| Take Care of Yourself | Calle in São Paulo

Take Care of Yourself  by Sophie Calle.

From July 10 to September 7  on July 10 at SESC Pompeia , Sao Paolo. Promoted by SESC São Paulo and Associação Cultural Videobrasil.

“I received an email telling me it was over.
I didn’t know how to respond.
It was almost as if it hadn’t been meant for me.
It ended with the words, “Take care of yourself.”
And so I did.
I asked 107 women (including two made from wood and one with feathers),
chosen for their profession or skills, to interpret this letter.
To analyze it, comment on it, dance it, sing it.
Dissect it.  Exhaust it.  Understand it for me.
Answer for me.
It was a way of taking the time to break up.
A way of taking care of myself.”

When a boyfriend dumped her by email, French artist Sophie Calle asked 107 women to read it.

Sophie Calle is a French artist who works with photographs and performances, placing herself in situations almost as if she and the people she encounters were fictional. She also imposes elements of her own life onto public places creating a personal narrative where she is both author and character. She has been called a detective and a voyeur and her pieces involve serious investigations as well as natural curiousity.

In this “tour de force of feminine responses… executed in a wild range of media,” Sophie Calle orchestrates a virtual chorus of women’s interpretations and assessments of a breakup letter she received in an email. In photographic portraits, textual analysis, and filmed performances, the show presents a seemingly exhaustive compendium with contributions ranging from a clairvoyant’s response to a scientific study, a children’s fairytale to a Talmudic exegesis, among many others. Examining the conditions and possibilities of human emotions, Take Care of Yourself opens up ideas about love and heartache, gender and intimacy, labour and identity. 107 women (including a parrot) from the realms of anthropology, criminology, philosophy, psychiatry, theatre, opera, soap opera and beyond each take on this letter, reading and re-reading it, performing it, transforming it, and pursuing the emotions it contains and elicits.

Further information.
Also: Subjetividades em Trânsito workshop by Kika Nicolela , 14 – 17 July, Sesc Avenida  Paulista, part of  Olhares sobre o acervo do Videobrasil.

ECVP Volume II at Formverk and Alucine

The 12 videos that comprise the new volume of the project will be finished in July 2009.

Exhibitions have been scheduled at Fromverk, Sweden in September and Alucine, Canada in November 2009.

| Green Pink Caviar | Times Square NY

Chewing Color on MTV’s HD billboard at 44th Street in Times Square Presented by Creative Time, 44 ½. Video Exhibition Curated by Marilyn Minter. Screening extended through May 31.

Green Pink Caviar, a five-minute video by the artist Marilyn Minter

“I wanted to make enamel paintings along the idea of ‘painting with my tongue.” Marilyn Minter

Creative Time, 44 ½, is a series of provocative video works that screen hourly on MTV’s gilded HD screen in Times Square. The first installment, Chewing Color, was curated by artist Marilyn Minter as a means of investigating what she refers to as the “pathology of glamour.” The films include Patty Chang’s Fan Dance, Kate Gilmore’s Star Bright, Star Might, and Minter’s Green Pink Caviar. Onlookers may be thrown off by Minter’s models, which were shot on low definition video swirling and sucking bakery products from beneath a pane of glass — a distinctly different kind of “sexy” than the commercial advertisements plastered all over Times Square.

Still from Green Pink Caviar

Marilyn Minter continues her interest in blurring the boundaries between fine and commercial art. Co-opting advertising genres and related spaces, she takes a new platform to direct her first video. Green Pink Caviar (2009) is a lush and sensual voyeuristic hallucination. Filmed with macro lenses, she captures the most minute movements of female mouths licking candy and cake decoration.

For more on the work, visit Marilyn Minter’s own website.

Marilyn Minter’s Exhibition
Screening schedule may be found on Creative Time’s website.

| Human Emotion Project | Melbourne

Guildford Lane Gallery. Melbourne, Australia. At the launch screening of works by Australian artist Neil Howe and a reading by Meg Oakley Australian Art Review

_ poster by Adamo Macri  Canada Drawn together by the art that they share via the internet, artists with disparate cultural and aesthetic identities approach the internal workings that exist in all humans. Emotions are inherently difficult to explicate. How does one describe fear? We know it when we feel it but how can we share, through the paltry use of language, our experience of it? Moving images, mostly embellished with sound, extend the expressive possibilities beyond what can be accomplished through language or even static imagery. By employing the largest palette of creative possibilities, film and video artists from around the world strive to externalize those complex driving forces that we all enjoy and endure and that bind us, as humanity, together despite our differences. The project was initiated and it is managed by South African artist  Alison Williams. It was born online, an art web site and artist networking site to which all of the artists involved belong. Democratically organized, individual artists are seeking real world venues in their home countries for a work that, even a few years ago, would have been a logistic impossibility.

| neil howe Australia | meg oakley – Australia | glenn church UK | anders weberg Sweden | cristina valenca limeira USA | bill millett UK| mads ljungdahl Denmark |alison williams RSA | debbie douez Spain | jose drummond Portugal | niclas hallberg Sweden | robertina sebjanič & nika autor Slovenia | tatjana de luxe Germany | wilfried agricola de cologne Germany | adamo macri Canada | michael chang Denmark | alicia felberbaum UK | alberto guerreiro Portugal | ulf kristiansen Norway | christy walsh USA | manfred marburger UK | dave swensen USA | daniel chavez USA | masha yozefpolsky Israel | behjat omer Kurdistan, UK | hakan akcura Sweden | osvaldo cibils Uruguay | mike hinc UK |tristan mory France | richard jochum NYC USA | irina gabiani Luxembourg | simone stoll Germany | wilma kun Brazil | anna jaros Poland | anthony elliot UK | vienne chan Hong Kong,Canada | sue pam-grant RSA | michael ebert, axel ebert(Ebros) Germany (for Faticart Group) | gaia bartolini Italy | nicole rademacher USA |

Read about some of the artists taking part in  HEP Melbourne 2009

| Water Preserves | Ithaca, NY

State of the Art Gallery (SOAG), Ithaca, New York
Wednesday, February 4, through Sunday, March 1, 2009
Opening reception: Friday, February 6, 5:00-8:00 pm

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Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

When a former student called her attention to the beginning passage of Moby Dick, Jan Kather began to think about water and her upcoming show at State of the Art. She got a copy of the book and says that “Melville seemed like a kindred spirit, as his sentiments were clearly beyond the obvious fact that water preserves our physical being.” Kather thought about how essential water has been for the preservation of culture. “Everywhere I looked,” she says, “I began to notice references to water, whether it be painting, music, poetry, plays, Cornell seminars, environmental reports or news of hurricanes, floods, and heavy snowfall. I looked back at my oeuvre of photographic expression, realizing water was often my subject, but more often my metaphor for embracing and expecting change.”

Kather initially imagined glass canning jars of water stacked like strawberry preserves in a cupboard. Deciding that was too literal, she tried projecting video clips of water through the jars of water onto surrounding walls in her house. “To my surprise,” she says,” the sounds of birds, automobiles, and voices created an unexpected, prayerful ambience. I knew then that the installation I was planning for February at State of the Art would center around a transformation of the gallery space into a meditation room.”

The result, a body of work titled “Water Preserves” (click to see movie) explores our complex and sometimes precarious relationship with water by visually and aurally examining its beauty, magic, terror, and poetry.