Thursday, December 11, 2014
UNIVERSITY PLACE GALLERY EXHIBITION - Dec 4 - Jan 16, 2015
PLATINUM - JURIED BY ALISE UPITIS, ASSISTANT CURATOR OF THE MIT LIST VISUAL ARTS CENTER
DECEMBER 4, 2014 - JANUARY 16, 2015
Opening Reception: Friday, December 5th, 6-8pm, Awards presented at 7pm, University Place Gallery, At the Kathryn Schultz and University Place Galleries
December 5, 2014: PLATINUM celebrates 70 years of the Cambridge Art Association (CAA) with a compelling show of work by artists from all corners of the Northeastern United States. PLATINUM's juror, Alise Upitis, carefully considered over 800 pieces of artwork submitted by 268 artists from the Northeast. Her selections - 56 in total - embody the concept of PLATINUM, as well as the breadth and depth of expression exhibited by the entrants. She presents a beautiful show that ushers in a new year and an important moment for the Association.
As part of the CAA at 70 exhibition year, PLATINUM celebrates the spirit of the many artists who have supported - and been supported by - CAA over the years - and the many benefactors who make it possible for the Association to carry out a mission to foster support and promote artists within the community for 70 more years.
From Alise Upitis:
Platinum Patriarch, father of Wynton, Jason, Branford and Dafeao Marsalis was drawn by Carolyn Newberger during a 2014 concert at Tanglewood, at which Ellis Marsalis, Jr. and Dafeao Marsalis were performing together. Following the concert, Newberger asked for Ellis' signature on her work, and the sketch includes a pairing of his and her signatures. I find the work particularly significant as an investigation of authenticity. Photography is prohibited at Tanglewood concerts, and Newberger's deft capture of Ellis' playing is an unaffected gesture in a space without cameras. The pairing of signatures also operates as dual authentication of the document, a gesture, I might add, that is also quite humorous.
Selfie 01 by Kay Dolezal may be the best of its genre I have seen. Its merit is in part the difficulty of deciphering how it was made. My first impression was that this is a photo of a TV screen showing an image of a woman at a microphone and a reflection of the photographer shooting with a fairly early digital camera. Yet is that dust on the TV screen, or dust on an analog film negative or print? It is rare to see a selfie as a physical print at its proper ratio. There is also an important continuity between the technology that produced the image and its content-the woman in white is clearly camera ready, no crew at work is visible in the shot on TV, while the reflection of the photographer-and the background of what appears to be the photographer's studio-returns artistic labor to the production of the image.
I selected several works that invoke the traditional form of the landscape or seascape, of which Kathryn Geismar's Beautiful Disaster 1 is an outstanding example. The work has a temporality that is difficult to locate, evoking an ocean with a burning oil slick in the present or near future as well as historical seaborne tragedies, in line with J.M.W. Turner's 1840 The Slave Ship. Her painting, and other included works in these genres, engages the relationship between human and nonhuman, commonly thought in terms of culture and nature. This is not new to these types of works, but those I selected have a particular significance to contemporary concerns-the undecidable temporality of Geismar's included-such as the edge habitat depicted in Michele J. Kenna's Hidden Backwoods or the object-oriented ontology considered through Hyperobject I by Dinora Justice.
I selected Spinneklub (Spin Club) by Astrid Reischwitz for Best in Show for its strength in connecting historical and contemporary photographic practices to the history of female labor. The pose and framing of Reischwitz's old family photo is in disjuncture with her carefully staged and beautifully shot photo of her family's domestic wares. Yet there remains a striking formal affinity in the depiction of patterns, details of handmade family textiles, which is reinforced by her use of photos of these patterns to frame the other photos in the composite. It is also a fine investigation of the limits of specific mediums, such as how the representation of textiles can relate to the materials of textiles and the, largely female, labor that makes these fabrics possible."
Images available by request
Contact: Erin Becker, Director
info@cambridgeart.org
DECEMBER 4, 2014 - JANUARY 16, 2015
Opening Reception: Friday, December 5th, 6-8pm, Awards presented at 7pm, University Place Gallery, At the Kathryn Schultz and University Place Galleries
December 5, 2014: PLATINUM celebrates 70 years of the Cambridge Art Association (CAA) with a compelling show of work by artists from all corners of the Northeastern United States. PLATINUM's juror, Alise Upitis, carefully considered over 800 pieces of artwork submitted by 268 artists from the Northeast. Her selections - 56 in total - embody the concept of PLATINUM, as well as the breadth and depth of expression exhibited by the entrants. She presents a beautiful show that ushers in a new year and an important moment for the Association.
As part of the CAA at 70 exhibition year, PLATINUM celebrates the spirit of the many artists who have supported - and been supported by - CAA over the years - and the many benefactors who make it possible for the Association to carry out a mission to foster support and promote artists within the community for 70 more years.
From Alise Upitis:
Platinum Patriarch, father of Wynton, Jason, Branford and Dafeao Marsalis was drawn by Carolyn Newberger during a 2014 concert at Tanglewood, at which Ellis Marsalis, Jr. and Dafeao Marsalis were performing together. Following the concert, Newberger asked for Ellis' signature on her work, and the sketch includes a pairing of his and her signatures. I find the work particularly significant as an investigation of authenticity. Photography is prohibited at Tanglewood concerts, and Newberger's deft capture of Ellis' playing is an unaffected gesture in a space without cameras. The pairing of signatures also operates as dual authentication of the document, a gesture, I might add, that is also quite humorous.
Selfie 01 by Kay Dolezal may be the best of its genre I have seen. Its merit is in part the difficulty of deciphering how it was made. My first impression was that this is a photo of a TV screen showing an image of a woman at a microphone and a reflection of the photographer shooting with a fairly early digital camera. Yet is that dust on the TV screen, or dust on an analog film negative or print? It is rare to see a selfie as a physical print at its proper ratio. There is also an important continuity between the technology that produced the image and its content-the woman in white is clearly camera ready, no crew at work is visible in the shot on TV, while the reflection of the photographer-and the background of what appears to be the photographer's studio-returns artistic labor to the production of the image.
I selected several works that invoke the traditional form of the landscape or seascape, of which Kathryn Geismar's Beautiful Disaster 1 is an outstanding example. The work has a temporality that is difficult to locate, evoking an ocean with a burning oil slick in the present or near future as well as historical seaborne tragedies, in line with J.M.W. Turner's 1840 The Slave Ship. Her painting, and other included works in these genres, engages the relationship between human and nonhuman, commonly thought in terms of culture and nature. This is not new to these types of works, but those I selected have a particular significance to contemporary concerns-the undecidable temporality of Geismar's included-such as the edge habitat depicted in Michele J. Kenna's Hidden Backwoods or the object-oriented ontology considered through Hyperobject I by Dinora Justice.
I selected Spinneklub (Spin Club) by Astrid Reischwitz for Best in Show for its strength in connecting historical and contemporary photographic practices to the history of female labor. The pose and framing of Reischwitz's old family photo is in disjuncture with her carefully staged and beautifully shot photo of her family's domestic wares. Yet there remains a striking formal affinity in the depiction of patterns, details of handmade family textiles, which is reinforced by her use of photos of these patterns to frame the other photos in the composite. It is also a fine investigation of the limits of specific mediums, such as how the representation of textiles can relate to the materials of textiles and the, largely female, labor that makes these fabrics possible."
Images available by request
Contact: Erin Becker, Director
info@cambridgeart.org
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