Kirsten Kindler

One of Kirsten Kindler's wall hangings at ADA Gallery. All of her pieces in this show are assembled from cut-outs of magazine photographs, I think mostly advertisements; it isn't possible to identify the subjects of the original photos. I visited her studio once and she had a row of boxes on her worktable filled with shapes, separated by color. Lots of blues, greens, and darks.

This piece is not touching the wall, it's suspended at the top and casting shadows. I'm not sure if, with a piece like this, she knows what she is making from the start and cuts the shapes accordingly, or if she assembles something unplanned from the shapes she has cut. Maybe a little of both. This whole thing is taped together with scotch tape; it looks very fancy here but up close you can see all the tape and the scissor cuts that have been repaired with tape. It shimmies in the wind when the door opens and closes.

This is an interesting piece to compare to one of Carson Fox's wall hangings. They look similar, but Carson's piece is made of wire and synthetic hair, and brings to mind specifics like hair memorials and mourning. The interpretations of Kirstin's piece are more open, your idea of what the material might be (iron, cloth) shifts along with various associations (a closed gate, an illuminating chandelier).

The recontextualized glossy magazine source imagery is making me think of Paul Ryan's paintings.


One of three mysterious milky rorschachs. Everything is obfuscated - the original source imagery, whatever it was in the magazine, is cut into this sort of creepy rorschach pattern and then placed under a milky piece of glass.

I see a royal insect face-mask, like a character from my Garden story. No, wait, now I see the female reproductive system.


Many many interlocking rings, cut from magazine photos and taped together. Something bridal beautiful and also pond-scum gross. How does this get moved and stored? Click here to see it much larger and better.


Installation at ADA


Kirsten Kindler is the ONLY PERSON to have bought one of my paintings in 2005!!!

Matthew Fisher and Steven Roebuck at ADA

This small Matthew Fisher painting at ADA Gallery is so strong, from all the way across the gallery it commands your attention. The black is much shinier on the wall, the white horse more muscular. Everything is compacted and compressed, like a tensed muscle.

(you need to click on these paintings to see them best, they seem a little distorted here)


Steven Roebuck's newest paintings were such a surprise! The gloomy black glossiness is gone, replaced by a grainy, sandy, sweet white melancholy. You can't tell from these photos, but the canvas is attached very casually, much looser than the previous paintings, which as I recall often had claustrophobic frames. Or maybe they didn't, and that is just the way they felt - heavy black spaces hard to breathe in.

These are as quiet, still, and dreamy as the Matthew Fisher, but without that painting's ominous charged intensity. Not compacted and compressed, but loose and languid depictions of imagination and discovery.


Steven Roebuck.

P.S. - Kirstin Kindler is also showing at ADA right now, I will do a separate post on her next.

Michele Arthur

I saw the Michele Arthur exhibition at Chop Suey today, and it was so strangely rewarding.


This piece is at the top of the stairs so it is one of the first things you see. The round piece is attached to a painted screen. You can't see it here, but there is a piece of thread that connects this piece to another circle-on-a-painted-screen piece (more like a morning-time one), with origami birds attached to the thread. Not sure yet how I feel about the thread and origami birds, but I like the individual screen pieces.


Most of the paintings were orange and black, or orange or black. This piece is called Moonless Mountain. Wendy White posted on Forrest Bess recently, and one of my reasons to visit Chop Suey was to try and find a Forrest Bess book - I didn't find one but my FB radar was up and my mind was very much in tune with these paintings. Here is a page of Forrest Bess paintings.

It cracked me up reading her labels, the prices were $33, $99, $111, $222, $333, $444, $555, $777, with one for $5,432.10 and another 3,000,000 rubles. It was all so random - perfect and funny for Richmond because nobody ever buys anything anyways. There was no painting for $666.

Some of these cell-phone photos are so bad. The wall around the one above is too white, and around the orange painting below so blue - but it was all the same color.


So simple, so little done here, but it is clearly finished. I wonder if it happened for her as easily as it looks like it came? I sometimes am able to make a painting just happen, but that usually surprises me. More often I'll make something that looks like it came a lot easier and quicker than it did.


Fingerprint windowpeople and one small antenna.


The black one has a smaller canvas glued to it, and an asteroid or shooting star. I think that asteroid is cut from a magazine or something, it isn't painted. There is a texture to the smaller glued-on canvas that I was associating with the moon and craters before I stood in the right light and saw that it was a handprint.

Here is that little one viewed from an angle.

Michelle Arthur at Chop Suey closes March 5th

memorial

Broken-hearted Harvey family memorial at the edge of Carytown.

i take the bait

"Our colleague Jerry Saltz who teaches at Columbia has also dropped by Natalie’s studio"

Jerry Saltz had thirty-two articles published on Artnet between 12/2004 and 12/2005, sixteen of which were individual artist features. Eight of those were of NYC artists, three of whom are Columbia graduates, one of whom (until very recently anyway) is faculty.

Jerry knows which side his bread is buttered on. The features mentioned above focus on single artists, but there are plenty of two or more artist articles with an inordinate number of favorable Columbia mentions. Here is a 12/7 feature on Columbia professor Jon Kessler. Here is a 11/10 article on recent graduate Laleh Khorramian, sandwiched between two articles on European men. The Khorramian article notes that "Khorramian has yet to master the art of melding sound and image (something her Columbia colleague Mika Rottenberg excels at)".

The funniest example is probably the review of the Greater NY show, in which he admits that having 31 Columbia graduates and current students in the exhibition of 162 artists feels fishy, yet includes seven of those Columbia students among the nineteen artists he chooses to name. Six of those Columbia artists are described as "excellent", with the seventh, Tamy Ben-Tor's video, deemed "one of the strongest pieces in the show". The non-Columbia artists mentioned are variously described as "rowdy artists turned tidy", "left to die in hallways", and "intriguing", followed by a parenthetical listing of twelve women artists cited as examples of some of the better artists in the show. Four of the seven photos of artwork (from a show of one hundred sixty-two artists) accompanying the article are the work of the Columbia-affiliated artists.

Oh, only FOUR of those sixteen consecutive individual artists featured were women. Does anybody not notice Jerry's propensity to pay lip-service to a problem (like the absence of women, or the hyping of youth and the market) but then continue to write as if that problem doesn't exist and he isn't a big part of the problem?

Frankenstein Scholar's Rock

This is a (bad) photograph of a Steve Bickley in front of a James Hyde, at Reynolds Gallery. Like a scholar's rock.

many many prints at Reynolds Gallery

There has been A LOT of printmaking to see in Richmond recently. Barbara Tisserat's show at the Hand Workshop, the current amazing collection of prints from the collection on exhibit at the Anderson Gallery, the current Carrie Mae Weems show at the Hand. I guess the Weems are prints, right? Prints or photographs? The card says "gelatin silver prints", I don't know what all the terms and techniques are.

Reynolds Gallery is showing a big selection of "prints by modern masters" through February -


Cute faces in the crowd of Marc Chagall's Les Cyclistes, 1956


Here is another shot of the same Chagall lithograph. So much movement and circles and speckles.


Elizabeth Murray, Undoing, 1989-1990. Much greener in reality than this photograph shows. There are three wavy-edged pieces of paper, each consecutively smaller, placed one on top of the other. The smallest one (the one on top) has a hole cut out in the center, the middle sized sheet of paper has a smaller hole, and the biggest piece of paper (the bottom one) has the smallest hole. Maybe too much explanation on my part, but I liked seeing all these layers and overlapping with everything spinning around into that center whirlpool. Can you see the two uncorked green bottles releasing their spirits?

James Sienna has two prints hung near the corner opposite Chuck Close's portrait of him. Those look interesting together. I noticed that some of the prints - the Sienna's, a Clemente, a Frankenthaler - are all listed as being "ukiyoe style". The Sienna is a "thirteen color ukiyoe style woodcut", the Clemente a "twenty-two color ukiyoe style woodblock", and the Frankenthaler a "sixteen color ukiyoe style woodcut". What does that mean? I know that Ukiyo-e was a Japanese style, and that many woodblock prints were made in that style, but don't understand this as a printmaking term. All three of these artist's work is coming from Pace, did they just make up the term or something?


Wayne Thiebaud, Delicatessen (from Delights), etching, 1964. I like this one very much. I was drawn over to it thinking, "this is like that 1964 illustrationy stuff I like so much" - and it was dated 1964!!


Richard Serra has a black black textured piece called Extension #3, 2004. I like the whole thing but especially this area.


On the left you can see a teeny tiny black mark on the white wall.


On the right you can see a teeny tiny white speck of dust or something on the black etching.

Here is a shot of Bruce pointing to the black spot, for scale

Bruce! - and other Richmond artblogs

Bruce Wilhelm has a blog! Or at least a blogspot address which he is using as a place to post his work. I am a big Bruce fan, here is an old post of one of his shows.

The blog I am addicted to has recently posted on Marcel Dzama and Amy Cutler, two artists that Bruce's work has sometimes reminded me of (more the older messier Amy Cutler stuff than the new cleaner Amy Cutler stuff). I recommend hunting around on my blogroll to try and find that blog, I am not going to make it easy for you, sorry.


I own this Bruce Wilhelm painting! I bought it maybe two years ago or so. The paper part is glued to a white board, sort of off-center. You are looking at just the painting, not any wall.

I'd like to say more, maybe pull some quotes from the comments of that other blog, but I'm too sleepy and hungry right now. Maybe tomorrow.

MORE RICHMOND ARTBLOGS:

A Painting A Day
Angels and Infidels
Annabelle's Aspirin
Dennis Matthews
George Allen
Jared Clark
Michael McDevitt
notoneforstarving
ProCurate.com
Research for the Movie

....

I am right now addicted to another blog that is so popular with so many comments and so many things to consider that I don't want to even share the name of it at the moment, for fear that the comments there will hit the thousands and I will never sleep or eat again.

It is one of the blogs linked to on my blogroll to the right, so you can find it if you really want to.

submitted for your annoyance

UPDATE 9/06: i've gone through here and removed x's real name because when googled, this post was like the first thing that came up... and it is unfair to scapegoat x so much. if anybody leaves any new comments that name x, i will delete them. x is a fellow struggling artist, not a bad guy.

PART ONE:

Oh! I missed a fourth one of X's glowing VCU reviews! From VCU Arts e-League Newsletter -

Carolyn Henne is the Assistant Dean for Student Affairs at VCUarts. She exhibits her work in many venues in Virginia as well as nationally and internationally. Her October 2004 show at the ADA Gallery in Richmond received positive critical reviews by Paul Ryan in ArtPapers and by X in Sculpture Magazine. In January 2006, Henne will exhibit in Berlin, Germany, at the KunstOffice Gallery.

X sent me, a while back, a pissed-off e-mail about this post so now I'm excited to maybe submit an FOIA request to VCU and compare all of his positive VCU reviews of the last three years with how much he has been paid by VCU for his various visiting artist gigs within that same period.

X on Relativity for NYArts Magazine
X on Katharina Grosse for NYArts Magazine
X on Collaborative Concepts for NYTimes
X on Carolyn Henne at ADA for Sculpture Magazine - no link yet, but I will scan it later.

Write a review, get a teaching gig, write a review, get a teaching gig, write a review... what's wrong with that? I am paraphrasing X's e-mail to me because he told me I can't publish it. I wrote back that he wasn't much of a reviewer. He wrote back "lose my e-mail". He e-mailed me first! Anyways X, please don't e-mail me either, you can leave a comment if you want.

How dare I question his critical integrity!!!

Funniest Funniest Saddest Thing - I heard on Friday that Joe Seipel was going around the galleries with a NYTimes art critic, my friend said she heard it was because the critic was meeting all these Richmonders in Miami at Art Basel and wanted to come here and see what all the Richmond fuss was about. It was, I'm told, X!!!! Joe Seipel is the Senior Associate DEAN of the VCU School of the Arts! UPDATE 3:20pm: An anonymous commenter thinks the visitor with Joe Seipel might have been Stephen Rockwell, painter and publisher of Dart magazine, based out of Toronto.

Is Stephen also doing a paid visiting artist gig or lecture while he is here?

Hey, University of Richmond readers, do you think Siepel took the NYTimes/Dart guy to any of your shows?

PART TWO:

I’m also looking forward to seeing what the hell Richmond shows Dinah and Paul Ryan will be covering for Art Papers, now that Paul has had his show at Reynolds Gallery and joined the VCU faculty. Paul has had Morris Yarowsky's old job since the start of the Fall semester.

Recent Richmond in Art Papers -

Jan/Feb 2006 - VCU faculty member Stephen Vitiello at VCU's Solvent Space - Dinah Ryan
Nov/Dec 2005 - 4 VCU faculty members, curated by VCU faculty member, in Relativity at VCU's Anderson Gallery - Dinah Ryan
Sep/Oct 2oo5 - Katharina Grosse at VCU's Solvent Space - Paul Ryan

From Art Papers website stating editorial guidelines -

a) The editors will not consider submissions in which a writer: writes about his/her work, the work of someone with whom the writer has a personal relationship, the work of someone with whom the writer has a financial relationship, any gallery that represents his/her work, any relative, any gallery institutionally related to the organization employing the writer or a colleague in the institution employing the writer.

Holy Shit! This might be the end of Richmond in Art Papers! I am so curious about what they will have in the March/April issue!

I'm planning a kick-ass sequel to Meatballs at Stuffy's, I'll be sure to let you guys know.

RELATED: my Carolyn Henne post, not mentioned in the above excerpted newsletter along with the other two reviews. Also - me on Relativity here and here, on Paul Ryan here and here, on Stepen Vitiello here.

Fellow VCU faculty member and Reynolds Gallery artist Ron Johnson on VCU/Reynolds colleague Paul Ryan for NYArts Magazine.

SPECIAL PLEA to Critics - Please please feel welcome to visit Richmond and see art here and write about it. VCU puts on some very good shows but these reviews by VCU employees or wannabe employees mean NOTHING. It trivializes everybody's hard work.

February First Friday Report

No nudes!!! I couldn't see the nudes at Gallery5! They had a line that went all the way down the block. I 've since heard that they had EIGHT THOUSAND people come to that opening! Can that be right???

The weather was nice and warm, and there were tons of people hitting the galleries on Broad Street, many many more so than at the galleries on Main Street, which still had good crowds - but the Broad Street galleries were packed.

There is a huge art audience here, maybe not many buyers, but a very big and interested audience, and unfortunately most of what was available to see on Broad Street was crap! I'm shocked at how many people come out to look at bad stuff. It is exciting.

We need to show more and better stuff.

Why was 1708 Gallery closed? UPDATE: They were open, just had the windows blacked out. Thanks, Nate!

February's First Friday, 2006

Carrie Mae Weems at Hand Workshop, 6-8pm, 1812 W. Main St - I saw a big show of her stuff at Williams College a few years ago, so this will be nice.

Lauren Duckworth at Main Art, 7-9pm, 1537 W. Main St. Catered by Baja Beans! Free beer! Delicious meatballs!

Group show of paintings and sculpture at Casablanca Coffee, 5pm, 1106 W. Main St - this is the space being run by Dennis Matthews and friends, mostly PAPR undergrads. EXCELLENT place to buy paintings on a budget. I want a Kaylee Pickinpaugh really bad.

Kate Horne at Nonesuch, 7-10pm, 918 W. Grace - she will be exhibiting her latest ceramics - vampires, unicorns, werewolves, and Plantman. This is one of my favorite places. I like everything about it. I'm sorry I never got to posting on the Pat Berran show.


Pat Berran

Disrobed at Gallery5 - a NUDE art show, with paintings, photos, videos , and live nudes. I think they are going to have like ten nude models painted by students from the Tom Savini School of Special Effects. They can't move, they have to stand still like statues, because if they move it would be considered a strip show. I think I will mostly be here. Starting at 7pm, and continues late into the night with bands and hopefully lots of nudity. 200 W. Marshall St.

ADA had it's opening last week, so I'm not sure if they will be open this Friday night. Most likely they WILL be. Lots of good stuff up there right now - Kirsten Kindler, Matthew Fisher, Steve Roebuck, Jered Sprecher, Warren Craghead... and MORE.

NOT OPENING, BUT UP -

Michele Arthur at Chop Suey - I regret not posting on the drawing show that just closed. Not that I loved it at all, just wanted to talk about it.

Tanja Softic at Reynolds Gallery

A wonderful show of prints from the collection at Anderson Gallery. Also a video installation by Bob Paris.

it is a very very very small artworld

Fairy Butler and Mountain Man have both posted announcements for Sarah Peters upcoming show at PS122 Gallery. It was a surprise to me that they are probably friends with Sarah, because I moved into her old apartment here in Richmond.

It was really strange meeting Sarah. The landlord showed me the place while she was home and we just said hi, but the next day we ran into each other at Lowes and briefly chatted about the apartment. Later that same day I ran into her again at the supermarket across town and so we laughed and talked a little more, and discovered that we had both used to live in Philadelphia (at different times), and that Sarah had gone to PAFA. I could have said twenty different Academy names but the one I said was "Do you know Carson Fox?" - someone I haven't seen or heard from in more than fifteen years. It turned out that she and Carson were best friends (!!!), AND that the place I would be renting was formerly owned by Carson's mom. Carson had grown up next door. I never would have known any of that if we hadn't run into each other that second time at the supermarket.


Carson will be showing in Richmond at 1708 Gallery in April!

I found that out last time I was in New York and saw one of her pieces at Claire Oliver Gallery. I was at Claire Oliver to see very best buds Eva and Adele's show, and then I saw one of former HUGE crush Carson's pieces, then I saw some of former teacher Bonnie's pieces, then I saw one of Philadelphian Judith Schaecter's pieces. I think I first saw Judith's work more than fifteen years ago, Meatman, at a show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art of Philadelphia artists; I still remember seeing that piece - a small stained-glass of a man made of meat, boxing. I'm sure PMA curator at the time John Ravenal had something to do with that show, and he is now here in Richmond at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Actually, the last time I saw John Ravenal was when I was sitting in front of Scope Miami trying to sell my paintings.


Judith Schaecter will be showing in Richmond at the Visual Arts Center in April!


So I went to the PS122 Gallery's website to see if they had any more images of Sarah's work, I hadn't seen anything since her show at Feigen last year, and I find that they still have up the page for the January show - and one of the artists is Fawn Krieger! I met Fawn at a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, she is very very very funny. She does everything, her work is smart and fun and funny and GOOD. Sculptures, paintings, drawings, stories, comedy, computer things, performance - she is un-pigeonhole-able.

Then I check my e-mail today and find that Look, See friend Chris Ashley has mentioned Warren Rohrer on his own blog and that Chris will be showing in Richmond at 1708 Gallery in May, in a six-person show co-curated by Kristin Beal and Peter Baldes. Peter Baldes was one of the faculty members on the unanimous vote NOT to grant me a leave of absence from VCU (otherwise, he's okay).


Chris Ashley will be showing in Richmond at 1708 Gallery in May!

I go to the 1708 Gallery site to see if they say anything about Chris' show and notice that the current show includes a catalogue essay by Michael Oatman. This is the same Michael Oatman whose Saratoga show I wrote about in July (he posted a comment!), and whom both Warren Craghead and Carolyn Zick e-mailed to say they used to know fairly well when they lived in the Albany/Troy area. Now Warren is in VIRGINIA and Carolyn is in Seattle. Did Warren and Carolyn know each other?


Warren Craghead will be showing in Richmond at ADA in March!

Finally, at last week's ADA Gallery opening I noticed some small drawings John had in the back, and they are by one of the artists I enjoyed so much at Scope, Jered Sprecher!


Jered Sprecher will be showing at ADA in October!

Joy Garnett, Katrina Benefit, Katrina Photos

Joy Garnett has donated a painting from the Strange Weather series to this event that's raising money for Gulf Coast visual artists. I really like Joy's paintings. Above is one from her series New York's Chelsea Art District On Fire. I think that is Anton Kern's gallery, especially uploaded for Edna.

I have an aunt and uncle who live(d) on the Gulf Coast; here is how they found their house shortly after people were allowed back in the area. All of their kids are grown and live in Mississippi, and I think two or three of them also lost everything. My cousin Mimi has just sent these Gulf Coast before and after pictures.


So strange to see these old houses completely gone, with the trees fine.


The low blue entrance gate is still there.






Only the stairway and the tree.

more on Richmond Outdoor Sculpture

H. Jennings Sheffield has written with more info on the sculpture thing I posted last week -

"2006 Richmond Outdoor Sculpture exhibition is indeed year two of the 2005 Sculpture Invitational. Last year was an invitational only, and this year we did not want to limit ourselves to only sculptors we were aware of. We wanted the call for proposals to reach more sculptors outside of Richmond. The name change was owing to our wants of broadening the idea and scope of the project in the future. We are extremely excited about this year's exhibition."

The deadline is March 1st and there is NO ENTRY FEE. Click here for a PDF of the entry form.

building as painting

Kaylee Pickinpaugh at Casablanca Coffee

Dennis Matthews and friends have taken over a spacious coffee house and are having shows there. The current show consists of fifteen different artists and is probably closing soon, because the next show opens on February 4th.

Kaylee Pickinpaugh has a weird painting in the bathroom. I like her stuff a lot, I remember seeing two of her paintings more than a year ago in a VCU student show. The painting up now is a skewed interior of some kind of disco palace-like living room, with a big round fluffy chartreuse rug on the floor and a grotesque lady-man, or manly lady, sitting in a big stuffed chair wearing a little dress and glittery ruby platform shoes, with a cat on her lap. The perspective of the disco paneled floor is all screwed up and there is a big golden gilt mirror on the back wall reflecting a twisty disco hallway. The mirror is hanging on a wall on which the wallpaper pattern seems to be drifting into the corner like jellyfish.


I googled Kaylee to try to find some of her paintings but only found her contributions to Miranda July's site. This one is from Assignment #11: Photograph a scar and write about it -

"Molly, Amy, Nina and I all got these heart brands as a symbol of our friendship. We all took turns giving them to each other. It was pretty painful, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else, but we figured that it was all about the crazy experiences we've had together, and the stupid things that we'll always laugh about. Plus now we're all super tough."

1106 West Main Street, Casablanca Coffee. Next opening is Feb 4th, First Saturday at 5 PM it's at 1106 West Main Street.

sculpture something

The second annual sculpture something is accepting proposals. I'm not sure what it is called now. The first one was called 2005 Sculpture Invitational, but this one might be called Richmond Outdoor Exhibition or 2006 Richmond Outdoor Sculpture - I'm just not sure. Here is all the entry information.

The deadline is March 1st!!!

First year Sculpture Invitational posts - here, here, here, and here - and the Sculpture Invitational website is here.

PS - hey, anonymous militant artist ladies, look at the bad sign I wrote about in this initial Sculpture Invitational post from last year. Solidarity!

PPPPPPPPPPPPP

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Rebecca Winston at Diversity Thrift

I've finally scanned the other prints I got when I bought the Lester Van Winkle piece at Diversity Thrift. I've never heard of Rebecca Winston, the artist, but when I saw these little paper pieces crammed into a rack with a bunch of other stuff I had to save them, especially when I saw that some were signed and dated 1964. How have these little unframed things survived so long, uncared for?

These are the three that I bought. The biggest one here is the nativity scene, only about nine by eleven inches, the other two are postcard-sized. All three were priced at five dollars each, but because the bigger one is signed, titled, and dated while the other two are only initialed I was able to talk him down a buck on each.


I think this one is my favorite. It has a sad fairy-taleness, and you can't quite tell what she is doing. Washing clothes, or drowning a baby? She looks so sad, like something has happened to ruin the fairy-tale. All of these pieces feature a woman sitting or kneeling over a baby or possible baby.


This image is the smallest, probably about actual size on your computer. I see a lady but I don't see the baby. Is the crib empty?


The nativity pieces were the only ones that were signed. This is something that fits into her theme, but that she may also have had hopes of selling. There were more of these same nativity prints available, all hand-colored differently, all signed, dated, and titled.