Posts from — January 2010

Randy Regier, MFA ’07,’s work at the 2010 DeCordova Biennial in Lincoln, MA was reviewed in The Boston Phoenix.

Portland artist Randy Regier’s work is just beginning to be known, but he may be one of the best sculptors in the country. In the 2010 DeCordova Biennial at the DeCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, Regier has installed Honorable Mention: H. Maxwell Fisher and the Space Race, a “life-size” spacecraft, spacesuit, and related ephemera. Your senses tell you this wondrous, crackpot 1950s Buck Rogers dream machine is real. And you — particularly if you’re a certain kind of boy — may want to believe it’s real. But your mind insists that it’s fake. The result of this contradiction is a pleasurable mental short circuit.

The Fisher Fire Fly spacecraft is a ball-shaped capsule atop a cone-shaped thruster with three landing-gear legs. It’s painted Wizard of Oz emerald green. The top of the capsule is scuffed and blistered, as if scorched during passage through the earth’s atmosphere. Peer inside the open hatch and you find a metal-frame seat, wires, hoses, switches, and dials. Everything appears authentically old, right down to the musty industrial smell.

Read more online.

It’s Back-to-School time as the MFA begins the 2nd semester of the 2009/2010 year.  As 2nd years begin working on their theses, 1st years are taking Impetus to Analysis and Interdisciplinary Studies.

Can you spot the MFA faculty member in this 6th grade class photo?

2009 Visiting Artist Ken Lum creates large-scale installation for The Vancouver Art Gallery.

Ken Lum from shangri-la to shangri-la, 2010 (detail)
site-specific installation in progress. Photo: Brian Howell

The Vancouver Art Gallery has commissioned a large-scale site-specific installation by internationally renowned artist Ken Lum for display in one of the city’s most prominent locations during the 2010 Winter Games. On view from January 23 to September 6 at the Gallery’s recently launched outdoor exhibition space, Offsite, the artist’s large sculptural work includes three scale replicas of squatters’ shacks that once populated North Vancouver’s shoreline.

Titled from shangri-la to shangri-la, Lum’s rustic cabins resemble those of the Maplewood Mudflats squatters’ community. Located along North Vancouver’s intertidal zone from the early 20th century until 1971, this improvised village was home to a number of artists, writers and activists. For his project, Lum has recreated the homes of renowned writer Malcolm Lowry, artist Tom Burrows and Greenpeace leader Dr. Paul Spong. Propped up on stilts over the surface of the Offsite reflecting pool, the huts strike a sharp contrast with the surrounding downtown architecture. Located at the foot of the Shangri-La Hotel, Vancouver’s tallest building at the busy intersection of Thurlow and West Georgia Streets, these dissimilar structures evoke the character of the mudflat community and draw attention to the rapid advance of urban development in the Lower Mainland.

The work of Vancouver artist Ken Lum questions the relationship between modernism, mass culture and everyday experience, often blurring the boundaries separating high art and popular culture. Over the past twenty years, Lum’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions throughout North America, Europe and Asia. He has also represented Canada at the Istanbul Biennial, São Paulo Biennial, Shanghai Biennale, Gwangju Biennale and Documenta.

Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite offers a rotating program of innovative public art projects by local and international artists in Vancouver’s downtown core, which respond to the city’s unique urban environment. The exhibition space presents new projects organized by the Gallery two times a year, funded by the City of Vancouver through its Public Art Program.

Offsite: Ken Lum is curated by the Audain Curator of British Columbia Art, Grant Arnold, with assistant curator, Kathleen Ritter. The Gallery deeply appreciates support for Offsite: Ken Lum from the Michael O’Brian Family Foundation. Offsite is also supported by Ian Gillespie, President, Westbank; Ben Yeung, President, Peterson Investment Group; and the residents at Shangri-La.

In December 2009, MFA students and faculty visited Portland, OR and Philadelphia, PA.

Highlights from Portland included: exploring the Chinese Gardens, visiting Powell’s Books, meeting Andy Paiko and Ethan Rose, a glass artist and a sound artist who collaborated to put together the Transference show at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, and of course, the Nike Kitchen.  In between, we held interviews with each other, met two fantastic MFA alums (Shaun Jarvis, MFA ’05 and Sandra Preston, MFA ’08), went on a walking tour of the city with former-MFA faculty Tracey Cockrell, sampled some fantastic Portland beer, ate yummy vegan food, and had a super fun karaoke night.

Highlights from Philly included: a visit to the West Collection, curator/artist talk with Sue Spaid and Caroline Lathan-Stiefel, MFA ’01 at Locks Gallery, and of course, Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms at Philadelphia Museum of Art. In between, we held more interviews with each other, met some great perspective students and reconnected with Karyn Olivier, a 2008 visiting artist, enjoyed a delicious dinner at Farmacia, local/organic/slow food place.

Applications for the MFA priority deadline must be postmarked January 15th, 2010.

Late applications will be considered based on space available.

If applicants encounter any problems with MECA’s on-line system, please contact the Admissions staff at admissions@meca.edu or Rachel Katz in the MFA Office rkatz@meca.edu.

JUST LOOK AROUND THIS PLACE
Baer Ridgway Exhibitions | San Francisco
January 22, 2010

Baer Ridgway Exhibitions of 172 Minna Street, San Francisco, presents Just Look Around This Place, a program of new works in video curated by Kenneth White. The one-time screening will begin at 8pm on Friday, January 22, 2010. Total running time is approximately one hour. Admission is free and open to the public.

Just Look Around This Place is a collection of seven short works in video that explore the transformation of social relations by the video medium. Using a diverse range of methods, including video-diary, home video, animation, direct address, and appropriation, the artists dissect their means of creative production and the mutations of social performance that their medium instigates. Video is an environment through which interaction is conditioned. In each work, we are beckoned to “just look around this place,” and recognize the (often hilarious) scenes of life performed for electronic media. Works and artists include “Let’s watch this guy at a coffee shop.” (Julie Perini), “HOME / VIDEO” (Michael Hession), “Video Terraform Dance Party” (Jeremy Bailey), “Pine Point” (Kenneth White), “Beauty Plus Pity” (Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby), “West Nile” (Tom Sherman), and “The Frills 3.0” (Jimmy DiPasquale).

Kenneth White is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator. He is currently a graduate student in the Art History / Film Studies Ph.D. Program at Stanford University. He received his B.F.A. in film production from Syracuse University in 2005. He is a co-founder of the Portland Film + Video Artists Collective, of Portland, Maine. White will serve as a visiting curator in the summer 2010 session of the Maine College of Art M.F.A. Program.

Paul Bloodgood, MFA ’03, exhibits new paintings at the Walter Keller Gallery in Zurich.

Anne Chu, Paul Bloodgood, Peter Emch
Walter Keller Gallery | Zurich, Switzerland
December 10, 2009 – January 30, 2010

“I’ve come to the realization that a landscape is part of a larger energetic system; that it is not constant in form, structure or proportion; and that any attempts to capture both the rough topography and the sensorial experience of landscape in painting must include an active human presence. The essential reality of nature is not separating, self-contained, and complete in itself. Rather, nature’s unfolding truth emerges only with the active participation of the human mind.

I believe that painting’s particular calling is to initiate this type of engagement. I also believe that the traditions of abstract painting (such as those developed by the three artists I mention above) are particularly suited to the task. Abstraction’s imperative to grant the medium priority over the subject matter allows for an exploration of the expressive capability of line as an embodiment of naturalistic form and of human values.”
Paul Bloodgood