I want to show you somewhere

"I want to show you somewhere." is an exhibition concerning image, exchange, and communication. The title of the exhibition is a sentence from the novel Landscape Memory by Matthew Stadler.

"I want to show you somewhere." consists of two installations around a "social space" where small groups of people can sit in conversation/study/etc. in the gallery.

LUCIEN SAMAHA Lucien Samaha is a photographer, DJ (he was the DJ at the World Trade Center), and installation artist. I met Lucien through Walid Raad. Like Walid, he is a board member of the Arab Image Foundation. To say that Lucien is an obsessive photographer of the everyday is something of an understatement. Since the late 1970s he has created an archive of over 300,000 images. Samaha has spent the last several years putting most of these photographs on-line and sharing them in various "fine art" and "popular" formats such as blogs, flicker sites, and museum projects. Lucien is also particularly interested in how people relate to each other photographically, in spaces such as on-line communities. I have attached a pdf file of an exhibition entitled "7 Boys" that Lucien produced in NYC in 2003. In the case of "7 Boys," Lucien culled the work of others into perspective.

Lucien photographs situationally, continually documenting events as they unfold around and in relationship to him. Needless to say Samaha's photographs reveal celebratory as well as traumatic events, such as war, AIDS, and 9/11. Like Nan Goldin and Andy Warhol, Samaha's work is grounded in subculture, but I would argue that where Goldin and Warhol carefully insert/ed themselves into their work, Samaha seems to disregard the precise creation or preservation of his own image. Samaha has a deep interest in interacting with his subjects, and also the people who view his work. For Samaha photography is a vehicle for interaction.

The project that Samaha is instigating at Reed began at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany, in the exhibition "Gut ist was gefallt." -- "Good is What Pleases." from Jan 15—Feb 12, 2006 as part of an exhibition with Hans-Peter Feldmann and Wolfgang Tillmans. It is a project that Samaha is hoping to continue around the world, as it involves the collection of data chronicling the actions of viewers etc. that will eventually be compiled in book form.

For this project, Samaha has pulled 91 semi-autobiographical photographs from his archive. These photographs are printed on a modest scale and displayed around a three sided room, attached by magnets to white metal sheeting on the walls. In the middle of this room at a large desk Lucien works during gallery hours. (He will be at Reed for the entire exhibition. This will give you the opportunity to craft longer-term interactions with him, if you desire).

As viewers explore the photographs, at some point they realize that they can take an image for themselves. Usually, Lucien begins a conversation with a viewer... and this results in the exchange. The viewer must remove the photograph. Samaha then takes a quick snapshot of the viewer holding their selection, and they must wait for a few minutes while Lucien prints an identical copy of the photograph that they must place back into the exhibition in the same spot. In order to complete the exchange, the viewer then agrees to re-photograph the image in "their" world and email a jpg of this photo to Lucien. These re-photographed images are then organized onto the web... this is one of the things Lucien works on while sitting in the gallery each day.

HADLEY AND MAXWELL The second installation is by the Vancouver B.C. artist team Hadley and Maxwell. H+M respond to contexts and environments, and create work that is instigated in dialogue with people and institutions... they work in a variety of media. Right now they are finishing a proposal for the Cooley created in response to Lucien's project. They will not "live" in the gallery. On their way to a residency in Berlin, they are able to visit Reed during the first part of November. For the last several years Hadley and Maxwell have been working on a piece called the Decor Project in which they gather evidence about the environments of artists and other culture workers, and systematically re-organize their living spaces, adding installation pieces that become permanent parts of people's lives. Here is a description of one case study from Vancouver... to date they have completed approximately 15 interventions/collaborations with a wide variety of subjects....

PROJECT: SANDMAN was a collaborative, site-specific installation work that involved the re-decoration of the home of Artspace Director, David LaRiviere. The project began late in the year 2002, when two Vancouver-based artists, Hadley Howes and Maxwell Stephens, sent LaRiviere a disposable camera with explicit instructions to take photographs of the interior of his home and then send the undeveloped film back to Vancouver. The artists also included a survey requesting specific information about the Director’s residence, which ultimately gave the artists the data they needed to begin planning their project.

Hadley & Maxwell arrived in Peterborough the first week of January and began the task of re-decorating the Director’s home, responding spontaneously to the interior environment but at the same time, basing their final decisions on several pre-determined criteria. First, their project would involve an unconventional and often humorous reorganization of objects, which would ultimately emphasize or re-frame the art and decoration already present within the space. During this process, objects would be reorganized according to random or unconventional structure, spaces previously unattended would be activated, and those commonly seen as dominant visually would be de-emphasized.

Two main themes seemed to evolve out of this process. On his completed survey, LaRiviere had indicated that if he could own any three pieces of art in the world, one of them would be, without a doubt, “Der Sandman”, a film installation created by the Vancouver artist, Stan Douglas. Hadley and Maxwell took this information to heart and created a delightful scaled-down desktop movie set model of “Der Sandman”, which was placed on David’s bedside table, presumably as inspiration for “dreaming” about owning the “Sandman”.

LaRiviere’s survey and photographs had also indicated that he was passionate about, and actively involved in creating progressive and experimental music. This music theme manifested in the Director’s living room, which was magically transformed into a rave event, complete with stage, state-of-the-art turntables, extraordinary lighting, balloons, and a myriad of other wild and thought-provoking objects.

Upon completion of the re-decoration process, Hadley and Maxwell collaborated with Sven Boecker, an architectural photographer, who professionally documented the transformation of LaRiviere’s home. The negatives were subsequently developed and enlarged to 30” x 40” format and then framed. These six exceptional photographs were exhibited at Artspace from January 17 to February 15, 2003.

I want to show you somewhere

Hadley + Maxwell (Vancouver B.C.)
Lucien Samaha (New York/Beirut)