The film is co-written by famed graphic novelist Jeffrey Brown (Clumsy), who also provides custom illustrations; director Michael Mohan (One Too Many Mornings); and Egan Reich. Its all-star cast includes stars Lizzy Caplan (Party Down), Alison Brie (Mad Men, Community), Martin Starr (Party Down, Freaks and Geeks), Jeffrey Arend ([500] Days of Summer), and Mark Webber (Scott Pilgrim).

Save the Date will be at Sundance all this week. View the dates and times here. Also, be sure to check out the director's Sundance 2012 interview (below).

Ahearn also recently released the short film Bongo Barbershop, which played at the New York African Film Festival earlier this month. The film takes place in the heart of New York City, following a Tanzanian MC in search of "real hip hop."

Last year, BAMcinemaFest screened indie hits like Cyrus and Tiny Furniture. The full lineup for this year's festival will be announced on May 16. The festival kicks off June 16 and runs through the 26th. Click here for more information.

Tuscon, Arizona-based artist Wayne Belger, whose striking work with custom pinhole cameras warranted a story in ALARM (read the article here), just launched a Kickstarter project to help fund his Bloodworks: Africa project. Using the Untouchable camera, Belger is attempting to compile a worldwide photographic study of people living with HIV.

Of the camera itself, which uses the subject's blood as a filter, Belger says, “[It] was inspired by one of my best friends that has the HIV virus and my quest for understanding it. I named the camera Untouchable because of the similarities of the untouchables in India and how some with the virus in the US are treated. My friend is the one who donated the blood and is in the first series of photos from the camera. A photo of him is also in the camera itself.”

Currently, Belger has residency set up in Sierra Leona, Uganda, Ethiopia, Calcutta, and five locations in Cambodia to do portraits of people living with HIV. He hopes to create a new view of the global HIV community through a coffee table book and exhibitions all over the world. However, his photo opportunity in Sierra Leona expires on May 20, so he's turned to Kickstarter to raise the funds necessary to complete the project in time.

Head over to his project page, watch the video, and donate / spread the word.

“It was just kind of an imperative need to start doing things after the storm, because nothing was happening culturally, for obvious reasons,” Gisleson says.

The informal art shows and literary events that the group hosted in the months after the storm led to the formation of Press-Street later that year. In 2008, Gisleson and her partners opened Antenna, a gallery space on St. Claude Street in the city’s Upper Ninth Ward. Their intent with Antenna was to create a place that would support and inspire the local creative community by focusing on cutting-edge contemporary art.

“It’s a space where the commercial end is taken out of the equation,” Gisleson says. “It’s a space where people can do the sort of projects that they wouldn’t be able to do in a for-profit gallery, which tends to be a bit safer and market oriented.”

Press-Street is currently a 12-artist collective with a multidisciplinary approach, as each member specializes in a different medium. The non-profit collective also focuses heavily on New Orleans’ literary scene and actively promotes local writers’ endeavors. Press-Street is currently promoting the book Curtain Optional, a collaboration between father-son team Jim Richard (artist) and Brad Richard (writer). The book focuses on how Jim's writing career and a creative household impacted Brad’s early life.

This month, Antenna has been showcasing How To Build a Forest, an art-performance installation by collaborative duo PearlDamour and artist Shawn Hall. In this piece, a group constructs and deconstructs a makeshift forest over an eight-hour time frame. The project is influenced by Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of 100 trees on PearlDamour collaborator Lisa D’Amour’s family’s property. How To Build a Forest addresses how events like Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill have altered the Gulf’s ecosystems, while allowing viewers to become active participants in the installation and, thus, their environment. In May, Antenna will be showcasing My Mom Says My Work Has Really Improved, in which artists will pair one work from their childhood with a recent piece in order to show how their aesthetic has evolved over the years.

Antenna also hosts a number of events, including the annual 24-hour "Draw-a-Thon," in which artists and gallery visitors can stop by to sketch and socialize. Last year’s event brought in nearly 700 people, and Gisleson hopes that this year will pull in even more.

Over the past couple of years, Gisleson has noticed that New Orleans’ art scene has grown considerably, due in part to the influx of younger artists that will continue to make significant contributions to the city’s strong cultural legacy.

“A lot of young people have come in at a time when a lot of us that have been here since after the storm, working on these projects, are getting really burned out,” Gisleson says. “So we really have this influx of energy, ideas, and people who really want to keep things going.”

“Initially, a lot of people were interested [in starting a space], but then it just dwindled down to the few that were actually devoted to it,” Wallace says. “So we moved to Philadelphia with the intention of starting a space.”

Extra Extra is one of a handful of artist-run spaces in Philadelphia. Wallace, Frech, and Lacina wanted the space to provide a platform that would allow artists to create work that could challenge the traditional notions of what art, an artist, or a gallery could be.
 

Jon Rafman and Tabor Robak's "BNPJ.exe"

One of the ways that Extra Extra pushes artistic and geographical boundaries is by showcasing interactive Web-based projects by digital artists, which allows viewers to connect with the work from anywhere.

The guys recently launched their first downloadable project, BNJP.exe, which was created by Jon Rafman and Tabor Robak and takes viewers on a journey through a virtual labyrinth. “What this enables us to do is really show the work in the space that it was meant to be seen,” Wallace says. “This provides a Web interface for this project to take off.”

Throughout April, Extra Extra will be featuring Common Place, a transformative sculpture installation created by Beth Brandon, Samantha Margherita, and Luren Jenison. The collaboration between the three artists focuses on the ever-shifting definition of domestic life and the role that organic design plays in our increasingly tech-driven, secluded lives.

Philadelphia’s creative community has become pretty tight-knit, and commercial interests have not over-saturated the city’s gallery scene, which enables DIY venues and emerging artists to have complete creative license in developing unique ideas. There also have been a number of art spaces sprouting up throughout town, exemplifying how the city’s art scene has grown considerably over the past few years.

“Within a month of us opening up, we’ve had three other spaces open, which is kind of big for Philadelphia,” Frech says. “In Philly, there are just a handful of galleries, so three new spaces — it’s kind of a huge deal.”

“My landlord had a vacant store, which I thought I could experiment with and provide as a platform for some of the artists that I met at Goldsmiths,” Ilfeld says. “I initially had no idea how it would all develop, and it just grew organically.”
 

Tenderpixel is a tiny space (less than 65 square feet) that acts as a creative incubator for artists. Many of the artists that are invited to exhibit usually showcase work that is highly conceptualized.

Previous shows include an exhibit that was built around fictitious books that are mentioned within actual books and an exhibit that allowed patrons to dismantle artwork and purchase a section of it for a fraction of the original price.

“If it’s different and it stimulates the imagination, that’s a good start,” Ilfeld says. “The fun thing about Tenderpixel is that I never really know how a show will look until it actually happens.”

Ilfeld has also incorporated his interest in film into Tenderpixel’s programming. For the past four years, the gallery’s staff has been teaming up with the Rushes Soho Shorts Festival to host Tenderflix, a program that highlights the annual film festival’s experimental entries. Last year, Tenderpixel’s staff also introduced the Flicker Alley Film Festival that honors its neighborhood’s role as a hub for Britain’s burgeoning film industry in the early 20th Century.
 

Though the gallery focuses on allowing artists to pursue innovative projects, Ilfeld has also branched out into a commercial venture, Tenderproduct, which enables artists to create affordable pieces and sell their work. The shop and the gallery are located in neighboring spaces, and though Tenderpixel's physical space may be limited, it has made a sizable impact on Central London’s creative community and contemporary art scene.

“I hope that we can continue to grow in name and accolades," Ilfeld says, "and [that we] continue exhibiting a diverse range of artists.”

In 2009, Louky’s husband and fellow art curator Bart Keijsers Koning began focusing on LMAK full time. That same year, the couple decided to relocate its gallery and project space to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, an area that was receptive to its intent of engaging audiences with thought-provoking conceptual art.

“The nice thing that the Lower East Side is doing is drawing crowds that are very serious about art and what to engage, and [they] really look,” Bart says.

Louky, an independent art curator and art historian, has been known to take a DIY approach to showcasing art, including projects such as hosting guerrilla film screening from a truck. Her efforts with LMAK are guided by this same ideology of curating innovative contemporary art.

Both Louky and Bart have an interest in any medium of art that challenges the viewer in some way. They gravitate towards work that gives insight into the artist’s creative process and that captures a sense of progression in his or her methodologies and thought processes.

In March, LMAK will feature work by Elana Herzog, an artist who creates “sculptural drawings” from found textiles and staples. Her work blurs the lines between 2-D and 3-D spaces and high-brow and low-brow culture through the use of discarded fabrics.

LMAK also represents a number of international artists whose work is more conceptualized, so Louky and Bart have found inventive ways to forge connections between artists and potential collectors by building a solid online presence and marketing endeavors for their artists.

“We are constantly reviewing with the artist new goals and new ways to approach people,” Bart says. “It’s not just the show that you put up; that would be a quarter of the work.”

Aside from the exhibits, the Keijsers Konings curate LMAKseries, which showcases work by video and audio artists and allows the couple to continue delivering a broad perspective of innovative art.

“It keeps us aware and on the level of looking around, interested, fresh, and engaged,” Bart says. “It is personally what we do the gallery for; we are interested in art and the process of art, and we like to be a platform for that.”

[Have you pre-ordered yet? Don't miss our limited-time offer, saving up to 38%, for Chromatic: The Crossroads of Color and Music, our next book that profiles independent musicians and artists who explore color in unorthodox ways.]

Through March 26, Liu will be showing a series of paintings that takes elements of nature and creates narratives with an ominous undertone.

Chang will also be displaying her latest work, which focuses on Central Asian textile design. Her project was developed during a residency at San Francisco’s de Young Museum as a means to explore her experiences as a first-generation Chinese American growing up in suburban Orange County.

In early February, Chang spent a few days covering Hosfelt’s white walls with vinyl stencils and painting layers of traditional Central Asian motifs juxtaposed with Western symbols like designer logos.

“She is exploring the West’s fascination and romanticism of the Orient and her own ambivalent relationship to it,” Hosfelt partner Dianne Dec says.

In 2006, Hosfelt branched out by opening a gallery space in Manhattan, and, for the past five years, the gallery has expanded its artists’ appeal to a new audience, while also giving East Coast artists the opportunity to showcase their work in the San Francisco space.

“We wanted a chance," Dec says, "to give a different venue and visibility to the West Coast artists that we work with that have not had exposure in New York.”

[Have you pledged yet?  Don't forget to visit the Kickstarter page for Chromatic: The Crossroads of Color and Music, our next book that profiles independent musicians and artists who explore color in unorthodox ways.]

Campbell sources uncut sheets of dollars directly from the United States Mint and, using a relief technique, creates intricate, three-dimensional carvings of the violent (skulls, guns) and holy (Jesus, Mary). He's also known to engrave copper plates with a tattoo gun and draw on the interior of ostrich eggshells. Pretty wild stuff.
 

Noblesse Oblige
March 19 – April 22, 2011
Opening Reception March 19, 2011 6-9pm

OHWOW Los Angeles
937 N. La Cienega
Los Angeles, CA 90069

“Is there art if nobody sees it?" Nelson asks. "Yes, of course there is, but not on this whole social level.  We figured we could get people to talk about it and have this whole dialogue.”

Secret Project Robot is focused on creating a solid sense of community through events and exhibits with a postmodern approach that allows for audience participation. “The viewer is completing the work of art,” Nelson says. The multipurpose venue features installation pieces and shows by a number of Brooklyn-based bands.

Nelson and Zajaceskowski have built strong ties to bands like Aa, Vivian Girls, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who have all performed at Secret Project Robot. They have known Karen O, Nick Zinner and Brian Chase of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs for years, and the trio hosted the group’s 10-year anniversary show in September of 2010.

“We actually knew them from way before they were the Yeah Yeah Yeahs because they were just all in other bands,” Nelson says. “They were all just people that we knew for like 12 years.”

Throughout February, Mira Billotte from White Magic is showcasing Spira Mirabilis Mundain, an installation piece that combines a maze of projected video elements covered in layers of translucent fabric. In addition, White Magic also played the exhibit’s opening on February 4, and will perform another show on February 26 for the release of its limited-edition White Widow EP.

Although Williamsburg has become more commercialized since the venue’s inception, Secret Project Robot has always been a space where locals can gather and connect over shared creative interests.

“I think that in the last couple of years, people have gotten really excited about the fact that we just want them to come hang out,” Nelson says. “I think that the idea of friendship, even among people who sort of don’t know each other, has evolved.”