Visiting artist, Carnegie Mellon School of Art

For the Fall 08 semester I’m a Krauss Visiting Professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art in Pittsburgh, PA. I’m teaching an undergraduate studio sculpture class dealing with material culture as well as preparing work for my upcoming solo exhibition in Houston (opens Dec 11). It’s been wonderful getting to know the local scene and I’m hoping to add updates about the things that I do and see while here! My term is from August to December 2008, which is almost four months, so there’ll be plenty going on…

Doherty Hall, across from the Fine Arts Building, where my studio/office is located.

I’ll be giving a public lecture at Carnegie Mellon on Wednesday, September 24 in the Kresge Theater. Will post specific time in the future!

At the Mattress Factory with Yayoi Kusama installation.

Go Tartans!

“FuturaManila” at Osage Gallery, Hong Kong

Anyone in the Hong Kong area? If you are, please check out a show I’m in that opens in a few weeks and let me know how it looks . I can’t make it out there due to budget constraints but it would have been awesome of course! I’m in good company: lots of colleagues and artist friends that I met last summer while in Manila for the Galleon Trade show, as well as several Fil-Am artists I’m super close to here in SF: Mike Arcega, Jenifer Wofford, and Gina Osterloh. Rockin’ it Filipino style!

Here’s the deets:

———————
FUTURAMANILA

“— Broken bones of concrete & metal, wreckage of wires & lives,
heretic radio frequency, astral chants, distress signals, graveyards
of decrepit Taiwanese buses, interminable lines for non-potable water
& mysterious canned meat. This moment is saturated in strange music,
like the sound of falling satellites. A vague notion of the sea & its
varying permutations of violence. “

-Lourd De Veyra, “The Pancreas Is Deceitful Above All
Things (20 Fragments for The Apocalypse)”

FUTURAMANILA is a group exhibition comprised of 23
contemporary Filipino artists brought together by an association
created through artist-run spaces and exchange residency programs and
who practice both in the Philippines and abroad. These artists who
exhibit their works locally and internationally all possess a mutual
connection with the collective Filipino identity. Along with this,
their cross-cultural relations reinforce the core of the exhibit,
providing a discussion drawn from various creative viewpoints.

Offering a comprehensive spectrum of ideas, the exhibit
allows the envisioning of the Philippines’ past, present and imminent
future. Since the colonial eras up to the 21st century, the country
has harbored the intricacies of a people and time, grounded on a
foundation of survival, adaptability and ironic preservation.

Taking inspiration from the capital of the Philippines,
FUTURAMANILA paints a picture of the developing Third World urban
society, a manifestation of the double-edged sword of globalization
and the changes the country goes through to accommodate these effects
vis-à-vis society and the media, as well as a simple contextualization
through everyday human interaction. With the many aspects that affect
the Filipino people who reside both locally and abroad, there is a
shared yearning to discern and shed light on the struggles in which
the country, as a whole and as individuals, is immersed in.

The exhibit gathers a myriad of perspectives that have
absorbed facets of their corresponding surroundings. Indirectly
exploited through artistic ventures, they involve themselves with
distinct and sundry issues, whether drawing from a social or personal
situation. They tackle reconnections, displacement, retrospection of
cultural origins, as well as the contemplation on the need to step
away and break free of the tangled trappings of the country, its
traditions, societal pressures and norms. It is an ironic culmination
that ultimately leads to the speculation of how the future may unfold,
but more significantly, also reveals the stark reality of the
country’s cryptic and sinuous present.

Opening on the 5th of September at the Osage Gallery in
Kwun Tong, FUTURAMANILA also brings forth the contemporary Filipino
music scene, the popular and innovative spoken-word, 8-man jazz band,
Radioactive Sago Project. On this night, music and art will echo each
other, displaying how Filipino creativity is spun and manifested in
different artistic ways. Radioactive Sago Project is slated to do an
additional performance in Osage Soho the following night, on 6th of
September at 8 pm. A roundtable discussion, Proposing Zero Hour,
moderated by Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez, will also be held on the 5th of
September with speakers Yason Banal, Gary-Ross Pastrana, Alvin Zafra,
Bea Camacho, Gina Osterloh (via webcam from the United States), Ronald
Achacoso, and John Batten.

Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez is a respected writer and curator and is
presently a curatorial consultant at the Lopez Memorial Museum in the
Philippines. Focusing on how intra- and cross-cultural exchange plays
integral roles in the spheres of art scholarship and curatorial
practice, she frequently publishes essays and articles on Philippine
and Asian contemporary art in various magazines and publications.

John Batten comments, broadcasts and writes on art, culture, heritage
and policy issues for Hong Kong newspapers and overseas magazines and
regularly writes art reviews for the South China Morning Post. He has
run his own gallery since 1997 and has been a regular visitor to the
Philippines and its art scene since the early 1990s.

About Osage Gallery
Osage is an international gallery group with exhibition spaces in Hong
Kong, Beijing, Singapore and Shanghai. Osage represents some of the
most outstanding artists in Asia and works closely with a variety of
internationally respected curators, critics and art historians to
present and promote exhibitions that address fundamental global
issues.

For more details, please visit www.osagegallery.com。

Exhibiting Artists:
Mike Arcega, Felix Bacolor, Victor Balanon, Yason Banal, Bea Camacho,
Mariano Ching, Louie Cordero, Jed Escueta, Nona Garcia, Robert Gutierrez,
Jordin Isip, Romeo Lee, Cocoy Lumbao, Kaloy Olavides, Gina Osterloh,
Gary-Ross Pastrana, Stanley Ruiz, Kreskin Sugay, Stephanie Syjuco,
Maria Taniguchi, Mac Valdezco, Jenifer K. Wofford, and Alvin Zafra

Venue: Osage Kwun Tong
Address: 5/F, Kian Dai Industrial Building, 73-75 Hung To Road, Kwun Tong, Kowloon

Exhibition Opens: 5 September 2008 till 6 October 2008
Roundtable discussion: 5 September 2008 (Friday) 4 pm – 6 pm
Opening Reception: 5 September 2008 (Friday) 6 pm – 8 pm

Band performance by Radioactive Sago Project:
5 September 2008 (Friday) at 8 pm
6 September 2008 (Saturday) at 8 pm at Osage Soho

(Osage Soho: 45 Caine Road, L/G Shop 1, Corner Old Bailey Street,
Soho, Central, Hong Kong)
Tel:2793 4817

Allison Smith: Crockery

“Jugs, Pitchers, Bottles, and Crocks, Household Linens and Yardage in Stock” is a sculptural installation I produced for The Mattress Factory exhibition “Inner and Outer Space.” For this project, I worked with local Pittsburgh potter Bernard Jakub to make a series of over one hundred stoneware objects decorated with cobalt blue slip imagery. In the spirit of early American ceramics that commemorate important dates, battles, political figures, or popular slogans, I thought of these objects as containers of anxiety, adorning them with contemporary equivalents such as “homeland security,” “chemical warfare,” “when you see something say something,” and many more. These are housed along with printed linens in a large cabinet that recalls a portable dollhouse interior that opens outward, offering up its contents.” more

“Blanket Offer” by Travis Meinolf

“I have been weaving and giving away wool blankets since early 2007 (32 blankets). It started as an attempt to create an example of a kind of “pure, free” commodity, which is still a part of my artistic goal. This type of object would be created through a production process pleasurable to the laborer, and it would be distributed according to self-assessed need…” more

3-D modeling mania: towards a better form of spatial planning!

Can I say enough how Google’s free 3-D modeling program Sketchup has totally revolutionized my planning process for installation spaces? I used it extensively for planning my last show at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and now I get to utilize it on my future show. Which is super helpful since I don’t think I’ll be able to make an actual site visit before the install process of all the componenets. So between now and then I’ll be shuttling images back and forth like these to curator for discussion and tweaking…

These images will make absolutely no sense to those who don’t know what it’s supposed to represent, but it’s a preliminary 3-D mockup of my solo show at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, opening in December. I’ll leave the specific components a secret for now!

Reprezentin’ in the homeland

click on the image above to view the article!

The writer of this lovely article, Lian Ladia, just emailed me a layout of the recent issue of Marie Claire Philippines (yes, there IS a Filipino version of this mag!) which features an interview spread of me talking about The Counterfeit Crochet Project and my art practice in general. It’s always great to be able to present this work in the context of the “motherland” no matter how far away it may seem both physically and psychologically. The ongoing feature “Pinay & Proud” roughly translates to “Filipina & Proud” and they continually spotlight women in the arts. Thanks, Lian!

Gender Trouble in Big China: whither the women artists?

Hello, ladiez! Mugging with curator Pauline Yao in Beijing, April 2007.

Last year I had the opportunity to work on an exhibition in Beijing that curator Pauline Yao (based in San Francisco and Beijing) put together called “Forged Realities.” Held at UniversalStudios Gallery, it was a great experience and I had the chance to mingle and meet with a few stars of the local Beijing scene. Folks who were jetsetting across the globe to this biennial and that triennial and living like virtual rockstars. The art market in China has inflated itself with a vengeance, and everyone is whisperingly wondering when the bubble will pop.

Amidst all the pomp and grandeur of the Chinese artworld, it became super apparent to me how few women artists I was meeting. Not to mention that the male artists, while always friendly and warm, thought me something of a curiosity. Young and female were not necessarily too common qualities in the artists they were meeting. Add to that my Asian heritage, and I wasn’t representing their idea of a what a Western artist was like. While I never had a straightforward conversation about this topic with any artist I met while there, I could sense that it was essentially… still a man’s artworld.

So it was nice to read this article, which in some way, starts to highlight those who have been steadily and actively working in the background. But hopefully not for long.