ARTFORUM Reviews PREDRIVE

Antoine Catala, Pumpkins (2008), DVD, 7 minutes, looped

PREDRIVE: After Technology
November 14, 2008 - April 5, 2009
Review by Alexander Keefe

This group exhibition of new-media art covers a wide terrain, ranging from rec-room psychedelia to neo-Op-art electronics. The eye-popping vitality of the former is evident in Jacob and Jessica Ciocci’s mixed-media installation The Dark Side of Light, 2008. Core members of Paper Rad, their approach is visually intense and eclectic, using rough juxtapositions of high and low technology in flashing tie-dye colors, furry stuffed animals, VHS-era video hacks, stoner jokes, and crudely pixelated pattern making.

Compared with this dizzying heterogeneity, Gretchen Skogerson’s Switch, 2008, works with a far simpler set of tools: A gently curved wall is hung with vertical threads and serves as a screen for a shifting set of powerfully physical fluorescent light fields, some of them magma hot, some icy cool.

Antoine Catala’s single-channel video Pumpkins, 2008, takes heavily processed footage of children playing Twenty Questions and echoes the game’s riddling ambiguity with digital visual distortion, their faces breaking and smearing into playfully grotesque abstraction. | CONTINUE READING |

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Tyler Green's Top-Ten of 2008

THIS JUST IN: Sarah Oppenheimer's 610-3356 makes Tyler Green's top-ten list for 2008.

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IAOS Review: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Mattress Factory exhibition spreads art through Inner and Outer Space
Thursday, December 18, 2008
By Mary Thomas, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


David Ellis, shown creating the imagery for one of his trademark "animated motion paintings," is exhibiting in the Mattress Factory's "Inner and Outer Space" and will speak at 7 tonight at the North Side museum.


Individual installations by nine international artists who probe "Inner and Outer Space" add up to one of the Mattress Factory's best exhibitions to date. The North Side venue is no stranger to artists who transgress routine expectations, aesthetic and metaphysical, to create encompassing experiences that position visitors to imagine the world anew.

For this show, says guest curator Dara Meyers-Kingsley, "the 'inner and outer space theme' -- the conceptual underpinning for the exhibition -- not only relates to the form and content of the work but also an approach to artistic practice." The works spill through floors, out windows, into the parking area, onto a Jumbotron and arrive via e-mail. One was completed with the help of local artisans.

Case in point is exhibiting artist David Ellis, who will give an Artist Talk at 7 tonight at the museum ($5, members free). His trademark "animated motion paintings" are captivating, both for their vibrant graphic imagery and their intriguing process.

To create "OKAY," included in the exhibition, he set up a Quonset-hut-like structure in the museum lobby within which he painted from morning until night during his 15-day residency. Ellis paints over previous works, layering imagery that is recorded every few seconds by a camera suspended overhead. He edits these digital images into mesmerizing projected works that change with flipbook speed.

His "FLY" is playing through month's end on the Jumbotron at CAPA, where the New York artist has been conducting workshops this week. In it he does a full-body glide across a floor, wet and illuminated with paint, looking somewhat like he's engulfed in flame. | CONTINUE READING |

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Pittsburgh City Paper Reviews IAOS

A MATTRESS FACTORY EXHIBIT CHALLENGES THE WALLS OF ITS OWN GALLERIES
by Melissa Kuntz

Both literally and metaphorically, the theme of Inner and Outer Space is evoked in the work of nine artists currently showing at the Mattress Factory. Organized by independent New York-based curator Dara Meyers-Kinsley [sic], the exhibition presents "inner and outer space" as both the form and content of the works. The title nods to the show's approach to artistic practices, as well as to such relationships as private/public, interior/exterior or earthly/cosmic. (CONTINUE READING)

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ArtKrush reviews INNER AND OUTER SPACE

INNER AND OUTER SPACE
at the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh)
Now through January 11, 2009
[ LINK TO STORY ]

Across town from the galactic-themed Carnegie International exhibit Life on Mars, the Mattress Factory brings together nine artists who explore art and space in Inner and Outer Space. Modern art's spatial investigations are reprised in Luca Buvoli's sculptural Instant Before Incident (Marinetti's Drive 1908), representing futurist pioneer F.T. Marinetti's fateful car crash; recalling a three-dimensional futurist painting, the piece literally leaps out of the gallery through a window. Bahamas-born Tavares Strachan collaborated with scientists from Carnegie Mellon to develop a robotic rover that explores a fictional stellar landscape in Where Do We Go from Here and reports back to a command center in the museum parking lot. The museum space is further transformed by Mary Temple's pair of trompe l'oeil installation paintings of shadows, while Sarah Oppenheimer provides an unusual vantage point with her hole in the floor.

(reviewed by Brian Skar for ArtKrush)

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ArtForum reviews INNER AND OUTER SPACE

INNER AND OUTER SPACE
at the Mattress Factory
April 25, 2008 – January 11, 2009
[ LINK TO STORY ]

Desire for a dialogue with the history of Pittsburgh, the architecture of the Mattress Factory’s main building, and the James Turrell and Yayoi Kusama installations on permanent view prompted New York–based curator Dara Meyers-Kingsley to bring together nine artists under the titular theme. Spatial and psychological issues mark much of today’s art, yet this show constitutes a fresh approach to the subject, as the selected works address their environment in an intellectually and sensorially challenging manner.

   

Sarah Oppenheimer’s 610-3356 (all works 2008) consists of an aperture that intersects both the floor and the window of two small rooms on different stories of the edifice, allowing new views into the street. The work’s title references a system the artist devised to classify the materials used in her works. Optical questions also define Mary Temple’s Transparent Brick Wall for Kusama: a wall painting, done in the artist’s signature style, that features a subtle silhouette of a tree, as if its shadow were cast through a nearby window. Daniel Canogar’s Midnight Plumber I and Midnight Plumber II add bodily forms to the trompe l’oeil effect: In two adjacent, darkened rooms, Canogar presents a complex net of fiber-optic cables and projected slides of different humanlike figures in a state of suspended animation.



In Instant Before Incident (Marinetti’s Drive 1908), Luca Buvoli references the famous car crash caused by Futurism founder Filippo Marinetti by stringing, from floor to ceiling and through a window, a long chain of replicas of the early-twentieth-century Fiat driven by the Italian poet. By intertwining traditions of culture and economy in Italy and the US, Buvoli explores the heroic mythologies of national identity. Sensitively mixing physical and mental interpretations of the exhibition’s organizing principle, the nine artists push the boundaries of established notions such as space and perception, breaking ground for new trends in the relationship between art and the built world.

(reviewed by Miguel Amado for ArtForum)

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Meet the Made Reviewed in the Tribune-Review

This morning's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review includes a review of Meet the Made, the eleventh installment of the Gestures Exhibition Series sponsored by Robot 250.

REVIEW: Mattress Factory's 'Gestures' exhibit lets visitors meet the robots
by Kurt Shaw (08.07.2008)



"Meet the Made," the 11th installment of the Mattress Factory's "Gestures" series, is unique among its predecessors because its focus is on robotic art.

Organized by Carl DiSalvo and Ian Ingram, the exhibit, on display in the museum's annex building along Monterey Street in the North Side, was conceived as part of a citywide community art and technology program known as Robot 250, which was designed in conjunction with Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary. | MORE |

  

Meet the Made runs through August 31, 2008.

Two Reviews of Note.

Elaine King wrote a very nice review of INDIA: NEW INSTALLATIONS (Part I & Part II) in the June issue of Sculpture Magazine. They don't publish the magazine's full content online, but find out how to get it HERE.

Blogger Michael Fulk reviews INNER AND OUTER SPACE.

About mid-April someone from the Mattress Factory invited Pittsburgh bloggers to have media access to the April 25 opening of the new exhibit Inner and Outer Space. As I had not visited the Mattress Factory before, I figured I would take the opportunity to explore another museum/gallery and see some new art. Not that I hadn’t heard of the space previously, my friend Heather Mallak of monkey museum has done some work there in the past. Plus, it’s only about 5 minutes from work.

I met Mike Woycheck and Uncle Crappy (and wife) to explore Inner and Outer Space together. The art installations by the nine artists go way beyond the traditional painting in a frame on the wall but break through the confines of the floor, walls and ceiling. The new exhibit, which runs through January 2009, seems to complement the other permanent installations nicely. [ READ MORE ]

Modern Art Notes - Part II

Part two of Tyler Green's review of Sarah Oppenheimer's 610-3356 is now posted over at Modern Art Notes.

Modern Art Notes

Tyler Green, of Modern Art Notes, posted some thoughts on Sarah Oppenheimer's 610-3356. Read the full-post HERE.

MAN began in September, 2001. It's been hosted since January, 2003 by ArtsJournal.com. The Wall Street Journal recently called MAN "the most influential of all visual-arts blogs." Forbes magazine named MAN a "Best of the Web" site. Publications such as Slate, Contemporary, Art & Auction, Black Book, The New Criterion, and Art in America have all featured MAN. The Boston Globe said that Green "digs for news, does his research and has a 'tude."

Tyler's site is awesome. And we're not just saying that because we're on it. His art-worldview is unique, honest and thoughtful. Update your readers accordingly and FaceBook'em today.

Inner and Outer Space :: Review

Sunday's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review contained a nice review of Inner and Outer Space. The print edition showcased some great photos of works by Luca Buvoli, Allison Smith, Mark Garry and Sarah Oppenheimer.

ARTISTS MAKE NEW USE OF MATTRESS FACTORY
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review | Sunday, May 11, 2008

Last month, visitors to the opening reception of the exhibition "Inner Outer Space" at the Mattress Factory couldn't help but stare at the floor in a room on the fourth floor. For, cut into it was a 6-foot-wide hole.

Looking down the hole, which is actually an artwork by New York City-based artist Sarah Oppenheimer, all one could see was the roof of a garage across the alley from the museum. That's because Oppenheimer had purposely directed the view to a third-floor window via a carefully crafted tunnel made of plywood that angled through the third-floor gallery below.

In a place known for pushing the limits, not to mention the boundaries, of its own space, this is the first time in the museum's 30-year history that an artist has reconfigured the building structure in this way. ( FULL STORY )

ILLUSTRATIONS OF CATASTROPHE: Review

Illustrations of Catastrophe and Remote Times is reviewed by Melissa Kuntz in this week's Pittsburgh City Paper.

The current manifestation of the "Gestures" series at the Mattress Factory, intriguingly titled Illustrations of Catastrophe and Remote Times, includes artworks and installations by 21 participants, not all of whom (as per the series' premise) were trained as visual artists. They include a graphic designer, a robotics researcher, a musician, a window designer and a doll maker.

An exhibition of artworks by such an assortment of individuals ought to generate interest through sheer variety. Guest curator Heather Pesanti, who's assistant curator of contemporary art at the Carnegie Museum of Art, raised the conceptual bar by asking each participant to read a passage from "The Domain of the Great Bear," by the illustrious artists Mel Bochner and Robert Smithson, published in 1966 in the periodical Art Voices and premised on the theory that a magazine offers an alternative place for the display of artwork. ( FULL ARTICLE )

JUST ANNOUNCED: Illustrations of Catastrophe and Remote Times is extended through June 15, 2008.

IOCART: Tribune-Review

A review of illustrations of catastrophe and remote times that came out in last Sunday's Tribune-Review.

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...the participants in this show represent a wide spectrum of creative fields, techniques, media, ages and perspectives, ranging from visual and performing artists to an experimental band and a robotics professor. Indeed, this crew is by far the most motley, making for one of the most interesting Gestures exhibitions ever. (READ MORE)

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IOCART: Post-Gazette Review

Friday evening was amazing. A big THANK YOU to the almost 500 of you who braved the frigid, sub-zero temperatures in the name of great art. It clearly didn't effect the performers in Ben Kinsley and John Rubin's piece, as you can see from the video in the post below. The reviews for illustrations of catastrophe and remote times are starting to roll in. This one comes from Sunday's Post-Gazette:

What do the following Pittsburghers have in common?: A vintage clothing store owner, a robotics professor, members of an experimental band, an artist steeped in fine art tradition and an alternative art space developer.

The answer is that they're all participating in "illustrations of catastrophe and remote times," the 10th installment of the popular, eclectic "Gestures" exhibition series at the Mattress Factory. (READ MORE)

INDIA II Review: Pittsburgh City Paper

The December 26th issue of the Pittsburgh City Paper contains a very nice review of INDIA: NEW INSTALLATIONS, Part II, which continues through January 20, 2008.

As in the museum's INDIA: NEW INSTALLATIONS, Part I, the artists in Part II were chosen after studio visits by Mattress Factory curator Michael Olijnyk and executive artistic director Barbara Luderowski. Also like Part I, participating artists marginalize color and forego traditional cultural iconography. What differs in Part II is that each artist subtly engages the viewer's anxiety mechanisms, through means both intellectual and physical. And while they seem to reject traditional aesthetic concerns, these largely concept-driven works speak directly to the intellect (READ MORE)