WMU Photography & Intermedia Course Extension Blog

An introduction to Lars Vilhelmsen’s project The Sandwich Box

The Sandwich Box, having grown out of his earlier artworks, inscribes a new element onto Lars Vilhelmsen’s art practice. The following text explains its evolutionary process, beginning with Lars’ work, How Scandinavian Of Me, The Travellers Secret Box and Scandinavian-t-ransit, and arriving now to The Sandwich Box. There is also an explanation of how The Sandwich Box project will operate, what intentions and concerns will be searched out and examined, and how these will be incorporated into the project.

The Sandwich Box will be ongoing and continuous, and will involve a number of artists on a collaborative level. The resulting collaborative artworks and ongoing project documentation, will be evaluated and published on the www.thesandwichboxsite.org at each stage of the project.

© Toni Hafkenscheid, Grand Canyon, 2008
colour photograph mounted to cintra and plexiglass
Courtesy Birch Libralato Gallery

CONTACT is an annual month long festival of photography that takes place at over 200 venues across the Greater Toronto Area from May 1 - 31. As the largest photography festival in the world, CONTACT has become a premiere cultural event in Toronto with a broad range of international programming. This includes exhibitions, public installations, films, lectures, seminars and workshops. CONTACT participants, whether acclaimed international artists or local emerging photographers, exhibit in a variety of venues, from major public museums to private galleries and many alternative spaces including subway stations, billboards, the airport and city streets.

CONTACT 2008 examines how photography shapes our understanding of the world around us and the enduring role it plays in the preservation of individual and collective memories. A wide range of images – from the epic to the everyday – look beyond the headlines to explore private and social histories.

Between Memory and History: Throughout the years, CONTACT has questioned photography’s ability to represent the truth, explored rapidly increasing global interconnections and celebrated constructed imagery within a photographic culture. Despite its ever evolving conditions, a fundamental characteristic of the medium – its ability to preserve our individual memories and collective histories – at least for the moment, remains unchanged.

Photography has been associated with memory since its invention and memory has long been described as a continuous exchange of images. As we experience the global shift from film to digital technology, will photographic images merely become “memories made easy”? As the increasing participation in CONTACT demonstrates, photography is prevalent throughout our lives, now more then ever before, and wields a complex relationship to human experience.

Featured Exhibitions:

APR 26 - MAY 31
CONFABULATION / SHANGHAI DRAGON
TONI HAFKENSCHEID, LOUISE NOGUCHI
Birch Libralato >>

APR 28 - JUN 6
DREAM CITY OF AMERICA
DAVE FISHER
Scotiabank - Main Banking Hall - Scotia Plaza >>

APR 30 - JUN 8
DRAWN FROM MEMORY
EVAN LEE
Monte Clark Gallery >>

APR 30 - MAY 24
PARKING ON PERSONAL WEBCAMS
CHERYL SOURKES
Peak Gallery >>

APR 30 - MAY 31
SOMMES-NOUS? TENDANCE FLOUE
PASCAL AIMAR, THIERRY ARDOUIN, DENIS BOURGES, GILLES COULON, OLIVIER CULMANN, MAT JACOB, CATY JAN, PHILIPPE LOPPARELLI, BERTRAND MEUNIER, MEYER, FLORE-AëL SURUN, PATRICK TOURNEBOEUF
ALLIANCE FRANCAISE >>

MAY 1 - 31
AUFHEBUNG
ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE
Olga Korper Gallery >>

exhibitions listing continues on CONTACT website

** if you travel into Canada, make sure that you have the proper ID.

Photo Credit: Jackson-Triggs Estate Winery, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario (detail)
KPMB Architects, completion, 2001
Photo credit: Eduard Heuber/Arch Photo Inc.

Museum London presents: Architecture, Sustainability and Local Identity: film and discussion about the future of architecture, suburbia and urban development.

Friday, May 9 at 7:30 pm
FILM SCREENING

Lecture Theatre

Radiant City: A Documentary about Urban Sprawl
Followed by a Q & A with directors Gary Burns and Jim Brown

Venturing into territory both familiar and foreign, directors Gary Burns and Jim Brown turn the documentary genre inside out, crafting a vivid account of life in The Late Suburban Age.

Burns and Brown rummage through a toybox of cultural references, from Jane Jacobs to The Sopranos, to create a provocative reflection on why we live the way we do. Riffing off sitcoms and reality TV, they play fast and loose with a range of cinematic devices to consider what happens when cities get sick and mutate.

Radiant City was recently awarded the Genie for Best Documentary.

Saturday, May 10 at 1 pm
LECTURE

Lecture Theatre

James Howard Kunstler has long been recognized as a fierce critic of suburban sprawl and the high costs associated with an automobile-centric culture. He is the author of The Geography of Nowhere (Simon & Schuster, 1993) and Home from Nowhere (Simon & Schuster, 1996). Most recently, he authored The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.

“The future will require us to build better places, or the future will belong to other people in other societies.”
– James Howard Kunstler

Saturday, May 10 at 3:00 pm
PANEL DISCUSSION

Lecture Theatre

Local Identity and Regional Responses to Sustainable Architecture

Balancing environmental, social, and sustainable design has the potential to transform everyday life and is already reshaping the fields of architecture and product design. This panel discussion will explore such topics as the role architecture plays in defining humanity’s relationship to its physical and cultural context, nationally and with a local focus on the City of London. Among the issues discussed will be contemporary and future urban design, sustainability, the development of green buildings and the protection of heritage streetscapes.

Moderator:
John Nicholson, principle architect with the award winning firm Malhotra, Nicholson and Sheffield Architects Inc.

Panelists:
Brian Dust is an associate architect with the award winning Vancouver firm Neale Staniszkis Doll and Adams Architects.

John McMinn is an associate professor at the University of Waterloo’s School of Architecture. In 1992 he was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Prix de Rome in Architecture. His professional interests include architectural and environmental design, poetic tectonics, contemporary urbanism and vernacular landscapes.

Marco Polo is an assistant professor at Ryerson University and is the editor of The Prix de Rome in Architecture: A Retrospective, published by Coach House Books (2006). Polo’s areas of specialization include Canadian architecture since 1945, regionalism in Canadian Architecture and the cultural dimensions of sustainability.

Together Polo and McMinn curated the exhibition 41 to 66: Regional Responses to Sustainable Architecture, organized by Cambridge Galleries. A version of this exhibition will represent Canada at the prestigious Venice Biennale in Architecture from September 14 to November 23, 2008.

Saturday, May 10, 5:30 to 7:30 pm
COMMUNITY FORUM

Lorraine Ivey Shuttleworth Community Gallery

Community members are invited to discuss the changing landscape of London in a conversation led by City of London urban designer Sean Galloway.

NOTE: All sessions of ARCHITECTURE, SUSTAINABILITY AND LOCAL IDENTITY are offered free of charge, although space is limited. To reserve your ticket please RSVP by calling 519.661.0333. Tickets will be available at the door the day of the program.

Museum London is located at 421 Ridout Street North, London, Ontario. For general information please contact us at 519.661.0333.

Museum London

** if you travel into Canada, make sure that you have the proper ID.

Whitwell Middle School in rural Tennessee is the setting for this documentary about an extraordinary experiment in Holocaust education. Struggling to grasp the concept of 6 million Holocaust victims, the students decide to collect 6 million paper clips to better understand the enormity of the calamity. The film details how the students met Holocaust survivors from around the world and how the experience transformed them and their community.

Hysteria and the Body opens April 18 @ Art Gallery of Windsor

Major international art exhibition looks at stereotypes about women, their bodies and “the female malady”

Organized by the National Gallery of Canada
Art Gallery of Windsor – 401 Riverside Drive West, Windsor, Ontario, N9A 7J1
March 29, – June 15, 2008
Opening Reception at 7 pm on April 18

Featuring some of the most important women artists working today in Europe, Canada and the US, this stunning exhibition looks at the long and troubling association of women and hysteria, which is often based on deeply-rooted stereotypes and assumptions.

In the 19th century, psychiatry deemed hysteria, a functional disturbance of the nervous system, a “female malady”, but since the 1970s, many women artists – and a few men – have mimicked hysteria as a means of empowerment to resist traditional gender roles. The exhibition Hysteria and the Body investigates many related ideas, including the “hysterical” body, stereotypes of femininity, aging, motherhood, and individual identity.

Featuring work by internationally acclaimed artists like Cindy Sherman (American), Louise Bourgeois (French), Annette Messager (French), Jana Sterbak (Canadian), Marina Abramovic (born in Serbia), Pipilotti Rist (Swiss) and Vito Acconci (American), Hysteria includes sculptures, video, prints, drawing and photography. The exhibition seeks to disrupt traditional ways of viewing the figure and our preconceptions of “normal” behaviour.

www.artgalleryofwindsor.com

** if you travel into Canada, make sure that you have the proper ID.

Nicole Miller, MFA Painting Thesis Exhibition

DeVries Student Gallery
Richmond Center for Visual Arts
Opening Reception Monday April 21, 5-9pm

www.nicolevanessamiller.com

There will be installations from the Alternative Process class in the critique spaces in Kohrman and other areas of the studio building. Also in rm 2206 in Kohrman there will be an installation by Jesse Soltis from the Time Based Media class.

All from 5-8pm on Friday 4/18.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Edward Lorenz, the father of chaos theory, died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Wednesday. He was 90.

He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he came up with the scientific concept that small effects lead to big changes, something that was explained in a simple example known as the “butterfly effect.” He explained how something as minuscule as a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil changes the constantly moving atmosphere in ways that could later trigger tornadoes in Texas.

read more

LGA Landing Pattern in Brooklyn

LGA Final Approaches over Queens

Photography is by nature an exploration of time. The blink of an eye may be frozen by the shutter. Or in the case of this series, many minutes or even hours add up to construct a single image punctuated by the paths of commercial airplanes traversing the night skies. These white streaks, the only aspect of the planes visible in the photographs, are created by the landing and navigation lighting on every plane. Each line represents the amount of time it takes a commercial flight to pass through the frame. The work pays respect to pioneering photographers Edward Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey, and their studies of motion, while representing the passage of time in an unfamiliar, challenging, and visually rewarding manner.

In photographing from residential and often marginal areas immediately surrounding large commercial airports, a sense of grace, solitude, and quiet peacefulness is created from the otherwise hectic airport environments. Gone are the long lines, the anxieties, and even the massive planes themselves. The audience is challenged to consider this work as metaphor for our desire for escape and the increasingly interconnected world in which we live. Ultimately, they are asked to reflect on the impact of all of this on the environment.

CRITICAL MASS TOP 50, 2007 - Kevin Cooley

www.kevincooley.net

Richmond Center plasma screens - Replay on 4/15

Congo - Belgium: 1′05″, stereo
Myriam Thyes, DE/CH, 2005

** includes Deanna Morse + animation class from Grand Rapids

Myriam Thyes - Düsseldorf Germany
www.flag-metamorphoses.net

see original post on 17 Days Blog

ART 3560 Web students respond ….. 4/16

Natalieann Rich
Sri Lanka - Thailand

Student flash projects include:

Natalieann Rich: Sri Lanka - Thailand
Stacey Averill: Kiribati - Nauru
Lee Schwingler: Guatemala - Honduras
Michael Sisk: St. Kitts and Nevis - St. Lucia
Whitney Goodell: Panama - Peru
Sonya Mansour: Bahamas - Eritrea

Documentarian Jennifer Baichwal tells the true stories behind the faces of the Kentucky Appalachian inhabitants — once labeled hillbillies — who were originally captured through the camera lens of photographer Shelby Lee Adams 30 years earlier. Baichwal tracks the lives of two families who have each endured their share of heartache throughout their struggle to resist the influence of American popular culture.

Water & Wind: Window, 2007 - 3:49 mins

more information and complete schedule:
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Jacqueline Wilson, BFA Ceramics Thesis Exhibition
Reception April 18, 5-8pm

This project began with my daughter. My seven-year-old daughter loves pink. She wants to wear only pink clothes and only own pink toys and objects. My daughter is not unusual. Most other little girls in the United States and South Korea love pink clothing, accessories and toys. This phenomenon seems widespread among various ethnic groups of children regardless of their cultural backgrounds. This preference is the result of cultural influences and the power of pervasive commercial advertisements such as those for Barbie and Hello Kitty. Through advertising, customers are directed to buy blue items for boys and pink for girls. Blue has become a symbol of strength and masculinity, while pink symbolizes sweetness and femininity.

To make The Pink and Blue Project series, I visited children’s rooms, where I displayed their possessions in an effort to show the viewer the extent to which children and their parents, knowingly or unknowing, are influenced by advertising and popular culture.

CRITICAL MASS TOP 50, 2007 - Jeongmee Yoon

In case you missed the campus lecture - Batik Lecture @ the KIA
April 15, 2008 - 12:15 pm

Kalamazoo Institute of Arts
314 S. Park St
Kalamazoo MI 49007

Opera Jawa!
Kalamazoo Premiere
April 15, 2008 - 5:30pm - 2008 Richmond Center

Artist Entang Wiharso will discuss his work on this film after the screening.

Turn 13745 April 2004 / Turn 15384 April 2004

32″ X 44″ lightjet prints / Installation mock-up for an exhibition proposal in Germany

Turn 21139 April 2006 / Turn 20214 April 2006

(More Turns) The Subway Turnstile Pictures I developed a situation so that various subjects could be defined by the constraints of exactly the same mechanical apparatus. The scenario consisted of someone passing through a subway turnstile. At the moment that the subjects passed through the turnstile, unknown to them, I took their picture stationed at a distance of eleven feet. I stood there turning pages of a magazine observing subjects out of the corner of my eye, waiting for only the moment when they pushed the turnstile bar to release the shutter.

I was tired of the conventions in which most photographs of people are taken. And I was tired of the results that often seem to pass for poetry. I needed something to be objective: I wanted the context to be clearly established. I wanted to play a role in the situation, but I wanted the situation to take a photograph of itself for me. I would design the scenarios in which this could happen, and then the situation could be responsible for creating the picture. The poetry would be as much in the design of that scenario as from any photograph that might come from it. These situations would include me but I would disappear as any kind of typical photographer. I would simply play a role in the scenario.

The series More Turns is part of a trilogy of work entitled 3Situations. The other 2 series involve people sitting for another artist’s portrait and being in an elevator as the doors open and close. Together the 3 series reveal how icons are created through framing, and how the grammar of portraiture is found in the world around us.

CRITICAL MASS TOP 50, 2007 - Bill Sullivan

www.3situations.com

Director Philippe Diaz exposes some of the issues the movie Blood Diamond touched upon in this award-winning documentary on the atrocities that occurred in Sierra Leone, West Africa. In 1991, a civil war exploded in this tiny, diamond-rich country, fueled by a rebel group against exploitative Western interests. But instead of coming to the aid of the people, the international community manipulated an election and used violent means for their own ends.

“The Librarian Is In” station will be in the RCVA student lounge on Wednesday, April 9 from noon - 2 pm. Students can drop in for assistance with finding materials and citing for their research projects.

Just an FYI that you will need to back up your art server space. Kevin will be changing around the equipment in computer lab at the end of the semester and a new server will be put in and our files will NOT be transfered to the new server. Please make plans to back up your files by the end of exam week.

I know what some are thinking - we’ve heard this before - but the switch is now - so be prepared.

And the old G4’s in the open lab side of 2309 will be replaced with G5’s … hooray!

More good stuff coming soon…..

andSHEwasn’t, 2007

more information and complete schedule:
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All films are FREE and will be held in Room 2008 RCVA.
Everyone is welcome to attend.
Sponsored by the Foundation Art Program.

Southeast Museum of Photography presents Show Us Your Shorts

CALL FOR ENTRIES: The Southeast Museum of Photography is now accepting submissions for our student film festival to take place on Wednesday, May 14, 2008. Open to all High School and College level students. Deadline for submissions is May 1, 2008. All films must be submitted in DVD format and no longer than 10 minutes in length.

Guidelines and Submission Form

Virgin, April 4, 1979. Chalk on blackboard, chalk and soap bar on wood table, wood chair, electrical cable, socket, and light bulb, Dimensions Variable. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 94.4265. Joseph Beuys © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Beuys’s public discussions—lectures on politics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and social relations that often served as catalysts for other work—exemplify his role as artist, teacher, and activist. One such discussion was held in Vienna on April 4, 1979, at the Galerie Nächst St. Stephan, where Beuys had been invited to speak in the context of a debate surrounding the use of Vienna’s Palais Lichtenstein as a museum for modern art. Earlier that same year, the gallery had given Beuys the opportunity to create an installation entitled Basic Room–Wet Laundry, a manifestation of his provocative contention that the baroque palace was as useful for hanging wet laundry as it was for displaying art. The April 4 discussion grew directly from that project. During the discussion, Beuys referred to a chalk drawing on a blackboard that showed the chemical formula for making soap. Using the soap-making process as a metaphor for social relations and its colloidal character as an analogy for the stages of fetal development, he then spoke of the cyclical nature of feminine cleansing, associating virginity and motherhood with cleanliness and impurity respectively. The lecture also related back to the notion of washing as “the traditional domain of women” presented in Basic Room–Wet Laundry. These themes were further brought to bear upon the machinations and politics of the art world, which the artist viewed with contempt. The installation Virgin, April 4, 1979, is a kind of “representation” of that lecture, and utilized the essential elements that comprised this cycle of works—soap, blackboard, a table and chair, and the single light bulb,

In the summer of that same year, Beuys made Virgin Basic–Wet Room Laundry for a major exhibition at the Vienna Secession. A further iteration of the previous two installations and lectures, this was to have been the grandest presentation of the subject of the Virgin. However, Beuys decided to isolate some (though not all) of the elements of the piece as independent objects after a vandal had damaged the work; Virgin, April 4, 1979/June 23, 1979, consists solely of the blackboard from the Vienna installation. Beuys reworked the imagery to evoke more painterly results, which he achieved by rubbing soap directly onto the surface in broad circular movements. The dual date refers to both that of the original idea—in this case, back to the April 4 discussion—and the date the piece was constituted as a self-contained object, rather than referring to the date of its actual creation, a practice occasionally used by Beuys to underscore his belief that “thinking=art.”

Matthew Drutt
Guggenheim.com

Frostic School of Art – April 3, 2008, Open House - Schedule of Events

Award Ceremony in Dalton Recital Hall at 3:30
Annual Student Show Reception 4:30-5:00 to 6:00 with refreshments
Kohrman Open House - 6-8 with refreshments and art and demos and music

Ceramics
6:00 – 8:00 (continuous), Korhman 1003 & 1005
• Faculty - Ed Harkness, Paul Flickinger, and Shay Church with Students demonstrate a variety of construction techniques, such as hand-building and wheel-throwing, as they make ceramic objects both small and colossal.

Graphic Design
6:00 – 8:00 (continuous), RCVA 3rd Floor
• Graphic Design students will be working on projects and are ready to discuss with visitors. Student work on display.

Foundation Program
6:00 – 8:00 (continuous), with presentation at 6:15-6:30, Korhman 1117
• Karen Bondarchuk (art faculty), Kevin Abbott (Office of Information Technology) and Students discuss the use of motion capture software in the creative 3-D process. Student work on display in the foundation showcases (K1304).

Metals/Jewelry
6:00 – 8:00 (continuous), Korhman 1150
• Advanced Metals/Jewelry Students will assist guests in making a quick brooch to take away in their pin-making workshop. Student work will be on display.

Painting
6:00 – 8:00 (continuous) with presentation 7:00-7:15, Korhman 2102
• Patrick Trimbath (Adjunct Faculty & MFA 2007) will demonstrate how he integrates the artist’s palette and digital imaging software in his large-scale paintings. Student work on display.

Photography/Intermedia
6:00 – 8:00 (continuous), Korhman 2102
• Faculty – Ginger Owen, Bill Davis, Adriane Little, and Dan Grohs with Students present tours of the facility and a studio lighting demonstration (K2111). Exhibit of 6 BFA students (K2130).

Printmaking
6:00 - 6:30, Kohrman 2504
• Leslie Grossman, BFA student, creates a three-color image using photo-mechanically produced stencils while offering an explanation of screenprinting and its uses. Student work on display.

6:30 - 7:15, Korhman 2170
• Robert Bartholomew, MFA student, creates and prints an etched image from a copper plate. Student work on display.

Sculpture
6:30 and 7:30, Kohrman 1104
• Faculty Al LaVergne and John Running-Johnson with Students conduct a bronze pour in the new foundry. Student work on display.

Tours of the RCVA & Kohrman
Faculty will lead tours of the facilities starting at 6:15, 6:45, 7:15, and 7:45. Tours will begin on the 2nd story bridge between the RCVA & Kohrman – the Frostic Bridge.

Exhibits
Annual Student Show, Foundation Show, John Link Exhibit, RCVA Galleries
Batik & Ceramics, Kohrman 1206
Foundation Sculpture, Kohrman 1117
SmithGroup per.cep.tion Photography Competition, Kohrman 2121
Videos, Korhman 2113 Crit Space
BFA photographers & MFA painters, Kohrman 2130 (COOKIES HERE).

Information Tables
• Art History, Kohrman 2123

On the Frostic Bridge, 2nd Floor between the RCVA & Kohrman
• Frostic School of Art
• Art Education
• Friends of the Richmond Center
• Visual Resources Library

The Xerces Society, Installment VII: From London to Marrakech, 2006 - 11:15 mins

more information and complete schedule:
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Amid ever-increasing gas prices, this documentary delves into the short life of the GM EV1 electric car — once all the rage in the mid-1990s and now fallen by the roadside. How could such an efficient, green-friendly vehicle fail to transform our garages and skies? Through interviews with government officials, former GM employees and concerned celebs (such as EV1 driver Mel Gibson), Chris Paine (former EV1 owner) seeks to answer the question.

Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, 1924-37

Schwitters is very well known for his monumental Merzbau, a structure which was his own house. And so Kurt Schwitters picked refuse up off the ground and attempted to build a place in which he could live. Is this not the very task that faces modern society the vitality of which depends upon urban infrastructure and city planning?

“[E]verything had broken down in any case and new things had to be made out of the fragments: and this is Merz. It was like an image of the revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been.”
–Kurt Schwitters

Marcel Duchamp, Mile of String, 1942, New York

In 1942, Andre Breton organised a retrospective exhibition of Surrealist art in New York: First Papers of Surrealism. For the vernissage Marcel Duchamp created this installation – a gigantic web – called the Mile of String. He and Breton furthermore arranged for a number of children to ball in the room thereby making it very difficult for the guests to see the paintings.