Shimon Attie

This video installation took the two essential elements that diabetics deal with every day--blood and sugar--and used them as a kind of springboard for a phantasmagoric journey and exploration into the rhythms of the disease. During the summer and fall of 2000, Shimon Attie was the Art ConText artist-in-residence at the Rochambeau Branch of the Providence public Library. Working with RISD students and fellow diabetics who served as subjects for the video, Attie created the raw footage and photographs that make up this installation.

As with his other work, Attie, who says he has "a ghostly or hauntingly beautiful kind of aesthetic," here attempted to create an aesthetic experience with strong emotional impact. As metaphors for life and death, safety and danger, balance and chaos, nutrition and poison, blood and sugar represent something much more profound and deep than the medical reality of having diabetes. White Nights, Sugar Dreams used the disease as a point of departure to engage the imagination, featuring abstracted "scenes" of blood and sugar that played across the video screens as moving landscapes of crimson and white.

Shimon Attie received a BA from the University of California, Berkeley; an MA in psychology from Antioch Univeristy, San Francisco; and an MFA from San Francisco State University. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the arts, 1993; Art Matters, 1994; Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, 1995; and Ministry of Culture, Berlin, 1996.

RISD students Natalia Almada MFA '01 PH, Vale Bruck '01 PH and Carrie White '01 FAV assisted Attie on this project during the summer of 2000.

White Nights, Sugar Dreams was the seventh Art ConText project. Art ConText, a partnership between the Providence Public Library and The RISD Museum, is designed to introduce new audiences to contemporary art; to bring art and reading programs to library branches throughout Providence; and to provide opportunities for RISD students to apply their talents. Funding for Art ConText is provided by Pew Charitable Trusts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Pressetext

Shimon Attie
WHITE NIGHTS, SUGAR DREAMS