Look, See

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere 13

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Deborah Butterfield at Paule Anglim

Four horses by Deborah Butterfield at Paule Anglim, San Francisco, May 2006.

The GIF Show

When a gallery website says they're open "WED - SAT 2:00pm - 6:00pm" I expect the place to be open when I show up at 3:00pm.

When I make the extra effort to get there, take time out of my busy schedule, buy a ticket and take BART from the East Bay under the SF Bay to the big city, walk a few blocks, and find the address for a place I've never been to before, I expect the doors to be open.

And when I find the address, and I see from across the street that the big metal gates in front of the door are closed, I'm still hopeful that the gallery is open, and that the gates are just the smallest barrier guarding against random traffic in an iffy neighborhood.

And when I walk up to this big gate and see that it's padlocked from the inside I'm still expecting to get in, because, after all, they've been open since 2:00pm.

But when I shake the gate, and look for a bell or something and find no way to get in, I finally realize I'm not going to see the show I made a special trip to see.

So I kick the gate, mumble something, and walk way in frustration knowing I'm not likely to see the show unless I again take time out of my busy schedule to come back and see it before it closes on June 9.

You'd think a gallery would stick to their advertised hours.

This is what I came to see:

The GIF Show, an exhibition opening May 3rd, at San Francisco's Rx Gallery, takes the pulse of what some net surfers call 'GIF Luv,' a recent frenzy of file-sharing and creative muscle-flexing associated with GIFs (Graphic Interchange Format files). Curated by Marisa Olson in a West Coast Rhizome collaboration with Rx, the show presents GIFs and GIF-based videos, prints, readymades, and sculptures by a range of artists, including Cory Arcangel, Peter Baldes, Michael Bell-Smith, Jimpunk, Olia Lialina, Abe Linkoln, Guthrie Lonergan, Lovid, Tom Moody, Paper Rad, Paul Slocum, and Matt Smear (aka 893/umeancompetitor). GIFs have a rich cultural life on the internet and each bears specific stylistic markers. From Myspace graphics to advertising images to porn banners, and beyond, GIFs overcome resolution and bandwidth challenges in their pervasive population of the net. Animated GIFs, in particular, have evolved from a largely cinematic, cell-based form of art practice, and ! have more recently been incorporated in music videos and employed as stimulating narrative devices on blogs. From the flashy to the minimal, the sonic to the silent, the artists in The GIF Show demonstrate the diversity of forms to be found in GIFs, and many of them comment on the broader social life of these image files.

I wanted to see the show particularly because I am acquainted with Pete Baldes (curator of the Pulse 2006 show at 1708 Gallery I'm in right now) and Tom Moody.

And I wanted to see the work by Jimpunk and Abe Linkoln because I've seen lots of their work online, and because I was, uh, kind of on an -empyre- panel with them last summer for the month of June.

And there's a bunch of other well known names, too, all those others, you know, as they sing on the Gilligan's Island Theme Song, "...the Professor and Mary Ann."

There's a myspace site for the show; seriously, see if you have enough RAM to handle it.

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere 12

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Everybody Knows This is Nowhere 11 (Happy Birthday George Rodart)

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More 1708 photos

Installation photos of the other five artists in Pulse 2006 at 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA, curated by Peter Baldes and Kristin Beal . All photos Pete Baldes.

Below: Brad Hampton:

Below: Rachel Hayes:

Below: Steve Karlik

Below: Lisa Fletcher Rundstrom

Below: Anna Von Mertens

Berkeley Paintings Statement

Berkeley Paintings 1-6 installed, 2195 Hearst, UC Berkeley (see photo of each painting)

Six Paintings for a Room in Berkeley

These six paintings were made with Room 200C in 2195 Hearst at UC Berkeley in mind. In this room there are seven windows in-between which are six short walls, each approximately three feet wide. Looking out through the windows one sees an intersection, buildings, cars and pedestrians, trees and hills. From the beginning it was my intention to make six paintings to hang between the windows using a blue and green palette. In making these paintings I determined that these paintings would refer to the Berkeley landscape.

Qinglü 青 绿 (also called qinglübai or qinglü shanshui) is a style of Chinese blue and green landscape painting made principally during the Sui (581–618) and Tang (618–907) dynasties. A rich and powerful color effect was achieved using two mineral colors— azurite blue and malachite green. In Fantastic Mountains: Chinese Landscape Painting from The Shanghai Museum, Liu Yang writes that this style “developed during the Six Dynasties period (222-479) to become the prime mode for landscape painting,” and “enjoyed its heyday during the Tang dynasty but remained vital thereafter.”

These paintings use a variety of ways to directly and simply make a painted image. The paint is applied in dots, gestures, drips, strokes, line, and filled-in shape. The black outlines are calligraphic and have different qualities: smooth; thin; barbed; abrupt; flowing. The blue and green don’t blend or mix, so the colors remain distinct and clean. The linen ground is not hidden, providing a warm background in which the fabric is plainly visible. The aluminum paint seems to both give off and flatten light; its contrast with the linen points to both the natural and the artificial, which is what paintings are.

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365 at 1708

More installation photos of my installation of inkjet-printed HTML drawings called 365 at 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA, thanks to Pete Baldes; more at Flickr.

This is probably the most encompassing shot; there isn't a single photo that captures the whole thing:

George Lawson: New Work

George Lawson: New Work

Ivory 16 (left) & Ivory 18 (right), 2006, oil on linoleum, 10 x 8 inches each

Sassetta: Le bienheureux Ranieri délivre les pauvres d'une prison de Florence

Stefano di Giovanni dit SASSETTA: Connu à Sienne en 1426 - Sienne, 1450
Le bienheureux Ranieri délivre les pauvres d'une prison de Florence

Neil Young: Living With War

It's good. I've listened to it a couple of dozen times. Released on Tuesday, I bought it right away. It's great. Neil is right. He has a big heart. Hear it all streamed. It's very moving. I like it a lot. Immediate, raw, feeling.

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Everybody Knows This is Nowhere 8

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Popel Coumou at ACF

Popel Coumou
Amsterdam Centre of Photography (ACF)
13 May - 10 of June, 2006
Opening: 13 May at 17:00.

ACF
Bethanienstraat 39
1012 BZ Amsterdam
+31 (0)20 622 48 99
www.acf-web.nl
Hoiurse: Thursday till Saturday from 13:00-17:00

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere 7

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1708 Pulse 2006 announcement

The announcements for the 1708 Gallery show Pulse 2006 got to me late, or else I would've posted this earlier. The image on the card and the catalogue (a scan of which I'll post later) is my image from the February 2006 Wikipedia series 18. Political Integration of India.

1708 installation photos

Views of Pulse 2006 at 1708 Gallery Gallery in Richmond, VA. The show just opened last night, May 5, 2006. All photos Pete Baldes, who curated the show with Kristin Beal. Lots more at Pete's Flickr page. A few other shots at http://pulse2006.blogspot.com/.

I'm showing an installation called 365- 365 inkjet prints of HTML drawings spanning one year, March 2005 to March 2006, installed in twelve rows, one month each, plus a 365 page slide show of the same images on a monitor, that takes over half an hour to view.

Below: My installation on the left, Brad Hampton on the right, that's Steve Karlik and his wife Syndy standing in front of Rachel Hayes' work looking at Steve's two paintings. In the left middleground on the floor is Lisa Fletcher Rundstrom's work, and the platforms on the right are Anna Von Mertens'.

Below: view of my installation of inkjet prints with monitor playing slideshow.

Below: the opening, shot through front window, and my drawing installation. See what looks five blank pages in my installation just above the woman's head left of the center of the photo? Those five blank pages represent the five days I was in Philadelphia October 2005 for the Gallery Siano show when I didn't take my laptop with me and had no internet access.

Artists Interview Artists

I am participating in J. T. Kirkland's project called "Artists Interview Artists." It works like this: Artist A poses five questions that are randomly assigned to Artist B to answer, and then five questions from Artist C are randomly sent to Artist A, and so on. No artist answering questions knows who asked the questions until the interview is posted on J. T.'s weblog. It's a terrific project that has already resulted in over fifty short interviews, and connects artists of various media, aesthetics, and intentions. My five questions were answered by Michael Grayeagle. I have answered five questions already, but won't know who posed them until they're published on J. T.'s weblog. Grayeagle's answers are clearly from a good heart and mind, and I'm thrilled with his answers. Read.