New Year, New Stuff

As 2012 begins, I'm looking forward to new opportunities and savoring some of the brighter spots of last year. 

Big news first: I'm excited to announce I have been selected as one of two 2012 Regional Emerging Artists in Residence for the winter/spring at Artspace in downtown Raleigh. I'll be as much of a fixture there as time allows from January to June. My studio will be on the second floor, adjacent to the other Artist-in-residence, Sarah West. This residency, truly, is an honor, and I hope I can do it justice. Many of the artists who have held this residency in the past are folks I respect a whole lot.

I'm also involved in two shows happening now, one of which opens Friday at the beautiful new VAE space on W. Martin Street. Contemporary South should be a rad one — it was juried by Xandra Eden of the Weatherspoon in Greensboro, and the theme is near and dear. 

Meanwhile, a selection of work from the past three years is on view in a two-person show with Luke Miller Buchanan at the Betty Ray McCain Gallery in the Performing Arts Center in downtown Raleigh. If you're there to see the symphony or another performance, I hope you can check it out — it runs through February.

A couple other recent things worth mentioning — Neill Prewitt and I collaborated with The Hot @ Nights at Flanders Gallery. Matt Hedt helped us document it, and the videos are pretty durn good. The Hot @ Nights are a fantastic band, and super dudes, and Flanders was really sweet to put this on.

Yuxtapongo worked on video projections for the ultra-Halloween bash at CAM in October:  

X-tra fun night. 

But a huge part of 2011 for me was the Dream Acts community art project I did with Neill Prewitt and Eleanor Blake. We've just finished a documentary video about the project, which was made possible by a grant from the Town of Chapel Hill. (We presented a rough cut of this doc at the Visualizing Human Rights conference in November.) Through course of the project we made friends, contributed to alliances, and, I think, brought a little light to an extremely vital community too often misrepresented and overlooked. It was a hugely rewarding project and I think this work will continue in various ways. In fact, Eleanor was asked to join the Board of the Human Rights Center, so she's now a part of the very group that was our crucial liasion to the Abbey Court community.   

That's it for now — happy new year! 

THIS WILD DESIRE: New Work at Morning Times Gallery

(9.29 Update: work from this series is now viewable here.)

This September, I'm pleased to be showing new paintings and mixed-media work at the Morning Times Gallery in downtown Raleigh.

This work represents my reengagement with painting following some time away. [Since last fall, I’ve been working on a collaborative community art project commissioned by the Town of Chapel Hill.*] 

Returning to studio this summer, I had to negotiate between my intuitive approach to my own work and the complex, other-oriented artmaking of that recently-completed collaborative project. As always seems to be the case, perceived conflicts fall away once I get my hands dirty.

In some ways, these may be my most personal paintings. They collect and convey things I’ve kept, things I’ve found, things I’ve made — affinities, totems, my “life and contacts” (to conjure Pound). The contents of these pieces are symbolically and practically important to my ongoing attempts to understand myself. But these pieces are not just for me. In that space between life and art, I try to make things that speak for themselves. 

The title of the show is a riff on Pound, too — in “The Spring” he creates an image of cyclical rebirth, tempered with lingering bittersweet change. This is a fall show, yes, but for me it feels like newness emerges … as haunted as it may be by the spectre of what (and who) was. 

* In that project, called Dream Acts, I worked with two other artists in a community primarily composed of Hispanic immigrants and political refugees from Burma and Thailand. Making art in this community was less about my personal psychic negotiations and more about an outward-oriented process of building trust — ultimately, facilitating a different mode of speaking for a very dynamic, provisional community with sometimes limited access to the arts apparatus in the Triangle.

Nah Rah Rah.

I've just posted photos of and some thoughts on an installation (here) completed this spring with the help of Mollie Earls. We designed two giant kites (assembled from a series of huge $50 and $100 bills) to ride the breeze in an alley in downtown Raleigh. This was first and foremost an engagement with a space, but also a work of commentary, openly critical of a significant art event happening simultaneously in the city. We didn't really promote it or tell anyone about it — just left it blowing in the alley on a Friday morning, half a block from where a fancy black-tie gala would be thrown by the new Contemporary Art Museum (in fact, we had to split immediately after we finished installing for my youngest brother's wedding happening out of town the same weekend).

I'm not sure whether anyone saw the piece (other than the person who tore it down sometime over the intervening days). We slyly positioned it in an area that might catch some party-going foot traffic, and we wanted it to live anonymously — a bit of quiet resistance to the semi-hegemonic stylings of an exclusive, prohibitively-priced "street festival" a hundred feet away. But I'm sure our decision to let things unfold organically was partially a matter of not wanting the piece to be perceived as sour grapes. (I have a number of friends who've been involved in CAM from its earliest stages, and I do appreciate their work. The museum is bringing good things to downtown Raleigh.)

It can be tough to balance a desire to foster local arts energies with the need (and responsibility) we have as artists to speak our truths. Many of the institutional avenues for exhibiting and fostering contemporary work in this (let's face it) conservative city (and region) have to play it somewhat safe. I ran up against this last summer when I installed Radios Appear in the city-operated Block 2 space on Fayetteville Street. The piece highlighted the antics of our newly-elected Wake County School Board (who were waging open assault on a highly successful, decades-old diversity policy with racially-coded critiques of busing). I knew I'd never get away with making an openly critical statement in that space, but thought I'd decode the work's complex imagery a bit through my recorded audio message (accessible to the audience via a number posted at the install site). My message followed the script here. Even this hint of a political statement was too much — the gallery called me when they heard it and told me I had to tone it down. (Again, I appreciate the work of Block Gallery and even as I'm writing this, I feel a twinge of guilt.)

More recently, the area witnessed stuffy intransigence in Chapel Hill effectively shutting down an awesome modernist space at 523 E. Franklin. Former home to a public library, then the Chapel Hill Museum, this year the space has housed Local Histories and Dream Acts — two important and successful exhibitions of contemporary work (the latter funded by a Town grant, ironically). After an at times nasty public debate, the Chapel Hill Town Council just weeks ago voted to defund all future activity at 523, despite an outstanding offer from UNC Art Professor elin o'Hara slavick to manage and curate the space for the next year at almost no cost to the Town.

Practicing art here has its ups and downs, and the more I think about it, this is one of the big downs. As artists, as designers, how safe do we have to play it here? Are we coddling our institutions, coddling the public? I'd like to see more art and more design testing more limits in more places in North Carolina. Please. 

Dinner Music

Spent a weekend this month on a farm in Youngsville, NC with a crew of 20 or so other artists, audio engineers, filmmakers and friends working on a shoot for David Colagiovanni and Melissa Haviland's project called (for now, at least) Dinner Music. The work builds on Music for New Mexico (excerpts below) and their mutual interests in breaking things and, of course, fine china. 

In Youngsville, the artists constructed a 25-ish-foot scaffold from which they'd drop entire table settings of china onto a dinner table (the photo above shows the crew prepping for a preliminary test using tuning forks). The crew dropped six or seven complete settings over two days. Following each round we picked up every shard — the artists' intent is to reassemble as many plates, cups, saucers, shakers, teapots and serving dishes as possible for exhibition. A daunting task; many pieces, naturally, were obliterated.

Each drop was recorded on a RED camera at 100 fps; the audio meticulously captured by David McConnell (above, both Davids). The finished work will mine the explosions for every visual and aural detail, turning split-second shatters inside out. David C. says the show (location and schedule TBD) will have a number of outputs: video, object, photograph and screenprint.

Colagiovanni and Haviland's earlier explorations in Music for New Mexico are exceptionally beautiful. I'm really into such technologically-afforded manipulations of experience, especially as sound pieces. What's in a moment, and what might we apprehend if our consciousnesses were shaped differently? Dinner Music will be an even richer and more expansive exploration of occurrences at the edge of perception; surreality in effect. 

a couple other benefits of farm-time:

Concession Stand

I was pleased to be asked to compose a critical statement for Shaun Richards' recent show at Flanders Gallery in Raleigh. I'm sharing it here, but I encourage you to check out his work at the Flanders site. Good stuff, indeed.

Shaun Richardsʼ latest body of work is a meditation from within a dream. Icons and
spectres drawn from the American tale of the last half-century haunt these pieces.
Visual cues from lowbrow genre work — pulp, noir, porno — inflect a series of moments
and montages which, taken as a whole, begin to etch out the artistʼs ongoing psychic
negotiation of being in the twenty-first century. But the personal territory Richards mines
is rich with transferrable revelation. Through juxtaposition and accretion of figurative,
symbolic and textual elements, Richards illuminates the machinations of finance, desire
and violence that lurk behind the veneer of the everyday.

“Concession Stand,” the title of the present exhibition, is a play on words that points
immediately to the question of our complicity in and responsibility for the world.
Ultimately, the work interrogates the complexity of maintaining a coherent moral stance
in the midst of market systems that only want us to buy. Richards employs the language
of advertising, broad sloganeering and day-glo impact to draw us into dialogue with
often unsettling questions that get to the heart of what it means to participate in the
American marketplace of ideas, actions, and glances. Richardsʼ surreal landscapes and
scenarios, the product of his galvanizing admixture of figurative technique and graphic
gusto, conjure spaces within which we are asked to confront and acknowledge precisely
what we give up in our own perpetual quests to be who we think we are.