Alyssa's and My Art Show

Now for some shameless (tactless) promotion of Alyssa’s and my latest exhibition café showing at the New Moon Café in Oshkosh (Wisconsin) running through the month of November. I contacted Alyssa a few months back to work on a collaborative project. The two of us have worked together quite a bit for the last three years with various artistic endeavors, primarily through art education courses and art workshop-happenings at the university, presenting at the NAEA conference in New York, going on crazy, on-a-whim weekend adventures, and even to Rome for a couple of art history courses together (see the pictures). So needless to say, we work well together, and by working well I mean making things happen (seemingly) without a hitch by throwing them together at the last minute. I think the only reason we are able to roll like this is because we have similar styles, ideas, and visions about the way art, and the world generally operates.

The title of the exhibition is Desktop Landscape and Transculture, which attempts to talk about the function of art as it exists, intervenes, and operates in our lives. (More about Transculture to come...) The rhizomatically collaged assembled works are representative of these artistic interfaces, indeed performances, be they in our art studios preparing serigraphs and lithographs for a print exhibition, taking photographs in the field on our vacations, thinking about design when writing down our thoughts in sketchbooks or otherwise random pieces of paper, designing and posting on our blogs, deciding to use alternative photography techniques despite the influence of digital formats, cyanotypes done on a whim on a arid summer day, drawings and doodles you work on during phone conversations and during boring lectures, batik wall hangings from workshops, to kinder-art examples art teachers make as examples for their elementary students. 

How do these experiences performances (and then made manifest into images) coalesce? What kind of correlations, between these varied artistic realms, can be made? How are these images arranged in our mind’s eye; how do we make sense of the visual cacophony? And subsequently, tow do they influence our way of thinking, our worldview?  These are just the beginning of the questions that influence and inform our work and process the that the show attempts to provide an amount of insight into. The café showing featuring photos, prints, drawings, paintings, batiks, thoughts, musings, and other paper works will be  on display at the New Moon Cage in Oshkosh through the month of November. I would encourage everyone to check it out and forward me your relevant thoughts about the show, or about art (and life).

I don’t want this post (indeed, this blog) to seem as crass self-promotion, so I think some reason must be provided to justify the post (or rather, myself). The show has been up for a couple of weeks now, and I hadn’t originally intended to blog about it; the show can speak for itself, just as this blog does. And for that matter, I think my Sketchblog does a fair job at communicating many of the same ideas, save for the way the images are presented to the viewer, but alas, we are working with different platforms, and each platform (the large space of a wall, where all of the images are seen at once and simultaneously versus sequentially dated web pages to note the date and order of the thought process), despite having their own attributes, and thereby merits, are still aptly able to speak (roughly) about the same ideas. The wall has the merit of seeing the whole, their unity, how the mind juggles all of these images; the blog, the merit of sharing the experience of the thought process, how ideas come to us, come back to us, linger, and eventually stick.

I have already been carried away from my reasoning for the post. I unrepentantly, (though very pleasantly) received a couple of emails from friends who went to the show’s reception, and took the time to offer some feedback. I, unfortunately, couldn’t be at the opening reception, during the November Art Walk, so I couldn’t speak with viewers in person. Posted below is the email (review?) from Vicki, a painter and friend living in Oshkosh. I have also linked to her blog, so you can check out her lastest artistic endeavors.

Tony~
I wanted to apologize for not saying hi Thursday night at the art reception for the Rosenblatts. I saw you as I was leaving, and like a very lame person I thought I shouldn’t bother you. As I said, LAME... I was thinking of you, as I saw your work up at the New Moon yesterday for Gallery Walk. LOVED it. Actually I love it. No past tense. Indeed one of the most interesting shows of the night, and definitely at the New Moon in a long while. I really love the concept behind this collaboration, and found it profound and quite refreshing.      

Have you found a teaching position yet? How is Platteville treating you? I just finished visiting your blog, and had to give you a high five for watching the L Word. One of my favorite shows, for various reasons. I can't wait for it to return in January, and I hear rumors that Dana will frequent the show in the future, which made me giddy. She was my favorite character!  

Namaste~ Vicki

P.S. See the picture version of this post.