Buffalo Rising Online

The Hallwalls installation created by California artist, Julio César Morales will remain on view for an extra week, through December 22. The Year of the Diamond Dogs offers up the aura of a contemporary disco party tainted with despair.

The Year of the Diamond Dogs is composed largely of shiny, reflective surfaces. Most notably a large ramp that nearly runs right out of the gallery into the foyer of the building, covered with broken beer bottles. The ambient light is largely created through the neon red lights on the floor that write out the words, “There's gonna be sorrow” bouncing around the room. Two large sections of mirrors on opposing walls keep the light moving and suggest an ideal location for a voyeuristic rave.

The dance party feeling is enhanced by music that escapes from a second space to the left as you enter the space. In this space, Mor…

Dorothea Braemer’s “Ten Short Videos About My Childhood Home” will be screened at Hallwalls this Saturday, November 3 at 8:00 pm. We had a post on Braemer recently, which you can check out here. The shorts screened this week explore her relationship with her mother and other family members, along with the loss of her childhood home as her mother moves into an assisted care home.

To rev you up for Election Day, a number of other shorts will be screened Saturday, including exploring democracy, “ballot confusion,” and freedoms.

Thursday, November 1 at Hallwalls, check out a retrospective of avant garde filmmaker, Ted Lyman’s work, in a collection entitled, “A Sense of Place.” A Vermont artists, Lyman, has been creating film since the 1970s, and has influenced many younger filmmaker…

A few years ago, a friend and I took a “Business of Art” two day seminar offered by the New York Foundation for the Arts. It was pretty great, we met in New York University classrooms, and we met a lot of cool people. We learned to set goals, how to market our work, take slides, approach galleries, and more. It was good to meet artists from across the state, and learn methods to making it real.

Well, now NYFA is offering a six month seminar, NYFA MARK, for visual artists, meeting once per month here in Buffalo at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, 341 Delaware Avenue. The experience culminates with a trip to New York City, for a two-day seminar, to meet with folks who participated in the same program down state. The cost is only $150 for the six months, and they provide a place to stay in Manhattan for th…

A recycled dollhouse and four films are the basis for Dorothea Braemer’s piece at UB Center for the Arts Gallery. This idealized symbol of a home is fraught with conflict as the four films capture the complex family dynamics that evolve over the selling of Braemer’s childhood home and her mother’s move to an assisted living facility. The tiny projections and screens inside the windows of the dollhouse make for an intimate melancholy, a metaphor for psychology.

Passive main characters inspire Braemer’s work; she uses documentary footage and fiction, where she casts people to create characters, and makes the most of mixing formats. Her video, also about her mother, will be screened as a part of the Beyond/In Western New York exhibit at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center on Saturday, November 3 at 8:00pm.

Buffalo Rising is taking …

Using the body in art is nothing new, but media, politics, war, poverty, wealth, sex, religion, fashion, violence, our parents, technology, design, and well basically everything that surrounds us every day are constantly redefining the way the body is being used. Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center will screen 20 short videos that incorporate the use of the human body in their content tomorrow night. The total running time is 88 minutes, so these really are short videos (perfect for our 21st century short attention spans).

Raw Tactics Of The Subversive Body was organized by Andres Tapia-Urzua of Pittsburgh, and includes works by international artists, as well as Buffalo’s own, Caroline Koebel. The screening investigates – in video – our bodies as we see and u…

Beyond/In Western New York opens this weekend in 12 galleries across Buffalo Niagara, featuring the work of fifty artists who live and work within the Great Lakes region. Here we visit with Roberley Bell as she is installing her work at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center. The reception at Hallwalls is this Friday, and Visual Arts Curator, John Massier, has put together a rocking mix of artists, that truly bring the space to life with delightful invention.

Roberley Bell has installed “Becoming Blurred,” a grouping of works made of colorful fiberglass original forms (she calls flower blobs) and molds of found objects, and colorful plastic decorative items, along with preserved butterflies. Bell’s recent work is primarily executed outside in site spec…

In preparation for the Beyond/In Western New York exhibition we are introduciong you to the Buffalo artists who will be showing their work. Beyond/In is an event that brings twelve Buffalo Niagara region art spaces together to show the work of fifty artists who live and work within the Great Lakes region. We are visiting Buffalo artist’s studios to learn about their working process, their art, their studios, and how they live and work in Buffalo.

This time we visit Adam Weekley at his studio in his home on Buffalo’s west side. Weekley is putting the final touches on the individual pieces that will make up an installation at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in The Church at 341 Delaware Avenue. He talks about the process of creating this fairy tale like installation, which includes blue bear costume, a grouping of bee-hives, drawings of bees, golden colored birds, and…

On Saturday June 23rd at 8pm, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center will present the award-winning film The Guatemalan Handshake, (2006, 96min). A hit among the underground, and winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 2006 Slamdance Film Festival, director Todd Rohal’s debut feature "suggests what Jacques Tati may have done with rural America" (Variety). When a power failure occurs in a small mountain town, it sets in motion a bizarre chain of events. The sun rises sideways, a woman attends her own funeral, cars drive circles in the dirt, and Donald Turnupseed, an awkward demolition derby driver (played by musician Will Oldham, aka Bonnie 'Prince' Billy and the recent star of Old Joy) disappears. His vanishing affects the film’s eccentric characters, which includes a pack of wild boy scouts, a lactose intolerant roller rink employee, and a ten-year-old girl name…

If ever you've been wandering the streets of Buffalo wondering why, with such flourishing culture and young talent, we have never been home to a television series, your question has been answered. Elmwood Avenue makes its debut in Norman Toy's DISCS. Buffalonian Norman Toy, director, takes full advantage of the area's creative hub by filming his series in some of Buffalo's most notorious hot spots.

The sight chosen for the series needed to reflect an urban American landscape. Executive Producer Milly Toy (Bidwell Productions) and Co-Producers Evan Pease and Peter Williams (3C Multimedia) have pooled resources and decided that DISCS Record Store would be brought to life through Spot Coffee and New World Records. The setting will feel authentic and familiar and for most of us here in the Elmwood Vill…

Kirsten Reynolds is a New Hampshire-based artist whose work has been on display in galleries throughout the East Coast. Her latest installment, The Other Last Moment, will show at the Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.

Reynolds decides to explore the intersection of language, architecture, and the body in The Other Last Moment, using humor and the grotesque to “ceaselessly question the systems of thought that formed the original architectural space.” Much of the work appears on the verge of collapse, suspended in a way that insinuates both destruction and recreation.

“Modern physics and self-help gurus both agree that the observer affects the observed,” she writes, “What we think about a thing changes the thing itself. The question is: can a modern cynical society believe again in its own ability to make magic?”

If you believe, check out the e…

Forget the cliché “avant garde” label associated with today's jazz pioneers. On June 8, Hallwalls will play host to jazz legends Billy Bang and Kahil El'zabar, a duo that calls for the attention of your ears favoring the likes of hip-hop to classical and everything in between.

World-renowned jazz violinist and master of improvisational composition, Billy Bang, and his partner, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and jazz phenomena, Kahil El'Zabar, are one of the most powerful, free-jazz duos to ever play in Buffalo. Billy Bang started playing the violin while still in elementary school. He grew up in Harlem New York, where he was hand-picked for his school's new music department. Preferring to play the drums or the saxophone, Bang was not as enthusiastic as one may think. Despite his initial reluctance, years of artistr…

For our last stop we caught up with visual artist/ photographer Nancy Parisi. Nancy describes herself as a lover of the imagination. Through her work, she challenges herself by searching for inspiration in unexplored and often unconventional realms.

While we sipped tea and shared some laughs, Nancy talked to us about being inspired by Buffalo, transformational installations, and cooking up a masterpiece. Be sure to check out Nancy and all of the other artists you've read about at Hallwalls' Artist and Models Event June 2nd 2007. See you there.

Fun, zany, entertaining and just plain weird are a few words that describe some of the artists we will see this year at Hallwalls' Artists and Models “Nocterminal” event; a fund raiser to support Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center.

Our first interview was with visual artist and connoisseur of the sensual, Sean McGarry. Upon entering Sean's studio, I was besieged by an exquisite collection of erotic artwork. Beautiful paintings of equally beautiful women indulging themselves in various pleasures of the flesh, made me feel as though I had stepped into some kind of alternate universe. This was an atmosphere of fearless self expression and moral immunity, an environment that demands a laissez faire attitude from even its toughest critic.

Buffalo Rising: Would you classify your work as art for experiment or art for entertainment?

McGarry: …