Congratulations to Brantly Moore, who has been awarded the UNC Graduate School’s Werner P. Friederich Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship (for study in the humanities with travel to Switzerland, if possible) and Summer Research Fellowship.
Read about Williams’ VERA Collaborative project to help inform decision-makers about the historical implications of digital reproduction methods, particularly the effect on portraying people of color, here: https://magazine.college.unc.edu/news-article/preserving-visual-history/
Let’s examine the Petit Trianon, a small retreat in the gardens of the palace at Versailles created by Louis XV as a portrait. What does this home tell us about this powerful king? Kevin Justus, PhD (UNC-CH 2002), is an independent art historian, writer, and musician. He specializes in and publishes on the patronage of Louis XV and Versailles. Although based in Tucson, he works yearly at the Research Center at Versailles creating a monumental photographic database to assist in scholarly research. He is a Chateaubriand scholar and French Ambassadorial Laureate.
Congratulations to PhD candidate Jennifer Wu, who has just received a three-month Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Junior Fellowship for Spring 2020.
Opening Reception: Friday, March 13th
From 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
Paradise of Pleasure
Photographs by Mike Keaveney
Artist Statement
“That nothing last forever is perhaps our favorite thing to forget. And forgetting is the ruin of memory, its collapse, decay, shattering and eventual fading away into nothingness.” Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007) 254.
At the core of photography is a resistance to forgetting, decay and fading away. Each recorded image rips a moment from time in an attempt at preservation. However, with every exposure to light, air and time, images degrade, technologies become obsolete and context is lost. Leaving behind futile attempts at permanence, abandoned archives and outdated recording devices.
These forgotten archives and obsolete technologies become the raw materials for my practice. Through re-use, assemblage, erasure and digital manipulation I bring attention to photography’s ephemerality, our inherent need to record and preserve. In Halos of Happiness I collected and assembled found 4×6 landscape photographs. Using bleach as an erasure tool and varnish as a resistor, I manipulated them into representations of the state of the materials and the landscapes they represent. Fading archives, chemistry, and technology; baring traces of the past but deteriorating from every direction.
Photography mimics the entropic nature of the world it attempts to preserve, a site of transient moments and landscapes. Within the United States it is difficult to understand the landscape, no matter how many representations are made of it. It appears to have hidden its own history, traces dissolved and architecture demolished. Devoid of the romantic ruins of the past, what remains is a utopic fantasy of progression. Paired with photography’s ties to representation I create futile attempts at understanding a landscape vibrating in a constant state of creation and deterioration.
Exhibition runs March 1st-31st, 2020
ADAPTATION FEVER
4 single-channel videos, black and white with sound, 21 minutes.
Hồng-Ân Trương
Jan. 31 – March 22, 2020
On display every night from sundown to 3 a.m. and each First Friday
Exploring the history of French and American colonialism in Vietnam, these videos use found historical footage – all shot on or before 1954, the year that marked the end of French occupation but the beginning of U.S. involvement – to consider postcolonial subjectivity and nostalgia, and the uneasy division between the “mythic” and the “real” past. Playing with the notion that nostalgia can be evoked without memory or experience (but through the experience of images and the imaginary landscape of images), the videos suggest the co-dependent relationship between the West’s present and the Other’s desire for that present-modernity.
The archive is approached through the double, where colonial sound and scenes are mirrored against each other, split, and repeated. Bifurcated screens and juxtaposition become simple techniques whereby the “real” and by extension, its historical referent, are permanently deferred objects, further diminished through the overdubbed narratives in Vietnamese or French. Much of the footage suggests the impact of Catholicism, which, unlike the vestiges of colonialism left on the Vietnamese social landscape in the form of architecture, cuisine, and street names, instead marks the body: a transcendent and mystical stain made corporeal. The historical trace asks: What happens when the Other becomes a specter from within?
For address and more info: https://raleighnc.gov/places/block2-gallery
Joy Drury Cox
Prone and Plumb
Asphodel
Brooklyn, NY
March 5th – April 18th
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 5th
6 – 9 pm
Asphodel presents PRONE AND PLUMB, an exhibition of new graphic works by JOY DRURY COX, opening on Thursday, March 5 and on view through Saturday, April 18.
Please join us for the artist reception on Thursday, March 5 from 6 to 9 pm.
Prone carries the weight of physical pain—immovable, exhausted—often following a substantial expression of energy. Plumb, on the other hand, is upright, energetic—though ultimately enervating. In three new series of drawings, Joy Drury Cox represents this pair of semantic antipodes as palindromic conceptual drawings, exercising what the artist terms “line dialectics.” Cox’s interdisciplinary artistic practice includes drawing, artist’s books, texts, and photography. Her works consider mapping, making, measuring, and marking and their variables roles in the politics of labor and the structures of everyday life.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Joy Drury Cox was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1978 and received a BA in English from Emory University and an MFA from the School of Art and Art History at the University of Florida. She has exhibited nationally and internationally since 2003 and is the author of three artist’s books: STRANGER, OLD MAN AND SEA, and OR, SOME OF THE WHALE. Most recently, Cox co-authored a photography book with her partner, Ben Alper, titled COMPOUND FRACTURES featuring photographs of caves taken in the Southeastern United States. Her works are included in private and public collections, including the New York Public Library and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Cox is currently a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Art and Art History Department at UNC-Chapel Hill.
For more information on the artist, please visit joydrurycox.com.
Asphodel
20 Jay Street
Suite 837 (eighth floor)
Brooklyn, New York
11201 US
Wednesday → Friday
12 → 6 pm
& by appointment
gallery@asphodel.us
ASPHODEL is an art gallery and project space co-founded by Lisa Kahlden and Jason Loeffler in 2017. Previous one-person exhibitions include Nicholas Szymanski, Notes to Diane; Amy Vogel, fear-of-nature-of-fear; Vanha Lam, Variables; Clary Stolte, Nobody Knows; Jeff Kraus, My Bunny the Snake; Karl Burkheimer, aline; Heidi Schwegler, Zoonosis; and Anastasia Komarova, Material Control.
Asphodel gratefully acknowledges Anthology of Recorded Music, Inc. (ARM) for providing logistical and operational support for its 2020 exhibition series. Operating continuously since 1974, ARM’s imprints include New World Records, the Database of Recorded American Music, and Sound American. Recent releases include Kate Soper, Ipsa Dixit; Julius Eastman, The Zürich Concert; Christian Wolff, 2 Orchestra Pieces; and James Tenney, Changes: 64 Studies for Six Harps.
Symposium: Revisiting Discourses of Love, Sex, and Desire in Modern Iran and Diaspora
Persian Studies Program at UNC-Chapel Hill Presents
March 28, 2020 Revisiting Discourses of Love, Sex, and Desire in Modern Iran and Diaspora
Including an exhibition of work by MFA Candidate in Studio Art, Minoo Emami, titled “Dystopia”
FedEx Global Education Center
Room 1005
UNC-Chapel Hill
This one-day symposium is an attempt to provide a safe space for public discussions of the nuances around discourses of love and desire in modern Iran, challenging and contributing to the dominant discourses on key topics. From their mundane to their sublime forms, love and desire have played a central role in various discourses in modern Iran. From romantic epics to ghazals, and from arranged marriages to white marriages, and from companionate love to contemporary cohabitations, desire is undoubtedly one of the most important theoretical topics for scholars. This symposium brings together a range of scholars from different disciplines focusing on modern Iran to analyze the wide variety of ways in which love and desire have been represented, imagined, and discursively constructed. Participants will address discourses of love and desire and revisit those discourses considering the implications that they have for larger theoretical debates. Selected papers of the symposium will be published in the book series titled, Sex, Marriage, and family in the Middle East, edited by Janet Afary and Claudia Yaghoobi, published by Bloomsbury. Other selected papers will appear as a special issue in the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies.
Organizer:
Dr. Claudia Yaghoobi, Ph. D – Roshan Institute Assistant Professor in Persian Studies, for information about the symposium contact Dr. Yaghoobi at Yaghoobi@email.unc.edu
Sponsors:
The American Institute of Iranian Studies, UNC Persian Studies Program, UNC Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, the Department of Asian Studies, College of Arts and Sciences, Associate Provost of Global Affairs, the Department of English and Comparative Literature, the Department of History, the Department of Religious Studies, the Department of Women and Gender Studies, The Department of Geography, The Institute for the Arts and Humanities, UNC-Chapel Hill University Libraries, The Countering Hate Initiative
For more info: https://claudiayaghoobi.com/symposium-revisiting-discourses-of-love-sex-and-desire-in-modern-iran-and-diaspora/
A nice photo essay about the course “Art and Science: Merging Printmaking and Biology” led by art professor Beth Grabowski and biology professor Bob Goldstein can be read in Endeavors here: https://endeavors.unc.edu/through-a-different-lens/
From his obituary in the NY Times:
He was a leading member of the generation that sought to recast abstraction in cooler, more analytic terms after the turmoil of Abstract Expressionism.
Jack Youngerman, a French-trained American artist whose profuse invention of abstract shapes in two and three dimensions opened up a new aesthetic vocabulary in the period immediately after Abstract Expressionism, died on Wednesday in Stony Brook, N.Y. He was 93.
Janet Goleas, his studio manager and archivist, said the cause was complications of a fall.
Mr. Youngerman, like many American artists in the late 1940s, studied in Paris on the G.I. Bill. Unlike them, he remained there, developing a distinctive style of abstraction based on organic shapes, drawing inspiration from the woodblock prints of Jean Arp and Wassily Kandinsky and, perhaps most decisively, the ink drawings of Henri Matisse.
Mr. Youngerman’s fluid, emblem-like shapes embraced flatness and frontal views, leaping forward to meet the viewer with bold primary colors. The shapes, vaguely floral or leafy, flirted with representation but remained aloof, floating like mysterious essences in a timeless spirit world.
As he wrote in Art in America in 1968: “We are immersed in the powerful and autonomous effigies of the world before these forms are possessed and diminished by names and uses, the name pre-empting the form. Painting involves the restoring of the image to that original primacy.”
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Encouraged by Betty Parsons, New York’s premier dealer in American avant-garde art at the time, Mr. Youngerman returned to the United States in 1956. He soon emerged as a leading exponent of post-painterly abstraction, a catchall term describing the impulse of the generation seeking to recast abstraction in cooler, more analytic terms after the Sturm und Drang of Abstract Expressionism. . . .
