BEYOND/IN WNY 2010: ALTERNATING CURRENTS Buffalo Arts Studio Free public opening reception Saturday, September 25, 2010 @ 6-10 p.m. ...

Artist talks at BAS Saturday, October 23, 2010 @ 7-9 p.m. This international contemporary art exhibition--the product of a unique curatorial collaboration among twelve of Western New York's museums and galleries--will showcase the work of over 100 extraordinary artists from the region and beyond. Works in an expansive range of media, all connected under a common theme, Alternating Currents, will be on display beginning with the Beyond/In WNY Opening Weekend (September 24-26, 2010) and extending through the end of 2010. Installations by featured international artists will also become permanent parts of the region's landscape, serving as lasting impressions of the biennial. As a subtheme of Alternating Currents, all of the works featured at Buffalo Arts Studio may collectively be discussed in terms of the Sublime, paradoxically invoking feelings of curiosity, marvel, and discomfort in the viewer. ----- ABOUT THE ARTISTS: Yasser Aggour www.yasseraggour.com Syracuse-based artist Yasser Aggour's series "The Hunted" is a compilation of photographs depicting trophy hunters posing with their victims that the artist has digitally manipulated to eliminate the physical presence of the hunters. With Aggour's careful, seamless removal of the grinning sportsman and his sadistic practice from the picture, we are confronted with the overwhelming finality and solitude of mortality. Though actually lifeless, Aggour's subjects appear captured in their last pleading moments, poised with a sorrowful dignity and futility. Conversely, without understanding the artist's technical process, the unsuspecting viewer might find the hemorrhaging creatures oddly serene and indifferent to their grave circumstances. By enlarging the photographs and emphasizing their formal components, Aggour enables us to view the horror from a distance without contemplating the arguably unnatural manner in which the animals met their demise. The effect is works that are simultaneously astonishing, majestic, disconcerting, and enticing. Megan Ehrhart www.tuscarstudiofilms.com Cleveland-based artist Megan Ehrhart's stop-motion animations are therapeutic manifestations of her life as a chronic insomniac and lucid dreamer. Described by the artist as "manageable nightmares," the bizarre imagery incorporated into Ehrhart's films drolly reflects her childhood fears along with more mature underlying concepts such as gender and sexuality, consumerism and cannibalism, Darwinian notions of evolution and survival, and death and decomposition. Stage props include antique toys, dolls, taxidermy animals, prosthetics, live worms, meat, and homemade clay and leather puppets, which interact with one another in clever and unexpected ways. Lucid Lunch is a macabre spin on a girl's tea party in which a doll and four dead stuffed animals are seated to eat together. Shot entirely in one session without sleep, the film sheds light on the subjectivity of taste and how the subliminal associations we make can confuse the already delicate distinctions between gratification and disgust, nature and culture, and predator and prey. Phil Hastings www.coilproductions.com Fredonia-based artist Phil Hastings's Steadfast is the first in a series of four films in the ongoing "Lake Series." Inspired by the artist's personal experience in a devastating flood in 2009, this terrifyingly seductive film of a remote house eclipsed by waves crashing against a rocky shoreline is a gripping enactment of the explosive power and destructive force of nature. The use of slow motion enhances the volcanic quality of the rocks, producing an ethereal landscape of impending doom. Further augmenting the tension is an original score, which menacingly fades in and out before climaxing and abruptly ceasing, achieving an apocalyptic effect that serves to remind the viewer of his or her own existence and removal from the peril. The dark, secure confines of the gallery provide a suitable environment for free association through which the pliable narrative becomes a metaphor for distinct historical and autobiographical events, real and imagined memories, and deeper inner thoughts and sentiments. TH&B www.thbcollective.com Perhaps the most literal depiction of alternating currents, Swarm, an installation by the Hamilton, ON-based artist collective TH&B (Simon Frank, Dave Hind, Ivan Jurakic, and Tor Lukasik-Foss), is also teeming with conceptual interpretations. Consisting of a telephone pole covered with burrs and a looped audio track imitating the buzz of power lines, the work concurrently implies positive and negative connotations of attraction (manifested as electrostatic cling, overgrowth, or infestation) and repulsion (in the form of decay or neglect--contextually fitting within the shrinking city of Buffalo and, more specifically, the former manufacturing plant in which the work is installed). Swarm challenges the boundaries between indoor and outdoor spaces, the public's trust in the gallery system, the art market, and the conventional notion of art as an object of visual, sonic, or tactile beauty. The alluring threat of the thorny burrs paired with the cautionary drone and awe-inspiring violence of electricity elicits an undeniable feeling of the Sublime. Adam Weekley www.adamweekleyart.com Buffalo-based artist Adam Weekley's enchanting yet disturbing paintings and drawings feature surreal imagery reminiscent of fairy tales gone awry. In the tradition of the fantasy genre, the artist participates in the passing down and adaptation of stories, borrowing ingredients such as animal symbolism, psychological drama, physical alteration, and the otherworldly in his revelatory exploration of modern issues. But rather than preaching universal values and promoting a naïve belief in miracles and happy endings, Weekley's open-ended works derive from an individual perspective, addressing his own emotions, recollections, and sociopolitical observations. Reappropriating conventional masculine and feminine forms, Weekley's two-dimensional works subvert established mythologies through the integration of contemporary motifs. His soft sculptures and three-dimensional paintings integrate lush, saturated hues and synthetic materials such as slippery satin and sleek upholstery chosen for their tempting lavishness. In these harrowing pictorial folktales, overindulgence in the form of sexual hedonism, binge eating, and material consumption embodies the Sublime as a combination of the pleasurable and the grotesque. ----- Buffalo Arts Studio (BAS) is a not-for-profit arts organization whose mission is to provide affordable studio space and regular public exposure for regional, national, and international artists through exhibitions, and to enrich the community with art classes, mural programs, and public art. Exhibitions, public art projects, and classes help the studio serve as a cultural center. For more information, please visit www.buffaloartsstudio.org or www.beyondinwny.org