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Artventure: Watching the world go by. Alexa Meade, Artventure, Gao Gao, Irvine Gallery, Karin Jurick, Marina Abramović, MoMa, The Artist is Present, Trompe l'oeil

Hullo Adventurers.

This week’s Artventure post is about watching/looking/seeing. Get excited.

Karin Jurick works fast. The photographic quality of her work comes from a masterful command of texture and light; she distills a moment onto the canvas by efficiently abstracting shapes and simplifying the composition. Jurick mostly paints scenes of everyday life, but I am captivated by her depictions of scenes in a museum or art gallery. In capturing her subjects in these settings, she modestly comments on the scopic pleasure we gain from voyeurism. Check out her Painting a Day series here.

Alexa Meade takes the concept of ‘seeing is believing’ to the next step. As a mixed media artist, Meade challenges our perception of depth and reality by mimicking the brushwork found on an oil painting using acrylic on walls, objects and people. She realigns the viewer’s line of sight by compressing  and skewing a 3D plane into one articulated in 2D. As a young artist of only 23, Meade is already represented by the Irvine Gallery in DC. Definitely someone to watch.

Marina Abramović is one of my long standing idols. As a matriarch of performance art, MoMa is holding a retrospective of her work, which includes a much publicised installation where she sits across from a rotation of strangers. The exhibit, “The Artist is Present” has solicited a series of interesting participants, including a weeping make up artist who has visited at least 15 times, Alan Rickman, Ulay, and her doppelganger.  To learn more, there’s a Tumblr dedicated to cataloguing the tears and a Flickr photostream for the stares. Worth it, adventurers. I went through every single photo.

Until next week adventurers.

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