Really, if I ever, ever, ever hear someone whingeing about how there is nothing to do in St. Louis...well, I'm going to have to school 'em. Like, look at what is going on just tonight:
--At Webster University's Cecille Hunt Gallery, curators Dana Turkovic and Jeffrey Hughes have put together a large-scale exhibit of contemporary Indian artists -- a first for St. Louis. "Bring Me a Lion," gathers together a group of young Indian artists, whose work examines "the primary discourses in contemporary Indian culture," including "competing forces of tradition and modernity, indigence and diasporas, village economies and international capitalism."
--Downtown at Philip Slein Gallery, there's a new show focused on big cats of a different sort; Michael Hernadez de Luna's "A Tiger's Tale," is a series of clever stamp sheets that poke fun at the Tiger Woods sex scandal. The image on the show card is a sheet of faux 44-cent stamps, featuring what seems to be a pastiche of an Arthur Lyman record sleeve. Under the title THE TIGER TAMER, a woman with a riding crop (who looks very much like Elin Nordegren), tickles the chin of a stuffed tiger, proclaiming she'll "fix that infidelity!" The clever twist here is that de Luna uses these as actual postage, and displays the envelopes with the canceled stamps alongside the digital prints. The fact that postal employees send his stamps -- which often feature boobs and other scandalous images -- straight through the cancellation machine makes one think that yes, maybe these guys should be taking Saturdays off...
--The amazing Cindy Tower, who I shadowed a few years ago when she was painting inside the collapsing meat-packing factories in East St. Louis, has a new show opening tonight at Bruno David Gallery. There are a whole string of things that have been said over and over again about Cindy's work, but I think they bear repeating: that she is a painter's painter; that her paintings address the decline of an America where people actually made things; and that her paintings, often made in risky situations, are also a kind of performance art. "Decadense" (that's a play on words, so that misspelling is on purpose) is a suite of all-new work, which opens concurrently with Nanette Boileau's "Heard but not Said"" in the Front Room, and videos by Dickson Beall in the Media Room.
--New work by Jeffrey Sass and Colin Michael Shaw opens tonight at Concrete Ocean Gallery on Jefferson; Shaw's acoustic band, the Good Medicine Revival Show, performs for the occasion. Sass' show, "Postcards from the Near Future" focuses on cultural artifacts disappearing from the American landscape that express the "audacity of a uniquely American spirit, its neighborhood treasures and roadside attractions,” while Shaw's show is retrospective of paintings, mixed media pieces and collages made over the past seven years.
--If you missed the premiere of Stephen Prina's Concerto for Modern, Movie, and Pop Music for Ten Instruments and Voice at the Contemporary last night, note that at 7:30 pm, Wash U. is hosting Stephen Prina: Film Screening and Artist Talk. You can see two of the artist's recent films, The Way He Always Wanted It II (2008) and Vinyl II (2000), followed by a discussion with the artist. The event is a coordinated effort between the Contemporary, Cinema St. Louis and Wash. U's film/media department; the event is free, and held in the Brown Hall Auditorium.
--And my neighbor, the very fine painter Kathleen Wylie, is showing her paintings at Urban Studio tonight in Old North St. Louis.
Of course, it would be impossible to make all of these shows, unless you own a helicopter. So if you're out and about tonight, snapping pictures at openings, feel free to send 'em my way, and I'll post them next week. --Stefene Russell
