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As winter continues on into it’s doldrums, you can do a nice thing for your houseplants and give them a shower!  The dry air from heat doesn’t do these guys any good.  A tepid shower fully hydrates them, gives them a nice dose of humidity, and cleans off their dusty leaves.  They will reward you for your efforts with renewed growth and a little extra green, all of which helps when the days are very grey.

Untitled Event, Andrew Venell 2011

Photos courtesy of Andrew Venell. The show will be up until March 27th.   Learn about the details of the show here.

Vote on the winner of the first Present Prize:
a $1K travel grant for a Bay Area artist.

The Present Prize is an intermittent artist grant funded by web hosting fees and awarded by the community of hostees with help from the general public. Each grant period will have a new theme targeting an underfunded area of the creative landscape.

For our first prize, we have teamed up with the Collective Foundation to create a $1K travel grant to a Bay Area artist in order to address a possible reason why Bay Area artists often leave the area after a period of “incubation”. Joseph delPesco, founder of the Collective Foundation speaks eloquently about the reasoning behind this grant theme on the SF Moma blog. (excerpt below)

“Unlike most first-world countries we don’t have a cultural agency at the state or federal level that funds artists’ travel. I have an untested theory that if Bay Area artists had support for mobility that they would be more likely to stay. While the last sentence may sound counter-intuitive, I think one reason artists leave is the relative isolation of the Bay Area in relation to the art centers. More to the point, It appears that most of the artists who have stayed are those who have been able to develop projects and find exhibition opportunities outside of the Bay Area.”

Nominees* for The Present Prize:

Ajit Chauhan, Alison Pebworth, Amanda Eicher, Andrew Venell, Christine Kesler, Lindsey White, Margaret Tedesco, Matt Borruso, and Nathaniel Parsons

We want to YOUR discerning eye!

This stage of the voting is open to all members of the public.  View proposals and give us your preference in randomized arena-style matchups**.  Voting is open until February 28th, 2011. VOTE NOW >>

*Artists were nominated by two groups of hosting clients whose fees contributed to the creation of this grant.  Artists were then contacted to provide short statements about where they wanted to go and why, an image, and a weblink.

** One of the things we were concerned about regarding the voting process was that we wanted to involved the public, but didn’t want it to just be an online popularity contest.  That’s why we decided on the head-to-head matchup style and a proposal-centered presentation.  We hope that this encourages voters to more fully consider the proposals merits rather than simply voting once for their friend and leaving.

Wapke Feenstra.  Former Farmland, Sagarossa, Spain, 2008; pamphlet/poster, 5.88 x 4.16 in. closed, 11.66 x 16.75 in. open.

Welcome Landfill!  A new project by Ted Purves and Elyse Mallouk, Landfill is interested in the funny little pieces of information or material byproducts that are produced by social practice artists.  They are cataloging these pieces of history on their website and have also started an art subscription to allow more people to collect and learn about these projects (at a really reasonable price: $60/year for 4 issues).   The subscription will consist of a Journal along with selected pieces of actual ephemera.   Perhaps a good preview of what the Journal will be like is these two articles on Art Practical highlighting this project.  Here’s a tidbit describing themselves:

Landfill is a project that archives, studies, and redistributes the material byproducts produced by ephemeral artworks. It creates a second venue for projects that largely existed in non-material form, and aims to build a non-linear history of socially engaged art practice.  Landfill exists in three parts: an online Archive, a material Quarterly, and a written Journal.  The Quarterly is distributed to subscribers four times a year.  It contains the Journal and selected pieces of material ephemera.

As part of the Landfill Archive, supplemental materials become conduits for ideas that continue to circulate.  The Archive is an aggregate capable of accounting for the broad range of projects that self-consciously consider their publics, without laying claim to a singular narrative.  It is accessible all the time, for free.

They are looking for submissions. With this new addition, we now have 5 solid art subscriptions in the Bay Area!  Check out the links on the sidebar to learn about them all.   It’s pretty exciting to see how this model can adapt to suit all sorts of work and interests.  It’s not clear if Landfill will use subscription dues solely to create the journal or if they will also be using some of the funds to compensate contributing artists who often rely on grants to accomplish this sort of work.  My guess is for that price they will need most of the money just to accomplish the creation of the physical journal, shipping, and writing.  However, as they grow, perhaps they will consider sponsoring projects to give back to the community of artists they will rely for donations.

As some of you know, we are launching a new project this year called Art Micro-Patronage, an online exhibition space dedicated to both showing wonderfully curated shows of work that is suitable for online viewing and explores the idea of trying to get people to associate the amount that they appreciate a work with an actual dollar amount.    We’re hoping to debut by mid-year.

But we’re not the only ones who’ve had this great idea. We just learned about United States Artists project which will be like a kickstarter for artists.  I’m glad to see this idea is being approached from multiple angles.  From the NY Times:

Part social network, part glossy brochure, part fund-raising mechanism, the site seeks to democratize arts patronage as government support for the arts continues to decline and private sources of financing also shrink.

“What we’ve tried to do is take the good ideas about microphilanthropy and the good ideas about social networking and put them together in a way that people can learn about artists and learn about their projects and how they work,” said Katharine DeShaw, the organization’s executive director.

In testing, the Web site attracted roughly 36,000 unique visitors and raised a total of $210,000, with an average of $120 from each of 1,500 small donors, Ms. DeShaw said.
Read more>>

The State of the Arts Project led by Joseph del Pesco ( #8 ) was featured in the newest Proximity Magazine (Issue #8, not yet up on their website). We’re honored. And we have 2 free copies to give away.  Make a comment with your favorite art magazine and we’ll pick randomly from the hat.

Wasteland, a multi-media exhibition curated by Matt Cella, opens this Saturday, February 5th, from 6 to 9pm at SOAP Gallery.

A suburban cabinet of curiosities, Wasteland highlights the work of a generation of artists raised on 80′s and 90′s popular media.

Inspired by the emo-bedrooms and basement dens of teenage America, the exhibition will feature works by Adam Hathaway, Amir Esfahani, Anthony Record, Ben Venom, Carrie Hott, David Horton, Jeremiah Jenkins, Julumarie Joy Cornista, Kristen Roberts, Matt Cella, Mike Decker, Neils Neilson lll, Renetta Sitoy, Robert Burden, Ross Campbell, and Tom Mueske.

Wasteland will run until March 5th. The Gallery is located at 3180 Mission Street, in San Francisco.

SOAP Gallery
3180 Mission St
San Francisco, CA

http://206.130.104.2/soap-gallery/

by Wreck and Salvage

Presley Martin (#2), Christine Kesler (#3), and Andrew Venell (critic #7) are all participating in the show “Give and Take” at Lost Coast Culture Machine.  The show opens this weekend.

Friday, February 4, 6-9 PM:  GIVE & TAKE OPENS @ LCCM
Saturday, February 5, 5 PM: ARTIST TALKS (Join artists for a conversation about the Give & Take project.)

Lost Coast Culture Machine celebrates First Friday, February 4th, 6–9 pm, with the opening of Give & Take, an exhibition documenting the results of a seven-month collaborative trans-Atlantic project. Conceived by Tonya McMullan of Belfast, Ireland and coordinated with LCCM, five artists from Belfast and Edinburgh, Scotland and five artists from California were paired off to exchange instructions for the creation of new work. The artists’ instructions varied from the rigid and restrictive, ritualistic and suggestive, to the obstructionist, subtractive, and playful, all aimed to disrupt and augment the creative practices of the other.

The California participants in Give & Take are Anne Beck, Christine Kesler, Dietmar Krumrey, Presley Martin, and Andrew Venell;
the artists from across-the-pond are Acitore Z Artezione, Alexa Hare, Michael Hart, Tonya McMullan, and Paulina Sandberg.
Acitore Artezione, Tonya McMullan, Presley Martin & Andrew Venell will join us for the installation, opening & artist talks. Please come welcome them to Fort Bragg!

Give & Take part II continues at PS2 Gallery, Belfast, Northern Ireland in April 2011.

Give & Take runs February 4- March 27 at the Lost Coast Culture Machine, 190 East Elm Street (across from the bowling alley) in Fort
Bragg. More information at 961-1600, or lostcoastculturemachine.org.

Interactive Display Window from Marcus Wallander on Vimeo.

May this year be full of finding ways to build your own world.