View PDF page 6 ACE Weekly November 12, 2009
Exhibit Collaborators work together on UK’s Little/Gaines series
By Kim Thomas
UK’s Little/Gaines Artist series is known for bringing the community together —but in the November 17 2009 exhibit “I want to please you,” it will also bring together longtime friends as artists and collaborators:
Aimee Lynn Hirschowitz, James Shambhu, and Andrea Sims, along with Cara Lundy as curator.
A graduate of the UK College of Fine Arts and The Art Institute of Boston, Lynne-Hirchowitz was selected as the Little/Gaines Artist for November. I Want to Please You will be the third program in the Series sponsored by UK ‘s Little Fine Arts Library and the Gaines Center for the Humanities. The Little/Gaines Artist Series intends to help nurture the vibrant community of artists in central Kentucky.
The series is inspired by other collaborative projects, including the multimedia show “Pet Milk: A Collaborative Creative Exchange” curated by Burton, which had openings at ArtsPlace in 2008 and Little Fine Arts Library in 2009. The series also was informed by “The McSweeney’s Book of Poets Picking Poets,” which asked poets to pick favorite poems and poets who in turn picked their favorite poet and poem for five revolutions, and the Kentucky Women Writers Conference’s Hardwick Jones Reading, an annual celebration of mentorship and collaboration in women writers’ lives.
“The show’s title was the jumping off point for the works included in the show,” says Lynne- Hirschowitz, “I was really honored to be asked to put together an exhibit of some sort for the Series, and chose James and Andrea because I’ve always admired their work and never gotten a chance to work with them in an art context.
“We’ve all collaborated on events and graphic designs together for other purposes, but never shown (fine art) together. We came up with the idea that we would make work based off a concept, and ‘I want to please you’ was a phrase that was really meaningful — but very, very different — to all of us, so we left it at that. Besides three works we all know will be the same size, the generative words, and the fact that the works are 2D, I know nothing about what they’ve made.”
She laughingly recounts their different styles, “Everyone works so differently. Andrea can work for three days straight without sleeping and be done. Jim works during pockets of time he actually has scheduled in a calendar because his home and work life are so incredibly busy and he’s so organized. And me? I guess that’s the funny part —I can’t schedule and I can’t stay up late, so I put a lot of faith in Luck and the Little Engine That Could.”
She adds, “Cara Lundy, a graduate of the Arts Administration Program at UK, is curating … meaning she is the one actually choosing how to hang the pieces that were created by myself, Andrea Sims, and James Shambhu, and in what order. Each of us are coming from a very different place, both visually and conceptually, but we have a few guiding principles we worked with in order to make the show cohesive.”
James Shambhu admits he could not resist participating in this project. “Aimee Lynne-Hirschowitz asked me to be a part of the exhibition and I couldn’t refuse. With the title and jumping off point being ‘I want to please you,’ so many things were possible. For example, what does it mean to please you on a private level, on an interpersonal level, on a government level on a consumer level? We buy things to please and pacify ourselves. The possibilities were just endless.”
Shambhu is well known in Lexington as a multifaceted artist. (He was also Ace’s art director for most of the ‘90s.) You may have recently seen his mural at the Morris Book Shop on Southland. He points out that the Little/Gaines series provided him with an opportunity to flex his illustrative muscle. “Another great thing about this show, for me, was I had been wanting to do some work with a more illustrative/pop art sensibility and this exhibit seemed the perfect fit for exploring these ideas.” His piece called “We R Here 2 Please You” was created using oil, shellac, Kryon on concrete board. (see photo)
Interior design artist, Andrea Sims, who with her husband, Krim Boughalem, owns and operates the popular Wine+Market downtown (see Ace Weekly, April, 2008) is known for her trompe l’oeil murals.
Before her move to Kentucky in 1998, Lynne- Hirschowitz worked as an assistant to several well known veterans of the fashion and design world in New York.
She says she is working with entirely new media and “my work is really abstract. It’s not a change for me conceptually, but I think people who are familiar with my figurative work will be surprised, yet I’ve been working in this abstract way for at least ten years, I’ve just not shown that work because it didn’t fit with the shows I’ve had.” ■
The artists will give a brief Artists’ Talk open to the public on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 7:30pm in the Niles Gallery located in the Lucille Little Library. The work, hung in the upstairs gallery of Lucille Little Library, will be on exhibit through December.
This is the third program in the Little/Gaines Artist Series, sponsored by UK’s Little Fine Arts Library and the Gaines Center for the Humanities. Little/Gaines showcases artistic collaboration in Kentucky. Four Little/Gaines Artists have been named for 2009. Each of the four artists choose other artists with whom they will collaborate on a program centered around a theme or unifying principle. Aimee Lynne-Hirschowitz, a graduate of the UK College of Fine Arts and The Art Institute of Boston, is the Little/Gaines Artist for November. Before her move to Kentucky in 1998, she worked as an assistant to several well-known veterans of the fashion and design world in New York. Little/Gaines Artists for 2009 and Performance/Exhibit
Dates:
Kelli Burton (top left) September
Jason Zavala (bottom right) October
Aimee Lynne-Hirschowitz (top right) November 17
Lauren Argo (bottom left) December 15
