Scott Malbaum: Interim Director for Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland

Scott Malbaurn 

Interim Director for the Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland

Scott Malbaurn

Schneider Museum of Art Interim Director 

Photograph Courtesy of the Schneider Museum of Art

The Schneider Museum of Art announces the appointment of Scott Malbaurn as the new interim Director of the Schneider Museum of Art effective July 1, 2015.  Scott Malbaurn has a MFA degree from Pratt Institute and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art both degrees in Painting.

Scott Malbaurn was Acting Assistant Chairperson of Fine Arts at Pratt and oversaw the undergraduate Fine Arts program in the areas of drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, jewelry and ceramics. Scott Malbaurn also worked at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum located in Queens, NY where he worked in the Curatorial and Collections Department as well as Noguchi’s Design Department. Scott Malbaurn has an extensive background in independent curatorial work in New York and has had his own work displayed in many professional exhibitions nationally and internationally.  Scott Malbaurn was also co-owner and curatorial director of the H. Lewis Gallery in Baltimore, MD. This past year he taught drawing courses for Southern Oregon University.

The Schneider Museum of Art, which is part of the Oregon Center for the Arts, is going through an exciting period of development. Along with the new leadership, the Museum will create a strategic plan for a successful future. “We will be dreaming big and small”, says Scott Malbaurn. “We will continue to do the good work set forth by our predecessors and we hope to build upon that with additional programming focused toward connecting our student and community groups. We will attempt to visualize our programs and exhibitions as a spectrum where we create a context for contemporary art that supports the well established, the mid career, and the young emerging artist from Oregon and beyond. What we do over the span of a year is what will define us.”

The Museum’s fall exhibition, Breaking Pattern is curated by the New York based team Matthew Deleget and Rosanna Martinez who run Minus Space, a gallery located in Dumbo, Brooklyn that specializes in abstract and reductive art. The exhibition highlights several generations of artists from coast to coast whose works investigate and advance the discourse around pattern, optical, and perceptual abstract painting. The exhibition will feature recent paintings by seven American artists: Gabriele Evertz, Anoka Faruqee, Michelle Grabner, Gilbert Hsiao, Douglas Melini, Brian Porray, and Michael Scott. This exhibition coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal exhibition The Responsive Eye curated by William C. Seitz.

Matthew Deleget and Rosanna Martinez are respective artists themselves and they will present a project of their own work in our Treehaven Gallery. Scott Malbaurn explains, “More and more artists today are beginning to wear many hats, from curating to art criticism and gallery operations. This is a great example of today’s contemporary art discourse.” One of the artists in this exhibition, Michelle Grabner, was one of three curators who curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American art in New York, NY. Grabner was also tapped to be the upcoming curator for the Portland 2016 Biennial. Grabner also runs a successful artist project space called The Suburban in Oak Park, Illinois.

Additionally there will be a Southern Oregon Site Project installation by Tannaz Farsi, an Iranian-American artist who teaches at the University of Oregon. She is designing a living “Persian Rug” comprised of plants native to the Rogue valley. This project, funded in part by The Ford Family Foundation, Roseburg, is designed to support the development and presentation of new art by Oregon artists.

SCHNEIDER MUSEUM OF ART

Southern Oregon University - SOU

1250 Siskiyou Boulevard, Ashland, OR 97520

www.sou.edu

Wang Guangle, Beijing Commune Gallery - Six Colors

Wang Guangle: Six Colors

Beijing Commune Gallery, Beijing

July 23 - September 12, 2015

Beijing Commune presents Wang Guangle’s third solo exhibition “Six Colors” at the gallery.

Wang Guangle is generally considered one of the most representative figures in the New Abstract Movement that has gradually formed through the past decades among the emerging generation in China’s contemporary art scene. His paintings have acquired increasing attention since the Terrazzo series in early 2000s. His later works from the Coffin Paint and Untitled series consistently imply a looming thread that is closely related to an immediate experience with time and life. This exhibit shows off six large scale color paintings from the artist’s latest Untitled series.

Wang has gained critical praise for his process-based paintings, which simultaneously reference traditional memento mori, temporality, repetition, and abstraction. The Coffin Paint series was inspired by a burial tradition he witnessed while growing up in Fujian province, southern China, where there still exists the local tradition of aged people preparing their waiting coffins with a layer of lacquer for each year they remain alive. A meditative symbol of acceptance and preparation, the coffin can incur several years’ worth of paint layers up until the moment of a person’s passing. Wang adds layers of paint to his canvas several times daily, with each layer covered upon the previous one. As the pigment accumulates, the surface of the canvas builds to a thick layer of paint that attains a nearly sculptural dimension. The paint naturally flows down along both right and left sides of the canvases.

BEIJING COMMUNE

798 Art District, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing

www.beijingcommune.com

Peter Saul, From Pop to Punk @ Venus Over Manhattan, NYC

Peter Saul, From Pop to Punk
Venus Over Manhattan, New York
February 25 - April 25, 2015

VENUS OVER MANHATTAN presents From Pop to Punk, paintings from the ’60s and ’70s by renowned painter PETER SAUL.

Peter Saul’s politically charged, and often politically incorrect, paintings are rooted in a system of removal from the artist’s beliefs, void of morals and ambivalent in their politics. Peter Saul sources imagery from popular culture and current and historical events for his cartoonish and surreal depictions. The resulting paintings of the grotesque are more akin to social commentary than clear political statements.

Born in San Francisco in 1934, Peter Saul settled in Paris in the late ’50s after completing his studies at California School of Fine Arts and Washington University, St. Louis. Peter Saul is often associated with the Chicago Imagists, a group of artists typically defined by their Post-War tradition of fantasy-based art-making rooted in surrealism, pop culture, and the grotesque, as well as the Funk Artists of the San Francisco Bay Area. Like the Imagists and Funk Artists, Peter Saul chose to work outside of the confines of the New York art scene, instead embracing humor in a time of stark seriousness.

Predating Pop Art, Peter Saul’s Sex Boat, 1961, is expressionist and loosely rendered, depicting banal everyday objects as a direct response to the existentialist beliefs of Abstract Expressionism. Peter Saul’s paintings from the late ’60s and early ’70s, on the other hand, are more vibrantly colored, technically refined and illustrative. An exhibition highlight, Crucifixion of Angela Davis, 1973, depicts Davis as a green, contorted, monstrous figure strung about a wooden cross, stabbed with knives that read “JEEZ US,” “JEEZ IS,” and “JEE SIS”. A prominent counterculture leader of the ’60s associated with both human rights and violent activism, Davis remains a controversial political figure. These are the images that Peter Saul is drawn to – “pictures with problems.”

Peter Saul has exhibited his work internationally and throughout the United States. Peter Saul’s work appears in numerous museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Peter Saul lives and works in New York.

VENUS OVER MANHATTAN
980 Madison Avenue, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10075
venusovermanhattan.com

Sony TIPA Awards 2015 : 3 récompenses

Sony remporte trois récompenses aux TIPA Awards 2015

La prestigieuse Technical Image Press Association salue à nouveau l'innovation de Sony en matière d'imagerie numérique.

Meilleur appareil photo/camera professionnel : a7S

Sony récolte les fruits de sa stratégie consistant à utiliser des photosites plus grands sur un capteur CMOS Exmor plein format (12,2 mégapixels). Cette technologie se révèle en effet payante puisqu’elle offre une plage dynamique très large (15,3 EV), d'excellentes performances en basse lumière (autofocus rapide et intelligent jusqu'à -4EV et faible bruit) et une sensibilité extrêmement étendue (plage ISO de 50 à 409600). La « lecture directe des photosites » utilise toute la largeur du capteur sans élimination de ligne (line skipping) ni regroupement des pixels (binning), ce qui signifie que les données vidéo HD et 4K sont traitées au niveau de chaque pixel du capteur. L'appareil permet d'enregistrer des vidéos Full HD non compressées en 4:2:2 et QFHD 4K non compressées en 4:2:2 sur 8 bits, mais pour ce dernier format sur un enregistreur 4K externe via HDMI. À l'instar des caméras vidéo professionnelles Sony, il est également doté du SLog2 gamma qui permet de configurer un profil d'image en réglant le gamma, le noir, le niveau et la couleur et de le sauvegarder pour faciliter la mise en place de tournages multi caméra.

Meilleur appareil photo hybride entrée de gamme : a5100

Surnommé le CSC « super compact », l'α5100 de Sony fait environ la moitié de la taille d'un reflex numérique classique. L'appareil embarque néanmoins un capteur CMOS APS-C de 24 mégapixels avec la même structure de micro-lentilles sans espace que l'α7R, autre fleuron de la marque. Il affiche une mise au point AF éclair de 0,07 seconde et jusqu'à 6 images par seconde en mode rafale avec un suivi d’une grande précision grâce aux 179 points à détection de phase du système d’autofocus. Les options vidéo ne manquent pas : Full HD en 60p, 60i ou 24p pour un rendu cinématographique, XAVC S 50 Mb/s paramétrable depuis l’appareil, AVCHD qualité Blu-Ray et codec MP4 ; tous ces formats sont disponibles via la connexion HDMI. L'appareil dispose également d'une plage de sensibilité ISO impressionnante (de 100 à 25600). En termes d'objectifs, il est compatible avec les modèles Sony à monture E et avec ceux de type A à l'aide d'une bague d'adaptation optionnelle.

Meilleur appareil d'imagerie mobile : ILCE-QX1

Si les photographes adeptes du Smartphone ne voient que peu d’intérêt à transporter un appareil photo supplémentaire pour leurs clichés, leurs exigences atteignent des sommets en termes de qualité d'image et d'options de prises de vue. Dans cette optique, le Sony QX1 offre les fonctionnalités d'un véritable appareil photo hybride dans une solution compacte « sans boîtier ». En effet, l'unité peut se fixer sur un Smartphone à l'aide d'un simple adaptateur ou encore, être utilisée indépendamment, le Smartphone se transformant alors en viseur via une connexion NFC/WiFi. Le QX1 est doté d'un grand capteur APS-C de 20,1 mégapixels, d'un flash intégré et d'une baïonnette pour pouvoir y monter n'importe quel objectif à monture E. Les objectifs tiers sont aussi compatibles à condition d'utiliser la bague d'adaptation correspondante. Chaque photo peut également être sauvegardée sur l'appareil comme sur la mémoire du téléphone. Les performances du QX1 en basse lumière sont clairement supérieures à celles des Smartphones, tout comme les vidéos HD en 30p.

Michael Snow @ La Virreina Image Centre, Barcelona

Michael Snow: Sequences
La Virreina Image Centre, Barcelona
9 July - 1 November 2015

La Virreina Image Centre devotes a major retrospective to the Canadian artist Michael Snow.

Michael Snow: Sequences exhibits work from throughout his career, including many pieces never seen before in Europe, and reflects the wide range of media he has worked with: music, film, video, painting, sculpture, books and installations.

In all these media he explores the expressive possibilities of sound and image and challenges the vision/representation duality. His creative approach requires the active participation of the spectator, who is invited to see the object, perceive it, become involved with it. His compositions aim to direct attention in different ways and involve the viewer in the creative process. He breaks down boundaries not only by creating crossover pieces—both objects and images—but also by appreciating the space as a visual, plastic and sound element rather than a neutral container for creations.

The exhibition includes a programme of screenings, under the title Michael Snow, Sequences. A retrospective, that features a selection of the artist’s films. His film Wavelength, a landmark of avant-garde filmmaking eager to reflect on its own language, will be shown in the exhibition rooms of La Virreina Image Centre (screenings: 12.30 pm and 6 pm). In keeping with the artist's criteria, the rest of the programme will be screened at the Filmoteca de Catalunya.

Curator: Gloria Moure

MICHAEL SNOW: BIOGRAPHY

Michael Snow was born in 1928 in Toronto, where he currently lives. As a musician, he has played the piano and other instruments both solo and with several ensembles (most frequently with the CCMC of Toronto) in Canada, the United States, Europe and Japan. He has also released a number of recordings. His work as a filmmaker has been screened at festivals worldwide and can be found in several film archives, including the Anthology Film Archives (New York), the Royal Belgian Film Archives (Brussels) and the Austrian Film Museum (Vienna), among others. In 1967 his film Wavelength won the Grand Prize at Exprmntl Experimental Film Festival in Knokke (Belgium), and in 1982 So Is This won a Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award.

He is also a painter and sculptor, although since 1962 much of his work has been photography based or holographic. His work in all these media is represented in private and public collections worldwide, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), MoMA (New York), Museum Ludwig (Cologne and Vienna), the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), and the Musée des Beaux-Arts and Musée d’art contemporain (Montreal).

He has created video, film and sound installations, designed books such as Michael Snow / A Survey (1970) and Cover to Cover (1975) and carried out several public sculpture commissions, including Flight Stop at the Eaton Centre and The Audience at Skydome, both in Toronto.

He has had retrospective shows at the Hara Museum of Tokyo (1988), the Cinémathèque Française of Paris (1999), the Anthology Film Archives (New York) and the Institut Lumière (Lyon). In 1994 The Power Plant and the Art Gallery of Ontario, both in Toronto, put on simultaneous shows of his work in all media. Additional retrospective exhibitions have been mounted at the Vancouver Art Gallery (1967 and 1979) and the Musée d’art contemporain (Montreal, 1995), as well as at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Objects of Vision, Toronto, 2012) and at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Michael Snow: Photo-Centric, 2014).

He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1982 and a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres in 1995 (France). In 2004 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Paris.

La Virreina Centre de la Imatge
Palau de la Virreina
La Rambla, 99. 08002 Barcelona
http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat