March 02, 2006

Wall Snatcheroo

View this photo If “all art is mediated by values arising from its culture and from its immediate context" ( Dipeveen, 9), then what can I make of street art, pulled off the street and placed in a gutted Staples store in the heart of Georgetown?  I’m thrilled to see graffiti appreciated as an art form, but while I enjoyed the Wall Snatchers exhibit, I found myself disappointed, feeling like some of the pieces were incomplete or rushed.  Despite a few exceptions (Faile’s mural and everything Bask)  I felt unsatisfied, because the contex of the graffiti had been so disoriented.  I think this has a lot to do with graffiti being stripped of its usual street mystique, as graffiti tends to be strategically placed on interesting buildings or walls allowing previous layers of advertisements or the texture of a brick wall to interact with the tag or the mural.  By extracting these works from their usual environment they seemed shivering, naked. The space in which these works were presented also distorted their context.  By housing them temporarily in a gutted out Staples, I couldn’t help but notice a bit of residual corporate goo trickling into that which fight so hard to oppose any such institutional or corporate involvement.  Though the Washington Project for the Arts & Corcoran had good intentions for funding such a project, it inadvertently stripped the pieces of their allure, allowing the space in which the work was celebrated to unintentionally deride it.

09:19 PM in DC Area Art shmack | | Comments (0)

March 01, 2006

Gimme Fi5e

Within the first chapter of But is it Art, Cynthia Freeland refers to  Lucy Lippard's “three pronged” approach to analyzing Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ by considering it’s material properties, its content and its contextual qualities. I’m sure this is a basic model for critiquing art that she’s adopted.  I find Lippard’s approach particularly relevant to contemporary and postmodern art, as the context of these artworks is usually appropriated and reflects an increased complexity through its compilation of historical movements and references. Looking at  New York artist Fi5e’s Graffiti Analysis  as an example, first, I examine the material qualities of the piece.  Fi5e created a computer program which captures the strokes of a graffiti artist’s pen, translates the pen stroke into pixels, captures them in a computer and then projects them through a digital projector onto any surface. This allows the artist to tag any surface non-permanently, in any size, and any location.  This is in direct opposition of the typical permanence of graffiti’s spray paint to a building, car or wall. 

Graffiti has always been challenged as an art form because artists use it as a rebellious means of defacing property to express idealisms.   Fi5e’s projection allows graffiti to be stripped of this context.  Suddenly, a viewer is subject to a laser light show (of sorts) and can look beyond the negativity that is often attached to a work of graffiti.  The projection is temporary, inoffesive and transitory. Participants have the chance to appreciate the taxonomy, which (Fi5e did a separate brilliant piece on) and the semiotic value of a tag.  Fi5e’s projections nod toward the inevitability that media culture has on our lives, that we experience it and it experiences us. Oh, I could write endless media theory papers on this, but not now.  Finally, the content, the tags that are projected, are collaborative.  They’re not just Fi5e’s tag’s, Typically, though not always, graffiti has been an isolated art, refined to self-promotion of beliefs and style of the individual artist. Fi5e has even put a call on his website looking for more collaborators for this project.  Lippard’s 3-prongged styles is useful for getting really in-depth with any artwork, though I find it particularly useful for works such as Fi5e’s. In the future, when I visit openings, I’m going to jot down briefly in my notebook next to artist and works that I like: material, content, context. Then I’ll answer them as briefly but succinctly as possible. I think this should become a fine habit to get into for exploring and understanding any artwork.

12:45 PM in DC Area Art shmack, Internet Art (Avt 483 Blogpost) | | Comments (0)

February 20, 2006

Billy Colbert and his crew

I was fortunate enough to catch the opening night of Without Formula, a week long exhibit of 17 artists brought to DC from Cubicle 10, a gallery space in Baltimore owned by Ozlem and Billy Colbert. The space, a condo turned temporary art gallery, was ideal for displaying and viewing art, not to mention an ingenious plan on Colbert's for selling art and the Realtor's end for selling condos.

Cubicle 10 flyer

There was something about this collection of art work that maintained a consistent quality, energy, humor and diversity in medium and subject matter which made it hard for me to pull myself away. I spent a lot longer walking around this show than I'd anticipated. You know how you go to an art show and there's a general patchwork of blech and then you move to the next room and it's whoah holy shit ICK, blech. Well, there was like maybe two instances of that at this show for me.

Billy Colbert was definitely the star of the show in my eyes, as everything I absolutely loved was his work. Incidentally he curated the show. Here's a picture of Why the Hell is She Crying?, though it's not entirely accurate because there's a really cute squirrel that got cropped out of the right. You see, had to take a picture of Clay in front of it because he got hit in the head with a pipe at the Shaw metro and still came to the art show. He's a real trooper.

clay ouchie

I've been seeing Candace Keegan's art

candace keegan

around a lot. I noticed her work at ArtOMatic a couple years ago and I hated it because I thought a man did it. Then i realised she was a she and I loved that that was her point also, maybe its a slight play on her name, hence Candy , Candace...ah ah...yeah. She mostly paints woman eating candy in erotic way. They all seem to be of the same lady, who is not young, I'd guess around 35 or so. I'd like to say that I think the star of Keegan's paintings is a milf and I like them for that.

A lot of the art at this show has a sense of humor, which again, was a lot of its appeal. was satiracal or just plain cute., for instance, Trish Tillman who's wok is always evolving and I love it for that, had a few small canvases with Shel Silverstien characters printed on them, I'm not sure if they were painted or pigment prints like the other pieces she had up, but they were totally fun and made me smile. These characters were isolated on a very simple color plane, in comical action poses, with glass bubbled placed as highlights, one might even call them teardrops. Trish referred to them "a bit emo" as do convey a sweet and simple sensitivity.

Bridgett Sue Lambert's pigment prints of generic toys in confrontational situations captured the raw essence of human interaction in a very haunting and satirical fashion. The isolation of the situation in the frame combined with the simplicity of the toys and interaction between them made the scenarios seem comical, yet alienating.

Jefferson Pinder's The Truth about Light and Carwash can be viewed here.

carwash still

I don't need to tell you that these were the joint. U can c 4 ur self.

10:40 PM in DC Area Art shmack | | Comments (2)