More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid

More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid
February 28th – April 19th, 2009
Celia Baker, Cristiano Mangione, Christian Capurro, Daniel Baker, Dorothy Iannone, Goekhan Erdogan, Jorge Peris, Sarah Pucci, Sheree Rose, Bob Flanagan and Mike Kelley

FEINKOST is pleased to present the group exhibition “More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid”. Taking its title from a seminal work by Mike Kelley, “Love Hours” brings together practices based on process, persistence and personal states of perfection: each in a quest for a possibly unobtainable ideal. According to Kelley, “love hours” quantify the time/effort/love one invests in making something that does not proportionally reflect the everything that went into making it.
A heart-swelling love letter from Dorothy Iannone’s ‘Opera Box’ of 1980 introduces the exhibition on a note of passioned desire to be completed by an other. Musing the possibility of a perfect union, the tableau captures the artist’s style of lyrical romanticism through hedonic liberty and insatiable love. A different range of affections cause love and pain to interchange in a collaborative work about masochism and corporal punishment by Mike Kelley, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose entitled ‘100 Reasons’ from 1991. Meanwhile, a zealous repetition of daily practice has produced the bejeweled objects of the late Sarah Pucci, mother of Iannone. These intense, compacted works, made throughout the second half of the 20th century, scintillate an aura of idealistic beauty on steroids that grows into a delicate grotesque.
Weaving a quilt of Penelopean proportions Celia Baker’s piece is borne out of therapeutic pastime creating impractically large pastel blanketry. Across the gallery her son, Daniel Baker, continues his study of reflective othering with a sculptural surveillance blanket made by replicating low-tech security measures employing mirrored stripes. The reflection is picked up again in the work of Goekhan Erdogan, combining with the artist’s self-portrait to take on mise-en-abymical dimensions in a tablet of his own visage.
Frenzied scribblings of Cristiano Mangione bring the surface support of the canvas to an ethereal extreme, rendering abstract and primal forms through a necessity for their existence. In contrast, the white monochromes of Christian Capurro are elusive in their making and refusal to disclose either their methodical technique or their previous existence. Similarly, the seen and unseen experiments of artist Jorge Peris conjure organics and entropy in a manner as shamanistic as it is scientific, offering alchemical wabi-sabi totems and a possible conclusion to the exhibition.
From O.C.D. abstraction and a therapy of labor moving onward towards the desire to balance the world on a pinhead, alternative economies and new forms of value emerge. Each project in “Love Hours” tries to imagine art possessing worth that goes beyond price and one that is electrified by the energy of its maker. By touching on various trajectories of praxis and vision the overall focus of the exhibition is on the journey towards an aesthetics of the sublime.

FEINKOST would like to thank Sheree Rose for her collaboration (www.shereerose.com).

FEINKOST: More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid

"Translating Media" 2009

TRANSLATING MEDIA
A Graduate Student Conference co-hosted by the Department of Critical Studies and the Media Arts and Practice PhD (iMAP) Program
School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California
April 3-4, 2009

Keynote Speaker: Lisa Parks, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellite and the Televisual and co-editor of Planet TV: A Global Television Reader and Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She is also the producer and co-producer of an array of media arts projects such as Experiments in Satellite Media Arts (w/ Ursula Biemann), Loom (w/ Miha Vipotnik), Postwar Footprints and Roaming.

Artist’s Talk by: To Be Determined

The graduate students in the Department of Critical Studies and the Media Arts and Practice (iMAP) PhD program in the School of Cinematic Arts seek conference papers and creative presentations from graduate students addressing the theme of "Translating Media."

‘Translation’ has gained a renewed valence within the fields of media study and arts practice. As theoretical and creative inquiry shifts toward transmedia, transnational and transdisciplinary approaches and renderings of the current global audiovisual landscape, translation means more than just a linguistic exercise. Rather, the term increasingly lends itself as a productive conceptual lens and metaphor for the interlaced and often contradictory set of transformative processes at work when media objects, policies, and economies traffic across geographic borders, cultural institutions, and technological platforms. The widespread global, regional and local shifts in cultural media practices that arise from these traversals undoubtedly call for transdisciplinary methodologies. To address these issues, Media Studies has sought to exchange and translate critical vocabularies among Cultural Studies, Global Critical Race Feminism/Critical Race Theory, Ethnic Studies, Queer Theory, History, Art History, Mass Communications, American Studies, Post Colonial Theory, and Visual and Performance Studies. And, as many media studies scholars seek to produce more than just textual representations of their research, the translation of theory into audiovisual practice has more frequently become an alternative mode of scholarship. We thus feel that translation is a critical keyword that speaks in diverse ways to media cultures, Media Studies and a growing body of scholar-practitioners who both thematize translation in their media art and seek for new translative possibilities in their creative processes. We have chosen “Translating Media” as the title for the conference to foreground media’s translation as an ongoing process. And we believe the expansive deployment of the term will invite an exciting array of creative interpretations and theoretical positions.


CFP: "Translating Media" 2009 USC Graduate Student Conference | HASTAC

Mercedes Helnwein

The Molesworth Gallery is delighted to present Mercedes Helnwein’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. Her drawings have variously been described as “photo-realistic delicacies”, “lucid fairy-tales”, “strikingly bizarre”, “haunting”, “southern Gothic”, “evocative” and “unexpected”. Her self-portraits have been compared to Cindy Sherman and her sense of quiet drama to Alfred Hitchcock and Edgar Allen Poe.
Her new solo exhibition, Whistling past the graveyard, consists of a series of large-scale, meticulously executed drawings – some of them in colour, most of them in black pencil – as well as paintings and a series of five digital prints on plexiglas. Each piece in the exhibition depicts a strange “uncompleted” scene drowned in artificial light – truncated moments in time, where accidents teeter on the edge of occurrence, and the minimalistic aftermath of imagined accidents are frozen in aspic.

As the title suggests, something unsettling is being choked by the beautiful women that make up the cast of Whistling past the graveyard. Demurely dressed with glossy hair and expensive shoes, they are engaged in inexplicable activities involving toy trucks, bars of soap, miniature camels, plastic dinosaurs and strange utensils that look like they might belong into an industrial kitchen from the 1930s. Despite the innocence of the props, the women’s loaded expressions undermine any straight interpretation of the scenes.

Also included in the exhibition is a video projection, in which the formerly frozen characters jerk to life for the first time in thick, saturated colours. The toys, antlers and masks are carried over from the drawings into the video, creating a strange world powered by the machine-like movements of the women who are the central inhabitants of Mercedes Helnwein’s work – the perpetrators and the trouble-makers.

The Molesworth Gallery - Dublin, Ireland

ISWC'09

The International Symposium on Wearable Computers is an IEEE conference dedicated to cutting-edge research in wearable technologies.

This year's conference will be held in Linz, Austria from September 4th to 7th, 2009.

ISWC'09, the thirteenth annual IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, is the premier forum for wearable computing and issues related to on-body and worn mobile technologies. ISWC'09 will bring together researchers, product vendors, fashion designers, textile manufacturers, users, and related professionals to share information and advances in wearable computing. ISWC'09 explicitly aims to broaden its scope to include cell phones and cell phone applications as they have become the most successful wearable computer to date.

http://iswc.net/