Manda Remmen

On view May-June, 2010

“We humans take our measure of being from what surrounds us, and what surrounds us is always, to some extent, of our own making.” Robert Harrison, Hic Jacket

Manda Remmen inaugurates The Luminary Installation Space with Sanctuary, a monumental piece constructed of silk and latex casts of wood preserved from barns. Balancing the space’s history as a chapel and the weathered barn that informs the structure, the immersive work creates both a memorial and a space for meditation.

The weightlessness of the work is tethered by the materiality of the wood casts, which are made up of decades of marks where someone cut the wood or the weather eroded it away. Each mark on the object is a distinct reminder of its history, anchoring it in time and place. Taken as a whole, the marks form a narrative of physical memories suspended in the silk columns in the pattern of a typical basilica.

The structure carries the viewer inward into a distinct, hushed environment that mutes the outward world. The immediate referents–the barn, the basilica–are left behind as one moves amid the overarching casts. Once transmuted into latex casts, the terrestrial begins to float; the physical becomes ethereal, yet is simultaneously preserved more permanently than the original structure itself, continuing to make imperceptible marks on the space as it moves.

THE LUMINARY CENTER FOR THE ARTS PRESENTS
CAUSE + TIME
May 1, 2010 – June 26, 2010

The Luminary | Center for the Arts is pleased to announce the international group exhibition Cause + Time with a free opening reception on Saturday, May 1st from 6-9pm. Cause + Time brings together five artists working in generative, time-based work that evolves over time in response to environmental factors, audience interaction and data processing.

Cause + Time is the second exhibition in our 2010 Answer Factory series focusing on how information is shaping our contemporary culture. The artists included are working in a wide range of media, from sculpture to evolving aesthetic interfaces, each linked by the idea that the artist is the initiator of an interaction that evolves rather than the creator of a stable, unchanging work. Eric Souther’s aesthetic interfaces investigate the liminal area where technology and the body meet. In Dataform, a deluge of information derived from social media networks is projected in the outline of one’s body when the participant chooses to interact with the piece. Likewise, David Bowen’s Infrared Drawing Device creates a charcoal drawing based on a participant’s movements, leaving behind a trace of each participant’s interaction in a static work. Arnold Wedemeyer’s still lifes are more concerned with art history, animating traditional still lifes into dynamic ecosystems strife with decay.

Andrew Cozzens will be presenting a series of sculptural objects that poetically intertwine industrial materials with organic elements that must be tended to daily in order to grow. Similarly, The Luminary’s Director of Public Programming, Brea McAnally, will be coordinating a public moss-painting project in conjunction with the exhibition that uses moss paste to create a living mural on city buildings that will continue growing long after the closing.

The opening reception will take place on Saturday, May 1st from 6-9pm and the exhibition will remain on view Wednesday-Saturday from 12-6pm each week through June 26th.

Old Media/Old News will open the 2010 Exhibition Season at The Luminary Center for the Arts on January 30, 2010 with an opening recption from 6-9pm. The curated group exhibition will feature internationally-recognized work from six artists working with concepts of news reception, media saturation and the role of the artist as documentarian and mediator of information in our current media climate.

Old Media/Old News proposes the artist as an alternative documentarian who engages, ingests, reimagines, or combats contemporary news sources and the mode of knowledge they presuppose. Positioning the six artists included as harbingers as well as combatants of the disposability and passivity we feel toward the contemporary media climate, Old Media/Old News is a document of the content stream made static and news invested in as art.

2010 Great Rivers Biennial winner Martin Brief will be creating new work from his Newspaper Series in which random selections of The New York Times are drawn from the day he was born and will conclude when the artist selects his birthdate. Jihoon Park, a Korean-born artist, is contributing One Day, One Deal, an engaging series of triptychs composed of video, baseball bats, and layered newspapers that transplants various media into new forms.

Xiang-Yang, a Chinese artist currently working in Philadelphia, will be showing Newsreel, which is comprised of peeled images from newspapers with scotch tape assembled into a sculptural film reel that simultaneously spotlights these anonymous faces and highlights their uniformity through repetition. Old Media/Old News will also feature a special installation work constructed from Austin Kleon’s Newspaper Blackout Poems, which have been featured on NPR and are being published this year by Harper-Collins.

Artists Michelle Forsyth and Lisa Bulawsky have taken a more personal-historical approach to the news by forging intense, detailed relationships with past events. Michelle Forsyth’s work from her 100 Drawings series engages with sites of past tragedy through hyper-elaborate gouache drawings of common objects in order to reintroduce them as historical events as well as fostering ongoing media attention. Likewise, Lisa Bulawsky’s Flashbulb Memories monotypes explore the relationship between personal and cultural versions of history, reimagining such shared experiences as the Civil Rights movement and the Mt. St. Helens eruption as a personal memory reified into cultural understanding.

The opening reception will take place on Saturday, January 30th from 6-9pm and the exhibition will remain on view Wednesday-Saturday from 12-6pm each week through March 27th.

Links to each of the artists can be found below:

Martin Brief

Lisa Bulawsky

Michelle Forsyth

Austin Kleon

Jihoon Park

Xiang Yang

The centerpiece of Writing with Light will be a new sculptural piece by local artist Joseph Poon entitled Resurrection: 40 constructed from 40 analog televisions displaying video footage scored to Mahler’s 2nd Symphony.  Celebrated Chicago-based artist Alexander Stewart will also be screening “Errata,” a film made entirely from reiterative Xerox copying process and showing a new conceptual book piece made in an afternoon at the public library in Astoria, Queens, where xerography was invented.

A free concert follows the opening at 9pm with Early Day Miners, Metavari, and Fractured Army performing as part of our Elevator Music Series.

The exhibit brings together a broad base of St. Louis artists, from the internationally recognized work of Peter Marcus to the emerging work of Brea McAnally, BJ Vogt, Jessica Kiel-Wornson and Christine D’Epiro. Peter Marcus will contribute several pieces from his striking Horsehead series (provided by Bruno David Gallery) that focus on a single Victorian house “emblematic of an America-or, at least, the idea—of an America that has ceased to exist.” Brea, who also curated the exhibit, has created an interactive outdoor cityscape that invites viewers to add water to an adjacent dam that will, at some point in the evening, overflow and flood the city. The work is a ambivalent exploration of the role of man in natural disaster, inviting questions of implication and responsibility.

They are joined by Luminary Resident Artist Christine D’Epiro, who is transforming brown paper grocery bags into a room-sized installation depicting a nightscape.  Entitled Night, the exhibition responds to our present shared economic situation with imagery that represents both a conclusion and a cyclical occurrence. B.J. Vogt is also contributing sculptural pieces depicting ‘natural’ environments or settings using mass produced or easily replicated ‘man-made’ materials, such as cardboard, PVC pipes, plastic implements, lamps and other electrical devices.

The opening reception took place on Saturday, August 8th from 6-9pm and will remain on view on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 2-7pm and on Saturdays from 12-5pm through the end of September.