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machines machines machines machines machines machines machines
Gallery artists, Steven and Billy Blaise Dufala, have designed the intricately futile machines that are featured in machines machines machines machines machines machines machines, which is currently onstage at Here (New York).
machines machines machines machines machines machines machines explodes the world of garage tinkers and backyard engineers in a ridiculous theatre piece featuring the world\'s most complicated machines set to perform the simplest tasks. Following the formula, \"the most of amount of effort for the least amount of gain,\" three chowderhead geniuses reach for the heights of mechanical ingenuity to reveal the depths of human idiocy.
Machines x 7 focuses on a trio of fretful men (Rainpan co-founders Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford along with Pig Iron\'s Gabriel Quinn Bauriedel) who may or may not be brothers living in what may or may not be a postapocalyptic world. In constant fear of an unnamed and unseen enemy, they grow increasingly paranoid and wire their bunker with an enormous array of machines constructed from debris.
HERE
145 Sixth Avenue
NY, NY
Pew Fellowships in the Arts Announced
Fleisher/Ollman is pleased to spread the good news that the following old friends, new friends and amazing artists have been named the 2009 Pew Fellows:
Marc Brodzik, Anthony Campuzano, Sarah Gamble, Daniel Heyman, Ken Kalfus, Jennifer Levonian, Robert Matthews, Frances McElroy, Ben Peterson, Marco Roth, Ryan Trecartin, Nami Yamamoto
Pew Fellowships in the Arts, a program of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, was established by The Pew Charitable Trusts in 1991 and awards grants to artists working in a wide variety of performing, visual and literary disciplines.
Mocha Dick In the Invisible World reviewed in Philadelphia Inquirer
Dynamic duo
by Edith Newhall
Few artworks in Philadelphia can inspire the jaw-dropping awe that Tristin Lowe's single, gigantic felt replica of a whale, Mocha Dick, at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, does (and will do all summer). By contrast, the two-person show Lowe is sharing with Paul Swenbeck at Fleisher/Ollman Gallery has the feeling of a collaboration, of two friends playing off each other's whims.
Lowe is showing a variety of felt pieces. Some are directly inspired by Melville's Moby-Dick (as, of course, was Mocha Dick), such as a rendition of a broken masthead with Queequeg's head lying on it; others, such as an upside-down trash can and an overturned chair, suggest relics of the urban cityscape.
Swenbeck's resin and ceramic sculptures, in colors so intense they look almost toxic, seem to have sprung from science fiction. There's a 1950s movie that featured one of these pieces in a living room, you think, or maybe it was in a scene in a desert, just after the flying saucer took flight. Strange half-human, half-plant forms grow from pools of Day-Glo liquid (dried resin, actually).
Lowe and Swenbeck have, in fact, collaborated on a few works here. Several lemon-yellow shelves hang from wooden pegs on a strip of molding attached to the wall; on them, Lowe and Swenbeck have arranged cups and bottles (in felt, by Lowe) and variously shaped and colored vessels (in ceramic and resin, by Swenbeck). A colonial tavern meets Giorgio Morandi. Why not?
Mocha Dick reviewed in Philadelphia Inquirer
Fabric Workshop features Philly artist
By Edward Sozanski
Ryan Trecartin has junked the traditionally gentle paradigm of passive art for something audaciously combative. His art assaults the unwary, pummels with unrelenting visual percussion and aural raucousness until one either collapses in submission or flees the premises.
Trecartin is only five years out of Rhode Island School of Design. Yet already he has been included in one Whitney Biennial (2006) and has been shown at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
He's one of four Philadelphia artists the Fabric Workshop and Museum has brought together not because they investigate similar themes; they are, in fact, considerably different from one another. But they are all Philadelphians, and that's the show's principal rationale.
The other three artists have been highly visible locally for some years - Tristin Lowe, Virgil Marti, and Peter Rose. The first two are primarily sculptors and installation artists, while Rose and Trecartin work in video. The juxtaposition of Rose and Trecartin reveals starkly how the latter has radicalized this medium.
Rose has demonstrated repeatedly, as he does again in this exhibition, that he's capable of striking innovation. He uses video to illuminate layers of perception, both physical and psychological, in everyday situations.
Even when Rose's manipulations of reality are extreme, they are still plausibly connected to common experience.
Trecartin's videos describe a dystopian world so intensely confrontational, fragmented, and bizarre that one is first puzzled, then disoriented, and finally exhausted, as if having just spent 24 hours on an alien planet.
For him and his troupe of supporting players, the medium truly is the message. It has to be so, because underlying themes are buried beneath a streaming torrent of gibberish dialogue, laser-quick scene shifts, and mind-shattering noise.
Trecartin has shifted video art into hyperdrive. Plots are impossible to follow, which might be his point. He appears to have projected contemporary life, with all its absurdities, into a future so frenetic that it makes Dada seem like Shakespeare.
He's showing three videos that are part of a projected suite of seven related films (proof enough that he's a serious and ambitious fellow). These are so manic and chaotic that they can't be described, another clue that he's charting new territory.
I can only pass along their ostensible themes - one is about the alarming and annoying proliferation of market research, another addresses the idiocies of corporate culture, and the third concerns family dynamics, in which personal interactions are expressed in business terms.
These are all areas of concern in contemporary life, and will continue to be so. It sounds odd, but even though Trecartin (who plays multiple roles in these videos) is difficult to follow, his method is also mesmerizing in its slick technical legerdemain. One has the feeling of witnessing an aesthetic turning point, never mind what that point might be.
See Trecardin first, because you'll need to decompress afterward. The workshop has thoughtfully installed him in its so-called New Temporary Contemporary a few doors west of the main gallery.
There, you might begin with Rose's new video, Journey to Q'xtlan, a triptych that is more like a diptych with mirror images. The central screen displays a semi-abstract sequence in which human figures move through darkened tunnels or caverns illuminated by brief flashes of brilliant light and accompanied by deep rumblings and crashings.
One catches glimpses of natural things such as trees and a viscous red material that suggests flowing lava. The images unfold amid constant shaking, as if Rose had filmed an earthquake from inside Earth. The two side screens present a more subdued secondary sequence, but as mirror images.
As you contemplate this piece, only seven minutes long, consider that you're looking at what now seems like traditional, "Old-Masterish" video art. Its effect, to stimulate contemplation, memory and imagination, is the opposite of what Trecartin achieves with his "shock-and-awe" bombardment.
Virgil Marti, a longtime master printer at the workshop, is known for demonstrating that the vocabulary of interior decoration - wallpaper, fabrics and lighting - can be made to serve high art. He has two installations in the exhibition, one of which is the most persuasive demonstration of this idea I have seen from him.
Marti has covered two walls of one large room with champagne-colored wallpaper silkscreened to resemble silk hung in swags. It's perfect trompe-l'oeil. Several circular and half-moon settees are covered in wedges of boldly patterned and contrasting solid-colored fabrics, which in this environment seem perfectly mated.
On the walls, Marti has installed lights within snowflake-like reliefs composed of casts of human bones. That might seem macabre, but their delicacy and symmetry override such concerns.
Another room is papered with a gridlike design adapted from photographs of Elvis Presley's gravesite memorial at Graceland. One might expect this to be garish, but in fact its mood of sentimental melancholy is demurely Victorian.
Tristin Lowe's contribution, a monumental sculpture, is a piece that would normally dominate such a group show; perhaps it does if one sees it last. It's not only enormous, but improbable - a life-scale, 52-foot-long sperm whale, Mocha Dick, executed in ivory-colored industrial felt stretched over an inflatable vinyl armature.
Mocha Dick isn't a commercialized Disney attraction but a scientifically accurate re-creation. If if weren't for the zipper seams - the felt covering was made in sections - you could mistake Mocha for one of nature's own. (The name refers to a real leviathan that attacked whalers off Chile and inspired Herman Melville.)
Lowe has given the beast lifelike barnacles on its snout and sucker scars and creases on its hide. Unfortunately, the mouth is hidden, so you can't see its squid-crunching teeth. But you can stare into its diminutive, soulful eyes.
Lowe doesn't explain what prompted him to tackle such an immense labor, executed with the workshop staff, so one is left to speculate and extrapolate. The most obvious reference is to Melville's novel and its allegorical lessons about life's travails.
Another, more immediate response is to gape in astonishment at such a natural marvel. One could never get this close to a real sperm whale, so the encounter is bound to be sobering, and memorable.
Tristin Lowe at The Fabric Workshop and Museum
Tristin Lowe will be unveiling his newest work-a 52 foot long sculpture of a sperm whale at the Fabric Workshop and Museum’s newly renovated galleries. The exhibition which runs from April 27 through the end of the summer also includes work by Virgil Marti, Peter Rose and Ryan Trecartin.
Inspired by Mocha Dick, the notorious male sperm whale that lived in the Pacific Ocean in the early 19th Century and which was the model for Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Lowe has created his version of the iconic leviathan out of felt. The piece was made in conjunction with the Fabric Workshop and Museum.