ART: Marilyn Minter @ Salon 94 Freemans thru 6/13

GREEN PINK CAVIAR AT SALON 94

Green Pink Caviar
New Photographs and Paintings by Marilyn Minter
Salon 94 Freemans
April 28 - June 13

Continuing her critique of the underbelly of glamour, for her second solo exhibition, Green Pink Caviar at Salon 94. Marilyn Minter will present monumental paintings alongside large scale photographs. By showing extreme close ups of tattooed and freckled skin, mouths blowing bubbles and tongues licking candy her work undermines our cultural taste for the clean and flawless. Playing with her own vocabulary of zooming and focusing in and out of the body, Minter finds the exact moment before the bubble bursts, the sweat dries or the candy melts. Minter’s monumental 15-foot painting, Pop Rocks, her largest to date, she explores the idea of painting with the tongue. Directing her models to lick brightly colored candies, Minter shot photos from underneath a glass plate. The tongues mixed the ‘paint’ with saliva, slurping and pushing the color around the glass surface. The result of this very Minter-esque action paintings are featured in two photographs, in which the models seem to regurgitate their own makeup, Gimmie and Chewing Pink. (source)

Marilyn Minter was born in 1948 in Shreveport, Louisiana, and lives and works in New York.

SCENE/ART/BOOK: Rejoice!!

"Rejoice" by Vicksburg, MS artist H.C. Porter seems to sum up how at least 50+ million folks are feeling this morning!!

H.C. Porter's mixed-media paintings begin as black and white portraits. Using a printing technique called serigraphy, Porter screens her photographs onto paper and begins painting. It is an unusual process but it's one that reflects a way of life. Beneath the vibrant colors are the black and white images that begin each piece.

Porter takes this process to the next level with her extensive documentary project, BACKYARDS AND BEYOND, which combines mixed media visual art with audio allowing each image itself to tell the story of Mississippians affected by Hurricane Katrina. “Amazingly, my time on the Coast has revealed that many people throughout the United States have no idea that Mississippi was affected by Hurricane Katrina,” states H.C. Porter, “much less that our entire Coastline has been annihilated. People’s lives have been altered for generations. This is not the Great Depression or The Dust Bowl Days, but it is Hurricane Katrina, a part of our nation’s history that unfortunately landed head strong into every single Coastal community of Mississippi. I am simply a vessel through which the story is being conveyed. It is about the faces and emotions and words of those I am documenting. This Exhibition will be their stories …our story … Backyards and Beyond … a story that must be told for a very long time.”

Porter is currently on tour throughout the south to promote the exhibit's companion fine art coffee table book.

ART: Like A Rolling Thunder Tent Revival Revue

My brother always threatens to leave town. Like that would magically solve all his problems. What people like him fail to realize though is that wherever you go, there you are. I don't mean that in a Zen way either. I mean, you take your problems with you, especially if it's you that is the problem.

The weight of lies will bring you down
And follow you to every town
Cause nothing happens here that doesn’t happen there
So when you run make sure you run
To something and not away from
Cause lies don’t need an aeroplane to chase you anywhere
(The Avett Brothers, "The Weight Of Lies" from Emotionalism)

But running away....It does hold the hopeful mirage of a clean break, a fresh start where no one knows you. And all your wrongs can be made right or maybe never even existed. You can be the person you always believed you could be. The you that you know you are, but maybe nobody else can see. There is no possibility like that of a new place...and the story whose end has yet to be told. And besides, it's just a few tracks later on Emotionalism that the Avett Brothers sing that "all my mistakes, They brought me to you."

So, I guess you never know...

When he's not making music with his brother Seth, Scott Avett is painting. An exhibit of his work, in collaboration with husband & wife photography team Crackerfarm, is up now thru August 29 at the Envoy Gallery on the Lower East Side, NYC. The Avett Brothers The Gleam II is out now.