The final exhibition at SELLOUT in Minneapolis focuses on 2D work from the flat files and beyond. The opening reception is on March 5th at 6pm, at the Northrup King Building in Minneapolis. tectonic industries will be exhibiting work with a plethora of other artists. For more information please visit the website of SELLOUT.
We were very happy to discover that we have been selected as one of the five artists to receive a Northern Lights Art(ists) on the Verge 2 fellowships running from January and culminating in an exhibition in October.
(AOV2) is an intensive, mentor-based fellowship program for 5 Minnesota-based, emerging artists or artist groups working experimentally at the intersection of art, technology, and digital culture with a focus on network-based practices that are interactive and/or participatory.
We are not exactly sure which format our final work will take- hence the fellowship proces- but we know that we are starting by blogging the Oprah Winfrey show. Tomorrow (Jan 8th) is the first show of the new season, where 3 wives of men leading secret double lives reveal all. We will be blogging over at Another One Year Project. Below follows our proposal, as written in December:
Oprah Winfrey is one of the singularly most important figures when looking at the convergence of celebrity status with our endless desire for self-betterment. TV listings of the Oprah Winfrey Show proclaim “The groundbreaking talk show host interviews celebrities, newsmakers and experts in the world of self-improvement, style and culture.” Her media empire includes her talk show, film company, book club, radio show, magazine, lifestyle website and online charitable network. Press releases inform us that in 2010, Oprah, as we all know her, will debut her own television network, Oprah’s Own Network (OWN), replacing the Discovery Health Channel. The network will be dedicated to “Best Life Programming”, showcasing talent dedicated to allowing us to lead our best life, broadcast to over 70 million viewers.
For the duration of 2010, tectonic industries are committed to watching every new episode of the Oprah Winfrey show and committing the spoken words to text. We will transcribe every episode and put the transcription on our website, www.anotheroneyearproject.com, in blog format. In this manner, we will become extremely knowledgeable of the important news, style and cultural issues of the day, as dictated by Oprah. We will be in an exceptionally strong position with regards to knowledge of means of self betterment. We will treat the Oprah program as a medication to be taken for an hour a day each weekday, with the outcome being tangible knowledge of processes of self-betterment, dramatically upgraded typing skills and improved small-talk capabilities.
By transcribing the show we are removing all drama and visuals for the audience, allowing the conversations to be akin to a stream of consciousness from the table of Oprah. For one person to be responsible for the opinions and fortunes of so many, outside of the political or religious realm, is a peculiarly contemporary phenomena. As viewers actively translating the experience of digesting so much daytime television, we will both be differentiated from, and the same as, the millions-strong audience. All of the received information is processed, but ultimately we will rarely change our behavior as a result of the passive activity of television watching. Like the rest of the audience, we may be full of good intentions but they will invariably dissipate sometime before going to bed full of resolve and waking up to reenact old habits.
The transcriptions will continue for the duration of 2010, activated whenever new episodes of the Oprah Winfrey Show are aired. We envisage that the final manifestation of the project would take place either at the culmination of the fellowship period at the Spark Festival in October, or possibly/ additionally in January 2011 if this was acceptable. We do not have an absolute concrete vision for the final manifestation of the project, but would like to stream the transcripts into a physical space. This could be achieved through video projections, or monitor displays, or audio recordings of the transcripts done through the computer’s text to voice feature (eg Voice Over for Mac) which play simultaneously and together create a cacophony of instruction, information and entertainment.
The goal of our project, is to create two distinct streams of information, one of which is published in real time as we transcribe the episode of the chat show, throughout the year, and one of which is cumulative, displaying the collected knowledge of the year as a multitude of layers of information. The online element is reasonably straightforward, requiring that we publish a blog post per weekday, transcribing what was heard on the show. This information will also be distributed via such channels as Facebook and Twitter, for maximum exposure to the inane. This information feed will begin with the first episode of Oprah aired on or after New Year’s Day. The cumulative information will require more assistance and input from others. It is anticipated that we will seek advice on some technological aspects or potential solutions, and need assistance in acquiring equipment for the final exhibition and with creating a marketing plan.
The public outcome of this project will be an experience which is far removed from the original source material, but recognizable as the combined weight of many many episodes of a daytime talk show. The stream of words will include references to media events, celebrities and wellness tips which form a time capsule of sorts of the collective preoccupations of the year 2010, as reflected through the media empire of Oprah Winfrey. In this way, we want to communicate the necessity of re-examining that which we take for granted, by giving viewers the opportunity to examine our aspirations from the mundane to the fantastical. As a society we want to make delicious, healthy meals in minutes, to throw fabulous dinner parties, to seem effortlessly stylish and impeccably organized. We want to be smarter, richer, more successful, to cure cancer and solve the problems of the world. And at the heart of all this, we want to be appreciated for who we are, recognized for our individuality within the mass, and perhaps most importantly, we want to be loved.
Opening October 3rd, 6-9pm
SELLOUT art
#456 Northrup King Building
1500 Jackson St. NE
Minneapolis, MN, 55413
SELLOUT continues its ongoing series of three-person exhibitions with TECTONIC / TAPOLA / LAHR. This exhibition features recent work by St. Paul artists Bruce Tapola and Tectonic Industries as well as South Bend, IN artist Jason Lahr. The work explores constructions of personal identity through the filter of pop culture, found images, television, forgotten and fictional histories and language. The combined production of the trio is a bit like thumbing through a pile of discarded art magazines, album covers and Boy Scout manuals dripping in white paint and neon.
BRUCE TAPOLA’s paintings and sculptures explore the meaning and experience of images after their original context and history are removed. His artistic process often begins with the selection of photographic source material, some aspect of which is compelling to the artist. Because photographic images are used to communicate a vast range of content, Tapola’s selected images, while in their original context, can be anything from the banal to the sensual, the familiar to the strange, and the important to the trivial, and the tragic to the humorous. Through his work the image is obscured and isolated from its source, thereby transforming it, while retaining a familiarly open to numerous interpretations.
TECTONIC INDUSTRIES is a collaborative art partnership of the Danish artist Lars Boye Jerlach and the British artist Helen Stringfellow. Tectonic Industries’ work examines the artifice inherent within the creation of the modern myths and belief systems of popular culture. Ultimately these created worlds become a pervasive form of reality, universally meaningful within the mainstream collective memory. At the heart of the investigation lies a fascination with visual, literal, televisual and cinematic pop culture that centers on appearances and narrative. Borrowed language is distorted, manipulated and morphed to heighten the artificial. Referencing immediately identifiable cultural signifiers in conjunction with our seemingly endless quest for self-improvement, tectonic industries create mixed-media installations that scrutinize our all-encompassing desire for instant gratification and immediate satisfaction.
JASON LAHR’s paintings, drawings, and installations integrate darkly comic texts with appropriated images, in ever shifting narratives of identity as constructed by popular culture. Taking their cues from contemporary/postmodern fiction, film theory, and semiotics, the paintings position the viewer at the core of the construction of narrative, weaving an intertextual thread of references and allusions. Simultaneously, the work explores the construction and articulation of masculine identity by/through mass culture as manifested in Generation X and filtered through feminism and identity politics/criticism.
SELLOUT is an artist-run initiative devoted to the exhibition of work by emerging and mid-career artists, as well as independent curators. We focus on small-scaled idea-based works, multiples, and ephemeral projects. The intimate space features a mix of curated group and solo exhibitions as well as innovative community events. The humble scale of the gallery (250 square feet) provides artists with the opportunity to experiment with fresh ideas, pursue new directions, and exhibit alternative, atypical media.
SELLOUT exhibits artists with a distinct vision and commitment to their artistic practice. However, we acknowledge that art exists not in a vacuum, but in a capitalist cultural framework. In addition to regular exhibitions, artists are encouraged to create small, affordable works that are available for purchase in the flat file. Collectors may browse through pieces not only by the current exhibiting artists, but also by the regular roster of artists. Our desire is to support new art collectors and interesting artwork while allowing unique access and interaction between the collector, curator, and artist.
Over 200 artists have donated works to the Soap Factory for their annual fundraiser, the $99 sale. The tag line is 200+ artists, 1 size, 1 price, 0 names.
This year tectonic industries donated two works, if you want a chance to try and find one, head over to the Soap Factory, MInneapolis, this weekend.
Fake it, for Real is a media workshop for teens to be led by tectonic industries in June and July 2009 at the Walker Art Center. For further information, and to sign up to participate, click here.
tectonic industries completed three text-based glitter drawings at the Monster Drawing Rally at Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis on December 13th, 2008. The chosen texts were anagrams of the names of fellow artists drawing at the event. All three were sold to help fundraise for the gallery.
Pay Attention: GM08
Patricia Healy McMeans and Christopher Pole, producers
Dave Salmela and Yasmil Raymond, structural advisors
Location: Soap Factory, Minneapolis
Opens September 13 – October 26, 2008
In 1974, Gordon Matta-Clark wrote “the only difference between expectation and surprise is authorship.” This observation framed his artistic process; he regarded the bisection of buildings and houses as a “releasing of architecture.” His own hand on the chainsaw simply became a utilitarian tool to release inherent energies already existing within the structure. Clearly Matta-Clark’s engagement is crucial to the experiment, but for him the art remains separate from himself in a phenomenological sense. He surrenders the idea of the artist author, and in doing so, the result of his experiment begins to shift away from expectation to the unknown. The distinction between expectation and surprise informs the timbre of the exhibition Pay Attention: GM08, on view at the Soap Factory from September 13- October 26.
The 23 artists in this group show seek to script their practice with more perfect diction. They each locate different voices in a 21st century conversation: Fiction. Place. Cinema. Language. Narrative. They seek to balance their process between speaking clearly and listening closely: to their own work, to other work, to the world. This repeated activity of engagement and release, laden with failure and discovery, is arguably the greatest experiment that can be undertaken by artists. They ask us to re-define our notions of authorship and attention, surprise and expectation.
What began as a survey of emerging contemporary artists based out of the Twin Cities area has focused itself into a group show of experimental new work by 23 artists and collaboratives. Critically engaging social and psychological examination, these artists use varied processes and time- and object-based mediums: performance, sound, new media, painting, printmaking, photography, film, and sculpture. All participating artists are required to make new work specifically for this show. As producers, and viewers, we don’t know exactly what we’re going to get in September, a condition which further shifts our expectation.
Loosely adapting the model of Greater New York – P.S.1’s 2001 and 2005 survey shows of New York City’s emerging local talent – to the Twin Cities and outreaching areas, the locus of Pay Attention: GM08 is to bring together in one show a cross-breadth of local contemporary art. It acts as a barometer of our specific time and place, presenting early and mid-career artists who have perhaps been under-recognized within the Twin Cities art scene leading up to 2007. Culling an initial pool of over 200 recommendations, the producing group conducted 72 studio visits from which the artists were chosen. The exhibition title is co-opted from Bruce Nauman’s 1972 print Pay Attention which reverses hand-drawn capital letters reading “pay attention mother fuckers”. In Nauman’s simple brazen directive, it compels the viewer, the artist, and collective zeitgeist inexplicably to attend, immediately, withholding pretense and judgement.
The strategies for producing this exhibition have included choosing artists, not specific artworks. In doing so, the conversation broadens to include their full concern, not this or that piece. Part of the current dialogue examines narrative, focusing on fiction and more specifically the constructs of the cinema. How do we interpolate our relationship to the world as children of the cinema, a mediated society, and the culture industry as a whole?
What forms might this take? Many artists enter into another discussion investigating memory and the activity of recording: to gather, to glean, to collect. Others utilize methodologies such as re-enactment and mapping. By undoing conventions of language and place these artists challenge notions of collective and cultural memory, sometimes blatant: directive text and neon signs; sometimes more subtly, simply by obscuring the vocabulary with which we might enter a work. Is this a photograph or a print or a painting, and is that important for my entry as a viewer? What is all this black and epoxy obfuscating? Why is this man running around a stark sound stage constantly framed by the camera, as if in a dream?
Participating artists are: Christopher Baker, David A. Bradberry, Eric William Carroll, Jan Estep, Chris Hill, Julia Kouneski, Kristine Heykants, Abinadi Meza, Ali Momeni, Pete McLarnan, Christian Nielsen, Christopher Pancoe, Kirsten Peterson, Drew Peterson, Minneapolis, Heidi Prenevost, Stevie Rexroth, Jenny Schmid, Andrew Schroeder, Tony Sunder, Tectonic Industries, Megan Vossler, Jonathan Gomez Whitney, and Marcus Young.
Please visit the Pay Attention: GM08 website for further information.
200+ artworks, 1 size, no price, no names…
The $99 Sale is an aesthetic melée, a statement about the inherent value of art, and a fabulous fundraiser for The Soap Factory on September 19 and 20, 2008.
Artists from around the country have donated their works, and all proceeds support The Soap Factory, the region’s premier laboratory for emerging contemporary art. From local luminaries to emerging artists across the country, there will be much to choose from and the elbowing at the door will be intense. (Last year people waited to get in and yes, rushed in when the doors opened!) Pre-purchase your tickets and be among the first through the door on September 19 for the pre-sale and fabulous party. All remaining works will be sold on September 20, 9:00-noon, and admission that day is free.
September 19: Pre-sale party $35 ticket
7 to 10 pm with music, beverages and fabulous food
Guests with purchased tickets will be able to head right in through a separate line, avoiding the “will call” wait. Artists’ signatures are on the reverse, but works cannot be moved to reveal the identities. Guests may purchase pieces during the party, but the works will remain on view (marked sold) until September 20.
September 20: The $99 Sale Free
Doors open at 9am sharp. 9 – 12 noon.
Wear flat shoes and hit the ground running. All remaining works are for sale for $99, and may be taken at the time of purchase.
