On the occasion of the pre-publication of a new issue of Cinema Schism, alterna-film zine, a remake of Sarah Jacobson’s incredible title scene:
I wrote an essay for it, to be published soon. You’ll be amongst the first to know. In the meantime, check out their other zines and merch.
I was asked to write a letter, by Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts, to be included in their catalog for the three day Feminist Art Program Archive Exhibition. This is my letter:
June, 26th, 2023 There are role models for young women artists now: a smattering throughout history and plenty in the 20th and 21nd century. Dear younger woman artist, if you are afraid but want to be an artist, turn to your art for reassurance. Whatever thoughts, feelings, concerns you're having at the moment can be addressed within the artwork. Loneliness is a reason to become an artist. In focusing your creative imagination, you develop something like another self. The art must be imbued with spirit and able to speak back to you. You are no longer alone when you have art. If you're thinking about fame and fortune, it is possible you could achieve those through art. However, those are not the same thing as being an artist and finding a life within art. Women have historically painted, drawn, decorated, and made things with children. Letters on a page is a form of drawing! Sewing clothes, altering patterns, making something delicious to eat out of possibly meager rations are all the art the homemaker, oftentimes a woman. Art is an ordinary thing. Being an artist is often the only thing that's left when the world shuns you and makes you an outsider. The best work comes from people who don't belong anywhere in particular and who's creative visualization and problem solving Is pointed in a strange direction (rather than the direction of something useful in a material sense). If you are unloved, fall into the arms of the artwork you create. Over time it will become more than you expected, develop a language and speak back to you. You can make art even in prison or a refugee camp. Ontologically speaking, there are no specific materials required. In art, you make your own blanket; you make your own mother; you make your own mirror; you make your own lover. You don't even have to share it (or make it because truly no one cares whether you do or not). Sincerely, Kristin Calabrese
Herein lies a collection of thoughts and trying to figure stuff out and cool things and announcements, changing artist statements, plus lamentable documentations of paintings, stories, some of the back story about some art projects, a catch-all. Welcome. The posts below this sentence are from my last website… above will be new.
Message to the World, Kristin Calabrese solo exhibition –
Opening at Brennan & Griffin, April 26, 2018
Into the Fold: The Paintings of Kristin Calabrese
by Kiki Seror
Woven cloth, otherwise known as drapery, has been used for centuries, as a society metaphor, from the Social Fabric, “The looser the weave, the weaker the fabric,” and inherently serves as a reference used by linguistics to illustrate the dance between ‘word and thought’. For painters it is their runway support to take flight from. Whether be it cotton, linen, or dried woven pulp, it is the initial ground, which their first stroke of liquid or graphite is laid upon. Calabrese’s paintings take flight here, as an image of the surface-object, the woven support becomes the subject of the painting, and after all, once an object has been incorporated in a picture it accepts a new destiny. Her subject is transform by means of paint strokes that create the image, although gravity will slowly modify the forms of the folds, what is present is the artist hand painting the fabric to evoke memory as surface selections are brought into play. Just how much vision and memory, we absorb from the paintings, depends on the degree by which her faculty has been masterly developed, and selection is shown by way the artist’s asserts herself in choosing those folds, creases, and furrows. Her painted curvilinear triangles forms with folds and furrows, are not common outlines or simple areas of tones, these forms exhibit triangular or at times trapeziform contours, since lines defining drapery forms are never parallel. Kristin’s intent rises from the plane of inscription – it results from a recoil which divides the support into a landscape of valleys as though to recall the void in which this act is achieved, the paint, detached from the surface, it proceeds to weave itself there, delegated from depths which are not deep towards the surface, which is no longer a surface but a ‘signified fold,’ painted vertically from beneath to its upper surface, a perfect operation – touch as echo – illustrating a “concealed point” or of the “absence of traces.
THE FOURTH WALL – ORGANIZED BY KRISTIN CALABRESE
SEPTEMBER 3 – OCTOBER 15, 2016
ARTISTS’ RECEPTION SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3rd 2016 FROM 6-9PM
Check out more pictures at Charlie James Gallery Of “The Fourth Wall,” a group show organized by Kristin Calabrese, including works by Alexis Murray, Jeremy Rocine, Oscar Moreno, and many other artists under the umbrella of The David Bowie Tribute Wall.
The Fourth Wall is an exhibition organized specifically for a room with four walls. Art is a container for content, and gallery walls a container for art. Each of the three artists and one project are given one wall. The show is installed in the intuitive method of abstract expressionism. Works are hung salon style on two walls and in a single row on the other two. Depending on your point of view, each wall can be the fourth wall.
Alexis Murray makes narrative, figurative paintings using old master techniques and are full of fantasy and caricature. They explore the psychology of coping with anxiety and the darker elements of the human condition. Jeremy Rocine’s has been painting patterns with a glitch built into the pattern, which is analogous to the sand in the oyster that causes the pearl. Oscar Moreno’s paintings are developed from a process of addition, subtraction and reformulation in reaction to the painting while it’s being formed. Sometimes elements of autobiography and influences like underground comix can be seen lurking beneath the surface.
The Fourth Wall is an exhibition organized specifically for a room with four walls. Art is a container for content, and gallery walls a container for art. Each of the three artists and one project are given one wall. The show is installed in the intuitive method of abstract expressionism. Works are hung salon style on two walls and in a single row on the other two. Depending on your point of view, each wall can be the fourth wall.
Alexis Murray makes narrative, figurative paintings using old master techniques and are full of fantasy and caricature. They explore the psychology of coping with anxiety and the darker elements of the human condition. Jeremy Rocine’s has been painting patterns with a glitch built into the pattern, which is analogous to the sand in the oyster that causes the pearl. Oscar Moreno’s paintings are developed from a process of addition, subtraction and reformulation in reaction to the painting while it’s being formed. Sometimes elements of autobiography and influences like underground comix can be seen lurking beneath the surface.
The David Bowie Tribute Wall is a shrine-like installation of paintings, drawings, photos, needlepoint, sculpture, and other kinds of art created as a tribute for the great musical artist David Bowie. Artists participating in The David Bowie Tribute Wall responded to an online Call for Art – here. The list of artists is still growing, but so far will include work by Alan Skalaski, Alicia Araya, Annie Lapin, Amy Wilson Faville, Ariana Papademetropolis, Alexis Murray, Andy Alexander, Ben Evans, Brian Brooks, Catt Avery, Deb Kavis, Denise de la Vaux, Devonie Kemp, Emma Gray, Emily Joyce, Erik Hanson, Emilie Duval, Face Osiris, Heather Morgan, Jason LaMotte, Jennifer Celio, Jenny Phelps, Joey Dammit, Joshua Aster, Julia Schwartz, Kelly Smith, Kristin Dowling, Kristin Calabrese, Laura London, Liz Walsh, Michael Arata, Michelle Fierro, Natalie Sistrunk, Nate Pottker, Patricia Salcedo, Phillip Holt, Rachel Rogov, Rory Devine, Roya Falahi, Sarah M. Almond, Sean Griffin, Sharon Ryan, Sharon Shapiro, Sherry Carroll, Stephen L Shriver, Tamar Lalenya, Tina Wood Phalen, Veronica Wood, Vivian Colodro, and Wanda Malatesta.
MY BUS SHELTER IN FRONT OF LA><ART
06.04.2016—08.04.2016
LA>< ART
7000 Santa Monica Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA
90038
www.laxart.org
THE SMALL TEXT ON THE BUS SHELTER SAYS THIS:
How do I say it? I don’t think it’s fair that money trumps the individual. In public speech? Why do we have 2b subjected to guess + american apparel ads.
Sure, we could rent ad space on a bus or billboard, but let’s not pretend there’s any kind of even playing field between a corporation and an individual.
We tune out the ads everywhere. What else do we tune out.
Maybe you’re on your way home? Do you want to look at an advertisement?
Didn’t you pay to take the bus? It seems unfair to have to look at an ad for some sappy romance
Are you on your way to work now?
Friendship through commerce – not impossible. Control through excessive ads – constant reminders of the price of everything takes away from what really matters
Advertising – words + graphics intended to sell something to the viewer. Private property land or stuff owned by someone (or a company or corporation). Owner can rent ad space on their billboard. What I don’t get is how our eyespace being taken up by their untruthful messages (i.e.: happy people banking). is allowed to be the visual landscape of our lives without our permission can I say here that I hate CHASE without being sued?
Guilt & Pleasure
Qual Kristin
Loves Josh
Focking (unlegible text)
Agent
Everyones always looking at everyone else as a customer
Money shouldn’t be everything
People need permits to gather in large groups meanwhile time warner is all over the side of a building and disney (yuck!) owns time square. How is it that personal speech isn’t the most revered? Street art + anyone who wants to write on the wall or paste a sign should be allowed, given priority, over ads selling something especially over any faceless corporation. I’m not so against a small family business getting the word out. Profits need to be weighted against quality of life.
Only messages with an agenda let me sell myself to you. Visual pollution. Ask the viewer. Why are ads ok + graf not
Meditation doesn’t helps. One mans tasteful is another mans eyesore. No quiet.
This is a message to everyone that’s alive today. This is our world. It’s up to us how we want to live. Do we want to live like this – where every bit of public space is a cacophony of messages who’s sole purpose is to get us to buy stuff – services, products, policies, agents, a whole structure of adult life is company and brand alliances.
The junk mail in my mailbox is printed on paper that cannot be recycled.
Why is every surface blaring some ad at me. TMobile SPRINT Verizon Everyone hates – these companies. I was at a grocery store in line the other day. It had sponsored fox news sports playing ___> I like grocery shopping. I find it to be a time for me to be quietly with my thoughts. So when I was subjected to fox just to buy my items I felt frustrated, stressed + offended.
Every time you buy something from time war – target you’re supporting their ads. Ads are distracting for drivers but they also take away from time to think.
I thought automation + mechanization was supposed to give us more free time more leisure, more time to read, write, make music, travel hangout with friends, instead, made up jobs, marketing, incessant advertising.
When you see ads, do you think about how many hours you have to be at work to pay for that thing, that poor guy at starbucks – what did he deserve to have to stay there all day, everyday, ?
Why have we sold every inch of our visual field to the highest bidder – just because someone has the most money, doesn’t mean they have the most important thing to say. Advertising is the biggest waste of (squandering) of resources, marketing, spin, hype + lies meant to sell something no one wants or it would sell itself.
Its the big companies we’ve heard about that are the worst
A store window could have a gradient color window that disappears at certain time of day
I remember hating t mobile finally got out of that contract so I hate them a little less I have a friend who’s being robbed by at&t she thought she was just renewing her service, turns out they were upgrading 3 lines so she got a $380 bill. Any company that tricks you into buying something + won’t let you out of a contract where you didn’t mean to sign up in the first place, is selling garbage no wants in the first place.
Why are we ok with having our cities look like this? Contemporary life could be more fun + more mellow
You know how relaxing it is to look at trees and even streets + buildings without ads! Even the signs in store windows take up mind space.
Grafitti artwork + personal expression by everyone who wants to – the voices of individuals – who are not trying to sell something are much more beautiful + better for societal well being btw have you noticed the word “wellness” is being applied to everything lately? Marketing its marketing.
Kristin loves josh
I’m not against private property everyone needs their own private space – especially with the onslaught of sales pitches but there should be some tangible recognition that ads add to public stress + we have to look at them just because we’re outside
Somebody maybe many people making money by presenting a monopolized life view if I’m reading ads I’m not thinking about art, and not inventing, not being philosophical, things about capitalism I like —> C The big C – is that I pick my on career or whatever, but when everything is for sales everything has to sell, money starts becoming the only virtuous goal – wining at any cost which is detrimental to the collective.
I can appreciate the effort of an ad that tries to be funny – but I don’t really see those outside. What would be on signs if it wasn’t advertising? Could be nothing that would be better. We could look to social media for examples for what might be in the public sphere even personal ads would be fun.
We’re losing public space all together – parents are arrested for letting their kids play outside or walk to school unsupervised how did this happen?
Quality of life
It’s hard to get away in my mind when everywhere I look another ad in my face
On a bus shelter someone could publish a poem
We’re sitting ducks for outdoor advertisers. A captive audience can’t escape it + stay in a city in USA
Peoples lives wasted working in marketing offices. The way I feel about ads + spam etc is I’ll let you know if I want it
When you think of chase ads fill me with dread because they make me think about my rent + my bills + my student loans + how much money I have to make every day forever. I don’t know if it’s just me or if I have add or something but having to keep up with bills + everything everyday is really stressful, even if I have money plus am making money. You never know what the future holds ads just remind me of stress even more.
People like to entertain each other + be entertained think youtube vimeo companies that rely on that
This is a call to the people to say no more advertisements in public spaces our eye space should not be used as a place to sell us stuff I didn’t opt in to receive
These guess+Target ads. I’m not receiving any benefit for my attention as it is we pay a lot of sales taxes in cali – it should be enough that we don’t have to look at ads everywhere
Ideally signs in public places would not have any commercial component. Vandalism is in the eye of the beholder. Money talks + everything else has to listen.
How much energy does it take to block out ads? Wouldn’t it be better to just be calm drink in the visual silences they, you sell landscape sights cape + it causes stress. It might be less people + more ads that cause stress. Does anyone see a credit card ad + think of luxury goods + a vacation to st. tropez. I think of bills, deadlines, money I have to make by keeping my feelings in check
Everyone always looking at everyone as a customer
Sell yourself to me
Don’t you think you should get paid for looking at all the corporate branding
Yes to art not ads
It’s another bleak day
Eye pollution
Ads never say what they mean
Be nice because you never know who might buy something from you
Arbitrary isn’t good
What would this sign say if it wan’t trying to sell you something
Everyone needs customers
Lies <3
I just can’t stand anymore meaningless shirt****
Sell yourself to me
don’t you want a more pleasant life
Ulterior motives
Manipulation
If you’re rich I’m not talking
LA>< ART
7000 Santa Monica Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA
90038
www.laxart.org
Press contact: info@laxart.org
I made these monoprints in Putnam/Graphics studio at MacDowell Colony late summer, early fall 2014. Sorry about the bad pics.
LIFE PIERCING ART
A BOOK OF PORTRAITS AND SELF – PORTRAITS
By Rosanna Albertini
ORESTE & Co. Publishers, Los Angeles, 2013
Nine portraits of women, nine artists finding in art the core of their own lives: KIM ABELES, SIMONE FORTI, DOMINIQUE MOODY, HILJA KEADING, KAREN CARSON, KRISTIN CALABRESE, ERIN COSGROVE, RACHEL MASON, DAWN KASPER. They squeezed from their liquid substance fruits that never grow in nature, and visions that history would not welcome. Yet, they happen to be in the world, sharing the same reality as everybody else.
The portraits are in words, the self-portraits in images.
Limited edition, 100 copies numbered and signed, 7’ x 8’ ½, 200 pages.
Price: $ 150. It’s a hand made book designed, sewn by hand and published by the same person who wrote it.
Rosanna Albertini, the author of the text and of the book as an object, is a scholar who became a journalist, a journalist who became an art-writer and a curator, moved from the eighteenth century philosophy to contemporary art, from Italy and France to Los Angeles, where researching and teaching (at USC, UCLA, Otis School of Art and Design) joined writing and craftwork. Life Piercing Art is the n.3 of the Collection “The Red Thread” after New Zealand with an Italian Accent, 2010 and White Owls – Artists I Found in Los Angeles 1994-2011, 2011.
For other books and articles, see her web-site: albertini.ws
To purchase the book send an e-mail: rosanna@albertini.ws
The Wall Show at the Irvine Fine Arts Center
Irrational Caring
Come see the 20 x 13 foot wall painting that I made that incorporates paintings made by other artists – Joshua Aster, Danial Mendel Black, Frank Ryan, Nihura Montiel, Alexandra Grant, Pearl C. Hsiung, Lucas Reiner, Analia Saban, Brian Porray, Julian Rogers, Fran Siegal, Nikko Mueller, Stephanie Pryor, Noah Davis, Sabina Ott, and Marie Thibault – as collage material.
Another installment in a new sequence of The Secret Choreographer’s activities, the 3-and-a-half minute video Atopical Bandaids (After Calabrese) features a dance designed for its backdrop, the Kristin Calabrese painting Art as Bandaid, 2011. Collaborator Nicholas Frank’s sculptural setting for the video is designed specifically to fit the confines of the head-sized John Riepenhoff Experience. The Secret Choreographer responds to Calabrese’s rendering of hidden wounds and compounded healing, while Frank offers edges and refractions to multiply and complexify the physical and emotional equation.
The Secret Choreographer’s latest project is to haunt the spaces of art shows just as they pass into art history. Dances are composed to correspond to the work featured as backdrop, stage set, prop, foil and director. History is itself a complex choreography; The Secret Choreographer brings it into form.
This exhibition is supported in part by The Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Suitcase Export Fund for Visual Art.
The Secret Choreographer
Atopical Bandaids (After Calabrese), 2012
video still
©2012 Nicholas Frank
The Secret Choreographer
Atopical Bandaids (After Calabrese) install shot
install shot
©2012 Nicholas Frank
an exciting project that I would like to continue with other friends – this was shown with the Green Gallery East in Milwaukee:
What We Do for Fun: Kristin Calabrese with Caitlin Lonegan and Brenna Youngblood
Exhibition: June 16 – July 2012
The Green Gallery East presents What We Do for Fun: Kristin Calabrese with Caitlin Lonegan and Brenna Youngblood. This unique three woman show spurred from a couple of ideas Kristin was exploring while collecting source material for new paintings. Calabrese started taking photographs of incidental paint marks in her friends’ studios and the marks inspired Calabrese to look at collaboration from a different perspective. By bringing the paint marks into her own studio, Calabrese could actually collaborate with the impressions her friends had made on their studios. Also through her friends’ paint markings, Calabrese achieved her desire to shift the color of her usual palette and make paintings that looked abstract yet have rendered light, texture and space (thus needing some sort of basis in observation).
In a subsequent conversation, Caitlin Lonegan expressed an interest in seeing a painting of hers along side one of Kristin’s paintings that incorporated the paint marks from Caitlin’s floor. Their separate works had a literal link of palette/source (Caitlin had painted her floor not too long before Kristin took the picture, so the paint on the floor was mostly from her recent body of work).
Soon this concept of linked paintings inspired Brenna Youngblood to volunteer a painted tarp for Kristin’s project. Kristin incorporated the tarp into her body of work by using it as a subject for one of her paintings. While there is an esoteric link to Brenna’s paintings, the two paintings together create a conversation. Kristin is more quoting Brenna in combination with her own formal fascination with the appearance of space in the picture. Brenna is speaking her truth directly, utilizing her own unique formal painting language, which includes breaking the frame literally and figuratively, and the recycling of found discarded materials.
The paintings Kristin Calabrese made from Caitlin Lonegan’s studio floor and Brenna Youngblood’s tarp are the first two in the project. They will be shown together with a painting by Caitlin Lonegan and two pieces by Brenna Youngblood that were made around the same time the materials were collected.
The result is a show that is loaded with re-appropriation of color, texture, and incidental marks – stripping the raw materials of their original purpose and re-contextualizing them into other paintings with a different artistic intention. This show is not only a celebration of the elements that link these paintings, but a comment on all paintings (which are linked because they are paintings). These paintings are a little more linked than other paintings.
We are excited to see what they will look like together.
~~~
Caitlin Lonegan is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work includes large scale paintings on canvas, small journalistic studies, and works on paper. She received her B.A. from Yale University and her M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell M.F.A. Award and has recently been exhibited at ACME., (Los Angeles), L.A.C.E., (Los Angeles), Idyllwild Arts Center (Idyllwild, CA), Steve Turner Contemporary (Los Angeles), and the Cue Foundation (New York). She is represented by ACME., Los Angeles and is currently working on an upcoming solo show, a recently founded arts journal, and a handmade artist book as a part of Laura Owens’ curated books project.
Brenna Youngblood earned a BFA in 2002 from Cal State Long Beach and an MFA in 2006 from UCLA, where she studied with Cathy Opie and James Welling. Recent solo projects include exhibitions at Honor Fraser Gallery, Jack Tilton Gallery, Susanne Vielmetter Berlin Projects, Margo Leavin Gallery, Wignall Museum, and the Hammer Museum. Youngblood has also participated in exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Harris Lieberman Gallery, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, the 2008 California Biennial, and the California African American Museum. In June of this year she will participate in the first Los Angeles Biennial, Made in L.A. 2012. Her work is included in the collections of Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art, Fundación/Colección Jumex, Hammer Museum, and Studio Museum in Harlem.
The Green Gallery East
1500 North Farwell Ave
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53202
Exhibition: June 16 – July 2012
Curated by Joshua Aster and Kristin Calabrese
At FOCA Gallery February 18 – April 21, 2012
The Fellows of Contemporary Art
Curator’s Lab Exhibition
presents Finds! The Unusual Object
Press Release
Looking around, we’ve noticed a lot of group exhibitions organized in various ways that are not the way this exhibition is organized. The
artists in this show all make work that is unusual, even when considered within all the possible objects artists make, which are usually unusual. These artists lift content from wildly divergent sources and fuse them into entirely different and new, whole art objects. Their individual concerns have informed the decisions that have forged their artwork in a way that is similar to a tree that has to grow around a fire hydrant.
Juan Martin del Campo Jr.’s glass objects are a reaction to his Catholic upbringing in suburban Los Angeles. He uses glass to transform light into interpretations of his thoughts and ideas. Iconic cultural elements, like images from vintage pornography, phrases from pop culture, and portraits of his personal superstars, are taken out of their context and transformed into moments of enlightenment.
Linda Stark’s emblematic paintings look embossed, almost scarred onto canvasses with paint (applied over time with tiny brushes), the
texture resembling some sort of mold making process.
Joyce Lightbody plumbs the depths of thrift stores to find old cookbooks and coffee table travel books. Like a hippy Martha Stewart, she uses the images to obsessively decorate folders, which she then uses in her day-to-day life. Every surface of everything is decorated, like living in an impressionist painting, where the dabs of paint are objects and words. A dried glue circle, a cube of marble, a shiny stick, and things that she’s covered with stamps are all raw materials, like a painters’ palette. She writes phrases on her objects in phonetic spelling, such as “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
One of the defining concerns of Holly Lane’s work is the framing of artwork, how it’s usually something that contains the work but is not
the work. This caused her to incorporate the frame into the artwork, which, over time, has become as important as her paintings within.
She intricately carves elaborate, tiny frames that contain classically painted, often metaphorical paintings that refer to the nature of the
human condition as well as the important issues of today, including global warming and feminism.
Chris Finley and Anna Simson are married. They are both artists. They’ve been working in the same studio recently and have started
to make work that responds to one another’s work, almost in a collaborative way. Chris uses all sorts of found objects and does things to them like wrap them with thread, organize them in boxes, carve them, and cover them with other found and decorated objects. His process is something of the artists’ way of thinking unleashed from any overarching idea other than obsessive art making. Anna’s part of their effort is a more traditional painting, except it’s made with fabric and based on a drawing that she and her stepson made. About their work for this exhibition, Anna writes, “If our artworks were a band, I think of Chris’s piece as the lead singer and mine as the wall of sound behind it.”
Jeni Spota blends traditional religious painting with a built up, almost sculptural surface. She paints dozens of characters through a
dense application of oil paint.
Mark Babcock makes drawings on the computer (in photoshop) and prints them onto bi-axially oriented polystyrene plastic that he
shrinks in the oven. The finished objects are gorgeous little lumpy paintings that fit in the palm of your hand. They are attached to the
wall with neodymium magnets.
Francesca Pastine combines journalism (ARTFORUM magazine), sculpture (cut ARTFORUM), and drawing (The act of cutting is like
drawing with an X-acto blade) to make startling objects that no longer function as anything other than art.
Marcia Binnendyk’s ceramic decorated concrete chair sculpture is sheer joy. We wanted it for the show because we thought it would
ground the exhibition. It’s meant to be sat on. Other objects in the show are interactive as well. Joyce’s folders may be looked through
and/or purchased for $25 each. With the help of the gallery attendant, Chris Finley’s sculpture can be taken apart.