15 May 2009 to 20 June 2009
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11 am - 6 pm
Opening: Friday, May 15, 6-8 PM
Winkleman Gallery
637 West 27th Street (Ground Floor)
NY 10001
New York, NY
New York
North America
p: 212.643.3152
m:
f: 212.643.2040
w: www.winkleman.com
Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation Eve & Simon on the Road to Kosmostantsia, March 2009, Photograph - Jeff Wood
Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation White on White: The Pilot
May 15 – June 20, 2009 Opening: Friday, May 15, 6-8 Hours: Tues. - Sat. 11-6 PM
Founded on a premise of 60's-era-evil-think-tank-meets-traveling circus, the group of collaborators known as Rufus Corporation have embarked on an expedition-cum-artwork that morphs into a cinema verité thriller as it moves from Moscow to the Caspian. They encounter time capsules and testaments to both past and present failed utopias. Their search, as they log the banalities of daily life, is for places, devices and people that are prescient as premonitions for the future.
In July 2007, inspired by Kazimir Malevich’s manifestos and the conundrums of ‘space', Eve Sussman, Claudia de Serpa Soares, and Jeff Wood attempted to gain access to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the middle of the Central Asian steppe (the highly secured facility that is the heart of the Russian space program and the launch site of Yuri Gagarin, first man in orbit). Their goal was to resolve Wood's hankering to 'go to space,' a desire he felt was perfectly in line with Malevich's declaration "I am the chairman of space.” Stopped at the gate and detained by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB), fingerprinted, iris scanned, and debriefed, they were later released from the Baikonur police station onto the platform of a train bound for the Aral Sea — site of endless salt residue, where roaming camels and horses rest in the shade of rusting hulks in what locals call the ‘ship graveyard’, one of the biggest environmental disasters known to man. They continued on to a city described to them as the 'arm-pit' of the steppe. An ordered numerical Soviet era utopia built where the desert meets the Caspian. A perfectly planned environment that lacked the essential substance of human life: water.
So began Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation's latest venture. Known for their previous projects 89 Seconds at Alcázar and The Rape of the Sabine Women, Rufus is in production on an expedition-cum-art-work that will culminate in a cinema verité thriller, White on White, that they describe as an improvised film noir culled from everyday life on the road between Moscow and the Caspian. Over the next year, episodes of the project will be released as "TV shows" using every possible platform, including the art gallery, as a means for broadcast. Similarly, cinematic convention is just one of the devices employed. The series also includes photographs, storyboards, installations and sculptures, each episode inevitably ending with...to be continued...
Winkleman Gallery is very pleased to present the first of these episodes: White on White: The Pilot, which will feature two artworks - points of departure on the subjects of time, space, past, future and Sussman's constant subject 'dailiness'. The centerpiece of White on White: The Pilot (the title a word play on the television pilot and famed astronaut and test pilot Yuri Gagarin) is Yuri's Office, a set for the upcoming TV show. Based on Sussman's photograph, Yuri's Office, this detailed recreation, by Sussman and Nicolas Locke, is inspired by the museumification of the real office of Gagarin. The installation takes on the desire to freeze time, to impose cryogenics on space when it is still untenable to freeze people. A second video installation "How to Tell the Future from the Past, v.2" (HtttFftPv.2), by Eve Sussman and Angela Christlieb – shot during a 72-hour train journey across the steppe – conceptualizes time with the manifestation of humanity as the constant, as daily life – history in the making – runs backwards and forwards simultaneously. HtttFftPv.2 elevates the characteristics of humanity that transcend time, exposing us, un-empowered against it. Both pieces act as a visual 'captain's log', marking time, as if to build a dam of toothpicks against the deluge.
For more information, please contact Ed Winkleman at edward@ winkleman.com or 212.643.3152.
REVIEW
The New York Times June 5, 2009
EVE SUSSMAN AND RUFUS CORPORATION ‘White on White: The Pilot (just like being there)’
Remember the space race? In the 1960s, going to the Moon and beyond was a galvanizing fantasy for millions of Americans and Russians. Now it seems a quaint artifact of a more innocent and gullible time.
In this vein, Eve Sussman and her collaborators, who go by the name Rufus Corporation, have constructed an evocative think piece: a meticulously detailed re-creation of the office of the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human to go into space and to orbit Earth. After Gagarin’s death in 1968, the Soviets made his office a museum, which Ms. Sussman visited, photographed and simulated so faithfully that it looks as if the real thing — including chairs, a desk, telephones, memorabilia and fake daylight coming through sheer white curtains from a false window — had been teleported to Chelsea.
Besides being an impressive feat of realism, the installation, which looks more antique than modern to a contemporary eye, invites meditation on the aspirations and disappointments of technological progress. The title, “White on White,” refers to the proto-Minimalist, all-white painting by Kasimir Malevich, and, by extension, to the once seemingly unlimited and now apparently stymied possibilities of human evolution.
This is a surprising and intriguing turn for Ms. Sussman, who is known for her cinematic re-creation of “Las Meninas” by Velázquez and modern film version of the story “The Rape of the Sabine Women.” She plans to use the Gagarin office as a set for a futuristic film noir. That should be something to look forward to.
