Artipedia - Arts News

Wood Street Galleries

“Text Memory”
Friday, April 25 - Sunday, June 1, 2008

http://www.woodstreetgalleries.org

“Text Memory” is comprised of two full-room instillations, The Last Days in the Beginning of March by Jim Campbell and Want (continuous) by Mark Scheeff. Both instillations use illumination and text to create poignant imagery.

In The Last Days in the Beginning of March, Campbell creates an immersive space that fabricates reality through the innovative use of light, memory, and text. The gallery ceiling is adorned with thirty custom made lights that create rhythmic light patterns on the floor and each pool of light is monitored to reflect the pulse of a previously recorded event. The fluctuating light sequence is complimented with wall text that defines each specific event and provides a narrative framework for the piece. The Last Day in the Beginning of March is a poetic blend of reality and fiction that is intended to chronicle the last days in someone’s life.

Mark Scheeff also provides a glimpse into human emotions in his instillation, Want (continuous). Scheeff places three spotlights on the gallery ceiling and leaves the room pitch black, creating the illusion of a stage. Thermal receipt printers will drop 1’’ by 3’’ paper slips from the ceiling that contain textual ads representing collective desires. Information was gathered from online personal ads, online prayer sites, and from a database of individuals waiting for an organ transplants—these incarnations of want reflect the universal longing for love, security, and health. The fluttering rain of paper accumulates throughout the duration of the exhibit and slowly fills the space with traces of how life could be different.

Both Campbell and Scheeff will be at the Wood Street Galleries on April 26 at 1 p.m. to further describe their distinct pieces in an Artist Talk.

Jim Campbell has shown his work internationally and throughout North America in institutions such as the Whitney Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Carpenter Center, Harvard University; The International Center for Photography, New York, and the Intercommunication Center in Tokyo. His electronic art work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the University Art Museum at Berkeley. In 1992 he created one of the first permanent public interactive video artworks in the United States in Phoenix, Arizona. He has lectured on interactive media art at many Institutions throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in NY. He has received many grants and awards including a Rockefeller Grant in Multimedia, three Langlois Foundation Grants, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. As an engineer he holds almost twenty patents in t
he field of video image processing.

He was born in Chicago in 1956 and lives in San Francisco. He received 2 Bachelor of Science Degrees in Mathematics and Engineering from MIT in 1978.

Mark Scheeff’s sculpture and installation work combines the physical and the computational. His work repurposes his background in engineering (with its emphasis on utility, societal progress and technical mastery) to investigate a set of questions not normally addressed by these skills and attitudes.
As a research engineer, he has built robots that are social with people. These robots used lifelike gesture and facial expressions to portray emotion and respond to humans in their vicinity. He also has built countless instruments for scientists studying materials, biology, high energy physics and
nano-science.

He was born in 1969, raised in California, and has B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.

Wood Street Galleries are located at 601 Wood Street above the T-Station in downtown Pittsburgh’s Cultural District, the Galleries are FREE and open to the public Tuesday-Thursday, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. - 8 p.m. For more information, call Wood Street Galleries at
(412) 471-5605 or visit http://www.woodstreetgalleries.org

Support for Wood Street Galleries has been provided by the Howard Heinz
Endowment and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Additional support provided by
the Port Authority of Allegheny County and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts.

Ania Bas / Tecnalia

Call for artists to collaborate on joint research projects with companies and organisations located in the Basque country, Spain.

http://www.disonancias.com

Deadline for applications: 7 July 2008, 9 am (local time).
Collaboration period: from 15 October 2008 to 15 July 2009 (9 months).
Fields of research: mainly associated with urban dynamics, creative environments, technologies (data visualisation) and materials (glass, wire).
For more information: http://www.disonancias.com

DISONANCIAS is pleased to announce the call for proposals from international artists who wish to participate in its third annual edition.

DISONANCIAS is a platform that promotes relationships between artists and companies, research centres or public organisations in order to foster innovation in all its aspects and transmit to society the importance of developing creative environments.

Artists are asked to develop, in collaboration with a team, a prototype, procedure or idea based on a framework predefined by one of the participating entities: either companies (BULTZAKI, EZARRI, PROIEK, SEGUROS LAGUN ARO), public organisations (Vitoria-Gasteiz City Council, EiTB) or universities (Tecnológico Fundación Deusto, Mondragón Unibertsitatea).

The concepts they wish to investigate can be grouped within three main fields:

- investigations related to urban dynamics: social and commercial dynamics for the city centre (Vitoria-Gasteiz City Council), an encounter point based on urban furniture and on the concept of urbanotics (PROIEK), and new uses for a branch network (SEGUROS LAGUN ARO).

- related to the development of creative environments, in this case for the different users of a Faculty of Engineering (Mondragón Unibertsitatea).

- investigations related to technological or material application/developments: visualisation of Artificial Intelligence techniques (Tecnológico Fundación Deusto - S3Lab), new applications for recycled glass or glass mosaics (EZARRI), new applications for wire and metal tube (BULTZAKI).

In the special case of EiTB (Basque Radio and Television), the artist(s) is requested to research into the documentary format using documentation reflecting the processes developed within the
collaboration projects.

The submitted proposals will be examined by a jury including Jorge Luis Marzo and Juan Freire. The pre-selected artists will be informed in mid-July, and will get a chance to defend their project during a conference call with the hosting organisation. The final decision will be taken by the hosting entities and will be communicated at the end of August 2008.

DISONANCIAS gives priority to the involvement of artists who: are committed to their environment; feel that art can be a factor of social transformation; are interested in stimulating interaction between different cultural and social systems; and who can contribute to collective work.

The call is open to artists working with any type of medium and in any discipline, either individually or as a group. There is no limit on age, nationality or place of residence.

The selected artists or group of artists will each receive a minimum amount of 10,000 euros – up to 12,000 euros, depending on their geographical origin - as a fee for the work carried out and for their travel and accommodation costs. Costs that may be generated in the development of the research work and associated with external companies and suppliers should not exceed 6,000 euros + VAT, and they should be previously approved by the hosting entity.

Full information regarding the participating organisations, the teams that will be involved, the concepts they wish to investigate, and the rules for participation is available at http://www.disonancias.com

For more information you can also send us a message to info@disonancias.com , or call us on
+34 943 27 85 01.

DISONANCIAS is sponsored mainly by the Basque Government (Industry, Trade and Tourism Department), is supported by Innobasque, and is promoted by Grupo Xabide.
DISONANCIAS is member of artsactive.net.

Kunsthalle Bremen

Marcel Odenbach:
Performance Aachen 1978
(Photo: Anne Gold)

Marcel Odenbach
“Caught while escaping”
Plans 1975-1983. Video installations. New drawings
6 April - 8 June 2008

Kunsthalle Bremen
Am Wall 207
D - 28195 Bremen
T +49 (0)421 329 08-0
F +49 (0)421 329 08-47
office@kunsthalle-bremen.de

http://www.kunsthalle-bremen.de

For ten years now, the Kunsthalle Bremen has been devoting major exhibitions with catalogues to the most influential artists of video art, like Nam June Paik or Peter Campus, but also to successful younger artists such as Björn Melhus, Diana Thater or Yves Netzhammer.

This year, we will be focusing on one of the most significant, internationally productive and – for several decades – successful German artists: Marcel Odenbach.

The exhibition and the catalogue concentrate on his “Plans” from 1975 – 1983; these are fascinating collage sheets with texts and drawings relating to the artist’s performances and installations employing video. The “Plans” will be exhibited and published in their entirety for the first time, whether they were realised or remained concepts. One highlight in this context is the 22-metre-long collage “Freeing myself from my thoughts”, which combines everyday and personal observations made by the 22-year-old artist with pieces torn from newspapers, and drawings. During a performance in 1976, Marcel Odenbach tore up this strip after he had wrapped himself in it. The collage will be reassembled for the first time for our exhibition, and the full work is reproduced in the catalogue.

At the centre of this exhibition, we are showing one of Odenbach’s main works, “Oh, how good that no-one knows” dating from 1999. In this large-format, four-part projection, historical recordings (“found footage”) from German history are combined with the artist’s own new images and then interwoven with his own and cited film images showing past and contemporary Africa. Personal responsibility, emotional proximity and the presence of history are united on four large-format picture surfaces within a single room, and the viewer stands at their centre. Three more prize-winning video tapes illustrate the links between Odenbach’s paper “Plans” and the realised works and offer a vivid insight into the artist’s œuvre. Our survey is completed by four new large-format works on paper.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue:
Marcel Odenbach - “Caught on the Point of Escape”
Plans 1975-1983. Video installations. New drawings
With texts by Wulf Herzogenrath, Angela Breidbach and Sabine Maria Schmidt
as well as over 70 coloured images on 180 pages
german/english
Verlag Walther König

An exhibition by the Förderkreis für Gegenwartskunst in the Kunstverein Bremen.
The exhibition is kindly supported by Bremer Landesbank.

Opening Hours
Wednesday to Sunday
10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Tuesday 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Monday closed

Easter Sunday and Easter Monday
1 May/Ascension Day, Whit Monday and Whit Sunday
10 a.m. - 5 p.m.