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Posted via web from thepresentgroup’s posterous

Posted via web from thepresentgroup’s posterous

The goal of the Rhizome Commissions Program is to support emerging artists by providing grants for the creation of significant works of new media art. By new media art, we mean projects that creatively engage new and networked technologies to works that reflect on the impact of these tools and media in a variety of forms. Rhizome defines emerging artist as artists who exhibit great potential yet are not fully recognized within their field. Commissioned works can take the final form of online works, performance, video, installation or sound art. Projects can be made for the context of the gallery, the public, the web or networked devices.

Apply here!

For the past couple of days I have been discovering Art Slant, as it calls itself the “#1 Contemporary Art Network.”

It is actually pretty impressive in its dynamic content building and the ways in which it connects artists, galleries, events, resources, writers, and even art lovers/collectors.  Any information that is added by any one person is added into anything or person that it relates to.  Example: If you add an event- the event gets added to the artist’s page, the gallery’s page, the curator’s page.

So artists may have a full page of information with their history of shows and images even if they have not even ever gone onto the website.

There are a couple of things that seem to be unfortunate:

-the inability for it to upload your own blog feed into your profile’s blog

-the fact that there seem to be three categories of profiles and there doesn’t seem to be a way to combine the different profiles: profesional profiles, gallery profiles, and resource profiles.  The Present Group now has a profile in each category and though they are connected through links, I would have to manually update

That last one perhaps won’t be a problem for most people.  So all in all, I am pretty excited by this website and might, just might, stop updating my terrible, ugly, out-of-date myspace profile as this seems a much better alternative with a much more honed audience.  There is also no “friending”.  Your connections are made through who you work with- so it isn’t a popularity contest.

Do it.

www.thepresentgroup.com/TPG-submissions.pdf

Another example of someone believing in creating change in small doses- Ramit Sethi isn’t waiting around to see the change he wants in the world.  He’s contributing to it.

Check out the grant/advice he is offering. It’s due this Thursday!!

A Sneak Peak into the making of TPG8 and into the life of James D. Lang, the owner of Horwinski Printing Company.  Founded in 1906 and dedicated to the craft of letterpress, this business has a long history of  working with artists, unions, politicians, and businesses of all sizes to spread their message.

more after the jump >> Continue Reading »

We’ve decided to elevate this piece by Eva Repo out of the comments section.

Text/ile includes the two conditions of the contemporary art object: tautology and mythology. These two conditions are the main forms of the object after 60′s, the so called conceptual object. Upon the management of their balance or imbalance is based the mass of all the theories and practices since then. The first years of that period there was a prominence of the tautological form. The object was a lectical, anatomical, logical extract. In the revolutionary 70′s the object had to abandon this introversial tautology and develop communicative patterns with the urban environment, the society, the humanity. The object releases all the mythology forms that used to expel. It becomes biographical, social, ethnographical. Since 2000, there is a great interest towards the mythological forms of the object as a light struggle towards globalization and leveling of cultures. The object reveals all the elements expressing its variation, codification and hetetotis (otherness). From another point of view there is the aspect of a new kind of colonization : the accumulation of a variety of ethnographic mythologies to the Western based institutional art system. But this comprises subjects of a future judgement.

According to the above standards, Maggie Leininger presents an object in various and overlapping levels of tautology and mythology. The first notice is the cover of some medical content. This box provides some information that stamp a kind of ‘scientificality’. And this is not a latency. It is the reliance of Leininger’s venture. On this first notice, the ‘form’ of the human genome is indicated and the content of samples is implied. The word ‘legend’ though is written and already provokes a different kind of expectations for the content of the box.

The content of the box are the metaphorical samples of a medical experiment. There are the modulors of Leininger’s experiment: the phenomenon of chromosomes, the procedures of a multiplicity and the one stroke procedure of creating from zero to a whole. Leininger does not aim to offer information or cognitive values. This is the point where she treats her object in a different way from what Joseph Kosuth maybe would do in the 1968, she skips its tautology and enters its mythology.

Weaving segments is the model of her research. Those black and white pieces of textile don’t offer any knowledge. Howbeit this technique is regarding to a strict rationalization as it follows specific traditions to produce the manufacture. The patterns are taken out of the box and they are exposed on the wall. This exposition creates the final impression of the object as the model and the prototype are conceived in the procedure of repetition and proliferation of the main pattern. This is the point where Leininger’s object exposes an irregularity. So far it can be described through all this reading of its readable layers. But now the exposition on the wall offers the optical obvious of the experiment. The object becomes an aesthetic item. The pile of the boxes in the corner is a hasty representation of the chromosome assumption and do not manage to complete as a concept and as an image the initial expectations. The textiles become an interesting gimmick in an unformed object.

The above formal debility is resolved by an extra connotation of Leininger’s project:
The technique used by Leininger provides her with the possibility of an interface with the economic and cultural conditions of her locality. The American textile workers lost their employment as the textils travel to Asia, South America and other places so as to be manufactured by cheaper hands. This long thread starting from the micro human structure to reach -theoretically- the macro structure of the contemporary economy, also represents the to-and-fro state of the conceptual and physical object between a tautology (now it becomes the tautology of the economic mechanism) and a mythology (the poetic weaving of textiles, plots and stories).

This concern of Leininger is creating a link to a feminine heterotis of object construction. It brings to mind the objects of Sheela Gowda who works with dyed ropes as metaphor for the umbilical cord and the birth, but also implies the Indian textile tradition and the colonization of their industry in 18th century. And a look to Sheela Gowda goes back to Eva Hesse and her almost common repetition practice. The long fiber of a connected feminine object is also an aspect of a feminine mythology. An expletory factor is that Maggie Leininger figures a consistent american allure, as a different kind of sensitivity in comparison to Gowda.
In conclusion, the Text/ile is a structure that is articulated in an acrobat’s way among critical points. It is an initial draft of a research in the system of chromosomes. It is the directing of the methodological tools for this research, the patterns of textiles. And it is the presentation of these pieces in a repetition formula and the implications of a transfer to a macro-level of the textile industry affairs. This procedure inevitably follows the moves of a conceptual loom as the conception of the object has to operate in to-and-fro and up-and-down levels of the whole scenery.

-by Eva Repo

Just found this: a good compilation of grants and residencies put out by CalArts.

Check it out here.Â

Asked by Marianna Stark of the Stark Guide

The way that I answered this question was

1. do your research: the information is out there
and
2. make friends

But I think I can be a little more thorough here. I think what Eleanor Harwood added was important and a good place to start:

have a good package.

Make sure you have a complete package, including images, a cv, and an artist statement. I think, though, that it is also becoming more and more important these days to have a website. This site can be fairly simple. You can even use blogs, such as wordpress, livejournal, or blogger, which are very easy to use and have lots of free templates you can start off with. You can create categories or pages that will separate your different bodies of work. A website is a useful tool for the person viewing your work, in that everything is in one place, you aren’t clogging up email with lots of images, and one can view your growth over the years. Also, it helps increase your visibility as galleries can link to your site from theirs, allowing people to gain a better idea of who you are.

Also, going into the idea of making friends, it (a website) is also a good networking tool. You can trade links with people you like and you can keep in close contact with other artists who you respect. Making friends in the real world can be very difficult for some of us. It is very easy to say, “go make friends,” but that is sortof hard to actually accomplish sometimes. But online, it isn’t quite as hard. I am realizing more and more that the artworld is built on connections between people.

Davin Youngs, TPG artist #5, is a great example of this. He tries to update his livejournal with a new photo daily. He keeps up with friends and other artists by monitoring their RSS feeds and commenting on work he particularly likes. And he has found through this network some online projects that have well suited him. He is part of The Ones We Love, Fjordphoto.org, and Anything.

And now for doing your research: The opportunities are out there, you just have to find ones that suit your work. It takes a good amount of time and energy to do this, but art as a career is just that. Find galleries that work with artists like you and approach them, see if they have an open submission policy. We do. Eleanor Harwood does. SoEx does.

Lastly, I thought it could be helpful if I shared the places that we’ve found that list open calls. The only ones that charges money for submitting an opportunity art NYFA and Art Week. Most of them are free to view: Arts Opportunities Monthly and The Art List both charge fees. I haven’t found a great resource for artists in the Bay Area; it seems as though there’s a hole since the shut down of Artist Resource. Many people look down on open calls, but it is a good way for artists to start establishing those all-important connections and getting their work out there.

NYFA
Rhizome
A Singular Creation
Art Deadlines List
Arts Opportunities Monthly ($20 a year- sent via email monthly)
Art Source
Art Week
Chicago Artist Resource
Fecal Face (under forums: Calls for Artists)
Del.icio.us (with tags: /call_and_events, tag/opportunities)
Fjord (under “member news”)
Klog!
Arts Opportunities
TheArtList ($15 a year to view)
PortlandArt (mostly has Oregon-only listings, but occaional national listings as well)
Zurco