Mark Dion | “Neukom Vivarium”
EXCLUSIVE: Mark Dion leads a discussion of his installation Neukom Vivarium (2006) at the Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle.
Mark Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. Appropriating archeological and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion creates artworks that question the distinctions between “objective” (”rational”) scientific methods and “subjective” (”irrational”) influences.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Mark Dion.
LEARN: Mark Dion is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Ecology of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
DISCUSS: What do you think about this video? Leave a comment!
PHOTO | Mark Dion, Neukom Vivarium, 2006. Courtesy the Seattle Art Museum.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: John Gordon Hill. Sound: Charles Tomaras. Editor: Steven Wechsler. Artwork courtesy: Mark Dion. Thanks: Olympic Sculpture Park.
Maya Lin and More at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
Systematic Landscapes, a traveling exhibition of work by Season 1 artist Maya Lin, is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego through June 30, 2008. The exhibition focuses on a trio of large-scale sculptural installations—2×4 Landscape, Water Line, and Blue Lake Pass (pictured above)—that wed the artist’s deep interest in forces and forms of nature with her long-standing investigation into sculptural forms. Watch a video featuring the installation of 2×4 Landscape at MCA San Diego here.
In a recent Los Angeles Times article, which took the MCA San Diego exhibition as its starting point, Lin discussed her current project for the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Calling it her “last memorial,” the commissioned piece will grieve for the animals, birds and plants driven into extinction—and warn of the urgency of acting now to halt the devastation. Envisioning the piece as a “multisite chronicle, including photography and video, at places around the world and with a commemorative list of names of extinct species,” it is scheduled to launch on Earth Day in April 2009.
MCA San Diego’s attention to nature and environmental issues in contemporary art continues this August with Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet. Art 21 artists Mark Dion (Season 4) and Ann Hamilton (Season 1) are included in this collaborative multi-year exhibition project that sent eight leading artists to UNESCO World Heritage sites around the globe to create new work informed and inspired by their experiences. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, Rigo 23, Dario Robleto, Diana Thater and Xu Bing will also participate. Human/Nature is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, in partnership with the international conservation organization Rare.
Mark Dion talk at the Ulrich Museum in Wichita
Tomorrow at 6:00pm, the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, KS (a Season 4 mini-grant partner) presents a talk by Season 4 artist Mark Dion. Dion’s interest in the natural world takes him around the globe as he probes the scientific practices that develop and construct our knowledge of the environment. Adopting scientific modes of investigation and display, the artist’s resulting installations often question and upend these traditional methods.
For more information, please contact the Ulrich Museum (316-978-3664/ulrich@wichita.edu).
Wichita State University
School of Art and Design
210 McKnight Art Center West
1845 Fairmount Street
Wichita, KS 67260
Mark Dion at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in NYC
On view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery through March 15 is The Octagon Room, a major installation and sculpture project comprising Season 4 artist Mark Dion’s new solo presentation at the gallery.
In The Octagon Room, which takes the form of an architecturally scaled installation, Dion furthers his investigation into the blurred boundaries between art, society, and history, as well as the homogenized methods of their presentation and consumption. Confronting the inherent contradictions between the artifact and the context in which it is displayed, The Octagon Room takes the appearance of a brutalist styled bunker. However, within the installation, the viewer is invited to browse though an abandoned office, the contents of which represent the artist’s own labyrinthine history of the past eight years.
The imagined provenance of each of the objects in Dion’s arrangement adds up to a staggering sum of experiences. As each speaks of an individual past, collectively they present a complex mosaic, informing our understanding of the overall subject matter and material. A wunderkammer both autobiographical and sociological, The Octagon Room takes the nation’s relationship with its own people and its neighbors, and the artist’s status and position within this framework as its foundation.
Based in New York City and Pennsylvania, Dion is currently developing and ongoing project with the John Bartram Association that will result in the exhibition Mark Dion: Travels of William Bartram Reconsidered at Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia, June 21st - December 6th.
Podcast: Mark Dion lecture in Toronto
Learn more about Season 4 artist Mark Dion in an audiocast of a talk Dion gave the inaugural 2008 Canadian Art International Lecture Series on January 18 at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Listen as he discusses the development of his work over the past ten years. (running time: 1 hour 15 minutes)
[via Canadian Art Online]
Mark Dion talk in Toronto tonight
The work of Season 4 artist Mark Dion blurs the boundaries of art, science and natural history. Playing off the human impulse to classify and order phenomena, he frequently creates arrangements of found objects or juxtaposes imagery of fantastical flora and fauna with the syntax of the natural-history museum.
In this talk at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Dion will speak about his practice over the past decade.
Royal Ontario Museum, Level 1B
Signy and Cleophee Eaton Theatre
7:00-8:30pm
Cost: $10.00
Visit the Museum’s website for more information.
Mark Dion’s Bartram’s Travels
Travels of William Bartram‚ÄîReconsidered examines the history and culture of 18th-century American naturalists, John and his son William Bartram. Using their travel journals, drawings, and maps, Season 4 artist Mark Dion is retracing the journey of William Bartram, in particular, to northern Florida. Like Bartram, he is collecting things both natural and unnatural, making drawings and paintings of them, examining them, and mailing them back to Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia. The treasures that Dion finds will be installed in cabinets in the historic home of John Bartram next year.
Dion’s journey started with a send-off from Bartram’s in mid-November in Philadelphia. His travels can be followed online here, featuring monthly video chats, video of daily travels, city stops, photo galleries, audio, Mark’s handwritten journals, drawings and maps that pinpoint where he is.
The exhibition Mark Dion: Travels of William Bartram‚ÄîReconsidered will open June 20, 2008 at Bartram’s Garden.
For more information on the project, visit its website at http://www.markdionsbartramstravels.com. See more photos on the project’s Flickr site here.
Spotlight on Ecology: Mark Dion
Mark Dion was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1961. He received a BFA (1986) and an honorary doctorate (2003) from the University of Hartford School of Art, Connecticut. Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. The job of the artist, he says, is to go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception and convention. Appropriating archaeological and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion creates works that question the distinctions between ‘objective’ (’rational’) scientific methods and ’subjective’ (’irrational’) influences. The artist’s spectacular and often fantastical curiosity cabinets, modeled on Wunderkabinetts of the 16th Century, exalt atypical orderings of objects and specimens. By locating the roots of environmental politics and public policy in the construction of knowledge about nature, Mark Dion questions the authoritative role of the scientific voice in contemporary society. He has received numerous awards, including the ninth annual Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (2001). He has had major exhibitions at the Miami Art Museum (2006); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2004); Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2003); and Tate Gallery, London (1999). Neukom Vivarium (2006), a permanent outdoor installation and learning lab for the Olympic Sculpture Park, was commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum. Dion lives and works in New York.
Watch a clip from Dion’s Art:21 segment:
“My idea of art isn’t necessarily something that provides answers or is decorative or affirmative. I like Goya. I enjoy the still-life tradition, and hunting painting, and things toward the dark side that tend to have a more critical function. That’s what I see as the job of contemporary artists: to function as critical foils to dominant culture. My job as an artist isn’t to satisfy the public. That’s not what I do. I don’t necessarily make people happy. I think the job of the artist is to go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception, prejudice, and convention…I think it’s really important that artists have an agitational function in culture. No one else seems to.”
(taken from the companion book Art in the Twenty-First Century 4, p. 78).
Read more about his work and watch additional clips on his Art:21 webpage here.
Have you experienced Dion’s work in person, or did you have an opportunity to view his segment in one of the hundreds of Art21 Access ‘07 events that have been taking place all month? Share your thoughts on Mark Dion by leaving a comment below.
Event photos: Art21 at Queens Museum 10-7-07
A curious and substantial crowd came out to the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows Corona Park this past Sunday to hear Season 4 featured artist Mark Dion in conversation with the Museum’s Chief Curator, Valerie Smith. After viewing the new Ecology episode, premiering November 11 on PBS, Mark and Valerie discussed his work, the experience being filmed for the Art:21 series, and the work he’s done with the Queens Museum. Audience members asked many questions on a range of topics‚Äîfrom concerns about the environment and different viewpoints regarding an artist’s activist responsibilities (or lack thereof), to the clear influence of science on Dion’s work. See more photos on Art21’s Access ‘07 group on Flickr here: http://flickr.com/groups/art21-access07/
The next screening will take place tomorrow at Tribeca Cinemas at 7pm. Various Art21 artists’ segments will be screened, followed by a panel discussion on contemporary art and filmmaking. RSVP at www.tribecafilmfest.org/art21. Seating is limited.
Art21 Artists’ Talks Tonight, Coast to Coast
In a perhaps unprecedented twist in the history of Art21 public programs, three Season 4 featured artists will be speaking at various cultural institutions tonight in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York City.
Painter Lari Pittman, profiled in Romance, will talk at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) at 7pm in the Bing Theater, following a screening of this episode. Mark Dion will participate in a panel at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University (in the Engineering and Architecture building’s Lecture Hall, Room 126) along with curator Sheryl Conkelton and artist/Tyler Professor Winifred Lutz, moderated by art historian Philip Glahn. Select artists’ segments will also be screened. Finally, Mark Bradford, featured in the Season 4 episode Paradox, will converse with Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem at 7pm.
All of these events are free. For more information on Lari Pittman’s talk, visit LACMA’s site here. Email Jennie Shanker, Tyler’s Foundation Dept Chair at shanker@temple.edu about the panel discussion featuring Mark Dion. And reservations are recommended for Mark Bradford’s screening at the Studio Museum. Call 212-864-3500 to reserve a space.
