Urban Culture PROJECT SPACE:Considering the monuments: video art from the east coast - Curated by Megan and Murray McMillan - 20 June 2008 to 19 July 2008
Considering the monuments: video art from the east coast Curated by Megan and Murray McMillan Project Space | 21 East 12th Street | 816.221.5115 Third Friday opening: June 20, 6-9 pm June 20-July 19, 2008 Hours: Thursdays & Saturdays, 12-5 pm
Boston, New York City, Providence: these are three of the oldest and most historic cities in the United States. Each has been and is still home to a vast number of working artists and has had a front row seat for the first few hundred years of American art history. Considering the Monuments: Video Art from the East Coast looks at nine artists living in these cities. How do the artists who live and work in these cities contend with the weight of that history? How do artists living in these cities envision the future?
This diverse collection of videos, presented as a single-channel program of approximately 40 minutes, was curated by Megan and Murray McMillan, an artist-partnership collaborating in video, photography and installation. Based in Providence, Rhode Island, they are represented by Qbox Gallery in Athens, Greece and have exhibited nationally and internationally including at the National Museum of Art in La Paz, Bolivia, White Flag Projects in St. Louis, and Sound Art Space in Laredo, Texas. They are beneficiaries of several awards including grants from the Dallas Museum of Art and Purdue University, and recently participated in the 10th International Istanbul Biennial (2007) in Turkey.
The exhibition features recent video works by Pawel Wojtasik, Julia Hechtman, Timothy Hutchings, Joseph Tekippe, David Politzer, Brian Hutcheson, Rupert Nesbitt, Peter Owen, and Nade Haley. Whether exploring the new landscapes of public waste (Pawel Wojtasik’s Landfill), posing an apocalyptic entreaty (Julia Hechtman's Before the Fall), merging iconic American tourist destinations with intimate storytelling (David Politzer’s Mt. Rushmore and Niagara Falls), or juxtaposing street-level images and GPS data to portray a walk around Manhattan (Joseph Tekippe’s 24 Hours Walking Manhattan: [Excerpt]), the artists represented in this exhibition consider the history and narrative of place and attempt to find their own place within it.
About the artists:
Nade Haley (Erik Satie) lives in New York and Nova Scotia and teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including the Sculpture Center in New York, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Islip Art Museum and has received grants from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is represented by Kenise Barnes Fine Art Gallery in New York.
Born and raised in NYC, Julia Hechtman (Before the Fall) is a visual artist who makes works dealing with issues of agency and control in her multi-faceted studio practice. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally. Her videos are part of the Video Data Bank’s collection in Chicago, Illinois. She has been an artist-in-residence at Oxbow in Saugatuck, Michigan, and at Sydney Olympic Park in Sydney, Australia. She received her MFA from University of Illinois at Chicago, and her BFA from Syracuse University. Along with being a practicing artist and an art professor, she recently opened a contemporary art gallery in South Boston, Massachusetts: Proof. Julia Hechtman lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Brian Hutcheson (With Cream and Sugar Please) works in both traditional and new media. He has exhibited on both the East and West Coast and is a recent graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design.
Rupert Nesbitt (Atmosphere and Sky) graduated from The Cooper Union with a BFA in 1991 and received his MFA from Vermont College in 2007. In the early 1990s his work involved documenting the performative and exploratory practice of climbing New York City’s numerous bridges. Nesbitt is the co-founder of a public art organization in Newport, Rhode Island.
In his videos and drawings, Peter Owen (Los Angeles II) explores the urban landscape, isolating and layering moments to reinterpret personal experience within public space. Peter Owen has lived in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, and New England, and his work draws from each of these places. He has shown at D.E.N. Contemporary and The Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles, F.U.E.L. Gallery in Philadelphia, and The Fallout Gallery in Las Vegas. His work has recently been included in New American Paintings magazine.
David Politzer (Mt. Rushmore and Niagara Falls) was born in Baltimore, MD and is currently participating in the Roswell Artist in Residence program in New Mexico. David holds an MFA from Syracuse University and a BS from Skidmore College. Recent group exhibitions include Host at the Soap Factory in Minneapolis, Here and Elsewhere at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and Does Gender Still Matter? at Purdue University. In July, David will have a solo show at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT as part of their GO! exhibition for emerging artists. David’s residencies include Yaddo, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Vermont Studio Center and the Kala Institute.
David employs video, photography, performance and sculpture to discuss how mass media representations further confuse the vagaries of contemporary social interaction. Specifically, he is interested in portrayals of masculinity on the big and small screens, and the expectations they create. He uses an intimate and straightforward approach along with humor to address such topics as relationships, body image and self-confidence.
Joseph Tekippe (24 Hours Walking Manhattan: [Excerpt]) is an artist who uses new technologies to think about the worlds we live in and the ways that we interact with them and with one another. He is originally from rural Iowa, and studied intermedia art at the University of Iowa before migrating to the east coast. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York and at Bloomfield College in Bloomfield, 24 Hours Walking Manhattan is a two-channel visualization of data gathered during 24 hours spent walking Manhattan in late March, 2006. The left channel displays still images recorded by a small video camera that worn while walking around. The right channel displays a 3-D model being generated from GPS data gathered during the walk. The piece is meant to be played/generated by a custom computer program over the course of 24 hours, with the time of the recorded walk synchronized to the local time.
Pawel Wojtasik (Landfill) a video artist and filmmaker, born in Lodz, Poland, lived in Tunisia before immigrating to the United States in 1972. He currently resides in New York City. He received his M.F.A. from Yale University in 1996. Wojtasik started making 8 mm films in Poland at age 14. After several years as a painter, he returned to the moving image in 2000. His work investigates the intersection of the natural and human-made environments. The film and installation Dark Sun Squeeze (2003-8) examines the workings of a sewage treatment plant; Naked (2005-6) explores the lives of laboratory animals; The Aquarium (2006) deals with captive sea mammals; Landfill (2007) looks at the handling of society’s waste.
Pawel Wojtasik's work has been shown at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York City; Momenta gallery in Brooklyn, Alona Kagan and Sarah Meltzer galleries in New York, NY; the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, Spain; Michael Janssen Gallery in Berlin, Germany, and Platform China gallery in Beijing, among others. Film festivals include Oberhausen, Germany (2008), Images Festival, Toronto (2007), Scanners Video Festival, Lincoln Center, New York City (2007), Athens International Film and Video Festival (2007), San Francisco International Film Festival (2006), Rotterdam International Film Festival (with Electric Current 2) (2006), Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, Chicago, IL (2006), Antimatter Underground Film Festival (2006), and Borderline Video Art Festival, Beijing, China (2006). His recent work, The Aquarium, shot in Alaska, was recently featured in a solo show at Alona Kagan gallery in New York, and at Westport Arts Center in Westport, CT. It was also shown at Anthology Film Archives, New York City, and on PBS/Thirteen public television in New York. Pawel Wojtasik has held residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Edward Albee Foundation, Voom HD Lab, and the Outpost (Brooklyn, NY), and was awarded a NYSCA grant in 2006 and two grants from Voom HD Lab Artist Outreach program in New York City. His work is featured in exhibition catalogues published by P.S. 1/MoMA, the Reina Sofia Museum, Real Art Ways, and others. It was favorably reviewed by The New York Times, Artforum, New York Arts Magazine, The Philadelphia Enquirer, and other publications. His new video installation, Landfill, was included in Connecticut Contemporary at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Pawel Wojtasik’s latest work, a panoramic video installation, Below Sea Level, a collaboration with composer Sebastian Currier, will premiere at MASS MoCA in March 2009.
