Tag Archives: Michelle Marcuse

Tattooed

HENRY BERMUDEZ Tatooed Nature
Tattooed Nature #2, 2019   30″ h x 22″ w  acrylic paint, paper

HENRY BERMUDEZ, Tattooed Nature, HOUSEGallery

October 4th – 31st, 2019

Opening Reception: Friday, October 4th, 6 –9 pm

Location: HOUSEGallery, 1816 Frankford Ave, Philadelphia, PA, 19125

Hours: by appointment


PHILADELPHIA OPEN STUDIO TOURS: OCTOBER 13TH 12 – 6 pm with Michelle Marcuse and Henry Bermudez

Emerged from the Caribbean tropics, the artistic life of Henry Bermudez has been an unexpected hybrid of ideas informed by an acute sensitivity to the past, stenciled as part of a personal inventory onto different foreign places that throughout his life have become his home and artistic working territory.

Henry’s paintings are steeped in mythical dream imagery within an other-worldliness of carefully constructed creature and plant forms. Further defined by his identity as a Latino, his visual itinerary combines symbols and myth from pre-Hispanic cultures charged with powerful influences from Judaeo-Christian and Afro-Caribbean religions, and further melds these with the iconography of western contemporary art. This blend of cultural diversities is his autobiographical vision that further defines itself through immersion into societies other that the one he was born into. Henry’s art transcends timelines and national boundaries as he joins magical dimensions of symbols with supposed western rationality.

Thank you to Michelle Marcuse, Co Director HOUSE Gallery for the content of this post.

www.housegallery1816.com

www.henrybermudezart.com

www.michellemarcuse.com

Like DoNArTNeWs Philadelphia Art News Blog on facebook

Follow the new DoNArTNeWs.com

Follow DoN on Twitter @DoNNieBeat58

DoN Brewer on Pinterest

@donniebeat on Instagram

Affiliate Marketing [disclosure page] Shop on-line and help support DoNArTNeWs

Donate via safe and secure PayPal in the sidebar.

DoNArTNeWs – celebrating eleven years reporting on Philadelphia artists and art.

Digging

As By Digging

As By Digging, Jaime Alvarez, Olivia Jia, Michelle Marcuse

InLiquid @ The Painted Bride

As By Digging features three artists—Jaime Alvarez, Olivia Jia, Michelle Marcuse—working in distinct media, whose works suggest an archaeological position to their subjects. Materials are used to draw out contradictions in our relationships to things and spaces with unclear origins: Photographs pronounce their subject with a different accent; paintings reflect on tangible objects without pointing us in the direction of where exactly we are; cardboard is put together to seem like lumbering parts reclaimed from a shipwreck. Split personalities can be sensed in the work, and each of the artists use their medium to collapse the distance between what we expect something to be and our fantasies of how it actually performs. The Indiana Jones franchise is a useful comparison in popular culture, in which the medium of film is a bridge between an intellectual’s quiet scholarly pursuit and their alter ego’s perilous adventure.

In contrast to an action movie, the excavations here unfold more quietly and without black and white good and bad guys. Jaime Alvarez’s photographs of small, synthetic figurines appear giant and alive; Michelle Marcuse’s bits of cardboard and glue take on machinic obscurity; Olivia Jia manipulates paint illusionistically in an idiosyncratic approach to cataloging personal documents and art history fragments. Amidst these approaches, we become conscious of our connection to a vast lineage of human remains, and the strange moment when our distance to these emergent totems is both closed and accentuated.

Jaime Alvarez’s work introduces us to some of the fundamental poles of the photographic medium. His large prints of uniformly painted figurines, trinkets, and other left-behinds, in either jet black or white, offer a sumptuous version of familiar things while they remain at the distance imposed by their singularity and iconized stature. Amidst these delectable yet cold memento mori, there appear straightly documented rooms of an empty, crumbling home. In their quiet, irreversible decay, we find we can pay attention.

Olivia Jia calls on the sleight of hand in painting to place us into an object’s space. Curious specificity meets ambivalent setting. Busts of classical, familiar statues are captured in a moment of focus, and provide little context for their inner fracturing. Fragments of personal ephemera, art historical reproductions, and more abstracted yet referential piles of historic matter are similarly reverent yet concise in what they appear to describe.

In the cardboard and glue sculptures of Michelle Marcuse, we encounter flexible understandings of reverence and delicateness. That which is flimsy is not necessarily weak; lightness in weight is not bound to a lightness in being. Her objects, while small in stature, imply something grand, aged and important, and indeed heavy. Each one is a space that is found out, by a process of physical conflicts and resolutions with the material. We come to detect them, not by a definitive allegation from their author about their personalities, but by the clear relationship between the object and the hands constructing it.

The Painted Bride Cafe Gallery, 230 Vine Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106

Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, noon – 6:00pm

As By Digging: November 1, 2017 – December 16, 2017

Reception Dates: Friday, December 1, 2017 · 5:00 pm–7:00 pm

Thank you to Michelle Marcuse for the content of this post.

SEO and Photoshop by DoN.

Like DoNArTNeWs Philadelphia Art News Blog on facebook

Follow the new DoNArTNeWs.com

Follow DoN on Twitter @DoNNieBeat58

DoN Brewer on Pinterest

@donniebeat on Instagram

Affiliate Marketing [disclosure page] Shop on-line and help support DoNArTNeWs

Reunion

SAGE Reunion TourALL NEW WORK by David Foss, Don Kaiser, Heather Rachel Phillips, Henry Bermudez, Jon Manteau, Michelle Marcuse, Nic Coviello, Raphael Fenton-Spaid, Robert Solomon and Vincent Romaniello

SAGE REUNION TOUR

BLAM Projects Brooklyn
Opening reception: 6 to 9pm, Friday, October 7
Show runs through October 30, 2016
Hours: 11am to 6pm, Friday, Saturday and Sunday

BLAM Projects 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn, NY 11206

The Sage Reunion Tour will bring together 10 of the original members, each showing how their work has evolved since their Philadelphia project space closed in 2009. A variety of media are planned including: painting, sculpture, photography, performance, banners and video.

About Sage Projects
In late 2008 a group of Philadelphia artists organized visits to each other’s studios. Many of the artists enjoyed the tours and other artist’s work so much that they wanted to take the group a step further.

The perfect opportunity to form a cooperative came in early 2009 when the US economy crashed leaving many small businesses in dire straits. A team of business leaders in a popular tourist area, known as South Street, put out a call asking for arts groups to occupy vacant storefronts, cost free, in the hopes of bringing life back to the area. That’s when David Foss, artist and director of DaVinci Art Alliance, and Vincent Romaniello applied for and got the green light on a 2,000 sq ft, two story, empty storefront.

During the run of Sage Projects over 250 artists, musicians, filmmakers and other artists were given the opportunity to share the space and to bring their work to a wider audience.

Performance Information
Conceptual Punk-a-Rock-a-Billy-Blues ensemble MagicCarpet ManCave will be
performing both original compositions and covers during the opening reception on Friday,
October 7, between 6-9pm during the exhibition reception.

As a mixed race artist Heather Raquel Phillips takes her experience of marginality to
create spaces for bodies using personal story telling and attempted acrobatic feats. Phillips, along with musicians Meg Widholm and Mike Woloszczuk, will be performing on Saturday, October 22, at 8pm during the Exchange Rates expo.

Contact: Vincent Romaniello   blambklyn@gmail.com   267-902-1115
Hi-resolution images of works in the show available upon request
BLAM

 
BLAM Projects 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn, NY 11206 www.blamprojects.com
sage3

Shadow Overcome by Memory plus No Logic in Line, Michelle Marcuse

“Part of 2016 was involved in my making work for the 39th Wind Challenge Exhibition.  My preparation was over 18 months and the show opened in September.  It will be up till November 2nd.  I exhibited with Amber Johnston and Brian Richmond.” – Michelle Marcuse

Michelle Marcus, Wind Challenge

“HOUSE Gallery 1816 has kept us busy, we have had some good shows up until June. After a summer hiatus, we are set to start up again.  POST 2016 east side….and our November show will be with Erik Ruin.   http://erikruin.com/

Henry Bermudez is off to Peru October 1st for a solo exhibition in Lima. He will spend 2 months there on research for a project. Maybe i will get to visit him in November. We will both exhibit at BLAM in Brooklyn.  It is a reunion with other SAGE artists from Philadelphia, some of them you probably know. BLAM has a counterpart gallery in Los Angeles. My images of the Challenge show were photographed by John Carlano.” – Michelle Marcuse

Thank you to Michelle Marcuse for the content of this post.

SEO and Photoshop by DoN.

Like DoNArTNeWs Philadelphia Art News Blog on facebook

Follow the new DoNArTNeWs.com

Follow DoN on Twitter @DoNNieBeat58

DoNArTNeWs on Tumblr

DoN Brewer on Pinterest

@donniebeat on Instagram

Affiliate Marketing [disclosure page] Shop on-line and help support DoNArTNeWs