I will be participating in a panel for the Now! Visual Culture conference on Feminism, Technology and Visuality moderated by Lisa Cartwright on Saturday, June 2nd at 1:30 pm. Join us for a lively discussion of contemporary art, media, gender issues and visual culture! I will be talking about Kate Gilmore and Marie Sester.
Museum of Monday
A curatorial notebook & archive of weekend sightings by Emily Berçir Zimmerman
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A curatorial notebook & archive of weekend sightings by Emily Berçir Zimmerman
+ Projects
+ Press
+ About
+ Contact
+ Discussion
Now! Visual Culture
A Feast of Fairs
What would be the collective noun for a bunch of art fairs? Perhaps a feast, a bevy, a jolt? Here are some photographs from the many art fairs that activated the city this weekend.
Moving Image Fair:
Independent Art Fair:
Scope:
Volta:
Kickstarted!
So To Speak’s Kickstarter campaign is funded with a spectacular showing of support by 51 backers! Enormous thanks are due to the following individuals who kindly contributed to the project:
Johnny Goett, Franklin & Elena Zimmerman, Jonathan Lee Marcus, Royah Ansari, David Lublin, John Johanson, Jack Turner, DS Institute, Claire Zimmerman, Melissa Stafford, Kara Jefts, Amy Lancaster, Andrew Andkjar, Mary Jane Fitch, Scott Fitzgerald, Pamela Fitch, Hallie Fitch Mylotte, Helene McCarthy, Beatrice Fitch, Stacey Rayburg, Priscilla Fitch, Harold Fitch, Camilla Lancaster, Jack Fate, Mary Lancaster, Julia Alsaraff, Abbey Beckel, Christy Olezeski, Sean Oak, Nancy Butterly, Emily Luddy, Micah Silver, Gabriel Squalia, Fernando Gomez-Baquero, Phoebus J. Dhrymes, Riccardo-Zoran Balmas de Kide, Candy Marlow & Armando Di Cianno, Nao Bustamante, Damien James, Il Young-Son, Phyllis White Chambers, Cher Fitch, Patricia Cohen, Maura Marks, and Matt Barnett.
(in order of appearance)
This exhibition would not have been possible without your support, I am deeply touched and immensely grateful for it!! So to Speak will open on March 21, 2012 from 7 - 9 pm at BRIC Rotunda Gallery (33 Clinton Street in Brooklyn Heights), and I hope to see you there!
Peripheral Perceptions
Ryan and Trevor Oakes wrap up their residency in EMPAC’s concert hall this week, and we’ve been dutifully documenting the conversations that have taken place since the start. In this first video, the twins very briefly describe how they traced the periphery of Trevor’s visual field using a green laser:
This was the first step in creating their commissioned drawing which will be the first to follow the organic perimeter of the human vision, taking in a 240-degree field of view. In the second video, Ryan and Trevor discuss how they will handle shading in the commission for EMPAC, creating a parallel between light as a wave and sound as a wave:
The EMPAC commission constitues the first time that the Oakes have expanded the surface area of their drawings to encapsulate the entire field of human vision (approximately three times the amount of surface area of their previous drawings).
Ryan and Trevor Oakes: The Periphery of Perception is on view at EMPAC from February 21 - May 31, 2012. There will be a panel discussion with the artists, writer Damien James, and photographer Michael Benson on April 18, 2012.
The Short of It
What happens when you throw a camera, a notebook, a handful of sharpies, and add equal doses of strong coffee and persistence into a brainstorm?
Twin Oakes
During the month of January identical twins Ryan and Trevor Oakes have been in residence at EMPAC, creating a commissioned drawing of the Concert Hall. It has been a month filled with in depth conversations about the physics of light and the nature of visual perception as they create this new commission which marks their first foray into binocular vision with a canvas that sweeps the entire 240-degree visual field.
The Oakes brothers have created a new method for creating perspective drawings which art historian Jonathan Crary has called the one of the most original breakthroughs in the rendering of visual space since the Renaissance. Instead of drawing on a flat piece of paper, the Oakes have developed a spherical canvas and easel to match the curvature of the eye. They use a binocular tracing method to create their drawings by defocusing their eyes and tracing the double image that results.
The canvas for the Oakes’ new canvas is quite stunning, as is the meticulousness with which they execute their process (you can get a taste of it in this video: http://vimeo.com/channels/235617)
The Oakes brothers have engaged in probing conversation about perception since childhood. This ongoing line of inquiry has placed them in dialog with physicists, neuropsychologists, cognitive scientists, engineers, artists as well as art historians (for instance this lecture with Jonathan Crary at the Chicago Humanities Festival)
Here are a few studies that have resulted from residency thus far:
An image of their setup in the Concert Hall with their easel
A study for a new method of shading, which will draw a parallel between light as a wave and sound as a wave
A study for their first ever binocular drawing
Kickstart So To Speak!
Kickstart So To Speak! Why, you ask? Beyond gaining great kickstarter karma, there are some incredible rewards, including limited edition prints by exhibiting artist Melinda McDaniel from her Movie Lines series, produced exclusively for the campaign!
Movie Lines uses the short, one-line descriptions for movies found in television programming menus to point to absurdist economies of paraphrasing.
In So to Speak, Mindy’s work joins that of experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton, YBA Fiona Banner, and the interdisciplinary collective Klub Zwei (Simone Bader and Jo Schmeiser) from Austria.
Kickstarter smartly harnesses the power of the many, so every contribution has a significant impact! Check out the So To Speak Kickstarter campaign here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bercir/so-to-speak
Day 7: Hanna Kim
On the seventh day of the Space Bandee curatorial residency we went to visit the studio of Hanna Kim, a young Korean artist who has seen some commercial success in the past few years. All of her work features two characters: a young girl and her rabbit friend. She creates new work for each exhibition, bound together by a single narrative thread chronicling the adventures of the girl and her rabbit.
When we visited her studio, she greeted us with delicious cream puffs and tea, but there was evidence everywhere that she was busily preparing for her upcoming solo exhibition:
She also has recently expanded her practice to work outside of painting, by branching into video and sculpture (the bunny ears in the photo below are not actually part of the piece, just a pun by the artist):
Day 6: Agit
The alternative space Agit (which means the space where people come together) is a graffiti collective in Busan, that reminded me a great deal of Space 1026 in Philadelphia, combining production studios with a residency program and an exhibition space. Agit has been organizing community events in Busan for 10 years, and finally secured a space four years ago as a central hub for their activities.
Agit has an expansive gallery space that was showing the work of the artist Start From Zero at the time of our visit. The exhibition was a timely reflection on culture of protest (one poster proclaimed: Nevermind the pepper spray!”) in keeping with the Occupy protests which had spread to cities across the global that week:
The director of Agit, Hun Joo Koo, emphasized that the internet is not mobilizing the youth in the right way, instead of going out into the world and creating themselves, they have taken up a more passive stance of consuming photographs of others’ work on the internet.
Hun Joo Koo has contributed to two public art projects in Busan, and commented on the top down approach that many public art projects assume, where the curator invites a number of artists to respond to a site. Spaces such as Agit take the opposite approach, seeking out synergies in a particular group first and then using those synergies to fuel an event or exhibition.
Day 4: Taehee Kim
I have rarely heard artificial intelligence explained in such lucid and poetic terms as those mobilized by Taehee Kim in his presentation to the curatorial residents at Space Bandee. Having had his start in AI, he pursued an MFA at RISD after having already received a PhD at the University of Edinburgh.
With these stellar academic credentials, Taehee Kim creates robots and interactive installations that subtly reflect on our embodied status. Take, for example, his piece Mediated Tension from 2009, a robot that maintains a constant distance from the viewer:
Insisting upon this precise margin of space, the piece engages the desires and prohibitions surrounding direct contact with art objects. He pieces allow the viewer to do the heavy intellectual lifting of association and attribution of meaning:
“I agree with the phenomenological standpoint in artificial intelligence and robotics, where the intelligence of an autonomous agent relies on the observer’s mind rather than how it is built and programmed. Where it is situated, what material it has been made from, and what body structure it has all affect how the agent behaves, and, furthermore, how others perceive the way it works. An agent cannot be separated from its environment—the situatedness plays a crucial role in qualifying the subjectivity of the agent. I introduce the concept of extended self in this context because an agent interacts with its environment through media, and the boundary of the subjectivity can hardly be determined.”
This is true of Fortron 3000 (a collaboration between Taehee Kim, Bevin Kelly, Jordan Bartee, and Alexander Eizenberg), a robot that tells your fortune using unexpected humor:
The robot begins by asking the viewer if they would like a general fortune or if they would like to ask a specific question, and then proceeds to deliver a ridiculous fantastical future, mocking the faith we place in technology to act as a harbinger for what lie ahead.
Day 5: Sun Kyung Lee
Already a well-renowned painter within Korea, Sun Kyung Lee is nothing short of prolific. When we visited her studio as part of the Space Bandee curatorial residency I was shocked by the intensity of her work, its candor and unwaivering focus. Her oeuvre consists almost entirely of self-portraits, gradually shifting in tonality from a Schiele-like angst to a sense of fecundity and generosity:
Day 3: Tae Hun Kang
Busan-based artist Tae Hun Kang has a thoughtful and timely interest in representing repressive social realities, such as neoliberalist economic policies. He does so by attaching faucets to objects - high heeled shoes, riot shields, turtles and books including Hans-Dieter Bamberg’s Politisches Lesebuch: fur Arbeiter, Schüler, Lehrlinge, Sozialarbeiter, Gewerkschafter und progressive Lehrer (1973). Through the symbol of the faucet he points to the mechanisms through which violence is carried out between the society and the individual.
More recently, his work has broached the use of animals to allegorically represent social realities with the installation, Birds Don’t Sing Here Anymore (2010). Consisting of a red room with bird cages of various sizes and a large stuffed cat, the piece also includes a blue water tower common to less affluent areas of Busan, and three windows that look out on the urban reality that neoliberalism has produced. This work, created in 2010, was a prescient look at neoliberalism and the concerns fueling the public’s present outcry protesting the layoffs of Hanjin Heavy Industries.
Day 2: SATA
After stopping by the stately Busan Museum of Art, where we saw “The Secret: Margin of Error,” an exhibition of young Korean artists (and the museum’s amazing childrens’ exhibits downstairs), we headed to Haeundae beach for a studio visit with SATA. Entering the Novotel Ambassador hotel, we made our way through the polished corridors to Gana Art Gallery, the largest commercial gallery in Korea that represents Vanessa Beecroft, Mark Quinn, Son Seock, Jason Hackenwerth, and Jee Hye Kim, among many others.
SATA’s work is whimsical, lighthearted, and stark in a way that recalls Magritte, though SATA’s work refrains from philosophical halls of mirrors and probing semantic play. He creates collages by culling images from the internet, which is where his work first became known. After his work gained a strong following in the digital realm, he joined the Gana Art Gallery, and remains active in both spheres in order to stay in touch with his audience.
After some time he grew tired of manipulation and wished to work with reality again, initiating a series of photographs where he catches surreal moments in everyday life. SATA maintains that, at their core, capturing and creating are the same thing - that to frame something with a camera is as artificial as assembling a collage.
Day 1: Dae Young Byun
On the first day of the Space Bandee residency we went to visit the studio of Dae Young Byun, located in an industrial manufacturing area of Busan. Dae Young Byun creates highly refined sculptures that couch political critique in cuteness. For example, his sculptural portrait of China, entitled, One-eyed Panda keeps saying blood-jam is so sweet (2008) takes the form of an oversized and exuberantly happy Winnie the Pooh wielding a honey pot filled with a viscous, red substance that drips down onto his foot, resting upon a symbol of Tibet (below is Dae Young Byun himself wielding the starred scepter usually held in the fist of Pooh):
In the Suspicious Worlds series he uses the symbol of Mickey Mouse to criticize the internet (referencing the computer mouse through the pop symbol). In the piece below, there is a faceoff between a diminutive Mickey and an oversized Hello Kitty:
In another series, animals are modified to have human faces, or two animals are grafted together.
He is interested in tensions between a figure and their media image, inherent in pop icons such as Michael Jackson, whose effigy is ubiquitous, yet whose real persona was known by a precious few.
“Two Dream in One Bed” takes its title from a Korean saying for two figures that do not co-exist well, in this case Buddha and Mickey Mouse. Dae Young Byun began using more intense colors in his sculptures following a trip to India, initially evident in the piece below. Following the visit in his studio we accompanied him to the Dadaepo Art Factory where we saw the piece itself, in all of its intensity of color and expression.
