Visual Art and Artists: Artery, Indy Week

"The world's best artist" Mitch O'Connell brings modern kitsch to Raleigh

Zack Smith — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 13:47:00 -0400

Mitch O'Connell's colorful, crazed pop-art illustrations have appeared everywhere from the cover of Newsweek (four times) to a recent full-page story in The Wall Street Journal, but you'll have to forgive him for hoping for a good-sized turnout at his appearance at Nice Price Books in Raleigh on April 27.

"I’ll be in North Carolina meeting my fiancé’s father," says O'Connell, on the phone from his home in Chicago.…

CAM Raleigh changes leadership on eve of second anniversary

Chris Vitiello — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 11:28:00 -0500

RALEIGH—As CAM Raleigh approaches the two-year mark, the museum is making changes. It’s also taking the opportunity, in advance of the noise of birthday celebrations next month, to revisit its aspirations.…

Stu Martell's reluctant retrospective, Saturday only at Outsiders Art

Chris Vitiello — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:47:00 -0500

DURHAM—Out of appreciation for the public discomfort of a unique maker of many various things and deft handler of many different materials—the word “artist” embarrasses him—I’m only going to use his name in the headline. He didn’t ask to be the center of attention, but he’s summoning the tolerance.…

Eleven paintings and a giant vagina: Robin Walker at the Carrack

Chris Vitiello — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 14:24:00 -0500

“Decorative” is a bit of a dirty word in the art world. It’s why we say “interior decorators” instead of something like “décor artists.” In galleries and museums, the word “ornamental” is preferred, describing artwork that incorporates motifs from traditional crafts, fashion or architecture into a larger statement or meaning.…

What the ocean saw: David Gatten's films at NCSU

Chris Vitiello — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 12:31:00 -0500

DAVID GATTEN FILM SCREENING AND DISCUSSION
N.C. State University
Caldwell Hall G107, 2221 Hillsborough St.
Fri., Feb. 15, 5-7:30 p.m.

This is the true story of how the ocean made a movie.

To be more precise, filmmaker David Gatten collaborated on a movie with the Atlantic Ocean, where the Edisto River empties its freshwater into the ocean’s salt along the South Carolina coast.…

Disarming delight: Iris Gottlieb's Inventories and Observations

Chris Vitiello — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 17:09:00 -0500

Self-consciousness is exhausting. It’s such a drain to have to maintain one’s personality or to display a situationally appropriate persona as one moves from place to place over the course of a day.…

Closing Sunday at NC Museum of Art: Project 35: Volume II

Amy White — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 17:48:00 -0500

PROJECT 35 — Volume II
North Carolina Museum of Art
Part II closes Jan. 13
Part III Jan. 20-March 24
Part IV April 2—June 2

When it comes to good art, sometimes late is better than never.…

UNC School of the Arts graduate Craig Zobel gets under your skin with Compliance, now out on DVD

Zack Smith — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 11:42:00 -0500

It’s not every Hollywood résumé that includes multiple Southern art films, a flash animation about a tiny Luchador and an award-winning feature about an interrogation in the back room of a fast-food restaurant, but UNC School of the Arts graduate Craig Zobel is not your typical filmmaker—and his latest film Compliance, which hit DVD this week, is anything but your typical film.

In its premiere at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Compliance proved one of the most controversial films there, prompting multiple walkouts in its initial screening.…

Last chance to see "Season of Japan" at the Ackland

Chris Vitiello — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 12:35:00 -0500

CHAPEL HILL—The word “ambivalence” is usually used to express an emotionless, uncaring state or a kind of personal isolationism. But the term really describes the conflicted state of holding two contrary points of view.…

Boneshaker author Cherie Priest talks steampunk at ConTemporal in Chapel Hill

Zack Smith — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 09:47:00 -0400

Why should you head to ConTemporal, the Chapel Hill-based science fiction convention that focuses heavily on the retro-futuristic concept of steampunk? We’ll let the con’s literary guest of honor Cherie Priest tell you why.…

Interaction without ego: sarah goetz's Just Between Us opens at Durham's Carrack Gallery

Chris Vitiello — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 10:48:00 -0400

The circle and the square. This phrase recalls Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man notebook drawing, in which he exemplifies the proportional relationship that the Roman architect Vitruvius asserted as optimally connecting man to the structures around him.…

El Anatsui's optimistic objects

Chris Vitiello — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:27:00 -0400

Artists are a resourceful lot. In their hands, common materials become artifacts charged with new significance.…

What the negative saw: M.J. Sharp's long-exposure photographs at Durham's Craven Allen Gallery

Chris Vitiello — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:29:00 -0500

Say the word “click” out loud. It’s only one syllable, but its sound has a beginning, middle and end.…

[Updated] Durham City Council greenlights public art program

Chris Vitiello — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 13:36:00 -0500

UPDATED: 10:48pm Monday, Nov. 21.
DURHAM—The Bull City is finally taking the public art plunge.

The Durham City Council passed a resolution Monday night to devote up to one percent of the proposed General Capital Improvement Project (CIP) annual budget to the installation of public art at CIP sites and other locations around the city, including a priority area downtown and along "gateways" to the city.…

Drive to Raleigh to see one photograph? Do it.

Chris Vitiello — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 11:07:00 -0500

“It is not (it seems to me) by painting that photography touches art, but by theater,” Roland Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. The French theorist’s book investigates the relatively young medium through the question of why certain individual images fascinate him.…

On absence and presence: Catherine Howard's Veil Tease

Chris Vitiello — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 07:25:00 -0400

Diaphaneity. When was the last time you encountered that word?…

Ultraportraiture: Morag Charlton’s new paintings of Facebook profile pictures

Chris Vitiello — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 06:43:00 -0400

Although it’s not always activated in painting, scale is one of the most interesting aspects of an artifact. Monumental garden sculptures by Henry Moore turn you into a child wandering through the looking glass, while gazing up at Louise Bourgeois’ gigantic maternal spiders can leave you feeling meek or apologetic for the rest of the day.…

From Sushi Boy Thunder to Ninja Hamster Rescue: Game On Raleigh happens tonight

Zack Smith — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 15:34:56 -0400

The Triangle has proven a home for such large video game companies as Epic Games, but now a new generation of Triangle residents are creating their own games—and are ready to pit them against one another.

The first Game On Raleigh will be held tonight at the Busy Bee Café’s Hive in downtown Raleigh from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., a self-described “Battle of the Bands” for video games that offers Triangle gamers samples of what local developers have to offer.…

Notes on Durham Third Friday, Part 2: Image and idiosyncrasy

Chris Vitiello — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 09:46:14 -0400

Although summer doesn’t end until the fall equinox in late September, August’s Third Friday in Durham uses the public impatience with the season as a springboard into fall. Tom Elrod already described some of the bounty of visual arts in an earlier post, but that was only the half of it.…

Notes on Durham Third Friday, Part 1: The paranormal and the apocalyptic

Tom Elrod — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 11:42:00 -0400

In Durham Friday night at the Stedman Center, Irish artist Susan MacWilliam presented some of her latest work in a lecture entitled “My Adventures in the Supernormal.” She developed her most recent work while in residency the Rhine Research Center in Durham this summer. MacWilliam has been working for more than 10 years on subjects surrounding the “paranormal” and “parapsychology.” Her interest, she says, is not so much the paranormal per se but the people who study it and the many types of apparatus they've created in order to run tests or communicate with the dead.…

Pulping Dixie: Poet Kay Byer and the complexity of race in the South

Chris Vitiello — Fri, 27 May 2011 11:34:17 -0400

Any writing about race relations in the South will have its limitations. One’s experiences are never comprehensive.…

Jason Whitman’s hapless animals at Rebus Works

Chris Vitiello — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 18:36:00 -0400

Jason Whitman:
Drawings
Rebus Works

Through March

Remember that guy in high school who was always drawing? You always wanted to sit in the row next to him so you could peek over during class to see what he was scrawling there, hiding the paper with an arm so the teacher couldn’t see what he was up to.…

First Friday diary

Lauren Shute — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 17:38:00 -0400

Although I’ve spent three years in Raleigh, I’d yet to hit downtown for a First Friday. But this month, it was time.…

(More) cute "a-gnome-ymous" art in D-town

Samiha Khanna — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 15:34:05 -0400

Spring is in the air. Heaps of little creatures are prepping for debut, from bitty bunnies to budding bulbs and... lucky little cork gnomes, as the Indy staff has learned.…

Positive images: Documenting chemotherapy with archaic photography techniques

Chris Vitiello — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 10:31:00 -0500

ChemoToxic
Ambrotype photographs by Willie Osterman
Durham
Through This Lens Gallery
Through March 12

“I photograph because I don’t understand something, or I’m curious about something, or want to learn about something,” Willie Osterman says.

In the case of cancer, one’s body is what’s not understood, to the specific extent that it becomes an enemy.…