Brent Green
Still from Paulina Hollers, 2006
Hand-drawn and wood-carved stop motion animated film.
13 mins
courtesy of the artist

Nov 9, 2007 – Jan 5, 2008

MAIN GALLERY
Brent Green: Animation in 4 Dimensions
Friday, November 9, Main and Euclid Avenue Galleries
5:30 – 8 PM Opening with Gallery Talk with Brent Green and performance artist Liz Cohen

Saturday, December 1, Euclid Avenue Gallery
8 PM Live Performance by Brent Green and his band with select films, followed by an After Party hosted by the Poets’ and Writers’ League of Greater Cleveland

Brent Green: Animation in 4 Dimensions is Green’s first solo museum exhibition and the first exhibition of his film props. It includes continuous showings of 5 of Green’s stop motion animated films in the Euclid Avenue Gallery and an exhibition of his low tech, small scale movie sets, his hand made carved wooden and taxidermic film props, and a selection of his sculpture. Visitors, entering the Main Gallery through an intricately carved door made especially for this exhibition, are immersed in the claustrophobic other-world of a Brent Green film, the walls covered with huge drawings and his backdrops of obsessively carved, star lit night skies and the room filled with his highly eccentric objects. (more info…)

Lauren Kalman
A Pretty Little Trick (detail), 2007

Jan 18 – Feb 16, 2008

MAIN GALLERY
LAUREN KALMAN: A PRETTY LITTLE TRICK
THE FIRST OF THE 2008 WINDOW TO SCULPTURE EMERGING ARTIST SERIES

A Pretty Little Trick is an installation of objects, videos, and an audio track that exposes and explores the “transgressions” of the real human body in contradiction to its idealized and media enhanced imagery. The loosely narrative progression of the work is derived from the medieval alchemic processes to achieve ultimate material and spiritual purity, with intermediate stages of hermaphroditism, mortification, and destruction.

The artist explains, “The physical body is both transgressive and can be transgressed. It spills, tears, infects, expands, and contracts through the skin. Our subconscious self can also penetrate the controlled facade. In spite of our conscious desire to emulate iconic ideals our personality quarks, flaws, and social deviations twitch their way to visibility.”

Lauren Kalman’s elegant and slyly humorous installation uses artist-made jewelry and mortuary furniture, bones and skeletal specimens, medical items, video, and sound to explore the disconnection between the commercial depiction of the female body and that body’s realities. The work exposes the dichotomy between the media hype of female perfection, with the accompanying acceptable feminine imagery and body types mandated by the fashion and cosmetic industries, and the realities, the anomalies, the foibles, and the contradictions of the actual, living human body.

A beautiful video of a diaphanously clad woman going through meaningless motions, such as repeated leaps into the air, is juxtaposed with framed biological specimens of frog skeletons. In another video the woman wears a perfectly pressed white suit, which is also found in the gallery, folded on a shelf and dotted with inexplicable red stains. As the videos progress, the clothing begins to reveal real, less than harmonious aspects of the human body, jarring objects as bovine jaw bones begin to protrude from various parts of the woman’s body, the gender distinction becomes blurred, fluids are released, and the clothing changes color from white to red. The installation includes ambiguous sound tracks that suggest, but are not actually, the squeaking of bed springs.

Other objects about the rooms - microscopes, prescription bottles, artist-made rusted steel mortuary tables and trays – also allude to modern medicine’s transformative efforts and the inexorable, ultimate state of all life. A Pretty Little Trick begins as an oblique critique of the advertising, fashion, and cosmetic industries’ distortion of the female body and concludes as a striking polemic on vanity and vanitas.

About the Artist
Two of Lauren Kalman’s earlier pieces were seen in the 2007 On A Pedestal and Off The Wall: Small Sculpture from the Region at The Sculpture Center. Her installation Corpus, Figure, Skate opens in January 2008 at the Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, TN. The installation, Hard Wear (2006), was shown at the Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina, as part of an international conference hosted by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, the 6th Encuentro, Corpoliticas/Body Politics in the Americas (summer 2007).  A third installation, Dress Up, Dress Down, was exhibited at the Medicine Factory, Memphis, TN (2007). She has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including In Situ at the Massachusetts College of Art (2007), On A Pedestal and Off the Wall at The Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH (2007), Misdemeanors at SPACES, Cleveland, OH (2006), and Coming Into View, A Juried Exhibition of Emerging Jewelry Artists,a traveling exhibition that opened in conjunction with the Annual Society of North American Goldsmiths Conference (2006) at the Residence of Yann Woolley, Chicago, IL.

Kalman, raised in Cleveland Heights, OH, received a BFA from Massachusetts College of Arts in Boston (2002), with a focus on metalsmithing, and a MFA from Ohio State University in Columbus (2006). She has taught at several nonprofit centers, including the Indian Church Village Artisan Center in Indian Church, Belize, and is an Assistant Professor and 3D Coordinator in the Fine Arts Department at Watkins College of Art and Design in Nashville, TN. She has previously worked at the Johnson Atelier Technical Institute of Sculpture and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Joseph F. Filak, III
American Breed, 2007
found object assemblage
22 x 36 x 24 inches
Image courtesy of the artist.

Feb 22 – March 22, 2008

Main Gallery
Window to Sculpture
Emerging Artist Series
Joseph J. Filak, III: An Accumulated Blur

Through his artwork, Filak expresses outrage at the contemporary culture of consumerism and Americans’ seemingly unquestioning acceptance of the pervasive influence of the military in this culture. He also indicates a healthy skepticism towards the commercial art market and the driving forces behind the conversion of an object from a discard-ible to a collectible to an artwork to a piece deemed worthy of a museum collection. Titles, word plays, and unexpected references to cultural and art imagery intermingle as important facets of all of Filak’s work.

Filak writes, “My art objects, made largely from the discarded and disliked materials of our society, point to the disposable truth behind our culture and ask when the creed “shop ‘til you drop” is too much. The overall attempt is to lead the view to ask, ‘Ultimately, when does the current war and consumerism present a scourge upon the land? And when is the extent of everybody’s role in this culture?’”

Fashionistas To The Front Iraqi Edition (2007), a slender missile painted with designer logos, and American Breed (2007), a wooden pigeon crate filled with hand grenades neatly lined up in rows and nestled in a bed of shredded  money, stress particularly well the alliance of American consumerism, whether of fashion, food, or sex, and military spending.  American Change (2007) with a spray of bullets falling from a battered metal, wall mounted change machine, and Salvation through Repetition (2008), a precise grid work of red plastic and gleaming brass cartridge shells in a long, narrow, white painted wooden frame, highlight Americans’ obsession with guns and the questionable currency of a life, while also obliquely recalling Renaissance paintings of the shower of gold coins upon Danaë, the formalist work of such artists as Donald Judd, and the master of the found object, the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp.

With eleven new assemblages, Joseph Filak transforms various materials, now useless, discarded, and often disliked, into protest objects of contemplation, highly charged with social and political irony.

About the Artist
Joseph J. Filak, III, a recent Cleveland State University graduate (BA, 2007) who has lived in Cleveland on and off for the past 19 years, is attending the MFA program at Notre Dame University, South Bend, IN (2010, expected graduation) with a concentration in metalwork. His artwork has been exhibited in galleries in Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York, and Detroit, and for the last three years at the Dirty Show, Detroit, MI.

Tannaz Farsi
the formal absences of precious things
2008, 21 x 45 ft. installation
inflated vinyl, tubing, fluorescent lights, steel, Plexi-glas, cast plastic, 2 video projections (30 min.). Detail.
Image courtesy of the artist.

Mar 28 – May 26, 2008

Main Gallery
Window to Sculpture
Emerging Artist Series
Tannaz Farsi: the formal absences of precious things

More info.

Charmaine Spencer
Nest, 2005
suspended wood and hemp rope
2 x 2 x 4 ft.

May 2 – May 31, 2008

Euclid Avenue Gallery
Window to Sculpture
Emerging Artist Series
Charmaine Spencer: A Place to Dwell

More info.

On A Pedestal and off The Wall, 2007
(detail of gallery)

June 6 – July 26, 2008

MAIN GALLERY
On A Pedestal and Off The Wall, The Annual Juried Exhibition of Small Sculpture from the Region

This annual exhibition showcases smaller sculptural works by artists of Ohio, its contiguous states (Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania), and Ontario, Canada.
The internationally recognized painter Gregory Amenoff will jury the 2008 exhibition. Amenoff is Chair of the Visual Arts Division of Columbia University’s School of the Arts; a member of the Board of Directors and the Foundation Curator Governor of The CUE Art Foundation, which provides New York City studio space for emerging artists; and past President of the National Academy of Design.

Previous exhibitions were juried by Richard Hunt (2005), Viktor Schreckengost (2006), and Don Harvey (2007).

Exhibitions:
2007/2008, 2006/2007, 2005/2006,
2004/2005, 2003/2004,  2002,2001,
2000, 1999,1998,1997

The Sculpture Center is a not-for-profit arts institution dedicated to the advancement of the careers of emerging Ohio sculptors and the preservation of Ohio outdoor sculpture as a means to provide support for artists and to effect the enrichment, education, enjoyment, and visual enhancement of the Cleveland community and greater region.

The Sculpture Center is generously supported by an anonymous donor and other individual donors to Friends of The Sculpture Center, by studioTECHNE architects, and by funding from the Bernice and David E. Davis Art Foundation, the John P. Murphy Foundation, the Kulas Foundation, The George Gund Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. The Sculpture Center also gratefully acknowledges the citizens of Cuyahoga County for their support through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

Gallery hours: Wednesday through Friday, 10 AM to 4 pm, Saturday 12 noon to 4 pm or by prior appointment (Free Parking, Handicapped accessible)