Jerry Birchfield

Work from his oeuvre.

“Back and fill is a term that refers to a series of small movements for maneuvering a sailboat through a narrow area. It is also an idiom that refers to reneging on a previous statement or promise. It is appropriate here for describing the work of Jerry Birchfield, as both his work and process are dependent on a series of small shifts that result in its operation and form.

His photographs are as much built as they are taken. They function as a result of their material construction and as a document of their making. While subject matter is constructed for the photographs and materials are registered on film, the frame of the camera shifts, crops, translates three-dimensions into two, and functions as a documentary device. Signs all but fail, the photographs operate like sculpture, and the frame of the camera is reflected by the relationship between subject and object. Viewing the photographs becomes as equally latent with potential as pictorial and material content.

As the work maneuvers through narrow spaces, and reneges on statements it just made, sense must be made of its parts. As a result of the specificity of indexical information and the ambiguity of legibility, in combination with referentiality to myriad sources, the photographs are not allowed to reconcile. Once the operation of parts are acknowledged, a position can be identified and formed in which understanding is questioned then reaffirmed or changed.” – Jerry Birchfield

Mateusz Sadowski

Work from The Resonance 

@ Galeria Stereo 10 January – 22 February 2014

“ML: Can you briefly describe the technique in which the film “Resonance” was made?

Mateusz Sadowski:

To simplify things it’s enough to say that the film was made in the technique of stop-motion animation. Technically speaking the realization of “Resonance” can be also described through the process of transformation that the image underwent: from the video registration, through the separation of the stills in the computer, then printing of these different stills, achieving a new physical form, and then photographic registration in a studio, again returning to the computer and editing in order to achieve the format of a film.

Do you think that the process of reshaping of the film material can be considered as a metaphor of some inner, mental process that is connected to perception of the world?

Yes. I think perception of the world is tightly attached to the constructing by the brain the structure of what we perceive. Such structure isn’t complete, it contains mistakes and is open to transformation, to corrections. Thanks to that an increasing over time understating of various phenomena in the world is possible, although it isn’t a linear process, of course. Coming back to the film. It took me quite a long time to discover the method step by step, not to mention the technical difficulties. Building the whole process of making of this film led me to changing or transforming the earlier scenes. In the end plenty possibilities of presenting appeared that I wasn’t able to forsee previously. When closing the production I felt pleasant insufficiency due to the appearance of ideas for the next film, because I could not fit them all in this one.

„New physical form” of the image that you mention is a writting-pad of film stills – a two- and three-dimensional thing at the same time. How did you decide to place an animated image in a wider static frame and show as an element of a composition?

From a desire to show several “realities” that have different qualities, which together form one. At the very beginning I was thinking about recreating an idea for sound piece that haunted me when I was 15 years old. The pieces was meant to be impossible to be listened to from the beginning till the end. Its structure was meant to be based on a consonance of different harmonies, melodies, rhythms and other attributes in such a way that they last simultaneously and are coupled with my emotional state. I believe that it was a vision that, if there were such necessity, could be classified as religious.

Back then I had no means through which I would have been able to express something like that and religion still does not appeal to me. In order not to fail again after 14 years, I began to write a visual piece. I read and thought about different physical theories that propose parallel worlds, about the disputes whether the world has continuous structure (analogue) or non-continuous (discrete). I had a lot of time for those meditations because the work on the animation required performing arduous tasks, which without some “material” in the head would have been beyond endurance. For keeping the balance I read also different literature, Robert Walser’s, among others. The film was being made parallelly. It was meant to be just like a strange theory made up during a crazy stroll when the world seems beautiful.

The cycle „Once and for all” consists of a number of photographs that in short can be divided into two series: the first consists of studio photographs that present variety of models, the second is a series of photographs of real objects or calibrated details of objects. What concept hides behind the second series?

In the second series I create divisions in space that is in the frame and I do it by registering such cut-outs of an apartment-space that are anonymous, which means that they could exist in many places, they have no important pecularities. In the “first” series I also create divisions in the image of the frame, however I construct them relating to models created from the scratch. What’s interesting, I notice common features of both methods. One of those characteristics are perceptual qualities of the image, the possibility of manipulation of the space in different scales. Another one is the realization that “real” space that I photograph, unifies itself with the “model” one. I speak about that moment when a wall starts to resemble a sheet of paper, out of which then I create a model in 5 minutes. Thus a wall can acquire the features of a model. I should add that it is not a concept that the photographs of the cycle illustrate, but only my secondary considerations based on the images that I make. The fundamental problem of the whole cycle is like that: how to achieve an interesting image using the weakest means possibly, or: how to strengthen the power of expression with the use of uninteresting matter. A strong image for me is the one that stimulates imagination.

What is according to you the role of the „point of view” in finding an image of the right power?

It is a necessary element that I try to make use of consciously. Most often I place the photographed three dimensional objects in a way that takes into consideration the point of view of a standing man. Thus, I can influence the impression of the scale of the shown space, enlarge and diminish it. Thanks to the fact that the used materials are recognizable, so the real scale is not actually hidden, the power of the image is build through the tension that accompanies the decoding, recognizing what is familiar.

Although the result of these endeavours is two dimensional photograph, the viewer has an impression of dealing with a three-dimensional object. Flattening does not deprive the objects of spatial features. That seems to be the leading thread of your latest works – suggesting an additional dimension of things, in a literal and metaphorical sense.

I begin work at the moment when I begin to lack the words, and in order to check something I need to do it, in order to see it. I am interested in creating such meanings of visual situations that I am not able to meaningfully verbalise. Perhaps this is where this additional dimension of things comes from.”

Interview by Michał Lasota

via Dust

Vettor Pisani

Work from “Eroica/Antieroica” at MADRE, Naples.

“Vettor Pisani figure appears to us today radically contemporary, that of a true precursor who successfully combined conceptual investigation with irony, the play of language with role playing, masking with the search for truth, major history with the chronicle of the trivial, the sacred with the profane, the art of the past with provocations of the present. From his solo exhibition in 1970 at the Galleria La Salita in Rome, and presence at Documenta V, through his many participations in several editions of the Venice Biennale, Vettor Pisani gradually revealed himself as one of the most important witnesses and exponents of artistic research in Italy from the ‘70s, as well as one of the most personal and visionary authors on the art scene of his generation.

Studded with triangles, circles and semi-crosses, mirrors and tables, labyrinths and pyramids, pavilions and architectural models, alembics and hourglasses, pianos and violins juxtaposed with busts, mannequins, casts, fusions of religious figures like Christ, the Virgin, the angels, or pictures of Oedipus and the Sphinx or Arnold Böcklin’s Island of the Dead, and populated by a veritable personal bestiary (turtles, rabbits, chickens, monkeys, goldfish, snails, guinea pigs, cats, peacocks, eagles and pigeons), the works of Vettor Pisani are imaginary theaters of memory and knowledge, philosophical and cognitive representations “of the history of modern Europe” and its contradictions, ephemeral scenographies of moral issues and intellectual questions as unavoidable as they are insoluble, forms of introduction to the complexity of speculation expressed through the ordinariness of everyday life, spacetime thresholds between different eras, codes of communication between opposing states or entities (hero and antihero; human and divine; human and animal; man and woman; life and death)  and, finally, provisional museums of the inevitable destruction and constant reconstruction of art, in which the kaleidoscopic variety of the artist’s artifacts and references, the dimensions of history and myth, gender, the different cultural traditions and identities of the artist all come together in a unicum, indefinable in its critical status and aesthetic consistency.

Pisani’s output has some of its most significant achievements in the many versions of RC Theatrum  (a veritable Rosicrucian Theatre presented for the first time at the 1976 Venice Biennale and then resubmitted and extended over the years in various versions, including The Theatre of Oedipus, The Theatre of the Virgin, The Azure Island, The Theatre of the Sphinx, The Theatre of Artists and Animals, The Crystal Theatre, Virginia with the Goldfish), in cycles devoted to the islands of Capri and Ischia and “Napoli Borderline,”  in political works that have as their focus the themes of Judaism, Nazism, the compromised European identity (dealing also with the issue of migrants),  and in the design of the Virginia Art Theatrum / Museum of Catastrophe, a work  produced from 1995 to 2006 in a disused travertine quarry at Serre di Rapolano, Siena, configured as the culmination of all his research: dwelling, philosopher’s stone, opus  which condenses his idea of art itself. These are projects and works that will all be reconstructed, reordered and documented in the exhibition. In all these works and projects, art history, politics, psychoanalysis, popular culture, everyday news, hermetic philosophies, Masonic symbols, alchemical rituals and Rosicrucian doctrine  inextricably overlap, often in ways that are oddly dissonant or even ironic and often self-deprecating, yet paradoxically always coherent in creating a sense and a world of his own.

Offering an in-depth vision of the principal aspects of this research, at the same time broad and deeply complex, stratified in time and articulated in expressive media adopted, the exhibition – curated by Andrea Viliani and Eugenio Viola  and under the scholarly supervision of Laura Cherubini  – is the most comprehensive to date to deal with the artist. It brings together the most substantial group of works, both historical and recent, ever united in a single exhibition on the artist, enabling visitors to trace his whole output, from site-specific installations to drawings and collages, from paintings on canvas and PVC to performative actions, from photographic and filmic images to works in mixed media, with an essential endowment of documentary materials.  At the conclusion of the exhibition, in 2014, the Madre will produce a major monographic bilingual publication (Italian/ English), to be issued by Electa. A second exhibition  will be presented, in the early months of 2014, at the Teatro Margherita in Bari  (the artist’s birthplace). Designed specifically for the spaces of the Teatro Margherita and organized in collaboration between the Fondazione Donnaregina Naples and the City of Bari, the exhibition will bring together works and documents from the 1970s down to his most recent production.” – MADRE, Naples

Marian Tubbs

Work from her oeuvre 

“The installation art of Marian Tubbs collapses tropes of high and low visual culture. Her work examines how materiality can be manipulated to produce art that delves into notions of pleasure, utopia, and reality.”

Work from “Zelda Zonk” at Preface Gallery, Paris.

“Zelda Zonk has escaped her primary identity. She has always refused to stick to a single self, contented to be chameleon-like. She wanted to be mobile,
to hide and succumb to the joys of masks, disguise and role-play.
2 An exhibition of fictional artists.” – Timothée Chaillou/Preface Gallery

Harun Farocki

Stills from “Images of War (at a Distance)”

“Harun Farocki: Images of War (at a Distance) marks the first comprehensive solo exhibition of Berlin-based artist Harun Farocki (b. 1944, German-annexed Czechoslovakia) in a U.S. museum, and features the U.S. premiere of Serious Games I–IV (2009–10), a four–part video installation at the center of the exhibition. The exhibition reflects a recent large-scale acquisition—realized as a joint effort by MoMA’s departments of Media and Performance Art and Film—of 36 artworks, a body of work spanning four decades and including nearly all of Farocki’s videos, video installations, and films in video format.

Galvanized by the international student protest movement of the late 1960s, Farocki has developed an experimental documentary style, integrating his own material with footage appropriated from a range of sources, including mass media, surveillance, and political propaganda. Serious Games I–IV (2009–10), which is comprised of four distinct video installations—I: Watson is Down (2010), II: Three Dead (2010), III: Immersion (2009), and IV: A Sun with No Shadow(2010)—positions video game technology within the context of the military, where it originated. The work juxtaposes real-life wartime exercises with virtual reenactments in order to examine the fundamental links between technology, politics, and violence. Other works on view include the early agit-prop filmInextinguishable Fire (1969) and Videograms of a Revolution (1992), a collaboration with Andrej Uijca. The exhibition also includes Farocki’s most recent work, The Silver and the Cross (2010). Some 32 works are presented at three interactive viewing stations, providing a comprehensive overview of Farocki’s practice.

In the adjoining Projects Gallery, I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts(2000) and the trilogy Eye/Machine I-III (2001–03), are on view from June 29 through October 17, 2011. I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts draws connections between the role of surveillance in everyday consumer culture and in prison life, directing viewers’ attention to the fatal shooting of an unarmed prisoner by a guard at a maximum-security penitentiary in 1989, an event that was caught on camera. In Eye/Machine I-III, Farocki collects images from military and industrial surveillance devices to explore the increasingly complex relationship between humans and machines.

A selection of publications featuring texts by or about the artist will also be available in the exhibition gallery, presenting the various dialogues that have taken shape around Farocki’s work, as well as his indelible impact on film criticism and theory.” – Museum of Modern Art, New York

Sebastian Jefford

Work from his oeuvre

“Sebastian Jefford makes objects, paintings, images, installations, videos and web-based works – and often things that exist somewhere in between. Familiar yet strange, a chronic artificiality pervades in his work to the point of sickliness. Humble DIY materials and domestic objects are assigned new yet curiously absurd roles. The work forges a styleless, workaday, dull environment, accented by elements of pathetic drollery: jostling between an industrial coldness and slapstick crappiness. It takes an impressive degree of accomplishment and assurance to make this approach somehow so involving, and with Sebastian currently undertaking the the Spike Island Studio Fellowship, we expect to see much more in the near future.”

Toril Johannessen

Work from Teleportation Paradigm at Unge Kunstneres Samfund

“TELEPORTED

You may have had the experience of waking up in a strange place, not realizing where you are, or for a short time thinking that you are somewhere quite different? At the Teleportation Paradigm exhibition, everything has been organized for such a spatial confusion to take place – in a monumental light installation based on an experiment that has previously only been carried out on rats.

The work is the result of collaboration between artist Toril Johannessen and neuroscientist Karel Jezek of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, NTNU, Trondheim. Johannessen has often been involved in interdisciplinary work, working with programmers, engineers, physicists and geologists, but this is the first time she has worked so closely with a scientist. Jezek and Johannessen close in on each other’s disciplines, but they do not try to blur the boundaries by letting the researcher act as an artist or vice versa.

MAP” IN THE BRAIN
As you enter a new room, the place cells in your brain create and save a spatial memory. A “map” of the room takes shape. When you step outside, it is put aside, but if you return, it will be retrieved. The light installation Teleportation Paradigm consists of three rooms the public may enter, a greatly enlarged version of the laboratory experiment «teleportation paradigm» that Jezek and his colleagues performed on rats in order to study the brains’ memory of place. At UKS it is inflated to human size, and the audience enter the same situation as the rats.

The rats/people first spend time in rooms A and B, then in C. The lighting in A differs from that in B, as it did in the original neuro-experiment. Each room has its own discreet audio tracks. Thus, in rooms A and B two different maps are stored in our brains. Room C is programmed to switch between elements of A and B, and both of these “maps” are retrieved. It is this moment, as you are “teleported”, which is of interest to the researchers: The transition between two memories. This transition may be experienced as a spatial disorientation.

While Jezek and the other researchers could measure and map electromagnetic signals in the brain, but not inquire after the test subjects’ experience of “teleportation”, at UKS people can experience, but not measure.

Inside the installation there is a mural of a classic optical illusion, a so-called Necker cube. The cube is also central to the drawings at the exhibition and to the book Unseeing.”

Spencer Stucky

Work from his oeuvre

“Whether architectural, anatomical, or miniature, the model is both object and investigative exercise.  As an object, such as a scale replica or illustrative device, a model presents authority: a hierarchy of information structured for legibility.  Yet the model is also employed for the prospective, the unmade, the planned action.  In this sense the model is a sketch: one rendering of possibility among many, a moment in a process of revision.  A model is also an idea: an idealized rendition of what it depicts. In the practice I have built, the notion of the model is central. My photographs and sculptures investigate the fixity of site, the reconfiguration of space, and the affects of display and surface, while utilizing the provisional qualities of the stand-in.”

Mato Tannatt

Work from his oeuvre.

“Tannatt tends to circle complex political or sociological themes and then deliver works that are open and unstable, never unlocking the problems at their centre. For ‘Rendezvous Vous’, Tannatt reprinted the building’s notice of abandonment but, erasing the central chunk of its text, drew keyholes over it. He also penned a libretto in which one of the homeless men sings about his life. The character was cast, in this dubious entertainment, as a debonair gentleman-vagrant: the photo-collage No. 1 Hit Song(2010) pictures him with a top hat, cane and suit jacket. The title of the sculpture, Casting Call: Vagrant No. 1 (Mattia) (2010), which places a half-dressed mannequin behind a freestanding metal frame, hints at Tannatt’s own forename – he might be projecting more than just theatrical stereotypes.

Throughout Tannatt’s work, we see personal spaces opened up and the realm of the public shown to be a subjective, inconstant mess. He refers to his painted steel structure Konzert (2010) as a ‘plaza sculpture’; it shows a room exploded into an abstraction, a space turned into an object and then into a symbol (particularly in its slight resemblance to a swastika). He is deeply interested in public sculpture by artists such as Clement Meadmore, Mark di Suvero and Alexander Liberman, whose abstract constructions are frequently degraded into logos by civic or commercial interests.

But these sculptures’ straightforward legibility appeals to Tannatt, as does the aesthetic efficiency of advertising. He draws a comparison between advertising and nature, pointing out that a fruit’s skin is the best possible advertisement for its own ripeness. In Untitled (Yellow for Helio) (2011) Tannatt hangs two bananas and a blond wig on a yellow-painted metal frame; the fruit blackens as the exhibition progresses. If only people, he seems to imply, could be so easily read. A related photo-collage, Last Name Bannana [sic] (2011), is a photograph of a woman gazing out of a window shrouded beneath a stream-of-consciousness text that laments, amongst other things, the difficulty of interpersonal communication.” – Frieze Magazine