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Every week, BR&S picks out a series of gallery events, screenings, exhibitions, performances. Here are our choices for you to go & see this week: • Events Tuesday July 16 & Friday July 20 Gerry Bergstein (left), Paul Stopforth (right) MassArt, Kennedy Bldg 280a, 621 Huntington Ave, Boston Low-Residency MFA Program Summer Lecture Series: Gerry Bergstein, Tuesday July 16 Paul Stopforth, Friday July 20 12:30-1:30pm / Free • • • • • • • • • • • • Saturday July 20 Fourth Wall Projects, 132 Brookline Ave, Boston, MA 02215…
In this episode of Studio Sessions I’ll be talking with Jeremy Olson. Jeremy earned his BFA from the University of Arizona in 2000, and his MFA from NYU Steinhardt in 2009. Primarily a surrealist painter, Jeremy’s recent series plays with the human face in various ways. In some paintings the faces of magazine models are obscured by different items of food, and in others a group of objects can be found to abstractly reference the form of a face in their arrangement. He has also produced some recent sculptural works that through…
The format of the performance art festival, which has been widely developed in other parts of the word for decades, is seeping into the United States. In the past month alone, three large-scale international performance art festivals have taken place in Chicago, Illinois; Miami, Florida; and Rosslyn, Virginia. This month, Brooklyn International Performance Festival, (BIPAF) will occur throughout various venues in Brooklyn, NY. Each festival varies depending on the organizer, context, and alchemy between the participating artists. However, no matter how varied, there is an unspoken etiquette that has allowed this format…
Bruce Myren’s The Fortieth Parallel is a project of western depiction. Rooted in history, it takes cues from historic survey projects and their subsequent rephotographic cousins, Ed Ruscha’s explorations of buildings on Sunset Strip and the New Topographers’ unromantic views of the west. It is an exploration of how to picture the land when the land has already been pictured: a conversation with the past designed to teach us about our present. Myren began to think about the invisible lines that circle our earth at five years old when his father, a…
A hidden factor is present when an artist makes a work of art. That same factor is present when a person looks at art. This factor is plainly visible and easily palpable, but remains largely unconscious and unacknowledged, and that is the body—the artist’s body, my body, your body, our bodies. Rosalyn Driscoll, Breathing Ground, 1992, Handmade paper, wood, cloth, 3.5″ x 20″ x 15″ I arrived at that observation after many years of working as an artist in two dimensions—first painting and then hand papermaking. Then in 1991, I made an…
Last week, BR&S editors Stephanie Cardon and Leah Triplett sat down with Michael Mittelman at his Waltham Street studio in Boston, where, until recently, ASPECT Magazine was published. Mittelman founded ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art in 2003 as a way to investigate and record the genre. Over ten years, Mittelman built the publication into a DVD magazine which published hundreds of artists working around the world. One of those artists was Liz Nofziger, whose work was published in Volume 5, Joie de vivre, and who eventually joined ASPECT as Managing…
Last December singer-songwriter Beck, best known for his songs Loser, Where It’s At, or E-Pro, released his new album Song Reader exclusively as sheet music. To hear the songs, we have to play them. But what sounds easy (if you happen to play any instrument and know how to read sheet music) is actually a complex process literary theorists have long looked at and discussed: the process of interpretation. How do we interpret a text or in this case notated music? How do we arrive at a meaning or our own version…
“It is difficult to recall a gathering as important as this one.” José Mateo did not mince words as he stood behind the podium at one end of the BCA’s Cyclorama. The crowd (of educators, artists, performers, advocates, administrators—affectionately dubbed “hell-raisers” and “troublemakers”) knew why it had gathered: to represent, unify, and organize the city’s creative sector in light of opportunities presented by the election of a new Mayor of Boston, this 5th of November. The non-partisan campaign, tagged #CreateTheVote, is organized by MassCreative, a state-wide advocacy group currently focusing its…