Not The Way You Remembered Curated by Jamillah James

NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED
April 10 - August 14, 2011
Opening reception
Sunday, April 10 3:00 - 6:00 PM

Former Baltimore resident and friend, Jamillah James, mounts her fellowship exhibition at the Queens Museum this Sunday!  We are very excited for and proud of her!


Participating artists: Taylor Baldwin, Clifford Borress, Barb Choit, Brendan Fowler, Ted Gahl, Rashawn Griffin, Faten Kanaan, Zak Kitnick, Jason Lazarus, Lauren Luloff, Dave Murray, Amanda Ross-Ho, Jean Shin, Hayley Silverman, Agathe Snow, and Bryan Zanisnik.

As museums have mounted more exhibitions from their permanent collections, revisiting their archives and breathing new life into years’ worth of holdings, this generation’s artists are also looking back-revisiting materiality, composing and recombining nontraditional materials, perhaps out of necessity, or as a comment on a collective loss of intimacy through lives lived online. NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED explores how collecting and displaying personal, physical objects creates and recreates memories and associations, both individual and collective. Collecting here refers to the artist’s methodology, with the amassing of specific, charged materials being central to their practice, or, simply, a visual accumulation of things. With the process of selection and presentation often made explicit in the work, the items assembled project “specialness” or preciousness, while often lacking that quality inherently. Situating the ordinary, banal, familiar or personal into grander narratives activates new sites of tribute and remembrance. Considering the popularity of television programs about collecting (and hoarding), we are reminded that sentiment and physical attachments are powerful motivators. The artists inREMEMBERED use the power of association to explore the ways in which objects become invested with emotional and intimate value. The resultant arrangements-of trophies, scrapbook clippings, family snapshots, replicas of cultural artifacts-begin to collapse the distance between spectator and object in the sometimes alienating space of a museum, reconnecting viewers to the physical, emotional world of memory and daily experience in an age where the virtual often displaces the real.

Beginning with French artist Arman’s response to Yves Klein in 1960 through the accumulative installations of Ilya Kabakov and Thomas Hirschhorn, that which governs what can be considered “junk” has often hinged on context. The 16 artists in this exhibition are using certain strategies of their forebears to engage in their own explorations of time and place-marking through material, while initiating new dialogues around worth and significance. To borrow from the time-worn adage, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure-or in this case, another museum’s.


NOT THE WAY YOU REMEMBERED is curated by Jamillah James, Queens Museum of Art Van Lier Fund Fellow.

Project support provided by The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of the New York Community Trust. Additional funding from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts.

Funny Games @ Load Of Fun

Nick Van Woert's "Mr. Potato Head"

FUNNY GAMES

Exhibition Preview:
October 10, 8 - 9 pm

Opening Reception:
October 16, 7 - 10 pm

Frontier Projects, in collaboration with Load Of Fun Studios, is pleased to present Funny Games, a new exhibition curated by Jamillah James.

Funny Games takes as its starting point humor and play as critical devices. The ten artists featured in the exhibition use equal parts cynicism and visual comedy to question the role of the artist in and artistic practice in and outside of an institutional context. Cognizant of their own entrenchment in the machination being examined, the artists take on the art market's value system, the notion of "art stars," theory and the academy, and problems of representation, among other quandaries. The approaches used are varied - the use of unconventional, sometimes "cheap" materials; intentionally naive or reductive techniques; contrived theatricality, visual gags and inside jokes; mining the art historical canon for content - resulting in work that continues the perilous conversation begun some 90 years ago about authenticity and art.

Artists participating in Funny Games include Leidy Churchman (New York), Sara Clendening (Los Angeles), Petra Cortright (Berlin), Peter Harkawik (New Haven, CT), Dina Kelberman (Baltimore), Maria Pithara (Richmond, VA), William Powhida (New York), Scott Reeder (Chicago), Jordan Rhoat (MICA Alumni - Chicago) and Nick Van Woert (Brooklyn)


Funny Games will be on view at Load Of Fun Studios, located at 120 W. North Ave, Station North Arts District, Baltimore, Maryland, from October 10 - November 6

Gallery Hours are Friday - Sunday, 12 - 6 pm and by appointment with Frontier Projects, frontier.projects@gmail.com

Photos from Altered States @ Load Of Fun

Posted Originally on the City Paper website
Transmodern, Day Four: Altered States
By Alex Ebstein
Altered States, a satellite Transmodern exhibition and the latest curatorial endeavor by Jamillah James, delivers an impressive--dare-we-say all-star, both local and national--roster of video, installation, and new media artists, with a killer live performance at the opening to boot. Bringing the work of major, contemporary artists--including a video piece by the Providence-based collective Forcefield, which consists of Matt Brinkman, Jim Drain, Ara Peterson, and Leif Goldberg--into the Baltimore and Transmodern spectrum, while simultaneously highlighting local artists working in the same vein, Altered States helps to uphold the level of professionalism that the Transmodern festival has achieved with each year's manifestation.

Though unfortunately limited to the smaller, second-floor gallery at Load of Fun, James more than made due with the space's awkward, hallway layout. Projecting two larger videos and screening additional pieces on television monitors--along with three major installations by Erin Womak, a collaboration between Caitlin Williams and Sarah Milinski, and the New Jedi Order--the space is full without being overcrowded. Cohesive in its overall aesthetic and celebrating the action of making work over the idea of art as product, the exhibition is an intentional throwback to 1960s fringe, communal subcultures. A majority of the included works are collaborative projects, with the pieces by individual artists echoing the idea of a collective ceremony. Womack displays a beautifully eerie series of masks, many of which were seen in her ritual, performance/installation during last year's Transmodern festival, while Jimmy Joe Roche plays the part of a spiritualist in his video.

As a whole, the video work is comprised of experimental forms and ambiguous imagery. Familiar images and symbols lose their recognition and meaning within each strange context. In watching the looping footage melt from one visual reference into the next, a greater narrative is never obvious. EMR's (Matt Bass and Dylan Mira's Extreme Mature Respect) and Forcefield's respective pieces reflect a vague communal or teamwork effort to an indeterminate end, although EMR's repetitious imagery of linking arms arguably climaxes with an unrelated explosion.

Marking the closing of Transmodern and the opening of Altered States, Sunday night's music performances were similarly themed and well-considered. Featuring the indisputably awesome line-up of the Lexie Mountain Boys, Soft Circle, and Ra Khuit Noor (a performance by Erin Womak and Ravi Binning, which exceeded the average attention span by three minutes or so). Perhaps the only blip was the inclusion of New York's Blues Control. Purposefully ambient, the band has the stage presence of an iPod, an uncomfortably sharp contrast to the upbeat energy of its fellow performers.

Despite its satellite location, Altered States pushes the Transmodern envelope and manages to capture its generally uncontainable energy in a gallery exhibition. Perhaps a glimpse into the future of the festival, and certainly a concise and digestible cross-section of the overall, four-day program, Altered States helps to establish this Baltimore institution's art-world relevance and reinforces its infinite potential. Altered States was a one-night-only event, and compelling enough to make us look forward to James' future projects.

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.

Agenda Opens @ Current Gallery

Cellphone/ipod installation by Edie Fake

Agenda, the ambitious new show curated by Jamillah James, opened at Current Gallery on Friday. The show includes work by over 30 artists, including Ten Tigers' friends Michael Farley, Xavier Shipani, and Owen Brightman and video pieces by art world oddballs/darlings Ryan Trecartin and Dynasty Handbag.

Owen Brightman's "flag"...I will never be able to look at the letter A the same way.

Artist Mike Farley

The show has a fun house feel-bright, bold and overstimulating, and it rules. There are a million things to look at, interact with and watch, you almost want to do it in two trips. It is nearly impossible to get through all the videos, or at least a serious time investment to do so.

Jeffrey Augustine Songco's dreamcatchers

Looping videos by 12 artists, including Dynasty Handbag, next to Xavier Shipani's flag

Hermonie Williams in front of Jeffery Augustine Songco's "Self Portrait #1: You Look Better Online"

Ryan Trecartin's "A Family Finds Entertainment"

Dylan Mira and Latham Zearfoss's video piece

Lexi watching Latham Zearfoss's video piece

Marty Weishaar admiring Lex Young's photos from a performance piece

Me, reflected in Jeffrey Augustino Songco's "Self Portrait #5: Next Time You Take a Pic"

Mike Benevento

"Pinups" by Christopher Schulz

Xavier Shipani's rad drawings

In addition to the installed pieces, there are 4 supplemental screenings:
11/22, 7 pm PILOT TV, a 2004 Chicago (trans-)feminist experimental media conference
11/23, 7 pm Paris is Burning, the 1987 Jenny Livingstone documentary about drag balls held by African-American and Latino-American men in New York City
11/29, 7 pm Sexy, Wiggy, Desserty (1982-1992), an anthology of works by seminal underground queer video artist Tom Rubnitz
11/30, 7 pm I-BE AREA¬ (2007), the critically acclaimed 100-minute video by artist Ryan Trecartin

Details, above and below, from Michael Farley's "Sex in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction".....Walter Benjamin nod, YES.

Rebecca Nagle's fifteen minute performances

Agenda will be on view through December 5th, check it out. For more information, visit Current's website.

Agenda Opens @ Current Gallery November 14, 2008

AGENDA: QUEERING POPULAR MEDIA
Opening Reception: Friday, November 14, 7 pm

Exhibition Dates: November 14 - December 5, 2008

Current Gallery is pleased to present Agenda: Queering Popular Media curated by Jamillah James for Frontier Projects. The exhibition examines how queer (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans) subjectivity informs, and is mediated by, evolving technology, the media, and popular culture. Through mining the formal and narrative conventions of film and television, revisiting printed matter as a traditional means of communication, and addressing symptoms of immediacy precipitated by the digital age, the participating artists in Agenda create autonomous spaces for play, discourse, and protest in which identities and histories are fluid.

Agenda also considers the traditional definition of "queer"—to make strange. The experimental opportunities afforded by new media (installation, performance, video, and internet-based art) provides the critical apparatus to question matters of representation and agency, the influence to radicalize other art making practices, and the platform to subvert and eschew aesthetic conventions.

Agenda documents the present state of collective (un)consciousness, with its interest attuned to the quandary of visibility and a cultural obsession with "others" outside of the self. The collapse of public and private is expected, and surveillance spells opportunity. By refitting the lens through which popular culture and the media are viewed and rabidly consumed, and re-calibrating the gaze, the artists featured in Agenda affirm that the personal is indeed political.

Participating artists include:

The Opening Reception 7 pm, Friday, November 14, with performances by participants Owen Brightman, Rebecca Nagle, and Michael Farley with Dazzlestorm.

Rahne Alexander, Davey Ball & Levi Barringer, Owen Brightman, Alan Calpe, Dynasty Handbag, Edie Fake, Michael Farley, Kristen Galvin, K8 Hardy & Wynne Greenwood, Gabriel Held, Michael Lent, LTTR (K8 Hardy, Emily Roysdon, Ulrike Müller, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Lanka Tattersal), Sarah McKiel, Dylan Mira & Latham Zearfoss, Rebecca Nagle, PILOT TV, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Liz Rosenfeld, Mariadele Arcuri Rossoni, Christopher Schulz, Xavier Schipani, Emily Shinada, Hayley Silverman, Jeffrey Augustine Songco, Ryan Trecartin, Victor Van Bramer, Lex Young, and Latham Zearfoss.

Supplemental Screenings:
11/22, 7 pm PILOT TV, a 2004 Chicago (trans-)feminist experimental media conference
11/23, 7 pm Paris is Burning, the 1987 Jenny Livingstone documentary about drag balls held by African-American and Latino-American men in New York City
11/29, 7 pm Sexy, Wiggy, Desserty (1982-1992), an anthology of works by seminal underground queer video artist Tom Rubnitz
11/30, 7 pm I-BE AREA¬ (2007), the critically acclaimed 100-minute video by artist Ryan Trecartin