All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ Artist Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva, based in Brighton, United Kingdom, is the first artist to hold an eight-month Artist-in-Restaurant residency at the starred restaurant Pied a Terre in central London. Her exhibit there "The Wish of the Witness" just closed. The show included 10 sculptural works and installations created mostly from raw materials sourced from the restaurant's kitchen. Hadzi-Vasileva notes on her site that her artworks involved in-depth research and close collaborations with the chefs. Some of the artworks, which use such materials as fish skins and quail carcasses, are quite beautiful. Take some time to look at the images on Hadzi-Vasileva's site that document projects such as Raison D'etre, Reoccurring Undulation, and Butterflies in the Stomach. She is an artist to watch!

✦ A site-specific project conceived by artist Mary Miss and commissioned for the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, FLOW: Can You See the River? is a city-wide public art project (it involves more than 20 arts, science, environmental, and municipal organizations and agencies). It  uses mirror markers and a series of interactive activities and technologies along six miles of the White River to show citizens how they affect the health and future of the water system that supplies Indianapolis. (One of the technologies for the project is an app that enables the tracking of a raindrop.) The art installation debuted in September and has been featured in the Indianapolis Star newspaper and Indianapolis Business Journal, as well as Artdaily.

FLOW on Twitter: #FLOWindy

✦ One of the most interesting and thought-provoking artistic projects I've come across recently is Running the Numbers II, a series of digital photographic images by Chris Jordan that he calls "portraits of global mass culture". Jordan describes the series, which he began in 2009, as a look at mass phenomena as they occur globally. 

With each image representing a specific quantity of something (Jordan researches all the statistics he uses), the series seeks to draw meaning from "phenomena [that] themselves are invisible, spread across the earth in millions of separate places", Jordan writes in his project description, and to understand their gravity in a language other than pure statistics. For example, one of Jordan's series images, Insatiable (2011), is meant to depict 48,000 plastic spoons, equal to the number of gallons of oil consumed globally every second. Another, Tuna (2009), made from 19 watercolor paintings by Sarah Waller, depicts 20,500 tuna, the average number fished every 15 minutes from the world's oceans. Yet another, Maya (2011), depicts 92,500 agricultural seeds, the equivalent of 100th of one percent of the number of people in the world suffering from malnutrition. Jordan points out that to illustrate the entire statistic with 925 million seeds, he would need to make 10,000 prints of the image, which would cover more than eight football fields.

Jordan's first project in the series, Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, is limited to a look at contemporary American culture via statistics. One of his images for that collection, Barbie Dolls (2008), depicts 32,000 Barbies, the equivalent of the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries performed each month in the United States in 2006. 

Jordan has created visually representations of some intensely sobering statistics that raise important questions about our role and responsibilities to each other and to the environment.

Also see Jordan's Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption (2003-2005) and In Katrina's Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster (2005), which depicts the costs of Hurricane Katrina on a deeply personal scale.

Jordan's photographs for the first Running the Numbers, the Katrina project, and the American mass consumption project have been collected in three books, information for which is here. 

In a 2010 All Art Friday post, I spotlighted Jordan's extraordinary photographic work on Midway Atoll. Jordan has since returned to the island and made a film, still in production and planned for release in Fall 2012; the trailer is below. His initiative on Midway is chronicled here.

MIDWAY : trailer : a film by Chris Jordan from Midway on Vimeo.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ On November 11, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., opens "Multiplicity", a show of 83 prints from the permanent collections that addresses the concept of making multiples, each of which is considered an original artwork. Some artists whose work is included in the show are John Baldessari, Vija Celmins, Chuck Close, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Julie Mehretu, Susan Rothenberg, Kiki Smith, and Kara Walker. The exhibition will run through March 11, 2012, and thereafter be available to tour. 

Sol LeWitt, Wavy Brushstrokes Superimposed #4, 1995

Hand-Drawn Photo Transfer with Aquatint on Paper

35-3/8" x 35-3/8"

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Gift of Mike Wilkins and Sheila Duignan

✭ In New York City, Japan Society is exhibiting through December 18 a juried show of textile work: "Fiber Futures: Japan's Textile Pioneers". Organized in collaboration with Tama Art University Museum and presented with International Textile Network Japan, the exhibit offers a display of gorgeous work made from such materials as silk, hemp, raw wool, paper pulp, chemical dyes, and synthetic fiber and using both traditional artistic methods, such as hand-weaving, and contemporary (read "green") technologies. Among the 30 established and emerging artists whose work is on view are Machiko Agano, Akio Hamatani, Kyoko Ibe, Yasuko Iyanaga, Shigeo Kubota, Kyoko Kumai, Hitomi Nagai, Yuh Okano, Fuminori Ono, Naoko Serino, Reiko Sudo, and Hiroko Watanabe. A selection of images of artwork in the show is here and here.

Kyoko Ibe, Airy Sonnet of Blue, 1989

Kozo Mulberry Fiber, 197" x 236" x 276"

Museu de Arte Moderna, Sao Paulo

Photo: Ei Oiwa

A hard-to-resist catalogue accompanies the exhibition. In addition, a free app for iPhone (via iTunes) and Android is available.

Related programming includes the Free-Form Saori Weaving Workshop on November 20; Irresistible Colors: Shibori-Dyeing Workshop on December 3; and Nature's Inspiration: Embroidery Workshop on December 10.

"Japan Society Showcases a Growing Aesthetic Movement — Art Inspired by Extreme Textile Making", Press Release, Japan Society

Japan Society on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

Japan Society Blog (See the September 16, 2011, post "Japan's Textile Pioneers: Weaving Threads of the Past Into the Future".)

Janelle Zara, "Not Your Grandma's Textile Art: See Radical Sculptures, Tapestries, and More From the Japan Society's 'Fiber Futures' Show", ArtInfo, October 3, 2011

✭ The marvelous Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, Massachusetts, continues through January 22, 2012, its exhibition "Growing Every Which Way But Up: The Children's Book Art of Jules Feiffer". The show, which highlights Feiffer's collaboration with Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) and The Odious Ogre (2010), focuses on illustrations from Feiffer's many own wonderful children's books, including Henry, The Dog With No Tail (2007), I'm Not Bobby (2001), By the Side of the Road, and Bark, George (1999).

The Eric Carle Museum on FaceBook and Twitter

The Eric Carle Museum Blog, Shop Talk (If you enjoy the children's book art, this blog is a delight.)

Feiffer's memoir is Backing Into Forward (Random House, 2010).

✭ In Washington, D.C., the exhibitions "Silk Road Luxuries From China", "Cranes and Clouds: The Korean Art of Ceramic Inlay", and Chinese Ceramics: 10th - 13th Century" all open tomorrow, November 5, at the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Museums of Asian Art.

Continuing on view through January 29 is "Power | Play: China's Empress Dowager" at the Sackler. Online, view images of the segments Throne, Diplomacy, Private Moments, Tableaux: The Power of Play, and Cixi's Popular Legacy.

Freer and Sackler Galleries on FaceBook, Twitter, and Flickr