plural blog

700 Million Miles an Hour
an Evening with Rebecca Cummins

Backspace is proud to present:

Creative Will
Curated by Jabari Jordan-Walker (Vancouver, BC)
May 27 – June 17 / 2011
Opening Reception / Friday / May 27 / 6–9 pm

Featuring:  Derek Chan (Chicago, IL), Rusty Shackleford (Chicago, IL), Angela Teng (Vancouver, BC) + Ben Raymer (Vancouver, BC)

As an exhibition, Creative Will explores the self-examination and motivations that surface as a result of the ongoing investigations and activity of producing artwork. Making no demand for definitive answers, this exhibition asks simply for the viewer to consider the reasons in which artworks are both produced and pondered upon. By celebrating the humbling search for self-expression and even “failure” within material experimentation and intuitive processes, each artist has developed work that is indebted to interpretations on the everyday realities they experience. In being an exhibition that doesn’t dedicate itself to one definitive answer, its context is rooted within the discourse of contemporary art making and the efforts to curate it. The work-on-paper, printed media, and paintings presented manifest themselves through the language of abstraction (Raymer, Teng), appropriation of cultural imagery (Shackleford) and meditations on the spiritual challenges faced from within esoteric realties (Chan).

Amazing.

Plural will have a brand new animated gif in Tween tomorrow night.

TWEEN @TheOCTAGON
ONE NIGHT ONLY
Saturday / May 7 / 2011
7:00 – 10:00 pm

TWEEN is a survey of responses to the animated GIF via animated GIF-the bastard child of early motion picture technology and most pesky annoyance generator capable of rendering the most sober of images into perpetual ridicule. Local, national, and international cultural workers were asked to either create or curate an animated GIF. The show is divided in two parts.

1.THE RACE
Emphasizing the personal computer as the frame for production and consumption, 30 animated GIFS will play simultaneously by a diverse yet local slew of artists, designers, curators, writers, art historians, and cat fanciers, as they all race their animated GIF to personal computer battery death via an ad hoc computer lab.

2.TWEEN SCREEN
Projecting the animated GIF to a monumental scale via the 15’ TWEEN SCREEN;  the wee GIF file will reach new lofty proportions that are incapable of experiencing at home in your mom’s basement.

TWEEN is a one night event and all GIFS and documentation, as well as a text by Steven Pate, will have an eternal afterlife where you can revel in its planned obsolescence at tweenchicago.tumblr.com. TWEEN is a project in collaboration between artist Christopher Smith and Octagon Gallery.

Participants include:

Aaron Orsini,   Adam Farcus, Adam Grossi, Alberto Aguilar, Alicja Zelazko, Angeline Evans, Arielle Bielak, Adam Trowbridge, Ben Russell, Big Bad Ron, Brandon Alvendia, Brian Wadford, Burak Birinci, Chris Hammes, E. Aaron Ross, Eric Fleischauer, Emily Keuhn, Hooliganship, Isak Berbic,  Jake Myers, Jerimiah Chiu, Jesse Avina, Jon Satrom, Kevin Jennings, Kevin Robinson, Kirsten Leenaars, Kyle Fletcher, Laura Boban, Lara Stall, Mark Sansone, Michelle Harris, Michael Radziewicz, Miguel Cortez, PaperRad, Philip Parcellano, Philip von Zweck,  Rob Ray, Silas Reeves, Steven Pate, Tim Pigot, Tom Burtonwood, Theo Darst, and many more!

The Chicagoist interviewed us after seeing the inclusion of the Relax Attack Jazz Poster in the Creative Review 2011 Annual. Read all about it!

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ABOUT THE SHOW:
XQQQQME Dear Friend, but your FAMILYYYYYY at BEN RUSSELL sure is feeling a bit FAREDCE!  We usually have TIMING TI MING in bringing you, TIME TIME, the finest of the fine arts, but for some reason we got LAL in putting together this month’s 5-person exhibition - BEN RUSSELL : REBUS!  While putting this show together hasn’t been a P WALK ARK, but believe us when we say that the line-up is M1LLION - an SYMPHON that has finally been completed, that LOV that you dream of at night.  We’re  getting ahead of ourselves, though - we should really TAKE PETS and remind you, Dear Friend, what it is we’re getting on about.

BEN RUSSELL : REBUS is art-word and art-puzzle made manifest!  From Lewis Carroll to Egyptian hieroglyphs to the British game of Concentration to your older brother’s collection of Lone Star Beer bottle caps, BEN RUSSELL : REBUS is yet another move forward in wo/man’s eternal quest to arrive at symbolic meaning through pictogrammatic signification!  With the ever-clarifying but perpetually complicating metaphoric powers of art at our ready, we call upon you to venture in/out of that great unknown we call Meaning with naught but a Wi-Fi trail marker as guidepost for your deeply personal inner quest (ARCTANDER).  Your path, as it were, will be bound by strange lines and drops of blood (TRAINOR), it will lead you to a painted cave wall of glyphs and symbols (PRICE) and an outcropping of transformative image-combinations (MOSK), at which point your world will rotate entirely.  That thrum of voice and hum of light will settle upon your head, echoing out from smaller-cave to skull and back, an HD image-sound cipher (KNEZEVIC) cracked by your own delicate puzzle of eyes and ears.

So good it must be SICKBIRD, so affecting it’s like a punch IRIGHTI, this is proof positive that art and BEN RUSSELL : REBUS are PPOD - come on down and see for yourself!

Interview with Michael Cina via Ghostly

(link via TheNewGraphic)

Interview with Kenneth “UbuWeb” Goldsmith via Freize.