Sunday, February 26, 2012

CNY Scholastic Art Awards Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Whitney Applied Technology Center
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

The Awards signify to parents, teachers, community, and colleges that a student is an accomplished artist or writer. 30,000 teen artists and writers will be recognized in their regions. 1,000 will win national awards. Each work is reviewed by a panel of arts professionals for the originality, technical skill, and emergence of personal vision or voice.

Looking & Looking: Photos by Amy Elkins and Jen Davis
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Jen Davis and Amy Elkins create work that focuses on gaze and identity, with Davis looking at herself and Elkins looking at young male athletes. The images in the exhibition explore the perception of how men and women are supposed to appear in society -- men should be strong and confident, women should be beautiful -- and the crafting of a self-image.

Jen Davis creates self-portraits that deal with issues surrounding beauty, identity, and body image of women, and challenges the perceptions and stereotypes of how women should look in their physical appearances. Amy Elkins depicts the more aggressive, competitive, and violent aspects of male identity in her series Elegant Violence, which captures portraits of young Ivy League rugby athletes moments after their game. Elkins' images explore the balance between athleticism, modes of violence or aggression, and varying degrees of vulnerability within a sport where brutal body contact is fundamental.

Both artists focus on the construction of identity -- the players are astutely aware of how they are presenting themselves while Davis draws attention to her own self-image in a more emotional way. Shown together, the works of Davis and Elkins urge the viewer to consider expectations and perceptions (both societal and individual) of identity.

Envisionary
Szozda Gallery

Szozda Gallery
Delavan Center, 501 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Well established artist Phil Parsons and relatively new talent Emily Elizabeth display their painterly visions of atmospheric and landscape horizons surrounding Central New York. "Envisionary," the show's title, was coined perhaps to sharpen the concept of changing environs, elements commonplace every day that some artists foresee in greater depths than what most people perceive. In Elizabeth's case, it's her fascination with the universe that compels her to paint beyond shape and form to focus on color and atmosphere, while Parsons chooses to capture memorable landscapes that he himself alters with color and invented skies, reflecting his own feelings.

Read a review!

Pressing Print: Contemporary Prints and Process from Universal Limited Art Editions
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"Pressing Print: Contemporary Prints and Process from Universal Limited Art Editions" chronicles the recent decade of artwork published by one of the most renowned American printmaking workshops. The exhibition of 60 works illustrates the impact that artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler and Kiki Smith have had on contemporary art, evident through the work of artists Jason Middelbrook, Amy Cutler and Jane Hammond. The show also illustrates how emerging artists recently selected to work with ULAE has influenced the current trend, in both process and concept.

Weekend and evening visitors can park in the Q4 lot on College Place. Notify the attendant that you are visiting the Galleries and you will be directed where to park. Parking is on a space available basis and may be restricted during events held at the Carrier Dome. If spaces are not available, the attendant will direct you to the nearest lot.

Emilio Sanchez: No Way Home--Images of the Caribbean and New York City
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"No Way Home" features a selection of 24 paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints drawn from the recently acquired collection of work by Cuban-American artist Emilio Sanchez (1921-1999). Best known for his brightly colored, strongly shadowed images of Caribbean and New York City architecture, this exhibition reveals the artist's ongoing interest in repetitive patterns. The show highlights a recent gift to the University Art Collection from the Emilio Sanchez Foundation of over 250 paintings, drawings and prints.

John Knecht: Fragments from the Wheels of Ezekiel
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $5 suggested donation
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

John Knecht is the featured artist for the Urban Video Project in January and February. In conjunction with the exhibition of "Deluge and Anima" on the Everson's north façade, a series of Knecht's animations, called "Fragments from the Wheels of Ezekiel," will be on view inside the museum. The Fragments, individual animations displayed on monitors, provide a glimpse into the artist's brilliant imagination, where fantasy collides with vivid colors and quirky sounds.

From New York to Corrymore: Robert Henri and Ireland
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $10 adults, $8 students/seniors, $30 family pack (2 adults, 4 children))
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

"From New York to Corrymore: Robert Henri and Ireland" is the first exhibition to examine the American artist's work focused on the Irish landscape and people, particularly children, created between the time of his first trip to Ireland in 1913 and his last trip there in 1928. Long celebrated as an iconic American artist due to his important early work as a teacher and as the leader of The Eight, Henri's paintings have received less attention on their own. Most projects explored his career as it related to his role as a member of The Eight or in a broadly retrospective manner. Few projects focused on his landscapes, drawings, or foreign portraits.

Henri's Irish portraits constitute his largest focused body of work, and often depict the same sitters year after year. These paintings offer a unique and fascinating window onto the genre about which Henri felt most strongly--portraiture--and also chart his experiments with paint handling and color theories over time. He wrote that the time spent in Ireland was extremely valuable to him (it was the only other place besides New York where he purchased a residence), for only there was he able to focus on his painting without the distractions of life in New York. It is not surprising, then, that the periods Henri spent in Ireland were among his most prolific, and the paintings produced there among his most accomplished. Just before his death, Henri composed a list of his most important paintings; many of the works on this list were his Irish subjects. Forty-one paintings of Irish people and landscapes will be on view in the upcoming exhibition.

VPA Faculty Show Part II
XL Projects

Price: Free
XL Projects
307-313 S. Clinton St., Syracuse

Part two of an exhibition of work by faculty in S.U.'s College of Visual and Performing Arts.

For more information, phone 315-442-2542 during gallery hours or e-mail Andrew Havenhand at ahavenhand@yahoo.com.

Price Check
Redhouse

Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

A research-based curatorial examination by Roslyn Esperon and Courtney Rile, featuring the art of Michael Barletta, Caol Flaitz, Carla Goldberg, Novado Cappuccilli, Jason Varone, Fred Wellner, Laura Wellner, and Leah Wolff

John Knecht: Deluge and Anima
Urban Video Project

Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Deluge (2010) hand-drawn looping animation
Anima (2011) hand-drawn looping animation

Artist Statement:
Things have been falling in my videos for decades. It was at first formal. Falling things filled the frame and made a complicated cinematic space. The things falling -- wishbones, test tubes, martini glasses, plastic strawberries that looked like a human heart, cement blocks and infected molars -- increasingly became an atmosphere, functioning both as a formal device and a metaphorical space.

There is a drawing in the collection of the Queen, hanging in Buckingham Palace, by Leonardo daVinci which depicts a deluge of raining everyday objects: rakes, funnels, lamps and general debris. The title of the drawing is "A Cloudburst of Material Things." It is graphite on paper and credited to daVinci. It is dated 1500. The drawing is torn in half so only a part of the drawing remains. I have struggled to find out more about the piece and there is virtually nothing written about it, but I am haunted by it. "Deluge" is directly informed by the overwhelmed totality of daVinci's image. What was he thinking?

For Syracuse, 2010: Selections of Truisms and Survival
Urban Video Project

Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Internationally renowned artist Jenny Holzer created "For Syracuse" as a site-specific installation that streams across the facade of Syracuse Stage on an LED curtain. The installation features 272 aphorisms from her celebrated series "Truisms, and Survival" that challenge viewer's assumptions about the world we live in through the use of language as art. Whether questioning consumerist impulses, or lamenting the struggles of daily living Jenny Holzer always provokes a response. Her work crosses the boundary between poetry and visual art, and suggests both the limitations and power of technology and the information age.

For more than 30 years, this influential American conceptual artist has been creating subversive works that blend in among advertisements in public spaces questioning and confronting our passive consumption of information. Since the early 1970s, Holzer has been collecting and writing phrases and aphorisms found in literature, philosophy and contemporary culture. She calls these summaries her Truisms, and has printed them on bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches, footstools, stickers, t-shirts, condoms, paintings, photographs, video, sound, light projection, and the Internet. In 1982, Holzer installed Truisms on one of Time Square's gigantic LED billboards. In the 1980s, for her Survival Series, Holzer adopted more personal and urgent messages about the realities of everyday living. Power, vulnerability, violence, tenderness, moral struggles and motherhood are courageously chronicled in this series which continuously prods the viewer to question the role of individuals in society.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Syracuse International Film Festival

Price: Free (donations accepted)
Al's Wine & Whiskey Lounge
321 S. Clinton St., Syracuse

Classic film starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell.

The Past is Not Past: The Work of the Cold Case Justice Initiative
University Neighbors Lecture Series
Featuring Paula Johnson and Janis McDonald

Price: $10 regular, $5 with student ID
Westcott Community Center
Corner of Euclid Ave. and Westcott St., Syracuse

Paula C. Johnson is professor of Law at Syracuse University College of Law. She is co-director of the Cold Case Justice Initiative at SU College of Law. She has held several distinguished teaching posts, including the Haywood Burns Chair in Civil Rights at CUNY Law School. She is co-editor of "Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States" (UC-Berkeley Press, 2010); and is the author of "Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women in Prison" (NYU Press, 2003). She received the Chancellor's Citation for Excellence at Syracuse University in 2011.

Professor Janis McDonald is a Professor and the Co-Director of the Cold Case Justice Initiative (CCJI). The CCJI was established in early 2007 by Professor McDonald and Professor Paula C. Johnson to assist the families of those killed by acts of racial hatred and violence in the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. She and Professor Johnson also co-teach a unique new interdisciplinary course, "Investigating and Reopening Civil Rights Era Murders," with graduate students from the SUCOL and other graduate schools at S.U. The course received the 2008 Syracuse University Chancellor's Award for Public Engagement and Scholarship in Action. Professor Johnson and McDonald work to help other law schools adopt the model of the CCJI to assist other families who seek justice.

John Cadley and Cathy Wenthen
CNY Bluegrass Association

Price: $10 adults, $8 members, kids 16 and under free with paying adult
Marcellus American Legion Hall
13 E. Main St., Marcellus

CNYBA Jam/Showcase. Please bring a salad, bread or dessert to accompany the chili dinner.

11:00 am: jam
3:00 pm: dinner
4:30 pm: concert

Email cnybacontactus@aol.com or call 315-572-2247 for more information.

Keeping Sparky's Spark Alive
ArtRage Gallery

Price: Donation
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

Open House featuring live music, food, raffle, and open mic

1:00-2:00 pm: Atlantic Flyway
2:00-4:00 pm: Open mic/Sparky stories,
4:00–5:00 pm: Hanna Richardson & Phil Flanigan

This fundraiser is to help offset the estate costs associated with Sparky Mortimer's death.

Brian Israel Tribute Concert
Society for New Music

Price: $15 regular, $12 seniors, $10 students
Hosmer Auditorium, Everson Museum
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Brian Israel was a prodigiously gifted pianist, composer and conductor, and a staunch supporter of new music and the young composers who create it. The Society for New Music and the New York Federation of Music Clubs recognize two outstanding young composers each year who live or study in New York in Israel's honor. To mark the 25th anniversary of his death, this year's winners will be joined by a few previous Israel Prize winners in a celebration of the man and his legacy.

Featured on this program are:
Rob Paterson Sunset (1995, rev. 2008)
Bret Bohman String Quartet No. 1 (2011)
Derek Bermel Funk Studies (2004)
Thomas Healy String Quartet No. 1 (2010)
Derek Bermel SchiZm (1994)
Brian Israel Love Songs, Lions & Lullabyes (1978)

Winter Concert
Onondaga Civic Symphony Orchestra
Erik Kibelsbeck, conductor
Featuring Benjamin Daly, piano

Atonement Lutheran Church
116 W. Glen Ave., Syracuse

Gounod Petite Symphony for Winds (excerpt)
Haydn Piano Concerto in D
Shostakovich Symphony No. 5

The Jazzuits Sing Gershwin with Nancy Kelly
LeMoyne College

Price: $10 regular, $7 seniors, $5 students
James Commons
Le Moyne College, Syracuse

World-class vocalist Nancy Kelly joins the Jazzuits, featuring the music of the great George Gershwin. For more information and to purchase tickets, call 315-445-4523.

*CANCELLED* musica intima, chamber choir
Malmgren Concert Series

Price: Free
Hendricks Chapel
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Choral Evensong and Organ Recital
Featuring Cathedral Choir; Jim Potts, organ

Price: Freewill offering
St. Paul's Syracuse
220 E. Fayette St., Syracuse

The choir will sing works of William Smith, Orlando Gibbons, Maurice Greene, and others.

Jim Potts will present an organ recital of works by Johann Bernhard Bach, Cesar Franck, and Norman Cocker.

7th Annual Cora A. Thomas Gospel Extravaganza
Featuring Kurt Carr & Singers

Bethany Baptist Church
149 Beattie St., Syracuse

For more information, please contact Cedric Bolton in Syracuse University's Office of Multicultural Affairs at 315-443-9676.

Les Miserables
Broadway in Syracuse

Price: $17.50 to $72.50
Crouse Hinds Concert Theater, Mulroy Civic Center
411 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Uber-producer Cameron Mackintosh, of Cats and The Phantom of the Opera fame, is rolling out a new 25th anniversary production of Les Miserables. Based on Victor Hugo's literary opus, it tells the story of ex-convict Jean Valjean, who tries to remake his life and protect his "adopted" daughter Cosette.

Read a Review!

Salt City Abolitionists
Onondaga Historical Association

Price: Free
Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

The audience can engage with actors portraying famous local abolitionists the Rev. Samuel May and Caroline Loguen, organizing a meeting in the aftermath of the Jerry Rescue in 1851. Actors Scott Peal and Toni Jones are portraying May and Loguen, respectively.

The Marvelous Wonderettes
Rarely Done Productions
Appleseed Productions

Price: $25
Jazz Central
441 E. Washington St., Syracuse

The story is set at the 1958 Springfield High School prom where we meet the Wonderettes — Betty Jean, Cindy Lou, Missy, and Suzy, four girls with hopes and dreams as big as their crinoline skirts and voices to match! As we learn about their lives and loves, we are treated to the girls performing classic 50s and 60s songs. Written by Roger Bean.

This reprise of last season's smash hit is a joint fundraiser for Appleseed Productions and Rarely Done Productions.

Othello
Syracuse Shakespeare-in-the-Park
Dan Stevens, director

Price: $12 regular; $10 student/senior; $5 SU students, faculty, staff and alumni
Empire Theater
New York State Fairgrounds, Geddes

This play is one of Shakespeare's masterpieces. Othello focuses on the themes of love, jealousy and ambition. Set in modern times, the show will resonate with audience members who see our cultural mores in the 21st century played out in Shakespeare's beautiful language. Starring Tony Brown in the title role, SSF's 5th annual Shakespeare Under A Roof kickoff features the considerable acting talents of Rick Signorelli as Iago, Sara Caliva as Desdemona, and Nora O'Dea as Emilia. Don't miss this classic of The Bard.

Read a Review!

Caroline, or Change
Syracuse Stage
Marcela Lorca, director

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

The acclaimed musical event blending blues, gospel and traditional Jewish melodies, with book and lyrics by Tony Kushner (Angels in America) and music by Jeanine Tesori (Thoroughly Modern Millie and Shrek: The Musical).

An eight-year-old boy named Noah Gellman struggles with the loss of his mother and the arrival of a new stepmother. One constant in his life are the small daily rituals he shares with Caroline, the family's African-American maid. The year is 1963—civil rights and Kennedy—and in the Gellman household in Lake Charles, Louisiana, change is coming for everyone, in big ways and small. Two powerhouses of the American theatre, playwright Tony Kushner and composer Jeanine Tesori, join forces on a musical of startling creativity and refreshing originality (don't be surprised when the washing machine starts to sing). Acclaimed on Broadway and winner of London's prestigious Olivier Award for Best New Musical, with a score ranging from blues to gospel to traditional Jewish melodies, Caroline, or Change proves playwright Kushner's point that "music is a blessing that enters the soul through the ear."

Read a Review!

The Lower Depths
Syracuse University Drama Department
Gerardine Clark, director

Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

A masterpiece of Russian realism, The Lower Depths was Maxim Gorky's first great play and its premiere production in 1902 helped establish the reputation of the famed Moscow Art Theatre and its influential director Constantine Stanislavsky. In the cave-like basement of a run-down boarding house, a disparate group of bosyák (literally, the barefoot) -- outcasts, petty criminals and day laborers -- negotiate days lived between harsh truth and consoling lies. With little hope or light in their lives, Gorky's finely detailed and psychologically rich characters manage to celebrate what Stanislavsky called the play's spiritual essence: "freedom, whatever happens!"

Read a Review!

Les Miserables
Broadway in Syracuse

Price: $17.50 to $72.50
Crouse Hinds Concert Theater, Mulroy Civic Center
411 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Uber-producer Cameron Mackintosh, of Cats and The Phantom of the Opera fame, is rolling out a new 25th anniversary production of Les Miserables. Based on Victor Hugo's literary opus, it tells the story of ex-convict Jean Valjean, who tries to remake his life and protect his "adopted" daughter Cosette.

Read a Review!

Durang in Duet
Black Box Players
Katie Lynch, director

Price: Free
Loft Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Durang in Duet is an evening of two short plays, Canker Sores and Other Distractions and For Who the Southern Belle Tolls, written by Christopher Durang. Durang is an American playwright know for works of outrageous and often absurd comedy.

Canker Sores and Other Distractions takes place in a restaurant with an ex-husband and wife meeting for one of the first times after their divorce. A disagreeable waitress causes an obstacle while the two characters develop several afflictions that cause them to remember why they divorced in the first place.

For Who the Southern Belle Tolls is a parody of Tenessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. It takes place on the night that Tom brings home a lady friend for his crippled brother, Lawrence. The play is an absurd and hilarious take on the Wingfield family that Tennesse Williams made famous in The Glass Menagerie.

Read a review!

Monday, February 27, 2012

Gallery Exhibit: Abisay Puentes, Imposibilitatos
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Ann Felton Multicultural Center and Gallery
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Artist Statement:

In the imagination of all artists lay all transcendent questions that humankind have formulated in their heart and mind. In my artwork there are only a few questions as the center. Why do humans hurt each other? What is the reason for man's evil? Why do men have bad nature?

The only answer I have found is: Because mankind is "IMPOSIBILITATO" (unable, helpless, without means, impossibility in man).

This is a spiritual and physical stage that makes possible an unhappy humanity. This impossibility became the product of man losing the purpose of existence. With this loss we have found pain, agony and disorientation.

In my paintings I try to capture the diverse stages of impossibility. This is why this series has the same theme, feeling and internal message. Between the expressionism and the neo-romanticism I establish a pictorial-sonorous piece of work with its own time and space, making a greater connection with the viewer.

CNY Scholastic Art Awards Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Whitney Applied Technology Center
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

The Awards signify to parents, teachers, community, and colleges that a student is an accomplished artist or writer. 30,000 teen artists and writers will be recognized in their regions. 1,000 will win national awards. Each work is reviewed by a panel of arts professionals for the originality, technical skill, and emergence of personal vision or voice.

Contain/Constrain: Works by Sam Horowitz
Point of Contact Gallery

Price: Free
Point of Contact Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

In today's virtual era, when we can communicate at light speed, inhabit cyber realities, and continually discard the "old" in search for "upgrades", one might expect that technology innovation makes us less burdened, less constrained by time and space. By the same token, so many of us are living rushed unthinking lives, desensitized and isolated from anything real. Are we constrained by our own innovations? We work, live and play inside frames, according to Horowitz, and those frames are mobile or immobile, physical, mental or metaphorical.

In this exhibition, the intrusion of familiar objects with uncharacteristic contents invites the viewer to reconsider the forms, functions and limitations of recognizable, re-purposed relics, and pokes fun at our decreasing flexibility, our increasing demands, and the collective loss of craft, localized-innovation and repair. "The trunks, once utilitarian objects used to carry clothing and other personal items, are now filled for the sake of filling. The cardboard, created initially to contain other entities, functions as contents. Though each framing device no longer holds the contents they were created to contain, they contain nonetheless; it is the humor and irony of this relationship that I strive to illustrate thorough my work."

To create this installation, Horowitz began by collecting trunks, cases and boxes. Though most bore a patina of age, use and neglect, he cleaned, fixed, and saved each piece. Horowitz is able to manipulate cardboard to create the designs and patterns he finds within the lines and corrugation so readily offered. "I have drawn each piece through the gauntlet intentionally, irrationally or purely by necessity," states Horowitz. "Thinking over my work, and planning new directions strays into theory, but in practice, I work, live, and act in this moment."

Salon: Strictly Local
Syracuse Technology Garden Gallery

Price: Free
Syracuse Technology Garden
235 Harrison St., Syracuse

The exhibit will feature works by over 50 local artists.

The Power and The Piety: The World of Medieval and Renaissance Europe
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Bird Library, 6th Floor
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This exhibit, curated by History Professor Chris Kyle with Senior Director of Special Collections Sean Quimby, showcases the library's collection of illuminated manuscripts and early printed works, including a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible.

The title "The Power and The Piety," refers to extraordinary influence that secular monarchies and the Church had on the lives of everyday men and women. Richly illustrated late medieval psalters and books of hours exemplify the painstaking attention that the pious paid to their spiritual well-being. But the printing revolution made it possible for new ideas to spread more rapidly. Printed works like Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan" (1651) signified the increasing power wielded by kings, queens and other secular authorities. As the Protestant Reformation and Scientific Revolution took hold of Europe, the power of the Catholic Church further waned. "The Power and the Piety" includes such important works as the first King James Bible (1611) and a second printing of Copernicus' "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium" (1566), which argued in favor of a heliocentric, or sun-centered, universe.

The exhibition is arranged thematically, highlighting the overarching themes of power and piety, as well as English literature, music, architecture, science and fine bindings.

FOR_PLAY
Syracuse University School of Architecture
Featuring James and Hayes Slade

Price: Free
Slocum Hall Gallery
Syracuse University campus, Syracuse

An exhibition of projects by Slade Architecture of New York City designed for or including an element of play.

Westcott Community Gallery Group Show
Westcott Community Art Gallery

Price: Free
Westcott Community Center
Corner of Euclid Ave. and Westcott St., Syracuse

Works by Molly Susman, Steve Susman, and Jessica Breedlove.

Looking & Looking: Photos by Amy Elkins and Jen Davis
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Jen Davis and Amy Elkins create work that focuses on gaze and identity, with Davis looking at herself and Elkins looking at young male athletes. The images in the exhibition explore the perception of how men and women are supposed to appear in society -- men should be strong and confident, women should be beautiful -- and the crafting of a self-image.

Jen Davis creates self-portraits that deal with issues surrounding beauty, identity, and body image of women, and challenges the perceptions and stereotypes of how women should look in their physical appearances. Amy Elkins depicts the more aggressive, competitive, and violent aspects of male identity in her series Elegant Violence, which captures portraits of young Ivy League rugby athletes moments after their game. Elkins' images explore the balance between athleticism, modes of violence or aggression, and varying degrees of vulnerability within a sport where brutal body contact is fundamental.

Both artists focus on the construction of identity -- the players are astutely aware of how they are presenting themselves while Davis draws attention to her own self-image in a more emotional way. Shown together, the works of Davis and Elkins urge the viewer to consider expectations and perceptions (both societal and individual) of identity.

Design and Aging
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

Price: Free
Genet Design Gallery
The Warehouse, 350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

"Design and Aging," an exhibition of student design projects focused on solutions to problems associated with aging, features work by students in industrial and interaction design, interior design and advertising design in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. It includes a project that explores how effective design could assist the elderly population of Hong Kong, as well as a series of posters that illustrate potential kiosks that could be targeted to mall walkers at Shoppingtown Mall in DeWitt.

The Design Gallery is located on the first floor of The Warehouse. Patrons should enter via the ground-floor door adjacent to the café on W. Fayette St. or the first-floor door on W. Washington St.

For more information, contact Bradley Hudson at bjhudson@syr.edu.

The Photographer as Child: Memories of Guatemala
La Casita Cultural Center

La Casita Cultural Center
109 Otisco St., Syracuse

Born in Guatemala, award-winning photographer Efren Lopez is a student in the Military Photojournalism Program at Syracuse University. He is also an aerial photographer for the U.S. Air Force and the first reservist to be selected to attend Newhouse's Military Photojournalism Program. He now lives in Arizona.

The exhibit features images Lopez captured on a return trip to Guatemala in 2009. "My life began in a bamboo hut at the side of a road in a tiny town named Petaca, Guatemala, in 1966," Lopez writes. "It's a town so small that it is next to impossible to find on most maps of Guatemala, much less Central America."

Lopez has documented real-world situations and the military around the globe and has captured stunning images in Arizona and Guatemala. His work has been featured in various publications, including the book Arizona 24/7, and has been awarded many distinctions, including first place in the Professional Photography category at the 2008 Arizona State Fair, an honorable mention in the pictorial category in the 2009 Military Photographer of the Year competition, and first place in the 2011 Multimedia Team 19th Annual Department of Defense Worldwide Military Photography Workshop.

For Syracuse, 2010: Selections of Truisms and Survival
Urban Video Project

Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Internationally renowned artist Jenny Holzer created "For Syracuse" as a site-specific installation that streams across the facade of Syracuse Stage on an LED curtain. The installation features 272 aphorisms from her celebrated series "Truisms, and Survival" that challenge viewer's assumptions about the world we live in through the use of language as art. Whether questioning consumerist impulses, or lamenting the struggles of daily living Jenny Holzer always provokes a response. Her work crosses the boundary between poetry and visual art, and suggests both the limitations and power of technology and the information age.

For more than 30 years, this influential American conceptual artist has been creating subversive works that blend in among advertisements in public spaces questioning and confronting our passive consumption of information. Since the early 1970s, Holzer has been collecting and writing phrases and aphorisms found in literature, philosophy and contemporary culture. She calls these summaries her Truisms, and has printed them on bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches, footstools, stickers, t-shirts, condoms, paintings, photographs, video, sound, light projection, and the Internet. In 1982, Holzer installed Truisms on one of Time Square's gigantic LED billboards. In the 1980s, for her Survival Series, Holzer adopted more personal and urgent messages about the realities of everyday living. Power, vulnerability, violence, tenderness, moral struggles and motherhood are courageously chronicled in this series which continuously prods the viewer to question the role of individuals in society.

Ryan McGiver and Jesse Smith in Concert
Kellish Hill Farm

Price: $15
Kellish Hill Farm
3192 Pompey Center Rd., Pompey

The duo features an all-star and eclectic mixture of traditional and Indie-folk music. Fiddle player, Jesse Smith was born into a musical family. His mother, Donna Long, has recorded and performed with, most notably, Brendan Mulvihill and the American-based band, Cherish the Ladies. His dad John sings and plays the guitar. Jesse grew up immersed in the Irish music tradition having spent his childhood surrounded by many of the great Irish-American musicians. Ryan McGiver's debut album, "Troubled in Mind," is a Indie-folk record of imaginative musical interpretations of old Appalachian ballads. Co-produced by Shahzad Ismaily (Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Marc Ribot), the collaboration results in a spiritual, often meditative music, with a haunting quality that draws from sources as diverse as Buell Kazee, Levi Smith, Annie Watson, Washington Phillips, Neil Driscoll and Randy Newman.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

CNY Scholastic Art Awards Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Whitney Applied Technology Center
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

The Awards signify to parents, teachers, community, and colleges that a student is an accomplished artist or writer. 30,000 teen artists and writers will be recognized in their regions. 1,000 will win national awards. Each work is reviewed by a panel of arts professionals for the originality, technical skill, and emergence of personal vision or voice.

Gallery Exhibit: Abisay Puentes, Imposibilitatos
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Ann Felton Multicultural Center and Gallery
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Artist Statement:

In the imagination of all artists lay all transcendent questions that humankind have formulated in their heart and mind. In my artwork there are only a few questions as the center. Why do humans hurt each other? What is the reason for man's evil? Why do men have bad nature?

The only answer I have found is: Because mankind is "IMPOSIBILITATO" (unable, helpless, without means, impossibility in man).

This is a spiritual and physical stage that makes possible an unhappy humanity. This impossibility became the product of man losing the purpose of existence. With this loss we have found pain, agony and disorientation.

In my paintings I try to capture the diverse stages of impossibility. This is why this series has the same theme, feeling and internal message. Between the expressionism and the neo-romanticism I establish a pictorial-sonorous piece of work with its own time and space, making a greater connection with the viewer.

"Images of Upstate New York" and "Juxtaposed Through Wonderland"
SUNY Oswego Metro Center at the Atrium

SUNY Oswego Metro Center at the Atrium
2 Clinton Square, Syracuse

"Images of Upstate New York" features work by Morgan Goodwin and Kate Walseman
"Juxtaposed Through Wonderland" features recent work by KayCie Danniel

Salon: Strictly Local
Syracuse Technology Garden Gallery

Price: Free
Syracuse Technology Garden
235 Harrison St., Syracuse

The exhibit will feature works by over 50 local artists.

The Power and The Piety: The World of Medieval and Renaissance Europe
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Bird Library, 6th Floor
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This exhibit, curated by History Professor Chris Kyle with Senior Director of Special Collections Sean Quimby, showcases the library's collection of illuminated manuscripts and early printed works, including a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible.

The title "The Power and The Piety," refers to extraordinary influence that secular monarchies and the Church had on the lives of everyday men and women. Richly illustrated late medieval psalters and books of hours exemplify the painstaking attention that the pious paid to their spiritual well-being. But the printing revolution made it possible for new ideas to spread more rapidly. Printed works like Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan" (1651) signified the increasing power wielded by kings, queens and other secular authorities. As the Protestant Reformation and Scientific Revolution took hold of Europe, the power of the Catholic Church further waned. "The Power and the Piety" includes such important works as the first King James Bible (1611) and a second printing of Copernicus' "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium" (1566), which argued in favor of a heliocentric, or sun-centered, universe.

The exhibition is arranged thematically, highlighting the overarching themes of power and piety, as well as English literature, music, architecture, science and fine bindings.

FOR_PLAY
Syracuse University School of Architecture
Featuring James and Hayes Slade

Price: Free
Slocum Hall Gallery
Syracuse University campus, Syracuse

An exhibition of projects by Slade Architecture of New York City designed for or including an element of play.

Westcott Community Gallery Group Show
Westcott Community Art Gallery

Price: Free
Westcott Community Center
Corner of Euclid Ave. and Westcott St., Syracuse

Works by Molly Susman, Steve Susman, and Jessica Breedlove.

Creatures Small and Great
Edgewood Gallery

Edgewood Gallery
216 Tecumseh Rd., Syracuse

Dana Blythe Stenson (metalsmith jewelry), Candace Rhea (ceramic and mixed media), Alan Hart (acrylic on board), and Diane Menzies (oil paintings) interpret insects and small animals.

Looking & Looking: Photos by Amy Elkins and Jen Davis
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Jen Davis and Amy Elkins create work that focuses on gaze and identity, with Davis looking at herself and Elkins looking at young male athletes. The images in the exhibition explore the perception of how men and women are supposed to appear in society -- men should be strong and confident, women should be beautiful -- and the crafting of a self-image.

Jen Davis creates self-portraits that deal with issues surrounding beauty, identity, and body image of women, and challenges the perceptions and stereotypes of how women should look in their physical appearances. Amy Elkins depicts the more aggressive, competitive, and violent aspects of male identity in her series Elegant Violence, which captures portraits of young Ivy League rugby athletes moments after their game. Elkins' images explore the balance between athleticism, modes of violence or aggression, and varying degrees of vulnerability within a sport where brutal body contact is fundamental.

Both artists focus on the construction of identity -- the players are astutely aware of how they are presenting themselves while Davis draws attention to her own self-image in a more emotional way. Shown together, the works of Davis and Elkins urge the viewer to consider expectations and perceptions (both societal and individual) of identity.

Design and Aging
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

Price: Free
Genet Design Gallery
The Warehouse, 350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

"Design and Aging," an exhibition of student design projects focused on solutions to problems associated with aging, features work by students in industrial and interaction design, interior design and advertising design in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. It includes a project that explores how effective design could assist the elderly population of Hong Kong, as well as a series of posters that illustrate potential kiosks that could be targeted to mall walkers at Shoppingtown Mall in DeWitt.

The Design Gallery is located on the first floor of The Warehouse. Patrons should enter via the ground-floor door adjacent to the café on W. Fayette St. or the first-floor door on W. Washington St.

For more information, contact Bradley Hudson at bjhudson@syr.edu.

Emilio Sanchez: No Way Home--Images of the Caribbean and New York City
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"No Way Home" features a selection of 24 paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints drawn from the recently acquired collection of work by Cuban-American artist Emilio Sanchez (1921-1999). Best known for his brightly colored, strongly shadowed images of Caribbean and New York City architecture, this exhibition reveals the artist's ongoing interest in repetitive patterns. The show highlights a recent gift to the University Art Collection from the Emilio Sanchez Foundation of over 250 paintings, drawings and prints.

Pressing Print: Contemporary Prints and Process from Universal Limited Art Editions
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"Pressing Print: Contemporary Prints and Process from Universal Limited Art Editions" chronicles the recent decade of artwork published by one of the most renowned American printmaking workshops. The exhibition of 60 works illustrates the impact that artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler and Kiki Smith have had on contemporary art, evident through the work of artists Jason Middelbrook, Amy Cutler and Jane Hammond. The show also illustrates how emerging artists recently selected to work with ULAE has influenced the current trend, in both process and concept.

Weekend and evening visitors can park in the Q4 lot on College Place. Notify the attendant that you are visiting the Galleries and you will be directed where to park. Parking is on a space available basis and may be restricted during events held at the Carrier Dome. If spaces are not available, the attendant will direct you to the nearest lot.

From New York to Corrymore: Robert Henri and Ireland
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $10 adults, $8 students/seniors, $30 family pack (2 adults, 4 children))
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

"From New York to Corrymore: Robert Henri and Ireland" is the first exhibition to examine the American artist's work focused on the Irish landscape and people, particularly children, created between the time of his first trip to Ireland in 1913 and his last trip there in 1928. Long celebrated as an iconic American artist due to his important early work as a teacher and as the leader of The Eight, Henri's paintings have received less attention on their own. Most projects explored his career as it related to his role as a member of The Eight or in a broadly retrospective manner. Few projects focused on his landscapes, drawings, or foreign portraits.

Henri's Irish portraits constitute his largest focused body of work, and often depict the same sitters year after year. These paintings offer a unique and fascinating window onto the genre about which Henri felt most strongly--portraiture--and also chart his experiments with paint handling and color theories over time. He wrote that the time spent in Ireland was extremely valuable to him (it was the only other place besides New York where he purchased a residence), for only there was he able to focus on his painting without the distractions of life in New York. It is not surprising, then, that the periods Henri spent in Ireland were among his most prolific, and the paintings produced there among his most accomplished. Just before his death, Henri composed a list of his most important paintings; many of the works on this list were his Irish subjects. Forty-one paintings of Irish people and landscapes will be on view in the upcoming exhibition.

John Knecht: Fragments from the Wheels of Ezekiel
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $5 suggested donation
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

John Knecht is the featured artist for the Urban Video Project in January and February. In conjunction with the exhibition of "Deluge and Anima" on the Everson's north façade, a series of Knecht's animations, called "Fragments from the Wheels of Ezekiel," will be on view inside the museum. The Fragments, individual animations displayed on monitors, provide a glimpse into the artist's brilliant imagination, where fantasy collides with vivid colors and quirky sounds.

The Photographer as Child: Memories of Guatemala
La Casita Cultural Center

La Casita Cultural Center
109 Otisco St., Syracuse

Born in Guatemala, award-winning photographer Efren Lopez is a student in the Military Photojournalism Program at Syracuse University. He is also an aerial photographer for the U.S. Air Force and the first reservist to be selected to attend Newhouse's Military Photojournalism Program. He now lives in Arizona.

The exhibit features images Lopez captured on a return trip to Guatemala in 2009. "My life began in a bamboo hut at the side of a road in a tiny town named Petaca, Guatemala, in 1966," Lopez writes. "It's a town so small that it is next to impossible to find on most maps of Guatemala, much less Central America."

Lopez has documented real-world situations and the military around the globe and has captured stunning images in Arizona and Guatemala. His work has been featured in various publications, including the book Arizona 24/7, and has been awarded many distinctions, including first place in the Professional Photography category at the 2008 Arizona State Fair, an honorable mention in the pictorial category in the 2009 Military Photographer of the Year competition, and first place in the 2011 Multimedia Team 19th Annual Department of Defense Worldwide Military Photography Workshop.

Contain/Constrain: Works by Sam Horowitz
Point of Contact Gallery

Price: Free
Point of Contact Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

In today's virtual era, when we can communicate at light speed, inhabit cyber realities, and continually discard the "old" in search for "upgrades", one might expect that technology innovation makes us less burdened, less constrained by time and space. By the same token, so many of us are living rushed unthinking lives, desensitized and isolated from anything real. Are we constrained by our own innovations? We work, live and play inside frames, according to Horowitz, and those frames are mobile or immobile, physical, mental or metaphorical.

In this exhibition, the intrusion of familiar objects with uncharacteristic contents invites the viewer to reconsider the forms, functions and limitations of recognizable, re-purposed relics, and pokes fun at our decreasing flexibility, our increasing demands, and the collective loss of craft, localized-innovation and repair. "The trunks, once utilitarian objects used to carry clothing and other personal items, are now filled for the sake of filling. The cardboard, created initially to contain other entities, functions as contents. Though each framing device no longer holds the contents they were created to contain, they contain nonetheless; it is the humor and irony of this relationship that I strive to illustrate thorough my work."

To create this installation, Horowitz began by collecting trunks, cases and boxes. Though most bore a patina of age, use and neglect, he cleaned, fixed, and saved each piece. Horowitz is able to manipulate cardboard to create the designs and patterns he finds within the lines and corrugation so readily offered. "I have drawn each piece through the gauntlet intentionally, irrationally or purely by necessity," states Horowitz. "Thinking over my work, and planning new directions strays into theory, but in practice, I work, live, and act in this moment."

Sick at Home: Works of Tonja Torgerson
Echo

745 N. Salina St. (formerly Craft Chemistry)
Syracuse

Artist Statement: Notions of privacy and disclosure are at the core of my work. My portraits and figures deal with the reality of illness while balancing a thin line between expression and discretion. They explore the internal and external factors that compose one’s identity. While these topics could be divisive, the use of color, humor, and childish aesthetic keeps my work welcoming. Vomit, blood and bile appear alongside pinks, paisley and sweet poses. I am interested in this collision of attraction and disgust, and how it creates a difficult beauty and a pleasant anxiety. My work presents a personal side of an ever-increasingly political issue through a girlish lens of soft aesthetics and sad whimsy.

Tonja is currently pursuing an MFA in printmaking at Syracuse University.

For Syracuse, 2010: Selections of Truisms and Survival
Urban Video Project

Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Internationally renowned artist Jenny Holzer created "For Syracuse" as a site-specific installation that streams across the facade of Syracuse Stage on an LED curtain. The installation features 272 aphorisms from her celebrated series "Truisms, and Survival" that challenge viewer's assumptions about the world we live in through the use of language as art. Whether questioning consumerist impulses, or lamenting the struggles of daily living Jenny Holzer always provokes a response. Her work crosses the boundary between poetry and visual art, and suggests both the limitations and power of technology and the information age.

For more than 30 years, this influential American conceptual artist has been creating subversive works that blend in among advertisements in public spaces questioning and confronting our passive consumption of information. Since the early 1970s, Holzer has been collecting and writing phrases and aphorisms found in literature, philosophy and contemporary culture. She calls these summaries her Truisms, and has printed them on bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches, footstools, stickers, t-shirts, condoms, paintings, photographs, video, sound, light projection, and the Internet. In 1982, Holzer installed Truisms on one of Time Square's gigantic LED billboards. In the 1980s, for her Survival Series, Holzer adopted more personal and urgent messages about the realities of everyday living. Power, vulnerability, violence, tenderness, moral struggles and motherhood are courageously chronicled in this series which continuously prods the viewer to question the role of individuals in society.

Science and Magic in Film: Fellini Satyricon (1969)
Redhouse
Syracuse International Film Festival

Price: $8 regular, $5 members
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

Film and discussion with guest Jeffrey Gorney, writer, photographer and actor.

This Oscar-nominated Italian fantasy drama, written and directed by Federico Fellini, is loosely based on Petronius's work, "Satyricon", a series of bawdy and satirical episodes written during the reign of the emperor Nero and set in imperial Rome. Fellini has described this film as "science fiction of the past," as though the Romans of that decadent age were being observed by the astounded inhabitants of a flying saucer. Curiously enough, in this effort of objectivity, the director has created a film that is so subjective as to warrant psychoanalysis.

Visiting Artist Lecture: Anna Schuleit
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

Price: Free
Shemin Auditorium, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Anna Schuleit has been a visiting artist/lecturer at MIT, Brown, Smith, Rhode Island School of Design, the New School, Brandeis, Pratt, the University of Michigan, McGill University and Bowdoin College and was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. In 2006, she was named a MacArthur Fellow. She is now working on a collaborative painting/piano project with composer Yotam Haber, as well as her second set design for Ivy Baldwin Dance at New York Live Arts. In 2012, she will be a fellow at the Hermitage Artist Retreat in Florida and a visiting artist at the Eastman School of Music.

Schuleit studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and creative writing/book arts at Dartmouth College. Her early, large-scale installations revolved around sites of trauma and isolation: "Habeas Corpus" (2000) at Northampton State Hospital and "Bloom" (2003) at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. In 2007, she created a site-specific project for the military ruins of Lovells Island in Boston Harbor, commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Recently, she completed "Just a Rumor," a large painting commission at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as well as her first set design for Ivy Baldwin Dance at the Chocolate Factory Theater in New York.

The Art of theActor/Director/Producer
LeMoyne College
Syracuse International Film Festival
Featuring Giancarlo Esposito

Price: $10 general public, $5 seniors/LeMoyne faculty, free for LeMoyne and SU students
Coyne Center for the Performing Arts
LeMoyne College, Syracuse

Galactic, with The Soul Rebels
Westcott Theater

Westcott Theater
524 Westcott St., Syracuse

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Price Check
Redhouse

Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

A research-based curatorial examination by Roslyn Esperon and Courtney Rile, featuring the art of Michael Barletta, Caol Flaitz, Carla Goldberg, Novado Cappuccilli, Jason Varone, Fred Wellner, Laura Wellner, and Leah Wolff

CNY Scholastic Art Awards Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Whitney Applied Technology Center
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

The Awards signify to parents, teachers, community, and colleges that a student is an accomplished artist or writer. 30,000 teen artists and writers will be recognized in their regions. 1,000 will win national awards. Each work is reviewed by a panel of arts professionals for the originality, technical skill, and emergence of personal vision or voice.

Contain/Constrain: Works by Sam Horowitz
Point of Contact Gallery

Price: Free
Point of Contact Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

In today's virtual era, when we can communicate at light speed, inhabit cyber realities, and continually discard the "old" in search for "upgrades", one might expect that technology innovation makes us less burdened, less constrained by time and space. By the same token, so many of us are living rushed unthinking lives, desensitized and isolated from anything real. Are we constrained by our own innovations? We work, live and play inside frames, according to Horowitz, and those frames are mobile or immobile, physical, mental or metaphorical.

In this exhibition, the intrusion of familiar objects with uncharacteristic contents invites the viewer to reconsider the forms, functions and limitations of recognizable, re-purposed relics, and pokes fun at our decreasing flexibility, our increasing demands, and the collective loss of craft, localized-innovation and repair. "The trunks, once utilitarian objects used to carry clothing and other personal items, are now filled for the sake of filling. The cardboard, created initially to contain other entities, functions as contents. Though each framing device no longer holds the contents they were created to contain, they contain nonetheless; it is the humor and irony of this relationship that I strive to illustrate thorough my work."

To create this installation, Horowitz began by collecting trunks, cases and boxes. Though most bore a patina of age, use and neglect, he cleaned, fixed, and saved each piece. Horowitz is able to manipulate cardboard to create the designs and patterns he finds within the lines and corrugation so readily offered. "I have drawn each piece through the gauntlet intentionally, irrationally or purely by necessity," states Horowitz. "Thinking over my work, and planning new directions strays into theory, but in practice, I work, live, and act in this moment."

"Images of Upstate New York" and "Juxtaposed Through Wonderland"
SUNY Oswego Metro Center at the Atrium

SUNY Oswego Metro Center at the Atrium
2 Clinton Square, Syracuse

"Images of Upstate New York" features work by Morgan Goodwin and Kate Walseman
"Juxtaposed Through Wonderland" features recent work by KayCie Danniel

Salon: Strictly Local
Syracuse Technology Garden Gallery

Price: Free
Syracuse Technology Garden
235 Harrison St., Syracuse

The exhibit will feature works by over 50 local artists.

The Power and The Piety: The World of Medieval and Renaissance Europe
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Bird Library, 6th Floor
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This exhibit, curated by History Professor Chris Kyle with Senior Director of Special Collections Sean Quimby, showcases the library's collection of illuminated manuscripts and early printed works, including a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible.

The title "The Power and The Piety," refers to extraordinary influence that secular monarchies and the Church had on the lives of everyday men and women. Richly illustrated late medieval psalters and books of hours exemplify the painstaking attention that the pious paid to their spiritual well-being. But the printing revolution made it possible for new ideas to spread more rapidly. Printed works like Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan" (1651) signified the increasing power wielded by kings, queens and other secular authorities. As the Protestant Reformation and Scientific Revolution took hold of Europe, the power of the Catholic Church further waned. "The Power and the Piety" includes such important works as the first King James Bible (1611) and a second printing of Copernicus' "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium" (1566), which argued in favor of a heliocentric, or sun-centered, universe.

The exhibition is arranged thematically, highlighting the overarching themes of power and piety, as well as English literature, music, architecture, science and fine bindings.

FOR_PLAY
Syracuse University School of Architecture
Featuring James and Hayes Slade

Price: Free
Slocum Hall Gallery
Syracuse University campus, Syracuse

An exhibition of projects by Slade Architecture of New York City designed for or including an element of play.

Westcott Community Gallery Group Show
Westcott Community Art Gallery

Price: Free
Westcott Community Center
Corner of Euclid Ave. and Westcott St., Syracuse

Works by Molly Susman, Steve Susman, and Jessica Breedlove.

Creatures Small and Great
Edgewood Gallery

Edgewood Gallery
216 Tecumseh Rd., Syracuse

Dana Blythe Stenson (metalsmith jewelry), Candace Rhea (ceramic and mixed media), Alan Hart (acrylic on board), and Diane Menzies (oil paintings) interpret insects and small animals.

Looking & Looking: Photos by Amy Elkins and Jen Davis
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Jen Davis and Amy Elkins create work that focuses on gaze and identity, with Davis looking at herself and Elkins looking at young male athletes. The images in the exhibition explore the perception of how men and women are supposed to appear in society -- men should be strong and confident, women should be beautiful -- and the crafting of a self-image.

Jen Davis creates self-portraits that deal with issues surrounding beauty, identity, and body image of women, and challenges the perceptions and stereotypes of how women should look in their physical appearances. Amy Elkins depicts the more aggressive, competitive, and violent aspects of male identity in her series Elegant Violence, which captures portraits of young Ivy League rugby athletes moments after their game. Elkins' images explore the balance between athleticism, modes of violence or aggression, and varying degrees of vulnerability within a sport where brutal body contact is fundamental.

Both artists focus on the construction of identity -- the players are astutely aware of how they are presenting themselves while Davis draws attention to her own self-image in a more emotional way. Shown together, the works of Davis and Elkins urge the viewer to consider expectations and perceptions (both societal and individual) of identity.

Design and Aging
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

Price: Free
Genet Design Gallery
The Warehouse, 350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

"Design and Aging," an exhibition of student design projects focused on solutions to problems associated with aging, features work by students in industrial and interaction design, interior design and advertising design in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. It includes a project that explores how effective design could assist the elderly population of Hong Kong, as well as a series of posters that illustrate potential kiosks that could be targeted to mall walkers at Shoppingtown Mall in DeWitt.

The Design Gallery is located on the first floor of The Warehouse. Patrons should enter via the ground-floor door adjacent to the café on W. Fayette St. or the first-floor door on W. Washington St.

For more information, contact Bradley Hudson at bjhudson@syr.edu.

Envisionary
Szozda Gallery

Szozda Gallery
Delavan Center, 501 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Well established artist Phil Parsons and relatively new talent Emily Elizabeth display their painterly visions of atmospheric and landscape horizons surrounding Central New York. "Envisionary," the show's title, was coined perhaps to sharpen the concept of changing environs, elements commonplace every day that some artists foresee in greater depths than what most people perceive. In Elizabeth's case, it's her fascination with the universe that compels her to paint beyond shape and form to focus on color and atmosphere, while Parsons chooses to capture memorable landscapes that he himself alters with color and invented skies, reflecting his own feelings.

Read a review!

Pressing Print: Contemporary Prints and Process from Universal Limited Art Editions
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"Pressing Print: Contemporary Prints and Process from Universal Limited Art Editions" chronicles the recent decade of artwork published by one of the most renowned American printmaking workshops. The exhibition of 60 works illustrates the impact that artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler and Kiki Smith have had on contemporary art, evident through the work of artists Jason Middelbrook, Amy Cutler and Jane Hammond. The show also illustrates how emerging artists recently selected to work with ULAE has influenced the current trend, in both process and concept.

Weekend and evening visitors can park in the Q4 lot on College Place. Notify the attendant that you are visiting the Galleries and you will be directed where to park. Parking is on a space available basis and may be restricted during events held at the Carrier Dome. If spaces are not available, the attendant will direct you to the nearest lot.

Emilio Sanchez: No Way Home--Images of the Caribbean and New York City
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"No Way Home" features a selection of 24 paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints drawn from the recently acquired collection of work by Cuban-American artist Emilio Sanchez (1921-1999). Best known for his brightly colored, strongly shadowed images of Caribbean and New York City architecture, this exhibition reveals the artist's ongoing interest in repetitive patterns. The show highlights a recent gift to the University Art Collection from the Emilio Sanchez Foundation of over 250 paintings, drawings and prints.

John Knecht: Fragments from the Wheels of Ezekiel
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $5 suggested donation
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

John Knecht is the featured artist for the Urban Video Project in January and February. In conjunction with the exhibition of "Deluge and Anima" on the Everson's north façade, a series of Knecht's animations, called "Fragments from the Wheels of Ezekiel," will be on view inside the museum. The Fragments, individual animations displayed on monitors, provide a glimpse into the artist's brilliant imagination, where fantasy collides with vivid colors and quirky sounds.

From New York to Corrymore: Robert Henri and Ireland
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $10 adults, $8 students/seniors, $30 family pack (2 adults, 4 children))
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

"From New York to Corrymore: Robert Henri and Ireland" is the first exhibition to examine the American artist's work focused on the Irish landscape and people, particularly children, created between the time of his first trip to Ireland in 1913 and his last trip there in 1928. Long celebrated as an iconic American artist due to his important early work as a teacher and as the leader of The Eight, Henri's paintings have received less attention on their own. Most projects explored his career as it related to his role as a member of The Eight or in a broadly retrospective manner. Few projects focused on his landscapes, drawings, or foreign portraits.

Henri's Irish portraits constitute his largest focused body of work, and often depict the same sitters year after year. These paintings offer a unique and fascinating window onto the genre about which Henri felt most strongly--portraiture--and also chart his experiments with paint handling and color theories over time. He wrote that the time spent in Ireland was extremely valuable to him (it was the only other place besides New York where he purchased a residence), for only there was he able to focus on his painting without the distractions of life in New York. It is not surprising, then, that the periods Henri spent in Ireland were among his most prolific, and the paintings produced there among his most accomplished. Just before his death, Henri composed a list of his most important paintings; many of the works on this list were his Irish subjects. Forty-one paintings of Irish people and landscapes will be on view in the upcoming exhibition.

The Photographer as Child: Memories of Guatemala
La Casita Cultural Center

La Casita Cultural Center
109 Otisco St., Syracuse

Born in Guatemala, award-winning photographer Efren Lopez is a student in the Military Photojournalism Program at Syracuse University. He is also an aerial photographer for the U.S. Air Force and the first reservist to be selected to attend Newhouse's Military Photojournalism Program. He now lives in Arizona.

The exhibit features images Lopez captured on a return trip to Guatemala in 2009. "My life began in a bamboo hut at the side of a road in a tiny town named Petaca, Guatemala, in 1966," Lopez writes. "It's a town so small that it is next to impossible to find on most maps of Guatemala, much less Central America."

Lopez has documented real-world situations and the military around the globe and has captured stunning images in Arizona and Guatemala. His work has been featured in various publications, including the book Arizona 24/7, and has been awarded many distinctions, including first place in the Professional Photography category at the 2008 Arizona State Fair, an honorable mention in the pictorial category in the 2009 Military Photographer of the Year competition, and first place in the 2011 Multimedia Team 19th Annual Department of Defense Worldwide Military Photography Workshop.

VPA Faculty Show Part II
XL Projects

Price: Free
XL Projects
307-313 S. Clinton St., Syracuse

Part two of an exhibition of work by faculty in S.U.'s College of Visual and Performing Arts.

For more information, phone 315-442-2542 during gallery hours or e-mail Andrew Havenhand at ahavenhand@yahoo.com.

Sick at Home: Works of Tonja Torgerson
Echo

745 N. Salina St. (formerly Craft Chemistry)
Syracuse

Artist Statement: Notions of privacy and disclosure are at the core of my work. My portraits and figures deal with the reality of illness while balancing a thin line between expression and discretion. They explore the internal and external factors that compose one’s identity. While these topics could be divisive, the use of color, humor, and childish aesthetic keeps my work welcoming. Vomit, blood and bile appear alongside pinks, paisley and sweet poses. I am interested in this collision of attraction and disgust, and how it creates a difficult beauty and a pleasant anxiety. My work presents a personal side of an ever-increasingly political issue through a girlish lens of soft aesthetics and sad whimsy.

Tonja is currently pursuing an MFA in printmaking at Syracuse University.

Men Only: Vernacular Photographs of Male Affection
ArtRage Gallery

Price: Free
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

This exhibit of works from the collection of William Knodel looks at masculinity, gender and sexuality in our society. William Knodel was a college student in the 1970s in New York City when he purchased his first second-hand snapshot, a group of young men in assorted swimming attire whose style dated them back to the turn of the century, posing before a camp tent marked with a sign, "Men Only." Since then, he's collected vernacular images of male affection -- tintypes, daguerreotypes and photos -- during his travels to the West Coast, Canada, and Europe, scouring second-hand shops, old photo sales and used book stores. His collection now runs into the hundreds, dating from the mid-19th century and featuring couples and socializing groups from every race and social class. "Men Only" is a gift that incarnates the "gay spirit" that his good friend Harry Hay warned us must be kept alive and a history too often dismissed.

Read a review!

For Syracuse, 2010: Selections of Truisms and Survival
Urban Video Project

Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Internationally renowned artist Jenny Holzer created "For Syracuse" as a site-specific installation that streams across the facade of Syracuse Stage on an LED curtain. The installation features 272 aphorisms from her celebrated series "Truisms, and Survival" that challenge viewer's assumptions about the world we live in through the use of language as art. Whether questioning consumerist impulses, or lamenting the struggles of daily living Jenny Holzer always provokes a response. Her work crosses the boundary between poetry and visual art, and suggests both the limitations and power of technology and the information age.

For more than 30 years, this influential American conceptual artist has been creating subversive works that blend in among advertisements in public spaces questioning and confronting our passive consumption of information. Since the early 1970s, Holzer has been collecting and writing phrases and aphorisms found in literature, philosophy and contemporary culture. She calls these summaries her Truisms, and has printed them on bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches, footstools, stickers, t-shirts, condoms, paintings, photographs, video, sound, light projection, and the Internet. In 1982, Holzer installed Truisms on one of Time Square's gigantic LED billboards. In the 1980s, for her Survival Series, Holzer adopted more personal and urgent messages about the realities of everyday living. Power, vulnerability, violence, tenderness, moral struggles and motherhood are courageously chronicled in this series which continuously prods the viewer to question the role of individuals in society.

Wednesday Film Series: Powers of Ten
Syracuse University School of Architecture

Price: Free
Slocum Hall Auditorium
Syracuse University campus, Syracuse

Charles and Ray Eames, 1977, 9 minutes

Michael Dubaniewicz, saxophone; Maryna Mazhukhova, piano
Civic Morning Musicals

Price: Free
Hosmer Auditorium, Everson Museum
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Novel, thrilling program of Phil Woods Alto Saxophone Sonata employing improvisation, Scriabin Preludes, Op. 74, and more.

Parking available in the OnCenter Garage: maximum $2.50 with CMM stamped ticket.

Prism Concert
Syracuse University Setnor School of Music

Price: Free
Setnor Auditorium, Crouse College
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Prism is a unique 360-degree panoramic concert where darkness and light intertwine. Performances take place in many locations throughout the auditorium, surrounding the audience. Many talented student groups and soloists will be showcased for the 13th annual Prism concert, including a cappella groups the Mandarins, Orange Appeal, and newly formed Otto Tunes; a musical theater number by the new First-Year Players cast; the Brazilian Ensemble; and singer/songwriter Sarah Aument.

The Prism Concert showcases the commitment and talent of SU's finest musicians. It is an excellent opportunity for SU students and Syracuse community members alike to take part in a unique and enriching experience, produced by music industry students.

Free parking is available in the Irving Garage; patrons should mention that they are attending the concert.

Leap Year Party: The Brew, with Lee Terrace
Westcott Theater

Westcott Theater
524 Westcott St., Syracuse

The Lower Depths
Syracuse University Drama Department
Gerardine Clark, director

Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

A masterpiece of Russian realism, The Lower Depths was Maxim Gorky's first great play and its premiere production in 1902 helped establish the reputation of the famed Moscow Art Theatre and its influential director Constantine Stanislavsky. In the cave-like basement of a run-down boarding house, a disparate group of bosyák (literally, the barefoot) -- outcasts, petty criminals and day laborers -- negotiate days lived between harsh truth and consoling lies. With little hope or light in their lives, Gorky's finely detailed and psychologically rich characters manage to celebrate what Stanislavsky called the play's spiritual essence: "freedom, whatever happens!"

Read a Review!

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Windows Project: Chaz Griffin: The History of Silence
The Warehouse Gallery

The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

There will be an opening reception this evening 5:00-8:00 pm.

Chaz Griffin studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and currently resides in Syracuse. For the Window Projects space he will produce a partially-autobiographical collage addressing the issue of youth living in 21st-century urban environments.

Price Check
Redhouse

Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

A research-based curatorial examination by Roslyn Esperon and Courtney Rile, featuring the art of Michael Barletta, Caol Flaitz, Carla Goldberg, Novado Cappuccilli, Jason Varone, Fred Wellner, Laura Wellner, and Leah Wolff

Being Impossible: Works by Deborah Zlotsky
LeMoyne College

Price: Free
Wilson Art Gallery, Noreen Reale Falcone Library
LeMoyne College, Syracuse

An exhibition of drawings and paintings by Deborah Zlotsky. In this series, the artist manipulates powdered graphite on sheets of mylar, searching for signs of life in the smears and conjuring up blurred boundaries between documenting nature and inventing nature. Zlotsky is represented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in New York and presented a solo exhibition in October 2011. She has been the recipient of numerous residencies, including a residency fellowship at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY, this past summer. She earned a bachelor's degree from Yale University and a master's degree in painting and drawing from the University of Connecticut.

For more information, call 315-445-4153.

CNY Scholastic Art Awards Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Whitney Applied Technology Center
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

The Awards signify to parents, teachers, community, and colleges that a student is an accomplished artist or writer. 30,000 teen artists and writers will be recognized in their regions. 1,000 will win national awards. Each work is reviewed by a panel of arts professionals for the originality, technical skill, and emergence of personal vision or voice.

"Images of Upstate New York" and "Juxtaposed Through Wonderland"
SUNY Oswego Metro Center at the Atrium

SUNY Oswego Metro Center at the Atrium
2 Clinton Square, Syracuse

"Images of Upstate New York" features work by Morgan Goodwin and Kate Walseman
"Juxtaposed Through Wonderland" features recent work by KayCie Danniel

The Power and The Piety: The World of Medieval and Renaissance Europe
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Bird Library, 6th Floor
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This exhibit, curated by History Professor Chris Kyle with Senior Director of Special Collections Sean Quimby, showcases the library's collection of illuminated manuscripts and early printed works, including a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible.

The title "The Power and The Piety," refers to extraordinary influence that secular monarchies and the Church had on the lives of everyday men and women. Richly illustrated late medieval psalters and books of hours exemplify the painstaking attention that the pious paid to their spiritual well-being. But the printing revolution made it possible for new ideas to spread more rapidly. Printed works like Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan" (1651) signified the increasing power wielded by kings, queens and other secular authorities. As the Protestant Reformation and Scientific Revolution took hold of Europe, the power of the Catholic Church further waned. "The Power and the Piety" includes such important works as the first King James Bible (1611) and a second printing of Copernicus' "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium" (1566), which argued in favor of a heliocentric, or sun-centered, universe.

The exhibition is arranged thematically, highlighting the overarching themes of power and piety, as well as English literature, music, architecture, science and fine bindings.

FOR_PLAY
Syracuse University School of Architecture
Featuring James and Hayes Slade

Price: Free
Slocum Hall Gallery
Syracuse University campus, Syracuse

An exhibition of projects by Slade Architecture of New York City designed for or including an element of play.

Creatures Small and Great
Edgewood Gallery

Edgewood Gallery
216 Tecumseh Rd., Syracuse

Dana Blythe Stenson (metalsmith jewelry), Candace Rhea (ceramic and mixed media), Alan Hart (acrylic on board), and Diane Menzies (oil paintings) interpret insects and small animals.

Looking & Looking: Photos by Amy Elkins and Jen Davis
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Jen Davis and Amy Elkins create work that focuses on gaze and identity, with Davis looking at herself and Elkins looking at young male athletes. The images in the exhibition explore the perception of how men and women are supposed to appear in society -- men should be strong and confident, women should be beautiful -- and the crafting of a self-image.

Jen Davis creates self-portraits that deal with issues surrounding beauty, identity, and body image of women, and challenges the perceptions and stereotypes of how women should look in their physical appearances. Amy Elkins depicts the more aggressive, competitive, and violent aspects of male identity in her series Elegant Violence, which captures portraits of young Ivy League rugby athletes moments after their game. Elkins' images explore the balance between athleticism, modes of violence or aggression, and varying degrees of vulnerability within a sport where brutal body contact is fundamental.

Both artists focus on the construction of identity -- the players are astutely aware of how they are presenting themselves while Davis draws attention to her own self-image in a more emotional way. Shown together, the works of Davis and Elkins urge the viewer to consider expectations and perceptions (both societal and individual) of identity.

Design and Aging
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

Price: Free
Genet Design Gallery
The Warehouse, 350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

"Design and Aging," an exhibition of student design projects focused on solutions to problems associated with aging, features work by students in industrial and interaction design, interior design and advertising design in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. It includes a project that explores how effective design could assist the elderly population of Hong Kong, as well as a series of posters that illustrate potential kiosks that could be targeted to mall walkers at Shoppingtown Mall in DeWitt.

The Design Gallery is located on the first floor of The Warehouse. Patrons should enter via the ground-floor door adjacent to the café on W. Fayette St. or the first-floor door on W. Washington St.

For more information, contact Bradley Hudson at bjhudson@syr.edu.

Envisionary
Szozda Gallery

Szozda Gallery
Delavan Center, 501 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Well established artist Phil Parsons and relatively new talent Emily Elizabeth display their painterly visions of atmospheric and landscape horizons surrounding Central New York. "Envisionary," the show's title, was coined perhaps to sharpen the concept of changing environs, elements commonplace every day that some artists foresee in greater depths than what most people perceive. In Elizabeth's case, it's her fascination with the universe that compels her to paint beyond shape and form to focus on color and atmosphere, while Parsons chooses to capture memorable landscapes that he himself alters with color and invented skies, reflecting his own feelings.

Read a review!

Emilio Sanchez: No Way Home--Images of the Caribbean and New York City
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"No Way Home" features a selection of 24 paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints drawn from the recently acquired collection of work by Cuban-American artist Emilio Sanchez (1921-1999). Best known for his brightly colored, strongly shadowed images of Caribbean and New York City architecture, this exhibition reveals the artist's ongoing interest in repetitive patterns. The show highlights a recent gift to the University Art Collection from the Emilio Sanchez Foundation of over 250 paintings, drawings and prints.

Pressing Print: Contemporary Prints and Process from Universal Limited Art Editions
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"Pressing Print: Contemporary Prints and Process from Universal Limited Art Editions" chronicles the recent decade of artwork published by one of the most renowned American printmaking workshops. The exhibition of 60 works illustrates the impact that artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler and Kiki Smith have had on contemporary art, evident through the work of artists Jason Middelbrook, Amy Cutler and Jane Hammond. The show also illustrates how emerging artists recently selected to work with ULAE has influenced the current trend, in both process and concept.

Weekend and evening visitors can park in the Q4 lot on College Place. Notify the attendant that you are visiting the Galleries and you will be directed where to park. Parking is on a space available basis and may be restricted during events held at the Carrier Dome. If spaces are not available, the attendant will direct you to the nearest lot.

From New York to Corrymore: Robert Henri and Ireland
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $10 adults, $8 students/seniors, $30 family pack (2 adults, 4 children))
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

"From New York to Corrymore: Robert Henri and Ireland" is the first exhibition to examine the American artist's work focused on the Irish landscape and people, particularly children, created between the time of his first trip to Ireland in 1913 and his last trip there in 1928. Long celebrated as an iconic American artist due to his important early work as a teacher and as the leader of The Eight, Henri's paintings have received less attention on their own. Most projects explored his career as it related to his role as a member of The Eight or in a broadly retrospective manner. Few projects focused on his landscapes, drawings, or foreign portraits.

Henri's Irish portraits constitute his largest focused body of work, and often depict the same sitters year after year. These paintings offer a unique and fascinating window onto the genre about which Henri felt most strongly--portraiture--and also chart his experiments with paint handling and color theories over time. He wrote that the time spent in Ireland was extremely valuable to him (it was the only other place besides New York where he purchased a residence), for only there was he able to focus on his painting without the distractions of life in New York. It is not surprising, then, that the periods Henri spent in Ireland were among his most prolific, and the paintings produced there among his most accomplished. Just before his death, Henri composed a list of his most important paintings; many of the works on this list were his Irish subjects. Forty-one paintings of Irish people and landscapes will be on view in the upcoming exhibition.

John Knecht: Fragments from the Wheels of Ezekiel
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $5 suggested donation
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

John Knecht is the featured artist for the Urban Video Project in January and February. In conjunction with the exhibition of "Deluge and Anima" on the Everson's north façade, a series of Knecht's animations, called "Fragments from the Wheels of Ezekiel," will be on view inside the museum. The Fragments, individual animations displayed on monitors, provide a glimpse into the artist's brilliant imagination, where fantasy collides with vivid colors and quirky sounds.

The Photographer as Child: Memories of Guatemala
La Casita Cultural Center

La Casita Cultural Center
109 Otisco St., Syracuse

Born in Guatemala, award-winning photographer Efren Lopez is a student in the Military Photojournalism Program at Syracuse University. He is also an aerial photographer for the U.S. Air Force and the first reservist to be selected to attend Newhouse's Military Photojournalism Program. He now lives in Arizona.

The exhibit features images Lopez captured on a return trip to Guatemala in 2009. "My life began in a bamboo hut at the side of a road in a tiny town named Petaca, Guatemala, in 1966," Lopez writes. "It's a town so small that it is next to impossible to find on most maps of Guatemala, much less Central America."

Lopez has documented real-world situations and the military around the globe and has captured stunning images in Arizona and Guatemala. His work has been featured in various publications, including the book Arizona 24/7, and has been awarded many distinctions, including first place in the Professional Photography category at the 2008 Arizona State Fair, an honorable mention in the pictorial category in the 2009 Military Photographer of the Year competition, and first place in the 2011 Multimedia Team 19th Annual Department of Defense Worldwide Military Photography Workshop.

Contain/Constrain: Works by Sam Horowitz
Point of Contact Gallery

Price: Free
Point of Contact Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

In today's virtual era, when we can communicate at light speed, inhabit cyber realities, and continually discard the "old" in search for "upgrades", one might expect that technology innovation makes us less burdened, less constrained by time and space. By the same token, so many of us are living rushed unthinking lives, desensitized and isolated from anything real. Are we constrained by our own innovations? We work, live and play inside frames, according to Horowitz, and those frames are mobile or immobile, physical, mental or metaphorical.

In this exhibition, the intrusion of familiar objects with uncharacteristic contents invites the viewer to reconsider the forms, functions and limitations of recognizable, re-purposed relics, and pokes fun at our decreasing flexibility, our increasing demands, and the collective loss of craft, localized-innovation and repair. "The trunks, once utilitarian objects used to carry clothing and other personal items, are now filled for the sake of filling. The cardboard, created initially to contain other entities, functions as contents. Though each framing device no longer holds the contents they were created to contain, they contain nonetheless; it is the humor and irony of this relationship that I strive to illustrate thorough my work."

To create this installation, Horowitz began by collecting trunks, cases and boxes. Though most bore a patina of age, use and neglect, he cleaned, fixed, and saved each piece. Horowitz is able to manipulate cardboard to create the designs and patterns he finds within the lines and corrugation so readily offered. "I have drawn each piece through the gauntlet intentionally, irrationally or purely by necessity," states Horowitz. "Thinking over my work, and planning new directions strays into theory, but in practice, I work, live, and act in this moment."

Opening: Noriko Ambe: Inner Water
The Warehouse Gallery

Price: Free
The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

There will be an opening reception this evening 5:00-8:00 pm.

In her first US museum solo show, New York City-based Japanese artist Noriko Ambe will create a new site-specific installation in the main gallery reflecting the tragic 2011 events in Japan through the use of video projections and her signature large-scale paper cutouts that evoke waves.

Nature plays an important role in Ambe's work, and it points to larger issues, such as the natural forces determining our global landscape, and the relationship between nature and humans throughout time. A recipient of prestigious awards such as the AICA Award and Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Ambe's work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Arts and Design and the Japan Society in New York and the Kyoto University of Art and Design in Kyoto, Japan. Her work is also in the collection of the Whitney Museum of Art.

Read a review!

VPA Faculty Show Part II
XL Projects

Price: Free
XL Projects
307-313 S. Clinton St., Syracuse

Part two of an exhibition of work by faculty in S.U.'s College of Visual and Performing Arts.

For more information, phone 315-442-2542 during gallery hours or e-mail Andrew Havenhand at ahavenhand@yahoo.com.

Sick at Home: Works of Tonja Torgerson
Echo

745 N. Salina St. (formerly Craft Chemistry)
Syracuse

Artist Statement: Notions of privacy and disclosure are at the core of my work. My portraits and figures deal with the reality of illness while balancing a thin line between expression and discretion. They explore the internal and external factors that compose one’s identity. While these topics could be divisive, the use of color, humor, and childish aesthetic keeps my work welcoming. Vomit, blood and bile appear alongside pinks, paisley and sweet poses. I am interested in this collision of attraction and disgust, and how it creates a difficult beauty and a pleasant anxiety. My work presents a personal side of an ever-increasingly political issue through a girlish lens of soft aesthetics and sad whimsy.

Tonja is currently pursuing an MFA in printmaking at Syracuse University.

Men Only: Vernacular Photographs of Male Affection
ArtRage Gallery

Price: Free
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

This exhibit of works from the collection of William Knodel looks at masculinity, gender and sexuality in our society. William Knodel was a college student in the 1970s in New York City when he purchased his first second-hand snapshot, a group of young men in assorted swimming attire whose style dated them back to the turn of the century, posing before a camp tent marked with a sign, "Men Only." Since then, he's collected vernacular images of male affection -- tintypes, daguerreotypes and photos -- during his travels to the West Coast, Canada, and Europe, scouring second-hand shops, old photo sales and used book stores. His collection now runs into the hundreds, dating from the mid-19th century and featuring couples and socializing groups from every race and social class. "Men Only" is a gift that incarnates the "gay spirit" that his good friend Harry Hay warned us must be kept alive and a history too often dismissed.

Read a review!

William Wegman: Flo Flow (2011)
Urban Video Project

Everson Museum of Art Plaza
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

The video "Flo Flow" is William Wegman's latest in a long line of human-canid collaborations. It was while he was in Long Beach in the 1970s that Wegman got his dog, Man Ray, with whom he began a fruitful collaboration of many years. Man Ray, known in the art world and beyond for his endearing deadpan presence, became a central figure in Wegman's photographs and videotapes. Ever since, Weimaraner-actors have peopled Wegman's uncanny imaginative universe, a reflection on both the human-ness of "animals" and the strangeness of humans.

William Wegman lives in New York and Maine where he continues to make videos, to take photographs and to make drawings and paintings.

For Syracuse, 2010: Selections of Truisms and Survival
Urban Video Project

Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Internationally renowned artist Jenny Holzer created "For Syracuse" as a site-specific installation that streams across the facade of Syracuse Stage on an LED curtain. The installation features 272 aphorisms from her celebrated series "Truisms, and Survival" that challenge viewer's assumptions about the world we live in through the use of language as art. Whether questioning consumerist impulses, or lamenting the struggles of daily living Jenny Holzer always provokes a response. Her work crosses the boundary between poetry and visual art, and suggests both the limitations and power of technology and the information age.

For more than 30 years, this influential American conceptual artist has been creating subversive works that blend in among advertisements in public spaces questioning and confronting our passive consumption of information. Since the early 1970s, Holzer has been collecting and writing phrases and aphorisms found in literature, philosophy and contemporary culture. She calls these summaries her Truisms, and has printed them on bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches, footstools, stickers, t-shirts, condoms, paintings, photographs, video, sound, light projection, and the Internet. In 1982, Holzer installed Truisms on one of Time Square's gigantic LED billboards. In the 1980s, for her Survival Series, Holzer adopted more personal and urgent messages about the realities of everyday living. Power, vulnerability, violence, tenderness, moral struggles and motherhood are courageously chronicled in this series which continuously prods the viewer to question the role of individuals in society.

Memory and Commemoration, as Fact or Fiction
Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts
Featuring Anna Schuleit

Price: Free
Watson Theater, Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave. (Syracuse University), Syracuse

"Memory and Commemoration, as Fact or Fiction" is a new cross-disciplinary speaker series on art, memory, community and commemoration.

Anna Schuleit, internationally prominent visual artist and a 2006 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, will present some of her powerful public art installations that deal with memory, community and regeneration.

Parking for the public is available for $4 in Booth Garage.

Disaster, Memory, and Art Making
The Warehouse Gallery

Price: Free
The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

A roundtable discussion on Disaster, Memory, and Art Making. Room 003, Warehouse Building.

Panel Discussion
ArtRage Gallery

Price: Free
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

Panel discussion about the exhibit "Men Only--Vernacular Photographs of Male Affection" with collector Willam Knodel, curator Nancy Keefe Rhodes, and writer/art historian/critic David Deitcher.

An Irish Celebration
LeMoyne College
Travis Newton, conductor
Featuring Kitty Hoynes Session Players, LeMoyne Chamber Orchestra

Coyne Center for the Performing Arts
LeMoyne College, Syracuse

The concert will feature the Kitty Hoynes Session Players (often heard at their namesake pub in downtown Syracuse) alongside the Le Moyne College Chamber Orchestra. Featuring authentic Irish instruments, including concertina, harp, whistle, bodhrán and uilleann pipes, the concert will also highlight the various instruments of the chamber orchestra. The orchestra will also accompany the session players, performing an original work arranged and orchestrated by music faculty member Edward Ruchalski.

For tickets and further information, please call 315-445-4523.

SU Women's Choir Invitational Concert
Syracuse University Setnor School of Music
Featuring The Pine Grove Girl Choir

Price: Free
Setnor Auditorium, Crouse College
Syracuse University, Syracuse

The SU Women's Choir, under the direction of Barbara M. Tagg, will host the Pine Grove Girl Choir, directed by Aimee deBergeois.

The Pine Grove Girl Choir will present Viva la Musica by Mark Weston, When I Close My Eyes by Jim Papoulis, Al Shlosha D'Varim by Allan E. Naplan, and Lollipop, the 1950s hit tune by the Chordettes.

The SU Women's Choir's repertoire will include Domine Deus by J. S. Bach, Lux Aeterna (Eternal Light) by Michelle Roueché, This Little Light of Mine arranged by Ysaye Barnwell, and Paul Caldwell and Sean Ivory's Lay Earth's Burden Down.

The two choirs will combine for the concert finale, which includes Lowell Mason's O Music and Amazing Grace, arranged by Francisco Nuñéz.

Free parking is available in the Irving Garage; patrons should mention that they are attending the concert.

All Time Low, with I Call Fives, With The Punches
Westcott Theater

Westcott Theater
524 Westcott St., Syracuse

Florence of Moravia
Acme Mystery Company

Price: $32.50 (includes meal, show, tax and gratuities)
Spaghetti Warehouse
689 N. Clinton St., Syracuse

It's 1927 and local radio personality Nevelle Haspin invites you to the broadcast of a gala reception for silent film diva Lorraine Bowes who is making a film portraying notorious WWI spy Florence Goode a.k.a. Hata Mahma. Joining Lorraine will be her leading man, if he's sober, Roland DeHay and Lorraine's agent, Harold "Hawk" Toohey. Arriving without an invitation is nationally syndicated gossip columninst Helena Handbasquet. Be careful. These celebrities autograph with poisoned pens.

Durang in Duet
Black Box Players
Katie Lynch, director

Price: Free
Loft Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Durang in Duet is an evening of two short plays, Canker Sores and Other Distractions and For Who the Southern Belle Tolls, written by Christopher Durang. Durang is an American playwright know for works of outrageous and often absurd comedy.

Canker Sores and Other Distractions takes place in a restaurant with an ex-husband and wife meeting for one of the first times after their divorce. A disagreeable waitress causes an obstacle while the two characters develop several afflictions that cause them to remember why they divorced in the first place.

For Who the Southern Belle Tolls is a parody of Tenessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. It takes place on the night that Tom brings home a lady friend for his crippled brother, Lawrence. The play is an absurd and hilarious take on the Wingfield family that Tennesse Williams made famous in The Glass Menagerie.

Read a review!

Preview: Beautiful Child
Rarely Done Productions
Roy Van Nostrand, director

Price: $10
Jazz Central
441 E. Washington St., Syracuse

How do we love someone who falls outside our moral code? A couple's marriage is called into question when their son comes home for lunch and asks to stay. The world's no longer safe for their son as his secrets are about to become public. They want to help their son, who was once a beautiful child. They want to love him. But how? They arrive at a decision that's painful and restorative. This show is intended for mature audiences only. By Nicky Silver.

Read a Review!

LaMaMa Series: Poor Baby Bree: I Am Going to Run Away
Redhouse

Price: $20 regular, $15 members
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

The piece is written and directed by Bree Benton with music by Franklin Bruno. The story is built around Benton's portrayal of Poor Baby Bree, an archetypal waif, who weaves a tragicomic narrative of innocence and loss around seventeen obscure vaudeville and parlor songs dating from the 1890s through the 1930s.

Bree Benton (creator) has been performing as Poor Baby Bree since 2005, after a lifetime of collecting period sheet music and studying vaudeville and its performers. Her first one-woman show as Poor Baby Bree, "Weary River," earned awards from Time Out New York and BackStage. Her following show, "I Am Going to Run Away," was presented at The Club at La MaMa E.T.C. in 2010, and will return in Spring 2012.

Franklin Bruno (pianist/musical director), in addition to his work with Poor Baby Bree, has released over a dozen albums of original songs since the 1990s, as a solo artist and member of Nothing Painted Blue and (currently) The Human Hearts. He is a frequent collaborator with The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle, both as a multi-instrumentalist on the acclaimed albums Tallahassee and The Sunset Tree, and in the collaborative duo The Extra Lens.

The Lower Depths
Syracuse University Drama Department
Gerardine Clark, director

Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

A masterpiece of Russian realism, The Lower Depths was Maxim Gorky's first great play and its premiere production in 1902 helped establish the reputation of the famed Moscow Art Theatre and its influential director Constantine Stanislavsky. In the cave-like basement of a run-down boarding house, a disparate group of bosyák (literally, the barefoot) -- outcasts, petty criminals and day laborers -- negotiate days lived between harsh truth and consoling lies. With little hope or light in their lives, Gorky's finely detailed and psychologically rich characters manage to celebrate what Stanislavsky called the play's spiritual essence: "freedom, whatever happens!"

Read a Review!

Friday, March 2, 2012

Windows Project: Chaz Griffin: The History of Silence
The Warehouse Gallery

The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Chaz Griffin studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and currently resides in Syracuse. For the Window Projects space he will produce a partially-autobiographical collage addressing the issue of youth living in 21st-century urban environments.

Price Check
Redhouse

Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

A research-based curatorial examination by Roslyn Esperon and Courtney Rile, featuring the art of Michael Barletta, Caol Flaitz, Carla Goldberg, Novado Cappuccilli, Jason Varone, Fred Wellner, Laura Wellner, and Leah Wolff

Being Impossible: Works by Deborah Zlotsky
LeMoyne College

Price: Free
Wilson Art Gallery, Noreen Reale Falcone Library
LeMoyne College, Syracuse

There will be an opening reception this afternoon 4:00-6:00 pm.

An exhibition of drawings and paintings by Deborah Zlotsky. In this series, the artist manipulates powdered graphite on sheets of mylar, searching for signs of life in the smears and conjuring up blurred boundaries between documenting nature and inventing nature. Zlotsky is represented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in New York and presented a solo exhibition in October 2011. She has been the recipient of numerous residencies, including a residency fellowship at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY, this past summer. She earned a bachelor's degree from Yale University and a master's degree in painting and drawing from the University of Connecticut.

For more information, call 315-445-4153.

CNY Scholastic Art Awards Exhibit
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free
Whitney Applied Technology Center
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

The Awards signify to parents, teachers, community, and colleges that a student is an accomplished artist or writer. 30,000 teen artists and writers will be recognized in their regions. 1,000 will win national awards. Each work is reviewed by a panel of arts professionals for the originality, technical skill, and emergence of personal vision or voice.

Contain/Constrain: Works by Sam Horowitz
Point of Contact Gallery

Price: Free
Point of Contact Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

In today's virtual era, when we can communicate at light speed, inhabit cyber realities, and continually discard the "old" in search for "upgrades", one might expect that technology innovation makes us less burdened, less constrained by time and space. By the same token, so many of us are living rushed unthinking lives, desensitized and isolated from anything real. Are we constrained by our own innovations? We work, live and play inside frames, according to Horowitz, and those frames are mobile or immobile, physical, mental or metaphorical.

In this exhibition, the intrusion of familiar objects with uncharacteristic contents invites the viewer to reconsider the forms, functions and limitations of recognizable, re-purposed relics, and pokes fun at our decreasing flexibility, our increasing demands, and the collective loss of craft, localized-innovation and repair. "The trunks, once utilitarian objects used to carry clothing and other personal items, are now filled for the sake of filling. The cardboard, created initially to contain other entities, functions as contents. Though each framing device no longer holds the contents they were created to contain, they contain nonetheless; it is the humor and irony of this relationship that I strive to illustrate thorough my work."

To create this installation, Horowitz began by collecting trunks, cases and boxes. Though most bore a patina of age, use and neglect, he cleaned, fixed, and saved each piece. Horowitz is able to manipulate cardboard to create the designs and patterns he finds within the lines and corrugation so readily offered. "I have drawn each piece through the gauntlet intentionally, irrationally or purely by necessity," states Horowitz. "Thinking over my work, and planning new directions strays into theory, but in practice, I work, live, and act in this moment."

"Images of Upstate New York" and "Juxtaposed Through Wonderland"
SUNY Oswego Metro Center at the Atrium

SUNY Oswego Metro Center at the Atrium
2 Clinton Square, Syracuse

"Images of Upstate New York" features work by Morgan Goodwin and Kate Walseman
"Juxtaposed Through Wonderland" features recent work by KayCie Danniel

The Power and The Piety: The World of Medieval and Renaissance Europe
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Bird Library, 6th Floor
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This exhibit, curated by History Professor Chris Kyle with Senior Director of Special Collections Sean Quimby, showcases the library's collection of illuminated manuscripts and early printed works, including a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible.

The title "The Power and The Piety," refers to extraordinary influence that secular monarchies and the Church had on the lives of everyday men and women. Richly illustrated late medieval psalters and books of hours exemplify the painstaking attention that the pious paid to their spiritual well-being. But the printing revolution made it possible for new ideas to spread more rapidly. Printed works like Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan" (1651) signified the increasing power wielded by kings, queens and other secular authorities. As the Protestant Reformation and Scientific Revolution took hold of Europe, the power of the Catholic Church further waned. "The Power and the Piety" includes such important works as the first King James Bible (1611) and a second printing of Copernicus' "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium" (1566), which argued in favor of a heliocentric, or sun-centered, universe.

The exhibition is arranged thematically, highlighting the overarching themes of power and piety, as well as English literature, music, architecture, science and fine bindings.

FOR_PLAY
Syracuse University School of Architecture
Featuring James and Hayes Slade

Price: Free
Slocum Hall Gallery
Syracuse University campus, Syracuse

An exhibition of projects by Slade Architecture of New York City designed for or including an element of play.

Creatures Small and Great
Edgewood Gallery

Edgewood Gallery
216 Tecumseh Rd., Syracuse

Dana Blythe Stenson (metalsmith jewelry), Candace Rhea (ceramic and mixed media), Alan Hart (acrylic on board), and Diane Menzies (oil paintings) interpret insects and small animals.

Looking & Looking: Photos by Amy Elkins and Jen Davis
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Jen Davis and Amy Elkins create work that focuses on gaze and identity, with Davis looking at herself and Elkins looking at young male athletes. The images in the exhibition explore the perception of how men and women are supposed to appear in society -- men should be strong and confident, women should be beautiful -- and the crafting of a self-image.

Jen Davis creates self-portraits that deal with issues surrounding beauty, identity, and body image of women, and challenges the perceptions and stereotypes of how women should look in their physical appearances. Amy Elkins depicts the more aggressive, competitive, and violent aspects of male identity in her series Elegant Violence, which captures portraits of young Ivy League rugby athletes moments after their game. Elkins' images explore the balance between athleticism, modes of violence or aggression, and varying degrees of vulnerability within a sport where brutal body contact is fundamental.

Both artists focus on the construction of identity -- the players are astutely aware of how they are presenting themselves while Davis draws attention to her own self-image in a more emotional way. Shown together, the works of Davis and Elkins urge the viewer to consider expectations and perceptions (both societal and individual) of identity.

Design and Aging
Syracuse University School of Art and Design

Price: Free
Genet Design Gallery
The Warehouse, 350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

"Design and Aging," an exhibition of student design projects focused on solutions to problems associated with aging, features work by students in industrial and interaction design, interior design and advertising design in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. It includes a project that explores how effective design could assist the elderly population of Hong Kong, as well as a series of posters that illustrate potential kiosks that could be targeted to mall walkers at Shoppingtown Mall in DeWitt.

The Design Gallery is located on the first floor of The Warehouse. Patrons should enter via the ground-floor door adjacent to the café on W. Fayette St. or the first-floor door on W. Washington St.

For more information, contact Bradley Hudson at bjhudson@syr.edu.

Envisionary
Szozda Gallery

Szozda Gallery
Delavan Center, 501 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Well established artist Phil Parsons and relatively new talent Emily Elizabeth display their painterly visions of atmospheric and landscape horizons surrounding Central New York. "Envisionary," the show's title, was coined perhaps to sharpen the concept of changing environs, elements commonplace every day that some artists foresee in greater depths than what most people perceive. In Elizabeth's case, it's her fascination with the universe that compels her to paint beyond shape and form to focus on color and atmosphere, while Parsons chooses to capture memorable landscapes that he himself alters with color and invented skies, reflecting his own feelings.

Read a review!

Pressing Print: Contemporary Prints and Process from Universal Limited Art Editions
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"Pressing Print: Contemporary Prints and Process from Universal Limited Art Editions" chronicles the recent decade of artwork published by one of the most renowned American printmaking workshops. The exhibition of 60 works illustrates the impact that artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler and Kiki Smith have had on contemporary art, evident through the work of artists Jason Middelbrook, Amy Cutler and Jane Hammond. The show also illustrates how emerging artists recently selected to work with ULAE has influenced the current trend, in both process and concept.

Weekend and evening visitors can park in the Q4 lot on College Place. Notify the attendant that you are visiting the Galleries and you will be directed where to park. Parking is on a space available basis and may be restricted during events held at the Carrier Dome. If spaces are not available, the attendant will direct you to the nearest lot.

Emilio Sanchez: No Way Home--Images of the Caribbean and New York City
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"No Way Home" features a selection of 24 paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints drawn from the recently acquired collection of work by Cuban-American artist Emilio Sanchez (1921-1999). Best known for his brightly colored, strongly shadowed images of Caribbean and New York City architecture, this exhibition reveals the artist's ongoing interest in repetitive patterns. The show highlights a recent gift to the University Art Collection from the Emilio Sanchez Foundation of over 250 paintings, drawings and prints.

John Knecht: Fragments from the Wheels of Ezekiel
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $5 suggested donation
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

John Knecht is the featured artist for the Urban Video Project in January and February. In conjunction with the exhibition of "Deluge and Anima" on the Everson's north façade, a series of Knecht's animations, called "Fragments from the Wheels of Ezekiel," will be on view inside the museum. The Fragments, individual animations displayed on monitors, provide a glimpse into the artist's brilliant imagination, where fantasy collides with vivid colors and quirky sounds.

From New York to Corrymore: Robert Henri and Ireland
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $10 adults, $8 students/seniors, $30 family pack (2 adults, 4 children))
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

"From New York to Corrymore: Robert Henri and Ireland" is the first exhibition to examine the American artist's work focused on the Irish landscape and people, particularly children, created between the time of his first trip to Ireland in 1913 and his last trip there in 1928. Long celebrated as an iconic American artist due to his important early work as a teacher and as the leader of The Eight, Henri's paintings have received less attention on their own. Most projects explored his career as it related to his role as a member of The Eight or in a broadly retrospective manner. Few projects focused on his landscapes, drawings, or foreign portraits.

Henri's Irish portraits constitute his largest focused body of work, and often depict the same sitters year after year. These paintings offer a unique and fascinating window onto the genre about which Henri felt most strongly--portraiture--and also chart his experiments with paint handling and color theories over time. He wrote that the time spent in Ireland was extremely valuable to him (it was the only other place besides New York where he purchased a residence), for only there was he able to focus on his painting without the distractions of life in New York. It is not surprising, then, that the periods Henri spent in Ireland were among his most prolific, and the paintings produced there among his most accomplished. Just before his death, Henri composed a list of his most important paintings; many of the works on this list were his Irish subjects. Forty-one paintings of Irish people and landscapes will be on view in the upcoming exhibition.

The Photographer as Child: Memories of Guatemala
La Casita Cultural Center

La Casita Cultural Center
109 Otisco St., Syracuse

Born in Guatemala, award-winning photographer Efren Lopez is a student in the Military Photojournalism Program at Syracuse University. He is also an aerial photographer for the U.S. Air Force and the first reservist to be selected to attend Newhouse's Military Photojournalism Program. He now lives in Arizona.

The exhibit features images Lopez captured on a return trip to Guatemala in 2009. "My life began in a bamboo hut at the side of a road in a tiny town named Petaca, Guatemala, in 1966," Lopez writes. "It's a town so small that it is next to impossible to find on most maps of Guatemala, much less Central America."

Lopez has documented real-world situations and the military around the globe and has captured stunning images in Arizona and Guatemala. His work has been featured in various publications, including the book Arizona 24/7, and has been awarded many distinctions, including first place in the Professional Photography category at the 2008 Arizona State Fair, an honorable mention in the pictorial category in the 2009 Military Photographer of the Year competition, and first place in the 2011 Multimedia Team 19th Annual Department of Defense Worldwide Military Photography Workshop.

Noriko Ambe: Inner Water
The Warehouse Gallery

Price: Free
The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

In her first US museum solo show, New York City-based Japanese artist Noriko Ambe will create a new site-specific installation in the main gallery reflecting the tragic 2011 events in Japan through the use of video projections and her signature large-scale paper cutouts that evoke waves.

Nature plays an important role in Ambe's work, and it points to larger issues, such as the natural forces determining our global landscape, and the relationship between nature and humans throughout time. A recipient of prestigious awards such as the AICA Award and Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Ambe's work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Arts and Design and the Japan Society in New York and the Kyoto University of Art and Design in Kyoto, Japan. Her work is also in the collection of the Whitney Museum of Art.

Read a review!

VPA Faculty Show Part II
XL Projects

Price: Free
XL Projects
307-313 S. Clinton St., Syracuse

Part two of an exhibition of work by faculty in S.U.'s College of Visual and Performing Arts.

For more information, phone 315-442-2542 during gallery hours or e-mail Andrew Havenhand at ahavenhand@yahoo.com.

Sick at Home: Works of Tonja Torgerson
Echo

745 N. Salina St. (formerly Craft Chemistry)
Syracuse

Artist Statement: Notions of privacy and disclosure are at the core of my work. My portraits and figures deal with the reality of illness while balancing a thin line between expression and discretion. They explore the internal and external factors that compose one’s identity. While these topics could be divisive, the use of color, humor, and childish aesthetic keeps my work welcoming. Vomit, blood and bile appear alongside pinks, paisley and sweet poses. I am interested in this collision of attraction and disgust, and how it creates a difficult beauty and a pleasant anxiety. My work presents a personal side of an ever-increasingly political issue through a girlish lens of soft aesthetics and sad whimsy.

Tonja is currently pursuing an MFA in printmaking at Syracuse University.

Men Only: Vernacular Photographs of Male Affection
ArtRage Gallery

Price: Free
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

This exhibit of works from the collection of William Knodel looks at masculinity, gender and sexuality in our society. William Knodel was a college student in the 1970s in New York City when he purchased his first second-hand snapshot, a group of young men in assorted swimming attire whose style dated them back to the turn of the century, posing before a camp tent marked with a sign, "Men Only." Since then, he's collected vernacular images of male affection -- tintypes, daguerreotypes and photos -- during his travels to the West Coast, Canada, and Europe, scouring second-hand shops, old photo sales and used book stores. His collection now runs into the hundreds, dating from the mid-19th century and featuring couples and socializing groups from every race and social class. "Men Only" is a gift that incarnates the "gay spirit" that his good friend Harry Hay warned us must be kept alive and a history too often dismissed.

Read a review!

William Wegman: Flo Flow (2011)
Urban Video Project

Everson Museum of Art Plaza
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

The video "Flo Flow" is William Wegman's latest in a long line of human-canid collaborations. It was while he was in Long Beach in the 1970s that Wegman got his dog, Man Ray, with whom he began a fruitful collaboration of many years. Man Ray, known in the art world and beyond for his endearing deadpan presence, became a central figure in Wegman's photographs and videotapes. Ever since, Weimaraner-actors have peopled Wegman's uncanny imaginative universe, a reflection on both the human-ness of "animals" and the strangeness of humans.

William Wegman lives in New York and Maine where he continues to make videos, to take photographs and to make drawings and paintings.

For Syracuse, 2010: Selections of Truisms and Survival
Urban Video Project

Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Internationally renowned artist Jenny Holzer created "For Syracuse" as a site-specific installation that streams across the facade of Syracuse Stage on an LED curtain. The installation features 272 aphorisms from her celebrated series "Truisms, and Survival" that challenge viewer's assumptions about the world we live in through the use of language as art. Whether questioning consumerist impulses, or lamenting the struggles of daily living Jenny Holzer always provokes a response. Her work crosses the boundary between poetry and visual art, and suggests both the limitations and power of technology and the information age.

For more than 30 years, this influential American conceptual artist has been creating subversive works that blend in among advertisements in public spaces questioning and confronting our passive consumption of information. Since the early 1970s, Holzer has been collecting and writing phrases and aphorisms found in literature, philosophy and contemporary culture. She calls these summaries her Truisms, and has printed them on bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches, footstools, stickers, t-shirts, condoms, paintings, photographs, video, sound, light projection, and the Internet. In 1982, Holzer installed Truisms on one of Time Square's gigantic LED billboards. In the 1980s, for her Survival Series, Holzer adopted more personal and urgent messages about the realities of everyday living. Power, vulnerability, violence, tenderness, moral struggles and motherhood are courageously chronicled in this series which continuously prods the viewer to question the role of individuals in society.

Paul Taylor Dance Company
Arts Engage

Price: Free, but RSVP recommended
Crouse Hinds Concert Theater, Mulroy Civic Center
411 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Syracuse University's ArtsEngage will welcome the Paul Taylor Dance Company for an evening of modern dance. The evening's performance will include choreography set to the music of the Andrews Sisters, the St. Louis Melody Museum collection of band machines and House of Joy and Bach's Brandenburg Concertos.

The Paul Taylor Dance Company, now in its 55th year, is highly respected around the world. Taylor's love for music began at Syracuse University in the late 1940s, when he discovered dance in books at the school library. A short while later, he transferred to the Juilliard School. By 1954, he had assembled a small company of dancers before joining the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1955 as soloist for seven seasons while also choreographing his own small troupe. In 1959, he was invited by Balanchine to be a guest artist with New York City Ballet. In 1993, Taylor created the Paul Taylor Dance Company and Taylor 2, which have traveled the globe. The company has performed in more than 500 cities in 62 countries and in theaters and venues of every size and description in cultural capitals, college campuses and rural communities.

Attendees should RSVP to SUartspresenter@syr.edu or call 315-443-0296 with party size and name.

Dana & Susan Robinson
Folkus Project

Price: $15
May Memorial Unitarian Society
3800 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Dana and Susan Robinson make music that is the sound and feel of bedrock America--a perfect blend of old and new, bringing a traditional feel to their contemporary songwriting. They are consummate multi-instrumentalists (guitar, banjo, fiddle, and mandolin), integrating musical styles from the Appalachian, Celtic, and African traditions to create a unique, fresh sound. They bring a joyful energy to their performances, along with an acute understanding of America's musical heritage and its significance to our culture today.

Buckwheat Zydeco, with Professor Louie and the Cromatix

Price: $25
Palace Theater
2384 James St., Syracuse

"Buckwheat leads one of the best party bands in America; he can pump out Zydeco two-beats or shift into 12-bar blues, steaming all the way!" --New York Times

A portion of the proceeds will benefit P.E.A.C.E. Inc.

Tickets available at Sound Garden in Armory Square, online at www.brownpapertickets.com/event/225904, or by phone at 800-838-3006.

Legends of Jazz Series: Randy Brecker Quintet
Onondaga Community College

Price: Free, but tickets required
Storer Auditorium
Onondaga Community College, Syracuse

Free tickets available at Sound Garden in Armory Square beginning Sat., 2/18 at 10:00am, while they last, limit two per customer.

Randal "Randy" Brecker is one of the most most sought-after trumpeters in the history of jazz, rock, and R&B, and soul, and an astonishing musician, composer, arranger, leader and sideman. He has performed, toured, and recorded with an astonishing list of superstars, including Dire Straits, Frank Zappa and Todd Rundgren. Most recently, he appeared at Syracuse Jazz Fest with longtime collaborator and saxophonist Bill Evans and their SoulBop Band, which featured the late Hiram Bullock on guitar and Weather Report's Vistor Bailey on Bass.

Brecker played on the first breakthrough Blood Sweat & Tears album, Child Is Father to the Man, but left the band when founder Al Kooper left. He is the older brother of the late jazz saxophonist Michael Brecker (1949–2007). Together they led Dreams and the Brecker Brothers, a popular funk and fusion band which recorded several albums from the 1970s through the 1990s. After the Brecker Brothers disbanded in 1982, Randy recorded and toured as a member of legendary bassist Jaco Pastorius' Word of Mouth big band. It was soon thereafter that he met Brazilian jazz pianist Eliane Elias. Eliane and Randy formed their own band, touring the world several times and recording one album together, Amanda on Passport Records.

Joining Randy for this concert will be the Italian tenor saxophonist Ada Rovatti, Soulbop keyboardist Dave Kikoski, Santana drummer and jazz legend Rodney Homes, and the great Dean Johnson on bass.

Black Box Cabaret: Simply Sondheim
Black Box Players

Price: Free
Dolce Vita
907 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

The Drunkard
Baldwinsville Theatre Guild
Jon J Barden, director

Price: $20 adults; $17 students
First Presbyterian Church of Baldwinsville
64 Oswego St., Baldwinsville

A 19th century melodrama musical comedy...with music by Barry Manilow?!

The Drunkard is based on "the world-famous melodrama by W.H.S. Smith." Bro Herrod and the king of 1970s pop take us back to a simpler time in this deliciously coy and exaggerated play about the good, the bad, and the besotted. When Sweet Mary Wilson weds the virtuous Edward, the villainous lawyer Cribbs, determined to foreclose on the quaint little cottage Mary shares with her poor widowed mother, sees to it that the devil's beverage—alcohol—is served. Alas and alack! Edward is lured to the city and ensnared in a web of sin and drunkenness! Can Mary and her innocent young child save her inebriated husband from the evils of the bottle? And what of the diabolical Cribbs? Come join us for a fun hilarious evening. Complimentary desserts and hot beverages are served at intermission.

Jon Barden, director; Deborah Taylor, associate director; Steve Borek, producer; Dan Williams, music director (assisted by Michael Stapleton & Phill Sterling)

Durang in Duet
Black Box Players
Katie Lynch, director

Price: Free
Loft Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Durang in Duet is an evening of two short plays, Canker Sores and Other Distractions and For Who the Southern Belle Tolls, written by Christopher Durang. Durang is an American playwright know for works of outrageous and often absurd comedy.

Canker Sores and Other Distractions takes place in a restaurant with an ex-husband and wife meeting for one of the first times after their divorce. A disagreeable waitress causes an obstacle while the two characters develop several afflictions that cause them to remember why they divorced in the first place.

For Who the Southern Belle Tolls is a parody of Tenessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. It takes place on the night that Tom brings home a lady friend for his crippled brother, Lawrence. The play is an absurd and hilarious take on the Wingfield family that Tennesse Williams made famous in The Glass Menagerie.

Read a review!

Reaching for Marsby
Len Fonte, director

Price: $22 regular, $20 students/seniors
BeVard Room, Mulroy Civic Center
411 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Reaching for Marsby, the second staged comedy by former Post-Standard humor columnist Jeff Kramer, follows brash, bumbling American actor Gary Blenkinsopp, who travels to England in an attempt to save his career. Mayhem ensues in his theater world.

The cast features Mark Eischen, Moe Harrington, Kris Rusho, Michael O'Neill, Karis Wiggins, Brendon Cole and Peter Moller.

Tickets, with processing fees added, also be purchased by calling the box office at 315-435-2121 or by going to ticketmaster.com.

Read a Review!

Beautiful Child
Rarely Done Productions
Roy Van Nostrand, director

Price: $25
Jazz Central
441 E. Washington St., Syracuse

How do we love someone who falls outside our moral code? A couple's marriage is called into question when their son comes home for lunch and asks to stay. The world's no longer safe for their son as his secrets are about to become public. They want to help their son, who was once a beautiful child. They want to love him. But how? They arrive at a decision that's painful and restorative. This show is intended for mature audiences only. By Nicky Silver.

Read a Review!

LaMaMa Series: Poor Baby Bree: I Am Going to Run Away
Redhouse

Price: $20 regular, $15 members
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

The piece is written and directed by Bree Benton with music by Franklin Bruno. The story is built around Benton's portrayal of Poor Baby Bree, an archetypal waif, who weaves a tragicomic narrative of innocence and loss around seventeen obscure vaudeville and parlor songs dating from the 1890s through the 1930s.

Bree Benton (creator) has been performing as Poor Baby Bree since 2005, after a lifetime of collecting period sheet music and studying vaudeville and its performers. Her first one-woman show as Poor Baby Bree, "Weary River," earned awards from Time Out New York and BackStage. Her following show, "I Am Going to Run Away," was presented at The Club at La MaMa E.T.C. in 2010, and will return in Spring 2012.

Franklin Bruno (pianist/musical director), in addition to his work with Poor Baby Bree, has released over a dozen albums of original songs since the 1990s, as a solo artist and member of Nothing Painted Blue and (currently) The Human Hearts. He is a frequent collaborator with The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle, both as a multi-instrumentalist on the acclaimed albums Tallahassee and The Sunset Tree, and in the collaborative duo The Extra Lens.

The Lower Depths
Syracuse University Drama Department
Gerardine Clark, director

Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

A masterpiece of Russian realism, The Lower Depths was Maxim Gorky's first great play and its premiere production in 1902 helped establish the reputation of the famed Moscow Art Theatre and its influential director Constantine Stanislavsky. In the cave-like basement of a run-down boarding house, a disparate group of bosyák (literally, the barefoot) -- outcasts, petty criminals and day laborers -- negotiate days lived between harsh truth and consoling lies. With little hope or light in their lives, Gorky's finely detailed and psychologically rich characters manage to celebrate what Stanislavsky called the play's spiritual essence: "freedom, whatever happens!"

Read a Review!

Saturday, March 3, 2012

Windows Project: Chaz Griffin: The History of Silence
The Warehouse Gallery

The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Chaz Griffin studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and currently resides in Syracuse. For the Window Projects space he will produce a partially-autobiographical collage addressing the issue of youth living in 21st-century urban environments.

Price Check
Redhouse

Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

A research-based curatorial examination by Roslyn Esperon and Courtney Rile, featuring the art of Michael Barletta, Caol Flaitz, Carla Goldberg, Novado Cappuccilli, Jason Varone, Fred Wellner, Laura Wellner, and Leah Wolff

Being Impossible: Works by Deborah Zlotsky
LeMoyne College

Price: Free
Wilson Art Gallery, Noreen Reale Falcone Library
LeMoyne College, Syracuse

An exhibition of drawings and paintings by Deborah Zlotsky. In this series, the artist manipulates powdered graphite on sheets of mylar, searching for signs of life in the smears and conjuring up blurred boundaries between documenting nature and inventing nature. Zlotsky is represented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in New York and presented a solo exhibition in October 2011. She has been the recipient of numerous residencies, including a residency fellowship at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY, this past summer. She earned a bachelor's degree from Yale University and a master's degree in painting and drawing from the University of Connecticut.

For more information, call 315-445-4153.

Creatures Small and Great
Edgewood Gallery

Edgewood Gallery
216 Tecumseh Rd., Syracuse

Dana Blythe Stenson (metalsmith jewelry), Candace Rhea (ceramic and mixed media), Alan Hart (acrylic on board), and Diane Menzies (oil paintings) interpret insects and small animals.

From New York to Corrymore: Robert Henri and Ireland
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $10 adults, $8 students/seniors, $30 family pack (2 adults, 4 children))
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

"From New York to Corrymore: Robert Henri and Ireland" is the first exhibition to examine the American artist's work focused on the Irish landscape and people, particularly children, created between the time of his first trip to Ireland in 1913 and his last trip there in 1928. Long celebrated as an iconic American artist due to his important early work as a teacher and as the leader of The Eight, Henri's paintings have received less attention on their own. Most projects explored his career as it related to his role as a member of The Eight or in a broadly retrospective manner. Few projects focused on his landscapes, drawings, or foreign portraits.

Henri's Irish portraits constitute his largest focused body of work, and often depict the same sitters year after year. These paintings offer a unique and fascinating window onto the genre about which Henri felt most strongly--portraiture--and also chart his experiments with paint handling and color theories over time. He wrote that the time spent in Ireland was extremely valuable to him (it was the only other place besides New York where he purchased a residence), for only there was he able to focus on his painting without the distractions of life in New York. It is not surprising, then, that the periods Henri spent in Ireland were among his most prolific, and the paintings produced there among his most accomplished. Just before his death, Henri composed a list of his most important paintings; many of the works on this list were his Irish subjects. Forty-one paintings of Irish people and landscapes will be on view in the upcoming exhibition.

John Knecht: Fragments from the Wheels of Ezekiel
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $5 suggested donation
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

John Knecht is the featured artist for the Urban Video Project in January and February. In conjunction with the exhibition of "Deluge and Anima" on the Everson's north façade, a series of Knecht's animations, called "Fragments from the Wheels of Ezekiel," will be on view inside the museum. The Fragments, individual animations displayed on monitors, provide a glimpse into the artist's brilliant imagination, where fantasy collides with vivid colors and quirky sounds.

Envisionary
Szozda Gallery

Szozda Gallery
Delavan Center, 501 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Well established artist Phil Parsons and relatively new talent Emily Elizabeth display their painterly visions of atmospheric and landscape horizons surrounding Central New York. "Envisionary," the show's title, was coined perhaps to sharpen the concept of changing environs, elements commonplace every day that some artists foresee in greater depths than what most people perceive. In Elizabeth's case, it's her fascination with the universe that compels her to paint beyond shape and form to focus on color and atmosphere, while Parsons chooses to capture memorable landscapes that he himself alters with color and invented skies, reflecting his own feelings.

Read a review!

Sick at Home: Works of Tonja Torgerson
Echo

745 N. Salina St. (formerly Craft Chemistry)
Syracuse

Artist Statement: Notions of privacy and disclosure are at the core of my work. My portraits and figures deal with the reality of illness while balancing a thin line between expression and discretion. They explore the internal and external factors that compose one’s identity. While these topics could be divisive, the use of color, humor, and childish aesthetic keeps my work welcoming. Vomit, blood and bile appear alongside pinks, paisley and sweet poses. I am interested in this collision of attraction and disgust, and how it creates a difficult beauty and a pleasant anxiety. My work presents a personal side of an ever-increasingly political issue through a girlish lens of soft aesthetics and sad whimsy.

Tonja is currently pursuing an MFA in printmaking at Syracuse University.

Emilio Sanchez: No Way Home--Images of the Caribbean and New York City
Syracuse University Art Museum

Price: Free
Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"No Way Home" features a selection of 24 paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints drawn from the recently acquired collection of work by Cuban-American artist Emilio Sanchez (1921-1999). Best known for his brightly colored, strongly shadowed images of Caribbean and New York City architecture, this exhibition reveals the artist's ongoing interest in repetitive patterns. The show highlights a recent gift to the University Art Collection from the Emilio Sanchez Foundation of over 250 paintings, drawings and prints.

Pressing Print: Contemporary Prints and Process from Universal Limited Art Editions
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse

"Pressing Print: Contemporary Prints and Process from Universal Limited Art Editions" chronicles the recent decade of artwork published by one of the most renowned American printmaking workshops. The exhibition of 60 works illustrates the impact that artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler and Kiki Smith have had on contemporary art, evident through the work of artists Jason Middelbrook, Amy Cutler and Jane Hammond. The show also illustrates how emerging artists recently selected to work with ULAE has influenced the current trend, in both process and concept.

Weekend and evening visitors can park in the Q4 lot on College Place. Notify the attendant that you are visiting the Galleries and you will be directed where to park. Parking is on a space available basis and may be restricted during events held at the Carrier Dome. If spaces are not available, the attendant will direct you to the nearest lot.

Men Only: Vernacular Photographs of Male Affection
ArtRage Gallery

Price: Free
ArtRage Gallery
505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse

This exhibit of works from the collection of William Knodel looks at masculinity, gender and sexuality in our society. William Knodel was a college student in the 1970s in New York City when he purchased his first second-hand snapshot, a group of young men in assorted swimming attire whose style dated them back to the turn of the century, posing before a camp tent marked with a sign, "Men Only." Since then, he's collected vernacular images of male affection -- tintypes, daguerreotypes and photos -- during his travels to the West Coast, Canada, and Europe, scouring second-hand shops, old photo sales and used book stores. His collection now runs into the hundreds, dating from the mid-19th century and featuring couples and socializing groups from every race and social class. "Men Only" is a gift that incarnates the "gay spirit" that his good friend Harry Hay warned us must be kept alive and a history too often dismissed.

Read a review!

Noriko Ambe: Inner Water
The Warehouse Gallery

Price: Free
The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

In her first US museum solo show, New York City-based Japanese artist Noriko Ambe will create a new site-specific installation in the main gallery reflecting the tragic 2011 events in Japan through the use of video projections and her signature large-scale paper cutouts that evoke waves.

Nature plays an important role in Ambe's work, and it points to larger issues, such as the natural forces determining our global landscape, and the relationship between nature and humans throughout time. A recipient of prestigious awards such as the AICA Award and Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Ambe's work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Arts and Design and the Japan Society in New York and the Kyoto University of Art and Design in Kyoto, Japan. Her work is also in the collection of the Whitney Museum of Art.

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VPA Faculty Show Part II
XL Projects

Price: Free
XL Projects
307-313 S. Clinton St., Syracuse

Part two of an exhibition of work by faculty in S.U.'s College of Visual and Performing Arts.

For more information, phone 315-442-2542 during gallery hours or e-mail Andrew Havenhand at ahavenhand@yahoo.com.

William Wegman: Flo Flow (2011)
Urban Video Project

Everson Museum of Art Plaza
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

The video "Flo Flow" is William Wegman's latest in a long line of human-canid collaborations. It was while he was in Long Beach in the 1970s that Wegman got his dog, Man Ray, with whom he began a fruitful collaboration of many years. Man Ray, known in the art world and beyond for his endearing deadpan presence, became a central figure in Wegman's photographs and videotapes. Ever since, Weimaraner-actors have peopled Wegman's uncanny imaginative universe, a reflection on both the human-ness of "animals" and the strangeness of humans.

William Wegman lives in New York and Maine where he continues to make videos, to take photographs and to make drawings and paintings.

For Syracuse, 2010: Selections of Truisms and Survival
Urban Video Project

Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Internationally renowned artist Jenny Holzer created "For Syracuse" as a site-specific installation that streams across the facade of Syracuse Stage on an LED curtain. The installation features 272 aphorisms from her celebrated series "Truisms, and Survival" that challenge viewer's assumptions about the world we live in through the use of language as art. Whether questioning consumerist impulses, or lamenting the struggles of daily living Jenny Holzer always provokes a response. Her work crosses the boundary between poetry and visual art, and suggests both the limitations and power of technology and the information age.

For more than 30 years, this influential American conceptual artist has been creating subversive works that blend in among advertisements in public spaces questioning and confronting our passive consumption of information. Since the early 1970s, Holzer has been collecting and writing phrases and aphorisms found in literature, philosophy and contemporary culture. She calls these summaries her Truisms, and has printed them on bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches, footstools, stickers, t-shirts, condoms, paintings, photographs, video, sound, light projection, and the Internet. In 1982, Holzer installed Truisms on one of Time Square's gigantic LED billboards. In the 1980s, for her Survival Series, Holzer adopted more personal and urgent messages about the realities of everyday living. Power, vulnerability, violence, tenderness, moral struggles and motherhood are courageously chronicled in this series which continuously prods the viewer to question the role of individuals in society.

Brew and View Series: Back to the Future and The 'Burbs
Syracuse International Film Festival

Price: $10
Palace Theater
2384 James St., Syracuse

7:00 pm: Back to the Future
9:00 pm: The 'Burbs

Senior Piano and Voice Recital
Syracuse University Setnor School of Music
Featuring Fiona Andrews

Price: Free
Setnor Auditorium, Crouse College
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Fiona Andrews will be singing works by Mozart, Barber, Rorem and Menotti and will be playing works by Debussy and Chopin.

Parking is available in the Waverly, Harrison, or Lehman lots.

Play the Tuneful Oboe: Works for Chorus and Oboe
Syracuse Vocal Ensemble
Robert Cowles, conductor

St. Charles Borromeo Church
417 S. Orchard Rd., Syracuse

Cantata S 22 by J.S. Bach with chamber orchestra; the premier of Michael Dellaira's Nobody, a choral/oboe work using four interwoven texts by Emily Dickinson, featuring Anna Petersen Stearns, oboe; and other works.

Conspirator, with Eliot Lipp, Jeff Bujak
Westcott Theater

Westcott Theater
524 Westcott St., Syracuse

World Tales
Open Hand Theater
Hobey Ford's Golden Rod Puppets

Price: $8 adults, $6 children
International Mask and Puppet Museum
518 Prospect Ave., Syracuse

"World Tales" takes the audience on a thrilling expedition that explores the beauty and movement of whales, dolphins, birds, butterflies, wolves and a menagerie of other animals. Hobey Ford has created a puppetry ballet of incredibly realistic animal puppets and wonderfully animated creatures.

Two-time winner of puppetry's highest honor, the UNIMA Citation of Excellence, and recipient of three Jim Henson Foundation grants, Hobey Ford is known for excellence in puppetry performance and craft.

The Little Mermaid
Magic Circle Children's Theatre

Price: $5
Spaghetti Warehouse
689 N. Clinton St., Syracuse

Interactive adaptation of the children's classic.

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The Lower Depths
Syracuse University Drama Department
Gerardine Clark, director

Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

A masterpiece of Russian realism, The Lower Depths was Maxim Gorky's first great play and its premiere production in 1902 helped establish the reputation of the famed Moscow Art Theatre and its influential director Constantine Stanislavsky. In the cave-like basement of a run-down boarding house, a disparate group of bosyák (literally, the barefoot) -- outcasts, petty criminals and day laborers -- negotiate days lived between harsh truth and consoling lies. With little hope or light in their lives, Gorky's finely detailed and psychologically rich characters manage to celebrate what Stanislavsky called the play's spiritual essence: "freedom, whatever happens!"

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The Drunkard
Baldwinsville Theatre Guild
Jon J Barden, director

Price: $20 adults; $17 students
First Presbyterian Church of Baldwinsville
64 Oswego St., Baldwinsville

A 19th century melodrama musical comedy...with music by Barry Manilow?!

The Drunkard is based on "the world-famous melodrama by W.H.S. Smith." Bro Herrod and the king of 1970s pop take us back to a simpler time in this deliciously coy and exaggerated play about the good, the bad, and the besotted. When Sweet Mary Wilson weds the virtuous Edward, the villainous lawyer Cribbs, determined to foreclose on the quaint little cottage Mary shares with her poor widowed mother, sees to it that the devil's beverage—alcohol—is served. Alas and alack! Edward is lured to the city and ensnared in a web of sin and drunkenness! Can Mary and her innocent young child save her inebriated husband from the evils of the bottle? And what of the diabolical Cribbs? Come join us for a fun hilarious evening. Complimentary desserts and hot beverages are served at intermission.

Jon Barden, director; Deborah Taylor, associate director; Steve Borek, producer; Dan Williams, music director (assisted by Michael Stapleton & Phill Sterling)

Durang in Duet
Black Box Players
Katie Lynch, director

Price: Free
Loft Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Durang in Duet is an evening of two short plays, Canker Sores and Other Distractions and For Who the Southern Belle Tolls, written by Christopher Durang. Durang is an American playwright know for works of outrageous and often absurd comedy.

Canker Sores and Other Distractions takes place in a restaurant with an ex-husband and wife meeting for one of the first times after their divorce. A disagreeable waitress causes an obstacle while the two characters develop several afflictions that cause them to remember why they divorced in the first place.

For Who the Southern Belle Tolls is a parody of Tenessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. It takes place on the night that Tom brings home a lady friend for his crippled brother, Lawrence. The play is an absurd and hilarious take on the Wingfield family that Tennesse Williams made famous in The Glass Menagerie.

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Reaching for Marsby
Len Fonte, director

Price: $22 regular, $20 students/seniors
BeVard Room, Mulroy Civic Center
411 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Reaching for Marsby, the second staged comedy by former Post-Standard humor columnist Jeff Kramer, follows brash, bumbling American actor Gary Blenkinsopp, who travels to England in an attempt to save his career. Mayhem ensues in his theater world.

The cast features Mark Eischen, Moe Harrington, Kris Rusho, Michael O'Neill, Karis Wiggins, Brendon Cole and Peter Moller.

Tickets, with processing fees added, also be purchased by calling the box office at 315-435-2121 or by going to ticketmaster.com.

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Beautiful Child
Rarely Done Productions
Roy Van Nostrand, director

Price: $20
Jazz Central
441 E. Washington St., Syracuse

How do we love someone who falls outside our moral code? A couple's marriage is called into question when their son comes home for lunch and asks to stay. The world's no longer safe for their son as his secrets are about to become public. They want to help their son, who was once a beautiful child. They want to love him. But how? They arrive at a decision that's painful and restorative. This show is intended for mature audiences only. By Nicky Silver.

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LaMaMa Series: Poor Baby Bree: I Am Going to Run Away
Redhouse

Price: $20 regular, $15 members
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

The piece is written and directed by Bree Benton with music by Franklin Bruno. The story is built around Benton's portrayal of Poor Baby Bree, an archetypal waif, who weaves a tragicomic narrative of innocence and loss around seventeen obscure vaudeville and parlor songs dating from the 1890s through the 1930s.

Bree Benton (creator) has been performing as Poor Baby Bree since 2005, after a lifetime of collecting period sheet music and studying vaudeville and its performers. Her first one-woman show as Poor Baby Bree, "Weary River," earned awards from Time Out New York and BackStage. Her following show, "I Am Going to Run Away," was presented at The Club at La MaMa E.T.C. in 2010, and will return in Spring 2012.

Franklin Bruno (pianist/musical director), in addition to his work with Poor Baby Bree, has released over a dozen albums of original songs since the 1990s, as a solo artist and member of Nothing Painted Blue and (currently) The Human Hearts. He is a frequent collaborator with The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle, both as a multi-instrumentalist on the acclaimed albums Tallahassee and The Sunset Tree, and in the collaborative duo The Extra Lens.

The Lower Depths
Syracuse University Drama Department
Gerardine Clark, director

Storch Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

A masterpiece of Russian realism, The Lower Depths was Maxim Gorky's first great play and its premiere production in 1902 helped establish the reputation of the famed Moscow Art Theatre and its influential director Constantine Stanislavsky. In the cave-like basement of a run-down boarding house, a disparate group of bosyák (literally, the barefoot) -- outcasts, petty criminals and day laborers -- negotiate days lived between harsh truth and consoling lies. With little hope or light in their lives, Gorky's finely detailed and psychologically rich characters manage to celebrate what Stanislavsky called the play's spiritual essence: "freedom, whatever happens!"

Read a Review!

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Windows Project: Chaz Griffin: The History of Silence
The Warehouse Gallery

The Warehouse Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Chaz Griffin studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and currently resides in Syracuse. For the Window Projects space he will produce a partially-autobiographical collage addressing the issue of youth living in 21st-century urban environments.

Looking & Looking: Photos by Amy Elkins and Jen Davis
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Jen Davis and Amy Elkins create work that focuses on gaze and identity, with Davis looking at herself and Elkins looking at young male athletes. The images in the exhibition explore the perception of how men and women are supposed to appear in society -- men should be strong and confident, women should be beautiful -- and the crafting of a self-image.

Jen Davis creates self-portraits that deal with issues surrounding beauty, identity, and body image of women, and challenges the perceptions and stereotypes of how women should look in their physical appearances. Amy Elkins depicts the more aggressive, competitive, and violent aspects of male identity in her series Elegant Violence, which captures portraits of young Ivy League rugby athletes moments after their game. Elkins' images explore the balance between athleticism, modes of violence or aggression, and varying degrees of vulnerability within a sport where brutal body contact is fundamental.

Both artists focus on the construction of identity -- the players are astutely aware of how they are presenting themselves while Davis draws attention to her own self-image in a more emotional way. Shown together, the works of Davis and Elkins urge the viewer to consider expectations and perceptions (both societal and individual) of identity.

Envisionary
Szozda Gallery

Szozda Gallery
Delavan Center, 501 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

Well established artist Phil Parsons and relatively new talent Emily Elizabeth display their painterly visions of atmospheric and landscape horizons surrounding Central New York. "Envisionary," the show's title, was coined perhaps to sharpen the concept of changing environs, elements commonplace every day that some artists foresee in greater depths than what most people perceive. In Elizabeth's case, it's her fascination with the universe that compels her to paint beyond shape and form to focus on color and atmosphere, while Parsons chooses to capture memorable landscapes that he himself alters with color and invented skies, reflecting his own feelings.

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Pressing Print: Contemporary Prints and Process from Universal Limited Art Editions
Syracuse University Art Museum

Syracuse University Art Museum, Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University, Syracuse