Thursday, March 31, 2011

we pity the fool who misses April's First Saturday art openings

We pity the fool who misses April's First Saturday art openings
Crawl Space
by JOE NOLAN
Nashville Scene

First Saturday Art Crawl
6 to 9 p.m. Saturday, April 2, downtown

April showers bring May flowers, but spring has already blossomed in Nashville and the first big art season of the year is upon us. Saturday's Art Crawl promises moving images, Japanese treasures, a floating butterfly and a stinging bee — no fooling!

Dance Sequence, Amelia Winger-Bearskin's new show at Twist, features a projected video/song installation alongside 200 tiny paintings mounted in water. Winger-Bearskin, an assistant professor of studio art at Vanderbilt, also has a piece in the Material Apparatus show currently on display at Cheekwood's Video Installation Galleries. Titled "AmbienTTransformation," it shows the artist revealing her face beneath layers of black paint, gold leaf and honey. If "AmbienTTransformation" is about the subconscious mind, Dance Sequence is pure id. Winger-Bearskin promises surprises for early attendees at Twist this Saturday.

Twist Etc. is teaming up with COOP Gallery to present Neon Sigh, a collaborative exhibit by Adam Henry and Emily Mae Smith. Smith is currently visiting artist-in-residence at both Vanderbilt and Watkins. Incorporating painting, sculpture, drawing and collage, Neon Sigh attempts to reorder the perception of expectation and desire, dovetailing nicely with Matt Christy's work from last month's Twist Etc. show. The curtain that separates the two spaces has been removed to create "Twistcooparcadia," spilling from Arcade 75 into Arcade 77.

Blend Studio co-founder Ben Vitualla has taken on more of his gallery's programming duties, and now he finds himself with a fight on his hands. This month's collaboration between local artists Andee Rudloff and Lindsey Bailey and filmmaker Allie Sultan is a return to form for Blend, and these ladies are ready to rumble. Composed of a number of multimedia pieces and a video installation, Floats Like a Butterfly Stings Like a Bee: Who controls Art? fits in nicely with Blend's community-conscious ethos, engaging viewers in a dialogue about creative control. Saturday's audience can purchase specially printed wooden nickels to cast their vote. The nickels can be kept as souvenirs or donated to a number of creative causes.

Last month, we mentioned that we'd like to see galleries consider leaving exhibits up for more than a month. Estel Gallery has never fully embraced the 30-days-and-out scheduling, and this month's repeat of Just So... will give art-abouts a second chance to see this group show of work by four contemporary painters: Mark Bradley-Shoup, Claire Brassil, Kelly Williams and Chris Scarborough. If you missed this in March, take advantage on Saturday. Also, be sure to stop by Tennessee Art League for something completely different: A timely show given recent events, The Dolls of Japan – Shapes of Prayer, Embodiments of Love includes 72 examples from various Japanese doll-making traditions, allowing viewers to experience the regions, culture and customs of The Land of the Rising Sun through the decorative figures.

On Fifth Avenue proper, Tinney Contemporary is opening a show of mixed-media drawings, prints and paintings by Patricia Bellan-Gillen, Stealing Stories. Bellan-Gillen sets her meticulous zoological illustrations within surreal, pastel dreamscapes. Rymer Gallery opens What We Carry, a solo exhibit by Minneapolis-based figurative painter Luke Hillestad. Hillestad often explores still lifes, but his narrative portraits are the highlight of the show. The Arts Company's From Slow Road to China to Fashion and Beyond showcases work by fashion photographer Drew Doggett placing his commercial work alongside documentary photographs from his trek through China. The gallery will also be hosting the Fifth Annual Nashville Film Festival Official Preview in their Avant-Garage space. Pop in, knock the rust off your red carpet strut, hobnob with film fest big wigs and enjoy sneak previews of this year's NaFF offerings on the big screen.

And make sure to stop at the Arcade's BelArt Gallery, which is showing Marleen De Waele-De Bock's latest creations. Her newest paintings are inspired by Nashville's recent (and lovely) springtime weather, which looks like it's here to stay, y'all.

Happy crawling!

Email arts@nashvillescene.com.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

installation will invite art crawl crowd inside

Installation will invite art crawl crowd inside
4:40 PM, Mar. 25, 2011 |

Stills from Amelia Winger-Bearskin's video series Dance Sequence, which will be shown Saturday at Twist Art Gallery as part of the monthly art crawl.



Written by
MiChelle Jones
for The Tennessean
FILED UNDER
Entertainment
Entertainment Arts & Culture


What: Dance Sequence, new installation by Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Where: Twist Art Gallery, Arcade #73
When: Saturday through April 30; opening reception 6-9 p.m. Saturday during the First Saturday Art Crawl.
Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Thursday-Friday; 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday.
Admission: Free
Contact: 1-888-535-5286 or www.twistartgallery.com
There's going to be one thing missing from performance artist Amelia Winger-Bearskin's upcoming installation at Twist Art Gallery, and that is live performance art.

Sort of.

Instead of staging a performance featuring herself, Winger-Bearskin's Dance Sequence will engage next week's First Saturday Art Crawl crowd in a display blurring the line between performer and audience.

"I want it to be a space that people feel like they are stepping inside of rather than it being a window that they're looking into," she says.

Dance Sequence is a series of one- to four-minute videos of scenes taken from film musicals, each accompanied by an original piece of music or sound created by Winger-Bearskin. The Twist show will include 10 of the 15 videos in the series.

The installation will continue in Twist's second room with 150 small paintings in gold frames. Ranging from palm-size to 5 inches square, these enamel on glass paintings were conceived as "slices" of the videos similar to single cells of an animated production. Winger-Bearskin also likens them to slide-mounted cells prepared for viewing under a microscope.

Playing with light

Winger-Bearskin originally planned a live performance component featuring either herself or dancers following her choreography and wearing costumes onto which the videos would be projected. She abandoned that approach after a trial run in a space similar to that of Twist proved to be a tight fit.

She decided instead to project the videos so that they will alternately be obscured and highlighted by audience members moving in the space.

"It'll be like a stretched video image that will encompass the room with the lenses, mirrors and crystals so it creates a scattering of the light," Winger-Bearskin explains. "I've created videos that I purposely did symmetrically so that no matter how they're stretched or reflected they always look the way I intended. Even if you were to flip it around backwards or turn it upside down it'll look the same."

In the case of Twist, they'll create a domed effect in the gallery's first room, resulting in a space filled with kaleidoscopic images of dance, from Bollywood-esque numbers to classical ballet.

Projecting art, experiences

Part of the idea for this installation of Dance Sequence is to re-create the feeling of light experienced at concerts or in dance clubs, along with the freedom of movement that comes with being in such spaces.

"Could we experience something like that not in a drunken hookup environment; could we experience something like that in an art experience where we're allowed to move our bodies in different ways but without it having the connotations of a club," she wondered.

On the other hand, she also wants to play off the club-like atmosphere that often develops during the art crawl.

"It feels like a Mardi Gras or something, and I'd like the performance to highlight that that is a performance," she says.

She's also hoping to re-create one of her earliest memories of art, that of the beading, silverwork and other art classes she took from the elders in her community of Native Americans.

"When you go to a powwow and people dance in a circle, you see this scattered prismatic light everywhere because all the light shines off their very sparkly costumes. I'm hoping to replicate that so it feels more like a powwow of images and sound than a discothèque," she says. "It's really beautiful to see those as light patterns rather than just on fabric."

Friday, March 11, 2011

dance Your 'Art Out Art Show & Dance Party at Mercy Lounge

Dance Your 'Art Out Art Show & Dance Party at Mercy Lounge
When: Wed., March 16, 9 p.m.
Price: $5
Imagine if the most crowded gallery at the Art Crawl suddenly broke into dance. That’s the sort of hypothetical Dance Your ’Art Out is attempting to make a reality. It’s a party for the art crowd that features installations by Twist Gallery — who are bringing along work by artists Jaime Raybin and Ryan Hogan — at Mercy Lounge, while instrumental hip-hop from Get-Got and sets from DJs Orig and Potamus are bound to make even the most introverted art wallflower break a sweat. Think of it as a social experiment to discover what happens when art nerds rock out. It’s a great idea: There’s tons of overlap between the dance crowd and the art world, and those stragglers who’ve been waiting in the outer rings of the art/dance Venn Diagram have a great excuse to mingle. There’s a $5 cover, and all proceeds go to the Leukemia Lymphoma Society.
— Laura Hutson
Slideshow Mercy Lounge
BROADWAY/ THE GULCH/ MUSIC ROW/ WEST END 1 Cannery Row
615-251-3020
www.mercylounge.com

Monday, March 7, 2011

Twist Art Gallery April 2011

Twist Art Gallery presents: April 2 -23 ,2011

Amelia Winger -Bearskin in space #73
Solo Show: Dance Sequence at Twist Gallery, Nashville, TN

to view Amelia's videos ahead of time go here:
http://www.studioamelia.com/dancesequence.html

Amelia will also have up installation work...

bio: Amelia Winger-Bearskin is currently an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Vanderbilt University in the area of Video and Performance Art, in Nashville, Tn.

She was classically trained as an Opera Singer in Rochester NY at the Eastman conservatory of music, and then finished her Undergraduate degree at George Mason University in 2000. While at GMU she studied sculpture and time based art and received her BAIS in Performance Art. She went on to do her MFA in Transmedia (time based art) at University of Texas at Austin in 2008. She was in the group show Art in the Age of the Internet at the Chelsea Art Museum in 2007 and was a featured video and performance artist at Basel in Miami, Scope at the Lincoln Center and other art fairs consistently since 2007 as an artist at large for the perpetual art machine [PAM]. She has been focusing her performances primarily on Asian performance festivals this year as she finds that regionally Asia has created a unique method of support for Performance Art, she has performed at the 10th Annual OPEN ART Performance Art festival in Beijing, China, The Performance Art Network PANAsia '09 in Seoul, South Korea, the TAMA TUPADA 2010 Media and Performance festival in the Philippines and and she has been invited to perform as part of the GwangJu International Human Rights Performance Art Festival in Gwanju, South Korea in Fall 2010.



She is the Editor-in-Chief of Art Art Zine a new online publication of art and society for the South.



Twist etc...


Adam Henry and Emily Mae Smith present Neon Sigh: a new collaborative exhibition between the New York based artists on view for the first time in Nashville. Working through diverse media such as painting, sculpture, drawing, and collage, the artists manipulate found objects and imagery to reorder the perception of expectation and desire.


Smith is currently Lecturer in the Art Department at Vanderbilt University. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s Visual Arts MFA program and has exhibited nationally and abroad, most recently at Portugal Arte- the Biennial international exhibition held in Lisbon. Henry holds a MFA from the Yale School of Art and is Visiting Artist-in-Residence at both Vanderbilt University and Watkins College of Art and Design. His work was recently shown in New York’s Blackston Gallery and was also featured in Portugal Arte in Lisbon. Both artists have been prominently featured in publications such as the New York Times and The Village Voice.

The show runs from April 2- 23 at the combined spaces of COOP and Twist Etc Galleries, presented as Twistcooparcadia for the duration of the exhibition in Downtown Nashville’s Historic Arcade Building. # 75 & 77.

The Opening Reception will be held from 6-9 pm on Saturday April 2nd during the First Saturday Gallery Crawl.


Twist Art Gallery
73 Arcade
Nashville, TN 37219

phone: 888-535-5286

Jacqueline Kirby, Director: jacqueline@twistartgallery.com
Beth Gilmore, Curator: beth@twistartgallery.com


Gallery hours
Thursday and Friday 11 - 5
Saturday 11 - 3
Join us the first Saturday of every month
6 to 9 p.m. for the First Saturday Gallery Crawl

Friday, March 4, 2011

the March Art Crawl looks a whole lot like the February version — and that's a good thing



Nashville Scene
March 03, 2011 ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT » ART

The March Art Crawl looks a whole lot like the February version — and that's a good thing
by JOE NOLAN


ARTWORK BY ELENA GRAJEK


First Saturday Art Crawl
6 to 9 p.m. Saturday, March 5, downtown

This month's First Saturday brings March to a crawl.

February offered an intriguing roster of exhibits, and many downtown galleries are sticking with last month's programming. This is not a bad thing. The March Art Crawl promises unexpected surprises along with space for reflection.

The show at Twist is a highlight. Who can't relate to Anxious Days' themes of weird weather, terror alerts, looming pandemics and economic instability? Curated by artist/educator Brady Haston, the group printmaking exhibit addresses contemporary dilemmas using techniques that originated in the ancient Far East. How does that Chinese curse go? Oh, yeah: May you live in interesting times. ...

At Twist Etc., Matt Christy's Trust Us God We Got This finds the artist painting breasts on brassiere advertisements, effectively undressing his models by covering their printed images. Christy's new work includes a number of pieces that make use of cardboard, silk, notebook paper, fabric and ribbon. The show expresses a playful cynicism, exposing the urge to death that lies at the heart of beauty. William Blake called this urge an "invisible worm." In Christy's work, the worms are on display.

With The Fulcrum Lost Its Feather, wife-and-husband artists Shu-Mei Chan and Daniel Evans create a site-specific installation at COOP Gallery, improvising an atmosphere with ceramics and other materials. Part love letter, part misunderstanding — we're not sure what to expect, but COOP's consistent commitment to contemporary art in a variety of media is the medicine that makes the Crawl a thought-provoking journey and not just another cheap date.

Mir Gallery's new show features "over 20 of the wildest pop surrealist, fantasy and lowbrow artists in this no-holds-barred, kick-in-your-teeth group art event." You had us at surrealist! Curated by Brandt Hardin and Miranda Herrick, Versus fills Mir with the comic and the cosmic, serving as a battlefield for unlikely adversaries. We're particularly looking forward to Billy Tackett's "Frankenstein vs. The Rubik's Cube." Hardin is also among the February Crawl artists held over at the Tennessee Art League. In addition, Studio A Group will feature new faces in TAL's Second Floor Gallery, including Annie Tagg, Arlene Bates, Peach McComb, Susan Walker and Wendy Latimer.

Estel Gallery opens a group show curated by Jerry Dale McFadden. Just So includes Mark Bradley-Shoup, Claire Brassil, Kelly Williams and Chris Scarborough, whose recent paintings may be the biggest surprise of Saturday's Crawl. While Scarborough still plays with pop and anime elements, the artist reduces his new figures to crystalline blasts of geometric abstraction. We expect the unexpected from Scarborough, but this show has us feeling excited about what's coming next.

The Arts Company is the only Fifth Avenue gallery opening a new show. While Norman Lerner's mid-20th century photographs remain, the gallery is also presenting a show that may struggle to live up to its helter-skelter title — The Floating World: A Tribute to The Beatles features tar paper paintings embedded with miniature sculptures. This Fab tribute is the work of Tres Taylor and Xander Booker. Each piece incorporates an iPod mini queued to a Beatles song. And you thought letting Ringo sing was zany.

Tinney Contemporary will continue its show of Brett De Palma's collages, and The Rymer Gallery will host an encore reception for Gordon Chandler's figurative metal sculptures. Some may find this repetition disappointing, but we find it refreshing, and this slow-down highlights an important point. While the Art Crawl has become an unqualified success, 30 days isn't necessarily enough time for a show to find its audience. Early converts may wish to see an exhibit several times, and many shows take their bows just as word-of-mouth really starts to build. The monthly novelty of the Art Crawl is one of its strengths — but when it comes to scheduling potentially exceptional shows, we ask curators to gaze into their crystal balls, take a deep breath, and step away from the calendar. Again, William Blake has some relevant words of advice: "Eternity is in love with the productions of time."

We'll be spending some of ours downtown on Saturday night.

Happy crawling!

Email arts@nashvillescene.com.

Thursday, March 3, 2011