Citywide

From the UArts site:

More than 25 artist-run collectives collaborate to present a celebration of Philadelphia contemporary art this November

September 20, 2013

This November, more than 25 artist-run collectives will join forces to present a month-long celebration of Philadelphia contemporary art with CITYWIDE, a “massive collaboration” that will include a publication and feature performances, panel discussions, gallery openings and other programming in a variety of venues across the city. A Kickstarter campaign is underway through October 6 to help raise funds for this cross-collaborative event.

The University of the Arts, at the heart of Philly’s artist collective culture, is well represented at CITYWIDE, with a long list of alumni, faculty and staff whose work will be showcased during the exhibition. Participating UArts community members include Senior Lecturer and Academic AdvisorJordan Rockford BFA '00 (Photography), Craft & Material Studies Senior Lecturer Christina P. Day BFA '99 (Crafts), MFA in Studio Art Lecturer H. John Thompson MFA ’09 (Studio Art), Print Services staff member Jason Chen BFA '08 (Animation), Photography and MFA in Book Arts/Printmaking Senior Lecturer Julianna Foster MFA '06 (Book Arts/Printmaking), Sara McCorriston BFA '09 (Theater Design & Technology), Mary Smull BFA '95 (Fibers), Sculpture Shop Supervisor Lewis Colburn, Assistant Professor of Glass Alexander Rosenberg, Interdisciplinary Fine Arts Lecturer Erica Prince and Interdisciplinary Fine Arts Senior LecturerDaniel Gerwin.

These artists are members of the 25-plus participating collectives that includes Vox Populi, Space 1026, Little Berlin, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Grizzly Grizzly, Marginal Utility, NAPOLEON, Fjord, Mt. Airy Contemporary Artists Space, Rebekah Templeton, Highwire Gallery, Basekamp, McCartney/Belknap Projects, Practice, Traction Company, InLiquid, Paradigm Gallery, Magic Pictures, Termite TV Collective, the Soapbox, Title Magazine, the Nicola Midnight St. Claire, Pterodactyl, Art/ Assembly, BYO Print and the OOF Animation Collective.

CITYWIDE is the recipient of a 2013 Knight Arts Challenge Grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

“Philadelphia artists are dedicated community-builders. We pool our resources and volunteer our time to create gallery spaces, to make sure the art we're seeing and are moved by can be seen by anyone,” said Grizzly Grizzly artist curatorial member and former UArts lecturer Mary Smull. “CITYWIDE is possible because our audience has really responded and grown, and the Knight Foundation sees that and wants to support it.”

IMPORTANT DATES
Sunday, October 6
Kickstarter campaign ends

First Friday, November 1
CITYWIDE exhibit openings commence and continue through the first two weeks of November

Wednesday, November 13, 11:30 a.m.
CBS Auditorium
Nicola Trezzi Lecture: the U.S. editor for Flash Art will speak in conjunction with CITYWIDE

Wednesday, November 13, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
Moore College of Art & Design
CITYWIDE Panel Discussion on artist-run spaces, moderated by Richard Torchia and including Matthew Higgs, Kaytie Johnson, Nicola Trezzi and others

Saturday, November 16, 2 – 5 p.m.
CITYWIDE Trolley Day: shuttle bus service between all participating sites

Tyler School of Art//Visiting Artists

FWM lectures

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.