March 2016
Jon Pestoni: Some Years
24/03/16
Cleveland Museum of Art at Transformer Station
Sat, 04/23/2016 to Sun, 07/10/2016
Underbite, 2014. Jon Pestoni (American, born 1969). Oil and mixed media on canvas; 103 x 78 in.
(261.6 x 198.1 cm). Collection of Laurie Ziegler. Image courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles and Real Fine Arts, New York. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.
The Los Angeles-based painter’s first solo museum exhibition opens at the Transformer Station, featuring paintings made during the past five years. Pestoni’s bold work is comprised of many layers, revealing how and why each brushstroke was made. Ranging from intimate to monumental scale, Pestoni’s paintings will be joined by works on paper and a suite of watercolors making their exhibition debut.
Exhibition opening on April 22, 2016
Please join us in celebrating Jon Pestoni: Some Years
Opening with the Artist from 6pm to 8pm
The Cleveland Museum of Art is generously funded by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. The Ohio Arts Council helped fund this exhibition with state tax dollars to encourage economic growth, educational excellence, and cultural enrichment for all Ohioans.
Read More...
Sat, 04/23/2016 to Sun, 07/10/2016
Underbite, 2014. Jon Pestoni (American, born 1969). Oil and mixed media on canvas; 103 x 78 in.
(261.6 x 198.1 cm). Collection of Laurie Ziegler. Image courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles and Real Fine Arts, New York. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.
The Los Angeles-based painter’s first solo museum exhibition opens at the Transformer Station, featuring paintings made during the past five years. Pestoni’s bold work is comprised of many layers, revealing how and why each brushstroke was made. Ranging from intimate to monumental scale, Pestoni’s paintings will be joined by works on paper and a suite of watercolors making their exhibition debut.
Exhibition opening on April 22, 2016
Please join us in celebrating Jon Pestoni: Some Years
Opening with the Artist from 6pm to 8pm
The Cleveland Museum of Art is generously funded by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. The Ohio Arts Council helped fund this exhibition with state tax dollars to encourage economic growth, educational excellence, and cultural enrichment for all Ohioans.
Read More...
Calder Quartet in Concert: Sold Out
24/03/16
Calder Quartet in Concert
Thu, 03/31/2016 - 7:30pm to 9:30pm
“The Calder takes its place as one of America’s most satisfying—and most enterprising—quartets.” —Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times
Since its first performance on the museum’s series seven years ago, the Calder Quartet has achieved international success while deepening its relationship with Cleveland, including performances with the Cleveland Orchestra as part of the “California Masterworks” series, and being named quartet in residence at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Already the choice of many leading composers to perform their works—including Christopher Rouse, Terry Riley and Thomas Adès—the group’s distinctive approach is exemplified by a musical curiosity brought to everything it performs, whether it’s Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, or sold-out rock shows with bands like the National or the Airborne Toxic Event. Winners of the 2014 Avery Fisher Career Grant, the group continues to work and collaborate with artists across musical genres, spanning the classical and contemporary music world, and in venues ranging from art galleries and rock clubs to Carnegie and Walt Disney concert halls. To hear one of the most exciting string quartets at the height of its powers is a rare thrill.
Program:
Anders Hillborg, Kongsgaard Variations
Beethoven, String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131
Read More...
Thu, 03/31/2016 - 7:30pm to 9:30pm
“The Calder takes its place as one of America’s most satisfying—and most enterprising—quartets.” —Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times
Since its first performance on the museum’s series seven years ago, the Calder Quartet has achieved international success while deepening its relationship with Cleveland, including performances with the Cleveland Orchestra as part of the “California Masterworks” series, and being named quartet in residence at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Already the choice of many leading composers to perform their works—including Christopher Rouse, Terry Riley and Thomas Adès—the group’s distinctive approach is exemplified by a musical curiosity brought to everything it performs, whether it’s Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, or sold-out rock shows with bands like the National or the Airborne Toxic Event. Winners of the 2014 Avery Fisher Career Grant, the group continues to work and collaborate with artists across musical genres, spanning the classical and contemporary music world, and in venues ranging from art galleries and rock clubs to Carnegie and Walt Disney concert halls. To hear one of the most exciting string quartets at the height of its powers is a rare thrill.
Program:
Anders Hillborg, Kongsgaard Variations
Beethoven, String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131
Read More...
Tom Persinger Gallery Talk: April 3
19/03/16
Gallery Talk and Performance April 3 at 3:00 pm
Tom Persinger is a Pittsburgh artist, writer, and founder of F295, an international organization of photographers interested in conceptual approaches to technique and process in photography. Persinger created a triptych installation for “UNFIXED: The Fugitive Image” called PAST/FUTURE PRESENT. With this work, Persinger deconstructs the life cycle of the medium. In Past, the developer has already been fixed in the dark blue of cyanotype, while the site of a potential photograph is outlined in Future. Present, which has been sensitized with chemicals but not yet fixed, has been changing slowly throughout the course of the exhibition, evolving from canary yellow to green to bright blue and darkening to blue-grey. The large “fugitive” work invites infinite contemplation, as it changes constantly in minute ways. In the artist’s words, “We can empty ourselves into the abyss, yet it is never full.”
On April 3rd, the last day of the exhibition, Persinger will return to discuss his work and artistic practice and fix Present with a public performance that encloses the work in parentheses, a record of the exhibition’s duration. Read More...
Tom Persinger is a Pittsburgh artist, writer, and founder of F295, an international organization of photographers interested in conceptual approaches to technique and process in photography. Persinger created a triptych installation for “UNFIXED: The Fugitive Image” called PAST/FUTURE PRESENT. With this work, Persinger deconstructs the life cycle of the medium. In Past, the developer has already been fixed in the dark blue of cyanotype, while the site of a potential photograph is outlined in Future. Present, which has been sensitized with chemicals but not yet fixed, has been changing slowly throughout the course of the exhibition, evolving from canary yellow to green to bright blue and darkening to blue-grey. The large “fugitive” work invites infinite contemplation, as it changes constantly in minute ways. In the artist’s words, “We can empty ourselves into the abyss, yet it is never full.”
On April 3rd, the last day of the exhibition, Persinger will return to discuss his work and artistic practice and fix Present with a public performance that encloses the work in parentheses, a record of the exhibition’s duration. Read More...
Review: "UNFIXED" - CAN Journal
11/03/16
WASHING THE BLUES AWAY – UNFIXED: THE FUGITIVE IMAGE AT TRANSFORMER STATION
Author: Douglas Max Utter - CAN Journal
Fred and Laura Bidwell’s Transformer Station Museum is a particularly savvy instance of contemporary design, and simultaneously a study of fading history. Originally a streetcar power substation dating from 1924, the well-made and now restored original building is supplemented at the west end by a new minimalist structure of about the same size. It looks intriguingly like one thing hooked up to another – maybe the past plugged into the future.
Unfixed: The Fugitive Image, an exhibit curated by Fred Bidwell, and on view at Transformer Station through April 3, 2016, is a further study of impermanence and the uses of fading histories. Consisting of images produced by twelve contemporary photographers and video artists with a variety of cameras and techniques on surfaces ranging from metal plates to diaphanous, curtain-like swathes of fabric, it’s a conceptually and didactically oriented exhibit about encroaching absence, or the very fleeting nature of presence.
Read More...
Author: Douglas Max Utter - CAN Journal
Fred and Laura Bidwell’s Transformer Station Museum is a particularly savvy instance of contemporary design, and simultaneously a study of fading history. Originally a streetcar power substation dating from 1924, the well-made and now restored original building is supplemented at the west end by a new minimalist structure of about the same size. It looks intriguingly like one thing hooked up to another – maybe the past plugged into the future.
Unfixed: The Fugitive Image, an exhibit curated by Fred Bidwell, and on view at Transformer Station through April 3, 2016, is a further study of impermanence and the uses of fading histories. Consisting of images produced by twelve contemporary photographers and video artists with a variety of cameras and techniques on surfaces ranging from metal plates to diaphanous, curtain-like swathes of fabric, it’s a conceptually and didactically oriented exhibit about encroaching absence, or the very fleeting nature of presence.
Read More...
Review: "UNFIXED" - love, -j.
10/03/16
Still movement (#ArtReview)
"UNFIXED: The fugitive image" at the Transformer Station
By Christopher Alexander Gellert for love, -j.
“The contingency of photography confirms that everything
is perishable; the arbitrariness of photographic evidence
indicates that reality is fundamentally unclassifiable."
-Susan Sontag
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains...
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandius”
I’m almost hesitant to label “UNFIXED: The fugitive image” as a photography exhibition. The show, currently on exhibition until April 3 at the Transformer Station (the Cleveland Museum of Art’s West Side annex), resists traditional assumptions about photos as pictures. Instead, it asks us to approach photography, and video, as a process that does not immortalize, but like all things inevitably dies. That death is written into the works encourages us to treat them as living objects, to find beauty in their movement, meaning in their brief passage, as in our own.
Fred Bidwell, one of the gallery’s co-founders, with his wife Laura, opened a recent gallery talk by suggesting that photography has outgrown the need to try to prove itself as an art form. Photography can finally let loose.
Read More...
"UNFIXED: The fugitive image" at the Transformer Station
By Christopher Alexander Gellert for love, -j.
“The contingency of photography confirms that everything
is perishable; the arbitrariness of photographic evidence
indicates that reality is fundamentally unclassifiable."
-Susan Sontag
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains...
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandius”
I’m almost hesitant to label “UNFIXED: The fugitive image” as a photography exhibition. The show, currently on exhibition until April 3 at the Transformer Station (the Cleveland Museum of Art’s West Side annex), resists traditional assumptions about photos as pictures. Instead, it asks us to approach photography, and video, as a process that does not immortalize, but like all things inevitably dies. That death is written into the works encourages us to treat them as living objects, to find beauty in their movement, meaning in their brief passage, as in our own.
Fred Bidwell, one of the gallery’s co-founders, with his wife Laura, opened a recent gallery talk by suggesting that photography has outgrown the need to try to prove itself as an art form. Photography can finally let loose.
Read More...
Lecture in the gallery: Dr. Kate Albers
10/03/16
The Ephemeral Photograph: From Salt Prints to Snapchat
Saturday March 12, 2 pm
Dr. Kate Albers will speak about her study of the ephemeral photograph in the context of “UNFIXED: The Fugitive Image” a group show of work by contemporary photographers now showing at Transformer Station.
Kate Palmer Albers is Assistant Professor in the Art History Division, with a speciality in the History and Theory of Photography. Prior to joining the UA faculty, she taught at the Massachusetts College of Art and Boston University, and held curatorial positions in the photography departments at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, MA dn the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her book, Uncertain Histories: Accumulation, Inaccessibility, and Doubt in Contemporary Photography (University of California Press, 2015), addresses the limits of photography's ability to narrate the past andargues that doubt and inaccessibility can generate a space for a productive uncertainty that is as culturally valuable as information and clarity.
Read More...
Saturday March 12, 2 pm
Dr. Kate Albers will speak about her study of the ephemeral photograph in the context of “UNFIXED: The Fugitive Image” a group show of work by contemporary photographers now showing at Transformer Station.
Kate Palmer Albers is Assistant Professor in the Art History Division, with a speciality in the History and Theory of Photography. Prior to joining the UA faculty, she taught at the Massachusetts College of Art and Boston University, and held curatorial positions in the photography departments at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, MA dn the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her book, Uncertain Histories: Accumulation, Inaccessibility, and Doubt in Contemporary Photography (University of California Press, 2015), addresses the limits of photography's ability to narrate the past andargues that doubt and inaccessibility can generate a space for a productive uncertainty that is as culturally valuable as information and clarity.
Read More...
Review: Jack Quartet in Concert
03/03/16
Zachary Lewis - The Plain Dealer
CLEVELAND, Ohio – Music critics love to call concerts unforgettable. In this case, however, I'm not exaggerating.
That's because the performance Tuesday by the JACK Quartet at the Transformer Station wasn't strictly a (brilliant) musical or even auditory event. It was an all-encompassing, multi-sensory physical experience.
Never in the concert hall have I worked so hard. Sitting for an hour in the dark – in the complete absence of light – through Georg Friedrich Haas' String Quartet No. 3 required the sort of stamina more commonly demanded by "Stretching Out," my fitness column. Read More...