Lisa Tan
Thursday, 3 December 2009
Work from Based on a True Story and Happenstance.
“Included in this exhibition is the piece titled, Letters from Dr. Bamberger, 2001-ongoing. I have aestheticized my relationship with my general physician, Dr. Mark Bamberger. It is his practice to send letters to his patients after they have had an annual physical. The quasi-performative act of going to see Dr. Bamberger began in 2001 and will continue until either event occurs: my death, or the close of his practice. The piece is further complicated by my decision to not only depict myself through these letters, but also my romantic partner in any given year.” – Lisa Tan
[…] and thematically from the introspective testimonial to the historical account, all works in the exhibition explore the narrative procedures at play in relaying first-hand knowledge and experience. Here, identity is not perceived as a construct of outside forces or predetermined paths, but rather, it manifests only momentarily, through the personal experiences that form the basis of each work. But, personal experience as the privileged locus of identity formation—if it is to be understood as a temporary situation where agency is present only for an instance—must also be measured against the artists’ desire to render meaningful that which is available only as a fleeting impression. The embellishments of one’s feelings and memories, the willful, even forceful attempts at signification make it impossible to render transparent any supposed primacy of experience as a conduit to the true, authentic, or uninhibited self. […]” – Christian Rattemeyer, from the catalog for Based on a True Story, Artists Space, New York.
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““…The exhibition investigates subtle, absurd and fantastical spatial and temporal experiments, based on chance and construction, primarily in the mediums of photography, video and sculpture, in an effort to question translation, invention and perception. Many of the artists in the show engage in a process that Mark Godfrey has noted in an Artforum article entitled “Image Structures: Photography and Sculpture” (February 2005): ‘photography and sculpture have entered a more complex phase of their relationship, folding over each other, reversing positions, flipping back and forth, the one becoming the other.’” – Lauri Firstenberg, from the press release for Happenstance