From Dailyserving.com: The Light and the End of the Tunnel is an Oncoming Train Ten years ago today, on September 11, 2001, at 5:46 am Pacific Standard Time, I was asleep in the semi-darkness of an Oregon dawn.  I was still asleep at 6:03 am.  By 6:37 am, however, I had been jolted awake by the ringing sound of a telephone in another room of the house, and then by the sound of footsteps coming towards my door, and—eventually—by the information that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.  For better or worse, I missed the initial confusion, the questions about irregular flight patterns and problems with air traffic control.  By the time I got to the television set, Bush had held his moment of silence, there were reports of a fire at the Pentagon, and it was clear that this was a planned attack. I watched as President George W. Bush sent our troops into Afghanistan, eventually dragging the rest of the world—in the form of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force —behind him.  In March of 2003, I finally saw the negative space punched out of the Manhattan skyline with my own eyes.  Coincidentally, it was the same week that Bush dropped thinly veiled threats via his press secretary that if the United Nations did not take action against Iraq, other “international bodies” would.  And we did, despite the fact that the motives given were dubious and lacked hard evidence. I was twenty-five in 2001.  I was not a child, or a teenager whose nightmare became the bogeyman in the form of Osama bin Laden.  My nightmare, post-9/11, has been many the frequent and many betrayals of the citizens of the United States by its government at the levels of accountability and policy.  Watching President Barack Obama announce the death of Osama bin Laden, I felt no relief.  The War in Afghanistan is listed as ongoing (2001-present).  Our engagement with Iraq is ongoing. It has been a decade, long enough to have begun to talk about post-9/11 trends in art and literature, long enough for those artists and writers whose practices weren’t quite set on September 11, 2011, to have grown up and to have incorporated their own personal nightmares into their production.  Earlier this summer, OHWOW Gallery in Los Angeles staged “Post-9/11,”  with work by New-York-based-artists Ryan McGinley and his circle.  The keystone piece, McGinley’s Tom (Golden Tunnel), 2010, features a naked man walking toward a golden light at the end of a stone or concrete tunnel with his hand guarding his eyes.  The light washes everything in the photo. The exhibition title itself was merely meant to be provocative, as well as to encapsulate McGinley and his milieu.  This was not a grand curatorial retrospective of Post-9/11 art.  But I have gone back to McGinley’s photo multiple times, made a little nauseous by the combination of the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel metaphor, McGinley’s capital-R Romanticism, and the double-entendre of the show title.  Are we post-9/11?  Have we survived and come through to the other side?  If we have, we are irrevocably changed.  The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train. http://dailyserving.com/2011/09/the-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-is-an-oncoming-train/
UGA’s Kim Deakins (MFA 2010) has been featured in the art/culture blog Phantasmaphile, run by creative planner Pam Grossman. She describes Deakins as “an artist whose work feels really fearless…Such a vivid palette and so much kinesis and magic and mischief.”  See the post here: http://www.phantasmaphile.com/2010/07/kim-deakins.html Congrats Kim! (http://kimdeakins.com/)
Third-year MFA candidate Layet Johnson was featured on the blog “Art Is Moving” From the interview: “When dealing with objects, I tend to work independently with materials, signs, and symbols, for each piece. Sometimes though I get obsessed with certain ideas and the materials that reflect those ideas keep popping up. And it’s those ideas that link my body of work, like how two pieces can be similar by theme, and two by materials. Like I’m excited about cacti right now, so I’ve been using them a lot for different ideas. In one sculpture that I left untitled, I had a four-foot tall cactus protruding through an elliptical hole in an old chair. It reminds me of Joseph Beuys’ “Fat Chair” in a way, but it’s about sex, nature, discomfort, and other things, but most of all it’s funny. The ideas usually come from jokes I think of, and then I go to work. Another piece with cacti was called “The Normalizer” and with it I placed a lot of American desert plants on wooden bleachers in order for them to watch western films. The idea was that instead of the plants having typically supported the film’s narrative, the films were now supporting the plants, like grow lights. So while my work is absolutely about materials, it doesn’t depend on them like it depends on punch-lines, or what I like to think of as short poems, for the work’s real success. My vision is to hop freely between topics, materials, and strategies of working, very quixotically, so that I sort of find my art and it’s always very exciting.” Read the article at http://artismoving.blogspot.com/2010/07/i-am-artist-layet-johnson.htmlLayet Johnson’s website: http://www.layetjohnson.com/
If anyone is interested in contemporary performance or west-coast art, Another Righteous Transfer (http://anotherrighteoustransfer.wordpress.com) is a great blog to check out what’s going on in both. Written since 2009 by curator and artist Carol Cheh, this blog keeps up with what she calls the “performance renaissance” happening in Los Angeles.  “Another Righteous Transfer! is a blog devoted to documenting the performance art scene in the greater LA area. Its content will include reviews, commentary, interviews with artists, photos, links to videos, and notices of upcoming events. I will be the main blogger, but I’ll be tapping other writers to do guest blogs as frequently as possible—a plurality of voices is key to this endeavor. My hope is that this blog can become a space for archival information as well as ongoing community dialogue about the time-based art that is happening in our midst, as we speak.” Her most recent post is about James Franco at MOMA- check it out at http://anotherrighteoustransfer.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/soap-at-moca-discuss/
New American Paintings (http://www.newamericanpaintings.com/index.html) has a blog!  http://newamericanpaintings.wordpress.com/ Painting by Joshua Bronaugh, “Change is the Disease, Doctor, Both” | oil, motor oil, alkyd on plastic, 36 x 48 inches