FIrst Friday Happenings for November 7, 2014

Locks Gallery
600 Washington Square South
Philadelphia, PA 19106
215-629-1000

Thomas Chimes The Body in Spirals

Reception: Friday, November 7, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm
Exhibition: November 7 - December 13, 2014

Conversation: Saturday, November 15th, conversation between Hood Museum Director Michael R. Taylor and Philadelphia Museum of Art Curator Matthew Affron.

The Body in Spirals focusing on the explorations of geometry, alchemy, physics, and metals within the career of Thomas Chimes. While much of Chimes’s work is deeply indebted to literature, each body of work (his metal and plexi box constructions, drawings, and later white paintings) maintained structured systems that dictated the composition—a process-based manifestation of the classicist and symbolist ideals in his work.

More info...

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Pentimenti Gallery

145 N. Second Street 

Philadelphia, PA

215.625.9990

Vector Forms - Tim Eads

Opening Reception: Friday, November 7 from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Exhibition: November 7 - December 15, 2014 

Vector Forms features up ten wall pieces, free-standing sculptural pieces, and an installation in the Project Room. The works on display share a digital aesthetic, viewable in the sharp, minimal use of line and geometry, and bright artificial color. Yet they retain a whimsical quality, typical of Eads, which permits a more complex relationship with the otherwise simple materials. Plastic becomes playful, metal becomes mystical, and patterns puzzle the eyes.

More info...

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NAPOLEON

319 N. 11th Street

Philadelphia, PA

On This Site: A New Project By Napoleon Member Lewis Colburn

Reception: Friday, November 7, from 6:00 to 10:00 pm

Exhibition: November 7 - November 25, 2014 

On This SIte: A New Project By Napoleon Member Lewis Colburn

A historical marker sprouts out of the pavement like a bright-colored non sequitur: something happened here, but it clearly isn’t happening now. On This Site proposes a different kind of marker, the placement of which is itself an historic event.

More info...

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Practice

319 N 11th Street, 2
Philadelphia, PA

Dinosaur! Practice's 3rd Annual animal-based fundraiser

Reception: Friday, November 7, from 6:00 to 10:00 pm

Exhibition: November 7 - November 22, 2014 

Dinosaurs make terrible lizards but great art. This November dino-based artworks will cover the walls of PRACTICE and you are invited to view and buy them. DINOSAUR!, is a fundraiser, the sale of each work will be put back into PRACTICE, directly recycled as the resources to continue putting on exhibitions. Hold onto your butts (deals!) because no dino will be priced over $200 and some may be as affordable as $20 (super deals!).

Artworks will be sold directly off the walls and disappear forever into someone’s private collection. Persons wishing to purchase a dinosaur should get to Practice early in order to assure the procurement of their top choice. 

Over 45 artists have agreed to support PRACTICE with a dinosaur, each of these artists is an amazing and generous individual MANY artist are UArts faculty, alum and students.

More info...

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Vox Populi Gallery

319 N. 11th Street

Philadelphia, PA

Shift Your Weight

Reception: Friday, November 7, from 6:00 to 10:00 pm

Exhibition: November 7 - November 25, 2014 

Shift Your Weight represents fresh perspectives from six established voices in the Philadelphia art community. Stephanie Bursese, who most recently served Vox as Interim Director, is a celebrated photographer and educator originally hailing from upstate New York. Bursese creates sophisticated and mysterious printed matter in both books and installations exploring the liminality of what is visible and controlled.

More info...

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Fourth Wall

Motherism - Lise Haller Baggesen

Reception: Friday, November 7, from 6:00 to 10:00 pm

Exhibition: November 7 - November 30, 2014 

At the intersection of feminism, science fiction and disco “Mothernism” aims to locate the mother-shaped hole in contemporary art and discourse. The central hypothesis being examined is if the proverbial Mother is perhaps perceived as a persona non grata in the art world, because her nurturing nature is at odds with the hyperbolic ideas of the singular artistic genious. Mothernism operates as a practice-based approach to critical research, and engages what can be dubbed “confluences of influences”: seeking to eke out information not solely from primary sources, but more importantly from their non-obvious interconnectedness.

More info...

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PMA Craft Show

Pennsylvania Convention Center

12th and Arch Streets

Philadelphia, PA

Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show

Exhibition: November 5 - November 9, 2014 

Outstanding work will again be offered by students and recent alumni from The University of the Arts.

The highly competitive jury process draws artists from Maine to California, carefully selected from more than 1,000 applicants. Craft Show artists present a striking variety of museum-quality work in glass, ceramics, wood, basketry, both wearable and decorative fibers, metal, paper, leather and mixed media, as well as one-of-a-kind handmade furniture and both precious and semi-precious jewelry.

More info...

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CRUX space

700 w Master Street

Philadelphia, PA 19122

PeevesPlayHAUS

Opening Reception:  Friday, November 7, 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm

MartinPeeves is the critical mass of New Media. MP sought out new media to embrace new forms of artistic expression. Pushing the limits of what can be accomplished artistically with consumer technology and moving toward a reduction in the use of physical matter over digital mediums to produce art. “Create everything from thin air.” or “Slip it all into your pocket and walk away.” The artist suggests trying out what can be created with the phone in your pocket, before picking up a paint brush. PeevesPlayHAUS, the artists first solo exhibition of his work, serves to passionately to promote the New Media genre. Grinding against the puzzle: How do you own the work of an artist working in new media?

More info...http://cruxspace.com/martin-peeves-playhaus/

Mickalene Thomas// BeautifulDecay

Messing Up Ideas Of Beauty: The Queen Of Afro-Kitsch, Mickalene Thomas Challenges Us All

October 9, 2014 by Genista

 

Mickalene Thomas arranges collages, stages photographs, places rhinestones, directs art films and layers up oil and acrylic paint, all in the name of beauty and feminism. Her glittering artworks are a homage to black culture, cubism, portraiture, ideas of the still life and what it is to be a woman. Initially inviting women into her studio and coercing an energy out of them, she aims to represent these ladies as “beautiful, sexual, desirable, stylish and fierce”. (Source) Thomas says she, as well as other black women have had to consider this question of beauty often:

Beauty has always been an element of discussion for black women, whether or not we were the ones having the conversation. We’ve had to contend with the element of our hair. Beauty pros and cons have changed the world of how we perceive each other. Some people go to great lengths to bleach themselves to conform to the norm, the whiteness, and all the complexities. (Source)

Thomas’ artwork is an exploration of how one presents themselves – the images we create of ourselves, how we chop and change our appearance, and why. She has been involved in a couple of different projects lately as well. Including designing pop star Solange Knowles’ EP cover and airing her directorial debut on HBO called “Happy Birthday To A Beautiful Woman” earlier this year. This art film is a kind of love letter to her mother – and an extension of her research into women and their identity. While her work is undeniably beautiful and luscious on the surface, she is concerned more with what that exterior is hiding. Thomas says:

I am drawn to objects and people that have undergone some kind of a hardship. They are beautiful and there is an artifice to them, but if you dig deeper, there’s another layer. (Source)

Here is an amazing collection of openings are happening for this coming First Friday, October 3rd, 2014. Don't stay home...go out and live in the art scene!

CRUXspace
700 W. Master Street Philadelphia, PA


Opening Reception: Friday, October 3 @ 6:00 pm - 10:00 pm

CRUX space, Philadelphia’s only New Media Art gallery will open its doors on October 3rd. Founded by Andrew Cameron Zahn (UArts MFA '13), CRUX space is not only a gallery space with work influenced by and created with technology, but a space for experimental projects to be born. Philadelphia’s only space dedicated to the vast field of technological art and design opens its doors. Featuring monthly shows, CRUX will have an ongoing lineup of the best in New Media art and design. This exhibition investigates the good and the troublesome, with suggestions towards how we can design our technologies for a better future.

more info...



NAPOLEON



319 N 11th Street, 2L
Philadelphia, PA

Holding Our Own - H. John Thompson
Opening Reception: Friday, October 3 @ 6 pm - 10 pm
Exhibition: October 3 - October 30, 2014

Linking the enigmatic accounts of an airline hijacker known under the alias “D.B. Cooper” and the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, Holding Our Own cites incidents of evasion and distress while contemplating a manhunt and a rescue search from unverifiable points-of-view.

more info...

Practice319 N 11th Street, 2 fl.
Philadelphia, PA

Long Hidden Friend - Nick Lenker 
Opening Reception: Friday, October 3 @ 6 pm - 10 pm
Exhibition: October 3 - November 1, 2014

Nick Lenker and PRACTICE invite you to interpret a video installation best seen after a long, cold winter, in which 3 people died, 2 by their own hand, 1 by yours, 2 were friends, the other a stranger.  Nick Lenker’s new work borrows its title from the 1820 book The Long-Lost Friend, a collection of herbal formulas and magical prayers gathered by John George Hohman, a Pennsylvania Dutch healer. . Shrouded in mystery, Lenker’s work never tells all the answers but provides a tantalizing puzzle for viewers to interpret.

more info...

Vox Populi Gallery
319 N 11th Street, 3L

Philadelphia, PA

Opening Reception: Friday, October 3 @ 6 pm - 10 pm

Beat Your Alter - Mark Stockton 

Beat Your Altar is a drawing-based installation that continues to build on my interest in individualism. Stockton creates a visually inverted space in which preliminary sketches have been scaled to the size of the gallery walls, and the final rendered drawings are small enough to collapse within a pedestal in the center of the gallery. Subjectively, this group of work is random and non-contiguous. It absorbs a myriad of subjects that have randomly entered my sphere of interest and influence. Personal connections are embedded but not important. The work defies genre; it spans portraiture, still life, abstraction and landscape.

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Axon Ladder - Catherine Pancake
In Axon Ladder, the dancer’s cinematic body is both conceptual and experiential. The piece changes the relational framework of Foley’s choreography by dividing up the perceived and idiosyncratic ends of a given movement. In so doing, it changes how the movement is read as material and its incremental parts and overall “shape.” One might ask how choreographic shape and definition function in this “outer” space where the body is weighted and weightless. The dance piece becomes a functional visual motion study as well as aesthetic material.

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Dream House - Erin Murray, Edward Murray
This exhibition, Dream House, is a way to bring limited realization to this alternate timeline
for our family. In a way, it is a gift to the architect. A way to engage and remember, to heal
and maintain. An excuse to trespass together. In another way, a man’s soul is revealed;
the unrealized plans themselves evidence of a life gone off track. The naive romanticism
and naked symbolism, both embarrasses and endears. In fact, the show reveals more than
a little of myself; my interest in the embodied information of the built environment, a
tendency toward anthropomorphization and melodrama in my work, and my own home’s
outsized status in my life.


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Hyperpyrexic - Alexander Rosenberg
Alexander Rosenberg is a Philadelphia-based artist and educator. He received a BFA in glass from Rhode Island School of Design and Master of Science in Visual Studies from MIT. His artistic practice is rooted in the study of glass as a material, in conjunction with broad interdisciplinary investigation crossing over into many other media and areas of research.

more info...

Pentimenti Gallery
145 N. Second Street
Philadelphia, PA215.625.9990

Complementary Colors  - Peter Combe, Alexis Grantwell, Clint Jukkala, Donald Martiny
Opening Reception: Friday, October 3 @ 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Complementary Colors make a strange pair. They are opposite, yet they require each other. They incite each other to maximum vividness when together; and annihilate each other when mixed.  Complementary Colors  will display the works of four artists exploring their own individual interpretation of complementary colors and what the phrase means to them.

more info...

PAFA Presents Eiko: A Body in Places
30th Street Station / Main Waiting Room
Philadelphia, PA

Eiko: A Body in Places
Performance: Friday, October 3 @ 12:00 am - 3:00 pm - Free

A four-part series of three-hour performances conceived and performed by Eiko, A Body in a Station will take place in two waiting terminals of Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, on October 3, 10, 17, and 24, 2014. “I am scared but excited about performing alone for as many as twelve hours at a train station. I have never dreamt of being a soloist before,” says Eiko. “I saw that people at 30th Street Station are alone, going somewhere or waiting to go somewhere. Many are busy with cell phones. Sitting in the train station, I had an epiphany. I want to perform here alone. I want to exchange a gaze with viewers. A simple set. An odd, but beautiful costume. A body and mind very exposed…I want to embody the sense of nakedness, feebleness of a human and the solitude of an artist.”

more info...

Muse Gallery
52 North Second Street
Old City, Philadelphia 19106
215. 627. 5310

In Reverse - Terri Fridkin
Opening Reception: Friday, October 3 @ 5:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Muse Gallery will feature “In Reverse”, an exhibit of works by Terri Fridkin.  The foundation of Terri’s  hand-pulled prints are structure, pattern, line and color.  They are simple yet complex, bold yet subtle and resist a specific meaning. Terri Fridkin is a printmker/mixed media artist who lives and works in the philadelphia area. This fueled her lifelong passion for art.
more info...

Locks Gallery
600 Washington Square South
Philadelphia, PA 19106
215-629-1000

Allusion - John Moore  
Opening Reception: Friday, October 3 @ 5:  - 7:30 pm
Exhibition: October 3 - Nov 8, 2014

Moore’s masterful paintings edge on acute realism but seldom reveal what is actually there. Collecting fleeting moments of ephemeral lighting, or taking disparate elements of different views to make one place, Moore weaves his observed perspectives into psychologically charged scenes. Through the work, he both examines and elevates his historic and post-industrial surroundings where his studio is located in Frankford, Philadelphia. Here, Moore offers a contemporary perspective in dialogue with the legacy of early 20th century American precisionist painting. Now a city deeply in flux, Moore embodies the current transformation of Philadelphia in his reimagined scenes that depict both urban ruin and a transcendent beauty.

more info...

First Thursday Happenings for Thursday, October 2, 2014

Fabric Workshop Museum1214 Arch Street / Seventh Floor

Philadelphia, PA 19107 215.561.8888


Mother and Child Reunion - Kazumi Tanaka  

Opening Reception: Thursday, October 2, 2014 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm

Exhibition: August 1, 2014–November 9, 2014 

This exhibition presents an accumulation of memories, customs, and traditional Japanese fabric processes that tells a story of family, tradition, and one’s self. Kazumi Tanaka is known for creating detailed and finely-crafted objects using a variety of materials such as wood, hair, metal, and Japanese fabrics. Recently, the artist produced a series of miniature Tansu (traditional Japanese storage cabinets) inspired by her memories of her childhood in Japan. The initial idea for her project at FWM was to examine what is typically put into and taken out of these bureaus. However, as Tanaka states in her exhibition journal Mother and Child Reunion, “When I am looking for something, often I find something else along the way. It catches my attention completely and I forget what I was originally looking for. Ultimately, this discovery leads me to find what I am really looking for…”
http://www.fabricworkshopandmuseum.org/Exhibitions/ExhibitionDetail.aspx?

more info...

Fleisher/Ollman
1616 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA

Anthony Campuzano: Slow Movies and Mark Mahosky: Paper View 
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 2 @ 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Exhibiton: September 26th - November 15th, 2014

Two exhibitions opening this fall at Fleisher/Ollman explore the printed word from different vantage points. In Paper View, Mark Mahosky paints over newspaper pages, creating abstract compositions that evoke the evolution of abstraction in the early 20th century. For Slow Movies, Anthony Campuzano appropriates texts and images from popular culture, transposing them into handmade advertisements that proclaim his love of particular subjects, in this case, Hollywood film. Reception: Thursday, October 2, 6-8pm Exhibition dates: September 26 – November 15, 2014.

more info...

ICA features UArts Alumni Collaboration

Institute of Contemporary Art
118 S. 36th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-3289
215.898.7108


Alex Da Corte and Jayson Musson: Easternsports
Opening Reception: September 19 - 6:30pm - 9:00pm
Exhibition: September 19-December 28, 2014

Longtime friends and first-time collaborators Alex Da Corte (BFA '04 Printmaking) and Jayson Musson, aka Hennessy Youngman, (BFA '02 Photography) create a major new commission for ICA. Featuring lesser-known strengths in their practices—video for Da Corte and language for Musson—Easternsports is a four-channel, multilingual soap opera starring the artists, both of whom have deep Philadelphia roots. A vignette-driven update of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town—equal parts Peter Greenaway and Jim Henson, David Lynch and Duck Amuck—the work will be presented as an in-the-round video installation.

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Moyra Davey: Burn the Diaries
Opening Reception: September 19 - 6:30pm - 9:00pm
Exhibition: September 19-December 28, 2014

ICA presents a new body of work by Moyra Davey based on the artist’s recent reading of Jean Genet. The act of reading has long been integral to Davey’s work, which is full of images of books; however this is the first time Davey has ever made a book specifically for a gallery installation. Her art interprets and critiques her own experience as an artist through a generous frame of literary, philosophical, and cultural references, drawing as well on objects, memories, and even dust.

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Dear Nemesis, Nicole Eisenman 1993–2013

Opening Reception: September 19 - 6:30pm - 9:00pm
Exhibition: September 19-December 28, 2014

Dear Nemesis, Nicole Eisenman 1993–2013 is the most expansive mid-career survey of this major American artist to date. Over 120 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures represent Eisenman’s sprawling 20-year output. A painter consistently drawn to figures and faces, Eisenman’s canvases overflow with pathos and humor, tenderness and violence. An early focus on drawing, evident in murals and installations, evolved into large, narrative paintings clustered with bodies—and heads. Eisenman’s queer and feminist work often repositions historical works of art. We see Gaugin, Picasso, and Manet’s greatest hits recast as bitingly political and deeply intimate subjects, reanimating the radicality of these art historical works.

more info

Art + Food Event at Moore College of Art

Do It Event!

The Galleries At Moore
Moore College of Art
20th Street and The Parkway Philadelphia, PA 
215.965.4027

Thursday, September 18, 2014
Opening Reception: Free 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm

DO IT: Rirkrit Tiravanija and Relational AestheticsAn evening of social relations through food and conversation as we (re)create Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled (1994) – a written instruction for the preparation of Thai green curry paste –and discuss the ideas, implications and debates surrounding relational aesthetics and the social context of art.more info

More Art Events This Week

The Galleries At Moore

Moore College of Art

20th Street and The Parkway

Philadelphia, PA 

215.965.4027

Friday, September 13, 2014

Opening Reception: Free 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Do It

What would happen if an exhibition never stopped? This is precisely what artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier, and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, asked themselves in a Paris café in 1993. To test the idea, they invited twelve artists to propose artworks based on written instructions that can be openly interpreted every time they are presented. Since then, hundreds of artists have been invited to submit instructions, and versions of do it have been presented in over fifty venues worldwide, giving new meaning to the concept of the “exhibition in progress.”  

For The Galleries’ presentation of do it, over seventy of these artist instructions will be interpreted by Philadelphia-based artists, performers and the public, resulting in installations, objects and performances that range from the sculptural to the performative, the poetic to the absurd. 

more info

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Philadelphia Museum of Art

2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway

Philadelphia, PA

215.763.8100 

Saturday, September 13, 2014

Exhibition Opening: September 13, 2014 - November 30, 2104

Full Circle: Works On Paper Richard Pousette-Dart

Full Circle surveys the long and extremely prolific career of one of the twentieth century’s most creative draftsmen, Richard Pousette-Dart (American, 1916–1992). Focused on his works on paper, the exhibition explores his remarkably varied use of materials and techniques, which often involved layering and scraping, scribbling and dripping, dotting and blotting. Over the course of nearly seventy years, his imagery evolved through various approaches in an attempt “to express the spiritual nature of the universe.” In the 1940s and 1950s, Pousette-Dart was associated with Abstract Expressionists like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell, artists with whom he exhibited in New York galleries. 

more info

Second Thursday Events for September 11, 2014

Second Thursdays are bonus art openings and events that occur every second Thursday of the month. Here are a few new happenings in Philly.


University of the Arts

The President's Office

Hamilton Hall

Thursday, September 11, 2014

CLOSING RECEPTION: Free 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Intrusive Thoughts 

Kristine Strawser

When faculty member/alum Kris Strawser MFA ’12 (Studio Art) is making what she considers higher-minded artwork, other primitive tendencies find her again and gnaw their way through layers of better intentions. Her higher self uses materials that are often ready made, a bit more elegant, loaded with metaphor she hears like a dog whistle. By contrast, the unruly work in “Intrusive Thoughts” is a compact with her political self—and comprises silent mutterings and cartoon retorts—aimed at various news outlets. It’s a world of play and free association and desires that won’t be met—a collage with news, an old obsession. For this brand of stunted and indirect commentary, there’s a constant supply of material.

more info

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Crane Arts / The Hall

1400 North American Street / 1st Floor

Philadelphia, PA

215.646.4302

Thursday, September 11, 2014

OPENING RECEPTION: Free 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Exhibition: September 11 – November 7, 2014

Cut & Paste: New Mixed Media and Digital Collages

Jen McCleary

A solo exhibition by Jen McCleary. This show presents her digital and mixed-media work, which explores the connections between these two very different ways of creating layered collage images. Her images are inspired by scientific imagery, dreamlike imagined landscapes, dualities such as light/dark, complexity/simplicity, and the obvious beauty of nature and the sometimes hidden beauty of urban decay.

more info

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Philadelphia Art Alliance

251 S. 18th Street

Philadelphia, PA

215.646.4302

Thursday, September 11, 2014

OPENING RECEPTION: Free 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Fifth Wall: Christina P. DayInspired by the phrase, "fifth wall," used by the interiors industry to describe the concealment of an overhead floor that creates a truly closed space, Day’s exhibition considers spatial inversions of surface and place. Ranging from object-based sculpture to site-specific architectural installation, common interior surfaces and materials are re-assigned to associate with unlikely forms and objects. 

An Edifice Spectrum: Lauren Dombrowiak 

Heavily influenced by Victorian decorative motifs found in the home, Dombrowiak creates entire environments that include tower-like sculptural forms crated out of dinnerware and other household objects such as mirrors and wood furnishings.

Erotic Alchemy: Heather Ujiie
Textile artist and designer Heather Ujiie incorporates many techniques--including hand painting, drawing, stitching, and printing with innovative large-format digital printing technology--to create an immersive Utopia that she describes as “ a celebration of the unconscious.” 

more info

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