Megan and Murray

Alison Owen Installation in Our House

Alison Owen, Untitled, 2008, installation, adhesive, dust, lint, animal hair

Installation artist Alison Owen, a former New Yorker now living in Providence, uses the existing elements of an environment to make sharp and witty tromp l'oeil works with conceptual heft. In previous bodies of work, Owen has painted shadows behind architectural oddities, extended lines, and otherwise ever-so-slightly modified the palette of a room.

In her current work, she has branched into creating "decorative" motifs out of the invisible contents of an environment. Her most recent installation is a faux floral wallpaper pattern constructed out of the dust, animal hair and detritus she harvested from the corners of the room.

From a safe distance, the material seems velvet-like and tactile, and the color shifts from flower to flower in each iteration. Yet as soon as you're close enough to see what it's made of, the experience changes from aesthetic pleasure to mild disgust coupled with the voyeuristic interest piqued by seeing somebody else's "dirt."

Up indefinitely and viewable upon request.

Styrofoam at the RISD Museum

Folkert de Jong, Mount Maslow, 2007, (detail), styrofoam, polyurethane foam and pigment, [source]

Any exhibition where the organizing factor is as straightforward as material runs the risk of reading like a treatise on variation and the artists' ingenuity of the material's exploited uses. With a material as ubiquitous and malleable as styrofoam, the title and basis of RISD museum's current exhibition, the risk of catalogued variation seems a pitfall hard to avoid.

Yet, in this quirky show, the stuff the artwork is made of stays in the background, allowing the works to speak to one another in surprising ways by using the properties of the material as a point of conversation.

Richard Tuttle's carved arrowhead-shaped works play at the crossroads of high / low art and old / new technology. B. Wurtz's photographs of the contours of packing material are a humorous take on modern landscape. Heide Fasnacht's Exploding Plane, which hovers in the airspace above the other works, though made in 2000, draws the conversation into a possible political commentary on exploited natural resources and the lead-up to the terror attacks of 2001.

It is Folkert de Jong's dancing figures that inspired curator Judith Tannenbaum to originally propose the exhibition. Carved into kilted totems of leprechaun-like hilarity, these creatures pose defiantly under the deadly plane, just, you know, keepin' it light.

Styrofoam
RISD Museum
March 14-July 20, 2008

Styrofoam Panel Discussion and Opening Reception at the RISD Museum on March 19

Heide Fasnacht, Exploding Plane, 2000, Graphite Acrylic over Neoprene, Dimensions Variable (approx 20' sq), [source]

Styrofoam presents art made of the commonplace material known for its light weight quality and wide application. Opening to the public on Friday, March 14 (opening reception on March 19, see below) in the lower Farago Gallery, Styrofoam highlights both the earlier and current uses of this material by artists in a wide range of styles and approaches. Styrofoam (extruded or expanded polystyrene) is a material whose intended uses range from building insulation and construction models to product packaging and coffee cups. In recent years, artists have used styrofoam in a variety of new and ingenious ways. They carve into it, mold it, and assemble it into entirely new forms and images that often contrast with its original functions, at times implying environmental concerns about use and reuse. Artists represented are Folkert de Jong, Heide Fasnacht, Tony Feher, Tom Friedman, Steve Keister, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Pearson, Shirley Tse, Richard Tuttle, and B. Wurtz.

Opening Reception: Styrofoam
Wednesday, March 19
5:30 pm: View the exhibition
6:45 pm: Artist panel discussion with Heide Fasnacht, Steve Keister, Bruce Pearson, Richard Tuttle, and B. Wurtz. RISD Auditorium, Canal Way. Free and open to the public. More info here.

Barry Anderson at Roger Williams University

I'm curating a outdoor video space on the campus of Roger Williams University that is now featuring Vertical Blinds (2) (2007) from Kansas City artist Barry Anderson. Vertical Blinds (2) employs animated strips of people's faces. The strips are animated separately creating a space in which faces appear and disappear.

The outdoor screen is active Monday through Thursday from 7pm to 1am. Vertical Blinds (2) closes March 21.

Snowed In

[source]

We've been snowed in! It's a forced break, which is nice to make sure we've crossed our t's.

First Look at the New Studio

It's a big space, 2800 sqft, and we're sharing it with two other artists (both teach at RISD). Like many studios in the Providence area, it's an old mill building that's now multi-use industrial with artist studios thrown into the mix. This space has been in the artist studio rotation for who-knows-how long, so we've got the happy task of peeling back the layers of inherited materials and tools and dust and cobwebs to make a space that's workable for this new crew of studio-mates. It's already set up well, with a shared wood-shop and a shared open space for building larger projects or showing work for studio visits.

Since I took these pictures, Murray and I have pieced together a smaller work space for the two of us and have started to move in the boxes of studio gear that we've been edging around at home since we got our stuff off the moving truck.

What you're not seeing here is a large loft space over the shop area, the kitchen area, and the individual studio spaces, as well as the view out the wall of windows, which captures a steep tree-covered sloping hill and the roof lines of the rest of this enormous complex.

New Studio; Field Trip to NYC

We started looking for a new studio when we moved to Providence in August. After a few months of cramped quarters at home and using our parking space to store art crates instead of a car, we finally found a studio and started moving in this past weekend. It's good timing for us: we've got a show back in Los Angeles this February and are getting to the point with the project where we need the space to build the set for the video that will be part of the installation for that show.

This past weekend was also our first trip down to NYC since we moved out east. We went with some of Murray's digital media students to PS1, MoMA, the Whitney, Cooper Hewitt and the Met. Murray and I have a lot to say this week about what we saw, in particular, the Kara Walker and Martin Puryear shows.

Providence Transition Complete

Slater Mill, Pawtucket, RI [source]

We just finished our move to Providence. Everyone here thinks we have an accent. This week we'll be touring the Rhode Island School of Design, which is down the street from us as well as Brown University, also down the street. One of my faculty perks is a library card to each.

My first impression of Providence is that it's dominated by the visual arts. Apparently, Providence has the second highest artists-per-capita in the States. This is underlined by the numerous mills in this city that have been converted to artist studio spaces. We know of at least 5 mills that have more than 100 studios each.

Providence is an artist paradise in a way. It's close enough to Boston and NY to have reasonable access to large exhibitions while being small enough to afford studio rent and a high standard of living. BTW, this is also a "foody" town because of the prestigious Johnson and Whales Culinary School — down the street, yet again.

Looking for Studio Space in Providence

We've been lucky enough in the last few years to stumble upon some pretty great studio spaces in both Los Angeles and St Louis. Los Angeles has the infrastructure of a well-established art community, which can anticipate artists' studio needs and provide for those needs accordingly: but you generally have to pay big bucks for a space. St Louis has great unused industrial spaces that are rough, raw and cheap, but you have to put up with wearing snowsuits in the winter while working (no heat) and you have to be willing to improvise when it comes to those important studio elements such as walls.

Providence seems to be unusual blend of both ends of the spectrum: plenty of huge, affordable industrial spaces, in addition to a thriving artist community well-schooled in resourceful adaptive real estate solutions. We were at first hoping for some sort of live/work situation — there are plenty around — but have instead opted to live and work separately. We've signed a lease on a place to live and are now turning our attention to finding a cheap, big, work-only studio space. Any leads?

Transition to Rhode Island 1

We knew months ago that we were moving to Providence and would, of course, need a place to live. We also knew we would be overseas until late in the summer, forcing us to either find a place several months early or crash into Rhode Island with a last-minute home hunt—a strategy that seemed better months ago than the last few days of hectic (read: frantic) searching, calling and searching.