Special Projects Spring 2001

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents Special Projects by Pierre Giner, Judith Murray, and Ross Sinclair. Continuing Projects include work by Susan Black, Karin Campbell, Ivana Franke, and Andrew Mount.

The P.S.1 Special Projects Program showcases the work of artists distinguished by the site-specific, process-oriented or audience-interactive nature of their work. Each year, 12 artists have the opportunity to develop and present a newly created project. Throughout the program period, artists work with their studio doors open to the public, allowing for an opportunity of exchange between artist and audience.

Pierre Giner's (b. 1966, France) Dancing is a work that deals with the body and movement. This 3-channel video installation creates a space in which the intimate and the public sphere interact. Men and women, projected life-size and larger than life in a darkened room, stand, dance, and gaze at each other. Their movements and gestures involve the viewer in an ambiguous tri-part relationship within the exhibition space. This project is organized in conjunction with the France Moves Festival.

Judith Murray's (b. 1941, United States) Toward a Supreme Fiction, whose title refers to the poem by famed American Modernist Wallace Stevens, is an exploration of modernist painting. Marked by a disciplined use of color (mostly red, yellow, black, and white), and with rhythmic and spontaneous strokes, Murray's canvases are infused with a vitality reflecting the energy and pace of nature. Abstraction becomes an instrument that allows Murray to explore her inspiration in the play between art and nature.

Ross Sinclair (b. 1966, Scotland, U.K.) presents The Sound of Young Scotland, a video which features the artist, naked to the waist, vigorously singing traditional Scottish songs in various bucolic settings in Scotland. Through these scenes, Sinclair reveals the constructed nature of nostalgia in the context of commercial advertising. He addresses how tourism exploits notions of the sublime by presenting it as product. Ross Sinclair lives and works in Scotland.

Susan Black's (b. 1964, United States) videos depict landscapes minimally re-edited to incorporate personal experience and impressions. Sometimes, the artist turns an image upside-down, re-mixes music to compose a soundtrack, or manipulates color. In Heaven on Earth, she highlights the flawlessly landscaped neighborhood of the California retiree, with its perfect gardens and gravel paths neatly turned upside-down. Black's work is currently featured in the 7th Havana Biennial in Havana, Cuba (2000).

Karin Campbell (b. 1962, San Diego, California) debuts her video Looped Tear, in which we see a tear rolling down Campbell's cheek into her ear and rolling back up, as if being replenished by the ear. As the tear travels between these two points of the body, the notion of gravity and bodily function becomes abstract. Campbell performs When I Close My Eyes in which she sits in conversation with visitors, images of eyes painted on her closed eyelids, on February 4th and March 11th at P.S.1. Karin Campbell lives and works in New York.

Ivana Franke (b. 1973, Zabreb, Croatia) presents a site-specific installation that explores the stillness of space and the perception of material presence. Upon entering, visitors are enveloped by soft white light which barely makes visible the delicate physical elements suspended around them. Using such materials as paraffin, paper, threads, and fishing line, Franke invokes simple geometrical rhythms that decelerate the pace of the environment. Ivana Franke lives and works in Zagreb.

Andrew Mount (b. 1969, Liverpool, U.K.) addresses the codes and economy of art with his multimedia installation of sound, light, and material objects. Mount deconstructs the holistic notions of art by presenting a fractured experience of the spectacle. His use of raw unfinished materials references the inchoate stages leading to the materiality of art. Andrew Mount lives and works in New York.

Special Projects Spring 2001

Künstler: Pierre Giner, Judith Murray, Ross Sinclair, Susan Black, Karin Campbell, Ivana Franke, Andrew Mount