Arts

Shooting Gallery

Gallery Spotlight: Shooting Gallery

For Justin Giarla, owner of San Francisco’s Shooting Gallery, opening up an art space in a once-dicey neighborhood was inevitable — especially considering that his captivation with the West Coast’s lowbrow scene started when he was in high school.

“I really got hooked on art, and I would cut history, math, and English to go to my other art classes and stay there all day long,” Giarla says. “After a while, my teachers figured it out, but they never really did anything or said anything because they were just kind of like, ‘Well, at least he’s still in school.'”

Joshua Petker: "Don't Walk Away"
Joshua Petker: "Don't Walk Away"

Zine Scene: Pink Noises

For the past ten years, Tara Rodgers, a.k.a. Analog Tara, has dedicated herself to studying female electronic musicians and the evolving dynamic of gender, creation, and community. With her website, PinkNoises.com, she publishes interviews, investigates the supposed dearth of women in electronic music, and develops collaborative relationships with the many fascinating women that she finds.

In a new book, Pink Noises: Women On Music and Sound (Duke University Press), Rodgers republishes and expands 24 of those interviews (including Ikue Mori, Le Tigre, and DJ Rekha), along with some striking black-and-white photographs and academic meditations on the meaning of her project.  Along the way, she tries to address some of those big questions of gender and music with what she has learned in the past decade.

Gallery Spotlight: Flatcolor Gallery

When Cris Cook was out of a job last May, the freelance art director / graphic designer decided that it was the perfect time to start up a gallery, and soon after, Seattle’s Flatcolor Gallery was founded. “It was in the back of my mind for a while,” he says, “and this situation kind of came up where I was like, ‘Do I go get a full-time job right away, do I freelance and start something of my own, or do I sit back and relax for a summer?’  I guess I decided to take the difficult route and just try to create something new.”

Morgan Lehman Gallery’s Opening Ceremony Sep. 9 – Oct. 9

New York’s Morgan Lehman Gallery recently moved to a 2,000-square-foot space, located at 535 West 22nd Street. To celebrate the grand opening of the new space, the gallery will hold a month-long event called Opening Ceremony, exhibiting work from 18 artists.

Participating in the show is Andrew Schoultz, featured on the cover of ALARM 17, alongside artists like David S. Allee, Laura Ball, Jaq Chartier, Emilie Clark, Alix Smith, Frohawk Two Feathers, and Paul Villinski.

See Chris Force and Sonnenzimmer at Public Works 2 tomorrow!

The Andrew Rafacz Gallery will finish up its weekly Speaker Series as part of Public Works 2: Art Show and Lecture Series tomorrow, Friday September 3, 2010.

Public Works will host another two-piece panel of art-industry professionals, including ALARM’s editor-in-chief Chris Force as well as graphic artists and screen-print studio owners Sonnenzimmer, featured in ALARM 35 and the inaugural issue of Design Bureau. The talks are scheduled for 7-9 p.m., followed by an hour-long reception with free beer and DJ Clerical Error.

Richard Colman

Richard Colman: From Graffiti to Fine Art

When looking at the paintings and illustrations of California-based artist Richard Colman, it’s clear that his electric-hued, intricately detailed images are influenced by everything from Byzantine-era iconography to geometric abstractions. Less obvious, however, is that the Washington, DC native started out as a graffiti artist.

Gallery Spotlight: Okay Mountain

Nowadays, Austin, Texas may be considered a venerable indie music and art Mecca, but only a few years ago, the city’s contemporary art scene was much more transient. The formation of art collectives like Okay Mountain has given artists more incentive to set down roots.

“There wasn’t always a lot going on in terms of spaces, so people just took it upon themselves to kind of just start doing things DIY style and open their own spaces,” co-founder Carlos Rosales-Silva says. “Now, there’s always young people coming through, and it seems like there’s people starting to stick around now, whereas before it was like people would make work for a while and often move to some bigger place.”

Zine Scene: Adam Pasion, Sundogs, & Wasabi Distro

As an American expat living and working in Japan, Adam Pasion faces several difficulties in publishing his journal-style mini comic Sundogs and other zines. Connecting with the locals can be tricky when words like “consignment” and “distribution” don’t translate easily into Japanese, or when professional magazines outsell personal projects.

Glossy, high-end art and fashion magazines are the norm, but zines still have managed to survive and thrive – sometimes by mimicking mainstream culture’s style. However, as Pasion notes, “A zine can look fancy and glossy as long as it is being made by individuals who want to participate with the zine community by trading, writing reviews, and all the other things that advance the zine scene. People who take part in this community are all making zines as far as I am concerned.”

Gallery Spotlight: The Wood Street Galleries

Directly above Pittsburgh’s T-Line Station, at the intersection of Wood Street and Liberty Street, is the Wood Street Galleries, one of downtown Pittsburgh’s prized cultural spaces for technology-based art. Since 2000, the organization has exclusively featured work by media artists and has elevated Pittsburgh’s emerging tech-inspired DIY scene into the fine-art realm.

“I would say what sets [us] apart internationally is that we solely focus on new-media artwork,” says Murray Horne, curator for the Wood Street Gallery. “I think that in North America, we are the gallery that focuses on that more than anybody else.”

Ewerdt Hilgemann’s imploded volumes

German artist Ewerdt Hilgemann has been recognized in the States for some time now, his work reflective of America’s current post-industrial state: a gleaming façade collapsing from within. Comparable to Los Angeles’ industrial damage in the past years, Hilgemann’s volumes express the remnants of a bruised economy and the resultant collective mindset.