Color Chart at MOMA

Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today is another of MOMA's really comprehensive exhibit websites.

There are several ways of looking at the exhibit, not all of them immediately apparent. For instance, you might think that "Listen to the audio tour: Full program" is a link to audio files. But, no, it's a link to a slide show which shows 17 slides with audio, most with commentary by the curator, and some by the artists. The link to "Download audio clips" takes you to a list of the audio clips from the slide show with tiny images of the pictures on the slides. This is not the way to go. And the link to the online exhibition on this page is a bad link.

Clicking on the link at the top of this post takes you to the main online website. From there, you can view the works by artist, medium, or timeline, and also see four installation videos. One word of warning - if you look at enlarged images, be sure to click to get back to the list of artists, etc., or you'll be starting over from the beginning.

MOMA has a pretty good presence on YouTube. The following video is one I found there of the the artist Niele Toroni painting his contribution to the exhibit. The video on the website is better quality.

Paul St.Amand's Parallels

This short film has just won the 2008 Short Film Festival at TriggerStreet which "was founded in 2002 by two time Academy Award winner Kevin Spacey ...".

It has won several other awards and appeared at many film festivals, as noted here. And, best of all, Paul St. Amand is from Bedford, Nova Scotia.

As for viewing the film: TriggerStreet wants you to have a free account in order to log in and view their members' work. St. Amand's website has videos of this and other films at the link above. I found a good (larger) copy of the video at Metacafe.

The film is very good and says what I've been thinking - there are a lot of parallels between the U.S. presence in Vietnam and in Iraq. It is also very sad, in that we seem to have learned nothing in the intervening years.

Jessica Stockholder lecture

A few weeks ago, October 24th to be exact, I travelled to Halifax to attend a lecture by installation artist Jessica Stockholder. Since I live a few hours away, and I don't drive, this meant I had to take a shuttle bus, stay overnight in a B & B, and, of course, shop and gallery hop in the time I had left over. The fact that I got hopelessly lost wandering around the city (I finally found someone who said - "Go that way") meant that I visited only one gallery, but I did manage to cram a lot of shopping into the next morning.

The Stockholder lecture was announced on the NSCAD news page and briefly in the local newspaper, but I haven't been able to find any other news coverage of the event. I'm more than a little miffed at that because the lecture hall was packed, and she is an important artist. Her art is probably not everyone's cup of tea, since she uses everyday objects in her sculptures and sometimes the meaning behind the work can be obscure.

I have wondered if she is poking fun at 'serious art' with her sculpture but I felt from what she said in the lecture that Stockholder takes her own work very seriously. She had a very good slideshow to go with her talk, although I would have liked it if she had shown a bit more of her recent work. And she had some really good slides of my favourite piece, which I can't find anywhere on the internet, of a wall of car bodies, and the surrounding landscape which she created.

I actually have some of Stockholder's works, sort of. A few years ago, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago had a fundraising sale and I bought a package of Stockholder's contribution - a hundred paper placemats, which are photos of kitchen gadgets/containers sitting on placemats. In fact, the placemats are on sale again for Christmas this year. [corrections and site added November 16/08] One of these days, I'm going to do my own gadget/placemat photo.

There is a very good site for this artist on PBS's Art:21 website. There she describes her approach to her work. The YouTube video below is from this series.



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