re-title.com Features

Jerwood Space, London

AN EXPERIMENT IN COLLABORATION

 

Private View: 29 July 6.30 - 8.30pm
30 July - 31 August 2008

6 ARTISTS + 6 COLLABORATORS = 6 EXPERIMENTAL PROJECTS

 

What happens when 6 artists are asked to choose a collaborator to work with in new ways? Who will they choose? What will they want to make? How will the process work? Will these collaborations continue after the exhibition? Will they fail? Will this opportunity encourage the artists to collaborate in the future? How does the collaborative working process differ to their usual ways of working? What are the benefits or disadvantages of working collaboratively?

An Experiment in Collaboration looks at the intricacies of artists operating as part of a team or partnership, laying bare the process and opening it up to scrutiny. The ongoing project is collaborative on every level: curator, writers, design team, artists and associates, share ideas, negotiate changes and make decisions about possibilities and outcomes.

An Experiment in Collaboration forms part of the Jerwood Visual Arts series of exhibitions and initiatives to support and promote emerging talent. 6 artists were invited to choose a collaborator to work with and to submit proposals for an experimental project that looked at the process of collaborative practice including:

Gemma Anderson + forensic psychiatrist Dr Tim McInerny and three of his patients from Bethlem Hospital, London = a series of revealing portraits;

Daniel Baker + computer game designer Ricky Haggett = a computer game of the artist's fictional world of 'Glob';

Michael Pybus + Dazed & Confused magazine = a series of fashion photographs set within Pybus' painting/sculptural installation;

Paul Richards + artists: Jason Dungan, Jenifer Evans, Claire Hooper, Edward Peake, Guy Rusha & Gili Tal, Joe Walsh = an experimental film for cinema;

Karen Tang + architect Daniel Sanderson = a Modernist building titled 'Modern Molluscs';

Artist collaborators Jackson Webb + biophysicist Dora Tang = chemical drawings that challenges the role of the 'author' within collaborative practice.

The exhibition will begin a conversation about collaborative working practice through a series of experiments and interconnected dialogues while allowing for each of the collaborators to explore a new way of working, drawing either on the other's expertise, ideas, knowledge or experience. The process of each of these artist collaborations will be available to view in an online blog:  www.experimentincollaboration.blogspot.com

 

Two discussions, open to the public, will take place during the exhibition: Monday 11 August and Thursday 21 August 6 - 8pm 2008. A catalogue, with foreword by Tamiko O'Brien and Mark Dunhill, designed by The Partners will accompany the exhibition. The catalogue will be launched on Thursday 21 August from 6 - 8pm.

Exhibition curated by Sarah Williams.

Image:
Michael Pybus and Dazed & Confused Magazine
Untitled
Photographic print
20 x 30 inches
2008

Photographer - Jenny Hueston, Stylist - Kim Howells, Hair - Amiee Robinson using Bumble and Bumble, Makeup - Hiromi Ueda using Dermalogica, Accessory designer - Fred Butler, Photographer assistant - Jamie Smith, Makeup assistant - Kaori Mitsuyasu, A special thanks to Spring Lighting, Models: Charlotte Pallister at Models 1, Pilar  at Select

 

Jerwood Space
171 Union Street
London, SE1 0LN
Mon - Fri 10 - 5, Sat - Sun 10 - 3
* Closed Bank Holidays
Admission: Free

Jerwood Space

 

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Like the Spice Gallery, New York

Forming Lines: Translations Between Drawing and Sculpture

July 25th - August 31st, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday July 25th 6:30-10pm

Like the Spice is pleased to present Forming Lines: Translations Between Drawing and Sculpture an exhibition examining the many relationships between sculpture and drawing. The show features works by Rachel Beach, Seth Cohen, Beka Goedde, Abby Goodman, Dean Goelz, Barry Hazard, Allie Rex, Marc André Robinson, Rodger Stevens, Kathleen Vance.

Translations between two and three-dimensional space, the works in this show explore the relationship between line and form. Drawings are both reference and original; sculptures are end product or study and vice versa. This exhibition acts as a Rosetta Stone for visual translation, exploring how drawings turn out when realized in three dimensions and the ways a sculpture's color, form and scale change when documented in two dimensions.

Illusion is almost always explicit in drawings: illusory space, illusory textures, imaginary places and impossible situations are all common factors in drawings. It is easier to forget the illusions in sculpture. From tricks of perspective to deceptive finishes, sculptures aren't the honest hunks of matter we sometimes take them for.

One key difference between drawing and sculpture is that a drawing's illusions are usually self-contained, staying on the paper. A sculpture however is always engaged in symbiosis with its environment. A sculpture can make a space seem smaller than it is, dominating everything around it. The same sculpture is dwarfed by an outdoor space, looking like an abandoned toy. The perception of sculpture is easily affected by its context and vice versa, conditions of space and light drastically change our experience of a sculpture whereas a drawing is fairly independent, forming its own context.

Rachel Beach was born in London, ON Canada in 1975. She received her MFA from Yale University in 2001 and her BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, Canada in 1998. Beach's works have been described as "tough, precise and disciplined with a hard edged cheeriness."
Seth Cohen was born in Leicester, England in 1971. He received his MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2003. Beka Goedde received her B.A. from Columbia University, Barnard College [Sept 2000-May 2004] with a concentration in Behavioral Neuroscience and Philosophy.
Abby Goodman Received her MFA from Syracuse University in 2002, she was recently chosen by studio visit Magazine as there cover artists Dean Goelz was born in New York in 1978. He earned his Bachelors of fine arts from the Maryland Institute College of art in 2001.
Barry Hazard earned is MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2008 and his BFA, from Tufts University in 1988. Allie Rex was born in Hartford, CT. She received her Masters of Fine Art from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2004. She creates drawing installations using mylar, paint, ink, pencils, vinyl and pins.
Marc André Robinson received a MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 2002. His work was recently exhibited in Unmonumental: The Object In The 21st Century New Museum of Contemporary Art and in UNTITLED (on paper) at Moti Hasson Gallery in Chelsea, NY.
Rodger Stevens was born in Brooklyn, New York and studied at the Parsons School of Design (NYC) and the School of Visual Arts (NYC). His sculptures, installations, and drawings have been exhibited in galleries and museums in New York, California, Paris and elsewhere since 1993.
Kathleen Vance received her MFA from Hunter College in 2006. She has exhibited all over New York including the Betty Cuningham Gallery in Chelsea, NY.

Image:

Rodger Stevens

Unshakable # 20

Pencil on Paper

11"x14"

 

Courtesy of the artist and Like the Spice Gallery, New York
 

Like the Spice Gallery
224 Roebling Street
Between S2nd & S3rd

Williamsburg

Brooklyn
New York, NY 11211

Like the Spice Gallery

 

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Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Berlin

 

Miss Van & Victor Castillo
Canto Negro y Brujerias

26 July to 23 August 2008

Merry Karnowsky Gallery Berlin is proud to present CANTO NEGRO Y BRUJERIAS, featuring the paintings of Barcelona-based artists Miss Van (France) and Victor Castillo (Chile). The two unfold their unique but harmonious iconographies in a pictorial exercise of intersecting ideas. These artists approach from their personal perspectives subjects like seduction, desire, enchantment, and the game of infantile cruelty. The title of the exhibition attempts to unite these proposals and at the same time, alludes to Spanish culture, superstition and witchcraft as basic context, and dark invocations of common ghosts.

The "poupees" of Miss Van, always surrounded in sensational atmospheres, embody the surrounding energies of the loving spell that they seduce and catch. All are portrayed in mystical scenarios, between meditation and liberation of evil, introspection and exorcism. Through their closed eyes, we enter into the private worlds of each, reflecting on their dark side and feminine fragility. Miss Van's work has shown in the United States, France, England, Austria, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany and Australia.

Victor Castillo shows us a mixture of classic and comic painting loaded with infantile personages of subjects: macabre, joy, seduction and the unscrupulous pleasures of the destruction game. At the same time he also makes references to contemporary realities and a new generation's stimulations from the increasing bombardment by the media. Castillo's work has shown in Spain, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Canada, Belgium and Taiwan.

 

Image:

Miss Van
Stolen Heart 3
2008, acrylic on canvas

 

Courtesy of the artist and Merry Karnowsky Gallery

 
Merry Karnowsky Gallery
Torstrasse 175
10115 Berlin-Mitte

 

Merry Karnowsky Gallery

 

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Flowers East, London

DOMESTIC APPLIANCE

1 AUGUST - 13 SEPTEMBER 2008
PRIVATE VIEW: THURSDAY 31 JULY 2008, 6-8PM
OPENING TIMES: TUESDAY TO SATURDAY 10AM TO 6PM

THOMAS BAUMANN / IAN BURNS / JIM BOND / MAX DEAN, RAFFAELLO D'ANDREA & MATT DONOVAN / THEO KACCOUFA / KRISTOF KINTERA / TIM LEWIS / HAROON MIRZA / GOSHA OSTRETSOV / STEVEN PIPPIN / JAIME PITARCH / NATHANIEL RACKOWE / NIK RAMAGE / CAROLINE TATTERSALL / JEAN TINGUELY / ANTOINE ZGRAGGEN

Kinetic art emerged in the 1960s from the mixed parentage of the well-oiled motor of Constructivism and the anti-art ad absurdum of Dada. On the one hand, the movement was a celebration of the artist-as-engineer; a utopian practice that gave formal expression to the energy of mechanical processes and championed a Modernism most High. On the other, it animated the anarcho-political fervour of a revolutionary post-war contingent bent on trashing aesthetic precepts and bourgeois tenets. Supreme functionality verses extreme destructiveness; the whirr of social harmony or the cacophony of a cog in the political machine.

Despite this significant lineage, it is broadly assumed that Kinetic art never really established itself beyond a contested adolescence, and that it played out this errant youth - depending on who's story of art you are reading - occupied with pseudo-scientific gadgetry or kitschy optical tricks. The footnoting of the movement in the history of 20th century art lead to its widespread dismissal in many areas of contemporary criticism, an erasure that triggered Yves-Alain Bois to declare that Kinetic art had 'suffered the unhappy fate of a flash in the pan'.
This exhibition substantiates the domestic connotations present in Bois' statement to investigate Kinetic art at a tangent to the discrete line of art history, a position located not only off the official path, but behind closed doors. Expanding the bracket of the artistic movement beyond its staunchly socio-political origins, it explores how artworks loosely grouped by the classification 'kinetic' have addressed the structures - psychological, linguistic, social and familial - that exist within the space of the home.

Whilst the domestic object can claim a legacy in Kinetic art that extends as far back as Duchamp's readymades, the significance of a domestic/kinetic interplay within a continuing field of practice has yet to be fully addressed. Here, a diverse group of artists explore the meanings generated when kinetic art, taken beyond its limitations as a finite modern movement, enters the machine for living in.

Jean Tinguely, founding father of Kinetic art in its Dadaist incarnation, and Czech artist Kristof Kintera exploit the same signifier - the power drill - to different ends. Tinguely's playful sculpture, an ode in steel and feathers to his second wife Niki de Saint Phalle, is imbued with an intimacy that hints at a private language of desire, whilst the violent pas de deux acted out in Kintera's domestic drama muddles objectification and anthropomorphism to make the viewer a voyeur, complicit - through the act of seeing - in a scene of sexual antagonism and gender politics.
The industrial aesthetic of Antoine Zgraggen's monumental destructive machines masks their role as priest-like vehicles of confession and catharsis. In the mechanical hands of these automaton analysts, domestic objects invested with traumatic memories and turbulent meanings are severed, compressed and shattered into extinction. Where Zgraggen destroys objects made faulty through their entanglement in psychic webs, Nik Ramage subverts the purpose of appliances to make them anew. Relinquishing Constructivist principles of utility and efficiency, fragility and faultiness become their bathetic function.

Max Dean, Raffaello D'Andrea & Matt Donovan pay deference to the Dadaist legacy of auto-destructive machines by creating a robotic chair that perpetually negotiates the spectrum of construction and collapse. Falling apart only to put itself back together again, the chair is a cipher of flux; neither figure nor ground, form or l'informe, it inhabits a space where the line between mechanical system and subjectivity blurs. This ambiguous terrain is also the setting for Thomas Baumann's Asilver, an object fixated on the cycle of deformation and re-formation. Doggedly remodelling itself ad-infinitum, it momentarily diverges from an abstract geometry to adopt the form of an unheimlich apparition - a domestic glitch that is the 'ghost' in the machine.

DOMESTIC APPLIANCE will be accompanied by a catalogue with text by exhibition curator Ellie Harrison-Read.

 

Image:
MAX DEAN, RAFFAELLO D'ANDREA & MATT DONOVAN

Robotic Chair 1985 - 2006

custom-made robot, software, vision system, computer & platform

Chair: 82 x 40 x 48 cm platform: 20 x 244 x 244 cm

 

Courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto

Photos by nichola feldman-kiss

Flowers East
82 Kingsland Road
London E2 8DP

Flowers East

 

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MADDER 139, London

PAUL CHIAPPE

10 July - 9 August 2008

Size determines an object, but scale determines art. A crack in the wall if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand Canyon. A room could be made to take on the immensity of the solar system. Scale depends on one's capacity to be conscious of the actualities of perception.[1]

MADDER139 is delighted to announce the first London solo show of Edinburgh artist, Paul Chiappe. In a series of hyperrealist drawings Chiappe questions our illusion between subject and object. Taking information from various settings; the traditional school photograph, books, vintage postcards, and particularly internet image searches, Chiappe alters and recreates the scrupulous and clinical precision of the camera with pencil to then blur and smudge into indeterminate plots and characters. The detailed and definitive use of the pencil sidles with the work of Chuck Close, however, unlike Close and his photorealist contemporaries, Chiappe's transcribed scenes hold narratives that highlight the shifting and fragile nature of memory.

In Untitled 12, a drawing sourced from google, Chiappe creates a macabre, ethereal setting as a bleak American Church School stands empty except for a girl who rigidly watches from the porch. Is she a schoolgirl or an apparition? The juxtaposition of the blurred, soft edge of the building against the crisp execution of the girl's stance at the entrance creates a nostalgic distance between viewer and piece.

In Untitled 18 an anonymous woman glares out and despite the absence of eyes appears tangibly real. Echoing Gerhard Richter's 'blur' technique from his photographic paintings of the sixties, Chiappe smears away the manicured backgrounds that he has created to produce out of focus scenes that drift back and forth and like a faded negative the works' edges disappear and overflow into a sinister no-man's land.

Chiappe's recent drawings compared to their photographic originals are vastly diminished in size, with some so meticulously small that they are a mere dot on the page and the use of a magnifying glass is required. By disrupting his subjects in exactitude and size Chiappe blots and dilutes the division between illusion and reality, with the pieces reading like a fleeting conception or the presence of a memory that we were told, but never had.

Paul Chiappe has recently exhibited at The Fleming Collection's 'Ten Decades' exhibition in Mayfair, London. Simultaneously to his show at MADDER139 Chiappe will be exhibiting at 'Kaleidoscope', a major exhibition of works on paper at The National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, from 15th July - 21st September 2008, where he will be placed alongside Douglas Gordon, Richard Long, Ben Nicholson and Simon Starling.
 
[1]Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, p. 147

Image:

Paul Chiappe

UNTITLED

2005

Pencil on Paper

10cm x 14cm 

Courtesy of the artist and MADDER139, London 

 
MADDER139
137-139
Whitecross St
London, EC1 Y 8JL

MADDER139

 

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Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York

microwave, six

10 July 2008 to 13 Sept 2008

Kamrooz Aram, Ernesto Caivano, Graham Dolphin, Jacob Dyrenforth, Stephen Eichhorn, Alexandra Grant, Jim Hodges, Károly Keserü, Brian Lund, Rivane Neuenschwander, Renato Orara, Jesse Pasca, Andrew Scott Ross, Casey Jex Smith, Dean Smith, Allyson Strafella, Phoebe Washburn

Josée Bienvenu gallery is pleased to present microwave, six, an exhibition of drawings by seventeen artists who set up various processes of fragmentation and erosion of information. Close attention is given to execution, a concentration on the production process itself. A microwave is useful everyday to cook fast, or once a year to look at slow drawings. Since 1999, the (almost) annual edition of microwave has been an opportunity to confirm the emergence of a new attitude. As an alternative to an inhospitable era, microwave identifies an international host of artists who commit to the obscene activity of paying attention. With intense focus, patience and precision, the artists in microwave document the relentless propagation of delicacy as a subversive attitude.

Ernesto Caivano, Dean Smith, Károly Keserü and Renato Orara bring drawing to an extreme, as a sort of "maximalism." Through the endless weaving of minute components, they accumulate signals and vibrations impossible to detect without an extraordinary level of attention. Tones, hues, and shades combined with density, shapes, and intangible forms result in a grand yet subtle game, always remaining just a fragment of a whole. With obsessive attentiveness to detail, Jim Hodges, Stephen Eichhorn and Kamrooz Aram subvert the conventions of monumental practice, poetically linking evanescent moments in works of self-confident beauty.

The works in the exhibition touch upon the very fragile nature of communication and exchange. Allyson Strafella's typewritten drawings on transfer paper, Alexandra Grant's multilayered wordscapes or Rivane Neuenschwander's Ze Carioca altered comic books, explore ways of recording, fragmenting and obliterating information to create new non-verbal narratives. Data manipulation is also at the core of Brian Lund's graphic translations of film sequences and of Jesse Pasca's charted drawings: Moore's Law, My Heart as a Stock Market and How To Be Human, map the correlation between human activity and systems of scientific data.

Through minor operations on paper the artists in microwave disturb established systems of expectations. Jacob Dyrenforth's pixilated pencil drawings of crowds at rock and roll concerts and Graham Dolphin's scripted vinyl records disrupt and reprocess the clichéd aspirations of popular culture and the glamour industry. Growing up in Utah in the Mormon Church, Casey Jex Smith explores narratives in ancient scripture. Andrew Scott Ross' Re-Collections inventory given museums. Randomly floating in space, artifacts are depicted in a constant curatorial drift, suspended from interpretation and hierarchy. Phoebe Washburn exposes generative systems based on absurd patterns of production. With their elaborate notations and coding, the un-monumental drawings are microcosms of her convoluted architectural environments.

Image:
Jacob Dyrenforth, Crowd #3, 2008
pencil on paper

 29.75 x 22 inches (32.75 x 25 inches framed)

Courtesy of  the artist and Josee Bienvenu Gallery, New York

Josee Bienvenu Gallery
529 West 20th Street
New York, NY 10011

Josee Bienvenu Gallery
 

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Leo Koenig Inc. New York

 

Wendy White, "Autokennel"

June 20th through August 1st, 2008

Leo Koenig Inc. is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by Wendy White.
For her first solo exhibition at the gallery, Wendy White has produced a body of work that is visually striking, physically confrontational and intellectually engaging. White's compositions utilize a distinctive abstract language that alludes to the bombardment of the everyday. Urban sprawl, space junk, graffiti, buried hazardous material, and the accumulation of refuse are punctuated by heavy black areas that map a direct trail from the ubiquitous to the subconscious.

Unafraid to conjure real feeling and emotion in these works, White gives new form to the bombast of rock concerts and the mass elation of sports arenas. Built organically and intuitively, these works balance accident and scrappy paint handling with compositional coherence. While White seems to work with reckless abandon, her off-kilter compositions prove well considered with time, though perhaps deliberately confounding. Just when one begins to get involved in a lush patch of painterly abstraction, a field of blank white canvas, almost large enough to topple the composition, is encountered. Flatness combats depth, black is balanced against white, and fluorescent colors fade and emerge on top of a surface that is consistently finessed.

Wendy White has an MFA from Rutgers University. She has been honored with several awards including a 2005 George & Helen Segal Foundation Grant and a 2003 Space Program Studio Grant from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, New York, NY. She has had previous solo exhibitions at Sixtyseven in New York and Solomon Projects in Atlanta. Recent group exhibitions include Galerie Markus Winter in Berlin, Thrust Projects in New York and Galeria Moriarty in Madrid, where she is preparing for a solo exhibition in 2009. Wendy White lives and works in New York City.

Summer gallery hours will remain the same as usual gallery hours which are Tuesday through Saturday 10-6.
 
Image:
Wendy White
Radio Blooper, 2008
Acrylic and spray paint on canvas
50 x 70 inches

Courtesy of the artist and Leo Koenig Inc, New York 

Leo Koenig Inc.
545 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011

Leo Koenig Inc.

 

Wendy White

 

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Sister, Los Angeles

 

ROBERT GUTIERREZ
Memory & Lore

June 28 - August 2, 2008

Sister is pleased to announce the opening of Memory & Lore, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Robert Gutierrez.  Fusing Filipino folklore and animism, Gutierrez's works are an amalgam of the dystopic mental landscape and a disjointed, fantastical narrative, often presenting multiple narratives that unfold within a single work.  Thematically, the works range from the transmogrified idyllic to an almost serene harmony of sexuality, violence, and chaos.  Gutierrez weaves together these themes through his distinctive sense of composition and attention to detail.

 

Image:
Robert Gutierrez
Let Evening Come, 2007
ink on panel
14 x 11 inches

Courtesy of the artist and Sister, Los Angeles

Sister
437 Gin Ling Way
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Sister

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San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Room for Thought: Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer

July 10 through October 5, 2008

Room for Thought pairs two computer-generated video installations by Swiss artists Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer that reveal a fascination with internal landscapes of the mind. Hahn's single-channel, interactive video projection Luminous Point (2006) allows the viewer to take a self-guided tour of a virtual simulation of the artist's Manhattan apartment, using a remote control to navigate a gamelike labyrinth of spaces derived from digital manipulations of photographic and filmic records. Where Hahn's hybrid space incorporates images of the real world, Netzhammer presents a poetic world of pure invention. Premiering at SFMOMA, his new three-channel, site-specific installation Furniture of Proportions (2008) incorporates highly stylized wall drawings, animation, and sculptural objects to create an intricate spatial narrative.

Organized by Rudolf Frieling, SFMOMA's curator of media arts, the exhibition occupies adjacent galleries and represents two generations of artists who have consciously worked with the computer as a formal artistic tool and means of expression. Both Hahn and Netzhammer combine a variety of traditional media with computer techniques in order to articulate a deep concern with the histories of philosophy and art. The artists also share an interest in human thought processes and the interplay between external images in the world and internal images in the mind. Undertaken as an open-ended investigation, their art is concerned with transience and states of change, and deals in surrealistic effects, associative thinking, and temporal multiplicity.

Alexander Hahn
Hahn (born 1954) is widely regarded as a pioneer of new media. His experiments with digitally reworked animations combine documentary film and video, photography, and computer-generated imagery, conflating reality and fantasy. Filled with associative, often cyclical image-streams, his work generally revolves around problems of representation-specifically rules governing individual and collective memory-and raises questions about what it means to perceive, store, and recollect visual knowledge in both time and space.

Yves Netzhammer
Zurich-based artist Netzhammer (born 1970) has become known for his graphically dynamic drawings, animations, and sculptural installations that explore the interconnectedness of things. Dealing in extremely reduced forms, his mainly figurative imagery intentionally blurs the hierarchy among humans, animals, plants, and iconic objects. This abstract pictorial lexicon-or, "thought-imagery" to use the artist's term-functions more akin to a system of encoded signs that, uprooted from reason and familiar context, stand in opposition to the world of everyday images.

Room for Thought: Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Support for this exhibition is provided by Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council.

Image:

Yves Netzhammer

Furniture of Proportions (preparatory sketch), 2008

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt, Germany

© 2008 Yves Netzhammer

 

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

 

Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt

 

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Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago

 

Catherine Forster

They Call Me Theirs

3 Aug 2008 to 5 Oct 2008

They Call Me Theirs is a multi-media installation composed of video, prints, sculpture and sound, creating an encounter intended to question the distinctions we make between the natural and digital world. They Call Me Theirs reverses the experience of the outdoors by neatly packaging the four seasons in a "Box Set" inside a cabin, suggesting that our efforts to purify our experience with nature have actually taken us farther away from it.

 

The title of the work is taken from a line in the poem "Hamatreya" by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which questions man's desire to claim ownership of the land that is inherently owned by nature. In the poem, the Earth responds, "How am I theirs, / If they cannot hold me, / But I hold them?" Similarly, the exhibition holds a sound-insulated cabin/shrine for the viewer to enter. A hand-crafted hardwood box containing a small personal monitor playing video images of the four seasons sits inside. Two different cacophonous soundtracks play from both the interior and exterior, highlighting the tension between the realities of the two environments. Adjacent to the gallery housing the cabin, is a "hanging garden" composed of large scale inkjet prints on aluminum sign panels. The prints were sourced from video stills, then painted and digitized, creating a luscious though synthetic environment.

Catherine Forster is a filmmaker, artist, curator and educator based in the Chicago area. She received an M.F.A from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her artwork has been shown in exhibitions at the Carnegie Art Museum, South Bend Regional Art Museum, Orange County Contemporary Art Center, Exit Art and Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania, to name a few. Films by Forster have been screened at the Echo Park Film Center, Portsmouth Film Festival (UK), The Directors Lounge Berlin, and San Diego Women's Film Festival. Her artwork explores themes of identity, social development and the impact of popular culture on individuality. Forster is also the founder and director of a non-profit nomadic new media art space, LiveBox Gallery.

Image:
Catherine Forster
They Call Me Theirs
Box Set: hand crafted hardwood box, 5 DVDs, DVD player
10 x 9 X 3in

Courtesy of the artist

 

Hyde Park Art Center
5020 South Cornell Avenue
Chicago, IL 60615

 

Catherine Forster

 

Catherine Forster on re-title.com

 

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