Art Intersection: Silent Auction

I attended Art Intersection (again!) two weeks ago and they finally have their new show up featuring work from local artists who contributed to their annual silent auction! There are prints from renowned photographers, as well as ASU students. I encourage everyone to check it out! You can bid on any piece, and their is something for every kind of budget. I have not bid yet, but I'm thinking about it...you never know if you will be the highest bidder, so it's worth a shot! It is a great opportunity to get original fine art.

Along with the donated pieces, there are several pieces on display from Mark and France Scully Ostermans new series, Light at Lacock: Sun Sketches at the Twilight of Photography. The entire exhibit can be seen at the Tilt Gallery in Phoenix, but there is a nice handful of prints at Art Intersection as well. The Osterman's travelled to Lacock Abbey in England, the birthplace of photography where William Henry Fox Talbot created his earliest camera designs and invented the process known as photogenic drawings. The Ostermans used hand made cameras, like Talbots, to create a collection of paper negatives depicting the surrounding areas that Talbot worked with. It is a great series, and I highly encourage every one to go see it!

This past week I went to the showing in the Step Gallery. It was prints all about wood. It was really cool because the artist had several different kinds of pieces in his show. He had pieces about how things the wood piecesfall apart and how things are connected. It was very cool how he showed his subjects disintegrating and some looked like they were almost exploding. It was very cool to think about the different ways things break and come apart. I also found very interesting some of the ways he grouped things together.

Exploding Geometry

On my most recent trip to the Phoenix Art Museum, I took the time to wander the entirety of its halls looking upon all of the works contained there. The piece that stuck with me the most was the large scale cube made up of charred bits of wood by Cornelia Parker. What was interesting about the piece was that the wood used was charred by a fire started by a lightning strike.

I also found the painting “Flower Garden” by Louis Ritman to be very intriguing. A very expressionist way to portray the flowers and foliage while a very impressionistic rendition of the woman.

There were a few other pieces that I found interesting, though I didn’t take the time to jot down the name of whom they were by or their title, but I have included pictures of the paintings in question.

 

-Ian Turk

Trip tp ASU Museum

Headed out to the ASU Museum this week. Its been awhile since I had last gone and there was plenty to see. But the main gallery I always like to go to is the faces wall, which I thought would always remain but to my surprise had change. A bit miffed I couldnt see my favorite Tamayo "Fumador" and O'Keefe "Blue Cow Skull", I quickly got over it when I saw this particular piece Titled "The Last Dance" by Dennis Oppenheim.

Its not hard to miss, this large suspended piece hangs to the side of the large gallery, and it SPINS! Making the two humanoid Cactus characters dance in the air. The box object on the side at the floor is playing some old time swing music which is what first grabs your attention before you enter the gallery. All in all, I loved it. Nothing over the top, aside from the consideration of man hours and muscle it took to make this, just a fun sculpture that made me smile.

I highly recommend other to see this before its gone.

- Tina O.

p.s: Has anyone met El Diablo? Currently located in the heart of the 2nd floor in the ASU Museum. Its a Huge Boa Constrictor or Python (not fully sure) in a insulated glass habitat. At first I believed it was fake, until I read his little passage. Plus when I got a bit too close and Diablo made me jump when he began to uncoil himself and stare right at me. Not able to take a photo though, Museum staff were keeping a close eye on him. He's part of the newly commisioned exhibit.

-Make sure to stop by and see him too!

Lucid State

Last week I visited the Harry Wood Gallery and saw the Lucid State Exhibition showcasing the work of Brett Schieszer. The main focus of his show draws upon a German area of scientific research called Umwelten. This area of study is mainly concerned with environments and the thought that although we all share the same environment we all look at the world and see things in a different way by creating our own perceptions and realities in life. I loved every piece in this exhibition and found the organic shapes in the drawings and prints to be very elegant. Every one seems to be a setting or background image of some kind of imaginary place, and the changing color schemes from each print can easily represent how people can look at the same environment in a different way.

Water Log Exhibition

Yesterday, I visited the Harry Wood Gallery and got to observe the Water Log exhibit. This exhibit was not focused specifically on artworks. The exhibit was focused on water caches and the roles they play in Arizona. The exhibit encouraged people to go out and search for water caches and participate in some kind of activity that is provided at each cache. I learned that there are three categories of caches: informational, activity, and story/narrative. I like the narrative caches the best because the caches themselves are artistically decorated in some way to catch people's eyes. At the exhibit, one thing I thought was rather cool was that the floor had lines of tape extending everywhere. At first, I was a bit confused as to why they were there, but then I realized that the taped lines matched the water log system. Although it was a map, I like how it took on an artistic feel. Overall, I thought the exhibit was pretty cool. I like that it wasn't just focused on interaction within the exhibit, but rather outside the exhibit and around Arizona.

Traversing the Lethe

Last week I went to Traversing the Lethe, an mfa thesis exhibition by Kathleen Scott Moore. This show was about the link between memory and mortality. In her statement, Kathleen talked about an African belief that there are two stages of death: first, when one physically dies and leaves behind their life on earth, and second, when everyone who remembers you has passed on. She showed this by turning the gallery into a hallway with a line of portraits across the walls on both sides. As you went down the hallway, the pictures progressively got more blurry and out of focus, and the wallpaper became more and more overgrown with plantlife. The wall at the end of the hallway was completely overgrown, and had a single picture of a floral pattern. I found the exhibition to be very interesting and well-done, and I liked the nostalgic and vaguely creepy kind of feeling it gave off.

Spinal Tap

Spinal Tap, at the Harry Wood Gallery, was an incredible exhibit. There were so many unique pieces. I absolutely fell in love with the paper tree. The amazing intracacies and details of each piece amazed me. The piece with the hand coming out of the book was also one of my favorites, not only because of the details, but the messages it sends. Books can grab you and suck you in, and being a reader, I connected with this piece. The brain piece was also really cool.

So I also went to the ABBA show in the Harry Wood Gallery. One of the reasons I really wanted to see this show is because I love books. I was very interested in seeing how the different artists approached this medium. I loved the variety of things I saw there. I think it is absolutely amazing the things artists can do with this medium. I loved all of the creative things that people came up with. One of my favorite pieces was the book with the exposed spine and the skeletal hand. I loved the fact that the artist created an actual spine to expose. I thought it was extremely clever.

ABBA's Spinal Tap Exhibit

Got a chance to check out the new ABBA Spinal Tap exhibit over at the Harry Wood gallery this week. There were loads of interesting and unique pieces all interconnected with one common item, a book. Or in some of the rare few the importance held within simple text (writting) (i.e. the hanging mobile with quotes.)

Anyways, since there are too many to list I'm sticking to one particular piece that has held my interest and that is one by artist Taryn Wiens. Her piece Home as an object to be treasured, Purposefully Disregarded, Missed and Recreated is both interesting and mesmerizing. At first I thought how clever, a shadow box of sorts to hold not only your book but also such random objects that can only keep a viewer guessing on their significance.

Either way, whatever the viewer can see or take away from this piece I'm sure it will remain memorable.

-Tina O.

This week I went to the Harry Wood Gallery again to see the "Spinal Tap" exhibit. Some pieces were a part of a silent auction, where I got to see one of my teacher's ink print. Some of my favorite pieces there were artists books, or paper cutouts that resembled books. These really show the skill and thought that it takes to make something like this.. It's incredible how far someone can push a creative thought! Another piece that stood out to me consisted of butcher paper taped to the wall, with colorful lines of paint run across it. Next to the paper was a pair of roller skates and a video showing the artist skating over the paper. I just thought that this was great. Creating a pattern by something we do in our lives is simple, and yet a beautiful idea.

Northlight: Photography in The Expanded Field

The current exhibition in the ASU Northlight gallery is a great collection of pieces that push the boundaries of photography. Curated by Josh White (an ASU photography grad student), the exhibit features some sculptural pieces that incorporate photography into the medium used to create the work. Rather than have every piece physically use photography, some artists chose to represent the preservation of a single moment, much like a photograph does, which in turn creates a correlation between it and the idea of photography.

One of the reasons I loved this show was the various alternative processes used in several of the pieces. There was one specific piece that used cyanotypes that was very well made, and since I've been experiencing with this process, I can appreciate how hard the artist must have worked.

Everyone should go check out the show before they take it down!!!

Spinal Tap

I went to the Harry Wood Gallery to see the Spinal Tap exhibition because I was interested in seeing more artwork made from already existing books, and I noticed that Hally had a piece in the exhibit too that I thought was really cool. Books are very special and meaningful to me and I really enjoyed seeing other artists re-invent books to showcase a certain story or feeling they have towards them.

Spinal Tap

This week, I went to the Spinal Tap exhibition, which was held at the Harry Wood Gallery.

This exhibition was sort of important for me because I recently joined the ABBA club and I did a collaborative piece with a friend of mine and was able to submit it into this exhibit. This is my first public piece and I was a bit nervous. I would like to say that I wish I had more time on my piece since there were a few problems I had with it and would have like to fix it. Overall, the process of making it, submitting it, and seeing it displayed in public has taught me some important lessons. It's been quite the learning experience for me.

Anyway, I found the exhibit to be really interesting. It contained many different styled works, all playing with the idea of books as a sculptural form. There were a few works that caught my eye. One being "Feed the Meter" by Jacob A. Meders. I found it to be visually appealing and the concept was comical to me. I love the choice of books he used as part of the piece, like Giant Book of Dirty Jokes, Honor Among Thieves, and Original Sin. I feel that there is a common link between all of them and the fact that there is a meter glued on top and that it is titled "Feed the Meter" suggests that there is an unspoken message behind the piece.

Another piece I enjoyed was "Fortune Cookies" by Roison Rubio. The humor really appealed to me. Each fortune cookie box had the words "For control freaks," "For pessimists," "For the blind" and so on printed on the front. In front of each box were a couple of fortune cookies with the fortunes rolled out so people could read them. The messages would in some way correspond with what a control freak, or a pessimist, or etc would feel or say. For example, for the control freak box, there was a fortune that said, "I can't control what goes on outside, but I can control what goes on inside." I especially liked the one for the blind. The fortunes were in braille.