Emvergeoning

Justin Parr took some cell phone video of Chris Kubick & Anne Walsh’s recent performance at UTSA, A Thousand Years of Sound Effects (below). It was a three-part performance, with each part focusing on a specific kind of sound effect. In all three parts, the performance was an interaction between the artists and a SuperCollider program designed to play sound effects in response to input parameters, with a certain amount of randomness thrown in. The first part, which was performed by Kubick alone, involved less physical performance than the others. This piece was a collection of bell sound effects, which were played as Kubick interacted with the program through the keyboard and other inputs. For the next piece, Kubick and Walsh both interacted with the computer by stepping on pressure sensitive inputs placed on the floor. The sounds used in this performance were of horses galloping or walking. The final piece used sound effects of people clapping, and the artists interacted with the computer by clapping into a microphone (you can watch a segment of this piece below).

The program also generated video to accompany the sounds. For most of the performance, the program displayed the name of the audio file(s) being played, giving a glimpse into the strange world of sound effect naming conventions. Many of the effects had titles such as “Fairy Belching” or “Claps of old powerful men, white.” Sometimes the titles referred to the location of the recording, other times to more abstract characteristics. The interaction between these sounds, which have no context and therefore a wide variety of potential meanings, and their titles, which at times provided absurdly specific cultural contexts, was of particular interest to the artists. During the horse performance, some images of horses were displayed rather than the titles of the sound effects. The images were fairly crude and had a sort of clip-arty feel.

The performance was rough, and the artists are clearly just beginning to explore the potential of this concept (in fact, this was the first time that the pieces have been performed in public). The work does, however, have a lot of potential, and it will be interesting to see how they develop these performances in the future.

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No. He doesn’t. Stop all that scandalous scuttlebutting, he’s just trying to make a living by drawing and running a skateboard company and making your eyeballs endure some illustrated pleasures. Behold the Chernobyl-esque lambkins below…this is an older example but you can peruse the sparkling new work of Austin’s busiest beaver at Art Palace next Saturday, March 31st.

oh, devoted young readers, I highly recommend reading his guest blog on Fecal Face. The slow degradation of photos truly entertains beyond your everyday blogginess. If you like skate ramps and lone star and deer skulls and walruses, then you like Michael Sieben. And if you like Michael Sieben and Michael Sieben likes to lick carpet, well, go figure.

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San Antonio artists Maurice and Liz Trevino invite you to an orgy at Art Palace and their lascivious visions don’t disappoint. Gauging the local proclivity for profane imagery and references [the Donkey Show, big dongs and panty shots in Dark Matter @ Okay Mountain, and Seth Alverson's goat headed girls gone wild in the dining room at Art Palace last month], it looks like spring is in the underwear. With the animalistic hubris of an unbounded libido, the Trevino duo shamelessly reveal all the devilish details of copulation and mild cannibalism. Sighs Matters illuminates sex acts with black lights, bright stoner-flourescent color schemes and scenes of slippery pleasures.
The loaded content leads us through a series of encounters that display pornographic compositions alongside symbols of virility, greed and an indefatigable appetite for the flesh.

The couple works together to create sculptures and paintings that tell a venereal tale meant to illicit hot cheeks and fog up an architect’s spectacles. It would be difficult to ascertain where one artist begins and the other ends and the show itself sheds the notion of collaboration as a dichotomy of two different styles or approaches to the same subject matter. The punchy title gives us a pun intent on investigating the life of a coxcomb. The entire house [Art Palace is a hybrid of a domestic dwelling/gallery space] pulsates with a sui generis power that is impossible to resist. You are absolutely compelled to contemplate a muscular, almost maniacal Leprechaun man busting through bright orange bricks somewhat mimetic of The Thing from Fantastic Four. Liz & Maurice took Mexican ceramic sculptures and made them their own by coating them with thick, golden glitter and intense, sanguine red/inky black paint that harbors significant connotations of bloodshed in dried and vivified forms. On the back wall of the gallery, a trifecta of paintings and intermingling lovers gives us a look at a man biting the back of one of his libertines. Flanked by two ravenous tiger heads, the scene quintessentially visualizes a cardinal drive while nibbling around masterpieces like Goya’s Saturno. It’s brilliantly deviant art that’s capable of lingering in your mind; a hot night of raw copulation that you can replay long after the act itself is over.

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this is one of those anti blog type posts where I tell you about mine and bens adventures on the south side.

(using convieniently placed photos)

heres ben judson holding a monkeywrench.

heres a sky in the shape of a brush fire.

heres some really silly graffiti.

thats all for the today.  I didnt even include any photos of my cat, marn-ball.

( adventure day was officially february 20th 2007 )

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Its a ghastly place. The floor is smudged with a thousand chocolate hearts, trampled on by high dollar pointed shoe-weapons. The glasses are all asunder, glowing behind them is a thousand LED lights, like tiny stars in the walls, a disco light on the ceiling and pink “fluff,” or “tool,” everywhere. The “tool,” has been heaved around like a massive giant stirred a martini with his finger, while the smattered chocolates just make you think of the fecal fetishes I jokingly hear about every so often in these funny art circles. Strange. It started out innocent enough. Clean, full bottles of tequila, stained pink, sat lined up in rows on the inside of the limo. Boxes and boxes of chocolates lie calmly awaiting consumption by the precious glittering hordes of fans, friends, followers, and skeptics. I worked on the inside. Not inside Lisa Ortiz’s Galeria Ortiz, where the Franco Mondini-Ruiz Love Stories was about to take place, but inside of the limo that Franco hired to party your pants off if you bought a painting from him. Included with this was the opportunity to go inside the limo and have your polaroid taken with Franco. Being the dedicated shooter, I think I saw everything. Here is what I can show you. The others might get me maimed, shot, murdered, or even “ruin my career,” in San Antonio. I joke, and you laugh, but dont even think these photos below are going to blow your mind. Here they are, by request from anonymous fans abroad (really? ..thats what ben tells me.) ; photos from the inside..

(I’ll tell you as much as I can about each image if you hover your mouse over them..)

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I’m sure you’ll all be glad to hear that the Artpace web site is up and running, just in time for the opening of the Jesse Amado show and Randy Wallace’s WindowWorks installation. I think I’ll celebrate by revisiting some Felix Gonzalez-Torres work. It was good to see a survey of Amado’s art, but I’m more taken with Randy Wallace’s Unsettlement, especially in light of his show at Sala Diaz not so long ago. Wallace’s work has a psychological impact that is somehow both crude and nuanced. More on that once I’ve had some time to reflect…

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I just finished hanging Marlys Dietricks new show at the fl!ght gallery a couple of minutes ago, and in true emvergeoning style, I thought it might be good to write a short response to a show in my own space.  (please excuse unnecessary or lacking punctuation) .

First I’ll start by saying that I’m extremely nervous, not for marlys but for myself.  This show is downright amazing.   Her frames look extremely well crafted and the way the pieces are hung within the glass is exquisite.  She throws in a casual latin title intelligently made using the creatures origins.  A sheet to break it all down is available at the entrance to the gallery.  The creatures themselves come from very interesting origins, she told me that in her quest to finish this work she would throw out a piece the second it started looking like something in our recognizable realm.  I’m torn to several of the smaller drawings.  They look suspiciously like an amalgamation of a dream I wanted to have when I was 14.   I’m quite excited about this show.  I know Marlys hasnt shown her work in over 12 years.  It totally wants to blow you away.  The giant drawings elucidate the hours of work that must have gone into each one..  ok, thats all i have time for now, back to speaking online french. désolé d’entendre parler de vous et de votre jeu emvergeoning de boule sur des roues.

heres an image from the show. 

The opening for this show is Second Saturday February Tenth.  This also coincides with the reopening of one9zero6 Gallery in the same building on South Flores(1906). one9zer06 will host Mollie Gates as they reopen this month.  

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Let me start off this post by saying I’m grateful for all the things Artpace does for San Antonio, from the potlucks to the rooftop parties, but someone has to call them out on this one. When I heard that Jesse Amado was showing at Fine Silver, I thought “That’s strange; isn’t he showing at the Hudson Showroom? Isn’t it a bit of a faux pas for San Antonio’s two most reputable galleries to show the same artist at the same time?” So I decided to do a little fact-checking, only to find that the repo men have come to collect Artpace’s web site:

The Google cache of the site turned up the information I was after: yes, Jesse Amado is opening a show at Artpace on February 8 and Fine Silver on February 9. And I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation for that. But the real mystery of the weekend emerges: Who killed the Artpace website?

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Who’s up for a little surprise road trip? I know I always am… sometimes maybe just a little too much surprise and not enough road trip, but hey.. So I approached Ed Saavedra Saturday night with a plan.. I needed to go out to the area around Marfa and the big bend region to do some shooting for a piece in my upcoming solo show “invisible houses,” at i2i gallery in March. As it turns out he was up for the trip. We decided to leave on Monday and come back sometime on Weds… soo traverse yourself along down old I-10 for about 6 hours and you hit the beautiful hole in the ground called Balmorhea . heres a photo.

this place was amazing. check out the waters.

i mean.. wow. the springs keep the pool at 73 degrees year round. just cold enough to be cold in the summer and just warm enough to be inviting in the winter. poor us, we didnt have towels of any kind and the sun was setting, so drip drying was out of the question as the winds started kicking up. Saying goodbye to the inviting waters we traveled onward to the Davis Mtns where we would camp for the night.. (click link below for the rest of the story)

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In case you were wondering who is behind the Emvergeoning curtain…Here’s a group photo from our last meeting. Keep San Antonio Lame, Lamer, & Lamest.

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Local artists are popping up on the international art radar. Zane Lewis bubbled to the European surface with a little bit of humor and ipecac. His recent, painterly rendition of a regurgitating Pope was part of the international, invitation-only Arte Fiera in Bologna, Italy. Looks incredibly delectable for holy bloviating and dribble. Somebody needs a bib…
Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Exhibit C:

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I pulled a classic emvergeoning sneak* peek* this afternoon at Blue Star while they were still hanging the show that opens on Thursday night ( Lost and Found ; curated by George Neubert ) .. The show is looking good, I plan on taking a good luck at it later on when its all hung, however, I’m totally scared of the show thats still being hung in the Project Space room.

See Below :

hmmm.. kind of looks innocent, not to intense.

digging through…

getting hotter..

save yourself while you still can.

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If you drive down South Flores on the edge of Southtown, you’ve seen it. Covered in graffiti and the citys answer to it (the subconcious art of graffiti removal) .. The Old Judson Candy Company sits high on the horizon near the intersection of Guadalupe and South Flores. (a few blocks down from South Alamo) . For years, this building was left virtually wide open to the world while it fell into disrepair, Lots of people & animals passed through it, including a large number of graffiti artists from all over the country (remember clogged caps 1,2,3, and 4?). As a result the walls inside are literally teeming with life .. About 6 months back, I introduced Future Worker Girl of Potter-Belmar Labs to the site, by showing her a random assortment of photos I had taken traipsing through the candy house early one morning. While I took the photos during a time that the building was literally wide open from the front, back, and sides.. It has since been carefully sealed off from all unwanted intruders. As a result of her new interest in the site, she proclaimed a gathering of data towards a renegade video projection onto the building. After last nights Bozo Texino film screening she popped the question on us, would we accompany her down to the sight of the old candy factory to view a projection of a melding of photos of the inside of the now sealed building on the outside? Of course.

The results were beautiful.

Future Worker Girl:

her “Something out of ghost-busters” vehicle.

Andy Benavides, Mike Casey. and visiting resident artist to UTSA, Chris Kubick view the projection from the bus stop benches.

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Sometimes you come across an artist web site that is so exhaustive you can spend hours dwelling in this visionary world, tracing out a career or leaping across decades of creative activity in an instant. The first site I found like this was Gerhard Richter’s elegant online document of his paintings, his Atlas, his editions, and even tours of select exhibitions.

Today I finally visited the Vasulkas’ site, which may not be as impressively interconnected as Richter’s, but presents and astounding document of their body of work, dating back to the early ’70s. Apart from a large number of videos and stills, their site provides PDFs of books and catalogs they have produced, photo documentation of installations, and an archive of the early years of The Kitchen.

For those unfamiliar with their work, here’s a little synopsis, courtesy Gene Youngblood:

Using the video synthesizers and image processors that were the user-built folk instruments of electronic culture, Woody exhaustively explored, demonstrated and categorized the “primitives” of electronic imaging. The visual manifestations of this research he called “artifacts” rather than art. But the material was so hypnotically beautiful that almost everyone else called it art—and it lived as art in the art world. Thus, a man who claimed to be uninterested in an art career became one of the seminal figures in the history of video art.

Steina, meanwhile, pursued two related paths. In a series called Violin Power, which began in the mid-70s, she “performed” video by using her violin to control real-time image processing. Later, she controlled laser discs with her violin in live performances. She continues to refine both techniques today. Her other body of work, called Machine Vision, involved robotic camera controls that removed human intentionality from the camera’s point of view. Together, then, the Vasulkas participated in developing (when they didn’t single-handedly pioneer) almost all the audiovisual possibilities intrinsic to video as an electronic moving-image and performance medium.

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I know we’ve all been REALLY WORRIED (about bird flu) psssstt..they just found a probable cure in Cod enzymes from Iceland.. Just thought you might find that interesting, seaing that is been quite icy in San Antonio as of late. Myself, I’ve been holed up in my little warm home, fighting off the chills and talking shop to my marnball. This morning, though I was so excited to see the light of day (err.. gray) that I dove into my camera and shot some photos of silly winter stuff, like icicles, and lamposts and hockey pucks.. (uh wait, no hockey pucks.. ) but lots of icicles. OH , yeah I also dove through the last issue of the SA Current, and lo and behold there was a small blurb style writeup on Emvergeoning. Yeah, go us! We’re famosos. soo.. if your interested.. heres some photos of San Antonio under ice..

The Photo below is proof of the cheesy icicle photos I speak of..just click on the link below..you know its killing you..

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Interesting festival excerpt from the brilliant sound culling machines known as Sublime Frequencies. Also watch the trailer for their film “Sumatran Folk Cinema.” I miss Thailand!!

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Though the title conjures a leitmotif of sutures and open wounds, I’d like to share an observation in local art scene group dynamics. The Legendary Criswell predicts that “the future is where you and I will spend the rest of our lives whether we like it or not.” And with that caveat, I predict that 2007 will be the year of Closings. Don’t be a part of the booboisie, showing up at 8 p.m. on Opening Night! Eegads, the horror of uncovering your social ineptitude when you realize that the Closing Night is so much more important and jubilant. There’s a sense of urgency and inaccessibility at a Closing Party because, hey, that art gets deconstructed tomorrow and this is your last chance to see it! But at the Opening Night, pffffft. Awe, rasberries. Those objects d’art will be there collecting dust bunnies for almost a whole month.

We here at Emvergeoning Headquarters pride ourselves in observing and documenting the latest patterns in art weather fluffery. So, we can’t stress this enough people. Do your fellow artists a flippin’ flavor and snub the art openings, for closure is what we all seek.

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Walking around First Friday the other night before Erick Michaud’s performance at Unit B was.. fun? exciting? trying? hmm.. I’m not sure really. but I did see a lot of folks who I hadn’t run into lately, and I handed out a bunch of postcards for the Derek Allen Brown show coming up this next Saturday at FL!GHT .. I also really enjoyed Mary Hawthornes show in the little room of Joan Grona Gallery, and I found a keen photo opportunity in the Blue Star Gallery four. Upon closer examination however, I noticed something was amiss(i think) .. Someone seems to have added an empty obituary box of their own to the display on the wall with an arrow pointing to it with the words “Time magazines person of the year.” .. Upon first viewing it, I thought it was part of the piece..and then after reflecting on it earlier today, and reading the handout I had picked up in the gallery, I was almost sure it was not exactly part of it, but some First Friday reveler’s idea of a prank. Anybody know for sure? (in my original photo look to the guy on the left, at his right side)

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Spaztek, caught on video for the first time at the closing for Cruz Ortiz’ exhibit at FL!GHT.

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The second monthly artist rodeo put on by Ken Little went down without a hitch this past Tuesday.  Performers included ; Hills Snyder, Ken Little, Cruz Ortiz, The Maybe Laters, Jimmy Kuehnle, Lloyd Walsh, Potter-Belmar Labs, and some other rightfully deserving folks whose names i cant quite always remember.  It was quite a ruckus.  hover over photos for more info.  

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sometimes. it doesnt all make sense.

sometimes. it doesnt all make sense.

sometimes.

it makes very little sense.

just sometimes. it makes a lot of sense.

this is your quarry.

get to it .

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..i couldn’t resist.

When John asked me to take some photos for the last show at unit B gallery,I had a blast, but I went a little overboard. Heres a documentation of nearly everybody who attended the show..up close.

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