saying the least and saying it loud.

SATURDAY, MAY 12th, 6-10PM

Emily Elizabeth Goodman has curated an exhibition investigating the question of determinacy; how we delineate and define the things that comprise our world, how we come to determine something as one thing or another, and whether such distinctions are positive, negative or useless. The contributing artists explore the limitations of certain forms and how one thing is differentiated from another, causing us to definitively determine what something is while challenging such distinctions altogether in their practices.

Working across a variety of media, Frankie Martin and Berglind Tomasdottir, Emily Sevier, and Allison Spence all examine this condition of indeterminacy, exploring the permeability of boundaries and distinctions between things, and opening up formerly defined forms to new interpretations.

Spring 2012

Helmuth is proud to present a two person show featuring Mike Calway-Fagen and Joshua Miller. This is a one night event, and your best chance to say goodbye to Mike as he leaves his fair and weathered friends of San Diego. Christen his crest with your finest champagne and moisten his chest with your finest clamp-stain.

Spring, 2012

Ela Boyd and Matt Savitsky curated works from the UCSD MFA program into a framework that sought to illuminate how digital tools and networked systems affect art practice. Taken as a starting point, artists were asked to name (in a hypothetical sense) central concepts in their research as they might be interpreted by the semantic web. In other words, to identify which keywords make their work searchable.

SPRING 2012

Room Face Realness
A residency project by Matt Savitsky

Throughout his residency, Savitsky transplanted his working studio and transformed the gallery space into a boutique-style living room where he and his drag mother, David Perez (a.k.a. Mz. Perez), met for their personal sessions.

During these sessions, the two made plaster casts of their bodies and practiced drag make-up working in a collaborative fashion where stylistic friction between the roles of “drag mother” and “drag baby” posed a challenge to balance Savitsky’s aestheticized clutter with Perez’s desire for gloss finish.

As an extension of the exploration of gay cultural issues, Savitsky involves his personal relationship with his drag mother in hopes to expose the “back-stage” of drag. Through a material process, he frames a moment in which he is receiving a tradition that is passed down through touch and play.

WORKSHOP 001

A hacking workshop for artists, tinkerers and fans of electronic droning and grating noise machines. $12 (materials and equipment provided). Led by Rob Duarte.

The group made their own etched circuit board PCB’s then learned how to assemble and solder the electronic components. Working with resistors, capacitors, output vehicles, LED’s and a 9V power supply each participant left with a controllable noise making machine.

Winter 2012

Stay: Reinterpreting the Token
A collection/exhibition curated by Angella d’Avignon

Stay featured artifacts from fifteen artists. The participants where asked to reinterpret personal mementos that signify loss, absence, and the passing of time. Along with the submissions each artists called d’Avignon to leave a message on her answering machine explaining the story behind the objects they where lending to the collection. The audio was looped in the gallery for the duration of the show. The objects and their respective stories interwove personal narrative while exploring aesthetic, history, and the importance of context.

Winter 2011

The Invocation of Saint Nicholas
A window display by 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 acted 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. – matthew bradley

Projection hours where dusk till dawn December 16th through the 25th.

Fall 2011

Thank You For Being A Friend
An endurance piece by J Noland

‘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.’ -J Noland

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 For Being A Friend 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.

Fall 2011

Stricken
A 24 hour endurance piece by Jenna Morrow

Morrow 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

Revelations of the Chattering Ether… Concealed
A sculptural sound installation by Jeff Eisenberg

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 the experiment explored 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.