12 June 2009 to 11 July 2009
Gallery Hours : Tu-F 11-6 : Sa 1-4, Su, M Closed
Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center
341 Delaware Ave
NY 14202
Buffalo, NY
New York
North America
p: 716-854-194
m:
f: 716-854-1696
w: www.hallwalls.org/index.html
SIEBREN VERSTEEG'S Identifying Hedges OPENS FRIDAY JUNE 12th, 8-11pm ON VIEW AT HALLWALLS, June 12-July 11, 2009
Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center is pleased to announce the exhibition of its 2008-09 HARP media artist, Siebren Versteeg, opening Friday June 12th and on view through Saturday July 11th, 2009. The exhibition "Identifying Hedges", which has been guest curated by Hallwalls Media Arts Director Carolyn Tennant, is the culmination of Versteeg's Hallwalls Artist-in-Residence Project . The opening reception on Friday the 12th will be preceded by an artist presentation in the Hallwalls Cinema at 8pm. Siebren Versteeg’s practice includes interactive paintings (as seen above), digital prints and sculptures that dissect the interactions of media, intention, and indeterminacy. In many of the works, extensive use is made of the Internet as a generative source of information and imagery. By developing precise algorithms that guide the flow of information, Versteeg models the movement and content of the ambient digital atmosphere into artworks that balance choice and chance.
Currently based in Brooklyn, Versteeg is originally from Connecticut and attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. At SAIC Versteeg studied media art, experimenting with video and early image processing tools, and exploring networked art and computer programming. After art school he became immersed in the Dot Com industry and worked as a freelance programmer, which influenced a growing fixation with the "architecture of code." Consequently Versteeg's work continues to examine the story of Information Technology and its existential implications, tracing our movement away from a material or physical universe towards a world of data, where information becomes experience. By creating programs that constantly mine the internet for data, such as images from sources like Flicker and Google Images, his projects are in a perpetual state of flux. These time-based media works may recombine data, but the emergent patterns are as informed by the source code and the ever-changing world wide web, as they are re-contextualized by Versteeg's framework. For example, in his early work CC, Versteeg superimposes a stream of text (gathered in real-time from blogs and positioned at the bottom of the screen as closed captioning) on a live broadcast feed from CNN. The implied objectivity of The News is confronted with the banal, lived experience of the anonymous diarists. It is within the graphic landscape of corporate broadcast, and among the talking heads of authority, that Versteeg creates a space for subjectivity and randomly generated data.
For his solo exhibition at Hallwalls, Versteeg will present several new works including sculpture, projected video, and computer installation. For more information, please contact Media Arts Director Carolyn Tennant at 716-854-1694.
Versteeg is represented by Max Protetch (NYC) and Rhona Hoffman Gallery (Chicago). http://siebrenversteeg.com/
