First Friday openings

Via Kathleen Greco:

First Friday Gallery Openings

Every first Friday of the month art galleries are open to the public in Philadelphia. It’s a free must-see cultural art experience for students to engage with the contemporary art scene. Here’s a listing of some  recommendations for current First Friday galleries for Friday, September 5^th. 


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Pentimenti Gallery145 North Second Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106  

ARTIST RECEPTION: Friday, September 5, 6:30 - 8:30 PM 

Logical Thinking; Illogical Thoughts 
Simeen Farhat - Sculptures & Installation 

Words borrowed from poetry in English, expressing logic and philosophy, and about life, Farhat’s sculptures are constructed with urethane cast-resin, which are intertwined into forms with undeniable rhythmic and directional force. In her own words, Farhat explains, “My objective in choosing those words is to show the essence of their message through abstraction;  by using overlapping shapes and lines which create tension and movement and stir up emotions”. 

Transferable Views 
Franco Mueller - Paintings, Works on Paper & Installation 

There is a dialogue that exists within the works of Franco Mueller. It is a quiet conversation between shape and space. These paintings and works on paper depict how space holds a shape and how shape holds the space. A partially illuminated background is silent. Mueller builds his paintings with layer upon layer of thin acrylic paint and his works on paper with layers of charcoal and acrylic paint. As each layer permeates on another, a “disturbed surface structure” begins to evolve.  

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Vox Populi319 North 11th Street
3^rd Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19107  

ARTIST RECEPTION: Friday, September 5, 6:00 – 11:00 PM 

Vox Populi is an artist collective that works to support the challenging and experimental work of under-represented artists with monthly exhibitions, gallery talks, performances, lectures, and related programming.  

Room for the Whole Wide World Elisa Gabor, Sanaz Mazinani, Anna Neighbor, Sarah Palmer, Elisabeth Tonnard 

Room for the Whole Wide World offers five artists’ findings from the field of abstraction, using ideas rooted in photography as a starting point. Within these artworks abstraction is a viable method for discovering larger truths and mapping our desires.

Still Wearing Each Other When AloneJordan Artim, Anthony Cudahy, Aimee Goguen, Matt Morris, Mathew Parkin

Be my Jordan, and I’ll be your Pippen. Be my Mulder, and I’ll be your Scully. Be my Jenko, and I’ll be your Schmidt. Be my Bill, and I’ll be your Ted. Be my residue, and I’ll be your mirror.

“…we shall find out when the light returns what the new season means / when others’ interpretations have gotten back up onto the pedestals we gave them / so long as we are still wearing each other when alone”
                                                                                                                                      

-Frank O’Hara

Between a rock and a hard place.
Laura Bernstein, Lydia Hardwick, Rachel Rotenberg

Between a rock and a hard place. offers a sculptural conversation between three female artists. Their works operate as the remnants from an otherworldly archaeological dig, marked with the indelible imprint and purposeful grace of their three makers. At their core, these are non-functional yet social objects: acknowledging or denying the body, embodying complex human relationships, and birthed through intuition and memory.

Errata
Micah Danges, Luke Stettner

Errata is a two-person show. Stettner’s work for this exhibition includes small photographs, fruit pits, drawings on blackboard surfaces, graphite-rubbed wood frames, and paintings that reference an enigmatic and nearly recognizable grammatical language. Each is a study in essentialism. Danges’ work for this exhibition includes several photo-based collages that explore surface, texture and placement, and are each derived from one of two single images of a greenhouse.

Fourth WallFourth Wall at Vox Populi presents new works chosen by a group of professionals from various locations and backgrounds. Each month, one of these curators will present the work of an experimental artist working in video, film, animation, or new media in the Vox Populi Project Space.

Harvest

Chaja Hertog, Nir Nadler - Video

An abnormal phenomenon occurs in an olive grove as one of the trees evokes an uprising. Inspired by the ancient olive harvesting methods in which aggression and cultivation come together, the film portrays the absurdity of enforced ideologies and the impossibility of taming the wild.

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NAPOLEON 
319 North 11th Street
2^nd Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19107  

ARTIST RECEPTION: Friday, September 5, 6:00 – 10:00 PM  

devynn emory’s Personal Public: On Gender Variance in Performance Art

September’s exhibition examines the importance of asserting gender identification in art, particularly in performance art where the body is a fundamental part of the work and the artist invites the viewer into this personal, physical space. In conversation with and through investigation of the work of devynn emory, a dancer and choreographer based in New York, the exhibition considers queer performance and its influence on social structures.

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Marginal Utility



319 North 11th Street
2^nd Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19107  

ARTIST RECEPTION: Friday, September 5, 6:00 – 10:00 PM 

Le Horla

Wenxing Ding, Virginia Fleming, Mariel Herring, Adam Lovitz, Scott Schultheis and C.J. Stahl

The title of the exhibition references Guy de Maupassant’s short story in which the protagonist witnesses the passing of a strange ship along a familiar waterway, and begins to experience haunting hallucinations. Written in diary form, Le Horla chronicles the anxiety of an individual whose perception of reality has become ungrounded. With an inability to control his most intimate settings, familiar objects and spaces become actors in discorporate narratives.

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Practice319 North 11th Street
2^nd Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19107  

ARTIST RECEPTION: Friday, September 5, 6:30 – 8:30 PM 

HominineAndrew Brehm

Hominine takes viewers cave-deep into a prehistoric lovers-stalemate through sculptures and live audio works.Hominine is installation as a sitcom of objects, each part humorously lampooning the eternal struggle of long-term relationships, investment strategies, and modernization. Join the artist for two live-reading performances on opening night or enjoy the sculpture as a recording throughout the month of August.    

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Grizzly Grizzly319 North 11th Street
2^nd Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19107  

ARTIST RECEPTION: Friday, September 5, 6:00 – 10:00 PM 

‘Cut & Paste’Jenny McGee Dougherty, Selena Kimball, Tyler Starr 

McGee Dougherty's subtle works transcend the parameters of both fiber and paper by collecting marks, scruffs and textures.  She then translates these impressions into a visual narrative of her surroundings. “I read the paper every morning but never finish it.” admits Selena Kimball.  Instead she reworks the pages’ images, texts, crinkles and stains to fashion new histories from the recent past. Tyler Starr's mixed media works investigate the history of geographical sites where an unsolved tragedy has occurred. Basing his collages in research gathered from sensationalized journalism.

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Locks Gallery
600 Washington Square South

Philadelphia, PA 19106  

ARTIST RECEPTION: Friday, September 5, 5:30 – 7:30 PM 

Locks gallery exhibition program presents new works by mid-career artists while introducing the work of emerging artists to a national audience. Survey and thematic exhibitions of work by essential artists of the 20th-century including Louise Bourgeois, Robert Motherwell, Louise Nevelson and George Segal, are regular highlights of the gallery exhibition program.

Forest Park Virgil Marti 

Marti will bring together new works with other recontextualized projects, highlighting his own investigation of the sublime and romanticism throughout history. Marti’s art merges his passion for Americana with his distinctive explorations of the world of domestic interiors.

ROB SWAINSTON @ MARGINAL UTILITY

ROB SWAINSTON: WOODCUT MAP OF UTOPIA FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2013 EDITION

6 September – 20 October 2013

Opening reception Friday, 6 September 2013, from 6 – 11 pm

Artist reception Friday, 4 October 2013, from 6-11 pm

Marginal Utility is proud to present WOODCUT MAP OF UTOPIA FROM THE SEPTEMBER 2013 EDITION, a solo exhibition by the New York based artist Rob Swainston.

The show explores the interface between political and institutional structures, historical memory and print technology by exposing the “unstable image” in moments of visual interference—moiré, bitmap, collage, and line.

The exhibition draws its title from an illustration heading in a mass-market edition of Renaissance humanist Thomas More’s Utopia, picked up for free at New Harmony Vegetarian in Philly’s Chinatown, several years ago.

The illustration, Woodcut Map of Utopia From the March 1518 edition, is now out-of-copyright and displayed in cheap reproduction on self-destructing paper. This mass-market paperback is a shadow of a reminder that once people could write a book describing an idealized society via a fictionalized conversation between two people that did actually exist.

While print technologies were once cutting-edge methods of disseminating representations (maps, fine art reproductions), or political machination (treatises, manifestos, proclamations, or representations of historical events), we now have the fragmented and democratized pixel.

Swainston’s Woodcut Map addresses the dismantling of the printed image. The theme is explored in multiple forms in which different print media masquerade as each other; the line between print, video and painting is blurred; cast iron poses as wood; and a deconstruction of Léon Frédéric’s Four Seasons is translated as an inscrutable color explosion, matching our current state of “global weirding,” to Frédéric’s 1894 Academic idealism.

Swainston’s recent work employs print-based installation, video, and works on paper to explore print technology, the meaning of the image and ultimately the fragmentation and disappearance of the image.

First Friday//July 5th

Tiger Strikes Asteroid//Ezra Masch

Vox Populi Gallery//VOX IX//Annual Juried Exhibition

Rebecca Rutstein @ Bridgette Mayer

Rebecca Rutstein / Deep Rift

January 24, 2013
Bridgette Mayer Gallery 

Bridgette Mayer Gallery announces its second exhibition of 2013:
A solo show by artist Rebecca Rutstein will be on view February 27 to
March 30, 2013, with an opening reception Friday, March 1, 6:00 – 8:30 PM.

Bridgette Mayer Gallery is pleased to announce its sixth solo exhibition of work by artist and Pew Fellow, Rebecca Rutstein. Deep Rift will be on view from February 27 to March 30, 2013, with an opening reception Friday, March 1, from 6:00 - 8:30 pm. The exhibition will feature new large and small paintings, as well as a site-specific, wall mounted sculptural piece spanning 10 x 16 ½ feet.

Deep Rift is a natural continuance of Rebecca Rutstein’s fantastical, landscape-based paintings. Her interest in geology as both subject matter and metaphor for life experiences and relationships is present, yet pared down and refined. Overt identifiable iconography has been abandoned in favor of more amorphous spaces. Wire-framed maps were once a muted background component in Rutstein’s work. In Deep Rift they have become the focal point. Undulating and disintegrating across the canvas, these artist-created topographies evoke the never ending turns of life and personal relationships. Along with the subject matter, the artist has shifted her physical use of paint as well. Experimenting with dripping, scraping and dragging paint across the canvas, the paintings in Deep Rift reveal a more dynamic surface quality and bolder color than previous bodies of work.

Rutstein’s participation in the Gullkistan Residency in Laugarvatn, Iceland was a major influence on the work in Deep Rift. She states, “One of the most geologically diverse places on earth – rich in glaciers, volcanoes, geysers and waterfalls – the island straddles two divergent tectonic plates. I was legitimately struck by the stark contrasts in the landscape and humbled by the forces behind it all. In particular, a guided hike on Sólheimajökull glacier in the south of Iceland was the inspiration for many of the paintings as well as the sculptural wall piece in the show.” During this exhibition, the back wall of the gallery will feature a laser-cut, steel sculpture that mimics the movement and rolling nature of Rutstein’s paintings.

Rebecca Rutstein received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 and her BFA from Cornell University in 1993. The artist has completed several residencies including, Gullkistan Residency (Laugarvatn, Iceland), the Red Cinder Artist Colony (Na'alehu, Hawaii), the Banff Centre for the Arts (Banff, Canada) and the Vermont Studio Center. She has been a visiting artist at a number of institutions, including Moore College of Art and Design, University of Texas, and Swarthmore College. Rutstein has been the recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a Bridgette Mayer Travel Grant, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Grant, a Pew Professional Development Grant, and an Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts. She has had numerous exhibitions including solo shows at the Philadelphia International Airport, Sylvia White Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, PA) and Fleisher Art Memorial (Challenge Exhibition).

Gallery hours are Tuesday - Saturday 10:00 a.m.- 6:00 p.m. & by appointment. For additional information please contact Bridgette Mayer at (p) 215-413-8893 (f) 215-413-2283 

Wandering Planar @ Fjord

::WANDERING PLANAR::

"Space and space again is the infinite deity which surrounds us and which we are ourselves contained. Height, weight and depth which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus protect myself from the infinity of space." -MAX BECKMANN

FJORD is pleased to announce our eighth group show, Wandering Planar, curated by A.J. Rombach and featuring artists: 
Abrahm Guthrie-Potter http://cargocollective.com/AbrahmGuthrie
Vera Iliatova http://www.verailiatova.com/index5.html
Jeremy Miranda http://jeremymiranda.com/
Matthew William Robinson http://matthewwrobinson.com/home.html
Lisa Sanditz http://www.lisasanditz.com/
Mary Witterschein http://cargocollective.com/mwitterschein/Spring-2012-Paintings

The works in this show have been selected to investigate the use of landscape as subject in contemporary painting. 

Please join us Friday, February 1st, for our opening reception. 6pm- 10pm with a live electronic performance from musician Matt Beck at 9pm.