Visiting faculty member Renzo Ortega, MFA alumni Allison Tierney and Jonh Blanco, and friend-of-the-department Bob Goldstein are all featured in this upcoming group show from the Orange County Arts Commission.

---

The Orange County Arts Commission, in partnership with the Orange County Department of Housing and Community Development present HOME? An Artistic Exploration of Housing in the Triangle, which seeks to showcase “home” through the eyes and words of working artists.

The exhibit features 100 works of art by 54 Triangle-based artists and will be on view through April, 2022 at the Eno Mill Gallery in Hillsborough. 

The public is invited to a free Opening Party on Friday, April 1, from 6-9pm featuring:

• Selected written works on the theme of “home” by sixteen Triangle-based writers
• Live music with Soteria Shepperson
• Open artist studios
• Food trucks Yagg Sii Tenn (back by popular demand!) and Maple View Ice Cream
• Beer from Red Oak Brewery
• Kids’ activities with the Art Therapy Institute
• Tabling with community housing organizations

About the Exhibit

In the Triangle, artists are considered to be fundamental to the quality of life and unique character of our communities, but they are one of the most impacted groups of rising costs of living, especially housing. To highlight this issue, the Orange County Arts Commission and Orange County Department of Housing and Community Development asked visual and literary artists living in Orange, Durham, Wake, and Chatham counties to respond to the following questions through visual and written works:

• What does the idea or experience of “home” mean to you?
• What has your experience of “home” been as an artist and person living in the Triangle?
• Is “home” a place of comfort, safety, and warmth, or something else?
• Is “home” positive, negative, or something in between?

Sixty-four visual artists submitted 148 works of art; 26 writers submitted 52 written works. Submissions were juried by panels of visual and literary artists. Works by 54 visual artists were selected for the exhibit and 16 writers were selected to read their submissions aloud during the opening event on Friday, April 1. 

Twenty percent of proceeds from work sold will be used to create an Emergency Housing Fund for artists in partnership with the Department of Housing.

  THE FLOWERS I HAVE NEVER SEEN IN MY GARDEN  

March 24, 2022- 7pm CET/1pm EST
On Mozilla Hubs  

Chris Golden, Mohsen Hazrati, Lauren Moffatt, Sabrina Ratté 

Opening:March 24, 2022- 7pm CET/1pm EST
Exhibition:March 24, 2022 – June 23, 2022
Private Tour: email to register, +49 176 325 10217
Online venue: https://hubs.mozilla.com/vA8xeJa/(activated on March 24th)

______________________________________________________________________________________________ 

The flowers I have never seen in my garden is a digital exhibition featuring works by Chris Golden, Sabrina Ratté, Mohsen Hazrati, and Lauren Moffatt. Constructed in the free-floating space of Mozilla Hubs, the works on view utilize this programmable backdrop to examine how gardens might appear in the wake of ecological and social cataclysms.  

These flowers, the works on view, are not invisible, so much as hypothetical, speculative. Each work contributed, each virtual garden plot, extends into all the others, creating a network of virtual pathways that unfold sequentially, like the illustrations of an idea that is carefully trying to prove itself.  

The exhibition doesn’t claim to be an online gallery space, or even a 3-dimensional archive, but acts more like a herbarium populated with anthropomorphized flora. A kind of new world is invoked where mechanism and finality mingle, not in the manner of a futuristic cyborg, but in a way where human history and natural history as we know them overgrow into a parallel reality that shares the same concerns as ours. Questions of ecological preservation, identity and its relationship to memory, and the threat of mass extinction are duly addressed. Only here, the familiar solutions offered by our world are placed in parentheses.  

Chris Golden’s Aura Garden, for example, treats of memory—only here memory is invaded by a sort of aural shimmer that translates the dynamics of floral growth into a psychedelic reflection of the calmness in nature. Through a mingling of visuality and sound, the viewer is confronted by the notion that “moments,” even at their most epiphanic, are nothing more than contingent human constructs. 

Sabrina Ratté’s Floralia offers a speculative natural history through a graduated and precise process of segmentation and reconstruction. Simulating the fusion of technology and organic matter, the work plunges the viewer into a speculative future, where samples of extinct plant species are preserved and displayed in a virtual archive room. Through editing and visual strategies, this archive room is sporadically transformed under the effect of interference caused by the memory emanating from the listed plants, revealing traces of the past that continue to haunt the present.  

Mohsen Hazrati, the architect of this Hubs environment, uses the utopian space of the virtual to revisit the history of technology. Taking the ancient Iranian innovation of using wine and other stringents (lemons, vinegar) to generate small volts of electricity, Hazrati has realized a 3D recreation of this pioneering ancient technology. The fruits that spark this device to life are wholly virtual, but have a practical, effective existence within an imaginarium modeled to look like a garden.  

Lauren Moffatt, for her contribution, plays off of the tension that obtains between augmented reality and virtual reality. Her Flowers for Suzanne Clair (named after a secondary character in J. G. Ballard’s disaster fiction novel The Crystal World) creates a strange type of organic digitality which pivots on a process of collecting and digitizing plant specimens through an exchange between the physical and the virtual. Fusing photographic details of flowers with aleatory textures, these fictive plant species are windows to alterity glimpsed through a prism of biological life.  

Staging, ultimately, is essential to what is happening throughout The flowers I have never seen in my garden. Looking at the the digital species the show models itself around, history itself becomes heavy with an unsettling inertia; and the concept of “nature” becomes mechanized to a point where we can almost peer past it, towards a sentient nothingness that defies the logic of temporal descriptors. 

The flowers I have never seen in my garden is curated and designed by George Vitale (synthesis gallery) and produced by Cosmic Rays. 

CHRIS GOLDEN (b. 1988, GBR, https://chrisgolden.art) is a digital artist exploring the energy and vibration of this world. His work focuses on synthesizing a meditative-psychedelic perspective through colour and form. Chris presents a spectrum of projects across physical and digital planes that shares a visual way of being. A reminder of our energy that resides within. 

MOHSEN HAZRATI (b. 1987, IRN, http://mohsenhazrati.com) focuses on digital culture and New Aesthetics, positioning connections to Shirazi culture and Iranian mystical literature. Recent exhibitions include UCL MAL, Los Angeles; Transfer Gallery, Los Angeles; Babycastles Gallery, New York; Telematic Media Arts, San Francisco and SUPERHIGHWAY 2020. He is currently a member of the Digital Art Fellowship program at Akademie Schloss Solitude.  

LAUREN MOFFATT (b. 1987, AUS, https://www.deptique.net/) is an Australian artist working with immersive environments and experimental narrative practices. Her works, often presented in hybrid and iterative forms, explore the paradoxical subjectivity of connected bodies and the indistinct boundaries between digital and organic life.  

SABRINA RATTÉ (b. 1982, CAN, http://sabrinaratte.com/) is an artist living between Montreal and Marseille. Her practice includes video, animation, installations, sculptures, audio-visual performances, prints and Virtual Reality. Mixing analog technologies, photography and 3D animation, she investigates the influence of digital and physical spaces and the interplay between these surroundings and subjectivity.  

COSMIC RAYS is an organization based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina that supports the promotion and diffusion of innovative film, video, and digital media art through public screenings, live performance, and gallery exhibition. 

synthesis gallery is an immersive blend of technology and art displayed under one roof, showcasing cutting-edge experiences by new wave artists and visionaries through virtual and augmented reality. Dedicated to exhibiting internationally renowned, well-established artists alongside emerging ones, since its inception, synthesis has garnered considerable attention in the art scene. 

The exhibition is kindly supported by: 

Join the discussion about the exhibition online at:  
Instagram: @cosmicraysfilmfestival; @synthesis.gallery 
Facebook: Cosmic Rays; synthesis gallery 
Website: cosmicraysfilmfest.com; synthesis.gallery 
Discord: https://discord.gg/WjWcqPQtrz  

Image credit: Sabrina Ratté, Floralia, 2021

Parallel/Shift with Joy Drury Cox and Robin Gourley has been extended until the end of April and have added to their calendar a reception for this Sunday, March 13th from 2 pm-4 pm. You can get more information about the show (ignore the Feb 27 closing date) and see images of the work at Preservation Chapel Hill’s Art Exhibitions Website. 

Today’s homepage features a great video profile of studio art major Jason Lord. Watch Jason do some screenprinting in the printmaking studio on the 3rd floor of Hanes Art: https://youtu.be/zsJDyWyeIAk 

EVERYWARE: COSMIC RAYS DIGITAL
March 1-April 2nd, 2022
Peel Gallery
708 West Rosemary Street 
Carrboro, NC 27510
https://www.peel.gallery
https://cosmicraysfilmfest.com
Opening Hours Wednesday – Sunday 12-5pm
Closing reception: Saturday April 2nd, 2022 6pm-8pm

Artists:
Bassam Al-Sabah
Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy
Matthew Gantt
Claudia Hart
Jason Isolini
Shasti O’Leary Soudant 
Elly Vadseth & Boris Kourtoukov 
Richard Michael Haley 
Kristin Lucas

Live Audiovisual Performances:
Brent Coughenour
Governance (Quran Karriem and Rebecca Uliasz)

EVERYWARE: COSMIC RAYS DIGITAL is a selection of Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and interactive artworks by national, international, and North Carolina-based artists who critically engage with the new media technologies that surround us while investigating digital forms of privacy, identity, and nature.

“The Triangle is a growing technology hub and our region’s cultural art offerings should reflect the impact of emerging media technologies.”
– Sabine Gruffat

COSMIC RAYS DIGITAL celebrates artists working with emerging digital media technologies. It is a brand-new programming initiative of the COSMIC RAYS FILM FESTIVAL which is co-directed by local artists and filmmakers Sabine Gruffat and Bill Brown, and will take place from March 31st – April 2nd, 2022.

For more information, please visit www.cosmicraysfilmfest.com.

Press Inquiries:
For more information please contact:
Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat
contact@cosmicraysfilmfest.com

Sabine Gruffat’s film “Moving or Being Moved” is screening as part of Transmediale at the Haus Der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

Transmediale Symposium

2022, Jan 28, Fri — 2022, Jan 29, Sat

What is the potential of refusal? What role do belief and compromise play in postures and acts of refusal? At a two-day symposium, transmediale 2021–22 explores the topic with an interdisciplinary program of lectures, panel discussions, performances and film screenings. Entitled for refusal, this festival edition of transmediale has progressed over the course of a year since January 2021. Together with the exhibition abandon all hope ye who enter here at the Akademie der Künste, the symposium at HKW forms the final part of the festival and, starting out from refusal as generative space, develops a pragmatic confrontation with its impossibilities. 

With AM Kanngieser, Antonia Hernández, Bassam El Baroni, Bassem Saad, Cassie Thornton, Cindy Kaiying Lin, Che Applewhaite, Distributed Cognition Cooperative (Anna Engelhardt, Sasha Shestakova), Donal Lally, Effi & Amir, Katerina Suvorova, Magda Tyżlik-Carver, Mary Maggic, Maya Indira Ganesh, Max Haiven, Nishant Shah, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Patricia Domínguez and Nicole L’Huillier, Paolo Gerbaudo, Phanuel Antwi, Samir Bhowmik, Sabine Gruffat, Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner, Tatjana Söding, Timothée Parrique, Xenia Chiaramonte, Zach Blas and others

Congratulations to our faculty (Lien Truong and Renzo Ortega) as well as our many alums (Saba Taj, Antoine Williams, William Paul Thomas, Meg Stein, Sam Hunter, Xiaowei Wu, and Ayla Gizlice) who are in the current show at the Nasher Museum! “Reckoning and Resilience: North Carolina Art Now” runs from January 13-July 10, 2022, so you have plenty of time to go see their work. You can get more information at the Nashers’ Exhibition Website.

Downtown Raleigh comes to light again this year with Illuminate Art Walk presented by Wake Tech. Parts of Downtown Raleigh’s Fayetteville Street and Glenwood South districts transform with large-scale, interactive and light-based art pieces that are unique and family-friendly. A highlight of this year’s month-long event is Chimes presented by Opendoor, an internationally recognized art piece that has traveled globally. Chimes will take over half of City Plaza in the heart of Downtown Raleigh. Installations shine nightly from December 3 to January 7. The art walk is free to the public and self-guided.

Sabine Gruffat has two videos included in the art walk, “Mountain” and “Amarillo Ramp” (with Bill Brown). You can find more information about them, as well as see the map of the art walk on the Illuminate Raleigh website.

In collaboration with Odessa Arts, First Basin Credit Union recently presented a new public art sculpture making its home at their headquarters in Odessa.

The formal dedication ceremony for the “Hadley Cell” art sculpture, designed and created by North Carolina artists Jim Hirschfield and Sonya Ishii, will be on display publicly and was lit for the first time on Nov. 18.

The commissioned work which was awarded in 2019 was selected from more than 100 artist submissions across the U.S.

The Hadley Cell sculpture consists of a 35’ vertical-column containing five graceful polyhedrons, or cells, extending 8’ at their widest point. The symbol of five stacked cells emulates a column of wind known as The Hadley Cell named after George Hadley. The Hadley Cell is a global scale tropical atmospheric circulation that features air rising near the equator, flowing poleward at a height of 10 to 15 kilometers above the earth’s surface, descending in the subtropics, and then returning equatorward near the surface. Hadley cells exist on either side of the equator. Each cell encircles the globe latitudinally and acts to transport energy from the equator to about the 30th latitude. At the latitudes of the tropics (30° – 35°) the once heated air cools and subsequently descends. Research revealed that Odessa, Texas is located at 31.8457° N and 102.3676° W in the area otherwise known as the horse latitudes.

The column transitions from green that imitates the shrubbery at ground level to blue meant to match the Odessa sky, it is noticeably see through the columns more ephemeral planer surfaces, embodying the sensation of wind. Observers can hear a relaxing hum of the wind gracefully moving through the stainless-steel wire panels purposefully used to give a transparent quality to the work. The transparent mesh exists to further enhance the calming presence of the always moving West Texas wind.

Hirschfield and Ishii have worked as a team for three decades, and as a team they have created a number of major public works of art.

Hirschfield teaches sculpture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was Department Chair of the Art Department for seven years. He has received a number of major grants and fellowships from both public and private foundations, including awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Graham Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Art Matters, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has also exhibited nationally. Jim has had a long interest and history in public art, and had served as a member of the Public Art Network Advisory Council for six years. He also as authored or co-authored five public art master plans.

Sonya Ishii is as an artist who after studying art and then architecture, began working as an artist on one of the very early collaborative team transit projects in Seattle Washington. She too has received a number of awards, including two North Carolina Artist Fellowships. Together Jim and Sonya have created a variety of public art projects ranging from freestanding sculpture to sculptural environments. Together they have completed over 50 Public Art Commissions across the US and Canada that stretch from Seattle Washington to Fort Lauderdale Florida, and from Orono, Maine to Phoenix, Arizona, including five separate projects in the great state of Texas.

Article link

Inside Outside

19.11.2021 – 08.01.2022
Vernissage 19.11.2021, 18:00

The occasion for this exhibition was an envelope that we received from France a few months ago. The sender did not give his name. The envelope contained 10 family photos, each pasted facedown with double-sided tape on white cardboards, and a small note with the following text:

«I have no talent for any artistic activity. Talent precedes the need to create. Without it, there is no satisfaction. Everything I started was abruptly stopped by the mediocrity of the draft and immediately destroyed, like a drawer that can only be opened from the inside. I recently attached the front of some old family photos to white cardboard with double-sided tape. Thus, only the pink paper remnants could be seen on the back of these photos. My mother detached them from two different albums and I inherited them after her death. These upturned photos are the sum of my failure. You will find them in this envelope.»

Press text

Galerie aKonzept
Niebuhrstraße 5
10629 Berlin

Öffnungszeiten:
Di – Fr 15–18 Uhr
Sa 14–19 Uhr

+493022452703
info@galerieakonzept.com 
www.galerieakonzept.com
www.raphael-levy.com