The excitement lately is the small kind, an offer tendered (so we’ll wait and see), an external monitor (no hunching!), Cory, Iyengar (and Maria for leading me to Cory). Finding balance in a new professional space (sometime lately I stopped feeling like I was faking it at being a grown up). Beans. Absolutely fascinating, a documentary

I can bring a guest to the Kiki Smith preview at BMA tomorrow. But there’s also this, which will make you think:

The opening of Kleio Projects in its new home in the Lower East Side, 153 1/2 Stanton Street:

Arrival
Ara Azad

11 February – 4 March 2010

Opening: Thursday 11 February 6-8 pm

Site specific performance painting begins at 7 pm

“Trust amongst us humans, is not a thing of the past”
- Ara Azad <>

For its inaugural exhibition, Kleio Projects is pleased to present Ara Azad’s first Solo exhibition in New York. This exhibit will feature work from Azad’s ongoing series, Postal Paintings, as well as a new wall length drawing that will be created on-site during the opening and will remain on view for the duration of the exhibition.

Begun in 1995, the Postal Paintings series developed from Arad’s desire to bridge the automated with the corporeal, and to explore his strong belief in the importance of trust and the human experience. Azad paints the surface of each canvas, then sends the paintings through the mail as is, unwrapped and exposed, so that each work becomes marked, scuffed, and changed as it passes by hand and machine through the postal and to its final destination. Azad’s resulting canvases are a tremendous outpouring of emotion – they evoke the palpable tension between a shudder and a scream.

The gallery space at Kleio Projects will become a studio space for a brief period of time as Ara Azad creates a site-specific mural for the month of February. The audience is invited to witness the live action painting, each fluid stroke of Azad’s brush on paper conveying the artist’s personal and
intense visual language.

Ara Azad received a BFA from Tufts as well as a D5 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where he taught for several years and traveled extensively as its representative. Currently, he spends time between Lebanon and the United States. Azad’s work has been widely exhibited and collected nationally and internationally.

Plus, Alyosha Dubina will be there, being Russian, drinking no whiskey.

I have a new correspondence art project that I’m inching towards starting. Maybe you’ll want to join me?