Returned home a few days ago from a wonderful trip to Providence for the opening of the Inappropriate Covers exhibition I co-curated with Justin Katko. The opening was held on April 10th and a few days before we organized a film screening for The Magic Lantern at the Cable Car Cinema. The screening went quite well with films such as a selection from the Lossless series by Rebecca Baron and Doug Goodwin (we screened #3 and #5), Robert Arnold’s “Morphology of Desire,” Matthew Suib’s excellent work “COCKED,” and other videos. Here’s a description of the films we screened.

The opening for the exhibition was wonderful with Stephanie Syjuco giving an excellent and “appropriate” artist talk; we exhibited her piece “Body Double.” Other artists in attendance were L. Amelia Raley (showing “I should have never ever ever did those things”) and Ted Riederer (showing “The Resurrectionists”).

From the press release: “Inappropriate Covers includes multimedia works by 11 established and emerging artists, chosen for the aesthetic tensions they generate through acts of appropriation, reconfiguration, and erasure. Works in the exhibition range from the refined to the outrageous, according to JoAnn Conklin, director of the Bell Gallery. Jim Campbell’s elegant sculpture muses on memory and loss: the artist’s own heartbeat and breath sets the frequency of a layer of fog that appears on a glass, covering and uncovering photographs of his parents. At the other end of the spectrum is Kelly Heaton’s Live Pelt (The Surrogate). Heaton refers to the cloak, made from 64 used Tickle Me Elmo dolls purchased on E-bay, as her “substitute lover.”  In addition to Campbell and Heaton, artists participating in the exhibition are Brian Dettmer, Kenneth Goldsmith, Christian Marclay, L. Amelia Raley, Ted Riederer, Brian Kim Stefans, Stephanie Syjuco, John Oswald, and Mark Wallinger.”

Inappropriate Covers @ The David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University. Running until May 29, 2009:

A vlog about Inappropriate Covers made by Julie Levin-Russo for HASTAC:

Press Release from Brown University:

More Text, from The Brown Daily Herald & Yankee Magazine.

The wall text introducing the show: “We are not only surrounded by, but complicit in, cultures of rampant appropriation. From pervasive acts of everyday consumption, to strictly economic acts of human exploitation; from the plundering of the avant-garde by the advertising industry, to the emergence of fan creations that feed off dominant media productions, rewiring them into new, personalized texts. There is no doubt that techniques of aesthetic appropriation will remain central to art production in the years to come. But how do we distinguish critically valuable forms of productive appropriation from unreflective reproductions of a culture seeped in acts of appropriation? How do we, the curators, qualify what we mean by (in)appropriate?

Inappropriate Covers presents works gathered for the tensions they generate through acts of reconfiguration and erasure. Combining the concept of the appropriate with that of covering—signaling both the literal act of obscuring and the phenomenon of rock and roll covers—this exhibition gathers artworks which engage in a strictly inappropriate covering. An inappropriate cover is an operation of impropriety seeking to melt frozen social conventions while undermining standard uses of media and aesthetic materials. Beyond this impropriety, these covers also commit acts of in-appropriation, which negate the idea of appropriation. If “to appropriate” means “to seize possession for oneself” then an act of inappropriation is a giving back, a return or a release of aesthetically and politically reconfigured significance.

The works presented here give back what they steal, their gifts arriving in forms of visceral critique and denial, of redemption, of historical healing and recovery, of aesthetic exploration and formal discovery. They enact a “cover” from the storm of savage appropriation, protecting a rare optimism that art can still evaluate culture, selecting properties of its structure to negate as well as to cultivate. These Inappropriate Covers are not casual reflections of a culture seduced by frenzied appropriation but mindful interventions scouting the potential of culture’s material transformation.”