Justin Beckman is also the proud recipient of an MFA from CWU. Town and Country is the name of the exhibition and it is a very ambitious show! Keep your eyes peeled for Justin's forthcoming show at PUNCH Gallery.

Congrats go to Dave Weed for earning an MFA in painting from CWU. His thesis show, 18 Signs, is fantastic and should be up through the month of June. See it at Studio D at the Tashiro Kaplan Building in Seattle's Pioneer Square. My regards to Dave's brother Jim and his wife Jillian who sacrificed their home to the post-thesis dance marathon. Glad to see someone else owns the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.

In conjunction with his inaugural lecture on tolerance and immunology, Dr. Berent Prakken has organized an evening of interdisciplinary lectures on the theme of tolerance. My contribution will be a multimedia piece called, Gezelligheid and Other Character Flaws. I am thrilled (and a little intimidated) to participate in this project, especially given the credentials of the other contributors:

- Tom Dommisse, philosopher
- Jan Lokin, professor Roman Law
- Tijs Goldschmidt, biologist/writer
- Maarten van Rossem, professor modern history

John Pena just found out he was admitted in into the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Congratulations John!

It's that time of year again. Students are contacting me with good news.

As for CWU drawing & painting alumni, John Pena (BFA, 2005, painting) received the AIGA WorldStudio Grant. John is also wrapping up his final semester in the MFA program at Carnegie Mellon University. Joel Brenden (BFA, 2005, drawing) is also completing graduate studies, in his case, in the visual studies department at University at Buffalo.

As for current students, Jay Hollick (BFA candidate, drawing) interned at Atelier van Lieshout, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Jay was also a recipient, along with BFA painting candidate, Melissa Nott, of a C. Farrell Scholarship, CWU's highest praise for an art student. Big ups to Travis Helmkamp (BFA, 2008, drawing) who had two works selected for the Pacific Northwest Annual at the University of Oregon.

And hot off the presses, the following people can finally get some sleep knowing they have been accepted into their respective MFA programs of choice: Lauren Norby : Art Center College of Design and University of California, Santa Barbara. Justin Martin: University of South Florida. Stephen John Ellis: The University of Tennessee - Knoxville.

Shoot.

(Above) Institutional Wellbeing: An olfactory plan for 1708 Gallery, pigment print on adhesive vinyl, wood shelves and environmental fragrance, 2008

OPENING: FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2008 FROM 7-10 PM
COMMAND P RECEPTION: MARCH 28, 2008 FROM 6-10 PM

Featuring:
HOPE GINSBURG
BRIAN GOELTZENLEUCHTER
AKIKO JACKSON
SUE JOHNSON
MATT KING
JACK RISLEY

1708 Gallery collaborates with the Virginia Commonwealth University Painting and Printmaking Department in an exciting new exhibition that investigates the association of the artist's multiple to the consumer-based products that in flux our daily lives. By expounding on the processes of printmaking, 3D Multiples: The Object of Production compares and contrasts the relationship of current art practices to the manufacturing of mass-produced objects.

My thanks goes out to everyone (especially Jessi Moore and Rosemary Jesionowski) for their assistance and company during my visit.

(Above) Institutional Wellbeing product launch: "ETHIC: An Environmental Fragrance for CSU-Pueblo's Department of Art", mixed media, 8' x 16' x 3', 2007.

A very warm thanks to Caroline Peters, Director of the Colorado State University Art Gallery. Everyone should check out spongexsponge. I will post a link to the images and curatorial statement when it becomes available.

My contribution to this exhibition featured graffiti by artist, Nicholas Santistevan. Nicholas is an incredibly talented and articulate guy. Big things to come for him in the future.

Stephen Ellis and I are collaborating on this multifaceted project, which resides most of the time in the virtual world, Second Life. One manifestation of the project will appear this week in China in the group show, Site: Unseen, curated by Stephen Chalmers. The show features artists whose images of the landscape are created using performative means.

Here is the project statement for our submission, Second Scape:
In 1983, Allan Sekula wrote about the scientific and artistic “dualism” that he claimed “haunts photography”. The former, scientific imperative, seeks objective truth; the latter, artistic imperative, embraces subjective experience. While one can read the genre of landscape photography through either lens, in so doing, one accepts and propagates this dualistic false dilemma.

The work of collaborators Stephen John Ellis and Brian Goeltzenleuchter argues for socio-aesthetic hybrids in an attempt to explain representations of self through visual artifacts. In Second Scape the duo seeks to record the socially constructed landscapes created in the online, virtual world, Second Life. According to its website, Second Life is “a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents”. The landscapes in Second Life, therefore, are entirely socially constructed, and reference the plurality of values characteristic of its over one million residents.

To accomplish this, Ellis and Goeltzenleuchter created virtual alter egos, or avatars, and built a photography studio in Second Life. Their avatars are social documentarians who travel extensively to survey and capture the topography of the Second Life landscape. Their avatars’ personae seek to exaggerate the subjectivities inherent in documentary photography, while simultaneously privileging the dynamic ways the landscape is imagined in this virtual world.

Katharine Whitcomb and I are team-teaching a new genres course called Hybrids & Collaborations. The students are fantastic and this event promises to rock. Check it out.

The CWU Writing Center and the students in ART/ENG 498 Hybrids and Collaborations invite you to an evening of allegorical tableaux in Hertz Hall.

Wed., May 23rd, 7-8 p.m., Hertz Hall Writing Center, Central Washington University

ON WRITING
Participating Artists:
Stephen Ellis
Tammy Fortin
Jay Hollick
Pat Hutchins
Aaron James
Desiree Jarboe
Jeff Lane
Kale Lemmon
Justin Martin
Jessi Nelson
Lauren Norby
Melissa Nott
Rachel Pybon
Lisa Ritchie

Sunday Portrait (#14), watercolor on Arches paper, 12.25 x 12.25 in., 2006.
Sunday Portrait (Record and Album Cover), Vinyl LP and Screen printed flocking on record cover (Ed. of 2), 12.25 x 12.25 in., 2006.

The show is up through 5 May 2007. Also on view are Sunday Paintings by Michelle Forsyth.

Project Notes:
Sunday Portrait is a multimedia, multi-sensory engagement with people who are loyal readers of the Sunday edition of The New York Times. By posting a classified ad in Seattle newspapers, I established a network of people who have developed rituals of reading the The New York Times every Sunday. After a preliminary telephone conversation with participants, during which time I explained the terms of my project, I arranged to meet them on a Sunday of their choice. I met with participants every other Sunday for a year. I met them at the location where they normally read the Sunday Times, and conducted a recorded interview with them in an attempt to tease out their specific reading rituals. I found these rituals to be both visual (where they read, what time of day, how they dress) and nonvisual (appropriate dispositions of the mind, organizational control of time and space). Following the interview, I photographed the participants while they read. Working creatively from photographic documents and digitally recorded interviews, I developed 24 watercolor portraits and an audio collage (remastered for LP records), which, when taken as a whole, suggest how personal taste informs daily rituals related to consuming the news. Sunday Portrait is my attempt to reflect on who consumes these texts and images (many of them horrific), and in what context they do so, ultimately redefining the relationships between consumption, leisure, and education. The project exists as an exhibition of 24 watercolor paintings and an edition of 2 LP record albums, each with a flocked album cover.