Art New England journal

The current issue of Art New England journal [Mar/Apr2019, Vol. 40 Issue 2, p65-65, 1/2p]  has an article about one of our artist collaborators and friends, Linda Behar. Last summer our female staff members participated in her community coloring project, Chromatic, discussed in this article. Ms. Behar sent us prints and we colored them in. To see them all displayed together is very moving.

Here is a snapshot of the article [click to enlarge]

You can interlilbrary loan articles from this journal thorough our ILLIAD service.

To learn moare about this artist please go to her website here LINDA BEHAR

Performance and Installation at The Box Gallery

BLACK POINT Performance and Installation MUU BLANCO The Box Gallery 811 Belvedere Road, West Palm Beach, Florida 33405 Friday, April 5, 2019 | 7 PM

FREE VIP TICKETS

Special “Collective Action” 2019 “Black Point” by Muu Blanco MUU explains it: “a black circle surrounded by white materializes the image of a bullet piercing through the human body. It is also the vanishing point for blood and bodily fluids. Blackpoint recreates the focal spot that symoolizes the beginning and the end of an object’s track that breaks unexpectedly and violently in a body. Entrance and exit, greeting and farewell, and evident and indelible seal”. Blackpoint is, precisely, that “black hole” that is able to absorb and dissolve –in an unpredictable instant- the stillness of our everyday and its certainties, its rituals and possibilities. Venezuela is heterogeneous, not because of its cultural or racial mixture, but because it is made of shreds, of disperse and diverse narratives that overlap, oppose and even obliterate each other, that deny and afflict violence upon themselves. In these last years that fragmentary condition has been increased, dividing the social body in fractions that disavow one another, so the nation –that text built by and for everyone, from agreements and symbolic practices became unreachable, splitting and plunging itself between an ungraspable, nostalgic identity and an insufficient, fissured, impossible everyday. Blackpoint, the performance in two movements by MUU Blanco, wanders trough the cracks and wounds of that unreachable nation that is Venezuela nowadays, amongst-us and for everyone, and does it by installing himself precisely in the arduous site of its tensions, disconnections and controversies and reflecting on two antagonistic narratives: on the one hand, the heroic which deals with identity and patriotic values (allegorized by the beauty of its landscapes and is territory) and, on the other, the raw sonic and visual attestation of the violence -and repression- that abducts and taints its own social body (documented in the events that occurred in Caracas, from February and March 2014). Amongst these two narrations, one of them symbolic and aesthetic (the landscapes) and the other being broken and elusive (the facts), MUU’s work installs itself as a calling, almost an outcry, to starkly acknowledge the place where one lives and the place each one of us occupies in it, to reflect on the both personal and collective task of fighting against the diffuse ways in which evil is present, beyond our own wishes and personal opinions. In this calling, this outcry, MUU is accompanied by Rüdiger Safranski who, in his book Evil or the drama of freedom, undertakes a dense historical reflection on the ways in which evil occurs in the world and how man, in the search of its own possibilities of becoming human tries to counteract it. In this historical task of facing evil Rüdiger Safranski grants art a meaningful role, not because of its capacity to produce beauty (and with it, good, as Plato would say) but, on the contrary, because art is able to gather –or funnel- in present life –and in presence itself- the intensities, potentialities and risks that are necessary to bring into play –that is, make way tofreedom, that difficult and fragile faculty that allows us to act being what we are. As a discourse, Blackpoint thematizes freedom, its weaknesses, choices and liabilities, and does so by facing that unavoidable –and also irrepressible- reality that situates us as part of a sociopolitical weave that surpasses us but in which we are not only participants but responsible. That is why Blackpoint is not exactly a performance but a sort of “collective action” in which all spectator will be unavoidably an active participant who will have to deal with the contradictions displayed, that will forcefully answer to sounds as is absorbed by images, its sequences, overlaps and inconsistencies. In this sense, Blackpoint proposes itself as an event –as a happening- in the most literal sense of the word: it is a collective –public and political- space in which something common is imposed and agitated; something n common builds stories, encounters, citations, clashes and meetings. As we said, Blackpoint two different narratives polemicize: at first, beautiful sequences of paintings –landscapes- recover the “heroic deed” of giving birth to a nation on an Eden-like land, a land filled with riches and beauties, a land so generous that has been able to obliterate any other form of civic constitution. The landscape, so, represents in Venezuela not only a pictorial genre, but a symbolic formula from which the nation becomes potentiality, heritage and welfare: the landscape is at the same time an identity statement and a model for existence. This heroic sequence is accompanied by a musical fusion in which heterogeneity affirms its own strength, and where the Latin substrate is at the time founding and fundamental. An introduction of joy and recognition, of appearance and festiveness: a commemorative start in which MUU attends his possessions, his assets –as a person and as a member of a social body- with the lucid irony of the one who knows that there, in the activity of becoming a territory, danger and impotence are also housed. This first narrative is broken, in a demand for assistance –in an emergency- by that in crescendo testimony, by real screams and shots there heard, by a swarm of images captured on the streets, in which the insurmountable fractures and wounds of a rickety and decomposed social body are shown. This testimony, far from being structured as a “narrative” inscribes itself precisely as the place in where there is no longer possible to narrate, where stories are dismantled and dissolved, where the amongst-all shows itself as impossible and freedom, in any of its possible assumptions, is fractured. Superimposed on the heroic narrative of landscapes, the images and sounds of protests come to show how what has been outraged and violated is life itself: the life of this social body that we are, more and more, ceasing to be; a social body that faces and cripples itself. In the end, as MUU announces, what remains is the Blackpoint, that bottomless absence, that void, that calls on each one for an answer to rebuild the limits of what is doable in order to assume strangeness before ourselves and the others. by Sandra Pinardi, Caracas,

Visit thier website

The Box Gallery 811 Belvedere Road West Palm Beach, Florida 33405 PalmBeachFineArtGallery@gmail.com www.TheBoxGallery.Info

Video Lounge featuring Allison Kotzig

The Jupiter Library is launching a new art program that has an interactive lounge that features film and video projects produced by international artists. Staff at the Jupiter library transformed a small corner on the first floor into a comfortable seating area, where patrons can relax as they watch the featured videos.

Our  goal is to expose students to a new art medium, spark conversation and inspire possible projects for students. We have curated a series of videos from conceptual artists and filmmakers that will stream in the video lounge Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.  Each film will be exhibited for a one month period.

Our first feature artist is Allison Kotzig. Her film short called Ghost Orchid is being streamed now through March 29th.  The artist website is https://www.facebook.com/AllisonKotzig

"My video work explores dream and trance states brought about by light reflection and movement as they relate to identity, transformation, mystery and transcendental experience," said Kotzig. 

Ghost Orchid  

2018

A Mambo interrupts time. In the interstices of the seconds, the spirits of the Ghost Orchids change form to dance and play in the Florida Everglades.

Video: 

Concept, direction, editing: Allison Kotzig

Cinematography: Melissa McCabe

Mambo: Manbo Vivi

Ghost Orchids/Dancer: Glavidia Alexis

Ghost Orchids/Dancer: Tamara Augustin

Special thanks to Prem Subrahmanyam for his footage of actual Ghost Orchids in bloom.

Music: Manbo Vivi “Nan Gran Chemen” re-mixed by Allison Kotzig with everglades sounds

Here are a few video stills from the Ghost Orchid.

We are excited about this project because it will give the students and community the chance to learn more about video art as an art medium in a welcoming setting.


For updates about the art lounge, be sure to follow the Our Instagram

Professor Feature: Carol Prusa

Sometimes I think the talents of some professors are taken for granted. We often feature visual artists we like, but feel we have to stop and mention one of our own superstars, Carol Prusa. She teaches Painting and Drawing on the Boca Raton campus. Here is her campus contact information.

Carol Prusa Professor, Painting/Drawing  MFA, Drake University curriculum vitae  Boca Raton Campus, VA 106A  561.267.3756  cprusa@fau.edu

Her bio [excerpted from her artist website]: Carol Prusa is a mid-career contemporary artist known for her meticulous silverpoint technique and use of unexpected materials from sculpted resin and fiberglass to metal leaf and LED lights. In the 2015 catalogue essay for the exhibition Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns, Bruce Weber called Carol Prusa “one of the most innovative artists working in metalpoint today.” Born in Chicago, Prusa lives and works in South Florida and exhibits internationally, including at Brintz Gallery (Palm Beach) and Jenkins Johnson Gallery (NYC and San Francisco). Her work is included in excellent public and private collections, including the Perez Art Museum (Miami), The Museum of Arts and Design (NYC), Telfair Art Museum (Savannah), and the Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz Collection.

Voyage Magazine-Miami Just did a feature on Carol. You can see the entire article by going to this link.

You can learn more about the Visual Arts and Art History Department Here. The library has a large selection of contemporary art books. Come by and check them out.

Here are a few more images of Carol's work. Copyright Carol Prusa.