More coverage of Ballroom alumnus Thomas Houseago’s epic exhibition at Storm King from 032c. The excellent “Coming into Form” interview by Cornelius Tittel covers lots of ground, including Houseago’s youth spent brawling in pubs and listening to Joy Division and this excerpt about his landing in Los Angeles …

“You say L.A. saved you.

Yes, to arrive in Los Angeles with nothing but a few friends – it either works or it doesn’t. And it worked. I mean it was tough. I was doing construction work and we had our daughter on Medi-Cal – all that American immigrant stuff!

What is that?

If you arrive in California and your wife is pregnant and you don’t have health insurance, they will help you have your baby, but the process is hyper-brutal. You are given a counselor, because normally if you have just arrived in America and don’t have insurance, you are an immigrant from El Salvador or wherever. I remember in our case they checked us for guns before we could meet our counselor. They told us, “We wanna make sure your baby doesn’t die and your wife doesn’t die, et cetera, et cetera.” You are humiliated and at the same time liberated in an absurd way. But, you know, as soon as we arrived it all started to make sense. I met other artists I could relate to. There was no dogma, you’re never gonna hear John Baldessari saying that one kind of art is better than another, or that a certain artist should not be shown. Like Paul McCarthy, I met him really early and he was always like: “Go for it!” Mike Kelly and Paul really set up a very free, strange, dynamic, exciting atmosphere for younger artists to enter. L.A. is a frontier town with a fantastic wealth of energy and that’s what really saved me.”

Keep reading at 032c.

As I Went Out One Morning at Storm King is “the first large-scale presentation” of Thomas Housesago’s work. As part of the documentation of this monumental undertaking, the Los Angeles-based sculptor took part in a wide-ranging Q&A with Nora Lawrence, including some interesting observations on his time in Marfa as artist-in-residence with Aaron Curry.

“I was included in a residency at the [Marfa] Ballroom. Me and Aaron Curry were doing a show together. Something about being out there in West Texas, and yet you’ve also got this massive figure of [Donald] Judd there. Anyone going to Marfa is either filming a movie or going to see Judd. And me and Aaron were processing a lot of weird stuff. I had met Aaron very early on in my life in L.A. We were removed from our life in L.A., put in this desert with Judd–so that kind of brought out this extreme behavior in both of us that was very, very alcoholic. We were drinking from morning ‘til night and in this weird room in Marfa. I think what I was doing was processing all these pieces that I had kind of hidden. I was making a series of felt works almost as this kind of degenerate behavior, almost like going back to being a kid. We were sort of acting out all these kind of weird arguments like we we’re kids, like getting mad at each other…it was an odd thing. That really was like a long, drawn-out performance. And the “felty”—I was making it with glue, just like when you’re a child you’re doing these crafts. The desire that both me and Aaron had was that we were going to do that show, then destroy a lot of that work—just light it up, boom, move on. You can almost say Judd is the end of something. And we were playing out this thing of being infantile, young artists messing with this whole idea of Judd, this shining example…”

Keep reading at Storm King.

Houseago’s joint residency with Curry took place here at Ballroom Marfa in the spring of 2009. Their time culminated in the Two Face exhibition, and the accompanying limited edition prints.

karthik pandian
Indian Country
May 2 – May 26, 2013
Opening: May 2, 6-8PM

Karthik @ Vilma Gold

This exhibition is co-presented with CineMarfa, an annual film festival in Marfa, TX that foregrounds the intersection between film and visual art. Please visit cinemarfa.org for their complete 2013 schedule.

More info at Michael Strogoff.

Lisa Cooley is pleased to present new work by Erin Shirreff in her second solo exhibition with the gallery, Day is Long.

More info from Lisa Cooley here.

More Shirreff at Ballroom here.

Uhura from Simone Leigh on Vimeo.

From Art Practical:

“The video piece Uhura (Tanka) (2012) stars the author Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts playing Nyota Uhura, the United States of Africa–born communications officer aboard the USS Enterprise in the original Star Trek series. Leigh recalls time spent as a child watching Star Trek and patiently waiting for Uhura to speak: “I had to deal with the conundrum that she mostly repeated one line,” she remembers. The Uhura in Leigh’s piece also remains silent, dutifully pressing buttons and congenially smiling. Nichelle Nichols, who played the original Uhura, holds an unsung but significant place in African American history and is often cited as one of the first black female television characters in the United States that wasn’t a domestic worker. On November 22, 1968, during the episode “Plato’s Stepchildren,” Nichols and her co-star William Shatner performed American television’s first scripted interracial kiss. While it could be easy to miss the significance of this in something as banal as Star Trek, Nichols recalls that when she was thinking of quitting the show, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. told her, “[Uhura] is not a black role or a female role. You have the first non-stereotypical role on television. You have broken ground…We look on that screen and we know where we’re going.”

Read the rest of Matthew Harrison Tedford’s profile of Ballroom alumna Leigh at Art Practical. Leigh will speak on May 1, 2013, at 7:00 p.m. at Nahl Hall at the California College of the Arts Oakland campus.

Ballroom alumna Anna Von Mertens‘ solo exhibition Gold! And Other Fallen Empires opens this Friday at the Boston Center for the Arts, and she writes with word of myriad Marfa connections:

“First off, the title gets its spark from the Gold Rush work exhibited as part of Data Deluge and which Cat Clifford has generously agreed to loan for the exhibition. The Ballroom Marfa diptych will be the first piece viewers see as they enter BCA.

In the main gallery is my latest series Migrations, Invasions, Plagues and Empires which also has a Ballroom connection: when I first started researching ideas for my Ballroom commission I was reading about Texas drought cycles and came across several studies linking climate change and the fall of empires through the study of tree rings. While I was hoping to create a piece in time for Data Deluge, I had to adapt to the timeline of the researchers who were generously collaborating with me. So a year later the series finally exists, and all thanks to Ballroom.”

Anna Von Mertens
Gold! And Other Fallen Empires
BOSTON CENTER FOR THE ARTS, MILLS GALLERY
April 19-June 16, 2013

Opening Reception
Friday, April 19, 6-8 pm

Artist Talk with Guest Curator Kirsten Swenson
Saturday, May 11, 4 pm

On view for the first time is Migrations, Invasions, Plagues and Empires, a series of large scale black-and-white quilted panels whose stitch patterns of historic tree ring cross-sections are derived from studies linking climate variability and periods of human instability. Working for the last two years with international dendrochronologists, Von Mertens culled images from their archives. The events represented in the series–the Fall of the Roman Empire, the Aztec Conquest, the Black Death, and Anasazi migration in the 12th century–correlate to periods of drought recorded by the tree rings. The tree rings (and hence the tree) become a stand-in for empire while being, as W.H. Auden puts it in his poem The Fall of Rome, “altogether elsewhere.”

This survey exhibition will also include a 2012 commission for Ballroom Marfa as well as a selection of aura interpretations of iconic paintings from Von Mertens’ 2009 series Portraits.

Additional images and project statement for Migrations, Invasions, Plagues and Empires can be seen here:
http://www.annavonmertens.com/portfolio.php

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Situated in the most sought after location of Wentworthville is this original family home, with only a short few hundred metres walk to Schools, Shops Train Station.
In early July, Ritchie announced that he had changed the Photo ID amendment’s title to: “Changes to in person absentee voting voter registration; provisional ballots.

From Whitewall‘s recent “Curator Q&A” with Rashid Johnson. Sam Gilliam: Hard-Edge Paintings 1963-1966, curated by Johnson, is on display at the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles until 11 May 2013.

“WW: What do you feel is the currency and the relevancy of these works from the mid-‘60s, these Hard-edge paintings. Why did you want to show them?

RJ: I was interested in, and continue to be interested in, Sam’s entire body of work. I think the reason that I reached into these particular works is that they’re even less familiar than the work that people are familiar with, if they are at all familiar with his work. The Hard-edge paintings were works that I was less familiar with.

I think they’re relevant in a couple different ways. There are some artists functioning in similar ways today. If you get a chance to go to some young artists’ studios today, you’ll see that there’s an interest in Frank Stella, an interest in Barnett Newman, and a lot of young artists are exploring similar directions as these painters. Also, there’s this idea of the escapist tactic that’s been employed in Sam’s work. If you think about the time in which he’s making these paintings—Kennedy gets assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated shortly after that period—and you have a guy living in Washington, D.C., right in the heart of a lot of this discourse, choosing to avoid it. It’s, in its own way, a form of protest. As an artist, as a person considering their environment, from my generation, you would look at the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, and how do artists function and build bodies of work that don’t necessarily address those issues specifically, but are somehow happening at the same time as those things are.”

Keep reading at Whitewall.

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Blatche’s untradeable long term guarantee figures to be amnestied before next season, whereas the final year of Lewis’ contract will be bought out by the Hornets for $13.
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From “The Nothing Act”, a profile of Alex Pearlstein’s recent work in Art in America:

“The circling camera of The Drawing Lesson was a device Pearlstein also used for her 2008 show at the Kitchen. Having created the four-channel video After the Fall in the venue’s black box theater downstairs, she then showed the piece in the white box gallery upstairs, alluding to the differing modes of performance in theater and art. Filmed using a set of four cameras, the video first shows a couple on the verge of having sex, and then the interplay between two groupings of actors, one in pink-and-red costumes and the other in gold-and-black. A couple of the actors feign injury from altercations. The way the actors are divided by costume and actions harkens back to Pearlstein’s earlier, more allegorical work. But the constant observation of the actors by the camera, as well as the greater immediacy of their connection with the viewer, makes the work feel more elemental. Building on such effects, Pearlstein went on to adapt the premise of the musical A Chorus Line (the 1975 play and 1985 film) for her video Talent (2009). A Chorus Line, which ran for over 6,000 performances, setting a Broadway record, is about actors auditioning for parts in a new musical. They laugh, cry, sing, dance and tell heartbreaking stories about themselves and their careers. Pearlstein stripped the musical of its songs and dialogue, leaving only the wondrous, spontaneous ephemera of actors at an audition: waiting, hopeful, bored or yearning for attention. At one point they share a loaf of bread. They turn their acting personas on and off and mingle occasionally, though they mostly stay in line as the camera moves in a parallel track back and forth across them.”

Continue reading …

Alix Pearlstein is the featured artist in this year’s Artists’ Films International, a program organized by Ballroom in conjunction with London’s Whitechapel Gallery, opening 19 July 2013 in Marfa. Read more here.

Krallice guitarist, Ballroom pal, OG hesher and all-around ace shredder Mick Barr serenades diners into infinity at the Ballroom Marfa 10 Year Anniversary Benefit Dinner. Video via Jeffrey Brodsky.

Keeping up with Rashid Johnson — whose New Growth solo exhibition is on display here at Ballroom until July 2013 — takes some doing.