Here’s some pics of our favorites:

Mike’s favorite was Adam Fowler’s cut & layered graphite piece:

And I was all about Judy Pfaff’s paper collage.  MAD had all these interactive flat screens, where you could watch videos about almost every piece on dispay.  Check out Judy Pfaff, talking about her work at MAD.

Here’s the blurb about the competition:

From Salvador Dali to Cindy Sherman the self has been the subject of all the art world’s greats. The self-portrait transcends medium, style and period, existing in the vast space between the personal and prophetic. This competition is about your story, your image and the power they hold. This is the Power of Self.

Anyway, Ali is an amazing photographer, so if you agree, and I think you will, click the link below and rate her portfolio (5 STARS!!)

http://www.artistswanted.org/Chenga

Mike and I went to see Avenue Q last night and I loved it!  Besides being able to relate to the whole idea of graduating college with a useless degree (Fine Art majors, you know it’s true!), no skill set (at least, not one that could make us more desirable than an Art History major), and a mountain of student loans (thanks, Cornell, from the bottom of my unemployed heart), I was completely blown away by the way the puppets and their puppeteers related to each other.  It was mesmerizing… like watching synchronized swimming.  The puppet and the puppeteer(s) never actually interact one on one, but act as an extension of each other, together making up the individual character.  It was bizarre.  Anyway, if you get the chance, go and see it.  Seth Rettberg was amazing to watch.

“Sheep Spills”

Acrylic & Mixed Media On Shaped Wood

Approximately 6 x 2 Feet

~Liz

But that was then, and this is now, a new year, a fresh start, and we’re ready to bring you all of our art adventures of 2010!

Hope you all had a Happy Holiday!

Love,

Mike & Liz

Over the harvest fields forsaken,

Silent, and soft, and slow,

Descends the snow.

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

]]> http://schneicove.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/a-new-year/feed/ 0 schneicove Meanwhile... http://schneicove.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/another-sheep-very-suspicious/ http://schneicove.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/another-sheep-very-suspicious/#comments Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:01:36 +0000 schneicove http://schneicove.wordpress.com/?p=52 ]]> So, what have we been up to?  I’ll let this very regal sheep do the talking for me.  Mike, on the other hand, has been secretly scribbling in his notebook, so we’ll have to wait and see what comes out of that crazy head of his…

“The Duke”
Mixed Media On Wood
12 x 24 inches

Mike Covello:

“Dark Intermission”  (charcoal and graphite on wood)

Elizabeth Schneider:

“Dear Richard Henry…” (mixed media on hand carved wood)

Add here are some pictures of us setting up the gallery and from the opening:

EMERGING ARTISTS INVESTIGATE THE COMPOUNDIMAGE

In Phoenix, five emerging artists come together to focus on the processes of assemblage, repetition, and juxtaposition. By presenting their own composite structures, these artists, although multifarious in their methods, collectively represent the homogeneous effort to develop aesthetically superb and philosophically charged geometries.

Elizabeth Schneider’s art deals with human consequence in our ecological habitat. In her newest painting, Dear Richard Henry, I Wish I Was Special (2009) Schneider utilizes a four-paneled vertical format to depict a tropical forest scene filled with birds. A giant, narrow tower of bright color and texture, Schneider’s eight foot tall, carved wood painting seems to howl for attention while her stylistic renderings beckon the viewer to revel in the sheer might and power of the scene. However, upon examination one realizes how humbling the painting’s piece-meal assemblage is. The mighty forest now seems overgrown and out of control, too much to fit on a single panel and refusing to conform to its boundaries. These panels reveal a vociferous façade, which is the very strength and conscience of the work, as it embodies the ever-consuming nature of humanity.

While moral responsibility is rendered with emotion in Schneider’s work, it is incongruously depicted through narrative and humor in the work of Benjamin Stein. A storyteller at heart, Stein’s digitally manipulated photographic works convey complex narratives derived from biblical and contemporary references. In his three-paneled triptych, Replacing Sheep with Robot Sheep (2009), Stein illustrates a hypothetical world where even the most common domesticated animals cannot escape our rapid technological over-growth. Quoting from medieval alter pieces, his work employs the use of continuous narrative, the method of portraying the same figure in multiple spots to delineate a storyline. Additionally, the triptych format, a religious storytelling device, is reinvented by the high-tech context and thus speaks to the swift modernization of society.

In Anima (2009), Alison Cheng utilizes the structural duplicity of the grid to depict and document the ceremonious recreation of a first kiss. Cheng’s large installation, roughly six by seven feet, appears dangerous yet sentimental, looming over the viewer and engulfing their periphery with ephemeral glimpses into abstract events. At once corporeal (portraying the wet, breathy, warmness of another’s mouth against yours) and emotional (capturing anxiety and excitement), the photographic grid imbues this piece with a pulse-like energy, reanimating this fleeting moment from the artist’s past through ritualistic repetition.

Cheng’s dark and emotional photos have found certain camaraderie among the abstract charcoal and graphite paintings of Michael Covello. Characterized by their exquisite mark making and transient silver smolder, the dark yet luminous paintings make the tangibility of time less palpable and the familiarities of space more nonspecific. In Phenomenological Abstraction #19 (Dark Intermission), Covello has divided the surface plane of his abstract-expressionist painting into long thin vertical panels, punctuating the burnished whirling deluge with voids of white wall. The resulting tension is blatant; the push and pull experience of the juxtaposed black and white stripes fight for dominance, simultaneously swallowing each other up and heaving each other outwards. The drawing itself becomes significant, where one minute the sheen of the graphite dazzles and the next, the marks fall flat and dull. As these fickle gestures carry over from panel to panel, it almost seems as if they are leaving imaginary marks in the voids. The empty space the work inhabits becomes just as significant as the work itself, collapsing our traditional expectations of space.

Contradictory to Covello’s tense installation, the photographic works of Nicole Tariverdian use juxtaposition to enhance meaning and gather synergy. In Butter the Size of an Egg (2009), Tariverdian assimilates and duplicates old or forgotten mementos and scrupulously assembles the cloned keepsakes into evocative installations. By resurrecting these once precious objects and digitalizing their existence, she begins to modernize things verging on obsolescence, and in the process evaluates old family customs and traditions. With almost forensic-like precision, Tariverdian organizes and presents to us her findings, delicately dangling them from book-binder’s string, a reference that perhaps the viewers are reading, or even inheriting, an ancestral lifeline.