opening. The two people who curated this show are the kind of glue that hold real artistic comunities together. They have been blogging long before a dumb person like me could do it and consistantly finding and supporting, often unknown artist's. The chances that this show is not worth seeing are less than zero.

the show opens tonight.Here's the dope from James Wagner's blog.

"Dangling Between The Real Thing And The Sign In The Window" finally opens on Friday [see the link to the left for the press release]. I expect so many gazillions of creative, smart, cute people to head for Dam, Stuhltrager that night that Barry and I will have to retreat to the garden for some air, where Susan Dessel's installation will remain through the run of the show inside. Loren Munk's work will be installed in the front room during the same month. If you can't make it on Friday, please stop in later in the weekend, or on any of the next four. The show closes on the 13th of November. After the opening reception the gallery will be open on Fridays from 3 until 8 and Saturdays and Sundays from noon until 6. You can also make an appointment.

Transportation Mess

Pittsburgh's transport woes grow.

Open Call for Craft Artist's

Pass this along.

Open Call to Crafters
Timeline:October 7: Printed announcements availableOctober 26 - November 3: Drop off workNovember 6 - 10: InstallationNovember 18, 2006: Opening receptionNovember 30 - December 3: Lawrenceville Cookie TourFebruary 3, 2007: Closing reception
Digging Pitt Gallery - Side I and Digging Pitt Too will house Bright and Shiny Holiday this year. We wanted to give you an early heads-up so that you have time to prepare. Above is a general timeline for the exhibit.
All mediums are welcome. Please be sure that your work is ready to hang, display or install. Work may be two- or three-dimensional. No limit to the number of pieces submitted, emphasis on cash-and-carry work. Work not to exceed 16" in any direction BUT SMALL ITEMS, APPROPRIATE FOR GIFTS, ARE PREFERRED. You might want to bring in a bunch of pieces!
Digging Pitt is recommending that your submissions fall within the $5-$30 price range, but some higher-priced items will be considered. Gallery commission rate is 30% of the selling price. Please be sure that your submissions are labeled with your name and the retail price. Please be sure that your work is sufficiently protected from damage. (wrapped, boxed, cushioned.) If possible, please bring an inventory sheet with you when you drop-off.
If DPG doesn't already have your current resume and bio please send it to the gallery along with your RSVP. If you have an updated version, please send it on! If possible, please send images of work that you are submitting to the gallery by September 29. We will post as many as we can on the DPG site. Please send images to diggingpittgallery@yahoo.com. Please size the images at 1600 width on the longest side in jpg or gif formats.
Printed announcements are ready. Please stop by the gallery and pick up a few to distribute to friends, family and passing strangers.
We begin installing on November 6. The 4th and 5th of November will be used to de-install the previous show and freshen the gallery. If you are available to lend a hand for the installation, DPG would really appreciate it. We would appreciate it. Really. A lot.
The opening reception is on November 18 and the closing reception is on February 3. As you can see, this is a long show. We hope to have additional events at the gallery during this exhibit. Digging Pitt will be part of the Cookie Tour this year. But if you have any grand ideas for events at the gallery, let us know.

Get Back in The Kitchen

I have a feeling that putting this thing out there, makes me some kind of politically correct activist. The blunt truth, is that the whole subject makes me ill. The only thing more sickening than endless tirades by woman artist's about thier treatment in the art world is seeing again and again that they are right. It will take a lot of flip flops to explain away this stink bomb. Thankfully some serious storm clouds are brewing out there. Having a small and very marginal gallery has made it murder on me to do any real outreach. I pretty much try to plan around the good artist's that aproach me and I have to admit that my gallery is not even close to being fully representative or diverse. But, these people have got some explaining to do.

Museum Of Contemporary Art Detroit

Speakingof Detroit; I have been trying to follow the cities long struggle to create a contemporary art museum. Detroit Arts has a great recent post on the subject which links to a long article. It now sure looks like it's now more than a wet dream-- the place will be known as MOCAD.
Detroit Arts, seems to have developed a srappy and dedicated following, judging from the active comments.

Here's the start of the article:

"A year ago, when word got out about seemingly legitimate plans for a new contemporary art institution in Detroit, the buzz was big in the creative community. Many were skeptical from the first word — people here are skeptical about "new" anything.
But in the ensuing months, the e-mails arrived, followed up by press releases. There were a few stories in local papers, and then the Web site launched. Weeks ago, colorful stickers and posters came in the mail. It still seems hard to believe, unless you've recently seen the space that's to be the home of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit ( MOCAD) on the corner of Woodward Avenue and Garfield Street. You probably haven't noticed the unremarkable building, but it's been there since the 1930s, when it was an auto dealership. Located in Midtown, near the Cultural Center, the museum will be a short walk south from the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit Public Library, Detroit Artists Market, and north from CPop Gallery and the Max M. Fisher Music Center, home of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

I have come across an impressive array of blogs and web projects in the Detroit area. Many of them are poignant efforts to document the lost memories of the city and also to develop a new virtual identity.