First Friday, February 3: Karla Siegel

Karla Siegel: Paintings

January 13-February 26, 2012

Reception: Friday, February 3, 6:30-9:30PM

Artspace Liberti is proud to present its first exhibition of 2012, Karla Siegel: Paintings. This exhibition runs from January 13- February 26. The reception for Ms. Siegel will be held on February 3, on the First Friday of the month, from 6:30-9:30PM.

Siegel’s paintings on view at Artspace Liberti take their cues from the tradition of portraiture and still life in art history. She arranges these compositions in her home or observes them in places found in her daily life. Working from photographic sources made from these arrangements, she takes an objective view of them, choosing to focus on formal elements such as color, light and form. The paintings record these images but they are captured as if only registered as brief glimpses captured in motion. Movement blurs the subject sometimes to the point of pure abstraction, capturing the speed in which we experience a space, sometimes barely registering it as a well-defined memory. Foreground and background flatten into a narrow space. There is no hierarchy created by the illusion of depth or scale. Equal attention is demanded across the surface of the painting. Supporting and disparate information sometimes are cut into the composition, building meaning through association, creating a fuller account of an experience that in some ways cannot be captured by a single space or arrangement.

Karla Siegel is a Philadelphia painter, trained at Tyler, obtaining her BFA in 2004. Her work has been widely exhibited in the Philadelphia region as well as New York. In addition to her career as a painter, Ms. Siegel has worked at a number of Philadelphia art institutions including the Mural Arts Program, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Main Line Art Center.

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While the gallery does not maintain regular viewing hours, visits can be scheduled by appointment. Please e-mail us at artspaceliberti@gmail.com to arrange a visit. Viewing is also possible during Sunday church services between 9:00AM-1:00PM.

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Artspace Liberti is a multi-discipline arts venue organized and maintained by liberti church east.

http://artspaceliberti.blogspot.com

November/December- Bonnie Kaye Whitfield

Time To Work by Bonnie Kaye Whitfield
November 4th - December 11th
Artspace Liberti
2424 E. York St.
Philadelphia, PA 19125

Contact: Rob Matthews - artspaceliberti@gmail.com

Artspace Liberti is pleased to announce its November/December exhibition: Time To Work- a works on paper and printmaking installation by Bonnie Kaye Whitfield. An opening reception will be held on Friday, November 4th from 6:30-9:30PM.

Whitfield’s current work revolves around that of work, organization and how these are woven into everyday life, in both seen and unseen ways. The methods incorporated in this body of work involve the accumulation of materials from her life as well as those of others along with printmaking and drawing. Time To Work focuses on three ever-growing pieces. In their own individual ways, these works touch on our need for work, organization, accounting for how our time is spent and how we calculate the value of our lives as a result. The work uses “seemingly insignificant objects …to illustrate how the everyday influences behavior.”

To-Do is composed of a massive amount of to-do lists collected by Whitfield both of her own creation and that of people that have donated them as well. Visitors to the exhibition will be encouraged to add their own lists to the collection.

In & Out is a collection of three handmade, printed books documenting the beginnings and endings of multiple work periods. Rather than being presented in a traditional, bound book format, the books of In & Out become tangled with one another weave their way across the wall.

Cover Letters is a growing collection of collected cover letters that have been printed, drawn and collaged on top of. Similar to To-Do this is a growing collection and visitors are encouraged to add to the piece.

Bonnie Kaye Whitfield is Philadelphia-based printmaker, designer, & conceptual artist. Born in Aberdeen, Scotland to Americans living abroad, she grew up in suburban Georgia. She holds a BFA from The University of Georgia in Art Education and an MFA in Printmaking from Pratt Institute. She has shown work throughout the United States, including the Art Students League and Flux Factory in NYC, the Hunterdon Museum of Art in Clinton, NJ, and the Center for Contemporary Art in Sacramento, CA. In 2009, she started a screen-print & home textile design studio, Kaye Rachelle Designs.

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While the gallery does not maintain regular viewing hours, visits can be scheduled by appointment. Please e-mail us at artspaceliberti@gmail.com to arrange a visit. Viewing is also possible during Sunday church services between 10:00AM-2:00PM.
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attached image: detail from In & Out, dimensions variable.
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Artspace Liberti is a multi-discipline arts venue organized and maintained by liberti church east.
http://artspaceliberti.blogspot.com/

POST Weekend and Ellie Brown Lecture

Ellie Brown- Daltin, 14, Student; 2011, digital c-print

We are excited to be able to offer you a couple of more events in order to see Ellie Brown's wonderful BAG installation.

Artspace Liberti will be participating in the Philadelphia Open Studio Tours weekend (POST). We will be open the weekend of October 15-16 during the "east of Broad" weekend for POST. In addition to that, we are happy to offer to you the opportunity to hear Ellie Brown speak about the BAG body of work. This series of photographs and objects naturally lends itself to an engaging narrative related to the subjects of the photographs and the objects they carry with them, choose to keep and choose to give to Ms. Brown.

It will be a great weekend of art events at the 2424 Studios building.

Join us for the following events:

POST reception: Friday, October 14, 7-10PM

Ellie Brown's artist talk: Saturday, October 15, 3PM

POST weekend hours: Saturday, October 15, Noon-6PM

Sunday, October 16, 1-6PM

September 2 Reception for Ellie Brown- BAG

ELLIE BROWN

BAG: a photographic installation

September 2nd-October 22nd

Artspace Liberti

2424 E. York St.

Philadelphia, PA 19125

Contact: Rob Matthews - artspaceliberti@gmail.com

Artspace Liberti is pleased to launch its second season of exhibitions with Ellie Brown’s BAG photography project. Conceived of by Camille Thoman and realized by Ms. Brown, the photographs in BAG were taken in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Urbana, Montana and Iceland. This Artspace exhibition marks the first time the work has been viewed in Philadelphia. An opening reception will be held on Friday, September 2nd from 6:30-9:30PM.

Brown’s process begins by asking her subjects (be they friends or strangers) to reveal the contents of their personal bags. The resulting photographic diptychs each show the person holding their bag along with the contents of the bag as arranged by the owner. During the photographic shoot, the person is asked what they are and are not willing to part with from their bag. The material that the person was willing to part with is on display under the photographic portrait. In addition, all of the contents of the bag are cataloged under two categories: what the person was and was not willing to part with.

The exhibition explores notions of material attachment in how we choose what to carry with us on our person, as well as with what we are willing to part. The photos also explore the public persona expressed through the exterior of the bag versus the private persona expressed through the interior contents. On the surface, the project can be seen as ‘fun’. The areas to consider more thoroughly are how difficult or easy it may have been for people to part with the objects in the bag, what the object they carry say about their socio-economic status, gender, and how all of the elements give us clues to the identity of the model.

http://elliebrown.com/section/94108_BAG.html

The artist’s reception will be held on Friday, September 2nd from 6:30-9:30PM at 2424 E York St in Philadelphia between Gaul and Cedar Sts.

We will also be open the weekend of October 15-16 for Philadelphia Open Studios Tour (POST).

While the gallery does not maintain regular viewing hours, visits can be scheduled by appointment. Please e-mail us at artspaceliberti@gmail.com to arrange a visit. Viewing is also possible during Sunday church services between 10:00AM-2:00PM.

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Artspace Liberti is a multi-discipline arts venue organized and maintained by liberti church east.

http://artspaceliberti.blogspot.com

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image: Hallbjorn, 65, Electrician, 20x30", digital c-print, 2011

May/June Exhibition: Home by Emilie Keim

Interior 7 (Family room bed with pile of clothes), 2011
Caran d’Ache crayons and oil on rag board
6 x 6 inches

Artspace Liberti is proud to present its May/June exhibition, Home- paintings by Emilie Keim.

As the title suggests, Keim’s work is inspired by her surroundings including her house and her neighborhood in South Philadelphia, following a methodology similar to that of Bonnard and Vuilllard. The intimately-scaled works are captured quickly using color and light to create a mood a

nd investigate narrative of Keim’s invention. Time is referenced on a personal level but also in a larger sense moving through the calendar year and allowing the palette to change as a reaction to the shifting sun.

Garden 2, 2010
Caran d’Ache crayons and oil on canvas over wood
10 x 10 inches

Keim’s subject matter of the interior and exteriors that surround her also conjures up the themes of nostalgia and childhood. The quick application and removal of paint suggests the passing of time and an attempt to capture the fleeting and ephemeral.

On the Roof 2, 2010
Caran d’Ache crayons and oil on rag board
8 ¾ x 10 ½ inches

Emilie Keim lives and works in Philadelphia. Recent group shows include exhibitions at Brooklyn Artists Gym in Brooklyn, NY and VASTU in Washington, DC. In 2009 Emilie graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with a Certificate in painting.

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The artists’ reception will be held on May 6th from 6:30-9:30PM at 2424 E York St in Philadelphia between Gaul and Cedar Sts.

While the gallery does not maintain regular viewing hours, visits can be scheduled by appointment. Please e-mail us at artspaceliberti@gmail.com to arrange a visit. Viewing is also possible during Sunday church services between 10:30AM-12:00.

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Artspace Liberti is a multi-discipline arts venue organized and maintained by liberti church east.

In the News

Check out this review by Jeffrey Bussmann of Rubens Ghenov's exhibition at the gallery:

http://postnonprofalyptic.blogspot.com/2011/03/unpacking-art-of-rubens-ghenov.html

March/April Show- Rubens Ghenov

O Astronauta da Saudade - 72x60", acrylic, carbon transfer, spray paint, graphite on canvas

Artspace Liberti presents its March/April exhibition of Rubens Ghenov's paintings, "ie: Brazilein Chaekkorias, rotted one note". This exhibition runs from March 4- April 24, 2011. There will be a reception for the artist on Friday, March 4 from 6:30-9:30PM.

The reception will also include a sound composition from Milton Jaula, also known as Gaiolinha. This composition will also be available as a free download as the opening of exhibition approaches. Follow this link for the download: http://soundcloud.com/milton-jaula

Gal Coastal - 20x15", acrylic, graphite, spray paint on linen

Compilation of artist statements:

"My work is concerned with fact, fiction and a subsequent offspring of paraficiton. In these recent works, I have been concerned in placing these fictive and factual elements within a narrative and architectural structure, taking inspiration from Korean Chaekkori (scholar's accoutrements) paintings and the conflicting architecture of São Paulo's sprawling favelas and its Latin American modernist skyscrapers. These "objects" are displayed upon and simultaneously support shelves of pau-brasil, the dark red, pigmented wood that begat the country's name.

...I work as if a writer under the guises of different pseudonyms or like Fernando Pessoa, heteronyms, performing vicariously through them or simply as myself. The stories concoct folklore and vice versa, reciprocally feeding one another. As a story teller, whether in fact or fiction, I am not interested in the terminus but intrigued by the seeds left over from what has been, from tangents and births which accumulate possibilities for reinvention, also looking to depict the spiritual with idioms of the physical. The stories never end, but rather birth new personae expanding the vernacular of the work.

...The work also takes on a plethora of media as each piece calls for specific materials, be they painting, drawing, sculpture or sound."

The Elliptical Professor, vol. 1 - 72x60", acrylic on canvas

Biographical information about Rubens Ghenov:

"At the age of 10, my family and I moved from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for two years, where my father had found new work as a school principal. We lived in a building situated between a tobacco factory and an enormous favela, sitting on the side of a hill or the morro. Coming home after school I would open the living room window and spend hours watching the morro life. Kids flying kites atop make shift building's rooftops, people hanging laundry from telephone poles to windows, houses painted in bright colors, brick buildings juxtaposed to tin houses with trees growing in between its cracks. At night, the lights peering out of windows would create a constellation of stars on the mount emanating the booming sound of drums out of the darkness from sunset to dawn. The favela was stacked, houses upon houses giving me, the viewer, a flattened idea of its space. Through the window of my third floor apartment I watched people walking in and out of its make shift construct, negating its flatness. A Persian miniature painting made out of Brazil's struggling class stacked like a shelf in the view of my window. Worlds within a world within a world. A make shift constellation of 60 wattage bolts. The world in a mountain in a house in a window. As an immigrant from South America, my work embodies two voices, that of a Brazilian and that of a foreigner."

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The artists’ reception will be held on March 4th from 6:30-9:30PM at 2424 E York St in Philadelphia between Gaul and Cedar Sts.

While the gallery does not maintain regular viewing hours, visits can be scheduled by appointment. Please e-mail us at artspaceliberti@gmail.com to arrange a visit. Viewing is also possible during Sunday church services between 10:30AM-12:00.

Artspace Liberti is a multi-discipline arts venue organized and maintained by liberti church east.