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SITE SANTA FE TO PRESENT
UNEASY SPACE --
INTERACTIONS WITH TWELVE ARTISTS
JULY 26-NOVEMBER 30, 2003
Santa Fe, NM -- SITE Santa Fe is pleased to present Uneasy Space, an
international group exhibition of projects by twelve artists, from Saturday,
July 26 through Sunday, November 23, 2003, with a free public opening reception
Friday, July 25, from 6 to 7 pm. There will be a panel discussion with participating
artists moderated by Gregory Volk, art critic, curator, and Visiting Professor
at SUNY Albany and New York University, as part of the Artists On SITE component
of Art & Culture on Saturday, July 26, at 12 noon. The exhibition will open
at 11:30 am to accommodate this event, which is free with museum admission.
Uneasy Space will focus on the innovative and sometimes unnerving use
of physical space, interactive possibilities, and signifiers of day-to-day
life that characterize much of contemporary art. The participating artists
are Mathieu Briand, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Philip-Lorca
diCorcia, Kevin Hanley, Chris Johanson, Yayoi Kusama, Cildo Meireles, Paul
Pfeiffer, Gregor Schneider, Bill Viola, and Rachel Whiteread. Some of
the themes that run through all of these artists' work include alternative
media and technology, sensory perception, and innovative, large-scale installation.
In keeping with the institution's philosophy of supporting the creation of
new work, SITE Santa Fe is commissioning new, site-specific pieces by Chris
Johanson and Gregor Schneider. The exhibition is organized by SITE Santa Fe,
and made possible in part by LLWW Foundation.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Mathieu Briand, an emerging French artist, creates work that challenges
our notions of a visual language by drawing on sources outside of traditional
art practices. His art encompasses electronic media and music, the sciences,
and technology. His piece SYS*05.ReE*03/SE*1\MoE*2-4 is a group of
cyberhelmets that the viewer wears and allows the user to switch his or her
own perceptions to those of another user in an endless loop of visual intrusions.
The viewers connect through the cyberhelmets, creating a mental space that
moves within the architectural space. The result is what the artist calls
a "controlled schizophrenia."
Working in tandem and based in Lethbridge, Alberta, and Berlin, Germany, Canadian
artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have forged a
practice that is considered one of the most significant breakthroughs in conceptual
art in the last decade. Janet Cardiff creates, among other projects, experiential
installations using ambient sounds and fractured narrative elements. Her museum-based
installations, which uniquely replicate film viewings and musical recitals,
combine the artist's personal observations with cinematic effects that compete
with real sounds and sensations in the environment, creating a strangely intimate
as well as dislocating experience. George Bures Miller's machine-like sculptures
and shadowy video pieces of the 1990s address similar themes. Miller creates
situations that are tinged with violence, causing sustained tension, heightened
emotional states, and an experience of disembodiment for the viewer.
American photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia's unflinching portraits
of people in urban settings, while utterly realistic, have the feel of staged
film scenes. For diCorcia, photography eludes and reveals at the same time,
rendering the viewer both active witness and scene narrator. His most recent
body of work, Heads, is a series of portraits taken in New York City.
The images evoke the street photography tradition of Paul Strand, Walker Evans,
Harry Callahan, and Robert Frank.
Kevin Hanley is a Los Angeles-based artist who is actively involved
in a variety of art forms. His visual art includes installations, video works,
and photo-digital prints that conduct spare, humorous investigations into
the mechanics of the media. While growing up in the digital age, Hanley became
interested in invading the linear narrative to explore the frenetic space
that is accessible through technology. His playful pieces toy with appropriated
and original imagery by distorting functions of time, space, movement, sound,
context, and color to create new perspectives. Hanley has exhibited worldwide,
and his work is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
A native of San Jose, California, Chris Johanson is a visual artist
based in the Mission district of San Francisco. He typically creates site-specific
sculptural installations, which include figurative images, candid yet humorously-written
commentary that collectively addresses salient issues, from personal relationships
to world events with a sense of humor, to represent varied social and economic
realities of life in urban San Francisco. In recent years, Johanson's work,
along with the work of other artists of the "Mission School," has become one
of the most identifiable aspects of contemporary art in the San Francisco
Bay Area for its highly personal and activist-like visual vocabulary. He participated
in the current Whitney Biennial and is working on exhibitions in Los Angeles,
New York, Vienna, Tokyo, and San Francisco.
Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama made a splash in the New York art scene
of the 1950s and 60s by creating provocative and influential art in a variety
of media, much of which foreshadowed important art movements and helped to
shape the 1960s art aesthetic. Her sewn-and-stuffed canvas series Compulsion
Furniture prefigured the emergence of references to the body and sexuality
in the postminimalist sculpture of artists such as Eva Hesse. She contributed
to the emergence of Environments with her Infinity Mirror Rooms and
to Happenings with her nude body painting performances and her fashion shows.
Kusama, who continues to work out of a psychiatric hospital in Japan, has
been the subject of major retrospectives in recent years, as art critics have
begun to acknowledge her unique body of work and the seminal role it played
in the development of contemporary art.
Cildo Meireles has played a vital role in the trajectory of Brazilian
art over the last 50 years. Emerging in the mid 1960s when international art
was undergoing formal and conceptual shifts, Meireles' work helped galvanize
theoretical discussions about art and its relationship to the social and political
world in which it is presented. His prodigious oeuvre, which includes large
installations, sculptures, and drawings, is marked by a consistent conceptual
complexity as well as an attentiveness to the physical experience of making
and seeing art. His installations invite the viewer into tactile environments,
intimately engaging the senses in the experience of the art. Meireles was
the subject of a retrospective presented at the New Museum of Contemporary
Art in New York in 1999. This retrospective was accompanied by the publication
of a major monograph.
Emerging New York City-based artist Paul Pfeiffer has been receiving
substantial attention for his digitally engineered installations, which find
unique ways of appropriating popular imagery to stirring effect. Pfeiffer
works in a variety of media including sculpture, photography, and computer
photocollage, but is perhaps best known for his video installations examining
the popular sports phenomenon. In these installations, images of athletes
and fans are remade into digital totems, and their interactions are used as
visual laboratories to examine the effects of contemporary media forms on
human forms and perceptions. Pfeiffer has exhibited at prestigious shows and
galleries throughout the world, and he is the recipient of numerous awards
and fellowships.
German artist Gregor Schneider has carved a unique niche for himself
in the contemporary art world by focusing on the ongoing reconstruction of
his family home, where he has been adding walls, partitions, and rooms. Later,
he began to dismantle pieces of house, accompanied by home videos and photographs,
and reconstruct them in galleries all over the world. Schneider's perpetually
expanding dwelling generates a strong sense of uncanniness and suspense. His
creations call into question the relationships between identity and home,
mind and architecture, and living and constructing. Schneider has received
numerous awards and exhibited worldwide.
Bill Viola has long been recognized as a pioneer of video art. His
contributions to the genre helped define the medium as it expanded to include
multiple-screen projections and immersive spatial environments. From the beginning,
he has kept abreast of technological advances. However, a primary characteristic
of his work is the avoidance of a "tech" aesthetic in favor of themes of consciousness,
contemplation, and spirituality, which are often represented in a deeply personal
address to the viewer. In 1995 Viola represented the United States at the
Venice Biennale with a highly acclaimed group of works titled Buried
Secrets. A Getty Scholar grant in 1998 enabled him to write and publish
Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973-1994. In 1997,
The Whitney Museum of American Art organized a comprehensive 25-year survey
of his video work, which toured extensively throughout the United States and
Europe.
Rachel Whiteread is known for literally turning common objects like bathtubs,
mortuary slabs, mattresses, and cupboards inside out through a casting process.
Her objects are records of the space they occupy but they are also psychological
momento mori of objects already deeply and emotionally charged. Memory and
death are important references for these starkly white objects. Whiteread
was born, lives and works in London, England. She was the recipient of the
Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1993 and has shown at the Museum
of Modern Art in New York.
Artists' Projects:
Mathieu Briand, SYS*05.ReE*03/SE*1\MoE*2-4 (2000) and SYS*016.JeX*02/SE-FX\360
(2001)
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, The Paradise Institute (2001)
Philip-Lorca diCorcia, 10 photographs from his Heads series
(2000-2001)
Kevin Hanley, Threesixty (2002) and Different at Times
(2002)
Chris Johanson, a new piece commissioned by SITE Santa Fe
Yayoi Kusama, Fireflies on the Water (2002)
Cildo Meireles, Volatile (1980-2003)
Paul Pfeiffer, work to be confirmed
Gregor Schneider, a new piece commissioned by SITE Santa Fe
Bill Viola, Anthem (1983)
Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Pair) (1999)
SITE Santa Fe is located at 1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Exhibition
hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 10:00 am - 5:00 pm; Friday, 10:00 am -
7:00 pm. Admission is $5.00 for adults and $2.50 for students and seniors;
members are free. Free admission is offered on Fridays, made possible by a
grant from The Brown Foundation, Inc., Houston. Free guided tours are offered
on Fridays at 6:00 pm and Saturdays and Sundays at 2:00 pm. Tours in Spanish
are by appointment. SITE Santa Fe gift certificates are available. Call 505.989.1199
for more information. This announcement is partially funded by the City of
Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers' Tax.
Contact: Press Office
Tel: 505.989.1199
Fax:505.989.1188
email: press@sitesantafe.org
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Bill Viola
Anthem, 1983
Videotape, color,
stereo sound, 11:30 minutes
Courtesy of the
artist
Photo: Kira Perov
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