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> Project Room > Past
Past
Vasken Mardikian |  | | | Vasken Mardikian, Still Image of "I Would LIke to Make a Painting," 2009 |
I Would Like to Make a Painting
Video Stills
April 4 - May 3, 2009
Vasken Mardikian, a Belgian artist who recently completed his MFA at the Yale School of Art, creates paintings, videos, and performances that explore the historical conditions that limit art-making, often using humor and self-parody.
"I use the multiple experiences of my life and observe what is happening in the everyday world as my subject matter," Mardikian says. "These experiences are often at odds with the limitations of institutional structure. As a result I have developed self-reflection, doubt, irony and lack of believe as positions from which to make my work."
Currently on display in the Project Room is a minimalist installation of still video images from Mardikian's recent video work, I Would Like to Make a Painting.
Vasken Mardikian's website can be found at www.vaskenmardikian.com.
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Seen Anew: Art from Everyday Objects |  | |
02.20.09 - 03.29.09
From Guest Curator Missy Stevens
I grew up with a Yankee mentality. My Dad could have penned the old saying use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without . I m imbued with a desire to make use of scraps! My own work has used recycled materials in a variety of ways. At first, in my rag rugs, I chose to use strips of second hand corduroy pants to weave with, for their variety of color and softness. My thread paintings use all kinds of sewing thread, and the old spools often have some brilliant even shocking colors!
Last winter, looking for a change of pace, I decided to finally make something using a collection of scraps of old lace that I had for years. These small survivors were so inherently beautiful, even though their world had decayed around them, that they deserved to be reincarnated. The fragments in that box became three pieces populated with plants and birds. This work then led to the theme for this show.
Whatever turn our lives take, it s natural to be curious about how others respond to similar circumstances. I went looking for more artists who were using materials that might be considered ready for the trash by many, and elevating them to a new status laced with meaning. Wanting more than recycling, I chose artists whose work reinvented their materials.
Donna Marder uses playing cards like tiles, blocks of a quilt, or strokes of paint in Double Solitaire to make a new vision that reflects back on the original use of the materials. With her reverential irreverence Jeana Klein augments the scenarios of abandoned embroideries in delightful ways. In Self Portrait Liz Alpert Fay has added depth and layers of meaning to a child s dress, stitching her life and heart into it. The common lunch bag is elevated by Laura Evans. She sees and uses the qualities that differentiate each unassuming bag to make geometric compositions. Diane Savona haunts the yard sales of her neighborhood. Her work creates mythic garments, shrines to the women who previously owned the potholders and zippers she claims as her materials.
Altogether it s a feast of creativity, a celebration not only of the materials but also the stories and lives objects hold which now merge with the artists own lives.
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Valerie Leonard12.06.09 - 01.04.09
Scuptures
Valerie Leonard studied art and design in both Basel and London. She has been an off-Broadway actress and spent almost eight years as a lithographic edition printer. She has worked as assistant to various artists such as Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg and, her own personal favorite, Dieter Roth. Leonard also spent more than ten years in the toy industry as an inventor and designer.
With the onset of the gulf war (1991), she found the need to return to creating her own artistic statements. Leonard's time in the toy industry had a strong influence on this work. Both Barbie and the universal toy soldier have become a basic media for her pieces.
The works included in Leonard's Project Room exhibition combine common American and religious icons with children s toys and other ubiquitous elements in assemblages designed to evoke conflicting messages.
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Charles & Ray Eames11.01.08 - 11.30.08
Vintage Furniture Pieces
Curated by George Champion |
Art of Sound |  | |
10.04.08 - 10.26.08
Vintage and Contemporary LP Art
Curated by Karl Ueberbacher
While records can evoke a sense of nostalgia for a bygone matrix of recorded sound, the vinyl record has recently experienced a resurgence in commercial appeal. An increasing number of audio connoisseurs, both young and old, prefer the warm, rich sound that vinyl offers "particularly when compared to the now-ubiquitous MP3 digital music format.
The Art of Sound features the art and design of album covers, from the rise of the 331/3 LP era in the 1950 s, to contemporary packaging. Iconic album art that occupies a place in the collective consciousness "such as The Velvet Underground & Nico by the Velvet Underground, Never Mind the Bullocks by the Sex Pistols, and Sgt. Pepper s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles "will be displayed, together with other less well-known images.
Karl Ueberbacher, general manager of Phoenix Records and Puretone Audio in Litchfield, assembled this exhibition based on the visual experience of the records rather than the auditory one "an approach quite different from the conventional way one would organize a music library. The worlds of art and music have always been on a collision course, with many icons like Andy Warhol and even Salvador Dali enlisted to provide artwork for album covers, even with the strict size and space constraints presented by the format, Ueberbacher notes. But it has also been a two-way street; album art has profoundly influenced broader aesthetic sensibilities, with many artists who got their start doing record covers, such as Storm Thorgeson (Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin), Robert Williams and Pushead (Metallica), crossing over into the world of fine art.
Many record covers feature outstanding examples of painting, drawing, and photography, as well as everyday design elements like typography, yet we tend to perceive them differently as 12 by 12 inch commercial objects than we would if they were presented on canvas or other traditional fine art media. The Art of Sound, will invite viewers to explore these contradictions, as well as questions about how imagery shapes expectations of the music contained within album covers.
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Alan Ruiz |  | |
09.06.08 - 09.28.08
Ground Control
Site-Specific Installation
art.yale.edu/alanruiz
Translating geometric abstraction into ticking bursts of stroboscopic light, Alan Ruiz uses the morphology of Minimalism to distill what began as a self-reflexive investigation of painting as object into its constituent elements: light, heat, force " in other words, pure transmission beaming, bounding and cascading off the reflective walls of a mirrored control room, thus collapsing two realities, the virtual and the Real.
Light straddles the boundary between particle, energy and waveform. Here, the physical act of painting is removed. Context collapses. Non-space, virtuality " at what point does the virtual end and the Real begin? Does synthetic experience ever replicate reality?
Taking the immersive experience of a Barnett Newman, of standing before a painting larger than human-scale, combining it with the peculiar atmosphere of non-place buzzing through airports, casinos and discotheques, Ruiz creates an experience that is both immersive and self-conscious, centered on and abstracted off from the core of architectural consciousness, the human scale.
Ruiz uses this scale to create a social architecture where these ideas are brought into play. Rooms within a room, a bank of strobes mounted on a gloss black and reflexive silver board. Within the control room the viewer is forced to monitor the exterior chamber via a camera that surveys the room, digitally projecting it on the adjacent wall of the gallery, while the pulses of light periodically annihilate it all, forcing attention on the sinuosity between the Real and virtuality.
Surveillance, gaze and the panopticon are all evident in this installation, while still retaining the resonance of mass media, consumer history: the contemporary collective unconsciousness and the darkness, greed and destruction lurking at its periphery. |
Justin Mata06.22.09 - 07.22.09
A Change is Gonna Come
Prints, Sculptures and Site-Specific Installation
www.justinmata.com
A Change is Gonna Come, by New York-based artist Justin Mata, includes seven new works by the artist, including sculptures and prints, together with a temporary, site-specific installation.
The show focuses on formal qualities and modes of representation, and on how those aesthetic notions generate meaning. The artist uses the processes of deletion, manipulation, and deterioration as a metaphor for a nation that is mired in both a war and a de facto recession but is anticipating change.
Justin Mata was born in Woodland, California, and attended California College of the Arts, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2001. He recently received his Master s of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
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