San Miguel de Allende

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The Art Of Two Amazing Muslim Women, Making Beauty Of Inscription And Erasure

It has been announced that on May 22 Lalla Essaydi will be awarded the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s Medal Award.    (A retrospective of her work, “Lalla Essaydi:  Revisions,” is currently on view at the National Museum of African Art Smithsonian in Washington.)  I feel like it’s some sort of personal triumph.  No, I do not know Lalla Essaydi and have obviously played no part in her phenomenal contributions to the art world.  However, she is the focus of a disagreement in our household which I like to hold over my husband’s head, so she has become a bit of an obsession.  I’m pretty sure I have told this story before, but to revisit, my husband and I saw a photograph by Lalla Essaydi at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s sale a number of years ago.  I loved the photograph.  There is some disagreement about what the actual price was at the time, but it was under $1,000.  We did not buy it, much to my chagrin, because it was too expensive and too large.  A few years later we saw the same photograph selling for $18,000.  Oops.  So there is really nothing more satisfying than proving to my husband what a horrendous mistake it was not to buy the photograph.

Essaydi was born in Marrakech, grew up initially in Morocco, and then spent a number of years living in Saudi Arabia.  She creates breathtaking large scale portraits of Muslim women.  The story they tell is both beautiful and chilling.  To look at them is to be overcome by an incredible stillness.

Lalla Essaydi at Galerie Protee via arnaudt on Flickr

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The City As The Ultimate Representation Of Twentieth Century Art

To mention Sol Lewitt and leave it at that is to do a disservice to the other artists showing at MASS MoCA since truly each exhibit is more engaging than the last. So, to continue my tour of our visit to the museum, one of the things I find most fun at a museum (and this is part of why I am particularly partial to contemporary art museums) is learning about a new artist whose work I like, but who is not as yet quite so well known. Yes, I’m sure this is only in small part due to an appreciation of the art, and in a large part due to the opportunity it represents to buy art, but I only buy things I genuinely like so I think it’s more or less the same thing at the end of the day.

The show that my husband had wanted to see, and which was the impetus behind our trip to MASS MoCA in the first place, is entitled “Invisible Cities”.  It is actually up until February 4, 2013, so if you have the opportunity to find yourself in North Adams, Massachusetts, within the next year, I highly recommend making the stop.  It was an overall interesting exhibit, not only for the individual works, but for the way in which it was curated and the varied interpretations of how we experience cities by the different artists, not just because each has a different vision, but because they actually appeal to different senses.  Emeka Ogboh’s Monday Morning in Lagos, 2010, consists only of a speaker mounted on the ceiling which plays the sounds of, as the title suggests, Lagos in the morning.  The city is given physical form, is literally mapped out, through the voices of the bus drivers calling out their destinations layered over the voices of other residents of the city.

In the first room we entered, full of fantastical three dimensional “cities”, the one set of painted collages mounted on the far wall was the least interesting work — that is until I got close to the images and discovered that they were in fact my favorite things in the room.  Mary Lum’s collages are surprisingly wonderful.  Surprisingly because from a distance I read them as yet another rendering of a certain kind of linear constructivism that has already been worked through in numerous ways by artists over the last century.  And yet, on closer inspection, Lum’s take on the subject is absolutely unique, contemporary and fascinating.  Her collages not only layer images and shapes, but layer a broad range of artistic idiom.  They bring together Constructivism, Cubism, Pop Art, you name it … there are elements Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Picasso, Rodchenko, El Lissitsky, and dozens of others, layered over each other to create an image of the city which is beautiful, but more than that, which has a depth that draws you in with increasing intensity the longer you look.  The modern city is, in essence, the ultimate signifier of the 20th Century, the object which much of 20th Century art struggles to come to terms with, to give form.  And that 100 years of visual culture gets compressed into the space and form of Lum’s collage.  The following images show some of Lum’s collage work that was included in a show at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts.  The first image is most representative of the work included in “Invisible Cities”.

Mary Lum, "Index 2." Acrylic and photo collage on paper. 10" x 13" (Photo courtesy Mary Lum) - image via Gwarlingo.com

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The Secret Life Of Funghi Part II

The world at a whole new scale … any minute now and the fairies will enter stage left.

The Secret Life of Funghi 1

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I Dare You To Try To Get A Permit For One Of These Projects

Now here’s a guy who knows how to put photoshop to good use.

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Calgon Take Me Away a.k.a. I Need Your Help

So, today I need your help.  For starters, let’s lay out the situation.  My husband and I purchased our current condo in very large part because of the master suite.  The house was converted into condos and the master suite occupies what was once the attic — the entire floor — and is pretty stinkin’ awesome.  I hope that doesn’t sound boastful.  Obviously we had nothing to do with its greatness.  It merely showed us to be the suckers that we are because we paid more for the condo than it was really worth in large part because of that master suite.  The bedroom itself feels like something of an escape.  There are three skylights (and four windows and a glass door) so the room is always flooded with light, and it has its own little balcony.  But the pièce de résistance is the master bath.  It’s huge.  Because it is in the attic, the ceiling cuts in at all sorts of annoying angles which make it extremely difficult to make good use of the space, and at least once a week cause my husband to crash his head into a pitched wall.  But it is dramatic and the odd shape prevents you from putting much furniture in it which means that it always stays a bit sparse and beautiful.  My thought, when I saw this bathroom, was that it looked like a spa.  Large tub with jacuzzi.  Skylight over the tub/shower.  Marble tiled floor and shower.  Large window and lots of sunlight.  Beautiful light wood his and hers double sink with a granite countertop, and a mirror covering most of the wall over the sink.  I imagined that any time I went into this bath, I would feel like I was on vacation — preferably in the tropics — and promptly bought a little potted palm to put by the window to complete the illusion.

What I didn’t bank on was that because this room was poorly insulated and in the roof, it would be absolutely impossible to heat in the winter.  And, in addition, since the house is poorly insulated and the pipes run up the outside walls, and the master bath is on the uppermost floor of the house, and the hot water heater is perhaps significantly smaller than it should be, it is also nearly impossible to get warm water up to the room in the winter.  But living with Boston winters (okay, clearly with the exception of this winter), the need for the tropic escape is strong enough that I’m usually able to overlook these minor inconveniences and submit to the illusion.

I recently purchased a photograph for the bathroom and hung it to the right of the his and hers sinks.  This is the photograph:

Jeremy Kohm, Casino Employee's Day

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The Art of the Big Bang

I often have trouble deciding what to make of art with a gimmick.  The gimmick distract the viewer from the work itself.  Typically, it is quite funny and can be uplifting.  Take, for example, profiles carved into the filling of Oreos.  Not only are they funny, but demonstrate phenomenal skill and craftsmanship.   The Oreos amazing.  They’re hysterical.  But the skill gets overshadowed and shaped by the humor of the gimmick.  Sometimes, however, the work can be quite powerful.  German photographer Marin Klimas has come up with a device which I think actually produces fascinating pictures which are in the end much more interesting as photographs than as simply the playing out of the gimmick.

For one fascinating series of images, Klimas drops porcelain fighting figures and photographs them at the moment of hitting the floor.  In what I think is a fairly ingenious move, he has rigged the camera so that the shutter is set off by the sound of the figure hitting the floor, thereby capturing the perfect moment.

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Names To Learn Now … Yuji Hamada and Joseph O. Holmes

One of my favorite things about Jen Beckman’s 20×200 project, is that she not only offers a vehicle, through her website, for making affordable art available and accessible to the general public, nor does she just supply a platform for artists to make their work available to buyers, but she works hard to discover new artists in a thoughtful and curatorial fashion and thereby brings her audience strong emerging talent.  In addition to the website, which is a sales tool, Jen does also run a brick and mortar gallery, which it seems serves more as a way to provide undiscovered and gifted artists visibility and recognition.  As part of that effort, every year 20×200 hosts an international photography competition entitled “Hey, Hot Shot!“.  Winners receive $10,000, a solo show at the Jen Beckman gallery, and gallery representation.  In recognition of the competition, which is accepting entries through March 21, 20×200 is showcasing a number of the past winners.  The stuff is pretty fabulous.

One of my favorites is Joseph O. Holmes, who won Hey, Hot Shot! in 2005 and again in 2006.  This photograph of the CBGB stage both vividly brings me back 25 years and makes me feel really old.

Joseph O. Holmes, CBGB (Stage), available on 20x200.com

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This Is Me … No Wait This Is Me

I am always intrigued by photographs that explore the changes in a person’s face over time.  It is a fascinating way of questioning what constitutes identity.  If you ask me, it can also be wildly unsettling — or, at the very least, completely mesmerizing.  It’s not a new project — think Rembrandt’s self portraits or, in more recent history, Chuck Close — but I do find it particularly engaging as a photographic project.

The photographer Betina La Plante somewhat accidentally stumbled into a project about identity over time.

Now & Then by Betina La Plante

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The Artist Is Overshadowed By The Image

When I first came across Chinese artist Liu Bolin’s work, it was extremely amusing.  Enough so that I showed it to everyone in my family.  It was clever.  We laughed.  We moved on.  But the artist’s collaboration with Bazaar magazine for it’s March issue takes the artist’s clever trope and pushes it to the next level — moving it beyond the joke to something more profound (something that is perhaps there in all of the earlier work, but which gets overshadowed by the game).  And I don’t think it’s just because we’re dealing with fashion here.  Admittedly, art and fashion are a little like my own personal Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup (although the metaphor suffers a little bit from the fact that a deadly sweet tooth means that the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup is really my ultimate Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, still, you put art, fashion and a dash of cleverness together in one place and you’re bound to rock my world) — but I think it’s more than that.

Liu Bolin is known for hiding himself in his photographs.

Photograph by Liu Bolin via anonymonk's flickr stream

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