Last night in Chelsea was huge with great turnouts at many venues including Pooneh Maghazehe’s performance at Chelsea Art Museum and a packed house at Daneyal Mahmood to see Nan Goldin and Lisa Ross speak. Videos and pictures will follow soon.

Tonight 7 events will take place across Downtown Manhattan which includes 3 amazing Open Portfolio Artists. Make sure to check out Anindita Dutta’s talk at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

Rundown of tonight’s events:

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council
3-4:30pm Open Portfolio: Anindita Dutta’s Talk

Gallery 456
5:30-8pm Reception / 6pm Discussion

Art Projects International
6-8pm Reception

Ethan Cohen Fine Arts
6-9pm Opening Reception / Open Portfolio: Performance

THE Gallery
6-8pm Opening Reception

Rubin Museum of Art
6:30pm Open Portfolio: Artist Talk

Eli Klein Fine Art
7-10pm Reception / Discussion

Note: bolded events are part of ACAW’s Open Portfolio program.

You can find full descriptions of each event by going to the our event calendar.

View ACAW 09 Friday, May 15th in a larger map

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Also, be sure to check our Facebook and Twitter pages for constant updates and images for the rest of the week. Images and video from Thursday night’s events will be up soon.

Tonight all ACAW events take place in throughout Chelsea. It’s going to be a huge night with 11 different venues across the neighborhood, some event with multiple events!

You can check out all of them by going to our event calendar. There you can find quick descriptions and all the information you need to plan the night.

A quick rundown of tonights events:

The Chelsea Art Museum
5pm Exhibition Walkthrouths
6-9pm Reception
6:30 and 8:30pm Open Portfolio: Performances

Bose Pacia
6-8pm Opening Reception

Chambers Fine Art
6-8pm Opening Reception

Daneyal Mahmood Gallery
6-8pm Exhibition Viewing / 7pm Open Portfolio: Discussion

Gana Art Gallery
6-9pm Reception / 8pm Lecture

Kips Gallery
6-8pm Opening Reception / Artists Talk

Sepia International/The Alkazi Collection
6-8pm Opening Reception / Open Portfolio: Exhibition Viewing

Sundaram Tagore Gallery
6-8pm Opening Reception

THE Gallery
6-8pm Opening Reception

Thomas Erben Gallery
6-8pm Opening Reception

Tyler Rollins Fine Art
6-8pm Opening Reception

M.Y. Art Prospects
7-9pm Open Portfolio: Artist Talk / Reception

*Note: Bolded events are part of ACAW 2009’s Open Portfolio Program

See a map of Thursday’s events after the jump.
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1. How did you start making art?

I’ve been around it all my life. My dad was a painter and my mother is a ceramist, so it was encouraged early on…
I got interested in film and photography when I was about 15, discovered all the cool things that you could do with the camera and in a dark room in high school, and that’s what I ended up studying and practicing before considering/making art at the graduate level.

2. Briefly describe your art from the perspective of what it could tell us about you?

The collage and installation that I’m interested in now is not anything I’d have considered interesting four years ago. I suppose that means the way I think about making work has undergone a big shift.
The collages use ordinary materials and they parody the fashion of miniature painting that has become a sought after genre of contemporary painting from Pakistan, especially in the international art market. Its even considered a movement of sorts. There are some amazing artists developing their work in this way, but I was more interested in the way that the contemporary miniature has become fetishized. Also what it implies in terms of taste, and painterly skill and all the rest is an important thing for me. The collages were also inspired by certain political events that happened in Pakistan last year.
The other thing I am really interested in is the urban kitsch of Lahore, which is where the wallpaper made from posters comes in. I’m fascinated by the recycled imagery, the sloppy photoshop work, and the romanticism. This says a lot about the culture especially in relation to what is happening there politically, and I’m very interested in using that in my work.

3. What experiences have most influenced your choice of subject matter medium and style?

Growing up in Lahore in the 80’s. Moving between the developing and the developed world from a young age. Discovering my grandfather’s archive of photographs and travelogues at 12. All these things are pretty significant with recent projects.

4. Is your formal or informal training as an artist useful? How?

That’s a really good question. Everyone is marked by the ideologies of the institutions that they have been associated with. It is useful to some degree because it gives you a framework and structure, particularly useful at a basic level. But it is probably more important to undo that training, or develop your work beyond what they’ve set you up for.

5. Does your work reflect issues in yourself, in society or community?

Probably all of the above.

6. Do you appreciate culturally specific works of art? If so how does your personal and cultural background show up in your work?

In a way every work of art is specific to a culture and time and place, whether its Gordon Matta Clark splitting a house in two pieces, or Yinka Shonibare’s Victorian dresses that he commissions a seamstress to make with African fabric.
If you mean in terms of heritage and cultural background, I’m not sure how that works without getting clichéd in a world and an art system which is pretty international and lets face it, has it an audience that is quite jaded. But some artists have been very clever at dealing with these issues in their work, which is pretty cool and inspiring.
Yes, my personal and cultural background does play a part in my work. The collage work specifically deals with miniature painting and the poster’s with a particular kind of Lahori kitch… Before I dealt with these things and used them in my work a lot of people tended to project an ethnicity that I hadn’t intended, regardless, so it can be a pretty tricky thing.

7. Is there anything you would like to say about your local art scene or the international art market, art education, and or system for art exhibition?

A lot. It would exceed the word count for this interview so I’ll maybe I should start a blog or write a pamphlet.

8. How does your current portfolio fit into the rest of your body of work?

I’m still dealing with a new conceptual direction that I started last year, so its quite different from work I was developing in film and photography and also in terms of what its about. But there are probably a lot formal similarities that you can see as thread.

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1. How did you start making art?

I grew up in an intellectual’s family that never kept me distanced from, if not very close to, art scenes. Meanwhile, having lived among commoners in the age before the market boom and witnessed their desires, ambitions and personal disasters, I have had a life that is dense enough for telling a vivid story. Initially, I made art only as a compliment to those “major” things more closely related to my professional interests – my literary writings (illustrations to The Fireworks of Chang’an), architectural researches (an interpretative project about Battery Park City, New York), curating projects (Chinese Gardens for Living, Germany), and so on – but I soon found they could stand alone to be a different kind of stories. My works may be appropriately categorized as the “visionary” but cannot be completely separated from the “necessary”: on one side there is my intellectual curiosity and on the other is my instinct out of real life experience.

2. Briefly describe your art from the perspective of what it could tell us about you?

My art is what they called “art in general,” where the concept of “work” is intentionally kept ambivalent. To put this in another way, my works pay less attention to media, subject or “authorship” than to the larger context where they are created. This concerns an exploration of the artist/curator/designer overlap – the act of sifting through a scholar’s mindset for vivid stories, or of exhaustive inventorying of things for a personal history emerged out of world-making. Like-minded, I do not mind being called a scholar, a curator, a novelist or an artist, yet with the only wish to be consistent in addressing artistic, architectural or urbanistic issues as a whole. For my artistic pursuits I prefer to be a “Renaissance Man” than to be a specialist.

3. What experiences have most influenced your choice of subject matter, medium and style?

As mentioned above, I have lived a real commoner’s life. Such a life can never be furnished with a thin veneer. Nor need it be too “avant-garde.” As Chinese always believe, there is a more “natural” attitude towards artistic creation as long as you could maintain an appropriate balance between the articulated and the “chance-upon.” For the above reasons the (Chinese) “garden” become an important framing concept for all my art. My professional trainings render more affinity to space-making as well as a Constructivist appearance for my work. But they are also tangible, detailed and story-telling. My world-making strategies grew out simultaneously of sociological concerns and of aesthetic appeals. They imply not only collaged images, but a softer and more idiosyncratic approach to the generic enormity of the built environment.

4. Is your formal or informal training as an artist useful? How?

I learned essential art skills and most common senses from my grandparents and parents, artist neighbors and friends, not from any professional training. In fact I have found that this is very useful because it taught you why to make art on top of how.

5. Does your work reflect issues in yourself, in society or community? What would you say is the purpose for making art?

Yes, and it has to. Or we cannot imagine other reasons why we would need such a thing. But it also need do so strategically. Against two popular myths about “creativity” and about “societal merits,” I want to argue that art should get neither too close to nor too far from social appeals. For example, I made a series of visionary architectural drawings, wrapped up by a fabricated medieval tale, to illustrate my reflection on the current Chinese urbanist discussion. The story needs be novel enough to refresh people’s thoughts and distance them from various cultural and professional clichés. Meanwhile, it still needs be appropriately supported by arguments and premises that are generally accepted by most scholars in the related field.

6. Do you appreciate culturally specific works of art? If so how does your personal and cultural background show up in your work?

In my opinions, it is healthy not to be too self-conscious about your cultural identity. As an artist and author living in New York City for most of the year, I simply cannot be blind to what happens under your nose. In addition to my New York researches, for example, I have had my own visionary reinterpretation/intervention of Battery Park City (say, a city hooligan’s unexpected visit to the banker’s backyard, which is against the initial wishes of the planner). The topic about two contested views of urban environment is simply becoming universal, immediate and not bound to your cultural background. On the other hand, you need be persistent on your own approach and perspective. I recently translated Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York into Chinese and I particularly like his idea of “retrospective manifesto”: as a cultural outsider may help your theoretic perfection of the ready-made reality. The only condition is that you cannot be both onshore and drifting away.

7. Is there anything you would like to say about your local art scene or the international art market, art education, and or system for art exhibition?

So far, I am a beneficiary of such a system, not its victim, so I am probably not in a good position to make very objective and critical comments. In general, I think that contemporary art should open its door to a wider variety of audience. As my New York photography series suggests, our visual culture now presents a kind of peculiar “translucency” that is optically intriguing yet politically uncertain. The openness that it reveals is somehow still an illusion. The in-between status is aesthetically interesting, but there also lurks a danger that it leads to nowhere.

8. How does your current portfolio fit into the rest of your body of work?

They are highly correlated though they may look very different. As stated, my works can be summarized as a variety of different representation of “gardens.” As a subject matter, the “garden” first of all embodies an interdisciplinary, trans-scale approach, as opposed to a simple division of the physical reality into humane construct versus regional operation. Despite the popular impression that a garden might satisfy only trivial horticultural interests, as an artistic notion the “garden” introduces a phenomenological view of the built environment that is especially meaningful in our rapidly urbanized world. To design a “garden” necessitates a synthesis of numerous things: not only structure but also infrastructure, not only schemes and ideas, but also materials and textures, not only the static composition but also an eidetic memory, not only a top-down conception but also a bottom-up process of implementation. To perceive a “garden” will require a flexible and liminal perspective, in which solid, triumphal spaces are often collapsed into indefinite and intimate experiences. Altogether my works form a complete typology of “garden space” as embodied in today’s architectural practices.

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