Blogs: July

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Just when I thought I was done...

Lordy. I'm happy I'm a web designer and addicted to the web. I've been watching a blog from two guys who are entirely too excited about going to the Olympics in Beijing. One sentence caught me completely by surprise; "We've got our tickets and our visas and now we're counting down the days until opening ceremony!"

Visa what? Surely you mean your credit card? I've been to China 7 times and never needed a Visa. Low-and-behold, September 2007 the country decided to switch its policy and make people get a Visa to enter the country. To make matters even worse, I'll have to get a business visa, costs more and I need to provide where I'm staying and my flight arrangements.

So I check out my plane tickets and click on the link that says: Proper documentation is needed for this trip, learn more. Come to find out now I need a visa. So tack on the fact that I'd have to got to Washington DC or Chicago to go to an embassy or counsulate for the People's Republic of China, and tack on about $200 in fees. I'm searching right now for a travel service that will allow me to do this without having to physically go to the Embassy. More details to come I'm sure. I'll need to have a photo taken on my way home from work I guess as its one of the requirements.

Damn.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Argentina Restaurant!!

So, I realize that it's supposed to say Argentine Restaurant, but this image and text is what I'm supposed to carry around with me around Beijing in case I get lost!!

Address:
北京市朝阳区何各庄318艺术园4排6号纽约艺术空间

How to get to NY Arts Beijing:
至纽约艺术·北京路线图：

京顺路——来广营东路路口（农场路口）左转——加油站红绿灯右转——直走到头黄色围墙处（金百万餐厅）左转——和光超市（紫云轩灯箱处）右转——318艺术园内4排6号纽约艺术空间

或走机场高速北皋出口出——京顺路——来广营东路路口（农场路口）左转，其余与上同。

如有问题请拨打Tel: 86-10-8457 3298

Along with a load of Chinese writing that I cannot make sense of;-) I guess that's why I'm supposed to carry it around! HELLO! Not only is my very best friend in the world Argentine, but I LOVE Argentine food. I have a feeling I'll get my taste of South America... while in China?

Monday, July 28, 2008

Life goes on!

The details are finalized for my trip to Beijing! I paid all fees, tickets, travel arrangements and the such, I'm very happy and very pleased with how everything is going. Just need a few more people to buy some painting so I can afford to do everything I plan to do there!!! Hint Hint!!

I found out the most amazing news on my space the other day. There's a historian who is the president for the Marine Hospital Association (a huge old civil war era hospital that sits right up the street from me which has just undergone a 1.2 million dollar renovation). This guy leaves me information about my building as he finds it. The first set of information was a packet of papers, copied, of all the newspaper articles about my building. From about 2 years before it was built to about 3 years after its final construction announcing its dedication and sucess as a medical clinic for the city of Portland and information about its architect.

Where things get interesting

Since I purchased the building that now houses my studio and offices I've always said " I love this building because of its symetry, it's built like a battleship, and it reminds me of all the old libraries in town that are my favorite buildings. Well, come to find out that the architect who designed my building, Auther Loomis, not only designed those same libraries, but also several famous landmarks in the city of Louisville from the Levy Building downtown, the Todd building, the Conrad mansion, (now a museum) the Carnigie building in New Albany (now a museum) and the kicker... Mr. Loomis also designed the Speed Art Museum!

Sometimes there's alot more to things than meets the eye. I have a huge brass plaque in the entryway that states that the building was build with a donation from Mrs. JB Speed (the name sake of the museum) which makes the immeadeate connection to Loomis. I have all the papers and documentation thanks to him and i couldn't be more surprised or happy.

Never take things at face value. When I bought this building and it was in terrible shape. Now I find out that I do tuely have the Speed Art Museum, Portland ;-)

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Build A Fire and Updates

As exhausting as putting on a show of work from artists from across the country would seem... it actually is. Thankfully Ilia was there to do most of the install. Still, I got the walls repaired, primed, and painted with obsessive/compulsive precision. This show was exhausting, and it's not over so get down and see it guys and gals!

See the photos of the exhibit | Go to the Plexus Contemporary site to read more

Updates from the front lines (Beijing)

I was granted the fantastic opportunity to go to Beijing for an entire month. Yes, on Octover 3rd I'll fly from Louisville to Tokyo, hopefully stay for three days, and then fly to Beijing where I will be until November 5th when I fly back to Louisville.

I'm so excited. I read a blog from an artist from the Netherlands who got to go back in March and she loved it, had ample opportunity to create 6 new paintings, and to network with artists from all over the world. Apparently, there are lots of artists from all over the world who take temporary residency in Beijing. Their recent openess with the welcoming of the 2008 Olympics have made the mega-city of Beijing a hot bed for contemporary art activity. There are some 3 or 4 art districts.

I'll know more as October draws near, as for now, I'm just trying to get my head (and my wallet) around all of this travel!

Sunday, July 13, 2008

by Diane Heilenman for The Courier Journal

Ironic.

Millions are connected at the level of intimate thought and images via the Internet, but in the physical world -- and Louisville is an example -- traditional neighborhood boundaries can defy those connections.

One Louisville artist and entrepreneur is among those building new connections in the physical and virtual worlds.

"In the spirit that made this city a city, I'm a pioneer, pushing west," said Bryce Hudson.

An artist represented by Louisville's Gallery NuLu, Hudson also is a successful Web designer, and he opens the first exhibition -- of digital art, naturally enough -- at his new combination gallery and studio, Plexus, in the Portland neighborhood west of downtown Louisville.

"Build a Fire" was organized by curator Ilia Ovechkin, 21, a Louisville native attending the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, which many of the nine artists in the exhibit attend or attended.

"A lot of it is very new, very new thinking, experimental," said Hudson, 29.

These artists are influenced by visual arts that run powerfully outside the conventional, such as film, special effects, anime, video games, comic books and advertising, even early 'net art. They were born after the early Internet years and are fluid, accomplished and unself-conscious computer geeks.

Hudson, who is biracial, said he realizes that his presence in Portland is experimental too.

The neighborhood of bungalows, shotgun houses and corner stores in 19th-century buildings is robustly white and lower middle class. Hudson, whose abstract art or staged photographs are often about the disconnects between genders, races and social constructs, formed Adorno studio at 24th and Main streets in Portland nearly four years ago with Cynthia Norton and Nico Jorcino.

Hudson, who lives on Cherokee Road near downtown, likes Portland a lot.

"I was looking for a great place to work that I could afford," he said. He bought and renovated a sturdy 1920s brick medical clinic at Portland Avenue and 24th Street last summer.

With Ché Rhodes, head of the glass program at the University of Louisville, also moving to Portland with a home studio, that makes at least three art studios in the area.

"I want to prove to myself and prove to others that not only is it possible (to connect with Portland), but it's the direction the city needs to move," said Hudson. "This neighborhood has more choices (than other parts of Louisville). It just seems more real and unique to me. I'd rather be here than on Hurstbourne Lane."

Hudson said he sees it as a "great financial decision" with resale possible in five or 10 years. He said he makes a good living at Web design and his other artwork sells well, too, so "I don't have to be a commercial success (at Plexus)."

Hudson is a former psychology major at Kent State University who moved to Louisville and took up social work. When he burned out on that, he got a degree in graphics and Web design at Sullivan University and began to pursue art seriously.

"Through all that, I got to figure out that networking, that was really what works. Plexus means a network. It's more or less a contemporary idea of exhibiting and introducing people to art and artists to other artists."

The space is like the show, he said. It's not necessarily commercial but is about discussion and discourse.

"I've always strongly believed that if I have the opportunity I should assist others in finding collectors, making sales," Hudson said.

He embraced the cubicles used for medical exams in the former clinic and saw that they would solve the problems most museums and galleries have in showing digital arts and time arts that require intimate dark spaces instead of vast, open galleries.

The first show is a perfect fit.

The artists are of the coming generation of digitally literate creators who will help define the future of contemporary art.

A signature work is "slow rave (last minutes of trance energy)" 2006 by Damon Zucconi of New York City. He took 10 seconds of a real rave and stretched it to three minutes and 24 seconds, using a software that fills in what would otherwise be "blanks" between stills. This creates a very slow motion with rational-looking but artificial, computer-based movement. It is a crown jewel of "Build a Fire" because it shows the increasingly deep layering of different and equally valid realities in the Internet age and shows off the computer's ability to combine and integrate images based on its own internal binary functions.

Another gem is the touching visualization of impossible self-discovery with gay and burlesque-hall overtones. The figure, dressed in two different white bodysuits, is shown in a diptych format. Jacolby Satterwhite of New York City gestures and vamps to a song written and sung by his mentally ill mother about her longing to pull her life together and discover herself.

Reporter Diane Heilenman can be reached at (502) 582-4682.

-- Diane Heilenman

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Build A Fire @ Plexus Contemporary

July 18 - August 8
Opening Reception: July 18, 5pm

contact for hours | get directions | visit plexus site

Addressing issues of contemporary art production, Build A Fire presents work by young artists influenced by the presence of technology as well as the media that it delivers. The works incorporate this influence into their very material makeup, as a reference point taken as an inescapable given.  This sort of comfort with digital media leaves the artists free to address their own topics, and accounts for the diverse, seemingly discontinuous dialogue between the works. Keeping connections with the past, Build A Fire looks for ways to identify itself with the present.

Drawing from media that exists in his immediate personal surroundings, such as drawings and music produced by his mentally ill mother, Jacolby Satterwhite creates paintings, videos and installations that examine African American male patriarchy, sexuality, and material culture. In Model It Jacolby films himself "vogueing", a dance popular in the underground inner-city gay culture, to one of his mother's songs. While addressing complex themes of sexuality, the video echoes the aesthetics of the amateur music and video production often found online via YouTube.

Will Simpson, currently a student at The Cooper Union in New York City, presents Auras and Auroras, a series of drawings that reach for narrative and myth at its most compressed and insular, presenting semi-legible situations and only the smallest illusionistic or spatial gestures. Elements of the drawings were referenced from found internet photographs of live-action role-players, bringing these deadpan images back into the realm of fluidity and fantasy.

Originally from Southern California, Petra Cortright often attempts to reconcile the visual language of computers (software interfaces, ASCII code, animated gifs, and instant messaging idioms) with the rhetoric of the "natural image." In "YARNSTRIPE" (2004) Cortright plays with the scale of digital imagery by working from a painter's perspective to produce an image under the size limitations of the digital software.

Justin Clark, a Louisville-based artist, creates small drawings, photographs and zines. For Build a Fire Clark will create a site-specific installation exposing the various media that influences his style.

Michael Guidetti, an interdisciplinary artist based out of San Francisco, comfortable with new as well as traditional media, builds up compositions by combining drawing and painting with projected animation. Additionally, his web-based project yyyyyyy.info is a constantly evolving composition made up of found text, images and various web elements, recalling the techniques found in a lot of his drawings and paintings.

Thomas Galloway, a New York City-based artist, influenced by found internet artifacts such as GIF animations, videos and collages, creates whimsical illustrations which echo amateur visual production of the internet. In "Tower Of  Tha Gods" Galloway creates grandiose monuments that celebrate banality of the visual vocabulary found on the 'net'.

Damon Zucconi, an interdisciplinary artist based out of New York City, whose work covers video, painting, web-based work, photography and sculpture. Zucconi plays with the manipulation of information, often by re-staging events using techniques of compression and expansion. In "Slow Rave" found footage from a rave was slowed down dramatically to allow the software to fill in the blanks between "real" frames, creating "artificial" information.