Kevin Atherton
Part of a generation that pioneered video and performance art in Britain in the 1970s and early 1980s, Atherton (Manx, b. 1950) has performed a number of pieces that adapt the structure of the press interview or the Q&A session of the artist talk. The work In Two Minds—Past Version (1978/2006), updates a piece done in 1978 by substituting a new set of answers.
In this 2006 version, Atherton responds to the amusingly antagonistic questions posed to him by his twenty-seven-year-old self. The questions are about the work itself and concern the effectiveness of his idea—as well as the effectiveness of idea-based art in general. Frustrated, present-day Atherton not only justifies his intentions in creating a piece based on an internal dialogue, but also explains how the terms of the debate have changed, and how the piece has become more about life than just art. The work reveals not only how video art has technically changed in the interim, but also how the perception of video art has changed over the years, as it has become ubiquitous in contemporary art.
To learn more about this artist, click here.
[exhibition press release via sfmoma.org]
Alex Schweder
A Sac of Rooms Three Times a Day, Vinyl & Fan Blown Air, 21’-0” x 9’-0” x 28’-0”, 2007
A Sac of Rooms Three Times a Day stuffs the four rooms of an 800 square foot house into a building envelope of a 500 square foot bungalow. Through this misfit, an architectural space results with deformations, writhings, and contortions as the rooms inflate and readjust to their volatile adjacencies. Although the timed “score” of fans turning on and off remains the same for every performance, the material and architectural result of the vinyl sacks is different each time that the rooms fall upon one another in different configurations during the deflations. Sound piece between inflations by Yann Novak.
to learn more about this artist, click here.
[images + text via alexschweder.com]
Leandro Erlich
Leandro Erlich’s installations function like traps made from fake mirrors, inversions or trompe l’oeils (a style of painting that gives an illusion of photographic reality) in which the spectator is invited to live out the strange experience of his presence or of his disappearance and to go beyond optical games in order to explore the depths of a psychological reality more disturbing than it appears.
- Extract from the press release for the exhibition, “Notre Histoire”, at the Palais de Tokyo, 2006
See/Learn more here.
Katrin Sigurdardottir
High Plane, 2001-2005, polystyrene, wood, steel.
“A very large white platform is constructed 13 feet off the ground, on top of the trusswork above the exhibition space. It is perforated with two holes and ladders that lead up to them. To view the landscape, the viewers climb the ladders and then can poke their heads through the 2 holes in the platform. Simultaneously they are confronted with each other and their heads become a disproportionate part of the landscape. The scene does not document an exisiting place, all the mountains/ islands are made up”*
[images via katrinsigurdardottir.info]
See/learn more here.
William Hundley
“I think we all share unconscious thoughts, but have learned to experience our lives independently. The lack of identity in my work allows the viewer to place themselves into the imagery or imagines who has been taken out.”*
