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November 10, 2000 - December 22, 2000
Jacqueline Cooper makes lush, erotic, and often gruesome paintings. Executed in the style of a traditional British figure in landscape painting, her subjects are ripped from the pages of underground Japanese fetish magazines and remade into distinctly American homespun scenarios.
Cooper describes variants on the rituals of Sado-Masochism. While the images often appear to depict pain, she would rather the work be discussed as inhabiting that knife-edge moment where the limitations of the pleasurable have been pushed almost to the point of fracture. The work describes the thrill of nearly breaking, rather than the defeat of being broken; and is celebratory rather than abject. In a society where intimacy is too often reduced to empty romantic ritual, the work describes desire without the treachery of romance.
Central to reading Cooper's paintings is understanding the female body as a highly tangible object whose flesh drips and oozes beyond the boundaries of the ropes, belts, hoods, and other restraining devices present. Just as the body appears to have been tamed it slips free again. She torques her figures in space to such an extreme degree that they at once engage and totally disrupt their reading. Each body type is punctuated by an unexpected nuance, a moment at which the cool removal of the business of pornography becomes heated and erotic through the lens of representation.
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September 16, 2000 - November 4, 2000
The 6 young artists in this exhibition tap into the potentials of new media in varying degrees of transparency. Their work ranges from that which exists in a solely digital domain to that which appears to be completely unplugged. Through experimental approaches and fluid formats, these artists have created works which invite the viewer to a new vantage point at which several levels of perspective are revealed.
In the environment that an interdisciplinary education offers, artists meet challenges which are neither purely sculptural nor two-dimensional. This is a community where artists mingle with engineers, musicians rub elbows with programmers, and designers meet historians. The resultant forms of creative expression search for new ways to manifest themselves, and those hybridizations often take form in new media.
Johannes Auvinen has worked extensively over the past few years experimenting with film, sound and digital video. Johannes' projects range from purely sonic work to lush, experimental video pieces and installations. He will be contributing a projected video work which samples from a classic film. Johannes is a recent graduate in Studio Arts.
David Beaudry is a classically trained clarinetist, pursuing his PhD in Music Performance. During his studies he has imposed upon his practice many conceptual challenges; expanding his playing to include computer mediated music/sound performance and has by extension developed sonic experiences which are immersive interactive installation works. David will be creating a unique interactive installation for this exhibition, using computer processing of sound triggered by a hybrid thermin. His work can currently be seen as part of Vision - Ruhr, Berlin, and his sound collaboration work with artist Victoria Vesna will be exhibited at the Walker Art Center later this year.
Mark Glover has recently completed his MFA in Design/Media Arts and exhibited Very Local Geographies, an outdoor sound installation, as part of his thesis work. He will be presenting a new version of this work for amped, in the gallery courtyard. Mark's interests reach deeply into sound design and the history of the sonic landscape.
Brian Van Klooster experiments with sound producing objects, small electronic circuits and their sculptural integration with video. An early iteration of his video leech will be shown - a small circuit clinging to a monitor which produces a sonic translation of video information. His degree in Studio Arts is nearly complete; and he is the facilitator/curator of this exhibition.
Rachel Mason has, over the past year adopted the role of a fictional character in her most recent video and film based work. Rachel brings together performance and film under the electronic eye of digital video, and will be contributing a 3 monitor installation containing footage of her character's recent activities. She will receive her degree this year.
Vincent Pruden has employed the use of hybrid remote control vehicles as part of his most recent sculptural video works. The opening of amped will feature his roaming remote control vehicle as it records and projects video footage of the attendants from a camera mounted on the vehicles' body. He is a recent MFA graduate in Studio Arts, and his work can be seen this fall at Location One, New York.
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June 23, 2000 - August 31, 2000
Sandroni Rey is pleased to present the U.S. debut of Heart + Soul, an exhibition of work by forty-four of the most dynamic young artists working in London today. Heart + Soul has been curated by artists Kirsten Berkeley and Gary Webb. The first showing of Heart + Soul took place in an east-end London warehouse in the summer of 1999 to much critical and popular acclaim. All new work has been created for the Los Angeles debut of Heart + Soul, with many of the artists making the journey to produce site specific installations.
Liam Gillick writes:
An expansive lexicon of new art making brought together for the first time. Diverse images and objects. Nothing held back by ironic endgames or fear induced repetition. The pictures and the sculptures on view are extreme, while some achieve this through softness, apparent familiarity and the induction of pleasure. Embroidered paintings, sewn-up sculptures, plastic excess. Paintings that look straight until you realize how skewed they are. Images produced from pattern. Design slipping in and out of focus. HEART + SOUL was spurred on by a moment. A time when work is still mutating and the next piece is another crucial move. Many artists in this show have already found critical and curatorial recognition. Yet none has locked up their work into a settled predictability. HEART + SOUL is the kind of show that can only happen once to each generation of artists. Not self-organized in collective fashion, the impulse comes from within the non-group. An openness at work, a desire to celebrate difference, a need just to see what it all might look like, all brought together...
Artists include: Kirsten Berkeley • JJ Charlesworth • Henry Coleman • Stuart Cumberland • Dexter Dalwood • Enrico David • Steven Dowson • Keith Farquhar • Ewan Gibbs • Brian Griffiths • Steven Gontarski • Luke Gottelier • Jun Hasegawa • Gavin Houtheusen • Roger Hiorns • Paul Hosking • Mustafa Hulusi • Max Hymes • Ben Judd • Dean Kenning • Elizabeth Kent • Jim Lambie • Elizabeth Manchester • Charlotte McGowan • Ian McLean • Paul Morrison • David Musgrave • Rupert Norfolk • Carl Plackman • Michael Raedecker • Berit Schweska • DJ Simpson • Polly Staple • Tommy Stockel • David Thorpe • Ralph Tait • Mark Titchner • Garry Webb • Martin Westwood • Richard Woods
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March 4, 2000 - April 22, 2000
Parallax is an exhibition of six young international artists currently working with photography.
All of these artists use photography to shed realness on imagery which tends to be romanticized and embellished. Memories of passion, pain and travel as well as childhood fairy tales are all things that we usually see through a fantastical lens – whether through an author’s description, an illustrator’s rendering, computer generated imagery or our own imaginations. Here, the unromanticized realness of the photographic image is used to manifest these images as they would really appear if we were ever able to re-experience our memories (which are generally comprised of moments that are infinitely more mundane than we remember them) or if we could ever actually experience our fantasies. We live in a world of self constructed realities. These artists have pulled back the curtain on our memories and exposed them as enhanced, inaccurate, incomplete and exaggerated. They have not realized our fantasies or memories but they have “real-ized” them. This collision of fantasy and reality makes us consider how much of reality we choose to edit out when given the choice.
The work of Elina Brotherus exists as an attempt to recreate and record memory. Brotherus tells open ended stories, using her body to express universal experiences. Her work is inspired by significant moments in her life that are then rendered in a decidedly realistic way. The matter-of-fact presentation of herself, with bruises and torn clothes, combined with her idyllic titles, emphasizes the fact that memory perfects moments that are actually imperfect, often making them romantic and flawless. Brotherus’ images focus us on the fact that the real value of our memories and fantasies lies in the feelings they leave behind and not the look of the events as they actually occur.
Patricia Dauder’s images take place in fictitious scenes that are reminiscent of fairy tales and fables. Dauder has transformed herself into a character found in strange yet some how familiar mystical forests. Her costumes and her surroundings recall mythical heroines and historical princesses. Dauder explores the alienation that takes place when the reality of the environment collides with fantasy of the character.
These same themes of childhood fantasies and magic realism are explored in the work of Sue de Beer. In this series of photographs, de Beer has inserted her own image into a popular video game. Video games in many ways serve as the modern day equivalent of children’s fantasy books. No where is our shared desire to enter into other worlds more acutely illustrated than in a child’s desire to control and explore the virtual worlds of video games. Here again, the artist introduces the intrusion of realism, in the form of her own photographic image, into the fantasy. This intrusion accentuates the actual falseness of our created worlds.
The work of Deborah Mesa-Pelly explores the universal childhood fantasies of secret tunnels and magical doorways through a decidedly unidealized lens. She builds models of imaginary worlds and underground passage ways that exist beneath the floor boards of her room or behind her closet walls. She depicts herself within these environments, often in the process of discovering them by pulling back pieces of her wallpaper or finding a hole in the wall behind her bed. These images of secret portals from children’s stories are usually only rendered verbally or through illustration, leaving our imaginations to fill in the blanks. Mesa-Pelly has made us consider how unrealistically these blanks are filled when solely left to our imaginations.
In Tom Hunter’s images, his use of light together with the arrangement of his subjects and their surroundings, recall the paintings of Vermeer. The contemporary nature of the images combined with the historical references make them oddly familiar and very powerful. By modernizing the surface elements of Vermeer’s imagery (clothing, furniture, architecture), Hunter’s photographs replace the romanticism which comes with the passing of time, with realism and a celebration of the banal. What we are left with are simply frozen moments in time. Stripped of their sentimentalism, these images remind us of the many layers of fantasy that we impose upon our reality and our history.
The work of Soo Kim explores frozen moments as well. Kim is interested in the moments ‘in between’ here and there. The moments that are seemingly forgotten and passed over but that, in actuality, create our realities and memories. The exoticism of travel is exposed as actually a series of ordinary and simple moments where location and destination are unimportant. It is only the combined traces left behind by these experiences that create memory.
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January 15, 2000 - February 19, 2000
Ryan has long been inspired by the moments of inception and creation. This fascination is reflected in Ryan’s markings, her attraction to colors found in the natural world and her use of birch wood as her canvas.
Each of Ryan’s paintings on birch are created in one sitting and are titled based on the date of their creation. Ryan then uses acrylic and gouache to create markings which follow the natural grain of the wood, striking a balance between naturally existing patterns and her own gestural embellishments. The resulting paintings land somewhere between a Rorschach test and a Dr. Seuss drawing.
This exhibition will mark the debut of Ryan’s sculptures. Made from cast fiberglass body parts, Ryan applies her markings on the surface of the ‘skin’. Here, the markings address the natural contours of the human body. Ryan has placed a truncated male and female figure in the small gallery. The markings on these figures lead one to think not only about the marks we leave on ourselves but about those marks and imprints that have been with us since birth.
The feeling of the exhibition as a whole is one that is born from fairy tales, fables and fantasies.
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