Bob Gregson retrospective reception tomorrow at City Lights Gallery in Bridgeport

City Lights Gallery
37 Markle Ct., Bridgeport, (203) 334-7748
Just a Phase: Artist's Retrospective of Bob Gregson
June 16—July 30, 2011.
Opening reception, Thurs., June 16, 5:30-8 p.m.

Press release

Bob Gregson, of Orange, has many sides to his artistic personality, but his best-known may be that of a creator of participatory art -- pieces that have movable parts that viewers are encouraged to touch and move, continually altering and changing the piece's composition.

The story of Gregson's creative career includes drawings, paintings, playful interactive constructions and "art situations." Viewers of all ages are invited to come and play with the art. Join us for an artist's reception, Thurs., June 16, 5:30—8 p.m.

A retrospective gives the viewer and the artist an opportunity to reflect back over decades of creative efforts. Themes and content are reworked. Ideas and imagery can be observed in different stages and forms. Gregson considers art an ever-changing process with various threads, phases and reoccurring connections he calls "art echoes," Featured works include, "The Bicker Box" and "Turning the Tables" and constructions called "Offshoots" that encourage creative play.

The "Bicker Booth" is divided into two sections with a small window between. Two participants enter either side of the booth and come face to face. Each side has a Rolodex file with approximately 300 theatrical clichés inspired from soap operas and movies. For example, "We'll never resolve this," "It's time you grow up," to "I don't care anymore," and I've had enough of your crap." A dramatic sound track sets the theatrical tone to bicker.

"Offshoots" are designed with moveable modules that the viewer can pivot to rearrange the composition. Also on exhibit are 2d and 3d plans for architectural environments to be set in nature. These plans include designs to be constructed over water, high grass or in the treetops. The architectural models and 2d renderings (fine pieces of art in and of themselves,) invite the viewer to take what is presented a step further, to imagine these clean, playful designs in nature, seeing and smelling the water and waves below, feeling the sea breeze, or hearing the leaves rustling in the wind. Then imagine yourself and others within these environments. Gregson's dream is to actually construct these environments in public places.

Under "Turning The Table" visitors discover a traditional-looking table rendered useless with four circular cut-outs and a spinning X-shaped bar. Four "monkey-boards" (used for automotive repairs) invite people to lie down and slip under the table. Underneath visitors find mirrors reflecting them and other participants and colors. The spinning bar can be seen as it passes over the holes creating another optical effect.

Conceptual art and the telephone exhibit reception on Thursday evening at HCC

Housatonic Museum of Art
900 Lafayette Blvd., Bridgeport, (203) 332-5052
It's For You: Conceptual Art and the Telephone
Through Mar. 25, 2011
Show reception: Thurs., Mar. 3, 5—8 p.m.

Press release

From Feb. 24—Mar. 25, 2011, the Housatonic Museum of Art (HMA) at Housatonic Community College will present an exhibit It’s for you: Conceptual Art and the Telephone in the Burt Chernow Galleries and other areas of the HCC campus. The exhibit is, in part, a response to the wide-ranging use of phones in the hallways and other areas on the campus of the college.

The reception for the exhibition is Mar. 3, from 5—8 p.m. at the gallery in Lafayette Hall (900 Lafayette Blvd, Bridgeport, CT).

Each day students text, talk, surf the net, and listen to music on their phones. With this exhibition, artworks that use the phone as an artistic medium or mediator are brought together in an original exhibition curated by Terri C. Smith.

The projects range from the late 1960s to today and include sound pieces, videos, and objects that resonate with the functions, technologies, and physicality of the telephone. Artists in the exhibition include: T. Foley, Lukas Geronimas, Jeremy LeClair, Christian Marclay, Yoko Ono, Rachel Perry Welty, Robert Peters, Pietro Pellini, and Hannah Wilke.

Many of the artists in It’s for you aim to democratize the artist/audience relationship, a quality that is intricately woven into the history of conceptual art. In It’s for you, Yoko Ono might call the gallery as part of her "Telephone Piece," providing direct contact between artist and viewer. Students will work with T. Foley, creating their own ring tones as part of her "Locally Toned" project. Archival materials are also included as a way to represent ephemeral works from the past as with Robert Peters' "Naming Others: Manufacturing Yourself" (1993) where the artist asked people to call an 800 number from pay phones and choose which stereotyping phrase described them best.

It’s for You harnesses the familiarity of the telephone as a way of introducing audiences to a variety of conceptual art practices, which often include a mix of art theory and social critique. The exhibition, consequently, endeavors to connect concerns found in contemporary art with the objects, communication habits, and changing technologies in our daily lives. In that spirit, visitors and students will be encouraged to comment on the exhibition using telephone-friendly interfaces such as Twitter.

Saturday evening openings at Real Art Ways

Real Art Ways
56 Arbor St., Hartford, (860) 232-1006
Olu Oguibe
Saya Woolfalk: Institute of Empathy
Oct. 23, 2010—Mar. 20, 2011
Opening reception: Sat., Oct. 23, 6—8 p.m.

Press release

Conceptual artist Olu Oguibe brings a 40-foot New England stonewall into the Real Art Ways gallery to examine its role as an iconic amalgamation of geology, history, craft and metaphor. Working together with local masons and using area field stones, Oguibe has created a stonewall as a neo-minimalist gesture where the natural and cultural histories of New England take form and become art.

There will be a free opening reception Sat., Oct. 23 from 6—8 p.m. Real Art Ways is located at 56 Arbor Street in Hartford's Parkville neighborhood.

Oguibe describes the New England stonewall as both a line and a limn, an illuminated space where the natural and cultural histories of New England take form and become art. By moving the stonewall into the gallery space, and making it part of the vocabulary of conceptual art, Oguibe hopes to generate a new, inclusive discourse that draws no line between aesthetic or formal concerns, on one hand, and environmental, cultural, or social discourses, on the other. Oguibe, an international artist whose work often deals with place, says, "I believe that it is time that New England artists rebuild the bridge between art and the museum public. By returning to the peculiar natural elements and forms that define the region and its environment, I hope this exhibition helps renew the public's interest in the beauty and uniqueness of the region."

Olu Oguibe is a conceptual artist whose work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, including the biennials of Venice, Havana, Busan Korea, and Johannesburg, South Africa as well as the Whitney Museum; PS1-MoMa; the Smithsonian; the Irish Museum of Modern Art; Migros Museum, Zurich; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastrich; Whitechapel Gallery; Royal Festival Hall; the United Nations Headquarters; and many others. He has also served as curator or co-curator for many international exhibitions including shows at the Tate Modern in London and the Venice Biennial. Oguibe is a Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Connecticut.

Using craft based installation, video, photography, drawing and live performance, artist Saya Woolfalk invites Real Art Ways visitors to re-imagine the world through her fictional creation, Institute of Empathy. The piece is an installment in Woolfalk's ongoing creation of another universe in which boundaries between man-woman, plant-animal, machine-human are blurred.

There will be a free opening reception Sat., Oct. 23 from 6—8 p.m. Real Art Ways is located at 56 Arbor Street in Hartford's Parkville neighborhood. Institute of Empathy will come alive with a dance performance from Scapegoat Garden's Deborah Goffee at the opening reception and from University of Hartford dancers under the direction of Stephen Pier and Bonita Weisman during upcoming Creative Cocktail Hours.

Woolfalk has used conversations with Hartford area doctors, political activists, dancers and others as a springboard for Institute of Empathy's subject matter: a group of "Empathics" who seek to understand truth through reason and mysticism, and to change themselves and their world. By blending fact and fiction, Woolfalk constructs playful narratives that immerse us in the logic of another place, ultimately exploring how ideas evolve in our own culture.

Woolfalk says, "Culture is not static. It is an ever-emerging phenomenon and I try to mirror this process in this body of work."

Artist Saya Woolfalk re-imagines the world in multiple dimensions (sculpture, installation, and painting to performance and video). She was an Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in Studio, and holds an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Brown University. She has exhibited at PS1/MoMA; Deitch Projects; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Momenta Art; Performa09; and many others. She has received an Art Matters grant to Japan, a NYFA grant, a Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA grant.

Artspace unveils four strong new solo shows

Artspace
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
Phil Lique: Traces of Things That Are Alive and Dead
Fritz Horstman: Guerrilla Trees
Elaine Kaufmann: International Design
Conspectus I: New Work from the Flatfile Collection
Cecile Chong: Unspoken Word
Peter Konsterlie: Medical Systems
Feb. 25-Mar. 20, 2010

While Phil Lique's Traces of Things That Are Alive and Dead is held over in Artspace's main gallery, several new shows have been installed in the smaller galleries.

The most overtly conceptual show is Fritz Horstman's "Guerilla Trees." Inspired by "guerrilla gardening" -- the practice of illictly cultivating flowers, vegetables and other greenery in otherwise forlorn public spaces -- Horstman's installation envisions the repopulating of the "Elm City" with real elm trees. At Artspace this consists of a wall drawing map of New Haven, a long planter with a dozen elm saplings, a few dozen elm seed packets and string.

Horstman invited viewers to pin blue strings keyed to individual saplings to points on the map. Horstman will plant the saplings in those spots -- or as near as is feasible --when the weather permits. Visitors are also invited to take a seed packet and pin a green string on the map in the location where they plan to plant it.

The strings themselves are becoming like a tangle of brush. There is a symbolic dimension, as well: the connection between humans and nature, and between consciousness and place. When the exhibit ends, Horstman will chart the planting locations on a map that will be archived on Artspace's Web site.

A socially-informed consideration of space also animates Elaine Kaufmann's exhibit International Design. These are beautifully wrought pencil drawings of living spaces. But where the media promulgates images of luxury living places, Kaufmann depicts environments of brutal poverty. As she noted at the show’s opening, almost a billion people across the planet live in such sprawling slums, tenement camps and favelas.

Her renderings of expanses of slums and their interior and exterior conditions are placed within a bitingly ironic context. Kaufmann has substituted these images of desperation for the images originally in pages of high end architecture and home publications. The found images and found text -- and ever so elegant design -- are made one through Kaufmann's superb technique. (She said at the opening that she chose to use pencil because "it was the most immediate, humble medium I could work with.")

"Kid-centric Condos," for example, depicts two hovels with corrugated tin roofs and their garbage-strewn surroundings. Along the left side, the original knockout type reads "Kid-centric condos." The caption on the bottom boasts, "Play Suite -- Children enjoying the amenities at Wellington Tower. The playroom occupies prime real estate; in other condo buildings, the room might be dedicated to more adult-friendly purposes." International Design is political critique laden with dark, satiric humor.

Layers of materials, of colors and of cultural signifiers make up the mixed media paintings of Cecile Chong's Unspoken Word. Chong was born in Ecuador of Chinese parents and has lived in many places since. She said at the opening that her experience of the "layering of cultures" is something she tries to capture through her use of materials. The primary material used here is encaustic, hot beeswax infused with pigments. Chong noted that she used pigments from Iraq and India. Also brought into the mix are rice paper, volcanic ash, beads and bits of circuit boards from old televisions.

The imagery is a mashup drawn from a Dutch children's book and Asian and South American sources. The translucence of the encaustic imbues the surface with a dreamlike air. In the circular "Meeting of Minds," swirls of blue and purple mists are reminiscent of views of Earth from space. From a distance, the yellowed backgrounds of several of the works appear similar to the mottled colors of antique rice paper.

Peter Konsterlie combines painting and drawing techniques to create the works in his Medical Systems series. Initiated in reaction to a loved one's illness and treatment, they were also inspired by Konsterlie's fascination with anatomical illustrations in his wife's medical textbooks. They incorporate text, stencils and patterning, diagrammatic elements -- painted and drawn grids -- and body features deconstructed and labeled.

This is a different kind of "life drawing." Konsterlie uses gestural marks and stabs of paint (stabs of pain?) to depict bone and muscle. The stained and splattered canvases reference both Konsterlie's previous work in abstraction but also the mess that accompanies medical procedures. These works straddle the abstract and figurative realms. He plays freely with color, leaves lots of white space and layers depiction with free mark-making.

The most recent work in his exhibit is "Ahh Th World," composed of charcoal, enamel and latex paint on a large uneven sheet of paper. The most representational element is a rough drawing of a skull; there are also spray-painted stencils of leaves, flowers and geometric shapes. "Ahh Th World" is a chaotic cacophony of marks: scrawled lines, long drips of paint, dashes of thick brushwork. It resembles a wall that has endured multiple taggings by graffiti writers.

Along the top Konsterlie has jotted the declarative statement "I want things to live forever." It is a sentiment that resonates on more than one level. "I want things to live forever" is both a protest against mortality as well as an expression of the artist istic desire to use art and mark-making to transcend mortality.

In addition to the four aforementioned shows, Conspectus I: New Work from the Flatfile Collection is showing in Gallery 4. This group show conveys a broad, if not deep, sense of the quality and diversity to be found in Artspace's Flatfile.