Curated online resource for contemporary art

  • Insight can be accomplished in a variety of ways, with often the best means of comprehension being found recursively in the activity of the process itself. The four artists selected for this winter's New Artists Feature look toward tools, governmental research and innate physicality to move towards a better understanding. I am honored to present the work of the Culturehall's newest members: Sara Dittrich, Xuan Chen, Ashley Carter and Brooks Dierdorff.

    Sara Dittrich works between a wide range of disciplines including sculpture, musical performance and technology to reflect upon the physicality of the body. This notion of the body is inclusive beyond the human form as object — giving equal consideration to how the body is a vessel for movement and communication. Her video Trio For Solo Contrabass revolves around the artist and two musicians working as a team with the instrument to produce a single pitch indefinitely. The act of playing the stand up bass has been altered to an endeavor requiring a division of labor by the use of a two-meter long musical bow created by the artist. Through collaboration the trio produce the minimal one-tone verse.

    Layered, prismatic and idiosyncratically referential, Xuan Chen's paintings from her series Screens negotiate the traditional cannon of abstraction while giving technology equal consideration. For each painting Xuan first creates simple forms in 3D software programs that are deconstructed through the manipulation of their base elements. Toying with but moving beyond the traditional concepts of the still life, each oil and acrylic work are in essence an interpreted duplicate of the first work, as the paintings on panel become the physical manifestation of a digital entity. Xuan's original subject matter is constructed but ultimately intangible as it lives only as reference in the realm of the computer display.

    The Figurehead series by Ashley Carter presents a collection of sculptures that form a fulcrum between surface and structure. Each form begins life as a digitally printed latex skin that displays a life-size image of an Olympic figure skater from the 1980s. Once prepared, pounds and pounds of plaster are poured into the latex vessels. Recognizable, but now grotesque, each form become distorted through the physical aftermath of process — a geological, lava-esque wrangling of liquids as they transform into solids. The result hugs a border between an act of comedy and malice. Making public the physical presence of the artist as she wrestled the amorphous forms into shape.

    In a move beyond his studio practice, Brooks Dierdorff created the Mojave Desert Mule Deer Refuge (MDMDR). Exhibited during High Desert Test Sites 2013, the MDMDR is an extension of Brooks' exploration of the complex relationships that have developed between hunting culture, wildlife conservation and nature. The outdoor project attempts to create an ideal environment for this specific species based on research from the most recent National Park Service study of mule deer habitats in Southern California. Beyond providing food, water and shelter for the local mule deer population, non-local plant species were removed from the half-acre installation site and replaced with bitterbrush, a common, local food source.

    David Andrew Frey is a New York-based artist, curator, and technologist. He founded Culturehall in 2008 as a new way for artists to connect with curators, gallerists, collectors, and other artists. David received an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2000. He has also studied at the Camberwell College of Art in London, the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and the Savannah College of Art and Design. He recently curated exhibitions in New York of work by Culturehall artists for Ligne Roset, the Big Screen Plaza, and Cindy Rucker Gallery.

  • About Culturehall

    Culturehall is a curated online resource for contemporary art where selected artists can share their work with curators, gallerists, collectors and other artists. We provide free artist portfolios with an easy to use set of web-based tools to make presenting art online simple and efficient. Our community of artists consists primarily of MFA graduates, arts professionals and teaching artists. Membership is available by invitation or application.

  • Applications close April 30th

  • New York art events list via Artcards.cc
  • Culturehall 5th Anniversary Artist - Where are the now?

    Culturehall is thrilled to celebrate its fifth anniversary and the global community of artists and curators who have contributed to our growing online resource for contemporary art.

    In the summer of 2008, David Andrew Frey founded Culturehall as a new way for artists to connect with curators, gallerists, collectors, and other artists. Culturehall has been honored to witness the outstanding achievements of artists whose work has been featured in our issues during the past five years. We would like to take this opportunity to recognize some of the many remarkable accomplishments by artists within the community.

    The 2009 feature issue Framed by Nina Büsing Corvallo brought together four female photographers, including LaToya Ruby Frazier and Tiana Markova-Gold, whose work examines theoretical, political, social, and personal issues. LaToya's documentary photography about her hometown, Braddock, Pennsylvania, received critical acclaim during the 2012 Whitney Biennial, and her solo exhibition, A Haunted Capital, is currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum. Tiana was a 2010 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Photography, as well as a 2010 recipient, with writer Saran Dohrmann, of the Dorothea Lange — Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University for their on-going collaboration about prostitution and the marginalization of women in Morocco. This work was recently presented in a solo exhibition at the Camera Club of New York as the culmination of Tiana's 2012 Darkroom Residency.

    Kelli Connell and Debbie Grossman, two featured artists who digitally alter images to re-imagine gender roles and identity, were included in After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this past year. Also a recent MacDowell Colony Fellow, Kelli was featured in Other Places, an issue about different generations of international artists whose photographic work explores gender and sexuality. Other artists in this issue, including Doug Ischar, were part of a group show guest curated by Tema Stauffer at the Camera Club of New York in 2011. Doug's Marginal Waters series documenting a gay beach in Chicago in the mid-eighties was recently on view at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography in Toronto and featured in the Guardian Weekend Magazine.

    Among a long list of gallery exhibitions of work by Culturehall artists in New York City, Higher Pictures included work by four featured artists — Artie Vierkant, Jessica Eaton, Letha Wilson, and Joshua Citarella — in the group show, Photography Is, in 2012. Artie, Jessica, and Letha also each had solo shows at Higher Pictures in the last two years. Letha's new series of photo-based sculptures examining the magnetic pull of the American West was recently exhibited in her solo show, Landmarks and Monuments, at Art in General. Cultured Stone, a solo show of work by another featured artist Ethan Greenbaum, was presented at Theirry Goldberg Gallery in 2012.

    This spring in Chicago, conceptual artist Jason Lazarus's Chicago Works was installed in two separate areas of the Museum of Contemporary Art. His installation of work from Michael Jackson Memorial Procession is included in a group show, Love to Love You, at MASS MoCA, bringing together artists who explore the notion of being a fan as an opportunity for shared social experience and extreme personal obsession.

    Constant Dullart's solo show Jennifer in Paradise opens at Import Projects in Berlin in September 2013. Featured in Being There by Jenny Jaskey, Constant also participated in an event at the New Museum in 2012 in which he released a series of works in response to the new Terms of Service conditions of several Internet services. Photographic portraits shot in Vietnam by Jamie Maxtone-Graham were shown at the Nooderlicht International Photofestival 2012 in the Netherlands this past fall. In Paris, featured artist Jo-ey Tang was selected to curate a group exhibition Forming Loss in Darkness at Praz-Delavallade as part of young curator season of Palais de Tokyo that opened in June 2013. The works in the exhibition set an alternative mise-en-scene of the rarely screened silent super-8 film Beautiful People (1998) by David Wojnarowicz, tracking the journey from slumber to death, with the history of material as a form of narrative.

    Jesper Norda's recent video and sound piece, Right Hand-Left Hand, was installed in three adjacent rooms at the Gothenburg Museum of Art in Sweden. Culturehall highlighted The Centre of Silence, an earlier sound installation at the Kalmar Museum, in our New Artists Feature, Spring 2012. A Swedish artist living in Berlin, Erik Bünger will exhibit work in a group show opening at the Gothenburg Museum in September, Nyförvärv, displaying work the museum has purchased in recent years.

    One of the artists selected for our New Artists Feature, Spring 2011, Sarah Palmer received the 2011 Aperture Portfolio Prize. A solo show of her photographic series, As A Real House, was presented by Aperture Gallery in Fall 2012. Featured in Traces along with three other women artists, Corinne May Botz was recently awarded a New York Film and Video Grant from the Jerome Foundation. The grant will fund an experimental video that will use the construction/deconstruction of a standardized patient simulation to explore empathy and the performative aspect of doctor-patient encounters.

    Featured photographers Juliana Beasley and Christoph Gielen received Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer's Fellowships in 2009 and 2010, respectively. Sasha Rudensky, whose work was included earlier this year in Scout by Jacob Rhodes, recently received one of six fellowships granted in 2013.

    Part of what made it possible for Culturehall to feature the work of this diverse and accomplished community of artists were the insights of exceptional guest curators from around the world. Culturehall has reached out to dynamic figures who shape the arts — such as curators, writers, poets, educators, artists, and gallerists — to invite them to share artists with our audience and to write essays about their work based on a curatorial theme. We've collaborated with guest curators in over twenty cities including New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, Moscow, and Mexico City.

    Culturehall would like to thank all of the guest curators who have contributed to the site: David B. Smith (28/73/91), Jordan Tate (32/62), Ruben Natal-San Miguel (34), Nina Büsing Corvallo & Candace Gottschalk (35), Erin Sickler (36), Ian Cofré (37), Leeza Meksin (39/49), Shane Lavalette (40), Zeina Assaf (41), Elissa Levy (42), Alex Ebstein & Seth Adelsberger (44/72), Matt Olson (46), Melissa Levin (48/64), Emily Carter (50), Tracy Candido (51) & Chelsea Haines (51/79), Allison Browning (52), Debora Kuan (53), Silke Bitzer (55), Jenny Jaskey (56), Ethan Greenbaum (57), Amy Fung (59), Jo-ey Tang (61), Howard Hurst (66), Oliver Wise & Eleanor Hanson Wise (67), Amy Elkins (68), Corinna Kirsch (71), Tucker Neel (75), Anna Knoebel & Tess Knoebel (76), Lauren van Haaften-Schick (78/82), Sean Justice (80), Gerardo Contreras (83), Helen Homan Wu (85), Yulia McCutcheon & Dasha Kutasina (86), Pauline Magnenat (88), Legacy Russell (89), Elly Clarke (92), Jacob Rhodes (94), Elizabeth White (95), Cindy Rucker & Brad Silk (97), Keri Oldham (98), and Abigail Smithson (100).

    Thank you also to all of the artists who have shared their work on Culturehall and to our friends and supporters. We look forward to building new relationships and featuring more exceptional artists in the years ahead.


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