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Fall Out Guide

It always follows a kind of formula. An August off plus one week of classes followed by a holiday weekend adds up to the inevitable shadow line where all cultural events coincide for a few nights of artspeak, chartered buses between institutions and enough blockbusters for Roland Emmerich to retire on.  Plenty of fall arts previews are floating around in print, so here is a temperamental (and geographical) look at a few St. Louis openings and events to catch over the weekend.

Grand Center + Central West End

Bruno David Gallery: Opens September 9th from 5-9pm

Bruno David Gallery will open its sixth season with work from four artists from its significant roster. The exhibition plays to the gallery’s strengths with a kind of conceptual abstraction and playful engagement with material. In particular, Leslie Laskey’s S.E.N.T. (Security Envelopes Now Tampered) shares a nice harmonic balance with the retrospective of the Museum of Pocket Art, which organizes exhibitions to be shown in a standard wallet on a scale comparable to a business card. Also opening is Kelley Johnson’s Works on Paper and William Morris’s video Atraxia.

Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis: Opens September 9th from 7-9pm

The Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis will open the first solo museum show in the United States by David Noonan. Noonan’s work engages with the timely consideration of how photographic documentation can be fictionalized and suggesting how contemporary events are processed personally and publicly as theatre. Emily Wardill’s 12 minute film Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck presents a nice compliment to Noonan as it plays with the idea of how allegory and metaphor are used to direct thought with a view towards the historical function and themes of stained glass in gothic cathedrals.

World Chess Hall of Fame: Opens September 9th at 10am

One of the most intriguing additions to the St. Louis gallery community is the World Chess Hall of Fame, whose name belies the challenging contemporary art exhibitions it has commissioned for its Central West End gallery. The Hall of Fame, which recently moved from its previous home in Miami, will present its first exhibition Out of the Box: Artists Play Chess featuring work from Barbara Kruger, Tom Friedman, Yoko Ono and a number of other artists using chess as medium or metaphor. The surprisingly broad range of approaches to the subject yields a complex view of how chess has entered the imagination of contemporary artists since Duchamp’s abdication of his art practice to become a chess master.

South City

Aisle One Gallery: Opens September 9th from 7-11pm

Aisle One Gallery on Cherokee Street opens a Bumble & Bramble with illustrators Ben Pierce and Joy Tiyasirichokchai. Both artists employ a surrealist approach to illustration, emphasizing enigmatic characters within muted landscapes. The show will remain open through October 1st.

Los Caminos: Opens September 10th from 7-10pm

Los Caminos will present Doing Easy, a group exhibition responding to William S. Burroughs’s maxim for The Discipline of Doing Easy. The exhibition, curated by Cole Root, features the work of Glen Fogel, Dani Kantrowitz, Gregg Louis, Mike Schuh, and Matthew Strauss. Doing Easy is the latest in a run of provocative, intelligent exhibitions in the Cherokee apartment gallery. Most of the other exhibitions in this guide will be easily accessible during the next several months, so be sure to make it out for the opening for this one.

White Flag Projects: Opens September 8th from 6-8pm

The always-interesting White Flag Projects opens its season with a solo show by St. Louis native Amy Granat, whose experimental film work is in the collections of many major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Granat’s work is an inheritor of materialist film manipulation and explore the mediums capacity for narrative, documentation and, ultimately, as an object itself. WFP opens the show on Thursday, September 8th, so lean in to the season a day early.

Forest Park/University City

Kemper Art Museum: Opens September 9th from 7-9pm

The Kemper Art Museum on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis opens two ambitious exhibitions this weekend in their newly renovated gallery space. The Kemper plays to its strengths with Precarious Worlds, which highlights the institution’s emphasis on contemporary German art. Precarious Worlds features significant pieces in their collection from Wolfgang Tillmans, Cosima von Bonin, Isa Genzken and more, as well as a large installation by Hans-Peter Feldmann. The show has a focus on post-Cold War notions of place and political transformation. Also opening is Tomas Saraceno’s Cloud-Specific, spotlighting the artist’s ongoing investigation of an imagined sustainable sky city composed. Cloud-Specific features prototypes and models of the airborne metropolis along with recent inflatable sculptures and video work.

 



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