10/1/2006
One Brief Moment
Apexart, New York
Adam Chodzko, Maria Eichhorn, Elizabeth Price. The artists introduce subjective, incomplete or even discontinuous perspectives, considered from both the past and the future. By privileging an expanded field of narratives, the exhibition reexamines the Institution's traditionally asymmetrical relationship to authority and knowledge, opening up the consideration that readings based on conjecture or ephemeral experience form as important an aspect of an institutions' history as the sobering distance of the relationships already formalized within its archive.
Adam Chodzko, Maria Eichhorn, Elizabeth Price
Curated by Mark Soo
The contemporary public art institution is a storehouse of knowledge and artwork of the
present day and recent past, an immeasurable aggregate of the multiple experiences and
stories of artists and their works, respective audiences, as well as all people involved.
Differentiated from a ‘collection’ by virtue of being the documentation of an exhibition,
performance or event rather than the artwork itself, a gallery archive is a record of past
proceedings and consists of related materials such as names, dates, photos, pictures,
descriptions, essays, didactic materials, posters, displays, and invitations.
As a rational system, mainstream notions of a successful archive privilege logic and
accessibility over the flow of personal memory, emotion and imagination. Skeptical of a static
and objectifying point of view, One Brief Moment invites three artists to review apexart’s
archive to interpret, speculate, add to and imagine their own understanding of what these
materials represent. New works will be produced specifically for this exhibition and will
include video, sculptural and conceptually-based projects.
Rather than proposing a circumscribed and singular definition of an archive, the exhibition
turns this infrastructure over to artists and creates ways in which they have agency over its
shape and conception. Exploring alternatives to the stories traditionally contained within,
these artists introduce subjective, incomplete or even discontinuous perspectives, considered
from both the past and the future. By privileging an expanded field of narratives, One Brief
Moment reexamines the Institution’s traditionally asymmetrical relationship to authority and
knowledge, opening up the consideration that readings based on conjecture or ephemeral
experience form as important an aspect of an institutions' history as the sobering distance of
the relationships already formalized within its archive.
Mark Soo is an artist based in Vancouver. His exhibition is one of two selected through apexart’s annual
Unsolicited Proposal Process.
Image: Elizabeth Price, Materializing the Apexart Archive, 2005, archive boxes, silk, drum, mallet, dimensions
variable. Visitors will be invited to “strike the drum once to commemorate dematerialization."
Opening: January 11
Apexart
291 Church Street - New York
Hours : Tues - Sat, 11-6