PHOTOLUST, the 7^th annual benefit auction for Seattle’s Photo Center NW, is offering an exceptional selection of photographs, including works by John Cyr, Elinor Carucci, Arthur Tress, Annie Marie Musselman, Erik Johnson, and many more. Doors open for the live auction tomorrow at 6 pm, with Laura Michalek at the gavel. Tickets. Online bidding is available by contacting Rafael Soldi at PCNW. Photo Center NW, 900 12rh Avenue, Seattle, WA.

The Center is national and regional platform for the photographic arts, and the region’s only organization of its kind offering intensive ten-week courses, a nationally accredited certificate program, workshops, and a full schedule of exhibitions and gallery programs. Information.

Evgenia Arbugaeva, Kolyada, 2001, available at the PCNW PHOTOLUST benefit auction, online and live tomorrow in Seattle.

Conveyor Magazine is seeking photographic and print-based projects for the next issue, on the theme Dark Matter— the theoretical composition believed to make up most of the universe; it is the unseen, mysterious structure speculated to hold all other matter together. While its foundations are cosmological, dark matter easily traverses the scientific into the ethereal. It points to macabre narratives, dark humor, mysticism, and ancient myth. Submissions should engage the astronomical questions raised by the concept of Dark Matter: How do we elucidate the unknown? How do we illustrate an existence with properties that are inferred rather than directly observed? What metaphors stand in place for that which lies outside of our spectrum of perception? 

The deadline is Monday, October 22. Please visit the website for submission requirements.

Conveyor Magazine is a semi-annual publication dedicated to eliminating the hierarchy between emerging and established artists. The magazine includes a series of new photography projects, interviews, articles, and essays by writers and artists who strive to bring new ideas on photography to light. Conveyor is devoted to all aspects of the medium, embracing digital technologies while maintaining the unique dialogue that exists between a printed photograph and its viewer. The publication is lovingly printed and produced in-house at Conveyor Arts.

Helen Frankenthaler in front of Mountains and Sea (1952) in her West End Avenue apartment, New York, spring 1956.

Today, the Gagosian Gallery announced that it now represents the Estate of Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011); and will present a memorial exhibition of her paintings from the 1950s, in the spring of 2013, at the West 21st Street gallery in New York.

Frankenthaler has long been recognized as one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. The paintings in her first solo exhibition of 1951, at age twenty-two, synthesized the most radical aspects of the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky, with canvases of textured surfaces, washed with pale color, and articulated by calligraphic drawing. The following year, she painted Mountains and Sea, a breakthrough composition created by pouring thinned paint onto unsized canvas so that the paint soaked into the canvas, staining rather than coating, to become at once the coloring and the drawing.

The 1950s saw the beginning of Frankenthaler's mature style as she gave full rein to color beyond the ordinary, freedom of composition, absolute candor in the means of the making, and an ambiguous figuration with "a sort of symbolically garden quality," as she put it. By 1960 her work had become sparer and brighter--like much New York School painting--and linearity soon almost disappeared as shaped-areas of color dominated. By the mid-1960s, she had established the polarity across which she would work with such fecundity for the next forty years: painterly drawing and shape-making, both of which contributed to the ambiguity of reference and the creation of pictorial space. For much of the 1970s the two sides were frequently counterpointed, but by 1976-77 shape and area had become dominant. A decade later, the counterpoint was reasserted and it continued until her painting slowed and finally ended in the early years of this century. Her final canvas was painted fifty years after Mountains and Sea.

The forthcoming memorial exhibition of Frankenthaler's paintings of the 1950s will be curated by John Elderfield, author of the 1989 monograph on her work and a Consultant at Gagosian Gallery. It will be accompanied by a major, fully documented and illustrated catalogue.

Reminder: the S.E.M. Ensemble’s Beyond Cage Festival begins on Monday, October 22, and runs through November 7^th. A major festival presenting John Cage's most significant (and rarely performed) works as well as his legacy in today's composition.

The program, including 8 performances and 2 talks, will span three generations, from Cage's closest associates to young emerging composers in order to display Cage's broad and lasting influence on the music of our times. The festival will feature works by John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, Luigi Nono, Salvatore Sciarrino, Roscoe Mitchell, Petr Kotik, Lucie Vitkova, Alex Mincek, Kate Soper, and many others. Beyond Cage isn't just one more Cage event, but most likely the last time NY audiences will be able to hear performances and discussions of Cage's music and influence on such a large scale by the generation that collaborated with him (in other words, primary-source musicians). For more information.