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/

First Friday

First Friday Gallery Openings

Every first Friday of the month art galleries are open to the public in Philadelphia. It’s a free must-see cultural art experience for students to engage with the contemporary art scene. Here’s a listing of some
recommendations for current First Friday galleries for Friday, September 5^th.


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Pentimenti Gallery
145 North Second Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106  

ARTIST RECEPTION: Friday, September 5, 6:30 - 8:30 PM 

Logical Thinking; Illogical Thoughts 
Simeen Farhat - Sculptures & Installation 

Words borrowed from poetry in English, expressing logic and philosophy, and about life, Farhat’s sculptures are constructed with urethane cast-resin, which are intertwined into forms with undeniable rhythmic and directional force. In her own words, Farhat explains, “My objective in choosing those words is to show the essence of their message through abstraction;  by using overlapping shapes and lines which create tension and movement and stir up emotions”.

Transferable Views 
Franco Mueller - Paintings, Works on Paper & Installation 

There is a dialogue that exists within the works of Franco Mueller. It is a quiet conversation between shape and space. These paintings and works on paper depict how space holds a shape and how shape holds the space. A partially illuminated background is silent. Mueller builds his paintings with layer upon layer of thin acrylic paint and his works on paper with layers of charcoal and acrylic paint. As each layer permeates on another, a “disturbed surface structure” begins to evolve. 

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Vox Populi
319 North 11th Street
3^rd Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19107  

ARTIST RECEPTION: Friday, September 5, 6:00 – 11:00 PM 

Vox Populi is an artist collective that works to support the challenging and experimental work of under-represented artists with monthly exhibitions, gallery talks, performances, lectures, and related programming. 

Room for the Whole Wide World
Elisa Gabor, Sanaz Mazinani, Anna Neighbor, Sarah Palmer, Elisabeth Tonnard

Room for the Whole Wide World offers five artists’ findings from the field of abstraction, using ideas rooted in photography as a starting point. Within these artworks abstraction is a viable method for discovering larger truths and mapping our desires.

Still Wearing Each Other When Alone
Jordan Artim, Anthony Cudahy, Aimee Goguen, Matt Morris, Mathew Parkin

Be my Jordan, and I’ll be your Pippen. Be my Mulder, and I’ll be your Scully. Be my Jenko, and I’ll be your Schmidt. Be my Bill, and I’ll be your Ted. Be my residue, and I’ll be your mirror.

“…we shall find out when the light returns what the new season means / when others’ interpretations have gotten back up onto the pedestals we gave them / so long as we are still wearing each other when alone”
                                                                                                                                      

-Frank O’Hara

Between a rock and a hard place.
Laura Bernstein, Lydia Hardwick, Rachel Rotenberg

Between a rock and a hard place. offers a sculptural conversation between three female artists. Their works operate as the remnants from an otherworldly archaeological dig, marked with the indelible imprint and purposeful grace of their three makers. At their core, these are non-functional yet social objects: acknowledging or denying the body, embodying complex human relationships, and birthed through intuition and memory.

Errata
Micah Danges, Luke Stettner

Errata is a two-person show. Stettner’s work for this exhibition includes small photographs, fruit pits, drawings on blackboard surfaces, graphite-rubbed wood frames, and paintings that reference an enigmatic and nearly recognizable grammatical language. Each is a study in essentialism. Danges’ work for this exhibition includes several photo-based collages that explore surface, texture and placement, and are each derived from one of two single images of a greenhouse.

Fourth Wall
Fourth Wall at Vox Populi presents new works chosen by a group of professionals from various locations and backgrounds. Each month, one of these curators will present the work of an experimental artist working in video, film, animation, or new media in the Vox Populi Project Space.

Harvest

Chaja Hertog, Nir Nadler - Video

An abnormal phenomenon occurs in an olive grove as one of the trees evokes an uprising. Inspired by the ancient olive harvesting methods in which aggression and cultivation come together, the film portrays the absurdity of enforced ideologies and the impossibility of taming the wild.

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NAPOLEON 
319 North 11th Street
2^nd Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19107  

ARTIST RECEPTION: Friday, September 5, 6:00 – 10:00 PM 

devynn emory’s Personal Public: On Gender Variance in Performance Art

September’s exhibition examines the importance of asserting gender identification in art, particularly in performance art where the body is a fundamental part of the work and the artist invites the viewer into this personal, physical space. In conversation with and through investigation of the work of devynn emory, a dancer and choreographer based in New York, the exhibition considers queer performance and its influence on social structures.

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Marginal Utility



319 North 11th Street
2^nd Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19107  

ARTIST RECEPTION: Friday, September 5, 6:00 – 10:00 PM 

Le Horla

Wenxing Ding, Virginia Fleming, Mariel Herring, Adam Lovitz, Scott Schultheis and C.J. Stahl

The title of the exhibition references Guy de Maupassant’s short story in which the protagonist witnesses the passing of a strange ship along a familiar waterway, and begins to experience haunting hallucinations. Written in diary form, Le Horla chronicles the anxiety of an individual whose perception of reality has become ungrounded. With an inability to control his most intimate settings, familiar objects and spaces become actors in discorporate narratives.

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Practice
319 North 11th Street
2^nd Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19107  

ARTIST RECEPTION: Friday, September 5, 6:30 – 8:30 PM 

Hominine
Andrew Brehm

Hominine takes viewers cave-deep into a prehistoric lovers-stalemate through sculptures and live audio works. Hominine is installation as a sitcom of objects, each part humorously lampooning the eternal struggle of long-term relationships, investment strategies, and modernization. Join the artist for two live-reading performances on opening night or enjoy the sculpture as a recording throughout the month of August.    

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Grizzly Grizzly
319 North 11th Street
2^nd Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19107  

ARTIST RECEPTION: Friday, September 5, 6:00 – 10:00 PM 

‘Cut & Paste’
Jenny McGee Dougherty, Selena Kimball, Tyler Starr

McGee Dougherty's subtle works transcend the parameters of both fiber and paper by collecting marks, scruffs and textures.  She then translates these impressions into a visual narrative of her surroundings. “I read the paper every morning but never finish it.” admits Selena Kimball.  Instead she reworks the pages’ images, texts, crinkles and stains to fashion new histories from the recent past. Tyler Starr's mixed media works investigate the history of geographical sites where an unsolved tragedy has occurred. Basing his collages in research gathered from sensationalized journalism.

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Locks Gallery
600 Washington Square South

Philadelphia, PA 19106  

ARTIST RECEPTION: Friday, September 5, 5:30 – 7:30 PM 

Locks gallery exhibition program presents new works by mid-career artists while introducing the work of emerging artists to a national audience. Survey and thematic exhibitions of work by essential artists of the 20th-century including Louise Bourgeois, Robert Motherwell, Louise Nevelson and George Segal, are regular highlights of the gallery exhibition program.

Forest Park
Virgil Marti

Marti will bring together new works with other recontextualized projects, highlighting his own investigation of the sublime and romanticism throughout history. Marti’s art merges his passion for Americana with his distinctive explorations of the world of domestic interiors.

First Friday

Please note: Don't miss Rebecca's important post below about class tomorrow, October 1st

Image for Lewis Colburn's The Noble Amateur show, opening this Friday at the NAPOLEON gallery

As some of you are probably aware, many cities including Philadelphia have "First Fridays", where on the first Friday night of each month, a variety of different galleries and other artist spaces open their doors for visitors. Since this Friday is the first Friday in October, I thought I'd give you guys a heads up if you're interested in checking out a bit of the art scene in Philly. I always find seeing fresh and exciting artwork to be inspiring. This is also a good time to familiarize yourself with some of the local artists and to make some connections.

The focal point of First Fridays can be found between Front and Third, and Market and Vine Streets. There are bunches of galleries in this area, but I find the art to be hit or miss, and the streets are swamped with people and vendors. 

Personally, my favorite First Friday spot is the Vox Populi building, located at 319 N 11th Street. The building houses a few different artist-run studio and exhibition spaces; galleries include the Vox Populi, NAPOLEON, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Marginal Utility, Practice, and Grizzly Grizzly.

NAPOLEON
Tiger Strikes Asteroid
Marginal Utility
Vox Populi

Grizzly Grizzly

There are also two fancy commercial galleries (more like some of the galleries you may have visited in Chelsea) around Washington Square that are usually worth checking out. 

Bridgette Mayer
Locks Gallery

And a little bit more information about some of the shows and other places to see art in Philly:
http://www.philebrity.com/firstfriday/
(note that not everywhere participates in First Fridays; for example, Crane Arts does Second Thursdays instead)

I hope everyone's weekend went well and that you have some good presentations ready for us tomorrow! We'll meet you in front of Anderson (see Rebecca's post, below). 

ROB SWAINSTON @ MARGINAL UTILITY

ROB SWAINSTON: WOODCUT MAP OF UTOPIA FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2013 EDITION

6 September – 20 October 2013

Opening reception Friday, 6 September 2013, from 6 – 11 pm

Artist reception Friday, 4 October 2013, from 6-11 pm

Marginal Utility is proud to present WOODCUT MAP OF UTOPIA FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2013 EDITION, a solo exhibition by the New York based artist Rob Swainston.

The show explores the interface between political and institutional structures, historical memory and print technology by exposing the “unstable image” in moments of visual interference—moiré, bitmap, collage, and line.

The exhibition draws its title from an illustration heading in a mass-market edition of Renaissance humanist Thomas More’s Utopia, picked up for free at New Harmony Vegetarian in Philly’s Chinatown, several years ago.

The illustration, Woodcut Map of Utopia From the March 1518 edition, is now out-of-copyright and displayed in cheap reproduction on self-destructing paper. This mass-market paperback is a shadow of a reminder that once people could write a book describing an idealized society via a fictionalized conversation between two people that did actually exist.

While print technologies were once cutting-edge methods of disseminating representations (maps, fine art reproductions), or political machination (treatises, manifestos, proclamations, or representations of historical events), we now have the fragmented and democratized pixel.

Swainston’s Woodcut Map addresses the dismantling of the printed image. The theme is explored in multiple forms in which different print media masquerade as each other; the line between print, video and painting is blurred; cast iron poses as wood; and a deconstruction of Léon Frédéric’s Four Seasons is translated as an inscrutable color explosion, matching our current state of “global weirding,” to Frédéric’s 1894 Academic idealism.

Swainston’s recent work employs print-based installation, video, and works on paper to explore print technology, the meaning of the image and ultimately the fragmentation and disappearance of the image.