XQUISITE CORPSE Open Studio ( and party )Saturday, March 10, 12-6 pm and party 6-11 pm
526 West 26th street, studio 723, New York, NY 10001
A Collaborative art project.. with a twist.
Please be cautious,
this will not be a usual art party,
you may need to wear art on your sleeve.
The XQUISITE CORPSE will drink the new wine and art will be made by all and not by one!
Paint, painting surfaces and booze will be FREE, make sure to wear comfortable clothes, if anything.
I have kept a diary since I was 13 years old. In these I write and draw sketches of personal and found work. In a way, they are diagrams of a past and a future, usually written in both English and Bulgarian, sometimes a sentence starts in English and ends in Bulgarian, sometimes I write English words in Cyrillic; sometimes I write Bulgarian words using the English alphabet. There are a lot of made up words and lots of drawings.
My last notebook is red.
These series of animations are the red notebook equivalent. In them I use my latest drawings and paintings, they carry the mood and the sense of place and space I currently occupy - Brooklyn, New York.
No digital manipulations for the drawings have been used - they have gone in as they are - I scan them into the computer and animate them. The hands are pen and ink drawings on hot pressed board, a very smooth velvety surface produced by an American paper company. The red background is a Crimson Red Intaglio ink monotype on Fabriano papers ( an Italian paper praised since the Renaissance ).
For these compositions I was inspired by Marcus Fischer's amazing album mip~map/for friends this winter.. and my friends as well.
Painted and animated by Mirena Rhee
Music by marcus fischer / mapmap.ch
I have kept a diary since I was 13 years old. In these I write and draw sketches of personal and found work. In a way, they are diagrams of a past and a future, usually written in both English and Bulgarian, sometimes a sentence starts in English and ends in Bulgarian, sometimes I write English words in Cyrillic; sometimes I write Bulgarian words using the English alphabet. There are a lot of made up words and lots of drawings.
My latest notebook is red.
These series of animations are the red notebook equivalent. In them I use my latest drawings and paintings, they carry the mood and the sense of place and space I currently occupy - Brooklyn, New York.
No digital manipulations for the drawings have been used - they have gone in as they are - I scan them into the computer and animate them. The hands are pen and ink drawings on hot pressed board, a very smooth velvety surface produced by an American paper company. The red background is a Crimson Red Intaglio ink monotype on Fabriano papers ( an Italian paper praised since the Renaissance ).
To score these compositions I used Marcus Fischer's amazing album mip~map/for friends this winter.. Please, support his work: marcus fischer / mapmap.ch and visit his blog.
Winter Diagrams: December ( Brooklyn machine series )
I had heard so much criticism about Damien's Spot paintings before going to the three New York shows, that I had the sneaky suspicion I am going to love them. They gave me pleasure - pleasure is hardly an argument - you either like having it or not. The flavor colored paintings made me want to lick every single dot, were named after various chemical substances and defied Jerry Saltz's argument "You see one, and you really have seen them all." In fact, they all tasted different.
When I think of Damien - I also can't help but think of Zaphod Beeblebrox. Hey, if that artist's intent is to make a lot of money - that is not a reason to reject the work - although this is not my intent but can't speak against that being someone else's. The spots aren't things by themselves and they do not create a traditional artistic value (via the artist's hand ). We all know from math that a dot cannot be defined as having a substance, it's a destination. Each room of the three Gagosian galleries was brilliantly hung - thus all the paintings in a room worked together with scale to triangulate space and create a giant, Three-dimensional musical piano ( you know, the toy ones - i had one when i was a kid ).
It was a pure pleasure to indulge in the simple language of color, to occupy the space within the dots and just listen to the music.
When I think of Damien - I also can't help but think of Zaphod Beeblebrox. Hey
The exhibition Opening at Pace gallery's Happenings: New York, 1958-1963 was packed with the Who's Who in the art world today. Although the crowds for the most parts obscured the actual show - I think it was more or less the point. The exhibition opening was, all over again, a Happening on its own.
Works by Jim Dine, Simone Forti, Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, Carolee Schneemann, and Robert Whitman.
Hand painted ocean in HD ( Brooklyn series ) - animated pen and ink drawings, 2011. Painted, animated and edited by Mirena Rhee. Music by Al Dimeola, John Mclaughlin & Paco Delucia - Azzura.
This piece was inspired by a climbing wall I saw in Brooklyn. A climbing wall is usually littered with tiny boulders of various shapes and sizes and your climbing path is marked and color-coded with tape. Say, black tape with a stripe designates a VO, a beginner's path, a dark red could be a V6, a path for only experienced climbers. I thought the climbing wall was a good metaphor for life, with the tape off.
..I have seen to have survived many centuries and hold their power, on paper. The Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted a lavish Indian painting exhibit and I managed to catch the last day and take notes, photography was not allowed.
The ultimate geek list of pigments used in Indian Painting:
White pigments:
1. Lead White ( basic Lead carbonate )
2. Zinc White ( zinc oxide )
3. Chalk ( calcium carbonate )
Red/Orange:
4. Cinnabar ( Mercury sulfide )
5. Vermillion ( Synthetic Mercuric Sulfide )
6. Lac ( primary colorant Laccaic Acid )
7. Red Lead ( Lead tetroxide/orange red )
8. Realgar ( Arsenic disulfide/bright orange red mineral )
9. Saffron ( Crocetin and Crocin )
Yellow:
10. Opriment ( Arsenic trisulfide/soft yellow )
11. Indian Yellow ( Magnesium euxanthate/ originally from the urine of cows fed mango leaves )
12. Gamboge ( yellowish orange )
Green:
13. Verdigris ( Basic Copper Acetate/dark bluish green pigment )
14. Malachite ( Basic Copper Carbonate )
Mixtures to make green - Indigo and Indian yellow
Blue/Violet:
15. Ultramarine ( Natural Ultramarine is the ground, separated blue particles - lazurite - from the gemstone Lapis Lazuli )
16. Azurite ( basic Copper Carbonate/frequently found adjacent to Malachite )
17. Indigo ( Indigotin )
Earth Pigments:
18. Iron Oxides
Black/Gold/Silver/Tin:
19. Carbon
20. Gold Ink ( Gold particles with gum ), similar with Silver and Tin ink
21. Beetle wings ( to represent Emeralds )
Inks:
22. Carbon inks ( Lamb black )
23. Metallo-gallic ink
24. Indian ink ( naturally )
25. Willow Charcoal
26. Lamp Black ( soot from fat, oil, tar )
27. Ivory Black
As part of an Action Art project over the holidays, I invited my artists friends over for a Bulgarian style feast, with a twist.. As Bulgarian tradition dictates, you have to paint on the walls for food:)
The twist was that my friends and participants didn't know that all the walls were tarped for painting.., I advertised the event as a sit down dinner with all the trimmings of a family event. I wanted to completely detach the action from a specific result and let things unfold.
..and here are the results
\\ Ink, brushes, charcoal, sharpies, pastels on butcher paper, red lights
The next day, I took photographs of all the walls in natural lighting..
In addition to drawings, there Were-Rabbits, poems and cryptic messages..
even a Were-Man..
Occupy Wall Street and Magritte also showed up.. with parts of a Christmas tree
And how do the grand Satyagraha at the Met Opera, the De Kooning exhibition at the MOMA, the La Carte D'Après Nature show at Matthew Marks gallery, moving studio 4 times, shaking hands with 470 people in three days during Open Studios compare to my brother's fishing - they don't even come close second.
Fishing is a philosophy and also a sport, a very zen way to gamble and a fusion of the Romantic and the Classical way of thinking. You could be well prepared, in a Classical way, to fish.. but fish has the very Romantic approach of not getting caught.
Insofar as we understand the universe - if it can be understood - our doings must have some desire for order in them; but from the point of view of the universe, they must be very grotesque. As a matter of fact, the idea of "order" reminds me of something Jack Tworkov was telling me that he remembered of his childhood.
There was the village idiot.His name was Plank and he measured everything. He measured roads, toads, and his own feet; fences, his nose and windows, trees, saws and caterpillars. Everything was there already to be measured by him. Because he was an idiot, it is difficult to think in terms of how happy he was. Jack says he walked around with a very satisfied expression on his face. He had no nostalgia, neither a memory nor a sense of time. All that he noticed about himself was that his length changed!
Insofar as we understand the universe - if it can be understood - our doings must have some desire for order in them; but from the point of view of the universe, they must be very grotesque. As a matter of fact, the idea of "order" reminds me of something Jack Tworkov was telling me that he remembered of his childhood.
There was the village idiot. His name was Plank and he measured everything. He measured roads, toads, and his own feet; fences, his nose and windows, trees, saws and caterpillars. Everything was there already to be measured by him. Because he was an idiot, it is difficult to think in terms of how happy he was. Jack says he walked around with a very satisfied expression on his face. He had no nostalgia, neither a memory nor a sense of time. All that he noticed about himself was that his length changed!
Willem De Kooning, written in 1950 for a lecture series at Studio 35 on Eighth Street in New York.
I went to Ultra Violet's studio this past weekend to take photographs of her and her work. Ultra Violet said the first person she met off the boat ( arriving from France in the 60's ) was Salvador Dali. She became his muse, and later on, became a muse to Andy Warhol and a superstar in his Factory.
says 99 percent certainty is 100 percent certainty.
Quantum Tunneling
Quantum Mechanics says a particle has a definite probability of being anywhere in the entire universe. Although any real distance from the particle’s expected classical path is infinitesimally small, since Quantum Mechanics is a statistical theory those small probabilities must be counted! Quantum Tunneling is a fascinating effect that arises out of these small probabilities. ( I certainly, 100 percent didn't write this )
Bhagavad Gita
Philip Glass' Satyagraha is based on Bhagavad Gita and sung entirely in Sanskrit, without titles for the audience. Bhagavad Gita says the world is not for the doubting man.
A friend of mine I used to work with at Lucasfilm recently shared this.. He is a brilliant technical mind, the guy behind the most advanced technology of special effects simulations created by Pixelux Entertainment. Naturally, artists and engineers at Lucasfilm were locked in eternal friendly battle of the minds, where engineers of course always had the upper hand since entertainment industry today is essentially a high-tech industry. So we had many inside jokes regarding the math abilities of artists.
Math is a language, and choosing Peet Mondrian's colors is no accident, for Math is not only an abstract language but also a visual language. Visualization in mathematics, or mathematical notation, was invented in the 16th century and it immensely liberated mathematical discovery. Like musical notation, modern mathematical notation is strict and a few symbols could convey very complex ideas.
I went to mathematical high school and participated in a few Mathematical Olympiads, although I am the worst student of math as I relied mostly on my pattern recognition ability rather than study. When I moved to the States I did some of the comprehensive IQ tests and scored pretty high; but my pattern recognition was the highest at 147. I have my own definition of pattern recognition and it's the ability to predict an outcome based on two or three reference points. As in life and math, trouble is if you think you have two or three reference points but in fact only one is a solid ground and the rest.. simply conjectures.
A Collaborative art project.. with a twist.
Please be cautious,
this will not be a usual art party,
you may need to wear art on your sleeve.
The XQUISITE CORPSE will drink the new wine and art will be made by all and not by one!
Paint, painting surfaces and booze will be FREE, make sure to wear comfortable clothes, if anything.
