MFA Open Studios!

Thursday, November 11th, Tyler School of Art invites the public to attend its second annual MFA Open Studio Night. Graduate students in all departments will open their studio doors to discuss their practice and work in addition to highlighting Tyler’s new facilities on Temple’s North Philadelphia campus. Inaugurated in 2009, the Tyler School of Art building is located at 2001 N. 13th Street. MFA Open studio night will coincide with the second Thursday reception at another premiere North Philadelphia Arts venue, The Crane Arts Building, located at Cecil B. Moore and 2nd Street. Tyler’s MFA Artists working in Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Printmaking, Fibers, Ceramics, Glass, Metals, and Graphic Design look forward to engaging with the community in an evening of multi-disciplinary exploration and art practice conversation.

Form and content are deftly bridged in Marc Swanson's visual vocabulary, as the artist's carefullyconsidered materials complement the deeply personal narratives that run throughout his work.Swanson was born in Connecticut in 1969 and grew up in rural New Hampshire where his father,a deer hunter and former Marine, attempted to instill in his son the rugged-yet somewhatromanticized- outdoorsman traditions of New England. Elements of East Coast wilderness informmuch of Swanson's work, juxtaposed with theatrical flourishes (glitter, rhinestones) and a senseof personal mythology and nostalgia.Swanson has lived in Boston and San Francisco, where he became involved in various facets of gay subculture, experimenting in art, music, fashion, and performance. He studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 2000 and received an MFA at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in 2004. Swanson currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. He has had solo or two-person exhibitions at the Saint Louis Art Museum; Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago; and Bellwether Gallery, New York. He has been included in exhibitions at MoMA P.S.1, The Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, The Seattle Art Museum and The Miami Art Museum. Swanson currently has a solo exhibition on view at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri and has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston in 2011.

For more information, please visit tylerartrent.tumblr.com, or send us an email at tylergradblog@gmail.com

OPEN VIDEO CALL

Philadelphia artists Matthew Suib and Nadia Hironaka host this year’s Open Video Call, an evening of videos by area artists and filmmakers juried by local curators:
Claire Iltes, Fleisher/Ollman Gallery
Jesse Pires, International House
and Adelina Vlas, The Philadelphia Museum of Art

Submission guidelines: Send DVD, CV, and artist statement by October 29th to OVC, ICA, 118 S 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Machete Group // ON NEGATION

Saturday 23 October, 8:00–10:00 PM

DISCUSSION
To inaugurate the Machete Group’s new series, Thinking the Present, Part 2: Figures of Critique, we shall consider the contemporary relevance of negation within the field of cultural production. The idea of negation remains a source of inspiration for artistic practices that aspire to critique. Against what Herbert Marcuse termed “affirmative culture,” or art which secures only an inner freedom while affirming the actual conditions of existence, the majority of critical art movements aim to negate the lived practices of contemporary politics and culture. But how do we define negation? And how exactly does the negation occur if lived experience continues in a field beyond culture’s control? Is negation truly desirable, or are there other more powerful paradigms for politically engaged aesthetic practice today? The discussion will be framed by readings from Theodor Adorno, Guy Debord and Alain Badiou and introduced by Avi Alpert and Alexi Kukuljevic.

ABOUT THE MACHETE GROUP
The Machete Group organizes workshops, mini-seminars, reading groups, screenings and other events open to the public that have as their general focus the intersection between artistic practice and its theoretical articulation. The guiding proposition of the Machete Group is the claim that practice without theory is empty and theory without practice is blind. The goal of the center is to engender a rigorous and open atmosphere outside a strictly academic context that encourages autodidacticism, a willingness to question all forms of mastery and specialization, and the desire to think critically about artistic practice in an historically, socially and politically astute manner.

The Machete Group is an international consortium of artists and intellectuals based at Marginal Utility Gallery in Philadelphia. The Group runs the magazine Machete, offers seminars on current issues in the arts, and is invested in developing new collective forms of artistic and intellectual practice. Its members include Avi Alpert, David Dempewolf, Etienne Dolet, Ludwig Fischer, Alexi Kukuljevic, Holly Martins, Gabriel Rockhill, Theodore Tucker, and Yuka Yokoyama. The Machete Group seminars are monthly workshops on current issues in the arts run by Alexi Kukuljevic, Gabriel Rockhill and Avi Alpert (as of fall 2010).

Brent Green is a self-taught animated filmmaker and artist who lives and works in Cressona, PA. His films have been shown at the Sundance Film Festival (2006-9), MoMA, the Getty Center, Warhol Museum, IFC Center, the Walker Arts Center, the Kitchen, Hammer Museum, EMPAC and a ton of other museums and festivals around the world. He’s had solo shows at the Andrew Edlin Gallery (NYC), Bellwether Gallery (NYC), the Sculpture Center (Cleveland), CAM St. Louis (St. Louis, MO), Site Santa Fe (Santa Fe, NM), The Berkeley Art Museum, Matrix program, with upcoming solo shows at the ASU Art Museum (Tempe, AZ), DiverseWorks (Houston, TX) and HallWalls (Buffalo, NY). Green’s artwork is represented by the Andrew Edlin Gallery, NYC and he is a 2005 Creative Capital grantee. His first feature, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, is currently on a screening tour.

Alumni Painters Jenna Weiss & Ryan McCartney at UArts

Michael Webb Lecture

Michael Webb, an instructor at Cooper Union, had a project he designed in his fourth year at Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster) exhibited at a MOMA New York show called "Visionary Architecture" in 1961. He was invited by Peter Cook to be part of an assortment of young architects known as the Archigram group, often called "the Beatles of Architecture." In 2006, the group was awarded the Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architecture. Part of the Architecture Lecture Series. Sponsored by Architecture and funded with General Activity Fees.

Wednesday, October 13, 6 pm, Room B-004

Alumni painter Peter Fox at Nuartlink

UNRAVELING ABSTRACTION
Reception and exhibition opening on September 25, 6-8pm

Nuartlink

19B Post Road (entrance on Parker Harding Plaza @ river)

Westport, CT

Hours : Tuesday through Sunday, 11 am till 6 pm and by appointment. For more information please call 203-858-2067, or email info@nuartlink.com.

Mudslingers (Tyler's Ceramics Club) PRESENTS:

x larger

Abby Donovan

Lecture and open forum

Donovan is coming to speak next Thursday the 14th at 1pm. The event is public and we're encouraging all departments to attend. She creates ceramic sculpture but many of her works are performance and video based. She is very versatile and we think her work appeals to everyone. We will meet in the Smart classroom in the green hallway and have an open forum after the lecture.

EVERYONE IS WELCOME!

Mark Shetabi at Jeff Bailey in NYC

Jeff Bailey Gallery is pleased to present Mark Shetabi: The Apparent Motion of Stationary Objects. In paintings and sculpture, Shetabi explores the grey area between representations of time, scale and space.

The small painting, My Favorite Year, depicts the earth in 1990 as seen from the Voyager 1 spacecraft. The photograph was taken at a distance of almost four billion miles. It is an image that the astronomer Carl Sagan made famous, characterizing the earth as "a pale blue dot". Sagan said, "Look again at the dot. That's here. That's home. That's us....all of human history has happened on that tiny pixel.”

Using this image as a point of departure, Shetabi presents the viewer with a variety of familiar objects, both large and small, seen from up close and from far away. A monochromatic palette in subdued tones links one image to the next.

A 1970s encyclopedia and old natural history catalogues served as source material for some of the works. Two paintings by Shetabi feature dinosaur skeletons presented in period museum settings. In Afterimage, Brontosaurus, the dinosaur stands on four legs with its tail dragging behind it. In reference books and memory, these creatures remain fixed in their time, even as our knowledge of them has changed. What were once accepted models take on new lives as relics.

Sculptures of slide projectors (now an obsolete technology), are simply constructed in painted wood with light beams forming a solid mass.

Two large paintings depict oil tankers from up close perspectives. In Tanker in Dry Dock, shipyard workers paint the hull of a massive vessel, their size trumped by the expansive scaffolding surrounding the ship. Tanker Adrift places the viewer on the wet and pitching deck of a huge oil tanker, seemingly adrift in a turbulent sea.

Other images for paintings are taken from internet surfing. Random car crashes are presented as distinct occurrences. As source material, the vastness of the web dwarfs what could once be found in an encyclopedia. By isolating events and objects, Shetabi invites the viewer to ruminate on history and time.

This is Shetabi's third solo exhibition with the gallery. His work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States. He is a 2002 recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Shetabi lives and works in Philadelphia, where he is Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at Tyler School of Art.

For further information or images, please contact the gallery at 212.989.0156 or info@baileygallery.com.

Siebren Versteeg writes computer programs that pull imagery from the Internet based upon subjects or criteria that he specifies. The images then appear on monitors within the gallery space. Although Versteeg determines the types of things that might appear on the monitors, the artwork—like the Internet it draws from—is constantly growing and changing. He has noted, “As the nature of the images presented by the work is random, the artist assumes both all and no responsibility for their presence and content.” This tension between creative control and the endless stream of images is of particular interest to the artist.

Siebren Versteeg was born in 1971 in New Haven, Connecticut. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and the School of Visual Arts, New York. He has had solo exhibitions at the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, Kansas; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Max Protetch Gallery, New York; Bellwether Gallery, New York; Ten in One Gallery, New York; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; and 1R Gallery, Chicago. His work has been exhibited in group shows at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, Maryland; Krannert Art Museum, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois; the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; the National Museum of Art, Czech Republic; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Versteeg lives and works in New York.

http://www.siebrenversteeg.com/

Come one, come all!