Hand drawn maps by Psyekl

I look for inspiration in a number of places; one of them is the mapping impulse we all seem to have and that manifests itself in a number of ways - including things like the hand-drawn map association. I’m not sure exactly what’s going on with these maps below but they seem loosely tied to fantasy fiction and gaming from the 80s.  In any case they’re beautiful.

The artist is Ivan E Ramirez, and he’s on Deviantart as psyekl here.

Caellend___tree_style___by_psyekl Seaside_City_by_psyekl Diodet_by_psyekl

 

 

They’re sort of like seed packets - Interviewing Artists

Citywide Publication - Photo Credit Jaime Alvarez 2014 I’ve had two experiences on the questioner end of the “artist interview”, separated by 15 years.

One afternoon back in 1998, I walked over from Hope Street to Ainslie Street to meet up with Mike Sarff and Tim Whidden of MTAA.  I’d borrowed a tape recorder and had a few questions written on a notecard, with the intent to write something about what was going on with people who were making net art.   Back then Rhizome was still an email mailing list populated by anonymous cranks, digital freaks and plain vanilla artists like myself looking for discourse, and anybody could post anything to that small community and have it feel like an unregulated frontier - unlike, say, Facebook art discourse today.

Mike and Tim were both in my social network back when that didn’t mean Facebook.  Mike was a Cranbrook grad too, and when I first moved to Brooklyn and was helping build out the 57hope space in ‘94, I borrowed Mike's typewriter to type cover letters for jobs, and showered at Ainslie Street too, since we had no shower yet.

Mike and Tim had started collaborating under a pair of aliases - M. River and T. Whid - first with large paintings and then, as the internet started to surface, doing web projects.  It was the beginning of a long occasional collaboration that has spanned over a decade.

Fifteen years later I got involved with the Publication Study Group for the Citywide Philly book that’s coming out very soon (I just saw the physical thing at Vox yesterday), and that got me into a reflective mood about talking with other artists about what we do and why we do it.  And especially why we collaborate; Citywide was nothing if not a giant collaboration, and I think we’re all still trying to work out the lessons learned.  Cindy Stockton Moore has a great essay on that at Title Magazine, here.

The Citywide publication is being mailed out to the Kickstarter supporters who gave at the $25 level now, and the laser cut sleeve version will go out later this spring.  There’s a launch party in May.

But for now I thought I’d repost that interview with Mike and Tim here.  It also lives on in the Rhizome archives here.

 

They're sort of like seed packets"--Colin Keefe interviews MT Art Associates (Part I)

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Resources:

MTAA website: http://www.spacelab.net/~twhid

Cary Peppermint's Real Audio interview with T. Whid: http://www.artnetweb.com/peppermint/peek/v2_5_1.html

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(This is Part One of a two part series. In the interest of moving this more toward a dialogue/list format, Part Two will consist of a series of lovingly crafted questions for the list from MT Art Associates.)

MT Art Associates produced "The Direct to Your Home Art Project" and "Buying Time: The Nostalgia-Free History Sale", both of which were lo-fi, high-impact participatory projects publicized (and operated) here on RHIZOME, as well as elsewhere. I sat down with M. River and T. Whid last Sunday to talk about the work they've been organizing over the past two years, and, elliptically, their perspective on the state of new media.

Colin: I just wanted to start off by asking about how you two guys got started, working as a collaborative, where that began.

T. Whid: Well, as I remember it, I wanted to do some painting, and I was doing some comics at the time. And I said to M., um...do you want to do a painting? And he said, "yeah, I have a canvas, come on over!" (laughter) That's basically how - and then, we did it and we kind of liked how it turned out, and we did a couple more paintings after that, and then just went from there. (turns to M.) Right? That how you remember it?

M. River: Well, yeah, I was interested in what T. was doing. He was self-publishing a magazine called Burger and he had done some work in World War III and a couple of other magazines. He was working collaboratively with a woman writer out in San Francisco. I wasn't painting; it wasn't what I was doing, but um -

C: - but you had a canvas, anyway -

M: - yeah - so we worked on a couple of paintings together, which were sort of narrative landscapes with figurative figures like Johnny Appleseed, Rip Van Winkle, Annie Oakely. And we would set them into spaces, and try to add as much information into them as possible.

Somewhere in there, we were also doing some other stuff, but Carol Stakenas from Creative Time asked us - because she knew that we were interested in public spaces, and history - she asked to do a piece for the Port(?) show at MIT through Pseudo. There was a guy named G.H. who had a program called Art Dirt at the time, and he was curated into the show. He approached Carol about if (Creative Time) had anything they wanted to put in. So they asked us to build this piece called Time.

T: That's pretty much how the online stuff started to happen, I mean, we didn't even have a computer at the time, and we didn't really know anything about any digital stuff at all. But we just wanted to get ourselves out into whatever medium we could. So we came up with this idea of "Buying Time", and it was kind of like, um, well - it's on the website, you can check it out. We were going to sell people their moment of purchase back to them, and it had to do with being able to videoconference cheaply. And then we took those images, and then, being artists, turned them into art and then sent them back to the people.

C: So, but there's a difference between the painting that you started off with, and Buying Time. I mean...Buying Time...that's the first instance where you become a commercial enterprise. What made you want to deal with the buying and selling of the work, the transaction?

T: Well, right before we did that, we were really into the idea of commodifying history. We had been up to North Tarrytown(?), which is where Sleepy Hollow was, and the town wanted to change its name to Sleepy Hollow, to maximize their "market potential". (laughter). You know? And so we were really into this idea of taking your history and making something sellable out of it; that was another aspect of Time. It was called the "nostalgia-free history sale" - we're taking someone's recent past, and turning it into a product that we then sell to them. That was kind of the idea of it. And we went over a lot of ways of how we could do that over the net. We kind of played up the idea of all the hype surrounding the internet; I mean, there's still lots of hype around it, but that was back in late 96. It was, like, serious hypeville.

C: And what struck me about it was, you know, at that time - you, know, even now - you know, ecommerce, nobody makes any money off of it. What's the first enterprise that actually has a valid transaction model? And it's from MTAA.

M: We actually went to Boston, to MIT, to see the site. This was a show that was streamed into a site in a gallery - and we were this very obscure subdivision in the show. We wanted to see the physical space, and when we got up there, we met the director of the show, and sort of introduced ourselves to this guy, Remo, and explained what we were doing. And we were talking about wanting to do this commercial piece, and that we thought that it was a good way of talking about the internet at that time. He thought that it was "crass", and used that word. (laughter) He said, "Why would you want to make work that involves the lowest common denominator of the internet?"

T: Yeah, he said it was crass. Cause we surrounded the whole thing with this marketing, sales jargon -

C: Yeah - "I want my TIME" -

T: Yeah, you know, like, seeing cheap ads, like "BUY NOW", you know, like you'd see in a cheap infomercial.

M: Which was one of our first moments we realized that the artwork that's made on the net's going to be different than the work we did, that we're approaching it from maybe a different set, a different parameter.

T: I always had a feeling that from, you know, a lot of the people, computer nerds, or whatever, that were first on the net, of the net, that really made it happen, they're all very like - even though people in Silicon Valley make tons of money, they kind of have this meritocracy thing, and they don't like the idea of these salesmen. I don't know, that's kind what I thought it was. That was the feeling I got.

M: Out of that show we met someone that we, we became interested in his work - Cary Peppermint. We actually met him online through a performance of his, and in the end, he participated in our pieces as well. And we've luckily enough ended up in the same neighborhood, and done some other work with him for his performances.

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C: Should we talk about the announcement slides?

T: Well the name of that, actually, is "Art Film Slide Advertisements", and "After the Film Slides" kind of goes with that.

C: So, so describe how it works. Well, first off, it's at Four Walls (an art space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn).

T: That's, well, every time we've shown it has been at Four Walls. Yeah. And what that was, was, I guess we knew Mike Ballou from Four Walls, M. knew him, and I guess he asked us to do some stuff. And we just came up with idea of doing slide advertisements, like when you go to the cineplex they show slides before the movie, to advertise whatever - everything from opticians to popcorn. And so we did these slides, and we had these little trivia questions, and scrambles. But since it's specifically marketed toward people who want to advertise to that audience, it all had to do with art. The questions and scrambles all had to do with art and artists. And we advertised some of our own projects, like Time and Direct to Your Home Art Projects, Cary Peppermint's website, we advertised another project called Carpet Rollers, which is Dave Brown and Standard & Poor. The thing I really like about that is that it exists in different contexts, you know, it's art, it's a piece, kind of like a performance in of itself. But then we also advertise - when we showed at the Anchorage, some businesses in Brooklyn sponsored Four Walls to do it, so we made ads for them. Like, Teddy's, you know -

C: So it's real marketing -

T: Yeah, so it's real ads, for real people. Teddy's, Planeat Thailand, Creative Time.

C: Have you guys heard of that, there's like these two guys who do this red carpet project -

T: Yeah, that's Carpet Rollers! Yeah, we advertise them.

C: It's very similar work.

T: Yeah, that's why I really wanted to advertise them, cause it's like, their piece goes from art to business and back. You know, when they do their performance, and they say they're a business, and they really are, you know, and when they actually get a job, to do the business, is it art then...it's kind of cool, the way it flows between different contexts. And that's what I really like about the slide ads. It's that they really were ads, but they also weren't, you know? They go back and forth.

M: You know perhaps you should explain in the article that - you know, Four Walls basically is a group of people that meet once a month and show films. And artists making films - One night we were curated into a show about the personal at Art In General (alt. art space in Manhattan) and we built a different piece , which was...we emailed out over the net saying that we were going to do personal ads at Art In General before the films; if you email us your personal ad we will show them to this venue and this type of person.

T: I think that was called "MT Print Personals".

M: So people are entering the venue before the event actually starts, and these slides are up on the screen and moving by ambiently; they're ignored and paid attention to in the same way you would in a cineplex. We're thinking about putting that also onto the net as well -

T: On our website.

M: Yeah.

T: If anyone wants to send us a personal, feel free!

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C: So, do want to talk about DYHAP, what that is?

T: The first posting, we posted on RHIZOME, and (sent to) the people we knew, who were on our mailing list. And we were totally flabbergasted that we got a response. (laughter). Cause I remember, we were like...you know, you just send this thing out to no one, really, and then something actually came back. And it was great, and we were like, okay, cool, let's keep doing it.

M: That project, though, was interesting; like Time, which is building this project and then trying to solicit a response, the DYHAP sort of operated in the same way, in that we would set up a structure and send out some information. And then the response that we got manipulated the first set of instructions. It was a little more satisfying, because people were a little more willing to do it. And that kind of structure, a sort of call and response, seems like a way for us to work and a way for it to make sense doing it on the internet, where you have an audience that is willing to participate, on the net and on the web, speaking back and forth, or speaking in quotation marks, or participating back and forth was something that was already a structure that was built. That's the way the net operates. So it was satisfying because we took what Time was and manipulated it in a different way, sort of set it on a different course.

T: Yeah. A good part of both those pieces - originally we were going to sell videos of you, and we were going to sell them for $19.97. And not many people were into that idea, so then we went down to just a hard print copy for two dollars. (laughter) And the Direct to Your Home Art Projects were free, so that's been part of our thing too, is, um (pause) selling really cheap art. (laughter) And you know, Direct to Your Home Art Projects started out as this kind of community service - you know, we want to give away free art, and who wants it? All you have to do is fabricate it, tell us that you did it, basically, and it's yours.

M: The instructions - I don't think it ever says on the site - but one of our criteria was that any information we received back from our instructions was deemed correct. So we said, people that just emailed us and said "I did the project", was a correct way of doing it. We sort of just let their end of the project be their end of the project. And it was great because it got a little wider play in what we received back.

T: Yeah, we got a good response from people. I was kind of surprised. Josh...Roston, is that his name, he sent us a couple. Carol Stakenas, she sent us one. (laughter)

C: An ongoing supporter?

T: Yeah, but Carol's cool, man!

M: Carol works at Creative Time and is very interested in public art. (lights cigarette) And in what it means to be a public artist on the web. She does an interesting project every year - she does the Day Without Art Web Action; she also supports a lot of people that are using technology. And one of the reasons she asked us to do this thing at MIT without us really being digital artists is that at that time she was interested in really getting more people involved in what online art might be, and not just people who already had sophisticated computers. Which is kind of another thing that we think about, is that we're not really trying to make sophisticated -

T: - technically sophisticated -

M: - technically sophisticated work because the net is a wide - the web is a wide thing, but you know, a lot of it is inaccessible.

T: For some stuff we see on the web, it just seems like a lot of gadgetry. And it's kind of formal, you know, like formal art. It's like an abstract expressionist painting or something, it's just about the painting, you know? And, I don't know, I've just never been that interested in formal art, since my early college days, you know? It just bugs me. We like to have some sort of *content* other than just the medium itself. I mean people were talking about "browser art" and I was just like, "throw that stuff in the trash, man!" Makes no sense to me at all. (pause) That was my feeling.

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C: You guys want to talk about VTAV?

M: Well, again, its a sort of call and response. We came up with an idea that we would like to do some kind of minimalist, very stripped down piece for a year, after ending the DYHAP. What we decided to do was to create a venue for something called visual text, which - we're not really sure what it is, but people who actually send us work will define it. So, again, it's something where the information we receive back will build the piece. And also with this we advertise (VTAV) in real spaces. We have announcement cards at the Abrons Art Center announcing this site, and we kind of consider that as part of the work.

T: Yeah, well, like with that show, we basically consider that an advertisement, but it's hanging in an art gallery - I guess comes from the Art Film Slides - 'cause that's another thing we're interested in, is work that can be in different contexts, but function not as art within a different context, but still function in that context. We could hang that (work) you know, in a hallway, in a school or an office and it would just be advertising. It might be art, it might be advertising at the same time. It just is what it is.

M: We plan to do it for a year, and we plan to have group shows, and individual shows. We're trying to get people involved who don't do net art.

C: Do you have anything planned past VTAV, in the pipeline?

M: Right now we just built a piece that we're still forming, called Site Unseen, and Website Unseen. Basically they're sister pieces. On is a list of a hundred titles of works; and, presenting these in the same kind of way the VTAV ads are, we present this list, and say that we will build these pieces, and we will build it anywhere for a hundred bucks. The sister piece is , we have a list of a hundred website that we will build upon receiving a hundred dollars commission. They're sort of like seed packets.

(end Part I)

Source Materials Redux

I started this blog with a post back in January 2011 about the things I look at and think about when making my own work. Since then I mostly keep my visual research images in Pinterest here - it’s mostly astronomy, microbiology, communal/group organisms like mold, and urban planning.

I still prefer physical notebooks for studio journaling.  For one thing, when you have a thought while looking at your own work and want to quickly jot it down, doing it in an iPad or whatever is an invitation to be assaulted with notifications, bleeps and tweets all calling for your attention...when really you just want to jot something down and turn your eyes back to what’s important.  Plus most of my studio notes from back in the 90s are on pen and paper.  There’s an offline archive there that’s very personal and acts as a reference point for where I’ve been and where I’m going.

But for sheer rapid research and image aggregation, internet wins.

 

Arcosanti: A Dream Waylaid

Earlier this summer Andi, Sam and I visited Arcosanti in Arizona.  I’d admired Paolo Soleri’s work since undergraduate school in the late 80’s and a business trip to California gave us the opportunity to explore. The physical manifestation of Arcosanti feels a little like a dream hatched in the 60’s, since waylaid.  There’s a dissonance between the ambitions of the original plans and the community’s current state.  The buildings act as placeholders, anchors for huge structures to be built, to house a community of 5,000.

Around 100 people currently occupy and build on the site.  They’re folks who in one form or another have committed themselves to Soleri’s principles of merging architecture and ecology in fundamental and practical ways.  How we today define “Green” architecture - LEEDS certification and all - is a small bore, localized implementation at the architectural level of what Soleri intended, 40 years earlier, at the urban planning level.  Of what use are “green buildings” if they don’t change the way we congregate, work, commute and connect to the earth?

And yet, now when the effects of global warming seem obvious even to the skeptics, one of the most interesting case studies for how to go about things differently percolates quietly at the fringes, unnoticed, the original concrete pours turning to decay.

Soleri died early this year.  There are adherents to his Arcology philosophy that continue his architectural explorations, and they’ve recently published a book: “Lean Linear City: An Arterial Arcology”, that’s worth a read.

[codepeople-post-map]

57hope

logo I’ve been doing a little archeology on stuff from the 90s.  At some point around 2003 or so I lost the diskette or whatever where I had the 57hope website archived, and assumed it was gone for good.

Not so.  Archive.org’s Wayback Machine had a snapshot from around 1997!

I’ve been scrubbing the HTML of archive.org code, and a bunch of the image content never got archived...but here it is in all its broken, amateur 1997 splendor:

57 Hope Gallery

Images are pretty much hosed, but one show  - The Art Exchange Show in 1997 - is wholly intact (frames and all!).

57hope was a small space inside the warehouse on Hope Street just off Havemeyer in Williamsburg Brooklyn.  A bunch of my friends (Amy, Mary, Stephan, Cynthia, Shannon) and I ran it for about 3 years.  It’s about what you would expect from kids in their mid-20s - raw, uneven, haphazard, but with some gems.

We never curated our own shows.  The space’s MO was that we “curated curators”.  We gave early curatorial opportunities to people who would go on to run White Columns, Petzel, LA Contemporary Exhibitions, and it was just a hell of a lot of fun. The funny thing about the 90’s is that because it happened at the dawn of the internet, a lot of what transpired now feels like it happened in a different century.

Which I guess it did.

Our last show was October 2000, after which we were evicted.

It lived here: [codepeople-post-map]

Back then I paid $100 a month or so for my share of the loft.  Now you can pay $3050 a month for the privilege.  The first floor, where a rag trade company used to bundle castoff clothing for shipping to Mexico, now looks like this:

57hopelobby

Manny, the super, used to yell at the guys who ran this place when he wasn’t yelling at the Chinese guys across the street, sitting in his “office” covered in porn pinups, or taking bribes to run the elevator.

I’m trying to imagine Manny in this lobby today and my brain is hurting.

In related archeology: you can find the archived website for Rome Arts, a gallery that Daniel Carello ran around the corner from us, on the original designer’s website, here: http://www.maxmayhew.com/rome_arts/.  Daniel gave me my first solo show, which got me my first (and only) review in the New York Times.

Citywide!

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So I’ve been participating in CITYWIDE for most of this year, like a good 100-odd other Philadelphia artists.  If you’re in Philadelphia you’ve likely heard about it.  Andi and I curated North by Northwest for Marginal Utility, we hosted Practice: Picture Day at our own space, Mount Airy Contemporary, and I’ve been helping with the publication study group, the trolley tours, a Kickstarted private tour, and so on.  That sounds like a lot but the fact is pretty much everyone involved is putting in similar effort.

This is more or less a placeholder for some things I plan to say on the experience, which has been an ongoing thing for 10 months now,  I think.  I’m working on finding the right words.  For now I’ll just say I’m very proud to be a Philadelphia artist.

Philadelphia Open Studio Tours 2013

postheader2013-withsponsor_1 So our studios at 25 West Mt. Airy Avenue will be open again for Philadelphia Open Studio Tours this coming weekend - October 19-20th 2013, 12 PM - 6 PM both days.

We’d love for you to come by.

Mount Airy Contemporary (our little DIY art space below our studios) will be open both days, showing Brad Litwin and Jon Eckel.

Best, Colin Keefe and Andrea Wohl Keefe

www.colinkeefe.net www.andreawohl.com

25 West Mt. Airy Avenue Philadelphia PA 19119

215 270 2787

Made in Philly Poster up now at Allen’s Lane Train Station

  So this is up now through I think the first week in November.  It’s part of CFEVA’s Made In Philly project, and I guess I have the  honor of being the one placed furthest northwest!  There are a few more in Germantown (Paul DuSold, Joel Erland/Kate Kaman and Melissa Madonni Haims) and one down in Manayunk (Leah MacDonald).  The rest are in parts south.

All the artists are POST participants.  I’ll have my studio doors open October 19th and 20th from 12-6 PM, and Mount Airy Contemporary (underneath my studio) will be open as well with the current show, Brad Litwin and Jonathan Eckel, both Germantown based artists.

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Grizzly Grizzly Opening

Thanks to Jacque for including me in this fantastic show, and to Mike, Cindy, Mary and the rest of the Grizzly team.  Fabio and Tom, you’re awesome. Permalink to Grizzly Grizzly exhibition page

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Here are some installation shots, (copyright 2013 Jaime Alvarez), after the fold (which BTW are the best photos anyone’s taken of my work.  Hmm.):

urban2-58lowrez 0913_colin 0913_colindetail 0913_UrbanEnvironments_Keefe 0913_UrbanEnvironments_overview3 0913_UrbanEnvironments_FabioFernandezTomLauerman1

Grizzly Grizzly: ‘Urban Environments’: Colin Keefe, Fabio J. Fernández, Tom Lauerman September 6 - 28, 2013

September-Card I’m pleased to be showing with SILWA (Sculpture in Love with Architecture, AKA Fabio Fernandez and Tom Lauerman) at Grizzly Grizzly this September 2013.

Heliotrope, 2013, 30” x 44"

Heliotrope, Detail

 

‘Urban Environments’: Colin Keefe, Fabio J. Fernández, Tom Lauerman September 6 - 28, 2013

This September, Grizzly Grizzly is pleased to present ‘Urban Environments’, featuring the work of Philadelphia based artist Colin Keefe and the collaborative work of Fabio Fernández and Tom Lauerman.  The exhibition, consisting of drawings and sculpture, explores systems of architecture, the built environment, and abstraction.

Colin Keefe will exhibit meticulously crafted drawings of fictitious environments that examine urban terrain through organic models.  Using ink on paper, Keefe begins with design principles gathered from diverse sources such as the reproductive processes of plants, the propulsion methods of microorganisms and architectural theory. Keefe states “the resulting images depict cities grown organically, without an “urban planner” as protagonist, based on environmental conditions.” Fabio J. Fernández and Tom Lauerman will present a collaborative body of work, Sculptures in Love with Architecture (SiLwA).  The works in this exhibition explore architecture from the perspective of two artists interested in “the reductive forms of early modernist constructions.”  They employ an array of techniques ranging from inked lines drawn on a moving train to laser cut wooden parts assembled atop folded paper geometry.  The artists state that “the works illustrate the development of ideas through conversation, repetition, experimentation and practice.”

The artists will be in attendance during the September 6th opening reception from 6–10pm.   For further inquiries or to arrange an interview with the artists at another time, please contact jacquejliu@yahoo.com.

Grizzly Grizzly is a project space in Philadelphia, PA.  Since 2009, Grizzly Grizzly has programmed monthly exhibitions, screenings and performances.  The gallery is currently under the direction of artists Michael Konrad, Jacque Liu, Ruth Scott, Mary Smull, Cindy Stockton-Moore and Josh Weiss. 

BRIEF ARTIST BIOS Fabio J. Fernández (born Montevideo, Uruguay) received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a B.S. in Business from Seton Hall University.  He has exhibited in the United States and abroad, at such venues as the Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Ferndale, MI, the Poleeni Cultural Center, Pieksämäki, Finland, and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, NY. Fabio’s studio practice is based in Boston, MA, where he is also curator at The Society of Arts and Crafts.

Colin Keefe (born Boston, MA) received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from Washington University.  Recent solo exhibitions include Robert Henry Contemporary, New York, NY, Abington Arts Center, Jenkintown, PA, and RHV Fine Art, Brooklyn, NY.  His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Village Voice, Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia City Paper, Toronto Globe and News, LA Times, Sculpture Magazine, and theartblog.  In addition to his studio practice, Keefe has been curating since 1995 – first, as co-director of 57 Hope in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, NY (1995-2001), and currently as co-director of Mount Airy Contemporary Artists Space (2009-present).

Tom Lauerman (born Chicago, IL) received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from SMU Meadows School of Art.  His work has been recently exhibited in Berlin, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago. He has taken part in a number of artist residencies including the ClayArch Gimhae Museum in South Korea, the Kohler Arts/Industry residency, and Pilchuck Glass School. He is a recipient of the Horizon Award from the American Craft Museum (now Museum of Arts and Design) and an Illinois Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.  He is currently an Assistant Professor at Penn State University.

‘Urban Environments’: Colin Keefe, Fabio Fernández, Tom Lauerman Curated by Jacque Liu Exhibition Dates: September 6–28, 2013 Opening Reception: First Friday, September 6, 6–10PM Press contact: Jacque Liu, jacquejliu@yahoo.com

Grizzly Grizzly, 319 North 11th Street, 2nd Floor, Philadelphia, PA Hours: Saturday and Sundays, 2-6PM www.grizzlygrizzly.com

Cellular/Molecular at EKG Gallery

Cellular Molecular Logo  

 

I’m in this, opening reception April 25th.

Cellular/Molecular

Local artists are connecting biology and organic chemistry to fine art in the group show Cellular/Molecular. The exhibition at Breadboard‘s EKG (Esther Klein Gallery) in University City runs from April 16–June 9, 2013, with an opening reception Thursday, April 25, 5:00–8:00pm. Cellular/Molecular was developed to coincide with the  Philadelphia Science Festival, which takes place April 18–28.

Through different media and through abstraction, Cellular/Molecular showcases local artworks inspired by biology and chemistry, works that define the terms, and works that demonstrate our accidental and natural inclination to create cellular and molecular forms.

Cellular (adj): of, relating to, resembling, or composed of a cell or cells; having cells or small cavities; porous; divided into a network of cells. Molecular (adj): relating to or produced by or consisting of molecules, relating to simple or elementary organization. Curated by Gaby Heit, the exhibition includes artists Jessica Curtaz, Lori Evensen, David Foss, Rebecca Jacoby, Colin Keefe, Angela McQuillan, Dolores Poacelli, Bruce Pollock, Jacob Rivkin, Sarah Steinwachs, Kristen Tinari and Alice Whealin. Some of the participating artists have studied biology and chemistry alongside fine art.

Breadboard is a hybrid program of the University City Science Center that explores intersections between contemporary art, design, science and technology. Expanding on 30+ years of Esther Klein Gallery programming, Breadboard’s mission is to convene communities around creative applications of technology. Breadboard is the non-profit partner of NextFab Studio, a membership-based, high-tech workshop and prototyping center

EKG is located on the ground floor of 3600 Market Street, University City Science Center, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Hours are Monday–Saturday 10:00am–5:00pm.