Aya Kakeda gave a wonderful, insightful, humorous, and inspiring presentation of her work, both commercial illustration and fine art, to this year’s Parsons Senior Illustration class on Friday, September 21st in Kellen Auditorium.
Aya is currently in a three-person show, “Creamy Cat”, at gallery onetwentyeight in NYC. It is up until September 30th. Check it out if you can.
Senior Thesis faculty Jordin Isip is included in Space//Form, a group exhibition curated by Sven Davis at Breeze Block Gallery in Portalnd, Oregon. The opening reception is Thursday, Sept. 6th, 6-10 pm.
Space//Form centers around notions of the architectural landscape. Over 100 of the most relevant young contemporary artists were each given an identical 10×10 inch panel and invited to create a work depicting their interpretation of space and form within either the constructed or the natural environment. Artists include: Adam Wallacavage, Alex Lukas, Chloe Early, Clayton Brothers, Doze Green, Eric White, Gary Taxali, Geoff McFetridge, James Marshall (Dalek), Jeff Soto, Jim Houser, Kozyndan, Kristen Schiele, Mars-1, Matt Leines, Maya Hayuk, Rich Jacobs, Rostarr, Tim Biskup, and Wayne White.
Adam Baumgold Gallery and Carl Hammer Gallery (Chicago) present an exhibition of 126 drawings by Chris Ware to coincide with the release of his new book Building Stories. Over ten years in the making, several of the drawings from this series were first published in The New York Times Sunday Magazine and The New Yorker. Building Stories takes its final form as 14 discrete books and booklets collected in a printed box. The result is something utterly unique-part graphic novel, part sculpture, and part mobius strip. The show runs from September 8 – October 27, 2012.
Reception for the artist, Saturday, September 8, 5:00 – 8:00 pm.
Adam Baumgold Gallery, 60 East 66th St. NYC
Recent Parsons Illustration graduates Su kyung (Hannah) Lee, Rachel Levit, and Hazel Lee Santino, and faculty Melinda Beck, Jordin Isip , and Taylor McKimens were included in One Hundred Dollars, a group show curated by Andrew Smenos and Sergio Barrale this summer at Littlefield in Brooklyn, NY. Each piece by the one hundred artists had to use a dollar bill as its canvas. Some of the other artists included were Daniel Davidson, Tricia Keightley, Rob Leecock, Matt Leines, Kristen Schiele, Joe Sorren, and Eric White. See more images and read the review in the Huffington Post.
Here are four of the one hundred pieces in the show:
Finally! As a great year draws to an end we invite everybody to come enjoy the fruits of our labors. From May 7th to May 20th we will be hosting the Senior Illustration Show on the 6th floor of the 6th East 16th street building.
The reception will be on May 11th from 6:30pm to 8:30pm. We look forward to everybody joining us.
On Tuesday May 15th from 10am to 4pm Senior presentations will be taking place. The presentations will consist of six minute speeches. Three minutes for the artist to talk about their work and three for the faculty and public to critique it. Keep checking the blog for updates.
Mirage Show, an exhibition of contemporary collage curated by Geoff Kim, opens on Friday, April 13th from 6:00 – 10:30 pm at Brooklyn Fire Proof. Included in the nine person show is Parsons Illustration Program graduate Lulu Wolf (2010) and former faculty member James Gallagher.
The opening reception for Edward del Rosario‘s appropriately titled solo show, “Paintings and Drawings”, is this Thursday, April 12th from 6:00 – 8:00 pm at Nancy Margolis Gallery in NYC. Please stop by to say hi, hang out, and see Eddie’s beautiful and powerful work.
Edward has exhibited on both coasts of the United States and the little island state of Hawaii. His work has appeared in many publications including The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The New York Times Magazine. Edward is a former Parsons Illustration Program adjunct faculty member (Junior Drawing and Painting; Painting).
Domecile l, oil on linen/panel, 30" x 30", 2012
“Melted City”, a show curated by Parsons Illustration faculty Jordin Isip and Filipino artist Louie Cordero opened on March 24th at Blanc Compound in Mandalyuong, Philippines. The ten person works-on-paper show (five artists chosen by each curator) includes Parsons Illustration Program alumni Hiro Kurata (’04), Hazel Lee Santino (’12), and Paula Searing (’11). The other artists are Vic Balanon, Patrick Cruz, Robert Gutierrez, Rob Leecock, Matt Leines, Jacob Lindo, and Yuji Maruyama. The exhibit runs through April 14, 2012.
“Melted City” was reviewed by The Manila Art Blogger. Read it here.
Melted City flyer, image by Robert Gutierrez
Hazel Lee Santino, "Hagley Woods"
Paula Searing, "What It's All About"
(left) Robert Leecock, "2012: Enter the Dragon"; (right) Matt Leines, "#122"
Hiro Kurata, "Portrait of a Slugger"
In late February Taylor Mckimens, Chang Park, and Jordin Isip took their Parsons Illustration classes to visit internationally renowned artist Misaki Kawai in her studio as she prepared for her upcoming show “Love from Mt. Pom Pom” at the Children’s Museum of the Arts. Misaki’s studio is in a vacated Bank of America on the ground floor of the beautiful Woolworth Building– plenty of room to host the 50+ visitors for a fun and inspirational morning. Thank you to Misaki and Justin for kindly opening up the studio and spending time with us!
Go see Misaki’s show– you can comb an 18 foot long, 11 foot tall fuzzy fuchsia dog with a 2 foot long comb.
“Love from Mt. Pom Pom” was reviewed in the New York Times. Read it here. The exhibit runs from March 14 – June 10, 2012.
Parsons Illustration alum Garrett Pruter‘s (’10) show was reviewed in Art Forum‘s Critic’s Picks.
“Grounded in found photographs gleaned from various sources, Garrett Pruter‘s recent body of work lends new visual life to images threatened with obsolescence. For June Gloom (all works 2011), Pruter has inflated a print to sprawling dimensions and then scraped away at the raw, wetted photographic emulsion with a dull blade, leaving a somewhat spectral scene scored with evenly paced yellow notches. In Washed Out, abstract patterns from a scrimlike layer have been cut out and placed over a blown-up image. See also Ship Wrecked, where pieces of the photographic print itself have been excised, resulting in a pocked and perforated surface. By contrast, Mixed Signals is additive, with cutout shapes from a found poster placed below an enlarged, anonymous portrait of two individuals. In each instance, the relationship of the pattern—either subtracted, abstracted, or superimposed—to the original imagery is quirky; all seem arbitrary and interrogative, evocative and suggestive rather than tendentious.
Three collage pieces—respectively titled Los Angeles, Blackout, and Flesh—feature repurposed magazine images, cut into squares and layered in abstract patterns. Flesh fittingly derives from vintage editions of Playboy and Penthouse. Abstracted into a field of pinkish (and seemingly pixilated) geometries, it bears only a metonymic relationship to more carnal origins. Similarly, Los Angeles, taken from aerial photographs of the eponymous city, plays on layers of removal from its original urban source, slicing up photographs into a series of formal facets.
The exhibition’s most striking piece is an installation incorporating various 35-mm slides—again culled from random sources—projected onto a curved mold, covered with tessellated mirror fragments. Cast onto the wall in intervals, the resultant images appear distorted and distended though still discernible in their basic dimensions, whether as landscape or portrait. Prutter seems to be hitting his stride in terms of a play between photographic removal and objective presence—a cocktail that he is bound to take in compelling directions.” -Ara H. Merjia
Garrett Pruter, “Mixed Signals”, Feb. 9 – March 11, 2012, Charles Bank Gallery , 196 Bowery, NYC
images: Flesh (l); Ship Wrecked (r)
