Entries Tagged as 'St Louis'

Goodbye St Louis, Hello Providence

May 28th, 2007 · No Comments · Providence, St Louis

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Providence, RI [source]

My one-year position as visiting artist at Webster University in St Louis has come to a close and I’ve accepted a tenure-track position as a new media assistant professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island. We’ve never lived on the East coast and look forward to reporting on what we hear is a hopping art scene in Providence.

We’re leaving St Louis this week and will be in Dallas, Fort Worth and London in June and Athens and Tzia in July and August. In the fall, we’ll begin reporting from New England.

Slinger at Boots Contemporary Art Space

May 17th, 2007 · 1 Comment · Artists, St Louis

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[source]

A STL show not to miss: Slinger, at Boots Contemporary Art Space this Saturday (May 19, 2007, 6:30-10). Featuring work by: Brandon Anschultz, Robin Assner, Sarah Colby, Andrea Green, Ryan Hess, Jamie Kreher, Jason Wednesday Miller, Peter Pranschke, Bryan Reckamp, Tim Ridlen, Mike Schuh, stripper:pilot, Matthew Strauss, Brett Williams and Paul Zografakis.

Mike Schuh at Maps Contemporary Art Space (Grand Opening)

May 16th, 2007 · No Comments · Artists, St Louis

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Mike Schuh, I See What You’re Saying., 2007, video installation

Maps Contemporary Art Space opens its inaugural exhibition with I See What You’re Saying by St Louis artist Mike Schuh (on view through June 3, 2007). Maps is located in micro-sized storefront in downtown Belleville, Illinois, a sleepy suburb of St Louis best known for donuts and thrift stores. Maps meets these challenges with feisty curatorial vision.

In I See What You’re Saying, Mike Schuh assembles a group of loosely-crafted sculptures and videos that are designed to both kindle and hinder communication. The result is witty and flippant — very 90s Los Angeles.

Webster MA Exhibition: Patrick Hunt

May 6th, 2007 · No Comments · Artists, St Louis

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Patrick Hunt, Shady Acres, 2007, photography and video installation (overview)

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Patrick Hunt, Shady Acres, 2007, photography and video installation (inside detail)

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Patrick Hunt, Shady Acres, 2007, photography and video installation (inside detail)

One of my favorite art exhibition genres is the masters exhibition. With little to lose and everything to gain, masters candidates often fuel audience experiences with risk and spirit.

Patrick Hunt’s photography and video installation, Shady Acres, contains a fabricated room inside the gallery with windows to view gallery-wall mounted photographs. The images contain out of place suburban characters like a woman sitting before folded clothes like a monk at a shrine.

Although the “room inside a room” presentation strategy is highly in debt to Tobias Putrih (among others), and Hunt’s ambition gets the best of him by adding one element too many with an unnecessary video projection, this installation has a definite wow factor: spirit and heart in spades. If you live in St Louis, this is a must-see show.

Shady Acres is on view at The Cecile R. Hunt Gallery (I don’t think there is a relation) at Webster University until May 18, 2007.

Aspect Ratio at The Factory

May 2nd, 2007 · No Comments · Artists, St Louis

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Larry Robinson and Camillo Spiegelfeld, Untitled, 2007, video installation

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Nathan Janeczek, [title unavailable], 2007, video installation

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Patrick Hunt, In Between the Line, 2007, video still

Aspect Ratio, a one-night-only video exhibition at The Factory in St Louis, premiered new works from 5 emerging St Louis video artists: Trevor Fields, Patrick Hunt, Nathan Janeczek, Larry Robinson and Camillo Spiegelfeld. The exhibition was strong, and two works in particular were a delight:

In Larry Robinson and Camillo Spiegelfeld’s Untitled (2007), two videos simultaneously pan over a group of actors. With ambitious engineering panache and witty choreography, both video monitors move along a track in sync with the pan in the video.

Equally successful is Trevor Fields’ work in which a broken TV is placed on a stage like a Buddha statue. It only has the capacity to show a single horizontal row of bright pulsating light. Very Nam June Paik, yet defiantly contemporary.

Nikki S. Lee at SLAM

April 25th, 2007 · No Comments · Artists, St Louis

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Nikki S. Lee [source]

This Friday, Nikki S. Lee will be in St Louis to introduce her film a.k.a. Nikki S. Lee for the St Louis Art Museum’s series: Action/Reaction: Film and Video Artists Look at Their World.

“a.k.a. Nikki S. Lee,” 2006 (60 minutes)
Friday, April 27 at 7 p.m.
Auditorium
$5 ($3 Members)

Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis

January 12th, 2007 · No Comments · St Louis

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St Louis, host of the 1904 World Fair, created an impressive collection of architecture to capture the heart of the world and the spirit of America a century ago. One example is the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis, the world’s largest mosaic covering 83,000 square feet with 41.5 million pieces of glass tesserae. The mosaic was finished in 1988 and employs multiple artistic styles, the signature of a modern cathedral.

Modular: New Art from Los Angeles at White Flag Projects

January 11th, 2007 · 2 Comments · Artists, St Louis

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Nichole Van Beek, Aether Fucking Carbonated the Lattice Site Dude, 2006

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Louisa van Leer, Looking at You, Looking at Me, 2006

One surprise we had upon moving to St Louis from Los Angeles was meeting another recently transplanted Angeleno, Dana Turkovic, an independent curator who used to work at the Hammer. Dana has brought challenging and innovative new work to this city, and most recently, worked with Matthew Strauss at White Flag Projects to bring a taste of LA to St Louis in the just-opened exhibition, modular: New Art from Los Angeles.

This exhibition features six emerging LA artists — Hollis Cooper, Danny Jauregui, Nichole van Beek, Louisa Van Leer, Kevin Wingate, and Bari Ziperstein.

Dave Hickey once called Los Angeles the ultimate postmodern city. It’s diverse, all-inclusive, and tenuously connected with a gridwork of highways linking everything to everything; it’s a hyper-constructed, artificial, surreal, multi-lingual, multi-everything kind of place. For someone unfamiliar with it, modular captures a spirit that is reflective of the ethos of the city.

For the art community in St Louis, which is culturally sophisticated and savvy, although perhaps more accustomed to the polished exhibitions of area institutions like the Pulitzer Foundation, it’s a clear and well-presented introduction to the surprisingly loose and simultaneously tense aesthetic of contemporary Los Angeles. For example, Louisa Van Leer’s witty and culture-critiquing Looking at Me, Looking at You (2006), has torn scraps of blue masking tape with assembly directions stuck on most of its wood planes, and Hollis Cooper’s multi-layered piece, Parallax (2006), uses industrial PVC sheets as the surfaces of her site-specific painting.

If LA is indeed the frontrunner of emergent art, then modular at White Flag Projects is the place to see the kind of ebullient and gritty work that’s in the forecast for the near-future.

modular: New Art from Los Angeles runs through February 10.

Julius Popp at Kemper

December 22nd, 2006 · 1 Comment · Artists, St Louis

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Julius Popp, Bit.Fall, 2006 [source]

Wow. It’s been a long time since I walked into a gallery and just stood there looking in awe. What’s not exactly clear by the photo is that Popp has designed a water-dropping system that “prints” words, like a dot-matrix computer printer, in falling water. Allow me to repeat that: falling drops of water.

You hear the sound all over the museum of the water dropping — and that might be novel enough —but it’s hard to not drop your mouth when you start reading the water. This is no trick: a spectacle of engineering drops the water precisely as clear as the photo above. Breathtaking.

The words themselves are the most commonly used words on the internet, and they are arranged in no specific order. Why on earth would an artist labor so intensely to make such a beautiful and innovative engineering feat then use it to drive such a bland concept?

If you have nothing to say then quote a poet, politician or a manifesto you agree with. With this technology, one could easily create an animation, or possibly even a video image (perhaps impossible). The unused possibilities are as engaging as the craft behind the artwork.

Kemper Art Museum, Last Chance for Fall Exhibitions

December 21st, 2006 · No Comments · St Louis, Writing

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Julius Popp, Bit.Fall, 2006, currently on view at the Kemper Art Museum in Grid < > Matrix, [source]

If you haven’t yet been to the sublime new Kemper Art Museum, you better go now. The three blockbuster exhibitions which opened the museum this fall are closing on Dec. 31, and no one within a reasonable radius of St Louis should miss them: Grid < > Matrix, with the show-stopping Bit.Fall featured above, Models and Prototypes, with LA artist Mark Bennett’s magical blueprints of TV-land, along with Marcel Duchamp’s Pocket Chess Set, and Ed Ruscha’s classic Every Building on Sunset Strip; and Pure Invention: Tom Friedman, which is pure hide-and-seek whimsy.

Look for Murray’s contribution to the interactive matrix wall drawing in the main hallway. Hint: it’s much higher than 99% of the other drawings, and spills the secret of how he got so high up there in the first place.