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.
Josiah McElheny | “The Alpine Cathedral and the City-Crown”
EXCLUSIVE: Josiah McElheny discusses his installation The Alpine Cathedral and the City-Crown (2007) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Josiah McElheny creates finely crafted, handmade glass objects that he combines with photographs, text, and museological displays to evoke notions of meaning and memory. McElheny’s work takes as its subject the history of Modernism and the impact it has made on society, aesthetics, and contemporary thought.
Josiah McElheny is featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode Memory of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
ART21: What drew you to the architect Bruno Taut and his secret society of architects? How did early modernist practice become a touchstone for your work The Alpine Cathedral and the City-Crown?
MCELHENY: This set of architects, this secret society called the Crystal Chain, they laid the foundations for the modern world as it’s been built today. They basically set up the structures for all the modern architecture that exists. The group’s whole portfolio of drawings was about an impossible architecture, of trying to push something that could be translated into practical things. Just to draw a picture of a different world. Continue reading »
Lari Pittman | Craft
EXCLUSIVE: Lari Pittman painting Palace (2006) in his Los Angeles studio.
Inspired by commercial advertising, folk art, and decorative traditions, Lari Pittman’s meticulously layered paintings transform pattern and signage into luxurious scenes. Meditations on romantic love, violence, and mortality, his work demonstrates the complementary nature of beauty and suffering, pain and pleasure. In a manner both visually gripping and psychologically strange, Pittman’s hallucinatory works reference myriad aesthetic styles, from Victorian silhouettes to social realist murals to Southwestern kitsch.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Lari Pittman.
LEARN: Lari Pittman is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Romance 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 | Lari Pittman, Palace, and detail, 2006. Photos by Douglas M. Parker Studio. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Mark Sutton. Artwork courtesy: Lari Pittman.
Allora & Calzadilla | Form
EXCLUSIVE: Allora & Calzadilla’s Ruin (2006) installed at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.
Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla approach visual art as a set of experiments that test whether ideas such as authorship, nationality, borders, and democracy adequately describe today’s increasingly global and consumerist society. Their hybridized works—often a unique mix of sculpture, photography, performance, sound and video—explore the physical and conceptual act of mark making and its survival through traces. By drawing historical, cultural, and political metaphors out of basic materials, their works explore the complex associations between an object and its meaning.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Allora & Calzadilla.
LEARN: Allora & Calzadilla are featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Paradox 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 | Allora & Calzadilla, Ruin, 2006. Courtesy the artists and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Bob Elfstrom & Miguel Sanchez-Martin. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Monte Matteotti. Artwork courtesy: Allora & Calzadilla. Thanks: Galerie Chantal Crousel.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle | “Oppenheimer”
EXCLUSIVE: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s film Oppenheimer (2003) and mural Time (2003) installed at the Rochester Art Center, Minnesota.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s technologically sophisticated works use natural forms such as clouds, icebergs, and DNA as metaphors for understanding social issues such as immigration, gun violence, and human cloning. The artist´s strategy of representing nature through information leads to an investigation of the underlying forces that shape the planet as well as points of human interaction and interference with the environment.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle.
LEARN: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle 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 | Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, details of (Left) Oppenheimer, 2003 and (Right) Time, 2003. Courtesy the artist and Max Protetch, New York.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Mark Falstad. Sound: Heidi Hesse. Editor: Steven Wechsler. Artwork courtesy: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. Thanks: Rochester Contemporary Art Center.
Nancy Spero | Becoming an Artist
EXCLUSIVE: Photographs of Nancy Spero from the 1960s to 2000.
A pioneer of feminist art, Nancy Spero’s work since the 1960s is an unapologetic statement against the pervasive abuse of power, Western privilege, and male dominance. Executed with a raw intensity on paper and in ephemeral installations, her work often draws its imagery and subject matter from current and historical events such as the torture of women in Nicaragua, the Holocaust, and the atrocities of the Vietnam War.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Nancy Spero.
LEARN: Nancy Spero is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Protest 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 | Photos © Nancy Spero, courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Sound: Merce Williams. Editor: Lizzie Donahue. Artwork courtesy: Nancy Spero. Thanks: Samm Kunce.>
Judy Pfaff | “Buckets of Rain” Time Lapse
EXCLUSIVE: Two week time lapse of Judy Pfaff’s installation Buckets of Rain (2006) at Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art, New York.
Balancing intense planning with improvisational decision-making, Judy Pfaff creates exuberant, sprawling sculptures and installations that weave landscape, architecture, and synthetic color into a tense yet organic whole. A pioneer of installation art in the 1970s, Pfaff synthesizes sculpture, painting, and architecture into dynamic environments in which space seems to expand and collapse, fluctuating between two and three dimensions.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Judy Pfaff.
LEARN: Judy Pfaff is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Romance 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 | Judy Pfaff, details of Buckets of Rain, 2006. Photos by Zonder Title and Jordan Tinker. Courtesy the artist and Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art, New York.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Alice Berton & Joel Shapiro. Sound: Merce Williams. Editor: Ahmed Amer & Jennifer Chiurco. Artwork courtesy: Judy Pfaff. Thanks: Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art.
Catherine Sullivan | Empathy
EXCLUSIVE: Excerpts from Catherine Sullivan’s film installations Big Hunt (2002), Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land (2003), and The Chittendens (2006).
Catherine Sullivan’s anxiety-inducing films and live performances reveal the degree to which everyday gestures and emotional states are scripted and performed, probing the border between innate and learned behavior. Sullivan’s appropriation of classic Hollywood filming styles, period costumes, and contemporary spaces such as corporate offices draws the viewer’s attention away from traditional narratives and towards an examination of performance itself.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Catherine Sullivan.
LEARN: Catherine Sullivan is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Paradox 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 | Catherine Sullivan, production stills from (Left) Baby Jane/Birdie Jo Infusion, from Big Hunt, 2002; (Right) Chittenden Office (The Virtuous Woman) from The Chittendens, 2005. © Catherine Sullivan.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Mark Falstad. Sound: Heidi Hesse. Editor: Monte Matteotti. Artwork courtesy: Catherine Sullivan.
Laurie Simmons | Dancer Greg Sinacori
EXCLUSIVE: Dancer Greg Sinacori during the making of Laurie Simmons’s The Music of Regret (2006) at the Alvin Ailey Dance Studio, New York.
Laurie Simmons stages photographs and films with paper dolls, finger puppets, ventriloquist dummies, and costumed dancers as ‘living objects’, animating a dollhouse world suffused with nostalgia and colored by an adult’s memories, longings, and regrets. Her work blends psychological, political and conceptual approaches to art making, transforming photography’s propensity to objectify people, especially women, into a sustained critique of the medium.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Laurie Simmons.
LEARN: Laurie Simmons is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Romance 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 | Laurie Simmons, production stills from The Music of Regret - Act III, 2006. © Laurie Simmons, courtesy the artist, Salon 94, and Sperone Westwater Gallery, New York.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Roger Phenix. Editor: Mark Sutton. Artwork courtesy: Laurie Simmons. Thanks: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
Robert Adams | Books & Gravures
EXCLUSIVE: Robert Adam’s with photogravure plates for Harney County, Oregon (1999-2003) in his Oregon studio.
Robert Adams’s black-and-white photographs document scenes of the American West, revealing the impact of human activity on the last vestiges of wilderness and open space. An underlying tension in Adams’s body of work is the contradiction between landscapes visibly transformed or scarred by human presence and the inherent beauty of light and land rendered by the camera.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Robert Adams.
LEARN: Robert Adams 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 | Robert Adams, Harney County, Oregon, 1999-2003. © Robert Adams. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Doug Dunderdale. Editor: Steven Wechsler. Artwork courtesy: Robert Adams. Thanks: Matthew Marks Gallery & Fraenkel Gallery.
