Find us on the HIGH 5 REVIEW!

heyo,

Quick update on this blog.... and where to go in the future for updates.....

As of today, this blog will remain here to redirect people and as an archive, but we won't be updating it anymore. We are happy to announce the building of our new online arts-paper --- The High 5 Review (www.high5review.org). There will be a TRaC section in the newspaper that will pick up where this blog left off. Expect weekly posts about TRaC ongoings, TRaC reviews, event announcements, and much much more!


Events like first friday Pizza and a Movie Nights will continue to be announced on Facebook (become a fan of High 5 here) and the High 5 Review.   Both will have updates for free tickets to shows, news about special TRaC events, and random posts about random arts opportunities for teens.

And if you're not on High 5's e-mail newsletter, you're missing out on new shows, reviews and event announcements every week! Sign up here to get the inside beat on all things art in the city: www.high5tix.org/mailinglist

We'll see you out there at the shows!
(and on the High 5 Review)

the matriach showing me the food that my land produces and Joy -Ann showing me the 20acres

Apply for spring Visual Arts TRaC

Applications for spring Visual Arts TRaC are now available for eligible high school students at www.high5tix.org/TRaC.

Come together with people from different backgrounds and schools who want to explore the arts and sharpen their critical eye.  Imagine yourself and these 12 peers attending world-class performances, meeting professional artists and critics, and breaking it down in weekly two-hour workshops.  All while improving your writing!

What else will you do in Visual Arts TRaC?

• Attend at least 5 shows and exhibitions
• Experience the NYC arts world with behind-the-scenes access
• Learn from high-profile professional artists and critics
• Expand your critical writing and dialogue skills
• Publish reviews read by thousands
• Meet like-minded peers from all over NY and NJ
• Master New York City’s public transportation system
• Discover more about yourself!

ArtsConnection/High 5 partners with the Museum of Arts and Design (a.k.a. the MAD Museum) to bring you the best in the visual arts from around the city.  The Visual Arts TRaC schedule is as follows* (subject to change):

TRaC Kickoff Party, 4:30 - 6:15, March 16

8 Classes on Thursdays @ the MAD Museum 4:30 - 6:30

March 18, March 25, (off March 31 for Winter Break)
April 8, April 15, April 22 (off April 28 for Spring Break)
May 6, May 13, May 20
+ the 5 or 6 exhibition outings TBD

The TRaC Finale, 2:00 - 4:00, May 22

Download a TRaC flier and application today at www.high5tix.org/TRaC.  Or attend our Open House on February 25th to get more information.  Applications are accepted on a first come, first served basis.  (Yes, all former TRaC participants may take another TRaC class.  Yes, you must resubmit an application).


Applications are due on March 4th.

Friday Dec. 4: Open Studio at MAD with Jil Weinstock

Rubber. Its uncanny approximation of flesh, its factory aesthetic, its art historical precedents have all made rubber an irresistible medium for Jil Weinstock. She use its ambivalent appeal to beguile the viewer with questions about identity, beauty, memory and artifact. First using it as nature entraps a fly in amber for the suspension of household objects in a celebration/critique of domesticity. Then for making vintage dresses float Ophelia-like in compositions revealing their seams, linings and zippers. And then for its ability to mold the shape of a shirt so convincingly it looks ready to wear except for its waxy sheen.

These textile sculptures hang on the wall much like vanity mirrors or portraits or groups of cast-rubber forms that have a familial relationship. The fabrics become sheer and sensuously folded when suspended in the rubber. The material's fleshy surface acknowledges the body while the strict geometric shape of the pieces shows her continuing exploration of formal and photographic composition. Confined by these formal shapes, the garments have fallen into folds that enhance the intimate impression of being worn, evoking the very skin that wrinkled them. The delicate and fragile garments are placed and arranged; carefully tucked , pinched and folded. In looking at these artifacts, the viewer feels like a nostalgic voyeur.

The amber color of the rubber is similar to that of sepia-toned photographs – precious mementos of lives no longer with us. This idea has become the departure point for Jil Weinstock's next body of work.

Represented by: Charles Cowles, New York; Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Education: BFA, University of California Berkeley; MFA, University of California at Berkeley

Selected One-person exhibitions in order of most recent first: Walter Maciel Gallery, LA, CA, Byron Cohen, Kansas City, MI; The University of Alabama Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY; Catherine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Davidson Contemporaries, Seattle, WA; Avram Gallery, Southampton College, Long Island Univ., Southampton, NY; Caren Golden Fine Art, NYC; Orari Galleria, Milan, Italy; Perimeter Editions, London, England; Frumkin/Duval Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The Cultural Arts Center, Vienna, Austria; Novy Horizon Galerie, Prague, CzechoslovakiaSelected awards, honors and publications in order of the most recent first: McGrath Grant, ³Bottle: Contemporary Art and Vernacular Tradition", Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, (catalog production); ³Rubber! Fun, Fashion, Fetish², book by Janet Bloor, published by Thames & Hudson, work reproduced; Women¹s Visual Studies League Grant (catalog production); Whitney Museum of American Art, Youth Insights Pilot Program; SECA Arts nomination, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Polaroid Corporation Artist-In-Residence, Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA; Artist-In-Residence, Richmond Art Center, Richmond, CA

Selected Group Exhibitions in order of the most recent first: "Seams", Noyes Museum of Art, Oceanville, NJ,"Things Remain", Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, "Pattern redefined", Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles, CA,"Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things: 3-logy Triennial 2008, Price Tower Arts Center, Bartlesville, OK,"Reminiscence", Grounds for Sculpture, Trenton,"Undercover", The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT; "A Changing Fabric", Salina Art Center, Salina, Kansas; Hildur Bjarnadóttir, Nick Cave, Jessica Rankin, Jil Weinstock; "Sights", Arco Madrid, Spain; "Beyond Plastics", LIMN Gallery, San Francisco, CA; "A Summer Group", Charles Cowles, New York, NY; "Surfaced", Byron Cohen Gallery, Kansas City, MI; "Bottle: Contemporary Art and Vernacular Tradition", The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; "Crits' Pix", Black & White Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; "Strata", Davidson Galleries, Seattle, WA; "Window Project" New Langton Arts, San Francisco, CA; "Art and Auction", San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA; "Post-Systemic," Hunterdon Museum of Art, Clinton, NJ; "Picture Prone," Avram Gallery, Southampton College, Long Island Univ., Southampton

Selected Publications include: Art in America, ARTNews, Art Scene, Artweek, Fiberarts Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Weekly, Metropolitan Home, The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York Magazine, San Francisco Bay Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Examiner - Magazine, SF Gate, San Francisco Tribune, San Francisco Weekly, Sculpture Magazine, The Seattle Times, Seattle Weekly, Southampton Press, Surface Magazine, Time Out, New York, World, Sculpture News.

Nicole Eisenman at Leo Koenig

Nicole Eisenman moves deftly in and out of genres, sifting through both history and contemporary philosophical concerns with a poignant and searing personal lens. In this series of paintings, Eisenman’s wit, facility and sheer visual eloquence are exemplified. Co-mingled tropes suggest the conflict of the thinking contemporary artist struggling with both the ordinary and the immense issues of the day.

When recently interviewed about her new series of works, Eisenman said this:

"There’s a whole genre of paintings, particularly French ones, of people eating and drinking, and the beer garden seems to be the equivalent, for certain residents of twenty-first-century Brooklyn, of the grand public promenades and social spaces of the nineteenth century. It’s where we go to socialize, to commiserate about how the world is a fucked-up place and about our culture’s obsession with happiness."

Communication, or perhaps the futility of it, seems to be a lingering premise in these visually hypnotic and psychologically fraught paintings. The large and medium scaled works depict group scenes at beer gardens, conversations between various night creatures at a dinner table, and a couple langorously reclining. Color and pattern play a pivotal role in the accessibility of these works. Fascinated by shifting ways of seeing, Eisenman acknowledges pattern recognition as an integral aspect of visual communication as well as a tool to vary perception.

Though coupled or grouped together, Eisenman’s canvases are populated with characters that seem adrift in their own thoughts. The scenes are suspended in that comforting “golden moment” at night before things go one way or another. The artist’s proclivity for painting each character differently heightens the sense of “being alone in a crowd.” Throughout, Eisenman offers an insight into the isolation experienced in the pursuit of artistic creation and the very human need to seek diversion from that same pursuit.

Nicole Eisenman currently has a solo exhibition at the Tang Museum, Skidmore College, NY. She has also had solo shows at the Kunsthalle, Zurich, Switzerland, Barbara Weiss Gallery, Berlin, Germany, and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, in Mexico City, The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, The Centraal Museum Utrecht, Holland and the San Francisco Art Institute.

Olaf Breuning: Small Brain Big Stomach at Metro Pictures

The wall drawings and wood sculptures that make up the core of Olaf Breuning's exhibition are based on the content and imagery of his small, childlike pencil drawings that "speak about the simple questions one could have about life." These drawings are typically produced in concentrated episodes of self-imposed isolation; prior to this exhibition Breuning spent five days alone drawing in his room aboard the Queen Mary II. In their translation to a larger scale, Breuning's humorous and earnest philosophical aphorisms are presented with a directness that is poignantly faithful to their source drawings. The wall drawings use broad black lines painted directly on the white walls. Their sculptural counterparts are essentially three-dimensional drawings made of wooden blocks painted black such as "Me, Me, Me, You and Me," which depicts a human head in profile with each egocentric thought illustrated inside: a dozen "me's" and a single "you." In "Yesnoyesno," the viewer is literally confronted with a wall of indecision.

In contrast to the existential, stark, black and white works, the third gallery is devoted to "color studies," a series of works based on paint and primary colors. Breuning's play with dripping, splattering and spraying paint is documented in these sculptures and photographs. Experiments that began as diversions in the studio evolved into Breuning's active engagement with painting and abstract art—issues he never before considered.

Olaf Breuning was born in Switzerland and lives and works in New York City. www.olafbreuning.com

Tim Eitel: Invisible Forces at Pace Wildenstein

This series of new oil on canvas paintings by Tim Eitel is his second solo exhibition at Pace Wildenstin. A catalogue with an essay by Joachim Pissarro, Bershad Professor of Art History and director of the Hunter College Art Galleries, will accompany the exhibition. Tim Eitel: Invisible Forces will be on view from November 6 through December 5, 2009 at 545 West 22nd Street, New York City.

In Tim Eitel’s emotionally complex and stirring paintings, the artist conflates fragments of images and memories of everyday life with print and film media, as well as the history of art. Using formal, realist painting techniques, Eitel creates disconnected worlds extracted from time. The artist isolates his anonymous subjects from their contexts, profoundly elevating the significance of every gesture and nuance. Past and present, memories, feelings, and associations converge, evoking ambiguous narratives which force viewers to reexamine their own perceptions of society and to see that which they often allow to become invisible.

The new works are based on pictorial elements isolated from photographs that Eitel takes on city streets as part of an ongoing investigation of the world surrounding him. Eitel uses ambiguous settings and distills out all reference to motion or change, allowing the works to become a lens into the viewer’s own contextual references and associations. “There is a saying that we only see what we know, and sociologically, this notion might explain why it is so easy to ignore the homeless, the cardboard boxes, and the pigeons, that are all over the streets,” Eitel explains; “If you don’t ‘know’ these things, they become invisible. But in front of a painting, you bring so many things you know already—your expectations, taste, opinions—that you can’t help but look at the subject with other eyes. A painting is much like an invitation to go and see things differently.”

Some of Eitel’s most recent works have become markedly more abstract, accompanying his growing interest in formal composition, like paintings in which figures disappear altogether: a pile of cloth strewn across the floor, a cot with rumpled sheets, paper towels and bags on the sidewalk. Looking to Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, Eitel’s abstraction is closely tied to spirituality and philosophy and how these messages can be expressed through art. Formal structure and meaning work in tandem in his canvases, such as Crows, 2009, (85-1/8" x 70-1/8"), where the bleak, grey backdrop serves as a formal device and simultaneously emphasizes a sense of despair.

Tim Eitel was born in 1971 in the southern German city of Leonberg, near Stuttgart. He graduated with a degree in painting from the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig in 2001. Eitel first gained recognition as a co-founder of the collective art gallery, Liga, in Berlin. He joined PaceWildenstein in 2006 and his first solo-exhibition at the gallery, Center of Gravity, was mounted the same year.

Eitel has participated in more than fifty exhibitions worldwide since 2000. In 2008, Martin Hellmold, Director of the Kunsthalle Tübingen, Germany, organized and curated Tim Eitel: Die Bewohner, a traveling exhibition which debuted at the museum and had subsequent installations at the Kunsthallen Brandts, Denmark and Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Germany. Other significant solo exhibitions include Currents 96: Tim Eitelat the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri (2005-6); Tim Eitel: Terrain, a traveling exhibition organized by the Museum zu Allerheiligen/Kunstverein Schaffhausen (2004-5); and Tim Eitel at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2002).

Eitel’s work has also been included in a traveling exhibition organized by Mass MocA (2004-2008) and in group shows at the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2008-9); MART Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy (2008); Cleveland Museum of Art (2005); Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2004-8); Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig (2003); and Frankfurter Kunstverein (2003).

Eitel has received a number of prestigious scholarships and awards throughout his career, including the Marion Ermer-Preis (2003) and the Landesgraduiertenstipendium, Saxonia, Germany (2002). He was granted an artist’s residency in the International studio programme at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin in 2002. His work is part of numerous museum collections and important private collections worldwide, such as the Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Germany; Ovitz Family Collection, Los Angeles; Sammlung Essl—Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Austria, and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami.

The artist lives and works in New York City.