Back with the Pollen

The posts are back after a month-long, spring-transitional break. So to catch up... mid-March brought us the "Redress" exhibition held at the Thomas Street Gallery. This show displayed student fabric artists' reworkings of found dresses, new and old. Opening night featured the artists standing throughout the gallery wearing their own works. Dresses were covered in varying textures from twizzlers, quilt patches, and ornamental umbrellas. Above, a vintage, polka dotted skirt is restructered using steel rods and red thread. The most dramatic dress transformation was the white mass seen upon entry to the gallery, below. This work, by student Ophelia Culpepper, dressed a plaster cast of her sleeping self in gauzey layers of reclaimed philosophy notes. The white dress and body were lit only by tea candles which rested upon the work.



Also of note, artist Paul Pfeiffer visits the Lamar Dodd School of Art this week. I caught a discussion with him this morning in the Digital Media department. He spoke of his transition from printmaking to digital works, his loose theories of success, and his recent trip to the Phillipines. He will lead an ArtTalk at Lamar today at 5:30 pm and an artist lecture tomorrow at 5:30 in the UGA Student Learning Center. Check out http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/pfeiffer/index.html for more on Mr. Pfeiffer.

Upcoming Exhibits Around Town:
*"Forty Nine Hundred," work by UGA art grads and undergrads, The Clayton Street Gallery, April 6- , Opening reception April 6, 6-8 pm
* "We Built This City," photography senior exit exhibition, The Lamar Dodd School of Art, Opening reception April 14, 7-9 pm
* Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition, featuring works by over 20 Lamar Dodd graduates, The Georgia Museum of Art, Opening reception April 13, 7-9 pm
* "Modern Threads," work by fiber and fashion artist Mariska Karatsz, The Georgia Museum of Art, through April
* "Rubarbs and Other Spaces in Between: Land Use and Environmentalism," ATHICA, through May 27

Laboratory Works

This evening the University of Georgia's School of Landscape Architecture presented Richard Saxton and his work with Municipal Workshop. Saxton, trained as a sculptor, birthed the idea for the Workshop in 2002. Today, the Workshop is "dedicated to the creation and facilitation of contemporary public art projects in hopes of creating more creative and dynamic cities and townships". (see: municipalworkshop.com)
In his lecture, Saxton highlighted the communal successes that Municipal Workshop has made possible in areas of need. The Workshop seems to take root quickly wherever it goes- gaining local governments' support, recruiting volunteers, planning and gathering resources. What results are appealing and beneficial structures and systems for the public good.
Municipal Workshop will be on hold until 2008 as Saxton takes residency at Switzerland's The Wall House and works on plans for taking the Workshop global. "Laboratory Works," a survey of Municipal Workshop's works to date - including drawings, prints, proposals, photographs, and videos- will be on display in the Circle Gallery, Caldwell Hall, the University of Georgia, through April 4, 2007.

Also: Nina Bovasso's exhibition "The Cartographer's Podiatrist's Underestimation of a Melancholic Toe (Contemporaneous Mappings of the Spirit, Body and Mind)" will be coming down on Friday, March 9, so head over to the Lamar Dodd Main Gallery and take a look while you can. Her paper diptychs swirl and implode to create states of color trauma. See it to believe it...

Dance in the Salt

This Sunday brought the closing of ATHICA's most recent exhibition entitled "Transience: The Paradox of Being." A strong collection of works was presented including installation, video, photography, mixed media painting, sound, and text. Pictured above is an angle of Rebecca Murtaugh's "Breath." Its span of plastic-dipped matchsticks seemed to emerge from the wall like tiny, halted arrows. Directly in front of Murtaugh's work was the exhibition's central piece, artist Young Kim's "Salt and Earth." Kim formed ten earthbound plateaus of pure salt and applied screened portraits to their surfaces(below). Each person in portrait was a stranger that Kim met and photographed on the street. Many of the portraits showed signs of erosion due to the exhibitions interactive, one and a half month run.

By late afternoon on this day, complete erosion of Kim's "Salt and Earth" was happily completed by an eager group of young art lovers in the span of about three minutes. The destruction was followed by a calm, strong, and curious improvised duet by Gaelyn Hurd and Julie Rothschild. The two dancers moved over and through the salt to the percussion of Louis Romanos.

This looks like art...

The inaugural post has been motivated by the recent flood of exhibits, most noteably those of sculptural and installational origins. The evening of Friday March 2nd has opened with a brief display by Laleh Mehran's "Making and Exhibiting" class. The collection, titled "Everything Must Go," is the result of a class assignment entitled "This looks like art". From golden tigers to white-washed construction cones and animal crackers, this one-wall exhibit triumphs over visual boredom through the utilization of curious aesthetic voids. Less continues to be more.

Tony Smith's work, entitled "Clive Arrowsmith," is a powerful appropriation of vintage, photographic documentation. Tony said the original image was about two palms width, but his version spans a significant three feet. This enlargement allows us to consider the image with greater weight as we read its caption, "Makeup and a well-cut wig transform a model into a seeming clone of Lady Diana, showing any girl can be a princess for a day."
The exhibition runs through Friday, March 9 in the Lamar Dodd School of Art entry hall.