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. )