Artists and Astronauts: Bean Gilsdorf

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

CCA MFA Class of 2011 Exhibtion!!! (Part I)

I may be a little behind, but I have a giant post of coverage from my MFA exhibition which took place from May 12-21. Walking around a few days later, it was ideal to take shots after the chaos of the opening. On the evening of the reception, I was stuck at my post next to my paintings, so it wasn't until I walked around to get some photos that I got to spend some quality time with everyone's artwork. I did not get to each artist in this post- some photos were bad and some I missed, so my apologies to anyone left out. We had a stellar class and I'm super proud of all of us!

CCA main building

Here we are! (Double-click for larger image)

Opening night in the main walkway

Sarah Thibault's painting and sculpture

Thibault close-up of texture

Maysha Mohamedi's wall of paintings

Maysha and I: Our art was right across from each other in the main hallway

Here's one of my walls

Here's the other one

I wore a sweet suit!

Dave Sandoval's "Holiday Dinner Karaoke" was a crowd pleaser

Inside, you sat at one of four seats around a table with a microphone and a scrolling prompter of banal family dinner conversation. Like, "Last year we went to Vegas", and the other seat: "Oh, I didn't know that. I like Blackjack".

A video projection on the table of a time-lapsed view of the dinner plates

Emily Eifler's super-ambitious interactive video game

Radka Pulliam's "constellations" of her charted walks around her Tenderloin neighborhood. Some recorded items: prostitutes and pee smells.

Neil LeDoux's Headlands Tournesol Prize-winning cat mural

Carlos Ramirez's ceramic Mario Brothers blocks and blobs in the background

More Ramirez ceramic blobs

Jonathan Runcio's paintings and concrete sculptures on mini-plinths

Runcio painting

Amber Stucke's drawings and mushroom spore paper hand-outs

Carol Koffel's melting ice and porcelain sculpture

Ida Roden's detailed installation of an imaginary character's bedroom

She even made the book cover

Bean Gilsdorf's enormous digitally printed textile piece

Gilsdorf close-up: She's got Reagan and some civil war images mingling on the fabric

Stay tuned for more Part II coming soon!
Class photo by Jim Norrena. Can't get enough CCA photos? See the rest of his images here.

The CCA class of 2011 is:

(Click on names for links)

Frederick Alvarado

Natalia Anciso
Simone Bailey
Mark Benson
Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik
Marissa Botelho
Marylene Camacho
Jillian Clark
Serena Cole
Daniel Dallabrida
C. Wright Daniel
Rachel Dawson
Crystal De la Torre
Victoria Deblassie
Katherine Dorame
Elizabeth Dorbad
Emily Eifler
Rachel Foster
Mik Gaspay
Bean Gilsdorf
Angus Haller
Julie Henson
Sarah Hotchkiss
Courtney Johnson
Waheguru Khalsa
Brian King
Carol Koffel
Noah Krell
Neil Ledoux
Maysha Mohamedi
Vanessa Nava
Nancy Nowacek
Radka Pulliam
Carlos Ramirez
Ida Roden
Allison Rowe
Jonathan Runcio
David Sandoval
Amber Stucke
Mark Taylor
Sarah Thibault
Natasha Wheat

Sunday, February 27, 2011

CCA Wattis Shows: "Undisclosed Destination" and "Hammarby!"

The other night I was so excited to celebrate my good friend, Rachel Foster's, inclusion in a show at the Wattis Institute for the Arts at CCA. Wattis shows are generally touted as a big deal in our smallish city, bringing in artists who are well-known and often unseen beyond in museum exhibitions in the Bay Area. Last semester boasted the "Huckleberry Finn" exhibition curated by Wattis Director Jens Hoffman, (formerly of the London Institute of Contemporary Arts), with a commissioned installation by Kara Walker and pieces by two of my favorites, Hank Willis Thomas and Yinka Shonibare. This semester's exhibition on the bottom floor of the Wattis is called 101 Collection: Route 2 Undisclosed Destination and was curated by Sharon Lerner as a "collection show", meaning that annually a local collector's "101 Collection" is curated by different guests. Rachel happens to be part of the 101 Collection, and was shown along side some pretty fancy names, including John Baldessari and Todd Hido.

Rachel showing the announcement

Any time there is an opening at school there is food and a swarm of students around the food

Elisheva Biernoff's large landscape panel combining park, beach, volcanos, and basically environmental trouble

Elisheva's hand-painted double-sided imagined postcards from lost explorers

Two of Rachel's (hard-to-photograph) prints

Two more prints from Rachel

A stack of John Baldessari

Upside-down tree photo print- artist unknown

Upstairs was a sort of pre-exhibition of Belgian artist, (and one of the "Magnificent Seven artists scheduled to exhibit solo shows at the Wattis), Kris Martin's, show, Hammarby! in which he asked his project class made up of several of my friends to create work to be exhibited in the space which adds up to his own exhibition. This is what the Wattis says about it:
"Over the course of this semester, Martin is living in San Francisco and serving as a guest faculty member at CCA. He is leading a class of 13 graduate Fine Arts students in creating new works on the subject of time, a universal truth with which all artists—and of course all people—must contend. Graduate school is a period when art students are developing their own practices, their own career paths. And so, Martin finds it appropriate to transform the private space of the classroom into the public space of an art gallery, with the latter's new set of expectations around finished pieces and the status of the working, professional artist. The gallery is divided into 13 autonomous-but-public spaces, one per student, via a grid of red lines. Martin is working in a 14th space, the entire gallery, and has given himself the same task that he has given his students: to devise new works that investigate issues of time and duration." There will be a closing reception for the exhibition on March 29.