Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Skillat Hans: a play performed by MFA students from California College of the Arts

Currently on display in the windows of Adobe Books are props, costumes, and remnants from Skillät Hans, a play originally performed at PLAySPACE Gallery on March 25, 2010, by a class of MFA students from California College of the Arts.

Synopsis:
Skillät Hans is the story of a man with problems. He seeks pharmapoiticals to help him with his troubles, and winds up sleeping in the underground world of sweatshop production and human skinning. Skillät abandons life as a successful painter to make more socially conscious art. He befriends immigrant laborers and collaborates with them on a new body of work. Embroiled in kidney stones, brutality, stardom, pharmapoiticals and lavender, this smash-hit-sold-out-on-opening-night exhibition is set in current day New York City.


Some notes on process:
The product of a three-week intensive collaboration, Skillät Hans is a play in which the characters are themselves enacted by characters. An exercise in personality switching and empathy, and a conversation on modes of artistic production, the play is evidence of the rare but serendipitous “organically democratic” success. Each player contributed ideas, adding upon collective agreements, all accepted though imperfect but collectively permitted consensus. Working in such a manner—rushed, without stringent conceptual editing—this process yielded an oneiric portrait that repeatedly folds over upon itself. The discussion of dream states, the fulfilled “dream” of the artist’s success, and the nightmare of confrontation with the ethics of production are astutely explored alongside the cathartic draining of unconscious thoughts—eloquent, grotesque, taboo—to produce not only a narrative, but also a miasmic state.

Participants:
Georgia Carbone as Natasha Wheat as Dr. Natasha Wheat, the French Pharmapoitical Commercial star, Nancy, and the News Girl; Natasha Wheat as Kai Althoff as Skillät Hans; Kai Althoff as Rebecca Ora as Nadia, The Receptionist, and the Snake; Sasha Krieger as Matthew Waldbillig as the Pharmacist and the Father; Alex Wang as Sasha Krieger as Suo Chow and the Thing; Brigid Mason as Georgia Carbone with Kidney stones, as a drug addict and Becky; Matthew Waldbillig as Isaac Gray and the Boss, and Drunk Man with kidney stones; Rebecca Ora as The Table and Matthew Waldbillig with kidney stones

Music composed and performed by Jim Fairchild

Written by Kai Althoff, Georgia Carbone, Isaac Gray, Sasha Kreiger, Brigid Mason, Rebecca Ora, Matthew Waldbillig, Alex Wang, and Natasha Wheat. Organized with the assistance of Chrissie Bradley, Ted Purves, Arden Sherman, Maria Elena Ortiz, and Katie Hood Morgan

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Glass gilding demo

Damon Styer presents a concise-yet-thorough demonstration of applying gold leaf to glass in the form of letters and numbers, for young and old alike, easy to understand in all but the mysterious chemical properties underlying its physical beauty!

Tuesday, 23 March, 2010
7pm - 9pm
$Free (donations accepted)

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Custom-made political posters

As part of the It's a Sign show, sign painters Jeff Canham and Caitlyn Galloway will be painting free custom-made protest and political posters at the Adobe Books Backroom Gallery.

TONIGHT
, Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
7:00 - 9:00pm
$Free (donations accepted)

Come by and get a poster...

Sunday, March 7, 2010

It's a Sign



It's a Sign: New Bohemia Signs group exhibition

Caitlyn Galloway
Damon Styer
Jeff Canham
Josh Luke
Ken Davis

**Reception: Friday, March 12, 2010 7:00-9pm

Signs, like any kind of advertising, and most of design for that matter, employ aesthetic concerns to achieve directive ends, if not only to tell you where to go, then perhaps to elicit an emotional response, often one conducive to the more rapid flexing of your purchasing muscles. The "signs, signs, everywhere signs" that ever increasingly break up the scenery, whether or not they're even so bold as to call attention to their own physical beauty, typically do so on behalf of some corporate entity, big or small, wishing you to ascribe whatever design sense is evident in the sign, to the quality of their goods or services on offer. The "language" of signage, meanwhile, encompasses a constantly evolving and multiplying variety of materials and methods to communicate ornately complex nuances of meaning to a bewilderingly polyglot populace.

We sign writers, here at New Bohemia Signs, tend to focus more intently on some of the most rudimentary parts of sign language, or any language – the little squiggles, curves and strokes that form our alphabet. Our tool chest holds brushes, enamel, some gold leaf, and not much else. Individually and collectively, we harbor a cultured and intimate familiarity with, and to some extent, an abiding love for letter forms, which themselves take shape from the habits our limbs have fallen into, drawing and painting them again and again and again and again and again.

It's a Sign illustrates something of the path whereby our signs move from idea to sketch, to pattern, to painting; a show that makes apparent the relationship of letter forms to the arc our individual arms take, or to the way we each roll a quill between our fingertips; a show that celebrates, from amidst this digital era of limitless copiability, the joy of fine tuning the only copier that draws its current directly from our hearts. – Damon Styer, New Bohemia Signs

Exhibition dates: March 4- April 3, 2010

Curated by Devon Bella


Saturday, March 6, 2010

Factorycompany: This


Adobe Books hosts Factorycompany
Thursday, March 11, 2010
7:00-9pm