The annual BINNAR Festival returns to Northern Portugal:

“The BINNAR festival has been held in the city of Vila Nova de Famalicão since 2016. Among music, performance, photography, theatre, video, sculpture, image or installation, several artists and groups of artists pass through the city, whether in exhibitions, with live performances, in residence and/or coordinating projects and workshops. Created and produced by the BINNAR platform with the support of the City Council, the festival has brought together several partnerships and different spaces in the city and municipality (museums, galleries, foundations, schools and others) to present a programme that brings together established and emerging artists.”

Among the seven programs in venues around the city, the exhibit Leudhero at the Casa-Museu Soledade Malvar features video art & photography.

“Between distance, a lack, a wanting. The reinhabitation in the look of everyday life, between touch and love, the place found for the deformation that screams out between human making and the digitally conceived. In the soul, in sight, in search. Between proximity, the body and artifice.” - curator’s statement

Featuring:

Blanche the Vidiot (Szabine Peter + Kristof Janos Bodnar) // Fatima Essabar // Jing Zhou // Lionel Cruet // Sarah Buckius // Sarah Legow // Terri Lloyd // Yuehan Hao

Media Art Friesland presents SNEEK Stories, a public exhibition of light and sound art in de Gemeentetuin, the municipal gardens of the town Sneek in the Netherlands.

“Sneek’s Gemeentetuin will transform into an enchanting world of light and sound for three evenings at the end of October with the immersive audio-visual installation ‘SNEEK Stories’. Using video, animation, film and sound, the history, present and future of the world in relation to Sneek are brought to life in an inspiring way.

The installation is being developed by renowned Polish artist Robert Sochacki. He collaborates with Anne Fie Salverda, one of Friesland’s leading autonomous artists, and sound designer Marinus Groen, known for audio-visual projects by visual artists, media art collectives and film productions in Friesland and beyond. For ‘SNEEK Stories’, they draw on images and sounds from their own collection. In addition, an open call went out to regional and international artists, designers, photographers, filmmakers, and other creative makers to contribute. Over 100 submissions were received. From them, 10 artists were selected:

Jérémy Griffaud & Makiko Furuichi | Hagar Schuringa | Joacelio Batista | Yang Tzu Yi | Sjaak Verboom | Laila Abd Elrazaq | Sarah Legow | KinoMANUAL | Paulius Šliaupa | Joyce den Hertog

SNEEK Stories

The images and sounds will be projected in different formats on facades and other surfaces of buildings and objects in Sneek’s Gemeentetuin from 31 October for three evenings from sunset to 11pm. Entry is free. The address of the Gemeentetuin is Kruizebroederstraat 26. It will be a spectacular audio-visual experience that you can walk through.

‘Sneek Stories’ comes about through a collaboration between Media Art Friesland, Gemeente Súdwest-Fryslân, het Fries Scheepvaartmuseum, Cultuur Kwartier Sneek, Mondriaan Fonds & Faber NEP.”

Full program of featured films here.

Regional tourism page VVV Waterland van Friesland shared a photo series documenting the exhibition.

KO(O)RTS Short Film Festival “for the weird, wicked and wonderful” is a new project by Sickhouse screening experimental & underground films in Enschede, the Netherlands.

“WEIRD is uncanny, unfamiliar, surprising, strange, eerie, odd, not what you expected…

WICKED is from another world, devilish, made by witches or wizards, naughty, vicious, disruptive, could make you uncomfortable..

WONDERFUL is whimsical, kitsch, slay, cheesy, drip, eccentric, camp, extravagant, kinky, droll, probably made by unicorns…”

The 70+ films are organized into thematic blocks and spread across three venues. My work appears in the Lust session at the Concordia theater:

“We all desire, We all want. We could be the floor longing for the ceiling, it could depend on the person we play with, it could be just a fetish. Expect to be touched by a selection where pleasure, desire, sex can also end in hilarious and happy endings.”

Dear Ceiling, Sarah Legow
Doghouse, Charnstar Anderson
Feet, Nianyu Zhong
Gametes, Nova Lov
Holey, Bavly Soliman
Clap, Esteph Medusa
Imperio, Thaís de Almeida Prado

—-

Also today: the opening of The Scaffolding Palace in the courtyard of Prague’s Místečko gallery.

“The very first edition of Scaffolding Palace – a series of experimental exhibitions in scaffolding structures.

In this edition we are showcasing the works of artists from The Outsiders – an exhibition curated by Jo Blin, featuring the documentation of street performances, installations, urban interventions and other forms of art created for and/or displayed in the public space.”

This physical exhibition is an extrapolation of the Outsiders’ digital show which originally appeared in the Wrong Biennale.

The 21114 Film Fest takes place yearly in Novi Sad, Serbia. The festival, “tucked away in the Novo Naselje neighbourhood, [and] loved and cherished by the local community, local and regional film makers, enthusiasts and artists,” makes use “of open, public, semi-public and private spaces in Novo Naselje, which are transformed into cinemas for 4 days during August and September.”

Closing out this tenth edition of fest are 17 films in the “2 minutes” category, a diverse selection of animation, documentary, and experimental shorts, including my “Dear Ceiling.”

Full schedule here.

Sculpture Walk Springfield, a public art initiative in Springfield, Missouri, has ventured into public video art installations. Each month one artist’s work is screened in a back alleyway as part of the year-long series “Alleyscapes.” My “Dear Ceiling” will play from June 7th through July 4th.

“Sculpture Walk Springfield in partnership with the Hatch Foundation is excited to announce their newest downtown arts venture, ‘Alleyscapes.’ SWS and Hatch aim to enhance Springfield’s sense of place by enlivening alleyways and other overlooked sites of the city with video art and sound. These works will enrich the built environment of downtown Springfield and create unexpected moments for the public to experience.

Each month from October 2023 through September 2024, a new video art piece will be projected from sunset to midnight in the ‘backstage alley’ behind the Hotel Vandivort and the Landers Theater (accessible via Robberson Alley). Each new piece will debut at First Friday Art Walk and will remain on view for one month.

‘Alleyscapes’ was brought to fruition through the generosity of Hatch Foundation, Pitt Technology Group, and Hotel Vandivort.”

In a press release preview, The Springfield Daily Citizen shares a video still & quotes from my project statement.

Mientras Tanto CINE is an itinerant series of screenings & workshops that presents an international selection of experimental cinema in Montevideo and all across Uruguay.

Tonight, they screen at the Facultad de Artes, the art department at Universidade de la República, Uruguay's largest & oldest university.

On the program, works by:

Sarah Legow // Martín Dávalos // Rafael de Campos // Joanna Mamede // Yann les Jours // Morena Henke // Carlos Montoya // Maria Inês Gonçalves // Em Van Loan // Jennifer Moule // Patricio Ballesteros Ledesma // Tomas Vettorello // Camila Peyronel // Florencia Varela

Very excited to be in the opening day lineup for this year’s Cadence Video Poetry Festival, screening at Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum. Now in its seventh year, Cadence presents over fifty works in thematically themed sessions.

The first session is titled “They multiply more and more:”

“Enter the dream state. Shared dreams, lucid dreams, unattainable dreams, waking dreams. These video poems are portals into ourselves and others where new associations and unexpected connections are crafted. We are suspended in the gravity of these pieces, our feet never quite touching solid ground as our emotional core soars. Using erasure, installation, tableaux, anthropomorphism, and live music, this showcase traverses the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious to imagine the multitude of pathways through reality. What will we wake up to?”

Featuring:

Eyrún Úa's SOMEONE YOU ONCE SAW IN A DREAM
melisa yağmur saydı's BIRDIE'S DREAM
Sarah Legow's DEAR CEILING
Marina Sagona's YOUR DREAM IS MY DREAM
E.T. Russian & Edward Mast's SWEEP DREAMS
Junie Desil, Deanne Angelina Emery, Carola Campa Garcia, Luna Davies, Emilio Terrazas Rocha, Rachel Christina Kearney, Lingjun Mi & Mingyang Pan's THIS WAS MEANT TO BE FOR NORA
Elena Motiejunaite & Lyja Maknaviciute's ANTIPODES
Pauline Raybaud & Philomène Amougou's HEALING QUEEN: PROTECT IT
Pat van Boeckel's BUILD ME A COTTAGE
Daniel Carter's MOVED BEFORE SWALLOWED
Esme Madra's STORMERS

Barcelona’s annual NUDO Festival de Poesía Desatada is a packed 8 days of poetry recitals, workshops, visual art, and music that "celebrates the unexpected links between beings and things, between ideas and forms”.

On the 13th, the V² Versos & Visuals screening of 40+ selected videopoems will be held at the Centre Cívic Pati Llimona in the Gothic Quarter.

In Portugal’s ancient university city of Coimbra ~

The upcoming bLast is the last exhibition that Casa das Artes Bissaya Barreto’s building on Sá da Bandeira will host “before entering a period of renovation. The transformation begins with the reimagining of the spaces throughout the House, from the basement to the attic, with total freedom to intervene in the structure and objects that have persisted over time...bLast features the participation of 38 artistic projects, whose creations have been designed to provide the public with an immersive and interactive experience, before, as the title suggests, everything goes up in smoke."

Thanks to the team at the Casa das Artes for letting me peel up their floorboards and install the Dear Ceiling text piece in its rawest setting yet.

I’m sharing the space with projects by:

Gil Mac // ETC – Eléonore Labattut & Simon Deprez // Inês Rebeca // Sonia Salcedo // Inês Serpente // Sarah Legow // Diogo Braga, Nathalia Coehl e Thales Luzv // Gonçalo Gaiola // Clarisse Silva // M.M.Moinhos // Babu // Lilian Walker // Bite Records // So & Bernardo Matos // Ana Frois // Luísa Ramires // Henrique Vilão // Madalena Pequito // Pinelopi Triantafyllou // Bernardo Nascimento // Inês Santos // CALA x Vanda Santos // Ricardo Leiria // Maria Palma e Pedro Rodrigues // Diogo MM Nunes // Catarina Parente // João Concha // Vitor Malva // Martîm // Andrea Paz // Time for the oniric // Xana Eloy // Cyril Reichenbach // Maria Palma // Bruno Fidalgo Sousa // Filipa Alfama // Coletivo Gambozino // Saco da Baixa // Margarida Franco Rodrigues

Coming to Argentina: I'm delighted to be screening a Spanish audio version of my work at Buenos Aires' Videobardo Festival Internacional de Videopoesia, the world's oldest videopoetry festival. In this 27th year of operation, the festival will be screening 130 works at multiple venues around the city.

“We understand Videopoetry to be those audiovisual works in which the poetic verbal language (word, letter, speech, writing, visual or sound sign) has a leading role or special transformative treatment. So that the three fields: Moving Image, Sound and Verbal Language dialogue to create a reality that is the Videopoetic Work.”

Full schedule viewable here. Curation by Javier Robledo and Marisol Bellusci.

Open through March 1st, The Ousiders is a pavilion of the The Wrong Bienniale.

“An online exhibition featuring the documentation of street performances, experiments, happenings, urban interventions and installations, and other forms of art created for / displayed in the PUBLIC SPACE.”

Curated by Jo Blin, and featuring:

Adam Tuna // Alice Guéricolas-Gagné // Bárbara Serafim // Carolina Dutca // Valentin Sidorenko // Chun-Tzu Chang // Francisco Rider // Interior Ministry // Jo Blin // Les Tyroliennes Saint-Jambiennes // Loretta Lau // Object:Paradise // Ras Sankara // Riccardo Matlakas // Sarah Legow // Sasha Honigman // Sumin Sung // Swen Leer // Sylvain Souklaye // Teresa Leung // The Native American Bare-Wolf // Tyko Say // Uronto Artist Community // Vincent Tanguy

“The Wrong Biennale is an independent, art driven, multicultural, decentralised and collaborative international art biennial founded in 2013 by David Quiles Guilló, and organised by TheWrong Studio.

The Wrong has grown to become a massive international community and a reference in the art scene, bringing together curators, artists and institutions, online and offline, every two years, rendering massive attendance and following, and obtaining institutional recognition and awards like SOIS Cultura 2019 and an honorific mention by European Commission S+T+ARTS 2020 prize.

‘Counting its viewership in the millions, The Wrong just might be the world’s largest art biennale — The digital world’s answer to Venice.’

- The New York Times.”

Next up is my first art event here in Portugal: I have one of the twelve short films selected by open call for this year’s FUSO, the annual Festival Internacional de Videoarte de Lisboa.

“Created in 2009, FUSO is the only vídeo art festival that takes place outdoors in Lisbon, in unique spaces such as gardens and cloisters of museums and palaces. With free admission, the festival welcomes artists, curators, the general public, Portuguese institutions involved in this artistic practice, as well as specialists and those responsible for international collections.”

Part of a multi-day event showing work both historic and contemporary, the open call session will be presented on the night of August 23rd at Lisbon’s MAAT - Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia.

“For its fifteenth edition, Festival Fuso presents a new kaleidoscope of utopian, dystopian, political and above all poetic images. What characterizes the proposals made under the Open Call (rules of the game: works of less than 10 minutes created between 2021 and 2023) is a dynamic look at a post-pandemic world. More than in previous years, there is now a more personal, singular questioning.

The number of applications continues to grow (more than 250 in 2023): from the difficult choice among so many proposals, the twelve selected demonstrate the diversity of the Portuguese artistic panorama. For this new edition, the projects translate into images, letters, words, sounds and bodies the issues that cut across our societies.

Let us listen and dwell on the vibrations of these promises, these fragile plants that flourish in between the ruins. Let us welcome this sometimes-disconcerting plurality of looks that are open to the multiplication of possibilities and the construction of new imaginaries.”

Curated by Jean-François Chougnet.

Selected Artists:

António Olaio // Beatriz Soares Dias e Francisca Manuel // Francisca Dores // Ian Capillé // João Saramago // Lula Pena // Maria Peixoto Martins // Miguel Leonardo // Rafael Raposo Pires // Ricardo Leandro // Sarah Legow // Sofia Santa-Rita

Summer publications:

—The seventeenth edition of Three Rooms Press’ annual Dadaist anthology, Maintenant. My text art piece “Fuck Silence” is among the 200+ selections of art and writing from around the world.

“The Maintenant series, established in 2008, explores themes of politics, humanity, philosophy, and current concerns from an antiwar, anarchic (and often eye-opening) perspective.”

—The seventieth and final issue of Otoliths magazine was published today, including a page of textual + visual experiments by me.

Published quarterly since 2006, Otoliths’ intention was “to contain a variety of what can be loosely described as e-things, that is, anything that can be translated (visually at this stage) to an electronic platform.”

This summer in Philadelphia, Vox Populi’s Black Box space is presenting Cellphone Library, an archive of mobile videos.

“A receipt paper comes out of an ATM machine, flapping in the wind like an unnaturally long tongue, snippets of casual conversation are recorded over breathtaking landscapes, the image of breaking waves caught in the reflection of a goggle, a leaf spins floating in mid air, an inquisitive shadow that does not look like you is following your every step… These are a few glimpses into the…cellphone videos that are part of Vox Populi’s Cellphone Library. With more than 100 participating artists, this exhibition is a casual, unstable and maybe pocket sized portrait of our everyday relationship to image making, creating a curious tapestry of the mundane.“

Meanwhile today, Joseph and Barrie Ann George covered Ejecta Projects’ “Cannibals of Love” for Carlisle-area newspaper The Sentinel. In a nod to the film and video work on display, they cite “films from Stefanie Klingemann, Stefani Byrd, Ron Lambert, Sarah Legow, Henry Gepfer and Melissa Ichiuji” as “bringing a unique artistic sensory experience.”

“The works on view successfully navigate the gamut of emotions and feelings that make the subject [of love] the messiest and yet most human.”

Coming soon to Broward College’s South Gallery, in Miami/Fort Lauderdale, Florida : The Elastic Mind.

The elastic mind, curator Kohl King writes, refers “to the ability to think non-linearly and be fluid to survive in times of rapid change and uncertainty. In other words, to ‘have the capacity to let go of comfortable ideas and become accustomed to ambiguity and contradiction, the capability to rise above conventional mindsets and reframe the questions we ask, the ability to abandon our ingrained assumptions and open ourselves to a new paradigm, the propensity to rely on imagination as much as on logic and to generate and integrate a wide variety of ideas, and the willingness to experiment and be tolerant of failure.’”

An expansive survey of digital and video art, it includes 67 artists and art collectives.

“Cannibals of Love” is now open at Ejecta Projects, a Carlisle, Pennsylvania-area gallery curated and run by artist Anthony Cervino + art historian Shannon Egan.

From the press release:

“‘Cannibals of Love’ takes as its inspiration the romantic comedy genre in film and television – the “Rom Com” – to “cast” an exhibition that explores themes of love and humor.

Selected from an open call that yielded over 120 submissions, the work included in this exhibition critiques or reflects notions of heartache, summer flings, awkward love triangles, unlikely couples, one-night stands, unrequited loves, the “meet cute,” or other tropes of Rom Coms. More specifically, the curated works explore romance and/or humor in relation to cinematically-scaled stories of pathos and eros.

Although the exhibition theme might at first appear to engage with light-hearted frivolities, the curators assembled a nuanced survey of contemporary artistic responses to love and power, as well as a diverse examination of relationships and romance. With the mention of cannibals in its title, the exhibition also investigates the intersections of desire, appetites, and other perceived taboos and “improper” behaviors largely absent from or suppressed by Hollywood and Hallmark. Moreover, the curators included work critical of the conventional heteronormativity, pervasive whiteness, and gender politics of the film genre.

Ultimately, the artists in the exhibition, selected for their range of perspectives, identities and works across visual media, provide viewers with new and inclusive insights into the shared human impulses to love and laugh.”

Featuring work by:

Brandin Barón // Rein Brooks // Stefani Byrd // Lindsay Deifik // Walter Early // Henry Gepfer // Ali Ha // Craig Hill // Melissa Ichiuji // Andrew Ellis Johnson // Stefanie Klingemann // Ron Lambert // Sarah Legow // Carla Lobmier // Susan Lowry // Peter Morgan // Kirsten Olson // Colin Pezzano // Thom Sawyer // Thomas Tustin // Brian Walters II // Jesse Wiedel // Julie Wills

March 11th at 8 PM, Brooklyn, NY gallery Tomato Mouse presents a showcase of animated shorts, curated by Jeremy Finch, and including work by Michael Dispensa, Leda Brittenham, Sarah Legow, Kate Stone, Michael Price, Zosia S M Kochanski, Cody Healey-Conelly, Matt Richards, James J.A. Mercer, Yifan Jiang, and Carman.

Foundation Press’s Field Trip: A Collective Playbook for Making Art in the Outdoors is now available. Commissioned by Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, England, to coincide with their exhibit Hinterlands, the book is a collection of creative prompts for making art in the wild. It’s viewable in the gallery, through April 30th, as well as in the Baltic Centre’s physical and digital archives, and downloadable via the publishers.

“This book celebrates brief moments of creative play – the unpredictable coming together of people in a place trying something out. It contains 35 instructions proposing ways that you could make something ‘in the landscape’. Whether these prompts sow the seeds for further making or perhaps simply produce an out-of-the- ordinary moment, we hope you enjoy the trip.”

Contributors: Alison Diamond // Alison Lloyd // Anne Vibeke Mou // Backgroundcamel // Beth J Ross // Caroline Locke // Chloe Henson // Christina Kolaiti // Christine Mackey // David Eckersley // Deane Hodgson // Eileen White // E McKenna // Emily Birkett // Emily Jardine // Erika Cann // Fiona Jesson // Foundation Press // Froso Papadimitriou // Hannah Gawne/Walter and Edith // Jane Pitt // Janina Sabaliauskaite // Jenny Purrett // Karis Richardson & Molly Traynor // Kath Bell // Kathryn Frund // Laura Harrington // Lena Wurz // Marcia Ley // Matthias Neumann // Natasha Armstrong // Noah Petit Navarro // Sarah Legow // Soft Radicle // Sonic Acts of Noticing

Now open in Boston, Fountain Street Gallery's presentation of my video "Dear Ceiling," paired with “The Sweet Here After: Wallpaper” by German artist Joas Nebe.

"In February 2021 Fountain Street launched 'The Sidewalk Video Gallery,' a public viewing gallery for video and other digital media art. Exhibitions of short, silent, experimental work will be displayed on two 50” monitors facing out from gallery windows at sidewalk level."

Bremerhaven's Nordsee-Zeitung newspaper covered & thoughtfully interpreted the Artspace Bremerhaven opening.

Anne Stürzer writes:

"The "Alte Bürger" [neighborhood] seemed transformed this weekend...

Full of curiosity, the art fans pushed open doors otherwise closed to them, exploring 14 enchanted places. They were amazed once again - the Artspace was held for the fifth time this year - at the Art Nouveau tiles in the stairwells, the marble floors, the high ceilings. On the one hand, time seemed to have stood still in the old quarter; on the other, the ravages of time had taken their toll on some of the houses. In some apartments, the former charm could only be guessed at, but art kissed them awake for a weekend...

Some of the artists dealt directly with the place where they were exhibiting...A short love letter, formulated by Sarah Legow, was written on the marble floor in a stairwell. The ceiling and the floor, they cannot come to each other like the two royal children from the ballad. Only if the world should collapse, the two could find each other.

Thank God, it is not that far yet. For the time being, the visitors enjoyed the many performances..."

(Translated from the German by DeepL.)

The “two royal children,” I’ve learned, is a reference to a German folk ballad with origins in the myth of Hero and Leander:

There were two royal children who
loved each other so much,
they couldn't come together,
the water was much too deep…

Artspace Bremerhaven, an annual public art festival that enlivens Die Alte Bürger neighborhood of Bremerhaven, Germany, is "a diverse journey of discovery...presented in empty spaces, shops, pubs, studios, galleries, stairwells, apartments and on the street."

Over the last weekend in August, I'll be installing "Dear Ceiling" in a stairwell in both English and German, where it will join 30+ other projects across a wide spectrum of art media.

Coming soon to an abandoned shopping mall in Helsinki, Finland, Kino Club & Ostaritutkimuksia - Shopping Mall Investigations present:
(de)construction, "a site-specific screening event addressing structural socio/economical changes related to urban development.

An international selection of short films show different perspectives on cityscaping and inhabitation around the world, from historical remnants to potential future outcomes.

Join us in the Helsinki suburb of Konala, where we collaborate with local vendors on hosting this event as part of the Shopping Mall Investigation programme.

Films by
David Valentine // Subrata Ghosh // Alexandre Silveira // Leyla Rodriguez // Delphine Richer // Susan Sentler // Edwin Miles // Sarah Legow // Arash Akbari // Lee Campbell // Sauli Tvaltvadze // Leonhard Müllner & Robin Klengel // Özlem Sarıyıldız & Bora Yediel // Greta Alfaro // Ville Koskinen

Live Performance by
Veronika Klausz & Jacqueline Aylward"

Ostaritutkimuksia "has established a temporary art and research space in the old Konalanvuori shopping center, which will open its doors in August. The program includes an exhibition, a research day, a video art screening event and an open reading circle."

“Experimental Film & Video 2022” is now open at the CICA Museum in Gimpo, South Korea, including my video “Numbers vs Death.”

Featured Artists: Marte Aas // AN SOH (안소현) // Eve Barden // Anibal Catalan // Enzo Cillo // Celia Eid // Lejin Fan // Paola Fernanda Guzmán Figueroa // Ciana Fitzgerald // Ali Georgescu // Marianne Hoffmeister // Young Hyun Jeon (전영현) // James Johnson-Perkins // Sofia Rudi Kent // Eun Gyeong Kim (김은경) // Kim tae hee (김태희) // Zach Koch // Sivaroj Kongsakul // Kiki Kouniari // Olivia Faye Lathuilliere // Leticia Laxon // Sarah Legow // Sarah Ellen Lundy // Carol Anne McGowan // Leah Netsky // Areumbit Park (박아름빛) // Park In Ok (박인옥) // Maria Pleshkovam // Erica Schreiner // David Smith // Madeline Rile Smith // Annie Strader/Matthew Weedman // Jayne Struble // Claudia Ungersbäck // Luisa Vidales Reina // Vanja Vukovic // Sam Welch & Alex Popa // Filip Wierzbicki-Nowak // Chansong Woo (우찬송) // Liqing Xu // Yoo Inseon (유인선) // Māra Zoltners

Meanwhile, my sculpture “Chicane” appears in the summer issue of Superpresent, in an issue themed around signs & symbols.

My short, absurdist fable "On Defeating the Apocalypse" will be published this summer in volume 16 of Maintenant, a yearly anthology of Dada-inspired work, along with selections from 200+ other writers and artists from around the world.

"When the corporate powers that be control all of the energy resources, Art Becomes A Necessity!!! Or as Tristen Tzara put it in his Dada Manifesto, 'Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE!'"

"The smallest, the quietest, the least, the narrowest, the slowest, the lightest, the shortest and the thinnest. We show work, barely perceptible by eye or by ear, yet unmistakably present." 

The Festival of the Smallest, now in its second edition, is an online exhibition organized by 222lodge, an artist-run art space in Dordrecht, the Netherlands. Featured artists:

Banketje // Frans Duckers // Frans van Lent // Frans Verschoor // Ienke Kastelein // Jack Madden // Jan Barel // Janneke Kornet // Julian Walker // Kimvi Nguyen // Liesje van den Berk // Nico Parlevliet // Paul Henning // Sarah Legow // Sascha Röhricht // Steef van Lent // Toine Horvers // Ton Kraayeveld // Topp & Dubio

ArchiShorts, the short film competition associated with the Architecture + Design Film Festival Winnipeg, screens films that “celebrate the narrative potential of places, real and imagined.”

My stop-motion film version of “Dear Ceiling” was selected as an Honourable Mention.

The Spring 2022 issue of Superpresent magazine is now live, including two of the photography/poetry diptychs I made in collaboration with photographer Paul Ward.

And tomorrow, the show "Inscapes," an exploration of interior architecture, is opening at the Roxbury Arts Center in the Catskills of New York, with work by:

Kate Brown // Robert Buckwalter // Charles Clary // Gary Duehr // Elisabeth Dzuricsko // Michael Fauerbach // Sarah Legow // Edward Garbarino // Tabitha Gilmore-Barnes // Elaine Grandy // Rhonda Harrow-Engel // Megan Irving // Helane Levine-Keating // Ron Macklin // Alan Powell // Michael Reichman // Sara Stone

On hiatus, 2017 - 2021. Relocated to Porto, Portugal. Watch this space for upcoming events in 2022.

I'm screening my video "Numbers vs Death" at our MFA thesis exhibition, "Happiness Greens Our Irrelevance," opening tonight at the MAMA Gallery in Los Angeles.

"The Penn MFA program presented the 2016 thesis exhibition in Los Angeles. The exhibition was the culmination of a five-month exchange between the graduate students and curator Hamza Walker. During their residency in Los Angeles, the students installed works created for the exhibition, visited artists’ studios, and engaged in this highly experimental exhibition project.

In recent years the Penn MFA program has organized exhibitions in Los Angeles and Berlin (2013), in Vienna (2014), and in Brussels (2015). The thesis exhibition project acknowledges that emerging artists work from a globalized state of culture and respond to a new perception of site specificity. The exhibition presents work impacted by a collective discussion on the premise that travel, cultural exchange and the examination of cultural relativism are all markers of a profound evolution in our vision of the world.

PennMFA Thesis Exhibition artists:
chukwumaa, Keenan Bennett, Stephanie Elden, Shaina Gates, Rich Hogan, E. Jane, Olivia Jones, Doah Lee, Sarah Legow, Daria McMeans, Yue Nakayama, Heather Raquel Phillips, Kaitlin Pomerantz, Gonzalo Reyes Rodríguez, Fern Vargas Vargas, Marianna Williams"

"This February, Grizzly Grizzly hosts "Echolocation" a group exhibition featuring Richard Hogan, Doah Lee, Sarah Legow, and Heather Raquel Phillips. The provocative selection of painting, collage, photography and video engages mimesis, mimicry, and replication as formal principles and conceptual approaches. Echolocation is curated by Haely Chang, Kirsten Gill, and Hilary R. Whitham as a part of The Incubation Series, a collaboration between the Fine Arts and History of Art Graduate Programs at the University of Pennsylvania. 

In Eunyoung Lee's paintings, amalgams of recognizable, quasi-universal symbols and unruly yet familiar abstractions, oscillate between almost and barely recognizable. In site-specific installations and collage- and text-based pieces, Sarah Legow juxtaposes seemingly arbitrary found objects in complex visual phrases. Heather Raquel Phillips creates stylized, staged photographs, primarily portraits that revel in saturated color and burlesque visual drama. Her recent work contemplates the adoption of disguise and personae, and behavioral miming more generally. Richard Hogan's photos interrogate canonical approaches to both the style and subject matter of photography, moving towards a transcendent critique of not only the medium itself, but also a broader history of image- making. Through his seemingly unassuming investigations, the unique abilities of photography to imitate, heighten, and subvert reality are gradually revealed. 

This is the second exhibition in The Incubation Series, which takes its name from the idea that graduate school is a laboratory where one can test out new ways of thinking. Fostered by Keenan Bennett, Haely Chang, Kirsten Gill, and Hilary R. Whitham, the program aims to showcase the work of MFA candidates, while offering an opportunity for art history graduate students to expand their curatorial practices."

The four exhibiting artists share further thoughts on Speak Speak, Grizzly Grizzly's blog of essays & conversation.

My site-specific text piece "Dear Ceiling" travels up to New Brunswick, Canada for Third Shift, Third Space Gallery's night time festival of public art projects. The seventeen outdoor art projects are spread among otherwise overlooked and abandoned city blocks.

"Occupying a small section of the Trinity Royal historic district between 7p.m. and midnight on August 21st, 2015, Third Shift aims to inspire Saint John residents to reimagine their city, reclaim vacant and under-utilized areas and engage with the uptown area.

Artists will be considering the physical presence of the area’s architecture to develop and exhibit their projects, making this experience unique to our city."

Jericho Knopp stops in for a look on Medium.com.

Inspired by the Pope's visit, Philadelphia Sculptors present Pope Up at Globe Dye Works, an exhibition of religious-themed art. "From the traditional to the offbeat and humorous, the show will present contemporary artists’ approaches to religion and its meanings and interpretations."

City Paper anoints Pope Up as "one of the hidden gems of this year's Fringe Festival." I'm exhibiting the Islamic calligraphy influenced sculpture "Helix."

Just Come is a collaborative show produced by the members of Matt Freedman's Graduate Drawing Seminar. Working in pairs, we produced original works which were then subject to experimental dismantling and rearrangement by the team as a whole. The duos:

Sarah Legow / Stephanie Elden
Daniel Haun / Keenan Bennett
Marianna Williams / Eunyoung Lee
Shaina Gates / Richard Hogan
Jacob Been / Daria McMeans
Olivia Jones / Derek Rigby

Tonight: MFA candidates present public lectures on their research and work at Philadephia's Institute of Contemporary Art.

Now that I'm settling into my second semester at the University of Pennsylvania MFA program, the exhibitions are starting to pile up. Two are currently open:

LIKE, now showing at Charles Addams Gallery, is a show of work by the class of '16, including:

chukwumaa // Keenan Bennett // Stephanie Elden // Shaina Gates // Richard Hogan // E. Jane // Olivia Jones // Eunyoung Lee // Sarah Legow // Daria McMeans // Yue Nakayama // Heather Raquel Phillips // Kaitlin Pomerantz // Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez // Fern Vargas Vargas // Marianna Williams

Meanwhile, Aftermarketpara.de is a show staged in and around a crate on pickup truck, inspired by Marcel Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise (Box in a Suitcase), 1935-41. In addition to the physical show, the project spawned its own (now defunct) website.

Aftermarketpara.de was conceived and curated collectively by its participants:

chukwumaa // Charles Hall // Ava Hassinger // Corey Herynk // Sacha Hughes-Caley // E. Jane // Sarah Legow // Katie Locke // Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez // Derek Rigby // Lydia Rosenberg // Kasey Short // Stephanie Elden // Wilmer Wilson

"Homeward Found" is an Artforum.com critic's pick.

Chelsea Haines writes: "The Wassaic Project is a quirky, informal yet surprisingly ambitious exhibition and residency complex in a sleepy hamlet in upstate New York. At its core is a four-story mill converted into a quick-and-dirty exhibition space. This is the site of the organization’s sixth annual summer exhibition, which includes the work of eighty artists, about half of whom are former residents and whose intimacy with Wassaic’s idiosyncratic spaces and tight-knit community is keenly felt.

Installation and sculpture reign supreme in the exhibition’s barnlike setting..."

My "Sex and the Nature of Things" collage series is featured today in the London-based Journal of Wild Culture. Published by the Society for the Preservation of Wild Culture, the journal "focuses on the broad and fertile intersection between culture and the environment."

Homeward Found is now open at the Wassaic Project through September 2nd.

"Homeward Found, the Wassaic Project’s sixth annual summer exhibition, refers to a passage, a personal quest, and a seeking of home. The Wassaic Project invites viewers to climb the seven stories of the Maxon Mills grain elevator once again and explore the work of over eighty emerging artists, half of whom are Wassaic Artist Residency alumni. Homeward Found speaks to the domestic themes present throughout the exhibition, as well as the scavenged materials found in many of the works."

Come check out the work of my fellow January residents: Vika Adutova, Giada Crispiels, Alicia DeBrincat, Priti Gulati Cox, Alex McKenzie, Nora Rodriguez, Eduardo Santiere, and Markel Uriu.

Fall travels: I'm on the road this season, hopping between residencies and other short-term gigs. First up was a residency at Contemporary Artists Center at Woodside, in a renovated church in upstate New York, and now I'm pitching in as a Studio Assistant at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. Next are residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Wassaic Project.

This year's Kinsey Institute Art Show opens at Indiana University's Grunwald Gallery of Art on May 18th. Work "address[es] gender issues, sexuality, reproduction, sexual politics, romantic relationships, and the human figure."

A virtual version of the exhibit is viewable here.

Recommendations for the Evil Is Interesting show from Newcity and Bad at Sports.

Evil Is Interesting, curated by Michael Workman/ANTIDOTE projects, opens at Antena Gallery this Friday, the 23rd. From the exhibition statement:

"This exhibition interrogates the seductiveness and glamour of evil. Evil, after all, is adept at projecting a certain kind of charm. We cherish the antics of our TV and motion picture villains in all their insouciant brutality and eroticized violence. But evil can also exert a subtle charm in the allure of its ability to feign a release from life's problems. Accepting the Faustian bargain of evil offerings requires a willingness to enter into a complicity with that evil, and to sacrifice the ideals of the "good life" that we aspire to. It is arguable that consenting to evil is always an intimate choice, with the goal of manipulating its victims into rejecting their own self-worth and, in consequence, to giving away control over the direction of their own life-course, now subsumed in service to evil. This can take place on the level of an intimate personal relationship, as in the instance of a rakish seduction, or on the level of an entire culture, as the history of fascism has shown.

Borrowing from a diverse range of artists from Filippo Marinetti, Rirkrit Tiranamija, Yves Klein and Wyndham Lewis, the exhibition space will be converted into a domestic backdrop against which objects, activities and more will form a totalized artistic environment. Visitors will be invited to interact with this environment while performances are conducted in the manner of a teatro totale. The question of the allure of evil will be interrogated both in objects that compose the environment, in performances both interactive with the audience, and in those acted out
as if no audience were present."

With: Frank Pollard, Mike Lenkowski, Lorna Mills, Sarah Weis, Bill Talsma, Elizabeth Suter, Jody Oesterreicher, Micki Tschur, Sarah Legow, Industry of the Ordinary, Holly Streekstra, Samantha Ocasta, Jeffrey Grauel, Tony Kapel, Computers Cult, Maitejosune Urrechaga and others.

False Love 'zine with texts by AA Bronson, Michael Workman, Dan Gleason and others.

"Excavating History: Artists Take on Historic Sites" is now available from Annie Heckman's StepSister Press. Featured are essays and images from all of the "Excavating History" series of exhibitions, including the 2010 iteration at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum where I screened The Woman in the Wallpaper.

The group exhibit KNOCKOUT opens tomorrow at [prak-sis] Contemporary Art Association.

"The subject of this show is the fight-ending blow, the final kick, the punch, a strike so hard it renders someone unconscious. Traditionally associated with full-contact combat sports, this term is typically associated to masculinity, aggression, strength, and undisputed, uncontested victory. Interestingly, this term also can be used to refer to women whose hyper-femininity makes them worthy of admiration, becoming objectified as the passive subject of the male gaze. This show includes work that explores both of these seemingly contradictory sides or the gray areas where both concepts meet."

With - Leah Rae Brown // David Criner // Michael Fazio // Daniel Greenberg // Andrew Hammerand // Jennifer Hodges // Kristie Keenon // Evelyn Kelley // Karolina Kowalczyk // Sarah Legow // Jordan McGirk // Sharon Mooney // Joe Morris // Giuseppe Pellicano // Christine Rabenold // Ali Urasky // Colette Wright Adams

Final show with the School of the Art Institute opens tonight and runs through November 12th. I'm showing one sculpture series and one collages series.

February's Prague show opens tonight in its new incarnation at Chicago's Mess Hall. Now known as 7,308.23 kilometers = 4,541.123 miles, it features photography, collage, text, and live improvised music. Thanks to Becky and Troy for pulling it together.

Also new, a working draft of my latest animation, "Chemical Emblems," appears in an online exhibition at ExTV.

The group exhibition 7308.230 opens today in Prague's Galerie AVU.

"A koan is a fundamental part of the history and lore of Zen Buddhism. It consists of a story, dialogue, question, or statement, the meaning of which cannot be understood by rational thinking but may be accessible through intuition. A meeting of cultures, conceptual thinking enabled a mix of visually unified perspectives. A memory exchange between Chicago and Prague based artists who then respond to a chosen memory though a photograph.

Featuring - Becky Grajeda // Troy Briggs // Veronika Bromova // Jirí Hladík // Sarah Legow // Catherine Pancake // Brenna Quinn // Tamara Malas // Amanda Leigh Maranca // Mark McWilliams // Markéta Rákosníková // Ali Scott // Jennifer Nicole Swann // Lukas Petr Josef Theofil Válka // Tomáš Vrána // Kim Walker"

The elegantly designed Urban Bloom is an online periodical which explores nature's role in the city through monthly themed art portfolios. This November the theme is "the methods of the scavenger." My works appear on page 11 & 12.

NewPages has posted a review of the Spring 2010 Cream City Review. Tanya Angell Allen writes:

"Sarah Legow's cover art for the latest 245 page volume of Cream City Review depicts ordinary objects inside eggshells. One shell holds sand. Another holds fur. Others hold clock gears, cigarette butts, shells, and twine. It's oddly perfect for the issue, as Cream City is crammed with strange, good pieces that give magic-realistic tinges to ordinary and gritty subjects...

[The] essays, stories, poems, and artworks in Cream City remind us of the beautiful and mad bits of magic that can be made from ordinary life."

The Spring 2010 issue of Cream City Review, published by the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, features 200+ pages of poetry, fiction, art, and creative non-fiction. Two of my sculpture pieces appear inside and another supplies the cover art.

Messing with Jane opens today at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum, with a nod from Bad at Sports. I'll be screening The Woman in the Wallpaper, a site-specific animation installation.

Exhibition organized by Rebecca Keller, and featuring the work of - Liene Bosque-Muller // Chiara Galimberti // Elise Goldstein // Maral Hashemi // Rebecca Hernandez // Allison Jenetopulos // Rebecca Keller // Sarah Legow // Erin Obradovich // Hannah Merry Shaw // Cori Williams