Emvergeoning

No Comments »

Why does this picture remind me of walking around Lora Reynolds Gallery in the construction-condo zone of downtown Austin? A recent lecture by Conrad Bakker proved once again that despite its location, Lora Reynolds always exhibits unusual and intriguing artists.
In other news, behold the best zombie portraiture ever taken by one prolific Jillian McDonald. She makes me love America, oh wait, she’s Canadian. Seems like an apropos photo for the Katrina anniversary. Which reminds me, check out the latest New Yorker cover with a brilliant new work by silhouette connoisseur Kara Walker.

2 Comments »

Emigre just published the history of the Matrix typeface on their site to hail the release of Matrix II. It’s a story of emerging technologies and their impact on design (exemplifying this quote, also from Emigre), of an iconoclastic designer whose work became iconic, and of the kind of debate that has been raging in the design community for years. It’s also the story of a great font.

8 Comments »

So, it depends on who your list is made up of, but to some folks at La Tuna this past Friday night, it reminded them a little bit of of high school when they thought they knew somebody in the crowd..

he looks kinda familiar.. wait.. heres a Bryan De La Garza Polaroid of him :

oh wait.. here he is with Tori Amos.

…

oh!

Now I remember.

what a wierd Friday…

4 Comments »

Bill Daniel breezed through town earlier this year to screen his hobo film, Bozo Texino. He just printed a bunch of amazing photos from Katrina’s aftermath in New Orleans as well as photos of hippy houseboats in northern California. The “Sunset Scavenger” show at Rayco looks fantastic thanks to Daniel’s analog aesthetics when it comes to printing photos the old fashioned way. Highly recommended show if you happen to be strolling around the SFMOMA. More photos…
Continue Reading »

1 Comment »

Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin sift through new media with a sharp and calculating statistician’s sensibility. The result, currently at Yerba Buena, leaves audiences reeling with the brainiac implications involved in such a complicated, perfectly orchestrated piece of musical, LED sublimeness. Here’s an example of the listening post in action at the Whitney in 2002.

No Comments »

It’s time for someone to please bomb the billboard entranceway to Southtown. This is our neighborhood and Emvergeoning is publicly inviting you to paint something new on this old billboard. The previous artist, Mark Hogenson, has personally given the green light to cover up this fading mural. Supher, Clogged Caps, Illego…I challenge you to give this billboard new life. Ideally, this would be a monthly installation…

11 Comments »

Back in March, i2i Gallery changed it’s name to Vtrue, and now it’s gone. There were hits and misses, as with any gallery, but Vtrue made a great contribution to the San Antonio art community, and will be missed. On the positive side, maybe this will give owners Gary Smith and Judith Cotrell more time to work on their own art. Emvergeoning covered two exhibits at i2i / Vtrue:

• Jerry Monteith’s Hilarious Wounds
• Pattie Chalmers’ What I Meant to Say

Now, of course, I wish we’d written more on their shows. But that’s how it goes. Mark Jones managed to document Vtrue’s swan song, Kerri Coar’s Sweet Tooth.

No Comments »

Anne Hamilton’s installation at SFMOMA takes working class artifacts and transforms them into a monumental homage to indigo blue. The pile of 18,000 janitors’ uniforms was accompanied by a humble “attendant” that sat patiently at a desk and proceeded to erase names from a small book. You can watch a funny time lapse video of the 3-week installation and listen to an interesting interview with the artist about this piece that she originally made in South Carolina.

No Comments »

The Artist Foundation just posted the application for the 2008 grant period on their web site. All applications must be submitted through the web site this year (don’t worry, they’ve gone a long way toward making the site usable).

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the grant, it offers up to $5,000 for professional Bexar County artists to create original works of art in the areas of literary arts, visual arts, media arts, and performing arts, as well as new awards in the areas of classical singing, set design, and costume design. (Their definition of “professional” is somewhat loose, but you have to demonstrate that you’ve spent some real time and energy focused on producing new work). The deadline is September 14.

Although this is basically the same deal as last year, there are a few changes. Rather than awarding one grant per category, the Foundation plans to dole out 15 grants across the 7 categories. In addition, all 15 grant recipients will automatically be considered for an additional $7,500 award for artistic excellence.

No Comments »

… in the age of Web 2.0.

3 Comments »

“It should be clear that in the applied arts, innovation is not an unceasing hunt for heterodox and unseen things from desert islands; it is not merely an image surgery soliciting the senses, or a tension tickling the nerves. The idea of seeking the new for the sake of being different is nonsensical, resulting from the prevailing contemporary ‘market and goods’ ideology. True innovation is one that is rightly able to link the adaptive history embodied in any artifact with the changes of production tools, whenever they occur.” — Sergio Polano, Emigre 26

“But these forward gropings, this anticipation of an undefined future and the cult of the new mean in fact the exaltation of the present. The new time consciousness, which enters philosophy in the writings of Bergson, does more than express the experience of mobility in society, of acceleration in history, of discontinuity in everyday life. The new value placed on the transitory, the elusive and the ephemeral, the very celebration of dynamism, discloses a longing for an undefiled, immaculate and stable present.” — Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity – An Incomplete Project”

6 Comments »

Andrew Waggoner sends a 3,000 word battle cry into the ether, begging us to beat back the “colonization of silence” before it’s too late. He juxtaposes complaints about the overabundance of music in modern life (music while we shop; music while we drive; music while we wait for the AT&T customer service rep to answer our calls) with praise for the powerful use of silence by composers such as Webern and Morton Feldman. I can’t help but wonder if the solution to this problem is as simple as replacing Muzak with, say, the Lovely Music catalog.

On the other hand, here’s a video of John Cage . He, too, waxes eloquent on the limitations of “what we call music” (does this include Feldman?), and the power of silence. And somehow, in this 4-minute video, Cage seems to say more than Wagonner can pack into 3,000 words. You get the feeling that Cage has absorbed silence, that he embodies silence, while Wagonner pines away for it.

PS. Here’s another discussion of silence in the context of poetry for those that missed it.

3 Comments »