The Common Studio
Curated by Julia Cooke
Twenty-four searchlights, all high-powered, were set on rooftops around Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway last September and October. They were programmed, however, to avoid shining their spotlights on any physical objects: no buildings, no naked windows, no trees. Instead, they glimmered straight up into the sky: twenty-four columns of light...
New media artist Steve Bull creates augmented reality installations by adding three-dimensional graphics and sound via global positioning satellites onto real life places. The result can only be seen through a free Junaio browser downloaded to smartphones or tablets. Using the browser as a window, the viewer wanders through the augmented reality construct in any direction. Touching the object...
If you need a blanket, Travis Meinolf, the self-appointed Action Weaver, will give you one. For free. And it won’t be a common fleece or wool number. It will look like folk art. It could be made by the artist or by many hands, and perhaps strung together from woven cloths of varying stripes, colors, and sizes. These free hand-woven blankets are a component of the artist’s ongoing...
Curated by Elizabeth Hamby and Jessie Henson
“DC Arteries,” a collaboration between photographers Kate MacDonnell and Lely Constantinople, traces the subtle shifts of character and form that mark the landscape along the roads of Washington, DC. They capture the graffiti, the store signs, and the faded paint that make up the urban still-life passed along the way...
Curated by Jeff Bergman
In every family, traditional portraits are hung up or carried around: cousins arrayed before a monument, parents holding their grandchildren, long-gone ancestors smiling from a black and white beyond. Though we cherish their aura, the faces and places remain static.
By contrast, Rachel Barrett composes images that could be candid or...
Curated by Elizabeth Essner
Everyone has sat on a gray, metal folding chair: waiting at the DMV, as an extra guest at a dinner table, working in a makeshift office. Tanya Aguiñiga, a Los Angeles-based designer, transforms this ubiquitous piece of furniture in her series, Felt Chairs. Aguiñiga spends up to twenty laborious hours lovingly hand-felting each...
Curated by Amy Sande-Friedman.
C-MacKenzie (Chris MacKenzie) removes the background imagery from his photographs, creating uncanny visions of people in surreal blank settings. Although his figures often assume the pose of spectators, they gaze upon nothingness. In creating these images, C-MacKenzie draws on his background in motion picture editing and post production, in...
Curated by Amy Sande-Friedman
Last month at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Eliza Stamps, with her collaborator Amy Linsenmayer, unveiled the first edition of The Kiosk—a micro, mobile exhibition space that can be adapted to house a variety of art projects in different locations. Rent-a-Grandma, the premier Kiosk installation, on view through November 25...
The Common Studio, curated by Amy Sande-Friedman, will present a selection of work by a different artist each month. We are pleased to begin this series with Tatiana Garmendia.
Tatiana Garmendia was inspired to create this series of work, which includes both embroideries stitched into military netting and drawings on paper, by a conversation she had with a veteran who had...
Around Times Square in New York City – images of the familiar cityscape where millions of people pass daily, taken at odd hours. This is an attempt to reveal a different state of that place, a place still permeated with blinking neon but devoid of its participants, left to itself. A surreal performance that continues without its audience.
