Exhibitions

701 CCA is proud to present contemporary art exhibitions in the center’s gallery, as well as the artist’s loft, on the second floor of 701 Whaley. Read below for our current and past exhibitions.

Current Exhibitions: Faster Forward

JANUARY – MARCH, 2012 EXHIBITION

Curator: Frank McCauley

Period: January 19 –  March 4, 2012

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

Faster Forward presents experimental film and new media and video works by nine artists from Israel to Canada and Italy to New York. This first exhibition of its kind at 701 CCA is curated by Frank McCauley, curator of the Sumter County Gallery of Art in Sumter, S.C. The diverse group of artists represents a broad spectrum of cultural backgrounds, geographies, perspectives and educational and professional careers. The works show great aesthetic and technical diversity and are at once experimental, interactive, dynamic and reflective. The artists in the exhibition are Yoni Goldstein & Meredith Zielke, Sean Hovendick, Jillian McDonald, Sarah Boothroyd, Blake Carrington, Brooke White, Simon Aeppli, Bill Domonkos and Pascual Sisto.

Faster Forward demonstrates the artists’ unmitigated command of film, video and new media technologies.  Many of the works provoke questions about the broader, often disquieting, implications of our ever-accelerating technological evolution.  The artists represent a broad spectrum of cultural backgrounds, geographies and perspectives, and the works in the exhibition resonate with diversity, both aesthetically and technically. They are at once experimental, interactive, dynamic, reflective and multivalent.

The ten artists included in the exhibition are: Yoni Goldstein (Israel) and Meredith Zielke (United States), Sean Hovendick (United States), Jillian Mcdonald (Canada), Sarah Boothroyd (Canada), Blake Carrington (United States), Brooke White (United States), Simon Aeppli (United Kingdom), Bill Domonkos (United States), and Pascual Sisto (Spain).

Guest curator Frank McCauley has organized several exhibitions in the new media genre including The Big Switch at Sumter County Gallery of Art as well as Channelling and Art & Television as part of the annual Accessibility project in downtown Sumter, SC. He is currently the assistant director and chief curator of the Sumter County Gallery of Art. McCauley states “these types of shows are exciting because they highlight the recent transition from mechanical, chemical and analogue processes to those that are electronically and digitally based. Now artists are provided with an extraordinary range of creative opportunities.”

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.

Yoni Goldstein is an Israeli born, Chicago based filmmaker, cinematographer, and editor whose work puts forward multi-sited transects of body, conflict, and diaspora. His films have circulated in numerous regional, national, and international festivals, conferences, and galleries.

Meredith Zielke is an award-winning American independent filmmaker, photographer, and performance artist. Zielke’s creative practice appropriates and embodies the medical and anatomizing gaze. Her work has been presented internationally across several major cities, including London, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, New York, Chicago, Montreal, and Seoul.

Sean Hovendick: Be A Man / Sugar and Spice

Hovendick’s 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.

After the unique experience of being a US Army paratrooper, Sean Hovendick graduated from Eastern New Mexico University studying broadcast communication, art and computer animation. After ten years of industry experience in video post-production, motion graphics and multimedia, Sean went on to earn his MFA in computer art from the Department of Transmedia at Syracuse University. In addition to operating his own design studio, Sean is an exhibiting media artist, Assistant Professor of visual arts and serves as Coordinator of the Graphic + Media Design program at Sage College in upstate New York. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at Esther M. Klein Art Gallery, George Mason University, the Everson Museum of Art, FutureSonic: International Festival of Art, Music & Ideas in Manchester, England and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, Chile.

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.

Jillian Mcdonald is a Canadian artist, dividing her time between New York and Canada. She is an Associate Professor of Art at Pace University, where she also co-directs the Pace Digital Gallery. She has shown nationally and internationally at Moti Hasson Gallery and Jack the Pelican Presents in New York, The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery and Rosenthal Gallery in San Francisco, Hallwalls in Buffalo, La Sala Narañja in Valencia, Spain, YYZ in Toronto, Video Pool in Winnipeg, and Edge Media in Newfoundland.

Mcdonald has received grants from The New York Foundation for the Arts, The Canada Council for the Arts, Soil New Media, Turbulence, Verizon, NYSCA, The Experimental Television Center, and Pace University.

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.

Boothroyd’s audio work has been broadcast on over 50 radio stations around the world and has been presented at galleries, festivals and conferences in Canada, the United States, Ireland, England, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, China, Nigeria, South Korea, Kenya, and beyond.

In 2011 All In Time was presented in stereo on Radio Suisse Romande in Switzerland and Deutschlandradio Kultur in Germany, as well as in octophonic format at the Archipel Contemporary Music Festival in Geneva, at Festival Extension XI in Paris, at Netaudio London, at Ohrenhoch sound art gallery in Berlin, and at the Deep Wireless Festival in Toronto. The work recently won a Gold World Medal for Best Sound at the New York Festivals Radio Programming Awards.

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.

Blake Carrington (b. 1980) operates within the spheres of the visual, sound, and performing arts.  His work in all of these forms displays a minimal aesthetic and finds resonance with the graphic sign systems of geography and architecture. He has recently been artist-in-residence at LMCC’s Swing Space on Governors Island and at Haeinsa Temple in South Korea, and received a NYSCA grant in support of his debut CD release concert at the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in New York. He has also completed residencies at HIAP in Helsinki, Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, and Rustines Lab in Montreal. Carrington was born in Indiana and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He holds an MFA from Syracuse University.

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 artist’s personal history, these images describe the artist’s interpretations of the disease.

White is both a practicing artist and an educator who specializes in fine art photography. She has exhibited her photographs and videos nationally and internationally including at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE, MASSMoCA and the DiVA Art Fair in New York, Paris and Berlin. Recently she was the recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission grant and a Residency at the Bakery Collective in Westbrook, Maine.

Simon Aeppli: Secondhand Daylight

The first in a series of videos that use Simon Aeppli’s scrapbooks as a starting point for a moving image work, Secondhand Daylight is an experimental narrative work that explores place, memory and obsession.  The video itself becomes a type of scrapbook as Aeppli interweaves video footage he has collected with images from a variety of sources.

Simon Aeppli is an artist and filmmaker who constructs personal and subjective forms of documentary. His research interests focus on place and memory and use the landscape of his hometown of Eden, Northern Ireland as a site for investigation. His films have been screened at festivals throughout Britain and abroad. His documentaries have been broadcast on Channel 4, FIVE and ITV London. Aeppli has also completed film commissions for Film London, Arts Council, England and Wellcome Trust.

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.”

Domonkos’s 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, Best Film Short – Victory Media Network, and Best Experimental/Avant Garde Short – Trenton Film Festival.

Pascual Sisto: Push/Pull (my luck is your misfortune)

Visual cycles of urban 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 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. The viewers sit in a suspended state, neither coming nor going, in the space in between.

Pascual Sisto’s Film and video work has been exhibited internationally at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Latin American Art (MALBA) in Buenos Aires and the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival. Recent solo exhibitions include Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; Salt Lake Art Center, Salt Lake City; Telic Gallery, Los Angeles and Bytheway Projects, Amsterdam. His work has been seen at the LA Freewaves at the Hammer Museum; Brooklyn Underground Film Festival; Reencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; Viper Festival, Basel, Switzerland. Born in Ferrol, Spain, and raised in Barcelona, Pascual Sisto holds a BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and an MFA from UCLA.

DAVID CIANNI RESIDENCY AND EXHIBITION

Residency Period: January – March, 2012

Exhibition Period: March 29 – May 31, 2012

701 CCA’s next artist in residence is 50-year-old David Cianni, who lives in Aiken, S.C., and was born in Guatemala. Cianni has been creating life-size, robotic, cyborg-like sculptures from post-consumer, recycled materials for two decades. The sculptures, which include light features, have never been exhibited and will have their world premier during Cianni’s March ­– May exhibition at 701 CCA. The sculptures also feature in a story written by Cianni that the artist eventually envisions as a comic book. During his January – March residency, Cianni will produce additional sculptures and build an elaborate cave system with light and sound features that together will create a gallery-wide environment for his exhibition. During his residency, Cianni, who owns a metal construction company, will conduct workshops for children about creating sculptures from recycled materials.

Past Exhibitions:

Biennial 2011 Exhibition:

Part I: October 6 – November 13, 2011: Opening Reception, October 7, 2011, 7-9 pm *New Date*
Part II: November 17 – December 21, 2011:  Opening Reception, November 17, 2011, 7-9 pm

August 18-September 25, 2011 Triennial Revisited

June 16 – July 31, 2011  Diana Farfan: The Toy Republic and The Dream Life of Broken Toys

Wednesday, June 8, 2011, Michaela Pilar Brown: I Am Dark But Lovely: A Mixed Media Video Installation

April 13 – May 29, 2011: SC3D – An Exhibition of Three-Dimensional Art from South Carolina

January 20, 2011-March 6, 2011: Alex Powers, Inquiries

October 28 – Dec. 12, 2010: Mike Lavine: echoes

August 5 – Sept. 19, 2010: Jan Banning, Bureaucratics

May 20 – July 11, 2010: Bob Trotman, Business as Usual
Masterfully-carved wooden sculptures

March 11 – April 25 2010: Michael Nye, The Fine Line: Mental HealthMental Illness
Portrait photography with audio stories.

January 7 – February 7, 2010: Gwylene Gallimard and Jean Marie Mauclet, Olympia: An Installation
Sculptures based on historic and more recent types of buildings in Columbia’s old mill village. Click Here to read more about the Olympia Exhibition and related programming.

January 31 – February 28, 2010: Jocelyn Châteauvert, Within and Out
Handmade paper installation in 701 CCA Artist Loft

November 5 – December 13, 2009: State Art Collection, Contemporary Conversations II – Presented by the 701 Center for Contemporary Art, South Carolina Arts Foundation & South Carolina Arts Commission

October 1 – November 1, 2009: State Art Collection, Contemporary Conversations I – Presented by the 701 Center for Contemporary Art, South Carolina Arts Foundation & South Carolina Arts Commission

August 19- September 24, 2009: Damond Howard, Still America’s Greatest Problem
Large-scale charcoal drawings displayed in the artist’s loft space.

August 6 – September 15, 2009: Phil Moody, As Bees Practise Geometry
Manipulation of photography with mill industry and village imagery. 701 CCA gallery.

May 7 – July 5, 2009: Anne Boudreau, a delicate balance

February 5 – April 5, 2009: Ellen Kochansky, Embedded Energy
A textile installation celebrating the people, stories, and resources we often overlook. 701 CCA gallery.

October 17, 2008 – January 4, 2009: Textile Tales, 701 CCA’s inaugural exhibition
Exhibition Artists: Ellen Kochansky, Beth Melton, Phil Moody, Scotty Peek. 701 CCA gallery.