saying the least and saying it loud.

A window display for the holiday season.
matthew bradley

The Invocation of Saint Nicholas was a prayer for the patron saint of sailors and thieves. A live video feed of a vintage Santa Claus candle burning from head to toe. The seemingly grotesque nature of burning the beloved figure is confronted by the tradition of ritualistic candle burning to commission spirits and supernatural energies. The Christmas window- style display acts as a quintessential venue for promoting both our most pious of holiday pursuits and our most commercial holiday trappings.

The Invocation of Saint Nicholas,
A prayer for grace and forgiveness.
A war on Christmas.

“The Invocation of Saint Nicholas”
a video-based window display by matthew bradley

Projection hours:
Dusk till Dawn Dec. 16-25

Fall, 2011

“Thank You For Being A Friend is an act of endurance and indulgence investigating the passivity of television, representative forms/functions of friendship, and the ‘average’ against the backdrop of situational comedy and ground-breaking comfort technology.

“In a 1995 interview, artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres was quoted as saying ‘I don’t want to make art just for people who can read Frederic Jameson sitting upright in a Mackintosh chair. I want to make art for people who watch The Golden Girls and sit in a big brown La-Z-Boy chair.’

“Let us consider this secondary audience – this ‘average’ American – in a hyperbolic state, a state of exaggeration perhaps more fitting of our contemporary culture. The popularized American condition is not one of moderation or reasonable consumption, but rather one of inflated indulgence and insatiability. If we apply these notions to the very act of sitting in a La-Z-Boy chair and watching the Golden Girls, then this ‘average’ viewership may take on a quality of the extraordinary. Thank You… presents the entirety of The Golden Girls from the perspective of a La-Z-Boy in an attempt to transform an everyday experience into one of exception through an exaggeration of scale. While the artist plays the role of the exceptional, attendees are asked to consider themselves as the ‘average’ by signing up to view episodes during this 4-day marathon.” -J Noland

Fall, 2011

A 24 hour endurance piece by Jenna Morrow. Jenna knit continuously in the German Continental fashion from 6am Saturday to 6am Sunday. The gallery was open for the duration.

“My goal with the 24 hour knit is to reduce control over the body and the process to such a degree that the results are autonomous from my intentions. It is the unknowns that ignite my curiosity – what happens to the body, the process, and the object when all are pushed further than what was previously considered possible? In moving towards what is uncertain, through resistance and absurdity, veritable discoveries are made possible.” -Jenna Morrow

The performance was broadcast live and is archived (link to the right).

Summer, 2011

Jeff Eisenberg creates drawings, paintings, sound sculptures and collaborative projects that focus on the artifacts and detritus associated with fringe communities and marginal systems. Incorporating humor and absurdity into his work, Eisenberg considers how groups with radically different ideologies and agendas imprint their values onto the objects and built surroundings that make up their daily lives, examining how their methodologies, strategies and cosmologies often and oddly converge.

For his project at Helmuth, Eisenberg created a six channel sound sculpture, inspired by the SETI and Arecibo Radio Telescope arrays, new age shaman objects, and the AM Talk Radio format, in order to explore the phenomena of conspiracy theories and the mainstreaming of outmoded hermetic and arcane knowledge systems that purport to find patterns of truth and meaning locked away in the everyday background static of our lives.

Summer, 2011

“Shooting the Shit combined inebriation and recreation in a social sculpture predicated on the pastimes of the flyover states. Participants were invited to drink beer, get drunk and shoot guns – a diversion familiar to suburban Americans plagued by boredom.  As the work progressed, participants became increasingly intoxicated, the mess of cans and spilt beer grew and caution waned. Shooting the Shit stands as American leisure activity at its finest.”  -J Noland

Spring, 2011
Our initial build-out was for a DNZA Projects exhibition. DNZA Projects is a quarterly thematic group show curated by Lauren Popp and staged at different local residences.

“The seven artists featured in Suspension each present a unique ‘semblance of truth’ for the viewer to accept or deny in the hope of inspiring artistic faith as endorsed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notion of a willing suspension of disbelief.” -Lauren Popp

This installment featured new work by:

Matt Bradley
John Oliver Lewis
Jessica McCambly (pictured)
Melissa Mclean
J Noland
Katherine Powers
Joe Yorty