“Survey/Surveil” : Jason Reed and Bethany Delahunt

Opening Reception: Saturday, June 16th, 2012, 7-11PM
On view by appointment only through June 23rd

Survey/Surveil explores the visual rhetoric and psychogeography of the U.S./Mexico border through video, interactive sculpture, photography, and appropriated imagery. We have worked independent of each other, except for a few conversations, and our nature of creating and reference of experience are quite different. However, we are intrigued by and have made work in response to similar issues, in particular the construction of border identity by the public and media, notions of otherness, the land as a surveyed/surveilled space, and the game of us vs. them that is played out daily along the line.

With an understanding that vision facilitates each of these issues and functions as the chief method of control in this environment, we have built an installation that shifts the context of looking and invites reflection on what is being seen and by whom. Within the space, we also invite interaction within real and constructed situations, illuminating how seductive it is to engage in the game of watching.

Ultimately this exhibition reflects our collective effort to use art as a means to pose significant social questions about borders, ways of looking, immigration, smuggling, and modes of representation. Rather than using the work to make a value judgment, we are most interested in the installation serving as a catalyst for critical inquiry and contemplation. And through participation we work to provide viewers an opportunity to explore multiple perspectives — to watch and to be watched.

“New Nature” : Calder Kamin

Opening Reception: Saturday, June 2nd, 2012, 7-11PM
On view by appointment only through June 9th, 2012

Additional programming including an artist talk, neighborhood clean up, urban wildlife tour, build a bird house out of recycled materials workshop T.B.A.

I am interested in synanthropes- animals that thrive due to mankind’s impact on biodiversity. Urbanization has been detrimental to many species, but it has also accelerated adaptations and successful symbiosis in some animals living amongst humans. I celebrate the creative effects of our influence on nature in addition to concerning myself with the negative. Synanthrope Stations are sculptural installations equipped to accommodate the seasonal needs of urban dwelling birds. Trash infused bird nests are a common sight in cities and suburban areas, and some researches say that birds benefit from the longevity of synthetic over natural. I will process and organize various man-made materials, taken from litter, and weave it through sculptural steel and ceramic supply stations for birds. By removing trash from a site and transforming it for animal use, I am hoping to initiate other ways of looking at refuse and our responsibility to nature.

Calder Kamin (born Austin, TX) is an artist and art administrator in Kansas City, MO. Kamin’s fabricated ceramic fauna illustrate an investigation into our benevolence towards certain species and cultural constructions of nature. Before completing her BFA, for ceramics and art history from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2009, she curated for Red Star Studios, the Kansas City Art Institute’s Ferguson Teaching Collection and off campus galleries. Kamin is a 2011-2012 Charlotte Street Foundation’s Urban Culture Project resident artist, and has returned to KCAI, as staff in Career Services, responsible for the development of the Professional Practice programing. She has shown nationally, and is in several notable collections in Kansas City.

Co-Lab Projects/Nelsen Partners presents 

“ROW HOME” : Mark Johnson 

Open hours during the West Austin Studio Tour May 19th and 20th, 11AM-6PM
On view by appointment May 21st-July 14th, 2012

N Space at Nelsen Partners
905 Congress Ave.
Austin, TX 78701

“In these works I invade the viewers space with fragmented conversations. The lost paragraphs meanings find their way to the surface through similar relationships between letters, drawings, color and texture. I try to observe events, human interactions, and personal perspectives to become more conscious of my own emotional responses and to find metaphors for experience. My findings become the phrases used in my work that are journalistic in nature and describe a universal struggle of reflection.” -Mark Johnson

http://paintjohnson.com/

Mark Johnson paints, draws, and creates multimedia work out of a studio in the east side art megaplex, Pump Project. Much of his work involves text and letters - sometimes with direct messages, others that are harder to decipher. He moved to Austin in 2008 from Brooklyn and has exhibited during the East Austin Studio Tours, “Fifth Business” a joint show with Debra Broz and Michael Merck at Pump Project, and a solo show at Art Project in 2009. He currently works as Operations Manager/Preparator at AMOA/Arthouse.

Newly rebranded nonprofit Co-Lab Projects has entered into a unique partnership with downtown architecture firm Nelsen Partners to provide an additional exhibition site called N Space—a new testing ground for a rotating selection of contemporary art meant to complement work customarily exhibited at Co-Lab’s Project Space in East Austin.

Co-Lab Projects will now serve the artistic community by providing multiple venues in which to exhibit, learn, and teach. Co-Lab Projects aims to cultivate a new collectorship for up and coming artists.

“All_Over” : Ben Brandt

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 19th, 2012, 7-11PM
On view by appointment only through May 26th, 2012

“All_Over” is a contemporary iteration of an ancient form, the grotto. Ambiguous in its definition owing to various uses, both artificial and manmade grottos are caves that have served as oracle temples and garden decorations. Generally, manmade grottos are created to represent their natural counterpart, sculpted environments that are embellished with statuary and artificial geological formations. The famous Buontalenti Grotto in Boboli Garden outside Florence houses a sculpted pastoral scene, encrusted with stalactites, along with Michaelangelo’s Prisoners, and landscape frescoes that provide a space for contemplation of the numinous.

The site-specific installation “All_Over”, takes as a departure point, the often-overlooked grotto-like domestic spaces of the attic and basement crawlspaces. These liminal spaces that insulate and buffer everyday living spaces from the exterior world, often serve as repositories of little-used items of storage, or house the mechanical systems that regulate the flow of air and water through the structure. These spaces often sit dark and forgotten for extended periods until either some problem with our environmental regulation system presents itself, or some occurrence outside of the daily flow of life creates the need for us to enact a retrieval operation. If a building and a body were metaphorically mapped into each other, the attic and the basement would represent the space of memory and the subconscious, respectively. This grotto presents a collapse of these two separate zones, where blown insulation will become the geologic accretions over the stored remnants of sculptures as psychological contents.

Nightmare City Presents
“Not Free, Not Dead: The Psychedelic End”
a touring program of recent San Francisco Bay Area shorts

Outdoor Screening: Saturday, May 5th, 2012, 8:30PM
Runs concurrently with “TEENAGE WASTELAND” in the gallery

San Francisco, CA – Nightmare City is pleased to announce the upcoming tour of Not Free, Not Dead: The Psychedelic End, a video program of recent Bay Area shorts.

Harkening back to the tripped out psychedelic lightshows of San Francisco’s 1960s counter culture as well as early Beat Generation experiments in stop motion animation, the artists included in Not Free, Not Dead pay homage to the Bay Area’s rich relationship with the moving image while simultaneously transcribing their fragmented technological experience onto these varied strategies and materials.

Ranging from narrative to music video to experimental – these mixed shorts are united by a visual vernacular specific to California.  Cobbled together from internet search words, these kaleidoscopic fragments are informed equally by subculture, the Bay Area’s rich underground film and video history as well as Hollywood’s cult classics and formulaic genres. 

These hazy dreamlike states are populated by rock-and-roll devil horns, hang-loose hands and smiley faces floating freely alongside processed clips appropriated from major motion pictures. The darker side, a bad trip, emerges as surreal worlds give way to surreal worlds in a narrative buddy film and a horror flick, twisted from the mirrored, rainbow static of California’s once frontier landscape. 

Featuring recent work by Caitlin Denny, Gregory Kaplowitz, Jen Kirsten, Alex S. Lukas, Jessica Miller, Dan Olsen, Skye Thorstenson, Virtual Pubes, and Nightmare City.

ABOUT
Since the 1940s the existence of institutions in the San Francisco Bay dedicated to the screening, distribution, and discussion of alternative film and video art fostered an environment that facilitated and supported the thriving experimental scene.  Not Free, Not Dead: The Psychedelic End explores the extension of this trajectory in which a new crop of video artists are claiming the San Francisco Bay Area’s video landscape.  Their performative, processed, hyper-color, animated worlds of skewed, sometimes non-existent narrative are united by an aesthetic of trippiness, the values of punk cinema, and seemingly abject notions of form, notions that are disembodied by the camera, computer or projector’s consumption.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Caitlin Denny is an independent curator, writer and artist based in San Francisco. In 2009 she founded JstChillin.org, an online exhibition platform, with Parker Ito. Through videos, interactive works, installations, essays, and various fabricated ephemera, the site generated a sense of community that reflected JstChillin’s interest in collapsing the relationship between curatorial pursuit and artistic practice.  Rhizome at The New Museum is currently undertaking a complete archival of the project.  Denny recently spoke in a panel discussion on The Digital Museum at The Creator’s Project and has done projects at Xth Lyon Biennale, The Dependent Art Fair (New York), 319 Scholes (Brooklyn), Reference Gallery (Richmond), School 33 Art Center (Baltimore), Roots and Culture (Chicago), The LAB (SF), NOMA Gallery (SF) La Mama (NYC) and many other locations in the net. She currently is directing and choreographing an evening of interactive and performative installations referencing the negative reflexivity of “being-online”.  Body Manipulations will occur in June 2012 at San Francisco’s The LAB located in The Mission.  She graduated from California College of the Arts in 2009 with a BFA in Media Arts.

Gregory Kaplowitz uses the mediums of photography and video to create painterly abstractions that result in unique photographs, editioned prints, and installations. He graduated from the California College of the Arts in 2007 with a dual BFA in photography and graphic design. Since then, he has participated in group exhibitions in New York and the Bay Area; and in 2009, he collaborated with Inbred Hybrid Collective for a solo show at the Christopher Henry Gallery in New York. Gregory Kaplowitz has also had his videos screened in programs presented in Hamburg, Berlin, Montreal, Chicago, and San Francisco. Currently, Gregory Kaplowitz is in the process of co-curating the exhibition, The Body is Missing, which has also received a 2011 Alternative Exposure Grant.

Jen Kirsten is an Oakland, CA based film and video artist whose work is informed by the Bay Area’s punk and LGBT community.  By juxtaposing different formats, such as 16mm and VHS, and using lo-fi editing techniques like rescanning, Kirsten playfully examines the layering of identity and socially prescribed gender roles, while creating formally striking works.   

Alex S. Lukas has been active as an experimental musician and practicing sound & video artist since his teenage years, performing regularly and showing nationally and internationally.  Alex attended the MFA program of the California College of the Arts in Media Arts and holds a BFA in Film / Video / Performance.  His video work focuses on temporal manipulation and illusion, predominately on analog formats.

Jessica Miller is an artist and designer living in San Francisco. Much of her work revolves around the subconscious symbology of color and form, and how those visual cues operate within social structures and cultural tropes.  She received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2008, graduating with both the Toby Devan Lewis Award and the Cadogan Award. She held the 3 x 3 Residency at the Exploratorium, and has exhibited at The San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art, the San Francisco Arts Commission, Intersection for the Arts, SomArts gallery, and other Bay Area arts institutions.  She currently works as Design Manager at Pivotal Labs, a software development agency where she specializes in Interaction Design for web and mobile applications. Her design work has been recognized at SXSW, where she was part of a team that won the Best in Mobile award in 2010.

Dan Olsen is the founding member of the ILuvMaryHartman YOUTUBE CHANNEL Fan Club.  His collages, drawings and videos pull, twist and distort the pop cultural visual landscape.  He has shown at S.H.E.D. Projects, The LAB, Shelf Gallery, Chop Chop Gallery, and The Toledo Art Museum, and his work will be on view at Adobe Books Backroom Gallery in the show 4 Dimensional Hollywood, opening March 31 2012.

Skye Thorstenson is an interdisciplinary artist who moonlights as a music video director, notably directing the video for Myles Cooper’s “Gonna Find Boyfriends Today”.  He has exhibited at several galleries including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, David Cunningham Projects, Fringe Exhibitions, and Current Gallery.  He co-curated Channel Drift, a program of animated shorts in The San Francisco International Animation Festival and was recently awarded a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Virtual Pubes is guided by the delirious visions of Eric Svedas and Sam Wohl.  Svedas and Whol both grew up in Southern California and share an interest the behind-the-scenes gritty, grimy magic of fabrication and special effects in big budget movie production.  Their collaborative endeavors explore the space in which fine art, performance, video and entertainment meet while dispersing authorship by expanding their collaborative net.  They often work with Sarah Bernat, producer extraordinaire, Josh Self, cinematographer and filmmaker, and Rob Spector, accomplished musician and front man of Bronze.

Nightmare City IS/WAS/WILL BE an interdisciplinary collaborative project renowned for their video art and installation works such as “Daisies,” “Welcome to Art School,” and “The Pixie Troll Witch Hour: Into the 3AM Void with Carol Anne & Keturah”. According to Nightmare City, We live in the present; which is simply to say we live in a version of the future past.

“T E E N A G E W A S T E L A N D”

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 5th, 2012, 7-11PM
On view by appointment only through May 12th, 2012
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 12th, 2012, 7-11PM

All the angst, all the conviction, all the confusion, all the hook-ups and the horror: experience it all again. Teenage Wasteland brings together a collection of work by Austin artists created during their most formative years. This compendium of teenage creative output spans genres from painting and drawing to zines, voodoo dolls and skate videos. 

Join us May 5th for opening party and May 12th for closing party and bonfire of teenage dreams in which all unwanted works will be burnt. 

Curated by Julia Hungerford & Lee Webster 

Low Lives 4
Networked Performance Festival

Global Festival of Online Performance Art Comes to Austin, TX

Featuring “magnus retwined” : Alyssa Taylor Wendt

Co-Lab Projects and Fusebox Festival are pleased to announce their participation in Low Lives 4, an international exhibition of live performance-based works transmitted over the web and projected in real-time at multiple venues around the world.

Co-Lab Projects and Fusebox Festival will host a live performance by Alyssa Taylor Wendt as part of Low Lives 4. Alyssa’s performance, along with more than 50 others taking place around the globe, will be streamed online and screened for public viewing at The Fusebox Festival Hub, located at 1100 E. 5th St in the old Tops Used Furniture building. Low Lives 4 will take place at the the Fusebox Festival Hub on Friday, April 27 from 7:30-10:30PM and at Co-Lab Project Space on Saturday, April 28 from 2-5PM. Alyssa will only perform on Friday, April 27th from 9-9:30PM.

Fusebox champions innovative works of art across a variety of different mediums. The festival acts as a catalyst for new ideas, new artistic models, and approaches to help us engage with the issues and questions that define contemporary life.

Co-Lab Projects is an artist-run non-profit organization dedicated to facilitating public projects and exhibiting contemporary works of art, installation, and performance. By operating on an ambitious programming schedule, the organization provides exposure and opportunities for local and national artists to create new and experimental bodies of work on a frequent and flexible basis. Through collaboration, education, and engagement, Co-Lab encourages artistic exploration and dialogue within the community. 

About Low Lives
Founded in 2009 by artist and independent curator Jorge Rojas, the annual Low Lives festival highlights works that critically investigate, challenge, and extend the potential of networked performance practices. The project celebrates the transmission of ideas beyond geographical and cultural borders, offering global audiences the opportunity to consider live performance in both physical and virtual space.

By organizing performances at numerous venues and then broadcasting them via online networks, Low Lives provides a new model for efficiently presenting, viewing, and archiving live performance-based art. The annual exhibition embraces low-tech aesthetics, such as low pixel images and muddled sound quality, to emphasize the raw, inquisitive quality of the broadcast and reception of the works.

“Over the past four years Low Lives has developed a platform that invites and enables artists, audiences, and presenting venues to “plug in and participate” from anywhere an internet connection exists,” Rojas explains. “Low Lives is not simply about the presentation of performance art at a particular place and time, it is also about exploring the potential of live streaming networks as a medium to connect performance artists with audiences around the world.”

Low Lives has found new momentum after presenting Low Lives Occupy! in New York City on March 3, 2012. Low Lives partnered with Occupy with Art and The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at NYU to present a one-night-only festival of simulcast performances by 36 artists and collectives committed to the Occupy Wall Street movement. The well-received Low Lives Occupy! program offered new perspectives on the Occupy protests and expanded the reach of the movement by broadcasting to an international community.

Now in its fourth year, Low Lives 4 will feature more than 50 live performances over two days, streamed in real-time at 25 venues across the globe. The exhibition will begin on Friday, April 27 from 7:30-10:30PM and continue on Saturday, April 28 from 2-5PM. Low Lives 4 is co-produced by the Brooklyn-based arts organizations Chez Bushwick (www.chezbushwick.net) and SPREAD ART (www.spreadart.org), and by Colombian artist, Juan Obando (www.juanobando.com). Low Lives curator Jorge Rojas will conduct the 2012 festival from the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Participating Artists
Austin Adkins | Regina Agu | Lindsey Allgood + Amy Luznicky | Emma Alonze | Mauricio Ancalmo | Angela Bartram + Mary O’Neill | Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte | Ruth Vigueras Bravo | Caryana Castillo | Khalil Charif | Matthew Thomas Cianfrani | Gina Cuntstruct | Elwin Cotman | Dance Troupe Practice + Luciana D’Anunciação | Ian Deleon + Kara Stokowski | Stephanie Diamond | Bados Earthling + The Wild Audio Society | Michelle Ellsworth | Ursula Endlicher | Tim Eriksen | Francesca Fini | Les Filles Föllen | Marcel William Foster + Dunstan Matungwa | Future Death Toll | Lawrence Graham-Brown | Alejandro Guzmán | Matt Hawthorn | Joseph Herring | Kanene Holder | James Holland + Alycia Bright Holland | Linda Hutchins | Rima Najdi | Samantha Jones | Igor Josifov | Nathaniel Katz + Valentina Curandi | Elizabeth Leister | Jonathan Lemieux | Gideonsson/Londré | Jonatan Lopez | Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen | Soukei Matsuo | MoTA - Museum of Transitory Art | Nataliya Petkova | Blatta Orientalis | Alexandre Pombo-Mendes | prOphecy sun | Stefan Riebel | Tara Raye Russo | Nuria Guiu Sagarra | Maximiliano Siñani | Jonathan Sutton | Étienne Tremblay-Tardif | Elinor Thompson | Robert Tyree + Andra Rotaru | Marcus Vinícius | A.G. Viva | Alyssa Taylor Wendt | Amelia Winger-Bearskin | Martin Zet |

Presenting Partners
Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art (Newark, New Jersey); Center for Performance Research (CPR) (Brooklyn, New York); Chez Bushwick (Brooklyn, New York); Co-Lab (Austin, Texas); Diaspora Vibe Gallery (Miami, Florida); Fusebox Festival (Austin, Texas); Grace Exhibition Space (Brooklyn, New York); Legion Arts (Cedar Rapids, Iowa); Little Berlin (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania); Living Arts (Tulsa, Oklahoma); Mascher Space Co-op (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania); Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) (Portland, Oregon); Real Art Ways (Harford, Connecticut); SOMArts (San Francisco, California); Space One Eleven (Birmingham, Alabama): Spread Art (Brooklyn, New York); Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) (Salt Lake City, Utah); Alice Yard (Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago); the temporary space (USA/Japan); Yamaguchi Institute of Contemporary Arts (YICA) (Yamaguchi, Japan); Dimanche Rouge (Paris, France); La Maison des Artistes (Paris, France); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá (MAC) (Colombia); At The Vanishing Point (Sydney, Australia); Small Projects (Tromsø, Norway); Ateliers ‘89, Contemporary Art Institute (Aruba)

A live simulcast of the event will be streamed on April 27 and 28 at www.lowlives.net.
For more information, please visit www.lowlives.net.

About Low Lives Founding Director Jorge Rojas
Jorge Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. He uses traditional and new media, as well as performative elements to investigate communication systems and the effect of technology on artistic production, social structures and communities. Rojas’ work and curatorial projects have been exhibited internationally. In 2009, Rojas founded Low Lives, where he currently serves as director, producer, and curator.

A. T. Wendt was born in 1969 in New York City. She has performed on record, in films, on stage and as art in San Francisco and beyond. Miss Wendt has returned to the fold to earn her MFA from Bard College, recently exhibiting both nationally in New York, Philadelphia and Austin and abroad. She is also published, has performed at festivals and openings, collaborated with an array of talented artists and completed two art residencies in Norway and Iceland. Residing and working in Brooklyn, she is currently conjuring multimedia pieces that reference legacy through ritual and composites, using video, large format staged photography, sculpture, sound landscapes and performance.

“Famous by Association - the artist and me series” : J Haley

Performance/Installation: Saturday, April 28th, 2012, 7-11PM
One Night Only

The Project “Famous by Association - the artist and me series” consists of images picturing J. Haley alongside another artist. These photos began conglomerating in 2003, culminated in 2009 as online social network content, and continues to grow to the day.

This content and its online existence has found search engine recognition and it has become clear that the project must create new and relevant content, links, and posts in order to maintain viability.

By utilizing this moniker - ‘Famous by Association’…it is the primary goal of the project to make clear to the public that, indeed, these are associations worthy of fame.

Tell your friends.

On Saturday April, 28th at Co-Lab. 
Over 100 Artists featured in a performance based installation scheduled and designed to further the propagation and documentation of the project.  Featuring an exposé on the “Famous by Association - the artist and me series”, informational handouts, historical evidence of artistry, artist interviews, and a series of information booth performances, J.Haley will give you the ‘in’ on the artists he’s met.

The list of artists represented is ever growing. We invite you to arrive before the presentations, staying after to soak it all in. You never know which of the artists will make an appearance, and/or which one is on the verge of becoming world renowned.

The presentations will feature live “informationals” illustrating a few different artists that have associated with J.Haley and whose work he believes to be phenomenal. These presentations will, in turn, become posting fodder for the likes of YouTube, Facebook, and the Tweet-Plerp-Bot-Systems of the Internets… Propagating further steps of famous associative behaviors.

J. Haley, began promoting other artists while simultaneously promoting himself via social networks, blog writing, and online linking. It was his intention to document the process with the process itself, and in doing so, historically associate himself with the great artists of his time. His thought… “As they become more and more famous, so will I. And as I become more famous, so will they…”

Now it is your turn.

“magnus retwined” : Alyssa Taylor Wendt

Performance: Friday, April 27th, 2012, 9-9:30PM
At The Fusebox Festival Hub, located at 1100 E. 5th St in the old Tops Used Furniture building. Plenty of free parking is available in adjacent lots and on area streets.

As part of the Low Lives showcase presented by Co-Lab Projects and the Fusebox Festival, Alyssa Taylor Wendt has designed an interactive performance that elicits response by combining planes of energy. Dressed in character, this New York based artist will bind the audience together in a frenetic slapstick string ritual dating back to her childhood. Manning her own live soundtrack, she will be judged by a live panel of nihilists, and ciphers to great amusement for all. Prepare to participate and be united.

“Hirsute Drosscapes and Cenotaphs: (Finem Respice)” : Alyssa Taylor Wendt

LIVE hair performance and open hours for installation: Thursday, Friday and Saturday, April 19th-21st, 2012, 3-6PM

Closing Reception with the artist and viewing of both the installation and the finished piece: Saturday, April 21st, 2012, 7-11PM

Please join us for any and all of the showtimes and be a part of future history.

Ruin enthusiasm runs rampant through artistic communities. Our artists, after all, hold a proud tradition and responsibility for pioneering unwanted lands and forging new territories and vistas into otherwise discarded cultural architecture. The magic that modern culture uses to bring structure back from the dead hovers in a careful purgatory, serving both as reminders of the past and projecting us into the future. At what point do ruins become monuments and vice-versa?

In her new installation and participatory performance, Alyssa Taylor Wendt revisits tropes of urban decay, monument and mourning with a multimedia installation in the main space, using a variety of materials, including horsehair. Building large forms that need to be negotiated with, she asks us to consider the materials at hand and question their place as signifiers of both ruin and rebirth. Hairwork has been used to remind us of both the mortality within the very matter of its dead follicles, and the magical living essence of the natural world it hails from and celebrates.

The viewer will have the opportunity to participate in a live ongoing afternoon performance, in which the artist, on leave from her native New York City, will be working on a community hair wreath in the outdoor space at Co-Lab Projects. One can leave a sample clipping of his or her hair in a baggie, with the option to write something personal on a scrap of paper. The artist will use the donated hair pieces and paper to construct a living memorial wreath of hair, binding together strangers on the common grounds that they have an interest in conceptual art. The finished piece will be added to the installation and on view in its final form during the Saturday closing reception.

For more information about the artist: www.alyssataylorwendt.com

“Sacred Land Grab” : Rebecca Jane Rodriguez & Dustin Kilgore

Super 8, video, and slides of the American West
Screening / Two-channel installation: Thursday, April 12th, 2012, 8-10PM

“I take a walk in the country. Everything is as it should be: nature at its best. Birds, sun, soft grass, a view through the trees of the mountains, nobody around, no radio, no smell of gasoline. Then the path turns and ends on the highway. I am back among the billboards, service stations, motels, and roadhouses. I was in a National Park, and I now know that this was not reality. It was a “reservation,” something that is being preserved like a species dying out. If it were not for the government, the billboards, hot dog stands, and motels would long since have invaded that piece of Nature. I am grateful to the government; we have it much better than before…”

—Herbert Marcuse
“One Dimensional Man”
Beacon Press

Sacred Land Grab is an outdoor slide show and video installation that blends footage of the American West with everyday audio to examine the context in which we interact with nature.

“NO MAS” : Paul McLean

Artist Reception: Saturday, April 7th, 2012, 7-11PM
Occupational Art School Sessions: Artist available for demonstrations, teach-ins, meet-ups, consultations, clarifications, interviews, or more formal presentations and expositions until Tuesday April 10th. Call for more information 512.300.8217

Since late September, 2011, I have been co-organizer of Occupy with Art, an affinity group of the Arts & Culture Working Group of the New York General Assembly for Occupy Wall Street. The Occupational Art School is emerging from this scenario, as a collective and individual proposition, a shared imaginary, a hyper-real construct for a 99% art world, or maybe even a 100% liberation of art, for all and from all. Its appearances are momentary, like a ghost or a shade of a memory. Fortunately, we have mobile devices with powerful still- and moving-image cameras built-in, now, and other networked “capture” devices that can virtually prove the existence of such non-things, as simulations, as they happen. If we piece enough such events together, we can build a true story that exists beyond fact and fiction, as a becoming that is also a teaching about the impossible being made possible, as art and occupation. The medium is dimensional. Time is the only Object, and everything else is the Subject. This art is for humans, and it is free. We have nothing to lose, except either/or. 

SUBTEXT IN RE-PRESENTATION [Flux BETA: these premises are continuously modified (see project tumblr)]
[1] In the End, the Hydra Kills Hercules [and the Other One] (“I Love You, Monster”)
[2] Nothing Is Transparent, Really & It Is OK [Mountain = Painted Mountain] (Matterhorn Project)
[3] Main Street Has No Dead End (Concentricity Projects)
[4] West Virginia, Blood & Bone (The Orphanage of a Refugee’s Home)

Program: The Artist will work on one image [potentially objective], creating multiple iterations, while ex-positioning or coursing amongst multiple seams of related immaterial, IRL, IRT, for the purposes of generating a documentation for digital environments. This is not a performance, nor is it installation.

Paul McLean is an artist who works in both new media and traditional fine art. His research interests include media philosophy, specifically pertaining to time and systems; arts management, art, and cultural economics; and the convergence of 4-D methodologies among military, political, business, and social sectors. His web site is artforhumans[dot]com. McLean is also a co-organizer of Occupy with Art [www.occupywithart.com].

“possible and remembered time” : Daniel Kliewer

Reception: March 31st, 2012, 7-11PM
One night only.

My present work is about expressing the malleable nature of time and how the mind can alter and transfigure events in future and past parts of our lives. When I paint I often remember the steps and methods used and upon looking at the image at a time in the future, I may go backwards and deconstruct the image in my mind, in a similar way to how returning to a location might remind a person of things that happened years before and bring about thoughts and understanding that were unavailable at that time. When we remember things that occurred, like going backwards through the day’s events, I think that we recollect what was felt and experience a more conscious awareness through adding more thought and allowing emotion to be understood. Through the cultivation of thought and becoming aware of oneself I think one can gain a better understanding of time and how simple association or repetition can alter and create new time where there was none before.

In 2010 I began painting digitally using a Wacom, a pressure sensitive tablet and stylus input for a computer, and used screen capture, which records every ‘brushstroke’ of what I paint on screen. I would then edit and time lapse the video as well as altering the flow of time. From these videos I could take a painting that took 8 hours to create, condense it to 15 seconds and then reverse the video so that in 30 seconds you could see the process used in creating the image and then watch as the same image devolved and began again. While I was working I suffered a concussion and began imagining an alternate history that developed after I found an old biography of Eisenhower that had an interesting portrait on the back. I would listen to the news on the radio while painting and imagined a world in which a cybernetic artificial intelligence was created that permeated the internet and had a bodily form of an android in the likeness of Eisenhower. The android was created by the military as a computer entity that was much more intelligent that any human mind and was a last resort super weapon. Upon the activation of Cybernetic Android Eisenhower rather than launching bombs it instead used confusion and altered all the languages of the world, including the meaning of words, all communications, removing anger from voices in phone calls and preventing any sort of violence from occurring.

In order to display my digital work I have taken old television sets and modified their hardware to play digital video, as well as painting the exteriors. I have found that part of what I want to do when I make these videos which I call ‘moving paintings’ is to transform televisions into a type of ambient art. I designed my art to transform the place of a television from the centerpiece of a room to a painting hanging on the wall. I feel when our attention is enveloped by an interesting narrative or focused on hand eye coordination it becomes difficult to think our own thoughts or to relate to others in an authentic and meaningful fashion. Not to say film or games are bad when taken in moderation but when taken to extremes I feel they can become a damper on developing authentic relations or understanding oneself and can lead to isolation.

When I first began creating digital time lapsed paintings I was recovering from an accident that put my canvas work on hold until my arm could heal and was given hypnosis treatments as part of my physical therapy. I still experience the pain but to a lesser degree and I used painting with a Wacom as an escape. When I would paint I would forget my pain but I would still think and my perception of time would be different. I hope that others when watching my paintings will get to feel or experience the state in which time is altered but thought still occurs. It is that time, where I think about time or think about thoughts, and I do not feel isolation because I feel understanding and peace.

“neurological tangle” : Kollin Baker

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 17th, 2012, 7-11PM
On view by appointment only through March 24th, 2012

I began this project a couple of years ago, first by visualizing the usage of a common and familiar object. The second part has been the contemplation of the overall layout and design of the parts to create a “whole”.

What congealed the parts into this installation was observing my thoughts and feelings during the process. It occurred to me that visually this reminds me of our neurological pathways. 

It is not that a bunch of twigs arranged around a room is that interesting to you or me, its the concepts and thought/s. I realize that is the very essence of being human and an artist. No other organism can do this, that is what differentiates us. 

Our thoughts and emotions, brief. The need to express, utterly human.

“Low Lives: Occupy!”

Presenting Partner Screening: March, 3rd, 5-9PM CST, 2012

Low Lives launches new program in partnership with Occupy With Art and The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.

On March 3rd, 2012, Low Lives: Occupy! an international platform designed to enable artists, audiences, and presenters in alliance with the Occupy movement to support the occupation, will transmit live performances, actions, and happenings online as they occur in real time around the world. Participating artists, artist collectives, Occupy groups, and presenters worldwide will expand the reach and visibility of the Occupy protests by broadcasting to an international community and audiences. The Occupy protests, and the myriad of perspectives and experiences related to this unique moment, will be amplified, explored, and experimented with, through Low Lives’ internet-based creative platform. Low Lives: Occupy! recognizes the powerful opportunity that is the presentation of performances from around the world, and invites artists to open eyes and minds by presenting a radical re-imagining of possible ways of existing and relating.

Over the past 4 years Low Lives has developed a platform that invites and enables artists, audiences, and presenting venues to “plug in and participate” from anywhere an internet connection exists. This technological platform brings a history of supporting artists’ full creative freedom to imagine new worlds and is now offered to artists interested to present work in solidarity with #OWS. Online documentation of the live event will allow Low Lives: Occupy! to inspire online audiences far into the future.

About Low Lives
Founded in 2009, Low Lives is an international platform for live performance-based works transmitted via the internet and projected in real time. Low Lives examines works that critically investigate, challenge, and extend the potential of performance practice presented live through online broadcasting networks. These networks provide a new alternative and efficient medium for presenting, viewing, and archiving performances. Low Lives offers local and global audiences a contextual frame from which to consider live performance in both the physical and virtual space.

The platform celebrates the transmission of ideas beyond geographical and cultural borders, and opens multicultural and intergenerational dialogue through visual language, new technologies, and contemporary expressions. Low Lives is about both the presentation and transmission of performative gestures from a particular place and time. Low Lives produces an annual Networked Performance Festival. www.lowlives.net

About Occupy With Art
Occupy With Art (Formerly Occupennial) is an affinity group of the Arts & Culture working group. We are artists, writers, curators, and art professionals lending our skills to produce art, cultural events and projects, with a particular focus on OWS itself as a social art process. We work with organizations and artists that require a focused team to facilitate their projects. We produce art projects, large-scale events, and exhibitions. Our website, www.occupywithart.com, serves as an information hub for current and past art-related activities in the OWS movement. We are committed to building relationships within OWS and with outside arts organizations.

About Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics
The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics is a collaborative, multilingual and interdisciplinary network of institutions, artists, scholars, and activists throughout the Americas. Working at the intersection of scholarship, artistic expression and politics, the organization explores embodied practice—performance—as a vehicle for the creation of new meaning and the transmission of cultural values, memory and identity. Anchored in its geographical focus on the Americas (thus “hemispheric”) and in three working languages (English, Spanish and Portuguese), the Institute’s goal is to promote vibrant interactions and collaborations at the level of scholarship, art practice and pedagogy among practitioners interested in the relationship between performance and politics in the hemisphere. www.hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/