These incredible 3D sculptures were created by artist Daniel Crossland. Daniel was born in 1978 in the steel city of Sheffield, England and studied at the Scotland Street Art School where impressionistic, realistic and abstract painting and drawing were taught. He further studied in graphic design and multimedia including 3D and after graduating he worked in the graphics industry producing a variety of work including posters, illustrations, magazines and 3D art. He has worked in the computer games industry for five years on nine successfully published titles before going freelance and now produces cg sculptures, model work, textures and visual effects for tv and film.

To learn more about Daniel Crossland, please visit his site at http://www.pteropus.co.uk

The Carrie Secrist Gallery is pleased to announce our next exhibition, Tehom, a solo show by Italian artist Angelo Musco. Two years in production, the show includes Musco’s photo installation Hadal, which was shown in the 53rd Venice Biennale last summer.The title piece, Tehom, an underwater world populated with tens of thousands of nude bodies, will cover the main wall of the gallery stretching 12 x 48 feet wide. The dialogue between classic art forms and contemporary expressions is one of the main themes of Musco’s photographic work. Using mosaic type panels and photo pieces allows the artist to make the entire gallery a unique underwater world experience.

WHO: Angelo Musco
WHAT: Tehom
WHEN: May 1 – July 10, 2010
WHERE: Carrie Secrist Gallery, 835 W. Washington Blvd. Chicago IL 60607, USA

Original article found here

The following report (and these photos!) just in from my friend Lisa O'Sullivan, who is based in Australia and who kindly offered to spy on the auctioning off of the Owsten collection, an amazing collection of naturalia, decorative arts and curiosities amassed by millionaire Warren Anderson and his now estranged wife. The auction took place last Friday and Saturday in Sydney, Australia and here is what Lisa had to say about the spectacle:

In the end, there were no last-minute invasions from the previous owner of the collection, who had threatened to disrupt the sale. He argued that the auction house Bonhams had seriously undervalued his collection. Looking at some of the final auction prices, he may have had a point. Many pieces went significantly over reserve, especially the taxidermy which had been, often ridiculously*, under valued (*she says, with zero authority, but all the bitterness of a taxidermy enthusiast of limited means - the birds I liked having a reserve of A$400 - $600 but selling at A$6,600 (US$5,768), over 10 times that).

For the pre-auction viewing, the collection was displayed in the overseas ferry terminal at Circular Quay, opposite the Sydney Opera house. This was a good thing, because every so often, my retinas needed a rest, and I could step out for some air and gaze at the harbour for a while (calm, washed out blues, very soothing to the eyes). When we say ferry terminal, this is a cavernous space, designed to deal with the massive cruise ships that descend on Sydney. Despite the scale, it felt absolutely jam-packed with over 1,300 objects, many of them made up into room dioramas, like a version of IKEA, designed for, as my friend Felix said, someone looking to furnish an entire Carpathian Castle all at once.

The room was edged with Japanese suits of armour, standing to attention between cabinets and chests of drawers, all with their obligatory taxidermy on top. Looking around, every available surface seemed to be covered with cases. The taxidermy was very varied, some amazing pieces, next to some very dodgy dioramas, and examples in a bad state of repair. Among the saddest were the little birds with stuffing coming out of their eye sockets where fake eyeballs had fallen out.

Add to this, job lots of boomerangs (I heard one staff member complaining to another that his life had shrunk to a point where it was purely dedicated to counting boomerangs in and out of boxes), art nouveau sculptures jostling with ethnographic masks, castle-scaled wooden furniture and a seemingly endless array of trophy heads.

Rumour had it the interest in the rhinoceros horns and heads was fuelled by their medicinal potential (rhino horn is a traditional Chinese remedy against fever). As trade in these horns is now banned, antique examples are the only legal means of procuring them. In any case, a single horn sold for A$90,000 (US$78,655).

For me the most bizarre heads were the wombat trophies. I always understood the ‘heads on a wall’ to gesture towards the prowess of the hunter (all aspects of unfair advantage aside). Despite my best efforts, it’s hard to picture a ‘man v beast’ hunting scenario that involves wombats (also known as the animals most likely to cause a danger to humans as trip hazards in the dark) and a fight to the death any hunter could be proud of...

And the monkey and cat barbershop? A$24,000 (US$20,975) - A$9,000 over reserve. Time to set up a Morbid Anatomy acquisition fund so we can be ready next time?

Addendum: At the end of the day, the entire Owsten Collection sold for A$12 million - double the auction houses estimate, but still under the A$20 million the owner claimed.

Thanks so much, Lisa, for this awesome report and images! So wish I could have been there myself! It looks (and sounds) even more epic than I had expected! To find out more about the collection and to see more images, you can visit this recent pre-auction post.

All images are from Lisa's visit to the auction pre-sale. You can see the entire set of images (well worth your while!) by clicking here.

A Caravaggio painting considered to be the most valuable work of art in Ukraine was recovered in Germany, two years after it was stolen from a museum in Odessa, Reuters reported. The painting, below, called “The Taking of Christ” or “The Kiss of Judas,” was made by Caravaggio in the early 17th century, and depicts Jesus and his apostles John and Judas as they are being separated by soldiers. It had belonged to a Russian ambassador to France and a Russian prince before it was turned over to the Odessa museum, where it was stolen in 2008. On Tuesday Anatoly Mogylyov, the interior minister of Ukraine, said in a briefing that the Ukrainian and German police had recovered the painting and detained members of a gang that focuses on high-value thefts who had tried to sell the work in Berlin.

Original article found here

Eran Webber is a figurative artist born in Israel in 1980, and currently living in Florence, Italy. At the moment, he is studying and teaching at the Florence Academy of Art Sculpting program.

To learn more about Eran Webber, please visit his upcoming site at http://www.eranwebber.com, or through his facebook page.

This Tuesday! Morbid Anatomy presents at Observatory! Hope to see you there!

Torino:Margolis Performance
A performative exploration of electricity, biomedicine, and spectacle
Date: June 29, 2010
Time: 8:00 P.M.
Admission: $5
Please note: This lecture is paired with an event which took place on Tuesday, June 15; More here.

Tonight, join Observatory as it hosts Torino:Margolis in a three-part performance investigating the rich history of biomedicine, electricity, and spectacle. First, the audience will have the opportunity to control the movement of the performer using neuromuscular stimulation, which sends outside electricity into the performer’s muscle, forcing their muscle to contract and the performer to move involuntarily.

In the second part of the performance, they will use electromyography (EMG) in a sound-based performance. EMG is a way of sensing the electricity produced naturally during muscle contraction when an individual moves voluntarily. However, when the performer is physically manipulated by another person there is no action potential generated, no signal sensed by the EMG, and no change in the sound is produced. In this way you can hear someone’s free will.

In the third portion they will add a vocal component to the EMG “rig” by manipulating sound coming from the vocal cords using neuromuscular stimulation.

Torino:Margolis will then explain the workings of the biomedical tools used in the performance and the audience will have the opportunity to ask questions.

Torino:Margolis is a performance art team that smashes through physical and psychological barriers separating one body from another using invasive electronics and biomedical tools. They explore the idea that the self is transient, elusive and modular by playing with the notion of control and free will. Their extraction of physiological processes concretizes these concepts and presents them as questions to the viewer — not to illustrate the mechanism, but to explore the experience. The team has performed nationally and internationally at New York venues such as Issue Project Room, POSTMASTERS Gallery and Exit Art, the HIVE Gallery in California, and the Bergen Kunsthall Museum in Norway. They have lectured for institutions such as SUNY Stony Brook and the School of Visual Arts. For more information please see http://www.torinomargolis.com.

You can find out more about this here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

The empty glassine packets can be found in Manhattan, Brooklyn and beyond, scattered on streets and sidewalks with only obscure slogans or graphic images to suggest their former use. At one time they contained heroin and the markings stamped on the packets were meant to differentiate strains of varying purity or provenance.

To some they are crime evidence. Addicts may see them mainly as a vehicle to fulfill a dangerous urge. For a group of artists who have been collecting them they are cultural artifacts that are equally unsettling and compelling.

On Wednesday a weeklong show called “Heroin Stamp Project” organized by seven members of the Social Art Collective is scheduled to open at the White Box Gallery on Broome Street on the Lower East Side. The show, which will include 150 packets picked off city streets, as well as 12 blown-up prints made from them, is meant to examine the intersection of advertising and addiction and provoke questions about how society addresses dependence and disease.

Original Article found here

c

Karol Bak is a polish artist currently working out of  Poznan, Poland. He studied at  the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan and graduated in 1989. His figurative works are inspired by myth and mythology. You can view more of Karol’s work by visiting the links below.

To view more  please visit the following links:

http://www.karolbak.art.pl

http://www.emptykingdom.com

http://www.artistsandart.org

http://www.brainparking.com

Woman Advertising J.M. Dolph, Furniture Maker and Undertaker
W. Peppets Art Gallery, Homer, Michigan
Cabinet card, circa 1877

A peculiar advertising photographic pictorial was devised during the 1870s. Women were posed holding signs heralding businesses, their dresses and bodies decorated with life-size objects related to the business. This woman’s hat is adorned with rings from coffin robes. On her chest, she sports a coffin plate, and above and beneath that plate are handles from a coffin. Around her neck is another coffin plate, and coffin chains and paraphernalia hang from her dress. Furniture makers became coffin makers as a natural extension of woodworking skills. The large frame [on the skirt of her dress] indicates this establishment also made frames.

From the wonderful Sleeping Beauty II - Grief, Bereavement and the Family in Memorial Photography by Stanley B. Burns, M.D.

As posted on Liquid Night and picked up by Turn of the Century.

Friend of Morbid Anatomy, frequent Boing Boing contributer, innovative cultural theorist and all around bon vivant Mark Dery will be giving an illustrated lecture this Friday night, June 18th, at Observatory. Come witness the linguistic pyrotechnics as Dery traces the connections betweeb wax anatomical models, pornographic x-ray fantasies of the 1950s, and x-ray fears of the post-terrorist society in his inimitable fashion. People: I have seen this man speak and it is, I promise, not to be missed!

Full info follows; hope very much to see you there!

The Anatomical Unconscious: X-Ray Specs, Visible Women, and the Eros of the Unseen
An illustrated lecture with cult author and cultural critic Mark Dery
Date: Friday, June 18th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $7
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

What do 18th-century wax “anatomical Venuses” doing a striptease in which they expose their internal organs; cutaway views of the imaginary anatomy of Loony Tunes characters; the X-Ray Specs and Visible Woman toys familiar to boomers; and artist Wim Delvoye’s X-rated X-rays of people performing sex acts have in common?

Mark Dery makes these and other provocative connections in his lecture “The Anatomical Unconscious: X-Ray Specs, Visible Women, and the Eros of the Unseen,” a cultural critique of the eroticizing of the scientific gaze. In his hour-long lecture/slideshow, Dery will touch on the pornographic fantasies that swirled around the X-ray from its inception; adolescent dreams, fueled by comic-book ads for X-Ray Specs, of the potential uses for Superman’s X-ray vision; current fears of the potential for abusive use of airport scanners that penetrate clothing; and the artist Wim Delvoye’s series of pornographic X-rays. He’ll theorize the eros of the X-ray, with digressions into the weird cartoon subgenre of imaginary anatomies (of everything from Star Wars At-Ats to Loony Tunes characters) and premonitions of X-rated X-rays inherent in the baroque medical mannequins on display at the Museum La Specola in Florence, Italy.

Mark Dery (http://www.markdery.com) is a cultural critic. He is best known for his writings on the politics of popular culture in books such as The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. Dery is widely associated with the concept of “culture jamming,” the guerrilla media criticism movement he popularized through his 1993 essay “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs,” and “Afrofuturism,” a term he coined and theorized in his 1994 essay “Black to the Future” (included in the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, which he edited). He has been a professor in the Department of Journalism at New York University, a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine, a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome, and, most proudly, a guest blogger at Boing Boing. He writes the Doom Patrol column of cultural commentary at True/Slant (http://trueslant.com/markdery)

You can find out more about these presentation here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Image: Tweety Bird skull: Copyright Hyungkoo Lee, all rights reserved.

This beautiful Richard Mcdonald inspired 3D study was created by artist Mariano Steiner. Mariano is a 3D generalist specializing in architecture, products, scenery and characters. He graduated in Animation Design from Anhembi Morumbi University and is employed at Techno Image. Mariano currently resides in Sao Paolo, Brazil.

To learn more about Mariano Steiner, please visit his site at marianosteiner.blogspot.com

These figurative paintings were created by artist John M Collier. John Collier is an oil painter specializing in portraits and subtly narrative figurative pieces. Working from models and photographs, his figures are realistic in dimension, but have a flesh created from thick oil paint that appears to have been forced onto the canvas.

You can learn more about John M Collier and view additional work through his official site at blog.johnmcollier.com

For those of you in or near London, friend, artist, and favorite Observatory presenter Zoe Beloff has a few upcoming engagements in your fair city. I have seen both of these presentations here in New York City and could not recommend them more enthusiastically!

Full details follow; hope you can make it out to see her! You won't be sorry.

The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society Dream Films 1926-1972: an illustrated lecture and screening
Date: June 10, 2010 Time: 7pm
Place: Viktor Wynd Fine Art, 11 Mare Street , London E8 4RP

The members of the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society were filled with the desire to participate in one of the great intellectual movements of the 20th century: psycho-analysis. Additionally, like the Amateur Cine League (founded the same year), many members wished to tap into the power for self expression afforded by technologies like home movie cameras that were newly accessible to ordinary people. This screening presents a range of their amateur films, which reveal an incredibly brave, unapologetic exploration of their inner lives.

Find out more and book tickets here:
http://www.thelasttuesdaysociety.org/coneyisland.html

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Discipline & the Moving Image - lecture/screening
Date: Friday, June 11, 2010
Time:6:30pm - 9:00pm
Admission Free
Location: Birkbeck Cinema (http://www.birkbeckcinema.com)
43 Gordon Square, London
Obedience, Stanley Milgram, 16mm, 1962, 45 mins
Folie à Deux, National Film Board of Canada, 16mm, 1952, 15 mins
Motion Studies Application, 16mm, ca. 1950, 15 mins

Obedience documents the infamous “Milgram experiment” conducted at Yale University in 1962, created to evaluate an everyday person’s deference to authority within institutional structures. Psychologist Stanley Milgram designed a scenario in which individuals were made to think they were administering electric shocks to an unseen subject, with a researcher asking them to increase the voltage levels despite the loud cries of pain that seemed to come from the other room. Milgram saw his test, conducted mere months after Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, as a way to understand the environments that made genocide possible.

Tonight, artist Zoe Beloff pairs Obedience with two earlier works dealing with psychosocial control: Folie à Deux and Motion Studies Application. The former, one of a series of films on various psychological maladies produced by the National Film Board of Canada in the 1950s, presents an interview with a young woman and her immigrant mother afflicted by shared delusions that manifest when the two are together. The latter is an industrial film purporting to present ways to increase efficiency in the workplace: explaining, for instance, a means to fold cardboard boxes more quickly. In stark contrast to the nostalgic whimsy typically associated with old educational films, Folie à Deux and Motion Studies Application play as infernal dreams of systemic power and sources of surprising, unintended pathos.

The concept of ‘motion studies’ is central to cinema itself. Without the desire to analyze human motion, there would be no cinematic apparatus. But the history of motion studies is freighted with ideology. Its inventor Étienne-Jules Marey was paid by the French Government to figure out the most efficient method for soldiers to march, while his protégé Albert Londe analyzed the gait of hysterical patients. From the beginning, the productive body promoted by Taylorism was always shadowed by its double, the body riven by psychic breakdown. We see this in Motion Studies Application and especially Folie à Deux, where unproductive patients, confined to the asylum, understand with paranoid lucidity that the institution is everywhere, monitoring them always. Obedience stands as a conscious critique of these earlier industrial films, co-opting their form only to subvert them and reveal their fascist underpinnings.

You can find out more about Zoe and her work by clicking here. You can find out more about event number one by clicking here and event number two by clicking here.

Tonight! Hope to see you there.

Saul Chernick
Borrowed from the Charnel House
June 10–July 30, 2010
Opening reception: Thursday, June 10, 6:00–8:00pm

Max Protetch Gallery is pleased to announce Borrowed From the Charnel House, an exhibition of new work by Saul Chernick. The exhibition runs from June 10 through July 30, 2010. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, June 10 from 6:00 to 8:00pm.

Saul Chernick makes highly detailed ink drawings that combine masterful control of the individual mark with an incisive grasp of the history of image-making and various visual media. The exhibition brings together works that display Chernick's penchant for borrowing from the relics of art history to transform them into the constituent elements of his own visual language.

On view are some of Chernick's largest drawings to date, including a piece in extreme horizontal format, almost thirty-five feet long and comprised of roughly thirty drawings done en plein air at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. A meditation on mortality created from a position in the living world, it also proves to be a forum in which Chernick displays his mastery of the use of line and shifts in perspective. The cemetery is seen not only as a landscape but as a museum of funerary sculpture.

In fact, the exhibition's title, Borrowed from the Charnel House, refers to the vaults where skeletons are stored, often after they have been dug up from crowded burial grounds; one of the most famous of these, and noted because it is still in use, can be found at St. Catherine's Monastery in Sinai, where the monks gather relics from the difficult, rocky soil for both practical and spiritual reasons.

Reflections on contemporary sexuality and technology are embedded into Chernick's intensely detailed riffs on anatomical drawings, heralds, and etchings. The most evident reference is perhaps to the prints, manuscripts, and illuminations of the Northern Renaissance. But like the monks of St. Catherine's relying upon their brothers' relics as reminders of their own mortality, Chernick tweaks specific images and compositional methods from the past to shed light upon current cultural conditions. In this sense, he works like a musician improvising on an existing theme or a writer adapting an older idea for a new context.

Another of the large-scale drawings on view, 'Ars Gratia Artis,' depicts a lion's head floating in a vast alpine landscape. Uncannily reminiscent of the roaring lion that serves as the logo for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, the piece seems to hint at both the history and future of cinema, drawing a connection to the logo's roots in centuries-old coats of arms. Almost eight feet wide, the piece seems to exist at a hybrid scale, between the intimacy of the drawing and the expansive presence of the movie screen. The emotional power of the drawing, however, lies not only in the scope of its cultural references, but in the mysterious way that the lion himself is rendered.

This sensitivity to individual moments, and the subtleties of human and animal forms, lends Chernick's work an immediacy that places it squarely in the present, and that engages the viewer outside of any specific art historical context. It is a question of both craft and poetry. On the surface it is clear that the artist's technique is indebted to the achievements of the Old Masters, but the critical and psychological revelations on view in his drawings are wholly his own, and shed light on the future of our physical condition––in the short term with respect to technology, and in the long with respect to death.

Saul Chernick was recently the subject of a solo exhibition at Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions across the United States, and reproduced in a variety of print and online publications.

For more information, click here. Click to see larger images.

Lui Ferreyra earned his BFA at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he studied under notable artists Stan Brakhage and Chuck Forsman. Before graduating, his work was selected to be shown internationally at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City, and at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, Chile.

For the past ten years he has been exhibiting his work in some of Denver’s most prominent art spaces. During this time he has arrived at a signature style he calls ‘fragmentism’. The works of Chuck Close, Egon Schiele, Van Gogh, and Richard Diebenkorn have played a significant role in the development of his aesthetic. Digital means of imaging such as satellite photography, medical CAT scans, and vector graphics have had a pronounced impact as well. The central source of inspiration for his work, however, lies in the organic patterns of nature itself– poignantly observed in the Chinese ideogram Li as “the markings in jade, the fiber in muscle, the grain in wood…”

In recent years, Ferreyra’s work has been included in some of the region’s most prestigious invitationals and competitions such as, “Colorado Masters”, and “The Best of Colorado”. Recent commissions include a portrait for the Institute for Children’s Mental Disorders, two portraits for the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, and two landscapes for The Foothills Art Center. He has garnered both regional and national attention with publications such as, New American Paintings, Art Papers, The Rocky Mountain News, and The Westword.

Lui Ferreyra’s work can be seen in person at Van Straaten Gallery (formerly Sandy Carson Gallery) where he is currently represented (760 Santa Fe Dr, Denver, CO).

You can learn about Lui Ferreyra and view additional work at http://www.luiferreyra.com

Just a brief reminder that I will be waxing [sic] poetic on the wonders of medical museum this Sunday at the Coney Island Museum as part of their "Ask the Experts" series.

Full details follow; hope to see you there!

Anatomical Venuses, The Slashed Beauty, and Fetuses Dancing a Jig: A Journey into the Curious World of the Medical Museum
Date: THIS SUNDAY, June 13th
Time: 4:30 PM
Admission: $5
Location: Coney Island Museum (208 Surf Ave. Brooklyn)

This afternoon's highly-illustrated lecture will introduce you to the the Medical Museum and its curious denizens, from the Anatomical Venus to the Slashed Beauty, the allegorical fetal skeleton tableau to the taxidermied bearded lady, the flayed horseman of the apocalypse to the three fetuses dancing a jig. The lecture will contextualize these artifacts by situating them within their historical context via a discussion of the history of medical modeling, a survey of the great artists of the genre, and an examination of the other death-related diversions which made up the cultural landscape at the time that these objects were originally created, collected, and exhibited.

You can find out more by clicking here and can get directions by clicking here.

Image: From the Anatomical Theatre exhibition: "Museum of Anatomical Waxes “Luigi Cattezneo” (Museo Delle Cere Anatomiche “Luigi Cattaneo”): Bologna, Italy "Iniope–conjoined twins" Wax anatomical model; Cesare Bettini, Early 19th Century

Morbid Anatomy is very pleased to present an electricity-and-the-body-on-display themed lecture and performance pairing by Torino:Margolis. Event number one, a lecture entitled "Electricity and the Body in Public Performance," will investigate over 250 years of electricity and the body in spectacular scientific performance via an illustrated historical lecture. Event number two will explore the same rich territory via a historically informed interactive performance. Hope you can make it to one or both of these amazing sounding events!

Electricity and the Body in Public Performance
An illustrated lecture by Torino:Margolis
Date: June 15, 2010
Time: 8:00 P.M.
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

Beginning with the first known public performance by Stephen Gray in 1729 and continuing through the present, scientists and artists have been exploring electricity and the human body for hundreds of years. The innate electrical potential of the human body, electricity as a medium of destruction and using outside electricity to manipulate the body have been served as conceptual fodder throughout this rich history. Although the collaboration between the arts and sciences may seem recent, due to its popularization in the media and 20th century art movements such as Bioart, the connection between these two groups have existed for centuries. Benjamin Margolis, MD and Jenny Torino, MS, RD current tinkerers in both worlds, will take you through the history of public performances in this arena and discuss how it relates to their own work using invasive electronics and the body.

________________________________________

Torino:Margolis Performance
A performative exploration of electricity, biomedicine, and spectacle
Date: June 29, 2010
Time: 8:00 P.M.
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

Tonight, join Observatory as it hosts Torino:Margolis in a three-part performance investigating the rich history of biomedicine, electricity, and spectacle. First, the audience will have the opportunity to control the movement of the performer using neuromuscular stimulation, which sends outside electricity into the performer’s muscle, forcing their muscle to contract and the performer to move involuntarily.

In the second part of the performance, they will use electromyography (EMG) in a sound-based performance. EMG is a way of sensing the electricity produced naturally during muscle contraction when an individual moves voluntarily. However, when the performer is physically manipulated by another person there is no action potential generated, no signal sensed by the EMG, and no change in the sound is produced. In this way you can hear someone’s free will.

In the third portion they will add a vocal component to the EMG “rig” by manipulating sound coming from the vocal cords using neuromuscular stimulation.

Torino:Margolis will then explain the workings of the biomedical tools used in the performance and the audience will have the opportunity to ask questions.

Torino:Margolis is a performance art team that smashes through physical and psychological barriers separating one body from another using invasive electronics and biomedical tools. They explore the idea that the self is transient, elusive and modular by playing with the notion of control and free will. Their extraction of physiological processes concretizes these concepts and presents them as questions to the viewer — not to illustrate the mechanism, but to explore the experience. The team has performed nationally and internationally at New York venues such as Issue Project Room, POSTMASTERS Gallery and Exit Art, the HIVE Gallery in California, and the Bergen Kunsthall Museum in Norway. They have lectured for institutions such as SUNY Stony Brook and the School of Visual Arts. For more information please see http://www.torinomargolis.com.

You can find out more about these presentation here and here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Born in Columbus, Ohio, Ron was a student whose artistic talents were immediately recognized. He has been interested in art since he was 4 years old and growing up in Columbus, Ohio. His mother pursued art as a hobby and took correspondence courses. The young Hicks would scan the critiques of his mother’s works and then trace some of the assignments himself.

As his talents became known in his neighborhood, he was called on to draw things for community events. Throughout high school Ron won several awards and contests, including Best of Show at the Ohio State Governor’s Art Show. During this period Ron was invited to attend Saturday art classes at the Columbus College of Art and Design and later received one of the highest scholarships awarded to attend the same school.

Hicks eventually moved west, where he graduated from the Colorado Institute of Art and studied with Quang Ho at the Art Students League. As a class monitor for Ho, he spent extra time talking and listening to him. Today he credits his teacher with exposing him to a new way of seeing. “A light bulb was turned on. I started seeing things in terms of shapes and edges, texture, line and color,” he says. “I no longer saw painting as a way of just transferring information; I started looking at what I wanted to say in a piece.”

After winning Best of Show at the 1994 Art Students League Exhibition, Hicks began painting full time. Since then, his career has escalated and he has become one of America’s finest emerging artists. Hicks worked for a time as a freelance illustrator. He also worked as a manager for a satellite dish company while he painted at night. “Maybe it’s three years of night painting that gave me my subtle palette,” he says half-jokingly.

Hick’s works have been characterized as a blend of representational art and impressionism. Some critics have compared them to paintings by Rembrandt and Daumier. The artist translates his own moody visions with a muted palette and rarely uses pure color. He finds tremendous variety and range in gray, which suits the atmospheric qualities of his compositions. Ron’s paintings move beyond simple documentation, capturing mood, gesture and layers of emotion.

You can learn more about Ron Hicks through the following links:

Ron Hicks official website

Ron Hicks at Arcadia Fine Arts

Ron Hicks at The Vail International Gallery