Exhibitions

With this premier presentation of his latest body of work, South Carolina contemporary art pioneer John Acorn shows that after more than five decades of art production, he still creates striking, ambitious and relevant work. Constructed mostly from wooden, cut out, painted pistols, the retired Clemson University art department chair has built oversized sculptural representations of a charm bracelet, a pizza, lifesavers, a Palmetto tree, a heart, a crown, a wreath, a T-shirt, a person, a skull and other common phenomena. “I do not intend to be a crusader or missionary on issues regarding firearms,” the Verner Award winner says. “I do admit, however, to wondering about the fact that my culture is so enamored with firearms.”

Exhibition: Faster Forward

Curator: Frank McCauley

Period: January 19 –  March 4, 2012

Opening Reception: Thursday, January 19, 2012, 7 ­ 9 pm.

This exhibition highlights the work of nine artists from Israel to Canada and from Italy to New York whose new media, experimental film, and video works explore contemporary visual culture mediated through popular technologies.

The development of cinema throughout history has been inextricably linked with developments in a range of film production technologies. The recent transition from mechanical, chemical and analogue processes to those that are electronically and digitally based has provided artists with an extraordinary range of creative opportunities. As digital data, the fundamental elements that constitute the cinematic experience, space, time, light, sound and motion, are now infinitely malleable and endlessly reconfigurable. The artworks in Faster Forward demonstrate the artists’, and their collaborators’, unmitigated command of film, video, and new media technologies. Many of the works also provoke questions about the broader, often disquieting, implications of our ever-accelerating technological evolution.

This diverse group of artists represents a broad spectrum of cultural backgrounds, geographies and perspectives, each of which has taken distinctly different educational and professional paths to arrive where they are today. The works in this exhibition resonate with diversity both aesthetically and technically. They are at once experiential, interactive, dynamic, reflective, and multivalent.

Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke: The Jettisoned

Rendered from footage shot in Chicago, Warsaw, and Mexico City this 3-channel video activates a sensorial experience that sends the viewer into an opulent darkness where history is performed through living bodies, both stilled and silenced. Each of the three projections gives the illusion of a single instant. This illusion fades, however, as the viewer notices the winking of an eye, a woman’s fluttering skirt, or the glistening of water as it streams from an elaborate network of forensic tubes. Many of the symbolic elements found throughout the videos are informed directly by art history—from the tradition of tableau vivant to Northern European still life painting. Curious revelations draw the viewer into a stratified realm where reality and constructed environments are merged into three living portraits of trauma offering a rich cartography of identity at its most nebulous form.

Sean Hovendick: Be A Man / Sugar and Spice

Hovendicks’ interactive computer-art work is a critical assessment of the omnipresence of media and its power to influence our society. In particular, it explores gender-role behaviors learned from mediated reality. He is interested in the way in which mass media is used for entertainment, information and social connectedness, and the unconscious issues that arise with such dependence.

Jillian Mcdonald: Screen Kiss

The crush is a familiar experience. In “Screen Kiss” Mcdonald explores the idea of fantasy and misplaced intimacy as a symptom of our heavily mediated culture. Featuring several popular actors including Daniel Day Lewis, Vincent Gallo, Johnny Depp, and one actress, Billy Bob Thornton’s former wife Angelina Jolie. In each case the artist inserts herself into existing film scenes as a stand-in for the actresses or actor kissing these stars. She makes eye contact with the camera, which functions as voyeur and Billy Bob’s, presumably jealous eye.

Sarah Boothroyd: All In Time

The clock ticks; the moon waxes; the autumn leaves turn crimson. Time is as ubiquitous as it is elusive. Guided by science and science fiction, this stereophonic work traverses the timeless mystery of time itself. Boothroyd studied visual art and costume design on her way to a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a master’s degree in broadcast journalism.  This eclectic background informs her diverse approach to audio work, as she combines a plurality of sources, drawing on the devices and techniques of film, music, literary arts, and theatre.

Blake Carrington: Haeinsa Palimpsest

Field recordings made in and around a 1,200-year-old Haeinsa Temple isolated in the mountains of South Korea were used as raw material to merge with and manipulate existing architectural and topographic diagrams of the temple complex. These recordings are processed and tuned to a specific scale, then performed live using custom software. The video image emerges in real-time from the custom software, blending together the oscillating visual waveform of each sound sample with topographic and architectural renderings of the temple grounds.

Brooke White: Slices of Clarity

“Slices of Clarity” investigates the ways that Alzheimer’s disease alters one’s connection to memory and place. By using x-rays of skulls combined with photographs and 8mm archival film footage from the artists’ personal history, these images describe the artists’ personal interpretations of the disease.

Simon Aeppli: Secondhand Daylight

“Secondhand Daylight”, the first in a series of videos that use the artists’ scrapbooks as a starting point for a moving image work, is an experimental narrative that explores place, memory and obsession. The video itself becomes a type of scrapbook as Aeppli interweaves video footage he has collected over the past ten years with images from books, photographs, photocopied and found images, written fragments, quotes, letters, lists and the artists’ own fictitious notations

Bill Domonkos: Nocturne

Innocence, wonderment, and the allure of the moon. “Nocturne” is a captivating dreamscape inspired by the music of Tchaikovsky and the poetry of Shelley. Michael Hardy of The Boston Globe states: “Spooky. Hypnotic. Lush. Witty. Sublime. The extraordinary films of San Francisco-based artist Bill Domonkos call up a descriptive vocabulary that never seems to capture the fluidity, the aesthetic metamorphoses, of the director’s vision.” His short films have been broadcast and shown internationally in cinemas, film festivals, galleries and museums including the MoMA in NYC. They have won numerous awards including Best Experimental Film – New Orleans International Film Festival (2004), Best Film Short – Victory Media Network (2007) and Best Experimental/Avant Garde Short – Trenton Film Festival (2004).

Pascual Sisto: Push/Pull

Visual cycles of urban and natural systems appear in the video work of Los Angeles-based Pascual Sisto (b. 1975, Ferrol, Spain). Sisto digitally intervenes with otherwise mundane imagery and crafts mesmerizing, impossible realities. Spatial compositions challenging the logic of everyday events such as driving a car or witnessing the passage of birds flying overhead- are activated by the artist’s replication and patterning of form. Sisto’s two-channel installation Push / Pull (my luck is your misfortune) rearranges seemingly endless lanes of evening traffic into opposing kaleidoscopic video planes. Approaching white lights from oncoming traffic pass in a tunnel-like flow, receding as red tail lights. The two squarely framed video spaces take on a cosmic scale, reflecting physical logic of the Doppler effect, in which red shift occurs in sources of light moving away from an observer. The viewers sit in a suspended state, neither coming nor going, in the space in between.