Art

Mega Mall Chicago Aug 28 – Sept 3, 2011

28 August, 2011 by Andrew Rosinski

A series of seven day-long exhibitions at Booth 415–416 of the Chicago Megamall.

Mega Mall Chicago is a series of seven day-long exhibitions curated by local artists, gallerists, and curators. The event takes place from August 28 to Septemeber 3, 2011, at the Mega Mall Flea Market, located at 2500 N. Milwaukee Avenue. Each exhibition is one day only and will be open to the public from 4–8pm. It’s just like, it’s just like, a mini mall.

(Map)

Artist/curator dates & lineup include:

August 28 – Marcel Alcala
August 29 – Jose Lerma
August 30 – Diego Leclery
August 31 – Eric May
September 1 – Alex Herrera
Septemeber 2 – Jason Lazarus
September 3 – Bea Fremderman

“I am the organizer for a week-long series of one-day, pop-up art exhibitions at the Mega Mall, in Chicago, IL. The series will feature a revolving display of work culled from a multitude of Chicago-based artists. My intent is to expose Chicago to the broad expanse of relevant contemporary work produced here.

Organizing a show in a place designed explicitly for non-luxury commerce runs contrary to the model used by current art fairs, where access is denied to those without status or privilege. A tattoo artist in the Mega Mall becomes equivalent to a museum director, and personal, real world, life-applicable experiences such as the purchase of a diet coke at a Chinese restaurant become more relevant than the auctioning off of some century-old Cubist painting.”

— ♥ Marcel Alcala

More: megamallchicago.com

Event organizer: Marcel Alcala
Assistant organizer: Hiba Ali
PR / installation: Brandon Seckler
Installation: Natacha Stolz
Website: Walter Latimer

Posted in art, event, new media art
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Harry Smith’s Birthday Party by Allen Ginsberg

10 August, 2011 by Andrew Rosinski

“Harry Smith's Birthday Party” by Allen Ginsberg, 1998, estate stamped 32 1/4" x 24 1/2"

A helpful commenter (thanks!) lead me to “Harry Smith’s Birthday Party,” a two color lithograph and screenprint by Allen Ginsberg.

Edition of 39, available through Gemini GEL.

(Sidenote: DINCA welcomes all comments. Comments are fun and helpful, especially when contributing additional informational. To obviate spam comments, we close dincomments after 60 days. Aight, rip it up.)

Posted in art, experimental film, print / graphic design
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BEN RUSSELL : US : July 10, 2011 – July 31, 2011

6 July, 2011 by Andrew Rosinski

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BEN RUSSELL presents
BEN RUSSELL : US

THE CO-PROSPERITY SCHOOL
HIDEOUS BEAST
POOPER & PIZZA DOG
TM SISTERS
YOSHUA OKÓN

1716 S Morgan #2F Chicago, IL 60608
July 10, 2011 – July 31, 2011
Opening reception: Sunday 4-9pm, July 10th, 2011Private viewings by appointment*

*Two BPMs by Pooper & Pizza Dog will be performed at dusk during the opening reception.

ABOUT THE SHOW:
Beautiful Friend, this is the end! My Only Friend, the end! Of our elaborate plans, the end! After approximately 778 days,72 artists, and 12 group exhibitions of the most contemporary of the contemporary arts, BEN RUSSELL offers you a misty-eyed finale to what has undoubtedly been the greatest curatorial collaboration this city may have ever known. What with our lease expiring at the end of July and one of our directors leaving Chicago indefinitely for Parts Unknown,BEN RUSSELL : US will be our 13th and final show. And so: in pre-memorium and now-celebration of the hyper-intellectual pseudo-aesthetic alliance betwixt Brandon Alvendia (aka Chicago’s Best Artist) and Ben Russell (aka Chicago’s Best Local Filmmaker) and ummm You (Chicago’s Best Audience), the umpteen artists participating in BEN RUSSELL :US represent a veritable smörgåsbord of artistic alliances as drawn across fraternal, familial, romantic, pedagogical, and altruistic lines. Hand-picked for their collective sensibilities and their beguiling confidence in the generative power of directed camaraderie, these are artists that work together because they live/work/love together – they are US, plain and simple.

Inasmuch as US is “we” and “we” is BEN RUSSELL, we will exit as we entered, 25 months prior: A Lazy Sunday Opening, With Grilled Meats and Un-Meats, Libations and Fireworks and Goodwill Aplenty. A week shy of Independence Day, we will send bottle rockets to the sky while interrogating the monumental semiotics of national identification (OKÓN); we will hold hands and dive into the virtual summertime sea, hunting electric crabs and manatee-smiles (TM SISTERS). We will consume live Ham Dances (POOPER & PIZZA DOG) and roast the last marshmallows and bask in the illuminating/illuminated minimalist monolith to the challenges of communication (HIDEOUS BEAST) as our psychic hearts and Six Degrees of Separation to Everyone Everywhere are mapped out in chalk dust and memory (CO-PROSPERITY SCHOOL). From Miami to Mexico City, Bridgeport to Pilsen, and Inner to Outer Space, BEN RUSSELL : US is the US in your USA, the WE in your WE THE PEOPLE, the NOSOTROS in your NOS(O)TR(O)ADAMUS. BEN RUSSELL : US is Goodbye to our Past and Hello to our bright uncertain Future.

—–

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

THE CO-PROSPERITY SCHOOL is an Artist-Run School for and about the advancement and understanding of contemporary Chicago Art. Through guest speakers and class member presentations we shine a light on the contemporary art scene of Chicago. One of our goals is to break down the panel discussion dialogue of Chicago’s art and bring it to a more informal group discussion format in which shapers of Chicago’s Art World themselves tell of the contemporary scene. Members can discuss their own work, or the work of others. Past guests have included Daniel Tucker, Hamza Walker, Paul Klein, Duncan MacKenzie, Cody Hudson, Carolne Picard, Jason Foumberg, Carrie Gundersdorf, Tom Torluemke, Tom Burtonwood, Aron Packer, James Duignan, Nandipha Mntambo, and Barbara Koenen.

HIDEOUS BEAST is a collaborative effort between two artists, Josh Ippel and Charlie Roderick. Through organizing structured participatory events we attempt to encourage cultural activity outside the bounds of mainstream entertainment and fabricated desire. Critical of the audience as a passive participant, Hideous Beast seeks to coordinate events in which an acknowledged exchange between the event (as entertainment) and the spectator (as collaborator) can generate meanings beyond traditional formalized modes of entertainment.

It is their intent as artists and beings in common to shift perceptions of authorship and participation within the realm of constructed entertainment and art generated activities. This might change, though. HIDEOUS BEAST is always looking for others to collaborate with, both in carrying out our own projects and realizing others. Please contact them with any ideas for activities or events.

POOPER & PIZZA DOGfirst met in Chicago in the year 2008. Bonding over a mutual love for crude animations, fierce performances, excrement, and junk food, they hooked up and started playing together. They attended the FountainheadResidency in Miami in 2009 and performed as the double bill of “Pooper and Pizza Dog” at Locust Projects. Since then, they have collaborated on paintings, animations, sculptures, set designs, and performances to create a habitually double-featured audio visual experience. They have exhibited and performed at such venues as Art Basel’s Design Miami, the MCA, Roxaboxen Exhibitions, and ACRE Projects. They are currently working on implementing live reactive animations into their performances, a website for online Art Games, Pooper’s new album, and a peyote-themed amusement park.

TM SISTERS is a collaboration between Miami-based Monica Lopez De Victoria and Tasha Lopez De Victoria. They work in the mediums of video, digital video performance, VJing, collage, social experiments, zines, clothing, installations, and interactive video created along with their brother Samuel. Their do-it-yourself ethic started by being home schooled together by their parents. They were raised with intense psychological and spiritual discussions regarding behavior, relationships, creativity, and truth. The sisters’ work has been included in the international exhibitions “Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium” curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Daniel Birnbaum, and Gunnar B. Kvaran, the Second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, and PERFORMA 07. Their work has been seen and written about in publications like L’Officiel magazine, The Guardian, STEP Inside Design, the New York Times, Vogue Italia, and on the cover of ARTnews magazine for its 2007 “25 Trendsetters” article.

YOSHUA OKÓN was born in Mexico City in 1970 where he currently lives and works. In 2002 he received an MFA from UCLA with a Fulbright scholarship. In 1994, he founded La Panadería, an artist-run space in Mexico City; in 2009, he founded SOMA, an artist’s academic/residency program. His solo exhibitions include: HH, Baró Sao Paulo Brazil, Yoshua Okón: 2007-2010, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Ventanilla Única, Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City,Canned Laughter, Viafarini, Milan, SUBTITLED, Städtische Kunsthalle, Munich, Bocanegra, The Project, NY, Gaza Stripper, Herzeliya Museum, Israel, Cockfight, Galleria Francesca Kaufmann, Milan, Oríllese a la Orilla, Art & Public, Geneva, Lo Mejor de lo Mejor, La Panadería, Mexico City. His Group exhibitions include: Amateurs, CCA Wattis, San Francisco, Laughing in a Foreign Language, Hayward Gallery, London, The Age of Discrepancy, MUCA, Mexico City,Adaptive Behavior, New Museum, NY, Terror Chic, Spruth/Magers, Munich, The Virgin Show, Wrong Gallery, NY, Mexico City: an exhibition about the exchange rates between bodies and values, PS1, MoMA, NY, and Kunstwerke, Berlin.

ABOUT THE SPACE:
BEN RUSSELL is an art space in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. Co-curated by artists Brandon Alvendia and Ben Russell and situated around the front two rooms in the apartment of its namesake, BEN RUSSELL began presenting a series of month-long 5-person shows on Memorial Day Weekend in the year 2009. Participating artists are invited to produce and exhibit work that is in accordance with the title/theme of each show, the name of which will be derived entirely from the 10 letters in the words “ben russell.” Past shows have included BEN RUSSELL : RUSE, BEN RUSSELL :BLUENESS, and BEN RUSSELL : BEER. In keeping with the structural conceits of the French Oulipo language group and the spatial and material limits of what is effectively a rented apartment, BEN RUSSELL maintains a strict set of restrictions for all exhibiting artists by which:- One artist shall produce a wall-mounted work scaled at a minimum of three quarters of the thirteen by ten foot wall.
- One artist shall produce a wall-mounted work at a maximum of one half of the opposing wall space between the two adjacent doors.
- One artist shall produce a time-based work to be presented via a CRT flat screen monitor (and associated components) with Dolby 5.1 audio in the adjacent screening room.
- One artist shall produce work to be installed in the all-weather sculpture garden.
- One artist shall produce work to be performed for the duration of 15-30 minutes during the opening.

BEN RUSSELL features a rotating roster of Chicago-based and non-Chicago-based artists and will be open for viewings one night a month and by appointment, as needed.

–
www.dimeshow.com

Posted in art, avant-garde, event
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Internal Necessity

29 May, 2011 by Andrew Rosinski

“All methods are sacred if they are internally necessary. All methods are sins if they are not justified by internal necessity.”

— Wassily Kandinsky

Posted in art, quotes
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Review: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View by Jon Rafman, or Veritable Objective Collective Soul Earth Family Photo Album

19 May, 2011 by Andrew Rosinski

Before time, before you were born, and before your mother and mother’s mother were born, (in 2007) Google, IRL, emailed a fleet of cars o’er the land with the goal of documenting the street views of the world, street level. Each car a carriage with a pole fixed with nine cameras; each camera indifferent to art, art history, and the human experience; each camera a nebula ball that rests in a google fantasy claw.

: Google ball rests in fantasy claw

The Nine Eyes of Google Street View is a project by Jon Rafman, a Montreal-based artist and Paint FX club member; the project is an indelible collection of images gleaned from Google Street Views. Google street view is a subset of Google Maps, comprised of images captured by a nebula ball camera mounted atop a moving vehicle. It looks like, well, you know, one of those nebula balls that rests in the fantasy claw, except it moves around the world snapping copious photographs. The resulting images are typically mundane, because the nebula ball exists to capture and upload informational and topographical imagery for Google. The nebula ball does not pursue art; however, there are instances where the nebula ball (unintentionally) renders fine-art: images remarkably within spitting distance of the pure human experience, and quite well nigh to artistic objectivity. Rafman’s project is Rafman’s subjective aggregation and presentation of these special moments, via internet and post-internet.

By dint of Rafman’s curated 9-eyes.com collection, the participant opens a leather-bound book that might as well be titled, “Mother Earth’s Family Photo Album,” inasmuch as we are all living together, here on earth, as one big family — an unfathomably large family — with 6,835,508,543 mouths to feed (as of 12:11am on 5.19.2o11, vide this graphic, rendered by this source): we are family, we are happy and mad, we are capricious, tempestuous, and sad; a disfunction with a function ; a family, here on Earth, together at this present moment. So, with altruism, let us all hold hands and form a hand-holding chain around the earth, because this likely will alleviate all the ills of this difficult human experience . . . the sense of accomplishment, too . . . I mean, wouldn’t it be nice to say, “Hey, we did it! Finally, everyone on Earth held hands to wrap around and give the Earth a warm hug.” Obviously this was the impetus for Michael Jackson’s “Black Or White,” “Man In The Mirror” and “Heal The World,” or Agularia’s masterwork “Genie In A Bottle,” or Kool Aid ’89, and the Chicago Bulls dynasty of the ’90s, go Bulls.

Back to the Nine Eyes project, the participant journeys and cruises the streets of the world — images, visual artifacts — from country to country, from coast to coast, from truck stop prostitute to prostitute, from vagabond crawling babies to friendly guinea pig walkers — all moments that define our collective conscious and unconscious human experience.

Take the time to stop and smell the pixeled flowers of the 9-eyes.com webpage: you might find that the curated images evoke a visceral feeling; moreover, a profound sense of spirituality tinges: the profound sense of spirituality that we all experience every day, every night, this human (and much more than human) experience that we call death and that we call life. Sex, drugs, guns, murder, death, disease, hockey, knee surgery, wet jeans, earning Gs, jet-skiing off the coast of a coast of the coast of the Andes — moments like these are found by the google vehicle and viewed by many, but Jon Rafman sedulously devoted his time wandering, cruising, screen-capturing, surfing.

Rafman inevitably went Post-Internet with this project: the selected images are screen-captured, blown up to a very large scale, and mounted on a wall for gallery presentation. The project makes a graceful crossover. John Rafman’s Nine Eyes of Google Street View is brilliant project; thoughtful work that congeals the four corners of the internets’ imagery, a pleasing contrast to the meretricious, impetuous and vapid work of his Paint FX crew. Nine Eyes is an outstanding accomplishment of new media art: it’s net art with a concept that appeals to the multitude, inasmuch as it is google, and most people have heard the word google and most people understand the services google provides.

With sophisticated execution and vision, the Nine Eyes project initiates Rafman as an august figure and trailblazer of the incipient net-art and post-internet art movements vis-a-vis the overall ethos of new & experimental media today, 2011.

Below are 18 selected images from http://9-eyes.com:

More:
Jon Rafman’s website
Official website for 9-eyes, Google Street View
‘The Nine Eyes of Google Street View’ essay
http://9-eyes.com

Posted in art, computer art
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BEN RUSSELL : REBUS — Opening Reception — Saturday May 7th, 2010, 5-9pm

5 May, 2011 by Andrew Rosinski

1716 S Morgan #2F Chicago, IL 60608
May 7, 2011 – June 19, 2011
Opening reception: Saturday 5-9 pm, May 7th, 2011

Private viewings by appointment*
*The Presentation Theme (14:00, 16mm, 2008) by Jim Trainor will be projected twice during the opening reception.

About the show:
“XQQQQME Dear Friend, but your FAMILYYYYYY at BEN RUSSELL sure is feeling a bit FAREDCE! We usually have TIMING TI MING in bringing you, TIME TIME, the finest of the fine arts, but for some reason we got LAL in putting together this month’s 5-person exhibition — BENRUSSELL : REBUS! While putting this show together hasn’t been a P WALK ARK, but believe us when we say that the line-up is M1LLION — an SYMPHON that has finally been completed, that LOV that you dream of at night. We’re getting ahead of ourselves, though — we should really TAKE PETS and remind you, Dear Friend, what it is we’re getting on about.

BEN RUSSELL : REBUS is art-word and art-puzzle made manifest! From Lewis Carroll to Egyptian hieroglyphs to the British game of Concentration to your older brother’s collection of Lone Star Beer bottle caps, BEN RUSSELL : REBUS is yet another move forward in wo/man’s eternal quest to arrive at symbolic meaning through pictogrammatic signification! With the ever-clarifying but perpetually complicating metaphoric powers of art at our ready, we call upon you to venture in/out of that great unknown we call Meaning with naught but a Wi-Fi trail marker as guidepost for your deeply personal inner quest (ARCTANDER). Your path, as it were, will be bound by strange lines and drops of blood (TRAINOR), it will lead you to a painted cave wall of glyphs and symbols (PRICE) and an outcropping of transformative image-combinations (MOSK), at which point your world will rotate entirely. That thrum of voice and hum of light will settle upon your head, echoing out from smaller-cave to skull and back, an HD image-sound cipher (KNEZEVIC) cracked by your own delicate puzzle of eyes and ears.

So good it must be SICKBIRD, so affecting it’s like a punch IRIGHTI, this is proof positive that art and BEN RUSSELL : REBUS are PPOD — come on down and see for yourself!

About the Artists:
ZAK ARCTANDER is a Chicago based artist who makes sculptures, videos, and photographs. He received his BFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2010. He works as an Artist Guide at the Museum of Contemporary Art and is an assistant at Iceberg Projects in Rogers Park.

IKA KNEZEVIC is a Serbian artist based in Chicago. Her work occurs in various program-making media, physical objects and moving images. Current areas of research are: secrets, involuntary movement, dream-wreck, liquidity, topical and tropical disasters, downward spirals, bright lights, vibratory inscription, record making, dude art, double dude art, forensic exhibition models, Germany’s infatuation with minimalism and shit.

SARAH MOSK was born in 1978. Lives in Pilsen, Chicago, USA. Has a BFA from Northern Illinois University.

CARMEN PRICE‘s drawings create new relationships between familiar visual elements to express joy in contemporary culture. His celebratory works use personal symbolism and a strong faith in the accidental to form occasionally narrative and often confusing scenes. Originally from Kansas City, Price currently lives and works in Chicago.

JIM TRAINOR is a filmmaker, mostly an animator, living in Chicago. He is just now completing a series of films called The Animals and their Limitations, of which Harmony is the latest installment, with The Bat and the Virgin, The Bats, The Moschops and The Magic Kingdom its predecessors. Most recently, he has been working on a long comic strip project called Sun Shames Headhunting Moon. Jim Trainor teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

About the Space:
BEN RUSSELL is an art space in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. Co-curated by artists Brandon Alvendia and Ben Russell and situated around the front two rooms in the apartment of its namesake, BEN RUSSELL began presenting a series of month-long 5-person shows on Memorial Day Weekend in the year 2009. Participating artists are invited to produce and exhibit work that is in accordance with the title/theme of each show, the name of which will be derived entirely from the 10 letters in the words “ben russell.” Future shows may include BEN RUSSELL : LENS, BEN RUSSELL : REBELS, and BEN RUSSELL : US. In keeping with the structural conceits of the French Oulipo language group and the spatial and material limits of what is effectively a rented apartment, BEN RUSSELL maintains a strict set of restrictions for all exhibiting artists by which:

One artist shall produce a wall-mounted work scaled at a minimum of three quarters of the thirteen by ten foot wall.
One artist shall produce a wall-mounted work at a maximum of one half of the opposing wall space between the two adjacent doors.
One artist shall produce a time-based work to be presented via a CRT flat screen monitor (and associated components) with Dolby 5.1 audio in the adjacent screening room.
One artist shall produce work to be installed in the all-weather sculpture garden.
One artist shall produce work to be performed for the duration of 15-30 minutes during the opening.

BEN RUSSELL features a rotating roster of Chicago-based and non-Chicago-based artists and will be open for viewings one night a month and by appointment, as needed.”

–
www.dimeshow.com

Posted in animation & motion design, art, event, film
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Takeshi Murata: Get Your Ass to Mars

2 May, 2011 by Andrew Rosinski

Takeshi Murata // Art and The Future // 2011 // Pigment print 32.5 x 50 inches // Edition of 3 with 2 APs

Takeshi Murata: Get Your Ass to Mars
April 29 – June 11, 2011
Ratio 3 (website)
1447 Stevenson Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103, USA (map)

Ratio 3 is pleased to present Get Your Ass to Mars, new work by Takeshi Murata, on view from April 29 to June 11, 2011.

Takeshi Murata // Cyborg // 2011 // Pigment print // 28 x 42 inches // Edition of 3 with 2 APs

Takeshi Murata // Expanded Cinema // 2011 // Pigment print // 27.43 x 42 inches // Edition of 3 with 2 APs

Takeshi Murata // Golden Banana // 2011 // Pigment print // 30.45 x 42 inches // Edition of 3 with 2 APs

Takeshi Murata // Gumbone and Coke // 2011 // Pigment print // 23.2 x 32 inches // Edition of 3 with 2 APs

Takeshi Murata // Jazz Funeral // 2011 // Pigment print // 23.2 x 32 inches // Edition of 3 with 2 APs

Takeshi Murata // The Heretic // 2011 // Pigment print // 27.3 x 42 inches // edition of 3 with 2 APs

Takeshi Murata // Salon Kitty // 2011 // Pigment print // 27.3 x 42 inches // Edition of 3 with 2 APs

Takeshi Murata The Sisterhood // 2011 // Pigment print // 23.2 x 32 inches // Edition of 3 with 2 APs

Honestly, I guess I’m either credulous or oblivious with realist computer art these days: I was trusting these were photographs taken at the exhibit IRL, one of my initial reactions being, “Does Takeshi have to cut fresh oranges everyday for the ‘Art and Future’ piece?” (irl?) In real life or not, this is impressive, alluring work, and for those in San Francisco — or California — you should make yer merry way to SF and visit Ratio 3 for Takeshi Murata’s “Get Your Ass to Mars” exhibit, which shows April 29 – June 11, 2011. The exhibit gleans its title from a line of movie dialogue, spoken by Arnold Schwartzenager, in Total Recall (1990), directed by Paul Verhoeven, a personal favorite.

Fun fact: Total Recall is such a favorite that I acted a scene from it in my Acting for Camera course in film school. James Franco was in that class as well, for he is enrolled in septendecim schools simultaneously.

April 17, 2011: SPACE PROGRAM presents: Mercury, or One-Half a Life Spent in Darkness is One-Half a Life Spent Facing the Sun

15 April, 2011 by Andrew Rosinski

SPACE PROGRAM presents
“Mercury, or One-Half a Life Spent in Darkness is One-Half a Life Spent Facing the Sun”
Curated by Ben Russell

This Sunday!
April 17, 2011 | 7:30pm
at Thalia Hall
1807 S Allport, Chicago, IL, 60608 (map)
$5 suggested donation

Messenger Mercury is retrograde until April 23, but with this SPACE PROGRAM screening series, Mercury turns direct on Sunday, April 17th, 2011. Guided by the afflatus of the planetary teachers, Space Program projects indelible cinema in the historic, Pilsen-based Thalia Hall — both NASA employees and non-NASA employees are invited — but please note that this space is unheated, so bring warm clothes, sleeping bags, blankets, beaver pelts, caribou furs, and other warm goods. Considering the typical 40°–80° Chicago-flux of weather this time of year, it is advised that you bring extra beaver pelts and warm materials.

Synopsis of the Mercury Programme: “In honor of its eccentric orbit, its 176-day day, its large iron core, its tidal bulges and Beethoven Crater and its ‘gently rolling, hilly plains,’ your navigators at SPACE PROGRAM hereby propose an audiovisual third fly-by of the smallest galactic sphere: MERCURY. The innermost planet of our Solar System, Mercury is metaphorically volatile, changeable, fickle and flighty. It is a slow rotation with a sharp edge; one that occupies the two poles of our human psyche – Mercury is radical darkness, sorrow and despair; Mercury is blinding radiance, heat and wonderment. Mercury is youth. It is the cusp of adulthood, the terrors of development, that bittersweet joy of (not) knowing enough. Viewed from our telescope, Mercury is Eva Marie Rødbro’s constellation of Texan teenagers, all infrared desire and insect and nipple pierce and imminent danger — the anxiety of that next rotation is deep, soul-shaking. When we focus again, we see Mercury in the overwhelming sweetness and sorrow of Martin Bell and Mary Ellen Marks’ Streetwise (1984) — a document of a 1980s gang of Seattle street kids living in abandoned spaces (echoes of Thalia Hall), with the sort of heart-baring openness that can only come from living far too close to the sun … Where there is light, there is darkness.”

Below is a letter from the curator, Ben Russell:

Fellow Travelers,

On behalf of your friends at Mission Control (Pilsen), I am proud to announce the launch of SPACE PROGRAM* – a screening series in four parts that will temporarily re-colonize a world heretofore lost to Silence-and-Darkness in the name of Light-and-Sound. Presented in the shadowy maw of Pilsen’s historic Thalia Hall under the guidance of artist/astronaut Ben Russell, SPACE PROGRAM is a satellite alternative to dominant media practices, a time-image map for those new constellations rapidly forming in your heads. From April 17th onwards, each of the initial four SPACE PROGRAM screenings are named after and thematically curated in relation to one of the planets of our solar system. Come, discover new worlds with us! More specifically:

April 17th, 2011: MERCURY (see details below)
April 24th, 2011: VENUS (details TBA)
May 1st, 2011: MARS (details TBA)
May 8th, 2011: JUPITER (details TBA)

Space Is the Place,

Ben Russell

MERCURY PROGRAMME DETAILS

Featuring:
I Touched Her Legs by Eva Marie Rødbro (15:00, video, 2010)
Streetwise by Martin Bell and Mary Ellen Marks (91:00, 16mm, 1984)
TRT 106:00

I Touched Her Legs by Eva Marie Rødbro (15:00, video, 2010)
These Texan youth are the descendants of David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’, and they are both invincible and as fragile as a deer caught in the headlights of an approaching car. The Danish artist Eva Marie Rødbro’s sound-and-image montage is an extraordinary experience – a deeply poetic anthropological study of the self-destructive rites of passage of teenage life. This is the fragility of youth, caught shattering. Everything is simultaneously animal and human, domestic and ethereal – that kid backflipping off his couch is an astronaut, untethered in space; those forgotten Jesus hymns are portals to St.Elsewhere, true. If this video is a document then it’s also a vision – not just about what one looks at, but how one sees and hears the world.

Streetwise by Martin Bell (91:00, 16mm, 1984)
“The first time I saw this film, when I was a child, I felt like running away and living under a bridge, someplace or other. It’s an extremely beautiful film, which captures a time and a place that no longer exists in this way.” — Harmony Korine

Martin Bell’s unforgettable vérité documentary was shot on the streets of Seattle in the mid-1980s, and follows a group of homeless teenage kids aged between 13 and 19, who live off ‘container-raiding’, stealing and hustling. Rat, the dumpster diver, Tiny, the teenage prostitute, Shellie, the baby-faced blonde, DeWayne, the hustler, all old beyond their years. They talk as if they were port workers, but behind the tough façade lie the vulnerable, small beings that have chosen the freedom of the street instead of the broken homes they come from. A raw masterpiece, and a kind of documentary precursor to Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), which Harmony Korine himself wrote the screenplay for as a teenager. This is a film that is rarely screened, one that you’ll never forget.

===========================================================================

STREETWISE courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

SPACE PROGRAM is made possible by a grant from Propeller Fund and through material support from the The Foundation for Emerging Artistic Talent (E.A.T.).

Launched in May 2010, Propeller Fund is administered jointly by Gallery 400, UIC and threewalls. Initial support for the program is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts as part of its initiative to promote informal and independently organized visual arts activities across the United States.

The Foundation for Emerging Artistic Talent (E.A.T.) is a non-profit organization dedicated to promote the arts by providing exhibition opportunities and educational resources for emerging artists in the Chicago-land community. E.A.T.’s goal is to enrich the neighborhood of Pilsen through inspired artistic productions showcased in Thalia Hall’s 800-seat theater and gallery space. E.A.T’s dynamic programs will cultivate a supportive artistic network where emerging artists can be empowered to share their voice.

More:
www.dimeshow.com

Thalia Hall

Posted in art, avant-garde, documentary / ethnography, event, film
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3/31/11 at 7:00pm > Ben Russell: The Artist’s Talk As A Disappearing Act (With Live Video Feed) at threewalls, Chicago, IL, USA

29 March, 2011 by Andrew Rosinski

Ben Russell
The Artist’s Talk As A Disappearing Act (With Live Video Feed)
3/31/11 at 7:00pm
Threewalls, Chicago, IL, USA
119 North Peoria #2C, Chicago, IL 60607 (map)
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-5pm

For those of you in/around Chicago this week, Ben Russell will be giving an artist’s talk/performance about his current solo show at threewalls on Thursday at 7:00pm. It is a delicious exhibit of BR’s mystic acuity. Superluminal; punk-rock; enchanting; ton-o-fun.

***

The Artist’s Talk As A Disappearing Act (With Live Video Feed)
In which the artist performs a televised lecture regarding the seven works currently on display in his solo exhibition, Uh-Oh It’s Magic. Possible topics to be discussed include: working under the influence, phenomenological states, animism, optics and subjectivity, levitation, cultural relativism, and rainbows. The notion of “losing oneself in one’s work” will be demonstrated materially during the course of the lecture and subsequent Q&A.

***
In case you haven’t yet seen the show, it’ll be up until the 23rd of April — here is what some kind souls have said about it so far (in both image and word):

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I am Back: Recent Work by Nicholas O’Brien, March 23, 2011, The Nightingale, Chicago

23 March, 2011 by Andrew Rosinski

I am Back: Recent Work by Nicholas O’Brien
TONIGHT
Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011, 8PM–11pm
The Nightingale
1084 N. Milwaukee, Chicago, IL 60642
(map)

“During the course of the evening, Nicholas O’Brien will weave a conversation and lecture around his recent screen-based works. These routes will range from a reading of an online conversation about mediated spatial awareness, screening samples from an ongoing video blog, presenting a pecha-kucha style lecture on the show Breaking Bad, as well as showing a VHS love letter sent to a distant, yet familial, stranger. The evening will enfold over the course of interlinking monologues discussing loss/return, finding sincerity in transient formats, discovering self through cultural history, excavating digital landscapes, and employing wit to both disarm and embrace.

Nicholas O’Brien is a writer, curator, and artist currently living and working in Boulder and online. He received his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently getting his MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder where he also teaches Digital Art production and theory. His work has appeared both nationally and internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Xth Biennial in Lyon, The Interferenze Festival in Bisaccia, Italy, and USC’s Ed and Gayle Roski MFA Gallery.”

More: http://doubleunderscore.net/

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Ben Russell: Uh-Oh It’s Magic: March 11-April 23, at Threewalls, Chicago

10 March, 2011 by Andrew Rosinski

BEN RUSSELL: UH-OH IT'S MAGIC

March 11th- April 23rd, 2011
three-walls.org
119 North Peoria #2C, Chicago, IL 60607 (map)
Opening reception: Friday, March 11th, 6-9pm
Artist talk: Thursday, March 31st, 7pm
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-5pm

CHICAGO: For his SOLO exhibition Uh-Oh It’s Magic, artist Ben Russell gathers together seven instances of sound and image that speak to the varying possibilities of belief and mysticism within a global construct. Taking its title from the choral refrain of the Cars’ song Magic (1984), Uh-Oh It’s Magic points towards the persistence of a culturally Western hope/belief in the existence of Magic: a belief-in-belief that employs logic to dismantle difference-as-superstition as quickly as it drops its jaw in the presence of the technologically explicable. From the myth of Icarus to the divination rites of Malian animists, from Mexican cotton candy makers to Vietnamese martial artists, and from Icelandic drowning pools to Abbie Hoffmans’ 1967 levitation of the Pentagon, this exhibition is realized across a multitude of forms – 16mm film loops, auto-repeat records, found photographs, multi-projector installations, prisms, mirrors, heat lamps, desiccants and a transformed non-space that bathes viewers in a delirious chroma-key paint job, effectively making the gallery everywhere and anywhere at once.

In the her essay for the exhibition, Erika Balsom says: “In the art of Ben Russell, the cinema’s paradoxical status as both disinterested document and active producer of magic emerges as a fundamental preoccupation. Moving into the gallery space after an established career in filmmaking has allowed Russell to make use of an expanded array of strategies and media to explore issues he has long addressed: Do we—and should we—believe in what we see? When does the moving image seek to deceive us and when does it promise revelation? Russell imagines a global cartography of sites and sights that challenge rationality. Placing the experience of travel at the center of his practice, the artist charts culturally varying approaches to the otherworldly with the ethnographic tradition never far out of sight.”

Ben Russell Portrait #1

Ben Russell is a media artist and curator whose films, installations, and performances have been presented in spaces ranging from 14th Century Belgian monasteries to 17th Century East India Trading Co. buildings, police station basements to outdoor punk squats, Japanese cinematheques to Parisian storefronts, and Chicago bathtubs to Viennese boats. He has had solo screenings and exhibtions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Museum of Modern Art. A 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and 2010 FIPRESCI award recipient, Ben began the Magic Lantern screening series in Providence, Rhode Island, is co-director of the artist-run space BEN RUSSELL in Chicago, and he currently teaches in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Founded in 2003, threewalls’ is dedicated to increasing Chicago’s cultural capital by cultivating contemporary art practice and discourse. With a focus on the practices of local artists and administrators or visiting artists interested in regional history and culture, we aim to create a locus of exchange between local, national and international contemporary art communities that builds Chicago’s reputation as an important site for creative research and production.

threewalls operates three programs: six exhibitions per year that support local artists through SOLO and group exhibitions; a series of public programs that explore current ideas in art and culture (The Public Culture Lecture Series, threewallsSALONS and a biannual symposium on grass-roots and community organized cultural administration) and a residency that invites artists from around the world to engage in regionally site-specific research or projects. threewalls is also joint administrator of The Propeller Fund with Gallery 400 at The University of Illinois at Chicago.

threewalls is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency; by a CityArts Program I grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs; The Chicago Community Trust; The Cliff Dwellers Foundation for the Arts; ArtsWork Fund for Organizational Development; The Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation; The Alphawood Foundation; The MacArthur Fund for Arts & Culture at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation; 3Arts Chicago; and major support is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. threewalls is sponsored by Pernod Absinthe.

More

Ben Russell on Vimeo

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art

Mega Mall Chicago Aug 28 – Sept 3, 2011

Harry Smith’s Birthday Party by Allen Ginsberg

BEN RUSSELL : US : July 10, 2011 – July 31, 2011

Internal Necessity

“All methods are sacred if they are internally necessary. All methods are sins if they are not justified by internal necessity.”

— Wassily Kandinsky

Review: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View by Jon Rafman, or Veritable Objective Collective Soul Earth Family Photo Album

BEN RUSSELL : REBUS — Opening Reception — Saturday May 7th, 2010, 5-9pm

Takeshi Murata: Get Your Ass to Mars

April 17, 2011: SPACE PROGRAM presents: Mercury, or One-Half a Life Spent in Darkness is One-Half a Life Spent Facing the Sun

MERCURY PROGRAMME DETAILS

3/31/11 at 7:00pm > Ben Russell: The Artist’s Talk As A Disappearing Act (With Live Video Feed) at threewalls, Chicago, IL, USA

I am Back: Recent Work by Nicholas O’Brien, March 23, 2011, The Nightingale, Chicago

Ben Russell: Uh-Oh It’s Magic: March 11-April 23, at Threewalls, Chicago

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“All methods are sacred if they are internally necessary. All methods are sins if they are not justified by internal necessity.”

— Wassily Kandinsky

MERCURY PROGRAMME DETAILS

dinca.org SACRED VISIONS 4 U

Navigation

Interview

Hand Motions

t0p 5

1mage

Essay

Review

Dincategories

Dincarchives

Dincauthors

dinca.org
SACRED VISIONS 4 U