Phil Whitman, Battlefield Guides in Devil's Den, Gettysburg. 2008, graphite on paper, 12 x 13 inches. Courtesy the artist and iGavel.

Just received word from Alana Celii that iGavel Associates and Daniel Cooney Fine Art are calling for open submissions to their successful series of Emerging Artist Auctions, and are encouraging artists of all mediums (except installation) who do not have gallery or commercial representation to forward work for consideration by December 14th. The first Emerging Artist Auction curated from these submissions is slated to launch in early 2010.

iGavel is an international network of fine art and antiques professionals with regional networks that enable consignors to minimize handling and shipping expenses while reaching an international marketplace of buyers.

In participation with Daniel Cooney Fine Art and iGavel Associates, iGavel is pleased to present our Emerging Artists Auctions. These auctions include a curated selection of works of art by promising emerging talent. The auction is a showcase before an audience of collectors, dealers, museum professionals and gallery owners. To ensure equal and fair representation all works are presented with reserves set at $200.

Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis. To submit you must meet the following requirements:

- Undergraduate student works will not be accepted
- All mediums are welcome besides installation works
- Artists cannot have gallery or commercial representation
- Some prior exhibition or publication experience is required

To submit, please go to iGavel’s submissions page to fill out an online form and upload images, or email submissions to EmergingArtists@iGavel.com.

Submit one image per work. Images must be at least 800 pixels on the longest side, jpeg saved for web, below 200kb in size, and SRGB color space. Each artist will be required to sign a contract with iGavel. Artists receive a 50% commission on all sold works. Shipping of accepted works to iGavel or the iGavel Associate is the responsibility of the artist, and the return shipment if not sold. After your submission is received, you will be contacted by email.

Tags: Alana Celii, auction, call for submissions, Daniel Cooney Fine Art, emerging artists, iGavel, open call.

Michael McConnell, Slings 1, courtesy of the artist.

Tonight: Group opening at Jancar Jones Gallery in SF- Justin Beal, Lena Daly & Kate Owens. 6-9pm.

Artist Mark Dion presents a lecture about his work around scientific presentation and methodologies. Timken Hall at CCA, SF campus. 7-9pm. Free.

Friday, October 16th: Michael McConnell’s Slings and Arrows opens at Gallery BellJar in SF. 6-9pm. 

HYPERSPACES group opening at Park Life in SF: new works by Sean Mcfarland, Paul Wackers, David Kasprzak, Orion Shepherd, and James Sterling Pitt. 7-10pm

Cutters, an exhibition of international collage curated by James Gallagher, opens at Cinders Gallery in Brooklyn. 7-10pm

Saturday October 17th: The newly renovated El Museo del Barrio celebrates its grand reopening with free admission and a day of music and activities. 11am-9pm.

The grand opening of SF’s contemporary art space Southern Exposure in its new location, with an inaugural exhibition, Bellwether. 4-10pm

Sunday, October 18th: artist Tamar Hirschl will hold an open studio event as part of Chelsea’s High Line Open Studios event, featuring tours of more than 100 artists’ workspaces in the center of New York’s gallery district.

Monday, October 19th: The Berkeley Center for New Media and SFMOMA  presents From A to B and Back Again, a photo and video presentation by artist Candice Breitz. 160 Kroeber Hall, UC Berkeley, 7:30-9pm. Free.

Wednesday, October 21st: International curators Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Jens Hoffmann, Hou Hanru, and Dominic Willsdon participate in a panel discussion at the SF Art Institute on Global Art in the Downturn. 7:30pm. Free.

Tags: BellJar, Bellwether, Candice Breitz, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, CCA, Cinders, Cutters, David Kasprzak, Dominic Willsdon, El Museo del Barrio, From A to B and Back Again, Gallery, Global Art in the Downturn, grand opening, High Line, Hou Hanru, James Gallagher, James Sterling Pitt, Jancar Jones, Jens Hoffmann, Justin Beal, Kate Owens, lecture, Lena Daly, Mark Dion, Michael McConnell, open studios, Orion Shepherd, Park Life, Paul Wackers, Sean Mcfarland, SF MoMA, SFAI, Southern Exposure, Tamar Hirschl, UC Berkeley.

Mike Sinclair, Fourth of July #2, Independence, Missouri. 30x40 inches, Archival pigment print. Courtesy Jen Bekman Gallery

Two more days to catch the 2009 First Edition of Hey, Hot Shot!, Jen Bekman Gallery’s twice-yearly showcase for emerging photographers. The exhibition opened September 9th and features the photography of Michelle Arcila, Daniel Cheek, Mike Sinclair, Parsley Steinweiss and Kurt Tong.

With the exception of Steinweiss’ large-format details of stacks of printed material, reminiscent of some of Marco Breuer’s abstractions, the works on exhibit all seemed to touch upon each photographers’ unique relationship(s) with aspects of the natural landscape.

Here are some of our favorite images:

Kurt Tong, Guangzhou Zoo II, 2007. 32x40 inches, Lambda print. Courtesy Jen Bekman Gallery

Michelle Arcila, Faering, 2007. 16x20 inches, C-Print. Courtesy Jen Bekman Gallery

Daniel Cheek, Mercey Hot Springs, Mendota, California. 2009, 8x10 inches, Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Jen Bekman Gallery

Sinclair, Tong and Arcila’s works are also available in multiple editions at 20×200.

Tags: 2009 First Edition, 20x200, Daniel Cheek, Hey Hot Shot, Jen Bekman Gallery, Kurt Tong, Michelle Arcila, Mike Sinclair, Parsley Steinweiss, photographers.

TONIGHT, August 20th: Artists’ reception for Trains and Trips from Cement to Cemetery at Heist Gallery, featuring Peter Feigenbaum’s model-railroad-scale depiction of outer-borough NYC in the 1980s, and eerie woodland paintings by Marissa Bluestone.

Friday, August 21st: EAI Project Space at X-Initiative presents a video tribute to the late Merce Cunningham, featuring works by Charles Atlas, Nam June Paik and Shigeto Kubota. Noon-8pm, free.

San Francisco artists Lisa Rybovich Cralle and Jessalyn Aaland’s Good News opens at Painted Bird, with music by Jealousy. 8-10pm. Thru Sept. 11th.

Saturday, August 22nd: The 8th annual San Francisco Zine Fest celebrates small-press and DIY publications from the Bay Area and beyond this weekend. At the SF County Fair Building in Golden Gate Park thru Sunday, August 23rd, 11am-6pm, free.

Sunday, August 23rd:  One of our favorite storytellers, Juliet Wayne, is spinning a 40-minute tale, “The Moron Years,” about her life which is already the stuff of legend. If you haven’t seen her at various performance events around NYC or Philadelphia, don’t miss your chance this weekend. 6pm, Cornelia Street Cafe, $10. (via Jeff Simmermon)

Monday, August 24th: Your last week to catch I Don’t Believe in Miracles, a group exhibition focusing on the natural elements curated by Alana Celii at Space Womb gallery in Long Island City. Open Thursday-Monday.

Tags: Alana Celii, Cornelia Street Cafe, EAI, Good News, Heist Gallery, I Don't Believe In Miracles, Jeff Simmermon, Jessalyn Aaland, Juliet Wayne, Lisa Rybovich Cralle, Marissa Bluestone, Merce Cunningham, Painted Bird, paintings, Peter Feigenbaum, railroad model, SF Zine Fest, Space Womb, storyteller, storytelling, The Moron Years, Trains and Trips from Cement to Cemetery, video, X Initiative.

Unlike the artist’s earlier works which teem with bright, faceless figures (think Jonathan Borofsky’s sculptures invading a Hieronymous Bosch landscape) Lux’s new paintings seem to have distilled the color punctuation and movement of his previous works into more contemplative canvases with a kinetic, modernist bent.

Citing diverse influences, from Pieter Bruegel the Elder to Tal R, these paintings have a confidence and naive energy associated with the latter artist’s work, but seem executed with a less-studied, looser hand. Lux’s inventive use of repurposed materials in his compositions is evident in the incorporation of elements like plastic branches and layered glass panels in his paintings, or in the use of fake-marble busts as a pedestal.

Some of my favorites:

The paintings were accompanied by a selection of Lux’s found-object sculptures in a glass vitrine that at first glance recalled Josephine Meckseper’s retail displays. While the sculptures held some interest as possible referents to the artist’s working process, the case, neither large enough to compete with the paintings nor small enough to be supplementary ultimately seemed tangential to the dominance of the 2-D work in the gallery space.

Chris Lux’s Flickr

Jancar Jones Gallery

(photos c/o Aileen Tat unless noted)

Tags: Chris Lux, Give Me Some Peppermint Freedom, Jancar Jones, Jonathan Borofsky, Josephine Meckseper, paintings, sculptures, Tal R.

TONIGHT: San Francisco-based artist Chris Lux’s solo exhibition Give Me Some Peppermint Freedom opens at Jancar Jones Gallery. Lux’s work was accorded this week’s SFBG Pick for his “new rave sensibility.” 6-9pm, free. Through July 18th.

OMG Gallery Aferro Benefit preview, see below for additional details. 6-8pm

Saturday, June 20th: OMG Aferro Art Party Benefit. Gallery Aferro founders Evonne Davis and Emma Wilcox have been consistently supporting and producing some of the strongest emerging artists’ projects that The Totam has come across in recent years. Funds from the sale of artist-donated artworks and crafts at this inaugural benefit event will be used to cover the costs of finalizing Aferro’s status as a non-profit organization. We strongly urge tri-state residents to enjoy an entertaining evening and buy some fantastic work to support an organization promoting a thriving community of artists in and beyond the Newark area.

Everything is Terrible: The Movie premieres at The Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles. This full-length feature by the group of friends responsible for the popular Everything is Terrible website and YouTube channel promises to be a comic videoclip mashup of weird and epic proportions. One night only. Accompanied by a screening of the 1994 softcore classic, Dinosaur Island. 10:30pm, $10. Tickets here.

Monday, June 22nd: catch Afternoon, the solo project of singer-songwriter Krista Warden at the new Williamsburg music venue Bruar Falls, with Drew Victor. Warden’s accordion, guitar, and bittersweet honky-tonk-tinged vocal sensibility has graced collaborations with fellow Brooklyn notables Drew Victor, Beastheart and Sharon van Etten. 9pm, free.

Tuesday, June 23rd: The opening of X-Initiative’s No Soul For Sale: A Festival of Independents. X has invited more than 30 international nonprofit art spaces to travel to New York City to present themselves, their programs and the artists they support. 1-9pm, RSVP here. Through June 28th.

In conjunction with No Soul For Sale, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) will be unveiling a temporary video project space on X’s ground floor which will be open to the public, bringing new works by emerging artists into dialogue with rarely seen historical treasures from the EAI archives for the summer. Character Witness, the launch program for EAI’s project space, includes works by Kalup Linzy, Alex Bag, Michael Smith, MICA-TV, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, and Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. 6pm, free. Through September 2009.

Tags: Aferro, Afternoon, Beastheart, Bruar Falls, Chris Lux, clips, Dinosaur Island, Drew Victor, EAI, emerging artists, Emma Wilcox, Everything Is Terrible, Evonne Davis, Gallery, Give Me Some Peppermint Freedom, Jancar Jones, Krista Warden, movie, Newark, No Soul for Sale, non-profit, OMG, SFBG, Sharon Van Etten, Silent Theater, summer, temporary, video, Williamsburg, X Initiative.

Daniel Salemi, Ikea vs. Beuer, 2009, c-print. Courtesy of Kris Graves Projects.

Not able to see Swoon’s Swimming Cities, or Bruce Nauman’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale in person this year? Well, you could opt to visit what is being touted as the Biennale’s “largest pavilion” here, or just take advantage of an abundance of homegrown activities this weekend and beyond:

TONIGHT: Honey Space hosts a benefit and celebration for Swoon’s Swimming Cities of Serenissima, with a silent auction that includes works by many of the artists on the boats’ crew, and a raffle for original artwork by Swoon and Thomas Beale. 7-9pm, $10 admission.

Artists Daniel Salemi and Austin Thomas have concurrent openings of their work tonight in the main and project spaces of Kris Graves Projects. Salemi’s photographs and Thomas’ drawings and collages share an affinity for architectural forms. 6-9pm

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in SF presents Big Idea Night, featuring the delicious stylings of Mission Street Food. 9pm-3am. FREE, RSVP recommended.

Friday June 5th: Varnish Gallery hosts a party to raise awareness about eminent domain issues with guests Jello Biafra, Matt Gonzalez, etc. The gallery is one of over 30 local businesses and residences being evicted by a San Francisco city agency under the property law. 7-Midnight, 21+. Free.

Saturday June 6th: As part of Michael Cataldi and Nils Norman’s The University of Trash at Sculpture Center in Long Island City, guest artists McKendree Key and the neuroTransmitter collective have been invited to give public courses at the museum. Key will teach a family workshop on making recycled paper and paper-pulp sculptures, and neuroTransmitter will lead a radio transmitter building workshop. 1pm. Courses available with $5 admission to museum. ($25 materials fee and a reservation for the transmitter class is recommended.)

Your last chance to see Sophie Calle (and 107 other women)’s collaborative breakdown of a breakup, Take Care of Yourself at Paula Cooper Gallery.

Saturday & Sunday, June 6th & 7th: Oakland’s Pro Arts Gallery presents the 2009 East Bay Open Studios. Over 400 artists exhibit their work this weekend and the weekend of June 14th-15th. Visit site for more info.

Sunday June 7: The Exploratorium hosts a talk, reception and book signing by scholar Edward Shanken, author of the new book Art and Electronic Media, interviewed by arts commentator Dorka Keehn. Innovative Bay Area electronics artists Lynn Hershman Leeson, Paul DeMarinis, Ken Goldberg, Jim Campbell, Survival Research Labs, and Alan Rath are among the over 200 artists featured in Shanken’s book. 3pm. Free with Exploratorium admission.

Monday June 8th: David Byrne will perform a selection of music created with Brian Eno at the Prospect Park Bandshell as part of BRIC Art’s Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival. Other performers this summer include Femi Kuti, Blonde Redhead, Big Daddy Kane and They Might Be Giants. 8pm, gates open at 6:30pm. FREE, first come first served.

Tags: Alan Rath, artists, auction, Austin Thomas, benefit, Big Idea Night, Brian Eno, BRIC Arts, Bruce Nauman, Celebrate Brooklyn!, Daniel Salemi, David Byrne, Dorka Keehn, East Bay Open Studios, Edward Shanken, eminent domain, Exploratorium, festival, Honey Space, Internet Pavilion, Jello Biafra, Jim Campbell, Ken Goldberg, Kris Graves Projects, Matt Gonzalez, McKendree Key, Michael Cataldi, Miltos Manetas, Mission Street Food, Nils Norman, Oakland, paper, Paul DeMarinis, Paula Cooper Gallery, Prospect Park Bandshell, radio transmitter, Rafael Rozendaal, recycled, Sculpture Center, Sophie Calle, Survival Research Labs, Swimming Cities of Serenissima, Swoon, Take Care of Yourself, University of Trash, Varnish Gallery, Venice Biennale, workshop, Yerba Buena Center,  Art and Electronic Media,  Lynn Hershman Leeson,  neuroTransmitter.

Brian Ulrich, Circuit, Ponderosa. Image via www.notifbutwhen.com

Interesting work by artists working with photography and video opening in NYC this weekend:

TONIGHT: Brian Ulrich at Julie Saul Gallery, 6-8pm. Ulrich photographs consumer culture, from the boom of post-9/11 spending to the shuttered storefronts and interiors of recent years.

Friday, May 29th: William Lamson at Pierogi 2000, 7-9pm. Lamson documents three interventions within urban, natural and gallery contexts, including the exchange of his shoes for ones shot down from Brooklyn power lines with a bow and arrow. 

Saturday, May 30th: Leo Fitzpatrick at Fuse Gallery, 7-10pm. The snapshot quality of Fitzpatrick’s photos of “the deterioration of America at the turn of the century,” taken on a series of cross-country road trips, are an interesting complement to Ulrich’s deliberately observed images of suburban decline.

ALSO: William Kentridge closes at the SFMOMA this Sunday May 31st; last chance to catch Kentridge’s masterful films, drawings and mechanical theater works.

Tags: Brian Ulrich, Fuse, Gallery, Julie Saul, Leo Fitzpatrick, Pierogi 2000, SF MoMA, William Kentridge, William Lamson.

Emma Wilcox, Eminent Domain No. 5, 2006, silver gelatin print, 20x24". Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Aferro

TONIGHT Friday, April 24th: The Secret of the Ninth Planet opens concurrently at at Queens Nails Projects and Photo Epicenter in San Francisco. The group exhibit of sixteen artists whose works deal with space, time or travel is presented by graduate students in the Curatorial Practice program at California College of the Arts. 7-11pm, thru May 24, 2009

Saturday, April 25th: Symposium on the Super-8 films of Derek Jarman at the new nonprofit X Initiative (the former Dia space) in Chelsea, with Ed Halter, Chrissie Iles, Gerald Incandela and James Mackay. Moderated by Stuart Comer. 5pm, free, RSVP required.

Wednesday, April 29th: The Guggenheim presents a reception with artist Julieta Aranda in conjunction with her new camera obscura installation, part of the museum’s new Intervals emerging artists series. 6:30-8pm, $5 tickets or free for students/members with RSVP. 

Thursday, April 30th: DON’T MISS: Artist talk with Emma Wilcox as part of her solo exhibition Salvage Rights at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT. Long shadows in Wilcox’s carefully considered, desolate aerial photographs of rooftops and vacant lots seem a literal manifestation of the dark, gray area surrounding land rights issues. Mysterious text-marks upon her landscapes add to a general feeling that the artist is an archaeologist who has discovered evidence of the death-rite of a fallen civilization. Catalog available. 6pm, $3 suggested donation.

Tags: California College of the Arts, Chrissie Iles, curatorial studies, Derek Jarman, Ed Halter, emerging artists, Emma Wilcox, Gerald Incandela, graduate, Guggenheim, Intervals, James Mackay, Julieta Aranda, Photo Epicenter, photographs, Queens Nails Projects, Real Art Ways, Salvage Rights, Stuart Comer, symposium, The Secret of the Ninth Planet, X Initiative.

A transparent curtain slowly descends on the actress who uses her own blood to rouge her cheeks. She emits the violin from her throat, contorts her body to interpret the last line and with the mirrored glasses called for in the script, stares without a single blink at the hundred eyes lodged in the fourth wall.

Avelardo Ibarra, from Clandestine Theatre

Veronica Ibarra’s photographs defy definition. Like a sinister Dare Wright, one well-versed in the alchemical imagery of Cocteau and Anger, Ibarra carefully constructs scenes of glamour, her characters poised in fixed penny arcade moments of tantalizing possibility. Under her gaze, subjects become denizens of the artist’s indeterminate dreamworld, whether they be innocent babies or decadent performers. But the fantastic nature of Ibarra’s work belies the hard-won magic wrought from her steamer trunk of traveling vaudeville secrets. 

I spoke to Ibarra about her work and recent travels in late February, upon the publication of her limited edition book, Clandestine Theatre. A series of new images from her collaboration with legendary Transgressive filmmaker Tommy Turner, Beloved Pigs, will be featured in the group exhibition Cosmic Love, which opens at the Show Cave gallery in Los Angeles tonight.

Ibarra’s teenage fascination for the transformative power of makeup, combined with a penchant for the Helter Skelter nightlife prompted a burgeoning interest in documenting fellow artists and performers around downtown Los Angeles. She began drafting her first “guinea pigs” from her circle of friends, making day trips to places like the Angeles National Forest, junk heaps and abandoned buildings to make her first staged portraits.

Following a short stint at Otis College of Art and Design, Ibarra went on to begin a career gilding the faces of the known and aspiring on Hollywood film sets and runways as a makeup artist for MAC Cosmetics. The demand for her talents led to commissions to style and photograph performers at art events for artists like Murakami and Warhol at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA). Despite lucrative offers to continue her career as a stylist in California, however, Ibarra felt drawn to more potent temptations awaiting her in the glittering underbelly of rock and roll, and moved to New York City in 2001.

In New York, Ibarra found kindred spirits in other young performers making a name for themselves in the downtown music scene, including Lady Starlight, Breedlove, and Anna Copa Cabanna. She immersed herself in a nighttime world of the cabaret-going flaneur, and derived new inspiration for her work through her friendships. However, trading her large loft in downtown LA for a tiny tenement apartment in the East Village meant Ibarra was forced to pack away most of her studio gear. Out of practical necessity, she began devising ways to work within the building’s confines, using its historic, cramped hallways and atmospheric darkness to produce her first body of work, 60 Avenue B, a semi-biographical series of portraits of her friends. The photographs pay a kind of fictional homage to recent generations of artists celebrated and unknown, Factory-era divas and dandies whose ghosts continue to haunt the neighborhood.

Joel-Peter Witkin also used a lot of masks as well, and I’m a really big fan of his stuff. So I’ve always had little masks. And I’ve always felt that photographs seem a little more mysterious when you have props, or separate elements that make you wonder what they’re doing there and why, why they’re wearing that– I’ve always loved that sort of costumed style.

- Veronica Ibarra

Ibarra’s ingenuity with props and styling is even more readily apparent in her next series of images, Los Cuentos de Hadas (The Fairytales). The lush backdrops and Babylonian costumes that drape her models constitute a mysterious opium den of riches, a world of masquerade where one moves seamlessly from a Louise Brooks doppelganger to a pair of 19th century Parisian streetwalkers. Each group of photographs in this series have their own unique visual identity, so I was floored to learn that the gorgeous vignettes had all been shot in the same 10×10′ space in her apartment. The variations in look were accomplished on an almost non-existent budget with nothing more than a change of costume and clever drapery, all recycled items Ibarra finds in thrift shops, stored in a small bedside trunk. Her practical resourcefulness with artifice and her ability to fully realize illusions of otherworldly debauchery is something that deeply impressed me. It is inspiring that money and space are no obstacle to the spirit which drives Ibarra to undertake her work, and that there is seemed to be no spectacle that she could not effect through utilitarian means.

Along with Los Cuentos de Hadas and 60 Avenue B, Ibarra’s photographs of musicians from Genesis P.Orridge to Jon Spencer attracted additional attention from fashion and art circles. She began collaborating on photographic projects with artists like Tora Lopez and Emiliano Maggi, Carmen Hawk, Joanne Burke of Chromium Dumb Belle, and Tommy Turner. Ibarra recently traveled with Lopez and Maggi to New Orleans, where she documented their KK Projects installation, Modern Witchcraft at the Prospect 1 Biennial. 

Turner, whose film Where Evil Dwells with David Wojnarowicz is a seminal work of the Cinema of Transgression era, plays Ibarra’s lover and muse in her new series, Beloved Pigs. In a hallucinatory, blue-tinged dream sequence, the artists blur the boundary between fiction and reality when Ibarra performs the very real act of mutilating Turner’s body in her photographs.  

Veronica Ibarra is currently working on a series of self-portraits, one of which is the title image on her new blog, La Bella Memoria. Highlights of Ibarra’s last decade of work has been collected and self-published by the artist in the new volume, Clandestine Theatre, available for special order by email through her website.

(All photos in this piece are courtesy of the artist, except where noted.)

Veronica Ibarra Photography

Cosmic Love at Show Cave Gallery, April 18-25, 2009

La Bella Memoria

Glitter and Starz

Blitz Kids

Tags: 60 Avenue B, Anna Copa Cabanna, apartment, artists, Beloved Pigs, Blitz Kids, book, cabaret, Carmen Hawk, Chromium Dumb Belle, Clandestine Theatre, collaboration, Cosmic Love, costumes, East Village, emerging artists, Emiliano Maggi, Genesis P.Orridge, Glitter and Starz, Helter Skelter, installation, Joanne Burke, Joel Peter Witkin, Jon Spencer, KK Projects, La Bella Memoria, Lady Starlight, Los Cuentos de Hadas, makeup, MoCA, Modern Witchcraft, music, New Orleans, nightlife, performers, photographers, photographs, portraits, props, Prospect 1 Biennial, Show Cave, studio, Tommy Turner, Tora Lopez, Veronica Ibarra,  Breedlove.