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.

January/February Show- Lorraine Glessner

Artspace Liberti is proud to present its first show of 2011, Church Drawings- a solo exhibition featuring the drawings by Lorraine Glessner. This exhibition runs from January 7- February 20, 2011. There will be a reception for the artist on Friday, February 4 from 6:30-9:30PM.

Glessner’s drawings are responses to sound and speech- specifically sermons. She describes the process in the following way:

“I draw in church during the sermons because it helps me hear and retain the words. I also draw in meetings, lectures, etc., whenever and wherever I'm sitting and required to listen as I find I can concentrate better when I'm doing something with my hands.

I usually begin by drawing the first thing I see-a piece of furniture, the shadows in the architecture, the pattern of someone's shirt-and let the drawing take on a life of it's own. Most of the time, the object or pattern I started with isn't recognizable when the drawing is finished. Usually, I only work on these drawings for one sermon and rarely work back into them.”

The majority of the drawings on view were originally created in sketchbooks. For the purposes of this exhibition, these originals have been scanned and printed as an archival ink jet and then hand colored using a ballpoint pen.

Lorraine Glessner received an MFA in Fibers from Temple University, Tyler School of Art, where she is currently an Assistant Professor in the Fibers and Material Studies Department. Lorraine also holds a BS in Textile Design from Philadelphia University and an Associate’s Degree in Computer Graphics from Moore College of Art and Design. Recent awards include two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Individual Creative Artist Fellowship Grant in Crafts, the Anne K Allison Award, Woodmere Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the Montserrat Award, 301 Gallery, Beverly, Massachusetts. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Watchung Art Center, Watchung, New Jersey and Cabrini College, Radnor Pennsylvania and group exhibitions at Parlor Gallery, Asbury Park, New Jersey, Artspace, Richmond, Virginia and Clay Scot Gallery, Birmingham, Alabama. Her work is included in the recently released Encaustic With a Textile Sensibility by Daniella Woolf and Encaustic Art: The Complete Guide to Creating Fine Art With Wax by Lissa Rankin. Lorraine lectures, teaches, exhibits her work nationally and maintains a studio in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. See her complete CV and work at www.lorraineglessner.net

The artists’ reception will be held on February 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.

November/December Show: Congo’s Silent Scream - a collection of photographs by Melanie Blanding

Artspace Liberti presents its November/December show, Congo’s Silent Scream, featuring a collection of emotive portrait images by lead photographer of Women in Warzones, Melanie Blanding. This exhibition runs from November 5 – December 20, 2010. There will be an opening reception on Friday, November 5^th from 7:00 – 10:00pm featuring a musical performance by Will Chambers.

Melanie first traveled to eastern Congo in the summer of 2005 and was mortified by the number of women affected by monstrous acts of sexual violence. Thousands of women have been victims of this horrific violence in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo since Hutu rebels fled Rwanda after the genocide in 1994. These rebels pillage, rape, steal and burn villages as targeted acts of war designed to terrorize and exploit the people while reaping massive financial gains for themselves.

As of 2005, Panzi Hospital, in Bukavu, South Kivu, had treated more than 3,600 women who were Victims of Sexual Violence, with no news of this being reported in the U.S. at the time. Melanie was determined to return to the Congo and share the stories of willing women. She created this collection of photographs when she returned to eastern Congo in 2006, in response to the great need for awareness and for these women’s stories to be heard. “Silence is their greatest enemy”, Melanie stated, and hopes that through her illuminating work, more people will join the mission to get these women the help they need to rebuild their lives.

The artist’s reception will be held on November 5, from 7:00-10:00pm 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 artspaceliberti@gmail.com to arrange a visit. Viewing is also possible during Sunday church services between 10:00am – 1:15pm.

Contact: 
Kacey Crawford
Artspace Liberti
Phone: 202-701-4530
Fax: 267-639-4424

artspaceliberti@gmail.com
artspaceliberti.blogspot.com

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

September/October Show

Artspace Liberti presents its fall show, In3s, paintings by Stephen Evans, Timothy Gierschick II and Matthew Sepielli. This exhibition runs from September 3- October 23, 2010. There will be an opening reception on Friday, September 3rd from 7:00-10:00PM featuring a music performance by Good Dust.

These three painters represent three different approaches to non-representational work but all share an affinity for the process of creation and the experiential nature of looking at art.

Matthew Sepielli- Pick It, 2009-2010

Matthew Sepielli’s paintings explore a “what-if” approach to creating art. What happens when you combine oil paint, Vaseline, glue, white out and other materials into a painting? Sepielli is interested in the relative “alchemy” of art- combining familiar materials in something unfamiliar, unknown and somewhat unknowable.
To quote Sepielli: “It is my goal to make works whose physical structure and identity produces a meaning inherent to the moment one encounters the physical object of the work and one whose identity morphs from the moment one encounters the work, to the time one leaves it and remembers it and thus returns- though changed upon a second encounter.”

Stephen Evans- Beelzebub, 2010

Conversely, Stephen Evans’ work investigates a more minimal and calculated approach to painting. The application and development of the works are more deliberate and controlled. Evans taps into Kandinsky’s views of painting that there is an “initial, physical, and optical reaction to an image that takes place in the eye, but that it may also go further to touch on another level of a being: the emotional and spiritual level. I believe that the formal issues of art are perfect vehicles for the allegorical, and may further more leave the message to supersede the artwork itself.”

Timothy Gierschick II- Pique, 2010

Somewhere between these two approaches lies the work of Timothy Gierschick II. His paintings appear simultaneously calculated and improvised. His work is a slow call-and-response. Gierschick’s paintings are as much an internal dialogue as they are a conversation with the world. Like Sepielli, his materials are often recycled and repurposed. Prescription pads, found wood and latex paint are salvaged and reborn, combining seemingly unrelated materials. Within the structure of the work, color and shape combine and set next to one another in an Albers-like method of communication.

The artists’ reception will be held on September 3rd from 7:00-10:00PM 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.

Links:

Stephen Evans: http://sevansbooksontape.blogspot.com/
Timothy Gierschick II: http://www.gierschickwork.com/
Matthew Sepielli: http://matthewsepielli.blogspot.com

Good Dust: http://www.gooddust.com