AC/IC

Hi all. I finally posted the first podcast of Arts & Culture Iowa City on the internets. I'll copy the post here. Enjoy tape-recorded goodness of this month's art walk.

Sara Black (Material Exchange), Visiting Artist

Eric Asboe & John Engelbrecht, Understanding the Understood - Arts Iowa City

Michael Meyers , Musician and Sculptor - Washington & Dubuque

Sean Alexander, Back to the World - Public Space One

Caleb Engstrom, Dia de los Muertos - BS Gallery

Click here to download the program

For the Record

Goblin Valley is actually in Utah
http://photosandsuch.wordpress.com/2007/10/15/goblin-valley-state-park-the-goblins/

Eileen Myles reading

This Tuesday at 7pm at Prairie Lights, the poet Eileen Myles will read from her collection of art essays, The Importance of Being Iceland. Details here: http://www.prairielights.com/eileen-myles

"I Used to Call Myself Elvis"

I just received the email below about a talk next Thursday on Indian call centers. Thought some of you might be interested. Jesse, this could relate to some of your investigations regarding work environment. In this case, the employees are required to wear a mask...


International Programs and the South Asian Studies Program
Present a free public lecture:

“I Used to Call Myself 'Elvis’:
The Politics of Experience in Indian Call Centers”

Aimee Carrillo Rowe
Associate Professor of Rhetoric, POROI (Project on the Rhetoric
Of Inquiry), and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies

Indian call center agents become estranged from their immediate surroundings
as they stretch their imaginations and identities to meet American customers
in the virtual space of the telephone call. Drawing on interviews with fifty
call center workers, this presentation considers the implications of the
particular demands of their transnational labor for agents’ sense of
embodied being.

Thursday, Nov. 19, 4:00 PM
1117 University Capitol Center
Chai and snacks will be served.

For more information on this presentation or for special accommodations to
attend, please contact Heidi Vekemans, Events Coordinator, UI International
Programs, at (319) 335-3862 or heidi-vekemans@uiowa.edu

Reefer Madness opens Nov. 13

My thesis production, Reefer Madness; the Musical, opens this Friday Nov. 13.

All performances are at the theatre building in Mabie Theatre. Tickets are still available, but they are going pretty fast.

There are performances Nov. 13, 14, 18, 19, 20, 21 at 8 PM. There is also a performance at 2:00 PM on Nov. 15.

Admission is $5 for students. For more info, go to http://www.uiowa.edu/~theatre/season/tickets.htm. You can buy your tickets there or at the Hancher Box Office in the Old Capitol Mall.

Hope to see you there!

SOFA Chicago

The annual Sculpture Objects and Functional Art Expo (SOFA) took place in Chicago this past weekend, November 6-8. True to its name, only objects were included, with jewelry, woodturning, hand blown & cast glass, and ceramics dominating the show. I went to help my boyfriend, a sculptor, set up and take down a piece included in a woodturning exhibit.

Self-described as “The world’s foremost fairs of Contemporary Decorative Arts and Design” (www.sofaexpo.com), SOFA is primarily known as a crafts exhibition. The range of artists is diverse, however, and while some artists fit firmly within the craft tradition, others are clearly engaged in the language of sculpture, installation, and the fine art tradition. Conversations about art and craft abounded, which is a long-standing debate that I do not intend to solve in one blog post. I am interested in that intersection, however, and was expecting to see cutting edge designs of functional objects. But it was disappointing to see the number of overly decorative objects that did not really question that boundary, or function comfortably in either language. For example, ornate hand blown glass teapots that neither function as teapots nor fine art objects seem purposeless as anything other than coffee table decoration. The result is that the most successful works were usually the traditional objects that retain their function. This undercut the wonderful tension that could have happened between traditional functional work, traditional sculptural objects, and hybrids of the two. So if this is not the point, I had to wonder what the point really is.

Being a newbie to SOFA, and an outsider to functional art, the general atmosphere was of great interest to me. High-rolling galleries pay tens of thousands of dollars for a small booth space, with more well-established and wealthy galleries taking up several spaces to show off expensive hand blown glass and other objects. In fact, to even have an artwork anywhere in the expo, including the juried & invitational’s, the artist must be represented by a commercial gallery. And while there were some red dots indicating sold works, for the most part it seemed these galleries must be taking a loss, especially considering the far distances they travel and ship the works to get to Chicago. Indeed, it seems that the whole point is more about bragging rights for galleries than showing new works of functional art. Being at SOFA shows that a gallery has the resources to ship several dozen valuable and fragile objects and representatives halfway across the country. As it turns out, I think this is the over-arching message of SOFA – which galleries can best keep up the appearance of success, in order to hopefully perpetuate it.

Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich will be speaking this Wednesday (tomorrow) at:

101 Becker Communications Building, 7 p.m.

I was introduced to Ehrlich's writing via recommendation from Jeff Porter, who teaches in the English Department. Her book "The Solace of Open Spaces" is an essay about her experiences living in rural Wyoming. After the death of her partner, she left her career as a filmmaker in New York and decided to work on a sheep farm in Wyoming-- in her writings, she wanders from Western culture and rodeos to the relationships, landscape... You can read more about her here:

http://www.parkcentralwebs.com/GretelEhrlich/bio.asp