Big Orbit - Exhibition Opening

BENEATH / SUSPICION  Excerpts from the notebook of T.D.H. Castle-Tunnel Master 2nd Class an immersive installation by GARY SCZERBANIEWICZ winner of big orbit's 2012 members' exhibition      opening reception SATURDAY, APRIL 27 from 8-11p.m.  BIG ORBIT GALLERY 30d essex street buffalo, new york 14213 712-4355    Sczerbaniewicz's practice involves an insatiable fascination with interior and often, uncanny architectural spaces such as tunnels, mineshafts, catacombs, sewers, fallout shelters, basements, crawlspaces, confessional booths, and myriad other forms of Subterranea. This passion articulates itself in the form of immersive installations and various other two and three-dimensional strategies (drawings, models, videos, etc.). The work asserts and demonstrates the connections between these spaces and their historical, psychological, sociological, or political stratas. Sczerbaniewicz states, "I seek to disorient the viewer in an attempt to break the staid and often detached, passive, and familiar approach to consuming artworks. I believe that it is only in this hermetic space where authentic communication between artist and viewer occurs. To this end I employ tactics of individual viewer experience, physical engagement (such as compelling the spectator to crawl, crouch, lay, or adopt an atypical posture within a viewing space), and use of scale shifts."    Vignette, 2010, mixed media installation/performance   Gary Sczerbaniewicz received his BFA in mixed media aculpture from Alfred University in 1995.  He will complete his MFA from the University of Buffalo's Visual Studies Department this May.  Beneath/Suspicion is Gary's MFA Thesis Exhibition, and continues a long history of technically masterful and psychologically impactful installations and performances. The exhibition runs through June 9, 2013

Squeaky Wheel - Regional Artist Access Residency

REGIONAL ARTIST ACCESS RESIDENCY PREMIERE
FRI., APR. 26TH @ 7:00 PM       LOCATION: SQUEAKY WHEEL

Squeaky Wheel’s Regional Artist Access Residency (RAAR!) program annually provides equipment and facility access to emerging media artists in the Western New York region. Join this year's residency participants as they premiere brand new projects. This event is free and open to the public.
 
 
THE ARTISTS + THEIR PROJECTS:
 
Kyle Butler is a visual artist from Michigan who currently lives in Buffalo, New York. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a focus in painting from Central Michigan University in 2008 and received his Master's degree in Visual Studies from the University at Buffalo in the spring of 2010.
 
Shasti O'Leary Soudant has been a professional graphic designer and photographer for the last twenty-one years. She has one child, one spouse, one business and no pets. In her art practice, she employs a wide range of media, including photography, performance, sculpture, video, film, music, graphic design and mechanical engineering to explore and interrogate vanity, aging, sexuality and the ways in which we edit the self in reaction to culture, politics and emotion.
 
Through collaborative dual-channel video and performative sculpture, Kyleand Shasti will stage a large scale, involuntary snail migration to illustrate the slow tensions between historical and existential dichotomies that often result in frustrating truncations of, diversions from, and compromises in, a given life's trajectory.  The viewer is invited to impose their will onto the snails' disposition by initiating their trip from one end of the gallery (beginnings) to the other (conclusions). The viewers "help" at their own discretion, assuming the interjectionary role of life's unresolved dichotomies and provoking their consequence.
 
 
 
Lauren Rebecca Gay was born in beloved Buffalo. She went to the city’s public Montessori and City Honors School. Since graduating from Buffalo State college and receiving her certification to teach Secondary English she has been practicing the written word and art in the world at large. As a substitute teacher she has turned science classrooms into open mics. She invented POPPress in early 2012 as a self-publishing and creative endeavor specializing in hand-drawn, hand-bound goods; she strung together 81 books.
 
Isaac Johnson went to UB for too long and learned too little. Residing in lovely Buffalo, he reads and writes and films and watches. He has performed and screened work all over Buffalo and gets lost very easily. Very interested in everything, fearing nothing really ever gets done, Isaac will continue trying.
 
Lauren and Isaac's multimedia docu-fiction will provide an intimate look into a couple's 9 months of pregnancy and the resulting child's first month of life. Blending diary like video, poetry and performance, the border between documentation and artistic representation will be blurred in the protagonists' all encompassing yet subtly elliptical journey.
 
 
 
Emerging from the small but eclectic film scenes of Austin and Houston, Matthew Hardesty is a sometimes-resident of Buffalo, NY. A recent graduate of the Austin School of Film, he has been involved in dozens of short films and infamous features. Through working with budding artists like himself, he continues to shell out phenomenal expression in leagues of his own creativity while modestly waiting for the next big shot. 
 
Using the "Vow of Chastity" rules outlined by filmmaking group Dogme 95, Matthew is creating a short narrative video about sex and suicide.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

UB: IEMA Lecture

WNYBAC - Exhibition Opening/Event

Chris Fritton – The Baltimore Catechism

Opening Reception and Artist’s Talk on Friday, March 15th / 6-9pm

The Baltimore Catechism is an unintentional, fanciful, imaginary revision of A Catechism of Christian Doctrine, Prepared and Enjoined by Order of The Third Plenary Council of Baltimore (1885) wherein the authors posit the most fundamental and absurd physical and metaphysical questions, and postulate ever more fundamental and absurd answers. Originally intended as just an artist’s book, the project quickly took on a much wider scope, begetting large-scale woodcuts and accompanying prints, a performance component, and hand-set letterpress posters and broadsides. Capricious and inadvertently satirical, this eccentric exhibit features 12 large-scale prints and corresponding woodblocks, the artist’s book, and elements from the construction of the Catechism.

The opening reception for The Baltimore Catechism is free and open to the public. On view March 8th-April 12

A complete reading of The Baltimore Catechism will take place at a special "Midnight Mass" on April 5th at 11:30pm at WNYBAC. This event is also free & open to the public. 

University at Buffalo

Renowned Scholar of French Art and Culture
to Speak at Buffalo History Museum

Talk investigates impact of electrification of Paris on turn of the century art  

Buffalo, NY – The University at Buffalo Department of Visual Studies is pleased to host Dr. S. Hollis Clayson, professor of art history and Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University. Clayson’s talk, titled John Singer Sargent's Paris Moon Light: Twilight Disenchanted?, will explore her work analyzing the electrification of Paris and its impact on the art of the time. Clayson will speak at 7pm on Thursday March 28, 2013, at the Buffalo History Museum. The talk is free and open to the public.

Specializing in the social history of nineteenth-century Parisian art, Clayson has organized 3 exhibitions and has written: 2 books; more than 30 articles, book chapters and exhibition catalogs; and given more than 100 conference talks. The recipient of numerous grants and fellowships for her scholarly work, her excellence in teaching has also been recognized by several awards. Her long career has culminated in appointment as next year's Samuel H. Kress Professor at the National Gallery of Art, one of the most prestigious academic appointments in the world.

Jonathan D. Katz, Director of the Visual Studies PhD program will introduce Clayson and said of her work: “Long celebrated as one of the premier voices in the study of 19th century French art, Holly Clayson has worked on everything from the image of the courtesan in Impressionism to the conditions of life and art in Paris under the siege of 1870-71. After earning recognition for redefining Impressionism through including the perspective of the unheard, Clayson now sets out to chart the impact of the unseen; the electrification that literally redefined visibility in the last quarter of the 19th century."

  

Of late, Clayson has begun turning her attention to the effects of electricity in the development of modern painting, and it is out of that research that this project emerges. Entitled  John Singer Sargent's Paris Moon Light: Twilight Disenchanted?, Clayson argues that Sargent's supposedly most "impressionist" canvases, the two Luxembourg Garden paintings of 1879, are nothing of the kind.  They are read instead as extraordinary redefinitions of the Whistlerian nocturne that respond explicitly and imaginatively to the electric street lights that newly impinged upon the Jardin du Luxembourg, the largest green space on the Left Bank. From within the matrix of illumination discourse, Sargent's canvases displace the brutality of electric into the poetry of reflected moon light.

Hosted by the University at Buffalo’s Department of Visual Studies, Clayson’s talk is co-sponsored by: the Buffalo History Museum; the New York Power Authority; M. Pascal Soarès, Honorary Consul, Consulat Général de France; and the Alliance Française de Buffalo.

Buffalo State College - Department of Fine Arts

Dr. Maria Georgopoulou, Director of the Gennadius Library in Athens, Greece will present
"The Venetian Cities of Crete (The Cities of Crete during the Venetian Occupation, from 1204-1669 AD)"

Tuesday, March 19 at 5 pm
Burchfield Penney Art Center Auditorium

Canisius - Amy Greenan exhibition

This show is up in the library until 8 April. To earn extra credit for this, visit the gallery between now and 8 April (you will need to get the key from the Reference Desk), and write the 2-page critical reaction to the exhibit.