[PAM] Member Blogs

Dr. Ivo Chandor paid a visit to Charlie Rose on Friday to discuss the choices confronting Obama's administration.

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/22bb456a56/ivo-chandor-on-charlie-rose 

BABELGUM METROPOLIS ART PRIZE

A free public screening across three Jumbotron monitors in Times Square of the nine winning art videos from the Babelgum Metropolis Art Prize, an international search for the best and edgiest artists sponsored by Babelgum.

The screening will be kicked off by Isabella Rossellini, the actress/video artist who served as head judge for the contest, who will be seated in an antique electric chair to also herald the premiere of “Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair” an art video short co-directed by the actress and Guy Maddin. The event is the latest innovative effort by the Times Square Alliance to bring cutting-edge art to the people of New York.

GRAND PRIZE:
The Magnitude of the Continental Divide (Christopher Coleman)
RUNNERS UP:
Wonderland (Hye Yeon Nam)
Cardboard (Sjors Vervoort)
STREET ART AWARD:
Mask (2501)
RUNNERS UP
Pixelator (Jason Eppink)
Suspended Garden of Babylon (Jeorge Simas and Filipe Morozini)
AUDIENCE AWARD:
Subway Yearbook Photos (Improv Everywhere)
RUNNERS UP:
Last Kodachrome 40 for a Nizo S800 (Davide Pepe)
Simple Present - Future Perfect (Davide Pepe)
Visit the ART PRIZE PAGE to find out more.

Where: Times Square at Duffy Square, 47th and Broadway adjacent to TKTS Booth.
Screens featuring the art videos include Fox News Corp (43rd St. and Broadway), MTV (Broadway between 46th and 47th Sts.) and Clear Channel / CNN (47th St. and 7th Ave).

When: December 17 from 7 – 8 pm.

You are also invited to the VIP drinks reception and awards presentation following the event:

Jonathan Levine Gallery
529 West, 20th Street
New York

From 8 pm

RSVP to metropolis@babelgum.com

Maesmak is Whats your name? in Arabic.

Maesmak is a meditative exploration of one day spent in Rutba in late 2002, to plant an olive tree against the war, just before the invasion of Iraq.

Duration: 20'20''

Athens-Palermo August 2008

Upcoming screenings, awards, review and more information:
georgessalameh.wordpress.com/maesmak/

Video at Art Basel

By G.H. Hovagimyan (for [PAM])

One of the great pleasures of Art Basel Miami is the discovery of galleries from Mexico and Latin America. I’ve seen several booths presenting fresh perspectives on conceptual art, body art and video art that have been somehow overlooked by the mainstream art press.  The perspective and voice is a presentation of Post Colonialism filtered through a very rigorous poetry that seems to pervade all Latin American works. I’m not a big fan of the standard sort of surrealist painting mural style techniques. I find that area of art to be boring repetitive and exhausted. I am however enthralled at the Latin perspective of media histories and narratives. I find them to be more inventive and insightful than all the Chinese neo-conceptual art that the mainstream art word is so enamored of.

I happened upon a gallery called Proyectos Monclava http://www.proyectosmonclova.com I was immediately attracted to a video installation piece by the artist Mario Garcia Torres.  The piece looked like a 1970’s video installation/minimal sculpture piece. It had a steel frame that held two Sony B&W video monitors one on top of another. On the monitors were playing two B&W videos that looked like 1970’s earth art or body works.  The video was grainy and I realized it was shot on film and transferred to video. I asked the dealer what the process was and he told me that Torres had shot super 8 film and transferred it to video.  I thought this piece was quite intriguing. It used outdated technology and tools to evoke another epoch in art.  I sensed the nostalgia and poetry of the work.  The piece was very subtle. It could have been ignored or overlooked. This seems to be the case with a lot of contemporary Latin American art and artists with the exception being Gabriel Orozco.  What I found is that the idea of a US style conceptual/minimal canon has been viewed almost with a disjunctive voyeurism in Latin America.  My favorite Mexican saying goes something like this,” Mexico, so far from God but so close to the United State!”

Following the peculiarities of Latin American video art both high conceptual and populist is quite interesting. One of the Artists Meeting and [PAM] artists Maria Joao Salema has done a number of quirky and exciting curatorial works of found footage using you Tube videos. Some of these were projected for a band concert this summer in Brooklyn. Salema has also created several youTube triptychs that are part of Artists Meeting youTube parties (YTTP) see:  http://www.you3b.com/watch/765 and http://www.you3b.com/watch/936

And perhaps the most concise postcolonial media riff is her triptych Drum and Bass -- http://www.you3b.com/watch/737

My point is that the range and use of video as an object rather than a direct reporting of some live event has quite a lot of poetic punch.  This carries far beyond a lot of super high production quality work we see now in the museums and on large flat screens. There’s an intimacy and shallow space that video commands that is similar to a story circle around a campfire or in this case the crackling TV set of olden days. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ_egdDRz5Y 

For Immediate Release:                                                                                      
Artists Meeting, the artists collaborative, will have a benefit party/art auction and concert at the Flux Factory, Sunday, November 1st.

Doors open at 6pm.  Suggested Admission is $10.
Flux Factory
39-31 29th St
Queens, NY 11101
Directions -- http://www.fluxfactory.org/about/directions/
 
Schedule of Events:
Art Viewing/Auction -- 6pm-8pm – (special auction performance by Bethany Fancher starting at 7:00). 

Artworks by: James Andrews, Daniel Blochwitz, Eliza Fernbach, Emmanuelle Gauthier, David Graeve, Karen Gunderson, Jon Handel, G.H. Hovagimyan, Thomas Hutchison, Jaime Jackson, Olga and Viktor Lysenko, Lara Star Martini, Christina McPhee, Artists Meeting, Mayuko Nakatsuka, Nsumi Collective, Sally Payen, Maria Joao Salema, Lee Wells and others.

Preview and Pre-Bid auction site – http://artistsmeeting.org/auction

Concert/Dance Party/DJ - 8pm-10pm Featuring --
Super Seaweed Sex Scandal and Live Footage                                                    

SSSS - http://www.myspace.com/superseaweedsexscandal                                          

Live Footage - http://www.livefootagebrooklyn.com/                                            

Special DJ sounds by: Y.M.I.