April 25th, 2012

 


Jack Ramunni is a graduating senior at the Columbus College of Art and Design, a school with a sclerotic curriculum geared toward producing graphic designers for local corporations, a place where “fine art” tends to begin and end at object-based art-making for commercial galleries. Ramunni, using this restrictive background as a catalyst, instigated an array of projects aimed at redefining what contemporary art is and what we should expect it to do.

Ramunni and Nikki Skrinak have coined the term “Social Heat” to describe the intent of his artwork. Social Heat is:

“…the spontaneous transfer of energy from one body, group of individuals, or larger social system to another due to a multiplicity of connections and modes of communication.”

Ramunni uses a variety of methods to achieve this goal. In Sweater Shoppe, he reworked the logic of the market system by co-founding a trade-based pop-up “store” replete with its own currency; with Late Lunch Live, a weekly USTREAM cooking show, Ramunni turned the banal activity of making lunch into free community entertainment; in EX-PDF Library, he exchanged lithographed bookmarks for PDF files from the public, which he printed out and made available in a public library; in Benches Gallery, Ramunni created a portable gallery for showcasing artwork in public spaces, excising commercial concerns from the gallery experience.

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April 17th, 2012


FASTWÜRMS is a Canadian artist collective started in 1979 by Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse, who are associate professors of studio art at the University of Guelph in Ontario. Their artwork seemingly encompass all disciplines – installation, video, manifesto, performance, drawing, etc – and concerns witch positivity, working class aesthetics, queer politics, and public collaborations. Many of the images after the jump are taken from the FASTWÜRMS: DONKEY@NINJA@WITCH catalogue that accompanied a 2007 retrospective at the Art Gallery of York University.
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April 5th, 2012


In Jessica Langley‘s artwork, the staid landscape genre is revivified through jokes, ha-has, and a reworking of the conceptual apparatus attached to depicting the environment. Langley, a adjunct associate professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, creates new avenues at the margins of “landscape,” by interrogating its space in the human imagination rather than in its physical fact. For instance, in the series Outfitters, Langley explores the troubling conflation of killing nature with loving nature by using the brand names of hunting apparel companies like “Real Tree,” “Open Country,” and “Forever Wild” as edifying doses of black humor. In The Aww and Make CATopia Real (with Ben Kingsley) series, Langley uses kit-kats as a method to defuse all that modernist baggage that accompanies human quests for utopia. But what is CATopia? Extensive networks of imposing cat towers to play on? Free nip for all? It’s unclear, but Langley compels us to consider it worth purrsuing.

Langley is the first artist participating in Skylab Gallery‘s new artist-in-residence program in downtown Columbus, Ohio. Her exhibition at Skylab opens at the end of May 2012. Until then, view more of her work after the jump. Read more »

March 26th, 2012

John Collins McCormick is a 28-year-old artist and experimental noise musician living in Garrett, Indiana. McCormick performs with Megan Mirro in the band Sky Thing, which has releases on Eggy records and Friends and Relatives records. Friends and  Relatives records recently published a zine collecting McCormick’s line drawings – some of which you can see after the jump. If interested, feel free to email McCormick at johncollinsmccormick@gmail.com to inquire about his zines and records.
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March 16th, 2012


Aidan Koch, a comics writer and illustrator who’s previously been featured on Beautiful/Decay, has started a new blog entitled Field Studies to help fund an extended period of traveling. Koch, who hails from Portland, Oregon, is drawing intriguing sights she encounters during her travels – often depicting local flora, or a recurring pup named Edie – and selling each original piece for $20 through PayPal. The payments go back into Koch’s travels, thus generating even more field studies.

The studies themselves manage to come off as both timeless observations and, with the focus on plants, for instance, articulations of the zeitgeist. They are austere without being restrained and composed without being constrained. Most usefully, they serve as visual inlets to her larger body of artwork. For those not already familiar with Koch’s comics and styles of drawing, a good place to start is her comic book The Whale published by Gaze Books.

As part of her season of traveling, Koch will be the artist-in-residence at Skylab Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, during the month of June. As there is a lot of America in-between Portland and Columbus, I suggest checking out Koch’s drawings that are after the jump, then finding one that suits your daily décor needs on her site.
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March 7th, 2012

Martin Hugo’s sketchbooks détourné the commercial imagery he encountered while designing corporate fashion in the “Empire State.” These books read as Hugo’s coping mechanism for trafficking in cultures he actively disdains.  Using styles from esoteric hardcore music and quotidian visual culture, Hugo degrades and problematizes “high-brow” mainstays like the fashion industry, the contemporary art world, and our global plutocracy. But these minimal collages would be a bore if they were just well-designed, on-the-nose crits of capitalism’s look and effect; whether it’s through his deft rebranding of The Whitney (it rhymes), or by imploring us to “Support Our Predator Drones,” it’s Hugo’s gallows humor that makes them shine. He is able to look into the abyss of American culture and find the ha-has we need to get through the (last) day(s).

Two collections of Hugo’s artwork are available: Drug Topics Zine AKA Whole Hog Zine and 6 Months of Shit, which he co-authored with Shawn Khemsurov. Another publication, Marlito’s Way Zine, will come out this June. Until then, check out more of his artwork after the jump.
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February 20th, 2012


Chelsea Dirck is an art student majoring in Art Education and Fibers at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Massachusetts. I met her through the DIY punk scene five years ago, and her drawings are still resonant with the energy, sincerity, and immediacy of that time period. Dirck’s artwork is often derived from her innumerable personal journals, some of which have recently been released as zines. These zines are full of emotive jottings and ink drawings that are paired with humorous or poignant words and slogans – oftentimes directly referring to Dirck’s personal life. The drawings in her zines are influenced by such disparate quarters as advertising, comics, Internet memes, David Shrigley’s drawings, the book More Things Like This, and other forms of text and image combination – which seems to be the predominant mode of expression for us “Millennials.”

Dirck’s journal-based artwork seems almost tailor-made for Internet distribution through sites like Tumblr, where she has cultivated a sizable following. However, she has recently expanded her art practice to include mediums where physicality is a central concern: embroidery, quilt-making, and large-scale drawings. With an upcoming show this spring at MassArt and an ongoing relationship with the Boston gallery Lincoln Arts Project, Dirck seems to be coming into her own – just in time for her 24th birthday, which, by the way, is today. So go do some celebratory pillaging of her Etsy for prints, originals drawings, postcards, and zines of many of the images found after the jump.
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February 6th, 2012


AJ Fusco is a multimedia artist currently living at Skylab Gallery in Columbus, Ohio. His past body of work, seen after the jump, consists of finely wrought, large-scale graphite drawings that put the viewer’s received distinctions between natural and digital imagery in doubt.
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