Press Release
April 13 - May 26, 2007
Opening Reception: April 12, 6-8pm
The Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery is pleased to present Natural Circuits, a new
show featuring an international group of contemporary artists.
Natural Circuits brings together artists who employ a variety of media and
technologies to create innovative aesthetic strategies for fashioning images and
experiences that reflect on how we see the world around us. Each of the artists
employs interactive means to engage the viewer directly in the reception of the
artwork. The artists rework existing technologies to shape an intertextual
engagement with a variety of materials in artworks that change over time and
through participation.
The use of closed-circuit video as a means for altering real-time perception features in installations by Buky Schwartz and Hsin-Chien Huang. In Spring 1981, Schwartz explores the treatment of natural elements and how different perceptual instruments allow us to see them in new ways. A pioneer in the creative use of closed-circuit video to create complex installations, Schwartz in this work fills the gallery with a cluster of variously sized tree trunks, each of them painted with markings. On a monitor those markings appear as seen through the video camera. But the camera flattens the three-dimensional space it shoots, creating from the painted lines a two-dimensional geometric image, revealing the hidden shape that only exists from a mediated point of view. Key to Schwartz' video-construction is how the work operates, and can be enjoyed from, a variety of perspectives.
Hsin-Chien Huang creates a sophisticated body art that involves the active
participation of the viewer. Experiment Exchange consists of a screen on which
appears a silhouette made up of animated white birds, moving in real time
according to the action of the viewer. The human shape is thereby transformed and the viewer revealed as a living presence of and with nature. Elegant and evocative, Experiment Exchange turns the mirror into a new means for representing immediate, transformative reflections of ourselves.
Our experience and understanding of an artwork shifts as we see it from different perspectives, a phenomenon evocatively explored in works by Monika Bravo and Mariano Sardón. Bravo offers a large body of moving images, photo works and interactive installations of urban landscapes and recognizable environments that explores the idea of the world as a psychological entity. In The Vortex, a moving image of a pond appears twice: projected against the wall but also reflected in an adjacent mirror. As the viewer triggers a hidden interactive device, image and reflection begin to rotate in a spiraling motion, creating a subtle and vivid sense of how our environment can change through perception.
One of a series of elegant artworks that reflect on our physical transaction with the aesthetic text, Mariano Sardón's Books of Sand projects stories by Jorge Luis Borges onto a bed of sand. The viewer can move her hands through both sand and text, experiencing the interface between natural material and word as a textual surface where language can be read and felt as a physical object.
Paul DeMarinis displays a series of innovative projects that explore the dialectics of visual and auditory experience. Like many of his works, these comment on how we experience memory and history through the dynamic visual and aural presence of spoken language. In Tongues of Fire, George W. Bush's speech justifying theinvasion of Iraq is presented as a photographic flame recording, a method based on 19th-century manometric flames, originally used for studying phonetics. The troubling meaning and historical significance of Bush's words are signified through the changing intensity of the flame. In this powerful meditation on language and meaning, the voracious and destructive quality of fire thus becomes a metaphor for the power of words.
Participating Artists...
Monika Bravo is a Columbian-born artist living and working in New York City. Employing moving images, still photography and sound, her work focuses on how architecture and the urban environment reflect the individual's ability to conjure memories of a particular place in time. She studied at theInternational Center for Photography in New York as well as the London School of Photography and has received grants and awards such as the SITE Santa
Fe Art Institute Artist-in-Residence Grant and the NYSCA Electronic Media & Film Award. She has participated in many international film festivals and video screenings, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York. Solo exhibitions include the Centro de Arte Caja Burgos, Spain; Ciocca Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy; Site Santa Fe and Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, NY.
Paul DeMarinis was born in Palo Alto, CA where he is now an Associate Professor at Stanford University. He has been working as an electronic media artist since 1971 and has created numerous performance works, sound and computer installations and interactive electronic inventions. He has performed at The Kitchen, NY and internationally at the Festival d'Automne à Paris, Het Apollohuis in Holland and at Ars Electronica in Linz and has created music for
the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. His interactive audio artworks have been shown at the I.C.C. in Tokyo, The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and Bravin Post Lee Gallery in New York. Public artworks include large- scale interactive installations at Park Tower Hall in Tokyo, the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and Expo 1998 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Hsin-Chien Huang was born in Taiwan. Having studied mechanical engineering at National Taiwan University and at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, he is fluent in both digital technology and traditional art. Hsin-
Chien was the artist in residence for Chinese Culture University in 2004. He has exhibited work at the Hong-Ga Museum, the Taipei Artist Village and the National Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan, as well as at the MiArt Contemporary Art Fair in Milan, Italy.
Mariano Sardón was born in Argentina artist and is currently a professor of Electronic Arts at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero. His work explores the aesthetic possibilities of scientific paradigms using real-time
technologies such as interactive video and installations. Academically, Sardón received a fellowship from the Media Centre d'Art I Disseny (MECAD) in Barcelona, Spain and was a visiting scholar in the Hypermedia Studio at the
School of Theater, Film and TV at UCLA. International exhibitions include the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Missouri, the Museum of Latin American Art, Buenos Aires; the Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires; and the Manifestation Internationale Vidéo et Art Electronique de Montréal.
Buky Schwartz was born in Jerusalem, Israel and currently lives and works in Tel Aviv. His muti-media interactive sculptures present the viewer with the construction of the image as an experience in real time as something we can
inhabit and reconstruct in our minds. His work is in numerous private and public collections and has been included in the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial in New York, the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, and Documenta in Kassel. He was also represented in such leading historical surveys of video art as A History of Video Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Video Skulptur, Cologne. He was also represented in such leading historical surveys of video art as A History of Video Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Video Skulptur, Cologne, Germany.
The Gallery is located at 601 W 26th Street, Suite 1240, New York, NY. The Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11-6.