Inaugural Event
Clare Britt at Cosign Projects
On May 3rd, 2009, Cosign Projects in Saint Louis, Missouri, is pleased to present Clare Britt's inaugural flag.
Opening event from 3:00 - 6:00 p.m.
Broken and bruised, I am still number one; First thing first; It's all about me!;
Introducing Cosign-Inaugural Exhibition; Cosign wins award for best new alternative
art space in St Louis; Blue Ribbon; I'm # 1!
“The St. Louis area continues to suffer from an inferiority complex - a feeling that we are just never going to be as great as we think we could be - or as great as we all know we should be.”
--
Rev. Lawrence Biondi,
President of Saint Louis University
and 2005 St. Louis Citizen of the Year
Reflecting upon the idea of ‘firsts’ and with an eye towards imbuing the site with an inspired sense of pride, Britt has constructed a blue ribbon #1 banner. Cosign is especially pleased that this flag challenges the long-documented inferiority complex so often referenced by St. Louis politicians, celebrities, businesspeople, and citizens. In the spirit of celebrating one’s neighborhood, one’s home, and one’s future, Cosign Projects offers up its first project, I'm # 1, by Clare Britt of Chicago, Illinois.
Clare Britt has recently shown at Green Lantern, Flatfile Gallery, and Gallery 400 in Chicago, and Golden Belt in Durham, NC. She directed Fraction Workspace in Chicago from 2003 - 2007. Her curatorial work will soon be featured in Artists Run Chicago at the Hyde Park Art Center.
View her website here. CV (pdf).
Artist Bio:
If Clare Britt were a map she would be printed on Chinese paper that was found in a bottle floating in the sea. If she were a meal she would be spicy fried chicken with all the fixins’. If she were a song she’d be a sad song about a happy clown sung by Roy Orbison. If she were a body of water she’d be an inlet swamp slowly meandering out to sea. If she were a story she’d be a tale of magic, desire, despair and intrigue. If she were a Sunday paper comic strip she would be about a dog named Biscuit that never behaves. If she were a bandit she would never stop until she got caught ‘er shot.
elin o'hara slavick
Flags for Hiroshima
September 5 - October 30, 2009
"Flags for Hiroshima is an attempt to reshape how we think about war and the aftermath. Trying to record the gruesome effects of war and to expose the indiscriminate cruelty of aerial bombardment have been major concerns of mine as a visual artist for the past 10 years. Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century, (Catherine Lutz, Beacon Press, 2001), includes over 30 of my photographs of the Fort Bragg military base in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography (Charta Books, Milan, Italy, 2007) a monograph of a series of drawings of places the U.S. has bombed is my first book. Like Homefront and Bomb After Bomb, Flags for Hiroshima attempts to engage in ethical seeing by addressing the irreconcilable paradox of making visible the most barbaric as witness, artist, and viewer. As a hibakusha (A-bomb survivor) said in Hiroshima, “There are now over 30,000 nuclear weapons in this world. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not past events. They are about today's situation.”
- Statement from the artist, August, 2009
Click here to read elin o'Hara slavick's full artist statement and to see more images from the installation.
elin o’Hara slavick is a Distinguished Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she teaches studio art, theory and practice. She received her MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BA in poetry, photography and art history from Sarah Lawrence College. Slavick has exhibited her work in Hong Kong, Canada, France, Italy, Scotland, England, Cuba, the Netherlands and across the United States. She is the author of Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography, (Charta, 2007), with a foreword by Howard Zinn.
View her website here. CV (pdf).
Artist elin o'Hara slavick photographing an A-bombed Bank,
now a city exhibition center, in downtown Hiroshima, summer, 2008.
Photo by Madeleine Marie Savick
Jessica Langley
Home Game
November 1 - December 12, 2009
study for flag 1 of 3
As much as Jessica Langley’s work is alive with activity, bright colors, and wonder, her work deals with darker issues of decay in nature and idealism. In the flags for Cosign Projects, Langley is conflating a common competitive sports slogan with autumnal images of nature making further reference to the death of nature when matched against the industrial giants of agriculture.
See Langley's website here. CV (pdf).
Jessica Langley in her studio in Cleveland, Ohio, 2009
Cheryl Wassenaar and Brigid Dolan
The Other Side
December 12, 2009 - January 22, 2010
Poet Brigid Dolan and visual artist Cheryl Wassenaar collaborate for the first time on “The Other Side,” a poem about 2733 Arsenal, the hundred-year-old site of Cosign Projects, a former general store. Dolan responded to the building’s sense of past in a first person narrative, with words that carry us through the cycles of lives lived there. Wassenaar responds by arranging portions of the text on the windows of the building, the “eyes” of its soul.
A special thanks for Bianca Jackson for her assistance.
The Other Side
This is the story of a house that was once a store,
Brick and mortar, spirit and surrender.
Will you cross the street
To the other side?
Men and women have haunted my rooms,
Filling me with the light of their bodies,
The din of their souls.
In dark closets,
I nurse their secrets, watching them grow.
Each one a treasure.
Under the bed, behind the door,
All that they have lost
Will return in a new shape.
What is living, but to give over?
Under the clouds, the moon, the sun,
Play, work, rest, repeat.
Good heart, bad heart.
We are one in this collapse
Simply this:
Do no harm.
Cheryl Wassenaar in her studio in St. Louis, Missouri.
Photo by T. Dorrance
Cheryl Wassenaar
Cheryl Wassenaar is a visual artist who works with the function of language and text, exploring visual metaphors of speech, sound, and communication. She works primarily with found commercial signage, constructing paintings with fragments of text that are broken from rules of syntax. Although the source material often originates from the detritus of commerce and industry in her own neighborhood, Wassenaar finds inspiration in the ornamentation and constructive practices of artisans around the world, particularly those in southern United States, Eastern Europe, and Mexico. Wassenaar is currently Associate Professor in the College of Art at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri
See Cheryl Wassenaar's portfolio here. CV (pdf).
Brigid Dolan in her studio in St. Louis, Missouri.
BRIGID DOLAN
Brigid Dolan is a poet who finds much of her inspiration from the symbiotic relationship between people and their homes. As a repository of human emotions, a home bears witness to the emotional lives of its individual inhabitants and the interactions among family members, which can range from love to hate, compassion to aggression. Therefore, homes bear the indelible traces of its inhabitants in the same way that humans bear the traces of their homes and their families. The notion of home is at once universal and local, physical and spiritual, individual and social. The powerful role of home in the human imagination, as a point of departure and return, ensures that we will always be haunted by home. Dolan currently teaches English at Parkway South High School.
See Brigid Dolan's CV here (pdf).
