[Nettime-bold] Art Event >>Artemisia Gallery / BorderPetrol presents POTSHOTS: Recent Performance Installation and Video Art (Screening and Live Performances)

[Artemisia Gallery / BorderPetrol <borderpetrol@artemisia.org>]

Apologies for any cross-posting...

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For Immediate Release

August 18, 2001

Contact:  	Louise McKissick (773) 493-5515
potshots@artemisia.org

http://www.artemisia.org

POTSHOTS:  Recent Performance Installation and Video Art

Installations, live performances (ongoing) and video screenings (8 pm)

(Hi-res JPEG images of Christine Carson’s piece, Another Gravity, are available for print via download from our website, http://www.artemisia.org/potshots)

Friday, August 24 and Saturday, August 25th, 2001

7:00 pm - 10:00 pm

Artemisia Gallery, 700 N. Carpenter Street, Chicago Illinois 

Free Admission
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CHICAGO, Illinois USA ... On August 24 and 25th, BorderPetrol, a newly-formed entity devoted to bringing international media art to Chicago will present POTSHOTS:  Recent Performance Installation and Video Art, a live performance event and video screening.

The artists selected for POTSHOTS have often chosen to re-shoot famous movies or videos, casting themselves in the starring role as a way to wittily subvert what they cannot escape.  The artists represented in POTSHOTS run the gamut from the human/computing interface of BADPACKET to the singularly beautiful installation work of Christine Carson, in which she reconfigures Bruce Nauman’s "Pacing Upside Down" video into a neo-feminist gesture.

The event offers the Chicago audience a unique opportunity to see work by both high profile and emerging local artists, as well as works by well-known international artists such as Roi Vaara, who participated this year in the Venice Biennale.  The foreign artists who are a part of this performance and screening have never before presented work in Chicago.  This is a rare chance to survey what is going on due north, above the border and across the Atlantic.

 "A resurgent interest in the early 70s body-centered video art by artists such as Bruce Nauman and Steina Vasulka seems to have cross-pollinated with our technocentric, media-saturated pop culture," says curator Louse McKissick.  "The result has been quite amazing work where, a la "the Real World", the artist as ordinary Joe seeks to insert her/himself onto the omnipresent screen and into the omnipotent Hollywood narrative.  The only things that seem to stick in our collective unconscious today are top 40 pop lyrics, opening dialogue from blockbuster movies, or, for the over-educated amongst us, MOMA standards.  Like bad Muzak, these media signposts become the background to which we live out the enormity of our lives. 

Chicago Artists:  Dara Greenwald, Rob Ray, Josh Steinbauer, Dolores Wilber

Finnish Artists:  Roi Vaara

Toronto Artists: BADPACKET (Michelle Kasprzak + Mike Steventon), Christine Carson, Johanna Householder + b.h. Yael.

(Biographical information and short performance descriptions follow below.)


Artemisia Gallery is pleased to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts 


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Mike Steventon + Michelle Kasprzak = _badpacket_
_badpacket_ uses performance as a vehicle for the exploration of contemporary issues relating to the interfacing of humans and machines. In particular, they examine the changing role of human biology in the age of smart machines and genetic modification, and the evolution taking place within the architecture of human communication.

_badpacket_ uses computer generated imagery, performance, live video mixing and projection to create a unique layered environment that taps into our hopes and fears for the future of technology. Combining the use of digital, analogue, and live techniques allows _badpacket_ to plunder the immediacy of the internet, the fluidity of live video mixing, and the responsive interactivity of performance.

>>For 20 years Mike Steventon has been working collaboratively with those who wish to use creative technologies to create their own media outside of the mainstream. His experience covers design, photography, film, video, television, audio, performance, computers and digital media.

>>Michelle Kasprzak is a performer, video artist, photographer and digital artist based in Toronto. She has a BFA in the New Media from Ryerson University. Her solo work and collaborations have recently been exhibited at: the Art Gallery of Ontario, ASpace Gallery, Mercer Union, PleasureDome, iMAGES Festival, CONTACT Festival of Photography, Cinematheque Ontario, the 7A*11D Performance Art Festival, Year Zero One, InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, and Trinity Square Video. In the year 2001, she won the InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre/Toronto Community Foundation Emerging Electronic Artist award.

Christine Carson
Another Gravity is a non -linear mediated performance that occupies the space and is to be understood as a "presence". Carson was inspired by Bruce Nauman’s 1969 video entitled "Pacing Upside Down" where Nauman attempts to create the illusion that he is walking on the ceiling in a circle, the diameter of which increases until he is outside the range of the camera. By filming from above with his arms in the air, Nauman examines the potential of the camera – he performs for the camera, as it were. Christine Carson’s project extends Nauman’s original idea to its natural conclusion utilizing the scope of image and sound manipulation technologies that are currently available.  In Another Gravity, Carson will be wearing a red dress that appears to fall from her waist over her head as if she was truly walking on the ceiling. Her feminist reprisal of Nauman’s video will feature a human scale projection on the ceiling of the gallery. The crystalline sound of taffeta rustling (digitally!
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 augmented) will emanate from miniature speakers to create a surround sound environment. Where Nauman’s piece envisions the potential of the medium, Another Gravity’s hyper real illusion creates real vertigo and claustrophobia. 

Christine Carson is a Toronto based multidisciplinary artist whose videos,  performative installations and cultural interventions attempt to collapse the critical distance between the spectator and the art experience. Carson ‘s most recent project entitled Numb/Hum A Subterranean Metropolitan Opera is a cultural intervention that has been presented at performance festivals  in Edmonton,  Toronto  and Montreal. She has just been  awarded one of the American Franklin Furnace Grant’s to present Numb/Hum in New York in 2002. Christine is active on the board of directors of the artist run alternative film and video cooperative Charles Street Video and is a masters student at York University.

Dara Greenwald
Dara Greenwald’s Bouncing in the Corner #36DDD is, according to Fred Camper, "a funny take-off on Bruce Nauman’s early video work, replaces Nauman’s repetitive movements with a large breasted woman slamming herself into the corner of a room, the bouncing of her breasts tweaking his ideas of formalist perfection." 

Dara Greenwald is an interdisciplinary artist living in Chicago.  She is concerned with bodies, communities, and social activism.  Bouncing in the Corner #36DDD has been screened at B54 London, England, Chicago Filmmakers, Videolisboa, and the Split Video Festival in Split, Croatia, as well as numerous other venues.

Johanna Householder + b.h. Yael
December 31, 2000 is a shot-for-shot recreation of the THE PIVOTAL scene in Stanley Kubrick's classic 2001:  A Space Odyssey.  Dave is in the process of dismantling HAL, the renegade and recalcitrant computer.  On December 31, 2000, Kubrick's apocalyptic dream has not yet been realized.  The domestic scene supplants the space station, and household appliances are the conduit through which Dave (Householder) emerges and enters the spaceship in order to render HAL powerless.  In an ironic reversal, December 31, 2000 exposes the failure of the future.

Johanna Householder is a multidisciplinary and performance artist, best known as a member of the satirical feminist performance ensemble, The Clichettes. She teaches performance art and contemporary issues at the Ontario College of Art and Design, where she was chair of the New Media/Integrated Media program from 1990 to 1996. She has performed across Canada and in the U S under variable circumstances. One of the founders of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, she is currently collaborating on a book on performance art by Canadian women. 

Louise McKissick (curator)
Louise McKissick is a Canadian new media performance and installation artist based in Chicago. In September she will be exhibiting at Artemisia Gallery with Toronto artist Victoria Scott. Her recent project is "The Julia Set", an interactive installation featuring borrowed library books and a series of subtly erotic photographs influenced by the work of Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.  The images will be hidden between the pages of borrowed library books based on mathematical calculations from the Julia Set, part of the Chaos theory branch of mathematics. 

Her digital video microshort , iloveyou, won the Palm d'Or first prize in the Aggressively Boring Film Festival (billed as "The world's first film fest for the Palm OS"), and was broadcast on an outdoor LCD video billboard as part of the Transmedia 2000 show in Toronto this past September. She has performed internationally, most recently at the Exit Performance Art Festival in Helsinki last winter. Her work has been critically reviewed in Lola and Eye Magazine and was recently mentioned in the New York Times, the London Guardian and Res Magazine: the Magazine of Digital Filmmaking. 

She has received grants from the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, the Illinois Arts Council, the Chicago Artists International Program, the Canada Council, and the Ontario Arts Council. Currently, she is Assistant Professor of Academic Computing at Columbia College Chicago.

Rob Ray
Make Big Dreams Happen is an interactive installation for the Palm PDA. The participant takes a nametag/stylus apparatus with an empowerment word of their choosing. The participant then kneels in front of bed and places stylus is placed on the tongue. While preparing for the piece the participant can watch video footage of adult film actors participating in cunnilingus along side audio and visual messages of personal empowerment. 

The stylus is then placed on the tongue and cunnilingus is performed on the Palm Pilot which is mounted on the bed. This cunnilingus is rewarded by the pitch shifting, effectation, and filtering of the audio in response to the participant. This work explores man's need to positively focus his sexual energy and drive into achieving success in all facets of their life.

Rob Ray is the Founder and Director of Deadtech, a 1200 sq. foot 780k "business class" bandwidth enabled center for art and technology installations, performances, and workshops in Chicago.  Over the past 2 years Deadtech has hosted technology artists from Canada, Japan, Australia, Holland, Germany, and the United States including world renowned tech artists such as The Seemen and Norman White. 

Josh Steinbauer
Censored from a previous exhibition, MY FUNNY VALENTINE uses perversion to examine capacities for intimacy and to pun the popular construction and manipulation of romance.

Josh Steinbauer is one hell of a funny guy currently living and working in Chicago. One night with this artist  will make a bold curator humble.. and a hard critic crumble.

Roi Vaara
The video Ascensions is about man’s transcendent plight as a flightless mammal.

Roi Vaara is an artist who has made a name for himself internationally with works in which the concept of the visual arts is extended to embrace time; to function in time. In the topical, time-specific field of the international visual arts, Vaara has been a pioneer with work that reveals the importance for art of place/situation-related connotations. Vaara’s attention changes art paradigms. The revolutionary power of his art springs from integration: everything that is not art becomes momentarily linked with art, an essential part of the artwork, and the site of the occurrence of art. Roi performed in this year’s Venice Biennale, where he carried a stone for 6 days.  This piece was broadcast on the BBC World News Service.

Dolores Wilber 
Ties that bind us together, our physical bodies and the ramifications of psychological/social violence mark the investigations characterized in my work. I tend to work with collaborators, many of the same core group of collaborators, building relationships based on shared values and social concerns. What makes us—the whole human community with all of our social, cultural and physical differences — feel safe, how we survive, and issues of social responsibility are enduring topics for me. I believe that live unmediated small-scale performance has the power to affect the audience in a fundamental way that distinguishes it from other experiences; I believe the process is a kind of problem-solving for how we should lead our lives. I focus on performance, installation, video and still images. The work is consciously emotional and highly charged; it aims for formal strength and vivid and unusual images; it is disturbing, funny and entertains. I try to provide a respite from our overw!
!
helming everyday lives to provide time for contemplation of life's difficulties and pleasures.

Dolores is a visual and performing artist, writer and director. She is a an assistant professor in the Art Department at DePaul University; she taught Visual Communication at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago for ten years. Her work has been presented locally and internationally including at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Cleveland Performance Art Festival, The Royal College of Art in London, and the VonKrahlik Theatre and Rakvere Museum in Tallinn, Estonia. She works collaboratively and has worked ith Goat Island Performance Group, the LA Poverty Department, and Natsu Nakajima, Japanese butoh artist. In 1999 she has received two DePaul University Faculty Research Grants and a DePaul University Humanities Fellowship and her second Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in 2000. She is an occasional radio producer for This American Life hosted by Ira Glass on national public radio.

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