cubes+hoses wallet, 2010. Limited Edition of 100.

People are saying that the recession is over, but I think its fair to say that despite the small upturn, most of us are not yet feeling anywhere near secure and it will probably be a long time before things get back to normal, whatever that’s supposed to be. Irrespective of where the art market is at and whether the embattled Lehman Brothers will raise enough money for their creditors in their upcoming auction, jobs are still scarce and the taste of desperation remains fresh in the mouths of many who have not yet adopted quasi self sufficient life styles. Enter www.isnotbroke.com, the latest project by Transit Antenna founder and Artlurker contributor, Bob Snead whose characteristically worn and appropriately grubby fingers can be seen above.

The website functions as an online shop and forum, complete with a personal blog and lengthy features on each piece. The product, recession proof wallets. What? Handmade wallets with a twenty dollar bill printed inside. Of course this doesn’t actually prevent you from being broke, wont put food on your table and will more than likely will make you feel worse not better after you kick yourself for not remembering that you bought a recession proof wallet when the excitement of discovering previously unknown funds subsides, but, if the idea doesn’t strike you as particularly clever perhaps this will: each wallet is adorned with a design based on compelling stories of financial resilience.

Crouching Tiger, Knitting Dragon, 2010. Each wallet is handmade in the USA with a hand printed exterior, 4 credit card slots, ID window slot, two hidden pockets (for your business cards), and twenty bucks printed in the bill slot. Full size of the wallet is 8.5”x3.5” and folded 4.25”x3.5”. Developed from a mix of durable canvas, vinyl, and nylon. Limited Edition of 100.

The website says: “Is Not Broke Recession Proof Wallet, Co. was formed by artist Bob Snead to act as a window into the worst economy of our lifetime through wallets and individual stories of survival. The concept of a Recession Proof Wallet is simple. On the interior, a fabric twenty dollar bill is printed permanently inside so the owner always has money. Then the exterior is used to tell a story through abstracted forms, patterns, or illustrations. Each wallet is designed by a selected artist and meticulously hand crafted, usually by Bob himself, in the USA.”

Fields, created by Josef Kristofoletti inspired by the Cern Particle Collider.

Bob, who recently made the brave move to New Orleans on the promise of jobs that have yet to materialize has been busy and the www.isnotbroke.com franchise, which began just a few months ago, now totals nine whole wallets, which considering the amount of bespoke handicraft and experiential content poured into each design is impressive, or at least I think so. Ranging from stories recounting experiences such as living in a vegetable oil powered bus for two years to traveling to Geneva to paint murals inspired by the Cern Particle Collider, these limited edition wallets, each an ironic symbol of resourcefulness in dark times and a work of art of themselves, tell stories that many of us can identify with.

The Suit is the second in the ongoing Upturn series. The goal of each Upturn wallet is to depict with abstracted forms, patterns, or illustrations a story of survival which is hand picked from submissions to the free wallet program.

Tragically for our readers this post comes just a few days too late as www.isnotbroke.com’s first sale has just finished, but at least now Bob and his elves can perhaps enjoy some top-rate windfalls from contentious Miamians looking to buy into some peace of mind. And if you’re really hard up, be sure to check out the free section in which fans are invited to submit stories that if liked will be made up into limited edition wallets as part of the Upturn Series (above).

…and neither can you be! (?)

Please visit www.isnotbroke.com for more information and sales.

This post was contributed by Thomas Hollingworth.

Psychic Youth, Inc. photo by Federico Nessi.

Time and time again, I’m asked the same question, “are you a performance artist or are you a choreographer?”  I hesitate to say that I am one or the other because I don’t feel like my work fits completely into either of these categories. I’d like to think that my process is fluid and can change focus at any moment without depending entirely on an applied strategy. I have never felt totally satisfied with creating choreography to be performed exactly as planned.

TRI photo by Thomas Hollingworth.

Before I began working collaboratively, my solo performances were created with landmarks. I would devise a beginning, middle and end with only an intention to guide me to these points. I always gave myself the space to lose my head – where I could feel like my body was no longer controlled by my mind, but by an energetic projection of an intention or emotion. I have referred to some performances as having been out of body experiences. In some cases losing memory of what I’d just done or experiencing violent physical reactions like throwing up. I am not always successful in getting out of my head, but that has always been my goal through these ritual dances.

Parrucca photo by Stian Roenning.

Two years ago I began working collaboratively as a member of Psychic Youth, Inc. In the collective I was able to create movement scenarios designed for untrained dancers (untrained in the modern and classical techniques of dance). They are brave visual artists and/or musicians that have unique and powerful body-voices. Some of these dancers include Federico Nessi, Aja Albertson, Marcela Loayza, Ricardo Guerrero and Rick Diaz. I find they can sometimes express through their body in a way I could never have choreographed. They are unpredictable.

TRIBUTE photo by Thomas Hollingworth.

Working with these bodies, gives my work so much more range because they will not and cannot repeat what I offer them verbatim. I urge them not to think they have to recreate what I give them, but to do what they think or remember the movement was.

TRIBTUE photo by Christy Gast.

My choreography becomes a suggested guide or a springboard for new movement. I usually give them a series of tasks or actions that, when done in a particular sequence, have no purpose.  This kind of action dance is a reference to Yvonne Rainer’s “Trio A”, which has always been a source for me to reflect on. I am always inspired by my dancer’s interpretations of these task sequences and like my solo work, I also give them the space to lose themselves. I offer them the outline and they fill in the gaps. The act of creating as they perform brings the group together. Recently, I have been creating games to play during performance so that they are not merely going through the motions, but are bringing consciousness into the work.

PSYCHIC YOUTH, INC. presents: TRI: A Living Ritual Environment. First Installment featuring Ricardo Guerrero, Ana Mendez & Federico Nessi at de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space, Miami, Florida, March 13th, 2010.

I love performances that flirt with an element of risk. I especially love performances taken out of the safe haven of a theater where everything is perversely controlled to perfection. Site-specific work such as Meg Stuart’s “Revisited” is an example of taking the escape the audience feels in the theater and rearranging it with reality. The escape catches you by surprise in “real life” rather than anticipating it as the lights lower in a theater. I also enjoy using alternative spaces because they come with their own stories, as opposed to the theater’s blank canvas. I am not a theater “hater”, but after having danced in them for so long, the blank canvas seems sterile. I have seen a handful of amazing performances that have transformed the theater’s predictable entrance and exit stage areas and have also manipulated the perspective of the audience. Chicago based theater company Plasticene’s “Come Like Shadows” is a good example of the possibilities of altering the black box, where the audience is tricked into believing they are the only ones observing the show – a second audience is later exposed on the opposite side of the performance space.

TRI photo by Thomas Hollingworth.

TRI photo by Thomas Hollingworth.

TRI photo by Thomas Hollingworth.

This confusion, between theater space and life space, between trained dancers and action dancers, confuses and influences my own blurred version of choreography and performance art. I build stories through dances and “non-dances”, crossing genres of performance through music and the relation of dance and dance space, where music is not just an audio backdrop to the drama of the dance, but is woven into the fabric of the choreography, such as in my latest performance piece “Walking Spell”, which premiered recently at Miami Art Museum[.]

This post was contributed by Ana Mendez.

Dance sequence from the Josephine Baker film Princess Tam Tam (1935) [link]

Maya Deren’s, Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) [link]

Maya Deren’s The Very Eye of Night (1958) [link]

Clip from Merce Cunningham’s Beach Birds for Camera (1992) [link]

A dance clip from the Bollywood film Devdas (2002) [link]

Clips from David Lachapelle’s dance documentary Rize (2005) [link]

This post was contributed by Annie Hollingsworth winner of this year’s Miami Writer’s Prize.

Ana Mendez, from Tribute: A Summoning (2010).

For these dog days, while Miami’s art world is gearing up for the fall season, it’s all about dance. Not just your average dance on stage, but genre-bending performance and an exploration of the intersection points between dance and art.

On the lower end of the artistic spectrum, Step Up 3D, the third installment of the Step Up series is out in theaters. It’s a shamelessly indulgent dance film, and yes, it’s in 3D. Delicious dance candy, battles galore! I mention this film not only because it’s a great opportunity to turn off your brain for a minute and have a good time, but also because it belongs in a rich vein of cross-genre performance: dance for camera. Stay tuned to artlurker.com for this weekend’s mini-film festival of dance videos including some classic examples from the archives.

In the meantime, big news on the local performance front. Thursday August 19th at Miami Art Museum, the Afterhours program features Talking Head Transmitters, with a broadcast on contemporary dance from their in-museum AM radio station, and Walking Spell, a performance by local performer and choreographer Ana Mendez.

Ana Mendez, from Valley of the Queen (2009).

MAM’s announcement describes Walking Spell as “experimental performance.” Indeed, Mendez’s work, lying somewhere in the space between theater, dance, music and art, is not easy to describe. Consider her the conductor of a series of beautiful games. I use beautiful in the broadest sense because her visually stunning performances can be gritty at times, anguished, and emotionally resonant. The striking sense of presence that characterizes much of her work is due to her construction process – she creates situations and improvisatory scripts rather than strict choreography. As a result, her performers “play” the show, embodying her instructions with their own movement patterns. They seem to experience the performance as deeply as anyone in the audience. The musical background is not canned either – it’s a live soundscape responding to the dancers’ movements or the rules of the game.

Walking Spell will be driven by a deck of cards. Very John Cage. Each card drawn by the dancers prompts a specific sound to be played by the musicians. Every sound then generates a movement from the dancers. Because such a show could not exactly be rehearsed, the attention of the performers will be heightened as they listen for cues and respond to each other. Mendez describes Walking Spell as a meditation – “we intend to lose ourselves.” She will be performing alongside Aja Albertson, with sound created by Richard Vergez and Frederico Nessi and a customized floor built by Richard Martinez. The concept for this show was inspired by Cage’s Water Walk, a 1959 composition for, among other things, grand piano, electric mixer, whistle, tape recorder, five radios, a bathtub and a vase of roses.

John Cage performing “Water Walk” in January 1960, on the popular TV show I’ve Got A Secret.

While Mendez is clearly a talent to watch, one of her greatest strengths is her ability to work collaboratively. She draws generously from the talents of her performers, most of whom are not actually trained dancers, but accomplished artists or musicians in their own right. Tribute: A Summoning, a performance earlier this year based on the life of music producer Joe Meek, was well-developed in every aspect – visually, musically, and performatively – thanks to the contributions of her many collaborators (including both Vergez and Nessi). Each element could easily have stood on its own as a solid and complete artistic effort and so the show, as a whole, was far more than the sum of its parts.

Ana Mendez, from Tribute: A Summoning (2010).

Mendez and Nessi, creative partners for both Tribute and Walking Spell, first collaborated in 2008 for a project called Wire Wire Wire. The strength of their working relationship was later extended when local musicians got involved, and Psychic Youth, Inc. was formed in 2009. PYI’s performances are, like Mendez’s solo projects, structured by a loose set of parameters rather than a rigid set of movements. Psychic Youth Inc.’s recent extravagant three-night happening at the de la Cruz collection earlier this year, TRI, followed an improvisatory script that allowed each performer to fully own his or her movements and position in space. A wild and unpredictable, living, breathing show was born.

Tonight’s event promises to be another memorable addition to Mendez’s already rich performance history. The program runs from 6-9pm. Don’t miss it. For more information, visit www.miamiartmuseum.org.

Walking Spell flyer by Richard Vergez.

This post was contributed by Annie Hollingsworth winner of this year’s Miami Writer’s Prize.

Spreeblitz coaster.

With one week past and one more to go, artist Agustina Woodgate and curator Anthony Spinello from Miami, collaborators George Scheer, Stephanie Sherman, and Chris Lineberry from Elsewhere in NC, and scientist Dan Margulies of The Neuro Bureau Berlin, are in the throes of an ArtMatters research project in an abandoned amusement park. Miami based Spinello and Woodgate have been collaborators with Elsewhere artists since Woodgate’s residency last fall at the thrift-store turned living museum. The group shares an interest in cultural imaginaries, the poetics of abandoned spaces, process-based productions, and artist communities that foster creative collaborations and public exchanges. Since last Thursday, they’ve been investigating the politics, poetics, and possibilities of a former GDR amusement park located within the sprawling Treptow Park in East Berlin. The artists from Elsewhere knew of the park from a 2007 trip, when they hopped the fence (a rite of passage for Berliners and tourists alike) and discovered a wonder world of trees growing through the center of Roller coasters, graffitied gangs of land-locked swan boats, toppled dinosaurs, and suspended amusement.

Land-locked swans.

A  giant Ferris wheel looms over the park.

A moss covered lake beneath the Ferris wheel.

Artist Agustina Woodgate gets her brain scanned at the Max Plank Institute For Human Development.

No official information exists regarding current access to the park, so the group started by casing the park perimeter. Many of the rides and attractions, including the park’s iconic Ferris wheel, sinister looking Roller coasters, partly operating spinning teacups, circus tents, more-than-extinct dinosaurs, and head-shaped cars, are visible through the metal fence. The group came across a security guard, EMGE, who offered a private tour of the park. On the tour, they befriended the guard, who, with his dog Basko, keeps out daily fence hoppers, protecting the privacy of Mr. Witte, now living amongst the abandoned rides.

The artists on the Quik Cup spinning tea cup ride, which is still manually operable.

The Spreepark crew (pictured from left: Agustina Woodgate, George Scheer, Chris Lineberry, Anthony Spinello, and Stephanie Sherman) at Kunst-Werke Berlin Institute for Contemporary Art.

Dinosaurs from another era.

The former Tempelhof airport is now a sprawling public park.

Spreeblitz coaster parked interminably in its dock.

This post was contributed by Stephanie Sherman with collaborators Anthony Spinello, Chris Lineberry, Agustina Woodgate, and George Scheer.

Virtual High from Binaural Beats via HammyBlingBling

This post was contributed by Thomas Hollingworth.

Photo by Steve Crecelius.

The whole of last July saw the launch of Denver’s inaugural Biennial of the Americas, an international event dedicated to “celebrat[ing] the culture, ideas and people of the Western Hemisphere”—a considerable endeavor for any one city. The event culminated in citywide exhibitions, samples of cultural diversity, and a series of roundtables that brought together world leaders, dignitaries, and other industry experts to discuss the broader issues of the day. However, this is not a biennial in the conventional sense, as contemporary art played a surprisingly small role. Instead, it could more appropriately be described as a platform for the hemisphere’s 35 nations to air their grievances, with a few object lessons thrown in.

The campaign for the occasion began back in 2007, when Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, its chief initiator, chose renowned graphic designer Bruce Mau to be the biennial’s director. Mau publicly announced his grand plans in 2008, but eventually withdrew following budgetary negotiations. Nevertheless, plans continued without an artistic director to oversee Denver’s unifying vision. Paola Santoscoy, a recent MA graduate from the California College of the Arts, was chosen shortly thereafter to curate a portion of the program. Given a limited timeframe and slim financial resources, she somehow managed to pull together a thoughtful and critically valid show.

Photo by Steve Crecelius.

Santoscoy (in collaboration with María del Carmen Carrión) has showcased several newly commissioned projects and a number of preexisting works by 24 contemporary artists from nine countries in North, South, and Central America. The exhibition owes its title to Lucretius’ first-century poem De Rerum Natura, which focuses on perception and the diverse, often conventional means by which people interpret and construct the world around them. This premise winds through the exhibition’s multiple threads, such topics as the relationship between man and nature, geographic boundaries, community, technological innovation, and sustainability.

The venue chosen for The Nature of Things was the 100-year-old McNicols Building located in Civic Center Park, a former public library cum government office cum energy-efficient exhibition hall. Before entering the site, visitors got to walk through Mexican Jerónimo Hagerman’s radial garden installation Lime Green Corinthian over Saturn Dublin over Acapulco Chairs (2010), a satirical intervention on McNicols’ neoclassical façade and Corinthian columns, the entirety contrasted here with Mexican pink awning ribbons, and neon-green garden chairs. According to Santoscoy, the building’s tropical makeover was central to the exhibition, exemplifying the way idealized or fantasy landscapes reflect our relationship to the outside world.

Photo by Steve Crecelius.

Inside, the show opened with Puerto Rican Karlo Andrei Ibarra’s solar-powered neon sign, illuminating the words Vivo en America (I live in America), first shown in Havana, Cuba in 2007. A pointed rejoinder to Chilean Alfredo Jaar’s digital art display in New York City, This is not America (1987), Ibarra’s response, referring as it does to someone from a colony of the United States, is especially charged. Yet the phrase’s inherent ambivalence, particularly in its use of the reductive national identifier, which still has enormous repercussions in the region, poignantly comes through. Near by, Peruvian Sandra Nakamura’s laborious E Pluribus Unum (2010) continues this conversation with a large-scale floor installation of 347,208 pennies, totaling $347 billion dollars paid by undocumented Hispanic workers in the U.S. since the 1970s. Given the recent introduction of Arizona’s proposed immigration laws, it is unfortunate this topic seems to have been omitted from the roundtable discussions.

Photo by Steve Crecelius.

Many of the works in The Nature of Things share Ibarra and Nakamura’s utopian or ironic sensibilities, wherein a more considered (or less didactic) response takes precedence over hard rhetoric. This is clearly evident in Mexican Pedro Reyes’ Palas Por Pistolas (2008), comprised of pristine shovels lined up in a row on the gallery floor, as well as a number of single-channel videos, which narrated the larger project. To get his venture off the ground, the artist partnered with a local botanical garden and a Mexican government campaign aimed at reducing the number of handgun deaths. The weaponry collected during the campaign was melted down and forged into shovels, which were then used for planting trees across cities in Mexico and other world destinations. Palas Por Pistolas, a clever play on ‘shovels (or trees) for guns,’ highlights the need for taking an all-inclusive approach when redressing social ills.

Photo by Steve Crecelius.

While incorporating artists who use a variety of media and express different approaches to, and interests in the topics at hand, Santoscoy organized a cohesive exhibition that examines how we define the Americas and the possibilities of our collective future, which in turn pushed the biennial’s themes beyond their buzzword-like status. Though the 2010 Biennial of the Americas was more of an international conference than biennial, it certainly was a step in the right direction[.]

This post was written by Kristin Korolowicz and contributed to Artlurker courtesy of DaWire.

Jillian Mayer, Scenic Jogging.

Last Friday night, the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami packed the house twice for Optic Nerve XII, an annual festival of film and video by South Florida artists and filmmakers. Both the 7pm and 9pm screenings were so full that a satellite room was set up for the overflow and a third screening was added for the next afternoon. The strong and enthusiastic crowd – artists and supporters of all ages – was ripe for entertainment, and Optic Nerve supplied. From close to 100 applications, the jurors picked 22 short, fast and furious videos, all 5 minutes or less. And videos they were. Although it’s technically a film and video festival, film appears nostalgically in Optic Nerve as a medium of a former era, like cassette tapes or 8-tracks. These are clearly digital days.

The evening opened with Autumn Casey’s Getting Rid of All My Shoes, one of the evening’s three chosen winners (a fourth, chosen by the audience, will be announced this week at www.mocanomi.org). The first shot of the night showed Casey digging through her closet, throwing shoes into a plastic bin for what turned out to be quite a long time – she has a lot of shoes. The video then shifted into shorter clips, each one framing Casey putting out a single pair of shoes in a random neighborhood spot.

Autumn Casey, Getting Rid of All My Shoes.

Casey’s video was followed by Jillian Mayer’s Scenic Jogging, a frantic 1-minute shot of Mayer running through city streets to keep up with a moving projection of a landscape. Up next, Erwin Georgi’s equally concise Lines, a shifting composition of symmetrical pulsing lines straight out of the club, complete with bass-heavy sound. From here, sensory overload continued in a wild ride. Almost all of the artists featured in Optic Nerve freely mixed media to produce a collage of moving image and sound, including some combination of low-tech video, digital animation, scrolling text, found sound and footage, hand-drawn elements and ominous electronic music, sometimes all at once.

(R) Erwin Georgi, Lines, (L) Moira Holohan, Look at the Signs.

Moira Holohan’s Look at the Sign used not only live action but video montage, painted animation, green screen and found sound. Hers is a good example of the additive nature of almost every work in the show. After incorporating multiple image sources, very few of the artists used synchronous sound, meaning sound generated by the image being filmed, so the audio was yet another source of sensory information for the brain to integrate.

Even when the media was reduced to a more classical combination – single image, single audio track – the pace was rapid-fire. Two loosely narrative works, including Justin H. Long’s In Search of Miercoles – another winner, and Eve as a Young Girl, Vanessa Cruz’s Kentridge-style animation, were almost jittery.

There were few meditative moments in Optic Nerve, all instant recognition, nothing requiring a little reflection to fully comprehend. For this reason, the show seemed very of the moment, blissfully free from the burdens of what has come before, like a rebellious child smashing toys together. When references to history were made, it was generally not art history but popular culture or simply the history of technology. Susan Lee-Chun’s Let’s Suz-ercise! (Chicago Style), the third winner, was a fully satisfying dance show of the artist’s alter ego exercisers. It brings to mind the best of 90’s music video artists like Chris Cunningham. Look up Windowlicker on YouTube if you don’t know what I’m talking about.

Susan Lee-Chun, Let’s Suz-ercise! (Chicago Style).

Scenic Jogging and Barron Scherer’s Wall Street Neu!, were based on containing one form of media inside another. Wall Street Neu! frames an out-of-register projection of Oliver Stone’s famous 80’s film, Wall Street. Both videos deconstruct their own technological origins, pointing to the ephemerality of any medium and the brief glory days before another medium takes over.

Many were like television on crack, including Dee Hood’s Believe, which layered a scrolling text (Twitter results for the word “believe”) over multiple stacked frames pulsing through all manner of video imagery. The sound was the ever-present morbid electronica. Believe went beyond the saturation point – it was impossible to take it all in. The same can be said for Scott Draft’s Apocalypse and Emerson Rosethal’s Pseudocoma.

Overall the works went for maximum. This went on for over an hour. After the screening finished, audiences seemed animated though perhaps too stunned to talk about the show in any depth, at least not before taking a minute to just breathe and be quiet[.]

Dee Hood, Believe.

Optic Nerve XII was on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami August 6^th and 7^th, 2010

For more information please visit: www.mocanomi.org

Susan Lee-Chun image courtesy the artist and David Castillo Gallery. All other images courtesy the artist.

This post was contributed by Annie Hollingsworth winner of this year’s Miami Writer’s Prize.

powers of ten :: charles and ray eames from bacteriasleep on Vimeo.

This post was contributed by Thomas Hollingworth.