Porcelain, Stoneware, wood, paint, video projection, audio, monofilament.
10 ft. x 25 ft. x 14 ft. area installed
Images of the gallery exhibition can be seen here. You can also see and hear the video and audio that was included in the installation.
Despite being legal in the united states, portrayals of abortion in pop culture and politics would have us believe that the choice is only acceptable when the alternative is self-destruction or worse. Rarely is abortion portrayed as a smart, brave decision. People who have had abortions are cast as villains or, more benevolently, victims and rarely as heroes of their own story. AWE/AGENCY seeks to combine formal beauty and wonder with pointed, direct content with the intent of offering an alternative model to the dominant narrative surrounding abortion in the U.S.
Nicole Gugliotti is an artist and abortion services worker.
Organic shapes made of clay serve as speakers that cradle the head when participants lean in to hear recorded personal stories.
In INTERFACE/INTERFACING, a suspended needle moves slowly along a thread stretched across the gallery wall. The needle strikes the thimbles creating subtle percussive sound and also triggering the pre-recorded sounds embedded in the electronics. Visitors are invited to intimately experience line and space not only visually but also through movement and sound. Life and art intersect through this drawing together of various art practices and sensory experiences.
Accompanying the installation is NOTIONS, a series of mixed media works by Robin Ripley, that takes us further into this extra-ordinary experiencing of everyday objects.
DIANA BURGOYNE’s work addresses the relationships between society, technology, and the human environment. Burgoyne assembles electronic components to create works that appear “hand-made” to humanize what is often perceived as a sterile material. The material, content, and aesthetic of her art practice are developed from the idea of constructing “Electronic Folk Art”.
ROBIN RIPLEY works with the language of objects, highlighting the composite nature of perception. Her work re-examines familiar objects as well as explores their function as signifiers and repository for sensory information, knowledge and memory. Ripley creates objects that do not exist in the natural world and yet reflect or transmit information about our world and our place in it.
Created in 1989, Chasing the Blue Train covered the entrance landing of the exhibit making it the largest installation on display though its dimensions vary upon each exhibit. The modest piece included five-six pianos with boom boxes attached, each playing a different Coltrane composition: including “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes” and “Body and Soul”.
As the petite blue locomotive made its way along the tracks, it disappears and reappears behind piano lids into a coal-lined tunnel. Hammons often incorporated his African-American heritage into his pieces. He emphasized on Black empowerment, racial injustice, and struggle.
Chasing was layered in historic symbolism which could be interpreted as narrations of the Industrial Revolution represented by the coal tunnel. This represented the start of the Harlem Renaissance around the time the “A” line was built on 125th street. Hammons commented on many areas regarding history and the progression of American culture.
Personnes at Monumenta 2010 in the Grand Palais, Paris
A common denominator in Boltanski’s work is memory – spanning childhood and personal memories, memorials and the history of humanity. The artist made an installation with 30 tons of clothes in memory of all the people who used to wear them, evoking the memory of their disappearance. ‘Personnes’ means both ‘people’ and ‘nobodies’ . The installation was supported by a deafening soundtrack of human heart beats recorded for the artist’s Archives du Coeur project.
Eight minute video.
Great art deserves a pilgrimage. We should travel to see it. Literalists might argue that this can hardly be avoided. But the long winter's journey to Paris is not just a necessity if you want to see Christian Boltanski's momentous new show: it is peculiarly apt. For when you get there, the journey continues.
An icy breeze shivers through the colossal emptiness of the Grand Palais, desolate, bare, its exit signs creaking. The structure rises high above the void, a gigantic birdcage of iron curlicues and struts in which pigeons clatter in hope of a perch. Stretching out before you is nothing but an array of floor-level encampments, each marked out by four rusting poles with a neon tube slung between them. The last light is away in the distance.
Sixty-nine camps, but there are no tents and no living people, only thousands of old clothes lying face down on the floor. Is this where they fell or where they were laid? The irresistible metaphor springs literal in the visitor's mind, as if clothes could have bodies or faces.
You walk, you look, you search for evidence among the mildewed raincoats and threadbare denim. Here is a corduroy jacket, almost new, and a faded gabardine; there is a baby's knitted cardigan. They were young, they were old, they were not ready to die, poor departed souls who leave nothing behind but shucked garments. Mown down, laid out in groups, they have all met a terrible end. This is apparent without a single bloodstain or name; Boltanski's evidence is both more and less than proof.
And as you walk, the sense is of honouring the dead, of trying to observe the details of each and every one. These grouped clothes may represent mass graves, or corpses arrayed for identification in the school gym, but they also constitute a kind of cemetery. For the experience is just the same: that there is nobody here and yet the place is crowded. Personnes, the piece is called: people, but at the same time no one.
The title is as characteristic of Christian Boltanski's art as the work itself, being perfectly judged and distilled. I cannot think of a single piece by this poet-artist that is not equally affecting and concise. It is no surprise that he has long been considered France's greatest living artist but, at 65, Boltanski has surpassed himself. The third in the Monumenta series – comparable with the Unilever Series in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern – is his most profound installation yet.
Boltanski has always been a maker of monuments and memorials. His medium is the human trace and the memento mori. In the 1970s, he used to exhibit the "documents" of his own life, letters, scraps, locks of hair, photographs of himself as a child (which were probably nothing of the sort). Later, he began to commemorate the lives of others.
TheDead Swiss, the Children of Dijon: these world-famous shrines were assembled from photographs cut from obituaries, heaps of secondhand clothes, biscuit tins that might, or might not, contain personal effects; false memories, so to speak, especially since the dead were always anonymous. But these objects and images, no matter their provenance, were inevitably powerful for the sympathetic mind can hardly help but reconstruct a life from the smallest and most trivial of relics.
Pawned brooches, lost umbrellas, dogeared telephone books with their intensely intimate yet resolutely impersonal listings: your mind would rush in, imagining all these other people in other places. It did not matter that the evidence was meagre, partial, perhaps entirely specious, because the objects themselves were real, had once belonged to real livings beings.
That their owners were unknown equated very precisely with the universality of the evidence – a watch, a coat – and the poignant truth that one could only mourn the unknown through an act of the imagination.
This was an art that spoke so clearly and simply that a child could understand it and so it is, to some extent, with Personnes. The austerity of the scene is overwhelming, compounded by the booming heartbeats that seem to emit from nowhere and yet all around – time being measured out by human life.
But what makes this work – this experience – different is that it does not depend upon reality in quite the same way. You do not imagine these clothes to be those of murdered people so much as humanity en masse, flattened like biblical crops. And the metaphor climaxes in a towering mound of clothes, above which a five-fingered claw hangs from a crane, occasionally moving towards the pile, hoisting a random garment and then, just as arbitrarily, letting it drop.
You were in a necropolis, now you are in purgatory: balanced between heaven and hell, witnessing the hand of God. Except, of course, that you are in a freezing, cacophonous place surrounded by secondhand clothes and probably eager to be gone. That is the exceptional achievement of the piece. All its elements are frankly simple and apparent, you see how they combine, how it all works. Yet none of this stifles its resonant truths, that in the midst of life we are in death, that man's inhumanity to man continues beyond Auschwitz, Srebrenica, Rwanda.
Boltanski keeps you there, looking and thinking, walking through the work instead of standing before it like a picture. And then he asks you to record your own heartbeat in a supremely pointless but utopian project. All the world's heartbeats stretching out until the last syllable of recorded time: that should stand against oblivion. Or so it seems, listening to their rhythms filling the Grand Palais – a sound fearful to some, joyful to others, heralding one's release back to life from this premonitory vision. The choice, as in life, is all yours.- Laura Cumming, January 2010, theguardian.com
Cropped photographs from original German mug shots of captured Reistence fighters.
The Haus der Kunst is one of the most important art museums in Germany. The building in Munich’s Prinzregentenstrasse was opened by Adolf Hitler in 1937 amidst substantial fanfare.
Originally dubbed the “House of German Art,” the museum promoted art which reflected the National Socialist understanding of the so-called master race.
The building’s sinister past made it a symbol of the censorship of “degenerate art” as well as the persecution of artists during the Nazi’s reign of terror. In recent years the museum has made concerted efforts to challenge and confront its history.
The Haus der Kunst was constructed by the Nazis in 1937.
Sun Boxes are installations by Craig Colorusso powered by the sun via solar panels. There is a different loop set to play a guitar note in each box continuously. These guitar notes collectively make a Bb chord. Because the loops are different in length, once the piece begins they continually overlap and the piece slowly evolves over time.
The sounds of Sun Boxes have been described as both soothing and energizing. A unique combination of adjectives often used to describe yoga, or meditation. When experiencing the piece, Sun Boxes allows the participant to slow down, and notice the subtleties of the composition unfold. With the abundance of technology and hustle of this culture it is a much needed concept to not only be allowed, but also encouraged to slow down.
Image and text source Design Squish. Link here to see video.
DC-motors, wire isolated, cardboard boxes, power supply. Dimensions: height 3.5m, Ø 4.8m / height 11.5 ft, Ø 15,7 ft. Installation view: Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida, USA. Curated by Matthew McLendon. Exhibition design by Matthew Harmon. Project coordination and assisted by Stephanie Sherriff. Assisted by Vanessa Gageos, Florian Bürki, Matthew Harmon, Kyle Petreycik, Alvy Vereecke, Emily Martin, Morgan Janssen, Chris Schumaker, Gabbi Ricci, Tracy Keenan, Diana Lueken, Lester Gessley, Alicia Stein, Emily Meyer, Chris Degrer, Alex Wyllie, Katelyn Bobek and Anna Paul. Exhibition coordination by Donn Roll. Conservation by David Piurek. Volunteer coordination and academic affairs by David Berry. Photographies and videos by Zimoun. Kindly supported by Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council.
DC-motors, paper, nylon, wood, power supply. Dimensions: Size variable.
Installation view: Orbital Garden Bern, Switzerland.
Curated by Don Li and Jahn Antener. Studio production assisted by Elisa Tangheroni, Valentina Brkovic, Matteo Taramelli, Janis Weidner, Ulf Kallscheidt and Till Hillbrecht. On-site production assisted by Elisa Tangheroni, Valentina Brkovic, Matteo Taramelli, Paul Hügli, Don Li, Jahn Antener, Li Rotzler, Marc Beekhuis, Hannes Zweifel, Micha Bürgi, Simon Petermann, Jelena Savic, Monika Grossen, Jahn Mazel and Nina Wagner. Video by Studio Zimoun. Supported by KulturStadtBern, Swisslos / Amt für Kultur Kanton Bern, Migros Aare and Burgergemeinde Bern.
Bee's Planetary Map, 1998 Installation: 15 straw baskets, wire, motors, broken mirror disk, shattered mirror glass, metal rods, wooden stick, rock, sound, lights. h: 168 x w: 384 x d: 228 in / h: 426.7 x w: 975.4 x d: 579.1 cm Courtesy: Marian Goodman Gallery
Sixteen inverted straw baskets, looking for all the world like beehives, were suspended from the ceiling at various heights. Inside each basket was a lightbulb, casting pools of light on the floor. On the floor beneath each basket was a circular glass mirror which now and then swiveled, catching the light and reflecting it in constantly moving circles and oblongs on the walls and ceiling. Throughout the room you could hear a recording of the insistent buzzing of a swarm of bees. Topping it all off, every few minutes a small rock attached to a cable fell from the ceiling to hit a cracked mirror on the floor, around which were strewn pieces of broken glass. This repetitive, destructive act was disturbing but also raw and cathartic. On one wall could be found a poem by Horn, providing an excellent textual counterpoint: "The bees have lost their equilibrium / They swarm in dense clouds high above / Their luminous basket hives are deserted / One of their centres is being destroyed forever anew...." At their best (and this installation was a good example), Horn's works are dramatic and theatrical but also poetically engaging, in a way that gets to you on numerous levels simultaneously. Here, the notion of bees loosed from their hives to permanently wander unseen evoked ideas of dislocation, rootlessness and nomadism--perhaps a subtle reference to current crises in places like Kosovo. At the same time the installation had a dreamlike, mythic quality suggestive of primal fears and longings: the desire for safety and order, or the desire for unencumbered release. source: findarticles.com
