Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery is inaugurating its new location with a group exhibition entitled Textual Landscapes: Real and Imagined. The exhibition will feature works by Jim Campbell, Airan Kang, Yongseok Oh, Alan Rath, Ben Rubin and Marina Zurkow. Each of the artists represent different generations of art making, and deploy a variety of media including the moving image, language, photography, and virtual imagery to depict places both real and imaginary.
Jim Campbell uses Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) to transform photographic surfaces, shifting and redefining the image's material presence. By layering the photograph with moving images his works hover between the imaginary and the real, capturing the passage of time and shifting fields of visual representation.
Airan Kang fashions books out of fiber optics enclosed within plastic cases. Each text is an immaterial presence in light and color that is further realized in the space of the imagination. For this exhibition, Kang's virtual library was created as a homage to the books of the philosophers, poets and novelists that are her sources of inspiration.
Alan Rath's newest sculpture is a pair of mechanistic eyes, which will be suspended from above, positioned to look down upon the gallery and its visitors. Rath's wit and subtle treatment of materials, including cathode ray tubes and tubular metal, evoke bio-mechanical, futurist metaphors of the human body.
Ben Rubin's moving text sculptures, which are fashioned from white LED strips are inspired by language. The LED displays run off an algorithm designed by Rubin, which searches through phrases from all of Shakespeare's texts and strategically selects excerpts to scroll across the screen. Rubin has an uncanny ability to unfold and unravel words and phrases, joining them in strange and unfamiliar combinations.
Yongseok Oh creates nearly seamless video sequences by editing fictive scenes appropriated from a variety of different movies and combining them with his own footage. In Drama No. 3 an invented narrative is collaged together from different sources, which invite the audience to experience the changed scenarios as chance encounters.
Marina Zurkow's simultaneously hopeful and foreboding works entitled SLURB ("slum" and "suburb") and The Elixir Series depict watery vistas in which climate change has produced ecological disasters. Her seascapes are a breathtaking journey through the rough waters of a changing world.