arcades project

ARCADES PROJECT

CALL FOR SMALL PRESS & INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS

CALL FOR ARTISTS

CALL FOR VENDORS

Deadline for applications: March 14th

What: Arcades Project is a curated event featuring artists, designers, and independent presses who are reconsidering the idea of text, writing, and the book. The event is part of Spring (W)rites, an annual literary festival in Ithaca, and is founded by visual and literary artists in Ithaca.

When: Friday 4pm-9pm Friday, May 6

as part of Spring (W)rites 2011

coinciding with Gallery Night (over 2,000 visitors)

Where: Ithaca, New York (The Commons)

Who: Arcades Project is looking for proposals from visual and literary artists to sell their wares, create installations/performances, screen videos, or conduct workshops. If you have any questions, please email emailarcadesproject@gmail.com

Call for Vendors: Vendors sell art objects, books, journals, zines, dvds, or games that are priced under $50. Visitors can purchase items and meet the authors/designers/artists behind the work.

Call for Artists: Artists are invited to propose installations, performances, or video screenings. Proposals should creatively explore the relationship between literary and visual arts, text and image, or art and shopping. Some financial support for materials will be provided.

Call for Workshops: Booth space is also available for informal workshops that introduce book arts related skills and discussion topics to visitors.

Application Fee: It is FREE to apply. Participating vendors will be charged a small ($25) fee to help cover the costs and secure your slot in Arcades Project.

Application deadline: March 14th

For more info contact: emailarcadesproject@gmail.com

Click here to download an application form

Accepted proposals notified by: March 23rd via email

Participation Fee is due by April 6^th

capital poetics

Mark your calendar for this tantalizing symposium on poetry and the economic turn, taking place on March 4th at Cornell.  Looks like one not to be missed.

Read more about the event here.

 

weather report

Well, so much for the warm weekend in Ithaca I blogged about earlier this week. Yesterday was rather nice, but this is what it looks like today.

This is actually a picture of Robert Andrade’s ruined state(s), in a snowstorm. I guess we’ll have to wait a bit longer to find out how the sculpture has weathered the winter so far.

banksy in the hood

Banksy’s documentary ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’ is up for best documentary at the Oscars next Sunday. Meanwhile, this week in LA, four new works of graffiti assumed to be the work of the elusive artist himself, have cropped up around the city.  Not surprisingly, the one pictured above was removed by authorities fairly soon after it went up.

You can view the other images – including Charlie Brown smoking a cigarette and about to set fire to a building – here on Banksy’s website.

The LA Times seemed to doubt the authenticity of the work, questioning whether Banksy would stoop to the level of engaging in a pre-Oscar publicity campaign. What? You mean Banksy creating subversive art stunts that draw attention to himself in the media? Nah, never.

roses are red

If you’re planning on heading downtown this weekend for the Chili Festival, make sure to pop into the CAP Artspace to check out Josh Sperling’s new show.

Sperling was recently selected as one of this year’s NYFA Mark artists representing Ithaca, and I am sure he is destined for a long and productive career.  I have been following his work since he first moved to Ithaca after finishing art school about four years ago, and I wrote about a show he had at Gimme! Coffee last March in The Ithaca Times, where I suggested that his work alludes to a kind of NeoModernism, drawing from the philosophical position in which art is considered to be an expression of the most sublime spiritual principles and interpretations of the universe and human existence, where reality is but a mirror of a deeper one that can only be reached through inspiration and imagination.

In his latest show, he presents three new paintings: Roses are red, Violets are blue, and Goldenrod is goldenrod. In these new pictures, he  continues to channel 1960s Minimalism and the possibilities offered through geometric abstraction, featuring brightly-colored geometric forms that have been enhanced through digital technology.

I have to say, each time I see this artist’s work, I find myself  imagining how it would look stenciled onto the side of an abandoned building, or placed outside in the landscape, like the kind of work highlighted in this article in January’s ARTnews.  Especially the big op-arty, shape canvases, like this one:

Anyway, if you’re not busy this Monday, Sperling will be giving an artist’s talk at 6:30pm at CAP Artspace, 171 The Commons. The show will be up until March, so there’s still plenty of time to check it out.

proto-pop

Today my review of the American Abstract Art show at the Johnson Museum was published  in the Ithaca Times.

As a result of yesterday’s news, I have been thinking a lot today about Jasper Johns, and consequently, his relationship to abstract art in America.  I will begin by admitting that I generally side with the camp that tends to view Johns’ art as embodying the manifestation of the avant-garde – the Duchampian legacy as it were – when art’s leading edge left Paris and came to NY after World War II.  And this is not just because Johns was more of a dandy, like Duchamp, as opposed to the hard-drinking hero-figures that characterized the New York School.  But, because his art most closely followed the true spirit of rebellion.  Like Duchamp, Johns was not afraid to challenge traditional aesthetic values, carrying on the defiant, inquisitive avant-garde ‘tradition,’ creating art that above all embodied content, while opposing established opinion or structure.  Was Flag a painting or a flag? Like Duchamp, Johns worked with form and content.

On the other hand, the Abstract Expressionists, who dominated the American art scene with their grand, sublime gestures favoring form over content,  followed in Surrealist fashion the automatic Zen move.  Placing total faith in abstraction’s abilities (as advocated by the modernist critic Clement  Greenberg) the New York School, working with copies of Zen Buddhism on their studio tables, used abstraction to preserve art’s autonomy against mass culture in a kind of ‘mute repudiation of capitalist values.’  The Duchampian model faced it head-on.

In American art, the post-war avant-garde is perhaps defined by this juxtaposition.  Duchamp, the fuel behind every distinct postwar shift in art from surrealism to postmodernism, directly confronted and challenged the maladies of Modernism.  Likewise, ‘Proto-Pop’ Johns (and Rauschenberg)  also followed an alternate path; remaining rebellious, and open to questioning established structure and opinion.  As a result, they were unaffected in a way their New York School contemporaries were not because of the limitations of the form of their expression.  Maybe Abstract Expressionism, in its arbitrary subjectivity, simply became too personal to be avant-garde, or to be useful for the future.

freedom medal

Today was an important day for the visual arts in America.  Props to Jasper Johns for being the first studio artist in 34 years to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Double props to Obama;  for being the third president, along with JFK and Gerald Ford, to give the award to a painter or sculptor, and for awarding it to Jasper Johns.

Watch the ceremony from earlier today on the White House website.

the state of ruined state(s)

Although it was hard to detect any sign of it this morning while driving to work, as the streets and facilities crew busied themselves with the removal of the ice mounds  aligning many of the streets downtown, they say a warm front is coming, with temperatures rising into the 50s and, perhaps, some say even into the 60s this weekend. While Ithacans rejoice, eager with anticipation to have some relief from the frigid temperatures of late, we at station923 are especially excited because it will be the first time in months that we will be able to see the state of Robert Andrade’s sculpture Ruined State(s), which has been covered in a blanket of snow on the front lawn for some time.

For those unaware, Ruined State(s) is a site-specific outdoor piece created by Cornell MFA student Robert Andrade in August 2010, consisting of five cement squares resembling a sidewalk, each square containing an imprint of a map depicting the ancient city of Rome. The piece is designed to weather, crack and become ruins. Maybe it already has, we’ll find out soon..

As part of the installation, Andrade created a scaled-down model of the work, which happens to be on view at the CSMA Gallery as part of their current exhibition.  Titled, Passages: in honor of Black History, the show features work by eight local artists of diverse backgrounds and artistic traditions, including Robert Andrade, Raymond Dalton, Suzanne Onodera, Terry Plater, Jay Potter, Lin Price, Richard Robinson, and Sharl Smith, who explore concerns such as art, identity and history.

For more information on Robert Andrade’s art, check out this interview I wrote for TheIthacaPost: Minimalist Departure, October 2010

media station egypt

Of all the images generated from the Egyptian Revolution, this is one of our faves.  Revolutionary media station!