When Sol Lewitt died in 2007, he was working on a series of process oriented scribble drawings. Lewitt, who drew out the plans for his drawings and then let his apprentices and trainees execute them, never had a chance to see some of these drawings come to life. Now, Mass Moca is hosting an in-progress Sol Lewitt wall drawing retrospective, an exhibition that will include never-before-realized, premeditated scribbling. While the exhibition doesn’t technically open until November 16th, the pre-exhibition process is well under way and patrons are able to follow its progress on the museum website and on its youtube page.

“We’re scribbling very, very consciously,” says Sol Lewitt professional Michael Benjamin Vedder, an artist who has made a career out of executing drawings like those he’s working on for the retrospective. The drawing process has the collaborative feeling of mural painting and graffiti art – the apprentices, interns and professionals work at a low-key, but disciplined pace and the walls around change from blank spaces to geometric and tonal seas of mark making.

According to another Lewitt professional, Takeshi Arita, the art world’s focus on Lewitt’s late career drawings is misleading: “We’re working for the scribble drawings, but I don’t know if it’s necessary to emphasize it’s the last piece. My understanding is that he was still working on progress.” According to Arita, Lewitt would finish one drawing and then his interest would move to the next project. Fortunately, that’s the way this retrospective works: one drawing moves into another and then into another.

The retrospective was collaboratively organized by Mass Moca, Yale University Art Gallery, and Williams College Museum of Art.

Transit Antenna is a diverse group of creators, bound in space and time to each other and a 40 foot metro bus named Walter. Traveling across North America, the mobile living experiment, which consists of seven people, featuring writers, filmmakers, painters, chefs, musicians and a dog, are all living on the road for a two year journey. Now six months into their travels, Transit Antenna, launching from Charleston, SC, are currently in Portland, Oregon. You can track them at anytime via their wikimap.

The nomadic group may seem like a throw back to the sixties with their free spirits, overgrown beards and desire to just be on the road, but there is much more than meets the eye. The group is capturing their experience through writing, painting, filmmaking, photography and most of all through a loose network of social collaborators that spread across the US, sharing what they know and can do with whomever they come in contact.

The group, which is affiliated with Deitch Projects, Redux Contemporary Art Center, DailyServing.com and Fat American is mostly fueled on private donations, hard labor and free vegetable oil for the bus.

When asked, why are they doing this project the group has replied, “for the challenge of living on the road, of living frugally, and of finding ways to support ourselves. For the excitement of seeing the country, of meeting engaging people, of exploring the periphery of America where culture doesn’t get handed down from cultural imperialists-it grows dynamically from the people up. We’re doing this for the possibility of creating community on the road, of developing collaborations that will fuel our creative practices…”

Visit DailyServing.com and TransitAntenna.com often to find the location of the crew and to catch up on all of their recent projects and videos.

OKOK Gallery’s current exhibition, TEXT/URAL, presents the work of seven national and international artists whose text-based works illustrate the expressive potential of language. The infinite mutability of letters, words, and their meanings allow these artists to explore, both formally and conceptually, the role of language in art. The exhibition features works by Michael Waugh, Kay Rosen, Kim Rugg, Will Yackulic, Ewoud Van Rijn, Annie Bradley, and Grant Barnhart.

Michael Waugh’s labor intensive drawings are executed in ink lines of tiny handwritten script. Waugh selects his text from dozens of Presidential inaugural addresses, commission reports, and speeches to Congress. Thousands of words are written out by the artist, and the text becomes large images, as seen above in one of two works on display in TEXT/URAL. The images created from the sprawling text are often loaded with religious and political allegory.

Kay Rosen has been working with language since 1969. Her wall painting, HALFULL, will be on display at OKOK Gallery. She articulates the meaning of this work in her essay, The Center is A Concept, where she states “referencing the proverbial glass, HALFULL offers a verbal shortcut for viewing the world in two ways, positively or negatively, through a simple linguistic choice involving the letter F”. Rosen uses the predictable palette of 1 Shot brand of sign-painters lettering enamel, an arbitrary system with an infinite combination, similar to the alphabet.

Kim Rugg renders our print and media culture unintelligible by meticulously dissecting pages of newspaper with an X-ACTO knife. She cuts out every letter and alphabetizes them on the page, all while preserving the dignity in presentation and formality of the newspaper format. She cuts the pictures into small equal sized pieces,and arranges them by color into what resembles television static. Three works will be included in this exhibition utilizing the front pages of the New York, Seattle, and L.A. Times. Rugg was recently reviewed by the L.A. Times and described as “a vandal of the highest order, a tamperer, an interventionist.”

Will Yackulic’s works on paper combine text with obsessively rendered micro-landscapes that recall rudimentary digital imagery. His work was featured in 2007 on DailyServing. Ewoud van Rijn’s epic drawing, Reality, will be included in the show as well. The image, whose gushing lettering suggests both water and sperm, contains a bold statement “reality has no mistress it has a master me.” New Zealand-based artist Annie Bradley is presenting her audio video animation, Sodding G. Monolith, in the project room. This work is inspired by the names spammers use to circumvent e-mail filters and comments on the incessant flow of information. Grant Barnhart, another previous DS feature (and was interviewed by DS in 2007), is presenting work that combines text with adolescent ephemera, such as Playboys adorned with forged Babe Ruth signatures. He is also displaying the sleeping bag in which he received his first kiss, creating an awkward homage to innocence lost.

TEXT/URAL will be on display at OKOK Gallery in Seattle until September 7, 2008.

Samuel Roy-Bois constructs architectural spaces using industrial and domestic materials such as wood, plexiglass, paint, electrical lighting, objects, and furniture. His built environments often engage the viewer physically, such as in Ghetto from 2006 (seen above). This installation, from the artist’s first solo show in Montreal, is a simple room with four walls of sheet rock and exposed framework which houses a mattress complete with pillows and a light fixture above. The large entrance on one facade allows the viewer to step in. The artist uses the term “uninhabit” when discussing his work, which describes “the fact of feeling outside a world that is nonetheless familiar to us.”

Our awareness of material reality heightens as we address this public bedroom. The objects and interiors of Roy-Bois engage viewers in a spatial discourse that punctuates our presence in space. Roy-Bois received his B.F.A. in Quebec from the Universite Laval where he has also taught. He later received his M.F.A. in Montreal from Concordia University. He has exhibited in Canada and abroad (Paris, Lausanne, Mexico City), and had his first solo museum show, Improbable and Ridiculous, at the Musee D’Art Comtemporain de Montreal in 2006.

One Breath below Consciousness, is a new, corporeal exhibition by Spanish born artist Dani Marti. Currently showing at Breenspace, Waterloo, the display consists of both video works and textile weaving. These interlaced canvases are often a mix of both simple, structural materials such as nylon braiding, leather, polyester and knitting yarn, as well as more brilliant substances including Swarovski glass, beaded necklaces and Spanish rosary beads. Last year Marti took this fixation with weaving and applied it to more unconventional forms. . His installation work Off my Noodle, consisting of a giant tangled ball of pink, polyethylene foam pool noodles was displayed at both The University of Technology, Sydney and Newcastle Regional Art Gallery.

Although born in Barcelona, Marti currently spends his time living and working between Sydney and Glasgow. He has studied at various institutions around the world including Esade, Barcelona, Julian Ashton Art School, Sydney and Glasgow School of Art. His work has appeared in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including Dark Bones at Citric Gallery, Italy, Missing Spain at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Sydney and the 2007 Cornice Art Fair, Venice. In 2007 he was awarded the Newcastle Regional Gallery Residency as well as a New Work Grant from the Scottish Arts Council.

A new collection of works by Imants Tillers is currently on display at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Paddington. Entitled The Tears of Things, the exhibition is the artist’s first Sydney-based solo show in three years. The tiled paintings are a collection of landscapes built in the Tiller’s signature style. Many are monolithic portraits of Australian panorama, some even extending to almost 10m in length. Images of the outback, desert motifs and drought stricken land are overlaid with poetic text and names of regional Australian suburbs.

Tillers lives and works in Cooma, Australia, a regional town located near the Snowy Mountains. With a respected career spanning over thirty years, his work has been widely displayed on an international scale at institutions including Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Galerie Susan Wyss, Zurich and Bess Cutler Gallery, New York. He has received various awards for his art practice including Grand Prize at the 1993 Osaka Painting Triennial, First Prize at the 1999 Visy Board Art Prize, South Australia and a Prize for Excellence at the 2003 Beijing International Art Biennial. In 2005 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of New South Wales for his long and distinguished contribution to the field of arts.

Jonathan Bouknight is captivated by the duality of one’s psychological and physical presence and how this duality defines one’s personal reality. His evocative photographs, drawings, and sculptures depict this aspect of the human condition. Referencing mythology, history, pop culture, and science, Bouknight explores his own sexuality and attempts to understand how the corporeal and cerebral influence one another, and how these entities are shaped by the presence of others.

In his compositions, Bouknight photographs barriers or membranes which neither completely conceal nor reveal the subjects within. He labels his series “Integuments” and “Encasements”, thereby defining the unseen psychological division between the self and others. The above photograph, entitled Nipple, conceals this bodily part below a sea of diaphanous fabric whose frayed ends are stitched together with a thin black thread. The fabric clings to flesh in some areas, creating a visual tease for the spectator.

Bouknight studied at the Lamar Dodd School of Art in Cortona, Italy in 2000 with the University of Georgia and received his B.A. in Studio Art from Furman University in 2002. He has previously exhibited at Whitespace and Eyedrum in Atlanta, where he currently lives and works.