[atlantaprog] [eyedrum-announcement-list] July 12 – July 16, 2006

Eyedrum events July 12 – July 16, 2006


Regular Gallery Hours are Wednesday, Friday & Saturday 12:00pm – 5:00pm

Members admitted free to all events!

Erica Wilson’s small gallery installation, “Cricket Constellations” ends this Saturday, July 15th. Come check out this amazing exhibit!

Becoming a member of Eyedrum is a huge value in addition to helping keep the doors open!
Click here for more info!
http://eyedrum.org/membership.asp

____________________________________________________________

This week’s events: (more info below or click on the link)

Thursday July 13  8:00pm $5
Film Love: ‘Friendly Witness and other films by Warren Sonbert

Saturday July 15  7:00pm – 11:00pm Free
The Carbonist School:  Study Hall art opening

Sunday July 16  9:00pm $5
The Eagle-Ager

________________________________________________________________________


July 13  Thursday


The Films of Warren Sonbert
Film
8:00pm
$5

Frequent Small Meals presents
FRIENDLY WITNESS
Films by Warren Sonbert

A Film Love event

Show begins promptly at 8 pm

"fantastic visual riches of texture, composition, and rhythm" --Film Comment

Among the generation of American independent filmmakers who came of age in the 1960s, Warren Sonbert (1947-1995), holds a unique place. On one hand he was an admirer of Hitchcock and the Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk, and on the other he was a rigorous avant- gardist whose films were utterly personal accounts of his world travels. Sonbert's films are widely admired - they have been the subject of retrospectives at the Guggenhiem Museum and other institutions - but remain available only in 16mm prints and are too rarely screened. Frequent Small Meals presents a pair of early films and a pair of late films by this crucial figure of the American avant- garde.

* Sonbert began his career with a sensational trilogy of films made while he was a teenage student at New York University. Two of these films, "Amphetamine" and "Where Did Our Love Go," document the 1960s New York of Warhol's Factory, art galleries, and the sometimes seedy, sometimes glamorous goings on within. The films show an influence of sweeping Hollywood camera styles, set to exuberant pop music soundtracks.

* After this initial phase, Sonbert developed a highly personal and complex editing style based on footage shot on his extensive world travels. After amassing voluminous footage, he would edit shots from multiple locations into seamless, almost symphonic film journeys, bringing out subtle connections between people in vastly different locations. "Honor and Obey," is a 16mm opus which, while silent, "flows along with the grace of a musical score built on complex tensions hidden among the notes" (the New York Times). "Friendly Witness" plays off a soundtrack of rock songs and opera to create "an extraordinary palette of synchronous global activity" (Jon Gartenberg).

All films will be shown in their original 16mm format, in recently restored prints.

For more information on this program please contact Andy Ditzler at
andy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The Film Love series exists to provide access to important but little- seen films. Film Love is programmed and hosted by Andy Ditzler for Frequent Small Meals.




July 15  Saturday

The Carbonist School: Study Hall
Art opening
7:00pm – 11:00pm
Free

School is in session.

Eyedrum hosts the first public exhibition (June 24-August 5, 2006) of The Carbonist School, an underground art and idea movement with its roots in the American South. The Carbonist School was founded over wireless laptops and cell phones in 2004 by a small group of black artists in response to shifting social realities in which an ever widening array of experiences has become available to black people.

By using metaphors of strangeness and mutation, and strategies of disorientation and science fiction allusion, these artists imagine a geek-enabled practice in which blackness is expressed as a malleable technology open to infinite mutation. No longer limited narrowly by metaphors of struggle or strictly by the logic of oppression, the Carbonist School opens a new era of expression marked by aesthetic exuberance, multilayered realities, and the cult of the strange. The Carbonist School seeks to represent blackness in ways that do not foreclose on multiple readings of the work. The Carbonist School is an idea whose time has come.

Come study with the Carbonist School: video, painting, sculpture and sound works by emerging and mid-career artists will be on the curriculum.

Exhibiting artists include Greg Tate, William Cordoa, Cauleen Smith, Kojo Griffin, Mendi+Kieth Obadike, Kevin Sipp, and others.

Through August 5th.


July 16 Sunday

The Eagle-Ager
Performance
9:00pm
$5

Brooklyn based performance art team Eagle Ager combine puppetry, performance art, and experimental movement/music. Their piece for Atlanta will likely consist of a set made almost entirely of scrap wood, cardboard, eagles, toy firetrucks, florescent Jesus figurines, paintings
of mountains, Styrofoam starfish suits, the music of
composer/electronic musician, and a
spotlight performance by their dancer/ ritual leader,
all working to construct a socially relevant, absurdist profundity.





In the galleries:

Small Gallery:

Erica Wilson, "Cricket Constellations"

An installation inspired by Palladio, decay, beauty, time, spirituality and music.

"My work is a celebration of the wonders of the world and all the complexities that arise from simple rules within it. I am illustrating concepts and ideas that are not tangible realities, ideas that no real words can describe. The installation is my way of illustrating an idea, a philosophy, and a way of life that is felt in the souls of individuals. It's that feeling of awe and excitement when one truly sees something for the first time and is moved by its beauty. It is recognition of those aesthetics not typically embraced by western standars of beauty, and overlooked in our fast-paced day- to-day lives. All of the pieces, simple and complex, tiny as they are, come to make one whole piece; embracing the silence and wonder that occur between moments of chaos."

Exhibit runs through July 15th.


Back Gallery:

Robert Witherspoon, “Machinations”

sculptural installations

Machinate (mak'-e-nat'): to devise, plan, and plot artfully, especially with evil intent.
Machinator: a plotter, schemer; intriguer.

This exhibition, Machinations, showcases Robert Witherspoon's recent sculptural works that investigate the merging of installation art, social commentary, and object making. For this exhibition, Witherspoon has turned his attention to metaphor-laden objects and common iconography that have politically and socially potent messages. The associations and meaning escalate as the artist takes these objects out of context to investigate social issues ranging from censorship, the language of the defenses industry, to unabashed American consumerism. These subjects are all closely related in our society and current events at home and overseas.

At times the work leads you down some dark mental pathways that utilize humor, irony, and sometimes an exaggerated sense of scale to usher in a dialogue with the viewer. Witherspoon remarks, "My work strives to create situations that draw the viewer to investigate my objects closely while simultaneously creating visual and physical barriers that confront the viewer and create a psychological barrier that can be navigated."

At a time when the absurdities and perversions of war are unfurled and fears and insecurities about the future are augmented daily, the very collective psyche of our nation has temporarily become altered. The trajectory of Witherspoon's artwork reflects on this evolving dynamic and attempts to ratchet and rise to meet these challenges. In two of the installations, the language of the defense industry and censorship is certainly one of the foremost concerns. Using satire, common iconography and dark humor, Witherspoon unfurls his own parachutes and arsenals of the mind's eye that bears witness to political landscape like a canary in the coal mine.

Exhibit runs through August 5th.



Front Gallery:

Please note: The OPENING RECEPTION will be held SATURDAY, JULY 15TH from 7-11PM)

"The Carbonist School: Study Hall"

School is in session.

Eyedrum hosts the first public exhibition (June 24-August 5, 2006) of The Carbonist School, an underground art and idea movement with its roots in the American South. The Carbonist School was founded over wireless laptops and cell phones in 2004 by a small group of black artists in response to shifting social realities in which an ever widening array of experiences has become available to black people.

By using metaphors of strangeness and mutation, and strategies of disorientation and science fiction allusion, these artists imagine a geek-enabled practice in which blackness is expressed as a malleable technology open to infinite mutation. No longer limited narrowly by metaphors of struggle or strictly by the logic of oppression, the Carbonist School opens a new era of expression marked by aesthetic exuberance, multilayered realities, and the cult of the strange. The Carbonist School seeks to represent blackness in ways that do not foreclose on multiple readings of the work. The Carbonist School is an idea whose time has come.

Come study with the Carbonist School: video, painting, sculpture and sound works by emerging and mid-career artists will be on the curriculum.

Exhibiting artists include Greg Tate, William Cordoa, Cauleen Smith, Kojo Griffin, Mendi+Kieth Obadike, Kevin Sipp, and others.

Exhibit runs through August 5th.


Miscellany

In recognition of its dedication to visual arts programming, Eyedrum has been awarded a $30,000 grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts! It’s our largest grant to date! This grant will allow us to provide financial support to curators, artists and their projects at Eyedrum over the next two years.

Read the press release here! http://www.eyedrum.org/pressreleases/ eyedrum-warhol-grant.pdf

Read what the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had to say! http:// www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/atlanta/stories/0619warhol.html

Read what Creative Loafing had to say!
http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid:87935


July’s Podcast is now available!

This month's show is now available and features music from Dirty Projectors, Venus 7, Eastern Seaboard, Z-Axis, Shaking Ray Levis with Erik Hinds, Unbounded Sky and King Congregation, among others. If you're using iTunes or other RSS software, click here for the feed. If not, you can also just download the May or July show (right click on the link) although be forewarned that the file is 50 MB in size.



EYEDRUM is located at 290 Martin Luther King Jr Dr, Suite 8 in Atlanta.
404.522.0655 or www.eyedrum.org

Eyedrum’s programming is supported in part by the City of Atlanta Office of Cultural Affairs.

Become an Eyedrum member!  ( http://eyedrum.org/membership.asp )

Donate to Eyedrum.  (http://eyedrum.org/donate.asp )

To unsubscribe to this email newsletter, please reply to this message with unsubscribe in the subject line. Please be patient as this process may take a week or so. Thanks!




Other related posts: