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Monday, March 17, 2008

AICA awards update! Picture Show gets silver but feels like gold

Here is an update on the 2008 AICA USA awards from the New England region, which were held about 3 weeks ago at the end of Feburary. Yep, you can always count on me to post on the latest, most fast breaking news. HOWEVER, yesterday, an audio review of our awards was released on Chicago's super online arts podcast mag, Bad at Sports. (Well, actually, there is a reason - I was gone for 10 of those days...and promise to do a roundup soon on Fotofest & SPE.)

I am proud as a peach to report that the exhibition Picture Show that I curated at the
PRC (and Boston Cyberarts) was mentioned very positively for 4 minutes! In the category of “Best Show in a University or College Gallery," Picture Show took second place at AICA NE, but as stated above, I feel like gold. Thanks again to AICA NE, George Fifield of Cyberarts, and all of the artists in Picture Show.

Art critic Greg Cook (of the Boston Globe, Boston Phoenix, and of course, the blog, New England Journal of Aesthetic Research) joined Matt Nash, James Nadeau, and Christian Holland of Big RED & Shiny for the Bad at Sports roundtable at MIT's Stata Center. You can listen to the roundtable of these fine folks discuss all of the shows and more here. If you want to hear the Picture Show part specifically, fast forward about 20 minutes in.

Supposedly, the AICA New England awards won't be held next year so they can concentrate on getting more members (they don't have any $ to do the awards, but each host museum, this year the Rose, helps out). I hope they continue it, as the evening was great for the whole community, allowing big and little guns like me and us to come together. It was truly great. Big RED and Greg Cook hope to maybe have the ceremony morph into something, read more about that here and here.

1 comment:

George Fifield said...

Congratulations on all of Picture Show's successes. In your round-up of the great press you received, you missed the paragraph in Ken Johnson's Boston Globe review of the entire Festival, "Back to the Future at the Boston Cyberarts Festival" (4/27/07). He said:

One of the most unexpected of the festival's exhibitions is "Picture Show" at the Photographic Resource Center . Here curator Leslie K. Brown has gathered together not futuristic technology, but works by contemporary artists that imitate old- fashioned moving-picture devices. Mechanized sculptures by Steve Hollinger , Deb Todd Wheeler , and others based on pre-cinematic devices like the flip book and the mutoscope convey nostalgia for obsolete technologies, and they invite us to wonder how people will look back on machines that are now state of the art. The term cyberart itself already seems a dorky relic of the past.