"Werewolf Karaoke" opens Thursday at Wadsworth during Phoenix Art After Hours event

Wadsworth Atheneum
600 Main St., Hartford, (860) 278-2670
Justin Lowe: Werewolf Karaoke
June 3—Sept. 5, 2010
Opening reception: Thurs., June 3, 5 p.m.

Press release

The return of the Wadsworth Atheneum's MATRIX contemporary art series continues this summer with a new, site-specific installation by New York artist Justin Lowe, titled Werewolf Karaoke/MATRIX 159. Lowe's exhibition is comprised of four interconnected rooms that reference aspects of the Wadsworth's collection, such as the museum's two period rooms, the Austin House, and the adjacent gallery of Surrealist paintings, while reflecting a more contemporary culture, rooted in 1970s psychedelia. The exhibition opens on June 3 and is on view through Sept. 5, 2010.

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art continues its fun, fast-paced approach to Thursday night happy hour with the exhibition opening of Justin Lowe/MATRIX 159 on June 3, 2010. Lowe's Werewolf Karaoke themed installation will offer the perfect backdrop to a night of art, music and film in conjunction with the museum's monthly Phoenix Art After Hours event.

The night's music begins with DJ Breakadawn as she spins dance, trance and hip-hop until the Psychic Ills take the stage at 7 p.m. Named "Best Psych Rock Band" in the Village Voice 2006 Best of NYC issue, the experimental Brooklyn-based band complements Lowe's eclectic style and distinctive spin on contemporary art.

A hands-on graffiti art activity led by Hartford artist Jose Camacho will add to the gritty nature of the event, reflecting the wildly-decorated public restroom in Lowe's installation, which pays homage to the one at CBGB, the legendary New York hardcore and punk rock club.

Exhibition artist Justin Lowe will also be on hand to give two artist "Small Talks" explaining his new installation and the multi-media collage process he used to achieve such a large scale, experiential work of art.

The seemingly disparate rooms in Lowe's installation - a gallery, passageway, video lounge, and restroom - connect through visual threads that carry through all four spaces, which is typical of Lowe's practice.

Lowe will transform the gallery space through a multi-media collage process that combines video, painting, slide show, and sculpture into a large-scale, experiential work of art. A highlight of the piece will be Lowe's contemporary approach to the concept of the museum "period room," which will reference the Wadsworth's Goodwin and Whetmore parlors, but in the form of a wildly-decorated public restroom, inspired by the notorious graffiti-covered bathroom at CBGB, the legendary New York hardcore and punk rock club.

"All of the imagery in the exhibition is in a state of dissolution," Lowe said. "Hidden elements are revealed, but as they attain clarity they are once again obscured by an image emerging from beneath, similar to the classic werewolf transformation scene, which plays out metaphorically throughout the exhibition."

Justin Lowe was born in 1976 in Dayton, OH and lives and works in New York City. He has been exhibiting since 2000, creating installation "environments" like gallery-lounges, cluttered house interiors and—for his 2006 solo show at Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery, New York—an intricately stocked bodega and Mister Softee truck. Most recently Mr. Lowe has been collaborating with Jonah Freeman on an elaborate labyrinthine environment exploring the community ritual and psychoses surrounding the historical trajectory of meth culture from its separatist hippie roots and its ties to global alchemy, at such places as Ballroom Marfa and Deitch Projects.

About MATRIX:

The Wadsworth was the first to embrace the idea of contemporary art in an "encyclopedic" museum through its MATRIX program, which began in 1975 as a series of single-artist exhibitions that have showcased more than 150 artists, providing many non-prominent artists with their first solo museum exhibition in the United States-including Adrian Piper, Louise Lawler, Janine Antoni, and Dawoud Bey. These, and many MATRIX artists, such as Sol LeWitt, Willem de Kooning, Christo, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman and Gerhard Richter, are now considered seminal figures in contemporary art.

Arthur Danto to speak at Wadsworth Atheneum Saturday afternoon

Wadsworth Atheneum
600 Main St., Hartford, (860) 278-2670
Critic Talk: Arthur Danto
Sat., Apr. 10, 2010, 2 p.m.

Press release

Arthur Danto, former art critic for The Nation and author of numerous books on the philosophy of art, will be at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art on Sat., Apr. 10, to host a talk at 2 p.m. on his influential theories regarding the works of Andy Warhol.

Danto will read from his newest publication, Andy Warhol (Yale University Press, 2009), with a special focus on the Warhol silkscreens in the Wadsworth's own collection, including "Triple Silver Disaster" (1963), "Early Colored Jackie" (1964) and "Camouflage Self-Portrait" (1986).

Selected as one of the "Best Art and Photography Books" of 2009 by Rachel Wolff in The Daily Beast, Danto's work delivers a compact, masterful tour of Andy Warhol's personal, artistic, and philosophical transformations. He traces the evolution of the pop artist, including his early reception, relationships with artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and the Factory phenomenon. Danto draws upon his encyclopedic knowledge of Warhol's time and presents Warhol as an endlessly multidimensional figure-artist, political activist, filmmaker, writer, philosopher-who retains permanent residence in our national imagination.

Now Johnsonian Professor Emeritus Philosophy, Arthur Danto taught at Columbia University for 26 years. Danto is the recipient of many fellowships and grants including a Fulbright Scholarship, two Guggenheim Fellowships and an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Award. He has been published in numerous journals and is the author of several books on art criticism and aesthetic theory, including Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990), Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992), and The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000). He was art critic for The Nation from 1984 to 2009,and an editor of the Journal of Philosophy and a contributing editor of the Naked Punch Review and Artforum.

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art is located at 600 Main St. in Hartford, Connecticut. The Museum is open Wednesdays to Fridays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Please visit www.wadsworthatheneum.org for more information.

Mir solves painting myth-teries

Wadsworth Atheneum
600 Main St., Hartford, (860) 278-2670
Christopher Mir: Dreams, Memories, Reflections
Oct. 4, 2007—Jan. 6, 2008

There was a good crowd for Chris Mir's opening talk Thursday night in the MATRIX 157 Gallery at the Wadsworth Atheneum. Dreams, Memories, Reflections is Mir's first solo museum show; he has had several solo gallery shows.

Mir spoke off the cuff about his artistic practice, referring to various of the oil paintings to illustrate the points he had to make about his work. The 10 paintings follow, he said, "the trajectory set 10 years ago at Boston University [where he earned an M.F.A. in 1997]—a diorama space where mythic dramas could unfold."

He noted that while at BU he had participated in an exchange program between BU and the Rhode Island School of Design.

"The RISD kids were all about concept first. The idea and the work flows from the conceptual model," Mir recalled. "The way I trained, you get lost inside the painting world and make mistakes and feel your way in the painting." It's a "very romantic, early Modernist" approach, according to Mir.

Mir spoke first of the painting "Generator," painted in the summer of last year. The work shows two figures in Hazmat suits ascending a craggy hill. It was made, he said, in direct reference to a painting of Cezanne's, "Mount St. Victoire." Mir noted that was intrigued by the idea of a mountain being the subject of a painting and found an image of a rocky hill to which he could refer.

Starting with a landscape is his typical modus operandi. He scavenges coffee table nature books and the Internet for imagery. (More recently, he has taken to photographing friends and families as models for many of his constructed scenarios.) He described the "essence" of his practice as "perceiving visual information and translating it into small abstract forms."

"When I see a landscape image that resonates for me, it should look like a stage set," Mir said. Mir then sets about populating his "stage set" with a repertory company of tropes and mythic figures. There are seven elements in this repertory company: the beautiful woman/goddess figure, the God or wanderer ("Jesus, hippie, Charles Manson, 'the dude'—he represents the primal state"), raw nature ("pure, beautiful sublime landscapes"), the child, the "spirit animal," the "corporate menace" ("my fear of being sucked into the moment of climate change or unchecked greed") and magic, "usually represented by little spheres of light."

As Mir tells it, these mythic figures trace their origins in his personal artistic universe to a "formative image" from his early childhood. When he was born, his mother—Mir said she was a "hippie"—hung a painting over his crib. It was a tarot card image of a little boy riding a white horse, the card of the sun.

"It was a very powerful, graphic beautiful image and I grew up with this in my house," Mir said. "That's still burned into the back of my brain."

Christopher Mir painting show opening at Wadsworth

Wadsworth Atheneum
600 Main St., Hartford, (860) 278-2670
Christopher Mir: Dreams, Memories, Reflections
Oct. 4, 2007—Jan. 6, 2008
Opening reception Thurs., Oct. 4, 5—8 p.m.

Hamden-based painter Christopher Mir has had a few solo gallery shows the past few years in New York. And he has had work included in group shows, including the 2001 Emerging Artists Exhibition at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield. Dreams, Memories, Reflections in MATRIX 157 at the Wadsworth Atheneum is Mir's first solo museum show.

I wrote about Mir last fall as part of a series of posts for City-Wide Open Studios. He told me that he is interested in "dreamscapes like a natural history diorama—but with a lot of room for play. It's the Garden of Eden or the Apocalypse."

Joanna Marsh's commentary for the Wadsworth show parses Mir's Method:

For his first solo museum exhibition, New Haven-based painter Christopher Mir presents a unique style of painting that emerges directly from his interest in collage and accumulative image making. Over the past five years, Mir has culled hundreds of pictures from random sources - magazines, coffee table books on national parks, calendars, and the Internet. These images, along with Mir's own photographs, form the basis for each painting - a compilation of unrelated scenes stitched together digitally and translated onto canvas. Each painting begins with a landscape, rendered in oil or acrylic, upon which the artist positions figures, animals, machines, and buildings. This careful orchestration of incongruous elements and highly distinct spatial relationships gives each painting a dream-like quality, which recalls the work of Surrealist painters, such as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. Like the Surrealists, Mir is deeply influenced by psychoanalytic theory, particularly that of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung.1 Jung's writings on spirituality, "synchronicity" (the recurrence of closely related coincidences), and dreams provide a rich intellectual framework for Mir's paintings, as do the artist's studies in anthropology. Through his interest in Native American traditions and primitive religions, Mir has developed a distinct visual language of archetypal figures and situations that appear in nearly every painting. His principal cast of characters includes the wanderer, the sorceress, the innocent child, and the spirit animal, all of whom play a critical role in the constructed dramas.

There will be an opening reception at the Wadsworth Atheneum this Thursday, Oct. 4, with a gallery talk at 6 p.m. Doors open at 5 p.m. for the Wadsworth's Phoenix Art After Hours, an evening of live music, complimentary food, cocktails, gallery talks, and films. Admission is only $5! (Free for Members.)

Thursday night opening at Wadsworth Atheneum

Wadsworth Atheneum
600 Main St., Hartford, (860) 278-2670
again: serial practices in contemporary art
Sept. 22—Dec. 30, 2007
Opening reception Thurs., Sept. 27, 7 p.m.

Press release

A 2004 major gift from celebrated art collector Mickey Cartin has inspired a new exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. A selection from the 125 contemporary photographs gifted to the Atheneum will be on exhibit along with loaned works from the Cartin Collection in again: serial practices in contemporary art from Sept. 22 through Dec. 30, 2007. The Atheneum plans a variety of special programs and events to celebrate the exhibition.

The Cartin gift ranks as one of the most important and largest single donations of contemporary art in the Atheneum's history. According to Betsy Kornhauser, Krieble Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Wadsworth, "While the Atheneum has actively acquired single contemporary works of photo-based art, the Cartin gift which features works by noted artists Roger Ballen, Zarina Bhimji, Edward Burtynsky, Olafur Eliasson, and Arnold Odermatt, among others, is an invaluable and unique addition to the Museum's permanent collection of contemporary art."

again: serial practices in contemporary art features work by fifteen internationally known artists who share the common theme of duplication and repetition to explore single subjects or ideas. Spanning the second half of the twentieth century, the works offer a rich cross section of photographic media and examine a diverse range of cultural issues. The gifted photographic images in the exhibit are supplemented by a selection from the Cartin Collection's own holdings including books, correspondence, video and painting. The exhibit is co-curated by Ash Anderson, a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art program at Yale University, and Steven Holmes, curator of the Cartin Collection, and is made possible by the generous support of The Contemporary Coalition and The Larsen Fund for Photography.

Works by On Kawara, Ed Ruscha, Hans-Peter Feldmann and Jonathan Monk anchor the central theme of again by exploring the serial processes. Images by Arnold Odermatt, Lucinda Devlin, Joe Ovelman, Frank Breuer and Malick Sidibé evoke traditional documentary photography, the classic use of the camera to dispassionately record and order subjects as varied as execution chambers, industrial parks, car crashes and passersby. The work draws its power from repetition rather than selection, in that the more examples of a subject that one can record, the less important any individual image becomes, and the final collective product then represents a more dimensionally complete record. Meaning is therefore accumulated, accrued, aggregated. Works by artists Spencer Finch and Charles Sandison address time itself, allowing one to perceive what otherwise would remain real, but difficult to perceive. In each work within the exhibition, the word again resonates in different ways—sometimes quietly as in the case of the small paintings by Cecilia Edefalk or sometimes with wit, as in the case of Jonathan Monk.

Mickey Cartin commented, "I have always been interested in making my collection available to as many people as possible. The Wadsworth Atheneum is a very special place, and it has meant a lot to me over the years. I am proud and quite happy to support their renewed commitment to bring exciting contemporary art projects to the Greater Hartford area through curated exhibitions such as again."

The Cartin Collection now holds approximately 2,400 objects by over 400 artists, ranging from fifteenth century paintings to modern and contemporary art. It has recently been listed as one of the top 200 art collections in the world by Art News Magazine. Internationally active with as many as forty worldwide venues exhibiting borrowed pieces from the Cartin Collection at any one time, the collection loans extensively, produces artist projects and encourages institutional partnerships.

During the four-month venue, the Atheneum is planning several dates of special programming:

• On Thursday, September 27th at 7:00 pm, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art will host a public opening of the again exhibit, featuring a reception and free lecture: A Conversation with Mickey Cartin and Betsy Kornhauser, in the Avery Theater at the Museum.

• To follow on Friday, September 28th at noon, again exhibition co-curators Ash Anderson and Steven Holmes will give The Dana Engstrom DeLoach Gallery Talk.

• On Thursday, November 1st at 6:00pm, as part of downtown Hartford's First Thursday series, the Atheneum's "Phoenix Art After Hours" program will offer a Gallery Talk with again: serial practices in contemporary art exhibition co-curators Ash Anderson and Steven Holmes.