SFR Picks—Week of Oct. 24

Match 3

Santa Fe Community Gallery celebrates 10 years with artist retrospective

The art game known as Exquisite Corpse can trace its roots back to 1925 Paris when Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert and André Breton allegedly created it, and it's only grown in the nearly 100 years since then. By assigning different artists disparate sections of the human form (head, torso, legs), sometimes bold, sometimes silly, sometimes gorgeous creations can be born, and the Santa Fe Community Gallery's Rod Lambert understands this well—it's why he adopted Exquisite Corpse for the gallery's 10th anniversary exhibit of the same name, pulling in over 100 New Mexico artists to participate.

"We were coming up on our 10-year anniversary, and we were realizing at the end of last year that we needed to figure out what we were going to do for the anniversary—it's kind of a big deal," Lambert tells SFR. "I had an idea to do a timeline of the exhibits we've done, but my boss Debra Garcia y Griego thought it would be more interesting and fun to have artists participate in a dynamic way, so we invited every artist who has ever participated in a theme exhibit."

Like the game's founders, Lambert assigned artists either head, torso or legs, and submissions rolled in from across the state from the likes of Nocona Burgess, Erin Currier, Israel Francisco Haros Lopez, Sarah Stolar, Joel Nakamura and many more. Lambert points out that all the pieces are original and never seen anywhere else and, during the run of the show, that patrons can assemble any three pieces they wish for $150. The show also serves to highlight some of the nearly 900 artists who've exhibited in the Community Gallery since its inception.

"The artists are the reason why we're successful, I think, and when they participate in an exhibit, they're actually creating a piece specifically for that show; they're not bringing in something that pre-exists," Lambert adds. "So a lot of them have been pushing their studio practice with us for years—trying new media, trying new content. We wanted to give a tribute to them."

Mission accomplished. (Alex De Vore)

Exquisite Corpse: A Celebration of 10 Years
5-7 pm Friday Oct. 26. Free. Through Jan. 17.
Santa Fe Community Gallery,
201 W Marcy St.,
955-6705

Room for Improv-ment

Sorry about the dorky headline, but there's one core rule to the world of improv that's important to remember: Always say yes, even if you think it'll come across as dumb. See, we know this because we've taken a class before, just not in Santa Fe; but with the rise of Santa Fe Improv, we might just have to give it a try. Instructor Scott Plunkett has a lot to impart, and he'll do so at the Honing Improv Skills workshop tonight and tomorrow evening at 6 pm at Santa Fe Improv's space; you can also check out a performance from the group at Warehouse 21 on Friday. It should be a funny and thoroughly unscripted time. (ADV)

Honing Improv Skills
6 pm Wednesday Oct. 24 and Thursday Oct. 25. $25.
Santa Fe Improv,
1213 Mercantile Road, Ste. D,
395-0580

Santa Fe Improv: BANG!
7 pm Friday Oct. 26. $10.
Warehouse 21,
1614 Paseo de Peralta,
989-4423

Out of This World

If you've yet to visit Paradiso, the sort of private but you can totally go club hidden behind the Fruit of the Earth Organics dispensary, you're missing out—and the time to rectify the issue is now: Halloween time, party time. Find yourself there for the Earth Alien dance party, a live music event featuring musicians Dwight Loop, Lee Howard, Arnold Bodmer and Justin Parker getting super weird and super dancey with keys, loops, electronics and more. Those with their cards can even pop by the dispensary for some party aids beforehand or during the show, and everyone else can find out why Paradiso is one of the best if under-appreciated venues in town. (ADV)

Earth Alien
8 pm Saturday Oct. 27. $10.
Paradiso,
903 Early St.,
415-889-0035

Common Knowledge

The concept of The Commons is a pretty simple one: That the Earth and its resources are available equally to all species thereon; it's also clearly a quintessentially Indigenous perspective. Renowned historian Jack Loeffler takes it a step further: "It dawned on me fairly recently that human consciousness itself is like a commons, and over the last decades, it's been subject to a hostile takeover by the corporate political system," he says. His Monday lecture explains how he believes "it is possible for us to get back into a level of cultural sanity if we can recognize who we are and where we are and where we came from." He seems more optimistic than we are, so many we can all learn something. (Charlotte Jusinski)

Southwest Seminars: Indigenous Minds and the Commons of Human Consciousness:
6 pm Monday Oct. 29. $15.
Hotel Santa Fe,
1501 Paseo de Peralta,
982-1200