Daughters of Mercury Kickstarter

 

Daughters of Mercury

I'm running a Kickstarter until October 26 asking for your support painting a series of full-length oil portraits of trans women, that transcend their conventional depictions in art and media. Rewards include wall calendars, prints, and original paintings. Click above to view a preview or support after Sunday, September 21. If we don't reach the goal, I can't pay the models, cover travel costs, or pay for my time and materials, so I won't make art. If you can't spare, share. Thank you!

Teleportraiture

(FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 4/9/2012)
by Janet Bruesselbach
teleportraiture.com
Exhibition May 18-31, 2012
Opening Reception Friday, May 18^th, 7-9pm
Space Womb Gallery
22-48 Jackson Ave.
Long Island City, NY 11101

Teleportraiture is a series of small, intimate oil portraits, painted from live poses, by remote video chat, via Skype, Google Hangout, or iChat. Janet Bruesselbach launched Teleportraiture in 2011 as a Kickstarter campaign.  The subject of each portrait is a backer of the campaign, or a loved one volunteered by the backer.

Janet is pleased to announce that the 45 resulting paintings, completed between October 2011 and February 2012, will be displayed in a 2-week gallery exhibition in New York City, in downtown Long Island City, to be more precise.  Attendance at the opening reception on Friday, May 18^th, will also be possible remotely through a simultaneous online video chat.

The pricing and experimentalism of the series made the fine art portrait experience open to people who had never before considered commissioning one. The subjects include the artist’s friends and relatives as well as people met only through the campaign, and only online.  Some posed from the other side of the world, others from the same room, all framed by their computer screens. The ages of subjects ranged from under a year old to septuagenarian.  Many subjects had never used video chat before.  The project reflects a moment when a flexible technology is still finding its social niche.

Janet has been working as a portrait artist since she was 15, and was further trained at RISD and the New York Academy of Art.  Her painting is traditional but fresh and lively, and feeds on the energy of interaction with a live subject.  Paintings reflect on both the artist’s personality and her subjects’.  Yet as artifacts of sittings, they are not quite realistic, and often contain traces of awkwardness in every level of communication.

Some of the portraits remain available for purchase, as are a limited number of catalogs.  The artist will be working in the gallery and will be available for live video chat Monday (21, 29), Tuesday (22, 30), and Thursday (24), from 12-6pm EST.  The gallery is also open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, 12-6pm.  To commission a portrait during this or another time, to schedule a viewing, and for any other inquiries, contact: janet@bruesselbach.com (310) 617-3366

Download as pdf

EXQUISITE POOP : Blind Reproduction

Today is the last day to support Blind Reproduction's Indiegogo campaign. We have catalogs, prints, art, and special commissions for sale.
Blind Reproduction is a project between 26 artists and writers, in which artists try to remake each others' work based only on a verbal description. View all of the results here.
Next Saturday our show, Exquisite Poop, opens.

EXQUISITE POOP : Blind Reproduction
March 10 – April 15, 2012
Opening Reception Saturday, March 10, 6-9pm
LIVE PERFORMANCE BY ABACUS JONES 8PM

A Gathering of the Tribes
285 East 3rd St. 2nd Floor (Between Ave C & D, near F at 2nd Ave or Delancey/Essex)
New York, NY 10009 (212) 674-3778 info@tribes.org / gatheringofthetribes@gmail.com

Inspired by the different descriptions Steve Cannon’s visitors would give of the art on the walls, and by taking the blind professor to art openings, curator Janet Bruesselbach organized an elaborate art and writing project between 13 artists and writers. It aims to consider the subjectivity of attentive visuality in art writing and the absurdity of symbolic imagery.

The artists were invited to contribute a small two-dimensional work, and commit to another. Images, titles, size and media information were then assigned to the writers, who were charged with describing the art as thoroughly and sincerely as possible. These descriptions were nearly randomly assigned to the contributing artists, who were tasked with recreating the artwork they thought the writer had described, without knowing the artist or seeing the original image.

The first stage of translation from visual to verbal varies hugely in style and focus, even given stylistic restrictions. The artist’s job is even harder and even more subject to the variations of personality and style. Not only was it hard to communicate the most basic aspects of artwork or even the rules of the game, the variations in series are indescribable. The resulting illustration of mis/communication varies from wondrous to farcical and demonstrates the impossibility of translation.

Participating artists:
Alexis Duque
Lorra Jackson
Brian Elig
Blair Kamage
Carly Bodnar
Robert Scott
Joseph Materkowski
Samuel Bjorgum
Lauren Kolesinskas
Jessica Daly
David Hollenbach
BMIP (Babyhead)
Nick Musaelian

Participating Writers:
Allison Moore
Maddie Drake
Joshua Crowley
Jenny Bhatt
Casey Plett
Kaitlin Heller
Adam Kavulic
Zane Hart
Matt Keeley
Jamie T. Clark
Jon Boulier
 Ammon Ford
Chris Heffernan

 Contact the curator: janet@bruesselbach.com

Teleportraiture

Teleportraiture is a series of oil portraits painted through videochat. I am a classically-trained portrait artist whose work has always been based around the intimacy generated during the interaction between painter and subject. The painting is artifact of a performance of relationship and conversation, mutual but asymmetrical observation. Unlike paintings from photos, these portraits capture a personality over time. Sometimes things occur like the mirror effect, where I have to put the expression on my face that my subject should have in the painting. Yet the resulting painting is still, choosing challenge over cubist adaptations.

I’ve grown up on the internet, communicating throught text, but in the past few years interacting face-to-face remotely has become commonplace. In videochat, the mirror effect is more explicit, as you’re always able to see yourself as the other sees you. You find yourself having to alter your face from the way people look at computers to how they look at people – yet the portrait artist often looks at people the way people look at computers. This toggling between performing and concentrating means that, more often than not, the absent, concentrating expression of the computer user will be depicted – if I allow it to be.

This project seeks to examine the tenuous, technology, strange intimacy, and charged emotions around communicating remotely, by making the archaic oil portraiture tradition site-unspecific and international in a way that, if anything, makes it more personalized. This differentiates it from the portrait-by-photo services made affordable by outsourcing. The ultimate images use the intermediary camera and compression to generate artifact artifacts. They are not supposed to look like they were done in person, but reflect their particular system of old and new technologies.

I have worked this way on three occasions prior to starting this campaign: once with deep romance, once with a stranger speaking another language, and once for a self-portrait. Teleportraiture in part examines the current trend toward erosion of online anonymity. In the course of the project I hope to see many faces I haven’t seen in person or ever before. Ultimately, my goal is always to make my subject look good, and give them a unique experience with a tangible result – the conceptual aspects will never supercede that. By making your backing part of this project specifically, you get to participate in a techno-social experiment marking a particular cultural moment in an oddly old-school way.

Your money buys you a portrait, images thereof, and videos of sessions, or goes toward a book, poster, and exhibition of the series. The backing structure is based around backers of the smallest amounts being able to sit in and watch the process. At the next level, you’ll get a pdf book and poster of every portrait. Mid-range backers actively contribute by sitting to have their portrait painted, and keep a scan, but I keep the painting. With the permission of the sitter, sessions will be recorded, and a little more money gets you the video. At a relatively low cost for oil portrait commissions, backerss can buy the painting. Even higher donations will keep lower backers from viewing the session, plus no limitations on time or size. I will continue to take commissions for these after the project funded through kickstarter is fulfilled. All backers receive an invitation to a preview reception of the exhibition of these works. The exhibition’s location is undetermined, but should be longer than a month in New York City in mid-2012, somewhere with wifi and computers for remote attendance and so I can keep painting teleportraits from the space.

I'm hoping to make 20-30 paintings over the course of 2 months. Sittings usually take about 3 hours. Most of the paintings I make through Teleportraiture will be between 8x10 inches and 12x16 inches. Usually, I charge $400 or more for a head and shoulders portrait. That means what I really want to raise is $8000. This is, at bare minimum, what your donation goes towards:

Studio rental 800

Electricity 100

Cable 100

Painting Supplies 300

Printing 300

Shipping 400

Frames 200

Exhibition space rental 2000

Exhibition ad/promo 500

Exhibition hardware and labor 300

TOTAL: 5000

With $3000 more, at least, though, I can rent the space for longer, invest in a bigger, better scanner, and provide a computer and projector for the opening. In fact, I'm looking for a good tech-friendly space for this, and if it's non-profit, that would be a huge help, as well.

Here's a 10-minute demo video in which I paint Lauren while discussing the project.

Hosts

I wanted to generate what the aliens, Ariekei, in Embassytown by China Mieville look like before I looked up the better job other artists have probably done.  It's almost instantly one of my favorite books, everyone.  I don't think I have any better examples of Literary Sci Fi.  I can compare it to Babel-17 or Anathem but better.

Anyway, the Ariekei are described with mixed analogies to earth creatures, enough that you get an idea of something very alien-looking.  Their technology is all biological and they speak a non-representational language with two harmonizing mouths, the "cut" (above, on the neck) and the "turn" (at chest level).  They walk on four "spider"-like legs ending in "hooves", with spines and dark hair.  They have two coral-like "wings", the giftwing (manipulation, from under the turn mouth) and the fanwing (hearing, behind cutmouth and eye antlers).  Wings and eye-antlers all retract or furl and emerge like those of sea creatures or stop-motion plants.  Mature hosts are accompanied by battery creatures (zelles) and older ones grow edible sacs.

Veritas Odium Parit

means "truth creates hatred".



Oil on linen, 72'x60', 2009. I started with a composite of several photographs of colliding/gravitationally interacting spiral galaxies, then improvisationally found humanoid figures (and some more virtual metaphors) in it, following a spatial structure of in for one galaxy center and out for the other, and finding cool and warm pastel lights in fetal forms. It's seeded by a psychological allegory of resisting attractive forces. Dali claimed that relativistic physics suggested the vacuum was meatspace: matter is not pulled towards other matter but pushed by muscular nothingness.

Also finished:


"Insults as Veiled Compliments", 36"x72", oil and silver paint on linen, 2009.

Almost finished:


"Respect the Autonomy of Inanimate Objects", acrylic underpainting with oils on canvas, 72"x72". Painted in brightly colored glazes, cheesy Richard Corben-style, under Nicola Verlato. I started with a spontaneous drawing and then evolved it through tracings, color studies, clay and digital models, and compositional organization.