Exchanges in Usonia, 2009

Mixed media installation

Courtesy of Floating Lab Collective 

The Floating Lab Collective is a Metropolitan Washington DC area-based group of artists. Who collectively work on performances, media art and research. The main idea is to expand the space of art into public space thereby expanding the discourse concerning contemporary art. The participating artists are a dynamic and flexible group that varies in size depending on the piece to be executed. 

It is about empowering ourselves to play a role in a system in which we feel powerless and invisible, reduced to a series of passive roles: consumer, unemployed, debtor, and taxpayer. We are interested in the term "economy" as critical analysis of how "exchange", originally central to economic systems is decentralized in the creation of complex systems of speculation and accumulation. As a collective, we prioritize dialogical processes between active individuals or groups over material goods.

The current economic crisis is accentuating the social gap, presenting new forms of exclusion. In the face of that reality, collective responses and creative solutions have surfaced, and artists can play an important role within this context. The main principle of this project is to establish a network of communities, creating local currency or "scrip" establishing a system where the community currency becomes part of a larger economic network. As such, we want to produce a journal of the economy with exchange rates, stories of how the community empowers itself and what problems it encounters. We also plan to create an archive of the bills as symbolic objects. By proposing its own currency, FLC will have generated a local economy at some location in the Washington D.C. metroplex.

For this piece in particular with participatory performances and actions involving people, investigating ways of placing the economic engine within the communities and by focusing on the most basic principles of exchange-reciprocity.

In this case media, particularly blogs, news have been a constant source of information and ideas. In the times of crisis the news media looks for faces, micro-stories, and personal narratives, I think we have been attentive to that trend, but with the intention to empower, not victimize.

We want to propose creative tactics of participation and expression. As in the past, our attempt here is to create a social platform for dialogue and exchange of ideas, to look for creative alternatives. We envision an active audience, one that engages and proposes. Looking at the crisis, the most innovative and creative ideas seem to come from community members in search of resistance.

To learn more about Floating Lab Collective please click on the link below.

Floating Lab Collective Homepage 

Jennifer Allora (American b.1974)

Guillermo Calzadilla (Cuban, b. 1971)

Land Mark (Footprints) #1, Set I, 2001-2004

19" x 24" digital C-prints

Courtesy of the artists and Moises Beresdivin Collection

Collaborating since 1995, Allora & Calzadilla approach visual art as a set of experiments that test whether ideas such as authorship, nationality, borders, and democracy adequately describe today’s increasingly global and consumerist society. Their hybridized works—often a unique mix of sculpture, photography, performance, sound and video—explore the physical and conceptual act of mark making and its survival through traces. By drawing historical, cultural, and political metaphors out of basic materials, Allora & Calzadilla's works explore the complex associations between an object and its meaning.

About the Work

Initially this photography project consisted of designing custom-made soles that were added onto the shoes of activists involved with the land reclamation campaign on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico, at that time a disputed U.S. Navy bomb-testing range. The shoes were used in civil disobedience actions in which various people seeking to reclaim that land entered the range and, as a result of walking in that landscape, marked their presence in the form of a stamp on the terrain.

Whenever the U.S. military was about to bomb, the range would be surrounded by military police to keep the activists out. If somebody got in, the bombing had to stop. Walking, to leave an index or a trace in the sand, took on a much denser, meaning in this context. It meant to contest, to refuse, and to "critically" disrupt the "official" meaning of the site.

Depicted in the images are multiple footsteps leaving individual messages chosen by each individual person. In some photos you can trace the trajectory of a single person across the photographic frame. In others, there are a hundreds of steps taken that to tease out any single path would be impossible. This, we felt has a lot to do with the nature of the civil disobedience actions themselves. There were numerous people partaking in these actions, each with their own ideological perspective and reason for being there.

We wanted to find a way to convey the heterogeneity of this group in the photograph, and as we saw with the actual marks being produced in the sand going in so many different directions, canceling each other out as one foot replaced the one that was made before- there were many paths and directions, both physically as well as subjectively. The people that were involved in there actions, while all converging on the issue of stopping the bombings in Vieques, arrived at this moment from distant, even antagonistic perspectives.

The reality of diverse political perspectives, portrayed in the photographic images that we took, is the new crucible of the future development of these military lands, and many of the people where were once marching together in solidarity against the bombing, are now confronted with the difficult task of how to democratically debate the future development of this land, and in fact are finding themselves in opposition to each other over these new issues.

To learn more about the artists please click on the links below.

PBS

Gladstone Gallery

Homepage 

Nora Ligorano (American, b.1955)

Marshall Reese (American, b. 1956)

Main Street Meltdown, 2008

DVD, digital print

Courtesy of the artists

Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese have collaborated together as Ligorano/Reese since the early 80’s. They use collaboration to blend diverse talents into a singular voice and vision. In the process of creating their work, their individual contributions intermingle between each other from brainstorming to realizing and producing the art on location or in the studio.

They use unusual materials and industrial processes to make their limited edition multiples, videos, sculptures and installations. They move easily from dish towels, underwear, and snow globes, to electronic art and computer controlled interactive installations.Their pursuit is an ongoing investigation into the impact of technology on culture and the associations and meanings that the media brings to images, language and speech in politics.

As the 2008 election drew to a close, we felt the need to draw attention to the economy and the impact of a recession, the connection between the costs of the Iraq war and its economic consequences on the U.S.

As we developed the project, and as the economic forecasts darkened, we decided to time it with the anniversary of the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, which caused the Great Depression, an anniversary coinciding with the final week of the '08 election.

The temporary monuments we make from ice function as a stage, or public forum, that draws people. Ice is an enchanting and familiar material, it's not precious by nature, so people feel that they can touch it, and freely interact with it, one of the points, in making this work, was to gauge the public’s reaction to seeing the economy disappear before their eyes. The event becomes "a social sculpture" which we sought to document by interviewing passerby and expanding on the event through media, to give the physical dimensions of the work a virtual aspect thought the Internet.

The installation became a magnet for the media; it was a spectacle- the wire 

services, broadcast television, internet services all came to visit the site and witness the event. There is very much an element of the absurd to seeing so many reporters standing around writing notes as ice melts.

We read journals and follow alternative media on a regular, sometimes daily basis- 

The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Harper‚In These Times, Democracy Now that 

provided critical analyses of economic and political events. Naomi Klein's book on Disaster Capitalism is a significant work and something that we think about.

We are hoping to expand this project: to present ice sculptures in various locations throughout the country to create a dialogue focusing on progressive economics and local solutions to economic change.

We are provocateurs, in the sense that art allows people to comprehend the unthinkable, to break down walls, open windows, and push through doors. This is the role we are 

looking for.

To learn more about the artists please click on the links below.

PBS

Ligorano/Reese Homepage 

(American, b.1978)

Untitled Translation Exercise,2006

DVD, 103 minutes

Courtesy of the artist and team (gallery, inc.)

Arcangel is a digital artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. His work is concerned with the relationship between technology and culture, and with media appropriation. The artist's best known works are his Nintendo game cartridge hacks and reworkings of obsolete computer systems of the 70's and 80's. 

In this piece Arcangel is focusing on the relationship between technology and culture. The artist appropriated the film, Dazed and Confused by Richard Linklater, which is a coming of age film in America in the 70s, and a familiar pop culture film. He then took the script of the movie and had it sent to India to be rerecorded. Once Archangel had the new recording he then redubbed the newly recorded version over the original.

What is interesting is how the original meaning of the film has, or has not changed to you, the viewer. One could see how this would easily comment on the idea of outsourcing in today's society, using the overseas company to record the script and then giving it back to the American viewer. It can also speak to how our own culture is beginning to come back to us. Is the movie taken out of context with the addition of a non-American accent?  How has media appropriation affected the original meaning of the film? 

To learn more about the artist please click on the links below.

Wikipedia

Deitch Projects

Columbia University Interview

(American, b.1950)

Destroy Me, 2007

75" x 60", pigment print

Courtesy of the artist and Cheim & Read

Jenny Holzer is an American conceptual artist. The main focus of her work is the use of language, words and ideas in public space. Originally utilizing street posters, LED signs became her most visible medium, though her diverse practice incorporates a wide array of media including bronze plaques, painted signs, stone benches and footstools, stickers, T-shirts, condoms, paintings, photographs, sound, video, light projection and the Internet as well.

Holzer is a world-renowned artist who has received numerous awards and has had international major exhibitions. She was the first woman to represent the United States in the Venice Biennale (1990).

Jenny Holzer is an American conceptual artist who focuses her work on the use of words and ideas in public space. While her subversive work often blends in among advertisements in public space, its arresting content violates expectations. Often Holzer's work presents both explicit content and minimalist aesthetics that make profound statements about the world of advertising and consumer society today. The texts function as comments on that environment they fit into, stimulating awareness of our social conditioning as conveyed by the very landscape in which we may be confronted by them.

In this piece the artist has over laid a picture of a Castle Sant'Angelo in Rome with a poem by Mahmoud Darwish.  Jenny Holzer wrote texts herself for a long time however since 1993, she has been mainly working with texts written by others. Some of these are literary texts by great authors such as the Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, Henri Cole (USA), Elfriede Jelinek (Austria), Fadhil Al-Azawi (Iraq), Yehuda Amichai (Israel) and Mahmoud Darwish (Palestine). "I stopped writing my own text in 2001," she explains. "I found that I couldn't say enough adequately and so it was with great pleasure that I went to the text of others."

He Embraced His Murderer

He embraces his murderer. May he win his heart: Do you feel angrier if I survive?

Brother...My brother! What did I do to make you destroy me?

Two birds fly overhead. Why don‚'t you shoot upwards? What do you say?

You grew tired of my embrace and my smell. Aren't you just as tired of the fear within me?

Then throw your gun in the river! What do you say?

The enemy on the riverbank aim his machine gun at an embrace? Shoot the enemy!

Thus we avoid the enemy's bullets and keep from falling into sin.

What do you say? You'll kill me so the enemy can go to our home

and descend again into the law of the jungle?

What did you do with my mother's coffee, with your mother's coffee?

What crime did I commit to make you destroy me?

I will never cease embracing you.

And I will never release you.

From Unfortunately, It was Paradise by Mahmoud Darwish

To learn more about the artist please click on the links below.

Artist's Homepage 

PBS 

Wikipedia 

More information about this work 

Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer whose work deliberately blurs lines between social science, contemporary art, journalism, and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us. 

Paglen's visual work has been exhibited around the world and several Biennials and has been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, Wired, Newsweek, Modern Painters, Aperture, and Art Forum. Paglen is the author of three books and in spring 2010, Aperture will publish a book of his visual work.

In all of my work, I look at military intelligence operations that are undertaken in secret, the so-called "black world". For Symbology, I compiled patches, insignia, and symbols referring to these programs. Strangely enough, this "black world" is rich with such symbolic imagery, even though it affiliates someone with deeply held secrets. When these patches get displayed they give you clues to what some of these programs might be, but they do not tell you what they are. Nevertheless, you know that there is something.

In Limit-telephotography I used tools from astronomy to produce photographs of "black" sites that are typically out in the desert. There are these giant restricted military ranges around these sites, so there‚'s often no place where you can go to actually see some of these places. I started to aim at the ground with equipment that would normally be used to take pictures of Jupiter. I was trying to find places where I would have a line of sight to some of these "black" sites and shoot landscape photos. It seems that these images are about seeing the places they are trying to depict, but in a certain sense they also show you the physical limits of vision. It shows you how it looks like when vision starts falling apart.

About eight years ago, I was studying prisons in the Unites States and I was going though all these old satellite and aerial image archives. I wanted to see where these prisons were, what was around them, why they were in the places that they were. I would notice places where the images had been taken out. I started to realize they were not there because some of the military installations are not supposed to be out there. The War on Terror was getting started and I very early on got the sense that these blank spots on the map were somehow paradigmatic of something that was happening politically.

 I am trying to capture the moment when something becomes visible but remains unintelligible, when you find evidence of absence in a certain sense, It‚'s about showing something and not showing it at the same time, but also pointing out the epistemological collapse that goes along with that.

To learn more about the artist, please click on the links below.

 Artist's homepage

 More about this piece

Wikipedia 

(American, b.1951)

Operation Paydirt, 2009

Mixed media installation

Courtesy of the artist and Helen K. Nagge

Though he is classically trained, Chin's art, which is both analytical and poetic, evades easy classification. Alchemy, botany, and ecology are but a few of the disciplines that intersect in his work. He insinuates art into unlikely places, including destroyed homes, toxic landfills, and even popular television, investigating how art can provoke greater social awareness and responsibility. Unconventional and politically engaged, his projects also challenge the idea of the artist as the exclusive creative force behind an artwork. 

Operation Paydirt is about SOLUTION and responsible action to deal with high lead contaminated soil of New Orleans. It involves the delivery of a call to action of three million children (and adults) through expression, a defensible scientific solution and a program that can implement that solution.  It is about the transformation of a city in need, with compromised ecological conditions, into a city that can offer a plan of rescue to other cities threatened by the same circumstances.

The project started in Spring 2006 with visits to Post Katrina New Orleans to assist as an artist in the rebuilding of the flood wrecked city. My investigations and observations yielded disturbing and overwhelming evidence of post-storm trauma. While researching soil contamination, I learned that New Orleans has been one of the top lead polluted cities in the USA and 30% if the inner-city childhood population were lead poisoned before the storm. After learning that little or np support was going toward efforts to deal with this disturbing reality, I was compelled to initiate a response of equivalent magnitude.

I engaged with an inventive seriousness. After all, how do you make $300 million (the projected cost of the solution) real through an art action? And how do you make sure the people of New Orleans, given so many bogus promises and after enduring so much real tragedy and poverty, receive something real?

I used reports from environmental agencies and an environmental defense fund to set a background to investigate and then I consulted with scientists from academic and federal agencies as well as the department of health. For the FUNDRED aspect of the project, I took leads from the distribution of currency by the Federal Reserve banking system and maps of the disaster victim's diaspora.

Pointing out the problem is adequate. I aim for engagement on all levels process-art, science, politics-to assist in the collective rebuilding of a city from below the ground up.

The audience can have an opportunity to become the artists of the project and participate in any part of the solution.

To learn more about the artist please click on the links below.

 PBS

 Wikipedia

 Mel Chin at the Columbus Museum of Art

(Spanish, b.1972)

Polylumious tetraflacidontics (red, yellow, orange),2009

60"x 47", enamel on Mylar

Courtesy of the artist and Foxy Production

Ester Partegtas' work cannily articulates tensions around consumption and excess, capturing the expression and resistance that somehow escape through fissures in a contemporary climate of scrutiny and control. In her investigations of public and private spaces, she often takes the city street, its people, products and refuse, as her starting point. She creates unnerving, gestural tableaux that consider how individuality and collectivity evolve and devolve. Partegas produces work across a often surprising range of media and explores excessive consumption by destabilizing scale, and mimicking and parodying familiar signs or settings. 

It is about mystery, trust, blindness, intimacy, economics, politics, poetry, abuse, abstraction, power.

The starting point was my fascination with the amount of incomprehensive words that make up the list of ingredients in processed food. On one hand, it's a pure explosion of inventiveness: long beautiful words, coded by numbers, stimulated by Latin prefixes, seasoned with shades of catalogued colors: it's poetry within reach, very postmodern. On the other hand, it's absolutely scary to put this inside your body, a bunch of things you don't know al all! Is this an act of complete trust, or complete blindness?

For Polylumpious, I was interested in capturing my feelings when holding one of these products in my hand, reading the label. What I depict in my work is always a return to thise first encounters with objects or spaces, bringing out my own experiences with them, my fears, desires, and hopes, and ultimately, contradictions and anxieties so abundant in our society, I use myself as a guinea pig assuming that my feelings are representative of those of others. It's a grey area to work in as it doesn't bring any specific answers and isn't supported by a theory of field of research, the aim is to express admiration for the advancement of our society, while expressing distrust and profound sense of tragedy.

For me, displaying my work is to start a dialogue. I am not trying to point out what's wrong, or to say what is best. Besides all that's been written, studied, analyzed, investigated, etc., what is important and real, is your own experience at that precise moment, the awareness of your existence in the world. These moments so direct and so fresh, are very empowering. Our society has resorted to meaningless amounts of information that data, invested in determining that is good or bad. In a way, it's an extremely religious way of functioning: your own experience is not valued because it is not computable and often irreconcilable. So I am not pointing to anything in particular: I take a recognizable common object, manipulate it, and show it in the hope that people will formulate their own thoughts about it.

To learn more about the artist please click on the links below.

Artist's homepage

Artnet

Foxy Productions

(British, b.1966)

It Is What It Is, 2009

DVD, digital prints

Courtesy of the artist and Creative Time

Jeremy Deller is a conceptual, video, and installation artist who over the past ten years, has archived, examined, and often staged demonstrations, exhibitions, historical reconstructions, parades, and concerts as a way to both celebrate and critically examine them as forms of social action. His work focuses on cultural history‚how it is made, recorded, manipulated, and remembered.  He is best known for his piece Memory Bucket from 2003, a documentory film about  the town of Crawford, Texas, the hometown of George W. Bush and the siege in nearby Waco Texas which in turn won him the prestigious Turner Prize in 2004. 

In 2009 the Three Museum Project, the New Museum and Creative Time presented It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq, a new commission by British artist Jeremy Deller. In an effort to encourage the public to discuss the present circumstances in Iraq, a revolving cast of participants including veterans, journalists, scholars, and Iraqi nationals who have expertise in a particular aspect of the region and/or first-hand experience of Iraq were invited to take up residence in the New Museum's gallery space with the express purpose of encouraging discussion with visitors to the Museum. The six-week exhibition was at the New Museum from February 11 through March 22, 2009. After the initial gallery exhibition the project extend past the New Museum's walls into towns and cities across the United States during a three-week road trip and then traveled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, as part of the Three Museum partnership.

Objects meant to stimulate discussion shared the gallery with the resident guest experts. The first and most significant artifact that was on display was the remnant of a car that was destroyed in March of 2007 by an explosion on Al-Mutanabbi, a street in Baghdad. This tragedy killed over thirty people, and has taken on added significance because the street, named after a well-known Iraqi poet, was the site of numerous book markets and cafes, and was considered the nexus of Baghdadi cultural and intellectual life. Evidence of the violence continuing to take place in Iraq, the car is meant to ground conversation in the facts, figures, and eyewitness descriptions that have been so lacking in most information about the Iraq war made available to the public. The second object was a handmade banner by artist Ed Hall, who has collaborated with Deller in the past and is known for his work for trade unions and other interest groups. The last was a wall graphic juxtaposing two maps‚one of Iraq and one of the United States. This visual representation serves as a reminder of the disconnect between two countries that are intimately involved politically and economically, though geographically distanced. However urgently the project encourages discussion about a painful, ongoing situation, this endeavor is nonpartisan, and will be unscripted and free form, and as formal or informal as each guest expert desires.

In March, Deller traveled aboard an RV with two selected Iraq experts and a writer, who documented the journey from New York to Los Angeles. The RV stopped at various cultural institutions and community centers along the way to continue the conversation on a national scale. The exploded car, first seen at the New Museum, was placed on a flatbed trailer hitched to the RV. This traveling portion of the exhibition is co-organized by public arts presenter Creative Time, and will enable the project to be seen by many communities beyond the art world.

It Is What Is: Conversations About Iraq is curated for the New Museum by Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator, and Amy Mackie, Curatorial Assistant; for Creative Time by Nato Thompson, Curator.

To learn more about the artist please click on the links below.

Artist's Homepage

New Museum 

Wikipedia 

(American)

Istanbul Series, 2007

Drypoint with chine colle

Courtesy of the artist

Daniel Heyman is a  painter and printmaker who has been shown widely both in Philadelphia and nationally. For the past four years, Daniel Heyman has concentrated his art on making images about the war in Iraq, specifically the abuse and torture of innocent Iraqis at Abu Ghraib and other prisons. For this work, Heyman traveled to Jordan and Turkey where he has talked face to face with over 25 former detainees, painting their portraits and taking down their own versions of what happened to them at the hands of the American captors. Three of these detainees have since been killed in the war.

The Istanbul series is about listening to people who were victims of great injustice at the hands of the American war effort in Iraq. The series of tem prints picture three different Iraqi men and contains along with their sketched likenesses the words they used to describe to American human rights lawyers their imprisonment and torture in Abu Ghraib and their facilities in Iraq in 2003-2004. The men were also responding to a folder of over 200 photos taken during that time period at the Abu Ghraib hard site, revealing what they knew about the people and situations photographed. The prints, as a series, are an undeniably moving document that brings out the human cost of bad political and war policies, of wrongful arrests, routine beatings and torture. Through their own telling of that happened to them, each sitter is reclaiming his ownership of his story, and by reading the text, viewers are helping to restore the dignity and humanity of the victims.

Anger, disappointment and a feeling of betrayal in the government of my country so deep that I was compelled to so something to mark that I, and many, many Americans like me, were horrified by the turning away from human rights and human dignity as a driving force in American politics.

To learn more about the artist please click on the links below. 

Artist's Homepage

More about the work

Refuge Media Project

(American, b.1975)

Great White Shark In Captivity, Million-Gallon Outer Bay, 

Monterey Bay Aquarium, Monterey, California, 2007

From An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamilar, 2007

37"x 45", chromogenic color prints

Infectious Medical Waste Treatment Center, Sanitec Industries, Inc., Sun Valley, California, 2007

From An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamilar, 2007

37" x 45", chromogenic color prints

Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery

Taryn Simon is an American fine art photographer who currently is an assignment photographer for the New York Times Magazine. Her photography and writing have been featured in numerous publications and broadcasts as well as being shown internationally in museums and galleries.

For this project, artist Taryn Simon assumes the dual role of shrewd informant and collector of curiosities, compiling an inventory of what lies hidden and out-of-view within the borders of the United States. She examines a culture through careful documentation of diverse subjects from across the realms of science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature, security, and religion. Transforming the unknown into a seductive and intelligible form, Simon confronts the divide between those with and without the privilege of access. Her sometimes ethereal, sometimes foreboding compositions, shot over a four-year period with a large-format view camera whenever conditions allowed, vary as much as her subject matter, which ranges from radioactive capsules at a nuclear waste storage facility to a black bear in hibernation. Offering visions of the unseen, the photographs of An American Index of the hissden and the Unfamilar capture the strange magic at the foundation of a national identity.

Simon has created a collection of photographs that documents the inaccessible places that exist below the surface of American identity. It took her as long as a year to gain permission to photograph some of the high-security zones on view in this work, like government-regulated quarantine sites, nuclear waste storage facilities, prison death rows and C.I.A. offices.

Simon makes use of the annotated-photograph's capacity to engage and inform the public. Through text and image, the work underscores the complicated relationship between a photograph and its context. The visual is processed aesthetically and then re-defined by its text.

In examining that which is integral to America's foundation, mythology and daily functioning, Simon creates a collection of works that reflect and reveal a national identity. 

To learn more about the artist please click on the links below. 

Artist's homepage 

Gagosian Art Gallery 

Whitney Museum of American Art 

Wikipedia 

(American, b.1970)

Manifesto For a People's Republic of Antarctica, 2009

From the Terra Nova Project.

36"x 24", digital prints

North/South, 2009

DVD

Courtesy of the artist and Robert Miller Gallery

Paul Miller is a musician, composer, producer, artist, and author. He borrowed his stage name from the character The "Subliminal Kid" in the novel Nova Express by William S. Burroughs. Spooky began his career writing science fiction and formed a collective called "Soundlab" with several other artists. In the mid 1990s, he began recording and collaborating on a series of singles and EPs. Currently, DJ Spooky is also a professor of music mediated art at the European Graduate School. His work as an artist has appeared in a wide variety of contexts such as the Whitney Biennial and The Venice Biennial, the Paula Cooper Gallery as well as many other museums and galleries.

Terra Nova means, simply,"new earth"- Antarctica is the only place on this planet that has no government. It's an environmental terrain marked by geopolitical tension, yet it remains a utopian space at the edge of the known world. I wanted to find some way to engage that concept with my art and music.

The last eight years were in some ways cumulative hell, with so many governments abandoning even the semblance of caring about environmental issues. Whether it was Russia claiming the Arctic seabed in the North or the radical amount of whale fishing Japan did near the Antarctic, so many things needed to be addressed. I feel like the Terra Nova project is a call to environmental awareness and climate literacy. It's just a beginning.

I went to Antarctica for four weeks and visited several of the main ice fields. The idea was to look at Antarctica from the perspective of a composer, artist, and writer. Landscape has been a major inspiration for my work over the years. I usually focus on the urban environment- this was a transitional piece. I plan to make a trilogy about it. The next aspect of my project will be in Nauru, a remote island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. That project will be about the global economy and off-shore banking.

(Lebanese, b.1967)

America, 2006

88" x 150", paper

Courtesy of the artist

Annabel Daou speaks of trying to accommodate genre to content. The 

Lebanese-born New York artist works in a shifting combination of abstraction, conceptualism, and linguistic and numerical jottings, as well as sound. Although the words may be decipherable, they are essentially designed as elements in a land- or thought-scape; the ideas are like abstract forms for viewers to assemble on their own or not. Her materials paper, torn and not; tape, fingerprinted or fresh; pencil, smudged or clean; translucent gesso are simple, accessible, and fragile, and thereby adaptable to different places, situations, and ideas. The work can be seen as literary or political or personal.

    - Barbara A. MacAdam, ArtNews, 2007

America is 20 sheets of paper assembled to create a 7-foot by 13-foot (88x150 inches) composition. Text in its many forms-sounds, substance, symbol, and texture- fills the paper. The words are drawn from numerous sources, each in some way involved with America and the American experience: literature, history, poetry, politics, music, popular culture, and sociology (Hannah Arendt Cioran, William Faulkner, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Jefferson, Allen Ginsberg, George Oppen, Arthur Miller, Bernadette Mayer, Ramones, Bob Dylan, George Washington, George Bush). Each was transcribed in pencil as it was read, in the manner of Barteby. Together the texts form lines that crisscross each other to create geological, cultural, and metaphysical structures. From a distance, America reads as landscape, a war painting, a map, and a document. Up close, it is legible only in fragments, though the texts have been transcribed verbatim.

It is impossible to read America as a whole, or all at once. The accumulation of words forms a sense of place, creates meaning, and eradicates meaning. The composition is erased as it is defined (a work of art, a country), since any one definition eclipses the others. The act of reading is a performance of this occlusion. America is an exploration of limits and limitlessness across time and between people, composed of the words that bind and divide us. The documents that make up America were selected unsystematically. They represent the individual experiences and discoveries of its creators. The accumulation of documents begins to convey a sense of the monumental weight of American ideas.

Accompanying the works in the exhibition, National Reality, a leaflet by New York based poet and sound artist Greta Byrum, excavates the structures of America and documents its findings. It is a catalog of the elements of the project, a poem, an interpretation, an explication, and a diagrammatic guide to the personal and archaeological connection between the writers and readers of America.

-Annabel Daou

To learn more about the artist please click on the links below.

Artnet 

Josee Bienvenu Gallery 

More on this work 

(American, b.1948)

Everything #10, 2007

Digital prints

Courtesy of the artist and Creative Time

Adrian Piper is a conceptual artist and analytic philosopher. She has taught philosophy at numerous educational institutions including Georgetown, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, and UCSD. Since the late 1960s, Adrian Piper has forged a unique artistic practice that infused classical Minimal sculptural form with explicit political content and introduced issues of race, gender and identity politics focused on imperimance and loss. Her work has been shown extensively for the past four decades, in solo and group contexts, and has been the subject of numerous monographic exhibitions across the United States and internationally.

In this work Adrian Piper created a poetic and philosophical duration performance in which the text "Everything will be taken away" was written, in henna, on an unspecified number of participants foreheads that responded to an open call in New York City as part of Creative Time's "Six Actions for New York City."  The henna was then applied to respondents on May 1 and May 2, 2007.  Written in reverse, the message becomes readable when seen through the reflection of a mirror, and the dye is anticipated to endure on the skin for 1- 2 weeks. The participants were then asked keep journals of their experiences and audience reactions during the project, then re-read the journals a year after the performance.  Written directly on the forehead the text suggests the layered, shifting organization and loss of memory. The work functions on two levels, the individual experience of confronting the mesage in one's own reflection as it disapeards as well as being out in public and their response to the message. It is both a promise and a threat. What will be taken away and what do we consider to be "our" everything?

Everything will be taken away is labeled #10 as it is the tenth rendition of the ongoing series the artist began in 2003.  The simple prose has been displayed in a variety of media including sandwich boards and on personal photographs that have been photocopied, printed and erased. Contingent upon the context and relationship to the audience, the sentence reveals new aspects of its potential meanings with each adaptation. The endurance and repetition of the phrase is crucial to the series and the relationship to Piper's writings and philosophical work. A student and teacher of philosophy and meta-ethics, Piper often employs Hindu philosophical imagery and concepts, such as the henna used in this project. 

To learn more about the artist please click on the links below.

 Artist's Homepage

 Wikipedia

 Time Out New York Article

 Creative Time