Alexa Meade

Alexa Meade creates "living still lifes" by painting live bodies and incorporating them into installations with found objects. These are photos, not paintings!
Also check out her flickr.

RIP Jeanne-Claude

I've been remiss in not posting this sooner. Jeanne-Claude passed away last November after a life making beautiful "environmental art" with her husband, Christo. I will never forget seeing The Gates (pictured above) in Central Park my senior year of high school. It was breathtaking, and one of my first introductions to site-specific art. I wish I could have seen when they wrapped the Reichstag in billowing fabric here in Berlin. Jeanne-Claude, you will be missed.

The Fun Theory

Even though I was surprised at the end to see it's "an initiative of Volkswagen" and not some cool artist collective, this is still great.

San Jose Art Museum

Went for the first time today...
They have an exhibit up on Andy Warhol that I wanted to check out. The actual selection of pieces was blah--a couple rooms of screen prints that I've seen a million times before. But there was an interesting blurb about his "fascination with fame" on one wall and an informative documentary playing in one corner. The best part, though, was the little craft table in the middle of one gallery where you could combine Warhol's images (soup cans, a self portrait, and flowers) printed in black on clear plastic with your own compositions of colord paper cutouts and crayon drawings. It was neat.
Upstairs they had an exhibition called "Process as Paradigm" with works from the permanent collection and it was a great smattering of things, including Tony Oursler's Slip (2003), seen above. It's an S-shaped fiberglass sculpture with a video of a woman's mouth and lips projected onto it. Her skin looks green and there's a soundtrack of various phrases, some more intelligible than others, all emphasizing the 'sss' sound. It was both creepy and alluring; I really liked it.
There was also an exhibition of works by female printmakers, where these two aquatints:

by Pat Steir (whose work I just realized I also saw at Crown Point Press last year) really reminded me of my own work:


Other standouts:

Edward Corbett Untitled (Black Painting), 1950
(part of an exhibition on San Francisco Abstract Expressionism)


A detailed Franklin Williams 1972 thread and fabric canvas kind of like the one above.

Leo Villareal's Multiverse

I took this video at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. It's not the best quality but you get the idea. It was really cool to walk through, especially emerging into I.M. Pei's East Wing Building, with a basement full of contemporary art, on the other side.

Expanding

This morning I finally managed to remember to stop by Stanford's own Thomas Welton Art Gallery on my way home from class to see the current exhibit there, "Expanding." The show consists of pieces by eleven Bay Area artists that, in the words of the curators, "pulls you out of a routine and plants you firmly in the middle of a new perspective by offering a fenestration on the unfamiliar and a new context to the familiar. When contemplating expansion one might think of the expanding universe, the expansion of landscape, or expanding one's mind..."
The piece pictured above is Shims: Thousands of Uses-Use #17 by Christine Lee. It's a number of wooden slats jammed together in a constrained space to create intriguing fluctuating patterns. The installation "alludes to the composition of geological equivalents of sediment transformed by wind...[and] melds the architecture and natural environment seamlessly."
I was also particularly taken with Katie Lewis' Parallel Evidence, another site-specific installation of thousands of pins pushed into the wall in patterns reflecting bodily sensations, with a mirror image of pin holes and numbered markings directly opposite.
I also loved Jesse Houlding's Ferrous Wheel, an intricate piece of machinery that drags a magnet in a perfect circle across the back of a sheet of paper, thus also dragging rusty iron filings across its front that leave a reddish brown trail behind them. Next to the working machinery hangs a roll of paper with a completed circle on it, and it seems to raise up from the paper and even slightly pulse.
I took these pictures with my cameraphone, so they're not the best quality!
Ferrous Wheel, with extra rolls of paper to the side:

Close-up of the filings on their endless journey across the paper:

The finished circle (note the places where falling filings left traces down the bottom of the sheet):

All in all, a very interesting show.