Cooley | HADLEY+MAXWELL // LUCIEN SAMAHA | NOV 4-DEC 10, Portland
“I want to show you somewhere.”
November 4December 10, 2006
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, Oregon
HADLEY+MAXWELL
Hadley+Maxwell (VANCOUVER, BC) ‹ consider subjectivity and political
experience through moving image, song, drawing, and printed matter. Created
for the Cooley, their poetic installation asserts the importance of the
idiosyncratic and the incomplete in re-envisioning the body politic.
LUCIEN SAMAHA
Lucien Samaha (NEW YORK, NY) ‹ 100 photographs, a social contract, a
high-speed internet connection. Samaha inhabits the Cooley for the duration
of the exhibition, continuing his investigations into exchange, value,
conversation, and pleasure.
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EVENTS
Saturday, November 4, 6:30 p.m.
back room symposium with artists Hadley+Maxwell
and writer Lisa Robertson, hosted by Matthew Stadler.
For reservations and more info visit: http://www.thebackroompdx.com/
Monday, November 6, 7:30 p.m.
Vollum lounge, Reed College campus
Public conversation with artists Lucien Samaha and Hadley+Maxwell
Followed by a reception at the Cooley Gallery
The Cooley will be open Monday November 6, 12 p.m. 9 p.m.
Wednesday, November 15, 7 p.m.
Vollum lecture hall, Reed College campus
Lecture by MOMA NY Chief Conservator Jim Coddington, who will discuss
current issues in conservation in relation to contemporary artistic forms.
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HADLEY+MAXWELL
“We ‘feel free’ precisely because we lack the very language to articulate
our unfreedom.” ‹ Slavoj Zizek
Hadley+Maxwell consider subjectivity and political experience through moving
image, song, drawing, and printed matter, working, in part, from photographs
of the Kent State riots on May 4, 1970, as chronicled in news magazines of
the time. During the summer of 2006, Hadley+Maxwell improvised these
photographs on the Reed College campus, alternating roles as victim and
bystander, corpse and “person,” re-imagining and re-opening consideration of
the images as historical records, but more critically, as spaces for the
incomplete and idiosyncratic articulation of gesture, time, and attachment.
While the video is projected onto small, cut-out representations of the
artists and reflected around the room, the artists ground our experience on
the textured surfaces of a series of delicate graphite drawings based on the
Kent State photographs. The drawings carefully record a process of
identification between the artists and their subject, taking on the quality
of a body of evidence that exists somewhere between public and private
experience. Permeating the space is a recording of Hadley singing a somber
and matter-of-fact rendition of “Gloomy Sunday.” A song written by Rezsô
Seress in 1933 that was banned from the airwaves in the 1940s for being too
damn sad. Throughout the installation, the bodies of the artists are cropped
and rescaled, deleted and reinserted. This dislocation makes space for, and
summons, the viewer into the work ‹ an invitation to “be-together” that
resists over-definition; an invitation to “be” together, in consideration of
something meaningful, an invitation to “be-together-in-meaning.” What
Hadley+Maxwell invite the viewer to engage in, they first and foremost do
themselves, together. The installation is neither a practice run for
something else, nor a partial action.
Accompanying Hadley+Maxwell’s installation is Promise, a 22-ft. flag pole
waving a white flag at half staff that will be installed on the great lawn
across from Eliot Hall, Reed’s oldest building. Promise comes to Reed from
Vancouver BC, where it was first installed in front of the Contemporary Art
Gallery of Vancouver as part of the exhibition Deleted Scenes (March 31May
28, 2006, curated by Jenifer Papararo).
Hadley+Maxwell (Hadley Howes and Maxwell Stephens) began working and living
together in 1997 in Vancouver, Canada. They have exhibited and published
work across Canada and internationally, recently at the Vancouver Art
Gallery and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, the Saidye Bronfman
Centre for the Arts, Montréal, and the Western Bridge, Seattle.
Hadley+Maxwell’s practice includes silk-screen, photography, video,
sculpture and site-responsive work, and often involves extending their
collaboration to include third persons, investigating mediation as the
condition of being-together.
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LUCIEN SAMAHA
Lucien Samaha photographs situationally ‹ continually documenting life as it
unfolds around him while pursuing formal, social, and personal compulsions ‹
such as photographing people touching cheek to cheek, or playfully exploring
the work of friends such as the Austrian artist collective Gelitin. Samaha
is driven by how people relate to each other photographically, exploring the
significance and value of the photographic object, specifically in relation
to the global art market, new image technologies, and the elusive, sometimes
deceptive nature of the on-line environment. To describe Samaha as an
obsessive photographer of the everyday is something of an understatement.
Since the 1970s Samaha has created an archive of over 300,000 images that he
has purposed in exhibitions and site-specific projects around the world.
For “I want to show you somewhere.” Samaha comes to work at the Cooley
Gallery for the duration of the exhibition. It is a project that Samaha
doesn’t like to say too much about, as it involves rich surprises for those
who venture to engage him in the space. Suffice it to say that Samaha has
assembled 100 photographs from his archive and he wants to talk with you
about them. He wants to get to know you. Samaha plans to continue the
project around the world, as it involves meeting as many people as possible,
both in and out of art institutions, and investigating the various roles
that we all play in producing and determining the value of images.
Samaha’s project continues from the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt,
Germany, where it began in the exhibition “Gut ist was gefallt.” — “Good is
What Pleases.” from Jan 15‹Feb 12, 2006, a group exhibition with Hans-Peter
Feldmann and Wolfgang Tillmans.
Lucien Samaha has been photographing his life and adventures since he took
one of the first photography courses offered in a US High School in 1973.
Photography has been Samaha’s companion throughout his many careers,
including that of a TWA Flight Attendant; a Marketing Manager for Eastman
Kodak Company where he was instrumental in the launch of the first digital
camera; and a world renowned DJ on the 107th floor of the World Trade
Center. Samaha has exhibited his work at spaces including: the Museum für
Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; the Center for Opinions in Music and Art
(C.O.M.A.), Berlin; the Elizabeth Foundation, NY; and the Feldman Gallery,
Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR. Samaha was a finalist for
the Nam June Paik award in 2004. He is represented by the Sara Tecchia Roma
Gallery, NY, NY.
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Curated by Stephanie Snyder, John and Anne Hauberg Curator and Director
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College.
The title of the exhibition is a quotation from the novel “Landscape
Memory” by author Matthew Stadler.
For more information contact:
Stephanie Snyder, director and curator
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery
Reed College
3203 SE Woodstock Blvd.
Portland, OR 97202
snyders@reed.edu
503.777.7251
http://web.reed.edu/gallery