photo by Elena Dorfman

Friday, February 24
8 p.m.
Salvo Collective
216 S Shelby St, Louisville, KY

This month’s Food For Thought: After Dark features photographer Sarah Lyon. Food and cocktail samples will be provided by Garage Bar, wine samples by Taste Fine Wine and Spirits, desserts by Please and Thank You and special gift from Peace of the Earth. Reservations are required and admission is $15 for LVAA Members/$25 for non-members.

The Louisville Visual Arts Association’s Food for Thought After Dark program brings an insider’s view on visual art to the community. This monthly event takes place at various locations in the community during the evening hours. Each month, you have the opportunity to experience an intimate discussion with a select local artist while enjoying local food and beverages from restaurants and business specific to the neighborhood where the event takes place. louisvillevisualart.org/food

Limited ticket availability-Admission costs are $15 for LVAA Members and $25 for non-members; call Keith Waits at 502.896.2146 x 100 to get your ticket today

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES, NEW ARTWORK BY JOEL MCDONALD AND SARAH LYON, TO BE EXHIBITED AT ZEPHYR GALLERY

JANUARY 6 TO FEBURARY 11, 2012

OPENING RECEPTION FRIDAY JANUARY 6
5 TO 9PM

ZEPHYR GALLERY
610 EAST MARKET STREET
LOUISVILLE, KY

Hours 11am to 6pm, Wednesday to Saturday
502.585.5646
zephyrgallery.org

Artists Joel McDonald and Sarah Lyon explore the theme of Autobiographies with an amalgam of drawing, photography, and sculpture in a new exhibit at Zephyr Gallery from January 6 to February 11, 2012.

Magic plays a role in both artists’ work in this concurrent solo exhibition.  Sarah creates a 9-ft wall sculpture purging her of the need to make art, while Joel plays off the fictional Necronomicon to question who we really are in a triptych composed of large drawings, altars, Canopic jars, and a plant.  Upstairs in the gallery, Sarah’s stark color photographs depict recent places she’s been, in a domestic setting and in the landscape.  On the first floor, Joel’s brainstorms in ink and acrylic show what happens when you brood.

“My main theme is autobiography and identity through fiction.  The story we create that defines us, how we view reality, and how we interact with the world.”   — Joel McDonald

Joel McDonald, age 33, was born in Louisville.  His elaborate psychosexual drawings, sculpture and performance piece were included in two exhibits earlier this year at the Land of Tomorrow Gallery on East Broadway.  He was featured as one of ten artists to watch in Eye Openers, published by the Courier Journal in 2010.

Sarah Lyon, age 33, was born in Louisville.  She is known for her large format color landscapes that depict locales of Louisville, and for her Female Mechanics Calendars. Her work is included in the collections of 21c Museum and the Speed Art Museum.  Her photographs are currently on view at the Speed Art Museum, and were recently seen in a solo exhibition at Salvo Artist Collective.

Zephyr Gallery is located at 610 East Market Street, near the corner of Market and Hancock Streets in the NuLu East Market arts district. Zephyr is a member of LOOK (the Louisville area galleries, museums and art presenters group), the East Market Business Association, and the First Friday Trolley Hop.  Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.  For more information, please contact Brenda Wirth: 502.585.5646, info@zephyrgallery.org

Target Practice, archival pigment prints in 4x5 film holders

Wendover Vacation
Western Landscapes, Bomb Sites, and Target Practice Off the Grid
artwork by Sarah Lyon

Artist Reception Friday, October 14
6-10pm

Salvo Collective
216 South Shelby Street (at Market Street)
Louisville, Ky 40202
502-614-6381
www.salvo.com

In conjunction with the Louisville Photo Biennial

Gallery Hours:
Wednesday 11-3
Thursday 11-3
Friday 11-6
Saturday 12-4

Wendover Vacation Installation at Salvo Collective

Wendover Vacation

During the summer of 2011, I took a trip to visit the Wendover Residence Program in Wendover, Utah.  Matthew Coolidge, the founder and director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) in Los Angeles, was generous to share time showing me around the various buildings associated with the residency, and to introduce me to some of the current artists working there.  CLUI is a non-profit art/research organization that employs a multimedia and multidisciplinary approach to increase and diffuse knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized and perceived.  The Wendover Residency exists to support the development of new interpretations of the land.

I considered my trip to be a reconnaissance mission to brainstorm project ideas for applying to the residency.  It was also a much-needed post-Kentucky Derby vacation.  In total I spent three nights at the Red Garter casino hotel for $30 a night, and one night in an airstream trailer in the backyard of the main residency space.  My days involved wandering the town on foot and driving around the region in my rental car.  I brought my cameras, but just for fun, and to collect data for brainstorming.  I had not anticipated creating an exhibition from the images, as I was making them purely for myself out of innocent thrill of discovery of a new place.  When Salvo approached me to host an exhibition of my work for the Photo Biennial, I embraced the opportunity to form a body of work out of my Wendover experience.

Utah Series, 16x16 archival pigment prints

More about the Wendover Residence Program (from www.clui.org):

The Center operates a residence program to support the development of new interpretive methodologies and ideas. The program is open to artists, researchers, theorists, or anyone who works with land and land use issues in an innovative and engaging manner. Residents primarily work out of the CLUI facilities at Wendover, Utah, and explore and interpret the landscape of that unique and inspiring geographic region, which includes the Great Salt Lake and its desert and salt-flat environs.

Some have claimed that Wendover is centrally located in the middle of nowhere. If this is true, then nowhere is a complex and fascinating place indeed. The Center established The Wendover Residence Program in 1997, to bring selected people to Wendover to better understand this place, including the issues it raises and the activities it inspires, and what it might represent, on a local, national, global, and theoretical level. The Program exists to encourage new and compelling ways of thinking about the built landscape, and to develop interpretations of it, literal and otherwise, in any medium. It is open to anyone with interesting, constructive ideas, and an ability to see them through.

More about Wendover:

Wendover City is on the western border of Utah, and is contiguous with West Wendover, Nevada.  It is famous for the nearby Bonneville Salt Flats, the 26,000 acres of salt flats where land speed records are made.  During World War II, the Wendover Army Air Field was a training base for bomber pilots, including the crew of the Enola Gay. The Enola Gay was stationed there until June 1945, when it flew to drop the bomb on Japan.

To be viewed in its entirety at Zephyr Gallery in Louisville, Kentucky, January 2012.
(motorcycle not included)

Jessica at Tinks in the afternoon

July 15 – September 9, 2011
Reception:  7pm July 23, 2011

Land of Tomorrow
233 West Broadway, Louisville KY
info@lotlex.com

Land of Tomorrow is pleased to announce Summer Heat. This new exhibition will open on the 15th of July with a reception on the 23rd at 7pm. Summer Heat will include works by several artists who are exploring sexuality and gender in their works.

Sexuality and gender have been favorite subjects of artists since art’s inception – think of classical Greek sculptures of the ideal male form, the female lure in Botticelli’s works, coquettish Danae rendered by Rembrandt, Fragonard’s young lady who kicks off her shoe, gender bending performances of the 60s, Mapplethorpe’s photography… The issue of gender and sexuality remains a subject of profound interest for artists, and the visual outcome of this interest continues to intrigue audiences worldwide.

Summer Heat continues in the same vein. This exhibition explores various aspects of sexuality and gender in today’s Information Age. Issues of ambiguity, mutability, social acceptance and the dichotomy between the sexes will be examined through means of images, objects, performances, videos and public displays of affection. Summer Heat will serve as a sexual journey for the viewer allowing the gallery goer to explore their own sexuality through the works in the exhibition.

Artists will include:

Lauren Argo
Louis Zoellar Bickett II
Richard Campbell
E.V. Day
Joel McDonald
Britton von Fischer
Bryce Hudson
Russel Hulsey
Shelley Vaughn Hulsey
Stephen Irwin
John King
Sarah Lasley
Sarah Lyon
Daniel Pfalzgraf
Letitia Quesenberry
Chris Radtke
Arturo Alonzo Sandoval
Aaron Michael Skolnick

http://www.landoftomorrow.org/events-exhibitions/summer-heat/

Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery
333 South Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102
More info: 215 717 6480

Monday – Thursday: 10 – 5
Friday: 10 – 4
Saturday – Sunday: CLOSED

http://www.thedcca.org/young-country

En route to Wendover, near Salt Lake City

In May I visited Wendover, Utah to check out an artist residency operated by the Center For Land Use Interpretation (CLUI).  Matt Coolidge, the director of the program, was very helpful in showing me around.  I had a great time exploring, and stayed four days at the Red Garter Casino Hotel in West Wendover, Nevada for 30 bucks a night!

South of Wendover

30,000 Miles

Quonset Hut
599 Rubel Ave, Louisville, KY
502-489-2655
May 4 to July 4, 2011

University of the Arts, Philadelphia
Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery
July 8-28, 2011

Curated by Maiza Hixson
An exhibition devoted to rural themes in contemporary art, Young Country specifically examines how artists are re-defining ideas of “country” in America. Addressing how geographic regions shape identity, Young Country features artists who employ rural images and ideas such as horseracing, honkytonks, and homesteading. The exhibition probes our assumptions of taste, class and sophistication, and presents an alternative to common, Hollywood, and cliched portrayals of rural culture.

Stephen in his studio, 2006

Obituary Published in The Courier-Journal, December 29, 2010
Written by Gabriel Wrye

IRWIN, STEPHEN LAWRENCE, born in Vine Grove, KY on September 19, 1959, he lived! Steve-ann, Rustee, Crustee, Craven Morehead, Gingerspice, Pom-Pom, Tanta, artist, raconteur, fabricator, impresario, cool hunter, shopkeeper, botanist, collector, reader, agitator, counselor, mentor, collaborator, brother, son, friend, lover, trouble maker and solver, icon, he was all verb, CREATIVITY, big mouth, bright eyes and rough hands that never stopped making.

Everything he did was art, from Sparks, the revolution that masqueraded as the best bar in town, he owned, to his career as an innovative photo-stylist and commercial designer and his selfless advocacy of the arts and social causes, to his actual art, a ground breaking body of work represented by galleries in New York City, New Orleans, London, Cologne and Louisville, widely collected both regionally and internationally, part of the permanent collection of the Speed Art Museum and 21C and exhibited around the world.

Stephen was an unparalleled Louisville artist who revealed invisible grace in the obscene and mundane, in his city, in his friends and in his world. He gave generously of his experience, time and love, inspiring, encouraging and enabling other artists and the creative life of Louisville. He lived wild, abundant, kinky and original as his fabulous mane of coiled red hair. He was hot and star-like, drawing in bunches of solar systems with his unique gravity; over bright and uncompromising, even burning, illuminating, he transformed any stone lucky enough to find his orbit into a celestial body.

On December 27th at the age of 51, he died. He is missed.

He is survived by a family of friends.

An informal gathering of friends will take place from 4-6 p.m. on January 1, 2011 at Zephyr Gallery, where he was a long time member and an exhibition of work is currently on display. A memorial service will be 4 p.m. at the Auditorium of the Speed Museum on Saturday, January 15, 2011.

Expressions of sympathy may be made in honor of Stephen Irwin to New Art Collectors of the Speed Art Museum, 2035 S 3rd Street, Louisville, KY 40208-1803.

In this photo: Stephen Irwin, Chris Radtke, Lauren Argo, Alice Stites, Cynthia Norton, Stephen Reily, Valerie Sullivan Fuchs, Carlos Gamez de Francisco, Daniel Pfalzgraf, Brad White, Bryce Hudson, Russel Hulsey, Tiffany Carbonneau, Shannon Westerman, Jake Heustis, Leticia Bajuyo, Aron Conaway, Jesse Levesque Bishop, Todd Smith, Anne Peabody, Travis Shaffer, Mary Carothers, Che Rhodes, Sarah Lyon (behind the camera), Letitia Quesenberry, Monica Mahoney, Joyce Ogden

Sarah Lyon, along with 23 other Kentucky artists, was nominated to participate in the nationally renowned Professional Development Program of the Creative Capital Foundation of New York. artwithoutwalls sponsored this weekend-long workshop for visual artists Friday November 19 through Sunday, November 21, 2010. Workshops, presentations, and related activities took place at 21c MuseumHotel (700 West Main Street, Louisville).

Founded in 1999, Creative Capital is a groundbreaking organization that gives substantial grants and guidance to artists pursuing adventurous projects in a range of media and practices. The professional development program, which has been presented in cities all over the United States, is designed to help artists learn how to manage their artistic careers, fund and market their work, communicate effectively, and develop sustainable practices. This is the first time a Creative Capital Professional Development Program has been presented in Kentucky.

Creative Capital is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to providing integrated financial and advisory support to artists pursuing adventurous projects in five disciplines: Emerging Fields, Film/Video, Innovative Literature, and Performing and Visual Arts. Working in long-term partnership with artists, Creative Capital’s pioneering approach to support combines funding, counsel and career development services to enable a project’s success and foster sustainable practices for its grantees. In its first decade, Creative Capital has committed more than $20 million in financial and advisory support to 325 projects representing 406 artists, and has reached an additional 3,500 artists through its Professional Development Program. For more information, visit www.creative-capital.org.