The New Temporary

- Genesis by Terry Suprean
- Vince Shlomi's Bidden Tongueby PERSUASION
- Planed Debris: Texas Noise and Ambient (environment #2)
organized by Chin Xaou Ti Won

the temporary space
1320 Nance
Saturday, February 13th, 7 pm – 11:30 pm
Performance begins at 8 pm
thetemporaryspace.com

the temporary space is pleased to announce their 2nd exhibition project, a collaboration with Chin Xaou Ti Won. Our series of collaborative exhibition projects focuses on visual and experimental engagements; #2 features installations, experimental sound, performance and special projects.

Genesis is a group of multi-faceted works by Houston artist Terry Suprean. Suprean investigates his personal relationship with his father as a discussion of the symbolic presence of “god” in patriarchal society.

Vince Shlomi’s Bidden Tongue is a video assemblage work by curatorial collaborative PERSUASION.

Planed Debris: Texas Noise and Ambient (environment #2) will feature 7 experimental music bands selected by Chin Xaou Ti Won. Planed Debris spotlights ambient, drone and noise musicians creating sound collages and musical environments. Artists include: Zer0-sum, Concrete Violin, Endless Blinding Sunshine, Chin Xaou Ti Won, Bret Shirley, T.E.F and Bonus.

+ Review and critique session will be scheduled for further critical engaging discussions. Please inquire @ thetemporaryspace.com

Persuasion

Persuasion opens January 15, 2010, 8-10 pm, at the Temporary Space, 1320 Nance, Houston, TX 77002.
After the opening reception the exhibition will be open by appointment until February 5, 2010.
For viewing appointments contact Keijiro Suzuki, cell: 832-867-9207, manager@thetemporaryspace.com

Persuasion is a series of exhibitions curated by Tex Kerschen and Erika Thrasher.
The inaugural exhibitions are Michael Dee: Song of Myself and Domokos Benczedi: Collagen and Prototypes.

Michael Dee is a Los Angeles based artist who works in sculpture, video, painting, and drawing. His videos investigate cacophony and overload with regards to the hasty reassembly of culture. Through excessive volume, claustrophobic framing, imagery that is often intentionally degraded from repeated transfers from bootleg sources, and visual content drawn from the world of rock music, ballistics tests, medical process, and aeronautic engineering, his videos attempt to create an experience as viscerally powerful as that of someone attending his or her first live rock concert.

Here he will be exhibiting two video works: Song of Myself and Here It Comes Again.

Michael Dee, Song of Myself, still from dvd loop 2008.

Michael Dee, Here it Comes Again, still from dvd loop, 2005.

Domokos Benczedi is a Houston-based artist and musician. His collages, in part inspired by the art of Damon Edge of Chrome, futurize dada techniques. Familiar objects are highjacked and transformed into fetishes for unspoken states of astonishment and desire. These new images, derived from everyday sources, suggest human rituals amid alien landscapes.

He will be exhibiting large-scale collages as well as prototypes for new sculptures.

Domokos Benczedi, Blondes Multiplex, collage.


Domokos Benczedi, Untitled, collage.

About Persuasion.

Hybrid Moments:
“When new creatures rape your face
Hybrids open up the door.”>

We will be displaying works by various artists according to a system of self-applied rules and limitations.

First of all, no begging from corporations, individuals, or institutions.
Begging has put art in a sorry place.
For that reason, original works are de-prioritized. Multiples, copies and bootlegs are ok.
cf., Walter Benjamin “Art in the age of Mechanical Bull-riding.”

We take courage in the samizdat tradition of self-published literature during the Soviet and other totalitarian regimes.

About us:
Erika Thrasher is a Houston-based musician, artist, and graphic designer.
Tex Kerschen is a writer, musician, and former chief curator of the Station. Exhibitions he has organized have been reviewed favorably in Art in America, Art Lies, the Christian Science Monitor, the Houston Press, and the Houston Chronicle among countless other publications.

About the Temporary Space
The Temporary Space is a new project space managed by Keijiro Suzuki.
http://www.thetemporaryspace.com

--
// PERSUASION //
http://persuasionart.wordpress.com

Like The Ear Cut Off: A Tribute To Jacob Scanlan

A Tribute to the Life of Jacob Scanlan
Like The Ear Cut Off

Opening Friday, November 20th
6 – 9 pm

On View by Appointment November 20 – 29, 2009

Apama Mackey Gallery
628 East 11th Street
Houston, TX 77008

Join us in celebrating the life of artist Jacob Scanlan this Friday, November 20, 2009, from 6 – 9 pm at Apama Mackey Gallery, curated by Sean Carroll and Mark Hougham from the collection of the Scanlan family. Through Scanlan’s poems, paintings, origami and photographs we hope to reveal the intense zeal and creative mind that touched his family and friends.

Untitled

Artist and writer Jacob Scanlan, aka JKOP, was born in Houston on November 29, 1979, and studied philosophy and poetry at the University of Houston. He delved into street art and public paintings that were bold, bright, and passionate. As a regular on the punk scene and with a keen ear for early hip hop, he quickly immersed himself into a chaotic lifestyle, making friendships with the most infamous graffiti writers in downtown Houston. Gaining insight and experience, he set out to make a name for himself on many fronts. He folded intricate origami and painted graffiti-influenced expressionism. He took thousands of photographs of his life, his friends and his environment. After a near fatal bout with Encephalitis, writing was one of the many catalysts he used to express the turmoil he felt deep inside. All of his poetry was written during the aftermath of his illness. An avid reader, he was influenced by the works of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Riding-Jackson. His studies in philosophy have given his poetry and art a rare and vibrant perspective.

Untitled (Burning Bible)

For Scanlan art was an emotional force. He viewed artistic creation as the freeing himself from society. He felt that art was rooted in daily experience; that it grew into something beautiful and personal. This collection portrays Jacob’s life; full of love and romance. Scanlan was a guest poet on The Spoken Word, a Rice University radio show and had poems published by Our Time Is Now, Poetry Motel, Rag Shock, Lone Stars magazines, and Poetry Junction website. His poems "Physiognomy" and "Equation" were featured in the anthology The Great American Poetry Show by Muse Media Publishing.

Self Portrait with Twombly

Scanlan died on Tuesday, September 23, 2008, at the age of twenty-eight, of residual complications of encephalitis. During the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, the stress of living in those conditions and the strain of his medications took its toll on his body, and he succumbed. A friend found him the next morning. Over the next several months his parents gathered dozens of poems, paintings and delicate origami sculptures along with thousands of photographs that detailed his life in the past decade. At the opening we will release Scanlon’s book of poems and essays, The Grammar of a Nightmare. A portion of all sales will benefit a fund set up at the Menil Collection in Scanlan’s name.

Free Press Summerfest and The A/V Swap

Wrought Park, Video by Sean Carroll Audio by Thousands

filmed mostly at Summerfest, Eleanor Tinsley Park, Co-Lab Artspace in Austin, the joanna Gallery and BOX 13 Artspace.



Johnny and Paul / Flash Yo Grill, Video by Michael Rodriguez Audio by Kanude

Where will you see a country song about Paul Wall and Johnny Dang turned into a love story about hipsters eaten by monsters? Where else but The A/V Swap?



Come check out the Best Of The A/V Swap 2009 tonight at Rice Media Center at 8 pm!

This fall The A/V Swap is back with a bigger and badder group of films, this time from both Texas and New York! For our screening Friday, September 18th at 8 pm, The A/V Swap presents the Best Of 2009, a selection of collaborations from Houston, Austin, Buffalo and New York City created this summer. The screening will start with an artists reception at 7:30 pm and conclude a Q & A with participating filmmakers and musicians.

A/V Swap projects are collaborations that begin with a film or song that is traded between artists to complete; we hope to provide a forum where artists can showcase their talents by manipulating audio and video they would never otherwise encounter. In this "swap" we anonymously pair composers and filmmakers, hoping to expand their creative horizons. Over 70 artists participated in this year's swap.

This year the A/V Swap is proud to be screening films at the Rice Media Center, founded in 1969 by Dominique de Menil and an evolving haven for experimental film for 40 years. Many inspired events have happen at Rice Media Center; Andy Warhol premiered Lonesome Cowboys, Dennis Hooper performed the Russian Dynamite Death Chair Act and Spike Lee was hosted for a screening of Do The Right Thing followed by a "spirited debate" with the crowd. The founders' intent was that the Media Center provide a channel through which different peoples of the world could communicate- and for four decades it has lived up to their vision. The A/V Swap is pleased to be working with another exemplary innovator to bring you this event, KTRU, Rice Radio.

Push It

Untitled (Sisyphean Task), 2009

by Divya Murthy

While Devin the Dude performed on the main stage at Summerfest, Frank Olson, Johnny DiBlasi and Matt Keller were attracting a significant audience toiling away in the sweltering heat. While festival-goers tuned in, turned on and dropped out, at the top of the hill Olson and Keller endlessly repeated a performance piece referencing the unyielding absurdity of an endless chore.

Set under the shade of a tree and surrounded by teeming crowds, Untitled (Sisyphean Task), attracted onlookers, cheerleaders and catcalls. While one performer unsuccessfully attempted to move an old heavy television with broken wheels up a 12-foot ramp, another made lackadaisical loops around the structure. In case there was not enough emphasis on cyclical behavior, Keller and Olson both painted purple Os on their back; their sweat washed the paint down in rivulets. As they continually exerted themselves, jocks in polos and hippie girls in flowery dresses looked on, their minds spinning with circular humdrum. A video looped on the television, playing video of CDs spinning in the players, scenes from action films and screensaver-ish self-generating computer images.

Was it really necessary to be so didactic and push so many literal ideas of circular logic at a redundant pace? Considering the references to Sisyphus (who endured a never ending, ineffective act), a durational performance art piece (that lasted at least two hours), and the overcrowded venue (a park teeming with hipsters looking for music not art), I would probably say yes. As Sisyphean Task endured at Summerfest its audience filtered in and out; their quickly recognizable visual markers made the performance accessible to any person passing through, pausing in wonder or finishing their beer before leaving to see a band play on the main stage. DiBlasi and Olson made a courageous effort at creating a lengthy time-based piece, with a fair concept and delivery for the brutal temperatures during the heavily trafficked festival. Performance art still seems to be one of those largely under-represented mediums in a contemporary art world that accommodates the obsession with ownership of images. Durational pieces are rarely utilized in fine arts venues, especially in Houston. Sisyphean Task, tweaked with a bit more subtlety, would blossom in an art space where it is one of the main events. I believe many art lovers, who didn’t want to go to Summerfest, would appreciate its earnest bluntness.

Human Nature Political

by Dean Liscum

Whether or not the end is near, its close enough. Charity in the billions is doled out to the über-rich by their own underlings. The poor live and die without air conditioning or basic medical care. If the pundits won’t profess it, at least artists will paint the picture. The installation Human Nature Planted does not present itself as overtly political, but it plays out that way. Curated by June Woest and Claudio Franco of Urban Artists at the Nature Discovery Center of Bellaire, Planted is a group sculptural installation by twelve innovative Texas artists. The official theme of the show is to “explore the human handprint in the natural world and how it positively and negatively influences the environment,” but the show resonates with current socio-political-economic turmoil. Nathaniel Donnett’s Myke’s Clubhouse captures the crisis from the vantage point of the forgotten poor and vulnerable; Cornell West accusing Obama of neglecting those most in need. Merging fantasy with nightmare, Donnett constructed a tree house and foreclosed it, with a red sign and a foreclosure listing in the paper. June Woest’s Pharmacy Domesticus forms a field of bamboo-like columns out of plastic prescription bottles, makes a visually stunning side-effect of our fascination with better living through pharmaceuticals. Lucinda Cobley’s tree+cipher proposes a vibrant new taxonomy for nature that makes one cry out for a new political discourse. Amie Adelman’s untitled, Mari Omari’s Gifts and Orna Feinstein’s Eco-librium enhance or alter the existing environment; binding, weaving, and clumping leaves, stems, branches, and grasses; regulating nature in quirky, unanticipated ways. Kathy Hall’s I say Poaceae, You say Poaceae introduces non-native grasses into the park and forces us to confront the unpredictable nature of complex systems.

Recessions depress but they can inspire innovation and reinvention, every tool becomes a weapon when held just right. Kathy Kelley’s The birth of destruction deconstructs automobile tires and fashions them into boulder-sized spheres that remind one of objects of play or meditation. Andis Applewhite’s Soul distills man-made and natural fragments to serve as objects for meditation. Jason Dean Moul’s Water, Seed, Pollen, Leaf hints at moving away from Christian salvation through salary and inserts customer designed stain glass windows in the intersections of the pecan tree branches. The trees etched on plexiglas in Keith Hollingworth’s Arboretum may serve as a memento mori for the park in anticipation of a coming environmental crisis. Michael Crowder’s frozen birds will have melted before this exhibit even ends, but you could find yourself, decades from now, peering at the two glass ones-- wondering how quickly the next ice age will come.


click HERE for pics from the exhibition

Performance Art!

That was a hell of a day... more today too...

Nancy Douthey




Cleanin' the loo in style




City health inspector Jerry Bradshaw
(who has a twin brother named Terry Bradshaw, no joke)
wrote Nancy a commendation for her performance art




Daniel Adame




Matt Keller




Johnny DiBlasi's video getting pushed around




Frank Olsen