If “Body | Figure | Nude” isn’t titillating enough, how about the words “seared coriander ahi tuna with wasabi and spicy mustard”? Need more to tempt you? Take a look at this teaser by Candace Chaney at the Herald-Leader (we love Candace!) or this feature by Mark Boxley at KY Forward (yay for Mark!!)

Doors open at 6pm, but if you want to get out of the cold and get into the warm faster than anyone else, call us right now at 254-7024 and buy your tickets. See you in a bit!

Sam Sears and his amazing team at South Van Events literally have us drooling for this roasted anti pasto tray right now.

The day that Lexington’s most anticipated annual visual arts exhibition opens at LAL @ Loudoun House with an exclusive preview party. If you still haven’t claimed your tickets for that extraordinary Body | Figure | Nude opening, here’s one sneak peek to further entice you.

A detail of "Solemn 1" by Zachary Pritchard

Artist Zachary Pritchard, who is based in Buffalo, N.Y., has this to say about his work: “My interest in the figure lies in the universality of its form. I select materials intuitively for their significance in appearance and idea. The fragment gives a notion of separation, while materials such as concrete give notion of weight and architectural formula. I use such fragmented materials as tools constructing objects and, through materials combined, forming a narrative for a viewer to step inside.”

To step inside the emotional heft of this sculpture by Pritchard, you’ve got to make plans to join LAL on Friday, Jan. 13, 6-10pm!

Tickets are $30 for LAL members, $40 for members-in-the-making. Guests will not only be treated to a visual experience that makes you reconsider these vessels we call our bodies, but you’ll also enjoy delicious food from South-Van Events, live jazz with Detour Ahead, gorgeous flowers by Greg Jordan Fine Flowers and Events, and the chance to be immortalized in our super cool photo booth.

Yes, it is going to be the thing everyone is talking about on Monday, so DON’T MISS IT!

More information on lectures, workshops and tickets for the events surrounding Body | Figure | Nude can be found on LAL’s website.

If starlings can do that, we can definitely do this. Be a part of Lexington’s contemporary art murmuration here.

All of them died on Kentucky’s highways this year, and some of them are still remembered post-humously with roadside memorials. Wooden crosses usually anchor the marker; silk flowers, plastic ribbons, and painted letters embellish it and give it individuality.

These highway shrines are the subject of Phillip March Jones’ latest project, Points of Departure: Roadside Memorial Polaroids. Since 2006, Jones has been pulling off to the side of the road to take a closer look at the final resting place of people on their way somewhere. He has captured the memorials with Polaroid film, which has also faded out of existence, and now plans to showcase his collection in a book of images published by The Jargon Society.

Jones, who is the brains behind Institute 193, had this to say:

Roadside memorials mark geographical points of departure in a landscape that is generally devoid of real human interaction or activity. They are almost always built in the no man’s land bordering our country roads, interstates and highways. We pass them at 60 miles an hour, sometimes glancing back, but we are never afforded the time to actually see them. This project is ultimately about slowing down.

I wanted to capture both the place where these horrific events occurred and the resulting commemorative sculptures that are erected by friends and family. For me, these roadside memorials are evidence of some greater impulse or need to create when confronted by the inevitability of death.

If you want to thumb through the pages of Points of Departure, which is due out in January, order yours now at Kickstarter. There’s less than a month left to order, and, yes, if you order it as a Christmas gift, you’ll get a printed card stand-in to wrap up and put under the tree.

That media frenzy in the making? It’s all because we’ve come down with Art Fever!

LAL’s annual art-collecting and artist-appreciating fundraiser opened last weekend, and as if that’s not exciting enough, this Friday we’re having a Fifth Third 4th Friday bash to infect Lexington with enthusiasm for art that is for everyone.

Live music by Mother Jane, amazing food by DaRae & Friends, a refreshing cash bar, exciting give-aways, and a creeptastic Halloween costumes set the stage for this 4th Friday, which is the final one of the 2011 season.

So grab that gorilla suit, throw on a witch’s hat, or glue on some decorative eye lashes, and come to LAL @ Loudoun House for the perfect kickoff to your Halloween weekend.

Special thanks to Nancy Barron & Associates, Landrum & Shouse LLP, and House by JSD Designs for their incredible support of Art Fever and the Lexington Art League.

Vincent Van Gogh Self Portrait 1889

60 Minutes spent some time this weekend looking at Vincent Van Gogh, the brilliant painter behind Starry Night and the alienated madman who cut off his ear after being abandoned by a friend.

But what you think you know about Van Gogh may just need to go out the Window of Vincent’s Studio at the Asylum.

Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Steve Naifeh and Greg Smith have spent the past 10 years investigating the man whose suicide became the thing of legend thanks to a 1956 film Lust for Life. They’ve affirmed his diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy and the influence of his brother Theo on his painting. But they’ve also discovered some holes in the suicide story that may just mean murder.

Dunh, dunh, dunhhhhh. Watch.

And we are so tuning in.

The Lexington Art League’s exhibition Re:Play, curated by the Lexington Film League, explores the conceptual and technical breadth of contemporary video artists working with found media as source material, a method known as Materialfilm, Collage Film, Found Footage, and/or Video Mashup.

Over the last decade, technology like media extraction and programming and platforms like YouTube and Vimeo have given artists a treasure trove of material for piecing together moving collages. For the next month, 19 of those artists are bringing their work to the walls of LAL @ Loudoun House.

Steve Reinke is one of the artists featured in Re:Play. Reinke, who has shown work in the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Museum, and the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, often integrates personal essays into the narrative thread of his videos, layering new perspectives over old films. Take a look at his Not Torn (Asunder from the Very Start).

Reinke’s film The Fallen is included in Re:Play, and artists from New York to California join him for this exhibition (including Lexington’s Matt Page, Ashley Watson, and Nikolai Warner).

As an added bonus, on Oct. 13 at 7:30pm, LAL will host a screening of Craig Baldwin’s Mock up and Mu, a feature-length film that, as described by Village Voice, “uses a seemingly inexhaustible trove of cheesy found footage and his own haphazardly shot dramatizations to rewire American history, reconfigure old conspiracy theories, and rail against the machine.”

That description alone deserves four stars and two thumbs up.

Re:Play is open thru Oct. 16; LAL @ Loudoun House gallery hours are Tues-Fri 10-4, and Sat-Sun 1-4.

Consider yourself informed.

We’re moving on up by heading downtown!

That’s right. The rumors of even more contemporary art brilliance a la LAL are true.

After years of hoping, wishing, praying, and planning, the Lexington Art League has moved into doing. We have officially kicked off a capital campaign to raise funds for a new contemporary art space in the downtown core of Lexington.

After years of hoping, wishing, praying, and planning, the Lexington Art League has moved into doing. We have officially kicked off a capital campaign to raise funds for a new contemporary art space in the downtown core of Lexington.

Nooo, we’re not leaving our beloved Loudoun House. LAL will continue to offer exhibitions, lectures, workshops, and artist galleries in the house we have called a home since that fateful Decorators’ Showcase in 1984.

The new space will allow us to do things that the fixed walls and historic integrity of the Loudoun House simply can’t. The final location is yet to be determined, but the more money we raise, the more options we have.

(Here’s the part where you pull out your checkbooks… )

We can’t wait to open our doors to regional visitors and hometown neighbors, to participate in downtown events and mingle with downtown businesses, to play a significant role in showcasing contemporary art and impacting economic development through the arts.

Or, as Stephanie Harris, LAL’s executive director, said, “This expansion represents the beginning of a bright future for our organization as we establish this new contemporary gallery space in the heart of Lexington.  We are so fortunate to have the support of our community and its leadership as we take this bold step towards a new chapter at LAL. The expansion will provide our organization with an opportunity to reach a broader segment of our community through meaningful interactions with contemporary art.”

To learn more about LAL’s capital campaign, visit our website or give us a call at 859-254-7024.

Mitsura Timepieces in Pellicano, Sixta, and Versata.

Those are Mistura Timepieces, created by ecology warriors and creative visionaries Juan Felipe Barreneche and Daniel Schemel.

Juan and Daniel, originally from Columbia, started Mistura in 2005 to raise awareness about deforestation and environmental irresponsibility. In just 6 years, their creation, which tracks every second that two football fields’ worth of rainforest are lost in the world, have become the accessory of choice for enlightened celebrities like Catherine Zeta Jones and Jessica Biel.

Mistura co-founder Daniel Schemel (left), Jessica Biel, Felipe Lopez, and Mateo Isaza show off their eco-savvy timekeepers.

These handmade watches, each of which takes about 85 hours to construct, are made from renewable and recyclable resources and powered by mercury-free batteries. The line of wood timepieces use exotic woods like pui, purpleheart, guaimaro and teak from the South American tropics, but these woods are harvested under established environmental regulations and with attention to sustainability.

Here’s more from their website:

Mistura Timepiece in Ferro PAP

Our primary focus is to preserve and take care of the natural resources that provide the raw materials used in the creation of our timepieces… We truly value our connection to nature, the environment, and the preservation of its natural resources; therefore, we make it a priority to maintain a high standard of sustainability and responsibility when it comes to the raw materials used in the various stages of our timepieces.

In a time when ecological awareness is of critical importance to societies worldwide, we make it our mission to continuously develop handcrafting processes that minimize negative effects on the environment in order to continue with our top quality, earth-friendly, and treasured timepieces.

Juan and Daniel are bringing their activism through art from Dallas to Lexington TOMORROW for the Lexington Art League’s annual AFB Woodland Art Fair. They’ll be located in Booth #131, near the tennis courts… they’ll be the ones wearing the amazing watches.

Can you believe it’s finally here?!! We are so ready.