6th Annual Transmodern Festival THIS WEEKEND!

The 6th Annual Transmodern Festival (arguably the best thing ever) takes place this weekend on 4 floors (3, 4, 5, & 6) of the H&H building.
Check out their website for more information on the schedule and artists
Highlights include a performance/installation piece by Michael Benevento and Andrew Liang, Transmodern Tranny make-overs by Jackie Milad & Sarada Conaway and roaming performances by over 20 artists including Lauren Bender and Sarah Jablecki Friday evening

Photos from the Wise Guise Opening

Jessie and Owen

Julie and Ryan

Dan and Emiline

Exhibiting artists Molly O'Connell and Xavier Schipani

Exhibiting artist Bonner Sale with Carlie

Seth and Joe

Owen

Bartending ladies, Merrill, Dixie and Maggie

Exhibiting artist Edie Fake and Liz

Sarah and Emily

Weesie and Sara

Jon

Sarah and Liz

Seth and exhibiting artist Reuben Breslar

John Bylander

Jamillah and exhibiting artist Mark Brown

Marissa and exhibiting artist Edward Max Fendley

Andrew

Rachel and John

For more information on Nudashank and Wise Guise, check out the Nudashank blog!

Altered States Opens April 5th at Load Of Fun Theater

Frontier Projects, in collaboration with Transmodern and Load of Fun Theater, is pleased to present Altered States, an exhibition and live performance program curated by Jamillah James for the 2009 installment of Transmodern, Baltimore’s annual performance art festival.

The exhibition examines the history of collective action, originating in the 1960s with communalism (made families in hippie and freak subcultures), and avant-garde performance, where elements were borrowed from traditional rituals and ceremonial spectacle. This rubric for performance and artistic practice champions a freedom from creative, economic, and social constraints, and de-emphasizes the singular, commodifiable art object as the end-all of cultural production.

The artists in Altered States have all worked collectively and across disciplines. Delia & Gavin employ music, video, performance, and sculpture to explore mythology, ecstasy, and rites of initiation and celebration as simultaneous expressions of creative and destructive energy. Forcefield, a celebrated collective from Providence, Rhode Island, performed live and on video to pulsating electronic rhythms in hand-knit, colorful shrouds, creating a participatory environment of disorientation and frenzy. Local group Lexie Mountain Boys rely primarily on their voices, bodies, and found objects as instruments, recalling 1970s female-oriented performance art, always blurring the line between theater and music.

Spiritual journeys and character alchemy are documented in the videos of Brooklyn-based artists Zeljko McMullen & Severiano Martinez and EMR, a queer, feminist collaborative from San Francisco. Local artist Jimmy Joe Roche takes on the role of shaman and mystic in his psychedelic, pastiche style of video-making. New Jedi Order interchanges mysticism and new media technology, exploring rave culture as an embodiment of ritual performance.

Working outside of video and performance are Erin Womack, Caitlin Williams, and Sarah Milinski, formerly of the collective Crystal Coven. Womack’s papier-mâché and found object masks have a mysterious, foreboding quality, inviting interaction, while eroding the art object’s status as sacred and inaccessible. Williams and Milinski’s work has a similar, albeit playful, quality with a homespun aesthetic emphasizing craft as an extension of the spirit.

Altered States considers a renewed interest in the aesthetics and performativity of mysticism. Through idiosyncratic performance, borrowed iconography, and the creation of “invested” objects and spaces, the artists in Altered States re-contextualize alterity, or “otherness”, as a psychedelic state of being, and explore the secular, the sacred, and the creative space in between.

Altered States opens Sunday, April 5 at 8 PM, with live performances by Lexie Mountain Boys, Soft Circle (Hisham Bharoocha formerly of Black Dice and Lightning Bolt), Blues Control (Siltbreeze Records), Ra Khuit Noor, and New Jedi Order. The event is the closing party for the 2009 Transmodern Festival and will be hosted by Load of Fun Theater, at 120 W. North Avenue in Baltimore.

The Long Goodbye @ the Charles Theatre this week

Showtimes:
Saturday, March 28 at Noon
Monday, March 30 at 7 PM
Thursday, April 2 9 PM

1973 Dir. Robert Altman. Elliott Gould, Nina Van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden, Mark Rydell, Henry Gibson, David Arkin, Jim Bouton. 112m. 'Scope.

Robert Altman's second exercise in genre revision is a gem that has only lately received its due. The Long Goodbye takes on not only that master of detective fiction, Raymond Chandler, but his greatest creation, Philip Marlowe, famously incarnated in 1946 by beloved Bogie in The Big Sleep. As played by the counterculture's favorite anti-hero, Elliot Gould, this Marlowe is anything but the tough, savvy gumshoe of noir lore. He's a shambling, clueless mess of a man, and Gould's endearingly maddening portrayal of an impotent shamus infuriated traditionalists, as did the film's ending, altered from the novel on one shocking key point. But as Gould bumbles his way through a glittering, sun-bleached contemporary LA, it becomes apparent that Altman has created a Marlowe more deeply true to the original than his film predecessors. As its relentless camera slowly zooms, tracks and arcs its way around a culture built on quicksand, the film uncovers a rich, unyielding view of Hollywood and the price we pay for being in its thrall. 112 m. (Linda DeLibero)

Regain/Regrowth: Photographs from Latvia and the Baltic Region opens tonight at MICA

Regain/Regrowth: Photographs from Latvia and the Baltic Region by Danielle Yurchinkonis

March 23 - April 12

Reception: Friday March 27th, 5-7pm

Main Gallery, Maryland Institute College of Art

Everyone an Artist? Opening at MICA

"Everyone an Artist?" Reception
Project: An Everything Installation

March 28, 2009
3:00 PM to 6:00 PM

Maryland Institute College of Art, Post-Baccalaureate Program Studios



The reception is free and open to the public and includes:


The Post-Baccalaureate Program studios are located on the 100 block of North Avenue. Call Emily at Art on Purpose at 410/243-4708 for details.

The exhibition will be open for viewing three dates only: March 28, 3:00-6:00pm, April 15, 5:00-7:00pm, and April 25, 3:00-6:00pm

Everyone an Artist? Opening at Johns Hopkins tonight

"Everyone an Artist?" Reception tonight, March 26
Project: We're Not Alone
5 pm to 7:30 pm
Johns Hopkins University, Mattin Center


The reception is free and open to the public and includes:

• Make a Card, Take a Card—Hundreds of Artist Trading Cards made since fall 2008 by numerous college students are laid out on a table, the one you want ready to be exchanged for the Artist Trading Card you may make at the reception.

• Concert Draw—Student musicians provide the inspiration for you to draw in response to what you hear. Art supplies and basic instructions provided by Art on Purpose staff.

• Big Doll House—You’re never too old. Help decorate the over-sized cardboard house that travels from exhibition to exhibition, reception to reception, an invitation to collaborative, creative play.

• College Culture Vulture Competition—Which of the 13 participating colleges and universities have the most avid cultural consumers among their student body? We measure the answer to this question by counting those who take part in our activities at each reception, offering prizes to the students from the college or university that outnumber the rest.

The reception includes a demonstration of Johns Hopkins University students' drawing machines at 6:30pm.

Directions

Baker Artist Awards Announced Tomorrow!

The Baker Artist Awards are being announced and awarded tomorrow night, March 25, live on Maryland Public Television, and through a live video feed on www.bakerartistawards.org at 7:30 p.m.

The Awards consist of the Mary Sawyers Baker Prize, which will award three Baltimore area artists $25,000 each; and the Baltimore’s Choice Prize, voted on by the public, which will give seven artists $1,000 each.

The Baker Artist Awards is the first public art competition of its kind to incorporate public voting through an online forum. Over 600 Baltimore area artists were nominated, and more than 35,000 people from all 50 states and over 118 countries visited the website between November, 2008 and February, 2009, when voting closed.

More detailed information on tomorrow night’s broadcast is available on Maryland Public Television’s website, here: http://www.mpt.org/pressroom/pr/prdisplay.cfm?pruid=09032401

GOOD LUCK!!

Wise Guise: Grand Opening Group Exhibition

Who Nu?

Wise Guise opens March 27th
Reception 7 - 9 pm
After-party in the adjacent Whole Gallery
with performances by Talk Normal , U.S. Girls, and Jana Hunter

Nudashank
405 West Franklin Street 3rd Floor
Baltimore, MD 21201

On View from March 27 - April 25
Gallery Hours: Saturday and Sunday 11am - 5pm and by appointment

Molly O'Connell

http://nudashank.blogspot.com

McCabe & Mrs. Miller @ the Charles Theatre this week

Showtimes:
Saturday, March 21 at Noon
Monday, March 23 at 7 PM
Thursday, March 26 at 9 PM

(1971 Robert Altman) Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois, Keith Carradine. 120m.

MCCABE & MRS. MILLER 1971 Among the flurry of revisionist Westerns crowding screens in the late '60s and early '70s, few were destined to transcend their status as cultural artifacts-try sitting through Little Big Man today if you don't believe me. But when Altman applied his touch to this protean genre, he redefined the redefinitions. McCabe and Mrs. Miller has not only come to be regarded as a masterpiece; it's an essential reference point for nearly every Western made since. Channeling classics as diverse as My Darling Clementine and High Noon, McCabe is both an earthbound critique of the myths that fueled those movies and a fever dream of otherworldly beauty. Beatty and Christie as the title characters are heartbreaking, Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography is evanescent, Leonard Cohen's songs cast an unforgettable spell of melancholy and loss. McCabe is Altman's most affecting film, and yes, probably his best. 120 m. (Linda DeLibero)


Robert Altman has made a dozen films that can be called great in one way or another, but one of them is perfect, and that one is McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Roger Ebert)

The Point! A Puppet Musical

Come out this weekend out check out the Point!
Directed by Ellen Nielson
Musical Direction by Dan Breen



The Point! A Puppet Musical
March 20th and 21st
8pm
$5
5th floor of the H&H

Call for Submissions for Lotta Art @ School 33

L O T T A A R T 2 0 0 9

School 33 Art Center’s New and Improved

Annual Fundraiser & Exhibition

Fundraiser: April 25, 2009

Exhibition Preview: April 18 – April 25, 2009

Submission Deadline: March 20, 2009

School 33 Art Center, a program of the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts, invites artists to submit artwork for consideration for our annual fundraiser exhibition, LOTTA ART. This annual lottery-style event raises funds for the support and growth of School 33, the renowned Baltimore arts institution that has championed the arts for nearly 30 years through exhibitions, studio space, and arts education.

School 33 is proud to announce several significant changes that have been made to this much anticipated event. These include a juried selection process, the ability to preview the selected artwork on School 33’s NEW website, and an all new venue at the award winning Silo Point complex.

To show our appreciation for your generous tax-deductible contribution of artwork, our selection committee will nominate three artists as “Best in Show”. Each of these three artists will be awarded a solo exhibition at School 33 Art Center during the 2009-10 exhibition season.

Additionally, ALL selected artists for LOTTA ART will receive:

• one free “patron” ticket for the April 25^th fundraiser
• the opportunity to purchase an additional discounted “art “ ticket
• one year long membership to School 33
• discounts on exhibition applications and art classes
• the opportunity to apply for Members’ Gallery solo exhibitions

If you have donated to Lotta Art in the past, we ask that you continue your support by doing so once again. If you are donating for the first time, please know that your donation will support our mission and our exhibition space—a space that also supports you. For more information about LOTTA ART please visit www.school33.org.

APPLICATION GUIDELINES (please read carefully):

1. Each artist can submit up to five works of art (plus one detail / piece) for consideration. Only one piece per artist will be selected for Lotta Art.
2. Image files should be titled exactly as follows and numbered corresponding to the image description sheet (last_first1.jpg; last_first1detail.jpg, etc.). Each image should be sized at least 72 dpi at approximately 1024 x 768 pixels.
3. Typed image description list including image number, title, materials, dimensions, and date completed. Please be sure to include artist’s name and contact information at the top of the page. Text files should be saved as Microsoft Word documents (last_first.doc)
4. Submissions MUST represent EXACT artwork available to donate for the LOTTA ART fundraiser.
5. All work must be securely framed and/or ready to hang or present.
6. Artists must make all necessary arrangements for the delivery and pick up of their artwork. See details below.

Applications can be emailed to jhughes@promotionandarts.com. Please type LOTTA ART in the subject line for all application materials.

School 33 will also accept images following the same guidelines on a CD and sent to School 33 Art Center before March 20, 2009.

Artists selected for inclusion will be notified by March 30, 2009. All selected artworks should be dropped off at School 33 Art Center NO LATER THAN April 10, 2009. “Best in Show” prizes for solo exhibitions at School 33 Art Center will be announced during the LOTTA ART preview cocktail party April 25, 2009.

Civilian Art Projects Closing Reception and Artists' Talk

Seth Adelsberger and Jayme McLellan

Seth Adelsberger's Semi-Final Frontiers and Christopher Sims' Guantanamo Bay closed at Civilian Art Projects today with a reception and talks by both artists.
Semi-Final Frontiers Catalog essay by Jack Livingston:

"Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien."
— Terence McKenna

Following his commercially successful album Transformer1 seminal New York

musician/songwriter Lou Reed released his harrowing album Berlin2, a song cycle detailing a triangular relationship fraught with abuse and addiction—not because he was contrary or artistically brave but because it simply was what he found himself writing. He recently elaborated, “That’s what got written down. That was what was there. When there’s something to work with…that’s what I’m gonna do3. ”

Seth Adelsberger, a Baltimore artist, has never been a theorist and has always avoided dogma, he, like Reed, instead trusts and follows his artistic instincts. “I don’t analyze it all too much when I work” he says, “I do what I am interested in at that moment and consider the ramifications later. It comes together.” In 2008 he made a trip to the capital of Germany—a city Lou Reed had, in fact, never even visited when he wrote his tragic opus. Seth had been awarded the Maryland State Arts Council top honors in painting that year. The prize was six thousand dollars, no strings attached. He used it to travel abroad for the first time and when he hit Berlin he found he felt very much at home. Stoic Euro-mechanist structuralism and wild bombed out communal flair thrive together in this fast paced art colonized post-millennium epicenter. The powerful often transgressive art of Berlin does not shrink from any subject, no matter how taboo or silly. He came back with a newfound sense of purpose. An earlier sojourn within the United Sates had had an even more pronounced, transformative effect on Adelsberger. He spent some time in San Francisco soaking up the cultural atmosphere. Frisco is like no other American city, the long continuum of US bohemianism flourishes through generations and remains intact there—in fact dominating the city. Psychedelia continues to be a surprising dominant influence there. Aspects of classic psychedelia and op art in general appealed to Adelsberger and would begin to seep into his work soon after his return.

The artist, a small town kid from the East coast, had already made his mark in the big city closest to where he grew up. In Baltimore his visually astute hyperactive thick brush loaded multi-layered biomorphic abstract paintings, created after he graduated from Towson University, quickly found an audience. Young artists, older practitioners and regional critics, all took appreciative notice. He could have easily stuck with this style of work, refined it and garnered more acclaim. But over the past year his work moved in a significant new direction. As with the aforementioned Reed, it was not career strategy that drove this change; it was the result of the artist’s personal studio practice. Like many painters, the truth is he plays it as it comes and sticks with what pleases him, with what he finds compelling as he digs around. He found himself guided by the detailed geometric structures that emerged in his new work; the results contained a striking new subset of psychological underpinnings.

Recent paintings Red Dawn and Plastic Galactica are emblematic of this change, with their intricate hard edge linear overlays and symmetrical triangular shapes painted in a dominant bruised purple to red palette they gaze outward shifting, possibly menacing insect like. The viewer is intentionally given a choice as to how to interpret these paintings. Are these elaborate non-representational works formal in intent with no other meaning, a playful sparring by the artist? Or are they cool skittering emotive, full of slippery representational visage—images of disembodied, faces, bodies, eyes—a revelatory spewing rumination of domination, flux and psychosis? The artist sees it both ways with meaning shifting between the two extremes.

Employing a cut-up neo-visionary style, he vanquished much of his previous influence (Philip Guston and Cy Twombly4 —though ghosts remain) in order to embrace a new flat synthetic formula. By combining stoic German utilitarian form and freewheeling California acid test disorientation—along with bits of the artists autobiography (primitive video games of the nineteen eighties, current art warehouse communal lifestyle, fringe sci-fi such as Philip K. Dick and William Burroughs and his own droll, humorous and anxious persona) Adelsberger’s once expansive landscape meets internal rollicking rollercoaster derived work is now deeply internal, jammed through pulsing windows of distorted reflective portraiture. With the painting Let Cyclopes Be Bygones he pushes the new formula into high gear, doubling the symmetry and increasing the color key. The hidden fractured images mimic those found in worldwide shamanistic practices. They have a layered gaze that pays witness to the dark shadow of calamity. But Seth’s examination of calamity is of the giddy manic sort that results from “button mashing5”—a form of aggressive gaming strategy play employed in the 8-bit action side-scrolling video games of his youth — and here, when the game is over, the player resets the game for another round.

A key addition to the aforementioned work is Adelsberger’s expansive wall paintings. These large temporary installations envelope the viewer, further immersing them in his brave new synthetic world, broadening their perspective. The wall works, contain angular girder form geometrics as well, though these are more askew, piled high with linier debris. Grounded in earth tone this work is central to understanding the epistemology the art is engaged in—the feel is less claustrophobic, here the external returns, the world sighs. Hints of Guston reappear in the central absurd stacking and piling of form. This is the incongruous cosmic carnie world we and his other works inhabit.

With its increasing flat color composition and detailed cosmic goof Adelsberger’s new work then is ultimately derived from a mash up of many strains of contemporary pop culture. Aligned with graphic art, video games, cinema, online music, skate culture, computers graphics, etc. Strains of high and low art, popular culture and counter culture coalesce, blend and bleed together permeating most every aspect of our lives. It is here Adelsberger's recent work situates itself, in the ever-evolving interconnected world of the popular now—a contemporary collective place where an individuals creations become a part of a greater expanding whole.

1. The 1972 David Bowie produced album was Reed’s second solo effort and contained his signature cool do-wopish ode to the Warhol set “Walk on the Wild Side”, a song that despite its often overlooked adult subject matter made its way up the charts becoming an international mainstream hit.
2. Reed recently revived the Berlin song-cycle, now a recognized masterwork, via a series of live performances with a follow-up film by artist Julian Schnabel who also served as the performance set designer.
3. From a January 2009 interview with Lou Reed by Holly Gleason for American Songwriter magazine.
4. Phillip Guston (1913 –1980) and Cy Twombly (Born 1928) both use thick brush strokes of loaded oil paint and suspend imagery on fields of white or off white. Their later work is full of abstract imagery, often humorous with pop and sexual pathos. They heavily influenced Adelsberger’s earlier work.
5. Button mashing is a term used in console gaming contexts to refer to quick, repeated, and generally random button pressings. The technique is used often out of desperation, to barraging the opponent to win, or just because the "masher" likes the reaction he/she gets while mashing. — From Wikipedia

Jack Livingston
January 2009

Christopher Sims

In the project space, Christopher Sims talked about the process through which he was able to obtain access to Guantanamo Bay and his photographic decisions throughout his 5 days there.

For more information on the exhibitions and the artists, visit Civilian's website

Brewster Mccloud @ Charles Theatre this week

An 11-film Robert Altman series begins this Saturday at the Charles Theatre. This series offers the best of the miraculous streak of films that made his reputation in the 1970s, along with a selection of his later work, beginning with The Player, that marked the final, fruitful phase of his long career.

This week: Bud Cort and Shelley Duvall in BREWSTER MCCLOUD.


Showtimes:
Saturday, March 14 at Noon
Monday, March 16 at 7 PM
Thursday, March 19 at 9 PM

(1970 Robert Altman) Bud Cort, Sally Kellerman, Michael Murphy, Shelley Duvall, Stacy Keach, Margaret Hamilton. 105m. 'Scope.

Fresh off the commercial success of M*A*S*H, Robert Altman had carte blanche when he made Brewster McCloud, and his unfettered freedom shows in every frame. It's a rarely seen cult delight that's by turns fascinating, whacky, frustrating, and charming. A fractured fairytale about an adolescent Icarus (played by the pre-Harold and Maude Bud Cort) living in the bowels of the Houston Astrodome, the film is stuffed with every off-the-wall idea the director could throw into it, from Margaret Hamilton (aka the Wicked Witch of the West) leading an all-black marching band in a cracked version of “The Star Spangled Banner” to a Bullitt-inspired car chase staged by Bob Harris, designer of the original. Beneath the whimsy there's a hard core of political satire; Brewster, like so many of Altman's '70s films, is haunted by the dark reign of Richard Nixon, and its humor, however giddy, is decidedly black, it's musings on freedom determinedly bleak. Overall, though, Brewster is a wild ride, and few films capture the glory days of '70s filmmaking better than this one.(Linda DeLibero)

Armory Show 2009

This year's Armory show was humongous, occupying two piers, 94 and 92, but altogether a little lack-luster. Pier 94 was dedicated to contemporary art, and had tons of boring stuff to sift through before finding the few worth-while or even amusing pieces. Somehow we managed to miss the Deitch Projects booth, which was a little disappointing, but given the overwhelming size of the fair, its not too surprising. Pier 92 housed the "Modern and historically significant Contemporary Art," but was also sort of drab. Below are highlights from both sections of the fair, please bear with all the Dzamas, I know what I like.
Pier 94:

Gordon Cheung

Brian Calvin's "Can with Landscape"

Lynda Benglis

Tracey Emin

Annie Lapin

A giant telephone

Kara Walker above and below

Billy Sullivan

Armen Eloyan

Giant Alex Katz

Anish Kapoor mirror dome

Tal R

Peter Doig

Daniel Richter

Fabian Marcaccio

Marcel Dzama, above and below

Raymond Pettibon

Alyson Schotz

Thomas Nozkowski

Franz West blobs

Phillip Allen

Meat, with awesome sausage specs at the Leo Koenig booth

Hernan Bas

Baker Overstreet

Many more Dzamas

Pier 92:

Dennis Hollingsworth

light sculpture

George Condo, above and below

Side note: If anyone knows how to get a hold of the movie Condo Painting, please let me know!