March 11- April 2, 2017
Opening reception Saturday March 11th, 6-10pm
Performances commence at 7pm and 9pm during the opening. Please join us!
Rooms 1 & 2:
Patrick Coll, The Cloud #4: Anemone, still from 3D animation, 1920x1080, 2016
Patrick Coll
The Cloud
The term, "The Cloud" refers to the concept of cloud computing, the sharing of processing resources across computer networks such as the Internet. From a technological standpoint, allocating processing power in such manner is a sound decision. It is the metaphor itself I take issue with. "The Cloud" is a term dreamt up by marketing executives, a vague "handwavy" explanation to describe a predominant aspect of our connected world. As a metaphor, "The Cloud" positions this newer technology in an ideological framework I find problematic. The prevailing metaphor of the 1990s to describe the network was "The Information Superhighway", a metaphor that implies a man-made infrastructure, with all the attendant implications of shared responsibilities and expected codes of conduct. This has been replaced by "The Cloud", a term that implies that the network is invisible, ephemeral, all encompassing and completely natural. When we, as a culture, accept something as natural, our capacity to critically examine it becomes diminished. This exhibition takes this lazy metaphor as a starting point, proposing new visual metaphors to describe our connected world. The proposed metaphors take the form of short, looping 3D animations and printed stills selected from these animations.
Patrick Coll is an artist who lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 2016 he joined The Front, an artist-run collective and not-for-profit gallery. In 2013 he received an MFA in Printmaking from Tulane University, New Orleans, LA. In 2007 he received a BFA in Painting from Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA. He considers New Hampshire a nice place to be from.
Patrick Coll, The Cloud #8: Handsplaining, still from 3D animation.
Room 3:
Valerie Veator
Blotto in the Grotto
In Blotto in the Grotto, Veator presents six new paintings on silk, and several hand-painted prints on copy paper. Each of the silk works are hinged to the top of blank canvases, their lower halves hanging loose and subject to even the slightest movement within the space. The drawings are hung in between, behind, and underneath the silk works. The two bodies of work functioning both as a whole, and as separate, discrete objects. The term “blotto” (c. 1905) is a little-known slang word for being drunk, from some signification of blot, in its “soak up liquid” meaning, and functions as both a process and a state that always asks (sucks up) for more. Grotto, defined as a “picturesque cavern,” or “hidden place” functions as the not-so-secret stage for the endless projections to unfold between the works, between the artist and viewer, and between the viewer and the works. The paintings absorb and distort the picturesque, yet remain physically available and even vulnerable to the viewer.
Valerie Veator was born in Syracuse, NY and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Her practice investigates the subjectivity of painting as it relates to the experience of casual observing, consuming, and being seen in the digital sphere. She examines the digital realm as it's devoid of the haptic, increasingly removed from embodiment, and significantly more open to objectification and vulnerability. Utilizing gestural mark-making, staining, and printing as its formal bases, her process is rooted in a diaristic experimentation in the language of abstraction. Her work exercises forms of tracing, embedding, concealing and revealing to collapse the space between image and material, the personal and the public, and the protected and the vulnerable.
An edition of booklets comprised of found images & iPhone photos will accompany the exhibition as both a visual reader and a kind of secret diary.
Room 4:
Thomas Friel, Happy Flebbe Year!, video, 2016; To Hell with Poverty, mixed media, performance, video and souvenirs, 2015
Good Weather presents Thomas Friel
Feed me with your tears as long as your tears cry money
“There. You smell that?”
He stared at his assistant with yellowish eyes. The regular mid-afternoon parade of sweat from his forehead had started. The wrinkles in his brow directed traffic and would soon pause at intersections of neck, pecs and gut. Fleshy traffic cops. His face was, and always seemed to be, contorted. Not pained in any significant way, just a general chronic discomfort that is hard to come to terms with but easy to get used to, for the most part.
“That’s the smell of FREEDOM.”
Proud freedom.
Does that even need emphasis?
His assistant was used to his intense stares. They were for no reason other than dramatics, the need to seem like daily tasks were a matter of life and death. Arts administration was never a matter of life and death, unless the non-profit you started just lost funding. Even still, this is America, so everything is going to be OK. But it was part of the game: he acted as if something horrible or wonderful was on the verge of happening, right there in the small shared office and he was right in the center of it in a pivotal role. She would give in to his reaction, never buying it of course, she just had to look like she did. Deep down he knew this, but wouldn’t ever admit it. After all, she was pretty, not beautiful, but her intelligence made up for that. Her youth allowed him to claim ignorance in her understanding of his game, which wouldn’t work if they didn’t work together. She was his only assistant, so without her, it would be pointless. It was clear he needed her more than she needed him.
“Do you smell it or not?” Annoyance in his voice. Attention shouldn’t have to be demanded.
Did she just lose herself in the cubicle flocking? Trying to figure out if the lowest of shag gray carpeting on the wall is tinged with pink or blue can make your mind numb.
“Wait.” She said, suddenly alert. “Did you just fart in front of me?” Screw this game.
Thomas Friel (b. 1979 Ridley Park, Pennsylvania) has an artistic practice that includes video, performance, painting, collage, and sculpture. High and low sensibilities collide in subversive humor, color, and patterning to reflect a sense of urgency to dismantle the failed capitalist state. He has exhibited his work in the United States and abroad, including at ACRE Projects(Chicago), DFBRL8R (Chicago), Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills, Michigan), and Art Basel 2011 (Basel, Switzerland). He has written art and social criticism for print publications and artist books, Bad at Sports, Carets and Sticks, and WOW HUH. He received an MFA in Sculpture at Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA in Fine Arts from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He received a bumper sticker, coffee mug, and T-shirt from Conan O’Brien for inclusion in the show’s “Occupy Conan” episode, and he often wears the shirt to the gym. He is currently based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, he has been exposed to more of Metallica’s music than anyone should, from basements to strip mall parking lots, train tracks and small businesses, all with an unintentional sense of ennui.
Good Weather is a contemporary art gallery in North Little Rock, Arkansas founded in 2011 by Haynes Riley in his brother’s suburban garage. It has made a decentralizing impact on the presentation of contemporary art and is dedicated to exhibiting critically-engaged artists whose practices represent a breadth of significant movements in the field. The gallery is an intimate kunsthalle space that has, over the course of nearly four years, presented thirty-four solo exhibitions from national and international artists, including Michael Assiff, Sondra Perry, Willie Wayne Smith, Hartmut Austen, Lauren Cherry and Max Springer, Ron Ewert, Devin Farrand, Jenny G, Talon Gustafson, Tony Hope, Layet Johnson, Ian Jones, Matthew Kerkhof, Martha Mysko, Ezra Tessler, Anne Vieux, and John Zane Zappas, among others. Outside of its primary location, Good Weather has organized exhibitions through various platforms including at Atlanta Contemporary, The Luminary, COOP, Fringe Projects, Institute 193, and Gallery Protocol. Good Weather also publishes artists books and apparel that have been presented at Printed Matter's LA Art Book Fair at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Cranbrook Art Museum, Detroit Art Book Fair, and Vancouver Art/Book Fair.