Title: Art Event >>BorderPetrol presents>>
POTSHOTS: Recent
For
Immediate Release
August 18, 2001
Contact: Louise McKissick (773)
493-5515
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.artemisia.org
POTSHOTS: Recent Performance Installation and Video Art
Installations, live performances (ongoing) and video screenings (8
pm)
(Hi-res JPEG images of Christine Carson's piece, Another Gravity, are
available for print via download from our website,
http://www.artemisia.org/potshots)
Friday, August 24 and Saturday, August 25th, 2001
7:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Artemisia Gallery, 700 N. Carpenter Street, Chicago Illinois
Free Admission
_________________________________________________________________
CHICAGO, Illinois USA ... On August 24 and 25th, BorderPetrol, a
newly-formed entity devoted to bringing international media art to
Chicago will present POTSHOTS: Recent Performance Installation
and Video Art, a live performance installation and video
screening.
The artists chosen for POTSHOTS have often chosen to re-shoot famous
movies or videos, casting themselves in the starring role as a way to
wittily subvert what they cannot escape. The artists represented
in POTSHOTS run the gamut from the human/computing interface of
BADPACKET to the singularly beautiful installation work of Christine
Carson, in which she reconfigures Bruce Nauman's "Upside Down"
video as a neo-feminist gesture.
The event offers the Chicago audience a unique opportunity to see work
by both high-profile and emerging local artists, as well as works by
well-known international artists such as Roi Vaara, who participated
this year in the Venice Biennale. The foreign artists who are a
part of this performance and screening have never before presented
work in Chicago. This is a rare chance to survey what is going
on due north, above the border and across the Atlantic.
"A resurgent interest in the early 70s body-centered video
art by artists such as Bruce Nauman and Steina Vasulka seems to have
cross-pollinated with our technocentric, media-saturated pop culture,"
says curator Louse McKissick. "The result has been quite
amazing work where, a la "the Real World", the artist as
ordinary Joe seeks to insert her/himself onto the omnipresent screen
and into the omnipotent Hollywood narrative. The only things
that seem to stick in our collective unconscious are top 40 pop
lyrics, opening dialogue from blockbuster movies, or, for the
over-educated amongst us, MOMA standards. Like bad Muzak, these
media signposts are the background to which we live out the enormity
of our lives.
Chicago Artists: Dara Greenwald, Rob Ray, Josh Steinbauer,
Dolores Wilber
Finnish Artists: Roi Vaara
Toronto Artists: BADPACKET (Michelle Kasprzak + Mike
Steventon), Christine Carson, Johanna Householder + b.h.
Yael.
(Biographical information and short performance
descriptions follow below.)
Artemisia Gallery is pleased to acknowledge the
support of the Canada Council for the Arts
_______________________________
BADPACKET (Michelle Kasprzak + Mike
Steventon)
Badpacket uses performance as a vehicle for the
exploration of contemporary issues relating to the interfacing of
humans and machines. In particular, they examine the changing
role of human biology in the age of smart machines, and the evolution
taking place within the architecture of human communication.
They inhabit a shared space, playing oles with a bioscientific theme.
Taking turns as examiner and examined, they transfer information to
each other using technology as an
intermediary.
Michelle Kasprzak is a performer, video artist,
photographer and web artist based in Toronto. Recently, her work
has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, PleasureDome, Images
Festival, Cinematheque Ontario, Trinity Square Video, Money House,
Oberhausen Short Film Festival, 7A*11D Performance Art Festival,
Aspace Gallery and Mercer Union.
Mike Steventon has been working with electronic media for 14 years.
He is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and collected a
distinction for his Post Graduate work at St. Martin's College of Art,
London, England. Mike has worked across the spectrum of
technological Media in an effort to engage audiences with an
experience that challenges the supposed neutrality of the mediated
experience. As a founding member of England's Despite TV video
group, Mike spent 10 years developing collaborative video production
methods for the grass-roots exploration of social and cultural
issues. Mike has lectured on art/culture/politics and exhibited
his video work across Europe and in Toronto. Most recent he has
been working in electro-physical media with installations exhibited in
Toronto at InterAccess October 1997, April 1998 and June
1999.
Christine Carson
Another Gravity is a non -linear mediated performance that occupies
the space and is to be understood as a "presence". I
inspired by Bruce Nauman's 1969 video entitled "Pacing Upside
Down" where Nauman attempts to create the illusion that he is
walking on the ceiling in a circle, the diameter of which
increases until he is outside the range of the camera. By filming from
above with his arms in the air, Nauman examines the potential of the
camera - performs for the camera, as it were. My project extends
Nauman's original idea to its natural conclusion utilizing the scope
of image and sound manipulation technologies that are currently
available. In Another Gravity Carson will be wearing a red dress
that appears to fall from my waist over my head as if I was truly
walking on the ceiling. Her feminist reprisal of Nauman's video will
be a human scale projection on the ceiling of the gallery. The
crystalline sound of taffeta rustling (digitally augmented) will
emanate from miniature speakers to create a surround sound
environment. Where Nauman's piece envisions the potential of the
medium, Another Gravity's hyper real illusion creates real vertigo and
claustrophobia.
Christine Carson is a Toronto based multidisciplinary artist whose
videos, performative installations and cultural interventions
attempt to collapse the critical distance between the spectator and
the art experience. Carson 's most recent project entitled Numb/Hum A
Subterranean Metropolitan Opera is a cultural intervention that has
been presented at performance festivals in Edmonton,
Toronto and Montreal. She has just been awarded one of the
American Franklin Furnace Grant's to present Numb/Hum in New York in
2002. Christine is active on the board of directors of the
artist run alternative film and video cooperative Charles Street Video
and is a masters student at York University.
Dara Greenwald
Dara Greenwald's Bouncing in the Corner #36DDD is, according to Fred
Camper, "a funny take-off on Bruce Nauman's early video work,
replaces Nauman's repetitive movements with a large breasted woman
slamming herself into the corner of a room, the bouncing of her
breasts tweaking his ideas of formalist perfection."
Dara Greenwald is an interdisciplinary artist living in Chicago.
She is concerned with bodies, communities, and social activism.
Bouncing in the Corner #36DDD has been screened at B54 London,
England, Chicago Filmmakers, Videolisboa, and the Split Video Festival
in Split, Croatia, to name a few.
Johanna Householder
December 31, 2000 is a shot-for-shot recreation of the THE PIVOTAL
scene in Stanley Kubrick's classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Dave is in the process of dismantling HAL, the renegade and
recalcitrant computer. On December 31, 2000, Kubrick's
apocalyptic dream has not yet been realized. The domestic scene
supplants the space station, and household appliances are the conduit
through which Dave (Joanna Householder) emerges and enters the
spaceship in order to render HAL powerless. In an ironic
reversal, December 31, 2000 exposes the failure of the future.
Johanna Householder is a multidisciplinary and performance artist,
best known as a member of the satirical feminist performance ensemble,
The Clichettes. She teaches performance art and contemporary issues at
the Ontario College of Art and Design, where she was chair of the New
Media/Integrated Media program from 1990 to 1996. She has performed
across Canada and in the U S under variable circumstances. One of the
founders of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, she
is currently collaborating on a book on performance art by Canadian
women.
Louise McKissick (curator)
Louise McKissick is a Canadian new media performance and installation
artist based in Chicago. In September she will be exhibiting at
Artemisia Gallery with Toronto artist Victoria Scott. Her recent
project is "The Julia Set", an interactive installation
featuring borrowed library books and a series of subtly erotic
photographs influenced by the work of Victorian photographer Julia
Margaret Cameron. The images were hidden between the pages of
the borrowed library books based on mathematical calculations from the
Julia Set, which is part of the Chaos theory branch of
mathematics.
Her digital video microshort , iloveyou, won the Palm d'Or first prize
in the Aggressively Boring Film Festival (billed as "The world's
first film fest for the Palm OS"), and was broadcast on an
outdoor LCD video billboard as part of the Transmedia 2000 show in
Toronto this past September. She has performed internationally, most
recently at the Exit Performance Art Festival in Helsinki last winter.
Her work has been critically reviewed in Lola and Eye Magazine and was
recently mentioned in the New York Times, the London Guardian and Res
Magazine: the Magazine of Digital Filmmaking.
She has received grants from the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, the
Illinois Arts Council, the Chicago Artists International Program, the
Canada Council, and the Ontario Arts Council. Currently, she is
Assistant Professor of Academic Computing at Columbia College
Chicago.
Rob Ray
Make Big Dreams Happen is an interactive installation for the Palm
PDA. The participant takes a nametag/stylus apparatus with an
empowerment word of their choosing. The participant then kneels in
front of bed and places stylus is placed on the tongue. While
preparing for the piece the participant can watch video footage of
adult film actors participating in cunnilingus along side audio and
visual messages of personal empowerment.
The stylus is then placed on the tongue and cunnilingus is performed
on the Palm Pilot which is mounted on the bed. This cunnilingus is
rewarded by the pitch shifting, effectation, and filtering of the
audio in response to the participant. This work explores man's need to
positively focus his sexual energy and drive into achieving success in
all facets of their life.
Rob Ray is the Founder and Director of Deadtech, a 1200 sq. foot 780k
"business class" bandwidth enabled center for art and
technology installations, performances, and workshops in Chicago.
Over the past 2 years Deadtech has hosted technology artists from
Canada, Japan, Australia, Holland, Germany, and the United States
including world renowned tech artists such as The Seemen and Norman
White.
Josh Steinbauer
Josh is a recent graduate of the Maryland Institute of the Arts, and
is currently working on a computer-generated animation short. He
lives in Chicago.
Roi Vaara
The video Ascensions is about man's transcendent plight as a
flightless mammal.
Roi Vaara is an artist who has made a name for himself internationally
with works in which the concept of the visual arts is extended to
embrace time; to function in time. In the topical, time-specific field
of the international visual arts, Vaara has been a pioneer with work
that reveals the importance for art of place/situation-related
connotations. Vaara's attention changes art paradigms. The
revolutionary power of his art springs from integration: everything
that is not art becomes momentarily linked with art, an essential part
of the artwork, and the site of the occurrence of art. Roi performed
in this year's Venice Biennale, where he carried a stone for 6 days.
This piece was broadcast on the BBC World News Service.
Dolores Wilber
Ties that bind us together, our physical bodies and the ramifications
of psychological/social violence mark the investigations characterized
in my work. I tend to work with collaborators, many of the same core
group of collaborators, building relationships based on shared values
and social concerns. What makes us-the whole human community with all
of our social, cultural and physical differences - feel safe, how we
survive, and issues of social responsibility are enduring topics for
me. I believe that live unmediated small-scale performance has the
power to affect the audience in a fundamental way that distinguishes
it from other experiences; I believe the process is a kind of
problem-solving for how we should lead our lives. I focus on
performance, installation, video and still images. The work is
consciously emotional and highly charged; it aims for formal strength
and vivid and unusual images; it is disturbing, funny and entertains.
I try to provide a respite from our overwhelming everyday lives to
provide time for contemplation of life's difficulties and
pleasures.
Dolores is a visual and performing artist, writer and director. She is
a an assistant professor in the Art Department at DePaul University;
she taught Visual Communication at the School of the Art Institute in
Chicago for ten years. Her work has been presented locally and
internationally including at the Museum of Contemporary Art in
Chicago, the Cleveland Performance Art Festival, The Royal College of
Art in London, and the VonKrahlik Theatre and Rakvere Museum in
Tallinn, Estonia. She works collaboratively and has worked ith Goat
Island Performance Group, the LA Poverty Department, and Natsu
Nakajima, Japanese butoh artist. In 1999 she has received two DePaul
University Faculty Research Grants and a DePaul University Humanities
Fellowship and her second Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in 2000.
She is an occasional radio producer for This American Life hosted by
Ira Glass on national public radio.
