This poster was provided by Gallery ML

As world’s first and only collective body art gallery, Gallery ML is one of the most refreshing, dynamic, and unique art galleries in Philadelphia. Since its opening in 2010, Gallery ML has featured body art by local, national, and international artists.  The gallery’s founders/owners/photographers, Noah Musher and Tom Lovelund, and the gallery director/resident body artist, Lawren Alice, have worked hard to prove that body art is a legitimate and respected fine art medium.  The gallery’s lively and popular First Friday events always smartly reveal the impermanence and immortality of body art.  The surprisingly fast and well executed live body art demonstrations on brave semi-nude models always creates a great juxtaposition to the gallery’s vibrant and thought provoking large photographs of body art frozen in time.  Please check out the awesome video below to get idea of what makes Gallery ML so great!

Gallery ML’s Living Breathing Canvas

In order to be a successful body artist, one has to be able to fearlessly paint a great design and concept on a living human body within a couple of hours.  Dilly-dallying, lunch and cigarette breaks, existential life crises, and paralyzing moments of self doubt are not allowed.  Body artists have to go in with a mission and own it from start to finish.  Gallery ML approaches the business of running a gallery in much the same way.  They refuse to become stagnant and are constantly changing, adapting, and finding smart ways to grow their business.

Despite Gallery ML’s success as a collective body art gallery, Noah, Tom, and Lawren felt that they still needed to take Gallery ML to the next level.  They noticed that there were too many talented, unique, and thought provoking local artists that weren’t getting the recognition or the visibility that they deserved.  Therefore, they decided to get a bigger space that would allow them to support and serve the local arts community better.  Gallery ML will be moving to a HUGE gallery on 109 Arch St. on April 6th.  Half of the gallery will be dedicated to body art and the other half will be dedicated to local artists of all mediums.

As a way to introduce the public to Gallery ML’s expansion, they debuted their first non-body art oriented exhibit this past First Friday.  Although there weren’t any semi-nude women walking around with fabulously intricate and colorful body paint designs for Gallery ML’s opening reception of “The Lunatic and the Lover,” their First Friday event did not disappoint.  The show will feature infrared black and white photography by Bill Hoo, fashion and conceptional portrait color photography by Jason Blake, and surreal socially oriented installation art by Morgan Mangiaruga until the end of January.  To learn more about each artist and their work, please click on each of the artist’s names from the previous sentence.

Noah, Tom, and Lawren will be attending a lot of exciting events this month (the Sundance Film Festival and the 2011 RAWards), so the gallery may be closed sporadically.  Please call 215-717-7774 to inquire if the studio is open or to schedule an appointment.

Written by Cassandra Hoo: Contributing Writer, SideArts 

I am very proud and thankful that the infrared black and white photography by Bill Hoo (my awesome father) was chosen to be featured at Gallery ML’s exhibit, “The Lunatic and the Lover.”  The camera lens has literally been an extension of his own two eyes for as long as I can remember.  He has captured all of our family’s vacations, hiking expeditions and nature outings, and precious moments in a unique and artistic way.  Although Bill Hoo majored in photography from the School of Museum of Fine Arts and worked as a professional photographer for a while in his youth, he has spent the majority of his career as a very successful graphic designer and creative director for major Fortune 500 companies.  It wasn’t until several years ago that he decided to say goodbye to the corporate world and pursue photography professionally again.  I think the long wait was worth it.  He’s in an artistic groove that can’t be messed with — and he has the photographs to prove it.

Bill Hoo has an acute and highly advanced understanding of light and shadow.  In art school, his nickname was the “Light Meter Man.”  He can literally tell what time of day it is without wearing a watch.  His training in traditional black and white photography and his mastery of the Zone System has fully prepared him for his latest photographic medium, digital infrared and ultraviolet photography.  The special cameras that he uses capture infrared and ultraviolet lightwaves that the human eye can’t see.  In just a couple of years, Bill Hoo has retrained his eyes and brain to see and imagine these frequencies whenever he looks through the red or blue tinted camera screen/lens.  This sixth sense gives him the innate ability to manually control the aperture and shutter speed to get the desired look that he wants for a photograph.  Therefore, every finished and printed photograph that you will see in the “The Lunatic and the Lover” exhibit was already fully realized in his brain before the image was captured.

In Bill Hoo’s Artistic Statement, he describes how he hopes his unique style and medium helps uncover the hidden beauty in nature to those that take Mother Earth for granted:

“I believe that everything is an illusion and that there is always something more interesting underneath the surface. In my photographs, I capture what the human eye cannot see by using specialty cameras that render infrared and ultra violet spectrums. By filtering out the human visible light waves, I am able to create images that bring a naked, mysterious and unsettling transparent beauty beyond what once felt familiar. I translate my vision in monochromatic (B&W) prints to purposely strip out all subjectivity to color. It is my intent to heighten the focus on the splendors of the world in the hope that people will reassess and alter their lifestyles to reconnect with nature the way that I have. I plan to bringing more people together to help build more preserves that protect wildlife and greenways.”

The photographs that were chosen for “The Lunatic and the Lover” exhibit show a wide range of Bill Hoo’s work.  There are majestic aerial shots of clouds and sky, landscapes of seemingly mystical places, and abstract close-ups of nature.  The luminous white highlights in his pictures makes the negative space in his images glow like magic, while the deep and rich dark grey and black shadows add a sense of mystery and wonder.  His ability to capture just the right amount of shadow and light, and all of the grays in between, would seriously make Edward Weston proud.  He often professes to me that he now dreams in monochrome.  I wish I could buy a one-way dream ticket to one of his beautiful photographic creations.  I don’t think that I would miss color when he makes black and white looks so fabulous.

Make sure to visit Gallery ML this month so that you can dream in monochrome too.  For more information about Gallery ML, please read my article entitled, Gallery ML’s “The Lunatic and the Lover” Exhibit. If you want to learn more about Bill Hoo’s photography, see more fantastic images, or want to hire him to brand or re-brand your business, make sure to visit his website.  He provides a wide array of marketing, advertising, graphic design, and web design services.

Written by Cassandra Hoo: Contributing Writer, SideArts 

Morgan Mangiaruga’s surreal mixed media sculpture installation at Gallery ML’s exhibit, “The Lunatic and the Lover,” immediately caught my eye when I walked into the gallery.  Granted, it was hard not to notice the two human-like sculptures with real taxidermied deer heads.  The initial shock that I felt when I first saw these interesting creatures was really entertaining.  I always like a good surprise.  Since Gallery ML has been completely dedicated to showcasing body art up until this current show, I felt that Morgan’s work served as a great introduction for the direction that Gallery ML wants to go in once it moves into a larger gallery space in April and starts curating exhibits that feature body art and local art of all mediums.

Meeting the artist behind this unique installation was equally surprising for me.  Morgan Mangiaruga is a petite young woman with a bubbly and friendly personality.  I had a hard time trying to imagine her buying cumbersome taxidermied deer heads at her town’s local farmer’s markets and spending countless hours adapting them for her installation.  This interesting dichotomy made a lot more sense once I got to know her a little bit better.  Her artwork is very socially oriented and she is very passionate about the message that she hopes to convey.

Morgan gravitates towards using animals in her work, because she feels it is representational of humanity’s primal instincts.  She also enjoys working with taxidermied animals, because she likes the challenge of bringing emotion and life to something that is so static and literally dead.  I also really respect her notion that she would rather see a taxidermied deer head in a piece of artwork than to see it be a trophy on someone’s wall.  Overall, her work is meant to remind us to not loose the purity of ourselves and conform to something that we’re not.

“A lot of my work deals with social problems or things that I see happen to my friends, family, strangers, or myself. I use animals, because of our primal instinct and our honesty with animals. With this work, it’s about the social behaviors that start to infect us.  These sculptures represent the behavioral infections that we don’t always notice is happening until it’s too late and we start to loose our own selves and the purity of ourselves.  That’s why my one sculpture is running, while the other sculpture is sitting and has accepted it.  We often allow both of these scenarios to happen without realizing it.”

Morgan’s artistic message, free spirit, and desire to be true to herself is uplifting.  She is definitely very wise for her age and I look forward to seeing the progression of her work and artistic career.

For more information about Gallery ML, please read my article entitled, Gallery ML’s “The Lunatic and the Lover” Exhibit.

Written and photographed by Cassandra Hoo: Contributing Writer, SideArts 

Jason Blake’s moody, edgy, playful, and stylized portrait color photography at Gallery ML’s “The Lunatic and the Lover ”exhibit really made my eyes happy.  My pupils danced back and forth as I looked at each photograph and tried to peel back the layers of shadows and light, muted and vibrant color combinations, and scratched, texturized, and blurred image manipulations.  The intermingling of all of these contrasting variables creates a poetic, whimsical, and mysterious backdrop to each portrait’s main focal point, the face.  In all of Jason’s photographs, the face is either dramatically in focus, blurred, in silhouette, or stylized in such a way that it stands out and gives a detailed backstory and narrative.  I felt like each photograph could be the cover of a book; I wanted to open each one up read what was inside.

When I interviewed Jason Blake after the opening reception for “The Lunatic and the Lover ” I learned that my desire to want to “read” each of his photographs wasn’t completely off base.  Jason explained to me that he reads and writes a lot of fiction and was heavily influenced by existential philosophy and Kafka’s abstract short stories while he was honing his craft at the University of the Arts.

“I was fascinated by how, within a few small paragraphs, Kafka was able to expertly craft a narrative that could fill pages of content and story in a person’s head.   For my work in general, I envision and try to capture images that contain a strong narrative that lets the viewer explore a concept in which I hint at. The viewer is free to explore the beginning, middle, and end of each characters’ history and the meaning behind their existence. Hopefully, the viewer can then relate to the subjects in a more personal way and get something out of the experience.”

“The notion of physical and spiritual transcendence is another theme that drives my work.  I like the idea that one can achieve a state of being where they can metaphysically leave their body.  In the same moment, I like to think about what happens or becomes of the body that is being left behind.   I try to capture some of these moments. In the same vein, I’m fascinated with imagery that is blurred, shows movement, or is out of focus.”

The photographs chosen for “The Lunatic and the Lover ” exhibit came from a variety of projects that Jason created over the course of the last two to three years.  The progression of his work, from oldest to newest, literally goes from dark to light (the two online photo galleries on Jason’s website are aptly titled, “Dark” and “Light”).  His older work tends to be more sinister and dramatic, while his newer work is much more vibrant and commercial (with an indie and vintage fashion photography feel).  While I’m impressed with both his “Dark” and “Light” work, I became more infatuated with his “Light” work when he explained his new artistic process to me.

“In most of my newer work I’ve started to return to shooting film.  Some I will shoot on 35mm film, sometimes push the film to achieve thicker film grain, and then rub the negatives in dust and then scan them into a computer. Sometimes I shoot on 120mm film using a plastic camera and then roll the film under a gel to get light leaks on the film.”

 The scratched and rugged texture of his newest work fondly reminds me of the Avant-Garde films that I watched in art school, which specifically tried to film the art of manipulating and deconstructing the medium of film itself.  Given that we live in a digital age, I like and respect that a young artist like Jason mixes old technology techniques with new ones.  I hope it inspires others, both young and old, to respect and learn film photography before they go and buy a digital camera.

If you haven’t already, please go and read the article I wrote on Gallery ML’s exhibition, “The Lunatic and the Lover.”  I also recommend that you read the article I wrote on Bill Hoo, the other photographer featured at the show.  He is another shining example of a photographer that integrates traditional photography with modern technology.

Written by Cassandra Hoo, Contributing Writer, SideArts

This Friday 11/11/11:

Paradigm Gallery + Studio Presents: Height x Width x Depth

A Group Show of Artists Exploring Shadow Boxes, Dimension and Light

October 28th – November 19th

Opening Reception: Friday, October 28th • 6-10pm

Closing Reception: Friday, November 18th • 6-10pm

Artists:

Courtney Brown

Jason Chen

Ian Foster

Stefanie Fuoco

Jennifer Gin

Ann Keech

Caitlin McCormack

Sara McCorriston

Casey Murphy

Edward Richards

Ellen Sall

Burnell Yow!

 

RSVP to this event on Facebook.

Recently Flux Space hosted an open forum for those to read their responses to the proposed question from a text Where Art Belongs. With the words still echoing in my mind from that hot July night, I just read another blog post demarcating the moment that you become an artist: when you finally have Blue Chip gallery representation.

I’m troubled by this because it gives artists the false sense of security in their plans, wishes, hopes, dreams, and wants.  I find more and more that the ideas proposed by artists like Marcel Duchamp ring a truth that needs to be firmly planted in everyone’s minds.  If you exist in a society and you  go to a school that is given credit by approved members and groups of said society; further you are successful in completing all requirements demanded before being granted completion, then you are what you say you are.  Going even further if you simply state to yourself that you are whatever you want to become, then you are what you say you wish to be.  Clearly there are different levels of skill, ability, and knowledge that demarcate you as either good, bad, or passe, however we are not talking about that.

Very simply, I just wanted to start a dialogue by saying we all seek a certain type of success, and that dream is rarely tasted in the way that you want it to happen.  There is no substitute for hard work, patience, and failure.  In this current Depression, every art form has been relegated to oblivion by the economic purists.  Money is not, nor should it ever be, the motivating factor.  Personal success and growth can never be accounted for in a financial chart.  That being said, money is a part of our lives.

So let me ask you the reader, does it deflate your artistic ideas if you never achieve a high end gallery representation, or if you make art in your attic or basement?  Where does art belong if not in our hearts and minds?  I believe it exists wherever we want it to, and that is devoid of a gallery, swarms of passerby’s, and collectors with money.  We want all of that, but I don’t think we need it.  What we need is to live without the trappings of the normal life; rent/mortgages, utility bills, and car insurance.  What if someone offered us a live/work space for cheap that echoed our former college life?   Would you NEED anything else, or just want it? 

April 1, 2, 3  - ARTwear at The Philadelphia Art Alliance

ARTwear is a weekend-long craft show and sale, held at the Philadelphia Art Alliance. The diverse list of local and regional artisans includes milliners, weavers and jewelers working in a variety of media.

Philadelphia Art Alliance, 251 S. South 18th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103

Shopping Hours:

Preview Cocktail Reception: Thursday, March 31 – 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM

Friday, April 1 : 3-8 PM

Saturday, April 2 : 10 AM – 5 PM

Sunday, April 3 : 11 AM – 5 PM

Saturday, November 13^th 2010, two established Lithuanian artists Zivile Pupinyte (Zivile Art) and Jurgita Cenkute (BedHeadSheep) will present their new one-of-a-kind collections inspired by old Baltic traditions in a one evening event called ‘MODERN FOLK’. New collections will be presented at LGTripp abstract gallery in the heart of Philadelphia’s old city, 47-49 North 2^nd street.

Work of Zivile and Jurgita is a synthesis of old tradition and modern innovative design. The collections are inspired by the old craft making techniques like felting and beading. The event will feature a runway fashion show of Jurgita’s and Zivile’s new collections, a dance and vocal performance by Fatima Adamu, inspired by medieval Gaelic songs and live music by DJ Todd Damon.

About the artists:

Artisan and adventurer Zivile Pupinyte creates wearable art for daring women. Born and raised in Vilnius, Lithuania Pupinyte created Zivile Art – jewelry for daring women - in 2004 and since has been featured in several fashion shows and photo shoots in Philadelphia and New York City. Recently (October 6^th 2010) Zivile Art has been featured as one of the most avant-garde jewelry designers on Philadelphia Fashion Week runway.

Using exotic stones and natural materials, Zivile’s meticulous handiwork and lucid creative process has yielded an eclectic collection of jewelry that is both fashionable and refreshingly unique. Her pieces lend adventurous spirit to haute couture. The November 13th showcase of Baltic traditions and modern innovation is a fragment of an introduction into her new series ‘Little Worlds’ – to be presented in December 2010. Pupinyte’s jewelry collections are strictly handmade and one of a kind. She is a recognized artist in Europe as well as locally selected ‘The Best Philadelphia Jeweler 2010′ by Philadelphia Weekly.

Jurgita Cenkute obtained Master’s Degree in Fine Arts from Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts back in 2006. Her major was in photography and media arts. Jurgita gained a great success as an artist in Lithuania while still being a student. Right after graduating art school Jurgita developed a great passion for the fiber arts and felting techniques. She learned professional felting from the best Lithuanian felting artists. In 2007 Jurgita moved to United States and just a year ago created a one person based business BedHeadSheep which features one of a kind, hand felted accessories, like scarves, handbags and hand warmers, for women who like to feel unique and want to be seen. Her work with felts is a fusion of old felting techniques and modern designs. All pieces are made from renewable materials, and each piece is unique and unrepeatable.

The event will be held at LGTripp Gallery, located in historic Old City, Philadelphia’s art district, was recently established with the primary purpose of representing emerging artists focusing on abstract and non-objective work from the Philadelphia region. All art work by Zivile Art and BedHeadSheep presented in the gallery space will be exhibited next to the works of Miriam Singer and Rebecca Jacoby.

It is a one night only event and it is free and open to the public. All accessories and jewelry will be available for purchase throughout the event.

Cocktails and hors d’oeuvres will be offered.

Event DJ: DJ Todd Damon

Dance interpretation: Fatima Adamu

Event sponsors: Absolut, Swanky Bubbles, LGTripp gallery, Liz Jacobs.

For more information on the ‘MODERN FOLK’ even please contact Zivile Pupinyte at 215-834-8138 or via email zivile2008@yahoo.com and Jurgita Cenkute at 215-779-9128 or via email cenkute@yahoo.com