Opening at Magoo: "There's no bible in here?" Tues. 12 January 2009 2PM SLT

Penumbra Carter and Dekka Raymaker

SLurl (exhibition has ended)

This is a freeform art build. When we were given the homestead at Magoo to produce a piece for it we had no preconceived ideas for it, so we tackled it in a manner that we constructed our Burning Life 2009 collaboration, throw a plywood cube prim down and see where it took us. The resulting madness is what you see.

As the build developed, we wanted to include some avatar interaction, and we wanted the work to come alive around the spectator. We hope that in some way we have achieved that. The build encompasses sound, light and movement. The build is foremost about fun, nothing heavy, no deep meanings, just subconscious energy driving us to complete the build in the first 3 weeks of December (we actually extended into the first week of January too, taking a 8 day break over Christmas week).

While discussing where the build was going we often used words like 'mad', 'scribble', 'no idea', 'sketchbook' and 'wtf are we doing'. There is a visual remark about an upcoming Linden Lab policy to charge L$99 per month for listing 'freebies' on it's Xstreet marketplace (Joke: "when is a freebie not a freebie?" … "when it costs L$99") there seems to be religious overtones too, but there is no bible in here.

Dekka Raymaker

Field Trip: John Baldessari

John Baldessari's Six Colorful Inside Jobs 1971

Q To some degree would you say that Baldessari’s work is like an encyclopedia of maleness?

A Hard to say no to that question. I’d say that’s one of the bigger yeses in the history of answers.

Q To use or misuse the regularly bastardized word, does he deconstruct the male? 


A How could he not?

Q Does Baldessari’s gaze around and through the male gaze render a double-dude staredown? 


A Affirmative. There’s a German phrase for it.

Q Wissenschaftler der mannlichen Schwierigheit?

A Scholar of male complexity.

-- Benjamin Weissman on John Baldessari, in 'Men Swallowing Swords, Men Blowing Out Candles" frieze 126 (link)

John Baldessari talks to Jessica Morgan (curator of his upcoming retrospective at Tate Modern) in TATE ETC 17 (link)

John Baldessari: Pure Beauty at Tate Modern 13 October 2009 till 10 January 2010 (link)

Field Trip: Warhol TV

La Maison Rouge (Paris) (link)

Via Walker Art Center (link)

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves*

Penumbra Carter's mysterious cosmos spins technology and wonder into a tender dialectic with The Unkempt Hair of the Dead.

Arthole Season 3 (link) (slurl)

From the notecard for The Unkempt Hair of the Dead:

I have entitled my piece "The Unkempt Hair of the Dead" from a line in a Walt Whitman poem. He writes that the grass in cemeteries is the unkempt hair of the dead. I don't think he was being morbid, but just celebrating the fact that eventually we are swallowed back up by the earth and defacto the universe. The cycle of small matter to large matter, and back to small matter.

I have always been fascinated by people in the past who have tried to study and look at the universe and imagine how it all works. So I have paid homage to a few devices from the past created to explore and understand such things.

William Pearson's Orrery (link)

Johannes Kepler's Solar System (link)

Johannes Hevelius's Telescope (link)

I have placed grass underneath my version of our universe and made a device that is the initial maker of stuff of the universe. Whales to me represent one of the few remaining ancient mysteries we have on earth, they seem to be more of a creature of the universe than the earth.

Penumbra Carter is a talented artist and filmmaker in both Second Life® and Real Life℗. Her machinimas can be viewed on Youtube (link).

*Walt Whitman, from "A child said, What is the grass?"

Aequitas 2009

CM Pauluh aka Nebulosus Severine Bending Trees (diptych) acrylic and thread on canvas 16 x 10 inches (2009) (link) now on exhibition at Aequitas

Aequitas@Artspace OSA NYC (link) June 1-June 30, 2009
Aequitas Second Life Version@Caerleon Art Collective (link)(slurl) June 26-July 3, 2009
Second Life Reception June 26 6:30-8:30 PM SLT

From Stephen Beveridge's blog sense and defense (link):

Social media has drawn together a group of international artists to New York for Aequitas, an exhibit of art based on childhood experiences.

Artspace OSA in New York City and the virtual community of Second Life will host a joint exhibition of international artists: paintings, digital work, and virtual world installations during the month of June 2009.

Artists can be a solitary lot but with the advent of virtual worlds and web 2.0 they are finding each other and communicating in the way they know best: making and exhibiting art together. This disparate group of artists, having never met face to face, nevertheless finds a common ground in exploring their childhood for art.
Sowa Mai, also known as the artist Stephen Beveridge, conceived and planned this exhibit as an extension of the relationships he had formed in the Second Life virtual world with artist/avatars from different time zones and cultural backgrounds.
The exhibit in Washington Heights, New York City will display paintings and digital work by the human artists. An exhibit in the Second Life virtual world will consist of (art) installations and scripted objects by the human artists’ avatar counterparts. Both exhibits are based around the theme of mining childhood experience for art.

Dekka Raymaker Andrew MacLachlan Penumbra Carter Beth Olds Nebulosus Severine CM Pauluh Sowa Mai Stephen Beveridge David Ferrando Banrion Constantine Robert Garlick Elif Arat

Aequitas
Artspace OSA
June 1 – June 30, 2009
Reception Friday June 19th. 6:30-8:30
178 Bennett Ave @ 189th St, NYC
1 train to 191st Street | A train to 190th Street

Second Life Version
Caerleon Art Collective
June 26 – July 3, 2009
Reception June 26th. 6:30-8:30slpm

(slurl)

Contact:
Stephen Beveridge
212 928 8351
SowaMai@gmail.com

Nebulosus Severine has more information here (link) and a slideshow of images here (link)

Field Trip: Event Horizon

David Hominal Le Troue (2009)

Event Horizon@Raster, Warsaw, Poland (link) (more)

Within the gallery itself the opening scene consists of David Hominal’s corridor-sculpture Through the Window (2009), an assemblage that comprises an armchair, a lighter, a packet of cigarettes and a Polish translation of Andrei Bely’s modernist novel Saint Petersburg (1913, revised 1922). Recounting the story of Russia in 1905, the paperback is one of a pair of literary references made by Hominal. In the large room, Le Troue (2009) comprises the collected works of Victor Hugo, a stake rammed through the middle of their pages. Little squares of paper, scraps displaced by the spike, hang on the wall in three collages. The works recall Marcel Duchamp’s instructions for a window-hung geometry book The Unhappy Readymade (1919). ‘It amused me,’ Duchamp later admitted, ‘to disparage the seriousness of a book full of principles.’ (Daniel Miller, Frieze Magazine (link)  

Field Trip: Go Figure

Gerhard Richter Deck Chair II oil on canvas 39 1/4 x 78 3/8 inches (1965)

Go Figure@Gagosian Gallery NYC (link) May 9-June 13, 2009