Artist John Muse to give away work at exhibit’s end
HAVERFORD, Pa., Aug. 10, 2023 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — Today, Haverford College’s Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities announced the launch of a new art exhibition opening on Friday, September 8th. Titled, “Extra Medium | John Muse,” the exhibition will feature unique pieces of collage, video, daily live artist studio work, and more from local artist John Muse, Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at Haverford College.
This exhibition, which is free to the public, is uniquely designed as an engaging showcase for visitors where Muse will be present each day at the gallery. At the final event on October 11, Muse will be offering up his work for free to visitors.
For the past fifteen years, John Muse has taught conceptual art and theory at Haverford, helping to launch the College’s Visual Studies Program as well as its long-running STRANGE TRUTH film series. This exhibition is anticipated to be the most comprehensive show of Muse’s various practices to date, combining his interests in video, performance, collage, and social practice artwork. Employing everyday tools, a modest vocabulary of shapes and forms, and found and made materials, Muse makes images that invite sustained attention, blunt swift decoding, and probe the difference between abstraction and figuration.
Curated by Homay King, Professor in the Department of History of Art and co-founder of the Program in Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College, the exhibition begins on September 8th and concludes on October 11th with artist gallery studio hours from 3:00pm to 5:00pm daily.
“The Extra Medium artworks are abstract, and the video works are experimental. Nevertheless, they are about relationships between people, bodies, images, and the gravitational forces, both literal and metaphorical, that drive them,” said King. “I hope visitors gain an increased awareness of the impulse to identify shapes and forms, to label them, and to pass judgment on them as pleasing or displeasing, good or bad.”
About the Exhibition Series:
Opening Conversation & Reception: Friday, Sep 8, 2023, 4:30pm at the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery
- Join us for a first look at the exhibit featuring a brief conversation with the artist and curator followed by food, drink, and conversation outside the gallery.
The Films: Thursday, Sep 21, 2023, 4:30pm at the VCAM Cinema
- This screening will showcase a program of experimental shorts films that are united in their exploration of relations among bodies, horizons, and gravitational forces, both physical and metaphysical. The event will conclude with a panel discussion featuring filmmakers: Jeanne C. Finley, Mason Rosenthal, and Brendamaris RodrCguez.
The Shape Game: Wednesday, Oct 4, 2023, 4:30pm at the VCAM Lounge
- An expanded version of artist Maia Chao’s original broadcast, The Shape Show, Muse will be asking audience members to choose between shapes and explain their preferences. The goal is to dig deeper into preferences, new shapes, and understand others point of view.
Everything Must Go!: Wednesday, Oct 11, 2023, 4:30pm at the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery
- An alternative, non-market-based economy for the circulation of art, this raffle event sends each work off to an indeterminate afterlife potentially modeled on care, stewardship, and a promise to document an image in its future habitat.
“I make things to discover what it is I want to see. I always hope that someone else might want to see what I see, might enjoy my enjoyment, my way of putting one thing on another,” said Muse. “By sharing with folks in this formal way—literally, Everything Must Go!—I hope to disperse works to other walls, homes, rooms, and to thus, establish new relationships with persons, places, and things.”
Extra Medium | John Muse is made possible with support from The John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and the Distinguished Visitors Program.
To learn more about this upcoming exhibit and events, please visit the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery’s website at https://www.haverford.edu/exhibitions-program.
About the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities
The John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities provides a place for inclusive and interdisciplinary programming by promoting collaborative engagement with the intellectual and artistic ambitions of Haverford College and broader communities. Learn more at https://www.haverford.edu/hcah
About John Muse
John Muse writes criticism, teaches visual studies at Haverford College, and makes experimental films, multi-channel installation works, collages, and paintings. Muse is currently an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at Haverford College where he also directs VCAM (the Visual Culture, Arts, and Media facility) and the Visual Studies Program. His 2021 film giroscopio, co-directed with Brendmaris Rodriguez, won Best Director award at the Ribalta Film Festival, a Jury’s Choice Award at the Thomas Edison Film Festival, and a Juror Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. His 2019 film Duet, made in collaboration with Mason Rosenthal, won the Black Bear Award for Sound Editing at the Athens International Film + Video Festival. In 2009 he and frequent collaborator, Jeanne C. Finley, were featured artists at the Flaherty Seminar programmed by Irina Leimbacher. In 2001 Finley + Muse received a Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship for their experimental documentary project, Age of Consent. In 1999 they received a Creative Capital Foundation Award. In 1995 they were Artists in Residence at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Muse has written critical essays about the work of Markus Baenziger, Roland Barthes, Suzanne Bocanegra, Victor Burgin, Nomi Talisman & Dee Hibbert-Jones, Amy Hicks, Roni Horn, Mary Lydon, Yoonmi Nam, Avital Ronell, Dread Scott, Lee Walton, and others. His films are distributed by the Video Data Bank; his writings can be found at his academic page.
About Homay King
Homay King is Professor in the Department of History of Art and co-founder of the Program in Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of Virtual Memory: Time-based Art and the Dream of Digitality (Duke UP, 2015), which won the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award of Distinction from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier (Duke UP, 2010), which provided inspiration for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s China: Through the Looking Glass. Her work on film, digital media, contemporary art, and theory has appeared in publications including Afterall, Film Quarterly, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, October, The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory, and The Andy Warhol Film Catalogue RaisonnI. She was featured in a video essay for the Criterion Collection’s edition of Shanghai Express, and is a member of the Camera Obscura editorial collective. She is currently writing a book entitled Go West: A Mythology of California’s Silicon Valley, for which she was awarded a CASVA Visiting Senior Fellowship.
Media Contact
Matthew Seamus Callinan, Haverford College, 1 (856) 404-3274, [email protected], https://www.haverford.edu/hcah
SOURCE Haverford College
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.
