Bob Dylan famous [70th] birthday, May 24th

!!!Happy 70th Birthday, Mr. Dylan!!!

http://expectingrain.com/

Mario Loprete

MARIO LOPRETE Black power olio su tavola 75 x 150 2011

EUROPAFRICA

SPAZIOTTAGONI
Via Goffredo Mameli 9Roma
Inaugurazione mercoledì 25 maggio ore 19.00

Curatori Vittorio Pavoncello e Giuseppe Salerno


Da un'idea di Vittorio Pavoncello un gemellaggio virtuale tra il Giorno della Memoria (27 gennaio) e la Giornata Mondiale dell'Africa (25 maggio) 50 artisti offrono il loro libero contributo alla trattazione di tematiche sul razzismo che accomunano le due ricorrenze.

Le influenze dell'arte africana sulle avanguardie del ventesimo secolo sono ben note tanto da essere incluse in ciò che i nazisti definirono "arte degenerata". Ciò che risulta curioso, paradossale e inquietante è il fatto che mentre l'arte occidentale andava sempre più aprendosi a mondi e culture altre, senza alcuna discriminazione razziale e prefigurando quella che sarebbe divenuto un pianeta multiculturale, la società si chiudeva in forme di segregazione sempre più ferree fino a giungere all'eliminazione sia delle persone fisiche sia delle arti che a quella mescolanza di forme e modelli si andava ispirando. Gli artisti delle avanguardie storiche, nell'aprirsi alle forme d'arte africana, sperimentavano in senso positivo quella de soggettivazione dell'identità che nei lager nazisti veniva imposta come privazione di qualunque diritto umano. Molti furono gli artisti che s'ispirano alle teorie intraviste, nelle sculture e geometrie decorative africane, come nuove forme di interazione dello spazio e del tempo. Fra questi Picasso, Braque, Derain, Matisse, Kleee Modigliani, per citarne solo alcuni.
Una mostra che unisca oggi artisti contemporanei su temi che vanno dall'avanguardie storiche, alla schiavitù, alla Shoah, all'Africa e all'Europa incrementa il dialogo fra i due continenti, quello europeo e quello africano, in un unico spazio culturale unito dall'arte. E come gli artisti occidentali vedevano nei volti delle maschere africane un archetipo con il quale confrontarsi, oggi, che sempre più i volti i gesti della shoah ci appaiono come maschere, il confronto è con un archetipo che è la stessa memoria.
La rassegna si arricchisce, nei giorni di esposizione delle opere, con i seguenti eventi:

25 maggio h 19
"Variazioni su Al Jolson" ovvero "Il Dolore del Contrasto"
Ro' Rocchi performance
Alpha Dieme ai tamburi
h 20
ONDULA MOVULA
Isabella Venantini danza
AFRO-EMBE' di Artale Afro Percussion Band musica

26 maggio h 18
Laura Boldrini e Anna Foa
(Immigrazioni e concetto di Genocidio)
incontro

27 maggio h 18
Gemma Vecchio Associazione Casa Africa
Incontro

28 maggio h 18
letture dei poeti
Roberto Piperno, Deborah D'Agostino, Ribka Sibhatu , Ndjock Ngana, Michele De Luca,Michela Zanarella, Rossella Pompeo, Lucia Cenni

"I piedi di Abele Bikila" spettacolo performance di Stefano Lucarelli
Galleria Spazio Ottagoni
Via Goffredo Mameli, 9 -00153 Roma

Contatti: Vittorio Pavoncello 366 4545656 SpaziOttagoni 335 6158199

mail art collage piece sent by Dirk Vekemans,

puis.1 déformée au lavage par l'objectif du konica minolta trucmuche puis.2 ironed with paint.net software

Charleroi 1911-2011

"industrie et culture"

http://charleroi1911-2011.blogspot.com/

Istvan Kantor - Monty Cantsin Amen.By Damian Rogala (Albums), FB

Great photos of great performance art...intensity and passion!

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002171721403#!/media/set/?set=a.174148589309870.47522.100001441902581

Africa

PROXY GALLERY (now showing: the africa collection): Select and assemble your own custom art exhibition with catalogue! Ultra hi-res art files, suitable for printing, are delivered in one custom pdf/ebook. Thousands of enlarged (custom, patented algorithms) and enhanced photographs (now, likely several hundred thousands, soon over a million,) mostly low-res cellphone, web-cam, and low-end digital camera self-portraits (self-packaging), culled from dating/social websites -- as you might expect, there is some explicit content (more than is permitted here unfortunately: you really should see them all, but it probably makes little difference) -- fascinating and occasionally disturbing. I've decided to also add a set of painting-filters -- this was good, as it enabled a 'recovery' of many more worthwhile images, and also clouded any possible erogenous/irregular corporate claims, but the project now extends beyond my life-span. I could easily make small paintings from these images but who support that activity? It's interesting to find the balance/inertia point between the look of photo and painting, and it speaks to the current social/heroic condition! Often it makes faces look squinty so it's necessary to 'bring-back' facial aspects. The display images on this site are but quick approximations of the larger art files which simply don't scale -- kinda like paint on canvas. Another advantage of the painting filters is that they drastically reduce the file sizes and make it well-nigh impossible for someone to covertly res-up these display images for printing. It's quite incredible to realize that many of these pictures were only 3-4K or so when I started to work on them. You may realize that this is not the first time I've collected anonymous found-public imagery: notably dumpster-diving (bicycling with backpack at midnight,) at photofinishers' in the 70's. And of course, there's the "Insatiable Abstraction Engine" -- collections from newsgroups. [http://bbrace.net/insatiable-abstraction.html] But come to think it, nearly all my work involves repeated multiples or collections of imagery. My new friends. Whenever possible I retained any color casts, cropping and lighting. The portraits are actually very considered, sometimes selections made/altered merely to obscure the identity that they wished to presumably portray initially. Sunglasses are a popular ruse, as are close-ups of cleavage, butts, tattoos, feet and groins. (Curiously, I've yet to see a picture of hands... ok, now I have: some intricate fingernails and the love/hate finger-tats.) Many feature-obilerating camera-flash-portraits in the bathroom mirror. Many of course, occur in and around motorized vehicles. Only one (so far) in a grocery store. And some, but surprisingly few, are filched from somewhere online, but this must be a risky choice in the event of an 'actual encounter.' How much introductory information/description do you want to put out there to begin with? There are some very creative, even artful, solutions to this dilemma. Various select groups of portraits are included in each PDF 500-page ebook/catalogue for $250 (sorry about the price but it was a hellish amount of work and I guarantee you won't be disappointed or YMB), and can be ordered directly. The images contain sufficient resolution to print them out on letter-size/A4 paper for an instant exhibition. Use my verified Paypal account to have the DVD delivered at no charge: [bbrace@eskimo.com; http://bradbrace.net/buy-into.html] Or, even better, assemble your own catalogue/exhibition at the Proxy Gallery storefront [http://cart.iabrace.com/]. Art files are only $1 each. My new friends. Having been recently kicked-off Facebook (there was an anonymous report of a depicted nipple!), and losing 5,000 so-called friends - it was the perfect place to host a social-media profile-portrait-collection, I've decided to also open an online storefront where individual high-res files will sell for only $1/each. [http://cart.iabrace.com] How hypocritical to object to profile pictures that were on FB to begin with; but it's fun to now position coloured boxes and bars over n•pples, c•nts and c•cks. How idiotic is that? The prints of course required different custom algorithms and some masterful retouching -- they look great! Technically given the incredibly diverse range of imagery it was difficult to make them all equally legible; despite a variety of intricate processing directives, the scripts would inevitably crash or be unable to render a decent image. These were handled individually as were the painting-filters. If I receive a reasonable number of orders, I'll offer additional states of the union or countries... but California had to be the place to begin. Sure to be a collectors' (socio-anthropologists') item! An amazing and compelling, collective portrait! The interspersed military/gangster imagery (or maybe something else), also introduces a new spin on the hopes for this already tenuous social-media culture. I've had to organize/sub-divide these in some fashion, so by state/country seems to be the prevailing approach. And given how often workers are compelled to move around, there's more of a local difference in cultural self-perception, body language, and social-sexual proclivity than you might expect. It really is a perhaps overlooked (overly-present), socially significant era when a massive proportion of the population is able to individually exorcise their self-imagery instead of being routinely dependent on existing systematized systems of portraiture and presentation -- which is not to say that it's entirely free from stylistic-cultural-corporate constraints and codification (and why, for now at least, I left the imagery in a nearly random arrangement), but the individual, probably for the first time ever, is seen freely negotiating a shifting porous skein of varied reception... well, something like that... what does it matter in this big world of shuffled lies... ( commissioned encaustic paintings on 12x12" panels of any subject are available for $15,000US ) http://cart.iabrace.com

Mary Cassatt, Jean Tinguely, famous birthdays May 22nd

Mary Stevenson Cassatt (pronounced /kəˈsæt/; May 22, 1844 – June 14, 1926) was an American painter and printmaker. She lived much of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later exhibited among the Impressionists. Cassatt often created images of the social and private lives of women, with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children.
Though women of her day were discouraged from pursuing a career, Mary Cassatt enrolled in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at age 16. Not surprisingly, she found the male faculty and her fellow students to be patronizing and resentful of her attendance. Cassatt also became frustrated by the curriculum’s slow pace and inadequate course offerings. She decided to leave the program and move to Europe where she could study the works of the Old Masters firsthand on her own.
- Wikipedia

Jean Tinguely (22 May 1925 in Fribourg, Switzerland – 30 August 1991 in Bern) was a Swiss painter and sculptor. He is best known for his sculptural machines or kinetic art, in the Dada tradition; known officially as metamechanics. Tinguely's art satirized the mindless overproduction of material goods in advanced industrial society.

Jean Tinguely, creator of machines that draw, play, explode, and capture our imagination,
spent countless childhood hours in the Swiss forest creating a story that would become a model for his future artwork. ...
-Wikipedia