Leave it to Beavers features works by

Carla Edwards
Christy Gast
Anya Kielar
Fabienne Lasserre
Ella Kruglyanskaya
Katherine Bernhardt
Letha Wilson
Denise Kupferschmidt
Holly Coulis
Lia Lowenthal

ABAB: Who are you?

GB: Gina Beavers

ABAB: What are you?

GB: An artist, a curator, a teacher.

ABAB: What do these artists do?

GB: Video, sculpture, paintings, photographs, hybrids. They might also teach, curate, style, collaborate, DJ.

ABAB: Who are they to you?

GB: The girl-crush, the muse, the soul-sister, the BFF, the mentor.

ABAB: How did you discover their work?

GB: Through friends recently, saw their work on ART BLOG ART BLOG, known forever, stalked online, just met, collaborated with, put me in important shows, had important shows, gave a talk, in a show together.

ABAB: How would you describe their work?

GB: Ground-breaking, diverse, intuitive, conceptual, mind-bending, live-wire, insane, baddass, hysterical, moving, horizon-expanding, free, experimental, so smart, perfect.

ART BLOG ART BLOG is a curatorial project by Joshua Abelow.  From a recent interview with Abelow, “Intitially the blog was a way for me to contextualize my own work alongside artworks and text by other artists and writers I was interested in, and it still is that.  But, it’s also a way for me to curate in the simplest way possible.  To call a gallery space a blog is something that had never been done before and I think it generated a lot of interest because of that simple gesture.  It created an element of confusion – like what is ART BLOG ART BLOG – a gallery, a blog, or a website?  And, for a temporary period, it was all three.”

Last summer in New York, ART BLOG ART BLOG presented ten exhibitions at a temporary location on the 11th floor of 508 West 26th Street.  The location was generously donated to Joshua Abelow by the painter, Ross Bleckner.  Abelow’s new book, Painter’s Journal, describes in detail his first year living in New York in the late 90′s working for Bleckner as a studio assistant.

Friday, May 11th 6 – 8 PM at Gallery Diet

Gast’s work has been exhibited at museums and galleries internationally, including MoMA/P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Performa, Artist’s Space and Harris Lieberman Gallery in New York; Miami Art Museum, the de la Cruz Collection, Gallery Diet, and the Bass Museum of Art in Miami; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and High Desert Test Sites in California, The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and Centro Cultural Matucana 100 in Santiago, Chile.

ONE SIZE FITS ALL

Bhakti Baxter | curator

Please join us for a one night event.

Opening:
May 11, 7-11 pm

Address: Buena Vista Building, 180 NE 39 St. Suite 120, Miami FL 33137

Featuring artists: Kevin Arrow, Jenna Balfe, Bhakti Baxter, Autumn Casey, Clint Casey, Dino Felipe, Kool Large, Nicolas Lobo, Gean Moreno, Upahar David Neiburger, Daniel Newman, and DJ Le Spam.

One Size Fits All is a one-night exhibition that features works by contemporary artists whose work in some manner embodies the attitude and character of the music of Frank Zappa. The impetus for arranging this exhibition was taken from Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention’s 1975 album by the same name. The album One Size Fits All played a critical role in conceiving this exhibition, serving as a model by which to select work that incorporates a similar aesthetic audacity, humorous surprise, technical virtuosity, and confrontational character as the music. Although the term One Size Fits All may suggest notions of universality, it may also recall the marketing of elastic underwear and other such meanings that are welcome in the context of this exhibition.

Each exhibition will include a student art portfolio preparation with the artists.

May 26, 10 am-1 pm | 801 SW 3rd Ave. Miami FL 33130
Limited seats. RSVP at 801projects@gmail.com.com

Project coordinators and Press contacts: Odalis Valdivieso and Angela Valella

Over at the hip Gallery Diet, local artist and curator Christy Gast’s larger-than-life burlap sculptures tower over viewers. Riffing on the idea that the artist’s studio is a site that’s both liberating and confining, the works reference polar opposites: past and present, interior and exterior, figurative and abstract. Gast’s material of choice, which is normally used as a container of seeds, beans, or soil, gives a nod to elements for creation, life, and consumption.

To read the full article click HERE

Locust Projects is pleased to announce a new public art project by New York-based artist Anya Kielar. Yellow Lines, a “sprayogram” resembling a ghostly clothesline displaying dismembered apparel, will be featured on over 30 bus shelters around Miami Beach and the Design District in April and May 2012. Kielar’s work draws upon sources including set design, surrealist collage, post-minimalist sculpture, and decorative arts, while joining varied objects and textures. In Yellow Lines, rows of lace gloves, jewelry, stockings, hair weaves and silhouettes rendered in black, white and yellow create a whimsical, theatrical environment.

Read the full article Here

Read the full review HERE

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Gallery Diet is pleased to present Good Tool, a one-time performance by Aki Sasamoto. This is the artist’s first performance at the gallery.
Special thanks to the Fountainhead Residency.

“As a teenage backpacker, I gained 33 lbs. over one summer,
traveling through the Middle East. I fell in love with the idea of
hummus as a main course. I fell in love with nut shops, with the
endless dub rhythms of bite, salt, crack, open, seed, chew, swallow
(repeated until the bag of sunflower seeds was empty). I fell in love
with a girl. I fell in love with clothing without zippers.

Interesting thoughts originate outside of us, especially the intensely
fresh ones. I want an idea to look fat and juicy, full and
floating about in the distance. It waits to encounter you, for you
to get the right pointy tool to aim towards it, popping it open to
release its fragrance.

After the summer, when I returned to the anorexic city of Tokyo,
I ran into an unintentionally evil English teacher from my former
school, who said to me: ‘You look like a huge balloon, about to
pop. What has happened to you, Miss Sasamoto?’
I was full of ideas.”

(excerpt from “Molasses,” a booklet published on the occasion of an exhibition, A Likeness Has Blisters, at CCS Bard, April 29, 2012)

About the artist:

Aki Sasamoto is a Japanese artist based in New York who works in performance, sculpture, dance, and other mediums. Her works have been shown in performing arts and visual arts venues in New York and abroad. Aside from her solo work, she collaborates with artists in visual arts, music, and dance and takes on multiple roles as dancer, sculptor, or director. Sasamoto co-founded Culture Push, a non- profit organization in which diverse professionals meet through artist-led projects and cross-disciplinary symposia.

“Batty Cave,” filmed on a desert mountain in Utah, was based on the story of two men who built an ark in a mountain cave because they were expecting a flood of biblical proportions. The center screen of the three-channel video installation shows Gast’s hands arranging stones and scraps of rusted metal and glass to form a pictogram that tells the men’s story. “Herbert Hoover Dyke,” the other video installation, reveals Gast wearing a dark tuxedo jacket, white pants and a cowboy hat and tap-dancing on the 30-foot high berm that prevents Lake Okeechobee from flowing into the Everglades and suburban expanses.

Read the full article Here