InTransit from Object to Site

This fall, the Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art will present in TRANSIT: from OBJECT to SITE, featuring ten installations by established and emerging artists and Brown students, which will be displayed throughout List Art Center. The Bell Gallery is preparing a four-part exhibition, presenting an installation by renowned American artist Fred Wilson in the main gallery; a piece by French artist Xavier Veilhan in the lobby; an outdoor sculptural work by New York artist Sharon Louden; and a video projection on the second floor by Chilean artist Magaly Ponce. The Department of Visual Art has invited three artists: Peggy Diggs, whose installation will be displayed in the second floor gallery; Laura Evans, who will present her installation in the north stairwell; and subRosa, a feminist performance group who will create an interactive work. Furthermore, three students in the Department of Visual Art—Arlene Chung, Hilary Leewong, and Nico Wheadon—will present their work inside and outside of List Art Center.

Featured Installations/Artists:

Fred Wilson’s installation in the Bell Gallery space, My Eco, My Shadow,and Me, features nine works all made of blown glass. Although functioning as individual pieces, the works—Viscous Risk, Chandelier Mori, First Spurt, Dark Down, Black Memory, and Black Present—are interrelated, creating a unifying walk-through space, that evokes poetic or melancholic sentiment while also bringing an awareness of blackness or black consciousness.

Wilson is best known for his site-specific exhibitions—such as the groundbreaking exhibition Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society—in which he re-contextualized objects and artifacts from various museum’s collections thereby changing their traditional meanings and interpretations. Wilson’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, TX; the Venice Biennale, Italy; the Whitney Biennial in New York, NY; and the International Cairo Biennale, Egypt.

Xavier Veilhan’s installation Mobile occupies the List Art Center lobby. It is comprised of fifty spheres in varying sizes, and suspended from the ceiling. Fabricated in plastic (according to the artist’s computer generated renderings) and with a matte black finish, the full-volume spheres activate the lobby in a way that is neither obstructive nor purely decorative. With its strong physical presence and in constant motion, Mobile arouses a sense of weight and lightness, density and transparency, producing a space that envelops both the architectural surrounding and the viewer.

Veilhan is one of the most prominent contemporary artists in France who lives and works in Paris. His work employs a wide range of media from traditional practices of photography, printmaking, painting, and sculpture to innovative digitally-based production, computer simulation, and filmmaking. Veilhan has exhibited widely throughout Europe and the US, including at the Centre Pompidou in Paris; Le Magasin in Grenoble, France; Barbican in London, England; Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, Spain; and in New York City at the Jewish Museum, National Academy Museum, and Sandra Gering Gallery.

Magaly Ponce’s video projection Subject, Horizon, Reflection spans the entire hallway on the second floor of the List Art Center. Six video projections of horizon, shadows, reflections and blurred figures/subjects are projected on different walls and in between the elevators creating an encompassing space in which the imagery of vast un/known landscapes, merges with those of water, sunlight, people and their reflections, thereby exploring the experience of (self)reflection, and the idea of mirroring or doubling of the self and the surrounding, altering an ordinary walk-way space into a poetic, dreamscape.

Ponce is a Chilean-born video and installation artist who currently lives in Providence and teaches new media at Bridgewater State College, MA. Her work has been exhibited widely in her home country, as well as in Denmark, Korea, Turkey, and in the US, including at the Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts, and the Saint Louis University Museum in St. Louis, MI; the America Fest and the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA; the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY; and most recently at inSite_05 in Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, CA.

Sharon Louden’s outdoor installation Faires is situated on the lawn facing the main entrance to the List Art Center. More than 200,000 feet of black tie-wire is arranged into an organic configuration that elegantly merges with its natural setting. Within theses piles of raw wire thousands of small, flickery “lights” (reflective sheeting imbedded in the piles of wire) absorbs and reflects the constantly changing light from its surrounding, creating a magical lighting field. As such, Louden’s Fairies, much like fairy-creatures themselves—delicate imaginary beings with supernatural power—triggers fancy and delight.

Louden is a New York-based artist who works in numerous media, from drawing and painting to sculpture, installation and mostly recently video animation. Her work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries including the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, CT; the Drawing Center in New York, NY; Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA; Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts in Wilmington, DE; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO; and most recently the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY.

Peggy Diggs’ installation Resolution Room—presented in the second floor gallery of the List Art Center—captures the physical and visual aspects of the resolution process, the key to human understanding and communication. It consists of a circular pathway with two straight paths intersecting at the circle's center. The circular pathway is covered with sand, while the intersecting paths are covered by large rocks, except for a few feet at the exact point of intersection. The remaining spaces of the room are occupied by glasses of water, items often present at negotiations, providing solace for the voice. Hence, Resolution Room may function on two levels: as a metaphor of conflict resolution or as an actual space for resolving conflict.

Diggs is best known for her activist and public art projects oriented toward social justice and marginalized groups. Her public art installations include the interactive project Here and Then currently on view at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA; Make Do at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina Greensboro, NC; Recollection for Wave Hill in the Bronx; and Finding Home in Chicago. She has also done projects in Boston and other US cities, as well as in Canada and Venezuela.

Laura Evans’ installation Sinuendo is displayed in the north stairwell of the List Art Center. It consists of two main parts: a large mass of curling yellow forms clutched together and suspended from the ceiling, and multiple snaking forms made from painted pipes, coated wire, soft fabric forms, and flexible plastic tubing that emerge at different levels throughout the stairwell. It is in this sense that the installation bares the name Sinuendo referring to serpentine forms and sinuous movement.

Evans lives and works in Boston. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and groups exhibitions mostly on the East Coast, including at O.K. Harris Works of Art in New York, NY; and in Boston, MA at Howard Yezerski Gallery, Barbara Krakow, Mills Gallery, and Harbor Gallery, University of Massachusetts Galleries.

subRosa’s Love is Strong as Death: A Convivial Feast is performance of hosting on the List Art Center terrace. Modeled on the tradition of Plato’s Symposium, as well as on bell hooks’ and other feminist’s notions of hospitality and collaboration, the performance functions as a site for critical conviviality, addressing the ideas about politics of friendship, especially those between women.

subRosa is a feminist art collective (Faith Wilding and Hyla Willis), committed to producing artworks, activist campaigns and projects, publications, media interventions, and public forums that explore the effects of new information and biotechnologies on women’s bodies, lives, and work. While the name subRosa honors feminist pioneers in art, activism, labor, science, and politics: Rosa Bonheur, Rosa Luxemburg, Rosie the Riveter, Rosa Parks and Rosie Franklin, the collective’s practices focus on “art of social relations developed around critical issues of feminist concern.”

Brown alumnae

Arlene Chung’s installation Untitled (The Legacy of Gaetan Dugas) in the interior lobby of List Art Center consists of hundreds of syringes with needles suspended from the ceiling alluding to human conditions of disease and medical protection, illness and recovery. Chung graduated Magna Cum Laude from Brown Univesity in 2006 with a concentration in neuroscience.

Hilary Leewong’s installation Pasa is made of sugar, sugar substitutes, paper, PVC piping, fishing wire, and is displayed on the north lawn of List Art Center. By using organic, perishable substances and more sturdy industrial materials, she questions, in her own words, “what is artificial and what is real,” and “how we construct a nation,” on real or artificial grounds. Leewong graduated in 2006, concentrating in Art Semiotics and with Honors in English literature.

Nico Wheadon's interactive installation Soft Mathematics: Numbers Revisited—presented in the second floor video room,—is comprised of sound objects activated by touch and wall text taken from the artist’s own fictional writings inspired by the Dewey Decimal System. Dwelling on the sensual, soft aspects of numbers or mathematics, Soft Mathematics “revisits the numbers” via words, objects and sound creating multi-sensory environment in which the viewers are engaged in the experience of touching, reading and listening.

Support for InTransit has been provided by the Creative Arts Council, Brown University.

InTransit from Object to Site

mit Fred Wilson, Magaly Ponce, Sharon Louden, Xavier Veilhan, Peggy Diggs, Laura Evans, subRosea, Arlene Chung, Nico Wheadon, Hilary Leewong