BOMB BITS

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Documentary Interventions

BOMB Bits is BOMBlog’s frequently updated outlet for ephemera, notes, and thoughts about culture. Enjoy and check back soon for more!

 

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Andrea Callard’s film bites have the feeling of a high school video class gone horribly right. Whether talking to the camera stony-eyed over an ironing board, climbing the ladders in her downtown apartment, or musing aloud on the azalea bushes creeping over New York’s bald patches, it’s fuzzy who exactly she’s trying to reach. A “personal essay committed to film” definition would fit, but so would “video art” if you took her thoughts and games for a performance and Callard for a canvas.

Her first feature Talking Landscapes makes its world premiere this week at Maysles Cinema (founded by the director of Grey Gardens, Gimme Shelter, and Salesman). Mixed into the short-piece playlist (11 thru 12, Fluorescent/Azalea, Lost Show Blues, and others) is never-before-seen footage of the ’70s collective Colab’s star-studded exhibition. The work of artists such as Basquiat and Haring (who painted an air conditioner) filled an abandoned massage parlor in Times Square from top to bottom, while Callard, who curated, was there to pick up the pieces with her camera.

History, existentialism gone playful, and a young Callard with a lens so wide, she catches both. Maybe even a little more.

Post-film discussion with director Andrea Callard, moderated by curator Livia Bloom, will follow the 7:30PM screenings on Thursday, February 16, and Saturday, February 18. Maysles Cinema is located at 343 Lenox Avenue/Malcolm X Boulevard, between 127th and 128th Streets, New York, NY 10027. Screenings are open to the public with a suggested donation of $10.

—JN



 

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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

 

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The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is kind of like a graduate school but without the fluff—the staggeringly expensive fluff. By their calculation adjunct profs at major universities get paid just 2% of the tuition paid for, well, adjunct profs to teach the tuition payers. And it’s a lot of tuition.

So in a dramatic bout of middleman-obliterating, the Brooklyn Institute pays its profs more (100% more) and slashes tuition (95% less) than those major universities. These are infomercial type numbers but the magic is real—and I have seen a man toss a pineapple in the air and halve it as it fell.

Literally their entire faculty is or just finished doing obscenely impressive things at Columbia University and is teaching at Brooklyn Institute as a kind of utopian jaunt down from the ivory tower. They are “committed to the idea that to learn, teach, study, write and think is labor worth doing both for its own sake and for the sake of communities and citizens who are active, engaged and alive.” It’s pretty sweet. Visit their website here!

—FTG



 

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TICK Tock

BOMB Bits is BOMBlog’s frequently updated outlet for ephemera, notes, and thoughts about culture. Enjoy and check back soon for more!

 

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Olafur Eliasson is better known for his eco-sculptures, like the makeshift waterfall he installed under the Brooklyn Bridge and the sun mockup hung from the rafters in the Tate, than for his Bauhaus inspired educational research project Institut für Raumexperimente. The curriculum takes experiential art education to a summer camp high. Although, if the diction of their website gives any sign to what their day-by-day is like, it’s probably more on par with ancient Greek bath houses than a teen comedy for the artsy.

Although the school’s focus is broad—film, sculpture, etc.—it probably won’t come as a surprise that the school will be publishing a literary journal. Volume I of TICK is now accepting submissions in any art from that deal with the theme of timing until February 15. The journal’s website says, “Please submit original work which gives someone the experience of TIMING when they encounter your work online.” It goes on to mention you should state the amount of time you want to allow your work to be viewed. Curious? So are we.

—JN



 

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Art Hack Day

BOMB Bits is BOMBlog’s frequently updated outlet for ephemera, notes, and thoughts about culture. Enjoy and check back soon for more!

 

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The term “hacker” overheard in conversation often evokes images of vitamin-D-deprived wunderkinds lit by the harsh green glow of code cascading across a wall of monitors. Accurate or not, the mythos attached to the word is warranted with computers currently holding rank as the most popular artistic and political tools.

The effectiveness of technology will be further explored from January 26th through the 28th at 319 Scholes’s “Art Hack Day.” Hackers, artists, and maybe even one or two Luddites seeking liberation will gather together to create new work, utilizing the capabilities of open source technology and exploring the nature of collaboration between human and computer. The public will be able to view and interact with the participants’ creations online during the initial two days and are encouraged to stop trolling alone and show up to a closing exhibition and party at the space.

Hacking begins Thurs Jan 26, 7pm Exhibit / closing party Sat Jan 28 7pm @319 Scholes St, Brooklyn

—Natalie



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The ABC’s of Space
with David Lamelas

 

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David Lamelas

I can imagine a lot of possible mixed strands in Marcel Duchamp’s head when he wrote to a friend, “Bueños Aires n’existe pas.” Maybe he was churning on art and the ephemeral, maybe on the spirit of a city that super and precedes the material city itself, or maybe just the kind of thing a person muses on when he’s lost and lonely, having only the guilt of artistic production and a game of chess for comfort.

In his most recent installation, Argentinian born David Lamelas took Duchamp’s idea and explored its reversal. His new exhibition, “New York Exists in 8.5 Billion Sq. Ft.” at the Maccarone Galley points to the small ways that space exists and reminds us of how we’re affected by the bits that make this ‘phenomenon’. Because, as Lamelas points out, that’s what space is, a phenomenon—one that can be isolated and tinkered with. He turns corners inside out, replicates the size and shape of the columns in the middle of rooms with casts he pushes to the side, and sets up artificial corridors diagonally in square rooms to remind us how these little variations transform an environment and how we react to it. But there’s humor in the way he does it, a playfulness in pulling back OZ’s curtain and making the whole of what he’s doing, which honestly isn’t much, as easy to digest as possible. His titles (Projection, Corner Piece Rectangle) are descriptive instead of poetic, a sign of his motives to ask and get out, to leave the glitter and pomp at home and let the space do the talking.

Lamelas has been making art since the ’60s and his approach comes directly from the conceptual. Largely, he prefers the minimal to the fanfare, which might seem strange considering his history in tangoing with the rock star persona and his fascination for pop American cinema and commercials. You might think dotting a room with inversed squares would appeal more to the air guitarists of the sculpture world than seasoned virtuosos, but as most artists know, minimalism doesn’t equate to laziness so much as to a trust in the effect of the material. Even still, it’s not for everybody. The paired-down as a form has always had its gargoyles that have kept away most that aren’t either austere or child-like. Frankly, it’s a surprise that the person who speaks up, “But it does exist Mr. Duchamp. There’s 8.5 million sq. ft of it!” is in his ’60s instead of his pre-teens. It’s a reminder that sometimes the best art, the kind both smart and funny, can be as simple and genuine as a butterfly net.

The exhibition will be showing at Maccarone Gallery at 630 Greenwich Street from January 10 – February 4. There will be a screening of Lamelas’ film “Desert People” on Saturday, January 21 at 3:00 pm and on Saturday, January 28 at 3:00 pm.

—JN



 

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Ronnie Bass

 

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Ronnie Bass, Video Stills, Victor School. Courtesy of I-20 Gallery.

 

Ronnie Bass’s second solo exhibition at I-20, Victor School, engages with mythopoetic imagination, using techniques of telling through photographic portraits, video, and composed song, each offering a private entrance into plausible truths. Bass continuously connects conscious and unconscious realms through a rendering of personal enactments within enclosed, interior spaces (his bedroom, basement, etc.) where symbols act as portals, and the self becomes suspended between this world and one that is newly conceived and spoken of, in a realm beyond. In his video, Bass takes on the role and identity for his school’s Vice Principle (named Victor), while also providing the voices of the Principal and School Superintendent; he also softly plays a recorder flute, in solitude, with a gravity of seriousness. In Bass’s work, there are no singular dimensions of being, only mirrors of improbable and reinvented selves alongside a muted sublime. We take notice of mythic narrative, private ritual, and a threshold where an inevitable loss of equilibrium occurs, as seen in a sculpture of fallible leaking fountain, on the floor. Time passes and time stops. Triangle bells are rung and breath becomes song. Meaning is captured through sound and symbols, but then released with prismatic hesitancy.

Victor School will be showing at I-20 Gallery through January 28th.

—Kari Adelaide



 

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Fine Fiction and Pints Writers Can Afford

 

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In the slosh of lit mags and handbound zines, it’s become wise to ask for a writer’s résumé before their manuscript. But backed by seat in Columbia’s creative writing faculty, a Guggenheim fellowship, and having pieces accepted by a roster of magazines that could serve as a who’s who in the world of notable lit slingers (The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Tin House, Noon, N+1, McSweeney’s, Esquire, The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post), Sam Lipsyte (The Ask, Venus Drive) has earned his get-out-of-first-read-folder-free card. The wry absurdist will be reading alongside equally notable, though more reclusive author, Gary Lutz (I Looked Alive, Divorcer), who also publishes in the short-listers and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. Up and comers Catherine Lacey, Mitch Levenberg, and Christine Vines round out this night not to be missed. Meet us down for $4 pints and fiction that makes the existential more funny than morose.

As part of the FRANKLIN PARK READING SERIES, the Short Fiction Night with Sam Lipsyte and Gary Lutz will take place Monday, January 9, 8-10pm at the Franklin Park Bar and Beer Garden on 618 St. Johns Place, between Franklin and Classon Avenues in Crown Heights, Brooklyn for the cost of FREE.

—Jerred North



 

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Poem Forest

 

BOMB Bits is BOMBlog’s frequently updated outlet for ephemera, notes, and thoughts about culture. Enjoy and check back soon for more!

This is some walk in the park! After the success of the Spontaneous Society, Jon Cotner has been invited by The Poetry Society of America to design a walk for the New York Botanical Garden’s Thain Family Forest Dedication Festival this weekend (November 5th and 6th) and the following weekend.

Poem Forest builds upon the principle of his conceptual walks around the city, this time inviting visitors to engage with and become enchanted by selected lines from 2500 year old nature poetry. Cotner intends to fuse Thain forest’s seasonal landscape with compositions of poetry from travelers, explorers and observers at various points throughout the trail. One line he uses is by Bernadette Mayer, a quote stating, “Robins, starlings, wrens, warblers / they pay no rent”.

As both a way to celebrate to (fast-coming) autumn, and a practice in meditation, we suggest that you make your way down to the Poem Forest!

Poem Forest is a self-guided tour that takes place from 12-4:30 pm on Saturday and Sunday, November 5-6, and again the next weekend, on November 12-13.

–– FP



 

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Mary Poppins is A Junkie

 

BOMB Bits is BOMBlog’s frequently updated outlet for ephemera, notes, and thoughts about culture. Enjoy and check back soon for more!

 

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Mary Poppins Is A Junkie”, a phrase ostensibly coined by a California disc jockey in the mid 1960s in response to the Disney movie phenomena, became one of the first widely distributed bumper stickers. This sophistic idiom was later revived as a lapel pin by the students in protest to their cantankerous professor P.L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins. This weekend, Jeannie Weissglass, Ann Deleporte and Stephen Dean’s exhibition at newly opened Show Room, while not referring to drugs, proves to be more than a little euphoria-haze inducing. As a starting point, the catchy phrase describes how snippets of illogical information travel on the feet and wheels of pop culture, a phrase left to disseminate only through physical happenstance, not purpose.

Fierce circular paintings, pillaged newspapers and reflected light is their traveling tête-à-tête. The works communicate with each other, ignoring the viewer. If they were personified, they would speak Pig Latin about Dada, analog instruments, scavenging, astronaut helmets, dark magic and state: “Fireworks only happen at night.” Dean, Deleporte and Weissglass work both in opposing media, opposing styles and this opposition attracts.

“Mary Poppins is A Junkie” opens on Saturday, October 29 at Show Room. The vintage pins have been reproduced and will be free at the reception from 6-9 pm.

–– AC



 

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A Page Turner: The Third Annual Asian-American Literary Festival

 

BOMB Bits is BOMBlog’s frequently updated outlet for ephemera, notes, and thoughts about culture. Enjoy and check back soon for more!

This Saturday, Page Turner, the third annual Asian-American Literary Festival takes place at powerHouse books, celebrating some of the most talented minds on the American cultural scene. To name a few: Junot Diaz, Amitav Ghosh, Teju Cole, Hisham Matar, Jessica Hagedorn, Wangechi Mutu, as well as seven Guggenheim fellows and five National Book Award finalists.

The event, self-described as being like the perfect boyfriend or girlfriend, “that hot unabashedly-lefty braniac with an awesome sense of humor and a great heart” promises to serve up a delectable menu of literary food through its certified quality and jam-packed schedule. If all this is taking your fancy, then let us mention the after-party with selected playlists from Das Racist and head of XL records Kris Chen, sealing off what will surely be a fun-filled day. Make sure you’re there!

–– FP



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The Place to Bee: A Spelling Bee to Support [CLMP]

 

BOMB Bits is BOMBlog’s frequently updated outlet for ephemera, notes, and thoughts about culture. Enjoy and check back soon for more!

 

Who knew spelling could be this glamorous? This Monday, The Standard Hotel in New York City will host a spelling bee to support the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, [CLMP], that most worthy spelling-conscious organization. But beware—these savvy spellers are not your typical bees! Bee participants include quick-witted literary minds Francine Prose, Elissa Schappell, Simon Winchester, and Lynne Tillman, to name a few. Ira Silverberg will emcee and Jesse Sheidlower, Editor-at-Large of the Oxford English Dictionary, will serve as the night’s venerable judge.

The event kicks off at 7 PM with Canapés ‘n Cocktails and a Buzzless Bidding Silent Auction; at 8 PM, spellers will go head-to-head in a competition that’s sure to be anything but a drone. With fashions by Paul Stuart, DVF, and Chance, why not shed your glasses, slip on some heels, and leave your stereotypes behind?

To buy tickets and find out more about the event, go to [CLMP]’s website.

–– HJ



 

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Pray the Devil Back to Hell

 

BOMB Bits is BOMBlog’s frequently updated outlet for ephemera, notes, and thoughts about culture. Enjoy and check back soon for more!

 

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How often do we have the chance to achieve the unimaginable? Leymah Gbowee, Liberian activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner reflects on her struggles against brutal civil war and its seemingly insurmountable odds: “No one thought that we could sustain a protest for two and a half years. No one.”

Armed with only white T-shirts and strong convictions, Liberian women protesters challenged the vicious regime of corrupt dictator Charles Taylor. They risked their lives to change a war that was creating hell on earth, seeing no other option.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell, an award-winning documentary tracing the heroic journey of Liberian women fed up with war, makes its U.S. broadcast premiere tonight as the second part of the PBS series Women, War & Peace. This documentary is not to be missed. It is an inspiring tale surrounding these Liberian heroes who achieved what no one thought was possible, peace.

For more information about Pray the Devil Back to Hell, check out their website here.

For a statement by Leymah Gbowee about political action that didn’t make it into the film, check out this video

–– TM



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Dance New Amsterdam: RAW Material

 

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Photograph from Trespass Trespass, courtesy of Lauren Bakst.

 

Dance New Amsterdam puts the spotlight on emerging artists with their 2011-2012 performance series, RAW Material. The two-night run features the work of five young choreographers whose 10-minute pieces explore a wide variety of themes ranging from immortality to the subtleties and defeats of a breakup.

Lauren Bakst, BOMB’s Development Associate, doubles as an independent dance artist and performer. Her work reckons with the violence of the contemporary moment, and ultimately searches for hope in the face of complexity and confusion. RAW Material presents the New York Premiere of Trespass Trespass, an experimental piece that Bakst has been developing since May 2011. Her performance statement describes the different sources, inspirations, and goals of her work:

Hannah Arendt understood trespassing as a forgivable offense, defining it in the ancient deconstruction of the word—”to miss the mark or go astray, as an arrow misses a target.” Assuming that we are always already trespassing, how do we negotiate the space between self and other? Drawing from seemingly disparate sources such as Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona, and the sociopolitical terrain of Israel/Palestine, Trespass Trespass experientially entangles questions around both what constitutes and dismantles belief, empathy and the self.

Trespass Trespass premiers alongside works by Lauren Hale Binaris, Marjani Forté, Aaron McGloin, and Jumatatu Poe. Performances take place Thursday and Friday at 8:00 p.m. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit the DNA website.

—HR

 



 

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Snapshots: Tourism in Cinema

 

BOMB Bits is BOMBlog’s frequently updated outlet for ephemera, notes, and thoughts about culture. Enjoy and check back soon for more!

 

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Gone to Earth, directed by Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger. Image courtesy of 92Y.

Fall has arrived and the summer Hollywood blockbuster season is officially over! Cinephiles and culture-enthusiasts can rejoice however; utterly mind-stimulating films are on their way! Flaherty NYC presents Snapshots: Tourism in Cinema at 92YTribeca beginning October 5th at 7:30pm. The series explores the outer limits of documentary filmmaking and takes us beyond our preconceived notion of documentaries as simply talking heads and B-roll, and will equally highlight vérité, travelogues, and the notable trend of documentary in fiction as seen in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Miriam Bale, a film critic and programmer, expertly curates this series, including films by Sam Fleischner, Les Blank, Paul Clipson, Maya Deren, Olivia Wyatt, Pascal Aubier (whom Tarkovsky called “the great hope of French cinema”), among other influential filmmakers in the field. With or without the popcorn, these are films not to be missed this fall. For a complete listing of screenings and ticket information, refer to 92Y’s website.

Gone to Earth, Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s Technicolor masterpiece, is screening tonight, October 5, at 92YTribeca.

 

—MD

 



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Adarsh Alphons Project

 

BOMB Bits is BOMBlog’s frequently updated outlet for ephemera, notes, and thoughts about culture. Enjoy and check back soon for more!

 

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Students at Work

Get it wherever and while you can! Art education programs are dwindling due to meager funding in schools. Adarsh Alphons, once director of the Harlem School of the Arts, set up his own tuition free extra-curricular program, Adarsh Alphons Projects, for school children ages 11–17. With weekend courses in drawing, painting, mixed media, installation, and public art (all culminating in exhibitions of the students’ work), the program is supported by The Shelly & Donald Rubin and Levitt foundations, to name a few. AAP is a creative outlet for those left without one, and is a resource for those whose passion for art exceeds the reach of their school program. Alphons’s program believes that art is inside everyone and stresses the importance of accessing and enriching each child’s vision. Harboring independence and individuality through vision, AAP is the perfect experience to strengthen confidence and sense of self in the face of schools’ escalating problems with bullying.

Tonight, Adarsh Alphons Projects partners with Katy Grayson, director of The Hole, for their Inaugural Gala and presentation of AAP student work at the gallery on 312 Bowery. AAP will honor Anita Durst for all her efforts through the years in supporting artists’ vision through chashama, inc., her legendary venue. The evening will also include a live mural painting by AAP students and an auction led by Christie’s auctioneer featuring the student mural and other exhibited work. All proceeds go directly back to the students.

Tickets are still available, so join Adarsh Alphons, Anita Durst, CNN correspondent Soledad O’Brien, CNN Bureau Chief Darius Rucker, artist and collector Danny Simmons, philanthropist Roberto Clemente, Jr., Donald and Shelley Rubin, Emily Ford and former Congressman Harold Ford, Jr., Chairman of Global Partnerships Forum Amir Dossal, and artist Sanford Biggers.

 

—RG

 



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ISSUE Project Room: Benefit Art Auction

 

BOMB Bits is BOMBlog’s frequently updated outlet for ephemera, notes, and thoughts about culture. Enjoy and check back soon for more!

 

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When is the last time you indulged in the thrill of the opening bid? If it’s been too long, assuage your fears! Preparations are already under way for a live art auction this Saturday, October 1, hosted by ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn’s creatively charged and venerable venue for experimental art and performance. An eclectic mix of over 50 works will be available for the taking; some of the legendary and accomplished artists represented include Gary Simmons, Cindy Sherman, James Nares, Andy Warhol and Mickalene Thomas. Can’t make it Saturday? Be your own auctioneer and bid online through September 30; lucky BOMB subscribers receive a member discount for this event, paying a mere $50 instead of the original $125 (buy tickets here, discount code “bombsite”). Proceeds from the auction will benefit a wide variety of the organization’s extensive programming and artists’ projects. Performances by A^CTION (Kim Gordon, Tony Conrad, John Miller), and Steve Roden are sure to stimulate auction-goers. For a complete artist listing and more event details, refer to ISSUE Project Room’s website.

The auction will start at 6:30 PM at Industria Superstudio, 775 Washington St., at West 12th St. and Jane.

—Hannah Jansen

 



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New Museum’s MakerBot Challenge

 

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Photo courtesy of the New Museum.

 

Let’s say the world really is going to end in 2012. That means you have roughly three months to accomplish everything you’ve wanted to do before you die. Well, now you have more of a reason than just crossing something off your bucket list. The New Museum has an exciting opportunity called the MakerBot Challenge. The challenge aims to accomplish the New Museum’s idea of “New Art, New Ideas” by creating a 3D design that is not only inventive and derivative but also helps the world around us. The rules are simple: designs must be a single part or multiple parts that are smaller than 4×4 x 4 and printable on a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic. Parts can be made in almost ever color including nuclear green and glow-in-the-dark. A jury from MakerBot and the New Museum will select the final designs and all you have to do is upload your 3D file on Thingiverse.com by October 31st. If creating something just to create isn’t enough for you, there are some pretty stellar prizes included (if you win, of course.) Your design will be printed on a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic, which will be displayed in the New Muesum’s window, a New Museum Deluxe membership, a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic Kit and an invitation to the New Musuem’s Maker-Bot Challenge launch party. You can find out more information here. Better get to work, the clock is a’tickin’.



––Rebecca Ambrose, archive intern



 

Michael Alan’s Living Installation

 

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Michael Alan, Mad Max performance, 2010, Greenpoint. Photo by Garry Boake.

 

What are you doing Friday night? Chances are you’ll be dropping by ABC No Rio after this. Another incarnation of the Living Installation by Michael Alan will be held at the East Village’s avant-hip landmark from nine PM until three AM—that’s six hours of Monster Truck Rally art excitement. In this version of the artist’s own wonderama, Alan, as DJ Alien, will reign over the direction of artful anarchy for two, yes two, simultaneous happenings. First The Wedding, which explores the “marriage of a man who will be not a man, and his love turned backwards,” and Vampire Circus, “a moving carnival of happy eaters”—pretty much a volcano spewing DayGlo art lava all over the audience (scratch audience, there are only participants here). As participants, you’ll be able to engage and revel in the reveal of the two stories. For those of you who ever had the inclination to reach out and touch the art in a gallery, Living Installation is for you. Michael Alan’s is an art for the tacitly inclined and free spirited. Purchase tickets for the event here. Before you head out, do your homework and impress your friends with a little history lesson on ABC No Rio gratis the BOMB Archive here.

Michael Alan’s Living Installation ABC No Rio Gallery September 16, 9PM–3AM  

—RG



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The Paper Project

 

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Valerie Hammond. Who Killed Cock Robin 2. 2011. Watercolor and graphite on paper. 22×30 inches. Courtesy of 80WSE.

 

“Sorry for killing trees,” you’ll often hear people say after printing something out. Paper is an everyday site for the collision of nature and technology, an industrial product whose ecological origins still linger in its use. Artists Kiki Smith and Valerie Hammond, curators of the Papertails exhibit opening today at NYU’s 80WSE, are well aware of this. The two, who have co-taught Advanced Printmaking at NYU for the past several years, have assembled a group of artists whose commitment to using paper in unconventional ways brings out both naturalistic elements and technological themes.

Chie Fueki mixes spraypaint and collage with colored pencil and watercolor work in a scene seen through a window of a human form with something that looks suspiciously like a MacBook atop his chest. Zachary Wollard’s As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame mingles fairy-tale imagery of roots and creatures with wheels and crystals churning beneath the earth. Kathleen Graves’ Garden Bots series inserts “nanobots”—computerized traces or defects—into digital but pastoral images of flowers. Others make paper into something more physical and solid than one might expect. Musician-artist Antony’s Moluccan Crest, named for a cockatoo, uses cement and grout to make a shieldlike image, while Hilary Harnischfeger builds thick, volcanic sculptures from plaster and layered paper. The curators supply the exhibit’s highlights. Hammond’s Who Killed Cock Robin watercolor and graphite works are almost scientific sketches of flowers accompanied by birds and bats, like an old-fashioned naturalist’s observations of a morbid ecosystem. In Underworld, Kiki Smith fills a vast paper canvas with sedimentary layers surrounding a corpse entangled within roots, the paper wrinkled like the texture of bark or old skin. The work gradually reveals rabbits and ants within warrens and tunnels, trickling water, and a rose and a cocoon, as if to hint at rebirth from the dead body—and the dead trees.

The exhibit, which also includes works by Michael Byron, Francesco Clemente, Julia Fish, Carl Fudge, Beka Goedde, Stephen Mueller, and Rachel Ostrow, has an opening reception tonight from 6-8 pm.

—ZF



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Reflecting the Stars

 

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Free associate New York and and you are bound to think of lights. The fantasy image of a city in lights is likely more of a faux-pas-fantasy today in the face of Green-ness and concerns of light pollution. Just think of the difference between a night sky in New York and say . . . Kentucky. That’s exactly what Jon Morris, director of the Brooklyn-based The Windmill Factory did. Born in a small Kentucky town where he frequently gazed at stars above Lake Cumberland, Morris grappled with the idea of the disappearing night sky over New York City and other metropolises of the east coast.

In a gesture to bring the night sky back, Morris teamed up with T/K firm/collective Kontraptioneering, Google Senior Software Engineer Adam Berensweig, and interns from MIT and NYU’s Interactive Technology Program, who all started toying with wirelessly-controlled, solar-powered LED lamps for the decaying pilings of Pier 49. The result is Reflecting the Stars, an interactive light installation consisting of radio-controlled, steel encased luminaries perched on top of the pier posts. Each luminary, named after constellations that are becoming increasingly obscured, can be dedicated with a personal message online here.

So flip, switch, and clap off your thoughts of brights lights in the big city and remember the lights you used to wish upon. Reflecting the Stars happens from sunset to midnight through October 25. Special events at the Pier 49 site in the Hudson River Park include a sunset launch with Charles Renfro (DS + R) and Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal, and starting on Tuesday, August 30, weekly onsite telescopic stargazing with astronomers. Read more here for information about Reflecting the Stars.

Due to damage by Hurricane Irene, the opening reception of and sunset picnic for Reflecting the Stars is rescheduled for tomorrow, August 31, 7:17 at the Pier 49 site in the Hudson River Park.

—RG



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98 Bowery

Who doesn’t like art from the ‘70’s and ‘80’s? And who doesn’t love PayPal? Gallery 98 brings them both together as an online gallery and store for the website 98Bowery.com. Right now the Gallery features rad art and ephemera created by the group Colab, and its associated art spaces: Fashion-Moda and ABC No-Rio Dinero.

The current inventory includes a number of Fashion Moda posters by Charlie and John Ahearn, Stefan Eins, Walter Robinson, and Marc Brasz, little graphic Barbara Kruger match books, photographs by Tom Warren, Harvey Wang and Jane Dickinson; along with plaster and ceramic art objects and silk screen prints. All the artwork ties into the out-of-print 1985 book, recently restored to life by 98Bowery.com, ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Gallery. This book gives the low-down on the “original” lower east side gallery of the 1980s, serving as a kind of survey for their past events, exhibitions, projects, and involved artists. Take your pick of the related art for sale at Gallery 98, but the inventory will continue to change, and will include photographs, art objects, and works on paper, from between the years of 1969 and 1989.

—AK

Read older BOMB Bits here.

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