Ann Lislegaard
dal 24/10/2008 al 19/12/2008
Segnalato da
24/10/2008
Ann Lislegaard
Murray Guy Gallery, New York
These works comprise the second and third parts of a trilogy of 3D animations based on science fiction novels that began with Bellona (After Samuel R. Delany), exhibited in 2005. This trilogy continues Lislegaard’s longstanding investigation into modes of perception and cognition, and, in particular, divergent forms of narrative.
Murray Guy is pleased to present two major digital animations by Ann
Lislegaard: Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard), 2006 and The Left Hand
of Darkness (after Ursula K. Le Guin), 2008. These works comprise the
second and third parts of a trilogy of 3D animations based on science
fiction novels that began with Bellona (After Samuel R. Delany),
exhibited at Murray Guy in 2005.
This trilogy continues Lislegaard’s longstanding investigation into
modes of perception and cognition, and, in particular, divergent forms
of narrative. She draws here on science fiction not to illustrate its
imaginative content but rather, as Frederic Jameson articulates it,
because of science fiction’s potential to provide “something like an
experimental variation on our empirical universe.” The works reference
modernism and historical visions of the future to reflect on our
present triangulation of space and knowledge and temporality; as a
whole, they comprise a far-reaching investigation into the structuring
of cognition in the digital age.
The Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard) is a looping double screen
animation showing a modernist glass hotel in a tropical jungle that is
slowly invaded by crystalline growth. Text drawn from Ballard’s 1966
novel, which describes a viral crystal found deep in the rainforest
that petrifies all organic matter, mingles intermittently with
shifting digital images of shadows and the jungle seen from vague
interior spaces. Taking the glass house as conceit for a modernist
structuring of knowledge, Lislegaard’s animation directly references
the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi’s 1951 Glass House, and the work
of Robert Smithson and Eva Hesse, who investigated crystalline and
organic structures as a way of understanding nonlinear time.
Set in a similarly extreme climate, The Left Hand of Darkness (After
Ursula K. LeGuin) is a three-channel projection that draws on LeGuin’s
1969 novel describing an icy planet populated by a single sex of
androgynous humanoids. Pages of the novel are inscribed on top of
another and rotoscopic images spin next to drawings of male and female
genitalia. Here identity and behavior seem at once both paralyzed and
in a state of constant flux; we are unsure what is static and what
fluid and the novel’s radical re-imagining of gender is inscribed in a
space between cinema, architecture and writing. As in The Crystal
World, Lislegaard works to reconfigure polarities—between interiority
and exteriority, male and female, organic and inorganic—in an
explosively horizontal digital terrain, where nothing aligns as we
would expect.
Ann Lislegaard lives and works between Copenhagen and New York.
Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard) was recently on view as an outdoor
installation in The Light Project at the Pulitzer Foundation for the
Arts, St. Louis, and was originally commissioned for 27th Bienal de
São Paulo in 2006. Lislegaard has had numerous solo museum
exhibitions, including presentations at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of
Modern Art, Oslo, Norway (2007); Statens Museum fur Kunst, Copenhagen,
Denmark (2007); Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2004); Dundee
Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland (2002); and Moderna Museet,
Stockholm, Sweden (1999), among others. She represented Denmark at
the 51st Bienniale di Venezia in 2005, and will be the subject of a
solo exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, Washington,
opening in May 2009.
opening October 25
Murray Guy Gallery
453 West 17 Street - New York
Gallery hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 10am – 6pm.
Free admission