Thursday, April 30, 2009

This Weekend (sorry I skipped last weekend)

5.1.09
Meet The Members Benefit Show at The Hexagon
The Hexagon, a community-run gallery and performance space, presents 'Meet the Members,' a group exhibition featuring new artwork by Hexagon Members. This exhibition is an open house to showcase visual art in the spirit of Baltimore's dynamic DIY community.

Featured member artists are: Josh Atkins, Krista Faist, Andrew Geddes, Alex Ghinger, Carlos Guillen, Anna Jiongco, Torin Nash, Phuong Pham, Miguel Sabogal, Rick Weaver, and Marty Weishaar.

May 1 - May 29, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday May 1, 2009 pm

The Hexagon
1825 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21201
www.hexagonspace.com


5.2.09
DECOY at The Creative Alliance
Featuring the work of Paul Jeans, Michael Mansfield, Kendra Hebel, Robert Horvath, Jenny Mullins & Kimberly Rupert
Curated by Erin Cluley

May 2, 2009- May 30, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 2, 2009 6-8 pm

Creative Alliance @ The Patterson
3134 Eastern Ave.
Baltimore MD 21224
www.creativealliance.org

5.3.09

Je Ne Sais Quoi at Sub-Basement Studios
Featuring work by these ten women artists:
Melissa Dickenson, Cara Ober, Gloria Askin, Nancy Valk, Marcia Ray Wolfson, Michelle Woodward, Edna Emmet, Rachel Rotenburg, Peggy Fox & Andrea Guay

Curated by Mimi Kapiloff

May 3, 2009- June 7, 2009
Opening Reception: Sunday May 3, 2009 2-4 pm

Sub-Basement Artist Studios
118 North Howard St.
Baltimore MD 21201
www.subbasementartiststudios.com

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

This Weekend

4.16.09

Christopher Saah: New Work
&
Landscapes into Art
featuring: David Brewster, Sukey Bryan, Henry Coe, Robert Dash, Paul Hotvedt, Eugene Leake, Raoul Middleman, Fairfield Porter, Giorgos Rigas, and Thom Sawyer
simultaneous exhibitions at C. Grimaldis Gallery
April 16- May 16, 2009
Opening Recption: Thursday April 16, 2009 6-8 pm

C. Grimaldis Gallery
523 N. Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21201
www.cgrimaldisgallery.com


Painted Space
at The Light
Group Painting Exhibition- work by MICA students Jon Marshalik, Kate Dervishi, Leah Caplan, Travis Hinkle. Curated by MICA professor Sangram Majumdar.
April 16th-May 17th, 2009
Opening reception: April 16th, 2009 7-9pm

The Light
1015 North Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21201
www.atthelight.org


4.17.09


HAIR

MICA students, faculty, and staff will perform HAIR: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, a play that celebrates the heyday of the 1960s hippie movement, Tuesday, April 14-Sunday, April 19
Performances takes place Tuesday-Thursday, April 14-16 at 8 p.m.; Friday, April 17 at 7 p.m.; Saturday, April 18, special midnight show; and Sunday, April 19, 2 p.m.

Tickets:
Opening night special, $5 for everyone; all other shows, $10, students with ID; $15, everyone else. Tickets are on sale at the MICA store, 1200 W. Mount Royal Ave. For more information, call Judy Lidie at 410-225-2350 or e-mail jlidie@mica.edu.
BBOX, the performance space of MICA's new Gateway building
1601 W. Mount Royal Ave.


4.18.09


CityLit Festival VI @ the Pratt

On Saturday, April 18, visit the Enoch Pratt Free Library to celebrate the written word at the Sixth Annual CityLit Festival. Enjoy a full day of readings by contemporay writers, author panels, writing workshops, and a lively book market filled with exhibitors. Guest speakers include Junot Diaz, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Click here to see a full schedule of CityLit Festivities.

For information on other upcoming events at the Pratt, visit www.PrattLibrary.org.


Marquee Ball 2009 GOLDFINGER!

at The Creative Alliance
Sat April 18 9pm.
$35, $25 mbrs in adv, $40 at door. Incl. performances, silent auction, beer, wine, hors d’oeuvres. Cash bar f/ liquor. Suave mod or Bond Formal Glam attire.

w/ Junkyard Saints, Spytastic Vaudeville & Burlesque, Peter Pan Award to Todd Lesser, Live & Let Buy Silent Auction, & other Solid Gold Silliness

for more info visit www.creativealliance.org

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

The 2009 Sondheim Prize Finalists are...

drum roll....

2009 Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize Finalists:

BDC (Baltimore Development Cooperative), Baltimore, MD
Leslie Furlong, Baltimore, MD
Ryan Hackett, Kensington, MD
Jessie Lehson, Baltimore, MD
Molly Springfield, Washington, DC
Karen Yasinsky, Baltimore, MD

The winner of the $25,000 prize will be announced during an award ceremony on Saturday, July, 11 at 7pm at The Baltimore Museum of Art, located at 10 Art Museum Drive.

Check below for last week's interview with Molly Springfield.

Hopefully I can post interviews with the rest of the finalists soon...

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Studio Visit with Molly Springfield

Molly Springfield is a Washington, DC based artist. She received her MFA from the University of California at Berkeley in 2004, and was in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2006. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art Papers, The Village Voice, The New Yorker, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Chicago Tribune. She is currently a semi-finalist for the Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize for 2009.
interviewed by Mindy Hirt

MH: Could you tell me a bit about where you have been and how you got to the point you're at now in your career?


MS: Well, I went to graduate school at UC Berkley and I graduated in 2004. I lived in DC before going to grad school. My partner and I came back to DC and I have been here ever since. I taught at George Washington University and MICA the first three years after grad school. Now, I'm just working full time in the studio. During that period from grad school I just worked hard in the studio as well as teaching, tried to get my work out as much as I could. I built up enough momentum that I felt like I could do it full time. So that's what I've been doing the past couple years.

MH: Can you talk a little about your drawing process?

MS: Well, in very general terms I start by doing a lot of research identifying text or subject that I want to work from. Then I pull all of that stuff together either make photocopies that I'm going to draw directly from or make copies or clippings that I'll use as less direct subject matter. Then I make drawings from there. It's pretty straight forward- what you see is basically what I'm drawing from.

A comparison of one of Molly's drawings (left) to the photocopy it was drawn from (right).

MH: So you plan the drawing out ahead of time?

MS: I don't want to say it's regimented because that's not how I feel about it. It might appear that way but there is something about doing a 1:1 equivalent of whatever it is that I'm drawing that's important to me. That process of doing that 1:1 correspondence is something that drives me to make work. Any kind of work. So, it might appear to be really contained or constrained but that's not the way it works for me.

These are two drawings of an empty photo copy. It was a reaction to one of her previous projects.

MH: How do you go about deciding the text you're going to draw?

MS: When I first started drawing photocopies the texts were usually about language in some way. Whether it was language and visual art or language and philosophy. So that's kinda where I started from; an interest in language. How language has a visual presence as well as a semantic presence. Its kinda evolved from there. I have a pretty broad intellectual interest. So, I like to pull from all kinds of different things, whether its conceptual art from the 60's or 70's or the history of photography. Right now I'm researching the proto-history of the internet and how early 20th century models prefigured the internet as we know it today. So, I have a wide range of interests in terms of subject matter and why I chose things.


MH: Do you think that you might start drawing from the internet or is there something specific about the book?

MS: I won't say never because you never know what you're going to end up doing down the road. Right now I don't think that I would draw from the internet. I still think that there has to be some kind of tangible thing, maybe if I did I would be printing out from the browser and then drawing the print out. Or something like that. There has to be some kind of physical correspondence and the internet is a completely unphysical thing.

MH: Is that what the book gives you, that physical correspondence?

MS: Yes, the book is an object that has a lot of weight to it, whether it's emotional or historical. It's a nostalgic object for a lot of people in a lot of different ways. That's defiantly one of the things that attracts me to actual books. I'm not one of those people who thinks that books are gonna disappear.


MH: Can you talk a little bit about the importance of your hand in your drawings?

MS: Yeah, a lot of people don't see the hand in the drawings and it is there and that's important to me. If it wasn't important to me then I wouldn't be drawing them I would be re photographing them or just putting up the photocopy itself. So, the imperfections that I introduce by drawing them by hand are very important.
And they are there. If we had a drawing and the original photocopy it would be pretty obvious that it's not a perfect copy I don't try to hide the little flaws that happen in that process I want them to occur.

MH: What's your next project?

MS: Well, like I mentioned before I'm researching these kinds of pre-internet organizational systems. I think I'm going to be doing something along those lines. It's pretty early in the process. I've been wanting to try some sculptural ideas out and I think this might be a vehicle for me to do that. I took a sculpture class in undergrad because I had to for my major and I've done a little here and there but never in a really serious way. So it's kind of a new thing for me that's going to require a lot of education and research. Probably some collaborating with people who know about these kinds of things. But it will defiantly also include drawing. Right now I'm thinking that the drawing and sculpture will be combined in some way. I'm still trying to get my head wrapped around the actual history and the technology and all the sources that I have been collecting. I'm ready to try something new.


MH: Are there any specific goals in your career that you haven't reached yet but would like to?

MS: It would be really nice to have some kind of museum show within the next few years of some of the projects that I have recently finished. It doesn't have to be MOMA. You don't not get things by not trying. I would also like to do some more residencies, kind of longer term that would allow me to really make a dent is some of this new stuff that I'm getting into. My last major project of my Proust translation there are plans to publish it in book form and I'm going to have a book design ready to go it's just a matter of finding a publisher and/or funding to publish the book. I would really like to see that happen in the next couple years.

MH: Can you talk a little bit more about the book?

MS: It's basically, not a catalog so much as a book version of my drawn Proust translation and it would have a reproduction of every drawing. You would be able to read it like a book rather than view it as the drawings in the gallery. A poet named Bill Berkson has written an essay that would be in the book. I wrote an introduction for the drawings which became another drawing for the show version of the project. Because the drawing is one piece, and whoever buys it has to buy the entire set of 28 drawings, I wanted there to be a more democratic version that could distribute the project to people. And would also give people an opportunity to read it like a book, like a real new translation. Which is the concept of the project that I've made this new translation.


MH: If you could interview any local artist, who would it be?

MS: Noelle Tan. She has a show up at civilian right now. I really love her work. In fact she had a show at DCAC a couple years ago maybe more than that and I saw it. Her photographs were amazing, they look almost like drawings and I think that's why I was attracted to them in the first place. They have a kind of drawn quality to them in the way they are exposed. I would love to meet her and talk to her about her work.

To See More:

www.mollyspringfield.com

Mindy Hirt's work will be on view at The Katzen Art Museum
as part of the first year MFA exhibition April 11- 19, 2009

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

This Weekend

4.2.09
6th Annual Transmodern Festival
Four Days of Avant Performance, Installation,
Sound, Film, Mayhem, Ecstasy, and Radical Culture!
April 2nd thru April 5th, 2009

THURSDAY April 2nd, 8:00pm The festival kicks off at the Whole Gallery with an opening ceremony performance by artist Jenny Graf

H&H Building
405 W. Franklin Street
Baltimore MD
www.transmodernfestival.org/2009/

4.3.09

Out of Order at Maryland Art Place
Annual art auction & gala featuring the work of hundreds of area artists (including yours truly)
Friday April 3, 2009 8pm

Maryland Art Place
Power Plant Live!
8 Market Place, Suite 100
Baltimore, MD 21202


Conventionalized Calculations for Primary Structures at the Hexagon Gallery
The work of Andrew Geddes, April 3 to April 24, 2009
Opening reception: April 3, 7 PM to 8 PM
Closing reception: April 24 from 6:30 PM to 8 PM

The Hexagon
Community-run Gallery and Performance Space
1825 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21201
www.hexagonspace.com


"Hunger"
- A New Film by Steve McQueen
at Landmark's E Street Cinema (555 11th Street NW)
Washington DC
Premier: Friday April 3, 2009 1:45, 4:15, 7:00, 9:30, 11:40 pm
www.landmarktheatres.com