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12/12/2008

Simon Starling

Mass MoCA, North Adams

Simon Starling, who won the Turner Prize in 2005, is creating a new work for MASS MoCA’s largest gallery. This will be the British artist’s second solo museum exhibition in the United States. Addressing both the site’s manufacturing history and trends in contemporary artistic practice, the installation will continue the artist’s investigations of various modes of production and their social and economic implications and intersections. The work for MASS MoCA takes as its departure a photograph of Chinese laborers who were brought to Massachusetts in 1870 to break a strike at the Sampson Shoe Company (a factory once located on what is now the MASS MoCA campus). A collection of photographs and a handful of newspaper articles are all that remain of the workers’ time in North Adams. For the exhibition Starling mines the history of one of the photographs both literally and metaphorically. Interested in the photograph as a receptacle for meaning as well as for certain quantities of metal, the artist has extracted two silver particles from the photograph’s emulsion. With the aid of an electron microscope and advanced data imaging technology, Starling will present these tiny image fragments as immensely enlarged sculptural phenomenon.

Continuing his investigation into manufacturing processes and labor, Simon Starling will create a major new work for MASS MoCA's Building 5 as part of an exhibition entitled The Nanjing Particles which opens December 13, 2008. The installation will address a particularly poignant socioeconomic moment in North Adams' history - the period during which the town was, surprisingly, home to the largest population of Chinese immigrant workers east of the Mississippi. Overlaying local labor history onto current and historic practices in art production and presentation, the installation draws surprising connections between art, industry, and, global economics.

The jurors who awarded Starling the prestigious Turner Prize in 2005 singled out Starling's "unique ability to create poetics, drawing together a wide range of cultural, political and historical narratives." Engaging directly with the sites where he exhibits, Starling often retells the stories of a particular place while making revealing - and often unexpected - connections to distant times and places. Invited to take on MASS MoCA's largest and most dramatic venue, Starling employs an extraordinary economy of means, choosing to animate the enormous exhibition space with sculptural forms derived from microscopic particles. In doing so Starling offers an elegant, if provocative, critique of recent museum trends that embrace size and spectacle. At the same time he continues his exploration of labor and materials and their geographic, political, and cultural roots and repercussions.

In an adjacent gallery at MASS MoCA, Starling will exhibit Strip Canoe (African Walnut), a continuing project begun in 2007 which will be seen in its next iteration at MASS MoCA and will involve a journey down the nearby Hoosic River. Starling is known as much for his elaborate and performative working process - and the complex narratives he weaves together - as he is for the exquisitely crafted objects he produces. Travel and various forms of transport play an important role in the artist's work: his own pilgrimages mimic or re-trace the paths of the resources and stories that drive his investigations and illustrate the collapsing nature of the globe. His work frequently addresses colonial histories and the relationships between first-world economies and the communities that provide an increasing percentage of global resources. Other works track the physical transformation of objects and materials as well as their changes in meaning, function, and value as they cross and re-cross borders.

Photography figures prominently in Starling's work and is the starting point for the main work in the exhibition titled The Nanjing Particles (After Henry Ward, View of C.T. Sampson's Shoe Manufactory, with the Chinese Shoemakers in working Costume, ca. 1875). The installation began with two very small albumen prints - each measuring roughly 3 x 3 inches. This pair of stereographic photographs depicts a group of Chinese laborers in work clothes posed in front of the Sampson Shoe Company (a factory once located on what is now the MASS MoCA campus). The Chinese men, who were reportedly more productive in the factory than their American counterparts - and who worked for far less money - were brought to North Adams in 1870 to break a strike and stayed in North Adams for roughly ten years. While the nearly identical photographs were originally meant to be viewed using a stereoscope - an optical device which produced the illusion of a single three-dimensional picture - a fleshed-out image of the Chinese immigrants' presence in North Adams remains elusive. A collection of photographs and a handful of newspaper articles are mostly all that remain of their time in North Adams. By 1880, the group had largely evacuated the area, most returning to China, some to California.

As Starling has done in several previous works, for The Nanjing Particles (After Henry Ward, View of C.T. Sampson's Shoe Manufactory, with the Chinese Shoemakers in working Costume, ca. 1875), he literally and metaphorically mines the history captured in the two photographs. Interested in the photographs as a receptacle for meaning as well as their physical existence as repositories for metal grains used in forming the images, the artist extracted silver particles from the prints' emulsion in order to present their three-dimensional, sculptural characteristics. Working with scientists in nearby Albany, New York, Starling created 3-D images of two particular silver particles with the aid of a one million volt electron microscope which magnified the particles 25,000 times. Starling translated scanned images of the particles into computer renderings from which three-dimensional models were produced. These models of the tiny image fragments were then replicated as immensely enlarged sculptural objects, scaled up one million times their original size. At this point the story comes full circle: economic imperatives took Starling to present-day China where the enlarged particles were fabricated into sculptures, forged in stainless steel and polished to a seductive, reflective sheen, reminiscent of works by sculptors such as Jeff Koons and Anish Kapoor. By juxtaposing historical material with contemporary modes of production and market conditions, Starling's project draws attention to economies of labor both past and present. The works will be presented in a manner that thwarts visitors' expectations of a dramatic view of the cavernous gallery.

The second part of the The Nanjing Particles exhibition features Strip Canoe (African Walnut), a work that references the 1909 expedition to North Eastern Congo by scientist and photographer Herbert Lang. Sent on a biological survey by the American Museum of Natural History, Lang is now perhaps best known for his photographs of the Okapi, an elusive animal related to the giraffe. The Okapi's black, brown, and white markings are referenced in the stripes of Starling's canoe which was constructed in the manner of typical New England cedar strip canoes (derived themselves from Native American birch bark canoes.) Using African hardwoods instead of cedar, Starling has transformed the canoe into a hybrid: part African, part American, part camouflage, part sculpture, part vessel.

In an extension of Strip Canoe Starling will juxtapose Lang's expedition with a journey in a different time and place. Next spring the artist will remove the canoe from the exhibition in order to travel down the Hoosic River - the south and north branches of which run through the MASS MoCA campus - to its junction with the Hudson River in the township of Schaghticoke (named for the Tribal Nation). The artist's travels will be filmed, and a new work made from the footage will be added to the exhibition in Summer 2009. Conflating his own excursion on the Hoosic (in a type of boat the European colonists borrowed from the Native Americans) with Lang's journey on the Congo and Ituri rivers (made during Belgium's violent rule over the African region), Starling seems to raise questions about New England's own colonial past and the relationships played out in the Hoosic region between the Dutch, British, and French, and their Native American allies and enemies.

About Simon Starling

Born in 1967 in Epsom, England, Starling attended Nottingham Polytechnic and the Glasgow School of Art. His work is in the permanent collection of distinguished museums, such as the Tate Modern, London; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Kroller Muller Museum, Netherlands; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Museum Folkwang, Essen. Starling has had solo exhibitions at numerous international venues including the Power Plant, Toronto (2008); Städtischen Kunstmuseum zum Museum Folkwang, Essen (2007); Kunstmuseum Basel Museum für Gegenwartskunst (2005); Museum of Modern Art, Sydney (2002); Portikus, Frankfurt (2002); UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2002); Kunstverein Hamburg (2001); Vienna Secession (2001), Museu Serralves, Porto (2000); Camden Arts Centre, London (1998); and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1998), among others. In conjunction with the exhibition "Cuttings", the Kunstmuseum Basel and the Power Plant co-published a two-volume catalogue featuring a selection of Starling's works made between 1994 and 2008. In 2003, the artist represented Scotland at the 50th Venice Biennial. He has received many awards, including, most recently, the Tate's Turner Prize in 2005. Starling was short-listed for the Guggenheim's Hugo Boss Prize for contemporary art in 2004. Starling is a Professor of Fine Arts at the Staatliche Hochscule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule, Frankfurt, and currently lives in Copenhagen.

Opening celebration

The opening reception for the exhibition will be held on Saturday, December 13, 2008 from 5:30 - 7:30 PM. All MASS MoCA members will receive an invitation and will be admitted free to the opening. Not-yet-members may attend the party for $6. Following the opening and starting at 8 PM, there will be a performance of a new work-in-progress collaboration between Toshi Reagon and Sarah East Johnson and her dance troupe LAVA.

Exhibition catalogue

MASS MoCA will publish an illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by exhibition curator Susan Cross as well as a contribution from Mount Holyoke College Professor of Art History Anthony W. Lee, the leading expert on the photographs, which act as the exhibition's foundation and the author of A Shoemaker's Story: Being Chiefly about French Canadian Immigrants, Enterprising Photographers, Rascal Yankees, and Chinese Cobblers in a Nineteenth-Century Factory Town (published by Princeton University Press, 2008). The exhibition catalogue will also include photographs of the new installations as well as archival photographs and documentation of the works' fabrication.

Exhibition sponsorship

The exhibition is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Henry Moore Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Karolyn Buttle, David Barnard, Christian Renken and, especially, Samuel Bowser, contributed generous technical support and expertise.

About MASS MoCA

MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) is one of the largest centers for contemporary visual and performing arts in the country and is located in North Adams, Massachusetts, on a restored 19th-century factory campus. MASS MoCA's galleries are open 11 - 5 every day except Tuesdays. Gallery admission is $15 for adults, $10 for students, $5 for children 6 - 16, and free for children 5 and under. Members admitted free year-round.

Exhibition opens December 13, 2008

MassMoCA
87 Marshall Street - North Adams

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