Gallery Archive
Leah Bailis, Brent Wahl, Xiang Yang, Marisa Olson, One Gray Grass in the Ball Field
Images
EXHIBITION DATES: October 3 – November 2, 2008
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, October 3 from 6 - 11 pm
GALLERY HOURS: Wednesday - Sunday 12 - 6pm
GALLERY TALK: With Denise Carvalho, PHD, Art Critic and Curator, Sunday November 2 at 3pm.
On exhibition at Vox in October are member artists, Leah Bailis, Brent Wahl, and Xiang Yang, and guest net,n performance and video artist, Marisa Olson in the Video Lounge. One Gray Grass in the Ball Field, an exhibition featuring Vox Populi alumni, Clint Takeda, David Wickland, Joy Feasley, Jen Macdonald, Kait Midgett, Nancy Lewis, Nick Muellner, Paul Swenbeck, Richard Harrod, Shannon Bowser, and Tristin Lowe, continues through the end of the month.
This is the second month in Vox Populi’s 21st Anniversary season, which runs from September 2008 through August 2009. Check our website for up to date information on things we have planned for the year to celebrate!
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Leah Bailis
Re-Building
For her third solo show at Vox Populi, Leah Bailis constructs fragments of an imagined house. These fragments become building blocks for the construction of a new house-like structure. The house is cut apart and reconfigured, attempting a new sense of wholeness.
Brent Wahl
Motets for Architecture and Fear
Motets for Architecture and Fear is a grouping of images that comes out of a three part series started earlier this year. Making use of the disparate linkage of architecture, faith, and nature, Brent quietly employs pop/historical references teamed with dark humor, in an effort to pull the viewer in and repel them at the same time. The themes of cultural phenomenon, abstraction, time, illusion, and the spectacle are all ongoing concerns in Brent’s work and were most recently seen in The Interplanetary Death Star, The Most Fearful and Merciful Thing in the World, and The Phantom Limb.
Xiang Yang
You Can’t Sit Down
IN THE FOURTH ROOM
Vox Alumni Present:
One Gray Grass in the Ball Field
Continuing at Vox this month is One Gray Grass in the Ball Field, an exhibition which revives the great 90’s tradition: the group theme show. One Gray Grass in the Ball Field assigns artists with a simple mission: to create the feeling of a county fair art exhibition. The idea for One Gray Grass in the Ball Field was forged through the friendly bond between Shannon Bowser, Joy Feasley, Paul Swenbeck and Clint Takeada. An earlier Vox exhibition called Doohickey Lodge became the inspiration for this group to pitch in and buy a three-season cottage in Northport ME. 4-H clubs and country fairs like the Common Ground Fair in Liberty, Maine, serve as a model for the aesthetic view of the show. Following in the footsteps of past Vox exhibitions like Elf Portraits and New Nihilism Now, this show will be a chaotic mŽlange of handicraft and poetry, “fine art” and pies. The artists involved are sampled from a group of artists that cut their teeth in the mid-nineties when John Cage was still around to be mortified by our tributes to his Yoda-like art practice. Invited artists include David Wickland, Jen Macdonald, Kait Midgett, Nick Muellner, Richard Harrod and Tristin Lowe.
IN THE VIDEO LOUNGE
Marisa Olson
Break-Up Album (Demo)
Break-Up Album (Demo) is a four-channel "video album" about pain as a medium, the breakup album genre, and the notion of a demo—something that shows what an artist may (or may not) have to offer or be capable of... in hopes of getting "picked up."
Marisa Olson's work combines performance, video, sound, drawing, and installation to address intersections of pop culture and the cultural history of technology, as they effect the voice, power, and persona. Her work has recently been presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou-Paris, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 52nd International Biennale di Venezia, National Museum of Contemporary Art (Athens, Greece), Edith Russ-Haus fur Medienkunst, Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst/ Montevideo, the British Film Institute, the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, and elsewhere. She is also a founding member of the Nasty Nets "internet surfing club" whose new DVD recently premiered at the New York Underground Film Festival and will be the subject of an exhibition at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Her work has been written about in ArtForum, Art in America, Folha de Sao Paolo, Liberation-Paris, the Village Voice, New York Magazine, and elsewhere. While Wired has called her both funny and humorous, the New York Times has called her "anything but stupid." Marisa studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College-London, History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, and Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Her critiques of contemporary art and digital visual culture have extended to writing for Flash Art, Art Review, Afterimage, Planet, and Art on Paper and to curating exhibitions and programs at the Guggenheim, SFMOMA, White Columns, Artists Space, the Performa Biennial, SF Camerawork, and Rhizome. Marisa was born in Germany and lives in New York.
AT SCREENING
Michael Bell-Smith
On the Grid
Michael Bell-Smith’s On the Grid is a minimal computer animation that presents an endless cityscape scrolling continuously across the screen like the backdrop of an early arcade game. Bringing to mind the expansive futurenoir cityscapes of Blade Runner, the crisp, glowing and perfect geometries of Tron and the micro-architecture of circuit boards, On the Grid points towards a geography defined by technology. On the Grid is Michael Bell- Smith’s first gallery exhibition in Philadelphia. Michael Bell-Smith's work-in animation, video, web sites, pictures, and audio-explores the ways in which technology mediates culture and personal experience. Recent exhibitions and screenings have taken place at the MusŽe d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; and Galeri F15, Moss, Norway. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Time Out New York, and Artnet and was included in the recent exhibitio The Cinema Effect at The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C.
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