Filed under: Spring 2009
10th Lesson
3.9 – 3.18.2009
A film within a video that uses bad timing to draw out a classic joke, this work highlights how language lessons teach you more than proper pronunciation. The motif of the circle, the wheel, and the spiral conspire to confuse and befuddle. Made in collaboration with sound artist Will Redman.
Essential Chair
3.19 – 3.31.2009
16mm experimental film about the ideal and the embodiment of the Father figure.
10th Lesson … 3.9 – 3.18.2009
Essential Chair … 3.19 – 3.31.2009
Atrium Gallery – Western Michigan University
Joanna Raczynska earned her masters degree in documentary production from the University of London. She is a member of the video collective Termite TV and a founding member of the programming collective Stateless Cinema. Her short videos have shown internationally and across the US. Screening history includes: Festival of Women’s Film & Media Arts, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, September 2007 – The Takoma Park Film Festival, Takoma Park, MD, October 2007 Videopolis – The Metro Gallery, Baltimore, MD, May 2008
Joanna Raczynska – Baltimore Maryland
Filed under: Spring 2009
44 Meaningful Sounds derives its name from the number of meaningful sounds (or phonemes) in the English (American) language. Each sound was extracted from representative words in order to obtain as closely as possible the way it might vary slightly from the beginning or end of a word to its interior. These sounds have been assembled into a library and are played back in random order using an algorithm designed to mimic the consonant and vowel patterns of the English language.
I am curious about the effects of randomness and the ways it can be wielded as a tool to upset our expectations and create representations that defy predictable meaning. While most of my work plays with or against language, 44 Meaningful sounds is the first to directly engage with systems of linguistic representation.
44 Meaningful Sounds … 2.11 – 3.7.2009
Patrick Craig Manning is an Assistant Professor of Photography at the University of New Mexico. Born in Seattle, WA, he received degrees in photography and archeology from the University of Washington and his MFA from the University of New Mexico before going on to teach as a professor at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis. His photographic, digital, and video work invokes loss to explore the intersection of representation, language, and history and has been exhibited at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Eiteljorg Museum of Indian and Western Art and galleries from coast to coast.
Patrick Craig Manning – Alburquerque New Mexico
Filed under: Spring 2009
Lee Wells
Metropolis (1800 Frames Plus), 2008
Digital Video (color/sound)
Duration: 54 minutes
An anonymous figure roams the maze-like streets of an ancient marble city. Although there are signs of contemporary life present, a bike, garbage bins, shops and some cats, no humans are present outside of occasional voices and the artists footsteps echoing down the claustrophobic walkways. More than a simple document of place and that of light and color. The work creates a subtle sense of suspense, mystery and discovery as the camera passes from areas of darkness that open up to theatrically lit ancient architecture and back again, eventually leading the viewer to a final destination.
This video was shot on location in the city center of Split Croatia, formerly Roman Emperor Diocletian’s 4th century palace.
Metropolis (1800 Frames Plus) … 1.26 – 2.7.2009
Atrium Gallery – Western Michigan University
Lee Wells is an artist, independent curator and consultant currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. His artwork primarily questions systems of power and control and has been exhibited internationally for over 10 years, including the 51st La Biennale Di Venezia, NCCA Moscow, Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, the Museo d’arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (MART), Chelsea Art Museum and the PS1 Contemporary Art Center. He is a co-founder and director of IFAC-arts, an alternative exhibition and installation program for artists and curators. He is also a co-founder of the video art portal, Perpetual Art Machine His projects and exhibitions have been written about by various national and international art and news publications to include: The New York Times, Art Newspaper, The Washington Post, Art inAmerica, WPS1 Art Radio. Wells is currently a curator at large for Scope Art Fairs and is a site editor emeritus for www.rhizome.org.
Lee Wells – Brooklyn New York
Filed under: Spring 2009
Vince Mistretta
This video highlights the work of Western New York area media and sound artists interested in composition and new methods of collaboration. This is a witness to the development of original sound and image works that are collaborative and improvised, trustful and open to new ways of working between media and sound artists.
Twelve media artists were invited to produce an original, silent (or near silent) short film or video piece to be “read” as a graphic score by variations of performers from The Open Music Ensemble. Live recordings and performances of the scores in sound are paired with visual works, developed especially for this exhibition, now video. A live concert of selected works was originally performed on September 23, 2005.
Siew Wai Kok
Featured media artists include: Dorothea Braemer, Elliot Caplan, Stephanie Gray, Siew-wai Kok, Carl Lee, Brian Milbrand, Vince Mistretta, Jan Nagle, Alan Rhodes, Kelly Spivey, Carolyn Tennant and Stephen Vitiello.
Participating musicians include: Steve Baczkowski (horns), J.T Rinker (trombone), Josh DeScherer (bass), Ben Harris (violin), Leah Muir (cello), Otto Muller (accordian), Chris Reba (bass), Will Redman (percussion), Bill Sack (electric guitar), Andrew Walsh (contrabass) and Todd Whitman (horns and various alternative noise makers).
The Open Music Ensemble is a collective of over a dozen Buffalo-based musicians affiliated with The Open Music Foundation, a not-for-profit organization for composers and artists dedicated to the promotion of artistic expression based on unconventional, experimental, open-form, and — especially — graphical, forms of communicating musical ideas. For more information, visit http://www.openmusic.us
July 4, 2005 NYC
i: Elliot Capalan
s: Will Redman + N. Andrew Walsh
New York, 8pm, 8/25/05
i: Kelly Spivey
s: Todd Whitman
Intensity Priority
i: C. Tennant + David Jones
s: Otto Muller, Ben Harris + Chris Reba
Untitled
i: Brian Milbrand
s: Bill Sack, JT Rinker, Todd Whitman, N. Andrew Walsh, Chris Reba + Steve Baczkowski
Greta’s Ball
i: Dorothea Braemer
s: JT Rinker, Todd Whitman, Leah Muir + Steve Baczkowski
Leaving
i: Alan Rhodes
s: Ben Harris
Grass Roots, Moth Light
i: Stephen Vitiello
s: Will Redman + Bill Sack
Storm at Lacock Abbey
i: Jan Nagle
s: Steve Baczkowski + Josh DeScherer
Fire Escape
i: Carl Lee
s: JT Rinker + Otto Muller
Faces
i: Siew-wai Kok
s: Otto Muller, N. Andrew Walsh, Leah Muir, Chris Reba + Steve Baczkowski
Zig Zag
i: Vince Mistretta
s: Bill Sack
Governor’s Island
i: Stephanie Gray
s: Leah Muir
Eyes and Ears: Sound Needs Image … 1.5 – 1.21.2009
Atrium Gallery – Western Michigan University
A second version of this project was commissioned by Hallwalls in Buffalo NY in the spring of 2008.
Joanna Raczynska and Will Redman, curators
Filed under: Fall 2008
Translations of Lorca, 2006 (see video)
For this interdisciplinary collaborative project, I worked with the director of Central Washington University’s Chamber Choir and another filmmaker to create a video installation, which coincided with a live performance of the “Suite de Lorca” written by a famous Finnish composer, Einojuhani Rautavaara. The synchronized installation consisted of compatible imagery, compiled from video-based observations of nature and travels through various environments, projected on two separate 9 x 12 foot screens placed on either sides of the choir. Shifting with the music from fast to slow, light to dark, frantic to meditative, the film follows an anonymous figure whose presence serves as a conduit for one’s inner quest.
* single channel video only will be presented at Western Michigan University.
Previous documentation: Translations of Lorca, Two-Channel Video Installation with Live Choir, Central Washington University, 2006
Translations of Lorca … 12.1 – 12.20.2008
Atrium Gallery – Western Michigan University
Originally from Southwestern Ohio, Michael Sherwin received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from The Ohio State University in 1999, and in June of 2004 he received his Master of Fine Arts in Photography from the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon. He has taught a variety of photography and digital imaging courses at institutions including: the Center for the Arts in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Maude Kerns Art Center in Eugene, Oregon, the University of Oregon and Central Washington University. After an eight-year stint in the Northwest, Michael recently returned to the East to accept a position as Assistant Professor of Photography and Digital Imaging at West Virginia University. He has won numerous grants and awards for his work, and has been exhibited widely. He is also an active and participating member of the Society for Photographic Education, and the College Art Association.
Michael Sherwin – Morgantown West Virginia
Filed under: Fall 2008
Michael Lasater
Passing Figure, 1999
Video with Sound, stereo
Running Time: 5:00 minutes
11.3 – 11.8.2008
see video
Michael Lasater
Billboard, 2004
Video with Sound, stereo
Running Time: 5:15 minutes
11.10 – 11.15.2008
see video
Michael Lasater
Visions Fugitive, 2007
Video with Sound, stereo
Running Time: 6:00 minutes
11.17 – 11.22.2008
see video
The subject of my work often derives from issues and processes of personal psychology, especially perception, memory, personal narrative, and the construction of meaning.
As an artist, I am primarily interested in composition in video, animation, and sound as a means of exploring, discussing, and objectifying ideas and concepts. But I am also interested in the exploration of media composition for its own sake; I’m interested in vocabulary, structure, technique, and methods.
Dziga Vertov (film), Anton Webern (music), and Gerhard Richter (painting) are representative of artists who have had a significant influence on my work. Vertov’s ethos in his declaration I am cinema-eye, I am camera-eye , his development of film as a separate reality, nearly an alternative consciousness, have influenced my conception of media composition as a self-referencing language, much like music. Webern’s serial work, in which every note is a planet, every movement a universe, suggests to me not only strategies for composition and structure, but provides a firm basis for confidence in minimalist time-forms or time-objects as vehicles of significant communicative power. I am enormously attracted to the work of Gerhard Richter, who often bases his art on photographs and other preexisting sources, and whose technique includes the ability to control radically different vocabularies, often within the same frame.
Passing Figure … 11.3 – 11.8.2008
Billboard … 11.10 – 11.15.2008
Visions Fugitive … 11.17 – 11.22.2008
Atrium Gallery – Western Michigan University
Michael Lasater – South Bend Indiana
Filed under: Fall 2008
courtsey of the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/TBA
© Marina Abramović, The Onion, 1996 – 20:00 mins
The first shot is a close up of Abramović looking upward and holding a large onion. Her fingernails are painted bright red, just like her lips. Slowly she brings the onion closer to her mouth, taking a large bite from it and beginning to chew. Her voice-over keeps repeating the following as she devours the onion: ‘I’m tired of changing planes so often, waiting in the waiting rooms, bus stations, train stations, airports. I am tired of waiting for endless passport controls. Fast shopping in shopping malls. I am tired of more career decisions: museum and gallery openings, endless receptions, standing around with a glass of plain water, pretending that I am interested in conversation. I am tired of my migraine attacks. Lonely hotel room, room service, long distance telephone calls, bad TV movies. I am tired of always falling in love with the wrong man. I am tired of being ashamed of my nose being too big, of my ass being too large, ashamed about the war in Yugoslavia. I want to go away. Somewhere so far that I’m unreachable, by telephone or fax. I want to get old, really, really old, so that nothing matters any more. I want to understand and see clearly what is behind all of us. I want not to want anymore.’
As she is complaining, Abramović is noticeably agitated by eating the raw onion. Her eyes are tearing up, her saliva is dripping out of her mouth as her lipstick is rubbed off and bits of onion layers stick to her face. Her chewing is slowing down, but she continues to take ferocious bites from the onion while the voice-over continues. In certain respects, ‘The Onion’ shows familiarities with early performances like ‘Art must be Beautiful, Artists must be Beautiful’, in which Abramović is violently brushing her hair and face while reciting the title of the piece. As the early performances revolve around mental and physical limits of pain, ‘The Onion’ resumes Marina’s dedication to idea of the inseparability of body and mind by challenging apparent limitations of physical stamina. The video is also part of the 16-channel installation ‘Video Portrait Gallery’ (Abramović 1975-2002).
The Onion … 10.25 – 11.1.2008
Atrium Gallery – Western Michigan University
Marina Abramović – New York New York
Filed under: Fall 2008
Andrew Kaufman
Hold On/ Hold Up
Video with no Sound
Running Time – 8:34 minutes
9.2 – 9.6.2008
Hold On/ Hold Up is a endurance video performance documenting myself struggling to hold onto a bar and hold a bar over my head for as long as possible. I understand this struggle as an allegory of the human condition, in which the changing contexts of the bar serves only as extreme ideological opposites bereft of empathy for the undertaking.
Andrew Kaufman
End Trajectory (Trauma Map)
Video with Sound
Running Time – 2:54 minutes
9.8 – 9.13.2008
see video
This video maps the destruction of five drinking glasses half filled with water. The jarring sound of the rupturing glasses is meant to create a sense of unease in an often-contemplative space. The conceptual beginning of this series of investigations was the events of September 11, 2002. I have shown this video with re-assembled drinking glasses on small pedestals.
Andrew Kaufman
Conquest of the Air
Video with Sound
Running Time – 15:00 minutes
9.15 – 9.20.2008
see video
Conquest of the Air is a short video performance documenting a collaborative effort to create a simple paper airplane. The video shows a close up view of a pair of hands trying to navigate a set of simple decisions to produce a paper airplane. The visual awkwardness that sometimes ensues is because one hand is mine and one hand is from a collaborator. Concepts such as invisibility, perception, collaboration, transformation and fun were the impetus for the performance.
Hold On/ Hold Up … 9.2 – 9.6.2008
End Trajectory (Trauma Map) … 9.8 – 9.13.2008
Conquest of the Air … 9.15 – 9.20.2008
Atrium Gallery – Western Michigan University
My artwork is a direct reflection of my own observations and experiences within society. Collecting these, I translate them into contemplative visual and experiential art. Since my work is driven by experience and idea, I am able to free myself from specific media concerns enabling the utilization of any medium that successfully develops my response. The multiplicity of forms I have created; which include painting, video, sculpture, and installation, are presented in such a way as to encourage the viewer to engage with them as an experience of space and form on a psychological, illusory and/or physical level.
Andrew Kaufman received his Master of Fine Arts degree in 2002 from the University of South Florida in a studio art program that emphasized the coupling of concept and form. Kaufman considers himself a convergent artist, letting idea dictate medium, which has led to a multiplicity of mediums that include video, sound, sculpture, painting and digital print. He has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, and recently was the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP grant for visual art. Andrew Kaufman is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting at Grinnell College in Iowa.
Andrew Kaufman – Grinnell Iowa
