NEW/NOW wants YOU: Michael Mahalchick to assemble a material portrait of the community with your help

Now through January 27th, the public is invited to participate in an upcoming installation by NEW/NOW artist, Michael Mahalchick, by donating objects which will become the raw material for his work. Welcomed items include trinkets, hand-made treasures, decorative objects, manufactured goods,  etc. If an object could conceivably be found at a garage sale and is of reasonable size, it likely fits the bill. Objects selected for inclusion in the artist’s work will be featured in the upcoming exhibition NEW/NOW: Michael Mahalchick in the Cheney Gallery March 9- June 9, 2013.

The work of Michael Mahalchick defies any one specific definition. Moving seamlessly between the realms of sculpture/assemblage, installation, performance, music and dance, Mahalchick incorporates a self-identified “scavenging” aesthetic or “thrift-store nostalgia” to his work. In utilizing objects of everyday use (or disuse), the artist is free to imbue whatever meaning he sees fit to ascribe, making icons out of the ordinary.

Michael Mahalchick, “IT” installation, March 6th, 2012, Canada Gallery

Ever since Duchamp scandalized the world with his Fountain, the concept of the object as art has been a prominent part of our visual lexicon, from Rauschenberg’s gritty Combines to the poetic assemblages of Joseph Cornell. Like Duchamp, Mahalchick’s works call into question meaning and purpose in art and culture. Who holds the power to ascribe meaning in our every day lives and why?

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Joyous Windows: The Luminous Glass Art of Mundy Hepburn

This post comes to us from Bethany Gugliemino, Curatorial Intern

Joyous Windows, 2003-2006. Mundy Hepburn (b.1955). Hand-blown glass, phosphor, argon, helium, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, small static electric charge. Charles F. Smith Fund, 2006.00.

Mundy Hepburn, of Old Saybrook, Connecticut, began his experiments with glassblowing in 1963 at the age of eight after accompanying his mother to the Guilford Town Fair, where he witnessed a glassblowing demonstration. Captivated by what he had seen, he attempted to replicate the effects himself at home by melting an old light bulb over the flames of a gas stove. His mother caught him, but Hepburn quickly explained that he had “fire polished” the glass, removing the sharp edges. His mother was impressed by his inventiveness, and from that point on his parents encouraged his experiments (and made sure that they were more properly supervised). He dropped out of school at fourteen but continued to explore new methods of working with glass as a way of dealing with personal problems he was experiencing at the time.

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Reaching Particular Heights: Viewer Participation and New Media

This post comes to us from Bethany Gugliemino, Curatorial Intern.

 

Particular Heights 2.0, 2012. Paul Theriault (b.1972) and Siebren Versteeg (b.1971). Handmade steel swing set, counter, and LCD monitor. Collection of the artists.

 On the evening of May 25, the LED counter mounted above the swing in the front courtyard of the NBMAA displayed a single red digit: 0. Two weeks later, the counter boasted the significantly larger number of 3614, a number that will only continue to grow in the coming months. This swing is one part of Particular Heights 2.0, the second incarnation of an installation by artists Paul Theriault and Siebren Versteeg that was first displayed in New Haven, Connecticut in 2010. Consisting of an outdoor component (the swing and LED counter) and a gallery component, the installation falls into the category of New Media, a field with which both Theriault and Versteeg are very familiar. New Media involves the fusion of traditional mediums such as painting, sculpture, and music with the interactive potential of computers, communications technology, and the internet. Both Theriault and Versteeg have worked individually with New Media in the past, producing works that explore themes of contemporary life and the way that digital technology can be used to create pieces that constantly change and grow.

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Media History Through the Eyes of a Blue Boar

Blue Boar (2010) installed in the Contemporary Gallery at the NBMAA

The New Britain Museum of American Art is pleased to feature the newest addition to the New Media series, Blue Boar, 2010 by Victoria Bradbury. This interactive, mixed-media installation brings the viewer into the midst of a witch trial – the so-called “blue boar incident.” In 1692, 75-year-old Mary Bradbury, the artist’s 10th great-grandmother and the first “American” woman in her lineage, was convicted of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts. Two local men, Richard Carr and Zerubabel Endicott, accused Mrs. Bradbury of transforming herself into a blue boar while she was tending to her garden. Victoria Bradbury retells the “blue boar incident”  through a sewn book narrated by vegetables, face recognition software projected onto a sculpture of a boar, and a video animation of a blue boar running through flowers.

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Carson Fox: “Bi-Polar” Looks Beyond Fire, Flames, and Ice

Carson Fox (b. 1970) installing one of her cast resin snowflakes

“I am interested in beauty but I mistrust it. Instead, I look for beauty that exists in tension with the material or circumstances that invent it”. This has become one of the mantras of Carson Fox, the Brooklyn-based artists whose artwork is the newest installment in the NEW/NOW exhibition series for emerging contemporary artists. The dual nature of beauty is certainly evident in Bi-Polar, which will open at the NBMAA on November 4th.

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Relational Aesthetics: The Art of Sociability

Blue Boar, 2009. Victoria Bradbury (b.1981). Video still.

The phenomenon of “global art” emerged after a revision of the world’s relations. With the expansion of communication and technology, a new inter-connectivity was created throughout most of the globe. New media forms and aesthetic relations were born as a response to and embodiment of  the cross-cultural interchanges and easy transmutations of national borders.

Currently, many artists are using their practice to probe the new relations of power in a global world by creating works that set in place certain social relations. In each piece, the participating spectator and the artist reenact every-day social relationships that model aspects of global interactions as a whole.  In an attempt to describe this current in art, internationally-renowned curator Nicholas Bourriaud introduced the theory of relational aesthetics in his work Esthétique Relationelle (1998). His main claim is that the social interactions created between the viewing audience and a work of art hold the true meaning of art. Through “little gestures,” Bourriaud suggests, the “relational fabric” of society may be “re-stitched”(1).

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200 Years of Women Artists

A Caress, 1891. Mary Cassatt (1844-1926). Pastel on paper, 29 1/4 x 23 3/4 in. New Britain Museum of AMerican Art, Harriet Rusell Stanley Fund (1948.14).

On Dec. 18 the New Britain Museum of American Art will open WomenArtists@NewBritainMuseum, a comprehensive exhibition of women artists represented in the permanent collection. This is a first in the Museum’s history and a landmark show that sets it among a group of major international museums—the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles—that have presented large-scale exhibitions of art by women in the past four years. The Museum of Modern Art just published a 500-page catalogue of women’s work in their collection and the Jewish Museum of New York recently opened an exhibition of feminism and painting drawn primarily from their collection and featuring seven works that they have recently acquired. This sudden flurry of action signals a coming of age for women artists from the perspective of museums. After forty years of political pressure, women’s art has achieved major institutional recognition.

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Politically-Charged Seeds (An Installation)

Sunflower Seeds, 2010. Ai Weiwei (b.1957). Temporary installation at the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, London.

You might have heard about Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds, an installation in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London, England. Initially, visitors were encouraged to interact with the artwork but due to health and safety concerns the museum decided to close access to the public. Now, the work can be viewed from a bridge that goes across the gallery or from behind a rope. This is the third show at the Tate that experienced safety issues. The first occured in 2006 when visitors were injured in Carsten Höller’s exhibit of Test Site. This was an installation of a series of slides-the longest one being 58 meters (approximately 190.2 feet) long. The second issue arose during Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth when three visitors fell into the crack on the floor.

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New Media & Fractal Art

TV Cello, 1971. Nam June Paik (1932-2006). Video tubes, TV chassis, plexiglass boxes, electronics, wiring, wood base, fan, stool, photograph. Permanent Collection, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

A broad term that emerged in the 1960s and exploded onto the art scene in the 1980s, New Media ecompasses the fusion of traditional media such as film, images, painting, sculpture, music, and the written and spoken word with the interactive power of computer and communications technology, computer-enabled consumer devices, and the Internet. This new category of art includes digital art, animation, interactive and installation art, and computer graphics, among others. New media artists such as Nam June Paik (1932-2006) and Wolf Vostell (1932-1998) first experimented with video and sound art in the 1960s and many artists have since followed in their footsteps with further experimentation. A key concept of New Media is that the artworks produced are available to anyone at any time through the Internet and other digital frameworks. This digitization creates a universal forum for artists to share ideas with each other, and communicate with viewers directly.

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Digital Art: The Skeptics and The Supporters

World Skin, 1997. Maurice Benayoun. Virtual Reality Installation.

As we become a society increasingly engulfed in computer technology, there seem to be changes in the art world, specifically in regards to digitalization.  Since the 1970s, art produced digitally has risen into the fine arts realm.  For example, as opposed to manual photography which catches chemical changes on film, digital photography uses electronic sensors that record the desired image as electronic data.  A major advantage of digital photography is the ability to manipulate the image using computer programs and software.  many different effects can be utilized, increasing the tools the artist has to express their vision.  Aside from digital photography, digital art contains multiple other forms, such as photopainting, digital collage, integrated digital art, virtual reality, hollogram, fractals, and more.

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