calendario eventi  :: 

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3/6/2004

Three exhibitions

Santa Monica Museum of Art SMMoA, Santa Monica

Project Room I:
HUGH POCOCK: THIS GARDEN - MAKING SALT AND EVAPORATION DRAWINGS

"Water is ubiquitous. It is at once entirely practical and utterly sublime."
-Hugh Pocock

Project Room I of the Santa Monica Museum of Art presents Hugh Pocock: This Garden - making salt and evaporation drawings. For this site-specific installation, Pocock uses hundreds of gallons of seawater gathered from the Santa Monica Bay as his primary medium. Employing solar-powered lights and fans, Pocock forces the water's evaporation in a shallow concrete bin, and regularly harvest the remaining salt throughout the course of the exhibition. The salt produced from the process reveals the pollutant level in the Bay's water. Pocock also charts atmospheric changes in the Project Room and levels of natural evaporation of the seawater in a series of large-scale drawings. This Garden features a projection of photographs documenting the water collection process.

Pocock's sculptures, installations, and videos often investigate the history and metaphor of the human relationship to natural resources, space, time, consumerism, art, and language. His projects represent what he terms "an expression of involvement with intense labor." In his 1998 Living With a Log, the artist acquired and installed a two-ton, 42-foot log in the house in which he and his wife were living. In Drilling a Well to the Source of Water, realized in 2001 at Portikus Museum in Frankfurt, Germany and the Baltimore Museum of Art, Pocock explored water as the transaction point between culture and natural phenomena by retrieving water from beneath the ground through the process of drilling a well. In the Baltimore Museum of Art installation, the extracted water was added into the ice making plant at the center of the museum's air conditioning system, becoming a permanent part of the volumetric space of the museum.

Born in New Zealand and raised in the United States, England, and New Zealand, Hugh Pocock received his B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute and his M.F.A. in New Genres at UCLA. He has exhibited his work across the United States, as well as internationally. Pocock lives in Baltimore, where he teaches at Maryland Institute College of Art.

This exhibition been made possible in part by the City of Santa Monica Community Arts Grant Program, a project of the Santa Monica Arts Commission.

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Project Room II:
ALEX SLADE: VACANT LOT

Project Room II of the Santa Monica Museum of Art presents Alex Slade: Vacant Lot, a series of photographs exploring urban transitory spaces in and around Los Angeles. While seemingly devoid of content, on closer inspection these sites are full of meaning, entropic places reflecting natural world, built environment, and human dramas in their chaotic slides towards disorder. The photographs also represent a way for the artist to overlay and map his movements through the city.

Vacant Lot furthers the artist's investigation of mapping first begun in 1996 with the installation A Walk in the Park. Created during a residency at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien's Studio 246, Slade surveyed the trajectory of a walk in the park outside the studio, and reconstructed a scaled-down version of the walk in the gallery. He subsequently introduced mapping and topographical strategies into his sculptural and photographic projects.

While the lots in Slade's photographs first appear empty, as compared to what borders them, they are actually brimming with stories charting the ebb and flow of financial fortunes, shifts in population, and dynamic and ephemeral history of neighborhoods. The photographs have been included in several exhibitions, most notably in Urban Pornography at Artist's Space in New York, and in The Prague Biennale of 2003. The entire series is on view at Santa Monica Museum of Art.

Alex Slade received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and his M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts. His photographs and sculptures have been in many exhibitions, including the recent Snapshot: New Art from Los Angeles at UCLA's Hammer Museum, The Prague Biennale of 2003, and Topographies at the San Francisco Art Institute's Walter McBean Gallery, which travels to the Pasadena Museum of Contemporary Art in mid-July. He is represented by Mary Goldman Gallery, and lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches at Otis College of Art and Design.

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Ant Farm 1968 - 1978

"It was always organic - no one person always did one thing. One of us might design one time, build another, or manage things. It was nonlinear, completely." -the late Doug Michels, Ant Farm co-founder

From June 5 though August 14, 2004, Santa Monica Museum of Art presents Ant Farm 1968 - 1978, a retrospective of the underground architecture, video, performance, and installation collective committed to working outside traditional systems, whose core members were Doug Michels, Chip Lord, and Curtis Schreier. Activist art visionaries, Ant Farm riffed off of, puckishly chided, and embraced, the themes of the contemporary pop culture - especially cars, space exploration and the future - in a way that presaged the work of many artists and radical thinkers who came after them.

Ant Farm was responsible for such iconic works as: Cadillac Ranch (1974, Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez, Doug Michels, site-specific installation, Amarillo, Texas) - a modern Stonehenge of ten 1949 to 1964 model Cadillacs buried nose down in a row - and Media Burn (July 4, 1975, Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Curtis Schreier, Tom Weinberg, performance at the Cow Palace, San Francisco), where "artist-dummies" Michels and Schreier drove the Phantom Dream Car, a customized 1959 Cadillac El Dorado Biarritz convertible, through a wall of flaming televisions. They created a series of inflatables, like the ICE-9, which Ant Farm transported around the country in a modified Chevrolet van during the Truckstop Network tour of college and universities (1970, Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Curtis Schreier, Hudson Marquez, W. Douglas Hurr, Pepper Mouser). Ant Farm designed many futuristic projects, including The Dolphin Embassy (1974, Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Curtis Schreier, W. Douglas Hurr), a floating research station promoting interspecies communication. Sometimes they also had the opportunity to transform their designs into reality, as with the award-winning, ferro-cement House of the Century (1972, Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Richard Jost, W. Douglas Hurr, Mojo Lake, Angleton, Texas).

Ant Farm 1968 - 1978 is the first major museum retrospective of Ant Farm's 10-year production. The exhibition includes a visual timeline of the collective, the ICE-9 inflatable, blueprints, publications, drawings, collages, architectural models, illustrative video clips, and a video retrospective from the Pacific Film Archive, as well as other documentary material and ephemera. The public opening reception for the exhibition is Friday, June 4, 7 - 9 p.m., with refreshments provided by Crystal Geyser Water Company, Malcolm's Munchies, Michael + David Vineyards, Peet's Coffee & Tea, and Red Bull. The Members' Preview, with a walk-through with co-curator Constance Lewallen, is from 6 - 7 p.m.

Ant Farm 1968 - 1978 tours to the University of Pennsylvania, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Art Museum of the University of Houston; and Zentrum fur Munst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany.

Opening Reception Friday, June 4, 6-7pm

Image: Ant Farm, Media Burn
July 4, 1975
Performance; Cow Palace, San Francisco, CA
Photo: (C) John F. Turner

Santa Monica Museum of Art
Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Avenue, CA 90404
Santa Monica

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