Clockwork 2000

19 Studio Artists from 14 Countries Celebrate P.S.1’s Residency Program

(New York, NY, April 18, 2000). P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center announces an exhibition of work by the 1999-2000 P.S.1 National and International Studio Artists, opening at the Clocktower Gallery, 108 Leonard Street in Manhattan. The opening will be Thursday, May 11, from 6 to 8 p.m. Clockwork 2000 is curated by Roxana Marcoci, Janice H. Levin Fellow, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art. A catalogue will become available the second week of June.

P.S.1 takes an open approach to selecting artists for its National and International Studio Program. A number of artistic perspectives are represented not only through the global nature of the program but by encouraging diverse interests, creative currents, and counterculture. Clockwork 2000 will include video, mural-scale drawings, performance, sculpture, sound and light installations, painting, and photography by 19 artists and artist groups from 14 countries. The exhibition features works about mass culture as a common language, cultural alienation, the history of the Clocktower, and fantasies about technology, virtuality, and rational systems of thought.

1999-2000 National Studio Program Artists included in the exhibition are: Sanford Biggers, Elke Lehmann, Andrea Ray, Mary Ellen Strom, Fiona Templeton, and Liz Zawada.

1999-2000 International Studio Program Artists and Artist Groups included in the exhibition are: Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol, David Godbold, Kurt Hentschläger, Sabine Hornig, Seung-Young Kim, Jan Kopp, Susan Macwilliam, Claudia and Julia Müller, Hironori Murai, Paula Pivi, Montserrat Soto, Gert Verhoeven, and Sara Chi Hang Wong.

ARTISTS:

Sanford Biggers (USA) Mandala of the B-Bodhisattva is one in a series of works dealing with the thin line between the sacred and the popular. Like the mandala, breakdancing is an art form based on circular movements depicted on the floor. This project presents breaking outside of its commercialized context, as a true urban ritual.

Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol (Netherlands) Bik and van der Pol have conducted a site-specific, historical investigation of the Clocktower through the writings of architect Michael Asher, among other sources. Their stroboscopic lights appear atop the Clocktower building and on their design of the exhibition invitation.

David Godbold (Republic of Ireland) America[s] Disclosed 2000 is a large-scale wall painting that depicts the European "discovery" of America as a farce and questions Columbus Day as an appropriate national holiday.

Kurt Hentschläger/Granular Synthesis (Austria) Granular Synthesis, whose projects are electronically-based, will present MV1, a large-scale sound and video installation. Granular Synthesis is currently planning a major installation in June at the Anchorage, a project created in collaboration with Creative Time.

Sabine Hornig (Germany) Hanging nine feet above the gallery floor, Sleepcorner is an abstracted little room with a bed. Hornig reflects on questions of private and public architecture as well as the local regulations that define them. The artist was surprised to find tiny living spaces (akin to her earlier work) in New York apartments.

Seung-Young Kim (Korea ) Beyond is a poetic video that reminds us of the loss of self in a foreign and seemingly vacuous place. Facing the Atlantic Ocean, Kim sees himself dissolve in the sand.

Jan Kopp (France) Kopp presents 2 adjacent video pieces. Final Races is a frantic and funny escape from the P.S.1 studios, while Alien is a series of uncanny voice-overs in which Kopp transplants his voice into channel-surfed excerpts from popular prime-time TV.

Elke Lehmann (USA) Lehmann’s video installation projects seagulls from the roof of the Cocktower into the gallery. The live sound of traffic, wind, and birds is fed into the space, as we watch recorded footage of gulls feeding from Lehmann’s hand, surrounding the statuary eagles atop the Clocktower.

Susan MacWilliam (Northern Ireland) A brief video work, Faint, presents images of a fainting woman set against the sound of a bird’s song. The artist repeatedly enacts the gesture interrupted by interior shots that function as flashbacks, as though suggesting a cause. The work addresses broader issues of psychology and hysteria.

Claudia and Julia Müller (Switzerland) In the video installation Overtaxed in Front of a Colored Background (Don't believe the Hype) 3 monitors display the sisters performing mundane activities gone slightly awry. Bright monochrome backdrops further suggest decontextualized TV advertisements or bizarre scientific experiments.

Hironori Murai (Japan) Murai animates puppets with air and sound. His large-scale black figures are brought to life by plastic-fan respirators, and speak the recorded dialogues of families and friends on the subways of New York. Murai’s puppets at once emanate the life of the city and are dislocated from it.

Paola Pivi (Italy) The work of Paola Pivi stretches or extends reality. Her focus is an irrational concentration of elements, such as light photons, pizza, Chinese people, airplanes, or in this case, pearls. The superficial system of counting or categorizing is replaced by a more indefinable element of beauty.

Andrea Ray (USA) Andrea Ray evokes ill-perceived and misdiagnosed communications between a subject and its environment. Uneasy moments of passive resistance are seen in the constant motion of Carrier, a six-minute video by Ray, which relates travel to the notion of communicable invisible things such as disease and thought.

Montserrat Soto (Spain) SECRET LANDSCAPE investigates the environment of contemporary art collectors’ homes. Peeking into these particular homes, we realize that they are independent installation pieces, created by the collector's art works. The works become objets trouvés, transformed by furniture and, ultimately, by photography.

Mary Ellen Strom (USA )Daughter is a speaking doll which conveys the tenets of the New York chapter of a historic women's organization. The sculpture is part of a larger project examining ways in which the organization attempts to maintain ideals of patriarchy and "whiteness" as a category, propagating its specific version of history.

Fiona Templeton (USA) A SPEAKING is a performance of continuously generated live language. It relates to Templeton’s recent continuous writing Cells of Release, in which a strip of words weaves throughout a building. In A SPEAKING, however, the piece winds back on itself only through the memory of sound from the artist’s body.

Gert Verhoeven (Belgium) Gert Verhoeven’s installation of drawings and plaster forms evokes childhood and gaming. Verhoeven’s work is both Freudian and playful, full of comic irony.

Sara Chi Hang Wong and Leung Chi Wo (Hong Kong) Wong and Leung have baked cookies in the shape of extracted pieces of sky. Shaped by architectural forms, the sky in the vicinity becomes a puzzle of dough to be eaten by gallery visitors. Wong and Wo will in turn document visitors’ sky-eating.

Elizabeth Zawada (USA) The painted large-format print Untitled – paint by number depicts a series of handwritten numbers meticulously repeated, filling the photograph. Each number has been assigned a color and hand painted, exposing the inherent beauty of the arduous writing task.