"Collider" Exhibition
ZieherSmith
This event has ended.
Titled in reference to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (which recently proved the existence of the Higgs Boson, or God particle), Collider is a group exhibition organized by ZieherSmith artist Rachel Owens that considers the idea of the multiverse and the collision between the endless universes that can and do exist within our shared human experience. The five featured artists manipulate the interwoven relationships between seemingly disparate things, allowing their meanings to exist in the same time and space. Extrapolated beyond social and political readings, the artists work within the contemporary collision of various artistic practices; employing media, film, collage, craft and theater in their exploration of the relationship between object and image. The resulting exhibition investigates the breakdown of separation, as the artists utilize those spaces where ideas/objects/universes overlap.
Pinned in Robert Heinecken's UCLA office, an IA Richards quote read: "The greatest difference between the artist or poet and the ordinary person is found… in the range, delicacy, and freedom of the connections he is able to make between different elements of his experience." This idea is embodied in all of Heineken’s works as he fused images taken from the media to create radical new contexts, altering meanings and perceptions in the process.
Lucy Raven presents a selection of stereo slide viewers, each fit with her own 35mm stereo slides of Hollywood and India. The series comprises one component of an on-going project about the dismantling of the American film industry. Raven calls attention to the outsourcing to India by Hollywood of the stereoscopic 3D conversion in today’s blockbuster films.
Taking the concept of the show literally and into a domestic sphere, Beth Campbell’s newest body of exquisitely executed sculpture merges and penetrates multiple realities. Objects become unstable as they, and their meaning, collapse into each other. It is a physical, analog version of what we experience daily in ever-accessible digital lives; a complete compression of time, space and self. Objects which should epitomize the idea of home become nothing but dislocating.
Tommy Hartung’s video, The Last Vehicle, explores the way violence and conflict is represented in the media through war journalism and in moving images in general. The piece uses appropriated footage from various documentary films that cover brutal and often conflicting accounts of wars. The footage is juxtaposed with, and mediated by, very theatrical animated sequences that attempt to contextualize the appropriated footage. “The Last Vehicle” refers to the history of representing violence through moving images and the alarming way these stories are consumed.
Continuing her series of works inspired by Augusto Boal, Rachel Owens presents a new video installation using the techniques of the “Theater of the Oppressed.” She uses a diverse group of volunteers as performers working together in movement exercises that attempt to achieve “unity” without traditional communication (including speech and direct eye contact). Based on gender, race, socio-economic levels and even individual personalities, a struggle to reach consensus ensues. The work is projected on one of her bent wall sculptures, architectural elements that reiterate the idea of barriers being reduced through collision. A former studio assistant to Robert Heineken, she will also present a series of collages directly influenced by her mentor whereby politically charged images are literally woven together.
[Image: Robert Heinecken "Man Dealing with Four Elements" (1998) dye bleach print on foamcore, 72 1/2 x 30 in., Courtesy of the Robert Heinecken Trust, Chicago, and Petzel Gallery, New York]
Media
Schedule
from April 26, 2013 to May 24, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-04-26 from 18:00 to 20:00
Artist(s)
Robert Heinecken, Lucy Raven, Beth Campbell, Tommy Hartung, Rachel Owens