calendario eventi  :: 

X

22/1/2005

Three exhibitions

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

Solitude and Focus: Recent Work by MacDowell Colony Fellows in the Visual Arts

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to present the exhibition, Solitude and Focus: Recent Work by MacDowell Colony Fellows in the Visual Arts, featuring the work of thirteen artists who participated in recent residencies at The MacDowell Colony. The exhibition will be on view at The Aldrich from January 23 through June 22, 2005. An opening reception will be held on Sunday, January 23, from 4 to 6 pm. Round-trip transportation from NYC is available, please call the Museum at 203.438.4519 for reservations.

Founded in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in 1907, by the American composer Edward MacDowell and his wife, Marian MacDowell, The MacDowell Colony is one of the most revered artist retreats in the US. Each year more than 240 artists, including architects, composers, filmmakers, writers, visual artists, and those working in interdisciplinary genres, come to MacDowell from all over the world to focus on their work in an inspiring environment created to foster the imagination. The Colony’s mission remarkably parallels that of The Aldrich in their commitment to supporting new work by visual artists.

Organized by Richard Klein, Aldrich director of exhibitions, the exhibition will represent a cross-section of visual arts disciplines, including photography, painting, drawing, animation, sculpture, printmaking, video, and installation. Participating artists include: John Bisbee, Lynn Cazabon, Neil Goldberg, Mark Greenwold, Bill Jacobson, Joyce Kozloff in collaboration with Judith Solodkin, Sarah Jane Lapp and Mark Dresser, Jane South, Whiting Tennis, Alan Wiener, and Amy Yoes. A new video by New York-based artist Neil Goldberg will provocatively explore the need and motivation to create art. Shot in 2001 while Goldberg was a Fellow at MacDowell, the video pieces together interviews with five other artists who were in residence at the time and will premiere at The Aldrich. Each work chosen for this exhibition will aim to convey a sense of the individual achievement of MacDowell Fellows and their ongoing contribution to America’s cultural life. A catalogue will be published in conjunction with the project, including commentary by Klein and participating artists.

The MacDowell Colony nurtures the arts by offering creative individuals of the highest talent an inspiring environment in which to produce enduring works of imagination. Since its inception in 1907, more than 5,500 women and men of exceptional ability have come to the Colony. Situated on 450 acres of woodlands and fields, the Colony has 32 studios, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, and is a National Historic Landmark. Works of art conceived, developed, and completed during residencies at MacDowell have added immeasurably to our country's cultural life. In 1997, The MacDowell Colony was awarded the National Medal of Arts for "nurturing and inspiring many of this century's finest artists."

Opening Reception: Sunday, January 23, 2005, 4 to 6 pm
__________


Alyson Shotz: Light, Sound, Space

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum will present Light, Sound, Space, a solo exhibition of site-specific sculpture by artist Alyson Shotz on view at The Aldrich from January 23 through June 22, 2005. An opening reception will be held on Sunday, January 23, from 4 to 6 pm. Round-trip transportation from NYC is available, please call the Museum at 203.438.4519 for reservations.

In her most ambitious work to date, Shotz created Shape of Space, a shimmering wall of light consisting of 18,000 plastic oval Fresnel lenses that measures thirty-eight-feet long and over fourteen-feet high. Originally created for Rice University’s Art Gallery in Houston, the work features thousands of different-size ovals cut from sheets of Fresnel lens plastic by Shotz and a crew of assistants which were then stapled together. Flat on one side and ridged on the opposite side, the Fresnel lens was named for its eighteenth-century inventor Augustin Jean Fresnel (1788–1827), and was originally put to use as a lens for lighthouses in 1822. Shotz’s lenses build on the lens’s reflective characteristics by imprinting concentric circles of prisms to further bend and refract light, capturing and magnifying its surroundings.

In addition to the indoor work, the outdoor sculpture Mirror Fence will be installed in the Museum’s Cornish Family Sculpture Garden. This outdoor work is a 130-foot-long, standard-size picket fence, faced in mirror. Shotz designed the artificial structure to reflect its natural environs, so as to subsequently disappear into its surroundings. Mirror Fence is on view from November 2004 through May 15, 2005 as the third sculpture in the Museum’s Main Street Sculpture Project series.

Born in Glendale, Arizona, in 1964, Alyson Shotz received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1987, and an MFA from University of Washington, Seattle, in 1991. Recent solo exhibitions include Simple Forms (2004) at Ingalls & Associates Fine Arts, Miami; Alyson Shotz: A Slight Magnification of Altered Things (2003) at The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; and Alyson Shotz (2003) at Derek Eller Gallery, New York. Group exhibitions include Yard: an Exhibition about the Private Landscape that Surrounds Domestic Architecture (2003) at Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY; Larger Than Life: Women Artists Making it Big (2003) at Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrisburg, PA; and Mirror Mirror (2002) at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) North Adams. In 2004, Shotz received a New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship in Painting and a Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Fellowship. Shotz lives and works in Brooklyn.

Opening Reception: Sunday, January 23, 2005, 4 to 6 pm

A gallery talk by the artist will take place on Sunday, January 23 at 3 pm. For more information, click here.
_______


Shannon Plumb: Behind the Curtain

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum will present a series of super-8 short films by the artist Shannon Plumb in a solo exhibition opening at the Museum on January 23. The exhibition will be on view through June 22, 2005, in the Sound Gallery. An opening reception will be held on Sunday, January 23, from 4 to 6 pm. Round-trip transportation is available from NYC, please call the Museum at 203.438.4519 for reservations.

Shannon Plumb produces super-8 short films ranging from 3 to 8 minutes, each starring herself dressed as several different characters. Described as witty self-portraits, Plumb’s films remind us of Cindy Sherman’s self-transformative powers, mixed with the expert pantomime of Charlie Chaplin. Plumb grew up watching the Hollywood classics: Groucho Marx, Chaplin, Abbott and Costello, Gene Kelly, and Shirley Temple, among others. Her influences stem from a number of cinema genres and periods, from Film Noir, the Western, and the Comedy, to the Peep Show, while reaching into her personal history.

The film Black and White revisits the eponymous format of film and creates a circular dialogue within the history of video art, incorporating and updating previous conventions. Inspired by artists that explore themes of gender and the notion of performance, Plumb integrates personal history into her films, using significant events as inspirations for new characters. She subtly captures a sense of nostalgia through the use of Super-8 film and its inherent scratches and blips. Unplanned events and ambient sounds "off screen" are welcome happenstance for Plumb, and are often incorporated into the scenes. Plumb subverts the medium by presenting a humorous combination of character and self at once. If a wig or moustache falls off in the filming, the viewer is included in the joke. Reality is made fantasy.

In An Elevator Ride, Plumb presents the viewer with a film that replicates security camera closed-circuit TV footage of elevator interiors. For this piece, Plumb plays close to 30 unique characters: a wildly eclectic range of passengers who enter and leave the elevators at differing times. The sense of simultaneous yet random action is reiterated as these images appear on all three monitors of the Video Wall. The public space becomes private; the rider stands alone, devoid of inhibitions, within the elevator. One empty elevator slowly reveals its identity as a set throughout the film, emphasizing Plumb's interest in the deconstruction of larger ideals.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Shannon Plumb has exhibited at Sara Meltzer Gallery, New York, and in such venues as the Lincoln Center Video Festival, the New Museum for Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn) and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London). Plumb has recently been included in the Lyons, Lake Placid, and Anchorage film festivals. Earlier this year she created a film with Fountainhead Films, Before Z, which was screened at Anthology Film Archives and is available in wide distribution.

Opening Reception: Sunday, January 23, 2005, 4 to 6 pm

Aldrich Museum
258 Main Street Ridgefield

stampa

permanent link