Visual Arts Briefs

As the Sundance Film Festival enters its final weekend, one of the films that has people talking is Holy Rollers, the directorial feature debut from SVA alumnus Kevin Asch (BFA 1998 Film and Video). The work received a standing ovation when it premiered this week as one of 16 films in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. Inspired by actual events, the film stars Jesse Eisenberg (Roger Dodger, The Squid and the Whale) as a young Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn who is recruited by an Israeli drug dealer to smuggle ecstasy from Europe into the United States. “Holy Rollers is a fresh take on the emotional side of drug use,” says Asch, who talked to IndieWIRE recently about making the film, “I wanted to explore a subculture and its characters as real and visceral.” Read more about the filmmaker’s influences here, and an extended interview here.

Several other members of the SVA community are showing work at Sundance this year. Alumnus James Blagden (BFA 2004 Illustration) directed Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No, one of 70 short films selected from a record 6092 submissions. Johan Grimonprez (MFA 1992 Fine Arts), an alumnus and faculty member in the MFA Fine Arts Department, is represented by his critically acclaimed feature, Double Take. Grimonprez spoke to the Briefs about the project last year; the interview is here. And director of photography Bob Richman, a faculty member in the MFA Social Documentary Film Department, worked on Waiting for Superman, which is being screened in the U.S. Documentary Competition.

The Festival concludes January 31. For screening schedule and other details, visit the Sundance Web site at festival.sundance.org/2010.

Image: Holy Rollers, photo Dan Levin.

The first exhibition on view at the Visual Arts Gallery this semester is the MFA Fine Arts Department thesis exhibition “Multiplex,” which runs through Saturday, January 30, at 601 West 26 Street, 15th floor. Curator Elizabeth M. Grady took advantage of the four-room layout of the gallery by creating four discrete exhibitions within the space, meant to evoke a multiplex movie theater. Grady divided the work among the rooms according to the following themes: De-construction and Reconstruction; Abstracted Nature; Consumer Culture and the Patterns of Everyday Life; and The Grotesque. “The metaphor of the multiplex serves to invite the audience to celebrate diversity rather than to seek a single unifying thread,” says Grady.

The first of two thesis exhibitions in the department, “Multiplex” includes work by Bryan Balla, Cathleen Cueto II, Sean Dunstan-Halliday, Bibi Flores, Colleen Ford, Seong-eun Hong, Hye Soon Hwang, Naoko Ito, Eric Lundquist, Wade Schaming, Kevin Stahl,  Matthew Stone, Yonatan Ullman, Le Xi and Natalia Yovane.

Image: Naoko Ito, Ubiquitous, 2009, jars and tree

When the students at Acorn Preschool on East 26th Street returned to class this semester, they were greeted by a series of colorful murals, courtesy of more than 20 SVA student volunteers. Last November, Zach Brunner, a current student in the BFA Film, Video and Animation Department and a student assistant in the Office of Student Activities, along with Tina Crayton, associate director of student activities, made contact with the principal at Acorn to set up the community service project. Together they brainstormed ideas for the murals and came up with a series that represented the four seasons and various iconic images of New York City, including the American Museum of Natural History and the city skyline. The murals were completed over two weekends and cover the concrete walls surrounding the school’s playground.

Brunner said of the project, “It was great to see the preschoolers actually playing with the drawings and pretending they were real. I think we all had a lot of fun being creative and making things simple and enjoyable to 2 – 6 year olds.”

The participating students were Alex Thiel from the BFA Advertising and Graphic Design Department; Zach Brunner, Yanise Cabrera, Pat Hughes, Thomas Minerva and Melody Shaiken from the BFA Film, Video and Animation Department; Adam DePalma,  Jesse Keating, Maria Petrovskaya, Andrea Solow and Ximena Velazquez-Arenas from the BFA Fine Arts Department; Hyang  Mi An, Yura Kim, Melissa Matos and Louis Spano from the BFA Illustration and Cartooning Department; Suh Hwang, Shashank Mittal and Kristen Vincent from the BFA Interior Design Department;  Luke Nilsson and Samantha Yudin from the BFA Photography Department; and Yvonne Andrea Castellanos from the MFA Fine Arts Department.

Image: Photo by Melissa Matos.

• Alumnus Jonathan Torgovnik’s (BFA 1996 Photography) photographs of the post-earthquake recovery efforts in Haiti are featured on Anderson Cooper’s blog AC360°. Torgovnik and Cooper, along with with other members of CNN’s crew, were in Haiti reporting on the effects of the earthquake,when Cooper aided a young boy who had been attacked by looters. Click here to view Torgovnik’s photographs of the incident.
• The New York Times recently mentioned Humanities and Sciences Department faculty member Susan Mosakowski in a glowing review of the one-person show “Wild Man.” Mosakowski is one of the creative directors of the Creation Production Company, which is co-presenting the play, at The Wild Project, 195 East Third Street, through Tuesday, January 26.
• The Web site for the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph touted a class project by current MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Department student James Pomerantz. Pomerantz aggregated essays, images and video about conflict photography to create a Web site on the topic. Pomerantz also blogs about his studies at SVA.

As part of the yearly season of film and television awards, the Visual Effects Society (VES) presents an annual slate of prizes for the best effects artistry in more than 20 categories of film, animation, television, commercials and video games. This year’s VES nominees have been announced, and seven SVA alumni and faculty members have been singled out.

For their work on Pepsi’s The Flight of the Penguin commercial, James Dick (BFA 2007 Computer Art), Seth Gollub (BFA 2005 Computer Art), Spencer Leuders, (Faculty, BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects Department) and Andy Walker (Faculty, BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects Department) are up for Outstanding Animated Character in a Broadcast Program or Commercial; Golub and Walker are also nominees for the same Pepsi ad in the Outstanding Visual Effects in a Commercial category.

In the category of Outstanding Matte Paintings in a Feature Motion Picture, Brenton Cottman (BFA 2003 Illustration) is nominated for his work as lead matte painter for the hit film Avatar.

The 8th Annual VES Awards will be presented on Sunday, February 28, in Los Angeles. Visit visualeffectssociety.com for more information.

In 2006, the venerable music retailer Tower Records closed its doors in New York City. Since then, the former Tower site at the corner of Broadway and Fourth Avenue has remained empty…until now. The not-for-profit arts organization No Longer Empty, which uses vacated properties in NYC to stage public art exhibitions, has opened “Never Can Say Goodbye” in the former record store. The multimedia show spotlights work by more than 20 artists, including two SVA alumni: Mike Egan (MFA 2007 Fine Arts) has contributed an original video piece; and Ted Riederer (MFA 2006 Fine Arts) created a massive music-themed installation called Never Records that incorporates works by more than 40 fellow artists, including Jeff Beebe (MFA 2006 Fine Arts), Jake Berthot (faculty), Steven Bindernagel (BFA 2006 Fine Arts), Brendan Carney (MFA 2008 Fine Arts), Allison Hester (MFA 2006 Fine Arts), Jason Losh (MFA 2007 Fine Arts), Marilyn Minter (faculty), Ted O’Sullivan (MFA 2006 Fine Arts), Josh Shaddock (MFA 2006 Fine Arts) and Ryan Sullivan (MFA 2007 Fine Arts).

The reopening of Tower for “Never Can Say Goodbye” has invited the attention of the local and national press, with stories appearing in the New York Post, Papermag, Time Out New York, The Wall Street Journal and many others. Riederer talked to the Journal about his large-scale installation, which he describes as a “love letter” to the quickly disappearing idea of a physical record shop. “My goal is…to have them in the store for 30 minutes until they realize it’s not a store,” he told the newspaper. For more on No Longer Empty and “Never Say Goodbye” (which runs at the former Tower Records through Saturday, February 13), visit nolongerempty.org.

Image: Ted Riederer, Never Records, 2010. Courtesy of No Longer Empty.

• Business magazine Fast Company chose Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design by MPS Branding Department Chair Debbie Millman for its Best Design and Architecture Books of 2009 list.
• In the latest installment of HOW magazine’s In-HOWse Design Awards, the Visual Arts Press won four Merit awards in the Education category: the 2009–2010 Undergraduate Catalog; subway posters by faculty members Gail Anderson and Mirko Ilic; and the fall 2008 issue of the Visual Arts Journal.
• Film critic Richard Roeper has compiled his Best Films of the Decade for the Chicago Sun-Times, and Dinner Rush, directed by MPS Live Action Short Film Department Chair Bob Giraldi, earned a slot on the list.
• Alumnus Michael Rizzo (2006 Film and Video) won the Audience Choice Award at the Zero Film Festival for Bay Rizz – The Rescue, a short film about Mayor Bay Rizz (played by Rizzo), who goes missing in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge neighborhood.
• BFA Illustration and Cartooning Department faculty member Peter Kuper took home the Gold Medal in the Sequential Art category at this year’s Society of Illustrators 52 competition. Kuper’s winning work will be on display in the “Annual Exhibition: Illustrators 52,” 128 East 63 Street, through Saturday, January 23.

• The New York Times praised “Design USA: Contemporary Innovation,” an exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, which includes work by SVA Acting Chairman Milton Glaser. Featuring works by designers honored during the first 10 years of the museum’s National Design Awards, the exhibition also has an accompanying multimedia iPod Touch guide with additional features including slideshows and interviews. The exhibition is on view through Sunday, April 4, at 2 East 91st Street.
• Alumnus Kevin Asch’s (BFA 1998 Film and Video) film Holy Rollers, which is a contender in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, was featured in indiWIRE. The movie follows the story of an American Hasidic Jew who smuggles Ecstasy from Europe to the U.S. in the late 1990s. Click here to view a video clip of Asch talking about the film on the Sundance Web site.
• Alumnus Craig Gillespie (BFA 1989 Advertising) just picked up his fourth career nomination for a Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award in the commercials category. Gillespie was nominated for three campaigns for Car.com, Guinness and Orbit. Click here to read an article in Shoot about Gillespie’s entries for the awards.

For those who may have missed seeing The Wilde Years: Four Decades of Shaping Visual Culture when it was on view at the Visual Arts Gallery, it’s still possible to explore the far-reaching influence of BFA Advertising and Graphic Design Department Chair Richard Wilde. In conjunction with the show, faculty member Benita Raphan directed The Wilde Ones, a short documentary that pays tribute to Wilde’s 40th anniversary with the College:

A look at the documentary by the blog Digital Buyology described it as, “built around a series of interviews with some of Wilde’s most accomplished professors and industry icons, including George Lois, Paula Scher, Carin Goldberg, James Victore, Paul Sahre and Gail Anderson, extolling the enthusiasm, professionalism, consistency and brilliance that helped Richard build the school into one of the world’s preeminent graphic design and advertising institutions.”

The first in a series of one-on-one conversations with SVA’s department chairs.

MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department Chair David Levi Strauss is starting off 2010 with a double publishing event, releasing both his new essay collection From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010) and a new edition of his underground classic Between Dog and Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia, 2010). Strauss talked to the Briefs just before the beginning of the spring 2010 semester to discuss the two books and his role running a graduate department at the College.

Tell me about From Head to Hand.
It’s a book that has been in the works for awhile, and I’m very pleased with how it’s turned out. I’m generally known as someone who writes about photography and politics, and this was an effort to focus on mostly painters, sculptors and drawing, along with some writers. It’s a look at the least mediated of the arts; if photography is the most mediated, meaning that it involves the most media between the artist and the work, the things I’m talking about in this book are much less so.

You’re also seeing an older book, Between Dog and Wolf, reissued at the same time.
It was my first collection, and it’s kind of earned an underground place. This new edition has a prologue written by Hakim Bey, with whom I’ve done a number of things over the years. I’ve had an unusual trajectory as a writer, in that I started out as a poet and then began to write essays. I’ve found the essay form to be extremely flexible and full. It’s served me well for 25 – 30 years. I can certainly see an historical progression in the way I think, and the writing has developed in various ways, but I think there’s a continuity through it all.

How has your experience at SVA affected the way you approach art criticism?
The thing about SVA that people know is that we encourage practitioner teachers. When I became chair, I didn’t stop being a writer. I write constantly and publish a lot, and I think it feeds into my teaching and running of the department. From the beginning I’ve had the idea that this is not a primarily academic program—it’s a practical program. It’s intended to prepare people to write out in the world as I do. The intent is to write directly and clearly about art.

What impresses you most about the students in your department?
Their enthusiasm to learn. That’s what I’m looking for in students. When I find it, it’s very exciting, and it makes everything go better when someone is just hungry to learn. Then, the teachers can do anything. There are no brakes on how far we can go.

Image: David Levi Strauss, From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010).