Exhibition details tba.

Collecting and sorting define the activities and behaviors of our Information Age. Whether out of necessity or satisfaction, we hoard and organize, as Michel Foucault said, “to tame the wild profusion of existing things.” In its original sense, curate means “to care for a person or an object.” Now the term delineates the relationships and intersections between objects, ideas and people. Just as curators carefully organize artworks, we, as consumers, attentively curate everything, making decisions that construct and publicly display our perceived identities. This exhibition examines the ways in which visual artists interpret collecting and sorting in a culture overflowing with data, technology, and things. The artists in the show— Andy Warhol, Carmen Winant, Ed Ruscha, Lenka Clayton, Michael Mandiberg, Natalie Bookchin, William E. Jones, Christian Marclay,* Shana Lutker and John Baldessari—critically and humorously recover lost histories, recontextualize everyday experiences, visualize the archive, and connect the isolated behaviors of web users by acting as “curators” in every sense of the word.

Prompted by the exhibition of Blake Byrne’s collection of contemporary art at the OSU Urban Arts Space, 24 students in Prof. Kris Paulsen’s “History of Art 5001: The Task of the Curator” collectively curated this exhibition and producing all of the related materials.

The 24 curators of this exhibition would like to thank Blake Byrne, OSU Art’s Initiative, Merijn Van Der Heijden and the staff of OSU’s Urban Arts Space, The Department of History of Art, Lisa Iacobellis and The Thompson Rare Books Library, Jennifer Lange and The Wexner Center for the Arts, Erin Fletcher, Sarah Falls, and the artists for lending their work and their time to this project.

Good Neighbor is group exhibition-cum-art lending library that convenes the work of over 20 artists and artist collectives from the northwest and beyond. The title refers to Aby Warburg’s “law of the good neighbor,” which describes an associative, subjective system of arrangement by which library items are discovered by serendipitous proximity, rather than via a proscribed cataloging system based on official categories. The artists for Good Neighbor were chosen through a similarly associative process, and as a group their artworks manifest a network of relationships—by no mean exhaustive—extending from curator Amanda Donnan and her collaborators, Dawn Cerny and Rob Rhee, to artists based in Washington, Oregon, California, Pennsylvania, and New York.

Following a public reception on October 29th, the Hedreen will function as a hub of dispersed activity, offering each of the sculptures, paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, and artist books included in the exhibition for temporary loan to anyone with a Seattle University identification card. Borrowers are invited to check out an object of their choosing, install it in their home for one week, and post a photograph of the work in situ to the gallery’s Instagram feed. Available pieces will remain on public view at the Hedreen alongside borrowers’ photos of absent works, which extend the exhibition into private spaces and bring domestic objects into spontaneous dialogue with art.

Good Neighbor affords the Seattle University community the opportunity to live with and care for artworks, to experience them over time and in a context of personal significance. Conversely, it asks the invited artists to consider anew the audience for their work, and assume the risk of (literally) surrendering a valued object to strangers. In this way, the project enables exchange between individuals who may otherwise never meet, and upends the typically detached display experience of the art gallery. 

Curated by Amanda Donnan

Hedreen Gallery | 206-296-2244

Wed-Sat 1:30-6:00PM

Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, Austria

MOTHER OF THE YEAR
Between Empowerment and Crisis: Images of Motherhood from 1900 to Today

Super mom or childless? It almost looks as if there were no such thing any longer as motherhood pure and simple, as if all that is left is the choice between perfectionism and resignation. Nevertheless, motherhood has many aspects: joy, an intense experience of life, love relationship, learning, exultation, on one hand, and, on the other, frustration, being weighed down by expectations and the fear of being inadequate to the task. Until the 19th century motherhood was never called into question even if in actual reality the rewards often fell woefully short of projected ideals. It was only the advent of career openings for women that created alternatives to motherhood as a fulfilled life.

Pregnancy, birth, abortion, life with children, the decision against children, the struggle of children with their mothers – all these themes have their place in art. Nor did we have to wait for 1960s feminist art to produce realistic portrayals of the mother’s role but fi nd renderings of social reality and individual conflicts already as early as the beginning of the 20th century.

The exhibition showcases not only shifts in the stereotypes of motherhood from 1900 to today but also the changes in the perspective from which children see their mothers. It calls into question the optimisation logic of today’s life designs and nurtures the hope of change: an ever greater number of women with children opt out of the complex, often stressful regime of everyday life, refusing to accept their life world between career, children and consumption as preordained or God-given.

Curators: Sabine Fellner, Elisabeth Nowak-Thaller and Stella Rollig

download exhibition leaflet here

Fluent~Collaborative & testsite are pleased to present testsite 15.3: Lenka Clayton & Veronica Roberts: TYPEWRITER DRAWINGS, an installation of works on paper by British-born, Pittsburgh-based artist Lenka Clayton. Curated by Veronica Roberts, this is Clayton’s first exhibition in Texas. The project opens on Sunday, October 11 with a public reception from 4 to 6pm, and a conversation between the artist and the curator at 4:30pm.

This intimate installation features approximately twenty-six drawings as well as one work on cloth. Since 2012 Lenka Clayton has been using a typewriter as a tool for drawing, and at the same time as an obstruction to drawing. Her ongoing series, Typewriter Drawings, misuses a machine designed to effortlessly accomplish one kind of task to achieve another for which it is quite unsuited. The drawings act as a diary of sorts, depicting objects or moments that happened over the course of a day, or that appeared as fleeting visions while the artist went about other quotidian tasks. Additionally, every November she and a collaborator—the writer and artist Michael Crowe—each make concurrent drawings on their typewriters (he in London, UK; she in Pittsburgh, USA). A selection of the artists’ paired drawings will be exhibited in the dining room at testsite during this presentation.

The presentation will also include Hand-Typed Polka-Dot Shirt, 2015. The button-down shirt—originally manufactured by an anonymous garment worker—was disassembled at the seams into twenty-one component parts and each piece run through a typewriter. The ‘period’ key was pressed over 20,000 times to create a polka-dot pattern, hand-typed directly onto the fabric. Once printed, the pieces were hand-sewn back together. At first glance, the pattern may appear industrially printed, yet on closer inspection mistakes can be glimpsed, such as an accidental “m” marking, or a misaligned row. Together, the typewriter drawings and shirt illuminate Clayton’s ability to find new and inventive ways to make art using very old tools.

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Lenka Clayton grew up in Cornwall, United Kingdom, and is currently based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In previous work she has hand-numbered 7,000 stones, filmed a person of each age from 1 to 100 years old, and reconstituted a lost museum from a sketch on the back of an envelope. From 2012 to 2015, she was the world’s first Artist-in-Residence-in-Motherhood after founding a fully funded, structured artist residency that took place inside her home as a mother of two young children. She and artist Michael Crowe are currently endeavoring to write a unique, personal letter to every household in the world.

Lenka holds an MA in Documentary Direction from the National Film & Television School (Beaconsfield, U.K.) and a BA in Fine Art from Central St. Martins (London). Her work has been internationally exhibited, including at MoMA and Anthology Film Archives in New York City; Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh; FRAC Le Plateau in Paris; Kunsthalle St. Gallen in Switzerland; at the Tehran International Documentary Festival; and after the evening news on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom. Lenka has also been featured on PBS’ The Art Assignment hosted by curator Sarah Green. She is a recent recipient of a Heinz Endowments/Pittsburgh Foundation Creative Development Grant, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and a Carol R. Brown Award for Creative Achievement. She is currently artist-in-residence at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. For more information: www.lenkaclayton.com.

Veronica Roberts is curator of modern and contemporary art at the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas. She is currently preparing a mid-career survey of Nina Katchadourian, opening at the Blanton in spring 2017. Her most recent exhibition, Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt is touring to the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA (fall 2015) and Cleveland Museum of Art (Spring 2016) after opening at the Blanton in 2014. Prior to working at the Blanton, she held curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art. She received her MA in the history of art and architecture from UC Santa Barbara and her BA in art history from Williams College.

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Opening reception at testsite: Sunday, October 11, 4-6pm, with an artist talk at 4:30pm. Exhibition on view through December 6.
Hours: Sundays 4–6pm and by appointment
Information: sbancroft@fluentcollab.org, 512.453.3199