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.

In celebration of the extraordinary range of artistic expression in the Muslim world, Asia Society, BAM, and New York University Center for Dialogues proudly present Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas. Muslim artists and speakers from as far away as Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and as near as Brooklyn will gather for an unprecedented ten-day festival and conference, offering New York audiences the opportunity to experience the cultural diversity and multiple perspectives that represent the Muslim world.

Official festival events will take place at the Asia Society, BAM, and the American Museum of Natural History, with a 2-day, 150-vendor outdoor souk at BAM during the opening weekend. There will be related events and programming around the city and on public television at WNET Channel THIRTEEN, and in celebration, the Empire State Building and Brooklyn Borough Hall will be lit green from June 5—7.  

Our top picks include:

Thursday, May 21st (Festival Partner Event): The Seen and the Hidden: (Dis)covering the Veil- 14 contemporary artists from the Middle East, Europe, and New York, including celebrated graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi, present approaches to the ideas that surround both the literal and metaphorical meaning of the veil. Opening reception from 6-8pm at the Austrian Cultural Forum. Free, through August 29th.

Friday, June 5th: Opening reception for New York Masjid: The Mosques of New York City. Photographer Edward Grazda and CUNY Professor of Architecture Jerrilynn R. Dodds not only documented the mosques and analyzed their architectural forms, but conducted interviews with community members, revealing an alternative image of American Islam in the process. Natman Room at BAM’s Peter Jay Sharp Building, though June 28th.

Monday, June 8th: Shirin Neshat presents a rare screening of Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad’s landmark short film The House Is Black (1962), which has had a profound influence on the New Wave in Iranian cinema as well as Neshat’s work. Neshat will also screen excerpts of her own films. At BAMcafé. 7pm, $10 ($5 for members), reception follows. 

Friday, June 12th & Saturday, June 13th: BAMcafé Live presents contemporary Muslim musicians in concert- Brahim Fribgane and zerobridge perform on Friday night, and Saturday night features global hip-hop by Muslim-American artists such as Dr. Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Kenny Muhammad The Human Orchestra, and Nihan Devecioglu, selected by the fantastic beatboxer and composer Adam Matta. 9:30pm both nights, FREE.

Tags: Adam Matta, American Museum of Natural History, artists, Asia Society, Austrian Cultural Forum, BAM, BAMcafe, beatbox, Brahim Fribgane, Brooklyn, concert, Dr. Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Edward Grazda, Forough Farrokhzad, Iran, Islam, Kenny Muhammad The Human Orchestra, Marjane Satrapi, mosques, Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas, New York Masjid, Nihan Devecioglu, Shirin Neshat, souk, The House Is Black, The Seen and the Hidden: (Dis)covering the Veil, zerobridge.

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.

Untitled 2007, Shilpa Gupta c. 2007. Archival photographic print on canvas. 40x53" Courtesy the artist.

The New Museum has announced its roster of fifty (truly) international artists for its newly-minted triennial debut, “The Generational”, opening April 8th. The exhibition’s title, “Younger Than Jesus”, refers to the fact that all the artists selected by a body of over 150 curators out of 500 recommended artists, are under the age of 33:

AIDS-3D (Daniel Keller and Nik Kosmas)
Daniel Keller
Nik Kosmas
Ziad Antar
Cory Arcangel

Tauba Auerbach

Wojciech Bakowsky
Dineo Seshee Bopape
Mohamed Bourouissa
Kerstin Brätsch
Cao Fei
Carolina Caycedo
Chu Yun
Keren Cytter
Mariechen Danz
Faye Driscoll
Ida Ekblad
Haris Epaminonda
Patricia Esquivias
Mark Essen
Ruth Ewan
Brendan Fowler
Luke Fowler
LaToya Ruby Frazier
Cyprien Gaillard
Ryan Gander
Liz Glynn
Loris Gréaud
Shilpa Gupta
Emre Hüner
Matt Keegan
Tigran Khachatryan
Kitty Kraus
Adriana Lara
Elad Lassry
Liu Chuang
Guthrie Lonergan
Tala Madani
Anna Molska
Ciprian Muresan
Ahmet Ögüt
Adam Pendleton
James Richards
Emily Roysdon
Katerina Sedá
Josh Smith
Ryan Trecartin
Alexander Ugay
Tris Vonna-Michell
Jakub Julian Ziolkowski
Icaro Zorbar

Other New York museum surveys that have included emerging work include PS1’s Greater New York, The Queens Museum of Art’s Queens International, and the Whitney Biennial. However, the New Museum is the first to dedicate its entire show to the practice of young artists.

The quality of the work selected remains to be determined, but The Totam would like to know what your opinion is on the New Museum’s decision to stage “Younger Than Jesus”. Does art created by a generation born after 1976 have more relevance and impact on our current culture than artists born before? Does it deserve an exclusive showcase? How do you feel about the name of the exhibition? Please comment!

Tags: artists, Generational, New Museum, roster, survey, young, Younger Than Jesus.