Thursday, September 22, 2011

Member Spotlight: Heba Amin, filmmaker, announces fundraising campaign for experimental film "Voices from the Revolution"

International Women Artists' Salon is honored to support filmmaker member Heba Amin's fund-raising campaign for her experimental film "Voices from the Revolution."  We invite you to visit her IndieGoGo and Facebook pages to learn about her film project and support her effort in any way you can.


 

During the recent uprising in Egypt in 2011, speak2Tweet allowed Egyptians to post their breaking news and opinions on Twitter via voicemail despite countrywide Internet cuts. The result was thousands of heartfelt messages from Egyptians recording their emotions by phone. This experimental film presents selected speak2Tweet messages prior to the fall of the Mubarak regime on February 11, 2011 and juxtaposes them with the abandoned structures that represent the long-lasting effects of a corrupt dictatorship. It attempts to depict the harsh reality of the physical state of the city and addresses the role that the urban infrastructure plays in instigating unrest amongst its inhabitants. The project reveals the hopes and fears of a people who have yet to discover the outcome of their revolution within the context of their crumbling surroundings. This is not another documentary about the revolution but rather an artistic presentation revealing the collective psyche during a specific time-frame.





Bio: 
Heba Amin: Artist, Director
Heba Amin is an Egyptian artist whose work seeks to map collective memory as it relates to the built environment. Her theoretical and studio-based work addresses themes related to urban planning, mapping, migration/immigration and language as an aesthetic database to explore junctures, failures, and flawed memory.

Amin has taught at the University of Minnesota, the American University in Cairo, and the Hochschule fur Technik und Wirtschaft in Berlin. She is a 2009 Rhizome Commissions grant recipient and a 2010 Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) scholar. She has exhibited her work internationally and has attended several workshops and residencies in Europe. Amin currently resides in Berlin. More information about her work can be found at www.hebaamin.com.





More from Heba:
I am very happy to share with you exciting updates for Voices from the Revolution, an experimental documentary I am directing!  I see this project as a platform to discuss very important issues addressed by the film including democratization of communication, rights to internet access, impact of neglected infrastructure, and importance of historical structures, among others. This is not another documentary about the revolution but rather an artistic presentation that not only gives you intimate insight on what the emotional state of the people was before their government fell but also features beautiful architecture in Cairo, much of which has been abandoned, neglected and forgotten, relaying the context in which revolution happened.

I am perhaps doing the unthinkable, but with complete confidence in the project, I am sending you a call to help support it.

Contributions can be as low as $1, be anonymous and be done using Paypal or credit card. Couldn't be more simple!

To help make this project happen visit our IndieGoGo campaign (where you can also see an excerpt of the project): http://www.indiegogo.com/Voices-from-the-Revolution

 



Thursday, September 15, 2011

Member Spotlight: Visual Artist Jennie Booth - Solo Exhibition- "The Universe Goes Looking 4 an Answer"

International Women Artists' Salon is thrilled to announce member Jennie Booth's solo exhibition of mixed-media paintings, "The Universe Goes Looking 4 an Answer" at Chashama 461 Studio Gallery, September 14, 2011 - Tuesday, September 27, 2011.



The Universe Goes Looking 4 an Answer

Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Wednesday through Sunday, 1-6PM
Chashama 461 Studio Gallery, 461 W. 126th St, NYC


Opening Reception Friday, September 16th, 2011 6-9PM

Click HERE for directions.


Universe Gets a Query
4"w x 7" h 2011
oil/beeswax on paper


The Universe comes to Harlem from September 14-27, 2011 as chashama's 461 Gallery presents mixed-media paintings by New York City artist Jennie Booth. Booth fills the gallery with glowing portraits of an iconographic Universe walking through the landscape of her own Consciousness.

These oil and mixed media paintings express the power and vulnerability of the human psyche when faced with its own vast and mysterious nature. Having lost loved ones to the worst outcomes of mental illness, and having struggled for years herself with the crushing depressions of Bipolar II, she has experienced firsthand how "reality" is truly a projection of the mind, and the mind is vulnerable to the complex wiring of its motherboard, the brain.

Jennie Booth's iconography carries us through a world of Freaky Observers, vibrating Strings, life-anchoring yucca and blazing sunsets painted with jewel-like colors that have the feeling of stained glass. This layering of brain science, physics, psychology, icongraphic traditions and landscape tableaux speaks to the miracle of thought on the micro and macro scale.

Universe Goes Looking 4 an Answer
Oil/beeswax on Paper
 

Bio
Artist, Jennie Booth has exhibited her work nationally and internationally and is recipient of numerous grants and awards including a Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Studio Residency, Vermont Studio Full Fellowship, and Fundacion Valparaiso Residency in Spain. She works between New York City and Los Angeles, California

Sunset With Freaky Observers
10" x 10"  2010
Oil Beeswax on Canvas


Artist Statement
The central figure in my work is the Universal Self, wandering through a landscape of her own Consciousness. She is compassion, rationality, strength and kinetic energy.  Brain clouds hovering around her are the Freaky Observers of the Albrecht/SoroBoltzmann Brain Paradox; a play on the mathematical unlikelihood that we are here thinking at all.
Travel through the Egyptian Sahara in 2005 and White Sands Desert during a 2007 Artist Residency at Mano Y Mente in New Mexico allowed me to experience the awe and strange familiarity of being surrounded by an ocean of sand.  These vast, stark environments were the settings in which celebrated thinkers from both regions sought to answer fundamental questions and gain control of their worlds, resulting in The Eyptian Book of Emerging Forth Into the Light…..and the nuclear bomb. Quiet, immense and dazzling, I found the Desert ecosystem to be a potent symbolic parallel to our human presence on Earth: fragile, tentative and interdependent, yet ultimately alone.

PowerSource (The Universe Gets Juiced)
71/2" w x 6" h  2007
Oil/Beeswax on Paper



Sponsored by Chashama:
Facebook Invitation:

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Member Spotlight: Judith Z. Miller - "Celebration of Life!" Artists Commemorating 9/11

International Women Artists' Salon member Judith Z. Miller Invites You to Collaborate in the  Celebration of Life! “Be-In” Artists Commemorating 9/11




Come Celebrate LIFE on 9/11/2011
Artists Commemorating 9/11
2-7pm

(*RAIN DATES: Saturday, September 24 or in case of rain, Sunday, September 25th.)

In Park Slope's Lush Warren/ St. Mark's Community Garden (619-625 Warren St, Between 4th and 5th Ave, Brooklyn, NY).

“Celebration of Life!” - a dance-percussive-art “Happening” - features Sticks & Stones healing ritual artist

Judith Z. Miller’s primal wearable art and sculpture made from trees and stones, set to a live soundscape of global rhythms by Music for the Masses DJ Neva Wartell, in Park Slope’s lush St. Marks/Warren Street Community Garden.

“Celebration of Life” will include dancers in body paint wearing Judith’s handmade, one-of-a-kind amulets, moving throughout the garden with her “Sacred Staffs” made from the roots and trunks of trees. Dancers will be accompanied by music spun by DJ Neva along with live percussion. The community will be invited to participate.




To RSVP, search Facebook:
Celebration of Life! “Be-In”
View Video Invitation:
Dancers will honor the earth by creating movement in response to the song “MANKIND” by MAURI, accompanied by live music.
Dancers, Choreographers, Percussionists, Body Painters, Poets & Writers, Photographers, Videographers, and advance & on-site Event Organizers are invited to collaborate. If you want to participate, please let us know what skills you'd like to share!

POTLUCK: Please bring food and non-alcoholic beverages to share. The grill will be fired up.

Featured Artists:
DJ NEVA (Music for the Masses) is an ethnomusicologist and long-time cultural activist. Along with performances at festivals and events, she co-produces "New York International" — NY’s longest-running weekly live-format World Music radio show — on Haitian community station Radio Soleil http://www.radiosoleil.com/.

More information: http://www.facebook.com/DJNeva
Radio show archive: http://www.djneva.podOmatic.com/


Judith Z. Miller (Sticks & Stones) is a self-trained healing ritual artist who lives in an erotic, musical, spiritual universe. Inspired by the beauty of nature and the guiding force of her intuition, she draws and creates primal sculpture and wearable art from trees, stones and found objects, which she fashions into ritual staffs, instruments, wearable amulets, and employs in healing rituals.


To learn more about Judith Z. Miller, go to:

http://www.fracturedatlas.org/site/blog/2009/10/16/featured-member-judith-z-miller

http://www.zamo-zamo.com/

Partial list of collaborating artists:
Artist/Designer/Raconteur Thomas Lynn Pool will display his origami designs and shoot video.

Jazz improvisational and devotional vocalist Deborah Shelton will lead a song circle combining vocal improvisation and multi-part songs of faith, hope and love.
Dub Poet Infinity [http://www.adiosbabylon.com/INFINITY.html] will perform.
Jim Su and Tyler P. Fairbanks [www.modelmayhem.com/582872] will paint the dancers’ bodies and Ahuva Adanani will do makeup and hair.
Taino tongue drummer William Ruiz [http://www.reverbnation.com/percussionistwilliamruiz] and percussionist Shoshana Jedwab [http://shoshanajedwab.com] will lead drum circles.

Brooklyn videographer Jett Cain a documentary, live music performance and music video producer will document the days’ events and create a music video.
We invite your collaboration, please contact CelebrationOfLifeNYC@gmail.com and let us know what you’d like to contribute.

Please include the words “Celebration of Life!” in the subject line.

Event Hashtag: #911COL

Create a small temporary installation and document it for submission for "Return, Remember" sponsored by the Brooklyn Arts Council at Celebration of Life!

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION - BROOKLYN ARTS COUNCIL
Return, Remember

Ephemeral Memorials in the Legacy of September 11th Deadline: September 30, 2011

For more information:

http://www.brooklynartscouncil.org/documents/1716

For information and inspiration, view this beautiful memorial on CityLore's website:

http://www.citylore.org/911_exhibit/911_home.html