this weekend

11.6.09

Merill Feitell & Maria Chavez @ The LOF/T
Los Solos Series presents it's 3rd installment of performances by groundbreaking female artists.

MERRILL FEITELL (BALTIMORE) Merrill Feitell’s first book, Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes, won the Iowa Award for short fiction. She has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Byrdcliffe, Bread Loaf, and the Taos Writers Conference. Her short stories have appeared in many publications, including the Best New American Voices series and have been short-listed in Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Awards. She teaches in the MFA program at University of Maryland in College Park and is Fiction Editor at Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, and Light Industrial Safety. She has spent the past eight years at work on a novel called Any Minute Now. She lives in Baltimore. http://www.merrillfeitell.com/main.php

MARIA CHAVEZ (NYC) Born in Peru, avant-turntablist Maria Chavez currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. With a collection of new and broken needles that she calls “pencils of sound” and a selection of records, she harnesses the electro-acoustic sounds of vinyl and needle. Chavez made her NYC debut in a duet with Thurston Moore, collaborated with Otomo Yoshihide as part of the 2007 Wien Modern Festival, and recently shared a stage with Pauline Oliveros and Lydia Lunch during Vienna’s Phonofemme Festival 2009. She has performed at San Francisco’s Electronic Music Festival, T.I.T.O., a turntable festival in Berlin, STEIM (Amsterdam) and the Kitchen (NYC), and was an artist-in-residence at Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room in 2006. In June and July, 2008, she was selected to be part of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for a series of performances in and around Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses sculptures at DIA: Beacon. Fellow sound artist and writer Tara Rodgers will include an interview with Chavez in Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound, to be published by Duke University Press in 2009/10. http://www.myspace.com/mariachavez

Friday, November 6, 2009 8:30pm (doors open at 8pm)
The LOF/T
120 W. North Ave.
Baltimore, MD 21201



11.7.09

Torkwase Dyson and Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum @ The Creative Alliance


Artists Torkwase Dyson and Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum live fearlessly in the world as it is, in a state of becoming, where visual culture elides with visual metaphor, and dragons appear as domineering specters of globalized adaptation and alter egos journey bravely through landscapes that are a fusion of myth and autobiographical make-believe.
Dyson, Media Artist in Residence at American University, exhibits nationally and internationally, presents Here Be Dragons, a collection of wall installations, animations and sound design that are dizzying, visionary and political, as if Sun Ra and Chuck D got together with Fela Kuti to make art. Dubbing her practice “The Black Eco Imagination,” Dyson up-cycles bulk goods such as cotton t-shirts, solar panels, belt buckles, earring cards and plastic to address environmental reform alongside economic justice, underground economies, and black visual culture.

Rooted in drawing, but ranging to installation and animation, Pamela Sunstrum charts the hero-quest of her alter-ego Asme (pronounced “AZ-mee”) who embodies selves that are trans-cultural, trans-historical, trans-geographical. In my skin of mirrors and clouds, Asme ventures into the underworld, where the outlines of her being are porous and unfamiliar. Sunstrum was born in Mochudi, Botswana and grew up living in Africa and Southeast Asia. Currently, she is a Resident Artist at The Patterson, exhibiting both nationally and internationally and teaching at the Maryland Institute College of Art. On Thu Dec 3, Dyson and Sunstrum share an evening in the theater, presenting solo works that combine performance, installation, puppetry, video and animation. Click here for more info!

Main Gallery
On view: Nov 7-Dec 19, 2009.
Opening Reception: Sat. Nov 7, 2009 5-7pm.
Performances: Thursday Dec 3, 2009 7:30pm.



The Pendulum, The Pit, and Hope @ Metro Gallery
Metro Gallery presents photographs by artist Natasha Tylea.
This work strives to find the most overlooked or ordinarily mundane subjects and locate the corner where it all gets weird. To witness the irk in life. Little explorations in the moment between a grim reality and a possibly great reality, the space between despair and enlightenment. There is a comfort there, as these sensations are the sustenance of life, but there is also the spook of fate in our bones. The photographs conjure this sensation while giving new light to the spook. There is always a sense of hope in all these mixed emotions, if one resists the whitewashing methods of this America and the dumbing, numbing, narrowing down of letting fear live here. The photographs are carefully conceived in seconds. The work is often composed entirely of painterly moods from hues, stark instances, quaint folks or insect perspectives. The camera for Natasha, lives in this hope and that spook, and channels it by hand.

On View: Nov. 7-Nov. 29, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, Nov. 7, 2009 8pm

11.11.09

New Art Dialogue Series @ MICA
The second season of the Contemporary Museum’s New Art Dialogue Series, a forum for discussion of contemporary art in Baltimore, will begin Wednesday, November 11 at 7 p.m. with Carlos Basualdo, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

A renowned curator of international exhibitions, Carlos Basualdo will share his experiences curating at prestigious international art venues and museums. His most recent work includes the celebrated Bruce Nauman exhibition at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Other projects of note include the exhibitions Structure of Survival, also for the Venice Biennale, and Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany.
The lecture is held in collaboration with the Maryland Institute College of Art, and will be held in MICA’s Falvey Hall, located in the Brown Center at 1300 Mt. Royal Avenue in Bolton Hill.
Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2009 7pm
www.contemporary.org