Happy Holidays!

VERSUS - Save the date!

Excited to be a part of this one.. so many great artists in the show!


VERSUS- Curated by Ruben Natal-San Miguel
Hous Projects
31 Howard Street
SoHo, NYC
www.housprojects.com

Opening January 7th

Artists include: Mickalene Thomas, Brian Ulrich, Cara Phillips, Zoe Strauss, Hank Willis Thomas, Matthew Pillsbury, Amy Elkins, Molly Landreth, Eric Ogden, Alex Leme, Kris Graves, Jen Davis, Gina LeVay, Phil Toledano, Ruben Natal-SanMiguel, Michael Wolf, Elizabeth Fleming and Nadine Rovner.

Hope to see you there! (After heading over to see Timothy Briner's Booneville solo show at Daniel Cooney of course!!)

A few roughly edited shots from this whirlwind weekend for my ongoing series Where I Found You.


Mid-flight view, 2009



At ease, 2009



Lull, 2009



The demonstration, 2009



Cloaked, 2009



Red, 2009



Fractured light, 2009

Home•sick successfully opened at The Carnegie Art Museum this past Saturday. It was a whirlwind of a trip to CA, and the night of the opening was great. There was a great turn out and a steady stream of people throughout the opening. I had meant to post all of the artists in the exhibition before it went up, but couldn't get to a computer. Alas.. I now introduce the rest of the artists in Homesick: Stephanie Halmos, Dennis McLeod, Federico Gutierrez Schott, Jen Dessinger and Anthony Zepeda. Enjoy.


© Stephanie Halmos

"Homesick… I see it more as a longing for childhood, for memories. It is a longing for that freedom of having someone else care for you, and the ability to be lost without any sense of responsibility.

[My work] is representative of shifts in ideals, much of which I think happens when you leave home. Home to me is such a fluid word. In these pieces there is a literal depiction of people or objects in water, fog and these wet environments. When you leave from where you’ve been raised, the ideals with which you grew up begin to change as your definition of home changes. It is a process of growing." - sh




© Dennis McLeod

"Before moving to California, I had only been where I was born and raised. My family didn’t really travel so moving [to California] was like being a duck out of water. I was born in the south and it’s just a completely different experience. Home for me was having a close knit group of friends and being able to play every day: explore with them, go out all day and the parents wouldn’t worry—so a certain amount of freedom just to be on my own with my buddies.

The work that I’m going to be showing is based some on astronomy and constellations, and some of it is inspired by a trip I took to India about a year ago. I didn’t want to create works specifically for the show that some how tied into the notion of homesick … I know the way that I work stems from some early childhood discoveries that for years I didn’t even remember in terms of [my] process. The manner in which I work has been greatly influenced by those early childhood experiences and has offered me an opportunity to build and expand upon a body of work that fascinates me" - dm




© Federico Gutierrez Schott

"Right after high school, I left to Germany for a year. I know there are different levels of homesickness. I experienced a version that was like an illness. In my case, I felt it was more an intense feeling of being detached from my environment and being plugged into this new environment. It made me nauseous." - fgs




© Jen Dessinger

"A lot of the time [Homesick] is sensory. It can be a smell that takes me back to something—it’s almost a dizzying feeling. It always gets me going back to California, when I get into a hot car that’s been sitting in the sun, I think: oh my god, I’ve totally forgotten about this.

Over the past seven years I’ve been shooting the Demolition Derby project which is a direct reference to my dad, the relationship that I had with him, and missing it. There’s something really beautiful about [the Demolition Derby]. In the time that I’ve been going to these since I was five, it’s never changed. It’s exactly the same." - jd



© Anthony Zepeda

"I’m sometimes at a loss to make art if I don’t have a press, or particular equipment and materials around. To me a lot of paintings, prints and drawings are more like diaries. Even though they’re not the written word, they still conjure up memories. Part of the homesick concept would be not having your equipment, your brushes, and your tools.

I had these paintings in some boxes, in a locked cabinet, that were done a while ago. Since they haven’t been shown, I thought it might be a good time to do that along with some more recent wood cut, intaglio and silkscreen prints that I’ve produced." - af


Home•sick
Dec 12, 2009 - Feb 21, 2010
OPENS Dec 12th 4pm-7pm
Carnegie Art Museum

Home•sick
Dec 12, 2009 - Feb 21, 2010
OPENS Dec 12th 4pm-7pm
Carnegie Art Museum

I will be introducing a few of the artists a day, throughout the week.
Today: Jeff Beck, Livia Corona and Brian Paumier.


c. Jeff Beck

"Home looks like a rat maze to me. Everybody’s in a grid here, but it’s what I know. I’m sick of it, I leave, and then I miss it. I paint these neighborhoods that I’ve known my whole life. It’s their familiarity that relates to the theme of homesickness.

This will be a continuation of a series I’ve worked on for the last few years of the suburbs— the local Southern California suburban housing track. The response that I’ve gotten from most people that have seen [the work] is familiarity. Everyone thinks—if they’ve grown up in Southern California—that it’s a painting of the neighborhood they grew up in. People tell me: I know where that is. Most of the time, it’s not. It’s kind of funny; it’s so homogenous here that everyone has the same feeling for it." - jb


c. Livia Corona


"One can define home not by the mere construction of a dwelling, but as the combination of cultural, ecological, academic, architectural and social environments that delineate areas of growth for living creatures.

“Two Million Homes for Mexico" documents the massive low-income housing projects currently spreading through remote agrarian territory in Mexico. It explores multiple definitions of home, from the perspectives of real estate developers to the young resident families. The project examines the surge and effects of these developments, focusing on their role in the ongoing transformation of the cultural and ecological landscape in Mexico." - lc



c. Brian Paumier

"I'm homesick for my memories. I hang out with my grandmother and she can’t do the things that she used to do: I want to play cards with her until three in the morning, I want to go to the bakery and buy bread with her, but she can’t do that any more. I’m sad when things aren’t what they used to be. When things are changing and not remembered enough, I feel more homesick for the past.

The images that I’m presenting are the memories of my home in both California and Ohio, and of my grandmother. I’m showing things that may not be around anymore and things that might disappear." - bp

Homesick at Carnegie Art Museum (cont)

Home•sick
Dec 12, 2009 - Feb 21, 2010
OPENS Dec 12th 4pm-7pm
Carnegie Art Museum

I will be introducing a few of the artists a day, throughout the week.
Today: Kelly Reemtsen, Joaquin Trujillo and Sophia Wallace.


© Kelly Reemsten

"The first time I went to camp, it was a two-week camp. Every day felt like an eternity. I also felt like I was really far away from home. I was probably only a couple of hours away, but it felt on the other side of the world. I think in general, homesick means people who are longing for home. Instead of nostalgia, I’m viewing homesick at a different angle and using the word as a mental illness.

The work is about my obsessive-compulsive behavior. It’s always kind of joke between me and my friends about how clean I am. I am searching for perfection: fixing, organizing and cleaning my home because it never seems quite right." - kr



© Joaquin Trujillo

"Homesick was a word that was foreign to me. We really don’t have that word in Mexico. Someone explained it to me, but it still was a mystery until I got to New York. It was interesting to me that when I was so happy, had accomplished what I had worked for, when I had reached this moment, I felt so alone even though I was surrounded by so many people. I started wondering what homesick was for a lot of other people that I knew.

Flowers are really important in my mother and sisters' homes, not just on birthdays and anniversaries, but everyday and year round, on their patios and through their houses. When I was a kid I used to pick flowers from each of them. But December 12, Guadalupe Day, was extra special. I would make a bouquet that was so amazing, I always felt like I had taken home the first place blue ribbon at an American county fair for it. Six flowers and one arrangement is the representation of love and support they have given me. My arrangement represents what I have consciously obtained from them as well as what has made me the man I am today." - jt



© Sophia Wallace

"Homesick for me is a lot about memories of the past, my family, and the people I grew up with who influenced and shaped me.

I’m going to be showing found photographs of my grandmother—portraits of her and then also portraits of me as her. In creating this series, the process of discovery and restoration was important to me. I know very little about the period of her life before her role as wife, mother and grandmother—when she was Sophie Olafson, a theater student and the teacher of a one-room schoolhouse. I lost my grandmother this year so the series is about losing and finding my grandmother." - sw

Homesick at Carnegie Art Museum opens 12/12/09

©Amy Elkins from the series Black is the Day, Black is the Night

I am more than excited to put some new work out into the world, especially at this upcoming group exhibition in a museum space in southern CA. A treat to show work in my native state and among such fantastic artists.

--
Home•sick
Dec 12, 2009 - Feb 21, 2010
Carnegie Art Museum
See map here

—adjective, longing for another place, another person, another time
—noun, a group art exhibition in Oxnard, California this December 2009

Featuring fifteen international artists, Homesick debuts at Carnegie Art Museum December 12. Through mixed media including prints on paper, oil paintings, video installation, photography and sculpture, the show is an exploration of Homesick portrayed through images of wet landscapes, racing automobiles, grandmothers, track housing, meditative abstract illustration, stickers, and domestic housework.

Artists include Dennis McLeod whose line and drip ink works on paper were most recently shown in the exhibition "Rembrandt to Thiebaud: A decade of collecting works on paper" at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco; Amy Elkins whose photography has been exhibited internationally from Kunsthalle wien in Vienna, Austria to The PIP International Photo Festival in Pingyao, China as well as a solo show at Yancey Richardson Gallery last year called "Wallflower"; Derick Melander whose sculptures have been exhibited in numerous NYC museums and galleries, with most recent projects being a community event with CENYC utilizing 3,615 pounds of clothing and a solo show at Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA; Anthony Zepeda, a former Master Printmaker at Gemini G.E.L., whose prints have been exhibited around the world from Brazil to Thailand; and Livia Corona with her work, "Two Million Homes for Mexico" for which she was awarded a Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

The show is curated by New York City based photographer Joaquin Trujillo who, originally a native of Los Angeles, also calls Zacatecas, Mexico home. His body of work "Los Ninos" has been shown by Rose Gallery at Paris Photo, Art Maimi and The Armory. He is half of the collaborative team Trujillo-Paumier that works editorially and commercially creating bodies of work that include "Hot Cakes" which belongs to the Weisman Art Foundation Collections.

Carnegie Art Museum is located at 424 South C Street in Oxnard, California. The opening public reception is from 4 to 7 pm on Saturday, December 12. The show runs through December to February 21.

For more information, please click here.
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I will be introducing a few of the artists a day, throughout the week.
Today: Malú Alvarez, Edward Doty and Derick Melander


© Malú Alvarez

"When I went to college and came back for the first break, I had an overwhelming sense of homesickness. We had to speak English because a guest was there. Later, when I went to Australia to study, I was completely by myself. Even though I had some contacts, and I was working the last year and a half, in that time, the weekends could be very lonely.

My photographs capture different images of home from details of interiors to food. I often feel like I’m between places culturally, but also now, I’m in this in-between place where I still very much yearn for the comfort and life of my family’s home as I try to make my own." - ma


© Edward Doty

"I have this memory of driving, when we were moving to Massachusetts from Connecticut, of driving on the highway from one house to another. That kind of displacement, having left one place and not having arrived in the new home, an early sense of that is what I consider homesick.

These photographs are from some slides that I found, mostly that were taken by my paternal grandfather. A few years ago, I started looking at them again, re-photographing them with magnifying glasses and cropping the images to something that was of particular interest to me. I recomposed some of the pictures and used the kind of blurring effect that the magnifiers provided to get a sense of what it was like for me to look at those. I’m thinking about how the photographic object functions kind of as a place-keeper, and also as a way of generating memories, stories and kind of a history because I can’t identify many of the people in those photographs. There’s still a lot of mystery about them. [A photograph] is a small object that can move around with you, that still refers back to the idea of home if not necessarily the specific place that was considered home." - ed


© Derick Melander

"Since moving here, I’ve never really left New York for probably more than a month. I did go to Washington DC for six months at one point. I never thought about being homesick at the time. I thought I was just suffering from a broken heart. But that probably was also being homesick for New York.

I’m excited to work with clothing that comes all from one source. Essentially, this pretty specific population that has [one person] in the middle is very interesting to me. If you can fancy that clothing perhaps maintains a trace of the people who wore it, as the elbows wear out on an old sweater and the way that jeans get tattered along the cuff, in a sense, the piece is going to end up ultimately being like a portrait." - dm

Choir by accumulation

My all time favorite piece at MoMA to date: The Forty Part Motet by Janet Cardiff.

Video does this absolutely no justice, as the piece is created by forty separately recorded choir voices, played through forty speakers placed throughout the exhibition space and is only fully absorbed by walking from speaker to speaker to hear every inflection and note. Or perhaps by sitting in the middle of the room for the entire 14 minute loop. I wish it was permanently on display at MoMA, alas it's been away since 2006.

www. implosion

Sometimes I wonder if we've all gotten so tangled up in blogging and posting content, twittering, facebooking, flickring, etc around the clock, that we are creating a virtual world we are never capable of keeping up with.. not only that, I wonder if we are all so distracted by these virtual communities that we forget to spend time away from our computers and iphones. Majority of the information feeding into the www.'s is lost and perhaps never even reaches anybody before being replaced by more content. I sometimes think perhaps the internet might just implode upon itself. Of course like many of my photo peers, I am equally tangled up in and contributing to this over-stimulation, and I'm probably not going to stop. I guess I wonder.. when does it all become too much? Is anybody else concerned about this?