2008 MFA Candidate Monica Palma will be exhibiting her latest drawings in “Medium Love” at Transmission gallery.

Monica’s work deals with the relationship between closeness and distance, private and public, and the difficulties of integrating the two sides. And can best be described by reading from her bio. “…There is a further tension between specificity and abstraction. Interacting with the paper over an extensive period of time, my attention moves from source material to medium. The process of repetitive mark making reflects my experiences in therapy, in which the past is revived through memory over and over. Arduous repetition also mirrors aspects of penance absorbed through my Mexican Catholic background.

Since moving away from Mexico I have been using an increasing amount of imagery related to the United States: significant rivers,famous mountains, and the iconic landscapes engraved on the back of coins. But even in the final drawings this subject matter remains distant to me, I connect to the work (and the ideas behind it) only through making marks on paper. On one level, specificity is important: which river? or which mountain?, but another kind of connection is made when the individual images cease to be legible.”

Opening: Feb. 1, 7-9pm
Show runs Feb. 1-29
Gallery hours: TR, F: 11-6, SAT 12-5

TRANSMISSION
321 Brook Rd
Richmond, VA 23220

January 30, 2008

AFO Movie Night continues its exploration of Space, Time, Surface, and Drawing with a screening of The Five Obstructions, by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth. This 2003 experimental documentary explores filmmaking through “manifestos” written by each director. The result is a film about process and possibility, collaboration and the testing of limits in the creative process. A must-see by anyone who has felt stifled by the limitations of assignments.

The screening will take place Wednesday the 30rd at 9pm in Room 535 at the Bowe Street Deck.

Everybody is welcome.

A project initiated by Nina Colosi linking real-time exhibitions in cyberspace and public space on seven continents. The project launches January 29, 2008 and will present an ongoing program of multi-media exhibitions in collaboration with international curators and cultural institutions.

Streaming Museum is conceived as a source of free cultural content and public service messaging on the environment, education and health, accessed via Internet and in high visibility public locations. The opening exhibition, Good Morning Mr. Orwell, by pioneer video artist Nam June Paik, is a transcontinental musical extravaganza that interweaves fine art and pop culture icons. Paik’s ideas in the 1970s about the “information  superhighway”  and  global connectivity forecast the Internet.
See www.StreamingMuseum.org for information and location schedules. Visitors at each venue are invited to upload pictures via cell phone or email to the Streaming Museum website.

February 1  – February 24, 2008
OPENING, Friday February 1st 6:00 – 10:00 p.m.

Pocket Utopia is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Rico Gatson.  It
is Gatson’s desire to modulate the conversation surrounding the iconic, the
conceptually efficient and the articulation of identity politics through a
series of sculptures, paintings, collages and video.

A cross morphs into an “x,” a video reloads and repeats a running sequence
revealing the “connection,” and a painted platform becomes a social
construction.  Gatson shines a light into our collective blackness and
reflects a variety of cultural realities where minimalism and the Black
Panther Party are on the same plane.

At Pocket Utopia, Gatson enters a relational conversation in a social space
where there are no fixed meanings. His complex compositions are an
evolving conversation.  Pocket Utopia is also pleased to release Gatson’s
limited edition print of the musician Nina Simone. This print is the
second in a series of limited editions that support the exhibition and
social investigations of Pocket Utopia.

There will be a salon discussion on Thursday, February 21st  at 6:00 p.m.
where the artist will be present to talk about the relevance of the
situational prefix “post-black.”  Refreshments will be served.  This
discussion is a part of Austin Thomas’s salon series titled, “Excuse me,
you have art in your teeth.”

Pocket Utopia is an away-from center, off-center, exhibition, salon and
social space run by artist Austin Thomas.

POCKET UTOPIA
1037 Flushing Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
Open Saturdays and Sundays 12-6 p.m.

 pocketutopia.blogspot.com/

The VCU Department of Sculpture + Extended Media presents
Karin Sander
Tuesday, January 29 at 5:00 pm
VCU Student Commons, Virginia Rooms A-B-C-D
907 Floyd Ave.

“What must a work of mine fulfill? I must be able to work using resources that actually exist, that are already present within the system, and that can turn the system against itself. I must be able to read things from a location, the situation, of a museum or gallery. And the work must both reveal something and also remain mysterious. It must transcend itself and gesture towards something that was not previously visible. In other words, it must render something visible that is already present but that has hitherto escaped perception, that exists in a latent state. If the work provokes amazement and perhaps amusement as well, then it is successful.”
 K.S.

Sander was educated at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart Germany and the Whitney Independent Studio Program in NYC. She exhibits internationally to much acclaim. She lives in Berlin and teaches in Zurich at the Architecture Academy.

Craft/ Material Studies Visiting Artist Lecture: Susan Brandeis
Tuesday, January  29th at 2:00pm in the Fine Arts Building, 1000 W. Broad Street, Room 238

Susan Brandeis teaches at the College of Design at North Carolina State
University, where she coordinates the program in Fibers and Surface Design
and the Anni Albers Scholars Program. Her work has been published in the
books Celebrating the Stitch, The Surface Designer’s Art, and The Art
Quilt, and in leading craft and textile art magazines. She has exhibited
throughout the United States and in England, Ireland, Japan, the
Netherlands, Colombia, and at the International Biennial of Tapestry in
Lausanne, Switzerland.

Craft: The Great Connector or Dreaming of Living in a Perfect World

Craft/Material Studies, Graphic Design, Interior Design, and the “the Terry Noack Fund for the Arts” present Andrew Wagner and Jeanette Abbink Monday January 28, at the Grace Street Theatre. Andrew Wagner and Jeanette Abbink, founding members of the architecture and design magazine Dwell, were charged with revamping the 66 year-old publication American Craft. Wagner and Abbink will describe their discoveries leading up to the re-launch of American Craft this past October. They will sum up their views of the craft world now and their search for the beautiful blurring the superficial boundaries that have been erected across disciplines in the past thirty years.

January 28th
Grace Street Theatre
930-934 West Grace Street
4:30 - 5:30 pm

The Department of Theatre presents For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf.
Written by Ntozake Shange
Directed by Tawnya Pettiford-Wates

‘For Colored Girls…” is a choroepoem that illuminates the journey of life, love and transformation in the lives of young women. Choreopoetry is poetic drama that moves, sings and speaks to the immediate feelings, soul and spirit of our inner most being. The stories told by the ensemble of “colored girls” are passionate, poignant and ultimately triumphant. “For Colored Girls…” has been described as spellbinding and piercingly truthful. It weaves together the universality of lives lived through wit, humor, pain and joy. Music, dance and song impel the women of this rainbow to reveal themselves and their inner most thoughts, feelings and experiences as we all discover the truth of who they really are. It is pure theatre and rings clear with universal appeal.

Feb. 15-16, Feb. 21 - 23 - 7:30 pm
Feb. 17 & 24 - 3:00 pm HS Matinees Tues., Feb. 19 & Wed., Feb. 20 - 10 am

Theatre VCU

The moment of death is significant as a transient period, a passing over. In this body of work Lyndi Sales investigates the subject of transcendence from a personal perspective. The aeroplane journey acts as a metaphor for departures and arrivals. Flying becomes symbolic of transition, transcendence and a state of unpredictability. The tunnel of light scenario and the vortex are explored as a portal between the known and the unknown. In this site the positive and negative is considered as a void (emptiness) and a space (presence) that defines the separation from one realm to another. TRANSIenT is Lyndi Sales’ second solo exhibition at Bell-Roberts Contemporary.

January 23 2008 - February 18 2008

The Centre Pompidou is presenting Vision Tenace, an exhibition by M/M (Paris), a studio established by Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak in 1992.