Founded in 1975, Real Art Ways in Hartford is one of America’s oldest alternative contemporary art spaces. Its longevity is a testament to the depth of its support from the government and the local community, but also to its terrific exhibition program. As other museums increasingly treat art as a branch of the entertainment business, exhibitions at Real Art Ways continue to raise serious questions about the social function of the artist and the nature of artistic commentary.

Eschewing the accessible and the pervasive, “Archaeology of Wonder” presents two dozen works by 16 young and emerging artists that challenge and provoke. I am not saying I like them all, but I like the fact that these works are here.

The show encourages viewers to think about the ways in which artists evoke and reflect on the past. Kristina Newman-Scott, the gallery’s curator and the organizer of this show, is on to something: Art that draws inspiration from personal and social histories has enjoyed popularity over the past few years, judging by my visits to galleries in New York’s Chelsea district.

Simone Leigh’s “Queen Bee” (2008), a weird, ornamented chandelier-like object filling the exhibition entrance, incorporates symbolic objects and materials to evoke the past. The artist decorated the chandelier, a symbol of luxury and decadence, with African-themed elements, including metal spikes reminiscent of nails driven into Central African ceremonial sculptures. The sculpture, which looks like Sputnik, idiosyncratically links slavery with empire.

Sigmund Freud used archaeological excavation as a metaphor for the process of remembering the past, especially repressed, traumatic experiences dredged up from the subconscious during therapy. Several works dealing with childhood are assembled here, notably Yuko Suzuki’s colorful silhouettes made of cut-out, painted pieces of plywood that fill the back wall of the main gallery.

Early phases of childhood are the subject of the silhouettes, many of which depict moments when children, particularly girls, unable to distinguish between right and wrong, innocently engage in aberrant behavior. “Victim” (2001) shows a teddy bear stabbed with pencils. Another wood-cut silhouette, “Message” (2005), shows a young girl without pants urinating and defecating on the floor.

Isolation and the vulnerability of childhood are the subjects of Sally B. Moore’s intricate and wonderfully intriguing hanging sculptures made of wood, wire and various other materials. They look a bit like the deconstructed interiors of doll’s houses, with a miscellany of rooms and platforms linked by flimsy stairs and ladders. Curious, incidental details like miniature furniture, fake trees and patches of grass enrich the overall vision of a self-contained fantasy world.

Childhood memories and experiences can also spring to mind as one stands in front of Brian Burkhardt’s “Seven Specimen Surveillance Beetle Painting” (2006), a rainbow pattern made up of several, sequential rows of artificial beetles arranged according to their color (each of the creatures is handmade by the artist in his studio). I was reminded of stamp, coin and insect collections assembled as a child, but also those displays of insects and birds seen at natural history museums.

It is often said that art holds a mirror to its times, but it can also hold a mirror to the past, as evidenced by Julia Brown’s “American Vernacular” (2007), a compelling five-minute video inspired by the representation of African-Americans in advertising and as decoration on household goods, especially from the late 19th century. The video consists of a series of vignettes in which one person, usually white, treats another, often but not always black, as an object — in one scene, for example, a black hand scoops soup from a bowl into the mouth of a woman.

By now it should be obvious that there is a collective strangeness to the works in this exhibition, some of which defy an easy explanation. None more so than “Daedalus” (2008) by Javier Piñón, an installation consisting of a comfortable armchair decorated with bull horns and enclosed in a miniature pen installed in the middle of the gallery. Every few minutes the chair begins to buck and swivel in simulation of a practice bull for rodeo riders.

According to the exhibition room sheet, Piñón, of Cuban descent, grew up in Houston, where he became enamored of cowboys and bull-riding. Knowing this, one is tempted to read the installation as homage to his youth, the solitary yearning of an artist caught up in his own dreams and memories of childhood. But the piece also succeeds in evoking a broader impulse — the freedom and imaginary romance of the cowboy life.

Other works assembled for this excellent exhibition also touch on themes of isolation, injustice and childhood memories. Taken together, they evoke the passage of time in intriguing ways

.: Read the article at NYTimes.com

Real Art Ways' monthly Creative Cocktail Hours are always fun, with great art, food and music, but Thursday's event offered something a little different: Hartford Symphony Orchestra's Horn Quartet gave the audience a glimpse into how a chamber music ensemble rehearses.

"Tonight, we're going to be deciding on a program that we're performing Dec. 14," said musician Barbara Hill before their working rehearsal. "We haven't looked at any of the music, with the exception of maybe one piece."

Besides Hill, the horn quartet includes Emery Tapley, Hilary Ledebuhr and Andrew Spearman.

"We're not all stuffed shirts all the time," said Tapley, HSO's director of education.

Thursday, they were entirely informal.

"Rarely do you get to have that intimate experience where you can ask them questions about their process and stop them in the middle of what their doing," said Kristina Newman-Scott, Real Art Ways' director of visual arts.

Brendan Callahan and Brandi Cahill, both of West Hartford, were attending their first Creative Cocktail Hour.

"We're pretty convinced it's a great place to meet other young people in the Greater Hartford area," said Cahill.

Java spotted the cutest baby (and possibly the youngest Real Art Ways member), 5-month-old Samuel Henzerling, with his dad, Daniel Henzerling, checking out Carol Padberg's art exhibition in the Real Room.

"To tell you the truth, he looks like he's ready to be fed," said Daniel, equipped with a bottle, burp cloth and blankie. Mom is Jane Henzerling, director of advancement at Real Art Ways.

.: Read the original article at courant.com

I believe I have noted in the past that, as a reviewer, I have a conflicted relationship with themed shows. When presented with an exhibition like Archaeology of Wonder at Real Art Ways, do I consider the individual works through that frame? Or is it better to ignore the frame and contemplate each on its own? Kristina Newman-Scott, RAW's Director of Visual Arts and the curator of this show, describes her process in her curator's statement. "Archaeology" in this sense is symbolic. (The "wonder" in the show's title refers to the revelatory moments that viewers may experience when confronted with a particularly powerful work of art.) Newman-Scott writes, "Like Freud...who used archaeological excavation as a metaphor for the process of remembering or unearthing life experiences, I wanted to explore the life story of individual works of art."

It is a worthy metaphor around which to organize a show. But it can also be a distraction. Given the multiplicity of ideas and media offered here, trying to consider the works through any one given frame seems a mistake. So I'm not going to.

That said, I'll note that one of the first works that catch the eye as one enters the main gallery are Yuko Suzuki's wood cutouts on the back wall. Suzuki digs into childhood memories for inspiration. Her cutouts, which read almost as wall drawings, reference the contradictions of early childhood—particularly that of young girls—in which innocence and budding worldliness clash. These cutouts capture moments at the nexus of socialization, making for some awkward humor. In "Message," a girl squats on the ground to urinate and defecate while a cat sniffs at her excrement. The "victim" in "Victim" is a one-eyed teddy bear impaled by pencils. Childhood frustration is vented on an inanimate object (yet one imbued with a simulation of life and personality).

Harriet Caldwell's "Cerebration" looks to the other end of the life cycle. It is a meditation on the functioning of the brain. In particular, Caldwell is concerned with the brain under stress, as with Alzheimer's. This mixed media work incorporates drawing, sculpture and installation, and a very popular material for artists these days, beeswax. Dozens upon dozens of circular vellum panels are hung in layers, held together by a network of threads. Caldwell has drawn in ink and graphite on the vellum, which is also treated with the wax. The drawn imagery is a mix of scientific representations of brain functioning—scans, chemical diagrams—and representations of memories. Memories are associated with faces or, more impressionistically, silhouettes of figures alone or with others. The vellum panels with drawings are clustered around the center of the installation. Panels toward the top and the edges and especially toward the bottom tend to be blank. Caldwell's piece posits consciousness as a complex, multi-layered process: the intersection of biology, chemistry and interconnected humanity. The wrinkling of the vellum from the beeswax treatment also evokes the topography of the brain.

Well, bees are bugs and bugs don't bug Julia Gail Oldham. I'm sure some scientist could correct me if I'm wrong, but I think humans and insects probably share a lot more DNA in common than most of us would think (or perhaps be comfortable with). Oldham's video, "Night Spider," makes the leap from the idea of shared DNA to that of a shared attachment to social experiences and ritual. Oldham has studied bugs in "an attempt to enter the mind of the invertebrate." She videotaped herself at night engaged in a series of motions mimicking invertebrate mating dances and communication rituals. Hands and feet planted in the grass, rocking from side to side. Bent over and repetitively pawing at the ground. Flapping her arms, crooked at the elbows like wings. With its sped-up imagery and added soundtrack, "Night Spider" is compellingly disconcerting. We don't see Oldham's face. Instead, she assumes the identity of a human bug.

For Brian Burkhardt, bugs are also a source of fascination. In the main gallery, we meet the beetles in his triptych "Seven Specimen Surveillance Beetle Painting." Behind the glass within the three wood frames Burkhardt has arranged a rainbow of handmade beetles in the formation of an arch. They may be seven different species—signified through color schemes and markings—but on close inspection each is individuated. As in an entomologist's display, they are stuck to the backing with pins. With their shiny carapaces and wings they are almost jewel-like. The militaristic precision of their organization is appealingly disrupted in the right panel. One of the beetles in the forward row breaks ranks to fly off on its own. In the two works by Chad Curtis (Web site), cows—either as drawings in "Turbines" or porcelain figurines in "Cows"—become symbols of the intersection of the biological and industrial worlds. Approximately 20,000 black licorice mice comprise Tom Bogaert's "Colline au Milles Souris." The floor installation targets Eurocentric notions of "rudderless third-world humanity impulsively acting out ancient ritual blood feuds," according to Bogaert's statement. The piece has a kinetic dynamism, static yet with a palpable sense of upward thrust and motion. The masses of mice are all pointed upward, all rushing over each other to reach the pinnacle. Yet, at the pinnacle, there is no "there" there—it's a dead end.

Remember having to diagram sentences in school? Brian Lund must have really enjoyed that. Lund takes the concept of diagramming to what may be an absurdist extreme. His series of seemingly abstract drawings ("Edit Cuts from the Motion Picture Showgirls") is in actuality a deconstruction of the notorious flop. Lund devised his own system of analysis and contextualization, cross-referenced with index cards. The drawings, executed with color pencils, have their own compositional integrity apart from their inspiration.

Heather Hart queried folks connected to Real Art Ways on books that had particular meaning for them or strong impact on their lives. Each participant named two books and gave some reasons for their choices. Hart knitted yarn cozies for each pair of books. The cozies join and protect the books but also obscure and hide them. For her installation, "Notations of a Hybrid," Hart set the cozied books on two shelves in a little mini-den. On top of a tattered oriental rug, a couple of comfortable chairs are provided for sitting and perusing the books—they are unreadable in the cozies. On the wall, Hart sketched out her own diagram, linking book titles with excerpts and commentary on their importance.

There is a complementarity between the undulations of Lund's abstract diagrams, with their suggestions of exotic dancers, and Sally Moore's wood constructions in the nearby room. Moore's two sculptures suggest miniature architectural dreamscapes, imaginative and inviting yet also fragile and easily susceptible to dissolution. In turn, her delicate fabrications—marked by carved spiral staircases, ladders and splintered collapsing planks—resonate with Javier Piñón's collages in the same room. Piñón, son of Cuban parents and raised in Houston, Texas, is fascinated by the American cowboy myth. His collages—and his striking installation "Daedalus," with its confining rough hewn wood fence and bucking chair framed by large bull horns—depict the cowboy myth as a construct that is, on the one hand, active and powerful while at the same time being constraining and unstable.

Identity—and its sociopolitical ramifications—is at the heart of Simone Leigh's "Queen Bee." Leigh's stunning chandelier-like sculpture hangs from the ceiling in the main gallery, bearing down on viewers with the weight of gender and race oppression. It consists of a large cluster of rounded forms with pointed, nipple-like tips aiming downward. They suggest multiple referents: breasts, bombs, bunches of ripe tropical fruit. A profusion of thin metal spikes—old car antennas—flare outwards, referencing the nail sculptures of Nkisi fetishes as well early Space Age satellite iconography. Leigh's piece is particularly evocative of Newman-Scott's interest in the process, the life story, of artworks. Its existence is shaped, formed, by a confluence of intellectual/ideological/historical factors—Black Liberation thought of the 1960's and 1970's, feminism, Orientalism, empire—as well as by physical and aesthetic considerations, including the use of traditional and contemporary artmaking techniques and materials.

In Elia Alba's (Web site) video "Se Revela, Se Devela," the male figure's face is never seen. Throughout the two-minute loop, he appears to struggle with a wrapping of pinkish cloth around his head. From glimpses of the man's shoulders and upper torsos it is possible to surmise that he is African-American or Latino. Does it matter? The man's motions present a puzzle. Is he engaged in a struggle to unveil himself, to drop the mask? Or is he wrapping himself up, a living mummy, endeavoring to hide from the world the more definitive signifiers of his identity?

Julia Brown's video "American Vernacular" was shot in an historic Maine barn house. As Brown notes in her statement, "the video features a series of scenes of physical interaction in domestic settings, in which one person uses another as an object." Many of these scenes are racially charged, as when a light-skinned woman—Brown herself—sips soup from the cupped palm of a Black man. (We see only his hand and forearm.) The racial dynamic is reversed in a different scene where a Black woman holds the legs of a white woman, seeming to use her to churn butter. The video was inspired by Black Americana objects, which were first manufactured in the late 19th century and "frequently feature representations of Black characters as decorations on household goods." In Brown's video, this dehumanizing kitsch is foregrounded by situations in which one person uses another as a tool in a domestic task without regard to their personhood.

Kitsch also informs Valerie Garlick's "Under My Skin," a 2:42 video loop. Garlick's video is considerably more lighthearted than Brown's. It is one of a series of videos Garlick has made interpreting old love songs in unconventional ways. Playing off an old recording of Cole Porter's "I've Got you Under My Skin," Garlick—lipstick-bright lips in a pout—acts out a pantomime of clinical romantic obsession. Shot using green screen technology and with her image edited in front of a postcard beach scene, Garlick scratches off her "skin," actually a layer of dried Elmer's glue.

And, speaking of archaeology, Kristina Newman-Scott dug up a couple of artists working in a medium that almost seems archaic these days: painting. "Retro kitsch" is one of the elements informing Jennifer Knaus' (Web site) anthropomorphic still lifes. (Others include Art History and "the salad bar at Stop & Shop.") There is a whiff of Surrealist whimsy in her amalgamations of fruits, vegetables and flowers into representations of women's faces and bodies. Like Knaus, Justin McAllister combines strong technique with a quirky conceptualism. McAllister has been depicting ice glaciers as "a character" in his paintings since 2003. In his statement, he writes, "Riffing off nineteenth-century American painting, they act as a predator, literalizing the sublime." And it is, in fact, sublime—if not ridiculous—to see a great wall of ice advancing down High Street in New Haven in McAllister's oil painting "Ground to Bits II." The glacier is bearing down on the building housing the Skull and Bones secret society, which counts among its alumni both Presidents Bush as well as Sen. John Kerry. Of course, it's always a pleasure to see nature put the power elite in its crosshairs. Even more so when depicted with such painterly skill: McAllister has expertly captured the color temperature of frigid afternoon winter light. I dig it.

.: Read the original post at ctartscene.blogspot.com

Joni Mitchell — folk icon, beautiful Canadian, lover of legends, committed smoker, bad-ass painter, and genius songwriter — has been known to compare her compositions to the art songs of Schubert. Nobody ever said she was humble. But, though there are countless imitators, scores of high-voiced phony Jonis, legions of Ladies of the Canyon who only wish their diary scribblings and wailing had even a shred of Mitchell's fierce artistry, insight and beauty, few have managed to capture her essence. The one exception may be the performance artist John Kelly, who, incidentally, treats Mitchell's songs with the same reverence that a soprano would a Mozart aria. Hartford is extraordinarily lucky to get the rare chance of seeing Kelly perform as Joni Mitchell in Paved Paradise at Real Art Ways.

Kelly is a dancer, visual artist, actor and musician. He's sung the music of John Cage. He's performed with Blue Man Group and Antony and the Johnsons and he's been on Broadway with Christopher Walken. But Kelly may be best known for his work portraying Joni Mitchell. "This is my one connection with the popular culture," said Kelly, in a phone conversation from New York. "I guess it's understandable."

I suppose one should add this to Kelly's list of achievements: Joni Mitchell has seen his performance at least three times and she seems to fully approve. But what's not to approve of? A dude wearing a blond wig and singing in an impressive, if slightly frightening, counter tenor while the crowd goes out of their minds, yelling "I love you, Joni!" (check it out on YouTube) — that's good entertainment.

But before you get all carried away anticipating some campy drag show, think again. Kelly's performance is as likely to leave you teary eyed — to "clobber" you, as he puts it — as it is to give you a gay-kitsch popcorn high (though you might get that too). Expect to hear some of the monuments from Joni's songbook — like "Blue" and "Woodstock" — but also expect to hear lesser-known compositions from Court and Spark, Mitchell's landmark 1974 release. Part of Kelly's zeal is to convey the full breadth of Mitchell's songwriting artistry.

"For me it feels like a bit of a mission to remind people that she's been functioning as a musician since then, and she's not just the cliché flaxen-haired ingenue, and her music is challenging and political, as well as remaining personal."

Kelly first began channeling Mitchell in 1985 at the first Wigstock Festival in New York's East Village. "Originally, my first impulse was to sing the music," said Kelly. "As an actor, I thought, 'Do I want to take it to the next place and conjure up the visual?' And that's where the drag part of it came. It didn't begin with drag, and, of course, drag gets all the attention, and in a way I've had a very tenuous connection with that part of it."

Using transcripts of Mitchell's actual on-stage banter, Kelly tries to capture the essence of Joni.

"She's a raconteur," says Kelly. "This show is serious, but it can be very funny and absurd to straddle that place of irony and pathos, and that's something that's very doable with this show. I like to make people laugh, but then I like to clobber them with a beautifully rendered version of this beautiful song. It's a fun back and forth."

.: Read the story at hartfordadvocate.com

Je Banach, who worked at Real Art Ways as the Visual Arts Coordinator, just received a Greater Hartford Arts Council Fiction Grant. Sam McKinniss, who showed at Real Art Ways in summer 2008, received a Greater Hartford Arts Council artist grant for painting. Congratulations, Je and Sam!

Over the past several years, photography has evolved from a replica of the world we live in, to a carefully constructed and digitally enhanced version of reality. In her new show entitled Cutouts, Reka Reisinger’s series of self portraits tackles this theme with images that are both visually confusing and undeniably authentic. The Hungarian-born artist constructs life-size cardboard cutouts of her own likeness by hand and then re-photographs them out in the world where Reisinger does “…not use any digital manipulation to composite the pictures”. The end result is a disjointed and collaged look that explores the “…sometimes-indistinguishable relationship between the real and fake.”

Reisinger’s portraits range from backdrops of vast, open, and untouched scenes of nature to the developed and bustling heart of New York City, where the artist lives and works today. In Untitled (Time Square), Reisinger’s cutout stands in the middle of the gleaming and bustling city streets. Surrounded by bright lights and larger-than-life advertisements; the scene highlights the digitally altered imagery that bombards our senses every day. What’s interesting is the fact that Reisinger’s propped-up portrait is, in many ways, less artificial than its highly stylized surroundings. While the promotional posters and neon advertisements lining the streets have been edited, touched up, and approved by many sets of discerning eyes before reaching the public; Reisinger’s portrait is an unaltered, traditional photograph that has been hand-crafted by a single artist. This disparity creates tension between trusting what we perceive as realistic and what is truly real.

Several of the portraits in the Cutouts series are set in picturesque scenes of American landscapes. In her photograph Untitled (Yosemite), Reisinger’s flat portrait stands in tall grass with immense mountains and evergreens behind her. The scene resembles a primitive digital experiment “from the early days of Photoshop” where Reisinger’s image is crudely pasted over this pristine backdrop. Ironically, images of nature are often enhanced with light, color, and carefully choreographed composition using this technology. By creating this "collaged and altered” look in a new way, Reisinger brings attention to advances in digital photography by using a traditional in-camera processes. The act of an original alteration is preserved, behaving as both a record of performance and a altered projection of self.

Some of Reisinger’s photographs feature her cardboard cutout engaged in pseudo-relationships with other individuals, interacting with them in various situations. In Untitled (Birthday), one of Reisinger’s cutouts stands among a circle of friends, propped up in position to blow out the candles on her birthday cake. The relationship between the inanimate cutout and her surroundings serves as a commentary on the logic of pictures that have been pieced together with digital technology. Often scenes that portray romantic relationships or friendships are composite together, with no authentic connection between the original figures. In some ways, the concept of Reisinger’s two-dimension figure standing in with these individuals is a lot more “real” than a highly polished photo composite together after multiple photo-shoots, digital editing, and extensive consultation with creative experts. By making the seams obvious, you see Reisinger's desires made out in plain view, rather than illusion.

Many of Reisinger’s portraits play off the illogical nature of modern photographs with a great sense of humor. Her Untitled (Bathroom) photo, the legs of her cutout peek out from under a public bathroom stall — an unromantic and mildly grotesque scene. In Untitled (Swimsuit) her cardboard portrait stands ankle-deep in a wading pool decked out in scuba gear and flippers. Set on what appears to be a hotel resort, the landscape is complete with white plastic chairs and a maintenance worker in the background. With the imagery of palm trees and blue water, the photo represents an idealistic advertisement for anything from Corona to designer swimsuits. However, the inherent humor and awkwardness of the scene bring out its ultimate truthfulness. It reminds us that although we venerate those pristine and perfectly fine-tuned images, Reisinger’s distracting visual background noise and disenchanted version is much closer to our everyday experience.

By orchestrating these scenes with a cutout of her own image, Reisinger’s work is reminiscent of performance art suspended in time. Yet instead of making herself the subject, Reisinger is using her image as a vehicle to explore the relationship between the technology and image making in our world today. Her work can be compared to Cindy Sherman's famed Untitled Film Stills series, circa 1977. The pictures were a parody of “…fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blonde actress…) played by Sherman herself.” Sherman’s series investigated the expectations and limitations of female figures in cinematography of the time. These photographs, like Reisinger’s, are not about creating ordinary portraits; but use the artist’s own figure to explore broader themes that comment on the expectations that we bring to an image.

Just as modern painting responded to photography by exploring the uniqueness of its flat surface and corporeal medium; modern photography is now defying the new technology of digital imaging by focusing on its ability to capture an authentic moment in time. Reisinger’s pieces offer a subtle distinction from shiny, perfectly sculpted, photographic imagery that we’ve become accustomed to in our everyday sensory experience. In doing so, she raises interesting questions about the truthfulness of the medium, the technology behind the finished product we see, and our attraction to glamorized digital images that are not from this world.

.: See the original story on Big Red & Shiny

Photographer Reka Reisinger opens a show tonight from 6 to 8 at the monthly Creative Cocktail Hour at Real Art Ways in Hartford.

Her show, "Cutouts," has 12 images meant to show the lifeless synthetic quality of computer generated art. Cardboard cutouts of her image are put in familiar settings such as a vacation, a family portrait and a birthday.

Reisinger is from Budapest, Hungary, and a graduate of the Yale University School of Art. She lives in New York City.

Admission to the cocktail party is $10; $5 for RAW members. A $3 donation is suggested for the exhibit. Reisinger will talk about her work Oct. 2 from 6 to 7 p.m. at the gallery.

.: See the original story on The Hartford Courant

.: Download PDF

By MATT EAGAN - Courant Staff Writer

Sam McKinniss is certain of one thing.

"There aren't enough sexy pictures in the world," McKinniss says. "There's a lot of porn but not a lot of truly sexy pictures."

McKinniss is doing his best to change that. He is one of four artists with work on display at Real Art Ways.

The works range from portraiture to video installation but they are connected by a willingness to examine how we look at the world and how the world looks back.

Three of the artists, McKinniss, Corinne Rae Beardsely and David Politzer, are winners from Real Art Ways' open-call competition and were selected by an independent jury from among 290 applicants. (The fourth artist, Margaret Murphy, opens her show tonight during Creative Cocktail Hour).

McKinniss and Beardsley are graduates of the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford.

"It's so great to see our students being successful so early out of the gate," says the art school dean Power Boothe. "They were stars at the school, and they are becoming stars outside the school."

Beardsley's ceramic sculptures seem to have a kinship with '60s-style pornography but the scale of the works and the self-awareness of her subjects negate the voyeuristic aspects.

"They know they are being looked at, and that gives them power," Beardsley says. "These come from my own ideal. My friends modeled for me. The mojo for the work comes from these conversations and interactions I had while working in my studio."

The gaze is also the theme of "True Love," a collection of McKinniss portraits.

"I'm opposed to the cliché of the portrait capturing a subject," McKinniss says. "I want to be captured and captivated by them."

His portraits are pictures of people attempting to seduce the viewer. At first glance, this doesn't seem all that different from the way fashionable faces are captured in the pages of glossy magazines. These are more artfully rendered but the superficial impact is the same.

A second look clouds the issue.

The subjects in these paintings aren't sneering at us with that odd mixture of longing and loathing that fashion models perfect. These faces are frozen at a perfect moment when one looks across a room and sees an interesting face — a face that wants to be seen — for the first time.

There are playful elements to his show — a painting of ABBA on a picnic — but when one stands in the middle of his works there is an eerie sense of being watched.

It's only an illusion, but it's powerful and a little disquieting.

If the first two exhibitions examine the way we look at other people, David Politzer is concerned with the way images from our mass culture become fixed in our brains.

His video installations focus on the issues of the self-help industry as well as the iconography of the cowboy in American culture.

"At the base of all my work is male insecurity," Politzer says. "Male insecurity over body issues, sex, the notion of being a role model and his place in the family."

Politzer's work alludes to the world of movie director John Ford, who sent the lonely Ethan Edwards wandering off into the dust at the end of "The Searchers."

The exhibit's dominant installation sets television up as an awe-inspiring marvel and then creates a debate between a self-help guru and an increasingly angry Everyman unable to rid himself of guilt.

The parody of the world's Dr. Phils is almost too close for comedy, but Politzer assures us there is humor at work.

Murphy's work, which opens tonight, fits in thematically as it examines our complicity in the creation of the stereotypes that make up the ideal women.

Murphy paints portraits of mass-produced female figurines. After she began the project, Murphy discovered that the figurines representing traditional feminine values had what she describes as "mustard colored hair." The black-haired figurines were the so-called bad girls.

SAM MCKINNIS, David Politzer and Corinne Rae Beardsley's works are on display at Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor St., Hartford through Aug. 24.

Margaret Murphy's exhibit opens tonight at the Creative Cocktail Hour, 6 to 10 p.m. Admission is $10, $5 for members. The show runs through Aug. 17.

Regular gallery hours are Tuesday through Thursday and Sunday, 2 to 10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 2 to 11 p.m. Suggested donation is $3. Information call 860-232-1006 or visit www.realartways.org.

Contact Matt Eagan at eagan@courant.com.

Original Article on Courant.com

Java: MaryEllen Fillo

If we're truly living in a Barbie world, only a handful of partyers at Real Art Ways' Creative Cocktail Hour Thursday admitted to ever idolizing the icon.

With seductive ceramic nudes (by artist Corinne Rae Beardsley) and portraits of mass-produced female figurines (by Margaret Murphy) titillating guests at the summer's hottest-yet cocktail hour, talk of Barbie and her friends (Skipper, Stacey and that tart, Midge) filled the somewhat naughty-themed room.

"I hated Barbie," said UConn Law School student Kate Grelle, who claimed to have never owned a Barbie doll. "Even at that young age she kind of gave me a complex. She was too perfect. I was more of a Care Bears kind of girl.

"I had tons of Barbies, and I named all of them Kelley and Liz," said Christie Corrigan, a housing coordinator and case manager for Salvation Army's Marshall House, who wasn't bothered by Barbie's perfection because "I thought I was tall and perfect."

Attendees of the monthly cocktail hour — some enjoying the equally forbidden absinthe, Thursday's featured cocktail — had mixed reviews of Beardsley's sexually harged pajama-party ceramic installation.

"Clearly, this artist hasn't grappled with cellulite issues," said media consultant Marianne O'Hare. "I think this is what men think that women do when they're together. I don't remember my dorm room having the same joie de vivre."

— Teresa M. Pelham, Special to The Courant

Read the original article on Cournat.com

We asked you to vote and you did!  Sarah Anne Johnson, who exhibited at Real Art Ways in 2005, won the inaugural Grange Prize.  The Grange Prize recognizes the best of Canadian and international photography.  

It doesn't leave much room for confusion: It's titled "Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex," and the book's cover is filled with dirty words.

"At Borders, it was shelved in the back of the store for 'reference,'" says Ellen Sussman, the book's editor. "Which is a little weird, because if you're looking for a dictionary, that's really not what you're looking for."

Sussman and a handful of the book's contributors will be appearing at Real Art Ways in Hartford Monday and at the Green Street Arts Center in Middletown Tuesday. They will read from and sign copies of the book.

Don't let the word "literary" in the title throw you off. The writing is good, sure, but it pulls no punches for the sake of good taste. Many of the titles of the encyclopedia's 94 entries are unprintable here.

The format of "Dirty Words" ($19.99, Bloomsbury USA) is modeled after encyclopedias, but only if encyclopedias were written by folks who lean toward the very confessional. Each of the alphabetically listed entries is based on a sex term and begins with a cut-and-dried definition. Contributors were pretty much given free reign from there. Entries include poems, short stories and reminiscences on their sexual topic of choice.

"I wanted them to find something that excited them, so to speak," says Sussman, 53, who lives outside of San Francisco.

Sussman says she got the idea for "Dirty Words" when she realized that literary writers did some of their best work when the topic is sex. Finding more than 90 high-caliber writers to muse on the subject wasn't difficult. She sent out a few e-mails, and word spread. Soon, writers were contacting her to get in on the project.

Terms explored range from the common ("one-night stand") to the mysterious ("silver-balling"), from the acronymic ("LUG," or lesbian until graduation) to the obscure ("cicisbeo," a married woman's lover or escort).

As editor of the anthology "Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave," published last year, Sussman is no stranger to sex writing. But even she found herself at a loss when it came to some of the terms contributors chose — "fobbing," for instance. Contributor Sam Brumbaugh, who says it's the act of crying during sex, will be one of the writers featured Monday and Tuesday.

Other folks reading from the book include Dan Pope ("coitus interruptus"), Mary-Ann Tirone Smith (on a specific form of fellatio) and Thaisa Frank ("piercings"). Sussman will read from her entry "69," which considers how her dyslexia makes a particular position a little tricky.

The book's title is an attention-getter, but Sussman thinks it's something of a misnomer.

"I actually don't think there is such a thing as dirty words," she says. "I don't think there's anything dirty about any of this stuff. Let's just look at this stuff head on."

The reading at Real Art Ways begins at 7 p.m. Monday with a reception and a cash bar. For more information, call (860) 232-1006, or go to www.realartways.org. The event at the Green Street Arts Center's is Tuesday at 7 p.m. Suggested donation is $5; because of mature content, it is recommended for people 18 and older. For more information, call (860) 685-7871, or go to www.greenstreetartscenter.org.

Contact William Weir at bweir@courant.com.

Link to article, here.

Buffalo, NY--Dr. Steven Kurtz, a Professor of Visual Studies at SUNY at Buffalo and cofounder of the award-winning art and theater group Critical Art Ensemble, has been cleared of all charges of mail and wire fraud. On April 21, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara dismissed the government's entire indictment against Dr. Kurtz as "insufficient on its face." This means that even if the actions alleged in the indictment (which the judge must accept as "fact") were true, they would not constitute a crime. The US Department of Justice had thirty days from the date of the ruling to appeal. No action has been taken in this time period, thus stopping any appeal of the dismissal. According to Margaret McFarland, a spokeswoman for US Attorney Terrance P. Flynn, the DoJ will not appeal Arcara's ruling and will not seek any new charges against Kurtz.

For over a decade, cultural institutions worldwide have hosted Kurtz and Critical Art Ensemble's educational art projects, which use common science materials to examine issues surrounding the new biotechnologies. In 2004 the Department of Justice alleged that Dr. Kurtz had schemed with colleague Dr. Robert Ferrell of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health to illegally acquire two harmless bacteria cultures for use in one of those projects. The Justice Department further alleged that the transfer of the material from Ferrell to Kurtz broke a material transfer agreement, thus constituting mail fraud.

Under the USA PATRIOT Act, the maximum sentence for these charges was increased from five years to twenty years in prison.

Dr. Kurtz has been fighting the charges ever since. In October 2007, Dr. Ferrell pleaded to a lesser misdemeanor charge after recurring bouts of cancer and three strokes suffered since his indictment prevented him from continuing the struggle.

KURTZ SUMS UP END OF FOUR-YEAR NIGHTMARE

Finally vindicated after four years of struggle, Kurtz, asked for a statement, responded stoically: "I don't have a statement, but I do have questions. As an innocent man, where do I go to get back the four years the Department of Justice stole from me? As a taxpayer, where do I go to get back the millions of dollars the FBI and Justice Department wasted persecuting me? And as a citizen, what must I do to have a Justice Department free of partisan corruption so profound it has turned on those it is sworn to protect?"

Said Kurtz's attorney, Paul Cambria, "I am glad an innocent man has been vindicated. Steve Kurtz stared in the face of the federal government and a twenty-year prison term and never flinched, because he believes in his work and his actions were those of a completely innocent man. Clients like him are a blessing, and although I have had many important victories, this one stands at the top of the list."

As coordinator of the CAE Defense Fund, a group organized to support Kurtz from the beginning of the case, Lucia Sommer sees the end of the prosecution as bittersweet, and like Kurtz, is thoughtful about the broader significance of the case: "This ruling is the best possible ending to a horrible ordeal--but we are mindful of numerous cases still pending, and the grave injustices perpetrated by the Bush administration following 9/11. This case was part of a larger picture, in which law enforcement was given expanded powers. In this instance, the Bush administration was unsuccessful in its attempt to erode Americans' constitutional rights."

Referring to the international outcry the case provoked, involving fundraisers and protests held on four continents, Sommer said, "The government has unlimited resources to bring and prosecute these kinds of charges, but the accused often don't have any resources to defend themselves. This victory could never have happened without the activism of thousands of people. Supporters protested, vocally opposed the prosecution, and refused to let it go on in silence. And without their efforts at fundraising, Kurtz and Ferrell would not have been able to defend themselves from these false accusations."

Sommer added that the next step for the defense will be to get back all of the materials taken by the FBI during its 2004 raid on the Kurtz home, including several completed art projects, as well as Dr. Kurtz's lab equipment, computers, books, manuscripts, notes, research materials, and personal belongings. The four confiscated art projects are the subject of an exhibition entitled SEIZED on view at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY, through July 18:
http://www.hallwalls.org/visual_shows/2008/show_seized.html.

BACKGROUND TO THE CASE

The case originated in May 2004, when Kurtz's wife Hope died of heart failure as the couple was preparing a project about genetically modified agriculture for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Police who responded to Steve Kurtz's 911 call deemed the Kurtzes' art materials suspicious and alerted the FBI. Kurtz explained that the materials (legally and easily obtained basic life science equipment and two harmless bacteria samples) had already been displayed at museums throughout Europe and North America with absolutely no risk to the public. However, the following day, Kurtz was illegally detained for 22 hours on suspicion of bioterrorism, as dozens of agents from the FBI, Joint Terrorism Task Force, Homeland Security, Department of Defense, ATF, and numerous other law enforcement agencies raided his home, seizing his personal and professional belongings. After a federal grand jury refused to charge Kurtz with bioterrorism, Kurtz and Ferrell were indicted on two counts of mail fraud and two counts of wire fraud concerning the acquisition of of harmless bacteria for one of Critical Art Ensemble's educational art projects. (Critical Art Ensemble is the recipient of numerous awards for its projects, including the prestigious 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation Wynn Kramarsky Freedom of Artistic Expression Grant, in recognition of twenty years of distinguished work:
http://www.creative-capital.org/index2.html.)

The Department of Justice brought the charges in spite of the fact that the alleged "victims of fraud"--American Type Culture Collection and the University of Pittsburgh--never filed any charges or complained of any wrongdoing, and the fact that in bringing the charges the Department of Justice was acting completely outside its own Prosecution Policy Relating to Mail Fraud and Wire Fraud
(http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/eousa/foia_reading_room/usam/title9/43mcrm.htm).

For more information and extensive documentation, including the Judge's
dismissal, please visit: http://caedefensefund.org

CONTACTS:
Email: media@caedefensefund.org
Dr. Steven J. Kurtz: (716) 812-2968
Lucia Sommer, CAE Defense Fund: (716) 359-3061
Edmund Cardoni, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center: (716) 854-1694

New York, NY  - Rarely in a musical movement has a player left an indelible mark on those with whom he collaborated and those listeners with whom he enthralled more than the late NYC avant jazz saxist, Thomas Chapin. To commemorate this gifted, multi-instrumentalist-composer and to mark the decade since his passing, two NYC concerts are planned by his widow, Terri Castillo-Chapin, with the help of Thomas’ many friends and musical colleagues. Entitled LIFT OFF! REMEMBERING THOMAS CHAPIN, the concerts will take place in NYC on Wednesday, February 13 at St. Peter’s Church at 6:30 pm (619 Lexington Ave. at East 54th St. – admission free), and on Friday, February 15, 2008 at the Bowery Poetry Club at 8:00 pm (308 Bowery at Bleecker St. – admission $15).
 
Since his untimely death from leukemia in 1998 at the otherwise emerging age of 40, the music and playing of Thomas Chapin continues to be a highly influential and inspirational force to those who knew him and to those who continue to know him through his music and example. Even a decade after his death, a newly awakened school of disciples and a newfound generation of jazz enthusiasts of his unique and emancipated musical expression grow. Renowned downtown-saxophonist John Zorn, who performed and recorded with Chapin in the 90’s, recalls Chapin as “The real deal. A complete musician in every sense, he created work that was honest, imaginative, well crafted and cathartic. Putting himself into each and every note, he played with a rare and intense passion. His energy was absolutely astounding. He is sorely missed.”
 
The series title, LIFT OFF! REMEMBERING THOMAS CHAPIN, refers to what peers and critics said after Chapin passed all too quickly: that his brilliant career was taking off and he was just gaining altitude when he was “cut down.“ These concerts return to that moment and many of Chapin's core devotees will offer a musical salute.
  
The February 13th concert, “THOMAS CHAPIN: HIGHER AND HIGHER” will feature Chapin’s musical collaborators, including the original Thomas Chapin Trio members, bassist Mario Pavone and drummer Michael Sarin, performing with Frank Kimbrough, piano and Steven Bernstein, trumpet and slide trumpet.   Soundpainter Walter Thompson traveling from Sweden, along with Paul Jeffrey, legendary tenor saxophonist and teacher-mentor of Chapin at Rutgers, will debut and direct The New Thomas Chapin Orchestra, a 15-piece big band featuring former members of the innovative, experimental ensemble The Walter Thompson Orchestra, of which Chapin was a member in the '90’s. Performing on February 13th will be: Alan Chase, Michael Blake, Michael Attias and David CasT on saxophones, Frank London, Steven Bernstein, Herb Robertson, Ron Horton, Steve Swell and Bob Hovey on brass, Rolf Sturm, Tomas Ulrich, Joe Fonda and Pablo Aslan on strings, and Hollis Hedrich on percussion.
 
Also on the program are Paul Jeffrey Ensemble with Mike Rabinowitz, bassoon, and John Colanni, piano; pianist Armen Donelian with Marc Mommaas, tenor sax; bassist Pablo Aslan’s Avantango with Oscar Feldman, sax, and Emilio Solla, piano; Spirits Rebellious Quartet with Arthur Kell, bass, Saul Rubin, guitar, and Art Baron, trombone, representing Chapin’s Brazilian explorations; Dutch artists Ineke van Doorn, voice, and Marc Van Vugt, guitar; poet Steve Dalachinsky; and additional guests, plus films of Chapin.
 
The February 15th concert,  “THOMAS CHAPIN: HIGHER STILL” continues to celebrate Chapin’s legacy with an interdisciplinary mix of poets, music ensembles, guest speakers and film clips of Thomas Chapin performances. Scheduled to appear is the Quartet of Mario Pavone and Michael Sarin, along with celebrated reedist Marty Ehrlich and trombonist Pete McEachern, playing some of Thomas Chapin’s most acclaimed Trio pieces.  The evening showcases another legend, James Spaulding, offering an original tune for solo flute, “Time to Go”.  Written for fallen heroes Dr. King and Malcolm X, Spaulding says, “Somehow the words remind me of Tom's leaving us at such a young and vibrant age. I believe, were Tom here, still amongst us, his musical achievements would parallel those of the most recognized of our peers.”

Others in the February 15th lineup include Paul Jeffrey, Walter Thompson and a reprise of the premiering New Thomas Chapin Orchestra; a poet-group with John Richey, Steve Dalachinsky, guitarist Robert Musso, Jair-Rohm Parker Wells and Josh Harris (former members with Chapin of Machine Gun); guitarist Michael Musillami Trio with Joe Fonda, bass, and George Schuller, drums; multi-reed tone scientist Elliott Levin; and next-generation saxophonist Brett Ryan, who never met Thomas but has been deeply influenced by him.  Ryan will perform the concert’s “Lift Off!” theme, a rocket-fueled original Chapin piece from 1991, expressing the events' celebratory, upward-trajectory spirit.

Alto saxophonist and flautist, Thomas Chapin forged his name in music as a free expressionist.  A versatile multi-instrumentalist, bandleader and composer in the 80s and 90s, Chapin led a trio performing his own music playing in New York City's downtown scene and at festivals and clubs around the world. He was also an outstanding composer for larger groups, and sometimes augmented the trio with strings and horn ensembles. Thomas Chapin left behind a legacy of recognized albums and performances. The New York Times called him "one of the more exuberant saxophonists and bandleaders in jazz" and "one of the few musicians to exist in both the worlds of the downtown, experimentalist scene and mainstream jazz.”

Proceeds from the events will benefit Akasha, Inc., a non-profit whose mission is to preserve the musical legacy of Thomas Chapin (donate at thomaschapin.com/akasha.php), and the Jazz Foundation of America, a national non-profit whose Musician’s Emergency Fund provides financial assistance and support services for musicians facing illness or in crisis (jazzfoundation.org). These events are made possible in part by the generous support of Playscape Recordings, Downtown Music Gallery, AllAboutJazz.com and LiveWired NYC.
    
LIFT OFF! REMEMBERING THOMAS CHAPIN: First Concert on the Tenth Year of His Passing
“Thomas Chapin: Higher and Higher”
St. Peter’s Church, 619 Lexington Avenue at 54th Street, New York, NY Wednesday February 13, 2008 from 6:30 pm to 10:30 pm.   Admission is free. (212) 935-2200

Correction Appended

JWL B. of the Florida hip-hop duo Yo Majesty was not satisfied with her tight-collared, mostly male audience at a New York club last fall. So she nonchalantly peeled off her oversized white T-shirt and black sports bra and performed the next several songs topless, bounding about the stage with the ease of a shirtless male rapper. The audience lit up and finally proceeded to, as the Yo Majesty song “Club Action” commands, get their behinds “on the floor.”

And that is how a lesbian rap group from Florida got an uptight Manhattan crowd to relax a little.

“I got stretch marks, and I’m fat, and I’m wildin,’ ” Jwl B., whose real name is Jewel Baynham, said in a phone interview. “But your boy 50 Cent does his show with his shirt off. Why can’t I? God made me who I am, and I’m comfortable in it. I want people to know you don’t have to look glamorous to be an inspiration.”

It’s a lackluster time for mainstream female rappers, with M.C.’s like Foxy Brown and Remy Ma making more headlines for jail stints than for their music. Lil’ Kim hasn’t gone platinum since 2003, Eve’s comeback album has been delayed several times, and Missy Elliott’s first record in three years isn’t due until late spring. Fergie, with her singsong chants about her feminine wiles, is the closest thing to a female rap superstar these days. But in the wake of the critical favorite M.I.A., a new crop of young, multicultural, female hip-hop acts is causing a stir on the Internet and in indie-label conference rooms.

There’s Kid Sister, a cheeky, charismatic rapper from Chicago who recently released a video featuring Kanye West; Amanda Blank, a nasty-mouthed M.C. from Philadelphia who is associated with the hipster male hip-hopper Spank Rock; and Santogold, a new-wavey singer and dub-style rapper from Brooklyn who toured with Bjork last fall. Though their styles vary from agile wordplay to club-ready choruses, what unites them is their fresh, left-of-center enthusiasm; their bold attitudes; and an expansive approach to female sexuality.

“There is a reason why these artists are having so much early traction online,” said Josh Deutsch, chief executive of Downtown Records, which will release albums by Amanda Blank and Santogold this spring. “And it’s because they have such strong voices and strong points of view. There’s nothing remotely manufactured about them.”

Yo Majesty’s roots go back six years, when Ms. Baynham met LaShunda Flowers, who is known as Shunda K., a track star turned rapper, at a gay club in Tampa, Fla. (A third member, Shon Burt, quit recently.) The group’s early songs were “real gay music,” Ms. Flowers said.

Yo Majesty broke up for a few years, during which Ms. Flowers renounced her homosexuality, found God, married a male Christian missionary, got divorced then reclaimed her lesbian identity. Upon reuniting, the rappers began building a following through MySpace. That led to a recording contract with Domino Records, which will release their debut album this year.

Yo Majesty’s party-rap proudly celebrates everything below the waist, but the duo also grapples with growing up Christian and gay. “At the end of every show,” Ms. Flowers said, “whatever we do, we ask people, ‘Do you know who the Lord is?’ ”

The only religion in Amanda Blank’s music is the kind she is losing. Ms. Blank, whose real name is Amanda Mallory, mimics the pornographic lyrics of Southern rappers like Trina and Khia, but she ramps up the gross-out factor to the point of nigh-absurdity. Her persona is a mix of seediness and street-toughness, which is on display in “Loose,” a recent video by Spank Rock. As several naked, tattooed women writhe all over him, Ms. Blank sits on a toilet, threatening to fight rappers who try to steal her style and making highly unprintable claims about her sexual prowess.

Unlike Yo Majesty and Amanda Blank, Kid Sister spurns sexual frankness in favor of innuendo. Born Melisa Young on the South Side of Chicago, she dismisses unsuitable suitors while strutting her postmodern stuff. “We could be hugged up like hippies on a tree trunk,” she teases in her verse in Chromeo’s “Tenderoni,” while “Telephone” reprimands a guy for calling too much. In the video for her single “Pro Nails,” backup dancers sit in pedicure chairs, lip-synching the chorus: “Got her toes done up with her fingernails matchin’.”

The video underscores Ms. Young’s populist, all-ages aspirations. “It’s music made by a girl who shops at Target, made for girls who shop at Target,” Ms. Young said. “Or girls who work at LensCrafters or Ace Hardware or are sorority sisters or debutantes.”

Angel Laws, editor of the celebrity news Web site Concreteloop.com and an early champion of Kid Sister, said: “I think she stands out. She’s a party rapper, bringing back the ‘80s style with the club-hop.” (Kid Sister’s debut album, “KoKo B. Ware,” is due from Fool’s Gold Records this summer.)

But the artist with the loudest buzz is Santogold, who has already been called the next big thing in many articles. Born Santi White, she parlayed a college internship at Ruffhouse Records into a job as an A&R scout for Sony. After she was executive producer and wrote most of the songs on an album for the R&B singer Res, she left and eventually formed her own punk band, Stiffed.

In 2006 Ms. White, who now lives in Brooklyn, began writing her own songs; “Creator” and “LES Artists” confess to feelings of alienation, but she also revels in her individuality. Singing in a haunting, sensual wail, or toasting in the style of dub M.C.’s, she adds a layer of softness to an unusual mix of synthesizers, dancehall rhythms and percolating new wave.

“She appeals very broadly,” said Martin Heath, the founder of Lizard King Records, which signed Stiffed and is jointly releasing Santogold’s debut album with Downtown. “She’s not cliché one way or the other. She’s not playing on the foxy thing.”

Ms. White said she admires other female artists who try to defy stereotypes. “You get these images of women in sexy clothes, walking around in, like, panties,” she said. “Even Beyoncé — that’s what it is to be a woman and make music. But now there are all these other women doing cool, interesting things, wearing styles they came up with, and it’s not about being naked.”

Since the time seems ripe for underground, unquantifiable female M.C.’s, the Lady Tigra is hoping that pioneers will have a place too. She was half of the ’80s duo L’Trimm, which scored a poppy Miami bass hit with “Cars that Go Boom” in 1988.

After spending the last two decades getting a creative writing degree, managing Manhattan clubs and writing and singing the theme song for the frozen yogurt chain Pinkberry (“Sorry Ice Cream”), she’s preparing for a comeback. Her first solo album, “Please Mr. Boom Box,” released by High Score Records, is available through major digital retailers.

Tigra’s aesthetic hasn’t changed much since the ‘80s. She raps in the same honeyed, high-pitched tone, and there are beefy low-end clicks, handclaps and electro synthesizers, all hallmarks of classic Miami bass music. But contrary to much music of that genre, there is little overt sex; she prefers coy comebacks.

The Lady Tigra, whose real name is Rachel de Rougemont, said she hopes that girls will realize that artists like Fergie and Gwen Stefani were inspired by semi-forgotten female forebears like “L’Trimm and J. J. Fad and M.C. Lyte and get into that.”

“Before, you’d really have to come with it to be considered an M.C.,” she added. “And now women get — if not equal — way more respect and recognition for what they do.”

Correction: February 3, 2008

An article last Sunday about female rappers misidentified the member of the hip-hop duo Yo Majesty who married and then divorced a male Christian missionary. She is LaShunda Flowers — not Jewel Baynham, the other rapper.

.: Read the original story on the New York Times

The doors have been open for barely half an hour, but a strong crowd has already gathered at Real Art Ways. They stand inside the gallery space of the Arbor Street arts center and cinema with arms crossed, cocktails dangling and noses reaching toward the wall — all the better to inspect the intricacies of the exhibited photographs.

It's the third Thursday evening of the month, which means it's Creative Cocktail Hour, a regular event that melds art, music and mingling — and for the past five years has given people good reason to venture out on a "school night."

"The interesting thing about it is it isn't the same group of people every month," says Audrey Conrad, among the minglers this December evening. She wears a knit mini and black knee-high boots.

"There are some hard-core Creative Cocktail Hour addicts who you'll see every month. But depending on what [art or music] is being featured, you get … a whole different contingent of people," she says.

Conrad is one of the event's "hard-core addicts" — self-proclaimed and such an advocate of Real Art Ways that the folks there had the good sense to ask her to join its board of directors about a year and a half ago.

If you've gone to a cocktail hour, fundraising event or art happening there, you've likely seen her. That's her in the short blond bob, chatting up old faces and welcoming new ones.

Dressed as she is this evening in her "girl persona," Conrad is also one of a dozen or so cocktail-hour regulars from the transgender community, all at various stages in their search for gender identity. For some, that's meant surgery; for some, that's meant cross-dressing, and for still others, something else entirely.

They come here, says Conrad, to find community in the accepting environment that Real Art Ways and its patrons have helped to cultivate.

But that search for community and identity isn't unique to them, or any one group, says Conrad. Really, it's everyone's story here this night. Even that of the very city that hosts them.

"The concept isn't peculiar to the transgender community," she says. "There are all sorts of people who come here … who wouldn't typically interact with each other but who find a commonality here they wouldn't find elsewhere in Hartford — a commonality in music, in art or in just the fact that people are getting together and talking.

"It has far less to do with people's backgrounds or sexual orientation and gender," she says, "than with an interest in finding something to do which has meaning."

Meaning is what first drew Conrad, a Midwestern native who moved to Connecticut in the late 1980s. She immersed herself in work for the first few years, which didn't leave much room for socializing. At the same time, she was still wrestling with her gender identity.

"For a long time, I really fought internally with myself," she says. "Society is always trying to put you in a box ... and as hard as I tried to fit into that "boy box," there was a part of me that just was not comfortable at all."

Yet, she wasn't entirely comfortable in the "girl box" either.

"I consider myself transgender, and I bounce back and forth," she says. That might mean her "girl persona" for going out on the town and her "boy persona" at her job in the tourism industry.

In the late 1990s, with that internal wrestling behind her, Conrad was ready to carve out a social life. She stumbled on Real Art Ways, attended a few art events and has been returning ever since.

Here, she says, she's found a vibrant group of people, provocative artworks and films — and a place in which she feels welcome as Audrey.

"And actually, I've found I don't have any difficulty here in Hartford, or Connecticut. I go pretty much anywhere in 'girl mode' and very seldom have anyone take notice of me," says Conrad, 61. "One of the nice things about Connecticut is people are fairly involved with their own lives.

"They haven't the time to worry about others."

Her pro may be another's con, but she does sum it up quite right.

Back inside the gallery, people meander, nibble on cheese and crackers and peruse the hanging photographs of artist Caleb Portfolio. In another corner, a small group is clutched around the DJ and dancing to the loungey music.

All around, there's laughter, conversation, even quiet introspection. There are artists and office drones, activists and college students, urban and suburban, gay and straight. And those who don't fit neatly into any of our "boxes."

And, of course, there's Conrad.

"I'm not sure I've made a lot of deep friendships here. But I've met a lot of interesting, vibrant people," she says. "This is a place to go once a month and see people and chat.

"And at the end of the evening, you say goodbye and 'see ya next month.'"

Contact Joann Klimkiewicz at The Hartford Courant.

In “The Republic,” Plato uses an allegory of prisoners chained in a cave watching shadows on a wall to suggest that the things we believe are real are often only an illusion, a kind of puppet show of real life. To experience true reality we must escape from the cave of ignorance and into the clear light of day.

“Shadow Show,” at Real Art Ways in Hartford, picks up in various ways on this metaphor. The curators — Elizabeth Keithline, a Rhode Island artist who originated the idea, and Kristina Newman-Scott, director of visual arts at Real Art Ways — have assembled the work of 16 artists exploring shadows and concepts of shadowing in contemporary culture. Exhibits range from installations that use actual shadows for visual effect to video art and elaborate conceptual pieces concerned with issues of surveillance, memory, perception and truth.

That the majority of the artwork is installed in the dark is, I suspect, more an accident of curatorial selection than any nod to Plato, but it nonetheless adds an overall, welcome air of mystery. Entering this exhibition you feel as if you are stepping into an alternate universe, a place where nothing is entirely as it seems. Or maybe for the first time we begin to see the delicate nature of reality.

Using digital animation software, Rupert Nesbitt creates realistic-looking video landscapes that move. An occasional distortion of perspective reveals that the imagery has no basis in reality, and that these are purely imaginative spaces, but most of the time you think you are looking at a real environment.

Shadowy government activities are the subject of William Allen’s nine-panel text paintings examining the history, purpose and mythology around the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, a United States government structure near Bluemont, Va. Here, beneath a FEMA training base, is an underground operation designed to house government officials in case of a nuclear emergency.

Humor is lacking from this show, with the exception of William Lamson’s one-minute animated video loop. It is made up of photographs of the artist lying face down in various suburban landscapes, that have been spliced together to make it seem as if his motionless body is sliding along the ground like some giant worm. Though it is sort of silly, the imagery is captivating.

What I also like about this video is the way in which it plays with our willingness to respond positively toward that which we know isn’t real. This is in some ways the opposite of what Plato was talking about, for it involves a knowing appreciation of something clearly artificial — as if we are heading back into Plato’s cave just for the fun of it.

Several artists in this show are interested in the idea of traces, evidence of things left behind in the landscape, or in the mind, or on the body. This is a popular theme in contemporary art but has a particular, even special relevance here.

Perhaps most interesting among the works of this kind is a collaborative installation by an artist, Duncan Laurie, and an electrical engineer, Gordon Salisbury. It is installed in a darkened room off to one side of the exhibition. Inside the room is a rock hooked up to a device measuring energy waves, and a video of hallucinogenically pulsating signals that represent naturally occurring energy waves in plants and rocks.

Whereas Mr. Laurie and Mr. Salisbury’s installation is all about picturing hidden energy flows, Olu Oguibe’s sculptural installation, “Buggy Memorial to the Unknown Child,” makes manifest complex human emotional states. This deeply personal work is all about the artist’s feelings surrounding the pointless death of his brother, at the age of 4, from dehydration after a routine attack of measles.

Things half-hidden are the subject of Sam Ekwurtzel’s pair of video loops, a compilation of close-ups of photographs of television sets for sale on eBay. Mr. Ekwurtzel discovered that when the owners photographed their television sets to sell online, many inadvertently captured reflections of themselves and their living rooms on the reflective surface of the television screens. By cropping and blowing up these images the artist reveals a hidden world.

There are many other interesting works here dealing with shadowy issues, ranging from street surveillance of random individuals in snapshot photographs by Erik Gould to the documentation of the noises and atmosphere of an airport lounge in an installation by Barbara Westermann. Like so many other artworks here, they zoom in on things that we look at but rarely see.

.: Read the original story at The New York Times