Saturday, September 12, 2009

Boots fall opening exhibition Theaster Gates


photo: Sara Pooley

Holiness: In 3 Parts, a solo exhibition at Boots will give Theaster an opportunity to work through ideas surrounding the psychic space of the back yard. On opening night, with help from his performance ensemble, The Black Monks of Mississippi, Gates will bring charismatic structures of the black church into brief conversation with the formalities of City Planning Policy.

Performance will begin at 7:42pm and last till 8:53pm

Part 1: The Westside Piece (Front Space) 7:42- 7:52 (Theaster and possibly Orron Kenyatta -poet) photo by Sara Pooley

Part 2: The Glorious Picnic (Front of the back) 7:52- 8:40 (Black Monks of Mississippi)

Part 3: Stairwell to heaven and Other things from my backyard (Back of the back Space) 8:40-8:53 (Monastic Funk Band)

“Holiness in three parts could be thought of in the following way: Heaven, Hood and the City - using sculptural objects made from things in my backyard, we will move between these three loosely prescribed categories. With “The City” representing hell and the hood being somewhere between paradise and the underworld, I hope to consider three different presentation formats, in three different parts of the space in what would appear to be a Joseph Beuys styled performance that uses the black religious form to deliver thoughts on new urbanism, slave labor via the embodiment of Dave the slave potter and the history of the racialized bodythrough performance. Holiness in three parts is literally a trinity of confusion and urban rumination. Lots of stones will be left unturned, but those turned will get a good shining”

Theaster Gates




Tea Shack- photo by Sara Pooley










About Theaster Gates

Sculptor and Performance Artist, Theaster Gates works with the sacred city found just below its forgotten and often abandoned exterior. With parts of old buildings and visions of grand rehab projects, Gates, a believer in the possibility of place, begins to release some of the resonate beauty of the city’s under belly in a way that is both contemplative and frenetic.

for more info on Theaster Gates click on the link

for more info on boots click on the link

Saturday, May 9, 2009

BAZUCO MEDIA CORPORATION-June 19th 2009

DEAD DRUGLORDS - LIVE from BAZUCO MEDIA CORPORATION on Vimeo.



Bazuco (BZC) has been working as an art production unit in between Colombia and the USA, with cells in Venezuela, Argentina, and the Netherlands. Headed by artist Juan Obando in association with interaction designer Juan Ospina and designer/musician Juan Rios, BZC has been featured in different exhibitions and publications, including a selection for “Salon Nacional de Artistas” in Colombia in 2008.

As a performance-based unit, BZC has ventured into fashion, radio, prints, music, and video production, creating a variety of live and web shows and products that speak clearly to and about a new hybrid, deterritorialized generation defined by consumption and commercialism.

BAZUCO MEDIA CORPORATION will be creating a “pop-up” retail experience using the multilingual and heavily commercial visuals of Bazuco.
http://www.bazucobazuco.com/corporate/

The exhibition will all so include the Dead Druglords. Dead Druglords is a one-night party/event involving a DJ set, latin mash-up and live performers with a visual and interactive show that includes a narcoaesthetic language, heavily influenced by the imaginary of the latin druglord of the 80s and 90s in the USA.

This performance will include the channeling of Pablo Acosta and Amado Carrillo Fuentes that will dance from the dead while an airplane piñata full of “Colombian candy” waits to be smashed down the by St. Louis crowd. Live video projections of animated sequences and DJ sets of Salsa and Reggaeton-mashups will entertain and engage the public. Additionally, this night will include live performances by Colombo American band Drumkit, and Lafayette-based electro act Analog Zebra.

! Come one Come all !

Saturday, January 17, 2009

BAD MOON RISING 3






Laura Fried, Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and Jan Van Woensel











Anthony Huberman, Chief Curator, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and Jan Van Woensel











STORFRONT OF BOOTS CONTEMPORARY ART SPACE




OPENING NIGHT

Sunday, January 4, 2009

BAD MOON RISING Opening on JAN 16th


Jason Kalogiros, Double Sunset No. 1, 2007 Analog c-print

Opening reception:
Friday, January 16th 6:30 - 10:00 pm
Curators: Jessica Silverman and Jan Van Woensel
Assistant Curator: Kara Smith

Please join us for a conversation with Curators: Jessica Silverman and
Jan Van Woensel from 6:30pm - 7:15 on opening night.

The traveling group exhibition Bad Moon Rising exposes some of the dark sides of the world's self-proclaimed greatest nation: the United States of America. With the election of a new President in November 2008, people are optimistic about the future of the USA's national and international politics, economy and warfare. Nevertheless, the country's continual increase in unemployment, poverty, the financial downfall, expensive and unreliable health care, equal rights and overprized education are problems that are yet to be resolved. Although the mantra-esque "Yes, We Can" encourages us to believe in a better future, we cannot start dreaming. Offensive, annoying, naughty and whimsical, Bad Moon Rising 3 helps to reminds us of some of the most disturbing facts of the USA's past and present. Through a selection of artworks, artifacts and a-historical references, major themes such as politics, religion, society, family, war and the media are disturbingly portrayed, casting a dark shadow over the USA's promised ideologies of freedom and prosperity. (JVW)

Featuring work by: Vanessa Albury & Marthe Fortun / Tariq Ali / Julieta Aranda / Yossi Atia & Itamar Rose / Claire Beckett / Brice Bischoff / Zee Boudreaux / Irma Cannavo / Lori Cheatle & Daisy Wright / Brian Conley / Meg Cranston / Custer's Revenge / Alain Declercq / Messieurs Delmotte / Blue Firth / Lonnie Frisbee & David di Sabatino / Tony Garifalakis / Daniel Goodwin / Deva Graf / Simon Gush / Hamza Halloubi / George Hennard / Jason Kalogiros / Paulus Kapteyn / Richard Kern / Ragnar Kjartansson / Wonder Koch / David Matorin / Christina McPhee / NECK FACE / Joe Heaps Nelson/ Dustin Michael Pevey / Job Piston / Luther Price / Rage Against the Machine / Lee Ranaldo/ Max Razdow / Ruth Sacks / Yoji Sakate / Joaquin Segura / Ben Shaffer / Elin O'Hara Slavick / Ginger Wolfe-Suarez & Jeanne Moen Wolfe / The Weather Underground / Philippe Vandenberg / Ben Vautier / Pete Watts / Jackson Webb

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Upcoming Boot Print - Clémentine Deliss

This came across the wire from DOVA at the University of Chicago: Clémentine Deliss will be speaking tomorrow on the University of Chicago campus at Cochrane Woods Fine Art Center and again on November 18th at the Franke Institute (Details below).  Deliss was interviewed for the upcoming issue of Boot Print, to be released in December, for our study section on the future of art education in the Academy.  Deliss happens to be an expert on the subject with her involvement in the Metronome Press and Future Academy, “a self-reflexive investigation that relies on the free will and engagement of students from different institutions and faculties.”  Here is a preview from Danyel Ferrari’s interview with her from the upcoming Boot Print Vol. 2, Issue 2:

 

Danyel Ferrari: Questions of space and mobility were often discussed as a part of Future Academy. What do you think about the place of architecture in the architecture of ideas, should there be walls?

Clementine Deliss: I might have a different perspective on that than, say, the students I have worked with in Future Academy. For the students I have worked with, this was actually one of the clearest issues and it came up very early on with regard to future buildings. The majority of students, whether they were based in Mumbai, Bangalore, Dakar or Edinburgh generally felt that they didn’t need buildings in the first instance. They sought more face-to-face contact in the sense that they wanted field studies in locations and therefore a kind of plug-in system to enable contact to be played out. So they proposed the “shack academy,” built on existing tea shops, usually roadside venues where more discussions took place than within the walls of the academy buildings. They effectively wanted a more informal location for the production of ideas. The Bangalore group felt that it wouldn’t be advantageous at this stage to invest in a large amount of technology, but safer to wait a while and test out the conditions that might develop over the next few years.  So it wasn’t just about buying computers and various technology that would allow for this kind of plug-in mobility, it was something else. What they felt needed to be created was a quasi-business model where information, contacts and networks between these students could be developed into an economic set of relations as they became professionalized and entered into various careers. They wanted to build on the structures that they were already developing through Future Academy and create “roving colleges” that might provide a more equitable framework for them than the type of expansionism that we have known from the colonial period and that is in some cases, though not everywhere, being reformulated today.

Personally, I think one should be more careful and more sensitive to the fact that artists, if they work in the art college context, are actually moving into a back-stage condition. And this back-stage condition is enormously enriching for students. So sure they will teach, they’re always teaching, but they do not need to do courses so much as to be able to mediate what it is they are working on. In an art college, everybody is in a research context and for that purpose they need space. So I would argue that if you invite an artist to work within the art college, as much as possible you need to provide a certain space, a notion of “studio,” rather than creating staff rooms where they all check their emails and then go home. So I’m quite old fashioned in that I favor the artist’s studio within the art school context.  And that is something that is either being reduced or is, in some parts of the world, utterly nonexistent.

Look for Boot Print Vol. 2, Issue 2 in December for the rest of her interview and others on the future of art pedagogy.  In the meantime, check out her lecture if you’re in Chicago.

 

MORE INFO: Clémentine Deliss is an independent curator, researcher and publisher. Since 1996 she has produced  Metronome, which was launched at the Dakar and Venice Biennales; the Kunsthalle Basel; DAAD, Berlin; documenta X and documenta 12; Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris; and Kandada/CommandN  gallery Tokyo. Dr. Deliss initiated Future Academy in late 2002 to investigate the transformations of the art college and, with the central input of students, forecast future conditions for independent research and art production. As a self-reflexive investigation that relies on the free will and engagement of students from different institutions and faculties, Future Academy is necessarily autonomous in its structure and thinking. The latest focus of Future Academy centers on the 'prelusive' phase within art production and a reappraisal of the artists' study collection as the possible core of a future art institute. In her talk, she will present outcomes of this research that relate specifically to international relations and economic self-sufficiency.

 

DETAILS:

Wednesday, November 12, 5PM  (I would recommend calling ahead to confirm)
Cochrane Woods Art Center RM 157 (University of Chicago)

5540 South Greenwood Avenue

Tuesday, November 18, 3PM

The Franke Institute, JRL S-118, Regenstein Library (University of Chicago)

1100 E 57th Street

 posted by Tim Ridlen

 

Serkan Ozkaya "A Sudden Gust of Wind"


Installation view, main gallery, Boots Contemporary Art Space



Exhibition reviews/blog postings:

1. David Bonetti, A gust of wind; a blast of hot air: one exhibit of installation art is a studied essay, the other a shoddy bore, Post-Dispatch, STLTODAY.COM, F3, Sunday October 5, 2008, St. Louis, MO, USA
2. Ivy Cooper, Serkan Ozkaya  works magic, St. Louis Beacon, Tuesday October 7, 2008, St. Louis, MO, USA
3. Jessica Baran, St. Louis Art Capsules, RTF, October 28, 2008, St. Louis, MO, USA
4. Rachel Gagnon, Artist Interviews: Serkan Ozkaya and Pepe Mar, Art:21 blog, October 16, 2008, USA
An interview with artist Serkan Ozkaya with Georgia Kotretsos at Boots Contemporary Arts Space




Serkan Ozkaya in front of his installation at Boots


Wednesday, September 3, 2008