Exhibition Opening Saturday: Making Masters 2014

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The writing is on the wall, literally. This weekend a group of artists from UGA’s MFA program and I drove down to Madison, Georgia to install Making Masters 2014 at the Madison Museum of Fine Art. The ten artists in the show work in different media and themes, so it was exciting to bring their pieces together and see how they responded to each other. As the curator I had tried to imagine how the artworks would look in the space for weeks, so it was really satisfying to see them on the wall.

We also had our first visitors. A small school group appeared just as we were putting on the final touches, and the children got to ask the artists questions about their work, such as “Where do you get your ideas for an artwork from?” or “How do you know it’s good enough to be in a museum?” Going right for the jugular! More questions like that are heartily welcomed. The exhibition is open to the public this coming Saturday, September 27. Even better, join us on October 11 from 4 to 6 pm for a reception.

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Oliver Laric’s Versions at the Hirschhorn Museum, Washington D.C.

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What do two Disney scenes have to do with Photoshoping missiles being fired? Or, for that matter, with a clearly computer-generated chair design and a white porcelain sculpture of a curiously bedecked man’s head? Ostensibly nothing, and I think that remains the case even after viewing Austrian artist Oliver Laric’s video Versions at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington D. C. several times. The linking thread in the chain of images in Versions is the accompanying female voice. In doing so, the artist makes the point that the linking thread of many contemporary cultural products in the remix culture of today are works of just such an amalgamated sourcing.

Oliver Laric Versions 2012 from Seventeen Gallery on Vimeo.

With the utmost professionalism and authority, the voice expounds on the philosophy of images, image-making today, and copies through such examples. Perhaps surprisingly, such a theoretical topic does not become boring, and if heavy-handed, pointedly so. Just as the images are created and remixed to tell this story, the words are also largely a remix. Taking from both high and low culture, Laric quotes from Borges but also James Brown, thus mimicking the same questions of authenticity and originality that he is tackling.

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To quote the video: “It’s the real thing. Hybridize, or disappear.” On view at the Hirschhorn through October 5. More information available here.

do it: Taking the Global Local

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I’m excited to get the ball rolling on a few projects for Fall, one of which is an exhibition that art history PhD student Brooke Leeton and I will be curating at the Lamar Dodd School of Art entitled Let’s do it UGA. We recently created a website for the project at www.letsdoituga.wordpress.com.

do it is a curatorial project begun by Hans Ulrich Obrist based on a simple proposition: “Create an instruction that someone else can use to make an artwork.” (More about that on e-flux’s project website.) In “Let’s do it UGA,” graduate students select different sets of do it instructions that form the basis of works of art. Instruction-based art privileges themes of variation, copy and authenticity, and play and experimentation, resulting in a work of art unconcerned with ownership or style. Instead, what drives the exhibition is the act of interpretation.

Brooke and I have enjoyed preparing the framework for the exhibition, but most of all we are excited to see what it will look like when it opens October 17. Because the artists are working from different sets of instructions that changes how they normally work, rather than us selecting objects or artist’s who work we are familiar with, the end result is a surprise. The only performance we can predict is one we will do ourselves, on the opening night of the reception. Following Amalia Pica’s instructions Throw A Party (2012), Brooke and I will end our night sweeping confetti evenly against one wall.

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