Nepopolitan Ice Cream

Andy Moon Wilson (or as he's known on the blog circuit, AM-dub) sicks the ol' tongue on Jessica Dawson's review in this Grammar.police comments thread. Dawson threw the nepotism word around--Jiha Moon is his wife and the shows curator.

I'm getting pretty irritated about this whole nepotism thing. This was not a juried show, this was not a show where there was a call for entries or an application fee. This was a proposed show, curated around a common undercurrent that Jiha noticed running through some of the art she had been looking at. She wrote up a proposal and submitted it to the MPA, which was reviewed and deemed interesting enough to show.

Jiha does not work for the MPA, she is not a member of the board and neither am I. Neither of us has any ties to the organization. So Jiha is in no position of power with regards to what is being exhibited at the MPA. The show was accepted based upon the strength of the proposal, which my slides were a part of. No effort has ever been made to conceal the fact that Jiha and I are married. The idea that this might be a problem for some people never occurred to us.

I am a professional artist with an MFA, gallery representation and an extensive exhibition record, not some hobby painter who has never shown his work before. That my work is being summarily dismissed as part of this show simply because I am married to the person who submitted the proposal seems ridiculous.

My work should be evaluated based upon its quality and how it contributes to the dialogue of the exhibition. I accept any well argued criticism based upon the work itself, but this accusation of nepotism is stupid, unfounded, gossipy bullshit.

My advice to people is to go look at the show or shut the fuck up.

Word. We love your drawings, not the vitriol.

COMET

Be sure to come out to the TRANSFORMER fundraiser at James Alefantis and Carole Greenwood's Comet.

COMET PIZZA & PING PONG PARTY!

FUNDRAISER FOR TRANSFORMER!

PREVIEW THE NEW COMET PIZZA AND HELP SUPPORT EMERGING ARTISTS!!!

Please join area artists and arts supporters for a night of pizza and ping pong, with special guest DJ Ian Svenonius of Weird War, and DJs Yellow Fever.

Admission to this event is FREE

Proceeds of food and drink sales from the evening to benefit Transformer�s 2006/2007 Exhibition Series.

Thursday, June 29, 2006 from 6 � 10 PM

COMET PIZZA
5037 Connecticut Avenue, NW (Connecticut & Nebraska Avenues)
Washington, DC

Please enter through Buck�s Fishing & Camping

PLAY PING PONG. EAT PIZZA. DRINK UP. SUPPORT EMERGING ARTISTS!

Special Thanks to James Alefantis and Carole Greenwood

Damn (cont'd)

Heather clarifies JT on Irvine's representation in the Trawick prize:

To correct JT-We do NOT represent 40 artists at all, the artists listed on our web are all that have work in our inventory or have shown in the past, including group shows up at present. We formally represent only 15 artists, so I think 3 out of 15 as Trawick finalists is pretty good, two of which (Mellor and Zimmerman) have had solos with us in the past 6 months. For a program re-developed in one year, I feel truly honored and most of all thrilled for Suzanna, Rob and Jason!! Great luck to all the finalists...

drinking and video games

"When cultures change so do games" Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964), p. 211

Seems like the antedote to these soggy times. From onepaintingaday.

Trawick

From GrammarPolice, the Trawick Prize finalists are:

• Christine Buckton Tillman (Baltimore, MD)
  
• Caryl Burtner (Richmond, VA)
  
• Eric Dyer (Baltimore, MD)
  
• Suzanna Fields (Richmond, VA)
  
• Adam Fowler (Washington, DC)
  
• Kristin Holder (Washington, DC)
  
• Kirsten Kindler (Richmond, VA)
  
• Maxwell MacKenzie (Washington, DC)
  
• Robert Mellor, Chatham, VA
  
• James Rieck (Baltimore, MD)
  
• Jo Smail (Baltimore, MD)
  
• Molly Springfield (Washington, DC)
  
• Georgianne Stinnett (Richmond, VA)
  
• Jason Zimmerman (Washington, DC)

That's 4 Irvine represented artists? Correct me if I'm wrong I lost track. Damn

Chad Yencer

Nemo
& detail
2006
72X96 in.

Chad Yencer, a recent Corcoran grad, recently shared some of his thesis paintings. Grumpy/cheery kids and ever-steady Disney characters

Oblique widget

Brian Eno's card set Oblique is available as a widget.

Animalia

My review of Irvine Contemporary's Animalia is up on DCist

hey you, what's that sound

George Hemphill, Annie Gawlak, and Kim Ward were present for last night's Heaven and Earth preview at the Hirshhorn. The opening itself was exceptional, the show, as expected, had some soft-opening hiccups:

-- Smithsonian security had installed heat reacting alarms to the large works and sculptures (pretty much all of Kiefer's work). Last nights small crowd set them off in a continual atonal chord heard throughout the gallery. This prompted one misguided gallery goer to whisper that "the noise was a powerful and grating addition (to Kiefer's work)." Oh, the pitfalls of the Bombay Saphire-stocked open bar.

-- The Secret Life of Plants, a free standing book fanned out on its sides, had been "over conserved" by museum facilities staff. The lead and debris that surrounds the 195 cm tall piece after each installation is supposed to remain but it got tossed during cleaning.

Let's see what happens in the 2 hours before the exhibit opens to the press this afternoon. This show is so close to being as huge as the work inside it.

*** A very plesant suprise is yesterday's return of Ron Mueck's Big Man to the second floor. He stares you down as you leave Heaven and Earth in an exhibition exit soul-check. Be quick though, when Ways of Seeing comes in two weeks, he goes back upstairs.

island

from Margaret Boozer's Dirt of the Day

A Hyatsville tree is spared the shovel to protect a duck and her eggs.

one month later

After free spirited toddlers trampled Marco Maggi's Hotbed two weeks ago the Hirshhorn's Anselm Kiefer retrospective Heaven and Earth has hit its own terrible twos:

Curator Valerie Fletcher has near wholly abandoned the messy (lead, 1-ton crates, cracked floors) job of curating the neo expressionist's Hirshhorn retrospective. She took off for a day and a half in the eleventh hour for illness. Kiefer's assistant and, bizarrely, his wife, have stepped in. His wife reworked the last two galleries of the show to push late work that "they're looking to move."

Kiefer won't be present to confront the mess or Heaven and Earth's opening. He's protesting the United States role in the war. Not by pulling the art at the three US shows in Dalles, SF Moma, and DC -- but by forgoing the foie gras and edamame at Tuesday's opening.

On the nice side:
-Maggi's DC installation of Hotbed is being rehabilitated in conservation.
-Olga Viso spent Friday night at the Irvine opening of Animalia
-And a renovation proposal places a large glass spiral ramp on the outside of the Hirshhorn as well as a completely glassed in lower level to make a real first floor. Take a look at the model in the Artlab entrance in the sculpture garden. A pipe dream with ambition.