bea mcmahon at mattress factory

Bea McMahon mostly uses video, sculptures and drawings to articulate her ideas which weave a strange and boundless path between an inner reality of thought and the ordinary outside world. Although her practice does not subscribe to an obvious visual lexicon of science, it does rely on thought processes she learned through the study of mathematics – one which exists in a state of logic and before language.

The real time elements of the film, entitled InDivisible, were shot using two cameras simultaneously. During filming in Pittsburgh, the cameras were positioned on a devise that fixed them so that they replicated the distance between human eyes. This real time footage was combined with a number of animated sequences. The two pieces of film are displayed simultaneously and are superimposed causing a double image to occur. The footage is projected using two projectors through left and right circular polarizing filters onto a screen made from a mirror that is coated in milk.

Within this body of work the mechanics of production and the methods of display coalesce with the conceptual references and subject matter. Creating a situation where each element references and reveals elements of each other. Such is the manner in which much of the subject matter in the film work is presented as double images which reference both thinking about how our vision works and the stereoscopic method used to film this work.

In this film what appears in each eye is different. Subsequently, by shutting either eye the viewer is in control of the structure of what appears to them; a set of choices are available, making manifest the binocular vision inherent in human sight. The film functions like an allegory where references are eluded to but never clarified where, partial representations of a number of systems combine.

We are brought on a quest where many seemingly disparate characteristics appear and disappear, where representations of Dante in the year 2010 are superimposed upon images of him from 1465. It counts out a logical, complicated, unreasonable thing; an irregular set of possibilities which the secular capitalist system we live in does not allow, as it does not admit other myths - that leads toward its own conclusion, like a myth that has already been unfurled.

Recent exhibitions include: Reverse Pedagogy, Model Niland Gallery, Sligo; The Pleasure is all mine, Auto Italia, London; Gracelands, curated by Vaari Claffey, outdoor festival, Dromohair, Co. Leitrim; Into Irish Drawing, touring exhibition, Limerick City Gallery, Great Britain, France, The Netherlands, all 2009; Present, Green On Red Gallery, Dublin; The Curated Visual Artist Award, curated by Mike Nelson, Douglas

Wild Signals

http://66.102.9.132/search?q=cache:gJzubvJuWtQJ:www.wkv-stuttgart.de/uploads/media/p_lang_eng.doc+susan+hiller+after+microscope+slides+found+in&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk

Wild Signals

Artistic Positions between Symptom and Analysis
September 13 – November 9, 2008





Kevin Schmidt, Wild Signals



Corinne May Botz

Sorel Cohen

Martin Dammann

Charles Gaines

Jana Gunstheimer

Susan Hiller

Joachim Koester

Joshua Mosley

Pablo Pijnappel

Tim Roda

Kevin Schmidt








Curators

Iris Dressler, Hans D. Christ

Introduction



From September 13 to November 9, 2008, the Württembergischer Kunstverein is presenting the exhibition “Wild Signals. Artistic Positions between Symptom and Analysis.” The exhibition comprises around 100 works by eleven international artists who have appropriated scientific methods in different ways. Historical documents are subjected to a shifted reading. The instruments and discourses of criminology, psychoanalysis, ethnology, natural and parasciences are borrowed as much as questioned. With an attitude that is as critical as it is ironical, the artists confront that production of truth that seeks to master the unknown and the incomprehensible and that rests on the denial of its own fallacies.


Speculation and staging, as techniques intrinsic to scientific thought, its experiments and reasonings, receive special attention – not least because this is the point at which aesthetic and scientific practices intersect. For example, stage, photography and film have long been described as instruments of knowledge, that serve not to prove but rather to actually produce and stage knowledge.


“Wild Signals” presents artistic mis-en-scènes of knowledge – and non-knowledge – in which the performative aspect is manifest. Here, knowledge appears in an open resonant space in which fact and possibility, what may be interpreted and what may not, are mutually conditional. In this context, the exhibition deploys two artistic strategies (and their overlapping): The analysis and simulation of findings, evidence and symptoms.


The exhibition’s title refers to Kevin Schmidt’s video installation of the same name.

Radical Nature

http://www.barbican.org.uk/radical_nature/exhibition

Psycho Buildings - Hayward Gallery

Rachel Whiteread, Place (Village), 2006–08, Mixed media: doll’s houses, crates, boxes, wood, electrical fittings and fixtures, electricity. Courtesy Rachel Whiteread. Photo: Stephen White

Above: Mike Nelson, To the Memory of H.P. Lovecraft, 1999, 2008. Mixed media. Courtesy the artist, Matt’s Gallery, London and Galleria Franco Noero, Torino. Photo: © Stephen White

Above: Michael Beutler, Sandwiches, dobbels and burgers, 2008. Paper and mesh. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Christian Nagel. Photo: © Stephen White

Above: Los Carpinteros, Show Room, 2008, Cinder blocks, fishing nylon, Ikea and B&Q furniture. Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. Photo: Stephen White

Above: Do Ho Suh, Fallen Star 1/5, 2008. ABS, basswood, beech, ceramic, enamel paint, glass, honeycomb board, laquer paint, latex paint, LED lights, pinewood, plywood, resin, spruce, styrene, polycarbonate sheets, PVC sheets. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York. Photo: © Stephen White

Gelitin, normally, proceeding and unrestricted with without title, 2008, Mixed media. Courtesy the artists. Photo: © Stephen White






Slovenian artist Tobias Putrih is showing Venetian, Atmospheric (2007), a beautifully created 30-seat cinema. Designed with curved wooden walls and a ceiling onto which twinkling stars and moving clouds are projected, Venetian, Atmospheric places the spectator in an ever-changing environment. Situated on the sculpture terrace facing Waterloo Bridge, Putrih’s structure screens a specially-curated programme of films about artists and architecture.Outside on another of the gallery’s sculpture terraces, the Argentinean artist, Tomas Saraceno has installed a huge transparent dome Observatory, Air-Port-City (2008). Visitors walk onto a mirrored floor into a disconcerting space where they can observe the sky above their heads or reflected below their feet. Visitors can also enter the dome at a higher level and climb up onto its transparent air supported ‘pillow’ to observe the visitors below.
Korean-born artist Do Ho Suh is presenting a major new sculpture, Fallen Star 1/5 (2008). The autobiographical work features an extraordinary detailed 1:5 scale model of the artist’s childhood home in Korea colliding into the New England apartment where he lived as an art student, the intricately recreated contents of both houses merged together on impact. In the upper galleries he has created a second work, Staircase – V (2008), a ghostly evocation of the basement staircase in the artist’s apartment that he has fashioned from vibrant red semi-translucent fabric. Suspended from the gallery’s ceiling, the staircase hovers off the gallery floor responding to the slightest movement around it.

Experimental Geography

Experimental Geography
Guest curated by Nato ThompsonOrganized by iCI (Independent Curators International) Oct. 9, 2009 - Jan. 31, 2010
Artists: Francis Alÿs, AREA Chicago, The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), e-Xplo, Ilana Halperin, kanarinka (Catherine D'lgnazio), Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, Lize Mogel, Multiplicity, Trevor Paglen, Raqs Media Collective, Ellen Rothenberg, Spurse, Deborah Stratman, Daniel Tucker, Alex Villar, Yin Xiuzhen

Experimental Geography is an exhibition that explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, as well as the juncture where the two realms collide (and possibly make a new field altogether). The exhibition presents a panoptic view of this new practice through a wide range of mediums including interactive computer units, sound and video installations, photography, sculpture, and experimental cartography created by 19 artists or artist teams from six countries as well as the United States.
Geography benefits from the study of specific histories, sites, and memories. Every estuary, landfill, and cul-de-sac has a story to tell. The task of the geographer is to alert us to what is directly in front of us, while the task of the experimental geographer—an amalgam of scientist, artist, and explorer—is to do so in a manner that deploys aesthetics, ambiguity, poetry, and a dash of empiricism.
The manifestations of “experimental geography” (a term coined by geographer Trevor Paglen in 2002) run the gamut of contemporary art practice today: sewn cloth cities that spill out of suitcases, bus tours through water treatment centers, performers climbing up the sides of buildings, and sound art of the breaths exhaled in running Boston’s evacuation route. In the hands of contemporary artists, the study of humanity’s engagement with the earth’s surface becomes a riddle best solved in experimental fashion.
The approaches used by the artists featured in Experimental Geography range from a poetic conflation of humanity and the earth to more empirical studies of our planet. Francis Alÿs, in collaboration with Rafael Ortega, Cuauhtémoc Medina, and 500 volunteers, created a human comb to move a sand dune outside Lima, Peru. Although the actual displacement was infinitesimal, its metaphorical resonance was colossal. Creating projects that are more empirically minded, the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a research organization, explores the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth's surface, embracing a multidisciplinary approach to fulfilling its mission. Using skill sets culled from the toolbox of geography, CLUI forces a reading of the American landscape (which includes man-made islands, submerged cities, traffic in Los Angeles, and the broadcast antennas in the San Gabriel Mountains) that refamiliarizes the viewer with the overlooked details of their everyday experience.
Nato Thompson is a curator at Creative Time, as well as a writer and activist. Among his public projects for Creative Time are Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, a project by Paul Chan in collaboration with The Classical Theatre of Harlem, and Democracy in America: The National Campaign. Thompson was formerly a curator at MASS MoCA, where his exhibitions included The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere and Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History.
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue co-published by iCI and Melville House Publishing. The catalogue includes essays by Nato Thompson, art historian Jeffrey Kastner, and artist Trevor Paglen; artist’s statements; and brief texts on forms of artistic practice.
Experimental Geography is a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by iCI (Independent Curators International), New York. The exhibition, tour, and catalogue are made possible, in part, by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the iCI Advocates, the iCI Partners, Gerrit L. and Sydie Lansing, and Barbara and John Robinson.

http://millergallery.cfa.cmu.edu/exhibitions/experimentalgeography/index.php?eid=143842020348

Yves Klein

http://www.jstor.org/pss/778734

Yves Klein or The Dead Dealer Thierry De Duve

“Having rejected nothingness, I discovered the void. The meaning of the immaterial pictorial zones, extracted from the depth of the void which by that time was of a very material order. Finding it unacceptable to sell these immaterial zones for money, I insisted in exchange for the highest quality of the immaterial, the highest quality of material payment — a bar of pure gold. Incredible as it may seem, I have actually sold a number of these pictorial immaterial states . . . Painting no longer appeared to me to be functionally related to the gaze, since during the blue monochrome period of 1957 I became aware of what I called the pictorial sensibility. This pictorial sensibility exists beyond our being and yet belongs in our sphere. We hold no right of possession over life itself. It is only by the intermediary of our taking possession of sensibility that we are able to purchase life. Sensibility enables us to pursue life to the level of its base material manifestations, in the exchange and barter that are the universe of space, the immense totality of nature.” Yves Klein, from the Chelsea Hotel Manifesto, 1961 [15]

Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle (Zone of immaterial pictorial sensibility) is an artist's book and performance by the french artist Yves Klein. The work involved the sale of documentation of ownership of empty space (the Immaterial Zone), taking the form of a cheque, in exchange for gold; if the buyer wished, the piece could then be completed in an elaborate ritual in which the buyer would burn the cheque, and Klein would throw half of the gold into the Seine [1]. The ritual would be performed in the presence of an art critic or distinguished dealer, an art museum director and at least two witnesses [1].

Reception of the Work
The French press delighted in calling the event 'a scandal' (Klein Sells Wind!), but others were more impressed; [1] Various members of the group present to watch Michael Blankfort's ritual transaction, for instance, on February 10th 1962, concurred that the event was 'extremely awe-inspiring' [1], ending with the noonday chimes ringing out from churches all around Paris. Blankfort, a Hollywood writer, wrote later of having "no other experience in art equal to the depth of feeling of [the sale ceremony]. It evoked in me a shock of self-recognition and an explosion of awareness of time and space." [16]
It has been suggested that the work is a response to Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction [17], in which he wrote “The unique value of the ‘authentic’ work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value.” [18] If so, the Zones directly refute Benjamin's central argument, that modern mass production can finally "emancipate the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual" [18].
"Believe me, one is not robbed when one buys such paintings; it is I who am always robbed because I accept money." Yves Klein

Exhibtions Past/Present

The Russian Linesman

Anish Kapoor
http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/anish-kapoor/

“I have often said that I have nothing to say as an artist. Having something to say implies that one is struggling with meaning. The role of the artist is in fact that we don’t know what to say, and it is that not knowing that leads to the work.” anish kapoor


http://www.wattis.org/ (california college of the arts)
Passangers
Americana: 50 States, 50 Months, 50 Exhibitions
Round 1: Daria Martin / Alexandre da Cunha / Ryan Gander / Shana Lutker / Tim Lee / Annette Kelm / João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva / Ulla von Brandenburg / Gareth Moore / Roman Ondák / Valérie Mréjen / Federico Herrero
Passengers is a permanent but constantly transforming exhibition of emerging international contemporary artists, none of whom have ever had a solo presentation in an American public art institution. The gallery is divided into two separate spaces, one of which features a group show of 11 artists, and the other a solo exhibition. At the end of each month, the solo artist will leave the exhibition completely, an artist from the group show will move into the solo space, and a new artist will be introduced into the group show. By September 2008 the group portion will have changed entirely from its original incarnation in September 2007.
The novel format of Passengers offers a new concept for exhibition making. It is part of a shift in programming at the Wattis that attempts to rethink the traditional ways in which art institutions organize exhibitions—as static presentations lasting several weeks or months—and to reevaluate the ideas of time and transformation with respect to exhibition practice. Over the coming years, the Wattis is also presenting a permanent exhibition featuring the artist Tino Sehgal, which will eventually include all of Sehgal's works to date presented one after the other, as well as Americana: 50 States, 50 Months, 50 Exhibitions, which runs through 2012.
Passengers is specifically designed to allow emerging artists to enter the Wattis Institute program quickly, and the exhibition will adapt according to developments in contemporary art practice. Its title is inspired by the way in which many artists and curators, working in a globalized world, pass through places and become witnesses of our time. Passengers now forms part of this journey, functioning as a vehicle by which artists can come to San Francisco. In this first year they will be visiting from countries as diverse as Portugal, Brazil, Slovakia, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Costa Rica as well as the United States—before moving on.
Jens Hoffmann

The Arctic Circle, NY

The Arctic Circle


http://www.thearcticcircle.org/


The Artic Circle is a nexus where art intersects science, architecture, and activisim - an incubator for thought and experimentation for artists and innovators who seek out and foster areas of collaboration to engage in the central issues of our time.



THE ARCTIC CIRCLE EXPEDITION OCT 2010


http://www.thearcticcircle.org/download/Exped_PDF.pdf

Sarah Anne Johnson

Forest

Laundry Room

Tent At Night


Tree Planting Project - Morning Meeting

Also see Ian Burns



'Canadian artist Sarah Anne Johnson completed her MFA at Yale in 2004 with a thesis project entitled "Tree Planting." This ambitious installation formed a record of her summers spent in northern Canada engaged in the collective activity of reforesting as a way of earning money and having a communal experience. For her art, she combines straight photographs with photographs recording "tableaux" made from sculptural figures set in the landscape. These vignettes extend the images beyond just what she was able to record to what she remembers both visually and emotionally.
In an extended project based on ecological volunteer tourism in the Galapagos Islands (financed partially by a grant from Yale) she continued the themes of idealism and nature, and has expanded the mediums in which she works to include painting and sculpture.Johnson's work is featured in many museum collections including the Guggenheim Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Canada. To learn more about the work of Sarah Anne Johnson please visit www.saulgallery.com/johnson/statement.html '

The End Of The Line - Fruitmarket Gallery Drawing Exhibition

Naoyuki Tsuji

Michael Borremans

The World As A Stage

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/theworldasastage/