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bowerbird@LANDMARKS
An ongoing curatorial partnership
Through this partnership with bowerbird, we bring experimental and improvisational music, film, dance and other
creative, genre-defying performing arts to historic sites in the region. Events co-presented with Bowerbird will continue on an
ongoing basis.
For upcoming bowerbird@LANDMARKS events, click here.
For details of previous events, please visit the bowerbird
website here.
PIMA Group
Look!
A bowerbird@LANDMARKS project
Performances February 1-3, 2008
Powel House Museum
PIMA Group
is a non-profit dance and music company based in Philadelphia that
performs and presents innovative live music and dance, developing new
approaches to the integration of dance, music and visual art. PIMA
Group undertook a residency with Landmarks Contemporary
Projects that resulted in an original, site-specific performance
piece at the Powel House Museum in February 2008.
From the project description: Come share in
the experience as PIMA performers take an intimate-sized group through
the historic home in which Benjamin Franklin's daughter, Sarah, shared
in a dance with George Washington. As the audience moves throughout the
rooms of the house, the gentle movement of the dancers creates an
immersive experience. The setting of the Powel House Museum offers a
multitude of inspiring intrigues, inviting the audience to interact
with and examine this historic home through contemporary dance. The
challenge of commenting upon the historical while maintaining a
refreshing and new artistic aesthetic is of utmost interest to PIMA
choreographer Melisa Putz. Look! is inspired by the colors, furniture
and the beauty of a historical time period...a time when the Powel
House hosted some of the most elegant dancing of the age.
About
PIMA
Group explores the edges of works ranging from improvisational
performance art work to more formal choreographed and composed pieces.
PIMA Group regularly collaborates with outside artists and
organizations. As part of its mission, PIMA Group also offers dance
classes and workshops throughout the year. PIMA Group was founded in
2001 by choreographer Melisa Putz and musicians Michael Barker and
Thomas Clark. PIMA Group has performed at numerous venues nationally
and internationally. Most recently, PIMA Group was a part of the 2007
Sibiu Dans Festival in Sibiu, Romania offering a seven-day dance
technique and composition workshop along with a performance. PIMA Group
has received two Temple University Space Grants, selection for Susan
Hess Choreographer's Project, a New Edge Dance Residency at the
Community Education Center and most recently Artist-in-Residence as
part of the Bowerbird@Landmarks Series. PIMA Group has received support
from the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, Fractured Atlas and Dance Theater
Workshop's Suitcase Fund.
Michelle Wilson
Aftermath
November 2-November 25, 2007
Powel House Museum
What if the liberty we believe we know is only a shadow of true
freedom?
Landmarks Contemporary Projects is pleased to present Aftermath, an important new project by artist Michelle Wilson. Aftermath will be on view from November
2-25, 2007
at the Powel House Museum, 244 South 3rd Street in Philadelphia. A free public reception with the
artist will be held at the museum on Friday, November 2nd, from 6-9pm.
Behind the scenes of modern
American comfort is a complex web of influence and deferred responsibility. Aftermath is a multi-media installation
in which Wilson challenges viewers to consider the unseen consequences of
the choices we make as a society, as well as the choices made for us by our
government.
Inspired by the ideas of Plato's
Cave, as well as alchemical theories of fire as a purifier, Wilson tries to find a way to see clearly
in a world confounded by mass misinformation and misdirection. Aftermath exposes the ashes we have
collectively brushed under the rug. Do you burn what you fear, or what you
hate? Or are they the same thing?
Artist Michelle Wilson recently
lived in the Powel House Museum for two years as Site
Manager/Caretaker. Aftermath is
heavily informed by her time in this historically significant site, which gave
her a strong appreciation of the relationship between social responsibility and
the ideals of our Founding Fathers. While living at the Powel House, the
environment of historical interpretation challenged Wilson to view contemporary society with
new eyes. The Iraq war, the degradation of the
environment, imprisonment without trial, genocide in the Sudan--she couldn't help but wonder how we
arrived in this situation as a nation. Through prints, installation,
projections and sound, Wilson will attempt to break through this
mask of comfort. The Powel House--as a center of the political and social
milieu surrounding the birth of our Constitution--is an ideal, if poignant site
for this experiment. The Powel House represents the best of our Revolutionary
past and philosophy. It is a contextualizing environment for the idea that we
live in a time where there is much debate about some of the political and
philosophical ideals put forth in the Constitution: from wiretapping, to
detention without access to lawyers, to freedom of speech.
Wilson's work has been part of
exhibitions at the Phillips Museum, the National Constitution Center, the Nasu International Biennial
of Contemporary Art in Japan, and the Second International
Biennial for the Artists' Book, in Alexandria, Egypt. Wilson is former President of the
Philadelphia Women's Caucus for Art, and holds an MFA from the University of
the Arts. To find out more about Wilson's work, visit her blog, Rocinante Press, or see more of her work on
Inliquid.com
As with all art
exhibitions, the views reflected in the content of the project are those of the
artist, and not necessarily those of Landmarks or its supporters. Landmarks supports open
dialogue, free speech and vigorous debate.
Virginia
Maksymowicz
Rules of Civility
September 14-October 21, 2007
Powel House Museum
Rules of Civility is a mixed-media installation that
draws its inspiration from two Eliza's: Elizabeth Willing Powel and Eliza
Leslie. Besides sharing similar first names, the women were roughly
contemporaries, their lives having overlapped by 43 years. They both lived in Philadelphia. And they
were both, very much, ladies of their time.
Elizabeth Willing (1743-1830) was the wife
of one of Philadelphia's mayors, Samuel Powel, and the house they shared on 3rd Street
was often visited
by George and Martha Washington, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. She
was a
prolific letter-writer and many of her personal papers are archived at
the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and at the Mount Vernon Ladies'
Association in Virginia. Although
credited with convincing Washington
to serve a second term as president, much of her correspondence as seen by Maksymowicz deals
with the day-to-day minutia of turn-of-the-century life. Her husband died
of yellow fever in 1793, and Elizabeth
spent her remaining 36 years as a widow.
Eliza Leslie (1787-1858) was born in Philadelphia
and spent her childhood in London.
Her father, Robert, was a clockmaker and a personal friend of Benjamin
Franklin. The family returned to America when Eliza was twelve. Even
at that early age, she loved to write but despaired at ever becoming a
published author. When her father died in 1803, financial hardship caused her
mother to take in boarders. Eliza went to cooking school, possibly to help with
the family's new business. These studies led her to the publish a cookbook,
followed by a series of children's books, magazine articles and etiquette
guides. She eventually became somewhat of a celebrity and she received many
distinguished visitors at her residence at the United States Hotel.
 The Powel
House installation consists of a series of open books, cast in white Hydrostone
plaster, overlaid with quotations from Eliza Leslie's The Behaviour Book and
Elizabeth Powel's own words. Images of Elizabeth,
chosen from the numerous portraits painted of her during her lifetime, peer out
from underneath the texts. The books, along with pairs of 18-century shoes,
quill pens and inkwells also cast in Hydrostone are positioned within the
various rooms of the historic house, along with items selected from the
collection. Throughout the installation, a soft female voice can be heard
detailing the etiquette of middle-class society. The title, Rules of Civility,
is taken from Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior, a pamphlet of good
manners written by George Washington himself.
Exhibition made possible with support from Franklin & Marshall College and the Vermont Studio Center.
Zoe Cohen
show
someone how you feel about something:
a public
art service project
Powel House
Museum
Dates:
- September
7, 2007: First Friday 5-7pm
- Sundays in
September:
Sept 2: 2-4 pm
Sept 9: 2-4pm
Sept 16: 12-2pm
Sept 23: 2-4pm
Sept 30: 2-4pm
In the 18th
Century, there were quite a few revolutionaries running about Philadelphia and
the other colonies letting other know through their words, actions and images
how they felt about things. Thomas Paine's Common Sense for example, was
printed just a few hundred feet away from the Powel House.
Invited to
Landmarks Contemporary projects by artist/curator Michelle Wilson, Zoe Cohen now gives you the chance to Show Someone How You Feel About Something.
This ongoing public service art project, offers people in public spaces the
opportunity to take a few minutes to make a drawing to express how they feel
about something ( anything) to someone (anyone). The drawing is then mailed to
their chosen recipient. Addresses of elected officials, a stamped envelope,
paper, and drawing materials are provided.
Facilitators
for the project will include Rebecca Ennen, Jodi Netzer, Michael Schwartz, and
Leigh Seeleman.
Visit
Zoe Cohen's project blog.
Karen Kilmnik
June 26-August 12, 2007
Opening reception:
June 26th, 6-8pm
Powel House Museum
The Philadelphia
Society for the Preservation of Landmarks presented an exhibition
at the Powel House Museum by
internationally-acclaimed artist Karen
Kilimnik. The exhibition will run from June 26 till August 12, with a free,
public opening reception on June 26th, from 6-8pm. The latest in the Landmarks
Contemporary Projects series, this installation by Philadelphia-native Kilimnik was been timed to coincide with the artist's retrospective at the
Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art (on view till August 5th).
The Powel House
Museum---the Georgian home of Samuel Powel, the mayor of Philadelphia just before
and after the American Revolution---has been a familiar site to Kilimnik while
growing up in Philadelphia. As one of the centers of the political and social
life in Colonial and Revolutionary Philadelphia, the Powel House is an ideal
location for Kilimnik's ongoing interrogation of history. In its reconstructed
and reinterpreted tourist-attraction state, the house is also a fertile ground
for Kilimnik to continue exploring the magic potential of an artwork's
environment.
Kilimnik's
project at the Powel House was her first major intervention in a historic
space in the United States, and it is fitting that it should take place in her
home-city. The project consisted of subtle additions of sound works,
paintings and sculptural elements that draw from sources as varied as 18th-century
painting, stories by Charles Dickens, The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Avengers television
series. For viewers, Kilimnik's piece was be at once familiar and discordant:
recognizable cues from popular culture will reveal the impossibility of
objective interpretation. Her poetic and subjective explorations -- such
as placing picturesque tufts of artificial snow on certain interior windows of
the Powel House, or showing photographs of Philadelphia streets that give
a Dickensian era feeling - provide a new way to connect the
contemporary mind to the past.
Karen
Kilimnik concurrently had a mid-career retrospective on view at the ICA in Philadelphia that will travel to
the MCA Chicago, and Aspen Museum of Art. A Catalog is forthcoming. In the past
year, Kilimink has had solo museum
shows, at the ARC Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Serpentine Gallery,
London; and Le Consortium, in Dijon, France. In conjunction with these
European exhibitions, JP RIngier published the first monograph of Karen
Kilimnik's work. In 2005, Kilimnik had one person exhibition at the Fondazione
Bevilacqua La Masa,Venice, Italy, and did a special exhibition of her work
within the Haus zum Kirschgarten, at the Historisches Museum Basel,
Switzerland. Karen Kilimnik is
represented by 303 Gallery, New York.
Image above: KAREN KILIMNIK Hounds from Hell or Hellhounds with Phosphorus on Back 1996, oil on canvas, 20" x 24", KK 0738 Image credit: "Private Collection, Courtesy of 303 Gallery, New York"
Caitlin Emma Perkins
Playing Telephone
With Ghosts
Various
locations throughout 2007 (details below)
Online at Playing
Telephone With Ghosts: The Blog
"The Junto, after several
private meetings and adjournments at the Theater of Scandal, in Fourth Street,
during two long weeks past, and at a prodigious waste of paper, and much
inkshed, have at last sent forth one Benjamin Towne with a stink pot in his
hand."
-18th century text, Philadelphia
Playing Telephone with Ghosts by artist Caitlin Emma Perkins is a pliable mixture of fact and fiction,
of seriousness and frivolity, of artistic virtue and humorous
indulgence celebrating the synchronistic streets of Philadelphia. It is a project filled to bursting with ephemera,
societes secretes, culinary
excursions, clandestine meetings, literary investigations and pataphysical
technologies. Throughout 2007, Perkins will present a series of participatory
public events and web-based projects designed to slowly initiate visitors into a deeper
understanding of our much-clouded politico-communal histories. Join Perkins as
she disinters the writings of Swift, Sterne, Rabelais and Cervantes, plumbs the considerable depths
of the Founding Fathers tippling habits and learns how to prepare the
perennial 18th Century feast, Pigeons
Transmogrified.
Follow along throughout the year at a Secret Cafe, internet
projects, Grand Public Readings and perhaps a Seance or two. Then, join us at
the Physick House at a date to be announced for a culminating exhibition in which deeper
meaning will be elucidated...
Landmarks
Contemporary Projects
at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art
Thursday, May 17, 2007
A 3rd Thursday
Double-Feature! 
5:30 pm
Foolscaps and Inkshed
A Playing Telephone with Ghosts event
Facilitating
portable reading and entertainment for men, women and children of leisure and toil
An
interstate historical romp of an evening...
Inspired
by the Philadelphia almanac printing industry of the 18th Century, join artists
Caitlin Perkins and Katie Baldwin along with other cohorts in a traveling print
shop and bindery at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art for a hands on
evening of printmaking wonder!
A foolscap
is a standard size sheet of paper folded three times to make eight leaves,
creating a signature of 16 pages. It also happens to be the most common size of
almanac printed in the early days of the U.S. Inspired by the early
Philadelphia almanacs, Perkins and Baldwin will create a collection of printed
ephemera which participants may take home. These works of art will be full of historical anecdotes,
prescriptive literature, recipes, maxims and mayhem. All this fun within the
margins of some simple sheets of paper greased with a little bit of ink and
humor!
The
activities will include woodblock relief printing, screen-printing and a simple
bookbinding activity so that participants leave with their own little
collection of ephemera.
7pm
A.R.S. Trio
Are you
ready for an aural and visual journey through history and contemporary culture?
Then join us in DCCA's black box space for a performance of very serious art
and music that may or may not be taken very seriously by the performers...
A.R.S. is a social outing group based in
Philadelphia, PA whose members enjoy sight-seeing, taking snapshots, videotaping,
and picnics. The group's focus is on
museums, restaurants with quirky themes, very large sandwiches, street
performers, historical attractions, people who dress up like Benjamin Franklin,
tripe carts, old forts, living statues, and other such cultural
destinations. Inspired by President Al
Gore, A.R.S. is currently presenting a multiple-media slide show to whoever
will watch/listen. For its DCCA visit, A.R.S. will feature sounds and images collected from
visits to the Powel House in Philadelphia, PA.
Roxana Perez-Mendez
La Declaracion
March 1-April
1, 2007
Powel House Museum
Landmarks Contemporary Projects is delighted to present La Declaracion, a new, site-specific installation by Roxana Perez-Mendez. Through a multi-media project
and subtle interventions that use the Powel House Museum as a (historical) backdrop, Perez-Mendez invites the viewer to re-imagine American
history and inserts both true and fictional references to the obscured colonial
history of Boricua, the original
Taino name for the island which was renamed Puerto Rico. La Declaracion is a project that delicately unearths
the old wounds of possession, historical memory, lust, colonialism, and plants
the fantasy of an alternate legacy.
In her
artistic practice, Perez-Mendez re-examines history through the lens of the Puerto Rican
experience. She inserts fictions about Puerto Rican achievements
and monuments into the global meta-narrative. This method, which is guided by
her notion of Vera Historia*, or True
History, works to juxtapose, reflect, deconstruct and isolate the strains of
difference associated with Puerto Rican culture, class and geopolitical
position--the strains that define one as other.
Vera Historia is an ongoing
exploration of a wide range of tropes and models of modernization and
globalization. In video performances and installations, Perez-Mendez plays
with the visual's ability to position subjects in history and the contemporary.
Fresh narratives arise, placing people, objects, and sites into new relations
while sending others into a void. Working with humble, ephemeral processes and
materials--such as works made from paper, light and shadow, she brings into
being an everyday world where illusion and reality are confused. Her artwork
becomes a fiction that forecasts the emergence of a new cultural, global
politic that ends Puerto Rican exceptionalism.
*Vera
Historia: transl. as True History. The first known science fiction novel,
concerned with a voyage into space and to the moon was written two-thousand years
ago by the Greek Sophist and satirist Lucian of Samosata. In this journey, the
ship and its crew ends up on the moon, colonizes its inhabitants, and brings
them back to Earth.
The Moles Not Molar Reading Series
January 26th, 2007
Powel House Museum
Below: Detail from Basket of Blood by David Larsen
To open a PDF of the entire work, click here.
Landmarks Contemporary Projects and Moles Not Molar presented an evening of literary
experiments and music featuring David
Larsen, A.R.S. Trio and Frances
Richard.
David Larsen is a performer, artist, scholar,
and poet. Larsen is one the most important practitioners of an emerging form
that might be called the "graphic poem". Larsen teaches at Berkeley, and administers the New Yipes!
film and poetry series in Oakland, California. In 2005, his long record of
self-publishing was broken with the appearance of The Thorn from Faux Press.
A.R.S. is a Philadelphia-based trio that
will be performing a new improvisational piece designed for the Powel House which may or may not include: a
piano, violin, percussion, Cantonese, Japanese and English.
Frances Richard's book of poems, See Through, was published by Four Way
Books in 2003. She writes frequently about contemporary art, teaches at Barnard College and the Rhode Island School of
Design. Richard lives in Brooklyn, NY and is also an editor-at-large for New York City at Cabinet Magazine.
The goal of Moles Not Molar is to put writers and artists pursuing exciting,
innovative, and experimental textual projects into contact and dialogue with
each other and their diverse audiences, creating exposure and engagement across
regional and generic lines.
Candy Depew: Between Worlds
Physick House
Museum
October 5-November 26, 2006
Featuring a museum-wide intervention by Candy Depew, this was the
first-ever exhibition of contemporary art at Physick House--the Federal-style
home of Dr. Philip Syng Physick, "Father of American Surgery"--and
the second exhibition of the new Landmarks Contemporary Projects program. Just as the surface splendor of the Physick House conceals a rich history of scientific advances and investigations into human life and death, so Depew's artwork offers an unexpectedly deep exploration of the fragility of materials and life that exists beneath the surface of 'beautiful' objects. For a full project description and press release, please click here to open a PDF.
David Gatten
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE DIVIDING LINE: A TRUE ACCOUNT IN
NINE PARTS
Powel
House Museum
November
7, 2006
The Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks
presented the Philadelphia premiere
of the films of artist David Gatten on November
7, 2006 at the Powel
House Museum.
David Gatten's films explore the intersection of the printed
word and the moving image, while investigating the shifting vocabularies of
experience and representation within intimate spaces and historical documents.
Through traditional research methods and non-traditional film processes, the
films trace the contours of both private lives and public histories, combining
elements of philosophy, biography and poetry with experiments in cinematic
forms and narrative structures. Currently Gatten is at work on a series of nine
films about letters, lovers, books, ghosts and the Byrd family of Virginia
during the early 18th century. Click here to open a PDF of an article about David Gatten from the March 2006 issue of Artforum magazine.
This project was made possible through the 5-County Arts Fund, a
Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts program of the Pennsylvania Council
on the Arts a state agency. It is funded by the citizens of Pennsylvania through
an annual legislative appropriation, and administered locally by the
Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance. The Pennsylvania Council on
the Arts is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, a
federal agency.
Philagrafika presents Megawords
Powel House Museum
September 5-12, 2006
A site-specific installation presented by Philagrafika, Megawords was the premiere exhibition for Landmarks Contemporary Projects. Megawords
is an ongoing, collaborative artistic investigation by Dan Murphy and Anthony
Smyrski. Through their artwork, they address issues of community and document
people surviving in cities all over the world. Prior to this exhibition, the
primary medium of this exploration has been the freely-distributed and
critically-acclaimed print publication Megawords.
For a full project description, click here to open a PDF.
Read the Artforum review of the opening here.
Read a Philadelphia Weekly article about Megawords here.
Visit Megawords.
For more information, please contact:
Robert Wuilfe, Curator of Contemporary Projects
rwuilfe [at] philalandmarks.org
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