at Contrasts Gallery Shanghai

November 22 – December 22, 2009

Vernissage: Sunday, November 22, 2009 3-6pm

Contrasts Gallery, No. 181 Middle Jiangxi Road, G/F, Shanghai, China 200002

SHANGHAI – Contrasts Gallery is pleased to present SKIN: BINGYI, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Shanghai.

A provocative painter, Bingyi is best known for her strange, exotic imagery exposing the most sensitive aspects of human relationships.  SKIN best exemplifies the virtuoso nature of the artist’s oeuvre.  The exhibition design includes seven site-specific installations of paintings and sculptures, which Bingyi terms “seven environments.”  The spaces that she invokes range from classical salon to mortuary shrine; from cave to private bathroom.

To Bingyi, there are only two characters in the visual world that she has created: You and I.  All of her experiments playing with the idea of “You and I” complicate our understanding of various relationships, between ourselves and the images, between man and woman, and between objects and images.  Bingyi paints sadness, pain, sentiment and joy, as well as all emotions possibly reflected by human interaction.  Yet she is not satisfied with just portraying emotions: she also raises several questions about the time and space that contain these experiences and emotions.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a Salon that displays over forty paintings of various styles.  The theme of the salon is “How Do You Remember Your Body?”  Bingyi carefully crafts images (content) and frames (presentation) from different eras and continents to present a critique of the temporal and spatial parameters that stabilize our mentality.  For example, the painting entitled “Lady in White, My Whistler” appears to evoke a Whistler painting with the same title.

However, close examination of the painting will reveal that the frame and painting are antiques, which Bingyi later painted over.  And the audience will come to realize that the Whistler painting in reference does not actually exist.  Like the formalism of the Salon itself, Bingyi commentates on a fantastic historic style and a visual world.  Neither world exists in reality, but they somehow manage to develop a lingering impact on the psyche of our contemporary cultures.

Bingyi’s art is often confessional in terms of inspiration.  The strength of her expression lies precisely in this directness of her approach.  Bingyi’s titles, such as “I Sucked All the Blood Out of You, I Hurt Too” or “Looking at Me Through You,” just like her images, are equally literal, graphic and comical.  The conceptualism in Bingyi’s painting happens when she confronts the tensions and turmoil in her own life.  For example, “The Men that I Loved,” is a crystal resin sculpture that contains personal belongings of a number of men that she loved.  “The Square Footage of Your Skin” is a seemingly minimalist white painting, yet it is also the most straight-forward measurement of her touch.

The liveliest piece is “The Volume of My Heart.”  The sculptural installation is essentially an old bathtub containing the metal gallium in the volume of the artist’s heart.  When the water inside the bathtub is heated to a certain temperature, the gallium melts; otherwise, it returns to solidity.

SKIN, to Bingyi, is not only a description, a noun, or a title.  It is an organic experience that becomes marked by accidents, events, or interventions of other human beings.  Painting, as a medium, allows her to make images that turn one’s physical being into mental reminiscence.  The content of these paintings inevitably explores problems related to conflict, violence, intimacy and tension that permeate all human dynamics and personal experiences.  Bingyi argues that the notion of sensuality can be both physical and ideological, as she perceives such notions as a direct expression of the various problems introduced by the debates of modernity.

Since Bingyi’s first solo show in 2007, she has exhibited worldwide at various museums, galleries and biennials.  She has shown at the Caixa Forum in Madrid, Today Art Museum in Beijing, Max Protetch Gallery in New York, Erna Hecey Gallery in Belgium, The White Rabbit Collection in Sydney, the Chinese Architecture Biennial in Chongqing, and the Gwangju Biennial in Korea.

Bingyi holds a Ph.D. degree from Yale University.  She currently lives in Beijing and Buffalo, New York. She is an Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo.

About Contrasts Gallery

Contrasts Gallery is dedicated to presenting creative excellence in art and design from East and West to the international art community. Founded by Pearl Lam in 1992 in Hong Kong, the Gallery nurtures and promotes creative talents where art, architecture, and design intersect. The gallery’s exhibition program is designed to create new cultural exchanges by representing artists from all parts of the world working in divergent traditions and across disciplines. Contrasts Gallery is based in Shanghai with an additional gallery in Beijing.

For additional information and images, please contact:

Moxian Sun +8621 6323 1989

Selections from Sculpture

Opening reception Thursday November 19, 5-7pm

The exhibition will be up through December 7.

Department of Visual Studies Gallery
B45 Center for the Arts
University at Buffalo
North Campus
Buffalo, NY, 142260-6010

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday – Friday 10am – 6pm
Saturday 12-5pm

Best Practices in Banana Time with Dr. Rodenberger

Can a doctor perform the same job in the real world and in the virtual? What about a minister? Or a classical musician? What happens when the real life workplace and the virtual collide?

Find out this Saturday, Nov. 21, 2009, at the pilot launch of the mixed reality talk show “Best Practices in Banana Time with Dr. Rodenberger”. The talk show will take place in real life (Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center) and in the Soviet-style TV tower on Eyebeam Island in Second Life (3D social networking virtual world) with both a real life audience (you) and virtual audience.

Inspired by oral historian and broadcaster Studs Terkel’s acclaimed book “Working” written in 1974 exploring what makes work meaningful to people from all walks of life, Doctor Rodenberger (aka guess who) will interview her virtual guests about how they do their jobs in both worlds and how the virtualization of their labor affects the value of the their work.

The evening’s guests will include real life conversationalist Alexis Bhagat and our avatar guests including Pastor Garret Mehrtens, classical pianist Clarissima Schumann and physician Ren Stonecutter. Ms. Schumann will hopefully perform live on her virtual piano.

“Best Practices in Banana Time” is part of the exhibition Conversation Pieces currently on view at CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY. Special thanks to Hallwalls for hosting the event!

So please join us this Saturday night, Nov 21 at 8:00 PM at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center for a thought provoking and rather insane evening!

Best wishes from yours truly,
Doctor Rodenberger

Performance details:
http://hallwalls.org/media-arts/4753.html

More info on the exhibition:
http://www.cepagallery.org/exhibitions/Conversation_Pieces/index.html

And for more info on the wacky world of Second Life:
http://secondlife.com

More Please? The 14th Annual One Day Benefit Sale & Exhibition of Print Media Works by UB Students & Alumni. A portion of each sale supports student scholarship and research in print media.  Multicolored coasters, good for holiday ornaments or drinks will be printed on the Vandercook 099 Proof Press. Afternoon live demonstrations of dye discharge screen printing on black t-shirts will provide hot off the press ready to wear art.

Sale – Thursday Nov 19, 11 AM to 7 PM

Exhibition: – Nov 13-Dec 11

ART496 – Print Media Internship / Henderson

Wanted: A post-modern retro letterpress, printing or book arts aficionado. In addition to gaining experience in the printshop, opportunities include organizational development, exhibitions, marketing, design and research in the book arts, letterpress printing, typography and more.

Internships are meant to provide professional experience and familiarizes students with practices and expectations in the field. Internships are 1-5 credit hours and unpaid. Hours are flexible. Enthusiasm a plus. Per university policy, internship requires 40 hours of work for every credit earned, 3 credits require 120 hours or about 8 hours a week over one semester.

Interested candidates should contact Adele Henderson – come to CFA B34 M/W or email adeleh@buffalo.edu.

Invisible Threads

October 22 – April 5, 2010
LABORAL Centro de Arte, Gijon, Spain

“Invisible Threads – A Virtual Sweatshop” a collaboration between Stephanie Rothenberg and Senior Eyebeam Fellow Jeff Crouse, is featured in this new exhibition curated by Steve Dietz and Christiane Paul. The show addresses the current moment in history where the wreckage of political conflict and economic inequality is piling up, while globalized forces—largely enabled by the “progress” of digital information technologies—inexorably feed us forward. The show features 27 amazing artists and artist teams including Christopher Baker, Paul Chan, Nonny de la Peña and Peggy Weil, Hasan Elahi, Cao Fei, Daniel García Andújar, Goldin + Senneby, Harwood, Wright, Yokokoji, Knowbotic Research, Langlands + Bell, Jennifer + Kevin McCoy, Margot Lovejoy, Naeem Mohaiemen, Ali Momeni, Carlos Motta, Trevor Paglen, System77 Consortium, Piotr Szyhalski, Tamiko Thiel.

BUFFALO, N.Y. — DespinaStratigakos, PhD, assistant professor of architecture in the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning and assistant professor of Visual Studies in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, has received the prestigious 2009 Book Prize from the DAAD (Deutcher Akadamischer Austausch Dienst/German Academic Exchange Service), a publicly funded independent organization of higher education institutions in Germany.

Stratigakos was honored for her 2008 book “A Woman’s Berlin: Building the Modern City” (University of Minnesota Press), in which she examines the era between 1871 and 1918 when women took control of Berlin’s spaces and laid the foundation for a novel experience of urban modernity.

The DAAD prize is presented for the outstanding book on German language, literature or cultural studies published during the preceding two years by a scholar working in a North American institution. It is awarded in alternate years for books in the German studies and humanities fields and in the history and social-science fields.

Stratigakos received the award this month in Washington, D.C., at the 2009 Conference of the German Studies Association (GSA), the international association of scholars in all fields of German studies, for her 2008 book, “A Woman’s Berlin,” which documents the dramatic and significant reconceptualization — both physical and imaginary — of urban space in one of the great European cities through the lens of women’s experience and work.

In presenting the award, which carries a cash prize of $1,000, Celia Applegate, professor of history at University of Rochester and president of the association, said, “‘A Woman’s Berlin’ impressed the jury with its meticulous research, its intelligent use of visual material, its path-breaking content, its elegant argumentation and its multidisciplinary methodology. And it is a joy to read. It represents the best in German studies, and is a book that the GSA can be proud to honor.”

The book was cited by Applegate as “highly original and beautifully written,” one that “enlightens, surprises, entertains and changes the way we think about its subject, by examining how, through the built environment, women architects, designers, patrons of the arts and social reformers ‘remapped Berlin as the birthplace of a new female subject.’”

The book focuses on women’s housing cooperatives, social clubs and buildings for political and social welfare organizations — the urban spaces that Applegate says “reflected and helped to produce an emerging emancipated woman at the turn of the last century, functional spaces that served the professional, social and intellectual needs of this new woman.”

She noted that their architecture also formed, in Stratigakos‘ reading, “a kind of symbolic coded language that challenged prevailing norms of proper, domestic femininity. Indeed, one of the surprises of the work is how radical and bold these building projects were.”

In 2008 the book won the $1,000 Milka Bliznakov Prize awarded by the International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA), College of Architecture and Urban Studies, Virginia Tech, and in 2007 Stratigakos received a $7,500 production and presentation grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts to prepare the book for publication.

A UB faculty member since 2007, Stratigakos is an architectural historian with an overarching interest in gender and modernity in European cities. She has also published on the public image of women architects, the gender politics of the Werkbund (the German Work Federation so important to the development of modern architecture and industrial design), connections between architectural and sexual discourses in Weimar Germany, and exiled Jewish women architects in the United States.

Stratigakos recently curated an exhibition on Mattel’s “Architect Barbie” and is currently writing a book on the work of Gerdy Troost, Hitler’s trusted artistic advisor and one of the most powerful architects of the Third Reich.

Stratigakos received her doctoral degree from Bryn Mawr College, and taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining the UB faculty.

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, a flagship institution in the State University of New York system and its largest and most comprehensive campus. UB’s more than 28,000 students pursue their academic interests through more than 300 undergraduate, graduate and professional degree programs. Founded in 1846, the University at Buffalo is a member of the Association of American Universities.

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Three exceptional artists, recent graduates of the University at Buffalo Department of Visual Studies, will be featured in the exhibition, “Noncommittal: A Prospective Glance 2,” Nov. 5 to Dec. 12 in the UB Art Gallery, Center for the Arts, North Campus.

The show will be presented in collaboration with the UB Department of Visual Studies.

According to Sandra Q. Firmin, gallery curator, and Millie Chen, associate professor and chair of the Department of Visual Studies, the three artists selected for this exhibition, Amanda Maciuba (BFA Print Media ‘09), Rob Rzeznik (BFA Emerging Practice ‘09) and Andrew Vaga (BFA Communication Design ‘09), were chosen for the high quality of their work, depth of vision and how their work addresses the ways technology and architecture influence interpersonal relationships.

The exhibit will take place on the second floor of the gallery. It is free and open to the public. A public reception for the artists will be held Nov. 5 from 5-7 p.m.

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, call 716-645-0570.

“Maciuba, Rzeznik and Vaga draw from the rich scope of present-day contemporary art practice to critique the dissolution of communities due to the establishment of both physical barriers, which isolate people in their homes and apartments, and technological ones, which rely on a model of entertainment based on passive consumption,” says Firmin.

Maciuba’s haunting black-and-white prints illustrate rural communities undergoing a transformation into alienating suburban enclaves. She employs a poetic vocabulary of houses tethered together by ribbons. They, in turn, are ensnarled in trees like Christmas decorations and carried away by ravens.

“Recently, Maciuba expanded her practice to include wall drawings,” says Chen, “and this exhibition will be the first opportunity she has had to create a large-scale installation incorporating sculpture, wall drawing and prints.”

While Maciuba offers an exterior view of cookie-cutter houses vulnerable to unspecified threats, Rzeznick explores potentially combustible scenarios suggested by what we find on television and computer screens.

Now available on YouTube and on his MySpace page, Rzeznick’s darkly humorous animations are mash-ups of a range of television genres from courtTV and adult cartoons, to Sesame Street and shoot-them-up videogames. His work is a commentary on a culture enured to mindless TV flipping and Web surfing.

“In the gallery, where their ability to shock is amplified,” Firmin says, “Rzeznick’s videos seem to ask about the consequences of prolonged exposure to violence in the media on our interpersonal relationships and our capacity for empathy.”

Vaga, who also references media in his work, does not take such a nightmarish view.

“Nevertheless,” Firmin says, “he is equally concerned about the fact that communication technologies for multitasking and social networking encourage conversations that occur in tweets and abbreviations.

“In an interactive installation in the show,” she says, “he repurposes a webcam, which is routinely used to connect people across distances, using it to capture and abstract people’s movements on a bank of computer monitors, allowing them to creatively engage the technology to generate pixilated patterns.”

Chen points out that a seismic shift has occurred recently in art school curricula. “Today, less emphasis is placed on the mastery of a single area of concentration and more on the integration of art practice and history with theory to effectively address prevalent aesthetic and societal concerns,” Chen says.

“This trend is reflected in the UB Art Gallery’s pedagogical mission to present and interpret temporary exhibitions that examine the dynamic between contemporary art and cultural and socio-political topics,” Firmin says.

“Both the UB Art Gallery and Department of Visual Studies are committed to the practice and scholarship surrounding the history, critical study and making of art. By fostering the creation and presentation of artwork by students who have shown both a dedicated commitment to their art practice and a critical engagement with the world, the ‘Noncommittal’ series supports the continued professional development of these young artists at a critical juncture in their post-undergraduate careers.

The ongoing mission of the gallery and the department is to further the scholarship of young art historians and critical theorists. In addition, Allison Bosch and Denise Lang, graduate students in the graduate program in art history, and José Felipe Alvergue, a doctoral candidate in the UB Poetics Program, contributed thoughtful and insightful essays on each of the artists in this exhibition.

The UB Art Gallery is funded by the UB College of Arts and Sciences, the Visual Arts Building Fund, the Seymour H. Knox Foundation Fine Arts Fund and the Fine Arts Center Endowment.

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, a flagship institution in the State University of New York system and its largest and most comprehensive campus. UB’s more than 28,000 students pursue their academic interests through more than 300 undergraduate, graduate and professional degree programs. Founded in 1846, the University at Buffalo is a member of the Association of American Universities.

Snapshots, 2009

RUST BELT BOOKS
202 Allen Street, Buffalo NY 14201-1416
October 14 & 15 starting at 7:00pm

Snapshots, 2009 is a mini lecture series where a group of students in Photography from SUNY Buffalo, Visual Studies Department will present their artistic development during their studies at university. The two evenings will expose several artistic visions embracing different aesthetics, social and cultural concerns explored by 10 young committed artists.

Meghan Brennan researches how lines and plans explore the physical spaces within a photograph.

Jeannette Wiley explores the boundaries of two dimensional layouts.  Her work consists of design, sculpture, and photography, and varies greatly in subject and style.

Andrea Brough investigates elements of social pressures on women in American society.

Brad Phillips challenges social conformity and its effects on modern dystopia.

Satoshi Tsuchiyama journals his artistic awakenings, explores originality and its relation to the artist. He will also attempt to trace inner expeditions with embodiments of the mind.

Brielle Greenberg uses a variety of medium such as sound, film, and photography. Her body of work ranges from pop art to items of a more personal nature. Her overall research deals with the social and emotional trials and tribulations that affect her generation.

Nicole Wurstner integrates her photos into constructed spaces that recreate other time periods and unusual contexts where unfolds a discovery of “the self”.

Ethan Calabrese focuses around urban landscape and light through both traditional and digital photography.

Jessica Ballard uses photography to capture a particular stillness in landscapes.  Her photographs deal with the idea of timelessness in relation to nostalgia.

Alexandra Turchinsky investigates the daily lives of individuals as she explores the moments when we have forgotten on ‘how to see’.

We look forward to seeing and engaging you for our two evenings of Snapshots.

Contact Information:

Meghan Brennan

Brielle Greenberg