ZER01 Artistic Director in NY Times re Upcoming UnConvention

There’s no rest for the wicked – uh make that the compulsively creative.  Steve Dietz, ZER01’s artistic director, recently made the pages of the New York Times for his newest project, The UnConvention, who’s mission is:

• To umbrella the myriad artistic and educational activities (exhibitions, lectures, performances, etc.) that will take place in the Twin Cities during the lead-up and staging of the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.
• To host the alternative media that will converge on the Twin Cities during the Convention.

Working with major institutions in the Twin Cities, like the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and Intermedia Arts, as well as with local universities and community groups,Steve’s project involves more than a hundred local and national artists in an array of exhibitions, events and performances that will begin on Aug. 30 and run throughout the Republican convention, which ends Sept. 4.

Read the New York Times article.

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Final Open Mic / Talent Show at the South Bay Talent Center in San Jose

From Jon Brumit of South Bay Talent Center, part of the 01SJ Biennial’s Who’s on 1st, What’s on 2nd? exhibition:

Please come on down THIS SATURDAY to the final Open Mic / Talent Show here at the South Bay Talent Center in San Jose! This has been an incredible project and I am so excited to watch it come together; even more excited to realize that I have experienced only a tiny little bit of what the fine people of San Jose have to offer!

Saturday August 16 from 4:30 until 8 (or late?) pm ….
We’re on the ground floor of the Lion Building at South 2nd Street @ San Fernando, San Jose 95113

We’ll have a lot of special guests from around the bay including Vito, a former professional touring and studio Top 40 drummer, the inimitable songstress Nanci Armstrong, Lisa Mezzacappa and Phillip Greenlief giving us a fully postmodern bedtime story performance, Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough rocking our faces off with her piano-ness (or will she demonstrate her highly-crafted-duct-tape-nesses?) and if we’re very lucky … special return appearances from Red: the tech-surviving penny whistle player, AC: a local up and coming R&B singer & songwriter, Alaina: an incredible voice with original music, IQ or Vocal Tone: two of the heaviest hitting rapper / writers to come through the center to date. And as usual … there’s no telling what will happen! And for those of you far away – just know you’re invited and missed! And please check out the far-ranging videos on the site when you have a chance. Fun!

The book & audio cd (yes – like a book and record set . . . DING!) will be available end of October, with loads of photos, talent worksheets, video stills, an introduction from Barbara Goldstein, writings from Glen Helfand, Susan O’Malley, and Kevin Thompson, and an audio CD too! Likely I will share some cerebral leakage inking some dark corner of the book (to further test your patience) and above all else … please look for a photo of diarrhea fountain! Oh … San Jose!!

Hope to see you Saturday!
Jon

www.southbaytalentcenter.com

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Daniel Faust at the Gwangju Biennale

Daniel Faust, in 2nd 01SJ Biennial exhibition Superlight, will be exhibiting “Alaska” at the Gwangju Biennale.

Lawrence Rinder writes, in Daniel Faust’s Alaska:

Alaska is banal, sublime, and odd. In a series of thirty-three photographs, Daniel Faust uncovers this character of place, though not with the eyes of a decade-long resident but rather with the just-passing-through glance of a keen-eyed traveler.

There is a glowing pool-table top, a drive-up fireworks stand, a weathered statue of a bear: the kinds of things that have become invisible to people they exist among. In his career as a photographer, Faust has cared especially about such things. His work is in some ways a rescue project, saving images from the oblivion of familiarity. Nothing extraordinary here, just that Daniel saw it. There is a history of off-hand photography, yet I have encountered few photographers who leave their dull subjects alone as confidently as Daniel Faust. It’s a matter of trust.

At times he is not above a nod to local color. A truckload of chain-sawed grizzly bears holding signs that read ‘Welcome,’ and ‘Gone Fishing,’ could have been found nowhere else but Alaska. Another decidedly Alaskan shot: a bush plane poised before a sea-gray gravel runway. And the word ‘Yukon’ adjacent to the word ‘liquor.’

Faust’s images of landscape are at times harrowingly bland and at others rehearse, without apparent irony, the conventions of so-called ‘nature porn’ (snow-capped peak and sunny sky), or veer into Modernist abstraction (close-up furrows of peeling green paint).

“The truly mundane,” says Faust, “upon further and extended viewing, somehow reveals the most. Beyond the kodachrome red. Past the out of focus blur. And into the depths of emotion. Not so known. Nor comprehended.”

Lawrence Rinder is Director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Prior, Dean at the California College of the Arts from 2004 to 2008; and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 2000 to 2004.

Alaska
Faust
2001/08

33 photographs
75 linear feet

archival pigment print
15.5 x 22 inches

gwangju
s korea
biennale

okwui enwezor
artistic director

September 5
to November 9
2008

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