Cherry Art Editions release party featuring a limited postcard and CD set and performance by legendary local artist and musician Al Perry, memory card game limited editions by Servane Mary of New York City and Nina Ott of Milwaukee, and a book of writings by Bryan Price, of Los Angeles. Elizabeth Cherry is a known cult figure in the Tucson art scene. Her past credits include Elizabeth Cherry Gallery, where she featured world-renowned conceptual artists.

This fantastic documentary profiles the avant-garde Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), a polka-dot-loving eminence recognized throughout the international art world. Kusama is one of the most influential and most collected artists of the 1960s; this film follows her creative process in her later years, working on a massive solo exhibition. At once an endearing and an intimidating character, Kusama has been widely quoted as saying “If I didn’t make art, I’d probably be dead by now.” As each work comes to completion, we witness the essence of Kusama’s art welling up in the conflict between life, death, and love. Opening the show will be multi-instrumentalist & songwriter Karima Walker who will be channeling Kusama’s ecstatic energies into a minimalist folk-scape of image and sound.

(Photographer Eric Kroll in person)

An inventor of video art and media sculpture The Korean-American artist, Nam June Paik (1932–2006) was for a period of time in NYC, a friend and mentor to (presently Tucson-based) renowned artist / photographer, Eric Kroll.

Writes Kroll, “When I was a young man in Manhattan taking photographs of anything that moved, for myself and for anyone that would publish the images, I accidently intersected with Nam June Paik. He changed how I did what I did in photography by showing me aka teaching me, the importance of including absurdity in my work. I shot for him, worked with him, from the mid-seventies to when I moved to San Francisco in 1994. That experience unlocked the door to everything I try to do.”

This evening is a truly rare one night gallery installation of Kroll’s intimate photos of Paik in addition to original drawings, seriagraphs and sculpture. With improvised noise from electronic keyboards, The Dos Jorgs will preface and footnote a never-before-seen screening of Kroll’s video documentation of Paik at work creating an iconic video sculpture. Plus, single-channel Paik works from the EV archive.

Date:         Thursday, May 21st
Location:  Exploded View Micro-Cinema located at 197 E Toole Ave
Time:         6:00 -7:30PM it’s free admission!

Please join us in this fast, fun evening as TPAC’s New Works Artist Project Awardees (2014-2015)
The artist will present their artwork in the realm of visual arts, sculpture, interdisciplinary arts, literature and playwriting.  Milta Ortiz presents a live excerpt from her docu-theater script Más, based on the banning of Mexican American studies in the Tucson Unified School District; David Sherman’s documentary film Son Blues explores the music and emerging consciousness of a young Tucson musician; Catherine Eyde explores the evolution of her paintings and drawings when she designedly invited her 8 year old daughter Aria into her art; Ben Johnson explores the ancient practice of honeybee domestication and the bond between humans and bees in an interdisciplinary work; Shloka Mangharam Ettna shares new illustrations from her mixed media children’s book Amalla Dreamypants Learns to Fly ; Adan Banuelos discusses his kinetic sculpture inspired by lowrider car culture; and based on news reports of the murders of 85 transgender people in recent years, TC Tolbert creates a series of erasure poems that examine the relationship between violence against trans people and the language used to represent them in the media.

The New Works Grant provides support to individual artists residing in Tucson and Pima County for projects that employ innovative approaches to art, while meeting the highest standards of excellence.

Photo credits (clockwise from top left):  Red Shoes, mixed media on canvas, by Catherine Eyde,  photo by Wilson Graham; Beekeeping, by Ben Johnson; mixed media illustration from the book  Amalla Dreamypants Learns to Fly, by Shloka Mangharam Ettna.

https://www.facebook.com/events/810151625745262/

Whether iconic or obscure, wild or laid back, we respond to the art of record album covers in deeply personal ways. Here, in Tucson, vinyl is omnipresent and alive in record swaps, fairs, thrift stores, yard sales and living rooms. EV has invited over 20 artists, dj’s, musicians and collagists to respond to the challenge of altering (re-invented through any desired medium or means) one album cover as a 12.25” x 12.25” canvas for their own imagination. Participants include Tom Walbank, Boyd and Lesli Peterson, Fish Karma, Al Perry, Nika Kaiser, Kidd Squid, Eric Kroll, Carl Hanni, Nick Georgiou, Wesley Fawcett Creigh, Clif Taylor, Carrie Vonier, Bill Mackey, Beth Weinstein, Igloo Martian, Andy Burgess, R. Pinpole, Debra Gregerman, Melissa Mauzy and more. Join us at the opening for an unveiling of re-configured cover-art as well as a spinning of chosen LP’s!

(free!)

Tisch Abelow (NYC) and Wesley Fawcett Crei

¡TEENAGE WASTELAND!

SAT 4/11 (free!)

Tisch Abelow (NYC) and Wesley Fawcett Creigh (Tucson) pay a surreal homage to their teenage years with an experimental documentary film comprised of footage taken 12 years earlier during their senior year of high school. In the fall of 2013, Tisch revisited this footage and pared it down into a short film, mostly starring Wesley’s father, which she calls, “a musing on the mundane.” In addition, there will be a collaborative 2-D artwork spanning the course of their friendship reflecting on the nihilistic and absurd tendencies of youth. Please join us as we “come of age” with cake and local DJ’s.

In the first portion of the evening, acclaimed painter and expatriate, Dimitri Kozyrev will present a personal introduction to the great Russian director, Andrei Tarkovsky. Kozyrev will discuss his experience growing up in the USSR with the cinema of Tarkovsky, and the director’s continuing influence on his own painting practice. We will follow with a screening of Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). The film depicts an expedition to a mysterious site known as “The Zone”, which has the supposed potential to fulfill a person’s innermost desires. Exquisite in form (comprised of only 142 finely articulated shots), Stalker is a haunting masterwork that depicts a world of post-apocalyptic misery, a premonition of Chernobyl and Soviet disintegration. Stalker is arguably one of cinema’s purest articulation of the film as spiritual quest.

$10 admission (no reservations….line up early…only 40 available seats!)

Exploded View is one of several hundred art spaces around the world (Sarajevo, Prague, Tokyo, Warsaw and Istanbul etc…) that have been chosen to premiere Bjork’s astonishing new multimedia concert film, BIOPHILIA LIVE. Nick Fenton and Peter Strickland’s film captures the human element of Björk’s multi-disciplinary multimedia project: Biophilia. Recorded live at Björk’s show at London’s Alexandra Palace in 2013, the film features Björk and her band performing every song on Biophilia and more using a broad variety of instruments – some digital, some traditional and some completely unclassifiable. The film has already been hailed as a captivating record of an artist in full command of her idiosyncratic powers. “There are not many artists who can combine the lifecycle of a jellyfish with a breakbeat and make it work. But this is an extraordinary piece, perhaps more an opera, where Björk and drummer Manu Delago are at their virtuosic best. It’s utterly bonkers yet moving – especially a strange love song set to a mutating virus. “
- The Guardian

VIEW TRAILER HERE