Two exhibitions
dal 31/1/2007 al 9/3/2007
Segnalato da
31/1/2007
Two exhibitions
CUE Art Foundation, New York
Haruko Tanaka explores how cultural representation is largely a matter of negotiation in her current exhibition of video, photographs, and a site-specific sculpture installation. The experimental performance group, Cupola Bobber's presents "The Man Who Pictured Space From His Apartment": a chronicle of the duo's struggle to build a railroad to the sky.
Haruko Tanaka
Curated by Cindy Bernard
California-based artist and activist, Haruko Tanaka, explores how cultural representation is largely a matter of negotiation in her current exhibition of video, photographs, and a site-specific sculpture installation at CUE. Recent photographs along with a suspended sculpture installation made up of 1,000 grocery bags folded into triangles reveal the simplicity and complexity, tradition and nuance of culture as shown through routine familial rituals. Her most recent installment to her ongoing video series examines the diversity of place and language by conveying the distance between feelings and words, image and sound. Tanaka's layered examination of identity through the metaphor of exchange ultimately presents a complex commentary on the transmission and interpretation of culture through gestures, images, text, and sounds as cultural signifiers. Through the process of observation, instruction, translation and transliteration, she creates a non-homogenous, transnational, multilingual and seemingly contradictory sense of reality, which fully explores both the gaps and links that guide the cognitive process.
Performance Feb. 3 at 4 pm
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Cupola Bobber
Curated by Goat Island
In homage to the irrepressible American desire to conquer distance, and with a nod towards the comic delights of vaudeville, the technological feat of the transcontinental railroad, and the inventive lens of Buster Keaton, Chicago-based experimental performance group, Cupola Bobber's (artists Tyler Myers and Stephen Fiehn) premier performance of The Man Who Pictured Space From His Apartment at CUE will chronicle the duo's struggle to build a railroad to the sky. In an effort to further convey the experience of pinpointing massive space through examinations of scale, distance, and discovery, Cupola Bobber will transform aspects of their performance set into a stand-alone installation at CUE.
As part of the exhibition, Myers and Fiehn will convert a portion of the gallery's interior into a transition point for witnessing a star-filled universe through deceptively low tech means, by creating a room in the gallery defined by a cardboard ceiling and matching floor, in forced perspective, and occupied by a used drill, a ladder, and some toy cardboard bricks. Upon climbing the ladder, and placing an eye to the small hole cut into the cardboard ceiling, the viewer will see a very dim starry night being projected onto the inside surface of a box placed atop of the ceiling. The installation will be accompanied by a framed, wallmounted, extremely lengthy letter written in very small handwriting by the occupant of the room, and addressed to the astronomers at the Mt. Wilson Observatory.
Also growing out of a sequence in the performance, a series of approximately 200, two inch by two inch black-profiled silhouette heads (study pictured) will be installed as a horizon line along three gallery walls. When viewed up close, drawings of symbols placed within the empty space of the heads will form an elaborate show and tell of a conversation absurdly failing to create mutual understanding, thus chronicling how the incomprehensible may instantly feel profound, but ultimately proves illusory.
The Man Who Pictured Space From His Apartment performances:
Friday, Feb. 2 at 8:00pm and Saturday, Feb. 3 at 6:00pm
Image: Haruko Tanaka
CUE Art Foundation
511 West 25th Street - New York