Collaboration with Hahn Rowe, 2010
Live, dual screen video projection onto architectural surfaces behind the musicians. Presented at The Stone, New York City, With Hahn Rowe and Ha-Yang Kim.
Project Description:
I worked with the idea of music as mathematics. This was a kind of visual jazz style improvisation in which I brought in a limited amount of pre shot content, and then mixed it live along with video from two live cameras, to create a set of moving images in time to the music, and evoking qualities in each of the movements of the musical composition. Inspired by the fact that Han is of Korean descent, I also used images of driving through the Korean countryside for one of the movements.
Twenty one 13″ x19″ Digital drawings, (three each) of the seven other artists in The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts inaugural “Studio Residency for New York City Arts Workers”. The drawings are made directly from digital photographs, using algorithms associated with edge detection. Presented during the residency, EFA Project Space, New York City.
Project Description:
The title makes reference to the classic 1954 Japanese film by Akira Kurosawa. Seven Artists acknowledges the difficult place artists occupy in contemporary Western society, where there are veritable armies of professionally trained artists exiting art schools every year, yet there is little hope that most can make a living from their chosen profession. The situation is further complicated by the fact that artists are frequently used by real estate developers to rejuvenate blighted neighborhoods, only to be evicted after the goal has been accomplished.
New York City Arts workers take on an even more difficult task, devoting a portion of their precious time, energy, and networking abilities, to assist artists other than themselves. I wanted to make an artwork about the residency and the fact that there were seven artists (not including myself) created the opportunity for this frame.
Superheros have been in the zeitgeist for some years now, and for this project I asked the artists if I could photograph them in movements suggesting a benevolent fictional character with superhuman powers. All the artists were game, though each interpreted the request in a different way. Some struck classic poses while others simply moved like gymnasts or athletes.
In Seven Samurai the character Kambei notes at the end of the film: “Again we are defeated. The farmers have won. Not us.” Yet with help from the The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, the artists may succeed, and save the world after all.
Note cards, miniature manila envelopes, Lace gift bags, decorative pen, fish bowl, folding table stand, desk, and chair. Dimensions variable.
Created at, and presented during The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts “Studio Residency for New York City Arts Workers”, New York City.
Project Description:
This is a simple interactive artwork where people are welcomed to write down a sexual secret on a small folding card, (resembling a mass produced gift card), put it in a small manilla envelope, and deposit it into an empty fish bowl. At intervals the secrets are pulled from the bowl and placed in miniature lace giftbags, where they are displayed on a small folding table stand. These can be opened and read by visitors, who then put them back for the next viewer to encounter.
The structure of display is intended to suggest that these shared secrets are like beautiful little gifts, thus diffusing lurid or unsettling qualities in the massage and encouraging the reader to focus on the humanity of the truth revealed.
Plastic retail display parts, found and altered plexiglass sign, and Plexiglass base. 9″h x 31″w x 24″d
Created at, and presented during The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts “Studio Residency for New York City Arts Workersâ€, New York City.
Project Description:
This is a sculpture made of objects found mostly around the vicinity of EFA. The theme is self explanatory, though the visual surface is intended to confound a quick political reading, and to create questions in the mind of the viewer. The modified plexiglass sign from which the title is drawn, is cut from a section of a larger plexiglass sign found in the garbage on the street. Given the number of artists in the neighborhood, it may even have been part of some previous artist’s discarded project. The shinny artificial quality of the materials suggests the supply chain in modern industrial manufacturing, and the waste as these materials are used to create things that are now not even needed, as their completely artificial value has now plummeted.
