“The Man Who Waits and Sleeps While I Dream”

www.dreamlab.org

I became interested in exploring dreams as the primary material of all narrative structures — the first awkward stories we tell our own selves before our conscious selves can censor them.  Drawing on observation techniques from a 19th century sleep disorders clinic the work poses a charged but unexpressed intimacy between a professional observer and her sleeping charge.

A large video projection of an impossibly deep drain is surrounded by images, text, and sound. These elements tumble together in random sequences of narrative structure, and become source material for a kind of “conversation.” A voice-over soundtrack that can be heard through headphones accompanies the video excerpt.

Physically, the images are projected in different scales on all sides of the room. Psychologically, the projections are contained within the voice over as the observer projects her own thoughts and neuroses onto the sleeping subject. These projections can also be seen as metaphors for the exchange between artist and viewer; between separation and longing; between lovers; between the conscious and sub-conscious within ourselves. The viewer walks between the elements of the work, putting together a particular understanding based on the randomness of his own physical placement in the room. –– One has to be somewhere to be at all involved and so we bring to any story our own personal and cultural assumptions, interpreting not only the language of the narrative, but images and sensations as well. -Joey Morgan

“Crude” Series

www.sonjathomsen.com

Obscure is my understanding of oil, its origins; its raw potential; its economic, social and political relationships. What does oil look like? Diverse circumstances came together that made me curious about oil’s invisibility and ubiquitous influence in daily life. These circumstances climaxed in November of 2006 when a loved one returned home after his tour of duty in Iraq. At this time I began collecting my used motor oil and photographing it. By examining oil most immediate in our daily lives, the photographs make visible the slippery substance that has become as needed as water to sustain our contemporary lives.

The photographs entitled Crude (2007-2008) are light jet prints. The dark creamy images abstract scale and are a visual metaphor of the incomprehensible. The title creates a paradox between the refined oil photographed, its origins, its captivating surface and its obscene usage.

Burning Water (2007) is a video completed in collaboration with a colleague and sound artist, Jason Nanna.  The four and a half minute video integrates my study of water, its elusive surface and potential, with my curiosity about oil–a complicated raw material that affects our economy and politics. -Sonja Thomsen

“Vapor”

www.annelindberg.com

Water as space.

Surface to volume.

Mass of chroma.

Suspended from many thousands of points in the ceiling, fine delicate thread lines create a floating volume of color. Subject to gravity, the internal structure of this form is difficult to comprehend and collect at any given moment or vantage point. I am interested in that mystery and intangibility. What results is a fleeting, ethereal collection of particles, dissolution – vapor.  In this work, my curiosity gravitated toward conditions of architecture, optics, visual phenomena, drawing in space and an expression of water as light.  I have challenged myself with questions of scale, color, process, density and proportion in the making of this installation. Optically, Vapor responds to light and sculpturally it answers to air movement.  Tender, liquid, abstract, manic.

I frequently return to the subtle distinction between drawing as noun and verb as a long held focus in my studio practice. This blurred distinction drives my fascination with an expanded definition of drawing languages and the resurgence of drawing in contemporary art. My collective body of work is an iteration of this language – a reassertion of the age-old desire to understand self in place. -Anne Lindberg

“Waterfall”

www.cuifei.net

As a Chinese artist active in the United States, witnessing radical social changes in China and experiencing cultural differences in the United States, I find that my thinking has been permanently altered.  In response to a continually changing outside world, I seek the underlying essence of our lives, something that is real and permanent, which cannot be altered by social, political, cultural, or geographic conditions.  I see nature as consistent and ordered, thus providing a therapeutic agent for healing and harmony in an otherwise chaotic world. I utilize materials found in nature, such as tendrils, leaves and thorns composing a manuscript symbolizing the voiceless messages in nature that are waiting to be discovered and to be heard.

Both the concept of nature in my Chinese heritage, which emphasizes the interconnectedness of all beings, and the Western theory of Transculture, which stresses living beyond the limitations of any particular culture, offer me a unique vision to view the relationships between cultural differences; between culture and nature; and between nature and human beings. -Cui Fei

“BigWater” 

www.avyclaire.com

BigWater is a project I started after reading Maude Barlow’s the Blue Covenant.  It occurred to me that I could further empower the words in this book by incorporating them into an image of water.  Maude Barlow generously allowed me to use her text. This permission began a journey to find out more about water and the project evolved to the scale you see before you.

In the process of working on BigWater I have experienced the enormity of what has been written about water as a precious resource in need of protecting to ensure it’s availability to all.  I have found and read a volume of work written by individuals, scientists, journalists, researchers, policy makers, politicians, lawyers to politicians; the list and amounts of words are vast.

The 16 panels on view hold approximately 600,000 words. The book that inspired this project has about 58,000 words. And, 600,000 words is a tiny fraction of what has been written on the topic.

When I get involved in a project, I find that the process leads me into unexpected places. This project led me to the plethora of policies and laws, written by countries and world organizations — many of which are represented in this piece.  I can’t help but wonder how many more words need to be written in order to affect change. -Avy Claire

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Sponsorship for the printing and fabrication of this project has been generously provided by Moss, Inc., “The Leader in Tension Fabric Displays”.

“In Depth”

www.juneahrens.com

You can describe a wave as no beginning and no end, birth and death…Looking deeply, we can see that the waves are at the same time water…seeking there own true nature…the nature of nondiscrimination, of no birth, of no death, of no being and of no non-being.

Thich Nhat Hanh   

June Ahrens creates sculpture and site-dependent installations that incorporate everyday materials.  Loss, pain, fragility and danger are major inspirations for her work. She isolates these materials to refocus the viewer’s attention toward exploring and examining their own thoughts and feelings.   

Selected solo and group shows include the Meade Museum, Amherst, MA, Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY. Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, Scotland, In-Site, Sculpture Guild, Governors Island, NY. Grants include, NEA, CT Commission on the Arts, Polaroid and Duracell Companies among others.

“GULP (Generative Urban Landscape Project)”

www.bigobjects.com

A gulp of water, a gulp of air, a gulp of reality…

In this photographic project, the ubiquitous Southern California pool becomes a medium through which the surrounding landscape is interpreted. The peculiar garden that is urban Southern California would not exist without water. Here it is viewed through that chlorinated lens. Descending into water, my movement, and the exhalation of my breath, causes distortion of the surface. Pictures are made looking upward. The water is clear, but distorts; the landscape can be intuited but the perspective is indeterminate. The resulting cognitive dissonance forces viewers to sense, rather than read, the images. Verisimilitude has never been my goal: instead it is to provide a sensual springboard for interpretation. My work has addressed issues of self, place, and memory through an appeal to the viewer’s body, using sculptural forms and architecture to do so. This new project takes me back to photography, which was my first love as an artist.

Using the sensual immediacy of large-scale photographic imagery I aim to cajole viewers out of their learned response to the environment into a more sensory experience of it, and back into their bodies, so to speak. The images are generated by an action, the descent under water. When viewers stand in front of the finished pictures, they find themselves inserted into the action and by extension into my presence there. The physical nature of the finished objects is therefore intimately connected to their effectiveness. The scale of the images the intensity of the color, the reflective surfaces play crucial roles in the work.

-Daniel Wheeler

“Kusho” Series

www.shinichimaruyama.com

As a young student, I often wrote Chinese characters in sumi ink. I loved the nervous, precarious feeling of sitting before an empty white page, the moment just before my brush touched the paper. I was always excited to see the unique result of each new brushing.

Once your brush touches paper, you must finish the character; you have one chance. It can never be repeated or duplicated. You must commit your full attention and being to each stroke. Liquids, like ink, are elusive by nature. As sumi ink finds its own path through the paper grain, liquid finds its unique path as it moves through air.

Remembering those childhood moments, of ink and empty page, I fashioned a large ‘brush’ and bucket of ink. I get the same feeling, a precarious nervous excitement, as I stand before the empty studio space. Each stroke is unique, ephemeral. I can never copy or recreate them. I know something fantastic is happening, “a decisive moment”, but I can’t fully understand the event until I look at these captured afterimages, these paintings in the sky. -Shinichi Maruyama

“alleverythingthatisyou”

www.starnstudio.com

For the Starns, the six-sided nature of snow crystals appears less important than the ways in which the flakes hover between one state and another. As the Starns photograph, the crystals are in a process of alteration from solid to liquid, from organized form in space to aqueous blob on a surface.  They suggest a transitiveness that photography, as a medium devoted to stilling the moment, would seem to contradict. Instead of appearing as specimens, in the manner of 19^th century scientific observation, the snowflakes are objects of transformation.

Few of the Starns’ snowflakes are models of perfection, and in this they remind one of finding starfish and seashells scoured by the tides and left to dry on sandy beaches. Many have parts missing, or they have all their detailed armatures on one side but not the other. Here again – and despite their appearance on gallery walls in grid-like arrangements – the Starns’ images exceed the aesthetic register of the catalog. Unlike industrial structures, or man-made devices, imperfection is an essential part of their beauty and poignancy.

Here, then, is material evidence of the Starns interest in the phenomenological character of the natural world, cast into being against the certitude of our own impermanence. The photographs speak of the fragile delicacy of our ever-warming world while being themselves a visual bulwark against despair, and they draw us, like moths to light, to the pleasures of sight that but for the camera would exceed the human eye.”

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Excerpt from Andy Grundberg’s introduction in alleverythingthatisyou (catalogue published by the Wetterling gallery, Stockholm—Sweden 2007)

“Water” Series

www.larrysilver.com

Larry Silver [b.1934] began photographing the streets and subways of New York City in 1949 at the age of 15, and studied photography at the High School of Industrial Art (1949-53). The School’s proximity to Peerless Camera Store enabled Silver to meet numerous members of the Photo League, including W. Eugene Smith, Weegee and Lou Bernstein. In Silver’s senior year, he won first prize in the Scholastic-Ansco Photography Awards, and was granted a full scholarship to the Art Center School in Los Angeles (1954-56). During visits to the Santa Monica Beach, Silver photographed the local weightlifters, body builders, and acrobats. This celebrated series, “Muscle Beach” (1954), was the subject of a solo exhibition at the International Center of Photography in 1985, and again in 1999 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In 2003, after more than 50 years, Larry Silver began to move away from documentary photography and began creating a series of water abstractions.  These photographs often bear little resemblance to water, incorporating natural and unnatural impurities such as pollution, bacteria, leaves, and brush.  For Silver, these works were the beginning of a conceptual leap – moving away from depicting people in their environment to the effects of people on their environment.

Larry Silver has work in over 20 museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Brooklyn Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Yale University Art Gallery.

“JUMP”

www.stephendirado.com

One of the rites to passage for vacationers on Martha’s Vineyard is jumping from the American Legion Memorial Bridge into the ocean 18 feet below. For many this symbolic ritual is tantamount to announcing: “my vacation has begun.” Stephen DiRado, a Worcester based photographer, has spent the past seven summers photographing the tourists and residents who take this leap of faith. Although DiRado has been visiting Martha’s Vineyard for nearly 20 years, he drove by the bridge for almost 15 years before he stopped to photograph. He was lured by the chanting which surged to a frenzy when a jumper hesitated: “JUMP! JUMP! JUMP!”

The pictures invite us to leap with the jumper, albeit vicariously. DiRado notes, “The first pictures were exploratory, an inventory of sorts about their process: limbering up, adjusting bathing suits, veins pumped with adrenalin, followed by the leap, contact with the water and look of pleasure when they turn upwards to witness the reactions from peers. I came back to do the same the next day, and then the day after, realizing that I was onto something. I was experiencing the thrill of jumping through my camera.” For DiRado, whose fear of heights and water keeps him from jumping himself, this experience is freeing. -Stephen DiRado

“Water Paintings”

www.peterwbrooke.com

I have based this group of paintings on a new collection of Poems by Charles Wright titled Sestets.  Each painting, however, is not directly about any given poem.  They are rather, evocations of elements and fragments of the work as a whole.  Water certainly plays an elemental role in Wright’s work, however it is not the poet’s exclusive theme.  So, like his poems, water is certainly a theme or vehicle in my paintings, but ultimately they are about mortality, nature, reflection, and illusion. -Peter Brooke

www.sonjathomsen.com

Obscure is my understanding of oil, its origins; its raw potential; its economic, social and political relationships. What does oil look like? Diverse circumstances came together that made me curious about oil’s invisibility and ubiquitous influence in daily life. These circumstances climaxed in November of 2006 when a loved one returned home after his tour of duty in Iraq. At this time I began collecting my used motor oil and photographing it. By examining oil most immediate in our daily lives, the photographs make visible the slippery substance that has become as needed as water to sustain our contemporary lives.

Burning Water (2007) is a video completed in collaboration with a colleague and sound artist, Jason Nanna.  The four and a half minute video integrates my study of water, its elusive surface and potential, with my curiosity about oil–a complicated raw material that affects our economy and politics.

-Sonja Thomsen

“Choosing the Best Way”, “Doubting the Right Moment”, “Second Mistake”

www.amparosard.com/amparosard.html

In Amparo Sard’s latest video series water is the most important element, often coupled by an additional leit motif such as a carpet, a landscape, a flashlight, and a wooden raft. Sard uses her props symbolically.  For example, in one work, the carpet represents mistake, marking a difference between two worlds, or two options, the empty space and the filled space. 

Sard uses her familiar motif–the white dress–to represent subliminal language started in the Fly Woman series.  In the Fly Woman series Sard reflects on the doubt and anguish produced by indecision.  Through the work Sard speaks to the implication of mistakes, without revealing what the ultimate consequences may be.

Sard’s practice encompasses mixed media from video art and pin-hole drawings to full scale installation.  Sard’s artwork presents mysterious scenes focusing on a drowning woman and monstrous flies.

“Waterfall”

www.sadestudio.com

In Waterfall, Sadé presents 15 intimately scaled videos of running water.  She filmed the river from her train window, as she rode along New England’s waterways.  In the work Sadé turns the river’s horizontal orientation 90 degrees, shifting river’s axis vertically, and thereby abstracting the natural landscape.  The river’s motion and that of the train blur the images further.  The river cascades down the wall, rather than running along it, taking on the visual properties of a waterfall.  Sadé further stylizes the work through her use of artificial coloration, which visually references her larger body of work.

Regarding her oeuvre, Sade says:  My video stills arrest time and memory. My work aims toward a contemplation of time as a perfect metaphor for its own transcendence, which leaves us with a deepened awareness of our own motion toward mortality.In sets of stills taken from a video recorded on a train and car journey I resolve to remember as if the past were new, as if this journey remained a part of consciousness, as of course it does in our memory.

Through my visual studies I cultivate the thought that we never remain still because we are part of a flux that is omnipresent and affects all things, both the mind and the objects it is composed of.   Such a consciousness permits us to meditate on the cyclic nature of our own existence.  Art transforms what it is able to imagine. -Shuli Sade

“Reverence of Flow (in Motion)”

www.jaanikapeerna.net

Jaanika Peerna works at the crossroads of digital and traditional media, often dealing with the themes of water, simplicity and silence.
“I look for the universal beneath the particular and for the particular above the universal,” Peerna says.  “In my video work I point my camera towards carefully chosen ordinary phenomena such as water moving around a rock or a reflection on a car and record long takes without moving the camera in the hope that something essential about the subject matter reveals itself. I study the footage closely by slowing it way down and at times reversing it. I try looking at it upside down or sideways, all this in order to end up with a video which conveys something essential about the subject matter at hand. I am after the essence of things, the inner movement reflected in the outer motion. Often a small shift in how things are represented can bring a fresh and more immediate way to see and experience the ordinary things around us. I am interested in the never ending process of becoming with no story, no beginning, no end—just the current moment in flux.”

Reverence of Flow in Motion (2009) depicts a moving ball of water and light upon the screen. What is it?  A distant imaginary planet seen from outer space? A rushing stream viewed through a round hole in a log?  A synthetic fractal landscape?  None and all of the above, a work composed by the artist’s gaze in tandem with the transformative possibilities of the machine.  We tend to see only what our technologies offer to us, but sometimes, we peek through, past image and reflection, to some truer world beyond.

www.bigpaperairplane.com

Edwin’s Idea Farm is a cynical nod to the pitfalls of egotism. As the primary actor, I intentionally implicate myself in the verbal conflagration that my protagonist creates around himself. I mean to do this with a nod to Charlie Chaplain, who understood that idiocy is inevitable and our own role in it is assured.

-Ethan Murrow

Ethan Murrow received his B.A. from Carleton College and his M.F.A from The University of North Carolina. Based in New York City, he shows his work internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include, Winston Wachter in New York and Obsolete in Los Angeles. Ethan’s short film, “Dust,” was an official selection of the 2008 New York Film Festival. Ethan’s drawing, painting, video and film work is in many collections worldwide including the Guggenheim Foundation. In addition to joining the painting faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston in the fall of 2009, Ethan will also serve as the Dayton Hudson Distinguished Visiting Artist and Teacher at Carleton College in Minnesota.

“Seas” 

www.jennifermoller.com

The images used in Seas were presented to me on an extremely cold day walking along the Cape Cod bay. The sun was low in the sky raking the late afternoon light across the surface of the ocean. There was no saturated color; the scene was almost monochromatic. Broken chunks of ice formed along the shoreline extending 10 feet out to sea.  The beach was covered with large block shaped ice floats. The bay actually looked like a large white glistening slushy made up of crushed ice.

I noticed the extraordinary beauty of horizontal line, as the waves rhythmically rolled under the bulky ice. I watched as waves repeatedly cast their black linear shadows. I was entranced as I watched the movement’s repetition. I had a camcorder, a tripod, and some digital audio equipment with me. I attempted to capture what I was seeing and feeling that day. The wind was very cold and blowing hard.

Later, in the warm environment of my room I thought more about the wave experience and how it related to meditation. I had been exploring philosophical ideas about consciousness and I saw a connection with the form of the “wave” and the experience of human breathing. I was reading about brain wave states, specifically the theta states reached during meditation.

Presently, I perceive the ocean as a large sleeping form, a sentient being with the wave as its breath. It is in the wave or breath that transcendence seems possible because it may contain within it the mystery of consciousness. -Jenn Moller

www.susanjennings.com

www.slinkmoss.com

Susan Jennings’ abstract video work has long involved itself with the bare essentials of light, movement and color. She has turned to nature, specifically water, very often for her imagery. For this piece Jennings captures moving light on a river as a dance between figure and ground. This imagery is then projected onto whimsically moving sculptures which reflect and refract the video light and send it around the room onto the walls and sculptures as well as the viewers.

For the first time Jennings has collaborated with the artist, Slink Moss who created a sound piece in response to the visual art. His sound for this piece is also inspired by water and light. Drums and percussion represent drops of water or rays of light.  The field sounds Moss has captured of water, birds and trains are also percussive. In this way they relate to the visuals of the installation which deal with light as an object and, conversely, objects as light.

“The Flooded Rooms”

www.clarelangan.com

The Flooded Rooms explores the extreme forces of nature on mankind and it’s environments. This 4-minute film leads the viewer through a series of flooded rooms where it appears that nature has taken over the interiors created by mankind and claimed them as it’s own new landscape. Empty of their former inhabitants, their serenity seems almost normal.

Unlike Langan’s previous film work, which has always been shot in existing environments and landscapes, The Flooded Rooms is shot in created environments. These maquettes were built by the artist while doing a 2-month residency at Moly Sabata, on the Rhone, France from August – September 2005. The Flooded Rooms is inspired by the studio’s proximity to the river, but also mirrors Langan’s sand-filled rooms in her 2001 film Too Dark for Night. Langan’s familiar use of hand-painted glass filters used in front of the camera lens aid in blurring the boundaries between the real and the unreal. The use of exaggerated slow motion in the film has an almost hypnotic quality with the moving water as well as the effect of extending time.

There has always been a crossover between photography, film and painting within Langan’s practice. The use of hand-painted filters and lens attachments employs a very site-specific approach, as well as an obvious reference to painting. Each shot in the film is taken through specifically fabricated hand painted filters, altering the image as it comes into the camera. Its is accompanied by an original score by Jurgen Simpson.

“Electric Sheep”

www.nevadaart.org/exhibitions/

Electric Sheep is a video installation that provides viewers with a unique audio-visual experience as they watch an octopus make its way through glass tubing. Under such close observation the octopus becomes oddly sensuous as it writhes and squeezes through the confined space. The image is both disturbing and beautiful, a sensation that is underscored by the accompanying soundtrack, Wrecking Ball by Emmylou Harris, in which romance and love are coupled with suggestions of fear and destruction.

Amy Globus debuted electric sheep as part of Future Noir a group exhibition organized by Gorney Bravin + Lee, New York, NY. The exhibition was inspired by Syd Mead’s set designs for Blade Runner.  Amy Globus derived the title for electric sheep from Philip K. Dick’s 1968 science fiction book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was adapted into the science fiction cult film Blade Runner.

SELECTED BIOGRAPHY

Amy Globus received a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University, New York, New York and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island. She was born in New York City in 1976 where she currently resides. Globus works with video and sculpture.

In 2003, she received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Fellowship Award. Solo exhibitions of her work include Electronic Sheep at Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Sculpting in Time at D’Amelio Terras in New York, and Electric Sheep at The Nevada Museum of Art Media Gallery in Reno.

“Spiraling Water”

www.georgiefriedman.com/georgie_friedman.html

“Summer Solstice: 24 Hour Film”

www.jeffreyblondes.com

Jeffrey Blondes lives between Paris and the Loire Valley. His work explores the intersection of landscape and time – in particular the French word ‘temps’ with its numerous interpretations:  time, weather, season, beat, rhythm, speed, cycle, pulse. The length of his videos (i.e. 24 or 52 hours) provides a visual record of an experience in an isolated rural place in real time. The local sense of time is transported from the area into the viewing experience. The viewer is transported visually and temporally into a new conceptual space. Blondes’ is highlighting the function of landscape in art as a means of projection and escapism, creating a space between perception and experience. His films are presented vertically on the wall with a picture frame, so that at first glance they look like paintings.

Summer Solstice: 24 Hour Film is one 24 hour capture of the never-ending day from midnight June 21st to Midnight June 22nd in Tornehamn, a spit of land 200 km north of the Arctic Circle on Tornetrask, a large lake leading into Lapland on the Swedish-Norwegian border.