Bittersweet - my first solo exhibition

I hope to see all of you at the opening!





Heres the press release :

Akus Gallery features artist Kelly Bigelow Becerra

Willimantic, Conn. –The Julian Akus Gallery at Eastern Connecticut State University presents the exhibition, “Kelly Bigelow Becerra: Bittersweet” a solo show. There will be a visiting artist lecture on February 19 at 3:00 followed by a reception from 5:00 to 9:00 p.m. with a special performance by the Quiet Corner Fiddlers. The exhibition runs from January 29 through March 12.

Kelly Bigelow Becerra is a contemporary artist who uses the labor-intensive process of direct, flatbed scanning of objects and people to create a digital vocabulary. Images are created by literally placing objects in direct contact with the glass of the scanner which creates shadowy, softly modeled shapes that are oddly foreshortened. The resulting archive of imagery is used to piece together scenes from her sometimes idyllic/sometimes abusive childhood in the rural Midwest. Both the heavily patterned images and the process itself of piecing the digital works together are inspired from traditional American sampler patterns. The viewer is drawn in by the unassuming, familiar, and homey patterns and taken aback by the deeper message of a family in disarray.

Bigelow Becerra was recently awarded an Artist Fellowship Grant via the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism. She has exhibited with the Rodger Lapelle Gallery, Philadelphia, PA and the Aldrich Contemporary Museum of Art, Ridgefield, CT, among other venues in the northeast. She is a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In addition to being an exhibiting fine artist, Kelly Bigelow Becerra is also a filmmaker. She is the co-writer and co-producer of the short film "Dear Beautiful" which was chosen as an official selection of The Sundance Film Festival 2009. Collaborating with her partner and husband Roland Becerra (director and animator of the film) Bigelow Becerra worked as assistant director, designed the distinctive "look" of the monsters seen in the film, and co-wrote the screenplay for the animated feature length version of "Dear Beautiful", which is in production. "Dear Beautiful" was winner of the Moving Pictures Magazine Animated Short Film competition and screened during The Cannes Film Festival 2007.

New York Times review 1/2/09 of the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition Full Circle: 10 Years of Radius which features Becerra’s archival digital work

Connecticut Post review 1/9/09 of Becerra’s film “Dear Beautiful”

Becerra’s film “Dear Beautiful” is one of 96 short films selected to screen at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival

Sundance was amazing!

photo credit: nathan lewis

The New York Times

The New York Times has a review of the Full Circle Show in the Connecticut section...




We all know how commemorative group shows work. They don’t, for the most part, since the artworks are often hung randomly about a room. Not so with “Full Circle: Ten Years of Radius,” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. The guest curator, Regine Basha, from Arthouse in Austin, Tex., has made a valiant effort to group works by 14 alumni of Radius, an artist development program run by the museum and the Ridgefield Guild of Artists, by medium and subject. But in the end, the show as a whole is so beautiful and thought-provoking, the arrangement doesn’t really matter.

The art is installed throughout the first few rooms of the museum’s big, open upstairs galleries. It is not under-hung, but there is certainly enough white wall around the 20 or so works, pretty much one per artist, to give you enough space to contemplate them without the faintest possibility of distraction. Two works by each participating artist might have helped to fill things out.

Given that our understanding of art has undergone tremendous upheaval in the past couple of decades, it is surprising to find so much painting in this show. It is painting, what’s more, that uses traditional art materials, mostly oil on linen, and adheres to centuries-old genres, including landscape, history painting and portraiture. It is 2009, right?

I am curious about this focus because digital technologies have radically altered how images are made and experienced. Meanwhile, our understanding of visual art has been torn from its roots in ritual and tradition and thrust into the context of mass media and cultural studies. Art today has a very different look, purpose and social position than it did a century ago, or even four decades back.

This is not to say that the work here is reactionary, for much of the painting in this show suggests a nuanced awareness of the world in which we live. For instance, Jaclyn Conley’s dramatic, skillfully painted mis-en-scènes possess a real cinematic quality, while paintings by Joseph Smolinski, Ben Weiner, Christopher Mir and Bryan Jones touch on environmental issues and concerns.

These paintings belong to our time. It is just that they look backward as much as they look forward in their ideas and influence, suggesting the possibility of a new shift toward reclaiming some of the qualities that distinguish visual art from other imagery.

Whatever the outcome of these efforts, art today is now part of a broader visual culture. This, too, is reflected in the works here — from Paul Favello’s digital photographs of appropriated war-related imagery to Kelly Bigelow Becerra’s collage prints made of scanned imagery cut and combined into pictorial vignettes that re-create memorable scenes from the artist’s childhood.

Art as a form of writing seems to lie behind much of the abstract art that is assembled for the exhibition, some of it quite good. Jim Hett’s eye-popping, odd mixed-media drawing, “They’re All the Same Except They’re All Different” (1998-2008), presents a dense accretion of colored lines slowly built up in a cumulative process over long periods of time. It is casual yet obsessive; art as daily ritual.

The same calligraphic quality underlies Beth Gilfilen’s abstract painting, “The Big Hunch” (2008), which is based on exploratory, expressionistic drawing. She paints with no fixed or prescribed ideas in mind, simply allowing the imagery to develop and unravel intuitively. The results are lyrical, colorful and fun, but also startlingly strange. They even suggest an alchemical process.

There is some video art in the show, as might be expected, but not much. “Blue Plasma” (2008) by Robert Federico magnifies simple scenes — fresh water flowing freely over a rock, the flickering of a flame — to the point of abstraction. He makes the familiar strange, a technique that also harks back to the past,specifically the early-20th-century Russian Modernist avant garde.

Perhaps it’s a symptom of the cultural moment, but on the face of many of the works assembled for this show, art seems to be heading back to the future.

See you in Park City!!

DEAR BEAUTIFUL
Official Selection-2009 Sundance Film Festival

Bridgeport, CT- SoMuch Pictures announces its groundbreaking animated short film, “Dear Beautiful”, has been named an Official Selection by the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. (This year the Sundance Film Festival selected 200 films for exhibition from more than 9,000 submissions.)

Winner of the Moving Pictures Magazine Animated Short Film competition and screened at Cannes, “Dear Beautiful” has captured audiences and critics alike with its combination of haunting, jarring visuals and foreboding audial immersion. Using flash animation and stop motion animation techniques, Bridgeport-based director Roland Becerra and wife/production/writing partner Kelly Bigelow Becerra have created a unique and gripping animated horror-movie experience that extends beyond the run-of-the-mill grotesqueness of the genre and delves into the emotional impediments faced by all subjects in the film.

Synopsis:
The sudden appearance of exotic flowers in New Haven spawns an unprecedented epidemic that threatens to destroy the city. Infected people cover themselves maniacally with lotions, creams, and rags, the result of a botched experiment by cosmetics giant, V-Zone.

Paul and Lauren, a married couple, are caught between the catastrophe and their own troubled relationship. Paul has grown defeated and depressed from job frustrations and their banal existence taken its toll on Lauren as she becomes more and more isolated and he descends into alcoholism.

On her way out of the house to leave Paul, Lauren encounters one of the flowers and becomes infected. As her symptoms worsen, Paul's denial of Lauren’s illness puts the couple in grave danger as the city is overrun with infected people, media frenzy, National Guard, protesters and a panicked populace.

“Dear Beautiful” has garnered on-line acclaim and cult-status among both horror/science-fiction genre fans and critics drawn in by Becerra’s artistic, technical and storytelling styles. Ain’t It Cool News calls “Dear Beautiful”, “…an unforgettable and artful zombie experience”, while sci-fi website io9.com hails the infected characters in the short as “The World’s Most Beautiful Zombies”. In addition to Cannes, “Dear Beautiful” also screened at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, where it was awarded Bronze place in the audience choice competition.

“Dear Beautiful” represents five and a half years of tireless work between this husband and wife collaboration. Roland and Kelly Becerra moved to Bridgeport, CT as “artist pioneers” in the city’s first artist housing development, Read’s ArtSpace. There, they met and partnered with another Bridgeport husband and wife team, Keith Saunders and Meredith DiMenna, who supplied the project with the short’s distinctive music and assisted on the script.

Sundance Screening Dates and Times:

Fri. Jan 16 9:15 AM Holiday Village IV
Fri. Jan 16 4:15 PM Yarrow Hotel Theatre
Sat. Jan 17 12:30 PM Rose Wagner Center
Sun. Jan 18 11:59 PM Egyptian Theatre
Thu. Jan 22 9:00 PM Egyptian Theatre
Sat. Jan 24 3:15 PM Eccles Theatre

For More Information, contact: info@somuchpictures.com

Full Circle - at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

I was selected to be part of the Full Circle: Ten Years of Radius exhibition at the Aldrich! "Grandma Whackin' Me with a Yellow Hoe" will be representing me in the exhibition - which runs through June of 2009. So, Mark your calendars and I'll see you at the opening!

The Art Agenda ...On the radio

I will be live on the radio tomorrow doing an interview with Lex Leifheit on her weekly show The Art Agenda. I'll be discussing my work which is currently on display as part of the Tracing Identity show at The Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism Gallery in Hartford.

So, tune in to WESU (88.1fm), Thursday July 31 - 4:35pm—4:55pm

Live Stream - http://www.wesufm.org/...

Tracing Identity

Pretty Things - review from Connecticut Art Scene

AH! I love Hank Hoffman!!! ... heres an excerpt from his review of the show.

Pretty but not vacant at Artspace...

... "Kelly Bigelow Becerra also invokes folk art, in her case the samplers of middle America. It's a combination of contemporary technology and tradition with a dose of dysfunctional American Gothic. Bigelow Becerra uses a flatbed scanner to scan all the pictorial elements of her montage "Grandma Whacking Me with a Yellow Hoe." It's a real tour de force (and a little bit tour de farce). She has scanned not only blades of grass, a rose and tree leaves native to her Michigan home but also herself and her grandmother. She manages to combine the flat perspective that's at once the hallmark of folk art and the inevitable result of using a scanner with a sense of depth and distance.

The imagery of orchards and distanceless expanses of flat land convey order, bounty and a benevolent, domesticated Nature. But counterposed to this is the central conflict—the artist in young girl mode cowering as her grandma looms over her, hoe raised high to strike. Within the framework of the traditional, sometimes (often?) looms the threat of oppression. "...

Pretty Things ...opening.. and artist talk

Pretty Things @ ArtSpace New Haven

PRETTY THINGS: Confronting Sensuousness

Kelly Bigelow Becerra
Phyllis Bramson
Mia Brownell
Oliver Herring
Grant Lincoln Johnston
Joyce Kozloff
Cristi Rinklin
Ben Weiner
Jane Rainwater
Cheryl Yun

This exhibition seeks to explore the role of sensuousness in contemporary art and promote new discussion about the significance of materials and form in art-making, beyond the context of formalist rhetoric. Including not only work that demonstrates a direct embrace of sumptuous materials and explores traditionally “decorative” motifs, enticing textures, and rich colors, but also work that problematizes seductive aesthetics in contemporary art with conscious irony or ambivalence.

Curated by Joy Pepe

CWOS 2007

From Connecticut Art Scene - Hank Hoffman

"Kelly Bigelow Becerra and Roland Becerra were in high spirits when I stopped by their room. I had met Bigelow Becerra last year when I checked out her installation "Harvest: Hidin' from the Hair Cut, Amongst the Sweet Corn." The reason for the married couple's excitement was showing in the darkened room: clips from and a trailer for their short animated art/horror film Dear Beautiful.

Dear Beautiful won Moving Pictures Magazine's Spring 2007 Short Film Award Contest in the Animation category. The award scored the couple a paid trip to the Cannes Film Festival where the short was shown.

Becerra, who received his M.F.A. from Yale in 2001 and teaches at the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, used still photography, hand drawings and animated painting to create the visually unique film. What he didn't use was video. The paintings are of areas around New Haven. The photographs are of friends playing the roles of the characters in the film.

"It's a combination of scanning in the actual paintings and drawings, using stop-motion photography and compiling all those in Photoshop and using Flash and Final Cut Pro to make it move," Roland Becerra explained. "It's painting outside the computer and painting inside the computer."

Bigelow Becerra described the short as "the calling card to get into competitions: 'We can do this and this is what it will look like.'" The ultimate aim is to parlay the short into a contract to make Dear Beautiful a feature film.

The short will be featured with the other Spring 2007 Short Film Contest winners on a DVD to be included in an upcoming issue of Moving Pictures Magazine."

Dear Beautiful - at The Cannes Film Festival 2007

I really need to post more often..theres so much i haven't posted info about... so many shows.. including attending The Cannes Film Festival in 2007 and showing Dear Beautiful. (click the link to view the short. )