testsite 10.1

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 12:02:37 -0800

Sanders and Smith come together once again but this time doing their own things investigating the myths behind the Greek Fraternity system and the mysteries surrounding these sacred fraternal organizations. Using sound, text and of course Greek letters, the collaborators will transform testsite into a new chapter of the national order of the Pan Hellenic Society. Fuji, Sammies and all the Sigma Chi brothers will surely take note of the new house near to the UT campus.

Just Because

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:46:26 -0800

Karl Marx says that the problem with beauty is that it doesn’t talk back; that is its strength in fact. Its silence reminds us about grace. –Elizabeth ChilesTaking compositions found within the landscape as a starting place, Elizabeth Chiles builds syntax out of the formal and affective relationships between darkness and natural light. Her photographs endow light with temporal and spatial presence—a visible presence that nonetheless gestures toward the imperceptible and ineffable. This handling of light transforms the everyday into something to be revered. In this way, the works in Book of Praise become an ode to a presence akin to that of an altar or inspired text, or what may be the aura of the sacred.Elizabeth Chiles studied with Henry Wessel, Linda Connor and Bill Berkson in graduate school at San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been shown at numerous places in the San Francisco area and in Texas including Stanford University,…

Artist Talk

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 10:46:40 -0800

If [the stranger] remains foreign, [her] coming will not cease; nor will it cease being in some respect an intrusion. –Jean Luc Nancy, L’IntrusIs the artist a stranger who trespasses among us? With an eye to Jean Luc Nancy’s concept of “the stranger,” Mary Walling Blackburn will consider notions of place, ownership and borderlands through the lens of her own artistic practice.Mary Walling Blackburn is an artist and the founder of the experimental school for women, The Anhoek School. Her most recent projects include Carrying Love is Not Like Carrying Money, a project made for e-flux's Time/Bank at Frieze Art Fair/London and SMS Iran, a collaboration with Naeem Mohaiemen featured at Art Dubai Project Space online. LA>

Anhoek School

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:09:39 -0700

homebirth footage* health manuals* sex education films* gynecological self-exam diagrams* contemporary female surgery advertisements* contemporary vaginas.Course description: Throughout the 1970s, the women’s health volume Our Bodies, Ourselves was a staple in counter-culture households throughout the United States. It included a photo of a woman with a mirror between her legs and a text urging the naked woman to know herself and love what she saw. Last spring, Apexart gallery advertised a lecture on "The Designer Vagina," in which a surgeon discussed the rise and proportion of vaginal cosmetic surgery. These striking shifts in perception from the 1970s to the 2000s indicate the fundamental instability of readings of the vagina. The consequences of imagining the vagina as an object (whether of contemplation, admiration, or improvement) have ranged in scope, and invite a more unruly reading and/or experience of the vagina as subject. (Perhaps…

Conversation

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:13:58 -0700

Fluent~Collaborative, in conjunction with Arthouse, hosts an informal exhibition of artist books by Celia Alvarez Muñoz and a conversation between the artist and Roberto Tejada, the author of a recently released book on Muñoz. The book, Celia Alvarez Muñoz (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), will be available for purchase at the event.Celia Alvarez Muñoz has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. She has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and her work was included in the 1991 Whitney Biennial. Her conceptually-based practice draws on family and communal memories to explore her own experiences growing up Catholic and Mexican American on the Texas-Mexico border.Roberto Tejada is associate professor of art history at the University of Texas, Austin. Most recently, he published National Camera: Photography and Mexico's Image Environment (University of Minnesota Press,…

Satellite Summit

Mon, 18 May 2009 07:38:44 -0700

testsite and ...might be good will host a live Satellite Summit via webcast for A National Summit on Arts Journalism: New Models in Cultural Coverage on October 2, 2009 from 10:30 am to 3 pm CST.The Summit will present five competitively-chosen projects that offer sustainable new models for supporting arts journalism. In addition, the Summit will present five other ideas both from inside and outside arts journalism that touch on issues in finding new models.After the webcast presentations, …might be good Editor Claire Ruud will lead a conversation about these issues as they relate to midsized art communities like Austin’s. Also, feel free to bring your laptop, iPhone or Blackberry so that you can participate in the nation-wide conversation via Twitter.Space is limited. Please RSVP to Claire Ruud at cruud@fluentcollab.orgA…

testsite 09.3

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 10:03:58 -0700

KNITTING MARATHON: Final Open Knitting HoursThis Sunday, July 26, Noon to 6pmFor testsite 09.3, Sheila Pepe and Elizabeth Dunbar seek to engage a diverse audience in conversation and action regarding the relationship between DIY culture, craft and contemporary art. At a political, economic and cultural moment in which practicality and action are critical, “the heart of Pepe’s project concerns sustainability—sustainable art making, to be exact.”In the rooms of testsite, Pepe will install massive networks of crocheted yarn– skeins of yarn available for constructive re-use by testsite’s visitors. Throughout the exhibition’s duration, visitors are “encouraged to become interpreters, collaborators, to sit down and literally unravel Pepe’s crochet stitches, and then use the same yarn to knit items for personal or domestic use, i.e. scarves, hats, socks, mittens, slippers, purses, cosies, potholders, etc. This collaborative effort removes…

testsite 09.2

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 12:10:28 -0800

Please note: We will be closed for the Mother's Day holiday, Sunday, May 10. Additionally, testsite's gallery hours have changed. We are now currently open Sundays 2-5 pm and by appointment.A conversation between two “cultural contributors” is at the heart of every testsite project. Justin Boyd and Nick Tosches began their conversation with a common interest in American culture; both Boyd, over the last few years, and Tosches, over the past few decades, have created bodies of work exploring the American spirit—ugly, bold, yet ever hopeful. But what happens to a conversation about our national identity when everything around us seems to shift overnight?For many of us, America suddenly feels young again. Especially for those who came of age during the Bush era. A sense of fruitful possibility breaks through the murky darkness of the headlines that continue to loom around us. Yet as historical events swirl around…

testsite 09.1

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:32:03 -0700

testsite 08.5

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:00:00 -0800

"We want to be in control of our lives. Whether we are jungle fighters, craftsmen, company men, gamesmen, we want to be in control. And when the government erodes that control, we are not comfortable."- Barbara Jordan"When you come back with no arms or legs, then you can say war is fun"- The Dicks ("I Hope You Get Drafted") For testsite 08.5, Temporary Services will investigate two aspects of the state's cultural and political history that embody its radical independence: the development of Punk music in Austin during the early 1980s, and the speeches of Barbara Jordan, the great, late United States representative from Texas. This will be Temporary Services' first exhibition in the Lone Star State. As part of their ongoing series of publications entitled Temporary Conversations, Temporary Services will publish two new booklets drawn from interviews, memories, and artifacts contributed by Punkers. One will celebrate the band The Dicks and a separate…

testsite 08.4

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 22:00:00 -0700

Matthew Ronay’s art occupies a space where illustration, tableau, sculpture, and installation all intersect in harmonious indifference to one another. Beginning in 2004, his arrangements of discreet, colorful, mutated objects evoked wild manifestations of surrealist imagination and hallucinogenically induced visions, with distended narratives designed to provoke or even outrage viewers through their irreconcilable compositions and outrageous imagery, such as drooping anuses skewered on a pole. Indeed, like Dada and Surrealist artists earlier in the 20th century and American Funk musicians of the 1970s, whose work employed metanarrative, metaphor, provocation, and fantasy as devices for addressing human behavior in times of social upheaval, Ronay’s work has been a manifesto of the spirit, screaming back at us with pieces that suggest that fear, pain, and violence have replaced pleasure in a society increasingly indifferent to war and terrorism.His more recent work…

testsite 08.3

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 22:00:00 -0700

The testsite collaboration between artist Cliff Hengst and writer/curator Lawrence Rinder draws inspiration from the presence in Austin—at the Harry Ransom Center—of two remarkable historic artifacts: the very first photograph (c. 1826), a simple image of rooftops seen through the window of the photographer Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s home in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France, and the archive of the English author Denton Welch (1915-1948). Welch himself frequently used the image and metaphor of the window to express the threshold of the imagination and the entry point into the unknown. Echoing the Niépce photograph while addressing the domestic status of the testsite location, Hengst has painted on the living room wall an image of the view from the upstairs bedroom window of the house’s occupant, Laurence Miller. (Hengst has installed in Miller’s private area a single work that remains concealed from the visiting…

testsite 08.2

Sun, 6 Apr 2008 22:00:00 -0700

This exhibition takes its name from a 1956 collage by the British artist Richard Hamilton. Staged as cross between a domestic interior and showroom, the picture constructs a space crammed with Modernist furniture and an over-abundance of appliances. (Hanging over the TV, a comic book picture framed next to an ancestral portrait stakes this work’s historic claim as an icon of Pop art). The title came up, at first humorously in conversation with Beverly Semmes about how we might approach the opportunity testsite presents: for a curator (me) to invite an artist (her) to collaborate on a project with some site specificity inasmuch as it is largely located in a living room. Our subsequent decision to make eponymous Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? immediately provided a useful set of correspondences upon which to build, and now enter, this installation. Starting with collage.Semmes…

testsite 08.1

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 22:00:00 -0800

Ether is a collaborative work by Frances Colpitt and Terri Thornton based on the idea of invisibility or near invisibility in art. In this collaboration, Thornton and Colpitt complicated the standard relationship between artist as creator and critic as interpreter through a process of exchange and response. Inspired by Thornton’s delicate drawings and pin-pricked words on the wall, Colpitt wrote an essay exploring related works in modern art history—those that approach invisibility but are still able to be seen and those that are fully invisible, such as Robert Barry’s Psychic Series. Colpitt’s essay in turn served as fodder for a new body of work by Thornton. In nine works on paper and a pin-pricked piece created in situ at testsite, Colpitt’s essay is visually reiterated but never fully legible.

Fluent~Collaborative: testsite