May 9–June 14, 2008

Feel better, longer
May 9 through June 14, at Civilian Art Projects

more info [civilianartprojects.com]...


 

 

 

 

Previous Events

March 21–April 26, 2008

craigslist

Civilian Art Projects
craigslist explores how four artists utilize this renowned community web site as a conceptual component in their artistic practice. The exhibition features works by the artist team Joseph Dumbacher & John Dumbacher, Jason Horowitz, and Jason Zimmerman and is co-curated by Jayme McLellan, Director of Civilian Art Projects and Andrea Pollan, Director of Curator's Office. An opening reception is scheduled for Friday, March 21 from 7 - 9 pm. An essay by Andrea Pollan will accompany the exhibition.

August 23–September 30, 2007

2007 Alumni Juried Exhibition: Recent Graduates 2002–2006

Corcoran Gallery of Art: Gallery 31
The alumni of the Corcoran College of Art + Design featured in this exhibition were chosen by their Administrative Chairs. This select group of graduates submitted one piece of artwork to be juried by Molly Donovan, curator of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art. All media are represented in the final collection of works, showcasing the burgeoning talent of our recent graduates.

SPOTTING ON VIEW NOW

July 19–August 2, 2007

Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize Exhibition at MICA

Decker and Meyerhoff Galleries
Fox Building, Maryland Institute College of Art
1303 Mount Royal Avenue
Baltimore, Maryland

Thirty-seven semi-finalists were selected in the first round of the Sondheim Prize. This exhibition expands on the finalist exhibition at The Baltimore Museum of Art by showing the broad range of artists whose work was reviewed in depth in the second round of the Sondheim review.

Artists:
Seth Adelsberger (Baltimore MD) ~ Chul-Hyun Ahn (Baltimore MD) ~ Lillian Bayley (Baltimore MD) ~ Heather Boaz (Towson MD) ~ Mark Cameron Boyd (Beltsville MD) ~ Edward Brown (Salisbury MD) ~ Lynn Cazabon (Baltimore MD) ~ Mary Coble (Washington DC) ~ Kathryn Cornelius (Washington DC) ~ Neil Feather (Baltimore MD) ~ Shaun Flynn (Baltimore MD) ~ Steven Frost (Washington DC) ~ Dawn Gavin (Baltimore MD) ~ Susannah Gust (Baltimore MD) ~ Maren Hassinger (Baltimore MD) ~ Sam Christian Holmes (Baltimore MD) ~ Jason Horowitz (Arlington MD) ~ Courtney Jordan (Baltimore MD) ~ Brian Kain (Emmitsburg MD) ~ Avish Khebrehzadeh (Washington DC) ~ Magnolia Laurie (Baltimore MD) ~ Joey P. Mánlapaz (Washington DC) ~ Jeanette May (Alexandria VA) ~ Lisa Moren (Baltimore MD) ~ Brandon Morse (Takoma Park MD) ~ Jeremy Rountree (Baltimore MD) ~ Erik Sandberg (Washington DC) ~ Molly Springfield (Washington DC) ~ René Treviño (Baltimore MD) ~ Jason Zimmerman (Washington DC)

SPOTTING ON VIEW NOW

March 9–April 21, 2007

Jason Falchook, Contours & Detours
Jason Zimmerman, Natural Acts


CIVILIAN ART PROJECTS:
Essay by Andy Grundberg

The recipe for creating a contemporary art scene is not hard to intuit. Take some innovative, eager, personable young artists, add a few hip commercial galleries and artist-run spaces, some saavy collectors, at least one critic of enthusiasm and intelligence, a pinch of media outlets for such criticism, a nearby museum with a contemporary-art curator, and your choice of a welcoming restaurant, bar, or coffee shop where all these people can meet, and then mix well. Voila! Who needs New York?

The reality is a bit more complicated. Plenty of cities have the minimum daily requirements for an art scene but don't quite pull it off - San Francisco, say, or Boston. That's because art is ultimately about something else: imagination, talent, risk taking, having something to say.

In Washington, D.C., an art scene is taking shape today. That's as much testament to the imagination and risk taking of the people who choose to show contemporary art as of the artists who make it. Civilian Art Projects is a great example of a grass-rooted, arts-community based, independent minded showplace for art that complements the city's other innovative enterprises, from the late, lamented Fusebox to Transformer to the Hirshhorn Museum. The list could go on.

Civilian Art Projects is the brainchild of Jayme McLellan, a co-founder of Transformer and a contemporary of many of the artists she now represents as a commercial galleryist. Her vision is sympathetic to a broad mix of media and styles, she believes in the importance of her generation of artists, and her timing is impeccable. With this, Civilian's first show, she gives us a glimpse of what these young artists have to say.

Jason Falchook's color photographs depict unprepossessing, unpopulated urban spaces lit with the enervating glow of mercury vapor lights. They have the isolated eeriness of surveillance pictures, but the corrugated fences and shutters and stark buildings are their own protagonists. The time is night or nearly so, and without the intersession of the photograph we probably would not linger long to examine the scenes in detail. Falchook calls the series "Contours & Detours," but we might also add a coda, "Places We'd Just as Soon Avoid." Still, the bright light sources give off what passes for warmth, and one suspects that beyond the terror we are made to feel lies a sympathy for a present that seems equally to speak of the past and the future.

Jason Zimmerman's series "Natural Acts" continues his photographic exploration of incidental evidence supplied by the physical world. Like Falchook, he positions nature and humanity in a tenuous balance, but while Falchook's pictures read as surveillance Zimmerman's appear forensic. Whatever the word "documentary" means when applied to the camera, it has traction here, in images of chipped china and gooey aluminum foil and other frayed objects, but for no imaginable uplifting social purpose. Call it Documentary Degree Zero, a collection of evidence for which there is no crime.

Taken together, and in company with the other artists on the roster of Civilian Art Projects, Falchook and Zimmerman are sniffing out similar aesthetic territory, fashioning a discourse that tempers inevitability and loss with possibility and wonder. Without seeming cynical or hectoring, their work steers us toward considering art as a critical instrument that embraces feeling and subjectivity as crucial to its meaning.

The debut of a new gallery that celebrates local talent is always a cause for celebration and optimism, in part because it signals the viability of a new aesthetic point of view. In this case, the cause for optimism is even greater since there is an assumption that this viewpoint has a market - that collectors and curators will support these artists and this gallery. Based on the evidence of this first show, they should.

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Andy Grundberg is a critic, curator, and educator who has written about photography for more than 25 years. His writings for the New York Times and other publications are collected in the book Crisis of the Real (Aperture).



Foil on Icing
January 13–February 10, 2007

Civilian at G

CIVILIAN ART PROJECTS ROVES TO G FINE ART

Ken Ashton · Breck Omar Brunson · Lily Cox-Richard · Jason Falchook · Erick Jackson · Michael Johnson · Nilay Lawson · Noelle Tan · Jason Zimmerman

Please join us in building a collector and community base of support for this talented group of artists represented by Civilian, a new Washington, DC gallery.
www.civilianartprojects.com · 202-607-3804
www.gfineartdc.com · 202-462-1601

December 2–23, 2006

Civilian Art Projects Presents: Dynamic Field

Featuring: Ken Ashton, Breck Omar Brunson, J Carrier, Lily Cox-Richard, Frank Hallam Day, Jason Falchook, Erick Jackson, Michael Johnson, Nilay Lawson, and Jason Zimmerman.

Dynamic Field is an exhibition uniting a talented group of under-represented American artists for the launch of Civilian Art Projects - a new gallery based in Washington, DC. Promoting a program of exhibitions and events to increase recognition and support for its roster of artists, Civilian will operate as a roving, commercial gallery, without a physical home base. It will work in partnership with creative spaces nationally and worldwide to present work and promote artists. The website www.civilianartprojects.com is the centralized resource of information on the gallery.

CLICK HERE TO VISIT CIVILIANARTPROJECTS.COM
Video still from Spotting, 2006

November 3–4, 2006

Freewaves 10th Biennial Film, Video, and New Media event:
Too much Freedom?


UCLA Hammer Museum
The Demolition was exhibited at the UCLA Hammer Museum at part of Freewaves 10th Biennial Film, Video, and New Media event, Too much Freedom?


Installation view of The Demolition in the main lobby of the UCLA Hammer Museum.
Photo: Freewaves, 2006

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