Living with Contemporary Art was inspired by comments from visitors to the several museum of modern and contemporary art in which I have worked over the last nine years.  During this time, I have learned to have a great deal of respect for most of the viewers of art I have met.  By and large intelligent and inquisitive people, they are looking for the very things most artists, myself included, want to give them: insight, beauty, mystery, metaphor, formal rigor, poetry.  Yet today there is an often impassible chasm between artist and viewer, which museums rarely bridge.  Most museum professionals forget how deeply involved they are with an esoteric language, how intimidating or effete their buildings and publication can look to outsiders, how refined their arguments are.  I have learned, both as a museum educator and as an artist, to respect the basic questions visitors ask: “Who decides this is art?” “How can people live with this stuff?”

“What makes this a work of art?” is among the most fundamental questions one can ask.  Marcel Duchamp’s wonderfully subversive gesture of making a found object into a work of art simply by declaring it so has evolved into an institutionalized dictum.  A paradoxical situation exists whereby the institution certifies to its public that Duchamp’s stool and bicycle wheel, or or a pile of bubble gum, is art.  While the artist, often quite rightly, declares such assemblages to be art, for the public they are only recognizable as art in the context of the museum, because the museum tells them it is art.

What if the museum were removed from the role of certifying the object as art?  What if you found Charles Long’s BULOOP BULOOP without a wall label?  What if you ran into it in your neighbor’s house?  Living with Contemporary Art is, in part, an attempt to put these questions to the test.  The exhibition, particuarily for viewers who participated in the house tours, minimized the impact of the institutional role of The Aldich Museum as mediator between art and viewer.  The viewer confronted the work of art in a familiar context–a home–without the intercession of the Museum, its explanatory texts and pure white walls…

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I love this idea.  Living with art, particularly contemporary art, is a special experience.  I didn’t fully understand or love all of the art in our home when I was growing up (I will still have stress nightmares that include Jonathan Borofsky’s Dancing Clown) but I know that it made me more open-minded, observant and, though it may sound cheesy, enriched.  The experience also gave me a sense of what I want to live with as I start my own collection.

I understand that when purchasing a piece most people think they should want to live with it immediately and forever, but sometimes contemporary art isn’t instant and easy.  It’s kind of like avocados.  Forever I thought I hated avocados; fruit or vegetable? weird texture, weird color, weird name.  But at some point, in a moment of feeling adventurous I tried one.  I had to admit that I in fact love avocados!  Maybe living with contemporary art is like that…maybe sometimes we don’t know what we want or like until we fully embrace the experience of it…

The highlight of the trip was getting to attend Laddie John Dill’s opening at Nye + Brown.  The show included several neon pieces from the 70s and a huge site-specific sand and light piece.  It was compelling, seductive and even dreamlike.  Since being included in David Zwirner’s 2010 “Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960-1970,” a major acquisition by MOMA and all the Pacific Standard Time shows, Laddie’s works from the 60s and 70s have been rediscovered and recognized as an important body of work.  We look forward to Laddie’s upcoming show with Ochi in July…more information on that to come.

Laddie signing a poster for the show

Ed Moses and Hayley Miner

Peter Alexander and Chuck Arnoldi at Laddie's party

photos by Denis Ochi

Although Earth Day was yesterday, we really should work to honor our planet everyday.  An Ochi Shop favorite designer, Samantha Pleet, uses eco-friendly materials and processes wherever possible without compromising her amazing aesthetic.  We interviewed our new favorite designer to celebrate Earth Day.

What is your earliest memory of art making?

I have been making art since I can remember.  My mother painted and made furniture, we had a wood shop in our house, so I always had plenty of supplies.  She always had these creative activities for my sister and I, like painting blocks of wood and then she would cut them up into puzzles with her saw.  We would make costumes to wear and preform little plays, I just remember constantly making things and I have not stopped since.

During our process of choosing designers for our gallery shop you stood out because of your clothes’ beautiful and almost architectural lines-can you tell me how you make the formal and structural decisions in your designs?  

I look at inspirations, absorb ideas and then let myself freely work with the fabric on the dress form.  Everything just has to come together to make a piece just like drafting a building, it is a 3 dimensional structure but it also has to be conformable and flattering on the body.

Your collections feel quite narrative, where do you draw your inspiration from? 

Traveling is one of the ways I find ideas.  I wander around museums, sights, local cafes and shops where, I find new characters and landscapes then I can imagine. I love to go far, like Iceland or Peru, but even a day trip or a walk around the block can lead to new discoveries. I also find new muses in music, films, and books.  I bring it all together on a big board and when i feel I understand the direction for the season, I begin draping the silhouettes, finding the fabrics, and creating the original print artwork that brigs the collection to life.

You showed your FALL 12 collection at Exit Art in NYC, which is an art space. I believe you also have a fine art background. Where do you see the crossover between art and fashion? 

Art and fashion are very related in my world. I am not just making clothes, I am creating a way of seeing the world much as an artist does when they create a painting.  Part of the fun is imagining interesting ways to present the collection like making short films and fashion shows that bring people into this world.

And finally, what does it mean to use organic and green materials in your designs? Why did you decide to be Eco-friendly?

I use natural fabrics like silk, wool, and cotton in my collection and I like to use fabrics from mills who take the time to create a great product. The wool I use is from a heritage mill in Leeds England with the magical name Moon, and all their fabrics are naturally dyed.  I am also proud to produce the clothes locally in NYC factories.  I think it is everyone responsibility to be as sustainable as possible.

Check out the designer’s website here.  And see her beautiful designs on Ochi Shop here.

Hudak has two pieces included in this awesome-looking show!

If you are in New York city you should check out the show!  Press Release below:

April 19 – May 5, 2012

Artists: Taylor Absher, Brock Enright, John Filker, Leo Gabin, Peter Gerakaris, Judith Harvey, Molly Larkey, Gail Leboff, Lawrence Lee,Thom McDonell, Monica Moran, Dan Peyton, Nick Poe, Max Snow, Lee Strasburger, Michael St. John

Flash Mob is an expression used to describe a synchronized event where a group rapidly amasses at a specific time and place to perform a seemingly mundane choreographed task — an action that is often meant to critique cultural conformity.

Join Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts in New York City for its own “Flash Mob”, where the plurality of the artists’ work, concerns, and media coalesce like greased lightening before traveling upstate to the Re Institute as a new iteration of this exhibit.

The existence of so-called “Flash Mobs” predates the term itself. Historically, artists who have been united by a common time and place (such as Paris in the 1920s and NYC in the 1950s), have frequently congregated to debate cultural beliefs, concerns, and approaches to art making — such artists have used their work as a mechanism with which to question the culture of their times. Within the myriad fringe cultures of today, artists more than ever tend to generate their own societal realities and microcosms in an attempt to transcend the individual. Collectively, the artists in this exhibit remain part of this continuum, while simultaneously pushing the envelop of previous artistic movements. Here, you will find everything from fresh perspectives and appropriations of ‘traditional media’, to new media and performance-based methods — a paradoxically ‘universal plurality’ that renders each artist simultaneously “Individual” AND “Member”. Unconfined by a single medium, these artists embrace everything from photography and drawing, to sculpture, painting, and almost any possible combination therein.  What unifies them is neither a literal theme nor common medium, but rather a sensibility that acknowledges, questions, and deconstructs (if not jettisons) tradition in favor of the more unorthodox and imaginative. Striving to avoid the regurgitation of their own ideas, this Flash Mob boldly pushes boundaries through its ambition of perpetual transformation.

Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies. - Anish Kapoor

Megan Murphy, Seer, 2012

It’s thinking about being spring here in Ketchum and while it’s definitely slack (you know it’s slack when the paper is only 12 pages long) we are working hard to finalize our summer schedule.  We’ll keep you posted about our awesome upcoming shows and SPRING events!

Join our mailing list if you don’t already get our info.  In the meantime here are some tunes to make your Good Friday extra good.


Create a MySpace Music Playlist at MixPod.com

Megan Murphy, Sublime, 2012

Storm Tharp, Crepe de Chine

March 9 – May 1, 350 Walnut Avenue

Opening Reception March 9, 5-8 PM

Ochi Gallery is pleased to present the work of Megan Murphy and Storm Tharp. Both

Northwest artists, Tharp based in Portland, OR and Murphy in Hailey, ID, the two artists’ works create a thoughtful conversation within the context of one another.

Interested in 1970’s American cinema and Japanese portrait prints, Tharp’s characters come to life via a process involving water and mineral ink. The results are figures that feel at the same time transparent and solid, beautiful and bizarre. Though hardly traditional, with features fluid yet exact, Tharp’s portraits exude personality and narrative.

Relating to his portraits and created during his TBA:10 residency, Tharp’s grid of colors was part of a larger installation called High House. The piece consists of several like- colored panels, distinguishable only by being in proximity to one another. Tharp’s more minimal works inform his portraits by exploring color identity and how it tells a story.

Through a process equally unique as Tharp’s, Murphy creates quiet, contemplative works that despite representing actual locations, seem to transcend place and time.

Working with glass, mirror and photography Murphy creates works that incorporate the viewer through their semi-reflective surfaces. In doing so, Murphy’s landscapes seem to ask us to consider our place within the grander scheme and our transient experiences with nature. We feel as though we should be quiet and meditative with these works.

They are layered, like nature itself; simple and complex, mysterious and wise and memorably, hauntingly beautiful.

Long-time friends who have followed one another’s successful careers, Tharp being included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, and Murphy winner of the Pacific Northwest Art

Awards in 2011, the two artists are perhaps not an obvious two-person show. But both of them, through individually complex processes, explore questions of human nature, beauty and the capacity of art to capture a moment and idea.