Ann Agee

Ann Agee will be giving a lecture at MCIA next week. 

"In a recent review in Art and 
America, Lilly Wei framed Agee’s work 
by saying, 'Toying with once-ingrained 
notions of ceramics as a minor art, Agee’s 
porcelain creations are mischievous, 
wonderfully misbegotten offspring of 
sculpture, painting, objet d’art, and 
kitschy souvenir, throwing in some 
economic, sociopolitical, and gender 
commentary for good measure.' Agee’s 
work addresses and inhabits multiple 
media, riffs on Delftware, domestic 
interiors, and feminism with an elegance, 
style, and humor. Agee’s work is widely 
exhibited, most recently at the Brooklyn 
Museum in New York, Locks Gallery in 
Philadelphia, and Lux Art Institute in 
California. She has won numerous awards 
for her works including a John Simon 
Guggenheim Memorial Foundation 
fellowship, the Louis Comfort Tiffany 
Foundation award, and a National 
Endowment for the Arts fellowship."

The last photos are of her most recent exhibition: Playing House

February 24–August 26, 2012 at the Brooklyn Museum. "Playing House, is the first in a series of “activations” of the Museum’s period rooms by contemporary artists. Here Ann Agee works with art handlers to install her work in the Library and Drawing Room of the Milligan House."

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brooklyn_museum

I think her environments are fascinating, elegant, but extremely playful, interactive, curious and quite stunning; she gives the most mundane environments vibrance and interest.  Playing House is like a very sophisticated, minimalized, one person Meow Wolf installation. I'm definitely a fan.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brooklyn_museum

Marcel Musil's Icelandic photos

It’s very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature

Photographs of Icelandic volcanoes by Marcel Musil
found via butdoesitfloat.com

Elena Stonaker

"Elena Stonaker’s lifelong fascination with the unanswerable questions of the origins of the universe has fueled her to create a personal mythology celebrating mystery and imagination in a society that deprives connection to the spirit with its obsession of superficial reality. Her playful, but bizarre watercolor and ink composite portraits and surreal landscapes offer a portal between the physical and spiritual realms. Composed of layers of faces, semi-recognizable appendages, animal parts, and patterns melt into one another creating characters that are humanoid but otherworldly, implying that both can live within the same plane. 

Her current work utilizes a repetitive motif of sensuous femininity- voluptuous nude female figures with bare breasts and genitals, floating moons, piles of eggs, and soft curving lines and colors. While subtly sexual, these qualities are intended honor the power of fertility. The symbol of woman’s body as a vessel is used to represent the capacity to create and nourish both body and soul. Connecting these female forms with animal features like wings, tentacles, or claws, acts as a suggestion to tune into the more intuitive knowledge and rhythm of the natural world in order to expand personal potential."

www.elenastonaker.com

Toby Liebowitz

This evening I stopped by Izzy's place to get my measurements taken to potentially wear a dress she recently made. Her room was cozy, filled with 20th century records, handmade wooden frames, a sewing machine on her desk beside a grey felt chair. Out of everything I was mostly fascinated with a poster on the wall. It was illustrated by Toby Liebowitz, for Fleet Foxes' album Helpless Blues. I'm surprised that I've never seen it before, and I immediately checked out her work online upon my arrival home. I found this interesting article on the piece for Fleet Foxes:


"A Seattle based illustrator, Toby Liebowitz started designing the Fleet Foxes' Helplessness Bluesrecord cover without listening to the songs. 'I hadn’t heard the entire thing from beginning to end in its proper order until recently but everything has an amazing depth to it—the instrumentation and vocals are complex…the lyrics especially are beautiful and bring such vivid imagery to mind,' she says. She worked with front man Robin Pecknold on the final piece.

Liebowitz calls the concept of the cover a 'collective mind-map—' an account of 'non-linear and cyclical web time through the creation of relationships and branching memories, experiences, dreams, and places.'

She proceeded with the project by first conducting interviews with 11 of her friends and family— 'a quick and silly exercise on spontaneity'- where she used four prompts: sunrise, sunset, moonrise, and moonset, to which they responded with the first thing that came to mind.

'I used their responses as stepping-stones to create a bigger picture,' she says, 'The final drawing is a compilation of all the individual maps, with a few changes here and there to tell a more cohesive story.'" http://www.imposemagazine.com/bytes/toby-liebowitzs-colletive-mind-maps

Julia Pott

"Julia employs awkward animated characters to act out her inner confusions. 
She graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2011 with an MA in Animation. " - Juliapott.com

Marianne Mueller

Swiss artist Marianne Mueller had a solo exhibition at the PEM Museum in Salem, Massachusetts last March. I found her through, johnstonmarklee.com. And enjoyed looking through her body of work on her website: mariannemueller.ch. She shows an interesting array of photography, drawings and video - - ranging from cityscapes, nudity, masturbation, parts of her life, flocks of birds and abstractions. 

Most of these are from her series COMBINE and THE FLOCK.

Baltimore Residents: Carlson and Heinemann

Lee Heinemann and Dustin Carlson are separate in their work and relations, though they they both currently live in Baltimore. Carlson dropped out as a painting major from Maryland Institute College of Art and Heinemann happens to currently attend the school.
Carlson founded Gallery 4 and the rest of the H&H building in the late 90s with Jason Hughes. "We noticed that there was a lot of talent in Baltimore from all over the country, and there was really no place for them to show here," Carlson says. 6 resident artists live and work in the 10,000-square-foot wood-floored, white walled series of rooms. He just recently had a show called Cowboys and Engines, including various machines and large photographic billboards.
Read more: http://citypaper.com/arts/visualart/a-man-a-plan-a-planer-1.1202737

Cowboys and Engines from Dustin Carlson on Vimeo.

As I feel funny posting another students work, I can't resist. It's a treasure. I'll let the Vimeo description do the telling:

PEASANTRY - Meal from PEASANTRY on Vimeo.

In and Out of Whack: Deb Karpman and Kimerly Hennessy

First three images: Deb Karpman, remaining three: Kimberly Hennessy

Recently I wandered into an art exhibit at SCA Contemporary Art. The exhibit included artists: Deb Karpman, Kimberly Hennessy, Danielle Rae Miller and Joe Barron. The work was fabulous, ranging from installation to collage. Miller's work was stunning, she had a massive ink painting of twisted reflecting branches on thick white paper. She also had a room where branches laid as a roof. Light struck the branches at different angles spontaneously to create beautiful patterns upon the white walls of the room. A small girl in sparkly shoes and colorful tights, spoke up in the corner of the room. Apparently she was Miller's daughter and led me to her mom who I met and didn't have much to say to other then, "I love your work and wish it was in my home". I told her daughter I've always wanted a room like Max's from Where the Wild Things Are... so that wasn't a lie.
I didn't see much of Joe's work but a small architectural lit cube. But Karpman and Hennessy's work totally filled the space. Karpman did these beautiful organic collages. The were tiny and several taking up a space together. Hennessy's work was all over the place, scattered on the floor, on the walls, and up to the ceiling. It was bright, colorful and playful, using several craft materials I used as a kid. My friend pondered one piece of hers for several minutes, wondering the significance of it and why it was considered art, while I was illuminated with inspiration, joy and marvel. Kimberely Hennessy lives in Brooklyn, NY and Deb Karpman is located in Montevallo, AL. Here's a brief segment of her artist statement: "The formations in my recent work are defiantly mobile, teetering between sturdiness and volatility, acceleration and collapse. My work derives from found images – old, discarded textbooks, architectural diagrams, and field guides. The source, which initially arrives as a complete entity – a fixed, systematically-produced branch of knowledge, is meticulously extracted, multiplied, bent, and curved. The resulting formations suggest choreographed animations, momentarily arrested in space but implying unremitting flux and transformation. The column-like shapes insinuate appendages, morphing from architectural structures into pictorial representations of an invented language. The constructions oscillate between collapsed stick figures, scaffolded habitats, archaic devices, and ritualistic objects."
Both Danielle Rae Miller and Joe Barron are resident artists of Albuquerque.