Jordan Wolfson
dal 2/2/2009 al 27/2/2009
Segnalato da
2/2/2009
Jordan Wolfson
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco
The Exhibition Formerly Known as Passengers: 2.6. The New York-based artist Wolfson's films and installations often combine strategies of classic conceptualism with an exploration of personal experiences, emotions, and a poetic sense of potentiality. The artist frequently plays with ideas of repetition and makes digitally animated films that are then transferred onto 16mm film.
The New York-based artist Jordan Wolfson's films and installations often combine strategies of classic conceptualism with an exploration of personal experiences, emotions, and a poetic sense of potentiality. The artist frequently plays with ideas of repetition and makes digitally animated films that are then transferred onto 16mm film. In Wolfson's piece Dreaming of the dream of the dream (2004), a 16mm film is looped endlessly until the film stock is destroyed. Once the film has completely worn out it will never be remade.
The single copy of the film is comprised of hundreds of clips from animated cartoons depicting water—whether the ocean, a river, even a rainstorm—symbols of life and its temporality. In the work included in the Passengers exhibition, Perfect Lover (2007), a realistically animated crow marks the hours of the day in a human voice. Wolfson's film is a meditation on mortality and the passage of time with an unmistakable reference to Felix Gonzalez-Torres' work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1991), two wall clocks that are initially set to the same time and inevitably fall out of sync with each other. The crow is often characterized as a bad omen or a signal of coming change, and this film relates to an untitled work the artist created for the 2006 Whitney Biennial in which he attempted to manufacture an omen by luring crows, with an audio recording of their calls, to the top of the museum.
This exhibition is part of The Exhibition Formerly Known as Passengers, a constantly transforming show featuring emerging international contemporary artists. A new presentation opens to the public on the first Tuesday of every month, with a short artist talk at 7 p.m. followed by a reception.
Paul McCarthy Film Series: Michael Snow
Wednesday, February 4
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
FREE and open to the public.
More info: 415.551.9210
Wavelength, 1966-67
16mm film, color, sound, 45 mins.
La Region Centrale, 1971
16mm film, color, sound, 180 mins.
Lecture by Shamim M. Momin
Spring 2009 Graduate Studies Lecture Series
Tuesday, February 24, 7 pm
Paul McCarthy Film Series: Les Levine and Bruce Nauman
Thursday, February 26
The Exhibition Formerly Known as Passengers, as we are now calling it in its second year, follows largely the same format but discontinues the monthly new addition, so that the show will eventually reach an endpoint—a solo presentation of the remaining single artist—in August 2009. Each month the gallery architecture will adapt, with the cube expanding as the group show contracts.
The Exhibition Formerly Known as Passengers will continue to present new work in sculpture, video, film, photography, collage, and drawing by emerging international artists who have not yet had a solo exhibition in an American public art institution. Inspired by the ways in which artists and curators, working in a globalized context, pass through places and become witnesses of our time, this exhibition functions as a vehicle by which artists travel to San Francisco from around the world. Many of them respond to the particular situation of the Wattis Institute and its audiences by creating new commissions and site-specific installations.
Press Contacts
Brenda Tucker Director of Public Relations tel 415.703.9548 e-mail btucker@cca.edu
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts
1111 Eighth Street (California College of the Arts) - San Francisco
Gallery Hours
Tues. 11 a.m.–7 p.m.
Wed. 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
Thurs. 11 a.m.–7 p.m.
Fri. 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
Sat. 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
Sun. closed
Mon. closed