"Live Theory" Exhibition
Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery
This event has ended.
Through a variety of media technologies, both new and old, each of these artists describe and interpret our rapidly changing social, political, and economic landscapes. This group of internationally diverse artists are in the midst of reshaping our understanding of how to create and disseminate information. The modes developed for mapping information, the roles of language across media networks, and the pictorial authority of photography, are all changing at rapid speeds. An array of media interfaces from the Google map that gives us immediate access to any place on earth to the social media that support regional activism all are becoming new tools and the means for artists to reshape our conventional modes of creative expression.
Ingo Günther's installation of illuminated globes foreground our planet as a place of shifting power relationships that can be imagined in new ways. His subtle and incisive articulations of visual information inform his brilliant remaking of the traditional globe into a sculpture representing history and today's changing world. One can look back over time to see how the history of mapping captured how the world was imagined. During the Renaissance, maps depicted uncharted seas filled with monsters and lands containing unknown populations. As territories distant from Europe were colonized the mapping of the then known world reflected the changing relationships of competing spheres of power. The map of the nation states has been in a constant state of flux perhaps most dramatically with the end of the Cold War toward the end of the last century.
Brigitte Kowanz creates elegant sculptures that shape the movements of language and give an added dimension of expression to the constant flow of written language and our codes of communication. Written language has taken on a new presence through the internet and i-Phone technology. We are constantly texting one another through a never-ending sequence of blogs, tweets, and emails. Although technology is giving us new ways to communicate it is still language and the constant flow of information, data, that shapes so much of how we see the world.
Shirley Shor has created an innovative computer program that creates an infinitely changing human face. Taken from a series of still photographic portraits, her algorithm renders a continually changing portrait that never repeats. The changing topologies of the self become the material of an evocative redefinition of the portrait, and how we see ourselves over the course of time. Whether it is homeland security or the passport we use to identify ourselves, the photographic portrait is a fundamental tool for identifying and proving who we are as individuals. However, the ability to digitally manipulate the photograph as a document of reality has called into question the truth of the photograph.
[Image: Ingo Günther "WorldProcessor Globes" Installation View]
Media
Schedule
from September 16, 2011 to October 15, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-09-15 from 18:00 to 20:00