Look, See

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere 6

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere 6, 2006, HTML, 300 x 330 pixels

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere 5

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere 5, 20060505, HTML, 447 x 372

Berkeley Paintings Installation

Berkeley Paintings 1-6 installed, 2195 Hearst, UC Berkeley

Tom Moody/Room Sized Animated GIFs/artMovingProjects

Tom Moody/Room Sized Animated GIFs/artMovingProjects
Williamsburg/166 North 12th Street/917-301-6680
May 5 - June 25, 2006
Opening: Friday, May 5, 7:00PM - 9:00PM
Music Performance/Lecture: May 19th, 8PM
See ArtCal
Note: gallery closed June 8-11

Tom Moody, Double Centrifuge, (2004-06?), animated GIF, 333 x 580 pixels (reduced 50% for display here)

Animated GIFs, the tiny, blinking, often annoying image files that draw your eye to particular parts of a Web page, have been around since the Net's early days. There is a sizeable do-it-yourself culture built up around them, which now includes a second generation of Web and gallery based art using them ironically and/or proactively.

For the past several years, Moody has been drawing GIFs in a simple paint program and posting them on his blog at http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody. The gallery will be projecting one of these pulsing, but defiantly lo-fi animations huge on one wall of the space, while others will be displayed on monitors scattered throughout the gallery.

The gallery will also feature a lecture/performance by Moody on May 19, where he will present some of his music and music-based videos. These compositions, made with a combination of old computers such as the Macintosh SE as well as more current soft synths and samplers, have a punchy concision similar to his GIFs. The styles range from videogame Electro to a string quartet piece written for a softsampler.

I also recommend Tom's Quicktime Guitar Solo.

Tom is also in The GIF Show at Rx Gallery in San Francisco; see the announcement and the heavy duty, potential browser crashing MySpace page for the show. Also see curator Maria Olsen's de.lio.us list of works in the show.

ORDERed at Gallery Siano

I know quite a few people in the show ORDERed opening tonight at Gallery Siano in Philadelphia. Curated by Julie Karabenick, it includes Vincent Romaniello and Joanne Mattera and a number of others. The catalogue essay (PDF) is by Roberta Fallon (of Fallon & Rosof's Artblog fame).

From the essay:

From a vocabulary of regular and repeating shapes and lines, the artists build visual structures that hint at chaos and point to the age-old need of humans to impose order on the world. The works in the exhibit range from hard-edged, bright and almost industrial in nature to soft, nuanced and obviously handmade. Throughout, each artist speaks with an individualized vocabulary of shapes, colors, and lines; yet this does not create a Babel-like cacophony. For the unifying spark that flows from one work to another is the idea of the mind ordering these mini universes into visual relational databases, with hierarchies or perhaps non-hierarchical links, but networked, gridded, mapped and fixed as if in a snapshot from some ongoing greater whole. I suppose this could be the anti-entropy show: The artist as warrior against the forces of inertia.

The artists' personal constructs have almost free-associative charm. What you see is a circle, but what you get — unlike what Frank Stella said in his youth** — is not just a circle. The circles, squares and lines in these abstract paintings are not math or science, but painted visual hypotheses about the world.

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere 4

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere 4, 20060504, HTML, 450 x 375 pixels

Six Paintings for a Room in Berkeley

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere 3

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere 3, 20060503, HTML, 320 x 320 pixels

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere 2

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere 2, 20060502, HTML, 255 x 440 pixels

Preview: 1708 Gallery

Curatorial Statement Painting has always used pictorial representation to enact the metaphor of the window, employing painting as a metaphor for the window, and the window as a metaphor for painting. This classical screen was established as a place for the images of the world to be recorded. The images of our world are now developing through new interactive technologies. We believe the resilience of painting reveals itself through its ability to adapt its fundamental practices to new mediums. Our primary curatorial research and communication was done via the Internet. This interactive window/screen has become our window into artist studios as well as our primary source of communication throughout the selection process. Through blogging and other Web 2.0 services like del.ici.ous and flickr we were able to instantaneously share information. Blogging as curating; uninhibited; taste takes over. This allowed our bookmarks menu to become our curatorial point of view. Formal issues (color/form/space) seem to be enhanced by the computer space, while the informal nature of checking artists' websites allowed us the breathing room necessary to look at works. These artists borrow from the history of art through their formal practice while also remaining firmly planted in contemporary culture through their use of materials as well as by their presence on the web. From Chris Ashley, whose work is literally made from the web to Steve Karlik's references to technology through hard lines and grid patterns. These artists don't stray from the history of art, rather they further it. Their works have become a hybrid of both the computer space and real space. Peter Baldes Kristin Beal-DeGrandmont

 

 

 

 

Posted by chrisashley at 12:52 AM

May 01, 2006

Thirty Leaves

 

 

 

Thirty Leaves, April 2006, HTML, 365 x 265 pixels each

Above is a GIF representation of the Thirty Leaves drawings made during April. This is not an accurate representation. In reducing this representation to 50% some of the details are lost. For example, some of the lines of the internal figures in the first drawings in the first and second rows are lost. The second drawing in the second row is unusally crunchy. As always, a compilation page has been made where you can see the drawings at full size in HTML.

These thirty drawings were made during April 2006, one each day. This practice relates to the previous two months, during which the drawings I made spanned an entire month, resulting in 28 drawings during Feburary and 31 drawings during March. Making a series that spans a month seems a good way to go because it sets me up for something that will fit on the calendar with a definite beginning and ending, and the length of the series forces me to commit to and extend something over a long time.

I didn't set out with any thought other than using this kind of winged rectangle kind of shape- a rectangle with two squares notched out of the two bottom corners. This shape echoes a series made in June 2004 called 18 Hummingbirds. This choice was influenced by the fact that in February all the dimensions of the drawings were the same shape, and each that March drawing was a different size, but they all had the animated GIF in common. The shape I chose for April could be repeated the entire month and also be something a little more dynamic than a strict rectangle, even though they didn't continue the use of an animated GIF.

It wasn't until I did the sixth drawing, Minaret, that I recognized a kind of theme, which I'll identify only by saying that the single-word noun and verb titles seem very apt to the season and month during which Easter occurs.

 

 

 

 

Posted by chrisashley at 07:19 PM

Siegfried Schreiber, video

 

 

Another terrific video by Vince Romaniello:

Siegfried Schreiber, video

If universal themes like time, love and the cosmos interest you, go see Siegfried Schreiber's kinetic sculpture. This weekend the Wood Turning Center in Philadelphia hosts a series of events that include lectures and demonstrations. Mr. Schreiber turns wood into perfectly crafted sculpture that is beautiful to the eye and meditative to the soul, and since he is only visiting our area from Germany for a short time, this is an opportunity that you don't want to pass up. Use the links below to watch a short video which only scratches the surface of what Siegfried Schreiber is all about.

 

 

 

 

Posted by chrisashley at 07:15 PM

April 30, 2006