Maia Brown’s Senior Studio Exhibition

Maia Brown’s solo exhibition took place in a refreshing new location: 166 S Pleasant Street.  Her show, titled “You Who Stand in the Doorway, Come In”, was an exploration of the sites of memory.  Her entire body of work was built around Orthodox Jewish Tefilin, which are small leather boxes worn during prayer.  These sealed boxes contain passages of the Torah which are to be remembered daily, but the small slips of paper are meant to never be seen.

Maia’s work recreated Tefilin using leather, video animation and castings out of resin.  These Tefilin burst open, over-flowing with fabric, spices and even plants.  Her many drawings which surrounded the space used Tefilin as builidng blocks of abstract city-scapes.  Maia Brown wants us to open our collective memory, even the memories that are tightly sealed away, allowing all voices and stories to be heard.

The 166 S. Pleasant St house is part of the Building Prosperity Project, a collaboration between Oberlin residents and college students to create an art and community space for the Oberlin Underground Railroad Society.

All photos in this post courtesy John Seyfried.

 

Strange & Familiar: Margarida Malarkey’s Senior Exhibition

Senior Studio student Margarida Malarkey had her solo exhibition opening on March 19th, 2010.  An experienced photographer, Margarida’s colorful portraits offered more than an everyday staged scene.  Each of her photgraphs had surrealistic content, ranging from vague and subtle to overt and powerful.  Her subjects’ gazes were often far, far away, or deep inside themselves.

All photos courtesy Gary Cohen.  More images of Malarkey’s show on Gary’s Flickr page.

 

Screening Tonight: BROADCAST YOURSELF Part 2, Cinema 062 (Art Bldg Basement), 8pm

Hello All,

Just a friendly invitation to CINEMA 062′s event TONIGHT, Wednesday, March 17th at 8:00 pm in the basement of the Art Building (Sculpture Studio 062). This week’s screening, BROADCAST YOURSELF Part 2, will feature finely crafted, radically brief YouTube playlists curated by CINEMA 062 members Christina Boland, Katherine Buono, Kelly Crimmins, Rachel Garcia-Grossman, Adekemi Gbadebo, Jack Mintz, Amanda Mummery, and Logan Takahashi. As usual, snacks and beverages will be provided. We hope to see you there!

And also, don’t forget about Cat Mazza’s artist talk TOMORROW, Thursday, March 18th at 12pm at the Cat in the Cream (free pizza!), or Jim Finn’s screening TOMORROW NIGHT at 8pm in Hallock Auditorium (communist utopianism! + Dick Cheney in a cold, dark cell!).

Love,
CINEMA 062

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CINEMA 062 is a weekly series that presents specially curated alternative, independent, and experimental media every Wednesday night in Oberlin, Ohio. Screenings take place in the basement of Oberlin College’s Art Building, in room 062. All events are free and open to the public, and snacks will be provided. If you would like to be removed from this mailing list, please let us know.

 

Richard Tuttle at Kent State

Richard Tuttle, world-renowned artist of inventive abstract works, lectures as part of the Thomas Schroth Visiting Artist Series on the main campus of Kent State on Thursday, March 18 at 7:30 pm in the KIVA Auditorium, located in the Student Center. This event is free and open to the public.

For more information, call 330-672-2192 or visit the website of the Kent State University School of Art.

 

Super8 Oberlin Showcase call for entries

The Super8 Oberlin Showcase (S.O.S.) will be returning to Oberlin on April 23rd. A presentation of the One Take Super 8 Event, S.O.S. is a non-competitive festival of one-take films made on Super 8, unique in that none of the films will be viewed, even by the filmmakers, before the festival. Festival organizer Alex Rogalski, the Oberlin Film Co-op, and INCITE! Journal of Experimental Media & Radical Aesthetics are sponsoring the event after its one-year hiatus, and invite the public to create and submit new works. Registration is free and now open. For more information on the festival and how to participate, contact the Oberlin Film Co-op at ofc@oberlin.edu or at their office in Wilder 326.

 

Screening to feature works by filmmaker Jim Finn

The “Sight Lines: Dialogues in Film and Media” series continues this Thursday with a screening of films by Jim Finn.

Jim Finn’s award-winning movies have been called ‘Utopian comedies.’  His films have screened at Sundance, Rotterdam and other international festivals like AFI and Edinburgh as well as the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, Danish Film Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Harvard Film Archive. He has had retrospectives in Argentina, Spain, Colombia and Venezuela.

Jim will be in attendance, presenting his 2006 feature Interkosmos, the recent short Dick Cheney in a Cold, Dark Cell, and various other shorts. Check out what International Film Festival Rotterdam had to say about Interkosmos:

The East Germans started in the 1970′s, with their allies, on an ambitious, secret project to colonise the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. You didn’t know that, did you? Finn reveals all: with beautiful archive material, swinging musical numbers in retro-socialist style, beautiful miniature sets, guinea pigs and a dramatic plot theory.

The screening will be held at Hallock Auditorium in the AJ Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at 8pm. It is free and open to the public.

 

If you listen closely: Allie and Amina’s Senior Exhibition

Allie Takahashi and Amina Hassen had the opening of their Senior Studio show on March 12th, 2010 at 8pm.  Allie, who works with many non-traditional materials including clear tape, and paper hole-punch reinforcers as well as charcoal and graphite, showed a body of minimalist and conceptual works she has been fastidiously making the entire 2009-2010 school year.   Interested in the meditative experience of her artmaking process, Allie’s work is characterized by gently undulating lights and darks and a patient hand behind her time-consuming methods.

For the above piece Allie used thousands of tiny nails, applied at slanted angles to create a beautiful, textured abstract landscape.

Amina has spent the year photographically documenting the interiors of abandoned and foreclosed houses in and around Lorain County, Ohio.  Her large C-prints capture beautiful light falling across ripping wallpaper and empty indoor swimming pools- creating a tension between the beauty of her images and the sad stories behind the places she photographs.

All photos courtesy Gary Cohen.  See more images on his Flickr page.

 

“Adaptive Reuse” highlights Christensen

The work of Oberlin professor Julia Christensen is featured in an article by Claire Barliant in the latest issue of Afterall:

Over the past several months, I have been following the work of three North American artists – Mary Ellen Carroll, Julia Christensen and Damon Rich – who are making work positioned somewhere between art, archi-tecture and advocacy. While their practices are only tangentially related, they all share an interest in the forces driving property values and in broadening the definition of the public, in the sense of creating an arena that is democratic, transparent in its operations and encouraging of open debate.

Providing both review of Christensen’s recent work  that resulted in Big Box Reuse, and investigation into her ongoing project following the resale and movement of used factory equipment, the article surveys artists’ investigations into phenomena related to economic crisis, and their implications as strategic responses. Find it in full here.

 

Paper sculpture tunnels

Enjoy these crafty displays sculpted by artist Anastassia Elias from toilet paper tubes.