performances | "Drawing Sound" at the Drawing Center

Last night’s Drawing Sound performance at Soho’s Drawing Center on Wooster Street brought together new works in drawing and music by Billy Martin and String Nose, as well as incorporated odors in a “scentstallation” created by Phaedra Martin.

While the images by Martin were projected on the walls, the performers reacted to, improvised on, or played pre-written music  on their music stands .  It wasn’t clear if there were direct intersections between the visual and audio, but the music was masterfully played, including Ned Rothenberg on shakuhachi and Martin himself on percussion. Fung  Chern  Hwei played a very warm, romantic violin, and John Zorn dropped in with his saxophone.

The concert ended with a three-minute, seemingly tightly-organized composition with strong ensemble playing.   The concert seemed a fusion of loft music and the always-energetic, improvisatory downtown scene.

Elizabeth Davis

Exhibitions | Marcelo Toledo "Northern Skies" at The Gabe M. Wiener Music & Arts Library

An exhibition at the Music & Arts Library at Columbia University presented original music scores by Marcelo Toledo.  Containing excerpts from a larger work entitled  "Northern skies, the notation of the music" is derived from the shapes of 21 constellations from the skies in the northern hemisphere.
One excerpt, "Notturno", is scored for clarinet, saxophone, trumpet and trombone, while a second, Luminous emptiness, is scored for flute, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, percussion, violin and violoncello,

Central aspects of the composer’s approach to instrumental writing include the exploration of new instrumental techniques, the use of complex sounds, the relationship between expression and sonic structure, and the dynamic and interactive process between sound material and its visual representation.

The clear representation of visual materials re-injects new possibilities into the compositional process. A permanent back and forth between sound material and its notation occurs in the representation of musical ideas.  The flexibility of the mechanism of representation expands the musical materials and opens--in an almost rhizomatic way--the intermediate states of the sound/image relationship.

Elizabeth Davis

See the library website for location and hours

"Luminous Emptiness" audio excerpts

Vernissages | Hudson, Sarah Peters @ John Davis Gallery

John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY, is presenting a solo exhibition of sculpture and drawings by Sarah Peters.  It is a show for winter—-muted colors and serious postures.
The black-penned, white papered portraits emanate sternness, zealousness, serious-mindedness.  Drawn from characters in American spiritual movements and separatist sects from colonial days to the 20th century, the images cause us to reflect on the paths that have been followed in bringing us to the present.     Meanwhile, the bronze sculptures present a complementary group.  Principally also black, and many with angled torsos and distorted limbs, these works cause us to ponder the artist’s interpretation of a work’s trajectory from figurative sculpture to a contemporary remaking.

Elizabeth Davis

Vernissages | Guy Laliberté "GAIA", Marlborough Gallery

On display at the Marlborough Gallery are roughly four dozen beautiful photographic images, many large-scale, of sites on the planet earth taken from outer space.  Perched on board the International Space Station for eleven days in 2009, Guy Laliberté focused his Nikon camera on sites in the Sahara Desert in Egypt, Dolzhanskaya Point in Russia, the Balkhas Lake in Kazakhstan, the Euphrates River in Turkey, and others in the U.S. and Tibet to bring to our attention not only their beauty, but their fragility.
Conventional wisdom holds that the determining wars to be fought in the future will be over water.  In the face of such sentiment, Laliberté designed this creative project for his ONE DROP initiative, “a charitable organization that develops integrated, innovative projects with an international scope, in which water plays a central role as a creative force in generating positive, sustainable effects for local and foreign populations and in the fight against poverty”.
Like the Renaissance man, Laliberté channels his energy and skills into a variety of initiatives: founder of Cirque du Soleil, Chair of ONE DROP, stilt walker, fire eater and accordionist .
Accompanying the exhibition Assouline has published both an artist’s book and a trade edition titled GAIA with images from the show and more besides.

Elizabeth Davis

Vernissages | Frank Boros and John Haubrich at Fox Gallery

The Fox Gallery is presenting an exhibit of two different media which really works.  Painting and graphite don’t always partner well visually, but in this case the contrast in the techniques, shapes, and colors particular to each, makes for a  flowing and stimulating perambulation. 
The 2012 graphite by Frank Boros, “A Number for Elaine,” with its intertwining and overlapping lines, circles, and spatial areas, illustrate Boros’ statement: “I began to explore, to push, to question and to wonder.  This simple play of the circle and a square has become an inquiry.”  Inspiration for these works came to Boros from a more than six-hour stay in a hospital emergency room, gazing up at the ceiling--a firmly creative response to an inhospitable and unwelcoming setting.
John Haubrich takes his inspiration from more traditional sources: the beauty of the countryside with its numerous rivers, lakes and grid of the farm fields from his boyhood growing up in southern Minnesota.  But he also finds beauty in damaged and decaying elements, such as abandoned farms, factories, and gravel pits.  His painting “Smile” from 2011 juxtaposes rectangular areas—one with human bones, a smiling face with eyes blackened over, and blood-red swashes of color interspersed with running lines of text which seem to merge his responses to beauty and decay.

Elizabeth Davis

 

Exhibitions | Hudson: Chris Gallagher at Galerie Gris

Galerie Gris in Hudson, NY, is exhibiting paintings by Chris Gallagher. This exhibition of oil paintings reflects the artist’s longtime interest in invisible information and energy endlessly suspended in the circulation of the cosmos and the scientific observation of distant phenomena. The parallel linear bands of luminous color pulsate from edge to edge on the canvas and register the hand of the artist through the slight imperfections in the brushwork. The bands run vertically, horizontally or diagonally, in some cases possessing a gentle curve. They are built with multiple layers of paint that achieve glowing, vibrating streams that suggest the dizzying blur of technological information.  The striations are densely packed and seem to be part of a boundless field suggesting expansion beyond the edges of the canvas--thereby creating an ongoing intuitive response and capturing something much larger than the canvas itself or, perhaps, something infinitely smaller. The exhibition also includes “Tondos”, circular format paintings that reinforce the astronomical associations and create the illusion of buoyant, slowly rotating spheres.

Elizabeth Davis

Vernissages NYC | Angus MacLise

Much of the contents of a suitcase belonging to Angus MacLise is now on exhibit at the Boo-Hooray Gallery. MacLise, an American artist, poet, percussionist, and composer was active in New York, San Francisco, Paris, London and Kathmandu from the 1950s through the 1970s. The suitcase contained artwork, publications, and manuscripts, as well as more than 100 hours of recorded music.
In addition to the suitcase contents, the exhibition includes materials from private, previously unseen collections and archives, including ephemera, photos, artwork, memorabilia, posters, etc.
An additional sound installation at Boo-Hooray's new Chinatown space will be featured in an upcoming post.

Elizabeth Davis

Vernissages NYC | Robert Mapplethorpe 50 Americans at Sean Kelly Gallery

Racially mixed embraces, AIDS sufferers, frankly passionate and highly-charged images of men and women, along with mesmerizing photos of flowers, and tender images of loved ones—-all appear in Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos from the late 1970s-1980s. Mainstream at the time—-definitely not.

But a generation later, Americans responded to the invitation by the Sean Kelly Gallery to pick an image that resonated with them personally. The selected image, along with the respondent’s response—-one from each of the 50 states—-is on view at the Gallery. And a diverse group of respondents it is: they range in age from their 20s to one individual who is over 100; they live in rural and urban settings; and they work in various professions.

Clearly, the respondents resonate to the humanity depicted in the photos, with 37 being of people or bodily parts of people, including hands, heads, torsos, etc. Flowers and landscapes were selected by 11 respondents.

A handsomely and respectfully presented exhibition.

Elizabeth Davis

Robert Mapplethorpe
50 Americans

at Sean Kelly Gallery

May 7 through June 18

Events NYC | Paolo Galluzzi "The Shadow of Light: Leonardo's Mind by Candlelight"

The Shadow of Light: Leonardo's Mind by Candlelight

A lecture by Paolo Galluzzi

Spirals of smoke, and energy rising from air hitting a flame was the seminal image shown by Paolo Galluzzi last evening in his presentation "The Shadow of Light: Leonardo's Mind by Candlelight". From the Codex Atlanticus of ca. 1508-10, this image crystallized Galluzzi's theme of unity--the unity in which Leonardo perceived the earth, the human body, and physical phenomena. To Leonardo, this unity linked all the phenomena from the microcosm to the macrocosm, in a vision of reality—a concept preceding by several centuries our contemporary Gestalt or System Thinking.

“Leonardo,” says Prof. Galluzzi, “records the extraordinary chain of thoughts triggered by the candle burning on his table”, as recorded in a double folio in the Codex Atlanticus of c. 1508-10 – a fairly long and organic text, at least by Leonardo’s standards, entitled On the motion of flame. The sequence of ingenious observations and penetrating reflections echoes experiments and analyses recorded in other manuscripts of the same years. Leonardo’s daring analogies offer a fascinating journey through his unified vision of man and the physical world, a vision reaching from natural philosophy to meteorology, from the ‘science of painting’ to cosmology, from anatomy to geology. The candle’s flame is transformed by Leonardo’s sharp eye into a powerful microscope that reveals the universal principles which govern all natural phenomena."

Most daring, perhaps, was Leonardo's likening the streaming water in the earth to the blood in the body. Or most fascinating was Leonardo's "making art" as process used to understand the working of things, which would be expressed in modern terms as "form follows function".

The metaphor of the candle flame revealing the universal principles Leonardo perceived as governing all natural phenomena was made all the more convincing by the speaker's evidence gleaned from Leonardo's manuscripts and paintings. Interestingly, after ca. 1510, Leonardo veered away from this train of thought.

Would Leonardo be known as an artist were he working today? Wide-ranging discussion followed the talk, with one scholar positing a more scientific role for Leonardo in our time--molecular biologist, cosmologist, or something unknown to us that he would have pioneered.

Elizabeth Davis

Prof. Galluzzi has lectured and taught at the Universities of Siena and Florence, and at Harvard, Princeton, UCLA, and NYU as well as at the University of Hamburg, the Centre Koyré, at the Ecole des Haute Etudes (Paris). Paolo Galluzzi has been Director of Florence’s Museo Galileo (formerly the Institute and Museum of the History of Science) since 1982. He is a member of the Royal Academy of Science in Stockholm and socio of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. He is the author of more than 200 publications on the activity of the scientists and engineers of the Renaissance, on several aspects of science during the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, on scientific terminology, on the activities of Galileo and his school, on the history of the European scientific academies and on the birth and development of the historiography of science.

Fore more information visit The Italian Academy

Exhibitions | Philadelphia, Project Basho ONWARD '11

Project Basho ONWARD '11 exhibition
by Elizabeth Davis

Seventy images are featured in this current show at Project Basho in Philadelphia.
Two photos received juror awards: New York Sandy Alpert for the silver print New York Morning and Mary Beth Meehan for the inkjet print Ashleigh's Bouquet. The two winners will be traveling to Tokyo, along with the show, after the showing in Philadelphia.

Vernissages | Long Island City, The Sculpture Center

SculptureCenter organized and premiered the traveling exhibition "Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture 1991­2009". The exhibition presents a selection of the artist's sculptures, including wall reliefs and monumental cedar works created from 1991 to 2009.

Ursula von Rydingsvard sculptures |Photo Credit: Elizabeth Davis

SculptureCenter also presented "Vide-Poche" (from the French "empty pocket") featuring the works of Michele Abeles, Samuel Clagnaz, Isabelle Cornaro, Miles Huston, Charles Mayton, Valerie Snobeck, curated by Fionn Meade.

"Vide Poche": Isabelle Cornaro | Photo Credit: Elizabeth Davis

Exhibition Dates:
January 24 - March 28,2011
SculptureCenter
44-19 Purves Street
Long lsland City
t 718.361.1750
info@sculpture-center.org
www.sculpture-center.org