About the Exhibition
Louisville’s Idea Festival celebrates art and innovation, featuring a number of speakers working at the intersections of art and science. In 2013, noted interactive artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer will make a presentation on Friday, September 27, followed by four recent recipients of grants from the Creative Capital Foundation. The Art of Idea Festival will include photographic and video works by each of the participating artists.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is an electronic artist who develops interactive installations that are at the intersection of architecture and performance art. His main interest is in creating platforms for public participation, by perverting technologies such as robotics, computerized surveillance or telematic networks. Inspired by phantasmagoria, carnival and animatronics, his light and shadow works are “antimonuments for alien agency.”
In August 2013, Lozano-Hemmer’s Voice Tunnel transformed a New York tunnel between 33’d and 401h streets on Park Avenue into an interactive light and sound installation using 300 theatrical spotlights that produced glimmering arches of light along the 1 ,400-foot tunnel’s walls and ceiling. Participants influenced the intensity of each light by speaking into a special intercom at the tunnel’s center, which recorded their voices and looped them, creating a Morse-like code of flashes throughout the tunnel.
In conjunction with Lozano-Hemmer’s presentation at Idea Festival 2013, 21 c will exhibit Performance Review UBS, 2013, courtesy of bitforms gallery, New York. Performance Review is a new photographic project comprised of thousands of fingerprints captured by high magnification surveillance equipment. While the distinctive patterns found in friction ridges of the human finger allow for the identification of an individual, here those singularities are subsumed to create an ambiguous image, representing the generalized use of biometry itself. Named fingerprints.
Born in Mexico City, and now living and working in Toronto and Mexico City, Lozano-Hemmer has been commissioned to create large-scale installations for events such as the Millennium Celebrations in Mexico City (1999), the Cultural Capital of Europe in Rotterdam (2001), the UN World Summit of Cities in·Lyon (2003), the opening of the YCAM Center in Japan (2003), the Expansion of the European Union in Dublin (2004), the memorial for the Tlatelolco Student Massacre in Mexico City (2008), the 50th Anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2009) and the Winter Olympics in Vancouver (2010).
Recently the subject of solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fundaci6n Telef6nica in Buenos Aires and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, he was the first artist to officially represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition at Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel in 2007. Creative Capital supports innovative and adventurous artists across the country through funding,counsel and career development services. Our pioneering approach-inspired by venture-capitalprlnciples-helps artists working in all creative disciplines realize their visions and build sustainable practices. At Idea Festival 2013, Creative Capital executive director Ruby Lerner will be joined onstage by four recent grantees: Eric Dyer, Paul Rucker, Jesse Sugarmann, and Elaine Tin-Nyo.
Eric Dyer, Short Ride
Short Ride is an animated film and installation project that utilizes the zoetrope, a pre-cinema device that creates the appearance of motion from static pictures. The zoetrope features a perforated cylinder through which images are visible. Dyer employs his own version of this mechanism to explore a visual language of loops and spirals. When spun, the complex sculptures, dubbed cinetropes, are a blur to the eye but come to animated life when viewed through shutter-glasses, fast-shutter video cameras or with strobe lights. This process allows for projects that manifest themselves as both films and installations. In addition to developing an immersive zoetrope tunnel, Dyer is working on projects Involving animated umbrellas, vinyl records and a hot air balloon. Three short animations related to Dyer’s Creative Capital grant will be show at 21 c: The Bellows March (2009), Media Archeology(2010), and Coversong (2012).
Eric Dyer is an artist, filmmaker, experimental animator and educator who creates films, installations and performances from spinning zoetrope-like sculpture. His award-winning films have screened internationally at numerous festivals, including the Chicago International Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, South by Southwest and the Ottawa, Annecy, Melbourne and London International Animation Festivals. His work has also been exhibited at the Exploratorium, the Hirshhorn, the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art, Ars Electronica, and the Cairo and Venice Biennales.
Paul Rucker, Recapitulation
Recapitulation is an installation demonstrating the parallels between slavery and the contemporary prison industrial complex through animation, digital stills, sculpture, original music compositions, interactive sound and video. Although slave and convict have different names, these labels share similar limitations and expectations. Both have_ faced exploitation for labor, a loss of rights and disenfranchisement. Currently over 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the U.S.; 40 percent are African Americans, although they comprise only 12 percent of the country’s total population. In Recapitulation, Paul Rucker will examine the vast numbers affected by both institutions and the disparity in the racial makeup of the prison population.
21 c will present a video component of Rucker’s grant project, Proliferation, 2009, which the artists describes here: Art can tell stories. For years I would talk about injustice by reciting numbers and statistics. When you say, “We have over 2.3 million people in prison,” it’s a large number to comprehend. Doing research at a prison issues-themed residency at the Blue Mountain Center in New York, I found some maps that I felt could help tell the story. This project shows the proliferation of the US prison system if seen from a celestial point of view. Using different colors to indicate different eras, the viewer can clearly see the astonishing growth of this system over time.
Paul Rucker is a visual artist, composer and musician who combines media, often integrating live performance, sound, original compositions and visual art. His work is the product of a rich interactive process, through which he investigates community impacts, human rights issues, historical research and basic human emotions surrounding a subject. As a musician and director, Rucker plays in various situations, from solo cellist to leading his LARGE ENSEMBLE of 22 musicians. He was invited by legendary filmmaker David Lynch to perform for the opening of Lynch’s film, Inland Empire. As a visual artist, Rucker has created work for the Museum of Flight in Seattle, 4Culture and the City of Tacoma, WA. Past residencies include the Headlands Center for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, Ucross Foundation, Art OMI, Banff Centre, Pilchuck Glass School and the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, Italy.
Jesse Sugarmann, We Build Excitement
The American auto industry is a manufacturer of personal and cultural identity. The failure of the American auto industry was therefore a failure of self and the closure of several longstanding automotive marquees equated a loss of cultural identity. Shot at a decommissioned Pontiac dealership in Pontiac, Michigan, We Build Excitement is an experimental documentary featuring an environmental study of a shuttered car dealership, punctuated by sculptural car wrecks and interpretive works performed by car salesmen. We Build Excitement isolates and categorizes the portion of identity that has been lost by the auto industry’s degeneration, documenting the social scars left by its breakdown.
Based in Bakersfield, California, Jesse Sugarmann is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, performance, sculpture and fibers. His work engages the automotive industry as a manufacturer of human identity, accessing automotive history as an index of both cultural identity and social history. Jesse has exhibited work both nationally and internationally in venues such as the Getty Institute, Los Angeles; el Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Oregon; the Banff Center, Canada; Filmbase, Ireland; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Michael Strogoff, Marfa; Drift Station, Omaha; Fugitive Projects, Nashville; and the 201 0 Portland Biennial.
Elaine Tin Nyo, This Little Piggy
This Little Piggy will explore mankind’s love/loathing relationship to swine. With local breeders, the artist will adopt five piglets in ham-producing regions of the world (Italy, Spain, France, China and the U.S.) and follow them from stable to table. Each pig’s life, documented by video and celebrated in a cookbook, ends in a dinner cooked with local chefs. The project culminates in a multichannel video projection of these meals.
Elaine Tin Nyo’s family came to the U.S. when she was seven as exiles from their native Burma. Burmese food is central to her earliest memories, and since the early 1990s, food has been a vehicle for the artist to explore issues of mortality and responsibility. Now based in New York, Tin Nyo has received project support from the Bronx Museum, Seoksu Art Project, Franklin Furnace and The Phillips Collection, among others. Her photographs, food,· videos, installations and performances have been presented at New Museum, Deitch Projects, Creative Time, Fargfabriken, Brooklyn Museum, Josee Bienvenu Gallery, Postmasters Gallery, the French Culinary Institute and other venues.
