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Distance, Stance, Circumstance
Katherine Bauer - New York City
-Erotomotive Cosmogenic Provocation, 2012, 16mm film loop and llxl4" black and white photograms David Flaugher - New York City -(title for Flaugher's first piece is the space made by hitting the space bar 21 times), 5 gallon buckets, plastic cups, essential oils, water vapor, honey and wood glue residue, 1986 -Sweetgrass braid, sweetgrass, scotch tape, 1986 Michelle Young Lee - New York City -Broadcast from a Peninsula, 2012, video -Snowdown, 2006, video projection Davida Newman - New York City -Today's Crossword, The Daily News 6/15/2012, 2012, mixed media -Deliberate Compositions, 2012, stickers -Remnants/Byproducts, 2012, vinyl, paper and cardboard James Woodward - New York City -Self-portrait with football, 2005, video -Swamp (piggys revenge) 2011-2012, mixed media and digital video looped, <time: approx, 3:20> -Hadaly (Chrissy), 2012, mixed media Description “[E]very expression is an invention. It violates the purity of being with the accidents of personality, language, and time.” —Leo Bersani “Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.” —Jasper Johns Distance Movement as a simultaneous organization and disorganization: travel, flux, kinetics, contraction and expansion, collection and dispersal; the movement implicit in any “distance,” meaning di-stance, or “two positions.” Distance as a condition of movement: being between two places, being in two places at once. Stance The implicit point of fixity in any movement between distances—a kind of rootedness that allows for that movement. The first stance, as the condition of possibility for a second stance, and then the movement between. The quality of movement depends on the poise, the bearing, of the initial stance. Circumstance Displacing the binaries that attempt to erect themselves from the pairing of “distance, stance” (like between “movement” and “fixity”), circumstance arrives as almost an afterthought—the most forcible kind. It means to travel around… a movement more like wandering, a little less purposive, and suggests an oblique approach, compassing, curious. “Circumstance” highlights the role of contingency in any endeavor, the importance of the “circumstantial,” and of tenuous connections; it invokes the idea that any two things may relate to each other through accident, simply by their proximity, rather than through a shared logic. Distance, stance, circumstance should range through the works of these very distinctive artists, touching down here or there, and gathering things together in places, like a loose plaiting: the tracery of delicate, accretative networks in Davida Newman’s wall drawings; the condition of maximal potential energy expressed in James Woodward’s sculptures; the sense of physically and psychically negotiating a multiplicity of places in Michelle Lee’s video and photography; David Flaugher’s re-routing of space and of the senses through subtle obstructions and diffusions; the intense rhythms of Katherine Bauer’s visionary, erotic, epic films. Between each stance, a distance and a circumstance. Bios & Statements
Rachel Wilson Rachael Wilson is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of English at NYU where she also works as an Adjunct Instructor. She is Co-Founder and Co-Editor of The Organism for Poetic Research and Pelt, and she is also a Co-Editor of Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture. Her dissertation, "Feeling Reticent: Sensation, Exhaustion and Expression from Samuel Beckett to Clark Coolidge," investigates the resistance to language as a medium of artistic expression in 20th Century avant-garde literature. Her arts & culture blog can be found at www.mostperfectworld.com The Organism for Poetic Research at organismforpoeticresearch.org - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Katherine Bauer Katherine Bauer works primarily with 16mm film and its material potential for sculpture, photography and installation. Much of her work involves mythologies, folklores, and narratives. The celluloid of film gives bodily presence to these nan-narratives and enacts their themes of decay, eroticism and horror. Katherine received a BA from Bard College where she mojored in Film and Electronic Arts. She is currently working on a MFA from NYU in Studio Art whert she also teaches 16mm filmmaking. She is on the Board of Directors at the Filmmakers Cooperative, an active member of Millennium Film Workshop, and a member of the film collective Optipus. With Optipus she has performed at The Kitchen, Participant Inc., and Millennium Film Workshop among others. Her work has been shown across the United States and internationally In a variety of venues and galleries. Recently she has performed or shown work in New York at Microscope Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Millennium Film Workshop. Yaudeville Park, Bobby Redd Project Space, 80WSE Gallery, NYU Deutsch Hous Gallery, The Knitting Factory, The Stone, St. Cecilia's Convent, Tribes Gallery, Mono No Aware, Union Docs, and outside New York at DC #03 in Düsseldorf Germany, Unsmoke Systems Gallery in Braddock PA, Television Access Gallery in San Francisco CA, Havana Film festival Havana Cuba, Be Your Own Placebo Gallery North Adams MA, among others. Her films and photography are available are on view and as rentals at The Film-Makers Cooperative in New York City. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - David Flaugher On my artistic efforts, A temporary abstract set in motion while she awaits greater efforts. Keeps looking for a settlement. The longer she looks direct the greater the divide becomes. She's concerned with rather classical sentiments. Formn and subjective inlets are the varying shells that carry said classical drives. Like her father's boot size. Or the way her grandmother naturally places emphasis on the word 'you' When reading, the text seems to dance. She remembers, 'It's the spaces that surrounds which gives form'. This holds especially true for text. Pleasure is derived from her observations of contraction and allowance. A wholesome ease surfaces when she finds arbitrary tides to be responsible for the perimeters that surround her. 'What moves lives ', an older man once said. 'Concretion, a partnership with lifeless stagnation', her unspoken response. How could she speak directly in so many breaths and not sacrifice integrity? A most difficult contemplation buried deep from what seemed like before birth. She remembered reading, 'The richness of life's delicate interlacing may only be hinted at by linear means'. 'Then why do I keep fighting to comprehend in black and white?' If text does little to re-instate the ebb and flow of existence then it certainly stands to damage her rather sensitive inhabitance here. 'But if I sit-still, all efforts flatten'. And nothing satisfies more than the richness of spherical being. On my history, I've recently migrated from my native home in Detroit, MI to New York in order to pursue an MFA at New York University's Studio Art program. Prior to my current efforts I attended a residency at Skowhegan in the summer of 2010 and received my BFA from The College for Creative Studies in 2008. David Flaugher Summer 2012 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Michelle Young Lee Michelle Young Lee (b. 1981) is a native Angeleno from Southern California. Since graduating with a BFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2006, she has fancied herself as a purveyor of images and objects for the aesthetically inclined Michelle has gone on to live, work and exhibit in various countries including Mexico, Spain, S. Korea and the U.S Currently, she resides in New York City I Connecticut while pursuing an MFA in Studio Arts at New York University's Studio Arts Program. "...to become the empty screen which both receives what is projected onto it and projects back onto others what has been projected onto it. In this way, one look can make possible a potential infinity of other looks." --Kaja Silverman As a visual artist, I use photography, film/video and installation to create distinct branches of work. l utilize these mediums to address self-representation, the social construction of identities, and the relationship between the individual with that of wider historical influences such as migration and Diasporas. Starting from an early age, I have been aware of the friction that lies between the Korean preference for collective identity and the American disposition for individual agency. In turn, I am curious about how an individual is at once a representative of a group while being their own agent. This examination has taken form by way of perforrnance-based video and photographic self-portraits. I draw from various influences including international popular media the history of feminist photography, film and perforn1ance video, and these mediums' propensity to evoke reality or truth in representation. I also use the two-dimensionality of these mediums as a way to resist simple readings and to convey multi-dimensional interpretations of a subject. The visual space of cinema also serves as major influence; a space where a complete mise en scene contributes to a larger story. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Davida Fraya Newman Davida Newman received her BFA from Columbia College Chicago and is currently working toward her MFA at NYU Steinhardt. *** Language Reclamation Experiments We think of Oedipus and the way solving riddles leads to blindness . A 'solved' riddle is the reduction of heterogeneous material to logic, to the homogeneity oflogical thought, which produces a blind spot, the inability to see the otherness that gets lost in reduction. Only the unsolved riddle , the process of riddle-work before its final completion, is a confrontation with otherness. (Calvino, Six Memos for the next Millenium, p. 61). [Poetic language] is the only signifying strategy allowing the speaking anima/to shift the limits of its enclosure (Kristeva, Desire in Language, 33). Crossword: Between Q & A Glance of eye, thought of man, wing of angel, which of these had speed enough to sweep between the question and the answer, and divide the one from the other? (De Quincey quoted in Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium, 40.) My approach to a crossword puzzle begins by acknowledging the (literally) black and white, evenly delineated, direct clue-to-answer relationship that tends to purport a kind of standardized use of language. Crosswords provide a distraction from the fraught and nuanced language of thoughts in favor of a concrete, predictable and ultimately knowable application of words, with a right answer and correct placement in relation to all others. Between Q & A is a confrontation an effort to make language work for me by jamming so many ways of making meaning and containing it--organizational methods, office supplies, symbols, stickers, associations, annotations, connections, word plays, graphs, coding, re-coding, cross coding--to the point where the crossword functions as something else entirely: a network of play with multiple access points, a choose-your-own adventure, a search for freedom, not from the prison-house of language, but within it. Colleetive Image Bank In search of strategies with which to negotiate the limits of my signifying enclosure, I created and maintain a database of archetypal images that not only allows me to closely reflect upon my confrontation with information, but can also be employed as an evocative tool in a variety of situations. The database burgeoned from a folder into an entity; the friendly monster I've reared. I wrestle with it. I deal with its dirty, visceral side, its byproducts, its remnants. I partition the work space in order to contain its flow, to process it, to try and take possession of Things. But no matter how eagerly I strive toward centralization, consolidation, accessibility, boudaries and control, the data insists on producing excess and surprises, turning organization against itself, bringing images into odd contacts with one another, setting off sparks. Culled from various sources both web-based and print, each image in the collective image bank is downloaded or uploaded, renamed, tagged and re-edited. Each image is printed onto a card, labeled and sorted alphabetically. Images exist at once virtually, physically, and as potentialities. When a file is retired from the digital collection, the card becomes the image's final body. The database functions as engine. It generates art works. The cells of this organism manifest at my command as digital file, projection, printed and cut sticker, as a card, transparency, tattoo, animation, a poem or story, as part of an accidental composition, graffiti, a mystical divining device, in a film or video, a slide, as a design element in an interior vignette, as entertainment at a children's party, a tool for remembering dreams, as a star in a constellation, and as a tactic for exploding crossword puzzles. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - James Woodward James Woodward is an artist living in New York City. He uses individual and culturtal refuse and is interested in regression, abstraction, elegiac fetish and the confusion of language. He makes sculptures, video and collage. Exhibitions and screenings include Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; The Queens Museum of Art; The Museum of New Art, Detroit; NADAt Miami; Whitebox, New York and Camel Art Space, Brooklyn. He is currently pursuing his MFA from NYU Steinhardt where he also teaches Intro to Digital Photography. I recycle individual and cultural refuse, preexisting and found objects provide material intrinsically linked to time and process; excrement dumped and translated through the artist's body and society. Debris is a product of both nature and technology, archaeological resources whose disordered position reflects our own construction of models for society. I use sculpture to seek tension in this scatological amalgamation, questioning accepted hierarchies and systems structuring power. Transparency in production is vital to my practice, utilizing everyday objects that are accessible; my work exposes systems of value through emptied symbols and signs. There exists no separation between my art and myself. My life and practice is the realization of my unconscious self, an investigation into narratives that have both always existed yet will forever fail to reach their most honest state. I consider flesh my primary material, the body a vessel through which art can offer transubstantiation, breaking our codes from the linearity of a crafted timeline. Our bodies are strainers of passageways, not only measuring time but intersecting auras that blend fresh manifestations in the fonn of an artwork. Our thoughts are always memories; dialogues inherently fictional, non-linear and mimetic. My work attempts to blur these truths, treating fiction as omnipotent and a method for revealing fluctuations of authenticity and structures of social mythology. Mixing the autobiographical with the sensational, I acknowledge not simply the fabrication of memory but indulge in the potential for unfolding temporary narratives. By rendering time as malleable, I can work towards exposing the hegemonic structure of power it sustains. My work investigates memory as moving pictures; dialectical feelings informed by time and made available to arrest through the process of making art. |
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