Installations
My more recent installation work has been collaborative. How does collaboration unfold, and what is the role of the artist within them. Collaborative art includes artist teams and collectives, as well as emerging canonized terms like “dialogical art” and “relational aesthetics” that begin to show the art world’s attempt to understand newly occurring shifts in power of multiple voices from development to production. The creative collaborative process is a unique relational exchange of transcultural/diverse/cross cultural knowledge, skills, and aesthetics that interrupts and interfaces difference, location, and boundaries of our artistic practice.
The Warrior Series
The Warrior: H. Gardner is part of a series of artworks inspired by my interests in the history of projection technologies, the deacquisitioning of many slide film archives, and the array of slides from magic lanterns to 35mm available on eBay. More specifically, the artwork interrogates how the meanings of technologies often reside outside the tool and are constructed in a socio-cultural context or network.
The sculpture, The Warrior: H. Gardner, features a kataginu like garment created by repurposing an old 35 mm slideware set from Helen Gardner’s Art Through The Ages, now in its 14th edition. Her book was originally published in 1926 as the first single-volume textbook to cover the entire range of art history from a global perspective. Lantern slide technologies were used in education as early as 1886 by New York State Normal Colleges. The Warrior: H. Gardner is illumined from the inside using a strip of flexible LED lights and displayed on a metal armature.
The Warrior: H. Gardner serves to comment on visual epistemology, to provoke inquiry on the changing discourse of vision and knowledge, and to comment on the role of visual technologies in art, our lives, and visual culture.
Iterative Convergence
Collaborative video Installation with Joo Yeon Woo , 2005, 2009
My most recent artwork, Iterative Convergence, is a collaborative installation and was motivated by the changing nature of communication. The installation juxtaposes old and new technologies of screen and chairs to engage the viewer in a live interaction to provoke interpretation as well as intended and unintended meanings. We link over a billion people in real time through the Internet, with thoughts and images through the minimum unit of bits in 0s and 1s, and volumes of information that is updated by doubling every seventy three days. Contemporary digital communication and its culture have become embedded in our senses and daily lives and are influencing how we come to know, think, and express ourselves. The continually changing nature of communication in digital visual culture is what motivates the recent project titled Iterative Convergence. The project is a collaborative installation with the artist, Joo Yeon Woo and will be accompanied by interactive video installation that juxtaposes chairs, monitors, and audience’s interactions. The project provides a critical perspective on dialogue in digital media culture. The project was selected to show in the exhibition entitled Bit, Byte, Dot, Spot: Post-digital Art at the Tampa Museum of Art, Florida from April 14 to July 11, 2009. The show is intended to support and research new media art including computer-based game, web-based program, book art, digital photography, and experimental video/film.
Mass-Mingling
This in progress installation builds upon and extend the collaborative working artistic processes of Iterative Convergence an interactive installation. In continuing our visual research from the previous collaboration, we will pursue a project that will represent blurring the boundary between online and offline communication. In particular we will visualize one of the most significant phenomena, mass-mingling, that have occurred in the last few years in social networks. Collaborative Team: Joo Yeon Woo and Michelle Tillander
Glass Explorations
Glass process has been an interest over the past 15 years. While I do not pursuing using glass as an art focus I have continued to explore a variety of art practices and workshops from casting to collaborative performance installation. Bottled Emotion: Five Easy Pieces was created as part of a collaborative performance with glass artist Charlotte Potter. The process took place at the Chrysler Museum new glass facility and the work was exhibited at Virginia Wesleyan College in Virginia. I have taken a variety of glass workshop, for example with artist Alice Rogan Nelson to explore variety of hot cast glass and kiln forming processes (e.g. frit, lost wax, Pate de verre; past casting, mold casting, and sand casting) using the imagery of the house.
Touching-Touch Seeing-Seen Series
The boundaries of our senses (touch, small, sight, hearing, and taste) do not stop at the edges of specific sensory modes but represent part of a reciprocal framework which embodies interactions, with people, nature, devices, memories, and thoughts. Including metaphoric thinking. Touching-Touch Seeing-Seen Series are a set of wooden boxes that use rope a line element. I was recently at an artist residency called Jentel in Banner, Wyoming, were I became fascinated with the technology of rope. Rope is made for cowboys and ranchers with five different levels of tensions, and specifically for left and right handed use. While rope for me has a visual beauty, the tactile qualities, often hidden from sight, are equally as aesthetic. My intention was to brings attention to the amalgamation of relationships between the touch, sight and metaphoric concepts of community and difference in both the tactile and visual aesthetic realm.