Iternational Waters

Thu, May 4
5:30 - 7:30pm
FREE!

The notion of place, near and far, virtual and real, global and
intimate, familiar and strange will be explored in this international
group show.
Opening on May 4 and running through June 23, the show includes new
works by David Bunn, Linda Burnham, Adriane Colburn, Ginny Cook,
Matthew Gerring, Alex Hartley, Tania Kovats, and David Maupin as well
as groundbreaking historical works by the Situationist International,
Archigram, Ed Ruscha, Chieko Shiomi and Nam June Paik.
Inspired by the writings of Raymond Roussel, who penned Impressions
of Africa without raising the canopy on his carriage while there,
curators Soo Kim and Jessica Silverman have crafted a collection of
allusive and poetical objects that probe our experience of place and
report on how it has changed over time.
"Our comprehension of place has veered away from the traditional
anthropological understanding, one registered by experience,
familiarity and time spent, to one that is mediated and
instantaneous," writes Kim, an artist and professor of Art at Otis
College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, in her introduction to the
catalogue.
For the historical artists in the show place had become a largely
predictable, overly quantified experience when they made their works.
Guy Debord's Guide Psychogeographique, a 1957 reconstruction of the
map of Paris into awkward chunks of urban space connected by
deceptively meaningless arrows, is not just an attack on bourgeois
capitalist control over city life but an invitation to re-experience
place as play through controlled wandering.
Similarly, Nam June Paik in his 1963 Fluxus Island in Decollage Ocean
mocks the logic of conventional mapping by sprinkling across the
surface of an oddly-shaped land mass the names of lovers,
collaborators, memories, jokes and events from his life and
experience of Fluxus. The dada inspired document seems to imply that
it is Paik's brain that has been bisected and flattened onto the
paper and not that of a three-dimensional island.
It's not just the conventions of traditional cartography that are
called into question for their inadequacy in describing what's
interesting and essential about place in International Waters. In
Hypothermia Alex Hartley uses video to question the very
juxtaposition of indoors with outdoors and landscape with portraiture
in a grueling two- hour battle with the elements that gives new
meaning to the term travelogue. The camera watches a naked Hartley
from the waist up endure frigid cold as the temperature in the
Canadian lab in which he sits is systematically lowered to match the
0 degree Celsius temperature outside.
The role of memory as a layering device that compresses space and
time into a unified experience is key to understanding David Maupin's
Pedestrian Contemplation Plaques. This L.A. artist excavates lost and
turbulent histories that occurred at seemingly banal sites and then
commemorates the forgotten events with a screen-printed aluminum
plaque, transforming the everyday into something unfamiliar and
strange. A Maupin plaque outside of the Petersen Automotive Museum
along L.A.'s museum mile, for instance, designates the site as one
where thugs gunned down famed rapper Christopher Wallace aka
Notorious B.I.G.
For some of the younger artists, however, place isn't just a thing to
critique or a category in need of complexity it's an opportunity to
burrow and dream. Adriane Colburne's cut paper sculptures echo
inaccessible worlds and forgotten histories like ancient pipe
networks and the human anatomy. Mathew Gerring explores the
mysterious relationship of man to his environment by transforming an
off-the-rack sleeping bag into "a remote and all-encompassing dream
machine," writes Jessica Silverman in the catalogue. By stitching
psychedelic colors into baroque patterns that suggest the trace of a
human body into the bag's interior Gerring has created a one-object
installation that seems to promise a clear night sky, shining moon
and glittering stars. "It's a personal get-away," says Silverman, "a
place to slide into."
There will be a full catalogue designed by Michael Worthington
available for this exhibition.

Venue:

Steven Wolf Fine Arts
49 Geary, Suite 411
San Francisco

http://www.stevenwolffinearts.com

Additional Info:

415-263-3677
http://www.stevenwolffinearts.com/ www.jessicasilverman.com