Michael Smith & Joshua White (And Other Collaborators)
April 25 - August 3, 2008

The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania presents “Mike’s World: Michael Smith & Joshua White (and other collaborators),” the first major retrospective of internationally renowned performance/video/installation artist Michael Smith and his New York-based collaborator, director/artist Joshua White. The exhibition features 30 years of videos, installation environments, and other performance-related materials detailing the adventures of “Mike,” a sweet but hapless Everyman character created by Smith, and his amusingly ineffectual search for a piece of the American Dream.

www.icaphila.org/exhibitions/mikes.php

ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
University of Pennsylvania, 118 South 36th Street, Philadelphia PA

Responding to the challenge of the biennial format, curators are increasingly taking such shows into uncharted territory. Adam Szymczyk, director of the Kunsthalle Basel and a cofounder of Warsaw’s Foksal Gallery Foundation, and Brussels-based curator and critic Elena Filipovic have divided this year’s Berlin Biennial into a main show on view in the daytime and a series of events taking place in the evenings. Some forty artists are participating in the exhibition component, which occupies three sites—the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie, and a new artist-run outdoor space, the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum. After hours, performances, screenings, readings, and other events will be held both in these venues and at locations that foster different kinds of artistic production.

http://www.berlinbiennale.de

Translated from German by Oliver E. Dryfuss.

April 4  – April 27, 2008
OPENING, Friday April 4th  6:00 – 10:00 p.m.
POCKET UTOPIA
1037 Flushing Avenue
[Just off the Morgan L, Bushwick]
Open Saturdays and Sundays 12-6 p.m. and by appointment
Call:  917-400-3869

Pocket Utopia is pleased to present a solo exhibition of artist in residence, Libby Hartle.  Since September, Libby Hartle has been transporting her materials and focusing her art-making to a small table at the back of the gallery, transporting her supplies and transforming her ideas to co-exisit with an exhibition program and a visiting public.
The result is presented here in the form of found papers (parking tickets, lottery stubs, and other detritus), picked up on her walks to the gallery and turned into, through a sorting, soaking and casting process, a brightly colored habitat.  Hartle, working in the space and relating to its visitors has also expanded the floor space into a seating area, or a place to perch and drink tea or sip beer (Hartle is an expert “beeramid” builder).
A visitor can join Hartle as she “hosts” a salon of drawn and collaged structures (homes and bus-mobiles), cut and glued through a semi-architectural drawing process or what Hartle has termed “stickitecture.”  The space is filled and formed for the viewer to sit and plan their escape.
There will be a salon discussion on Wednesday, April 28th  at 6:00 p.m. where the artist will be present to talk about the post-studio practice and artist residencies.  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

Repressed III Opening Reception
March 7th
 7PM-11PM

In collaboration with T.O.W.A.R., Gallery5 will host Repressed III, a show dedicated to socially conscious works. This event will take place March 7th, 2008 and will be the precursor to a workshop series. Gallery5 is currently seeking workshop proposals, performers, artists, and volunteers.

Repressed III is being held in conjunction with: The 2008 Southern Graphics Council Conference. Closing Reception: Friday, March 28th.

Gallery5
200 W. Marshall St.
Richmond,VA 23220

March 8 through June 22, 2008
De Pont museum of contemporary art
Tilburg, NL

‘Actually I’ve never done anything other than seek the right form for my ideas.’ Ever since his debut in 1992, Job Koelewijn (Spakenburg, 1962) has been putting this statement by Man Ray into practice. Despite the diversity of his photographic works, sculptures and installations in terms of form and the use of material, they bear his own highly recognizable signature due to their distinct atmosphere and logic. At De Pont, Koelewijn has combined a number of existing photographic works and sculptures with works produced for this exhibition. Together they form one large installation in which the experience of the here and now constitutes a basic theme.

Job Koelewijn’s exhibition begins even before one arrives in the museum. Standing outside at the museum’s entrance is his Cinema on Wheels. The visitor is invited to take a seat; music sets the tone; the black wall frames the image and allows the eye to focus. In the space where we normally see the movie screen, there is an opening to the outside; rather than a film, reality itself is shown in a ‘continuous performance’. Nothing prevents the viewer from looking at Tilburg’s Goirkestraat with the same intensity as he would when confronted, for instance, with Vermeer’s Little Street in the Rijksmuseum.

The Spiral Jetty is a large earthwork art piece which was built in the shallow, pink waters of the Great Salt Lake in 1970 by artist Robert Smithson. The 1500-foot-long spiral was submerged for decades by highwater levels, but it has recently returned to the surface, and is now at the leading edge of a controversial drilling proposal currently under consideration by the State of Utah’s Governor’s Office Resource Development Coordinating Committee…… (See more of this article at)

www.nowpublic.com
http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/080212smithson.asp
http://www.spiraljetty.org/
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/18/opinion/18mon3.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Spiral+Jetty&st=nyt&oref=slogin
http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/254746/17/
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/02/oil_drilling_spiral_jetty.php
 http://bradbirchettart.blogspot.com/2008/02/oil-vs-art.html

1708 Gallery Presents Jillian McDonald
Video, Performance, and Installation
February 1–March 1
Opening Reception: Friday, February 1 from 7–10pm
Artist Talk: Friday, February 1, at 4pm

Jillian McDonald is fanatical about the human obsession with film genres and celebrities, turning intimate and horrifying moments in film into satirical drama.  McDonald’s video series Me and Billy Bob bridges the gap between celebrity obsession and infatuation with a girlish crush.  Jillian takes one extra step with obsession by handing out temporary Billy Bob tattoo replicas made by the artist on opening night.

1708 Gallery
319 W. Broad St.
Richmond, VA

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 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.