For obvious reasons I am really excited about the line-up for the upcoming First Friday. It isn’t like I’m not usually overjoyed with the monthly art stroll, but this month is a real send-off to 2007, complete with art, words, and music — it’s all covered this weekend. So bundle up, arrive a little early, and be prepared to stay a little late — with a full slate of events, you’ll thank yourself at the end of the night that you did.
Laurie Brainerd’s Fiber Art Space has only been at the location just above Joe Blue’s in the Blue Star Arts Complex since the middle of September, but Brainerd has already brought in watercolorist Sue Vittner and painter and fiber artist Leighann Foster. For this month’s First Friday stroll, Brainerd is showing artist Laurel Gibson’s Attracting Opposites, which features Gibson’s work with coffee filters, yoga, and embroidery.
Gibson utilizes a constant theme of conflict between East and West within her works. She draws inspiration from religions and symbols from early mankind to modern-day. In one of her featured works, “Love is to Hate as Lotus is to Scorpion,” Gibson uses three embroidered figures, two on each side and one embroidered over what appears to be a tie-dyed coffee filter; Gisbon delves into a very organic style of work.
In an attempt to build a dialogue with the Austin visual-arts community, Bill FitzGibbons and Blue Star Contemporary Art Center will be hosting Selections from the Texas Biennial 2007, culled from the second bi-annual juried show, held in Austin earlier this year. The show has been up since mid-November and will remain at Blue Star until January 20, 2008. Nine artists from the Texas Biennial are represented — with works ranging from the delicate paper shadow boxes of Michael Velliquette to the large-scale site-specific installations of Brad Tucker and Buster Graybill.
An incentive to visit this exhibit ahead of Friday is a brief 30-minute performance by Trucker’s one-man band 8 p.m. Thursday at Blue Star. Trucker will be mixing pre-programmed video projections, videos on TV monitors, and sculptural room interventions with live musical instrumentation and singing. It’s a cross between karaoke and performance art, a very odd artistic combo.
More First Friday
events include:
6-8pm
Sweet Remedy: Narratives in Oil p
UTSA Satellite Space, 111 Blue Star (located in the Blue Star Arts Complex), (210) 212-7146
Anabel Toribio’s graduate art show will feature oil on canvas paintings depicting the human figure and “portraits” of medicine cabinets containing personal bath and beauty products — exploring the daily routine of physical maintanence. Toribio will be earning her master’s degree in fine arts from UTSA this month.
6-9pm
New Elders of Zion
cactus bra SPACE, 106 C Blue Star, (210) 226-6688
Noah Simblist will explore the limits of symbolic meaning in political, religious, and quasi-religious modernist iconography with New Elders of Zion, starring Simblist’s fictional organization of Christian Zionists. The exhibit includes a manifesto and drawings that the group made to map out the various stages of the end times. This fictional group’s mission is to borrow strategies from avant-garde artists of the early 20th-century to fulfill a Biblical prophecy. It’s interesting to note that San Antonio is home to John Hagee, a prominent Zionist with political connections.
6-9pm
Reception for Marble, a poetry journal
Stella House, 106 Blue Star, Bldg B (located in Blue Star Arts Complex), (210) 416-8938
Marble, a locally produced poetry journal, will be celebrating the publication of its third issue while hosting a one-of-a-kind poetry installation, as well as photographs from the journal by Andrew Watson and S. Tyler Rutherford. Marble has been in existence for three years and publishes professionals as well as emerging writers.
9pm
iParty III – All ’80s Version
Salon Mijangos, 1906 S. Flores, (210) 271-9592
Bring your iPod complete with ’80s dance tunes (no playlists are accepted, sorry) and dance the night away a la Flashdance. NeoAztlan, a San Antonio-based, online, contemporary art, music, and culture journal is throwing this free event. What a perfect way to end First Friday: dancing to The Cure and Siouxsie & the Banshees. •
