Julie Perini: The Blog

Cluster
A group show curated by Adam Welch
Pittsburgh Center for the Arts
Pittsburgh, PA
Opening reception:  Friday, Feb. 5, 2010, 5:30pm – 8:00pm
Feb. 5, 2010 – March 28, 2010

Frozen and Trapped Forever (detail), Jacob Ciocci, 2010

From the PCA site:  Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and Pittsburgh Filmmakers announce Cluster, a group exhibition of more than 20 Pittsburgh-area artists, curated by Adam Welch. It is on view February 5 – March 28, 2010. An opening reception will be held on Friday evening, February 5 from 5:30 to 8:00pm. It is open to the public; $5 requested donation; free to PF/PCA members. Beginning with this show, PCA will extend Thursday evening hours to 7:00 pm. The Dialogue Series continues on the second Thursday of each month, and the pavilion series will resume on Thursdays in the summer.

Cluster takes over all PCA’s gallery spaces at the Shadyside campus and features invited artists who’ve investigated the spatial device of connections. These connections might be obvious, esoteric, direct, or juxtaposed, and elicit a fundamental element of artistic discourse. Welch says these artists are, “working within their interests to profess what they know or do not know, for a purpose that is both self and collectively informing.”

The show offers a wide range of visual works in a variety of mediums from regional artists. Artworks with dissimilar processes and formations will be displayed around the building creating multiple levels of viewing experiences. Some of these are:

• A large-scale mixed-media installation by Jacob Ciocci titled, “Frozen and Trapped Forever.” This piece employs HD video with painting, combining outtakes of TV/film, comics and self-drawn animations, rapidly cut and collaged together to create an overload of information.
• A site-specific installation by Jason Lee, which further extends his “Euthenic Set Series,” made up of elements of safety-orange painted light boxes containing photographic imagery, wires, plastic ducks and picket fences arranged to present contemporary landscape as sanitized, congenially pristine and compartmentalized.
• Individual video works by Robert Ladislas Derr and Julie Perini, both of which investigate the relationship of history and social constructs through filmed performance acts.
• Interactive installations by Sean Derry and Amanda Long. Derry’s piece, “Rehearsing Spring,” combines monochromatic panels and heating elements, which hold a temperature close to natural body heat. Long’s work involves color and pattern with multi-channel projectors. When the viewer interacts with it, it takes on different special arrangements of color fields.
• Sculptural works by Dee Briggs, Will Giannotti, Kyle Houser and Anita Sulimanovic, all of which navigate the object as a process of expression.
• Painted/printed/drawn/cut works by Connie Cantor, Brian Brown, David Montano, and Nayda Collazo-Llorens.
• A series of black and white photographs by Jacob Koestler, and digital color photographs by Michael Sherwin.

BAER RIDGWAY EXHIBITIONS PRESENTS
JUST LOOK AROUND THIS PLACE
ONE-NIGHT SCREENING OF NEW WORKS IN VIDEO
CURATED BY KENNETH WHITE
FRIDAY, 22 JANUARY 2010 / 8PM / FREE

Baer Ridgway Exhibitions of 172 Minna Street, San Francisco, presents Just Look Around This Place, a program of new works in video curated by Kenneth White. The one-time screening will begin at 8pm on Friday, January 22, 2010. Total running time is approximately one hour. Admission is free and open to the public.

Just Look Around This Place is a collection of seven short works in video that explore the transformation of social relations by the video medium. Using a diverse range of methods, including video-diary, home video, animation, direct address, and appropriation, the artists dissect their means of creative production and the mutations of social performance that their medium instigates. Video is an environment through which interaction is conditioned. In each work, we are beckoned to “just look around this place,” and recognize the (often hilarious) scenes of life performed for electronic media. Works and artists include “Let’s watch this guy at a coffee shop.” (Julie Perini), “HOME / VIDEO” (Michael Hession), “Video Terraform Dance Party” (Jeremy Bailey), “Pine Point” (Kenneth White), “Beauty Plus Pity” (Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby), “West Nile” (Tom Sherman), and “The Frills 3.0” (Jimmy DiPasquale).

Kenneth White is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator. He is currently a graduate student in the Art History / Film Studies Ph.D. Program at Stanford University. He received his B.F.A. in film production from Syracuse University in 2005. He is a co-founder of the Portland Film + Video Artists Collective, of Portland, Maine. White will serve as a visiting curator in the summer 2010 session of the Maine College of Art M.F.A. Program.

Baer Ridgway Exhibitions
Kent Baer and Eli Ridgway
Address: 172 Minna Street, San Francisco
Phone: 415-777-1366
Email: info@baerridgway.com
Website: www.baerridgway.com

From "They have a name for girls like me." (2006-present)

In early December, They have a name for girls like me. screened in its most recent incarnation at Gender & the Body in Contemporary Found Footage Filmmaking, a collection of films that use appropriated material, programmed by Jaimie Baron at UCLA.  Filmmaker/writer Dinorah de Jesus Rodriguez has an article about the screening on her blog.  Check it out.

Saturday December 19th
8pm $3 donation.
Tough Stuff from the Buff: Experimental and Activist Video from the Fringes of Buffalo, NY
Sugar City, Buffalo, NY
with co-organizers Dave Gracon and Julie Perini!!!!

Tough Stuff from the Buff makes It home! The film program, brought to you by ex-pats Mark Moscato, David Gracon and Julie Perini, highlights Buffalo’s little known Do-It-Yourself (DIY) media arts community, focusing on contemporary works that blur the lines between video art, personal documentary and media activism. Representing a diverse group of artists, from accomplished media makers to youth-produced projects, the collection reflects the city’s public spaces, political struggles and its resiliency under late capitalism. Artist include: Chris Ernst, Tony Conrad, Meg Knowles, Critical Art Ensemble, Terry Cuddy, Kelly Spivey, Stephanie Gray, and more!

Buffalo has only recently started to become recognized for its lo-fi, experimental and uncompromising body of film and video. Last year’s release of Buffalo Heads: Media Study , Media Practice, Media Pioneers, 1973-1990 (MIT, 2008) has brought renewed interest in the city’s media community and the organizations that have fostered its vibrancy, including New York State Council on the Arts, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, University at Buffalo’s Department of Media Study and Squeaky Wheel. Tough Stuff from the Buff acknowledges the origins of this tradition, while focusing on contemporary examples of those persevering against the odds of creating media in a dying rustbelt town.

First, you all need to run to your local library or independent bookseller and get Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority edited by Josh MacPhee and Eric Reuland.

Second, it is filled with interesting articles, but one in particular by anarchist anthropologist David Graeber is grabbing me right now.  It is called “The Twilight of Vanguardism” and in it he discusses a history of the idea of vanguardism, finishing up with some statements about how revolutionary alliances form between society’s least alienated people (artists in this discussion) and most oppressed people.  Here is an excerpt:

“For me the really intriguing question is this:  why is it that artists have so often been drawn to revolutionary politics in the first place?…It seems to me the answer must have something to do with alienation.  There would appear to be a direct link between the experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into being (individually or collectively) – that is, the experience of certain forms of un-alienated production – and the ability to imagine social alternatives, particularly the ability to imagine a society itself premised on less alienated forms of creativity.”

The talk at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester last weekend was a blast.  We had this interesting crowd of smarty-pantses from the area, asking all sorts of smarty-pantsed questions about what I think about the discipline of athropology, this wave of “social practice” sweeping over the art world, and more.

By The Center for Urban Pedagogy

This past weekend I zipped down to Pittsburgh for the afternoon to see “Experimental Geography” at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon.  It’s a great show, but I cannot figure out from the site who was responsible for my two favorite pieces.  I will get back to you on this one.